Starting out: considering moving to Dallas

[Annis Naeem]

Hi all,

preface: 

I work in the film industry in LA. I make a pretty comfortable living and I can do my job from anywhere in the world as a designer and still make the same income which is a blessing. Heck, we could move to Tahiti, but we want to move to a place that has opportunity for growth in real estate investing. My wife and I are tired of LA's pricetags on rentals, real estate, food, etc. I only ended up here due to college, but nothing holds us here now. No matter where we look in SoCal, everything's blown out of proportion. So with our first kid on the way, we thought; hey, we don't even have to live here! Why didn't we think of this sooner, and why not move to an area with more opportunity to begin our real estate investing journey?

I have been researching and reading everything I can get my hands on about real estate, money, and mindset in general. I finally feel ready, as I am at the cusp of paying off all my student debt and other mistakes of my early 20s, and cultivating good behaviors of savings, watching my budgets, etc, mentally undoing years of bad habits developed from financially unsound parents(not meant in a negative way).

We want to buy a 4plex, live in one unit, house-hack, and do the whole deal. I hope to escalate that into a snowball that builds into bigger properties in a few years if the universe smiles on us.

 We've been analyzing deals and feel that we have a pretty good handle/baseline to analyze a deal instead of feeling like we're gambling. Now we just need to go to the school of hard knocks and actually do a deal and truly learn the hard way! And we're very excited about that.

The big question:

All that to say, we have been looking into Dallas to start our lives anew. I can see that the prices are all over the place and not a whole lot cheaper. I know that the price tag isn't everything on a property, and you must "make a deal", which I plan to do no matter what by employing all the techniques of marketing, real estate meetings, networking, etc. 

But Lindhall's book also discusses points in which a market becomes over saturated in cycles. Where you must get out at the peak rather than at the bottom. And I know this is a loaded topic and heated discussions begin around this. I've been hearing of DFW for years. It's been one of the fastest growing markets for a few years now. And just surfing zillow and browsing rental prices, it seems it's getting up there in the price tag. Do you guys think it's nearing a peak?

And this is just an open question, so please don't poop on me. If you could move anywhere in the states while not having to worry about income to begin your real estate career from a completely clean slate, where do you think you'd go? All the various markets everywhere are overwhelming. I am doing my due diligence, but curious to hear everyone's thoughts.

Perhaps a better question to ask is: what are the right questions I should be asking myself?

I am unsure of how saturated the market is with the hordes of skyscraping apartment buildings under construction/coming online now and in a few years that may slow down the progress everyone has been writing about online the past year or two. Does anyone have helpful links to be able to view this stuff?

We're also just curious to hear everyone's thoughts, and hear any words of wisdom.

p.s. We also chose Texas because of no income tax. It will help in our FIRE savings rate to move to a state that doesn't have this. Nevada was too hot, and Oregon too cold. Texas feels perfect.