Moving 1,500 Miles Away to Buy His First Rental with Just $25,000

Ashley:
Many BiggerPockets employees are also investors, but today we’re joined by an employee who purchased his first investment property after working here for less than six months. He is a true rookie and he’s already picked up invaluable lessons that all of us can learn from whether you’re new to investing or looking for that push to finally get started, this episode is packed with takeaways for everyone. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with Tony j Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And I’m super excited to welcome none other than Austin Wolff to the Real Estate Rookie podcast. Austin, how you doing, brother?

Austin:
Good. Good. I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me,

Tony:
Dude. Excited to get into the story, man. Now a few things. We’re going to discuss how to select an out-of-State Market, how to analyze your first deal as a true rookie and how maybe relocating for a house hack might be one of the best ways to get started in real estate investing. So let’s jump in with Austin.

Ashley:
Austin, tell us a little bit about your life. So you were working at BiggerPockets, and did you ever think when you started working at BiggerPockets that you were going to get in real estate investing? Was that something you already had in the back of your mind or did BiggerPockets introduce you to the idea of investing?

Austin:
No, that’s a great question. I’ve actually been interested in real estate for a very long time. Probably in 2018 is when I first heard of BiggerPockets. And from there I started to get my finances in order. I was just out of high school. So learning how to make decent money and just going through the process that I’m sure a lot of other investors have gone through, real estate has always kind of been the end goal for me. The real reason I want to invest in real estate is to create art. I’m from Los Angeles. I screen write, I wrote a movie, I produced a movie. I want to write and act the rest of my life, but it doesn’t quite pay as well as almost anything else. So real estate was always sort of the goal. And after I wrote a movie, I was like, man, I need to get money to fund this thing.

Austin:
This isn’t cutting it. So I decided to sort of change careers slightly. And I have a background in mathematics. I was studying to be an actuary. They’re the math petitions behind insurance companies. And I sort of combined that skill with, I used to also code video games in high school. So the coding plus the math made for this unique job title called a data scientist. And they essentially use coding and statistics to look at data and to look at trends. And I thought it would be a perfect fit to also merge that with my interests in real estate. So I really wanted to use those skills to see, okay, where are the best places to invest? Because I lived in Los Angeles and house hacking was a little hard in 2019. It’s a lot harder now, especially since prices have risen and so have interest rates. So to me, house hacking, I couldn’t really find any deals that worked. And so out-of-State investing was really the main vehicle that I wanted to go in When I was analyzing these markets, I was building a dashboard for myself to find the best markets, and that’s when I saw a posting on Dave Meyer’s Instagram for a market intelligence analyst. And I’m like, oh, I think I’d be a good fit for this. So long story short, now I’m here doing market analytics for a living.

Ashley:
Welcome to the team.

Austin:
Thank

Tony:
You. Yeah, welcome to the team, man. But I got to say, we’ve interviewed a lot of people and I don’t think I’ve met anyone that had such a diverse career trajectory. As someone who wants to be an actor and an actuary, those are two radically different types of people. So the fact that you can make both of those work in your mind is super impressive.

Austin:
Thank you. Yeah, I like math and I like acting. So what can I say?

Tony:
So you say that the LA market, I’m in SoCal as well, so I know how challenging it can be. So I guess what was that first strategy then for the real estate deal you eventually took down?

Austin:
Yeah, so I wanted to find an out-of-state market that was not only affordable and had a good rent price ratio, but was also growing in population and employment and wages. Those three things are very important to me and I think they can help predict what the demand will be in the future for this given market. So the strategy then was I was like, okay, out of all the markets in the United States, let’s rank them. There are going to be places with good population growth, but maybe not good job growth because they’re vacation or retirement communities like the villages in Florida, big retirement community, not a lot of job growth technically, but a very big population growth that didn’t really appeal to me. I want places with also good employment growth and then there’s some places that experienced some employment growth and not as much population growth.

Austin:
Some places in Kansas were like that. So I needed both population and employment growth and places where prices were growing and places where rents were growing and also places where wages were growing. I just want a healthy market that’s growing that’s not a Los Angeles or a Boise or in Austin where its time is already passed in a way. Don’t get me wrong, those markets are still probably going to continue growing, but I’m priced out of them. I wanted to find a market that I wasn’t priced out of, a market that a newbie could enter in that is still growing. So sort of catching that wave, so to speak. I hope that makes sense.

Ashley:
I would have to say as you’re talking about, I’m looking for this, I’m looking for this, I’m looking for this. There’s got to be some kind of art form to what you’re describing here is not just looking at the data, but also being able to compare and to translate as to what is more for you than other types of criteria as to what do you want. And I think the fact of establishing what your strategy is first is the first step because the criteria that you’re going to look for in a market is way different if you are going to do a rental compared to if you’re going to flip a house. So that’s a great starting point. So once you’ve identified a market, what was that market?

Austin:
Yes, I’m so happy you brought up strategy because my strategy was always long-term rentals. I’m sure if my strategy were short-term rentals or mid-term rentals, I would have different variables that I appreciated more. But I was able to boil it down to actually my first ever blog article I published on the BiggerPockets team, I was working with Dave and we sort of decided together that the best first thing to publish would be a top 10 places to get started. And after running through all of those variables, a few markets stood out to me. There was Fayetteville, Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas. If anyone knows Henry Washington is listening to the podcasts. His backyard Indianapolis was also on the list. It’s very interesting. Their GDP per capita keeps growing and they have good population and job growth, but prices are still good. And Columbus, Ohio is another good example of one of those Midwest, I don’t want to say rust belt markets, but places where there’s affordability and job growth.

Austin:
The only thing I don’t personally like about Columbus, Ohio are the high property taxes. So I also factored that into account. If a place had high property taxes, I didn’t really look at it. So that kind of ruled out all of Texas because Texas has very high property taxes as well. So that’s kind of why I like Indianapolis more than Columbus is really that difference in property tax values. It’s going to be maybe a little harder to cash flow in Columbus than would in Indianapolis. Chattanooga, Tennessee was also one that popped up. You learn so many things about all these different cities when you do this deep dive. Chattanooga built a citywide smart grid and is offering really high internet to almost every single household and business in the city, which I never even knew about. And apparently that’s helped the startup culture there. So really, really interesting things happening in Chattanooga. But out of all those places, the two that I was looking in the most were Indianapolis, mostly for cashflow and Fayetteville, Arkansas because of the mix between affordability and also appreciation. And I think Fayetteville is going to appreciate a little faster than Indianapolis in this part.

Ashley:
Stay tuned after a break for more from Austin and how he chose the market for his very first deal and what went into this decision.

Tony:
Alright guys, welcome back to the show where we’re joined by Austin Wolff. Austin, you have a background obviously in digging deep into the data and I can tell just by the extreme level of detail that you still remember of all these different markets you were considering. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday and you remember all that data. It’s crazy. But BiggerPockets has a tool to help rookies that are listening, dissect and digest some of the data points that Austin was talking about. So if you go to biggerpockets.com/find a market, and also maybe you worked on this part of the website, but it’s a really incredible tool that helps you dig deep into some of the underlying data and economics around different potential markets.

Austin:
That tool’s going to be very helpful. I have to give credit where credit is due. That was basically finished by the time they brought me in, so give credit to the BiggerPockets team, not me, because they did a great job.

Ashley:
So that first property, which one did you end up deciding on of those markets?

Austin:
Yeah, so I decided to do a house sack, just the reason is I wanted to lower my living expenses and at the end of the day, what ended up happening over the past two years. And I want to be fully transparent because whenever I listen to the rookie podcast, I like to know as much about the guest as possible just so I can hopefully take the nuggets and apply it to my life. So just to give sort of background on why I chose a house act in Fayetteville rather than living in Los Angeles and investing out of state is essentially the same side of the coin. The coin is I decided to fund my own movie and I wrote it for myself. My character was 20 years old in the movie, I’m 27, so I’m not going to look 20 years old for much longer. And the clock was ticking and the whole point for me to invest in real estate was to make movies and play in this role. And I knew if I didn’t make this movie sooner or later, I regret it the rest of my life. So all the money I had saved for real estate, I took about two thirds of that and actually produced the movie. So I actually had less money to invest out of state after the movie’s production. I’m not regretting that decision at all. I think it was the right decision for me personally.

Ashley:
Austin, first of all, how were you able to save this big chunk of money?

Austin:
Yeah, out of high school, I was going to college to be an actuary and I decided I didn’t want to work for insurance companies the rest of my life. That sounded miserable. And so I’ll be honest, I dropped out of college because that wasn’t the path for me and I wanted to be a screenwriter. I was working minimum wage jobs and then I was like, I’m tired of being poor. So that’s when I decided to teach myself more data science. I went to sort of a trade school for coding and then I became a data scientist. And throughout the years, just to be frank, it increased my income to a healthy amount. So it all started with increasing my W2 income. I think that’s important for people here as well.

Ashley:
And I guess would it coincide with the fact that you stayed within your lifestyle and kept your living expenses the same and didn’t have the lifestyle creep that sometimes comes with making more money?

Austin:
No, absolutely not. So in May of 2020 height of Covid, me and my girlfriend, she actually found us a suite deal for a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles for $1,600, which I don’t know if anyone listening if that’s high or low, but for us that was extremely low and it was a nice neighborhood too. And one benefit of being a renter in Los Angeles is landlords can’t really raise rent on you. So we got a sweet deal from Covid and we rode that out until I moved to Arkansas. So no, I did not have lifestyle creep. We stayed within our means.

Ashley:
Okay, so it’s revealed, it’s Arkansas that you moved to. Tell us about the property that you found and how you found it.

Austin:
Yes. BiggerPockets has a tool called the deal Finder, which you can find on the website. It does what it sounds. It helps you find deals. And so I wanted the BiggerPockets steel finder. You’re able to see the different qualities of neighborhoods within a given market. So I wanted to find a neighborhood that wasn’t volatile, was highly likely to keep appreciating, was highly likely to have rent growth, and we have access to the underlying data. So I was able to double check the data and it all works. So I was able to identify a few key neighborhoods within the Fayetteville market and then you can also filter for good properties. And I found a new construction property about 10 minutes away from the University of Arkansas, which is a big draw and a big reason why Fayetteville, the city is growing right now North you have Bentonville, which is where Walmart HQ is and where all of the companies are sort of moving into.

Austin:
So all the high paying jobs are up north in Bentonville, it’s about 30 minutes away. And then the college is in Fayetteville. I found a property, it was $275,000 for a new construction, two bedroom and two and a half bath. And compared to the other properties out there in Fayetteville, you’re seeing if you wanted to get a new construction at that level, you’re seeing at least $330, $330,000. Excuse me. And so this property was extremely affordable and it sounded a little too good to be true. So I went on the BiggerPockets finding agent, I found a few different agents. I ended up, I called all of them. I found the one that I wanted to work with, and then I got the property under contract. And then I flew out there and I got the property under contract before I had actually walked the property because well, if I walked the property and I don’t like it, you can still back out during the due diligence period.

Austin:
So we got out under contract. I flew out about two months ago, end of August, and I landed at 6:00 PM There was a real estate meetup at seven. So I hurried over to the real estate meetup. I stayed there for an hour and then I drove to the neighborhood and I walked around it at night because I think it’s important to walk around the neighborhood at night to sort of check the vibe, so to speak. And it was completely safe. It was a nice neighborhood. I looked around the house, I probably looked a little weird, shining the flashlight through the windows at night trying to see the property. Maybe that wasn’t the best move to do, but no one stopped me and I was like, oh, this neighborhood’s pretty gray. The property’s awesome. So I got to know the neighborhood the next day we actually walked the property. I’m like, alright, what’s too good to be true about this? And so far it appears to have been built pretty good. We got an inspector out there, nothing horrible. We got a one year home warranty. So if anything does break within the air, it’s covered. And overall, yeah, that’s sort of the story of the property.

Tony:
I just wanted to ask one follow-up question. Austin, did you have any ties to Arkansas at all?

Austin:
None.

Tony:
No friends, no family didn’t go to school there. Nothing other than, hey, this is a great investment, is what pulled you into that market?

Austin:
Yes, and I’m probably going to be a weird unique story where I was driven purely by the numbers of where to live rather than how much I’m going to enjoy it or the people that I know. It was purely mathematical decision.

Tony:
Awesome. That is one of the most badass things I think we’ve heard on the Ricky podcast. For someone to literally pick up and move from Los Angeles to Arkansas based on nothing other than the cold, hard bottom line, dude, I love it, man.

Ashley:
Austin, can we get the numbers on this deal real quick? As far as how much capital did you end up saving from that chunk that you had left over? How much was that money? What was the purchase price would you have to put into it? How did you fund it?

Austin:
Yeah, so I just want to preface this by saying that this deal actually would not work as an out-of-state investment unless I had put a considerable amount down into it, about 40% down, which I had before the movie. But this is post movie.

Ashley:
So you’re saying if it was just an investment property and you didn’t move there as a house hack,

Austin:
Correct? Yes. This deal would not have worked unless you put 40% down. And the reason is this place is a very affordable place. It’s growing, but the median rents are below the national average, which is great for everybody here. And the rents are growing just slightly below national average. I’m fine with that because population job wages and prices are growing beyond the national average. So that was one thing that I was willing to give up is the fast rent growth. That being said, with respect to the deal, I had 30 grand left in the bank in my savings. I put 5% down that plus closing costs. I asked for five grand in closing costs from the seller. They agreed immediately, which tells me I should have asked for more in closing costs. So shame on me, I should have asked for 10. Also, the property didn’t come with gutters and I’m getting those installed soon.

Austin:
I should have asked for more help in closing costs from the builder. So that’s definitely a lesson when builders have properties and they’re still building a phase three down the street, they need to offload their inventory to help fund the rest of their buildings. And so they’re much more willing to offer incentives than people that aren’t builders, people that are just selling their home that they live in. So that’s certainly a lesson that I learned. That being said, after closing was a 16 grand total, even with their closing costs help and then the make ready costs, everything in the house is sort of on the higher end when it comes to finishes and appliances. So I wanted to sort of match that. They didn’t come to the fridge, so I bought stainless steel, higher end fridge and then a higher end washer and dryer just because of everything else is sort of on the higher end. I thought I’d be able to attract a better tenant if everything was a little bit on the higher ends rather than average or below average. That plus gutters, plus moving was about an extra seven grand. Buying a bed frame, buying a bed mattress, things like that. So all in now I’m all in for about $25,000. So I still have a little bit left in reserves, which is very nice. I won’t be needing it, but it’s nice to always have reserves.

Ashley:
I just want to say you’re not the first guest that has gone and bought. I feel like we’re hearing this more and more frequent from somebody who’s bought a new build to house hack in and all the benefits that can come with it from getting concessions at closing a better interest rate through the builder, and then just knowing that you’re not going to hopefully have a capital improvement, especially if there’s a warranty on the home, things like that. So it’s just interesting how we’re hearing this more often that people are doing this.

Austin:
Yes, my cardinal sin is I’m terrible with my hands. There’s a trade-off good at coding, not really good at fixing things. So a rehab would probably be the worst decision for me to make value add, maybe not as worse, but yeah, when it comes to my investor id, that isn’t really my strong suit and that would add a lot of risk to me because I haven’t really fixed anything in my life besides computers. So I really wanted to stick with new construction, something that’s newer because it’s safer, it’s going to offer less of a return. But at this point I’m okay with that because I’m very confident in this market. I do want to say, I’ve been saying I’m confident in this market that technically is speculation. I’m speculating that this market is going to improve over time and I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m going to be wrong and I’m putting my money where my mouth is. If I’m going to publish something on BiggerPockets, I actually wanted to show like, Hey, I said that Fayetteville, when I first got here, I said that Fayetteville was a great market, now I’m actually going there. So it is sort of a speculative play and I’m okay with that risk.

Tony:
Austin, you talked a little bit about the cash you have to bring to the table to actually get this deal across the finish line, but what type of financing, what actual loan product did you use to be able to get into this deal?

Austin:
Great question. Most people assume it was FHA. The thing is, my broker, who I also found from the BiggerPockets lender Finder, they basically came to me with two options. There’s the FHA and there’s the conventional, and we looked at three and a half down, but five down was just looking better when it came to the mortgage insurance at 5% down for both. The conventional loan that I ended up going with actually had less in mortgage insurance than the FHA, so I don’t have to stay here for a year if I don’t want to. And it just costs less overall than the FHA loan. So yeah, it was a 5% down 6.125% interest rate conventional.

Ashley:
And you didn’t have to do the FHA inspection either too?

Austin:
No.

Ashley:
So what are you renting out the rooms for now and what are you cashflowing from this property?

Austin:
I actually put up the rental listing about two or three days ago, so technically zero right now. Currently looking for,

Ashley:
What are you listing it at?

Austin:
Yeah, I listed at a thousand right now. I’m probably going to lower that just because the amount of bytes I’ve gotten isn’t the sort of quantity that I like it to be. So I’m probably going to lower it to 900 liter tonight. And then continuing to market from there. Marketing on Zillow, marketing on Craigslist, and then Facebook groups. There’s a lot of different groups for students and young professionals and parents of students looking for housing for either their college kids or young professionals just looking for a place to live.

Ashley:
We have to take the final ad break, but more on what’s next for Austin after the break.

Tony:
Alright guys, let’s jump back in with Austin and then Austin, you said it’s a two bedroom? Correct. So you’re renting out just one of the bedrooms?

Austin:
That’s correct, yeah. In hindsight, there weren’t any three bedroom new build properties that were within my price range. In hindsight, maybe I should have waited in and done a three bedroom because renting out two additional bedrooms would’ve saved me more money. But it is what it is. This was definitely the most affordable house I could find in America in a fast growing market. So just one bedroom from now, and then when I move out of the property, I’m either going to rent out both bedrooms to college kids or rent out the entire unit. It depends.

Tony:
You’ve got the listing up right now to find your tenants. Are you planning to then self-manage this entire process? You’re going to be the point of contact for this person as well?

Austin:
Yes. For now, eventually the goal is to move back to la Just in full transparency for the audience. Me and my girlfriend are currently doing long distance. She did not move with me,

Ashley:
Honestly. I was dying to ask this question. What happened to your girlfriend then? You’re saying you’re considering sleeping out on the couch, running out the other room?

Austin:
Yeah, no. Yeah, we’re still going strong, but she’s like, I’m not moving to Arkansas. And I’m like, look, I don’t blame you. And the thing is, I actually, we started dating in 2019. I brought this up to her in 2019. I had a property in our contract in Phoenix, and I didn’t end up going through with it because it was a triplex. I was like, great, I’m going to live in one of the units, I’m going to rent out the other two units. And a day before closing, my real estate agent was like, Austin, you should probably go down to the courthouse and see if all three units are permitted because I don’t know about this one. So I walked to the courthouse, I looked at the big paper document. They didn’t have it online at the time, and it was only permitted for two units, and it just opened up a lot of risk to me.

Austin:
But even back then, in 2019, I told her, I’m like, I might have to move there for a year. And she’s like, this is what you want to do. This is your goal. You go for it. So this has been a thing. Yeah, our entire relationship, she’s always been supportive of like, Hey, whenever you want to do this house hack and move out of state, you let me know and we’ll figure it out. And I just couldn’t wait any longer. So she took the mattress, or I guess it’s holding onto the mattress, and then I am flying her out here next week, and then I’m going back to LA in a month or two and staying there for a few weeks. So we’re making it work.

Ashley:
Well, we love her already because she’s supportive of your goals and it definitely probably is hard doing long distance, but that’s awesome.

Tony:
It is.

Ashley:
Okay. So let’s kind of go into the next steps for you. How are you planning to expand your portfolio? How are you going to fund your next deal?

Austin:
I think I’m going to be unique in the way that I answered this question because real estate is always a means to an end for me. Right now our movie is still in post-production. We still need to edit the thing and then market it and then hopefully make money back from it. So the reason why I wanted to hop on this property right now while the movie is not even finished is because real estate rewards patients and this movie is going to take a long time to make a return back. So I figured, okay, I might as well benefit from appreciation while we’re also working on the film. So next steps for me, I’ll be honest, is focus on making sure that the tenant is happy and I’m making money from this property. And by making money, I really mean lowering living expenses. I’m going to be going from a rent in LA that was 1660 down to if the tenant pays to be 900, I’m going to be, and then if we split utilities, I’ll be lowering my living expenses down to a thousand a month, which isn’t huge, but it’s saving me $600 a month and my income taxes have actually decreased.

Austin:
So I’m actually saving an additional $300 on top of that just by working from Arkansas and not in California or tax California.

Ashley:
Also too, you’re getting the mortgage pay down and equity in the property, which is huge. So it’s not just that 600 you’re saving. Yeah,

Austin:
Exactly. Exactly. So for me, I was like, okay, if it’s just going to suck for the next year trying to get this movie made, I might as well be benefiting from real estate while I’m doing this. So next steps for me are make money from the movie and I would like to make all my money back and then a little more, and then of course, use that money to then purchase another property. So I wish I had a more concrete answer, but now that I’ve got the property secured, focuses back on the movie. So

Ashley:
Was this part of the reason to move right now? So your girlfriend, the distraction wasn’t there, so you could lock yourself in your room and focus on your movie?

Austin:
Yeah, no, no, it wasn’t, wasn’t total part of my master plan.

Ashley:
Well, real quick, can you tell us what the movie’s about?

Austin:
Yeah, yeah. It’s about a young math genius who tries using math to find love. And what’s unique about the movie, it’s basically he’s on a date with a girl and he thinks in terms of probabilities, and we see the probabilities by his head. So he’s on a date with a girl and we see by head probability of kissing her and it’s going higher, it’s going higher, she’s laughing at his jokes, and then he makes the math joke and it falls flat, and then the probability of kissing her drops down to zero. And so it’s sort of like a Scott Pilgrim meets atypical meets 500 days of summer indie coming of age movie. So just overall a feel good coming of age movie, I guess is the best way to pitch it.

Ashley:
Well, Austin, one thing I want to ask before we wrap up here is what is your advice to rookie investors on analyzing deals? So you talked a lot about market selection and the statistics and the criteria that you use. What about deal analysis? What were some of the things you were looking at when you were analyzing your house hack?

Austin:
I wish I had my spreadsheet pulled up, but I’ve been analyzing properties for the past four years on this spreadsheet. I think at least my criteria is okay, I like to think of it as a waterfall or what’s your rent? Okay, minus your vacancies, minus your eventual property management. For me, the property management cost is zero, but when I leave, move back to LA in a year or two, I’m going to have to hire a property manager. They’re going to take their cut as they should, minus maintenance and CapEx for me, those are probably going to be smaller for me right now, just because this is a new build. I’m not going to be expecting any CapEx for now, but I still have that five grand a reserve. Utilities might be a wash because if you’re just doing a single family rental, you can just pass on the utilities to the tenants, HOAs 35 bucks a month, and then you have your pity payment. So I would just really recommend do the hard work, eat your vegetables of knowing the numbers and running the math on every single property, and make sure that whatever strategy you’re going with, you’re comfortable with the return that you’re getting. I hope that wasn’t a cop out answer, but just do the math. I know it’s hard, but you got to do it.

Tony:
No, no. I mean, you’re giving the rookie audience, I love you said, eat your vegetables. Right? It’s the thing that people know they have to do it, but they kind of shy away from it sometimes. And honestly, what I see a lot from people who are trying to get started is that they listen to the podcast, they watch the YouTube videos, they read all the books, but when it comes time to actually do the work of analyzing the deals and submitting the offers, they drag their feet and they kind of tiptoe their way into doing it. But you got to go full force, and that’s how you start to build the confidence and build the skillset. And with enough volume of deals analyzed, like you said, you start to get a good sense of what deals make sense and what deals. So I guess to kind of wrap things up here, Austin, as you’re still a Ricky in many sense of the phrase, even though you’ve already got your first deal done, what is your advice to the other Ricky’s that are listening who are still maybe on the sidelines or maybe hesitant about investing in real estate right now?

Austin:
That’s a great question. I knew I was going to be asked this because I’ve listened to this show before, just with a grain of salt. I’m not uber successful yet. So again, take advice with a grain of salt, but

Tony:
Let me add one correction there. The gap of knowledge between the person who’s done zero deals and one deal is exponentially bigger than the person who’s done one deal in two deals. Because by the time you’ve done your first deal, you’ve gone through a lot of the learning curve, the headaches, the lessons learned. So the second deal is always so much easier than the first, but it’s that first deal. It’s almost like a train, like a locomotive. It takes all this energy to get that train moving, but once it’s moving, then it’s cruising, right? So don’t discount the hard work that you’ve done already, man,

Austin:
Thank you for saying that. I will say I’ve learned more in the past month than I have in the past four years. There you go, right? It’s hard for me to answer that because we live in the most unaffordable real estate market in US history. I actually just recorded a podcast with Dave on the arm of the market show, and we’re talking specifically about that, but this is undoubtedly the hardest time ever to get started in real estate. People that bought their properties before the 2022 interest rate hike, they’re cruising, they’re doing good. If you haven’t bought a property yet and you’re still looking, and the year is 2024, it’s hard out there, I feel for you. And it’s extremely tough. On the flip side, don’t, it’s going to get better. I think affordability is going to get harder and harder as the years go on. So I don’t want to lean in and say, you should buy a property now rather than later. Although mathematically speaking, that’s probably the correct decision. I hope you buy a property now rather than five years from now. But you also need to be financially sound and make a financially responsible decision. So my main advice is I would get started sooner rather than later, but also make sure you’re making a financially responsible decision. I hope that’s, that counts as advice.

Ashley:
We will count it Austin. Yeah. Well, Austin, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Real Estate Rookie. If you want to learn more about Austin or reach out to him, you can find him on his BiggerPockets [email protected] by searching his name in the search bar. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. Thank you guys so much for listening to this week’s episode of Real Estate Rookie. We’ll see you guys next time.