Buy family home now in the east bay or wait?

[Neha Shah]

We are thinking of buying a long-term primary residence family home (in Lamorinda) but since we aren't in a huge rush and I've been reading a lot on this forum, I'm wondering if there are other options we should look at.

Some context: It's just me and my husband now, but we're planning to have a child in the next 2 years.  We own a 2 bedroom in SF. I work in Oakland. Husband works from home. Long-term, we know we want to raise our family in Lamorinda and when we move out of our current condo, we'll rent it out (which will cover our mortgage). We have the means to buy a Lamordina house we like right now, which would be about $1.5m-2m.  Ideally, by the time we have our first kid, we'd have moved out of SF, but it wouldn't be the worst thing to have an infant here. 

Some questions/options:

1) Is there any benefit of waiting to buy a house? The area isn't particular high growth and I don't see us being able to buy a nicer house if we wait 2-5 years (nor do we necessarily need a nicer house!)

2) Would it make sense to buy a place, fix-up, rent out in another bay area market before buying our long-term home? We could do this while living in SF or at the property (only if it's a safe are that's easy to get to Oakland), but given how much capital is required/how expensive everything is in the bay area, i'm not sure if this is worth it? Is it worth looking into? 

3) Focus on  buying a home with an in-law unit that we can rent out. Also, there are a lot of homes with big backyards where we could possibly build an in-law unit attachment or stand-alone.

4) We would be nervous about buying any properties out of state/area because we don't have experience or the time to invest in really understanding an out of state market. Is it worth considering?

I'd love to hear what you think we should think consider before diving into purchasing an expensive home. Thank you in advance for any advice.