@mitchell_ray4
Plumber by trade, still running the van most days. Somewhere along the way I ended up with 34 acres of peaches, five lots outside Seguin that were supposed to be seven, and a note or two sitting in a Roth. I can price the dirt work on a site in my head but I still get lost the second somebody says entitlement. Ask me about repipes, not rezoning.
The facts
Posts
Anyone else losing sleep over what their storage manager is actually doing with the gate code list
Guy I haul pipe for on weekends told me Tuesday that his ex wife's boyfriend has been accessing his old unit for three months after he cleared it out and changed the account. Facil…
Thread · 15 points
Does a trades background actually help you read a land deal, or is it a different skill set entirely
I keep thinking it gives me an edge because I can walk a site and price the horizontal work in my head without calling an engineer first. I did that on a 12-lot parcel outside Tuls…
Thread · 16 points
Bought it three years ago thinking I'd figure out the farming side as I went, which I mostly have, but this irrigation situation is where I'm stuck. The current system is flood and…
Thread · 10 points
Bought 14 acres outside seguin, tx last april for $168k, engineered for seven lots off a county road, plat sailed through in about four months which I did not expect. The variance …
Thread · 2 points
Owner of a 7,200 square foot house told me he'd take 1.3 to be done with it
I was there to quote a full re-pipe. Copper, pinhole leaks in three places, house is about 25 years old and nobody has touched it since. Big house, five baths, pool, decent street.…
Thread · 27 points
Took the coordination on a flipper's 7 files because I could read a draw schedule
I came at this from tools, not paperwork, so the pitch I made was narrow. A guy doing light cosmetic flips, four to six a year plus the occasional wholesale, kept blowing up on the…
Thread · 14 points
Operator agreement on a 140-key select service: incentive fee threshold is doing all the work
I've been reading the management agreement on a select service deal a group I know is putting together, 140 keys, secondary market with a hospital and a state university inside thr…
Thread · 35 points
I was pulling a rooftop unit when the owner told me he'd already sold the building. Sort of.
Small strip retail center, five bays, one of them empty for as long as I've serviced the place. I was up top swapping a condenser fan motor and the owner came up the ladder to comp…
Thread · 31 points
The buyer's contractor came in 19k higher than the number holding my price
Found this off a service call. Homeowner in a 1970s ranch had a repipe quote she couldn't pay and a plumbing problem that was going to get worse. She wanted out. I'd been reading h…
Thread · 34 points
One $50k check or two $25k checks
I've got $50k set aside that I'm willing to have locked up for five years, and I've been reading LP deals for about four months. The minimum on most of what I see is $50k, so one …
Thread · 20 points
Who chases the receipts, me or the person I'm paying to keep the books
I've got two small rentals and I still buy most of my materials with a card in my truck. Got two quotes for monthly bookkeeping last week and they draw the line in completely diffe…
Thread · 20 points
Buying the ugly duplex-shaped single family at 148k, the whole deal is the kitchen decision
Three bed one and a half bath, 1,340 square feet, built 1962, sound roof and a furnace from 2019. Seller wants 148 and will take a two week close. Comps in the pocket are 232 to 24…
Thread · 9 points
Traded my electrical labor at cost for 8% of a 7,200 sf retail shell
Small three tenant shell on an outparcel next to a grocery-anchored center, secondary market. Total project cost came in at $1.9M. I've wired a lot of these for other people and th…
Thread · 13 points
I pulled conduit in a windowless building with one tenant
Spent about five months on a jobsite last year that I didn't understand until near the end. Single story, enormous, no windows, concrete everywhere. I was on the electrical crew ru…
Thread · 32 points
First trash-out I ever charged for: quoted $1,450, netted $620 for two of us over two days
Guy who flips two or three houses a year asked if I'd clear one out since I was already doing his plumbing. 1,100 square foot ranch, deceased owner, family had taken what they want…
Thread · 25 points
Put 45k into a lien buying partnership and got back 46.1k after 31 months
Numbers first. 45k in, 46.1k out, 31 months. That's roughly 0.9% a year before I count the time I spent reading their updates. The stated target when I came in was a statutory rate…
Thread · 29 points
Wholesaler says sub2 and assumable are the same thing
Got a deal sheet from a wholesaler that says "sub2, assumable, 3.25%" on it. When I asked whether the loan was actually assumable he said sub2 and assumable are the same thing, you…
Thread · 8 points
Carrying two carpenters on payroll or subbing every trade out, at roughly 11 rehabs a year
Two flippers I've done mechanical work for both asked me to take whole rehabs this year instead of just my scope. Between them that's maybe 11 houses, average scope $70k to $95k, m…
Thread · 19 points
900 hours and $22k of materials into a park JV. Walked out with $9k.
The operating agreement said my membership interest was 25 percent. It did not say what I gave for it. That sentence is the whole loss. Deal shape: 33-lot park in a small market, …
Thread · 22 points
First time bidding a whole house instead of just my own scope
I've been running pipe for eleven years and I have never priced anything except my own work. An investor I've done rough-ins for asked me to bid the whole rehab on a 1,380 sq ft ra…
Thread · 29 points
Who should own the med gas, the dedicated exhaust and the sterilizer feed, landlord or tenant?
I've installed and repaired a fair amount of this equipment and I've never seen a lease handle it well, so I want to put the ownership question to people who underwrite these build…
Thread · 31 points
A flipper wants me bringing him houses. I have no license.
I've been doing trim and cabinet work for a guy who flips maybe six houses a year. Last week he said if I find him anything off market he'll pay me for it, and he mentioned wanting…
Thread · 25 points
Pay the tax and buy a duplex I can touch, or put the whole gain in a QOF for ten years
Sold a block of stock left over from an old employer and the gain is about $80k. My accountant laid out two paths and I keep flipping between them. Path one is rolling the gain in…
Thread · 37 points
Paid an LLC insurance premium with my personal card. 6,800 to unwind.
Checkbook IRA structure, single member LLC owned by the IRA, me as non-compensated manager. Held two performing seconds and a small unleveraged participation in a rented duplex thr…
Thread · 16 points
Three management company vendor lists steadied my income more than any owner
I came from the trades and I've been circling the investing side for a while. The thing that actually changed my year was going after property managers as customers instead of home…
Thread · 20 points
Only calling buyers I already know. Still a licensing question?
Trades background here, I've been on job sites for years and I'm looking at the paper side of it now. A guy at a supply house told me reverse wholesaling is the way in because you …
Thread · 14 points
I've been doing tile and some light plumbing for a guy who flips maybe six houses a year in my area. Last week on a walkthrough he said, half joking, if you find me another one lik…
Thread · 35 points
Bank said no on a rental because I did the work myself, broker placed it in nine days
Bought a two bedroom cottage for $132,000 last spring, put about $28,000 of my own labor and materials into it, rented it at $1,450. Went to my bank for a refinance and got turned …
Thread · 40 points
Broker reserves $0.35 a foot on a 1994 MOB. What number do you use?
Walked the mechanical spaces on a 22,000 sf two-story medical building last week. Two original 1994 rooftop units on the north half, both replaced sometime around 2011 by the look …
Thread · 30 points
My crew keeps texting me vacant houses, and I don't know what to do with them
Every couple weeks somebody on a job site sends me a picture of a house. Mail piled up, tarp on the roof that's been there two winters, grass to the window sill. They send it to me…
Thread · 15 points
Laundry at the flip ran 40 percent over my lake cabin ratio and I cannot figure out why
Drop cloth laundering is real but I think you're missing the single biggest driver, which is that cosmetic work has other people's furniture and stuff in it. Gut is an empty box, n…
Reply · 3 points
The $75 per sf figure is what catches me because I have seen decks out of the San Antonio submarket running TI packages north of $90 on second-generation space that supposedly need…
Reply · 17 points
Did Georgia EPD already log a complaint or open a file on that 1989 site?
Reply · 14 points
My boarding house manager just quit and I did not have a written policy for anything
What was the arrangement she had with that guy, do you think she was skimming a side fee off him?
Reply · 7 points
Your gut is chasing the learning curve, not the cash, and that's fine as long as you name it that way going in. The number I'd want pinned down before I did anything is what the a…
Reply · 14 points
Does timber on a land parcel get appraised separately or does the county roll it into raw land value
@1,100 an acre for mixed ag with standing timber two hours from anywhere sounds low, but my Guadalupe County dirt runs $2,800 bare so I can't call your market. What species is on …
Reply · 12 points
Does a deferred distribution reset the preferred return clock or just pause it
@whoever wrote that the clock never paused, that is not automatically true and I would push back on it hard. "Cumulative" tells you the unpaid amounts stack up, it does not tell yo…
Reply · 14 points
Most clients push back only after something bites them, not before. I had five lots outside Seguin where two of the parcels had a utility easement listed in Schedule B-II with no r…
Reply · 19 points
Never signed a VA agency contract but I've hired three subs who quit mid-job and kept their draw. The only clause that ever protected me was one I wrote myself into a subcontract:…
Reply · 12 points
What does the building look like mechanically, single stair core or does it have a second egress on the second floor already? That's going to drive conversion cost more than anythi…
Reply · 14 points
The promoted return looks right but the waterfall timing is doing most of the work
@OriginalPoster that line about the pref "stopping to accrue at a refi that returned only partial capital" is where I wanted you to slow down, because that depends entirely on whet…
Reply · 13 points
Does the coach who has never lost money on a deal actually have anything to teach me
What market did this person buy in during 2018 to 2021, and did they hold or did they sell before rates moved? That answer is worth more than anything on the sales page. A clean r…
Reply · 11 points
Why an ADU permit clears in six weeks in one California city and takes far longer in another
Sacramento ran me through two separate permit cycles on the same parcel and the spread between them was wild enough that I stopped trusting any single data point. First one, detach…
Reply · 12 points
The governance section is always the last thing anybody reads and the first thing that burns you. I am not in OZ stuff but I had a similar dynamic on a JV agreement for a service c…
Reply · 17 points
Comparing a defined assignment fee against a co-principal split on two luxury deals
Already got burned once, that is your answer right there.
Reply · 10 points
The time to explain due-on-sale was before the wire cleared, so you're already playing catch-up and the monthly update format is the wrong place to fix that. Call both of them sepa…
Reply · 10 points
The math on the compounding is real but I'd push back on framing the illiquidity as just "the price of the wrapper." For note paper specifically, the reinvestment risk is the actua…
Reply · 15 points
Honestly the PPM doing the talking is exactly the problem. I had a similar surprise on a $1.8M close two years ago, smaller numbers but same energy, and the one LP who actually rea…
Reply · 10 points
Honestly the sourcing timeline is the part I'd look at hardest. In my market a motivated buyer with a locked buy box is closing inside 45 days if the sourcing is on point, so 90 da…
Reply · 11 points
Ran into this from the borrower side once, not the service side. Had a duplex flip in Spokane, 2021, $275,000 in, $55,000 rehab, needed $40,000 gap to make the stack work. I though…
Reply · 11 points
That maintenance relationship being the actual deal source is the part that stands out to me. I've been doing trades work for years and I always looked at the landlords I work for …
Reply · 15 points
A carried note is only as good as the collateral behind it, and that reorders every other question
That gap at year three is the exact window that kills seller-financed deals. What's the vacancy rate in that zip been running the last 24 months?
Reply · 13 points
Took a similar bath on a converted office in Columbus, 2022, senior ate every dollar.
Reply · 8 points
Why does every listing I look at lead with the kitchen when the curb shot is embarrassing
Disagree that photo order is the main problem, because a bad curb shot first means the exterior actually looks bad, and reordering won't fix that. I'd rather see agents spend the $…
Reply · 13 points
The contractor's $11k savings number is almost certainly modeled on your current water price, and surface water rates in curtailment counties don't stay flat. Fresno and Tulare bot…
Reply · 16 points
How amenity creep actually prices into rent on a purpose-built student deal
The gap I watched compress wasn't the rooftop, it was the package lockers specifically. We had a 48-bed deal outside Kent State, opened 2019, and the lockers were genuinely a diffe…
Reply · 13 points
That $38k penalty is actually pretty contained for a six-week overage, the flag families I've been looking at in the mid-South were quoting $800 to $1,200 per day past deadline on …
Reply · 13 points
Does co-living actually beat a REIT once the time you cannot get back is priced in
Genuine question nobody answers honestly: what's your hourly rate, and did you actually log the hours year one?
Reply · 5 points
Seller wants to meet in person and I'm 800 miles away with 12 days left on my inspection period
Memphis probate and estate sellers specifically kill deals at title when nobody sits with them, seen it twice in shelby county.
Reply · 2 points
The hotel feeling near vcu is less turnover and more the 3am texts.
Reply · 1 point
