I'm John Ford and I bought my first home in 2005 in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. This was pre-Beltline, pre-PCM, pre-H4WP, etc... but all of those projects were either in the infancy of their planning phases or at least rumored to be on the horizon. So I took a chance and bought a 2/1 in the area and moved in. The neighborhood was super rough around the edges but I loved the convenience of the location and it was all the space I needed as a single person with a few animals and the occasional room-mate. My plan was to wait for the above-mentioned projects to happen and drive revitalization and rents to the point that I could rent the place out and have a cash-flowing-property.

Slow-forward 11 years and my plan has finally come to fruition! I just went under contract on a new home and close in May. I'm pretty sure I'll have no problem finding good tenants at the price I want. So, mission accomplished! After this minor success, I've really been bitten by the Real Estate Investing bug. But I'm not planning to wait around 11 more years for my next deal. I've set a goal to have 5 more cash-flowing properties by 2018.

I won't say I have no idea how I'm going to get there but I'm sure there are even better ways of getting there I haven't learned about yet.

I've joined GAREIA and will be attending the monthly meeting next Monday night. Right now I'm reading and learning about the ins and outs of managing a rental property which will probably consume most of my REI brain-space for the next few months. After that, I plan to learn about analyzing buy and hold deals and to start looking, in earnest, for potential deals for rental property #2. I also need to learn about financing deals. I don't have a ton of cash, but I do have about $150k in equity in the first house so that may be a potential source of funds to finance some deals. Of course, if I do end up using that, I'd prefer to learn how to structure my deals so that money doesn't get tied up into a property and I can keep reusing the same capital to bootstrap house after house. I don't even know enough to know whether that's really possible yet, but I suspect it is. It's real estate, anything's possible, right?!

Anyhoo, I look forward to learning from the members of the board and sharing what I can.