Does anyone here have experience buying a property in a city where they don't live, when they don't own their primary residence?
I stumbled into an opportunity to buy a really unique (historic) property that's in a great walkable neighborhood in a nearby major city. It's in a place near where I lived previously, close to family, and en route to other family. It's a place we'd be happy to vacation and where we've already discussed moving for our jobs someday (it would just be a transfer for one of us and lots of opportunity for the other, but it wouldn't be for at least 10 years). In the meantime, we plan to rent it out, with a strong possibility of turning it into a boutique vacation rental. I've read over the HOA policies and they would permit this. I also spoke with neighbors who do this and the rate we would likely get would more than cover the mortgage, even if it's occupied only 60% of the time, giving us plenty of time to enjoy it ourselves. The house is in good condition now (renovated bathrooms and recently repaired and assessed roof), but there's always the possibility of unexpected expenses. With a historic home and an HOA, there are lots of rules about how we would have to maintain the property. Most of them are superficial (paint color and material choices in renovations). Fortunately, there are no rules about who has to do it (unlike a lot of other historic property HOAs), which would save us some money.
My family currently rents in our hometown because that what makes sense for us in our current city. We have a very reasonable apartment we love, and our living expenses would go way up through either a mortgage or transit if we bought in our home city. We live within our means and can afford to take on the 30-year mortgage expenses while continuing to max out two retirement accounts and contributing to other investments. The money that would cover the mortgage would come from other savings accounts. We recently got rid of a lot of student loan debt and had been saving the money with vague ideas about it being for a down payment someday, but hadn't really figured out what to do with it. I'm ambivalent about buying, since I'm not sure it even makes economic sense where we live, but we thought having a down payment saved up would give us freedom to buy if rent were to skyrocket in the future or if we stumbled across an amazing deal in our current city. I don't see us buying in our area for at least 5 years though, since it's so expensive and the inventory is so, so low ATM. The biggest risk I can think of related to buying the other property would be that if we ended up finding something in our current city that was a home we loved, will we wish we had the money we'd poured into the other property? I don't expect we'd have problems selling, but that seems impossible to rely on. The possibility of a passive(ish) income and investment is pretty tempting. Any thoughts?
