Interest in the Jacksonville, NC area

[Padric Lynch]

In my introductory post, I mentioned briefly that my career in the Marine Corps will most likely bring me to the Jacksonville, NC real estate market (Camp Lejeune) within the next couple months. I have been trying to familiarize myself with the market as best as I can without physically being there. My excitement and eagerness to get started has got me thinking about what to expect and what a good deal looks like in this area. I've drawn a couple assumption in my analysis. Average home costs look to be around 125k, but multifamily units seem to linger around 35-40k per unit. Conservatively, rents on a 1 bed, 1 bath are about $425 and 2 bed, 1 bath about $525. Bordering zip codes seem to have the same stats. Home ownership is around 60% so that leaves me to believe that there is a strong rental market. However, the inventory of multi-family houses appears to be low on the MLS. The military population also may come with more tenant turnover. I'd be curious to see if there are any off-market deals from current landlords or military personnel who have invested in the area.

My philosophy and approach:

I am set on rapidly acquiring buy and hold real estate. Multi-families will be my primary focus. This will be my first deal to get my feet wet, make a bunch of mistakes, and become more informed through action. The strategy I am thinking of using to get the ball rolling is housing hacking a multifamily, purchased with a conventional loan. I have 30k saved up for this purpose. I'd like to lock in a more favorable interest rate through living in the property as an owner occupant. I would be looking for another deal shortly after purchasing this initial property. This is when I would probably use my VA loan to purchase a second property, with the intention to house hack. This is a rough game plan of how I'd like the experience to go in the first couple months of living in Jacksonville. My long-term goal is to scale-up, use private money, and churn out more rental properties systematically. However, I know that there are many lessons to be learned and credibility to be won before getting to that point.

Any comments, questions, and critiques are highly appreciated. Thanks!

-Paddy

[Ben H.]

Welcome to the area. While far from experienced, I’ve been doing the rental game around Lejeune for a number of years. Some observations:

- I don’t recommend offering discounts for multi-year leases. Risk with military orders. I’ve done 2-yr leases in the past but that is the longest I would do.
- Annual rent increases are a no-go in this area. A lot of competition and military families are used to moving so the thought of boxing everything up and changing addresses is no big deal.
- Multi-family obviously can work but there is a plethora of cheap single family homes and the multi-families in the area are mostly (not exclusively) in less desirable area. Those that choose multi-family do so, in my opinion, because they have no other choices.
- I cringe at the stigma attached to military members (as a military man myself) but stereotypes often exist for a reason. You are dealing with a young population with decent income (compared to the national median for a given age/education level) that have left home for the first time. They would otherwise be in college trashing a dorm or still in their parents’ basements. You get what you pay for.

I’ll leave more thoughts later.