BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - Regular Investor Makes $1.5M by Recognizing This Rare “Upside” on Her Rental

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Imagine making $1,500,000 on one regular real estate deal. We’re not talking about a huge apartment complex or commercial real estate investment. $1,500,000 on a single-family home purchase. How is that even possible? Dina Onur is more than a million dollars richer after spotting one rare real estate investing “upside” at the closing table. And the best part? She’s just a regular, everyday investor. Dina runs her own home healthcare business and is a mom of three, but she decided, “I’m not busy enough; let’s start buying (and renovating) rentals!” So, that’s exactly what she did. Her clients routinely had houses to sell, so instead of passing them along to real estate agents she knew, Dina made the jump, buying a triplex to test her hand at rental property investing. She did a BIG renovation but created some serious sweat equity as a result. The next rental? Double the size—a six-unit investment property. But, none of these compare to the one deal that is making her over a million dollars. This was such a rare find that Dina was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars over the asking price to sell it to other investors. She refused, and if you can find a property like hers, you too could make a seven-figure profit on your next real estate deal. In This Episode We Cover: How Dina made $1,500,000 on a real estate deal everyone else overlooked Pulling yourself up from bankruptcy to rebuild your financial life The one reason you ALWAYS check the zoning of a property before you buy Why Dina refuses to invest in single-family homes and sees them as too risky Using a HELOC (home equity line of credit) to fund your home renovations  Financing new construction and a sneaky way to get around the massive down payment 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 Invest in High-ROI Turnkey Rentals with Rent to Retirement or Txt REI to 33777 Save $100 on Real Estate’s Biggest Event of the Year, BPCon2025 Buy the BRRRR Book, “Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat” Find Investor-Friendly Lenders 10 Hidden Ways to Buy Properties with Huge “Upside” Connect with Dina Connect with Dave   (00:00) Intro (00:55) Young Business Owner to Bankruptcy (02:17) Accidentally Finding Real Estate (06:41) Finding Her First Deal (09:29) Huge Renovations, But BIG Rewards (17:12) Tearing Down Her House for This? (20:12) Making $1.5M on One DEAL!? (26:19) What's Next? Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1081 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

Imagine generating one and a half million dollars in a single deal in an expensive market in 2025. I know these numbers may sound impossible to believe, but today we are talking to a normal everyday investor who took a regular deal and found upside in it to the tune of one and a half million dollars. Dina O'Neur over the course of her career started a few different businesses, some of which failed and left her in pretty bad financial situations. But eventually, she She discovered real estate and gradually accumulated a handful of properties near Boston. And it was sort of a modest, sustainable portfolio until she accidentally stumbled onto a once-in-a-lifetime deal. We're going to get into Dina's full story today and how you can look for the same types of upsides as you look for your next property.

Let's bring on Dina. Dina Anear, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Dave. I'm so excited. Pinch me that I'm here. Well, we're excited to have you as well. From everything I've read about you and heard about you, you have a really cool story that I'm eager to dig into. So maybe you can just start by giving us a little bit of background on you and how you first started investing or at least thinking about real estate investing.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm an immigrant that came to this country about 25 years ago with my family. My father's entrepreneur. He threw me into his business, sourcing different type of materials that we exported to do. different countries. So got married, moved to New York, had my two kids, me and my husband started the business together. We made not such a good decision. So within six months, we filed a bankruptcy, had to move relocate from New York to Boston. And that was very difficult times. That's when my husband restarted his life. I started to going back to school, got my master's.

I got myself into a corporate world, which I did not like a lot. I was working in a medical device industry and after that, I decided to research, what else can I do? And I loved home healthcare business. I quit my job and started my own company. So my home health care company has been opened out for 10 years. Thank you for sharing your story, Dina. It sounds like you've had a lot of the ups and downs of an entrepreneur over the course of your career and have somehow, you know, figured it out. I'm curious sort of what gave you the drive to keep going and start another business after, unfortunately, I'm sorry to hear that you had a business that had failed in the past, but, you know, what was it about either your background

or your personality that gave you sort of that drive to keep going and keep trying new entrepreneurial things? Sure. So I think that was from the early age my father who threw me into the business at age 16 and 17, you know, trying to find products in U.S. sourcing him, connecting with vendors. So he gave me a lot of push. My father really built my business skills and I didn't even know at that time what he was doing, but I became who I am today just because you know, of him. Yeah, I grew up in obviously not the exact same situation, but like my dad was always kind of like pushing me in these situations where I'd have to like figure things out for myself. And I find that people either go in one or two directions, they either take to it

and really like it and then want to become entrepreneurs themselves or people, People just go the complete opposite direction. They're like, I want to be an accountant and I want like the most stable, predictable, possible job. But it sounds like you sort of caught the entrepreneurial bug. Started this home health care business, which is awesome. And tell us how that led into real estate for you. People started to just ask questions. I would get like a phone call from reception.

Well, this family is looking for real estate agents. You know, do you know someone? And that's what I started to like think. why am I not buying those properties directly from my clients? Interesting. And majority of those clients actually had single family homes. They didn't have multi-families. And at that time, when I started to read, I realized, like, single-family homes are not for me. I'm looking for multis. I want less risk. Because when you have a single family, you only have one payment coming in. So I was minimizing the risks. I knew from the entrepreneurship, like working with my dad,

that, you know, things can go up and down very fast. I did not want that for sure. So home health care company made me like really open up my eyes into like a real estate world. So people were looking to sell their homes because unfortunately someone in their family was either passed away or needed to move into some sort of assisted facility. So yeah, sort of by accident you found yourself with a deal flow pipeline. Yeah. That was sort of unexpected to you.

At that point, you know, you said you wanted multifamily, but like had you even been thinking about becoming a rental property investor or was this kind of just a fortunate opportunity? No, it was just like one business was leading to another one like a couple of years later down the line. I was thinking about it. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is incredible how this has pushed me into something else. And I pivot and I listened to a lot of like bigger pocket stuff, which I loved. I joined networking groups, masterminds and read a lot of books. And actually it felt really lonely, to be honest with you, when I realized and found like real estate, like I needed to find my people. I needed to find who can I talk to, who can give me some guidance.

And especially like a woman, it's more like male dominant industry. It's definitely a part of entrepreneurship. People don't talk about that. It is lonely, you know, when you're trying to figure everything out by yourself. And you're not necessarily following the path that a lot of your friends or your family members are doing. And if you don't have a community or support group, it can be really changed. challenging. So how did you go about and finding a community that would help you? Was it just Bigger Pockets or were there other things you were doing as well? So Bigger Pockets was one of them.

I religiously listened to the podcast. Brenda Turner was at that time, the host of the show. He's an amazing guy. For sure. One of my dreams is to meet him one day. And also masterminds. And I was able to network with people, learn a lot of stuff that people were doing, a lot of different things they were doing, not what I had my mindset on. So some of those people grew into like very close relationships that we can bounce off ideas, you know, like ask questions. It's just like community of people that have the same mindset, same goals. So you found yourself with this deal flow, which is really interesting.

How did you go from seeing an opportunity but not being an investor? so probably not knowing exactly how to make the most of that opportunity, and then go and develop a strategy and a plan to build a business that was in line with your personal goals. It was really hard to, like, you know, pull the trigger. I really was, like, pushed into it. It wasn't the client from home health care company that I purchased my first deal from. It was actually the employee, because you have so many employees, you have 15 employees. They come and you talk and you communicate.

and she told me that her landlord was selling the property because he's moving to assisted living facility. And I offered her to introduce me to him in return for a commission. Oh, nice. And she could stay at the property. So that's how I ended up purchasing my first deal. And then I was all the way in into rehab. I was trying to figure it out, you know, things that I need to do, pull the permits.

And I ended up skipping some of the steps. We all do. Not on purpose. It just happens. Yeah. So I was finding my deals throughout my employees and through my clients. But my clients were having single family homes, majority of them. So I passed on a lot of those deals to real estate agents.

Got it. Because my focus was on a multifamily homes primarily. That is what I wanted to do. I had very straight focus, multifamilies, rehabbing them, following the birth strategy, just like it was written in a book. I got the book and I got the recipe. So that was pretty amazing. All right, we do have to take a quick break, but before we go,

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So first property was a three-family home, purchased it for $289,000, put in about $70,000 into the property. I like to go in and make it look nice. I like to update all electrical, plumbing, kitchen. I don't want to have a phone call because I'm managing properties myself. Yep. So my goal is always to get this to the highest ARV I can so I can refinance out, pull my construction money out, and move on to the next project. So when I purchased them, I purchased them as a portfolio loans at 25% down payment. I was very skeptical about people suing you and this and that.

So I wanted all my properties to be under the LLC. And where was this? Just in what area of the country? So this is in North Attleboro in Massachusetts, sovereign part of Boston. So I rehabbed it, refinanced out. In the year, I was able to pull my money completely out. Oh, that's great. And make about $15,000, which actually, $15,000, I subtracted from the down payment.

And what year was this? I purchased 2018, 2019. I refinanced. Then I did another refi in 2023, and I was able to pull my down payment out and make $70,000. So the property value went from $289 to $650 in about five years. Okay, great. That's awesome. That's a huge jump. Some it sounds like due to your work and forced appreciation and value add, and then some due to sort of market conditions that helped everything go up. Exactly. That's great. Awesome. So what have you done since then? I mean, I can see why after a deal like that, very successful, you'd want to keep going. So what did you do after that?

So I did another one, which was a six family home. It was next door. And the lady who owned it, it was a six family house. It was just falling apart. I sent her a couple of letters, I handwritten them, followed up with a couple of phone calls, six months went by. She called me, she said she wasn't interested than a couple more months. Patience, yeah. And then I get a phone call and she told me she was ready to sell. So it was very interesting how this deal was working out. She was 80 years old. She was leaving an hour and a half away, so I had to arrange for an attorney to go out to her house.

At that time, it wasn't like really a thing. Like attorneys were going places. Usually you come to their offices. So this was 2019. So she sold it to me for $420,000, a six-family home, which was a complete mess. We needed to take down the roof, take down the walls, put new windows, siding. Like, there was a major rehab. Wow.

I think it was like $165,000 invested in that project. And the money, like, it was saving and the he lock that I was able to pull on my house. So combination of both of those. helped me go from project to project. And so you're saving money from your home health care business, essentially, or was some of it also coming from the rental income from the first one? It wasn't that much. You can't really, like you're getting like $300,500 per door and it's only three family

homesets. There is income, but it's good income, but it takes a long time for a down payment and a renovation budget, you know, like that would take a long time. So that took like a year itself. A year, wow. Yeah. And because it's six families. home, you can't really like move people out. You have to wait for them to leave. And it's just like

on its own, like very intense. Yeah. And so I just want to make a point to people that that's one of the things when you take on a rehab with these multifamily homes. If they're not vacant when you get them, it can be really slow. And you should really plan for that and a lot of vacancy in the first year. And it's totally fine. If you underwrite your deal and forecast at least one or two of your units being vacant at all times for the next year. year, it hurts, but if it still makes sense, you know, when you're running your numbers, that's fine. But pay close attention to that when the leases are coming up, how long the construction is going to be dragged out too, because at least in my experience, Dina, correct me if I'm wrong,

like, it's also hard to keep your contractors on a good schedule when you have these sort of, like, rotating things. A lot of times you want to maximize the work that you can do when you have the person there every single day and you don't want them coming and going. So did you learn how to sort of manage your subs and your your construction during the course of this project? I was trying different subs. That's when it was kind of like my learning curve. Who is my team of people? You know, who do I want to continue working with? It is hard because they go from project to project, you know, sometimes they don't show up. Sometimes people take your material, you know, like it happens. So this is just like trial and arrow you learn. I mean, you get referrals and stuff,

but you never know who's going to be, you know, working with you by your side. So you have to supervise it. And I was the one actually on site with my husband checking out like what's happening, you know, like do we need to order materials? Do we need another person in here? Do we need to fire someone? Yeah. So it's just like it gets real, you know, when you're talking about like big projects like this.

How did you manage all this? You were doing it. You had three kids. You're running a home health care business. You have one property. You're self-managing. And then you're doing this big rehab. Like, were you just busy all the time?

Like, how did you manage that? So my home health care business, I was only already at that time. It was, I think it was like established five years ago. I was only doing just the finance, just the billing part of it. The first two years when I started my home health care company, I was grinding. I was, my husband was saying to me, you're married to your business, not to me. So it was a lot of time spent for the first two years establishing the business. And then I had the freedom to actually live.

learn what the real estate is all about, managing kids. That's also like my part-time work that I do. Yeah, of course. Yes, it's, it is a lot. But you, you know, you juggle where you're going to be, you know, needing more or less. So it's just like planning out and running with it. If you want to reach your goals, you, you just have to work hard. Yeah, of course. I want to get into your your most recent deal because I think it's going to be fun to talk about with everyone. But just question, you've done so many things and it seems like been honing more and more in on real estate. Is it just because it's the most profitable? Do you like it? Or like, why of all these different things that you could be doing with your time? Are you doing real estate? I love it. I'm very

passionate about it. Whenever we do a rehab, actually, I do some work myself there as well. I love to tile. I think that what gives me like peace and quiet, maybe it's like a therapeutic. With your meditation. It's like a thing. So every single unit, every single house that we bought, I would put my stamp on it. I would do the back splash in the kitchen. That's just like my thing. That's nice. Yeah.

And then when you go visiting, you're like, I did that. That's a good feeling. Nice. Yeah, yeah. All right, we have to pause for one final ad. But on the other side, Dina's going to tell us about one of the most incredible real estate deals I've ever heard of. We'll be right back. People love to call real estate passive income, which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy.

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Tell me a little bit about your most recent deal, because obviously market conditions have changed a lot, but you're still active. What are you doing right now? So in 2023, me and my husband, we were talking about moving closer to where his business is, and it's in suburbs of Boston. Okay. About like 15 minutes away. We found a house that we wanted to buy, and we thought we were going to expand it because two kids were going off to college, and we have the little child with us. So we purchased it, and when we were closing, I realized we purchased not only a single family home, we purchased a house in a multi-family zoning.

Oh, okay. That changed the whole strategy. You're like, oh, I'm going to live here. Now I'm going to build an apartment built. Kind of. Yeah, which is great. I mean, but like, did you, so you didn't know that because you were shopping for a primary residence, right? Yes.

We purchased it like a primary residence too. So that's why me and my husband were like, well, what do we do? And I was like, this is an opportunity to build in this very expensive market. We took like six months to really like sit and think, I were going to do it. Let's put strategy together. Are we going to like, and he's like, okay, let's not move. Let's just rent it out, develop the project, knock it down, and build two beautiful town homes.

Okay. And they, both town homes, about 7,000 square feet altogether, not each. Whoa. So big houses, 3,500 pop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Serious townhouse, yeah. Huge townhouses. And I thought that I can pull it off and I did, I think.

I love how modest you are. I just pull it off. I did. That's great. So I let's dig into this. Because one of the things, if you've been listening to the show recently, I've been talking about a lot, is like looking for deals that work today, but have upside. And this zoning upside is like one of the sneaky things that can really go buying a good deal, even if you're buying it as a rental property from a good deal to an amazing deal. And it sounds like, you know, you found this on your primary, too. So you were going to move in. You decided not to, right? Not to, yeah. But did you say you rented it out then?

So, yes, we decided to not move in, stay where we were, and rented it out to college kids, and they paid $3,700 mortgage. Wow. I mean, that's so pretty good for college kids, because I guess was it a big house? No, this is 900 square foot home. Wait, what? Yeah. Where's college kids get that money? Babson college kids.

Wow. I'm going to date myself, but my rent, my last year of college was like $210. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Okay. So I guess the other nice thing about that is I would always worry about renting to college kids, but you're going to tear down the house anyway, right? So it doesn't even matter.

I didn't care. The only thing I cared about it, you know, they're going to disturb the neighbors. We had a couple of phone calls. You know, the cops came by. They said, turned down the music, but that was fine, you know. Okay. So you had to, you've done rehab at this point. But this is development.

New development. Yeah, ground up construction. Knocking down, you know, putting the foodings. It's a big project that took a whole year. And we're doing the finishes right now. How did you go about learning that? Because it's something, frankly, I've thought about and always been a little bit wary of because it just seems like a lot of bureaucracy, especially this is in Massachusetts, right?

I would imagine there's a lot of red tape. There's red tape everywhere, to be honest, when you go through development. But certain areas, certain states are definitely more infamous. bureaucracy. Yeah. It took a year and a half to go through all the paperwork. Okay. So good thing you rented out. So you rented it out that whole time. Hopefully you basically broke even. No, I decided to rent only for one year. And one year, the $44,000 came out of my pocket because I had all those permits with a special due dates and timelines. And I could not afford to have a tenant in there that needs more time to move or this or that. So I didn't want to play around because I was investing 100k into

architect, wetland specialist, arboritas, you know, like, you name it. Like, I had to assemble, like, a team of people prepare all these documents to submit to the town and have all those permits with special due dates. So I had to, like, really put the schedule together how this is all going to work out. I've never done it before. I just, like, listen to a lot of stuff, read stuff, ask questions. The biggest challenge for me was, like, finances. Yeah.

My project, if we're talking about converting the mortgage, which is, you know, the primary resident mortgage that we had with 5% down into construction loan. So that whole amount came into $2 million. Yeah, I was thinking in my head, you know, it's like what, 300 bucks a square foot roughly, you know, sounds like a little cheaper, but $2 million to build? No, well, to get the land. So what, you have to convert the primary resident loan into a construction loan. So $740,000 plus $1.3 million is the construction budget to build two townhouses. That's a ton of money. Yeah. So how do you do that? Like, for me, it took a lot of time. I went to a lot of banks.

I went to actually private lenders that offered to buy my project. They offered to give me 200K on top of what I'd be. I refuse. Well, that's annoying, but that's a vote of confidence, right? You're like, I'm on to something. If they want to buy it for me, then I'm probably doing something right. So I had to figure out two years from now, how am I going to qualify for $2 million loan?

I had to go pick everyone's brain, talk to people, increase my income, start the property management for family and friends. Wow. So you have like eight jobs at this point. But they're like small jobs that require very little time. You know, like you have to press this button, that button. Well, that's good. I mean, you've clearly made it sustainable for yourself, even though you have a lot of things going on. Yeah. Yeah. So figuring out the finances was the fun part. How do you call that fun? So I wanted to build for myself. So I call this primary residence house hack, like a development house hack that I created on my own. I found the bank that would lend me as a construction primary residence for two family or less with very special terms,

amazing terms that I've never heard of. When we went to the closing, bank paid me. Wait, what? Tell me more about that. How does that work? Cash to close to borrow $113,000 because they do two appraisals when you come to the closing. They do as is appraisal and they do future appraisal. So I bought it for $7.40 in two years. it appreciated to 1.2 million. After that, after the construction, when the building is ready, they do future appraisal,

future value. And that came in at 3.725. Okay. So the equity that I was generating in that project was $1.5 million. Oh, my God. That's insane. Oh, my God.

Wow. Congratulations. That's so cool. Yeah, I know. Wow. So it's like $1.5 million. dollars on one deal? Yes.

Oh my God. That's so cool. And you didn't even like you bought this as a primary residence. It's so cool. What a great story. Yeah. So my plan is to move in and rent the other apartment and I'm going to house hack.

I'm going to probably only paid 10 to 20% of the mortgage. Perfect. Amazing. Congratulations. Super cool. So that's probably one of the bigger equity pops I've ever heard of on this show, which is saying a lot because we hear some pretty cool stories. That's one of the coolest ones I've heard.

So amazing. Are you addicted to development now? Are you looking to do it again? It's very risky too. So when we were excavating, we found the ledge underground. And that costed me an additional $70,000, which is a change award that we did an account for. So it could be a lot of stuff. Then when you're doing a construction, you know, you can bump into that, you know, you did an account for.

And bank is not going to give you the money. You have to have your own savings. and you will be able to pull it off. And the market changes a lot. There's just a timing risk with it too, because it took you how long, three years basically, two and a half years? Yeah, like we are almost done.

And yeah, from the time when we bought it, development, like all those, you know, regulations, permits, until we broke the ground, it took three years with 1.5, yeah. Yeah, so obviously everyone, you know, you could see the upside of development. But in my mind, there's sort of this spectrum of real estate investing

strategies like rental property investing, single family homes and small multifamily is like low risk, but solid return. So that's like one side of the risk spectrum. And then developments on the other side. There's a lot of upside. There's amazing opportunities, but there's also a lot of risk.

And so it's great to hear this $1.5 million pop. But I'm glad that you called out the risk to it as well because it's not just like something easy and you have to find great deals. and there are risks in timeline and market conditions changing from the time you start a project to the time you end the project you got to think about all of that but obviously by dina's story we know that there that it can be very very worth it yeah so dana what's next for you what's your plan and your goals for your portfolio over the next few years yeah uh well right now is very hard

the prices are very high interest rates as well so i'm continuously looking just you have to like I listen to your podcast, it's like you have to find opportunities, you know, you have to create them yourself. And that's what I'm looking at right now in Massachusetts, we have this new law that's been passed recently ADU and accessory dwelling units, which you can add to the single family homes, but you have to be like a primary, I believe you have to be like a primary residence for you. But I'm looking to continue looking for different opportunities where you can create square footage or where you can, you know, maybe partner up with someone and do. ADU. So I love the game. I know how to play it, I think. Yeah. You have to be comfortable to win and lose. So yeah, for sure. And that's what I'm, that's what I'm comfortable with. Awesome. Well, good luck to you. If your track record is any indication, I'm sure you're going to find

more ways to find upside in this new changing era of real estate investing that we're in. But, Dina, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us your story. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me. Of course. And thank you all so for listening. We appreciate it. Make sure to share this story if you know someone who might want to get into real estate investing but doesn't know how to do it or thinks that they can't. Dina's story is such a great example of how you can figure it out, hustle your way, work hard to build a great portfolio, find financial freedom through real estate. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you again soon 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. On the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer, the show is produced by Ian K, copywriting is by Calicoe content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com.

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