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Does achieving financial freedom through real estate require grinding, hard work and hustle? Not necessarily. In this episode, Jeff interviews Dion McNeeley, a self-proclaimed lazy investor—who has achieved financing independence! In this conversation, Dion tells his story about how we went from significant bad debt to financial independence through real estate investing, while maintaining a job he loves. Jeff and Dion discuss what it means to be successful as a “lazy” real estate investor, what Dion looks for in a deal, and explains how we gets tenants to ASK for a rent increase!
Episode Transcript
being lazy for a lot of people could also mean being very busy. And something I grew up hearing from my dad all the time was if you want to find the easiest way to do something, ask a lazy person because they know the easy way to do it. So I needed to find a way to invest while working full time and raising kids that didn’t take up a lot of time and energy so that I’d be motivated to keep investing. I don’t want to buy another job. So I buy rental properties, and it started pretty slow.
Jeff Stephens
Welcome to racking up rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections, can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans. nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs we’re just looking for quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to you see, we are people oriented dealmakers we sit down directly with sellers to work out Win Win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from a thoughtful real estate entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media. This show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio. Hello, this is Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur. Thank you for joining me for another episode of racking up rentals. Show Notes for this episode, including a full transcript of the interview you’re going to hear in a moment can be found at thoughtful our e.com slash e 118. Please do us a huge favor by hitting that subscribe button in your podcast app. It really helps fellow thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs to find the show onward with today’s episode. And in today’s episode, I’m really pleased to share with you an interview that I had the privilege of conducting with my friend Dr. McNeely. And Deanna and I met through the Facebook groups that talk about real estate investing, especially those associated with bigger pockets. And while I quickly learned that the actual, you know, methods and strategies and tactics and approach that Deon has taken to build his real estate portfolio are different than mine, I felt an immediate sort of kinship, because the spirit of his energy and his purpose showing up in those groups is really to give in to help. And people really, really like what he has to say they really like his perspective. And I think one of the things you’re going to really enjoy from this interview is he has a very, very relatable story. He’s talking about how real average people make tremendous progress in their financial independence and in their lives, using real estate without necessarily at all becoming a full time real estate entrepreneur without even being an entrepreneur specifically at all. Deon definitely prefers to think of himself as an investor. And so I think you’re gonna get a lot out of this interview, I think you will find that his story, his strategies are very relatable and very, very encouraging. And I think he would probably agree that if he can do it, you can do it as well. So let’s go ahead and queue up this awesome interview with Dr. McNeely. All right, Dr. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today.
Howdy, Jeff. I’m actually excited to be here. I’ve seen you in the groups for a long time. And even though this is a podcast, I feel like I’m actually getting to meet you in person.
Jeff Stephens
I feel the same. Yeah, totally. You know, I was saying right before we hit record that I felt so we’ve had a lot of exchanges and comments and stuff like that and posts and. And even though I think that probably when we get down to some of the details, that sort of like how you were doing, what you’re doing and how we’re doing what we’re doing. I think tactically, it might end up being very different. But I’ve definitely I’ve just felt this not to make it sound cheesy, but almost like a kinship of spirit or a sense of positivity, certainly a sense of like, a shared sense of like wanting to help and provide perspective to other people. So I’ve been looking really forward to this as well, because I think my audience is going to learn a lot from you and finding out how you do stuff is that’s different than what I’ve jabbering at them about doing all the time.
Okay, so I think the first thing I’d like to start with is, why should someone listen to this podcast? Because you know, who am I and if they’ve seen me in the groups, or they’ve seen me on bigger pockets, or they might know me, but someone new, it’s probably listening, why am I listening to this guy? Perfect. 10 years ago, I 11 years ago now, I was at $9,000 in bad debt that I didn’t know about until I went through a divorce. That’s when I found out about the bad debt. So I started as a single parent with three kids. I had made it to 40 without ever having $1,000 in the bank. And I decided I wasn’t doing very well financially. I had after Desert Storm the Marine Corps downsized so I had lost My job basically in 2008, I was a police officer and the recession downsized our police department. So again, I lost a job. So I started looking at investing. And we flash forward. Now 11 years after that position, I found myself and I’m now financially free with 16 rental units. My pure cash flow, after all expenses, is about 103,000 a year. And house hacking. So I’m living for free of made work completely optional. My kids are going to inherit a few million in real estate. And I did this all while working full time, and being a single parent. And I’m not an entrepreneur. And one of the things I’ve liked about the way whenever you comment on a post and how you try to help somebody, and that’s why I was looking forward to being on this, your podcast is because your posts are actually trying to help people. It’s not like you’re trying to sell something. So I’m actually going to ask you a question before we’re done. Why do you do this, but I’m an investor, I figured out that if I put money to work, I don’t have to work. And an entrepreneur works very hard for their money. You know, a lot of people want to quit their 40 hour a week job and they don’t want to boss so they want to be an entrepreneur. Well, that means you’re gonna work 80 hours a week. Yeah, and you’re your own boss. That’s not me. I invest what I actually call a very lazy way. So I tried to do it, where it would work, no matter how busy a person is.
Jeff Stephens
Yeah, I’ve heard you use that word lazy before. And that was definitely one thing I was gonna prompt you about today’s as curious just to hear more about like, What? I’m sure that that sounds probably very attractive to just about everybody listening, including me. So what are some of like the parameters or frameworks or bullets that sort of define being a lazy investor to
being lazy for a lot of people could also mean being very busy. And something I grew up hearing from my dad all the time was, if you want to find the easiest way to do something, ask a lazy person, because they know the easy way to do it. So I needed to find a way to invest while working full time and raising kids that didn’t take up a lot of time and energy so that I’d be motivated to keep investing. I don’t want to buy another job. So I buy rental properties. And it started pretty slow. I wasn’t really, I had a house that I kept through the divorce that I got before I planned on being becoming an investor and I had a bad debt to income ratio. So to be able to get onto the property ladder to invest in real estate, I moved into an apartment and rented out the house. And in a little over a year, almost two years, this gave me rental income on my tax returns to help me offset my debt to income ratio, and let me invest. And my first actual investment property was a duplex that a house hacked. Reducing my housing costs enough to let me actually save money. So I’m not changing any of my habits. I just moved once in two years to see, you know, add, I added about 12 $100 a month my savings rate. And then I had some cash flow from the single family house. So to me, I hear about people like Tony Davis, if you can ever get him on your show is amazing. It’s 21. It’s got dozens of properties, selling an eight Plex to get a 30 Plex. I mean, he’s just what a marine would call a motivated hard charger. And I’m not that I’m busy. So I needed to find a way to invest that, to me lined up with being lazy. For some people, the goal of financial freedom is to not have to work. I don’t think I’ll ever actually quit working, I love the job that I have. But making it optional was important. And if you invest in such a way that it becomes a job, then you can’t retire, because you’re still working for that investment. I like rental income from an ice, I basically plan my portfolio to where it takes very little of my time, I suppose I self manage. And even with 16 rental units, I spent less than 27 hours in 2020 managing those properties, that is a lot better than the 50 hours a week I put in at my job. So not quite passive income, you know, sit back and the money just comes in doing nothing. But it’s a lot more passive than a regular job. So that’s how I would define lazy, it has to be easy, or I wouldn’t keep doing it. Yeah.
Jeff Stephens
So how does how does then that inform or even define maybe like your deal criteria, right? So you’re let’s say you’re, you’ve got three opportunities sitting on your desk, and you’re kind of sorting through them and sizing each one up. I’m guessing that that perspective then has a lot of influence on so how you see each one. So how, if you can make it sort of tactical? What are you looking for in the deals that will make them lazy a bowl?
Right? We can make that a word, better word. The really great thing about the Facebook groups and the BiggerPockets community in podcasts like this is when I’m asked a question, I need to have an answer. So when I was investing for about five years, if somebody said, What’s your criteria for your rental? I would say well, I want to make money. Like it was that simple? Yeah, but since I’ve had to type out an answer. When somebody says What do you actually look at, I have a clear concise list to where I can look at 100 properties on the MLS. And all my deals are from the MLS, I don’t have any special secret sauce, what I do is easily repeatable. But within 30 seconds or so I can dismiss or know if I want to look deeper into a property. So the quick criteria is within an hour of where I live, because I self management, I want to be able to drive there in a day without it being a big inconvenience. So a two hour one way trip would be a four hour turnaround. So one hour to me is enough. In my area, single family houses don’t cash flow, I still look for them, but I’ve never seen one. So I switched to small multifamily, because about one in 20 will return around 10% cash on cash return. So the first step for me is math. I’m looking for small multifamily that will hit my math metrics. Then I look for I want side by side units. And there are some criteria that help limit tenant turnover. So side by side units means that there’s no tenant living above or below another, so you don’t have noise complaints. And if there’s a plumbing issue, it only impacts one unit. I like places with at least two bedrooms in the garage because more space equals more stuff, so they are less likely to move. And I like washer dryer hookups inside the units because tenants using shared laundry or a laundromat are waiting for another place to open. So with those kinds of criteria, I can look through properties quickly and know that if I pursued that property, I’ll make the money that I want. And because of the strategy to limit tenant turnover, I won’t have to put a lot of work. I also prefer to hire or to buy rent ready or already occupied properties. I have a strategy that actually gets tenants to request a rent increase, and to request longer leases, things that helped me from having to do a tenant turnover or a rehab. And longer leases means more time between now and the next time I have to screen a tenant and do another tenant flip.
Jeff Stephens
Yeah. Awesome. So tell us where you are located physically.
All of my properties are between Tacoma and Olympia in Olympia and Washington state but not in the cities.
Jeff Stephens
Okay. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, obviously pricing and rents and stuff. It’s all very relative to locations. But I would say like, generally speaking, a lot of people feel like, Well, unless your property is about 1000 miles from an ocean, you can’t make properties, cashflow, but you are making it work to the tune of six figure, you know, net cash flow off your 16 units. What do you feel like? Is your Is there a secret sauce to be had with the way you’re buying those any of the other ways you’re selecting those because I would say people would still say well, to call them into Olympia, that’s still expensive ish. You know.
It is expensive. And something that I learned a few years into investing is I wish it was more expensive. And I love pausing after I say that because somebody out there just stopped and thought What did he mean he wishes he was more expensive means he would pay more. If the return scales with the amount of money that you spend, I wish I could spend more money because then my return is bigger. You can definitely go broke buying cheap. And that is just absolutely steal a quote from Michaels Uber of one rental at a time. It’s something he says all the time. So I don’t want to buy cheap and oh my first few years I was looking for the cheapest properties. My best cash flowing property is a triplex where I had been paying 150,000 a unit and the triplex I paid 175,000 units. So it was $75,000 more than what I was paying based on unit count. And most of my cash on cash returns are around 10% and that triplex is hitting 17% of a larger amount. So again, right back to I wish it cost more, but the return has to scale with it.
Jeff Stephens
Yeah. Awesome. And you’re a self manager like I am, although I do think I heard a video of yours recently where you indicated maybe that would not be the case forever. So what’s your kind of philosophy on that? And what would prompt you to change that strategy?
When you first invest, you have a choice, you can either manage your tenants or manage your property manager. In the beginning, both of those take the same amount of effort. Because when you don’t know anything about the industry, screening your property managers is not easy. It’s hard to know if you’re being taken advantage of what cost should be. And property managers and property owners are at odds. As an owner a tenant turnover cost me money. As a property manager, part of the business model to make money is based on tenant turnover. They take a full month’s rent or half a month’s rent. So some property managers are motivated to have tenant turnover and landlords usually aren’t unless you’re in a rent controlled area and it’s the only way to correct your rent, but I’m not there’s actually A law in Washington that says currently rent control is illegal, but who knows what’s gonna happen in the future. So I self manage, because I needed to learn how to do that. And wanted to know how to manage tenants. And my strategy for getting tenants to request request, a rent increase is easier for me to do them for me to teach a property manager to do. But now, I mean, I’ve been investing for 10 years, I have my systems in place. And a property manager does make it owning properties more hands off. So if I was investing at a distance, or if I didn’t have people skills, I definitely would have started with a property manager. Because I am investing locally and I have people skills, I wanted to self manage. But I want to increase my one month, a year in a foreign country up to three months. And to do that a property manager might make sense, and something that some people this is not advice to count on this, but it is a factor. When I buy a property, my goal is a 10%, or better cash on cash return the year that I buy it, I have no property that isn’t doing much better than that the second, third or fourth or fifth year that I own, the rents go up. Most mostly the mortgages stay the same property taxes and insurance might go up a little bit the mortgages, 30 year fixed rate debt, the reason I invest in residential properties. So there’s definitely a cushion of income to cover the expense of a property manager after a few years, even on properties that barely hit my 10% return when I buy them.
Jeff Stephens
That’s cool. That is cool. I was curious about your Well, uh, one of the things we talked about a lot on this show and in my community is like how we, how we source deals, and then how we finance them as well. So you mentioned you’re normally finding things on MLS, I think I’ve seen you mentioned that in other comments as well. And then you’ve kind of mentioned bank loans as well. So how has your experience been? With that have you has that slowed you down at all? Or have you, I get the impression you become good at sort of playing those specific games so that you can get them to work for you.
The first few years of investing, I was really only buying a place every two years or so didn’t have a good income had a bad debt to income ratio had to save the down payments. Because I’m doing conventional loans. My first duplex was a 5% down conventional on which is kind of unheard of for the last year or two. Most lenders are wanting 15% down if you’re going to owner occupy and 20 or 25% down for an investment property. But this thing starts to happen called the income snowball. So it was really easy to get properties off the MLS in the beginning because I was buying one every two years. So I could look at a lot and find one diamond in the rough every couple of years. But as the income comes in from those cash flowing assets, the downpayment, closing costs, immediate repairs and reserves build up faster, to where, you know, three or four years ago, it was a property every year and now it’s every three to six months, I have the money to buy the next property. So my systems have to be pretty easy to find them on the MLS. I’m not an agent, I don’t have access to the MLS. If I was an agent, I would still do what I do. I have three agents with auto searches setup. And I don’t know what the nuance to the MLS is. But in over 10 years, those agents have only one time ever sent me the same deal even though I copy and paste my criteria into an email to tell each one what I’m looking for the footprint, the type of property, the price range. So somehow people search differently on MLS and all of those searches are different. So if I use one agent, I’d be missing a lot of deals. And then I have honor. So whichever agent sends me the deal that I’m looking for, that I make an offer on that’s the agent that gets the commission and works with me through the whole deal. As far as lending goes, I have a and it sounds weird when I say these things because it sounds like I’m just over analytical. But these are. It’s this concise, because I’ve had to answer the question to people that are watching my YouTube channel to learn this. So I have a clear answer. To do lending, I get pre qualified with a major lender, like a big bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, it doesn’t matter which one because their lending criteria is the most standardized. Then I’m making offers on properties. And I’m using you know, letters of pre qualification from that lender. Once I have a property under contract, we’ll go to other lenders like guild mortgage fairway mortgage, or it’s been a while now but I checked with credit unions for a few years, because they’re different lending types of lenders. And I would see if anybody could beat the rates and fees of the big bank. And so far, pretty much all of them were able to I take that offer in writing back to the bank and for the first several the bank was able to beat the other lenders, so they kept my business and the last few fairway mortgage has been able to beat the rates and fees. So they’ve gotten my last two refinances, and two purchases And I’ll do that every time. It’s actually something my lender taught me. She said, from the big bank, the agent I was working with, or broker or whatever the title is. She said, I can’t go to my boss and ask for a better rate because I like Dion. But I can go to my boss and say Dion has this offer, in writing to keep this business, we need to beat it. And it sounds like a lot of work. But really, it’s four or five emails back and forth to save 10s of 1000s of dollars over the next 30 years.
Jeff Stephens
Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. I like I like that. I’m not sure if I’ve ever really thought about that angle before. That’s really that’s a great tip. Yeah, nice. Okay, fantastic. So at some point A while back, I want to say it wasn’t too long. In the past, you started being more deliberate about spreading your knowledge and teaching others and you’ve got Deon talk right on YouTube. And so I was just curious, tell us a little bit about what, what makes you feel like that’s the kind of thing you want to be doing? What would you say? Is your your goal? How will you know if you’ve succeeded with your sort of educational efforts? I guess.
There are two reasons why I try to share the information. And both of them are very selfish. The first one is, I really liked the emotional state I was in when I reached financial freedom, going from $89,000 in bad debt as a single parent. And bankruptcy wasn’t an option, because at that point in time, I was a police officer. And that’s a career killer for a cop to less than 10 years later, making it to I never have to work again in my life, and my kids have an actual inheritance. Now, that’s a really good emotional thing to go through. I think I think even somebody who wouldn’t know me knows that that’s probably a good situation to have lived through. And in a very selfish way, I like to re experience that. So for the last several years, I’ve tried to help as many people as I can reach financial freedom. That started with commenting on bigger pockets, on the forums. And then the Facebook group started and answering questions there. And that’s where I really think I found my niche is You and I are very active in the Facebook groups. Kevin Christiansen isn’t as active there too. And there’s several people that are very helpful. But most people that were really involved in the business are on the BiggerPockets forums, and they’re not in the Facebook group. So I started answering a bunch of questions and taking phone calls. And every week, I would take three or four, maybe five phone calls that were about an hour long. And why I enjoyed it. I helped kind of like opening someone’s mind to the idea that, you know, making work optional was even a choice. Again, it was selfish, because I liked the way that I feel when I do that. But that was a huge time sink. So I haven’t been doing it very long. It was just January of this year, I started making videos on YouTube to answer the most common questions so that when somebody says, should I have an LLC? How do I secure a loan? How do we get more mortgages than just one? How do I keep my debt to income ratio? Those questions that just come up all the time, I can contact somebody and say, Hey, here’s a 10 minute video that answers that question. I still take the phone calls. But it’s a lot easier if somebody watches a video for 10 minutes and has an idea of where I’m coming from, then the phone calls 10 or 15 minutes instead of an hour. And I thought I had three or four concepts that I really wanted to get into a video, especially the one where you get tenants to request a request to rent increase to me that was that was huge. I figured every landlord would like to know that. And for me, it’s really cool because it makes it easier on the tenants too. And I started making the videos, and I realized I can’t make them fast enough. And I have. So there’s so many small things in real estate that you can put into a 10 minute video that makes it so much easier for a person and gets rid of the fears and helps people get started to where now I’ve been doing three videos a week, and it’s the editing that’s making it only three. If I didn’t have to edit videos, I’d probably put out one a day. Yeah.
Jeff Stephens
That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, when I you know, when I checked out the channel originally and then versus like, right before we went once we set up our interview here, I was like holy smokes, look at the number of people watching these and the views and the subscribers. And it really seems to be striking a chord with people.
Well, there’s probably a couple reasons for that. As a CDL instructor, there’s a kind of a tenant in instruction that we use. If you can’t explain something simply you don’t understand it. So it’s not on the student to be able to understand the information, it’s on the trainer to be able to present the information simply. And it helps that amount that intelligent, I have to be able to present it in a way that I can absorb it. So there are there are several YouTube channels like one rental at a time, bigger pockets. afford anything APL Crosby, I mean, there’s all of this great information by really smart people. And on the other side of YouTube, there are funny channels, Screen Rants or the you know, College Humor, where they make a five to 10 minute video that just make somebody laugh. And people will watch that. I haven’t really seen any channels that put the two together. So my goal is to make short 10 minute try to keep up with make a couple of points that really help in real estate. But then mix in something that makes people laugh. And I laugh pretty much the whole time I’m recording, it’s so hard to keep a straight face, and talk to myself from 10 years ago to convince myself that I want more debt. That was one of my favorite videos to do. Because I enjoyed making it. So then I figured if just a couple people laugh at it, that’s great. But they’re actually getting the information on how real estate investing can change their life. And so I just hit about 6200 subscribers, and I’m interactive, I still answer every question that pops up. I look forward to questions. I’m taking a trip and leaving this Saturday. Well, depending on when this comes out, I’m I’m leaving for a month, going to get into a truck with my two brothers. And we’re going to find the United States. It’s out there somewhere. Well spent a whole month doing it. So I’m going to do some live interviews. And those will be my first ones. And I’m curious to see how those go.
Jeff Stephens
Wow, that is fantastic. Well, congratulations on the success of that. And I hope I hope you keep going and keep doing it because I think it’s serving a ton of people. So now you know when you mentioned UT something twice now I feel like I have to follow up on it the first time I was so tempted to ask you to explain if you would if you’d be so kind the basics of the the how to get your tenants to ask for rent increase. But I resisted the temptation at first, and then you mentioned it again. And like I can’t let this pass. Are you willing to give us a little teaser that maybe would lead someone to watching the full video about that topic.
So my actual video on my channel on how to get tenants to request a rent increase, it’s only five minutes long. The concept is super simple. implementing it, I just did a video for the course for one rental at a time. And that was a 20 minute video because it goes through the nuanced of timing and the psychology to it. But the cliff notes version is most tenants live in fear of landlords increasing the rent to a point where the tenant can’t afford it and they have to move. Especially when you buy a property. If a tenants been renting a place for a while that goes up for sale, the landlord’s probably been neglecting the property, they might not have raised rents for a while a lot of landlords don’t like to raise rents on a good tenant because it scares them away or makes them move or whatever the concept is. So a lot of tenants are living with rent that is below the average, especially when a sale happens.
So the best thing a landlord can do financially as a business, if you take all emotions out, is kick the tenants out, do a full rehab and rent the unit out at the maximum rent ucap. Business wise that makes the most sense. But two things first, that disrupts the tenants life. And second, I’m lazy. This is where the lazy kicks in. I don’t want to do a rehab, I don’t want to disrupt the tenants life. I don’t want to have to pay for a rehab, I don’t want to have to schedule, manage work with contractors do all the things that it takes. They don’t want to list a property screen tenants place a tenant all those things that it takes to do a tenant flip. So the park that works for the owner isn’t going to make more money than the rents are now because the tenant is going to request a rest rent increase. But I don’t have to do a rehab. So what I do is most tenants if they’ve been renting for a while, don’t know what current prices of properties are. And they don’t know what most what the rents are in their area usually, because they haven’t been thinking about moving until the sale happens. So what I’ll do is I’ll make a binder, literally a physical binder out of a three ring binder. The cover is a picture of the property with the amount that I paid because if somebody goes online and looks up on Zillow, the property that they’re renting, they’re usually going to see the price from 2010 or 2012 whenever it was sold last for two or $300,000. So that’s what they think the property’s worth, when I buy it now and 2018 1920 2122 You know, I’m paying $400,000 for a duplex, and the last time it sold was $210,000. So I’m showing the tenants the price increase. Then the first page is a map of the rentals that are available in the area. So the tenants can see that I looked, you know, within driving distance, you know, five minute drive from that rental, similar sized units. same number of bedrooms, has a garage, fenced yard, anything like that you can make the same with those area average wins listed. And you have to be really careful here. Some of those That’s what we really low. And you can point out to the tenants that that is low income housing. So when they do a search for a rental, they’re going to find Low Income Housing too. But this last one that I just did, the rents were at 1150, the area average rents were 1600. So the tenants know, they’re now seeing rentals for 1600 1550 1600. They know that I should kick them out, I should rehab the place and raise the rents because there’s a huge gap. But I slide the binder to the tenant and ask them, what do you think is fair. And so far, 100% of the time, the tenants request the rent to go up, not quite to the area average. Like, if they were going to pay the area average, they might just move. But these tenants, both sides of the duplex were 1150, they requested for the rent to go up to 1460. So the tenants requested for a $310 increase to their rent, because they saw the area averages, they know they’re still getting a deal. And that’s enough money so that I’m not tempted to just push them out of their place, rehab it and get better rents. So technically, I’m losing out on maybe 100, or a little bit more dollars a month in rent, which is 12 $100 a year to save a four to $7,000 rehab and all of the time energy. And that’s even if the property got rented out right away. And the contractors are available and costing materials weren’t as high as they are now. So the tenants are happy, I don’t have to deal with a tenant turnover, and they requested the rent increase. So I’m able to find properties on the MLS where the current rents don’t make sense. But just under the area, average rents gets me my return that I’m looking for, which opens up a lot more properties off the MLS for me to look for. And doing it this way. In 10 years of investing, I’ve had a total of two tenant turnovers, the tenants are happy. One inherited the house, and the other one went to the hospital and passed away. And then the spouse moved to assisted care. So literally, I’ve never had a turnover because of rent increases, or not taking care of the property. And to me that works because of the lazy. Yeah. Wow. That’s
Jeff Stephens
awesome. Thank you. That’s a great, that is a really great tip, as well. Alright, so I’m sure that there are lots of people listening here who are going to want to tune in, so to speak in the digital sense to you and your content. So as we wrap up, what’s the best way? Where would you like to point them to find out more about you and your ideas and your teachings?
I’m really active in the BiggerPockets community. So you can reach me on the forums there. In the official BiggerPockets Facebook group, the real estate rookie group, I’m actually working right now, bigger pockets put on a 12 week boot camp, actually care is the facilitator and I’m one of the assistants there’s six of us for 12 weeks doing that. So through bigger pockets is probably the easiest. Facebook I’m I’m like a teenager on Facebook all the time. And here on YouTube is Deon, talk financial freedom. If you just put in Deon, you’re gonna get Celine Dion for seven pages of information. And if you put financial freedom, you’ll get my channel. Awesome.
Jeff Stephens
All right. Thank you so much for spending time with me today sharing some of your wisdom and your experience in your story with us.
I appreciate it. Jeff, before we hit the off button, and tell me what got you started into your podcast?
Jeff Stephens
Yes, absolutely. The podcast since it was the first foray that I made into into the overall world of trying to, you know, shine a light on a path for other people, as well. And I’d say the reason was, I’ve always loved the medium of podcasts. But I’d say much more broadly than that. I remember exactly what it was like when when I found a voice. That was exactly what I had been searching for, who’s whose ideas not just made sense logically, but whose message in spirit resonated with me, like in my, in my heart as well. And when I found that, you know, it was like, if you were listening to an old school radio, and you, the dial is just a couple ticks, you know, it should have been 100.1, but you were at 100.3. And it just, it sounds awful and scratchy. But like that voice to me, was like putting that twisting the dial just to where everything became clear. And that made all the difference for me in terms of my ability to make progress. And I thought, I think there’s probably a good chance I can be that for somebody else. That little adjustment of the dial, who can give them clarity and help them make progress faster. So I’d say that’s probably the best way to put it. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. Alright, so I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as as I did and re listening to it and I think Dion’s just got such great perspectives and I just think he makes everything feel like it’s very real. It’s very achievable. And I hope you will take some time to subscribe to his YouTube channel and follow everything he’s doing because he’s helping a lot of people, and you can definitely be one of those. So that is it for today’s episode of racking up rental. So again, show notes, including a transcript are going to be at thoughtful ar e comm slash e 118. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button in your podcast app and just take a second to rate and review the show. Did you know we have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs as well? Yes, we do. It’s called rental portfolio wealth builders. We would love to have you join us there. Just go to group dot thoughtful r e.com. And the magic of the internet will redirect you right to that page where you can join. If you like this episode, please take a screenshot of that and post that screenshot to Instagram and tag us We are at thoughtful real estate. I’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, this is Jeff from a thoughtful real estate entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to racking up rentals where we build long term wealth by being a win win deal makers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
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