All Forum Posts by: Lawrence Leung

Joe Sz , Crystal balls and speculation aside, nobody on BP can give you a specific answer to what you should do because everyone’s situation is different. The best (IMHO)you can do is seek out a tax and wealth advisor that you can work with so they can better understand your long term preferences as it relates to your estate and then give you advice on sustainable income into retirement (passive and/or retirement accounts), charitable preferences and heirs, if applicable. One you have a strategy, you can work with the advisor to decide on which real estate vehicles can help you going forward like what @Jay Hinrichs suggested.

@Wen Chuang, As well as being an investor in the Bay Area/San Francisco, I also run a property management company in San Francisco and what you're asking and describing unfortunately doesn't have a simple answer and falls into those all too familiar words of "It Depends." There are many things to consider and think through which you may have already done, but here are some others if you haven't...

1. SFH/SFR in the city do not behave like anywhere else in the country. Location of your MIL's home, as with everything in real estate, is key. But even with a good location in San Francisco, the price point is so high for homes that your pool of prospective tenants will be very very low. Very few families can afford such a high price point and so you are instead left with a roommate situation and hopefully with professionals and not students. I see that you want to target professionals because of close proximity to 19th Avenue, but based on experience in the area, many of the homes we rent in Parkside and Sunset do not attract the IT professionals because or location and proximity. IT professionals lean more toward the other bus routes that go through Noe Valley, Marina and the Mission District. Sunset and Parkside tend to attract more students because of USF, UCSF or SFSU.
2. Rent control is another big consideration as @Account Closed suggested.  Run the numbers and see what works!!  If you have any other questions or want to talk more, you can PM me anytime.

   Cheers, Lawrence

Ana Marie B. , Mike M. Provided a great read from @Sean Carroll on a high level process, but with everything out there, the devil is in the details. You can easily be more or less involved, and whichever you choose will significantly influence your ROI. For example, you can be fully hands off and less involved (meaning less ROI) and have an engineer/architect, interior designer, construction/project manager and general contractor do everything for you. OR you can decide to pick and choose what you would like to be involved with your project. The more you do, the higher your ROI. But the best and most invaluable part above and beyond your increased ROI is the hands on experience. Bottom line, there is no right way to do things and sometimes what works for one investor might not work for another (you). At the end of the day, you need to explore different options and determine what you’re comfortable with based on the numbers and you’re desired ROI. Full disclosure for flipping, we recently finished a high end project and it is very involved, a lot of work and not for the faint at heart.

Welcome Keith, the best place to start is to search “multi-family investing” (and later add in additional key words for more filtered results like San Francisco or Bay Area) and read through the wealth of information in forum posts, articles and podcasts. Once you have a more specific question you have not found answered yet you can reach out to the BP community. Cheers, Lawrence

Hey everyone,  I'm looking to take a big first step toward financial freedom a la real estate investing and was ecstatic to find BP. Would very much love to network and meet more like minded folks, but realized there wasn't much in terms of events for San Francisco.  So I'm reaching out to see if anyone is interested in meeting up on a regular basis to talk about all thing Real Estate, and if there is, I would be happy to organize and put something on the event calendar.

A little bit about me...  I started in real estate in earnest about 10 years ago while I was still a W2 employee, but thinking of finally hanging up my hat with a primary focus on real estate investing.

Cheers,

Lawrence