KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Mastering Your Wealth with Finance Tracking and Real Estate

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Summary:This episode dives into the fundamentals of financial management for real estate professionals. The hosts, Brandon and Amanda, share practical advice on tracking personal and business finances, using a structured approach to understand cash flow and expenses. They also discuss real estate investment strategies, including the value of short-term rentals and how to analyze potential deals. The conversation provides clear, actionable guidance on building wealth through disciplined financial habits and smart real estate investment.

Welcome to the Financial Freedom Mastermind Group podcast. Here we're all about breaking free from the 40 to 50-year work grind and accelerating our journey towards financial freedom. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast track your path to financial independence. We serve as a hub for connecting with fellow members during our sessions so you can share successes, ask questions, and keep the momentum going. Thank you, everyone. My name is Ni Yi Adewale, host of the Akaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Group, and I'm excited to be joining you here in the middle of May, and this year is flying by fast. I hope that you guys are still attacking your goals with the same vigor that we kicked the year off with, and I'm excited to be joining you guys on an open session to talk about what's on your mind,

different types of investment, and how we can continue to move toward that goal of financial freedom. One of the things I wanted to talk about while we're waiting for individuals to join on this open session is how do you keep score and stay on track in this game of life, business and real estate? And one of the things that I picked up along the way is it's easy to always think, hey, I need to be putting my money toward buying more investments and buying more investments and over time start to not have anything in the account, right? One of the ways that can make even paying off debt be viewed as a win is if you start to calculate what your net worth is on a quarterly basis. And so quarter to quarter, what I do is I have this spreadsheet and I'm happy to send it to anybody that wants it. But it's an Excel file and it has three tabs.

The first tab is a summary tab where you can look at it and quickly see this is what your net worth is. Here goes your assets and liabilities. The second tab is the assets tab where you put in all the assets that you have and when it comes to properties, it's a good time to check in and see what the value is. And then the third tab is a liabilities tab. And it all calculates together to let you know what your net worth is. And I found this extremely useful, especially in the times where I feel like, man, am I dropping behind?

Because I haven't bought an investment in a while. No, these investments are paying off. And you can see that on that net worth calculator. And so I highly advise that as you start to continue down this journey of investing and really building your wealth that you start to track your net worth. It's not something you got to look at every day. This is not the stock market, right? But it's something that I'll look at at least twice a year. I usually do it once a quarter. I find it kind of fun to see, okay, have property values gone up? Have we paid down this? You know, what does that net worth look like? And I usually,

at the beginning of each year, we'll set actual net worth goal. And that kind of encompasses everything that we're doing from an investing, debt pay down, and everything in the sleep. But again, this is going to be an open session, feel free to throw any questions in the chat and or to join live. Looking forward to chatting with you guys. What do you got? Any questions from the chat or anything, anybody joining live? And I complete side note, while we wait, we had an awesome event a few weeks ago at the Adams Mansion. It was our second event of the year.

We actually had Ricardo Carrillo, who is one of the lenders that we utilize a lot. who's a broker based out of California, fly out. And we were able to host upwards of about 50 people at the mansion, which was awesome. There was good networking. And I've already gotten a couple of new contexts from that, including an electrician that did not have before. So it's awesome. And I just want to give a shout out to Glenn. Welcome.

Happy to having here. And if you have any questions or anything, feel free to throw in the chat and or to join live. the way we do this is typically we'll either have a live session where we're having an open chat like we are right now or we'll have a guest on. And so right now it's a live and open session. And we have our first question, what trends are you seeing in the STR space right now in ATL with the spring and summer season? And I'm going to take this as trends around occupancy.

And what I've noticed this year, and we started to see it a little bit last year, but this year, people are booking much closer to the time. Last year or two years ago, right, two years and three years ago, the trend was that people were booking well out in advance, right, of the summer and things that nature. When I'm seeing across the portfolio of 25 properties that we manage is they're booking a lot closer to the time. And we're starting to see some more extended stay bookings that have nothing to do with traveling for fun or vacation. It's more for work and, hey, I'm looking for a house and things that nature. And so that's kind of exciting. but we're starting to see people book closer to the time.

And you really got to have all your systems and your dollars and numbers dialed in. So what I've been doing is I've actually recently switched from beyond pricing over to Price Labs. A shout out to Justin, Justin Parham, for the suggestion, because Price Labs is a lot cheaper at scale, right? And they allow you to do one-on-one sessions with consultants there. And so I've done a couple over the last two weeks with different people within Price Labs to optimize our pricing and get best practices in and really even try to dial it down for seasonality like, hey, we should be going up here. And this season, we should be going down. If there's only two days left, it should be, you know, reducing the here. If there's a gap here,

we should promote it like this. Hey, if it's the day before the booking, let's slash the prices by 30 percent because we want to continue to boost that occupancy. So this has been time to really lean into your dynamic pricing software and optimize it. Good question. Anybody else. What is top of mile? Yes, they do. You just got to reach out. I don't know if it's a numbers thing, but they definitely do. I'd reach out to support to ask them. But yeah, we have like a person that's kind of dedicated to us who emails every so often and say like, hey, how are you doing with it? And so we're utilizing that. I actually have another call set up for next Friday with them just to work through a couple more nuances that they show me that I'm not entirely sure I get. So I do like Price Lab. It's pretty awesome. And also what I'm seeing is. is we do have individuals that are more people or become more common with selling properties fully furnished. And so as those opportunities pop up, that's a major way to be able to get in with a lot less money, do a little bit of a refresh, revamp with the knowledge that you have and

to be up and running. So much so that we actually have a listing that's coming up. We're going to start promoting it on Friday, but that's going to be a fully furnished one that's coming to market as well. AJ that you may actually know, which is kind of cool. This individual is looking to buy a personal house and their debt to income needs this to be off of it. And so, yeah, there's some opportunities coming to market that I'm excited about from the STR space. Anybody else, what questions do you have? What comments? What things are top of mind for you? One thing that I can't wait for while we wait

is interest rates, right? The Fed has been a lot tougher and a lot of people believed, including me, for this first half of the year. I thought during this first half would be when they would be doing all these rate cuts. Now we're starting to get to election season. I think the first debates are going to take place toward the end of next month. And so the Fed historically has not cut rates once the election cycle starts historically. It doesn't mean they won't do it, but they haven't because they don't want to rock the boat one way or the other for candidates and things that nature. They usually would do it after. And so I'm starting to think it's going to be early next year that we can start to see some of these rate cuts. But I'm excited for when that time comes because I'm planning to refinance a lot of problems right now.

Because I'm at 1099, a couple properties I have are at like 9% interest and things that nature. And I got that subject to property that's definitely going to be worth a bit more in the future. And so I'm looking forward to being able to refinance a couple of these properties and kind of get a lower payment. And I still look at this as an awesome opportunity to continue to acquire properties because a lot of buyers are going to the sideline, right? And so as long as the numbers work for you and you can write out the wave, you're going to come out on the other side ahead of a lot of people that are potentially getting out right now. Anything else top of mind, anyone. Okay. A little bit of housekeeping.

So we're going to be, I'm actually going to be gone for a bit toward the end of August and in. into September. The honeymoon, I got married last year. A lot of people on here know that and we postponed the honeymoon to this year to not hit the bank account with, you know, a one, two, punch all at once, which was awesome. That was a little bit of sales on my side. So we're going on the honeymoon here toward the end of August in the beginning of September. So it's going to be a lag for a couple of these. But before we head out, planning to have a couple guests come on, even some of the individuals that are on the Akaba home team that we may not I've heard from before, want to bring them on to share their story and kind of get back into

the flow of things from that standpoint and can kind of go from there. And if you haven't already, if you're not a part of the Facebook group, you may want to go ahead and join that because now we're going to start to get a little more active in there as far as what events that we have going, different property opportunities that may be coming to market, and also this, right, making sure that we keep you up to date on what guests are coming and when we're going to be joining live. and things of that nature. But for those that are just now joining,

this is an open session. And so feel free to throw any questions that you have into the chat and or to join live. And we can kick this thing off. AJ holding it down with the locks, man. I like it. He got them out today. What's going on, brother?

How you doing? Super good, man. How are you? I'm solid, man. Yeah, not too often. I have them out, but I just got from the gym. So I'm a little sweaty.

And, you know, I got to just air it out a bit. but you know how that goes, just the daily grind. You know, loves just keeping up with my body. I've been doing that my entire life. So I've got the locks out today. I know too many people, they don't see it too often, but yeah, got them out today, sledding them.

Come on. I know you're just showing off because I'm bald out here. All right, guys, I can't roll locks. Okay, go to AJ for that, all right? 13, 13 years. I'm on 13 years, actually. That's awesome. That's incredible.

Yeah, I started losing mine toward that middle part college and there was a Kobe period. You know, remember Kobe had the big throw and there was a period where it was like, hey, you've seen them that, is he going to throw and do the LeBron thing out on Germany or is he going to cut it off? Right? I decided to go the Kobe route. But let's get off the here then.

Kareem, how you doing that? I'm bringing back bad memories the first time with the Clinton. Hey, no, let's hold on. Just for a second. I don't want to get off of it too quick because I've always kind of wanted to ask you so, and then we can get off it after this. So was it, was it just by a choice? Did you just kind of like want to just trim it off and just keep rolling with the

baldy or how to happen. One of those where it was like, okay, you go from getting phased to getting bald phase to like, hey man, like it's looking bad. All right? So, Neve, what are you going to do? Are you going to hang on and have one of those weird, like, hey, it's patchy in one area

and the other area you have no hair? I was like, nah, man, I'm shaving this thing off. You know, I had tears in both eyes when I turned that clip wrong, but we made it happen. Respect it. It does look good on you, so. I appreciate it. in that.

Kareem, how you doing? I'm doing well. Doing well. All good. I just launched that property last week. Got my first five-star review. Yeah, we're off to the races. This is the property in Athens, right?

Athens, yeah. Wow. Okay. And so you have the team, cleaners, all that stuff set up? Yeah. Yeah. I still using, I started working closer with the turnified team. I'm not letting them run the show as.

much as they were before. Now I'm more involved in the selection of the cleaner pod and the clearantee themselves. But they're, they allowed me to, to get closer because they're, they're about to lose me to. So they're like, okay, what do you want us to do? I'm like, I'll let you run the operation, but like, I just need a little bit more oversight because this is the last straw. So I got to know the manager a little bit better. She gave me like a little bit oversight on what's going on and the operation itself. So so far so good. But yeah, the initial setup, a lot of lessons learned a lot of lessons there because this,

this was my first setup. The initial setup, you did it for me. So this is the first time I did my own setup. And yeah, I think one of the like the biggest turtles was the, the delivery. the furniture piece because it doesn't all come from the same place and they don't all come get shipped at the same time. So you need some kind of a depot to hold that furniture. Lucky for me because I'm in state, so I just use my garage to get everything, got all the boxes in, and then I hired someone to take all the boxes and take it to the unit, which is like an hour

and halfway, not that far. But I wonder if like how would this pan out for like out of state investors and that there's a lot of logistics involved. Literally, that's probably the hardest part, right, is the logistics of, hey, we've got all this stuff arriving. We've got all these people that need to be here. And lo and behold, like the package will say it's going to get here at three with everything else. And then it's not there until the next day or it gets delayed. You still need somebody to kind of put that in. And so exactly. In fact of what you've said, what we found is it doesn't make sense to ship everything, unless it's big furniture, right, like, couches, stuff like that, and still ship it directly

to the house. But everything else, we ship it to a central location, right? And then we either rent a U-Haul truck or we have somebody take all that stuff, get it on site. That's one way. Another way, because we do help a lot of out-of-state investors by short-term rentals and other types of rentals out here. And so they'll even pay like a handyman or project management fee, right, for somebody to be responsible for getting all those packages inside.

And then one other thing that you can do is if you do have that project manager that can do that stuff, just put the smart lights on. If you put the smart locks on, sometimes the delivery people, even the couch people and things that nature, if they ring like a doorbell, you'll be able to talk to them and say, hey, guys, I'm just going to unlock the door, please put it inside. But you can't depend on that. Some guys, especially like mattress people, they'll just leave it outside if you're not there, which is been seen. The first thing I did when I did the smart locks, and I did it myself, and it was interesting. Older building, you know, sometimes the door framed, like, things like weren't working properly. And, like, I couldn't figure out why the lock wasn't going into the frame. And, yeah, all I had to do was just get, like, a flat, flathead screwdriver and just flattened that hole to make it clear so that the bolt part, like, goes in.

probably took me like two days to figure this out. So imagine hour and a half, hour and a half each time. Yeah. I'm about to share the listing with you guys now. Tell me, please. What's your thing? Do you want to check this out?

Now, is this the one that we had done maybe a couple weeks ago as a team and kind of analyzed the numbers on? Yes. I got you. I said, just stay okay. We're vested in this. And Kareem already promised that when Georgia is on their street, we can go out there and stay for free.

Hey. Hey. just let me know. When was your closing date? This is an arbitrage deal. Gotcha. Now we remember. Everything happened last month.

Like within the last 25 days, 30 days. I paid the first friends a two weeks ago. Now, is it on Ferbillbooking.com or is it just Airbnb right now? For now, I did Airbnb in Burgo. They did. I haven't to,

I should. I should hold it on a lot on all at Orles. base half as well. I just didn't get a chance. Yeah, with that, I mean, I think it's like why not, you know, um, me personally, I still have yet to get a verbal or booking.com booking. You know, I've been doing this for almost a year now. So I can just maybe chalk that up to how, um, my settings are for maybe verbal or booking. com, but I don't complain too much because, you know, Airbnb does take all the bread.

But at the same time, you know, the more. I'm sure. Yeah. But, you know, the ability, you know, it definitely doesn't hurt, you know what I'm saying. So I definitely, you know. Honestly, the booking.com is going to be few and far between. And VRVO is even fewer. But when it does start to hit, it comes out of nowhere and it comes in waves.

Like, when I look across the board now, you have like this month, probably eight stays that are booking.com across 25 properties, right? But eight stays that are booking.com. And we usually put the premium a bit higher there because we want, you know, you got to, you got to, the time. The type of guests that come may be trying to throw apart or things that nature, so you've got to be careful of that. But one thing that they recently did, and I'm not an expert in this, I go through Desmond, and I'd highly recommend anybody if you are looking to list on booking.com, he does a bit of a consultancy, but he'll get everything set up. You literally just send him the pictures, send him the link to your Airbnb, and he'll set it up exactly like the Airbnb. So I literally was on the phone with him earlier day because

we just did another unit. So I'd reach out to Desmond. How do you recommend it. But he sets it up. And when you start to get bookings, it actually makes sense because we are charging a premium. Career, do you mind if I share my screen and show. No, please do me. There's just us. Take a look, man. Go here. Can you guys see my screen?

Yep. Check this bad boy out, man. Is this a pull-out couch? No, it's a regular one. It's nice. It's a regular one. I was like at budget. I couldn't send any more dollars.

It's not for bedroom. So draining. Four bedroom. Mommy bass. Like, creating countertops. I love the house. It has like an office area. It has like a separate dining.

It has just a dining outside the backyard. Got chairs and like games and stuff like that. Dude, this is cool. This is solid. I'm punk. Now, did you get an interior designer for this? Or did you just stay just all yourself? I got consultants.

consultants. I had already purchased furniture. I got consultants for like the artwork and like the wall, decor and like that kind of stuff. Yeah, I got to figure that out. This guy just dropped off. All that equipment belongs to the landlord. That's not mine. I just cleaned it. But you have the garage. Is the garage your stuff? The garage is a part of it. But the dude just came in and dropped that that piece of equipment, that multi, I don't know, what you call it, that bowflex looking thing, like smack dab in the middle of the garage. And it's carrying like, like 300 pounds worth of plates on it. So I got to figure out how to move it. Did he say you can use this stuff, though? Like, hey, you got to have? No, he dropped it up for me.

Oh, nice. Yeah. It came in with the bike, I think. I had like one piece of equipment. And then And he was like, hey, wait, I got more. I got more. Do you want it? I'm like, I guess. Yeah, sure. Why not? Dude, home gym, I mean, that's pretty solid.

Home gym, huge backyard. Like, this is what can differentiate your spot and people can even come out here to hang out and things that nature. Yeah. Yeah. Except the garage is not really a garage right now. Like, it's ill fit one. It's big enough for like three cars, probably without the equipment. But for right now, or probably just take one.

But then you have the driveway. And that's stuff. Honestly, we're visiting. We almost never give the garage to people, right? From a parking standpoint, it's just another area that you can make your Airbnb be unique. Interesting. Okay.

So it didn't hurt a listing to not have like an indoor barrage? Not so much. Most people are good without it. With one caveat, there's only one listing where we actually use the garage. But the reason we use it is because it's a single family with the end. law suite that split. And so the upstairs, they park outside and the downstairs, you have to go through the garage to park.

So we're like, all right, downstairs parks in the garage. Everybody else parks outside. That's the only one. Everybody else is like, okay, cool. And we just turn the garage into something cool. Makes sense. I think that's my next plan for East Point to clean up the garage and make it a game room. But like nothing electronics.

I don't think it has like any electricity going through there and figure that out. But oh, let me tell you this happened, though, and that's pretty significant. Please. I list this property on Airbnb. Two days later, exactly. I get a message from Airbnb saying, like, the listing will be shut down. And, like, basically, they just gave me, like, seven days to sort out, like, why. And I had to, like, get on the phone and speak to, and you know how it is.

Like, when you speak to these representatives, like, in India or, like, they don't, you know, they don't care. So it turns out that this property had been. been on Airbnb in the past and it had violations from the management. And you would have no way of knowing that until you actually list it. Because if it's off the platform, it's off the platform like all the data is gone. Once you put it back in, when you put that address back in, and it triggers something like in their system and it just spits out that decision. So was it deactivated or were you able to get ahead of it? No, I got ahead of it.

But like, I had three days of like, holy shit, like what's going to happen now? Like my biggest platform, like, I might, like, if, if I can't put it on Airbnb, then it's a no-go. Yeah, so I had like three days of anxiety, spoke to them. I explained that the house has been sold to a new owner. The new owner hired me. I'm a new manager. and I already have a track record with the company with Airbnb.

And this is my listing. It's been gutted. It's been renovated. It's been refurnished. Like everything that was, everything that happened basically in the past is irrelevant at this point. Everything has changed. But it took a few because the first time I emailed, they were like, all right, send

us the documents to prove what you're saying. So I send them the lease and they send them the addendum to the lease and it shows the date and everything. And it still came back to client. they still denied it. They were like, sorry, no. And you can't, yeah, with the email said, we received the documentation after like review, blah, blah, blah, and all that.

We were ready to tell you that, you know, you're still declined. And you cannot appeal again. That was the language. So you cannot appeal again. What I do, I appealed again. So, yeah. So I got it with somebody on the phone and I explained the situation. And, yeah, then I got that approval email.

And I was like, whew. That was close. Airbnb, they're starting to, I think, use AI and other software like everybody is, but there's definitely a learning curve and they're missing some things. Because what you're saying, now that you're playing like the whole thing, that literally happened to me as well, except mine actually got deactivated. I lost a bunch of bookings. And then I had to fight the whole thing and call a bunch of times in a row to get it back

up and running. But the subject two deal that I did, right? And this was in a different way. It wasn't because of violations. They were saying that the previous is not deactivated, even though it was deactivated, right? We were subject to. So we took it over, put it under our account and that, oh, you can't have two of the same address or whatever, right? And so I sent them all the documents.

They did the same thing. They actually went through and deactivated. We lost a bunch of bookings. I was so thankful to still be on all the other sites and be able to use the direct. So we're able to reach out to those people really quick and like, hey, come direct, right? and save a couple of bookings, but we're still awesome. But yeah, whatever Airbnb is doing from an AI standpoint, it's finicky. And so you definitely do have to be careful.

That's a really good call out. Yeah. Yeah. That's insane. I'm hoping I don't run into that, those issues at all with either of my properties. If you're up and running, like, you should be good. I think it has to do with that change of ownership piece. Correct.

Right. And then starting to make sure, like, hey, because a lot of people would deactivate a property and then reactivate it if they've had like bad review or things. that nature, and now they're trying to prevent that. Like, if you have a history with the property, it's the same owner, you've got to just stick with that history and kind of go from there. But, Kareen, we're pumped for you, man. And this is just in time for training camp and football season. And so, have you already set up all your pricing for summer and the season coming up? I just used the price labs. Basically, should just set it up for now. It's a little slow for right now.

So I put it on Airbnb, and I got it booking like the same day, basically. For, and that was last weekend. Nothing this week. I try to play to make adjustments with the, switch up the pictures a little bit, change, like put a dollar here, a dollar there, like in the days trying to, sometimes when you go mess with the numbers a little bit, somehow the algorithm senses that you're active and like, I don't know, I heard it somewhere.

I don't know if it's true or not. We'll see. But like, yeah, just had just had that one booking last weekend. And I haven't had anything this week yet, but we'll see. And for East Point, it's been, it's been slow. I had a, I had a booking for three months. And then that ended 10 days ago. And I didn't get anything after that, which is very strange for that location.

It may be one where you got to do the same thing that you were doing with the Athens one, where you just play around with it a little bit. literally this is this is good feedback because we have a booking at one of the properties that we manage out in Decatur the people have been in there since September right it was a construction company they're paying $4,800 a month to stay there and do like construction it's been amazing that MR-P but they're not going to be extending because they finish their work and they're getting out in 15 days right end of this month on the 31st and so now we just got the confirmation that they don't need to extend so we just open up the calendar and so now I think we do need a

play around with it to because we're out of practice. I don't even know if the pricing and all the stuff was set right anymore, right? It's been nine months. So we need to adjust it and kind of play with the titles to get people back in there. And also block off two days for deep, deep cleaning because I have no idea where we're going to find. These guys are on the rental platform like Airbnb or is just like deck direct, maybe midterm rental? Like, how did you handle that one? Yeah.

So it was through Airbnb. They booked it for like two weeks. They really liked it. And they extended to a month. Then they're like, hey, we're going to be here for a week. while and we tried to move them to direct, but they couldn't figure out how to like get that approved through their system. And they're like, it might be easier just do Airbnb. And so here was a cool tip. What we did before we actually accept the Airbnb because money did not seem

to be issue is we just adjusted the price of about like $8, right? Like took the minimum up just a little bit, right? But over nine months, that's a heck of a lot, right? Eight times, you know, however many days. And they booked it and it ended up equaling out to about $4,800 a month. for 4-Bend through death, which is not bad at all with no clean cost. Man, you guys are lucky. Where are you finding these guests at? Because nine months on Airbags, that's actually it. It is.

It definitely is. We've got a couple of those. And then we've had people that reach out on these different platforms and we'll just shift into the rec and things that nature. But what helps is as you continue to build, just like Korean is doing just like you're doing, you want to start to, you know, it's going to cost a little bit to pay for that direct site so that you can start to move people to that. and market it. At all the properties that we have, we have marketing there saying,

hey, next time book direct, save on fees, right? And we try to get them within our network. And then you start to hit big with some of these insurance companies, things that nature, because they know they're not calling just for one property. They're calling and you can find a solution for them. I think so the longest that I've had is nine months. But it wasn't Airbnb, so that's why I'm like, that's pretty crazy. Like, I've never had anybody reach out and want to stay in my Airbnb for nine months. But I've done so with furnish money. under not that success. And you've, and that's the piece.

Like, you're doing it in a harder platform. Airbnb is kind of just people coming to you, right? Which I appreciate because it's the day to day. But Furnish Finder, you've cracked the code for that. To be able to have somebody stay for nine months and then turn around somebody staying for three months, things of that nature is amazing. And like, I'm assuming that these people may be able to refer you to others. Is that kind of how you're getting the next ones?

Yeah. So anytime a guest leaves, especially for an extended period of time. And we had a really good, solid relationship. I always encourage them to, you know, reach out to other travel nurses or travel professionals if they have any context. But honestly, that's not how I've, you know, kind of continue to roll over those bookings. I think Furnish Finder as a platform right now, especially in particular right now, I'm seeing a lot of inquiries from different travel professionals, especially in the medical field. And they're just hitting up the listings. They're searching for places to stay.

this is probably peak season for a lot of the contracts that are going out right now. So we've just luckily been able to rely directly on the platform, so which is extremely a specific lesson. I know we talked about this before, but are you like texting them or messaging them on the platform or calling them? Yeah. So how it works is they'll kind of submit a bit for whatever listing or property type they're looking for.

And if my property on Furnish Finder matches their criteria, so for example, I have a one bed on bath, which is extremely popular because you have a lot of solo nurses or surgeons or technicians when they submit their bid for a property, I'll get a notification directly on Furnish Finder that says, hey, this person is looking for this property type and your property matches that criteria. So then I can reach out to them or they can specifically reach out directly to my property if they like the photos and obviously I make sure I have nice property description, nice photos, things of that nature.

And they'll reach out to me directly, which I really like because that shows they have direct interest in my specific listing. So I'm a bit aggressive. Even if people don't reach out to me, I'm just sending them out. It is a manual process. But my thing is, I think it's a small thing to sacrifice in the grand scheme of things because, yes, it's a little bit of manual work on the front end, but in the back end, You know, this guest is looking to stay, you know, two months, three months, you know, possibly extending.

So it's like I feel like after I do the initial work is pretty much I just sit back and collect rent. So to me personally, it's not that big of a deal just to, you know, hey, you know, pull out my phone, send a quick message. And I actually have template messages to send out to all of my prospective tenants. So they just get a message. It's not like I'm manually, you know, pulling out my phone and type. out a new message every single time, right? They have templates that you can reuse in Farnage Finder, which is extremely helpful. Man, this is one. I definitely want to start leaning into a bit more. We have VAs handling it, but we're not getting the production that we should

out of there. I mean, we got a bunch of properties, right? Like, we can literally just hop on the phone and just, hey, okay, we got this one. That one doesn't work. We got this one. So, yeah, definitely want to lean into it because it does give you some protection. Desmond, how you doing, man? What's up, man? I'm hanging out. How are you? How are you all? on that. Super good. I was giving a shout out here for the booking.com. I know that means looking to get into it.

So I think that would be a good concept of how to make that happen. Thank you. Thank you. Echo, Desmond. Sorry. But how was your, how was your B&Bs coming, man?

I know you've got everything listed now up and running. Yeah, they're coming well. And at this point, I just want to keep them like that. Like, that's my biggest focus. I kind of,

got nervous a little bit in that things were just going like so well. I'm like, man, like I, you know, it kind of, that can be a scary time, right? When everything's going well, you know, it kind of seems like something has to hit the fan at some point. But yeah, it's going well. Things are set up and maintenance and slowing down, taking a deep breath, especially after the, like that short-term rental setup can be a lot, right? So I'm really just trying to take a deep breath and like, read.

refocus, realign, and make sure I know where I'm going for the next move. Love it. Love it. I don't know if you heard earlier, but Karim was telling us about his recent setup of the short term rental. This is the first one he set up, and it was afar. And so any tips that you have on set up, Desmond, especially when it comes to like the packages and making sure all that's coming around the same time? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say first and foremost, having like a shopping list.

you know, how are the shopping list? Yeah. It is like first and foremost, like, number one, knee shared his with mine, or I feel like, you know, sharing it is super helpful. And just knowing like before you even jump in to order anything, what do you need to get, right?

And I think understanding that, hey, you can start doing the shopping before you even have the property just depending on, you know, what it looks like for you to actually get that property. So even before you've done the, and whatnot, and even, you know, you might not have your credit card or whatever ready. You could still be adding those items to a shopping cart, particularly an Amazon shopping cart, and seeing, hey, this item could come tomorrow, this item ain't going to come for another

three weeks. I'm probably not going to get that, right? So that was super helpful for me because I know I like to, once the clothes is done, get a zero percent APR card and then use that for the furnishing. but even before that, I'm collecting my items. I'm keeping in mind what am I going to get so that ideally, when I do close, I want to get to the point where I can click one button.

I've got everything I need in this one shopping cart. I click a button after that. I don't got to go to IKEA. I don't got to go to Target, nowhere. And I think that's what hurts me sometimes during the setup is, oh, we forgot this. We got to go get that. Oh, we didn't account for this.

Now we got to figure this piece of. out though. So, yeah, planning the head. Agreed. We got it. Yeah, for the 0%. I think I got 15 or 18 months. I forgot. I love it.

A.M.X. and Chase. I didn't know about City and Wells Fargo, but I'll definitely check those out. I got a bunch of AMAX and Chase that's stupidly who I go to. Yeah. When I recently bought my house hack, damn, so crazy. It's coming up almost on a year.

Time flies. But July, I went ahead and got that was offered 0% APR full of 15 months for the Wells Fargo and then turn around and did it again on my wife's profile. So we have, that's the, I love, you know, just partner investing, right? Having somebody there to help you, you know, you can do different strategies along with your partners if you have one. So that's something that we did. I'll definitely take advantage of that. Come on now. There's nothing like it.

And that's a way to just continue to expand quickly. Plus, it helps if you're able to kind of separate the debt to income because you can buy more properties, right? So for as long as you can, if you can keep that thing separate, do that for as long as you can and then combine forces to continue growing from there. But guys, like, this is mainly for AJ and Desmond. How are you guys managing maintenance right now for, for, I know we, we have like less than, like you can't hire. You don't have enough, we, we don't have enough units to hire like a full-time maintenance first. or something like that. So how do you guys manage it right now with a fewer?

Did you want to take that one? You got about 30 units. Nah, that's that's big man over here, man. I'm trying to get like, bro. This is not a question for me because once you get a level,

I'm figuring out. Yeah, I would honestly say that's like, that's been my biggest challenge, right? Is like finding, like building out your team, right? And I think it's trial and error.

and I found guys that are solid and reliable. And I'll say, too, the guys I found that have been the best are the guys I've gotten off of either referrals or oftentimes now, especially. Anytime I see somebody doing work, I'm walking up to him. I'm walking up to him and I'm basically shooting my shot. And you'd be surprised literally in the past month, I met like two or three like bigger time investors

just in the area by literally I'll see them on her porch. I'm approaching him. They're looking kind of confused at first, you know, come up friendly. Hey, I'm Desmond. By the way, I'm on a couple of properties. I met a guy named Merle. He does like ground up. He does all types of stuff.

You know, he's doing like real investing in Atlanta. Like it feels, I think when you're starting out, you know, you kind of have this, what's the word? What's that like fear or phobia? Like where you don't necessarily feel like. Like your, what's that word call? What's that phobia? You guys don't know what I'm talking about. Imposter syndrome.

You kind of, you kind of, I felt weird having my first property calling myself an investor. And even with the second one, it like, I kind of stutter when I say it coming out of my mouth. But it has been the biggest success piece for me talking to people and telling anybody under the sun, hey, like, I got properties and I'm looking for work. So it could be like your grandma, but like they might. I know, you know, some folks that did some work on their house. Like, you would be surprised just who knows who. And I found more success in that than anything, especially going to white pages, yellow pages. That's where I've not found as much success.

So, my, our main jobs, be like, bigger jobs. Bigger jobs, I tend to, like, find, because everyone wants to jump on a big job that's, like, $500 and up. But no one necessarily wants to come to your job. a place for like, you know, to for a stopped up toilet or or a sink. So you're talking about kind of a handyman work. Yeah. And for me, it's, I mean, go ahead, JJ. I was just going to say, I'm kind of my own handyman right now.

But fortunately, I, you know, don't have too many of those issues. I do rely on my cleaner a little bit. I don't expect her. I don't have so her expectation is to clean the property, right? But what she also does and this kind of goes back to what I said previously, you know, building a relationship with your cleaner, right? Because then, you know, if you've built that report with her, she may be, you know, a little bit comfortable about, you know, fixing the toilet seed or maybe a slightly broken door handle and things like that. So that's one thing that I kind of

lean on is just my relationship with my cleaner because she's the one that sees the property. She sees the property more than I do, right? So I would recommend trying to do that if you have built that report. Now, if it's something that maybe I feel like she can't address, then I'll kind of go out and do it myself. But as you scale, I would highly recommend, and I'm not even in this position. So that's the reason why it works right now. But, you know, if you have only, you know, two, three units, maybe you can do that by yourself.

But once you start getting up there, I'll probably see myself, you know, definitely finding a dedicated person. But right now it's a bit manageable. I just kind of, I'm my own handyman in a way. And then I lean on, you know, the people that I already use. Yeah, plus one of that. I'm my old handyman. I try to be as much as I can, you know,

and I'm getting out of this a bit, I think now with the second property now that I definitely have more on my plate, trying to outsource a bit more. But like, dude, I'll admit, that shit's hard. Like,

it's tough. And I was telling me this earlier, like, you can be in a weird phase where like you're not, like, you don't have just one unit. Like you have a little bit more than that, right?

Or you have some operations to be done and, you know, maintenance to be done. But it's not enough to pull, someone in full time. And then when you're doing that like part time vendor relationship, it can be hard to consistently get guys to show up when you only got $20, $30, $40 job. So it's been something I've been like struggling with too and trying to balance as well.

It's like what work do I do myself and what am I trying to learn my, what is out of my scope and needs to be handed off. And usually that's when I'm calling me. Like, hey, look, you got any like HVAC guys? And to that point, and to that point, I love this, right? Because everybody on this call, I think he's getting to that point. Deslin has like three, four units, right? Cream and AJ, you both have two units respectively, continuing to grow.

And this is the toughest part, to Desmond's point. I think Brandon Turner said it best on a recent podcast. I've been listening to us through podcasts. It's pretty awesome. If you haven't listened to, it's pretty good. But he said that in-between phase is the hardest point, and it's almost easier to go big than it is to. you stay small, right? And so if you can just keep pushing through and for short-term rentals,

I'd say big is about five or more. If you can get to that five or more, that's when it starts to make sense to bring on other people and really expand that thing. That was part of the reason we started doing the management piece. I was like, hey, Ben, I'm managing like four, four to six and it's taking up all my time. But if we can get this to 10, 12, 15, now it makes sense to be paying other people, still making money. And then it just becomes its own system. Now we have two properties going live here soon, and I don't even really think about it much because we have a whole team. Now it's like, hey, okay, you want to sign agreement? Sure. I put the little place, the little ravitors in place of, hey, we want to have it done by this timeline. Here goes the punch list,

handed off to the team, and it all gets done so we can expand quickly, but you've got to get through this point. And that goes for long-term rentals, short-term rentals. There's always that period of time where you're starting to grow where it doesn't make sense to hire everything out. So it's okay to do it yourself a bit if you can until you get to that. The higher and I can say, just, uh, I can attest he might have some long nights during the number of periods, bro, because hey, look, when you didn't got no staff,

you the staff, look. It's crazy. I'll leave you with one piece and then and then, and then, unfortunately, got a job tonight. But this is a story of Beckett, but I had started off with the Tribe Glex and I was the quote unquote handyman, except that wasn't handy at all, right? So I'd, I'd find other guys that can kind of help.

me out and not just be alongside with him. And there was this one guy who was a former veteran who was like cut the grass across the street. I did exactly what Destiny did. I was like, hey, man, you know, so you cut the grass, do you do land taping? He's like, yeah, I do landstaping. Also didn't even work. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Built a relationship and that became my guy to come and do a lot of the stuff.

And when I tell you, those weird things with this old house, met. There was times where not necessarily the safest, but like pipes would freeze, right, for one of the units. And we'd have to bring a kerosene heat in light. it and put it into the crawl space, there's barely inability to try to use the fights. That ain't up for the cold, man. Definitely not cold. It was a lot of stuff going on, replacing toilet, all this stuff going on us. But we made it through that point, and we were able to continue growing the portfolio

and eventually be able to bring guys on that that can do even more work. And so long story short, yes, there's going to be some growing pains. This is all perfectly normal. I would just try to niche down into certain areas. Like, Kareem, now you've got two different areas. You've got Athens and you got Georgia. in Atlanta, I would try to focus on those two and build up enough units to where not even have a team for both, right?

And kind of go from there. Yeah. AJ, I hear you on the flooded crawl space. That was crazy. We got it taken care of them, though, so that's all that matters. But guys, I hope everybody has an awesome Wednesday. Kareem will pump for you and the place looks amazing. And we will catch you next week, man.

Peace. See you guys. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast fast track your path to finance.