First Time House Hacker - Pittsburgh, PA

[Anthony Rini]

Hey everyone, after reading multiple books from BiggerPockets, I'm glad to finally be on the forum and looking forward to making connections! I'm a 24 year-old recent college graduate from Virginia but grew up in the Pittsburgh area. I'm looking to return home this summer and house hack my first property. I'll have about 16k saved up at this point and will be using an FHA owner occupied loan. I'm open to both single-family and multi-family units, preferably in the South Side or South Hills. I'd like to use this property to start out and then acquire more properties in the 2-3 years to follow using BRRRR. Does anyone have any good advice on starting out, since this is my first investment property? And what areas would you recommend, whether that's the areas I listed above or anywhere else? I'm also wondering if it's hard to rent out individual rooms if I were to go to the single-family route? Any advice or tips would be very much appreciated and I'm looking forward to making some connections with folks in the area!

[Elise Bickel Tauber]

Fantastic! Sounds like you are making a great decision when it comes to investing. Best advice I can suggest for someone looking to house hack, in addition to finding a good lender and saving for a down payment, is to research the areas you are looking to house hack. In addition to finding a place that you want to live, you need to be mindful of the areas and their growth/decline for future investment. I can tell you personally i have a few investors who are pulling out of South Side quickly because the market there is slowly declining. It use to be an A area but now is B (in my opinion) which I am basing off of crime, rental desirability, Days on market for flips, etc. Keep an eye on areas like Bellevue, Avalon, Brighton Heights, etc that are near the new Esplande Development as well as any other area with major growth or steady appreciation. Also, I know some people really like room rentals but I would steer away. It is much harder to find good, LONG TERM tenants in a room rental versus a duplex/triplex. Room rentals have much higher turn over from my experience where often our tenants in a nice duplex/triplex stay 2-4 years or longer.

Hope that helps and congrats!