Condos Worth Starting Out With?
Hi, my husband and I will be moving to Hawaii this summer for my career (military), and we are looking for our first RE purchase. We'll be in Honolulu for the next 6 years and will most likely return to the island in the future.
Our long-term goal is to buy-and-hold SFHs and multi-units. However, the downside to our sunny move is the average price of SFHs in Honolulu is pretty hard to swallow as our first purchase (and we are both from the San Francisco Bay Area, so we are accustomed to high prices). Thus, we started to look at condos*, and although their prices are more compatible with our budget (with enough cushion for emergencies), we fear having a lack of control over HOA fee increases (only one direction to go, in our opinion). As it's well-known, it's very difficult to achieve something near the 2% rule in markets like Honolulu and the Bay Area so having a large factor like HOA fees out of our control increases our anxiety about condos being our first purchase.
Although we are apprehensive about entering a RE market with such high entry prices, we are even more apprehensive about investing remotely (only other market we are interested in is the SF Bay Area, where both of our families are). Fellow BPers, what do you think we should do in order to help us balance our desire to add RE into our portfolio and our situation of living in Honolulu? Thank you in advance!
*For those familiar with the Honolulu market, we are specifically looking at the Salt Lake/Moanulua area.