All Forum Posts by: William Strong

@Orlando Andujar Welcome to BiggerPockets and always glad to see another military member who is interested in REI.

As @Daniel Ryu mentioned I have used my VA loan to buy what is now a rental property. This home was originally my primary residence and then converted it into a rental after I PCS'd out of the area.

As far as using the VA loan to buy a multifamily property you will be able to finance up to a 4-plex as 1-4 units are still considered residential properties. On the VA side of things everything should process through in the same way that a VA loan would for a SFR that was being bought for the purpose of a primary residence.

The VA does have some inspection requirements that a property must meet before being eligible for the VA to back the loan. Allowing you to put $0 down.

I am unsure of this and I would contact either the VA or even your lender to find out but, I think that all of the units would have to meet the inspection requirements. Not just the unit that you are intending to occupying.

I would encourage you to work with a realtor who is familiar with these requirements or be familiar with them yourself to prevent getting to far into the process and have your funding fall through. 

Also, picking a multifamily property would be the same as if you weren't using VA financing (minus excluding properties that don't meet inspection requirements.) Your property still needs to meet all of the requirements that a property would if you bought it using conventional financing or a cash. (i.e. cash flow, occupancy, tenant quality, condition of the property, expenses, etc.)

The property might even need to have more meat on the bones if you finance everything they let you include the funding fee. Both times when I used my VA loan this added thousands of dollars to my mortgage amount and increased expenses higher than originally anticipated. I ended up owing more money on the properties than it appraised in at since I financed all of the costs.

Hope this helps you out. Also there are a lot of military members on here so you should be able to find some good information searching using VA Loan or something similar.

@Elizabeth Colegrove has more experience in this area than me but if I am correct she is buying SFR's and converting those to rentals after a PCS. I don't know if they have bought any multifamilies.

@Daniel Ryu, @John Van Uytven is correct I did bring Rich along. He is on BP @Richard Harrington. 

Dan, I'm looking forward to the next meetup as well hopefully I will plan my travel better and we will have time to talk. 

@Daniel Ryu Thanks for posting about the meeting, once again I have learned a lot about REI. I'm looking forward to the next meeting.

@John Van Uytvenand @Engelo Rumora Thanks for presenting and providing everyone at the meet up with great information. 

@Antonio Esquivel This sounds like a good deal. Congrats on picking up your second house.

I live down in Bellevue, what part of Omaha is this house in? 

@Siddeeqah Porter

  If by requirements you mean how it works in your state, you would need to look up the state and county you want to invest in and read the laws. 

Here is the link for Arizona, all i searched for was Arizona Tax Lien Statute

http://www.azleg.gov/ArizonaRevisedStatutes.asp?Ti...

Also search the BP forums there are several investors who invest in Arizona on here. 

@Daniel Ryu thanks for putting together another meeting. I'm looking forward to hearing what @Engelo Rumora has to say. 

@Richard Harrington you should come out. 

I did the VA streamline in 2011 and it went pretty smooth for me, with the VA IRRL refinance program there wasn't a requirement to be below 80% LTV. I fully refinanced 100% of the purchase price. I bought the house in 2010 and refinanced just under two years later and was underwater on the house at the time. It didn't matter since they didn't require an appraisal. I'm pretty sure that I remember an owner occupancy clause still being a requirement for the refinance. I was still living in the house at the time so it wasn't an issue but you might want to look into that.

Is your goal of refinancing to get back some of your VA entitlement or are you trying to lower your payments to up your cashflow? You should be able to use a mortgage calculator to find out a rough estimate of payments. I like to use bank rate to get rough hacks.

http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/index-of-mortg...

Hope this helps. 

@Adam Worth

 I have only bought a primary residence in the Omaha area but I used Karen Jennings at CBS Home and she was great. She is consistently the top rated realtor for CBS Home in the Omaha area and am sure she could find what you need or at least put you in contact with someone who can. 

@Victor Collazo Sorry but i'm an Air Force guy. When were you out in Korea?

@Hardik Patel Welcome to BiggerPockets. I would suggest going to a local REIA and network with investors who are active in your local area.

I would also suggest interacting with other MA investors here on BiggerPockets, and learning what you can from them on here. Several BP members have gotten together to work on deals with people they met on here and you could do the same also.