Newbie from the Boston area

[Julie Jarvis]

Hey everyone! I am excited and eager to get started with real estate investing.  I have been listening to the podcast and reading books for long enough and am ready to jump into the game!  I live in the suburbs of Boston with my husband and our two teenage sons.  I am a high school math and computer science teacher and got my real estate license a while back and just recently got it reinstated.  My husband is in commercial construction management and has his contractors license.  

We actually have done a couple of house hacks just because of the expensive market we live in, so while we are new to the "investing" world, we do have some real estate experience...

We purchased our first house in 2003 (at the height of the market here)- it was a cape style home built in the 50s with an original kitchen and bath and the upstairs had never been finished.  We finished the upstairs - adding 3 bedrooms and a full bathroom and renovated the kitchen and bath on the main level and opening up a few walls to what had been one of the first floor bedrooms and making it into a dining room.  This was all while living there with our 2 year old son.   The market was extremely competitive and we overbid on the house by about $15k and paid $310K.  We sold the house in 2012 for about $420K and purchased another fixer-upper, this time a 1500 sq. ft. 3 bedroom, 2 bath ranch style home that had the potential for adding a 2nd floor.  We paid about $370K.  This house was only a few miles from our first home and was in a great neighborhood for kids.  It had been on the market for a while and needed significant work cosmetically (our kids were horrified that we were selling our nice house and moving into this place).  We could see the potential - we purchased it with the intent of using the existing foundation and first floor and adding a second floor and opening up the first floor to give it an open floor plan.   After working with an architect, we realized that it was going to be less expensive and less work to tear the house down to the foundation and rebuild it than it would have been to just add a 2nd floor.  We then ran into some roadblocks with financing for the construction loan, but we figured out a way around them and we were able to get started on the construction project about 9 months after we moved in.  Fortunately, my parents live near by and we were able to stay with them for the 6 months that we were under construction.  We worked with a general contractor for the construction loan aspect, but ran the job ourselves from a day to day perspective and coordinated all the subs and did a lot of the work ourselves.  Construction costs were about $225K in total, so we were into the house for just under $600K - about $100K - $150K below what we could have purchased an existing 20 year old 3,000 sq ft house in the neighborhood for.   

We are ready to take some of the equity and some money we have saved up and start investing. We have a few options that we are considering and are trying to figure out what our best first move is. My husband is from Pittsburgh and we are interested in buying some single family or small multi-family properties using the BRRRR strategy in that area. We are also interested in potentially flipping a property near us in the suburbs of Boston. We realize that flipping is going to require borrowing some money. I am also trying to figure out how best to utilize my real estate agent license.

I look forward to being an active part of the Bigger Pockets community and learning from and working with all the amazing contributors.