All Forum Posts by: Kat He

Hi @Jimmy Liu, I started similarly in SoCal house hacking with a condo, realizing CA was too expensive, reading David Greene's books, and buying properties in Indianapolis. Happy to connect and chat further!

Looks great Rob! The game room looks fun with the bean bags and I love the clean and inviting look of the living room. 

Hi Alex, I'm also active in the Indianapolis market. PM me and I'd be happy to connect and provide recommendations for team members.

HOA fees if there's an HOA.
Subscriptions if you're planning to offer streaming services instead of having guests sign in themselves. 
Lawn care is a great one that we completely underestimated. Weekly mowing in growing season, monthly mowing in winter + fall cleanup averaged out to be almost $300/mo for us.

Hi @Austin Guzman, I don't know any meetups but I'm in Seattle too! I invest in OOS buy and holds and short term rentals. Piggybacking on this thread to find some and hopefully get to meet other fellow Seattle investors.

Hi @Casey C., I started investing OOS in Indianapolis and have also recently entered the Louisville market. Mostly looking in South side and East side (J-Town area), but working with our PM to see strategies for West side opportunities as well.

Homes in the West side (Portland, Russell, Shawnee) etc often look good on paper but the properties need a lot of work, especially work that you can't see from listing photos such as repairs for failing foundation, flooding damage. Though there are flood walls around some areas by the Ohio River, a lot of homes still have damage from previous floods/years of neglect and there are still flood zones to be careful of. The area has historically not seen a lot of investment, though there is some talk of developments in Portland (Portland Investment Initiative).

If you want to PM me, I'd be happy to chat further! I spent a few months there--it's a cool city and I'm definitely hoping to expand my portfolio there.

@Valeria Boesch We were looking at Maple Leaf, Phinney Ridge, Fremont, Wallingford, Ballard, Central District and Cap Hill. We personally wanted to live closer to downtown, but we found that these areas were close to tourist attractions and neighborhood shops and had a healthy amount of STR activity.

@Valeria Boesch For our Seattle house hack, we were looking and offering during the holidays to avoid the competition a bit. It has a basement unit that we're running as a STR and worked perfect for us, though it sat on the market for a while because of the lower ceilings in the basement. I would suggest looking for properties that may need some renovations or that have some oddities that you can work with.

@Rick Buenaventura We househack with our basement unit as a STR, located east of the Pike/Pine corridor. If you're targeting DT attractions rather than the vacation spots, as long as you're within reasonable driving distance the location should still work. We were doing research in Phinney Ridge and Maple Lead initially. Happy to connect and chat further!

Hi Jarek, I started investing when I was 21 and have specifically been investing in Indianapolis for a few years now. The crime maps are a good starting point but I would dig deeper at specific pockets of higher/lower crime and what types of crime. Your boots on the ground will be most important in understanding the neighborhoods and checking if the areas are well kept or not--especially since Indy is well known as being very street by street.

We have had some attempted break ins in our vacant units, but this can be mitigated by getting appliances towards the end of the rehab and not putting them by windows, boarding up/covering windows, and getting a security system like simplisafe. Other than that, we have not had much trouble. Let me know if I can help!