New Twin Cities Investor Looking for Advice Getting Started

[Bob Avery]

Hey folks!

I've been lurking on BP for about a month, so I have a rough idea of the regular newbie steps which I will try to address below. I'll greatly appreciate feedback on any subset of my questions. Thanks!

First and foremost, I'm in Minneapolis / Saint Paul, so I'd like to know if you have any suggestions for 1) what investor meetups I should attend, and 2) recommendations for building my team (CPA, real estate lawyer, handyman / contractor, insurance broker, and agent (I have one but they don't seem to have much investing experience)). Also, if any investors in the area want to chat I'd love to hear about your experience.

Second I've read the BP intro doc (forget the name, was recommended in another post) as well as The Book on Rental Property Investing. I appreciate Brandon's advice on posting etiquette. Speaking of which... BRANDON, I decree that you are my mentor! Please reach out to me to schedule a trip to Saint Paul at your expense and my convenience. Thank you.

From what I've learned so far (aside from posting etiquette) I realize I need to have a clear plan, which so far consists of:
- My Goal: to have $10k/months of income to replace my day job. Once I hit that goal I'll take stock of how much I like scaling real estate vs. how much I dislike my job, and make a call on retiring vs continuing to scale.

- My Strategy: I'd like to buy and hold residential rental properties. I'm not 100% committed either way between the income benefits of multifamily vs. the reduced headaches of SFH tenants. I don't have the skill set YET to gauge rehab costs and try to BRRRR, but I'd like to learn.

- My Resources / Constraints: I'm in a by no means unique, but perhaps less common situation for those getting started; I'm a somewhat senior software engineer at a tech megacorp and should be able to save a couple of down payments per year for lower priced houses (100-200 in my area), or perhaps one medium priced house (300-500). House hacking is out of the question, I have two young children and a wife who will truly think I have lost my mind if I suggest we move and / or rent out a portion of our house. Aside from the financial resources, I suppose one skill is I write algorithms to distill signal from bulk data for a living, so if there are any other programmers out there please reach out! I'm sure you've all been down the same road that I'm starting on right now ("how do I scrape my county's property tax and crime data?" "What do you mean I can't get API access to the MLS?!") and maybe you can tell me how it ends.

Where am I now in my journey? Well, I'm in the process of purchasing my first rental house. It's not going to be the best investment, but it probably won't be that bad either (with the leverage of the mortgage it will probably outperform my stock index funds). It's actually to rent to a section 8 family which is *very* important to my wife and is facing housing insecurity right now. No, wait, stop! Please don't rabbit hole on this comment and ignore the rest of the post. I know, there are plenty of red flags there, but I do believe it is worth the risk when I consider how happy it makes my wife, how life-changing it will be for the family, how minor the financial impact will be on me, and how it gives me the opportunity to practice the steps of real estate investing with forgiving tenants.

Finally, I am going to attempt to self manage as nothing comes close to cash-flowing if you include PM costs. I've looked at PM software and it seems AppFolio is the clear favorite, but it requires a minimum of 50 units to sign up. I figure stability of the platform is important and so it seems like Buildium is the runner up, but if anyone has strong opinions here I'd love to hear them.

If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I'm excited to learn from this community.

-Bob