Newbie from NE Ohio, relocating to Southern Idaho or Salt Lake

[Persa Z.]

My story is that I've been renting the same place for 7 years in NE Ohio and I work by day doing web design work. For a few years before coming back to this town, I grew organic vegetables for other farmers in rural Ohio. I moved to this rental property to continue my side hustle growing food and running a vegetable farm closer to the city, but found out although that was my passion that I was never going to get anywhere selling vegetables - most of the time I couldn't even pay for my time working! I grew up in the Northeast Ohio area and have never really "left" or lived anywhere else (except a short stint in Denver).

My partner and I learned a lot about the Financial Independence movement in the last two years and have been saving everything we can and living as inexpensively as we can to help save up money for our first investment property. We've been listening to BiggerPockets for the last year and we spent this last year trying to buy a fixer-upper or a house hack in the Akron/Canton region and met a lot of challenges and deals that fell through along the way.

My partner's cousin lives outside of Twin Falls, Idaho and I fell in love with the area years ago. We were presented with a chance to buy undeveloped acreage neighboring my partner's cousin's house, where we could eventually continue the vegetable and fruit business once we have enough other income coming in from other businesses. (Ever heard the joke -- "What does a farmer do after winning a million dollars?" -- "Keeps on farming until it's all gone!")

We bought that property in August, so we'd like to move to be closer to that project so that we can start planting trees and berries, (things that take a long time to grow and don't need a lot of our time or attention) and also to closer to that side of the family. We have plans to make a camping oasis on the property to get some cashflow in the meantime. That will be a fun experiment in the "Short Term Rental" environment.

Our long-term goal is to start building a rental business using Single Family and smaller Multi-Family units. My partner is looking for a job in either Salt Lake or the Twin Falls area so we can move closer to the property in the next 3 months, and the plan is to find a Single Family home in need of help to live in and fix for a year, and hopefully find another a year later, rent the first out, and start growing one year at a time. It'll be a a slow road, but I think once we've done a few deals we'll be in a better position to try to grow faster.

If anyone has any good resources on the "live in rehab turned to rental" strategy, please let me know!