19 properties in 19 months

[John Hagen]

I’m not usually the one to post on here about our success, I usually leave that to my business partner @Michael Beeman. I usually ask questions to mine the community knowledge to solve problem we are facing. That said we just closed on our 19th property yesterday and this is the close of our 19th month in business.

We started the 1st of now 5 companies last spring by pooling some money and forming an LLC. We started with a total of $50,000 from 3 partners and a promise of an additional $30,000 from one of the partners. I think some of the keys to our growth was the initial cash, a plan to grow not just play catch up as we grow, and willingness to bring on new partners as we grow.

We also caught a lot of lucky breaks along the way like: a very friendly banker, access to private loans from partners and family, baby booms looking to move out of state and off load property at cost. But the most important lucky break we caught was finding a very talented contractor who saw a future with us and a willingness to make an investment of time and sweat in us to grow our business so his business could grow. He is now an equity partners in 7 of our properties. We are all fans of the saying “the harder I work the luckier I get” while true, sometimes you just get lucky when people and opportunities pass your way.

While I say we’ve gotten lucky, hard work has played a role, while we have a friendly banker it took work to make him love us, and it took a few project done right to get on the radar for boomers to call us up to off load their properties. If you talked to me last summer when I was sanding glue off wood stairs I would have told you this is going to be a long hard haul, but that hard work opened a lot of doors rather quickly.

Open doors are not always enough, you have to be willing to walk through them. In our partnership, I’m the methodical one, I do the books, run the backend like building and implementing the company SOPs. @Michael Beeman is the one looking at properties, talking to sellers, and even getting his real-estate license to help find more deals. I’m not one to sit on an opportunity for very long and analyze it to death but Mike sees and opportunity and just lunges for it. For Example on a Saturday morning this past winter Mike and I went and looked at a 10 unit building, we walked through it went to sit down with the seller and all of a sudden to my horror I hear Mike say “If I give you $500 right now can we buy it for asking price”.As it turns out the seller got another asking price offer that afternoon but he already took our money. That property is now fully rented out, cash flowing more than $2,000 a month and led to the purchase of another building and my partners new home.

Everybody has their story of success and their advise for how to make it work, in this business there are many paths to success.Our current and hopefully future success has been built on team work, hard work and proper planning for future expansions.