BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 127: How to Use a Partnership to Acquire (and Manage) 100+ Units with James Wise

Episode Date: June 18, 2015

As you grow your real estate business, a partner can help you achieve incredible levels. That’s why today on the BiggerPockets Podcast we sit down with James Wise to talk about how he used a partnership to build his own investment portfolio, as well as build a thriving brokerage and property management business. In this interview, you’ll learn how James finds and screens tenants, uses BiggerPockets to raise money, and much more. In This Episode We Cover: How James got started with real estate How he (unknowingly) house hacked his first property How he moved on to his next deals Tips on finding a business partner Learning the hard way through trial and error How James screens tenants now (and the mistakes he used to make!) Valuable tips on finding partners How he’s using BiggerPockets to grow his business His take on starting a brokerage or real estate management company Tips for real estate agents working with an investor Where to get the cash to actually live while investing in real estate And SO much more! Links from the Show Shia LaBeouf delivers the most intense motivational speech of all-time #AskBP Podcast Tenant Screening: The Ultimate Guide Evicted Tenant Threatens Landlord With a Machete (Seriously) BiggerPockets Forums #AskBP 034: Should You Rent to a Tenant With an Eviction in Their Past? Joel Owen’s BiggerPockets Profile New Member Welcome Forum Draft Day Books Mentioned in this Show Multiple Streams of Income: How to Generate a Lifetime of Unlimited Wealth by Robert G. Allen Tweetable Topics: “You’re always going to have vacancies. It’s part of the business.” (Tweet This!) Connect with James James’s BiggerPockets Profile James’s Company Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 127. I see so many people come on the website. Hey, everybody. I'm new to real estate investing. Anybody have any tips for me? And that's it. And that's the last time you ever heard from that person. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio.

Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the million. of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dork and host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr.

Brandon Turner, live in Denver. What up, man? Live in Denver. Yeah, it's good to be here. It's raining. It feels like home. It is miserable. It is miserable.

Yeah. I don't know how you guys live with this. I mean, in my area, it's sunny like 300 days a year. Wow. You guys have rain all the time. Yeah, amazing, amazing. The world has turned upside down. The world has turned upside down. Well, welcome to Denver, man. How's your road trip going? It's good. It's good. Except for the three-hour or four-hour adventure out of the way yesterday or a couple days ago, which we'll talk about in the podcast. We will. We will. Yeah, it's good. It's good. I saw a lot of the country and met a lot of BP people and heading back home next week. Outstanding. Outstanding. Cool, man. Well, today we got a cool show. We got a cool show. We got a cool show. Very excited about it. We're going to talk to.

How excited are you, Josh? How excited. I'm so excited. Oh, you know, it's almost like, I almost want to do a Shia LaBuff. Just do it. You're doing it today. Yeah. And we'll link to that reference.

If you don't get it, there's a Shia LaBuff, like, motivational video, which will make you pee your pants. So we'll link to it in the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 127. This is show 127, the Bigger Pockets podcast. And you know what? Before we jump into the show, I want to thank everybody for listening. guys are amazing. Just want to read a couple of quick reviews that people have left us. People leave us all these great reviews and we thank them so much for it, but let's read some because, you know, it's awesome. So David Goose, an excellent resource. I listen to this

podcast on the way to work every Thursday morning. Josh and Brandon ask just the right question so that both beginners and season investors can take away something useful. I found the guest knowledgeable and overall I enjoy the show. Thank you, David. That's awesome. I saw a warm and fuzzy inside. Yeah, man. Nate from Blackwell, Josh and Brennan have given real estate investors something to look forward to each week. The information and guests they provide

give so much insight, and I appreciate everything I've learned from them. Thanks a million. Awesome. You guys, this kind of stuff is, first of all, like honestly, it really does touch us. And, you know, if you have not left us a review and rating on iTunes, on Stitcher, on these other listening devices that you listen to the podcast, please do.

It helps us. It helps the show climb in the race. ratings and it helps get us exposed to more people and so we can help educate more folks. So please leave us ratings and reviews. We really do appreciate it. There you go. With that, should we do today's quick tip? Today's quick tip. Today's quick tip. Talk about value. Talk about value, Brandon. I don't want to talk about value. Okay, fine. I will. You talk about value. All right. Guys, we decided to cut off some of the money that's coming in our pockets. We said, You know what? What should we do? We should be even less successful as a business. We're going to just kill ads on the dashboard for bigger pockets users. We realize that, you know, at the end of the day, these ads can kind of be a distraction to what you want to do. And so what we did was we killed off ads on the dash. So yes, it hurts us a little bit. But at the end of the day, it helps you, our users. And really, that is our end-all BL goals. So hopefully you guys enjoy that. And that's today's quick tip.

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He's a wise guy from Cleveland, Ohio. He's never heard that before. Yeah, there's going to be some battling on this one. We're going to be talking real estate sports. Yeah, unfortunately. I try to steer clear of those combos. Yeah, well, you know. Anyway, James is a great guy.

He's built a pretty awesome business. The guy's got well. well over 100 rental units. He's built a really cool business. And we pick his brain on everything from tenant screening to property management to finding deals and to, you know, Cleveland of all places, which, you know, I have no problem with, but, you know, I got to give somebody a hard time. So here he is the man, Mr. James Wise. Welcome to the show. Good to have you here. Hey, how you guys doing? Doing great. I'm well. I'm well. It's nice to get out of the car, finally. I've been, you know, in the car for 30 some days now. So this is,

It's nice to be on solid ground. Not only has he been on the car for 30 days now. This guy yesterday had his wife driving four hours in the wrong direction. Basically, he's like, just don't listen to the GPS. Go straight. I don't care what happens. Go straight. So he ended up in Mexico.

Not quite Mexico, almost Mexico. Yeah, it was a very dumb and dumber moment. Like from, you know, Harry and Lloyd is that they went the wrong direction for, they went like eight hours or whatever. I went only four-ish. Yeah, long story. I won't get into that, but yeah. Nice.

It makes you feel better. I'm a horrible driver as well. Good, good. All right, James, man. Well, it's a pleasure to have you. Like, as we were talking about before, you are probably one of the more prolific guys in the greeting committee, unofficial of Bigger Pockets.

So anyone new who joins probably has spoken with you or at least, you know, had you speak to them. Thank you for doing that. And let's talk about you, man. How'd you get into real estate? How'd you get started? Well, when I was younger, the idea of renting never seemed like a good idea to me. I like the fact that when you get a mortgage, you pay it off and you build up that equity.

So I knew if I were to buy a house at an incredibly young age, like the first house I ever bought, I was 21. So in my mind, I'm like, hey, when I'm 51, I got a free house. This is awesome. So I guess my first house, I actually house hacked it. I had no idea what bigger pockets was. Yeah. What that term meant. But I could say it was probably a house hack.

I bought it. I actually got paid $8,000 to buy it, which was pretty cool. You want to explain that? And also, since everybody listening may not know what house hacking is, do you want to just kind of briefly explain that? Yeah, you know, you guys kind of coined the term. You go out, you buy a house, you live in it, but you later turn it into an investment process.

property. So what I did was I bought this house and I actually got paid $8,000 to buy the house, which is pretty cool. I was a younger guy. I was 21 years old. I had about $500 in my checking account. I had a decent credit score, a decent job. I was managing radio shacks at the time. You know, it was about $30,000 a year. But, you know, for a 21-year-old guy, I guess I was doing okay. So the city I live in, it's called Parma. And it has first-time home buyer grants if you're making under a certain amount of money. I believe at that time it was $40,000. So they gave 10% down payment assistance. So the house was like $85,000.

Used an FHA loan, which I only needed 3.5% down. So I walked away with a little bit of money. And then that was 2009. So at that time, the federal government was also giving a down payment grant. So a couple months down the road, I got another $8,000 check. Wow. So it worked out pretty good. I used that money.

And I built a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a bedroom. room in the basement and ended up running out the basement to my brother for a couple years. Nice. Definitely house hack. That's awesome, man. Yeah, my, it worked out pretty good as far as I was concerned and as far as my brother was concerned. My fiancé, on the other hand, he doesn't live there anymore.

She's pretty happy about that. Nice. Okay, I was going to say, she's still your fiancé, so that's good or wife? Yeah, there you go. And he no longer lives there. I actually sold him a house on the street over. still kept them close. Nice.

Nice. Yeah, house hacking definitely works better for people who are, you know, not married or engaged or whatever. You know, I mean, it can work for anybody and it does work, but it definitely works better for those who, you know, don't have his baggage a bad word. Well, it worked for 66% of the household. Yes. But the other 33% happens to make the rules. So he moved out.

Nice. Nice, nice, nice. Okay. So you bought that house and then what happened? Yeah, so we bought that house, and, you know, that was great. And a couple years later, I bought my first duplex. At this time, I got licensed as a real estate agent. You know, my thought was, I want to buy a lot of rentals, so I might as well be a real estate agent. I don't want to wait around for another guy to schedule appointments with me, and I'd like to get a commission when I buy it. So I bought a duplex, also in Parma, and I still didn't know about bigger pockets at this time. So I broke literally. every single rule you can break. We all do. Every rule you can break.

I just knew that I buy a house and somebody else pays the rent on that house and it's more than what I paid for the house. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love that. So I ended up purchasing the thing for $36,000. It was a bank owned. And real quick, where are you located at? I live in Parm, Ohio. Oh, that's right?

It's a suburb of Cleveland. Everyone knows Cleveland. You guys rag on Cleveland. That's like Detroit, right? same thing. Yeah, it's kind of like Detroit, except for not as bad. You guys have this, you guys have a losing basketball team, don't you? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We had a winning basketball team three days ago. Let's go California. Come on.

Oh, man, that's not even fair. We're missing all of our guys and we're still tied two to two. Yeah. I mean, you know, you guys, it's a pretty deep team over there, but, you know, we still have the greatest player of all time. Of all time. Wait, hold on. I'm sorry, this is a real estate podcast, but that's absolute insanity. I may have to just stop the call right now. I mean, you can't even, you can't even claim that LeBron James is a better basketball player than Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan. You're not even close to ready to do that.

And so we're going to just stop. We're going to just stop since this is my show. I'm going to overrule you. Josh, you're right. I apologize. I would feel bad if I was wrong on my show as well. All right. So you're in Cleveland where basketball is terrible. Yeah, so I'm in Cleveland, greatest location in the nation, great basketball team.

And so I buy back to real estate. So I buy this duplex. It's $36,000. I literally scraped every penny I had to purchase this thing. Six months of reserves, absolutely not. I did the rehab. I did half of it myself. And the other half of it, I brought in John Holden, who's now my business partner, who owns my company. We own 50% of the company with each other. And he was a contractor. I'm a realtor. I wanted to buy rentals. I knew he had a rental. So I didn't exactly know what the business model was going to be, but I figured that was a great place to start. So I had him do a little bit of work there, which this will show you how little I knew at the time. What I had him do was install carpet. That was the first and last time I ever did that in a rental property. What do you do now? A lot of the houses are older, so you can pull whatever's on top of the floor, and there's usually hardwoods under them. So we do a light buff and then, you know, coat them.

So in case the dog peas, it doesn't seep into the wood. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, he renovated that property. He finished it off for me because I was a little over my head. I'm not the greatest contractor. That's for sure. And after that, you know, I told him what I wanted to do. He discussed what he wanted to do, and we started buying properties together, and since then, you know, we were really cooking.

We were just buying rental after rental after rental. We both had W-2 jobs as well, so we had a good amount of money coming in. And after that, we got pretty involved with bigger pockets, and we started, you know, just telling everybody what we were doing. And there's a lot of guys on bigger pockets that, you know, they really were interested in what we had going on. probably because we're in Cleveland. Greatest location in the nation. Maybe if you keep repeating that, it'll come true in your own mind. Well, they say you have to say something seven times for it to set in. So I only got five more to go.

Right. Okay. Hey, I want to circle back a little bit. So you got this first house hack. Then you get this duplex. You got this guy who's kind of your partner, the contractor. You know, you put stuff on Home Depot credit cards. You kind of bounced around. said you made a thousand mistakes. So you got to show, you got, you know, we're sitting here. We're talking a 50 something thousand, maybe more people. What would you have done? If you knew then what you know today, what would you have done differently? So you started, you know, you just jumped in. You, you know, decided you were going to just kind of go for it, right? Which, yeah, I think to some extent is the right idea because it's the complete opposite of what a lot of

people listening do, which is they sit and they think and they contemplate and they worry and wonder and never ever take any action, right? They get frozen. They get paralyzed. I'm assuming you would say starting today, I still would take some kind of action, but I would do it a little more prudently. But what kind of advice would you give to those new people who are sitting on the sidelines wondering, should I do it and make those mistakes? Should I just go for it? What would your advice be? Well, believe it or not, if I could do it all over, I think I would have done everything I did. Did I make mistakes and do I do the same thing going forward? Absolutely not. But every single mistake I made, I guess I just got lucky because it all totally worked out. The upstairs tenant where we put the carpet in, he actually still lives there to this day. I didn't even run a credit screen on that guy. I met with them and I went purely off of gut.

Will I do that now? Absolutely not. That's a horrible idea. I just got lucky. Would I go into buying a property where I barely had enough money to cover the acquisition costs and then just the rehab was a complete afterthought? No, of course not. But it worked. I connected with a partner and I grew it into a business. But a lot of that was off of luck.

But, you know, I've learned a lot. I prefer to learn by doing. I'm a trial by a fire kind of guy. So, you know, through then, I went there and I made mistakes. and I learned from those mistakes and I tried to improve on the third deal, the fourth deal, the fifth deal. And, you know, I made mistakes on each one of those deals too, but, you know, gradually the mistakes went lower and lower. Yep.

But, you know, going forward now, make sure you have enough money to cover all your rehab costs. Because, you know, I went in there, the utilities were off. Miraculously, they all ended up working. That couldn't have been the case, though. You know, everything could have broke. When I turned down the water, every one of those pipes could have burst. and I don't know where I would have came up with that money. The tenant that I put in there,

I put two tenants in there because there's a duplex, both of which I didn't do a credit screen. They worked out pretty well. They could have been horrible. I could have been in court two months later. That worked out pretty decent, though. Yeah. By the way, that one thing,

I just want to harp really quickly. Anybody listening, like, of all the mess ups that you can make, don't ever do that. Don't ever, ever do a James. did. Don't ever go on gut. Screen your tenants. Period. Non-negotiable. If you do that, I will come find you and yell at you. Do not do what James did. It's really like, that's the absolute worst thing that you could possibly do. I don't care how good your gut feeling is.

And James got lucky and I'm really happy for that. But like listeners, please do not go on gut. You have to, have to do this the right way. Hey, Josh. How can people? I was about to go there. How do people do a tenant screening? You know what? We wrote the ultimate guide to tenant screening. Oh my gosh. We did, didn't we? We did.

And there will be a link to that in the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 127. Even better. They can also go directly there by biggerpockets.com slash tenant screening. Wow. Very obvious. Very helpful. Definitely go there. Definitely read it, guys.

And please, sorry James to cut you off, but this is like a really important point for new landlords, new investors, do not go on the gut feeling you have to methodically screen your tenants, period. I could not agree with you more. I am fully aware that I got 100% lucky on that deal. And of course, that's not how we operate today. Correct. Let's actually talk about that real quick. I know we're going to get into that a little bit more later, but how do you screen, because you own a property management company today, right? Yes. Okay, so how do you screen tenants nowadays? I mean, what do you look for in a tenant? What's a red flag? What's a good thing? You know, I'm, applying for a unit of yours. What do you do? We do full credit screening. We do criminal background

screening. We check with previous landlords. Just speaking with that tenant, you know, you can kind of get a feel for their personality. That's obviously the first thing. But then after that, you know, credit screening, criminal screening, checking with the landlords, three times rental income. Yeah. Let me ask you this. I had an eviction. I mean, we didn't ask BP episode a couple, about a week ago, you know, because that's the other podcast. People don't know. you should listen to the ASPP podcast. It's an awesome daily podcast from Bigger Pockets. Anyway, one of the daily question was, would you rent to a tenant who had an eviction from seven years ago? And so I answered that question, but I want to know your thoughts. So I'm a tenant and I applied to work.

What was your answer, Brandon, by the way? My answer was if I had no other options and like if my market was really bad and everything else checked out fine, I might consider it, but I'd probably charge a double security deposit. But what would you say, James? I would say no. I would say no. The reason I would say no is, you know, for every one rental property, you know, there's 10, 15, 20 tenants that want to rent that property. If she's, you know, was evicted seven years prior, it's a relatively low risk. But if there is another person who was never evicted, why not take the path the easiest real estate? That's what I said. Like, if it was going to be a matter

of me losing three months of rent because like the market was so soft, I would take that risk over losing the, you know, two grand in lost rent if I had a tenant that in every other way checked out. You guys are terrible people. What about these poor people who got kicked out of their property for not paying rent? I mean, like, what about them? Don't they have rights? No, no. That's kind of like the machete article that I wrote, right? There's an article on the blog right now that I wrote last week, you know, that it was about a tenant who was evicted and they went after their landlord with a machete, you know? Reasonable. I mean, listen, if my landlord kicked me out for not paying, you know, machete would be the first thing that I would grab.

I would at least wait to rent to you for at least two years after the machete incident. Okay. And I would rent you. Well, there you go. There you go. Nice. All right. So you would not rent to them because you've got lots of tenants to choose from.

And that's, that's, I agree wholeheartedly. Yeah, where you're at, you know, you said you'd rather rent to them than have three month a vacancy. Me personally, what I'd rather do, if my two choices are renting to someone with an eviction or a three month vacancy, I would probably just lower the rent. Sure. Yeah. I agree.

I think that's smart too. But yeah, I think for me, like, I actually, I mean, I had a tenant who had an eviction like five years earlier. Then she moved to my property. And this was before I really knew what I was doing. I wouldn't have actually rented to her back then probably because five years is, I mean, that's not that far. Anyway, she lived at the property for four years. So it's been now nine years since her eviction, you know, with a previous landlord. And then we just had to evict her.

And so, like, people don't change, right? Like, I mean, nine years later, the exact, like history just repeated herself. And I probably lost, I think I'm at like four or five grand on that property. in lost like rent and damages. Maybe it's three grand. I don't know. It's just, it's terrible. And, yeah, that was a total of nine years difference. Some people just never changed.

So, yeah, I don't know. I would have to be convinced pretty hard that I should rent to them. And I kind of a worst case scenario. But anyway, moving on. Well, and I'm really quick. That's your screening criteria, James, you know, great stuff. Yeah, exactly what I do, exactly what we advertise and not advertise, but we promote in the tenant screening guide.

So, people should check that out. All right. So you mentioned your partner. I want to talk on that for a little bit because that's something that, you know, I'm a big fan of generally using partners, but they can be dangerous. And, you know, how did you get lucky with that? Was that another one of those lucky things? Or how did you pick the right partner? Because you're still with him today, right?

Like you guys are still buying stuff. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how did that work out? I mean, was it just luck or did you know what you were doing when you were picking that partner? Well, I knew him for a long time. I was working in a gas station when I was in high school, and my assistant manager had lived in one of his rental properties. So I've known this guy for almost 10 years now. So, you know, we have a great friendship, a good trust. It's not like I'm just going on Craigslist picking partners at random.

Is that a bad idea? It can, and it can't be. You have to do a lot more due diligence if you are picking partners from the general public. I mean, our company partners with a lot of people. people from the general public on specific deals. Do we build a complete business together where everybody's in the same office, operating the exact same company, working hand in hand every single day? To do something like that, you really need to get to know a person. It's almost like a relationship. It's almost like a marriage, really. Yeah, I agree. I use that analogy a lot. So what do you look for? If I'm looking, if I'm a brand new investor wanting to, or maybe not brand new, I'm an investor who wants to partner with someone.

What should I look for? What are good qualifications of a good partner? Every partner needs to add value. It's the very first thing that you as a partner, me as a partner, Josh is a partner, anybody needs to do, is present the value that they can add and then talk about the value that they're looking to receive. Yeah, I love that.

That's great. Okay, cool. So, okay, so partner, that worked out well. How do you guys split things? You said earlier, I think, 50-50, right? Is everything 50-50, including what you put in and out, or how's that work? Everything is 100% 50-50.

Is it 100% or 50-50? 100%. Yeah, do the math, Josh. Come on. All right. So now between the, okay, go ahead.

He's still hating on me about the Cavaliers. Bust your chops. Between the two of you, do you mind me asking like, how many properties do you two, like as a partnership now own, how many units or whatever do you guys have together?

We together own about 100 rental. units. Wow. And are those mostly single family, multi-families are all over? We have a combination of single families, multifamilies, mostly duplexes, and then we have a handful of apartment buildings, six units, 11 units, the biggest one's a 21 unit. Okay, right on. So if I'm listening, again, you know, let's break this down for the listeners, I'm listening, I, you know, I'm sitting and I'm saying, hey, I want to get into this game, you know, wow, a hundred units. I mean,

that's not an insignificant number. number, how do I get there? You know, I, you know, I stop and I say, well, that's, that's huge. I'm scared, you know, I don't, how do I go from one to two, two, to three to a hundred? I mean, it's, it's a big leap, you know, is there, you know, did you have a formula? Did you have a strategy that you came up with? You know, did you say, hey, we're going to buy, you know, three properties a year. Next year, we're going to buy six, then nine, then 12. Or did you just kind of start going one, one at a time, one deal at a time and just kind of winging it? Well, I'll be honestly, bigger pockets actually helped us get to that number quite a bit.

We started buying them just ourselves. You know, he would own half of it, I would own half of it. Together, from a couple cash out refinances on the other properties, me and him together put together $150,000. And, you know, where we live, homes are not that expensive. You know, we were buying $25,000 bank renovation houses. We'd be all in for like $40,000. So we started off doing those, and we had some pretty good success. We found some houses that were pretty undervalued, so we flipped a couple of them,

made 20, 30 grand here or there. That's never been our model to be house flippers, but we did find some good deals, and that helped us build some capital. And we continued to buy more and more buildings. And at that time, I had found bigger pockets and was pretty active on the site. And we were just discussing our deals on what we're doing. We found a lot of other members on the site who were living in more expensive markets, and they wanted to get involved.

And that's when we started buying the apartment buildings. So they were putting up a relatively large amount of the down payment. John and I were putting up a smaller amount of the down payment, but of course, providing all the sweat equity. And once we started doing that, you know, that really accelerated our growth. Hey, James. So I want to talk about that, obviously, because I have a complete vested interest in you talking about this.

So, you know, I'm not going to hide the fact that, you know, clearly bigger pockets has been helpful to you. And I'd love for you to share how that is the case. So, you know, first you said, you know, you've met other people. I'd love to hear, how did you meet other people? You know, what are you doing on bigger pockets to kind of get the word out? Because, listen, we've got a lot of users on the site who have been doing deals for a long time. And they're like, you know, I don't see any value in participating on bigger pockets. I know everything. Why do I have to post? I know everything. Why do I have to help other people out?

And they don't realize that by doing so, you gain a ton of value yourself. So I'd love to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. What exactly are you doing? And how does that translate into potentially money, partners, you name it? Well, as you two said earlier, I am one of the most prolific welcomers on the entire website. I'm sure every single day someone logs on to bigger pockets. They see my mug on the dashboard. every single day.

I'm sorry for them. Moving on. You have to make it part of your daily life. I'm literally on the site all day, every day. I welcome new people. A couple welcomes have actually led to deals. Whenever anybody asks a question that I feel I have the qualifications to answer, I go ahead and answer.

I try to provide quality content. I do a lot of the welcomes, but at the same time, whenever there's questions that I know the answers to, that other people need the answers. You know, I provide those answers. You have to make something part of your daily life. I see so many people come on the website.

Hey, everybody. I'm new to real estate investing. Anybody have any tips for me? And that's it. And that's the last time you ever heard from that person. You know, that person's not going to be able to network and to find relationships. But if you get somebody on the site day in and day out, you know, you could tell that person that person knows what they're talking about.

You kind of get to know that person. You got a lot of guys on your site, like Joel Owen. I've never personally talked to the guy, but I can tell you just based on being on your site every day that he does high-end commercial real estate. I know that just from seeing him post every single day. Jay Henrichs, you know, he's on there every single day and you can tell that, you know, he's the veteran. He's done it all, it sounds like. You just kind of get an idea for what people are doing. Chris Clothier, he's down in Memphis.

That's what he does. Yep, yeah. So you have to get out there every day. You have to be known and, you know, it's not just a one and done thing. You can't put an ad, hey, I need joint venture partners, and then do it again three months later. You don't even have a picture on your profile. Your profile's not filled out. Yep.

It's just not going to work. So, I mean, you're saying basically you're building by engaging, by connecting on the forums, by participating, you're building a name for yourself. You're building reputation. People little by little get to know you. And as they do, they think of you and associate you with whatever it is that you're an expert in. And, you know, when they're looking for somebody like that or when you finally are like, you know what, yeah, I'm an ex-you know, everybody I think kind of knows me. I'm looking for money and you say,

you know, hey, I'm looking for partners or I'm looking for this. You've built the reputation and they pretty much know that and now are more willing to work with you. Absolutely. I mean, that's the secret sauce. That is the secret sauce. And it works for a lot of people. And that's why at the end of every show I always tell people to jump in and make sure they're participating. This, this website and like we don't do this. This is the show 127. We don't we don't sit here on the show you know trying to promote the site all day long about you know how you should be doing it. But you know, it changes lives when you do it and when you get it and when you jump in and you figure it out, you can have your life changed. You know, you. Here's the thing like, you know,

we don't encourage you to go get active on the forums because bigger pockets makes more money. Right. Like, you know, membership's free for bigger pockets. We like, we do it because we sincerely believe that by engaging on the forums, you will become more successful. Like both Josh and I just firmly believe that that is what is going to help you become more successful. So it's in our interest. We want you to become more successful. And I think that, yeah, the people over and over and over, the people that are most active tend to be the ones that do the most deals and the most real estate, both inside the network like with people on the site and people outside the site. Just over and over we see that.

So yeah, people aren't jumping in. You're missing out. Yeah. All right. Cool. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy, and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly.

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Ready to simplify your workflow, book your free demo at bill.com slash bigger pockets and get a $100 Amazon gift card. That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. James, thank you for sharing some of those tips. definitely appreciate it. So, you know, your business, you've got all these units, you've got these rental units, and you started a management company, so your management managing units for others. You've got a turnkey company now, right? So you fix up, is that kind of?

It's kind of different than, you know, what all the other turnkey guys are doing. You know, the main business model with turnkey right now is guys go out, they find really, really distressed properties, they purchase them, they fix them, and then they sell them to the end investor. We actually don't do that. Like I said, we've flipped a few houses here and there, but that's never been the business model. What we do, excuse me, we're a real estate brokerage. You know, right now I got a few realtors working for me. And we just go out and we search our specific market, the same market that John and I invest in. And we look for the best properties available out there on the MLS. And, you know, we act as the boots on the ground,

the buyer broker of the investor. So just like, you know, a regular guy lived down the street for me, He wanted to go buy a rental property. A guy in California could want to go buy a rental property, and we treat him the same way. Do you recommend that as a model for new real estate investors? You know, going to get your license. And, you know, if you don't have the resources to invest yourself, you know, start as a buyer broker, start as an agent, become the expert in one part of town. And then, you know, as you build up your resources, start using that capital to start building a portfolio?

Yes and no. I like the idea, absolutely, but it's not cheap, it's not free to start a real estate brokerage in a property management company. I think what helped us, because right off the get-go, we had credibility because we already were buying properties. So we already spent a ton of our own money because we believed in this and we believed in what we were doing. And we started managing other people's properties just like they were our own.

They knew we knew what were doing. If you've never managed a property to then, you know, just, you know, just a lot of, you just start a real estate brokerage. You know, you don't really have any experience. I just meant be an agent, less start a brokerage. I mean, just like go get your license as an agent to help people. That I 100% agree. You know, we get a million people to come on bigger pockets looking to get started in the

industry with absolutely no money. And my advice to most of them is always, hey, get your real estate license. That will open the doors to many, many connections, and you can go out, meet investors, network with investors, and you're providing value. Your value is that of a real estate. agent. And then when you get enough capital to buy your own house, you could go see the house whenever you want. Yeah. I've got to follow up on that. A lot of our listeners are agents and there's, you know, there's a million real estate agents out there. And, you know, what I think a lot of new investors

assume is that all agents know what they're talking about with investing and we know that is not true. And frankly, the good bulk of them probably don't. To those agents who are looking at investors and saying, oh, I don't want to work with investors because they stink and they throw low ball and, you know, whatever it is. What would you tell them, you know, especially because I think the vast majority of them would love to be investors owning their own properties. So what do you tell to the agents who are sitting there saying, you know, I hate investors because they lowball, but secretly, I really want to be an investor. I really want to own properties. How do you, how did those agents who are kind of stuck get unstuck?

I 100% agree with you. The majority of real estate agents are not investor focused. And to be honest to you, the residential, you know, first-time home buyer, people buying a house to live inside of the business, it's a lot easier to sell one of those houses. I mean, a lot of times you're literally showing somebody five houses and then they go, I love this house. I want to buy this house. Get me in this house.

And that's your job right there. Boom. Done. When you're selling investment properties, especially if you're selling them to guys out of state, you need to go over the numbers. you need to give them bids for how much it's going to cost to get everything fixed up. You need to explain how the rental process will work. So there's a lot more work involved.

However, the same person that's going to buy a house and live in that house is probably not going to buy a house for another seven to ten years. Whereas if you get yourself involved with an investor, he might buy five, ten, fifteen houses from you every single month. Oh, yeah. And also too, once you start working with an investor, after you start doing a few deals, you know, it becomes so much, easier and the trust is built up. And that's a two-way street. It really is. And you know, you start

doing a lot of deals with somebody. You know, it's just very, very easy. Hey, trust me, this is a great house. They've already bought several houses. They understand the criteria they're looking for. You find something that fits similar to the last five properties they bought. They're like, yeah, absolutely, let's do it. Boom. Go. So how does it, how does an investor then, to flip it the other way, how does an investor then go about proving to agents that they're not just another, you know, flash in the pan, real estate investor who just took some get rich quick course, who doesn't know anything from anything, and is actually going to close on deals and make things happen? Well, the first step would be to prove to the agent they have the ability to close.

So, you know, coming in with absolutely no money, there's pretty much no way you're going to be able to prove to that agent that you might be a great use of their time. But if you have the capital and you have the desire, show it to them, show them a proof of funds. And you also want to search out an agent that is interested in that space. Not every agent is going to be interested in that space. So if you find yourself an agent that owns a few rental properties themselves, convey to them that you have the ability to close deals and start working together. And like I said, it's a two-way street.

You know, the agent might be slightly apprehensive at first. The investor is going to be apprehensive at first. you start working together and getting closer and closer and that relationship develops and you become almost like business partners after a while. Yeah, that's great. Good advice, good advice. Yeah, I love it. All right, cool.

So before we go to the fire round, I guess I've got one more question. I mean, so you've been building this business, you've got this portfolio, you've got this partner. It sounds like things are going well. I'm going to ask an obvious and stupid question that may be obvious and stupid, but on bigger pockets, of course, there's no such thing as a stupid question. So how do you make money? I mean, so, you know, how do you make money with a portfolio if you're continuing to build it and reinvest it? I mean, where do you get money to, you know, pay your bills and pay your own personal mortgage and pay for the groceries?

I mean, I think a lot of people wonder this and they're afraid to ask this question. So I figure I'd just ask it, you know, if I'm just a guy who buys property and buys more and more property, where do you get the cash to actually live? Well, the properties themselves should make, they should, of course, make some money. You know, you should definitely be getting cash flow off your properties. So you have to buy your properties right. Us personally, we also make money off the real estate brokerage and then we do property management. So we, you know, we make money off the property management company as well. So when somebody buys a house from us, we make a commission for that. And then we make commissions placing the tenants and then the management fees and anything that's broken with the property, we make money that way. And then we reinvest a lot of that money into our. properties. A lot of our personal investments are more for the long-term gain. It's not necessarily a cash now thing. It's a lot of stuff that's going to pay off when we're both old and gray.

Yeah, right on. And I think it's, you know, I think it's one of those things because I know I wondered it when I first started and I was afraid to ask it like, hey, if I'm a full-time buy and hold investor, how do I actually make money to live? Because, you know, generally you're making some kind of profit, but is that going to be enough, at least in the early days? And I think for most people, it's not. I agree with you. It's not. You're not going to buy five houses and quit your job tomorrow. A lot of people are looking to quit their jobs a lot faster than they should. Don't do that. Bad idea. Absolutely. It's a get rich, slow process. It really is. Right on. Yeah. The only way to like, the way I look at it is if you want to quit your job,

you got to replace it with another business. And that's where people get into maybe flipping or wholesaling or whatever. But with buying whole rentals, it's very, very hard to just quit your job. I mean, it took me six years or something like that. And then I was out for like a year. And then I went back in because I wanted more income. You know, so like, yeah, I mean, it's very, very difficult to just take your passive income or whatever you want to call it from rentals unless you have a whole lot of them.

Yeah, it's a volume business. And plus, too, as soon as you quit your job, you're cutting yourself off at the knees. Bank financing now became almost impossible. Absolutely. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. When I started like, you know, I got a W2 again here at bigger pockets.

Like all of a sudden bank financing became so much easier. Like I forgot how easy it was compared to when I didn't. Exactly. Yeah. It's like having to go to like 20 banks and getting turned on by everyone and having to like get really creative because I didn't have, you know, a job. And then it was just like the first bank I go to there. Like, oh yeah, no problem.

There you go. I was like, weird. I think the greatest thing about a rental property is not actually the cash flow. It's the fact that you can go in, purchase a property using somebody else's money, the bank, and then have another person, the tenant, pay off your bank loan. So 30 years later, you got maybe you bought a $100,000 house, you put $25,000 into it. 30 years later, it's worth $200,000. So you turned your $25,000 into $200,000, and you probably made a decent amount of money along the way.

Yep. I mean, that to me, that's the real business. I think a lot of people, they look at incredibly cheap properties and cash flow, and they miss the boat on the fact that it's all about leverage. and if you're buying stuff with 25% down, you're quadruple and your money. Yeah. Love it.

Love it. Great stuff, man. Great stuff. All right, moving on. Let's go over to the next segment of the show, which we call the... It's time for the fire round. All right, the fire round.

These questions come direct out of the Bigger Pockets forums. And James, you are in the forums a lot, so I know you've probably seen all these, but I want to pick your brain on all of them. So, number one, what do you believe makes a great investment market. What do you look for in a great market? Well, first of all, I like the Cavaliers to play there. I'm sorry,

sorry. Hey, yeah, can we get another guest for the show? Come on now. I think, this is what I think as far as a great investment market. The bears. You should first, anybody, any investor should first

look locally. You should look to the town that you live in. That's the very thing you should do. If for some reason the town you live in is not going to provide you any properties that will make you money, then look to the outside. But the very, very first thing you need to do is look local. You're A, closer to the properties, B, you know the neighborhood, C, you know the people that live in the neighborhood. And D, when there's a problem, you're right there to be able to go solve it. Perfect. Agreed 100%. If you live in Cincinnati, Cincinnati's probably the greatest real estate market for you. If you live in Indianapolis, Indianapolis is the real

state market for you. What if you live in Detroit or Rochester? Yeah, I hear I hear good things about Metro Detroit. I don't know. I hear good things. Well, Cleveland. I mean, that's a given. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I know. Listen, I bust on the Rust Belt cities, but, you know, I think they're amazing places for local people. I think they're, you know, great places for people who live far away if they know what they're doing and know the city. So, cool. Vacancy rates. What's the best way to find a vacant? rate. It's kind of a tough one. Right now, what we're running, I think we're at about 90% occupied over the entire portfolio. But, you know, it's going to vary based on how every landlord is operating their portfolio. I mean, there's so many things that can go into that. You know,

if your apartment, you have it rented for $700, your vacancy rate's going to be higher than it be the exact same apartment rented for $650. You know, how well you are in tune to your market, how quality of a product you're producing. You know, that's how you've done. figure that out. What about like for a market? You know, like if I want to know vacancy for Cleveland, like is there a such thing as a vacancy rate for Cleveland? Or how do I know if I'm interested in investing somewhere? Where would I even begin to look for that information? I don't think it's published anywhere. Yeah, to be honest to you, I've never had to or thought about looking into something like that. I really don't know. I know what

we're doing. And everywhere I invest, I mean, I literally live 15 minutes from every one of our properties. So, you know, I grew up here. I kind of just know the market. I know the kind of people that are living there. So I never had to go look into a more macro-level thing such as that. So that's fine. And I think you actually answered the question almost perfectly, is that one, that's what benefit of your own neighborhood. And two, you said, well, I know what we do.

And so, like, what I do, if I wanted to go find a vacancy rate, I'd call up you. If I was going to go invest in your neighborhood, I'd call you up and be like, hey, I know you're a property manager. You know, we're looking to invest in this area. Can you let me know kind of what I'm looking at? And your company would probably be like, sure, this is kind of what we're seeing and this is what our numbers are. And at least it would give me a general idea

if I'm at 95 or 65%. Well, and that's what I was going to follow up and say, James, you said 90%, and I'll ask the quote, stupid question, which is not a stupid question, is that good? Is that good vacancy rate or what? Across a portfolio.

Or you mean occupancy rate? Yeah, that's whatever. Yeah, 90% vacancy rate. Yeah, we'd have some problems. You'd be in deep trouble. Yeah. 10% vacancy rates, 90%.

Yes, I've been corrected. Thank you. I think it's pretty good. I think we strive to get everything redded as soon as humanly possible. I mean, you're always going to have vacancies. It's part of the business. You know, it's just going to happen. But I stand pretty firmly that 90% is pretty good. Right on. Right on. Cool, man. Cool. Brandon. All right. Next question. I want to sell my property, but it still has tenants in it. How should I do that? Oh, that does make things much more difficult. Are you looking to sell your property to another investor or you want to sell it on the MLS to an owner occupant? Let's say I want to sell it to another investor.

Well, the tenants being in it, that's a good thing in that situation. Okay, let's say the other way then. I want to sell it without the tenants in it. You should try really hard to get the tenants out of it. That's good. Is it hard to sell a property with tenants in it? It is ten times harder to sell a property with tenants in it, especially if it's in a neighborhood where owner occupants are buying it. the majority of the houses. The tenants, they don't like to be bothered. It's very difficult to get people in them. If the tenants are on a lease, the lease might have six months left. So, you know, if I'm looking for a house to buy for me and my family, I don't want to buy a house and then

not be able to move in for half a year. Plus, you don't know what kind of damages are going to happen in the next six months. So I think if you're looking to sell your property, that might be a situation where you try to place that tenant in another property that you have or maybe you offer a cash settlement to get them to move out. But it is bar none, a million times easier to sell an empty property than one with tenants. Well, how about this then? So let's just say that I, you know, I'm kind of tight on money. This is supposed to be the fire round, by the way. You realize this is called the Salt and Pepper Round. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So I want to sell a property, but I'm kind of broke. And so if I don't want that property sitting empty for the next, you know,

three months, four months, five months while it sells. Can I have a month-to-month tenants in there and sell it? And then as soon as I get an offer that's accepted, then the tenants move out? Or is that a stupid idea? If you have month-to-month tenants, again, I would strive to end their tenancy and then start marketing the property for sale. I mean, you have a lot of tenants, Brandon? Have you tried to sell any of your properties with tenants to owner-occupants?

No, and I wouldn't. Have you ever done that? I mean, it's tough. It's tough. Showing a property with tenants is not easy. It's miserable, yeah. I don't want to do that ever again, and I don't recommend anybody else to do that. I don't think it's a great idea.

I mean, I've had tenants refuse to let people into properties before. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, happens all the time. Happens all the time. You can read about it on bigger pockets, right? Yeah. All right, last question on the fire round. Does it really matter the age of the property, or as long as it's in good condition and up-to-date, I don't really fully understand the question, but I think the question is asking,

you know, if you're looking at investment property, does age matter? As long as it's, you know, got updated, you know, water and sewer and all that other stuff. Pipes are good. I think it absolutely matters. You take properties with cast iron plumbing. You know, people update things. They update the electrical. They update the plumbing fixtures.

But it's very rare that people are completely going in and gutting out houses and completely removing everything. Not to mention the same pipe that's running, running out. out of the house to the main sewer line, that's probably going to be cast iron as well, or the clay tiles, tree roots are growing into them. So, of course, the newer property is going to have a lot less maintenance issues down the road. No, is that necessarily the case? So let's talk about my former house has the original boiler. This boiler was built in the 50s.

This boiler is still working, and it's working in great condition. You know, you buy a new, new, you know, HVAC. How long are those going to last, 10, 50s? years. I mean, they don't make stuff like they used to. So is that necessarily the case? I would argue that your boiler is also slightly less efficient than the newer stuff. So that's that. And eventually, you know, it will give out, of course. If I had my preference, if all things being equal, I had two houses, one had a brand new furnace, one had a 50-year-old boiler, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer the new boiler. That doesn't mean

I won't buy things with old, you know, old utilities and stuff like that in them, old mechanicals rather. But, you know, I believe, yeah, newer's better. Fair enough. I'm not arguing against you. Yeah, I'm not arguing against you. I just, you know, putting it out there. There you go.

Awesome. Awesome. Cool, man. Well, let's move on from Fire Round. All right. This is the, I guess it's time for the famous for. All right, it is time for the world famous, famous for these questions. We ask every single guest here on the podcast.

And I want to know your answer. So number one, what is your favorite? real estate related book. I've actually only read one business book ever and it was multiple streams of income. It dabbled into real estate but it had a lot of other stuff in there. The whole premise to the book was you know you have multiple sources of income if one stream of income were to ever dry up you still have the other three or four to rely on. I read that about 10 years ago. So then I think I heard you say bigger pockets is your favorite real estate book. I think I I think I said something like that too, yeah.

I thought I heard that. Maybe I'm off. Maybe I'm off. And you answered the business book question. So, you know, cutting me off at my knees, I'm going to have to just skip all the way ahead to what do you do for fun, man? Well, I run my business. We work a lot. You know, we're still in the newer stages of our business.

So it's kind of hard to fit a lot of hobbies in. But, you know, I'm a pretty avid sports fan, Cleveland Cavaliers in particular. Nice. So spent a lot of time with that, watching the Browns on the sporting events. Yeah, I know. You didn't see that comment, did you? No. By the way, just so you know, I just saw a movie this week called Draft Day.

And I don't know if you've seen it. I'm not a hater of Cleveland in any which way. I didn't get that impression from you at all. No, I just, you know, I don't like LeBron, but that's a whole other story. Draft Day. For those of you who are looking for fun movies, draft day was really cool. It was all about, you know, football draft day. and it wasn't about guys throwing footballs.

It was literally about the strategy of the draft. And it was really cool just watching. It was directed by Ivan Reitman. And I loved it. And as a person who is not a huge fan of Cleveland sports, I would wholeheartedly recommend this film, which is very big in supporting Cleveland sports. So there you go.

There's me having your back in some way, shape, or form. I appreciate that, Josh. There you go. All right. My final question of the day. What do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? Drive, passion, the ability to fall down and get back up. A lot of people I see, they want to get involved in investing because they think that they're going to sit on a beach.

This job, just like any other job, it's hard work. You're probably working more than at your 40-hour-a-week job. I know I work twice as many hours a week as 40 hours. I've never worked this many hours in my entire life. But if you love it, it doesn't really feel like work. Right on. Great stuff, man. All right, so where can people find out more about you?

Well, you guys can find out about me, of course, on Bigger Pockets. And on our website, www. Holtanwise Property Group.com. Awesome. And we will link to that in the show notes. James. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man. We really, really appreciate it.

And if you guys have any questions for James, you can hit them up on the show notes at biggerpockets. slash show 127. James Wise, thanks for being on the podcast. Hey, thank you guys. All right, everybody, big thanks again to James for being on the show. James, that was awesome. Since this is my show, I get the last word, and LeBron is going down.

Caves are going down. And hopefully, those of you who are listening, you know, three months, six months after this comes out, aren't laughing at me for being completely wrong. But, you know, I'm wishful here. I'm wishable. But yeah, thanks again. Great show. Lots of cool bits of information. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. As we talked about on the show, Bigger Pockets is an amazing place to connect, to find people, to link up, to find deals, to help educate yourself. And if you are not participating, as James suggested, in our community, on our forums, on a regular basis, make it part of your day, make it part

of your business. I think you're missing out. I could legitimately say that. What do you think, Brandon? Yeah, definitely. I mean, like, you can definitely hear that. today in James's story about how I used BP in such a powerful way to learn and grow. And so, yeah, jump in people. Yeah, that's awesome. So jump on bigger pockets, bigger pockets.com slash forums or the forums, create a free account today. Get involved. Otherwise, check us out on Facebook on LinkedIn on Gplus. Maybe not Gplus. It's dying, but, you know, still do it if you're there. And as we said in the upfront, we would love your ratings and reviews. They definitely help us out. So jump on iTunes and please share your feedback.

with us about how the show's going, and we're going to try and read those going forward on the show. So that's it. That's all I got. Brandon, anything? I got nothing. Let's take off. I'm going to go to eat lunch. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Josh Dorkin. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the height, you're in the right place. be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online.

Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calico content. And editing is by Exodus Media.

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