Having trouble finding a deal

[Samantha Smith]

Hello all,

Thank you for taking time to read my post.

I'm having trouble finding a good deal. There are a couple factors in my market that may be the reason for this. I'm looking for advice to help me decide if I should move on to another market (remote investing) or keep looking for the right deal in this market. I should mention I am a new investor and own zero property, I'm a renter myself currently.

The first thing to know about my market is that it is a small town built up around, and completely dependent on, an active military base. 

Some might not be aware how this effects a market, but the long and short of it is 95% of people living here long term own their house or build on family land (I imagine this typical of most small towns.) Thus almost all of the renters in this area are military families coming in and out of the area constantly, some being here as short 18 months before moving on. 

This short timing leads to higher turnover between renters. That means fixing up the property, marketing the property, and having to deal with vacancy a lot more frequently than most investors would be used to. 

Because there are thousands of potential renters coming in and out of the area annually, there are many many people who have already invested here and so there are many many similar properties for rent at the same time all of the time. Which drives the rent prices down to stay competitive and avoid long vacancies.

Another factor is that, as many of us know, a lot of people are beginning to see the benefit of owning and the potential of future rental income. My market is SATURATED with cheap houses, decent size homes with decent size lots are plentiful here and most are going for under 120k. So military families coming in are frequently making the choice to buy rather than rent.

So long story short, high turnover in renters and the saturated rental market, make it hard to justify investing here unless the deal is just really really good. 

I've been using the bigger pockets buy and hold calculator to analyze several potential deals, and even underselling the potential expenses (not airing on the conservative side at all) the best deal I found was only making about $50 a month in cash flow.

I've tried getting creative buy looking at tax sales and trying to find owners of property that looks abandoned, but I'm not have much luck off market. To be honest I'm terrified of doing an off market deal since I've never been through the home buying process at all and don't know what to expect so I'm probably not being as aggressive with pursuing off market as I could be.

I want to be Brandon Turner when I grow up, but I'm already older than him so I really want to get started. Anyway, sorry to be long winded, but BP always says in their podcasts that people post questions without giving enough information to get a real answer.

Thanks again,

Samantha