How I Decided to Invest in Real Estate

Hello Folks,

Welcome to my newbie real estate blog.  My name is Josh and I currently live in Portland Oregon.  This past summer i decided to dip my toe into the real estate investing world and just this past month I completed the purchase of my first two properties.  Around the same time I became a BiggerPockets member, as you can see from my profile, and I decided to take advantage of their blog tools.  I have no experience in real estate beyond purchasing the current home that I live in.   I thought a blog would be a good place to write down my thoughts and share them with others and rehash what I've learned and maybe what I screwed up.  So hopefully this is helpful for other very new investors out there. Here is how my investing began......

This summer I was listening to a technology podcast (nothing to do with real estate) one of the guests on the podcast I was familiar with, but he mentioned that he had started his own podcast on buy and hold real estate investing.  I had often thought that owning rental properties would be nice way to support ones self in retirement but I never considered it as a potential way to replace my current income with income from rental properties.  Living in Portland Oregon I had written off owning rental properties due to the extreme prices of homes in the area.  Many people i know, that have rental properties, just barely break even after they pay their loan and all of the expenses that are involved.  Their plan is to have the property paid off by the time they retire and then earn income from the rental during their retired life.  That didn't appeal to me.  But when I began to listen to the blog they talked about buying properties in the midwest and paying $30000 to $50000 for single family homes.  This sounded crazy to me, because in Portland there is no such thing as $30000 to $50000 single family homes.  They also talked about earning a return on investment of 10 to 12% after taxes, insurance and expenses.  I didn't believe that was possible.  So I began to dig around.  I began to look at zillow, trulia, redfin and rentometer.com and sure enough, there were properties like this in the midwest.  It was at this time I decided to move forward.  I made an appointment with a real estate investment company to learn more about what they could offer me.  I chose to work with a real estate investment company because I felt that I would need them initially to establish contacts with people in the area that I could then use in the future.  I consider the investment company to be my real estate investing training wheels, use them in the beginning and then take them off when you are ready to go it on your own.  Since I have a day job, I need the extra help, since I don't have time to physically go and meet folks myself.  So far this choice seems to be working out. 

Well my first blog post feels a little haphazard so hopefully I'll get things dialed in with some time.  In the next blog installment I'll talk about the first properties the investment company offered me and what I thought of them.  If you want to know details on certain things that I mentioned but didn't talk much about make a comment.  I'll try to respond either directly or in a following post.  Thanks for reading.