From $17K/Year Teacher Salary to Financial Freedom

Dave:
It’s very common these days to hear people say that you can no longer find cashflow or you can’t buy deals on the MLS and make them pencil. And this is particularly true when people start talking about some more expensive markets. But I’m curious if that’s actually true because I’ve spoken to a lot of investors who say that they are still buying in this market, even in more expensive areas of the country. And so today we’re actually going to do a deep dive into how you can absolutely still make deals pencil, and it’s not using some fancy new creative tactic. It’s using the same old fundamentals that have always worked for real estate investors.
Hey everyone, this is Dave. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Today we’re talking to a super cool, very interesting, fun investor named Corby Goad, who is operating out of Boise, Idaho. He has been investing for a couple decades now, but he left his W2 job recently. He actually rebuilt his entire career around real estate, not just investing, but also by building real estate services businesses. And we’re going to talk to Corby about a bunch of things, first and foremost, about market cycles and how he’s adapted, his tactics, his strategy, his portfolio being through a lot of different types of market conditions. We’ll also talk to him about the Boise housing market, and we’re going to get into a really great conversation about how to build a buy box that works even in this high interest rate confusing economic climate. Let’s bring on Corby Corby, welcome to the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. It’s so good to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Corby:
Thank you for having me. This has been a dream of mine for many years, so I’m honored to be here. Thanks so much.

Dave:
I love hearing that we’re making dreams come true. Absolutely. Well, I’m eager for this conversation, so I’d love to just start by having you tell us about how you first learned about real estate investing and why you decided to pursue it.

Corby:
Well, I’m older than probably most of your audience, and back in the day when I was in college, I was studying to be a teacher. And as you guys all know, teachers aren’t known for raking in a ton of money. And so I was trying to think of side gigs that I could do in the summer and that sort of thing.

Dave:
You sold out, man, just trying to be a teacher.

Corby:
It’s unfortunate, but so I don’t know how many people remember, but back in the day there was basically a wholesale guru, like the original one named Carlton Sheets. And he used to do these late night infomercials selling a kit to go out and learn how to wholesale properties. And I was so broke, I didn’t actually buy it. I went to the library and rented it, and it just kind of planted a seed. I never actually wholesale properties, but it started my mind thinking about real estate. And without into too much detail, when I was in college, I was working full-time, putting myself through school, and I ended up buying a starter home with an FHA loan. And one of my buddies moved in, so I was house hacking and he was paying me rent and he was handier than I was. And so over the year that he lived there, on the weekends we’d put in some tile or we paint a room.
And after a year, my lender came back to me and asked if I was interested in getting a heloc. And I didn’t know what that was. He informed me, I filled out an application and they sent an appraiser back out. And the bottom line is, in that year, messing around with my buddy at the house, I had made double the equity that I did teaching full time. Wow. And a light went off for me, and I just thought, what if I could replicate this two times or five times that it would create all kinds of opportunities for me. And so that was the first introduction I had to real estate being something that I thought I could do.

Dave:
Very cool. Well, congratulations on that. There are a couple parts of your story that I do want to dig into this. So tell me about this. What was his name? Carlton Sheets. I’ve never heard original sort of late night guru. You went to the library. How much was it, by the way? I’m curious. Do you remember what the course cost?

Corby:
It was tapes you would order. I don’t think they were even CDs. That’s how old I am. I think you had order tapes. Tapes, yes. It was hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars. Far more than I could have imagined having for something like that.

Dave:
But something in there must have appealed to you even though you didn’t wind up wholesaling. What about that sort of education, even though it was very expensive, sort of made you think that real estate was worthwhile?

Corby:
Well, it just was the idea that a lot of the gurus do now. He was selling the idea that anybody could go out and buy a property for less than market value and turn around and sell it for more. And he made it seem really attainable. And obviously as we know, BiggerPockets exist because there are more challenges than just knocking on somebody’s door and buying their property and turning around and making a hundred grand. But it just gave me that idea that this is something that anybody could do and just kind of got my mind thinking about it. And even when I was younger, I always just loved real estate and walking through open houses and just imagining doing projects. I didn’t have any skills or knowledge, but the idea of it was really appealing to me. And so that was something I just continued to explore.

Dave:
And do you think any of the education in that high priced course actually made you more successful, or were you able to learn what you needed to learn on your own or through actual just getting in there and doing things?

Corby:
Honestly, I don’t think I learned anything from listening to those tapes, but it’s like anything else. It’s like you said about taking action and listening to those tapes or listening to the BiggerPockets podcasts or getting all the forms or reading books. It keeps that fresh in your mind and it kind of keeps the dream alive and the idea that you can go out and do these things forefront. And so I think that’s what it did for me is that it wasn’t just an idea that popped in my head and then I never thought about it again, engaging in those types of things keeps it fresh in your mind and creates some creative thinking around those concepts, I think.

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like your first deal went extremely well. How did you wind up landing that first deal? Were you teaching then or were you still studying? When

Corby:
I bought the house, I was still studying and I graduated a few months after and got a teaching job. And so it was kind of both when I was there. I’m a big proponent for people going out and just taking action. And this was a property on the MLS. It was a fixer, it was just a cosmetic fixer. I didn’t have any business getting into something heavy, but it needed paint and flooring and things that anybody could do. And so I wasn’t thinking of it as an investment. I just thought it was a house I could afford that I could make nice on my own. And I still have that house today. And that one house that I bought on the MLS with an FHA loan with basically no money to my name has probably bought me five or six other properties

Dave:
By refinancing,

Corby:
Just pulling the equity out and moving it to another spot. It was a teacher I never made. I don’t think I had more than $3,000 to my name for several years, but I was able to move that equity around.

Dave:
That’s incredible. Well, let’s talk about how you did that because where we left off in your first deal, you made double your salary on that first deal and thought, man, if I did this a couple times, I could really improve my financial situation. So what’d you do next?

Corby:
So my wife and I, she was my girlfriend at the time, we got engaged and we started looking for a house for ourselves. And she had inherited some money previously and used that as a down payment for her house. Her parents cosigned for her and they put the house on the market. And because of this idea that was planted in my head about investing in real estate, and this was 20, I don’t know, 23 years ago when we went to move into our new house, my wife asked, well, when are you putting your house on the market? And I just said, I think I’m just going to try to rent it out. And she was very unhappy with that idea

Dave:
Why

Corby:
She didn’t like the idea. I think a lot of BiggerPockets listeners and readers struggle with this in their relationships too. She did not like the idea of having an extra mortgage. What if it was vacant for a month? What if the roof needs replacing? And we were both teachers and our first salaries were right in the $17,000 range. If there was a catastrophic issue, there was not cash in the bank to jump on that. And so I mean, she had some legitimate concerns, but a lot of people who are getting into real estate and that are coming to BiggerPockets for education are kind of in that same boat, and you have to take on a little bit of risk and it is going to be a little bit scary. And our first few deals were like that.

Dave:
But you did it, so you rented it out, right? I guess it turned out just fine. But I totally understand the concerns, especially if you’re uninitiated. There are a lot of questions, those are totally legitimate questions. But it sounds like you convinced her you knew what you were doing.

Corby:
Oh, no, I did not. I did not convince her I knew what I was doing.

Dave:
Are you 23 years later, you’re still working on that?

Corby:
Well, no, she’s come around. But one of the things that’s most interesting that I hope gives a little bit inspiration to people listening to this podcast is that I did everything wrong. And my wife was very clear about the fact that I was doing things wrong. I mean, she was a great partner, she was encouraging me, but I’m more of a jump in and make things happen kind of person. And she’s a process person. And as a landlord, I was not screening people properly. I was doing all the repairs myself. I was going over knocking on the door and asking for rent increases and just making things as difficult for myself as possible. And the first tenant that I screened, honestly, she was there for three years. She was on section eight. She destroyed the house, destroyed the house. And so she was there for three years.
And when it was done, we had to go in and do a full renovation. And really the conversation that I had with my wife was, she said, you’ve been a terrible property manager. You’ve done everything wrong all along the way. And somehow we still made money. Somehow it’s been okay. We had enough money to renovate the house our mortgage had been paid for. And so that honestly, ironically, that’s when she came on board. She said, if I think that if I help out by creating processes behind what we’re doing and start coming up with some plans to help scale, that we could actually make a run at this thing. Because if we can still make money doing everything wrong, then doing it right. Got to be a lot better than that.

Dave:
I love that. I say this on the show a lot that I think I’d love to plan so that even if things go wrong, I still make money. I’m just a conservative investor in that way because I know I’m going to screw up. It’s impossible to get everything exactly right. And it’s probably the most common advice I give to people who ask me about deal analysis or how to pick a market. It’s just like if you’re counting on everything going, that’s not a good business plan. You need a lot of wiggle room in there. And it sounds like you used up some of that wiggle room in the early years, but it still came out ahead, which is great. Yeah. All right. I am loving this conversation, but we do have to take a quick break for our sponsors, but we’ll be back with more from Corbe, God right after this. Welcome back investors. I’m here with Corbe God about how he got started in real estate while working full-time as a teacher I should add, and how he’s making deals work today. So then did you keep doing buy and hold rentals after that first one?

Corby:
Yeah, actually, the next few deals we did were just fixer uppers that we found on the MLS that we bought. And she and I went in and did what we could and we brought in contractors to help out with the rest. And we essentially did burrs before Burr was a thing, and we’d put tenants in there and let them pay the bills and just kind of kick back. And over time we’d raise the rents and we were making two or 300 bucks here and there. A lot of times they were breakeven the first year and they just got better and better over time. But we did three or four of those over the course of five or six years there at the beginning. Oh,

Dave:
Wow. That’s a pretty heavy look. And you were both working full-time at that point, right?

Corby:
Yep. Yes, we were.

Dave:
And was there a point when you went into real estate?

Corby:
Yeah, after those first few deals is when the recession hit in 2008. And so being teachers who didn’t make a bunch of money, and we were upside down in all of our properties at that point because everything in our market had lost probably 40% of its value. Oh, wow. And so we just kept our heads down. Rents didn’t really suffer much here, so we continued to rent our places out and they paid for themselves. And then when things started coming back in our market is when we really started getting serious about getting back into investing and making a career out of it.

Dave:
Tell me more about what it was like during that time, because I think a lot of newer investors don’t know about what it was like to live through, myself included. I started investing in 2010, so I didn’t live through 2008. But was there any point where you just thought about selling, closing up shop, just giving up and doing something else?

Corby:
No, partly because of ignorance probably. But also, we were negative equity in almost all of our properties, and I wasn’t interested in destroying our credit because I knew I was going to need that if we were going to take a run at it. When equity started coming back and all of my friends thought I was crazy, and all of our family thought we were crazy because we were underwater on everything we had. We had friends that were voluntarily doing short sales and destroying their credit, giving their properties back to the bank just because they had negative equity, not necessarily because they couldn’t afford it. And I mean, that was happening everywhere. And my wife and I just talked and we decided that the houses were paying for themselves and we were confident that our market was going to come back and be strong. And so we just put our heads down and wrote it out. We kept tenants in there and did our best to take good care of them, and it came back with a vengeance, and it’s been gangbusters ever since then. That’s

Dave:
Such a good point. I think something that people often overlook is that even in the relatively unusual scenario where housing prices do go down and you are underwater, that is a relatively unlikely thing in US history, the great financial crisis being a very big caveat to that. But even when that happens, if you keep paying your mortgage, you don’t have to sell. And I think that’s why as real estate investors, time is really always on our side. If you have cashflow, if you have appropriate cash reserves and you can withstand some of these difficult times like what Corby and his wife went through, you don’t need to sell at a loss. You could just keep doing what you’re doing, generating the cashflow and have it be a paper loss where in theory, your property is lost value, but you don’t actually realize those losses until you go on and sell. So I commend you for having the foresight and the guts to sort of stick with it. How long did it take for the market to rebound? Well, this was in Boise, right?

Corby:
Yeah, yeah. Or in Boise. It was about five years, probably between 2008 and about 2013 where things came about to the point where they were in 2007. But once it came back, our market, I’m sure some of the listeners have probably heard of Boise before, but our market has just continued to grow exponentially since then. And equity growth and appreciation has been just crazy since that point.

Dave:
During the pandemic. Boise was for I think maybe even close to a year, the fastest appreciating housing market in the entire country. I think it’s moderated since then. But in your wildest dreams in 2008, when you thought that it would come back, did you ever expect you would see the growth that we saw from 2020 to 20 22, 20 23? Oh,

Corby:
No, not in a million years. And I mean, that’s one of the things too that just to go back to my original point about just taking action is that I don’t think anybody who was on BiggerPockets or even anybody who lived here was thinking, man, I should really invest in Boise. That’s the next boom town. The only reason I’m sitting here today is because I took reasonable action and took some risk and made some moves that were scary to me at the time that put me in a position to be able to do some cool stuff.

Dave:
Absolutely. And it’s a perfect example and story of why you can’t time the market, right? No one would’ve guessed in 2018 all by in Boise, and all of a sudden we’re going to see 30% appreciation in a year or two years in a row or something. And I forget exactly what it was, but it was something remarkable like that and just proves that all you can do is just make good decisions and make incremental progress like you’re talking about.

Corby:
Absolutely. There’s a line in one of Gary Keller’s books that I really liked. He talks a lot about timing the market and how the only way that you can know when you’ve hit the bottom of the market is when it’s already gone. And so if you’re waiting for that moment, it’ll pass you by when you realize that it was actually there. And so the only way you can actually buy at the perfect time is pure luck.

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s entirely right. And I study this for a living, and I don’t try to drive the market. It’s just not possible. So tell us what you’re up to today, Corby, because I assume your strategies had to shift because what was possible in Boise in the early two thousands and even five, 10 years ago is probably different from what is profitable in today’s economic climate.

Corby:
Yeah, I mean, it is a little bit different, but when the market started coming back here and our equity started growing in our own personal properties, we just decided we were going to go all in. And so we started refinancing and pulling money out every opportunity we could and started buying small multifamilies around the Boise metro area. And so essentially after a couple of years of doing that, we just got to the point where we had enough passive cash flow that it was more than covering all of our bills. And so my wife basically sat me down one day and said, let’s take a run at this. And she had already left her job. We had kids and she was staying home with our kids. I honestly hadn’t even been thinking about it. And we had this conversation. I went in the next day and quit my job, and we went full-time into real estate and haven’t stopped since then. And really, I wish I would’ve done it 10 years before.

Dave:
And what does that mean to you, Corby? What is full-time? Does that mean you’re doing burrs full-time, or how do you spend your days?

Corby:
So we actually now own own three businesses where we serve other investors in our market. So we own a property management company, and we manage hundreds of properties around town for other investors. Most of our clients are out of state, some of ’em are out of the country. I have a small real estate team, and we only work with investors. And so we work with a lot of local people who are trying to get into real estate investing and want to do house hacks and burrs, and we handle transactions for people who are investing in our market from all over the place. And then we have our own investment business as well that we do on the side when an opportunity presents itself.

Dave:
Awesome. That’s great. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it’s one of those very rapid decisions years in the making. I imagine you’ve been thinking about quitting your job for a decade and then you just decide overnight to do it.

Corby:
That’s exactly how it worked. Yeah. It was one of those things where it was kind of a marathon to get there, and then when we got there, all the pieces are in place and it was much less scary than I thought it would be.

Dave:
Great. Well, good for you. So Corby, where is your portfolio today? How many units do you own? How many are you managing?

Corby:
So we only own personally about 20 units. And so I like to tell people that you don’t need to own 500 units to have financial freedom. So we only own 20. I quit my job, I think we had 10. So it’s very possible for anybody. That’s one of the things I love about real estate is it really is for anybody.

Dave:
I absolutely love that. I want to celebrate more people who just have modest, medium sized portfolios. I’m in the same range myself. I just think that you don’t need to own hundreds or thousands of units despite what a lot of people on social media say, most people can achieve their financial goals by just picking really good deals. Right? Just get really good at it than you can have. Fewer properties. Fewer properties means less work. And to me, that’s the perfect sweet spot. So congratulations on that.

Corby:
Thank you. Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. Once your living expenses are covered, everything else is gravy.

Dave:
Yeah, exactly. You said the third thing that you do in addition to your brokerage and your property management company is still opportunistically buying and operating real estate deals yourself. Can you tell us what a deal looks like for you in today’s market? Is there one in particular you could tell us about as an example? Sure.

Corby:
So a deal is relative obviously to everybody, and depending on where you are in your personal life and financially, that can be vastly different. But in our market right now, if I can buy a property that’s going to at least be cashflow neutral, that I like the location, and I think there’s an equity upside, I typically like to either burr or walk into a deal where I have 15 to 20% equity on the front end and it’s cashflow neutral, then I feel pretty good about that. And we work with a lot of our clients who go out and find deals that look just like that. And with the rent growth and equity growth that we’ve had here, those deals tend to just get better year, year. And as you mentioned before, when you have a mortgage, your payment stays the same. And if we can raise rents and build your equity from there, those deals just continue to get better.

Dave:
Okay, great. So can we dig into this a little bit? Because I would imagine there’s a lot of people thinking Boise seems like a great market long term. It’s relatively high price, cashflow is hard to find. So can we just sort of walk through how someone might achieve something like this?

Corby:
Sure. Yeah, I would love

Dave:
To. Alright. So what’s the price point of, I assume is this a single family home or a small multifamily? Yeah,

Corby:
Most of our deals are four plexes or smaller. Honestly, the majority of them are single family homes.

Dave:
All right. So what’s the price point of a single family home on a deal that you would either do yourself or recommend to a client? So

Corby:
The media and single family home price in Ada County where Boise is right now is about $570,000. So it’s not a cheap market, but most of the deals that we do with our clients are in the three 50 to maybe four 50 range on single families. The things that we look for on that end are it’s nice to have four bedrooms. We can get more rent for four bedroom houses, we can get more rents for homes that have private backyards, that have three car garages and have two living spaces. So those are the things that we generally look for. We find that depending on location and some of those amenities, we can get 10 to 20% above market rents for properties like that.

Dave:
Wow. Okay. So you said four bedrooms. I love that. I think that’s universally true, just the more bedrooms you can get, particularly if you’re doing a long-term, buy and hold, the better your rent prospects are going to be. You said two living spaces, right? And then what was it, a two car garage as well? Three

Corby:
Car garage,

Dave:
Three car garage.

Corby:
Yeah, lots of space. Now everybody in Idaho has an rv, a truck and a car. You have to

Dave:
A lot. Okay, excellent. So how long did it take you or how did you develop that very specific buy box? Because I think this is a super important lesson for everyone listening. Of course, everyone wants to know their price point and what strategy that they’re going to work on, but there are these sort of X factors in every market that make the deals either more valuable on a resale or able to attract more rent. So how did you figure out which ones were applicable for your business?

Corby:
Well, we had the benefit of having a property management company. And so we’ve been tracking how long our turnovers take, which properties rent faster, which properties we could push rents on, the quality of tenants that we got, how long they stayed, all of those sorts of things. And we found a sweet spot there using those criteria. And that’s not every deal that we do. I mean, there’s obviously other properties and criteria that can work, but by and large, if we can get a property that ticks all those boxes, we know that we can get higher rents on those and our turnovers are going to be very quick and very rare.

Dave:
Now, not everyone owns property management companies, but I guess it’s just something that anyone with a property manager could ask. And I would imagine that a good quality property manager would be able to help you identify some of those characteristics that you should include in your buy box.

Corby:
And actually, I do have a tip that I go on the forums and push this quite a bit, but it’s something a lot of people don’t know about. There’s a National Association of Residential Property Managers. It’s an organization called darpa. It’s just a trade group for property managers, but in some markets, they’re the only group that track local market stats. And so if you’re investing in an area, whether or not you’re working with a property manager, if you find a property manager who’s a NPA affiliate, or you can just reach out to the local NPA chapter and ask them to send you the last quarter stats or the last four quarters stats, they can send you all of the average rents for different types of units in different parts of town. For multifamilies, for single families, it’s super helpful information, and especially Idaho does not regulate property management in any way. And so in some states, you can get some of that information from a real estate brokerage, but especially if you’re in a state where property management is not regulated by the state, then NPA M is the only organization that tracks that information.

Dave:
Cool. That is a great tip for I did not know that. I’m literally writing it down, right? Yeah, I mean, I feel like that’s super valuable information that people should be looking at. We do have to take one final break, but we’ll get back to Corby’s buy box and how he thinks about deals right after this. Hey everyone. Welcome back to my conversation with investor Corby Goad. Okay, so let’s get back to the single family. You said that you’re buying below the median price for the area, so three 50 to four 50. What kind of shape is this in or is this sort of like a total rehab kind of job or cosmetic rehab at that price point?

Corby:
Mostly cosmetic. Every once in a while we’ll get lucky and find something that needs very little most of’em cosmetic paint flooring. Every once in a while we’ll replace some countertops and some hardware, do some landscaping, those sorts of things. But we try to shy away from deals where we’re going to have to get down to the studs or we know we’re going to have to gut a bunch of rooms. So we can usually, if we’re doing a burr, we can usually get in that 15 to 20% equity increase by doing some of those cosmetic things if we find the right property.

Dave:
And just in theory, if you bought this property and did nothing to it, I assume it would not generate positive cashflow?

Corby:
Probably not. At least not where we are right now with seven and a half, 8% interest rates during covid at 3%, it was gangbuster, so it was no problem.

Dave:
Yeah, yeah, I bet. But I think it’s important for people to know that there are deals that still work, but if you’re underwriting the deal just day one, it’s going to be harder to find. It’s certainly possible. I have bought a deal on the market this year that was cashflow positive, not amazing, three 4% right off the deal. But with a lot of, especially these markets with strong underlying fundamentals, I would put Boise in that category. You’re probably, if you’re looking for a really strong cash on cash return, you’re probably going to have to do the type of rehab work that Corby is talking about. So let’s talk about that. These are mostly cosmetic. Do you have a range? I know it varies a lot from property to property, how much money you would have to put in to be able to pull this off and get rents up to where you want them? Sure.

Corby:
Depending on the scope of work, we have a couple general contractors here that we work with regularly and one in particular that we do probably 90% of our turnovers with. And those cosmetic things, maybe some hardware, flooring and paint on, let’s say that’s an 1800, maybe 2000 square foot house that’s going to be in the range of 15 to 20,000 bucks. If we have to dig a little bit deeper and maybe we’re putting in a new bathroom or two in a kitchen, sometimes we work closer to that $30,000 range. So

Dave:
All in, I mean, what kind of financing are you buying these on? Are you putting 20% down? Are you doing hard money?

Corby:
Personally, I don’t really do hard money. So a lot of times we’re putting 20% down and the clients that we work with, a lot of times they’re doing 10 30 ones, and so they’re buying the property with their 10 31 cash and then coming out of pocket for the rehab. More of the deals we’ve been doing lately are house hacks. And so we have clients that move into those places and they’re doing what they can on their own. So it varies greatly. Personally, I put 20% down and then rehab it with cash. Or actually I should back that up. I am a huge fan of heloc. I do use a HELOC for a lot of that stuff.

Dave:
Okay, got it. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And we’re talking about a relatively expensive market here, but just in the house hacking scenario, I’m just ballparking this, so no one double check my math here, but if I go in the middle of the range of what you were talking about from three 50 to four 50, we’re at 400 K. If you house hack, let’s say you put 10% down with an FHA loan there, you’re putting in 40 grand, you’re going to need closing costs and cash reserves. That probably gets you to 50 grand. And then you need 20,000, so you’re talking about 70 grand. So that’s obviously a lot of money, but I think for people with a pretty good job and sounds like Boise’s got a good market, that does seem like something that could be feasible if you spend a couple of years putting yourself in a good financial position. Just wanted to call that out for people who do feel that it’s tough to get into these types of more expensive markets. Just want to give you a general ballpark of how much money you might need to get into a deal like this.

Corby:
For sure. And a lot of people we’re working with are using FHA loans or 5% down conventional loans. And if they’re doing house hacks and doing painting and flooring and that sort of thing themselves, they can get by spending far less money.

Dave:
Right. That’s totally right. And then, so if you did this, you put in 2030 grand, what kind of cash on cash return would an investor expect

Corby:
Depending on what method they’re using to rent the property? Generally we see a lot of those deals coming in somewhere around eight to 10%. Sometimes we’ll do a little bit better and get a little bit more, but generally something in that eight to 10% range is reasonable to expect after a year in a rehab and on a house hack, I’m talking about moving

Dave:
Out. I mean, to me that sounds fantastic. Eight to 10% cash on cash return is very good in this market. And you mentioned earlier that you probably got a 10 to 15% bump in equity from making those rehabs as well, right? Yeah.

Corby:
Yeah. That’s not unreasonable at all.

Dave:
I love it. I mean, this is an excellent type of deal. I mean, I think for people who have the kind of cash, this is exactly the kind of deal that you can and should be looking for. It combines cashflow, appreciation, and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything super risky, investing in a strong market like Boise and sticking to a more cosmetic type of rehab. So thank you for sharing this with Corby. Sorry, I went on sort of a little bit of a tangent, but I think it’s really important for people to understand exactly what goes into good deals these days, because it’s easy to say, oh, it’s just so hard right now. But when you put the dollars and cents behind it, I think some people will say, oh, and actually that is out of my budget. But for a lot of people, they might say, Hey, I actually can get into this and do something like the deals Corby is talking about. And along those lines, if you’re listening and want to get a better feel for the types of properties that might be a fit for you, just a quick reminder that BiggerPockets has a great tool for that. Our renter property calculator will help you figure that out, and you can find it at biggerpockets.com/calculators. So tell me a little bit about what the future holds for you, Corby. What are your aspirations? What are you looking to do with your portfolio and your businesses next? Well,

Corby:
We are just kind of growing as opportunity presents itself. We’ve been really fortunate in that the businesses that we built tend to bring opportunities to us, the property management company. We have a lot of investors that call us that have properties that they need us to manage or that they want to get rid of and don’t know what to do with. We work with a lot of wholesalers locally. And so one of the things that I do, and I’d encourage anybody who’s really familiar with their market, I network with a lot of the wholesalers here. I offer to help them run comps on ARVs. And as is I’ll help connect them with resources and help them come up with scopes of work and that sort of thing. And in exchange for that, I get to see a lot of those deals first. And so sometimes we do some of those deals ourselves. Sometimes we bring ’em to our clients and work those through. So doing more deals like that. I really love doing that kind of stuff. And we’re really working on growing our property management business as well, trying to get into, there’s been so much building here that now there’s a lot of larger multifamily development. So we want to work our way into managing some of those.

Dave:
Awesome. Great. Well, good luck with all of that. Thank you. Before we let you get out of here, I’m curious if you have any additional advice or tips for investors who are just trying to get started or just navigating the challenges of today’s investing climate?

Corby:
Yeah, it’s not anything new that I know people from BiggerPockets have not heard before, but taking action is far more important than trying to spend years ingesting every bit of information that you can. You’ll learn so much more by taking action. And not only that, but you’ll see more opportunity when you start doing that. So to be specific, I’m beating a dead horse here, but how sacking a small multi as your first deal and just taking action and getting out there and do it. There are so many opportunities to buy things with FHA loans, 5% down conventional loans and getting in and offsetting your living costs by house hacking multifamily properties. There’s no reason not to start that way. I wish I would have, in retrospect, if I would’ve done that five times, once a year, every 18 months for five years, I would’ve quit my job way sooner than I did.

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it is tried and true advice in the real estate investing community, but for good reason, because it is actually true. There’s a quote, I think it’s Marcus Aurelius, forgive me if I get this wrong, that says, more is lost from indecision than the wrong decision. And I think about that all the time, that doing nothing is way worse than making the wrong decision, making the wrong decision. At least you learn something with indecision, you don’t actually learn anything, nor do you achieve anything. So I definitely want to second what Corby said there. Well, Corby, thank you so much for joining us. I really, really enjoyed this conversation, learning about your story, your businesses, your successes. Very cool. If you want to connect with Corby, you can find him on BiggerPockets. Sounds like you’re an active member of the community there. I appreciate that. And we’ll put his contact information in the show notes below as well.

Corby:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an honor. I really appreciate it.

Dave:
Absolutely. And thank you all so much for listening for BiggerPockets. I’m Dave Meyer. We’ll see you again soon.