KGCI: Real Estate on Air - From Engineering to Entrepreneurship: Rasheed Ayodele's Blueprint for Real Estate and Short-Term Rental Mastery

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Good evening, everyone. This is Niyy Adewale, a host of the Akaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Podcast. And this podcast is for those who do not believe that we were put on this earth to work 30 to 40 years at a W2 to hopefully retire at 65 and hope that that 401k doesn't run out. This is for those that are looking to accelerate that timeline, build some investments, and reach financial freedom at a much faster rate so we can actually enjoy it. And today I'm joined by our co-host, Liban, how you doing? I'm doing quite well. Thank you. As always, it is a pleasure. Come on now. Come on now. And we're bringing a guest to you. We just were working through a couple technical difficulties. That guest is hopefully going to be joining here in a minute or two.

But in the meantime, Libon and I are going to give just a brief background so that when they do join, we can kind of get this thing going. And the guest that we have joining, his name is Rashid Ayodele. He's been in the investing space since 2002. And this is actually him right here. There it is. Rashid, perfect timing. Hey, I got it. Come on now.

Perfect timing. Yeah. So we are joined today by Rashid Ayodele. He's been in the investing space for 20 plus years. He's an engineer by trade turned entrepreneur that has been in this game through a lot of the ups and downs of market changes in 08 to the pandemic to now. And he's found a way to be successful in each of these different markets. Rashid, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, you're welcome. How you doing, guys? Super good. Super good. So the way we do the Akabo Home podcast is a little bit different. We have individuals that are a part of this group that are joining live. And toward the end of this, the last 15 or 20 minutes, we're going to open it up to a group discussion to allow individuals to join in and ask questions through the chat or to call in live. But first, we want to go through a bit of your story, Rashid.

And we want to start at before you even got into entrepreneurship and real estate, what were you doing when you got out of college? So right at a college or before college, I tried so many things in college with a buddy of mine. Try to hustle through college, like trying to open gas stations and coin laundries. Just try different things while we're going to college. You know, I had another buddy of mine. He's late now. It was an electrical major. I was an industrial engineer major.

So eventually we finished college, and he tried different things, and I was trying different things. I was going to the flea market to sell stuff, trying to figure out to sell stuff online. So I just kept working in the field. I worked for the at the Warner Robinson Air Force Basin. Warner Robinson, as an engineer, had a college. In the meantime, I was still figuring out myself,

in what direction I wanted to move in. So I moved to Warner Robbins, came back after a year, I started working for Lucent Technologies, and went to Georgia Power, and I bounced around, but I was never happy. You know, I'd go to work, you know, just doing basic minimum. So eventually, I started, pay wasn't good enough.

It was like $40,000 a year as an engineer, and I was never fulfilled. And so I was doing valid parking at nights and stuff like that. Eventually, I needed something to replace, to get an extra income. So I started selling stuff online. So basically selling stuff, buying stuff from Alabama back in the day and selling on eBay and stuff like that. And eventually, I started selling like, at that time, it was selling like up to a million dollars of what the merchandise, merchandise every year on eBay. So I was still working full time. And then,

Eventually, I built a website with a couple of buddies of mine out of the country. So we built up kind of like an international perfume company, and people would order from, basically, Europe from us and would ship to them. Eventually, we started that, and I started making this and money from that. I was working full-time eventually. I got laid off one more time because that was a trend then. and getting laid off after a year or two. It was like the same cycle. You know, I was tired of it.

So this last time, I wanted to get laid off. As a matter of fact, I told my butt, I said, I know you got to lay off again, but can you please make sure my name is on the list. I don't know, literally. He said, oh, you're such a good marriage. I said, sure. Because I was always scared to leave on my own, right? When I was doing okay, I would sell, like, perfumes and, like, during the break time,

I'll have bags to go take to the post office. And I'm like, what are you doing shit? I'm like, I'm just selling online. Eventually, yeah, we did a website and I said back then I used to ship from the basement and take it to the, take it to work, doing the work and mail it. So when I started full time, we started doing what you call Drop Ship. So we said Drop Ship, but a lot of, a lot of, I hooked up with a couple of suppliers. They were shipping out to sell the products and they would ship,

straight to my customers. So after that, I knew once that site started kind of like building up, I woke up one day and I went to my eBay account. Lights out. For no reason, they kind of like took me out

for no reason. Because sometimes the one you sell them a lot, the brands don't want you to sell certain things and they don't give any reason they just kill you because they don't, but you're messing up their numbers because I would sell with low margins with volume. But I had a website as a backup, so, you know, we started growing the website. Eventually, I said I needed some kind of a backup business

because I always have a backup business just in case something happens to one year I want. So that's when I started my real estate one at a time. Like with a profit of every year, I pick up one or two, you know. But back then, you know, I was doing just long-term Reynolds and stuff like that. And Rashid, yeah. We want to dive in that real estate piece, but you've said you kind of went through a bunch of different portions that I know individuals are interested in and want to learn more about. The real estate's what we're going to focus on, definitely.

But you mentioned wanting to be fired from the job. And I went through a phase where I was. actually wanted to as well. And it's harder than you think. Like, if you don't want to, they're always laying people out. Right, right. Right. Right. It's tough. Why did you want to get fired? What was going to be the benefit of that? Just to have, I wanted to control my own destiny, really. That's why. But it's hard when you're not sure of what the future holds or you don't show if this business is going to sustain itself. And that's when real estate came in. So the story is kind of like getting to where the real estate starts because I wanted something as a backup.

because I knew at any time the business could go down for any reason, and that's where the real estate piece comes in as a backup. So I needed to buy one every year. So I knew whichever way, whatever happened, people would still rent, right? Renta space. So I said, I figure in my mind, if I get 10 units, that would set me up good. That was always on my mind. But I didn't know nothing about the short-term piece of it, short-term rental.

It was always, let me get rent. Let me buy a property. Back then, we could buy it for $40,000. Three bedroom, too bad. $40,000. So I had to buy cash one and a time like that. So that's when I started buying real estate. And when I looked back, I had a couple.

But the problem was on Longton Reynolds, I had problems with collecting rent after a while. Just because of the types of property I was buying in the areas, I attracted certain people that just, you know, If I bought it a better area, I could probably get better quality pool of people that would pay me on time. But, you know, when you're paying $40,000 for a property, you get, you know, what you get. So if you want to know how I started to the short term rate, it started like, I bought a, this is how I really started with Airbnb. So 10 years ago, I had, I wanted to buy a, I bought a condo done with it.

I said I wanted to buy as a space, another home from home in the city. Donwood is kind of like in the city, closer to the city in between. So I bought that property. Right as when I was furnishing the property, I said, you know what? I'm not going to be all the time. So what's going to happen? And I didn't want to rent it because it was this nice new property for like 70,000 back then one bedroom. So I went online.

I'm like rentals, rentals. How can I rent this part time? and all kind of keywords. This site comes up. B&B. I'm like, what's this? B&B thing. So what I did was,

I put it in real quick. I was so curious. I kind of like put it online. And like after an hour, I got a booking, but I wasn't even ready. So I told the guy, hey,

I was just testing it out. Please don't come. I see you at a couple of days. The guy said, no, I'm on my way. I don't care. I said, I'll take it as is. We have nowhere to go.

I said, fine. So I let him go in. The micro wasn't hung. A couple of things wasn't done. They booked it. And right when I finished, I started getting back to bad bookings. Oh, I said, oh, wow. And this was nobody knew about Airbnb back there. And what years ago? This was 10 years ago. This would be 2003. Wow. So I'm noticing kind of a theme here. You've been kind of early in a lot of the online spaces because you mentioned using them as a group of makeup, but even drop shipping. Now it's common. It's known, hey, get things shipped over, get things. But what kind of brought about that and you being early on a lot of these things like you were with the drop session? Is it, hey, I need

a backup plan. Let me go look up. Like pretty much. I'm seeing, hey, what can I find? And I wake up in the middle of the night and just start searching for nothing. Search it for nothing. Like, just searching and what can I do? And you just keep trying and you get something. And, you know, like right now, a lot of people try to get into drop shipping and all that. It's so saturated now, but I'm still in a game. I mean, we have like over 400,000 customers, but I started 10 years ago. So it won't know, it's hard to get into now. It's, you know, we started early. But anyhow, I had a couple of properties for long-term Reynolds back then, and I said, I had stuff in Latonia, Georgia, and I was getting like $900 a month. Now,

my condo was a test. It was like the accidental test, you know, because, you know, I can't sit all the time I'm booking. I'm saying, you know what? I wonder if I could get more out of Latonia, Georgia, when I'm getting 900. The lady's been there. She hasn't paid me like three months. So I told her, hey, hey, you guys, you could just leave. And, you know, I'm not going to chase for the money. You know, in my mind, I wanted to try it out. So I tapped a Latona, Georgia, and I saw, like, crappy properties ready for, like, with a lot of reviews. Early people that started, like, Not even furnished well, whole houses, and people, they were getting, like, a lot of reviews, and they were charging, like, 150 a night for a crappy property.

So when she moved out, since I already did the kind of research, I switched that one into a rental, a short-term rental. And it was making, like, grossing like 3,000 back then. Oh, wow. This is eight years ago. I'm like, 900 to 3,000. Even when I pay off that expenses, it was paid off anyway. It was a property I bought for $30,000 cash, right?

Three bedroom, $2.5, split level. The area not that desirable, but good enough. Clean, I fixed it up. So I was grossing $3,500 like that. So I'm like, oh, shoot. So that's when the light bulb here, I say, I got to get, I switched two more like that into Shottes and Reynolds. And then I was getting, like, a property every year.

But if I did it, the way I did it was I didn't want single family because I want to scale fast enough. So I would target like duplexes, triplexes, stuff like that, properties like that where I can have three units on one location, so that way I can get to my goal of either many units I want. And over the years, that's how I just said it.

Or I would get a house with a basement and say one up says and one downstays, that would be two. So I said for a lot of house hacking. When you, when you, and I want to get into that house hacking piece, but you just mentioned something that was, incredible, right? You stayed consistent through the years and kept buying. Even though your strategy changed, you kept acquiring real estate. My whole thing is, it's got to be a bit of a mental shift when you look at the market today versus, you know, 15 years ago when you're getting

a house for 70K, you know, 80K, 40K. So what kept you motivated throughout the years to continue purchasing as somebody that's been through that full cycle? I mean, I always just believe in power volume. So once you're in a type of business, you know, where I was selling one item and I wanted to say, oh, if only I could sell 10 items or 20 items, it's all a matter of scaling. So I knew it didn't matter. I was, I had it on the game and I knew I could make more, I could get more. I mean, ROI back then was like 300%, 200%. Like, so it's like you can't beat that. So it's like, all I got to do is do more. If I do more, even, you know, if the competition comes, you got more.

And then you got, you got, you bought properties as cheaper prices. So, you know, you could always, even if it gets more expensive, if you have your portfolio, some cheaper selection of properties where, you know, you can make more money here. And the way I do it, as a matter of fact, is if I buy a duplex, I make more. It's two doors, three doors. And so how can you compare with me? when I say a lot of guys online, they have a single family, they can't compete.

Even if I buy it a higher price. Because I see they're buying single family homes, one door, one mortgage. I'm buying, even if I get a mortgage and I pay $300,000, I got three doors. I can reduce a price to compete and kick everybody out. And to kind of ask you a question now, obviously, we started to get to this, you know, to get as many units to your point and all these multifamily, we had to start with one. What was the first one? And how did we find it?

What made you want it, et cetera? And I think his internet just cut out. But what was that first property that you got and how did it go? So that was the lot on your property, the three, two and a half split level house. That was like the true test because I figured that wasn't a desirable area. As a matter of fact, that neighborhood was old and, you know, just old neighborhoods. It was like, you would never think nobody would come over there. But it was all about making a space kind of nicer.

As long as it's safe. And, you know, people can get past the safe, clean, safe and clean. And, you know, we don't have people walking around. We didn't have that. It was just an older neighborhood. And I figured once my mind, once I figured that people just want a safe, clean space, it doesn't matter how old their house is. and it was still producing.

So all I needed to do was buy just a little bit better properties. You know, that's it. I didn't have to go into a Porsche area to, you know, I can still still below a price mark to be able to compete. I didn't have to go buy a $500,000 property thinking, oh, it's going to be, you know, it's going to make me more money. I just, you know, bought properties that were kind of like very, very, is stable price, you know, multi-units, kind of like that. The only downside to that is buying those properties sometimes attract a certain kind of

people. I don't know if you're thinking or if it's, you know, because it's like they, you know, if you say you bought in like Affareta, Georgia, a lot of times you're going to get people that can afford Afriety, Georgia, they're not going to complain as much. Everything going to go smoother. But if you go buying the river, Georgia, the price. It's lower. They're going to give you a hard time.

It's time. It's time. So you got to know how to deal with people, you know, especially our people, you know. Hey, come on. With that in mind, I know we were talking about the lead up to this. You mentioned something about one of the first failures that happened early on, right? And this is something, if you're in this game long enough, it's not going to be all roses and sunshine, right? I mentioned a deal where somebody tried to scam you or what happened with that deal?

Oh, yeah. It was some type of mentor. I wanted a mentor, right? So this guy was a bigger brother. He just passed like last month, as a matter of fact. So he was buying properties. A lot of it was doing investment or whatever. I didn't know what it was doing.

So he came to church and he was trying to get people in. said, no, you could buy properties and you could buy properties that was going to reg. That worked. I can't say that word again. Rejentification. You know, places that, you know, so buying there now. We'll get you in now in a year. You go, you just want to appreciate like 200 percent.

You make money. So I'm like, oh, brother, yeah, yeah, help me up. I'm really interested. So if you got good credit, you were like an ideal candidate. You got good credit? Yeah, yeah. then he would like want to give you some incentive to do it. I'm like, I don't need the money.

I just want to build a portfolio so I can have real estate. So I bought two properties then and they were no good because they had over appraised the houses some kind of way. That's back then where you could do all the scrap. And you basically had a shell like nothing under appraised, over appraised house. And they would put, they wouldn't help you with put in like tenants, section eight tenants. and the mortgage was never covered that. It would give it a different.

It was so, but I was naive. I was 21 out of college, 22 had to college. And I kind of believed, well, you know what? My gut told me it wasn't right. But it was people I knew. I said, you know, and his brother wouldn't never do me wrong, you know, blah, blah, blah. But you become, you know, you just put your guards down because you really know these people and you didn't think they would do that.

So by the time I realized, I'm like, oh, man. And I had to let the houses go. That was before I bought the Latonia house. So I let it go. I was still doing my e-commerce business. Back then, I bought my, it was right before I was getting married. So before I let it go, I bought my main residence and then let those two go so that I could, you know, because if I did it afterwards, I don't be able to get my own private residence.

So I bought my residence and let those two go. And after like six, seven years, that's what I started buying for cash. And that was like the 08, 09, roughly that time where everything was kind of going crazy. Right. But that's not much from it commerce that I could buy houses, cash, like then, you know. So, but that was the right way to do it, you know. So like what we lack a lot of times in our community is mentorship. And, you know, when you're sick a mentor and people, you know, there's a lot of bad people

that's going, won't tell you the truth. They're just selfish. And, you know, all they're thinking about making a quick buck, and, you know, and that's what happened. And to kind of piggyback, because you guys mentioned earlier, you're one of the few investors that we've kind of spoken to that's invested, one, long enough, and two has survived 2008, 2009. You know, people are always constantly scared of investing. Even now we hear, hey, rates are super high. It's kind of tough. Now it's not a good time to invest or buy.

But arguably, 2009 was one of the worst times to buy by everyone's metric because markets down, Everyone's kind of down. What was your philosophy in kind of continuing and saying, hey, everyone else is wrong. I'm going to keep, I'm going to keep buying to now where you just drop. But it only makes sense. You buy it when the house is a super low. I showed a need my house one day and I asked him to guess how much I paid for it. So it was one of those times where I bought the house for nothing.

So it would only make sense if you have extra cash for it. I'd be ready for these things, you know. At that time, a lot of people were doing bad. I was doing good because I was on e-commerce. It didn't really, you know, I was driving then. So I had to cash to do it. So that's why a lot of people were known because a lot of these deals, you have to have cash.

Nobody was loaning anybody money. So I would buy one or two every year. And it lasted for like between 08 to like 2009, 10, 11, 12. That's when it started getting better. But at a time, you could still buy with a loan, you know, for a little more. If you bought something like 11, 12, 13, you'd be doing so good. You know, so that's all it is. I always go the other way.

When people don't want to buy, that's when I buy. I go against the grain every time. It's made you money. Like right now, the interest is high. It's better to buy now. People keep saying, oh, I'll wait to. the interest goes low. But guess what? Once the interest goes low, there's a lot of competition. You can't get the quality of property you want. Each time you bid for it is gone. So now you buy it.

Right now, you wait for interest to go low later and you can refire because you don't have to compete against all these people. Now you've got time for a property that you're sitting there got potential. You buy it at a higher rate. But if you buy the right property, you could cash flow really good and making sure, like, in my case, I try to buy multi-dwellings, two or three units. I know even if I pay 20 percent, I'll still make money, interest. I'll still make money. I won't worry about it. I only worry about cash flow. And that's, you know, and by when there's no competition. Agreed. Agreed. I think it's sound advice. I mean, last year, while interest rates were still accelerating, I think we talked about it, about a four unit up in Snellville. And my interest rate

is above nine because I'm buying 1099 stuff. But this year with them cutting rates, I think I'm going to be able to refinance that back to like a six and a half or a seven. And that's going to shave a lot off. So it's going to turn a good deal into a great deal. Right. And kind of make it keep going from there. Right.

Because at that time, probably nobody wanted to buy it. You had a clear shot to get it. Because if this is with 5%, trust me, you got people in China, mine, you know. I bid you. I've worked with some clients. I've worked with some clients in different areas, man. I saw a property like two years ago when everything was going crazy. It was in Snailville.

I went onto the property. I mean, potentially I could turn this property into like a six unit. It was just older building, but it was just a bunch of buildings. And I'm like, you didn't want it like 2.30. and I bid it like I was the first to get it, but they wanted him to pay cash, and somebody bid it just $10,000 over, and I wasn't the first to say it, though.

I said, no, I get it, but it's because at that time a lot of people looking at it. The interest was low, you know, and that would have been a great cash loan, you know, I would need to put like $150,000,000, but it would have been like at least five to six units, the way it was set up. I would have cut it in such a way that I get six million units and have people, you know,

booking Airbnb style just short term. And, you know, I only will worry about long term. I like it. I like it. To that point, this is kind of accelerating toward the end of the story before we open up to the rest of the group. Because I know there's going to be a lot of questions coming. But the short-term rental side, right? You're one of the individuals that I connected with and was super impressed and got some advice

on just different items because you own 20 plus short-term rentals and also co-host a couple as well. How did you get into building that big short-term rental portfolio and getting it to the level it is now? And what are some of the top systems that you're using to help manage your portfolio? So, like I said, I was looking for the fastest way. It's all about doors. how many units you got? And mind you, I know there's a research. I don't know if you know it.

I listen to a lot of the big timeers, the people with 2,000 units, 3,000 units. The average, what do you think the average net profit is on a unit, apartment or a rental property? What do you think that number is? The average across the U.S.? Yeah, like how much would they make? How much would it make after paying a profit per unit that they own, the average?

Like, how much in dollar amount will come to their pockets? Probably $100 per door if you're doing long-term rentals? Is that right or what? So it's about $2.50. $2.50 is considered very good. And if you know Grant Cardone, Grant Cadoon. Grand Cardone does about 250 a door, apartment, big time. And then I listen to other guys, and it's always between 200 and 250.

But with Airbnb, I can make $1,000 over it, $2,000 over it, one door. I mean, on a property. So you see the difference. So that's why I was trying to get as many doors as possible, but I would get properties with like three units, four units, in-law suite somewhere, you know, in-law suite of the garage, anything that qualifies as an extra space.

You know, like one time I had done a property, I told you about it. It was a house with a basement. So I was able to make two units out of the basement, a two-two and a two-one on the bottom, and I turned the garage into another unit, making four units out of one house. And it makes about maybe like 12,000 a month, you know?

And are you getting these rezoned as multi-unit, or are you just keeping them? Well, you know, a lot of times you just keep it as it is. If you start getting rezoning everything, it's so much headache, you know. A lot of times nobody's really saying nothing about this, you know, you're not doing a lot of, you know, you're the guy to base. You know, all you got to do is just finish it out. Cut it up, yeah. Yeah, that's what people don't tell you because, you know, but sometime you got to take a chance too.

Especially when you look at like the in-law suite piece, right? Like this is one where you could get it rezoned and kind of have the city come in, but they may pull other things apart, right? You know, just full transparency, right? What I've seen done is when you have an in-law suite, the way that they look at a single family house will call it is that you need to have one oven. It doesn't matter if you have all the other stuff. They're cabinets. You've got counters. That could be a bar area, right?

But it's the oven. And so if you have a two burner stove or an oven down there, it's just one of those things when you're selling the house, you would need to. to take that piece out with understanding with the buyer and then put it back after closing. Oh, you take the burner out. Take the burner out, put it back after closing and kind of go from there. Rashid, I know we have a lot of people on right now that may have some questions for you, especially with your wealth of experience. And so we want to take a second to open it up to the rest of the group and allow others to join in either a live call in and or drop your question in the chat.

And we'd love to hear from you. Mark, how you doing? I'm doing well. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Oh, good, good. I didn't have a, well, phenomenal story, Rashid, which you've gone to. I'm just getting in the game, so I'm kind of feeling like, man, I missed 10, 20 years to get in the game like you have. It's never too late.

It's never too late. Well, I'm just starting now. So what would you recommend for someone who's, I'm perching my, getting ready to purchase my second property. I'm here in Atlanta. And what would you suggest that I do? I have a two unit, one house, similar to what you were talking about with an in-laws apartment now, which is being Airbnb.

But I'm looking for my second property. What would you recommend in the Metro Atlanta area? I mean, for me, It doesn't matter as long as you have a two or three unit situation, meaning a house or the basement, with a sweet, in a safe, clean area. So a lot of times when I search a property randomly without even an agent, I just go multi-doney units. I do the filter, right? And I just go wide, like Atlanta. And anything that pops up, I take the address.

I put it into abdbb.com and what that does, it puts kind of like it takes it out, it takes it out on Airbnb and I see, I want to see what's going on in that area. So I want to see what other people are doing, what's in that area. If I see a property or two

and then I dive into the feedbacks to see how many feedback they have. If they have one of them like 10 feedbacks, I know mine's going to work. So all I got to do is to match what they're doing or better. I try to do better. And then I just make sure, then I go out to Google Maps. And then what I do without going to seeing the property, I do like a drive-through.

So I put on Google Map. I want to see how clean the street is. I want to see just abandoned cars on the street. And I go all the way out to like the main street, like I'm driving it without going there. I mean, you can tell what a good property, a good daybook it looks like. You literally see people walking in white beards. You'd be like, no, I don't want that. You see people hanging out like doing like this.

Like, I don't want that street. And that's not good. Before I consider going to look at the property, that situation, I mean from the street, Google Maps tells me everything I need to know. And from my little research on Airbnb tells me all I need to know. If you want to even go deeper, you can do a DNA account. Air DNA, all that does. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. There's another one. All the Rooms.com, I think. I think there's another one that might be a little better called All the Rooms. I haven't really looked at it. I've looked at them once or two times

to see their numbers if you want to do that. You can actually see how much you're making for nights, occupancy rates, and all that. So it's just as simple as that. So how do you determine whether it's going to be Airbnb and long-term rentals

Is it just based on what you have in your portfolio? I don't try to shoot for long-term rentals. I don't want to do it. Right now, you wouldn't do long-term rentals? No, another option. Okay, all right. I mean, I sold you the average, Joe makes $250 after paying for long-term.

Right. So, and the problem is, more than likely if you get a long-term tenants, depending on where you get it at, I mean, it's like a 50-50 chance after a while, they're going to default. Anybody that I know that's done real estate tells me this story, oh, they didn't pay me yet. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. And I don't want to go through that. I bought a property like two years ago.

It took me a year to kick them out. Yeah. A year. So once I got them out, I mean, I bought it with the tenants in there, and I couldn't get them out. And so that almost the whole year, but I knew once I get them out, I'll try to start making, trying to start to make my money back. Yeah, so you don't see an issue right now with the Airbnb market being saturated around Atlanta? It is. Oh, it is. Okay.

It is, but like I said, one more time, a lot of guys are buying single family homes. What sets your part is if you buy it. I mean, if you buy a three-barrens, you. too bad, you can only charge so much, a 150 or not max. If you buy a property that has a, a, a studio apartment in the basement, now you can get three bedroom too bad. You can get $100 at the top. You can get $80 at the bottom. You can split it up. Now you have two spaces. You can copy better. One unit can pay your mortgage and one can be your cash flow. I try to do three. I try to do three. Three is it for me.

If I see a deal with three, I don't care what neighborhood is in. If I can get three units out of a property, I'm golden. I'm not even going to worry about the competition because I'm going to blow them out. Because they don't know they're still buying a single family homes. Like, you know, you can only get max. I don't care how nice it is. Unless you're buying a bucket sometimes. But you're going to pay bucket price.

So now the mortgage is high, everything is high. And that's what everybody thinks. Oh, let me get this nice house. and you'll maxed out. But once you go in, then you know, once you go in a multi-doiling situation, you can chuck up her prices down, you know,

and it won't be better. Once you do that, I don't think you have a problem. Well, thank you. Thank you for the advice and the guidance. Let someone else ask a question. Appreciate it. So we got a question coming out of the chat. How do you manage your pricing for the STRs

and any tools that you recommend? So for me, a lot of people use Price Labs, and that's like the Golden Boy. Price Labs, and there's another one, I can't remember right now. Beyond pricing. Beyond pricing. But I'm old school. I go manual. Because anytime I use those things, they always never do it on time.

And so there's a couple of guys on YouTube. They use those tools, but they also go manual. my first choice software management software is guesty i use gasty.com and with guesty i can go into the calendar and just every day i do this or multiple times in the day i go chop the prices down myself i know at certain price you know i'll get a booking if i go so low so i like to do my things manually and i still do it to the day because it only takes a few minutes i go through the calendar chop chop chop chop Two days here, two their minimums. You know, you got to be dynamic your pricing.

And your money is your weekday. Your money is really during the weekday. Your weekend is not your money, meaning you're going to get your weekends booked most times. But the weekdays, think about it like this. From Monday to Thursday, where a lot of people don't want, if you lose money Thursday four times in a month, you've lost like 12 days. So what I do is I slash it half price.

If my normal price is $100, I'll go as low as 50 sometimes just to get money in Thursday in. I wait until two days before, like three days before, I see somebody's checking out on Monday, and I know the next person is coming on Thursday or Friday. Like on Saturday, I start going for like 60% of, no, no, I go like 40% of the day before I go on my aggressive. So what ends up happening is somebody would take the four days at a lot. the lower price and instead of zero, I get $300, $300 times $1,200, $1,200, four meaning four weeks.

But if you do it consistently and don't get, if you get zero on those weekdays, you're not going to make anything. So that's why I just said, your weekdays, your money. True, true. Right. Because the weekends, to your point, regardless of really time of year, those weekends are pretty much going to get booked. Right.

But the weekdays, that's where you want to, especially in the wintertime, make those adjustments. I personally am a fan of using some of the software, right? And so I use like beyond pricing. And there's ways where you can extrapolate like a whole two months and you can focus on certain days. So we'll take out the whole two months, eliminate the weekends and then adjust just the weekday prices a little bit lower.

Okay. Especially in the wintertime to make sure we can. Well, you just, you just focus on weekdays with your, with your tool. Right. So, yeah, yeah, which is something I could be doing and just focus on the weekdays, and they just keep reducing it. But sometimes you got to set the right ranges. Sometimes it would make it too high.

I'm like, no, I don't want it that high. I want it lower. That's the problem. Because the computer is telling you, no, you can book it at $80. No, I want it at $60. But you've set the range from 60 to 80, but it's still giving $705. No, I want to go 60 right now. I'm not playing games.

Let's go 60. be done with it, whoever takes it. I don't have to worry about that. Then I see, I see it, I see it all booked. I can show it in my calendar. It's just all, you know, you'll see it's tight. I want it tight. Hey, that is fair. That is fair. Any questions from the chat or calling questions. Rashid, what is one piece of advice that you would leave our listeners with when it comes to the real estate investing game? What's the one thing that we need to know today as far as getting started? I mean, as you know, you need good credit, right? That's like the golden room.

And you need to save and save and save. And also the patient, a lot of times with these deals that I do, if you want the best deals, you got to put up some of your own money. It's very hard to get a turnkey Airbnb property, you know, that just going to just go. You're just going to take it over. and you start right away. So a lot of times my turnaround takes as long as three years sometimes.

I've seen it where I got to get these people out of there. I got to chop it up into pieces. Like I've had a duplex that's onto like a four unit. So I got to do a lot of, you know, changes. And then you got to get a good team, contractors. Those people will kill you because they never, they're never on time. You know, they always just slowing you down, you know. So once you have those people and you take your time, you get more, more margins, better

arrow eyes if you have a little project. I mean, I don't have to go crazy like I go. Like, sometimes I go to the stud. I change everything to the stud and start over and make you what I want it to be. But, you know, like you buy a house that doesn't have a lot of, that needs a lot of cosmetic work. You know, like sometimes I would, I would take, like, a dining room and change into, like, an extra bedroom, you know, like in a basement. For example, I had a property. Like, it was a basement with one bedroom.

But the living was so huge. I'm like, I can put a dining room right here. Why? Why do I need a separate dining room? So what I did was, you know, put a door, you know, put a door and close that dining room up and put a little bedroom. and put a little bed there. So now I advertise it as a two-bedroom basement unit. And to that question, you mentioned you kind of advertise different units.

We have a question in the chat. Which of the units gets books the most, for example, one-bed, one bath versus two-bed-one bath, three-twos, four-twos, kind of. What are you seeing majority of your bookings take place in? What bed-bath count? I think a lot of the smaller units, they get booked faster. Because they're lower priced, you know, they get, you know, most people travel solo or in twos, you know, less than four people a lot of times. So I'll say a bedroom, two bedrooms at the biggest.

I do the big groups, too. I have some property that focuses on big groups. So, but a lot of times it's two ones, you know, but don't go buy a two ones by itself, buy a bunch of two ones in a building. That's when it makes sense, you know. And then you can get $80, $90 here, $90 here, and it adds up to $300 a night, you know. But it's consistent. Small space, you know, I like to do up the bathroom nights.

So they, you know, in the kitchen and that's it. Okay. Totally. Okay. And we have one more question before we transition here. How are you setting up your units? Where are you buying the furniture or using interior decorators? How are you setting your units apart from a decoration standpoint?

So I use a lot of online resources. Like, for example, I use like now, I use this LED mirrors in the bathroom. You know, they only cost like $150. But when people go into the bathrooms and they see the LED lights and some of them have Bluetooth. I buy the ones of Bluetooth now and they go in there and they play their Bluetooth and it's like, If you go to Amazon and put LED lights, vanity mirrors, and it looks so nice. Little things like that make your pop.

So if you go to like Wayfair, if you want to go local, I'll do, you know, a room to go outlet. The one of Jimmy Carter, they have a lot of good stuff for cheaper price. If you want to be able to see what you're doing, and so because, and the big one is TJ Omb goods. I get all my pictures and nice on goods, specific ones that have the high traffic,

they have all the good stuff. If you want to actually see it and pick it up, and I do a for my, for my bed sheets and stuff, towels, I do Costco. Like, I get bed sheets at Costco for 12 bucks, the good quality ones. And so I would stack up on them. And they sell,

the confidence for like $13, $16.15. Yeah. And I stack up a nose. I know. I'm sleeping on them. Right. He knows what I'm talking about. Right.

I go Costco for all those things. I don't go to Walmart. I go to Target. I used to go to Target. No, I said, no. I go to Costco all the time. I go to Costco every week. But it supplies.

Yeah. The furniture, like I said, rooms to go. If you go to, if you go on Wayfair or like, There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a house.com has a lot of like, good quality. Sal, yeah, ours is good. So I get a lot of, I and stuff from house.com. Yeah. So, you know, and that's that.

No, Rashid, we truly appreciate you giving us your night and spending it with the Akaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind group. And we just want to know how can we help you with some of your goals for 2024, whether it's different projects you're working on or something. that we should click into. How can we help you? Well, very soon here, I'm going to, like I told you, I may start co-hosting because I get it a quest a lot and I turn it down all the time because I'm dealing with my own 20, 25 plus units. And so people keep asking me. And the thing is, I've been doing for three, for years, like I told you, I've helped a lot of people get properties, set of properties,

go look at, as a matter of last weekend, the guy was doing, three units, he had me go to three different locations, Conyers, Riverdale, and Liverpool. He said, oh, man, when I finish, you're going to help me? I'm like, man, I need start charging now. I'm just helping everybody for free. It's like, you know, because I'm like this. It's like a lot of people, you know,

I feel like if you help the next man next to you, you know, that way is the way in our community, we can build each other up. It's lack of information. People don't know these things. A lot of people don't get it until I to buy a property and start seeing the money. They said, oh, shit, I get it now.

There's a neighbor of mine. It's actually African as well. I said, trust me, just buy this. He bought a unit in Decatur. It was old. And he bought the place. It was three units. It was two in the basement.

Two units in the basement and went on top. He paid like $300,000 for it. And he said, I went and said, I said, okay, cut this out, put the bed here. business. And he makes about, let me see, I think it grosses about 8,000 a month and his mortgage is like $2,300. And, you know, it's like, oh, man, I see it now. Because even when he started, he said, oh, no, I want $200 for the top. And I said, no, bro, you got to come down. It's power the volume. You want, you know, you don't want to charge $200 a month. And then you only get like

six days. So I said, you just got to be a home. It's like, see, the biggest thing is a lot of people feel like the properties want more. So they never want to, they never want to reduce the prices. No, until they get zero. I'm like, and I do it. It happens to me sometimes. Even though I know this, mentally I'm like, oh, man, I did it again, even though I know it. So I try not to, I try to cut the prices down.

That's like the biggest thing. Cuting down your prices when you need to. It's so hard to do sometimes. You're like, oh, I'll hear people saying, oh, If I cut my prices, then refraps are going to come in there and mess it up. Not really. Most times, they don't mess it up, even at cheaper prices. Every now that you might get it like that, but most times, you're going to be fine.

So ability to cut down prices when you need to at the right time is like the biggest thing. To make this all work, the last recipe. Flexibility. Agreed, agreed. Not taking too much pride in that piece and making sure that you're getting it booked up and keeping the occupancy high, especially in the low season, which is that winter time.

So I just want to say a question is, I may be coerston. So, I mean, coerston is something, you know, I know the process. I know the, you know, I might need a little bit of guidance, no, I'd say pricing and stuff like that. I don't know.

I can learn it, though. I mean, you know, I have the resources to do things, but maybe manage processes is a, you know, fine-tuned processes to make things smoother. Sure, sure. And what we're going to do is we have your contact info as well as the gram, as well as your website.

And we're going to put that into the show notes. So anybody that's looking to connect with Rashid after this, you're going to have his contact info on that piece. And we can help try to blow up this short-term rental co-host business for you. And, you know, we're going to talk. So any conversations, anything that you need on that standpoint, hit me up. We can definitely work through that. And no, we just appreciate you joining us here tonight and we look forward to

We almost didn't make it. The rest of our group. You said what? We almost didn't make it because I had to restore my computer 10 times. I know, I know. Hey, but we figured it out. We figured it out. I don't know what was going out the Chrome, but we figured that thing out. You know, the funny thing, for some reason, like, right before the call, I was so sleepy. Man, I felt so sleep. I felt so sleep. I felt sleep. I was asleep. My wife was, I sent my alarm, and I told my wife, just wake me up if I don't wake up.

She started to wake me up. I said, you told me to wake you up. I'm like, oh, shit. I right. To my baseball, that's all shot. Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. Because sometimes with this, Airbnb, I mean, I have a lot of horror stories.

I didn't even tell you guys. Man, I've had a lot, like, during COVID, I had, like, shootings. I had like people drug dealing like I had one time I had a baby dying of property Yeah This guy was dingled in his baby And baby started crying and I saw on the camera He was panicking

Come to know he was stopping it was stopping the baby I've had a lot of hours I've had to shoot in the way I had to go clean blood So I've been through everything I've had a situation where listen to this guy the girl checked in my property, let the guy in around 3 o'clock in the morning, and she calls me and say,

hey, can you look at the camera? I say, yeah, what's up? I feel fun. I'm like, you feel funny. What happened? I feel like being violated. I said, what? So I look into the camera,

and I see that a guy was coming in at 3 o'clock. But she let him in. Now the cops of calling me is asking, what did I see? But I'm like, she didn't have no code. Why? she said, oh, I don't know if I let him or not. I don't remember. But apparently, she probably had something together and she forgot or now she wants

to get this guy in trouble. It's a whole lot of stories. So you got to be careful with all the things that have cameras in place and know, you know. But those things will happen all the time, but I've just been through a lot of it. You know, I had a teenager, the guy shot in front of my property. He came from Ohio playing B-ball with people, and it came. came from another street and they shot him and ran back to the house. So this, so again, the areas that you're buying would determine this sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, so I've sold a couple

of properties in that. And just so that we can. That was going to be my next question. Yeah, what's been there is. I'm like, let me not stay in. I just told you like five stories in like a minute. Hey, yeah, we'll have to bring it back on how to avoid. How to avoid red flags, you know? I don't want to know. We should have started, we're going to circle back to this. We're hitting at time.

We appreciate you joining, but we're definitely going to bring you back on in a couple of months to circle back in some horror stories. Because I think people will get a lot of one. It'll make the situations they're going through seem a lot more menaceal. And I try to tell some of mine talking about. Right.

Mine is bad. I thought my word had. But Rashid, we appreciate you, man, and we are going to call it a night. All right. We'll hit you up a bit later. All right. No problem.

Thank you, guys. Bye, every me. All right, y'all. See you. All right.