All Forum Posts by: Juan Carlos Castillo

As I look into buying my first piece of property this year, I'm hoping to get a duplex in the Palm Beach or Broward County area but am struggling to find any duplexes on Zillow.

How much can I expect to pay for a duplex in South Florida? Will it normally be more than a regular house?

@Caleb Heimsoth I'm at 740, and am probably gonna have to wait until they remove these marks off my credit report in 3-6 months.

@Ed Emmons Would it be easy to partner with a flipper? I'm not sure what I would be able to bring to the table or why he would want to mentor me (This route will probably result in me quitting my job and taking less pay). I was thinking of applying at a big homebuilder (like lennar or toll brothers) as a project manager to get a feel for estimating costs, and labor times.

@Melvin List I honestly was thinking the same thing, but I'm if i go the route of getting a turnkey rental I might as well wait till those missed paents get removed from my credit report in the upcoming months and see my credit score shoot up.

I made a lot of bad decisions in college,  I started partying, racking up loans (even though I had full scholarships) and somehow still managed to max out two credit cards. It's been a year since I graduated college, and I've now worked down $20k of debt (10k/30k in student loans and 10k/20k in car loan), and also got my credit score back up from 500 to 700 after missing three months of payments on two cards in college. What a mess right?

I'm trying to get my finances in order and have always been interested in real estate, I even went to school for civil engineering (my dream is to design, build and rent my own apartment building). I just applied for my first FHA loan which my realtor said should have been an easy approval, but got denied because of the missed credit card payments on my report 2 years ago. I'm just looking for some general advice on how I should set myself up. I want to jump in, possibly into a fix and flip, but i feel it would be even harder to get that approved through a bank than the FHA loan I just got denied for, would it be completely idiotic to try to get a private lender/hard money loan for a fix and flip?

How would you go about investing in out of state? Can you just call a realtor say I want such and such property send an offer in for me and fax me the dotted line? Very curious in buying out of state as well.

Looking at buying my first piece of property and finally found a condo I like in a great location, under budget but the HOA is stringent on rentals (all leases must be approved by HOA, approval process seems lengthy and min credit score is 700 FICO) should this be a deterrent for me in terms of buying this as rental property? Also everything I'm seeing in my area doesn't seem to produce any cash flow at the end of the month, does this mean it's a bad investment? Like I'm calculating to spend $1500 month between mortgage insurances and HOA but think if I rent it I'll probably only be making $1250 a month.