New Member (reformed lurker) from San Francisco Bay Area, California

[Andrew N.]

Hey Everyone,

I've newly moved to San Francisco, California (from San Jose) and I'm committed to beginning my Real Estate Investing journey. I have been most recently employed as a Business Systems Integration Manager where I streamlined and automated business processes. I am also an active stock investor and High Stakes poker player.

I have been interested in investing in Real Estate since college (I was in the Undergraduate Real Estate Club at UC Berkeley) but always thought the best route to that was just to save up enough money for a down payment on rental property.

After all of the learning and research I've been doing on Bigger Pockets and in Real Estate books however I now realize that while having money is important, having a deal is MORE important. The largest risk factor for novice investors is not buying correctly (ie: 70% of ARV - Repairs). Therefore I've amended how I will begin my RE Investment journey.

Instead of just trying to blindly save money and then hope to purchase something correctly when I have that money, I've decided to create my systems for deal flow right now. I am going to invest my money into creating a DM and PPC marketing campaign whereby I can begin to practice creating lead generation, estimating ARV's, estimating Rehab Costs, and negotiating with motivated sellers. My initial planned exit is to wholesale those deals I create to other investors so that I can validate and refine my ARV and Rehab estimations with another set of experienced eyes.

Once I've established a track record of accurately assessing deals and successfully closing them I hope to partner with an experienced rehabber on a number of deals rather than just wholesaling them to learn that aspect of the business.

My eventual goal is to buy and hold a number of out of state (California) apartment complexes because I believe the numbers for out of state commercial properties can more easily support the 2% and 50% rules respectively.

I am also interested in shifting my SDIRA and solo 401k's into Discounted Note investing as financing actual properties out of these retirement accounts seems to be unattractive due to the terms usually required. (as mentioned in BP Podcast 17 with Jeff Brown)

I'm really excited to join the Bigger Pockets community of Real Estate Investors. I have been a lurker for a while now on the site and decided that after all of the great knowledge I've already picked up it would be a travesty to not give back a little and get a Pro account (before my first post no less =). I've already picked up the great BP books on Flipping and Rehab estimation that J Scott wrote and I'm trying to burn through them as quickly as I can.

One of my RE Investing Education goals is to write at least 1 BP post a day for the next year. Please hold me accountable to this goal!

-Andrew Nguyen

[Andrew N.]

@Mehran K. - Hey Mehran. Thanks for the words of encouragement. I'm hoping my obsession with process improvement will translate well into my REI career. Who knows perhaps some mentors out there would be willing to share their wisdom with me for some productivity or automation consulting =).

Thanks for the book list!

The Bigger Pocket's The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing is great and was one of the first things I read on the site.

I'm also in the middle of the Nickerson's How I Turned $1,000 into Five Million in Real Estate in My Spare Time

Next on my list is definitely J Scott's The Book on Flipping Houses and The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs

The rest of the books on the list look great too and I'm excited to read them as well.