Newbie in the Boston area

[Sarah McCoy]

Hi! My name is Sarah, I'm currently not an investor, however I have big plans for my future. I have been planning on getting my real estate license in the fall, and I have been lurking on BP for a while now. My dream is to do fix and flips and own a couple multi families outright. My husband and I want to team up and do this together. Here's our deal: We are currently trying to sell our home that we have lived in for the past 6 years. It has been on the market for 5 weeks, we did accept an offer at one point, but they rescinded they're offer due to the home inspection. We bought the house as a short sale in 2009, for $230,000. We did the whole house over room by room while living in it and starting a family. We have it listed for $319,000, but we are most likely going to be dropping that price to $310,000 this week due to lack of activity lately. We figure we will have around $50,000 in pocket after we sell and pay off debts. We are trying to figure out what to do to get started in investing. $50,000 is what we will have, but we also need a place to live. My idea is to rent, and use the $50,000 to try to get an investment property in the works. I would love some input/advice from anyone who has done this before. Thanks! Sarah and Dave

[Shaun Reilly]

Hi Sarah, welcome to BP.

This is a great place to learn. Make sure to listen to all the BP podcasts, read the articles on the main blog and be active in these forums to learn a ton very quickly about any topic in real estate you want to know more about.

This is also a great place to meet people that can be assets to your business. Lots of great connections all over but we also have a very strong and active contingent here in MA on here so make sure to find them (Set up some keyword alerts to find out about local topics) and get connected.

Besides doing that on here make sure to get out to some of the many local investor events we have.  Best one for you to check out is the NEREIA in Chelmsford, it happens to be this Wednesday.  Other stuff in the area are the NH RE Mastermind in Nashua, Mike has a few meetings on the North Shore and The Boston Investor's quarterly meetup in Reading.  Going a little more towards Boston you can check out the Boston AREIA in Medford and I'd recommend the Black Diamond meeting in Waltham.

As for your house issue.  Russel is right that $9K wouldn't be the deciding factor for people at this price point and that your listing is stale.  That being said I WOULD make your price drop to $309,900 (Stupid human psychology makes that look much better than $100 more...) but only because all the agents with clients in the area will get a notification of the price change and it will freshen it up a little.  If things stay slow you probably will need to go to $299,900 which is where you hopefully would pick up a new group of buyers.