All Forum Posts by: Jonathan McKay

Sorry I missed this one, but let me know when the next one is and I would love to come!

@Bo, great to hear about another investor in the Spokane area! I've been investing buy and hold in Spokane for a few years. Mainly multifamily but a few singles here and there. I now split my time between London and California, but family is in Spokane so come back quite often. 

If you are interested, I'd be happy to let you know how I got started in the area and what might be of interest to you! Feel free to PM me :) 

Best,

Jonathan

@Lane KawaokaI wouldn't argue that Spokane is a tertiary market, but I'm wondering what is your thesis against investing in these cities? I'm not looking to disagree, there are lots of good reasons not to invest in markets like this, just curious which one is yours. 

@Tamar Mar - interesting that you've been doing multi in Spokane from afar. I'm doing that too, but relying heavily on family connect in the city. How are you sourcing deals, and what have you been able to find? 

@Lane Kawaoka - what do you have against markets like Spokane? Worried about downside risk in a recession or something else? 

@Minji Wu - where did you land with Spokane? I've had trouble finding deals myself, although wholesale deals are still reasonable in the area. 

@Jerry Butler  congrats on the purchase, and welcome to BP! I've been trying to find good 4-plexes in Spokane but it's been two years and I haven't found anything yet. Maybe you beat me to the punch on the one you found ;). I've ended up going for larger units instead. 

What neighborhood did you get it in? 

Welcome @Taft Love! I've been purchasing multifamily in Spokane for a few years now (one even from 

@Jacob Evans recently.) I even have a triplex on the other side of the river from you in Chief Garry. Let me know if you're interested in connecting! 

Hello all, 

I've been working at Facebook for 3.5 years now, but for real estate, I've been focused mainly on deals in secondary markets such as Spokane and Indianapolis. Since I've started, I've picked up about 30 units. 

This year I would like to start looking at deals in the bay area, specifically in Alameda county. Are there any wholesalers here on BP that are active in Eastbay? If so I'd love to chat! 

Best,

Jonatan

@Ryan Evans I've heard lots of good things about Cleveland and am going there myself to start looking for apartment deals, and would love to hear about what you find out. When I went to Indianapolis last year, the one thing I discovered was the most important part was finding an inspector I trust. 

@Michael Swan - I listened to your podcast and didn't connect the dots until your post here! I'm looking at doing something similar, although I'm hoping to do more value add deals. I'm in process on two complexes (24 units total) in my hometown in Spokane, and hoping to do something similar in Cleveland.

I'm going to be in Cleveland October 5-9th, and have the same offer, if there's something I can help with on the ground, let me know! Whatever the case, we west-coast-Cleveland-investors should stick together ;) 

@Sonu Sundar - I evaluated Dubai real estate investment last year, as the cash flow seemed reasonable, and the appreciation potential looks significant. However, required downpayments were typically 40-50%, and would be difficult without a residency visa. When I ran the numbers compared to US real estate, the added leverage potential here meant that it was not worth the additional hassle to continue investigating Dubai. 

@Charles Rosenbaum - I would love to hear if you've found something that would prove my assumptions wrong! 

We are definitely not the only ones to think about it. 

Opendoor (https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/a-startup-that-p... presumably uses ML at the heart of their operation, and you can see they are limiting the criteria of their searches to try and make properties uniform with a large addressable market. Unfortunately their equity/debt structure is particularly novel, so it wasn't an enticing company to invest in. 

But their operating model makes sense, use ML to go through massive amounts of data and find outliers, then do manual analysis from there. 

As many others have pointed out, finding uniform/enough data is the big problem. I do only apartment complexes now, and in my home market that means ~100 potential deals / year, it's just easier to analyze manually.