Home Purchase Advice

[Vaughn Franklin]

Hey guys! I know the answer may seem lretty obvious but I’m hoping to get your advice anyways.

My wife and I live in Blacksburg Va at Virginia Tech and she’ll be graduating medical school in 2020 when we’ll probably have to leave and go somewhere else for residency.

From the general consensus of some of the real estate agents in town who know the market well, they said that this is a pretty hot market and prices are going up fast, and considering how much VT is growing and Blacksburg growing I can see why. The Zestimate shows a strong upward trend for home prices.

I told my real estate friend I’d like to invest and he said we should hop on it fast since home prices are going up so fast to ride the appreciation which is about 2.7% each year according to Zillow.

There's a really great townhome in an awesome location that's 4B/4bath going for about $230, which if my wife and I were to move into now we could use an FHA and our total would be about $10K. Our agent said within a couple of years that the place will be worth more and we'd automatically get about a 20% cash on cash ROI.

I would only do the move if we were to rent out two of the others and house hack it to cover rents. Rents here are about $450/room so we could potentially rent it out for $900 while we’re here and then when we move about $1800/mo which would maybe break even. 

I guess what I’m asking is would you even do a deal like this because you feel like you’re in a good market and could either rent it out in a year or sell it once it has appreciated? 

Thanks guys!