SFH or Condo buy and hold investing in DC Maryland or Virginia

[Wayne Brown]

Hello. I currently have one SFH rental property in Southern Maryland but reside in Arlington VA. I am looking forward to expanding and purchasing more properties. I have 13 years experience as a maintenance manager of 350+ unit properties in Arlington and look forward to applying my skills on my own investment properties but I am finding it difficult to locate good rental investments in DC Maryland Virginia area because it's so expensive. Any suggestions of good areas to purchase reasonably priced buy and hold properties in the DMV? I personally care more for cash flowing properties. I would love to locate and house hack a duplex, triplex or four plex on an FHA loan as well but they are hard to come by from what I have found in this particular area. Also, is anyone using condos as investment properties in the area? Any feedback is good feedback. Thanks!

[Andrew Gingerich]

Wayne, we have a couple of condos in WA state. They have been good investments for us but they are a bit dangerous in terms of condo assessments. @Joshua Dorkin covers a lot of this in early podcasts, specifically his California condo frustration back in the day. He'll be the first to point out that it is difficult to control the board and many people find themselves running for board positions to maintain their assets. One example Josh pointed to: his association refused to buy earthquake insurance in Cali. Duh...

In my opinion condos have some advantages that single family's don't. Our condo dues for example keep the board paying attention to us and our tenants when we aren't around. Of course it's nice knowing that the exterior of your unit, the yard, pool etc. is maintained. When we go to sell we can be confident that we don't have to do a bunch of curb appeal work. 

Condo's likely are harder to sell in most markets compared to single families. But the entry cost might be less than say a SF. 

In the end lots of pros and cons with condos. Again, we're pleased with the performance of ours. For us, it's all about the numbers. For example, we can by a SF for 125000 and rent it for 900 or we can by a condo for 90K and rent it for the same amount (900). Also, our maintenance is less because much of it is covered in our condo dues. Finally, condos are often very tax and insurance efficient relative to single families. Both are at least 1/2 the cost of what a SF would cost us. As a whole, you simple have to do the math and analysis to decide whether the assessment risk is worth it. 

Best of luck 

Andrew