Curious about finding renters

[Rae Edwards]

BP community, I am currently reading through the BP blog and ran across the post titled "60 day newbie action plan". One major point of the article is that you should have funds available in the event that your property is slow to rent out. My curiosity comes in to play when I think about success stories I've heard via podcast of how people were broke but still managed to buy their first property. I'm wondering were they ever in a position to where their property was slow to rent and how did they keep up the payments if so? I myself am hoping to have my first investment be a multifamily unit and I plan on living in one of the units myself. Should I be worried that I may not be able to find renters in the first few months? Thoughts such as these give me cold feet :(

[Andrew Johnson]

@Rae Edwards Make sure you have reserves in place and just as importantly make sure you have a way to vet the renters.  I would argue that the only thing worse that no renters are horrible tenants.  If you get a little pressed for time you can do engage options like waving a security deposit, allowing pets, use a month-to-month lease, etc. in an effort to get what you believe to be a quality tenant.

As for Podcasts about people who were broke managing to buy their first property you'll usually hear about the success stories and rarely the failures (if your first effort bankrupted then you couldn't stay investing in real estate - let alone make a Podcast!).  There are plenty of people that went upside down after the 2006-2008 crash and had their properties foreclosed on and credit crushed for 7 years.  The mortgage world was different back then with much less aggressive checks-and-balances.

Not that you and tons of others won't be successful but beware of "survivorship bias" when reading or listening to success stories. 

Side note:  Taking the time an diligence to even ask yourself "what if" means you're on the right path!