Hi all,
My name is Brad and I'm a newbie to investing in real-estate, though I'm not new at all to the world of rentals.
My current career/day job is being a Clinical Social Worker for the VA's HUD-VASH/Section 8 housing program, a program I'm sure many of you are familiar with and probably rent to tenants through. Hopefully, I can be helpful to members of the community that aren't familiar with the program learn the details, get in touch with their local arm of the program, and foster some great rental relationships. I love my work, and between my wife and I, make a good stable living where we currently save for rentals of our own.
We are approaching the level of savings where we feel comfortable investing in our first property, an owner occupied multi-family property, where we can begin our real estate investing and, hopefully, grow primarily as low to mid level rental owners to the point where we can purchase a dream home in 15-20 years, as well as have a good set of rentals to supplement our retirement incomes 15-20 years beyond that (we're on the younger side, if you can't tell by the timeline).
While I have a lot of experience in helping people locate, and then succeed in, low income housing, I have only limited experience in actually managing a property from the owner side. My parents have recently taken over an effective 5 unit property from my Grandfather, who is no longer mobile enough to manage and keep up on them himself (There's actually 6 units, but he still resides in one and looks like he will for a good long time, God willing). They've struggled with many aspects of management that I've read other people mention in my short time on the site, and while I've been able to give them advice based on what I've learned from the landlords I have relationships with, there is still a big learning curve. On the plus side, the transfer of the property didn't incur a significant tax burden, so my parents essentially acquired it for free. On the downside, there were two poor tenants, one reasonably good tenant, two vacancies, virtually no upgrades or remodels done beyond the absolute bare minimum over the last 25 years, and the neighborhood is poor (though not War-Zone status). They are looking like they will need to invest about $10-$20k into the property to bring it to a good working level. Long story short, I would like to be able to learn from their experience to help my own investing journey along, as well as help them achieve their goals with my acquired knowledge.
Thank you to all who have contributed to the site so far, I have been reading and learning quite a lot over the past few days and look forward to connecting with all of you in the future!
Cheers,
Brad
