All Forum Posts by: Ke Nan Wang

It is county by county specific. I've done evictions in St. Johns county and Duval county in Florida. The procedures are different. In either county, for a nonpayment of rent and non contested eviction the tenants were gone within 3 weeks. 

It's hard to contest if the tenants aren't paying rent because they don't have the money, and the first thing the court ask is they have to pay the rent to the court or it's automatically a lost case to the tenant. The judge won't even grant a hearing if the tenants fail to pay to the court. I've seen tenants wrote a very sobbing story to the judge and had zero effect. They would only have a case if they pay the rent to the court. I would say this is a very fair law. 

Usually is better to have the property vacant so you can do some light renovation and rent out the place at market rent. 

I would takeover the property with tenants if all of the following criteria are met:

1. I have a different plan for the property and it may take me a couple months or even a year to finalized the plan, then I may let the property continue to generate cash while I'm getting my plans and permit ready. 

2. The lease is either month to month or the lease termination date aligns with my plan stated above.

3. The lease, rent roll and tenant behavior show a history of good tenants with on-time payment track record and with no history of violating terms in the lease.  

We snowed ball our operation with HELOC and commercial LOC so we are a little biased towards HELOC than home equity loan. Just list some top pros and cons for this two so you can decide:

HELOC:

Pros:

1. Low/no closing cost. We opened up our HELOC when our bank had a promotion that they cover the closing cost for a line <$250k. So we opened a line at $250k with no closing cost and ready to go when deals come.

2. No pressure for spending. If we don't see a deal, we don't have to spend the money and we pay zero interest. This allow us to be more patient. 

3. Lower pressure on cashflow. If you make more money, you can paydown your principle. If you make less money, you can just pay interest only. 

4. Ability to reuse your capital. You can paydown principle and reuse them in a draw period. If it's a loan, it's an one-time cash out deal. 

Cons:

1. Higher and Variable interest rate. Currently the prime rate is so high and the HELOC interest payment has a huge impact to our bottom line. Typically HELOC rate is always a bit higher than Home Equity Loan rate.

Home Equity Loan:

Pros:

1.Fixed Rate. Depend on the time you locked your rate in and this could be good or bad. But if someone locked their rate in at low 2%, now they are probably the most happy people on this planet. Currently you probably can get the rate around 6% where HELOC is floating around 8-9%.

2.Higher LTV. Depend on the type of loan you are getting, I did a cash out refi on my primary residence with a VA loan and got 90% LTV at a low 2% interest rate last year.

Cons:

1. Closing cost. You would probably have to pay about 2%.

2. Pressure to deploy the capital. The moment you close the loan, you are starting to pay interest. And there will be always something behind your mind to tell you that you need to make better returns, which may lead you to jump into something hastier than you would have liked. 

3. Higher pressure on payment due to a mortgage payment. You will have to make PI payments every month no matter what. Unlike a HELOC your only obligation is interest payment during the draw period. Less flexible.

4. Cannot reuse the money. It's an one-time cash out deal. So you can't reuse the money that you put into the previous payments unless you do another refi, which is more closing cost.  

These are the pros and cons I could think of and hope they help you with your decision. 

We never have any feedback from our tenants one way or another but our default is ceiling fan and light combo in every bedroom. 

We don't think it's a huge cost to install and maintain a ceiling fan/light combo vs just LED light ($100 more per room maybe?). I do personally feel ceiling fan lightings aren't that bright and LED lightings are better. I think the ideal setup is probably ceiling fan and LED at four corners but that would be more expensive. 

This is Florida and we have central air running constantly and ceiling fan is still a nice feature in the room. 

Just a data point for you to consider. 

I'm building a 2100 sq ft conditioned, 3200 sq ft spec house in a nice community listing at 700k. 4 bedroom and 3 bath with a bonus room that can be easily converted to another bedroom, office, or entertainment room. We take pride into our new construction product, definitely not the turn and burn stuff where people just try to make a quick buck. 

Roommate are spending about $700 a month per bedroom here. That's the medium rent, so maybe a nice house could go a little higher. So house hack you are looking at $2100 as is or potentially $2800 if converting the bonus room into another bedroom. 

Let me know if you are interested. Location in a nice suburb, meets all of your distance criteria. 

Little bit about us.

So this is a dumb question and I apologize for my little knowledge in loan structure and policies. I just realized Canada has much better prime rate than US. So if a person have great credit score and income in the U.S., can they get a loan from a Canadian Financial Institution at a lower interest rate? Or another question, if the property is in U.S., can a homeowner get a HELOC from a Canadian bank???

The people I talked to who did not like real estate are the people who had a really bad real estate experience once in their life and they have made up their mind that one particular bad experience is a representation of what real estate is like, only other people who are lucky will win and they are always the unlucky one. 

Hi Raymond, I'm a FL state certified residential contractor and real estate agent, I have been doing new constructions in St. Augustine over the last three years. Currently working with a number of investors to build.

I'm specialized in finding and buying land, turn-key building a house at a fixed price and doing property management. Investors can choose any of my service a la cart, hire me to do a one-stop shop for a package discount rate, or don't use any of my services and just wanna chat (yes, you can ask me how to get your own FL license as well). Absolutely no pressure from me whatsoever.  

Love to connect and share my experience here.

Seeing you are from Miami, that's a different beast altogether. I've only heard from my instructors while getting my license that Miami-Dade county is a complete different experience. 

Anyway, feel free to reach out.   

Based on what I've seen so far and talked to my title company, you really don't need to pay to learn his teachings. Title companies who have done these for over decades love to teach you things like this for free, because you will bring them more deals. 

What might be worth for the money is the network and connections. Knowing that if you find a deal that the team is looking for, you can get it off your plate quickly and make decent money. I'm not sure what's people's experience with getting deals off their plates and make money through Pace Morby's team. When he does the demo live, he makes it seems very easy to close a deal that people brought it to him. Often this type of connect is well worth the money, if real life experience is the same as advertised.