All Forum Posts by: Joe Delgrosso

Holli McCray Group for realtors. Ask for John V. 

I've heard good things about Mountain Commerce for local banks, but my lenders in Nashville somehow always deliver the best rates. Keith Collison at Republic Bank and then Justin Lee at New American Funding. 

Looking for some BP wisdom and support! 

I'm a buy and hold investor in TN. I have a property I bought in 2018 for $175,000 and I have a loan on it for $133,000. 

Realtors are telling me I can easily get $220,000 for it if I sell, however, I just re-signed my tenant until next May and for multiple reasons I don't want to sell until she's out. 

So I looked into doing a cash out refi. The appraisal just came back at $205k (I guess cash out refi appraisals are lower than estimated sales prices?) and I'll get $14,000 in cash at closing with a new loan of $153,000. 

I'm tempted to take the cash and keep the investing going and just continue to hold this property. 

Thoughts? 

Investor background: Buy and hold investor in south east. I currently have a small portfolio of 6 investment condos/puds that cash flow. Next goal is to get to 10 within the next 2 years. 

Current situation: We've been lucky with great HOAs thus far, but one of our property's HOA has gone off the rails lately. I won't get into the details but they're trying to charge all sorts of fees to push out owner/landlords. We've tried to push back on them but looking into our options in case they become too much. We bought the property (4 beds, 3 bath) in 2018 for $175k and multiple realtors believe we can now get $230k. We owe $130k on it.

In the middle of the research phase now, talking with 1031 intermediaries and lenders - but I always love picking the BP forums for ya'lls advice as well! 

Ideally...I can use the money from the sale and 1031 it into TWO properties which would be great...or keep this property and cash out refi to buy one more. In either scenario I'm hoping to use one property to help get another one. 

Hopefully I explained this well enough - would love input! 

I know finding a great and reliable handyman is like finding a magical unicorn who can also show you where the buried treasure is...BUT...I'm running into a wall and hoping the BP community can help. I have 6 rentals and need a great handyman who is awesome with repairs, but can also do the occasional light reno when the opportunity arises. 

Any recommendations would be GREATLY appreciated! 

Does anyone know how this affects the situation when a lease is up? Is it equally as hard to evict the tenant for non-payment if the lease is expired? If it is easier to do that, why not just do shorter term leases like 3 or 6 months? 

I can't think of a witty intro (sleep deprivation from twin babies)...so I'll just jump right in to my story! 

I'm 34 years old and I've been in the unscripted TV industry going on 20 years. Cheers to unpaid internships back in the day before they started cracking down on free labor! The last 8 years or so I've been lucky enough to be on the executive level producing shows for networks like Discovery, History, Tru TV, Netflix and TLC to name a few and it's been great. 

The pros of the industry are great income, traveling to cool places, making fun content and meeting awesome people. However, the cons are that it's a churn and burn career (average time people stay at a company is generally 3 years) in a constant state of change. This change and overall unsteadiness has really heated up over the last 5 years due to new streaming platforms and everyone trying to fight for viewer's attention. I don't know one individual on the buyer (networks) or seller (producers) side who aren't in fear of losing their job on a regular basis. In these recent years I've seen top industry performers just flat out leave TV because they couldn't take the pressure of all the unknown factors. 

So like many in my industry I found myself resentful of it. Safe to say I came to hate an industry that I'd been in love with before I could drive. Who wants to live in a constant state of worry? You become almost a prisoner of your job - sacrificing your values or views just to make sure you stay employed for as long as you can. That's NO way to live in my opinion. Enter real estate investing! 

We bought our first single family rental property in 2016, not really knowing why or how to properly run it. I just saw my parents do it and knew it was a good investment. We treated the cash flow from it as our "vacation fund", but never thought of growing it into something more. Then as the TV industry got worse and worse (2017/2018), I found BIGGER POCKETS and RICH DAD POOR DAD as I was scouring the internet for a way to get out of TV. 

An already long story short - after listening to the podcasts and reading lots of the books we fast tracked our real estate investing and we bought 5 more properties over the last 2 years. We're buy and hold investors that look for monthly cash flow from each property we target. Now we're sitting at 6 properties total that generate a healthy monthly passive cash flow (mail box money as they say!). 

However...what I thought would happen DIDN'T happen. I thought that once I reached a solid cash flow that would allow me to walk away from TV I would jump out head first. Instead, the financial security the cash flow provided gave me more security in my job. I knew if I lost my job, we would be ok because of the properties.  This security made me BETTER at my job. I'm now much more willing to take chances and enjoy the moments instead of worrying so much...and let me tell you IT'S AMAZING! 

So now instead of living off the property cash flow, we just let it reinvest itself into more properties so we can continue to grow. I don't plan on working in TV too much longer, but when I choose to leave it will be on my terms. I never saw this coming, but instead of real estate investing helping me get out of my industry it instead allowed me to fall back in love with it! 

---THE END--- 

As this virus/recession is beginning to unfold, we all know the risks with tenants not being able to pay rent. I have most of my leases expiring in May and June...would love to get everyone’s thoughts on how to protect a new lease agreement given the state of everything and how hard it is to evict someone.

Yes I look forward to helping my tenants any way I can if it’s a short term situation, but I can’t financially do that over the long term. Imagine a tenant moving in, they say they can’t pay and then you can’t evict them for another 11 months.

Are there provisions I can legally add to the agreement? I usually do a first month and security deposit. Maybe I should do a first, last and security deposit?

@Christopher Smith lol officially “that guy” of the comments thread.

@Christopher Smith who said I’m not focused on the money making side of it? My properties have appreciated nicely and I average a 14% cash on cash return. I was simply asking a tax question. Ease up on the agro responses.

@Adam Rasmussen that's exactly what he said - so thank you for confirming! Just wanted to make sure this was really the case since this is a new guy I'm using. You just always hear on the Bigger Pockets podcast about how awesome of a tax benefit owning property is...it's ok, but nothing that's going to blow you away is what I'm finding out.