Buying property sight unseen

[Johnny Lau]

I closed on my first out of state property sight unseen, it worked out well. I’m planning to do the same again soon. Thoughts?

[John Corretti]

I have 4 properties that I have purchased sight unseen so far. It's been two years now, and I still haven't seen them. So far so good..I say if the numbers work go for it! People think I'm crazy...but I always say, "do you go visit the Coke bottling plant before buying their stock, no, you do it based on the numbers."  One thing I always recommend doing is having your property manager give you lots of good pictures any time they repair anything on the house. The next thing I recommend is using Task Rabbit for odds and end type stuff around the house. One time I paid a guy $20 on Task Rabbit to walk around my property take lots of pictures and tell me what he thought about the place. 

A caution though...be careful getting yourself into too many states, I found out the hard way at tax time last year that having to file multiple state returns in a huge pain...and I'm still struggling to figure out my LLC structure.