New. Excited. Overwhelmed. Thirsty. Ready. Doubting. Skeptical.

[David Sosna]

Hi everyone. My business partner (ok, let's be honest, my girlfriend) and I started Desert Garden Properties, LLC, and bought two houses. Well, we only meant to buy one, but that's another story. Why the profile picture in the mountains of Idaho? Because last Fall we were pretty much planning on selling our own two houses, buying some sort of small RV, and backpacking around US National Parks and Wildnernesses using the RV as our base. We figured we'd start out doing that for about a year or so and see what happens, but we realized we'd have nothing to come back to and our cool houses (well, my average house and her really cool house) would be gone. Instead we decided to work toward building a business that we figured, if we worked hard at for a few years, and stayed in shape, we'd still be able to do our travel plan but be making money while on the trail and have something to come back to. Every few days we're like, "Now why didn't we just go backpacking?"

I'm 52 and from Boston and Melissa is 41 and from Philadelphia but we now call Phoenix, AZ our home. We love the desert. I work for Trader Joe's and while it's a cool company, it's still trading hours for dollars with someone else telling you when you have to work. No thank you. Not afraid of work by any means. I just want to do it more on my own terms. Melissa has several jobs which she loves including helping to run a wilderness education literacy-based program and teaching wilderness first aid. 

We love hosting and cooking for people and taking travelers on local hikes and mountain bike rides, etc. We like idea of providing people with a positive experience of living in or visiting Phoenix. Which brings us to our goals and dilemmas. We want to run an Airbnb. We want to run several Airbnb's. We want to be busy with visitors and then close up the places (or rent them for medium terms like for traveling nurses or project managers) and then take off and backpack for weeks at a time. We are interested in single-family and small multifamily. We have a ridiculous amount to learn. We are both very handy, quick learners, and have a few good resources up our sleeves. For instance her parents have owned a lot of real estate their whole lives and own a tax accounting business. I am shameless and bold and just introduce myself to people even though I feel like I have nothing to offer other than enthusiasm. I may have recently found a mentor and am very excited about that.

Oh and I heard about the podcast from Moises Acevez, a friend I work with who just got his real estate license. I didn't listen to my first podcast until weeks after he mentioned it to me. I now listen constantly and started reading some of the blogs and here I am joining the forums. I'll probably upgrade the membership soon, too. 

Thanks for reading if you made it through.

Peace,

David