looking to create passive income with real estate

[Tim LaRiviere]

Hey everyone,

I'd like to start out by saying that I am new at this whole real estate investing thing and hope I can get some advice on some things.  There is sooooooo many articles that I have read, and it gets to be really overwhelming.  

1st).......Turnkey real estate. I've been all over the place on the web looking at the most popular turnkey rental investment places such as Morris invest, Memphis invest, etc.........only reason being I'm looking at this area is because I'm not sure if I'm gonna invest in my area.  I live in upstate New York, just outside of Syracuse and I'm just not sure about the market here for investing in real estate. Taxes here are awful !! 

2nd).......Roofstock.  I've been looking into that.  Any thoughts? I've read some good articles on them and also negative articles.

3rd).......Crowdfunding......Fundrise come to mind......Anyone one have thoughts on that?

Pretty much, I am looking for passive income so I can replace my current work salary........Just not sure if I want to do more of an investing thing with rental properties or maybe do crowdfunding investments.......I guess I could always do both :-) 

Any help is so appreciated !!

[Ian Ippolito]

@Tim LaRiviere, I invest in crowdfunding as part of my real estate portfolio, and before doing that I did an in-depth review of the top 100 sites (which I update every year). 

1) Roofstock: on the plus side they are backed with significant funding, so hopefully will be around for a while. And they have a growing inventory of homes available. On the downside, when I looked at the properties they had for sale in my home town of Tampa which I know very well, the yields were not very good compared to what I could get buying on my own. Also, one investor complained that the home he bought had unexpected problems that were not revealed by the inspection, that were expensive to fix. Personally, if I were going to buy a property on Roofstock, I would also take the time to visit it in person.

2) other crowdfunding sites: I'm guessing you are nonaccredited ... is that right? If so, Fundrise does have several nonaccredited investment offerings that might fit into your portfolio. They also have one of the lowest minimums at just $500. And they are set up with for bankruptcy protection if the company should go broke.  

On the minus side, some of their funds are very aggressive (meaning higher risk). And in my opinion they don't properly communicate the relative risk of their different funds to investors, and simply automatically place them into things without fully explaining.

In my opinion, if I were to invest in just one fund, it would not be Fundrise. I believe they are a good third or fourth choice to round out a portfolio, after filling more core/conservative positions with Blackstone BREIT, StREITWise. And RealtyMogul is another one to check out that should perform a similar role in a portfolio, in my opinion. After those, there's Impact Housing Reit, Medalist and several others.