People often have unrealistic expectations about what it's like to invest in property. 

They buy a property in a terrible, so called "up and coming" area, hoping to buy cheap and sell high. It's not a neighborhood they'd want to live in, yet they expect the property to magically appreciate and that tenants or a new owner would want to live there.

Other people go into business with a partner to start investing and expect it to be easy peasy. Partnerships are rarely easy.

In this interview, we talk to Jeanne Whipple of the Philly Home Girls. Jeanne's an experienced realtor and investor. She's even done several larger scale residential developments.

Hear tips from Jeanne about how she chooses what property to invest in, and her top tips for new investors.

For further information from Jeanne and Philly Home Girls, visit https://www.phillyhomegirls.com/

If you are an investor and need help setting up your investments and running them as a business, reach out to our office for one of our real estate investor packages: www.phillysmallbusinesslawyer.com

Are you an investor that's going to manage your rental properties yourself in order to save money? There are a number of reasons why that could be a terrible idea. In addition to costing you time, you could be missing out on an easy way to shift some of the risk and potential liability to another party. With a properly constructed contract, you might be able to mitigate some of the risks if the property is not maintained well.

Give this episode a listen to see if you are being pound foolish in managing your own property.

In this latest video, find out what you need to consider when you buy an investment property and are now going to lease it to commercial tenants. You'll need a lease, of course! Commercial leases are not like residential leases and involve many more terms and considerations. Watch this video for some critical tips.

If you need help with a commercial lease for your property, don't hesitate to contact our office.

Many investors have questions about what kind of financing to use when investing in property. Should they form an LLC? Can the LLC borrow money? What happens when they use personal financing but want to move the property into an LLC?

Many people don't know that the kind of financing they choose has a big impact on these issues. It's important to be careful about the choice of financing.

Here's a snippet of what to do if you want to finance a property and put it in an LLC:

Sarah Holmes:  Okay. So we get a lot of questions from people about the loans and when people come to me often they've already built up a portfolio of properties, maybe got five or six properties, and they have them all in their own name, and usually they do that because they've gotten one of those low interest rates that they qualified for, based on their personal credit. But from the liability side, on my end, I don't like to see that, because now they're exposed, their name's on the deed, so they always come in asking, "Well, how can I put in an LLC?" And most of the time I can't move that property into an LLC because it's going to violate their mortgage clause. So they try to think of a way, going forward, as to what kind of financing they're going to use.

Sarah Holmes: So if someone wants to put the property in an LLC, is that a different kind of financing than they've probably been using with the low interest in their own name.

Joe Scorese:  Well, good question, because if the borrower has stabilized rents, they have decent credit scores, maybe around 680 or plus, like 700 score. We can typically just refinance their property out of their name into an LLC. Now, the catch would be, there's a couple of catches. One would be that there's transfer tax, depending on what county you're in. So that you're going through a full refinance to take it out the personal name, and put it in the name of the LLC. It also has to make sense bank-ability wise because you don't want to put someone in a bad debt income circumstance. So you've got to evaluate that.

Joe Scorese:  But what one good thing is, they can treat that property now as a business, and issue tax returns and issue a K1 where that property and that mortgage is not reporting to their credit personally. Okay? So you could eliminate a lot of debt to income in the personal name, after you built up a decent portfolio in your name, and start moving them over into the portfolio loan, because, under your personal name, you're only allowed to have a personal home mortgage plus nine other mortgages. One can be a secondary, and then eight investment properties. So you kind of gets them back to ground zero to start over again if they want to buy more properties in their personal name.

Joe Scorese:   So it gives a lot of leeway to an investor. They have options at that point.

Sarah Holmes:  Okay. But what if they have multiple properties and we talk about the liability, and we decide that, for best protection purposes, they might need multiple LLCs. How complicated does that get on the financing side?

Joe Scorese: It would get more complicated on their side with a CPA, if they don't understand how to issue K1s, and personal returns. I mean business returns. I'm fine with it if they want to use a special purpose LLC for each property.

For more information on Joe, you can find him  on Linkedin as Joseph E. Scorese. On Facebook, Joseph Scorese. And Firstrust.com you could look up loan officers,  under the Firstrust.com and it's one 'T' in the middle, FirsTrust.com. 

For help in setting up your investment properties as a business, reach out to our office anytime or call.