All Forum Posts by: Sheryl Sitman

From Tinder Swindler to Inventing Anna - How do you know you are working with someone genuine? While today, it looks to me very simple to determine who I want to work with in Real Estate, I understand that for new investors and for people far away from the market, it can be hard to discern. So here are my tips from years of experience in investing and in working with many people. It is really simple.

1.Make sure that you work with someone who builds his real estate business from bricks and mortar and not from BS. Social media has given us all incredible power and some use it for good, to deliver valuable content, to share, to right wrongs, to genuinely connect with others and to just plain share their reality.  But some clearly and thoroughly abuse the power and use it to manipulate and lie. So look at what content they put out there. Do they deliver actual information that you learn from? Do they share what they are doing day to day and what the results are? Or are they focused on "motivating" you, sharing content that has nothing to do with the actual business but more about curating their image? I see people building businesses around what is clearly an empty shell. You should not care what kind of car she drives, how nice people think he is or how great she is at making you believe you too can achieve financial independence. Those are just magic tricks to divert your attention away from the facts. All you need to care about is if this person can help you to make the solid investment that you hope to make. You are not seeking a life coach or a friend - -you are seeking someone who will help you get your money invested safely. Keep reminding yourself of that.

2.There are some sizable companies with lots of clients that have left their investors with nothing but losses and headaches. There are well-meaning individuals that have led clients into bad deals. There are investors who have taken their hard earned cash and then blindly trusted a stranger only to learn that the promises were meaningless at best and outright lies at worse. Make sure that whomever you are talking to knows his stuff - come prepared with questions that if they can not answer, an alert should go off in your head. If you are giving someone your money to invest for you, they should know a lot more than you do and be able to answer any question you have or have a person on their team that can. 

3. References - everyone can get someone to say something nice about them. But if someone has done a deal with a person or company, they should be able to talk in detail about that project. Speak to 2-3 people who can give you details of what they did and how it went. And make sure it is not too recent. Problems often show up months or even years later -- like rehabs that cut corners or paperwork that was falsified or just not handled properly. A common technique is for people operating in the same space to act as references for one another -- it is not always a bad thing. Good people doing good business frequently cooperate and that is great! But there is a bro mentality that often leads to people referring one of their "bro's" just because they know him - not because they know he is good at what he does. So dive beneath the surface before you commit. 4. If they use words like "haters" and "losers" run really fast. These are signs of people who have actually learned techniques to really dissuade you from looking into the details. Seriously, just the use of these words should be enough to walk away. It's a gaslighting technique and you are not a loser or hater by virtue of wanting to know that you are making a good investment! And I promise you that you will never hear those words from a true professional. Quite the opposite.

I have a few contractors in Philly. Message me

I am a fulltime investor in several areas including Philadelphia. If you wantvto buy for $100k cash the info people offer here is not accurate. All in at 100k in Philly today will land you in a sfh in a high risk neighborhood with a tough tenant pool.  There are few worthwhile markets in which you can do much with this amt.  You need a strategy/ goals and then to figure out what you can do with the funds you have. Be careful about buying a single old property in a low income neighborhood as a newbie. It can end up costing you dearly.

I just got back from completing a project in SW Florida and was floored by the quality of workmanship and overall management skills of the many contractors that I worked with. I think everyone even showed up when they said they would - it was that good. This was a different type of project than I usually do, but the stark contrast with the experiences I often have in Philadelphia just could not be more extreme. Today, I visited one of my previous contractors who had left Philly for a few years and is back now. He was working on a newbie's project, saving him from absolutely awful workmanship done by another contractor who was about to be fired. I could not get over what I was seeing -this was at a level of disaster that even an unskilled eye could understand that basically nothing was being done right. We talked about the absurdly the non-existent requirements in Pennsylvania  --  a GC does not need to have skills and knowledge. I could see that this newbie investor was headed for a lot of trouble and definitely going to spend quite a bit on fixing what he had allowed someone to do wrong.  So Buyer Beware. When you work in areas like Philadelphia, you really need to check the skill level of your contractors or you will be redoing the work and risk having unhappy tenants and all kinds of problems with the City...    And don't even get me started on the contractors who take a down payment and disappear. Vet each person before you write him a check!

@Danielle Du Plooy  if you are doing buy and hold in Philadelphia, be sure to join our Philly Landlord group on Facebook. Small housing providers sharing info and supporting one another in the complex journey of owning rentals in the city https://www.facebook.com/group...

Central AC for a Strawberry Mansion rental would be overkill currently. You will not get it back in rent. However, if you are already doing extensive work, you may want to to already plan for it such as doing the ductwork or figuring out how ductless could provide a solution. I always keep an eye on the future exit in every house I do in Philly.  Same with the finished basement. If your ceilings are high enough and you make it clean and dry, you are already ahead. Investing in actually finishing it, I can not see how you would get it back unless you add egress and can make it a bedroom.

@Tara M. @Brandon Pimm  I think that if someone is telling you they do not "like" Bethlehem these days - or at any time in the last few years, it may be to try to dampen the influx of investors. I started several years back and the competitive situation today is insane compared to just a short while ago. Bethlehem was a hidden gem. No more. Now it takes experience and hardwork to identify and win deals but once you have something, you can rest assured you added something solid  to your portfolio.    Lehigh Valley has some rough areas but is filled with solid pockets for investing.

My team is vetting single family and small multis on a daily basis and we need to see quite a few properties to reach the one that works in Bethlehem and Easton. We slowly but consistently find very solid investments for our investors and then get inundated with good applications  -- even in December! It's a new world. 

Out of curiosity I wanted to see how folks here view the Bethlehem PA market and Lehigh Valley (Easton, etc) in general - over time.   7 years ago @Laura DelGuidice started this discussion asking  about job growth. Today, the teams I work with struggle to employ people in good paying jobs and the applications we are receiving for rentals are only getting stronger. I hope you invested 7 years ago :-) Appreciation and the fast rise in rent due to the growing interest in the region would have made just about anything you did 7 years ago a strong investment.  My team is vetting single family and small multis on a daily basis and we now need to see quite a few properties to reach the one that works -- and then we have to compete with an influx of investors often with less experience and therefore overbidding.  But we keep finding super solid investments for our investors and get inundated with good applications even in December. It's a new world.  Revisit the markets you overlooked a few years ago and see what's happening today.  And learn the lessons they have to teach.

So what does everyone think today after a few years of watching the Bethlehem market evolve? I've been investing there for the last 4 years and my only complaint now is the lack of inventory. People have been flocking to the Lehigh Valley lately, rents are rising faster than other areas, lots of new development, etc etc. My team there has to work much harder to source solid opportunities today, but we are seeing some movement right now and bringing strong opportunities to our investors. As soon as we put something on the market - we are flooded with good applicants - in both Bethlehem and Easton.   This latest find needs some cosmetic work and we know we will have our pick of solid tenants.

No actually. PHA does not react/respond/consider landlord complaints. You can report to them but they do not respond or take it into consideration in any way. Your only option, from my understanding, is to go to court. With a judgement in hand, they say they will take note. They take zero responsibility for their "clients" and make it clear that once you have a PHA tenant in place, all issues that arise are on you to resolve. I do not know if the way tings are managed by PHA is specific to PHA or is a characteristic of section 8 /HUD nationwide. I was also told tenants will respect the property if they like it and if they want to stay in the program. I have not found this to be true in some cases. I had a tenant trash my place and simply move to the next one without even giving notice. PHA's response? "We encourage our clients to inform their landlords that they have signed another lease".