My financial picture & where to get started?

[Kenneth Anderson]

Hi,

My wife and I are in our mid 30s and have been interested in real estate for a long time. I've been lurking on here for a few years and been following the market pretty closely as well. We're at kind of an impasse and don't know where we should or could get started in real estate investing. We have approximately $330k in cash/non-retirement investments, and approximately $150k of equity in our current house we live in. We've been pretty lucky financially. I feel like there's a few different options to explore in real estate but not 100% sure where to start. If you were in our situation, what would you do? Any other suggestions?  Thanks!

[Carey L Rouse]

With that kind of starting cash, you have some choices.  Do you want to be more conservative and just pull in a reasonable cash flow each month or maybe you want to be a bit more aggressive and build equity quickly and your not so concerned about the monthly cash flow at this time?  Or like most people, maybe you want a bit of both.  If I was in your position at your age, I would want to build even more equity now and consider cash flows deals later.  Either way, both of the strategies can be done via multi-family deals.  And deeper "value add" deals are the ones you want to be a part of...maybe as a passive investor first.  Find a deal sponsor with a track record of turning around deep value play apartment deals.  And you can find that out by networking, meeting other sponsors and especially talking to the passive investors on those other deals.  And I agree, San Antonio is a much better market than Austin.  But I think there are other great examples of places throughout Texas and beyond.