In this episode

Adam Ullrich’s Journey to His First Out-of-State Rental Property

Meet Adam Ullrich, a student of the Remote Real Estate Academy, who just went under contract on his first out-of-state rental property! 🏡

Tune in as we dive into Adam’s incredible journey:

• ✅ How he analyzed over 100 properties to find the perfect deal
• ✅ The importance of mindset shifts
• ✅ Lessons learned from networking and finding an investor-friendly real estate agent
• ✅ Why real estate offers unparalleled control over your financial future

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned investor, Adam’s story is packed with actionable insights and inspiration for anyone looking to build wealth through real estate.

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Chapters:

• 00:48 – Meet Adam
• 01:40 – From Factory Floor to First Property
• 03:11 – Analyzing Deals and Making Offers
• 05:21 – The Importance of Deal Analysis and Mindset
• 09:33 – Leveraging Tools and Mentorship
• 16:29 – Personal Finance and Real Estate Strategy
• 21:00 – Travel and Wealth Creation
• 22:51 – The 20-Minute Investor
• 23:23 – Writing and Journaling
• 25:42 – Embracing Your Real Estate Identity
• 28:52 – Balancing Career and Real Estate
• 32:18 – Snowball Effect
• 38:17 – Finding the Right Real Estate Agent
• 40:56 – Final Thoughts

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🔗 Resources & Links:

Connect with Adam:

• 🐦 Twitter: @JAdamUllrich
• 📸 Instagram: @jadamullrich

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• 🍏 Apple Podcasts: Listen on Apple Podcasts

0:00
I analyze over a 100 different properties to get to this one getting into real estate you have tax advantages
0:05
and your returns they’re moving the other direction the more Equity you have in the whole then the more return you’re
0:10
going to give as well as rental rates go up over time you can influence the outcomes a lot more in real estate than
0:17
you can in any type of stock or Equity position with real estate I can look at getting cash flow now the more cash flow
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I have month to month the more options I have in my personal life today’s episode is very special as we pull back to
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curtain on the Journey of one of our students at the remote real estate Academy to get his first investment property under contract his name is Adam
0:34
ol and you’ll hear directly from him on the exact process he followed to go from just thinking about it to under contract
0:41
without further Ado let’s get into
0:46
it today I’m joined by my friend fellow investor and a student of mine Adam
0:53
olrick Adam and I have known each other for a couple years now we were part of a uh writing challenge a couple years ago
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and we became friends and over time I learned that he was interested in real estate investing and it just so happened
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to coincide very nicely with me launching the remote real estate Academy and so he was a member of our founding
1:12
cohort part of the purpose of this show recording it right now it is December 29th as of the time of this recording
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Adam just went under contract on his very first out ofate rental so wanted to
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celebrate that Milestone and also just give an opportunity for Adam to share his story how he got here so Adam
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welcome to the show thanks Aaron excited to be here I’ve been a you know longtime listener I guess I’m a hybrid real
1:36
estate professional I pretty well incorporate the Hybrid part into my lifestyle my interest in real estate
1:42
started about seven years ago my now wife then girlfriend and I were looking for a place to to live and it was rent
1:48
or buy we opted to buy ended up in a single family home but at the time I was looking at multif family uh at that time
1:54
the single family was all we could take on but I never stopped saving I went back to school while I was working I
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working on the the factory floor I ended up getting a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration ended up in a corporate position continued to save and
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learn when Aon developed the remote real estate Academy I realized that is exactly the thing that I needed to start
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learning as I saw you developing it through your newsletter at the time I ended up there a similar time period I
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ended up in my current position which is head of operations for a global company it’s got about 300 employees and from
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there okay I finally got some significant leverage savings rates going up and the
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the remote real estate Academy opened up the first cohort happy to join as excited to be on the ground floor of that really was able to validate what I
2:37
had already learned and then fill the gaps of what I didn’t from yourself and Nathan who have actually been through it
2:43
and are continuing to grow your portfolios so fast forward about I guess it’s been over a year a little over a
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year and a multiple webinars and connections through the remote real estate academy one being with the bright
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investors Donaldo Callahan and the other one being with Brandon Goldsmith from a real estate group rco in Ohio those two
3:03
connections really really sealed the deal made some then from there ended up then n Ed up with this property today
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that I’m closing on in January amazing so tell us about the property that you’re under contract on
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sure yeah it’s a dlex in between Dayton and Cincinnati it’s pretty solid Market a lot of manufacturing jobs one of the
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things that I really picked up on when looking at the different properties is there uh population growth in the area
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obviously the crime rate is the crime solid right and is there a good property management company because I want to
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look at this as a a business from more of a financial perspective so I’m going to be the CFO of my real estate company
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so property management will take care of the vast majority of it and I’ll be watching the numbers awesome and remind us because I
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don’t I can’t remember if you mentioned it or not where are you located and how far away are you from this property right I’m located in Southeastern
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Indiana this property is I think around 60 miles or so away for me not too far but far enough that I wouldn’t want to
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be running there to fix water heater or something like that it’s close enough that I think it gives a little bit of a
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little bit more confidence because if something does come up I can actually go out there and do something about it but it’s still far enough away that I can
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really lean into the remote part of the investing and ideally I never even visit that
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property yeah that’s amazing I think remote is also a mindset as much as it is an actual proximity thing what our
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first rental was a mile down the road so even though I teach and largely work
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with people who want to invest sometimes even thousands of miles away I think sometimes there’s a comfort level
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of knowing that you can get there especially as you’re trying to build out your the base of your portfolio and get
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comfortable with the idea of building and scaling so I think when we first spoke you were much more of the mind
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that you would like to find something where you can personally self-manage it like almost entirely is that right
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absolutely yeah at that time the way I was doing analysis I couldn’t figure how to make the numbers work unless I was
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self-managing and my immediate Market other property management rates are like 15% so as I learned more from the
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Academy I changed how I was looking at different properties and different margets and then I found out oh wow
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there’s other areas where you can still find a deal saying that I probably analyze over a 100 different properties
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to get to this one and three or four of those I have made an offer see that right there is such a
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crucial element of what makes people successful especially in the early running we usually say it’s 90 deals and
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90 days it just gives you a finger on the pulse even if the first 15 that you
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don’t pencil at all and they’re totally not going to work for you at least you went through and you started you know
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saying okay well maybe my parameters aren’t right or maybe the market I’m looking at isn’t right something that
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I’m looking for I’m not finding so what do I need to change do I need to change the price point I’m looking at do I need
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to change some of the expenses do I need to like find a new market entirely it’s
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only through the process of looking at and understanding that data that you can really understand if you’re going to be in the right uh position and the second
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big mindset thing that I’ve noticed I think with you and with several other people I’ve talked to recently is people
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underwrite they do their deal analysis based on the list price of the property and that’s where a lot of people are
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having trouble right now is because they take the list price at face value which it is face value but the question that
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we try and equip people to ask is what can I pay for this property based on
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what I need my returns to be based on the available team I have and what that costs me like what is the offer price
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that I can write instead of just what is the list price on the property and I recall working you know with you on a
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couple specific ones where I think you started to make that shift in your head where you started thinking about what is
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my offer price versus what is the list price is that remotely accurate that as accurate yeah I went through all those
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stages where but I think to your point it’s getting started by doing the deal analysis just basically meeting yourself
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where you are and then running the numbers and then asking so that’s where the coaching comes in so important then
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asking saying you know how far often and then you start to fill the gaps then your next analysis is better the next
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one is better right until the point where you get you feel like you’re you’re proficient at that point I think
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there’s a list price I was about uh 10 or 15% under the list price and they didn’t ultimately accept it but for that
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market that was the appropriate way to appropriate offer and later on I kept an eye the property and I’d say it was
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generally Justified uh because it stayed on the market a significant time yeah you come up with your own
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rationale for the offer price sometimes people lowball just for the sake of lowballing but typically I think if you
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use real rationale that says okay you know these are the returns I’m aiming for I have a team in this market that I
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know and trust can operate this and play out the business plan that I’ve built this is what I can afford to offer for
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your property you’re not just like hey you listed at 200k I’m going to offer you 120 because I feel like it right you
8:01
can actually rationalize it explain it to your agent they can explain it to the sell’s agent if there is one and and
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then you only offer if you only ever offer based on prices that you know will work for you then it’s very difficult to
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fail if you offer the list price and that ends up locking you into a negative cash flow then you can be in a bad
8:21
position so I think that’s one of the biggest mindset shifts that I think you embodied very well and now you’re in a
8:27
position where you went through those almost 100 deals that you analyzed you made three or four offers and I actually
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think some of those offers not getting accepted is a good thing right because that that trains the muscle of being
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comfortable with putting things out there even if they might get rejected they were well rationalized wellth
8:46
through offers and it’s okay if people say no sometimes you might have to submit 10 offers and think of it like
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analyze 100 submit 10 to get one right it’s not always going to be that perfect
8:58
it depends on your market and your parameters but I think it’s okay especially at the beginning especially
9:04
in a market as sensitive as this one where the interest rates are still high and the affordability is still very
9:10
difficult now when I see you talk about the property that you’re hopefully going to close on here in in a week or two you
9:17
are comfortable with what you’re doing and that is so important because I think the last thing you want is to rush into
9:24
something that you don’t feel good about just because you want to get a deal done I think yes your slow method goal approach that’s backed by data embodies
9:32
what we try and teach in the program so you mentioned the analysis tools and the team I want to talk about both of those
9:37
so we’ll give a a quick free plug here to bride investor which is a market and deal analysis tool Donado Callahan is a
9:45
partner of remot real estate Academy and he did a workshop with us recently where he showed off the tool and his keys for
9:52
analyzing a market and so I would love for you to maybe just talk about like how did that workshop and then the the tool enhance what your learning in the
9:59
academy absolutely yes previously doing an analysis in a spreadsheet or even um using a different software tool but
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there were some things that were missing from the analysis that really left me with questions I didn’t even know how to
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ask at the time so then as uh we were in that Workshop the N ran us through exactly how to use the tool and I was
10:18
more and more impressed because the amount of data that tool provided and I realized oh wait these are the things
10:24
that I was unsure about one being like population in a hidden area I could find the population and I could find
10:30
different numbers for the population growth but I really trusted the sources that were pointed to from the bride
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investor tool other things being crime data is hard to find or at least I thought it was hard to find and doing deal analysis and that can absolutely be
10:42
a deal breaker so it clearly shows up those were just a few of them but I a
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key point to mention was I did after did the workshop I ended up joining bright investor and doing some analysis and I
10:54
realized nowhere near as smooth of using it as I seemed an AO and then I jumped on a call with him and again it clicked
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by the end of the call and it just absolutely changed how I was underwriting the deals yeah definitely it helps to have
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the the founder of the platform run you through it and that actually points to one other thing I want to just ask you
11:13
about in general which is like the role of coaches and mentors in this process
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getting started seeing other people succeed and do it well and ask questions just being in that group in that environment it gives you the right
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energy to do it on your own so the other point would be for me it was in the deal analysis so
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here’s a property it looks good am I am I getting over eager or am I looking at
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it in the correct way I definitely had some early ones that were just being overeager I can see that in hindsight at
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the time I couldn’t clearly identify and you were able to walk through those and break it down into a an analytical
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mindset and at that point ah okay yeah this isn’t going to work and as time went on of those deal analysis then
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started to get closer and closer to the mark fewer things I was missing absolutely and the idea of building a
12:02
buy box and and doing deal analysis is largely personalized to each person’s goals and risk appetite and so the way I
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analyze deals and the way Nathan analyzes deals might be different than the way you want to analy deals but I
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think by especially when some of the best conversational flow I’ve seen within our community is when somebody
12:21
posts a deal like you did and you say hey here’s here are the numbers I ran based on how I learned to do it what is
12:28
your guys perspective so you already brought a point of view it’s not like you said hey you guys go do all this for me you said hey this is
12:35
how I’ve applied the stuff that I’ve already learned here’s what I came up with what do you guys think and then we
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were each able to come in and say hey well I think maybe capex is a little bit low for this you know age of a property
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or here’s a couple additional considerations that we might think of from things that have happened to us and it became a dialogue where we could make
12:54
you feel more comfortable that you’re seeing it from different perspectives and then also in area where we’ve
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potentially made mistakes in the past we can hopefully spare you from having to do that yourself so I think that was a
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good example of the community and that the whole coaching container functioning
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exactly as we hoped it would which is helping you get through these kind of little friction points throughout the
13:16
process and then at the end of the day like you’re sinking a lot of your own money as an investment into this the the
13:22
feeling of actually being comfortable is pretty hard to get to especially on that first deal when you just like you’ve
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saved this is your hard-earned money you’ve you like you said you’ve been interested for seven years and you’re finally ready to close on a a true kind
13:37
of investment property and just like the confidence Gap getting past that that that was the idea at least and seems
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like that’s how it played out I I think it absolutely did yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if it would take me longer to
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get into an investment property or it would had have the house hack have I not been through the the academy and the
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connections made within it yeah that’s it’s awesome and so let’s rewind before
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this this property so the house that you’re living in now you also have plants that used at some point as an
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investment property correct correct yeah it’s not set in stone but we are in really good terms with it so I know it
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would have some solid cash flow it’s an 1880 home so it’s quite old and I’ve been working on it for the past six
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years or so and renovating different parts of it Building a garage on it to make more useful space but long longer
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term we won’t be staying here maybe two or three years and at that point look for different property and from here on
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unless we stumble on that house where you’re just going to buy and stay and that’s your lifetime house then we’re
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going to be looking at even future primary homes with a deal analysis perspective to say okay if we don’t stay
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there we don’t want to just turn around and sell we want to keep so it does a cash flow for that market but yet to
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that point now we’ll look two or three years and we’ll probably look at renting this out and if we’re still in the area
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that it may be the first self-managed property because of those High Property Management rates
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yeah yeah I made no secret of the fact that three out of our eight rentals we did the live then rent strategy and it’s
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one of the most amazing ways to scale because you can get in with more favorable financing you can live there
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get some utility out of it as a individual utility uh for you and your wife and potentially any family members
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that you may choose to add in the future and then also when you move out you can keep it as a rental knowing the house
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inside and out and I think you’re a bit more handy than I am but it’s there is a lot of value in having lived in a house
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so that you understand the quirks and the little things already especially if you choose to self-manage which we did
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for the first basically five years we were investing we were self-managing only this year did we transition away
15:44
from that but I think to the point and we’ve had this discussion a few times learning to self-manage and learning all
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the Motions that go into it is incredibly valuable especially if you plan to hold for decades because the
15:56
chances that you’re going to have even if you have a rockar property manager the chances you’re going to stay in lock
16:01
step for 20 or 30 years are pretty low right so the more you can learn about that process and and how to navigate it
16:08
uh even if you don’t intend to self-manage it’s still a valuable skill to have in your toolkit so I love that
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you guys are thinking about like like you said even whether it’s this house or any future P purchases as maybe having
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multi-purpose instead of just saying oh like we’re going to buy a primary house and sync a lot of our our net worth into
16:28
to that so I want to actually like use that as a lens for how you think about retirement savings and personal finance
16:35
in general because one thing I know and I’ve always admired about you is that you also have invested a lot in the
16:40
skills to grow in your career right so you’ve taken a lot of ongoing education
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and the way I perceive that in addition to you just enjoying learning is that you’re also trying to make yourself more
16:51
valuable so that you can continue to grow your earnings in your career right I see you do things like invest in real
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estate which is an incred first step of starting the snowball rolling down the hill but are you do you have like a kind
17:05
of broader Financial landscape or allocation strategy that you’re working towards yeah it’s so I the way that I
17:11
approach personal finance is Broad Strokes I don’t like to get into the the nitty-gritty details with it because I
17:16
think if you have the same basic behaviors and you execute those consistently you’ll get where you want to go one of those things is take
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advantage of any matches for a 41k or any kind of investment right full advantage of those the other thing to
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keep in mind is whatever you put into those it’s locked up so do you want to add more than your match it’s not
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usually beneficial right because that extra bit could be saved for Real Estate not to mention now you’re diversifying
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in asset classes so to me that’s a a huge point I’m not going to get any
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returns um that are beneficial to me from my 4K or stocks until age 59 and a
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half with real estate I can look at getting cash flow now and the more cash flow I have month to month the more
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options I have in my in our you know personal lives that’s exciting that’s interesting to work to but to your other
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point from an education standpoint I started off on the factory floor and really worked up through the ranks and
18:07
education wise and I’m now getting an executive Master’s business administration so finishing that in August there’s some synergies that you
18:14
find along the way one of those is even though I work in in business it’s interesting to find that as I’m doing
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this real estate and setting up an LLC I’m I’m closing gaps I have between business and Manufacturing and all the
18:27
elements thereof and then business from the perspective of Entrepreneurship and it’s pretty engaged
18:34
but longer term yeah I plan to continue to uh increase my skills by executing well at work and making making progress
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so part of that is is the the MBA and after that point I don’t know that’ll benefit from any more of schooling but I
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certainly will for like professional develop I consider professional and personal development like the remote real estate Academy yeah no I I love
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that attitude and like you said maybe there’s like the formal education with credal is one thing and Executive MBA is
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incredibly valuable in many ways but like you said the learning never stops the ongoing development whether it’s
19:07
networking learning new skills even the writing cohort we were in I also want to talk about the impact that’s had it’s
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had an enormous impact on me I could largely trace the remote real estate Academy back to starting writing and
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pulling some of these ideas out of my head and and learning the niche that was
19:26
you know most powerful to me but even stuff like that which is a totally extracurricular not really related to
19:32
either of our professions but it’s something we chose to do that I know had a big impact I think continuing to make
19:37
those Investments especially still towards the earlier mid part of our careers it can only serve well and I
19:44
view that the kind of earlier you make those Investments the longer you have to get value out of them as well so I guess
19:49
before we go into the writing stuff the last question I have is what on real estate is what do you feel like real
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estate’s purpose in your financial life is it to accelerate retirement is it to
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build up enough cash flow to have one you or your wife stop working sooner
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like what what is the outcome that you hope real estate has on your on you and your family so it’s a bit of both right
20:14
I think that one one of those outcomes gets the other right so if you increase your cash flow ultimately that’s the the
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main goal is just increasing cash flow so when I’m doing the deal analysis how much pure cash flow after all expenses
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are accounted for do I have each month that’s the the most important question that I answer when I’m looking at and
20:31
then I like to see in a return is is is it 6% is it 15% to see what that looks
20:37
like because it it helps if you’re already used to looking at at any kind of stocks or if you glance your 4K it helps to put in this term rather than
20:43
just dollar amounts so the cash flow then allows to say do we want to retire
20:49
we can right or to your point if we look at look we want to have children in a few years then at that point one of us
20:56
could stay home because we have the cash flow off said that um alternatively maybe we go a different route and we
21:02
want to do more traveling for a year or two it can it could cash flow could support us while we’re doing that a lot
21:07
of different options but It ultimately comes down to creating wealth but creating options for ourselves to live
21:13
and be able to do things that you know we we don’t believe we otherwise would be able to on that same
21:19
timeline I can appreciate that for sure I always I like I’ve always liked the phrase work optional even if the option
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you choose is to continue working right the more flexibility you can then afford
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yourself through the Investments that you built up real estate’s one of the few that has the potential to kick off
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monthly cash flow and it’s one of the few that you have the real ability I don’t want to say control because I
21:43
think control is a little too strong of a word you can influence the outcomes a lot more in real estate than you can in
21:49
any type of stock or Equity position where you’re not on the board you’re not the executive team even if you work at
21:56
the company you have very little influence over the over all performance of your investment whereas when you own
22:01
a piece of real estate not only do you have influence over the outcome but you typically have bought with some sort of
22:06
Leverage and leverage can be perceived as too risky in certain contexts but I
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truly believe from the bottom of my heart that responsible leverage such as a 30-year fixed rate loan with a you
22:19
know reasonable down payment backed by solid fundamentals and cash flow is very
22:24
different than taking out a bunch of Leverage to go all in on a growth stock just hoping you’re going to ride a wave
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right so I just think those benefits and the amplification of your returns backed
22:36
by those fundamentals we can provide all the options you could ever need especially if you do it with that kind
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of data driven methodical approach that’s mapped to your personal goals and your personal strategy the way that
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you’ve started to do it so I love that most people think I’m full of crap when
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I say that I can operate and grow my portfolio in an average of 20 minutes per day so in instead of asking you to
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take my word for it I sat down with my business partner Nathan and we ran through our entire 20-minute investor strategy in free Workshop we go through
23:06
all the different workflows software and tools we use to stay in control of our portfolios so we can focus on what
23:11
matters most to us you can watch the entire workshop and download our workflows for free at 20min investor.com
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again that’s 20 minutu investor.com now back to the show okay so writing I got to ask you
23:25
about this because I know this is something you and I are both passionate about and specifically journaling so the
23:30
the act of reflecting and giving yourself prompts to make sure that you’re really processing the moments in
23:37
your life as you go along both from an Investor’s perspective so as you went through this process of learning real
23:43
estate investing and from just an overall how you organize your life perspective what are some of the biggest
23:50
impacts that writing and journaling has had on you thinking right so writing is
23:55
foundational for thinking so as you’re writing you’re for forcing yourself to think in KN in different ways and as a
24:01
result you end up making progress in different areas of life that you may not have without the reflection uh so
24:06
there’s the writing part is you’re writing for an audience and the journaling you’re really writing for yourself so that’s probably I think the
24:13
biggest distinction between the two yeah your point I don’t know that I claim it as my Niche but it’s something that I
24:18
fell into and I was really interested so I went with it was the journaling Niche right and I actually wrote a journaling
24:25
guide book on from scarcity to abundance so it’s actually how do you go from a mindset of scarcity
24:30
to one two8 an abundance mindset that’s been the same kind of curve I’ve followed in my life and I think I’m
24:36
still on it but definitely journaling is what’s been a foundational skill for that now the writing aspect has been
24:43
useful across the board whether it’s analyzing somebody else’s writing you can actually identify after you do
24:48
something yourself oh this really good is it engaging what makes them special how do they grow an audience to a business vary where you can consider
24:55
things from a different angle not to mention just being in that space really does expose you to a lot of new ideas
25:00
and Technology 100 100% yeah I totally fell
25:06
down the rabbit hole I always thought of myself as a writer and then I realized I was never actually writing and and then when I joined the ship 30 for30
25:12
challenge that we were both in and then fell into the funnel of all the other ongoing products that that the two
25:19
Founders started I just felt found myself feeling like I was thinking more clearly to your point it’s all about
25:25
thinking and the ability to process those thoughts internally through journaling and then externally through
25:32
getting putting it out on social media and getting feedback breaking past my fear of putting my thoughts out there is
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one of the most consequential milestones in my personal life and I think one of the throughputs with real estate is that
25:45
a lot of people are interested in or invest in real estate and they haven’t told a soul about it for whatever reason
25:52
they might be afraid of consequence from their employer or they might be afraid of some sort of judgment from their or
25:58
friends that oh that’s riskier I don’t understand that therefore you individually might not want to share
26:05
about it but I think one of the best discoveries I ever made was when I started sharing that this was something
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my wife and I were doing investing in real estate building this foundational blocks for our future learning these
26:18
skills taking the entrepreneurial mindset and applying it what I found was that not only did I find out there were
26:25
a lot of people that I knew that were investing in real estate that I didn’t know but also people were drawn in by that
26:31
idea they were supportive and anybody the the tiny fraction of people that
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weren’t I didn’t care they weren’t people that I wanted in my corner anyway if that’s how they were going to be
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about it but I thought that putting those thoughts out there and then and declaring it as part of your identity
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that’s why I like this hybrid real estate professional umbrella because you’re not saying that oh I’m disregarding my career or that I don’t
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have anything else going on in my life you’re saying no real estate investing is part of my life it is part of a
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broader portfolio of assets such as my career my family my health that will
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contribute to the ongoing greater good of my family and ideally my community
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and that was a big mindset shift too for me and I wonder if you’re now that you’re especially are under contract and
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you’re really starting to embed this in your identity do you feel a similar shift or do you feel a little more comfortable kind of putting your real
27:24
estate identity out there I do yeah it’s it well said because when I started writing with ship 30 for30 I’d never
27:30
written or published like anything online at all it never got into social media very much the reason that it drew me to it was depending on the
27:37
environment you’re in significantly uh impacts your outcomes and the only way to change that trend is to in introduce
27:44
new elements to your environment in my case it felt like it was C an echo chamber and everyone around me is doing
27:50
the same thing and those things were not the future that I envisioned I didn’t know how to brid the Gap that riding
27:56
cofort just seemed like an opportunity to learn something new and more importantly meet new and interesting people just where we met yeah I think
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breaking through and being able to talk about whatever I find interesting online and then developing and honing in on in
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this case journaling and it’ll be something else before long real estate is going to be something I’ll I’ll introduce and talk about a bit more in
28:15
time as well it just creates that Network effect of opportunities and to your point you’re not thinking when you
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do it you shouldn’t be thinking about the people that are going to have a negative response including employers because it tells you more than it tells
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you what you need to know if people are having a negative response those people probably aren’t good for you to of your
28:33
life anyways and while it’s more tricky from an employer standpoint they don’t have to support by any means but if they
28:39
if it’s something that’s negative when it’s something you’re doing personally that doesn’t impact your work that tells you something about the company right
28:45
there so I don’t know that there is any significant downside to doing it I’ve only found generally benefits
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from yeah I think some of the perceived downside I’ve dra grappled with this a
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lot my myself because I do care about my career and I care about my job and I want to continue to advance as I’m
29:03
grateful to have been able to do recently I don’t want to be punished for having this other business and thing
29:10
that’s very important to me and my family on the side yeah the perceived downside is that you will be thought of
29:16
as someone who has split focus and therefore you can’t succeed in your job I think that’s more of a limiting belief
29:22
than it is anything because it’s on you to prove to your employer that you’re still focused and dedicated on job right
29:28
that that responsib whether you’re doing something else or not the results that you have at your job are what will
29:35
ultimately dictate the outcomes or as you said if the employer is going to punish you for something that’s
29:41
unrelated and not affecting your work then that kind of tells you something about them and whether you want to be
29:46
there or not long term anyway and I think it’s okay if part of why I enjoy what I do and why I I see a lot of
29:53
commonalities in what you do is that we’re learning all these business operations and even like in your case supply chain a lot of these very
30:00
versatile skills that even though the context is totally different you can apply them to become a better real
30:07
estate investor and as you said I think I heard you say this earlier I want to make sure I heard you correctly but you think of yourself as like the CFO of
30:13
your of your real estate business that you’re building now and that mindset of like I’ve always thought of it as my
30:19
real estate portfolio is a part of a diversified stream of incomes that I have built for myself one of which is my
30:26
salary one of which is real estate and third of which now is the academy and the coaching program that I offer I
30:33
don’t view any one of those as overly weighted or way more important than the
30:38
others I’m treating them with equal um seriousness because I believe that there’s tons of upside potential across
30:44
all three of them but you can’t ignore one and expect it to still be there the
30:50
next day or the next month so I don’t know how you feel about that like you I think you called it CFO I usually think
30:55
of it as CEO mindset around your whole like basket of streams that’s
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fair yeah yeah I think I H it on the CFO because at least considering I’m looking at one property right now it’s I want to
31:07
manage it from a financial standpoint but yeah longer term as it grows more more people are involved in that process
31:13
and yeah it would evolve evolve into more of a broader manage Focus but yeah
31:19
go ahead yeah I think it’s a this is actually the last threat I want to pull on here so when you’re doing this
31:26
initial like call it first two or three properties in your portfolio I think one of the other things I’ve seen a lot of
31:32
people grapple with is it feels like it’s too small or the returns or the cash
31:38
flow people get discouraged they say I’m only cash flowing net $150 or $200 a
31:43
month how can that possibly change my future it’s too small that barely covers my cell phone bill and and so the
31:50
ability to zoom out and see the big picture and maybe look ahead two to three years I think I heard you say like
31:55
maybe there’ll be another you know or two over the next couple years like that
32:01
skill of looking ahead and visualizing how this stuff plays out over the long term can be easy to lose sight of when
32:06
you’re right at the beginning what have you done to be able to continue to keep the big picture in mind and celebrate
32:13
this Milestone without getting discouraged that oh it’s maybe it’s not as big as you want it to be in the long run well that’s I think that’s the
32:20
beauty of the Hybrid part of being of the real estate professional right is that because I’m focusing on career as
32:26
well my earnings go up with career over time so I can stay focused on that and
32:31
then increasing savings relative to the amount that the career gives up and then that Inc that improves and and tightens
32:36
the time it takes me to buy a new property so that that even if I’m only earning 200 off of the first one then
32:42
the next one will be another 200 it’ll take me less time to get it it’s not going to take me seven years to get this NE property my goal is to do it within a
32:48
year that might be that might be a bit much but it’s good to have that aggressive goal the other thing is can
32:55
putting in the context of the that 200 $50 whatever you’re earning off your property for example the money I had
33:01
saved for that down payment which 25% on on a an investment property that you’re not living in that money was was earning
33:08
in a money market fund in one of my accounts so I got to see what 4% 5 and a half% interest was earning me month to
33:15
month and while that looks great we can in the last 6 months or more it’s gone down from that 5 and a half% to about
33:21
four so you can see a change not only that you end up paying taxes on that money so getting into real St you have
33:28
tax advantages and your returns are actually they’re moving in the other direction more often right the more
33:35
Equity you have in the whole then more the more return you’re going to get as well as rent rental rates go up over
33:40
time in the line with inflation so putting those factors together gives you
33:46
that the bigger picture that makes that that what seems like a little amount month-to month compound and snowball
33:52
into a lot and just have to get started and then look at it with that longer term Vision what will it look like in
33:58
five years what will look like in 10 years so yeah yeah really I I think a snowball is the best analogy because the
34:05
loan pay down is the lowest at the beginning the cash flow is usually the lowest at the beginning the appreciation
34:13
hasn’t kicked in yet at the beginning and the tax benefits you don’t you know benefit from those until the first year
34:19
when you go to actually file and so I think it can be easy to get discouraged
34:24
you did all this work to get a property under contract and close and you started you get the first check and there’s an
34:29
amazing feeling when you get the first check but then you you realize that it is a slow drip it’s not a fast stream of
34:36
cash I have I used to work in the concerts industry and I worked at a a rock club that was part of a company
34:42
that ran Arena and stadium shows and they would always talk about the clubs as a river of nickels right you’d make
34:49
the margins were small and the shows were small but you do enough of them and you continue to grow and build that
34:55
business and over time it still contributes in amazing amount to the overall bottom line of the company I
35:00
view these early stage rentals as the same thing right you’re making an investment it’s its own little startup
35:06
business within your broader portfolio and like you said five years from now 10 years from now when the loan pay down
35:13
really accelerates when the rent growth has continued steadily and you’re still
35:18
in theory most likely using fixed rate debt that hasn’t changed that’s when it really starts to magnify and so it’s not
35:25
just that you’re getting that $200 a month and that’s all you’ll ever have have like you said it really is an effective hedge against inflation that
35:31
your cash flow streams will continue to grow over time you can snowball that money into additional properties you can
35:37
snowball it into paying down your loans there’s a number of different ways you could go but it one thing I know for
35:44
absolute certain is that if you never start none of that will ever kick in I think you’ve done a great job keeping
35:49
the big picture in mind and I that’s just one thing I want to impart to anyone listening who’s thinking about
35:54
getting started or they’re close to getting their first one under cont contract don’t lose sight of the big picture because that’s what this is
36:00
really all about it doesn’t stop with the first closing it starts with the first closing right and to your point
36:06
when we talk about it in this context it sounds like everything went just perfectly according to plan and that’s just not the reality right there’s been
36:13
ups and downs and then plenty of different self-doubt along the way but the main thing is every time you’re
36:18
every time I was confronted with my own self-doubt process re reorienting looking at why I was interested in the
36:24
first place looking at other people’s success with it and then saying okay that nothing has changed
36:30
just my perception in the moment right and then continuing forward that pretty much encapsulates the whole investor
36:36
Journey at the beginning right there it’s like you do have to do some retooling in your mindset like your theme of your journaling product from
36:42
scarcity to abundance that’s a shift everyone has to make even if you came from a a household full of abundance
36:49
it’s still when you’re growing into your own adult life even if your parents thought like that you still have to
36:56
discover that mindset yourself at some point along the way and I think real estate it can feel scarce for some
37:02
reason or another especially you start looking around and you’re like nothing works out none of these deals work there aren’t enough houses it’s like well
37:09
there are first of all and especially if you widen your net and you learn that’s why I really like remote real estate
37:15
investing when you open up the entire map as a potential pallet almost certainly you can find something that
37:21
will fit your goals and the timeline of those goals and so I I think yeah just all the different mindset shifts along
37:27
Ong the way actually being willing to do a little bit of work not a ton I don’t think you ever sat down and spent 5
37:33
hours a day on this like you were doing consistent little chunks of time what we
37:39
teach in the academy is 20 minutes a day it seemed like what you were doing is over the course of the last 12 months
37:44
since we started working together you were putting in those little incremental bits of work retooling your mindset
37:50
learning the deal analysis putting offers on the ones that made sense and finally getting under contract with one
37:55
that really fits as a result and if assuming I didn’t inaccurately describe anything there that’s pretty much
38:00
exactly how it’s supposed to work yeah no you accurately described it for me with different uh work obligations I
38:06
would end up doing instead of 20 minutes a day what oftentimes I would do is several days a week I might do an hour
38:11
or an hour and a half and dive deeper and that got the amount of time it took me to do the deal analysis got shorter
38:17
right markets were chosen I think one thing I definitely wanted to mention and bring up is the importance of finding a
38:24
an investor-friendly real estate agent that was a game change I had worked with different real estate agents that were
38:29
absolutely fantastic but I didn’t know what that really meant until I met one through the academy right Randon
38:35
Goldsmith and that was night and day different and I like whoa this just got a lot easier so some of those barriers centry the friction points were reduced
38:42
significantly enough that confidence went up along with the underwriting Improvement and that’s where we’re at
38:47
today 100 perc and so finding an investor friendly agent can help a lot the inverse of that is finding an agent
38:55
that has no idea what an investor is looking for or how to speak in terms of
39:00
returns and understanding the rental Dynamics can hurt a lot and I
39:05
unfortunately know that from experience but I think that’s one of the other benefits of being in a community or or
39:10
just learning and being around other investors is that you end up meeting people who usually if another investor
39:16
is willing to work with someone long term they probably at least know how to work with investors so that’s a great call out and we could do a whole another
39:22
session on a on the team building element because I think that’s ultimately for LA longevity purposes
39:28
that’s what makes this strategy instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time now if you want to go invest again
39:34
in the same Market you can do that because you’ve already done a lot of The Upfront work to understand what you’re
39:39
looking for and then find the teammates that can help you make it happen yeah that is a great call out were there any
39:44
other nuggets you want to drop or otherwise I think we really we hit a lot of good stuff here yeah maybe the last one is another barrier entry if you’re
39:51
learning from books and podcasts you might sound it might you might think that getting started reques you to
39:57
network like crazy that might be something that’s taken away and the other side is there’s commonly said that
40:03
you can invest with other people’s money which I don’t recommend looking at that as a place to start because that’s like
40:09
jumping in feet first and without having a background of exactly what that means so slow and steady I think is the best
40:16
way to look at it and get started you can adjust and improve as you go along you have to build your foundational knowledge first and then back to the
40:22
networking it’s I’m not somebody that would typically aggressively Network right I like things to happen organic
40:29
that that means a lot more I feel like the relationships are more solid when that happens and joining the group is
40:34
exactly what that led to and nothing happens overnight but finding the right group of people and finding that your
40:41
values align that goes a long way and so again back to just re REO your mindset
40:46
again find the group that matches for you and then stick with it for the long haul continue to just focus on the fundamentals and um we’ll get there I
40:54
love it couldn’t have said it better myself and I can only speak for myself but I also feel confident in speaking
41:00
for Nathan here we’re both honored and truly grateful that you chose to join
41:06
the remote real estate Academy especially at the very beginning when we were launching that founding cohort it’s been absolutely amazing to watch you go
41:13
through all these steps and all this discovery we’re sitting here recording this leading into this big milestone but
41:18
like you said there was a lot of work along the way and I think being there for you on that journey is one of the
41:24
more fulfilling things that we’ve been able to watch this year so congratulations on the Milestone and also all the personal things that you
41:30
had to celebrate this year in your life really happy for you and can’t wait to support you uh with whatever comes next
41:37
well thank you so much Aaron and I’m very grateful to you and you and Nathan as well it’s yeah been a game changer I
41:43
love it well where can people find you if they want to stay in touch or or learn more about you yeah I’m on Twitter
41:49
uh not as active but I still do check it uh regularly and post it’s um jadam as
41:55
my handle and you can find my website there to see what else I’m doing and Linkedin profile through that link
42:01
awesome we will drop that in the show notes and if you enjoyed this interview make sure to please leave a five-star
42:08
rating review for the show that is one of the only ways that it grows so thanks again for coming on the show Adam and
42:13
we’ll do it again soon thanks Aaron looking forward to it thank you for making it to the end of today’s episode
42:19
as you may know podcasts are very difficult to grow organically if you’re getting value from today’s episode I’d
42:24
deeply appreciate if you can take 30 seconds to leave my show five-star rating and review this will go a long
42:29
way to helping me reach more listeners just like you thank you so much in advance