Greater Boston and NE investing oppertunities

[Michael S.]

Hello fellow investors,

I am a new member to this community and have spent the past 8 months soaking in the fantastic advice from the educational material and lurking user posts.

My experience is limited to living in and renovating my east medford home which I subsequently flipped (did much of the renovation myself) and recently upgraded to a larger west medford home.

I have spent a lot of time digging through all of the major online MLS online resources to track down reasonably priced local properties to begin building a rental portfolio. As you may all realize the market is insane in this area - inventory is low - there is no such thing as 50-200k properties as many of the success stories throughout the country have leveraged. Profits if any, even from short sales are limited or non existent.

I'm somewhat discouraged by the limited opportunities in my local area to springboard into RE investing. I have a full time job as an engineer and not sure I have the risk tolerance or time to be investing in far away states where more affordable real-estate (with decent local rents) may still exist.

Happy to hear about more recent success stories from folks who have been able to navigate in this market. What have your approaches been? Even for seasoned investors in this area - given low inventory and growing prices, how have you been able to address these market challenges to continue building income and solid property portfolios.

Regards,

M

[Alex Cwiakala]

@Michael S. welcome to the industry! @Neil Gulden is right, the market is super competitive so direct mail and bandit signs have historically worked. However we have an MLS acquisition team and have found 5 very lucrative projects in the last 3 months. To get traditional deals like that, you have to be very quick on the trigger though. We were writing 30 offers a week within 12 hours of a new house being listed. For the city, forcing appreciation i.e. condo conversions is a great way to make money. That's pretty much the route you have to go in the city. I'd be more than willing to sit down with you some time next week. Always love meeting investors. Neil and I had coffee actually last week!