Cash Flow vs. Equity

[Charles Masten]

Hello BiggerPockets family!

My partner and I are beginning our real estate investing journey! We've been listening to endless podcasts, reading a lot of the BP books, and perusing the BP forums and blogs as much as we can to make the best decisions and educate ourselves the best we can. First and foremost, I want to thank each and every one of you for welcoming us into this community; it is truly amazing to see everybody supporting and lifting each other up we feel so lucky to be apart of it.

My question today is about cash flow vs building up equity to open more doors. We plan on using the Buy and Hold strategy for multi family properties and are looking to invest OOS (we live in San Diego and not sure we can afford to break into this market quite yet as beginners). Big picture - we want to build our portfolio sooner rather than later and I am just wondering what would help us achieve that goal of adding more doors quicker, focusing on cash flow or focusing on building our equity? We are lucky enough that we are not in need of big cash flow, although it would obviously be nice. We have identified several markets we believe look very promising based on the 6 areas we learned about from a BP blog post (job creation, population growth, buildings coming to market, government planning, affordability, and absorption/vacancy rates) and are looking to purchase our first property within 90 days. Or maybe we are being to nitpicky and getting into our first property is more important than looking at these aspects and learning by doing haha.

Thank you so much in advance for taking the time to help us out and we look forward to being apart of this great community!