Buying is Expensive, Renting is Cheap

[Levi Meyer]

Hello,

I've been looking into rental property investing for years now and I'm excited to get started. Looking to buy cash-flowing rental properties and hold onto them for the long-term.

However, I've run into a problem in the small Wyoming town I live in.

Because the area is so scenic (about an hour for Yellowstone), housing prices are pretty high (average 3 bedroom house is almost 300k) while rent prices are pretty low (about 1000/mo for a 3 bedroom house on average). 

The area seems to have extremely high-paying jobs or service industry paying jobs with not much in between (other than your teachers/nurses/etc). This plus the fact that young professionals like myself don't really move/live/get jobs here and it makes for a tough rental property investing area, at least in my mind. Those who have good jobs usually buy homes — I read a stat that 65% of people in Cody own a home.

Maybe I'm a bit misled by stats, but I don't see — with the exception of the rare screaming deal — how a rental property could cash flow here, especially considering I wouldn't put more than 20% down on a place. The payments, even with good credit, would be too high for cash flow, and that doesn't even include maintenance, vacancy, and the like.

Anyone else live in a place like this? Any good advice on how/if to get started. The new guy appreciates the wisdom.

Levi

[Natalie Kolodij]

Here's the cool thing about investing in Real Estate

You're allowed to do it literally any where in the country. 

No joke, they'll just let you buy super cheap houses other places if you don't have them where you live ;) 

In all seriousness though coming from a high COL area (Seattle) My advice is that you either need to GRIND and make deals- and then you're going to hit 1% rule most likely, not 2%. OR

Look into out of state investing- If you search here on BP there are lots of good articles and even a book on long distance BRRRR.