All Forum Posts by: Ryan York

David Rawls

Hey all! We're excited to share that our first full rehab and flip resulted in a profit of 10k! Nothing massive but we made money for ourselves and our investor. My partner and I started up our real estate business about a year ago. Our friends and family still think we're crazy, but we trudged on and made money. We got the lead from a post card mailer. We paid 7k in a c area, put about 20k into the rehab and sold it for 47k. We researched a stupid amount before and during (and still now) but it's true what they say. You just can't learn it all. We messed up a ton of little things and got hit with several surprises. Our favorite mistake was ordering a dumpster for a shed we needed to demo. We paid someone to demo the shed then scheduled a day for all of our friends to come help us toss it. The mistake was that we scheduled the friend day for AFTER the dumpster was due back lol. So the company picked up an empty dumpster and we had a group of ten people there without a dumpster to put the shed into. Just one of our few rookie mistakes. Luckily, we did a great job on the most important things. We bought right. We were very conservative on our rehab numbers and we ended up selling it for more than we thought we would. My humble advice to other newbies is just to be conservative, especially right now. I see investors over paying so much on other deals right now. Crunch your numbers and constantly be asking what you're missing and how can you lose money. If you cover your butt with conservative estimates, you're bound to make money.

Thanks @Jeff G. We do attend our local REIA, but there isn't a meeting for a couple of weeks. We have a property we're looking to move on so it's a bit more urgent. Just trying to put together another option for the deal. Thanks!

Hey all,

I'm looking to network with hard money lenders in Michigan, specifically the Metro Detroit area. A few questions... 

Any tips on finding good ones?

What questions should I ask?

What information should we have prepared when planning to meet about a specific property?

Thanks all!

@Mike Spica @Richard Ball @Robert Spencer @Troy Young

How are things going with the new (as of circa 2015 I believe) rental ordinances and city inspections? We are looking at a couple apartment buildings in Port Huron. 

Any advice on the area in general? 

When you guys use 8% for vacancy rates, are you talking monthly or annually? For example, if the place rents for $1000/mo, are you reserving $80/mo?

Thanks all! That's helpful. I've spoken with a few lenders in the past, but never really tried getting any paperwork prior to deal finding. I'll meet up with them again. 

Any tips on marketing for value add properties? I'm currently writing down every address I see. I also have some realtors on the lookout. 

So we're looking into our first apartment complex and we keep running into an issue. Realtors keep asking for proof of financing in order to give us any useful information. From what I've read, at least a good portion of bank financing is based off the property's metrics. How are supposed to obtain commercial financing before getting any real information about a property? What am I missing?

@Ray Lai We're already using them. It's not much per month. Most of it is already included with our Podio subscription and Zapier is dirt cheap. 

We use Click2mail to produce and mail the postcards but I do the designs. It depends on how many we send out at a time, but we usually pay anywhere from .18 to .22 cents per postcard for production, and stamps are stamps. I think it's 27 cents each. We don't do many yellow letters, but those are about .90-$1 each if I remember correctly.