BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 204: Flipping 30+ Deals by Age Twenty-Five with Chris Gill

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

Today on the BiggerPockets Podcast, you’ll hear from Chris Gill, a real estate investor in the San Antonio market who has only been investing for three years but has already done over 30 deals �� mostly fix and flips. On this episode, we walk through Chris’s unique journey, including his initial four-plex rental property and his path toward flipping “the worst houses in the area.” And don’t miss Chris’s fantastic tip for finding deals that no one on the BiggerPockets Podcast has mentioned yet! In This Episode We Cover: How he transitioned from film to real estate Whether or not you should get your real estate license What Chris’s first deal looked like The things he wished he knew before he started investing Why properly screening tenants is vital Tips for creating a great team How he manages his properties How he does his bookkeeping Tips for transitioning to house flipping His criteria for finding deals How he estimates his rehabs Tips for evaluating a house to rehab How he funds his deals What he’s doing on the development side of real estate What’s unique about the San Antonio market How to find the sweet spot between too much and too little improvement What his end game looks like And SO much more! Links from the Show Trello BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Podcast Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad’s Advisors: The Advanced Guide to Real Estate Investing by Ken McElroy Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The Book on Flipping Houses by J. Scott The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon By Brad Stone The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder Tweetable Topics: “If you want scalability, if you want to go anywhere else, you have to find something that allows you that.” (Tweet This!) “Just because you’re not good at something does not mean it’s not important.” (Tweet This!) “Be aware of overanalyzing stuff because that will happen forever if you allow it.” (Tweet This!) “Becoming comfortable with the unknown is huge, and I think in real estate that’s absolutely the case.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Chris Chris’s BiggerPockets Profile Chris’s Facebook Page Chris’s Instagram Profile Chris’s Twitter Profile Chris’s Youtube Channel Snapchat: ChrisFGill Chris’s message to BP community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 204. Not bad, Dave. I don't think there really is a minimum age. I started really looking at real estate very seriously when I was like 17, 18, and I was reading, you know, reading books and, you know, self-educating on you. 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 millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com.

Your home for real estate investing online. Hey, what's going on, everybody? This is Dave Meyer, guest host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. Well, does that sound like Josh. You do sound a lot like Josh, you know, a little bit less, I don't know, a little bit. Well, I'll say you sound a little taller and better looking than Josh, but, you know. It's not just the sound. It's actually reality.

It is. Yeah, that is very much reality. Well, I'm excited to have you here again. You're actually on, so Dave is a guest hosting two episodes of the podcast. This one and the one that comes out next week. Josh had a last minute family kind of health thing to deal with. So he's, I had to run out of the town. And Dave, gratefully, is that the word, came in to help our host. Yeah, sure. So you're here. And we're going to have a good time today. We're talking with an investor who is young. I'm actually this week and next week, both. investors are young. Chris Gill is our guest today. He's 25 years old. He's done over 30 deals, just crushing it. Unbelievable. I mean, I, you know, I think you and I are about the same age, give or take, and I feel like both doing pretty well, but these guys who are 25, 26 went in. It's just unbelievable how successful they've been in just a couple of years. Yeah, I know. I'm like, man, why didn't I do that when I was 25? Come on. When did you actually get started? I was 21 when I bought my first deal. So I was, I was. So you've been, yeah.

I've been doing a little while, but I've been, you know, about a decade. But, yeah, I just, I started a lot slower than these guys. I think a big part of it, too, is, and I'm not saying it's all bigger pockets or anything like that, but I mean, like, when I started, all I had was books, right? Like, it was like, I had a problem. I had a book, I could read or whatever. You know, then I discovered bigger pockets. But, like, these guys, like, I mean, even myself and you as well, like, we listen to another podcast. And every week, there's new people who are sharing, like, this new strategy that's working for them.

And I don't know. I think that helps people scale a lot better when they can see how other people are scaling. Absolutely. You just get a sense of confidence. Like they know that they can do it. They've read all the books. They've read the forums. They really understand what they're doing.

I think Chris is an awesome example of that. He's a guy who really knows what he's talking about. He's a really broad depth of knowledge about real estate. He clearly knows the financial side of it, knows how to analyze a deal. And he's translated that knowledge into real monetary success. Yeah. Yeah. And he's also got guts.

He takes on some big rehabs. We talk about that later in the show about just these, massive rehabs that he's doing and the pretty amazing profit he's making on those. So, you know, big risk, big reward. Well said. I mean, I've been scared to try my first flip for like four years now. But I'm going to look at one on Friday, so maybe this will be the one. Nice, nice.

Yeah, it's about time. Come on, Dave. Hurry it up. Yeah, I got to get in there. All right. Well, let's get into this thing. Before we're going to further, why don't we talk about today's quick tip? Tip.

All right. All right. Today's quick tip is to fill out your Bigger Pockets profile completely. My job at Bigger Pockets is a lot about figuring out how to help people succeed on the site. One of the things we see all the time is that people who fill out their profile get more colleague requests, get more votes, and are generally more active in the Bigger Pockets community. So if you're looking to network, just start getting into real estate. Our tip this week is to fill out your bigger pockets profile completely. Very good. It's definitely true. Dave is our data nerd here at Bigger Pockets, our growth nerd. And he knows this stuff. He sees the magic behind the scenes.

Yes, lots of charts. Yes. A lot of property managers think their job is answering tenant emails and coordinating repairs. That's not the job. The job of a property manager is protecting and growing your operating income and earning your trust while they do it. And that comes down to three numbers. occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score.

If those numbers slip, your income slips, and your trust slips too. And most PMs don't hold themselves to performance standards. They focus on activity, not outcomes. Mind is different. They obsess over the metrics that actually grow your cash flow. Go to mind.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get a month of management for free. Because if you're going to hire a property manager, hire one that manages your investment like an investment.

Managing properties can feel like a full-on circus. You're juggling vendors, tracking payments, chasing approvals across multiple properties, and maybe a few HOAs, all while trying to keep tenants happy and owners confident. One delay can throw everything off, and suddenly your day is all clean up, no progress. That's why hundreds of property managers rely on bill

to streamline their finances. Bill for property management lets you, add all your properties, assign permissions, pay bills, and receive payments quickly and efficiently, without the usual bottlenecks. It syncs with platforms like QuickBooks, Zero, NetSuite, and Sage intact, so your accounting stays aligned. You can automate bulk payments across properties and HOAs, choose flexible payment methods like same-day ACH, international wires, card or check, and set custom roles in approval policies. There's even a dedicated bill inbox for each property to keep everything organized. 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. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios, but it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Funrise Flagship Fund. Now you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10. The portfolio features 4,700, a single-family rental homes spread across the booming sunbelt. They also have 3.3 million square feet of highly sought-after industrial facilities, thanks to the e-commerce wave. The flagship fund is one of the

largest of its kind. It's well diversified, and it's managed by a team of professionals. And it's now available to you. Visit fundrise.com. slash BP Market to explore the fund's full portfolio, check out historical returns, and start investing in just minutes. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship.

This is a paid advertisement. So should we get into this thing? Let's do it. All right. So today's guest is, I think we mentioned Chris Gill and Chris is awesome and he is crushing it at 25. He's investing down in San Antonio. He was a filmmaker that turned entrepreneurship.

turn real estate investor, developer, and he's doing some pretty amazing things. Started with rentals, did some flips, all that stuff. We're going to hit on his whole story today and even how he got into development as well. And again, all at the age of 25 and younger. So pretty awesome stuff. So let's do it. Let's bring him in. All right, Chris, welcome to the show.

How you doing, man? Awesome. Thanks for having me on. It's fun to be here. Yeah, this should be cool. It should be cool. And I know you've been following the Bigger Pockets podcast for a long time, isn't that right? Yeah, absolutely.

This was from way back when you just started. start Googling and you're like, how do I buy a house when I have no money and come across something called Bigger Pockets? And you're like, I want a bigger pocket and it all flows into there. So, yeah, this is a neat full circle experience for me. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, I mean, it's kind of that way for me too, right? I found Bigger Pockets when I was, you know, just beginning my real estate journey and kind of used it to help, you know, do what I've done today. So that's pretty cool. So anyway, well, let's get into this thing. First question I like to ask everybody, of course,

is how did you get into real estate? And what was your first deal like? Yeah, so I think real estate kind of, it's obviously all around us all the time. We all live in real estate and kind of got into it, I guess, from coming through and doing a lot of film work. And I had a film company. It was doing that full time and really enjoyed that, but realized very quickly that that is a service-based industry. And we all love the term passive income and what that can do to create for our lifestyle and for everything. And film is not passive income.

You're absolutely, you're working your bottle for every dollar you make. and it's a lot of fun, but if you want any scalability, if you want to go anywhere else, if you want to do anything except for film, you're going to need to find something that allows you that time, freedom, and I didn't see that in film. So continue doing film and loves that, but begin to phase in the real estate. And as I was researching things, I know there's the Forbes 400 list, and you see that the majority or a lot of the billionaires started in real estate, started in real estate, than anything else. And I guess that all just really spoke to my young 21-year-old heart and plunged in.

So what was the first thing you did? So it started out as an agent trying to figure out what the heck was going on and how do you fill out a contract and, you know, dad didn't do real estate, didn't have people directly around me doing it. And so that was, I think, really beneficial and not the way everyone has to go. And there's definitely reasons to or to not be a licensed agent. But it was definitely a huge learning experience for me and just, you know, going around and following the market and really drilling.

in and finding areas that made sense to me. And as I found my niches in investing and developing and the things that made sense to me. And so, yeah, starting out as a realtor was a huge, a really good experience. Okay. Do you recommend, I mean, like, there's a lot of people listen to this show right now who have never bought a single deal. And they're really, I mean, I get that question all the time. Should I get my license first or not? Should I go get it? What would you say to those people? I think you should think about where you want to go long term before you make that decision. And so, I mean, there's so many levels to real estate. And you can just do it obviously a couple of rental houses to give you some extra income, or you can say,

hey, I'm going to go into this full time and I'm going to be an active investor or developer full time. So I think Farrell, where you want to go is a really important thing. And then looking at who you already know, because I didn't know people in my local area who were actively doing this. And so the obvious first step for me was, well, we all know a realtor or two. And I know they're at least partially involved in some level of real estate. So I think definitely even just taking the classes, I've actually directed several people

that have come to me for coaching and saying, okay, just go take. real estate principles one and two in whatever states you're in, you'll learn so much about basic contracts and laws and deeds and surveys. And so I think a lot of the education is definitely beneficial, even if you don't go all the way of the point of getting license and then that whole process of actually selling it. I think moving forward and not doing that necessarily, you can more quickly get into deals and not get hung up by being a realtor for other people. So did you know that you wanted to be an investor when you were becoming a broker? or did you become a broker and start seeing people investing and think you could do it yourself? No, the investing was a long-term plan. I was, you know, I knew that helping people showing houses and having no weekends and no holidays didn't sound like a lot of fun.

And definitely not why I'd go from film to being a realtor. So it was definitely a transition period. And some people love it. Just I knew it wasn't for me. Okay. So you became a real estate agent. And then at some point you bought your first deal. What did that look like? Yeah. So looked around and it was my sponsoring broker at the time, brought the deal to me and said, hey, you should check this out. I know you've been looking for some rental property. And listed on the market for $120,000, I ended up buying it for $68,000. So pretty good discount there off of what they were trying to sell it for. Now, where are you located? So we're in, yeah, South Texas, San Antonio, kind of along the 35 quarter, Dallas, Houston, Austin,

and then San Antonio down here at the bottom. Okay. And so how do you get a house that listed 120-some for 60-some? How'd that work? the classical deferred maintenance, inheritance, didn't want it, been on the market, scared other people away with a lot of deferred maintenance, and, you know, said, hey, we're really ready to finally sell this. They reached the point of maximum pain. Yeah. And we're just ready to unload it. So that's cool. And so how did you finance that? Did you get a traditional mortgage, cash? So yeah, that was through a traditional mortgage. So it's one to four. so you can still finance those through all the conventional FHA, you know, loan platforms,

which is, I think, a great place for a lot of people to start because you can see something that gives you, obviously, rental income as well as potentially, you know, allowing you to be the investor and the homeowner all at the same time. It's a little bit of a less scary way to move into investing. Sure. And was that, was that a single family house? That one was, or was that a multifamily? So it was multifamily. It was a multifamily one time and broken up into a fourplex. Oh, that's awesome. And walked into three tenants, already there, one vacant unit that need to be rehabbed and rehabbed that and had the whole thing rock and rolling pretty quickly. That's awesome. So it sounds like there's a lot of deferred maintenance

or neglect, you could call it, for that property and scared a lot of people away. What did you see that made you confident that this was going to be a good deal? That's a great question. It goes back to me having spent the time to really research your markets. And I know so many people have, you know, total paralysis and they keep on looking and analyzing it deals and you've got to make that jump, but me having spent about six to nine months learning the market, this was an area that was definitely up and coming, but it was like pre up and coming. And because I was already doing things full time, I could see that I think this area would work. And if you've heard of the riverwalk, this backs up to where the river walk is. So it's on the river, but just a little like a mile or two

south of where that is. So it's a very unique property from that location and in the hood at the moment, but in an area that's definitely heading in a positive direction. So that allowed me to say, hey, this is going to be a little bit of a long-term thing for me, and not necessarily planning to sell it right away. And I think this area, just by the mere fact that's on the river, you know, is going to create some value there. Did you live in the property at all or is it just an investment? Yeah, so bought it, never ended up living there, considered it for a while, but just never worked out and had people paying the mortgage on it. So that was cool too. So what about mistakes? Like what do you, when you look back in that very first deal,

What do you wish you would have known going into that, looking back now? When was this, by the way? Maybe I'll ask that first question. Yeah, this is a little bit over three years ago now. Okay, so looking back three years ago, what do you wish you could tell yourself then about that very first deal? Higher property management company. Really?

I think that I or really come up with a system for self-management. And I think that's something that, at least I initially was just super excited and wanted to get there and fix the place up and see the cash flow. And it all seemed super cool and happy. And then you get into the weeds of learning, hey, you need to make sure you're screening your tenants and you need to make sure you have a process for collecting the rent. You don't want to be going down there every month. You need to train your tenants to do your system, not be working off of whatever broken system they've been operating off of.

So right off the bat, I would say that is huge. And to find a way to incorporate folks to help you with that process, especially if that's not the avenue of real estate you come from. Yeah, you just mentioned the word broken system, like getting the tenants off their broken system. And I found that time and time and time again. Anytime you buy a property, yeah, that has existing tenants, you get those inherited tenants there. Like, they almost always are part of a broken system. And sometimes it's a very, very badly broken system. And sometimes, like, it's hell to get them out of that system.

And sometimes you lose them. Sometimes you have to evict them and spend thousands of dollars. And it's just something to look at, make sure you know going into a deal is if there are inherited tenants, know that there will be broken systems that you have to try to fix. That's so true. I've never had to evict a tenant. I've screened myself, but I have had to evict inherited tenants multiple times. And I was super stoked about getting tense. I was like, oh my gosh, I get tense.

Why want to walk in the door? This is fair. And I think that may be a little bit of a fallacy for people starting out. And there can definitely be a lot of benefit if you budget for three months of downtime or something like that to properly screen and get the right people in there. I think you might even save time and definitely money from having to go and correct someone else's bad mistakes. Yeah, good point. So did you wind up? actually hiring a property management company or are you self-managing still? So yeah, I've moved away and sold the smaller rentals that I had, you know, moving forward toward the scale and the absolute awesome benefit of having a property management company when you have larger rental units,

I would say 30 units and above. So, you know, currently we've moved from the rentals to a lot of development and new builds and a lot of flips, but then looking as we're saying, okay, we want to move back to the rental and saying, okay, we need to find units large enough so we can definitely have the on-site property management and maintenance because that just makes our lives way easier. Okay. So since that deal, let's recap the last three years then. What's your strategy? Have you been just buying more rentals?

Are you in the flipping? Or what do you do? Yeah. So it started out with the rental and saying, you know, you want passive income and then saying, okay, I can't make enough passive income to keep buying more properties. So you've got to go on and generate more income. That's either with a full-time job for a lot of people or I said, okay, I think I'm going to try and get into the flipping game. And so I guess about three or four months after the fourplex,

I bought the first rehab house, a little 1,200 square foot buster and cranked through that one and got it sold. And yeah, so just scaled up the rehabbing side of the business and then began looking to add in the new build side of the business as well. Interesting. So how many total deals have you done so far, would you guess? We're in the middle of six or seven redoes right now, so probably mid-30s, I would say. Wow. That is definitely scaling up that business. So in the last few years you've done, and most of those are flips, you're saying. The majority, yeah, the vast majority of those are flips. There were some other rentals, you know, some little rental packages, but realize that, you know, without the economy of

scale, it makes managing single family rentals or even duplexes, it can be very difficult. Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. So you keep saying we, do you have partners or are you doing this yourself? Yeah, so that's another great thing is going back to your question, what would you do differently, is starting, and this is, I continue to, and this is, I continue to, to learn this the farther down the business you go, but creating that team, and I know it's been said hundreds of times, but it really is so important because there's all things that we're great at, and there's things we're lousy at, and you've got to be able to fill in those holes, just because you're not good, something doesn't mean it's not important. And so I think

quickly finding the people, so we've got two people working with me full time right now, and contractors who pretty much work with me full time, and developing that team and, you know, bringing in professionals has been really, really helpful as well. And how did you go about finding those people? I think that's one of the most common questions and challenges most real estate investors is how do you find people who you can trust and rely on long term? Well, I don't want to consider three years long term. So we'll keep our fingers crossed for you. Yeah, see how we're doing. But I think, you know, tapping on our credit, if you have friends, obviously, if you've, I think when anyone gets into real estate investing, it's such a sexy thing to be doing right now, which makes our jobs easier and more difficult at the same time. But I think you will have, at least I had lots of people come to me and say, hey, I've seen your pictures, I've seen your videos, I've seen this, I've seen that, you know, what are you doing? And hey, here's what I know how to do. And I came from a business background or I came from an accounting background or I've been in property management for somebody. You know, what are the things? Is there a way that we could work together. So that was a large part of it, just happy the network of people that I already knew. And then just getting more and more connected with the community, obviously, having friends

who are realtors was beneficial. You know, they're going to know property managers. They're going to know attorneys. And just beginning to build your network, I think is incredibly important. Yeah, right on. I definitely agree. I'm building that network. And it's kind of like a continual thing. It's not like, you know, I think a lot of people get this misconception about your team. It's like the superhero team you like assemble and then you go out and do your real estate. It's like, well, I can't get started. I don't have my team yet. It's like, well, you know, your team, like building a team is a continual process. I'm building my team today.

I was building it yesterday. I'm doing it tomorrow. And, you know, it's always like everywhere you go, everything, every person you talk to is a potential future member of your team or maybe not. You know, you're always networking. I'm always thinking in the back of my head, you know, is this somebody I could work with at some point? And how can we make this, you know, how can we make each other money? And now I've literally found people that I thought would work well in an aspect of the business that don't necessarily educate in real estate. And I said, hey, let me educate.

you on this or go to this conference or read this book or get on bigger pockets, you know, and start educating yourself. Do you have an interest in doing X, Y, or Z, you know, with me? And what would this look like? And this is something we could talk about, you know, three, six months down the road as you've begun your education process. So that's cool, too. Yeah. And you mentioned having a couple people that work on your team right now that are, like, are they employees of yours? Like, what do they do? And what does that look like? Right. So I have one guy who's helping me a lot with the business side of things going back and saying, accounting when you're spending $100,000 plus per month in renovation costs.

There's a lot of money flying around, and you've got to know where it's all going. And so going back and really gain the accounting side of things down and just a lot of logistical business things. So, I mean, my role has morphed much more into, you know, deal analyzing, talking to new private investors who are potentially interested in working with us, talking to the city as we're working inside the city limits. And some of these are historic districts with even more historic oversight by the city. So focusing on those core competencies and then saying, okay, the actual management of the job sites, I don't go to all my houses anymore.

You know, I'm not at them, some of them, like, once a week and I'm just popping in making sure everything's looking good and just doing low quality control. So, yeah, got someone handling a lot of construction stuff and someone handling a lot of helping with the business logistics of everything. Okay, very cool. And what do you guys use to track your bookkeeping? Do you know, like your paperwork and all the financials that are going in and out? Do you guys just use spreadsheets or do you have some fancier software? Yeah, there's some really good spreadsheets out there that you can, you can purchase and you can customize.

I mean, there's a myriad of options. So, I mean, it's a combination of Excel spreadsheets and an app called Trello, which has been really helpful. Yeah, we use that as well. Love Trella. Yeah, for lists. I mean, we just, that's our first round, whenever a contractor gets a check or an invoice or anything, it's literally a picture, dropped into cello for that job.

You know, it's all broken down based off weeks, you know, so as you're moving through the renovation process and then that's either exported to the Excel spreadsheet or to quickbooks or something like that. That's kind of cool. Right on. Awesome. So let's dump into the flipping that you've been doing. How did you transition for the first rental properties into flipping?

And how did you start finding those deals? So I didn't know anything about construction. So that's probably a hopefully an encouraging thing to some of the folks listening. If you're willing to get your hands dirty and learn, there's a lot of resources out there for that. So, I mean, that unit in the fourplex that I purchased, I did almost all the renovating on it myself. So, I mean, I did a little electrical, little plumbing, you know, laid floors, painted. So that was kind of the trial by fire, and I knew it was a rental, and I could hopefully get somebody in there at some price. But then, yeah, moved to the home renovation, the flipping.

And, you know, for the first couple of projects, I was there every single day from 8 to 6, you know, all day long with the contractors, you know, helping out with a demo, whatever I could. Being a gopher, you know, a lot of the time, just helping keeping them running and getting them supplies. But I think that's another area that you could definitely, you know, with finding a team, I didn't hire a GC for a long time. I did all of that. And that works and do save money, but you limit yourself in your scale. And, you know, I found you're really at three to four projects going at the same time, I was tapped out and had zero time for anything, you know, no bookkeeping, no finding new deals, nothing, just trying to keep these darn houses going. And so finding, you know, figuring out the upper level stuff that you're good at and then kind of breaking it down by how much is this job worth per hour essentially. and is it worthwhile for me to be doing the 10, 12, $15 an hour job when I can hire some of that and I can manage three or four of those. So, yeah, it was a trial by fire, learned a lot on the job, talked to a lot of contractors, fired a lot of contractors, and, you know, developing a team that, no, so I know enough to be dangerous now.

Yeah. So not knowing anything, what were your criteria for deals when you first started, were you driving around, driving for dollars, were you looking on the MLL? Yeah, I mean, the first deal was an on MLS, on market deal. It was a HUD home. So you got on there. I'm sure you've all worked the HUD homes. You submit your bid and you find out a couple days later if you get the house and there's the closing process and then you're off to the races. So that was the first one. And then it really just became a combination. I think there's a huge benefit to if you're working on a block, leave them a flyer, say, hey, I'm working. I'm redoing this house. If you want to sell it, let me know. And I've found multiple houses that way. So-and-so has a house down the road or down the block. I mean, I've done 10, 15 houses in the same neighborhood with all within a, you know, half mile to mile radius of each other from a lot of that kind of, you know, boots on the ground marketing. That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, it's just, if people see a house getting fixed up and it builds that trust with the community, they're like, oh yeah, you're working on that one. Oh, you're not just some scammer that's coming into like, you're actually doing good in this neighborhood. You know, I want to sell mine. My brother wants to sell his, whatever. It's just like, I love that idea. I'm going to definitely start doing that.

I've never done that, but every rehab that we do, I'm going to go and just canvas the neighborhood and just put up little door flyers or something like that just to get people's name out there. I love that. So, cool. Yeah, and once you build that consistency, I mean, you know, I now have almost as many deals. We're trying to buy about two deals a month at this point, you know, for the rehabs as well as the new builds. And so, I mean, now it's become remarkably easy to find really good deals because enough people I've been here.

I've been doing it a little while and I've been working in very small areas. You know, my target areas, it's only like a two or three mile radius total. And I really don't even look at stuff outside there or wholesale it. And so when you develop that concentrated focus, you can definitely develop a name for yourself real quickly by the people that are actively investing or wholesaling or live in that area. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned you didn't know a lot of what you were doing when you started out and you didn't know how to fix up a house or anything like that.

So a lot of the fear that people have when they're getting into rehabbing or even rental properties that need a rehab on them is. is estimating the rehab costs. People get very scared of what if I screw that up? Because I mean, I've screwed that up. I've been off by 30 grand before. And so like, how did you overcome that? Did you over?

I mean, did you make some big mistakes? And then like, how can our listeners, how can they be able to estimate accurately rehab costs? Talk to people that are doing it full time, you know, get the contractors out there. You know, I've gotten on Home Depot and lows. And what I'm trying to figure out, okay, is this a reasonable price for materials?

You know, I've just added up. we have this much drywall. Here's what it costs per sheet. You got your tape. You got your mud. It's pretty, you know, simple. So you can get real, you know, rolled down and dirty about calculating that and then saying,

well, hell, is this really worth $15 a foot? This guy's charging me just for the labor. I know material is only this much, you know. So getting really practical with that is definitely beneficial. But, I mean, getting as many eyes on it. I mean, the first couple of deals, I brought two or three or four other people out there who were either in the business, you know,

doing rehabs or just contractors and said, you know, can you help me kind of estimate this stuff? And then initially being very on top of the projects, I think, was huge. You know, my first two deals became pretty dramatically under budget, which I think is rare. And I think that was really because I was, you know, there full time and, you know, probably went a little bit overboard on trying to make sure we were doing things as least expensive as possible. So, but, I mean, finding a balance there. But I think if you're, if you, you know, get as many eyes as you can on the project and then, you know, try and be very active in the management of it until you develop a system, until you feel confident about that. estimating those costs.

Yeah, and that goes back to that networking too, again. You know, you build those relationships with contractors, and you get a lot better shot of them coming out to help you. Even if they aren't going to get the job or even if they know that, it probably will work out. Yeah, they might still come out and help you out because they see you as somebody who's, I mean, not just a business thing, but maybe a friend or at least like a, you know, somebody they can, you know, go hang out with for an hour to go look at a property. I mean, it's all, again, it's all networking and meeting people.

That's very cool. Well, so speaking of the contracts. And economies of scale, too, are really cool, because if you have three or four houses going, And you can show, you know, I was made with the new contract a couple days ago. And he looked at one house and I said, I literally am buying four other houses within half a mile over here in the next six weeks, you know, and everybody's lies eyed up. Yep, yep. You know, there's an excitement there saying, you know, makes their life easier because they're not having to go out and do the marketing. And if they realize they cultivate that relationship with you, that is a chance for repeat business, which is very unique about what we're doing opposed to a traditional person because you're only going to be renovating your home once every, you know, decade or so.

Yeah, that makes sense. So can you tell us a little bit about the characteristics of these flips? How big are they? What are some of the financials that are going into these? So, yeah, I mean, most of these homes, because I've chosen, there's, you know, a lot of ways to flip. And the way I've found that maximizes the return, really, at the end of the day is I literally look for the worst house on the block. And those are the ones I go after. And, I mean, we're talking, you know, we just finished one that was 10, 40-yard dumpsters, you know, and it was, I mean, there was trash knee deep in the house.

I mean, these are absolutely like the worst houses you can possibly get. And I mean, so you're essentially building a new house that just has some studs left and maybe some historic features if it's an older area. But that was for a reason the angle I decided to start with. And because a lot of them are older houses, so it's, I mean, a complete gut job. You're redoing the entire interior floor plan. Adding square footage a lot of the time has become a really great way to maximize value when an area gets hot and everyone's excited about it.

You can actually pay more on the per square foot. price of the existing footprint if you can know that you can sell this for 170 a foot but you can out on for 50 or 60 a foot and you can cover up a lot of you know size issues with the house potentially and you can beat people in the bidding process if there's you know a lot of people looking at it and you can pay more than it's currently worth but adding square footage is a great way to to make those numbers work so how do you do that I mean how do you add square foot are you talking about like adding a second floor or you add an addition on the side of the house or all the above yes I mean any any any and all the above. I mean, most of them are, you know, if you have the size of lots,

easier not to do a second floor because you can maintain the existing roof and whatnot that's already there. But yeah, I mean, popping it out the back and adding another four or five hundred square feet, putting a master suite on the back or, you know, the options are really endless there. But that's proven to be very, very beneficial in what we're doing. Okay. So if you're, if you're looking at the worst house you can find, I mean, is there, is there a level that you won't tackle? Like, are you like, you know, I won't deal with a messed up foundation or I won't deal with, you know, X, Y, and Z. Like, is there anything that's too bad? I mean, that would, it all be a price thing. So really, no, to be honest with you. I mean, we've done stuff that

had fires and, I mean, everything in it. And it's just, you know, you make your money on the buy. And that's very true. And that'll cover up a myriad of sins and a lot of problems when you're in the weeds of the house. If you got a great deal on it. So, you know, you can be looking at much bigger numbers on the sale end. And that's really exciting. But you got to realize that a lot of that will definitely get shrunk down if you're taking on these crazy projects that are, you know, eight to 12 to 15 weeks in time frame. It's not a lipstick flip at all. It's much more comprehensive. Yeah. And do you think because of that, like, I get the feeling most flippers are looking for the lipstick, the paint and carpet, that's it. You know, let's put 15 grand in and

walk away. Like, do you consider that like a competitive advantage that you have then is because you're willing to do all this? It's definitely unique. I mean, for the majority, I think there's definitely a differentiating factor by, you know, trying to find something that everyone else isn't going in. Yeah, it's a little more difficult. But, I mean, is that, you know, can you create your business and scale your business around the more comprehensive flips opposed to lipstick flips? And, you know, that's just a balance of saying, okay, you know, if it takes me three lipstick flips in the time frame to get one of these real comprehensive ones, the numbers still work. And I think that's changed a little bit market to market. But yeah, the comprehensive ones have definitely been a

a unique thing. And people notice, and people are like, this is, you know, this is a totally different house. It's a brand new product. And I like that from a quality standpoint, just saying, hey, I want these to look a certain way. And if you're working with really tight budgets and saying, I can, you know, the deal fails with a $5,000 overage. I don't want to do those deals. I'd much rather take on a little bit more work, but have that protection on the side end because I know that I can produce a product that I'm really happy with at the end of the day. Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. And Chris, how long did you say it takes for an average flip for these comprehensive deals? So we've gotten them down. I mean, we started at definitely the

three to six month time frame, and we're consistently between eight and 12 weeks. You know, we're putting $80,000 in a house, pretty average. So you're scheduling about you're cranking through them. Yeah. And do you, do you factor that in when you're trying to figure out what you're going to bid for a house, how long it's going to take you to actually turn around and sell it? Absolutely. No, and I think that's a huge thing people do not factor in his holding costs and the time and then the vandalism or the theft or even taxes, you know, and usually don't even pay the taxes because they're prorated. So you kind of have those mitigating. They're hidden in the buy and the sell. But you, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're in a house for a year, you know, if your redo gets way behind

and it's too comprehensive, you know, you can lose thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, especially if it's a hard money loan. You're not doing it all the way cash. And no. So calculating holding times is incredibly important. I did a, I did a flip one time, and it turned a duplex into a single family house, and it was amazing. We put a, you know, a good job on it, but it took me a year to fix the thing up and another year to actually sell it. So I held it for two years, and I used a, what was it, 12% hard money loan on it. And then I used, yeah, like 40 grand in credit card, credit cards to fund it. So you can imagine the holding costs alone in that property. I think I spent like 30 grand in holding costs. Like, stupid. And like that made that deal from a

positive to a drastic negative. And I should have known that going into it. I should have analyzed it and been like, you know what? This is a 4,000 square of a house. I'm going to do it myself. It's going to take a while. Yeah. Yeah, stupid. So that actually brings up a good question. You mentioned hard money loans. Are you doing any private lending? Are you doing this all but cash? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously started out, I started 15,000 bucks with that first fourplex was my down payment and closing costs on that. That was the chunk that was put into that very first deal. that's grown pretty substantially now in three years, which is super exciting. But yeah, I mean, hard money is fantastic for what it is, because it allows, you know, a relatively low barrier to

entry for this business. And that's, I mean, incredible that you can, you know, with very basic criteria, you know, a couple thousand bucks in the bank and a reasonable credit score, you can try and roll the dice and play this game. And I think that's a huge benefit. But, I mean, definitely needs to be approached with caution because it is expensive. And, you know, if you mess up, it's going to be difficult to recoup that. So, yeah, hard money is fantastic, but moving on to other sources of financing is great as well. Yeah, I was going to say, are you still using hard money or are using other things now? So, I mean, the hard money people I still work with, we've negotiated better deals than we were at, as they've seen a track record of, you know, I've never lost my own deal so far.

Knock on wood, wherever that is. And so, yeah, yeah, I mean, working with that. But I think there's an amazing opportunity today, especially with all the volatility in the stock. market and all the fear that's out there that if you can present a reasonable pro forma and a reasonable plan for real estate investing, there are people that will absolutely give you money. And it's surprising me the number of wealthy people that I meet who are really good at some industry that don't have a plan for what they're going to do with their money. And they like the idea of real estate, but they don't have the time.

And I think, you know, once you have a little bit of a track record going to them and approach them and saying, hey, I have an investment opportunity is huge. and that's, you know, 2017 and on doing 90%, you know, if not all of my business, simply with private investors. That's awesome. And again, that circles back to the networking we talked about earlier. Like, it's just so key in every part of this business. I'm about the acquisitions, the rehabs, the everything.

It's all about, you know, who you know and the networking you got. So that's very cool. That's awesome. So do you have a profit that you want to make on every deal? You're like, this is minimum I'll make. Or what's your average, if you don't mind me asking? Minimum, I would say is 35. I mean, we've made pretty close to six figures profit on a project before.

Wow. With the comprehensive redos, we average over 50 on the redos. And again, that number sounds great, but got to calculate in complexity. You know, so you're going to, you know, if you bet more, if you bet on a risky stock and you want to invest in that, you can potentially make more. So if you don't want to do the comprehensive redo, you might not make as much. So there's definitely that aspect of it. And then the holding time, if it is a more comprehensive redo. So the 50 or 60 or 70,000 gets shrunk down by the number of months and the number of other factors in there can happen very quickly.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Well, so you've been doing all these flipping. You've got 30-some deals. You mentioned that you're also moving into new builds, so that you've been doing some new builds. Can we jump over there and talk about like, why did you decide to get into development? And how does that look? Absolutely, yeah. So it comes back, at least for me, is saying where do you want this business to go long term? And for me, I'm 25. Been doing this full time for three years now, and I plan to have a giant real estate company. And that's not everyone's goal, but that is my goal. And so going back to the saying, okay, you got to figure out scale, right? I mean, I maxed myself out personally at three to four deals at time. So I got to bring out someone else to help me at the construction. And then you start to realize you're maximizing the number of deals that you can do for the rehabbing and the flipping

in your local market if all you're going to be doing is the rehabs. And there's, everybody that watches HGTV or DIY. I mean, a little single-family rental or a single-family flip is the first thing that gets, that's where 90% of people start, I would say, in real estate investing. So figuring out ways that you can ante up your business goes back to being able to scale. And so as you're finding areas, especially if you're working in an urban area, which I think is insulate and protected a lot from economic downturns. And there's a lot of reasons why I think, you know, dense urban spaces provide a lot of benefit

protection for real estate investors that now you have land is a scarcity. But if you can do new builds, you can pop, you know, 10 to 15 houses on an acre of land and now instead of having to go find 15 different flips, you've done all that with one development and three or four separate four plans that your contractors know how to do. And they've repeated that multiple times. So, yeah, that's, that it, and the ambiguity and the questions with flips, obviously with the new build, you know exactly how many two by fours and how much. nails you're going to need for the whole house and that's you know literally impossible to do with a flip just because you'll never know that when you start open up the walls yeah that makes all that sense

so are you actually doing that now you are buying land and sort of manufacturing a couple houses on a single plot yeah so we are in the final phasing stages with the city and with our you know engineers yeah to prep two pieces of property that we have that we're going to be doing um yeah new builds on And there's small lots. I mean, we're building almost up to the lot lines on these places and maximizing that density, which maximizes, you know, your lot costs per dwelling, which is, you know, you can pay, again, you can pay more for land. But if you can get a lot of houses on there and create that density, your costs per actual door can be dramatically less than the overall price for that house.

And if you're only being building one house on one lot. Yeah. So what exactly are you building? So, I mean, it's single family homes as well as condominiums. and town home type things. Okay, okay, cool. And is that in downtown San Antonio as well? Correct, yeah.

But again, that also goes back to the scalability, because if I can, you know, master, we've got a couple of pieces of land in the pipeline that we'd be looking to acquire, and even that, you've created another little scalable business that I can take to other urban areas around Texas or even around the nation that now the only thing I'm limited on is finding a piece of land and finding something to build me

the piece of property. If I know the numbers work and it costs roughly this, much and that changed a little bit depending on where you are, but that allows you to create another scalable product that you can take around to a lot of different areas. Awesome. So you just touched on this a little bit, just with the development in general. But my question is just about in San Antonio in general. It's one of those cities you hear a lot about that is just booming. How have you seen the market change since you first started? I know it's only been three years. And how have you adjusted your strategy and how are you going to adjust in the future

to account for future growth. It's wild. I literally feel so blessed to have landed in San Antonio of all the places and ended up wanting to start a real estate business here because I think Texas and San Antonio offers, you know, when you're young and you want to go somewhere cool and you visit New York or L.A. You're like, I'm getting out of this little, you know, not a little town, but comparatively small town. But then you realize you can really develop something and be a little bit of a bigger fish in a small pond instead of a tiny fish in the giant ocean. But yeah, I mean, it's It's changed dramatically where our downtown is probably, you know, I would say 10 to 15 to 20 years behind other cities of our size in terms of density and prices and stuff like that.

And I mean, I'm still buying houses for, you know, $30, $40, $50,000 that are literally blocks from the middle of our downtown in some areas, which I think is a really unique and special opportunity. Yeah, that's amazing. That's awesome, man. Cool. And I need to move to San Antonio. You're selling it pretty hard.

It's amazing. And I mean, but yeah, I mean, you just got to, you know, obviously look at where the trends are going. And it freaks everyone out in the local area when there are dramatic price increases. But I think even looking a little more globally to other, you know, cities there are a couple years ahead of us, Austin, you know, Denver, I would say, parts of Georgia and the Carolines and stuff that have gone through this metamorphosis and this change. And you kind of see where these national benchmarks are. So, I mean, I invest pretty aggressively and pay more, you know, know for properties at a time that at the moment they may not be worth that, but I just, I have a lot of confidence that we're heading in a good direction. And I did that with a building that was literally in no man's land three years ago when I bought it. And now we're in the middle of opening up a restaurant and a jazz club there. Yeah, the change is pretty amazing. You're saying you're, you're personally in the middle of opening a restaurant and jazz club? So I'm not going to do it again. I don't want to be an operator. I do real estate. But I own the property and we found a really neat person. And so we're, yeah, totally a little bit of a different thing, but a great buy-and-hold asset.

And so, yeah, I know it's been fun. That's fascinating. That's cool. That's cool. Well, so I asked you earlier about, you know, looking back at your buy-and-hold, you know, the mistakes you made on that first fourplex. I'll ask you the same question, though, for your flipping. Like, looking back now at you're flipping in the last few years, what would you do differently if you could go back and do it again? Almost some of the same things.

I would say hiring someone that does construction full-time and, can take over management and manage that part of the business, whether that's you having to get them an equity stake in your company, whether you know, you now have to decrease your margins from, you know, 50,000 to 30,000 a project, I think those things will make your life so much easier, unless you love construction, right? If you get in this from that background and you like being boots on the ground, you like doing that, fantastic, keep doing it. That's not where I came from, and I don't think that's where a lot of real estate investors come from. And so taking those things that you are not necessarily specifically good at and finding people,

that can handle those. It'll save you so much time and frustration and just, I mean, really rookie mistakes of having, you know, doors open into room instead of open against a wall. I never thought of that, you know, and it makes total, duh, sense when you get into it. But those are the kind of rookie mistakes you make if you try and handle all that on your own without bringing people that know how to do those kind of things. So that would definitely be one of them. And then really finding a sweet spot from too much improvement to too little improvement. And there's, you know, there's a huge range there with obviously flips and some people knock them out of the park and you put way too much into it and you're never going to get that much out of it and some people just scrape

by with whatever the bare minimum is and trying to judge your market and look at other comps in the area and figuring out what is acceptable low for you. I've done both. You know, you get excited and you want to way over improve it or are you under improvement then it's on the market for a couple months longer than it should be and you're getting frustrated. And so finding that happy medium and I think that's most easily found by just looking at comps and talking to realtors in your area. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Well, my last question before we head on, I think, to the fire round anyway, is what's your end game?

Like, where are you headed next? What's your plan, you know, five, ten, twenty years from now? You said you wanted to build a big business. Yeah, so I love real estate. I don't think that's changing anytime soon. I think the more I've learned about it, the more I've gotten excited about it, and that there's just so many different aspects of real estate. Y'all are running a technology company, you know, in the real estate field,

and that's such a unique aspect of real estate. and there's so many different things and there's so many different types of people that can work and do real estate successfully in completely different ways. I mean, stuff from even just purchasing property and rezoning it and replanting it and then selling it. I mean, the options are really endless there. So I think helping to create housing in urban areas that's high quality, I think we're still changing from density being the enemy to density being awesome and cool, if done well. I mean, my family was, you know, I want a yard, want my space.

and a lot of millennials, I think, are not really realizing that that's something they necessarily want as much. They much prefer amenities and being in an area, and I think we all spend way too much time in our cars. So finding those benefits from urbanization and creating more density. So that'll be cool. And then just seeing, you know, as technology continues to affect real estate, I think there's going to see some massive changes in the industry as a whole with, you know, who knows what. But I think that's going to be amazing to watch and see as technology really affects real estate. Yeah, that's awesome. I totally. Awesome.

100% agree. All right, well, cool. Well, hey, let's shift gears here. I head over to the world famous Fire Round. It's time for the Fire Round. Did you know you can go on vacation and actually earn money? Because while you're out exploring new horizons, your home is sitting there, dark, silent, and wildly underemployed.

And it could be making you extra cash. And Airbnb makes that possible with something called the co-host network. If you're away for a while or you live far from your place, you can hire a vetted local co-host with real hosting experience to help take care of everything. They handle guest messages. They prep your space, manage reservations, and they keep things running smoothly so you don't have to constantly check your phone between activities. That means fewer logistics, less stress, and more time actually enjoying your trip, instead of thinking about what's happening back home.

You can relax knowing guests are taking care of and your place is in good hands. So instead of your home just existing in the dark, it can be quietly earning its keep while you're off making memories somewhere else. You travel, your house works, everyone's happy. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense.

That's the power of the Funrise Flagship Fund. Now, you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10.10. The portfolio features 4,700, a single-family rental homes spread across the booming sunbelt. They also have 3.3 million square feet of highly sought after industrial facilities, thanks to the e-commerce wave. The flagship fund is one of the largest of its kind.

It's well diversified, and it's managed by a team of professionals. And it's now available to you. at Fundrise.com slash BP Market to explore the fund's full portfolio, check out historical returns, and start investing in just minutes. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at funrise.com slash flagship.

This is a paid advertisement. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed, sponsored job posts help you stand out and hire the right people quickly.

Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page where your ideal candidates are looking. And it works. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored post. The best part, no monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And speaking of results, in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 people just got hired through Indeed worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash rookie.

Just go to Indeed.com slash rookie right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Wouldn't it be great if your house plants paid rent while you were out of town? I mean, they've got the whole place to themselves. lots of sunlight, zero responsibilities.

But no, they just sit there waiting for someone to spray them with some cool mist like a bunch of leafy loafers. But guess what? Your home actually could be earning you money while you're not there. Airbnb has a great feature called the co-host network, which makes hosting your home so easy. If you live far from your property or are away for extended periods, you can hire a local co-host to take care of the hosting for you. These co-hosts are vetted locals who already have experience hosting on Airbnb. A co-host can handle all the details like messaging guests, creating your host.

host space and managing reservations. So everything runs smoothly. It's a practical way to earn a little extra money, maybe even some cash toward your next trip. Plus, you get to share your place with someone traveling to your area while you're off making memories somewhere else. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

So let's get into this thing. These are the fire-round questions. They come direct out of the bigger pockets forums, which means real actual users are asking these questions in the forums. And guys like Chris here and hundreds of thousands of other people are reading and answering questions and asking questions and hanging out in the forum. So if you want your question answered on the Bigger Pockets podcast, or at least by somebody who's smarter and better looking than the three of us,

go to BiggerPockets.com slash forums. And there's a lot of people there helping out all the time. So anyway, let's get to this thing. Question number one. For a newbie flipper, what should I look out for when it comes to structural or foundation problems? Ooh, well, make sure you can fix them. I mean, it's, I might have a little bit of a different opinion on that because of where I come from and the, the comprehensiveness of the rehabs we do. But I've really concluded almost anything is repairable.

And it just comes to kind of what the price is and it does that make sense. But I mean, it freaks people out. And whether or not it's actually as big a deal as people think it is, it scares your and buyer. And so figuring out, you know, what needs to happen to fix the problems, I think having a warranty from whoever fixes your problem. you know, you can get a guy to level your house for, you know, whatever per peer. But where's it going to be if there's an issue or something shifts or changes? So I think definitely trying to find people that warranty their work would be one of the biggest things you can do to protect yourself from from lawsuits and problems further down the road once you've sold the house,

but also just developing and sending off and completing really quality products that you're going to be proud of. Awesome. That's great advice. Question number two, straight from the bigger pockets forums. What is the earliest age you would recommend an investor? start investing? And what is the minimum amount of experience they have under their belts? I don't think there really is a minimum age. I started really looking at real estate very seriously when I was like 17, 18, and I was reading, you know, reading books and, you know, self-educating on YouTube and watching, listening to podcasts and watching forums and everything like that. And, you know, pulled the trigger probably a little bit earlier than some people are willing to. But I would say,

you know, the amounts you learn, you know, don't just purchase the deal just to do something, but really be aware of getting over-analyzing stuff because that will happen forever if you let it. And so, you know, create the team, find some people, you know, at least one person that knows a little bit more than you do, but, you know, try to get in there and start doing something. I think that's where more people than almost anything else get hung up with real estate or anything else in life is just don't over-analyze, learn. but then be willing to jump off the cliff into a pile of boards and get brief your project. I love it. I love it.

All right. Next question. How do I know if I should start with flipping, renting, or wholesaling? Oh, boy. How do you know? I think whatever, I mean, I would maybe whoever is closest to you that is good at one of those things, I would say could be a good answer. I don't think there is a perfect answer.

I've done very little wholesaling. I know a lot of newbie investors. That's something that a lot people tell them to begin with. and I found it to be a fairly difficult part of the business because you're having to find deals that are better than the investors that are looking for the deals. And then you've got to pass those on to people. So the myth that wholesaling is this easy thing. You just put out some bird signs all over the place and you're getting people calling you with these stupid deals. It's just not, I certainly haven't found that to be the case. So, and there's definitely, there's a time.

There's definitely some financial component to that as well. But if you have any sort of a construction background, I think flipping can be a great, great place to start. And I would really recommend people not start with single-family rentals unless there's a very specific reason that we haven't talked about from some of the stuff we said earlier with managing and just the scalability issues with single-family rentals i think they can be very difficult at times awesome all right last question for the fire around i've been looking for deals for months and can't find anything worth offering on i'm getting frustrated what am i doing wrong there's a couple things obviously it could be some markets aren't as conducive toward real estate investing i was talking a friend of mine who was visiting from

Australia and he said literally what you're doing in San Antonio is what happened in the part of Australia that he's living in like 60 years ago. He's like flipping doesn't happen in Australia in this area anymore just because of way prices and you know government structure, etc. So I mean some areas just aren't going to be necessarily conducive. But I think with real estate being so broad, I would say there is a type of real estate in pretty much every single market that is viable to invest in. And so maybe changing your strategy and saying instead of I'm looking for, instead of looking for a single family flip or single family rental, you know, would land acquisition and rezoning work. That's absolutely a type of real estate.

Would repletting work? Would, you know, an auxiliary business to help other developers, and you could begin learning before you actually pull the deal or pull the trigger on your particular deal. So get educated in your area, but then get really creative and trying to find the niches. There's overlooked niches everywhere, I think. I don't think there's anywhere that's not. I mean, student housing, you know, if these prices are too expensive, you can take and convert properties in student housing and get amazing rates per, you know, per room, not even per door. Now it's per door in the house. And so maybe just changing your strategy a little bit. Yeah, it's a fantastic answer.

Yeah. I mean, every area is good for something probably. So find somebody in your area who's succeeding and then find out what they're doing because, you know, people all the time are like, I just can't flip here. I'm like, well, are there any flippers in your area? Well, sure. Well, okay. When they're in your line. They're doing something, so don't tell me you can't do it because people are doing it.

So, all right, anyway, love that. All right, so moving on, let's get to our final four questions, which we love in the call hour. Famous for. All right, these are the same four questions we ask every guest every week, and we're going to throw them at you, Chris. So number one, what is your favorite real estate-related book? I think I was, yeah, giving that some consideration. I'm sure this has been mentioned multiple times, but Robert Kiyosaki's rich dad advises. The Advisors book, The Advanced Guide to Real Estate Investing, is really comprehensive.

Going back to changing your strategy, he talks about like 10 or 11 different strategies and different people doing different parts of real estate that are all working on his team. And that was definitely a mind-blowing book when the first time I read it. I've read it a couple times and own it in audio as well as digital as well as print form. But a good one to refer back to and when you're thinking about creating a team and thinking about, okay, what's a unique type of real estate I could do? I think that touches on a lot of really, and it goes beyond just a lot of the traditional advice that you'll see out there. It goes, dives a little bit deeper. So that was a really good one for me.

And what about more generally, not necessarily real estate specific? Do you have a favorite business book? So the business books I keep coming back to are biographies of other successful business people. And because I would consider myself an entrepreneur who does real estate, not necessarily just a real estate person. So I just finished the book about Jeff Baises and the founding of Amazon. That was really fantastic. Snowball about Warren Buffett or the the snowball effect, something like that. War above is fantastic book. The biography about Alon Musk is super inspirational,

blow your mind. But yeah, I love finding the stories of people who are doing what I would want to do and then trying to pull the little gems out of those. That's awesome. I love that answer. I think that's really good advice. All right. So what about for fun when you're not doing real estate?

What are you up to? Oh, man, riding motorcycles, horses, barrel racing, all the, no, not really. All right. Yeah, you're bringing your Western. side out now. It is Texas, but we don't all ride horses. Had to fun. If there's a hitching post out front of my house.

Yeah, staying active, doing motorcycles, different car projects, paintball, you name it. We're having fun down here. You know, you said you had a film business. You still do film, video, multimedia, anything even with your real estate or without? Yeah, so we have definitely continued doing the film work. And that was, you know, when people hear film in a real estate other than 8-sheet TV and do-it-yourself shows, they don't really sound like they go together. But I've found that it's actually has been huge in my business, because I very specifically tried to chronicle in a higher quality video format and really use video to educate other realtors and people in my local market about what I'm doing.

And we just, you know, shot a film for a house that we just finished flipping and did a drone shot and everything. and it got over with the 5,000 views on Facebook in the first, you know, week or so. Nice. And, you know, the amount of exposure that does to going back to your network, I think is huge when you're talking to, you know, investors, people who might be interested in working with you. You know, the marketing side of things can definitely get neglected if you're, you know, and again, in the weeds of things, but if you can find people to handle some of those other stuff, you can sit back and say, what can I do to really market and grow my business and educate people about what I'm doing. And I've, film has been huge for that. and definitely is a differentiating factor that I've seen very few real estate professionals using in a really successful way.

Yeah, that's cool. It's kind of a competitive advantage, you know, or an unfair advantage, something that you got and, like, I mean, not that, like, you're the only one with it, but, like, it's something that you use to stand out from the competition. I think that's solid. Oh, yeah. And you can talk about, I mean, again, going back to there's so many things. I mean, there's videos of us demoing stuff and final walkthroughs and framing and sheetrock

and everything in between. And so there's so many parts of the real estate business you could educate people on or educate potential investors or people bringing you deals or wholesalers. And just letting people know that you're really serious about this. You know, if you've got a bunch of videos up there, you've obviously been doing it a little while and you're not going anywhere, still feel more comfortable bringing you deals or approaching you. Yeah.

You know, on the Bigger Pockets webinar we have each week, one of the things I mentioned a lot is to certain people on Bigger Pockets, pro members specifically, can have a profile video on their bigger pockets profile. And I always emphasize, like if you are a pro member, I'll say this here, just like I do on the webinar, if you are a pro member, you don't have a video on your profile, you're missing on one of the greatest,

trust building tools in the world. Like, video is so good for building trust. Like, when people see a picture of somebody on bigger pockets, it's one thing. You see a video, and you're like, oh, that's a real person. That's not some guy living in a foreign country who's trying to scam me.

It's like, that's a real guy. He's really doing it. Yeah. So, I mean, just a simple way. Take your iPhone out or your smartphone, record a video yourself and throw it up on your bigger pockets profile. And just the number of people that will know what you do is, I mean, holiday season, I go to Christmas parties and see people I haven't seen in literally

over a year, sometimes years. And they're like, hey, I just saw your video on Facebook or YouTube. They're like, that's super cool. You're like on AG TV. And so it's a fun way to connect with people and educate them about what you're doing. I love that. I love it. Well, cool.

Well, my final question of the day, what do you believe sets apart? successful investors from all those who give up, fail, or just never get started. Over-analyzing things, I would say, is a huge part of it. I've never worked for anyone, which is kind of a weird part about me. I've always done my own thing or worked for myself in some form or capacity. So, you know, becoming comfortable with the unknown is huge. And I think with real estate, that's absolutely the case because you're talking about numbers that, you know, for the average person who doesn't do real estate, they're just insane. I mean, I thought it was crazy when I looked at my account, we're regularly spending over a

$100,000 on month on rehabs, and that just number sounds. It sounds crazy to me still, but it becomes so much more manageable once you get into it when you're doing it. So not over-analyzing to the point of not pulling the tour around something is huge. And then, yeah, I mean, and not continuing to learn. I mean, I just got back from a conference in Dallas about an aspect of real estate that I was wanting to learn about and, you know, continuing to look for those next steps and don't become, you know, comfortable. If you get really good at flipping, don't become comfortable with your five or 10 flips a year or whatever your number is. say if you want to keep growing and you want to have an ever-expanding business, finding those next

steps. And for me, that was, you know, going from the flipping to the new builds and looking at that. Yeah, I love it. Great advice. All right. Well, thanks a lot, man. Where can people find out more about you? Probably the easiest and most active place that I'm as, probably on Facebook. And you can go to Chris F. F. as in my middle name, Franklin Gill, Chris F. Gill on Facebook. And I'm on there. But You can use that same username on Instagram or Snapchat or YouTube and otherwise. So I'll pop up in there. And yeah, love to connect and talk about this. I live, breathe, eat, sleep this stuff.

So it's fun. And we'll link to your Facebook and all your social media accounts at biggerpockets.com slash show 204. So you can find everything new. 4. Cool. All right. Well, Chris, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with

us and talk to us about your journey. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Chris. See you around. See around. Thanks. All right. And that was our show with Chris Gill. Man, an awesome show. I love talking to these young guys that are just crushing in real estate. These guys are very, you know, motivating this show and next week's show. We recorded both of those today. Just amazing. Yeah, to be clear, we did record them both today. We didn't just coordinate the same one week's part. But yeah, Chris is a really smart dude. He knows what he's talking about. He really knows how to talk the talk. You could get a lot of sense of his own confidence and that he's destined for even greater things than he's already achieved. Yeah, that's true. And you know,

one thing we didn't harp on in the show or talk about, but I wanted to bring up, I just forgot, was he made this comment about how on his first few flips, he was there a lot. Like, he was really connected. And I think they're, like, we should have touched on it because I think that was one of the keys, like, reasons he's successful today is because he didn't know anything about construction. He didn't know how to fix up properties or estimate rehab costs. But he was obsessive about being there present and wanted to learn that stuff. So he learned it, you know, I think that's cool. Absolutely. He's a student of the industry for sure. You could tell. He loves learning from different people. He's clearly read a bunch of books and is very active in the

community and is just absorbing as much knowledge as he can. And it certainly shows in how successful he's been. Yeah, very true. Very true. All right. Well, let's get out of here. You know, one thing I'm going to miss Dave about your, you know, recording with you and Josh here in your current office because next week you're in the new office or you know yes is the random people that walk in the background and i see them back i know and like they're all trying to you can't see they're trying to distract me because there's a glass wall over here and like rebecca's coming by and like doing the the austin powers thing in the background but i think they they haven't gotten me too badly yet that's funny that's funny well anyway all right well let's get out of here and next week again

you guys will hear another episode with another young investor who's really crushing it so make sure We'll listen next week. And with that, you want to take us out. All right. Thanks, everyone. And I will see you next week on the Bigger Pockets podcast. All right. This is Brandon and Dave Meyer. 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 hype, 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. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own.

Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. Bigger Pocket's LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.