You should invest where you feel you have a competitive advantage.

Congratulations on your first investment, excited to hear more about your success. 

Feel free to reply here or DM me—I’d love to learn more about your investing strategies and see how we can help each other succeed.Wishing you all a successful and prosperous 2025! 

Ultimately, I plan on investing myself either going the house hacking route or doing a flip. 

I'm also based in CA and invest out of state (Detroit).

I plan to stay in this general area for at least the next 20 years and think buying real estate would be a great way to diversify my investment portfolio.So in almost any scenario you will come ahead buying vs renting over twenty years probably well less than half of that, but the investment you are making is a long term investment you probably won’t be able to leave after a year or two and rent for more than your mortgage, I’d really think about where you want to live medium-long term, than any investment metric, because the longer you stay the better the investment looks, and if you can move out sooner great, but I’d guess at minimum you’d have to stay 5 years before rents would catch up to your mortgage. 

Still, I think you'd find it difficult to find one that would be a good long-term investment unless you had another ~20-30 years to go, it's at least cash neutral, and you don't plan to hold it too long (to avoid too much investment loss and before you get to the point where it's unsellable because of too few years left); that's another way of saying that maybe it suits your cash needs in the near-term or is at least less of a pill to swallow than other options until you find something that's more of a sensible long-term play

Quote from @Evan Malburg: Hey BP Community, I'm new to investing, but not new to real estate.

Depending on what your investing goals are you want to looking into self directed IRA vs. checkbook IRA or even better if you qualify Solo 401k.

Nor do RE investing styles!