Hello from Framingham, MA!

[Christopher Reynolds]

Hi everyone! I just want to introduce myself here. I'm Christopher, and I'm a relatively new investor and landlord in Framingham, which is about 25 miles west of Boston. My girlfriend and I purchased a 3 family house just under 2 years ago, in which we also live. We are moving from unit to unit, improving it slowly, doing 100% of the work ourselves. We are quickly learning so much about being landlords, becoming home improvement wizards, and hopefully becoming wise real estate investors in the years to come.

We learned so much from several books I'm sure most of you have read, but we have learned the most from Bigger Pockets, and specifically the BP Podcast. It's seriously one of the greatest learning tools I've encountered. Thank you Brandon and Joshua, and all the podcast guests. The entire BP experience is a resource like no other.

We currently work 50 hours a week each, for an amazing company we both love. However, our schedules are quite demanding on weekends and holidays, and we find that we are missing out on spending quality time with our friends, families, and each other. We are having great financial success in our first real estate endeavor, and we have goals that will allow us to spend a lot more time enjoying life, and a lot less time "trading hours for dollars", which is a saying I learned on BP!

We may go a few different routes. We initially were seeking buy-and-hold rental properties, 2-4 units, for income. As the housing market seems to gain strength, we found our prospective income slowly dwindling as property prices increased, with rental rates not increasing at the same rate. We are still interested in the 2-4 multifamilies, but we are also looking at the small apartment buildings, likely 5-12 units. We like that the value of a building is directly tied to the rents the building is able to produce, not necessarily comps in the neighborhood. Although these properties are more expensive to acquire, it seems more stable than the 1-4 unit housing market, which can vary wildly at times.

Anyway, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading. See you on the forums!