House hacking lets you buy a multifamily property with 3.5% down on an FHA loan, live in one unit, and rent the others to cover your mortgage. You can repeat this up to four times before switching to fix-and-flips for real scaling.
The easiest way to get into real estate is the way that I did it. I did what's called house hacking, which means you take an FHA loan and you put as little down for as 3.5% on a multifamily or 5% down on a single family as your primary residence. And even though it's your primary residence, you can rent out most of those rooms and you just occupy one room, which means your roommates are paying for your rent and your mortgage. And you can do this 4 times. So after that year, you can use this method again and go get another FHA loan on a second property, and then a year later on a third property.
If you really want to get into real estate, sure, you can do that on your first one. And it's not a bad idea because it teaches you two things. One, it teaches you how to go through the process of buying a house. It also kind of teaches you how to be a landlord because now you're managing tenants. But it's not something that I would say is scalable. So I would advise it to do it once, get a good foundation, then turn that one into a rental, but then start going to hard money lenders, start looking at buying, fixing, flipping. That's how you scale.
