Advice for Rochester Neighborhoods?

[Raymond Liang]

Hello all!

I am a resident of NYC who has been itching to enter this fantastic world of real estate. Having spent my whole life here and as you might already know, owning a NYC property is like a page out from the fairy tales. However, I had been looking at Rochester properties on websites like zillow and find that most of the homes seem to be around my price range (<150k arv). 

Can anyone recommend any B/high C properties that have a higher probability of finding quality tenants around the ~150k ARV range without being in areas that have high crime rates?

I plan to spend a weekend in Rochester NY some time in the early Jan, so want to make sure I am focused on the areas that meet my criteria. 

Thanks so much for any advice you may have!

Ray

[JD DiGiacomandrea]

Hello! Rochester is a great place to invest, but the neighborhoods are something to learn from a local. In general A neighborhoods are easy to list: Park Ave, Upper Monroe, South Wedge, East Ave, University Ave, NOTA, to name a few. The B neighborhoods IMO are 19th Ward, Beechwood, Merchants Culver (B+/A depending). Finding that sweet spot between C and B is a hard game. If I list C neighborhoods in my opinion I'm sure others might disagree. Also it can change street by street, and over time, as there are a lot of up and coming neighborhoods. 

I just bought a duplex I thought was B/C, and it ended up having a shooting right in front of it the day after I closed. Since then it has been a challenge to evict the neighbors, who were drug dealers, and squatters I later found out. Instead of leaving the area after their absentee landlord evicted them (again after they broke back in and lived there with no utilities for the summer), they moved their operation to the abandoned property on the other side of my duplex. They would show up at 9 am everyday and bring a few chairs and just sit there all day until maybe 9 pm dealing drugs to cars coming by. Then they would leave, sleep somewhere, and show up the next day. I was friendly with them, so much so that one day I had a pile of garbage by the curb for pickup, with some metal in it. The local homeless guy walked by and started going through it trying to get the metal out and making a mess, and my drug dealer neighbor grabbed his baseball bat and walked up to the homeless guy and started screaming at him to leave my pile of garbage alone and scared him away. I was standing in the driveway talking to a contractor while all of this was going on. 

So to summarize, there are pros and cons, but make sure you know what you are getting into by using a local property management company, and realtor that knows the neighborhoods. Don't get enticed by the low prices. There are actually a lot of properties in the city that people would say are very over valued right now. Additionally, don't forget to check taxes, as they are pretty steep in upstate NY, and the city is going through a re-assessment right now and bumping up the values on most properties fairly significantly.