Newbie investor in Portland, Oregon

[Mike Meerschaert]

Hi,

My name is Mike Meerschaert and I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm moving up to Portland, OR in February 2020 and I'm planning to get started investing in real estate once up there. I work a 9-5 with pretty good comp and benefits, but my goal is to save as much as possible and invest everything in small multi family or single family BRRRR deals, and hopefully have $3,500/month in rental income within the next 5 years to be able to cover all my basic necessities so I can focus on working on things that matter to me without having to trade most of my time for money to pay my bills.

I don't have a background in real estate, but I am a computer programmer at an investment consulting firm so I do know a lot about how to analyze investments, and I live and breathe numbers every day. I started my career fixing computers, then working at a managed service provider that managed all IT needs for small businesses and startups around the SF bay area, but in my free time I was teaching myself programming until I landed my current job. Now my primary skills are JavaScript / Python / PHP / SQL, Relational / Graph Data Modeling, API / Web application development, and I'm pretty proficient with excel and google sheets. I've already come up with some quick and dirty models for doing side by side comparisons of cash flow on rental properties by inputting purchase price and rental income, and using some basic formulas to estimate expenses. I'm also pretty good with most technical issues due to my background in IT and systems administration. 

I learned about this community from Brandon Turner's youtube videos, then the bigger pockets podcast, then I signed up to buy David Greene's BRRRR book, and now I'm here to get advice, network and hopefully be able to provide value from my technical background to other members here.

I'm interested in networking with other real estate investors in the Portland area, specifically Real estate agents, Contractors, Property managers and Lenders who are investors themselves.