All Forum Posts by: Ryan Xu

I think you misunderstood the rule. For building up ADUs, yes most cities do have a requirement that the owner must occupy the primary home at the time of applying for the permit and finalizing it. Then condomize them and sell them separately. 

If it is the route you wanna try, go for it. An older home with land now in Seattle will be worth between 500k-1M. And it will cost about $350k to build an DADU and sell it for $700k-ish. Actually, I and my team have done 4 in the past 12 months and have 3 more now in process. This is deftly the most profitable approach here now.

And if you're talking about 'house hacking', it only means you're taking part of the occupancy and renting out the rest part of the property. To do it every one or two years and hold, you do not have to occupy all of them. Most loans for primary home purposes are only requiring you to live in that place for 1 year then you can rent the whole thing out after.

If they did it right and took care of the mold in time. With the record, receipt, email communication record, and after-treatment test result as proof. They should not be scared of lawsuits.

Meanwhile, get everything together and start to talk with attorneys right now. Stop replying, and hire a PM!

Mold is a serious problem in WA. But not something they should pay 2 months of rent as cost plus everything you mention.

100% great deal.

It's amazing to see you can finish it "down to the stud" with that cost. Did you put your own labor on it? Or it's really that low cost in your area?

Good job Andrew!

Throw a vendor machine there and you'll like it. I have one in mine and it earns more than I could think of.

I've tried almost all lead sources you can name: cold calls, postcards, door knock, open houses, Zillow, cinc, paper media ads, and social media.

And THEY ALL WORK! Just with different costs and techniques to approach.
Although people may say Zillow is not working well and costly. I'll have to say, it may not be cost-efficient, but so far it's the most effective one. I wouldn't recommend it to you since you're new. You'll less likely to be able to convert any leads in the beginning. Conversion rate is the key.

To newbies, the open houses are IMO the best way to approach them since you are meeting them directly.

Last but not least, start now. Quit planning, just go act. With my broken English, I did $26M in my first year, you can do it, too.

If the sale is taxable then it will be affected. For example, it has any capital gain (price difference more than $250 for a single, $500k for a married couple, if they live there longer than 2 yrs.)

Please remember to write off any capital investment/ improvement that they put in over the years on the property.

An easier way to deal with this is to find a lawyer to set up a seller financing contract for it. Let me know if you need any help on this.

A typical $1.8 - 2.5M SFH home in Eastside Seattle will rent around 5K. And there are a lot of them out there.

But if you break it down to 5 $500k homes around Tacoma, each of them can rent out for more than $2.3k to 3K easily.

So what I was suggesting to my savvy clients is, to break them down into smaller projects that can cashflow better as investments, and rent for living. Not only life quality is better, but investment risk is also lower than renting out one cash-burning home.

I would recommend buying a rental investment in a better cashflow area like around Tacoma or Everett as an investment with that budget. Use the rental income to cover your own rent in Seattle.

Not only because an SFH further out will appreciate more than a TH or condo in the city. But also, the life quality will be better with the rental income covering a better unit than 1B1B apt living in town.

Hey @Tracy Qi. I don't see many people's success on STR in Seattle. But yes, most of the people I know can at least outperform LTR even with the vacancy. Just with the amount of effort you have to put in, it may not be worth it.

There are a lot of pros and cons vs LTR in this business. Until you get into it, you'll never know. Ain't that the beautifulness of entrepreneurship?