All Forum Posts by: Beau Fannon

Yes sir. Appreciation is the game here. It's an inherently more risky game than cash flow because one market slip wipes out 10 years of appreciation and it can take another 10 years to build it back. That's what happened in Austin back in the early 80's. Big housing boom in the 70's followed by the Savings and Loan crisis in the early 80's. People who bought at the top in 79-80 didn't recover their lost appreciation until the early 90's. 

You you just missed the back to school summer rental season. since you live in a good suburb with good schools, that's going to be your best bet for renting out your existing home. It's gives you about 8 months to plan for option two. Option one ain't going to happen.

That's a catch 22. The further you get away from the city out past Round Rock, the easier it is to find good deals but the harder it is to sell them after the flip. 

If your goal is to buy and hold, just buy and hold. My in-laws sounded a lot like you a couple of years ago(no offense James). They hemmed and hawd for a year and then finally bit the bullet and bought a SFH as a rental last summer. Worst house in a great neighborhood with a 30% down payment or $108k. Took 6 weeks to rent out. On a normal month, they loose $80 on a 15 year mortgage. Since the house needed work, they've sunk an additional $10,000. By next summer, I'm forcasting they could sell the house for $54,000 more than their purchase price. But they plan to hold it for 20 years so you can imagine what that $118,000 investment will turn into.

Just do it. 

Dude, you already know the most complicated part of this game. You already bought a home. Surely you've already learned how to do maintenance. Just jump in. There's enough resources on this website and the rest of the internet to answer almost all of the other questions you're going to come up with as you dive in.

I tell people to start with pre-qualification at a credit union so you can see what you can afford. Really no point playing in Austin if you're $450,000 in debt and have a credit score of 502. 

Sure there are lots of other avenues you could pursue but it's best to know yourself before you travel those roads. 

I can share what it's like to live in a few. Mobile home communities are a unique blend of owners/renters. I will say you're going to have get pretty far from Austin to find many parks that aren't owned by sophisticated investors. I did a survey about a year ago and only found 3 that weren't held in an LLC.

Two different animals. San Antonio is driven by tourism, military and healthcare sectors. Austin is a giant research hub, tech center, state capital, and home to two generation of advanced manufacturing. The economies and cultures are very different which leads to very different real estate markets. Just look at how different ABOR operates compared to SABOR. Austin is cutting edge, fast paced, information driven. San Antonio is still classic old-school slow Texas good ole boy systems with limited information made public about the market. Which environment works best for you? 

While my experience is only a sample size of one, what I've seen is a lot of upper age Baby Boomers getting fed up with Austin and moving to places like Bastrop or Elgin to buy fixer uppers that they spend their golden years fixing up. Your margins buying a fixer-upper and then selling it to a baby boomer who wants a fixer-upper would be really really thin.

I'm interested in this as well. Not for myself or even investment, just curiosity. It's still a fledgling concept that will likely evolve greatly as technology advances.  The 3D printing of homes that started here in Austin could play a part in tiny home development as well. With time, market pressures and our innate creativity will push the movement further along in interesting ways. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than myself will chime in here. 

It depends on how you frame your perspective.  The way you frame it is from a short-term point of view.  In that view, the next 10 years show that renting is better. 

But if you frame it from a long-term point of view, buying is almost always better than renting. 

Do you want to be that person who rents the same place for 20 years, gets a new owner, and gets kicked to the curb without the ability to play in  that future real estate market that will have continued to appreciate? What other tangible investment can you make today that will have value in 20 years?