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This is how you do the Slow Burr, my personal favorite real estate investing strategy of 2025. And I'm going to tell you how to do it step by step. The BRRRR has been a very popular way to quickly scale a profitable real estate portfolio, even if you're starting without a lot of capital. And it can still absolutely work in today's market. But you gotta make a couple essential updates to the tried and true formula. And today I'm gonna show you. Hey, what's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, host here at Bigger Pockets. And on this show we help you pursue financial independence through real estate. And we're glad to have you all here. Today we released a recent episode of the podcast episode 1165. It was back on August 25th and it was called this is Better than the BRRRR Method, all about how to do BRRRs in 2025. And you guys seem to love that episode so much that today I'm going to go into more detail and more depth and explain exactly how you can execute a Slow Burr rental property deal step by step. To me, this is the best strategy right now to use to add value and increase the upside of your deals. But you just need to take into account current prices and current rates when you're figuring out how to actually go about executing one of these deals. Let's dive into it. So first things first. What is a BRRRR in the first place? Then we'll get to what is a Slow BRRRR and how you actually go about it. But BRRR is an acronym. It stands for Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, and Repeat. And the idea behind a BRRRR is that you buy a property that's not up to its highest and best use. It can be fully distressed, or it might just be a property that needs a little bit of love, but you're buying something that's not really stabilized and being used in its best possible way. Then you renovate that property to not just raise the value of the property like you would do with a flip, but also to raise the rents that you can generate. Because this is a rental property deal. Once you've done that, you rent it out at the new market rate that you've brought those rents up to. At that point, you could call the property quote unquote, stabilize, right? You've brought it up to its highest and best use. You've got market rents going for you, and at that point, you can refinance at the new appraised value, pull some cash out and Then use the cash that you just used to get that first deal and use it basically a second time. Recycle at least some of that money into the next deal that you want to go and acquire. And there are scales to how effective or how aggressive you want to be. On a brrrr. You could refinance some of it. There is something that some people call the quote unquote perfect brrrr where the cash out refinance pays back 100% of your initial capital. Both your down payment, your rehab costs, your closing costs. You're able to, in a perfect BRRRR refinance all of that. So you can basically recycle 100% of your money. But there are other ways to use a BRRRR effectively to increase your cash flow, to improve your net worth, to grow your portfolio. But no matter how you actually utilize the BRRRR strategy, it is just overall a super appealing option for people who are looking to scale and who are maybe starting with a lim, because as I said, the BRRRR method allows you to recycle that capital and that means you can use your money that you have very, very efficiently to scale a rental property portfolio. Now, of course, some things have changed since 2012, 2015, even since 2021. Rates aren't near zero anymore. Underwriting is a little bit tighter. Appraisals that you're getting and are super important to the refinance portion of the BRRRR are a little bit more conservative. And as we all know, renovations have gotten consider and I should also say in the last year or two, rents have sort of stagnated and this has changed the way that BRRR works. But is BRRRR dead? No, absolutely not. None of these things kill brrrr. If you've been listening to the show, I think you all know I think this is crazy that this is killed Burr. It just changes the approach. You have to tweak the strategy and the tactics that you use based on what has changed over the last couple of years. One thing, and I think the main thing that you really need to change if you're going to succeed with brrrr in 2025 and get all these amazing benefits and be able to recycle your capital is that you have to change your expectations a little bit because during the BRRRR quote unquote heyday, right from whatever 2017 to 2022, this sort of idea emerged where that the only BRRRR that is worth doing is that perfect BRRR that I mentioned before, where you take out 100% of your equity. And of course if you can do that, you should. But the idea that that's the only thing that makes BRRRR worth it I think is really crazy. And it's honestly really detrimental to the majority of investors out there because they're overlooking what could be great wealth building cash flow producing deals because it's not a hundred percent perfect. There's a saying that perfect is the enemy of good. And I think that applies really well to the situation with brrrr. To be clear, I am not saying that it's wrong to look for an 100% brrrr. If you can find that perfect brrrr, go out and do that. That is absolutely awesome. But it is important to note that in today's market, being able to do that is an outlier. That is not what should be expected. That is not normal. If you can find it, you found yourself a home run or a grand slam. But you should not overlook deals that don't meet that very strict criteria because that means you're going to overlook what could be a lot of great, great deal deals. By all means, if you can find it, do it. But it's just not normal. And that's okay. You could still use the many fundamentals of BRRRR to scale and grow. And I'm going to share with you the approach that I've been using to brrrr. Over the last couple of years. I've done several deals like this. It works well for me and I think it's just the right approach to real estate investing in the current environment that we're in. So this is the approach that I have been using. I call it the slow. BRRR still uses the same fundamentals as brrr, just tweaks it for modern conditions. Here is my basic thesis because I think, you know, before I share with you exactly how to do this step by step, I want to share with you at least my thinking and how I came about this strategy. Number one, value add investing works really well right now. Some people call this forced appreciation. But value add investing is basically buying a property that's not being used that well or is fallen into disrepair or needs a little bit of love renovating it to drive up the value of that property. And if you're doing it right, you're increasing the value of the property by more than you're paying to increase the value of that property. So just as an example, you buy a property for 200 grand, you put 50 grand into it, then it's worth 300 grand. That's value add investing because you spent $50,000 to increase the value of your property. $100,000. And I hope you all agree with me that if you can do a deal like that, you do it all day long. And right now, in today's market, even though cash flow is harder to find and there are real obstacles to real estate investing, value add investing is working really well. There's all sorts of macroeconomic reasons for this. But you see this with flippers who are still making money in today's environment even though prices aren't going up like crazy. And the same thing applies to BRRR Investing, which is why I use it as the foundation of the investing strategy I'm using right now. The second thesis that I have that drives this belief is that on market deals are getting better, they're becoming more abundant and you can negotiate better deals. If you listen to me on the show, you know that I'm not someone who has some sophisticated deal flow operation out there. I am not sending direct letters. I don't do Facebook ads, I don't do any of that. I find my deals either through my real estate agent, so on market deals or from pocket listings that again, usually come to me through my real estate agent. But in my experience, over I'd say the last year, really, the number of good opportunities on the MLS just on market deals is increasing. And as we enter an increasingly strong buyer's market, I think those deals are going to come more and more and it means that you're going to be able to negotiate better. And that is really key to the BRRRR strategy because if you're buying a distressed property, you need to buy it deep, you need to buy it under market comps. And I have seen this myself and I talked to tons of investors who are also seeing this. But your ability to negotiate down, particularly properties that haven't been renovated yet, is going up. Your ability to do that is increasing and is probably going to keep increasing, which is another reason I like this slow burr. Third, properties are sitting on the market a little bit longer, which not only means that you can negotiate, which is key to the burr, but it means that you can take a little bit longer to close, which I'll explain in a little bit, is an important element of the step by step guide I'm going to give you. Because I think the way you finance a brrrr right now really matters. And I actually have sort of a contrarian take about how you should finance brrrrs. I'll get into that. But it requires that you can close at a slower pace, which I know is possible in today's day and age. And this is just an example. These are just a couple of examples of that. You can invest in any kind of market, but you have to think about how you can use market conditions to your advantage. Because right now prices across the country are relatively flat. I think that's going to continue. I think they might even go down a little bit on a national basis in the next year or two. And so what I'm looking at is how can you take advantage of this? Because just like in the stock market, people don't stop investing in the stock if the market's going sideways or a little bit down. They just adjust their strategy. And this is exactly what we're doing with the slow burr. The last part of my thesis here, never change. This is always my thesis on real estate investing is you got to do it for the long term. You are in this for long term wealth creation. And the brrrr, as the name implies, it means you're being a little bit more patient about a brrrr. But that doesn't really matter because to me, real estate investing is a long term game anyway and I will take as much time as I need to lock up a great deal. And the slow burr is a perfect example of that. So these are my baseline beliefs right now. And if you're with me, which I'm hoping you are, you then you ask, what is the play? How do you take these market conditions and use them to your advantage? We're going to get to that right after this break. Look, we've all been there. You need to buy something for your business. But first you're stuck dealing with procurement bottlenecks, then going back and forth with approvals and boom, surprise costs that mess up your whole budget. There's gotta be a better way. And there is. 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