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Real estate cash flow is not dead. Here is exactly where it's hiding. So people think real estate investing is broken, like it doesn't work anymore, like cash flow is dead. Well, they're right if you're looking where everybody else is looking. So this video though is about where cash flow actually lives. So my name is Brendan Turner. Hi, I'm the author of the book on rental property investing, Beardy Brandon on social media. And today I wanted to share with you how to find cash flow today in like 20, 26. And I want to share the four places that I see it today. So there's an old joke about a man like stumbling around under a streetlight. It's like two in the morning and his neighbor walks out, here's the commotion, says, hey, what are you doing? And the guy says, I'm looking for my wedding ring. And the neighbor, you know, he's a nice guy, he gets down, he helps him search. 10 minutes go by, nothing. Finally the neighbor asks, look man, are you sure you dropped the ring around here? And the man shakes his head and said, no, I dropped it way up there. But it's too dark up there, the light's better here. Now that's exactly what's happening in real estate investing right now. You see, like millions of investors are searching for cash flow in the same lit up corner that they've always searched the mls. Traditional long term rentals, single family houses with one tenant, one lease, and they're coming up empty, or worse, they think they found something. They run the numbers like on the back of a napkin or on in the back of their head and they call it a deal. And then these lose money for years without understanding why. Now I know that because I've done that before. I've bought rental properties convinced I was going to make a bunch of money, hundreds of dollars a month. And then for year, year after year, I just lose money. I mean, things like the H Vac go out, the water heater goes out, vacancy swallows all the profit. I wasn't just looking in the wrong city. I wasn't making dumb decisions necessarily. I was just standing under the wrong streetlight. So cash flow is not dead. You're just looking for it in the wrong place. Now it doesn't work like it used to. I mean, to be fair, the old spot used to have way better lighting. Like for most of the last two decades, the math on traditional long term rentals actually did work in a lot of markets. Like interest rates were so historically low, like shockingly low. Like I have A loan for like 2 1/2% on a 30 year mortgage. Like you get that during the pandemic at those rates. The monthly payment on a $250,000 house, well that was manageable relative what the market would pay in rent. Now when you'd run the numbers, which is something I'm sure I'll talk a little bit more about later, the numbers actually made sense if you knew what you were doing. Now investors who bought in that era, they built a lot of wealth with a strategy that was, you know, frankly, pretty forgiving. But then rates went up fast and they stayed up 6 or 7%. The monthly mortgage payment on that same $250,000 property jumped by hundreds of dollars a month. But rents did not jump proportionally because honestly markets don't move that fast. And home prices, they actually stayed elevated. So now we have higher prices and higher rates together, making the math on traditional buy and hold genuinely just hard in most markets, if not impossible. So here's where it gets important. This is not the first time that the market's ever shifted underneath investors feet. I mean, every generation of real est investors has faced a version of this moment. Like something that used to work, stopped working. Everyone's still teaching it because they made all the money 10 years ago. And everyone who relied exclusively on that one approach starts suffering. And then they declare the game's over, there is no cash flow. But they're always wrong because what's actually happening isn't that real estate died, it didn't stop producing cash flow. The light moved. And investors who pay attention to that and they're moving quickly and they're adapting, they're doing just fine. In fact, better than fine. They're making a lot of cash flow, myself included. So where did that light go? I'm gonna about four places. I'm going to go deep into all of them. They all start with the letter F. You ready? Place number one. They went to the fringe. So the fringe, it's kind of the phrase I use for like tactics on the outside of normal traditional. Now this is the one that most like most real estate investors are like closest to, but they're still like missing somehow. So traditional real estate asks one question, like how much will one family pay to live here on a 12 month lease? The fringe strategies. And there's a bunch of them, I'll talk about them. They ask completely different question. It's what's the highest and best use of this property to generate income? What if I got a little weird and the answers to Those questions are honestly wildly different. Let me give you a few examples. First, midterm rentals. So a furnished property that is rented for, you know, stays between 30 days and six months. Your tenants are traveling nurses or doctors on temporary rotation or remote workers relocating between cities, or they're contractors on long job sites. The key here is furnished. You're providing a fully equipped move in ready space for professionals who need somewhere to live for a few months and they don't want to deal with a year long lease or night Airbnb rates. Now, in most markets, this commands, you know, sometimes up to double the rent of the same property that's unfurnished on a long term lease. So let's say a house that traditionally rents for $1,500 a month might get 25 to 30 $500 as a furnished midterm unit. Same property, same neighborhood, same square footage. The strategy changed and the income almost doubled. Sometimes more than that. Here's another one, Co Living. So instead of renting to one household for one rent check, you rent by the bedroom. Every tenant has their own, you know, private bed, their own lease. They maybe share some common areas like bathrooms and kitchens. And your total income across all the rooms is dramatically higher than any single family lease, Often two, three or five times higher than what you'd get traditionally on the exact same property. The reason this works is the uncomfortable but real truth. America is in a severe affordability crisis. A huge percentage of population simply cannot afford to rent a whole house or an apartment on their own. They're already living with roommates or with mom. Like, co living doesn't create new behavior. It just professional is one that's already happening. So I actually own several Co Living properties right now. In fact, one of them outside of Atlanta has 10 bedrooms in it. They average around 800 bucks a month each. That's $8,000 in total income. That house would traditionally rent for like two grand a month if I did it traditionally, after all expenses, utilities, Internet, the higher management costs, that Property clears over $1,000 a month in real pure cash flow. Now, I only got like $20,000 of my own money still in that deal and it prints that much. Like, now that math looks nothing like traditional rentals because it's not a traditional rental. Let me give you another one. You've heard of this one before? House hacking. You buy a small duplex or triplex or fourplex. You live in one unit, you rent out the rest. That still works today. The tenants cover your mortgage, sometimes all of it, sometimes more than all of it. And because you're living there, you qualify for that. Great FHA or VA financing, like 3 to 5% down, sometimes as low as 20%. It's a huge difference. And it really, really still works today. I mean, house hacking is how I recommend most beginners get their first deal done. I did it, I do it. Heck, I rent out a unit here in Hawaii. You get to learn how to be a landlord at small scale with you right there to manage it. You get to build equity, you get to use the experience and the proceeds to fund the next deal. It's really like an on ramp to like a great portfolio. Another option that still works though a little bit differently, short term rentals. It's like the highest income ceiling of anything on this list. You know, in the right market though, with the right property, Airbnb can generate two, three, sometimes 10 times a traditional rent. The trade off though is this is not passive. It's closer to running like a hospitality business. You got cleaning crews, you got guest communications, dynamic price and reviews. But for the right investor with the right systems in the right market, it's worth it. But go in with your eyes open about what it requires. And before you just buy specifically for short term rentals, be sure to research your local regulations because cities have been aggressive about restricting or banning them. So choose a strategy that's legal today and that is likely gonna stay legal. Now listen, on the short term rental thing, you've probably heard the news, like a lot of them are suffering right now. So make sure you also buy in an area where you can actually make money at it. The problem is with a lot of fringes like strategies is it gets popular and then everyone gets into it and not so like profitable anymore. So buy in the right area, especially areas that have a lot of restrictions. Do it legally. But in those areas. All right, now that was like what, four different fringe strategies. There's like more than like 20 that I've identified that work today. Things like section 8, 80 use, student rentals, mobile home parks, self storage, assisted living, and if you want to see what those are and take, you know, find out what's best for you. I built a two minute quiz at cashflow isn't dead.com asks you a few questions about your market, your goals, your situation, and it tells you which of these 20 might be the best starting point for you. So again, cashflowisn dead. Com link is also in the description. Now where else is cash flow found today? We talked about it's in the fringe number Two, it's in the flipping. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Flipping isn't cash flow, it's a paycheck. Now you're right, that is different from monthly passive income. But here's why it belongs in this conversation. Flipping is where a lot of investors find the capital that funds everything else. I call it the flip to fund model. So like the traditional rental investor, they're struggling to make the numbers work on a buy and hold. Right now they're not really facing a real estate problem. They might be facing a capital problem. They just don't have enough money to buy the kind of deal that they want that's actually going to make sense. And flipping, when done right, solves that. So you find a distressed property, you add value to renovation, and you sell it at the improved value and then you walk away with a check. That check, maybe it's 30, 40, $50,000 becomes down payment on a rental property because you're putting more down. It can actually cash flow more. Also, you can combine the flipping into one of the fringe strategies. Maybe you buy a house, you flip it, you make the money, and then you dump the money into a co living or a mobile home park. Now you use that flipping to fund your cash flow. The other thing about flipping is flipping is cash flow. If you do it right, it's not perfectly passive, but it's a business that can generate money every single month if you buy and sell enough properties. Now, it's hard work. And yes, you know Cam Cathcart, who's my co host on my podcast now the Better Life podcast, like he flips houses between 60 and 100 a year. It's a lot of work for them, but they make a lot of money. And you can start to hire people and take care of a lot of the issues along the way with flipping. So it can be not entirely passive, but heck, what real estate is entirely passive. It's pretty rare. So anyway, I think that the idea of flipping houses can be a really good way to build cash flow coming in. You can systematize this, you're not working so much and then you can use the profits to dump it in to rentals that actually cash flow. All right, we gotta move on. Number three, this one might come out of left field a little bit, but the third F on where you find cash flow today is in the fees. So this one almost nobody talks about, but it might be one of the most overlooked sources of cash flow. If we're talking cash flow, again, not passive income per se. But money coming in profit every month. This might be one of the best ways to do it today. So think about every transaction in real estate. Every single time a property changes hands, money flows to an enormous number of people who are not the buyer or the seller. So for example, the real estate agent earns a commission, they get a fee. The mortgage broker earns a fee, the title company gets paid a fee, the insurance agent earns a premium, a fee. The inspector charges for the report, a fee. The contractor gets a renovation budget and they earn their fee. The property manager earns their monthly percentage, the fee the attorney that closes the deal. All of these are businesses, but they're in the real estate space and they're cash flowing businesses. So it's tangential to real estate, but not dependent on owning it. And here's what makes this so interesting. Real estate investors are uniquely positioned to build or buy these businesses because they already understand the industry. Like, did you know I have a mortgage company, we're called Better Life Ref. Better Life Ref. Real estate funding. Now why did I start Better Life Rep? Why do I want a loan company? Because it makes a ton of money and I can help serve people. This is not a commercial. Please don't say this as a commercial. But we have great rates. We are serving people who need the product that I have. We have great rates and great service and I make a bunch of money from it. So why not start something like that? There's a tendency to want to do too many things and chase too many rabbits. I'm not suggesting you do that. But if you're struggling finding rental properties, maybe building a tangential business instead so you can make more income, so then you can dump that extra income into more rentals like the fringe strategies. Maybe that's what you need to do. Look, I've been, I've watched investors build serious wealth by getting their real estate licen or by building a team that serves investors that way. I've watched investors start hard money lending operations and make a ton of money. I've seen people just become private lenders, investing at 10, 12, 14% interest and getting that, giving it to flippers. They generate more cash flow from the lending business than they ever made from owning properties directly. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, I've watched investors partner with insurance brokers, start property management companies, become contractors, and then they can serve their own portfolio and their network's portfolio simultaneously. It's so overlooked. So the real estate industry processes trillions of dollars of transactions every single year. So cash flow doesn't only flow to the people who own the buildings. It flows to everybody in the ecosystem. Now, if owning properties is hard right now, and it is, if the numbers on a traditional rental don't pencil out the way you want, you don't want to do one of the fringe strategies, the question worth asking is, where else in this ecosystem that you're already invested in, is there money to be made? Because the answer is almost always a whole lot of places. All right, let's go to place number four. That cash flows found the funnel. Now, this one's a little different from the other three. It's not a strategy, it's a mindset about how deals actually get found. It's the thing that separates investors who close a lot of deals and great deals consistently from those who are still looking for their first deal three, four, five years in. Here's the truth about deal flow that nobody tells you up front. The deals that actually cash flow. Well, right now, like the co living properties, the midterm rentals, the house hacks, the multifamily, the flip opportunities, they don't just show up on the MLS at full price, just waiting to be purchased. They're like, here, take me down. I want, I want to work with you. No, you manufacture them, you engineer them, you find them by running a funnel, not by searching a website. So think about like this. If you look at a hundred properties, like a hundred leads of some kind, and then you analyze 10% of them with real rigor, like go deep, you're going to find one or two that warrant making an offer at a number that actually works. And if you make those offers consistently, you're going to close deals every single month. If you do enough of them and you just run the math, like a hundred leads might generate one or two closings. Cool. You want two to four deals a year, get two to 400 leads. You want 10 deals, then get a thousand leads. It's literally just math. It's not luck, it's a funnel. In fact, I say it's not luck, but I call it the luck funnel is you get leads, you underwrite them, you compete, and then you get the keys on some of them. It's just a funnel. Like the people that I know, like the investors who are finding a lot of deals in this market, they're not smarter than you, they're not luckier, they're just running more volume. They're sending more direct mail letters, or they're making more cold calls. They're using AI in a smart way. They're analyzing more deals, they're making more offers. They understand that every offer that gets rejected is not a failure. It's like a data point. It tells you something about the market, about seller psychology, about where the real floor is on pricing in the neighborhood. So the investors who close a lot of deals right now and great deals, they're just the ones who made 50 bad offers or offers that got rejected before the one that got accepted, it's the one who gave up after five. They're still standing under the streetlight wondering where their ring went. Look, the funnel requires a few things, but one thing in particular you got to get good at. You got to learn how to analyze deals correctly and quickly. Because if every analysis takes you three days and requires a spreadsheet from a PhD in finance, you're never going to run enough volume to find deals that actually work. You need a system. So hey, if you want to learn how to analyze deals a little bit better, I teach an analysis challenge. It's a multi day challenge where I walk people through how to actually analyze a deal. Just go to knowyourmath.com knowyourmath.com and you can do the channel. It's free, it's totally free. So learn how to analyze deals better. Just go to know your math. Okay, so cash flow in real estate is real. It's happening right now. It is still abundant. It's being generated right now by investors in your market. In my market, in markets just like ours all around the world on properties that look really unremarkable from the outside. That cash flow is hiding in furnished rentals and in co living houses and duplexes and house hacks and flipping operations and hard money lending businesses and property management companies and dozens of other places that nobody really puts on like the beginner investor's map. But now you know where to look. So go find it and find your fringe strategy@cashflowisintdead.com and take the challenge@knowyourmath.com My name is Brandon Turner. Beardy Brandon on social media signing off.