Wake Up to Wealth - The Three Step Process to Build Real Estate Wealth with Chris Rood

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

In episode 71 of Wake Up to Wealth, Brandon Brittingham interviews Chris Rood, a legendary real estate investor and straight-shooting entrepreneur, as he shares how he became an advocate for real talk, authentic leadership, and helping aspiring investors build generational wealth with practical, actionable strategies. Tune in for the no-holds-barred truth about wealth, grit, and building an empire that lasts.  SOCIAL MEDIA LINKSBrandon BrittinghamInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mailboxmoneyb/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandon.brittingham.1/ Chris RoodInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/realestaterood/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-rood-72a76276/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisRoodentrepreneur Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrisroodentrepreneur/  WEBSITES Brandon Brittingham: https://www.brandonsbrain.org/home Chris Rood: https://chrisrood.com/  ==========================SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS: 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. This next segment is brought to you by my good friends at Accruity. Now, if you run a business, most business owners neglect their back office, and they don't even know where to go or who to trust when it comes to their financials or CPA or taxes. That's where Accruity comes in. You can trust them. They can give you advice and they understand the back office. Listen, you're not running a business correctly if you don't have a hold of this and it's really hard to trust people that are out there. And most CPAs frankly work for the IRS and don't work for you. That's not the case with Accruity. Check my good friends out at Accruity for any needs that you have when it comes to helping with your back office, getting your book straight, getting your taxes correct. And they guide you and give you advice, which most firms don't. So check out my guys at Accruity.

Tell them I sent you. Hey, what's up, everybody? We are back again with another episode of Wake Up to Wealth. And as of today, as we start, and I say thank you to everyone for the support of the show. We are at of today 4.8 million downloads, which is just insane to think that we didn't start this very long ago. And you guys have supported us to be one of the top investing shows in the United States. And a few times, you know, I have nothing wrong with Dave Ramsey, but you know, I have a little bit different views than Dave Ramsey. We have been number one who usually Dave Ramsey's number one.

But several weeks we have leapfrog Dave. And because of you listeners, we typically are in the top five consistently on Apple Podcasts and investing. So can't thank you guys enough. Thank you guys so much for your continued support. And I get to bring on really cool guests again like we are today. And I'm bringing on Chris Rood, who has. I've wanted to get on the show for a while. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Absolutely, Brian. Appreciate you having me. So a couple of things I want to talk about. You know, I know you're involved in a lot of different things. Number one, I appreciate your content on Facebook and on social media in general because I think you tell it very straight. And I think we live in a world, not say anything negative about anybody, but we live in a world where there's a lot of gurus on social media that I think give bad advice on investing. And I think you give very tactical, real, you know, great advice when it comes to real estate investing. So I appreciate that.

It's just refreshing to see and hear. Yeah, I appreciate that, man. I, I mean, look, social media is Hollywood for one of the entrepreneurs that are not real operators. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 22 years old, started in bootstrapped many companies out of back of my truck from scratch and took them the seven figures before I was even on social media. So when I got on to social media and I started seeing all the half truths and bullshit, you know, it's pretty easy to pinpoint who's telling the truth, who's lying by the over-exaggerations and just, you know, anybody can do this. It's so easy.

No, dude, nobody, not everybody can do this. This shit is the hardest thing you would do in your lifetime. Yeah, no doubt. I want to talk about a couple of things. one thing that I've seen you talk about, and I don't want to misquote this, so I'm going to let you say it. But I think it's so true is you talk about, and I want you to say it in your words, but you talk about kind of like, it's either three or four buckets of like real estate, like today money, kind of in the middle money, long term money.

I just think that's a very simple way to explain it. And I never really see people talk about that. Like, if you wouldn't mind, kind of dive into that because I think that's so. good. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm a very simple basic guy. I could barely read and write coming out of high school. And I like things broken down into a way and a manner that I can understand. And I had to break down for myself first to really digest how to invest in real estate because there's a lot of things that are said on how to invest in real estate. And there's so much information that at first glance if you're just getting started, it's very confusing and you don't know where it

go and they'll tell you, well, you should wholesale. No, you should flip. But no, you should buy rental properties. No, you should do this and that. And they're all right and they're all wrong. You know, I did everything backwards when I was, you know, I started buying and holding when I was about 28, 29 years old. Because that's what you were supposed to do. You're supposed to what buy assets and try to live off you what? Your passive income. Well, come to find out that none of that shit was passive. It barely cash load because of the fact that, you know, tenants mess and stuff up or vacancies and just things that that just you can't foresee.

And I was like, either I'm stupid, I don't know what I'm doing or the people I'm listening to are just selling a bunch of bullshit. And I come to the conclusion that a lot of shit that sold in books and on Instagram and Facebook and social media gurus is just a bunch of bullshit because they're half-writing. half wrong and there's a thing in business and that goes for just about anything in business when you're trying to make money, you can do everything right and have all the right information, but you do it in the wrong order. I talk about this in my book, Skill Up, you know, you have to do things in the right order, sequencing, right? Yeah, should you wholesale, should you

flip? Should you buy and hold? Yes, but you should start off with learning how to buy at wholesale prices first and foremost, which is your fast money. And it doesn't necessarily mean wholesaling that you should just be doing wholesaling. Fast money is, you know, categorizes anything that pays you on a 30-day basis. It's your active income, right? You need active income to pay your bills every month. So I had to coin the term for myself, fast, medium, and slow money. And yes, I coined a lot of people try to rip off my content. And it's, you know, I've been talking about this for probably eight years now fast, minimum, slow money. Fast, you need fast money today that pays you, whether that's your W-2 job, whether that's wholesaling, whether that's a small business that

transact on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to pay you bills. And then you need what's called, what I call media money, which is a mid-term money, which is how you create seed capital. You need to learn how to flip stuff, whether that's houses, whether that's apartments, whether that's mobile home parks, whether it's cars, whether you need it, you need something to flip to give you a bigger rip so that you can have C-capable to invest in what I call slow money, which is what, buy and hold, land development, things that pay out in a, you know, one to two, two to four-year process, whereas your midterm or your median money usually pays you within a three to six, six-to-eight-month basis, maybe a year. But it gives you a bigger rip. You might make 40 or 50 grand. You might make 60 to

80. And if you do that in the right order and you roll your money from fast to medium to medium to slow, by default, you will build wealth. If you learn how to buy right, which that's why I talk about you need to learn how to buy at wholesale prices, then you need to learn how to raise capital. Then you flip. Then you buy and hold in that right order. Because if you do it sequentially in that right order, it's just the natural order of things. And then once you buy and hold, then you eventually want to get into land development. That's where I'm at. And I have that broken down into, like, you know, sections, you know, no different than when you go to elementary school, then junior high, high school, college, graduate school. You don't go straight to high school

before you go learn the ABCs and the one, two, threes of real estate investing. What's the ABCs and one, two, three's of real estate investing? Buying right. If you don't get that part right, if you don't learn how to buy at wholesale prices, I understand what things cost in relation to other things to where you can discern and better buy at a huge discount, you're not going to make it as a professional real estate invest. That's why fail rates probably 90, 95%. They don't learn how to buy right. Or they just go start buying, they go straight to going buying rental property. You have no business buying rental property until you learn how to buy right, to you learn the construction process. Because if you learn how to wholesale first and buy wholesale prices,

then you can buy deep enough to flip. And then when you start flipping, you have to learn the art of raising capital because most people don't have millions of dollars to go and dump into properties to flip. And then it forces you to learn the construction process because you're flipping and then you get more wiser. And then you have a tax problem because you're building up seed capital. Therefore, the next logical thing would be to start buying hold. So you can offset your fast and media money through your slow money investing in the best

properties that you cherry pick from your wholesale pipeline or maybe some of the flips you keep and you start learning the depreciation game, cost segregation, 10 31 exchanges. And dude, that's how you do it. It's not rocket science. None of this shit is, you ain't, this ain't splitting atoms. This is, it's just a lot of people never broke it down in the logical order from where you should start to where you should finish. Yeah, 100%.

That's a great, that's a great way. And it makes it so simple. Another thing that I know that you are really invested in and know a lot about is essentially, you know, kind of like the affordable housing with lot of home packages. and I'm just a huge believer. Just with everything that's going on and looking at the future, if I look at my own portfolio, some of the things that are performing the best are my mobile home parks,

my RV parks. To your point, I bought them right. You know, I talked to you, it was probably 60 days ago, and we actually were able to figure out, you know, the lot home package up here through a manufacturer. And, I mean, the margin on it is insane. but I'm going to also be at a price point where it's affordable in my market. So I'd love for you to talk about like how you got into that, what you see on that side.

Just talk about that. What state are you in? I'm Maryland, Delaware. Okay. So I've been investing in mobile homes now for about 10 years, about my first park in 2016. And I bought 19 mobile home parks from 2016 up until about 20, I'd say 20. four-ish and not because, you know, I was smarter than everybody back then. I just, when I was, when the apartment craze is going on, everybody's talking about apartments,

you know, listen, I'm a little bit older. I'm 45. I've been in the game a while. I almost been bankrupt in 2008. So, you know, I saw the 2008 crash. Whereas, you know, a lot of people didn't see that. And I saw these younger guys that were in their late 20s, early 30s, you know, that didn't really necessarily feel the pain of 2008.

I had a bunch of mechanic shops back then, almost in bankrupt. It was so tough. That stuck in my mind. So I've always had a discernment to make sure I'll buy, right? Well, everybody was buying all these apartments from 2012 all over through 2020. I couldn't make sense of how expensive they were in the little small margin that these guys were buying. I'm like, they're like, apartments this, and I go to these masterminds and they're like talking about apartments. I'm looking, you know, buying it out of, you know, a five cap or six cap.

I'm like, dude, I'm buying these mobile homes at an 18-20 cap. I'm like, I just can't make sense of what y'all are doing. If everything goes right, you're going to make $120 to $150 a door. If everything goes right, everybody pays and nothing breaks. I'm making $600 a door. You know, and it's just, so that's kind of how I fell into that. I couldn't make sense of that. And then I live in South Louisiana.

There's a lot of mobile home parks here. And, you know, I read an article in 2015 about Warren Buffett. Everybody knows who Warren Buffett is. He owns back then he had just bought or had bought Clayton Mobile Homes. And I read an article and he's, you know, he said that, you know, mobile homes are the wave of the future. This is how brilliant Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are, right? They see things into the future. I was getting a haircut.

And I was reading an article and about, he said, you know, mobile homes would be the wave of the future based off of all. all this stuff that's actually happened today. Demographics, the baby boomers are aging and they're going to get out of the homes and want something cheaper. Student college debt is so expensive that these kids that are getting out of college can't afford a brick on slab house. He said inflation will get so high, and this is before COVID, inflation will get so high that people just can't afford the house anymore. And that made sense to me. That's kind of what sparked my interest in mobile homes after reading that article in 2015. and I started paying attention more to mobile home parks.

And, you know, when you start thinking about things and talking about it in your mind, you start becoming aware of and you see things. And you start tracking things in your life and crazy about a week or two late after I read that article, I told myself, I'm going to start looking to buying some mobile home parks. A realtor approached me while I was in the gym. He knew I was a real estate invested. Hey, man, I got this weird asset. I know you buy real estate.

He goes, but I got this mobile home park, 24 unit that got brought to me. And I don't know what to do with it. Nobody wants to buy it. They say it's trash and said, well, I go to look at it. And dude, I bought my first park, 2016. I infielded and took the rents from 7,500 to 15-5. And, yeah, and I sold it, I believe, about a year and a half ago. But that was the first park I bought.

And I just kept snowballing and rolling more, buying more mobile home parks all over the south. And I'd get a lot of leads coming through from my wholesaling business for people I wanted to sell their mobile homes to be moved off the price. property and I put two and two together. I was buying mobile homes to two to five grand, moving them into my trailer parks and infielding and making, you know, 800 to $1,000 a month. I mean, it's just you can't, when you buy in margins that cheap, which of margins that high, you can't lose. So that's kind of how I got into it. And then the market pull back, call it 2022, 2023, where a single family home flips, you know, kind of in wholesale got really tight and I made the pivot into mobile homes and I, you know, I got my dealer's license and

set up shop in a few different states and own allies wholesale depot. You know, we're in three states now. We are year one. We did, we did it right at $8 million in gross revenue last year. This year was set to do about $13 million in gross revenue. So we wholesale and, you know, to different investors all over the country at the cheapest rock bottom prices to do what's called the land home package, which I do myself in four states. And that's where you buy land that zone for mobile homes and drop a brand new double wide or single wide and flip it. And that's the only thing left that's affordable to your point, like you said. There's nothing else that's affordable. And it ain't looking good for the foreseeable future. I mean, I do see price drops happening all over

the country, but it's still, I mean, there still needs to be probably another 15 to 20% correction just for people to afford shit. Yeah, I mean, no doubt about it. It's amazing. You said, Would you say that was 2015? You read that from Warren Buffett? Yep. Yeah, so you figure what, he was 11 years ahead of his time on that. And then think about the present day how right he was, like on all of it. Like, that's why he's such an amazing investor because the middle class right now is just getting murdered.

And even below that, because the cost to live in, the prices, everything. To your point, like, I have an RV park in. Texas and I have another pretty large mobile home park, but the RV park has turned into majority of people that are in our RV park are living there permanently. You know what I mean? Because of cost of living, right? And just to give you guys an idea, too, we put a bunch of tiny homes in there. And we got a waiting list of people wanting to get a tiny home, again, just because

it costs to live in. So that's pretty cool. You saw it before probably a lot of people saw it. But like the affordable, you know, a lot of people that listen to this are investors or are looking to invest whatever the case is. You know, the affordable housing space in general, like I think that has to be a part of your portfolio going forward to survive. If not, you're going to get crushed. It has to be, man. And if you're going to, if you're going to survive, you got to, it's not your opinion, you have to live in mirror reality and look in what's needed and wanted. I play the very top. I own a bunch of short-term vacation rentals on the beach and high-end destinations. I want a bunch of stuff in Destin, Florida on the beach and Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Broken Bow, I'm about to buy a big cabin in

Colorado and probably Grand Lake in Colorado. People got money. You know, they're going to still vacation. And then at the bottom, you got RV parks and mobile home parks where people, you know, can afford it. Everything else in between is host. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of like they're talking about the K-shaped economy. That's what you're seeing. Right. That's exactly right. That's like what you're seeing. So if, you know, someone, you've been through all kinds of different facets of being an investor, right? And you've seen it from a bunch of different angles. If somebody's new, like, you know, I just want to start getting into this or I'm new, what's your advice to where do they start?

What do you think they should do first? Learn how to source deals off market, one, two, learn how to negotiate. And three, eventually learn how to, you know, raise capital, right? In that order, you know, don't learn how to, let me tell you why all these syndicators are blowing themselves up right now in apartments, because they did it out of order. They learned how to raise capital because they had a social media following and they built trust through their audience. so they raised capital, but they didn't know how to find deals.

There weren't real operators. I was an operator first before I became, you know, a social media guru and got a bunch of followers. And I still hate that word social media guru because it's all fake and gay. You know, none of the shit's even real on social media. Learn how to find a motivated sellers, you know. And that goes for anything in business also, right? You know, I'm an entrepreneur first. I owned a bunch of mechanic shops in my 20s and 30s.

all the shops I bought when I was in my 20s, 30s was for me finding a motivated seller, whether the shop owner was on drugs, he was behind on his taxes and ended up buying their shops. That is the quintessential part of being good at business and entrepreneurship is becoming a deal finder. You just got to get good at finding opportunities. So if I'm young, I'm just getting started. I'd pick up my book, Skill Up. I mean, the playbook of how I build wealth from scratch is in there. No guru bullshit.

Like, it's hard. And you got to think in decades, not years. Decades. People don't want to hear that. They think they're going to buy, you know, go and start a business and get rich in a year. Dude, I've been, I'm 45, but I've been doing this since I was 22. That's when I started my first business. So that's, what is that?

23 years, 24 years of grinding. And I'm, and I just started seeing some headweight probably five years ago because it takes so long. And if you're not willing to grind it out, just put it down. Go get a job. And there's nothing wrong with getting a job. But it'll be one of the most stressful and at the same time, most satisfying and rewarding things you're ever doing your lifetime if you can get to the end of it. But you've got to be smart.

You can't blow yourself up. You've got to be patient. You can't overextend like these guys do because they want to get rich quick. There's no such thing. You can't skip the process. Everybody looked cool from 2017, you know, 2017. in 2022 because why they weren't smart their fundamentals were out for the most part it was just inflation inflation made everybody look like a genius yeah i mean you we had a run where you could buy a deal

that didn't make sense and still the market rewarded all of us for bad behavior you know i mean just um two points i want to make on what you said so similar to you i've been in this game for 20 plus years now didn't start raising capital until about five years ago. Obviously, I understood the debt. I had great relationships with institutions, with banks, all that, because I had to. But I didn't actually start raising capital through syndication, through a fund, any of that until about five years ago. And you know what I mean? That was when I had 15 years of being an operator under my belt. you know, so I'm glad you mentioned that because that is so true. And another thing you.

I want to just thought because you just said something really, really good that I forgot to add in there. I didn't start raising capital until I had built my own wealth. The first $15, $20 million in my portfolio, I did with my money. Yeah. Nobody else's. I didn't raise no money to build my, the first $15, $20 million of property I bought,

I did it all with my own money from part. Now, and then once you do that with your own money, then you qualify to go. go raise other people's money. That's the problem with all these syndicators. They never even invested their own money. They just go, it's easier to go use somebody else's money when you haven't done it yourself. You'll become discipline when you use your own.

Yeah. And I think the other thing that was cool that you said was you started really seeing Headway five years ago. So think about all the time that it took. And most people aren't willing to do that. Over the weekend, I was at an event. and one of my good friends, a guy by the name of Heath Evans, he played for the New England Patriots.

He was a fullback behind Brady, and he played with Belichick, obviously. He won a Super Bowl. He was in the league for 11 years, and he talked about how he never really learned how to play football until he got to New England. And, you know, career football guy, and the thing that you just said that reminds me

of something he said over the weekend, as he said, New England was the most stressful place to play but the most peaceful place to play because they stressed us in practice and we were always ready for the game. And it's what you said. And I think that I think we've glorified being an entrepreneur so much on social media

that no one talks about the actual shit you got to go through and the pressure you have to endure. It is going to be the hardest thing you will ever go through to make it to the other side and you just set it perfectly of, yeah, dude, once you get there,

it's great. But, you know, there's a reason why there's a 99% and 1% separation of wealth in our country. Because the 99 doesn't want to go through the pressure that it takes. And I'm just, it's refreshing to hear that because you go on social media and everybody's winning. And you and I both know from being in the trenches and getting our ass kicked that that's not fucking reality. No. If you haven't went almost bankrupt, couldn't pay you pay employees, had cash, haven't had cash flow problems. You don't talk about any of those things.

You're just not real, man. I mean, this is real stuff that entrepreneurs go through. Cash will problems, employees stealing from you, deals going sideways, Mother Nature kicking your ass for maybe a hurricane or whatever it may be. Just shit you can't foresee. I do, this is, shit is hard, man. And the price you pay to build wealth is mental anguish. And if you're not willing to have and sustain mental anguish for a sustained period of time,

you can't bill wealth. Sorry. That's a truth. percent. I'm going to ask you two more questions. One, for people that, you know, interested in following you, wanting to connect with you, how can they find you? I'd say go follow me on Instagram at Real Estate Root and Facebook at Chris Root and Chris Root entrepreneur. I do have a YouTube channel. I'll post my daily journey. Me and my wife are full-time investors. You know, we got her hands on a lot of stuff. You know, I try to share my journey with my audience

to help, you know, give nuggets of things that I made mistakes on and things and tidbits that I find out through my journey. I try to just, you know, transmigrate those skills into other people to help the younger crowd because I think there's just, there needs to be a change of how things are set on social media and how things are taught. I think things are just really out of whack and out of order. And a clear standard needs to be taught of an expect, and really the word is clear expectations of what you got to endure to get what you want. Yeah, I love that. I love your social media in general because you post about the issues and the problems

and the shit you've been through and what you need to watch out for. And it's not like, hey, man, we're just all winning at, you know, every fucking level, you know, every fucking day, which is what a lot of people are putting on social media, which is not real. So I appreciate the fact that you're willing to put stuff out there like, hey, this is what you need to watch out for and this is real and this is part of being an entrepreneur because it's what people need to hear. You know what I mean?

And last question, ask everybody this. So we call the show Wake Up to Wealth, probably similar to you. You know, I grew up poor. I wasn't taught about money. I wasn't educated about money. So two things of why I do this show. It's I want people to wake up to wealth one day. So I want them to wake up and be wealthy.

but I also want them to wake up from an education standpoint of we're just never been taught about money. No one teaches about money. So I want them to wake the fuck up to understand that there's a different way if you get educated. Ask everybody at the end of the show, whatever your answer is is your answer. What does waking up to wealth mean to you?

It means taking personal responsibility for your own future, your own wealth, your own outcome, stop being a victim, Blaming the government. Stop blaming the economy. Stop blaming your mom and dad and take personal responsibility for what you want. When you take personal responsibility for all of your outcomes, good, bad, ugly, or indifferent, you take back your life and you take back control. Because as soon as you give it to somebody else and say, hey, I'm the victim of somebody else's, maybe my parents or maybe my education, you lose all control and power. But once you understand that you're in full control and full power of your destiny, once you take full full. responsibility for your outcomes, dude, you can have whatever you want life because you get back your power because you're not a victim no more. Most people are victims on this planet. And whether you like it or not, we live on an economic planet. Whether you like money, you like the rich, you want to be poor, you want to be modest. It doesn't matter. The world

runs on production, money, and effort. And if you can't understand that, dude, and you're just going to be poor and broke. That's a fact. That's a great answer. Well, I want to say thank you, number one, for coming on the show. Everybody look him up, pay attention, follow him on social media, check out his book. He does really good stuff, and he puts really good content out. And again, I appreciate you taking your time and pouring into my audience today. Thank you for being a guest on the show. Absolutely.

Thank you, Brian. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Wake Up to Wealth. We're sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcast. This way of good updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast and tell your friends about the show. It is how new people find us.

Until next time.