Living in garage and renting home as first investment

[Kamaria Peters]

I live in the city of Austin Texas where the market is starting to get very expensive to buy a home. I am a first time home buyer and want to take advantage of the lower down payment to purchase my first property for investment. I’ve been looking into duplexes that are in the 250k-300k range, but most of them are in poor condition and are in tougher parts of town. Not really sure if I’d be comfortable living there and may cost way too much to renovate to raise rent. There was an opportunity for a single family home in brand new development in my price range, so I considered renovating the garage into a studio apartment and living inside there and renting the whole house out. Problem I think I may run into is finding someone willing to rent a house with their landlord living in the garage space. Any advice on how I can go about my first rental property investment in Austin as a first time home buyer?