College Coach with 10 “Doors” Renting By the Room to Students

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie, episode number 83.

Ryan:
What I found works really well is if I can fill a house all at one time with a group that already wants to live together. So the duplex I own, each side is three bedrooms, so if I can get a group of three that, “Hey, we’re three buds, we want to live together here,” that makes it a lot easier.

Ashley:
My name is Ashley Kehr, and I am here with Tony Robinson. Hello, Tony. Welcome to the show.

Tony:
It is a bash. We’ve been spending the last like half hour just shooting the breeze and forgot that we had to record an intro for the podcast.

Ashley:
I know. But we had such a great guest today, Ryan. We talked with him for over an hour and we could have dug in so much more. And then just from things he said, we started talking about our own personal business experiences and brainstormed some ideas and what we have going on. That was a lot of fun.

Tony:
Today’s guest was great. Like you said, the interview went long, but it’s because it was so good. We had to skip some segments because we were just enjoying the conversation so much. But Ryan is as a coach from… Where’s he at? He’s in-

Ashley:
Hastings, Nebraska?

Tony:
Hastings, Nebraska. And he’s talking about how he’s using the renting by the room strategy to rent to college students in his town and how he’s making a killing doing it.

Ashley:
And he just talks about being a great landlord too, how to have the tenants respect you and you respect them and how to give a great experience all around when you’re self-managing. So I thought that was something really important that not everyone always talks about, is the customer service experience, but also where to draw the fine line so that you’re not overrun by your residents in running the property. Ryan gave some great tips today, also on how he did commercial financing on his first two deals.
A lot of people go towards that residential, their first couple, and it was very interesting. He got one property 100% financed for the purchase price. So definitely if you’re looking to finance a property and that’s where you’re stuck right now, this is a great episode to listen to too.

Tony:
The last thing, I want to make sure that the listeners really pay attention when Ryan talks about the deal that didn’t go well for him and how he used that as more so a motivation to move forward as opposed to the thing that stopped him from becoming a real estate investor. So make sure you’re paying attention when he talks about that, that deal going wrong.

Ashley:
Let’s bring Ryan onto the show.

Tony:
Ryan, welcome to the podcast. So excited to have you on today, brother. Before we dive into your story, your real estate investing journey, do share with the listeners a little bit about yourself, who you are and how you came to be on the podcast with us today.

Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been a big fan of all the podcasts on BiggerPockets, so I’m really excited to be here. I guess I’ve been actively investing in real estate for three years now. I’m a college coach in Nebraska in a small town, and had done the house hacking thing in my past. I started talking to some of my athletes and saw what they were paying in rent and some of the conditions they were living in, and I thought, “Well, I can do a better job than that,” and jumped in. Primarily, I rent to students now. I do a lot of renting by the room, and I found it to be a really rewarding experience and enjoy it quite a bit.

Tony:
That’s awesome.

Ashley:
I have to ask, are most of these on your team?

Ryan:
Some of them are on other teams, but I leverage the fact that I work at a college and I have access to a lot of kids that are looking for a place to live.

Tony:
If the kids don’t pay their rent, do you just bench them like, “No game for you today, you didn’t pay rent on time”?

Ryan:
Well, yeah. It would be pretty hard to not pay your coach. Tony brings up an interesting thing, I make sure that I tell these kids, “This is a business. This is a business relationship we have when it comes to the tenant-landlord relationship, and it’s completely different than our coach athlete-relationship.”

Tony:
That’s interesting. So you said that you have a lot of students you’re renting by the room. I’m always super intrigued, Ryan, by the rent by the room approach, because you’ve got a lot of different personalities sharing a space. So I’m curious, how do you manage the rent by the room, both from, who pays utilities? Are you providing like toilet paper and paper towels or are they doing that on themselves? And then, how do you make sure that there’s just peace in the house with people like that?

Ryan:
Yeah. And those are really good questions and those are some of the things that I’ve had to work through a little bit. What I’ve found works really well is, if I can fill a house all at one time with a group that already wants to live together. The duplex I own each side is three bedrooms, so if I can get a group of three that, “Hey, we’re three buds. We want to live together here,” that makes it a lot easier. It’s a little harder if I’ve got two hold overs from the previous year and they’re looking for a third. I make sure that I communicate with them. I make sure that I let a prospective tenant meet the existing tenants and check and see if there’s any red flags, or somebody who’s like, “Ah, hey Ryan, this new kid you got, I’m really worried. I know they’re a big partier or I know they’re this.”
Those are good things for me to know and it could cause some harmony issues in the house. I tell them they’re in charge. I don’t pay any utilities. They handle trash. Here where I’m at, it’s a really nice. The town I’m in, it’s called Hastings, Hastings Utilities bundles all your utilities into one bill. So you don’t get a separate electric, a separate water, a separate gas, it comes as one bill and they just split that up. I leave that up to them. I make sure they go over and put the property in their name.
I do make them get trash, that’s one of the things I learned is that college kids don’t always know that you have to get trash service, you can’t just leave trash on the curb and expect someone to come get it, or just decide that you’re going to go throw it in the college dumpsters all the time. Eventually, you’ll get caught and I don’t want that coming back on me, but we make them do that. And yeah, they’re usually pretty good. In the duplex, they’ll come up with ways like, “Hey, if one of us gets internet, we can split it six ways.” I haven’t really run into any problems with that.
But you’re exactly right, just making sure that either they’ve got an existing relationship or they’re comfortable living together.

Tony:
I love that approach. And like I said, I’m always intrigued by the room approach because you’re able to really maximize your revenue more than if you were just renting the entire place. I get a lot of questions right here, a lot of questions around how you manage that relational part of the rent by the room. Ryan, I want to take it back a little bit, because you said that you’ve been investing for three years now. Is that when you started at the university or had you been at the university in this coaching position for a long time and one day it just dawned on you that this might be a great additional source of revenue for you? I guess walk us through the journey you went through to become a real estate investor.

Ryan:
Yeah. If I can go back even a little further, it was always something I was interested in. Right after college, I graduated in 1998, I was still living in a college house with four other guys and I decided I wanted to collect that equity myself, and so I bought my first house and house hacked. I was used to living with roommates and continued that and found it was a great experience. I ended up then in end of 2005, end of 2006, now here’s a financial mistake, I bought the absolute most house for your money, but actually more than I qualified for it. And remember back then, there were not the limits on what you could buy, and I did a no-document loan.
I went in, I said, “Look, I want to buy this house.” The house was about 280K, and I said, “How much money do I need to make to qualify for this house?” They came back with a number and I said, “Wow, that’s exactly how much I make. Perfect.” And it was significantly more than I should have qualified for, but I knew I was going to house hack, I was going to rent the rooms out. I made all my payments, but what happened was I had my other house under contract with a potential buyer and she backed out the day of closing.

Ashley:
Oh my gosh.

Ryan:
I got to keep $500 earnest money, but now here I am with a house I can’t afford in addition to another house, I’m making payments and I’m starting to stress. And somebody suggested, “Maybe you should rent it out.” At that time, to be honest with you, I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know what the steps were. You have the usual, “Oh, don’t be a landlord. They’ll ruin your house. They’ll never pay rent.” And I listened to that advice. I ended up selling my house like six months later. And so I was making two house payments. The deposit on my new house was going to be the money from my old house, so I went in, had to get another loan to cover that. So now I’m completely leveraged 100% on the new house, ended up getting it sold for a loss, worked out reasonably okay for the situation. But it’s like, “Okay, I’m not doing that again.”
In 2013, I got hired at the college. I moved up here. I kept my original house and was renting it out. I lived in an apartment for about a year and a half. And then in 2015, 2016 sold my house in Lincoln, which is about an hour and a half from here, and bought a house here in Hastings that was well within my price range. At that point, I saw how I was making money renting my house in Lincoln. It’s like, “Okay, I kind of want to do this.” But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon BiggerPockets and got a little more confidence in how to do it and how to do it right.

Ashley:
So Ryan, from there, how did it look like when you bought your first rental in a college town and doing the rent by the room and how did you even get that idea? Is it just because that was standard in the college town, or is that something you learned from maybe a mentor or even on BiggerPockets?

Ryan:
No, I would say standard in the town is to rent a house for a set rental amount. And to be honest, talking with some of the kids on my team, I coach track and field, so I have a large group of both men and women, and hearing the conditions that they live in, hearing that, “Hey, our sink has been overflowing for three months and no one fixes it. Hey, we pay cash to our landlord. We meet him at McDonald’s once a week and hand over cash in the parking lot.” I’m like, “That sounds really sketchy.” And just hearing this stuff that these kids are doing, and I started asking them, “Hey, how much are you paying for rent for this place?” And they’re “Well, there’s three of us there, we’re paying $1,000.”
And I’m like, “I looked at that house, it’s $50,000 and it’s about to fall down. You’re getting ripped off.” So I met with a realtor and started looking at houses, and I was really looking almost exclusively at cash flow. So the first few places I looked at were bad, in need of a lot of work, because initially you look them up online, you’re, “Hey, here’s a house for 60,000. I could rent it out for this.” And then you go in, it’s like, “I wouldn’t live here. There’s no way. I would not feel good about my athletes living here.” And at that point I don’t really know what to do to fix it up, that’s not really my forte.
And so eventually, I came across a side-by-side two story duplex, I think they were asking 108 and it had been partially refurbished, I walked in and I said, “Okay, this is reasonable. There’s no major structural issues.” It didn’t have knob and tube wiring, which a lot of the houses I looked at did, and I said, “Okay, I can do some of the basic repairs that still need to be done and get this rented out.” So I put it under contract in May of 2018 and then spent the summer rehabbing it ready for August. The funny thing was, right before closing, I was gone for 10 days for outdoor nationals and my realtor calls me and said, “Hey, do you have an inspection lined up? We have 10 days.”
And I said, “Oh, I need to do that? Okay.” So here I am, we’re stopped at a charter bus getting lunch somewhere in Mississippi, and I am just frantically searching and calling people, “Hey, can I get a home inspection?” “Okay. When do you need it?” “Tomorrow.” So finally, I found somebody, I had to pay them a little extra, but got them to go in there and do that. And so it was just a live and learn experience.

Ashley:
Getting the home inspection, is that something you typically do now going forward? And would you recommend that to our rookies?

Ryan:
Absolutely. The person I found, my realtor cautioned me and said, “Hey, you might want to be careful with this guy because he’s super nitpicky, and we’ve seen deals fall apart.” And I said, “That’s what I want.” I want somebody that’ll show me everything that’s wrong, because I can live with certain things, and now I can live with a lot more. That just helps me check off, “Okay, these are things I need to fix,” but I would much rather have somebody that does that. And really, you’re going to spend three, four, five, $600 for a home inspection, it’s money well spent. On this property, the duplex that we’re talking about, I think he gave me a list of probably 15 items that he felt were really pressing. I took 10, I think that I thought were the biggest ones that I was the least comfortable with, given my realtor and said, “Ask if they’ll do these repairs.”
So they came back and said, “Ugh, that seems a lot. What if we did these six?” And I said, “Tell you what, you do these seven and we got a deal.” And so they did them. Those were seven less thing I had to do, and I bet it saved me $3,000.

Ashley:
All you have to do is ask. I mean, even if they said two things, you could have gotten something out of it.

Ryan:
I was happy with anything. I was like, “Okay, I’ll just throw this out there, and maybe I’ll get half of them,” and I got seven of the 10 done, so no problem.

Tony:
I’ve got to share something that my partner and I do because we love home inspections also because it is an opportunity for you as the buyer to… And do this in good faith, but to renegotiate with the seller and potentially get a lower cost. So what we typically do is when we have our inspections scheduled, we’ll send our handyman to go along with the inspector. So the inspector is pointing out all of these different things that are wrong with the property, our handyman is sitting there taking notes, and then we’ll get a bid from our handyman on what it’ll cost to get those repairs done.
And then we send that over to the seller and say, “Hey, here’s what’s going to cost us to fix all these things. Can you get a credit?” Gosh, I want to say we’ve been able to, out of the seven properties that we currently own that are short term rentals, I think three of them we’ve been able to use that strategy to get a reduction on the price. So I love inspections. I wanted to throw that in there as a tidbit for you and the listeners.

Ryan:
Yeah. Tony, that’s great. I actually, if you saw me there, I wrote that down. I have a regular handyman now and I was like, “That’s brilliant. I’m going to do that.” So thank you.

Ashley:
Let me ask you guys about… Tony, I know you’re making offers on property now. Ryan, are you looking to buy more currently?

Ryan:
I am. Yeah, my goal is to get one this spring or early this summer as everyone else is running into… I’ve had two I was going to look at that were gone within a day of when I was going to go look at them. I’m in a small market, so it’s a little tougher, but yeah, I’m actively looking.

Ashley:
What is your guys’ strategy right now with home inspections? Because a lot of times, I’m hearing that you’re putting in an offer, no inspection because you’re not going to get it if you ask for an inspection. Have you guys seen the same thing in your markets at all?

Ryan:
I have not. I know stuff is going fast, and stuff is going even in small town I am, is going over asking price, but I would have a hard time waving an inspection personally. I think in the current market, I would probably ask for some stuff, but if they came back and said, no, I would probably just say, “That’s fine.”

Tony:
We haven’t seen that in our markets either. Every offer that we’ve put in, we’ve included an inspection continuity as well. I think the only thing that we are seeing with the market being so hot is appraisal gaps. My people are really driving up prices knowing that the property’s not going to praise for it, so we’re seeing a lot more appraisal gaps than the waving of inspection contingencies.

Ryan:
Interesting. Yeah. I think probably I’m just buying just such dumps that even I don’t need an inspection, because I know there’s so many things wrong… Maybe that’s the different.

Tony:
That’s a good point too there, because we bought a property right now that we’re doing a rehab on, and this is our first short-term rental we’re doing the BRRRR strategy, and we still did the inspection, but everything he pointed out in the inspection report, it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter because we’re going to replace that anyway.” So if you know you’re going in and doing a full gut rehab, maybe the inspection isn’t as important.

Ryan:
Yeah. I looked at a duplex next to the one I own that I tried to buy off market and it would have been a full gut rehab. That might be the only situation where I might not get inspections because it’s like I’m going to replace everything anyway.

Ashley:
Yeah. So I think between what Ryan and Tony said is that if you’re going to do an inspection, if you don’t plan on doing a lot of repairs, it’s worth the money to get that inspection done, but if you’re going to gut the thing and take it apart anyways, what’s the point of getting an inspection? What I have done is I do have a walkthrough, like you guys have, or Tony, you have your contractor go through with the inspector. I’ve done it where I just say, “I’m not going to hold the contingency, I just want my contractor to at least go through it.” And then if there was, for some reason, major termite damage or extreme mold that I had somehow missed when I looked at the property, then I would just lose my $500 deposit and walk away from that. But right now, any offer I’m making, I’m not doing an inspection at all.

Ryan:
Tony and Ashley, if you don’t mind, when it comes to inspections, are there any deal breakers for either of you?

Ashley:
For me, it would be foundation issues because I wouldn’t know where to start yet and how to fix that. But I do know you can’t be afraid because there’s always the way to fix something, and maybe I could turn into the foundation expert and buy all the houses with foundation issues, but I guess I should say I don’t care to learn about that process of how that is handled and taken care of, I guess.

Tony:
Yeah. I wouldn’t say that there’s anything in an inspection that would me away. I think it’s just more so, will I get a discount that’s equal to the size of the problem that I’m given. So say that there is a foundation issue, as long as my general contractor says that he can fix it and that the cost that’s required to get it fixed still makes the deal work, then I think I’d be okay with it. Ryan, I want to go back to what you said there, because you had a rocky start to your investing career where you were super over-leveraged on this house, you ended up selling it at a loss. I think that’s the thing that scares so many people from getting started, is that they have this deal that goes badly. How did you not let that experience just stop you dead on your tracks? How did you persevere past that initial failure somewhat to still say, “Real estate investing is what I want to do”?

Ryan:
I think it was because I saw the potential and I accepted the fact that I made mistakes. The financial loss wasn’t because of real estate itself, it was because I made some bad decisions, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I had seen benefits from, like I said, just from simply house hacking before I had any idea what house hacking was. I saw that, “Hey, I can reduce my monthly mortgage payment, I can build equity. I can do these things if I have a good plan, if I have good systems in place.” And so that, I think some trial and error and some mistakes and some self-examination allowed me to be a little more confident going into, when I actually was going to take the step from house hacking to actually buy and hold rental.

Ashley:
I want to talk a little bit about property management for these. So had would said family and friends had told you that don’t be a landlord. So how are you handling the property management? Are you doing it yourself? Are you outsourcing? Any kind of software? Especially rent by the room because that’s a very unique niche. So can you explain that for us?

Ryan:
Yeah. I self-manage my properties. I do use Cozy, which is great. Again, I’m one of the few in town that doesn’t collect cash and use this software, and I’ll get my kids like, “Can I just Venmo you my money?” “No, that’s a little sketchy, we’re going to do things the right way.” I want to stay legal with the government and record my income when I pay taxes. And honestly, that’s why a lot of the landlords in town want cash. They tell these kids, “We don’t want checks, we don’t want deposits, we want cash.” Yikes. Yeah, I started doing everything myself. I went in, when I was working YouTube hard learning how to do a lot of different things, and I had done some upkeep on houses I’d own. I knew how to change out light switches and electrical fixtures and basic painting and those kinds of things.
But plumbing is something that I don’t want anything to do other than I’ll put a new faucet in or something. Here’s a plumbing horror story for you. In this duplex, it was June after I had bought it. And one of our big fundraisers for the track team is we get all of our incoming freshmen come into town and we’d run a fireworks stand. It’s a nice fundraiser, pays for uniforms and that kind of stuff. And so I thought, “Well, this is great. I can have the kids stay at this duplex that I am about 95% done with renovations. It’s nice. They’ll have fun. I got one side the women can stay on, one side the men can stay on. They’ll have a lot of fun.”
The day before the kids arrived, I was like, “I’m going to change out the fixture, the handle, on the shower on the south side of the duplex.” And I had done that at my house and no problem. So I’m up there and it’s probably 10 o’clock at night. I take it off, it falls apart and water is coming out full blast like a fire hose. I don’t have a shower curtain. It is going everywhere in the bathroom.

Ashley:
Oh no.

Ryan:
I tried to throw something over it, it is coming out with such force I can’t stop it. So I go downstairs, find the water shut off. There are probably a dozen different water shutoffs down there, and I’m trying everything, none of it turns the main, I can’t figure out where the main is. And I go upstairs and I had replaced the lighting fixture in the kitchen, which is directly below this bathroom. The lighting fixture I replaced is now full of water because it’s leaking through the floor. At this point, I’m about to grab my cell phone. I’m just going to have to call any plumber that will answer their phone and I will give you a blank check, you’ve got to stop this because I’m going to destroy this house I just bought.
Before I call, I decide, “You know what, let me try the other side of the duplex.” And the main water shut off for the south side of the duplex was on the north side of the duplex in the basement over. Yeah, weird. And so I did get it shut off. I was able to go clean up the mess I made, turn off the main power, drain the water out. We were able to fix it with minimal damage, but you try to fix things, it’s stuff you don’t know and you just run into mistakes that. And so I have since had plumbers repair the plumbing so that there is a logical water shut off on each side now. But yeah, that was almost the moment of, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this?”

Ashley:
I have a story to share real quick along the water lines, I had purchased a house and I had new tenants move in. Anytime I purchase a property and have tenants come in right away, I feel there’s always that first stuff that comes up because nobody has lived there except the past owner. And so I get a text and it was, “911, Niagara Falls in here.”

Ryan:
Oh no.

Ashley:
So I call the lady, she’s freaking out that water is pouring into the basement, it’s not even raining. Luckily, my contractor was right in the area because this was maybe nine o’clock at night and he goes there. And what happened was they had the hose, the faucet, the shutoff on the hose, outside that faucet was broke, but the previous owners had left one of the sprayers on it so water doesn’t come out unless you take the sprayer off. Well, they took the sprayer off and just let the hose run, and it was aimed towards the basement and the water from the hose was just coming into the basement and it started coming down the walls in there. It was nine o’clock at night so it’d been going on for hours and hours and hours. And my contractor was so mad, he avoided doing a remodel there because he didn’t want to have to deal with these people.
But it was their own fault, how could they not know that they left it running and going on? Or at least called to say “Hey, we can’t get the water shut off, can you come now?” “Yeah, it’s just crazy.”

Tony:
Ryan, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this because you bring up a good point. And I think this is something that a lot of new investors, they struggle with, or not struggle with, but they have to make the decision of, “What work do I do myself? What work do I hire out?” So I guess two questions for you. First, were you a super handy person before you became a landlord? And if you weren’t, how did you go about educating yourself on which task you would do and wouldn’t do?

Ryan:
Yeah. Tony, that’s a good question. I would say I was moderately handy and moderately overconfident, but I usually look at things like, “Yeah, I can do that.” I watched this YouTube video, it took that person 30 minutes, so that’s fine. Four hours later and I’m still working on it. But yeah, early on, I think financial considerations had me doing most of the work. There were very few things I hired out. I was not confident hiring contractors. Listening to all the BiggerPockets podcasts, you hear time and time again, “Contractors are so hard to find, they’re not reliable. This person ripped me off.”
And so I was like, “Oh my gosh, how do I know? I don’t have contacts in that world.” I own two properties now, two rental properties. I’ve made more contacts. I’ve got a great plumber that I work with, I’ve got an electrician, I’ve got a general contractor that I work with, I’ve got a handyman that I work. And I’ve got more reserves now. I’m more confident in hiring things out where it’s like, “Yeah, I could do this myself, but why not just pay somebody that can do it faster and do it right so I’m not trial and erroring my way through it?”
And there are some things that I’ll just do myself because honestly, it’s not that hard, I’ve done it before. I look and it’s like, “That’s pretty easy.” But at this point, rather than me destroying something that I don’t know what I’m doing, I’d much rather just hire it out.” But I think totally, newbies should be okay to try to do some things themselves. And I think I’m much handier now three years later than I was because I’ve put in backsplash, I’ve replaced drywall, I’ve done basic electrical stuff that doesn’t require a certified electrician, I’ve changed kitchen countertops and put it in sinks and done stuff.
Certain things, I’m going to hire somebody to do carpet. It’s a couple hundred bucks and it’s a pain in the butt. I don’t have the tools to do that. You can pick up quite a bit on YouTube, I will say. Here’s another story for you. The most recent house I bought, I changed a bunch of the windows. It’s a brick house and there’s some of the old original 1940s wood windows. And you watch a YouTube video and they show you, “Okay, you take out the window, slide a new pocket window in, screw it in, and you’re good to go.” So I go over this summer and I strip it down. I take apart the window and I’m left with this big gaping brick hole. And I’m like, “Wow, none of this was in the video. There is nowhere to slide this window in. Why are there pieces of rebar sticking out of the bricks? What do I do?”
And so I ended up just tarping up the hole. No one lived there. I’m not a slumlord. I ended up tarping up the hole and I called the contractor I worked with, and he was on a job. And I said, “Dave, if you get a chance tomorrow morning, can you just swing by look at this, take 15 minutes, tell me what I need to do. I think I know what to do, but I don’t want to do this wrong.” And so he came over and just showed me, “Hey, you can cut this rebar out. You can construct a new window frame for your pocket window. You’re going to need a hammer drill. You need masonry screws. Here’s what you’re going to do. And then you put the window in, and then you rebuild around that.” And I said, “Okay.”
But it was good just to have someone tell me, “Hey, you’re on the right track,” as opposed to, “Hey, I’ll just figure this out and hopefully there’s not a big leak in the house.” Yeah, it was funny. I just remember sitting there seeing this hole in the house and like, “What did I do? Why did I do this myself?”

Tony:
I love how you have so many horror stories of things going wrong in your properties because we’re either really motivating the audience or we’re scaring the crap out of them right now, so we’ll see what happens. But Ryan, your story brings up a really good point of discussion for folks that want to get into investing. There’s this concept, and I encourage everybody to read the book, it’s called the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, we’ve talked about it on the show before. But the big premise of that book is that as you start to build your business, you want to focus from working in your business to working on your business. And for the folks that are listening, when you first start out, if it makes sense.
If you have the time, when you don’t want to spend the money to hire those things out, you should be the person in there doing the work. But as you get to five units, 10 units, 20 units, you have to ask yourself, “Is that scalable?” And the earlier you can start putting the systems, the processes, the standard operating procedures in place of how these different things get done within your business, the easier it will be for you to pass those things off as you start to scale. We’ve grown our portfolio quite a bit in the last year, and what we’re really trying to focus on right now is, how do we start bringing in other folks to do some of the work that we’re doing?
I love the fact that you were super hands on, but I’m just pointing out that as you start to scale, it’s good to have that in the back of your mind of, “How do I start passing some of these things off?”

Ashley:
And you talked about the fear of hiring contractors and everything like that. And that was for me too, I didn’t take on big jobs at first either because I didn’t know who to hire, who to talk to. And actually, on BiggerPockets on the Facebook and Instagram, they’ve been having James Dainard on, he’s been an investor from Seattle, Washington and he’s been doing Lives every week and they’re all about construction rehab based. And the last one that I watched, he did it about hiring contractors and how to screen them. And he goes into pulling up their bond, looking at how long they’ve had their bond for, is there any litigation about them? What questions to ask them? His Instagram, I think is @jdain, D-A-I-N, flips.
And then on BiggerPockets, you can watch the lives that he does all about that. And so if you are someone that wants to start outsourcing the rehab and getting contractors, this was a great BiggerPockets series to watch for sure.

Ryan:
Yeah. And I’ll say to the rookies, the newbies out there, as you start working with contractors, it does get easier, and you’ll start getting recommendations, you’ll start figuring out who you’re comfortable with. And you’ll start getting to the point where you can ask one contractor, “Hey, what do you think about this? Would you mind taking a look at it like I did with the window there?” Or, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this myself.” And they’ll give you advice like, “Oh yeah, that’s actually a pretty easy job.” Or, “Are you sure you want to do that?” I know a guy that I had somebody do kitchen backsplash for me, I was going to do it myself. And the plumbing company I work with, the owner goes, “Hey, I’ve got a guy that does all that. He’ll put that in for 100 bucks for you.”
And I said, “Oh, absolutely. 100 bucks is well worth it. It would take me well over a day, I would probably have to go buy a wet saw or rent one. Yeah, why would I not do that?” And if I wouldn’t have mentioned it, I never would’ve got that. And so I’m a lot more comfortable now talking to people and asking for advice and asking for recommendations than I was when I first started.

Ashley:
Ryan, how are you handling your maintenance requests? When there’s an actual issue, do your students just call you? Or how does that work?

Ryan:
I’m at the point now where they just call or text me. And what Tony said earlier is I think where I’m nearing, I do all the lawn work myself and those kinds of things. And I think I could probably handle one more property. In my job, I work about 60, 80 hours a week for nine months out of the year. My June and July, I work about 10 hours a week in my job. So I can do a lot of this stuff then, but when I get to the point where I’ve got three, four, five properties, I’m not even going to be able to keep up with the yard work let alone maintenance requests. And so I’m starting to get the pieces in place, I’ve got a handyman that does a really good job that I work with.
And I need to probably start looking at maybe Stessa or some other software to handle some of the other things I’m doing now. And maybe come up with a good app to do maintenance request, and get it away from, “Hey, just call.”

Ashley:
Yeah. Some really great ones for you to look into are Buildium, RentRedi, and then Stessa as your asset management there, you can’t really do maintenance requests or anything like that through it, but those are definitely great. But there’s a bunch of free ones out there now, property management software. I just saw another one the other day, I can’t think of what the name was, but it seems like every day there’s more and more coming out for property management, the different kinds of software and doing the paying online, the maintenance requests, all of that.

Ryan:
I’ve had in three years, I’ve had one, 3:00 AM phone call for a toilet that was overflowing. I really have very minimal maintenance requests. We fixed up our properties at a high level so we weren’t going to have to deal with a lot of ticky-tacky stuff. And I talked to my athletes and other students that are living there and tell them not everything’s an emergency. If a light bulb burns out, it’s not an emergency. If there’s water, if there’s gas, if there’s fire, call 911, call me, immediately to get these things fixed. But a lot of things, if it’s just something like, “Hey, this door is sticking,” it’s something that doesn’t need to get done immediately, but I will fix it for you.
And I try to make sure that I get back to my tenants within a day and I try to get repairs done within a week, so they see that I’m responsive and I do care. And I want them to make sure that they are reporting things. I don’t want things to, “Oh, hey, that fosse has been dripping for three months.” And now there’s mold, now, there’s all kinds of damage.

Ashley:
TurboTenant was the other free property management software. And of course, they have upgrades and stuff you can add onto, but look at that too. So you just talked about what the tenants should be responsible for and how they notify you. What do your leases look like? And what are some things that rookies should definitely put into their leases? One thing I’ve seen that’s become more common is that if the toilet’s plugged, that’s on you, call your own plumber as the resident because when I gave you the house, the toilet was working, it was not plugged. So what are some things that you put into your lease so that tenants know what to expect as a tenant of that residence?

Ryan:
Ashley, I actually one of the first things I did was I became a BiggerPockets Pro member and got access to the state specific leases. And so I’ve got the lease for Nebraska, I think is about 19 pages long. And so I went through and tweaked it a little bit to make it specific to rent by the room and to go through some of the things you mentioned. I do have in there that I’m responsible for the upkeep and the maintenance of the property, but if a light bulb burns out, you’re responsible for that. If you cause damage, you can call me, I’ll get it fixed, but the bill’s going to come to you in those situations. And so, yeah, I think just be as thorough as possible.
And really to tell you the truth, the leases on the BiggerPockets site if you’re a pro member, are actually really good. And I sit down with each tenant, and it’s boring, but I go step by step through the lease with them and make sure they understand, make sure they initial each page. I will not just give it to them, let them sign it and initial it because I’ve had once or twice where something comes back and it’s like, “No, don’t you remember in the lease when we went through that on page six, item 14, right here, it states this is the case.” But the other thing is I try to be accommodating to my tenant. I’ve had tenants, and you got to remember when you’re renting to college students, most of the time they haven’t lived on their own. They haven’t been responsible for themselves.
I’ve had tenants call in like, “Hey, a light bulb burned out.” And I said, “Okay, just go to Walmart, go to Menards, which is a Midwest Home Depot, or Lowe’s, get a light bulb, put it in.” “I don’t know how. What kind of light bulb?” And I said, “Okay, that’s okay. You don’t know all, I’ll go this first time. I’ll go there cheap, I’ll go get you one, I’ll teach you how to change the light bulb, but now you know.” And usually they’re thankful. Usually they’re like, “Oh, thanks. I didn’t want to break anything. I didn’t know how to do that.” And we forget sometimes that somebody’s got to teach you at some point how to change a light bulb. Somebody’s got to teach you some of this, has to teach you that, yes, you have to pay to have somebody pick up your trash.

Ashley:
Ryan, talking about these students moving in, what is your screening process? Because as you said, this is their first time usually living on their own, are you having parents as co-signers? How do you vet them and hold them accountable?

Ryan:
Yeah. That’s a little trick. When you’re doing this, sometimes they have lived somewhere else off campus and you can check previous references, but in those situations, it can be tough. One, was the landlord that was the previous landlord any good? And I’ve mentioned that’s a problem in our town. We have a lot of people that are slumlords or they were a trouble tenant and their previous landlord just wants to get rid of them and we’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, they were great. They never did anything wrong.” But a lot of mine are kids, it is their very first time living on their own. They’ve gone from parents’ house to the dorms to now this is their first place.
So yeah, you can have parent co-signers, you can require larger security deposits within state guidelines. I think parent co-signers is a smart thing to do. And to be honest with you, it’s not something I always do. I probably should make that a standard operating procedure. I’ve had no problems so far. Some of it is I’m in a unique situation where as a lot of these kids coach, I have access, I know their financial situations, I know for sure what jobs they have and those kinds of things. They’re probably not going to not pay me. But I think those are things that you do have to be careful about. And I would be much, much more thorough on my vetting process if I wasn’t renting to people I already had existing relationships with, which probably is going to come back to bite me at some point.

Ashley:
Ryan, I’ve been very curious of this and I haven’t asked anyone, I don’t know that many people doing the student rentals, but what happened during COVID? Did the students all go back home? Did they keep paying? Did you let them out of their lease early? What did that look like?

Ryan:
That’s a good question because that did impact me. Our school shut down, I think like everybody else’s, it was about mid-March, it was spring break. I was actually down recruiting in the Phoenix area, and I was meeting with kids at Starbucks and it was like, “Oh, businesses are shutting down all around me.” I actually went up, one of the end of spring break, my brother who coaches with me, and I usually go to Vegas for a couple of days. And so I drove from Phoenix to Vegas, he flew in, and we were first day in the hotel and we get an email, “Vegas is closing, get out.” And it was like, “Oh, wow. Okay.”
And I remember it was the same day, I got an email from the school and all the faculty were CC’d on it. It was basically the athletes like, “Don’t come back from spring break, we’re going 100% online.” So I called all my athletes, was communicating like, “Hey, the season’s been canceled, here’s what’s going on.” I had now my tenants like, “Hey, what’s going on? I said, “Here’s the deal, technically your lease runs through the end of May, but I’m willing to work with you. What is your plan?” And they said, “Well, right now,” most of them, “I’ve got jobs in town. Right now, I’m going to stay here. I’m just going to go online. I’d much rather be here than going back to,” whatever state they’re from.

Ashley:
Stay with their parents.

Ryan:
Yeah. And so we kept it going and I stayed in touch with them and they asked me, “Would it be okay if we left at the end of April? Our jobs are closing, everything’s closing down.” And I said, “Yes. I’ll tell you what, if you guys, those of you that are underclassmen, do you want to come back next year? What we’ll do, we’ll modify the lease. So instead of running through May, it’ll run through the end of April. And then if you re-sign with me for next year,” I do nine or 10 month leases. I basically prorate August on moving day. So they’re basically nine and a half month leases, “if you sign for next year with the understanding in the extension, that if school is still shut down, I will not hold you to this lease. I’m not going to make you move back to Hastings if we’re online, and I’ll just figure out what to do.”
And so they really appreciated that, that they got the month of May off. I got basically everyone that was eligible to re-sign with me to come back in and I ate a month worth of rent. To me, it was the right thing to do. My reserves were high enough at that point that I could easily handle that. And I think I kept good relationships open through that process. I didn’t want to get in a situation where kids were mad that I was making them stay, because they could easily come back and say, “Well, there’s an eviction moratorium. I don’t have to pay rent.”

Ashley:
And then they just stay there for a whole another year for free.

Ryan:
Yeah. So I would much rather like, “Let’s all be friends here.” And it worked out. And one of the things I did, I had the second property, which I haven’t talked much about when I was rehabbing that, I was rehabbing that at a level of, “Hey, if we’re shut down, if I’m furloughed, I want to have it where this is a place I could move into. I could sell my primary home, I can move into this rental that’s sitting vacant, that is nice.” And that would allow my financial reserves to stretch from instead of being three to six months, to stretch to probably two years. And so that would give me a lot more options. And so I was rehabbing that second property with the idea, “Hey, worst case, if the world stays shut down for a long time, I’m going to move into this rental. And this is going to be my new home.”

Tony:
I love that you have a contingency in place in case things don’t go well. But it’s important because I think-

Ashley:
Yeah. An exit strategy.

Tony:
Right. And that’s always important to have side bar. The second property that I purchased as an investment, that’s turned out to be a bad deal for us, similar to the deal that you mentioned earlier. We bought a property that was in a flood zone. We knew that the cashflow wasn’t going to be great because flood insurance is expensive compared to regular homeowner’s insurance, but there was still enough meat on the bone. I think we’re going to cash for like 150 bucks a month or something like that. But for us, we want the experience, we want to move forward with it any way. So we bought the house, but we never realized that flood insurance premiums can go up. And that’s exactly what they did this year.
Our flood insurance premium went way up this year so now we’re losing, I think $100 a month on that property after our flood insurance premium went up, but we didn’t have a secondary exit strategy. We went in, our only thought was, “It’s going to sit it in there or leave it in there and we’ll be good,” but not thinking-

Ashley:
And once again, everybody, Tony has a property for sale if you want to buy it.

Ryan:
Yeah. Just ignore the flood zone.

Ashley:
If you pay in all cash, you don’t have to get insurance on it then, so cash first.

Ryan:
There you go. I plan all my finances around the fact that I will be 100% vacant, but I will get kids that will ask to stay because they’re working, they’re doing an internship and we just do a month by month, or we do when we extend the lease, we can do a 12 or 14 month lease that’ll carry over for the next year. I had two students last year that came to me and said, when I let them move out in April and said, “Hey, Ryan, would it be okay if I just paid rent so I don’t have to move all my stuff out.” I said, “Well, yeah, that’ll be okay.” So they just kept paying rent just because they really just didn’t want to go get a storage unit and move their stuff. And I will get kids every year that’ll do that. They’d just rather pay rents and keep their stuff there.
This year, I know I have out of the 10 bedrooms I have, I’ve got one kid that’s staying all summer, the others are all moving out. One was one of them that paid rent last year. So my guess is she might do the same thing again, but I’ve already got two kids that, “Hey, I want to just stay for a job. I live in the college zone departments. Do you have a place that I could move into for two months?” And so I’ve got a few of those that when somebody moves out, somebody else moves in right away and just pays summer rent. And sometimes I’ll charge them just the same. I charge $300 a month per bedroom. I’ll charge them the same rate, or sometimes they’ve got a weird like, “I need it for 50 days?”
And I’ll just say, “Hey, how about X amount of money? How about $500?” And they’ll do that. So I usually pick up around, I would say, 30 to 50% vacancy in the summer that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And to me, that’s extra money that goes into the business.

Tony:
That’s not a bad position to be in. I always assume that during the summer months, your vacancy would be really, really low, but constantly, you’re still keeping some level of folks in the bedrooms. Now, I want to talk about financing. So how have you financed your properties? Are you using like a HELOC? Was this cash you saved up? And the actual loan, are you doing like… I guess, what loan product are you using for these?

Ryan:
My first property, the duplex, what I did, I had a really bad Roth IRA I got when I was a teacher. It was one of those companies that comes in and does the sales pitch to teachers. And I’ve always spent an investor and I’m 22 years old and signed on and like, “Hey, look, there’s 6% fees on this.” And I had eventually stopped giving money to that Roth and done some other things, but it was just sitting there, so I cashed that out. And remember, you don’t get a tax penalty on the initial money you put into a Roth. So the early withdrawal penalty, 10% was just on the interest from that Roth. So I really didn’t have much of a tax hit on that.
And I had about 20,000 in there, and that ended up being my down payment on the first duplex. It was 104,000, so I think the down payment was 21 or something like that. I got 80% financing at a local bank here in town, just asked around and talked to them. And I actually ran a report on the BiggerPockets Calculator, put it in a nice binder, brought it in, dressed up nice, went to the bank and brought it in and turned in the report. And I remember the banker that I still use, looked it over and goes, “This is really good. You ran a really detailed report here. We’d be more than happy to do business with you.” And he kept asking-

Ashley:
Ryan, you got to stop talking so nerdy to us. I’m enjoying this too much, you know how you love the binders.

Ryan:
I know. But it was funny because he was an investor and he was like, “What software did you use? Where can I find…” So I actually showed him the BiggerPockets Calculators and he thought that was really cool. But so yeah, that worked out really well. On my second house I bought, it was basically a BRRRR. And when I bought that, I went in and ran the same report, put it in a nice binder again, it worked once, why won’t it work twice? And I came in and they lended me the full purchase price because they said that… I showed him that the after repair value was going to take it from around 80 to around 120 based on comps and what I was doing to the place. And they said, “Well, yeah, we’d be more than happy to loan out 80.”
They just wanted to see a timeframe, they wanted to be able to see it when the repairs were done, and loan me the full purchase value of it. At purchase, I put $0 into that deal.

Ashley:
Wow. That’s really interesting.

Ryan:
My terms on my duplex were five-year amortized over 20, at 5%. The house was 4%, same terms, but I just refinanced both in January, so I have them both in one loan now, I am paying 3.6%, five years amortized over 20. And I’m paying it back because my cash flow is really, really high. I’m paying it back at about a 13-year amortization schedule. So I’m building equity in there just in case when those five years are up what happens with rates that I’m going to have a lot more options there.

Tony:
What made you go with the commercial loan over like a personal loan in your own name?

Ryan:
To be honest, it was so much easier.

Ashley:
It’s my answer too.

Ryan:
Yeah. The interest rates are a little higher, but I’ve found that the closing costs seem to be a little bit lower. And it’s honestly like little handshake deals. When I bought my house, my personal house here in town, you guys know how it is, they keep you coming back, “Hey, wait, we need this document and we need two years tax return. Oh wait, can we get a third year? Hey, will you show us your pay stub from 1985?” And it’s just like, “Why?”

Tony:
I know, Ashley, I know you’re a big advocate of the commercial loans as well. One other quick point, I also love Ryan that you went with a local bank to get the lending. My first two investments were also with local banks. They funded not only 100% of the purchase, but also 100% of the rehab. So I was like almost $0 out of pocket for my first two investment property. So just a word of advice to the listeners is that if you go with a local more regional banks, you can walk in, shake hands with people, build that relationship. And the lending options tend to be a little bit more flexible. And I think you’re a great example of that, Ryan.

Ryan:
Yeah. What I’m excited about is one of my really good friends talks to me about this. And I explained to him what I’m doing. He was one of the, I would say, skeptic of being a landlord at first. And when I start talking to him about the numbers, he’s gotten more and more interested. And this individual has basically said, “Hey, if I had some money to loan, I don’t want to do any of the work or be a landlord, but can I get in on the profits?” And we talked about, and this guy is good for this. And he’s basically said, “I’ve got up to $200,000 in private money that he’ll loan me at 5% interest only.” And so I’m looking for a property. What I’m probably going to do on the next one is buy it cash with a private money loan.
I like to do the rehab to bring up the value and then go in and refinance it a year later, because if I’m paying him 5% interest only, that’s a pretty great deal.

Ashley:
Yeah. And that’s even easier.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Ashley:
That’s awesome. Congratulations on finding that money partner.

Ryan:
Yeah. Thank you.

Ashley:
Can you go through real quick, what the numbers actually look like on one of your properties? What are you bringing in rent? What are your expenses, your mortgage payment and the good stuff, what’s the cashflow?

Ryan:
Right. Well, let’s look at, I’ll do the duplex because we’ve talked about that one the most. So when I bought it was two bedrooms, two baths on each side. Part of my version was now it’s three bedrooms on each side, one side has two baths. The other still has one, just because it’s an old duplex built in 1920, and the basements are completely different shapes. So I can’t get a second bathroom in the other, but I bring in $300 a month rents for each bedroom. So I’m bringing a $1,800 a month on that property, plan on 10 months, if we assume that June and July is 100% vacant.
Because my mortgage payment is tied with another property, if we broke it down, I would say by itself, I think initially before I refinanced to put them together, the P&I Mortgage payment was 540 on that. And so my insurance is probably 75, 80 bucks a month on that property. Tenants pay all utilities, so it cashflows really well.

Ashley:
And then even when you give up the landscaping, that’s still will not even cut into your cashflow at all. That would be very minimal to the cashflow that you’re actually seeing. So that’s awesome that you have that much wiggle room to outsource the things that you’re doing.

Tony:
Ryan, you shared so much there. We’re like almost an hour in and there’s so much to uncover. I want to take this to our next segment, which is our mindset segments. And we touched on this a little bit, but if you think about the expectations or the perceptions you had about becoming a landlord, being a real estate investor before it actually happened, and you compare those expectations to what’s actually the reality landlord if you’re in a real estate investor, what were some of the misconceptions that you had?

Ryan:
I think the first misconception is the negative that everyone throws at you is you’re going to get 3:00 AM calls about a broken toilet. And I do things not the way that they probably should in the fact that maintenance calls or phone calls or texts to me, I rarely, rarely get, like I told you, in three years, I’ve had one of those 3:00 AM phone calls about a broken toilet. The maintenance requests are fairly minimal. I found that I have good relationships with my tenants, but I treat it… I was a high school teacher for 11 years and I’m a college coach now, on eight years, I treat this like I do with my relationships with students and athletes like, “I’m going to have a positive relationship with you, but I’m going to respect appropriate boundaries. I’m not here to be your buddy, but I’m here to be supportive. I’m here to be understanding.”
I tell all my tenants, “This is a business relationship, and we’re going to treat it as such, but I’m not going to abuse you. I’m not going to treat you poorly, I’m going to respect you as a person. I’m going to be responsive when it comes to your needs, your issues, but I expect you to follow the lease. I’m not going to let you out of paying late fees if you pay rent late.” And those kinds of things, just so there’s that mutual respect, mutual understanding there. I found being a landlord is a very rewarding experience. And I found honestly, in three years, my financial situation is significantly better. I’ve gone from being where most Americans are, we live paycheck to paycheck because of lifestyle creep.
I found now I’m at a situation where each month, “Okay, now what do I put this money? What do I do with this money now?” Whereas opposed to, before that it was, “Where do I come up with this money for expenses?” Now I’m going to positive. And I think on my current trajectory, I think within five years, I can be financially independent, and that’s not where I was before. And I think that’s something that real estate gives us that a lot of other investments don’t have that much opportunity to benefit us and that much opportunities for us to control individually.

Tony:
Ryan, congratulations on being on that trajectory. I think so many folks that are listening to today’s podcast are so eager to be in that position to know that five years from now, I’ll have financial independence. At the end of the day, that’s what a lot of us do it for. So congratulations to you, bro, because that’s a big accomplishment.

Ryan:
Thank you. Thank you.

Tony:
I want to take us to our next segment, which is our Rookie Request Line. So for those of you that are listening, if you want your guests, I’m not your guest, if you want your question featured, if you’ve got a guest and you want to pitch them, you can do that too. If you want your question featured on today’s podcast, give us a call at 18885-ROOKIE. We might play your question on the podcast. So Ryan, are you ready for today’s question?

Ryan:
I’m ready.

Savannah:
Hi Ashley and Tony. This is Savannah from Minnesota. My husband I just got our first primary residence last October with the idea of jump-starting our real estate investing, renting it out when we moved. I’m curious to know, how do you guys set up your finances with all your personal finances and all of your rentals? You have different bank accounts that serve different purpose, what’s your best strategy for keeping your personal finances and business finances separate? Thank you. I love the show. I appreciate you guys answering my questions. See ya.

Ryan:
That’s a great question, Savannah. What I do and I’m glad I did this from the start, I ran into one of the same questions that a lot of investors ask, do I do an LLC? And what I did, I own the properties, even in the business loans. I own them in my personal name. However, all my rents, my business is through an LLC I created. I have a separate business savings and checkings account at a different bank, and anything I do with my business, any income coming in, goes through that account. I do not intermingle my personal accounts and my business accounts. I have separate ATM cards, separate credit cards in the business name, in addition to my name
And it’s actually with a pass-through LLC, it’s really not that hard when it comes to tax time or anything like that, but again, it just keeps everything straight and it makes it a lot less tempting to range your business account to pay off personal expenses. Or the other way is there are times that sometimes you forget and it’s just like, “Oh, here, I’ll pay for this business expense. No, wait, why am I paying for that on my personal income? That’s its expense.” And that way it makes sure that your business is profitable. I’ve heard people sometimes talking about, hey, their businesses making this amount of money. It’s like, “Well, are they because I know you’re personally paying for this, this and this, you’re subsidizing your business and your business really isn’t making money?”
And so that’s what I recommend, have completely separate business and personal accounts. I actually do them at two separate banks.

Ashley:
That’s a great advice, Ryan. And I love how you laid that out and explained it. Those are great points as to why you should have a separate account. Even if you don’t have an LLC, keep a separate account for that property or your properties. How I do it is I do a separate LLC for each partner I have, and then we have a bank account for each LLC. So my partner, Joe and I, we have two LLCs together. Each of them have multiple properties in them, but they’ve the same bank account for each. And then another partner, we have an LLC, and then we have a bank account for that. So you can do a bank account for each property, but that’s a lot of reconciling every month as you start to grow your portfolio.
So that’s not for me doing all that reconciling, but I think that keeping it separate from your personal is very, very important. Okay. So let’s move on to our Rookie Rockstar. So this week our Rookie Rockstar is Hannah, and she has two new construction homes that are both rented and they’re looking to buy their third in June. So this property, she gave us a quick breakdown. It is in the Louisiana area, new construction built October 2020, it’s 1,700 square feet. It’s got a beautiful acre pond view, 2020K asking price, 48K down payment. And then their monthly mortgage is 908 for P&I. And they are property managing themselves, self-managing, so they don’t have any extra fees.
The rent is 1,725 a month, and they requested 1,725 deposit. And then also $500, non-refundable small breed dog fee. So that is awesome, Hannah, congratulations. And can’t wait to see posts about your third property coming in June that you’re going to get. So if you guys want to be featured as a Rookie Rockstar, just post in the Facebook group or send Tony and I a message on Instagram and we’d love to feature you guys as the Rookie Rockstar. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, for joining us today. Can you tell everyone where they can find some more information about you and possibly reach out to you?

Ryan:
Yeah. Anyone that wants to reach out to me, I’m on BiggerPockets. You can look me up there, Ryan Mahoney. I am on Facebook. I don’t utilize it a lot, but I just recently joined the Rookie Facebook group. So you can reach out to me on Facebook as well. Those are probably the two best places to get in touch with me.

Ashley:
Ryan, what school? Do you coach track? We always hear people who want to be mentored by someone doing real estate. What better way to beat them to be on your track team and actually transfer to your school and live in your property and see a real life landlord now work?

Ryan:
Just so we don’t run into any recruiting violations, Ashley said that not me. I coach at Hastings College located in Hastings, Nebraska.

Ashley:
There you guys go. And don’t forget, Tony also has a property for sale. So thank you Ryan so much for joining us today. I’m Ashley @wealthfromrentals, and he’s tony @tonyjrobinson on Instagram. And you guys, don’t forget to subscribe to our very new Real Estate Rookie YouTube channel. BiggerPockets created our own YouTube channel for us, so all of these podcasts recordings, these episodes will be featured on this YouTube channel along with an additional video released every single week coming from myself, or Tony, or awesome contributors, Kyle and Lauren, who were on episode of one of the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Thank you guys for listening and make sure you join us on Saturday for the Rookie Reply.