All Forum Posts by: Joe Butcher

Doing anything with no experience is going to be hard. If anything that could yield a good return was easy, everyone would be doing it.

If you want to flip houses, find a local rehabber and ask if you can work with him/her. 

Tell them you are willing to work cheap in return for the experience. 

YES. You absolutely should.

Read this: http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/01/27...

Dont have a lot of time to see all the details but $1300/mo rent seems reasonable. It's hard to tell just from pictures but $65,000 in rehab seems like an awful lot for that size house, especially as a rental.

The house I just did was very similar in size, needed full cosmetics, foundation, new roof, new flooring in every room plus a bunch of plumbing and gas line issues and the rehab was about 30K.

Here's an application as well: http://beta.biggerpockets.com/files/user/biggerpo/...

There is this article: http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/01/27... which really helped me a lot. 

Plus there have been several discussions (some heated) here on BP, just do a search for "tenant screening" in the search bar in the upper right. It's good to hear the different opinions.

I used MySmartMove.com to do the background check and was very happy with it.

Good luck.

Private money would usually be money that comes from family and/or friends, so as long as you have at least one of the two then that is an option.

Trying to get them to finance 100% would be another story....you having experience or them having deep pockets would help.

The question that you need to have an answer for is this: What would you be bringing to the table that would motivate them to lend 100%?

You generally turn a "lead" into "deal" on your own. Once you have a deal, you can sell it, but we could just be talking semantics here.

Do you actually have the property under contract?

I noticed you didn't post the asking price or the rehab estimate.

I did something similar. Read about it here: http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/223/topics/128845-my-first-deal

Welcome! I love it when people from CA move here.....that means more Trader Joe's and tri-tip steaks!!!!

Start hitting the local REIA groups, theres plenty of them.

I see. In Dallas, a lot can happen in 5 miles....heck ,my neighborhood is awesome, but 1 mile from here....major difference.

If you are thinking duplex consider east Dallas, north of I-30.