I Turned My Condo into a $10K+/Month Rental Portfolio (in 4 Years!)

Andrew Freed turned one condo into a rental property portfolio that makes him $10,000 per month! Just four years ago, Andrew had little to his name—around $50,000 and a $200,000 condo. That’s what a decade of working had gotten him, but to Andrew, it was a sign he wasn’t doing enough. Like most real estate investors, Andrew stumbled upon Rich Dad Poor Dad and made an immediate change that would propel him to financial freedom. Four years later, he’s there—quitting his job and going full-time into real estate. How did he do it? Simple. “Recycling” his money is what allowed Andrew to scale so quickly. A HELOC (home equity line of credit) on his condo gave him the money for his first small multifamily—a house hack that would help him live for free. With each new property, he’d get a new HELOC and use it to grow his portfolio even faster. Now, Andrew has a sizable real estate portfolio, personally paying him six figures a year, while he focuses on the next property. If you want to quit your job and give real estate your all, you can do what Andrew did, recycling your money to build your wealth—and you can start with just a condo! In This Episode We Cover: How to use HELOCs (home equity lines of credit) to quickly fund your first real estate deal Using the BRRRR method (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat) to buy rentals for essentially $0 The “sweet spot” multifamily properties that are easier to manage and boast big cash flow How to take down huge real estate deals when you don’t have the money Why buying portfolios of properties (not single properties) is the cheat code for faster financial freedom And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Apply to Be a BiggerPockets Real Estate Guest Try REsimpli, The Only All-In-One Real Estate Investor CRM Software That Helps You Manage Data, Marketing, Sales, and Operations Get $100 Off BPCon 2025 Start with Strategy Rich Dad Poor Dad Real Estate Rookie 267 - 24 Units in 2 Years by Making Your Rentals Match the Market w/Andrew Freed BiggerPockets Real Estate 1085 - Making $200K/Year With the Least Amount of Rentals Possible w/Dion McNeeley Connect with Dave Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1111 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?

  This investor grew his portfolio to 25 properties and was able to quit his job in less than four years by repeating the same real estate strategy over and over. You do need to identify the right type of real estate investing for your goals and your market, and it's totally okay if that takes some time and some trial and error. But once you do that, once you have it, you can basically execute that one deal type to perfection, rinse and repeat, all the way to game-changing wealth. Today's guest proved that this is possible in the Boston area, and he did it in the current market, not during that crazy pandemic era. So let's find out how.

• 0:41Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. Today on the show, we're bringing you an investor story with Andrew Freed, who invested in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Andrew was previously on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast back in March of 2023, but I wanted to bring him on this show because he's progressed a lot in the last two years, but he's done it by doing pretty much the same thing. So we're going to talk to Andrew about why he primarily buys rental properties in the six to 12-unit range, why almost all of his deals are with two to four partners, and how he achieved his goal of quitting his day job to invest full-time. Andrew is a total open book with all of his deals and numbers, so there's a lot to learn in this conversation. Let's get into it.

• 1:25Dave Meyer?

  Andrew, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Thanks for being here.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much.

• 1:30Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I know you've been on our Rookie Podcast, our sister podcast here, but for those who didn't listen to that episode, maybe just give us a little bit of background. Tell us about yourself.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  So like many people here, I would have the American dream, you know, I get a good education, get a good job, get a nice swanky condo in a city, make six figures. Like, I essentially did that. I did it all through my twenties. And after I did that, you know, I came home and at the end of the day, I realized I was paycheck to paycheck. Yeah, maybe I had six months, maybe I have 12 months of reserves, but at the end of the day, I had to go crawling back to that job, and that ultimately scared the living hell out of me. So come around COVID, when I ran out of vices to do, video games. To play, movies to watch, like I really had to come face to face with, is this the life I really wanted to live? And the answer to that was absolutely no. So thankfully I found rich dad, poor dad at that time.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  And that opened my eyes to the power of real estate. And at that point, I looked at my net worth, which is about $250,000 at that point.

• 2:29Dave Meyer?

  Nice.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  $200,000 of which came from that one bedroom condo I completely forgot about. It literally took me 10 years to save up $50,000. And at that point, I realized maybe there's something to this real estate thing. So I literally just FOMOed, right? I took a HELOC on my one bedroom condo for $200,000. And I utilized that to start buying multifamily, specifically in Worcester, Massachusetts. Um, so I completely uprooted my life in Boston. I knew absolutely nobody in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is about 45 minutes from Boston. And I just decided to start buying multis in that market where I started with house hacks. And I kind of moved on to joint ventures and kind of moved on to syndications and larger projects from there.

• 3:09Dave Meyer?

  Awesome. Well, I want, I want to hear the fairy tale story. So it started in Worcester. I'm sort of familiar with the area. Why Worcester? Is Boston too expensive or?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  So when you're planning on investing and creating a real estate portfolio, you really have to come up with a thesis, right? And my thesis was I wanted to buy multifamily. And it's way easier to buy multifamily when there's a lot of that asset class in the market, right? So the way I really decided on Worcester was I looked at all the markets in Massachusetts that had a large, a lot of multis. Brockton, Massachusetts, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Worcester, Providence, Rhode Island had a lot of multis. Manchester, New Hampshire had a lot of multis. So I looked at all the markets. And out of all those markets, I felt like Worcester had the best fundamentals. It was one of the largest growing cities in Massachusetts, in New England. But not only that, 30 to 40% of the housing stock are multifamilies.

• 4:01Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  So it's way easier to get that asset class if there's a plethora of that asset class.

• 4:06Dave Meyer?

  I, I'm so glad you said that because I think a lot of people overlook that element of picking and selecting markets. Yeah, you need fundamentals of the economy, you need job growth, like all that stuff. But there are markets, as, as you've alluded to. The concept of a duplex or a triplex is basically non-existent. I actually invest in a market where it's almost impossible to find something bigger than a duplex. You know, I started my career investing in three unit, four unit buildings and I can't find any there. And that would changes my approach and strategy. So I, I really appreciate you said that. And, but I'm curious, so the multifamily approach, it sounds like you're doing small multifamily, right? Like sort of the still residential, you know, four in units or fewer, was that where you went first?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I started with house hacking. I started with house hacking residential properties, two through four unit multifamilies. Then I graduated to five to 10 plexes, commercial multis, primarily residential. And then from there, then I graduated to buying portfolios, a plethora of three, four, five, six, seven units. You know, buying 10, 12 of them all in one foul swoop.

• 5:10Dave Meyer?

  Just tell me a little bit about how you financed that first deal. Cause you had a solid net worth, $250,000, nothing to sneeze at. Most of it was locked up right into a condo. What you said you HELOCed or how did you, how did you wind up doing that first deal?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I wound up doing that first deal by utilizing a HELOC, a home line of credit on my one bedroom condo. And I ended up taking out 85% of the value in the form of a HELOC and got about $200,000 out of it. And when I utilized that HELOC, I want people to keep in mind the concept of, of return on net worth. Right? I had about $250,000 of net worth, $200,000 of which was locked up in this one bedroom condo. That's providing a 0% return on an annual basis. So my hypothesis was why don't I take this $200,000 and actually put in the assets that can provide me an eight, nine, 10% return. Meanwhile, I'm borrowing at a three and a four, that was during COVID, right? So with the simple concept of arbitrage, that's really how I kind of built my net worth from there.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Right? And going back to your original question, how did I finance that house hack? I ended up financing it with a FHA loan. So I combined that with the HELOC. So I took around $30,000 to $40,000 from a HELOC. And I used that combined with an FHA loan and I got a three unit in Worcester, Massachusetts for around $560,000.

• 6:25Dave Meyer?

  Okay.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I could rent two units for $3,200, $1,600 each. And I ended up living in the third for free and my mortgage was $3,200. So I ended up kind of breaking even on that property, but my savings rate went through the roof. Cause I didn't have to pay, you know, rent overhead in that regard.

• 6:41Dave Meyer?

  With your rookie episode, you had gotten to a point where I think you had 24 units and eight properties. How long did it take you to get to that level of scale?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  To get to 24 units, it probably took me a good year and a half to two years of investing in real estate.

• 6:55Dave Meyer?

  That's fast.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  You know, one thing I think people sleep on a lot of times is everybody knows about the house hack, right? It's the easy way to, you know, reduce your living expenses to zero. But very few people talk about the HELOC, right? And I recommend so many people prior to leaving your first house hack, get a HELOC on it. Cause when it's your primary residence, you can HELOC sometimes up to 100%. So you can actually access that equity before you leave it, right? And it becomes an investment property. Once it converts to an investment property, then your line of credit is limited to 75% of the value of the property, greatly reducing your ability to leverage, right? So you asked, how did I do that? I end up HELOC-ing my first house hack. I got another $75,000 HELOC and I used that to buy a couple more house hacks as well.

• 7:41Dave Meyer?

  Okay, got it. And just for everyone to understand, HELOC stands for Home Equity Line of Credit. This is a way that you can access equity in properties without actually having to sell or doing a cash out refinance where you might be getting a different mortgage rate. And so I think for that reason alone, it's a pretty attractive option right now. Cause say you bought something during the pandemic and you have a three or 4% interest rate, you've built up a ton of equity in your property, which you want to leverage, like Andrew's talking about, to go out and buy future properties. But you don't want to give up that three or 4% mortgage, totally understandable. Take out a HELOC or consider, talk to a lender about taking out a HELOC. This is a way that you can borrow against your assets. So that's

• 8:24Dave Meyer?

  a really great way to do it. And the other benefit of a HELOC that I love is you only pay interest when you're using it. It's what's called a revolving line of credit. And so let's say you use a HELOC to finance a renovation on a new rental property and then you're going to refinance that. Sure, you pay when you've drawn on that line of credit and you're paying it. But when you go refinance that burr, you could repay off your HELOC and pay nothing for a time and then Use it again in the future. And so this is a really good strategy that people can use. And I think it's going to become increasingly popular in the next few years because of that sort of dual advantage of allowing you to recycle your equity, but not giving up historical mortgage rates.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  And you bring up a really good point, and I just want people to be clear about, yeah, interest rates do have a higher interest rate. You're talking six, seven, eight percent, but you really have to look at the loan holistically, right? And what do I mean by that? It's like if 70% of your loan is at a three and 20% of the loan is at a seven, what is your blended interest rate? And is that blended interest rate better than what you can get from a refinance?

• 9:26Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Or is it not, right?

• 9:27Dave Meyer?

  That's right.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So you kind of want to weigh those options. So maybe a cash or refinance makes sense. Maybe the blended rate of your current low mortgage rate combined with a HELOC makes sense. So these are the sort of calculations I utilize when I decide how am I going to recycle this equity to buy more property?

• 9:41Dave Meyer?

  Totally. And I think this is just one of the natural evolutions that has to take place because during COVID or the years leading up to that, it was kind of a no brainer to do a burn and refi, right? Because like rates were going down. So why wouldn't you refinance and get a lower interest rate on your, on your new property that has higher equity? That was a no brainer. Now, in our new upside era that we're in, you just need to think about this stuff a little bit more critically. As Andrew said, there's options. Now there's just different options and there's different ways to do it, but it's not just as like cut and dry, like just do the burn, do the refi every single time. All right. We do need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, but we'll be back with Andrew Freed right after this.

• 10:22Dave Meyer?

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• 11:04Dave Meyer?

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• 11:45Dave Meyer?

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• 12:30Dave Meyer?

  investing actually works. If you're buying rentals, refinancing, or growing your portfolio, go to hostfinancial.com, that's H-O-S-T financial.com, and see what you qualify for. Some listeners may wonder why their insurance quote only took 30 seconds. Some listeners may wonder why their insurance quote took 30 seconds. A better question is, how long will that policy actually hold up when you need it? At Enreg, the goal isn't just getting coverage in place. It's making sure your investment property is properly protected when a real claim happens. That's why they take time to evaluate each property's unique risks and build coverage design for the realities investors

• 13:13Dave Meyer?

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• 14:26Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. We are here with investor Andrew Freed talking about how he scaled his portfolio in the last couple of years in the Boston area. Let's catch up then. So you, you know, you were at eight properties and 24 units. Obviously, investing conditions have changed pretty dramatically. What have you been up to in the last two years?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  So as we alluded to earlier, I went from 24 units and now I'm at 300. People like, how do you make that dramatic growth, right? And I'll give you some catalysts that really brought me to that level, right? So the first catalyst that really brought me to that level was becoming an investor focused agent while having my W2. Like ultimately, I didn't need the, you know, the agent income, right? It was icing on the cake. It allowed me to buy more real estate. But ultimately, why did I become an investor focused agent? I became an investor focused agent to find a mentor. The broker of that agency has over 300 doors, right? And I wanted to leverage him as much as I could. So I decided. Going to provide him value in the form of bringing him commissions, right? And if I bring commissions, then he's going to feel a need to help me along my journey.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  So that was number one. I found a mentor and I found ways to provide him value in the form of commissions. Number two, I started the largest real estate meetup in Worcester.

• 15:39Dave Meyer?

  Nice.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Through that meetup, I found capital partners, I found deals, I found my current partner. We were me and him own hundreds of units together. That really allowed me to grow to the next scale, right? And lastly, the catalyst that really pushed me to the next level, and thanks to BiggerPockets for this, was being on podcasts, being, you know, providing value on social media and just putting yourself out there and operating in the light. Ultimately, people aren't going to know what you're doing if you operate in the dark. So it's extremely important to put out there your wins, but also your losses.

• 16:10Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you said that because wins and losses, it is important to sort of build credibility. Can you maybe give us some examples of how you did this? Like, what's a property that you bought when you sort of stepped away from using your own equity and started using capital partners externally?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  I'll talk about a deal first that I burned into three other deals, right? It was with my own capital, but I recycled the money over and over and over again, right? So me and my partner now, Zach Gray, we ended up buying this five unit in Worcester, Massachusetts, up Solace Street, about for $650,000. Like, three units, three units in the area sold for $600,000. This was a deal all day, right? And it was right on the MLS. So what did we decide to do? We decided to like, put an offer out day one, right when it was on the MLS. Within two days of being on the MLS, we had it under contract.

• 17:02Dave Meyer?

  Nice.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  That particular property, the current rent rolling, it was around $3,500. Pro forma or market rents on the property, the ability to bring the rents up was about $9,000.

• 17:12Dave Meyer?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was a lot of big upside, right? But the downside is the cost was 650 and the monthly income was 3,500. If anybody knows anything about commercial debt and debt service coverage ratio, like, you can't get a loan at that 75% loan of value. Like, it's impossible, right?

• 17:27Dave Meyer?

  That's tough.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  But what did we do? Thankfully, I had a mentor and he guided me through this process and he advised. Rather than do a conventional financing, go to these portfolio lenders, these small local credit unions, and ask them for construction money. And when you ask them for construction money, they do it before appraisal and they do an after appraisal. And that after appraisal takes into account pro forma or market rents, right? So that allowed us to get a loan based off the pro forma rents, only bringing 25% down. We ended up bringing this property from 3,500 revenue to nine grand in revenue over the course of six, seven months.

• 18:02Dave Meyer?

  Okay, so not bad. Yeah, it's quick.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  We ended up bringing the value from 650 to 1.1 million dollars. So we had a ton of equity, right? But we wanted to access that equity. So what did we do? We ended up going to the bank that gave us the first lien and we got a rental line of credit for the equity up to 75%. So that bank gave us a line of credit for $156,000. More or less all of the money we put in the deal, we put about 160, right? Fantastic opportunity. What did we do with that money? We took the 160 and we ended up using that with, combined with hard money to buy a nine unit in West Work, Rhode Island, with four gutted units and five occupied units. We bought it for $715,000 with hard money, so we only brought 10% of the purchase price.

• 18:40Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  We ended up putting around $220,000 into it. We got the units rented, we brought the market rents up to 14 grand and we refi'd that at 1.52 million dollars.

• 18:49Dave Meyer?

  Wow. Oh my God. So yeah, that's, that's, I can't keep up with your math, but you built what? Like half a million, three quarters of a million dollars in equity just off those two deals alone?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And I split that 50/50 with my partner. So that was only 80 grand for me, right? So I built half a million dollars in net worth off 80 grand within a year, right?

• 19:07Dave Meyer?

  Wow.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And then the next, no, what did I do with this property, right? So we ended up doing a cash or refinance for 1.52 million. We got about $230,000 out of that. Me and my partner ended up transitioning that, that $230,000 into a 21 unit in Lowell, Massachusetts, that we just closed on this week.

• 19:23Dave Meyer?

  Wow, congrats. And so all of this has been done in this higher interest rate environment?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:28Dave Meyer?

  And did you have any qualms? Like, did you worry that the market was going to crash or this was bad timing?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I did not whatsoever, right? Because ultimately, I'm investing in high cap rate markets, right? I'm investing in assets that pro forma, once I'm Done stabilizing the asset, have an eight, nine, 10% cap rate, right? So 10% cash and cash return, right? So if I'm borrowing at a six or a seven, like that asset far exceeds the debt. I would get more worried if I was in a low cap rate market. You're talking, you know, a Boston or, you know, a Phoenix where the cap rates are four or five and borrowing at a six or a seven, then the asset's literally operating in the negative, right?

• 20:07Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  So the way I really got around the high interest rates was I operated in high cap rate markets, in tertiary markets outside high growth cities. Think Providence, think Boston.

• 20:18Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think hopefully everyone's following this, but in certain markets, especially when you're evaluating deals on cap rate, and this is just a way of measuring how much you're paying for a property based on how much cash flow that it potential it has to generate. And some of these markets, Phoenix, the fastest growing markets, because they are generally considered low risk, have lower cap rates, which means they're more expensive. And generally speaking, when you have a cap rate that is lower than your interest rate on your loan, that is negative leverage, you don't want to have that. But Andrew basically said, if you go into these tertiary or smaller markets where the cap rates are higher than the interest rate, it reduces your risk and it allows you to sort of operate and grow

• 21:03Dave Meyer?

  in a way that is frankly, just much more challenging in these lower cap rate markets right now. Andrew, I want to talk to you a little bit more about this sweet spot you seem to have found with multifamily right after this break, so everyone stick with us, we'll be right back. If you want to attend BPCon, but you're worried that you missed out on the best rates, I've got great news because we just opened up a surprise early bird extension through the end of April. BPCon 2025 is in Vegas this year at Caesar's Palace from October 5th through 7th, and the early bird savings will get you $100 off the regular registration price. If you haven't been to BPCon before, there's so much value to it. People are doing deals there, the networking is top notch.

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• 22:23Dave Meyer?

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• 23:08Dave Meyer?

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• 26:55Henry Washington?

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• 27:42Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm here with investor Andrew Freed, talking about how he scaled very rapidly from just owning a single condo a couple of years ago to hundreds of doors that he manages and owns now. Andrew, before the break, you were talking about how you've really effectively recycled capital, which is awesome, but you've also seemed to have honed in on sort of a sweet spot of commercial multifamily, more than four units, but it's not huge. At least right now, it doesn't sound like you're buying these 200-unit deals. Like, do you do that intentionally? And if so, why?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  So the sweet spot that we're really playing in is the multi-space between two and 50 units, right? So the reason why we like these smaller assets is because first Small, there's not as much competition, right? These deals are way too small for the big players. Additionally, these deals are really easy to stabilize. It's way easier to stabilize a six, eight templex than it is a 50, 100 unit, right? Like you can get that stabilized in six months versus 100, 200, that's going to take you a couple of years, right? So that, what does that mean? That it means that you can have a velocity of capital. You can keep utilizing that money quicker and quicker and quicker. And the last sweet spot that we really have been playing in that's been very effective is buying scattered site portfolios, right? Buying 10, 12 properties all at once.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And because we're buying in bulk, just like you go to BJ's and you buy toilet paper, you're getting in bulk. It's the same with property. Like if I'm buying 10 properties, I'm expecting a 20 to 30% discount for buying all those.

• 29:06Dave Meyer?

  Yes.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  All at once, right? So that's kind of the sweet spot we're playing in. And we also have started to flip, but we are only flipping multifamily. And the reason for that is because it allows multiple exit strategies, right? So if we can't sell it for the price we want, we could toss a renter and then it still works as a buy and hold rental. And we could simply refinance most of the cash out.

• 29:26Dave Meyer?

  I'm curious, Andrew, this is a lot of work. So are you doing this all yourself?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  So currently, me and my partner, we own a property management company. We self-manage around 250 doors, right? So it was a crap done work. Come around the start of 2022, I think we had about 150 doors that me and my partner self-managed and we had one employee. And I was doing this on top of being an investor-focused agent, on top of having my W2, because I didn't leave my W until June of 2024. Like it was a lot of work, but since then, we've increased our staff from one to around 16 employees.

• 29:58Dave Meyer?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  So we have a really, really strong staff that allow us to kind of stabilize these assets ourselves. You know, real estate is, is made in three ways, right? The debt on the property, the operations and the price, right? And operations is, is really important. You can turn a really good deal bad, or you can turn a bad deal okay with solid and good operations, right?

• 30:20Dave Meyer?

  Totally. Everyone always says you make money in real estate on the buy, right? I, I think you need to caveat that. You get the potential to make money from real estate on the buy, but you actually make the money by operating that program successfully. Cause I'm sure you've Seen this too, but I've seen a lot of people buy good deals and run them into the ground.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 30:37Dave Meyer?

  Or you see someone buy a thin deal, run it effectively and manage to turn it into a pretty solid return. It's not just as simple as getting a good deal. It's an important component for sure. But as you said, there's a lot more to it.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  A perfect example of that. I bought this duplex in Killenly, Connecticut for $160,000. We were planning on renovating it completely. We budgeted around $80,000. We come to realize the foundation is straight messed up, right? And our renovation budget went from 80K to 120. And we were planning on selling these duplexes of $320,000. Like, we were gonna make no money on this deal, right? So this is, this is an exact reason why operations are so important. So what do we decide to do? We actually looked at the property. We were like, hey, if we actually reconfigure this to a single family, we'll get a better price per unit. And by the way, our renovation costs will go down because now we're not doing two bathrooms. Now we're not doing two kitchens, right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  So we ended up doing that. We ended up bringing our renovation costs down to like 110 and we got the ARV from 320 to 450. And that's just a prime example of how operations can turn a bad deal good.

• 31:42Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, it works both ways for sure. Like, if you're good at this, you'll find a way to make it work. If you're bad at it, you could find a way to destroy what should be a really good deal.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 31:53Dave Meyer?

  At what point did you quit your job? Because you said in the beginning of the show that you had been working in corporate America. Then you took on being an investor friendly agent. Can you give us just like a timeline here of like when you stopped working a sort of more traditional corporate job?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  So I'll be honest with you. It was really, really challenging leaving my job. Like, I, I worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a project manager. So there was a certain level of identity associated with that that I had to escape, right? Additionally, my job paid me $130 a year and I was probably working 10 to 15 hours a week, right? It was so freaking easy. But at a certain point, you know, it came to the point where, you know, my activities in real estate from a dollar per hour perspective completely outweighed the money I was making at my W2. So, you know, I put it off as long as possible to leave my W2, but what really pushed me over the edge. Was going to a mastermind. I think I went there in March 2024, right? And the host asked a question to the table. He's like, what's one thing you can do?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  That's holding you back that will bring your business to the next level? You know, I ended up getting on stage and I'm taking the mic and I said, quitting my job. And the host, he's like, you know, so as of now, like, we're gonna set a deadline for you that you have to quit your job by this date.

• 33:05Dave Meyer?

  Oh.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And if you don't quit your job by this date, we're gonna shave that beard of yours.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  And then after that, the crowd of 500 people proceeded to yell, quit your job, quit your job, quit your job.

• 33:18Dave Meyer?

  No one can say no to that level of chanting. You just have to give it.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  It was such peer pressure. I literally felt like I was like naked in a dream. Now everybody's staring at me. It was so awkward. But that ended up pushing me to take the leap to leave my job in June. And since leaving my job, I probably Forex my annual income.

• 33:37Dave Meyer?

  Tell me a little bit about that because, you know, there's a big debate about how long you should work in a corporate job, when you should quit and go full time into real estate. So can you just tell me a little bit about where your income comes from now? Because it sounds like you do a couple of different things. You have a property management company, you do your own deals, you're an agent. Like, what does your income look like?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So ultimately, I was very strong on the defensive side, but was also very strong on the offensive side, right? So I actually moved into a house hack, did the three unit. I rent two units for two grand and I, I live in the third unit. It's a three bedroom, one bath. I rent two bedrooms and I live in the third.

• 34:15Dave Meyer?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I literally bring in 50, 500 in revenue on that three unit property and my mortgage is 3,200 bucks.

• 34:21Dave Meyer?

  That's pretty good. Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So my living expenses are really, really, really low. I probably spend four to five grand a month on probably food is my largest expense, right? So I didn't allow life creep to creep up. I mean, like ultimately I'm a multimillionaire, right? Like I don't have to be living in a house hack with roommates, but I do it because I see the long-term vision, right? And, and, and to answer your question, my other income comes from cash flow, right? I probably get nine to $10,000 in monthly cash flow combined from my own personal rentals that I've built over the years and combined with some of the investments I'm part with my investors, right? I also get, you know, buyer agent commissions or acquisition fees for deals that we close. Right? That's another form of income. I'm an investor focused agent, even though I've kind of taken a step back from that. So those are primarily the sources of my income.

• 35:07Dave Meyer?

  Thank you for sharing that because I think a lot of times what happens is people quit their corporate job. You know, they tell everyone they're quitting, they're going full time into real estate. And that means some combination of cash flow and maybe working as an agent or a loan officer. And that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes when you're doing that, you might be working 40 hours as an agent. It sounds like you're not in that bucket, Andrew, but the reason I'm asking the question is because I think it's really important. When people say, I quit my job and working in real estate full time. What does that look like? How many hours a week do you spend in each of these different buckets?

• 35:44Dave Meyer?

  But it sounds like it's really cool for you. You can spend the majority of your time on your own investments and then syndicating other deals to some LPs that you have other investors.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  So let me be clear, syndications are not great at building wealth. They are great at building network capital. When it comes to a syndication, the way it's usually set up is the investor has to get paid first before you get paid, right?

• 36:07Dave Meyer?

  That's right.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And that more or less means that you're not getting paid until year three or five of the business plan. So you're essentially working for free a lot of times, right? So syndications are fantastic for deals that you simply don't have the cash to take down. But they're also fantastic for building network capital to build credibility and also allow you to raise capital in some of these more profitable deals. Maybe a six or 10plex, you're talking about a fix and flip, right? So I think people should be clear, like syndications are not a get rich quick scheme. They're a get rich slow scheme.

• 36:39Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, it's a business. It's really, it's really like a business that you're operating similar to other, you know, operations intensive businesses. You need investor relations, you need to do property management. It's just, it's a different thing. It's a great thing if you want to do it, but as Andrew said, there are trade offs to this and you need to like consider pretty carefully. If it's right for you at this point in your investing career and it's sort of fits into your overall portfolio strategy. Andrew, it's been a lot of fun, great lessons for everyone here. Before we get out of here, though, just tell me a little bit, what are your goals for 2025? What are you looking to do next?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  So my goal for 2025 is I want to close on 200 more units. I think we've already closed on 120. We have another 30 or 40 in the pipeline, so we are way ahead of schedule. I'm also planning, I want to travel to 12 different places. I want to help 10,000 people reach financial independence is probably 10 year goal. And I want to travel six months out of the year, and I only want to work two hours a day. Like, that's my ultimate vision of like 10 years from now. And that's really why I'm working on growing, building my team, and kind of building a self-sufficient business, so I could really live the dream life that I want to. Because ultimately, you know, my life sounds great, and I did reach financial independence, but it does come with a lot of responsibility and a lot of time commitment. I'm trying to build systems to kind of get out of that down the road.

• 37:57Dave Meyer?

  I love that. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, Start with Strategy, but I feel like having that clear vision that you have is sort of the most important part of building a real estate portfolio. What you do to actually achieve that goal becomes so much easier if you know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, because you could say, all right, yeah, I should syndicate for the next couple of years. I should own a property management company for the next couple of years. And that will, even though, you know, property management is a loss leader for me right now, that means in a couple of years, I'll be working two hours a day, and I'll be able to travel like six months a year. And it makes those decisions so much easier, rather than sort of obsessing about the fact like, oh, I'm losing $500 a month. Well, it's like, yeah, that's fine, because it's getting me to this longer term goal. So it's easier said than done, too. Like,

• 38:41Dave Meyer?

  having that clear vision, I don't know about you. It took me a while to really sort of like nail down what I wanted to achieve with real estate, not just try and like grow at all costs and scale in every which way. Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for being here. We really appreciate it.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 38:56Dave Meyer?

  And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We appreciate each and every one of you. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave us a review either on Apple or Spotify, or give us a thumbs up on YouTube. We'll see you all next time.

• 39:10Speaker 03

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