OfflineI've been around real estate for about 15 years. I dabbled in it when I lived on the west coast of Florida. I bought 2 homes and cleaned them up and resold them with in days without the help of a realtor. I did have a friend who has a title company and she helped me immensely. After that I didn't do it any more because I owned a Radio Shack in town and that really demanded a lot of time. In 1998 I sold my store and pretty much retired for a year. Then I moved to Jacksonville, and started to dabble again in RE. I started by opening a residential and commercials painting business. By the end of the year I had 18 full time painters and trim carpenters. We moved right along like that till about June of 2008. The real estate crash was beginning to effect us. So I had to cut back and start letting some of really good employees go, the worst thing I ever had to do. I started to look at real estate in a different light until I read Deans book BREM and started to look into that. In 2010 I joined the local REA and started to network with other Investors. We, my 3 boys and I, started to do painting and trim carpentry for 7 investors. We graduated into full rehab with in 6 months of that. Currently we have done over 20+ rehabs from 5,000.00 to 35,000.00. I started to keep record of all the expenses and started to figure out a formula so that when I walked into a house that I could estimate a rehab in less than 15 min. I started testing my formula and I was off by 800.00 on the first one. I used my formula from that point on I have averaged less than a 5% (+-) of the actual cost. On 2 occasions that was due to price increases that I didn't see coming. With the help of 2 investors I started to JV on purchasing home. I have set my goals to BUY and Hold 2 properties for 2012. I have 1 already. We're cleaning it up and doing the necessary repairs and I'm going to rent it out for long term investment.
I love taking a beat up house and rehabbing it and looking at the end result, it gives me this sense of accomplishment.
Also excited but a bit overwhelmed…
I received my “Profit from RE Right now” book a few day ago and I have been reading it. I’m ¾ of the way through it and I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read about REI.
I’ve been doing rehabs for about 2 years for other REI and I want to get into this. I have looked over the web site (Deans) and it sounds like the Academy is the place to be. I’m going to find out how that works.
Just from reading the first ½ of the book I found a homeowner who is about to loose her house to the bank. Having a bit of knowledge from what I’ve seen from the investors I’ve done work for I managed to lock up the house with an option to purchase contract and her signing a “Authorization to Release of information” form I called the bank and stopped the foreclosure sale. Now I have to put together the short sale package and try to negotiate a price that is acceptable and try to flip the house to another investor so he can rehab it. Unfortunately I don’t have the means ($ or Credit) to rehab myself. But I do think it would make a great project for another investor and maybe I can make some $ in the transaction.
Would it be acceptable to list this property in this forum? I’m asking because this is my first posting.
EugeneA