All Forum Posts by: Neal Collins

Hey Jake. Great questions and welcome to the forums. I was talking with a mentor and long time successful investor this morning who said something that stuck with me. He said now is a time to be "aggressively patient."

Times are certainly changing with the economic reality we are facing. It's hard to graduate into a recession, I have been there.

Being young and mobile with no commitments it may be easiest to relocate to a market that you could at least have the options of purchasing your own home. Figuring out where to live, what you'll be doing professionally, and then trying to throw in long distance real estate investing may be an uphill challenge.

The ability to get in the trenches of a local market during times like these to be able to see where value is going, stay abreast of political changes, news, developments, business closings/openings, etc, is in my opinion very helpful.

@Kyler Pace Great point. We’re all trying to come into compliance with all the new laws. We don’t line item anything out as a “pet rent”. 

Welcome to the new normal of Portland landlording.

@Alyssa Dyer I’ve got a seller clients that are in this position. Interesting times, many optimistic about a quick bounce back but economists have much different opinions.

@Cuong Nguyen There will be plenty of people to help out that are good project managers during this time. This is a good forum for it.

@Michael Belmore In our Portland market pet fees range from $25-100 per month. On our personal rentals they are typically between $30-$50 per pet.

I'd certainly explore what rate you could get if you were to refinance right now. If you could shave off a point, that would certainly help with cash flow. I'd also talk with your lender about what it would look like if you did hold onto your house and you moved in the future, would you be able to qualify for another purchase money mortgage if you had rental income coming in from house #1.

There has been a big shift here locally about utility bill backs. What works in other parts of the country now are coming under fire locally in Portland. Class action lawsuits have started to fly.

You may want to potentially keep it as simple as possible and either tack on a set amount for water/sewer per person or increase the base rental rate to avoid the legal compliance issues.

@Dado Vucak You obviously haven’t put much thought into this plan... jk.

Sounds like a good plan. I find many wanna be house hackers want to completely eliminate their housing cost, but fail to recognize that they can cut a large portion out and come out ahead.

With rates low right now this could be a nice time to put your plan in action.

Your conventional landlord here would probably look at the potential fruit/nut droppings as a mess and want to cut down the tree. I'd even argue that some of our landlords colleagues would rather cut down all the trees on their property. I get it--we've dealt with branches down, trees falling on houses, and rotting fruit that has caused a mess.

Most of our urban centers are loosing their tree canopies. When you remove these resources simply because of the convenience factor you chip away at a community's resiliency. I'd implore people to take the extra effort to simply think a bit more out of the box before they chop.

@Hunter Lannon

Corvallis seems to be a solid place to invest, and you can’t beat local knowledge.