Education of a Real Estate Investor, Day 1

My goal is to do something every day that gets me closer to my first investment property. My present strategy is to buy and repair, then either rent, flip, or assign the contract. This could also take the form of buy, repair, rent, then flip or assign. The objective of the first few deals is to bring in some quick cash to pay bills and finance future deals.

Yesterday, I called a local outfit that had affiliates in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area. I hung my RE Salesperson's license there when I had one. Their phone is disconnected and they have no web presence, so I assume they've gone out of business. I'm not surprised, since their business model was heavily connected to the inflationary bubble.

Since my credit is shot, I'm looking at hard money lenders for financing. Most require 680 minimum FICO score, but Google brought up a few that deal with bad credit. I checked out BadCreditMortgage.com, which bills itself as the premier nationwide residential rehab lender. You couldn't prove it by me. There is no mention of rehab loans in the online loan application pulldown menu. I tried sending an email from their Contact link and got a permanent delivery failure: "no such user." I did find a couple of regional lenders who do not require a minimum FICO score, but I have not yet verified their existence. If they do exist, they are in a couple of the markets in which I am most interested.

Following the advice on Scott Roemermann's Real Estate Investing Secrets website, I've begun work on a spreadsheet to help me better understand the numbers. You can use a commercial package, but Scott (How many times do you think I'm going to type Roemermann?) recommends building your own because you do get a better grasp of what the numbers actually mean and you can tailor the sheet to your own requirements. I use OpenOffice, a free office suite, rather than Excel. Google's offers a free, web-based spreadsheet as one of their online applications.

I've pulled a number of properties off HomePath, Fannie Mae's REO site, looking for ones that meet my specific criteria. I'll delve more deeply into what those criteria are in a later post.