My First Rental House

In March 2010, I bought my first rental house. At this point I was only a little over 2 years into my career on a meager salary. The reason I was able to buy a rental house is because, as mentioned in my previous blog post, I had instant equity in the purchase of my primary residence. I was able to get an equity line against my own house of $29,500. This paid for the 20% down payment of the rental, as well as all of the renovations necessary.

This house sold last in 2007 for $103,500. It was a foreclosure listed at $64,900. I ended up purchasing the house for $58,000. What a deal right? I bought this house for almost half price! Little did I know at the time, that this house would be the only major mistake I have made so far in my real estate career. Keep reading.

My First House

I bought my first house in April 2008. This is, and has been my primary residence since purchasing. What does that have to do with real estate investing? Well, I bought it as a foreclosure, and got a pretty good deal on it. Notice the date – it is precisely when the housing bubble was popping; the very beginning of it. Little did I know that many more foreclosures would follow.

What is funny is that I saw this listing for $106,000 in the 8 month period that I was browsing for a house. I was happy in the area I was renting in, and this was right down the street. A few months later I saw it listed at $85,000. I ended up buying in a $100,000 neighborhood for $80,000, and doing about $10,000 of renovations myself – making it one of the nicer properties on the street for a total of $90,000 invested. The equity that this yielded in my house was the beginning of my real estate investing career!

Intro

Hey guys!  This is Eric coming to you from my home office in Lexington Kentucky.  In this blog I will be writing about my experience in real estate investing.  These first ten posts are a very condensed summary of my passive income journey over the past few years.  I plan to write about this in far more detail in the future, but for the purposes of this blog I just want to give an intro to what I have done as an entrepreneur thus far to earn passive income.  I have learned so much about real estate investing the past few years through study and experience.  If you have any questions feel free to ask!

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