Buying a home every 2 years, renting the previous home out, and repeating, good idea?

[Daniel Ben-Hur]

My and my soon to be wife both graduated college at the same time and we make a combined $150k/year ($75k each) We are still living at home with our parents to save money, and we want to build wealth in real estate. 

We both have 0 debt. I’ve seen many strategies, but this one that has caught my eye recently. Purchasing the right home every 2 years, then renting it out to someone and purchasing a new home. Repeat for 15ish years to hopefully own a total of 6-7 homes by the end of this. I am projected to make $100k and she is projected to make $150k within the next 5 years, and on from there. Is this doable on our salaries in Bakersfield, or would it be better out of state? 

[JD Martin]

Quote from @Daniel Ben-Hur:

My and my soon to be wife both graduated college at the same time and we make a combined $150k/year ($75k each) We are still living at home with our parents to save money, and we want to build wealth in real estate. 

We both have 0 debt. I’ve seen many strategies, but this one that has caught my eye recently. Purchasing the right home every 2 years, then renting it out to someone and purchasing a new home. Repeat for 15ish years to hopefully own a total of 6-7 homes by the end of this. I am projected to make $100k and she is projected to make $150k within the next 5 years, and on from there. Is this doable on our salaries in Bakersfield, or would it be better out of state? 

 Depends on if you've bought a house that makes an appropriate rental. Generally that's going to mean buying something under market (per sf) because it needs some attention, fixing it up while you're in there, then moving on and doing it again. If you're buying "you", turnkey homes, there's a reasonably good chance they're not very good rentals. A lot of people don't have a whole lot of interest in living in constant fixer-uppers, so you have to have the right mentality for that.

A variation on it, if you want to live in better homes that aren't great rentals, is to, again, buy homes that are under market because they need some work, do the work, live there 2 years then sell for a profit and keep all of your capital gains. Depending on where you are, do this half a dozen times and you could have $500k-$1mil tax free in a decade or so. 

You don't just want to own 6-7 homes. If that's your goal, you want 6-7 homes that make great rentals - low costs of ownership & maintenance, high ROI relative to cash in the property, easy to rent, etc. A lot of people find that the homes they are willing to live in, and the homes they want to rent out, don't necessarily correlate, so you have to alter one side or the other.