House hacked and Secured my first tenant! Excited to expand on this first step!

[Evan Alfaro]

Hey ya'll! 

So, 2 parts to this post.

First, simply wanted to share with everyone that as of June 1st this year, I secured a tenant for the vacant bedroom in my house! Long story short, I moved out of my house to live with my girlfriend, and in doing so I left the master bedroom vacant since the other two rooms were occupied by my parents. After some time, it became obvious that I needed to do something with this room, and do it ASAP. Initially, I wanted to utilize Furnished Finder (hence my previous post asking you all for input about it) but after a month or more of little to no interest, I had to start looking else where. Put the room up for rent on Rent-A-room and with in day's had a couple people interested. Made my choice on which tenant I felt most comfortable with, and BAM! Now I'm a landlord! We ultimately agreed on her signing a 6 month lease, and with in 2 months living there, she assured me she wanted to stay a minimum of another 6 months after!  I feel lucky because the tenant, living with my parents, has been so cool with everything! Gets along with everyone in the house just fine, and requests almost nothing from me!

Ok, with that out of the way, the second part of this post was intended to focus more on my next moves.

I just finished filling out the info for "find an agent", and funny thing is, the agent literally just text me! Hasn't even been 30 minutes! 

What should be my next step? 

I consistently here on the podcast and YouTube about building a team, who would be the next person to contact?

 I want to thank any who read and comment on this in advance! 

Hope all are well, Take care!

[Bryce Jamison]

The first thing I thought after reading your post is where do you live if your girlfriend kicks you out? "That isn't going to happen", but what if it does? Just something to think about.

If you're not already doing so, get on a budget. Then save up a big beefy emergency fund. You'll hear 3-6 months as the standard, but you'll need much more to cover when your tenants stop paying rent, trash your place, you need a new capital expense, or something happens in your life that prevents you from earning more income. After that I'd find a realtor, which your already doing, and start looking for properties. I've had bad experiences on here with the agent finder because who reaches out to you isn't always who you reached out to. I prefer Zillow's tool because you can see how many transactions each realtor has done in the last year, where their transactions were, how many reviews they have, and read those reviews. If they're any good they'll be able to connect you with all the ancillary vendors you'll need like contractors, closing lawyers, & lenders, but Google can help with finding these too. It's nice to have a list of all these vendors, but I'll typically only engage them when I'm about to need their services. 

I'd also recommend attending local meetups to connect with other investors in your area who can recommend vendors, and typically a few vendors will show up themselves at these, especially wholesalers.