All Forum Posts by: Davey Wilde

Looking to purchase an investment rental property in the Indianapolis area and looking for a suggestion on a great agent. Need someone who knows the area's/rental rates/schools/property managers.

Thank you!

Looking at investing into some mobile homes but struggling with the financing of them. Most lenders will not touch them and have gone to local banks to look at options but if a unit is over 30 years old they will not touch it. Any one have a creative way to get financing on them?

Also - any insight as to how they hold their value over a specific time? I'm concerned that once a unit is 40+ years old, they essentially become worthless.

Thanks,

Steve

I think you are on the right track with house hacking for your 1st purchase. You have such a unique opportunity to move into your first investment for 1-2 years, turn around and rent the whole place out and go find another multifamily to buy. Lower down-payment, better interest rate normally, actually turn your primary residence into an asset, etc..

I've been through both Rich Dad and Fortune Builders training's and they were a key reason my investment company got off the ground. If you decide not to go the route of education, I would connect with a local investor or agent that has done this before and get them to teach you what they know. 

@Andrew Herrig

I'm not an accountant but I would highly recommend hiring on a CPA and bookkeeper to handle this. You will save yourself time and headaches down the road by outsourcing and be focussing on the part of your business that brings in more money. 

Whichever CPA your choose will be the one actually doing your taxes and will have advice on how to take advantage of all the tax laws.

In the long run, you're much better off to outsource bookkeeping to a local bookkeeper in your area. 

I previously worked for a CPA firm and we always recommended small businesses try bookkeeping on their own to understand the how the numbers work. QuickBooks is the industry standard (90% market share) so start there and then outsource as soon as you can. At some point, it will not be worth your time to continue to do the bookkeeping on your own. It's tedious work and most bookkeepers charge $30-75 per hour. It's well worth it free up your time to focus on acquiring new houses.

These are the observations we've seen up in greater Seattle and the surrounding counties: 1. I normally use a PO box but I don't see a problem with using your home address. If you plan to continue mailing (highly recommended) then it's worth the cost to get a PO box to keep all of your business mail going to the same spot. I personally haven't seen any statistics to back up using one or the other or not having a return address at all. 2. This has been our experience with direct mail overall and not just residential MF but for all of our mail. We've sent quite a bit direct mail over the years and continue to get a 1-2.5% response rate. The more motivated the list, the better the response rate. Our driving for dollars, evictions, inherited, probate tend to get close to 2% because there is some form of motivation for the person to sell. High equity, absentee owners, farm area (zip code), tend to get lower response rates because they don't always have a reason to sell. The more you mail, the better the call back rate. We just got 2 phone calls last week from a mailing we did 14 months ago. The calls tend to come in over time. You won't get a 2% response rate the first week you send out mailers. Pick a group you can mail to for 8-12 months and just keep hitting them every week/month. Numbers tend to average themselves out over time, just give it enough time. Here are the two options Id recommend: 1. Use 3-4 factors and expand your search radius to find 500-750 addresses for MF. Maybe high equity, owner occupied, last purchase date 5 years or older, and assessed value under X amount for that area. You won't get a killer response rate but you can keep mailing every month for 12 months. Let's say 1% call back rate off 6000 mailers sent over 12 months and you'd have 60 leads of possible sellers in the next year. :) you don't need many leads for multifamily to make it worth your time. And/Or 2. This ones a lot of work but I could see getting a good call back rate for it. Combine driving for dollars, evictions, probate, inherited, code enforcement, etc and only hand pick the multi family ones. This list will take time to build but you will be left with a motivated list after you're done. Plus nobody will have your exact list. I didn't mean for this email to be so long but I hope it helps. Send me a PM if you want to talk more shop.

@Ken Walsh

As a wholesaler, we dance a fine line between telling the seller precisely what we plan to do with the property and not wanting to give them more information that they need. You need to find the ethical/moral line that you feel good about at the end of the day. Hey we all need to sleep at night. 

I've mentored a few new investors and each one had a different idea about what they felt was the right thing to do. With one individual, we had been working together for a month or two and finally got our first deal under contract. Later that night, he gave me a call and said he felt bad because the seller thought we were closing ourselves. I gave him this same speech about finding out what feels right to you. There's no right answer. 

Since then, we've closed a few more deals and we've made it a point (when the seller is signing the contract) to let know them know we partner with other investors and they will be the ones doing the remodel.

With your current situation, I wouldn't hold an open house or invite investors I haven't sold to in the past while the seller is present. I'd market the property to my buyers list first and then post on Craigslist/BP/Local REI forums/etc second. Let the seller know you will be bringing by other investors and contractors to bid out the project and bring them one at a time. Do as much due diligence with the potential buyers before you bring them by to make sure they're serious. Let the pictures and numbers (ARV, rehab, etc) weed out the buyers that won't be interested.

Thanks for the replies! I can always count on BP to give me good feedback on real estate related topics.

Let me know if you come across any others. I will add more to this forum as I find them.

Where do you get your real estate news? Blogs...Social Media... National newspapers... 

I'm always looking to stay on top of the national real estate market but I've have trouble finding good sources. The major news outlets (NY Times, WSJ, etc) seem to have more stories about where celebrities are living than actual news. I know BP has posted a few blogs on this but I couldn't find one updated in the last few years.

I'll start with a few that I've found:

1. Realty Trac - Main focus is foreclosures but they have one of the better news sources (home sales, mortgages, foreclosure stats, etc)

2. SeattleBubble.com - All the stories are based on statistics but it's a good site for anybody investing in the Seattle area.

3. Inman - Real estate news for brokers and agents. They charge $5 per week which is a little pricey when there are many free sources out there.

I'm excited to hear where everybody else goes for their morning fix on whats on in the real estate market.

@Jeff B.

I look forward to connecting about multi-family marketing! We've had great success wholesaling SFR but multi-family seems like a whole different animal.

I'm still looking to connect with a few more investors where we can bounce marketing ideas off of each other for multi-family. I'm a marketing guy so I eat this stuff up. Look forward to connecting with the rest of you.