All Forum Posts by: Ron Gallagher

There's some unwarrantable condos by the New Carrollton metro stop that are under $100k and would cash flow over $150 a month.

You should start a business in which you offer the service to separately meter units for water, gas, and electric in apartment buildings. I agree with @Russ B., if it was economically feasible the landlord would have already done it.

I'm not just a Mainer, I'm also from "The County"... but I became Financially Free thanks to properties I bought and held in Washington DC.

A little searching on the BP forums here would reveal that I have posted about the lenders I have found that will put a HELOC on a rental property and they are:

1.) PenFed FCU
2.) State Department FCU
3.) TD Bank
4.) and if you really hate yourself and want to deal with a corrupt bank- Wells Fargo

Please add to this list if one of the 100 banks you call tells you they offer HELOCs on investment properties. 

Sorry to crush your dreams but you can't really BRRRR with no money. You need access to capital in the form of a HELOC or a hard money lender to BRRRR (and the HML is going to have a higher interest rate then 8%)... what you should do is look for a multifamily property, with the idea that you are going to live in one unit and rent out the others, that way the lender can count 75% of the rental income of the other units toward your income to qualify. Buying a single family house with 18 bedrooms and renting out by the room isn't going to work because lenders won't count the "boarder income" from your roommates toward your income to qualify. But buying a 2-4 unit property will allow you to search beyond that $150k cap you are stuck in.

Also, I was self employed for years and I would never qualify for a loan because, like you, I made sure I took every expense possible and as far as the IRS was concerned I made no money.  That's a great strategy if you don't want to pay taxes, but while you are in your "acquisition phase" you should suck it up, and not write off every expense, and actually pay taxes for a few years so you can qualify for low interest rate mortgages.  Then after you buy all the properties you want then you can end your "acquisition phase" and you can go back to cooking your books and writing off all your expenses and never pay taxes again.

If you guys are happy with the level of crime in Trinidad then you are probably going to be OK with anything EOTR. 

That sliver of SW usually referred to as Buzzard Point, which I think is where they busted Marion Berry, anyway the new Audi field will turn over that neighborhood, for the better, fairly quickly since all that was down there was warehouses and not houses where people are currently living. You just have to look at the other side of South Capitol Street to see what the baseball stadium did to that entire area.  The only thing that is holding SW back is the projects that span from about 3rd Street SW to South Cap Street. I remember hearing something about tearing down those projects and replacing them with nicer, low income housing but that hasn't happened yet, and it may never happen.  But one has to believe that with the 2 billion dollar Wharf project on one side and the improvements to the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street on the other, that eventually those projects will be squeezed out.  

I own a condo in SW, one block away from the new Wharf development.  I have owned it for 20 years and I have seen SW transform from a sleepy residential area into the coolest neighborhood in DC (and my property value has quadrupled) .  I would be a buyer in Buzzard Point, especially if you can snag a property with water views.

A good friend of mine recently came back from a road trip that included some time in Detroit, and when I asked him how it was the response was "still a ********" and then he told me that they had to go to Canada to find a decent hotel where they felt safe. 

Early risers might be more successful then night owls, but us night owls certainly have more fun.  Nothing exciting usually happens before midnight most days.

Also, I know California is ahead of the curve for a lot of things, but it's not 2020 yet in most of the world.