Building a Duplex or Quadplex to House Hack

[Alfred Derrick]

Hi all,

I'm new to the BP community and really excited about to prospect of starting a real estate portfolio. I am considering the purchase of a duplex to house hack my way to a decent-sized portfolio of multi-family units. The purchase would my first ever home purchase and I was thinking that the house hacking strategy with a duplex would be a great way to get into real estate investing while getting my mortgage covered by someone else. My problem is that there are not a lot of duplexes in Gainesville, GA which is the area that I want to live in. So, I was thinking that using an FHA loan to buy land and build a duplex on it would be a great way to achieve my goal. Are there any possible downfalls in doing this? Or, should I just look for duplexes that are already built?