All Forum Posts by: Tammy Tebben

@Cody Davis We recently bought a duplex with tenants. One unit has a long term tenant (5 years), the other had one month left on their lease. What we did was give them a welcome letter right after we closed that said, "welcome to ABC Properties, we're the new landlord" and we set forth expectations such as rent is due on the first, we use xyz app to collect rent so please email us your contact info ASAP so we can get you set up in our software and here's how you submit maintenance requests. Both tenants got us their email addresses and submitted their rent via the app starting the very first month.

Daniel, if you don't mind sharing the name with multiple people, we're also looking and would love a referral.

@Mikael Winkler thanks for the advice & book recommendation. We originally thought we would start local but then thought Columbus might be a better market, but enough BP members have advised us to start local that I think we will start there.  The Lancaster market is definitely cheaper to enter. Based on our rather conservative calculations, Lancaster hasn't had much to offer yet but we've only been looking for a few weeks.  I'm sure something will come up. 

Congrats on your property, sounds like you found a great deal. We have considered BRRRR but we just don't feel we have the time for that right now...hopefully we will in about a year when a major work project completes and there's more time & mental bandwidth. For now we just want to jump in and get started before we lose motivation.

@Zeke Liston thanks for suggesting starting locally...one more person pushing us in that direction. That must be where we need to start :)

@Remington Lyman thats good to know. We saw the same thing in our research. We thought we'd start with cash flow so we can quit our full time jobs and then switch our focus to appreciation.

@Daniel Judge, those are all great questions that I wish I had answers for. While we have no reason to be connected to it, we seem to keep coming back to Raleigh, NC, when looking for a place to retire. So I guess we'd like to hear opinions on Raleigh. For a strategy, we've been thinking of starting with a turn-key to help us get started more quickly. We would like to eventually BRRRR but aren't sure we're ready for that yet. For a budget, we have $100k to get started. Our five-year goal is $2k/mo cash flow, 10 year is $6k/mo. After that, the sky's the limit.

Hello BiggerPockets Forums,

My husband and I have begun looking into real estate investing as a way to extract ourselves from the 9 to 5 rat race. We're both earning a decent living but are constantly stressed and no longer enjoy the work we're doing. We want to become our own bosses and begin letting our money work for us instead of working for it.

We both grew up in Columbus, OH, and are now living in Lancaster, OH (40 miles south of Columbus). Since we're just starting our investing career we figure we'll invest in either Columbus (more opportunities and better appreciation) or Lancaster (now more familiar). But our five-year goal has us moving farther south, so we have wondered if it would make more sense to begin investing where we would like to end up (I'd love to hear your opinions on this).

At this point we're still in the education phase, we just finished reading "The Book on Rental Property Investing" by @Brandon Turner, and have attended several BiggerPockets Webinars. We are now thinking the time has come to take the plunge. We still have lots of questions and we look forward to discussing them with other BiggerPockets forum members soon.

Tammy and David Tebben

That certainly jives with our experience. Thank you @Robert Ellis

Thank you @Remington Lyman. Getting connected with an agent is on our short list of things to do. At this point we're trying to analyze many different properties to start getting an idea of what makes a good deal. We didn't expect every listing on BP to be a winner but were a bit disappointed to see that none of them even seem to still be available.  May be DM you when we're ready to begin working with an agent?

Are the real estate listing on BP still being maintained? When browsing the listings we see a LOT of properties that say "For Sale over 1 yr ago." And when we then search on Zillow they've all been sold (sometimes over a year ago). Is there a filter we're missing or a way to see only active postings? We're looking in the Columbus, OH area and even the newest posting (about 1 month ago) is off market according to Redfin. We're new BP pro members just beginning our real estate investing adventure, and we were hoping BP would be a trust worthy place to find interesting leads (we know - trust but verify - always do your own research). So far, however, everything we've seen is either no longer on the market or a foreclosure that requires a separate paid subscription (maybe those are already sold too?). Any advice would be greatly appreciated.