Our Real Estate Investing Journey
Hi everyone, I’m not a very active member on the forum yet but I am working on learning and absorbing as much info as I can right now.
Some background about me and why I am interested in REI I am currently an Air Traffic Controller in the military and have been on active duty for more than 7 years. At this point, I have less than 2 years remaining on my contract and I do not really want to re-enlist again, but when I get out I do not want to go work a 9-5 so that left me with the problem of how am I going to make money.
Real estate has been attractive to me for a few years and I always thought I would save up 20-30k but a house and then repeat. Well, last year my wife and I bought our first home and that’s when I started thinking about real estate more. After having our house for a few months we decided to rent out our 2 spare bedrooms via Air BnB and that extra income helped us out a decent bit but after doing it for about 6 months or so we decided that the turnover was too much for us so we then started looking for longer-term roommates and have since then signed 2 different 6 month leases. Switching from Air BnB we saw a drop in monthly rent but that is something we are ok with instead of the constant turnover.
After looking into REI more I learned about different strategies as well as creative financing and how to acquire properties without traditional mortgages. We have taken some action and have a direct mail campaign set up already and right now we are in the middle of launching our Bandit Sign On Wheels program, and I just made a different post asking for help with creating an independent contractor agreement for our drivers. We also have set up a Facebook page for our business as well as a website.
Right now we are living in San Diego and since we are new to all this we have decided that we would prefer to be closer to any properties we might be working on so we picked San Marcos as our target market that way we can drive there if we need or want to. Additionally, we know a few realtors in San Diego as well as a handyman and a general contractor.
In the future, we plan to continue to expand our marketing efforts in areas that we find to work and discontinue or modify approaches that have less effective response rates. As of right now, we are focusing our efforts on establishing our BSOW program and after doing so we will be moving to online ads looking for drivers as well as promoting our website to generate property leads.