If you want to fill your property with residents sourced from the companies above, imagine being the overworked, relatively low-level employee tasked with finding the appropriate housing ASAP.

Long term, the Austin market will do just fine with strong population and job growth.

Thus, I have worked 2 jobs (1  is self employment) for 7 years to fund purchasing a few single family homes locally. 20k is not enough to purchase IMO, that should be your savings AFTER your purchase.

You have to be an active manager and many current owners are not wanting a second job and are selling.

The city is rapidly growing in terms of population and job market with so many major companies choosing to move and develop here like Intel, Google, Amazon, etc.

Heck of a job keeping all the paperwork from 22 years ago. 2 realtors and an inspector and none of them knew an old house or deck would be up to code?

I continued paying what I had paid before, with the additional money purely going to principal.The recast to a lower amount was purely to reduce my committed monthly payment to a point that I could get my property to cash flow if I had to move out (job loss, etc).

Today we are economically diverse and showing job growth in several sectors.Having said that, I am not an economist (or a fortune teller) so these are just my thoughts after having gone through the Great Recession and knowing how housing-dependent we were then.Melanie

You can tell who is actually passionate about their job and passionate about the market usually pretty quickly.

I guess my challenge right now is to define the strategy and balance all the factors, such as job and population growth (value increase), cashflow (demand & supply market, interest rate, property tax, maintenance cost), and risk control (insurance etc).