All Forum Posts by: Payam Dastmalchi

I used to be a big user of Mint app (www.mint.com) for personal financing and budgeting but they've been really slow at adding new features and product enhancements after they got acquired by Intuit a few yeas back so I started to look around and have slowly been transitioning my accounts from Mint over to Level Finance (https://levelmoney.com/). 

I like what I see so far with Level and I am hoping that since they are still a private company they will be able to roll out new features and fix bugs more quickly. It doesn't have all the functionality of Mint yet but it does a great job of providing a snapshot of all your accounts and helping to budget for specific projects/reasons.  Give it a try! 

This is awesome @Matthew B. , congrats! 

Hopefully you will be in a position to document and share the process of doing the rehab work and listing for others in this forum to use as a case study. 

Very inspiring post; I enjoyed reading everyone's goals for the rest of the year.

I am looking to finalize things related to our investing business; primarily building a solid relationship with smaller regional and investor friendly banks in the Washington DC area that we could leverage for our next project.  Our firm has also been approached by several individual investors so we'd have to evaluate all of our options to set us up for 2015.

I've also applied to a couple of grad schools for my Master's in Real Estate Finance and Development and should be hearing from both by December 1st so a lot of my plans for the firm are riding on whether I get accepted or not.  Fingers crossed :) 

I am curious to hear what your plans are as far as finding deals in DC while being remote. Would you be relying on a local agent, MLS listings, etc?

What we've realized is that in order to find great investment deals in our area; you'd have to be out networking with the agents and the wholesalers, talking with neighbors, being involved in the community and walking the streets to identify real deal opportunities. This topic actually came up in our meetup last night but most of us investors in DC aren't having much luck finding properties on MLS and a lot of transactions are happening the old school way.

K. Marie Poe is correct here. They are most likely to run your personal credit and not the LLC in order to have the full legal protection.

All great discussions. 

Not I only believe everyone should take advantage of their company matched program; I also know a couple of investors and flippers who had to dip into their 401k to take out a loan in order to fund their projects. Most programs allow to a loan up to 50% of the total balance of the account at 3-5% interest APR with no penalties. Since technically this is your own money; it is a quick and cost effective way to get some cash and pay back the program once the rehab or investment project is sold. You'd still be responsible for making monthly payments until the loan is paid off but assuming that the rehab project is something that you are 100% confident will sell quickly then it makes this a viable option as opposed to going through a bank or local lender.

After doing a ton of research and trialing a few of the CRM apps; we've decided to settle on Podio.  It is highly customizable, has a great mobile app and the basic Free version suits our needs at this point. You can basically make it work the way you'd want for tracking leads and email campaigns.

There are also a couple of other posts here on Biggerpockets with more information on how others RE professionals are using Podio for their business.  I would suggest doing a search. 

Hey Susan - Welcome...This is a great place to start. 

We have a monthly meetup in Columbia Heights in DC focused on real estate transactions and networking.  It is a great group of guys and usually there is someone that presents either on their success, marketing strategies or even failures.  Our next event is on October 29th at 7pm. 

Here is the link to the meetup if you'd like to join us in the future: 

http://www.meetup.com/DC-MD-VA-Real-Estate-Investing-Meetup-Group/

I am local to DC and as others have mentioned; you don't need a PM for just one unit considering that you live closeby.  The numbers for going through PM only starts to make sense once you have 5-10+ properties so you will be cutting into profits now. 

DC is a hot rental market and you should be able to rent it out very quickly at $1600. 

Here is a quick step by step process that I've used to rent out my properties:

-Clean up the place and take a few good pictures

-Post it on Craigslist and ask the interested parties to provide you with a paragraph of why they would make an ideal tenant 

-Select those that catch your eye to an Open House (Sunday afternoons from 1-4 works great in this area)

-If there is a party that wants to move forward with renting the place; have them submit an application (search online for rental applications)

-Use online services such www.tenantverification.com to run their credit and background check

-If everything checks out and everyone is happy with the terms and conditions then sign a lease and set a move-in date. 

Again this is a hot market and you have the leverage. PM me if you have any questions. 

Another vote for Bluehost and Wordpress. I've been with them for several years and have 10+ domains that are hosted with Bluehost. The key with billing is to prepay it for 2-3 years in advance to lock in the lower rates.

You could find free Wordpress templates online and launch a website rather quickly but might need to either hire someone for few hours to modify the template to work for your requirements or learn to do it yourself.