My wife and I are new aspiring rental property investors!

[Joshua White]

Hello everyone!

My wife and I are based in Hinesville, GA, near the Savannah area and we're excited to be joining BP. We've been studying real estate for the past 3 months, and we're eager to connect with fellow investors in the area and learn as much as we can from this community.

Our primary goal is to purchase our first rental property within the next 10 months, and we plan to use a "buy and hold" strategy for single family rentals. We believe that investing in real estate can provide a great opportunity for long-term wealth building, and we're excited to take our first steps in this journey.

We're hoping to make connections and gain insights from experienced investors, and we're also interested in meeting others in the local area who share our passion for real estate.

We look forward to getting to know fellow investors and contributing to this forum in any way we can!

[Jim Pfeifer]

Welcome to BP and Real Estate!

My first question is always, do you want to be passive or active investors?  When I started out, I bought single family properties and hired a property manager and told myself I was investing in passive real estate - it wasn't at all passive.  If you own a property, it is very hard to make that a passive investment.  You will need to manage the asset - that means managing the property manager, collecting rent payments, paying bills and the mortgage and much more.  It is NOT passive.  There is nothing wrong with it being an active investment - but it is critical that you understand that going in.

I ended up buying single and multi family properties and got up over 38 units. The entire time, I told myself I was passive, but I was spending a good portion of my time managing the assets - and a lot of that was trying to manage property managers.  I was fortunate as I was doing this at a time when all real estate seemed to do nothing but go up in value.  None of my properties cash-flowed like I expected, but they all appreciated beyond expectation.  I was lucky - I was a bad asset manager but I made quite a bit of money.

Then I found true passive investing - or as close to it as I have seen in real estate and that is investing in real estate syndications.  You are effectively hiring an asset manager to buy, manage and operate the asset on your behalf.  There are many advantages to this: the sponsor (operator, GP, asset manager) is a professional - this is their day job so they should (if you vet them properly) be much better at finding and managing assets than most new investors; you can diversify in multiple ways - you can invest with different operators, in different markets and different asset class; it is truly passive - you need to vet the operator and analyze the deal, but once the property is purchased you have no role - you just collect reports and (hopefully) cash flow; you don't need a competitive advantage - if you are an active investor, in order to get great returns you have to be able to do something better than your competitors - that could be local market expertise, DIY skills - something to make yourself stand out.

My experience since going fully passive is that my returns are better because I am hiring professional asset managers and my return on time is MUCH better because I am not managing the properties.

If you want to be an active investor - absolutely go for it!  BP is a great place to learn.  But if you are buying properties and you think that you will be a passive investor, I would encourage you to really think that through - because owning an asset and being the main person responsible for that asset is rarely a passive activity!

If you want to be a passive investor, I would strongly recommend you look into real estate syndications.

Good luck!!