BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 7 Ways to Lower Rental Property Expenses by Thousands Per Year

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

This could turn an average real estate deal into a home run, and it’s nothing you can’t do right now. Today, we’re giving you seven tips to save thousands (if not tens of thousands) on your rental property expenses, so you keep more of your cash flow every month. Plus, we’re announcing something new at BiggerPockets—something we specifically negotiated to save you hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on every rental you buy. We’ll teach you how to close on your first (or next) rental property with less, get the seller to pay for your reserves or next repair, instantly save $250/year on landlord insurance, do top-tier renovations for budget prices, and save $10,000+ with just two phone calls. Want lower property taxes, too? We’ll show you the completely legal (and surprisingly easy) way to get the city to charge you hundreds of dollars less per year. Get access to all the BiggerPockets Pro discounts by signing up today! In This Episode We Cover The rule of thumb that has saved Dave and Henry $10,000+ during renovations  How to immediately get $1,000+ off your closing costs on your next investment property  Why you always (especially now) ask sellers for a credit/assist at closing  Do not let your general contractor buy the materials (rookie mistake)  How Dave gets his property taxes lowered by hundreds of dollars with one phone call  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠h⁠ttps://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1247 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

These are seven ways to lower your expenses and save money on your rental property. Most investors obsess over finding their next property. They renovate, they increase rents, but they're bleeding thousands of dollars every year on expenses they honestly just don't need to pay. These are things like closing costs, insurance, materials, higher property taxes, software, and more. And these add up to thousands of dollars per property, and almost all of them can be negotiated or reduced. So today we're breaking down seven ways to cut your expenses and keep more money

in your pocket on every single property. Some of these will save you a few hundred dollars. Others can save you thousands. And you don't have to cut corners or downgrade on quality. This is about being smart with your money and being willing to shop around when other investors won't. What's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at Bigger Pockets. my co-host, Mr. Henry Washington, is also here with me today. Henry, how you doing? I'm doing great. I've got my Onyx, I mean McDonald's coffee, and I'm doing fantastic. Onyx is the bougie coffee shop in Henry's town, and he likes to make fun of me and our producer, Ian, for liking bougie coffee. I'll drink McDonald's coffee, too. I've had tons of it, but given the choice, I would have a nicer coffee if I have the option.

Well, actually, the discussion of McDonald's coffee is very on topic for today. show because we are talking about some of the ways that you can reduce your expenses, save money, and increase your cash on cash return for every property you buy. And no, I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, if millennials just stop drinking coffee out, they could buy more rental properties. But we did get on the right topic talking about saving money on coffee. Very Dave Ramsey of us. Yes, exactly. But these are actually seven great tips that you can use if you're buying a no deal. And even actually, if you're are, managing a property. These are some ideas that can take a deal that is completely

underperforming, isn't up to standard, and turn it into a good one. And we're going to go through these seven topics. And as we do, I'm going to actually share with you some really cool new stuff that Bigger Pockets can actually do to help you with this. We just announced this week a few brand new pro perks for the Bigger Pockets Pro membership that can help you save serious, serious money. We're talking reducing your costs on investment properties, on your loans, on your insurance. It's the biggest addition we've made to the pro membership in years, and we'll talk about some of those opportunities that every one of you can utilize as we go through these. But let's just get into this. Our number one is getting closing cost credits and looking for

down payment programs. This is one of the most powerful options available to real estate investors that I think, well, all of these are underutilized. I'm going to say this several times today. But I do think this is probably one of the most underutilized programs. People do not negotiate or talk to enough banks. They don't look for state and local programs. But these things can actually save you thousands of dollars on any new acquisition. This is one thing where people don't do enough research because there are tons of different programs out there that are designed to help people with home affordability.

but you do have to do the research. Some examples, without getting too specific, there are places where you can get forgivable second mortgages. In other words, they will give you a certain amount of money, maybe $10,000, $15,000 that you can use towards your down payments. It comes as a second mortgage, but if you live in the house for five to 10 years, that loan is forgiven, meaning you just got to use that money for your down payment. You don't have to take it back.

The second mortgage is removed. There are down payment grant programs in some states, and grants is money that you don't have to give back. Grants oftentimes do have pretty strict criteria that you have to meet, but it's worth looking into to see if it fits your specific situation. There are closing cost assistance programs, some nonprofits, but there are also company benefits that you may not be aware of. So check with the company that you work for. They may offer some sort of home ownership grants, down payment assistance as part of their benefits package. You know, that little handbook that give you when you first start that you kind of breeze over and you just sign up for your benefits.

but check with your company that you work for because you never know what kind of benefits they may have or check with your HR department and see if they have any resources that may not be tied to your direct employment that you can utilize as well. They tend to be tied into these kind of information that can help you out. 100%. I also recommend talking to your agent, talking to property managers. My first deal, I was exposed to a couple of programs that I took advantage of because it was an owner occupied deal. I will say that a lot of these state, local programs are for owner-occupied deals. So just keep that in mind. But actually, it's not just governments. Like, there are businesses that also offer closing cost credits or downpayment programs.

And that's actually one of the amazing new features of Bigger Pockets Pro. We actually went out and used the massive size of the Bigger Pockets community. We have over three and a half million members. We went out and actually were able to negotiate discounts for Bigger Pockets Pro members with two of the biggest lenders in the country, Lending One and Kiavi. So if you're a rental property investor, you want to do buy and hold, you want to go out and use a DSCR loan. Great way to buy properties right now. You can actually save $1,000 in closing costs per deal with lending one if you're a bigger pockets pro member. So that's a great value in itself. BP Pro costs a fraction of that to get.

So if you're going to do one deal a year, that is going to save you a ton of money. And you can actually use that credit towards closing costs twice per year. So if you do two deals, you use two DSCR loans. You can actually save $2,000 in closing costs. This is kind of a no-brainer way to save some money on your next loan. We also have a program with Kiavi, who's a lending partner specializing. They do sort of like fix and flips and bridge loans. They're going to give you $1,250.

off your closing costs. So these are just examples. Like if you're a Bigger Pockets Pro member, go use these. They're worth way more than a cost to become a Bigger Pro member. But there are also other examples of these kinds of discounts

that you can get if you're aligned with the right organizations, if you're in the right communities like being a Bigger Pockets Pro. All right. So that was number one. Henry, what is cost-saving technique number two? Cost-saving technique number two

is, again, not something people have probably never heard of. but we are in a market where this is more prevalent and you should be taking advantage of it. It is seller credits. So this is during the negotiation, you can ask for seller credits. Sometimes those credits can come in the form of dollars. Sometimes those credits come in the form of asking the seller to do some work that you would have to pay for once you own the property. We're in a market right now where sellers are much more willing to give a little bit more to the buyers.

because there's less seller activity in a lot of markets. And so people wanna capitalize on the opportunity they have when somebody's interested in their property. You need to take advantage of this and ask for what you want. So when you think about seller credits, yes, you can ask for things to be fixed, but sometimes what we like to do is you can just ask for a discount on the property.

Maybe you go through the inspection process and every inspector is going to find things that are air quotes wrong with the property. That's their job. When you look at these inspected, Inspection reports, sometimes you don't really care about the things that they say, but don't just take that and say, I'm good with it. You can ask for seller credit. So maybe you say, hey, I have this laundry list of things that my inspector found.

How about you give me $5,000 off the purchase price in lieu of repairs? For investors like me who are rehabbing properties, sometimes that's a dream come true because I don't have to go back in and fix anything. I can discount the property. You can get a discounted property and you can choose to fix what you want. Henry, what is the psychological thing about this? because I think a lot of people out there are probably saying, why can I just pay less for the property? But sometimes I just find that, you know, sellers want their number. And for some reason, you know, you pay them 300 grand. They're willing to give you five grand in seller credits, but they wouldn't take $2.95.

Even though it's literally the same, but like, is that just me or does that happen to you too? No, that happens all the time. There's a, there's a psychological piece to it for sure. You want to hit your number because it makes a, sure ROI look good, but net net at the end of the day, I'm concerned about what am I walking away with? So in my opinion, it truly doesn't matter to me how it happens. We have given seller credits to the buyer on probably my last five flip sales. We have in some instances, based on what they're asking for, have raised a purchase price to then allow them to take a seller credit, which is a net no difference in my opinion. But I got my butt kicked on a recent sale where I gave a ton of seller credits just because I was ready to move on from that property.

And so use the market in your favor right now. You should be asking for some sort of seller credits on every single deal because the market is giving you the opportunity to do that. And people are much more likely to hear that. And seasoned investors like myself, we're expecting it. Totally. So if it's expected, just ask for it. And you can probably get some sort of a discount off of the price or get maybe a big ticket

item that you were concerned with covered through that transaction. Or a rate buy down. A lot of common seller credit now, too. People are buying down points for people's mortgages is another really good thing, super valuable. I will say, you know, as a seller, I think it's kind of a funny thing. But from a buyer's perspective, a lot of time getting a cash credit is really advantageous because you can finance the purchase price. So like, let's just say you're buying a property for $400,000. If you just buy it for $400,000, no seller credits. And you just buy it for $400,000. reserves that you need or cash to renovate the property, typically you're going to have to come out of pocket for that. But maybe you have some leverage. And instead of negotiating down to $390,

you keep that property contract at $400,000 and get the $10,000 in cash credits. That means, yeah, you're still paying the same price, but you're financing usually 80% of that. And the seller is giving you $10,000 that you can then use as you're either your cash reserves or to finance some of your renovations, and yet you're going to have to pay that back over time. But oftentimes, that's a drop in the bucket in terms of your monthly payment and it gives you cash up front, which is super valuable. Absolutely. All right, Dave, what is the third option for saving money when buying a property? Shop around for insurance. Man, people don't do this. I'm going to be honest, I used to not do this at all. But in today's day and age, I think it is probably the fastest rising expense for almost every landlord.

Like, taxes are going up. But insurance premiums, I'm not. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but they're up like 40 plus percent since 2020. It's crazy. Insurance premiums are going up. And in 2025, we did an analysis of our expenses on our entire portfolio. And insurance was among the top expense that we have in our entire business. So we actually went shopping at a portfolio level for a lot of properties to make sure we were getting the best rate. But this is something I've always done because it is such a high expense, but it's also an important expense.

You don't think about it until you need it. then you panic when you need it and hope you've got the right coverage. Yeah. So not only do you need to be shopping for the best rate, you need to be shopping for the best rate for the appropriate amount of coverage for your portfolio. If you have a big portfolio, use your size to your advantage, try to negotiate discounts. Also, don't just shop directly with certain insurance providers. Also, throw in a couple of insurance brokerages into your search because brokerages go out

and search multiple insurance providers. Some you may not even know exist or think about. And that's going to give you a total picture. of what your insurance options are so you can select the best option. Totally. I think shopping at a portfolio level is excellent advice. I did that recently, and it does make a significant difference in terms of the price. And it's just headache. I love sending one check per year to one provider. And it's just like you talk to someone about renewals. It's not that big of a deal. I love that. But I think you're right. I've learned

painfully at times to make sure that you really have landlord-specific insurance. I, I think business interruption insurance is probably the most underrated part of getting that. Like, if your house becomes unlivable, if you have business interruption insurance, you get paid. You get your rent. You know, like that's really valuable. And, you know, it's usually a couple hundred bucks a year to get that. But for me, I find that kind of stuff that is designed for landlords to be super important

when shopping for insurance. One of the things I shop for to protect yourself, I like what you said about business interruption insurance. That's when I actually wrote down because I don't have it. that, but I shop for umbrella policies. So I have an umbrella policy that covers me above and beyond what my normal policy would cover. You'll start to notice as you shop for insurance, that you're only going to have so much coverage in terms of a dollar amount. And so if you have a bigger problem than your coverage has, that comes out of your pocket unless you have something like an umbrella

policy, which kicks in after you exceed what's in your insurance coverage for that property. Dude, another thing that people should be looking for is look at the replacement value. you that you're getting quoted for your properties because I have been noticing some of them are insane like so low they're low balling you to the point where if you had to rebuild your property you would not be able to do it without coming out of pocket for in the case of the one i'm thinking of hundreds of thousands of dollars and so like you need to be super careful about that stuff and because construction costs have really changed a lot and so you need to make sure that like you're you're actually going to be able to get the kind of claim.

that you need. Shopping for insurance, great way to save money. And if you want to, and you are a Bigger Pockets Pro, you can actually save up to $250 per year from Steadily. This is another deal that we just negotiated with Steadily. If you don't know them, they specialize in landlord insurance. I actually use them for a lot of my rental properties. They're offering $5 off landlord insurance premiums if you are a Baker Pockets Pro. So you can get 5% off your insurance premium. That could be hundreds of dollars depending on what you're insuring. I need to just say legally that these discounts may vary. They're not available in all states or cover all risk.

So make sure to read all the fine print. But it is a great way to save money on a type of insurance policy that is designed for our community. All right. So those are our first three ways to save money right now. Closing cost credits, down payment programs, seller credits, and then shopping around for insurance. We have to take a quick break, but when we get back, we have four more ways that pretty much everyone listening to this can use to save money right now.

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on your next investment property. And I'm jumping right into number four with one of my favorites, which is getting creative with saving on materials costs. This is something where you can save a ton of money as a property investor. Because a lot of times what investors do, especially new investors, is they hire a general contractor. They get a labor and materials bid. And then they just pay the contractor to go out and find all the supplies and do all the work. And you can lose thousands of dollars that you just end up paying to a general contractor.

When if you're only buying one property, you can source a lot of your materials on your own. The amount of amazing things I've found in places like Amazon for finishes, Facebook Marketplace for furniture if you're doing a furnished rental, there are huge discounts. And one of my secret sauces is when you're shopping for things like flooring, like tile, like carpet, a lot of these big box stores are just buying these things from warehouses.

You can also go to these warehouses and go. and get the same products for a little bit cheaper. And trust me, if you're saving 50 cents a square foot on flooring for an entire house, that's thousands of dollars on renovations. And that can go directly back in your pocket. Where do you see the biggest savings? What kind of finishes? What are the most important things to shop around on?

The biggest savings I get are on luxury vinyl plant flooring and on carpet. I get carpet at a great discount. How much? So when I carpet a house, I'm typically only carpeting bedrooms and I'm only doing that on flips. Guess what it costs me to carpet a three bedroom house total. How big is the house? Call it a 1,800 square foot house, but you're doing three bedrooms. Just the bedrooms is like 400 square feet.

I'm going to guess like three bucks a foot. Normally I would guess like four or four and a half, but since you're bragging about it, I'm going to say three bucks a foot. So, $1,200 bucks? Yeah, I'm paying less than $1,000 on that. So if you look at it for every house that I do, that's, saving me three to 500 bucks depending on the square footage. Yeah.

Doesn't sound like a lot. But when you're doing multiple houses, that adds up. And even if it's just one house, three to 500 bucks, why not? Dude, totally. And it's like each of these things we're talking about today aren't going to be amazing things. But if you get $2,000 off closing costs, if you get $5,000 in seller credits, you get $250 off your insurance, $500 on your carpet, you're talking about $8,000, $10,000 on a single

deal here. just from doing a little bit of legwork. It's not even that much stuff. And we're just talking about saving maybe five figures on some of these deals. And when I walk properties that other investors have rehabbed, I often see everybody has the same light fixtures and finishes from like Lowe's or Home Depot. And so I started pricing those against places like Amazon or other big box warehouses. and I'm saving anywhere between 5% and 20% depending on what kind of light fixtures.

And then my property looks different than everybody else. Yeah. Because most people are just walking into Lowe's and Home Depot. You just see the same backslash, the same pendant lights. It's the same countertops every time. And not they're usually pretty nice. Like there's a reason people choose them. But I do think it goes a really long way, even if they're slightly different just to stand out.

And if you could do that and save money. that's just like a double win. Yeah, that's another big savings point, too, as you talked about countertops. Man, getting countertops directly from a countertop supplier will save you a ton of money than going to a third party. A ton. I will also say this isn't always the easiest thing to do, but if you're plugged in with other investors, you can also trade.

Like, there are sometimes, I know people are getting rid of cabinets that you need to do. That's fair. I once traded a guy, a working hot tub. I got the working hot tub for. carpet that I was going to throw in a dumpster. Like, you never know what people want. Like, this guy wanted to get rid of his hot tub because some insurance thing.

And I just traded it to him. And it was great. And I've done that with cabinets as well. I've been getting rid of cabinets and gotten fixtures in exchange. People might want, if you're cleaning out a house and you have working appliances, trade it to someone or sell it to someone and reuse that money to go buy something else. I see a lot of people just trashing out things that they can actually resell.

That's a great point. you just jogged my memory. I bought cabinets at a second-hand store once because somebody was rehabbing their house. They had perfectly good solid wood cabinets. They got rid of them to a second-hand store. I picked them up and installed them and they looked fantastic. And they were better quality than me going to get something from Lowe's that's like half-particle board now. 100%.

Like I'm redoing my kitchen and my primary. I'm going to go buy nice appliances, right? But I have perfectly good appliances. They're just white and I want stainless steel ones. And I can sell them or I can trade them. to any, like, these would be great in any rental property. So, like, figure out a way or trade it to your contractors might buy these kinds of things. Like, they might be interested. I've sold tons of stuff to contractors in the past. Like, these are great ways to just make money off of the stuff that

literally would go in the trash. Almost every great hookup I found in parts and materials, almost all of them have come from contractors telling me about these locations or about these people. Like contractors with flooring, right? Like, oftentimes, they'll know a project where they bought too much and maybe you only need 500 square feet of flooring, and you could just go buy it from some person who doesn't even want it. These are like absolute ways to do this. So these are great, great ways.

I just think you got to get creative. Like most people do this kind of comparison shopping in their own life, right? If you were furnishing your own home, you'd probably be doing these kinds of things. Do the same thing with your rental property. Do the same thing with your flip. If you spend a little bit of time on it,

easy hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a deal. Couldn't agree more. Do a little bit of research. Save yourself potentially a lot of money. And speaking of saving a lot of money, what do you have for number five, Dave? Number five is similar. We're staying in the same theme of shopping around here. But this is getting multiple bids, not just when you're doing a renovation, but on every single time you talk to a contractor.

I don't know about you, but I notice the variance, the difference between the high end quotes and low end quotes that I get right now are absolutely. insane. I am scraping asbestos. I got one quote, $4,500. Guess what the next quote was. What, $6,000? $23,000. Get out of here. They're not even, not even fucking around. This is real, these are real people putting things on paper. $23,000 to scrape $809 square feet. Are you kidding me? But that's an extreme example, honestly. But, you know, I got two HVAC quotes. the other day. One was 33,000, the other was 17,000. It's literally double. Like, people are just throwing stuff out there. So I don't care if you've worked with someone for years. Get multiple quotes on every single project. This is just a smart thing to do. One of the things I've learned

as a seasoned investor is that contractors don't always bid a job as if they want to win the job. Oh, so true. Sometimes they bid the job. because they don't want it. And if they're going to do it, they want to get paid a lot of money for it. A ridiculous price. And that's because some contractors are just like other business owners. They have different superpowers. So you may have a contractor that has guys that do the kind of work that you need done.

They do it fast. They do it efficiently. And they get the materials cheap. They may give you a very good bid versus the very next contractor does not have the same connections or the same people to do that job as effectively, and you're going to get a much higher price because it's going to be much more of a pain for that contractor to get the job done. So they're going to price it astronomically. It doesn't mean that the contractors is jerk.

It just means they're built different than the other contractors. And you'll never know those things unless you get multiple bits. Yeah. One of the things I've learned from our mutual friend James Dainard is that a lot of this also just depends on how busy they are. Like, someone might have a bunch of other projects. And so to take the time away from their other projects, they might need a charge. It's fair. Three grand more because they're like, I have other stuff going on. Meanwhile, you catch a company who's between jobs, they might be willing to lower their cost to fill a spot in their schedule. That doesn't mean they're bad people.

It's just, this is supply and demand, right? Like, their supply and demand waivers over time. And you need to just be constantly in tune with what's going on. This can see. save you so, I mean, this might be the biggest one of all of the ones that we've been talking about. It can just save you tens of thousands of dollars on a project. And I know a lot of people just generically say you never use the lowest bid. I would say you need to be careful when using the lowest bid, but you got to compare that to your other bids. Because when you just, the example that you used, why would you pay an extra $15,000 just because

it wasn't your lowest bid? Like, get multiple bids so you can have a good apples to apples. comparison because they're not all bidding with the same things in mind. Each business is different. And also, a lot of contractors become contractors because they were great at turning wrenches and that got them a lot of business. It doesn't necessarily mean they're a great business person. So they're not thinking all of the times like a business person who's trying to write up a bid in order to win the job. They're just thinking, how am I going to survive this week? And what's my most important thing to do? And they're focused on that more so then making sure you get the best bid.

So you got to get multiple bids to protect yourself. 100%. I know it's annoying. Like it is annoying because you usually have to drive back and forth to a property, show people around depending on the project. Get three bids per project. That's what I would say. Three bids per trade per project minimum.

And if you don't like them, keep going. Just keep going. One trick of the trade I learned to help you with the time management on this is to write up high level scopes of work. They don't have to be super detailed. just line item, maybe room by room at a very high level of what the work is that needs to be done. And if you send that out with your request for the bid, it helps the contractor understand what's the size of the prize before they go out there. That way, if they're too busy and they can't get to it or if they're like, hey, I don't know that this job is worth my time, they can give you that information up front and save you the headache of having to go out there and wait for bids to turn around.

So the scope of work hack has saved me a ton of time and save, honestly save the contractors a ton of time as well. All right. So that's our number five tip for saving money in today's market. But we have two more for you when we get back from this quick break. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and

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to what you're paying. It's like those commercials where somebody asks you, how many streaming services are you paying for? And they're like three and it's like 33, right? I hate when people ask me that question because I know that I'm like my wife and I are both paying for the same ones like seven times. Yes. I'm scared to look at how many streaming services I pay for. But we often do look at our bank account to determine like what different software systems that we're paying for. And then we try to either consolidate those into one system or determine if we truly still need them. I think a lot of investors waste a lot of money paying for subscriptions for things they don't use anymore. That service had a need at one point. You stopped using that product of service and didn't even realize you're still paying for it. But one thing I've found most recently is now that AIs

become more prevalent and software tools have become more and more advanced. There are tools now that are more effectively priced than two to three years ago when I started paying for systems. And in 2025, there was one tool in specifically that we purchased and it literally replaced about five different subscription services and saved me a ton of money. And it was so nice to be able to email and cancel those subscriptions. So I know this one seems a little pain in the butt slash convoluted, but I promise you, you were throwing money away on systems that you're not using anymore. I think there are just ways to save money now. Software is definitely one of them because if you're a self-managing landlord, if you're real estate investor, you're going to need software platforms.

Like there's a ton of different options out there. And you're going to need to find good ones. This is something that we have always been helping people with at Bigger Pockets. If you're a pro member, we've been negotiating software discounts for people for a long time. You can get free access to rent ready, $350 value. You can get free access to baseline. That's $240. But whatever it is, shop around, find good systems that you feel like are sustainable for you, where you're not spending a ton of money and eating up your cash flow because, frankly, you don't need to, so you shouldn't be spending money on that. One of the things that I do to help with this is I have a spreadsheet that I literally add every product or service that I use

onto this spreadsheet. And then that way when I review it once a year or once every six months, I can see, oh gosh, I haven't used that in ages. And I can go and cancel it. So every time I add a new one, it goes onto this spreadsheet. It's the way I track. I mean, honestly, it's a bad idea, but it is also the way I track like the logins and passwords for all these things. But doing that keeps the visibility. You're going to get hacked tomorrow after this podcast comes out. I know. I mean, that doesn't exist anybody. But no, in all seriousness, having the spreadsheet, which I track where all my software tools are,

make sure that I don't have an excuse not to be paying for things that we're not using anymore. It took me like nine years before I started doing this, but it is a great option. All right, Henry, what is our last way? of saving money number seven here. What do you got? This is actually something that I learned from a business partner of mine. It's just not something I thought about before or I didn't know that you could do. And it's just something I learned from hanging out with other investors. But it is contesting your property taxes. Yep. I love doing this. It's a subjective thing. It's so subjective. They make it up. When you buy a property, especially if you're an investor and you're going to improve

that property, at some point, the city comes around and goes, hey, that property is cooler. than it used to be, which means you should pay us more in taxes. Give us more money. And then all of a sudden you get a new assessment and your tax bill's gone up by a few hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, sometimes a couple thousand bucks depending on where you live. Like this can drastically affect your cash flow. But you can just call the city and say, I don't like that. Every city like has a process for doing this. It's not just like you call Stan down at the market. Like online. I've always, I just do it online. You can do it online in some places. Here, most of the time you have to make a phone call. But every time I've done that, almost every time, I think there's been one time we've called and said,

hey, I think that's a little too high that they were like, nah, it's good. Every other time, they're like, yeah, we'll take a look at it. And then they come down. I am batting 1,000 in the city of Denver. Every time I've contested my property taxes and I tell them what I think it's worth, they split the difference. 100% of the time, down to the dollar. They say 700. I say 500. I say 500. at 600. That's exactly what happens every time. Why not do that? It takes four minutes. It's amazing. Just do it. Worst case scenario, they say no. Best case scenario, you save yourself a few hundred to a thousand bucks or so. Like just, it's unbelievable. Do it. It's just people at the city office, they're making their best guess. And if you call them with actual data, a lot of the times are like,

yeah, no, that's good. I'm fine with that. Yeah. I think this is true for all these things. Like all of these things, you don't know if they're going to save you a ton of money for each But if you go through these seven steps for each deal that you have or each deal that you're going to acquire, I promise you you're saving $1,000, you're saving $2,000, you're saving $3,000 on every single deal. That adds up so much. That's more money for your next down payment. That's more money in your reserves. That's more money you can put into a renovation.

That's more money you can go and go out and have a nice dinner. Whatever you want, these are amazing ways to save money and boost your cash flow. And they're things that literally everyone can do for every single process. Yes, exactly. And if you go back in this episode and you listen to number three through number seven, all of those are things that you can do with existing properties you own right now. So you don't have to be buying a new one to start taking advantage of some of these benefits. All right. Well, that's what we got for you all today. If you want to take advantage of all the amazing discounts that you get as a BiggerPockets. Pro member, go to BiggerPockets.com slash pro. Check out all the money saving tools that we have there on top of the calculators, the rent estimators, all of the other stuff that you get for being a part of the Bigger Pockets Pro community. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast, Henry. Oh, he's dancing. It's looking good. All right. He's ready to get out of here. Hope you all enjoy this episode as much as we did making it. We'll see you all next time. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate

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