All Forum Posts by: Kevin Noell

@Pete M., My wife and I use a very similar method and it has worked very well so far in our 2 rentals.  Everybody wins.

I use a website called HomeAdvisor that can give you ballpark figures down to the zipcode (labor rates can vary a lot nationwide).  You can look up anything from painting costs to replacing the roof.

@Grace Barstow, my wife and I house-hacked a duplex in Austin back in 2012 (before I even knew what this was) and what I remember from that deal was that you need 2 years of rental income on your tax returns before you can use the income (usually only 75% of the income is considered) as part of the deal.

@Megan Phillips,

My wife and I bought a house in San Antonio last year and the same thing happened where we found out the week of closing that even though we had agreed on $5000 from the seller towards closing costs there was a %2 limit on how much they could contribute.  Since the offer price was under 100k, there was a difference of almost $3000 that the sellers did not end up providing.  The deal still made sense to us and we moved forward with it (actually at that point we had already signed and my lender had not made us aware of this %2 limit, so it was basically their fault).  Needless to say we did not use the same lender for our primary home, which we bought 4 months later in Austin.

I can't understand how this issue hadn't come up in the 10 years the loan officer had been doing business.  I considered legal action against the lender but decided to just close on the deal and move forward with our other pending "to do" items.