All Forum Posts by: Zachary Schimenz

@Basit Siddiqi it's an online membership site business. Is this something that's pretty easy to handle?

I own a small business, so I already have a tax guy. Now I'm buying real estate investments to rent out to tenants, and I've read that you really should get a CPA who specializes in Real Estate.

How does this work? Do I need to fire my normal tax guy, or do I hire the Real Estate tax guy and he works WITH my normal tax guy?

Thanks and let me know if you have any advice!

I'm currently analyzing properties, and trying to get accurate numbers for insurance cost.

So first I tried requesting quotes online from various companies, but I'm realizing those are for personal properties, not investment properties, so I always have to call in and it takes like 20 to 30 minutes to get a quote over the phone.

How do you estimate insurance cost when you just need to ballpark it? Is there a "rule of thumb" percentage of the purchase price to estimate for insurance cost?

Thanks and let me know!

Awesome, thank you all so much for the advice, it's really helping me out

Ok gotcha, thanks for the replies. Yea mine is a duplex, but it's only $110,000  so I think I'll  reach out to other insurance companies. Thanks a lot for the input!

So I filled out  an online form for a quote, and got quoted at about $800 a year for a property. Then I realized that was for if I was living there, and it's  different since it's an investment property. When I called in they quoted me at $3,500!!

Is this right? Is  there really this big of a gap between if you're living in the house or if you're renting it out?

Hey, I'm doing some CapEx estimations, looking at driveways in particular. It looks like driveways cost about $5/sq ft (including removal cost) and last an average of about 30 years. 2 questions:

1. How do I find the square footage of the driveway? That info's not listed on Redfin, would the agent know or do I have to go over there and eyeball it?

2. I'm going to be renting out in a college town where most college kids don't care if the driveway "looks pretty". Will I have to replace a driveway in 30 years anyway because there are some kind of "structural issues" or can I just leave a cracked driveway in there, no big deal?

Thanks and I appreciate it!

-Zach

Ahh ok I see. Would you use them for rough estimates? Like if you're analyzing a ton of properties to find ones that are "maybe's" and then run a more detailed analysis on those? Or just skip the Redfin estimates all together?

Hey, I'm a new investor, currently analyzing a lot of deals (to buy and hold). I was wondering if the numbers on Redfin are fairly accurate, or do they just use a generic percentage across the US? There are two sections I'm referring to, one is the "Payment Calculator" area:

And the other is the "Taxes" under the "Property Details" section. Are these the real taxes on the property, or is Redfin estimating what the taxes would be?

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate any advice!

-Zach

I'm analyzing a bunch of properties at the moment, what's your go-to way of estimating the amount of rental income you'll make on a property?

Right now I'm just typing in "rent house in (zip code)" which gives me a general idea, but there aren't usually a lot of properties that also have the same amount of beds/baths, square footage, etc.

Is there a better way to estimate rental income? If you have something that works for you I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks, 

Zach