I'm really excited to tell you that I'm ready to make my first offer on a first investment property! I'm nervous, scared, excited, eager -- so many emotions! I wanted to share with my community to see what insights you all came up with, and maybe get some encouragement to help me get over the fear of taking this huge step.

This is the property that I'm looking at:

https://www.realtor.com/reales...

It's a 3-1 built in 1964. It's got a full sized basement with parking for one vehicle (garage-basement?) and it sits on a 1-acre lot. The basement has a garage door and a separate entrance so it could reasonably be converted into living space for AirBnB'ing or a multi-family setup. The lot is large enough to divide and build a tiny house or a single-wide mobile home, of which there are many in the area. They're asking $169.9K and I'm planning to offer $147.5K and see if they bite. It's going to be a house hack, but what excites me most about it is that while it's immediately livable (an EXTREMELY hard find in my area for anything under $200K), it also has lots of potential room for expansion in a part of town that seems poised for a growth spurt in the near future. Here's some more background about the property and the market that I'm working in.

First, the rental income. Within 18 minutes of downtown Asheville (like my property-to-be) I've seen a LOT of people renting out bedrooms in their primary residences. For $450/mo you can get a tiny bedroom in a dump of a house that uses the living room for storage, shares the bathroom, and offers "furnishings" that look like they've been dumpster dived. For $750/mo you can get a similarly tiny room in a nicer house with shared bathroom and decent common area furnishings. I estimate that I can get $550/mo conservatively for two of the three bedrooms, which puts me at $1100/mo. If I were to rent the third bedroom out, that would get me up to $1650, which is well into the 1% rule range, even if I paid the full asking price, but this is a house hack...

My current living arrangement is $640/mo including utilities. So comparing this house, financed for a $800/mo payment and rented to capacity, will immediately reduce my living costs by $940/mo. Screaming deal!!!

Now, I know that I haven't budgeted maintenance or capEx into this equation, but if you take 1% of the purchase price as estimated maintenance you get $1470/yr for maintenance. So I put the first two months' savings into my maintenance fund and the next ten go towards a deposit for my next house. In two years I've recouped my initial down payment of $20K and I'm ready to start the process again.

As a first deal, I'm very, very nervous. My income is barely enough to live on so there's a lot riding on getting this right. But when viewed as a choice between positive cash flow and renting for an indeterminate period of time, I think it's no-brainer. I just got prequalified so I'm ready to move...whenever I'm ready to move! Haha ^^

Thoughts? Input? Words of caution?

Thanks y'all! Really glad I could share here and tap your insights.

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