Newbie from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

Hi everyone,

Love the site lots of great info to learn from. I am 31 years old and work as a Community Manager for a medium sized property management company named Blue Coast Property Management. We manage 28 HOA's and 30 rental properties. I have been working there for about 3 years now. I am currently in class to get my Real Estate sales license. I plan to take the test by the end of the year. I finish class November 10. My boss is covering the expenses for getting my license. He wants me to get the license so I can learn, basically a training for me. I thought I would be showing properties after work and on the weekends to make some extra money which I desperately need to buy any investment properties. But after talking with my boss who is also the BIC he informed my that I wouldn't be listing of showing properties because the company is not set up for real estate sales. The company does not have errors and omissions insurance and it would be to expensive for him to buy it with the small amount of sales I would get. He thinks the sales would be small because I already work 40 to 50 hours at the office. As well as he wouldn't be getting listings for the company or doing any advertising. He wouldn't have time to watch over sales that I was doing. He mainly wants me to get the license so that he can retire in a few years and I can run the office without him. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

    So now I want to look into real estate investing. I am interested in doing buy and hold and fix and flip. I would like to do buy and hold since I have experience now managing rentals at work. I would like to do fix and flip because my fiancé is an Interior Designer and she can assist in what to do to fix up properties. I have maintenance guys at work that I trust who can do repairs for me. I can also do some work myself. I would not feel comfortable gutting a house. I just don't have a crew that I know of to do something like that in a timely manner. If someone can connect my with a good contractor please let me know?

    My income does not allow me to save money at this point in my career. Just a little for emergencies. But my finance and I bought a condo together for 70k about 4 years ago. We put in 15k as a down payment. The property is now worth about 80k and the mortgage is abut 50k now. So I would like to use that equity we have in the property to purchase an investment property and hopefully start something where it can lead to buying many more properties in the years to come.    

    Now I need to get some advice on what the next step should be to use that 30k in equity that I have in my home to buy an investment property? My main plan would be to use the 30k as a down payment on a property that I would rent out. I have really good credit and decent income. So I was thinking I could us the 30k as a 15% down payment and hopefully get a loan up to 200k. This should be a very good amount to work with in my area to buy a property.

Thanks!