All Forum Posts by: Ryan Evans

The best bang for your buck isn’t going to be anywhere in Washington. There are dozens of cities around the us where you could buy 3 nice respectable houses or a couple of duplexes for $300K. Sure, investing out of state has different challenges, but there is an incredible amount of resources on how to do it successfully. Best of luck!  

Yeah, it seems pretty much everyone uses Streeter around here. 

If you can save up enough in just a few months to pay cash for another duplex then you'll save quite a bit in loan fees and that wouldn't be a bad approach. You'll be able to make better offers as well.

If you're making good money at a job and plan on rehabbing from afar for the first time, know that it's a huge learning curve and potentially a huge time suck. There are a ton of ways to approach buying your next property, but don't think for a second that it's as simple as buying a fixer-upper, hiring a contractor, and then getting a tenant in place all to have a nice cash flowing property. 

Doing some kind of house hack is a great way to start. A lot of people in similar situations would buy a duplex that can be lived in and a bit of value created while you're there. An FHA or maybe even a USDA loan could be your best bet.

Strictly investing in rentals is going to take more cash and someone will still have to back the loan if you're not fully paying cash. That means even if you can drum up 25% down for a rental, you're going to have to get a loan application approved and that may be challenging with your income. Sure, someone else can bring the cash AND back the loan but then you'll have to really show where you're value is at. 

All that said, having any experience at all as a landlord will be tremendously beneficial when raising money from family and friends. 

Getting a realtor license will not be counted as stable income for potentially quite a while, so if you're trying to raise your income from a lending standpoint, a second w2 is going to get you there faster. 

I started out three years ago with no job after moving back to the states from overseas. Lending wasn't an option. I bought my first duplex for 24k  cash and just hated my life for a while as I fixed it up. Since then I've bought 4 more with no banks involved and no stable income. It's all possible! 

If you're in an area that students/young professionals are renting you might be able to furnish the common areas nicely and rent out bedrooms individually. I have a few friends that do that near Seattle with singles and duplexes. They cash flow really well in an area that otherwise wouldn't cash flow. The more bedrooms the better.

I have a couple of colors that I try to stick with. Agreeable gray is one of them and swiss coffee is the other. Some of my properties have darker wood trim or natural floors that clash quite a bit with agreeable gray so that's where the off white comes in. Then I get a good semigloss pure white that can be used for trim/doors on multiple properties since I buy nice paint and always have some leftover after turning a unit around. 

If some walls are better shape than others and just doing touch-ups isn't going to work well, you can always cut in just one whole wall and the difference will be almost indistinguishable vs having a bunch of one-foot patches of new paint. 

And if you don't know the paint color you can cut a small piece of drywall out and get it matched. Patching a little hole and doing a match is often much faster than repainting a wall or room. 

Welcome to the site. There are quite a few of us on BP who are active in the area.

I'd be cautious of whatever else this contractor is telling you if he's the one doing the work on the project. As others said, it has nothing to do with the lake. He is right in that a lot of old houses in the area get water in the basement of some kind, but the source of the problem and how to remedy it are on a case-by-case basis.

You're right that Memphis and Cleveland are great markets in invest in, but people invest there primarily because they are cash-flow markets with relatively low prices and high price/rent ratios. Sure, people flip in those markets, but it's probably easier elsewhere where there is more buyer demand and higher price points. Plus, Cleveland housing stock is old unless you're in the suburbs which is another challenge worth taking into consideration. If you start opening up plaster walls you will 100% find surprises that you aren't expecting. 

In my market I've heard and seen so many terrible things about most of the property managers here so I choose to self-manage, at least for the time being. I have even self-managed from out of state/country. It's not scalable and I don't enjoy it, but I effectively pay myself $500+ a month for a few hours work here and there. And I can do a far better job than the local PM's. I'm going to pass off my portfolio in the next year or so, but need to find the right PM.

I have a network of reliable contractors, a solid handyman, and a great attorney for any evictions that come up. That's the majority of what you need to self-manage. 

All that said, a lot of investors are way out of touch with what a PM does. They expect to get top-notch service when they have a single 100-year-old house renting for $800/month. A PM isn't going to bend over backwards for those kinds of clients and that's what a lot of BP members are. PM's need scale to be profitable so the expectations have to be in the right place.