All Forum Posts by: Phillip S.

Thanks, I agree with you.  My realtor is probably tired of wasting his time submitting offers that have them because they rarely get accepted.  In my view, if the seller of the property has a problem with a 3 or 5 day due diligence period what is he/she trying to hide??

@Steve K.  Thank you very much for the advice.  I tend to agree with you.  Personally I would feel a lot more comfortable submitting an offer where I had a due diligence period.  The Realtor I spoke with probably thinks inspection contingencies are a waste of his time because the offer will likely fall on the floor and won't be taken seriously, and in many cases he's probably right.  After 4 or 5 rejected offers, he probably won't want to work with me anymore.

@Jarrod Deshields  No, but part of me wants to.  That's a very expensive area though.  

@Roshan K.  While I don't believe my Realtor is an idiot, it does seem there are differing opinions on this.  I suppose it is market dependent.  

Thank you to everyone for your comments and suggestions.  Regarding inspection contingencies...I posed this question to one of my Realtor contacts and he responded "I rarely submit an investor offer that includes an inspection contingency."  So while the strategy sounds good in theory, in many cases it just doesn't work because my offer likely won't get accepted if I include an inspection contingency.  This means I will have to learn to do my own due diligence before submitting an offer, which will be a long learning process.    

@Jim Goebel  Thank you for the suggestions.  I have a full time day job, so I won't be able to keep track of or worry about all the little details you described.  I thought that is what general contractors do, and they get paid a crap ton of money to do it.  Heck if I had the time (and knowledge) to keep all the ducks in a row myself instead of relying on a GC, it would make it that much easier to turn a profit.

I'm a scientist - which I guess has some similarities to accountants and bookkeepers :-)  I guess I'm just afraid of making a miscalculation and end up losing my rear end on the first project.  That is not how anyone wants to start out, although I'm sure there are many on here who did start out that way.

@Jerryll Noorden  Thank you for the encouragement!  I will have to check out that homeadviser site - a few different folks have mentioned that.

@Neal Mahoney  Someone exactly like yourself is who I'm looking for.  You wouldn't have plans to move to Baltimore by any chance, would you?  ;-)

@Jerryll Noorden  I get your point as well as others on here who have made the same point.  The advice I seem to be getting is to put the property under contract first, and I better already have a good idea what the rehab costs will be before I even get a GC out to look at it.  If that is indeed the case, then I'm not ready to play this game.      

@John Hovanec  Great suggestion, I forgot about that.  I do recall seeing the book available for purchase.