All Forum Posts by: Trevor Ewen

@Ali Syed

Welcome! 

While this year will see the lower valuations in NYC metro area, I am still in the camp that it's a bad place to invest for cash flow. Regulatory burdens are likely to go up, and I think asset prices will remain artificially high due to loss aversion. Many NYC'ers hold onto non cash-flowing properties since they can use their incomes to float the difference. This is not to mention taxes, state budgets are going to have a lot of trouble. 

Needless to say, I have been pro going 'out-of-state' since I started investing in 2014 (by the way, I still live here, invest out of state). Covid has accelerated trends that were already underway. Internal migration, and particularly south, is very strong at the moment. Some of the markets that were attractive 5 years ago are getting pricier. You'll want to consider a thesis of where people go next. 

It's a fool's errand to predict the future. But, I think you can think of a few things to disqualify a market:
1) Natural disaster zone.
2) High, existing, property taxes.
3) Excessive rent regulation.
4) Asset prices that lead to low or no cash flow.
5) No obvious story about jobs + the local economy.

That takes a ton of cities / places off the list. Whatever is left, develop the thesis. Extra points if you have connections in an area that meets the qualifications. Having trusted partners in a market makes all the difference. I think there are some undervalued rural & small town opportunities at the moment, so that could be a place to start your investigation.

@Suzanne Player

Copper CRM is my tool of choice. It's more of a traditional sales-oriented CRM, but the integration with G-Suite is very nice.

@Quentin West

You could used demographically targeted Google Ad campaigns to assess interest and funnel potential buyers into a landing page. I am running an ad campaign for an accredited investor opportunity, and I am seeing a fair amount of traffic from people looking for smaller, owner-operator type projects (10-20 units is a very common search).

You could cap the budget and see where the interest lies, develop a prospect list. Good place to start if you have other slower processes moving along. This happens in the background.

@Calvin Liang

Similar story to yours. While I think some management is lacking on the tech side, so much of it has to do with the willingness on the side of practitioners.

It's why I tend to focus my efforts on data mining, similar to what @Account Closed mentioned. People can always use more and better data.

@L. Morello

Placester (https://placester.com/) is a very good product. Targeted at your exact use-case.

@Corey M.

Something you may want to consider. Yesterday's 'appreciation' markets have already been valued accordingly. I would answer your question with another set of questions:

1) What market has good fundamentals?
2) What market has undervalued assets?
3) What's a plausible growth story you see for the market?

The people who make a killing from appreciation are the ones were in the market before anyone cared (or knew) about the market. As Bernard Baruch said: "Something everyone knows isn't worth anything." 

@Account Closed

Agree with @Jaysen Medhurst on this one.

Curious what base this is near? This actually seems quite high (purchase price) for a typical military rental.

@Colby Wise

I had wondered if Rentometer had an API, but there is not one advertised. In your position, I would reach out to see if they have considered an API as a product offering.

If you are targeting a specific area, you could go a long way with a mix of scraping and some manual work via Mechanical Turk. I would only use Rentometer as an initial filter. If you want to go in-depth, you'll probably have to produce the numbers on your own.

@Tracy Belizaire

Welcome. 

One strategy for NYC investors (like myself) is to go out-of-state. I have invested entirely outside of the New York metro area. I have one project in New Jersey, but I barely recommend that at the moment. The midwest and the southeast have much better prices for entry and easier on the regulations.

@Oscar Reyes

I can't recommend too much on the 'flip-tools' side. But you will definitely have a ton of expenses and receipts to track. Expensify is excellent for this. It integrates well with several accounting platforms. You can take pictures of receipts and deal with them later.