Noob from PA - Investing in Delaware, San Jose, Bay Area

[Jason Fernandes]

Hi, I'm Jason Fernandes. I live in Delaware County (PA) very close to the Delaware state border.

I am a software developer working with databases for my day job. I moved to America in the mid 2000's to get my Master's and have been fortunate to call this country my home ever since.

I have two rental properties in the Bay Area from when I was living in California, one in Pennsylvania and two in Delaware. The one in Pennsylvania is a condo, the rest are SFR's. For right now, management is between my wife and myself, but we hope to build towards handing it over to property management in the future. Our strategy has been buy and hold. We have been doing most of the work ourselves as well, when the properties need repair.

In 2016, I made a resolution to buy more properties and 10 units by 2020. I ended up with 3 (1 PA and 2 DE) in 2016 to make it 5 rental units.

I will be closing on my first multi-family (triplex) in May (Delaware). This is a partnership with my in-laws who have been in the rental property business for close to 3 decades themselves. I was inspired to go into real estate investing by them and learnt most of what I know today from them, so I suppose they were my mentors. Although it is a partnership, I'm counting the 3 units against my name as well to make it 8.

I had some questions on landlording and condo investing (which my mentors detest :D ) and that is how I found BP in 2016. I have been hooked on to the articles and podcasts ever since. I have been just trying to soak in all the information from this website. After multiple podcasts where Josh has been mentioning people who just create profiles and lurk, I decided to take the plunge with interacting and here is my introduction post.

Right now, I am facing the challenges of getting mortgages (past the 4 in my name).. in addition to lower loan amounts (<50k for the paid off house) or seasoning requirements. However, I will be fixing up the triplex (gut job-ish) for the most part of the year, so maybe that will take care of the seasoning.

I hope to take a lot of pictures, so hopefully I will get around to sharing some of the work late 2017 - early 2018. I am putting it out there, to make sure I follow up on posting pics/video.