KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Niyi Adewole: Real Estate Investing to Escape the Rat Race

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Summary:In this episode, Niyi Adewole, a real estate investor and short-term rental expert, shares his journey from a corporate job to achieving financial freedom through intentional real estate investing. He outlines a tactical blueprint for agents looking to build wealth beyond their commission checks. Listeners will learn the power of house hacking, how to scale a rental portfolio with a long-term outlook, and the importance of building an investor-friendly team to support their journey toward financial independence and a life outside of the traditional 9-to-5.

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. Good evening, everyone. This is Nihi Adewal.

late host of the Akaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Group, and I'm super excited to be joining you here on Wednesday, February 19th. We're already more than halfway through the second month of the year, and it's truly been an incredible start to the year. I can tell you that the Akaba Home Network is still making moves. The Akaba Home Realty Team is still making moves, and I'm excited to see a lot of you in person next Friday at our bowling event. And so if you have not already, Please go ahead and reserve your spots for that. It's filling up quickly. And there are limited spots for that.

And so you want to go ahead and reserve. We look forward to seeing all of you there. And it's going to be awesome. So we're going to kick it off with the quote of the week. And so the quote of the week is you have less time than you think start now. And one story to reiterate that, the quote of you have less time than you think and you should start now, is when I first got started in Medical device sales. I was in a development program, right, for 18 months where I traveled around the country, work with different reps, and learn the products. And then I got my own first territory,

which was in Louisville, Kentucky. And so I was stationed in Louisville. There was not an end date in sight. It was just, hey, you got to make something happen. And then maybe a promotion would happen. Thankfully, I was able to do that within 15 months. But the person that I took over for to move to Louisville and take over the territory was an individual that had been there for 20-something years. He had graduated from the University of Louisville. He was a local legend. He played football for University of Louisville and had opportunities to potentially go pro but chose a different career path. But long story short, that person while he was working at my company, all he wanted to do when he retired was move to Destin, Florida and build a beach house because that's where his

family used to travel to and stay there by the beach. And so when he retired from working, they went there to start building that beach house. And within six months, he actually, unfortunately, had a stroke. And when he recovered from that stroke, he had a lot of functions not fully working well. Like the left side of his body forced him to walk in a way where he needed assistance and also didn't allow them to drive normally for a super long time. And so I say all this to say that you don't have as much time as you think. And if you believe that you want to go out and achieve something, whether it's in the long run or, you know, tomorrow, you should start taking steps toward it today. That was actually what made me start to set aside the goal to start crossing

places off my bucket list. A lot of people wait until, you know, you retire to get out. out there and start visiting all these places that you wanted to visit along the way, I'm a fan of doing it along the way. And immediately from 2016 on, I've been taking a trip once a year outside the country to a different place someone to cross off my bucket list. And now we're trying to accelerate that to do even more because you never know. Three questions that came up over the last week that we're going to dive into today. The first one is, I want to purchase an investment property and a primary home this year. Which one should I do first? And I love this.

And the question I'm going to ask, right, initially is, could you do both, right? As people on this podcast know, I love the whole house hack method. And so if you're open to a little bit of discomfort and open to doing both, why not buy a duplex, triplex, quadplex, live in one unit, and rent the others out because you're combining the two. Now, let's assume you can't do that for one reason or the other. Say you have a huge family and you guys really need space. What I would do is buy your primary house first.

because that's the most important. That's your comfort level. That's where your base of operations is going to be. And it's going to change your debt-to-income level. So you don't want an investment property affecting your debt-to-income when you're buying that personal property. And then after you get the personal, then you can go and get the investment property, which is going to cost you a bit more down as well.

So that personal property, you can put as little as 5%, 3.5%, depending on what loan products are available to you. And then the investment property, that's the one where I'd come in and put down a bit more. The second question we have for the week is, are we currently in a buyer's market or a seller's market? And we are firmly at this point in time, which is still the end of winter in 2025, in a buyer's market. When you look at a seller's market, 2020, 2021 was an intense, intense sellers market. And it took all of 22, 23, and a bit of 24 to cool down. And now we're firmly, firmly into a buyer's market, meaning there's more listings sitting out.

there, there's deals getting negotiated that, quite frankly, we're not able to even be negotiated a few years ago. And even on the sell side, we're getting creative in the way that we're helping our sellers get their homes sold. It's no longer putting a sign in the yard and just waiting for people to come. We are actively going out there and finding the buyers for these deals and putting together some creative deals. I can tell you one in particular that we did last year was a seller who actually listed with somebody else. His home sat for like 120 days. And then, we came in and took this listing over. We lowered the price a little bit, but it was still sitting for a while. We ran the numbers to find out, hey, what length would this work as a short-term rental,

right? Lowered it to that amount, which was roughly 20K off from where he was. And then we also brought the buyer to him to put that deal together. And now fast forward to this year, the buyer's happy. They're making a lot of money off of that because they turn the whole thing out into a luxury short-term rental. And the seller was happy because he was able to move it off. office books. And so long story short, this is a buyer's market. Going. We're doing pretty good. Just trying to make you happen. Come on now. And I saw some of the highlights from All Star. That was pretty dope. How was it hanging with some of the celebrities, some of the basketball players over the weekend? It was always, it's always good to get out there and connect with

like-minded individuals and see how we can continue to grow the game and make it a better product for the fans. Come on now. Hey, nothing wrong with it. Yvette. Welcome, how you doing? doing well. How are you doing? I'm super good. Just try and take it one step at a time, one day at a time, and make it happen. Yes. And I know just as a disclaimer, we're going to have another individual joining via the chat, not able to join live due to work, but please feel free to throw some of those questions that you had earlier into the chat. And us as a group will work to answer a few of those. But while we're waiting for those to come in, Yvette, what's new in your world? Well, I just want to comment on one thing. I know you were talking about the buyers market and actually we're starting to

see a lot of the clients coming out now, the volume starting to pick up. So if that was a goal for them for 20, 25, you know, a lot of the clients are starting to fulfill that goal, which is good. Yeah. It helps when you have more properties that you can choose from. Now, the thing that's still scarce is the small multies. I think bigger pockets did an awesome job over the years. And the fact that now you can put down 5%. Those are still ones that move. relatively quickly. This was an incredible deal, right? Naira on our team actually sourced it, and we sent it to a first-time investor, and they hesitated, and it's gone now, right? Literally, it was listed last week. This is day seven. It was listed last week. We sent it to them on

Thursday. They were like, hey, I just need to connect with the family thing through this over the weekend, and it's under contract over the weekend. But it was a duplex in Marietta, renovated. It was listed for 395 and each unit was already rented for 1850. It was hidden at 0.9% of the 1% rule and it was like, man, if I was in the position right now, we'd be after it. But yes, you do got to move on those type of deals. But broadly speaking, more house through out there. Justin, what about you, man? What's new in your life? I say you have your cop too. I do. Have you started to use this thing or what? There we go. My internet's going kind of all over the place. I'm having a little bit of spotty connection, but nothing new, man. Just trying to focus

and trying to get ready to acquire another deal. Sounds like you guys might have had one that would have been right up my alley. But, you know, all good. I'll start looking for something else here now. Just got to get pre-approved and get all that stuff kind of worked out. But probably buy a property in the next three to six months, probably six months, probably more so six months. But we're definitely looking to buy another property here soon. Come on now. And once we get that pre-approval, we're ready to hit the ground running. I think that this. is an awesome year, especially for a lot of sellers that have been waiting for interest rates to drop, man, it has been hanging tight. And in all reality, it may even go up before it comes down

with some of the tariff talks and things that nature. And so this is a very interesting time period. Outside of real estate investing, I don't know that we've talked about this much on here, but what other investments are you guys doing outside of real estate investing? I'm buying my S&P 500 and I'm letting it ride. I probably do about 20, 5% of my income every month until the S&P 500. I'm just letting it ride and I'm investing into my daughter's 529 plan, things that nature. But I'm buying, I'm buying stocks daily because I figured that's a opportunity for me to get money to work for me daily versus waiting for a deal to come up. I'm still putting money away for a real estate deal. But it's like I'm not going

to just let, you know, dollars that I can take pre-tax out of my check. Now I go to work for me. So I do 3% with my job for 401K and then I invest on the side as well. Just try to max out my HSA for the family contribution, trying to max out my Roth IRA, just making sure that I got as many dollars that I can't working for me now in my young life that by the time I get to retirement, I'll be all good and set to go. One piece to jump on before kick, go ahead. That, you know, that sounds good because I know when I was working when I had the W2,

I would always, you know, max out. And, you know, I tell young people when they're first starting out, you know, a lot of times they say they can't, they don't have the money to put away. But what you do also is you start somewhere. And then when you get your raise or whatever, you take that money and you start adding. And then sooner or later, you know, you're at that max, you know, point. Yeah, what I try to do now, event, every year, if we get a bonus, I just automatically put that bonus towards because I wasn't calculating earning that salary anyway. So I can go ahead and knock out a big chunk of whatever it is for the year with that bonus. Because you think about it, your Roth are $7,000.

For me, my family contributes to $8,500 is like, I'm not saying those are small numbers, but once you go ahead and get them taken care of, you really don't have to think about it for the rest of the year. Correct. Right. And at the end of the day, I mean, you know, you're saving. And a lot of times, I mean, you really don't necessarily miss that, you know, that income that you're putting away. And it's reducing your tax liability for certain of those accounts. So it's like, you know, you're going to lose it one way or another. Correct. So you might as well have it working for you.

Absolutely. And I think one of those things that I started doing in the last two years of working W-2 and I still do today, which is amazing, is the HSA account. Like this thing is a hack of hacks, right? It's just growing. And then every time I look at it, I'm just surprising. Wow, okay, it's actually like built something with the mind that's in the S&P, right? And then you can use it for different health-related things, especially the formation

of the family, which is awesome. Yeah. And it's a triple tax benefit. So you can't. You mind talking through that piece? The triple. Yeah. So you're not taxed when you put the money in.

You're not tax when you use the money for a qualified medical expense and the money grows tax free. So you got a triple tax benefit with that account. Come on now. And I hear that there's talks. I don't know how this would actually go down. I don't believe it's actually go down. But there's talks of having income tax eliminated.

We'll see how that goes. I'm not holding my breath on that piece. Don't hold your breath. But, Yvette, what about you? What are some alternative investments? that you dive into outside of real estate? Well, as, you know, Mark and I are looking at retirement. So we've been working with our retirement specialists, you know, prior to, you know, moving down here. So a lot of our money, you know, we started putting into annuities. Also, the

financial planner that we were working with, he's pretty aggressive and he has access to, you know, different funds that other people don't have access to. And we had been working with him probably, well, I guess 10 years now. lose track of time. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So he knows. No, I was just going to say retirement strategy for my, for my parents, right? I'm not quite to retirement age, but my parents are coming up on retirement age. And I haven't did the research because I'm not close to retirement. I'm just kind of doing an aggressive approach building for my retirement. So I definitely would want to connect with you to hear more about what I could be doing for someone that's nearing

retirement in order to kind of, you know, jumpstart that and make sure that they have their dollars working for them and it can last them the rest of their lives. Right. I can connect. you with the financial planner actually and he'll do, you know, a consultation, which will be good. Done and done. I think that'd be awesome. And I think Justin, you're going to drop your, yeah, or I'll text you bet your email for that piece. But no, that would be awesome. And the thing that I always look at when it comes to just the overall wealth building journey is you definitely have to diversify, right? Like, real estate is my main thing. I want to look at actively investing because I feel like if you focus on something and you really truly become an expert there,

you get an unfair advantage. And so I feel more comfortable taking quote unquote risk in real estate. But I still do the SV 500. I have just a consistent X amount goes over here every two weeks. I do it. I just dollar cost average it and leave that there. I'm doing the HSA maxing that one out. When I was working in corporate, we maxed out the 401K. And it was crazy how fast that grew over time. The first year is like, okay, this is just, you know, it really does. It grows. And then five, six years, like, wow, okay, this, you can actually do something with this. This is pretty cool.

And so one other piece that have added in recent years is very minimal, very, very minimal amount, but I do dollar cost average three Bitcoin. So I do Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then also XRP. XRP was given to me by my roofer. And it's crazy because it just blew up this year. But I do those three into real estate and then S&P 500. For those that don't quite maybe understand that are joining the call or watching the call, and you kind of write down dollar cost averaging.

I know we're tossing around a lot of terms and acronyms, and I can remember when I was first getting into this industry, right? You hear a lot of this jargon, but you don't quite understand what people are saying, and that can make people feel a little bit on the outside looking in. Absolutely. And Justin, you're spot on. Thank you for getting me to elaborate on this piece. So dollar cost averaging is not timing the market, but making sure that you spend time

in the market and instead of taking, say, $1,000 and throwing it in S&P 500 today to see it go down potentially tomorrow, it's taking $1,000 and splitting it up over 10 weeks and saying, hey, I'm just going to be consistent. Every week, every month, I'm going to put the exact same dollar amount, no matter if the market's going up, if it's going down. And if you do that long enough, you tend to win. And experts say that you can actually beat most of the market, or better yet, it's very hard to beat the market, the top paid mutual fund investors are able to beat it by about half a percent

or 1 percent, and that's not every year. But if you just dollar cast average the market, you should make 8 to 10 percent on average each year, which is more than enough to get you financially free. And to kind of break that down a little bit more, basically what happens is even if the market's high one day and you buy, you're also buying if the market goes down the next day. So you're making sure that you're buying both ends of the money, you always fall kind of right in the middle. Spot on. Spot on. And, Yvette, did you want to read the question in the chat? Well, yeah, I was looking at that. This is from Claudia. So I started marketing my property at the beginning of February, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting some tours schedule. And I feel like

I need to get more traffic coming in. So far, I've gotten 10 to 15 increase about it, but some people haven't really been following up after I've reached out. Is it still early in the game? Should I make changes to my rent price? What strategies should I use to market my property to get the best chances of getting it rented as soon as possible? And what website slash apps should I use? Okay. So first and foremost, a little more background. This is a house hack that's going to be a rent by the room, right?

And so renting other rooms to individuals where they're going to be co-living. This is something I did up in Boston, right, with the condo. and then also before that was my first apartment. And so Justin, any comments, any suggestions before I jump in? My first question, okay, she says she plans to do a long term. I will say if you find that your strategy of long term isn't working after a good but a time, I would say if you're comfortable, try to move to a short-term strategy because you could get people in there rent it quickly.

If you don't want to be saddled with floating that mortgage on your own, but I'll also say look for sites like Roomster. things of that nature and try to target people in the medical field. You want a ton of Facebook groups, figure out all the housing Facebook groups here in Atlanta area. You want to make sure that you're sending out your listing as much as possible. Because if you think about it from the standpoint, when you're looking for a home, you may come across something you love one day and come across things you hate the next day.

You can kind of get a bit of fatigue and you may not be checking that site regularly. So if you're always constantly putting your information out there, you could maybe find someone that's looking for a home. Like the first area they're looking, maybe they can find your home and they can get connected with you. So it's about putting your stuff out there consistently. You know, the more time you're in front of people's faces, the better opportunity you have of getting that property rent. That was spot on. And Roomster's not even one of I've heard of before.

But, Yvette, you got any to add to that? No, I'm just, I'm going back over accomplished. She was saying that, okay, people haven't followed up. Sometimes, too, you need to reach back out to people also. Because I'm saying, you know, they're looking at multiple. places to rent. So, you know, just having that follow-up call to them. And something that need told me about a long time ago, too, when you have someone reach out, you want to try to close that deal, right? You don't want to be aggressive in, like, drop your pricing or anything of that

nature. But like, if you can do anything sweet in the pot, maybe like a week-free rent or anything of that nature, it's like, you want to look into those things because if someone's reaching out and they're inquiring about it, they're interested. So if you can go ahead and close that deal, you know, a bird in hand is better than two birds in the bush. Absolutely. And I love that quote. And it's spot on. And so another piece to add to this, I think what Justin said is definitely it and what

event said. One, you need to definitely follow up with people and try to reach out to them as quickly as you can. Phone call, preferred. And then text and I think my internet's cutting in that. Can you guys see me? Yeah, we got you now. Yeah, we got you. Okay.

Okay. So everybody is super busy, right? And this is something I even talk to our team about when it comes to follow up with clients, things that nature. We all just have a lot going on in our lives. And it's not that you're bothering somebody. You're actually helping them because they need this. The thing about a lot of these apps is they've also made it super easy for somebody to say, hey, I'm interested in this without having any actual follow-up. And so it's up to you to be that person that follows up and puts yours on the map and puts it back in front of them to say, hey, yeah, you reached out about

this property. I'd love to get you out to go see it. And what I try to do with the scheduling is schedule as many as you can at the same time. So if you have 10 people reaching out, I'd reach out to them and say, hey, we actually got a showing on Saturday from 12 to 2, right? And you just be there from 12 to 2. And the more people you can get in during that time period, boom, you're going to be able to get it rented because now they see each other as competition to get the house. We actually just had a rental up in, but no, it was actually down my way. In Lakewood, right, that we got it rented out who somebody's going to start there on March 1st in about a week from now. and we used that strategy.

We had two renters show up at the same time to view it. Both of them were asking questions and hearing the answers. And one of them ended up applying, getting it, and they're moving in March 1st. And then from a platform standpoint, a couple other platforms to consider is Craigslist, which is an oldie but a goody, right? And Pad Split. Justin, Yvette, have you guys had any experience using Pad Split? I haven't used any of the rent by the room sites.

I'm typically doing a short-term strategy, so I haven't dealt with this at all. But I know people crush it, rent by the room on Airbnb, because you just have such big foot traffic coming from that large platform. And she actually had a follow-up question, too. How long do you think is considered too long before you drop your pricing? I would say that is highly dependent on your financial situation, right? If you can float that mortgage, obviously you don't want to, but if you want to make sure you rent at the price that you have already set, I would say kind of try to hold

out because you've had a bunch of inquiries on the property, right? You don't want to drop your pricing, get somebody in there for a price that you did want to rent to them, and now you got a ride out that 12 months when you could have probably rolled out two months of not getting any income at all and got the prices you wanted to rent. So look at how much you're thinking about dropping your pricing and see if that adds up to holding out for another two months, because then you're at a net zero, right? You dropped your pricing and you got somebody in, but you're still just going to have the same thing you would have had if you would have just wrote it out for two more months. So I'll just really be analytical about it and really think about it

and be honest with yourself about your financial situation with flooding that mortgage. Right. And then you said, she's had like 10 to 15 inquiries about it too. So I mean, people are actually seeing it. Yeah. And like out of those 10 to 15, maybe if you circle back, you make and maybe you can land one to two of them because that's a good bit of leads depending on how long you're talking. You've had it out there. Absolutely. And one other thing to do when you actually we have somebody that is coming to tour, and this is something we did that help set us apart, is we would, and I wish I had it handy, but we would put two or three of the pictures, almost like if you've ever been to go see a house, a listing, or an open house, they'll have

those flyers or the handouts where it has all the details in the house and maybe a couple pictures. We used to do that for our rentals, right? And we put, hey, this is the application link and put a QR code to it, but we'd make it really clean with the bunch of photos that were big, so people can see it and remember, and we'd hand it to anybody that came to tour the house, and it ended up allowing us to get more applications in, because if somebody's going to go look at your house today, they're probably going to look at three or four others as well, right, because they want to make a decision on where they want to live. But the paper that you give them is the one they'll remember.

And so that's another hack, and I can send you an example of what that looks like after this. I just got to find it because I don't necessarily have it anymore. We're going to find it, but that used to help tremendously. I think, you kind of spoke on this earlier, but FOMO is real, the fear of missing out. So if you could let those 10 to 15 people that reached out know that 10 to 15 people reached out, you maybe can get someone to go ahead and get it. You know how it's been, if you've ever tried to buy anything online, it's like, hey, I got three other people trying to buy this couch.

So you know, if you don't go get the accounts now, there's a possibility it could be gone. I think the same thing happens in the housing market. That's why we saw two years ago people were paying a lot over-axing price to, ensure that they could get the home. So I would definitely lean into that and try to make sure you let people know that other people are trying to get this house. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, this has been an awesome conversation on this and shifting gears a little bit. What do you guys get upcoming that you're excited about? I know Justin, you talked about getting that next house hack later this year. That's going to be awesome. And Yvette, I know we're working through,

continue to ramp up the real estate business. But what is new? What are you guys excited about for in 2025? Personally, I'm excited about some trips that I'm going to be taking. So time to get away. We're looking at Spain and Portugal. We're going to go with the group that's here. I live in a 55 and above community. So it's one of the clubs here. They're planning a trip. And then in the summertime, we'll be in North Carolina. And actually on that trip, we might, you know, consider looking at some property there, too. Hilton Head. Come on now. Hey, when you get the property in Hilton Head, all I ask is that I get one weekend a year, free, one weekend a year. Hilton Head is beautiful. I love the beach down there.

And I think that's the closest one driving distance to us. But I'm on need. Hey, come on now. We got to try. You never know unless you're at. But it's, it's cool to to be able to take time away and travel. And Portugal actually got to visit for the first time last year, beautiful, definitely could live there. Like, it's an awesome location. One of the things I'm excited about is we're going to Spain as well this year, taking a trip to Barcelona this summer, so super excited about that. But Justin, what you got? And what's you excited about this year? Speaking of truth, man, I don't want to switch gears too quickly. How are you doing these trips? Are you credit card hacking, all the business points you're getting from the multiple homes that

we're listing on these short-term platforms? So a little bit of everything. Definitely have the Delta card for the real estate business. And so all the expenses that come through the real estate business, we're putting on that. And so we're able to use some points for that piece. And then we've also run what we're doing as a company trip, right, for our top sales agent each year. And so that's part of this as well. So this whole thing's going to be a write-off because technically a company trip, just like,

you know, all the big companies do as well. So a little bit of both. Nice. I need to connect with you on the company trip aspect of things because. I got like 300,000 credit card points, man, that I'm looking to leverage here soon for quite a nice trip. And if I can also have some of the other calls with it being a company trip, I definitely like to do that because I definitely want to take the opportunity to help my partner be

able to take a trip because of something that we've been looking forward to. Come on now. Yeah, let's definitely connect offline. I'd love to talk about that piece. It is pretty fun. But what you got, man? What are you excited about? Man, I'm just excited about my little girl.

She's going to be one year's old here soon. So she's growing steadily and just trying to make sure that I'm setting up the best things that could help her in her and her life. You know, she has a long life ahead of her. So if I can put a place now to help her as she grows, I think will be pretty good. Come on now. Nothing like it. Legacy. It's amazing, man.

I think that you are setting the example for future generations. And the sacrifices made now are going to be well worth it when you're able to take step away and truly have time off and not worry about any income or things that nature with these investments you're making, which is awesome. 100%. Get free is to go. Come on now. Hey, we're going to make it happen.

But guys, I appreciate you joining tonight. I look forward to seeing everybody next Friday at the bowling event. Justin, we need to connect with that offline as well. Okay. It's completely different. But I hope everybody has a good evening and we will catch you a little bit later. All right. Peace.

See ya. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast track your path to financial independent.