First rental property of hopefully many in the future

[Mason De Vries]

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $93,000
Cash invested: $24,750

Bought with long term tenant in place. Receiving $1,100/month rent. Tenant pays all utilities but garbage. Using property management company. Trying out the long distance real estate game.

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

I live in Washington State where housing prices are pretty high and couldn't afford a rental property out here so I starting looking on Zillow for places that were more affordable and came across Dayton and the numbers seemed work out so thought I would try my first rental out.

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

I found it on Zillow and talked to an agent and a property management company to hear their thoughts on it. I offered $6k less that asking and got accepted

How did you finance this deal?

With a 30 year fixed mortgage hoping rates drop so I can refinance into a 15 year fixed.

What was the outcome?

It's cash flowing.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

Do more research, ask locals on this website about the area and for their opinions and run more numbers before the next purchase.

[Mason De Vries]

Quote from @Pat Quaranto:

Is this an out of state turn key? Or did you have to put some work into it? If it’s out of state I’d love to hear more about how you went about getting it inspected, if you built a team, etc. I live on Long Island, so investing out of state would be easier point of entry in terms of cost 

It is out of state turn key, I believe. I had the realtor I used to buy my house here in Washington refer me to someone in the same company as him over in Dayton, Ohio. I asked my realtor for a PM referral and I talked the PM and he said it sounds like a decent deal and I researched inspectors online and the inspector went and checked it out and he said it had good bones and he said he'd buy it as a rental property. The inspection was in the cold months so the inspector was unable to try out the AC unit. When my maintenance dude went to the house this summer, he turned on the breaker to the AC and it sparked at him so we replaced the whole panel which wasn't cheap. And a couple other things the maintenance guy said needed to be done. So far, we have put $2k into the house for maintenance issues.  After being on this site, I think I would definitely do thing differently. My realtor didn't seem to know much about rentals. I'd ask my pm company about their opinions more and look for a better deal.