All Forum Posts by: Justin B.

The answer to this question is no. The only thing that matters is who actually owns it. In this case, the LLC serves no asset protection purposes. If something happened, they'd sue the owner (you), not the LLC. Always consult a professional for the setup of your entities to ensure you are the most protected. No matter what you do, nothing is bulletproof, but when lawyers see you hold that property in your own name, it's like throwing a piece of a meat to a starving dog.

I would never buy an investment property in my own name, but I am getting 20-year loans (not 30). It's a trade-off I guess. I will say that if your property won't meet your specs with a 20-year amortized loan, then I'd question if it's a good investment. I'm buying property with 20-year loans and getting great cash flow. So if a 20-year makes it not profitable, then it's mot likely a bad investment or your paying too much for it.

Hope that helps.

Same here! I'm looking for MFH's in the Memphis, TN area.

If it's a DSL connection she would need to use the phone jack. If she got VoIP home service, it would tie into the system, but usually the installer does that piece for you. If it's DSL (which it has to be if they just sent her the router) then you can probably have the Telco fix it during installation. If she's trying to just plug the jack on the router into the port to provide VoIP service to her home phones, that won't work, that requires special wiring. I have Comcast home phone service and the guy had to pull the jack out to wire up the home phone service to all the jacks so get some more information on what she's doing. Chances are it won't cost you anything to fix them anyway because the Telco wants that money for service so they will most likely fix it for you when they come out.

Thanks. Missed that terminology :)

Then if you can rent it out, I'd say pull the money you need out using a refinance and just sell when you can. I say rent it out first because I wouldn't borrow money against a negative cash flowing property.

My initial thought is the time involved. I'd rather package them and sell them in one big lump than deal with selling them individually. I figure it would be much easier to sell them at once and use a single 1031 exchange so we can take advantage of the full 180 days. If it takes 6 months to sell them all (and that would be lucky) the exchange won't work.

Also, they are single family's (SFR's) so no retail applications. They are all in residential neighborhoods.

I'm curious as to how to package SFR's into a single deal. Here is why I ask. We have 5 SFR's right now. We're looking to move into Multi Family. We have the capital to get our first MFR and that's underway. Our 5 SFR's cash flow abut $1,300/month right now at an average of 80% leveraged. Since they cash flow well, we are not in a hurry to sell but I can see later this year wanting to trade them up for an MFR or 2.

We know we don't want to sell them individually and it would really only benefit us if we could sell them together (time wise and $ wise). We'd want to use a 1031 exchange most likely as we could probably pull $50-75k out of them for the exchange.

So what are the pro's/con's to doing it and what does the process look like? any ideas or thoughts? How do you market that, etc?

I'm pretty sure MFH = Multi-Family Home's. MHP = Mobile Home Parks.

Welcome, I'm in Gaithersburg, MD as well.

Sorry to hear that Mike. It is what it is (as they say). I purchased my first SFR in April 2010. In August 2010 (yes, just 4 months after we bought it), the air conditioner went out and had to be completely replaced. It was in MS so no air conditioning = house is a furnace. We had to credit her rent while she couldn't live there. All in all, it cost us $5k and we were only cash flowing $100/month so that wiped out profit for years. Now, 3+ years later, it's cash flowing $300+/month (thanks to rental increases) and we're profitable again. In fact, we're re-financing it and pulling out enough to cover what we put down on it + the air conditioning repairs so technically we're operating on infinite returns now. It doesn't take long for the silver lining to shine through in real estate. I'd say get it fixed, deal with the loss, and move on to the next property. Our next 4 SFR's have had 0 problems at that level.