The “Escape Corporate” Rental Property Plan I Followed to “Retire” in My 30s

Dave:
15 years ago, Matt McCurdy had everything most people want, a fresh MBA, a stable corporate job, and a clear path to retirement in 30 years. There was just one problem. He didn’t want to wait 30 years. So he sat down, wrote a business plan for real estate investing and bought his first rental property. Then he bought a few more. When his stable job became not so stable and he had to leave his W-2 job a few years later, he didn’t panic. He already had a backup plan generating income for him. So he decided to go all in on real estate and continue to build an impressive rental property portfolio. Today, Matt owns more than 50 properties and has a cheap financial freedom decades earlier than he would have if he had stayed in that cubicle. Matt took his financial future into his own hands instead of relying on a corporation and you can do the same thing.
Keep watching to find out how.
Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer of BiggerPockets. Today’s show is an investor story with Matt McCurdy from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Matt’s going to share his story of how he escaped the corporate treadmill by buying great cashflowing properties in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In this show, we’ll talk about why he waited almost 18 months to buy his first property, how he navigated a crossroads of whether to stay small or keep scaling, and how he bought 20 homes in a single deal with only $30,000 in cash. That actually happened. It’s a great story and there are a lot of lessons that all of you can apply to your own investing careers. So let’s bring on Matt. Matt, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Matt:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Dave:
I’m excited for our conversation to learn a little bit about your real estate investing journey. Let’s start from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about where you were in life when you decided you wanted to get into real estate investing and what brought that on?

Matt:
Well, I was in the typical role that a lot of people are in. In corporate America, grinding away, in a desk job, didn’t really see a way out of that. I saw a corporate ladder that I was trying to climb, but didn’t see it happening as fast as I wanted it to. So read the book that everyone typically has read. Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and then it kind of took off from there.

Dave:
That is a common angle, people reading Rich

Matt:
Dad

Dave:
Poor Dad. How old were you at the time when you were thinking about this?

Matt:
I think I was 27 when I read that book.

Dave:
And what was your career like? You said it was a desk job. Were you making decent money, just not fulfilling?

Matt:
Yeah, decent job. Call myself middle class. Did a four-year degree from the University of Iowa and moved through two different corporate positions in the supplier management role. So got to manage a lot of suppliers through project schedules, budgets. And from there, just didn’t see a way to transition to executive level to make the money I wanted to without going through the mundane manager roles that just grind people out.

Dave:
So where’d you go from there, Matt?

Matt:
Well, I started with a simple business plan. Speaking of my educational experience, they harped on creating a business plan. And I also saw that through my corporate America experience. So I said, “Well, if it’s working for Fortune 500 companies, it probably would work for me. ” So that’s what I first started with was a simple business plan. I knew I was going to be wrong from the get- go. It took me a year and a half to actually buying my first rental property, but after that it was plug and play and rent and repeat and try to go as fast as I could.

Dave:
I love that. So tell me a little bit why you wrote a business plan. It’s not something we hear a lot about in real estate investing. What was in it and what was the point? If you knew you wanted to do real estate, why go through the exercise?

Matt:
It helped me clear up everything that was in my brain and what I was hearing, what I was reading, what I was learning to put it onto paper. And once you put that onto paper, there’s something that happens between your brain, your nervous system, everything where you are actually committing to this and you’re really thinking through it. You can have ideas all day long, but it’s one thing to be very strategic with what you’re trying to do in your business. And now you’re trying to articulate it on the computer or writing it down on paper. Nowadays, it’s through AI. Why not? It’s very simple now. So there’s really no reason not to do it.

Dave:
It’s a differentiator, right? Absolutely. So few people do it. Whatever format you want to put that in, that doesn’t really matter. I think it’s the exercise of thinking through all the variables and what you’re good at. I love that. I think it’s really good advice that people should be following. So once you did that, Matt, what was your first deal? How’d you go about actually getting in the game?

Matt:
Yeah. So the first one was a prototypical single family house that was three bedrooms, one and a half bath house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, not too far from a local elementary and high school. Just location-wise, it made a ton of sense. I wanted to position myself to rent to as many people as I possibly could.

Dave:
No, I mean, I think especially for your first deal, just trying to get that mass appeal kind of rental where you’re not going to have a lot of vacancies, you’re going to find a high quality tenant. It just makes a lot of sense. What was it like though? How mu did you buy it for? How’d you finance that?

Matt:
Yeah, I bought it for $92,000, which sounds ridiculous nowadays. It does. It does. Which still, this kind of shows you where I was at in Cedar Rapids in particular. We’re right around probably 225 to 250 for that house nowadays. I was always looking to force appreciation and really through that was just buying a house that needed some work. So this house needed about $15,000 worth of work. Some of it was sweat equity. My fiance and I did at the time, but that was a three bed, one and a half bath that we made a four bed, two bath.

Dave:
Okay. So you were doing real value add. This wasn’t just cosmetic. You was doing some structural stuff. And you did all the work yourself?

Matt:
No. So I would say half and half. I had a contractor. My actual father-in-law helped me on some stuff too. Nice. Because my wife and I, or my fiance at the time, both of us had W2 jobs. So we were very busy, but we were burning the candle at both ends, going over there after work, working on weekends, just doing anything and everything, kind of clawing to scratch and claw to get that put together.

Dave:
How long did that take? Well,

Matt:
We closed December 13th and we had a tenant in there January 1st. Oh,

Dave:
Okay. Oh

Matt:
My gosh. We were messing around and that’s-

Dave:
Yeah, we’re in celebrating the holidays that year.

Matt:
No, we did. We bought this house in December of 13th of 2013. We got married January 11th of 2014. So roughly a month later, we went from renovating this house to getting married. I can remember many, many nights. It’d be midnight, one o’clock, and we were just going after it. But we’re young and stupid.

Dave:
Yeah. I mean, it helps sometimes to be young and stupid, at least in my case. Yeah. Well, good for you. I mean, that’s kind of the hustle that it takes, man. This is a lot of times when you’re just getting started. You just got to do what it takes. It’s going to be different for everyone, but recruiting your father-in-law, doing the work yourself, figuring out a way to get it funded, that’s usually what a first deal looks like. I know a lot of people want to raise private capital or do something advanced to start, but I think the hustle approach is not only the most common way, but often the best way you learn a lot, you learn what you like, what you don’t like, what to avoid in the future. And whether or not, honestly, if you’re going to like this business, but I assume since we’re talking here today, Matt, that you liked it, even though it sounds like a stressful couple of weeks and a very big push to get this thing open, sounds like it worked out well for you.

Matt:
I had my idea and I went with it. I’m too stubborn to stop. I learned, speaking of learning some things, I did not scope the sewer line. And that house unfortunately had Orangeburg sewer lines, which people don’t know what Orangeburg was. It was this magnificent revolutionary product back in the ’60s that they put in a lot of houses for sewer lines. And it was wrapped with some kind of cardboard paper type exterior, which go figure in the ground. It’s eventually going to rot and fall apart. So on our honeymoon, I was getting phone calls and I was actually dealing with a collapsed sewer line and tenants that were fortunately patient with me and were able to get some people to help while I was out of state.

Dave:
Yeah. These are the things you learned, right? Now, I’m sure you get a sewer scope on every deal you do. So sounds like a great first deal, Matt. I want to hear about what you did next, but we got to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. As a host, the last thing I want to do or have time for is to play accountant and banker, but that’s what I was doing every weekend, flipping between a bunch of apps, bank statements, and receipts, trying to sort it all by property and figure out if I was actually making any money. Then I found Baselane and it takes all of that off my plate. It’s BiggerPockets official banking platform that automatically sorts my transactions, matches receipts, and shows me my cashflow for every property. My tax prep is done and my weekends are mine again. Plus, I’m saving a ton of money on banking fees and apps that I just don’t need anymore.
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Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m here with investor Matt McCurdy, talking about his first deal, how he hustled into a single family home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Matt, after that first deal, you had a couple hiccups, but it sounds like overall it went well for you. What’d you go on and do after that?

Matt:
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a bank role. I didn’t have the idea of syndications back then. So I really just used my W2. I did the old fashioned way, saved a lot more than I spent. We were living pretty broke just to try to save every dollar because every dollar and cent got me closer to my end goal, which was ultimately to leave corporate America. So the faster I did that, the quicker I could get to it. So short-term sacrifice equals long-term gain, and that’s the way I look at it. So 2014, we just bought a couple properties, two single family houses, and then in 2015, we really scaled up a lot quicker with four duplexes and then I want to say three additional single family houses.

Dave:
And you were doing that just still with your W2?

Matt:
So that is part of it. The other part is, unfortunately, my wife, her mom passed away in November of 2013. I’m sorry. We had that on the front end, bought that first house and then got married. So we had a- Wow. Like I said, a busy couple months.
But we used some of that life insurance money to help pay for the down payment on those four duplexes. We still have those four duplexes. We still talk about how those are Karen’s duplexes. It’s just a great way to remember through that. But what we also did was find a different financing, basically a local credit union, and that loan officer was a lot more aggressive than what I was used to dealing with with the first few properties. And that’s something I’ll always advocate to do. I’m doing it right now. I’m actually trying to shop around different insurance companies, always trying to shop around, not necessarily rub it in the current people’s face that you’re doing it, just do it kind of behind the scenes and see if there’s other better options out there. And luckily we’re able to find a different loan officer that took a little bigger of a chance with it, did some bridge loan stuff with us and made it work so we could tackle those four.
It was a bigger bite than I was used to taking buying four duplexes all at the same time, but they’re all on the same block. Tons of synergies there. And then really once you hit five or more, it starts snowballing where it becomes- I agree. Instead of hundreds of dollars, it becomes thousands of dollars. And now thousands of dollars just sounds better.

Dave:
Yeah. It also buys more.

Matt:
Yeah, it does. It really does. And then every dollar that you’re taking from that, especially if you have a W2 job like I did, it was just compounding so much faster for me.

Dave:
It really does. Between the equity you’re building, the cashflow you’re getting, you’re saving more money, it really does have a exponential effect. People call everything exponential growth, but it actually can be exponential growth if you’re reinvesting your profits in the way that you should. So it sounds like you grew fast, Matt, but you were working at the same time. Your goal though was to quit your job. So did you have a number in mind, like, if I can get to X cashflow a month, I can quit my job and I need Y number of properties to get that cash flow. Is that what you were working towards?

Matt:
Yeah. And I was just trying to keep it simplistic. I ended up leaving corporate America in 2017, or corporate America left me is how that went.

Dave:
Oh, you lost your job?

Matt:
Yeah. So they moved my job to corporate headquarters and I didn’t really want to move there. Oh, fair. It didn’t really make sense for me to move, number one. And number two, I was planning on leaving in April of 2017, but they actually gave me severance until about April of 2017.

Dave:
Is it funny how some things work out like that?

Matt:
Yeah.

Dave:
It’s like meant to be.

Matt:
It is. So what I was doing around that was like $500 a month per property.

Dave:
Wow. Okay.

Matt:
So that’s what I wanted. I think I had about 20 properties at that point. Oh,

Dave:
So you’re making like 10 grand a month in cashflow, which I mean, tax advantage cashflow too. It’s probably more like making 12 grand or 13 grand in W2 income.

Matt:
Yeah. And looking back on it, I was naive like, “Oh, is this enough?” Because as real estate investors, we know how much our P&I, principal and interest are, the insurance, the taxes, all those things weren’t as crazy as they are now.

Dave:
No, it

Matt:
Was much easier. They were more stable. Nowadays, it’s a little different, but the big variable was your maintenance and repairs. “What’s that going to cost? What if five furnaces go out this year? Oh, man. “But it still felt weird because I went through the American educational system. We are not taught to become entrepreneurs. We’re not taught to be out on our own. We’re taught to get good paying jobs and then go retire and then die. It still felt raw and weird, but- I

Dave:
Bet. It’s all

Matt:
Right.

Dave:
It’s also kind of addicting when you have the cash flow and the W2 income, it takes a little pressure off the real estate side, at least speaking from experience. You have all this income that I think for most people covers your living expenses and then everything else you could just keep reinvesting and reinvesting, but I’m sure you have to change your strategy a little bit because now you’re living off that cashflow and it’s not just pure reinvestment into your

Matt:
Portfolio. Absolutely. At first, I said I was retired and then I was like, ” Wait a minute, my friends are making fun of me. Call me the retired guy.

Dave:
“And

Matt:
I was like, ” No, I graduated from corporate America. “There you go. I graduated
Because flash forward to 2018, I was never busier. I couldn’t believe how I went from fishing and golfing and trying to fill my time in 2017, see where I would go to just putting on the full throttle in 2018 and acquiring as much as I did. But it was a good reset because I didn’t know where I was going to go. I wanted to make sure my numbers were right. I still couldn’t believe that I wasn’t going to get hammered with taxes. I was just used to that mindset of the W2 where you get hammered with taxes, you’re meant to kind of be average and work through whatever they tell you to do. Whatever HR tells you you can have for a raise, whatever they tell you, you can have for a bonus, you accept and you move on. And now I’ve entered a new space where it’s up to me what I make.
It truly is. And it’s-

Dave:
Yeah, it’s

Matt:
So

Dave:
Liberating.

Matt:
It really is. It’s very liberating, but also scary. Where are you going to come up with the money to grow at this point? Where are you going to come up with the money if some of these risks actually come to fruition?

Dave:
I think it’s cool, the idea of just taking a little bit of time off. It helps reinforce that you really want to do real estate because if you have enough money to go play golf and go fishing, and then you’re like, ” Actually, I like doing this. I want to keep growing. I enjoy this. “And I think that’s where it goes from exciting and motivating because there’s this financial element to being fun and fulfilling where it’s like, this is a business and it’s something that matters to me more than just the dollars and cents. So in 2018, when you dove back in, where did you apply your time and your energy?

Matt:
It was the first time I acquired a package of single family houses. And that’s a really good niche if you have the capital or you have the leverage to be able to do something like that. And this package was sitting on the MLS. Oh, wow. Really? It was just sitting there underrented and that’s what turned a lot of people off. They didn’t understand what the market rent was for this portfolio. To give you an idea, those were $114,000 houses times 10, so 1.14 million. And I was able to cross collateralize some stuff. And I was a real estate agent, used my commission for some of the down payment, representing myself as a buyer. So I only brought, I think, maybe $100,000 to the 20% down.

Dave:
Oh my God, that’s amazing.

Matt:
So fast forward roughly eight years. Some of those properties are pushing 200, some of them are 250, $250,000.

Dave:
On average, double basically.

Matt:
In 2018, some people were talking about, well, maybe we’re overpriced at that point. But going back to my business plan, I would’ve shied away from that because I wasn’t making $500 a month in cashflow before repairs and maintenance. I was only going to make about 350 to 400 there. But the way I justified it is, do I want to grow? Number one, the answer was yes. Number two is, okay, what have I been doing in the past to make that 500? And it was to renovate a lot of these houses. And there were only about one or two of them that truly needed renovated. The rest of them were just plug and play and we were able to keep a lot of those tenants in place even after major rental increases.

Dave:
I mean, I think this is part of the trade-off that you have to make. It’s like you make more if you dive deep into one property, if you’re going to do value add. But sometimes when you want to scale, like Matt’s talking about, you have to give up some of the immediate upside. It’s not giving up the long-term upside, but you can’t renovate 10 properties all at once. I would imagine in your position, you’re buying 10 and you say, “This is more of a turnkey kind of thing. I might make a little bit less per unit on this, but I’m getting 10 all good deals at once, even if they’re not all home runs.” That’s just part of the trade-off as you scale, is just figuring it out. You want to do one great deal at a time or a couple pretty good deals at a time.
I think when you’re at the point Matt was at a couple pretty good deals makes a lot of sense. So Matt, I want to hear more about how you took this over because I do think people are sleeping on this idea of acquiring portfolios as they scale. You were able to not put that much down. It might be more accessible than people think. We’re going to dig into that, but we got to take one more quick break. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Matt McCurdy and I are here talking about his journey from buying a single, single family home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to buying a package of 10 properties in 2018. Let’s talk a little bit about these 10 properties because it sounds great. You only put a hundred grand to buy $1.1 million of properties, but I would imagine taking over these properties all at once is kind of like an operational challenge. What was that like?

Matt:
It is. And then the part I didn’t tell you, we actually were expecting our son, he’s now seven, but he was born in mid-November of 2018. We closed on those right around Halloween of 2018. Oh my

Dave:
Gosh. So everything all at once.

Matt:
Yep, of course. That’s the way I roll. But at that point, my wife had a little bit of feedback for me. The question was, how are you going to manage all these? Because at that point I was self-managing everything and I started my path of hiring a property manager. And what I did was I still self-managed most of my portfolio, but everything I was acquiring moving forward, I was giving to a property manager because I was still being cheap and scarcity mindset of just not wanting to give over everything because I didn’t value my time as much as I probably should have.

Dave:
Did you hire a firm or were you trying to hire a person who actually worked for you and just managed your rentals?

Matt:
He was more of a mom and pop property manager versus ABC property management company kind of thing.

Dave:
Personally, I find those people to be more effective.

Matt:
This one wasn’t.

Dave:
Oh, no. Uh-oh.

Matt:
Yeah. I went through two, one every year and then finally ended up hiring someone in- house and to this day he’s still my property manager.

Dave:
Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the dream, right? The

Matt:
In- house property

Dave:
Manager.

Matt:
That’s the ideal world.

Dave:
Did it at least give you confidence that you could keep scaling from that point? Having hired a property manager, did that mean you could go out and buy more units? Did you want to go buy more packages? What did that open up for you, if anything?

Matt:
It helped me to really develop that team that Robert Kiyosaki talks about, develop that team. You got to have a team and maintenance and repair contractor type workers are just, they’re tough. They’re really tough to find because all those property management firms have those contractors and you pay for them sometimes dearly, but getting some of that control back was definitely a blessing for the portfolio.

Dave:
So Matt, after you did this, 2018 still, you started to systemize this business, you’re now not working in corporate. Catch us up to what you’ve done between 2018 and today. I

Matt:
Started looking at mobile home parks and I acquired a couple of those, one in 2020 and one in 2021, but I still didn’t take my eyes off of the single family duplex area that really has been my bread and butter. And I ended up acquiring another package in 2023 back again, prices are white hot, shouldn’t be able to get anything. And I ended up buying a package of 22 houses.

Dave:
Oh, whoa. In Cedar Rapids still? All the same?

Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that was another thing where I lowered my cashflow expectations, but I ended up buying in for the equity.

Dave:
Because you got such a good price?

Matt:
Yeah, it really made a ton of sense. I’ve combed through those numbers so many times I couldn’t believe what I was actually buying. I’m pretty sure from purchase price to appraisal value, it was roughly a million dollars difference. And that was me not turning a wrench on anything.

Dave:
How would you not do that, right?

Matt:
Yeah.

Dave:
How did that come about? Were you looking for a package or did it just kind of fall into your

Matt:
Lap? That’s a funny story. I’m a real estate broker in Cedar Rapids, and I actually helped this client for the first property he ended up selling, but he just kind of started going with another agent and I guess she convinced him to put him into a package or maybe he got tired of dealing with the onesie-twosie sales that I told him to do and he just wanted to be done and out and just the timing was right. There was a little bit of a lull in Iowa in the fall of 2022 and early 2023 where things were just kind of sitting a little bit longer than they had in the past. And everybody was thinking, “Oh, I’m going to have my house listed, have 10 offers in the first 10 hours kind of situation.” And then when that didn’t happen, people kind of panicked. So I actually told the agent, I said, “I don’t know how he’s going to react to me even offering on these.
He has my phone number. He could have totally just reached out to me and saved himself all his commission.” But again, I was representing myself as the buyer and got commission to buy my own properties. And that one, I didn’t bring much to the closing table either because I was able to cross collateralize one of my mobile home parks and use my commission. I think I brought like $35,000 in cash to closing for- Wow.

Dave:
That’s unbelievable.

Matt:
$2.2 million purchase.

Dave:
Unbelievable. Yeah.

Matt:
It’s all about getting creative.

Dave:
So Matt, we got to get out of here, but maybe just tell us before, what does your portfolio look like today and what are your plans for the future?

Matt:
Yeah, so my portfolio, I have roughly 50 buildings. So between single families, duplexes, 60 front doors, and then I have about 90 mobile home lots that are filled with about a hundred additional lots that I need to infill for mobile home park stuff. And then just recently wrote a book, got it published right before Thanksgiving.

Dave:
Congrats. What’s it on real estate?

Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I call it the guide to buying one to four unit real estate. And just kind of really the idea was to write something. I never wanted to be an author, but I have a son that’s seven and I’m not sure if he wants to be in real estate or not. But if I got hit by a bus, I have all this knowledge that I haven’t shared with him, nor could he comprehend right now just at his age. So I just wrote 15 chapters in this book of things that I really think are critical for investors to understand. And it’s certainly only, I think, 160 pages long. So it’s not terribly in depth to the point where you have all these strategies, but at least it gives you an idea of understanding things. And I try to put in stories and humor to make it fun and real life concepts kind of like what I’ve shared today in that.
So yeah, the book’s called Corn Fed Millionaire Playing upon all these farmers in Iowa.

Dave:
That’s awesome.

Matt:
I’m not a farmer if you’re wondering. Is it

Dave:
Out yet?

Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. We published it right before Thanksgiving of 2025.

Dave:
Awesome. Well, check it out. Corn Fed Millionaire. I love the title.

Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. And you can check me out. I have a real estate brokerage firm and anybody that’s looking at Cedar Rapids market, you can go to investoredgere.com/biggerpockets and you can get a free Cedar Rapids market report, kind of tell you what’s been going on. We’re like every other metro in the country. We have a couple data centers that are They’re coming online and just a ton of rental demand that we’re seeing from that.

Dave:
Well, Matt, thank you so much. Congrats on your success and thanks for sharing your insights with us. I know probably buying packages of houses sounds difficult, but if you look at the way Matt sort of methodically went from hustling his first deal to getting a little bigger to getting a little bigger, that’s how you scale. You have to put in that effort upfront and then these opportunities, it does start to snowball, whether from your financing or your deal flow. This is how you build a successful real estate investing career. It takes 10 years. It takes 15 years, but you can absolutely do it. And Matt, congrats on all your success. It sounds like you’ve really done it all the right way and happy to hear that this has worked out for you in the way you were hoping.

Matt:
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Dave:
And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. We’ll see you next time.