Remote investing for buy-and-hold strategy

[Niranjan P Ghate]

I am located in California (San Jose area) and my local market is too expensive for real estate investing. I am looking at investing with a buy-and-hold strategy. Since I am no longer limiting myself to local deals, I would like to quickly filter out deals that don't make sense compared to options I may have elsewhere. I was thinking that some rules of thumb may help me with this and give me objective criteria for comparison across states. Something like "ignore deals that have less than "N%" for Cap Rate, or COC, or Return on Equity or ROI or IRR".

1. Does this make sense or should I be approaching this differently?

2. I don't know what threshold value I should use for each of these metrics. Would this be a single set of numbers across all the states or would these numbers have to be specific to any city/state?

3. Am I making things more difficult for myself by thinking of investing anywhere (I still don't have my first property) or should I pick a handful of cities/states to focus on? maybe cities that better support a buy-and-hold strategy? Market picker on bigger pockets has a number of recommendations...

4. For my first property I was thinking of going with a turnkey provider like REI Nation and hopefully learn as I go. The thinking is that a turnkey provider might prevent me from making blunders.

Any suggestions and advice would be highly appreciated!

- Niranjan 

[Niranjan P Ghate]

@Jared Smith, I am moving through my first deal with REI Nation. Learning a lot already along the way! I am looking forward to solidifying some of my opinions and having more confidence in my strategy.