All Forum Posts by: John Blackman

Have you looked into local note buyer clubs?

Show them your projections and your plan.  You can fix the place up as you live there and you are setting yourself up for owning a nice cash flowing asset that will be the foundation of your financial freedom.  Parents and friends are not always our best supporters.  Most aren't investors.  Find those that are. They will back you up.

Congratulations on your first asset!

I have never used them before but I am aware of a few houses around town that did.  I love all of the features you mentioned, but like @Karen Margrave mentioned, I just don't know any crews that are used to assembling them.  If the supplier will do assembly, that could be pretty nice.  However will they come back multiple times after city framing inspections find new lists every week?  

One problem I would imagine is small framing tweaks for duct ways, stairs, and window adjustments which are easy to craft a custom piece of wood on site, but may be harder with metal.

We are not using BDX at this time, but now I am going to have to do some research.  Thanks @Karen Margrave

This is a pretty open ended request.  There are so many avenues.  Here are a few scenarios I might suggest.

1) Equity Partner - JV with someone to reach the equity requirements you need for conventional financing. Equity is expensive. This will end up reducing the yield on your time by giving away equity. So be careful. Time is precious.

2) Conventional Financing - These are hard to get on flips unless you already own the building outright.  If you are going into acquiring a property with a loan contingency that is going to make you an unattractive buyer in the Austin market, maybe not so much in other markets.  This is assuming you are buying a distressed property where the seller may have several other options.  Most distressed or infill land purchases in Austin are going to need to be cash and you can finance the rehab or construction.

3) Unconventional Financing - This is hard money, but you don't want to consider this.  Even though the rates sound high, this can be a good option if you can get your project done quickly.  Better make sure your contractor can perform.

... This is not an Exhaustive List ...

In the Austin market I have only purchased property with equity and then I finance out the flip or construction costs.  I use hard money to fill short term (1-3 months) gaps if I have to.  There is no quick answer to this.  Ultimately you need to build relationships and try some people out.  You won't know until you've done a few deals.  There are plenty of hard money shops in Austin and even more potential equity partners.  I met all of mine through networking and meet ups.  After you have a few that you work well with, you may find yourself doing less networking since you are busier doing the actual deals.

Good luck.

@Ivan Vargas Yes realstarter.co is running on the software that we have written.  So anything we add or improve over time, would automatically be updated across all of its users.  We are constantly adding to it every week.  We'll have a significant UX update coming in the next 30 days as well.  The primary value it provides is allowing promoters to 

• List their offerings
• Digitally sign subscription documentation
• Accredit investors through a 3rd party provider (Fund America)
• Take money into escrow through a 3rd party provider (Fund America)
• Manage and communicate to your investors through the portal

It is set up for 506(c) raises as a promoter, so anyone using the software would need to operate under that exemption for now.  Laws sometimes change.

It is not a platform for enabling promoters to sponsor 3rd party deals.  It's aimed at companies that want to crowdfund or manage their own investor lists for their own deals.

Thank you for the kind words @Mark Robertson.  The project did not go as well as we would have liked.  Ideally it should have been done 6-8 months earlier with a higher return on investors money for the time invested.  We fell prey to a classic growth problem where one of the builders we were using was unable to scale as we rewarded him with more contracts based on previous performance.  It is unfortunate as we are not likely to use that vendor again due to the lapse in performance.  We take full responsibility for the project however.  This has exposed areas we want to improve and we are addressing them with new vendors going through the same scale out process with them as well.

You can see the final pictures for the project here.  It did turn out very well, it just took too long.  

904 people liked it when I watched it. Divide the cost of the video by those who viewed it, probably not a good ROI. We are certainly biased though. Bandit signs do annoy most people, far less than 1% derive any benefit from them. But you have to find a way to reach them. The sign wars are not likely to end soon.

Too be completely transparent, we had a project that we crowd funded on iFunding that went long, but we did hit our preferred return.  So we failed to deliver on schedule, but I'm glad that we will still hit our pref even for the extended duration.  Our incentives were properly aligned though, and we will make much less as the pref ate up the promoter return as it should have.

You can find deals in any location.  What's more important is to develop a strict investment criteria for what you want to buy.  Until you have your model for what it takes to green light an investment, you don't know how to buy yet.

You can likely find something that meets your criteria in either market, but then you will have to manage it.  Long distance property makes me nervous even though plenty of folks do it very successfully, I still have plenty of options close by, so I haven't taken that plunge yet.