Newbie from Jacksonville, FL - what a great community

[Dana Chen]

I just spent the last 4 hours reading through some posts on this forum and what a great community of people!  It is truly the total package with amazing questions, advice, commodore and experience. 

As for my intro, I've worked for a mortgage lender for the last 5 years.  Did pretty well for myself and while working for the company had the opportunity to live in Jacksonville, FL, Rochester, NY and Ft Worth, TX.  I am back in Jacksonville, FL now and after putting 20 offers on different houses finally got a good deal on one.  We are expecting to close at the end of the month.  

Now that my personal living situation is almost settled comes the questions about the future of my "professional career".  Here's what I have come up with so far

Any advice would be greatly appreciated 

1.  Start another mortgage company - as this is the industry that I am very familiar with and good at.  The problem here however is that with all the regulations, compliance costs and caps - it isn't nearly as profitable as it was a couple years ago.  The risk of being liable for buybacks, paying for audits and so on just isn't worth the reward of a couple thousand dollars on each transaction.  

2.  Start a property management company - don't know the first thing about managing properties but I feel like with the tougher lending guidelines, more investors buying homes again that rentals are the way to go.  I don't have the capital currently to buy my own rental properties so I would simply just be marketing and getting people to allow me to manage theirs. 

3.  Buy a house (under 100k) and flip it for at least a 15k profit.  Continue doing this until I build up enough money to buy and hold properties.  

Thank you guys for reading.  I am very excited to become a part of this community.  

[Dana Chen]

Jesse O. I would actually be partnering up with someone who already has their broker license which would make it significantly cheaper to get into property management. Would love to work together on a fix and flip if we get the opportunity to!

Dave Savage I appreciate the breakdown and I completely agree. Being able to get to 200 rentals in a very short amount of time (6-10 months) would make it so the PM side of the business could fund other real estate investments but instead of only collecting 10% on each property (only about 5% after expenses) it would definitely be much more worth it to wholesale/flip houses until I get to a point where I can have 200 units that are strictly my own. Looking forward to learning much more from this site!

Thanks Paul Timmins, Jerry Padilla and Tim E. for the advice! Appreciate it tremendously.