After spending the last 5 days driving to visit my 92 year old grandparents in West Virginia and back, I can really say it is nice to be home. My wife and I took this quick trip to take advantage of a couple of days off school for my daughter to allow both of my kids to see the changing leaves as well as spending some precious time with my aging grandparents and their great-grandparents. We made the trip up in 2 quick days, but spent 3 coming back to savor time in almost every state. From a real estate perspective, I tried to pick up home books in every state and we even took a side trip to Lake Overlee in South Carolina because we love lake property. From our quick view, it was picture perfect and it seemed you could get a lot with a small home or mobile for $200k on the lake. We will be researching that a bit more. It was not a bad drive from home and could be used in the summer or for a long weekend.
I was very interested in seeing how difficult it would be to find rental properties that could cash flow themselves and found some options. The problem that I ran into was that in the places that were most desirable to me in terms of price inflation over time were of course priced up thus making the cash flow goal more difficult to obtain. If you then add in the cost of property management it became more difficult. That is a short term view, however. Historically, properties don't descrease in value on the whole. So, if you can cash flow it it should pay for itself over time - thus the entire value regardless of gain - is a gain. Of course, there are operating costs, cost of capital, etc, to consider but the point is that if you take a long term view - which is a reasonable one there are opportunities out there.
I saw tons of potential in almost every state, especially as I headed north of Georgia. Virginia and especially West Virginia seemed to have the more reasonable rental price vs list price opportunities when I looked at long term leases. Short term rentals were more opportune in the southern resort states, but those prices were much higher.
So, in summary - because it is late and I did spend 5 driving days with 2 kids so I need my sleep - I learned that I am going to explore being a long distance property owner a bit more. The risks of being long distance are a big concern for me but I have some things to look into that I may talk about later.
The good news is that prices everywhere have come down which makes the options grow!
Now, for a bit of commentary. One of my pet peeves is that nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that we, as parents, cannot let our kids out of our sight and it wasn't that long ago that kids stayed out til the streetlights came on. I noticed that as I headed north I did see kids out and about a bit more than we see that in St Pete. Why is that? Our trip seemed to coincide with several national news stories about murders et al which pointed out that no state seems to be untouched by this crap, however.
What can be done about this? We went camping not that long ago with another family and our kids were able to walk around without us and when we asked them what was their favorite activity during this camping trip what do you think it was? those walks with their friends.
that should be normal activity for kids, but unfortunately in this day of age it is not. I hope I am not the only one mad as hell about it. I don't have a solution but do have some ideas that we will talk about at a later date.
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