Using “ADUs” to Go From Firefighter to FIRE by His Late 30s

Scott:
Building an A DU, especially in the context of house hacking may be the new no-brainer way to move towards fire, especially for those getting started on their journeys. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m Scott Trench here today with my self. There’ll be no additional host unit dwelling on today’s podcast. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Derek Cheryl is an early retired firefighter who has three letters that he hopes you’ll remember on your wealth building journey. Those letters are a d and u big surprise there. We’re going to talk about those and this is a huge opportunity for a lot of folks in at least four states.
Essentially, all of the state has been rezoned to allow adu. Those states are Oregon, Washington, California, and Montana, and then Colorado’s following suit. There’s a lot of states that are basically wanting to increase the housing stock in their states by allowing construction, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to allow the construction of these additional dwelling units. I don’t think that we don’t have official data on this, but I do not think this trend has really been getting fully baked yet. So it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs. We’re going to hear today about Derek’s story in building a handful of ADU and achieving PHI and millions of dollars in personal net worth early in life, and how he is dedicating his life to enabling more adu. He wants to build 1 million or influence 1 million a DU constructions in his lifetime, and I sure hope he gets there.
He’s well on his way. We’re going to discuss his journey to fire and the awakening that he had, and then we’re going to talk in depth about the tactics you can use and the tips and tricks and Blair to go looking for opportunity in the context of using ADUs to move towards fire. Bonus tip, Derek is going to be one of the speakers at BP Con this year, which as a reminder is in Cancun. We’re super excited about that. If you want to meet Derek this year and all the other great speakers we’re going to have, I’ll be there as well speaking. You can go to biggerpockets.com/events to get more info that it’s biggerpockets.com/events before we get into Derek’s fire story. A special thanks to our show sponsor, BAM Capital, your path to generational wealth. With Premier realestate opportunities, see why over 1000 investors have invested with BAM capital at biggerpockets.com/bam. That’s biggerpockets.com/b. Derek, that ADU guy. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. Well, Derek, can you tell us a little bit about what your life is like right now? What do you do on a day-to-day basis with your financial independence? Oh

Derek:
My goodness. Where do I even start? I think the first thing I would say is I wake up every day without an alarm. I’m never in a hurry in the morning. That’s the biggest difference I feel from when I was a W2 employee to where I am today. It starts at getting up about seven 30 or eight, drinking some green tea and planning the day of joy that I’m about to have.

Scott:
Awesome. And what is a day of joy in your life? What is a perfect day? Be a recent weekday that comes to mind that you’ve celebrated with this financial freedom? Yeah,

Derek:
For sure. So I don’t want my average day to sound like everybody else’s retirement day, but I’m addicted to building housing. I love to work. I love to build by nature. I’m an artist. I’m a builder. So these days I wake up 7 30, 8 o’clock, have tea, slow roll into my day, talk to some members of the team, mostly subcontractors. I’m in the building industry, maybe we’ll get into that a little bit, and I spend a lot of time running. I try to spend two or three hours a day in the mountains running around in the ski season. I ski a lot of powder. I tell people now that I’m retired that I’m a trail running ski bum because if I say retired, they say, oh, you’re too young for that, and it’s this big long conversation. So most of my days are pretty much that running, skiing and building needed housing.

Scott:
Well, I want to get into that building housing piece, but first I want to hear what is your current financial position? I go, how do you define numerically this level of financial independence that you’ve achieved?

Derek:
Yeah, for sure. One thing I grew up with was this fear of money and this taboo of talking about money and it’s rude to ask people about money and I want to kind of pull the screen back on that and share what’s worked for us or what we do. My financial position now is financially free. I live a very modest life. I live like a king on about $5,000 a month and I have around $20,000 a month of net passive income. I’ve got a real estate portfolio worth about $8 million and roughly a 50% loan to value position on that. So net worth roughly four to $5 million. Drive an old car live off of $5,000 a month and anybody else can do this simple, repeatable, average path to freedom.

Scott:
Awesome, and how old are you now and how old are you when you achieved financial independence?

Derek:
43 now, and I think I was financially free in 2018. Unfortunately, I had the golden handcuffs on at my job. I had a really amazing job, best job in the world if you have to have a W2, and it was just so hard to leave because I had literally fear of financial insecurity. It was just those self-limiting beliefs that I can’t leave this job that I love so much. So that was kind of 2018 ish. I was late thirties when I was financially free.

Scott:
Awesome. And this was a job as a high powered technology executive making hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars a year, right? Or wait, what was it?

Derek:
No, no, I’m not a developer here that made all that money. I was a blue collar worker, I was a structural fireman and an EMT. I started professionally as a fireman making like $4,300 a month and was able to slowly over time build some wealth with real estate.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing such a great detailed breakdown of personal information about your portfolio here. This is so inspiring. I want to hear every detail about how you got from the starting point as a fireman, I think it was in 2012 to this financially independent position today and the wonderful life you live. Can you tell us where your money story begins?

Derek:
Yeah, for sure. It began, Scott, out of necessity. I grew up poor. I’m sorry, mom, if you watch this, I know it always hurts your feelings when I talk about how poor we grew up, but it’s my greatest superpower. So I grew up poor with a single mom and working for what I had was always just the norm. I started a car washing business when I was seven years old. I had a full-time, paper route seven days a week. When I turned 10, you had to be 10 years old to get a paper route and I’d scheduled a meeting with the supervisor. So on my 10th birthday I could start and it’s just always been in my blood to work hard. So really by necessity, having to work and kind of pay my way through anything that I wanted to do was where I think my work ethic was crafted. And over time I really came into enjoying working with my hands, working with other people. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve always been into trying to add value to others. So my money story starts by growing up poor and if I wanted anything, I had to work for it, Scott.

Scott:
Awesome. So how did that translate through to high school and were you able to accumulate wealth or any type of cash, any small amount of cash going from high school to whatever came next?

Derek:
No, no, actually not. I was always a natural born hustler and worker be, but I wasn’t good with money. Nobody taught us about money. Like I said, there was guilt and shame and we didn’t talk about it. There was none. I would say that in high school I met somebody that changed my life. I had a wood shop teacher, John Weston is his name, and he handpicked a group of misfit kids that he knew probably weren’t going to go to college and he’d better teach them a trade and he ended up grabbing a group of kids and teaching us how to build housing. He started a construction technology program and we built an illegal A DU for those that don’t know in the real estate world, an A DU is an accessory dwelling unit. Think of like a granny flat or a mother-in-law cottage or a guest house or maybe a basement conversion if you’re a house hacker today. And we built an illegal a DU for another one of our teachers, and that was when I kind of first was introduced to real estate. But still at that time, I didn’t have any money. I wasn’t good at saving it. I didn’t have some cool story about waiting tables and having $50,000 when I graduated college like David Green, but I knew how to make money. You

Scott:
Got plenty of exposure to trades and building housing, working on houses, and you might not have graduated from high school with a master’s in home building or whatever, but you were pretty close. You had a lot of skills in this area after leaving high school that set you up for success. Is that right?

Derek:
Yeah, I mean, honestly just by luck, when I tell people now that I’ve been professionally in the building industry for 30 years, they say that’s not possible. How old are you? And I just tell ’em that I started really young from that first remodel full-time, 10 hour days over the summer when I was in seventh grade through the apprenticeship that I started in high school. Yeah, the trades definitely led me to an amazing life and real estate, and I didn’t know it at the time. That’s what I always tell all my kids, my kids as friends, I always tell them that don’t quit before the miracle. You don’t know how the connections and skills you’re making and learning today are going to absolutely form your life.

Scott:
So it’s funny because there’s a lot of folks that are like, oh, I wish I had learned how to do the trades in high school. I owed him so much more valuable than chemistry or whatever. And I think I’ve rarely met the person who actually did that and has reaped this huge reward from it. And I think you’re that guy that a DU guy to be precise here in that setting, so that’s awesome. What does this set you up for and what does life look like? After graduating high school?

Derek:
I went into an apprenticeship program, so I met a master carpenter and I didn’t know that even term mentor at the time, but looking back now, doing business and doing, always working on self-improvement and education is like, man, I had a mentor every step of the way. So I just happened to meet this gentleman who was a local home builder. He was a master carpenter and he hired me when I was, I think it was almost 16, 15 and a half years old, and he started teaching me the basic trades of building a house from the ground up. He was a long time general contractor who transitioned over to interior finish work exclusively. So we did a project for him almost ground up, and then I just started learning little bits at a time. I started, my very first job was sanding floors on plywood seams that had got raised during rainstorms, and after that I just progressed into the next step and I worked with him for the next four years. And then when I was 20 years old, I got my contractor’s license and ended up partnering with him for several years in that business up until what we know now as the great financial crisis. We live in a small southern Oregon market with a lot of California money, high cost of living area, and so that industry was booming during those years.

Scott:
Awesome. So in this period from high school to 2008, you’re becoming a master at these trades, I presume, and really rounding at your skillset here. Is that translating to wealth accumulation here or is that money going someplace else?

Derek:
No, great question. So there was never any wealth building strategy. Early in my career. I was making good money, but I would spend a lot of money. I’m still in that spot that I described earlier where I know how to make money, but I don’t know how to save it or invest it. I was living this feast or famine lifestyle. I would do a couple of big jobs. We would make a bunch of money and then I would go down to Lake Tahoe or I would go up north and I would ski and have fun and live an early twenties lifestyle until I was out of money, and then I would go back and I would work again. So my wealth building story doesn’t start for several years later when I met some more mentors.

Scott:
All right. We’re going to take a quick break here, but when we return, we’re going to talk about how Derek’s wealth building journey gets started. Alright, welcome back to BiggerPockets Money. Alright, awesome. So what changes here and what year does that change happen? And give us a snapshot in time of what your life looks like there. Where are you living, how much are you making? And then what does this catalyst for change that begins taking you down the wealth creation?

Derek:
Yeah, wonderful. I was living in a house that I purchased in 2002, so I bought this house on a little mountain lake about 20 miles out of town, and I bought this house and it was my dream. I lived at 5,500 feet. I could basically ski out of my backyard and I was building, I’d become a master at my trade as an interior finished contractor. I was making what I thought at the time for trading time for money to be a really good rate, and we started to see things slow down. This was like 2005, 2006. Everybody was buying real estate on stated incomes. There were some problems. I wasn’t an economist, I wasn’t into wealth building, but I knew something just wasn’t right. You could just kind of feel that. So I ended up going back to school on a freak story. I’ll take 30 seconds and tell it.
I had a riding lawnmower and I was selling it and I put an ad in the local paper to sell this lawnmower and the guy that shows up that buys the lawnmower happened to be a local fireman and they had just started a volunteer fire department in our little tiny mountain community and he said, Hey Derek, have you ever thought of being a fireman? And I said, no, never one time. And not that I wouldn’t love to do it, it just has never crossed my mind. And he said, Hey, we have drill every Tuesdays, why don’t you come? And anyways, that meeting selling that riding lawnmower, that old beat up craftsman lawnmower changed my life. That was where I made the pivot from. I’m a builder to, I’m going back to school to work on a fire science degree to get a job in the fire service. Once I got to the fire service, I met some more mentors that taught me about money and how to save it and how to invest it. So that’s kind of the long-winded answer to your question there, Scott.

Scott:
That’s awesome. So this year is what, 2007, 2008 you said is when you meet this guy and sell your lawnmower? Yeah. When do you become a fire? When do you actually get employed as a firefighter?

Derek:
Yeah, so that was in 2009 I believe when I started down that road. And I spent almost two years going to community college, getting certifications. I lived at the fire department for a year and a half for 10 days a month doing their student intern, getting on the job training, and then I got a seasonal job in 2009 as a fireman and then I was hired full-time the next year.

Scott:
So from 2010 till 2018. Now you’re a fireman, if I remember what we talked about earlier and what is changing in this setting that makes you more aware of and changing your behavior around accumulating wealth generally

Derek:
That would be the competitive nature and free time of a bunch of a people sitting around a table for 48 hours at a time when you’re not busy running calls or working or cleaning equipment. I could really boil it down to a couple of people. There was two folks on my original shift that I was placed on as a fireman, and so I’d already owned a little bit of real estate, but it was just on accident. I didn’t ever have a plan to accumulate wealth and buy real estate. And this is going to sound super cliche, but it was a couple of people sitting around a table, one telling me about stocks, one telling me about real estate. Thanks Kyle and Dan for that. And then the other was the education that was just starting to hit the mainstream. It might even have been underground at the time, but I found BiggerPockets, it was like Josh talking to himself about weird little things. I don’t even think Brandon was writing, maybe he was editing at the time, but I started looking around online for how to retire or how to make money or how to buy more real estate. And it was at kind of that cusp of where some of the, I mean Mr. Money mustache hadn’t started yet. There was a bunch of people that came along a little bit later, but BiggerPockets was kind of part of my story that in a couple of mentors, and again, the free time and paying attention, I

Scott:
Love it and I have met now, maybe it’s just anecdotes because I’m in this financial independence bubble in my online community, but it seems like there’s a lot of firefighters that pursue financial independence and I don’t think it’s just because the word fire is in there. That was a terrible pun, but we’ll go with it for a second here. But it’s because I think it’s also this concept of you said 10 days a month, 48 hours at a time, and this on off cycle feels plus that combination of a lot of, I would imagine waiting being on call but not actively responding. Is that right? Is this actually popular inside of the firefighting community to a large degree or am I just exposed to a small sect?

Derek:
Yeah, I think it’s probably a little bit of both, Scott. I think that public service workers in general usually have pretty good consistent paycheck, so that can lead to building wealth. I would say in my own personal experience of knowing hundreds of professional throughout our region is there’s two types. There’s savers and there’s spenders. It’s just like any other subgroup the advantage firefighters have is that they’re really competitive. I think that type a competitive personality where everybody’s always trying to one up each other is what drives a little bit of that growth. I can tell you that all the firemen, I know more of them spend a lot of money and work a lot of overtime so they can spend more money than there are that save and invest money. But with all that being said, every fireman I know has a side hustle because there’s so much time off. It’s just are they using it to buy more jet skis or are they using it to better their financial position?

Scott:
Okay, so we’re in 2009 to 2011, I believe is what you told me for the time period here to get started. When do you tell us about your journey with real estate as it pertains to your employment in the firehouse?

Derek:
For sure. So I bought really my third property in 2010. Again accidentally I was a move up buyer. Now I know what that is, right? It’s somebody that kind of outgrows their small house, they want a little bit more room, maybe a little bigger yard, maybe they’re about to have kids. So I was a move up buyer in 2010 and I just happened to buy this property at the absolute bottom of the market. It was a short sale. I didn’t even know what that was. I worked with a realtor and a banker and I just did whatever they said. I had no idea what debt to income ratio was. I didn’t know how to calculate cashflow. I didn’t know the difference between a seven 40 credit score and a six 20 credit score. I didn’t have any education. I got lucky. I bought this house that happened to be on three quarters of an acre in a small secondary market in a really cool little ritzy mountain town in southern Oregon, and I didn’t know that at the time either, but this property would end up changing my life due to the available building envelope and the current zoning laws that were coming down the pipe later.
But again, it was just showing up and taking massive action even though it was imperfect, was kind of how I got onto the real real estate path, which we’ll talk about here shortly.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, let’s hear about it. How did you find this deal? What did it look like and what was the secret sauce to it?

Derek:
For sure. So this was a deal that was on the MLS. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, but we ended up buying this property and later on down the road, as I started to listen to more and more BiggerPockets, and this is where BP comes in full swing, I understood cashflow after listening to BiggerPockets early days after reading, I knew that real estate was probably the fastest, most sustainable way. Somebody with my skillset and my time off had to get to wealth. So I took this property and I was able to, for all intents and purposes, chop it up without doing minor land partitions. I was able to build multiple other detached units on this property. So it’s basically a house hack on steroids as opposed to maybe converting your garage and renting it out to a friend. I would pull the legal permits that I would need to build another additional legal living space on this one property and ended up learning how to bring in infrastructure, how to upgrade sewer water systems, how to upgrade power systems and build these what we know now as accessory dwelling units on this big parent lot and start generating some real cashflow based on, again, my time and my skillset.

Scott:
Awesome. So how much did this cost and what did the A DU bring in the first

Derek:
Accessory dwelling units I was building back at this time? I could build all in, I’m talking soft cost, which would be like planning fees, permit fees, system development charges, impact fees, things like that, and hard costs, which would be billed the foundation, the walls, the roof, the windows, the floors, the cabinets for about $50,000. Again, using just a ton of sweat equity. And not everybody can do that with the same skillset, but they can get close, especially if you have time and you have the right mindset. So I was able to build these for around $50,000, and granted, this is like $2,010. Guys today the numbers are a little bit different. We could talk about those too, but about 50 grand and at the time they were renting for a thousand dollars a month. So you can see right there real quickly, if you’re

Scott:
2% rule all day, that’s the OG BiggerPockets, right? 2% rule in Oregon.

Derek:
Totally. Yeah. And it’s not 2% in Detroit. This is 2% with a brand new build with high end finishes and a great area that’s going to need zero CapEx for the next 15 years in an area that has a 0.1% vacancy rate. So that was how I got started. And

Scott:
Just for those listening, just so I don’t lose all the people who aren’t OG BiggerPockets folks, the 2% rule says that if your rent is 2% of the property’s purchase price, you have a great potentially cash flowing rental property. So a $100,000 house would need to rent for $2,000 to meet the 2% rule. This used to be fairly common in the early 2010s on the bigger pockets forums, we don’t see much of that no more. So that’s where the OG 2% rule of thumb comes from. That’s just not a rule of thumb that investors use anymore in almost everywhere in the country because it doesn’t exist in a practical sense at this point. Yeah,

Derek:
Yeah, yeah, great point, Scott.

Scott:
And it didn’t exist in Oregon at this point either, so that’s fantastic. How did you finance this? So did you have 50 K lying around to finance the project or how did you come into the cash to actually make that happen? It’s still expensive even if you are doing a lot of work yourself.

Derek:
Yeah, I hope all of our listeners, or if you’re watching on YouTube right now, I hope you guys don’t tune out right now. When I just say the slow boring path to wealth, I just saved the money, you guys. I drive old cars. I live within my means and I save my money so I can invest it, right? Scott’s book, if you’ve read set for, it’s about building this financial foundation and making smart financial decisions. Everybody talks about it, right? It’s hard to be disciplined to make money, live below your means and then invest the rest. But I’d saved up the first one. It took me a couple years to save up to build this accessory dwelling unit, and it was hard. I don’t want to say that it was easy. It was a lot of sacrifice to save your money and this is not a complete, have no life at all. I’ve never made my soap, I’ve never had a budget. I’ve just always tried to think logically about saving money so I can invest it, and I saved up for the first one and I built it with cash.

Scott:
Derek, did you sacrifice on your skis during this time period or were those pretty nice?

Derek:
No, even my skis now are old. I mean, there’s a pair of skis behind me that are maybe 10 or 12 years old that are still one of my favorite pairs. I have three pairs of skis in my quiver, so even the things I love running shoes that are built to get 500 miles, I run maybe 2000 miles in a pair of shoes. Again, I’m not trying to say that everybody needs to be super frugal, not I just use things until they wear out. It’s just a mindset, you guys. That’s all it is.

Scott:
Love it. So sacrifice, discipline, hustle, letting years pass and save up accumulative now. But one of the big questions I actually have on this point is earlier you said, Hey, this period from 2000 to 2008, 2009 kind of went by with money coming in and going out. It sounds like there was a natural proclivity not to waste it, but you also just weren’t accumulating cash. When did the mindset shift happen to actually save the cash for this purpose and to begin getting intentional about accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in liquidity to put it into real estate? Was there a moment in time where that mindset shifted a little bit to make that possible?

Derek:
I wish I had a better answer like this light bulb moment when I was watching the sunrise, but no, it was really just getting into the fire department and getting around people that were saving money and talking about a deferred compensation plan and being a self-employed person my whole life, I’d never had a real job. I didn’t know what a 401k was or a 4 57 or a 4 0 3 B. I had no idea what any of that stuff was. So when I got into those rooms and people were like, Hey, now that you’ve got this great government job, are you going to go Roth or traditional? Are you going to buy small cap? Are you going to buy blue chip stocks? This was all foreign language to me. So getting around those people and understanding money more and understanding stocks and real estate about the same time in 2009, 2010 is when my mind shifted slowly again, it wasn’t like this boom moment, it was just I kind of slowly, organically started seeing that everybody around me was trying to save money and I better catch up with them too, and that was the time period.
And then when I bought that house in 2010, I knew flat out that if I could save my money and produce cashflowing assets on this property that I already owned, that I had a clear path to victory. You guys. It was a slow steady path and I knew if I just kept with the plan, I was going to be financially free.

Scott:
Love it. So we get this a DU built for 50 K and rented out for $1,000. What happens next? Where does this path take you from there?

Derek:
I really just went into the profit snowball, so I’m not a huge Dave Ramsey fan. I like him if you’re going to pay off debt, I like what he stands for, but if Dave Ramsey and Robert Kiyosaki came together and had a prototype model, that would be more my style. So I like saving and living below my means, but it’s also okay to use leverage once we understand it. I still didn’t understand leverage. I still didn’t know what it even was, and I just decided to save up. So I was going to do not a debt snowball to pay off the debt that has the lowest amount. I was going to use a profit snowball to take every cent that I made from this cash producing asset, spend none of it and roll it back into the next one. So I just started saving again.
So I had my normal savings rate, which we didn’t know what that was at the time. Now I look back and be like, oh yeah, I had a 50% savings rate, but at the time I was just like, whatever, I don’t need to live comfortably, I’m going to save and I’m going to build real estate with it. I started adding that to the rental income that I had and I didn’t really have any expenses. I was self-managing, learning the business. I didn’t really have any CapEx because the thing was brand new and I didn’t really have any repairs because we design and build with sustainable hard materials that last and so I just was able to accumulate money quicker and kind of closed that gap. The first one took a couple years, the next one took maybe 18 months, and as you can extrapolate this story out, you could probably understand that after a while I was able to build them fairly back to back.

Scott:
Let’s zoom forward a couple of years. How many did you have? 5, 6, 7 years later, whenever the next kind of inflection point comes around and what did the income situation look like?

Derek:
Yeah, great question. So I was using a really cool strategy that anybody else can use. I want this to not just be relatable. I want you guys to all that are listening and watching think like, how could I do this? Well, I was simply house hacking you guys. I would buy a primary mortgage with 5% down, even in a high area, maybe if you’re va, it could be zero maybe if you want an FHA loan, it could be three and a half, but low down. And then I would use the bank’s money, long-term fixed rate debt to buy the house, and then I would build the accessory units with cash. So every unit that I built with cash, yeah, my return on equity would be low or lazy depending on who you listen to. But the cashflow, which was what I wanted so I could buy my freedom back from my job was high, so it only took me, I was making $4,300 a month as a step one starting firefighter. I only needed four and a half 80 U that I paid for with cash that kicked off approximately a thousand dollars a month to fully replace that income. So after I had the first five units, I remember just being so giddy. I was so giddy knowing that nobody would ever control my financial destiny again. Nobody ever, and if I had to, I could live in my garage and leave my job that day. So that’s probably about the time when I realized

Scott:
That. Awesome. And what year was that? What year was that moment in time?

Derek:
That was probably 16, 17, 18, 2000. I mean, I was Lean fi in probably 2015 and then definitely had plenty of money to leave my W2 job in 2017 or 18 and then was just stuck there for another multiple years with fear. Look,

Scott:
I just love that there’s so many ways to make money in this world, but the serial house hacking coupled with some secret sauce in your case, the ADUs in this area, it is just such an incredible method. I mean, you just told us the numbers here, you’re worth four or 5 million in your early forties coming from a construction and firefighting background because you just serial house hacked a few times and put in place a reasonable system. Many people will try to syndicate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate equity or whatever from big pools of capital and go big on these commercial assets, take huge leverage and these types of things. And no, you control the whole thing. You have no boss in your life, you have no obligation to other people from a financial standpoint, it seems like with this portfolio, I just absolutely love and admire the approach that you’ve taken here and the outcome that it’s produced. It’s fantastic.

Derek:
Yeah, yeah. Honestly, Scott, I don’t want to sound like I’m full of hot air here, but I live a life that’s so far beyond my wildest dreams because I just got lucky and took massive imperfect action and waited. And the biggest thing that’s hard to pass on, I can tell everybody my simple basic strategy and I can say, yes, go house hack. Even if you can’t build a doghouse and you’re not going to add value by adding accessory units or converting basements or anything like that. Even if you just buy a house every couple years, you don’t have to sell it to buy a bigger house, just keep it it into a rental. If it cash flows 1 cent over what you pay for it, your debt to income ratio actually goes up and you just go buy another one. I mean, say I’m half wrong and it takes you every four years to do that.
You’re still going to be a multimillionaire if you have a long-term horizon. And I usually pull these out. I call these my A DU goggles, and if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see ’em. If not, go check out BP money on YouTube, but these are my A DU goggles and I just put these on to give everybody a visual. I also want to show these as your long-term goggles. Just take this visual right now and realize you got to put on some goggles and look really, really far down the road. And that’s where I lose most people. Most people go to sleep, they understand how hacking they understand value add. They don’t understand that it’s going to take 10 years and you talked about starting a syndication or raising capital, and everybody on Instagram’s got a Lamborghini and it makes us feel like we’re not worthy, we’re doing it good enough and we’re not going to make it. And the truth is, folks, other average people out there like me that grew up with poor and grew up poor, didn’t know anything about money, it’s just basic principles over a long period of time, but time is the hardest one to swallow.

Scott:
And I think there’s another component that goes along with time, which is this concept of enough, which I think that whatever enough is to you, you seem to have gone way past that and are super comfortable with it. There’s not a hunger for the next $20 million, which I think is also hard for some people, right? Because it’s a certain type of person is going to sacrifice and grind and all those types of things to get to this point, but to switch it off and actually reap the benefits of FI is another challenge here. There’s a healthy surplus component that needs to be in place, which you clearly have as well. But I think that that’s another thing to admire about you in this context is you seem really content with what you’ve built here and ready to reap the rewards.

Derek:
Yeah, well said Scott. I really am. I live a simple life. I can’t stress that enough you guys. If you saw my daily driver, it’s a 1999 Ford Windstar green minivan with a missing hub cap, and I could probably go pay cash for any vehicle on the planet, but I choose to drive this because my self-esteem and my worth is not tied to stuff. It’s tied to waking up without an alarm and doing things that bring me joy and having the time to middle of the week take calls like this and hang out with other like-minded people.

Scott:
Alright, we’re going to be off for a quick break and when we return, we’re going to talk about where your portfolio of ADUs begins and how your real estate journey takes off, and we’re back. So let’s talk about ADU for a second here. So this is something that I think is a hot button topic especially, and I think especially on the west coast, I think Oregon, if I’m right, large chunks of Oregon, Washington and all of California from my understanding have essentially been rezoned to allow you to build an A DU at this point. Can you tell me how true that high level observation is here and why you like this approach with the ADUs in particular for folks?

Derek:
Yeah, so there’s four states currently that have overarching state legislation and housing law. And when you say what’s state legislation, that means that a state comes out and says every city has to abide by these rules when it comes to single family zoning and therefore the elimination of that and the allowability of accessory dwelling units. We have Oregon, California, Washington, and Montana with dozens of high price states following suit, including Denver, including Colorado, where BP is at. There’s a bunch of legislation that’s being championed right now that will pass Connecticut, New York, Florida, there’s a bunch of other states and then there’s also cities all across country in high value areas like Austin where the city itself has a great A DU legislation, but we like the states that have a DU legislation because there’s a simple, clear and objective standard and what an accessory dwelling unit is.
I touched on it earlier, it’s just a small legal secondary dwelling on a property that was primarily designated for one single family house. And some people don’t like infill housing. Some people like more low density areas without this kind of sprawl. But what’s happened in urban planning is that nationwide, we’ve decided that before we take our cities out, out, out into the high value farmlands, into the watersheds, into the timber resource areas, we continue to build where we have infrastructure, there’s already sidewalks and streetlights and public sewer and water and power and things like that. So the accessory dwelling unit movement is really popular right now in areas like you said on the west coast or areas where housing is as a shortage because they’re the easiest, most affordable option to provide a house because all the infrastructure is already there, the land is already there and it’s a smaller, simpler build. We can build these buy right in a lot of cases and much less red tape and expense than building multifamily housing. It’s kind of the 40,000 foot view.

Scott:
Perfect. Let’s zoom in a little bit here because you built, I mean, $50,000 to build an A DU that’s going to rent for $1,000 is a home run. My friend recently built one in northwest Denver and I think his costs were closer to 150 to $200,000 and he has to Airbnb it to get basically a $2,000 a month from that. So one of the things, I agree that this is a huge opportunity. You may be living in a place that has already essentially rezoned you, even if your current zoning doesn’t technically allow it. Your state might be overruling that and allowing you to do this, but the numbers are probably not as home run as they were when you got started. Can you walk us through and zoom in on what you would be doing today if you were starting over maybe in a bigger city in one of these west coast states?

Derek:
Yeah, wonderful. That’s a great question and for all of our listeners today, I want you to hear this. It’s that many places ADUs are very expensive to build and they don’t always get one-to-one return on appraised value. That’s the number one argument I get is Derek, they cost too much to build and once they’re built, I don’t even get my money’s worth. Well, those kind of markets, and for those listeners that are asking that question, I would say that your buy box needs to have ADUs in them try to buy a house that already has one period. That’s my number one strategy. I’ve been building ADUs for 30 years and my favorite way to build an A DU is to buy a house that already has one guys and to go down that path a little more. I would look for that, have unpermitted ADUs that you can get at a discount in areas that now legally permit ADUs.
Other little tips and tricks that we use to find properties that are going to be a home run are we want properties that already have good infrastructure. So there’s already maybe sewer that’s plumbed into the basement. There may already be a second power meter on the house because grandpa had a workshop in the garage and our grandma had a bathroom in her sewing room in the garage. So we identify properties that already have the most expensive parts of the process, which are like water sewer power, and we look for properties that already have bonus rooms or areas that were maybe illegally converted, like I said, that now we know we can get permits for. And then we also look at building our own units. So even if you’re not a builder, even if you just hire a four hire builder, their strategy is to buy a house and close with one closing table segment to buy a house and build it new. So we can also build for rent or build units cheaper than we can buy ’em. We can buy properties that already have ’em, or we put what I call my A DU goggles on and we go look for properties that already have a lot of the infrastructure done. So that $250,000 a DU that your friend just built, had they identified a property that already had a bathroom in their nice big detached garage, it might’ve cost that person $175,000 and it would’ve drove their ROI up a high percentage.

Scott:
So let me ask another question here, because the A DU is new. I’m coming in and let’s say I’m 25 and I’ve saved up 40, 50 grand, and I’m trying to repeat Derek’s approach, but with the 2024 edition and in the context of today’s environment, the eight, I love those tips and tricks to find potential value here. If I’m going the build route, so let’s say I’m going to go and I’m going to find a property and I’ve decided I can add an A DU here and that’s going to increase my cash flow, how I think it’s a little new and it hasn’t been widely adopted just because states have rezoned these, there’s not been a lot of construction per my understanding that’s actually taken place and this housing conversion is not yet in full swing based on the new legislation. Does adding an A DU always increase the value of the property by more than the construction costs, or is there a very real risk that in many cases it won’t?

Derek:
Yeah, there’s a very real risk that the money you put into the A DU will not be returned on your appraisal value, especially if you’re trying to burn your money back out. And I’ll give everybody a really quick way to find that out. You get a set of plans, a set of, we give away free plans on our website. You’re welcome to those. You get a set of plans and you take them to a local area appraiser who has experience in that market, and this is really important. You offer to pay them for their time. Hey, can I pay you $500 to give me an opinion of value of this plan set at this property with a build date of six months from now? And you can get a pretty good idea if that’s going to work or not. One thing I want to mention here too, Scott, is we always assume that building an A DU is this high-end jewel box in the backyard that’s going to cost a quarter million dollars.
And it’s not to back up to your example, you’re 25, you saved up 50 K, you want to go house hack a place, you need to be looking for a house that has a master bedroom in some form with the other rooms in the house. So think about a three bedroom, two bath house with a master on one side, a kitchen in the middle and the two bedrooms on the other side. You can pull the permits to legally convert that master bedroom into a one bedroom or a studio unit and legally wallet off meet fire and life safety code, maybe punch in an exterior door for an exterior entrance out to the parking, and you have a one one and a two two. Everybody has all these what if scenarios for ADUs? Just look at a DU as a duplex.

Scott:
That is really good. That’s a really good nugget there. I think that I, because I’ve been thinking one of the questions that I think has been bothering me for the last two years is I bought this duplex in 2014 that was 240 grand and both sides rented for 1100 and the mortgage was 1550. So that instantly is like a pretty breakeven or cash flowing property modestly cashflowing property if I wasn’t living in there. And if I sell that same property today, basically unchanged a couple updates over the years at a 20% off discount, it would be 500 and the person buying it would have a $3,600 mortgage and each side rents for 1600. So you can see your 400 bucks in the hole there. And I’m like, that is what’s bugging me is because if you’re 24 and trying to repeat what I did when I was 24, you can’t really do it, at least not without getting really creative here, but this is it, right?
You find that weird house that really should be a duplex and you can convert it into a duplex with this new A DU law that essentially is already rezoned parts of Denver, for example. Denver very badly wants that housing to come into place. And so there’s a lot of opportunity there, and I think that’s exactly where I’d be looking and I just haven’t had that light bulb go off about where to actually find this conversation. So I think that’s an awesome nugget, and that’s exactly where I’d be looking if I was getting started on day one. And that would be, that doesn’t sound like a very expensive project at all. That’s awesome. Do you have any examples of people who have done this?

Derek:
Yeah, yeah. We’ve actually done some video content for BiggerPockets. You can check out there’s some, there’s an A DU playlist on the BiggerPockets YouTube channel where I go over several different units of ours where we did this exact same strategy for under $40,000. We legally convert this four two into two different places, shared wall side-by-side duplexes. We’ve got some videos on BiggerPockets that we helped put together that have this strategy for over a garage. So yeah, just don’t think everybody thinks that, oh, an A DU costs $250,000 and I’m going to have to short-term run it to maybe break even. You’re looking at the wrong A DU, look at a house and figure out how to see it as a duplex with no other investor competition and go in there and pull a few permits and do this. Right? So great question, Scott. You must be like the CEO of some huge real estate company or something.

Scott:
I’m A CEO, but I haven’t watched our whole A DU playlist. So look at that. I’m going to go, I got some homework to do tonight. Thank you for putting that out there. And I’m a little embarrassed that I haven’t actually watched it yet before talking to you here. That’s going to be the first thing I’m going to look at. I might do that myself. And this is doing good in the world. This is how you increase housing supply because that four bed, two bath house is being put to a much higher and better use when it is converted into a duplex. Now two families or two different sets of people can live in the same property and you’ve just expanded the housing supply and are helping the affordability situation in this country. So I absolutely love that. And I think lots of cities will too.
I mean, one of the big problems in this country, just that’s zooming out here, is that in many cities, I think it’s 80% of land in major US cities is zoned single family only. And so again, that’s where this context of the A DU is coming in is because states like California, Washington, Oregon, now Colorado, I forget the other, the fourth one you said earlier, Montana, they’re being very crude about it in my view. They’re just saying, okay, everything is now zoned for a DU. Maybe they have to because it’s so hard to get the local district with a bunch of single family houses to agree to develop their land. Nobody wants to do it in their backyard and bism. But because states are doing this and no one knows the actual long-term effects of this, they’re just going to crudely rezoning the whole state. And that is opening up this opportunity in really interesting ways for people, I think, to make some money while people figure out what the ramifications are going to be long term. So love it. But you had figured this out before then.

Derek:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. I call it capitalism with compassion. And two things I want to add. One is if you’re in an area where they have stickler zoning and they don’t allow multifamily units or accessory dwelling units, we can still legally do this. Guys we’re investors. This is a business, pull the proper permits, create one section or one room of your house as a attached or detached master suite. You can use 110 volt plugin countertop appliance, like a say a microwave and an induction, hot top and a toaster oven. And you can completely legally do this strategy. And it’s not called a dwelling because it doesn’t have a kitchen. And the reason we do the A DU strategy over just the standard roommate position is one, it’s easier for our spouses to understand that we don’t have roommates, right? There’s a dividing wall. We soundproof those walls.
We teach people how to do that on our YouTube channel, by the way. We give everything that we do away. We open source everything. We sell nothing. We work for nobody. We really want to help you build housing. So check out some of that stuff. But the last point was that we can use this A DU income to bump our debt to income to qualify to go do this again. So those are the two things people say, well, I can’t build ADUs in my area, and why wouldn’t I just get roommates? And those are the two answers to those.

Scott:
Love it. Well, would you give us a snapshot?

Derek:
You can do it anywhere.

Scott:
You mentioned something important there that we haven’t touched on yet. In your money story, which is getting your spouse on board here. Can you tell us a little bit about your family and how you were able to convince them to let you build ADUs throughout this period?

Derek:
Yeah, great. I came here and I said, I’m going to do anything I can to share value with other people, good, bad, and ugly. And I had a long time marriage that I actually traded for accessory dwelling units. Amazing woman, still great friend of mine, but I was building and she wanted more vacations and she wanted more time off the job. And I had this mission driven focus to build more housing. And so real estate and building this has been 10 years ago, cost me that marriage. The partner I have now that I’ve had for years is very supportive. And we still to this day move every couple of years. So you have to have somebody that’s on board or else you’re not going to have that partnership anymore. And as hard as it is to admit that I might’ve chosen development over a marriage, it’s a learning process. We’re all doing the best we can. Scott,

Scott:
No, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. And I think that that’s an important concept for folks to understand is that with house hacking in any form is a very personal choice as well. And that alignment is really important and it’s a powerful tool, but it has an impact on the family dynamics. So thank you for sharing that as well with us. Talk to us a little bit about your mission here. You said you’re very mission driven for affordable housing. What is that? Can you define that for us? Yeah,

Derek:
For sure. So I grew up in the same town that I invest in, and we always kind of moved around from apartment to apartment and never had a true home of our own. And nowadays, being a housing provider and a developer, it’s like my life’s work to give tenants a really good product. Tenants want the same things that we want as homeowners. And I know because I’ve been both. And that’s we want a good location. We want privacy, and we want good amenities. So now today, we just seek out properties in good locations and we build brand new units and we put hardwood floors and granite and stainless steel appliances in them, and we give our workforce amazing, safe, new, affordable, clean places to live. And then on the back end of all of this, Scott, and what keeps me going today, we talked earlier about enough is enough I’ve got no of buying a jet or being in the Billionaire Boys Club.
I want to live a simple life, but when we die, when I die, I’m giving the whole portfolio away. So all the houses are going to go back to the people. My kids will get the skills to build wealth. They’re not getting any real estate. We’re going to give the properties away through a foundation that still designing, but it’ll be a combination of maybe the city, the housing authority, habitat for Humanities. I think we’ll get part of the portfolio, but the idea is to build as much housing as we possibly can until I die, and then I’m going to give it all away.

Scott:
Awesome. That is a fantastic mission here. How much housing have you created to this point, and what do you think you’ll accomplish in the next 10 years?

Derek:
Yeah, my goal is to influence 1 million ADUs in my lifetime. And I honestly feel like I’ve influenced at least a hundred thousand Aus already in the past 30 years. In the past, really 15 proper. I’ve been shouting this same strategy from the rooftop for decades, and nobody gave a shit until the last few years when it started to get some public traction and big markets like California passed statewide a DU legislation. So I’ve been like, when people call me and they say, Derek, you’re the a DU expert in the nation. And I say, no, I’ve just been doing it longer than anybody else. By luck, I lived in a little town that allowed them, and I’ve made more mistakes than anybody else has made. But over the years I’ve participated in hundreds of a DU builds. I’ve done probably tens of thousands of consultations and I want to influence as many ADUs as possible. And it’s a cool housing type that I think more people, if they understood it, they would either seek it or create it themselves.

Scott:
Yeah, I mean, it seems like a really good place to go look for opportunity in 2024, especially in those four states. I’m going to call Colorado a fifth state because we have very similar legislation that has actually already passed. That’s yet to, we’ll see how certain parts of the state react to that new legislation at this point. So I wouldn’t go all in on it yet. I’d view it with lens of caution, but there’s so much opportunity here within the existing laws and the landscape has clearly got the momentum for change that basically allows us everywhere is well underway. So I completely agree. I’m not surprised to see that things are taking off now. It’s certainly possible for a long time, but it’s definitely getting easier or encouraged by local governments on a bigger scale now. So this is awesome. One last question here around this. You’ve done tens of thousands of consultations. You have this big A DU business, this huge mission to influence a million ADUs. How do you think about the value of your time and where you invest it in the context of that mission and all the opportunities you have here?

Derek:
It should probably be easier to answer, man. It just chokes me up just even thinking about that. I’m just overcome with gratitude, Scott. I don’t look at my time as really any more valuable than it’s ever been. Honestly. I get up every day and I do things that I are in line with my moral compass that bring me joy and I just can’t stress enough folks. I live the most normal life. Again, drive old cars. One of my favorite things to do, I mean, until recently, I still mowed every single lawn myself. Think of Forrest Gump with no shirt on a riding lawnmower. That’s me living my best life. The greatest and best use of my time is probably not setting forum boards. I was helping strip a foundation this morning before this call. I should not be doing that in the eyes of most high level investors that are always trying to maximize their time.
And my response to that is nobody cares. Do what brings you joy. And to me today, that’s building, it’s building relationships, it’s building housing, and I just can’t stress enough that we’re more powerful than we think. If we have a simple strategy and we just focus long-term on that, do what brings you joy. The money will come. Money will always follow value. And I give away a lot of my time. People say, why do you do free consultations? Why don’t you build a course? Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you sell that? And I’ve always just learned that if I lead with value, everything else follows.

Scott:
Yeah, I would also just wonder aloud in reacting to that, if the fact that you do all of those things working on your tan would be unproductive, but you’re able to synergize that with your lawn mowing activity there again, lame joke here, but I think that there’s a concept here of you having enough and being content with these items here that enables you to keep your expenses low and not be forced to chase the next thing. And as a result, that allows you to be more methodical, think really long-term, and then good things come very quickly as a result of that. I wonder if there’s some sort of underlying current there, because I’ve heard this from a number of people that are financially independent for five plus years and are doing things like they have a very similar mindset. They’re doing lots of the work around the house themselves. They’re doing lots of work on their business. If they have a side business or whatever themselves, they’re not thinking about the next pursuit to scale, and yet that dynamic causes them to become ever increasingly more successful and to reach more people and to have bigger impacts as a result of that mentality. So it’s an interesting paradox there that I’ve observed a couple of times with a couple of people in this space. So I don’t know, maybe there’s something to that,

Derek:
What you just described, I feel, and I know that’s true, you add value and you manifest positive wins for other people and wins just fall into your lap. Yeah, I couldn’t more, Scott.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, two last questions here. Well, any last pieces of advice and then where can people find out more about you, Derek?

Derek:
Yeah, so not to give advice, but just sharing things that I did. And we talked more about real estate than a lot of different financial things, but I always just saved basic. I’ve always been a saver. So if you’re listening to this and you want to take a few things away, if you can fill up your employer sponsored account in either a traditional or a Roth way, if you’re outside of a traditional account like that, maybe just fill up your private IRA and then save money and invest in real estate. Use your skillset, leverage your time or your skills to build value with a long-term vision. That’s kind of what’s worked for me. Just again, long, long-term vision is what I see sets successful people apart from unsuccessful people. Nobody’s getting rich in this business, especially today at these rates. So take your time and if you’re looking for any information about me or what we’re doing, or you want free a DU plans or you want to watch our series where we give away exactly how to build our units with cost breakdown, you can check us [email protected] or on YouTube also at that ADU guy.
And then I share every day almost on Instagram just builds that we’re doing and little different details of housing and housing related content.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, Derek, that a DU guy, this has been fantastic. Thank you for sharing the very simple, highly repeatable path that you took to financial independence at an early age. Thanks for the incredible mission that you pursue and devote yourself to. And thanks for talking about the great resource you [email protected]. We really appreciate all you do for BiggerPockets and definitely encourage folks listening to this. If you’re interested in ADUs to go check out that adu guy.com and the YouTube channel there, there’s a ton of great information and I got some homework to do to go watch that YouTube series you produced for BiggerPockets here. I’m excited about that and we’ll be looking for opportunity for myself in the next couple of years in this space.

Derek:
Right on Scott. Thanks. I’m always only a phone call

Scott:
Away. Thanks so much. Alright, that was Derek Cheryl, that a DU guy. Scott, what’d you think? Great question, Scott. I had a great time interviewing Derek. Again. I think that this is a super interesting field. I think that for a house hacker, again, I studied on the show, I’ve been noodling about how can this work? What would I have done if I was getting started today? I couldn’t do the same strategy I pursued with that duplex and really make it work in the same way. And I think I’d be looking here and I think I will look here as I think about my next investment here in 2024. His suggestions of places to go hunting for value, especially in the conversion of a single family to a duplex is a really good one that I am definitely going to look into and think about for my personal investing activity.
So really learned a lot here. I think we’re onto something with this a DU thing. I think it’s the next big thing in real estate, and it is a really crude but potentially very effective way for a lot of states to drive a large increase in their housing supplies. And I think entrepreneurial real estate investors in particular, owner occupants are going to have an opportunity here for the next couple of years. So I’m excited and I hope that Derek, I think that will be a big tailwind to Derek’s mission in influencing a million of these constructions. So love the mission, love what we learned today. Definitely encourage you to go check out that adu guy.com. We are not affiliated with Derek. Other than that, we really appreciate when he produces great content for BiggerPockets and of course are excited for him to come and speak at our conference in Cancun. As a reminder, you can sign up for the conference at biggerpockets.com/events. It’s going to be a great party and we’re going to have a ton of really good educational speakers like Derek showing tips and tricks on how to build wealth in real estate and other ways. Alright, Scott, should we get out of here? Yes, we should. Yes, we should. Scott, let’s do it. It’s been a great episode. Thank you so much for listening. And I’m Scott Trench from BiggerPockets Money saying I bid you. I do.

Outro:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. This episode was produced by Eric Knutson, copywriting by Calico Content, post-production by Exodus Media and Cris Mikkan. Thanks for listening.