Wake Up to Wealth - Revolutionizing Real Estate: The Rise of PadSplit with Atticus LeBlanc

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

In episode 53 of Wake Up to Wealth, Brandon Brittingham interviews Atticus LeBlanc, the founder of PadSplit, a revolutionary platform that is changing the landscape of affordable housing, as he shares his journey from a commercial real estate broker to creating a new asset class in real estate focused on room rentals.Tune in for insights that can transform your approach to wealth and real estate investment! SOCIAL MEDIA LINKSBrandon BrittinghamInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mailboxmoneyb/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandon.brittingham.1/Atticus LeBlancLinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/atticus-leblanc-3960466/WEBSITESBrandon Brittingham: https://www.brandonsbrain.org/homePadSplit: https://www.padsplit.com/==========================SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS:Rocketly: https://rocketly.ai/Accruity: https://accruity.com/

This is Wake Up to Wealth, a podcast dedicated to helping you change the way you think about wealth. And now, here's your host, Brandon Brittingham. Hey, this next segment is brought to you, but my good friends at rockately.com. That is rockately.com.A.I. If you're in the real estate business, especially investment side, and you need a platform that can run your real estate business and talk to leads through AI when you're not able to talk to them and can qualify and get to all the leads you can't get to.

Plus, it has an amazing piece of technology with a called lead detector that helps get all the people that come to your site and not opt in to opt in to turn into a lead. These are my good friends atrocketly.a.I. I'm part of this company as well. I use it to run my real estate business, my real estate investment business, go check them out.

Again, rocketly.a.I. And thank you guys for sponsoring this segment. Hey, what's up, everybody? We are back on another episode of Wake Up to Wealth. And I just want to say thank you guys. We are consistently been one of the largest shows on Apple, consistently top five in investing, a few weeks we've been number one. Thank you guys so much for your support.

Um, the last three episodes we've averaged between 100 and 5,000 and 110,000 downloads. So I thank everyone for your continued support, for your support of the show. Thank you all for tuning in because we're going to continue to bring you things that we believe are relevant and give you real information and have real conversations. And thank you guys so much for supporting this format. And today, what's really cool is something that I'm passionate about and I think it's a place where the real estate world is going. We're going to talk a little bit about Pad Split, and I'm not going to take any thunder away because we actually have the founder of Pad Split on the podcast today, which is

really, really cool, Atticus Laban. And I was just talking to him, and he has ties to Maryland, which is how crazy the world is. But thank you for so much for being on the show with us today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brandon. It's really a pleasure to be here. and yeah, love that I have this opportunity.

So really cool, right? Like you guys have, I would say, revolutionized. I mean, you've created a new asset class in real estate, number one, but you solved a really big problem, which I think is getting worse every day and it's not going to get better. And that's affordability in housing. If you would, just kind of take me back to the beginning of like, when did you get this idea? How did you formalize it and say, all right, I'm going to go do this.

Yeah. Yeah. So we were talking earlier. So I started really buying houses in 2008. I'd been a commercial real estate broker. And then in September of 2007, my first son had just been born. My wife told me that she was going to leave her job. and over the next three weeks, all of my deals collapsed.

And I had like no income for all of 2007. But fortunately, I bought a house out of foreclosure when I was 23 that had some equity. So I could borrow 50 grand against that house. And with that money, started looking at what houses were available in Atlanta, where I live now, for 150 grand a year. And there was like this one day in November, I remember distinctly, There were over 1,100 listings for under $50,000 on the MLS, and they were not burned out shacks in the worst parts of town. These were basically livable houses are close to it. And they were everywhere.

And so that's kind of where I cut my teeth and really just jumped into real estate investing, thinking, all right, I don't want to rely on anybody else to determine my ability to pay for a living for my wife and my newborn baby. And that kind of started my journey to financial independence, just thinking, look, if I can get rentals, if I can have like 10 rentals on my own, then I can replace an income. And I don't have to worry about somebody else making a decision that's going to impact my life. Yeah. And so that was really the start. Interesting, I never got to 10 on my own, but over the next 10 years, basically owned and managed over $100 million in real estate, mostly in affordable housing. And so I got to know that space really, really well, single family rentals, multi-family rentals, market rate subsidized, the full gamut.

But in 2009, I had my first vacancy. One of the first houses I'd rent and became vacant, where if she had moved out, and I'd gotten to know these neighborhoods, literally like the back of my hand, like I had every house memorized because the technology didn't exist to be able to bid on houses really, really quickly. So it was the old fashioned way. You saw something come up, and I had to know it in my head to know what price we wanted to pay for this house.

And then our real estate agent had our power of attorney. So because I got to know it so well, I saw these rooming houses that were everywhere. And like my degree in college was in urban studies and architecture, but I had never heard of rooming houses still existing. And it was something that was like a hundred years old in New York City. But I saw these things. things that existed everywhere. And so when I had this vacant house, there happened to be a rooming house right next door. And there was this guy named Mitch, who he was earning Social Security income at the time. He was on disability, made $735 total income per month. And Mitch comes

to me one day as my house was vacant. And he's like, hey, our house is getting foreclosed. And we're all going to get evicted. Can me and my buddy Otis come rent rooms in your house? And first of all, like, I was terrified of having a vacant house because people, were stealing pipes and copper and wiring and appliances and the whole bit. And so I was like, yeah, absolutely. Like, come rent rooms in this house. But tell me, how does that work? Like, how do you actually do it? And he kind of walked me through at least the basic needs that he had. And a couple things became clear to me. One was if he was making 735 a month, and I know that every property manager in America requires three times a monthly rent as an income threshold,

he's only going to qualify for $200 and change. Well, in 2009, like the world had ended from a real estate valuation perspective. Houses had never been cheaper. Apartments were a disaster. Like, housing hadn't been cheaper in my entire lifetime than it was at that point. And this guy who has federally guaranteed income in the depths of the great financial crisis cannot qualify for anything. that is not subsidized. That was crazy.

And yet, I did the math, and I had four bedrooms in this house. And if Mitch moves in, he was paying either $100 or $125 a week. Otis was paying the same. The third person who moved in was a woman named Linda, who worked at Wendy's. Interestingly, she's still there 16 years later right now in the same exact room. But yeah, I had these four rooms, and I realized, well, wait a second. If I have four people paying me this rent on a per bedroom basis, even after I take away all the utilities and furniture, which was the stuff that they needed in order to make it work,

I still make more money doing this than doing it the old way. Why the heck isn't everybody doing this? And why have I never heard of it? And so that was really the first introduction to this concept. And then over the next seven years of operating a portfolio of all sorts of housing, I realized that on a profit and loss statement basis, like just comparing the P&Ls across all these different asset classes, this thing beat the pants off of everything else, like everything. It wasn't even close. The problem was that to make it work, I would only collect money orders. Okay, this was like well before electronic payments processing technology was really a thing.

Right. So I would have to go multiple times a week to collect rent from the property to make sure that the thermostat was set to the right temperature to make sure that there weren't any like really big problems or the people weren't being filthy or whatever. And so I knew the reason this model couldn't scale was because there was just so much operational complexity that went into it. And so when I got to a very different point in my career where I wasn't struggling to pay the bills, I had four kids at that point and wasn't worried about college, had really gotten to the point where I wasn't stressing. And I had found financial independence through real estate. And I thought, well, like, what do I want the next part of my career to be and what do I want to do with my life? And it was, hey, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, how do I make sure that I have left some legacy for good in the world? And I went back to this idea and comparing traditional like capital A affordable housing subsidized models versus this. And I was just really confident that individual real estate investors and homeowners, like just the power of the masses,

was so underappreciated and was really the mechanism to solve this massive housing problem and that if you could if you could make this rent by the room model scalable and take away that operational complexity then you could leverage those masses to go solve this problem independently without government assistance and so that was like the the impetus for the idea and then I had seen of course over those years how Airbnb had just grown into this massive phenomenon on at the time that I wrote the proposal for what became Pad Split, they had six million listings. And I looked at the largest single family homeowner in the country at the time, which was Invitation Homes, they had like 60,000 houses. And like, it's a hell of a lot of houses, right? I mean, it's an incredibly valuable company, but I wanted to solve this problem. And so I didn't care about owning the property.

I wanted to solve the problem. And the Airbnb strategy from just an online technology-enabled marketplace made way more sense than going out and trying to buy a lot more property that I didn't really feel compelled to do. So, yeah, that was the beginning. And then, you know, for what we do now, for listeners who don't know us, at PadSplit is a two-sided marketplace, very similar to Airbnb or Uber. We provide access to private rooms in these typically shared homes, they're not always. And we focus on the 50% of the American population who can't afford their rent. Anybody who's working hourly jobs, anybody works at an airport minus the pilots, anybody works at a hospital minus the doctors, literally anyone who works in retail.

So it's a tremendous number of folks. And then we try to take that operational complexity out of it for the hosts and show them how through this model, they can make more money than they ever could through a traditional rental or in many cases, even a vacation rental, just because of the way that the economics stack up for renting by the room. And then we help fill the rooms, we collect all the payments, and we build the technology and kind of services that just make it scalable so that if you want hundreds of these things, you can do it. And if you want to do five, it's a lot easier. that's that's fascinating so you have this idea right you've got you got your teeth cut on own in real estate do you have a tech background like you know that's a yeah i mean this is a big leap from i own real estate to i'm going to create essentially the technology platform for room renting in

this country right yeah yeah yeah no it's a great it's a great question uh and you're right i had no I had no business doing it, but I didn't have any technical background. I was really housing, construction guy, and, but I knew that it needed to exist as a technology platform if it was going to scale. And so from really all of 2017 and then most of 2018, I was networking just with anyone who would talk to me. and I was really fortunate here in Atlanta. That meant a lot of people who were just the technology community, much like the real estate communities. It's a pretty small, small world.

And people are happy to share their knowledge and experience with you. And that ultimately led me to an organization called TechStars, which is a technology accelerator for really small startup companies. And that just amplified my network to the, the nth degree where I could get in touch with just about anyone and was able to draw people to the idea. I'm still non-technical, but we've got 220 staff now and we've got a massive technology team and yeah, just recruited the right people early and attracted to them to the idea and the mission and then just made sure that the fundamentals were working.

That's amazing. So I do, I'm not. technical, but I've been fortunate enough to be a part of a couple of tech startups, been on the board of a few companies and on the board today too. So there's a lot of in between of what you just said, because I've experienced it, right? So just because a lot of people that listen to show, they're entrepreneurs, they own companies, they run companies. So you had this idea, right? obviously to build what it is today was different when you started but still a decent undertaken financially like did you have to go out and raise money did you have to find a co-founder um because to me this is it's amazing of you not like we've had other people on

the show we had a Stella Hahn a couple weeks ago who's somebody I'm super close with yeah fractional and like it makes sense because she's like I'm a software engineer Right. Yeah. So like it's like you saw a problem. You knew how to build it. In your situation, you saw the problem. You probably in your head knew how to build it. But someone else actually had to help you build it. Like did you go out and raise money? Like what was kind of that next step of like, okay, this is this is real. This is no longer an idea. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's one really important point that you're touching on here, which is when when I was in that situation in 2007 where like I just needed to. to find some form of capital to feed the family. Like, there's no way that I could have taken this much of a risk to do this. But in 2017, I was in a totally different spot in my life where... Because you had been an investor, right? Yeah, exactly.

Like, I had income. So I could bankroll at least the first couple of iterations. And I could go pay a local web studio to, like, do the first iterations of what the technology was ultimately going to be. Now, it wasn't right, and it's changed dramatically since then, but I was financially stable enough to be able to do it, and that's only because I had rental income coming in from all those properties. So, like, that's a really important point.

Absolutely. But, yeah, I mean, I knew pretty quickly that this needed to be a venture-scale business, and that I did not have the amount of money necessary to go fund it. And so really, I had enough to make it through tech stars. And then coming out of tech stars, I just wanted to, like we had a technical team at that point and was able to pay them. But I wanted to go raise venture capital. And we went to California and raised our first round. Let's see, April of 2019.

And then we raised, that was our seed. We raised $4.6 million. And then we raised $10 million for our Series A. Oh, by the way, that was middle of COVID. Like, we were supposed to close April 1st, 2020. And so we got left at the altar by the guys who had written our first term sheet. We got saved by our existing siege investor who ended up leading the A. And then we kind of did two different closing rounds there.

And then we raised a little over $20 million in 2021. And since then, we've raised like a bridge round, but we've been operating cash positive since Q4 of last year, which has been great. It certainly makes it a lot easier to sleep at night for the CEO. And yeah, now we raise debt. So it's a lot of money. I mean, we have over 40 million in equity. and then and then a lot more than that in over the years in debt but but yes it's working that's pretty cool so um so were you ever at a point in maybe early in the journey right

I like I you know it's cool when we get to these levels where you know you had financial independence before you could do this and people see this stuff and they're like man these guys had it easy you know they make it look easy and rarely do the people actually know that at one point we had to burn all the boats or we were a couple of days away from shutting it down like was there ever a part in this journey where you were like dude i don't know if we're going to get through this um so i'm a firm believer brandon that like the company doesn't die until the founder says i quit right yeah yeah and i've been an entrepreneur for 20 years like i knew a enough about myself to say, burn the frickin' boats, like, let's go.

Like, yeah. I mean, in, in COVID, when, when our, uh, series A fell through, like, I took no pay. I mean, a number of our staff took no pay. Almost everybody took pretty significant voluntary pay cuts just to be able to float through the, the, the summer. Um, let me quantify that for a second. If you don't know what we're saying and you're listening to this, the, they were at a point where when he went to the Series A, they needed capital to get to the next leg of the

company. Without it, you're in trouble, right? And you probably at that point in your Series A, you probably had a burn rate that was probably decent. Yeah, we had basically three months of cash left. Right. So if we would no longer be able to operate. Right. So if you're listening, three months of cash left and basically the funding in the Series A didn't come through. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, but even then, honestly, Brandon, like, I knew I wasn't going to quit. I knew that, okay, we might have to reset. But I think that's, like, it's really hard. And again, I'd say myself in a different scenario where I would not have been nearly as resilient to be able to do that. But as an entrepreneur, like, you just, you go through enough stuff and you just build. armor around yourself to be able to go to war every day. And yeah, I mean, I remember the closest I ever came was probably in 2009, honestly, where we were talking about just Section 8 or affordable housing earlier.

I only bought three houses on my own, on my own balance sheet. I was using credit cards and like every bit of cash that I found. or could kind of beg borrow or steal to get a deal done. And it was the last house that I had. And I thought, okay, like, I've done at that point 20 houses on Section 8. So, like, I felt like I knew what I was doing. And it was really obvious that, okay, now we are definitely in the financial crisis. Like, houses have never been cheaper.

This thesis that I had in late 2007 totally makes sense. and we're going to be great. And then this, this inspector for the housing authority came through this last house that I had in 2009. And like, I needed, I needed this deal to close. I was on, I was on fumes. And, and she just tore me a new one, man. Like, yeah.

Said I needed to replace all the windows in the house. And, like, I was barely holding it together. I remember escorting her out the front door and just collapsed on the carpet in one of the rooms thinking, like, how the hell am I going to go tell my wife that, like, as much sense as this made logically, we just lost everything. Right. And yeah, the only reason we made it through was, like, after laying on the floor for 45 minutes, I remember my mom used to always tell me, don't you ever feel sorry for yourself? And just thought, okay, well, like, I got to figure out what the next. next step is um the problem was the windows wouldn't go up and stay up and this it was this old kind of craftsman style house i needed some way for these old wood windows to stay up and so i found

these things called sash springs courtesy of an old bob villa article that like or 48 cents a piece and so i bought the entire ace hardware load of of uh of sash springs to keep the windows up and and that works so literally like the width of a couple millimeters what was what saved me from just utter financial ruin. And so from that point forward, even losing all our money in the Series A in 2020, I was like, all right.

I'll figure it out. Yeah, we can do it again. We can do it again. So, yeah. That's cool. So now, so that's,

I love, I love talking to founders, you know, and any entrepreneur, because I like people to hear the real shit of like, you know what I mean? You've built a massive company because you had the perseverance.

to do it and you have the vision to do it. And there's a lot of times when people get in that position where they're back against the wall and they'll quit, right? And so I just, I always want people to actually hear the real story of how this, how things really work out. I'll give you context. Last January, I was sitting in a room with one of the founders of, not read, but the other founder of Netflix.

And he talked about how they got on the jet after they were denied from Blockbuster. And he said, we were 50 million in the hole. and we had $5 million in cash, and our burn rate was $18 million a year in 1996. And I'm sitting there like, oh, my God. Yeah. And he says, and I got on the plane together and said,

we got to go raise more money. And my, I mean, can I ask a question? Yeah. And as I said that to the founder of Netflix. I said, hey, can I ask you a question? I said, yeah, I said, dude, how do you? How do you beat $50 million in the hole with a $15 million burn rate a year and $5 million in the bank and say, we got to go raise more money?

And he said the denial from Blockbuster gave us the fuel that we had to beat them. Yeah. Right. And then we knew we had no other choice. That was our last lifeline. We had no other choice. And it, you know, he goes on to tell how it completely pivoted how they looked at the company. So I'm glad you mentioned that.

So going forward, right, you get around the Series A, you get a couple other rounds. But now you've, I like you to talk about like a little bit of scale, like from how many units do you guys have now, like cities, where you're at now. Because if you've lived under a rock and you don't know what Pad Split is, they've literally changed. This is, this comes up. I help run a mastermind called Border Room, great friends with Stella. We see people raising money to buy pads splits all the time or fractional. It's literally changed the asset class for the investor, but you also change the lives for people who now can get into affordable housing that couldn't.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was the whole idea. It's like two problems with affordable housing. Like one, you have to increase supply and two, you have to provide better access, right? When Mitch came to me and he's got federally guaranteed income, but he doesn't qualify for anything there are reasons why like one this three to one income to rent ratio that everybody uses okay well it's bullshit like it's someone just made that up and and said like here's here's the rule uh

why do we look for upfront deposits okay that's another one huge barrier to entry that's gonna keep people that need affordable housing out of it landlords who are listening think oh well that's because i need to make sure that they can pay um well sorry but that's bullshit too can ask you hey let me ask a question on that if you know um one of your counterparts the the that got brought up in question and it was some statistic of like the the statistic that you guys have you've actually proved that these without putting up to they will pay like your you guys actually have data and statistics on that yeah our our effective collections rate for owners uh has never dropped below 97 and a half percent There you know, ever.

And you're talking about low-income, low-credit population. The reason why, and I was just excoriating somebody on LinkedIn for this yesterday, it's like, why is rent due on the first of the month, right? I mean, any audience members right now, I don't know when we're going to air, but like, what day of the week is the first of the month for next month or two months from now? Right. It's always different. Nobody knows.

Like, we're recording us on Wednesday. I know today's Wednesday. And guess what? All of your tenants know today is Wednesday, too. But they don't know, just like you don't know, what day of the week the first of the month is, because it has no correlation to when they actually get paid by their job. Yep. Good point. And so if a landlord wants, if they theoretically want to get money, if they want to get paid, then why on earth would you pick this arbitrary first of the month? And that has way more to do with whether or not you get paid than that upfront deposit, right? And so for us, like instead of saying rent is due on the first of the month and it's late on the fifth or whatever, and then you have an electricity bill and a water bill and a Wi-Fi bill. bill, they're all due on totally different dates and you got to go figure it out. But remember to

prioritize that one that's doing the first. Well, no shit. Like they don't. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really difficult system to figure out. Whereas if you say, hey, you know what? You have one payment that includes everything and even includes access to telemedicine, but it's always due on Wednesday. What's the likelihood that they make that payment? If you think that people are motivated for housing and that humans want to be housed, they're going to do everything they can to make that payment. And so that's really what happens. But so we remove those traditional barriers entry like a minimum credit score or upfront deposit and we provide access to these rooms.

And the way we create supplies to say, okay, well, look, we actually have in this country right now more supply of housing than we've ever had. Most people don't think that. It's not what you read in the papers. But if you just take the total square footage of housing in the United States today and divide it by the total population and then you take that same. equation and you run every census. So like 2010, 2000, 1990, 1890, all the way back to 1950. In 1950, in this country, we used about 299 square feet per person. Well, in the U.S. right now,

it's almost a thousand square feet per person. So don't tell me we don't have enough housing. It's that we've got empty bedrooms galore where you could house everybody you needed to house with less than 1% of existing homes in the United States. But nobody provides access to those rooms. So, like, that's how you solve supply, and then you solve access simultaneously. And so that's really what Padsplit does. And the way that we do it is because we go to all of those entrepreneurs, investors, and say, do you want to make more money?

That's it. Like, do you want to make more money? And if they say, yes, they want to make more money, we show them how they can make more money through a model that actually provides more affordable housing. And if you follow our rules of this low barrier to entry housing, it's actually attainable for 50% of the U.S. population, most of whom can't afford their rent already, then you have this massive market of people that can move into those rooms.

And then the cycle starts again, right? Just like when I moved to Atlanta and I rented a room when I first came here, I think those people are moving in. They're saving money. We average $366 a month in savings. Meanwhile, those owners are earning 2x increase in that operating income compared to what they were doing before on average. And the people who move in, okay, they're saving money. They're going back to school.

They're saving for a car. They're saving for that deposit on the apartment, buying a house, starting businesses, like all of these things just by giving people that opportunity. And so for anyone who's an entrepreneur, like, you've been there. Like, you know what that feels like. And it's just the same thing over and over again where you're giving other people that are just a little bit behind where you probably are now an opportunity and a shot at their better future. Yeah, that's amazing point. So now you guys are, how many properties are on the platform? So we've got 28,500 plus units right now.

We're adding the equivalent of like, depending on how big your standard apartment complex is, between six and 18 apartment complexes every month of just new inventory across the U.S. We've got over 200 cities at this point, but like 36 metros, I think. we'll open anywhere in the U.S. right now that we just announced we're launching Seattle, Sacramento, and Nashville. Yeah, West Coast needs it bad. Yeah, yeah, they do. But yeah, it's like it really is just an army of regular folks who are part of the solution within their communities.

Did you ever think when you started it that you'd get to, obviously you guys are going to blow past that number, but that's still wildly impressive. Did you ever think, man, I'd build this platform and have 28,000 houses on it one day? Oh, yeah. That's why I did it, man. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like, you've got to drink your own Kool-Aid. I think if you're going to go down this, go down this path.

No, in all serious, it's like we've got our eyes out on a million by 2030 and just doing everything we can to get there. And it sounds crazy because we're 28,000 now. But at the end of 2018, we were at 82. Yeah, I remember talking to you guys. And at the time, it was maybe 5 or 6,000 units, you know, early in your early iteration. And you guys weren't even over here at that time in Maryland yet. Yeah. You know, it was still super, super early.

And, I mean, it just doesn't seem to mean like that was that long ago. to go from there to where you are now. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean. It's like you, you project that you're going to be a lot farther along than you are. And certainly as a founder, CEO, like you always want things to go faster. But it is still really cool when you look back, regardless of if you didn't make it that far, like, 28,000 versus 82, you're like, man, that's pretty cool, right?

That's pretty cool. And what really just moves you. you is I look back at individual hosts who started with one and who have completely retired. Like they are totally financially independent because of this model. And I look at individual members who were full-time employed and living in their cars and now have started businesses or in some cases bought pad splits because of this model. And like that's the stuff I love. I was on a, I was on a webinar yesterday with the sub two community. And this guy who I, I have I have no idea who he is, but he was talking about buying a pad split and doing a deal with Pace

Morby, and he's talking about the advantages of vacancy in co-living, when you have multiple bedrooms rented and you have one vacant, it's way better than if you just have the entire apartment or entire house that's vacant. And like, I've been saying this line, like, 10 years. And so to hear your own words echoed back to you by somebody you don't know. It's just a really cool feeling, and you just get the sense that the power of these individual entrepreneurs has really taken over. Yeah, so it's funny. I was two weeks ago, I helped run a mastermind called Boardroom, and it's, you know, a concentration of literally the best of the best real estate investors in the United States.

And the first day, we always open it with everybody that's, you know, a concentration of, you know, that's at your table, hey, tell us, you know, give us a great share, you know, something we don't know. And there was a younger guy, he's probably early 30s, you know, real estate investor. And he's like, hey, I bought one co-living property. I figured it out. Now I'm up to seven. And he's walking through and telling us and telling his cash flow and all that kind of stuff. And he's like, yeah, man, he's like really struggling as an investor, you know, I was getting knocked around. It was really difficult. And he's like now, he's like the co-living gave me basically the basis to now go build out the company I wanted to build on the investment space. And now he's,

you know, he's consistently shifted his model where that's what he goes. You know, he really goes. And that's what I mean. And he created a different asset class for the investor because this is real time. This just happened. This conversation just happened at the table I was sitting at an boardroom. Yeah. So it's pretty amazing what it's actually done for the average investor that's out there, but also serving the purpose of the community, which is pretty remarkable. I'm going to ask you three more questions and they'll be quick.

Yeah. First is what do you think is, I know this is probably hard to tie it to one, but if you, the one that pops in your head, what do you think around this whole model, around pad split, around growing the company? what do you think is the best decision if you could pin it to one what's the best decision you made recognizing that the people who are close to the problems are the best equipped to solve them right we were talking about that before we got on yeah i mean yeah i um i mean i was only a successful real estate investor in Atlanta when i started my career because i knew those neighborhoods like

the back of my hand right and i knew that when i was starting this marketplace that that there's no way I would ever know Maryland as well as you do, right? Yeah. And but I also had confidence that there were people that knew it that were there on the ground that just needed the right incentive and the right set of tools to be able to go execute. And so really leaning in heavily as a company on who are the people who are experiencing the problems, whether they are the residents and, like, Like, what are the things that they need and getting to this payment structure of weekly all-inclusive payments, for instance?

Or if they're the hosts and like what works in Atlanta might not work as well in Maryland. And like, as you know, I mean, Baltimore Brownstones are really different than 1960s suburban houses in Metro Atlanta. And there are some really distinct advantages to knowing that product type and construction. And even just the codes and regulations and everything else. So I say that's probably the biggest thing is just understanding that if we're going to be successful, we need to empower the people who are closest to the problems with the incentives, the information, and the tools to be able to go solve them. Great answer. What do you think is the biggest mistake you made? You know, I think this is something I still struggle with a little bit is just I came from a place of scarcity. So even though you're talking about the company is really big now, I do wonder if I could have swung for the fences earlier and just risked more, right?

Um, I mean, looking back in the early days of investing, I certainly wish I would have bought more houses from 2008, 2012. Um, but, but yeah, like, I, I have this saying that if, uh, if you want to go whale hunting, you better be able to catch minnows along the way. Yeah. And I think it to some degree, like, I still believe that. It's absolutely true for, for me and I think for most people, uh, but it's really tempting to just keep catching minnows. And, and, for for me like there there are a couple occasions where i think i could have taken actually more risk and um and and still been fun um oh man i can't i can't let this slide this going to my coaching brain of like you saying the scarcity thing it's it's so powerful that you mentioned that because i think for a lot of entrepreneurs when you go from not having a certain amount of money and then you get it. Instead of becoming more abundant, you actually become more scarcity

because you're like, I don't ever want to go back to there. And I'm glad that you said that because I think it's so much a part of people's identity in the entrepreneurship world of they actually sometimes develop a scarcity mindset

once they get to a certain level of money and net worth, when in all reality, it should actually be the opposite. But it's because you didn't have, it now you got it and you don't want to lose it so you get in that scarcity mindset and that's remarkable saying that from the you know how amazing of a company that you've built i'm glad you mentioned that because that is the entrepreneur curse that's what a lot of people deal with and go through

um and i'll tell you i've been through it and now i just try to live completely in abundance and have an abundance around money and mindset you know as much as i possibly can but man that's a powerful one. I'm glad you said that. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you one other thing, though, Brandon, that's important there. Like, a lot of times you build a family along the way. Yeah. And one thing that I absolutely would not change, when I started this company and I was, it's kind of like going back to the beginning of my entrepreneurial career and take a deep breath. You're like, man, do I really want to do this again? Yeah. Yeah. Because it's painful. Like, the pain is No doubt. Yeah. But one thing that I was, I was very conscious of and have still held true to this day is like, I do not ever want to sacrifice my family or put the business ahead of my family. Yeah. And like just being super intentional about that. And so even though there are absolutely times when I'm thrilled that we took the risk that we did and did this moonshot. And I think there are other occasions that I look at business decisions where,

where we could have swung a little bit bigger. Putting my family first, I think, is still one of the best decisions that I've ever made. That's awesome. So last question, I ask everybody the same thing. And it's whatever your version. So I created this show called Wake Up to Wealth because I didn't come for money. Now when I got educated on money, I learned that I learned that I was always taught about money wrong. so the point of the show was to bring people on like you that have done remarkable things

to help people to wake up to wealth and whatever that version is for them but it's to let them understand that there's another version of money there's another version of life there's another version of wealth that they probably weren't taught and so I ask everybody at the end of the show the same question what is your version of waking up to wealth uh for for me I'll tell you what I wake up to is gratitude, and it doesn't matter, like, it hasn't matter what part of the journey I've been on, whether things have been terrible or felt terrible. There's always something to be grateful for, honestly. And abundance is a mindset, man. Like, and like, if you, if you set out

a five-year plan or whatever length of time it is, and envision your, there like every day just wake up and one be grateful for everything that you've got regardless of what it is but two just structure all the decisions you make over the course of that day and over the course of your life and every day to getting to whatever that goal happens to be and the person that you want to be in that in that future world I think that's that's really the biggest thing and where I see people struggle is if you know that I don't know you want to be a right rock star or something, um, or you want to be a real estate entrepreneur. Like, what are you doing

right now to make that and ultimately a reality? Uh, and, and how are you approaching it? Not from the perspective of, oh, like, I have this talent or this idea and I need to guard it and I can't tell anyone. Uh, but instead, what are, what are the, the contacts, the introductions, uh, I can get or I can make today, like, what's the network that I can build? What's the community that I can be a part of that is going to get me closer to that goal? And just living life in a way that seeks the abundance versus the scarcity. I mean, I think you said it better than I could, Brandon, and just understanding that you don't want to just fight for your slice of the pie being bigger. Grow the dang pie. And I've been a hell of a lot more.

successful like by orders of magnitude growing the pie and and just trying to add value for someone else than I than I have ever been when I have have tried to just like curate something for myself and and carve out a bigger piece great answer dude um man we ran over what we typically do for this show but you were jamming and that was so much good I just I didn't you know I want to just let you keep going. I could sit here and talk to you for hours. And I, dude, you're doing great in the world. You've built an amazing company, and you've created another lane for investors,

but you've also created another lane for the consumer. That's pretty special. And I want to say thank you so much for coming on here today and pouring into my career. This is going to be a good one. I think this one will break a record. Like, I think this one will be 125,000, 150,000 downloads because you drop massive, massive gems today. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Brandon. Hey, everybody. This next segment is brought to you by my good friends at Accruity.

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