Starting out

[Aquiles Veras]

hello my name is Aquiles and I am new to real estate investing. I really need some help and opinions. I was thinking of buying a multi-family house in New Jersey and live in it and rent the other units but my fiancé wants us to move to Florida buy a home for us there and then save money again to then come to New Jersey to buy properties. My problem is that I want to buy my first property in New Jersey to use the fha loan with 3.5 down, now the reason my fiancé doesn't want to agree with me is because most good deals for investment properties in New Jersey are in bad cities or towns . What should I do ? Move to Florida and save again to then come back and buy? I don't like florida's real estate market 

[Mark Elliott]

personally, i like the real estate market in florida. like any other state, there are good an bad areas in florida, i am sure, so you would have to scope out the areas you would like to invest in and see what they hold for you. take a vacation to an area that you would like to invest in and drive around a bit. if it looks like a bad area, mark it off your map. if it looks good to you, do some research on the area. look for vacant houses. talk to the locals, etc. then, make your move. i would not invest in an area that i am not close to. keep it local. if you get a new job in the same field that you are in now, FHA will consider it the same as if you stayed in your current job because it is a related field. the big plus, the weather. here in western new york, we get about 4 months of the year where you can do decent outside work on a house, then you have to fight the weather for the rest of the year just to get a place finished. and lets face it, you will be rehabbing a house, so why not go to an area where you can work on it nearly year round? if my wife wasn't so dedicated to this area, i would have headed south a long time ago myself. good luck to you.