Funny that the "how-to write a new member post" used Lawrence, KS. as a location ( I attended and graduated from Kansas University located in Lawrence)….

My name is Andy Pfleger and I'm currently a full time funeral director and have been in the funeral service for 10+ years. I've been married 10 years this past July and my wife, Lacy and I have 2 children. We bought a house about 7-8 years ago and ended up flipping it during the 5 years we lived there. We caught the "bug" you could say with moving in and improving and selling for a profit (House Hacking is the BP term from what I understand). We ended up selling the "Aberdeen" house (in 6 days) so we could buy a total gut that was built in 1905 and hadn't been inhabited for 6 years prior to us buying it. We paid 22K for this home and put about 75K into renovations and it is currently valued around 130K +/-.

After having success with the 1st house, and people starting to follow our projects with the old house we bought we really started to wonder what we could do with this skill set we had discovered. I was not afraid to get my hands dirty and my wife was pretty good at the design aspect. We figured a rental or 2 would help with some passive income to maybe buy a flip or just help with added income in general.

This is where the story gets really good. There's a 6 unit building next to our home that came up for sale. We looked at it and were unable to come up with the funds for the down payment. 20% of 180K... At the time we hadn't discovered the info and creative ways to fund purchases that we are aware of now. So I was discussing this with a friend who happens to be a CPA by trade married to a OB-GYN and he was interested solely because of the tax benefits real estate brings to his life... So we discussed funding and how much each of us would need to bring to the table. We actually passed on the 6 unit and found some less expensive units that made a little more sense for us "out of the gate."

Our first purchase consisted of a tri-plex (paid 67k) that needed some TLC (fully rented) across from the local dental school and a duplex (paid 45K, that had a hoarder who we had evicted as part of the purchase) about 3 miles or so from the dental school. We immediately renovated the hoarders unit, put new carpet in the adjoining unit and rented them both 3 weeks to the day after purchase. So we paid 67k and 45K, borrowed a little to update what needed to be updated and then got the rents coming in.

We were enjoying real estate, listening to podcasts, reading BP forums, and generally planning for the future. We kept coming back to a 5-10 year growth plan. Pour all of the cash back into the business, take a small fraction out occasionally but for the most part just focus on long term growth. We ended up coming across a friend/acquittance that really wanted a house (a specific house that was for sale). We ended up purchasing it(110K... he helped fund the down payment but is self employed and could not convince the bank to fund the purchase) and we put him in a 3 yr $1500/mo lease. You can imagine the cash flow on that is amazing. So now we have some extra cash flow we weren't expecting and another duplex came up for auction down the street from my house. We bought it for 35K prior to it going to auction (1 current tenant who maintained it). It needed very little work so we were able to fill the open unit for $600/mo.

All this to say... We went from forming an LLC with a 3-plex and a duplex in February of 2017 to having a million dollar investor and currently sitting on 45 units. We have 3; single family homes, 3; duplexes, 2; triplexes, a 4-plex, 2; 5-unit buildings, a 6 unit building and a 10 unit building.

If you can imagine being a funeral director and a landlord for 45 units (fortunately I have a CPA partner who can handle the books and the occasional tenant outreach)

Ryan(the CPA) and myself are thankful to BP for the forums, the podcasts etc. because a large part of our success has been because of the systems we've been able to learn about and soak up from other investors here on BP. At some point maybe we'll get to share our story and help others who are in the same situation we were and want to grow as quickly as we've been privileged to grow.

Andy Pfleger

Alton Illinois (look Alton up on season 3 of Hulu's Small Business Revolution)

Andrew Pfleger

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