[quote=42nate1]Bought our condo in 2008 during the frenzy & sold it in early 2008. Didn’t make any money. It was a bad location, and 1st time buyer mistakes – terrible noise pollution. Did manage to get out right before the crash. Watched the new owner walk away from it after more than $100k loss. Just lucky timing on our part, and poor timing on theirs.
Rented for 2 years and bought a short sale 4-bedroom on a cul-de-sac in Carmel Mountain Ranch in 2010. Love the neighborhood, and great appreciation over the last decade. Not quite a double, but close. Will never sell, so value is really irrelevant. Without the crash, we probably couldn’t have afforded to buy into the neighborhood.
In 2012, we bought a 4-bedroom house as a rental in mira mesa. Wish we would have bought a few more. It’s more than doubled & is a cash cow for rental income.
Also bought a 1-bedroom condo in mira mesa around the same time for my mother-in-law. Some appreciation. Not a great purchase, but it was bought out of need, rather than an investment.
Mira Mesa (and surrounding area) no longer pencil out from a price/rent standpoint. Latest properties are up in Oceanside. Have picked up a duplex, a 3-plex in the last 5-6 years. Hunting for a 4-plex, but its getting much harder to find deals that make sense. Not even looking at single family anymore. More tenants create their own challenges, but they do cash flow the purchase.
How about others?[/quote]
I’m still looking in mira mesa because I guess the way I look at it. $320kish for a 1-1 is roughly $1750 month, so after HOA etc, probably around $1250-1300/month… So I figure that’s roughly a 3.5-4% return on cash..versus CD rate is:
My$540k cashout refinance is 3% for 30 years… I probably didn’t need to do it, but I thought it might be fun to play around with it to see if arbitraging this amount, I could come out ahead. We will see. worst comes to worst, I can always pay it off early again, but at 3% why bother. So, the way I look at it. Bank loaned me money to go buy a property on them…And they can eat a weakened USD with a 30 year loan pegged at 3% if we really have severe inflation. Now there could be a time when CD rates are above 3%… Could be 2 years , 5 years, 10 years from now. Who knows. I’ll deal with that if that’s the case. But for the time being, I’ll take my chances on real estate. And it’s not like I’m leveraging up the ying-yang. I’m running about a $95k/year positive cash flow before this loan that I really don’t need along with my W2 income…So while I’m still able to work and collect a W2, I’ll do just about anything to reduce my rental cash flow closer to $0 in the near term to lower my taxes as long as have a larger cash flow with all properties free and clear when I can’t/won’t want to collect an income from a W2 and my rentals needs to support me and my family.
I’m not looking to heavily leverage. I’m looking for a place to park my money and collect something like a more predictable stream of income. Now, people say that I’m not counting vacancy rate into the equation. True. But in both my 1/1’s in MM and my 2/1 in MM, my tenants have consistently stayed 4-5 years+ waiting for their greencard. And when they finally get it and decide to move on, there’s another engineer that take’s their place. So the longest time I had a vacancy was maybe 6 weeks 3 years ago. Still see a pretty hefty stream of people starting out looking for a starter place to rent…Lot’s of engineers starting out, not trying to spend a lot, and trying to save/invest for their own home….and lots of companies hiring them maybe to replace older engineers that cost too much and/or retire…That’s my target rental pool…and it’s worked for me so far (knock on wood) pretty well). I have an inside plug on the Qualcomm internal QC boards and so usually when my rentals do come up, they get posted there first and then zillow (goodbye crazy craiglist). So most of the time, an QC engineer contacts me way before anyone else does, and usually they are first contact, first to qualify with their income and credit score,