BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - I Turned My Condo into a $10K+/Month Rental Portfolio (in 4 Years!)

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Andrew Freed turned one condo into a rental property portfolio that makes him $10,000 per month! Just four years ago, Andrew had little to his name—around $50,000 and a $200,000 condo. That’s what a decade of working had gotten him, but to Andrew, it was a sign he wasn’t doing enough. Like most real estate investors, Andrew stumbled upon Rich Dad Poor Dad and made an immediate change that would propel him to financial freedom. Four years later, he’s there—quitting his job and going full-time into real estate. How did he do it? Simple. “Recycling” his money is what allowed Andrew to scale so quickly. A HELOC (home equity line of credit) on his condo gave him the money for his first small multifamily—a house hack that would help him live for free. With each new property, he’d get a new HELOC and use it to grow his portfolio even faster.  Now, Andrew has a sizable real estate portfolio, personally paying him six figures a year, while he focuses on the next property. If you want to quit your job and give real estate your all, you can do what Andrew did, recycling your money to build your wealth—and you can start with just a condo! In This Episode We Cover: How to use HELOCs (home equity lines of credit) to quickly fund your first real estate deal Using the BRRRR method (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat) to buy rentals for essentially $0  The “sweet spot” multifamily properties that are easier to manage and boast big cash flow  How to take down huge real estate deals when you don’t have the money  Why buying portfolios of properties (not single properties) is the cheat code for faster financial freedom  And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Apply to Be a BiggerPockets Real Estate Guest Try REsimpli, The Only All-In-One Real Estate Investor CRM Software That Helps You Manage Data, Marketing, Sales, and Operations Get $100 Off BPCon 2025 Start with Strategy Rich Dad Poor Dad Real Estate Rookie 267 - 24 Units in 2 Years by Making Your Rentals Match the Market w/Andrew Freed BiggerPockets Real Estate 1085 - Making $200K/Year With the Least Amount of Rentals Possible w/Dion McNeeley Connect with Dave Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1111 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This investor grew his portfolio to 25 properties and was able to quit his job in less than four years by repeating the same real estate strategy over and over. You do need to identify the right type of real estate investing for your goals and your market, and it's totally okay if that takes some time and some trial and error. But once you do that, once you have it, you can basically execute that one deal type to perfection, rinse and repeat all the way to game-changing wealth. Today's guests proved that this is possible in the Boston area, and he did it in the current market, not during that crazy pandemic era.

So let's find out how. Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing here at Bigger Pockets. Today on the show, we're bringing you an investor story with Andrew Freed, who invests in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Andrew was previously on the real estate rookie podcast back in March of 2023, but I wanted to bring him on this show because he's progressed a lot in the last two years. But he's done it by doing pretty much the same thing.

thing. So we're going to talk to Andrew about why he primarily buys rental properties in the 6 to 12 unit range, why almost all of his deals are with two to four partners, and how he achieved his goal of quitting his day job to invest full time. Andrew is a total open book with all of his deals and numbers, so there's a lot to learn in this conversation. Let's get into it. Andrew, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. And I know you've been on our rookie podcast. or sister podcast here. But for those who didn't listen to that episode,

maybe just give us a little bit of background. Tell us about yourself. So like many people here, I would have the American dream. You know, I get a good education, get a good job, get a nice swanky condo in a city,

make six figures. Like, I essentially did that. I did it all through my 20s. And after I did that, you know, I came home. And at the end of the day, I realized I was paycheck to paycheck.

Yeah, maybe I had six months, maybe I have 12 months of reserves. But at the end of the day, I had to go crawling back to that job. And that, ultimately scared the living hell out of me. So come around COVID when I ran out of vices to do video games to play, movies to watch, like I really had to come face to face with, is this the life I really wanted to live? And the answer to that was absolutely no. So thankfully, I found rich

dad, poor dad at that time. And that opened my eyes to the power of real estate. And at that point, I looked at my net worth, which is about $250,000 at that point. Nice. $200,000 of which came from that one-beddom condo I completely forgot about. It literally took me 10 years to save of $50,000. And at that point, I realized maybe there's something to this real estate thing. So I literally just FOMO'd, right? I took a HELOC on my one-bendom condo for $200,000 and I utilized that to start buying multifamily, specifically in Worcester, Massachusetts. So I completely uprooted my life in Boston. I knew absolutely nobody in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is about 45 minutes from Boston, and I decided to start buying multis in that market where I started with house hacks,

and I kind of moved on to joint ventures and kind of moved on to syndications and larger projects from there. Awesome. Well, I want to hear the fairy tale story. So it started in Worcester. I'm sort of familiar with the area. Why Worcester is just Boston too expensive? So when you're planning on investing and creating a real estate portfolio, you really have to

come up with a thesis, right? And my thesis was I wanted to buy multifamily. And it's way easier to buy multifamily when there's a lot of that asset class in the market, right? So the way I really decided on Worcester was I looked at all the markets in Massachusetts that had a large, a lot of multis. Brockton, Massachusetts, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Worcester, Providence, Rhode Island had a lot of multies. Manchester, New Hampshire had a lot of multis. So I looked at all the markets. And out of all those markets, I felt like Worcester had the best fundamentals.

It was one of the largest growing cities in Massachusetts in New England, but not. Not only that, 30 to 40% of the housing stock are multifamily. So it's way easier to get that asset class if there's a plethora of that asset class. I'm so glad you said that because I think a lot of people overlook that element of picking and selecting markets. Yeah, you need fundamentals of the economy. You need job growth, like all that stuff. But there are markets, as you've alluded to, where the concept of a duplex or a

chiplex is basically non-existent. I actually invest in a market where it's almost impossible to find something. something bigger than a duplex. You know, I started my career investing in three-unit, four-unit buildings, and I can't find any there. And that changes my approach and strategy. So I really appreciate you said that. But I'm curious, so the multifamily approach sounds like you're doing small multifamily, right? Like sort of the still residential, you know, four-in units or fewer. Was that where you went first? I started with house hacking. I started with house hacking residential properties, two-to-four-unit multifamilies. Then I graduated to five to ten plexes.

commercial multis, primarily residential. And then from there, then I graduated to buying portfolios, a plethora of three, four, five, six, seven units, you know, buying 10, 12 of them all in one foul swoop. Just tell me a little bit about how you finance that first deal, because you had a solid net worth, $250,000, nothing to sneeze at. Most of it was locked up right into a condo. You said you he locked or how did you wind up doing that first deal? I wind up doing that first deal by utilize a helock, a homeowner.

of credit on my one bed and condo and I ended up taking out 85% of the value in the form of a he lock and got about $200,000 out of it. And when I utilize that he lock, I want people to keep in mind the concept of return on net worth, right? I had about $250,000 of net worth, $200,000 of which was locked up in this one bedroom condo that's providing a zero percent return on an annual basis. So my hypothesis was why do I take this $200,000 and actually put into assets that can provide me an eight, nine, 10% return. Meanwhile, I'm borrowing it a three to four. That was during COVID, right? So with the simple concept of arbitrage, that's really how I kind of built my net worth from there, right? And going back to your original question, how did I finance that house hack? I ended up

financing it with a FHA loan. So I combined that with the HELOC. So I took around $30,000 to $40,000 from a he lock. And I used that combined with an FHA loan. And I got a three unit in Worcester, Massachusetts for around $560,000. Okay. I could rent two units for $3,200, $1,600 each, and I ended up living in the third for free and my mortgage was $3,200. So I ended up kind of breaking even on that property, but my savings rate went through the roof because I didn't have to pay, you know, rent or overhead in that regard. With your rookie episode, you had gotten to a point where I think you had 24 units and eight properties. How long did it take you to get to that level of scale? To get to 24 units, it probably took me a good year and a half to two years.

of investing in real estate. That's fast. You know, one thing I think people sleep on a lot of times is everybody knows about the house hack, right? It's the easy way to, you know, reduce your living expenses to zero. But very few people talk about the he lock, right? And I recommend so many people prior to leaving your first house hack, get a helock on it. Because when it's your primary residence, you can helock sometimes up to 100%. So you can actually access that equity before you leave it, right?

And it becomes an investment property. Once it converts to an investment property, then your line of credit is limited to 75% of the value of the property, greatly reducing your ability to leverage. Right. So you asked, how did I do that? I end up HELOC in my first house hack. I got another $75,000 HELOC, and I used that to buy a couple more house tax as well. Okay, got it.

And just for everyone to understand, HELOC stands for home equity line of credit. This is a way that you can access equity in properties without actually having to sell or doing a cash out refinance where you might be getting a different mortgage rate. And so I think for that reason alone, it's a pretty attractive option right now because say you bought something during the pandemic and you have a three or four percent interest rate, you've built up a ton of equity in your property, which you want to leverage like Andrew's talking about to go out and buy future properties. But you don't want to give up that three or four percent mortgage, totally understandable.

Take out a he lock or consider talk to a lender about taking out a helock. This is a way that you can borrow against your assets. So that's a really great way to do it. And the other benefit of a helock that I love is you only pay interest when you're using it. It's what's called a revolving line of credit. And so let's say use a helock to finance a renovation on a new rental property and then you're going to refinance that. Sure, you pay when you've drawn on that line of credit and you're paying it. But when you go refinance that burr, you could repay off your helock and pay nothing.

for a time and then use it again in the future. And so this is a really good strategy that people can use. And I think it's going to become increasingly popular in the next few years because of that sort of dual advantage of allowing you to recycle your equity, but not giving up historical mortgage rates. And you bring up a really good point. And I just want people to be clear about, yeah, interest rates do have a higher interest rate. You're talking six, seven, eight percent, but you really have to look at the loan holistically, right?

And what do I mean by that? It's like if 70% of your loan is at a three and 20% of loan is at a seven, what is your blended interest rate? And is that blended interest rate better than what you can get from a refinance? Or is it not, right? So you kind of want to weigh those options. Maybe a cash-fired refinance makes sense. Maybe the blended rate of your current low mortgage rate combined with the HELOC makes sense.

So these are the sort of calculations I utilize when I decide how am I going to recycle this equity to buy more property. Totally. And I think this is just one of the natural evolutions that has to take place. during COVID or the years leading up to that, it was kind of a no-brainer to do a burr and refi, right? Because, like, rates were going down. So why wouldn't you refinance and get a lower interest rate on your new property that is higher equity?

That was a no-brainer. Now, in our new upside era that we're in, you just need to think about this stuff a little bit more critically. As Andrews said, there's options. Now there's just different options and there's different ways to do it. But it's not just as, like, cut and dry, like, just do the burr, do the refi every single time. All right, we do need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, but we'll be back with Andrew Freed right after this.

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couple of years in the Boston area. Let's catch up then. So you, you know, you were at eight properties in 24 units. Obviously, investing conditions have changed pretty dramatically. What have you been up to in the last two years? So as we alluded to earlier, I went from 24 units and now I'm at 300. People like, how do you make that dramatic growth, right? And I'll give you some catalysts that really.

brought me to that level, right? So the first catalyst that really brought me to that level was becoming an investor focused agent while having my W2. Like ultimately, I didn't need the, you know, the agent income, right? It was ice-in-the-cake. It allowed me to buy more real estate. But ultimately, why did I become an investor-focused agent? I became an investor-focused agent to find a mentor. The broker of that agency has over 300 doors, right? And I wanted to leverage him as much as I could. So I decided I'm going to provide him value in the form of bringing him commissions, right? And if I bring commissions, that he's going to feel a need to help me along my journey. So that was number one. I found the mentor and I found ways to provide him value in the form of commissions. Number two, I started the

largest real estate meetup in Worcester. Nice. Through that meetup, I found capital partners. I found deals. I found my current partner. We were me and him own hundreds of units together. That really allowed me to grow to the next scale, right? And lastly, the catalyst that really pushed me to the next level, and thanks to bigger pockets for this, was being on podcast, being, you know, providing value on social media and just putting yourself out there and operating in the light. Ultimately, people aren't going to know what you're doing if you operate in the dark. So it's extremely important to put out there your wins, but also your losses. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you said that because wins and losses, it is important to sort of

build credibility. Can you maybe give us some examples of how you did this? Like, what's a property that you bought when you sort of stepped away from using your own equity and started using capital partners externally? I'll talk about a deal first that I bird into three other deals, right? It was with my own capital, but I recycled the money over and over and over again, right? So me and my partner now, Zach Gray, we ended up buying this five unit in Worcester, Massachusetts up Solisree, about for $650,000. Like three units in the area sold for $600,000.

This was a deal all day, right? And it was right on the MLS. So what did we decide to do? We decided to like put an off row day one right when it was on the MLS. Within two days of being on the MLS, we had it under contract. That particular property, the current rent roll in it was around $3,500. Pro former or market rents in the property, the ability to bring the rents up was about $9,000. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it was a lot of big upside, right? But the downside is the cost was $6.50 and the monthly income was $3,500. If anybody knows anything about commercial debt and debt service coverage ratio, like you can't get a loan at that, 75% loan of value. Like, it's impossible, right? That's tough. But what do we do? Thankfully, I had a mentor and he guided me through this process. And he advised me rather than do a conventional finance and go to these portfolio lenders, these small local credit unions and ask them for construction money. And when you ask them for construction money, they do it before appraisal and they do an after appraisal. And that after appraisal takes to account pro forma or market rents, right? So that allowed us to get a loan based off their pro forma rents, only bringing 25% down. We ended up bringing this property from 3,500 revenue to 9 grand in revenue over the course of 6, 7 months. Okay. So not bad. Yeah, it's quick. We end up bringing the value from $6.50 to $1.1 million. So we had a ton of equity, right? But we wanted to access that equity. So what did we do? We end up going to the bank that gave us the first lien and we got a rental line of credit for the equity up to 75% so that bank gave us a line of credit for $156,000. More or less,

all of the money we put in the deal. We put about 160, right? Fantastic opportunity. What do we do with that money? We took the 160 and we ended up using that combined with hard money to buy a nine unit in West Work, Rhode Island with four gutted units and five occupied units. We bought it for $750,000 with hard money. So we only brought 10% of the purchase. price. We ended up putting around $220,000 into it. We got the units rented. We brought the market rents up to $14,000. We refied that at $1.5,2 million. Wow. Oh, my God. So yeah, that's, I can't keep up with your math, but you built what? Like half a million, three quarters of a million dollars in equity, just off those two deals alone. And I split that 50-50 with my partner,

so that was only 80 grand for me, right? So I built half a million dollars in that worth off 80 grand within a year, right? And then let me, the next. No, what did I do with this property? Right? So we ended up doing a cash or refinanced, but $1.5.2 million. We got about $2,000 out of that. Me and my partner ended up transitioning that $230,000 into a 21 unit in Lowell, Massachusetts that we just closed on this week. Wow, congrats. And so all of this has been done in this higher interest rate environment.

Yes. And did you have any qualms? Like, did you worry that the market was going to crash or this was bad timing? I did not whatsoever, right? Because ultimately, I'm investing in high cap rate markets, right? I'm investing in assets that pro forma, once I'm done stabilizing the asset, have an 8, 9, 10% cap rate, right? So 10% cash and cash return, right? So if I'm borrowing at a 6 or a 7, like that asset far exceeds the debt, I would get more worried if I was in a low cap rate market.

You're talking, you know, a Boston or, or, you know, a Phoenix where the cap rates are 4 or a 5 and borrowing at a 6 or 7, then the assets literally operating in the negative, right? Yeah. So the way I really got around the high interest rates was I operated in high cap rate markets in tertiary markets outside high growth cities. Think Providence, think Boston. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think hopefully everyone's following this. But in certain markets, especially when you're evaluating deals on cap rate and this is just a way of measuring

how much you're paying for a property based on how much cash flow that potential it has to generate. And some of these markets, Phoenix, the fastest growing markets, because they are generally considered low risk, have lower cap rates, which means they're more expensive. And generally speaking, when you have a cap rate that is lower than your interest rate on your loan, that is negative leverage. You don't want to have that. But Andrew basically said, if you go into these tertiary or smaller markets where the cap rates are higher than the interest rate, it reduces your risk and it allows you to sort of operate and grow in a way that is, frankly, just much more challenging. in these lower cap rate markets right now. Andrew, I want to talk to you a little bit more about this sweet spot you seem to have found

with multifamily right after this break. So everyone, stick with us. We'll be right back. If you want to attend BPCon, but you were worried that you missed out on the best rates, I've got great news because we just opened up a surprise early bird extension through the end of April. BPCon 2025 is in Vegas this year at Caesar's Palace from October 5th through 7th, and the early bird savings will get you $100 off the regular registration price.

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Andrew, before the break, you were talking about how you've really effectively recycled the capital, which is awesome. But you've also seemed to have honed in on sort of a sweet spot of commercial multifamily more than four units, but it's not huge. At least right now, it doesn't sound like you're buying these 200-unit deals. Like, do you do that intentionally? And if so, why? So the sweet spot that we're really playing in is the multi-space between two and 50 units, right? So the reason why we like these smaller assets is because, first of all, there's not as much competition, right? These deals are way too small for the big players.

Additionally, these deals are really easy to stabilize. It's way easier to stabilize a 6-8-10plex than it is a 50-100 unit, right? Like, you can get that stabilized in six months versus 100-200 units. That's going to take you a couple years, right? So what does that mean? That it means that you can have a velocity of capital. You can keep utilized in that money quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker. And the last sweet spot that we really have been playing in that's been very effective

is buying scattered site portfolios, right? buying 10, 12 properties all at once. And because we're buying in bulk, just like you go to BJs and you buy toilet paper, you get in bulk, it's the same with property. Like if I'm buying 10 properties, I'm expecting a 20 to 30 percent discount for buying all those all at once, right? So that's kind of the sweet spot we're playing in. And we also have started to flip, but we are only flipping multifamily.

And the reason for that is because it allows multiple exit strategies, right? So if we can't sell it for the price we want, we could toss a renter and then it still works as a buy and hold rental and we can simply refinance most of the cash out. I'm curious, Andrew, this is a lot of work. So are you doing this all yourself? So currently, me and my partner, we own a property management company. We self-manage around 250 doors, right? So it was a crap done or work. Come around the start of 2022, I think we had about 150 doors that me and my partner self-managed and we had one employee. And I was doing this on top of being an investor-focused agent on top of having my W-2, because I didn't leave my W-W

until June of 2024. Like, it was a lot of work. But since then, we've increased our staff from one to around 16 employees. Oh, wow. Okay. So we have a really, really strong staff that allow us to kind of stabilize these assets ourselves. You know, real estate is made in three ways, right?

The debt on the property, the operations, and the price, right? And operations is really important. You can turn a really good deal bad or you can turn a bad deal okay with solid and good operations, right? Totally. Everyone always says you make money real estate on the buy, right? I think you need to caveat that you get the potential to make money on real estate on the buy, but you actually make the money by operating that program successfully, because I'm sure you've seen this too, but I've seen a lot of people buy good deals and run them into the ground. Or you see someone buy a thin deal,

run it effectively and manage to turn it into a pretty solid return. It's not just as simple as getting a good deal. It's an important component for sure, but as you said, there's a lot more to it. A perfect example of that. I bought this duplex in Killingly, Connecticut for $160,000. We were playing on renovating it completely. We budget around $80,000. We come to realize the foundation is straight messed up, right? And our renovation budget from 80K to 120. And we were planning on selling these duplexes of $320,000. Like, we were going to make no money on this deal, right? So this is an exact reason why operations is so important. So what do we decide to do? We actually looked at the property, we're like, hey, if we actually reconfigure this to a single family,

we'll get a better price per unit. And by the way, our renovation costs will go down because now we're not doing two bathrooms. Now we're not doing two kitchens, right? So we ended up doing that. We ended up bringing our renovation costs down on like 110, and we got the ARV from 320 to 450. And that's just a prime example of how operations can turn a bad deal good. Yeah, it works both ways for sure. Like if you're good at this, you'll find a way to make it work. if you're bad at it, you could find a way to destroy what should be a really good deal. Totally. At what point did you quit your job?

Because you said in the beginning of the show that you had been working in corporate America, then you took on being an investor-friendly agent. Can you give us just like a timeline here of like when you stopped working a sort of more traditional corporate job? So I'll be honest with you. It was really, really challenging leaving my job. Like I worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a project manager. So there was a certain level of identity associated with that that I had to escape, right?

Additionally, my job paid me 1.30 a year. And I was probably working 10 to 15 hours a week, right? It was so freaking easy. But at a certain point, you know, it came to the point where, you know, my activities in real estate from a dollar per hour perspective, completely outweighed the money I was making at my W2. So, you know, I put it off as long as possible to leave my W2. But what really pushed me over the edge was going to a mastermind. I think I went there in March 24, right?

And the host asked a question to the table. He's like, what's one thing you can do that's holding you back that would bring your business to the next level? You know, I end up getting on stage and I'm taking the mic and I said, quitting my job. And the host, he's like, you know, so as of now, like, we're going to set a deadline for you that you have to quit your job by this date. Oh. And if you don't quit your job by this date, we're going to shave that beard of yours. And then after that, the crowd of 500 people proceeded to you. yell, quit your job, quit your job, quit your job. No one can say no to that level of chanting.

You just have to give it. It was such pure pressure. I literally felt like I was like naked in a dream. Not everybody staring at me. It was so awkward. But that ended up pushing me to take the leap to leave my job in June. And since leaving my job, I probably four-x my annual income. Tell me a little bit about that because, you know, there's a big debate about how long you should work in a corporate job when you should quit and go full-time into real estate. So can you just tell me a little bit about where your income comes from now? Because it sounds like you do a couple of different things. You have a property management company. You do your own deals. You're an agent. Like, what does your income look like? So ultimately, I was very strong on the defensive side,

but it was also very strong on the offensive side. Right. So I actually moved into a house hack at the three unit. I rent two units for two grand. And I live in the third. unit, it's a three bedroom, one bath. I rent two bedrooms and I live in the third. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I literally bring in $5,500 in revenue on that three unit property and my mortgage is $3,200 box. That's pretty good, yeah. So my living expenses are really, really, really low. I probably spend $4 to $5 grand a month on probably food is my largest expense, right? So I didn't allow life creep to creep up. I mean, like ultimately, I'm a multimillionaire, right? Like, I don't have to be living in a house app with roommates, but I do it because I see the long-term vision, right? And, and to answer

your question, my other income comes from cash flow, right? I probably get $9 to $10,000 in monthly cash flow combined from my own personal rentals that I've built over the years and combined with some of the investments in part with my investors, right? I also get, you know, buyer agent commissions or acquisition fees for deals that we close, right? That's another form of income. I'm an investor-focused agent, even though I've kind of taken a step back from that. So those are primarily the sources of my income. Thank you for sharing that because I think a lot of times what happens is people quit their corporate job. You know, they tell everyone they're quitting, they're going full time into real estate. And that means some combination of cash flow and maybe

working as an agent or a loan officer. And that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes when you're doing that, you might be working 40 hours as an agent. It sounds like you're not in that bucket, Andrew, but the reason I'm asking the questions, because I think it's really important when people say, I quit my job and working in real estate full time, what does that? look like? How many hours a week do you spend in each of these different buckets? But it sounds like it's really cool for you. You can spend the majority of your time on your own investments and then syndicating other deals to some LPs that you have other investors. So let me be clear. Syndications are not great at building wealth. They are great at building network capital.

When it comes to a syndication, the way it's usually set up is the investor has to get paid first before you get paid, right? That's right. And that more or less means that you're not getting paid until year three or five of the business plan. So you're essentially working for free a lot of times, right? So syndications are fantastic for deals that you simply don't have the cash to take down, but they're also fantastic for building network capital to build credibility and also allow you to raise capital in some of these more profitable deals. Maybe a six or templex. You're talking about a fix and flip, right? So I think people should be clear. Like syndications are not a get rich quick scheme. They're a get rich slow scheme. Yeah. It's a,

business. It's really, it's really like a business that you're operating similar to other, you know, operations intensive businesses. You need investor relations. You need to do property management. It's just it's a different thing. It's a great thing if you want to do it. But as Andrew said, there are tradeoffs to this and you need to like consider pretty carefully if it's right for you at this point in your investing career and it sort of fits into your overall portfolio strategy. Andrew, there's been a lot of fun. Great lessons for everyone here. Before we get out of here, though, just tell me a little bit. What are your goals for, 2025, what are you looking to do next? So my goal for 2025 is I want to close on 200 more units.

Oh, nice. I think we've already closed on on 120. We have another 30 or 40 in the pipeline. So we are way ahead of schedule. I'm also planning. I want to travel to 12 different places. I want to help 10,000 people reach financial independence. This is probably 10 year a goal. And I want to travel six months out of the year. And I only want to work two hours a day. Like that's my ultimate vision of like 10 years from now. And that's really why I'm working on growing, building my team and kind of building a self-sufficient business so I could really live the dream life that I want to. Because ultimately, you know, my life sounds great and I did reach financial independence, but it does come with a lot of responsibility and a lot of time commitment. I'm trying to build systems to kind of get out of that

down the road. I love that. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, Start with Strategy, but I feel like having that clear revision that you have is sort of the most important part of building a real estate portfolio. what you do to actually achieve that goal becomes so much easier if you know exactly what you're trying to accomplish because you could say, all right, yeah, I should syndicate for the next couple of years. I should own a property management company for the next couple years. And that will, even though, you know, property management is a loss leader for me right now, that means in a couple years I'll be working two hours a day and I'll be able to travel like six months a year.

And it makes those decisions so much easier rather than sort of obsessing about the fact like, oh, I'm losing $500 a month. Well, it's like, yeah, that's fine because it's getting me to this longer-term goal. So it's easier said than done, too. Like having that clear revision, I don't know about you. It took me a while to really sort of like nail down what I wanted to achieve with real estate and not just try and like grow at all costs and scale in every which way. Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for being here. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast. We appreciate each and every one of you. If you enjoy this episode, make sure to leave us a review either on Apple or Spotify or give us a thumbs up on YouTube. We'll see y'all next time. 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,

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