New Member from the East Bay, CA

[Greg Johns]

Hello Everybody!

My name is Greg and I'm new to the Bigger Pockets community.  I live in Berkeley, CA and after a long hiatus from real estate investing, my wife and I are ready to test the waters again.  

I started investing in real estate about 15 years ago in Jersey City, NJ after reading RDPD.  Back then, we focused on multi-family rentals that needed some rehab.  At that time, downtown Jersey City was still considered "sketchy" and "questionable".  We got a taste of long distance investing by buying a couple of rental properties in Lancaster, PA.  After a few years, we decided to cash out and buy a hospitality-related business in the Northern CA Wine Country.  Things went well for us the first few years, but the severity of the Great Recession (and explosion of the housing bubble) proved to great.  We closed the business and were literally sent back to square one.

After 5 long years of rebuilding ourselves, we are finally at a point where we feel we can begin to get back into real estate investing, as we both still believe that investing in real estate is our ticket to early retirement from the rat race and have a nest egg large enough to outlast us by many years.

This time around, we plan to focus purely on buy-and-hold rental properties (long-term and vacation rentals).  The days of chasing appreciation are over for us.  Because of the outrageous housing prices in the Bay area, we realize that we'll likely have to be long-distance investors.  We've identified a number of markets to research and look forward to jumping into the pool again. We know our biggest hurdle will be financing our investments, but for a number of reasons, we feel that now is the time.

I am a financial analyst by trade and work for a non-profit in SF.  As such, I probably spend way too much time "running the numbers", but I am who I am, lol.

I was excited to find this community of investors and look forward to getting to know you and exchanging knowledge!

Cheers!

Greg