How Vitaliy Volpov Purchased 51+ Rental Units through BRRRR for Infinite Cash Flow!

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives. Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest. And today we have the tally from succeed. Rei, how are you doing today? Doing good, Sharon. Thanks forUnknown Speaker 0:21
having me on the channel.Sharon Tseung 0:22
So yeah, I’m excited to chat. Maybe you can tell us about yourself?Unknown Speaker 0:26
Yeah, sure. So I am an attorney. I’m also a real estate investor in New York State in upstate New York near the Capitol. And I’ve been investing real estate since 2011. And been practicing law since 2010. And I’ve gotten into some additional side businesses, I’m a part owner of a real estate brokerage. Now. Also, I’m a licensed real estate broker. So I got my hand in a lot of different areas and different money making activities. SoSharon Tseung 0:50
wait. So I know your whole channel is about kind of real estate investing? Do you feel like having a career in law helps with the whole real estate investing side?Unknown Speaker 0:58
Yes. And no, I think that you don’t need to be an attorney, you don’t need to have a formal education to be very successful in real estate. I think for me, it did in a couple of ways. But I don’t think it’s necessary. But for me, it was going through law school and coming out of law school, having a decent paying job right away, um, definitely helped. It’s not It wasn’t like Doctor money or anything like that, you know, it was under under six figures coming out of law school, but it was still higher than probably, you know, an average for for most people, but at the same time, you also end up acquiring a lot of student loans. So you know, that’s a drag on what you’re doing to if you want to invest in real estate and get mortgages and, and those sorts of things, it might be a negative downside. So aside from a good job and good base to start from you also, you know, start building some connections. And, you know, you might know other attorneys in the area who you can turn to for help or assistance with different legal things. The other thing is sort of your legal training, there was no I mean, they teach you property courses in law school, but sort of theory, nothing is really practical. I didn’t learn anything about landlord tenant law while I was in law school. So that wasn’t it. I didn’t do anything for me there Bosco does teach you is it teaches you how to analyze things really well, and how to think like a, like a lawyer and how to think critically and analytically. So I think in that respect, I think it helps. I also think it’s like I said, it’s not necessary. I think if you have that kind of mindset already, and people who did really well, in law school probably already came into law school with that skill set to begin with, it doesn’t necessarily mean you know, that you’re going to do better or worse, if you didn’t go to law school.Sharon Tseung 2:34
I mean, I like that you have both backgrounds, because I feel like you’re like a trusted source, or I could I feel comfortable, like listening to your content. Cuz I know that you have that lawyer background. So it’s awesome. And so yeah, today, I think it’d be great if we can chat about building passive income through real estate investing, because you’ve told me some stuff about how you’re able to, like, continuously get more properties. And then it’s like almost unlimited how you’re doing it, because you don’t need to keep putting in your own money. So I’d like to learn more about that. I’m curious, because I’m like, how do you even do that? I’m like, can you? Yeah, walk us through the process of kind of continuously buying these rental properties?

Unknown Speaker 3:10
Yes. So um, let me just quick start to take a step back from the questions that you need to have kind of a baseline to start from before you get into that type of real estate investing. So when I started, the first property I bought was a house hack. It was a property that was a two family building where I moved into one of the units rented out the other one, and kind of did the landlording thing, learn the ropes, learn how to manage tenants, how to deal with property issues, how to be a property owner, those sorts of things. And when I started doing that, when I first bought that first property, there was no chance that anyone was going to give me their money, before I bought that property, their money to invest in, you know, apartment complexes or anything like that. So I just want to make sure that that’s clear to people that so it’s a bit of a caveat there, where you either need to start small, like I did investing your own money initially. And with house hacking, you know, there are very good advantageous mortgage programs out there where you don’t have to put a ton of money down. People probably have heard of FHA loans, where you only put three and a half percent down as opposed to having to put 20 or 25% down when you’re not living at the property and other programs, loan programs around, you know, your area, wherever people are watching. I’m sure there are banks nearby with maybe you can only put, maybe they only require to put 5% down or you know, maybe 10% down and not the huge amounts that you would need as an investor where you’re not living at the property. So to me, I started that way. And to me, that’s the best way to start and kind of learn things but once you start building a track record, you can start getting into more of you know, other people money type of investments, OPM situations. And so for me for the first I think, probably five years or so of investing, I just did my own deals, and I would basically save as much money as I can not splurge on Anything, pay my bills, but also set money aside for investing real estate. And so I started out with a duplex, I bought, I think paid $230,000. For that duplex, I put 10% down. So that was 23,000. So that’s not a small amount either, I could have done an FHA at the time. So I could have done a three and a half, it would have been less. But you know, initially, you have to kind of save the money, not overspend on your living expenses, not overspend on your discretionary expenses, and kind of, you know, prepare for investing and be disciplined. And then once you do that, then you kind of scale up, you can either live in that property for a bit, and then go buy another house hack, and keep the one you started with as a rental and you know, rent the apartment you were living in. Or if you save enough money, you can then you know, start putting money down, like I did, my next deal was two properties bought together where I put 25% down

Sharon Tseung 5:49
real quick. Maybe you can explain the FHA loan because I feel like my audience is probably newer, because I’m teaching online business usually. So yeah, maybe you can walk through what that means for people.

Unknown Speaker 6:01
Yeah, absolutely. And sorry for rambling and I get really excited. So um, FHA loans are Fair Housing Administration loan. So they’re loans that are backed by the federal government. And basically, they provide a insure against default, so that lenders are more willing to lend at more risky terms. A typical loan, which is a call it a conventional non FHA insured loan requires, you know, 20% down regardless whether it’s single family, or multifamily, if someone’s looking to get a property, buy a house and want to live in it, and they want to get a loan, typically, the requirement is 20%. So and that’s because the, the lender wants to make sure that the person has enough skin in the game, that they’re not just going to take out a loan and default on it, and then leave the landlord kind of holding the bag. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a risk tolerance issue for lenders. But when the federal government steps in with an FHA loan, they say to the lenders, we’re going to insure this borrower and this loan against default, so that you can give this borrower better terms in order to buy a property. And the purpose for the FHA loans for the government to do that federal government to do that is to incentivize homeownership, in people, possibly people lower income people, or people with poor credit scores, and those sorts of things. And so how real estate investors can take advantage of this is if you want to house hack, all FHA loans require you to live at the property, if you are willing to house hack, you can buy a property, whether you could go from one unit to four units up to four units, you can get that type of a loan where your term rather turn the down payment requirement is much lower than would be standard for most banks, because of this feature where the government’s insuring it, that’s one of the features. The other feature is that you can have a loan with a much worse credit score than you would normally be able to do again, because the government is insuring the loan. And so those are the two biggest obstacle for most of the obstacles for most people buying properties is a down payment where they don’t have enough money, and two is poor credit or credit that’s not quite up to par. And so that prevents people from investing real estate in buying, you know, single family homes to live in. And so this is a shortcut for that

Sharon Tseung 8:08
site. So that one is a it’s usually what three or 3.5% down or something like that, right?

Unknown Speaker 8:13
Yep, three and a half percent down as sort of the lowest you can go, you can go much you can go more than that. But three and a half percent is the lowest downpayment, they’ll let you do for just a regular FHA mortgage.

Sharon Tseung 8:23
Cool. And then you mentioned house hacking, and people might not know what that means. So yeah, maybe you can, you can do another definition of that. So

Unknown Speaker 8:30
just a quick plug to I have three videos, a series on house hacking on my YouTube channel. So sharing, maybe you can link that with this video. But yeah, I talked about my first investment I talked about how to finance a house hack, where I interviewed another friend of mine who’s a mortgage broker. And she goes through kind of the process and what’s possible and and also how to find a house hack how to kind of weed through properties out there. But what a house hack is, is basically a property that has the potential of being a rental in some shape or form. It could be a single family home with rooms where rooms that could be rented out to people. Maybe it’s on Airbnb, or roommates or whatnot, or it’s a multi family property where it’s more than one unit like a duplex, a triplex four Plex, etc. Where if you live in one of the units, you could still get income from the other units. So house hack is basically a hybrid between a rental property and the primary residence for people so you can live at the at the property and kind of, you know, have that as your primary residence and make money from other parts of the property. Awesome.

Sharon Tseung 9:28
So now let’s keep continuing with your journey. So you started Sorry about that. So yeah, we’re scaling up now. So how did you start collecting more properties and things like that?

Unknown Speaker 9:38
Yeah. So after my first few deals, I started kind of, you know, networking with people. I partnered up with a guy that I used to I was playing basketball with, you know, just a buddy of mine who we’re talking about real estate one day and I didn’t know he was investing. He didn’t know that I was investing and come to find out he just bought a six unit building in it. No, nearby town and they said, Oh, that’s interesting, and then kind of get got together. So well, let’s partner Let’s buy something together. I said, Okay, and how are we going to do that. And so then we started looking for, you know, people who might be interested in investing their money being private lenders, essentially. So being banks on our deals, and making a much higher percent interest return than they would from a CD or bank, or, you know, even the stock market, in some cases where it’s guaranteed interest every month. And so that’s kind of where it got started. I think the first time I did a purchase a bought a property that way was in 2017. And there was it was a pretty steep learning curve, it was a lot of trial and error, it was a lot of asking, you know, I basically went to everyone in my network, wherever I knew, that might have money, I didn’t even know whether they had money or an interest investing. But I basically just talked to everyone I could about, you know, investing in real estate, and about what I’ve done. So far, the big thing about it was the track record, and being able to show that, hey, I’ve done these deals, I’ve been very successful with them on my own using my own money, you know, I can be more successful if you are basically backing me for these deals. And so I did a couple, I did a deal with him with his business partner that I mentioned, we bought two properties together. And then after that, you know, I actually another one of my friends, who’s been in real estate for a long time, even longer than me approached me and kind of he saw that I partnered with this other guy. And he said, Well, let’s do some business together. And so him and I have been investing in property since then. And we’ve been scaling quite a bit. I can go into the more specifics if you want more, but I don’t want to keep rambling.

Sharon Tseung 11:36
No, I mean, I’m curious. So you essentially use kind of other people’s money to finance your projects, right? How did you get that trust? If you’re saying that they started seeing you have this portfolio or something? And they’re like, oh, and like, how does that work? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 11:49
So I would say if some people are interested in doing that, you got to start out with people you’re already friends with, and maybe family members. And you would basically approach them and maybe you’re talking about a specific deal, or you’re looking at a property and you’re you’re saying you know, this is this is a good potential property to buy. And you’re explaining what you’ve done in the past. And then you see, basically ask them, Do you know anyone who might be interested in investing as a lender and making a 10% interest only return for three years? That’s kind of been how we’ve invested? how we’ve gotten lenders, which is basically to say to them, Do you know anybody who might be interested in that kind of gets their wheels going in their head? like, Hmm, well, I have some money in an IRA that’s just sitting there, or maybe in the bank account, and I wasn’t sure what I want to do with it. Or maybe they have some other just brokerage account, where they’ve been in the stock market for a while, and markets at all time highs, and they want to get out and maybe invested in something else. Well, you know, they’re anticipating a downturn, and they can make 10% return with us, that sounds like a pretty nice opportunity for them. So that’s kind of how we started but a lot of it was, you know, friends and family to start with. And once we’ve built that track record, you know, I think we’ve gotten a few hundred thousand dollars in the beginning, from people like that those people started telling other people about, Hey, I’m making, you know, $20,000 a year doing absolutely nothing, you know, just collecting interest, and it’s coming in every month, it’s secured by the real estate that these guys are investing in, and I’m no trust and like them, one, one partner is an attorney. The other part is an investigator for the for the state government, you know, these are trustworthy people that, you know, you can make good money just passively investing. And that’s kind of how we were able to do that. Cool.

Sharon Tseung 13:28
So it’s kind of like a syndication or clarify, I guess what that means, too. So essentially, are you pulling together money from people and then investing in your own deals, and then like, basically cash flowing from those and giving a percentage of that to the other owners and stuff like that. So I’ll explain

Unknown Speaker 13:44
what a syndication is and kind of how that looks as compared to what we’re doing in a syndication deal. The people who are investing actually get a part ownership interest in the property typically, and so you have the sort of the main folks who are the managers or the deal runners of the syndication deal. And then you might have, you know, 10s, or hundreds of people who are investing in a piece of the property of the of the company really, that’s, that’s managing the property, and then they get an interest return. And then they also get an ownership a portion of it as well, so that when the property sold, they get it, they get some of that money back or something, you know, they get their money back, plus whatever profits they make with us, what we’re doing right now is we’re working maybe with only one or two people, maybe three people on a particular purchase, and they’re acting strictly as lenders for us. So they are making their profit on the deal is guaranteed at a preset particular rate. We have a mortgage, contract with them, we have we have the loan agreement, we have promissory note and some other agreements that are all signed and tie to the property. And then those agreements are for a set period of years. Typically we do two years or three years. And we essentially buy property with their money and we use their money to do any renovations at the property like all cash. Yes. Right. So so they give us they give our LLC See the investment investment funds that are needed to buy the property, we buy the property, they get it, they get a security interest in the property, we then you know, usually we structure so that there’s extra money over and above the purchase price that we can do renovations if those are necessary on the deal. So we’re using their money for the purchase price and for the renovations, and then once we complete the renovations there the entire time, they’re making monthly payment, they’re making monthly interest on their money. And then we would go and refinance that property with a commercial lender, presumably, we have increased the value of the property and we can refinance it at 80% loan to value for what that property is now worth after we’ve remodeled it. And those people would be entitled to their money back. So basically, they pay off the principal of the loan, as well as the interest that they’ve made on now what we usually do is we say to people are going to pay you back, you want to keep reusing that money for another deal. And most people want to do that, because they love it. Because it’s a it’s a monthly payment that comes in without them having to do anything for it.

Sharon Tseung 15:58
How much are they putting in? So like, how much are your home usually costing?

Unknown Speaker 16:03
Yes. So we have the the lowest amount someone’s invested with us is 20,000. And I think the highest amount that someone has invested with us, you know, on one loan basis is 300,000. So it’s kind of the range. And we have I think I have like 10 hundred 12 investors now. And it’s everything in between. But as far as property costs or values go in my area, I’m in the capital region of New York State. So not New York City, not the super high price market where you know, things cost millions of dollars, we’re sort of in between, we have a pretty stable economy here, we have good jobs. And we have good employers around here and businesses and government institutions where there’s a solid base, so we don’t really fluctuate that much in price. You know, when we had the downturn in 2009, then home values didn’t go down that much. And since then, you know, they’ve appreciated but not as not as crazy as California or, you know, San Francisco or anything like that. So I would say for us a sweet spot I think for there’s obviously variations depending on you know how good of an area it is better school districts make things cost more, slightly worse school districts, there’ll be cheaper, our sweet spot is somewhere around, I think 40,000 to 50,000, maybe 30 to 50,000 per apartment in a building. So we have for example, a triplex we don’t want to pay more than 150,000. For a triplex we have a four unit, we don’t want to pay more than 200,004. It varies. You know, it all depends on the circumstances of the deal. Some of my one of my best deals has been so far has been a 10 unit building that we bought for $375,000. Oh, yeah, that one needed renovations. And I can talk more about that if you want to jump into one of the specifics of a deal. But you know, that’s kind of the price. That’s the price point that we’d like to get it. That’s a that was a really good deal. But, you know, other deals that we buy are typically in the I think 100 to $300,000 range is probably the ballpark for us.

Sharon Tseung 17:55
So we’re usually doing like multifamily or apartments, you’re saying,

Unknown Speaker 17:59
Yeah, we don’t want to buy anything less than three units. So we don’t do single families. Right now we don’t do duplexes right now, anything we want to buy me and my business partner with one doing most of the work most of the best investing, we want to buy properties that are somewhere between three to 20 units. That’s kind of where we’re looking right now. Awesome. And how

Sharon Tseung 18:17
is that cash flow looking? Like, for example, for a four Plex for under 200,000? How much are you getting for monthly cash flow?

Unknown Speaker 18:25
Let me just think of one example. So we have one four Plex that we bought in 2018. That I’m thinking of specifically. And so the rents were and we haven’t really raised the rents too much on on them. Only one of the tenants turned over the other three are still there from from prior owner. But at the time, we bought the building two of the apartments were renting for 1000 each one apartment is renting for 975 per month, and the last apartment was renting I believe for 700 per month. That’s really good. That’s great. So yes, so we’re talking like 36 and change 3700 ish. For that property. We bought it for 210,000 Wow. Okay, where is this is this is right in the one of the surrounding cities near Albany, New York. So this is the city His name is cohoes, New York. And it’s sort of it’s a smaller city, it’s, you know, doesn’t have a huge population. But because it’s part of this, it’s called the Capital Region area near Albany, it’s sort of lumped together with it, because all the businesses, all the employers are kind of in the same, you know, within 30 minute radius. So our area is pretty diverse in that sense that we have, you know, some suburbs, we have some towns, we have some cities, and they’re all clustered together. So it makes it makes it easy to, you know, go outside of Albany and still buy something good. And, you know, people can still rent from you and that are working in Albany, and that sort of thing. And so, with that property, you can just look at the income and the purchase price, because New York State is known for all kinds of crazy expenses in government expenses. So you have your taxes, which are among the highest in the country for New York State. So property taxes, so that has to be factored in you also, you know, we have fairly high Insurance, property insurance just because of claims and things like that, you know, we don’t have tornadoes or hurricanes, but we have other things, you know, in the winter, you know, winter months, pipes freezing, all those things that causes damage that costs insurance companies money, we do have some flood zones as well. So that’s a concern for people for investors. So all those things need to be factored in. But overall, I would say our profit margins if I had to be conservative, after all the different expenses, where we factor in not just the standard fixed expenses, but also the capital expenditures on properties, I would say probably, maybe $300 per apartment is what we’re making. That’s really good. Two to 300, I would say conservatively,

Sharon Tseung 20:39
yeah, that’s awesome. You also mentioned with the lowest loan you got from someone who was like 30,000, I think 20,000 20,000. So how does that work? Like was that the purchase price was actually only that much? Or are they like splitting it with other people? How is that correct?

Unknown Speaker 20:54
Yes. So we are pulling some funds. So basically, that lenders loan is sort of supplement to what someone else’s lend on a particular property. So it will be let’s say, someone’s lending $160,000. And that’s the purchase price, and then someone else is willing to do another 20 or 40. And then, you know, that goes toward the construction or rent costs. Oh, that’s kind of how that would work.

Sharon Tseung 21:19
Yeah. Okay. And then when you’re buying it, it’s under your name, or like, it’s not under the lenders name, right? It’s just

Unknown Speaker 21:25
correct, right. So the way it would work is the lender gets a mortgage interest, the way that works out is you have the purchasers buying it and they get a deed which has their name on it. In our case, we use LLC for everything. So it’ll be an LLC that owns the property. And then there’s a lien on that property that is in favor of this lender, and the lien basically alerts anybody else who may want to buy the property or if this if the owner wants to sell that property, someone else that lien would be an encumbrance on title preventing that owner from selling the property without the loan being paid off. So then secures the lender to be paid back if and when the property is sold.

Sharon Tseung 22:05
Okay, that makes sense. And then it’s interesting. So when you refinance it, then you’re basically taking out a conventional loan each time, right? So you know, usually don’t they say, like you, you can get like four to 10. And then after that, it starts getting difficult to get those loans like how does that work? Sure,

Unknown Speaker 22:20
yes, so the difference for us, and that’s true, conventional lenders usually have limits, it’s anywhere from four to 10, on how many loans you can have with one lender, or actually with any any lenders, the difference for us is that we’re not going the conventional route, we are going to commercial and where they don’t have those restrictions at all. They when once you get into the commercial lending area, you can get as many loans as they are feeling comfortable to lend you. And they will look specifically at the assets that they’re lending on. So they’re they’re looking at the income, they’re looking at the expenses, they’re looking at your track record, all those things put together. And there really isn’t an issue, at least at the moment right now, unless something happens in the economy, where you know, things go south. But right now, you can do that, at least with lenders in my area that do commercial loans as much as you want.

Sharon Tseung 23:13
That’s pretty cool. So how big is your portfolio now?

Unknown Speaker 23:15
So I am at 45 apartments, now my business partner somewhere together between the two of us, we’re close to 200. Wow. So he owns you know, his own with some other business partners. I own some in my own name, I own some first business partner that I mentioned. And then I own a bunch with him that we’ve purchased in the last three years. Awesome.

Sharon Tseung 23:35
How does that partnership work? If you guys separately have your own? And then you have some together? So like, Is it like whatever’s in your network? You’re like, I’m putting my name on it, whatever’s on his he hits it? And then when do you decide? It’s like something you guys both do together? Like?

Unknown Speaker 23:49
Yeah, so that’s a great question. One of the things that’s really important is if you’re going to partner with someone that you have to partner with somebody not only gonna complement what you do well, and what you don’t do well, but also one you can sort of work these things out with and how this is going to work. And it’s always it’s kind of an ongoing relationship. And it’s always kind of evolving, and morphing, and all those things. But the way we have it set up, is that he has properties that he’s purchased before me with another business partner, he still buying properties with another business partner, and he’s also buying properties with me. And you know, sometimes it depends on you know, do we have to mean mean him with our lenders? Do we have financing available? Are funds available to buy something that came on the market or something that we’re looking at? Or if we don’t, maybe his other business partner, has lenders that are willing to buy that property with him? So for me, my main goal, I mean, I don’t look at it as Oh, no, you can’t buy it with someone else. I’m just looking at it from from my perspective, as am I advancing where I need to go through my partnership with him? And the answer is yes, you know, I’m looking at this building, let’s buy it or I don’t really I’m not really interested in this one. Okay. He says I’ll buy it with with the other guy. And that’s kind of how we’ve done it, but in terms of who owns what Just depends on who came to the table with the deal. And of you know, when at what time it was a purchase.

Sharon Tseung 25:05
That makes sense. Now let’s get into kind of finding those deals. How do you normally get those deals?

Unknown Speaker 25:10
Yeah. So when I started, it was mostly through the MLS multiple listing service, which is the website or the service that’s provided by your local realtors. And since then, since 2011, when I started, things have gotten much tougher to find good deals on that service. And so we’ve had to kind of expand in try to do different tried different things. Now that we’ve developed the track record, we’re kind of getting people calling us and saying, Hey, I know this deal, or I own this property I want to sell it are you guys interested in so we pick up some deals that way? we’ve purchased from tax foreclosures, one of our deals last year was a tax foreclosure, which, you know, it’s its own thing. Yeah. How do you find that? So in our area, we have tax auctions that are administered by the local municipalities. And I’m sure that’s probably true for for the bay area as well in other parts of the country. But basically, when property owners are behind on taxes, the the municipality has the right to take that property from them following a specific process defined by state law. And once they’ve taken that property, they need to dispose of it to at least recoup some of that money that’s owed. And so they put it up out for auction, which there are websites on, you know, city’s websites that talk about auctions that are happening. And so you just attend an auction and you bid on a property. Hopefully, you had the chance to do some research on it, maybe went saw it in person for us, the one that we bought last year, we didn’t even set foot inside because they didn’t allow it. So we basically bought a property sight unseen and it was a pretty harrowing experience because there’s another investor who really wanted that property and I was there bidding on

Sharon Tseung 26:49
it. So you there like in person bidding? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 26:52
I mean, you could you could also their online auctions as well, their their site from tax foreclosure auctions, their mortgage, foreclosure auctions, but this particular one, I was in the audience, my business partner wasn’t there, he was on the phone, and

Unknown Speaker 27:04
you guys are like, dang this. I haven’t

Unknown Speaker 27:06
seen the property in person either. But we had cash in hand, you know, we hit certified checks for the downpayment. And, you know, I think the property started is, it’s a three unit building very, very large, you know, ended up being a pretty, pretty good deal for us. But the initial bid, they said it was $30,000. So of course, there’s like six or seven people bidding on that, okay, so 3035 4043 45, you know, and it just keeps going up and up. And then you know, then it’s just me and this other guy, and we’re at, you know, over $50,000, and I’m on the phone Vinnie, my business partner, I’m like, sure you want me to beat him up? He’s like, yes, yes, keep going. So eventually, I think we end up getting it for 57,000, which his last bid was 56. I went 57. If he gave up and so, um, you know, then we have to pay the auction fees and other closing costs, and the city ended up being like $70,000, just to purchase that property. And then we had to put a ton of money renovating, it almost ended up not being a good deal. But we ended up okay, but it was definitely not something that I would always recommend, especially to new people.

Sharon Tseung 28:10
So yeah, a lot of it usually is from your network, like for the deals. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 28:13
And we

Unknown Speaker 28:14
do some we do some marketing too. So you know, we market to two different owners are people that we think might be interested in selling. So we do that as well. And I also want to mention, so as a part owner of a real estate brokerage, we have agents that work for a brokerage. So we have those kind of connections as well. So sometimes we’ll have agents will have a lead on something coming to us saying, Hey, you know, this is a, this is a property you might be interested in buying. So we have that angle as well.

Sharon Tseung 28:40
Okay, cool. How long did it take for you to build up that portfolio? where people are trusting you now? And like coming to you?

Unknown Speaker 28:46
Yeah, um, I would say, I mean, it took years, it took a few years, um, between gathering downpayment money closing on a property, managing it for a while, you know, building enough funds to go and buy another one, like, it takes time, you know, so this is unlike, you know, maybe businesses online businesses, and, you know, you see, you see ads on YouTube videos talking about, Hey, I made X number hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, you know, with Amazon FBA or something else. This is a slow go, but it’s sort of a snowball. So once you get the momentum going, the momentum is going to take a while. So it takes time and effort and knowledge and the research and all that. But after a while, I think I would say maybe three, four years you can really start building and depending on how involved you are in real estate, and I was doing this part time while working in still lamb. So if you had the ability to kind of go full speed and really network with people attend local real estate groups and all those things, you know, you might be able to do it quicker, but you do need that track record my opinion. Before you can really do you know, OPM deals, you know that way. Yeah, man.

Sharon Tseung 29:53
I do think it’s similar to most online businesses that you pursue have like the snowball effect of like, it grows extra Financially, the first $1,000 might be harder than like the rest, right? So the more you build up your brand, the more people will like come back to you and stuff like that. And you know, see that so that’s awesome. So when it comes to your the homes, you’re purchasing, what is your guys’s like Buying Criteria?

Unknown Speaker 30:16
Yeah, so like I said, price per unit is something that we look at, you know, that sort of general kind of ballpark guideline, I don’t think we ever want to go above $50,000 per apartment per unit in a building. If we do, it’s usually because we see upside in being able to add value to the property, meaning that maybe we can add additional units put it put more units in the building, yeah, there’s space for or we think that the rents can really be raised significantly. So those are usually things that we look at and consider. But beyond that, it’s sort of like a rule of thumb, then we really look at kind of the costs, the expenses and the income potential from the building. So it’s hard to say what you want to make at least $200 cash flow per unit after, you know, being super conservative, after all expense, I think we are hitting quite a bit over that for a lot of them. Yeah, but you know, you want to be conservative, because there is the potential for needing large expenditures on a property, you know, things certain things break or at the end of their useful life, you got to budget for those as well. So I factor those in to all my calculations. So that’s that’s kind of how we look at them.

Sharon Tseung 31:22
When it comes to neighborhoods, though. Do you live in that area? Or do you did you have to learn a whole new market? So yes,

Unknown Speaker 31:28
so I live in the in the capital region. So I’m very familiar with a lot of different areas. So I would say probably 30 mile radius, maybe 20 mile radius around the capital I’m very familiar with, I don’t typically buy in the area that I live in, because I live in a slightly more expensive area where First of all, there aren’t that many single are there, not that many multifamily properties for sale, and when there are, they’re very expensive, and the return on investment is much lower in those areas. So what we try to do is we try to find middle of the road locations, where it’s not a really bad area in terms of property values, crime and everything else. And it’s not the best area, either, you want to be in the sweet spot where it’s appealing to most people, it’s not that expensive, taxes aren’t that high, but we can still get decent rents, you know, we’re not going to get the top dollar rents. And we’re also not going to pay the top dollar prices either. So that’s kind of how we how we try to do

Sharon Tseung 32:24
so you know, how I like can’t do the properties like in the Bay Area, I prefer to do out of state, do you think this is possible for out of state, you know, investors and like bring up? Well, if I wanted to build something up where like, I can get funding from people that I know, in my circle? can I build this up with units like out of state? And what steps would I have to take to do that? Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 32:45
Yeah, I don’t think I don’t think it’s limited to your ability to get lenders and get other people to invest with you is not limited by you not being able to invest in your you know, kind of neck of the woods, I think it all comes down to how credible you are in what you’ve done so far. And being able to show people and get them to believe and trust that you are capable, you know, buying good deals, making a return on your investment and paying them back and paying them an interest rate that you’re promising them. So no, as long as you can accomplish that. There’s no issue with where you’re investing. So I know that you’re you have a property in California now and you’re under contract to buy two other properties in Texas. That’s awesome. And once you buy those, and you run them for a little bit, and I know that you and your boyfriend on doing stuff together in the Bay Area, and he’s he’s investing in real estate. I think that using him and leveraging his connections and kind of doing that together, I think you’re you’re almost there, if not already in terms of having enough credibility to get people to invest with you.

Sharon Tseung 33:43
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s good to hear. Yeah. So do you recommend focusing on one like neighbor, like one area, one city before kind of expanding? It sounds like you mainly do one area? Right?

Unknown Speaker 33:54
Yeah, I do want to area because we have such an abundance here. And the deals are still available for me, I just don’t have a need to go outside. And I like that I can go and I can visit the properties easily. And my business partner can and you know, we have routes and connections with all of our contractors. If there evictions that need to happen. We know the courts, we know who the judges all those things are useful to have. Because you know, if once you go out outside of the air, you have to find those people all over again. And you have to build those connections, build that support network. So for us, it just makes sense to continue with recent changes to landlord and tenant laws in New York. I’m starting to think about you know, does it make sense to continue building this portfolio here because of such an unfriendly landlord environment right now in New York. So that’s definitely causing me to do some thinking in regard to possibly going out of state but I’m not at that point yet. Or laws aren’t that bad yet, but that’s definitely something I’m watching closely.

Sharon Tseung 34:54
Yeah. Is there any rescue fine to focusing on one area or like is your area really good that you can Like it’s gonna appreciate for a while and things are gonna look up.

Unknown Speaker 35:03
Yeah, I think there’s always risk when you’re just in one area, but you have to consider what that area is made up of, for us. So if an economy went down, right for a period of time, a downturn in the economy can result in closures of businesses, and loss of jobs and inability for, you know, your renters to pay your rent, and for, you know, owners to pay their mortgages and property values to go down as a result and all those things, but you have to look at, you know, maybe if you’re in a small town in Ohio, somewhere, right, and you have one employer, who is, you know, maybe a huge employer for the for the town, but it’s just one employer, and they have a factory there, whatnot. And then something happens in the economy or the local state laws, and it’s no longer profitable for that employer to be there. And they just pick up and move their factory to Canada or something, you had ALL your rental properties, depending on those workers being your tenants. Now, you’re in big trouble in that sense, if that’s the situation that you’re looking at that that’s what the town looks like, or the area looks like, then yes, I would say it’s very risky to just be there and have all your eggs in one basket. But for our area, I do feel like we’re pretty stable. Now. We have government education, employers, and we have business employers, and they’re not really all going to go somewhere

Sharon Tseung 36:13
when it comes to running out those properties. Do you have a property management team in place? Do you have multiple, since you have like a lot of units now? How does that work?

Unknown Speaker 36:22
Yeah, so that has been a challenge. And it’s definitely a growing pain. As you get more units, I know that you use a property management company for your current rental, and you’re planning to do that for your the ones you’re buying in Texas, which is smart, especially if you don’t want to make that your kind of your main thing. For us, the way we’ve been able to do it. So far not saying that we won’t change this in the future. But the way we’ve done it so far is we’ve basically built up our own property management team, essentially where we’re sitting at the top of the team, but we have people that have agents that go out and rent our apartments have guys that can go in and do an apartment turnover, clean it painted, fix things up, refurbish things, and get that done. And then we have four evictions. I don’t even do my evictions most of the time, and I’m an attorney, because I’m too busy with my day job. And I have other responsibilities at my law firm, that I wouldn’t even do that work, we outsource that as well. So we have multiple key players in sort of our network that can handle all those different tasks. But right now we are the overseers and the managers at the top. So you know, when attendance issues come in, or they ask us questions, or there’s some kind of a complaint, we do have to figure out who we’re sending that off.

Sharon Tseung 37:33
Okay, so you’re okay, so they’re like communicating with you guys. But then you just like, send the work to other people. Exactly. Cool. And then have you faced any problem tenants? Like, have there been challenges with that?

Unknown Speaker 37:44
Oh, for sure. We’ve had, I’ve seen it all, honestly, you know, now that I’ve been doing this for nine years, almost, I seen everything, everything from problem tenants where they weren’t paying to their domestic issues with tenants where, you know, there was police involved in some cases, I don’t want to say too much to discourage people from from landlording. But what I will say is that, you just need to look at it as a business, take emotions out of it, which I know is very hard to do. And I haven’t always been able to do that myself effectively. But you got to take your emotions out of it. And you got to look at it as a business, you have to be fair to people, we also have to be firm. So a lot of times people have told us about, you know, really bad things that have happened in their lives or things that happen to their family and all those things, whether or not they’re true, I don’t know, I sympathize with them at the same time, you know, I level with them. And I tell them, you know, I understand that you’re going through something, but we have to pay our bills, and we just have to take the steps that are necessary. Meaning that you know, we start as far as evictions, for example, it’s a long process in our state as it is in your state, which is I think, even longer in your state than ours, but certain steps need to be taken. You can’t just rely on a tenant saying I’ll pay you next month, you know, pay for both months that I’m behind next month, okay? You can, you know, I tell them, we’ll start the eviction process. And if you can pay by x date, you’re telling me you’re going to pay will stop it will stop the eviction. But in the meantime, we’re going to continue so just so they understand, you know, kind of matter of factly that this is this is what’s happening. works out Would you be able to talk about like your best deal and walk us through the numbers and like the process I’d love to Yeah, so this is a deal that I just mentioned a little while ago. This is a 10 unit apartment building that we bought the 10 unit apartment building is in a pretty good area. Again, it’s not the best area in our neck of the woods, but it’s it’s decent. It’s it can attract pretty decent tenants with fairly high paying, you know, rental amounts, the way we came across the deal. Well, let me first back up. So we bought the deal for $375,000. It was a 10 unit building he needed about 80 to $100,000 of upgrades and updates in order to you know bring to its full potential and we’re almost done with all of that now. We bought it in the summer of 2019. So it’s been a little over half a year now that we’ve owned that property but it came to us through word of mouth This was a an owner who had owned this building for, I believe, 27 years, the only building that he owned, he was kind of a blue collar guy, he seems a construction guy, he owned his own construction company. So over the years, he’s done the management and fixing up and all those other things on the building himself. And he was getting to a point in his life where he didn’t want to do that anymore. He I believe he’s close to 60, close to retirement. And so we wanted to sell when I first heard about the billion quickly, I looked it up online. I’m like, oh, man, this is this is a really nice building.

Sharon Tseung 40:32
Yeah, but real quick, how did you find this guy? Again?

Unknown Speaker 40:34
It was was word of mouth. It was somebody who he reached out to us to to sell his building. Yeah, because he knew we’re, you know, we knew we’re in the in the market buying buying buildings, multifamily, especially like that. So that’s kind of that’s kind of how he came to us. You know, when it came to us, I think it was, it might have been an email, I forget what it was, I got an address, right. And I looked at, I looked up the address, and I’m like, oh, wow, it’s a solid brick two story building where it’s basically five duplexes in a row connected to each other. So up and down five next to each other. So there’s 10, total, so five, down five up, and it’s almost like half of the city block that the building was, you know, was sitting on. So it was the apartments were large, there are over 1000 square feet per apartment, it was designed as a multi family building. So it wasn’t one of those conversions where it was originally something else. And then it became a multifamily building. And I saw the potential right away. And so I said, you know, let’s contact this guy back, let’s go meet with him, let’s go check out the building and see what we can do. And so he met us at the building went through it keep the his rents were so much lower than they should have been, I can, you know, you can tell just from experience in this area of this type of apartment for this size, it should have been getting, you should have been getting a lot more money for him, he was renting them for I think the lowest was like 550 or 150 per month, and the highest might have been, I think 725 per month. And because they were each two bedrooms, one bath, or three bedrooms, one bath and over 1000 square feet in the location that it was in, we knew that we could probably get over $1,000 per unit for those for those arguments. And so right away, you know, we knew this is a very good building, we want it so we started the negotiation process and talking to them. And you know, this is where it becomes harder because you don’t have you don’t have an agent in between you don’t have an attorney, it’s kind of owner to owner or, you know, buyer to owner. Right. And on the one hand, it’s easier. On the other hand, it’s harder, he wouldn’t tell us how much you want it for the building. At first, she wanted us to put out a number. And you know, that’s a typical negotiating tactic. You know, we didn’t really want to put out a number because we didn’t know where he was right. So we put out a number which we thought was extremely low. just for the hell of it. Because you know, what do we have to lose? So I think we offered him 325,000 to start with now mind you in the in the look in the location and the condition that the building was in at the time, I think it was easily over 600,000 without having to do anything for it. Right. So we thought we were low balling this. He said, he said now, you know, I’m not gonna go that low. I want something more. We’re like, What do you want? And he said, Well, my building with the city is assessed for I think you said 425,000. And so that he kind of set the top for us on, you know, we were both kind of did a double take like, Okay, so we’re not that far off and make money on this, right? So after some more negotiating total on $375,000 knife, we waive all contingency. So in most contracts, you have an inspection contingency where if you get a licensed inspector and something goes wrong, you can back out, we waive that. So that was a risk we took because we felt confident that whatever issues come up, we can handle them, especially at the price forgetting. And you know, we’ve told them it’s cash. So we don’t need to go to a bank to get approval. There’s no appraisal on any of that. So that was a you know, selling point for him. Yeah. So that helped. And then we close on it. So 300 375,000 was private money. And then we had another hundred thousand of private money to do renovations and started renovating. And one thing I forgot to mention is that three of the apartments in this 10 unit were vacant, so he wasn’t even getting rent for those apartments. So seven apartments were rented three were not he said those three that were vacant, had been vacant for over a year. So you can really you can get a picture of this, you know, he really wasn’t he didn’t want to rent anymore. You want to be a landlord he was tired. And you know, that was part of the reason why the price was the price because he didn’t think that it was worth it the condition that it was in so we’ve renovated currently we have we’ve rented fully renovated six of the 10 apartments and the four remaining apartments are had been currently are rented to an organization that helps people with special needs find housing, and we’re negotiating with them to raise the rents on those apartments without really having to do much renovating to those apartments. If we ended up getting an agreement done, then you know, we’ll probably just proceed you know, forward as is if we don’t, then we’ll go in and renovate those apartments and raise the rents even more. So that’s the plan but right now, each of the remodeled six apartments are is renting for 1100 a month. So we’ve more than doubled the rents on those and for that we’re in negotiating, we’re probably going to get up to maybe nine, I think we asked for 975 or 950, something like that. Yeah. So it’ll be I think that comes to over 10,000 a month. Cash Flow, maybe 11, something like that. And not cash flow. Sorry, gross rent, that’s gross rent. But of course doing that increases the value of the building. I think it probably if we were to go and sell it right now, we’ll probably be over a million dollars. Oh, very, very good deal. grads, thanks. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Those deals, I just don’t want people to think that Oh, yeah. This guy’s doing them every day. No, this was a special situation special deal. Most of my other deals are not this much of a homerun. But once I get them,

Sharon Tseung 45:37
that sounds amazing. Like, it sounds like you know, your portfolio and everything you’re doing has been like, you’re just killing it right now. And you also have your own brokerage. So I want to get into that as well, because you can kind of cash like passively from having one right. So I’d love to learn. Yeah, I’d love to learn more about that. So why did you start that? And what was your thought process behind that?

Unknown Speaker 45:57
Yeah, so perk here of being an attorney. And you meant you asked me that, in the beginning, in New York State, an attorney can go and get their broker’s license. So skip the salesperson, let me back up most, in order to become a real estate agent and get into that you have to do a test to pass a test, then you have to have some experience in order to get to the next level with being a broker and having people work under you agents working under you. So in New York State, you can skip that whole process as an attorney, because they look at it as you have the necessary knowledge and expertise from your schooling from law school and passing the extensive bar exam. And you can pay a fee to apply for a license and become a broker. So for me, I immediately did that as soon as I became an attorney, and anyone here from New York is listening. They’re an attorney, you can do that if you don’t if you’re not familiar with it. So that was an easy thing to do. It was a very cheap thing, just I think it was maybe $150 or something like that, that I had to pay, got my broker’s license, I didn’t really do anything with it for many years, except for just doing some my own deals where I acted as my own agent on it. But then in 2017, the business partner with my own rental properties, most of the properties came to me and said, Do you want to partner up and just create a brokerage together. And he had been working as an agent for another broker, basically just doing deals, get making Commission’s on his own purchases with his other business partner up to that time. And so he was making decent money with that. But his thought was, well, if we become brokers, owner brokers, and we can have other people, agents who will work under us and close deals, and we’ll make some percentage of their of their profits of their commissions, they’ll go to us. And so that’s how the idea was born. And we said, okay, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s try it, I didn’t think much of it, we didn’t have anybody, or connections of agents that are gonna come work for us or anything like that. And so I think in the summer of 2017, we just set it up, started, set up a website, did all the things that are required to get it going. And then we slowly slowly started adding people who were interested, mostly they were investors who were interested in dabbling in being agents to making some commissions on the side. And that’s kind of how it started. And so as of today, we have about 10 people. Most of them are part time, like I said, investors, but we have just picked up three full time agents who are that’s their bread and butter. That’s what they do for a living that, of course, creates a substantial stream of income for us, because they’re doing this all the time.

Sharon Tseung 48:13
Yeah. How does that work with commission? So do you have them pay you monthly? Or is it by deal? It’s like split half half now for

Unknown Speaker 48:21
Yeah, so the way we do in there are different models of how you know, different brokerages do it, but the way we do it is just simple per deal, we have a we have a split, then they get a certain percentage, and we get a certain percentage of whatever the commission is due to the brokerage. And so the more deals they do, the more money they make, and the more the more money we make. And so you know, it’s very, it’s it’s mutually beneficial that way. And obviously, the better producers, the people who have more experience, they’re doing more deals per year, they get a higher split as a result of that.

Sharon Tseung 48:51
How did you attract those like full time agents? Did you propose that? Oh, like if there are no fees, you just add just a commission basis? Nice. Like is that one of the selling points? Or them?

Unknown Speaker 49:01
Yes. So we did we actually have quite a few selling points that we try to bring to to the table with them when we’re when we’re talking to them. One of them is the commission splits. The second thing is we don’t charge any fees. It’s sort of your commission is your commission you get what you what you put into it provide certain things that I think most brokerages do provide them, but we tell them up front, we pay for business cards, we pay for signs, we pay for errors and omissions insurance, it’s very easy to sort of do business with us. And the other thing we say to them is we don’t have any quotas. You know, we don’t require you to make cold calls or selling number of buildings per year, any of that stuff. So we’re making it very hands off, you are a go getter, you’re still going to be a go getter. If you just want to do one deal where you’re an investor and you buy a four Plex and you just want to make some of the commission back instead of paying an agent to do that for you. You can do that too. And that’s kind of how we say that to people. And the last thing that we offer that I think nobody else or very few other broker brokers offer is our experience with investment real estate in vesting. So that’s how we were able to attract agents who are maybe full time or part time, but they also have that investor mindset, and they’re looking for that. So we have that opportunity. And it’s awesome.

Sharon Tseung 50:09
Do you guys train those agents? Or like they already knew what to do? And they just started going at it?

Unknown Speaker 50:14
Yeah. So we do do some training for the for the agents specially for the new ones, the more experienced ones, it’s more kind of like issue basis, question basis, you know, their, their issues that come up with a deal or questions, they reach out to us a lot of the time, it’s pretty hands off for us. So like I said, I have a full time job, I’m not going out, you know, doing any showings, I’m not going out and listing properties, or dealing with other agents or the issues that come up, I’m basically providing oversight. My business partner is the one who is the principal broker. So he kind of handles more of the day to day stuff for the brokerage with the agents, I kind of do the legal stuff, you know, so if I’m doing some contracts that between our agents and the brokerage are the things kind of I’ll provide some oversight with that. But it’s, it’s pretty hands off. We do do trainings, every so often, we have some online tutorials that we’ve done for for basic things, but most of the time, they’re pretty self sufficient. And it doesn’t really require a ton of our time to manage the brokerage. It’s a very nice, semi very close to passive, semi passive income.

Sharon Tseung 51:18
Yeah, that’s amazing. I feel like I’m learning so much from you, right? What are your future goals with real estate investing with the brokerage and everything like that,

Unknown Speaker 51:26
Sharon, I feel like I’m rambling on, I hope you’re, I hope your viewers don’t mind. Like I said, I get excited about this stuff. And I just keep on I’ll talk,

Sharon Tseung 51:34
and I’m learning so much.

Unknown Speaker 51:36
So as far as my goals, it’s, it’s a question that I’ve thought about for, you know, for a long time kind of shifted and changed over time, you know, I just like you, I do want to make an impact with people, you know, helping people, especially with the YouTube channel, and I started recently, you know, I want to share what I learned. And I never say that I’m, you know, I know everything about real estate, or everything about law or everything about investing, you know, there’s certain things that I’m passionate about. And I’ve been kind of a student of the game for so long, that now I feel like I can talk about it authoritatively, and actually help other people who are maybe earlier on in their journey. So that’s definitely a passion of mine and an interest of mine. And I want to continue doing that. But of course, the other part of it is you want to make money, you know, the the goal here is to, of course, better myself, financially, my family financially, and to create a passive or semi passive stream of income, that’s not necessarily dependent on the My day job. I love my day job. I’ve been practicing law, like I said, even before I started investing real estate, if you know anything about attorneys, and how specially the private sector attorneys work, it’s a lot of work. And a lot of people burn out and depending on you know, what industry, you’re in what you know, how big the law firm, what, what city, all that stuff plays a role. But you know, a lot of attorneys work very, very hard. And people don’t really realize that they think that being an attorney is kind of like a very glorious type of a profession where you know, you’re making a ton of money, you got the prestige, you see the, you know, the shows on TV, you’re portraying attorneys in a certain way. And a lot of times, it’s not really like that at all. You’re not in court daily, like like on TV or in shows a lot of time spent doing research and sort of really putting in hard long hours, finding answers for clients and researching, writing, and doing all that stuff. And the ultimate result is enjoyable, and you kind of you’re happy when you can help a client you can, you know, win a case or advise them on something to the save the money or avoids them trouble you still, you know, it’s very hard work and long hours. And for us in the private sector, you have billable hours. So you have minimum hours, you have to meet every year, that’s set by your firm, which they say, Okay, well, you have to build 2000 hours or 1700 hours, or whatever it is firms are different, but 1800 hours a year, that has to be built to your clients or to the firm’s clients. And that’s on top of other you know, time you might spend at the firm. So you have administrative time you have other other time you spend on things. And so you end up working 5060 hours a week on a regular basis. And so that’s draining that that takes a toll on yourself and your health and your life and everything else. And so for me, I don’t know exactly where I’ll end up in terms of, you know, my future as far as work goes and law firm practice and all that. But I want to be able to have an opportunity an option to have a choice, you know, where I have to do that if I don’t want to, you know, forever. And I know that, you know, you share that and a lot of other people share that as well. But especially in a profession like mine, where everything’s billed hourly. And I almost feel like I’m in a construction trade or some other trade where it’s an hourly type of rate, even though I get paid salary, I still have to put in the hours that I put in, and you essentially become a highly paid hourly employee which which is a difficult thing to swallow for a long period of time.

Sharon Tseung 54:46
Yeah. Now I think we’re on the same page of like, let’s figure out a way where we have choices like we can decide, you know, if we don’t want to work full time anymore, like we can leave or if we actually enjoy our jobs like we can still work there. So it’s all about kind of designing your life. So I totally understand that as a goal. So when it comes to biggest advice for people who are trying to do what you do, right, so maybe if you, you know, start from scratch, like you don’t have all this amazing, like connections and your portfolio and stuff like that, if you’re just starting out, you know, how would you approach it? Like, what are your action items that other people can take as well?

Unknown Speaker 55:22
Yeah, for sure. So this is going to be another long answer. I’m sorry. I think it’s worth it to to give a very thorough answer. Yes. So I would start with a budget, I would start figuring out how much you’re spending on things, how much money you’re making, and how much money you can set aside. So that’s where I would start and then try to live below your means. And you know, this isn’t just for real estate. This is for everything, you know, anything any kind of investing or business you want to start, I think you need to know what you’re bringing in what you’re spending, and you need to live below your your income that’s coming in. Once you’ve got that down, the next thing I would tackle and maybe you could do them simultaneously. But next thing you need to figure out and sort of shore up is your credit score your credit, those are the two things, the amount of money you might have available financial resources to invest in real estate. And the second thing is having a good as good of a credit score as you can possibly make you want those two things to be in line first, you know, you can do those while you’re you know, researching real estate, learning about different things, watching YouTube videos, my channel, other channels, reading books, all those things, you should be able to do those things simultaneously while you’re working your day job. That’s what I would start doing and maybe some people who are close already, they have good credit scores, and they have decent amount of money saved or they’re saving already, they’re ahead of the game. But if you’re not one of those people, start there and just keep learning consuming content on real estate investing. And then that might take you a year might take a year and a half or two years, whatever it is, but you’ll get there eventually, once you really put in the effort and the time to learn how to raise your credit score and to save some money for investing. That’s your first step. And by

Sharon Tseung 56:53
the way, like for learning real estate investing. Do you have any, like claim resources? Sure, yeah, bigger pockets.

Unknown Speaker 56:59
One of the best resources out there has been for I don’t know, a decade now. That’s where I started, you can get so much information there. I don’t sure if you’re gonna ask me about books later. But pretty much bigger pockets suite of books they have on their website, I think I own probably two thirds of them. Brandon Turner’s books on how to buy rental properties, how to manage rental properties, I don’t have the exact titles in mind right now. But that’s a great resource. And then just pretty much all of their books on they’re on that site. They’re, they’re awesome. And my YouTube channel, check that out. And so yeah, so that that’s what I would say for that.

Sharon Tseung 57:30
Okay, and then yeah, continuing on from there

Unknown Speaker 57:32
with the strategy then. So once you once you have your credit and your finances in order, the next thing you want to do is start looking for a house hack. Now, it might be different. If you’re, if you already own a single family home, and you’re, you know, married with kids, it might be more challenging to do that. And you have to make sure you get your spouse on board with that if that’s what your you know, your goals are. But if you’re younger, and I know that a lot of our YouTube audiences might be younger, maybe just out of college, maybe in their 20s or whatever, that’s the best time to do this to start. But again, you can do this if you’re older as well. But the next thing you should be looking for is a In my opinion, multifamily property as opposed to single family property to house so that you can live in one of the apartments, save yourself money on you know, living expenses, and have your tenants pay your mortgage down, and maybe some other costs that come up, you probably won’t make money on that in terms of cash flow, but you certainly are going to save a ton of money and that will really catapult you into now being now you can snowball now you can save even more money for the next deal that would be my recommendation for people who want to get into real estate who happened yet they should start with a house hack and then from just scale up from there and then you can build on maybe do another house hack if you can find a good deal or if you made enough money you don’t want to do a house hack you just buy a straight out investment property with you know 20% down 25% down and just keep scaling from there once you’ve built up the credibility and the track record, start looking for private money lenders or partners you know, get into the deals and kind of just keep building and then you’ll be able to build once you’ve got that foundation going awesome. That’s great

Sharon Tseung 59:06
advice and I feel like this interview has been super helpful like because I’ve been trying to do way more real estate investing in me thinking about you know, financing of like, Okay, how do I scale this past just like my own money because I don’t want to have to keep waiting till I make enough to like put in another downpayment on something else. Right? So it’s like I love that you’ve talked about these solutions where you can keep going infinitely essentially and it’s really given me a lot to think about and I’m like this is a great kind of blueprint in terms of like myself if I want to try to do something like this. That’s awesome. And yeah, I’m sure people are gonna be curious about like how to find you so yeah, yeah, where can people find you?

Unknown Speaker 59:43
Yeah, so you guys if you want to find me on YouTube, just type in succeed r Ei and I should come up or you can search me by name Vitaly vi t A Li y Volvo EOL POV so you can find me on YouTube. You can also find me I do have a blog. Which is nowhere near as nice as Sharon’s blog. I have been posting some articles on there mainly just connected with the videos that I’ve recorded that I posted so I post on there and it’s it’s just succeed Rei calm, so you can find me there. You can also find me at my law firm, which is I have my law firm profile which is www.wh.com. So it’s it’s the initials of the three partners in the name of my law firm which is Whiteman, Osterman and Hanna so wh calm you can find me there just search for my name. Yeah, and I also have a Facebook page. It’s also succeed Rei just keeping the branding on the same there but I don’t do a ton on Facebook. Again, I just post some videos that I put out on YouTube, but that’s pretty much places where you can find right now.

Sharon Tseung 1:00:44
Perfect. I’ll put all the links in the description below so people can access them. Yeah, thank you so much Batali for speaking with me. I feel like our listeners and I

Unknown Speaker 1:00:52
learned a lot from this. Thanks a lot here and I really appreciate it. So I

Sharon Tseung 1:00:55
hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai