Mistakes you made when you bought your first investment property?

[Samuel Yoon]

I'm a young investor-- 25 years old and I'm looking for advice/horror stories related to buying your first house. I feel like there's a lot of confirmation bias out there from people who have done well for themselves, but I also think there are people with valuable experience that aren't speaking up because those stories are less sexy. Would love to hear some of those and learn as much as possible from them before buying my first investment property.

[Ben Zimmerman]

Never trust anyone who has a financial interest in selling you something.  As others have mentioned agents advice should be taken with a grain of salt.  Take note of what they say, but never blindly accept it at face value and always verify for yourself.  

As far as mistakes go, one of the hardest things for me was to look at houses objectively.  As a new investor I always looked at houses and thought to myself, "I wouldn't want to live here".  The problem is we start to have standards in life, we want the open concept, walk in closets, granite countertops etc.  So anything less than that seems unacceptable.  But the reality is that many of these very same "unacceptable" houses make the best rentals.  A house doesn't have to be super nice, it just needs to be sturdy, clean, and functional.  Don't analyze properties based on your wants/desires and emotions, instead look at properties objectively from a cost analysis that includes rehab, versus the expected rent for the property.  

The other thing is that some things are easy fixes.  Replacing carpet or installing laminate and repainting a house is relatively cheap and can make the world of difference for some ugly houses and increase the amount of rent you can get.  Other items like an aging HVAC unit, foundation issues, or roof can be extremely expensive and won't change your rent rates at all.  Look for ugly houses that you can fix up for relatively cheap as opposed to a nicer house with aging bones that is going to be very costly to replace.