Greetings from the North West corner of California

[Carson T.]

Hi! My name is Carson and I'm a rookie investor out of Northern California. For perspective, if you drove seven hours North from San Francisco you'd be in my neck of the woods. A few years back my wife and I bought a Victorian farmhouse built in 1889 and have remodeled it while we lived there. The house gained considerable appreciation over a few years and so we decided to use the equity to leverage towards the purchase of a rental property. I spent the next six months studying everything I could about real estate. A ton of it coming from Bigger Pockets. I then started running numbers on anything within a two hour radius of me and settled on the Crescent City area of Del Norte County to really focus on. The advantage of rural areas is that its easy to stay up to date on every new listing that comes out. I started the process of finding a bank for the loan. I spent way too long using my own trial and error with local small bank lenders thinking that was the best way to go. I was referred to an excellent real estate agent by a friend that invests in rentals in the area. That real estate agent referred me to an awesome loan officer from US Bank out of the Medford, Oregon area. He was able to set me up with a HELOC on my primary and use that towards the 20% down payment on the mortgage for a rental. I made several offers on several different properties with no luck. After a few months my realtor came up with a pocket listing that fit all of my criteria. A nice little 3 bed 1 bath single family home about two blocks from the ocean. I put an offer in at $148K and after a month of haggling back and forth I got it at that price. I'm currently in the middle of a minor remodel (windows, floors, paint) that should come out to cost about $9K. Doing most of the work myself because help is nearly impossible to hire around here. Hope to have it rent ready by the 1st of September. Expecting rent should be $1300 a month. Already loving the whole journey so far and trying to figure out how long until I can start searching for the next deal. Thanks for reading!