Ready to buy my first home in Massachusetts! Need guidance please.

[Aaron Landau]

Hello all,

I am located in Massachusetts and am looking to purchase my first home. I want an investment property as my first home where I live in one unit and rent the other units out. Unfortunately, there are not many multi-family homes in the area my girlfriend and I want to live in. Almost every residential area is zoned for multi-family (I have already checked and verified this) it just so happens that most of the homes on the market are SFH. I want to buy a SFH and convert it to a duplex.

Does anyone have experience with this and how can I go about finding a realtor that specialized in these conversions? 

For those who have done a conversion of SFH into duplex how much would you estimate this costs?