From a $35,000 Salary to Quitting with 11 Rentals

Ashley:
This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, episode number 596. My name is Ashley Kehr and I’m here with Tony j Robinson.

Tony:
And this is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And today we’ve got Matt on the podcast. And man, what an inspiring story Matt is going to share with you where he talks about hustling every year for five years, moving, picking up his young family to get his next rental. He talks about finding deals, about working with agents, about working with lenders, and he talks about the pivotal moment of realizing he actually could leave his job to do real estate. So if you want an episode that is both inspirational yet super tactical, Matt’s episode is going to deliver on all of that today.

Ashley:
Well, Matt’s welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s get started with what your life looked like before real estate investing.

Matt:
I don’t even know where to start. Back at probably college, I went to a conservative Baptist school. I actually have a degree in youth pastor. I was going to be a pastor. That was my goal at least after graduation, realized that pastors don’t actually make much money. Who knew? And I was looking for a job just to pay the bills, pay rent, was living in just a little one bedroom apartment and ended up getting a job at a cellular retail store, sprint selling phones. I met my wife, oh man, 2013. I got married in 2014 and we bought our first house at the end of 2014. So that’s kind of the life before real estate, but working a dead end job. Didn’t really know where I was going in life, making about 35 grand a year. She was a veterinary technician making about 14 bucks an hour. So that was us before real estate.

Ashley:
And then what was that moment in time when you found out about real estate investing and wanted to change your life?

Matt:
So I think really the big trigger for me was my in-laws. I think most people have maybe somebody close with them that does real estate that encourages them, or they’re just really invested into listening to podcasts and self-learning. But that was it for me. When I met my wife, my in-laws were already, we’ll call it retired, retired into full-time real estate investing. He had been a meat manager or meat cutter at a grocery store for 20 something years and then started buying rental properties, which they rehabbed themselves. And when I met them, he was, oh man, 51, 52 and had already been out of the W2 job for 10 ish years due to real estate. And they were spending a month each year down on, I guess in Tucson living the high life. And I’m like, man, I want to get into this. What can I do to get this life? So that’s kind of what really spurred us on to start.

Ashley:
So Mary into a mentor is what you’re saying. There you go.

Tony:
That’s one of the questions we get all the time is how to find a mentor. It’s just marry your mentor’s daughter or son. It’s the fastest way. Matt, I want to learn more about how you took that leap from, you said, working the dead end job to actually building the life you have today. But just let’s set the table for the rookies who are listening. What does your portfolio look like today?

Matt:
Portfolio today we’ve got 11 properties, three of which are short-term. The rest are long-term. They’re mostly single family homes, but I do have a fourplex as well.

Tony:
And you built that portfolio over what period of time?

Matt:
Oh man. I mean there’s been some selling in that time as well, I want to say. So we started in 2014 with our first deal and our last purchase was actually last year. I’ve not bought a house in about a year now. So yeah, I mean about a decade. And it took seven years to finally leave my W2 job from the mostly passive income that we were getting through real estate.

Tony:
Well, Matt, I appreciate you sharing that because I think that last part of what you said is what most rookies need to hear is that it was a decade of you putting in the work and seven years of that before you even consider leaving your job. I think giving Ricky’s a realistic timeframe of you’re not going to do it overnight, but it’s also not going to take you 30 or 40 years to do this either. So appreciate you giving us that insight. But let’s go back to the first deal, man. You see the inlaws living the high life as you said. How does that lead you to your first deal? What did that first deal look like?

Matt:
Yeah, so I mean, I think something that a lot of new investors just they compare to the last generation or the last, well, five years ago, it was easier than now. And that’s what I was doing then for sure, where my in-laws had done all of those no dock loan deals prior 2008, where anybody and everybody could get a house to me closing on three properties at once with no real income verification. And maybe stuff was easier back then, not that it was done the right way for everybody, but it worked for them. So with us though, starting in 2014 at first our desire, we wanted to have rental properties, but more than anything, we wanted to start building equity. So our first deal was the end of 2014, and we were at the time renting a two bedroom apartment. We were spending about $750 a month for rent in a little town in Iowa.
So we were, and expecting our first, my wife wanted to stay home and that was my desire as well. And we’re like, what are we going to do to afford a house? And honestly, driving to work, I’m listening to BiggerPockets and other podcasts and just trying to educate myself on what to do. And our thought was let’s buy a home that’s a fixer upper and move into this house and live in it as we renovate it. So we were approved, I want to say it was like $130,000 is all that we were approved up to because I was making nothing and found a house for $90,000. It was a single story crawlspace underneath definition of grandma’s home. I mean, it had orange she carpet in the bedrooms, it had carpet in the kitchen and wood paneled walls. This thing was falling apart, but it was still livable.
And what we did, because we didn’t have much money saved either, is we found a bank, I want to say we called almost a dozen places before we found a bank that offered a first time home buyer’s credit. So the Iowa Wild Hockey Team actually sponsored this, and it was like a thousand dollars credit. The stipulation was to live in the house for a year, which we planned to do. Anyway, we got to go to the hockey game, crashed their mascot, actually came to closing fully decked out in his costume and took a picture with us, but got that credit, which helped with closing costs. And then the other hack that I learned was to offer over asking with the stipulation that the seller would pay some of the closing costs. So we actually bought it for 92,000 with the seller paying 2000 of the closing costs. So all we had to bring to closing was like $2,500 to buy this house, and we moved into it. So that was our first, I guess, home purchase, our first deal. And yeah, that’s how we got into our first house.

Ashley:
I think the big takeaway there is that you went to a dozen banks, you kept asking and finding out what loan products are available, and you ended up finding this amazing credit to help with your closing costs and what you had to bring to the table. Today’s show, it’s sponsored by Base Lane. They say real estate investing is passive, but let’s get real chasing rents, drowning in receipts and getting buried in spreadsheets feels anything but passive. If you’re tired of losing valuable hours on financial busy work, I’ve found a solution that will transform your business. It’s Base Lane, a trusted BP Pro partner Base Lane is an all-in-one platform that can help you automate the day-to-day. It automates your rent collection and uses AI powered bookkeeping to auto tag transactions for instant cashflow visibility and reporting. Plus they have tons of other features like recurring payments, multi-user access and free wires to save you more time and money, spend less managing your money and more time growing your portfolio. Ready to automate the busy work and get back to investing. Base Lane is giving BiggerPockets listeners an exclusive $100 bonus when you sign up at base lane.com/biggerpockets. Okay, we’re back with Matt on real estate rookie. And Matt, you were able to get in that first deal, you moved in, you’re fixing the property up. What happened next after you’ve completed the renovation?

Matt:
So when we bought our first house, our desire was to eventually have rental properties. We just didn’t really know how we were going to do that because the 20% down was something that we just didn’t feel like was achievable to actually save up to buy a property. I mean, we’re living in Iowa and we’re looking to buy in Iowa, so real estate is more affordable anyway. But we ended up, honestly, I was listening to a podcast or something on social media on the way to work, and I hear this guy talking about this idea of house hacking where instead of doing it the way that everybody thinks of where you buy a multi-unit property and move into one unit, rent out the others that you’re buying a single family home and then fixing it up, moving out and renting it out and doing that once a year.
So that’s what we decided to do after a year of living in that first house and renovating it ourselves, learning how to fix it up using YouTube. And then my father-in-law and my dad showing us some tricks on stuff. I mean, we all learned how to do flooring in that house. LVP wasn’t a thing, so it was just like a laminate floor, but we tiled the kitchen back splash. We used a countertop paint kit. Actually, we were so broke, we couldn’t afford counters, so we painted the counter, but it was nice enough to rent out our mortgage payment. Escrowed was $610 a month after principal interest taxes and insurance. We moved out of that house and we bought another house with 3% down on a conventional loan. It was $130,000 home. Moved into that fixer upper and rented out the first house for $1,200 a month. So that was our first real pay

Ashley:
1200. And what was your mortgage payment?

Matt:
600. Six 10? Yeah. So we’re cash flowing $590 a month. That was life-changing money for us then for sure.

Ashley:
And most likely the tenant is paying the utilities, taking care of the lawn. You really don’t have any of your expenses besides that mortgage with the escrow. Yeah.

Matt:
Yeah. And we did that a total of five times in five years. So we would buy a fixer upper, and this is not for the faint of heart, so you’ve got to really want it to do this, especially as you accumulate stuff and accumulate children throughout those years as well. We’re moving, we’re having a baby, we’re moving, having a baby. And then after five years of doing it, we landed in the house right now,

Tony:
Matt, so first I just want to give you major kudos because like you said, you got to really want it to pick up and move your life every 12 months with a young growing family. But I want to just go back to the strategy a little bit here. So just to recap, for the rookies that are listening, basically your strategy was we’re going to move into a fixerupper, we’re going to live there for 12 months, get this property rent ready, and then we’re going to turn it into a rental, move out into our next primary and just repeat that process. But what kind of financing were you using on each subsequent purchase and how were you coming up with those funds? Was it just like, Hey, we’re saving up while we’re living, or how were you funding all of these subsequent purchases every 12 months?

Matt:
Yeah, so first to kind of answer your last part of that question, how are we affording the down payment closing costs on each one? Number one, to save money, we decided we were not going to live on any of the cashflow from a property. So every cashflow or every property that we purchased, that’s almost $600 a month. We were just putting that into a separate account, only using that for necessities. Like we’ve got appliance, we’ve got to change out, or just the normal maintenance stuff that would come up with rentals, but otherwise we were not living on that money. So that’s how we were able to save for down payments. As far as the type of financing that we were doing, we actually just used conventional for all of those. I have nine conventional loans right now, and we were able to do that by just putting 3% down as a primary residence because we moved into each one.
So 3% down on 130,000, I want to say house number two and three were one 30, and then we had 180. So I mean, we’re not buying houses that are very expensive, so we’re coming into closing. We also did another hack. We did a gift of equity on one where we knew the seller and we did gift of equity to get out of some of the mortgage insurance and stuff on ’em too. But we found different hacks and stuff too to essentially help lower these payments for us and lower our upfront costs, doing the offering more and having them, the seller pay some of the closing costs that we didn’t have to come up with as much money upfront, but 3% down conventional loans is how we did it. Yeah.

Ashley:
Matt, can you describe your buy box on these properties? Because obviously this is, you’re a different shopper than somebody who’s going to buy their primary residence and you’re a different shopper than somebody who’s going to buy just strictly a rental. You need the mix of bolts. So what does that kind of look like for you?

Matt:
Yeah, so I mean, I was working full-time and we were not looking to buy houses that needed major construction walls taken down in, well, we did out of a bathroom in one of ’em, but that wasn’t the plan at the time. But mostly it was just we’re in mid seventies to mid eighties neighborhoods, kind of those B plus neighborhoods where other houses in that area are selling for 180 to two and we’re buying around one 30 because they are, I would say cosmetically distressed, old carpet, old paint, maybe older oak cabinets that could just use some love but not needing full gut jobs type of stuff. So we were looking for really those three to four bedroom, one and a half to two bathroom homes that we could live in comfortably enough, maybe be a little in construction to begin with, but then live there as we fixed ’em up. That’s what we were looking for.

Tony:
And Matt, how were you sourcing all these deals? Were they all on market listed on the MLS or had you maybe built up a pipeline of off-market deal flow as well?

Matt:
Yeah, so the two most important things for us were, number one, a good local realtor, having somebody who knew what we were after and really helped us find these deals. Secondly, just being persistent with Zillow. I hate to say that, but just, I mean, you guys know how it is. I am sure you’ve both been there just consistently opening up. Zillow, Facebook marketplace wasn’t really a thing, so maybe Craigslist and stuff. But looking on Craigslist, looking on Zillow multiple times a day, every day.

Ashley:
Now, how did you line up the closings, the rentals? Like, okay, you got a property under contract, your year is almost up. What’s the coordination look like of like, okay, we need to get this house rented and we need to move out to another house. Did you have the lenders when you were getting your next house alone, say, we want the lease for your current house before we’ll actually even approve the loan and kind of go over just the logistics of that and what it looks like

Matt:
With my income being lower. That was definitely an obstacle, was the your DTI. There we go. So debt to income was not qualifying us for these, so we worked with a lender who was willing to basically get a lease from somebody. So basically what we had to do on some of these, honestly, they were super stressful. Some of them we were okay with where they were like, okay, underwriting will approve you knowing that somebody’s going to be moving into this. But some of them were like, Hey, underwriting is going to want to have a signed lease from somebody moving in. So we’re basically closing on this property, we’re approved for the loan, but we have to have a signed lease showing that somebody’s going to be moving in here prior to the actual closing date. So we could wait up until a week or two before closing before that point, but we’re putting some of these houses up for rent and just saying, Hey, this is when it’s available, and just maybe not going into severe detail, but there’s an addendum on here. If we can’t close on this house, then we’ll have to postpone this rental out. So it made it a little more challenging a couple times, but it all worked out in the end.

Tony:
And Matt, you talked about that being a loan requirement that they wanted to see assigned lease, and I think loan requirements are something that Ricks need to pay more attention to because they can and will dictate how you execute different plans for different properties. And one thing we didn’t touch on, but I’m hoping you can give us some clarity on here, Matt, but why were you kind of focused on only staying at each property for one year? What was driving that timeline of 12 months

Matt:
Prison mostly mortgage fraud. Mortgage fraud. Yeah. Not committing mortgage fraud would be why. So yeah, I mean, we would’ve loved to move faster, but I mean, honestly, it was all in good timing. I mean, it was one of those things like we’re moving into the house, we don’t have a ton of money anyway, so it’s okay, we’re going to redo this carpet once we have some money to do that, and then we’re going to redo this and we have money for that. So by the time we got to that year, we were basically finishing up the house anyway, so then it’s like, okay, now it’s time to move out and rent it out. And it ended up being, there was one property and it was our own fault. We had thought we had been a year and we were not so underwriting caught that we were at 11 months and the loan fell through. So we ended up not being able to close on a property because of that. But typically your lender will know and be asking those questions to, or they should be, but we knew as well. So yeah, got to be a year unless there’s extenuating circumstances that you need to move otherwise for, but we were just bouncing around the same neighborhood.

Tony:
And just to clarify what Matt is saying about mortgage fraud, but when you buy a property and use a loan that’s designated for primary residence purposes, you have to say there for most loan products for at least 12 months to satisfy the requirements of that loan and do it at any time. Less than that is where you can kind of find yourself in hot water. So thank you for clarifying that, Matt. So you guys just go pedal to the metal a million miles an hour knocking out these properties every year for five years, and then you land in the property that you’re at now, which it seems you guys are kind of settled into. Does your portfolio stop growing at that point, or what’s the next move to keep scaling the portfolio up?

Matt:
To be honest, we had planned to do this 10 times. Our goal was 10 times in 10 years max out the conventional loans that we can have and then settle. But we ended up getting a really good deal on this acreage that we’re on now. It was the ideal location. The house was needing a lot of work. We’ve poured years of time into this house to make it where it is now. We actually just finished a bathroom renovation this last week upstairs, but we wanted this house, so we decided it’s time and we’re going to stay. So we also were at a point where we had cashflow from properties that was sufficient enough to start putting 20% down. So we used savings for that. We also found other ways as we renovated our primary residence here, I bought this house for $180,000 and we have put 60 grand into it over the last five years, six years since we’ve been here, and it’s worth about a half a million now. So we pulled out a heloc, a home equity line of credit, and we’ve used that HELOC to help fund other deals for down payments, renovations, closing costs and stuff too. And then we’ll just pay back off the HELOC after we start getting profit from that property and then recycling, reuse. So yeah, finding other ways and then using money from our other deals to fund them.

Ashley:
Matt, Tony and I had just finished recording an episode where we talked about reasons you should invest in real estate, and one of those was just the equity that is built up in the property over time. So for example, you bought your first property 10 years ago. What has that impact on your wealth building been like to see these properties that you bought for X amount, the tenants to pay down all of these mortgages, and today you just have all of this equity available and have you talked about the HELOC that you just put on your primary residence, but have you gone back and refinanced and tapped into any of that equity or taken a HELOC there, or have you just let this equity sit and grow to build your wealth?

Matt:
Our goal has been to kind of keep it 50 50 or less as far as at least 50% equity to debt. So I don’t want to have more debt than equity. So we did do a cash out refi on one of our properties using A-D-S-C-R loan, and I mean new investors, it’s basically like a loan for investors using potential profits from a property to approve you other than your income for those of us without real jobs, but did a cash out refi, had bought this property for one 60, turned it into a short-term rental, and a year later did a cash out refi for 300 on it. And then honestly, just use that to pay back off the HELOC because my interest rate on that was about 9.5% at the time. So trying to get some of those high interest loans paid off, especially heloc, I’d rather have it looped up into a conventional loan and then be borrowing on that. But otherwise, no. I mean, we’ve just really tried to put our sweat equity into it, build it through sweat equity, through appreciation, and that’s how we built our wealth through it and have more equity than debt now for sure.

Ashley:
Matt, what does the strategy breakup look like as far as how many long-term or short-term rentals that you have?

Matt:
We started with long-term because that’s what we knew from what my in-laws did, and short term just was not like the Airbnb boom hadn’t happened yet. So I wasn’t too knowledgeable about it. It was actually through listening to other social media, I’ll call him influencers, I think I bring up his name probably on every interview, but Michael a Lafonte, he’s the guy that really influenced me. If you guys have met or know who he is, a lot of people in the space. But he had been working at Domino’s and then working, or Dunking Donuts, I think his wife was at Domino’s, and they liquidated their 401k, they got into short-term rentals. They were living in a conversion van traveling around the country, going to different national parks. I’m like, man, he was able to do that with just a few properties. And here I am with five, six properties and not even halfway there.
Maybe we should just try this out. So we got into the short-term rental space locally because my thought wasn’t, people want a vacation to Des Moines, Iowa, but I like to be hands-on. I want to renovate this property myself, so let’s buy a house downtown Des Moines, near shops, restaurants, event venue stuff. We did some market research with Air DNA and found that there, it was like 70% of properties could only sleep up to six people or seven people in Des Moines. So we bought a house that could sleep 10, and we got into it. And short-term rentals just dramatically changed the game for us with cashflow. I mean, we bought this house for 160 K and we did the thrift store stuff, and our thought was, let’s experience this, let’s see how it goes, and then invest in a vacation market. But it ended up doing so much better than we thought.
I mean, we did like 70 grand on that house the first year. We were cash flowing $2,500 a month. So we bought another house in Des Moines for 1 65, and that house did 90 2K last year. We’ve got another one that we just bought this last year for 2 25 that’ll do over a hundred grand this year. I call it an accommodation location, not a vacation destination, but that’s kind of what our niche has been. But we’re definitely more STR focused right now, and that’s what got us into it, was just listening to other people talk about it. I mean, you guys both know it’s not passive long-term rentals are, but the cashflow is four to six times greater. So that’s ultimately what helped me leave my job a lot faster too. So that’s kind of how we decided to transition into them was just listening to other people talk about how great they were. So

Tony:
Well, Matt, we definitely want to get into that transition of leaving your day job and going full-time into your real estate business, but we’ll do that right after a final word from today’s show sponsors. Alright, we’re back here with Matt. So Matt, you talked about the transition to short term and man, the numbers you were throwing out, doing a hundred plus K on a $200,000 property. Those are some fantastic numbers. Absolutely. But let’s talk about the actual transition because you said you were working again, to use your words, a quote, dead end job. At what point did you realize I think I can actually make the leap.

Matt:
Yeah, so I mean over the years I stayed in cellular retail sales. So I worked with Sprint, I worked my way up to a district manager role, but it was with a third party company, so I think I was making 50 k. I ended up getting a training job with a third party for Apple where I’d go around and train people on iPhones. And then my last job, I was actually an account manager with Google, and I really enjoyed that. It was, again, like a third party company. A lot of employees or people that work with Google are not working directly for ’em, and that was me. So my salary, I was mid sixties. We were happy though, and the cost of living out here is very affordable, so it was easy to live on. But our goal throughout this time had always been not necessarily a house number, a number of properties. It was have our cashflow consistently surpassing the salary that we brought in from my job and my salary went up over the years. And I dunno, it kind of gray a little bit for us. And Tony, you’re going to get a really big head for this because I’m going to give you props, but I say this in all of my other interviews. The breaking point for me for why we finally decided to make the leap was actually going to your short-term rental summit in Newport Beach, California. We had there too.
So I had been watching these real estate Robinson people and I’m like, man, these guys are cool. I need to figure out how to do what they’re doing and I’m going to go to their conference. So I took my wife and my in-laws actually went out to Newport and attended your SDR summit. And we had one short-term rental at that time, and we had just gone under contract with our second short-term rental. And at that time, our cashflow from our properties was greater than my salary, just barely. But it was enough to live on it. And it was just, I mean, honestly, through listening to some of the different speakers there, but then talking and networking with people, I wish I could give him credit and I wish I knew his name, but I talked to this one guy who he had made the leap and was doing real estate full time and talk with him.
And he’s like, so what’s preventing you from leaving? And I’m like, well, I just thinking about maybe just getting a couple more properties and then really feeling safer. And he is like, dude, the amount of freedom that you have from just leaving and how much more effort you’ll put into your business and how much greater your business is going to do by not giving 50% of your effort to your job and then 50% to real estate. He’s like, you are just going to this trigger in your brain will be like, okay, this is my only source of income. This is what needs to do well, and your business is going to do better. And then he says to me, what would happen if you don’t succeed? Then you’ll end up right back to where you are now. And I’m like, dang. So I needed proof of income to close on this property. It was a conventional loan. So I actually, I waited until we were in the closing office right after we closed on our second short-term rental. I was in the parking lot and that’s when I called my boss and to put in my two weeks notice. So yeah, so thank you Tony for putting that together so that can happen. Yeah,

Ashley:
I know. I just love it too that that was from Tony’s conference too.

Tony:
Yeah, and Matt, I appreciate the kind words, but I think the power of events like that is, it’s not always what’s being shared on stage, but it is those moments in between sessions where you’re networking and you’re talking to people and you’re hearing their stories and they can ask you that one insightful question that changes everything for you. And we’ve heard that story time and time again from events that we host BP Con about, man, I just met someone. We had this conversation and my entire perspective shifted in a way that I could have never imagined. So for all the Ricky that are listening, take Matt’s story and get out and go to an event, BP Con is coming up, and obviously Ash and I are a little bit biased, but we think it’s one of the best real estate events that’s happening. But aside from all the amazing speakers, it’s moments what Matt just talked about of being able to, not just listening to a podcast and hearing someone’s story, but sitting down next to someone shaking their hands, having a drink and hearing their story face to face.
I’m telling you, it motivates you in a way that’s so hard to even articulate clearly. So Matt, dude, that’s got to be one of the coldest I’m quitting. My job stories that I’ve heard is I signed the doc for this deal, then I called in and quit my job, man. So I love hearing that. And last thing I’ll say, I think you hit exactly what I wanted to say as well. It’s like the worst case scenario is that it doesn’t work for you and you just go back to a job that you already had or some similar job. And I think that when we can frame the decision to go full time or stay at our job with that perspective, it makes it a whole heck of a lot less scary because you’re like, I’m already living my worst case scenario right now working this job, so it can only go up from here, man. So congratulations brother. What an amazing story.

Matt:
Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, once you experienced it as Tony knowing your story from hearing it a couple times too, it’s once you get over the fear factor and actually experience the freedom of doing your own thing, it’s not something that you ever want to have to go back to. So those early morning conference calls, those late night meetings for deadlines of things like, man, just experiencing that, people say, well, you’re not financially free. You still have to work a little bit. It’s like, yeah, but I work on my time, on my terms where I want to and with who I want to. And that’s what it’s all about.

Ashley:
Matt, I guess the last piece to kind of touch on here is the actual operations of your businesses. Who is handling the day-to-day? Do you take it on yourself, your wife? Are you using a property manager? Give us a little insight into the day-to-day of your real estate investments.

Matt:
As of right now, we’re blessed to have everything relatively local to us. All of our properties are within about a half an hour. We did have a short-term rental that we own for about five weeks down on South Potter Allen that we sold for a good profit and ended up just not doing that because the market shifted. But otherwise we bought local. I’ve got a fourplex that’s two and a half hours away, but it’s all long-term. So it’s pretty, we self-manage. I mean, we’ve done everything on our own. We’ve had some opportunities for joint ventures and stuff, and some syndication offers as well. But my goal isn’t money. It’s my time. And we’re at a place where we’re very blessed financially. We never thought we’d be in this financial situation. It’s been fantastic, but that wasn’t our goal. It was to have the ability to wake up and spend my day with my kids and not need to put in 40, 50 hours for somebody else.
So we self-manage right now, and we keep our portfolio around the 10 to 11 properties because it’s manageable, especially with seven of them, eight of them being long-term rental and only three shortterm short-term take the most time. But I use Hospitable as my property management software, which has been great. They help automate a lot. So I mean, typically, I don’t know mean it varies, you guys know, but two to five hours a week managing the day-to-day, we have cleaners for all of our properties, and then I’ve got companies or individuals that I’ll call for HVAC or plumbing, electrical stuff. So we’ll still do some of the things ourselves. Like we had a water issue with some drainage, not going away from the house at one of our short-term rentals. Carpet got a little bit wet with some flash flooding we had, and we were out there.
My wife and I were shovels yesterday digging it away from the house and adding drainage tile and stuff. But we enjoy that stuff though. We brought our kids with us and we homeschool. So it’s like, here’s just, here’s your learning for the day. You can learn how to properly drain a house because the previous owners did not. So it’s stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, we travel a lot. We spend our winters down on South Potter Island and homeschool down there and try to take a good vacation every couple months, and it works out. I mean, some weeks are busier than others, but we manage ’em all on our own. Yeah.

Ashley:
Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people reach you and find out more information about your real estate journey?

Matt:
Yeah, social media. I go by the handle rental cashflow or just search up Matt Krueger. Rental Cashflow was available when I started social media, so that was just, that’s what stuck but rental cashflow, Matt Kruger on all platforms. So yeah, that’s where you’ll find me.

Ashley:
Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to share your journey with the rookie investors. Thank you so much. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie. I.