All Forum Posts by: John Moore

There’s a house up for auction today that my agent (a new agent I just started talking to), said would be with $100 sq ft in great to excellent condition. it’s a 2800 sq ft house so that’s 280k  that would make it at the top end of that neighborhood though.  My agent didn’t find the property, I did. And apparently the agent wouldn’t get a commission on an auction site anyways but she’s still helping me.

Problem is I can only drive by it, and can’t see it because it’s occupied. The starting bid is $152k but reserve not met. (On hubzu).  Zillow shows that they have been dropping the price by 10k a month from 250k down to 230k. Plus it’s cash only and places like fund that flip only fund accredited investors. I have no idea how much a bank would lend me, I’m working on making phone calls today.

This would be my first investment and I have no idea how bad a rehab could be. I can’t imagine it would be more than 10 or 20k. Even if it was 30k, there’s still a lot of profit left, right? I know I don’t know my numbers, and that’s why I’m here.

5% buyers premium at closing and 3% escrow at bid approval.

I feel like I have way too many questions till to jump into an investment like this right now, it also seems “too good to be true”  it it also seems too good to pass up but it was he first time I’ve used that website so I’m sure there will be others. 

Thanks for any and all advice. I feel like learning more about how y’all would analyze this deal will help me analyze future deals. Thanks again.

If I need to post more details, I will. 

@Joe Villeneuve

Everything I've read about REI says you make money during the purchase so your advice about being able to make money when buying above market value seems very contradictory to that. I mean sure you could buy above value and have cash flow but no instant equity and it would be harder to get out from under in the case that you might need to.

Thanks for all the advice, I will look into learning more about the 3 areas you mentioned. I'll try to find as many articles as i can on market analysis as well as the other topics you mentioned. 

@Kenny C.

Thanks, I guess I do need to get an agent. I've been kind of avoiding it. I understand how to dig a little deeper once I choose a property. I'm just not good at filtering through them at the very very beginning. How do I quickly narrow them down just by scanning through listings on multiple sites? I guess I need narrow criteria. My criteria is "a good deal" lol. But I can't look at a listing and quickly know if it's over-priced or under-priced. 

@James Canoy

Thanks. I have read about driving for dollars and I have been keeping my eyes open while just doing my normal driving. 

But I'm not sure about what neighborhoods to invest in and which not to. Seems like in my little town it'd take a while to flip a house but in Huntsville, AL (40 mins away), there are some hot areas and some not so hot areas. It also seems like in the hottest areas, competition is fierce. 

So I don't know if I'd rather invest a little more locally  or what. One of the real estate websites was estimating growth for that area. An area with a bunch of older duplexes. It said estimated growth was 0.5% while the rest of Huntsville would grow at 9% but who knows if I can trust that info at all.

Like @Joe Villeneuve said, I guess I need to learn market analysis. Don't slum lords make money just like higher end landlords?

Thanks everybody

I’ve spent a lot of time reading lately. I’m familiar with the 50% rule and the 70% rules of thumb. I’m looking for both a property to flip and a property for cash flow. I feel more confident in buying a rental property than I do a flip but I’d love to have the income this year from a flip. So I’m looking for both. 

After looking at a listing online, how do I know if that property is worth further investigation or not? I mean most people aren't going to list their properties at 70% of market value on any website and even if they did I wouldn't know it because I don't know what the market value is of their property. Plus I can't tell by a listing how motivated a seller is to sell at a lower price. Am I just going to get comps on every single property and then put offers in at 70% of ARV on every single property no matter what they listed it at? Which means I'd also have to estimate repairs, which I wouldn't know how to do without looking at the properties and even then I'm not confident I could estimate repairs. Even if I was good at estimating repairs, am I going to visit every single property that I find a listing on? I mean I'm finding tons of things for sale, albeit I have a somewhat broad set of search criteria.

So when I look at a ton of different listings, how do I decide what’s worth a little more investigation and what’s not?

I went ahead and just sent them a message. Thank you for your help. 

 Does that tag support so they see this message or do I need to click on that and send them a message? 

The links in the guides don’t work (at least not on an ipad).