New investor intro & Meet up events in Bay Area, CA
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
I'm not sure I share your thoughts about Utah being a more "cash flow friendly, affordable market". It certainly is more than SF Bay Area, but is not anywhere near the 1% model.
The last property I purchased was in Nov 2021 and my model, which is very conservative, showed about a 1% CoC with 75% LTV on a 30 year fixed at 2.75%. It is doing much better and has a DSCR ratio of 1.2 now, but if I were to buy it at today's interest rates it would be a seriously negative carry.
I'm looking to buy a single-family Subject To with a partner at 500k with a 2.75% underlying loan on almost $400k and it will be just slightly negative at about $-200 a month, but debt paydown is almost $1k a month and I'm sure in a few years the appreciation and rent growth will make it be more than break even. I've got a long-term horizon with all my properties and can easily cover the negative carry for many years, if needed.
Better cash flow markets, IMHO are more mid-west markets.
@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!
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Enrolled Agent
- Grand Slam Business Solutions
@Jana Cain thank you for the lists! i found some groups on Meetup and signed a few events! Perhaps will see you soon from one of them!
Hi @Doug Quist thank you, the breakdown is so helpful to see! As I looked into it more and as many have suggested mid-west markets, I've now zoomed in my focus towards Alabama and Indiana. I am still very interested in Utah in general, but this may need to be step 3 or 4 after I build up some reserve from smaller projects. Thank you! In the meantime if you have a good team in SLC area you'd recommend please kindly drop me a line!
@Shawn W., sorry for the slow reply. I'm also looking at properties in Alabama and Indiana, but haven't pulled the trigger yet due to personal complications. I do have a great property management team at MAXX PM (maxxpm.com) and I've been working with a couple realtors with the Evans Team (https://www.seeutahhomes.com/evansteam), but I don't think they are on BP.