All Forum Posts by: Robert Rixer

I know Florida property insurance is wild right, but has anyone found more success with particular insurers over others? I am underwriting a Quadplex in Miami specifically. Since it falls under residential, I've called Allstate but I know there could be other alternatives who may be better suited to this type of product. Any suggestions or past experience would be helpful. Thanks!

Get some experience under your belt doing a quad, duplex or even a SFH on your own. Investors are unlikely going to invest with someone with no track record. Also, if you're starting out from the ground floor, you're going to spend all your time going out and raising funds and very little time in honing your craft as a successful operator. What is your competitive advantage over seasoned and experienced operators? Get a small success under your belt first, then go out and raise money!

Getting seller financing boils downs to sales. It's not necessary you form a relationship with the seller but it definitely doesn't hurt. They will be more willing to seller finance if you have built trust and rapport with them.

Unit count is usually an ego driven measure many investors fall into. Buy what makes the most sense in terms of risk reward whether it be an 8-unit, SFH or something in between

I believe the phrase is "self-insure". But yes you're acting like an insurance company, you're pocketing the premium and betting that a catastrophic event won't occur. The difference is you have the risk concentrated on a very small sample size.

The new lender wouldn't care what the current loan is, as long as it's paid off. Assuming you execute the project properly and the rents support the mortgage payments, it should be no problem at all.

I understand you're trying to cash out, but if you have extra cash to throw at the property - you can get rid of PMI without doing a refinance which would make your payments really low.

@George Voutsinos Unfortunately none are too reliable. The problem is lists get dated pretty quickly, transactions are happening all the time, phone numbers change, people do a better job hiding their identity, etc. If there is a superior list out there, people get wind and the owners out there get called upon to oblivion. It's really difficult creating a high quality scalable list system. Personally, we have our own lists created using a mixture of the strengths of different platforms but very localized to our market. It's tedious and costly but the ROI is way better.

Hard to know for sure, you'll get dinged for being a duplex instead of a SFH, but being newer and nicer will definitely get a premium. Assuming the size/#bedrooms is the same as the comps, my gut would say they'd cancel each other out and you'd be around $1300

In theory, this should be a tenant paid expense. In practice I'd offer to split costs with the tenant (fixture would remain). If they accept, you know they really wanted it and would appreciate it. If they drop the issue, they were just looking for freebies.