First investment & first mistakes

[Tom Saysithideth]

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $120,000
Cash invested: $60,000

First real estate investment property in the books. First lesson, make sure your better half is on board with the investment before going through with the purchase. After listening to BP episodes and analyzing deals, I thought it was time to pull the trigger and start my real estate investing journey.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

The primary intention for this investment was cash flow. Chattanooga had more attractive numbers for my wife and I. We had connected with a real estate agent in the area to get started.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

Our real estate agent sent us a short-list of properties, and we selected this based on our numbers.

How did you finance this deal?

Conventional bank financing

How did you add value to the deal?

We did some minor repairs through the property management team, and listed it for rent soon after.

What was the outcome?

Still holding it to this day. Initially, it sat vacant for several months, and finally found a tenant that was later evicted.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

I purchased this property a bit trigger happy. It was one of the few properties that met my numbers and cash flowed in my acceptable range. It turned out the agents numbers were more liberal than expected.

[Tom Saysithideth]

Quote from @Robin Simon:

Curious on how you chose the agent and how you will do so moving forward.  Was the agent specialist on investment properties or a generally owner-occ focused agent that didn't really know how to evaluate a rental.  Will you be using someone else for the next one?

 Hi Robin, I found the agent through BP. Originally I reached out to get more information for the Northern Virginia market. They moved to Chattanooga, and got me interested in the market. My priority was on cash flow, and the market looked good for this strategy. The agent was an active investor in the area. She was familiar with the investor mindset. We will be evaluating other agents in the area for future transactions.