How we got started with Real Estate Investment
A frequent message/phone call/text/etc I get from people starts with:
“How did you and Cody get started with Real Estate investment?”
To which I always respond: “A massive miracle and act of God!”
If you want the nitty gritty, I am about to straight up layout exactly how this all came about.
It was not formulated. We actually didn’t plan it all out and make it all perfect.
We did one simple thing: We started.
And then kept going.
But, to give you the full story… here it is.
When Cody and I were 24, we bought a house. One that nobody would be willing to buy or live in. It was gross. The kind of gross where you could smell the cat pee from the sidewalk.
We had never renovated anything in our entire lives. But with YouTube, help from my Father in Law and a LOT of trial and error, we fixed up the worst house on the best street.
We found out that you can do something called “refinancing” and actually pull equity from your home and use that money for whatever…. for us…. that looked like paying back the $12k we spent fixing the house up!
When you choose to refinance a home, you have to order an appraisal.
That allows the bank to know how much the house is valued at so they can know how much they can loan to you.
When the appraisal came back, we were astounded at how much equity we had in the home.
Long story short, we decided to sell. At the time, we were drowning in student loan debt and we knew that selling the house would pay off all our loans…. including the house loan itself.
From there, we moved out of the house we fixed up and moved in with my parents. Sold the house, payed off student loans and walked away with literally no debt but also no profit.
We spent January-May searching for a home and saving saving saving for the next place we would live.
It was in that time frame that we had dinner with some friends. Those friends invited their friend who happened to be a real estate investor. Within a 3 hour dinner conversation, he convinced us to buy a Duplex we had looked at.
Telling us that if we bought a duplex we could live on one side and rent out the other side for at least the cost of the mortgage ..if not more.
In that season of life, Cody and I were all about no debt, low expenses, and low cost of living. To us, it seemed like the perfect plan.
We had ZERO intention of furthering the portfolio and just felt like this place would be a good place to live and save money.
So we bought it, fixed it up, and lived there. We rented out the other side and profited a small amount off the rent + zero housing expenses for ourselves. It was a nice treat after years of financial debt and burdens.
About a year into living in the duplex, our next door neighbor (who owned the triplex next door) informed us that she was moving to an assisted living and her kids planned to sell her triplex.
Something in me KNEW we had to jump on the opportunity to own another multi-family home!
I told cody all my ideas, how we could fix it, what we could potentially make…. and he jumped on board! Because we had lived in the duplex with no expenses, we were able to purchase the home next door with ease and within our budget!
We did the same thing…. and fixed it up.
We did the fixing up ourselves. This was a huge thing for saving money. We went to YouTube University taught ourselves how to do things and just ran after it. We hired out the scary stuff like plumbing and electricity and got that triplex fixed up—- we even moved into it and rented out our old apartment!
It was in that time frame that Cody started reallllly listening to a podcast called Bigger Pockets. Listening to that attracted him to the idea of Buying, Renovating, Renting, Refinancing, Repeat (aka BRRRR Method).
When that came to his mind… we really started dreaming.
We hit the ground running with the idea that we could build a portfolio, make profit and now…. a whole new income stream.
This is where we started to find a pace. We would find homes that needed work that we NOW had taught ourselves to do. We would fix them, add value, rent them out and then grab another house… and repeat.
From the triplex we bought another duplex… then two more single family homes.
This process allowed us to acquire five properties in 2 years (ten total homes we rent—- due to multi-family homes) and it allowed me to leave my day job and stay home with our daughter.
We learned how to fix up houses, we learned how to buy a home, how to refinance, how to appraise, how to pull equity.
More than anything, it gave us more and more FINANCIAL freedom that we have always desired! Lots of times in life, it is worth it to try the things we have never tried and learn things we have never learned to stretch and expand our world!
Be sure to leave any and all questions you may have in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!