All Forum Posts by: Ryan Davis

@Nicholas W. thanks for sharing! 

@Darian Richardson check this out...Pretty motivating! 

Thanks guys for your input, this really helped out. I hope to have the unit ready to go pretty soon. I appreciate everyone's advice!

I am in the process of renovating my first rental unit. I am house hacking on a duplex and almost have the other side ready to rent! I hope to have it move in ready by the first of December. So here's my question for all of you experienced landlords...

Do you make money on applications? If so, how? If not, why not? 

If you do make some side cash on the applications, what screening service do you use, how much do you pay and what do you make them pay? 

Thanks!

Gotcha,  well good luck to you! Whenever you come to the upstate let me know and we can connect! 

@Daniel Dexter

My apologies, I told you wrong. To get your class 1 GC license, you only need to show $10,000 in net worth. But then you are only cleared to do up to $50,000 in contract work. 

Find the chart here http://www.llr.state.sc.us/POL/Contractors/index.a...

Greer is an awesome place as well as travelers rest. The Greer housing market is hot right now (as well as everything else around here) but especially the Greer / Greenville area. It is growing at a rapid pace. 

I work in Greenville for a construction estimating firm and do handyman work on the side.  Ultimately, I want to start a contracting business doing residential and commercial work. 

Are you wanting to start your own business or do you already have a job lined up here? 

@Daniel Dexter I am looking into the same thing actually and I have done quite a bit of research. 

1) What type of work are you trying to do, because if you are just wanting to renovate houses you might not need a GC License but instead a residential builders license. 

2) There are 5 different classifications of GC's. Class 1 being the lowest...Class 5 being the highest where you can build practically anything. These different classes have their own requirements. To qualify for a Class 5 General Contractors license, your company has to have a minimum of $500,000 worth of assets as well as experience in the field (which you do).. To qualify for a class 1 General Contractors license, your company has to have at-least $50,000 worth of assets, but you are limited to a dollar amount in which you can work. 

To my understanding, the class 1 - 5 general contractors license is only required for commercial and industrial work. For residential, all you would need is to take the PSI exam and pay a fee and get your builders license. You also have to have experience for this. 

I haven't got my builders license yet but plan to have it soon. So all of this information is based off of my own research, it may not be 100% accurate but I believe this is right. If you find anything different I would love to know as well! 

What part of SC are you moving to? It is booming here in the upstate, projects going up on every street corner it seems like. 

http://www.llr.state.sc.us/pol.asp?file=Pol/apply....

Here is a link to our states department of labor, licensing and regulation for more information. 

 Thanks for the feedback, why do you say month to month only? I was thinking 6 month to a year lease only. I would think month to month would be super unstable. This is a nice property in a good location so I know I can find a well qualified stable tenant. I figured the more stability from a tenant the better...

I am about to close on my first property on October 30th!! (Thanks BP for the inspiration!) 

This is a duplex that I plan to house hack. I have to do some remodeling that will take about a month but I will be ready to rent out the other side by the end of November. I want to make sure I am going about this in the right direction, so here are a few of my questions; 

A) I plan to use BP's smartmove for screening and charging applicants the fee. So I think that part is pretty self guided. 

B) Do you require rental insurance? And if so, how do you make your tenants prove that they have and will maintain this throughout their lease? 

C) I think I read a forum on here a while back that said never let your tenant pay the water bill because if they don't pay, the city can file a lien on your property. Is this true? If so, how do you go about handling utilities? (The property is sub-metered off, so I was hoping to make my tenants pay all of their own utilities.)

D) How do you figure a proper amount to charge for a security deposit? What do you charge up front, first months rent AND security deposit? Am I missing something here? 

Final Question) I will go BP podcast style questioning here; if you had one piece of advice for someone like myself about to be a landlord, what would it be? 

Thanks for everyone's help in advance!

Update* 

We have finally came to an agreement with the seller! We have agreed upon the $135,000 and him replacing the floors and him meeting all FHA requirements... I had to agree to pay more closing cost. $2650 in closing to be exact. This was not planned, but I believe it is worth it. So with the down payment of 3.5% and the $2650 in closing, I will be initially out of pocket about $7,000 excluding renovation cost (budgeted about $4,000 for renovations, doing all the work myself).

So all in all, its a lot of money up front, but I see it as paying about $11,000 up front for a place to live for the next couple of years. Rather than paying around $1,000 monthly for a place to live for the next 11 months. 

Thanks for your advice everyone, glad to finally have negotiations over! 

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