Help a newbie settle on LOCATION

[Moshe Oppenheim]

What's up bigger pockets world!

I can't seem to settle on LOCATION.

I'll admit that this might be more of a hand holding guidance kind of question, so I do apologize for any of those on the forum that doesn't appreciate the newbie action 😎😉

As Brandon says (or it seems like something that he would say), it's one foot in front of the other. So at this point I still can't seem to have figured out an ideal location for my first investment (I've figured out a lot of other things up till this point.)

What I HAVE decided is that I want to stay LOCAL; maybe house hack for a year or not but definitely stay within a 2 hour driving range of my current residence.

My "LOCAL" is pretty huge though, hence the problem. I live, and work in Rockland. Investing here is way way out of my budget: a duplex in Suffern is well over $400K easily and most property taxes are about $15k+ a year. It's not investment math at all.. to me. I personally know individuals who have purchased property as investments in multiple locations around this area (Troy, Rockland, Trenton, Newark, etc.) but it still feels like rolling the dice and there are many attributes about those areas that I don't like,

Here's a little bit of what I'm looking for:

-I'm interested in a b-/c+ area where I can find a fourplex that's "local", within 125 miles of where I currently reside.

-I want to AVOID the big cities (NYC, Philadelphia). I'm hoping that I can 'learn' an area for future investments and so I want to get to know more of a smaller urban area nearby. As a new investor I want to avoid the cutthroat competition and this is just my preference. I don't want a small town either, definitely a city of sorts with job diversity and whatnot, but I'd like to steer clear of NYC. 

-I don't want to scale with Single family homes. It's my intention and goal to buy a four unit property, figure it out and then purchase more property with more units. That's my goal and I feel that getting to know a nearby city (albeit "small") will be great to scale up with apartment buildings. Because I want to be able to scale in an area that I've become familiar and researched and since I'm not interested in NYC, it would seem logical to me to look farther away from NYC and possibly in the nearby cities in other states.

-ideally I would want to find a fourplex that's going to have an after repair value of approximately $500,000 (and obviously assume it's a good deal). The reason I say this is because I don't either want to go into a market that's TOO cheap. (Reason being my interest in building equity if I sleep on acquisition activity or whatever.. it just makes sense to me :)) This aspect requires me to stay closer geography to the NYC metro area, or so I THINK.

-or plainly: "a fourplex in a decent neighborhood, that is nearby to a more urban area, but not dependent on the metro NYC area like Newark or similar (tenants don't work in the city), but still within 100 miles of Rockland County"

Based on my criteria I've thought about and considered places like Albany New York or New Haven Connecticut or even Allentown Pennsylvania(far), maybe Newburgh?

All of the biggerpockets books that I've read and much of the information that I've digested so far didn't really help me narrow down a particular area based on where I reside. I can certainly say that I'm most definitely interested in staying local and I feel that there's much potential for that, but there's still too much going on around me that I can't narrow it down.

If you are local to this area where have and would you focus?

If you are long distance to me, where would you start? Would you throw these questions at a real estate agent?

I obviously don't expect that anyone here would be able to say that one area is super awesome, and I should 100% invest there I'm sure there are deals in every area I just simply can't seem to narrow it down and I think that it would be more important to first find a location and then focus on discovering the awesome real estate agents there and making connections. I feel that I need to have my radii figure out before I start hunting for deals.

I can imagine that this might seem like a bunch of brain jargon (it's late, I'm 😴) but I would appreciate anybody's input and would love to hear what you guys think!!