All Forum Posts by: Jessenia Hartage

Hey Jessenia, if you decide to stick with NY, focus on understanding local laws, tenant screening, and working with a good property management company to help mitigate risks. You might want to consider Columbus, Ohio, instead of Queens or Brooklyn, NY. Columbus offers strong job growth, a growing population, and is more landlord-friendly. You'll find many positive cash flow opportunities and a safer investment environment. As an investor and agent here in Columbus Ohio, if you have any questions or want to connect, definitely reach out!

Thanks for the information Omar, By chance would you be able to provide the name(s) of those companies that offer the bonds please?

Hey @Jessenia Hartage - I'm a broker, investor, property manager, in NYC. 

NYC may not be a landlord "friendly" city relative to other parts of the country - but don't be fooled by the absurd headlines you'll hear. 

What I can say is that the headlines about the difficult tenants and rent restrictions cause issues or a small fraction of property owners - but you'll never hear about the 99% of cases where tenants are paying on time and respect their landlords' properties. 

if I'm in your shoes, in terms of recommended criteria, I would opt for looking for strongly appreciating areas and not just monthly cashflow. Most landlords actually lose money for the first few years (if you're focused solely on profit AKA income - expenses) but the vision for most owners here is to bank on the strong appreciation of property prices in NYC.

Shoot me a DM or text me if you'd like to chat further, happy to give you my $0.02 as well. 

You’ll get a lot of different answers here, I think most people in these forums shy away from tenant friendly states. I invest in Rochester ny (which is very tenant friendly) and the tenant friendly nature had given me issues yet, mostly it’s helped me reduce liabilities. Mostly what this means to me is you can’t fly by the seat of your pants and need to do things by the book and be very business like about it. You need to buy high quality properties, have stringent screening policies and take care of the property. Your margins also need to be better on the deal upfront because you need to have reserves to deal with a 6 month eviction process and you need to do a good job of documenting the evidence.

With that said I had a mentor who was smarter than me who said real estate in tier 1 cities is the best store of wealth. Despite them all being deep blue tenant friendly cities, they are also the engines of wealth creation in this country and therefore over a long period (20+ years) are likely to outperform everything else.

At the end of the day, you need to come up with an investment thesis you believe in. Maybe that thesis is wealth flows to the biggest and best cities like NYC therefore real estate will outperform else where in the country. One also does significantly better local so between those two things, dealing with the more difficult landlord laws are worth it. Another one might be I want to risk less money on the first deal even if investing out of state is more difficult and I need landlord friendly laws so my mistakes are less expensive.

With NYC, two house hacks are likely to get you enough for retirement. I could never be surrounded by some many people, but it’s househacking there is a great opportunity.

Go read the laws on tenant protections and come up with your own thesis. Best of luck.

The best way to protect yourself investing in NYC is to buy higher quality assets and require exceptional credit credentials from your applicants to obtain approval to rent. Minimum credit score 720. Unfortunately you cannot check New York eviction records and they are the best predictor of future problems. Are you ready to upgrade your primary and turn your current home into a rental?

If you're looking for cheap stuff with high cashflow you need not travel further than the areas around Camden, NJ, Newark, NJ etc. Bridgeport and Hartford CT are also worth looking into.