Am I missing something out here in Los Angeles?

[Adam Gresch]

Hi all, 

I am fairly new to the world of real estate. I've only worked in the field for a little over a year now and that's mostly been in the maintenance side. I'm still pretty young, but have been studying voraciously about REI and I am really eager to jump in a start investing asap.

The only problem for me is that I got my experience out of state. That didn't seem to be too big of an issue for me until I started looking around my local market. I just moved to Los Angeles last month and pretty much immediately began scoping out deals. However, I have noticed that real estate here is prohibitively expensive. 

I'm mostly interested in buying and holding small multifamily units and I am noticing that dublexes/triplexes/quadplexes are selling out here for a fortune. And what you get is a junked out place in a crappy location with ridiculously low rents. 

So what I want to know is who is buying these places? And how are they making any money at all? For example, if you're having to spend upwards of 350K for three units that are only grossing $750 per month, per unit, how are you ever even going to come close to achieving the 1% rule? And that's a very forgiving example, by the way, just based on what I've seen. 

Anyone familiar at all with the Los Angeles market feel like chiming in and setting me straight? Because at this point I am seriously considering the prospect of making all of my investments somewhere besides LA, and that is really not what I wanted to do.