All Forum Posts by: Julie Marquez

@Cindy Rule Do you have to have different insurance as the builder because you are selling as condos rather than apartments?

@Cindy Rule When do you plan to go in for permits? February 1 is when the big change for energy credits goes into effect and I don't know all the details but you will want to look into that. I'm building a duplex in Anacortes each side under 1500 sq ft for 1.5 credits and doing an electric heat pump in the main living and wall heaters in the bedrooms. This is the cheapest option for me and I don't think renters or buyers care that much. The heat pump is a huge selling feature because it has a/c and buyers like that option.

Where are you at in the design process and do you have all your required energy credits taken care of?

@Justin Reader Wow, deep question that has a lot more "it depends" than just the surface questions. But surface answer, better to buy than build. But we couldn't find anything to buy, so we built. My husband and I have experience building and have found a sweet spot of building duplexes with great financing in a town where we know the building department and have a good breadth of subs. But I hope lumber prices go down soon and you'll never avoid all the permit and impact fees. There's a reason why everyone doesn't just build, it's harder and longer and more complicated.

@Gabriel Wheeler Do you have the book? I'm really interested in reading it from all the talk on the podcast about it

After listening to BP Podcast episode 416 (btw, you need to go listen to this one right now!), I was inspired to read the book Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. It's been mentioned before on BP and I need to get my hands on it now. My first Amazon search led me to only a kindle version and a hardback for $49. That got me thinking that maybe someone wants to lend me the book. We have a Little Free Library in our front yard and I love sharing books with people, so how about mailing each other books? Now Amazon has a paperback for $22 and I'll probably go purchase that, but I still wanted to throw out the idea to the community if anyone is interested in sharing books. I have Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller that I can send out once I finish the last chapter. Happy reading!

My family and I were on a house hunters episode a couple years ago and it was really interesting to get a behind the scene perspective. The producers help a lot with the story and what you say. Then after 4 days of full days of filming, it gets edited to 22 minutes. So what they capture is a very small, semi scripted part of the real story. Have you watched Flipping 101 with Tarek? That show goes into a little more detail. It is sad to see people get enticed and think it’s real and try to emulate it. Good thing we have Bigger Pockets to help and teach the true part of flipping.

@Tina V. Hi Tina! Welcome to Bigger Pockets! I'm an investor and agent in the Skagit County area. My husband and I ran into the problem of finding multifamily, so now we build ourselves duplexes. Happy to help you find an investment in the area! 

@Corbin Lane I love the Skagit County region and you could find a sweet house hacking deal here. But just like everyone else said, traditional financing is going to be hard. I give a personal vote for Anacortes, best little town around.

@Eugenia K. It all depends on the rules of your City or jurisdiction. We know the building department in our small town so they were helpful and the rules weren't that hard. For a duplex, we had to pay the hookup fees for a completely separate unit. Even though they share the same sewer line and nothing changed, it still cost $9000 for a new sewer hookup fee to consider that other unit to be the second part of the duplex. Separating utilities is all up to the utility companies and even though we already had gas, we had to run a completely new line to both units of the new duplex. For electricity, we had overhead lines and usually all new service has to be underground, but we didn't have to do that in our case. You should reach out to your City and every utility company for making it a duplex. For an ADU, and keeping shared utilities, that is the easier route to go.

@Danielle Anderson Hello and welcome to BP and real estate investing. I invest in Mount Vernon and Anacortes in small multifamily and single family, and can't believe how much this area has appreciated. I can't even raise my rents fast enough (and especially not now due to covid) and there is little turnover. We now build our own duplexes for rentals