Nomadic couple trying to decide where to call home and invest.

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Nomadic couple trying to decide where to call home and invest.

James Mitchell
Member since 2020 · 4 posts · 1 vote

My partner and I are a truck driving team. He is from Long Island and I am from the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Neither of us care to live in our home towns. We live on the road and take our off time all over the country. Sometimes we visit family,  sometimes we just visit a place we'd like to see.

We're currently trying to decide which part of the country we would like to call home. Living on the road means we have no normal household expenses. It also means that most of the REI strategies wouldn't work for us.

I think that buy and hold rentals would be our best strategy and then only if we could find a really good property manager.  I would like to use the house hacking method for our first property 2 - 4 units while keeping one unit for ourselves as a "home base".

We should be able to have around 50k in cash to invest by the beginning of next year. My question is, how do I find the better markets for investing? I'd like to put together a short list of decent investment markets. Then we could visit each of them for a few days and see if we could find a place we would like to live.

I'm super new to learning about REI and any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

James

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  • Collin Placke
    Rental Property Investor · Denver, CO · Member since 2018 · 46 posts · 48 votes
    6y

    You need to decide what is most important to you and your partner... Do you want to truly enjoy living in your "home base" or are you okay setting up your home base wherever the numbers make the most sense?

    I am an "out of state investor" meaning I don't invest where I live (Denver) so I strictly invest in markets where the numbers make sense. By "numbers" I mean population, population growth, income growth, job growth, job diversity, lower crime, lower vacancy., etc. The list could and should go on. 

    Bottom line, if you only look at numbers, you could narrow your search pretty quickly to some of the top rental markets in the US. DFW, Austin, San Antonio, Kansas City, Hunstville AL, Jacksonville FL, the Carolinas, Nashville, Memphis, Phoenix, Reno. Just to name a few.

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  • James Mitchell
    OP
    Member since 2020 · 4 posts · 1 vote
    6y

    Collin,

    Thanks for the reply. The truth is we don't know where we want to live. I'd like to put together a list of places where "the numbers make sense" then use that list as a starting place for our search for somewhere that we would be happy. So I guess my question is how do I identify the markets that make sense. I mean I see your criteria and cities but what all criteria should I be looking at? Are there maybe guidelines somewhere that could help me determine if a market is good for investing?

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