#6 - Mobile Home Park Investing and Achieving Financial Freedom with Chase Lauderback

[0:00] This is the Wealthy Investor Show, where we don’t just talk about your wealth, we also talk about your holistic health. I’m your host, Matias. And I’m Erica. And this is the Wealthy Investor.

[0:14] I am here with Chase Lauterbach. Chase is a good friend of mine. He’s been a partner in some deals. He has been a co-leader of an investment group local to the Harrisburg-Rockyham area. Chase grew up in Page County and had some real estate surroundings as he grew up, but kind of got into it himself in college. I won’t get into that too much detail because I’d like you to talk about it. But has really, I feel like you are a wealth of information. You have done a lot of courses, a lot of masterminds, a lot of different things that give you a very deep understanding of real estate investing world. So I’m really excited to have you on. Do you want to talk a little bit about your journey of getting to be to where you are now, like where you started and background and that kind of stuff?

[1:09] Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So you’re probably going to get tired of hearing the story since we talk about it a lot in the meetups and everything. But I basically started in college. I’d saved up money from working a summer job and I had just an opportunity to come up where you had to be a first time home buyer. There’s a price range where I could work it out with what I had saved up. And yeah, I bought it with the plans of fixing it up and renting it out. And then throughout the course, I held it for about two years and the renters moved out. They trashed it and ended up deciding to sell it as opposed to doing that. So that was around the same time when I was going towards graduate school and it just didn’t make sense for me.

[1:49] One, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. I was thinking, well, I pull out a debt on. And then two, I just saw what that provided. And I was like, that’s, that’s a really nice check. And I had fun doing it. And so you were, you were in school for physical therapy. Was that? Yeah, I was. So I graduated from Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s of science and human nutrition for using exercise. Okay. The grad school was going to be. Physical therapy. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so you flipped a house and you got a nice paycheck. You’re like, yeah, that was, I can do that again. Yeah. And then, well, and then, so I moved back and then we ended up buying, you know, a deal. And my, my parents have some history with virtual property as well.

[2:28] And so I partnered with them on it and that turned out to be a lesson. We, we made money on it, but it just took multiple years actually. So it was about a year and a half to renovate. It was a bigger project. And then another year, almost another year and a half to sell it. The market was much slower back then. And then flipped some stuff during that time too. But yeah, definitely learn some lessons that way about sending things out and the whole process and everything, because everything was hands-on. Sure. Yeah. You, you’ve done a lot more hands-on than I have and you’re not doing it all now, but that’s, you know, certainly something to understand it better and probably have a better understanding.

[3:02] Like, I think you talked to me about some of the different things that you do regularly on your projects. I’m like, I, I have not done anything. Yeah. I haven’t even painted a house yet. And I, I personally, that my, my approach for that has been, but it’s, it’s been a side gig for my investing so far since my main thing is sales. And I thought to, to have longevity and that I don’t want to be burning myself out by, you know, unclogging toilets for rentals or whatever. I don’t think I’m right in that. I just think that’s been the path that I’ve taken. And from there you, yeah. I mean, tell me more about like your interest in real estate, what, what kind of paths you took in learning and practice.

[3:42] Yeah. So I would just like to say that I think you’re a hundred percent right. You should not be tearing down walls and painting walls and unclogging toilets. I think my frustration was back then when I started, I was trying very hard to get away from that. And I felt like I was the type of person that needed to do everything. That’s something I still struggle with. But so, I mean, from there I just continued to flip houses. I would flip a couple and use those proceeds to buy a rental property or if the property was, you know, just a great deal, essentially doing the BRRRR method, you know, buying it, renovating it, renting it, refinancing it. I think that was around the same time it became a buzzword or maybe right before being a buzzword when I started doing that.

[4:22] Thanks, Braden Turner. Yeah. Yeah. So from there, I mean, I just, you know, it wasn’t anything overnight. I just saw how the rental property was, how the work was for it, how the cash flow was for it. And it’s like, you’re not, in my experience, you’re not making a lot of money from it. You’re getting the equity appreciation. You need tax benefits. But you are, at the end of the day, my goal was to have financial freedom through cash flow. And I didn’t see that happening. You’re not getting enough equity appreciation to where you can refinance out every so often to make yourself live for free and you’re not having the cash flow to do it either. You have one day prepared and it wipes out all the year, the whole year, maybe even more than a year of cash flow.

[5:03] So I knew I had to transition to something else. And my options were, at the time, I could try to continue to scale the flipping business. I’m from Page County. There’s only so much inventory. So I knew that if I wanted to scale that, I was going to have to expand in other counties, probably go up to 45 minutes, an hour or plus away. And there’s more overhead people I’d have to hire and everything like that. And I think back then, I also just couldn’t wrap my head around finding somebody to do some of these jobs, like the project management and everything else like that. So I just saw that as an option. Otherwise, I was going to have to find something else in real estate that was going to actually get what my goals were originally.

[5:46] Sure. And I don’t know what originally piqued me on it, but it was commercial investing. And so I came across, originally it was apartments. And I did some mentorships and boot camps and stuff with apartments and just really quite a few months digging deep and spending some time on that. But ultimately what happened with me with that was I saw that basically when you get into those, you know, you have equity splits. So there’s the general partnership group for those that don’t know. You’ve got the general partnership group that actually finds the property, does all the due diligence, does the operations, does the value add turnaround, and they get a certain percentage of the ownership. And then the investors that are private, also known as the limited partnership to, you know, they contribute the bulk of the finance, not the finance, but the equity for it.

[6:39] They don’t have any say in it, but they get the other slice, which is an apartment, the apartment world could be anywhere from 60% for the limited partnership to 70%. And that was what I was looking at. It could be even more. And it just really depended on what the deal would allow. So, I mean, some would go less than that, but that was generally normal. And so you’re getting 30% to 40%, and the general partnership is multiple people. So depending on how that’s broken down, you could have a very low percentage ownership. And it was very hard to find deals if it made sense. As we’re kind of seeing now, like, not as secret, there’s a lot of apartment syndicators that are having issues, right? And so you’re having stretch numbers.

[7:17] It was tough to find deals. And back then too, it was like, you had an in with somebody or you were paying somebody like $20,000 to $50,000 for mentorship to basically have them buy it from you and give you like 5% of the deal or something small. It just didn’t, it didn’t make any sense. So I was like, I need to find something that has more cashflow or two, because those, they were all about you getting an acquisition fee, you getting a property management fee, and then you’re getting the sell on the backend. So during that whole period, you’re not really getting much for the general partnership. So then I was looking at self-storage and then the other asset class that came up was mobile home parks.

[7:51] And so I have an interesting background in that I am a second generation owner. My parents have a mobile home park and they’ve had it for 30 years. And it was just something that when I was growing up, I occasionally helped with that with fixing up homes, cleaning out really bad homes. I even did like a Lonnie deal, which is like, you know, you sell their finance a home to somebody apart when I was like, I took the 415 or something. Oh, wow. Like I hated, I mean, there would be cockroaches in there. It was gross. It was nasty. It was nasty. And so I, it’s just funny that I wanted nothing to do with it. And that’s the route I’m going. And I love it too. Yeah. So it’s, I think I’ve described it as like, maybe not the sexiest of investment, but not the one that if you’re going into a party that you’re going to be necessarily like it feels different.

[8:43] Like it’s the whole, like breaking into like, like the one Lord kind of like world where I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing. I’m just saying that like, there’s a perception there from what people have assumed things about you assume that whatever, but it, but in reality, it really fills the need. It’s a very affordable option for the people that are living there. And as we know, housing affordability is a huge problem right now. Yeah. So where else are you going to find a brand new house for a thousand dollars, roughly give or take some, you know, that you can move right into. But I mean, even, even then at that point though, I was still trying to decide between those two assets. And ultimately what it came down to was I knew more about mobile home parks.

[9:28] I think a lot of the same issues that self-storage is great. Mobile home parks are great. And I just think a little bit of the supply constraints too, it was a little bit easier to build self-storage. So, right. That’s why ultimately what we’re going to just knew a little bit more. Sure. And it felt like resonated better with me. So let’s, let’s dig into a little bit about the syndication structure. If you don’t mind, I think it might be helpful to explain a little bit what that, what all that looks like. So you, you, you touched on it there. So, you know, just to reiterate there, a person, a general, general partners, it could be multiple people, uh, will, will find an opportunity that, uh, usually you could consider it like a flip in a bigger scale on a commercial scale, a place that could, could, you know, with, with mobile home parks, if I understand it correctly, it could be that you can add more lots of infill with something that you could talk about here in a little bit.

[10:16] It could be that you could improve the property to make it more desirable and get higher rents. It could be that the owner has just mismanaged it for a long time and it’s not able to get a premium rent or just, you know, market rent at all. Either they haven’t tried to, or they just have run the thing into the ground a little bit. A lot of times people are burned out and that’s kind of where, where the problem comes about. And so kind of like flipping a property, you’re going in and you’re improving, uh, like, like the bird method we talked about, you know, you’re, you’re able to revitalize a property. Get it to be up to kind of nicer standards, nicer for everybody. And in turn, get more money coming in from, from the deal, which then with cap rates and everything and commercial financing makes it worth more.

[11:06] And so as an investor, I would say here, Chase, I trust you to, I trust your plan with this mobile home park. I want to invest in this opportunity. So tell me a little bit about what that would look like. So I, I, yeah, I want to invest in your mobile home park. Yeah. I don’t want to, I don’t want to speak to our specific, specific structure. Sure. Too much, but I can just give like kind of the general overviews because depending on what operator and what, you know, as much as you need to love the deal, you need to love the person who’s also operating it and knowing that they can, they can execute on the deal. So depending on which operator you go with, there’s different structures and cold periods.

[11:42] So how that generally looks is there is an equity split. So whatever that is that you’re looking for, it could be, you know, similar to the apartment structure. If it’s more, if it’s a more, I would say class A type deal, or, you know, if it’s a larger deal and, and the returns aren’t quite the same, if it’s something that’s a little smaller, it’s got more hair on the boat or hair on the, no more hair on it. And, you know, expect to have more of the equity split in the GP’s favor because they’re going to have to do a lot more work. But you just, I think the big thing for limited partners, you want to make sure that the, it’s people you trust, it’s a deal you love and they’re properly incentivized.

[12:22] So a lot of these will look at the form of, you know, some form of promote. So some percentage return that’s returned to the investor before anything else goes to be a split. And from there, once the capital event happens being a refinance or a sell and your money is returned, then everything goes to the promote structure, which let’s say it was, let’s say it was 30% GP and 70% to the LP that, that promote can, but then go that way. So any profit gets split that way. I’ve also seen waterfall structures or other different types of structures where it might be a more, maybe it’s like, you know, 40, 60 or whatever that goes to where more goes to the GP because they’re hitting their thresholds or getting rewarded better.

[13:07] And that’s an example of, of how to do that. So to, to break that down further, like it would, if I was an investor again, looking in and let’s say I was interviewing multiple people, one of the things he said, it’s important is to, to understand and trust the person that’s operating the deal, the general, general partner, that they’re going to do a good job. They have the plan. They have the experience. Um, other thing is that immediate cash on cash return. So I’m, I’m investing a certain amount and they’re projecting that I’ll be getting, you know, X, Y, Z 5%, 9%, something, you know, uh, on my money that I invest in the interim. And so this is going to be the money that I’m getting while the, the, the flip is happening, while the, they are repositioning this property, uh, to make it more marketable.

[13:52] And then what you said, the capital of that was, it could be a refinance. It could be a sale where the property is now more valuable. And so you can get the money that was invested in out either through a sale or through a, a refinance. Yeah. And then there’s different ways of how I could still have ownership than the property or, or, you know, yeah, just get, get the money. Yeah. Now, a lot of those structures are just whatever the operator, you know, depending on how they like to do things, the reputation, how they’re structuring that. And, you know, what your also requirements are like, is it a five-year hold or is this like a five-year business plan, a seven-year, a 10-year? And so that’s something to keep in mind too.

[14:36] There’s a lot of different structures where it could be a longer hold period. I would say in my personal opinion, the goal is if I’m trying to have another flipping business, otherwise I would just say flipping houses. Right. Right. So I think the goal is when we’re finding these deals, some are going to, some are obviously going to sell, they’re not going to make sense. But it’s, if you’re doing that, get into a position where you’re buying these assets, but you want to hold for the rest of your life. Right. So you and the investors you bring along with you should just be, you know, staying with that property for the long haul. I love it. So. I love it. And just, you know, and from, from an investor standpoint, such a win-win, it’s great because like, you know, at the end of the day, you get your cash back, you know, if all goes well and, but you’re still having self-ownership in it, in that particular structure you’ve mentioned.

[15:27] So that, that’s awesome. The other thing that’s really cool about it that, you know, I think especially, well, to, to take a step back for a second. I think one of the things that’s really interesting about realtors is that I don’t think there’s a big disconnect between the investing world and the realtor world. And I don’t think many realtors really understand the investing world. Well, I’m not saying that every realtor needs to become a commercial realtor or understand all those things, but there are certain advantages of being a real estate professional for taxes that, that I think a lot more people could take advantage of. And I think, you know, in, in this world where you are out there on your own, you, you know, let’s not get into lawsuits right now, but let’s, let’s talk about like just how it is to not have a guaranteed paycheck, not have any kind of benefit.

[16:15] You are having to pay my case, like $1,600 a month in insurance. What’s retirement? And there’s no, you know, there’s no matching. There’s no, nothing like that. And I think that we are in a position that we have abilities to pay for retirement through real estate, our expertise, and also the tax incentives with appreciation is my long-winded way of getting to the other benefit of vindication. So you want to talk about that a little bit? I do. I think too, before I touch on that, I just like to say that like, if you’re an agent, you’re doing well, you don’t, like you’re saying, you don’t have a retirement program, but going back to the rental properties, you make money. What is it? Five ways.

[16:58] You’ve got the cashflow, the mortgage credit on the appreciation. You’ve got the depreciation. I’m forgetting what the fifth one is off the top of my head. But the point is that the cashflow is generally the least impactful of those. Right. Right. And one of the most impactful is the depreciation. I mean, being a real estate professional, you’re able to actually take that. Whereas other professions can’t. So it would be limited and we’re not tax professionals. But like, there’d be a limit as to how much depreciation you could take if you’re not a real estate professional. According to more or less what the gist of what I understand. And so, yeah, with the beauty of this kind of syndication operation is that if you are a real estate professional, let’s say you just want to sell houses, you can put money into a trusted syndication and get a good return on your investment, depending on the deal, of course.

[17:49] And then you can get the depreciation. And as a limited partner, you know, I don’t have any money. I don’t really have any stay in the deal that I’m invested in, but I don’t have to do anything. Again, I think what you’re touching on is on a lot of these projects, we do cost aggregations. Yes. That you can tolerate the depreciation. With that, I would just say, if you’re an LP and you’re looking for that, then just make sure you know what the business plan is going in. Yeah. Depending on the project, what the timeframe is, you may not do that. And make sure you talk with your CPA that you can realize that things, because that can vary person to person. Yeah. That’s a good point. And just to break it down so people who don’t understand what that is, again, it may not apply to you.

[18:33] You need to double check and do your homework. But instead of taking your typical 27 years, you know, for the real property, not the land, and dividing that up and putting it, you know, depreciating that on your taxes, you’re looking at, I’m just going to use a house because I don’t really understand the mobile home world as well. But a house, you’re going to take a refrigerator. The IRS has like, you know, a certain lifespan on the refrigerator. So let’s say the seven years. So they’re going to say the thousand dollar refrigerator, divide that by seven. And then you can take that off on your taxes. And then if you compound that over all the things in the house, I, again, not a CPA, not my expertise, but maybe a roof, maybe some other things like that.

[19:12] It’s back, hot water heater that starts adding up. And it’s a lot more significant than if you’re just doing your 27 year divided. Yeah. And so those lifespans they use, no idea. You paid somebody to do it. Yeah. How long the roads last? How long the utility infrastructure lasts? I mean, those are just some examples off the top of my head. And I think when I looked at one of those schedules, it’s kind of surprising how quickly they can depreciate it. Just, just depending on what it is. Right. So like you’re saying, if you’re 27 and a half years, think about it like this. Um, we’re generally having to have some form of road work done within that time period. Right. Like the lifespan of the road is arguably how high quality, where the, where the road is, like what the temperatures are like.

[20:03] It could be a lot less than that. Right. So it really just, it really just depends. It, it, it makes sense. Like there’s a lot of things in the house that are not a simple 27 year. So it does make sense. Anything else you want to talk about, uh, related to the depreciation or anything? I mean, if you’re, if you’re looking to get into parks and you’re going to be a GP, then definitely make sure you have a good CPA or somebody to advise you ahead of time. Because the other moving part with mobile home parks is as much as you’re probably going to get into the rental business a little bit with park owned homes. So those are homes that the community owns or you as an individual owner, if you buy a community, just in your name, I don’t know all the aspects of that either.

[20:41] Cause you know, I’m not a CPA, but that’s a different structure depending on how you’re selling and doing things, renovating them. You just want to make sure that that structure could be vastly different than the depreciation for the property and making sure that you’re, you’re checking all those boxes too. So it’s one of those things where it really pays to pay. Yeah. Cause you’re renovating a, this goes back to the depreciation. If you’re renovating a home and at the, you know, it’s an expense that’s a couple of grand or renovating, they’re expanding it over 20 years or whatever that is, but it can be written off immediately because not actually IRS agrees that it’s this timeframe. And that’s quite a bit that you could be losing out of what they have 15 ohms over 15 ohms.

[21:22] Right. So that’s great. Um, now going back to a little bit about, uh, we touched on this a little bit with, um, talking about doing a lot of stuff yourself in the early flips and that kind of stuff in your investing world with, you know, maybe not the most clear, you’re not getting a check every two weeks kind of thing. What are some like personal finance things you want to talk about that you’ve kind of, you felt like you’ve had to develop to, to, to hone, to make it in this industry? Because like, you know, I think it could be scary if you don’t have something consistent coming in and that you might want to just go and get a regular job. Yeah. I don’t think anybody’s going to need me as a podcast guest.

[22:05] I’m going to cover everything on this one, but I would, I would say, so I believe it was Matt Sherkaw. He had talked about, this was years ago when he was doing his business, he did the 30, 30, 30, which was, you know, you, when you get a profit from a flip, you have 30% that you set aside for taxes, 30% that you live off of, and ideally not that much. And then 30% that you invest back in your business to grow it. Okay. So I just always operate from the perspective of similar manner. And then that portion that you live off of, I try to save even more. So I would, I would set budgets and try to make everything automated from where you’re saving. So like you have a check hit, I used to have a, have a W2 job for a short period of time.

[22:51] You have that? Yes. So I would, I would have it set. So I did my budget of what my expenses were. I had it automatically go to a savings account. This is, I think this is a big thing because if you see it, you’re going to spend it. Right. And so you have that go to this other account. And then from there, it’s like, okay, I have $4,000. I had my account this month and I know my expenses are going to be 3,500. I gave myself that $500 wiggle room. I’ll still make it a game to try to save that $500. I like it. And maybe even more if you can. So it’s really just about cutting back. That makes sense. And then, you know, worst case scenario, like if you have some extra savings and things get a little bit lean down the line that you could, you know, maybe go into that a little bit.

[23:34] Ideally, ideally not. What about one thing about you? I hope you don’t mind me sharing that you are a new father. How this time, I mean, how’s, how’s that been adjusting to your life with a, with a kid now? Very, very difficult. I’ve had to have that quite a bit, at least for this phase of his life. Yeah. I would like to, to do a little bit more than where I am right now, but it’s been great to watch him grow, but it makes it hard for doing everything that you probably really need to do. Yeah. That is definitely a challenge. I think that I had, I was sharing this with another friend a while back. It’s just like the, the level my brain can like function and might just be productive. Just think.

[24:15] Yeah. White go down. The sleep. Then I think, I think it’s just, you have more on your plate and like, I think there’s just more, you know, there, I can’t, it’s harder to come home after a day of work and work, you know, it’s now, obviously as a realtor, I know I need to get offers in and things like that, but it definitely different. It’s just different. And I think it’s a slower pace. I was noticing this too, um, with my recent, like trying to get this, this podcast going and setting goals for myself and everything. I feel like I was, had to just be okay with not being able to be completely hyper-focused on this at all times. And, and it just took a lot longer. I didn’t have time to think about it, to process it, to, to chew on it, to plan it, to, you know, figure things out.

[25:08] As quickly as I, you know, something that might have taken me a couple of weeks before to, you know, a couple of months. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s pretty big. Not just some of the stuff that Mike, you’re saying you’d have been able to focus on or maybe perfect a little bit. You just have to kind of get it done. And that’s been kind of a pro, you know, like for me, I’m someone who overthinks things. You also, we’ve talked a little bit about my thoughts on everything with, what I’m trying to work on projects wise. And, you know, I mean, I’ve just, I’m the type of person who wants everything to be perfect. So when you don’t have the time, you can’t be. And I think having children makes you have to be okay with not perfect.

[25:53] Yeah. It is, it is a mess most of the time. What about other things that you do in your life to like unwind to, to, for your, for your mental health, like, like anything that you, you do to kind of, you know, for physical fitness or anything like that, is there stuff that’s important to you to, to kind of keep your mind right so you can be optimal in your day to day? Yeah. I think, I think exercising is huge. That’s been tough with having a newborn. So I’m still just getting into that routine again. That makes a huge difference. If you’re very busy and you don’t have much time, then just the mental clarity you have is a huge, huge, huge difference. Eating well and making sure you’re getting as, I would say eight hours of sleep, but nothing happened for.

[26:37] Oh man. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be nice? So other than that, I mean, I think just having good friends and stuff to talk to and, and hang out with is kind of the big thing. Yeah. Or make sense. If you could like do, if you could give somebody your best real estate investing advice possible. I know that’s like a huge question to boil down into one little thing, but there’s something that you could say, this is my best in real estate investing advice. That’s really tricky. There’s, cause there’s so many things that I think would be really beneficial. But if, if I had to frame it towards realtors, I would say that the amount of time when I was doing more of that work, that someone was like, I wish I could do that.

[27:26] Or I’m trying to start doing that soon. It’d be our friends too. I need to save up a little bit more money or when the market’s right. I think the thing is, is just, I, I, my personal opinion is learn 80% and then then do it. So if education’s a limitation, go to that benchmark and then do it. And if you feel like money’s the limitation, then you need to not just shut down, think of other solutions for that, of how you can overcome the money. It’s a partnership, business loan. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know when I first got into the investing side of the, you know, space, like the idea of a hard money loan sounded like I was going to go to like Al Capone. Cause you’re going to have a screw in fifth.

[28:14] Is that a really scary? And then like, that’s obviously not the great, especially like, you know, we were coming from like a day brand, like pay off our debt kind of like world or mindset. And that’s like the complete opposite. But I think, you know, the more you learn, the more you get into stuff, the more you, you realize, like, you know, if there’s an opportunity there, like you do the math as a temporary thing, it can work. Yeah. I think people need to think about, they likely have some kind of asset. They either know somebody or the other, like beaten up story that I say a lot that Mike, I’m probably going to be my kids earlier and be like, oh, here you go. It’s talking about this story.

[28:50] And is the first, the first deal I did by myself, you know, I had that partnership thing going on with my parents. But the first thing I did by myself, I used my car as a platform. Okay. So like, think about what you have that could be an asset that you can leverage. Obviously don’t put your car up or anything that’s going to put you in a bad position. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ve educated yourself first. You need to make sure, like, I would say that the biggest hurdle is your first deal, but it’s also the biggest hurdle because it needs to be, in my opinion, one of your better deals because you don’t know what you don’t know. And so if you’re doing the numbers, you think it’s going to be a 30 grand profit and you’ve got, you know, I don’t know.

[29:27] You want to be more conservative as a corner. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Having the multiple exit strategies is good. That’s how my brain always works with these kinds of things, looking at if this doesn’t work and you can go this way and all that. And I think, I think with realtors too, like, I think, you know, it’s, it’s often easy to want to go straight to your, you know, your dream house and your dream car and all that kind of stuff. And because at times you can make good money, it’s just, it’s not consistent. And so I think building, um, building up, like, I mean, so I’ve, I’ve built a strong business. I’m not trying to brag. I’m just trying to be real that, you know, I have a strong business that things have been good, but there was six months of like, I sold a lot, like a couple of lots.

[30:13] Yeah. And then taxes hit and everything just got drained. I mean, we were not used to having to live off of my wife’s income. And, you know, maybe one day she won’t work. And it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a real thing to try to build up, you know, other, don’t make your life so expensive that you can’t sustain the, the slower times. And with that, I was going to get to like buying houses to live in that, you know, if you can’t afford a rental, buying a house to live in that you can make into a rental later is a great idea. Even if you’re not house hacking where you’re, you know, renting out a room, you get that, you know, 5% down conventional loan. And, you know, maybe do that three times before you go to your dream house.

[30:58] Then you got a little bit of a rental portfolio. Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s people out there. They just do that. They stay in the house for two years, but if they’re two out of five or something like that, I don’t know what it is. Check with your account again or your, or whatever about the tax benefits of that. But it’s like, you don’t pay capital gains taxes on it up to a certain amount. Do you sell it then? Yeah. Do you sell it with them? Right. Or the two or two out of five? Something like that. Those are all, those are all strategies too. You could use. And if an older builder where I am, that’s what he did for me. Yeah. Builders love that one. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s hard at a certain point to move your family around and everything, but I, I, builders definitely do.

[31:35] It’s a great way of, good strategy for sure. Let’s go into some rapid fire questions. Do you have like your favorite book ever? It doesn’t have to be real estate investing related, but it can be. Well, right now it picks out to me as who, not how. Who, not how. Okay. Because I’m sure there’s, there’s others. That one just, that one pops up in my head and it’s kind of focused right now on the business. We’ve hired some people and it’s made a huge difference. Maybe a lot of work done. So I would say. Okay. So that’s about hiring people. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Essentially the solution is who do you need to hire to, to fix the problem? Not how do I fix the problem? I like it. Um, what about your best deal you’ve ever completed?

[32:19] Best deal I’ve ever completed? Or favorite. Most memorable. Most memorable. You pick. Which route do I want to go? I would say the most memorable is that first deal. And it’s just because it was such an absolute bear. It definitely wasn’t the best deal. Yeah. Talk about that. It was a hundred percent not the best deal. But it, I learned so much and I would never, ever do anything again that way because there was so much pain in some of that things. Like. Well, you’re thankful you went through it. I would imagine. Kind of. I mean, you wish you would have learned. I wish I would have gone back with. I wish I was just not done that. Okay. Well, I mean, you know what’s not to do. I guess you got to imagine.

[33:02] Exactly. A little hard knock there a little bit. I guess that kind of is similar to the next question though. Like your biggest mistake. One of the, one of the things we had a best like learning outcome from. I would say to piggyback on that one is one of the things that I’m trying to do more is learn from other people. So partnerships are pretty huge. Yeah. It lets you scale better. You got to be really careful about the partners that you picked, but it’s not just the financial kind of, you know, pooling resources together and having that benefit. It’s more of like other person’s connections, their, their knowledge and everything, how they do things. Something as simple for me as like, I would overthink a lot of things going back to how I wanted to be perfect.

[33:46] And so when I would send an email, it took me way too long trying to make everything perfect. Well, by having partnerships and doing other work with other people, think how they operated. Like I just learned to, learn to send it out quick and change some of those habits that were actually causing a lot of stalls in my time. No, that’s huge. I think partnerships, all that kind of stuff, um, just saves you tons of learning time and growth. Like I, I think, I mean, that’s for real estate sales, like, you know, trying to do things like other people that have done them already. It’s just, yeah, it, it’s gold. Um, and being, being, I think if we want to break into that a little bit deeper, I think one of the things that I, I should be some of my success too, is that I’ve, I get excited about your wins.

[34:34] I don’t get threatened by them. I, I’m sure I’m, I’m human. There’s people that are going to like, you know, get on this. Yeah. I’m going to be, I’m going to, yeah, I’m human. If I see you as a rival or something, maybe I’ll be, you know, mad at your success or something. But I think overall, like, you know, with my friend, like I, I get really excited on, and I’m, you know, I share in their joy. I try to. Yeah. And I think that kind of mentality really helps you, opens doors. Like, I mean, if you’re, if you’re able to be excited with somebody, they’re going to want to talk about it with you. So you’re going to learn. They might want to work with you on the next thing they do, as opposed to somebody who would be threatened by it and then would just be talking bad, talking crap about, you know, I mean, you don’t want to work with them.

[35:16] Yeah. You don’t want to be around the person. Yeah. I kind of think, yeah, come on to my next deal. We do our proof on it.

[35:25] Well, I mean, this has been really good. I, I, I, I’ve really enjoyed, I think we got into some of the history that you’ve had with investing. I think that we, you know, got into this vindication world a lot. Cause I, you know, honestly, like I’ve, I’ve been a realtor for 10 years. I’ve been a co host of a, of a black animal word. Real say meetup. Yeah. Uh, for a while. And, but I don’t think I really understood the syndication world. We had guests talk about it and it, it was sometimes a little bit. Cause it is complicated, but it really boils down to the win-win. So I think that was really good that we could talk about that a little bit more. Is there any way you would, you’d want people to connect with you?

[36:10] Is there any social media platforms or if they’re. Yeah. So they’re, they’re welcome to reach out. The best place is probably LinkedIn. Okay. Chase Latterback. I honestly don’t even know. I mean, if you Google me, I mean, if you look me up on LinkedIn, you should be able to find me, but. Yeah. So you’re so professional. Happy to chat anytime. Without that. I mean, I’m need to work on an Instagram and stuff like that, but I don’t, I don’t really. Yeah. No worries. But I mean, I know there’s some great connections to be made on LinkedIn for sure. I don’t think I remember how to go on. I’ll work on that. I’ll have a podcast soon if you want to watch. Yeah. DVD. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for being here.

[36:55] Thanks for listening to the Wealthy Investor Podcast, where we talk about wealth and holistic health. If you enjoy our content, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to hear new episodes every Thursday. If you really like our content, you can follow us on social media at The Wealthy Investor. Wealthy spelled W-E-L-L-T-H-Y.