Relocating to Tucson, Arizona

[Gregory Pleshaw]

Greetings, Gregory Pleshaw.  I'm a former journalist in business, tech and fine arts who is currently an Uber driver with real estate investment aspirations.  I have absolutely zero experience in real estate, which includes never owning a primary residence, but both of my parents owe whatever "fortunes" they have had to real estate and it's now a pleasure to see both of them in later retirement (dad, 85, mom, 79) living primarily off their real estate investment property. My dad did very well at one point when I was still a youngster, and I have fond memories at eight of "helping" him renovate a property by gleefully taking his instructions to heart and using a hammer to take down old plaster and drywall from an investment property in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in the late 1970s when it was a very distressed neighborhood and not the more upscale and renowned neighborhood it is today.  

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hence the background in arts journalism, but due to the era, I became interested in tech journalism also and that led to an interest in business topics and clips in local papers and magazines as well as national clips in Wired, Fast Company, the Industry Standard and others during the dot-com era.  My only claim to "real estate" writing was a writer for hire project I wrote for a social entrepreneur called "the Cash Garden" which was designed to give working class people a blueprint for using manufactured housing units as a way to build wealth.  I've also written a few articles about outstanding houses for the real estate section of the Santa Fe daily, as well as website copy for a number of real estate companies looking to provide their clients with "neighborhood information" on their websites.

Currently, my wife and I live in Santa Cruz, California, but on a road trip two years ago, she fell in love with the deserts around Tucson and so by the end of the summer, we intend to move there.  I'm soon to hit 50, which seems like a good time to grow up and maybe follow my folks into real estate investing.  My current narrative is "my wife and I are moving to Tucson where I plan to drive for Uber, take some real estate courses, and enjoy the outstanding Native American traditional and contemporary art scenes in Arizona and just see what happens."  

My current sense of what that looks like is likely buy and hold rental properties.  My hat's are off to house flippers, but that game strikes me as an emotional "flip-flop" that I probably couldn't stomach despite the returns...but who knows?  Time changes everything...I might return to this post in a few years and my views will have changed.  I found BiggerPockets.com by simply typing "best real estate podcast USA" and I just started listening.  Looking forward to the journey and I'm happy that this community exists, because despite my parent's experience, I don't really know anything about the process of real estate investing other than that it worked for them.  Thank you.