BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 243: “How I Built 7-Figures of Wealth on a Working-Class Salary” with Joe “JD” Martin

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

Let’s be honest: not everyone is trying to buy hundreds or thousands of properties. In fact – just a small handful of incredible deals can help build impressive wealth AND great income. That’s the story you’ll hear today as we speak with Joe “JD” Martin, a real estate investor who’s building wealth while working his full-time job. As you’ll hear, JD had a rough start to his investing, losing over $100,000 on his first “deal,” but came back to create a stable, cash-flowing portfolio of single family houses that has given him financial freedom and over a million dollars in wealth. If that sounds like a plan you can get behind – don’t miss a moment of this powerful episode! In This Episode We Cover: Losing six figures on the first deal The number one problem of that failed deal How Joe got back into investing again and the strategy he chose The details on his first rehab Landlords who hate being landlords How the quality of tenants matter The importance of knowing who you want to rent to Having a day job while investing A Simple investing strategy How he finances his properties What is Cashflow Recycling? The freedom to do what you love to do And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Pro Replay Josh’s Instagram Profile Brandon’s Instagram Profile Brandon’s Twitter Profile Josh’s Twitter Profile BiggerPockets Calculators and Analysis Tools Zillow Trulia Realtor Books Mentioned in this Show Real Estate Investing For Dummies by Eric Tyson & Robert S. Griswold Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robbin, Joe Dominguez, & Monique Tilford The $100 Startup by Chis Guillebeau The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss Fire Round Questions Can I get started in real estate with $20k… and how? What’s your best advice for tenant screening? Electric vs Natural Gas Range/oven for tenants Tenant’s dog bit me on the leg Tweetable Topics: “A great place to live may not be a great place to sell to make some money.” (Tweet This!) “There’s no one path that works for everyone.” (Tweet This!) “You’re really just competing against yourself. There’s no competition.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Joe Joe’s BiggerPockets Profile Joe’s Personal Website Joe’s Band Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 243. As we got some experience doing this, we haven't done a million deals like some of the guests, but it's kind of been a slow and steady. My thing is, you know, hey, you can be just a regular old Joe and do this kind of thing. You don't have to, you don't have to, you don't have the guy out there swinging 50, 50 apartments and leveraging at 80 or 85%.

And you can, I mean, we average out three or four a year. And, you know, and that's, that's our goal. gig. And, you know, but it's, it's built a pretty good chunk of wealth. 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. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin, host to the Bigger Bockets podcast. Here.

with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's going on, man? You know, Josh, so I'm sitting here in Scott Trench's office right now with this giant American flag behind me. America. Really patriotic. Because I'm actually here in Denver right now, which is unusual. I actually don't live in Denver, which people don't realize that sometimes.

But no, I'm actually here in Denver, hanging out with you. You're like 40 feet away from me right now. Yep. And I'm about to come give you a big, you know, big, I don't know, what's the word? Smoochie. Noggy? That where you grab somebody by the, Nuggy, where you grab them by the arm and you, like, do their head, you know? Yeah.

I don't want a Nogi. I don't want a hug. I don't want a hug. I don't want to smooch. Just keep your distance. That's all. I'll stay in this office. You stay in yours. Yeah, that'd be great.

Anyway. It's good to see you, man. Yeah. It is good to see you. Yeah. I got to meet Rosie this morning. Got to meet the famous Rosie Lou. Wow.

It was too long. It took, what, 15 months. She's 15 months old. That's absurd. That's absurd. She's cute, man. Very, very cute kid. Thank you.

She is pretty awesome. Her and Heather at the zoo right now. Denver Zoo with my wife, by the way. No, she couldn't make it. Oh, oh, wow. I don't know, you should try to find out. I'm busy working, so, you know. Yeah, you're busy.

You know, she's got apparently had, you know, stuff going on more important than my wife. Well, you know, listen, you know, if I'm not even going to go there. I'll just stop. We'll give the watch it out of this. I'll just stop. You guys, this is show 243 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. You can check out our show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 243. we have a great show ahead for you.

Before we get into that thing, I just don't want to really talk to Brandon much more. So before we get into this thing, Brandon, why don't you share today's quick tip? All right, today's quick tip. It's something you all know, but we're going to say it again anyway.

Every single week, every single week, we've got live webinars. That means an online class that we're teaching. I host some of them. Matt Thurkoast teaches some of them. Dave Meyer teaches some of them. And we just sit down and we're going to explain,

like step by step how to do cool stuff in real estate. And they're completely free. You can show up live. They're usually on Wednesdays or, and then also sometimes Thursdays or Fridays. Anyway, come check out what the next webinar is. Go to BiggerPockets.com. That's webinar or webinars, I think plural now, but they both go there. And if you are a BiggerPockets pro member, he's a little pro tip, you can actually watch them later.

You don't have to watch them live. You can actually show up later as a pro member. So go to BiggerPockets.com slash pro replay, and you can check out over 50 hours of the past ones. And every week, we upload the new one there when they record okay. Awesome. There you go. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Cool. Guys, today's show is really cool. The reason, look, I mean, I know we say that over and over again. Here's why I like today's show as much as I do. Our guest is an average guy. You know, he's an average Joe. An average Joe. Because his name's Joe.

Yes, yes. No, Josh, let me explain. His name is Joe. What? Let me explain. What? His full name is Joe, and there's a phrase average Joe. Yes, I get it.

All right. So, J.D. otherwise known as Joe is our guest. And anyway, so he, you know, he never set out to get rich. He never set out to build some empire. He's a regular guy who's looking at his bank account saying, wow, I'm making no money on my money in the bank. You know, the banks pay Bubkis as far as interest is concerned. And by the way, Bubkis, for those who don't know what it means is nothing.

And so what do I do? I would like to make some money. And, you know, instead of going into the market, my presumption, because we didn't really dive into why real estate versus the stock market, but he decided to get involved in the market. And, you know, I think it's great. I think it's a great path. I think it makes a lot of sense.

By the way, this guy has taken his knocks. I mean, his first real estate experience was losing over 100 grand in real estate. And then he got back and got back on board again. So there's a lot to learn. there's a lot to take away and overall, you know, admirable to kind of see how he's, he's gone through his path and a lot to learn from Joe. So I'm pretty excited to have this one. Me too.

Should be a lot of fun. So with that, I don't know, before I bring him in, maybe you're always saying this, but I'll say this time can be able to be more more of an impact because I'm, you know, just much more eloquent than you were. Elegant. Wow. I can't even say the word eloquent than I am. What are you trying to do here?

Are you trying to say, hey, Joe, welcome to the. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Tell people. So what, we love ratings and reviews and iTunes. That's how iTunes chooses to show more people to show. So if you've not left this one yet, do so. And then hit us up on, like, Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and be like, hey, I just left your review. And we're going to give you a big, giant digital bear hug.

You can hit Josh at at J.R. Dorkin on Twitter or on Instagram at J.R. Dorkin. Yep. Or you hit me at Brandon at BP on Twitter or at Beardy Brandon on Instagram. Wow. That's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you in advance. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance,

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So let's get to the show. All right, Joe, welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here. Hey, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. It's a humbling to BS. Yeah,

this should be a lot of fun today. So we didn't really ask you. I mean, it just kind of... You showed up at the office. Yeah, you're like Josh, Brandon. I'm going to be on your show. And we're like, oh, okay.

Well, if you put it that way, we have no choice but to have you. I'm sure. Yeah. I think I can't, I don't remember. I think I maybe had passed a message to men. He said, hey, if you ever need a guest, you know, those guys sound like they have a lot of fun on there. We ran out of all qualified guests, which is why we're here. So, um.

Okay. So speaking of qualified, you got to do what you got to do. Before we get into your real estate story, I've got a note from Mindy saying that you are in a professional rock band and you had a song played at the Super Bowl. Can you tell us real quick? I mean, nothing to do with real estate. I just want to know. I got to know. That is true.

A song that I wrote, which is called God Guns and NASCAR, was played at the Super Bowl with the 49ers and Ravens. And how kind of how that got in there was a place we had played, the sound man, was picked he he worked sound for the tennessee titans football team when they do the super bowls they kind of put an amalgamation together of all the sound people and so he got to go down there and everybody got to put together a little bit of their song list and one of my songs was on his playlist so awesome i wasn't there but a hundred thousand people got to hear my crazy hillbilly song nice that is yeah no no money but what are you going to do fame and fortune Fame without fortune.

That's why you got through real estate. Yeah. There you go. So let's get into your real estate. How did you get into real estate investing? Okay, well, I mean, probably maybe typical like most people did. You know, me and I married, me and my wife had just bought a couple houses that we just lived in, just primary residences. And then about 15 or 16 years ago, I guess it would be now we decided we were going to do some new construction.

And the original plan was we were going to build this house. It was going to be our house. We're going to sell the house that we had. And then once we got into a little bit, we're like, well, we think maybe we can make some money on this and we'll sell the house that we're living in. And we'll, I mean, we'll stay in the house where we're living in and we'll sell the new construction house. And it turned into a total disaster. We lost a boatload of money. I mean, we lost six figures worth of money on this, on this project.

And what happened? How did you, on a spec bill that you're going to live in? How did you lose that much money? What happened? Was that the market crashing? Well, yeah, it was a combination of things altogether. I mean, it was, you know, self-inflicted Barney Fife gunshot wounds that, you know, we did on ourselves. It was, you know, the market had the way it was at that time. There was a lot of new construction was being built all the same time that we were competing with, you know, mistakes that we made cost overruns. We had a construction loan through the, through the financing bank that we were using that just dragged on nonstop. And we can we can pick out any one of these things and go to, it's more detail, but the amalgamation of the group ended up that we sold at a huge discount, basically to keep them going bankrupt, you know, to keep from being completely homeless.

Wow. Wow. So I actually want to dive in more because, you know, your misery makes us all feel better about ourselves. No, I, you know, it's, look, you learned something from it. You didn't, you didn't shy away and bounce out of the industry. Obviously, we're going to learn a little bit more about what happened. But since this is a show where, you know, we talk to people with the hope to inspire and educate somebody who comes into real estate and says, I want to do a new construction build. I want to build a house from scratch, you know, for investment or even primary residents, right?

What do they need to do to not become the Joe 15 years later? Well, maybe they want to be you 15 years later. But like, you know, to not have experience what you experienced in lose six figures. What advice would you offer to them on some of these key mistakes that you made? Well, I think, you know, the primary thing was I think that our biggest mistake, if I had to point to one, was I think we never really sat down and got the numbers correct. We never sat down, you know, things that we thought, you know, we thought, oh, we'd buy this piece of land. Then you start, you know, you build a foundation and then you build some framing, you plop a house on top. And hey, you're finished.

And we ended up with things like, for example, the property we bought. We had no idea this property had been used. It was a lot in a little subdivision. We had no idea that it was the filling ground for all of the stump and tree debris for the subdivision. So before we could even start building a foundation, we had about a month's worth of grading and clearing and pulling tree stumps out and just huge cost. Oh, geez. Yeah, I mean, they were, you know, they were pulling out trees that were, you know, the stumps were probably 150 years old, you know, just enormous trees.

So we, you know, before we had started putting a piece of cement in the ground, you know, we had probably $30,000 worth of cost overrun. How does somebody avoid that? I mean, like, what would a novice investor need to do to know ahead of time that there's stumps in the ground or there's something else in the ground that they wouldn't expect? You know, I would say probably as far as just on raw land, I mean, it would have helped that the land had been prepped before we actually looked at it. So, you know, when we looked at land, it was overgrown.

It had weeds and trees and things, brush and scrub and things that you couldn't see in there. So, you know, from that aspect, I think that we looked at the property as, oh, you know, this is, this is a great location here at the end of this dead end street. And, you know, we didn't look at it from an investment standpoint at the beginning. And that was where I think we made our biggest mistake, you know, just pointing at the property. because we looked at it as, you know, hey, this would be a great place to live, maybe not such a great place to sell to make some money. Gotcha. Gotcha. Any other bits of advice on this deal that, you know, you would share to help people avoid losing six figures?

Well, I'd say, yeah, I mean, we did a construction load, for example, on this property and the draws that we had to go through with the bank. There was so many loopholes that you had to jump before they would release funds. So all we started finding is as we were building this house, we were really depleting our own funds, trying to keep subcontractors and business. We did the GC ourselves. And so as, you know, for example, roughen framing was finished. You know, the framers want to be paid. They don't want to hear about construction loans and, you know, oh, we have to wait, you know, three weeks or four weeks for first union to sign off on this or the inspector to show up. And they want their money.

Yeah. You know, and so what ended up happening when we got it maybe maybe halfway in or a little bit more was we had. done a serious amount of depletion of our funds as, you know, the bank came in and they did their inspections and they released funds, but sometimes they would say, well, this is only 50% done. Or we're only going to release X amount of dollars for this project, even though the cost estimates on the front end, you know, when we had gone and gotten a construction loan said that, you know, framing was going to cost this and we'll release this. They might come out and say, we're only going to release 75% of that because we think that's what it works out to.

So by the time we were halfway in, I mean, we had probably depleted. I don't know how much. We had depleted quite a bit of our own funds, just trying to stay ahead of contractors in order to keep people working. But the, you know, once we had really depleted her own funds, then we were really at the mercy of the bank. In order to get projects done, we had to wait on draws and we had to wait on inspections.

And so the process just started grinding to a halt. And the whole, the total new build took about 14 months. Wow. Wow. Yeah, it was just a crazy amount of time. You lost six figures on it. Yeah, when it was all said and done, when we got close to the end, when we got real close to the end, we were doing a lot of work ourselves.

We weren't, we weren't subbing out so much stuff anymore because we were so far into it. It was going to be a brutal beating. And so we were doing a lot of work ourselves. Would you recommend that at that point? Should new investors avoid new construction for their first few deals until they get more experienced? Or do you think that was just a lot of freak accidents at one time for you? No, I think. A lot of our errors were self-inflicted.

You know, I mean, we, you know, there was other things that went against us. There was right when we got about 60, 65% of this house on the other side of the road, a developer bought like 200 acres and started dropping houses like pieces of popcorn, you know. And they were dropping houses. The build quality and was really poor, you know, and things that we had done to make our house better build quality, let's say. They weren't doing it all, you know, but nobody can see inside walls. People can't see two by six walls and they can't see, you know, special tongue and groove subfloor plywood and things like that. People can't see that.

They can see square footage. You know, they can see catching bathrooms. And so these guys were dropping these houses down and we were trying to compete with them. So some of it was just some of that timing issue. But, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was just inexperienced. You know, we thought, you know, we've fixed up houses and we've done work on our own houses. And, you know, we've remodeled this and that. You know, oh, we can take off from this.

no problem, we'll sell our house. No problem. Then we, when we had a problem with that way. So we'll make a pretty good bundle of money on this. And we just did not have the experience to do this at all. Yeah. Yeah. So what happened next? I mean, how did you move on? How did you decide to actually get more heavily into real estate after such a horrible thing? And then what was that next thing? Okay. Well, after we spent about, let's say, 10 years rebuilding our balance sheet, you know, Because we're just normal, regular blue collar people more or less. You know, I mean, I kind of have a white collar now. But be that as it may, after we spend about the next 10 or 11 years rebuilding our balance sheet

and getting our finances in order, we started thinking about it because we, I remember it opened a bank statement one day. And we've got pension and IRAs and some other stuff, but it opened this bank statement. And for close to six figures in there, I think there was like $1.50 an interest in this bank state. Well, when I opened it up, I was like, all right, we're going to have to do something here. We cannot leave this money sitting here. This is, this is not going to work out. And I'm right about the same time, I had started looking at my pension and thinking, you know, I'm getting close to 50. And I started thinking about, okay, what comes next? So thinking about

when I retire, what's our money situation going to look like? And I had run my pension numbers. And I was like, you know, originally at that time, we thought, oh, we'll, you know, pay off whatever remaining mortgage we might have on the house and, you know, stockpile our funds and then take the and that'll be it. And I ran the numbers. Oh, wait a second. I'm not to have a second job. This ain't going to pan out. So that was when we really started looking at real estate more seriously, I think, because it was something we said, hey, maybe we should give this thing a second try. You know, we went to this $100,000 school of hard knocks.

You know, maybe we tried to put some of this knowledge into practice. And so that was really when we started looking at things again. All right. So what did you do? Sorry, John. You know, we, we, we. We decided really, we kind of looked at, we thought maybe we might do a fix and flip or something like that. But then we said, well, maybe we'll look at some multifamily. We'd had, we got an agent.

We started looking at things. And ultimately, we just kind of fell into single family rentals. I mean, we looked at some multifamily and there, you know, in the area that I'm in, man, I'm not in a very big metropolitan area. So, you know, where are you? I'm halfway between Asheville and Johnson City, Tennessee. So Asheville, North Carolina, most people know where that is. that's where I work in Nashville and then I live in Tennessee but I live a little closer to Johnson City but roughly about halfway between the two so we invest in Johnson City up in

and you said you fell into single families what why why single families if you were looking at flipping you were looking at multi why did you ultimately choose to go with single well when we you know the one with the multifamily that we looked at was pretty daunting I mean it was the stuff that we looked at that we thought, you know, because we went into it, you know, this was not really having a lot of knowledge about the Burr method and leveraging and all those kind of things that, you know, maybe come later. This was really just, you know, me and my wife a couple of people thinking, hey, we've got this bundle of cash and, you know, maybe we should do something with this. So when we looked at what kind of fit into that category, you're like, you know,

wow, these are some, these things are going to need some really major work. This is going to be some big project. So we kind of expanded our viewpoint to, to say, well, let's look at some houses and see how those work out. And eventually you found a house. It was a tired landlord. It was somebody who had a property that was a rental. They had rented out and had real poor quality renters and a pretty poor quality house. But when you went inside and you looked at it, you kind of see, you know, from our experience with building a new construction and just our general real estate experience in our own life, I mean, we knew about electrical and plumbing and drywall and floors and all those kind of things.

You can kind of go into this place and see, hey, you know, this place really isn't that bad. And so we threw out an offer, which was, you know, I thought kind of a low ball, crazy offer. And they took it. You know, they said, hey, we're ready to be out of this game. And they took it. So we're not going to fix anything for that price. And we said, well, it's okay. We'll take care of it from here.

What was it on the market for and what did you offer? So I think we ultimately settled at 37. and I think it was maybe 60 or something like that somewhere in that neighborhood. So, yeah, it was a pretty good spread. And then we ended up when we ended up rehab in the house, I think we ended up with around $11,000 or so in the rehab all and all. And then later on this, most everything we have is owned free and clear. We don't have much in the way of leverage.

We have a couple houses that we've actually done the burr method, so to speak, on when we needed to free up some cash to do some other deals. But pretty much everything we own. we own outright. So 11K really quick on that 37 is at 48. What's that house worth or what was it worth after he fixed it? It's worth almost 100 now. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And what did it rent for? The house rents right now for almost 1,000. That's great. That's really good. Yep. So I want to dive in on a couple of things here. But first of all, I like to you mentioned the tired landlord. You know, like a failed like tired. Like there are, I say, tell that people that a lot.

that there's a lot of landlords who just hate being a landlord, like a lot of them out there. In fact, I would, I mean, I don't know the percentage, but like, it's probably like 80% of landlords just hate being landlords, you know, like they get into it for whatever reason. They inherit a house or maybe they run a book or whatever, but they're not good at it. They don't like it. They lose money in it. And so one of those things is like, if you're out there, if you're listening to this right now and you're like, I can't find any deals, like your strategy could be as simple as find landlords

and ask them if you can buy their property because there's a very good chance that they hate being a landlord and would sell if the price was right. Or maybe if they just sell for any reason, does they want to get out? I never underestimate the hatred people have for tenants, you know? Yeah, I would agree with that. These people that we actually bought this house from, I mean, I remember we were sitting there at the closing and we, like I said, we really didn't have any idea. Before we bought this house, we kind of sat down and did worst case scenario. Like we, you know, we took such a beating on that new construction that we sat down and we ran numbers, you know, add and this was actually before I even knew about the BP calculators and things like that.

But we ran similar numbers of that and said, okay, what's our worst case scenario if we buy this house and we can't rent it and we have to sell it, we fix it up, and you know, how much money would be staying and losing all that kind of stuff. And we found the worst case scenario really wasn't bad at all in the case of what we were doing in terms of what we were buying it for. But I remember we were sitting at the closing. And I had no real idea how much things rented for. I had kind of a vague idea, but no, you know, nothing for sure.

we hadn't tried to rent any houses out. And I asked the guy, and I said, well, I said, what do you usually get for rent in here? He said, oh, I usually don't have too much trouble getting maybe $400 or so. And I almost fell out of my seat. I was thinking, oh, gosh, if I have to rent this $400, I'm going to lose a lot of money. So hopefully I can do better than that. And, you know, of course, thankfully, what we found was that he was just attracting a poor quality tenants. You know, I mean, he had a house where he had one room that.

It was one wall was paneling and one wall was pink and one wall was a different color. And the ceiling had been painted in 20 years and just, you know, those kind of things where they just had given up essentially. They just said, we're not going to fix anything. We're not going to paint anything. We're not going to clean a window. We're not going to do anything. And, you know, and so we put a little bit of effort into it and really made it work pretty well. That's cool.

Really quick. A couple things to share for those people listening. One is know your numbers. So before you buy the house, you got to know what this thing's going to rent out for, right? Obviously, we know that now. But, you know, it's not that obvious. You know, it's not that obvious to everybody. So make sure you know what the numbers are, what kind of rents it can fetch, a property can fetch if you're going to be becoming a landlord. And those opportunities, like a house in that condition is a great opportunity to come in, tweak it, fix it and, you know, raise the rents dramatically. So, you know, that's, it's, you know, investors. get really excited when they see those kinds of things. And oftentimes the folks who are selling don't really know the value of the property anyway. They just have no way to determine it. So anyway, that said also you had mentioned the Bigger Pockets calculators.

Folks can get to the calculators on BiggerPockets by going to BiggerPockets.com slash analysis. That's BiggerPockets.com slash analysis. And we've got calculators to help you analyze flips or buying holds or burr, all sorts of cool stuff. So check that out. My wife often says that she thinks that the people who own that house probably when it comes up, every once in a while, it'll come open. It stays rented. It's never had more than a couple days vacancy. But she says when the people who own that house, when they see it up for rent, they probably just fall over dead when they see the rents that we get from this house.

Well, I found the same thing as true. This might not be true where Josh is at, where, you know, like Denver or like really expensive markets. But in, a more rural market like where I live and maybe where you're investing, there are so many bad houses and people who don't, they're pink walls and carpet that's 30 years old. And people are renting them. And so what I found is the same thing that you did is they might be getting 400 and I can get 800 or more just by having it look halfway decent, by having new carpet and having nice walls. You know, like, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. But there are a lot of good tenants in bad areas or small areas and that they just have nowhere to rent they're just like whoa i you know i don't

want to rent the crappy place for 400 i would gladly pay eight nine a thousand dollars there's just nothing available so when you can be that you can be that niche in a market like that it's a really good niche to have yeah one thing we found was that we you know in our area there's such a lack of professionalism that you're only competing against yourself you know there's really no competition against the landlord as a matter of fact we we had a house up for rent once and a college student ended up renting it. He came to look at it with his mother, and he looked at the house, and they looked at the house. And when they were done, he said, he said, this place only cost that much. It should cost a lot more. His mother wanted to slap them across the face.

Shut up. I'm paying it. Yeah. I would go back to one more thing, because I get this question all the time. You know, I do these live webinars, bigger pockets webinars every week, and we always analyze deals on them. And in the process of analyzing the deal, obviously the question comes up, how much will it rent for? And where you said earlier, you didn't know, like, you know, the guy said 400, you were hoping you do more. Now that you're an experienced investor today, can you talk to the people listening to this right now?

How do they know, if they're looking at a property, how do they even know what it's going to rent for? Well, we, you know, one thing we do now with as we pick up new houses, you know, of course now we know our market pretty good. So we have enough houses in our market and have enough track record that we have a pretty good understanding what things will rent for. And so nothing stays in the market very long. But you can certainly do comparisons with Z.

and Realtor.com and Trulia and other places like that, you can go to open houses and see the houses yourself and kind of compare. What's the neighborhood look like? What does this house compare to what I have or what I'm thinking about doing in the house that I've got? I mean, it's really just kind of doing your research, putting yourself out there, you know, driving around, looking at the neighborhoods. You know, when we buy houses, I mean, we buy specific neighborhoods, you know, there's even in a rural area somewhat that we're in. I mean, there's places that I know we're not going to buy a house in that neighborhood. It's not going to be easy to rent. A single woman is not going to rent in that neighborhood. So we're not going to touch that place.

So just knowing your neighborhoods. And that's, you know, that's one of the things about maybe investing out of town sometimes. I think it could be real troublesome for people that real estate is local for sure. Yeah. You know, when the crash happened in 2007, 2008, you know, I work in the utility industry. And, you know, it really affected the city that I work in terribly. I mean, housing developments around here, a number of them went bust. But where I live and where I invest, those people there barely even knew it happened.

You know, the growth has been kind of slower and steady. So you didn't have this kind of explosiveness like we had here in Asheville where I work. But on the flip side of things, the market was a lot more stable. So, you know, I think knowing your markets is key for sure. Hey, Joe, how does somebody do that? You know, I'm a knobby. I'm a knobby. I'm a novice. A hobbyist, knobby.

I don't know. I was like new hobby. New hobby. Yeah, I don't know, put it together. That could be our bigger pocket T-shirt, guys. I'm a knobby. Big pocket terms. How does somebody know whether or not a neighborhood's going to be one that will work for them?

Obviously, what works for you is going to be different than what works for Brandon is going to be different than what works for, you know, any of a number of the listeners. So, but for them, how would somebody really determine what's a okay neighborhood for them to be thinking about? I think, you know, you have to, if you know what your strategy is, like, let's say we're talking about buy and hold and you're going to be renting out houses. You know, I think the next thing is you have to really know who do you want to rent to. You know, there was a discussion in the forum is a couple weeks ago where somebody had posted up about, you know, oh, somebody has terrible housing and how can they, you know, provide that terrible housing? And it was a pretty long thread. And, you know, the upshot of it was, hey, even people that really can't afford much

or addicted to drugs or on the verge of homeless, they have to have someplace to live to. And these particular landlords, that's their market. Those are the tenants they cater to. You know, they understand that they're going to be evicting people every four months or struggling for the rent. But that's what they're aiming for. So, you know, if you know what your tenant class,

and we knew from the beginning that we didn't want to deal with things like Section 8, we didn't want to deal with, you know, having to have a lot of evictions and things like that. So we wanted to attract a higher class tenant. And so then we had to think, okay, well, what are those tenants going to want? You know, what are the amenities that are going to put up to be important? What are the neighborhoods that are going to feel safe living in or we're close to shopping or close to school or close to university? You know, we're a university town.

So, you know, close to the college zone. But we knew the kind of people that we wanted to attract on the front end. And then we geared what we did to that strategy. So, you know, I like that. I like that a lot. If you knew, if you knew you were just going to provide, say, lower class, you know, I was listening to some of your earlier podcasts about the, you know, the trailer parts. and I can't remember the guest's name, but, you know, talking saying, hey, we bought a trailer park and their clientele was this.

You know, people that would just in and out, they didn't have documentation. They didn't have a job, you know, things like that. We didn't. The only check we did was do they have $600 in their hand, you know, things like that. And then he said, we wanted to turn that trailer park around and attract a different class of people. So they, they did. They aimed for different court attendance. Yeah.

And that's so important. One of the things that we talk about at Baker Pockets all the time is how do we have. help people who've never done a deal to get to that first deal? How do we help the people who, you know, may have started but are struggling and can figure out, you know, what direction to take how to do that? And so one of those key decisions is absolutely like, what's your tolerance of risk? You know, what are you willing to put up with? Do you want to deal with evicting, you know, addicts in the middle of the night? Now, look, that could happen in any neighborhood, but, you know, likelihood is is higher and tougher neighborhoods, right, to deal with more of the problems.

So you're never clear from that. Even the Uber rich are drug addicts. You know, they're in that class, right? So, but yeah, so for folks to really think about the class of tenant allows you to now create this image in your head, hey, these are the people that I want to work with. This is the kind of neighborhood, the kind of area. You know, I don't want to invest in an area where there's bars. on the windows, right?

I don't want to invest in an area where, you know, the crime reports say that there's break-ins in the cars every single week. You got to look at that. You got to look at all these things. This is not just like a, hey, I want houses that are cheap. That doesn't mean anything. That's not going to tell you what kind of success you're going to have or what kind of headaches you're going to be dealing with.

Sure. You know, one of the things I do, I mean, I know most of our neighborhoods now pretty well, but one of the things I do that I did at beginning was I would drive around a neighborhood at say two or three o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday or Wednesday. And you may say stereotyping or whatever, but if I saw a lot of able-bodied young men hanging around a neighborhood at two or three o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, I would have to think about that neighborhood. You know, those people probably should be working somewhere. Maybe they'll have night jobs. But the likelihood is that you're looking in an area where there's a lot of people that just kind of maybe you're down

their luck or don't have employment opportunities and things like that, you know, and that's going to attract a different class of people than what we wanted to rent to. Yeah. And to go with what you said earlier, you know, sometimes in a market, like, I know my market. Like, I know that there are certain streets that the price is the exact same as this little sub-neighborhood, you know, or this street is the same price of this street, but I would never buy in this street and I would buy in this one. And that's where out-of-town investors went into problems. Like all they see is the numbers. Like this would rent, you know, this is, and even, but the rent might be the same. Purchase price, same. I would never buy here because I just know,

right? So I, you know, if you're going to a market, you don't understand. Let's say you live in an expensive market. You want to buy, you know, in another market, turnkey, whatever. Like, you've got to connect with local people who have lived there for years. Like, maybe fly out there or drive out there, you know, make some friends on bigger pockets who invest in that market. Because if somebody comes to me, I'm going to tell them, don't buy on that street, or at least I would tell them I would never buy there, but I would buy here. I'm happy to tell people that because I know my market. I know what's one street to another. So yeah, if you're looking at a market and you don't know that to that degree and find somebody who does and ask for help. Yeah, I'd agree with that. You know, some of the last year or two, some of the deals that we were beat out on,

there would have been deals at the right price. And some of these houses, what the price they ended up selling for us, like, wow. You know, these people are crazy. You know, there's no way they're going to. make any money on this house, you know, and then talking through my agent who, it's not a very big area. So everybody knows everybody else. And you find out, you know, a month later, oh, it's, you know, somebody from Charlotte or somebody from Atlanta that bought that house, you know, it's going to be a big investment. Well, well, probably not at the price they paid, you know, maybe one day. I mean, I'm not omnipotent. If I was, I would have never lost so much money on the introduction, but nevertheless. There are two kinds of real estate investors.

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Is that it, I mean, walk us, big picture, the last, if my math is right, the last 15 years since you kind of got started. bought that first, not the new construction, but the first house. What have you done since then? Well, this whole thing, we never really, I don't know that we actually set out to be real estate investors. You know, we're just working class people that had a chunk of money to do something with that we'd saved up, I mean, kind of a nest egg, if you will. I mean, we, we had this money and we said, maybe that's a little more dangerous than somebody uses leverage because then the bank has to say, hey, is that a good deal or not? Where, you know, it's just us with our pot of money and

say, you know, hey, you want to take some of this so we can have that house and work ourselves to death? So maybe that's a little dangerous. But we never really set out to do that. I mean, we just said, hey, let's try to put this money in something that will make a little bit more than a dollar 50 every month. And, you know, as it turned out, as we bought properties to accumulate about a dozen properties, we've created an income stream that essentially, it replaces my salary, for sure. I mean, if I, I love my job and I love what I do, but if for some reason my, my, elected board decided, hey, we don't want you anymore. I guess I would just be retired a little earlier than I thought because, you know, we created an income stream out of this thing

and a fixed asset wealth. I'm not, I'm just, that's just the cash flow. If we were to harvest off the equity in all the houses we have and we, you know, we've created about seven figures of wealth. And, you know, I don't know that we set out to do that. It just kind of, you know, one turned into another, turn into another. And as we did it and we got some experience and we knew, okay, renters will pay for square footage and they'll pay for a dishwasher in central heat and air, but they're not going to pay for a granite countertop. They don't, renters aren't going to pay for stainless steel appliances. They don't want those things.

Renters want location. They want a safe neighborhood. They want the most square footage and storage and some basic amenities. So as we got experience doing that and understanding the market better, really just snowballed to where, you know, I mean, we bought one house where we bought it for $50,000. I think we had three or $4,000. $1,000 in rehab costs. I mean, the house is worth $130,000.

You know, it's as we got some experience doing this, and we haven't done a million deals like some of the guests, but, you know, it's kind of been a slow and steady. My thing is, you know, hey, you can be just a regular old Joe and do this kind of thing. You don't have to, you don't have to the guy out there swinging 50, 50 apartments and leveraging at 80 or 85%. And you can, I mean, we average out three or four a year.

And, you know, and that's, that's our gig. And, you know, but it's built a pretty good chunk of wealth. So you're a dozen now. Is that what you said? And are you aiming to increase that? Or are you pretty happy with where you're at? No, I think, you know, it's one of those things where right now the market has gotten hotter. So like everybody says, you know, pretty much every market saying, oh, there's no deals to be had.

And even where I'm at, it's gotten tough where I look at things. And, you know, some of it's just my perception. Oh, I was buying this house for 30 and now I have to pay 60. You know, so some is just unrealistic. expectations on my own part. You know, but the market has gotten hotter and what, based on what you can charge for rent and what you can collect. So, you know, some of that maybe is slowed down.

But, you know, we've seen some, you know, some other opportunities. What we found is that there's no good professional management where we are. I mean, the management opportunities that are here are really limited and poorly done. And so that's probably an area that we're going to branch into. We've had people ask us, hey, would you manage our property? Would you be interested in doing something like that? So maybe kind of branching into that, picking up some deals, talk about maybe going to some smaller multifamily.

But I don't know. We've never really said for sure. I can't say, you know, oh, we have this strategy. And, you know, that's where I want to be in 10 years. I mean, if it's a good deal and it's making money, hey, you know, let's talk about it. You know what I really like about your story is that, I mean, you didn't come at this. Like, I'm going to be the next Grant Cardone. I'm not going to go out and buy millions and millions of dollars of properties overnight.

And I'm like, you're working a day job. You're working a job. You like your job. You want to get a better retirement. You want to build wealth. But you're not out there hustling 50 hours a week to try to build your portfolio. You know, you bought a dozen houses. And then you said earlier, you don't have really mortgages on most of them, right?

That's right. They just produce good cash flow. It's a secure investment. If the market tanks, you're not, you have no mortgage. I mean, it's such a conservative, easy. I don't know, I mean, that's not the word, simple, like strategy that should work simple. people in a good way in a really good way you know yeah this is like i don't know i think this is something

like most of our listeners probably are in your shoes 10 years ago or maybe they're on the same journey as you are they're saying you know i don't need a billion dollars i just want enough that if i lost my job or if i wanted to quit my job at some point i could and you don't have to have 50 units you got a dozen properties and they pay all your bills and i think that's i mean that's financial freedom in my mind i love yeah thank you i appreciate that like i said it's it wasn't necessarily a strategy that we started out with as much as it just became the strategy. When we sat down and looked at it, you know, after we said we would do the first one, and we, you know, we actually had, when we started up, we had figured we had enough money,

cash, our own cash to do about two houses. So we said, well, we'll do the first one and see what happens. And it turned out so well, he said, well, let's do another one. Right. So we did another one. So for 50 grand per house, you took your 100 grand that you had saved up, you know, And you were getting way the hell more than the one-tenth of a percent that you were getting in the bank. Right.

And it's a good means to an end. And all of a sudden, the next one and the next one. So how did you get to the third and the fourth and the fifth house? How did you finance those? Well, because I have a pretty good pay-in day job. You know, I mean, I make a reasonable standard of living. I didn't have to do this. We saved up the money from someplace.

Yeah. So what we did was we just turned all those profits back into the business. So we grouped everything under a business name with the later on with the thoughts. And we might want to do some property management or something like that. So we kind of early on created a little business name and just grouped all the rentals underneath the business name. And every dollar essentially that we got from that, you know, we didn't take it and go out buy Tesla or quit our jobs and stay home watching, dancing with the stars.

You guys always meant fun. Somebody's been to my webinars. I've listened to a lot of podcasts. Yeah, so we didn't take that money and do that. We took all those funds and just rolled it back into business. And pretty soon, I mean, the houses are paying for themselves. They're buying the next house. You know, no, there isn't any money coming out of our pockets.

You know, we're just taking that money and just letting it buy the next house. And so the tenants are buying the houses. You know, it's a concept I call, I call that cash flow recycling because I like putting names to things, right? Like when you take the cash flow and you, you don't spend it, you recycle it into a new property. Then that now is producing cash flow. You recycle that into the next one and then the next one. And it's such a powerful way to grow wealth because you're basically using exponential growth to build a portfolio. And so you might start small, but pretty soon you're getting faster and faster and faster and faster.

It's called playing with the casino's money, Brandon. There you go. Yeah, it really is an amazing. It's an amazing snowball effect. I see a lot of people. I spend a lot of time on the forums and I love the bigger pocket forms. Big shout out to those things. They are great.

spend a lot of time on the forums and, you know, I mean, not every question, but there's a lot of questions. You know, hey, I don't have any money and I want to start real estate investing and I want to quit my job, you know, in a month. What should I do? You know, you're probably going to have to work for a while. Yeah, but that might have been asked by like somebody who is like between 18 and 29 who I just offended like 80% of our listeners. No, look, I mean. Well, and it can be done, right? We've had examples of people who do it, but they're not doing it off of buying a rental property. I mean, they make a business. like flipping house. It's an active.

Sure, you want an active business. You want to put your job to find there's ways to do it. But for most of it, like most people like have a decent job, make a decent salary like their job. They just don't want to stay there forever. Yeah. And your strategy, I think it's perfect for that. I mean, I think it's, you know, one of the things that one of the things about this,

you know, I don't want to say, I don't want to pretend that this is all passive. I mean, we spend a lot of sweat equity on houses and things like this. So I don't want to pretend like, you know, oh, we just bought this and everybody sat around and made money because that's not. case at all. But I can honestly say, you know, once the house is rehab, because the one strategy that we decided to do early on was we were going to full rehab the house from the very beginning when there was no people in it. You know, if it needed a roof, it's getting a roof. It's getting a heating system. It's getting the heating system. So that when we put somebody in there, that is pretty much the end of it.

We weren't going to deal with the house anymore, other than collecting the rent, dealing with an odd call here and there. And that has pretty much been the case. I mean, I would estimate, you know, most houses we spend, if a house doesn't turn over a tenant, you know, I would estimate that we spend five or six hours a year on the house. I'm not kidding. I mean, once a house is in, most of our tenants want to be left alone. They don't want the landlord coming and knocking on. Hey, how are you doing? Can I come bother you and all that? So, you know, you spend, it's almost as passive as you can get. I wanted this to be with the least amount of aggravation as you could possibly get because I have enough going on in my own life right now that, you know, I don't need a job that has a hassle.

And that's where we come with some of our strategies. Like we don't take Section 8. I mean, I don't have anything against Section 8. It's just it's one more thing. I have to have an inspection. I have to interface the pay where the government pays and the tenant pays part of it. And, you know, it's just not something we want to get into. I just want somebody who wants a nice, clean place that's just going to pay their money and be done with it.

That's great. Yeah. That's great. So where do you go from here? I mean, it sounds like if something comes up, you may pick it up if it makes sense. If not, you're not. there's no aspiration here to kind of do anymore. You're a regular old Joe trying to just make a dollar and live a solid life and

using real estate as a means to help you get towards that retirement that you're hoping to have in a way where it's not just your pension and Social Security kind of giving you enough to barely survive on. It's, hey, I can actually plan ahead and build this lifestyle. Is that fair? Yeah, that's pretty fair. I have, I've got a few more years before I could take early retirement here at my job. And I haven't made that decision yet.

You know, I don't know. We'll see, we'll see when I get to that spot. But what it's done by creating this extra income stream is just, it's opened up possibility. I teach for two different universities. And, and I enjoy doing that. I love, I love the teaching, you know, I teach public administration and economics and budgeting and things like that. And I love doing that, you know, and that may be something that I might want to keep doing on a regular part-time basis. This just opens that avenue up for that.

You know, it creates, I can't remember the term, but one of the other bigger pockets members had a term for this. You know, I don't remember what the, what the term was, but having all these income streams, you know, where you've got this money coming in that if you don't want to work, fine. You just stay at the house, but you want to work. You're not really dependent on it. You may you do what you want to do because it's not really so much the money. Your needs are covered.

Yeah. Right on, man. Well, listen. Thank you so much. This is great. I love what you've done. you know, congrats on what you've built for yourself and your family. Obviously, lots of luck going forward.

I think it's time, though, Brandon. It is time for the fire round. It's time for the fire round. All right, let's get to these fire round questions. These questions come direct out of the bigger pockets forums, which I know, J.D., you are very active in, and we appreciate that. And I know a lot of other people have gotten a lot of good advice from you. So let's see what you've got to say on these questions.

Number one, can I get started? started with real estate with 20 grand. And if so, how? Sure. I mean, you know, you can, if you're in the right market, you know, I mean, that's, that could be a pretty good chunk of a house in the right market. I know some places you obviously don't want to be buying houses in war zones and places that are, you know, not going to have any return. But that's a pretty good chunk of money. And if you don't, if you're in a different kind of market, that's a 20% down payment on a $100,000 house. So I think if you use that money to leverage, and I'm a big, big fan of leveraging, even though we don't do much of it ourselves, you know, I mean, I know that it's, if you want to

really exponentially grow, and that is a good way to do it, because I can just see from the few that we did, even though most of our cash is locked up in the houses that we haven't harvested that equity, you know, I can see from the few that we did, how we really grew that. And you take that 20 grand and, you know, take another 80 grand in leverage, you've got a $100,000 house right there. There's your start. Yeah, love it. Awesome. All right. So next question. Hmm, I just had a question and Brandon trolling me decided to delete it. So I'm going to go to the next question here. I have to kind of answer. That's why I went out. All right. Next question. I went over to one of my tenants units at a fourplex. I own in Kern County, California yesterday. When I knocked on the door, the tenant tried not to let one of her dogs out. It squeezed between.

her and the dog and immediately bit me, landlord, on the lower leg, drawing blood and a puncture wound. Besides the medical end of the situation, which I took care of immediately with antibiotics, have any of you experienced the situation? What should I do? Get rid of the dog? Question mark. So what do you do? Your tenant has a dog that bites you. How do you deal with it? It kind of sounds like they may not have even included anything on the lease for a dog and maybe they didn't include something about a vicious dog. But what's your take on this? Well, we, you know, we actually rent to a lot of people. I'm amazed, you know, some of the people in the board in the forums will say, well, we don't allow any pets, but we, I would estimate easily 75 to 80 percent of our applicants have pets for

sure. So we rent to a lot of people that have dogs. And we have requirements on the dog has to be fixed. has to have all of its current shots. Occasionally, we meet the dog. We make that a requirement. So if the logistics, you make sense, you know, sometimes it's not possible. But, I mean, in a case like that, I don't know, that would probably be something where we be looking to say, you know, you're probably going to need to make some alternate arrangements to move on here because in a case like that where a dog has really come out and bit somebody

else, and that's an insurance liability. So, you know, it probably wouldn't bother me personally, but I don't want the plumber getting bit. Yeah, that makes sense. makes sense. Yeah, that's always a tough one. All right, next question. Electric versus natural gas range ovens for tenants. Like if you could have a choice and like, let's say there's natural gas at the house

or you're going to put an electric one. What would you do? Well, I know a lot of people like cooking with gas and we like cooking with gas, but I just think electric is much less trouble. It's much easier to swap out. Something goes wrong. You go in, you pull the range out and you pop a new one in and boom, you're done. So just from ease of turning over, a lot of tenants may not understand how to use the gas properly.

If you can have a gas leak. So that's not something that I would, if I had a choice, I would go with electric. Now, on the heating side of things, if we were talking about heat, I like having gas heat because it kind of saves some of the wear and tear on your condenser. So if you, you know, on your compressor unit that's outside, if you have gas heat and AC central heat in there and you have gas heat and it makes your unit outside run half as much. So, but from a stove, yeah, electric for sure. Brandon, what do you do? Same thing. Electric stoves all the way.

I'll put those in all day. Just for the same reason. I mean, if it was a really high-end house, I might lead natural gas. Like, it was a really good unit. Right, yeah. Right. If you had somebody, you know, if you had a house that you knew it was going to have, you know, somebody in it that really wanted to cook.

Yeah. Actually, I can say some of our houses we've gone in after a tenant's been there for a year and the stove hasn't been used. Oh, wow. You know. Nice. The microwave was used, but not the stuff. All right.

Last question. What is your best advice for tenant screening? Oh, boy. Well, I think that's where, I mean, knock on wood, we've had nothing but great tenants. And I think that it comes down to our screening. And, you know, my wife plays a huge part in this because she is a really good judge of character, present company accepted. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

So she's pretty good at talking to a tenant and saying, hey, this person's probably going to to be trouble just getting a feel for them, you know. And then we combine that. So she kind of takes the people end of that of that equation. And then I'll take the more technical end of things where I do the background screening online and go through their written application. And, you know, we have requirements on first and last and deposit and maybe a little more stringer than other people. But what I've found is that people, if you, if you screen a tenant and you look at their credit report, I don't mean just getting a credit score, but you look at their credit report, You look at their background in eviction check and you look at their application and you see somebody that has stable work, no felonies, no evictions, no real anything on their credit scores.

I mean, most people don't just turn into psychos from out of nowhere. You know, most people, there's going to be some warning flags. And, you know, and I think the people that are into trouble ignore the warning flags. You know, they see something on there, but they're so desperate to get somebody in the place. They just say, well, I'm going to, you know, kind of overlook that and talk myself out of it. And we haven't done that. And would. We haven't, we haven't done that. We've, you know, never really been afraid of vacancies. We own the house. So it's not like, well, you have to run out and pay the mortgage bill.

So that helps. That's another reason why having, you know, no mortgage. And again, there's that debate all day long. People talk about leverage versus not. But that is a huge benefit of not having a mortgage. Is it? You can wait a month, two months, three months. And that was one of the best piece of advice I forgot from anybody. When I first got in the real estate at my first rental, somebody said, like, if it means sitting empty for a month, two months, doesn't matter. that the kind of tenant you get will determine your success more than anything else in the world. So like get the right tenant. And yeah, every time I've had an eviction with somebody, I've had a red flag. Like that I avoided.

You know, like, I mentally, I was like, yeah, I ignored. I'm like, it's okay. You know, they've changed. Yeah. I did that with my co-hosts. I mean, I had to pick of the litter. There were so many to choose from. Look at what I ended up with.

Look at what you ended up. This handsome devil. I mean, you know, we've had such good tenants. that we've placed people just on referrals. You know, a place hasn't even come vacant. We haven't advertised it. I mean, I have signs. We never even put them in the yards anymore because we do, you know, half of our placement

just at a referral. Somebody we've had a successful tenancy with. And tenants move for whatever reason. They go to school someplace else or they take a job at a town or they want to buy a house. You know, there's no rhyme or reason to why they move. And they'll say, you know, hey, I know somebody that's going to be looking for a place. And most people kind of tend to stick together. So people that are good people have good friends.

Yeah, that makes sense. Awesome. Awesome. I think we got four questions that we want to ask this man. All right. These are the same four questions. We ask every guest every week, and I know you've heard them, but I'll ask anyway. Number one, what is your favorite real estate related book? My favorite real estate related book is kind of older, but it is real estate investing for dummies by Harry Tyson. And it's kind of the first book I just started off with. But, you know, it really, I mean, it explains things that you might feel dumb asking somebody else. Nice. Which is also the reason bigger pockets exist. I mean, like, I mean, seriously.

Like, that's why the forums are there. That's why our community exists is there aren't dumb questions. There just aren't. I mean, like, if you've never done this before, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know what you don't know. you don't know what to ask. And I felt like people needed a place where they can just go and feel free to ask any question no matter how quote unquote stupid it was. And, you know, the truth of the matter is we all appreciate it.

Because even today, like Brandon, how many years later, I mean, you're reading stuff on the site and learning. I'm listening to guests. I just posted something last night in the forums because I was like, I had a question about something. And I was like, hey, let's find out what people got to say because I didn't know. Exactly. So awesome.

Awesome. All right. Well, next question. What is your favorite business book? Oh, boy. That one's tough because I listen to a lot of business books. I do a lot of audio. I listen to a lot of audio books. And I do a lot of business books.

So I don't know if I could pick one, but I could pick a couple. I love your money or your life by Vicki Robin. I think people, a few people mentioned that before. But it really kind of speaks to me along the Mr. Money mustache type mentality. I think sometimes, you know, you want to. to build your real estate and you're investing in your income, you know, but you kind of need to know, what's your enough number? I mean, you could do this until you're dead. You could do it nonstop and kill yourself doing it. So, you know, what is the number that, what are you aiming for in life?

So I really enjoy that book. A hundred-dollar startup by Chris Gilbo is a great book. It's, you know, I like inspirational books and I like inspirational people. A millionaire next door is one of my favorites. Tim Ferriss's book, Who Are Our Work Week. Some of them are just, they make you think outside the box. You know, they make you think, hey, what are the possibilities? Not just focusing on what's right in front of your face, but what's possibilities, you know, five years down the road. Yeah, I love it. There you go. Love it. Awesome. Awesome. All right, hobbies, what do you do for fun outside of all this real estate stuff? Well, I play music in a rock band. I have a band called RhythmBrewers.com. Shamedombrowers.com. Shamedombreweres.com. Rhythm brewers. Like, Rhythmbrowers.

Beers. Rhythm Brewers. Rhythm Brewers.com. So play music, play with my dog, hang out with my wife on the front porch. That's pretty much the song of it. That's good. Very cool. Sounds like a good life. I like it. So last question from me of the day and the last of the famous four.

What do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail, or never get started? For me, it's kind of a two-part thing. I think the first part is hard work. None of this stuff is easy per se. I think you put your time in on the front end to reap the rewards later. It's not easy going out and driving neighborhoods and looking for deals and going to go into closings and then going and maybe doing some of the rehabs yourself or none of that stuff is easy. I mean, it's much easier to just work your job, punch the clock, come home, take your shoes off and that's it, go to bed. So I think that's half of the other half of this persistence. I mean, you know, it would have been really easy for us to give up after we had lost that

bundle of money and say, well, we're never messing with real estate again. We're just going to work our jobs and collect our money and we'll put some money in the IRA and then we'll get a pension and we'll live the rest of our life out and that's the sum of it, you know. And but, you know, we didn't let that stop us. It wasn't something, you know, I never felt like maybe one of my more aggravating qualities, but I am persistent to the end to the earth. To the point, I mean, I have gotten into music groups by being persistent saying, hey, if your guitar ever quit, you know, you need to call me up, you know, and eventually one day the group said, hey, you know what? We need a guitar player.

You want to come play with us? You know, so I think hard work and persistence. I don't think there's any substitute for either one. I love it. I love it. All right. Before we let you go, Joe, where can people find out more about you? Where can they connect with you?

You already gave the shameless plug. So, you know, no more of that. No, I'm just kidding. Okay. They can find me on the forums under J.D. Martin. I'm there on the forums pretty often. and I've got this little mentoring side thing I do under bizbrainstormers.com and it doesn't make any money, but it's fun. I get to talk to people and I charge a little bit of money, but it's really just to make sure people don't waste my time because I don't have a lot of time to waste.

So I do that a little bit unless they can, they can check that out, but they can find me on the forums. I'm always there to impart whatever advice or smart aleck remarks I can for free. Right on. Very cool. All right, Joe. Well, take care. Thanks so much for coming on. we really do appreciate it and lots of luck to you going forward.

Hey guys, I really appreciate it. And what you're doing with the forums and the site is phenomenal. I just want to give you that plug. It is the best real estate and business forum on the web hands down. Wow. Thank you. Great. It means a lot.

Thank you. All right. Take care. Thanks. All right, guys. That was Joe J.D. Martin, episode 243 here of the Bigger Pockets podcast. You know what I like about that show a lot? It shows that like even, you know, like there's even hope for guys like you, Josh.

You know, average people, maybe a little bit below average guys like you can still make a good living, you know, investing in real estate. You know, that's what I love about him. It's average Joe. Right. Is that I'm trying to understand what, I mean, what are you trying to imply here? No, I'm not. I'm just saying, you know, like you can be like Josh Dork in here and, you know, just be an average guy, you know, and you can still succeed at real estate. Wow.

That's great. That's great. Listen, I appreciate it. I take anything that you say as a compliment, even when you are trying to belittle me, tear me down. All day. Yeah. Well, that was, no, that was great. Good show. I like what Joe's doing. I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think it would make a lot of sense for a lot of people. So, hey, there's another one in the books, man. Another one in the books. Yeah. And I like also, he doesn't have 100 units. You know, like often as we look at like people come on the show. show. And like, I'm guilty of it too. Like, oh, they got a hundred properties. They got a thousand properties. Like, I got to go do that. Yeah. But like, Joe's like, well, what do I really want? I want to play music and band. I want to go and, you know, spend time with my wife on the front porch. I love that they said that. Like, so I, for me, he bought a dozen properties. Has financial freedom

pays all his bills if he needed to. But in the meantime, he just works a job he likes. He hangs out and does what he likes to do with life and takes care of his properties until he no longer wants to work that job. Sounds great. Yeah, sounds like a pretty good life to me. So there is no one path, right? There's no one path that works for everyone. And here's, I think, one of the biggest best piece of advice I ever got, which is you're not in a race against everyone else around you. Right. You know, who cares if that other guy is working on his 100th unit or his thousandth unit?

It's meaningless. What do you need? What do you want? Like, if you need one property, hey, you know, like Brandon, you went and bought your, your daughter a house when she was born, right? Four place. Yeah, I wish I had done that for my three children, right? I'm like, oh, man, maybe I should have done that.

That would have been a good idea. But it's brilliant. It's like, you know, even if you had just done that, right? It accomplishes that goal. That accomplishes a goal for her. Maybe that's her college fund. Maybe that's her post college. Maybe that's her retirement.

That's her nesting. Whatever it is, right? So figure out what you need and go for it. I mean, you don't have to like shoot to be some big mogul. You just got to figure out what you want, what you need. Maybe you want to be a mogul, but maybe you just want to be an average Joe. So yeah, maybe. Do what you got to do.

All right. Good stuff. Brandon. You want to go with some lunch? Let's go eat. All right. You guys, I'm Josh Dorkin. Signed 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. It's time for it. It's time for it. The Random Five.

All right, and coming back in real quick, we are going to end this show with the Random Sixth. So, question for you, Joe, J.D. Would you rather be invisible or be able to read minds? I would much rather be invisible because I do not want to know what most people are thinking. Most people know what I'm thinking. Would you rather work for the FBI or NASA? I would rather probably work for NASA, but only because that goes against kind of my government paranoia streak. What is your dream car?

My dream car is a 1969 Mustang fastback. Nice. When are you going to get it? Yeah. Well, you know, I used to have some of those old cars and I used to work on them and it was a lot of fun.

So maybe I might get one another once again another day. Yeah. Have you ever had a teacher that's changed your life? And if so, how so? I have. I had a high school teacher. When I was in high school, I got in a little bit of trouble with the law.

And he actually wrote a letter to the court for me. And the court still wasn't leaning on me. The letter made no difference whatsoever to the court. But it made a huge difference to me. I was probably somebody that was heading maybe down the wrong road. And to know that there was this guy out there that really had no reason to do anything for me other than he saw something there. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

What is your favorite card game? My favorite card game is probably a tie between Uker and Krivich. I don't know you. Isn't that what you play when you're like 80? Maybe, maybe, but I'm really good at both of them. Yeah. So Joe goes down to the old age home and takes advantage of the... It's part of my retirement plan.

Awesome. All right. Last question. Are you a good cook? And if so, or if not, what is your, what's the best thing that you make? I am such a bad cook that I have actually melted pots. That is a true story. I have turned pots into molten shapes of metal. So I'm generally not allowed to use the stove. Luckily for me, my wife is a fantastic cook, so it doesn't matter. I love it. I love it. All right, Joe. Thanks so much. Hey, thanks a lot, guys.

It was a lot of fun being with you guys. 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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