All Forum Posts by: Michael K Gallagher

@Chris Lo if you are considering renting out your current home and moving my biggest suggestion would be to consider an owner occupant 4 unit loan.  The down payment and rates will generally be more preferred and you may be able to get into an area with additional incentives.  you get your current house rented, and your 3 units paying for your 4th ideally.  

Welcome @Jennifer Lee I've got a great RE lawyer her in OH will shoot their info you you in a PM.

What is interesting to you about the dayton market?

This is my 1,000th post, and its taken me about 7 years to get here.  but its only been in the past two or so years that posting and engaging here has really been done with intent and constancy.  Through the early years I'd post a few times then go dark for months at a time, even into my early days of being an agent, always been hot and cold, in my postings.  Now A couple years into it being part of my daily routine, and here we are.  

Want to say a general and huge Thank you to these forums, even before being a "professional" of the industry, this was somewhere I enjoyed posting and meeting people when I had my W2, and continues to be the "benchmark" in the industry for me.  It has become and really continues to be my "one thing" on a daily basis.

When you couple these forums with the other opportunities like BPCon, you get invaluable experiences, just like being in a room with 15 other people getting some personal help with your profile from the one and only @Scott Trench.  

Like anything in life, you get out what you put in, not many things in my life I can say I've put in 1,000 reps, but I'm proud to say I've done that here.

Thanks ya'll!  here's to the next 1,000!

@Kim Huard ah the age old question of to sell or hold.  In general I say its a personal preference and there is no right or wrong here, just what works best for you.  If the property has run its course of usefulness for you and you feel that the capitol is better used in other areas then by all means rock and roll!

If its performing well for you, and you believe you'd be able to continue to cashflow it for the foreseeable future, that is a pretty "sheltered" market to be in.  As in its somewhat closed off from external factors and will often have at least seasonal draw to the market.  Or perhaps a standard LTR works better now that you don't need to stay in the unit, and that makes it more passive?  

This is going to be very market dependent, and property dependent.  Is the unit set up for rent by the room in a good efficient way?  Is there a use case or need for rent by the room?  If you want to test you're own theory there is no harm in putting up the rooms as separate at a discounted rate and see if you end up with some bites. nothing wrong with throwing the add up and testing it.

@Samantha McFarland welcome to the forums!  If used correctly you just unlocked some of the most powerful information out there.  

Im not familiar with your specific market but if you have not checked out the events section I would start there.  But you'll likely get some responses here from people active in that market.

If you haven't done so already, a great place to start is setting up your keyword alerts to know what posts are being made about your areas of interest.  

@Keira Hamilton thank you so much for putting this together, you clearly put a lot of time a thought into it.  This is the kind of content that makes these forumns trully unique and although I am not in the laundry biz, I see paralells to all aspects of negotiating and generally "getting deals done" regardless of the asset being traded.

Thank you again, I especially thought the "being a good buyer" section was enlightening and something I know I need to coach my buyers more on up front.  

Hey @Sean Michel welcome to the forums, we are glad to have you.  Appraisal is a strong background going into this, you've already got a leg up congrats.

I'm not in your market but I'm a big fan of all things affordable housing.  I think supplying the market with decent places to live at affordable prices is never a bad strategy.  

The issue we often run into is the pure cost to build...you have ideas or ways you are working around that?

@Naresh Yegireddi you also need to look into the locations of the building and general ability to re-tenant when then eventually leave or go dark.  They are generally large retail boxes that in my experience need to get demised for another user to take over, unless you find some kind of "local grocery" to backfill.  They can also be fairly remote and off the main "retail corridor" not always but its common. 

Ultimately you need to understand the underlying economics, psychographics and demographics of the market you are purchasing in to know if and how you can re-tenant the property.

I'm a bigger fan of dollar generals or family dollars that are in multi tenant shopping centers.  They tend to be set up to bring in a new anchor and re-stabalize after dollar general or the like leaves.  the additional tenants also help obviously in the vacancy costs.

@Kyle Schreur you can ultimatley do whatever you'd like, but whatever you do and whatever the arrangment should be put into writing.  

In general I'd not suggest the above regarding "contributing" to utilities.  It is common and customary acrossa almost all rentals except some A class office to pay your share of utilities.

Now you can make whatever arangment you'd like and work it out however you want with your tenant but if you are going to "share costs" I'd suggest keeping the utilities in your name, and then "back billing" the tenants for that share of their usage, but again thats a lot of work for really no gain in my book.

My recommendation would be to simply have the tenants pay all utilities.  If you want to offer a "rebate" of some kind after they stay up to date for certain amount of time, I'm more inclined to go that way, but in general theres no real good reason to put yourself as the owner in the middle of the utilities unless they aren't metered in a way to bill directly.