18 – Dos and Don’ts of Buying Your First Investment Property

Episode Summary

In this episode of Get Real Wealthy Season 2, Quentin talks about his first investment property.

Quentin shares his journey so that others could learn from his experience and mistakes. He says that he started by reading and educating himself about real estate, started going to meetups, and joined an organization to prepare for his first property. He bought a condo townhouse with a realtor who helped him identify a good cash flow property. There were three units, one on top of the other but it was called a townhouse that there was an underground garage as well. It was in 2008, and he was able to put 5% down at the time because the rules were different for financing.

He was getting decent cash flow from that property. This gave him the confidence to buy multiple properties. By scaling, he was able to get three to four properties. There, he says that he learned a lot about asset and tenant management from owning these properties. He adds “Being able to increase my income was a good way to be able to increase the cash flow and make that asset work harder for me, and so that was something that I learned and I found very useful.”

In conclusion, he suggests that you should get started by finding something that’s cash flow positive, don’t buy a negative-yielding asset where you’re trying to include the mortgage pay down as part of cash flow when it’s not. If money comes out of your bank account to pay for a rental property, it’s a negative-yielding asset. This helped him leave his job as a teacher to pursue real estate investing full-time.

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