Todays my 30th birthday, so I figured I’d write a success story and include failures on here:
I got started in 2013 and bought 2 properties. One was a rental fixer upper that I got in way over my head on. The property was an hour away and I was way too busy with my other businesses to manage it properly. The flip didn’t go smoothly and my first tenants that I put into my very first property I ended up having to evict a few months into the lease. They also trashed the place, so I had to dump another 5k in it to get it back to the original condition. Not a great way to start out in real estate! I had been on BP previous to finding that deal and was still learning. That first rehab and tenant nightmare taught me some valuable lessons.. My next tenants have been there ever since and I’ve gained 100k in equity since I bought it though, so it worked out.
In 2014 I didn’t do any business involving real estate. I was still reading and learning however, and still was very much interested. I had 2 other businesses going at the time that were consuming me. I was putting in 12+ hour days in every day of the week. This got to be too much and I wanted to shift to doing more deals. In 2015 I hired someone for one of my businesses that took over most of the work. I was able to get a few deals done in 2015 and made 50k on one wholesale which was the win for that year.
In 2016 I decided I was going to start crushing in RE. Well it’s not always a great idea to jump in head first without a solid plan. I was too gung ho and I ended up partnering with the wrong guy. I jumped into 6 deals with the guy within a 6 month time period. I lost 45K on 3, made 4k on a year long meth house headache of a flip, and am still chasing a large chunk of money on the other two a year and a half later. BE CAREFUL WHO YOU PARTNER WITH. There’s so many shady people in the business.. I also had a lot of successful deals in 2016, including multiple wholesales, flips, multis, and adding rental units to my portfolio.
2017 is here and I got out of one of my businesses earlier this year that was really time consuming. The other business (vending machines) is still kicking and pretty passive for me, so I still have that going. This has allowed me to focus all my energy on growing my RE business. So far I’ve done a total of 14 deals in 2017, which is a mix of wholesales, flips, and adding rentals. 2017 has been my most active year yet and I hope to crush it 10X harder moving forward. I would say at the moment I’m mostly focused on growing the wholesale side of things, but will continue to flip and buy rentals. I have 3 rehabs and a few wholesales in the mix currently. My goal is to be one of the top wholesalers in the Denver CO market and have 100 deals under my belt within a year. Might be a little ambitious, but I think it’s doable. My focus in scaling is through systems, marketing, and building a great team. There has been a lot of failure and successes over the past 4 years, but I will keep pushing and grinding.
If you can learn anything from my story I would say to take major action, but be calculated with your decisions. If you are not sure about someone or something, bring in outside help or do thorough research before making decisions on whether to get into certain properties or do business with people you don’t know. MIH
