All Forum Posts by: Ben Firstenberg

 Not sure if you mean geographic areas or investment strategies. If it's the former, I think smaller markets like the ones you mentioned are a great place to start. A lot of investors get their start working in smaller markets where prices and pressure aren't as high. If you're talking about investment strategies, I think house hacking is a great place to start. It's easier to make a house hack deal work than a true rental AND you gain a lot of hands on experience with property management and day to day operations. 

A lot of the books by Brandon Turner and David Greene are pretty modern, I would say.

I really liked BRRRR, How to invest with little or no money down and Long Distance real estate investing

Dude hats off to you. $2M at 20 years old? What a rockstar.

I would start by deciding what your investing goals are and how involved you want to be. Sounds like you're interested in steady monthly income but are you looking to live/retire on this income or just supplement what you already have. Are you looking to start a business where you're doing renovations and other things to increase property value or are you a turnkey kind of guy?

Maybe the right solution for you is a mix of cash flow and appreciation targeted investments? You could invest some in a place like Cleveland OH (great cash flow market and my hometown) and some in a place like Atlanta (great appreciation potential, where I live now). I personally love both markets but there are lots of great options out there. 

Happy to talk more about either market or offer advice where I can. Feel free to reach out! Contact info in my bio

You can get bank loans that don't require you to live in the property. It's really only agency lenders (FHA/Fannie/Freddie) that care about that since they can give you lower rates/better terms if you're living there. When you talk to your lender just let them know you won't be living on the property and they'll know what to do.

First of all, sucks that your expenses ended up higher than you thought. This has happened to me too and it's not fun. 

Second, if your property does not cash flow I wouldn't necessarily shy away from raising the rent. You said it's competitive, but what are those other houses getting per room? You can absolutely raise the rent to "market prices". As long as it's not excessive, I think your tenants will understand. Most people, especially in coastal markets, expect rent to increase every year. At least... they should.

As far as charging for the garage, I would definitely do so. The only problem might be enforcing it, since you can't exactly tow cars or call the police. Maybe you could, but it would be a hassle. So if you can come up with a system to enforce it, go for it. Parking is a premium in coastal markets!

On the commercial side, a lot of people are using less and less leverage to make deals work. Debt is too expensive so they're not using it!

A year ago, we saw people pushing 75+% LTV/LTC. Now we're looking at 50-60% LTV or maybe even less. I closed a deal at 30% LTV!

Of course, it's easier for the big buyers to do that, since they have lots of cash.

I agree in that I think this is a good way to think about it. And I also agree generally with where you've ranked most of the cities. 

Where I disagree is that "established/affordable" is kind of correlated to "growth/cash flow". In this case, affordable and cash flow mean basically the same thing, which is why your trend is from bottom left to top right. I think what you're really getting at is the stability of the market? I might plot something else like population growth, construction activity or maybe even job growth on the other axis. Something like that might give a clearer picture of how stable the market is. 

That said, it's still a great chart and a good way of looking at things. Hat's off to you for creating it

Hey Beth and Ken, great to meet you and good luck!

One of my closest friends is from Northern NJ so I felt like I had to chime in!

Hey Alex, you're on the right path man! Couple of thoughts for your consideration:

First of all, my main priority would be to get that income up. $18/hr in NYC is borderline criminal. You seem like a smart guy and you seem like you have your sh*t reasonably together at 19, so I'm proud of you for that. Now it's time to go out there and EARN. Not sure what your job is, but maybe there are ways for you to take on some overtime or some extra responsibilities and work yourself up to some higher wages? If not, maybe you can leverage that experience into a different job with better career potential?

Second, I wouldn't waste time with MLM or affiliate marketing or even stocks. This might be a controversial opinion, since some people will say "Do what you gotta do to make money and get ahead" and I definitely see where they're coming from. From my perspective, there's only so many hours in the day and a man can only focus on so many things at a time. Humans' capacity for work is immense, but trying to wrap your arms around real estate in addition to a full time job is hard enough. So I'd say stick with the job and the real estate for now. Focus all-in on both of those. 

A great way to do that would be to go get your real estate license. I'm not sure what that process is like in NYC, it might be a little bit pricey, but sometimes you can find brokerages that will pay for it. You'll learn so much about real estate just by getting the license and then working to get your first deals done. It'll be hard but you can do it. 

Lastly, you mentioned mentorship. Mentorship is tricky since you can't force it, it sort of has to happen naturally. So if you want to work on that, I would say just get some older guys around you that you can look up to and learn from. Ask them for advice, stay in touch and when you find the right person, the mentorship will come. You could look for these people at churches, gyms, networking events.

Good luck!

Hey David, 

I'm an agent and investor in the area. More than happy to offer advice if I can. Please feel free to reach out.