Hi All,

In 2017, Dave and I purchased 12 multi-family residences (56 units) using none of our own money in less than 12 months and we want to share with you our 5 top tips with the Bigger Pockets community that led us to this success. To clarify, these are NOT joint ventures. They are 100% in our names which means we keep 100% of the profit. We have three young children and at that time, we were both working full-time! Yes… that was our "side hustle".

Hope you find this helpful and educational.

1. Create More Time

If you want to grow your portfolio you must create more time to focus on your business. Now, we have three young children and certainly didn't want to sacrifice any time with them. The solution was easy, get up an hour and a half every single morning to work on growing our portfolio. For us, this meant getting up at 4:30 am, as they wake up around 6-6:30, so we can have some isolated time to grow our business. Yes, it's early... but we sacrificed than to live the life we are able to live today. We also gave up our favourite tv shows and went to bed as soon as the kids were sleeping so we wouldn’t be sleep deprived.

2. Your Network is Your Net Worth

Don’t underestimate the power of expanding your network. This means both in-person and online. Attend landlord association meetings, go to conferences and ensure that everyone knows that you are a serious investor and that you are actively purchasing properties. We were able to purchase numerous off-market deals due to our network that we actively choose to expand. An easy thing you can do today…. Post on your Facebook page: ACTIVELY PURCHASING multi-family properties in (enter name of the city). You’ll be surprised at how people are often willing to help.

3. Yes... It Can Be Done

Despite what countless people told us, you can solely purchase multi-family residences and scale quickly. The key for us was Seller Financing. Of course, many sellers were not interested. Many told us that this wasn’t being done in our city. But we didn’t let the naysayers slow us down. We got everyone on our team on board including our agent, accountant and lawyer. We kept pushing through until we started to finally get some “yes!”

4. Have Liquid Funds

Creative financing helped us scale our portfolio to 100+ units but before you proceed you should definitely ensure to have some liquid funds available even if you are buying properties with none of your own money. You’ll need money to pay for lawyer fees, deposits, repairs and have funds for unexpected repairs/maintenance as well as unexpected none payment of rent. Do your due diligence and have a back-up plan!

5. Know Your Exit Strategy

Speaking of a back-up plan, before entering a deal, you need to ensure that you have a clear exit strategy. By this, I mean that you need to know exactly how you will be able to pay back the private lender. This petrified me when I started investing. So, I met with investors who had unfortunately lost their complete portfolio and the one thing they all had in common is that they didn’t have a clear exit strategy. So please, always remember “Exit Before You Enter!”.

Hope this helps you. I welcome questions. :)

Be Great!

Investor Mel & Dave