All Forum Posts by: Polo Vazquez

DMing you mine!

I would buy SFR with little work and paying 20 or 25% down. Find older homes that banks will still finance but ugly enough that most people wouldn't want to buy so you have less competition. You should be able to buy a couple these homes, cash flow them a little bit (prices has gone up so much it's becoming hard to cashflow them), and enjoy the 6% apreciation on the whole price of the property!

Yup! FHA means you intent to live on it at least a year. 
Yes, you can get hard money or private money to buy the house, fix it and then refinance after to get a low cost mortgage. Keep in mind you have to wait 6 months after you buy the property to be able to refinance it with a bank. They call this a seasoning period. There is ways around this 6 month seasoning period but you have to get creative and can be more a hassle.

If you have that property with a mortgage you can put the property in forebearance to offset the rental loss. However, even though it should affect your credit this will also not allow you to get any mortgages while you have it under forebearance so if you plan on buying soon this is not for you.

Look for rental assisstance. Government has passed rental assisstance bills recently. Look into your city's housing website. They should have rental assisstance that pays the landlord directly.

Regards

Hello Melanie!

One of my biggest mistakes happened when I was purchasing my first property. In my mind, as a person with 0 knowledge about real estate investing, I wanted to buy a property and pay it off as fast as possible! After finding and nice duplex to buy I made the horrible mistake of setting it up with a 10 year mortgage. The mistake wasn't really to try to pay it off as fast as possible but that setting up the loan in such a short term meant that my monthly payment was extremly high. If I got laid of from work or had a couple of bad months I would not have been able to make this payment. I ended up refinancing to a 30 year loan and now the property cash flows nicely, but I had to pay double the closing costs....

Not a terrible mistake, but definetely a noob mistake that could had been avoided had a ready a few books about RE investing prior to buying my first property.

Regards

Is it allowed? No. Your contract says that if you transfer the property (to another name or sell it) then this activates the due on sale clause and the whole mortage is  due.

Can you do it? Yes you can and as long as you keep paying the mortgage the bank probably won't care. Personally I have never seen a bank activate the due on sale clause just because of transferr. A lot of people do it.

Big emphasis on the PROBABLY. It can happen, and if it does you either have to pay of the property immediately or refinance it....

Regards

Since you don't have much cash my recomendation is to buy yourself a primary residence using an FHA loan. You can buy a townhome or condo with a 3.5% down payment. Where I live you can find townhomes and condos for as little as $70k. 3.5% of 70k plus closing costs ends up being about $5k (which is what you have!).

Live in it, pay the mortgage instead of wasting your money in rent, then when you save a good amount of money you can buy another house and rent the townhome or condo.

Sounds like both of you will but down the same amoutn of work.

I would go 50/50 after on the profits. Say you bought for $100k and spent $20k on renovation costs. Out of those $120k you put down 80k and your partner puto 40k and you sell the house for 160k but had to pay 10k in closing and other costs making your net profit $30k (15k for each). You would get 95k (80+15) and he would get 55k (40+15).

Keep in mind though that if you are getting the loan you are risking your credit so maybe you deserve a little more than 50% or some other kinda of incentive

Make sure you don't overprice it! I know everyone wants the most money for their hard work, but giving it a just price or a price a bit under what it should be sometimes works better. Right now the market is so hot that if you set the price right you will get people fighting over the house and they will bid themselves up! They sometimes will bid themselves up higher than what you wanted to sell for. This will also allow you to sell fast diminishing your holding costs. 

You want the most amount of people to view your house as soon as you list it. If it's overpriced you won't get many viewings. 

Anyway, those are my two cents as a realtor and investor! Best of luck

Where I live we get this a lot. Most of the time it's immigrants and most of the time they are good people, but it's a bummer that you cannot perform credit or background checks on them....
It's a tought choice to make whether you should rent to them or not.