Hello from Olympia, WA

[Jeremy McIntosh]

Hi everybody.  Figured it was time to stop lurking and engage!  I'm a somewhat new investor with two single home properties that I rent and looking to get into multi family units in my area.  I'm a father of two little girls, which is the reason for my investing, I want to leave them something.  My wife and I are very interested to do investing as a side project to supplement our incomes.  I am a full time elementary teacher and she works in finance.  Anyway, I do have a few questions that I could use some help with if you have time.

1. My area is pretty hot for real estate right now (as is a lot of the country) and I'm having a hard time finding a property that meets the 2% rule, actually finding one that fits the criteria for 1% has proved difficult. How much do you guys rely on the 2% rule when analyzing a property for investment as a rental unit? After running numbers on the properties, some seem pretty reasonable for ROI but still don't meet the 2% rule.

2.  Do you have a general rule on how far from your area to invest in a property?  I am really interested in a 4-plex that is about 30 minutes away in a smaller town, which makes the property cheaper and a lot more appealing but I'm not sure if that's too far.  Our other two properties are in town so it makes it easy to check on them or run over for any maintenance quickly.

3.  Which brings me to my last question, property management.  I'm thinking of hiring a property management company to at least manage our next property we acquire.  Would you advise lumping all of our properties for the property management company to manage?  We've been doing fine with our other two properties that last few years on our own but I worry about the time and headache of a bigger unit.  Do people pick and choose which properties to professionally manage?  

(4).  This one is a more of a specific question to my area.  Does anyone from the Olympia area have any recommendations for a reliable property management company?

Thanks everyone and I can't wait to get involved in this amazing community.

Jeremy