All Forum Posts by: Kyle Spearin

@Aarielle Pannesi, from my understanding you can only have 1 FHA loan at a time. Perhaps you could buy one with an FHA and another with a 5% conventional. If you plan on living in Boston and having the SC property for other use, you may be able to ask lenders about vacation property/second home loans which would be less than 20%. Good luck!

@Jessica Lohr this is such a great question and a real dilemma for people who want to house hack. I'm going to try to answer this in a few different ways to give you some options.

1. You likely won't cash flow in a multi in Boston/CambridgeSomerville unless you use a short or medium term rental strategy and price points will be higher. You can probably live in this area and pay less per month than you would paying rent even if it's not cash flowing if you buy a 3 unit, though.

2. If cash flow is your priority and you don't need to be close to the city, focus on areas that have larger inventories of multis (Worcester, Lowell, New Bedford, Fall River, Brockton, etc.). Since you'd be living in one of these units and these are all cities, be sure to really research streets/locations. Better neighborhoods will likely also attract better tenants!

3. Single family w/in law suite-- you can find these just about anywhere. As a general rule of thumb, home prices and rent prices will probably be higher in Boston/Cambridge proper, areas with great schools, and areas with great proximity to the city.

@Kelly Johnson great job taking advantage of what was happening in your network/personal life!

How would you structure a flip deal where one person is bringing the capital (me in this case), the other is bringing the experience/expertise?

This will be my first time doing anything like this, so I want to make sure that I set it up right!

Thank you in advance.

@Denis Boyda welcome to the Boston metro! I've done single family live-in flips on the South Shore and am from Randolph originally. There's plenty of opportunity, depending on your strategy. Quincy is really the only area on the South Shore with a decent amount of multi-families (that's why people tend to go to the North Shore for this as Justin mentioned). However, you can certainly find good deals in great towns with long term upside. 

Milton and Hingham have highly ranked schools, so properties in these towns are especially desirable but come at a premium. Braintree and Quincy offer proximity to the city and excellent transportation (red line), still with pretty good schools as well.

In terms of MTRs, I recently interviewed Jessica Later on this subject in the Boston market. Let me know if I can ever help!

@Andrea Fajardo you've gotten a ton of great insight already, so I'm going to provide a slightly different perspective on your question.

The more units, the better is definitely true for cash flow. My question for you, though, is what's your end goal? If you wanted to resell, the single family with an in-law suite would probably appreciate better and be easier to sell down the road as the buyer pool is bigger (homeowners, not just investors). Start with the end in mind :)

@Faraz Mog as others have pointed out, Boston is a heavy appreciation market and 3 families are the most common multi-family type. To cash flow early, you'll need to get creative: rent by the room, do short term rentals, or medium term rentals.

 If you're set on Boston house hacking, I recommend looking in East Boston and Dorchester which have higher amounts of multis. Outside of Boston, secondary markets like Providence, New Bedford, Fall River, Worcester, Lowell etc. may make sense to investigate as they too have higher multi-family supply.

@Richard Boyle happy that you're house hacking in Co Springs, it's an awesome market. Connecting you with @Ryan Thomson who is a fellow house hacker in your area. Perhaps you can share your secrets to success, good luck on your next one!

@Michael Hauer looks awesome, congrats!

@Seth Nightengale I think you have to evaluate what you view as a comfortable safety net/emergency fund for your family. Personally, I like having 6 months-12 months of mortgage payments in the bank or otherwise liquid in the event of a worst case scenario. This is probably on the conservative end, but it's important to have this conversation and conduct this exercise before taking the next step.

As for your point on using low downpayment loan options, it sounds like it worked really well for you before with your AirBnb house hack. Why not leverage this again? While you might not be able to do a cash out refi early on, it will build equity over time and you can also get cash flow to safe up for the next deal. 

Think about 5+ years down the line rather than just tomorrow. It may seem slow, but it will snowball faster than you think!