All Forum Posts by: Ron Gallagher

Can your family pool their money together for a down payment on a house near Greenbelt? In the Hyattsville area I see lots of houses with a second kitchen in the basement, often times with a separate entrance, so you could live on one level of the house and have a little privacy for yourself and then your mom and sisters can live on the other level.

 Maybe your rental has that drywall from China?

I often see maps like this below to sell new condos or market a property for sale and I would like to have one to help better market my rentals for prospective tenants that are just moving into the city or don't know the neighborhood that well.

These maps all look the same (at least in the Washington DC area), like they are developed by the same person or there's a map collection that they are using.  Is there a website with these maps that I can just add a star where my rental property is, or do I need to find a condo development near my rental property and steal their map and re-purpose it for my use? Or God forbid do I need to sit down with photoshop and make the map myself?

Could you/would you consider moving into the new property and renting out your current residence?  I have lived in every property I own so I have low owner occupied interest rates on my mortgages, and you could take advantage of low down payment owner occupied mortgages. 

How much equity do you have in your current primary residence? You could put a HELOC on that and then buy the $45k investment property with the HELOC or even better a fixed rate home equity loan on your house.

 Mark is exactly right, especially here in DC.  If you find a decent property manager in the DC area please let me know, they don't even have to be good, just decent. haha

Type the address into Trulia and look at the crime heat map.... if it's dark blue, which I'm guessing it is, then I would consider it a D neighborhood and I wouldn't buy it.

Can you give us some numbers? Rent roll, PITI, expenses, net rent, etc.?

Also why was 25% down painful? It's only $21,250. As you know from living in DC I have to come up with $150k to $200k to close on a property in DC... now that's painful!

+1 for Cozy... The other good thing about cozy is that it keeps everything organized so at tax time I can just export the payment data to a spreadsheet. Another benefit for the tenant is the optional reporting of good rental payment history to Experian.  A lot of my tenants are young and just starting out building credit so by turning this option on they will be able to show good rental history in the future by paying with Cozy. 

 I don't disagree that Facebook is a lot of morons posting pics of food they're eating but those morons are your new tenants! You should create a FB profile if only to post listings, you have to go to where your tenants are!