BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 878: The Low-Risk “Micro-Flips” ANY Beginner Investor Should Try w/Antoine Martel

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Antoine Martel has a secret to finding the best real estate markets around, and here’s the thing—ANYONE can repeat his process. After flipping over SIX HUNDRED houses and building a BIG real estate portfolio, he knows a thing or two about where to buy, which markets make the most sense, and what type of house is worth the risk. That’s why, instead of doing multimillion-dollar luxury flips, Antoine decided to do “micro-flips” in affordable markets, with a staggering rate of success.   What is "micro-flipping?" If you’re a beginner investor like Antoine, starting out with only $40,000, buying in the big cities won’t work. So, instead, Antoine found the real estate markets with low prices, high demand, and LOTS of deals so he could get his money back faster and keep repeating the system. These low-risk “micro-flips” all-in often cost less than a down payment, but they can give beginner investors the snowball effect they need to start building wealth.  Shortly after seeing massive success with his “micro-flips,” Antoine ran out of deals and decided to move into more markets. From there, he developed a detailed system that ANYONE can copy to pinpoint America's BEST real estate investing markets. And if you stick around, you’ll learn how to do it, too!  In This Episode We Cover How to find the best real estate markets in the country, just like Antoine  The “micro-flipping” strategy that beginner investors can use to start building wealth WITHOUT a big investment  How to use the BRRRR method to turn one property into an entire passive income portfolio  How to “test” your long-distance real estate investing market and ensure it’ll be worth investing in  The home renovation budget “sweet spot” that has ninety-six percent accuracy on ANY flip or BRRRR  And So Much More! Click here to listen to the full episode: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-878 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

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. My name's Dave Meyer here today with Rob Abasolo, and we have a very interesting investor story for you. Yeah, today we're going to be talking with Antoine Martel, who has done some really interesting things using market intelligence and data to pick markets and scale his real estate business. Thank you for letting me come on here and join you today, Rob. It's our first show hosting together, too, which I'm very excited about. I know. It's so excited. I'm a little nervous. I've got notes. I've got notes on the intro. Usually when I intro someone, I say, I'm here with my good friend, Henry Washington or my good friend, David Green. But I haven't earned it yet. I noticed he didn't

say that when you introduced me. Okay. Hey, you're a good friend, Dave. Oh, because I was introducing you. I'm sorry. Well, next time, after we have this show together, I'll have detailed adjectives to describe you. Thank you very much. But seriously, thank you for having me on the show, because if you don't know me, I really love data. That's my job at bigger pockets. And I know that Antoine is going to share a lot of information about how he uses data in a really practical and honestly kind of simple way to pick different markets and figure out what strategies are right for him.

Yeah, and you're going to hear a very practical strategy that we're calling microflips that he uses. And I think it's a really super approachable way and less risky strategy for getting into the game in 2024. I really like it. I'm excited to jump into that. All right. Well, then with no further ado, let's welcome Antoine onto the show. Antoine, welcome to the show. We appreciate you being here. Of course. Thanks for having me. So I want to dig into your start to real estate investing. From what I understand, you got started really early in college and we're also investing out of state. Let's just start. Why did you do this in the first place? What compelled you while you were already a student in college to start investing in real estate? I was a

very entrepreneurial as a kid growing up. I always was selling something, always had a business on the side. I studied entrepreneurship in college. And while I was there, I was like making mobile apps. That was like the hot thing at the time. My brother dragged my dad and I to a real estate conference. It was like a three-day boot camp on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. After that, I just became completely addicted to real estate investing. And after that, I, you know, went back to college. I moved all my classes from 5 to 10 p.m. so that I could network with people throughout the day. And I took a ton of people out to coffee meetings in Los Angeles, kind of picking their brains actually on bigger pockets. I would go on bigger pockets, message people in L.A. and say, hey, I go to this college. I would

love to meet you and take you out for coffee. And I was meeting people that had more experience of me, which I didn't have any experience at the time. And I was kind of leveraging this college kid's status that I had. And after 200 coffee meetings, 90% of those people were investing out of state. And so that was my first iteration and like ideation of looking out of state and investing out of state was from meeting all of those people. And then from them, I got, you know, even more and more granular on how they were doing it, what they were investing in, where they were investing, all that kind of stuff. Given your entrepreneurial background, Antoine, I'm curious, what about real estate clicked for you and made you, and made you

think this is what you wanted to jump in rather than other alternative entrepreneurial pursuits? I think for me, it was profitable for like going from the tech space or like starting a mobile app where you like the goal is to just lose money and get users. What a great goal. Like I came from that kind of world. Like those are the kind of people I was meeting with in college that would come and speak at our class. And I was like, okay, cool. So we're going to make a business that loses money as long as we keep raising money to keep the lights on. And to me, that didn't seem fun. I grew up, again, selling candy bars, selling soda, selling things where like you invest this much money, you make a margin of 10, 20, 30 percent, and you make money every single day. And I think

real estate for me was that, but the big leagues, instead of selling a $3 soda, you can sell a $150,000 house. And so to me, it was just something that I've been doing my entire life. Whereas the whole tech world just like did not make business sense to me. I'm like, this does not sound fun continuously raising money to pay employees and keep the lights on. I think it's really impressive that you pick this up as a college student because real estate in general, I don't think is really hard once you're into it. But picking it up is not really the smoothest task for somebody. At your age when you were doing this, did it feel easy? Did it feel easy in comparison to developing mobile apps?

or was it just fun? And so the fact that it was hard was like no big deal. I think what saved me was that I didn't look my age. So I would go into these meetings and just like be like, hey, I'm a college kid. And I'm looking to invest in real estate. I was kind of leveraging that young or youth and like leveraging my age. And then when I would go to like a more important meeting where I didn't want them to know. Like I was in college, I would just grow my beard out a little bit and I can get by with the meeting. At the end of the meeting, somebody would always say, man, how old are you? And I'd be like 22 and, you know, their brains would explode at how much knowledge I had. I mean, I was doing a lot of the work in the back end, listening to podcasts all day long, reading all the books and then also just like meeting people on a consistent basis. Yeah. So you're in the groove. You're interviewing people or getting their autobiographies as you call, which I love that, by the way. That's a really great way to think about it. And then not only are you picking up real estate ever so casually as a youngster. You also decide to do long distance for your first deal, how did you even go about selecting a market,

having no experience in the field? That must have been pretty difficult. My brother took me and my dad to this real estate seminar over the weekend. From there, I was like, man, like screw mobile apps. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to do real estate. It's like, you know, in my blood. I've been doing the same thing just instead of sodas. Like I said, I'm now selling houses. So I think from that, my dad was like, all right, cool, I have four, I didn't have any money at the time. My dad had around $40,000 that he was willing to invest in this new business venture. And so throughout all those autobiographies, I would ask people like, where are you investing? What is the average purchase price, average repair costs? How did you build your team?

All this kind of stuff. And then doing a ton of homework and research online on Zillow and Redfin and Trulia started looking at where could I? buy a house, whether the down payment or buying the house all cash, with $40,000. So I think it was like a mixture of all those things, like literally budget constraints, the people I was meeting and where they were investing, to figure out a market that would make sense for our budget. And the first house we ended up buying was $35,000, and we renovated it for $5,000. And that was in Memphis. Wow. Okay, cool. So $35,000. How long ago was this, by the way?

This was in 2016. Okay, 2016. So either way, that's still a pretty cheap house. 5,000 bucks to renovate a house. What does that mean? I imagine it wasn't like a full gut remodel. It sounds more like a paint and new carpet situation. Yes, it was replacing the tile in the kitchen.

It was new interior paint and exterior paints, I believe. And then there was a carpeted bedroom or two, and it was like a deep cleaning of that. That's all we did. And the goal was to kind of do a burr. the deal. So buy it for 35, rehab it for five. We did a cash out refinance with a local credit union after house appraised for like 65,000 bucks. We were able to pull out almost all the money. And then that's kind of what propelled us to continue going from there. Wow. Okay, cool. So for anyone that doesn't know, Burr, basically a buy, rehab, rent, refinance and repeat.

And that's what you just described. You were able to fix it up enough. You left a little bit of equity into it. And then second house, you're like, this is working. I want to do another burr, or were you already curious on what other aspects you could follow? After that first deal, obviously my dad was stoked that we had gotten almost all the investment back from the deal. So we decided to keep on doing that strategy. And the goal was literally just to grow a family portfolio. I had graduated college now at this point. And I went to my dad and said, hey, I want to keep doing this. I don't want to go and look for a job. Can you keep funding this venture? let's just see how many times we can recycle this.

The people I've met are able to do this. I think we can do the same. And I think we got a great team here, property manager, realtor, and contractor. So we just kept on recycling that for about a year after graduating from college, just kept recycling that money. And in that first 12 months, I believe we did like eight deals where we just bird every single one, every single one, recycling the same money, slowly putting more cash into the family portfolio.

All right, so Antoine kicked off his real estate journey with a $40,000 budget and the Burr strategy. But part of what has made Antoine so successful is how he's picking markets. And he's going to break down how exactly he zeroes in on the zip codes that will make him a ton of money right after the break. You ever head out on a trip, lock your door, and think, cool, my most valuable asset is now doing absolutely nothing. Because while you're off traveling, your home is just sitting there. Quiet, empty, not contributing. which feels like a missed opportunity, considering it has solid Wi-Fi and a very comfy bed. With Airbnb's co-host network, your place can earn money while you're away.

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to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash rookie. Just go to Indeed.com slash rookie right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Welcome back. We're here with Antoine Martel, an investor who's doing Burrs and Fix and Flip's deals in the Midwest. Before the break, we talked about his first deal. And now we're going to transition to what he's been up to recently. And later, we'll talk about what's working for him in 2024. Okay, so you went into Memphis for your first deal. Did you stay in Memphis? Stayed in Memphis until about two years ago, two or three years ago. That's when we had,

like the Memphis market just got extremely expensive. Those houses we were buying for 30 to 50,000 bucks back then. Now we're selling for $150,000 today. And then now a lot of the retail fix and flippers are getting into those neighborhoods, which is not really my business model. my model is more in the turnkey fix and flip area. So, you know, buying in the $50,000 range and selling it below $150,000. I want to backtrack a little bit because it's such an important aspect of getting into real estate. It's picking your market. And I know you mentioned you're coming into the market here with $40,000. And obviously that worked for your first house. But there's so many cities out there with houses that probably cost $35,000 to $40,000. So was there any particular criteria or

Was there any specific reason why Memphis was the city that you decided to get started in? So Memphis was a city we decided to get started in because of the budgeting constraints that we did have and from meeting those people and collecting their autobiographies. That was kind of why we decided to go into Memphis in the first place just by looking purely on Zillow and Redfin and truly on looking at the sales prices. from there we did expand into other markets over the years because after we built up our family portfolio, we started a turnkey fix and flip business, which then we decided to expand into other markets across the country.

And that's really when we started looking at the data of what was working in some of our markets and trying to match that data like the average purchase price, average sales price, all that kind of stuff and matching that data to other markets across the country. All right, Anton, you're hitting some of my trigger words here, talking about data and selecting markets. Tell me a little bit about your process. What sort of metrics are you looking at when figuring out what markets you want to get into? So I grew the family portfolio at about eight houses.

After that, we had kind of ran out of capital to keep doing this family business and keep growing the family portfolio. We decided to start selling these houses as turnkey rentals. When we sold them as turnkey rentals, I made a little website called like Martelfamilyrealti.com sent it to everybody in my email list to sell these turnkey rental properties. Once we sold these turnkey rental properties, we grew that Martel Turnkey business. And we did over 650 turnkey fix and flips from that 2016 to today. And because of that success that we were having with Martel Turinke, we constantly needed to add

more and more markets to the portfolio. We had to add new cities, add new. zip code. So once we had done, so my dad's actually an actuarial major. He loves math and loves looking at all the data. And in our search to find new markets, we needed to have that amount of data on like what was working and what was selling for our clients. Once we had that, we actually not just looked at the city, but to find new cities to invest in, we would actually look at the most popular zip codes and the zip codes that we were doing the most amount of volume in. So, for example, now that we had data of 50 or 100 houses in a zip code or 30 houses in a zip code, we would look at all that data.

What is the property tax rate, average purchase price, average sale price, the population growth, the crime rate. And we would put all of this down into a spreadsheet. Then we would go and pull data for every single zip code in America. And we would find zip codes that match that criteria. So obviously, the crime weight was something we had to do manually. But we would almost look at what zip codes were working well for the business. We would use that data, you know, look at the BLS.gov data, download all of that,

and kind of figure out which cities and which zip codes, therefore which cities, we're going to be the best cities for us to move and expand our business into. That is very, yeah, that's crazy. Well, I admire your depth of research for all of the data that you're looking at. It's very impressive. one of the questions I get a lot that I'm curious how you handle is there are so many different data points. So if you're pulling all this business information that you have plus census data, plus all this different data, how do you weigh all those different variables and decide

which are the most important and which are going to determine what actions you take next? So a couple of different things. Because we were looking at zip codes, we would then say, okay, we would pull like a list of the top 100 zip codes that are working well for our business or potentially could work well for a business. Once we had those 100 zip codes, we would actually do a count of which zip codes were for which city. So for example, out of that top 100, Detroit, Michigan, which is a city we moved into very shortly after that, was like the top 20 or 30 in that top 100 list. Toledo, Ohio had some, Cincinnati had some Cleveland, which was where we were already investing had a ton of zip codes, St. Louis, Missouri. So that was a big thing for us because

you have to go into these cities and then build teams, which is the next step of this whole entire process. So if we had a city that had one zip code that makes sense, like Louisville, Kentucky comes to mind. If you have a city that just has one zip code makes sense, it may not be worth the time or effort to go into that city and build the team. So we did have different weighing factors, but I think that was probably the most important one for us was cool. Out of this top 100 list, you know, 20 of them are Detroit. Great. We got to build a team in Detroit.

We got to find a property manager, realtor, contractors, insurance, all that kind of stuff to help us grow that business because that's what takes the longest is building those teams on the group. You can do the data. And then once the data tell you something, now it's time to get to work and build those boots on the ground. Yeah, there's a, I imagine a lot of parallel pathing here where you're a researching market, be calling around to see if there's anyone to service the rental properties because I find rental properties all the time that are amazing properties, but there's no one to actually manage it and run it and run the day to day. Exactly. So, like, do you have a stress test or is there any amount

of due diligence that you do to ensure that those vendors exist before running the data or is it something you do at the same time? It's really a trial and error that we have to go through, sadly. Like you said, Rob, you can find a zip code in the middle of the forest and it's like four houses in that zip code. And it's like, great, this is a great zip code to invest in. The data told us, but it's in the middle of nowhere. It's three hours outside of a major metro, no property managers, no realtors, no contractors. So it's not going to work. So it was kind of combing through that list, finding out which cities are going to make the most amount of sense. And then building a team on the ground to just test one house. Can we just do one house?

in Detroit. Can we just do one house in St. Louis? You test that team out, the realtor, property manager, and contractor. And because of the deals that we were doing, like, again, our average purchase price was 50 to 90,000 bucks, average renovation, $20,000, average ARV, $100 to $150. Can we go and do some deals that have a $5,000 repair, a $10,000 repair, test out the team with a light, light, burr or buy and hold or something like that, just to see if they stay on budget, say on point. And then from there, let's increase the budget to, you know, $20,000,000, $15,000. You slowly build that out.

So it really was a trial in there after that, after the data pointed us into the right city or the right zip codes. Antoine, how do you find your initial team to even do that test? Tons and tons and tons of cold calls. I was like, I wonder if there's a secret strategy here. I was hoping there was. Me too. Nope.

Because I hate making calls. Unfortunately, it's just a lot of work. Is a lot of work cold calling them to find them? Then you have to like consistently email them, send them deals, collect feedback. You probably have to go through 10, 20 deals to make offers on, you know, let's say you send them 20 deals. You make offers on five of them. You get one of those houses under contract. Then you've got to go through the rehab bid.

So it is a lot of testing. Like it would take us. many, many months to finally have a team that we felt comfortable doing a 20 or $30,000 repair. But yeah, Dave, it's a ton of cold calls and say, hey, I'm Antoine. I live in, you know, Florida. I love to invest in St. Louis. Can you help me buy houses, renovate them, rent them out, and either sell them or refinance that. And, yeah, you get a ton of those, that's for sure.

Or no answers. That's usually the main thing. No one ever answers their phone. I've always said that I was going to start a company in the Smoky Mountains, particularly because that's where it's so hard to get someone to answer the phone. It's Rob's handyman service and our tagline is we answer the phone because I genuinely believe anyone who does this could make so much money as a vendor for rental properties. It's a low bar. No, it's it honestly it is kind of a low bar. Just pick up the phone. You're probably going to get a lot of business.

Yeah, really. Antoine, you said that I love this idea of testing too and it maybe it comes from your software background because this, you know, in software companies, this is kind of this idea where you try and test something for the smallest amount of money possible and maximize what they call your rate of learning. So if you can learn about this market or you can learn about rehab costs in a market for five grand, that's amazing rather than spending 30 grand. So I love that. And I think that's a super important thing for our audience to take home is that try and minimize

the amount you need to invest to build your network or to expand your portfolio. so you can maximize your learning. Now, Antoine, even though you're saying you're getting up to this like $30,000 rehab, that for anyone who's new is a lot of money. But in the scope or scale of rehabs, that's still a pretty inexpensive type of lip or burr. Do you deliberately target that type of budget? We do because, again, from the data that we've looked at, So the last 650 odd deals, the average renovation cost is around $30,000.

We realized that if we went over that rehab cost, if we went over, sorry, if we went over $40,000 in rehab cost, the variable from the actual bid to what actually happened. So to the bid, to what actually happened, went way up. So if you did a $50,000 renovation in Cleveland or Detroit, they have to tear down walls, they have to remove cabinets, they have to do this thing and that thing, which then brings up all these other issues with sub-flooring or rotting wood, and then you have to do that. And now your $50,000 bid turns into $60,000 in the blink of an eye. And some of these deals, that's your profit margin after financing costs, realtor costs, all that kind of stuff. So we found out that if we

stuck below $40,000, that $20,000, you have to do enough renovation to add enough value to get the house to appraise, but you don't want to do too much renovation to where your variable renovation costs goes through the roof. So for the last 650 rehab deals that we did, like the actual rehab bid to what actually happened was like 96%. Whoa, that's crazy. And I think that's from staying in that sweet spot price point that there isn't that much of a variable and not doing heavy demo and not tearing down walls, not looking at the subflooring. all that kind of stuff. I have always wondered this. And you're kind of explaining it, but help me understand this. And I feel like other people have the same question. When you rehab a

house and it's a full gut remodel, like let's say in just most markets in the country, like I just did a full gut remodel. It's going to be like, I mean, on one of my properties, $100,000 plus. And it makes sense because it's like in Austin, Texas and yeah, no big deal. But then you go to some of these cities where the houses are $40,000. but they're only worth a certain amount above that. Does that just mean that houses in certain areas or cities that you're rehabbing in never get full gut remodels? Exactly. You can, Rob, I can give you a house in Detroit for free and you would lose money on it.

Yeah. Oh, okay. That's super interesting. So that's just the way it works. There's some deals where for me to give you the house, I would have to pay you money for there to be any profit margin. What happens to those houses? They get added to the demo list.

And in 10, 20 years, hopefully somebody buys that land and builds a new, a brand new home. Got it. Okay. So it really is a waiting game on most houses like that. And just out of curiosity, Antron, because I've never really encountered this, do you mean demo lists by the city? Are they buying the properties and knocking them down? Yep. That is, I guess, unique to some of these, yeah, cities.

Because what happens is, like, the person who owns that property is on the, they don't pay their taxes. the house is just completely demolished. They get notices from the city. Eventually, the city through legal action, through tons of years of going to court, gets ownership back of the property, and they get the deed of the property. And then they'll put it up for auction. But like Rob's question, nobody wants to buy the house anyways because there's no profit margin. So you can buy, I can give you a duplex for free in Detroit. That's just the exterior brick. It's going to cost you $80, $100,000 to renovate that property and make it nice. plus all the other like, let's call it HVAC hot water tank.

Let's say you're all in for 130, 140. And the duplex may be worth 120. Nobody's going to buy. Nobody buys it from the auction. What does the city do next? We have to get rid of the blight. We're just going to demo the property anyways. And hopefully some, you know, it's better than having something that kids are going to run through and get injured.

And then we're going to have police reports. So they'd rather just demo it and wait for somebody to come and buy that land. Okay. So Antoine has done a ton of volume to scale his port. and make smarter choices. But how has he optimized those properties and why is his strategy working in today's market conditions? Stay tuned after the break.

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Go to mine.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get your first month free. which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. Welcome back, everyone. We're here with Antoine Martel talking about his data-driven investing strategy. So, it seems like you fine-tune your system here. You're within a 96% range. Amazing. I wish I was in that range for literally any real estate project I ever did.

But then again, I haven't done 650 flips, so that does make sense. So tell us where are you at nowadays, like, what does your portfolio look like? What are the type of deals that you're expanding into at the scale? that you're at currently. So before COVID, I mean, interest rates were low, people were buying left, right and center. We had a portfolio of around 250 houses. We had the turnkey fix and flip business, which was growing. Our biggest month pre-COVID was we did 50 houses in one month. So the business was really, really scaling up. Wait, 50 houses. What do you mean? Like 50 flips, 50 sales? Yeah. We purchased 50 houses and we sold about 30 houses in one month. Okay. Wow.

So just a little bit. Just a couple houses. From that, we realized that, you know, doing this kind of, these kinds of deals at this kind of volume, you know, really did hurt our net profit margin. And it didn't really make much sense just because we had to have so many project managers on staff and on payroll. Then we had to hire a ton of people to sell these assets and to sell the properties. So throughout that kind of time, we were just getting offers on our properties, on our apartment building. that were insane. And my dad and I ended up selling a ton of the assets before the interest rates started climbing, like even sold our apartment buildings, which again, we bought and we were

like, we're never selling these things. We're going to hold them for cash flow forever until you get a crazy offer. And we ended up selling a lot of that portfolio. So with the turnkey fix and flip business, we really slowed that business down to a place where it made the most amount of sense profitably, having the highest amount of margin without having all the overhead. had cost for us. And then we actually started a company flip system to show people this kind of model and how to do it out of state, doing that sweet spot $20,000 to $40,000 renovations, building their teams on the ground, giving them a software to manage and track the whole thing. And we took a lot of that cash that we had in those single family houses and in those rental properties and started investing

that into the software that we're building to help other people do the same and invest in these markets. Can you just as a refresher, you said 20 to 40,000 is the main cost to flip. And then what is the average profit? I guess give us one more time. Just break us down very simply like average cost of the house, average renovation, and then average profit. Sure. Average purchase price will be, let's call it for easy math, $70,000. Average renovation, let's say is $30,000.

Other costs will be around $5,000. And then you'll sell it for anything from like, let's say, 110 to all the way up to 130. So your net, your net margin, if you're doing the deal all cash, will be around 20,000 bucks. If you're using financing, it pretty much cuts that in half. So your net margin is going to be more like 10 to 15,000 bucks on these houses if you're using like a hard money lender, for example. Got it, got it. Okay. And then you're changing your business model and you said you've scaled down a little bit or you figured out what the optimal amount of flips is. So tell us about that now. Like, where was the use?

Where were you at your peak and then where are you at now, volume-wise? The peak was that month and it was kind of like a, oh, man, moment. Like, we bought 50 houses. A lot of them were in a big portfolio that we acquired and we sold like 30 houses. We had, you know, 30 people on staff and on payroll, not including the contractors, realtors, property managers that we had. We were in like five, six cities at the time running the business. So at that, that was our peak of it.

my dad and I sat down and looked at the P&L and we were like, this doesn't make sense. We were making more money doing five deals a month with a third of the staff. It was like a point of diminishing returns with the fix and flip business, which was very interesting. And we decided, okay, cool, let's start scaling this business down a little bit. We had let some people go. We paid off a ton of the loans that we had owed. And really just kept the business down to more like five deals per month was a good.

great place where you didn't have to have staff, you didn't have to have a large payroll. You know, most of the profit you were making was going right into the owner's pockets. And so that's kind of where we maintained. And then because of the excess capital that we did have, that's what allowed us to launch more of the software play on building out the software, building a team to build the software company. Anton, that's super cool. I don't often hear real estate investors say that they've scaled down parts of their business. And I just think it's important for our audience to take note of that because it's not all about getting to the most doors or growing to the largest size possible.

It's about what works for you and your individual goals and your individual plan. But I imagine that was kind of hard. Like was it a difficult? I mean, laying off people is always difficult. But was that a tough transition for you? Yes. It was a it was very tough transition to go for. You know, it's like gut punch.

It was like your baby and all you want to do for like eight years straight is grow and do more deals every single month. Or I guess less than that. Six years straight, just grow and do more and more deals every single month. And then you're like, wow, I'm making less money doing more deals than I was with like no employees, no staff, all this kind of stuff. So it definitely was a little bit of a gut punch. But I always say that I'm a business guy or an entrepreneur that fell into real estate. Like I said, like I was doing software and tech and apps and stuff before that. And, you know, I think it worked out for me.

It got me to the point where I am today and I learned a ton. And now it's it's doing other things that are still in the real estate space. But I really like what I'm doing now with the going back to the software. Look at that full circle. Back to the software play. Well, I have a question. I think a lot of people are probably wondering because obviously you were crushing it in the last, you know, five years or six or seven years.

Now if the economy and the market is shifting a little bit, do you still feel like this level of housing, the microflips, if you will, is still a good strategy in 2024? I think it's probably the best and safest strategy in 2024. If you are a newbie investor, if you're looking to get into your first deal, I would highly, highly recommend doing something where you have multiple exit strategies, especially if you don't know what you're doing. It's your first time, like Dave mentioned earlier. if you're testing out something, you want to test it out with the lowest amount of capital

upfront, which is going to be a deal that has a $10,000 renovation where you have multiple exit strategies. So I would recommend getting into a deal that you can buy, renovate it, rent it out, and now we can refinance it as a burr, we can sell it as a turnkey fix and flip, we can list it on the market. There's so many different exit strategies versus the traditional retail fix and flip where you don't have those options. maybe you can rent it out on Airbnb, but typically renting out to a long-term tenant or refinancing it or selling it as a turnkey rental doesn't really make sense. So I'm just a big proponent of testing with small amounts of money and then having a strategy where I can make money,

no matter what happens to the deal. And for me, that's having multiple different exits. I thought you're going to say make mad money. And I was like, yeah, that's right. That's what I'm talking about. I love it, man. Dave, are there any houses in Amsterdam that we can do this on. I imagine all the houses there are much, much higher than the 40 to 60,000 break in point. I think the median house price in Amsterdam is like 700,000 euro, so probably close to 800 grand. And there's so many regulations about what you can do. So I think Antoine's got a better approach here. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Antoine. We really, really appreciate you sharing. This is an amazing strategy. And I agree. I think this is an awesome

strategy for people that are looking to get into their first deal. So for anyone at home that's listening to this and once again, get in contact with Antoine, with me with Dave, all of our contact information can be found in the show notes down below. And don't forget, we have so many tools available to everyone over on biggerpockets.com. There's a little tab there that says tools. We've got a bunch of rehab estimators, rent estimators, a bunch of good stuff. So go visit that after you listen to today's episode and be sure to leave us a five-star review. Thanks to everyone for listening and we will catch you on the next episode of Bigger Pockets. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.

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