Nghi Le

Last Updated: February 2024 My family came to the US when I was 6 years old and we've struggled trying to achieve the American dream. When I reached the minimum age to make minimum wage (i.e. 16), I began working at McDonald's to help support the family. I hated to see people struggle, especially my parents, so I vowed to get to a point where we will never have to worry about money again. When I graduated college in 2011, I started my career in software and consulting, focused on Data & Analytics / Business Intelligence. My ultimate career goal used to be to become a CEO or CTO/CIO of a company, but then I realized how much of my life would be spent towards my "career" instead of being with the people that I love. So despite my early success as in IT professional, I started looking for a way to get out of the rat race. During Autumn 2014, our real estate journey started for myself, my wife, and a good friend of mine (that I’ve known since middle school). We were networking and attending real estate clubs, meetups, etc. pretty much every night of the week. I remember putting 5,000 miles a month in my car for those first few months. We encountered rough times in 2016-2017 due to some bad partnerships with GCs and trusting the wrong people, one of which ironically used to be a BP Podcast guest (whose podcast has actually been taken down now). We were pretty gung-ho when we started and had acquired 8 properties to flip in a 6-month timeframe in the Seattle market; that took us about 3 years to recover from. We learned some painful lessons about hard money (especially extension fees) and about creative exit strategies. There was one flip project that we held for 2.5 years; we essentially had to tear it down and rebuild a new house. Our budget went from $175k to $560k on that house, and we spent about $280k on financing costs alone across 3 different HMLs. I vowed to never go through that again and devoted time to study real estate financing. Since then, I’ve personally borrowed from 25+ different HMLs and have talked to 200+ hard money and commercial lenders nationwide. With this experience, I became a hard money broker in 2017, connecting investors to competitive financing and sparing them from hundreds of hours of research. Being connected to lending nationwide also eased me into out-of-state investing, and the birth of my first child in 2017 made me switch my mindset to passive income and cashflow. Within a year, I was flipping and BRRRRing in 8 different states and accumulated 16 units that follow the 3% rent rule. That grew to 70-80 units in year 2 after my second baby was born. In May 2018, I left my corporate IT job and switched careers, moving into real estate and finance full-time by joining forces with a VC-backed FinTech startup as their General Manager and Sales Director. I built out their national brand and helped grow the company from a couple employees to 70+. At the end of 2023, I had my third child and realized I couldn't work in a nationwide start-up environment anymore. I looked for more work-life balance and joined Flynn Family Lending, a small local private lender specializing in creative short-term loans (that no other hard money lender can do). I also hung my mortgage license with Coast2Coast Mortgage so I can still help homeowners and investors with long-term financing, specializing in DSCR, bank statement, and HELOC loans. As a real estate investor, I am not as active as before, although I still try to buy 1-2 houses a year. My goal for 2024 is to downsize my portfolio (and thus downsize my headaches) and refocus my efforts locally. I love the lease option strategy here in western WA for cashflow, minimal headaches, and to be able to help folks into home ownership at a time when affordability is at its lowest. Outside of being a workaholic, I spend most of my time with my wife, 3 young kids, and chickens. My hobbies include teaching financial literacy, playing board games, tennis, badminton, bowling, biking, clamming, and being a Seahawks fan.