Our First Investment Property - How and Why

Hi to All BiggerPocket Followers,

First let me tell you how we got into real estate investing. In December 2013, my husband approached me, after his work assignment ended. This happens a lot due to my husband's profession as an Union Carpenter in New York City. He said lets start a real estate business and start with investing in buy and hold properties. His push came after working 5 months of 7 days, 12 to 16 hours a day. While I took care of our 3 young boys, worked part-time, and was attending college at night on an attempt to obtain a 2nd degree. In hope of obtaining a better paying job once my boys got old enough to travel alone. I would be able to work full time. During this time, I felt like a single mom. Honestly, I don't know which is more painful, giving birth or being a single mom. All my prayers goes out to all you single moms/dads.

Why? I felt this opportunity was God sent. Not only was I feeling drained by life, I needed a reason to drop out of school. LOL!!! I'm so happy I got my first degree before getting married and having kids, because I could not manage this routine any longer. Also due to my schedule, my two younger boys were not doing well in school, guess they took mommy being busy as time for more play.

Anyway, I agreed, and I set out to learn how to start a real estate business. As I hit the keys with fingers running, I came across this website "BiggerPockets." I was very skeptical because of the name. I thought it was a site full of false or hyped up opportunity, that’s the New York Scam Radar in me. Well, after a week of everyday checking out the site and reading the forums and blogs, I was hooked and realized this site is the real deal. There is a lot of valuable information, experienced investors and just a lot of people here helping each other. BP is now my number 2 source. (Sorry BP the Bible is my #1 source). So, I prayed about the truth of BP and now it is my foundation for RE information. Through this site, I found my awesome mentor, Lisa Philips of Affordable Real Estate Investments and other key people to help build my team to assist us in building a REI business.

Once we decided where we would invest, I followed a lot of my mentor’s advice as to how to start investing out of my local area. I immediately started communicating with 2 realtors in the area over two months. I created a list of 20 houses for each realtor and sent them my lists. So, we decided to put the kids in the car and take a weekend to go view properties. I scheduled one day with each realtor for the weekend. I was blessed with these two realtors. There was a moment that I thought we would not find anything, because the houses we saw were horrible. I remember going back to the hotel room, getting on my knees and praying: "Lord, please lead us to an investment property this weekend. We pulled our kids out of school for a day. Please don’t let this be in vain. We put the boys through hours of sitting in the truck." The next day, we found our investment property.

So, in just 3 months, (March 2014), my husband and I were able to obtain our first investment property which is a single family house (out of state) about 7 hours away. We did a cash purchase of a foreclosure built in 2004. It is a 3 bedroom, 2 full baths and it looks great. It is located in a very nice subdivision at the end of a cul-de-sac. After inspections were done, it only needed minor repairs and some cosmetic work. We closed within 2 weeks. My husband took a week with a friend who also is also an Union Carpenter and they drove back to do the repairs that the home inspection indicated. My husband also put in brand new matching stainless steel appliances, new blinds in every room and painted the interior of house.

Most people tell us this usually doesn’t happen to new investors on their first time out. I must give thanks to God for answering my prayers and to my Realtor, she deserves a lot of credit for this. She was great and after spending an entire 2 days with us to show us houses. Once we decided on this house, she worked with us until 10:00 pm to get the offer prepared and have the papers ready to submit for the next business day because we had to get back on the road to head back to NYC. We did the closing via internet.

We immediately hired a Property Manager. As of May 1st, the Property Manager found us a tenant paying $875.00 a month. Since, we paid for the property in cash, we have monthly property expenses of $429.25 and our monthly cash flow is $445.75.

Although, we are still babies in this field, and still have an extreme amount of knowledge to learn, we are happy that we have BP and my Mentor Lisa Philips of Affordable Real Estate Investments on our side to help guide us. We are now in search of our next investment property. We are looking to finance the next deal. For the next deal will be using Lisa Philips’ of Affordable Real Estate Investments strategies.

Also, if you haven't read the eBook by BP, "Rewind", it is a must read. I have already highlighted things I won't do in red and things I will put to practice in yellow from all of the great REI's articles in this book.

So, with a big THANK YOU BP and Lisa Philips!!! We are officially Real Estate Investors.

Dana Nicholson

NicholandSons Real Estate, LLC