Canadian exploring in investing in US

[Duncan Lai]

Hello everyone, I am a newbie RE investor from Vancouver, Canada and am researching on investing in the US market. I am still starting out so I have a lot of (dumb) questions that I would like to consult the experts here. My goal is to accomplish buy and hold (and not flipping/wholesaling), at least for now.

Macro Research: I am taking a top down approach in identifying what neigborhood to do further work on by first looking at state level, then city level and then finally neighborhood level. The things I will be looking for are mainly job growth, population growth, average rent, average home prices and crime rate. I have started by looking at the US Bureau of Labour statistics and found some info there so far. Questions:

At the macro stage, are there any other factors that I should take into consideration?

What are some websites and sources that would be useful for finding these type of data? Preference would be government source data as they are unbiased but any other sources are welcome too.

In researching neigborhoods, before I even fly down to check them out, what are some good ways to get a sense of what areas within a city are the higher quality neigborhoods and which ones to avoid?

So far I have identified Cali, Texas and Florida to be the ones with the most job growth over the past year but will need to continue to gather more data. I saw a post about a lot of Canadians buying in Memphis and Indianapolis. Is there any specific reason to this?

Financing: I have read somewhere that if I borrow through a Canadian bank that has a US operation then I can use my Canadian credit history and get up to 50% LTV loan. Is this the maximum of what I can expect I can get? Are there any other financing methods that I should look into?

Tax/Legal: I know there are already a few threads out in the forum about Canadians investing in US and I have read through them. From what I have read so far, a lot of the advice is to sit down with lawyers and accountants with cross-border real estate expertise to discuss the appropriate legal and tax structure to fit my needs. This will definitely be something on my to-do list.  If there are any good contacts that any of you have work with before and recommend, it would be great if you can send it over to me too!

Besides these aspects above, what other factors am I missing out that I should be researching into at this stage? Currently I have just started the macro research stage and plan to work done the list above.

Looking forward to connect with the experts here! Thank you!

[Mike D'Arrigo]

@Duncan Lai 

Canadians are buying a lot of U.S. real estate. I have several Canadian clients. If you're looking for cash flow, CA is not the place to invest. It's way to expensive. You might as well just buy in Canada. Parts of TX (Dallas, Austin, Houston) have booming economies, however, the rent ratios in those markets are not great and TX has some of the highest property taxes and insurance rates in the countries, so although much better than CA, the cash flow and ROI is not great. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. census Bureau are going to be your best source of macro level economic and demographic data. The reason so many investors like Indianapolis and Memphis are the affordable prices, good rent ratios and returns. I particularly like Indianapolis and Kansa City. Both have strong, vibrant economies and offer very good returns. Below are a couple of podcasts on both of these markets that might help you.

http://www.spreaker.com/user/6739607/pinnacle-perspective-5-3-14-full

http://www.spreaker.com/user/6739607/pinnacle-perspective-09-06-14