@nataliehsu
Staging is the day job, mostly Phoenix flips, so I see the inside of a lot of deals I have no money in. One rental of my own in Maryvale, bought 2019, and I am permanently two spreadsheets away from selling it for two cheaper ones. Living in Portland now, which taught me the hard way what a property manager is for.
The facts
Posts
Does anyone else write the sourcing agreement before they even know who the end buyer is
I've been doing acquisition sourcing work for a repeat client in the East Valley and I kept waiting until I had a solid buyer relationship to draft anything formal. That worked fin…
Thread · 20 points
I keep going back and forth on whether to sell my Phoenix house and buy two cheaper ones
Bought in Maryvale in 2019 for 218k. It's sitting around 340k now based on what the comparable two streets over closed at in February. My tenant is month to month, pays 1,480, and …
Thread · 12 points
I'm on the service side, so I come into deals from a different angle than most people here. I work with operators and watch transactions move from the inside, which means I see whe…
Thread · 19 points
Self-managing from 800 miles away cost me a tenant and two months vacancy last winter
I converted the place in Tucson in March 2023 and moved to Portland for work. Figured I could handle it myself, save the 8% management fee, maybe $140 a month on a $1,750 rent. Fou…
Thread · 14 points
My staging company lost 5k on a flip referral and I'm not sure I understand why
Referred a client in phoenix last march, deal closed at 281k, arv was estimated at 340, staging cost me 2,800 out of pocket and the seller walked with less than projected so they c…
Thread · 5 points
$300 on list data or four weekends in the car
I want something to show an investor by the end of next month and I've got about $300 and four free weekends. Two ways to spend it and I keep flipping. Option one is data. A list …
Thread · 8 points
Start a management company from zero doors or buy someone's 40-door book?
I've been talking to two people on opposite ends of this and I can't tell which one is the harder road. One runs a shop that started with four doors from a friend's rental and gre…
Thread · 7 points
Converted on schedule, and my own rent is what wrecked it
This is the loss post. It went fine on paper and then I ran out of money. Bought a 3 bed ranch at 244,000, 3.5 percent down FHA, so 8,540 down and about 6,600 in closing after a s…
Thread · 19 points
Offered 8 percent of a half empty building with 14 months to maturity
An owner I've done work around asked if I want a small piece of a building instead of an invoice, and I don't know enough to say yes or no intelligently, so here are the numbers he…
Thread · 20 points
Stopped trying to buy the neglected houses, started selling the owners a cleanup
Been riding along on driving routes with an investor friend since summer, mostly to work out where I fit. He wants contracts. I kept noticing that most of the addresses he throws a…
Thread · 34 points
Is there a real service business inside tax sales or is it just lawyers
I sat through a live deed auction as a spectator and counted maybe fourteen bidders who clearly knew what they were doing and thirty-something who did not. The ones who did not wer…
Thread · 16 points
Should the person doing probate outreach be the same person doing the underwriting?
I've been trying to work out where a service-side person fits around probate investors, and the split that keeps coming up is whether outreach and underwriting should sit in the sa…
Thread · 33 points
Clean single fee or a full ancillary stack, which one actually holds 200 doors together
I've been sitting in on pricing conversations at two shops in the same metro, similar door counts, and they've gone opposite directions on the same math. Shop A charges 10.5% of c…
Thread · 13 points
AI staging and sky work: build the business on it, label it, or refuse it outright
A brokerage I quote for asked whether I do generated staging, and when I said I do standard virtual staging with photographed furniture composited in, they asked what the differenc…
Thread · 22 points
Turned three investor clients into two retainers by showing them my own rejection data
Been billing per lead across three clients since last spring. Two of them are now on monthly retainers and the change came from a spreadsheet I built for my own use, not from anyth…
Thread · 28 points
Google search or Facebook for a first seller campaign in a small market
Been going back and forth on this for a couple of weeks and I can't get to a clean answer, so I'll put it up. Small metro, maybe 180,000 people, and an investor client wants motiv…
Thread · 20 points
Ran a three-seat listing coordination pod for a year and held 38% margin
I've been building a small service offering around agent back office work and last year I finally got the unit economics to sit still, so here's what happened. The product was lis…
Thread · 13 points
Rena says this role is trending down. Bad time to walk into it?
Still working out where I fit in this industry, and I keep landing back on buyer representation because the work sounds like something I'd be decent at. Then I read the outlook her…
Thread · 17 points
Trying to work out where a non-traded REIT sits between a public REIT and buying a house
I'm sorting through which parts of this industry I might actually want to be in, and non-traded REITs keep coming up as the passive option. What I don't understand is what I'm actu…
Thread · 35 points
The silent 30% of a 9-room inn still takes 40 hours a month
This belongs in the passive room as a warning about the word. A friend who'd managed restaurants found a 9-room inn in a small tourist town, walkable to a state park entrance, doi…
Thread · 25 points
Fixed bid with an escalation clause, or an allowance line that gets trued up
I've been sitting in on scope walks with two different crews this spring and they price materials risk in opposite directions, which makes it hard for me to tell what normal even l…
Thread · 10 points
Released four draws on photos and texts, then two subs' liens beat my deed of trust
$142,000 bridge on a gut rehab the borrower already owned. He'd bought it a year earlier with cash, torn out most of the interior, and run dry. My money went in as a refinance, $98…
Thread · 17 points
Made $1,150 doing room turns all weekend and still priced it wrong
I've been trying to work out where I fit on the service side and this landed in my lap. An owner with a six room house had five people move out in the same two weeks (student calen…
Thread · 26 points
Nobody will give me a plain startup number for a small brokerage
I'm still working out where I fit in this industry and I keep circling back to the brokerage side rather than the agent side. What I can't find is a plain number for startup. I've …
Thread · 15 points
The free call I booked has a pre-call form asking for my credit score
I signed up for a free 45 minute strategy call from someone whose videos I've been watching for a few months. Then the confirmation email came with a form. It wants my credit score…
Thread · 38 points
Asked to run somebody's spec build for a fee, agreeing to what exactly
I've been trying to figure out where I fit on the service side of this business, and last week a guy I know through a contractor friend asked if I'd "handle the project" on a spec …
Thread · 38 points
Offered a teaching slot in somebody else's $4,000 program. Good trade?
A guy with a real audience, maybe 30k email list, runs a $4,000 program on buying small service businesses adjacent to real estate. He wants me to build and deliver a four-week mod…
Thread · 22 points
At what point does project managing someone's ADU need a license?
I've been talking to a few homeowners about their backyard unit plans and I keep ending up as the person who calls the building department, collects contractor bids and keeps the s…
Thread · 31 points
Contractor wants 40 percent up front on a 31,000 cosmetic scope
Helping on the paperwork side of a small flip and the general contractor's proposal asks for 40 percent at signing, 40 percent at what he calls substantial completion, 20 percent a…
Thread · 16 points
I paid $3,100 for the education before I checked whether anyone near me would supervise
Wanted to get into valuation work. Found the qualifying education requirement for a trainee credential in my state, signed up for the package, paid $3,100 up front for the courses …
Thread · 35 points
My PM tried something adjacent to this on a rent deferral in 2021 and the "forgiveness" still showed as income on my 1099.
Reply · 7 points
The $7,000 projection for the 24-unit feels optimistic actually, or pessimistic depending on how you look at it. On a C-class Columbus building with any turnover, I would run that …
Reply · 4 points
The $0.15 to $0.20 NNN per square foot is closer to what I see in similar vintage comparisons in that submarket, not $0.30. Noticeable but not the number that ends the investment t…
Reply · 20 points
Has anyone mapped what a listing marketing vendor actually owns after the contract ends
Templates are probably protected; finished listing copy delivered to the agent almost certainly isn't.
Reply · 18 points
That 81% occupied at 22% commission cost is just Expedia owning your asset for free.
Reply · 19 points
Borrower equity versus lender equity in a gap piece, and where the split should sit
@paulgrant17 the part that caught me is "the rate alone would have been cleaner for the gap lender." Maybe, but 12 percent on a junior 70k piece behind 280k senior is thin for that…
Reply · 11 points
Does anyone else write the sourcing agreement before they even know who the end buyer is
What does your client's standard assignment language say about fee triggers?
Reply · 16 points
Did the ADU income kill my DTI on a property I cannot even buy yet
The permitting gap on basement units in older Cuyahoga County stock is everywhere and almost nobody flags it upfront. Two weeks is a fast catch, honestly. I have walked into proper…
Reply · 12 points
Has anybody actually fixed a direct mail campaign after it stopped pulling, or did you just kill it
407 pieces is a sample size, not a campaign, but that title guy's 2,000 floor sounds like cope to me. My staging business sends about 600 postcards a quarter to a tight Phoenix zi…
Reply · 6 points
Nine of those 38 "leads" recanting on the second call is the whole story. That is not a lead, that is someone who wanted to get off the phone. I would not go hourly either, actuall…
Reply · 11 points
Has anyone here actually bought rural land in Spain and run the numbers on agricultural income?
The number I kept seeing cited in agricultural cooperative bulletins out of Albacete province was 80 to 120 euros per hectare per year for dryland cereal lease, and that held reaso…
Reply · 9 points
The line that got me was "considered it out of scope." I have watched that framing do real damage. One Phoenix flip group I staged for in 2022 had a small LP structure on the side,…
Reply · 10 points
We underwrote to county-level clearing rates on our last raise, and the number that broke two co-investors was not the bid rate itself but the variance across counties in the same …
Reply · 13 points
The attorney's move is genuinely clever and I do not think it's necessarily wrong as a pure contract-reading exercise, which is the irritating part. "Capital event" language in OAs…
Reply · 11 points
Charlotte at 60% occupancy with a 2026 lease roll is basically screaming that they need runway, so that extension I get. Columbus is the one I'd be sitting on the phone about, beca…
Reply · 8 points
Lease-up guarantees from a GC: what they actually cover and what they don't
Physical vs economic is the exact fight nobody reads for until month four.
Reply · 12 points
The title company already told you the fix, they just need a signed agreement. I did something similar last year with a small family office buying in Tarrant County, my fee was $5,…
Reply · 14 points
Does the buyer's credit history actually matter when I'm the one holding the note forever
The extra $13,950 at closing sounds better until you're chasing a default in month 38 and fronting the legal fees to get there.
Reply · 11 points
Sold data on seven properties over $3M in one metro shows an average of 214 days on market
Sellers at that price point almost never cut early enough for it to matter.
Reply · 8 points
A pre foreclosure beat its model by 22k because title cleared fast and the payoff matched
That 19,400 in reno on a 279k ARV model is tight, I'm seeing cosmetic scopes run closer to 26 to 28k in similar price bands around here even when you do the fixture swaps yourself,…
Reply · 12 points
When the tax tail is wagging the dog on a QOF decision
The sponsor packet thing is a real signal. I've seen the same pattern in a couple of service-side deals I was evaluating around 2022, where the zone designation was doing all the m…
Reply · 10 points
Should a sourcing fee attach to the deal type and market or to the client relationship
The thing I have never seen work is the handshake assumption that a flat per-deal fee scales gracefully across product types. Every time I have watched someone try to carry a singl…
Reply · 12 points
Asheville dropped hard in late 2023 when some of the newer boutique inventory came online and a chunk of operators who'd been running $170+ ADR quietly slid back to $140 occupancy-…
Reply · 15 points
Does REIT exposure count as real estate exposure when I'm still trying to buy actual property
The 34k is your closing buffer too, not just a down payment, and Cleveland inspections alone ran me $600 last year.
Reply · 8 points
Lost a deal in a similar way but it was a right of first refusal held by an LLC that was listed as a co-signer on a totally separate document, not even the purchase agreement or an…
Reply · 12 points
A QOF fee stack can reach 3.8 percent annually before the deal makes a dollar
The under-2% deals I've looked at still have the same problem you're describing, just smaller. I pulled apart one last spring, New Orleans zone, $100k minimum, fees came to 1.85% a…
Reply · 12 points
Does a $450 inspection make sense when the problem it finds costs $200 to fix
You paid $575 to find out the attic wasn't rotting, not to fix a fan.
Reply · 14 points
When the borrower is also my contractor, does the lien waiver schedule change?
The thing I keep circling back to is whether your lien position on his property and your payment obligations on your cabin are actually as separate as they look on paper. If he's G…
Reply · 8 points
Holding an agency mREIT through two dividend cuts in 14 months and how to decide that in advance
Repo haircut trends told me more than dividend coverage ever did.
Reply · 9 points
Has anyone here carried paper on a property they never intended to sell this soon
The balloon actually does protect you. At seven years you either get cashed out or you renegotiate, so you're not locked into today's rate forever the way your neighbor implied. W…
Reply · 10 points
