Rising From Struggles to Building Legacy Wealth with Megan Ahern

[0:00] welcome back to the rei agent erica hello it’s been a eventful week yeah it has um we had a bit of a crisis happen at our house this week and our daughter experienced a pretty severe skull to burn um in the morning while we were getting ready some hot boiling hot water spilled on her left side and um i won’t get too graphic with it but it was really hard to see and she was in a lot of pain and we were very quickly on our way to the emergency room about an hour away the the hospital that’s a little bit further away has a peds er so that’s where we were headed and we were there fun to see your kid in pain like that no that was awful um can i trade places burn pain especially i think is just a different kind of pain and pain meds don’t touch it near as well as they do other pain i remember a doctor telling me that once but it was just her skin was very raw and because it fell it was a cup of water that fell off the counter down on top of her it hit her shoulder her arm her hip and her leg um yeah basically we were heating up a thermos and she wanted to look at it look what was in it and and dumped it on herself and that’s yeah it’s

[1:32] just it’s really hard and then she came home like we had our our like our nanny came back for the first time uh this year uh she’s a local student we just have her for a couple hours every uh week and um she was there then my my parents were there too because uh they had to help transition stuff blah blah but she just comes back she’s kind of like overwhelmed like you know and everybody’s like just so concerned about her and i i just wanted to pick her up and squeeze her which would be probably really painful but that’s what i wanted to do and um you know i she just kind of made it clear she just kind of wanted a little bit of space and she’s you know happy that we were concerned and then you know she remembered all the fun stuff she she got a popsicle got to watch lots of tv um and so that’s kind of part of the story now that she likes to talk about but it was really hard to see yeah it was really tough and i think in some ways we’re moving on to maybe the harder part of the process for her because burns take a while to heal and they’re they’re extremely painful and we need we have to change the bandage every day and um she’s gonna have to take a shower tonight and so i just i just

[2:47] feel for her because it’s one thing to have it happen and it really hurts when it does but healing is slow and and painful and then being a five-year-old kid wanting to run around and run around and wrestle and all that stuff yeah um yeah so we’ll i guess probably be talking about updates as we go here um but we are also uh testing out a camper we just bought this week we’re not camping people or camper people we haven’t been before and so i backed it into our driveway so we could have it and prepare and pack it and stuff like that and that will you know i actually didn’t uh take out a mailbox or anything so i you know i feel like i was very worried about that but it would have been okay if you did our mailbox has been taken out like five times it’s hanging on by a screw it was seriously it was like two people that hit it within the span of like a week it was really funny and we did not care um but yeah no so we’re gonna we’re gonna try that out um hopefully you know uh it being a little bit more comfortable like it you know it would probably be a lot worse in a tent if it was really hot or something for her as well so hopefully this whole thing will be a

[3:54] little bit more comfortable uh she’s certainly excited about that the kids are very very excited about the camper and we are too so it’s gonna be a fun new adventure we’re not we’re going like 20 minutes away it’s just to try you’re talking about it so casually what you don’t know is that he’s pretty much spent every waking hour in it since he’s parked in the driveway yesterday we didn’t sleep in it we we reserved that uh but i did take some meetings and finish some stuff in the in the lazy boy in there uh earlier i might take a nap sometime whenever i find time for a nap that would be a great napping chair yeah you’ve been wanting one like that um but yeah so that’s going to be kind of a new thing we’re trying to figure out what that looks like for us going forward i had this idea of like hey it’s about football season at the time of recording anyway uh maybe we can uh like you know go camping and like watch uh football games in the camper and then there’s like well when is it going to be sunday monday or thursday that we can sit down and watch uh because we’ll be packing up at least on sundays right to go back and then also the kids are probably not

[5:00] going to want to just sit around inside the camper and watch football all day so that’s not a long live dream but anyway that’s going to happen we’re looking forward to it uh today’s guest is one that i’ve been excited about for a long time um i i first came across uh megan ahearn in uh the better life tribe she led some talks and and uh was you know active in in the in this one of the summits i went to um experienced people might know her better as the tatty investor if you’re on instagram follow her um she is yeah she’s great and um we had a nice conversation with her um we asked her if she could be on the show when when we went to austin and saw her there and um yeah you know finally got her on and and she was a really fun guest to talk to she was but yeah without further ado let’s get right into it here’s megan megan

[6:01] welcome back to the rei agent we are blessed to have uh megan ahearn here today megan thanks so much for joining us thanks for having me this is gonna be great yeah megan we’ve been connected uh through uh the better life tribe uh through that that kind of brandon turner beardy brandon’s uh network and i i’ve known you most as the tatty investor so if anybody is following you on social media that is who we’re talking to here um so yeah megan you are a big investor tell us kind of your story about getting into real estate yeah so i got into real estate in about 2015 kind of got sold on one of the big guru programs spent thirty thousand dollars on the big package and then just taught me enough to get myself into trouble honestly so i started sending out postcards got my first deal under contract tried to wholesale it because it was a long distance um deal tried to wholesale it couldn’t and so i decided you know what these flippers they don’t know what they’re doing so i’ll just try to flip it myself um and did that i made every mistake like i hired craigslist contractors everything went bad

[7:08] uh and i ended up losing 20 grand on that on that deal but in the meantime had bought a live-in flip kind of a house hack also uh in southern california where we lived at the time and ended up making eighty thousand dollars on that deal so going into uh about 2018 my husband was getting medically separated from the marine corps after a bad uh parachute accident and so we kind of had to reevaluate like what do we want to do what does he want to do when he grows up and uh we decided to just go for broken real estate sold everything we owned in california moved to lincoln to mark lincoln nebraska which was the market that we picked kind of to own as our market we’ve actually moved into a travel trailer and just parked that trailer behind um our first projects for the first year and really proved to ourselves that like we could make it work and make it happen and just totally went for broke on real estate wow what went into the thought process for lincoln when you were looking at markets yeah so we were looking at a lot of different midwest markets because we really wanted to buy rental properties and i just couldn’t wrap my mind around doing that in california where it’s so expensive it is

[8:23] such a high barrier of entry and uh so anytime one of our military friends would go like back home i’d be like where is back home and i would ask him about the cities ask him about the neighborhoods would i be safe there um he has like a small woman i didn’t want somewhere where i had to feel unsafe in a certain neighborhood uh and then i would look at the demographics of the market the population growth um the job growth in the area income and then rent versus um rent versus cost of the property a lot of different metrics like that and i probably looked at 50 different uh markets like very deeply and finally a friend of ours who had got out a couple years before uh his wife became an agent in lincoln nebraska she was from southern california too and she calls me up and she’s like hey you should come out and visit us like i think this is the market that you’re looking for i’m an agent now like i this is this is what you’ve been looking for and so that was probably about a year or so of us telling all of our friends what we were trying to do and like looking into all their markets so we came out to

[9:32] visit and i just fell in love with lincoln uh it’s a nice city it’s like kind of like mid-size smallish city but it has everything that you need in the city but it had all of those kind of demographic requirements low crime um it has a couple different universities in the in the city so it has very young population so a very strong rental market uh so we decided that and just went all in on it so um you were in southern california was that uh military based or was that was that because of military or were you also like did you grow up there was that home yeah i grew up there uh in southern california my husband grew up in alaska so that was military based for him he was stationed on camp pendleton um yeah i definitely wasn’t going to alaska though so nebraska sounded like a happy medium i mean hey detroit also that’s pretty good rent to purchase price ratios there i know and there there are some markets you know in the country that seem on paper to be much better than lincoln nebraska like if i would pick again maybe i wouldn’t have picked lincoln nebraska but i also knew i was going to be

[10:41] living there so like i wanted to pick a spot where i wanted to raise my kids and all of those things detroit seems maybe like it might be a little more dangerous in certain areas it’s gentrifying now though it’s it’s better than it was i think yeah that’s awesome um so that was a pretty big shift for you um before you were you kind of did this whole flip thing um where did you have a career as well that you had to leave like i mean so i’m i’m getting at you left your home um maybe from a military perspective it’s easier to move around to a completely new area but that was your home did you also then have a career that you also left or were you at that point already all in with that flip yeah so i was a stay-at-home mom at the time but before that um i have done a lot of things i’ve been in grocery management and uh sales kind of in the grocery industry i worked like cold calling selling small business loans so i’ve done a whole lot of different kind of weird things and i’m always like i want to be in a job for maybe six months and i’m either moving up or moving out i just get bored really easily and i’ve always wanted to be an

[11:51] entrepreneur business owner um so then when i got pregnant with my first i uh stopped working for a little while and was kind of in that mode still uh when when jeff got out but i think you know with with guys that exit the military a lot of times it’s hard for them to go from military life to civilian life and then even harder to go from military life to entrepreneur life so um i was happy i got to kind of step in and fill that gap a little bit in the beginning where um a lot of it was he he’s like such a hard worker but i didn’t have that um kind of entrepreneurial mindset of like he would say tell me what to do and i’ll do it but he didn’t have that ability to like dream and like really have a direction in our business at first okay that sounds like that could be really hard hard transition yeah and and two i mean not necessarily i guess you would have to speak to this but living in your travel trailer behind the property not necessarily having space to be separated or together kind of depending on what you were needing at the time um i know we talk about that sometimes like like moving to the house we’re living in now we have a couple of different places we

[13:14] can be depending on how close we want to be to each other uh but you know when we lived in a smaller home that that was hard when we had like one living room and then it was tough to to have your own space if you need some alone time yeah the trailer life is not the best like it’s so romanticized or everyone’s like oh my gosh that sounds so fun no no no actually it sucks like you don’t have a washer and dryer you don’t have your own space you’re living in like 200 square feet you know and for us we didn’t have most of the time like sewer hookups so we’d have to pull our trailer out every week and a half or two weeks and like you’re trying to stretch that amount of time you can go so you like try to wash a bowl like with just barely running water so it’s just like all these weird little quirks that we have to deal with and in nebraska obviously we have very harsh winters um so going into our second winter and i was about to have my second kid and we’re living in the trailer and i was like bro give me a house like i am done i am done with this life but by then we had done by i think um five rental units and done a flip uh so we had kind of like figured it out and we

[14:31] decided yeah we can afford a mortgage and uh stills like six hundred dollars for our mortgage because we got a great deal you know a fixer upper and just put mattresses on the floor for the next year while fixing it up and doing the live and flip thing so uh it wasn’t like a bougie mortgage or anything so yeah did it feel like a big step up it’s funny because we um we look at the time we bought a house this house we’re in now like so we went up like 3.7 times in square footage from the house we were in um and we weren’t necessarily looking for a bigger house necessarily maybe a little bigger but um we were looking for an opportunity like you you had like where we could fix it up was in a good area it could be a house that we’d love to live in for a long time um and so we got that and looking back a like seeing our kids like crawling on this like disgusting stains carpets like it’s like really hard to see uh and then second of all um when we had our kitchen being remodeled uh we were like doing dishes in like our bathtub in the basement uh for a while and it just it just was it to me it

[15:32] was dark times but maybe for you coming from the travel trailer this was actually like a felt better i mean how did that how’d that work for you doing like a live-in flip yeah it was like such a huge step up because we actually had like a washing machine you know like we don’t have to go to the laundromat and uh yeah but definitely it’s still some weird stuff like you almost have to do it out of order too when you’re doing a live-in flip like for us at least we ripped out all the carpets because it was like 50 year old carpet or whatever we ripped it all out redid the carpet but then we’re having to do all the rest of the project around it so like drywall work over fresh carpets it’s just such a bigger pain in the butt yeah and then we ended up remodeling the bathroom which was the only one bathroom one bathroom house remodeled it during covid and so we got the shower surround we got all the supplies we got everything we ripped out the tub in the shower and then went to install the the new tub and shower we’re gonna try and do it like one or two days and uh the shower surround was cracked

[16:36] and shipping we didn’t take it out of the box like verify before we went to install so then we had our shower tore out for like two weeks and you know how supplies were during covid like we couldn’t get another shower surround for two weeks so we’re going to the gym to shower and like it was just it was a hot mess but you know you do what you have to do and we ended up making like 60 000 bucks on that house and yeah you know it was fine worked out yeah now that you’re a little bit separated from it do you look back on that time fondly oh i do i like this sounds weird but going from a travel trailer to a house you don’t have any furniture like we didn’t have any so we literally just had one couch in the living room and mattresses on all the bedroom floors but like we had little kids so we had uh a three-year-old a two-year-old and a and a newborn and we would just like the kids would just run and just dive onto the mattresses on the floor and like it just became this big i don’t know like wwe like smack down like just wrestling on the on the mattresses on floor and so i look back on that

[17:46] like that was fun it was fun yeah yeah like kids kids dream yeah yeah kids can do they do such a good job of making an adventure out of like stressful situations for adults but kids always just see it as like this is the best opportunity we’d have so much fun they’re so resilient like we decided to move to maui out a couple years ago on a whim like we decided and then three weeks later we sold everything we owned and moved to maui wow and the kids were just like so down for it right they’re like yeah let’s go like how to get rid of all their toys all their everything and then just moved and then a year later we decided to move back and so they’re just like all right cool yeah let’s do nebraska again and like it doesn’t matter what we’re throwing at them they’re just so down for it yeah and then a few months after that my daughter’s like okay so what are we what are we doing this thing again where we just switch houses like where are we going next i think we’ll stay here for a little bit but they’re just i love that that’s the storyline our daughter too is on a smaller scale but you know we travel a lot and we like to go um camping and lots of different things and she always

[18:58] asks like what when’s our next trip what what are we doing next yeah i love that with uh these moves did you did you pick up another uh like fix live and flip again did you do any of that while you’re or or were you like okay we’re just going to get a house we can chill in yeah in maui uh we actually rented a fully furnished place so we just brought like 16 suitcases to maui on an airplane and that was it um yeah that was just like a year of rest and that was very refreshing because we were flipping a ton we were working like 100 hour work weeks and we just decided like we’re getting burnt out and we need to just remove ourselves from this and do it in a way that doesn’t require us to be here so that helped us like test our systems to say can we still flip houses in nebraska while being in maui and we’re able to get it down to like i worked probably 10 hours a week my husband worked 10 hours a week wow and still be able to flip uh and and do real estate our our um agent business and i own a staging business so we’re able to actually grow all of those businesses while not being there wow that’s

[20:11] amazing that’s a great way to test our systems maybe we could do that yeah well let’s break it down for selfish reasons no um yeah tell us a little bit about how um yeah how you manage some of that i mean so like obviously you’ve been you had been there so you probably had this laundry list of contractors and that kind of stuff you know the you know who’s who could do what so were you hiring or you were you having managers in the area kind of take over more or how how did you do that yeah so i had hired a full-time i called her an assistant but really what she was for me was i called her an assistant because she would do whatever i asked her to do quite honestly but uh she ran my entire staging company and also ran uh like our project so kind of a project manager but she would also do um tenant showings and things like that for us uh we also kind of transitioned into midterm rentals while in maui so she would furnish those completely um so without her i would not have been able to do it or i would have to do it in a very different way but we had that full-time kind of boots on the ground person that could just do whatever and so we had hired her about a month before moving and so

[21:25] i got to train her up on like okay this is how we stage this is how we run this business and then this is how we run projects and then i was still very much um a part of running the projects because she doesn’t have any construction experience previously uh so i’m managing that still like like the parts that are hard to teach someone is is if you put this money into a certain rehab like a remodel this bathroom or add a bathroom in the basement will you get that money and then plus some return out on the back end of that that that concept is very hard to quantify sometimes um but the getting the bids part of it and checking up on the contractors and doing all those things like it’s not actually that hard of a task so she’s able to do all of those and go to home depot a million times and whatever is needed of her um so yeah from afar the way that we run it is she’ll go to a project usually about once a week at least she’ll check on each of the projects she’ll take a hundred pictures of the project and then upload them to dropbox and then tag us in our project management uh software which we use podio that like hey i checked on this and then i’ll go in and

[22:39] look at all of those pictures and then i can say okay are we going to be uh dealing with this concrete pulling away from the foundation or like what’s the plan for this what’s the plan for that i might pick out like little things like that where she might not notice it or if things are framed up right or wrong i might notice that where she didn’t um but that’s how i get eyes on my properties like every week but for me then it only takes maybe five minutes to go through 100 pictures of the project instead of driving across town checking it out chit chatting with whatever contractors are there you know it becomes a much less of a process for me yeah and having like i don’t know like i think sometimes i get lost in all the weeds that i’m in and just having like a consistent like you know check in with the contractors make sure that they’re they’re they’re working um getting stuff done in a timely manner like that can be a challenge for sure too so like that i love that and one of the things that i love to do too is kind of um have this like checklist that i would uh because i hated i got so sick and tired of going to lowe’s like every day um that i would just like i would try to

[23:53] especially if it was a lighter flip where you didn’t really need to um you know gut it or anything like that or reframe anything would just go through and like each room you know like make a checklist like does it need a light fixture does it need you know xyz and then i can just make a shopping cart in lowe’s print it out or make it a pdf and email it to my lowe’s like pro representative and and then they can just like bulk order that all at once at once uh which is nice a nicer way for me um because it was delivered and didn’t have to go to lowe’s 16 times yeah i know a lot of things wrong when i did that too i mean i know i ordered some wrong because you know you like order a a a faucet or a uh uh sink fixture or whatever and then they like say you know add these like plumbing parts as well and i probably ordered the wrong ones because i just clicked add yeah we um we do a lot on the front end of a project to like really plan that out and then we also have kind of our standard finishes that we always use so natasha will go through and take measurements and counts of everything that we need

[24:54] and then do that big bulk order that you’re talking about but we do home depot and then we do a pro order send it to the bedroom get money off and all that and then get delivered and then for like a lot of our fixtures we’re getting off of amazon because there’s just significantly cheaper on like light fixtures plumbing fixtures uh and then we’re getting those all delivered to the property um as well and so it just makes it like very streamlined process for us and then anything that’s like cute stuff we’re ordering and then anything that’s like the ugly stuff the contractors are getting so like those plumbing fixtures and all of those or fittings you know like the p-trap and the the supply lines and all of those they’re responsible for so we’re not having that like back and forth so many times getting the wrong stuff no that makes sense and that’s they just include that in their initial bid i would imagine then right yep yep and we work with a lot of the same people so they kind of know like what are the things that we’re going to get and what are the things that they’re going to end up getting did you all start off doing your own work like were you rehabbing those first properties

[26:01] yourselves yeah we were doing a lot of it there were certain things that obviously we wouldn’t touch like hvac and stuff and then certain things that real quickly were like okay drywall is an art not a science like i don’t want to be doing that um but for a while we were doing a lot of the project ourself and we just had certain parts that like i would do certain parts jeff would do and then certain parts we would sub out but we could get a flip done in like 30 days because we were there every day we’re working like full full days on it and you know he’s doing all electrical i’m doing all the trim and paint and all of those things and i mean it worked for the time being we were able to make deals work that we couldn’t make work now uh just because we’re saving on that labor but like man i i don’t know how many times i’ve been nine months pregnant and up a 30-foot extension ladder painting the exterior of a house in snow you know what i mean like it’s just totally not worth it um um praise jesus that my babies are all safe but um yeah it was wild for a couple years there what um did you did you so was this like the trip to maui when you kind of drew that line in the sand

[27:14] and said i’m not we’re not doing everything anymore or because i know that’s often really hard for people to separate themselves from like you know like every time something happens in a rental that you know it’s an easy fix that you could do um like calling somebody to do it instead of going yourself like is that is that the time where you were burnt out like we need to make throughout the line are you already kind of phasing out of some of the day-to-day before then we were phasing out of a lot of the day to day but when those things came up it’s still just easier to like oh just run over there and do it um and and maui really did remove that ability from us right it should just say like all right well you gotta call a plumber like their toilet needs plunged and that i can just go do it in five minutes and cost zero or you call a plumber on off hours and it costs 200 bucks or whatever um but it it changed the mindset of it and so now even when we’re back now we’re like no we shouldn’t be doing that our time is best spent either hanging out with our family and just enjoying our life

[28:16] or doing really high value um tasks yeah that makes sense i i was fortunate enough not to be very handy and mainly uh you know started my career was a real estate agent um so when we started getting investment properties and rentals and that kind of stuff i i partially drew a line in the sand because i couldn’t do it i partially drew a line in the sand because i i knew that that would just suck joy out of it for me and i don’t think it was going to be a long-term way of like building up rentals because i would just hate having to go do those things and so like eating the cost of it knowing that like you know if we’re not killing it cash flow wise because of these things like it doesn’t matter now we don’t need that um we’re we’re really uh that’s a long-term investment and it’s gonna you know pay dividends down the line and so it’s better for us to have the enjoyment of our life and not just sell everything as we’re sick of it yeah yeah for sure then save a little bit of money as we go yeah but with that i mean this week this is where so we have a midterm rental where we had just started like earlier this

[29:25] year and we just had our first tenants move out and we had uh about 24 hours before the next tenants moved in and we didn’t realize that the landscaping had been become so overgrown and and so like i was really wanting to get it cleared for the new tenants coming in but man i worked my butt off for like two and a half hours pulling those weeds and these were the kind of weeds that like as they grow they also attach more roots and then more you know like horizontally so i was just pulling and pulling and pulling and two and a half hours and i made it about six feet and they’re still like the other side and then around the side of the house and finally i like threw up my hands i was like you know what i’m just gonna call landscaper because my time is better spent somewhere else and i’m gonna end up hating this space yeah yeah for sure i i just think too like a lot of times the professionals can get it done so much faster so you’re like man they’ve been charging for like 10 hours because it would take me 10 hours to do this thing really they get done in an hour and it’s no sweat so it’s like i would

[30:29] just much rather call and get it done and once you kind of switch that to that mentality it just makes everything easier you know and then it frees you up to make a hundred or a thousand dollar per hour tasks instead of doing a twenty dollar per hour task yeah that’s been a hard lesson for us to learn because we grew up in a mennonite culture where you don’t spend money on services if you can’t like you you probably should be able to do it yourself and if you can do it for cheap you should do it for cheap so that’s been like a big mindset switch for us for you more okay for me i think for myself for me i probably well clearly i haven’t moved out of it because i was just pulling weeds for two and a half she she is the only one that has a tool belt in the sounds

[31:16] it’s hard to break those like cultural norms like my dad is very much like that too like why would you pay someone to do it if you could just do it yourself and every once in a while like i’ll catch myself like why are we even doing this like i still shovel my snow because i just feel like it’s such a waste of money but every time i’m doing it i’m like am i doing this because i love it or am i doing this to save 20 bucks and if it’s to save 20 bucks it’s really dumb but i actually do really like shoveling snow it’s kind of like one of those things i do love it i know it’s kind of like me and my lawn i kind of still enjoy mowing it um i don’t like enjoy the weed eating part right nobody wants to do like the finish work you can’t really hurry out just the finish work i’ll do yeah um i do want to ask more about the the midterm rentals though um so you shifted into that we we were talking a little bit beforehand about how um you know it’s kind of a nerve-wracking like this is our first one and this is our second tenant and it seems like like you had mentioned like it seems like it just like

[32:17] the book has come like last minute like you have it advertised you know we’re setting it up so that you know the tenant if they’re not sure when their end date is going to be they have to like basically commit for a month so give us a month notice so that we can advertise it and everything um but yeah it just seems like it’s crickets and then boom there there is interest like when the availability is there so was that a transition thing for you as well to get used to and how many did you start with like did you just you said you did multiple right so like did you just go all in and like get a bunch at the same time um i started it because we had this seven plex from hell project and uh in order to save that deal and make it make sense i thought okay i need to switch some of these units to midterm rentals so we started with the first three units on that building uh as midterm rentals it was the first time i did midterm so i didn’t really know what to expect i didn’t really know what rates we could get for it um but yeah it’s super weird to me like i would think traveling nurses or traveling professionals

[33:19] in general would have it like a little bit more together like have their stuff together and be booking more than a week out but a lot of times those bookings come within like a week or two weeks they just i don’t think they get their like contract information from the hospital until right at the last minute and to me like i just am a little bit more of a planner than that seems crazy but that’s just how it is so as a midterm host you have to kind of just expect that and you can look into like what the demand is in your market and see uh like the searches per unit in your market and that’s a really good indicator of whether you have strong demand or not uh and if you have strong demand you just have to kind of trust in the process of like you are going to get a booking at the last minute i also in my portfolio now we’ve been doing it for like probably a year and a half and we’re running at about a five percent vacancy on our midterm rentals amazing it is amazing because that’s about what we’re running on our long-term rentals as well um but we’re only taking like two days of vacancy between each booking and then um we are having like an average stay of about four months per per booking

[34:35] um and what i do is we we post them both on airbnb and on furnish finder on airbnb we do a 31 night stay minimum and we remove the instant booking ability so when we get uh an inquiry whether on either platform if it’s available like september 1st but they want to move in september 15th i’ll tell them i don’t want to have to take two weeks of vacancy so can you move your move-in date to september 1st and start paying from there you can move in whenever you want and 90 of the people will say yes they’ll pay the extra two weeks to get the spot that they want um and you just have to it’s a bit of a ballsy move because you have to know like or you have to be comfortable enough that if they say no i’m not going to do that and they just go away are you going to get another booking that’s you know better um in in our experience they mostly say yes or we mostly get a better um booking that lines up anyway so that’s how we’re able to get like no vacancy on our properties i love that and i think one thing that’s helpful for me too hearing you talk about it is that you know if it is last minute for these people

[35:47] they’re not planning ahead so even if you’re worried about having some vacancy after these people move out and you don’t have another booking lined up that likely whoever books it it won’t be like for the next month it will be something like fairly soon we had we had a booking request for that would leave us about a month of vacancy and we just i was like they also wanted to add a cheaper price i was like this just doesn’t make sense like we can’t like have just a month gap because it’s going to take out a lot of people that might want to be there for longer um and and be there sooner and that kills your numbers when you first started what were you um what were you projecting for vacancy and did you price according to try to make up for that and or or what did you base your pricing on yeah i was looking at furnish finder and kind of seeing like what other people were charging for in the area it’s a little bit challenging to really like dial that in though because some units are going to be better furnished some units are a little better area some units are uh professional pictures which i think is probably the best indicator that you’ll be able to get the most

[36:51] amount for your property uh is that really very professional dialed in looking listing um but i think that we thought it would be worth it if we got 1500 um per month for our midterms and that was a two-bedroom unit uh but we were probably going to be able to get like a thousand dollars a month and we ended up getting the 1500 like instantly and so i thought okay let’s push it on these next time so every time it would turn we would push it up push it up push it up and now we’re getting around 1850 to 1900 on those same units so i think you’re able to push higher than what your uh maybe the other furnish finder like comps seem like uh if you have a very professionally managed property the way so you were saying a thousand would be the long-term uh amount long-term yep

[37:47] yeah and we’re paying like an extra i would say hundred dollars a month on our utilities between long-term and uh midterm it’s been interesting to see the type of inquiries that have come through so we live in a a town that has a university a hospital right along like a highway corridor area um but and some of the inquiries have been you know like athletics with james baddison university or uh but then some have been like 9-1-1 contractors that are coming into the area and then there’s been a lot of engineering contracts um just like some different stuff that i didn’t quite know was happening in our area so that’s been kind of interesting to read yeah it’s super random we have a a handful of guys that are from europe maybe england something like that and they’re all working out like a wind farm and i’m like i don’t even know we had a wind farm but apparently it’s like 40 minutes away but there’s nowhere else to stay and we accepted one of them and now they’re just like oh i have another friend that’s with me at the wind farm could you have any other places and so they just kind of keep coming

[38:54] up yeah michael i guess we have that here that is very random i i you know i think this this property uh you know it’s it’s we love it we we did a lot uh to it we made it really really really nice and i think you know it’s part of it is just because it’s a really good location that we just wanted to hold this long term um if we ever can refinance it i think the numbers would work well or a lot better for a long-term uh rental as well um but all that to say is that like i think if we were targeting a midterm rental i think we would probably not necessarily target a different property maybe a target different property but just probably not go all out with the the furnishings you know everything and we have like uh you know a really fancy bathroom with like a floating sink and under cabinet lighting underneath it wallpaper tiled everything and like you know granite countertops and all this like we went really fancy with it um but yeah you know i think it seems like it’s more workforce housing we could have maybe gotten a little bit cheaper of rent to make it work um and yeah people probably don’t care as much about that stuff for this type of thing yeah that’s like it really

[40:04] matters with like short-term rentals and they want the whole like experience on the vacation but for midterm rentals they’re like i want clean functional like it doesn’t need to be so bougie um we have one property that’s a duplex up down duplex completely like exactly the same units stacked on top of each other one of them we completely remodeled uh before it had like a 20 inch uh stove and no dishwasher so we added a dishwasher full-size stove microwave over the stove and like all these different kind of upgrades totally remodeled uh tiled the the bathroom right tiled the the shower surround and just made it really cute and then the other one we left it totally like that 20 inch stove countertop microwave no dishwasher green linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom and just kind of outdated they were exactly the same so like it has no lift the 20 000 bucks that we put into the basement unit so it’s like okay well now we know this is like ab testing it was split testing it’s amazing so lesson learned um yeah no i we every time we go back in there i’m like man if we’d have three kids like i’d move in i love this house

[41:27] yeah it is really cute it’s it’s also unfortunately where we the city where we live and at least at this point they don’t allow airbnb short term unless it’s your principal residence or a part of it and so we can’t fill in with some of the like short term but otherwise like it would be a really cute short term rental too because it’s right downtown it’s walkable to like all of our cute brunch sprouts and brunch spots and breweries and uh park and um lots of things but it’s been a big learning curve for us in a good way but lots of things we weren’t quite expecting but it’s it’s worked out yeah that’s awesome i did i did want to ask you quick uh you mentioned that you also have a real estate sales business then that you open i wanted to ask about that um when that come about and what’s that look like yeah as soon as we moved here my husband got licensed and so that was uh mostly to get us into properties as quickly as possible when they hit the market we could just be making offers pretty instantly

[42:30] um and also to list our own flips and then it also kind of evolved into like okay now we’re helping clients and that whole part of it i would say that like our business our flipping business is still our number one client but we do also work with a lot of retail clients um and then i got licensed just a couple years ago because they changed the laws in our state so that essentially they said uh you can’t market equitable interest in a contract unless you’re an agent so essentially you can’t wholesale properties unless you’re an agent where previously it was like okay jeff’s gonna be the real estate agent and i’m going to do the seller walkthroughs do the off-market stuff and then wholesale properties but that legislation for us kind of said okay well now it’s allowed that i could also be an agent and i could also wholesale um so i decided to get my license we always kind of joked like it would take me longer to get my license than it would take to lose my license because i’m a bit of a rebel and a rule breaker so i’m a loose cannon with my license so jeff mostly handles that that side of the business

[43:45] but yeah i am licensed so okay cool yeah and do you have other agents that around as well or such as you too uh it’s us and then we also got our assistant who handles all the rest of our business license as well so that she can uh do showings for us and all that kind of stuff that’s cool yeah so like yeah you you attracted this person and you taught them in a month how to be a contractor to a gc a stager an agent that’s it sounds like a special hire that you did well yeah and she’s still with us she’s amazing like i i don’t think she’ll ever leave she’s awesome um but yeah like we we don’t do small volume either like we probably close 35 realtor transactions a year we we flip 30 houses ourself

[44:38] per year and then we have i don’t know 80 to 100 stagings a year so she’s a she’s a busy lady for sure that’s amazing yeah who not how i just exemplified yeah um we should probably get into the golden nugget question if you have any uh golden nuggets you’d like to share uh to our listeners uh could be about investing or or agent specific whatever comes to mind yeah so um okay golden nugget for us the best off-market marketing right now has been pay per lead marketing so um that works really well especially if you’re an agent too because some of those uh leads come in they’re highly motivated they want a cash offer or if they’re not highly motivated and they’re just kind of tire kicking or they’re like i want top dollar for my house you can steer them into being a listing client as well but essentially what pay per lead marketing is is there’s certain companies that will uh run pay-per-click ads for people that are going to the internet and typing in like how do i sell my house with a non-paying tenant in it or how how do i sell my house if it’s a hoarder house how do i sell this inherited house that i don’t want

[45:54] and they’re taking all of those kind of searches and they’re uh running pay-per-click ads so they’re the top google search ad when it comes up uh and then the seller is putting their information into the website and then you get that lead and you’re paying per lead instead of per click but you’re getting that lead exclusively to you to your phone so you can call them immediately and those leads for us have been the hottest leads we can close them super quickly uh and so yeah we’ve been just mostly getting most of our deals that way that’s awesome that’s a really good tip it’s amazing and yeah that’s a it’s a really cool way of if you’re if you’re able to do walk that line and i think it’s it’s the one to be a bit careful of um but like if you’re able to clearly clearly like kind of walk that line where there are times where it is in their best interest to not go in the market and just like you know have a quick and easy uh closing um but yeah i feel like there is definitely ways you could you could have best of both worlds with that kind of marketing where you could you know sell some

[47:00] on the market etc so that’s that’s really cool i love it yeah we as agents like obviously you have a fiduciary responsibility we have that responsibility to say like to not pull the wool over grandma’s eyes and be like oh your house is only worth a hundred thousand bucks but i’m allowed as an agent to say like hey why don’t you list it with an agent you’re gonna get the most if you want to get the highest top dollar for your house it makes the most sense to list with an agent then grandma’s like i i just hate the whole realtor thing i don’t want all these people coming through my house i don’t have to clean up i don’t have to do this and that okay well i can take my agent hat off and talk to you as an investor and tell you i can pay a hundred thousand dollars for it but i’m just telling you we might be able to list it we can get 140 for it if you do xyz clean it up a little bit we’ll get some professional pictures now i don’t want to deal with any of that i’ll just take the hundred thousand bucks all right well great you know i’m not lying to them i’m not being deceitful a lot of times we do give them both of those options of like hey we can do this for you

[47:59] list it for 140 and clean it up and i can even you know use my guys to to do some work on it or whatever needs fixed or we can just do it easy cash i won’t do any inspections uh i’ll pay all your closing costs you won’t have to pay any realtor commissions and i’ll pay a hundred thousand bucks for it they’re like that just seems like the better option so yeah i’ve done that and it did you’re exactly right like if you spell it out like you can have like three different options even like where like there’s this is like how you could do the fixed up you know top of the dollar way but yeah you’re gonna have to spend 20 000 or whatever to fix it up to get that um and i can help you with the contractors and stuff like that too and that’s one of the beauties of being in both worlds is that you have this like you have people that are willing to jump for you because you give them a ton of business every all the time and um and so yeah that really can help as an agent as if you have those contractor contacts as well but yeah i love that that’s really cool um what about a book do you have a favorite book or a fundamental book you think everybody should read uh the book on flipping houses

[49:04] i think was like super instrumental uh by jay scott i read that book bigger pockets one of the bigger pockets ones yeah uh read that and then there’s a sister book the book on estimating rehab costs um both of those were just huge and being able to get my flipping business off the ground yeah that’s a huge barrier something that people um get wrong often it’s knowing how much something’s going to cost and um yeah how long you to hold it all that kind of stuff to to make it profitable yeah for sure um and then what about uh where can people find you uh do you instagram i know you’re big on instagram what where are people looking for you these days yeah on instagram i’m the tatty investor both underscores uh between the words there and then um i am also an advisor at firstdeal.com uh which is brandon turner’s

[50:02] program that teaches new and aspiring investors how to get their first deal or their next deal um so definitely if you’re kind of in that boat hit us up there we’d love to help you out well i feel like we have like three more hours we could probably talk if we had the time but we really appreciate your time being here thanks so much for being on the show yeah thanks yeah no problem thanks for having me thanks for listening to the rei agent if you enjoyed this episode hit subscribe to catch new shows every week visit rei agent.com for more content until next time keep building the life you want all content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy it is intended for entertainment purposes only you