Do you live in a place where houses are very expensive? If so, it can feel really hard to succeed as a

real estate investor. But I know many investors who over time, like in 10 years, did even better and

made even more money because they started in a place with high prices. So in this video, I want to share

one story, a case study about a couple who begins in a high priced market with $80,000 and grows that to $1.4 million.

And they did this by using smart investing strategies that you can use too.

Let's get started.

I want to give you a little bit of background information on this couple and the story.

They live in Oakland, California, which in the Bay Area of California is definitely a high-priced

real estate market.

And each of them work a full-time job, and together they make $300,000 per year.

And of the last couple of years, maybe they got inspired by some friends who were talking about it.

Maybe they saw my YouTube channel. Maybe they read my book, The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor, or something sparked their interest in real estate investing. They said, you know what? I know the first step we have to do is at least save up some cash. So this is no easy feat. You know, you're living your life. You have to save a little bit of money. You got to save that extra bonus, you have to spend a little bit less. But they're able to save up $80,000 to get started with something. Now, that's always the question, right? Like there's a fork in the road here. What should they do? Could they go invest long distance and maybe buy properties in a separate market? Because currently, they live in a rental property in the Oakland area. So they don't own their own home. So they could just keep on renting, buy another property in another market, maybe in Ohio or South Carolina or Texas or somewhere else. Or they could also invest that money locally, but it's expensive. The properties are expensive. So I want to go through a plan that if they were sitting down one-on-one with me, there's no right, perfect answer here. But what if they decided to invest locally? How could they do that. And I want to go through a 10-year plan of what that might look like so the first step i would recommend if you're investing in a high price market the hard part is getting in to get that first deal so one of my favorite strategies is something called a house hack now if you haven't heard of a house hack it basically means you live in a property. You can also rent out

part of that same property. There's a lot of different ways to do this. You could just live in a single family house. And if you wanted to rent out extra bedrooms, some people feel comfortable doing that. A little bit more private way to do this is to buy a duplex, which is one building, one roof, but it has two different apartments in that one building. Another variation is to buy a single

family house and have a granny flat or what's called an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard. And then you rent out the ADU or maybe you live in the ADU and rent out the house if you want to make even more money from that. The point is you buy a property instead of buying just a house that you live in and you don't generate any income from it, sort of a hybrid investment. You live in it and you rent it out. And the benefit is that you're able to get some income from that rental to help you make your mortgage payment. So it makes it more affordable. In the best case scenario, I've even seen people pay 100% of their mortgage payment. I did that in the case when I started doing house hacking. But in a high price market, even saving half or a quarter or a third of your total cost of housing can help you just get into a property and make it more affordable. So that's what this couple did. They bought a house hack. They moved into one side. And another huge benefit of this if you're trying to get in a high price market is there's owner occupant financing or mortgages that you're able to get with smaller down payments.

Because if you were to go buy an investment property just right off the bat, you typically have to put 20 to 30% down on a property.

So if you're buying an $800,000 or a million dollar property, a 20% down payment could be $200,000,

$30%, is $300,000. So that's way more than this couple has. But if they move into the property,

there are loans out there like FHA, which stands for a federal housing administration loan of 3.5% down.

If they're veterans, they might be able to get a 0% down loan through the Veterans Administration

or even conventional normal mortgages. There's 5% and 10% down loan programs. So even on a million dollar property, they found a million dollar duplex. Maybe they could get in for $50,000 down, 5% down, have a little bit extra money to help fix it up, do some closing costs. So it's feasible. It's possible they could just get their foot in the door with a 5% down buying a house hack. And that's what this couple did. And fast

forward for the next two years, they didn't do anything else. They just kept this rental property.

They learned how to manage it. They found a good tenant. They learned how the details of that work

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