New member looking to make the first step soon!

[Jorge Valdez]

Hi everyone! My name is Jorge and I am finally venturing into the BP forums. I am originally from Riverside County in California, but ended up going to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. After that, I moved to San Francisco to start my full-time job as a financial analyst.

I have very little exposure to real estate. My college roommate, Cole, actually introduced me to REI. After he explained everything to me, it became very clear that we wanted to work together to invest in real estate in order for us to become financially independent one day. We even did our senior project on the housing market in Reno,NV.

For the past 1-2 years we have worked on educating ourselves by using the resources that BP makes available (I even made it on Real Estate Rookie Podcast #14!). Cole and I both did not renew our expensive Bay Area leases and moved back home to save money to put towards an investment property since we have flexible work from home arrangements. 

Our ideal investment situation is a multi-family home that we can house hack, but we are also very open to single family homes. We have looked into states such as Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado. We will be in Salt Lake City and Boise during the first couple weeks of October to scope out the area and see if it's a place we will want to invest in. We plan on making more of these trips to learn more and meet more people in other parts of the country.

I look forward to making more connections and learning from those who have experience!

[Aaron K.]

I'd narrow it down a bit more from afar unless you just want to vacation.  As of now it seems you've narrowed it down to west of the Mississippi River and not CA.  Not only do you have to pin down a state but a city/ metro area as well.  This should be even easier if you plan on house hacking because you can eliminate places you don't want to live.