Newbie from St. Louis

[Nathan Murray]

Hello everyone, 

I have been interesting in real estate investing for the last 15 years but never jumped. Now it is time for me to jump....just not sure which pool to jump in first...flip or hold. My initial thoughts are flip but I don't have a lot of excess cash. Thoughts now are more in the buy low, easy in STL, and rent for cash flow with the possibility of refi for capitol.

any thoughts/suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks everyone, glad to have found this site

Nathan

[Cristo Heatherdale]

There's a few different venues you can take to start out.  I don't know your financial situation but to do fix and flips or a buy and hold you would still need to have some money down.  The main thing is knowing how to find these properties and building a team.  Think of a step by step process when it comes to purchasing a home.  You would need strong relationships with any of those professionals that you encounter; a realtor(s), mortgage broker/loan specialist, title agent or lawyer, just to name a few for example.  Then keep in mind what a business would need such as an accountant.  Start networking in your local community and get some feedback on your immediate market, see where investors are looking towards and why, what contractors they use that they can refer to you, property managers they would recommend, lenders, etc.  The more information you have before you get started, the better. 

If you do not have enough to put a down payment on a property you can start by wholesaling.  BP has a lot of discussions and articles on solely wholesaling real estate.  This will get you started with earning more cash necessary and often times quicker, and it will give you the practice needed to find the type of discounted properties that you would want to find when it comes time to fix and flip.  YouTube has a plethora of videos and even Amazon has $3 Kindle books you can browse through with enough information to get started.

If you want to start by having some cash flow, believe it or not, mobile homes.  The great thing about mobile homes is their depreciation, but you wouldn't be in it for a flip.  I've seen perfectly good mobile homes get sold for $3,000 with so much as just needing to shampoo the carpet, then rented out almost immediately for $650 per month and knew of one investor who's sole interest was to "flip" them as a 2 year lease option.  There's more to it, but that's the jist.

If you do have enough to start fixing and flipping, do it! I'm not a financial adviser, but if you start out by buying and renting, you would have most of your money tied up in one property that could take a while to get back what you paid for.