Newbie in Austin TX

[Forrest Berkey]

Hi, My name is Forrest. I'm new to BiggerPockets. I have a rental property near downtown Austin and I'm looking to buy my 2nd investment property. My 1st rental property used to be my primary residence and I decided to keep it as an investment property when I bought my new primary residence. So this is the first time I'm buying a house with the intention of having it be an investment property right away. I have a lot to learn and I'm excited to join this website to learn from folks with more experience. Austin is growing like crazy and it's getting fairly challenging to find a decent investment property close in that will cash flow. I have been looking for several weeks and most of the properties in the 175k - 225k range are further out from central Austin. If anyone has any suggestions or tips for finding good opportunities in Austin please let me know. Thanks! Forrest

[Christine Newton]

@Nathan Smith 

You can get the pre-foreclosure list from the Roddy Report Foreclosure Listing Service. It's a paid list that give you all of the pre-foreclosures for the upcoming auction. The names come out 21 days before the auction and you can purchase by county.

For tax delinquent lists and code violations you need to make a public information request with the county or city. 

Absentee landlord list can be purchasing through a listing service or if you have MLS access you can pull it through there!

Here are the meetups I recommend:

Investor Underground: Third Wednesday of the month at Abel's North. It starts at 6:30 and is geared towards flippers, buy and hold, and wholesalers. It's good networking. 

Multi-Family Investing: Every Tuesday at 11:45 at the Flying Saucer. This group is geared towards those that are investing in apartment complexes. Great networking. 

General Investing: Every Thursday at 11:30 at Big Daddy's. There are a wide variety of different types of investors at this meeting and the networking is great. 

Linda and Andrew Peterson also hold a meetup once a month (not sure which date) and also every Sunday where they bring a group of investors out to a house they are flipping. If you are looking to flip homes they are a great resource. You can find their meetups on Meetup.com and look for "Homes for the Win". 

There are many other meetups in the area! I don't have time to go to them all, so I can't comment on the others, but I'm sure there are some other great meetings going on out there!