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- [00:00]
Ashley Kerr
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast, episode number 596. My name is Ashley Kerr and I'm here with Tony J. Robinson.
- [00:16]
Tony J. Robinson
And this is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And today we've got Matt on the podcast. And man, what an inspiring story Matt is going to share with you where he talks about hustling every year for five years, moving, picking up his young family to, to get his next rental. He talks about finding deals, about working with agents, about working with lenders, and he talks about the pivotal moment of realizing he actually could leave his job to do real estate full time. So if you want an episode that is both inspirational yet super tactical, Matt's episode is going to deliver on all of that today.
- [00:56]
Ashley Kerr
Well, Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Let's get started with what your life looked like before real estate investing.
- [01:04]
Matt
I don't even know where to start back at probably college. So I went to a conservative Baptist school. I actually have a degree in youth pastor. I was going to be a pastor. That was my, that was my goal at least after graduation. Realized that pastors don't actually make much money, who knew? And I was looking for a job just to pay the bills, pay rent. Was living in just a little one bedroom apartment and ended up getting a job at a cellular retail store, Sprint, selling phones. I met my wife, oh man, 2013, got married in 2014 and we bought our first house at the end of 2014. So that's kind of the life before real estate. But working a dead end job, didn't really know where I was going in life. Making about 35 grand a year. She was a veterinary technician making about 14 bucks an hour. So that was us before real estate.
- [02:05]
Ashley Kerr
And then what was that moment in time when you found out about real estate investing and wanted to kind of change your life?
- [02:13]
Matt
Yeah, so I think really the big trigger for me was my in laws. You know, I think most people have maybe somebody close with them that does real estate that encourages them, you know, or they're just really invested into listening to podcasts and self learning. But that was it for me. When I met my wife, my in laws were already, you know, we'll call it retired. Retired into full time real estate investing. He had been a meat manager or meat cutter at a grocery store for 20 something years and, and then started buying rental properties which they rehabbed themselves. And when I met them, he was, oh man, 51, 52 and had already been out of the, the W2 job for 10ish years due to real estate. And they were spending a month each year down on, I guess in Tucson, you know, living the high life. And I'm like, man, like I want to, I want to get into this, like what, what can I do to, to get this life? So that's kind of what kind of, you know, really spurred us on to start.
- [03:16]
Ashley Kerr
So marry into a mentor is what you're saying.
- [03:20]
Tony J. Robinson
That's one of the questions we get all the time is how to find a mentor. It's just like, just marry your mentor's daughter or son. That's the fastest way. Matt, I want to learn more about how you took that leap from, you know, you said working the dead end job to actually building the life you have today. But just let's set the table for the rookies who are listening. What does your portfolio look like today?
- [03:39]
Matt
Portfolio? Today we've got 11 properties, three of which are short, the rest are long term. They're mostly single family homes, but I do have a fourplex as well. That's long term.
- [03:51]
Tony J. Robinson
And you built that portfolio over what period of time?
- [03:54]
Matt
Oh man, I mean there's been, you know, some, some selling in that time as well, I want to say. So we started in 2014 with our first deal and our last purchase was actually last year. I've not bought a house in about a year now, so yeah, I mean about, about a decade. And it took seven years to finally leave my, my W2 job from the passive, mostly passive income that we were getting through real estate so.
- [04:23]
Tony J. Robinson
Well Matt, I appreciate you sharing that because I think that last part of what you said is what most rookies need to hear is that dude, it was, it was a decade of you putting in the work and seven years of that before you even considered leaving your job. And I think giving Ricky's a realistic time frame of like you're not going to do it overnight, but it's also not going to take you, you know, 30 or 40 years to do this either. So appreciate you giving us that insight, but let's go back to the first deal, man. So you see the in laws, you know, living the high life as you said. How does that lead you to your first deal? Like what did that first deal look like?
- [04:53]
Matt
Yeah, so I mean I think something that a lot of new investors like just they, they compare to like the last generation or the last, you know, but five years ago it was Easier than now. Right? And that's what I was doing then for sure. Where my in laws had done, you know, all of those no DOC loan deals prior 2008 where, you know, anybody and everybody could get a house. I mean, closing on three properties at once with no, you know, real income verification and maybe stuff was easier back then. Not that it was done the right way for everybody, but it worked for them. So with us though, starting in 2014, you know, at first our desire, like we wanted to have rental properties, but more than anything we wanted to start building equity. So our first deal was the end of 2014 and we were at the time renting a two bedroom apartment. We were spending about $750 a month for rent in a little, little town in Iowa. And I want to say, so we were pregnant and expecting our first. My wife wanted to stay home and that was, that was my desire as well. And we're like, you know, what are we going to do to afford a house? And we, you know, honestly like driving to work, I'm listening to BiggerPockets and you know, other podcasts and just trying to educate myself on what to do. And like our thought was like, let's, let's buy a home that's a fixer upper and move into this house and live in it as we renovate it. So we were approved, I want to say it was like $130,000 is all that we were approved up to because I was making nothing and found a house for $90,000. It was a single story crawl space underneath definition of grandma's home. I mean it had orange shade carpet in the bedrooms, it had carpet in the kitchen and wood paneled walls. This thing was falling apart, but it was still livable. And what we did because we didn't have much money saved either is we found a bank. I want to say we called almost a dozen places before we found a bank that offered a first time home buyers credit. So the Iowa Wild hockey team actually sponsored this and it was like $1,000 credit. You had to. The stipulation was to live in the house for a year, which we planned to do anyway. We got to go to the hockey game crash. Their mascot actually came to closing fully decked out in his costume and took a picture with us, but got that credit which helped with closing costs. And then the other hack that I learned was to offer over asking the stipulation that the seller would pay some of the closing costs. So we, we actually bought it for 92,000 with the seller paying 2,000 of the closing costs. So all we had to bring to closing was like $2,500 to, to buy this house and we, we moved into it. So that was our first, I guess home purchase, our first deal. And yeah, that's how we got into our first house.
- [07:54]
Ashley Kerr
I think the big takeaway there is that you went to a dozen banks, you kept asking and finding out what loan products are available and you ended up finding credit to help with your closing costs and what you had to bring to the table. Today's show is sponsored by Baseline. They say real estate investing is passive, but let's get real. Chasing rents, drowning in receipts and getting buried in spreadsheets feels anything but passive. If you're tired of losing valuable hours on financial busy work, I've found a solution that will transform your business. It's Baseline, a trusted BP Pro partner. Baselane is an all in one platform that can help you automate the day to day. It automates your rent collection and uses AI powered bookkeeping to auto tag transactions for instant cash flow, visibility and reporting. Plus they have tons of other features like recurring payments, multi user access and free wires to save you more time and money. Spend less managing your money and more time growing your portfolio. Ready to automate the busy work and get back to investing. Baselane is giving BiggerPockets listeners an exclusive $100 bonus when you sign up@baselane.com BiggerPockets.
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- [10:36]
Matt
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- [10:37]
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- [10:58]
Ashley Kerr
Okay, we're back with Matt on real Estate Rookie. And Matt, you were able to get in that first deal, you moved in, you're fixing the property up. What happened next after you've completed the renovation?
- [11:11]
Matt
So when we bought our first house, you know, our desire was to eventually have rental properties. We just didn't really know how we were going to, to do that because you know, the 20% down was something that we just didn't feel like was, you know, achievable to actually save up to, to buy a property. And I mean we're living in Iowa and we're, we're looking to buy in Iowa so real estate is, is more affordable anyway. But, but we, we ended up, honestly I was, I was listening to a podcast or something on social media on the way to work and I hear this guy talking about this idea of house hacking where instead of doing it the way that everybody thinks of where you buy a multi unit property and move into one unit, rent out the others that you're buying a single family home and then fixing it up, moving out and renting it out and doing that, you know, once a year. So, so that's what we decided to do after a year of living in that first house and renovating it ourselves, learning how to fix it up using YouTube and then my father in law and my dad, you know, showing us some, some tricks on, on stuff. I mean we, we put, we learned how to do flooring in that house. LVP wasn't a thing so it was just, you know, like a laminate floor. But we, we tiled the kitchen backsplash, we used a countertop paint kit actually, because we were so broke we couldn't afford counters. So we painted the counter. But it was nice enough to rent out. Our mortgage payment escrowed was $610 a month. After principal, interest, taxes and insurance, we moved out of that house and we bought another house with 3% down on a conventional loan. It was $130,000 home. Moved into that fixer upper and rented out the first house for $1,200 a month. So that was our first real estate.
- [12:49]
Ashley Kerr
1200. And what was your mortgage payment?
- [12:50]
Matt
Yeah, 610. Yeah. So we're cash flowing, you know, $590 a month. That was, that was life changing money for us then for sure. So.
- [12:59]
Ashley Kerr
And most likely the tenant is paying the utilities, taking care of the lawn. Like you really don't have any of your expenses besides that mortgage with the escrow.
- [13:10]
Matt
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we did that a total of five times in five years. So we would buy a fixer upper. Yeah. And this is not for the faint of heart. So you, you've got to really want it to do this, especially as you accumulate stuff and accumulate children throughout those years as well. We're moving, we're having a baby. We're moving, having a baby, you know, and then after, after five years of doing it, we, we landed in the house we're in now, Matt.
- [13:38]
Tony J. Robinson
So first I just want to give you like major kudos because like you said, you got to really want it to pick up and move your life every 12 months with, with a young, growing family. But I, I want to just like go back to like the strategy a little bit here. So just to recap for the, for the rookies are listening, basically your strategy was we're going to move into a fixer upper. We're going to live there for 12 months, get this property rent ready and then we're going to turn it into a rental, move out into our next primary and just repeat that process. But what kind of financing were you using on each subsequent purchase and how are you coming up with those funds which is just like, hey, we're, we're saving up while we're living. Or like how are you funding all of these subsequent purchases every 12 months?
- [14:21]
Matt
Yeah. So first to kind of answer your last part of that question, how are we affording the down payment, closing costs on each one? Number one, like to save money, we decided we were not going to live on any of the cash flow from our properties. So every cash flow or every property that we purchased, you know, that that almost $600 a month. We were just putting that into a separate account only using that for, you know, necessities. Like we've got, you know, appliance, we got to, you know, change out or, you know, the. Just the normal maintenance stuff that, you know, would come up with rentals. But otherwise we were not living on that money. So that's how we were able to save for down payments. As far as the type of financing that we were doing, we actually just use conventional for all of those. I have nine conventional loans right now. And we were able to do that by just putting 3% down as a primary residence because we moved into each one. So, you know, 3% down on 130,000. I want to say house number two and three were 130 and then we had 180. So I mean, like, we're not buying houses that are very expensive. So, you know, we're coming into closing. We also did like another hack. We did like a gift of equity on one where we knew the seller. And we did gift of equity to get out of some of the, like mortgage insurance and stuff on them too. But we found like different hacks and stuff to, to essentially help lower these payments for us and, you know, lower our upfront costs, you know, doing the, you know, offering more and having them, the seller pay some of the closing costs. So we didn't have to come up with as much money up front. But 3% down conventional loans is how we did it. Yeah.
- [16:01]
Ashley Kerr
Matt, can you describe your buy box on these properties? Because obviously this is. You're. You're a different shopper than somebody who's going to buy their primary residence. And you're a different shopper than somebody who's going to buy just strictly a rental. You're. You need the mix of both. So what does that kind of look like for you?
- [16:20]
Matt
Yeah, so I mean, I was working full time and we were not looking to buy houses that needed major construction. You know, walls taken down and. Well, we did add a bathroom in one of them, but that wasn't the plan at the time. But mostly it was just were in like mid-70s to mid-80s neighborhoods, kind of those B plus neighborhoods where other houses in that area are selling for 180 to 2. And we're buying around 1130 because they are, I would say, cosmetically distressed. Old carpet, old paint, you know, maybe like older oak cabinets that could just use some. Some love but not needing, you know, full gut jobs type of stuff. So we were looking for really like those Three to four bedroom, one and a half to two bathroom homes that, that we could live in comfortably enough, you know, maybe, maybe be a little, a little in construction to begin with, but then, you know, live there as we fixed them up. That's what we were looking for.
- [17:22]
Tony J. Robinson
And Matt, how are you sourcing all these deals? Are they all on market, listed on the mls or had you kind of maybe built up a pipeline of off market deal flow as well?
- [17:29]
Matt
Yeah, so the two most important things for us were, number one, a good local realtor, like having somebody who knew what we were after and, and really helped us find these deals. Secondly, just being persistent with Zillow. I hate to say that, but like just, I mean, you guys know how it is. I'm sure you've both been there just like consistently opening up Zillow, Facebook Marketplace wasn't really a thing. So maybe Craigslist and stuff, but looking on Craigslist, looking on Zillow multiple times a day, every day.
- [17:59]
Ashley Kerr
Now, how did you line up the closings, the rentals? Like, okay, you got a property under contract, your year is almost up. What's like the coordination look like of like, okay, we need to get this house rented and we need to move out to another, another house. Did you have the lenders when you were getting your next house alone, say, we want the lease for your current house before we'll actually even approve the loan and kind of go over just the logistics of that and what it.
- [18:31]
Matt
Looks like with my income being lower, that was definitely an obstacle, was the, your dti. There we go. So debt to income was not qualifying us for these. So we worked with a lender who was willing to basically get like a lease from somebody. So basically what we had to do on some of these, honestly, they were super stressful. Some of them we were okay with where they were like, okay, underwriting will approve you knowing that somebody's going to be moving into this. But some of them were like, hey, underwriting is going to want to have a signed lease from somebody moving in. So we're basically closing on this property. We're approved for the loan, but we have to have a signed lease showing that somebody's going to be moving in here prior to the actual closing date. So we could wait up until, you know, a week or two before closing, before that point. But you know, we're, we're putting some of these houses up for rent. Just saying, hey, like, you know, this is when it's available. And just, you know, maybe not going into severe detail, but like you know, here's a. There's a. There's an addendum on here. If we, if we can't close on this house, then we'll have to postpone this. This rental out. So it made it a little more challenging a couple times, but it all worked out in the end.
- [19:41]
Tony J. Robinson
Matt, you talked about that being a loan requirement that they wanted to see a signed lease. And I think loan requirements are something that rookies need to pay more attention to because they can and will dictate how you execute different plans for different properties. And one thing we didn't touch on, but I'm hoping you can give us some clarity on here, Matt. But why were you kind of focused on only staying at each property for one year? What was driving that timeline of 12 months?
- [20:08]
Matt
Prison, mostly. Mortgage fraud. Mortgage fraud? Yeah. Not committing mortgage fraud would be why. So, yeah, I mean, we. We would have loved to move faster, but I mean, honestly, like, it was all. It was all in good timing. I mean, it was one of those things like we're. We're moving into the house, we don't have a ton of money anyway, so it's okay. We're gonna. We're gonna redo this carpet once we have some money to do that, and then we're gonna re. Redo this when we have money for that. So by the time we got to that year, we were basically finishing up the house anyway. So then it's like, okay, now, now it's time to. Now it's time to move out and rent it out. And it ended up being a year. There was one property, and it was our own fault. We had thought we had been a year, and we were not. So underwriting caught that we were at 11 months, and the. The loan fell through. So we ended up not being able to close on a property because of that. But typically your. Your lender will know and be asking those questions too, or they should be, but. But we knew as well. So, yeah, got to be a year, unless there's extenuating circumstances that you need to move otherwise for. So. But we were just bouncing around the same neighborhood, so.
- [21:15]
Tony J. Robinson
And just to clarify what Matt is saying about, like, mortgage fraud, but like, when you. When you buy a property and use a loan that's designated for primary residence purposes, you have to say there for most loan products for at least 12 months to satisfy the requirements of that loan and do it anytime. Less than that is where you can kind of find yourself in hot water. So thank you for, for, for clarifying that, Matt. So you guys just go, like, you know, pedal to the metal a million miles an hour, knocking out these properties every year for five years. And then you land in the property that you're at now, which it seems you guys are kind of settled into. Does your portfolio stop growing at that point, or what's the next move to keep scaling the portfolio up, to be honest.
- [21:54]
Matt
Like, we had planned 10 times. Like, our goal was 10 times in 10 years, max out the conventional loans that we can have and then, you know, settle. But we ended up getting a really good deal on this acreage that we're on now. It was the ideal location. The house was needing a lot of work. We've. We've poured years of time into this house to make it where it is now. We actually just finished a bathroom renovation this last week upstairs. But we. We wanted this house, so we decided, you know, it's. It's time and we're gonna. We're gonna stay. So we also were at a point where we had, you know, cash flow from properties that was sufficient enough to start putting 20% down. So we. We use savings for that. We also found other ways. Like as we renovated our primary residence here, we, like, I bought this house for $180,000, and we have put, like, 60 grand into it over the last five years, six years since we've been here, and it's worth about a half a million now. So we pulled out a heloc, a home equity line of credit, and we've used that HELOC to help fund other deals for down payments, renovations, closing costs, and stuff, too. So. And then we'll just pay back off the HELOC after we, you know, start getting profit from that property and then recycle and reuse. So, yeah, finding other ways and then using money, you know, from our other deals to fund them.
- [23:17]
Ashley Kerr
Matt, Tony, and I just finished recording an episode where we talked about, like, reasons you should invest in real estate. And one of those was just the equity that is built up in the property over time. So, for example, like, you bought your first property 10 years ago. What has that impact on your wealth building been like to see these properties that you bought for X amount, the tenants to pay down all of these mortgages, and today you just have all of this equity available. And have you, you know, you talked about the HELOC that you just put on your primary residence, but have you gone back and refinanced and tapped into any of that equity or taken a HELOC there, or have you just let this Equity like sit and grow to build your wealth.
- [24:04]
Matt
Our goal has been to, to kind of keep it 50, 50 or less as far as you know, at least 50% equity to, to debt. So you know, I don't want to have more debt than equity. So we did, we did do a cash out refi on one of our properties using a DSCR loan and I mean new investors. It's basically like a loan for investors using potential profits from a property to approve you other than your income for those of us without real jobs. But did, did a, did a cash out refi had bought this property for 160, turned it into a short term rental and a year later did a cash out refi for, for 300 on it and then honestly just use that to pay back off the heloc. Because my interest rate on that was about nine and a half percent at the time. So trying to get some of those high interest loans paid off, you know, especially heloc. I'd rather have it looped up into a conventional loan than then be borrowing on that. But otherwise no, I mean we've just really tried to put our sweat equity into it. You know, build it through sweat equity through appreciation and, and that's how we built our, our wealth through it and have more equity than, than debt now for sure.
- [25:24]
Ashley Kerr
Matt, what does the strategy breakup look like as far as how many long term or short term rentals that you have?
- [25:31]
Matt
We started with long term because that's what we knew from what our you know, my in laws did and short term just was not like you know, the Airbnb boom hadn't happened yet so I wasn't too knowledgeable about was actually through listening to other like social media called influencers. I think I bring up his name probably on every interview, but Michael Elefonte, he's, he's my like my, my the guy that, that really influenced me. If you guys have met or know who he is, a lot of people in the space do but he, he had been working at Domino's and then working or Dunkin Donuts. I think his wife was at Domino's and they, they liquidated their 401k. They got in short term rentals. They were living in a like a conversion van traveling around the country going to, to different national parks. I'm like man, like he was able to do that with just a few properties and here I am with you know, five, six properties and not even halfway there. Like what, what do like maybe we should just try this out. So we got into the short term rental space locally. Because, you know, my thought wasn't people want a vacation to Des Moines, Iowa, but I like to be hands on. I want to renovate this property myself. So let's buy a house downtown Des Moines, near shops, restaurants, event venue stuff. We did some market research with Air DNA and found that there were. It was like, like 70% of properties could only sleep up to six people or seven people in Des Moines. So we bought a house that could sleep 10 and we got into it and short term rentals just dramatically changed the game for us with cash flow. I mean, we bought this house for 160k and we did like the thrift store stuff. And our thought was let's experience this, let's see how it goes and then invest in a vacation market. But it ended up doing so much better than we thought. We did like 70 grand on that house. The first year. We were cash flowing $2,500 a month. So we bought another house in des moines for 165 and that house did 92k last year. We've got another one that we just bought this last year for 225. That'll do over 100 grand this year. I call it a, an accommodation location, not a vacation destination. But that's kind of what our niche has been. But we're definitely more str focused right now. And that's what got us into it, was just listening to other people talk about it. I mean, you guys both know it's not passive like long term rentals are, but the cash flow is four to six times greater. So that's ultimately what helped me leave my job a lot faster too. So that's kind of how we decided to transition into them, was just listening to other people talk about how great they were.
- [28:21]
Tony J. Robinson
Well, Matt, we definitely want to get into that transition of leaving your day job and going full time into your real estate business. But we'll do that right after a final word from today's show. Sponsors.
- [28:36]
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- [30:55]
Matt
I get it.
- [30:56]
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- [31:24]
Tony J. Robinson
Right, we're back here With Matt. So Matt, you talked about the transition to short term and man, the numbers you were throwing out, doing 100 plus K on a $200,000 property, like those are some fantastic numbers. Absolutely. But let's talk about the actual transition because you said you were working again, to use your words, a quote unquote dead end job. At what point did you realize I think I can actually make the leap?
- [31:49]
Matt
Yeah. So I mean over the years, like I stayed in cellular retail sales, so I worked with Sprint. I worked my way up to like a district manager role, but it was with a third party company so I think I was making like 50k. I ended up getting a training job with a third party for Apple where I'd go around and train people on iPhones. And then my last job, I was actually a, an account manager with Google and I really enjoyed that. It was again like a, like a third party company. You know, a lot of employees or people that work with Google are, are not working directly for them. And that was me. So my salary, I was like mid-60s. We were happy though. And you know, the cost of living out here is, is very affordable. So it was, it was easy, you know, to live on. But, but like our, our goal throughout this time had always been like not necessarily a house number, a number of properties. It was have our cash flow consistently surpassing the salary that we brought in from my job. And you know, my salary went up over the years and it just, I don't know, it kind of grayed a little bit for us. And Tony, you're going to get a really big head for this because I'm going to give you props. But I say this in all of my other interviews. The, the breaking point for me for why we finally decided to, to make the leap was actually going to your short term rental summit in Newport Beach, California. We had. Yeah, yeah. So I had been watching these real estate Robinson people and I'm like, man, these guys are cool. Like I need to figure out how to do what they're doing and I'm going to go to their conference. So I took my wife and my in laws actually went out to Newport and attended your SDR summit. And we had one short term rental at that time and we had just gone under contract with our second short term rental. And at that time our cash flow from our properties was greater than my salary, just barely, but it was enough to live on. And it was just, I mean honestly through listening to some of the different speakers there, but then talking and networking with people, I wish I could give him credit, and I wish I knew his name, but I talked to this one guy who he had made the leap and was doing real estate full time. And, and I'm talking with him and he's like, so what's, what's preventing you from leaving? And I'm like, well, I just, you know, thinking about maybe just, just getting, you know, a couple more properties and then, you know, really feeling safer. And he's like, dude, like, the amount of freedom that you have from just leaving, you know, and how much more effort you'll put into your business and how much greater your business is going to do by not giving 50% of your effort to your, your job and then 50% to real estate. He's like, you are just gonna, like, you'll. This trigger in your brain will be like, okay, this is my only source of income. This is what needs to do well and your business is going to do better. And then he says to me, you know, what would happen, you know, if you, if you don't succeed, then you'll end up right back to where you are now. And I'm like, dang, like, that's. So I needed proof of income to close on this property. It was a conventional loan. So I actually, I waited until we were in the closing office right after we closed on our second short term rental. I was in the parking lot and that's when I called my boss and put in my two weeks notice. So, yeah, so thank you. Thank you, Tony, for putting that together. So that can happen.
- [35:15]
Ashley Kerr
Yeah, yeah, I know. I just love it too. That. That was from Tony's conference too.
- [35:20]
Tony J. Robinson
Yeah. And you know, Matt, I, I appreciate the kind words, but I, I think the, the power of events like that is it's not always what's being shared on stage, but it is those moments in between sessions where you're networking and you're talking to people and you're hearing their stories and they can ask you that one insightful question that changes everything for you. And we've heard that story time and time again from, you know, events that we host bpcon about. Man, I just met someone, we had this conversation, and my entire perspective shifted in a way that I could have never imagined. So for all the rookies that are listening, like, take Matt's story and get out and go to an event. BPCON is coming up and obviously, you know, Ash and I are a little bit biased, but we think it's one of the best real estate events that's happening. But aside from all the Amazing speakers. It's moments like what Matt just talked about of being able to, not just listening to a podcast and hearing someone's story, but sitting down next to someone, shaking their hands, having a drink and hearing their story face to face. I'm telling you, it motivates you in a way that's so hard to even articulate clearly. So, Matt, dude, that's got to be one of the coldest, like, I'm quitting my job stories that I've heard is like, I signed the deal for this, signed the doctor this deal, then I called and quit my job, man. So I love hearing that. And last thing I'll say, I think you hit exactly what I wanted to say as well. It's like the worst case scenario is that it doesn't work for you and you just go back to a job that you already had or some similar job. And I think that when we can frame the decision to go full time or stay at our job with that perspective, it makes it a whole heck of a lot less scary because you're like, I'm already living my worst case scenario right now. Right. Working this job, so it can only go up from here, man. So congratulations, brother. What an amazing story.
- [37:12]
Matt
Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate it. Yeah. Once you experience it as a, you know, Tony, I mean, knowing you know your story from, from hearing it a couple times too, it's like once you, once you get over the fear factor and actually experience the freedom of doing your own thing, it, it's not something that you ever want to have to go back to. So those, you know, early morning conference calls, those late night meetings, you know, for deadlines of things like, man, like just experiencing that, you know, I, I, people say, well, you're not financially free, like you still have to work a little bit. It's like, yeah, but I, I work on my time, on my terms, where I want to and with who I want to, and that's what it's all about.
- [37:52]
Ashley Kerr
Matt, I guess the last piece to kind of touch on here is the actual operations of your businesses. Who is handling the day to day? Do you take it on yourself? Your wife? Are you using a property manager? Give us a little insight into the day to day of your real estate investments.
- [38:10]
Matt
As of right now, we're blessed to have everything relatively local to us. All of our properties are within about a half an hour. We did have a short term rental that we owned for about five weeks down on South Potter island that we, we sold for a good profit and ended up just not Doing that because the market shifted. But otherwise we've, we bought, we bought local. I've got a four plex that's two and a half hours away but it's all long term so it's pretty hands off. We self manage, I mean I, I, we've done everything on our own. We've had some opportunities for joint ventures and stuff and you know, some syndication offers as well. But like we just like my goal isn't money, it's my time and we're at a place where we're very blessed financially. Like you know, we never thought we'd be in this financial situation. It's been fantastic but that wasn't our goal. It was to have the ability to wake up and spend my day with my kids and not need to put in 40, 50 hours for somebody else. So we self manage right now and we keep our, our portfolio around the 10 to 11 properties because it's manageable especially with seven of them, eight of them being long term rental and only three short term. The short term take the most time. But I use Hospitable as my property management software which has been great. They help automate a lot. So I mean typically, I don't know, I mean it just, it varies, you get, you guys know, but like two, two to five hours a week, you know, managing the day to day. We have cleaners for all of our properties and then I've got companies or individuals that'll call for H vac or plumbing, you know, electrical stuff. So we'll still do some of the, some of the things ourselves. Like we had a water issue with some drainage, not going, not going away from the house. At one of our short term rentals, carpet got a little bit wet with some flash flooding we had and we were out there, my wife and I with shovels yesterday, digging it away from the house and adding drainage tile and stuff. But, but like we enjoy that stuff though. Like we brought our kids with us and we homeschool so it's like here's just, you know, here's your learning for the day. You can learn how to properly drain a house because the previous owners did not. So you know, it's, it's, it's stuff like that. But, but yeah, I mean we travel a lot. We, we spend our winters down on South Potter island and homeschool down there and, and, and try to take a good vacation every couple months and, and it works out. I mean some weeks are busier than others but we manage them all on our own.
- [40:35]
Ashley Kerr
Yeah, well, Matt thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people reach you and find out more information about your real estate journey?
- [40:43]
Matt
Yeah, social media. I go by the handle rental cash flow or just search up Matt Krueger. Rental cash flow was available when I started social media, so that was just, you know, that's what stuck. But rental cash flow, Matt Krueger on all platforms. So, yeah, that's where you'll find me.
- [41:01]
Ashley Kerr
Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to share your journey with the rookie investors. Thank you so much. I'm Ashley. He's Tony. And we'll see you guys on the next episode of real estate rookie.