I have 150K in San Diego and want to invest in Pittsburgh - HOW??

[John Earl Shaird II]

Hi! This is my first post and I'm a total rookie. I've read some BiggerPockets books, listened to the podcasts, and I've finally decided to actually go for it and try my hand at investing!

A close friend I met here in San Diego decided a few years ago to move back to Pittsburgh where he's originally from. We've both since gotten married and started families. Our conversations now focus less on the music we played together in local San Diego bands all those years ago, and have lately begun to gravitate more to what we're gonna leave behind for our little ones in the future.  So we got into BiggerPockets and now need to build a team to help us on our journey.

It's too expensive to play the game in Southern Cali, so we decided Pittsburgh is where we'd make our rookie start. My personal goal is to develop systems that will help me become a BRRRR machine. Forced appreciation just seems to be where it's at. But even though I've got my buddy on-site to be my bird dog, I'm still a bit leery about trying to do such a big and complicated thing right away, especially from out-of-state. It just seems like there's SO many moving parts, and neither of us has ever even been a landlord yet. So, we're not looking for the home run just yet - a simple base hit would be great. We want to eventually feel confident bringing a C- property up to a B+, but maybe we'll just start with B- to B (i.e., a stable cash-flowing duplex/triplex with tenants already in it, and as the tenants move out, we do a simple cosmetic upgrade before renting the unit out it at a higher price).

The reason for this post is that we have no team assembled at the moment. We know we'll have to do some interviews and due diligence before we finally find those team members that we truly harmonize with and are going to be our people. But we thought it would be great to start with advice and recommendations from the BiggerPockets community - especially those that know Pittsburgh.  So, if you have an investor-savvy agent, contractor, handyman, property manger, lender, insurance agent, attorney, etc... that you think could really help us jump-start our journey, please reply and let us know. 

I just closed on a 150K HELOC and I'm looking to use it in the most effective way possible in PGH. My buddy and I are pretty intent on starting by investing in cash-flowing multifamily rentals (2-4 units), B- properties in B neighborhoods, priced 350K and below, with a monthly cash-flow per unit of at least $200, and Cash-on-Cash return of at least 7%. So we're planning on using that 150K as seed money to use toward down-payments on our first properties. But, if you know Pittsburgh like a pro, convince us why we're idiots and that we should be investing in self-storage instead LOL!

Any and all advice is welcome. And don't forget to let me know if there's anything I can do to help you as well. I'm looking to make as many connections as possible and play my part in helping us all reach our goals - for ourselves AND our little ones.

Thanks for reading,

John.