Waiter to Financial Freedom in 18 Months (5 Rentals & $5,000/Month Cash Flow)

Ashley:
Hey, rookies on the show, we always talk about having a bias toward action.

Tony:
Our guest today never gave up on making real estate work for him. He partnered with other real estate investors and used co-living as his real estate investing strategy to be able to quit his W2 this year.

Ashley:
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. And I’m Ashley Care.

Tony:
And I’m Tony j Robinson. And welcome to the show. Andres. What’s up brother? How you doing, man? Good. How you doing guys? Thank you so much for hiring me.

Ashley:
Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Andres, can you share a little bit of your background before we actually get into real estate? What were some of the critical steps you took in your current state before you started your real estate journey?

Andres:
Well, it start from the beginning. Like they said, I came to this country when I was 18 years old, worked my way through every possible job that you can work as an immigrant. I started washing dishes, basketball, kitchen, eventually became a waiter, assistant manager. I did ballet parking, cutting yards, some construction work, put myself through college. After college, I got married and my wife was like, Hey, we need to buy a house. My, and at that time I was working full-time as a waiter, so I couldn’t qualify for a loan. Despite making good enough money, we were expecting to qualify for a house. We just couldn’t. And it’s upsetting because you’re making almost six figures, and just because you get paid in cash, they don’t want to take it. So I made a quick Google search, how to buy houses without any banks any credit. And as you guys know, that’s like Pace’s slogan. So I found pace. I started watching Pace’s videos, I found BiggerPockets, and a week later I was like, I’m going to find myself a deal. So I joined Pace’s Mentorship, and a couple weeks later I found my first house up two. That was the beginning of my real estate journey for a year. I did wholesaling with dad to build cash.
One of the last deals that I wholesale was to this guy who I didn’t know what he was doing with the house because the house didn’t really have an exited strategy. And when you wholesale creative deals, you got to make sure that your buyer is, they’re not going to default on the loan. So I went with him to the property. We walk it, his GC is there and he’s like, I’m going to put a wall here. I’m going to put a wall here. We need another bathroom here. And I was like, man, what are you doing? He’s like, oh, I do room rentals. I was like, that doesn’t exist. That’s false. And I went with a different buyer who was going to do an Airbnb in there, but that pique my curiosity because he sent me his spreadsheet like, Hey, we’re going to make like 3000 net in this house, but I just couldn’t believe it because who’s going to share a room?
Who’s going to share a bathroom? And then after that, I started researching room rentals because at this point, this is now December, 2023, a year after starting wholesaling, I’m like, I need to buy my first house. I build this capital. I want to be an investor. So I started researching. I was like, okay, this sounds like a good strategy because that year when I started real estate, when I was doing wholesaling, I really dove into short term rentals and midterm rentals because I thought that’s what I wanted to do. It is so hard. I am not a smart person. I don’t know how you guys do short term rentals, midterm rentals. I don’t understand how to run the numbers. I have joined a lot of coaching programs that I’ve paid for. I’ve seen every YouTube video possible. I still don’t get it.

Ashley:
Hey, we never let anybody on the show say they are not smart because you have been smart in some aspect to be able to meet it this far in your real estate investing journey. So

Tony:
Andre, there’s a couple of things in your story too. I want to get into it how you made the transition over to co-living, but there’s a couple of things I want to get into. First, you mentioned pace. So for our Rick, we’re referencing Pace. Morby and Pace actually wrote a book for BiggerPockets. It’s called Wealth Without Cash. If you guys head over to Bigger Pockets bookstore, you can pick up a copy of that and learn about the strategy that Andres was leveraging to help him get started in real estate investing. But it sounds like Andres, that you said you started Wholesaling first, which is a way to generate some cash. And then you decided, hey, let’s get into actually owning the real estate as an asset. And I just want to point out, for a lot of our rookies that are listening, you might find yourself in a similar position where you have the desire to go out there and start building your portfolio, but from a cash perspective, maybe you’re not ready. So even if you can’t necessarily put down 20% to go out and buy that first rental, are there other things you can do within the world of real estate investing to generate the cash, which would then eventually allow you to go out and buy something? So Andres, just really quickly before we get into the co-living, how long were you focused on that active income strategy before you had enough cash set a site to go out and actually get your first buy and hold rental?

Andres:
About 10 months, 10 to 11 months,

Tony:
10 months. That was a lot faster than what I was thinking, man.

Andres:
I wasn’t that successful, honestly, that year. I mean, at that point I was before that working full-time as an assistant manager slash waiter, so I was making pretty good money. But I was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, no days off. If they called me, I have to be there. But with wholesaling, well, how I get into wholesaling, right? While doing the full-time job, I was flipping clothing online, like going to the thrift stores and selling it on eBay, Poshmark, I was flipping furniture, I was flipping appliances.

Ashley:
We love Side Hustle ideas on the show, and that is a great one.

Andres:
I always side hassle. When I was in the community college, my sister-in-law used to work for Beer World, which is the company that produces those things for hot topic, the kind of anime toys and backpacks. They would have a clearance every three months and sell everything for a dollar. So I would go buy a hundred things, put it in the trunk of my car and go to college park right outside the arts building and sell it to all the taco guys there that play music and do arts. So I would pay my tuition that way. I’ve always liked idea of side hustle. If we go back to when I was a kid reselling candy, deflating other people’s bicycles so I can sell them air. I’ve always had that mindset. I was four or five, don’t judge me,

Ashley:
Were you? I’ve seen this Instagram reel where a girl pranks her dad and she goes to her dad and says, yeah, I went to the mechanics and they actually, they have premium air there. It was only a hundred dollars and I got premium air in my tires just to get a reaction out of her dad of it is that you saw the premium air.

Andres:
I’ve always had these little side hustles in college. I run a poker room under a table until I got kicked out. But that mindset of always doing something on the side, I think that’s something my parents gave me because when you come from poverty, all you have is hustle, greed, and you cannot give up the hopes of my ancestors lay on my shoulders, I got to keep going no matter what. So now we jump into wholesaling. I wasn’t very successful. I only like six deals in one year, which is not a lot, but it gave me enough cash where I wanted to buy a house and I decided to go with co living because it sounded doable. I started putting some test ads to people. I was like, Hey, yeah, I need a room. I need a room, studio, apartments at that time in Fort Worth or going for 1200, 1300. So if I can get somebody in a room for 700 to 800, that sounds like a good model.

Tony:
Sorry, before we go on, I just want you to define what co-living is. We’ve had a couple of guests on the podcast who have kind of gone through this strategy, but for folks who are listening and they’ve maybe never heard the phrase co-living, what exactly is this and how does it differ from traditional long-term rental or traditional short-term rentals

Andres:
Because of various names? Cold living room rentals, a lot of people know it as pad split the same way we know short-term rentals as Airbnb because that’s the biggest platform that does it, but it’s pretty much renting a room inside a house and you’re sharing the kitchen. A lot of the times you’re sharing the bathrooms. Now, a lot of people right now, lot of the big coaches, they’re fighting into, oh, if there’s no community in it, it’s not a co living. It’s just like you’re renting a room. I would say that’s the landlord’s taste, depending on your tenants. A lot of people really try to do a lot of extracurricular activities for their tenants, pizza parties and trying to do this, trying to do that. I don’t do anything like that. I just let them be, and I’ve had only one turnover since I started in 10 months. So I think I’m doing something right. A lot of people don’t believe me. It’s like, that’s not possible. You have 42 tenants and only one has left. I was like, yeah, give them a good product.

Ashley:
We are going to take a quick ad break, but when we come back, we are going to hear more from undress on his portfolio and how he cash flows from his co-living strategy. Okay, now let’s get back into the show. So Andres, I have a question for you. As far as the co-living, I always think of co-living as college. That’s what everybody did in college was run by the room. That’s how you got places. And you mentioned a couple places where you can list the apartment such as pad split and several others, and those are the Airbnb platform for co-living. What do you think is the big reason that co-living is becoming more popular right now? People talked about Rent by the room throughout time I guess, but it seems like this year going into 2025, co-living is the hot new thing. Several years ago it was Airbnb and then after that it was midterm rentals. What do you think is the major shift that has made this a hot commodity right now for investors, but also for people who want to live in co-living

Andres:
Real estate? Cyclical, right? 28, 29, the borough was the biggest thing because you could get all your money out, you could get paid, you can get cashflow. 16, 17 Airbnb is a boom. Two years ago, everybody was like, oh, the interest rate is so low, let’s get it at that low and resell it on a wrap. Also, at the same time, Hey, let’s do traveling nurses, let’s do midterm rentals. And now everybody’s failing on that. Now it’s like, oh, co leaving because it’s secured cashflow. The thing is that co living is actually really good because just as a general economical principle, we’re targeting the people who make the least amount of money and we are taking care of the most principal need, which is shelter. So that’s always going to be there because what happens, studio apartments, which is efficiency, apartments, the cheapest thing that you can buy, those prices have gone so high that people can’t qualify for them. For example, this studio apartment in this area that is 1200, you need to make about 43, 40 $4,000 a year to live in. What happens with the people who are making 36, 35? What happens with the people that are making minimum wage? Where are they living?
So even middle school teachers, high school teachers, they don’t make that much money. I have one teacher and then one of my properties, and when she came, she was crying and I was explaining to her, look, this is not a group home. There’s an engineer here. He was from home, there’s a nurse there. Other guys work locally because she couldn’t believe it. She went to college. She has a master’s degree and she has to share a bathroom with a couple guys. So it is what it is.

Tony:
Andres, let me ask, because you mentioned something that you did a little bit of a test before you actually dove into this strategy, and I’m just curious, what was that test? How did you try and validate this idea before you actually committed to IT?

Andres:
Advertising. Because my biggest fear, it was like how long is it going to take to get full? Because at that time I was using other company’s numbers. They’re telling you like, Hey, it takes this long. They stay for that long. And then talking with investors actually in the platforms like, dude, we’re barely breaking even as soon as you launch, they get you full. But then after that, they start taking tenants because so many people are diving in and at that time there was no control, which is about a year ago. Landlords can do whatever they want. So I was like, let me just run my own ads, do my own marketing, see if I can get my own tenants. So I started researching how to do that. I found Sam Ard, who is probably the biggest investor in this market. He’s out of North Carolina or South Carolina, somewhere in there. And then he does a five day free course where you can learn how to do this yourself for free. So I copied that and I started marketing on Zillow, apartment.com, Facebook marketplace, Craiglist, all the room rental websites, roomies, Roomster, Soper. I only got leads from Facebook Marketplace, but I started getting 13, 14 messages a day.

Ashley:
Was it, is this still available?

Andres:
All of them were, this is still available. And a lot of investors told me, don’t do it because people just click on it and they’ll respond. And I was like, okay, do you respond to, is this still available? No, never. Well, let me do it. So I started replying, and guess what? People do respond. They don’t type room for rental just because they’re crazy. So I started having conversations with them and the property was barely under contract. I had just gotten another contract with the seller and I was already people like, I’m ready to move in. So I was like, okay, this works. And then something else happened where the person who was going to onboard me into the OR company, they said a few things that my lawyer didn’t agree with. And that’s something a lot of krus and investors don’t talk about, which is the legalities of it. And that’s something we have to be aware of it. Otherwise your investment is going to go belly up.

Tony:
Yeah, it’s super cool way to test this strategy before going into it fully. And I guess two follow up questions for me. Number one, what did you actually put into the post that you think garnered such strong attention? And then second, how did you actually land on the pricing for the room rental? Like you said, hey, for you it’s difficult, how to underwrite and analyze properties as a short term. I know how to do that really well because we’ve done it a lot, but the idea of the single room rental, I feel like there’s a little bit less clarity around how to do that. So first, what did you put into the post to generate so much attention? And then second, how did you decide how much to actually charge for your rooms?

Andres:
Yeah, so the way you under divide a room rental, you go from the comms in the area, you can use comms from zilo. Zilo is great realtor.com because it tells you what the apartments in the area are going for. So once you find that price in your area, let’s say it’s between 1,012 hundred, you want to be within 65 to 70% of it because it has to be a deal, right? You’re telling people you’re going to share a bathroom, you’re going to share a kitchen, so it has to be a deal. So I started testing ads at 60%, 65%, 70%, 75%, and 80% the price of the studio apartment, which is at that time the cheapest available option. And I started getting responses in all of them. I was like, okay, so it’s not about the price because now we’re talking about 7, 7 75, 800, 8 25, 8 50. My cheapest advertising at that point was 600. And I started getting people who would not have qualified anyways, they just got out of jail. They have multiple felonies, DUIs, and one thing I really like about Facebook marketplace is that you can click on their profile and see their pictures. As a general rule of thumb, if their profile picture is themselves holding a few guns with a lot of weed and a couple pit bulls, they’re probably not going to qualify. And so you don’t even have to waste time betting this possible tenant.

Ashley:
I’ve done that before too is where when I haven’t done in a while, but I used to post long-term rentals on Facebook and I would go and I’d also look at their interactions with comments or if they had pictures of them in their own house trying to look like, is it kept clean? Is it nice? You definitely can find a lot about a person by going through their Facebook page for sure.

Andres:
I think yes, because they are deliberately choosing that to be their avatar. They want the world to know them as that. So if you want the world to know you as that, well I will, might as well treat you like that. And there’s so much volume right now from my ads, so I can choose the better tenants. So right now I have a criteria where I’m really just looking for introverts and when they respond it’s like, Hey, tell me a little bit about yourself. I’m a night owl. I keep to myself. That’s perfect because what happens before, I was looking for building the community type of thing, and that usually means you’re going to get people who want to talk to others. They might be friends for a month, for six weeks. Eventually they’re going to crash because you don’t know that person. You don’t know their background.
While building my lease, I was like, what is the middle ground where, because eventually they’re going to come to you if there’s a problem and you have to be the referee, you broke the lease, you’re out. So what happened? The people that have a good background check that we’re living with people who don’t have a good background check, they start texting me. So I was like, what you don’t like about this? And I was like, man, they’re forcing us to do this. They’re forcing us to do that. They want us to buy the towel papers together, the toilet paper together. They want us to share this and that. It’s like, what would you like? I was like, I just want to mind my own business. Done. You’re allowed. And I kind of let each house Right now I have five closing more in two weeks. Hopefully. We’re almost there.

Tony:
And Andress on those five, can you just kind of walk us through in a little bit more detail? So you have five properties currently, how many rooms is that and how many specific tenants is that across all those rooms?

Andres:
It’s 36. 36 rooms. So about seven perhaps one has eight.

Ashley:
Oh my god, those are big houses.

Andres:
Yes.

Ashley:
Did you buy these big houses or did you add rooms to them? Take a dining room and add?

Andres:
We definitely add rooms because it’s really rare to find a seven room house. Actually, I don’t know if my Instagram is going to be somewhere in here, but I have videos of there because now I’m the GC on the property, so I do walkthroughs of the properties, how to do the layout, how to do the construction quickly. A lot of people when they’re acquiring these properties, they have a three month holding period plus another month of renting. The fastest one we did was we closed on August 13th. By September 1st it was fully renovated, fully stopped, so we didn’t have any holding costs. We added four rooms. We find all the people. My longest time has been three weeks except for the first one. The first one I went with a contractor and she stole my money. That’s how I ended up doing the construction myself.

Tony:
Well, you got to tell us a little bit about that story, Andress. I mean I feel like every real estate investor’s got at least one bad contractor story. So tell us about yours

Andres:
So she can recommend it to me by another couple of investors in the area. I went to check her work that was close to my property. She was doing two full fleets, full gut changing plumbing. Okay, that’s a big job. This is not a small time contractor. And then they started doing my job and then the guys are not showing up every two, three days, which sometimes is normal when they have multiple projects. And then spring break hits and I asked for LVP flooring that was in the contract, and I get to the home and I see the guys cutting the flooring with the meter saw and putting dust. So I was like, dust is wood. LVP doesn’t have any wood, this is laminate. Then I see the brand and it’s the cheapest thing that you can find at a Home Depot. And I was like, Hey, we didn’t agree on this. And she’s like, well, we already put it if you want, you’re going to have to pay more. And that was it. Okay, yeah, sorry. But I already knew that it was going to happen. Fetching me three days later, she doesn’t deliver the rest of the flooring. She took it, it was about $5,000 worth of flooring. She didn’t pay the guys for two weeks that I didn’t know. And then they come to the house, it’s like, Hey, she said you didn’t pay her. We’re going to destroy our work.

Ashley:
Oh my god. Geez, I’d be crying at this point, just so you know.

Andres:
I have to say at the property, the SAPs who did the tile work for the bathroom, tried to break in at Saturday at 2:00 AM So luckily I’m there. So I have to get on a fight with them, have to call the police. So after that, I stay at the property every night and I had to finish the work myself. I’m kind of handy and YouTube is your best friend. You can learn everything on YouTube right now. So I was going to Home Depot at 6:00 AM buying material, going to work from 9:00 AM to 11:00 PM going back to the job site, 1130 to 2:00 AM sleeping next day, say for two weeks. So there was no delay in my first property. We were like, we’re going to go live April 1st. We are going to go live April 1st no matter what because I bought that house with other people’s money so I cannot fail them even though I have the money to pay for another crew at this point because I don’t know how to hire them. I don’t know if what they’re doing is the only way that I know that it’s right is if I can do it myself and I can see that they’re doing it, I’m supposed to do it, then they’re doing it right.
That was a big experience. I almost have a heart attack during those two weeks. Had to go to the emergency room. My heart would just not stop because it’s a lot of stress. At the same time, I had some bad news with my wife. We need to do an IVF treatment, so I had to put another 25,000 into there. So my reserves are like, so anyways, we went live, the property wasn’t even finished and I already had five people moving in. So I made the rooms upstairs ready, the bathroom’s ready. I was like, look, the kitchen is not ready. Downstairs is not ready. Cool. They didn’t even see the room. So I think it was a blessing because now everybody wants to come see the rooms, but for the first one, it was all online. I didn’t even have pictures because the house wasn’t ready and these guys moved in, they paid a deposit, they liked the area so much, they just moved in.

Ashley:
I have to say, I’m so impressed with your hustle. I mean just all the side hustles that you’ve done throughout your life so far. But in this circumstance, not many people are willing to roll up the sleeves and to spend every night after working a full-time job working on their property just to meet their deadline, to be able to pay back the people that invested with them. And that really does take some character, and I commend you on that hustle. We had a similar experience happen and I’m very thankful. I had a partner on the deal who was the one that went in and did all of the work on it when we had to fire our contractors and had no one else to lean on. So just from watching him kind of go through that grind, I share a little bit of your experience, but I just want to commend you on that hustle.
And I hope everyone listening knows that sometimes things like this will happen in real estate where you are going to have these really stressful periods, but sometimes just working hard and putting in that labor, putting in that sweat equity, and that may not even be actually doing the physical labor of a rehab that might be sitting behind your computer trying to find money or analyzing deals every single night. That grind is what’s going to get you through that hard time in your investing journey. Just like, and Andreas just showed us there’s light at the end of the tunnel as to renting out the whole house without even having pictures available for people to look at.

Andres:
That was a blessing. I don’t know how I got that. And actually those guys are still there. So when I do my monthly check-ins, it’s funny, in January everybody got sick. So I do my monthly check-in I around January 3rd to go to the house and they’re all of them sitting in the dining area drinking chicken soup. And I was sick too. So I sat with them and we were talking about it and I was like, do you guys remember when you walked in? And I was like, yeah, man. I don’t know how I would never move anywhere else without pictures. I was literally sending pictures and it a war zone. It’s a construction zone. We build the walls, there’s drywall everywhere. It was a bad area. I dunno how they did it, but it worked out. Thank God they’re still there. It’s what? It’s

Tony:
Andres, you said that there’s not many just seven bedrooms laying around that you’re able to go out and purchase. So you’re converting a lot of these and adding the additional living space. So I guess as you’re sourcing your properties, what is it exactly that you’re looking for? What is your buy box? How do I know? As someone who’s never done this before, what type of property is a good candidate to turn into a seven or eight bedroom property?

Andres:
Pretty much you’re going to go by a square feet, right? Each room you want to be around 250 square feet. So you can multiply that by seven, but a lot of the times if you stay above 2000 square feet, you’re going to make it work for seven to eight rooms. But that really depends on the mortgage payment, right? Again, I bought all of these creatively. They’re all sub two seller finance. So we have 3% interest rate, 2.75% interest rate or PTIs are pretty low for Texas 1900, $2,000. So we get a good spread on the end. So even though I can put eight rooms, I say at seven, just to give it a little bit more space and parking is really important. So if I had to define my buy box, it would be minimum three bedrooms, two bedrooms, 1600 square feet plus. So if it’s 1600 square feet, I need A-P-I-T-B at 1600 or less, right?
If the PITI is above $2,000 a month, I need the square feet to be above 2000 as well because I need to add a seven room to make the cashflow work. And given all the work that you have to put into this, I think you need at least 2000 net every month. Otherwise the property is not really worth it. And I passed on a lot of deals because it’s like 1800, 1700, and I was like, yeah, no, I need 2000. It’s a lot of work and I do everything myself right now. I’m still training my replacement, but he’s very hands-on. I think to me, that’s one of the biggest things when I talk to other C investors, the moment they tell me it’s easy, I stopped talking to them because that means that they just started a month. They only have one property. They haven’t gone through it yet, but just think about it and you’re going to see it in the comments.
You have seven people from seven different backgrounds now sharing a house. You are the referee for everything. Everybody’s going to be texting you this and this and that. And now when I do coaching, it’s like the first three months, you’re going to be very intense because you have to put some people in line. You have two other people, let it go until you find the right fit. But after three months, my other houses that have been open for six, nine months, I don’t get a message for 60 days because those three months were very intense. I was on top. I was checking the security cameras outside like, Hey, you parked in the wrong place, this and that, no guests, blah, blah. But once you set up the culture of the house and you have two or three guys there with the culture of the house, like, Hey, we’re clean. Everybody parks in the right place and this is how we do it. Then the new people that move in, they’re going to follow that.

Ashley:
We have to take the final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this while we are gone, make sure you are subscribed to the Real Estate Rookie YouTube channel. Okay. Welcome back from our short break. And Andreas, you kind of mentioned there that you are doing all of your rehabs. Are you still working a W2 job?

Andres:
No. So I quit my job two days before Thanksgiving last year.

Tony:
Congratulations.

Andres:
I just couldn’t do it anymore. We were setting up a house at that time. I had three houses under contract for December, so it was going to be a lot of work and I don’t have any money in my saving accounts for the rookie is listening to that. At that point, I had $300 in my cashflow

Ashley:
And you quit your job

Andres:
And I quit my job. And when I said I bought my first house with my own money, I used credit cards. I didn’t have cash because we’ve missed a lot of, all my savings went away with my wife’s treatment and my heart problems. Every penny that I saved since I was 18 to this point when I’m 30, every dollar every night, I didn’t go out every saving that I was like for my investments, it went away in three months because of health issues. But I had to keep going and I quit my job. I got another property, and that’s how I kind of started doing side jobs as a general contractor because now I have good subs and a lot of people wants to do recall living. So I kind help them with the layout, helping them with the construction and make some money there now from the properties is enough cashflow to cover my basic needs. So it’s the first stage of financial freedom where if I really don’t want to get out of my house, I don’t have to, but we want to keep going.

Ashley:
And you found a business that integrates well with your real estate too. For a long time I was a property manager and I did it for myself and I did it for another investor and it worked out really well having that income alongside my real estate investments also too. So now that you’ve started this GC business, how are you becoming bankable or what are you doing without your W2 income to actually finance deals?

Andres:
Well, so all the deals, even the first one were bought with OPM. So for the rookies, that means other people’s money. So I actually got paid to buy each house, right? Because I’m acquiring the deals myself. So I have my wholesale fee in there or acquisition fee now, call it a management fee. So because all of these are creative deals, we buy them sub two, we don’t have to go to bank, we don’t have to talk to anybody. We just go to title company, direct to seller, direct to agent, and we acquire the houses. So each deal comes at around 65 to 80,000 total from acquisition repairs to furnishing. And I usually bring a private money partner to each deal and then we split the deal half and a half. So they bring all the money to closing and I do everything else. That’s why also I don’t think a property is worth, if I don’t make less than 2000 a month because I have to split that with my private money partners. So their cash on cash, but probably is between 40 and 50%. That’s a lot. You don’t find that laying around. That’s why I’ve had so much success, like raising money at the beginning because that’s really hard to find. And people that have money to invest, they want to make sure that it’s in a recession proof kind of investment and affordable housing, it’s always going to be around.

Tony:
And just let me ask, have you ever thought about doing co-living but through ground up development, just buying a plot of land or redeveloping a small house, tearing it down and just building something built specifically for co-living?

Andres:
Yes, that’s the next stage. Again, if we go back, I’m pretty new in real estate. I still dunno how to do it better. And that’s what I’m saying how to do right now. I still don’t get it. How do you guys refinance those properties? Those numbers are so wild because I get to the A RB, but then the appraisal is going to give me a different number. I really don’t get it. It’s a lot harder than creative finance. But yes, ground up is going to be the next step. So right now I have five closing six, I want to get to 10, and then after that do only ground up because at that point the cashflow is good enough where I can feel free and I can focus on finding land and develop that.

Ashley:
Well, Andres, thank you so much for coming onto the show today. Just real quick before we kind of wrap up here, would you just give us an overview of what your monthly cashflow is off of these five properties that you’ve been able to generate?

Andres:
Yes. So in total we make a little bit over 10,000. So depending on 10,500, 10,400 and what I split that half and a half with my private money partners together, half I get my half. I’ve had this year, 97% occupancy rate. I have only one turnover. Yeah, it’s been great so far. Honestly, I don’t see me slowing down with this. The only thing that slows me down is finding good deals because parking is very important here in Texas. Almost everybody drives a car and I don’t want to bother the neighbors.

Ashley:
Well, you just gave everybody shiny object syndrome looking to get that type of cashflow and everyone’s going to be looking into co-living. So Andres, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people reach out to you and find out more information?

Andres:
My Instagram is probably the best way. My handle is Andres Martinez, like my name C. And you can leave a question here in the comments. I’ll try to be here and respond because I have also some videos on YouTube so you guys can go see there and check and just reach out if you have any questions and be ready to work. If you tell me you’re lazy, I’m not going to respond.

Ashley:
Yeah, love that motto. Thank you so much for watching this episode of Real Estate Rookie. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode.