Beginner looking for advice

[Jerome Boudreaux]

Morning, 

I am JB from Lafayette Louisiana (about 50 minutes from Baton Rouge). I am brand new to real estate investing and still trying to learn as much as possible. This post is to seek advice on where to begin, I currently do not own a home or any property. I found someone in my area with a decent amount of experience in real estate who advised me to first purchase a single family home of my own (starter home) then proceed to use that as my first rent house in a few years time. My original idea was to "house hack" and buy a duplex to live in one unit which he advised against. I guess my question is, how do you determine which starting plan is best for you or which type of purchase is best for you? (single family, duplex, etc...)

[Rich Hupper]

To start you need money, Your money or someone elses. You also need the deal. If you are not finding good deals money wont find you.

If you earn a decent wage and are credit worthy you can start investing by house hacking a multi family with a low down payment mortgage.

If you have no money or credit your best best is start finding deals and bringing them to other investors who have money. You could whole sale these deals or you could broker them if you have a broker license. Or you could attempt to get on title with the investor as a partner in the deal. However if you are bringing no equity to the deal they might scoff at the idea.

The other thing you could do is find someone who trusts you who has money and wants to lend it. ( Private Money ). Find deals and use the private money to purchase  and flip them. If you do a good job and make the private lender happy they will want to do this again.

Then there's seller financing which you see a lot with businesses, and commercial property. Residential usually the sellers are not savvy enough to go this route and usually just want their check at closing.

In the end it all boils down to finding the deals.... thats not easy. Sometimes you need to follow up with a decision maker for years before they are ready to sell.

Are you okay cold calling people? You need to be. You need to be able to talk with strangers over the phone or in person to build rapport. 

Finding deals can be done numerous ways but I suggest you just start reading bigger pockets for a few months to start. Don't do anything but read bigger pockets. Then you can buy a few books if you want but most of the information is here.

There are thousands of people here who have shared libraries worth of information for free.

You can get a phd in real estate right here if you read all the forums.