New Member from Washington!

[Kaitlyn Romberg]

Hi there! My husband and I recently moved to Everett, WA from Southern California and are eager to get started with real estate investment! He has been talking about it for years and I'm finally starting to wrap my head around the fact that we're about ready to take the plunge and look for our first deal. 

We are currently saving up and are looking to get something going within the next 6-8 months. We like the idea of either a long-term (2-2.5 years) flip or buying a duplex and renting our the other unit while living there. We are also open to the idea of out-of-state or out-of-area properties, but might approach that after we've had some hands on experience. 

We're open to connecting and meeting with other investors who have experience in our market and would like to help out some newbies! Any advice is welcomed :) 

[Chris Newman]

Hi @Kaitlyn Romberg

Welcome to Bigger Pockets! Be sure to set your keywords so that you can be notified when something local is happening. "Everett" and "Snohomish" are good ones.

And, welcome to Snohomish county. We're the last low-hanging fruit in the Seattle-overflow market and price appreciation here is about the same as Seattle's - around 12% - but with median prices about 2/3 of Seattle. Gentrification is now well underway and will run for quite a few years to come.

I invest in local rural land, primarily for its newly-transferable unused residential development rights and I'm just getting into The Note Game, particularly on the note-origination (Strategic Seller Financing) side. I like these because, besides being even more profitable than residential, they don't involve "trash, tenants and toilets." 

But, if I was playing with residential for buy-and-hold, I'd be doing student housing, i.e. room sharing, within walking or biking distance of fast-growing Everett College, at the north end of Broadway. Big SFR and duplexes, with minimal updating, can work fine for that and there are still plenty of opportunities here to add value. For rent values, check out local room sharing rates per bedroom (I've heard $700 - $800/month for a room with shared kitchen and bathroom) and work backwards from there to figure out if an opportunity caps out.

One thing to keep in mind is that many of these houses are over 100 years old and they've been used for rentals for at least decades. Everett has the lowest owner-occupied home rate (around 43%) of the top 20 cities in the state.

So, sellers could be simply getting rid of big future problems. You may also run into very old unsafe,, heating, wiring and plumbing w/lead, possibly even asbestos and PCBs.  So, until you learn how to assess properties (from BP articles), having a proper professional structural assessment is well worth the cost. 

If you have questions, posting them in the forums (with local keywords) will usually get you answers. Or, you can PM me and I'll try to help as I can.

best regards,

Chris Newman