I just recently closed on my first and my twenty-fourth rental property at the same closing table! I have BP to thank, really. Stumbling upon BiggerPockets when I was about 18 felt like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant of real estate information! It’s hard to know where to start! I stayed up late every night reading blogs, watching videos, and listening to the BiggerPockets podcast. I couldn’t get enough!

All that information, however, is useless without putting it into practice. During this time, I was working a full time job in the car business. Some of you can testify; working 60-70 hours a week can really motivate you to look for an alternative occupation! However, that season wasn’t all bad. I was able to save a good bit of money, allowing me to quit and focus 100% on real estate.

The #1 theme I heard over and over on BiggerPockets was this idea of finding a mentor. I had no idea where to find someone to mentor me, so I started telling my friends and family that I wanted to be a full time real estate investor. One day, out of the blue, one of my friends told me about a guy they knew who had been investing in real estate for about 20 years. During my lunch break one day, I went and had lunch with this investor. I tried to get to know his story and investing history. I didn’t want to scare him off by begging him to mentor me. That’s a sure fire way to freak them out! After about 2 hours of talking, it became clear that I needed to learn as much as I could from him. He was a broker licensed in over 20 states, owned an Auction company, co-authored a real estate branding book, and operated a successful general contracting business. Fast forward 4 months and multiple lunches later, I was performing all kinds of tasks for him and soaking up as much of his knowledge and experience as I possibly could! As Shawn Hitchcock says, “A mentor empowers a person to see a possible future, and believe it can be obtained.” I started believing that a perfect career of real estate investing could possibly be in my future.

A year later, at 21 years old, here I am. I just closed on 24 rental houses at the same time (my 1st rental property and my 24th), we’ve flipped 3 homes together, and we’re working on the 4th right now! Although it’s not a perfect career, it’s an exciting one! I won’t go into details of the rentals in this post, but I can say, without BiggerPockets and my mentor/business partner, I wouldn’t be writing this. Looking forward to MANY more deals to come!

Thanks for reading. Have any questions? I’d love to hear from you!