Quote from @Nick Harrington:
Hey Kollin -
I'm an investor myself in the Milwaukee area and also help a lot of house-hacker clients to find their first investment property.
For 150K, the neighborhoods I recommend that I see long term appreciation are going to be Riverwest, Harambe, Bay View, Washington Heights, and pockets of West Allis. These are neighborhoods that I see a lot of first time investors succeed in, and neighborhoods that I believe in long term.
Have you considered the duplex route instead of a single family or condo? With a duplex, you can still rent out your bedrooms, you have an additional tenant to offset your cash flow even further, and then down the road you have a rental property that is ideally cash flowing once you move out. This is how I got my start, and it gave me the ability to save up to add further investments to my portfolio and keep it as a cash flowing property long term.
Hello and thank you for the feedback! I was actually initially looking at duplexes and multifamily units. However, after looking at a lot of duplexes in Milwaukee, I began to notice some potential limitations with the financing for the property. Finding a lender that is willing to work with me would likely be very difficult for a 200-250k duplex. After all, I am a college student and my net income is around 15k per year. In this case, my DTI would be less than favorable to a bank. The second reason is that my down payment would have to be much lower in order to make a deal in this price range work. On top of those, I am a young first-time homebuyer and much risker to a bank (my credit score is around 650 so not terrible but also not amazing especially since banks are being more cautious with who they lend to now).
After putting a lot of thought into these reasons, I came to the realization that I should not limit myself to only looking at duplexes. Of course, I am still open to a duplex but my main concern is finding the best deal that I can and most importantly, a deal that works. This is why I have been strongly considering condos and single-family properties. A single-family or condo would be much less expensive than a duplex in the same area. Also, my LTV would be much lower if I were to buy a property for less than 150k and my DTI would be much more appealing. As a result, I feel like financing will be much easier. I would appreciate any other suggestions! Thanks!
