Louisville househacker ready to move to BRRRR

[Dana McMahan]

Hi all, this is a (re)introduction. I'm a freelance writer who joined BP a few years ago but never got involved. Now I'm trying to soak up everything I can, since my husband and I are ready to try our hand at BRRRR. Some background:

We live in Louisville, Kentucky, where we're "luxury househacking," a term I picked up on a recent BP podcast: we live in the main house -- first two floors -- of a big 1887 home and Airbnb the third floor guest suite and the carriage house. We've been working on renovations since buying the place in early 2016. The Airbnbs cover our mortgage, and the appraised value is up nearly 400k from when we purchased, and over 300k from our existing mortgage balance. (You can see some before and after photos on a feature on our house at Apartment Therapy).

I *love* renovations and am at risk of overimproving our house if we continue there. I don't want more than two Airbnbs, and am really intrigued by the potential of the BRRRR approach, which brings us to today. We were refinancing to drop our rate from 5.25 to 4, and a friend in real estate clued me in that we could cash out another 109k for around $400 more a month. We can cover that even if we don't get cash flow from a rental (though it wouldn't be ideal) so we're taking the leap.

We close tomorrow and I've been feverishly reading/watching/listening to the fantastic resources on this site. I have a ton to learn but look forward to making the most of all the knowledge available here. We're not 100 percent newbies; we rented a house that we bought and renovated in Detroit, and we rented our carriage house full time before we renovated and made it an Airbnb. But that was mom and pop stuff and we like the idea of buying one to two a year so it's time to treat this like a business.

Right now the biggest hurdle feels like just finding a place that we could be all in for 100k and be at 75% of ARV. Competition to find deals is fierce, and we are definitely rank beginners on this front. We have a great realtor who will definitely let us know if he hears of anything, but I can't hold my breath hoping the magical place will come up and we'll get to it in time. So if I have a question to kick this off, it's what are the best bets for finding and scoring those deals? I know the neighborhoods I'd like to be in, and people are literally cold calling homeowners in some of them trying to buy their houses. I'll continue my homework here on the site but especially if anyone here has Louisville area experience and success I would love to hear from you! Thanks to everyone for sharing your knowledge!