Buying First Home - Need Advice (Military)

[Chase Thatcher]

This is my first home/investment, I'm not sure what I'm doing but I know I want to get into real estate investing. Looking for advice on the following situation, I apologize for the length: 

I'm married and in the military about to move to my new base in a month and a half. I qualify for the VA loan, plan is to buy a home with zero down, live in it for a few years (2-3), then turn it into a rental property.

It's a smaller community around the base and we've been looking for houses for a few months now but anything decent/in our price range gets snatched up almost immediately, our first offer got beat by all cash. Recently had two offers rejected on a newly renovated house that has been on the market for 3 months now and is seemingly priced way too high according to the comps. We are trying to keep our PITI payment under my monthly, non-taxable housing allowance but the seller has dug their heels in and won't budge, if we were to agree to his price we would be roughly $150 over my monthly housing allowance for the rest of the year, next year with an allowance increase and tax decrease it would likely be under the allowance.

We have exhausted all other options in the area, there are cheaper options that would need to be a while-occupied renovation but I won't have time to do any renovating as I will be in a very intense training period while we live there. 

House details: 3 bed 2 bath, 1,613 sqft. Newly renovated interior/exterior, great yard and sunroom, best school district and desirable location. 

The house would be very rentable but I worry about the profitability if we pay too much on the front end. The seller guarantees it will appraise but we aren't sure how likely that is and if they would come down if it doesn't. 

I'm wondering if I should go ahead and buy this house or not. I'm new to this so I have no idea how to figure out the rent/cash flow margin in a few years once we move out. It's in an area that should grow and appreciate and continue to be desirable but I worry about the whole "you make money when you buy" concept. 

Plan B would be to just forfeit the housing allowance and live on base with crushed dreams.

Any advice is appreciated, sorry again for the length! 

[Stephen Fialko]

First off, congrats on making the leap and looking at buying your first home!

For context, I am also in the military and have used my VA loan 4 times now and turned 3 of those into rentals (granted all prior to 2023). While my experience and knowledge is far from perfect, I think I could shed a little insight into your situation.

The VA loan is an amazing tool for us vets to buy a home with zero down. However, it does make it tough to turn it into a rental post-assignment as you are not buying down the monthly payment with a down payment AND you are tacking on the VA funding fee. However, it can be done and continues to be done. The easiest and quickest way to determine if your property will cash flow is something called the 1% rule. If you can rent your home for 1% of your purchase price then you will generally cash flow. So if you purchase a $300,000 home, if you can rent it for $3,000 a month then you will cash flow. This is a general rule of thumb so there is some wiggle room. I do find that this number can sometimes be a little high. If you bought a house for $300,000 at 6.5% with $5,000 annual taxes and $1,000 annual insurance, you'd be looking at a $2,400 mortgage payment. The 1% rule dictates a $3,000 rent. After property management (generally 10% of rent) you're be looking at $3,000 - $2,700 = $300.00 of cash flow. Find a mortgage calculator app and just run through some houses on Zillow to see if they would cash flow. I use Mortgage Calculator+.

How do you assess what your house will rent for? You can just use Zillow and search for rentals that are comparable to the house you're buying and in the same location. Look at how prices compare to square feet and then extrapolate for your house. Every real estate platform will also tell you what the annual taxes are, give you an average for insurance in the area, and tell you what the HOA cost is. With this you can determine what your approximate mortgage will be and can compare to that average rent you found earlier.

You might determine that your market is not conducive to renting your house and that’s ok. If you determine that it’s not, (inbound opinion here) it is still loads better to buy than to rent. When you rent, you are basically throwing your BAH away and when you buy you are paying down against an asset that will provide you equity in the future (assuming the market goes up). If you buy a newer build and don’t expect major issues, you might be able to scrape by for a while with a smaller margin of cash flow ($100-$200). 

Overall, I think buying always outweighs renting for us vets. BAH will always cover your average mortgage in your area and it’s better to build equity than throw that money towards rent.