All Forum Posts by: Raymond Wai

@Sarah B. so sorry to hear this happened to your husband. I'll stick my neck out by saying this, but have you considered a cash for keys approach? The basic premise is you make an offer to pay a small sum of money to the tenant once they've vacated the property. Set tight deadlines, be firm and don't leave anything ambiguous. It sounds crazy to give something to your tenant after what happened, but if the goal is to avoid something more costly in both time and money like an eviction, which is a lose-lose proposition for both parties, this might not be as bad as it sounds especially if this gets the tenant to respond. Remember that you're still running a business and becoming vengeful/vindictive will likely cause the situation to escalate further. 

@David Oldenburg It's truly amazing how you were able to turn a pretty undesirable property to something so modern and expensive-looking without having to break the bank. The "after" for the kitchen looks so much bigger than before; is this camera magic or did you do some wall demolition? If you did break some walls to make the area bigger, was it just a gut feeling you had or is there a method you have in determining whether to do this?

Hey All,

I just started a few months ago and have been steadily taking in the wealth of information available here on BP. One thing that became very clear as I progressed was the way I had been storing information weren't robust enough. I used to create Google calendar events for action items or a spreadsheet to track research, but I started getting buried by the sheer amount of the information.

We use a task tracking software called JIRA at work so I decided to give it a try to track all the REI knowledge I was gaining. So far, it's been working pretty well and some of the features I've really appreciated are the custom workflows, ability to prioritize tasks, and ways to link tasks. I still create spreadsheets elsewhere, but I'll track the existence of the spreadsheet in the software as a task so I can go to one place to know what I have. Since I mainly chose JIRA because I was already familiar with it, I didn't really explore alternatives.

How do you all keep track of your information, and how has it been working for you?

@Jeremiah Ashe@Josane Cumandala@Russell Holmes Thank you for the advice all, looks like I have a lot more to read on!

Hey All,

First timer so go easy on me :)

We're in a position now to start thinking about moving into real estate through low end buy and hold properties (100k range), but one question that keeps coming up for us is whether to finance or to go all cash. I understand the cash on cash return on financing is going to be higher, but does going all cash to buy a property have anything going for it other than the peace of mind of not having a loan? For instance, does going all cash open up deals that otherwise would be unavailable?