Looking for advice, better to start inside DC or PG County?

[Isaac Passmore]

Hi all, first time posting on BP. My girlfriend and I are really interested in trying our hand at real estate but we aren't sure where to start in terms of location. We know we want to get inside the District of Columbia but it's crazy expensive in nearly every neighborhood. We've lived in the district for a number of years and have also spent sometime in the neighboring Prince George's county. Both locations have their perks, but looking long term we feel DC can better fill vacancies. This would be our first home purchase and we'd like to leverage house hacking. We'd prefer to have a separate dwelling area but those tend to be few and far between. We're also willing to live with roommates so standard single family homes are also an option for us. Because this is our first deal we want to try to avoid a lot of potential capital expense on repairs or rehabs. We'd like to put no more than 60K down which will likely mean that we need to make use of an FHA loan.

We wanted to get people's opinions on how to go about getting off the ground. Would it be more advisable to look for deals inside DC where there asking prices are typically 500k+ on relatively small apartments or to look into PG county and purchase a newly built home that's metro accessible and costs 300-400k?

Basically, I haven't seen many people talk about buying newly built homes and renting them out in the DMV area and was wondering what people think of these buildings as potential first time break-even type real estate investments?