Need next step advice: pull equity out vs. 1031 or.....?

[Pat Sieler]

Hey everyone.

We are new to BP and (sort of) new to real estate investing. We are super busy people and therefore are interested in more passive investing strategies.

Our goal is passive rental income into retirement, 100k+ net within 10 years

We own one rental property in Miami, FL that is fully paid off. It would sell today for approx. $650,000.

It cash flows around $2000/month.

We would like to leverage our equity and buy more properties, but as we are investigating this, we can't seem to find anything that would cash flow sufficiently to pay what would be our new loan.

Consequently, I was thinking it might be more profitable to 1031 it and use the money to put 25-30% down and jump into a larger property like a four-plex or similar. But where do I find a deal? What market? Etc?

We'd also be open to providing capital to syndicators, but again, this would need to obviously be profitable so we could make the payments on our re-fi.

Advice? Thoughts?