All Forum Posts by: Kelly Byrd

I'm out of state but got started investing in Sioux Falls last year. I'd be happy to answer whatever I can. About the RE meeting, could I call into that?

"Brandon's Code"?  I'm on the fence about PRO membership right now or waiting for the a concrete use in the future.

I'm investing in Sioux Falls from out of state, so I would like to join remotely. Maybe by phone or computer? There is another group that has posted their monthly meeting invites in the past. But I haven't seen an invite in a couple of months.

A private money lender is just someone you know or connect with. It could be a current friend or family member, a coworker. It could be also be someone you haven't met yet. Maybe someone you meet at a local REI meetup, or on BiggerPockets or somewhere else.

The requirements for this are up to you and the lender. Try to look at it from the point of view of the person who would loan you money. What would that person want to see in order to make a decision?  

I'll second the advice from others, find a deal. If you have a good deal with a plan that shows how you'll pay back a lender and several exit strategies showing you've thought thru possible complications, then finding a lender shouldn't be a problem.

@Mike Albani: So what I would do is run this thru the Bigger Pocket calculator for buy-n-hold. If there are numbers the calculator is asking for but you don't have, find out what they are, or decide on a reasonable substitute you can use. Those expenses sound low to me, but I don't know the area. The 100 acres may give you a way to force some appreciation, depending on local zoning regulations and such. Do you have an idea of what you would do with it?

You could always make an offer contingent on due diligence, verifying financials, neighborhood, zoning, etc. Then when you dig into the property if you find something you can't make work, use that contingency to back out of the deal. It's not bullet proof, you could end up in a fight over your earnest money, but it does get you under contract and able to start analyzing the actual records of the property and hopefully it all checks out and you'll close!

What's the mix of units? 2/1? 2/2?  Are the rents high, low, or avg for the area? Is there opportunity for improvement? How's the neighborhood? 

Originally posted by @Devin Mann:

BP should get a way to make people participate more in answering questions

This is similar to most other "enthusiast" forums I have seen on the Internet.  The common features I have seen are:

• There are always an constant set of "newbie" questions from folks that are posting for the first time or second time. Often these questions have been answered several times before or the first post is in the wrong sub-forum, like "Recommendations for a title company in Orlando, Florida?" question in the this ("Questions about BP") forum.  For many of these folks, they'll never post again and the questions tend to be of the "how do I do get started? [and I haven't done any of my own research]" type.
• Specific "newbie" questions People we'll often see again, but asking their first question. It'll be more specific than the first group, or pointing out why their question wasn't answered by searching for themselves. Many of these are the next generation of dedicated BP users.
• Each sub-forum has a set of folks that do most of the answering.  These folks welcome newcomers, do their best to help and set the tone for each subform as far as culture and tone of most sub-forums.
• There are the "discussions among experts". Multiple folks with experience giving opinions or talking about an unusual situation.
• Quasi-commercial posts in places where those things generally aren't wanted.
• Discussions about how the same questions are asked over and over
• Discussions about how to get more people involved in discussions.

I'm not trying to be rude to the original poster. My point is that the set of things I've seen here are pretty familiar to the various popular hobby/team/career forums. It's always a smaller set of people that answer questions, I expect it's a personality type that many don't have combined with a smaller set of forum members feeling like they're experts on a particular topic. I don't think that's required to answer a question, just that many people don't think they know enough to answer

If I could fix one thing on BP, it would be to somehow do direct more people to pick the correct forum for their first question. I subscribe to this sub-forum (the Questions about BP and Site Announcements forum) so I can see discussions EXACTLY LIKE THIS ONE, but I get notifications every day about new posts with questions like: "". The moderators to a great job of moving those out of here quickly, but we'd all be better off if somehow it was more clear to new posters that there are sub-forums and they'll get their question answered faster if they choose them. It's a tough User Experience problem. I don't have a good solution.. As I said above, this "new folks posting to the wrong forum" seems to be a universal problem on online forums. 

This surprised me, but I'm new so I thought I would ask my preferred title company in Sioux Falls, and the response was that they wouldn't do either an assigned contract or a double close. So at least First Dakota Title won't do them, maybe others know of ones that will? 

This isn't a question about which software to use, or how to setup Quickbooks. I'm committed to trying Quickbooks Pro Desktop for Windows to handle the books for a 12-unit property I just closed on. I have a specific question about entering transactions. I'm investing out of state and have a property manager that uses App Folio, so I'm not planning on using Quickbooks to actually generate invoices for rent. Most of the transactions will be mirroring my property account the PM, entering transactions, making sure things reconcile 

I have a 12-unit property and plan to have more in the same company file, so I have followed the advice here and other places and setup classes and sub-classes like this:
- 123 Retirement Blvd
-- Unit 1
-- Unit 2
...

I have also setup Customer, Job, Sub-Job with
- 123 Retirement Blvd
-- Unit 1
--- Jane Renter
-- Unit 2
--- John Tenant
...

So, now I'm going to enter rent from Jane Renter. When entering a transaction for my "PropMgmt Acct" I see that I can tag the transaction with a Customer:Job:SubJob and a Class:SubClass.  Should I be using both? One or the other? Why? 

Update: we didn't come to an agreement with the seller. I didn't use exact numbers in my original post, I just used made-up round numbers. The actual cash from the seller  at closing was a smaller percentage of purchase price than I used, and I believe the reason was for 1031 exchange.