Once new real estate investors get their feet wet, the next step is to develop a strategy for successfully investing in larger properties. The first move is to learn the neighborhoods in which to find them.
“I consider myself an entry-level investor,” said Matthew Haines, a principal at Property Research Partners LLC. “I think it’s when you start moving up to the 10- and 20-family buildings that you’ve crossed a threshold.”
Data compiled by Property Research Partners, which offers PropertyShark.com, shows that over the past year, there’s been a high concentration of sales of five- to 10-family homes for under $1 million in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn and the Ridgewood area of Queens.
Other areas that have seen a high rate of similar sales are Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Neighborhoods that have experienced a smattering of these cheap sales are Parkchester and areas just east of the Bronx River Parkway, along with Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Astoria in Queens, and even central Harlem.
The four-family home threshold
For investors looking to move up from four-family dwellings, there are various strategies that can be used to maximize their investment potential. While the best deals may be empty buildings, Haines pulled off a rather simple renovation of an occupied five-family building in Harlem five years ago.
“I had five free-market occupied units, which I was then able to renovate to a higher standard and raise the rents a great deal,” he said.
Easier said than done
Not all investments are as straightforward. Investor David Goldoff of Goldoff Properties purchased at a foreclosure auction a five-family building in the Tremont area of the Bronx that was actually occupied illegally by eight families – including the owner. Goldoff said he spent more than a year trying to evict the owner and rehabilitate the building, which also had retail space.
“This ended up being a complicated deal, what with getting the tenants out, legal issues, and getting the financing,” he said. “We couldn’t get conventional loans from anybody, so we had a hard-money loan from a lawyers’ group.”
Goldoff said he was fortunate that the retail tenant, a man who owned a barbershop and lived in the building, agreed to purchase the property. That meant Goldoff didn’t have to worry about refinancing the hard-money loan.
“Luckily for us, when we were fixing up, and people started paying us rent and signing leases, I was able to flip it and sell it to somebody else who finished the building,” he said. “These deals are all complicated, because you’re dealing with different variables. You have to have holding costs, and the money to stay in the place while you’re changing this around, because you’re going to have a lot of resistance from people.”
Building up sweat equity
Buying an under-performing building, moving in, and evicting tenants is a common form of investing for those beginning to flex their muscles as small investors, said Ryan Slack, Haines’ partner at Property Research Partners LLC.
“That’s one of the most important ways of people making money,” he said. “I’m investing in a building in Harlem where the building’s managers are doing that. They’ve been able to get a large part of the building to turn over. It’s not breaking anybody’s kneecaps. They’re suing people who haven’t been paying. They’re offering people money to move. It was a building where the previous owners let it slide.”
For investors who are marching a step ahead of entry-level, they can use owner move-in evictions to pull off some more advanced deals, such as converting a five-family to a four-family building, Slack said.
“When you get over a four-family to a five-family, it’s a commercial loan, and you have to put more money down,” he said. “What a lot of people do is convert five-families to four-families, or even three-families, because the price per square foot goes up dramatically.”
The owner can refinance the loan or sell to somebody who will live in the building, “who it’s worth a lot more to, because instead of having to put up the 30-plus percent that I did, they only have to put up 5 percent, and have the bank pay the rest,” Slack said.
In a neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where you can buy something currently for about $150 a foot, the price might go up to $300 a foot on such a deal, he said. Goldoff pointed out that in his experience, it’s easier to obtain a loan for larger buildings, over four- or five-family, than it is for four- or five-family buildings.
“Most banks I’ve dealt with seem to consider you are a higher risk with the smaller buildings, because if you lose a quarter of your occupancy, you can’t cover the debt-coverage ratio,” he said.
But there also exists a strategy for investors to convert six-family buildings to five-family buildings with owner move-in evictions and thus release the building from rent stabilization, Slack said.
“You convert the six-family building to a five-family building,” he said. “Everybody’s still covered by rent stabilization. But of the other four people, if one of them moves out, you can immediately move the rent to above $2,000 a month.”
But perhaps you’re a skilled investor who doesn’t have access to $600,000 in capital, but is looking at brownstones in the Prospect Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn. Janelle Benjamin, a principal with Red Real Estate, which matches up investors with distressed property owners, said she has seen some creative approaches to investment.
“One person did an equity transfer,” she said. “They found a woman who owned a brownstone but was $60,000 behind on her mortgage. The investor went into contract with the owner to pay the $60,000 off and take half of the equity.”
Since the brownstone was then in the black, the investor-turned-owner and the original owner were able to sell it on the open market.
“It went for over $1 million,” Benjamin said, “so they got a good deal.”