I am looking to purchase some single-family homes and was just making sure my return on investment calculations are done correctly. Any help to my questions will be much appreciated
When calculating your ROI, how does the increase in equity factor in and how do you calculate this?
Buying price – principal or
Market value (how do you find this – realtor or your rough estimate from available information) - principal
It makes since to use the second but I find this amount hard to calculate when analyzing properties. How do I know what it will sell for in 5, 10, or 15 years from now.
A Realtor should be able to help with determining market value. You could also get an appraisal, but you wouldn’t want to pay $300-400 for each house you’re looking at. It sounds like you are wanting to buy and hold long term. If you’re renting something out, you should be more concerned with cash flow each month rather than what the house will be worth years down the road. Buy at a discount where you can rent it for good cash flow. If you pay too much, the property won’t take care of itself financially.
Cash Flow is the single biggest driver when I am considering buying a house. If I leave out the increase in equity it just seems like I am short changing the ROI.
How do you guys find out what to rent a place for. I have looked up rental asking prices for houses in the area w/ comparable attributes (there are not a lot of houses to compare too – the area population is around $500,000), but how do I know the asking rental price is not too high or low. Is the best and easiest way to go through a realtor?
One thing you could do is make note of what ads are in the paper and where signs are in yards and see if they’re still there a couple weeks from now. If they are, they may be asking too much. Check out what local apartments are renting for. We rent houses cheaper than people could find apartments. Most of our houses range from $450-650. Those are for mostly 2-3 bedrooms and mostly one bath houses, but some have 2 baths. Many of the apartment complexes around town want $600-675 for 1-2br apartments. So why would I be under that amount for an entire house? Well, there are always other people out there renting out crappier houses for $300-500 so I can’t just be way above that. $100/mo is a lot of money to some people. Another reason is that a lot of the apartment complexes are newer. We have a lot of houses 30-60 yrs old.
I only invest in multi-family properties for long term holds. I don’t like to bank on future appreciation. I concentrate only a paying down the debt. Sfh are good for flips but not long term holds and this is exactly my strategy and it has serves me well for 14 years. I have 44been units but only 12a buildings to take care of. Much easier… I flip Sfh and then get out. No money in them as rentals. Too much maintenance costs and no income when empty. I never have multis where the whole building is empty at the same time. Returns are much better on multi and I would challenge any investor on here on this topic.
If managed properly MF does have better returns than SF, everything else being equal.
A MF owner can control increased equity through increased rents and decreasing vacancies, in single family there are a lot of things we can do, but much of the increase in equity will come from the housing market itself.
One advantage for single family is the low cost of entry, last year I averaged, by using hard money then converting to conventional mortgages, to have about $7,500 cash in each new property,t he average cash flow (just figuring rent less PITI), is $505 a month per property. obviously there will be maintenance, but I totally rehabed each house so that the maintenance cost should be fairly low.
In MF you will have to come up with more cash to get into the deal, and normally will be one of several investors into a deal if your dealing in larger MF properties.
But I’m not going to argue that MF can be more profitable, it can be
to calculate future amount of your investment, you have to take current interest rate and inflation rate as well. if you dont know than use simple statistical indexes for rough estimate.
secondly consider cash flow which your property will generate through rent and last count market value of your investment minus buying price.