Learning, Sharing, and Teaching > Real Estate and Landlording

What Made You Purchase Your First Property?

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RidetheRain:
Everyone has opinions on how/when to purchase your first property. I'm guessing most people purchased a primary residence first, but you never know! Some people say only purchase a house after marriage and others say when they had the cash and saw something profitable and just went for it!

I thought it would be interesting to see what made people here take the leap into real estate - for rental or personal use. Was there a beautiful house for the cheap or did you have a kid and decide it was time to settle down, or - as this article says - are you a millennial with a dog?

clarkfan1979:
The layout was perfect.

I ignored that there was 10K of cosmetic repair needed.

ketchup:
I wanted to move out of my parents' house, and my girlfriend wanted to move across the country.  Girlfriend also wanted to bring along girlfriend's sister and girlfriend's sister's boyfriend.

I found the cheapest house within 10 miles of my parents' house (I don't recommend this strategy) and it seemed good enough.  500 square foot 1 bedroom 1 bathroom house for $18k at the bottom of the market in 2012.  Viewed the house with the listing agent, plunked down $3500 down (brought in literal cash to the closing because I was an idiot) and paid the rest over five years to the seller (owner financing).  I was 20 (GF was 19).  The four of us lived there for just over a year, and good times were had by all as we figured life out.  Now a rental and paid off.

Second house is more of the "millennial with a dog" situation.  3bed/1bath ~900 square foot house for just GF and I, along with our dogs.  We were 24/23 at this point.

The first house was lucky since I had no idea what the hell I was doing.  For the second, I knew what I was doing, and did the whole "normal" realtor/30yr mortgage route.

Rcc:
Factors on choosing our first and current home:

1. Sale price was 2.13x my salary at the time. Banks were trying to get me into mortgages 4-5x my salary at the time

2. It was located less than 5 minutes away from my employer

3. It’s located less than 10 min away from most employers in the RTP area ( IT, my field, along with halo like employers for my skills ) gave me the confidence I wouldn’t need to relocate.

4. More space than we needed (1950 sq ft) so the upgrade temptation never infected us.

Full context, bought in 2000. Factor 3 & 4 have held up very well. Four employers later, and I’m still <20 min commute (if I choose to go in at all!)

thedayisbrave:
The numbers worked.  My eventual goal was to build up a portfolio of rental properties, so my 1st made sense cash flow wise.  I house hacked for a few years - lived in one bedroom and rented out the other 3.  Then when it came time to move on, I rented out the whole unit and bought another place :)

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