All Forum Posts by: Erick Sembrano

One good first move is to house hack a 2-4 multifamily property if that works with your current situation. Looks like you have a good healthy savings rate and make sure you set aside funds for both expected and unexpected expenses if you do house hack. Next move is to buy an investment property next, if you feel like you lack experience or needing more funds / resource to go after an investment multifamily property, then see if you can find a partner/s to JV. Let me know if you have questions and happy to help.

Agree with you @Daniel McDonald! Beverly is such a nice place to do it as well. How is it going in your market, particularly interested in houshacking multifamilies close to Dane Street Beach in Beverly? 

Yes I know Newburyport @River Sava! That's a nice area, did you grew up there? I will be in the Boston area for now, looking to invest more in the 5+ multifamily in the Worcester County for the next purchase then go from there. Where area are you investing at? 

Add: For the following year, we pivoted to MTR and LTR strategy since we found a good situation where our neighbors parents from out of state needed a place to stay close to them and the grandkids and has been staying at our place since 2023. 

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment in Wakefield.

Purchase price: $825,000
Cash invested: $41,250

May 2022: We bought a single family home with an ADU north of Boston in the town of Wakefield MA. We will renovate the fix up the first floor additional dwelling and plan to rent it out as a STR for the rest of 1st year to maximize the return of our renovation expense against our W2 taxes via the Cost Seg / Bonus Depreciation. Will find out how well we execute our plan. The long term play would be to pivot to MTR/LTF afterwards.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

We are looking for our next house-hack with an additional dwelling unit that we can rent out. Our strategy was to renovate, rent it out as a STR (short term rental), and manage it ourselves to qualify for the STR tax benefits in the year 2022.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

We found this deal in the MLS and actually paid above asking list price.

How did you finance this deal?

Conventional loan with a 5% down payment at 3.125% (this was in May 2022).

How did you add value to the deal?

Renovated the additional dwelling unit which is a 3 bed / 1 bath space spanning about ~1000 sq ft and added landscaping / hardscaping for guests to sit out and enjoy the shared backyard.

What was the outcome?

We successfully rented it out as STR by the end of the year, setup and managed ourselves, did cost segregation studies and got back 100% of our money invested thru tax refund for year 2022.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

The challenge was finding the right property to execute the house-hacking / STR strategy and also to find the right contractors and vendors to manage a quick timeline and cost of the renovation. We learned to rely on our network to find the right people for the type of work we needed.

Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

Our Agent / Advisor for this project was Lien Vuong (excellent experience and highly recommend if you are in the Greater Boston Area).

@Kyle Curtin coffee shops (Starbucks, Dunkin, or Cafe Nero), brunch places and yes, I would go to Panera! There's a really nice Panera in the Woburn Village my friend : ) 

Good job on creating your screening process! This is really helpful just to see it in writing. If you could also share the google form that would be appreciated. Thanks @Kyle Curtin!

@Kyle Curtin You are way smarter than me able to use QB! Curious to hear what others do for book keeping. 

@Kyle Curtin Right now I'm using Stessa for bookkeeping and upload receipts to the platform once I take a shot of the receipt using the Genius App. I've tried using QB before and just quite complicated for me, if I can find someone to do my bookkeeping in the future they can use QB on my behalf. 

@Tom Wagner thanks for the share, will do!