Renting an apartment, should I wait to invest?

[Bijan Gavahi]

So I want to get into rental property investing and I really want to get into house hacking so I can understand the business of it. The problem is that I currently rent my apartment and the lease is not up until May 2021. 

Should I wait until my lease is almost up or should I try to find something now and try to sublet my apartment? I have never sublet my apartment before and technically my apartment complex does not allow it...I would have to claim the person is my new roommate.

If I waited, I can probably save up money and get a little bit better property, but if a great deal comes by, I dont want to miss it.

[Taylor L.]

Personally, I wish I'd broken a lease to buy a property and not let that hold me back. However, I never had a lease that would have been terribly onerous or expensive to break. 

I agree with @Ryan Ingram that real estate is a small world and reputation is everything. But, any landlord I ever had would have been happy I was making the move to invest, or they were a large corporation for whom my lease is just numbers on a page. No reputation risk as long as you do it right. As long as you've paid the rent on time and don't leave the place a mess, it's not a big deal. "Bad tenant" is a pretty low bar, following the agreed upon procedure to break a lease early isn't that big of a problem.

Be aware of the facts of your situation and don't sit on the sideline just because of a lease. Who knows, you might come across a deal that works as a pure investment property, or you might find a deal so good it's worth breaking the lease. If you find a deal that'll make you $100k over the next 10 years, why let a couple thousand in the cost to break a lease hold you back?