All Forum Posts by: Juan Diaz

In talking about the market, I was referring to good long-term fundamentals. I'm not going to buy and rent unless there's marked appreciation over the next ten years, and I don't care too much if I pay 5% over current market value when I'm going to see average appreciation of 3-5% a year for the next ten.

It's the same calculus that Blackstone group used when they bought up all the foreclosed houses in 2012, and it paid off royally for them. Given the current under-supplied/over-priced state of the market, there's really only a few places that have really bright futures, regardless of what happens to interest rate.

My virtual help lives near Raleigh, and it's a city with great economic fundamentals. Very highly-educated, a bit moreso than Charlotte-area, which bodes well for the inevitable future raise of interest rates. Raleigh is all education, state, and high tech jobs, which are usually big winners for the housing market.

Charlotte on the other hand is finance and a lot of corporate headquarters. I'm not familiar with the market as much as Raleigh, but it looks like it's a little less expensive.

The whole market is overpriced, it's all because of the crazy low interest rates. If interest rates go up even 1%, the Bay is probably going to see prices stagnate or decrease. The time to buy and hold anything is not now, unless you're in a few very specific markets (Raleigh, Washington DC, Kansas City, etc)

In San Francisco it's used for SROs and called the Uniform Hotel Visitor Policy (it guarantees minimum 14 overnights), but most landlords have adopted those terms as the maximum allowable. I did a quick search for Los Angeles and didn't see anything similar.

These terms are specifically written into the leases, so it would probably be difficult to apply them to tenants who did not sign a lease with that specific language. Something to include on future leases though!

Get the house in contract with your contingencies intact, get a structural engineer to come out and give you a price to fix that part. Use that bid to negotiate the price down--you can feel free to back out if they won't come down to cover some of that extra cost

REOs are usually pushovers with this sort of negotiation.

In the Bay Area it's standard to limit overnights to 14/month (seems to derive from SF law), and any more than that requires the other person to be on the lease as well (where you can charge that extra $100).

Advantages?

• HML will cover all properties, sight-unseen
• HML can fund quick, sometimes within one hour
• HML is usually easy to pay off if you're keeping the house and have it whipped into good enough shape to take traditional financing
• Some HML lenders will fund flippers with no interest payments, money due when house is sold or @ 12 months in a balloon payment
• HML will give you better rates if you're experienced. 6 pts 18% is ridiculous. I've got some now at 4/12 (30% down), 0/12 (0% down), and 3/10 (0-20% down).

Purpose?

• Will fund property regardless of condition on houses banks won't lend to
• Fast closing is super important when dealing with a motivated seller
• Buying at auction--good luck buying without all the $$$ upfront

In return for those advantages you have a higher downpayment, points and interest than traditional loans. Unless you can self-fund or partner, you'll have to use PML for all auctions, super-fast closings, and torn-up houses.

It depends on costs of materials. Never get an estimate with materials included, because they'll always significantly overestimate material cost.

Get them to bid by the job for transparent pricing

Here's the thing about most guru courses -- they do contain plenty of good information. HOWEVER, they are wildly overpriced. The learning to price ratio is pretty small.

Most RE gurus will give you some "rah rah rah" speech about how much money you're going to earn, how you will change your life, when in reality, it's a lot of hard work. This can change your life, but most of the time, people aren't looking for that hard work part. They'll also add a lot of padding by talking about their personal experience flipping

Do your research--some gurus are motivational, some gurus actually give you a lot of info for your money. Guys like Bruce Norris in California do provide some really good, advanced-level information on the market, at a decent price. Armando Montelongo, not so much.

It's just like anything else you're a consumer of--would you blindly by a new computer without doing comparison shopping? It's pretty easy to do your homework and find a legit guru, if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Take a look at John T Reed's guru guide for more info. Although HE's a 'guru' and I am a 'guru', so who knows, can you trust us?

@Michael Modesto

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