All Forum Posts by: Stephen Keighery

@Phillip Davis I will be there for sure. I live in New Orleans so it's a no brainier.

@Cosmin Iuga start by investing in yourself and your knowledge. If you want to grow the money you need to know where to put it rather than following what someone tells you that you should do. You are in a great place though and the podcast and articles will move you in the right direction. Enjoy!

@Chris Elkendier I would personally use leverage and buy more properties to get a better cash on cash return.

The other alternative is to buy off market deals that need work with the cash and fix them up and then refinance out the equity you gain and then do it again(BRRR method). Having cash opens up great off market deals so you can take advantage.

Regardless, congrats on piling up the cash and I am sure you will be able to grow your finances and your knowledge in what ever path you decide to take.

Great to see the event in coming New Orleans. If ya'll are lucky crawfish may still be season 

I would personally use a commercial broker for a property like that. You will get a whole lot of tyre kickers through craigslist

@David Muscovalley I would purchase absentee owners but focus on out of state ones. This is more scalable than driving for dollars. When you get appointments drive the comps and check out the neighborhood and use that driving for driving for dollars.

Good luck with your goals @Andre Jernigan

My goals for 2020 are:

Close on 50 wholesale deals in 2020

Establish a private lending arm to fund deals for other people

Hire an Operations Assistance in H1

Hire an Acquisition Manager in H2

Disclaimer, I am not a realtor and have only been focusing on the New Orleans market for 18 months so you there would be people who could give you better advise than me. I do invest full time in the area so deal with this every day though so will share what I do. For me I draw a border to create a comparable area. Somewhere like Claiborne in your example would be a border for me as we know the comps change drastically. Being a local you would know what those borders are. I would always start with sales over the last 6 months but if there isn't enough in that little area I would prefer to take it to 12 months than to use comps out of the border. I can usually find enough good comps that way. I will always drive the comps as I progress on the deal just to make sure that block doesn't change a lot from the subject property. It is really hard to comp in New Orleans and you just need to put in a little extra effort and thought. 

In my experience these type of tools don't work in New Orleans. It is nothing to do with the quality of the tools but the fact that:
1. Louisiana is a non-disclosure state so the data sources are often incomplete
2. New Orleans can very different property values from one block to the next. You can't use any stand "0.5 miles" type of rules but instead need to understand where the neighborhoods change. 

I look at a lot of these tools and while they look great, I just struggle to make them work for the New Orleans area. Are there any New Orleans investors using this or similar tools?

Hey Darnell, @Bob Norton is a CPA based in Slidell. He is also a Real Estate Broker and investor so has a good perspective on helping investors. I have only just started using him so myself but I know people that I respect who have used him for a long time so he would be worth checking out.