I just took a job in Dallas. I’m only there part time, but enough to look for more homes to buy in a new area. Can anyone get me started and help me figure out what part of town to start looking for good deals is? What are the numbers on a “good” deal in DFW?
I’ll be hiring a management company.
You might PM MotivatedCEO.
He works that area and I believe at one time he was also looking at some wholesaling.
Yes, I am in DFW!
I will do 30-35 owner financed notes this year, I have rentals, and I do wholesaling too. I have developed a Homevestors style business system, but without the franchise fees (which are HUGE). I should buy 100+ houses this year; 60%+ I will wholesale. Note I still own another business too not even connected to real estate, and hopefully I’ll sell that off in the next 6 months to a year.
DFW has high property taxes compared to say California, but our housing prices are 1/2 to 1/4 (say vs San Francisco) than in most parts of California. We have ghetto areas like any metroplex, usually in Dallas or Fort Worth and not in the suburbs, where you can buy a house and rent it for what I call the 3% formula (you buy it for $20k and rent it for $600 a month), and we have middle class areas where the yields are not so good but stable and high end areas where it’s only good to rehab/flip.
Do you have lots of experience? And is your income & credit level great, so you can borrow money? Do you have tons of cash reserves? What do you want to do - rehab, wholesale, rentals, do notes? I assume do rentals since you said you’ll need a property manager. Tell me a bit about you, and I’ll try to help.
I’m about five years into a buy and hold strategy. I generally buy about two places a year, leveraged with 80/20 loans from local banks. I own 8 rentals now and manage them myself, but I am reaching the limits of what I can handle. My places cash flow nicely and I have a good portion my income that is devoted to investing. My banks will loan me more money than I am willing to borrow, so that’s not a problem.
I would be looking to buy a few houses in 2015. Dallas fits a lot of my general investing criteria, being a place with expanding job base and stable values. Without doing a lot of research yet, it appears that I can finance 80% on a 15 year note and rent about $500 higher than the payment. That’s hard to do in Kansas City because the home values are higher and rents lower.
Yeah, I’m definitely interested. The next step is identifying a part of town (smaller older homes near jobs and activities) and start looking at potential deals. I’ve only seen enough to know that I’m interested. The fact that I can drive by occasionally helps a lot.
Gotcha. Since you will be a buy & hold investor here in DFW, here’s what I would recommend:
#1 - Try to invest close to where you will live on a part-time basis. I am assuming you’ll have an apartment, hotel or house you’ll stay in on a regular basis. DFW is a big place, about 60-65+ miles wide, and as a rule of thumb its good to invest within 20-30 miles maximum of where you’ll live. You should find lots of opportunties close to wherever you’ll be. The closer, the better.
#2 - Get on a couple DFW wholesaler’s email lists - so you can get a good deal on a house. Most things these guys sell are off off-MLS transactions and are at 70-80% ARV. You just need to be prepared to move fast, as their deals sell fast. Here are two in DFW:
→ http://stevenbuyshomes.com/forinvestors.html
→ http://www.homewoodproperties.com/wwwhomewoodpropertiescom_buyer.aspx
#3 - Login to Ziprealty.com and create a free account, and target a couple suburbs or zip codes you’d like to see houses in. Create some saved searches, and they will email you when a certain house at a certain price hits the market (e.g. Plano Texas, under $100k). Most suburbs in DFW make great places to do buy & hold rentals. I would avoid the actual cities of Dallas & Fort Worth, until you are familiar with specific areas of each city you’d want to invest in, as there are certain areas within each big city that have hardened ghettos that 75% of the investors avoid. Most suburbs (there are 50+ of them?) that may have a ghetto are not really ghettos at all, compared to the big two cities anyway.
#4 - Need a property management company? Checkout these two guys. I recommend McCaw Properties, personally, but both are very good.
→ McCaw Property Management - http://www.mccawpropertymanagement.com/
→ Get There First Realty - http://www.dfwlandlord.com/
The job is in Grand Prairie. The guys at work call it the “bermuda triangle” of the DFW area. I live in Hotels while there so am awful flexible, but the best spot for me would be near Love Field Airport so I can leave a car there and not have to bum rides back and forth. Is there any decent neighborhoods in that area? Beyond that, Irving would be next best for me.
My general plan i to narrow it to a part of town and then begin to ride my bike there in the evenings to get a feel for the neighborhoods. If you can help me narrow it down a little bit that would be great!
Looks like some great advice here! I’ve been watching some of the properties coming across and an still intrigued. I think I’ll go look at some of them next week.
Dallas is the good place to start of anything or to invest. They have their own beautiful individuality or you can say property. I like many variations of work happen over there.
I personally looking to get some new business or investment at a new place.