New investor intro & Meet up events in Bay Area, CA

[Shawn W.]

Hi Bigger Pockets community!

New investor here in San Francisco Bay Area, looking for local meet ups and getting connected with like-minded communities!

A little bit about myself:

Day-time, I do project management for corporate real estate clients, and a registered architect. I'm so inspired to get into 'night-time' residential RE investment. Although I understand that corporate real estate is so different from residential, I hope that some knowledge and skills are transferable and I can turbo charge and learn fast!

I have a few ideas/tools in mind to get into my first deal, although I don't have to execute all of them if they don't make sense financially:

1. Looking into house hack strategy with my husband's VA loan. Location-wise we work between San Bruno - Alameda, many locations could work for us commute-wise. However, the hard part is the expensive bay area entry price - even with the VA loan, it's still difficult to find places that makes sense for both while we house hack and when it's turned into investment property if we move. So we are still researching.

2. Out of state investment in a more cash flow friendly, affordable market. (eg. Alabama, Utah)  Hopefully this is a strategy to get my feet wet with relatively small capital investment.

3. Also looking into the possibility of providing private lending. With today's interest rate, this may be a viable option, compared to buying physical RE.

Thank you for bearing with me for laying out my thoughts here. I know it may sound like I'm spreading butter thin everywhere, but I'm learning my way into narrowing down the options, or strategizing/timing them in the right sequence.

Anyways, I'd love to connect and learn with / from the community. If there are local RE meetup events in the Bay Area please kindly drop a line!

Happy investing, 

Shawn

[Jana Cain]

@Shawn W., welcome to the forums! 

Re: local meetups, if you haven't already, I recommend going on the Meetup website to find events - there are quite a few all over the bay area. Several that I know meet regularly are those hosted by Bobby Sharma (usually meets on the peninsula if not virtually), Neal Bawa (mostly virtual these days), Lori Greymont (SJREI in San Jose) and Bay Area Wealth Builders (they meet in the north bay). There are plenty more that I'm less familiar with. Meetup is great for finding others!