New to RIE, Starting to Get Educated

[Patrick Young]

Hey all,

Long post below and I apologize in advance haha.

I recently became interested it real estate investing and found bigger pockets shortly after. After graduating from college in May of 2015, I spent the first year or so focusing on personal finance (budgeting, saving, creating a plan, etc.). I have a good hold on that now and my next step is to put my current and future savings to work. Real estate is attractive to me because it is more hands on than just sticking my money in a mutual fund and watching it grow. After a year of watching stocks everyday, I already know that I hate the lack of control over what happens. It seems to be an area where you can grow as a result of hard work and proficiency. I like my current job and career track, so I see this as more of an investment opportunity to provide future wealth and comfort and potentially leading to an early retirement as opposed to quitting my job and going full time.

I'm looking to get into buy and hold and acquire my first property in the next 3-12 months. I want to continue my education on the topic before I jump into it. Right now I live in Knightdale, NC, right outside of Raleigh. Based on some initial analysis, I'm looking at Greensboro and especially Fayetteville as two markets that meet my criteria. The prices are lower which would allow me to start soon and there is a solid variety of SFR in my range (40-75k or so). If anyone has any experience in either of these areas or the RDU area in general, I'd love to discuss it and hear about what you've seen. My career track and company likely has me headed towards Charlotte, so that is another area that I'm interested in.

I do have a few questions that came from starting to run analysis on some places using mainly Zillow but also Trulia and Realtor.com that I wanted to get your thoughts on.

1) When houses are listed on Zillow as foreclosure rather than "For Sale", what exactly does that mean? I mean I understand what foreclosures are, but they consistently are way lower than the "Zestimate". Would I really be able to purchase these at that price, or are they likely to end up maybe between the amount foreclosed and the Zestimate?Do people submit bids between those two and hope they get accepted?

2) I see a bunch of properties that listed as for auction. Clearly the starting price for the auction is significantly lower than the value of the property. Is it worth my time to look into these and potentially work to go to the auction? It honestly seems like a mess/a lot of time invested when I could be researching properties that I actually have a shot at instead.

3) How accurate are the Zestimates that I'm seeing? I have a feeling that they are off and I'm sure that I will get a much more accurate number running comps and working with a real estate agent. Just starting off, it's difficult to get past when I initially pull up a property and the list price is 20-30k below the Zestimate because that looks so juicy.

4) What are everyone's thoughts on creating an LLC for your "company". Is this something everyone does, only a few people do, somewhere in between? What I've read so far makes it seem quite attractive.

Thanks for making it this far and I'm excited to join the community!