Visiting my first houses with RealtorTim

This afternoon was yet another small step towards finding my first passive income through single family homes that I intend to turn into rental property. I met RealtorTim at a house about 15 minutes from my place, near the western edge of the city and we went through the first of four houses we visited this afternoon.

I drove about 30 KM in total, following RealtorTim from the first house to the second, third and fourth. Of course, I recorded my kilometrage, since this is a personal business. I haven't talked to my accountant about how to do it "right" but I'm just starting with recording it and that'll have to do for now.

Two of the four houses definitely had potential to buy, do a bit of fixing up, re-assess, and set the rent at 1% of this newly estimated value. One of the promising ones was "supposed to be vacant" but wasn't, quite yet, but perhaps this does show some kind of urgency in sale. Both of the promising ones have been on the market 14+ days - one 14 days and the other, 88 days.

It took us about an hour and 45 minutes to go through all of the houses and discuss the different parts of them, but was very educational for me.

I've sent an email to TJ to let him know I'd looked at houses and saw a couple that were "promising" but ... now what?? I think I'll also call my advisor line tomorrow and see what kind of advice they can give me. I guess now is the time to "tie up the property" so nobody else can get in there, so I can do my due diligence, and determine whether this really IS a good deal... but I'm kind of hesitant to jump on any of the early "deals" I find... I'm always of the mindset that the first things you see aren't the ones you should choose, unless you've also reviewed a bunch more. When you're first reviewing anything, you can't tell whether it's really good or not because you have no real frame of reference for this new thing. Only time and exposure can give that understanding.

I'm fortunate to live in a city that has a 98-99% rental occupancy rate, I should be able to find a family to rent the property, in theory...

But I'm not sure exactly how to go about things. I figure if nothing else, I have time :)

Jill

Goin' to see houses tomorrow

This afternoon I got some house search results from RealtorTim, and tomorrow we're going to see all five of them in my area. I'll get together with him around 1PM, it'll be the first time I've seen him in person, since he was referred to me by TJ.

I haven't heard back from TJ about going out for coffee with him but I still am setting Thursday PM as my deadline, and considering my appointments tomorrow, I'd better get that done now.

Excuse me :)

Letting the long weekend stall me

This past weekend I really did nothing, other than watch Carleton Sheets DVD's that TJ gave me. I went to listen to my Robert Allen stuff again but my roommate came downstairs to play on her computer and visit with me and the cats, so I put on music instead. There are times when she's perfectly fine with listening to my "take over the world" stuff, but she's had a headache going on for a couple of days so instead we shared background noise in the form of music.

On Tuesday I jumped back on the horse, however, by emailing updated search criteria to RealtorTim and emailing TJ as well, hoping we can get together on Thursday evening. Setting this "date" with TJ gives me a deadline to find all the materials I'm supposed to be getting to him, in terms of finances so he can determine how much $$ we have for our first deal.

I also called another realtor who I saw listed as selling specifically to private investors - foreclosures, rehabs, income property, etc... I left a message with the answering service at about 7:30 PM expecting to chat with the realtor this morning during regular hours, and the guy called me back at 8:30, apologizing for "taking so long"! We set up a tentative meeting for Thursday at 11:30 AM but he didn't have his schedule in front of him so he asked me if he could confirm this morning.

This morning he called at about 8:30 am and confirmed our 11:30 appointment, and gave me the information I need to buzz up to his office once we nailed down where to meet.

I'm quite impressed that he called at 8:30 PM to follow up with my call from earlier, perhaps he'll be someone available on weekends, as well, without this being a big pain for him.

Apparently this guy works 85% with private investors and used to be a private investor himself years ago. This is good information to know, as I know I'm working with someone experienced. I'll have to ask him why he got out of private investing however, or if he even did.

I went for a walk last night around the neighborhood, and I write about it in this entry over in my karate/physical health blog. I noticed that the new private real estate magazine comes out on Friday, I'll grab one of those then and start making calls over the weekend to get some practice in with that.

My First Investment Realtor

Tim's his name. He's a referral from that friend-of-a-friend, TJ, since TJ uses this guy to find some of his real estate deals.

Today Tim called me and we had a little chat about what kind of properties I was looking to get into, and I told him my starting criteria. He called me again about 30 minutes later saying he had 17 hits in the MLS, and he requested my email address so he could email the results. I was to contact him back with the MLS #'s of the properties I wanted to check out, and we'd go from there.

I looked at the properties and realized I hadn't narrowed my criteria for him quite enough - I'll chat with him about that when we're in person next, which might be as early as tomorrow afternoon. At any rate, I narrowed down the properties and came up with four that looked like good deals, one of which had the strong possibility of being a motivated seller. I called Tim and left a message on his machine about the MLS#s of these houses.

Tim called me back after he had quickly reviewed the status of the properties again, and it turns out that the motivated seller property looks like it had been updated to 'conditionally sold', so we may not be able to even go and see it. But the other three look like they're still for sale, so he was going to do further research and see if we could go and see the properties starting tomorrow afternoon.

In the mean time, I need to find our notices of tax assessment from the last 3 years for TJ as part of this "how much $$ do you have for your first downpayment?" question he's helping me answer.

Jill