As part of our series on helping the everyday real investor making their investments into a business, we asked Farmers' Insurance Agent Jen Gregorski about what kind of coverage someone flipping property needs.  Here's an excerpt from our interview:

Q:   What about people that are just flipping property? They're going to buy a property, maybe they're going to spend two or three months rehabbing it, doing work, nobody's living there. Is that a different kind of insurance that they would need?

A:   It's a different type of insurance.  You need a builder's risk policy.  What makes it a little different is the insurance on the building is going to adjust as time goes on, with the understanding that you're putting money into building and it's becoming more finished as time goes on. So the policies also can be written in different time-frames. Usually a policy is an annual policy, where builders-risk ... if you think it's going to take you six months to finish the building, we write it on a six-month policy and we can always extend if we need to. But it's with the understanding that in six months you're going to be finished and it's going to be ready for resale or rent or whatever it is. 

Are you an everyday investor that needs help making your real estate investments into an actual business?  Book a call with us here to see how we can help.

​This video is part of our series focused on the every day real estate investor. Every day real estate investors are folks who normally have careers, full time jobs and on the side, want to start investing in real estate.  They might purchase properties to flip or hold and rent to tenants.

Often these investors have a lot of questions about how to best protect themselves from liability.  Insurance is one piece of that puzzle, but often people don't know what kind, or how much insurance to buy to best protect themselves. 

In this video, we discuss insurance for real estate investors with Jen Gregorski of Farmers' Insurance. Jen is an award-winning agent with an office in Dresher, PA.  She has over 20 years of experience in the insurance industry and protecting property owners.

For more information from Jen, visit www.jengregorski.com

Over the next few weeks, we're going to answer some common questions asked by everyday real estate investors. In this first video, we address the #1 question we get, "Should I set up an LLC for my real estate properties?"  Watch below for our answer!

The biggest question that we get from people thinking about or have already invested in real estate is, should I put my properties into an LLC or some kind of other business entity?

The answer to that is really, it depends. It depends a lot on how you finance the property. So number one, think about, have you used mortgages in your personal name to buy these properties? Number two, have you used commercial financing to buy the properties? You're going to want to get an opinion of somebody like an attorney or banker to see if, in fact, based on your financing, if you can move the properties into some type of business entity or not.

Next, you really want to think about what's your long-term plan with these properties. Are you going to be holding them, are you flipping them? What is the real nature of the risk? It's very important to look at each one on an individual basis and really figure out, "God forbid, if something terrible happened, how much exposure do I really face?" Because the exposure between buying and holding a property for a short period of time and flipping it versus holding for the long-term and stocking that property with tenants, that's a very different type of risk.

So the best thing is to get a professional opinion as to whether you can put them in an LLC, and then, how to overall structure your portfolio of holdings. Do you need multiple LLCs? Will just one suffice?

Stay tuned for some additional helpful videos for real estate investors on our channel.
You can always set up a time to talk with our office about how we can help structure your real estate properties.