All Forum Posts by: Erik Trefzger

Hi Everyone, thanks for all the responses, I look forward to becoming part of the community.

@Zach Schwarzmiller and @Gerald K. you guys are a little north of me, but if I can't find any meetups in South Seattle, Renton, or Bellevue, I'll make the trek sometime. Does anyone know of any meetups or REI groups in South Seattle or Renton? I found one in Bellevue last year that I went to twice (found it on meetups.com) but it seemed very pitchy w/o a lot of good information being exchanged.

Hello BP,

My wife and I live in beautiful South Seattle and are relatively new real estate investors. I am an Energy Trader and my wife works in Tech, and real estate investing has been a part-time job of sorts for us for the past few years.

We first got interested in real estate in 2011 because of the dramatic fall in prices that we saw across the country. We started making offers in Las Vegas as well as locally in 2011 and bought our first property in 2012. We now own 4 SFRs, a duplex, and a triplex, and just completed our first ever sale of a property (a quadplex in Vegas). We still own one SFR in Las Vegas but we are committed to staying local as investing long-distance turned out to be more of a hassle than it was worth, despite the phenomenal gains that we locked in by buying at the bottom of the market.

Up to now we have only bought distressed properties as long-term rentals and plan on holding onto the nine units we currently own. Eight of the nine units are local to Tacoma, Auburn, and Seattle. We have some experience overseeing the rehab since every property we have bought needed specific work, but that is still probably the part of the process we are worst at.

While our primary goal is building our long-term rental portfolio, we would like to start flipping one or two houses per year to help replenish all of the cash we spend on acquiring and rehabbing our rental properties.

My primary goal on BP is to find a mentor in the Seattle area. Even though we have done a few deals, I know I still have a lot to learn and would like to learn from someone wiser and more experienced than me. I only recently discovered BP and it's nice to use as a resource. Up until now we have been trying to figure it out on our own as we go along.

Best,

Erik