Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatterasguy
I wouldn't do the long distance rental thing. You would be far better off taking the money and investing it other ways.
Depending on how young you are and your mortgage terms you might not want to pay it off. If your young and your paying less than 4% I'd take all the cash and invest it in various stocks and bonds. You can beat the 4% in the markets and still get the interest write off.
Real estate is a business, I never recommend people get into it unless they want to run it as such. Long distance is difficult. I'd only consider an out of state long distance rental if it was a large property ie an apartment complex that could support its own staff on site, and you were a seasoned investor with a lot of experience and your own team as well.
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x2 on the out of town PITA factor.
Ive been doing that for just over 2 years on a property 150 miles from me. Even on that distance which is fairly small scale since I can get there in a couple hours, the pain of dealing with any issue, even as simple as a light leak in a sink or something minor, is extreme.
When I first rented out the property (a 4 bed single family on 2 acres), it went from a retired single woman to a family of 6 with 4 middle to high school age children. Every single system in the house developed problems with the new strain.
as soon as the well pump was fixed, the fridge crapped out, as soon as the fridge was fixed the dish washer crapped out, as soon as the dishwasher was fixed, the stove crapped out, as soon as the stove was fixed the hot water heater crapped out, ect. over and over and over again.
I learned some very important lessons, and I still only break even on the property when im not losing money. Every local contractor to the property pads the bill, and so on. Ive had to fire plumbers, carpenters, electricians when I noticed an amazing coincidence of gradually increasing prices, suddenly whole systems were bad, not components, more people than needed were brought on, ect. Identical jobs cost 400% more, and so on. Fortunately the tenant is a good sort, so i haven't had to deal with tenant problems, but its been enough otherwise.
condo or apartment, different story since a lot of maintenance is part of services local. Stand alone structure id only rent if im local, apart from this situation im working on extricating myself from over time.