My Story - from an Accidental Newbie in San Jose, CA

[Erin S.]

Hello, my name is Erin and I am married with 1 little one. I have started reading about real estate investing and it sounds pretty interesting. I am not an "official" investor or anything, in fact I kind of flipped my first house on accident. 

In a nutshell.... Bought my first house at the bottom of the market (end of 2009) and was just content to just own a house. Hubby fixed it up and it was just fine for us two. Then when I was pregnant at the end of 2013, we started thinking that we wanted to move to an area with a better school district by the time our incoming arrival would get to kindergarten. After having the baby in March 2014, I went out on maternity leave - and started looking at houses online. On a whim, I asked my hubby if he wanted to meet with a lender "just to see how much we could qualify for". That was in the middle of May. By Memorial weekend we met up with a real estate agent who she recommended, went some open houses including one that the agent just humored us with, and found a total gut job in a great area. We made an offer the next day with the contingency of us selling our house, and our agent told us we had about a 10% chance of them accepting. Well we beat out all the other offers, and they accepted. Well this was the house our agent just humored us with - it was THAT BAD - the previous owners had rented it out, NEVER checked on it, and the condition was horrendous. Anyways, so we put our house up for sale that week and it sold. We closed within a month and then we had 10 days to get it livable for our family to move in (this is with a 4 month old baby). It was crazy now that I look back on it.

Well now we replaced basically everything possible since it was a destroyed rental property and the value has shot through the roof. Of course all of that cost a lot of money, so instead of pecking away at our debt - I had another idea - why not convert our unused garage into a studio? We hired some contractors who raised the ground to house level and basically added a living space within the garage. I designed it, and it came out pretty nice. We listed it online, screened potential renters, and had it rented in a couple days. We now have a someone renting an area of our house that we almost never went in, and it is helping immensely with our bills.

All in all, during these transactions - I learned how much sense real estate makes. We would like to eventually purchase another property. I guess it's considered a "hybrid"? Get a fixer upper to rent out and keep it long term. Of course, I want to be at zero debt before starting this, but I thought I'd start researching early. :) 

Well sorry this got so long - and I hope to hear from lots of people with great advice for me!