New buy and hold investor in Boston Massachusetts metro area

[Joshua Olitzky]

Hello!

My name is Josh. My wife and I moved to the Boston metro area about 1 year ago now, previous to that spent a few years in southern New Hampshire. My first introduction to real estate investing was back in early 2011 when the market was at absolute bottom in AZ. I house hacked a property and rented it out 1 year later, and it’s performed extremely well. I took a hiatus on investing at the time to take finish my PhD and take a new job in NH. I knew I wanted to continue in real estate investment but back burnered it for a bit (what was I thinking??).

In all honesty though, I got lucky with that house, my knowledge at the time with respect to smart investing was nonexistent. At the time I did recognize that I could buy the house for half of what I could build it for and it was only several years old, how could it be a bad deal (I know Detroit). Over the past few months I discovered BiggerPockets through a friend. I’ve listened to at least one podcast a day, have now read two of Brandon’s books, and many forum/blogs posts. What a wealth of information. I’m so happy to have found all of this. It’s certainly helped to fan the fire and help me to draw the line in the sand to start investing again. This time with a lot more thought and analysis.

I’m now ready to pull the trigger investing in MA. I’ve been working to learn the market here, pre-approved for financing and I’m currently searching for a deal. We plan to buy and hold small multi families for rentals. We’ll again get the ball rolling by house hacking and living in one unit of a multi. I recently realized our target area focus needs some narrowing. We’ve been looking at Melrose, Medford, Arlington, Belmont, Sommerville, and even farther out like Maynard, Acton and Natick. If anybody has any suggestions or advice about those areas that would be much appreciated.