Networking and Investing in Portland, OR

[Jason Mills]

Hello everyone! I am new to Bigger Pockets, and just starting to dig around and get to know the lay of the land here. I've read through the Ultimate Beginner's Guide and look forward to lots more reading to come. Figured I would kick things off here with an introduction post!

I've lived in the Portland area for over 10 years, currently living in Beaverton. I've been a homeowner twice over, single family homes both times, but due to some life events over the last few years I'm back to being a renter at the moment. I've always had the property investing bug in the back of my head. My dad, who is no longer with us, was an avid investor, having owned a rental duplex and multiple manufactured homes that he would rent for awhile then sell at a profit. My previous partner was never really interested in pursuing this but my fiancee now is very supportive, and we are in a place where we really want to make this happen.

For our first step, we are looking to get into a small multi-family property that we occupy while renting out the other unit(s). We first started seriously looking into this last year, we found that Adair Homes had a very reasonably priced duplex plan, and so the plan was to find a piece of land, have the duplex built, rent out one side while living in the other, and use that "instant equity" they are famous for to leverage into another property sometime down the road. We had a piece of land lined up and ready to go, unfortunately the financing turned out to be a road block due to some job instability on my end. My partner works a regular job, but I've recently made the switch to self employment, doing a mix of stock trading and other independent contractor / gig work, so a traditional mortgage and/or construction loan seems to be off the table at this point. We are still looking for viable options, potentially including getting an existing 2/3/4 plex and foregoing the new construction route, depending on how things shake out, and I'm hoping this site will be a great resource to help us in that search.

So anyway, just wanted to say hi to everyone! Would love the opportunity to network with the locals on here, and in the mean time I've got lots of reading to do on hard money, private money, and all the other kinds of money I never heard of before!

--Jason