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All Forum Posts by: Doris Jin Huang

Doris Jin Huang has started 11 posts and replied 55 times.

Post: Indianapolis Property manager recommendation

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@Aaron Signer It’s in the Mapleton Fall Creek area, I believe traditionally it’s classified as a C neighborhood but fast improving. Is it an area suitable for your pm?

Post: Indianapolis Property manager recommendation

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

We are closing on a duplex with inherited tenants in Indianapolis, hoping to find a good property manager for it. Our current PM who manages our other property recently had some staff turnover and started to show signs of poor quality work. Could fellow investors in Indy recommend some PM companies that you have good experience with?

Much appreciated.

Doris

@Patrick Oliphant. Our strategy in Indy is different but my observation is in line with yours. We’ve been making offers on small multi-fam and seeing competition coming in at prices don’t make sense to us. I think several things are going on here: first, ppl have too much cash on hand that need to hedge against inflation; second, buyers try to lock in cheap mortgage before the projected rate hikes; third, some investors bet on appreciation as you suggested; and last, buy and hold strategy will allow more room than flipping (no need to budget in capital gain tax immediately and gives more time to let appreciation play out).

Personally I’m cautiously optimistic about the Indy market when it comes to appreciation - can’t compare to places like FL or TX, but probably better than most other midwest markets.

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@David Song@David Song This is how I get those appreciation numbers - for each market I took a relatively large sample of properties that changed hands at least twice in the past 20 years. I excluded those that were obviously a flip, and also excluded the transactions happened around the 2008 crash. Then I calculated the internal rate of return for each property and averaged them out. As this is a somewhat labor intensive process, I only focused on the areas/neighborhoods we are interested in buying, so my numbers are not accurate measurements for the entire city (say Indy or CC). However they are largely consistent with our first hand experience making offers in these places in the past year.

You are absolutely right about the challenges of OOS investing. We might still consider flipping in NYC but we are very determined to stay away from long-term rentals, having gone through a grossly unfair court process :(

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@David Song Your point is well taken. Estimating Capex is more straightforward but how would you project repair costs?

Curious why you'd stick with NYC? Based on my calculation appreciation in some boroughs in NYC averaged about 5-6% per year, but the numbers in Indy and Cape Coral are both north of 10%. Plus the tenant-friendly legal environment, I thought ditching NY was a pretty great idea?

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@Evan Polaski I agree meeting tenants in person is a very effective step during the screening process. Here in New York we also self-manage and know our tenants on a personal level. But with our out-of-state properties we wanted to be more hands-off. Still learning how to best work with PMs. When you had your PM, were you able to review the qualifications of the tenants they picked?

Would I purchase another turnkey? In fact we are working with RTR right now on a new construction home in Cape Coral, Florida. We just bought a piece of land, currently in the process of closing a construciton-to-perm loan. Land cost plus building price came out to be around $284K (water front lot), appraisal just came back at $350K. Closing cost and interest payments during construction will be around $12K. It'll take about a year to build the house but if everything goes well we'll have $50K+ immediate equity. There are good turnkey products out there, but definitely requires lots of research and choose the market/company carefully. 

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@Redrev Romano Thanks for the message Redrev. Zach had reached out and offered to help with half of the maintenance and to discuss with the PM and see what can be done about the turnover. It seems this property significantly underperforms your average, and I appreciate your involvement in resolving issues. Hopefully the turn won't cost us too much and we can get off to a fresh start in the spring. 

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

Wanted to share an update on this one while doing our year end reviews. We are 9 months into the ownership of this property. The positive is the PM company is pretty good at communication (maintenance requests, late payments etc). However repair and maintenance averaged 12.9%, much higher than my projection (6%) or RTR's projection (3%).


The tenant has been paying but late most of the months, at one point they were behind by over a month but was able to catch up with government/church assistance. Their lease will be up in about two months and the PM suggests either a non-renewal or switching to a month-to-month lease. On one hand we prefer not to renew the lease as we feel the reliance on assistance programs is not sustainable, but on the other hand the cost of the turn (vacancy, new tenant placement fee, cleaning etc.) will be pretty significant, especially considering their occupancy is less than one year. What will everyone do in this situation?

Post: Turnkey in Indianapolis through RTR case study

Doris Jin HuangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 57
  • Votes 39

@Zach Lemaster Avg holding time of 3.5-5 years is much shorter than I thought - what does your typical investor do after holding a property for 5 years?

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