All Forum Posts by: Matthew Sweere

Hi everyone,

I’m a relatively newbie investor, having successfully house-hacked my first property for the past year. I’m moving to the bay area (South bay area: Sunnyvale, Mountain View, North San Jose) in early spring 2022 for personal reasons. As someone who is always looking to minimize housing expenses and maximize equity gain, I’m considering a few different paths when it comes to investing in a new home. I’m looking for tips/guidance, all of which is helpful!

1. The first option is to do a live-in flip. Does anyone have experience doing this in this market? Or just flips in general? Do you have referrals to off-market deal finders? Trying to balance getting as much equity in initial purchase price with actually needing to live in the property.

2. The second option is to buy a more turnkey type property and renting/Airbnb-ing additional rooms. With my budget and asset-base, I probably can’t afford much more than a 2-bedroom house, unless there’s some off-market ones for less than $750k, so I don’t know how effective this strategy would be.

3. Renting a 2- or 3-bedroom apartment/house that allows me to sublet, where I Airbnb the additional room(s).

TYIA for the help!

Hi everyone,

I’m a relatively newbie investor, having successfully house-hacked my first property for the past year. I’m moving to the bay area (South bay area: Sunnyvale, Mountain View, North San Jose) in early spring 2022 for personal reasons. As someone who is always looking to minimize housing expenses and maximize equity gain, I’m considering a few different paths when it comes to investing in a new home. I’m looking for tips/guidance, all of which is helpful!

1. The first option is to do a live-in flip. Does anyone have experience doing this in this market? Or just flips in general? Do you have referrals to off-market deal finders? Trying to balance getting as much equity in initial purchase price with actually needing to live in the property.

2. The second option is to buy a more turnkey type property and renting/Airbnb-ing additional rooms. With my budget and asset-base, I probably can’t afford much more than a 2-bedroom house, unless there’s some off-market ones for less than $750k, so I don’t know how effective this strategy would be.

3. Renting a 2- or 3-bedroom apartment/house that allows me to sublet, where I Airbnb the additional room(s).

TYIA for the help!

Hi everyone,

I’m a relatively newbie investor, having successfully house-hacked my first property for the past year. I’m moving to the bay area (South bay area: Sunnyvale, Mountain View, North San Jose) in early spring 2022 for personal reasons. As someone who is always looking to minimize housing expenses and maximize equity gain, I’m considering a few different paths when it comes to investing in a new home.  I’m looking for tips/guidance, all of which is helpful!

1. The first option is to do a live-in flip. Does anyone have experience doing this in this market? Or just flips in general? Do you have referrals to off-market deal finders? Trying to balance getting as much equity in initial purchase price with actually needing to live in the property. 

2. The second option is to buy a more turnkey type property and renting/Airbnb-ing additional rooms. With my budget and asset-base, I probably can’t afford much more than a 2-bedroom house, unless there’s some off-market ones for less than $750k, so I don’t know how effective this strategy would be. 

3. Renting a 2- or 3-bedroom apartment/house that allows me to sublet, where I Airbnb the additional room(s). 

TYIA for the help!

Thank you very much ! @Wale Lawal. That means a lot because we still feel like we have a lot to do in order to gain real momentum.

We’ll definitely look at the AirBnb angle. We hadn’t considered that very seriously up to this point.

Thank you for the congratulations! @Wale Lawal  The location is actually near Memorial Hermann Medical Center, so we may look at renting to traveling nurses in the future.  We didn't furnish the individual rooms, but as both my business partner and I are living here, communal areas are completely furnished.  The $1000 rent includes utilities being paid by my business partner and me.

Thank you! @Dmitriy Fomichenko

Thanks @Luke Trovinger!  I would love to house hack in the future. Right now, the gameplan is to study up as much as possible on different RE techniques for when I move out.  Currently, I’m imagining a multi-family house hack and/or a live-in flip being my best two options

Townhouse buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $385,000
Cash invested: $20,000

My business partner and I bought a 4-bed, 4-bath townhome in November, 2020 that we are now house hacking with two of our friends. While the cash flow is not positive, it significantly reduces our amount of escrow payment having two others live here. Considering we bought the home before getting into real estate investing, I don't find it to be a terrible deal as it would cash flow with 4 tenants.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

We liked it because it could easily be house hacked with 3 floors. We wanted a home that we felt could be turned into a full-time rental once we left and this home can be rented out by room or as an entire unit.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

My business partner found this deal while just looking at different homes. We had brought in a real estate agent to negotiate the deal as we were just out of college and didn't have much experience with real estate.

How did you finance this deal?

We used a conventional mortgage with a 5% down payment. We didn't have a lot of cash upfront as we were just beginning our first jobs out of school.

How did you add value to the deal?

We didn't know about adding value to deals at the time. We just negotiated for the seller to provide money towards our closing costs

What was the outcome?

We're currently house hacking, earning $1000 in rent from each of our two tenants.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

Don't put all your money into a deal. If you have to do so, the deal timing is probably not right for you. Doing that has put us to square one with regard to saving up for a future deal.