Tell me your Real Estate story!

Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes

Good Saturday everyone! As I sit here in my Open House in between guests, I'm thinking about all of the negatives right now: high interest rates, high prices, and negative market sentiment. But to cheer myself up I’m thinking about all the great stories I’ve heard about people who were bit by the real estate bug and never looked back. So let’s all get to know each other a bit better and tell our stories!

How did you get bit by the bug? What was your journey like? How did you start? Where are you now?

I’ll go first: I’m still newer. I grew up in a middle-class family that was hit hard by the Great Recession. My parents had refinanced their free and clear house to invest in renting out a nearby condo. When the market crashed they started getting bad tenants, and they could no longer afford to keep the condo running. So they sold it at a huge loss at the bottom of the market. They’ve never recovered to this day and so I got very little financial support from them, I even gave them money sometimes. When I was 18 I started getting involved in penny stocks and other risky trades on Robinhood and through the YouTuber Graham Stephan, I started getting exposed to real estate. To make a long story short I got my AA, then eventually decided to get my license in Florida and now a few years later I’m with Keller Williams sitting in an empty open house. My partner and I own a house and I’ve got a plan in place to buy my first rental property in 2024. My parents negative experience with rentals has been a mental wall for me to break through, but the tales of success that I’ve seen and read keep me going. I’ve met Gary Keller and heard his story too, and found motivation in how much I could relate to him when he was a young man. By no stretch of the imagination am I a wild success yet, but I say that with a big ‘yet’. But I’m on the path and I’m loving every minute of it, especially when it’s with like-minded folks like all of you.

Enough of me, tell me your story!

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Steve Vaughan

Rental Property Investor · East Wenatchee, WA · Member since 2014 · 10k+ posts · 16k+ votes

Good story @Samuel Jolicoeur and good for you bootstrapping yourself up!

Briefly since most know my story- I was 30 and 4 years into a cubicle finance job in Denver 2001 looking for a change when I saw a late night Carelton Sheets infomercial. I'd always wanted residual income so buy and hold rentals intrigued me.

I studied for a year, read books from the library, books on tape, etc, quit my job, 'sold' my house with a lease option, moved 3 states away closer to family into a trailer park and got busy.

I was full-time 2002-2022 and sold most on contracts last year. The great recession was great for my 3 dozen b-class portfolio as owners became renters but I can see how someone's single rental could suffer if your tenants were laid off.

Buying rentals with no job forced me to learn creative finance. The bulk of my buys, especially lager 7-10 unit ones 2003-2007 were seller-financed. I haven't seen this much broad interest in creative financing ever.

2008-11 short sales primarily, 2012-2013 rates dropped but cash was king. Then low rate conventional through 2021. Cycles that will probably repeat.

Don't be afraid to go bigger. Lots of mom and pop tired landlords in the small commercial apt space that are under the radar of larger purchasers and completely ignored by the general public.

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Ke Nan Wang
Developer · St. Augustine, FL · Member since 2018 · 311 posts · 384 votes
2y
Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
1 Reply
Steve Vaughan
Rental Property Investor · East Wenatchee, WA · Member since 2014 · 10k+ posts · 16k+ votes
2y
Good story @Samuel Jolicoeur and good for you bootstrapping yourself up!

Briefly since most know my story- I was 30 and 4 years into a cubicle finance job in Denver 2001 looking for a change when I saw a late night Carelton Sheets infomercial. I'd always wanted residual income so buy and hold rentals intrigued me.

I studied for a year, read books from the library, books on tape, etc, quit my job, 'sold' my house with a lease option, moved 3 states away closer to family into a trailer park and got busy.

I was full-time 2002-2022 and sold most on contracts last year. The great recession was great for my 3 dozen b-class portfolio as owners became renters but I can see how someone's single rental could suffer if your tenants were laid off.

Buying rentals with no job forced me to learn creative finance. The bulk of my buys, especially lager 7-10 unit ones 2003-2007 were seller-financed. I haven't seen this much broad interest in creative financing ever.

2008-11 short sales primarily, 2012-2013 rates dropped but cash was king. Then low rate conventional through 2021. Cycles that will probably repeat.

Don't be afraid to go bigger. Lots of mom and pop tired landlords in the small commercial apt space that are under the radar of larger purchasers and completely ignored by the general public.
2 Reply
Alecia LovelessPro Member
Member since 2019 · 3k+ posts · 2k+ votes
2y
@Samuel Jolicoeur Many moons ago I bought the Carleton sheets CDs and was bit by the real estate bug. However foolish partnerships and naïveté caused me to quit investing and sell everything.
Fast forward 20 some odd years and with much more experience and knowledge I started over and jumped in again knowing real estate was my only hope at a decent retirement hopefully sooner rather than later and I’m still working towards that goal today.
I’ve got 7 properties 25 doors and a decent amount toward the next down payment. I’m looking to move into real estate full time quit the W-2 and get more control of my life where I had it in my 20s and 30s as a small business owner.
1 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
1 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Steve Vaughan:

Good story @Samuel Jolicoeur and good for you bootstrapping yourself up!

Briefly since most know my story- I was 30 and 4 years into a cubicle finance job in Denver 2001 looking for a change when I saw a late night Carelton Sheets infomercial. I'd always wanted residual income so buy and hold rentals intrigued me.

I studied for a year, read books from the library, books on tape, etc, quit my job, 'sold' my house with a lease option, moved 3 states away closer to family into a trailer park and got busy.

I was full-time 2002-2022 and sold most on contracts last year. The great recession was great for my 3 dozen b-class portfolio as owners became renters but I can see how someone's single rental could suffer if your tenants were laid off.

Buying rentals with no job forced me to learn creative finance. The bulk of my buys, especially lager 7-10 unit ones 2003-2007 were seller-financed. I haven't seen this much broad interest in creative financing ever.

2008-11 short sales primarily, 2012-2013 rates dropped but cash was king. Then low rate conventional through 2021. Cycles that will probably repeat.

Don't be afraid to go bigger. Lots of mom and pop tired landlords in the small commercial apt space that are under the radar of larger purchasers and completely ignored by the general public.
Hey thank you for reaching out to me Steve, it’s successful investors like you that I want to learn from and surround myself with. Congratulations on all do your success so far, and what was your cubicle finance job? I was almost considering an accounting degree until an Auditor in my family said you’ll have no life!

How did you push yourself to pull the trigger on investment properties without having an income? I’ve got a small nest egg saved up now but by no stretch do I have a mass of cash at my disposal. I’m about to read Pace Morby’s new book on creative finance and I’ve already done some research on it, and like I said my goal is to buy my first rental next year and by the time I’m 33 (10 years) my super-insane goal is I want to have 100 doors. But beyond that basic goal I don’t have a very fleshed-out plan. I live and grew up in a region with high growth and the writing is on the wall: it’s going to get bigger. I want to grow with my hometown.

Thanks again for reaching out! And I appreciate the advice. I want to go big. There are old apartments down the street from me that I keep eyeing up, but then I start thinking about it and I recognize that even if I seller-financed it zero dollars down, if something major went wrong I wouldn’t have the reserves to cover it.
0 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Alecia Loveless:

@Samuel Jolicoeur Many moons ago I bought the Carleton sheets CDs and was bit by the real estate bug. However foolish partnerships and naïveté caused me to quit investing and sell everything.
Fast forward 20 some odd years and with much more experience and knowledge I started over and jumped in again knowing real estate was my only hope at a decent retirement hopefully sooner rather than later and I’m still working towards that goal today.
I’ve got 7 properties 25 doors and a decent amount toward the next down payment. I’m looking to move into real estate full time quit the W-2 and get more control of my life where I had it in my 20s and 30s as a small business owner.
Thank you for telling me your story, and congratulations on your success so far! I also feel that my best chance at a proper ‘retirement’ someday is through Real Estate, and I want to get full time into real estate in 2024, whether that be as an agent (the current plan) or doing something else. What kind of small business did/do you operate? I’ve also considered opening a small business I have in mind if I can get an affordable spot for it and hash out the details.

Also where do you invest? Thanks again for reaching out, Alecia.
0 Reply
Steve Vaughan
Rental Property Investor · East Wenatchee, WA · Member since 2014 · 10k+ posts · 16k+ votes
2y
Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Steve Vaughan:

Good story @Samuel Jolicoeur and good for you bootstrapping yourself up!

Don't be afraid to go bigger. Lots of mom and pop tired landlords in the small commercial apt space that are under the radar of larger purchasers and completely ignored by the general public.
I appreciate the advice. I want to go big. There are old apartments down the street from me that I keep eyeing up, but then I start thinking about it and I recognize that even if I seller-financed it zero dollars down, if something major went wrong I wouldn’t have the reserves to cover it.

Smart to have reserves, but not absolutely necessary if your deal is good enough. I wrote many a credit card when needed back in the day for down payments or repairs/ improvements.

I'd caution you focusing on a guru. If PM was such a great dude, he'd come on here and clear some basic sub2 confusions up. Simple stuff like how to deal with insurance when you sub2. I am not impressed.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear makes a great point- it's our habits that sustain us when motivation fails.

If 100 doors is your why, (it's not- 100 doors was PFA), you'll need to execute simple daily habits to get you there. Focus on your why first. Ask yourself 'why 100 doors' 7 times to help you discover it.
1 Reply
Ke Nan Wang
Developer · St. Augustine, FL · Member since 2018 · 311 posts · 384 votes
2y
Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.
1 Reply
Bob S.
Real Estate Consultant · Cleveland · Member since 2020 · 6k+ posts · 3k+ votes
2y
My story
Hey all, I see so many posts, " I am researching, " I am doing my homework" , I am trying to build my team" "Deciding on which area" So many are TRYING but never do anything, like a hamster on a wheel, A LOT of movement but staying in the same place. What is holding you back? Who needs help, or just some advice.

I started out not know a darn thing. Literally got into RE while at a family BBQ about 15 years ago. My Cuz pulled up in a new SL 500. I said, Joe, I thought you were an extra tech. Well, he was, but he took action and got into RE. So that was my ah ha moment. Within my 1st month I flipped a contract for 19k, yes 19k my 1st month. At that moment I realized there is money in this. All I did was look at a property, run the comps, and got a reno budget, So nothing to intense. My next deal while I was just about to sign the contract on a house in Glenn Cove LI. a truck pulls up. The realtor says, may I help you? Nope says the driver with a lock and chain in is hand. I am here to lock it up, its going into foreclosure. I grabbed the contract and offered 100k less, and got it, Talk about timing. At that point I knew the universe was telling me, RE is my calling. Well, 500 deals later, (about 15 in LI the rest in Cleveland ) there is nothing I have not done. Purchased various sheriff auctions, short sale, and just low balling.

If you are stuck, not knowing where to turn, please feel free to reach out,

All the best
2 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Steve Vaughan:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Steve Vaughan:

Good story @Samuel Jolicoeur and good for you bootstrapping yourself up!

Don't be afraid to go bigger. Lots of mom and pop tired landlords in the small commercial apt space that are under the radar of larger purchasers and completely ignored by the general public.
I appreciate the advice. I want to go big. There are old apartments down the street from me that I keep eyeing up, but then I start thinking about it and I recognize that even if I seller-financed it zero dollars down, if something major went wrong I wouldn’t have the reserves to cover it.

Smart to have reserves, but not absolutely necessary if your deal is good enough. I wrote many a credit card when needed back in the day for down payments or repairs/ improvements.

I'd caution you focusing on a guru. If PM was such a great dude, he'd come on here and clear some basic sub2 confusions up. Simple stuff like how to deal with insurance when you sub2. I am not impressed.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear makes a great point- it's our habits that sustain us when motivation fails.

If 100 doors is your why, (it's not- 100 doors was PFA), you'll need to execute simple daily habits to get you there. Focus on your why first. Ask yourself 'why 100 doors' 7 times to help you discover it.
It always makes me feel good when I see someone referring to material that I'm already familiar with! Makes me feel like I'm on the right track. I love Atomic Habits and plan to re-read it soon; lord knows I need to.

As far as PM, I totally hear you. I get a weird feeling from people like him. I've almost fallen for gurus before but I like to think I'm over that now - nonetheless, I do want to learn more about sub2 and seller financing for myself and clients, and he seems to be the go-to man for that. In fact, I'm looking to purchase my first investment property through seller financing. I'm not actually familiar with the controversy around confusions like insurance. Would you care to enlighten me?

One thing I've appreciated about being an agent with Keller Williams is the emphasis on personal growth and accountability. I've taken more than one class about goal-setting and it all stems from 'the big why'. I know where I want to be and I've determined what my ultimate goal is. You're right though, it's going to take daily steps to get there, and that's truly where I've faltered. Thank you for the bit of advice. What are some daily habits you'd recommend setting?
1 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.

It would be awesome to meet you sometime! I drive up to Tampa frequently, and though St. Augustine is far away from me I do love the area.
It sounds like you're doing well for yourself, and good for you! I hope to someday also be at the point where money is no longer a major motivational factor. Development is another aspect of RE that I'm very interested in exploring more, but have not had the chance to. I want to be part of the growth and help to relieve the nation of its housing shortage. How would you describe the developments you produce?
0 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Bob S.:

My story
Hey all, I see so many posts, " I am researching, " I am doing my homework" , I am trying to build my team" "Deciding on which area" So many are TRYING but never do anything, like a hamster on a wheel, A LOT of movement but staying in the same place. What is holding you back? Who needs help, or just some advice.

I started out not know a darn thing. Literally got into RE while at a family BBQ about 15 years ago. My Cuz pulled up in a new SL 500. I said, Joe, I thought you were an extra tech. Well, he was, but he took action and got into RE. So that was my ah ha moment. Within my 1st month I flipped a contract for 19k, yes 19k my 1st month. At that moment I realized there is money in this. All I did was look at a property, run the comps, and got a reno budget, So nothing to intense. My next deal while I was just about to sign the contract on a house in Glenn Cove LI. a truck pulls up. The realtor says, may I help you? Nope says the driver with a lock and chain in is hand. I am here to lock it up, its going into foreclosure. I grabbed the contract and offered 100k less, and got it, Talk about timing. At that point I knew the universe was telling me, RE is my calling. Well, 500 deals later, (about 15 in LI the rest in Cleveland ) there is nothing I have not done. Purchased various sheriff auctions, short sale, and just low balling.

If you are stuck, not knowing where to turn, please feel free to reach out,

All the best

Thank you for reaching out, Bob! What a story!
The art of buying foreclosures and auction properties is one that I've often been warned to stay away from, yet it always intrigued me. How many lowball offers does it usually take for you to snag a good deal? In my area I'm noticing that the vast majority of homes would not make a good purchase unless they were six figures lower in cost!
0 Reply
Bob S.
Real Estate Consultant · Cleveland · Member since 2020 · 6k+ posts · 3k+ votes
2y
Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Bob S.:

My story
Hey all, I see so many posts, " I am researching, " I am doing my homework" , I am trying to build my team" "Deciding on which area" So many are TRYING but never do anything, like a hamster on a wheel, A LOT of movement but staying in the same place. What is holding you back? Who needs help, or just some advice.

I started out not know a darn thing. Literally got into RE while at a family BBQ about 15 years ago. My Cuz pulled up in a new SL 500. I said, Joe, I thought you were an extra tech. Well, he was, but he took action and got into RE. So that was my ah ha moment. Within my 1st month I flipped a contract for 19k, yes 19k my 1st month. At that moment I realized there is money in this. All I did was look at a property, run the comps, and got a reno budget, So nothing to intense. My next deal while I was just about to sign the contract on a house in Glenn Cove LI. a truck pulls up. The realtor says, may I help you? Nope says the driver with a lock and chain in is hand. I am here to lock it up, its going into foreclosure. I grabbed the contract and offered 100k less, and got it, Talk about timing. At that point I knew the universe was telling me, RE is my calling. Well, 500 deals later, (about 15 in LI the rest in Cleveland ) there is nothing I have not done. Purchased various sheriff auctions, short sale, and just low balling.

If you are stuck, not knowing where to turn, please feel free to reach out,

All the best

Thank you for reaching out, Bob! What a story!
The art of buying foreclosures and auction properties is one that I've often been warned to stay away from, yet it always intrigued me. How many lowball offers does it usually take for you to snag a good deal? In my area I'm noticing that the vast majority of homes would not make a good purchase unless they were six figures lower in cost!

When I used to go to the auctions, there really was no competition, we had an " inside " scoop :)
I have purchased about 100 tax lien props, as well. I can get as many deals as I want. I just picked up 7 more SF last week. All in about 85k each, with 1100- 1400 in rents. I may keep some and flip some.
All the best
1 Reply
Ke Nan Wang
Developer · St. Augustine, FL · Member since 2018 · 311 posts · 384 votes
2y
Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.

It would be awesome to meet you sometime! I drive up to Tampa frequently, and though St. Augustine is far away from me I do love the area.
It sounds like you're doing well for yourself, and good for you! I hope to someday also be at the point where money is no longer a major motivational factor. Development is another aspect of RE that I'm very interested in exploring more, but have not had the chance to. I want to be part of the growth and help to relieve the nation of its housing shortage. How would you describe the developments you produce?
I have that same vision too. In St. Augustine, you can either build to sell or build to rent. Almost all builders here do build to sell (flip) where they buy lot cheap either direct to seller, from wholesalers and sometimes from the MLS. Then they come in with a pre-designed floor plan that fits the lot and they build a house and sell the house. The margin is decent to great depend on what kinda product a builder produce. It can go from as low as $30k to $100k profit based on a number of factors: how good of a deal was the land deal, quality of house, retail market at the time of completion. The good thing about flipping lot vs flipping an old house is that flipping a lot has much less surprises and there is less things can go wrong as long as the builder have done their due diligence on the lot before the purchase. Researching a vacant land is much easier than studying an old house.

Our business model is pretty exclusively a build to hold model. Similar to the BRRRR method but instead of renovate a old house, we build a new house rent it out and refinance. Since we are our own contractor and PM, in today's market we still aim to achieve the 1% rule. 2021 to 2022 we were achieve 1.5% no problem. For our investors, we help them achieve at least 7% annual COC return (After our GC markup and PM fees, our new constructions are cash built). Obviously it's not for most of the aggressive investor here. Our investors are mostly busy career people and they have $300k cash and where can they park their $300k and still get some healthy returns and ride on top of inflation. If you are building new relationship and finding these type of investors is definitely a slow and steady effort.

Our business model is to be very flexible and present all the options to investors. We are in the field everyday and it's very easy for me to show investors the house we are building, the house we have built, show them my data on our current rent roll so we are 100% transparent about what we do. I even showed them how much money I make from each of the operation. The money I charge them is very affordable, all of them is either fair market rate below market rate based on what they can find if they have to shop for a GC, a PM and a real estate agent. It helps a lot to build trust.

In the last few years we were mostly our own customer with the low interest rate. But with the new high interest rate, we dial back our own operations and mostly working with new cash investors this year and going into next year.
0 Reply
Samuel Jolicoeur
OP
Real Estate Agent · Punta Gorda, FL · Member since 2022 · 28 posts · 22 votes
2y
Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.

It would be awesome to meet you sometime! I drive up to Tampa frequently, and though St. Augustine is far away from me I do love the area.
It sounds like you're doing well for yourself, and good for you! I hope to someday also be at the point where money is no longer a major motivational factor. Development is another aspect of RE that I'm very interested in exploring more, but have not had the chance to. I want to be part of the growth and help to relieve the nation of its housing shortage. How would you describe the developments you produce?
I have that same vision too. In St. Augustine, you can either build to sell or build to rent. Almost all builders here do build to sell (flip) where they buy lot cheap either direct to seller, from wholesalers and sometimes from the MLS. Then they come in with a pre-designed floor plan that fits the lot and they build a house and sell the house. The margin is decent to great depend on what kinda product a builder produce. It can go from as low as $30k to $100k profit based on a number of factors: how good of a deal was the land deal, quality of house, retail market at the time of completion. The good thing about flipping lot vs flipping an old house is that flipping a lot has much less surprises and there is less things can go wrong as long as the builder have done their due diligence on the lot before the purchase. Researching a vacant land is much easier than studying an old house.

Our business model is pretty exclusively a build to hold model. Similar to the BRRRR method but instead of renovate a old house, we build a new house rent it out and refinance. Since we are our own contractor and PM, in today's market we still aim to achieve the 1% rule. 2021 to 2022 we were achieve 1.5% no problem. For our investors, we help them achieve at least 7% annual COC return (After our GC markup and PM fees, our new constructions are cash built). Obviously it's not for most of the aggressive investor here. Our investors are mostly busy career people and they have $300k cash and where can they park their $300k and still get some healthy returns and ride on top of inflation. If you are building new relationship and finding these type of investors is definitely a slow and steady effort.

Our business model is to be very flexible and present all the options to investors. We are in the field everyday and it's very easy for me to show investors the house we are building, the house we have built, show them my data on our current rent roll so we are 100% transparent about what we do. I even showed them how much money I make from each of the operation. The money I charge them is very affordable, all of them is either fair market rate below market rate based on what they can find if they have to shop for a GC, a PM and a real estate agent. It helps a lot to build trust.

In the last few years we were mostly our own customer with the low interest rate. But with the new high interest rate, we dial back our own operations and mostly working with new cash investors this year and going into next year.

Is build to sell or build to hold a realistic strategy for a newer investor without a lot of cash? I am a fan of contributing to the supply rather than flipping an existing house but in your experience do you think one is better than the other for a first sale?
0 Reply
Ke Nan Wang
Developer · St. Augustine, FL · Member since 2018 · 311 posts · 384 votes
2y
Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.

It would be awesome to meet you sometime! I drive up to Tampa frequently, and though St. Augustine is far away from me I do love the area.
It sounds like you're doing well for yourself, and good for you! I hope to someday also be at the point where money is no longer a major motivational factor. Development is another aspect of RE that I'm very interested in exploring more, but have not had the chance to. I want to be part of the growth and help to relieve the nation of its housing shortage. How would you describe the developments you produce?
I have that same vision too. In St. Augustine, you can either build to sell or build to rent. Almost all builders here do build to sell (flip) where they buy lot cheap either direct to seller, from wholesalers and sometimes from the MLS. Then they come in with a pre-designed floor plan that fits the lot and they build a house and sell the house. The margin is decent to great depend on what kinda product a builder produce. It can go from as low as $30k to $100k profit based on a number of factors: how good of a deal was the land deal, quality of house, retail market at the time of completion. The good thing about flipping lot vs flipping an old house is that flipping a lot has much less surprises and there is less things can go wrong as long as the builder have done their due diligence on the lot before the purchase. Researching a vacant land is much easier than studying an old house.

Our business model is pretty exclusively a build to hold model. Similar to the BRRRR method but instead of renovate a old house, we build a new house rent it out and refinance. Since we are our own contractor and PM, in today's market we still aim to achieve the 1% rule. 2021 to 2022 we were achieve 1.5% no problem. For our investors, we help them achieve at least 7% annual COC return (After our GC markup and PM fees, our new constructions are cash built). Obviously it's not for most of the aggressive investor here. Our investors are mostly busy career people and they have $300k cash and where can they park their $300k and still get some healthy returns and ride on top of inflation. If you are building new relationship and finding these type of investors is definitely a slow and steady effort.

Our business model is to be very flexible and present all the options to investors. We are in the field everyday and it's very easy for me to show investors the house we are building, the house we have built, show them my data on our current rent roll so we are 100% transparent about what we do. I even showed them how much money I make from each of the operation. The money I charge them is very affordable, all of them is either fair market rate below market rate based on what they can find if they have to shop for a GC, a PM and a real estate agent. It helps a lot to build trust.

In the last few years we were mostly our own customer with the low interest rate. But with the new high interest rate, we dial back our own operations and mostly working with new cash investors this year and going into next year.

Is build to sell or build to hold a realistic strategy for a newer investor without a lot of cash? I am a fan of contributing to the supply rather than flipping an existing house but in your experience do you think one is better than the other for a first sale?

It's doable but certainly more challenging. In general ground up new construction loans are more expensive (higher origination fees and higher interest rate). Usually the LTV in the land doesn't justify the risk for a hard money lender unless you have other assets to put down as a collateral. If you have private money lender connection, then that could be a more affordable option than ground up new construction loan. In summary, the first build without cash will always be the most challenging part for newer investors. After the first build is complete, then investors can refi the house and repeat.
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David Garcia
Financial Advisor · Tampa, FL · Member since 2022 · 61 posts · 33 votes
2y
Hell Sam, appreciate you letting us in on your story. With that mentality and drive you will make it big. I am a newer investor as well, purchased my first duplex back in Feb of this year, rented it out and have been managing it myself. I chose to manage myself not really to save on the PM payment but wanted to learn and I figured the best way to learn is to manage my property myself. I also read a lot of books, listened to bigger pockets podcasts and watched as many videos as possible to educate myself before jumping in. I did this for just over a year or so and finally decided to make the leap and purchase the property.
In order to get the down payment, I opened up a HELOC on my primary. This was nerve-racking to say the least but once I got the tenants in the units and rents started to come in, I felt a bit better about the situation. The rents pay for both the mortgage and the HELOC on top of being able to put funds away for cap-ex, maintenance & vacancy. I will say I have learned a lot from managing my own units but still have a lot to learn as a whole. I was lucky enough to meet and work with a great investor friendly realtor and investor friendly lender. They both helped me out tremendously and ensured to do what was best for my long-term goals with the RE investing. There have been ups and downs but anything worth doing I believe has its ups and downs. Just make sure you learn from both.
With all that said, I am now stuck. I would like to purchase another 2-4 unit here soon but the funding/down-payment is the issue. My rental property has not appreciated enough in order to cash out refi to pay off my HELOC to utilize for my next property. My interest rate is not too bad at 7.25% on the rental and the interest rate on my primary is at 4%. My lender was talking to me about doing a cash-out refi on my primary to pay off the HELOC which would put me at a bit of a higher rate on my primary, but the HELOC would be paid off and that is currently on a variable rate at 9.26%.
I would love to speak with anyone who has been in my position and has more experience than I do in order to see what other options I may have to continue my RE investing journey. Thank you for starting this post, I feel I needed something like this.
P.S
I am 43 so started out a little late but I figured better late than never!!!

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Robert EllisBusiness Member
Developer · Miami, FL · Member since 2014 · 3k+ posts · 1k+ votes
2y
Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Quote from @Samuel Jolicoeur:

Quote from @Ke Nan Wang:

Hi Sam, kudos on doing a open house on Saturday and use your time as productive as you can be. I'm from St. Augustine so we are 3.5 hour away.
I totally understand your parents' concern. I would be if I was in their shoes. Just like my impression on the stock market. Many people made a fortune owning the right stocks, and I just seem to have okay experience with it. My overall stock portfolio is a net positive but nothing I have to show for. During COVID period my stock portfolio had like a 40% gain and I was happily thinking, yes, I'm doing it right by diversifying something from real estate into stocks. And I continued to putting more money into my stock portfolio, thinking it's the right way to do things, even though there were no reason to support my initial success other than luck and follow the trend. But this new woke culture war hit some of the big name companies really hard and I had a huge lost on them: Meta, Disney, Target, Nike and NIO (this is not so much the woke culture but just the company did not perform as expected). I invested in them at the peak of their performance and now they are all 40%-60% less and essentially broke my portfolio into pretty much even. I think overall I came up $15k ahead out of a over six figure portfolio over 3 years which is pretty sad but I'm fortunate that I didn't lose money. My mom had a similar experience during the dot com bubble crash time and lost her lots of money so she vowed to never touched stock again because she thinks she's bad luck with stock.
With that perspective, I can imagine someone has a similar experience with real estate investing, if they started with a bad experience, they probably think they are born with bad luck and even though everyone is winning in real estate, they will think they won't be that person.
I have a great plumber who works for me. Two days ago we just had a conversation, both him and his dad grossed $2M last year, their take home pay was $375k each, that's pretty incredible for a plumber. But he says both him and his dad only put money into CD's and money market after reinvest into their business. His dad advise him to not to play with any investment that has risk, in their mind, they think money in the bank is "safe".
Life taught me that it's incredibly difficult to change a person's mind through outside persuasion, but it's incredibly easy, if that person just changes their mind themselves. So for these type of people, I just tell them, hey, just watch me. See how I'm doing. If you like what I'm doing and doing better and it's something you are interested in, then maybe I can help you. And I'll just leave it like that.
My story right now is that I'm trying to work with more investors, providing values to them and help them with their investment. I do not sell, I show them what I have done and what my data is showing, I give them all the pros and cons I know. Slowly but surely, my credibility has grown in my market. I'm a slow but steady kind of a guy. And I put a huge value over networking and relationship and trust building. So I always carry myself with the upmost integrity and always do what I say.
It's nice to meet you and hope you have some foot traffic at your open house, and better, get an offer.
Thanks for reaching out to me, Ke! I’d say I’m a slow and steady kind of guy myself. Someone else in my shoes might have already pulled the trigger on an investment property with the capital that I do have, but I believe it’s important to have your nest egg. Networking is so important as I’ve seen, and I’ve been working it however it’s not been a cake walk being a young Realtor in a market locally saturated with more experienced realtors. That being said I am grateful for every small step forward, and at this moment in the aftermath of the NAR lawsuit I’m open to other avenues of moving forward in Real Estate beyond being an agent. I always like to have a backup plan.

I also am looking to work with investors and would like to be included on the BP investor friendly agents list however it is I can do that. To learn from them and see how they operate and negotiate and grow their money. After all, my real goal isn’t being an agent, it’s being an accredited investor.

I see you’re a developer - do you have your own company?
Seems like you are hustling and that's great. Keep an open mindset and say yes to everything and be everywhere is a great way to build your business.
Working with investors is a very broad scope because there is no credential for the title "investor," everyone can wear the hat so you just really have to pick the right ones to work for. For the right one, we pour our heart and soul to provide the best value to them, be available to them pretty much 24/7 and earn their trust for them to be our life long customer. My goal is to onboard 2-3 investors a year (I'm working with on and off and on average about 6 right now, all mom and pop super wonderful investors). I know I'm not the Ten-X super scaling business empire type of guy but life is good money is good and no stress. I like it this way.
We run a family own business, I'm fortunate that both my mom and brother are CPAs so I have an in house accountant right off the bat. I'm basically the person who wears every hat for now and so far I'm leveraging technologies and vendors to run our business. We develop about 10 single family houses (from land to a well built house) a year and we own and operate on and off about 30 rental properties that's 90% LTR and 10% MTR/STR. We currently own and planning ahead about 3-4 small development projects of ourselves in the next 3 years.
You say your real goal isn't being an agent, same here. But I don't want to be just a LP investor, at least for now or in the foreseeable future. I like to get up and do stuff. Going into the field and see houses coming off the ground and eventually move people in give me purpose and satisfaction. I can pretty much do this all day every day for the rest of my life even I don't need to make a single dime. Right now some of my good investors pay me my share everything upfront (of course with a discount) and I bust my *** for them just as hard if they have not paid me. Money is more of a measurement for self worth to me at this point but it's not a motivational factor to do what I do.
I'll keep your contact and let's find an opportunity to connect either next time I'm in Tampa or you come visit St. Augustine.

It would be awesome to meet you sometime! I drive up to Tampa frequently, and though St. Augustine is far away from me I do love the area.
It sounds like you're doing well for yourself, and good for you! I hope to someday also be at the point where money is no longer a major motivational factor. Development is another aspect of RE that I'm very interested in exploring more, but have not had the chance to. I want to be part of the growth and help to relieve the nation of its housing shortage. How would you describe the developments you produce?
I have that same vision too. In St. Augustine, you can either build to sell or build to rent. Almost all builders here do build to sell (flip) where they buy lot cheap either direct to seller, from wholesalers and sometimes from the MLS. Then they come in with a pre-designed floor plan that fits the lot and they build a house and sell the house. The margin is decent to great depend on what kinda product a builder produce. It can go from as low as $30k to $100k profit based on a number of factors: how good of a deal was the land deal, quality of house, retail market at the time of completion. The good thing about flipping lot vs flipping an old house is that flipping a lot has much less surprises and there is less things can go wrong as long as the builder have done their due diligence on the lot before the purchase. Researching a vacant land is much easier than studying an old house.

Our business model is pretty exclusively a build to hold model. Similar to the BRRRR method but instead of renovate a old house, we build a new house rent it out and refinance. Since we are our own contractor and PM, in today's market we still aim to achieve the 1% rule. 2021 to 2022 we were achieve 1.5% no problem. For our investors, we help them achieve at least 7% annual COC return (After our GC markup and PM fees, our new constructions are cash built). Obviously it's not for most of the aggressive investor here. Our investors are mostly busy career people and they have $300k cash and where can they park their $300k and still get some healthy returns and ride on top of inflation. If you are building new relationship and finding these type of investors is definitely a slow and steady effort.

Our business model is to be very flexible and present all the options to investors. We are in the field everyday and it's very easy for me to show investors the house we are building, the house we have built, show them my data on our current rent roll so we are 100% transparent about what we do. I even showed them how much money I make from each of the operation. The money I charge them is very affordable, all of them is either fair market rate below market rate based on what they can find if they have to shop for a GC, a PM and a real estate agent. It helps a lot to build trust.

In the last few years we were mostly our own customer with the low interest rate. But with the new high interest rate, we dial back our own operations and mostly working with new cash investors this year and going into next year.

finally someone who is smart. this exact strategy works in columbus ohio must be similar price point markets and build costs where the numbers work.
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