The Origin of BRRRR—An Amazing No Money Real Estate Strategy

Here are two lessons from my very first deal that I just did over and over and over throughout the next decade.

The Power of Partnerships

Number one, I added a partner to the deal. Now, that partner was my father. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he had a job. He was a meat cutter at a grocery store. He had a job. So I said, “Well, can I just add you to the title?”

And we refinance it. I talk to a local bank and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine, as long as he’s on the loan. We don’t care that you don’t have a job as long he has a job.”

Great! He didn’t have to put any money in; he just had his name on the loan.

I discovered two things that day. Number one, the power of partnerships—because at the end of the day, you don’t have everything you need to put together a real estate deal, chances are. But somebody does.

And the second thing? It’s called…

The Deal Delta

Today, I teach about the deal delta. There are three things every deal needs, right?

First, you have to have knowledge of what you’re doing. Somebody has to know what they’re doing in the deal to be able to put everything together. The knowledge of how to acquire deals, how to analyze it, knowledge of how loans work, whatever.

Then, you have to have the hustle. Somebody has to do all that work, fill out the paperwork, show up, manage the contractors, manage whatever the process is, everything—just the hustle involved.

And then third, you have to have the money. Somebody has to have the money.

So, it’s like a triangle. And you have to have all three sides in order to put together any real estate deal. I thought I had to have all three in the beginning, but then I realized I don’t.

I know this is part of your story as well, right? Like, if I had the knowledge and the hustle, I could figure out somebody else with the money.

Now, some people are really good at the money. They can raise money really well, but maybe they don’t have the knowledge or the hustle or the ability—maybe they don’t have something else. The key was my dad had the “money.”

Really, you know, the bank had the money. But my dad had the ability to get it. So, I added him on. And I realized that you can do deals with partners and amazing things happen.

The Importance of the Process

So, I bought that property. I then rehabbed that property. Full transparency, it was a really nice property—it hardly needed any repairs at all. I think I fixed it four times over the next decade.

I bought it, I rehabbed it, I rented it out. I then went to a local bank and I refinanced it, so I got all the hard money back that I’d used to buy and rehab the property.

Now it’s pretty rare to get a hard money lender to fund the rehab and the purchase price, all of it. But I got it. I paid the hard money lender back. And now the hard money lender’s money was freed up. Also, now he trusted me. He’s like, “Wow, Brandon did all this.”

So, I borrowed more money from him again, and I repeated the process.

And so looking back on that, a few years later, I was like, “I bought, rehabbed, rented, refinanced, repeated.”

I was writing a blog post for BiggerPockets like seven years ago and had a thought, “How can we make that whole process—which was really cool and a lot of people do it—how do we put a name to it?”

I was like, “Let’s call it BRRRR investing.” And when I told that story, I said I basically did a BRRRR. And that’s where the term BRRRR came from! I had discovered the power of the BRRRR strategy.