All Forum Posts by: Aaron McGinnis

Demo is surprisingly technical work. Getting it done quickly is a skill set, and there are actually some specialized tools that make the process go faster.

Best thing you can do for yourself is find a demolition contractor. Call around to a few dumpster companies, oftentimes they will do demolition work as well or be able to turn you on to a good demo contractor.

Unless you're redeeming points at a value greater than the fee...

We take CC and either use Square or Wepay via Buildertrend. Most credit cards have a 3% transaction fee (which we charge the client for), or more if you're using Amex.

Get a good accountant that knows real estate and can handle, at the very least, your monthly reconciliations and your year end taxes. Plan to scale into them doing your day to day book keeping. 

Sounds crazy, but I wish I had gotten a good accountant from day one. I tried to do it myself for too long, then made bad hiring decisions for an accountant that cost me tens of thousands of dollars. 

You don't need to have an in-house accountant, get one that works off site.

I may be able to help. Please feel free to contact me.

@Michael Henry - the issue one must watch out for is the fees. If you're paying more in fees than the points are worth, then you're not really accomplishing anything... so it's ultra-important to know what each point is worth to you.

For example, my chase ultimate rewards points are nominally valued at about 1.5 cents each. With careful use I value them more like 3-5 cents, and I've gotten as much as 6-8 cents. This is primarily (Read: exclusively) by using them for long-haul (European or Asian) airfare in premium cabins, paying careful attention to redemption rates. For example, I once snagged a pair of first class seats on Singapore air for a long-haul flight for 90,000 points each... paying with money that would have cost me something like $8000-9000 per seat. We ate caviar and drank Brut and Johnny Walker Blue until we couldn't take it no more. Good times. 

Opposite corollary - we also use points for booking ridiculous hotels that we would never consider paying the rack rate for. It's a bad numeric use of points (typically under 2 cents per point), but it's hilarious fun to stay at these places to bookend vacations. 

My own personal rule is that I'm willing to pay up to about 3% surcharge to use a credit card. After that it's iffy that I'll get any real value vs. just paying with cash. 

Check out the points guy. Like biggerpocket but for cc points.

Basically it goes like this... find a card that gives points for things you like. Pay everything you can on that card. Use points to get things you like.

For example: I love to travel. I have a corporate Visa with chase that generates a huge number of points. I transfer those points to my personal chase Visa sapphire preferred account which I can in turn xfer to star alliance airlines. This let's me go to far flung locations in the front of the plane for less money than driving to the beach.... aka, winning.  

Call the listing agent and ask. Or contact the building department and find out who the contractor of record was.

I may be able to help, please feel free to reach out to me. We've done work with pile foundations and suspended construction. Not so much with pin foundations, although I am familiar with the technology (Diamond pier in particular)... I don't know of any developer in Atlanta using pins right now, so you'd have to have all kinds of third party letters for it.

Suspended foundations (IE: above ground piers with framing suspended) are cool and there's some very solid modern architectural roots in it (See, Villa Savoye). It's a challenging way to build though, as getting everything level and plumb is a pretty taxing production. There's also some interesting challenges in the form of lateral bracing that can come up. We did a pretty large project using helical piers and posts that had the house about 10' above ground - came out well, took a LOT of laser work and math to get it all to be flat though. The challenge is that if your foundation pads aren't exact level (and it's almost impossible to get them level to each other), your above ground piers all end up being different heights. We were using structural steel piers for that project, so it took a lot of work with the steel fabrication team to get it all to come out level at the top. Lots of hardware...

I see that the profile system changed up and my old information hadn't yet transferred. You can reach me right here through my profile! =)