[QUOTE]Originally posted by altamoreaf
[B]I own some multi-familes.

 

That sounds like a pretty good plan. The only hard part is the financing. Given the fact that you intend to owner-occupy, you could probably find a lender with as little as 5% down, if you have a good credit history.

 

I rented out our first home for 4 years instead of putting it up for sale when we bought a new one. I worked thru a rental/real -estate agent and they took all of the maint calls, handled tenant screening and rent payment processing all for a 10% fee. I still cleared $ 200.00 a month and did quite well. I sold it last year for a nice profit.(I owned it for 13 years though.) Why did I sell? No emotional involvement. I went ot Europe for 2 weeks, bought my S2000 and am much happier.

My suggestion? Buy your own home first.

 

But if you don't need all the room, renting out a floor (like a finished basement) or something is also a possibility..

 

My name is Scot and I am a slum lord....... (now you all say...."we love you scot")

Anyway........we currently have 17 rental houses...... depending on your area, it works out pretty well....but there will almost always be something to annoy you alittle......

I am sure screening college kids would be fairly hard, but if you get enough $ up front, you could at least pay for most of their damage.

I have 8-9 "Section 8" houses......Which is government assisted living.... the good thing is if you get evicted, they take away your Section 8 certificate.... so there is some incentive to act semi-normal.

Our typical Section 8 house by the time we buy, fix, etc.... is about $25k..... they rent for about $575-$600 on average..... so...not bad....


We have paid off some of the houses so it is hard to tell how each house does....but something like 20 paid off Section 8 houses would net about $80k per year....... there is no amount of $ I can dump into my 401k to net me $80k per year like that.

I am planning to continue this from now...i am 34 years old...until maybe I am 40 and hopefully by then my full time job will have paid everything off, etc... and I can retire.

Scot


ps..... even with a 100% mortgage all of our properties show cash flow...15 year amortization.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Scot

Our typical Section 8 house by the time we buy, fix, etc.... is about $25k..... they rent for about $575-$600 on average..... so...not bad....

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Scot
[B]Our typical Section 8 house by the time we buy, fix, etc.... is about $25k..... they rent for about $575-$600 on average..... so...not bad....

 

i am 34...started at 31.... in just 3 years we bought all of these places...

we sort of got lucky on the section 8 thing...they generally pay about $50 more than typical rent, plus the tenants have a reason to be semi-good. Section 8 pays on time and most of the time they pay 75% or more for the tenant.

The other 7 houses (roughly) are not section 8 and I have 2 people who continue to annoy me by not paying on time, bouncing checks, meeting me with cash, etc....... I got great deals on the houses, so it was hard to pass, but still annoying.

with old houses like these there are water heater problems, furnace issues, roof issues...etc..... eventually as they slowly break, we replace them.... not cheap but averaging about $1k per house per year.....

so even with mortgages, repairs, prop taxes, insurance and utilities we make some decent $...plus i think we are paying down roughly $11-12k per year of debt.

Wow..that one guy has almost 100 units!!!!

 

So I guess the question is still out there? Why isn't everbody doing it?

Also, Scott are you buying houses for 25K or apts for 25K?

 

$25k for houses....

usually 3 bedroom, 1 bath, kitchen, dinning room, living room and usually a not so nice basement.... older houses had short basements and sometimes oil heat......

You can quickly spend a fair amount of $ replacing windows, furnace, etc......