All Forum Posts by: Tim Grillot

Our plan is to continue to hone our skills, network, and build our team

We purchased our first two properties in 2018, which are just OK deals.  2018 was our year to "take the leap" and get our hands dirty.  We are very happy with the properties we ended up with and ecstatic about how much we learned.  Our goal it to buy two more multi-family's in 2019, but with more focus and education going into them than we had with the first two. We now have much tough guidelines than when we jumped in.  Looking to find our niche and continue to educate ourselves heavily in 2019 and start to seriously scale in 2020.

@Julia Fair...unfortunately your husband is right!!!  I moved to Bowling Green 5 years ago, before then I had been coming here for years for the NMRA race!!  I actually have quite a few friends in the Atlanta area that I met through the NMRA!   The car scene is a very tight knit group that I have many life long friends from.  I just decided I need to move some of my financial focus away from it.  I have literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on cars and racing...time to do some sensible investing!!!  Like I said I will always be in the car scene, just scaled back for a bit.  Fourtanatly the reason I moved to Bowling Green was for a career opportunity in the performance industry.  I run the engineering department of the largest aftermarket performance company in the world....very cool gig!

@David Witty  that would be great!!  

@Mark S., yes these are gross rent numbers....I know not the best deals out there with the current numbers.  The thing I left out is the rents on the units we bought were grossly low when we purchased them.  On the tri-plex they were at $450/mo when we purchased.  We raised the rent on the existing two tenants to $550 a month after we closed, and rented the vacant unit for $600.  Market on these is $700-$750, and we are going to be doing rent increases every 6 months until we get caught up to market.  We let everyone know our plan when we bought it and they all knew they were underpaying.  Once up to market price the numbers will be better.  The response I got when we listed the vacant unit really confirmed they are way too cheap.  I listed them and within 3 days my ad had 2400 views and I received 90 messages.  From there I narrowed it down and showed it to 15 people.  I would have gladly rented it to any of the people I showed it to.  I purposely showed it a lot and didn't charge an application fee as I wanted the practice of honing my people side.  I deal with lots of people on a daily basis with my 9-5 job and love it, however I wanted to take the time to show lots of people so I could get a feel of the clients I was working with in this area. 

@James Wilcox see above, I am learning as I go and I agree with your statements.  Right now I LOVE doing the  maintenance, repairs, and property management myself.  I came from a construction background and am very good with my hands.  I know this isn't scale-able long term, but at the moment while we are getting our feet wet I like being in the trenches doing it all as it will teach me everything I need as we scale and hire help.   With that said if I end up "retiring" to do property management and maintenance/repairs on our portfolio I would be a happy man!!

Currently we do not need to nor are we pulling any money out of this. All the reserves stay in our LLC account for the business. Another thing I dint mention in my first post is how I previously spent my extra income. I have always had a HUGE spending issue in my car hobby. I have always bought and sold lots of cars, mostly old cars, hot rods, and race cars. While I have gotten really good at buying and selling cars and not totally losing my ***, for me to say I have always broken even would be the biggest lie to myself ever....especially on the racing side of things. This year I made the personal decision to focus my money on something that is not throw away (real estate). After jumping in I can truly say I get the same (or better) high from playing with real estate instead of cars, and it is pretty safe to say my worst real estate deal will come out better financially than a destroyed race car. I will always have a toe or two in the car stuff but I am scaling way way back. I am finishing up an engine for my race car now and when I look at what I could have bought in real estate with the same amount of money($45,000ish) it looks pretty foolish...lol!! I strive to learn and gain knowledge and I am truly enjoying this new venture and learning new skills!!

I have been lurking here for a while and decided it was time to finally introduce myself and join the fun!! My wife and I are beginner investors in the Bowling Green Kentucky area. We both work full time well paying jobs and have gotten into REI as a retirement(early) plan.

At my "normal" job I am the engineering Director at a large automotive aftermarket company managing approx. 85 employees, budgets, strategic planning, etc., etc.  My wife is a paralegal focused on real estate 95% of the time at a small law firm.  It is an awesome partnership between my wife and I with our mixed skill-sets and we love working together!

We currently have a tri-plex that we paid $170,000 for and rents for $1725/mo. After mortgage, insurance, and taxes it flows approx $140 per door. We are also closing on a duplex next week that we paid $123,000 for and rents for $1150/month. The cash flow on it after mortgage, insurance, and taxes is about the same as the tri-plex. We bought both of these off of Zillow. Due to the time our 9-5 jobs take along with kids, etc we decided to go this route to get our feet in the door. We know there are way better deals to be had and we plan to pursue that in the future as we learn and have time. So far we are loving it!!! We are focused on building a buy and hold portfolio large enough to support us in retirement. For these two deals we used money we had in savings for the down payment. As we move forward we are going to get more creative as we wont empty our nest egg doing this. We have a substantial 401k that we can borrow from as well as HELOC we can use in the future if we decide to go that route. For both these deals we used a local bank that only required 15% down on a 20 year term.

We have focused on properties in small surrounding towns, and so far that strategy has worked well for us.  We have very respectful tenants and they all want to live there.  The small towns we have focused on have very high demand and very low supply making it very easy to find good tenants.  

Our ultimate goal would be to be financially independent from monthly rent income and be able to "retire" and do real estate full time. 

Enough rambling from me for now, but thank you Bigger Pockets for all of the great information shared!!