The New (Better) BRRRR Method: Less Risk, More Cash Flow

The BRRRR method (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat) was, for a few years at least, the real estate investor’s golden ticket to a million-dollar portfolio. It allowed investors to buy properties, fix them up fast, get their down payment money back, and recycle it. This created an “infinite” investing loop where someone with one down payment could turn it into five (or more) separate houses. But with high mortgage rates, the BRRRR method was thought to be over by many…until now. We’re introducing a new BRRRR strategy. It’s safer, with less risk (and stress), makes you more cash flow than before, and keeps your leverage lower so you don’t go underwater in a housing correction. Does it work? Dave and Henry are both using this new BRRRR method right now—and doing quite well, we might add. You (yes, you listening to this) can also use this new BRRRR method to buy houses, increase their value, get higher cash flow than regular rentals, and then recycle the money you put into the property to use toward your next investment. You can invest faster, but with lower risk than before, and scale your real estate portfolio the right way, so if interest rates rise, it might not even matter for your bottom line! In This Episode We Cover The new 2025 BRRRR method that’s safer, smarter, and produces more cash flow One big problem with the “perfect BRRRR” and why you should (probably) stop chasing it You don’t need to refinance: why a HELOC (home equity line of credit) may be better Expert tips for doing your first BRRRR in 2025 with the least risk and the highest reward The right amount of money to leave in your BRRRR property (how much equity to pull out after the renovation) And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1165 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  Do burrs still work in 2025? It's been one of the most tried and true investing formulas over the last couple of years. You buy a property, you rehab it, you rent it out, then refinance your cash back out, and you repeat the process. But with higher home prices and higher interest rates today, some people say the burr is dead. Today, we're making a ruling on that question.

• 0:27Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, a rental property investor and the head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. And with me today on the podcast is my friend, Henry Washington. Henry, how's it going? What's up, bud? Glad to be here. I'm glad to have you because I saw this question on the BiggerPockets forum, and I wanted to break it down with you specifically. You've done a lot of burrs, right? Oh, yeah. Good. I figured you have, so you are the right person to help me break this down. I've also done several burrs in my investing career. I think it's a great strategy, or I should say, it has been a great strategy for me in the past, but we're going to talk about if it's still a great strategy going forward. So, a community member posted on the BiggerPockets forum, a community member named Kyle, asked,

• 1:12Dave Meyer?

  and I quote, "I'm curious what people are seeing for leverage on burr acquisitions. Has anyone successfully acquired, rehabbed, and refied a deal with less than 20% of their own cash in? Not trying to over-leverage, just exploring what's realistic in 2025." So, let me just explain this question a little bit, and Henry, feel free to jump in here. Kyle is referring to the BRRRR strategy, which if you've never heard it before, it stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, and repeat. It's basically an approach to real estate where you're buying a rental property, that's the B. Then what you're doing is rehabilitating it that's adding value. You're taking a property that needs some work, you're putting that love and that effort into it to boost your equity.

• 1:56Dave Meyer?

  Then, once you're done with that project, you rent it out to new tenants. Hopefully, you pulled it up to market rents and are generating good cash flow. And at that point, you refinance, so you can take some of the equity that you have built in this property. Some of the equity that you've put into this property and use it for future acquisitions. That's the last R, the repeat part of it. And this has become a very popular strategy over the last 10, 15 years because it's a great way to scale your portfolio. If you're able to execute this in a short timeline, you can do a renovation, build equity, get a cash flowing rental, and then have the same amount of money to go buy the next one. But as interest rates have gone up, properties have gotten more expensive. It's gotten a little bit harder.

• 2:41Dave Meyer?

  And so what Kyle is asking is, is it still realistic to be able to use the BRRRR strategy to grow and scale? Or perhaps is there a better approach that people should be using? So it's a question you should be asking right now. So anyway, I'm just going to ask you, have you done this?

• 2:56Henry Washington?

  Yes, I have done this. But the caveat is, as far as a real estate investor goes, I would consider myself a professional real estate investor. It's what I do for a living and finding deals is what I specialize in. And so for someone like me to say yes to that question, doesn't mean it's a viable strategy for most casual real estate investors, if that makes sense.

• 3:18Dave Meyer?

  It does. It's important to point out, and one of the reasons it's great to have you here is like, Henry does this full time. He's acquiring deals all the time. He's doing off-market deals. He does heavy rehabs. What he can accomplish is totally different from what I get and what I look for because I work full time. I'm not someone who's going to job sites every day. I'm not doing direct to seller marketing. So I do think this is perfect because we can have two different perspectives on this. So maybe let's start with you and I'll tell you my side of things. Like for you as a professional, is this normal? Or like, are you getting these, but not every deal pencils out this way?

• 3:53Henry Washington?

  So it was a whole lot easier to find deals to BRRRR three years ago. We still find them now, but less frequently. Flip numbers tend to make more sense in this market than rental numbers. But because we're looking for deals in volume and we're finding deals in volume, every so often we get one that makes a great BRRRR. And then I think you have to put some parameters around BRRRR, mostly like a timeline.

• 4:21Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Henry Washington?

  Because you can buy, renovate, rent.

• 4:26Henry Washington?

  And then refinance in a short period of time, or you can do it in a much longer period of time. I've refinanced multiple properties this year and pulled cash out of them when I bought them three to five years ago.

• 4:41Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Henry Washington?

  And I just put them on adjustable rates and that adjustable rate now came due. I refinanced it into a 30 year fixed and pulled cash out and those long-term burrs are still burrs.

• 4:53Dave Meyer?

  Henry, that's a great point. I think it's a really important caveat because I've been calling it the delayed burr or people in YouTube gave me new ideas of what to call it because I suck at this, but I couldn't come up with a better name of it. We'll call it the delayed burr. But I think there's two different things that you can do. One thing I've been doing is delaying the renovation. You buy something that's actually fully occupied rather than vacant and not trying to do the burr on this flip timeline.

• 5:18Henry Washington?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Dave Meyer?

  Because like, as you said, there is this approach to doing the burr method, which is like, I'm going to do this in six months or whatever. I'm going to get in there, I'm going to renovate it quickly. I'm going to get rents up to market rate. Then I'm going to do this cash out and I'm going to go acquire the next deal really rapidly. And that did work really well for a while. I think it's hard to line up two deals. Like you're saying, I can't do it right now realistically, but even you, Henry, it sounds like it would be hard to even line up two burrs in that timeframe where it would even be advantageous for you to even do that. And so what you could do is either take sort of the more delayed approach, which is getting the occupied units and opportunistically

• 5:59Dave Meyer?

  renovating when there's time, or, you know, doing the renovation upfront, but not refinancing until you need the capital. I'm actually looking at refinancing a deal I bought like six years ago because it's cash flowing well, but like I think that there's going to be good deals coming and I'm seeing more deals coming and I just might want to free up some capital. And so I'll just do the refinance, but it's way later.

• 6:21Henry Washington?

  Yep. I think when, when Burr was originally pitched, it was pitched as a way to scale a real estate business.

• 6:28Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Henry Washington?

  Because you could line up back-to-back burrs and you could repeat this process and you can still repeat it. I think. The timeline for the normal investor is just going to be longer.

• 6:39Dave Meyer?

  I think that's right. There is this assumption in this question, and I get this question all the time. I'm sure you do too. Like, do burrs work? Is it dead? There is this assumption that the only reason to do a burr is that you can refinance 100% of your capital.

• 6:55Henry Washington?

  Full burrs, you got a full burr.

• 6:57Dave Meyer?

  Right, exactly. You need the quote unquote perfect burr or full burr. But that is not that common. Like, maybe if you're doing Henry's kind of deals and you're in the right market at the right time, that can be common. But I think if you just kind of like reframe the conversation and don't assume that you need to take 100% of your capital out, then I would say burr is absolutely still a way to grow your business. You're still able to refinance some of your money out. And you're buying, ideally, if you're doing it right, a cash flowing rental property that has, you've built equity in. You're getting some of your money out of it to go scale again. That's still a win, even if it's not perfectly super 100% recycling of your capital, like it was for that brief moment in time.

• 7:42Henry Washington?

  Can I give you a hot take?

• 7:44Dave Meyer?

  Yes, that's why you're here.

• 7:46Henry Washington?

  Even when burrs were easy to do, I didn't really like doing them.

• 7:51Dave Meyer?

  Really? Why?

• 7:52Henry Washington?

  I didn't like pulling my cash out. Like, I liked the cash flow.

• 7:55Dave Meyer?

  That's the other thing, yeah.

• 7:57Henry Washington?

  When you refinance a deal, what's essentially what you're doing is you're getting a new loan at a higher amount.

• 8:03Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Henry Washington?

  And that new loan at a higher amount comes with a mortgage payment.

• 8:06Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Henry Washington?

  And that mortgage payment is going to be higher than the previous one, because now it's a higher mortgage. When you get a new mortgage, they front load the interest in the first five to seven years.

• 8:17Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Henry Washington?

  And so most of your payment is going to interest. And so you put this money in your pocket. And a lot of people, especially the casual investor, may not have had the next burr lined up. They pulled the cash out of their last burr, and then they blow a chunk of it before they get to their next deal. And then that kills the, like, it kills the purpose. What I was doing and what I still like to do is, instead of refinance, I just get access to a line of credit on that equity. And then that way, I don't get a new loan at a higher amount. I keep my lower mortgage payment, which keeps my cash flow. And then I have access to the money in the event I need it, instead of just pulling it out.

• 8:56Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Henry Washington?

  And starting to pay on a new loan and then not spending that money wisely.

• 9:00Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, because that's a great point. If you don't immediately reinvest your capital that you pull out, you're essentially just reducing your cash flow for no reason.

• 9:08Henry Washington?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:08Dave Meyer?

  That, to me, is a really important thing. All right, this is a great conversation, and we have a lot more of it, but we do have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. They say real estate is passive income, but if you've spent a Sunday night buried in spreadsheets, you know better. We hear it from investors all the time, spending hours every month sorting through receipts and bank transactions, trying to guess if you're making any money. And when tax season hits, it's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. But that is where Baseline comes in. BiggerPockets' official banking platform. It tags every rent payment and expense to the right property in Schedule E category as you bank, so you get tax-ready financial reports in real time, not at the

• 9:52Dave Meyer?

  end of the year. So you can instantly see how each unit is performing, where you're making money and where you're losing money. And then you can make changes while it still counts. So head over to baseline.com/biggerpockets to start protecting your profits and get a special $100 bonus when you sign up. Thanks again to our sponsor, Baseline.

• 10:14Henry Washington?

  Quick word about a new pro perk you'll want to know about. Aven. If you're a homeowner, there's a good chance you're sitting on equity that you're not using. The problem is tapping into that usually means a cash-out refi, a traditional second mortgage, or weeks of paperwork just to get approved. Aven built something different. It's a credit card, but it's backed by your home equity, so you get a lot of the rate benefits of a HELOC with the flexibility of a card you can use anywhere. Rates are typically well below a standard credit card, approval is fast and mostly online, and you can use it for anything: a renovation, paying down high-interest debt, or just have more breathing room in your budget. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, there's an extra reason to check it out. Get approved for the Aven card, and you'll get a $400 statement credit after

• 10:58Henry Washington?

  spending $400 on your Aven card. Enough to cover your entire annual Pro membership. Head over to aven.com/biggerpockets to see if you qualify. Aven Financial, Inc., NMLS #2042345. Cards issued per 20 days. From Visa USA, Inc. by Coastal Community Bank, NMLS number 462289, member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender, subject to approval. Terms apply. Visit Aven.com for details.

• 11:17Dave Meyer?

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• 12:00Dave Meyer?

  Lennar is an equal housing opportunity builder.

• 12:03Henry Washington?

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• 12:48Henry Washington?

  If you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, Mind will save you $500 for every home you onboard, up to $10,000 in your first year. Check mind.co to save time, money and frustration. That's M Y N D dot C O.

• 13:03Dave Meyer?

  Tax season reminder for all the real estate investors listening. If you own rental properties, short-term rentals, commercial buildings, basically anything that's not your primary residence, you need to know about cost segregation. It's an IRS compliance strategy that lets you accelerate depreciation on your properties, which means you're paying less in taxes this year and keeping more cash in your pocket for your next deal. Cost Segregation Guys is the go-to firm, having done over 12,000 of these studies with 500 million in total depreciation identified. Head to costsegregationguys.com/bp to get a free proposal and see your potential tax savings.

• 13:47Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the Big Brother Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer here with Henry Washington, talking all things BRRRR in 2025. And I also think what you brought up about HELOC, people should take notice of it. Like, it's not the only option for, you know, BRRRR. It's not the only option. I think BRRRR can work for people. I'm not saying it's not good, but like, there are other ways to pull out equity, like Henry said. Maybe you can explain to everyone sort of like the HELOC approach and just reiterate sort of like who that might work for and who it might not work for.

• 14:17Henry Washington?

  Let's assume you buy a property, you renovate it, you rent it out. Now you have this option. I can refinance it, right? And pull cash out, whatever I put into it, maybe plus some, and then I could go do my next deal. Or you can get a line of credit. And the way the line of credit works is similar to a refi. If you go and do a refi, whatever bank you're going to do the refi with is going to appraise that property. And then it should, you know, theoretically appraise for more than you have into it. So for more than you've purchased it, plus you've put into renovate it. So if you bought it for 100, you put 50 in it and it appraises for 250, you should be able to refinance all of your money out because that appraisal value is

• 14:59Henry Washington?

  higher than typically what they want, like 75%, 80% loan to value. And so you should be able to pull all of your money out. The HELOC method is very similar. You would just go to a bank and say, you want to take a line of credit out on the equity you have in your property. That lender would- Then order an appraisal. Let's say the appraisal comes back at 250,000. The way the line of credit would work is they will give you access to 75% of the equity. And so if the appraisal comes back at 250,000, you bought it for 100, you put 50 in it, you owe 150. That means you technically have about a hundred thousand dollars of equity. And if they give you access to 75% of that equity, that means you should get a line of credit for around 75,000.

• 15:43Henry Washington?

  And then what the way that line of credit works is you don't pay anything interest wise. As long as you haven't used any of that money. So now what that means is you now have access to that money. So if I need that money tomorrow, I can get access to that money tomorrow. I can just tell the bank, hey, I need access to 20,000 for a down payment for a property. They literally drop it in your account that same day. And so you have liquidity because you have access to that money. But you don't have to pay any interest on that money unless you use it. And you only pay interest on the money you use. And so if I have access to 75, but I only need to use 25 and I have a 6% interest rate on that HELOC.

• 16:23Henry Washington?

  That means I'm paying 6% interest on the 25,000 that I have taken out of my line of credit. If you refinance it, you're essentially paying interest on all of that money immediately. Because it's rolled into your monthly payment.

• 16:37Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, it just gives you optionality, which is a really, really nice thing. Especially if you don't know exactly what deals you're going to use next, or how you want to use the money. Like sometimes you might want to use it to fund a down payment, but other times you may want to use it to fund a rehab or do something else with the money.

• 16:51Henry Washington?

  And again, when we're going back to looking at the times when people were really loving the BRRRR strategy. A lot of people were using short-term loans to get into properties. And so they would use something like hard money or private money with a high interest rate to buy that property and renovate that property. And so then they're left with only one option is you've got to refinance that to pull that cash out and pay back those lenders because you don't want to be stuck in a note with a 12 or 13% interest rate.

• 17:20Dave Meyer?

  That's exactly right.

• 17:20Henry Washington?

  That strategy is much tougher now. Because it requires you to find a phenomenal deal so that you can complete a full bur. And I think if you're just a casual investor, that's something you need to be cautious of.

• 17:33Dave Meyer?

  A hundred percent.

• 17:34Henry Washington?

  If you're gonna buy a property, you can find a property to bur, but you gotta be careful how you purchase it. You probably don't want to use high interest money to get into the deal. Because what if you don't get that appraisal on the back end? What if your value doesn't come back what you thought it was? Now you're stuck in a loan with high interest that you can't get out of unless you pour even more of your own capital into that refinance.

• 17:58Dave Meyer?

  That's such a good point. The longer I am in this industry and do deals, it's like the debt is really what tells you.

• 18:06Henry Washington?

  It's a killer, man.

• 18:06Dave Meyer?

  The debt is basically, yeah, if you succeed or fail on a deal, it's so much like how much you choose to finance strategically. But what Henry said is so important, like I'm gonna just representing the sort of casual investor and like, you know, I do a fair amount of deals, but like I work full time. Like I'm not going out and doing what Henry is doing. And as someone who does that, like to me, I really like optionality. I don't like putting myself in a situation where I have to go refinance this, or I have to finish a renovation in six months. I have other stuff to do, you know, like I, I can't be on that kind of timeframe. And so that's why I sort of like this delayed bur.

• 18:45Dave Meyer?

  If you do this thing where you get an occupied home, you can typically, in my experience, always get a conventional mortgage on it. And that's so valuable, you just get, you know, you still have to put 25% down if you're an investor. But you can go get, you know, a six and three quarters loan in today's days, maybe a 7% loan in today's day and age. I would only buy that deal if it cash flows like that. Day one, I buy it 7% conventional loan with the current rents. They would need to be cash flowing. I, I need this to be at least positive cash flow. It doesn't need to be great cash flow. I think that's sort of the thing that Henry and I were arguing with James about on, on the market the other day.

• 19:24Dave Meyer?

  But like, I would buy that at 2% cash on cash return, knowing that the mark, the rents are under market rate. And that when my tenants choose. To move out, I'm going to renovate that and I'm going to get it up to an eight or a 10 or ideally a 12% cash on cash return. That's what I'm looking for. I am OK if that period of stabilization takes me a year. I'm fine with that because I have that six or 7% interest rate. That is the difference because I am building equity and getting the tax benefits. I'm doing all that, but I'm not under pressure to go refinance some hard money loan that I would have gotten if I was going to try and do this sprint burr that Henry's talking about.

• 20:04Henry Washington?

  You know what that's called, what you just described?

• 20:06Dave Meyer?

  What?

• 20:06Henry Washington?

  It's called real estate investing.

• 20:08Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, exactly. There's no, it's not burn. This is just like bread and butter boring.

• 20:13Henry Washington?

  I say that as a joke, but it's a testament to like how spoiled we've been to have gotten in the game.

• 20:19Dave Meyer?

  That's right.

• 20:20Henry Washington?

  Like for me, I got in the game in 2017 and in 2017, things were about to get great in 2020. Right? Like COVID aside, what it did for real estate was crazy. And so you didn't have to put as much thought. I know that sounds bad, but it's true. You didn't have to put as much thought and strategy into real estate investing because the market was going to save you. If you just bought something and you waited for a little bit, you were gonna be in a better position. And so you didn't have to be a strategic, you didn't have to plan out a long-term burr. You could just do it in three to six months and you were going to be great. Like now the market is requiring more of us.

• 21:03Henry Washington?

  The market is requiring us to be more educated. The market is requiring us to be more prepared before we jump in because the market's not saving you anymore. You've got to save yourself with your strategy. You have to save yourself with your planning. You have to save yourself with understanding how to pivot and you have to save yourself with managing your portfolio throughout its life cycle. Those weren't things you've really had to pay attention to before because you would just go, yeah, my portfolio is good. It was good back then. It's better now. Keep on trucking, right? Like it's, it's not that way anymore.

• 21:38Dave Meyer?

  Oh, it's bit a week. It's, it's worth 5% more. Everything's going well. I think what you're saying is so right. What we need to do as an industry is a shift of expectations. It's not like real estate is no longer good. And the reason I liked this question in the forums and I wanted to bring it and talk to you about is like, Kyle is asking, what should his expectations be in 2025? And that's a great question that everyone should be asking themselves because so many folks are comparing to 2020 and saying, "Oh, my God, you can't do BRRRR anymore." It's like, well, you could buy a lot of deals right now that will improve your financial situation a lot. That will really help you, in my opinion, more than any other asset class.

• 22:21Dave Meyer?

  Is it going to help you as much as this Goldilocks period in 2020, when every damn thing went right for real estate investors? No, and that literally may never happen again. It's, I know people are waiting, say, "Oh, rates are going to go down, it's going to go crazy again." I don't know. I don't think it will, it might never happen again in our lifetimes. I really mean that, and that's fine. I've said this before, but I really mean it. We didn't have those conditions in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. Real estate was still a great business. People still made money. They just had appropriate expectations and adjusted their, their strategy accordingly. And that's why when I'm talking about this delayed BRRRR, it might sound like super boring to people, but this is just bread and butter.

• 23:04Henry Washington?

  It's just real estate, bro.

• 23:05Dave Meyer?

  Super low risk, high, still has a high upside, right? Like, it's just bread and butter, not doing anything fancy.

• 23:12Henry Washington?

  I go to these conferences all across the country all the time when I get asked to speak. And inevitably, like, you know, 100 different people who are there, you know, whether they know me or not, they'll say, "Oh, so what do you do?" And I always like, it's always like, "I just, I buy houses and then I fix them up, and then I either rent it out or I sell it." And then I was like, "Oh, that's cool." I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's super boring. Like I just do regular boring real estate. I'm not doing some fancy boutique hotel. I'm not doing some $4 million short-term rental. I'm not buying things on some super creative fancy financing strategy that's brand new.

• 23:54Henry Washington?

  I just buy houses and then I fix them and then I rent them or I sell them. And it's, that's worked long before I ever invested in real estate. And that same strategy will work long after I'm done investing in real estate. And I am A okay with that.

• 24:10Dave Meyer?

  Well, I want to get back to the BRRRR thing here because you mentioned something earlier that I think is a super important topic. You said that you weren't a fan necessarily of the BRRRR, even when it was sort of this perfect time to do it because it reduces your cash flow. And I honestly have thought about that too, and I've done that in the past. When I've refinanced a BRRRR or just a property I haven't owned for a while, whatever, when I've refinanced, I don't always take out max leverage.

• 24:36Henry Washington?

  Yes, I don't either.

• 24:37Dave Meyer?

  And that was even true during a time when people were benefiting from max leverage. And what I mean by that is a lot of times when you refinance a property, if you go and do a BRRRR, basically you'll have to leave a certain amount in, like you're getting a new mortgage, right? And so you essentially have to keep an amount in that is equivalent to what a down payment would be. So for most investors, that's 25% down. So if you refinance it, it gets appraised at $400,000. You have to keep $100,000 in equity into that deal. Of course, you have to pay off your own mortgage, but during this process, the bank will tell you the most amount that you are able to take out. So let's just use a nice round number here and say they have the option to give out $100,000.

• 25:19Dave Meyer?

  So if you wanted to max your leverage, basically what you would do is keep that $100,000 in and borrow $300,000. You'd take 200 of that to pay off your own mortgage and 100 you can walk away with. Now you could do that, but of course borrowing $300,000 instead of borrowing $200,000 has implications for your cash flow, right? That is going to reduce your monthly cash flow. It also increases your risk a little bit. I don't think putting down 25% is a huge amount of risk. That's like an appropriate amount of leverage, I think, in most cases. But it does increase your risk when you do take out more leverage. As Henry said, it restarts your loan. And so what I've done in the past is often leave 30, 35, maybe even 40% in

• 26:02Dave Meyer?

  instead of taking out max leverage. And that does mean that I won't have as much capital to go buy the next deal or to fund the next renovation. But to me, it preserves cash flow, which is my long-term goal as an investor. It is not my immediate term goal. I'm not trying to maximize my cash flow today. But by leaving 30, 35%, it gets me closer to my long-term goal, which is to fully replace my income with real estate.

• 26:28Henry Washington?

  Yeah, absolutely. You keep your cash flow. And again, like, it's not like you could never access that money in the future. Like, if you had to go get a line of credit two, three years from now to access that money, you could. It, I mean, it's there, right? The value's gonna be there. Your real estate portfolio is not gonna take, you know, 50 to 75%. Like, it's gonna be there. It's gonna be more in the future. So you can still access it later on if you need to.

• 26:54Dave Meyer?

  That's so true. It's funny, I had this similar experience when we were on the Cash Flow Roadshow. I was talking to an agent in Madison, Wisconsin. I was talking about doing sort of like a cosmetic delayed kind of burr, the stuff that I like to do. I was like, is this gonna work in this market? And he was like, I don't know, it's pretty tight. Like, because I want, you know, a certain amount of cash flow if we're gonna go buy this deal. He's like, I don't know. And I was like, well, what if I just put left 35% in the deal? And his like face lit up. He was like, you would do that? And I was like, yeah, of course I would do that. Like, why? You know, like, I, I get that some people want to recycle 100% of your capital. I'm further in my investing career, so like, I have different perspective here. But he was like, oh, my God, that, yeah, I could find you those deals all day. And I was like, yeah, okay.

• 27:35Henry Washington?

  Wait a minute. So you're telling me as a real estate investor, you are willing to invest your money in your deal?

• 27:43Dave Meyer?

  Such a good point. I've never even thought about it that way. It's like, oh my God, you actually have to keep your money tied up in this investment to make money. Yes, that is, that is possible. Right? So, yeah, he would like the tone of the whole conversation changed, right? Because I was like, oh yeah, I'll leave 30% in, I'll put 40% in to make this deal work. Because if this is a great, like, if it's a great asset that I want to hold on to long term. If it was something I was trying to get rid of in a few years, which is not something I really do, I would think about this differently. But I approach all of my real estate acquisitions with that lens. Like, do I want all this for 10, 20 years? Then yeah, I'm willing to keep 30% into it to make this cash flow and to hold on to this awesome asset, for sure. All right. Well, let's take a quick break,

• 28:25Dave Meyer?

  but I want to leverage your expertise while you're here, Henry, and just talk about, like, if people want to do a BRRRR, how do they do it as best as they possibly can in 2025? Let's talk some tactics. We'll get into that right after this quick break. We'll be right back. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple. But honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming. And still, the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger, and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business, and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed. Plus, its AI

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• 32:18Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer here with Henry Washington talking about burrs in 2025. Henry and I just ranted about burrs and who they're right for, how to make them work. I still think that these, especially if you have appropriate expectations, doing a renovation, if you want to call it a burr, I don't care. If you want to do a value add project and eventually refinance it, whether that's quick or slow, or however you want to approach those two things. If you want to do that, Henry, do you have any tips for 2025, how people should be approaching it?

• 32:49Henry Washington?

  Well, yeah, first of all, you definitely have to know your buy box because this strategy is going to require you to have some knowledge about your market and knowledge about what you want to buy because you have to be able to go and find that deal at a price that's going to allow you to pull off your burr in the timeframe you want to pull it off in, right? So if you want to pull off a burr in six months, like the quick burr, like we talked about before, the discount you have to buy that property at is much deeper. Then you have to have a strategy for exactly what to go look for and how you're going to look for it. Are you going to spend money on marketing? Are you going to spend time on the MLS? How are you going to generate the leads in a timeframe enough that's going to allow you to find a deal at

• 33:34Henry Washington?

  a deep enough discount to pull it off in the short term? If you want to pull it off in the long term, you have to understand your buy box and understand your market from the perspective of knowing or having a good idea of what is a typical equity increase year over year in that market? What are the typical rent increases year over year in that market? And then what is your current cash on cash return that you're looking for? Because then that helps you go and pinpoint and run numbers on deals that specifically in deals that are probably on the MLS. It will help you weed out the properties. So now you can look at a handful of properties that may potentially hit your number because some neighborhoods may increase in value more than

• 34:17Henry Washington?

  others. Some zip codes may increase in value more than others. So in one neighborhood, you may be able to buy a property at XYZ price point, but in another town or another neighborhood, You may have to pay a little more, right? Or you may be able to pay a little less. So, understanding your timeframe. If you're like, hey, I want to refinance this thing in five years. I need it to come close to breaking even now. And then you can look in your market and say, okay, well, in my market, typically two to 3% of a value increase year over year. And you can do that calculation to figure out, if I bought this property for this price, this is what I would expect it to be worth in the future. Plus, if I do the value add that I'm looking to do, I expect that it'll add this much value. And so that means I can offer X for this property. I hope that kind of made sense.

• 35:01Henry Washington?

  You have to understand what it is you want to buy, where you want to buy it, and where you think the market's going. So you can buy the property at the right price point to execute your strategy in the future.

• 35:10Dave Meyer?

  Well said. Totally agree with that. I'll just add one other thing. And this is just my advice to everyone all the time right now. So you're just, you're going to hear it again. Sorry, everyone. It's just conservative underwriting right now. Like, I think we got into this era where people were taking the max comps. And then they were assuming that they were going to be able to get this appraisal that was going to work out really well for them. Right now, like, the market could turn. Like, instead of counting on appreciation, like, you could, you know, in 2020, you could probably count on holding a property for six months, probably 2%, 3% appreciation. That matters. On a $400,000 purchase, that's 12 grand in equity that you're building from doing nothing. You can't count on that. And in fact, I recommend people sort of count on the opposite happening. We are just seeing across the country,

• 35:55Dave Meyer?

  it's different in every market. But there is a chance that property values in your six months might drop 1%. They could drop 2%. I don't think there's a crash. But if you were counting on that equity, you really want to be conservative about that and make sure that you're assuming, I would say, at best, assume flat. If you want to be a conservative investor like I am, I would say, just count on going 1% to 2% below. That's a way to still invest during a buyer's market like we're in and be confident, right? Like, if you are accounting for that, your deal's going to work out because you're just taking the risk out upfront in your underwriting and your deal selection. Like, that's kind of the really important thing for you to do. I'd just say the same things about rent. Like, I do think rent's probably Next year or two are going to start accelerating again, but I wouldn't count on it.

• 36:39Dave Meyer?

  I would just assume that that's not going to happen. I would, as Henry said, and always caution, Henry is very adamant about this point all the time, which he should be, is like having the multiple exit strategies too. What happens if you don't get the appraisal? Like, can you still hold on to it? Is it still okay? Those are the kinds of things in this kind of market. It makes sense to be defensive. It makes sense to protect the downside. So I think there's still absolutely upside. I would still buy BRRRR deals. I'm still looking at them all the time, but I just underwrite them in a way to protect myself.

• 37:09Henry Washington?

  Right. And I think what we're both saying is the strategy is going to require you to look at a lot of deals and probably make a lot of offers and probably hear a lot of no's. Both Dave and I have different strategies for finding deals, but I can tell you one thing. We both analyze a lot of deals before we actually end up getting one.

• 37:28Dave Meyer?

  But that's the fun part. I love that part.

• 37:30Henry Washington?

  Yeah, me too, because I'm a deal junkie, right? But like, even though your strategy doesn't cost you money and it's fairly, you know, air quotes, easy for you to get deals across your desk, you still look at a ton before you're actually pulling the trigger on offers on some. And the same for me. I generate leads. I spend money to generate leads and I analyze a ton of deals and I make a ton of offers before I get a yes. That amount of work doesn't change based on the strategy that you do. There's very few investors in this world who just, a deal pops on their desk and they buy it. Because it's that, like, if they're doing that, they're not investing for cash flow. They're just investing because they need to save taxes somewhere and throw a bunch of cash at real estate. Like, we have to analyze a lot of deals.

• 38:13Dave Meyer?

  That's the job. That is literally the job of the investor, is like to go and do that stuff. All right, great. Well, this was a lot of fun, Henry. Thanks for being here.

• 38:20Henry Washington?

  I love talking about this topic because it pushes a lot of people's buttons when you start, oh, they're still talking about BRRRR 2025? Look, man, just be easy on what you think a BRRRR is. If you think it's the strategy where you can spend very little money and refinance your deal in 90 days, you're right, that's dead. That's, that's very uncommon. But doing a successful BRRRR project can be done in a lot of markets across the country if your expectations are more realistic.

• 38:47Dave Meyer?

  Absolutely. Let's just call it the like value add cash out. Like you decide the timeline, but what you're doing is buying an asset that is not up to its highest and best use. You're adding value, right? And then at some point you're cashing out a little bit, or you're taking a HELOC out on it, like Henry said, like adding value, building equity, and then leveraging that equity you created either through a cash out or a HELOC. You can do that. Like that is the game. That is real estate investing. That is called real estate investing, folks. Yes, you could absolutely still do that. One last thing, this is kind of a new format that we're doing on the show where we're taking one question. Henry and I are doing a deep dive, just sharing our personal experiences around it, but also just our opinions about it. We'd love to know if you like this format. So if you're watching this on YouTube or if

• 39:32Dave Meyer?

  you are watching on Spotify where you can make comments now, don't know if you know that, but Spotify, you can make comments on specific episodes. Let us know if you like this format and we'll do more of them. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We'll see you next time.

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