All Forum Posts by: Joshua Beall

Hi All,

I'm looking to pick up some properties in VA, and I'm hoping to start with vacant land (yes, I know land investing is a less common strategy).

I've been trying to find some good list sources, so I can market to people who own land in my target counties (Frederick, Clarke, Shenandoah, Warren, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Loudoun). What I've found so far is that it seems to be a bit of a challenge to locate these lists, since most list providers focus on improved property. For instance, ListSource.com says it has 0 matches when I look for vacant land in Clarke County!

So, I thought I'd try another tactic: just get the "assessor's role" (exhaustive list of all properties in the tax assessor's records). I know it doesn't have as much information, but it will show the value of the land vs the improvements, and I could infer if it's an absentee owner by checking the ZIP code. Furthermore, I thought that this would be public information, since I'm only asking for what is freely available on the web already--except I'm asking for a single giant spreadsheet, instead of just a handful of records at a time (on the web, most assessor's allow you to search, but you can only get a few dozen results at at time).

However, so far I haven't had any luck with getting this information from the assessor's offices. It occurred to me there might be a third party service that can provide the "assessor's role." Any VA investors know of such a service? Or do you know the secret handshake to get the assessor's office to work with you? ;-)

  -Josh

I've interviewed lenders at a number of local banks, and had a great interaction with the following. I'd encourage you to contact these lenders:

Joe Hronesz
Vice President, Commercial Loan Officer
Jefferson Security Bank

Tonya McLane
Business Services Administrator
Nymeo Federal Credit Union

Joshua Householder
Vice President, Commercial Loan Officer
Bank of Charles Town

The forum won't let me put contact info, but if you google these names I'm sure you'll be able to find their phone numbers. Give them a call!

  -Josh

#2 requires you to setup a separate business entity for every purchase, which seems expensive and cumbersome as opposed to #3.

I'd love to hear more about option #3, especially from someone who has done this. Anybody here? Is it possible to utilize #3 if you're an agent?

I'm in WV and pursuing my real estate license for many reasons, one of which was that I thought (as mentioned here, scroll down to "The Right Way to Wholesale?"), that it would be better to be licensed to do wholesaling--but the more I'm learning, the more I feel like that's not the case, at least in my state.

Hi All,

I've been having trouble finding an agent who is willing to actually submit all the offers I'd like to put in. Honestly, I don't blame them--I'm putting in offers that will probably get rejected, and they don't want to waste their time.

Instead, what they want to do is call the listing agent and say "would you take [some low number]." And, of course, you'll almost never get a yes to that. But I'm convinced the dynamics are different when they have an offer contract in front of them with a copy of the earnest money check.

So, in an effort to simultaneously respect the time of other agents, and be able to get into the houses I'm interested in, and put in offers, I've been thinking about getting my real estate license. I would then need to "hang my license" with a brokerage, and I haven't gotten to that step yet, although I've heard that Long & Foster may be a good option, because they don't require you to pay any monthly fees if you split commissions with them 50/50. That would be good for me starting out, and if I'm able to start doing more deals, I could opt to pay a monthly fee and get a bigger chunk of the pie.

Also, I like the idea of being an agent. The thought of taking people to see houses, talk about houses, and help them buy houses makes me excited. I love real estate, I love talking about real estate, and I love helping people achieve their real estate goals. So while my initial impetus to get my license is to help me put in more offers, I'm also excited about the possibility of helping others buy homes as well. If I'm able to make enough money on commissions and my investments, I might even be able to quit my day-job and do into real estate full time!

I thought I'd put all that out there and get feedback from the BP community. What do you think?

  -Josh

Hi Neil,

If you've had one or more banks tell you know, don't give up: keep contacting different banks, and see what they'll do for you. I contacted about ten different banks, and eventually found a local bank that would do a 5/5 ARM, 30 year amortization, cash-out refi with no seasoning requirement, and they'd go 85% LTV.

One NJ approved lender you might want to check out is Ridge Lending Group. I heard the founder, Caeli Ridg, interviewed on Matt Theriault's podcast last year, and while I don't remember the exact details, I'm pretty sure at the time that they were offering a cash-out refi without a seasoning requirement. You should check into them and see if they will work for you. I haven't used them because they have $60k minimum loan amount, and on some of my properties I wanted a smaller loan than that.

But, the bottom line is: keep looking, and don't give up if you can't find the right bank right away. :-)

  -Josh

I'm at the front-end of my real estate investing journey, and I don't have any huge wins, but I do have some small wins that have been encouraging, and I wanted to share.

I spent about a year getting educated--attending REIA meetings, reading and listening to BP and other real estate sites/podcasts, and researching my local area. I was really hoping to get a flip for my first purchase, but every offer I've put out there has been rejected so far.

I made plenty of good contacts at the REIA meetings I attended, and one of them was a property manager who had a number of properties for sale. I spent an August day touring properties he either managed, owned, or was remodeling, and after some more careful analysis, I decided to pull the trigger. Here the numbers on my first property:

• Acquisition: $50,000
• Cash to close: $14,000
• Mortgage PITI: $329
• Management, Repairs, CapEx, Vacancy, Utilities: $360
• Monthly rent: $850
• Monthly cashflow: $161
• Cash-on-cash ROI: 13.8%

Not a killer deal, but it's great to finally be making forward progress! The utilities are minimal, I would only need to pay them during a vacancy, and during vacancies there won't be much use of utilities. For management, repairs, capex, and vacancy, I am estimating 10% of monthly rents for each of them.

Next, in November, I found a similar property; acquisition cost was $60,000, and it is netting me $190 monthly cash flow and is about 15% cash-on-cash.

Then, this month I found another two properties that should cashflow very similar to my first property, maybe a little better, but I'm modifying my purchase strategy a bit: I've got a HELOC that I'm going to use to pay cash for the properties, which helped me get a slightly better deal on the purchase price. Then, I found a local bank that is willing to do a cash-out refi via a 5/5 ARM with 30 year amortization, no seasoning requirement, and they'll go 85% LTV.

So, I'm going to buy these two cash with my HELOC, get them rent-ready and place a tenant in them (expect to be able to get $850 for both), do a cash-out refi, and hopefully have most of my money back out of these in 90 days, ready to roll on to the next one.

I'm still very interested in doing a flip, if I could get an offer accepted. I think my rehab numbers are just not tight enough; on every property I've made an offer, somebody else was willing to pay more for. I guess I need to go re-read the BP Books about that :-)

My personal goal is to purchase a total of six rental units this year that will net me at least$100 on monthly cash-flow, after accounting for all expenses. We'll see how it goes! You all can try and keep me honest :-) Assuming I can successfully close these two units in February, then I only need four more before the year is out to hit my personal goal.

Maybe I should 10x it and make it 60 units this year!?

  -Josh

Every loan you take out is going to have fees associated with it, so if you purchase with one loan and then refinance to another loan, you (or someone) will have to pay both sets of fees.

If you want to avoid that (and who wouldn't!?), rethink your strategy to avoid opening a new loan on the initial purchase. For instance, you could use a revolving line of credit to make the purchase, or you could pay cash.

@Jerry Padilla, can you clarify what you mean by "#1-4 mortgages" and "#5-10 mortgages?"

I am guessing you meant "mortgages #1-4" and "mortgages #5-10," but wanted to make sure... The way it is written it sounds like you're talking about certain types of mortgages, in the same way that a pencil might be graded as a "#2 pencil," but I'm 95% sure that's not what you mean.

Hi Corey,

The strategy we took with a 203k loan was to get into the 203k loan first, and pay the PMI, and then refinance as quickly as possible once the renovation was completed and we had brought the property value up, so we could get rid of the PMI.

This is a more expensive option (you pay two sets of closing costs), but we couldn't afford the up-front costs on a conventional renovation loan, so it's what we did, and the numbers worked out once we evaluated the savings from eliminating the PMI.

I would shop around different lenders to see what kind of conventional renovation loans they offer. If they have one that works for your budget and won't require PMI, it would be great to get into that loan from day 1. But if not, you have the option of doing the 203k and then refinancing later to shed the PMI.

  -Josh

There are several sales contracts in the BP fileplace. Take a look and see if one of those has a clause that meets your needs:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/files/category/contra...