All Forum Posts by: Forrest Holden

Freshbooks Lite is $6 a month and is pretty cheap.  I am so cheap and so small though that I am doing excel and and scanning all of my receipts into the google drive cloud.

New to Jacksonville, looking forward to your meetups.

I have been looking at my portfolio the last few years, and while it is working, (there is cash flow and equity increase) it feels so slow.  My wife and I own 4 properties, but every property we buy is a long term leveraged rental.  Many days I think to myself that I should sell everything, get a pile of cash, and instead focus on buying auctions, foreclosures, and off market deals, and flipping them to build even more capital before investing in multi-family or newer properties with less maintenance risk.  Has anyone sold off their rental portfolio to do this?  It also doesn't help that much of the thrill of the business for me is in the acquisition, but I can't really do acquisitions right with only $20,000 in the bank.  Thoughts?

A combination of instant equity and good cashflow.  You make your money when you buy they say.  I don't buy anything unless it will cashflow and I can grab at least 20% equity simultaneously.

Dogs get used to you, and they will get used to the tenants as well, just takes a week or two of consistency.

Your first property could make or break you. First you need to get thin. Deny yourself any form of luxury. Save money, save money like it's your mission. You will need to either buy a multi family or a larger single family with many bedrooms and a couple bathrooms. Either way, you need to house hack and learn the fundamentals of landlording. Stay thin, stay hungry and grow from there. Use an FHA on a large home where you can rent our the rooms and save more money. Banks might be hesitant to lend 500K on a first time land lord intending to house hack a multifamily. You will need a strong and continuous income to support your first loan. You have to treat this property as stricly business, no leasing to friends or family no matter what.

First steps, save 10-40k depending on what type of property will be your first. Get and maintain a strong steady income. Going big could pay off big but it could hurt also. I would say start small with a SFR house hack strategy. Where do you currently stand? What do you have and what do you still need?

Alexander Felice, to be clear, you do not believe the current market value/ appraisal results to be a good piece of information that will allow you to negotiate rehab costs into the HUD 1?

Alexander Felice, I purchased a property that I will be putting 10k of work into for 65,500 a month or two ago with a 15% down payment. The house appraised for 75,000, as is, 1 week before closing. At 15%, I still had to pay PMI despite the appraisal. I also tried to get the lender to decrease the down payment required as a result of the appraisal, but they wouldn't budge. I did get really reasonable closing costs for the most part, so I was happy about that. Do you have any tips, tricks, or recommendations on how I could have done better with the lender by negotiating with the appraisal results?

Do you think I could have done betterwith the financing, or, gotten more of the costs of this deal financed based upon the information that I have provided you with?

-Forrest Holden

Has anyone in this thread been able to accomplish what is talked about in this Bigger Pockets article?

https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/work-with...

Pretty much they underwrite the rehab costs in the original loan and never actually refinance.  This would be amazing but I have never met anyone who has done this, nor do I know any lenders that I am aware of who will offer this.

I have an empty lot where I was thinking about building or placing a modular, the up front costs were too high for me to turn it into a rental that made sense.  Sewer access is down the street a half a block too, so that was prohibitive.  There are a couple builders building in San Angelo right now who are buying lots, you might consider wholesaling your lots to them or partnering with them in order to learn.