BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 288: 75 Rental Units in Their Early 30s with Jason and Carrie Harris

Episode Date: July 19, 2018

It takes a long, long time to become successful in real estate and financially free — doesn’t it? Well, not according to the power couple on today’s show! In this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we sit down with Utah’s Jason and Carrie Harris, who have built a sizable portfolio of more than seventy rental units over the past few years. These two have used a variety of creative financing strategies, and the lessons and stories they share are sure to inspire and educate you! Be sure to listen for the story of how they bought a four-plex for no money down, put $3,000 into it, and later made $186,000 in profit from that one deal. It’s unbelievable! In This Episode We Cover: Why real estate? Their first deal How they bought a four-plex and house-hacked it How they finance their deals Working their way with the bank Their current number of doors Commercial financing, residential financing, and partnerships Analysing multiple properties A deep dive on a deal Raising the rent and without losing tenants Lessons learned from an amazing deal Buying properties with no money down Upselling to their clients And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Events For Those Who Struggle Financially (Video) The Secret to Unlocking Bank Financing (PDF) Be a Podcast Guest! Brandon’s Instagram David’s Instagram Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The Book on Investing with Low or No Money Down by Brandon Turner Investing in Duplexes, Triplexes, and Quads by Larry Loftis The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber The E-Myth Real Estate Investor by Michael E. Gerber Fire Round Questions What brings more value, an extra bedroom or a garage space? What type of flooring do you use in your rentals, do you use carpet? What are your thoughts on investing in a property located in a flood zone? Curious to know if there are any good loan options (other than hard or private) that self employed people can use with little to no taxable income Tweetable Topics: “We didn’t have a lot of money so we had to find ways to be creative.” (Tweet This!) “You find a good enough deal, the money’s going to be there.” (Tweet This!) “There’s a way there’s a solution. You have to make it work.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Jason and Carrie Jason’s BiggerPockets Profile Jason and Carrie’s Company Website Email Jason and Carrie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 288. That was one of the first times we had used the birth strategy and seen that kind of profit. And with only $3,000 of our own money. And so it was just kind of crazy realizing, I mean, you really can't. People tell us all the time, you can't buy real estate anymore with zero money down. But we would argue you can. You can buy money with zero, zero dollars down. And I think that was our, that was my lesson.

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, everyone? This is Brandon Turner. Today's host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. David Green. How you doing, David Green?

What's going on, BT? I'm doing really good. We have some awesome guests today. And you know, it's funny. He's actually mentioned in the very beginning of this podcast, the velocity of money. And that is what I'm going to be talking about in the next meetup that we have coming up is why the velocity of money is important and what it is. Fancy, look at you doing meetups. Yeah, you know, this is just a message to everybody out there listening to this right now. If you're not regularly, regularly meeting up with other real estate investors, man, you're missing out. There's so much you can learn and grow as an investor just by being around other people who are doing awesome stuff. So that is today's quick tip. Yeah, BiggerPockets.com slash events if you want to find an event in your area.

I know I say that every week, but seriously, it's so good to just get together with the other people in the real world. So do it. Stop thinking about it. Do it right now. Pause us, then go to BiggerPockets.com slash events and sign up for the next event in your area. If there isn't one, start one with that. 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,

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So maybe I was to introduce our guests, plural today. Today we've got husband and wife duo Jason and Carrie Harris. They are fantastic. You guys are going to love them. They are real estate investors in their early 30s who are absolutely crushing it in their real estate, buying small multifamily properties. They live out in Utah. And they're doing some really amazing things with financing, with finding deals.

We cover all that. We go really deep into a recent deal that they did. They made like 180. $6,000 on one deal tax-free. It's incredible. And they put no money down to buy this deal. I think all they have into it was like $3,000 in repairs. And it's a super cool story.

So hang tight for all of that. You guys are going to love it. And the last thing I'll say before we bring them in is this. If you have not yet left to say rating or review or both in iTunes, please do so. Let the world know that you like this show and that you think we're doing a good job. Or if you think we suck, you know, let us know that too. That's fine. And, you know, call on David Green by name there.

If you're going to go that right. No, all right. No, I love David Green. So David Green, you're a good guy. It's not sure what they say about you. Thanks, man. As long as that's how you feel, I can handle the rest. Okay, good.

All righty. Well, I think that's all we got. So let's bring him in. All right, Jason and Carrie, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Good to have you guys. Good to be here. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So let's go through your story, talk about how you got into real estate. You guys are doing some really impressive stuff. I kind of looked over your story. and it's amazing. So, but before it was amazing, it probably started with a single deal, am I correct? Absolutely. All right, because that is kind of like required by logic.

So let's go through the very first, you know, how did you get into real estate? Why did you choose real estate? And what did that first deal look like? It was a little accidental, to be honest. Kerry's parents and grandparents own some rental property. And I actually am a financial advisor. I've been investing in stocks and we had a little bit of money. And I was interested to get started in real estate.

state. And so when her parents were going to sell their duplex and go to a fourplex, I asked if we could take them to dinner and see if we could be involved somehow owning one of the four units. And I'd do all the work and add value somehow there. And we found out after they were nice enough to let us be introduced to their real estate agent that we actually were in a position of finance something on our own. So once we found that out, we were like, wow, and bought our first fourplex with an FHA loan. And we actually were in a business. We were, We can go in more of that if you'd like to know. Yeah.

I'd actually love to because, you know, like the whole you bought a four, like I'm assuming you lived in one of the units. We sure did. As we call it house hacking here, we like that term. And yeah, tell us about that. Like, what was that like? What were the good sides, bad sides? It was amazing, to be honest.

It was life changing for us, I think. We found out that you can buy a property almost a half a million dollars for three and a half percent down. And as soon as I found that out, I realized that we had enough money to do it. I started analyzing different deals and properties to find out where we could invest that money. And within a month or two, we had already recouped our down payment we'd put into the property. So the whole velocity of money, putting your money in, getting the money back out, but retaining the asset that cash flows and being able to repeat the process was so, exciting to us that I had a new take on real estate. He was obsessed at that point. Absolutely.

We also, we were able to live rent free while living there, which was huge for us because we were actually both in college still. I was 22 and he was 24. So I mean, we didn't have a lot of money. So for us, we were living in this place that was a lot nicer than anything we could have rented, but we owned it, which was so crazy to us because we were so young. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was so funny when we got the lease agreements and then did the background checks, every single one of our tenants was older than us, made more money than we did. Yeah, we own it. We couldn't have afforded to live there. We couldn't pay the amount of rent to live there, live in a nicer place, get all the forced depreciation and equity, and save what we would have been spending in rent. And that enabled,

that enabled us to be able to repeat the process sooner than we otherwise would have. And so I was hooked on real estate from the very beginning once that happened. You know, one thing I'm curious about, Jason, you're a financial planner. So it's your job to help people make money, right? What was it about real estate that was so appealing that pulled you in when this is something that you make your life income by looking for financial opportunities? That's a great question, David. We started in real estate in 2010.

I was 24 years old at the time. And I started as a financial advisor with Edward Jones in 2012. So real estate was my baby first, I guess you could say. And so I was hooked on real estate. Edward Jones and being a financial planner was just something I've always enjoyed doing. I had a relationship with an advisor in Texas where I'm from where I had saved up this money in order to have the down payment to buy our first property. But real estate came first. We decided to have more reliable income.

I was going to choose to be a financial advisor by day and a real estate. real estate investor by night. And that was a lot of discussions. We had attended some real estate seminars together. And I was thinking about going all in, being a full-time active real estate investor. But it just made sense for us to take that route. And I'm so excited to actually understand real estate, most financial advisors focus only on stock investing and we'll even pitch stocks against real estate. And I think that's the completely wrong approach. I think that everyone should consider real estate as part of their financial planning. Whether or not they're going to buy rental for investment property, your house can be part of that financial plan. And it needs to be

discussed on how you're going to utilize that as an asset. So tell us about this first deal. What did you pay for it? What rents did you collect? How did you guys have that set up? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the first deal we found, it got under contract, we were so excited about. And then something fell through on that and she was devastated so she started looking herself we worked with a real estate agent and we found a property out in a city that wasn't where we currently were it was 434000 which was about 100 to 130,000 more than the other four looking at so that was a little intimidating until we started breaking down the numbers and analyzing it what we realized is by buying a bigger property meaning more bedrooms per unit.

The additional cost was justified in the additional rent income we could make per apartment or per property. And so I loved it. In fact, the numbers looked a lot better on it. And so we fought the loan officer. We were turned down many times. I can't tell this guy. I remember about a two and a half hour meeting where I kept saying, no, there's got to be a way because I knew if we could make this happen, it was going to set us on the path to be able to achieve things a lot faster.

than I had ever imagined as I was putting money away for stock investing. And so I was so excited that we found a five-year arm that reduced the interest rate and allowed our debt-to-income ratio fall within that 43% ratio that often underwriters are looking for, where if we would have done a 30-year fixed, the interest rate was too high, we wouldn't have been able to qualify. And so we hashed that out for about two and a half hours and finally found a solution. So I love that you said that. A couple of things I want to point out there.

First of all, if there were terms in there that the listeners here, you guys listening didn't understand, like, what's debt to income? What's an arm? What that should tell you is that these are terms you need to know, right? So like, I mean, we can talk about them a little bit, right? So debt to income is how much debt you have compared to how much income you have on a monthly basis. An arm is an adjustable rate mortgage. But like if you want to get financing, like it's not, in fact,

I was just creating a video for bigger pockets, like earlier, I just filmed it like an hour ago on this very topic. And it's like if you want to get approved for a loan, it's not a mystery. It's not a subjective thing. The bank doesn't go, yeah, I like you. I'll give you a loan. They say like, did you hit our combination? Did you enter in the code right?

Like high school locker style, right? And so I love that you guys sat there and you went through and you're like, no, we're going to figure out a way to get this combination open. Like we're going to keep working this. And the only way you can do that is by understanding. what is an arm, what is a debt to income, what is credit score, what is their requirement for all that? And as long as you do the combination, right, you're going to get in. Absolutely.

Yeah. So that's, that's fantastic. I will throw this out there as well. I wrote a guide a while back called like unlocking the secrets, the bank financing. It's totally free. People want to check it out. It just goes through all those metrics, biggerpockets.com slash bank financing. Again, bigger pockets.com slash bank financing. Again, there's no opt in. There's no charge. It's just like a ebook I wrote. So check it out. So anyway, all right, that's super cool. I love that story.

I love people who start that way because when you, like as you guys mentioned, when you don't have to pay rent to live, but you can live for cheap or for free, which house hacking allows you to do, it gives you the ability then to use your money for other things. I'm assuming you guys started buying more real estate deals sometime after that, right? So walk us through what came next. Yeah, great question.

So before we bought the Foreplex, we were able to save about $300 a month from our income. We were in our early 20s. We didn't make a whole lot of money in our 20s even. And so that extra $900 a month that we now were able to save, that we were paying in rent, allowed us to now save $1,200 a month. And that's exactly what we did. We started putting that away, investing it so that we could buy our next property.

At that particular time, they were offering the first time home buyer credit of $8,000. And so we were required to live there for three years. So our process was actually really slow. And we learned things along the way that could help speed that up. But at that particular time, we weren't able to buy our next property until 2014. We found what's called a portfolio lender who had a special loan, since you can typically only have one FHA loan at a time, unless you meet certain criteria.

We went through this portfolio lender that allowed us to put 10% down on a duplex. Owner-occupied again. Yeah, if we owner-occupied it for a year time. So that was our next deal. We bought that one for $271,000. It was a four-bedroom two-bath apartment per side. And our mortgage payment was 1313 a month. And the rent income on the other side was $1,200 a month.

And so when we left our fourplex and moved to the duplex, we now had another $950 a month from the apartment we were living in. And so now all of a sudden you can save a little over $2,000 a month in our case to put towards the next property. And so you just keep learning more and more on how to get each property faster and smarter. And that was the next deal. So tell us on this deal, what is a portfolio lender and why did that allow you to put 10% down when conventional wisdom says you have to have 20 or 25% to put down on investment property? Yeah, great question.

So typically the banks, the traditional bank's going to want 20% down on an owner occupied duplex. But there are certain banks that don't. don't sell their loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means the bank's going to create their own product that they keep in-house. And so we worked with U.S. Bank in that particular case. There's a lot of other banks, too, that will potentially offer that. But they offered or allowed us to put 10% down if we owner occupied it. And again, we did a five-year adjustable rate to have a lower interest rate

because our goal was to make our monthly mortgage payment as low as possible. and within the five years someday in the future, rate and term refinance into a 75% loan to value loan or an investment loan. We wanted to get that loan back in order to owner occupy another one in the future. That's what I'm trying to say. So that's interesting that you guys use this adjustable rate mortgage more than once when a lot of people hear that word and they immediately think, oh, that's bad. I'm going to lose my house. That's dangerous. I don't want that.

Help us understand why that was something you saw as a positive and how you used it to help your situation. Great question. And I would say, David, maybe I wouldn't be recommending that to people now necessarily. The Federal Reserve is trying to increase interest rates. And so that is something that you're going to want to factor in on your numbers that in five years that rate could increase. At this particular time, though, again, we were starving students. We didn't make a lot of money. That payment was very critical for us. So what we wanted to do was do everything we could to increase the value of the property. And we thought the only way to do that is either sweat equity or the potential cash flow or cash savings that we were going to make by having a lower mortgage payment. And so with the additional cash flow we were making each month, we could take that money and improve the property, increase the value. And within the five years, we thought we would be able to have the 25% or more equity needed in order to get that loan out of there before the interest rate would change.

Yeah. And also your rents probably went up every year. So as the interest rate might adjust, your income comes in and it kind of offsets that a little bit. Now, one thing, I don't know if you, I don't know if this is true for your adjustable rate mortgages, but I did one recently. I refinanced the property. I bought it with private money, rehabbed it, rented it out, refinanced it. And when I did that, they would only give me an adjustable rate mortgage. But I looked at the paperwork and because of all the mess of 2007, 8, there was now caps on how high an adjustable rate can actually go.

And in this case, it was 11%. It would never go higher than 11% ever, right? So even if interest rates jumped to 30%, 11. So I ran my numbers and said, okay. Okay, 11%. If that's what it goes to, what am I add? And it increased my payment like $100 a month on a property that was cash flow in $700. So I was like, all right, do I really care of adjustable rate? When worst case, it raises at $100 a month? No. Right. And so I kind of weighed that as well. That's something, I think a lot of times we're afraid of adjustable rate mortgages because we remember

what happened in 07. That's a great point. Most of them that I've found that we've done has capped at at 5% more than whatever you start at. So most of mine at the particular time were 3.7. roughly. So 8.75 was the maximum amount we would have paid. We would have been just fine too if that would have happened. All right. So tell us guys, you obviously got off to a really good start. How does your business evolve? Where have you guys grown to? How many doors do you have? At the end of this month, if we can close on the few that we have under contract, we'll have 75 doors. About 11 million in real estate value. Yeah. Cash flow, gross scheduled income will be just over a million. So we're excited. I can't believe how far it's, it's come and it's happened really

fast. That's awesome. So are those single family, multifamily, kind of what's the makeup look like? Almost all of ours are multifamily units. So duplexes and fourplexes are almost everything that we own. There are a few that we have house hacked. And instead of selling, I guess we've kept them. The plan will be to sell them within five years because we lived in them two out of the five. which then allows you to sell it tax-free, whatever capital gains is. Yeah, I love that. Most of them are all multifamily units. Yeah, for those people who don't know, and again, we're not CPAs or lawyers,

they're giving you tax advice, but there is a thing in the IRS code that says if you live in a property for two out of five years that you own it, yep, you can avoid, potentially, avoid, like how I'm doing my lawyer speak, you can potentially avoid paying the capital gains tax on that. So I actually recently did that. I sold a house. I think we made $80,000 on it. But because I lived there for two years,

paid $0 on capital games. Awesome. Yeah, right? Like that's such a cool little. And every time, every few years that comes up and they, they threaten to take that away from us. And, you know,

because it's a really nice little benefit. But they haven't yet. Still there as of this recording. So hopefully they'll have it for a while. So very cool. All right. So you guys have 75 doors. Now a lot of people are probably wondering,

well, how I mean, I want to cover how do you finance? how do you fund all that stuff or you know and how do you find them but a lot of people are worried about this like i can't have more than four properties like they say things like that right because that was the old rule like how have you gotten around the the limits on how many mortgages you can have so good question there's a lot of banks that will go up to 10 loans per person and so if you're married that's a benefit to have 10 loans per person so what we did is we started out putting Carrie and I both on loans and then realize this later, since we've refinanced out of some of these first couple properties we've talked about, we did that in my name only.

And over time, we've been building up Carrie's income so she can get her own set of 10 loans. Another thing that we've done, I think that helps, is a lot of our properties are similar in nature, which will allow us to actually get a commercial loan on these properties down the road. if we want to get some of those four or 10 residential loans back because they do cap you on that. So through commercial financing and then residential financing. And partnerships. We have used partnerships also. Yeah, partnership deals. We've used the Burr strategy.

There's a lot of different strategies to use. But yes, the banks do cap you at that 10 amount per person. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, getting around that is just really a matter of understanding the different options that exist. Like I was like people start freaking out when it's like they're on their first deal. They're like, yeah, but what I do after five or ten? Right. I'm like, when you get to 10 deals, you're going to know exactly.

You figure it out. Like you got the experience, you got the knowledge, you figure it out. You can partner what, you know, do the husband-wife thing or go commercial, go larger properties, whatever. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's really only an issue to people when they're on their first deal or second deal. Sure.

Sure. I would recommend, though, if you're able to. only have one of the two spouses be on the loan, because then it gives you the ability to add a spouse later or have that spouse get loans in the future. And so that was one thing that's really helped us. We also have bought a lot of property close together in proximity that have similar floor plans. And commercial lenders really like that. So that fourplex we first bought, we now own the fourplex right next door, exact same floor plans built the same year, share the parking lot. That to a commercial lender's an eightplex.

and I can easily turn around and give that to the commercial lender, get two residential loans back so I can go out and get more residential loans. Now, Carrie, we mentioned that you are building up your income so that you can start getting some of these loans in your name. And I understand that you're a, are you a broker or a real estate agent, both? I'm a real estate agent, hopefully soon to be broker. I just passed my test. Congratulations on that. Yeah, but before that, I primarily just stayed at home when we were first married. We had our first baby after 18 months of being married.

And I just stayed home with the kids. But we've slowly been putting the properties in my name. And then now that I have my real estate license, every time we buy something, the commissions also count as income for me. So I primarily just do stuff for us with the real estate agent thing. But it's been able to help me build my income so that I can also have my own set of 10. And we can be buying things in my name and Jason's name.

and it just gives us more options. Yeah, and actually that's where I wanted to go with this, is can you tell us about where you're finding these deals? Because you guys are actually finding deals on the MLS, which a lot of people say is impossible. Yeah, most of our properties, actually, I think, have come from the MLS. And David, I don't know if I recognized how we were actually making that happen until you asked me that question.

And I started analyzing and thinking, well, what am I doing? And what I've done is we take a little. at all multifamily units just because that's where we really like to invest. And we analyze them top to bottom of which ones are currently on the MLS producing the best cash flow, net operating income or cap rate. And once I have identified those top five perhaps, then I do additional due diligence to find out what ways can I potentially lower the price that I offer this seller where he'll still sell it to me? What ways can I reduce the current expenses to operate the property and what ways can I potentially increase the rent to increase the income and potential

cash flow. And once you identify what property offers those benefits, then that's the one I'm targeting and going after. And it's worked out very well. So you give us an example of that. Like what exactly do you mean? Like give us that, you either hypothetical or a real example, whatever. Yeah. Our real estate agent that we used at first before I got this fantastic real state agent in Kerry when she got her license. We started with someone who'd been in the business 30 years and we really trusted his advice. He actually would send out a cash flow spreadsheet of every property in Utah County that was available on the market. And so I'd go through it and identify those top ones. And then now I have an Excel spreadsheet that I actually throw the numbers

into that to more dissect what, after all the expenses, what is my true. cash flow from that. Is that answering the question or do you want me to go into more detail with that? Yeah, I mean, it's up to you. I mean, I just, yeah, I'm just thinking like maybe actually this would be a good time where we could actually segment into the new segment of the show, which we call our deep dive. Awesome. All right. So for the deep dive, we're just going to go deep into one of your deals. So I think kind of my question can be answered in that and like how, how you're looking at these deals. And we're going to go through these seven, I think there's seven questions. We're going to start asking everybody every week on one specific deal. So do you have a good deal in

mind, like one of your examples that we can dive deep and do? Yeah, we have one last year that we sold actually this year that was a great investment for us. All right. All right. So perfect. So why don't we start with how did you find it? Let's go through that process. That one's interesting. We have found most of our deals on the MLS. This one was an off market deal, actually. We had bought a fourplex from this gentleman two years prior and built a relationship with him. I knew his plan as he was getting older. He wanted to get out of the landlording business and sell. So I tried to build a relationship with him. I was very careful in the negotiations to make sure that his needs were most important in selling it. I let him know I need to make sure this property cash flows, but I want to do

everything I can to make sure you're getting what you want. And he really appreciated that. So I stayed in touch with him and I knew that next year he wanted to sell another fourplex of his and he wanted to work with me because I was very kind about it and caring of his needs and what he he wanted but he wanted to spread out when he was selling him obviously for taxable gain purposes and try to reduce his taxes and so we kept that relationship open and when January came around I called them to sell, and that's how we started the process of figuring out value and what I'd buy it for. All right. Super cool.

I love that the relationship aspect of that, you know, because like the relationships are so, so important for real estate investors. So that's how you found it. So how much was it? Let's go there next. We started at $365,000. We had an inspection ordered and actually found meth in one of the apartments. And so due to some of the issues that came up in the inspection, I came back to him and said, this is a real concern of ours knowing that there's these issues in the apartment.

And so he verified that in the inspection. And so we ended up buying it for $356,000 was the total amount. At the time, there was some other fourplexes pending that were under contract that could sell in the $450,000 range. and so instead of using a traditional loan and putting 25% down, this is an example of the birth strategy that we used. We went ahead and found a private money lender, hard money lender, who funded the whole deal because there was enough equity in the property. So we didn't have to put any of our own money in the deal and closed on it for 356.

We did do a little bit of work before we closed on it. No, that was after. Oh, that was after. Yeah, we bought it for 356 and then immediately put a little money of our own into it. that we could refinance out of the hard money. So you guys got free meth and you got the price reduced. Right. That's some impressive negotiating.

Breaking bad real estate. We made some, no, I'm just kidding. I was going to say, we made some profit there. Did you, did you increase your NOI through meth production in one of the new ways?

We lowered rents, but we made a lot more money. The rent income was great on that property. That's really funny. All right, Moving on. So that's, so we got how we started how did you find it? How much was it? How did you negotiate it? How did you fund it? Which sounds like you used private money. And did you refinance it later. Or you're still in that. Okay. That's what I was saying. We did, we did do a little bit of very minor rehab.

I guess primarily just went equity. We did a little bit on the yard and we did paint the outside. And that's actually primarily, I guess we did fix up one unit and raise all the rents. One of the greatest benefits of buying from an absentee landlord who didn't live in the city is he was unaware of what the market demanded for rent. And so I knew the rent amounts could be much higher. So the current rents at the time were about $6.50 and $700 for two of the apartments each. After we closed on it with the hard money, we put $3,000 into it paying a painter to paint all the exterior and did some landscaping, cleared out, all the debris and garbage, made it look a lot nicer. And two weeks after closing, went and posted a notice of rent increase.

All of them were in month-to-month contracts. They hadn't been updated in a long time. And so we raised the rents $750 a month and not a single tenant moved out. All of them were fine paying that additional rent because they found that we're new owners that came in and cared about the property, wanted it to look nice, and we're willing to address problems inside of the apartment. as well. But 3,000 is all that we put into it. If you know how appraisers work with appraisals, there's a cost approach, comparable analysis approach, and an income approach. So an income approach

is what I like most because I have more control over that. And so by increasing it $750 a month, it actually appraised for $475 just a month and a half later. And that was more than the 25% equity we needed so we rolled in closing cost in that and only had $3,000 in that deal six months later we sold it and made about $186,000 on that deal and so great wait you sold it and made we did end up selling it we closed yeah we sold that one in January and made 100 186 000 on that's awesome it was that's awesome yeah okay so you you bought it you fixed it up you then refinanced it rented it for a little while then sold it made $186,000. And the cool thing about that, too, is that, like, when you make a profit on real estate,

even if you don't live in it, you're not getting the two-year, you know, tax-free things, you're also likely, again, I'm CPA, but you're likely not paying, you know, self-employment tax. You're not paying, you know, short-term capital gains. You're paying nice, low, long-term capital gains tax, unless you 1031. Did you just pay the tax? Or did you guys roll it into a next deal? We found a way to have it be tax-free. Shocking.

Socking. Shocking that this couple found a way to save money. Yeah, it was great. And that deal led to even a better deal that we're not finished with yet, but we're really excited about a 16-plex, 4-4-plexes really. But using the birth strategy again, and it's just amazing how quickly things can accelerate. Yeah, that's super cool.

So last question of the deep dive then is, like, what lessons did you learn? If you could pull out a lesson or two, maybe each of you have a separate answer or maybe it's the same. Like, what did you learn from doing that deal? I think I learned that you can buy property with very low money down. I think that was that was one of the first times we had used the birth strategy and seen that kind of profit and with only $3,000 of our own money. And so it was just kind of crazy realizing, I mean, you really can't, people tell us all

the time, you can't buy real estate anymore with zero money down. But we would argue you can. You can buy money with zero, zero dollars down. And I think that was our, that was. my lesson, I guess. I learned that creating wealth is so much more exciting than trying to earn a high income that then the government's going to tax me on. You know how long it takes to save up 186,000 tax-free? For some people, it takes a lifetime. I mean, I meet with people all the time, And that's a lofty goal for some people.

And so it was amazing that not even with very much money. Or effort. We could come in, do a few sweat equity items of making things look nice, giving the tenants a little more pride in where they live, and be able to increase the value of a property so significantly that we could then benefit from that by selling it or refinancing. And just that eye-opening experienced, I think it's what's created us to go out into deals, realizing how easy it is when you understand

how to utilize that process and making sure that you have a lender in your back corner that can do the rate and term refinance if you're going to use hard money to have a way to pay it off and if you can't that you know that you'll be able to sell it for a profit. I just, wow, that was so exciting for us and now we're looking to do bigger deals using the same method. Yeah, it sounds like that's really a strength of you guys where you're able to go in there and for very low money down, get these cash filling properties, and then you add in the ways you're able to improve the property's condition. And that's where you get a real winner. And you can do this in any market. You don't need to wait for the down market that so many people are saying,

well, I'm on the sidelines. I'm going to wait for the market to crash. And meanwhile, you guys are making $186,000 on a deal because you're not waiting. You're learning and you're executing basically. Can you share with our listeners some of the common ideas? is that you're using to get properties for such low down payments so that you can buy in any market. Yeah, and I may add to that, David, when you don't have any money, that's all we could do. We didn't have a lot of money, so we had to find ways to be creative. And so all of our deals that I can think of, except one, we have put 5% down or less. And we've had to be real creative with that. And so the easiest ways to get started was the owner occupied financing. And

using an FHA loan. But then as time progressed, we figured out portfolio lenders and then hard money lenders can help us close without any of our own money as long as we found a good enough deal, as well as bringing in partners who can come in who have the money and we're providing the opportunity. Right. And we've also done things like seller financing. We've done lease options. And we've used commissions for down payments, things like that. Yeah, that's an example. I don't know if David, do you want to hear that? one, but we have a credit union here locally that will allow you to buy an investment property up to four units with 10% down. And so with Kerry being a real estate agent, we were able to

negotiate with a seller, a 6% commission paid out to her. We'd partner with someone that came in and got the loan. And our 50% contribution actually came from the commissions that Carrie was paid. So we only own 50% of the deal, but we're actually getting paid to own it. And as long as you can cash flow on that. I'll do that time and time again. So do you have any advice for how listeners can find a credit union that will offer a product like that? Call around. We've had to spend hours calling banks, meeting with bank managers, trying to figure out the best product for what we want to do. Or speak to other real estate investors, go to real estate investment clubs locally. A lot of them will know about certain banks that offer these special products. But yeah, you can just call in.

And sometimes calling in, you don't get the right people who know that there are those loan products. So I would ask real estate agents or brokers who are a little more predominant in your community, they'll probably know or talking to real estate investors at different clubs who they'll probably have some resources for you. All right. So what comes next in your guys' journey? Who knows? Buying more deals. I don't know.

Yeah, we're just wrapping up a project that we use the birth strategy again. And it was four fourplexes. We bought each of those. It's in a different area, so these don't sell for as much. But we bought them for about 153,000 each. We're going to put $30,000 into each of them. And then we think they'll appraise for 280 or $300,000. And so again, we'll just do a rate in term refinance or do a cash out refinance if there's

enough to pull some money out. And then my next deal is actually in that same area where there's a 25 unit complex. and that's going to be the next one once we get the hard money paid off on these 16 units. So our goal long term, we want to get to 500 units. We want to cash flow $200 a month per unit. And so someday we'll have them paid off and we'll make a lot more than that. But I want leveraged 500 units leveraged and cash flow weighs 200 a month. That's the goal.

That's fantastic. I love those goals. Anyway, you guys are doing it right. I just love to hear like the story. of like no matter what you come across you're just like instead of saying oh i can't do that you're saying well how do i do that how do i get through this how do i figure the financing how do i find the deals there's always a way no always away yeah super cool and that's that that's that mentality that's that's going to get you you know whatever you want for listeners as well like just have that attitude

listen to these two and yeah you got to do just like them so you guys you guys know this brandon you find a good enough deal the money's going to be there there's always someone willing to find a good deal and so we're always looking we know we know what we're looking for. And if we can't buy it, which has often been the case, especially in our early years, there's always a solution to find someone that's willing to help you, even if you have to give up some equity, 50% of something's better than 100% of nothing. There you go. Hey, how do you guys separate your roles, I guess, in your business? Like, who does what, when? Well, I would say it's evolved. In the beginning, I wasn't really that involved. But as I've caught the

vision of how crazy cool real estate is. I've taken on more the agent role where I find a lot of the deals. I filter them through Jason, who, you know, he does the analyzing. He's kind of our numbers guy and we both do the negotiating. She makes things look pretty and I just make sure they cash flow. But we work together on it. She helps me manage the contractors if we're renovating a property to increase rents. I just want to justify the expense. I want to make sure that the return on investment's worth it. So every single time we're willing to spend any money, we just have to make sure the output and return is worth it. And so some of those examples may be putting a storage unit on the back parking lot area where we may spend $1,500 per storage unit, but we've already verified

with the tenants, they're willing to pay $75 a month to rent them out. Well, that's $900 a year. That's a 60% return on investment every single year. It's a great way to add value to the property, but make sure that the financials are in place to cover your mortgage and continue to increase the cash flow. That's cool. You're talking when you say like a storage unit, talking about like a shed, you kind of, kind of you see it. Yeah, we've, we've done that before. We've just bought sheds from Home Depot and put them on our property and then we rent them out. It increases the income on the property. We looked out. We started out self-managing. So I needed a place to keep the lawn care equipment and whatever miscellaneous items. But over time, when we turned it over to a property management

company, I realized that shed does nothing for me. These tenants have asked for more storage, and we asked a tenant, they were willing to pay $75 a month. It's now $100 a month. And so we just decided to buy more storage units for each tenant there. And so that's another, in this case, there's eight storage units. So that's $800 more a month that we're now making on those two four plexes. And just another way to increase the income that you're making. and that's making me look even stronger to the bank or the lenders in which I'm trying to get loans because they're going to verify that your income supports the debt that you carry. Yeah, I love that.

That's fantastic. I don't think I've ever thought about just buying one of those little sheds and throwing it up. I'm thinking like I have a du plus. People will pay for it. Yeah, people put because like, I mean, really that's what like almost every company does, right? Do you want fries with that, right? You order the thing and you add on the, yeah, upsell this. Like, hey, yeah, the rent is this much.

but hey, if you want to have storage, I mean, we'll just, you know, 75 bucks a month. Okay, sure, no problem. And, yeah, I love that. Last question before we move to the fire round. What do you guys do to prevent people from breaking into those sheds and stealing stuff? I mean, it's probably just like a padlock you have on there, right? Yeah, great question. We haven't had any problems yet.

I don't know if we have necessarily something in place for that. one thing that we have done just from a lending standpoint, though, we have a copy of the keys. They have a copy of the keys. So we're the only one that has access to it. We've never had that problem, David. I hope we don't have one. And I guess I'll talk to the attorney when that happens. I should talk to him before it happens.

I'm just curious because that's a great idea. And then, of course, my mind went into how could that go wrong. That's probably. That's probably something we should figure out and safeguard. I would suggest to anyone out there who's considering doing it, make sure you add that additional rent income to the lease agreement. As far as the taxman goes, you're collecting that rent and then deducting an expense that comes from it. So taxes don't change any. But if you add that $75 or $100 a month to the lease agreement per apartment, they can include that as the total

income you're making on the building to offset the mortgage payment. I ran into an issue. where I was collecting a certain amount of rent from a property, but they wanted to include the additional pet rent fee that I was charging per month, the additional storage income that I was making. And so it affected my debt to income ratio, making it harder for me to qualify. So anytime we upsell an entertainment package, storage unit rent, pet rent, that all goes on the contract and the lease agreement because then the underwriter who's qualifying me for a loan is able to use that as income we're making on the property. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to use that rent,

even though we're receiving that income. Awesome. All right. Well, super cool, guys. I mean, really, really fantastic. But we're not quite done yet because we want to hear a little bit more specific advice in our fire round. It's time for the fire round.

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So number one, what do you think brings more value? This is a very, actually, very targeted question for you guys. What do you think brings more value? Adding on an extra bedroom in a house or adding on a garage space. Great question. I would argue from our own experience, the additional bedroom has been more beneficial for us. We didn't talk about this earlier, but all of our units, almost all of them are three bedroom apartments or more. And so those additional bedrooms actually we see a significant increase in the rent income that we can charge, especially if there's ample parking and we can go from families to renting to singles. We live in an area that has two universities. So there are quite a few students and single young singles that are looking to rent. And so we could take a property that is running to a family, three bedrooms are bigger, start running into singles and see a $500 or $800 a month

increase just for that one apartment. And so we absolutely love additional bedrooms as long as the zoning in the city and the parking lot can justify additional parking. spots. And so I would absolutely recommend more bedrooms. It's typically a little less expensive. And I find that in our market, people are willing to pay more for that. Awesome. Next question. What type of flooring do you use in your rentals? Do you use carpet? We use carpet. We've started to go towards, we actually use laminate a lot now. Or tile. Or tile. Yeah. I mean, it probably depends too on what we're doing. If we're, we have done some flips.

If we're flipping, definitely we probably go lamin it and we go carpet in the bedrooms. If we're planning on holding it long term, tile may be a better option, just the durability to last a lot longer. So you may pay a little more up front, but you're going to get a lot more years out of that tile generally. So keep some spare ones in the utility closet in case something breaks. But if we're going to hold something and flip it or do a 1031 exchange by only holding it five years or less, we may choose the less expensive option because we're not going to see the benefits of that tile by owning it long term. So you need to know your objective of the property. Are you going to keep it short term or is this something you're going to hold long term?

And that's probably how I'd factor which route to go there. All right. Now this next question, I don't know if it applies to you guys or not, like if you have experience with it, but we'll find out. What are your thoughts on investing in a property that is located in a flood zone? I found a property I can get for about 100K. and I think once fixed up, I can sell it in the low twos. But if it's in a flood zone, is that going to, like, affect my difficulty to, you know, is that going to affect my ability to sell it or to rent it out?

We actually don't have a lot of experience with flood zones. I would think it would affect the value of the property, however. We have had some flooding. It's not necessarily something we deal with here. But I would recommend this is, I don't know if this is sage advice, but I think this is what I would consider. Most likely, this sounds bad, there could be uninformed buyers out there that are willing to take the risk of flood and buy it for that higher 190s or 200,000 amount. And I'm more a risk taker, perhaps.

So if there's a great deal like that and I can make a good profit and I'm not going to own it long term, I'm willing to buy the property and flip it because probably in that short time period in which I own it, a flood's not going to happen. and I'm willing to take those odds, buy a good deal, renovate it and sell it to someone who's willing to take the risk of a flood. There's going to be some buyers that are going to look at the cash flow and cap rate and not be too concerned about it being in a flood zone. That's just my opinion. I have that same issue when I buy in Florida. There's a lot of areas that are flood zones. I find that it won't affect your ability to resell because that's based on comparable sales that are also in the same flood zone. So the appraisers aren't going to care.

And most homebuyers don't care about that as much as we as investors do. Where it hurts you is because it eats into your cash flow when you need to get expensive flood insurance. And that's what investors don't realize, right? So if this person has that much equity, he can get it for 100 or she can get it for 100 and sell it in the 200s, that's like a flip property. That's the best way that you take that because that should be owned by someone who wants to live in it. It wouldn't make sense to keep it as a rental because your cash flow is probably going to get eaten up by that extra insurance. That is a really good question, though. By the way, which area are you guys buying in primarily?

We're in Utah. We primarily buy in Utah County, but I mean, we kind of buy all over. We own some in you went to County and Utah County primarily. Some in Salt Lake also. We've looked out of state but haven't purchased anything yet. But yeah, just primarily Utah County. Oh, Salt Lake County too. Yeah.

Okay. So if I need to buy a property in Utah that's going to cash, I'm going to call you, Kerry. You know what I'm going to find it. All right. Last question. I'm curious to know if there are any good loan office. options other than hard or private that self-employed people can use with little to no taxable income.

Yeah, good question. Self-employed, obviously, that's the hardest for traditional banks to give you approval on. Obviously, going to seller financing route, the seller doesn't care. So that's a great option. A lease option purchase, again, sellers don't care. Another great option. But if you have to go through a traditional lender to get approved for self, when you're self-employed.

What we've done is we've structured debt to be in my name if Carrie's trying to get the loan. So if you have car loans, credit card debt, any type of debt that's going to negatively impact you, move that over to your spouse's name if you're married and have a spouse. But get rid of that so that makes the underwriter feel a little bit better. And then do everything you can to look financially stronger. That means more reserves in the bank. it could mean finding additional income that the underwriter can count. Usually when you're self-employed, they want a two-year history.

If not, they're going to take your one-year history and spread it out over two years. So it's making you look weaker. And so Kerry's in her case, we've had her get her agent license. We've had her get her mortgage loan origination license. We've added her to our LLCs and spit out a K-1 that helps make her income look better as well. And so Carrie started out as a stay-at-home mom, and now she makes more money than I do on paper. And so there's ways to arrange it where you can look like a strong buyer. And I would season the money for two months and then go get the loan. Those assets can now look like your assets. And so there's

some strategy there. If you have time, those would be some suggestions I'd offer. All right. Super cool. All right, well, before we get out of here, let's shift one last time over to our famous four. Famous Four. All right, let's get to the famous four. These are the same four questions we ask every guest every week. And let's see what you guys got to say. Number one, and you can answer it together or separately. It's up to you.

A favorite real estate related book. Jason's our book reader, so I'll let him answer that one. It's rich dad, poor dad, obviously changed my mindset. Investing in duplexes, triplexes, and quads was the book that I, read to get started because your book, Brandon, wasn't out at the time. I definitely recommend your book now, though, absolutely. So, yeah, those have really helped. Well, thanks. Cool. All right. What is your favorite business book? The E-Myth revisited probably was the book that I enjoyed most. And now there's one on real estate investing, too. It's a great book.

All right. Brandon's probably read that book a thousand times because every time we ask people, he's like, oh, that's a great book. He's read every book in existence. He's like the re- Jason too. Yeah. Yeah. Annoing. They're like Aristotle walking around in modern day time. That's exactly why they call me Brandon Aristotle.

All right. This one's for you, Carrie. What are some of your hobbies? Our kids, I guess, running after our kids. We also enjoy, I mean, we live in Utah, so we enjoy skiing and hiking and biking and all that kind of stuff. The thing we like to do most together is probably traveling. We love to travel and have adventures and that kind of thing. Yeah.

Cool. All right. My last question of the day, what do you think separates successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? Oh,

that's a good question. I honestly think I could have been that story. I was told no multiple times that we couldn't get the loan when I was 24 with that first fourplex. And I just knew that it would make all the difference. I told Carrie, if we can just find a way to make this happen. And it's funny because I tell her that every time we do a deal now. If we can just make this.

You have to make it work. There's a way, there's a solution. You have to make it work. And if you're determined to make it work, you'll find a way to make it work. I never thought we'd have this many properties and this much cash flow. I could retire if I wanted to. I just love what I do. We just had a vision that we had to make it happen.

and as you learn more about how to do things and find out that there's different techniques and tools, there's a solution out there. Just keep talking to people who know more than you and you'll figure it out. All right. Tell us, where can people find out more about you guys? We do have a website. It's creative gains real estate.com or they could shoot us an email, Creative Gains LLC at gmail.com. That would be the best way.

Well, thank you very much, guys. This has been great. I have really enjoyed hearing your story. I think this is motivating and inspiring to a lot of investors out there who are average shows just like all the rest of us and are eager to get into this. And you've given us a ton of advice and tips on how we can get started without making a million dollars a year. So thank you guys very much for sharing a lot of this. I hope that the listeners reach out to you guys.

Anybody out there that's looking for investment property in Utah, please find Carrie because she can help you find something just like they find for themselves. And with that, we will catch you guys later. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. All right. And that was our show with Jason and Carrie Harris. I love these stories of people who like just like figure it out no matter what. Like they've got all these adversities against them, all these things that are going to make it hard to invest. And they're like, you know what? I'm just going to keep asking how do I do it? How do it? How do I do it? And they did it. These are the average Joe. They're just like everybody else. There's nothing special. They didn't have an advantage. They didn't start off with a small loan of a million dollars. They found out how to make this thing work by. this sheer grit, determination, and wit. And I love hearing these stories because, like,

I don't think you can be more encouraged than a couple like this who just said, we're going to find a way to make this work and went out and made it happen. And now, like you said, they're having amazing success who wouldn't want to be in their shoes. And it just shows that, like, real estate can work for anybody. Yeah, that's totally true. So very, very neat. And I look forward to kind of seeing where they're headed in the future because a couple like that is going to go places.

So super cool. All right, y'all. Hey, I'll put on a call a request here. you have any interest in becoming a guest on the Bigger Pockets podcast and you're listening this long into it, which means you're diehard, we would love to talk to you. So kind of the basic requirements is we like to look for people who have at least 10 deals under their belt and have a fun personality and want to talk real estate with us for a little while. So if that's you, go to biggerpockets.com slash guest. Again, that's biggerpockets.com forward slash guest. And tell us as

much information as you can. There's a spot that you can even submit a video that increases your chances that Mindy, who is our kind of producer, is going to pick you for this show. So again, BiggerPockets.com slash guest. And hopefully we'll see you here on the show at some point in the future. Anyway, David, anything you want to close with or, you know, talk about before we get out of here? Yeah, I just want to say, Brandon and I are absolutely committed to making this the best podcast on iTunes. We want to just crush it and make it so that there's no reason anyone would not be listening

to this. So if you have some ideas, something you'd like to see more, something you don't like, something you think would make it better, send me a message on your Instagram, send Brandon a message on Instagram. I'm David Green 24. He's Beardy Brandon. Let us know what you'd like to see. If it's good, we'll put it in there and we'll keep making this thing better and we can get all your questions answered. With that, this is David Green for Brandon. Happy Birthday Boy, Turner, signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the height,

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