All Forum Posts by: Ryan Webber

The earnest money goes towards the purchase price so you won't make any profit on it when everything settles out. Your profit comes on the difference in the purchase and sales prices.

If you buy the house for 50K and put 5K down then at closing you owe 45K. If you are selling it for 55K and your buyer puts down 8K then they owe 47K at closing. Yes, you got 3K more in your pocket now, but at closing you will only get 2K more. Your spread is still 5K anyway you slice it.

I stand corrected. Island cabinets would obviously need to be mounted to the subfloor or slab in one way or another. For some reason, all I was picturing in my head were wall mount cabinets.

Jeffrey, that makes no sense to me. You will change the tile out much more often then the layout of a kitchen. Again, I've done hundreds of rehabs and I've changed out cabinets less than 10% of the time, but I've had to put in new tile or vinyl just about ever single time. Also, it might save time because you have less cuts but it increases your material cost.

I totally disagree. Wholesaling is not all about disclosure. That sounds like a realtor statement.

Yes, the buyers lender needs to understand the situation, but you should be dealing with cash or cash equivalent buyers anyway. Obviously the title agent needs to understand the situation also, but not the real estate agents. Fully explaining a wholesale flip to an agent will CAUSE you problems down the line. I know this from personal experience on multiple occasions.

Carla, I absolutely agree that most investors don't have an understanding of investing either. Most "real estate investors" never buy a single property. I would probably put that percentage up in the same range as the percentage of realtors that don't understand investing. The difference to me is that a realtor is supposed to be the "expert", and most of them are too arrogant and full of themselves to admit when they have no idea what they are talking about. I always love it when a realtor who has never bought an investment property in their life starts telling me what I should be buying or how I should be buying it, or even better, when they tell me that what I'm doing is illegal.

No, I don't have any empirical data to back my 95% of realtors are clueless about investing statement, but my own extensive experience with realtors definitely supports it. Really and truly I can only think of one realtor that I've ever met out of hundreds and hundreds that I would say truly understands investing EXCEPT for those that have done quite a bit of investing themselves. I would put the percentage of realtors that are experienced investors at about 5%, probably even less.

I'm sorry Carla but the stereotype has been well earned by your comrades.

95% of realtors are clueless about investing, and my biggest complaint is that they normally act like they actually do know something about investing when in reality they know absolutely nothing.

Now 5% of realtors are NOT clueless. So the point being that if we're trying to help a new investor understand what they are going to find in the reality of investing then we need to share with them that 19 out of 20 realtors are going to be a waste of their time. Stereotype or not, its the truth, and if we shared something different we would be lying.

Now let's talk about the 5%. That 1 out of 20 twenty realtor that understands investing and has an active network to find and sell deals is an absolute gold mine. A true investor oriented realtor can make you a lot of money, and they are a prize to find.

On a side note, I love cookies. What's wrong with baking cookies? I would love my realtors even more if they made me cookies.

I have never seen cabinets mounted to a slab floor or even to a wooden sub floor. I could see the possibility of it with a pier and beam house that has a wooden sub floor (though I think its probably completely unnecessary), but I would find it highly unlikely that you would ever see cabinets mounted into an actual concrete slab.

Sam, I don't see any problem with responding to old threads. Probably my biggest issue is answering questions that have been asked and answered every two or three months for the last 4 years. I would figure more people would look through the old mountains of data here to find answers to their problem before they ask the same question that gets asked every month or two.

Sally, as for tiling under your cabinets I think you are making a mistake. Its much more likely that you will be changing the tile before the cabinets, and cabinets are much more expensive than tile. If you put in cabinets after title and you decide to change the tile then the cabinets have to come out, too. In my rehabs, 98% of the time I put down new flooring in a kitchen, but less than 10% of the time do I replace the cabinets.

Brian's point of shimming cabinets on tile is another thing to consider. You won't be mounting them to the subfloor, though. They normally only get mounted to the wall and to each other.

Don is absolutely right. Take it to a good title agent and let them do their job. Every state has different heirship laws, and you don't always have to probate to get clear title.

In my double closings, I sign a contract with the seller and I sign a contract with the buyer. The title agent brings in everybody on the same day and the seller signs a warranty deed to me and I sign a warranty deed to my buyer. My buyer's funding funds my transaction with the seller. I never have brought money to the table.

Most realtors and title agents will have no idea what you are talking about. That's perfectly normal. I would suggest you follow Priscilla's advice and keep your mouth shut to your agent and find a title agent that understands double closings.

Brian, I've never heard all those things defined that way but they all make sense. Either way I would never expect my title agent to understand all or really any of those terms. I've always just thrown out there that I'd like to do a "double closing" which they normally respond with "huh?" and then explain exactly what I want to do and see how the title agent reacts.

As for the quit claim approach, make sure you check with your title agent first. Quit claims in Texas are worthless and you would end up having to redo it with a special warranty deed.

Todd, you got it figured out. That's how it works.

In Texas, Anthony, I would stay away from the lease option/rent-to-own/contract for deed thing. If you are planning on doing anything other than renting a subject 2 then I would, again, stay away from subject 2's also. The laws are sticky with all of these in Texas and unless you know what you are doing or have the money to pay an attorney to tell you what to do and not to do, don't do them.

Owner finance in general in Texas and many parts of the country is getting a whole lot harder to do. The SAFE Mortgage Act just went into place and is changing the rules for owner finance across the country. I can't even find an attorney right now that can give me a straight answer on all of it. According to this new legislation, in many states of the country, owner finance is pretty much illegal now unless you are doing it with your homestead or unless you have a mortgage broker's license.

My recommendation is to wholesale it and move on. If you want to be a wholesaler, you deal with cash buyers only.