@derekj19
Got into this sideways. A guy I know sells rural parcels on installment contracts and I offered to run his payment book for a flat fee, and a year later I was servicing 31 land notes for two sellers. Not a business yet but it taught me plenty. Interested in the service side, management, servicing, sourcing, the stuff that gets paid whether the deal works or not.
The facts
Posts
Asking because I've been in the servicing world, not ownership, and the stuff I see go wrong almost never shows up in the summary. I ran payment books for two land sellers on 31 in…
Thread · 12 points
That is the thing I kept reading was impossible to pull off consistently. My guy who runs the installment contracts had a cousin using a 3/1 in Kingsport, Tennessee this way, and I…
Thread · 12 points
I keep circling back to this. Feels like the contractors and managers in a hot brrrr market are printing money while the operators are sweating appraisals and seasoning clocks. Cur…
Thread · 5 points
In a leasing office on a Saturday, concession is the word you hear, not lease
A friend manages a 340 unit property and said I could sit in the leasing office on a Saturday if I wanted to see what the job actually looks like. I've been poking around the servi…
Thread · 12 points
Paid data feed, county records by hand, or just be the person the REO agents call
I have been pricing sourcing tools and the spread is wide. The national subscriptions with daily updated default and auction data run from about thirty dollars a month for somethin…
Thread · 19 points
The two things that actually break on 31 land notes
I got into this sideways. A guy I know sells rural parcels on installment contracts and was tracking 14 buyers in a spreadsheet with a stack of paper checks in a drawer. I offered …
Thread · 14 points
Conversion specialist or local multifamily developer, when the fund can only pick one sponsor
I've been sitting in on sponsor interviews for a conversion allocation and the split in the room is sharper than I expected. Candidate A has done four office-to-residential projec…
Thread · 23 points
Do you put your fee in front of the seller in dollars, or keep it off the table?
Two operators I trust do this opposite ways and both close consistently, so I want to see where this room lands. One of them tells the seller the number. Signs the contract, then …
Thread · 16 points
Do small rehab crews keep people with hourly or with per job pay?
I've had coffee with two crew owners in the last month and they run the same size outfit with opposite answers, so I want to see how the room splits. The first one pays $28 an hou…
Thread · 25 points
The self-sufficiency test kills a $640k fourplex renting for $4,600
Working through a fourplex listed at $640k. Four two-bedroom units, all leased at $1,150, so $4,600 gross. My plan was to occupy one unit with a low down payment government-backed …
Thread · 11 points
Charged 400 for a staging consult with no furniture. Sold in 12 days.
I've been poking at the service side for a while and kept getting stuck on the same wall: staging means owning furniture, owning furniture means a warehouse, and I have neither. S…
Thread · 11 points
Two free leads to prove I'm worth paying, or nothing moves until something is signed
Two investors, two completely different answers, same week. The first one told me to send him a couple and if he likes what he sees we'll talk about money. Friendly guy, buys mayb…
Thread · 7 points
I've been reading operator house agreements to work out where a service business could sit in this model, and two of them handle new tenant selection in completely opposite ways. …
Thread · 17 points
How do I price the risk in resident services on a 22 room house?
An operator with a 22 room house reached out about contracting out what he calls resident services. Right now that means daily common area cleaning, weekly room linen, a hot breakf…
Thread · 37 points
Walked four open houses on Sunday. Who are they actually for?
I walked four open houses in my area on Sunday as a nosy visitor. Two had maybe six people through in two hours. One had a line at the door and the agent working the room hard. One…
Thread · 33 points
First one worked. The six weeks between tenant and refinance nearly killed it.
Not an operator by trade, I do service work around this business, but I wanted one of these for myself and it's done. Small two bed, bought at 96k on a private loan from someone I…
Thread · 15 points
Investor at a meetup offered me $500 a door but won't sign anything
He buys small multifamily and said if I bring him an address he ends up closing, he pays $500 per door. He wouldn't put it in writing, said that's just how it works and everyone in…
Thread · 19 points
Put $60k into a two house JV on a one page term sheet, and $41k came back
I'd been doing service work around real estate for a while and figured I understood the business well enough to fund someone else doing it. I did not understand the paperwork part …
Thread · 12 points
Five weeks trying to find anyone to write a loan on an $84,000 house
I had a small house under contract at $84,000 in a working town about an hour out. Cheap, tenanted, nothing exciting. I thought the financing would be the easy part because the num…
Thread · 16 points
Trying to price myself as the person who walks houses for out-of-state wholesalers
Three different people found me in the last two months asking if I'd go look at a house for them. All out of state, all doing some version of remote wholesaling, all in the small m…
Thread · 31 points
The sewer lateral failed three of my nine ADU feasibility screens
I've been circling the service side of this for a while and finally sold something concrete: a pre-design feasibility screen for owners thinking about a backyard unit. Flat $850, t…
Thread · 28 points
Pricing aerials per shoot when drive time is half the job
I've been charging $250 flat for what I call the standard aerial: 8 to 10 edited stills plus a 60 second clip cut to music, delivered next day. Agents keep asking me to fold it int…
Thread · 29 points
Twenty-six files, eight closings, and I got paid on two
Twenty-six files. Eight closings. Two fee splits that actually landed in my account. The setup was supposed to be simple. I do a lot of talking to small investors in my area, and …
Thread · 27 points
Two hats on one deal, and I don't know how to price either
I run the service side and have never owned anything. An extended family group (four households, roughly 900k they've been sitting on since a land sale) asked me to find something …
Thread · 24 points
There are two sentences in the documents that took my $50k to nothing
This closed out last month so I can finally write it up. Early 2023 I put $50k into a single-asset deal, a 1970s eight story office building in a mid-size southeast downtown, goin…
Thread · 28 points
The down payment keeps shrinking on a duplex I'd carry
Seller I do listing work for owns a side by side duplex free and clear, both units rented, asking 340k. Two conventional offers fell apart on appraisal and financing, and the third…
Thread · 30 points
My first BRRRR ended with me writing a check at the refinance instead of receiving one
Small two bed one bath cottage in a working class part of town, the kind with a detached one car garage that leans. I paid 96k, budgeted 26k, and thought it was worth 165k fixed. T…
Thread · 15 points
A retainer offer with 30% of the fee tied to student completion I don't control
An operator with about 400 people in his paid community wants me to build and run the onboarding curriculum for new members. Terms as sent: $2,500 a month for 12 months, six module…
Thread · 19 points
First paid work: $750 for a zoning feasibility summary. The invoice cleared.
Someone in a local investor group posted asking whether a 0.4 acre corner lot could take four units under the current code, and got eleven guesses in the comments. I messaged him a…
Thread · 36 points
Added bookkeeping to the service menu, closed it eight months later down $9,400
I already do back office work for a handful of small landlords, so bookkeeping looked like the obvious adjacent line. Recurring, sticky, the clients were already asking. I signed s…
Thread · 27 points
Parking included or not is the single line that tanks response rate when it's buried.
Reply · 0 points
Missouri does not have a finder's fee statute that fills the gap when nothing is signed.
Reply · 0 points
Stacking a short-term gain into a QOF when the deferral period barely clears the 2026 inclusion date
Nobody I've seen in these funds modeled that break-even before wiring. What was the fund's projected net IRR, and did the manager show you a side-by-side against paying the tax an…
Reply · 15 points
Most annualized summaries I have seen get handed over with expense detail that is tighter than the revenue detail, which is backwards for exactly the reason you are describing. On …
Reply · 7 points
The lot one buyer's $18,000 ask is probably the floor, not a negotiating open.
Reply · 12 points
Does the buyer's financing type change which contracts I should be putting properties under
What's your assignment clause actually saying about timeline modifications, because that's where this usually breaks. The one thing I've watched fail repeatedly is writing a tight…
Reply · 5 points
The two-hour claim from the Phoenix shop is the one I'd pull on hard before signing anything. Ask them what "work" means. In my experience running payment tracking for a guy who so…
Reply · 11 points
Does BRRRR even work in SoCal or are we just pretending it does
The "$30k miss on the appraisal killed the whole thesis" framing is where I'd push back a little. It wasn't just the miss, it was that the model had no room for a miss at all. That…
Reply · 9 points
Does the asset management fee percentage stay flat or does it drop at stabilization
@OP that 1.25% of gross reads fine at lease-up when the sponsor is genuinely managing chaos, but by month 40 on a stabilized asset the AM fee is basically a quarterly report and a …
Reply · 10 points
What year did the Columbus property last have a plumbing inspection done, and is that in the doc?
Reply · 22 points
Borrower equity versus lender equity in a gap piece, and where the split should sit
Net versus gross is the question nobody pins down before closing.
Reply · 12 points
The labor access thing is real. In Memphis specifically, a lot of those buyers are running crews at $18 to $22 per hour all-in because they pay workers directly and skip GC margin,…
Reply · 17 points
The 70 percent rule ceiling dropping to 154k on a 220k ARV is the part I want people to sit with, because that is not a rounding error, that is a different deal entirely. I ran pay…
Reply · 14 points
What I'd want to know is whether the agent ever replied to either of those two reminders, even a thumbs-up emoji, because that reply is the closest thing to an acknowledgment you h…
Reply · 11 points
Is a co-investment side-by-side with my wholesaler friend the same as a fund, legally
The verbal "senior position" with no paper is the part that would make me walk.
Reply · 12 points
Servicing 31 land notes you see the commitment date problem from the other direction. Two of the sellers I work for had buyers default, went to re-sell the parcel, and the title se…
Reply · 9 points
My committed buyer closed on something else four days before I had a contract he would have loved
The seller talking to someone else this week is actually your live problem, not the buyer situation. Have you told the seller directly that you have two or three other buyers you n…
Reply · 15 points
"Who decides" is the whole problem, and in my experience it's never defined because the sponsor's counsel wrote the doc and didn't want it defined. The harder floor I've seen actu…
Reply · 6 points
Thirty days of showing traffic at $4M is hard to rebuild once the narrative sets.
Reply · 12 points
The borrower paid in full on day 47 and I did not see it coming.
Priced it in? Nobody prices that in, it's pure luck when it hits. What I'd want to know is what servicer you used, because a letter that breaks three years of silence in 47 days i…
Reply · 13 points
What's the QOF fund's target deployment timeline, because two years of cash drag on $140k at your DST's 6.8% is already $19k you never get back before the exclusion clock even star…
Reply · 8 points
The 2019 land basis at $180k is the part that's hard to replicate now, but I'd be careful about how you're marking the current $900k corridor comp. Prince William County parcels wi…
Reply · 11 points
My brother thinks REITs are fake real estate and I used to say the same thing
Disagree with the "parking position" framing a little. Thirty grand sitting for eleven months waiting on an acquisition gap is not a strategy, it is a symptom of under-deploying be…
Reply · 15 points
Had a deal like this in 2022, brought $4k to cover arrears that weren't disclosed until day of closing.
Reply · 7 points
Can a HAP contract be dated six weeks after the tenant moves in, and who eats that gap
Had almost the exact same thing happen in 2022, Columbus Ohio PHA, seven week gap, cost me $1,920. The thing I figured out too late is that the HAP contract execution date is entir…
Reply · 8 points
Why an ADU permit clears in six weeks in one California city and takes far longer in another
The six weeks is real but it is not portable, and I think your permit runner already told you why. What I would add is that you should stop treating "permit timeline" as a single n…
Reply · 15 points
Staying two extra months costs you $2,200 in delayed rent but buys almost no new data. What is the actual days-on-market for South Valley 3-beds before they go pending?
Reply · 12 points
Who pays for a perc test when the buyer's lender demands one on an assigned land contract
The financed buyer is the whole problem here, not the perc test. A buyer who needs a lender is not really a buyer for raw land in a county like Pocahontas, and I'd have been trying…
Reply · 14 points
The thing I have not seen mentioned yet is that if your CPA corrected their own interpretation between 2022 and 2023, they may have done it quietly without flagging it as a change,…
Reply · 10 points
The "we've never had that happen" answer is actually a red flag beyond just the working capital question, because it tells you the sponsor hasn't stress-tested their own structure.…
Reply · 13 points
