New investor questions

[Nicole Assali]

Hey everyone,

New investor here, i'm looking to purchase my first rental property and my main issues are :

1-Like most places the market i'm in is very hot now, the numbers are not adding up very well and there's no way in hell to find something that will make 10+% cash on cash.

2-The only "cheaper" better performing stuff will not be the beautiful brick and mortar, 4 or 6 plex, you know the one that was built for that purpose. Instead it will be a house transformed into a triplex, a large duplex transformed into a quad. Long story short these properties don't have the best curb appeal. You don't look at them and say wow i'm proud of owning that or i can brag about it , not even i would be shy almost to tell people i own that. But it makes money. I'm talking about the house transformed into 4 x 1 bedroom appartements, with weird separate entrances but all legal.

So my questions are, for those of you who are experienced, which property is better long term ? The nice normal quadruplex at a higher price, it breaks even but no real cashflow, vs the house converted into a quadruplex ?

Have you started with these similar cheaper properties and as you grew realized you should have bought the nice looking purposely built quadruplex instead?

Am i better to look for 2 bedroom appartements or 1 bedrooms are ok ? People are telling me the 1 bedrooms attract a different kind of clientele, they are unstable tenants long term ?

I am finding properties for sale today for 399k but were purchased for 140k in 2003. I don't know about you but it feels terribly wrong to be paying that much more in such a short amount of time.

It feels as if i just missed the golden days of real estate investing. Is this just a feeling all investors go through? I mean in 2003 when everything was cheap were people also thinking oh my god it's so expensive we just missed the golden days? was there actually a time where people said hey this is dirt cheap i want to buy as much as possible? it feels like we're never going to get that same opportunity...

Thank you in advance!