College Student Looking to get started out of market

[Samier Mahagna]

Hello, I am a brand new REI and am excited to get started.

I am a young guy still in college. I am studying to become a Software Engineer (and hopefully someday design software for REIs). I have secured a few internships and have saved about 25,000. Additionally I have a job lined up that will pay 105,000 per year as soon as I graduate.

I'm looking to get started investing but I am nervous to begin out of market. I feel like out of market is my only option for a rental property due to the high price of most California properties. I'm not sure how to find locations other than poking around on Redfin. I hope to set this up so that I can continue my investing by house hacking when I move to my new job location upon graduation and begin building my portfolio.

If anyone could provide advice for finding good property managers that are far away from me and locations as well. I originally planned to join meetup groups and get recommendations from those, but that doesn't seem possible when trying to find something out of market.

[Lee Ripma]

I think that Set for Life is an awesome read for those just starting out and wanting to build up cash to invest in RE. Where is your new job? You may be able to get into something there-there are a lot of owner occupant loans with very favorable terms and they are not just limited to FHA. I started with out of state but I wish that when I was younger I had scraped together the cash to get started in CA. I didn't understand RE at the time so I never did. You can learn a TON investing in your local market and then take the knowledge when you go out of state.