Skip to main content

Posted December 14, 2015

A Two-Minute Investment = Lifetime Dividends
If your client is a first-time homebuyer, do both of you a favor and consider a multi-unit property.  Obviously, most first-time homebuyers are looking for that cute little house with a two-car garage and a white picket fence – one of the symbols of the American Dream, of course.  However, consider for a moment that many first-time homebuyers are willing to look at and embrace a “tweak” to the American Dream: a revenue-generating investment.  While most investment properties require a fairly significant down payment, an FHA loan only requires 3.5% (and it can be a gift).  Making an even better case for this type of purchase is the size of loan FHA allows for the following sizes of properties:

o2-unit property: $347,000
o3-unit property: $419,255
o4-unit property: $521,250

Your buyer is only required to live in this property for 12 months.  Once she’s hit the 12-month mark, she can slide another renter into her unit and look for a single-family residence (if she so desires).  In addition to the rental history she’s built up with her other tenants, she can immediately count future rents for the unit which she’s just vacated as long as she has a one-year lease signed for that unit – all of that will be used as income in helping her qualify for the loan on the SFR (perhaps with a two-car garage and a white picket fence). 

We’re not kidding ourselves into believing that every child dreams of being a landlord when he grows up, but it doesn’t hurt to have a two-minute conversation with your new buyer and present him with the option as outlined above.  He’ll thank you for presenting him with all the options – and if he takes your advice, he’ll either be asking you to find a house for him in a short twelve months or look for more multi-unit properties, which means you could have a lifetime client looking to grow and manage a lucrative portfolio.  We’re fairly confident that’s worth a two-minute conversation.

Expand Your Horizons

Relocation and timing don’t always coincide with one another, and that usually leads to the potential buyer signing a twelve-month lease on a rental property when she’s moving to a new city because she thinks she needs an employment history to qualify for a mortgage.  For those professionals with jobs that are tied to a contract (doctor, attorney, teacher, nurse, dentist, etc.), we can close and fund 60 days before their starting that new job and use that income to qualify.  Put that information in your back pocket and start marketing yourself all over the country – or around the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beauty of Ugly

There’s an old saying, “A face only a mother could love.”   (I can assure you it was invented centuries before I was born.)   That saying, though, does remind me of the actor Steve Buscemi .   Most everyone knows he’s made a career for himself being the “weird looking guy” in movies, and I’m going to take a wild guess and say his paychecks have been healthy enough to buy a couple of houses.   With that said, though, I’m sure in very short order, he realized that he wouldn’t be winning the parts of Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible” or Logan in “X Men” – he sought out what he thought was available and reachable. Ideally, most of us want the brand new house that no one has lived in before us or the beautifully maintained house that has a fully remodeled kitchen and newly expanded master bathroom.   Conversely, we’re not walking around and saying to ourselves and anyone wh o will listen, “I want the house that had a small fire on the back half of it twel...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Naked Truth About Home Buying

It’s highly likely I’ve already written about this, but I’ll try to make it entertaining at least.   There’s a guy who works in ou r office who suffers from kidney stones – and from what he’s described, “suffers” might even be a little too tame a word for it.   As an aside, though, when you ask him how painful the experience is, he gets an odd smile and says, “It’s the most intense pain I’ve ever experienced, but it’s hard to describe.   I’ve heard a lot of people compare it to the pain a woman experiences while giving birth.   To that, I must say, those people are big, fat liars!   I’ve been in the presence of a woman giving birth, twice, and her pain has to be 100 times worse.   They’re passing the equivalent of a Buick.   I’m passing a pumpkin seed.”   He’s always been a colorful fellow. He’s had this wonderful condition for over a decade now, and the stones make their appearance about every 18 months or so.   Up until recently, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Saving Money is Music to Your Ears (Posted January 9, 2017)

For all the “old” people out there, you’ll instantly know the name Daryl Hall.   For those of you who are still on your original set of adult teeth (perhaps because you got your braces off fairly recently), Daryl Hall is a musician (the blonde half of the duo Hall & Oates – the one who DIDN’T have a mustache that looked like it was straight out of an ’ 80s adult film) with a number of albums (albums a re these big, black 12-inch vinyl “platters” that look like a pregnant CD) that have been certified as gold/platinum and hit songs to his credit, some of which he recorded himself and some he wrote for others.   Going back to 2007, he started a show on the internet called Live from Daryl’s House ; in 2011, he took it to cable where it currently airs.   The concept is relatively simple: he has musicians from all genres and eras come to his house to jam with him and his band.   In between songs, they talk about music and memories, and they usually end up eatin...
Post a Comment
Read more