New in Columbus

[Chip Carter]

Hello All,

    My name is Chip and I am looking to find an investment property in Westerville or Dublin.  I am a working class guy--currently working in medical sales.  I live in my hometown north of Youngstown, but I travel all over Ohio on a weekly basis.   

    My only RE experience so far was unfortunately a bad one.  Long story short I speculated on a house in Phoenix that ended up underwater and I had to short sell.  That has led me to the more interesting concept of cash flow investing.  

    Based on my previous experiences, I thought the idea of cash flow investing would be a very frustrating one.  If I had wanted to rent my house in Phoenix with property management, it would have been a monthly loss (hence the short sale).  I am really intrigued by the mathematics BP-type investors are using to calculate cashflow.  If working in corporate America these past years has taught me one thing it is that a 'job' is anything but stable.  

I have been reading some of the recent articles about using an FHA loan and that seems like it might be a good way for me to get in the game (but smart this time). I like the idea of a 'house hack' duplex/triplex/quadplex...stay there for a year, then acquire a new property. I am most interested in the Dublin and Westerville areas because they seem to be developing, but I am hoping to begin building a network and hearing the opinions of others. On the downside though, I am not sure those areas are really duplex/triplex friendly...I haven't really seen any listed and I'm not sure you will get the tenants for them up there.

    Hopefully I will be able to get to the Columbus meetup at the end of April (@brianhayes I think it was?).  I am definitely interested in hearing from others about cashflow investing and the north columbus markets.  So far I have just been looking on realtor.com etc. and I haven't seen anything that really matches up with the math for cash flow investing.  I am hoping to hear others experiences about actually acquiring cash flow properties. 

    Anyhow, thanks for reading and hopefully I get to meet some of you soon!