All Forum Posts by: Michael Seeker

@Shane Mcc - this is an interesting question that I've given some thought to but never really had a fruitful debate on.  Hopefully this thread garners some interest...anyhow, here are a couple thoughts:

1. Self-driving cars are a solid 5-10 years away and maybe another 10 years from a more wide-scale adoption that might start impacting real estate decisions.  So I wouldn't foresee any major trends starting to take shape for at least 10-20 years.

2. In many bigger cities there has been an urban revival in the past 10(ish) years.  You see a lot of people starting families inside the loop instead of out in the burbs.  There have got to be a lot of factors that play into this, but the biggest two for me have been convenience (want to be close to downtown, restaurants, bars, etc.) and architecture (it's impossible to find beautiful turn of the century homes in the burbs that were built between 60's and 00's).

Given 1 and 2, I would expect to see a sort of suburban revival in 20(ish) years.  Once people can dial up a car and then play with whatever the trending smart gadget is at the time while they commute, the appeal of being a 5 minute drive from everything won't be significantly better than being a 20 minute ride away.  The pricing dynamic between urban and suburban should be disjointed enough to encourage people to spend less for more moving out of town again (just like the arrival of the car and cheap gas).

It might also lead to more suburban sprawl, i.e. building outside of the 2nd and 3rd loops of cities.  Cheap farmland within an hour of major downtown cores might appreciate quickly if this occurs.

That being said, people generally want to live somewhere safe that is close to where they work and where they play.  Driverless cars should reduce or eliminate the pain points of a long commute, but it's not likely to push major commercial development out of the urban core as aggressively (after-all, you need people/traffic in a close proximity for brick and mortar businesses to succeed).

I imagine driverless cars will bring about some changes to the RE market, but I don't think they'll happen all that quickly.

What is the purpose for performing a joint inspection of the property?  Have they continued paying rents over the 60 day period?  Do they not owe you money for the eviction/back rents such that you'll be keeping their deposit?

A walkthrough should only be necessary if some portion of the deposit is expected to be returned to the tenant.  If this is somehow the case, I would give them a list of several options to choose from and say that if none are selected you will perform the walkthrough at X:XX and document your findings with photo/video in case there are any disputes.

If you have to pay into an escrow for taxes/insurance during a refi, then you will ostensibly get a similar amount of money back from the prior lender/escrow company.  You may run into a scenario where you have to pay $5K at closing for prepaid taxes/insurance and then get a $5K check several weeks/months later from your current administrator.  Make sure you sweat the details here as I've never found anybody handling escrows for me to be even remotely competent.

The best thing to do is ask for a detailed breakout of fees and then read through them to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.

Hey @Jackie F. - can you share a detailed breakout of the closing cost estimate you received?  2-3% sounds normal for a purchase, but a refi generally has pretty limited costs/fees.

If you have a copy of your title insurance from the initial loan, that should get you a discount on that.  In addition you will probably have an origination fee from the bank of $500-$1000, an appraisal of around $500 and prep fees from the closing company of around $500.  Throw in some miscellaneous costs and you should be around 1% or less.  It's hard to tell where you've been steered wrong without more detail behind those estimates though.

Hey @Alex Lane - I spent a lot of time personally developing my site, but you could easily create something similar using a template or hiring a virtual programmer.  I've got paper applications that people can download and am in the process of building out an online app that will help streamline things.  

A website is nice to have, but I would say it doesn't add much value if you've only got a handful of units.  If you plan to expand, it's nice to have something set up from the start that can grow and improve while you grow and improve your business.

@Jesse Scott - this is a pretty good looking kitchen for a rental property.  Is this located in a very high-rent, high-demand area?  If not, I wouldn't touch it personally.

The only way you'll seriously upgrade this kitchen is to redo the whole thing top to bottom which will cost a lot of money and probably not get you a lot more in rent.

@Shal Patel, that really depends on a lot of factors.  If the property is in great condition in a very popular area, it might be a matter of days before somebody is moving in.  If it is in rough shape in a bad area, it might take 6+ months to find a tenant.

Timing will also play a role, we're in the summer rental season which usually has a high level of activity.  Once you get past late August (around the time school starts) there is a lot less activity.

Our worst experiences have been with vacancies around mid October.  People are thinking about Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New years so it's much harder to get a tenant in until around February or so.

Best of luck with the new property!

@Cody L. - I think you were looking at the list of the awards and how many times each was given out in total on the site, not how many times you received it (which should just be once for each award I think)

@Chau Cao - typically LIHTC comes with a deed restriction that carries on to any owner for the entire period whether you receive any benefits or not.

You may want to look into that in more detail by either looking up the deed yourself or speaking to a title/closing attorney and seeing if they can dig that up for you.

@Deadrick Colbert - I don't know of any pros, but the big negative is that this could lead to the assessor raising your taxes.  The assessed value and information on the assessment (should) have no bearing on the value of your property when you go to sell or refinance so you're not gaining anything by asking them to correct.