Ernest Robles (6:10)

Hey, David, real big fan of the show. Been watching for a long time since Bigger Pockets. Love the content. My question is I want to get started in real estate investing and I don't know how to go about it. I think my best strategy right now would be to get a HELOC on my house. I currently have a mortgage on that house, but I think think it will go up in value. Just for short story, this guy right here, he, you know, he's okay, my other dog's okay, but he got. He turned on the stove somehow while we were gone. We were able to rescue both of them, but, you know, not the house, most of it's intact, but basically new kitchen, new bathroom, new laundry room, new ceilings, but floors are getting redone so it's basically a full rehab. So I should have more equity in there. Should bring up my value. What do you recommend I do to get started? And I don't know if I would love to, you know, basically rent that one out. But I know my wife might not be into that idea because we've been out of the house already. It's going to be probably seven months once the house is done. I don't know if I want to put, put her through that. Thank you.

David Green (7:21)

Ah, the age old question. Actually two age old questions in the same video. One is, my spouse is not on board with what I'm doing. How do I get into this if they're not involved? And the other one is how do I get started? I don't have any cash. Should I take a heloc? These are really good questions. I think a lot of people are asking them and I'm about to be the party pooper. I am not a fan of taking out HELOCs on existing properties to buy new ones in today's market nearly as much as I was in the past. And that doesn't mean that my philosophy shifted. It means the market has shifted. It made sense to do it because risk was significantly reduced in the past. We can all see that housing prices were going up like hotcakes. Why do we say going up like hot cakes? Was there a time when hotcakes experienced a lot of inflation? Is it the idea that if you put it out when it's still hot, people buy it right away? I bet that's what it is. Let me know in the comments of this if you know why we say that. I'm pretty sure it's going to be people buy the hotcakes first. And so prices on houses were going up because people were buying them really quick. Rents were going up because everybody had work, everybody was making money. They wanted their own place and they couldn't afford one so they rented. And that significantly decreased the risk for real estate investing. At the same time, you could take advantage of things like bonus depreciation and interest rates were crazy low and and software was being introduced that made property management easier than ever. It was the golden era of real estate investing. And we all know that the only thing better than gold is green. In that era, I was telling people, hey, you're better off to take off a HELOC to get in the game. I don't know, I don't know that I love that advice anymore. It is not a golden era. It is not a green era. It is a. Can you even call it bronze right now? Maybe like iron or steel, Something not super shiny. It's possible, but it's not easy. And you can get hurt. A lot of people have been hurt. I think we're going to be seeing a lot of foreclosures coming compared to what we historically have seen in the last decade. So don't feel like you need to be in a rush to get into this game. I do think, my friend, that you should be in a rush, Ernest, to save your money. You should be in a rush to get on a budget. You should be on a rush to look at what you can cut from where you're spending and what you can do to earn more money. If you love real estate, now's the time to get a license, to get into construction, to do loans, to sell houses, to do something in the industry you like in addition to your. I think this is the time people need to be doubling down on work. Especially because I'm not sure if we're going to have some of this opportunity with the AI developments that are coming in the future. I write about that in my book Pillars and I think that more people need to read that book and embrace that philosophy. And because this is not the time when it makes sense to rush into real estate like everyone else is, I want you to be in a position to capitalize on a really good deal that comes your way if one does, which means you're going to need to have the capital. So if I was you and I'm willing to play the potty poopa over here, I would advise you to consider a selling your house and moving the money into a bigger one that's uglier in a better neighborhood and doing a live in flip once it's nice, sell it, take your equity, reinvest it into another deal that you and the wife can move into and do that or make it a rental and then go buy or, sorry, go rent some things that would make sense for you guys to live in and save money. If you can't do that, make it a rental. Use a low down payment loan 3 to 5%. We do these at the one brokerage all the time. And get yourself a live in flip that way. Because if you only got to put 3% down, 4% down, 5% down, you probably can find a way to save up the money or take a very small HELOC on the property and use that to get a new primary. But I don't think you're going to want to jump in and buy a rental property putting 20% down. And that 20% came from a HELOC. So you have debt that you got to pay on the heloc, then you got debt you got to pay on the other 80%. That is a ton of debt to take on at a time when expenses keep going up and rents are not keeping up. If you find the great deal, the deal of century, hey, go forward with it. I'm not telling you not to. I wouldn't expect to find that right now. Those are kind of home run swings. When you pull equity out of one house and buy another one with the equity, that's got to be the perfect pitch. I don't think that's what we're looking at. You're better off to not try to hit a home run, try to get a walk, try to get a single, try to try to get on base and then have as many people on base as you can. When inflation comes back, we make money, then you'll be in a position to really scale that portfolio. And on that topic, if you guys are interested in learning how to scale a portfolio safely and how to invest in real estate when it's not a great market, I highly recommend you check out my new book, better than cash flow, the 10 ways you make money in real estate. It will teach you 10 different ways that real estate builds wealth for the people that own it and how to capitalize on several of those smaller ways into one deal that can take what looks like a mediocre deal from one category and make it a really good deal because you've added all these ways together. Available on Amazon now. All right, our next question comes from Yaneris Peralta from the Dominican Republic, but working her real estate business in New Jersey and Florida. First question, listeners. Do you say Florida or Florida? I'm trying to figure this out. I think that East Coasters say Florida and everyone else that's normal says Florida. Let me know in the comments how you pronounce it. Yannera submitted a video of a vacant property that she's got that she's trying to sell and she's asking me for advice on it. Her question is. Hi David, what exit strategy do you recommend to follow in a fix and flip house that I did in St. Petersburg, Florida? Florida. It's been sitting on the market for over four months. This area requires a minimum of 30 days to rent it out so she's telling us that this is not a short term rental. She has to do 30 days or more. And this is something, if you guys haven't heard before, is a bit of a man. What's the words that you would use here? I don't want to say like it's a serious deal in real estate. How bad Florida is getting massacred. We used to have this information like flowed very freely. Investors all kind of knew, man, everybody's buying in Birmingham, Alabama, everybody's buying in Madison, Wisconsin and stay out of this area because everything's going rough. It. I don't know why. It just doesn't seem like the information gets passed around anymore. Florida was red hot after Covid. A lot of people left big cities on the east coast, New York, New Jersey, Boston, and they went down into Florida where the weather was better. It used to be a retirement community because it was so cheap. It doesn't really feel like that anymore. Now it's almost like a luxury community. Prices went really high, demand went up, business flowed there. Florida was crushing it. They had all this new business coming in, they had all this new sales tax coming in, they had all this property tax they were collecting. Their state was run very well and it kind of became the idol of the conservative party for saying, hey, this is the way you should run a state. Well, natural disasters hit and inflation hit at the same time. And what that meant was the, the hurricanes that came through caused damage and then the cost of that damage was extra expensive because inflation made materials higher at the same time that there were less blue collar workers. That's more of an economic thing that people don't want to do those jobs. So you had to pay more to get the work done. Insurance companies got railroaded. It was more nasty for those folks. Now nobody feels bad for insurance companies. They're like lawyers. You're not going to get empathy if you want to get into one of those fields. We all hate them. Here's the problem with that. A lot of people made claims. Some of them were legit, some of them weren't. It's kind of a well known secret. Let's say in Florida that if you have like one roof tile that gets missing, you can get a whole new roof a lot of the time because of laws that were put in place to protect consumers being exploited. So roofing companies were freaking sprouting up everywhere, putting on all these new roofs and repairing all this damage. And they were charging a lot. So they were making good money. That's good for the State of Florida. It's going to be more jobs that are provided. The problem is those materials were so expensive and the jobs are so expensive that it hammered the insurance companies who then raised their insurance rates. People like me, who bought into Florida when it was a healthy market and Ynar is here, are now facing an upside down market where nobody wants to buy. There's. You can't sell your properties. It doesn't matter how much equity they might have. No one's buying them. Nobody wants to go in and buy where insurance has doubled or tripled and it could go up even worse. Furthermore, a lot of the Canadians that owned real estate there, we call them the Snowbirds. They leave Canada during the winter and they go hang out in Florida. They're all selling their properties because of concerns that they have with the American economy. So what was once a market that had very little inventory and a ton of buyers has flip flopped. There are now hardly any buyers and a lot of inventory and people are getting smashed. I've been forced to significantly, severely discount the properties that I have over there that I have to sell. At the same time, short term rentals are not doing very well because there's too many people that have them. There's not as many people vacationing to Florida. And a lot of the cities came in and said, we don't want short term rental operators in our state so we're going to shut them down. Now the state allows it, but individual cities don't want it and they play dirty. So you end up with situations like I can't rent it out as a short term rental. It has to be 30 days or more. I can't find a tenant that's going to make it cash flow and it won't sell. What do you do? You got a couple options here. If we're just going to get real. And this may hit your market, so make sure you pay attention to this because this could be coming to your hometown. You sell at a significant loss and you just take it on the chin, which sucks. You hold it at a reduced loss, but still a painful loss of cash flow every single month. And you're not taking haymakers to the chin, but you're taking jabs to the nose over and over and over. And those are your two options. You can put a tenant in there and lose money, or you can sell it and lose a lot of money. The way you make that decision, I guess the third option could be you foreclose, but then you would lose money even more so and you'd have other worse consequences. The way you make this decision is if you think the market's going to turn around, if you believe that the market will eventually stabilize and values will stabilize and maybe start increasing or rents will increase, then I recommend you hold it. You get peppered on the nose. You take the loss every single month and you wait. If you don't think the market's going to turn around, it's just nobody wants to be here. You bought into the wrong market at the wrong time, like maybe Corpus Christi, Texas, and it's not going to be getting better. Blue Ridge, Georgia, and it's not going to be getting better. Then you just sell it. You take a big loss. You learn the lesson that not all of real estate always does well. And you take that into consideration when you're someone like Ernest who submitted a video earlier and said, I'm thinking about taking a HELOC on my primary, so I go buy an investment property, it can go bad. That investment property can go bad and lose money. And then you may also lose your primary because of the extra debt you took. What typically happens in real estate when it goes bad is it all goes bad at once. So the economy goes bad. People stop buying houses. You can't refinance, you can't put a tenant in there because the economy went bad. You lose your job. Now you can't afford to lose money on it every single month and you let it go to foreclosure. Everybody else does the same thing because they're all in the same economy that you are. We now have way too much inventory and not enough buyers, which means sellers are forced to reduce their prices by a ton. A lot of houses get taken back by the bank. They get sold as real estate owned reo on their the bank, banks portfolios, and they sell at discounts. And those are the markets everybody wants to be in. But guess what? It doesn't help you if you can't buy because you had foreclosures or you don't have money to buy. So it's okay sometimes to sit on the sidelines, especially when it looks rough, and just exercise some self control. Save your money, keep saving money and keep preparing for when the market does turn down and you're ready to get in. We'll all keep our fingers crossed for you, miss Peralta. The house looks beautiful. I don't think there's anything you could do to change it at all. You just bought into a market that's really tough. All right, everybody, thank you for listening. Hope you've liked the show so far. If you've got a question, Remember, head to davidgreen24.comAsk and please submit your question there. We need them to make the show. You can also head to realtimerealestate.com text-letter and sign up for my free newsletter that I put out every single month, delivered right to the text app on your phone. All right, next segment of the show is the comment section. The comment section is sponsored by the one Brokerage. That's my mortgage company. We finance all kinds of real estate. We do a great job. We can make this a very easy and seamless experience for you. Whether you are an investor looking to buy someone that wants to buy a house or a Realtor who's listening to this because you want to be better at your craft, we can help all of your clients. Please go to davidgreen24.com Use the chat option to reach out to me directly or reach out on Instagram or Facebook. I'm David Green, 24 and I will get you in touch with the best loan officer for you right away. If you have my email, you can also send me an email. All right, our first comment comes from episode 54 of Real Talk Realtor. This comes from travel with SaaS. I'm not even a realtor and all these seem like common sense. Lol. Realtors should also learn how to take better videos for out of state buyers. Solid criticism there. Most Realtors don't do a great job with their business. That's why we make the show to help them be better. From episode 60 with Kelly Scoville of Real Talk Realtor. Thanks for sharing Kelly. This is my philosophy as well. I freaking love real estate. Thank you David for helping light the fire inside me way back in 2020 when you were on Bigger Pockets. Thanks for always keeping it real and for creating your own podcast to do it with you Rock for from Crystal Reiser. Wow Crystal, thank you. Made my day there. From an episode of Mortgage Monday with Bryce Jameson. As an investor who got their broker license to buy my own properties and kind of as a hobby, I really appreciate this. Learning general best practices and how to find new clients is extremely helpful. This and Mortgage Mondays may be my new can't miss videos. All right. If you guys are not listening to Mortgage Mondays they come out on YouTube as well as this podcast channel. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify you can get them there. I keep the YouTube videos shorter but sometimes we will take the short episode and then add to it and put those on Apple or Spotify to give you guys more details about what goes on in the mortgage industry. And this is a great time for me to remind you I need more loan officers. Other loan companies and mortgage companies are laying people off we are trying to hire. So if you are a licensed loan officer, if you know a licensed person that is halfway decent, we can turn him into a rock star. Send them my way. Please send them this episode or send them Mortgage Monday and say hey, these guys are looking for new people to bring on and help grow. And from seeing green episode 58 with my buddy Raging Al Iacuenta, Jennifer Roof says doing business with a non believer is a great opportunity to live Christ in front of them. You need to do your due diligence and make sure you are morally aligned. A lot of non believers are really good people and can bring good knowledge or skill that you may need. This was in response to one of the questions that Al and I answered on the show about should you do business with a non Christian if you are a Christian yourself? I don't believe Al is and so he got thrown a big curveball as soon as we got into that show. But if you guys want to hear a fun show, make sure you go check out that episode. And from my YouTube lives, I did an episode on the Big Beautiful Bill is headed to Senate and what this will mean for real estate. So if you guys are not following me on YouTube you definitely should be. You can head to YouTube.com David Green, 24 and subscribe to get notified when I go live. I typically try to go live once a day and I do it on what's going on in the news regarding how things will be affecting real estate. I'm getting ready to fly right now to Austin to meet up with Brandon Turner at his real estate event. So I won't be going live while I'm there, but I will when I get back. Michael Goodman says, love your lives Dave. Keep them coming. Stephanie Grable says, what the heck, Clean energy is something the entire planet needs. This is because in the Big Beautiful bill there is reductions in the clean energy programs. I believe it was like windmill and solar. And I think the logic was that those programs don't actually provide clean energy and they're way more expensive than the value that they bring. And Trump wants to move incentives into I covered it on the show. Coal mining, oil drilling and what was there was one more it's eluding me right now, but there was a third one that he's wanting to put money towards investing in because he believes that we'll get a better ROI on the money providing energy in those ways. Easy Money says cost segregation eliminates my federal taxes. I can't wipe the smile off my face. Bonus depreciation is proposed to be extended in the Big Beautiful Bill. Spill says will the no taxes on overtime be immediate or when you file taxes? Kelvin Gavin answered and said when you file your taxes plus you have to make under a hundred thousand a year for up to a $10,000 credit. Sounds like he missed telling that part. Yes, I did miss telling that part because this is the first that I'm hearing of it. It was very hard to get any details of what's in the Big Beautiful bill. My guess is because it is so big, so beautiful and so broad, it's hard to read the whole thing. X Amish Wow. We have someone who looks like they left the Amish. Interesting. Honestly, I think this new bill is actually a great plan. It might sound tough at first, but I believe it will help people stay more product focused. Sometimes structure is what we need most. Even if it feels hard in the moment. This could be a game changer for a lot of folks. And then rj gi2hf sounds like a robot if I've ever heard one says ot and no tax on tips is for those making less than 160,000 annually for 2025 through 2028. Don't even think about it. One says I don't like Trump, but if he puts a lot more money in my pocket than my dislike is lessened. That is funny. So if you guys want to see what's going on in the comments, make sure you follow me on YouTube and you can follow along with these discussions that are being had there. Good stuff. All right, moving on to the last segment of the show, we're going to talk about the Real News report what's going on in the world of real estate. In the news, we have an article out of Reuters that says a Judge weighs objections to U S Real Estate Commission's settlement a landmark 418 million settlement with the national association of Realtors over home sales commissions is facing a key test after several groups urged a federal judge in Missouri to reject the deal. The challengers, including home sellers and buyers pursuing separate lawsuits against the Realtors association, urge U.S. district Judge Stephen Bowe to deny final approval at a hearing set for November 26th. The objectors contend the deal is too sweeping and could bar claims and other pending lawsuits. One opponent said also that the plaintiff's lawyers were Seeking too much in legal fees. The Chicago based Realtors association in a statement said the settlement creates a path forward for our industry that promotes competition and consumer choice, and we will continue to advocate for final approval. Attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The deadline for new objections expired on Monday. The proposed settlement would resolve claims that the national association of Realtors violated antitrust law by requiring home sellers to pay a commission to a buyer's agent in order to list their homes for sale. Now, here's what's sad about this article. It says in order to list their homes for sale, but what it should say is in order to list their homes for sale in the MLS that the Realtors run, you could always list your house for sale. You just couldn't put it in the MLS unless you agreed to pay a buyer's agent to something. That something could be one red cent. And the logic behind that was buyer's agents were getting cut out of deals if the seller put the house on the market and you brought someone to show them the house, and then they said, I don't want an agent. I'll just use the listing agent. So they put in this rule to say, hey, if you're going to put your house in the. In our mls, where all the buyers bring their. Where all the buyer's agents bring their buyers, you got to pay them something. And you got to say what that something is. That's what they're calling a violation of antitrust. I understand why people could have issues with that ruling. It was widely understood by everyone that works in the industry as insane that they took that stance. But the way that the news reports on it is very different. And because, like lawyers and like insurance providers, nobody likes real estate agents, it was very easy to pile on and say, yeah, those greedy people were forcing us to pay commissions. I don't think anyone was forcing people to pay commissions. Commissions have always been negotiable. I think this is a matter of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. Consumers want the MLS where all the real estate agents bring their clients, but they don't want to have to pay the real estate agents who are bringing the clients there. That, to me, in my perspective, was the sad part of the ruling. And this article leaves a lot of that out. But, hey, that's why you're listening to me, to get the real talk. We have an article out of Real Estate News that says the HUD secretary targets the enemy of new housing. In a speech to industry executives, Scott Turner emphasized the agency's mission minded focus and his plans to cut out the bureaucracy that gets in the way. Promising a mission minded focus from his agency, the U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said the HUD will address the housing affordability crisis by easing regulations and cutting through red tape. Speaking to hundreds of real estate executives at the T3 Leadership Summit on May 19, Turner laid out his vision for HUD to clear away the bureaucracy that he says is getting in the way of home building efforts and to get creative with public private partnerships and community level programs to reach those goals. Bureaucracy is so often the enemy of new home construction, turner said. General soliciting general agreement from the crowd. I am with you, he responded. I think the same way, so we're working hard to get this done. During his keynote address, Turner discussed some of the ways the new administration plans to stimulate home construction, including opening up underutilized federal lands for housing development. He emphasized that national parks and natural forests are not on the list. He also spoke of his enthusiasm for Opportunity Zones, an initiative to improve economically distressed communities by providing incentives for public and private investment in those areas. The program was established during the first Trump administration by the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council. One item on the chopping block, however, is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which Turner called a massive power grab by Washington bureaucrats. The proposed rule aimed to address inequities, inequities in access to housing, and it required communities receiving HUD funding to help develop solutions. Turner previously discussed plans to terminate the role in February, saying that it would return decision making power to cities and states. Turner said that he has been shaped by many things his time in the NFL, preaching politics and even his first job as a dishwasher, which which taught him about dedication. All of those forces, he said, have contributed to how he approaches his leadership role at hud, but ultimately he remains focused on the agency's core values. We're not about anything else but the mission. We're working to expand the American dream of homeownership for all Americans and to ensure that every American can access quality, safe and affordable housing. All right, when I read that, I basically take from it that they're trying to efficiently cut out a lot of the stuff that stops them from doing their job well so that they can provide more affordable housing. And then instead of saying let's just tax everybody, he's saying let's be creative in how we do this, like taking federal lands that we don't have to buy and building low income housing there. Well done. Let's hope that we get some progress with that. All right, before we get you out of here, our Quick Hitter section is brought to you by Turbo Tenant. Turbo Tenant is the software that I use to manage my long term rentals. Best property software that we found, bar none. My staff loves it. I recommend it for sure. So hit up Turbo Tenant and let them know that David Green sent you. All right. First quick hitter from Edward John Vega at DavidGreen24. Keeps it 100. Understand what it takes, Keep the content coming sir. T Stell says more people should be like at David Green 24 and work harder Regarding a post that I made about pressure watching one of the properties I own in the Smoky Mountains, T Stell said I had no idea that it was a thing. Pressure washing makes a big difference. Mark Gomez says, bro, I got my first pressure washer a little while back and ever since I stay looking for something to pressure wash. I even ask the neighbors if I can do their houses. And Deep Sea Dusty said, hard to top the satisfaction that pressure washing brings. Instant joy. Yes. So go check out my instagram @david green24 and then check out my property management company coast to Coast Getaways. You can find us at CTC Getaways on Instagram where I do posts about the properties that we manage and ways that we've been upgrading them. What we see. Pictures of bears in the woods, cool beach pictures. And I've got discounts for listeners of the show if you'd like to stay in one of our properties. All right folks, that's what I have for you. Please. If you're thinking about financing property, I want to help you. Reach out, DM me, email me, find me on the website, whatever you like, but do it right now and let me put you in touch with somebody from the one brokerage. And please keep listening to this show. You can get my book better than cash flow, the 10 ways you make money in real estate at Amazon now. And please share this with other friends you have that might like it. We'll see you guys next week on the David Green Show. Sa.