BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - How Many Rentals Can One Person Actually Manage?

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Someone drove a car into Henry’s house. Yes, through his rental property.  For 99% of people reading this, that would put them in the hospital from stress. But Henry didn’t even need to lift a finger when this happened to him on vacation. Why? We’re about to tell you on this BiggerPockets Forum Q&A episode! You’ve got a few rental properties—maybe even a decent-sized portfolio—but you want to scale. How many rentals can you realistically self-manage? 10? 30? 50? What’s the tipping point where you go from managing it all to creating another full-time job for yourself? And when should you finally hire a property manager? Henry scaled up to 70 rental units before fully outsourcing, but he agrees that doing it sooner (and with fewer units) might have been the better move. Plus, Dave shares how to analyze real estate deals in under a minute when you’ve got dozens of potential rental properties in the pipeline. That’s right, the Data Deli himself is telling you NOT to open a spreadsheet for 90% of deals, and to use his quick “gut check” process instead. An investor also asks whether they should BRRRR in a rough neighborhood (C- or D-class) with low appreciation potential. Is there enough juice to make it worth it? Dave and Henry say it could be—but only in this circumstance.  In This Episode We Cover How many rental properties can one person realistically scale to (self-managing)? Dave and Henry’s quick “gut check” process for analyzing real estate deals ASAP BRRRRing in a C- or D-class neighborhood (what if it doesn’t appreciate?) The first steps every beginner real estate investor should take before buying property How to run the numbers on a house hack to ensure it makes sense for your lifestyle  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1202 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

How many rental properties can one person realistically buy? And even more importantly, how many properties can one person actually manage? Is it really possible to scale a rental property portfolio without property managers eating up all your profits? Today, we'll dig into that question and much more. Hey, everyone, I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at Bigger Pockets. Thank you all so much for being here. And Henry Washington, thank you for being here, helping me answer some of our

community questions. Hey, man. This is one of my favorite formats to do is finding a way to answer questions and help the BP community. Absolutely. Well, we got some really good questions from real investors on the Bigger Pockets forums today. First up, we have an investor in California who's wondering when it's time to hire a property manager. Then we'll get into tricks for analyzing deals quickly, which is a super important skill to have, in my opinion, and steps that you can take now, even if you're not planning to buy a property for the next couple of months. We got that and a couple of more. Let's jump into it. Our first question comes from Austin in Reseda, California. I have no idea where that is. But Austin asked, is anyone that manages their

own properties able to acquire many properties? What systems do you use to achieve scale? So I think the heart of the question here is like, at what point does self-management, come unreasonable, or is there even a point where self-management comes unreasonable? What's your take on this? Yeah, there's a point, but it's going to vary for every person depending on what kind of other job you have and how much time, freedom, it allows you, what kind of software systems you're using, what kind of processes you have in place. You know, you can be super efficient self-managing with the right systems, a couple of

VAs, but it does require you to know how to put those processes in place and know how to train the people you want on your team. You know, for me, I got to about 65, 75 units. Seriously? Before I hired out a property manager. And you were doing all that yourself? Yeah, not well. Okay. Yes. So the one thing I will say, I was good at picking tenants. And so, So the tenants I picked, it was a very rare situation where we picked a tenant that we had trouble collecting rent. Same. I just feel like at the heart of being a landlord, like you've got to get good at tenant selection. I don't care what price point, what class neighborhood.

There are people who suck at paying rent in an A class $3,000 a month rental. And there are people who suck it pay a rent in a D class $500 a month rental. Totally. If you can analyze deals and pick tenants, you're 90% of the way there. Right. Like, you just have to. Like, if you're going to self-manage, like, that's the skill you need to figure out how to hone is your tenant selection process. Because if you do that, right, everything else is much easier.

Can I ask, though? You were doing 60, 75, but you were working on your portfolio full-time. I had about 68 doors when I quit. So somewhere. Oh, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Your number is like 10 times higher than what I was going to say.

I started to realize between 65 and 75 units that things were taking longer than I wanted them to take. Like turning a unit after somebody moved out was taking longer than I wanted it to take in finding a tenant and getting them in the vacant units were taking longer. Because when you have that many units, like you're not just doing one turn at a time. You're sometimes doing three, four, five turns at a time. Plus I was still flipping 15, 20 houses a year. So it was just a lot. but I still didn't want to turn it over. Like it's just something in me didn't want to turn the business over.

Totally. My property manager basically told me like, you're probably paying more than 10%. Oh, for sure. And just lost rent collection and, you know, sitting with vacant units. So you might as well just pay me and let me do a better job than you. Wow, that's impressive. I think I was at 10 units or so when I decided it was time to get some help. But I didn't go into full property manager at first.

I hired a handyman who would take maintenance calls, and I still did all the tenant screening myself. I did all the leases. And I still did what I would call the asset management myself. And I think this is something that people get caught up on a lot and miss in rental property investing is there's two jobs when you talk about being a manager. There's property management, which is dealing with tenants, finding tenants, making sure that they have a good quality place to live. Then there's asset manage, which is like just,

what are you doing with the property? Are you making upgrades? When do you sell it? When do you invest in it? And that part, I think, is always the hard part to outsource. That's kind of your job as the investor. For me, working full time, I found it difficult to get past 10 units and to do the property management piece well. And I think you're totally right. Like, I've been fortunate to have really great tenants pretty much universally. Never really had a problem there. And the thing that kept dropping off for me is that asset management piece. I was not at the properties enough to notice when something was like starting to go wrong and being able to proactively fix it before something went really wrong.

And like that was sort of where things started to break down. It really wasn't on the tenant side. And so that's sort of how I've thought about my portfolio structure and where I hire and get help later is focusing like I want to be able to asset manage well. and I will pay people to do the property management because property management, it's not even that time consuming. It's just when the time comes is very variable and you need to be very flexible. And that's hard for me investing out of state and working nine to five. So that's really how I've thought about it. And I don't regret it for a single second. It has been one of the best things I ever did.

I wish I did it sooner because I actually think I'd own more units. Because like that was what was holding me back in retrospect. I didn't want to manage more properties, even though I had the capital to probably go buy more. I still felt like, man, maybe I should have kept the property management in-house until about two months in. I was on vacation in Hawaii, and I got a text message that someone drove through my house. They jumped to the curb because they were under the influence. they drove through the wall of the house. Luckily, that wall led into the garage, and they just drove through my garage, but not through the door. And so, like, as a self-manager, while you're on vacation, that's a nightmare text again.

Nightmare. Absolute nightmare. But I looked at my phone. I looked at the pictures, and I went, huh, that sucks. And then my property manager took care of the tenants, called the insurance company, filed the claim, got bids for the work, got the work done, got me the insurance payout, paid the contractor. And I literally didn't think about it again after I got that text message. And I was like, great decision here. Yeah. Can I give my property management hot take? Yeah, please. Once you get past

a certain point in your portfolio in terms of number of doors, it's no longer self-managing. like even if you plan to continue to manage your own rentals, if your portfolio is big enough, you're not self-managing. You're just building a property management company in-house. You have to have people, systems, and processes when you get over a certain amount of doors. So you're going to need VAs or somebody in-house that's helping you keep up with all this in systems that cost money in order. You're literally building out infrastructure for a property management company.

I'd say probably 30 doors plus. Can I tell you another reason I do it to hire a property manager? Absolutely. You can. Do you ever get that recurring dream when you like show up to school and you're not prepared for a test or something? I know it's like a really like popular recurring dream. Yeah, 100%.

But I was having this recurring dream where I just like forgot that I owned a certain property and like hadn't shown up there. I have literally all the time. I completely forget that I bought a property and have just been. sitting on it, un-renovated, not making that dream all the time. Oh, my God. That's so true. I'm always like, oh, no, I just bought it and just left it there for years.

What is wrong with me? Wow. I'm going to start asking that to every guest on this show. Have you ever had that dream where you forgot about a property? Wow. All right. I'm glad we could talk about these things, man. Real estate therapy.

All right. Well, that was a very good question. And I think hopefully we help answer your question there, Austin, because it is really personal, but absolutely you can do it yourself. I think almost anyone could do, you know, five to ten probably by themselves, realistically. Once you get past that, it really depends. Are you working full time? Are you building a business, kind of, as Henry said? Yeah.

All right. Well, we have plenty more questions from the community, but we do have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. They say real estate is passive income. But if you've spent a Sunday night buried in spreadsheets, you know better. We hear it from investors all the time, spending hours every month, sorting through receipts and bank transactions trying to guess if you're making any money. And when tax season hits, it's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded.

That's where Baseline comes in, Bigger Pocket's official banking platform. It tags every rent payment and expense to the right property and Schedule E category as you bank. so you get tax-ready financial reports in real time, not at the end of the year. You can instantly see how each unit is performing where you're making money and losing money and make changes while it still counts. Head over to baselane.com slash bigger pockets to start protecting your profits and get a special $100 bonus when you sign up. Thanks again to our sponsor, Baselain.

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. You can hire a vetted local co-host with real hosting experience to handle guest messages, prep your space, and manage reservations so everything runs smoothly. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb. dot com slash host.

Real estate investors, the April 15th tax deadline is coming fast. If you own rental property and haven't done a cost segregation study yet, you could be handing thousands of dollars to the IRS that you don't have to. These studies let you write off as much as 25% of your building and generate huge tax deductions. Costsegregation.com is an online self-guided software that makes cost segregation fast and affordable. So it finally makes sense for smaller rental property.

purchased for as low as $100,000. With pricing under $500 and an average savings of over $25,000, it's just a no-brainer. What's more, audit support is included by the number one cost segregation company in the U.S., but you must complete it before the tax deadline. Go to costsegregation.com and use code tax deadline to get 10% off your first report. Don't overpay the IRS. Head to costsegregation.com before April 15th. Running your real estate business doesn't have to feel like,

juggling five different tools, and the tools are blades or flaming torches. With Resimply, you can pull motivated seller lists, skip trace them instantly, for free, and reach out with calls or texts, all from one streamlined platform. The real magic? AI agents that answer inbound calls, follow up with prospects, and even grade your conversations so you know where you stand. That means less time on busy work and more time closing deals. Start your free trial and lock in 50% off your first month at resimply.com

slash bigger pockets. That's R-E-S-I-P-L-I dot com slash bigger pockets. Here's why savvy real estate investors are obsessed with bonus depreciation. It lets you take that rental property or commercial building you own and depreciate most of the cost against your income. Legally, 100% IRS compliant. That's instant cash flow improvement. Cost segregation guys is the number one firm nationwide, specializing and identifying these faster depreciating assets in your property. They've completed tens of thousands of studies across all 50 states from remote cabins to apartment complexes. So if you own investment property, this is a no-brainer. So visit costsegregationguise.com slash BP for your free proposal and find out how much you could save this tax season.

Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Henry and I are here answering community questions. And our next question comes from Shahab in Irving, Texas. He says, I'm new to real estate. estate investing and learning how to analyze deals quickly and confidently, especially small multifamily or house hack opportunities. For those of you with more experience, what's your step-by-step process before deciding to dig deeper or pass? Which tools, calculators, or spreadsheets do you rely on? I've seen some online, but I'd love to know what actually works in real life and any advice for

building speed without losing accuracy when running deal analysis. Can I just say, Shahab, I absolutely love this question. This is a great question because getting good at analyzing deals kind of means getting faster at it over time. I feel like, especially the way I look at deals, which is on market deals. I need to look at a lot of them before I find good ones. You need to be able to accurate at it, but you also can't spend 30 minutes on everyone or you'll never buy a deal.

So love this question. But Henry, let's start at the top year. What's your step-by-step process before deciding to dig deeper? You just told us you're not detail-oriented. So let me guess it doesn't start with a spreadsheet. Oh, absolutely not. It's literally on the back of a napkin. Yeah.

And so let me put a caveat here because you're right. You need to be able to analyze deals quickly in order to make offers. And you need to be able to do it quickly so you don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. Because if you've got to go through some complex calculation, every time you see a deal, you're going to second guess yourself, you're going to be playing with the numbers over and over again. And you're not going to submit enough offers to get you where you want to. go. And so I would suggest to people, like, if you are super detail-oriented person, that's cool. Get yourself all the calculators and spreadsheets that you need, but only use those when you get to

what I would call level two of analyzing a deal. Level one should be something that you can do quickly that just lets you know what offer will get you in the ballpark. Then you can make your offer or dive deeper into the deals that have a fighting chance of you getting them. So maybe you are analyzing a bunch on-market deals, you do it super quick back of the napkin, and then you submit 10 offers, and then you get a counter or two. Well, then on that counter or two, you can plug those suckers into your super fancy, smancy, you know, crazy calculator spreadsheet thing, and you can get the numbers right and spend the time on the appropriate deals and not spending that amount of time on every deal. Now, I think the thing that people get mixed up about that is that they think it's

some math problem that you're running in your head. For me, there is a little bit of math. You look maybe rent to price ratio, something like that. But actually what it is, it's a function of just knowing your market really well. That's the most important thing. You're looking at, is this in a good neighborhood that I'm interested in buying in? That will disqualify probably half of them. I don't know. I'm just making this up.

But it will probably just qualify a lot. You know, is it on a busy road? I don't want it. Is it in some neighborhood that's super expensive and there's no juice? I don't want it. Is it in a neighborhood that's probably not going to have a lot of tend to me? I don't want it. Those are the things that are going through my head.

The second thing is knowing your buy box and comparing this property to the buy box. So that's honestly the first round of filtering is that I'm not like coming up with some cash on cash return in my head. I'm like, does this just kind of fit the kind of thing I'm trying to do? And it's less about math. It's mostly about knowing what you want, which is why we talk so much about figuring out your goals and buy box and knowing your market enough to see if this particular property matches that.

So for me, that's phase one. step two is putting into a calculator. And again, by this time of my career takes me 10 minutes or less, 15 minutes at a certain point, you can use the bigger pockets calculator. There's plenty of guides on there, but that's where you really figure out, is this going to offer me the kind of return I'm looking for? And then I actually even go one step further and do sort of a third round. Sometimes this is after, you know, I put an offer right before I'm about to put an offer. that's where I would talk to my property manager or my agent and get just double checks on the assumptions that I'm putting into this deal because a calculator is only as good as the numbers

you put into it. If you're just wrong on rent, yeah, it's going to show you an awesome ROI, but you're just wrong. So that's where I sort of have someone else double check it. That's kind of the process I have. Getting good at step three, I don't think you need to be fast at that. You shouldn't be doing that that often unless you're like Henry and you're making offers all the time. But for someone like me, I don't need to do that all the time. One and two are really what I would focus on to be able to really look at the volume of deals that you need to be able to look at in order to find good deals with relative consistency. My gut check is still. Where would I need to be for this to hit a 1% rule or better? One percent rule is about break even. Maybe you're losing just a little money. So if I'm

better than 1% rule at the price point I'm looking at, I'm probably going to be making money. And so I will then dig a little deeper if I feel like the property passes that, you know, that vibe check. I literally, while you were talking, I just pulled up a property I was looking at before. Someone sent it to me. I asked what the year of construction was, what the rents are. If those are sustainable and the asking price, it hit 1% rule. It's in a good neighborhood. So now I'm going to move on to step number two and start checking this out. That's all it is. It took, you know, 30 seconds, 45 seconds to just be like, is this good enough? and you're going to look at a lot of them.

And honestly, they shouldn't be good, most of them. I'd say if more than like 30% of the things you look at past step one, your criteria are probably not strict enough. Yeah, your analysis is off. There's no way. You know, people get very frustrated by this, but that's the whole point is you have to be selective. Not every deal is meant for real estate investors. All right. Great question.

We have more, including questions about doing burs and what kind of neighborhoods you should target for those. That's a great question. We'll get to that when we come back. Stick with us. What if your CRM actually did the hard work for you? I know, crazy. ReSimply lets you pull seller lists, skip trace them at no cost,

and contact your leads by caller text without bouncing between apps. Then it's AI agents takeover. Answering calls, following up automatically, even grading your conversations so you can focus on the deals that matter. Everything's under one roof. Design to simplify your day and scale your business.

Start your free trial today and lock in 50% off your first month at reSimply.com slash bigger pockets. That's R-E-S-I-M-P-L-I dot com slash bigger pockets. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed.

When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed, sponsored job posts help you stand out and hire the right people quickly. Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page. where your ideal candidates are looking. And it works. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored post. The best part, no monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And speaking of results, in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 people just got hired through Indeed worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring

right now with Indeed. And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit 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. Managing properties can feel like a full-on circus. You're juggling vendors, tracking payments, chasing approvals across multiple properties, and maybe a few HOAs, all while trying to keep tenants happy and owners confident. One delay can throw everything off

and suddenly your day is all clean up, no progress. That's why hundreds of property managers rely on bill to streamline their finances. Bill for property management lets you add all your properties, assign permissions, pay bills, and receive payments quickly and efficiently without the usual bottlenecks. It syncs with platforms like QuickBooks, Zero,

NetSuite, and Sage intact, so your accounting stays aligned. You can automate bulk payments across properties and HOAs, choose flexible payment methods like same-day ACH, international wires, card, or check, and set custom roles in approval policies. There's even a dedicated bill inbox for each property to keep everything organized. Ready to simplify your workflow, book your free demo at bill.com slash bigger pockets, and get a $100 Amazon gift card. That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. All right, rental property investors, listen up. Our friends at Dominion Financial

already have some of the best DSCR rates in the industry. Now, they're the fastest, too. They just launched 10-day DSCR closing. That's right, 10 days. And they're still the only lender with a DSCR price beat guarantee. That means faster closing. The best terms. Zero guesswork. That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Henry and I are answering questions. Question number three is from Salvatore in Rochester, New York, where my alma mater is, Salvatore asks, I'm searching for my first deal and I want to do a burr, but the only homes I can buy with cash and rehab are C or D neighborhoods. I'm concerned the value of the home won't go up

over the years as it would in a better neighborhood. Can anyone with experience doing burs in C or D neighborhoods give me some advice? Good question. Lots in there. So I guess my first question would be, why do you have to buy cash? Like that, you know, do you have to buy cash was kind of what stood out to me? Because I think he's right. Generally speaking, especially in the sort of like weird housing market correction that we're in, the assumption that the value of the home won't go up as much in a B or A, Abrohood is absolutely true.

You should count on that. Like, maybe it will change. But generally speaking, you should probably count on the best appreciation in A markets, a little bit less than B markets, a little bit less than. C markets, a little bit less than D markets. Maybe you're on the path of progress. Like, maybe you can nail that. But generally speaking, that is true.

And so it really comes down to, are you trying to hold this forever as an appreciation play? Or as the burr, are you just trying to get an equity kick up front and then hold it for cash flow? Both are okay. But I kind of think it just comes down to a personal question, unless for some reason you are set on having to buy this property for cash and then you kind of just have to do the C&D neighborhood, but you can still make a great

profit on that, even if it doesn't appreciate as much as other neighborhoods, you could still get a huge equity kick and have a cash up. I do have several follow-up questions. One was, why do you have to pay cash? I agree with you. The other one is, like, I don't know, you just have to know your market. So just because it's a C or D neighborhood doesn't mean it's not going to be in appreciating market. There are C&D neighborhoods in appreciating markets all over the country. And so I think this is more a function of understanding where you're trying to do a burr and if properties go up in value in that market.

You know, look at the 10 year adjusted appreciation rate. And that'll let you know on average what you can expect properties to do when you zoom out over the long term. The other thing is I just sometimes. think C&D neighborhoods get a bad rap. Same. People hear C&D neighborhoods and they think, you know, crime and no appreciation and nobody wants to live there.

And that's just not true. Again, you need to understand your market. Sure, there are some neighborhoods in almost every market that are going to be a problem. But there are a lot of C&D neighborhoods where you can get great numbers. Absolutely. My other caveat is it's the concern of the value of the home won't go up. Is that concern related to you needing the home to go up in value in order for you to refinance and pull your money out? Or is that concern related to you just wanting a property that appreciates over time?

Because my real concern with this is are you paying cash for a property at retail value and then renovating it and then hoping that the market appreciates enough over time for you to pull your cash out in a short period of time? because that's not going to work. Yeah, don't do that. That's not going to work. But if you are, like, even if you buy a burr deal in a not appreciating area or a very slowly appreciating area, as long as you buy that deal at a low enough price point, you can absolutely refinance it and pull your money out. It's just, did you get the property at a low enough discount to enable you to pull your cash out?

Yeah, I totally agree with Henry. I think that this idea that you can find something that's distressed enough that you can buy it low enough to do a successful burr, and it's going to be in a great neighborhood that appreciates more than the average in your market. It's just a little bit unrealistic. I think the big change that we're going through right now is a change in expectations. And this is just normal investing, right? Like the reason you do the burr is because you don't need market appreciation. You're forcing that appreciation. You're doing the value at. And so expecting to be able to do that and get market appreciation, hopefully you do. But to me, the burr, in today's day,

day and age, the value of it is you get the value add, you get a pop of equity right up front quickly, super valuable. That is amazing. And hopefully when you refinance it, you have a cash filling property that is now renovated, is going to have high tenant demand, is going to command good rents for the neighborhood, and it's probably going to cash flow for you. That's more than enough for me. If you get that, that's great. If that market appreciates, that's also good. But if you go into an A neighborhood, for example, let's just play this out. You go in an A neighborhood. it's going to be much harder to buy at the right price, as Henry alluded to. And it is very unlikely in A neighborhoods, no matter what market you're in, that you're going to be able to cash flow a property after you refinance it. It's going to be much harder to do that. So I think it's really a question of priority. For me, I'd take the B or C class neighborhood, do the burr, get a cash flowing property rather than being a B and A neighborhood, but that's just me. Yep. I'm 100% with you. And I would also say in this market, I wouldn't expect you to be able to execute.

a full 100% burr in, you know, six months like you could before. But if you're able to get into a property in a B or C class neighborhood that's got some slow appreciation, but you're getting the equity bump on the buy, you're forcing the appreciation, it's cash flowing, and you can pull 50% of your cash out. It's a pretty solid win in my book. I, 100%. I think that's a great deal. All right, but good question. I think that makes a lot a sense, Salvatore. Let us know in the comments or on YouTube what you wind up doing with this project. We'd love to hear from you. We do have to get out here, but we have one more time, a quick question here. Fourth question comes from Erica in Washington, who's also kind of just getting started in real estate. She asked, is it ever too

early to start taking actionable steps? I plan to move to the market I choose to invest in and house hack a multifamily home, but I know I won't purchase property for at least another year. I'm not sure if I'm at the stage of speaking to lenders. Is this thought process holding me back? Should I reach out to local banks even if I don't have the savings I want yet? Any other advice on realistic, well, action steps to start taking early. This question has you written all over it. Me? Yeah. Okay. All right. You're just ready. You're just ready to go.

You just want to leave. I mean, my answer is, good job. Keep doing that. Absolutely. Yeah. The reason I put this at the end with question is because it's easy to answer. Absolutely. The fact that you're on the Bigger Pockets forums asking questions is excellent. I think most people usually take, I don't know, three, six, nine, 12 months to get comfortable enough with the idea of real estate investing to want to pull the trigger on a deal. So I think you're absolutely talking about it. Go talk to lenders. I think that is totally acceptable as well. They are not as much going to look at in the first conversation, how much savings you have.

They're going to look at your debt to income ratios and they're going to help you understand what payments, monthly payments you're going to be able to afford. And just be honest with the lender and they will have an honest conversation with you. In the meantime, I think you said you haven't moved to the local market. The other thing I would do is the second I move to that market, go to real estate investing meetups. Start meeting people even before you are ready to go out and execute on the deal. That's going to be super helpful and comforting and getting you to know the right people. And just keep doing this. Listen to the podcast. Read a couple of books. But I think it is very normal to spend a half a year or a year getting comfortable with the idea of investing before actually doing it.

Yeah. I think the difference between her and what we hear a lot of investors, say is a lot of new investors, they think they want to invest, but they're not truly bought in yet and they're still scared. And the vibe I'm getting from her post is not that she's scared. She's trying to be as prepared as she possibly can. And that may mean she needs to take some more time and save some more money. And she can learn that by talking to a lender. It may mean that she needs to focus on learning a little more about a particular strategy. When you have made the decision that you're going to do this and now the time you're spending is, is helping you become a better investor before you even start.

Like, that's positive. If you have a plan and you're trying to execute that plan and you can talk to lenders and learn how much money you need to do the thing you're trying to do when you're going to need it by, how much payment you can afford, and then you're taking steps along the course of a year to help you be prepared to do that. Like, that's great. Absolutely. I love that advice.

I think that's a very important distinction is like preparedness. and fear are different questions. If you know you want to do this and you're committed and you're just getting all your ducks in a row, do that. That's just smart. If you're just stalling because you can't decide if you want to be in, I understand that. That's a real issue.

It's hard, but that's a different question. So I think for Erica, she seems to know what she wants to do and taking time to save up money and do that in a responsible way. I think you're doing exactly what you should be doing, Erica, so good for you. All right, that's what we got. We talked all about self-managing. Henry and I talked about our dreams. We did talk about our dreams, yes.

We talked about our dreams. We talked about analyzing deals quickly, how to do a burr in the right type of neighborhood, and whether it's ever too early to start making moves into real estate investing. If you have questions, you want Henry and I to talk about, you can always send them to us on Instagram, comment them. in the comments on YouTube or participate in the Bigger Pockets forums. We have thousands of forum posts every single day where people are helping each other with their real estate journeys for free on BiggerPockets.com.

You can go do that and we might just pluck your question right out of those forums if you are an active member of the community. So go check that out as well. Henry, thanks so much, as always, for your support in answering these questions. It's great having you here. Glad to be here, buddy. And thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you next time for another episode.

of the Bigger Pockets podcast. 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 Calicoke 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.biggerpockets.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 qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results.

Bigger Pocket's LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.