Why This Expert Investor Owns Only ONE Rental Property

Mike Baum owns just one rental property, but this one property alone has changed his life. It’s allowed him to become such an investing expert that he’s constantly being asked for his opinion on the BiggerPockets forums, and he provides some of the most well-thought-out investing advice on the internet. So why does he have just one rental property, and why doesn’t he grow using his expertise? The answer isn’t that obvious. You wouldn’t know it, but Mike is permanently disabled. After overworking so hard that he ended up losing his vision, he was placed on disability for the rest of his working career. This high achiever was forced to slow down and find something else that could replace his day job. Shortly after his diagnosis, he found BiggerPockets and turned a family vacation home into a short-term rental. Now, he’s got systems and processes that help him self-manage with very few headaches, and he will probably keep this property as his one and only rental for life. Why didn’t he “FOMO” in when everyone was gobbling up real estate in 2020? Why didn’t he grow his portfolio to become the next tycoon? Mike has some clear answers for why he did what he did, and after listening to him, you might change what you want, too. In This Episode We Cover: Why you DON’T need a large real estate portfolio to find financial success when investing Why Mike tells beginner investors that they should NOT buy a short-term rental property The systems and processes Mike made to automate his vacation rental self-management (so he works less!) One thing you should do NOW before you start investing in real estate (it’s free!) The real result of “FOMO” investing and how to stop shiny object syndrome from blowing you off course And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1204 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?

  Hey everyone, Dave here. This Thanksgiving week, we are revisiting a few of our most popular recent episodes. In case you missed them the first time around. Today, it's an investor story originally published in September 2024, but I think the lessons and insights from it are as applicable today as they have ever been. The story is with Mike Baum, who turned to real estate investing in Idaho when a health condition forced him to retire early from a career in the tech industry. But what's really cool and unique about Mike's story is that his entire portfolio is just one investment property. This story makes for a great example of how you don't need a huge massive portfolio to make a huge

• 0:43Dave Meyer?

  impact on your life. Enjoy my conversation with Mike Baum from last fall, and we'll be back with new episodes next week.

• 0:55Dave Meyer?

  Hey everyone, it's Dave. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Every Monday, we like to start our week off by featuring a member of the BiggerPockets community and hearing about their investing journey. And today, we're hearing from an investor named Mike Baum. And fun fact, Mike is actually one of BiggerPockets community's top forum contributors. He has spent over 10,000 hours on biggerpockets.com posting and helping fellow investors learn about real estate. So if you're a frequent visitor to our website, you've probably seen his name pop up. But Mike has a lot to share on top of just what he does for the community already. And in today's episode, I'm going to talk to Mike about how an unexpected life

• 1:39Dave Meyer?

  change for Mike, and a serious one, started his journey in real estate. We'll talk about how he selected his preferred strategy of short-term rentals, and also why Mike has chosen to keep his portfolio small, and how not investing can be an active and strategic decision. And this is going to be a great episode, because I think it provides a really helpful and interesting counter narrative to what we hear most commonly in the real estate investing industry. And I get it, not everyone wants to stay small, not everyone wants to scale. But I think it's really beneficial for all of us to learn from people who are doing something a little bit different. And Mike fits that bill perfectly. So let's bring him on. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:24Dave Meyer?

  Well, I'm very curious to hear about your journey. And so let's just start with your career prior to becoming a real estate investor. What were you up to?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  So I was a engineer at Intel for 19 years. I was a product owner and what they call a technical marketing guy. So what I did was work with our IBM or Lenovo with some of the those platforms and helped them integrate our technology and supported our field sales staff. Plus, I did demonstrations all over the country onstage and show prep and did shows and stuff like that. And then I did a ton of videos and how to's and wrote a ton of technical documents. So that were, that was my gig.

• 3:11Dave Meyer?

  Wow.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I did that until 2011, when I had a huge undertaking, was working 70 hours a week, actually slept in the couch in our lab, just go, go, go, go, go to get a product launch completed. And then one morning I woke up and I couldn't see. The next morning I was, I could see, but I had one eye pointing up this way and one eye pointing this way. And it was a sixth and a third cranial nerve palsy. So that was the first indication. The stress of the work had put me over the edge. So basically, Intel put me on disability, short term. And then after about a year,

• 3:56Speaker 01

  there was no improvement. There never really is a neurological degeneration, right? You could, you can kind of arrest it as much as you can, but you can't bring it back to where it was. So they put me on full-time disability and that, that's been 13 years now. So.

• 4:11Dave Meyer?

  Well, I'm sorry to hear that. It sounds like quite an ordeal. So did that mean you were left without an income after all of that?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Uh, yep, for me, yes. I mean, it's not that we didn't have any income. I, Intel has a very good, uh, taking care of their employees. So there's a good, solid, long-term disability plan. And of course, it requires that I sign up for social security disability, which I did. So yeah, they put, I'm on disability. I had, you know, it was a pretty drastic. Income reduction. My wife is working, so that is good. So we it's not like we're broke, but we certainly went from, you know, upper middle class to, you know, middle, middle class, I guess you could say. We were never rich.

• 4:53Dave Meyer?

  I'm sure it's a change financially, but just emotionally and psychologically, that's like a big just life shift to

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:02Dave Meyer?

  Someone who's working really hard to, you know, having to manage your, your output uh in a more concerted way. And, you know, at this point, is that when you discovered real estate or started thinking about real estate?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  We've had a few rental houses. We've, we've bought and sold some stuff over time. Our vacation rental is located in uh Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on Lake Coeur d'Alene. And I've always wanted to have, I grew up there, always wanted to have a lake house. And a bunch of things kind of lined up for us to be able to uh afford to buy uh this house on the lake. And it was a way for us to replace, because I'm not contributing to retirement any longer, right? Because I have no way to return in normal ways. You know, there are certain ways, but for the most part, it's very difficult to uh when you're on disability because you don't have an actual earned income anymore. So you got to do something

• 5:55Speaker 01

  for retirement. So I figured, and initially, we were not going to rent the house. We weren't going to do a short-term rental. And basically, I bigger pockets is what turned me around to that. Because we, you know, we have, I have three kids, we have three kids, and we have three grandkids now. So we figured, oh, we'll have this lake house and we can go and I'll hang out there. And but it's, you know, I came to realize it's going to sit empty 80% of the time. You know, it's eight-hour drive from where we're at to get there. It's not something you can just kind of bop on over. And traveling with grandkids is certainly not easy, you know, for their age.

• 6:32Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  You know, pick up, pack up and drive eight hours across the state. To to uh to get there. It's easier now that they're older, but uh back then it was, you know, they were very young and

• 6:44Dave Meyer?

  What year was this?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  2017.

• 6:46Dave Meyer?

  Okay, so you you for a while after your diagnosis, you hadn't got into real estate. It took a couple of years for you to to start.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we had a we had a couple of long term rentals we had sold.

• 6:57Dave Meyer?

  Okay.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, it's not that we were completely green, uh but never really looked at short term rentals. In 2017, it was kind of that wasn't said a wild, wild west of short term rentals, but it was a different world than it is today. So I mean, I got to get to know uh Luke Carl and Avery Carl on BiggerPockets. We joined, I think I joined a little after they did. And I started hanging out on the BiggerPockets short term rental forum and was reading everything I possibly could about doing this. And we were a little nervous. I mean, it's a, you know, when you're when you're first thinking about doing a short term rental, you have this asset. It's like, you're you're basically handing the keys over.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  It's not a 1973 Toyota Corona. You're letting your buddy borrow, you know? It's a whole house sitting on the lake, you know, filled with furniture. And when we got started, the house was completely empty. Uh, so we had to furnish it and get it all ready to go. And that took a long time, not really that long, but you know, it's an expense and trying to figure it all out. But uh if it wasn't for BiggerPockets, I don't think I would have done it.

• 8:05Dave Meyer?

  Well, we're glad to hear that. And you've you've paid us back in spades because as I mentioned at the top of the show, Mike is one of the most prolific members of the BiggerPockets forum communities, which we we greatly appreciate. You're always in there answering people's questions. We got to take a quick break, but stick around because later in the show, Mike's going to explain why he's almost immune to FOMO or fear of missing out. And it's super interesting, so stick around. 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

• 8:50Dave Meyer?

  a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. That's where Baseline comes in, BiggerPockets' official banking platform. It tags every rent payment and expense to the right property and Schedule E category as you bank, so you get tax-ready financial reports in real time, not at the end of the year. You can instantly see how each unit is performing, where you're making money and losing money, and make changes while it still counts. 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. A lot of insurance companies compete on one thing: speed. But if you're protecting an investment property

• 9:33Dave Meyer?

  worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, should speed really be the priority? Enreg believes strong coverage starts with understanding the property, the risks, and the realities of ownership. That's why they don't rush the process. Their policies are designed for real-world claims, not just quick quotes. If you want insurance built to protect your investment when it matters most, visit nreg.com/bpllc and learn more today. Most deals don't fall apart because of the numbers. They fall apart because of the financing. You find a property that cash flows. The deal makes sense. But then, the lender looks at your personal income, your tax returns, your debt-to-income ratio, and suddenly, the deal doesn't qualify.

• 10:18Dave Meyer?

  That's the disconnect. Because as investors, we're not buying based on our W2. We're buying based on the asset. That's why Host Financial offers DSCR loans designed for real estate investors, where qualification is based primarily on the property's income, not your personal finances. So no W2s, no tax returns, and no DTI requirements. And with loan-to-value options up to 80% or even 85% on eligible deals, you can keep more capital available as you grow. If you're buying rentals, refinancing, or scaling your portfolio, go to hostfinancial.com. That's H-O-S-T-financial.com, and see what you qualify for.

• 11:00Henry Washington?

  Here's a strategy that most W2 employees have never heard of. Normally, if you want to write off a rental property against your regular income, you need real estate professional status. That means tracking hundreds of hours a year. Rent to Retirement just launched a program that skips all of that. It's called the STR loophole tenant placement program. Here's how it works. You buy one of Rent to Retirement's Class A new construction investment properties. You set up an Airbnb listing and self-manage it for the remainder of the year. Rent to Retirement then rents the home as a short-term rental to establish it as an STR for the year, no furnishing required, making this the easy button to save five or six figures in taxes this year.

• 11:43Henry Washington?

  And because you're the sole manager, there's no hourly minimum to meet. That lets you use a cost segregation study to accelerate the depreciation and potentially write off over $100,000 against your income, even on your first rental. Add in cash back up to 13% of the home price, which exceeds $60,000 on some properties. With this massive cash back incentive, investors are seeing total returns up to 126%. New construction, A-class properties, and inventory is limited. Learn more at biggerpockets.com/retirement or text REI to 33777. Again, text REI to 33777.

• 12:25Speaker 03

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• 12:58Dave Meyer?

  So what was the learning curve like for you? Because I imagine going from being in product development and software engineering, are there overlaps between that and managing a short-term rental?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  There is, because 50% of my job at least was creating processes for people that needed to understand how to implement our technology. So you really just take that and you apply it to processes for short-term rental. I'm a huge believer in self-management of your short-term rental. But you have to have all your ducks in a row. You have to have everything working. You have to make sure your maintenance schedule is on, right on the money. Because the last thing you want is this X, Y, or Z breaking down. So all your hard systems need to have steady maintenance. You need to hire the right people to be a handy person to come over and take care of something. So you have to have somebody there. You have to have a top-notch cleaner. And sometimes it's going to take a while.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  It took, I've been through four cleaners since we started.

• 13:59Dave Meyer?

  That's actually not that bad. I think I've been through way more.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  It isn't that bad, considering we're really rural. I mean, we are 36 miles down the lake from Coeur d'Alene. It's over an hour to drive down. And it's a tiny little town. And there's very few professionals of this kind. You know, there's another town about 18 miles farther south called St. Mary's that has some. But the cleaner comes all the way from Coeur d'Alene. It's a whole day job for her, drive down there, clean the whole house, top to bottom, do all the laundry, and then drive back. So that's always a key. But getting all the, everything in place and all the processes in place, once those are running, then management becomes a lot easier. I'm a huge believer in personal communication with the guests. I don't rely on automated communication.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I don't rely on bots of any kind to answer things. Somebody asks a question, does an inquiry on Airbnb or VRBO.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I'm the guy who answers the question.

• 15:00Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I give them my personal cell phone number that they can get ahold of me anytime. And I can count on one hand, the amount of times I've been contacted for problems.

• 15:12Dave Meyer?

  Really?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been seven years.

• 15:15Dave Meyer?

  Is that because the house is just in great condition or you find great guests?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Both, I think. I vet every guest. We do not have auto book turned on for anybody. Everybody has to talk to me and I gotta get a feel for where they are. We get a lot of fake bookings.

• 15:30Dave Meyer?

  Really?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Hi, this is Steve. We are looking at staying at your house. Are these dates available? You can almost hear it and the, it's obvious the dates are available. We had, we had one just come in the other day, November 1st to the 26th. I'm like, wow, that'd be a great booking. I've only had two bookings that long ever that were real. But I knew right away because of the wording and then it takes them about a week and a half to get back to me when I say yes. Great. My wife and I and kids are going to be going on a vacation and my business is going to be paying for it. Can I please send you this fake third party out of country check?

• 16:09Dave Meyer?

  Oh gosh.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Give me all your personal information so we can make this happen, dot, dot, dot. Yay. And you're like, no, only work through the tool. I only take payments through the tool. Sorry. And then they disappear.

• 16:22Dave Meyer?

  Good for you. I mean, it sounds like you've got some really good systems in place. I want to take a step back quickly though, because you know, you're sort of in your timeline. You bought this house for personal use. You found bigger pockets. And I think one of the common challenges that a lot of our audience hears is, you know, how long do you research and learn before just jumping in? Was it quick for you to just start renting it out? Or are you more the type that spent a lot of time educating yourself prior to, like you said, handing over the keys to this very valuable asset to people you've never met before?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Right. So analysis paralysis is probably the biggest hurdle for most folks who have never done anything like this before. It is a gigantic expense for most people and it's a real risk and roll of the dice. So I, I'm on both sides of that, what you just stated, because I am not risk averse, but I plan, plan, plan. If you fail to plan, plan to fail, right? You look at everything, you read everything. And I was had an advantage being disabled. I basically had time so I could learn everything there was to learn. And being more technical minded, it basically allows me to

• 17:46Speaker 01

  get a better understanding of the way finance is supposed to work and how insurance is going to play out. And it, you know, and I, I have a couple of algorithms that I have written that hunt the web, you know, that are for data that, you know, that's why I can post Mike's deals of the day, you know, because I scrub, I can scrub the internet on my own and find stuff that, you know, takes a while to become public to everybody else. That's why BiggerPockets is, you know, and I hate to keep coming back to that. I'm not trying to be a shill for BiggerPockets here, but that forum is so valuable because there's so many of us on there that have done this and been doing it. And if you have a question, you know, I can answer that question or John Underwood could answer that question

• 18:29Speaker 01

  or, or, or a dozen other people can answer that question.

• 18:32Dave Meyer?

  Well, first of all, Mike, if you want to be a shill for BiggerPockets, you're in the right place. You are, this is the one podcast you're probably allowed to shill BiggerPockets as much as you want. We really appreciate it, but just so everyone knows what Mike is talking about is a completely free resource to everyone. The forums are free. If you want to learn something about real estate, go ask a question. I think there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who don't even know we have these forums. Go check it out, ask a question, go see what other questions people are asking. I promise you're going to learn something. And I think you're right, Mike. I wanted to just get back to this idea of finding the right balance between preparation and, you know, fear. You know, there, everyone's going to have some fear.

• 19:16Dave Meyer?

  That's just a normal part of it. But you have to find the right level and the right way to cut it off and say like, educating myself is not going to help me anymore. Once I've done, you know, spent dozens or hundreds of hours, whatever it is, learning and reading, listening to the podcast, at a certain point, you just sort of have to jump in. And it sounds like you did that. And were you successful right away or did it take a while for your business to?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  It's going to take a while.

• 19:44Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. How long?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  The first year was lean. We lost money the first year. Uh, because I was a little hesitant. I, um, we're getting the house set up. We're filling the house with all kinds of new stuff and I want to make sure that it works. You know, I went through two different types of sheets before settled on a sheet brand. That worked really, really well because the first one really soft, super nice satin weave sheets. But the first person with heels that were kinda needed some work on, because they were sandals all the time. Tore the heck out of the sheets.

• 20:20Dave Meyer?

  Oh gosh.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  They were filled up like you wouldn't believe. So I had to toss them out after one, one stay. You know, things like that. So your first year, anybody who's going to do a short term rental, your first year is probably going to be on the lean side. My area has got low saturation in, on Lake Coeur d'Alene. There are not a lot of places for rent on the lake. Um, you know, I have dozens of people in competition, not thousands. So I price everything accordingly, but even then you can have a rough year. So you just really never a hundred percent, all the analysis and all your thoughts and air DNA and the enemy method and going through and comparing everything. Trying to set your prices and figuring out your occupancy and making sure you have the right amenities and the right stuff in the house.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Isn't a guarantee that you're just going to knock it out of the park. So you, you have to go into it with a understanding that this is something that you could do less than break even. But like anything, no risk, no reward.

• 21:21Dave Meyer?

  Absolutely. And it, it sounds like Mike, you, you got it together pretty quickly. I mean relatively quickly. Uh, and this in 2017 and by all accounts, from what we've talked about, you've run a successful short-term rental business. But one of the main reasons I was so excited to talk to you, Mike, is that you are clearly very passionate about real estate and about short-term rentals. You're on the forums all the time. I can hear it in your voice. But you've also chosen not to scale your portfolio. You have one short-term rental and you've, you're happy with that. Tell, tell me why you've made that decision.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Okay. So we have tried to buy a few other places. Unfortunately, as the, the farther down the road after COVID is when we started really starting to look. Well, the interest rates went nuts, you know, we were, you know, and, and that was crazy and property values went up and. And property values are an area where we were choosing to do our investing in Idaho shot through the roof. I mean, it was one of the highest in the country.

• 22:26Dave Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. It was. I mean, if forever and listening, if you you're not aware, places like Coeur d'Alene, Boise, just some had some of the fastest appreciation in the whole, you know, the whole country was kind of going crazy during that time. But Idaho might have been like the epicenter. Idaho and Austin, I think, were like the two places that were just booming even more than the rest of the country. So sorry to interrupt, but go ahead.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  No, no, that's okay. You're. Yeah, absolutely. Our houses are our lake house is worth four times what we paid for it now.

• 22:57Dave Meyer?

  Oh, my God, in seven years?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00Dave Meyer?

  So, yeah, why buy more if you're if you're doing that well with your first one?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Well, I we we've looked at other places. We we did a scouting trip down to Sedona, Arizona, looking around there. We went out to New Mexico, Angel Fire, looked at some, you know, some things like that. And all of it, you know, we liked all of it. But unfortunately, you know, the the places that we liked the best ended up either selling before we even got home, started talking about it, or they got pulled off the market, or there was various different reasons. We took out a pretty good sized HELOC on our primary, so we have cash for down payment and to get the house all prepped. And now we're kind of in a holding pattern. But we found a place

• 23:48Speaker 01

  out on the ocean that we were looking at. It was a big, successful short term rental. It was doing pretty well. And we were ready to pull the trigger on it, needed some updating, but we were ready for that. And then the people pulled it off the market. That was late last year. So we looked at a couple of other places, one in Coeur d'Alene. It was on the Ponderay River, which is a major inflow into Lake Ponderay, which is an enormous lake north of where we're at. And it was beautiful, it was great, and they pulled it off the market as well. So, you know, it's not that we don't want to expand it, but now we're getting to the point where my wife's going to retire in a couple of years. And we started kind of late in life in this particular game.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  So, you know, had we known more earlier, I think we would have done better. You know, if you're younger, I think there's a lot more, still going to be a lot more opportunity moving forward. You know, it's a more sophisticated market now than it was seven, eight years ago, so.

• 24:49Dave Meyer?

  All right, we got to take a pause for some ads, but we'll be back with this week's investor story on the other side. 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 Hostingr and everything was super simple. I asked Hostingr'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 agent helps with SEO, website copy, and email marketing after launch.

• 25:31Dave Meyer?

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• 26:14Dave Meyer?

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• 27:57Dave Meyer?

  Has it been hard, Mike, to be patient? You know, so much has gone on in the last couple of years.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? I'm a, I'm not really much of a FOMO guy, fear of missing out, you know? It happens on occasion that I get frustrated, but for the most part, I look at it like, well, you know what? It just wasn't meant to be, so I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to move on and see what else I find. I still scan, you know? I spend actually a lot of time on Craigslist looking at buyer stuff. And what people might have been trying to sell, you know, I've been driving around North Idaho quite a bit, down back roads, seeing if there's something interesting just kind of floating around. And, you know, I'll write an address down and nothing's popped up.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  But if you get mad and try to jump on every single deal that comes along, it's going to bite you. In my opinion, eventually it's going to bite you. You really got to watch that.

• 28:54Dave Meyer?

  And what do you attribute that lack of FOMO to? I mean, I think it takes confidence, right? To not be jealous or running, chasing every little shiny object. How do you stay disciplined?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Well, I would have to say that it's easier for me, being someone who is older than, I mean, most of the investors that come in that are asking questions are in their twenties, twenties and early thirties. You know, husband and wife or a single person trying to, trying to get started because they like the idea of short-term rentals. And, you know, when I was younger, you know, I was probably way more aggressive than I would be now. We have to plan for retirement. We can't be, you have that looming over your head the entire time. Do I, you know, do I sit there and I just take $200,000 and put it down on black? Cause then sometimes you feel like that's what you're doing. You're putting it all on black.

• 29:48Dave Meyer?

  Yep.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Hoping that it's going to pay out in the end. Now, it's not like that, but every real estate deal is a bit of a gamble. You can plan and you can, and you can get processed, you can do all kinds of things and you could still lose. And nobody wants to lose. We saw a lot of that in the last few years. I think things have evened out now. So experience and just life experience in general and seeing things come and go and come and go. And your life isn't worse because you didn't jump on this or you didn't jump on that. I mean, I don't spend a lot of time kicking myself in the butt for not buying Apple at $25.

• 30:29Dave Meyer?

  Right, yeah, I just didn't, that wasn't the part of life you were in.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Right. At that time, I just don't, I just don't think about it. I mean, we get quite a few young folks coming in. They want to do short-term rentals off the bat. They're single. And my advice to every young investor wanting to get started is to not do short-term rentals.

• 30:48Dave Meyer?

  Oh, really? Why is that?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Well, because there are better options to build a base off of. There was one young guy, he's 19, he's in the military, he's gonna be able to take advantage of VA loans. And he wants to get into short-term rentals once he gets out, about three years. And I told him, you're, what you should really do is take advantage of the VA loan, or for those who don't have access to VA loan, would be FHA low-down, 3% down loans. Buy a duplex, buy a triplex, buy a fourplex, right? You buy something like that, you live in one, and you have three renters, you do some minor rehab, you do it after a year, you have to live in the place for a year.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Then you basically exit the place, rent that last unit, and then do it all over again. You have to convert that one FHA loan to a conventional. You refinance, then you move over here and you do it again, and then you do it again. And maybe one more time. And now you've got duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, all of them producing, all of them income-producing for you, maybe 10, 15, 20% at this point, after doing it for a few years. Maybe you have one that's paid off. You have all these assets that form this really, really nice piece of bedrock that you can build the rest. So that's, if you're young, you don't have kids, you can move every couple of years, or every other year, or whatever,

• 32:14Speaker 01

  without dragging a whole family and changing school districts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that's what I would do. And then, once you do four or five years of that, then you can start looking at some other things.

• 32:25Dave Meyer?

  You're speaking my language. I mean, that's sort of what I did is just started with long-term rentals and over time, I've branched out. I started investing in syndications. I do some private lending now. You know, you do some different stuff, but I feel comfortable taking risk because I have a solid portfolio of low-risk, high-performing assets. And not all of them were like amazing when I first bought them, but I bought 10, 15 years ago. And that's the beauty of real estate is over time, you hold on to these things, they perform.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:55Dave Meyer?

  Well, Mike, I wanted to say thank you because I have only been hosting this podcast for a few months, but I've been a member of the BiggerPockets community for a long time and employee for a long time. And it's honestly people like you who choose to share their time and share their knowledge with people for free out of the goodness of their heart that it's made the community so strong. So I just wanted to personally thank you.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 33:18Dave Meyer?

  So last question, Mike, what are you excited about in the short-term rental or real estate thing industry right now?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Um, I think there's a lot of opportunity to be had, unfortunately, at the expense of folks that were overzealous in their FOMO purchases of short-term rentals, as you could say. Sometimes you can almost feel the desperation of some folks just to get out from underneath that mortgage because they bought, you know, they bought high at the top of the market. Their interest rate is crazy. You know, interest rates are starting to drop. I think we're going to see a couple more drops in the next few months. I think it's going to be a very interesting 2025.

• 34:01Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, likewise. Well, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your story and your insights with it. We really appreciate it. And if you want to connect with Mike, we'll put his contact information. But just go check out the BiggerPockets forums. You'll see him all over the BiggerPockets community. Thanks again, Mike.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Thank you. Have a good day, guys.