New investor interested in Boston market

[Daren Card]

Hello everyone,

I'm exciting to be introducing myself after a few months of absorbing a lot of great information from the BiggerPockets forums and podcast. My name is Daren Card and I am looking to start a side hustle as a real estate investor in the near future. Sorry for the longer post, but I got excited and a bit carried away with an introduction. I sprinkled in some bold emphasis for the TL;DR crowd. 

My "real" job is in academia and I am currently located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where I just finished my Ph.D. in genetics. I'm about to begin a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the National Science Foundation at Harvard University so I'll be moving to the Boston area in about a year.

Given I'm moving I have been looking seriously into a house hack in Boston to jumpstart my solo investment portfolio (hopefully it grows into that). Tough market to start in but I have some hope that I can make it work after reading the forums and doing some research, and maybe others have some specific thoughts on that. Independently, some friends and I have also been talking about starting a joint real estate investment venture where we would invest wherever makes sense (Western NY and the Philadelphia areas are where we are looking currently, due only really to familiarity).

I'm just getting started and graduate school isn't lucrative, so I don't have a ton of knowledge or capital I can contribute to others at this point. However, I'm very excited to learn more and to begin networking with others as ways to help meet my goals. Moreover, I do have a data analysis skillset built up during my education that I could leverage to help others. For example, I recently played around with accounting for variation when modeling property appreciation (a simple metric that I started with). I've noticed that when most investors run models in Excel they feed in constant values for appreciation, inflation, etc. but in reality these factors vary from year to year (or even month to month). By accounting for this variation we can better understand the probability of hitting some arbitrary property appreciation level. To better illustrate this point I put together a short HTML report, so feel free to check it out at https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=17-apjG-QT39GOv9dX5ZfRTHgMkfEQnJE.

I plan to post some more specific questions regarding my investment goals in Boston and elsewhere in appropriate forums. But in general, I would also welcome any interaction from experienced investors in the Boston market (or anywhere, really) and other more novice users too.

Looking forward to connecting with others and continuing to learn!

Daren Card

[Charlie MacPherson]

@Daren Card Welcome to BP and to Boston!

As I've said to so many others, be sure you have a good handle on landlord/tenant and fair housing laws in MA.  That will keep you out of hot water.

In general, homes south of Boston are more affordable than those inside RT 128, so look in Plymouth, Norfolk and Bristol counties for better pricing.

Those areas also have good commuter rail / MBTA service into town, which you'll need to get to Harvard. 

As for house hacking, the least expensive duplex in Cambridge is now $1.399M.  3-plexes start at $1.645M.  Or you could look to the south where you can pay about 1/3 of those amounts.