BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 936: 4 Ways to Start Investing in Real Estate with NO or LOW Money
Episode Date: April 15, 2024Want to know how to invest in real estate with NO money down? Or, maybe you’ve got a bit of cash in the bank and think now is the time to get into the real estate investing game. No matter where you...’re at or how much money you have, we’re bringing you four ways to invest in real estate with no money AND low money in 2024. Does it sound too good to be true? Thankfully, this is just how real estate works and our expert investor hosts can back up the facts—these methods CAN be done with little or no money down. Some of these strategies will get you in the game, making cash flow every month, EVEN without owning a rental property. Others will allow you to put very little money down to buy your first house, but you must be willing to follow a few rules. We’ll also get into the short-term rental side hustle that has landlords pay YOU for managing their property and exactly how Rob scored a three percent interest rate (in TODAY’s market) while putting very little money down on a property. Don’t let money stop you from starting your investing journey! Combine a few of these strategies, and you could have a cash-flowing rental property portfolio in just a few years’ time! In This Episode We Cover: How to start a real estate business without owning a single property! The exact method Rob used to score a three percent interest rate in 2024 How to buy one house every year using these low-money-down loans Real estate partnerships 101 and how to invest using other people’s money The property management side hustle for short-term rentals that could help you save up a down payment And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch Join BiggerPockets for FREE Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area Expand Your Investing Knowledge With the BiggerPockets Books Be a Guest on the BiggerPockets Podcast David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram Rob's BiggerPockets Profile Rob's Instagram Rob's TikTok Rob's X/Twitter Rob's YouTube BiggerPockets' Instagram Network and Learn from Other Investors on The BiggerPockets Forums Grab “The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down” How to Buy a Rental Property With No Money: 10 Strategies for Real Estate Investors Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-936 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 936. What's going on, everyone? This is David Green,
your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Join today, as always, with Rob Obisilo.
Delighted to be here, my friend, bringing real estate knowledge to the people, buy the people,
for the people? Yeah, for the people. Way to tie that thing together. Awesome. Rob, when you bought
your first property, how much money did you put down? You know, I only had to put down $6,000,
because I put three and a half percent down.
And that got me into my first property I ever purchased, which I then ended up house hacking.
And it was all history from there.
And I know that this is a very common thing that a lot of investors face, finding, funding.
It's a really big struggle.
Maybe some of the people at home are struggling with this today.
But that's exactly why we're doing today's episode to give you a few ideas.
All right.
So in today's show, we're going to be covering four strategies to get started in real estate with low money down.
We're going to be covering what they are.
the risks and benefits of each, who should consider them and steps to take to get started with all four strategies.
But before we get into those, we want to make sure we give a little disclaimer.
It doesn't always take a lot of money to get into real estate, but it usually does require some money to be able to own it safely.
Yeah, coils in your AC need to be replaced.
Refrigerators break down.
Oh, man, I don't know.
The list goes on and on.
You're also going to need to remember that when you put less money down, you usually take on more debt.
So remember that nothing comes free.
However, for those who are in a position where they don't have a ton of cash sitting in the bank account and they still want to break into this game, we've got some options for you.
All right.
Let's move on to our first one.
It's going to be arbitrage.
Rob, I'm going to let you describe for our listeners what arbitrage is.
Sure.
So in this specific scenario, we're talking about rental arbitrage.
And it's a pretty simple concept, but it's effectively where you go and you pitch a landlord on the idea of renting their property.
and then turning it into an Airbnb.
In this instance, the landlord is giving you a locked-in rate,
usually for a year, sometimes for two or three,
depending on how you negotiate it.
And then you are then furnishing it,
listing it on Airbnb,
running it as a small business, if you will,
and you are making the delta on how much revenue you gross
and all of your expenses.
So let's say your rent is $1,000,
and let's say you gross $3,000 in all of your expenses
after your rent and utilities and all,
stuff come out to $2,000, you would then make a profit of $1,000. That is arbitrage in a nutshell.
Yeah. So instead of owning an Airbnb and collecting income and then having expenses that you pay for,
you manage an Airbnb, collect the income and your expenses are something you pay to the owner of
the property. So you lease it from them to then turn around and rent it out. Now, what due diligence
to investors need to do if they want to try this method? Well, you know, first and foremost,
more than the due diligence itself.
You want to make sure that you're actually pitching a landlord on exactly what you're going
to be doing.
I think back in the day it was a bit more Wild West.
They actually used to call arbitrage.
It used to actually be called lying to the landlord.
No, I'm just kidding.
So don't do that.
There's a lot of people out there that do that.
There's just no reason to do it.
You're going to get evicted.
You really want your landlord to be on the same page as you for many different reasons.
But if they know that you're running the business and they agree to it,
well, it's great. It can actually be beneficial for both sides. If the landlord is down,
you know, you can negotiate a two, three-year lease and actually have, you know, a short little
business there where you don't have to worry about your lease ending or market rent increases
or anything like that. But I would say that what I just explained is a very
oversimplification of how that goes. It's not that easy. Most of the time landlords aren't
down for this and you really have to romance the idea a bit and get them on board. And that's what's
not really talked about. Okay, so the upside here with this strategy is that you don't need a down
payment. You just need to be able to convince somebody to let you lease their property. Maybe you need
first and last month's rent or a security deposit, but it's less money, which is why it's in this
category. But the downside is you don't get any of the benefits like loan pay down, appreciation,
tax benefits. So what do investors need to know if they're going to go into this strategy thinking,
hey, that sounds great. I don't need money. Well, I guess investors should probably know that it's not
really investing, in my opinion? You know, it's like, I guess you are investing money into this small
business to make cash flow, but it's not really a permanent business and it's not real estate.
It is in the real estate world, much like a property management company is, but it's, you know,
it's more hospitality than the real estate side of things. Yeah, that's a good point. You're kind of a
souped up property manager. You know, I also think that it's a little risky for a lot of the reasons
that you mentioned. You don't get the debt pay down. You don't get the tax appreciation. And you don't
get the, there's one more thing there, the appreciation. The main reason I like to invest in real estate,
right? So, I mean, the reason I say it's risky is because the only thing you have to count on
is cash flow. And thus, if you don't cash flow, you really don't have much to show for it.
You didn't get the other three benefits in the real estate side of things. All right. Now,
what happens if you rent this out to a short-term rental tenant and then they trash the property?
Well, you would, yeah, so basically whenever you rent this from a landlord, you're kind of assuming
a lot of the risk and a lot of the wear and tear and a lot of the damages that might result
as you being a tenant. So if a landlord charges you a deposit, they have every right to hold it back
from you if you return the unit in much worse condition than you rented it in. So you do have
to keep that in mind. You are running a transient business where people are coming in and out
and there's a lot of wear and tear and furniture is breaking and you know, you might have the occasional
hole in the drywall. And that's pretty much on you to take care of. I mean, every single lease is
different, but that's, you know, it's usually on the actual tenant. You're kind of getting all the
parts of owning real estate that we don't love and not the parts that you do because you don't
actually own it, but it does get your foot in the door. And you can learn the business and then
you can transition out of that and into a strategy that has a little bit more ice cream and a
little bit less broccoli, so to speak. All right. So we've covered the basics of arbitrage. But
Rob here has an alternative for you that has a lot of benefits without so much risk. And what if you're
ready to get into the game and build equity? Well, we've got three more strategies for you that
will allow you to do just that right after the break.
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Welcome back, investors.
We're here breaking down different ways to get started in real estate for low money down.
The risks, the benefits, and how to get started,
So let's jump back in.
There is a less risky option here that's a little bit different than arbitrage.
And I know you're a bigger fan of this.
Can you talk about co-hosting?
Yeah.
So first and foremost, let me just say I have rental arbitrage units.
And it is my least favorite version of short-term rentals in general,
mostly because at the end of the day, you have a rent that you have to pay for.
Meaning if you have a $1,000 rent and you rent your place for zero days out of the month,
you have to pay $1,000.
That's what you owe.
And then, of course, your utilities and all that stuff.
That's one thing that I think is overlooked because people just assume they're going to book.
Now let's talk about co-hosting and what the actual difference there is.
And it's a small one, but it's what makes it a much better strategy and actually requires no money down.
So co-hosting is basically property management.
The only difference between a property manager and a co-host is that typically property managers collect the money and then they remit it back to the owner.
and there's usually some kind of licensing that's involved with being a property manager.
With the co-host, you are actually getting paid by the owner of the property for your services.
So it's a little bit easier to get into from a license standpoint.
But effectively, you are managing a property for a landlord.
You're managing it on Airbnb, maybe as a short-term rental, maybe as a mid-term rental,
and you are getting a percentage of the bookings that come in.
Now, that is really important because, as I mentioned in my other example, if you make zero dollars that month, you don't make any money, but you don't lose any money. If you make $1,000 and you charge 20%, which is more or less the standard, you'll make $200 on the $1,000 that come in. But regardless, you don't lose money. You have every opportunity to lose money on the rental arbitrage side of things, in my opinion.
Okay, so what are the biggest benefits and potential return that you can make with the arbitrage method?
Benefits are that you can basically cold call landlords all day and all night and probably have a rental arbitrage unit negotiated and signed within a week or two.
Benefits are you can get into a rental arbitrage unit on the really low end, and I really don't like saying this, but $10,000.
But typically it's going to cost you $10,000 to $20,000.
You'll hear a lot of TikTokers and stuff talk about business credit and $7,000 to start.
I don't really subscribe to that.
I think $10,000 to $20,000 is pretty realistic.
Benefit is it's high cash flow.
Very possible to make $500 to $2,000 a month net profit on the right unit, sometimes more.
Usually $1,000 is what I'm targeting.
So it's high cash flow.
And then the other benefit is that you are only in this thing for a year.
So if it doesn't work out, if you don't like it,
You don't own the home.
You don't have to worry about selling it at a loss.
You can just walk away after a year.
Of course, that also being a downside that you could possibly be locked into a terrible
apartment or condo for a year and lose money for that amount of time, too.
Okay.
So next steps for arbitrage and for hostessing.
What do people need to do if they want to pursue either of these routes?
I would say best thing you could do is go to the bigger pockets forums, read about
other's experiences, and try to find someone that's doing it.
because I think there's a lot of glamour to both, to be honest, because they're low money down
to get into it. But it is a grind. And you really aren't, it's a bit of a job because you're still
grinding to make cash flow on something you don't own. So I think first steps is find someone who's doing
arbitrage and find someone that's doing co-hosting. You can do this by going to different meetups,
like I said, the bigger pockets forums, and try to talk to them and try to understand the key differences
for both and understanding the risk for both because there's a nuance to it. Although,
I'm trying to think. I don't really know the risk of co-hosting. I think that one's a pretty
solid strategy. All right. Moving on, our next low-down payment strategy is house hacking.
House hacking is when you buy a house as a primary residence and you rent out parts of it to
different people. There's lots of different ways to do it. Rob, I understand the first house that
you bought was a house hack. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. And you're a bit of a
experience bloke in the world of house hacking too, right? Yeah, I haven't written a book on
house hacking, so people think that I don't love it, but I'm in love with it. It's my favorite
strategy of every real estate strategy there is. I always tell people, before you do a burr, before you
do long distance investing, before you buy short term rental, you should buy at least one property
every single year as a house hack. Okay. Yeah, and so the idea here is that you can actually get
into a house hack using an FHA loan or some kind of low money down payment loan program,
living it for a year, and then after about the year mark, you can re-qualify for another
type of, another one of those loans. That's exactly right. Yeah, you can get a new primary
residence loan every year. And the real hack here is that you can get a primary residence loan
with way less money than an investment property. Investment property loans, the cheapest one you're
going to get 20% down. If you go the vacation home route, you could get 10% down, but you can
get 3% down on a primary residence loan. I mean, that's like the closing cost equivalent for a lot of
people. So if capital is your biggest hurdle, getting into a primary residence is the obvious answer.
Yeah, let me ask you this. So you mentioned you can get in for 3%. Are there two different loan
programs? Is there a 3% one and then a 3.5% one or are they the same thing? No, sir, you are
correct in your estimate there. The 3.5% loans are FHA loans. So the benefit of those is that you can
get in with a lower credit score and it's harder to turn people down. The downside of those is they come
with a form of mortgage insurance that will never go away. So we typically just say FHA, FHA,
because it's the easiest loan for people to qualify for it. It's only three and a half down.
But there are conventional home loans that we do where you can get 3% down. And mortgage insurance
will go away when you hit that point. So that's typically why I say three instead of three and a
half. Got it. Okay. So yeah, let's break that down a little bit and why this is a powerful strategy.
So let's talk about just a conventional or like an investment loan. You have to put down 20
percent, maybe 25 percent. And let's say you live in a market where the median price home is
$300,000. Well, 20 percent of that is $60K. So every time you want to buy an investment property,
you're looking at roughly $60,000 as your down payment. And it takes a long time to save $60,000.
I mean, obviously it depends on your job and everything like that. But I feel like no matter who you
are, that's a pretty large sum to save up. It's massive. And if you want to save $60K, you probably got to
make 80 to 90K because you're going to be taxed and then you're going to have to spend things
to stay alive. So this turns into several years of dedicated effort for a normal American to
build a buy an investment property versus a primary residence, that same house you just said,
you can get for $9,000 down. Super cheap. Yes. Yeah, yeah, much easier. I guess not cheap,
but obtainable, totally. And for me, the first house I ever bought, I think it was $159,000.
So whatever roughly 3.5% is of that. But I got to...
a tax refund and I used that towards my down payment and I just was thinking through this the
other day and I had like a guitar amp that was kind of expensive and I sold that. I sold things to
get into my first property and it was super painful at that moment because I was like, dang it,
I don't think I'll ever buy this again if I sell it, which is true. I never ended up rebuying
that thing again. But it put me into this house that I then started thinking and I was like, man,
if I rented a room out, I could really subsidize 30% of my mortgage, which I did. It was $400 off of
my $1,100 mortgage. And then from there, I was like, oh, my goodness, what if I could just pay no
mortgage? And that's sort of what really laid down the fundamental philosophy of how can I get
other people to pay for my things. Yeah, if you were able to save $1,000 a month, then that's $12,000
a year. That's literally the down payment for the next house that you could buy that we said is
$9,000. So if you can save up that first $9,000, and you can find a property that will cash flow when
you move out of it, you theoretically will have the house you bought this year, pay for the one that
you're going to get into next year and forever in perpetuity.
So can we break this down into maybe a few steps for someone that's like, okay, I'm interested.
I've heard y'all talk about this, you know, a long time.
This is clearly your favorite strategy, Robin, Dave.
What's a like a first step someone could take towards actually getting into a house hack?
First thing is you need the down payment.
So you start with saving.
Put yourself on a budget.
Start saving money.
Have a gold.
You can also sell some stuff.
As you were talking, I just thought, you know, what if somebody was driving a BMW?
That's why they don't have a lot of money.
And they sold it and they bought a used time.
to Civic, I bet you they could, a lot of people could get more than $9,000 out of that transaction,
which could be the down payment for a house. Your BMW might be what's stopping you from owning a home.
The next step is you have to have a little bit of understanding on the different ways you can
house hack. So we say house hacking, house hacking is a principle. There are many strategies within
house hacking. So for instance, you can rent, you can live in one room and you can rent out the
other rooms. You can buy a two, three, or four unit property, live in an entire unit, and rent
out the other units. You can get a fourplex with all two bedrooms. You can live in one unit and rent
out a bedroom in that unit and then rent out the other units. You can rent out the other units by
bedroom or by unit. You can rent out some of those units as a short-term rental or a medium-term
rental, and you can rent out other ones as long-term rentals. You can take all the tools that we
give you here on the podcast and you can put them together in a house-hack casserole. And pretty much
no matter how you do it, it tastes good. This is why I love the strategy. You can also use other
strategies like value ad where you buy a really nice house in a neighborhood you love and you finish
the basement, or you have an ADU on the property, or you turn one of the garage units into an ADU
and you create a house hack, but still you got in for 3%. The key, in my opinion, is when you move
out of it at the end of that year, you want to make sure that it's covering the mortgage with the
rent that it comes in, and then you can do this forever. If people want to get into this,
the first thing you need to do is get pre-approved.
Getting pre-approved is going to tell you how much you can buy, what your payment's going to be,
and most importantly, this part gets left out.
What could be improved in your financial picture to get a better loan?
So if you see that your credit score is low and you come up with a plan to improve it,
we have rapid rescores available that can get people's credit to boost up.
If you realize, oh, I don't qualify for enough,
maybe you need to pay off some of that debt so you can qualify for more and get into the houses that you want to buy.
After that, you want to talk to a real estate agent and tell them what you're looking
for you typically want to look for as big of a house as you can get because the more square footage
it has, the more places there are to create a bedroom or create something that could be rented out.
You want to make sure it has sufficient parking and sufficient bathrooms, especially if it's going to be
a shared space. And then you want to buy the best neighborhood that you can get into where you think
rents are going to continually increase over time. High walk scores will help you also. Love it. Yeah.
Well, that's house hacking in a nutshell. There's so much more we could do. Maybe we can co-write a book one
of these days on that because I love house hacking too. Okay, we have to take one more quick break.
But don't go anywhere.
We've got two more strategies for you that I think you're going to like.
And while we're away, if you feel like you've learned something on today's show that might be helpful to a friend or family, go ahead and share this episode with them.
And we'll be right back.
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Hey, hey, everyone.
Welcome back.
We're talking about ways that you could get started investing for a little money down.
So far, we've covered arbitrage and house hacking.
Let's get into our next strategy now.
So let's get into number three here, which is partnerships.
And this is a pretty simple concept.
You partner with someone else to acquire a property.
There are a bunch of different ways you can do this,
but you can go to someone and you can say, hey, will you put up the cash or the capital,
maybe even the borrowing power, and I will run the property?
It can also be, hey, I want to buy a property that's going to cash flow well, but I only have
$50,000.
And I need someone else that also has $50,000 so we can buy a property that's optimized
for short-term rentals, long-term rentals, commercial, whatever it is.
And so you can actually just partner with someone, split the funds, split the operations,
all that good stuff.
a thousand ways that you can do partnerships, but those are two simple ones. It's effectively,
you're leveraging someone else's time, money, expertise to advance your real estate goals.
Well, if you're listening to this show and you're interested in this stuff, it's because you don't
have a lot of cash. So you're probably wanting to partner with someone that does have more cash,
which means you need to be asking yourself the question, what am I bringing to the table if they're
bringing the cash? Totally. Now, I'm pretty sure you've had some partners, good partnerships,
bad partnerships. What are some words of advice you'd give to someone looking to, you know,
step into a partnership with someone else? Do look for a partner that has the same values as you and
complementary goals. So you want to be moving in the same direction. Don't look for a partner
that has the exact same skills with you because you get along with somebody like that.
Do look for a partner that is open to flexibility. You may not want to own the house with that person
forever. Don't look for a partner just because you're scared to take the jump and you're doing it
for emotional reasons. I don't want to buy a house. Let me just do it with somebody else. That's not good.
Do look for a partner that has experience or resources that you don't have. Don't look for a partner
thinking that it's going to cut the work in half. What happens is everybody just ends up doing all the
same work and the workload is actually increased. So if you don't have money and you don't have experience
and you don't have skills and you don't have networking, you're not necessarily bringing
anything of value to a partnership just because you're coming. So listening to podcasts like this one,
looking into different strategies, like let's say you were someone who was doing arbitrage for a while.
Now you know how Airbnb's work. You know how short term rentals operate. Now you can go to somebody
else and say, hey, let's buy a house together. I will manage the short term rental component of it.
And I know what to look for. We want to buy a house that has two 80Us in the back. We want to
buy a house in this neighborhood because this is where all the demand is. I want to furnish it this way.
I want to make it look this way.
I can show you what it's going to rent for.
You're actually bringing experience into this partnership where you don't have money.
That's a much better example.
Totally.
Yeah.
And one of the, I think probably for me, going back to one of the points you made, which is find
someone that's complimentary.
One of my mentors told me one time, if both of us are the same, one of us is unnecessary.
And there's no reason.
If you're a visionary, if you're a kind of more vision forward person, that's strategy and
all that stuff, you don't want someone else that's like that.
You don't need to be in a partnership like that because then all you're going to do is be dreaming,
scheming and figuring out like, yeah, what if we did this? What if we did this?
If you're a visionary, you need probably more of an integrator or operator to complement your skill set.
I am not a detail-oriented person. So whenever I'm partnering with someone, I need someone that can
bring that to the table. Now let's talk about partnership splits, structures. There's a lot of
different ways you can do that. Typically, one of the easiest ways to do it.
that I've done it is 50-50. I bring half the money, you bring half the money, and we figure out
what side of the operations we're doing. But I've also been in the, you know, the way I scaled my
portfolio is I went to investors after I had experience and I said, hey, if you fund it, I'll run it.
And basically, we would do 50-50 cash flow and equity appreciation in that instance. But that's not
always going to be the case. And you got to get creative with how you negotiate your partnerships
with other people. But one of the ways that you can negotiate this, if you're really coming into
this with an investor that might be a little bit more, I don't know, conservative, if you will,
is you can do what's called a waterfall where let's say the investor puts up the cash,
aka taking on really most of the risk here. Well, you can structure it in a way where you get
25% of the cash flow, they get 75% of the cash flow until their initial investment is paid
back, and then it waterfalls down to 50-50. That to me is a pretty fair arrangement.
I've also seen different splits where, hey, sometimes investors don't care about the cash flow,
but they want the tax benefits.
So maybe the investor can get 100% of the tax benefits and you can get the lion's share of
the cash flow.
You can really get creative with how you split things up is kind of the moral of the story there.
So there's a lot of creativity that goes into partnerships.
And that's what we want people to walk away from.
There's not just, well, give me a blueprint.
I don't have money.
So how do I find a partner?
But there's no way that you go out there and you just say, hey, I'm the person with
no money.
who are the people with money, you're going to have to convince somebody why they should partner
with you.
But if you do have experience in real estate investing, if you do have education, if you've been
a property manager, if you've done arbitrage, if you've done some of the strategies we talk
about, you do have some value to bring.
So learn from mistakes of people who have done this in the past.
Check out podcasts like this one.
Check out forums.
Talk to other people about partnerships and what worked and what went wrong and really get into
the nitty gritty details.
That's a big piece of it.
It's often unmet expectations that create bad partnerships.
Well, let's get into the fourth in final tip here.
And this one, you know, there's a lot of caveats to it.
But creative finance and specifically the one that I want to talk about today is seller finance.
Creative finance is effectively the way of buying properties or really buying anything unconventionally, not using a bank.
And in the instance of seller finance, the seller is the one acting as the bank.
So if I go and I find a seller who's willing to finance it to me, I'm making payments.
to them because in a lot of those cases, they own the property outright. So I'm setting the terms,
I'm setting the down payment, I'm setting everything directly with the seller and not having to go
through the vigorous underwriting of a property with a bank. All right. So what are some of the
benefits of creative finance? Well, there's a lot. I think in the world of seller finance,
you're dealing directly with the seller oftentimes. Many times in my experience, I'm not,
I don't have an agent as the middle person. So I'm able to really set not only the price,
but the interest rate and the down payment. And for me, this can be really huge because there's a lot of
different levers that you can pull to make a deal work. But in the one that I did recently,
I put 10% down. Now granted, it was a $400,000 home. So it was $40,000 down. But to me, that's still
half of what I would have had to have paid going through a bank and putting down 20%. And I got a 3%
interest rate. So I was able to not only get a 10% down payment, I was also able to get a 10% down payment.
I was also able to get an interest rate that is more than half of what current rates are.
And so for me, this turned this deal that would have lost money and not actually been a good investment
into a property that cash flows, you know, about $1,000 every month.
That's the plan for the property anyways.
So I think the ability to negotiate terms that make it cash flow is probably the biggest upside.
And how do people go about finding these creative finance opportunities?
There's a lot of different ways to do it.
I mean, I wish there was a lot of super easy ones.
but for me, I think the easiest strategy, you'd be surprised at how easy this is, but you could go to Redfin, you can go to Zillow, and there's a little keyword section at the bottom of the criteria form where you can type in seller financing, seller financed, owner financing, owner will consider financing, creative finance, any combination of those words. And it'll populate different properties where those words are in the description. And I was actually someone I know recently founded,
deal by doing exactly what I just said. She was like, Rob, it worked. And she did this. And she found a
property where the seller took zero money down and he wanted a 4% interest rate. And she was like,
I just can't believe I found a deal on the MLS. So sometimes it's actually just as easy as typing in the
keywords on Zillow. There you go. All right. What are the downsides of the strategy?
The downsides is the downside. Really the biggest one is I think a lot of people get into the creative
finance space with stars in their eyes. And they hear, oh, you know, free house. Or I can get in
with no money down. And so I think the downside is that a lot of inexperienced investors that don't
have a real relationship with debt yet get into these properties that might be 0% interest
or 0% down and they acquire properties too quickly without understanding the nuances of real estate.
And it can be very easy to over leverage yourself in these types of scenarios. And if you're
just gobbling up houses that are quote unquote free or like low money down. All right.
And if somebody wants to get into this, what's the first steps that they can take?
Own other properties first and understand debt and cut your teeth on the industry and build some
experience before you start trying to gobble up 10 houses in your first year.
Good deal.
All right.
There you have it.
Folks.
We've covered four strategies for you.
Arbitrage and co-hosting, house hacking, partnerships, and creative financing.
If you like this stuff, please do us a favor and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening,
as well as leaving us a review.
That's huge.
And if you're listening on YouTube, leave us a call.
comment and let us know if we missed a low down payment option that you think we should cover
in the future. If you'd like to know more information about Rob or I, our information are in
the show notes. And if you want to dive deeper into these strategies, I recommend to check out
BiggerPockets.com. Check out the forums. Check out the blogs. Learn as much as you can. Rob,
anything you want to say before I let you go? No, man. You know, I love a good short and crunchy
episode. So, yeah, this was a good one. That's exactly right. This is David Green for Rob,
short and crunchy himself, Abas Solo. Signing up.
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