Myself and two colleagues of mine are starting a business venture into real estate investing. We are entertaining the idea of starting a LLC, each of us throwing in 10 or 20k into bank account for our LLC, and borrowing to do deals off of the money accumulated in LLC account. I understand the requirements of getting construction loans, hard money loans, and converntional loans as an individual, but I am cloudy on what the requirements are as an actual company. Do the lenders still rely on personal assets as well as the money our LLC will have, or strictly off the money in our LLC account. Any information or ideas as to how to build the foundation of our company would be greatly appreciated.
For a new LLC, the lenders are going to be looking at all the LLC member’s financials and personal credit (as well as the strength of the deal obviously). In fact, the last couple deals I have done the bank hasn’t even asked to see our LLC’s bank account info, so make sure you can afford to throw that money into a bank account for the company, because once it’s in there, you DONT want to dip into it for personal reasons WHATSOEVER.
So it sounds like if we take our liquid capital and put it in an account for our LLC, and the bank doesnt look at the LLC bank account, then we are hurting ourselves by putting the money in the LLC account because then it will not be in our personal accounts, which the lenders will be looking at, correct?
I don’t think this should be too big of a problem, as two of the 3 members of the LLC are pretty well off financially, and the one whom isnt has the know how to put the deals together…
Any rules of thumb about how long it would take for a biz to build enough credit to finance a property on it’s own?
Make sure that when dividing up the LLC interests, that one person has the control. You might want to think about something like
Member 1 = 40%, member 2 = 30% and member 3 = 30%. With this arrangement, you will avoid grid lock and will always have the power to make a decision when you have to.
As far as the financing goes, if each of you is going to deposit $20K into the LLC checking account, it sounds like you have have some down payment money. But you have a long way to go in terms of being able to fund multiple deals over the short term.
And each of you will be on the financial hook for every dime of the banks’ money that the LLC ends up borrowing.