All Forum Posts by: Ron Gallagher

Haha I can see "only 3.5 hours away from the new HQ2" in Norfolk MLS property listings.

I sure do! @Russell Brazil is your new real estate agent if you are looking for investment property in NoVA.  

I do a house hack in DC where I live in the basement unit for free (actually I do better than free, I cash flow about $1800 a month) and I rent out all the bedrooms upstairs if you have any questions along the way about how to do the same in Fairfax.

Depends if you want cash flow or appreciation. If you want cash flow then buy in HR, if you want appreciation then buy in NoVA. My vote is for house hacking in Fairfax, then you can test out being a property owner and landlord in your own home and you could potentially cover most of your expenses with roommates.

Thank you for this post.  It is nice to see a post where the real life stress of being a real estate investor is being discussed.  Real estate isn't all cash flow and early retirement.  It's a lot of work and takes a special person to be able to juggle everything.  I have had some pretty rough weeks/months myself.  Back when I had a property manager we were in a particularly tricky situation and he said "let's just see if we can get out of this alive."  I have since fired that property manager since they were more work to manage than my tenants, but the sentiment is still there.  Whenever I am in a particularly stressful landlord situation I think to myself "let's just see if I can get out of this alive!"

@Agyei Axum To determine rents for the rooms I look at the rooms for rent section of Craigslist and zoom into my neighborhood using the Map View of the listings and look at the competition at that moment.  I get a rough overview of what people are asking for rents for rooms in my neighborhood and then I adjust my rent for the room I'm offering based on the size of the room, number of people sharing the bathroom that room uses, time of year I am trying to rent the room (I dropped the price a little bit in the winter months to keep vacancy at almost zero.), etc.  

It's definitely possible since I am currently doing it as Russell mentioned. Here's my story outlined in another forum post:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/48/topics/678444-house-hacking-research-tell-me-your-story?highlight_post=4024378&page=3#p4024378

Investing in Real Estate must really not be for everyone because I go on and on about how I am buying cash flowing rentals and this year I will quit my W-2 job to anyone that will listen, and not one person has pulled me aside and said "I want to increase my income too" or "I want to retire early too, can you explain to me how you are doing it with real estate?"  I showed a friend who is a renter how his monthly payment would be lower if he purchased a property and he wasn't interested.

Maybe all my friends and family are losers but no one seems to be interested in learning how to leverage real estate to build wealth or maybe they are just sick of hearing me talk about it.

Maybe I am soft and lazy (I'm definitely lazy) but I inherited a tenant who is paying below market rent in a property I purchased around Christmas time last year.  The tenant is 86 years old and he's been living there for at least 7 years.  The property has 5 units and cash flows well even if one of the tenants is below market. Maybe after I own the property for a year I will increase his rent a little, but I didn't feel like I needed to immediately jack up the rent on an 86 year old man because I don't have to eek out every last penny I can from a loyal tenant who pays on time every month and doesn't cause me too much drama. Sometimes there's a reward for living to be 86 and paying your rent on time every month for the last 7 years.

Another option is to expand your search to northern PG County. You can buy a house in Hyattsville for $350k with a second kitchen in the basement and live in the downstairs and rent out the upstairs.  Bonus if you can buy near UMD or on the UMD free shuttle route and then rent by the room to college students. There are ways to break into the DC market without buying a $1 million dollar house in NW DC.

What is the price range you are looking at?  You can also house hack with condos, I guess it would be called "condo hacking."  Anyway, if you can't afford a house in DC then I would look at buying a condo with a low condo fee in an area in DC that you (and your new roommates) would want to live in. If you can only afford a one bedroom condo then put up some temp walls or create a wall with book cases, etc in the living room and turn the 1 bedroom condo into a two "bedroom" condo with no common area, then get a roommate for the actual bedroom.

Then in about a year or two, rent out the condo and at that point maybe you are ready to qualify to buy a house that's in a good neighborhood and then you move into that.  But a condo would "get you in the game" and hopefully will appreciate some while you are living there for free or next to nothing.