All Forum Posts by: Jason Barnett

http://www.biggerpockets.com/real-estate-investment-clubs.html

Maybe you ought to have her scouting deals for you in the real world :D

all cash that makes sense... but do your "screening clauses" impair your rights as a landlord? In other words, did you run into any problems evicting the 2 or 3 people you had to evict?

Yes... things are quiet for the moment!

If I had it to do all over again I probably would have started wholesaling first. Don't get me wrong... my experience has provided me a lot of things to learn from, but I haven't made nearly as much money as I originally thought. In fact I have recently started to do wholesale deals to earn a little extra income right now!

You can use an FHA loan to get into a 4 unit building... that's what I did.

Subject-to (assume the mortgage)
Lease Option (rental with the option to buy at fixed price after X years)
Land Contract (seller will finance the sale of property to you)

If you're looking out of state then just find a bird dog in the area that you want to invest in. Let them do all of the searching and once they find some deals that make sense they can bring them to you. They can email photos, research tenants, etc.

Agreed 100% !

The first rental is a great education for you. For your first rental I suggest living very close by the unit so that you can check on it from time to time and/or do repairs. It would be ok to buy a new property and rent out that property instead of the one you currently live in, but you would need to make sure that the monthly cash flows will at least cover all of your expenses.

County recorder should have the information. Recorders usually keep all of the old stuff on microfiche so you can just go down to their office and check out the deed. Also, most of the time a house is known by the plat name / location. So if you can't find the original deed then you can check out the plat books and get a ball park idea of how old the house is.

All of those gurus sure do make it sound easy, but it hasn't been that way for me. :oops: I started out as a landlord a little over a year ago and made so many mistakes and spent so much time fixing things. The problems that I dealt with during my first year as a landlord:

Water pipe burst / total rehab of 1 unit
Pay-as-you-go general contractor that didn't finish the work on the unit
Mold / complaint filed with Health Department
Crack in foundation that let water come into 1 unit every time it rained
Got locked in to a below-market-rent section 8 rental
Marketing for vacant units
Tenant disputes
Section 8 dispute (although in this case it earned me $1900 :mrgreen: )

Fortunately I haven't had to deal with evictions yet, but I know they'll come in due time. Maybe my tenants felt bad for all of the problems that I had to fix so they decided to actually pay on time :lol:

So what is my point with all of this? Being a landlord is not going to be easy. It can be done as a part time job, but it requires some help when you have big problems like a water pipe bursting. However, it is very nice being able to live rent free in 1 of the units while making a small overall profit. The first year really is the toughest no matter what part of the business you decide to do.

Beaverflipper :lol: Sounds like the name of a movie from the "other" video store in town. :lol:

As far as getting started... flipping and bird dogging are great ways to go. Basically you just find deals, get them under contract and bring them to other buyers. You don't actually pay anything for those contracts... you will be "assigning" contracts. Read through the boards here and you'll find loads of information.

You can probably find a local mentor at an REI meeting.. try looking for an REI club here:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/real-estate-investment-clubs.html