BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 856: College Dropout to $110K/Year in Cash Flow by Buying “Sheriff Sale” Properties w/Hunter Lawler

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

How do you make six figures in passive income with no college degree, very little money, and zero experience in real estate? Do what Hunter Lawler did and take it step-by-step; within a few years, you, too, could be making over $100,000 in cash flow with just ten properties! But the only way you’ll get there is by thinking outside the box, buying properties most don’t even know about, and taking risks when talking to sellers. Hunter learned very early on that a college degree doesn’t guarantee a big paycheck. He was making a full-time income from his crawfish-selling side hustle when he decided to drop out. After seeing entrepreneurial success, Hunter pivoted and started investing in the sexiest, highest-priced properties ever…mobile homes. These dirt-cheap rentals gave him the sweat equity he needed to build a bigger portfolio. From mobile homes to single-family houses, self-storage facilities, and killer seller finance deals, this episode is a masterclass on how to grow a six-figure income stream without a college degree or hundreds of thousands in the bank! In This Episode We Cover How to build a six-figure income stream by buying cheap, low-risk rental properties Buying discounted houses at “sheriff sales” and what to know BEFORE you bid Mobile home investing and why it may be the easiest way to get into real estate  Commercial lines of credit, home equity, and how to turn your rentals into more mortgages  Self-storage investing and the hands-off system Hunter uses to create serious cash flow Seller financing and the simple way to convince a seller to take a fair price for their property  And So Much More! Click here to listen to the full episode: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-856 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

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 856. What's going on, everyone, is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcast. Join today with my co-host, Ashley Care and boy, have we got a show for you? If you have been struggling to figure out how to make real estate investing work in this challenging market, we're asking the question of, well, what would work for me? Today's show is for you. Our guest, Hunter Lawler, has an incredible story where he blazed his own path and then left breadcrumbs. So me, Ashley, and you, you can follow in his footsteps. Hunter has an incredible story where he started off, dropping out of college to start a business, put that money into a double wide, yes, double wide mobile home,

right out of the bayous of Louisiana, scaled that into a portfolio of 15 properties, got in self-storage and did a whole bunch of other stuff all while working a W-2 job. I love this story. I love the example that's being set and I love today's podcast. Ashley, welcome to the show. What are some things that people should keep an eye out for that really crushed it in today's show. Well, thank you so much for having me as your co-host. I know that you personally selected me and it is very much appreciated. With Hunter, first of all, I got to say you are a very vivid storyteller. I'm more to the facts and I'm just going to say that we are having two master classes today and one is going to be on screening attendant and the other one is going to be

on sheriff's sale. So David and I don't have any experience in this. So this was a whole learning process for us too. Absolutely. You get a ton of information at a very fast clip in an incredibly entertaining fashion. All right, let's bring him in. Hunter Lawler, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. How are you today? Doing well, David. Thanks for having me. Yeah, first off, your name sounds like you should be in the WWE. Has anyone ever told you that you sound like a professional wrestler? Uh, no, but the last name usually triggers it quite a bit. Yeah, and the first name, like you're hunting and you're a Lawler. You're made for this. But that's not what you do. You're actually a realtor investor with an incredible story. So why don't you start off letting us know how you got started in work and in real

estate? Yeah. So I really can't talk about my real estate journey without giving credit to a side hustle that I started while I was in college. I was working Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a family-owned construction company and going to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I can see the riding on the wall very early on that I would need another source of income to kind of keep up with the high cost of living. So I started thinking of ways to make some extra money and I thought everybody in Louisiana likes crawfish. So I decided to open up a crawfish business, uh, bought a catering trailer from a guy in my hometown. And the crawfish business ended up being very successful. And it got to the point where I got so busy with the crawfish that,

uh, I started failing in college because I couldn't go to class. So a little side story with that. one day I was walking in to take an exam. It was about 9 a.m. And I got a call from one of my best customers. And he says, hey, Hunter, can you bring 400 pounds of crawfish and have them ready on an oil field location by 4 p.m.? And I was like, oh, man, that sounds like a good job. And in my head, I was thinking, you know, I can make $2,000 off this job profit. And but at the same time, I was walking in and take an exam.

And I was like, man, if I missed this test, I failed this class. And so needless this. I took the $2,000 and went and fired up the pot. But, you know, as I was driving to this job, I was kind of, you know, weighing out, did I make the right decision? Because, you know, I could either make this $2,000 and fail this test or pass the test and lose this customer. And the more I thought about it, I had learned more in the two to three months of owning my own business than two years of college had taught me. And, you know, I don't, I don't want the listener to take away like, hey, you need to drop out of college and go. to make $35,000 a year still in crawfish.

What I do want you to take away is knowing that experience is a way better teacher than the classroom. You know, whenever I bought that trailer, it was December and I knew that I had to be up and running by February. And due to that pressure of pulling the trigger, like keep in mind, I knew nothing about cooking crawfish at this point. I knew nothing about running a business. I didn't know what an LLC was.

I didn't know what type of insurance I needed. but because I pulled a trigger on it, it forced me to get creative and figure out what the next step for in order to make it successful. You know, I got to say, you're sounding like the backstory of a WWB wrestler, being from Louisiana, spelling crawfish. Well, we haven't even got to the end of the story. Maybe he ends the episode with he actually is a WWE wrestler. Yeah, absolutely. Well, no, if you saw my stature, you're like, oh, that little guy's not. in the deveree. So you were in the position where you had to decide, am I going to stick with school

or am I going to start a business? Ultimately, you followed the money and the education experience that comes from now. What ended up happening with school? Did you retake that class or did you drop out? It was a wrap after that. And like I said, I knew I was going to get into the construction industry and there's, you don't need a degree to be a contractor. All you need to do is go pass a test with the state of Louisiana and pretty much they give you a license and they say good luck don't go broke. So what was the point where you decided to learn about real estate? So you have this business going on. You've decided to not go back to school. Are you still continuing this crawfish business? No. So actually you kind of lead me into, I sold the crawfish business and ended up by using that

cash from selling the business to buy my first rental property. And my first rental property cost me $42,500. It was a double wide on an acre of land. And this wasn't, you know, in a trailer park. It was just, you know, double wide on the outskirts of town, came for an acre of land. I was like, okay, this seems like a good deal. It didn't look like too much was wrong with it. But I know I said that I paid cash $42,500 for it.

And I know there's probably some listeners thinking right now, like, you idiot, why did you spend all your money on the house? Like, why didn't you leverage the bank's money? But, dude, at that time, I didn't know. I must have been on like a Dave Ramsey kick or something like. that, didn't want any debt. So that being said, I did spend all my money on the purchase, so I really didn't have any money to hire a contractor on the rehab. So that's whenever I got my crash course and sweat equity. And me and a buddy of mine pretty much just spent weekends

over there on YouTube a lot, figuring out how to build a frame for a bathtub, painting, putting up trim. But that being said, since we did most of the work, I was only into repairs, maybe two to $3,000 before he had it finished up. Hunter, the DIY destroyer Lawler, crawls out of the bayous of Louisiana, starts a crawfish business, saves up his money, keeps it all, drops out of school,

uses that money to pay cash for, yes, a double wide. You heard that right. Then fixes it all up himself to save even more. This incredible origin story is yours, Bigger Pockets. You're welcome. We're going to be going to a quick break.

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this and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Have you ever lost a DSCR deal because the financing just took too long? Red flags popped up late. The lender needed more time. The deal fell apart. Well, our friends at Dominion Financial just launched a program to help prevent that. With their new express rental loan, you can close in 10. days or less. And they still offer their price beat guarantee. So you can get great pricing and a timeline you can count on. Fast, simple, reliable. That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at Biggerpockets.com slash Dominion. That's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. All right, welcome back. Everybody has been waiting with baited breath to hear about the next phase of this journey of yours. I'm trying to figure out what more Louisiana stereotypes we could possibly work in to this thing. like with Theo Vaughn, one of your first sponsors on this deal, did Gambit from the X-Men

show up and throw some assistance in this? Like, what did you do once you had this property? You've now framed out a bathtub. You've done all the work yourself. It is a double-wide. By the way, are double-wides literally twice as wide as single-wides? Are they just wider? Good question, but I'm pretty sure it's twice. Like, exactly. So they're accurately named. Absolutely. Well, thank you. Because we don't get to talk about this very often on the podcast, but something tells me you're going to see more and more people taking the same journey that you took because as margins get smaller, we have to get more creative. So how did that deal end up? And then what was your next one?

Yeah. So like I said, I ended up renting the house out not long after we finished the rehab. And after we finished the rehab, I was, after listening to bigger pockets, you know, I'm figuring out like, you know, what's the best way to tap into the equity of this home? So I reached out to a local lender. And he recommended that I set up a commercial line of credit, which would allow me to tap into 70% of the home's equity. Hunter, real quick, can you explain what the difference between a commercial line of credit compared to just what a regular line of credit is? That is a good question. So the only line of credits I can think about are a commercial line and a helock. A helock is basically a home equity line of credit and you use your personal residence to use the equity in your personal residence

to set up a line of credit. But in this commercial line, basically the house that I'm collateralizing is my rent house. Is that? Yeah. And you're going on the commercial side of lending, too. You're talking to a different loan officer than you would if it was your primary resident. Yes, great point. Great point. I guess I already had that relationship. And usually not as great of an interest rate either. No, absolutely not. And it is definitely not good right now. But yeah, absolutely. It's a little steeper than a residential. That 70, you were at that 70 percent. What did that end up being of the value? Yes. So I was thinking probably around $65,000 to $70,000, what it would appraise for. And man, the house ended up appraising for $100,000. I'm like,

oh, man, that's great. I got $70,000 to play with. Now I can find another house. And so I ended up find another house very quickly, not too far away from the double wide that I bought. And it happened to be, you guessed it, another double wide, $38,000 this time. And, uh, and, and And anyway, so I bought the second house for $38,000. And this was a complete disaster. I ended up selling it for a loss maybe within a little over a year after I bought it. And that was due to bad tenant screening. I had a bad tenant in there.

He got to the point where he was making rent on time for about eight months. And then by the ninth month, I had to call him. I was like, look, man, you know, you got to pay on time. And after that, it was pretty much he just ghosted me, vacated the house about telling me. And when I tell you, like, I don't see how you can, like, if you had every intention of destroying that home and one year, I don't see how he did it. Like, it took a lot of effort to get that house as bad of shape because it was in after he moved out. But I say that to say, I really didn't put the right tenant in place. Back then, my pre-screening process looked like I would post a for rent sign in the yard with my cell phone number.

tenants would call me asking me any questions about the property and I would answer the same questions over and over, you know, how many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, or pets allowed, yada yada, and I would after that meet people to show them the home and, you know, if they would even show up, I would figure out like they don't have a job or like, hey, can you waive like the first two months for it? I'm like, no, absolutely not. Why didn't you ask me this on the phone? But back then, I had a very strict list of tenant qualifications and they were number one, do you? Do you? you have a pulse? And number two, do you have the deposit in the first month's rent? If yes, here's a lease, sign it and move in tomorrow. Hunter, before we go any further, I have to ask, what would you do different today? Yes, today I would use my current pre-screening process, which looks like, number one, advertise the property on Facebook, zillo, or realtor.com. and typically in my area whenever I do this, within the first day, I'll have 50 to 100 people inquiring about the property. And instead of writing them all back individually, I create this generic, basically, response

that covers all the details about the property, number of bedrooms, number of bass, square footage, or pets allow, yes or no, and then I provide them my minimal rental qualifications. And in doing that, I also paste a link. that allows them to pre-qualify through rent-ready. Shout-out rent-ready if y'all are still partners. So anyway, it leads them to rent-ready where they can pre-qualify. And typically, by the time they pre-qualify, I'm down 10 to 20% of the original applicants. And so after they pre-qualify, I'll run through all of them and make sure they meet our minimum qualification standards, which are now they must exceed three times the monthly rent, their income, and the tenant must have good references, the tenant has to

have no prior evictions, have a credit score of 600, and must pass a background check. And after going through all this, I'll email them either an acceptance letter with an opportunity to schedule viewing or a denial letter which basically shows which one of the qualification standards that they failed to meet. And now after this, we're down to 3% to 5% of the original inquiries. And once I have a pool of pre-qualified applicants, I'll schedule maybe one or two showing blocks. And I call these like a landlord open house. And that's when, you know, multiple people come look at the house at the same time.

And I think that showing the house while other applicants are there creates a sense of urgency to make them kind of respond faster. And if they like the home, I send them a final application. And at this point, I'm usually down to one to three, the most qualified candidates that I can choose from. Well, that's fantastic. Hunter, in the beginning, what do you think was driving you to skip the steps? Was it just a belief that human beings were inherently good? Did you not understand the consequences of picking a bad tenant? Because clearly, once you got this down, you did it well.

Why do you think you skipped those initial steps in the beginning? I think in the beginning, obviously you're putting so much money into these homes, time and effort, and you just want to get it rented as fast as possible. And number one, I didn't know, like, I think it takes the experience to shift your mindset of like, well, I don't want to do that again. I don't want to like go there and somebody stand me up on meeting or, you know, meet somebody all the way over there for them just to tell me they lost their job. Like I want to get weed everything out and filter them and pick the most qualified candidate.

All right. So it was just if they had a pulse, you'd put them in there. Now basically you're putting a lot of information in the showing itself. And then as they're applying, I think you mentioned, what was the next step that you said that you're weeding out to get to only 5% of the people sticking with it? So by the time, you know, you give them all these steps that they have to go through to actually pre-qualify. And then once they pre-qualify, I will either send them an acceptance or a denial letter. But pretty much I get it from 10% to 5% because they didn't even read the pre-qualification standards.

Number one, they showed me their monthly income and it wasn't exceeding three times a monthly rent. Or they have a dog that says no pets. Exactly. Yeah, clearly in the, yeah, they have to see it like three or four times. and then they still don't know and I still have to tell them like, hey, you're denied based upon this. Okay, so now would you feel like screening tenants is actually a strength of yours where at one time it was clearly a weakness? Absolutely. Since I've implemented this strategy, I can honestly say that I have not had one person move out. If they have moved out of one of my houses, it is you can probably eat off the floor by the time it's ready to rent somebody else.

You had mentioned rent ready. Is there any other tools or software that you're using to do this whole listing and showing? and move in process? No. Rent ready pretty much provides everything that I need. The only other thing that I use is quickbooks, obviously, for accounting purposes. But other than that, they know it's strictly rent-ready. All right. So you're rocking and rolling, making some momentum, solving for your mistakes, probably feeling pretty good about yourself, and then COVID hits. Tell us what happened there. Yeah. So up until COVID hit, my target market was bank. owned or real estate owned properties. And these are properties that have already been foreclosed on,

went to the share sale, and the bank ended up buying them back. And once the bank buys these properties back, they make very minor repairs to the properties. And that's usually just enough to either winterize them and make them safe enough to put on the market. Well, during COVID, there was a foreclosure moratorium, which provided relief for federally backed loans. And this caused a drastic,

decrease in the supply of real estate owned properties on the market. And, you know, here I was faced with a choice. Do I say, oh, well, I guess I'll start investing again when the market corrects, or do I dig one step deeper into the foreclosure process and try to catch these things at the sheriff sale? And the cool thing about sheriff sales is that instead of waiting for these properties to hit the market and basically be open to every investor that has access to the MLS, the only competitors you have are the 10 to 20 people that show.

up the courthouse that day to bid on these properties. And also, another pro is you can typically buy these houses for 20 to 50% less than if you were to wait for them to hit the market. But anyway, so there are cons to the sheriff's sales and one of them is that you cannot physically enter the property because that is trespassing. So you're pretty much buying these things sight unseen. Also another con to it, you have to show up with cash, a cashier certified check. within four hours after the conclusion of the sale.

So there's no like saying, yes, I want to buy this property, bid on it, and then go get a loan and then come back to, you know, give them the money. It just doesn't work like that. You have to be very liquid. And also, there's a good chance that a tenant could still be living in the property or the previous owner could still be living in the property. And if that's the case, you have to go through your, you know,

local eviction process to get them out. I think, Hunter, you come crawling out of like the Louisiana swamp, dripping wet, looking for the sheriff's sale. Like, I'm hunting deals. My name's Hunter. I think that's like, for sure, the stick. On that note, Hunter, how do you find these sheriff sales? I have no experience in this.

Where do you even go to find out about these auctions? Yeah, so I think every county does a little bit different. And, you know, I say county in Louisiana, we have parishes for some odd reason. But here in Caddo Parish, they advertise the sales on their website, which, you used to be strictly in the newspaper, but now they advertise them on the website. And what it looks like when they advertise them on the website, it's very unclear because all they provide is a suit number, who the plaintiff is, who the defendant is, and a legal description of the property.

So if you can't take that legal description and, you know, go to the assessor site and figure out the address yourself, you're not even going to know the address of this place, which I love because it pretty much takes out a lot of the competition because a lot of people are, you know, pretty timid to try to figure it out themselves. But, you know, that being said, whenever you walk into the sales, it can be very intimidating as a rookie because whenever you walk in, all the veterans, all the guys have been doing it for a long time, they look at you like you strictly came there to take money out of their wallet.

And I know that now because now that I'm kind of experienced in it, whenever I see a new face, I'm like, dead gum it. Somebody else that I got to compete against. And so what? When the sale starts, it's like this perfect storm of nervousness and excitement. And at 10 o'clock on the dot, bullets are flying, so you better be locked in. The lady up front will read off the suit description and the most softest, quietest, yet like talking as fast as a rapper.

She's like suit number, 633-27556, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, gotta, yada, gotta. A lot of times you can't even hear what she said. And she'll ask if the plaintiff would like to place a bid. plaintiff usually raises his hand. You know, I'd like to place a bid for $5,000. And the plaintiff who's representing the bank will go back and forth with a third party until there's a winner. Typically, the bank will give the plaintiff a top dollar that they'll take for the property. And after they get past that, it's a third party.

It's a third party. But the cool thing about it is there's an art to it. So the more you go, the more you kind of recognize tendencies that these other bidders have. So if you come in there like a rookie like me and your voice starts to crack just a little bit, that's like a shark smelling blood to some of those old guys. They just know that like they're about to get you. So if I'm, if my top dollars, you know, $70,000 and we're getting up to like, I'm like, $68,000, they know that they've got it in the bag.

They just have to go a little bit higher and they've gotten you beat. Yes, exactly. And it's, it's very intimidating because if you're bidding and get somebody else and they're just like, you can't even get the word $68,000 out of your mouth. And then they're already like 69, 60, 75. They'll like try to big wiggie and go like $5,000 ahead and you're like, okay, those guys serious. Is there a strategy that you've come up with when it comes to the bidding where you know,

all right, if I go up a thousand, they'll go up a thousand. The other guy will now feel emboldened, so he'll go up 1,000. But if you go up 6,000 in one moment, psychologically it causes pause and they're not quite ready to make the decision to go up higher. Like, do you think about that or is it just something you feel in the moment? It's something you feel in the moment, but at the same time, like, you don't want to be silly about it because you know that if their last number was, if their top dollar was $70,000 and then you just had $75,000 and then they didn't bid again, you're like, well, I just lost $5,000 for trying to be a big dog here. Yeah, that's definitely, I mean, it's similar with the MLS listings where a buyer wants to be the highest bid, but they don't want to be higher than they had to be to be to be. So there's always this awkwardness where the buyers will ask the seller, where do we have to be?

And the seller will come back and say, well, write your highest and best. And then the buyer will tell their agent, I don't want to, well, how high do I have to go? And there's like an awkwardness. So that's probably just amplified even more in the auctions. Do you just walk in there with a number and you say this is the highest I'm going to go and then this is a number where I would like to be at and take it from there? Yes. I'm glad you asked me that because yes, there is a number that I walk in there with.

and I will say that I have went over that number every single time I bought a house just because, like, you know, the excitement of going along with. And you're like, I don't want, I know that guy. I don't want him to get this house. Like, you know, it's just there's a lot of high stakes, high emotion. And it's very important that if you do go to these sales, that you do stick to your top dollar. But I'm a sucker for it. How many of these deals have you actually purchased from the auction? I have bought eight houses from share of sales. And what has that time span been over? So you started this in 2020? Is that when you bought your first one? Yeah, 2020 is when I bought my first one. And I'm happy to say that the roofs weren't falling in.

And even of these houses, I've had to make pretty minor repairs to most of them. But I do have friends that have bought houses that literally did not have a ceiling in them. So you've got to be really careful to know what you're buying. Are you able to see the properties before you bet on them? No, absolutely not. It's illegal to even. go walk in there. It's illegal to go on the property, much less actually peek through the window. What's the logic behind why the seller wouldn't want you to see what you're buying so you feel more comfortable buying it?

I believe that, well, number one, it's really not the owner of the property that is selling the house. I guess it's the, they're getting foreclosed on. So I guess up until the point when that sale actually happens, the previous owner still has possession of the property. so therefore if you are getting on that person's property, you are technically trespassing on what he owns. So it's not that they're trying to stop you from seeing. It's just that the bank doesn't even have title yet to let you see it. It's still the person who's being foreclosed on that owns a property,

and they're not giving you permission to go look at the property. Exactly, exactly. When I bought my first rental, I thought collecting rent would be the hard part. Nope. The admin crushed me. Every night was receipts, tax forms, and checking who was late on rent. I kept thinking, if this is one unit, how do people run 10? Baselane changed that. It's BiggerPockets official banking platform that handles

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Yes. So the only way it makes it to sell is if they were to actually just stop paying their mortgage. And I know that there's multiple notifications that the bank has to give out before that even can make it to the actual share sale, a lot of paperwork a lot of time, has to go into that. So it's not like you don't pay your mortgage one time and then boom, the next month it's going to sale. It's a long drawn-out process. But as far as other liens that could be on the property, it's very important that you do thorough research. And I would recommend hiring an attorney to do title work for you before you bid on these because there is some properties will have mechanic liens. that won't show up on the clerk of court or, you know, the courthouse documents.

But most of that stuff gets wiped clean before the sale. But you have to also be careful because sometimes if you go to the sale, you might be buying a second mortgage on the property. And it's not even the first mortgage. So you would really only be like a have a second position on that property. I ask because I have an investor friend that he bought this piece of land from a sheriff's auction, but it wasn't foreclosed on. It was the, his wife sold cigarettes illegally from the Indian reservation to New Jersey and didn't charge sales tax.

And they took that property as like his, almost like his fine or whatever for his wife doing that. Yes, restitution. And then they resold it at the sheriff's auction too. So I didn't know if any of the properties had things like that happen. Wow. You know, I haven't heard of anything like that. The only houses that I bought were because, you know, people didn't pay their mortgage. I have seen partitions at the sheriff's sales was basically like one person, one heir owned a certain

percentage of a property and they didn't want it anymore. So they had to basically take it to partition because them and the other owner couldn't come up with an agreement on, you know, what they wanted to pay each other for the property or if they even wanted to sell it. So whenever that's the case, they partition it to court. And whenever they do partition it to court, it'll go to a sheriff's sale. Okay, well, it's definitely worth mentioning this because when people here, I'm going to go buy something for $42,000, that's worth $100,000. They're all going to be rushing in there. But there's a reason that you can get that deal is you're taking a lot of risk.

You're buying something that you don't get a home inspection on. You don't know what kind of condition it's in. Like you just mentioned, there could be additional liens or money that is owed that that property is used as collateral on. That doesn't have as much equity as you thought. You think you're buying it free and clear, but there's a mortgage. on or there's two mortgages on it, that you could theoretically be buying title to something that already has debt on it. That's more than what you paid for the deal. And then there's the whole element of like, well, is it going to have bad smells? Like, there's just a lot you don't know about it.

And so that's why you're able to get these margins is because you're taking this risk. But clearly, you've jumped in with both feet similar to what you did when you left your, uh, your education. And you said, hey, I'm going to go start a business. I'm going to figure this out and you've done well, how were you able to scale eight of them? Were you just selling that many crawfish that you were able to get to the point that you could buy this many houses? Or were you refinancing these things and pulling money out of them and reinvesting it into the next deal? Yes. So with the original line of credit that I told you guys about previously, after I bought that second house, it was, you know, $38,000. And I think it ended up appraising for somewhere

around 75 or some odd like that. So what I did was after I bought that second house, I, rehabbed it and I rented it out and then what's the next step, David, refinanced it. So whenever I refinanced it, they basically took the equity I had in the home and used it to pay down my line of credit and now I have a mortgage on that property, property number two with a freed up line of credit. And I would basically snowball that over and over and over. And eventually it would get to the point where if I had, you know,

three properties mortgage separately, I would bundle those on the next. time that I would do a refinance. That way everything doesn't seem to scattered out everywhere. And I had, you know, 15 different mortgages. Would that be like a portfolio loan you did with like a small community bank did you use? Yeah, I used the same same local bank for that. And the way I did it, I usually did, you know, three to five properties at a time. And as I started to do that, you know, they increased the amount of my line of credit as that kind of started to snowball. I want to touch on your mobile homes real quick, too. With the financing on that, was it hard to get financing on a mobile home? And when you kind of switch to buying these other single family properties, was that

easier? No, financing for the mobile homes wasn't very difficult. Now I have worked with buyers before because I also am a real estate agent on the side. So I have worked with buyers and they have ran into some struggles, especially like single wide homes. And if those homes are older than like a 2000s model, they make sure they're retrofitted before the bank will even lend them any money on it. So you run into different struggles like that. But as far as me using my line of credit to buy this house, I pretty much bought it cash, if you look at it on paper, bought it cash. And then by that time, whenever the bank refinances it, it's usually just a drive-by

appraisal. So I haven't had any hassle on it as far as them not lending money on it due to being a mobile home. A drive-by appraisal. I've not had one of those on a very long. long time. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. Especially because appraisals are so easily changed and challenged and they're so subjective as it is, this idea that like, well, if it's a drive-by, it's not going to be accurate,

but if they walk in the house and they can feel the carpet under their feet, they're going to give you an accurate appraisal. It's like, it's such a joke when you actually see. And then not to go too far in a tangent, but all these appraisals in 2005 that showed a house that was worth something, were worth absolutely nothing. right when the market ended up crashing later. So in my opinion, has always been an appraisal as a false sense of security. It's not like they're bad. They do give you an idea if you can look at the comps of other sales.

But if you're basing your decision off of an appraisal, you're already doing things wrong. So this is a fascinating story, Hunter. I can see how you have pivoted into the WWE and you have such a big fan base behind you. I mean, I've been riveted this entire time. You got into self-storage. So you just keep on figuring something. it out dominating it and then moving on. You are like the bigger pockets poster child of what we want people to follow. And here's what I love about your story more than anyone else. We

didn't talk about a lot. You're still working a job. You're like, hey, I'm making good money. I'm doing good with real estate. But it's an investment. It is not a career. So I'm going to keep doing what I do. Keep working hard. Keep bringing value to the marketplace. Keep making money. and then I'm going to use that money to invest in a real estate to set myself up for the future, not retire on the beach and drink my tie. So well done to you. I just want to give you your props, man. This is such a cool story.

I hope a lot of people take inspiration from this. Everyone, we have the perfector of the pivot, the DIY destroyer, the deal Hunter Lawler. Thank you for being here, man. Ashley, any last word before we let him get out of here? Yeah, Hunter. I want to know what is your monthly cash flow from your investments on average, you know, I'm sure it changes, but what's that number? Yearly cash flow is, I haven't pulled it, yearly cash flow from my single family homes is

45,000, and the storage facility yearly cash flow is at 65,000. Awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you all for having me. It's an honor to be on here with you Titans. The honor is ours, my man. Thank you very much for doing this. If you guys would like to learn more about Hunter and connect with them, check out our show notes where his contact information is there. mine and Ashley's is there as well. Hunter, we're going to let you get out of here because you probably got another deal to hunt. This is David Green for Ashley. My new co-host care, signing on.

Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is. by Calicoe Content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with

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