Hello from Philadelphia!

[Daniel C.]

Hello all!

I'm Daniel. I'm an engineer based in Philadelphia and am new to real estate investing. I just moved to Philly from Salt Lake City this month and am looking to purchase my first real estate investment property. I am also currently taking the PA real estate course and have already learned a ton.

In Salt Lake City, I purchased my first home (primary residence) in 2017 for 291k. It was a split-level home built in 1978 that had great bones (I was the 2nd owner!) but cosmetically, was stuck in the 90s. My wonderful wife and I put a year's worth of weekends and late nights into installing new flooring, light fixtures, landscaping, and paint. We sold the property for 367k this year and could not be happier.

This experience was all before I started learning about real estate investing. I analyzed the deal last night out of curiosity and my rough number's crunching puts this at a 17% annual ROI (counting 1.5% down payment, holding, rehab, and closing costs). It doesn't seem much higher than what the ROI would've been if we didn't do any of the rehab but I'm glad we did since now we both have experience in the costs and labor that go into these light upgrades.

Now in Philadelphia, I have 50k that I'm looking to invest in real estate. I initially was set on trying to purchase a MF property for <200K and going for a "buy and hold" strategy where I would just do the minimum work to make the units rentable and let the cash flow "flow" in. I was looking at North Philadelphia (Olney). Now, I'm getting more intrigued by BRRRR and am also considering finding a SF property for ~100k and putting in another 10-15k for rehab. I've been looking at East Mt Airy and Brewerytown for these properties thus far. You could say I still have a ton of market research to do in front of me :)

Anyways, thanks for reading and I can't wait to interact with all of you on this forum.