REI099: HOW I GOT INTO REAL ESTATE & LONG-DISTANCE INVESTING

W/ ROBERT LEONARD

06 December 2021

In this week’s episode, Robert Leonard teaches all about long-distance real estate investing by walking through his experience. He discusses how he got into real estate, what house hacking and long-distance real estate investing is, how to find markets to invest in, how you can buy properties you’ve never seen in cities you’ve never been to, and much, much more!

Robert Leonard is a real estate investor, entrepreneur, and podcast host.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How and why Robert got into real estate investing.
  • What house hacking is.
  • What long-distance real estate investing is.
  • Why people make long-distance investing seem far more complicated than it is.
  • How to find cities to invest in.
  • How to find a real estate agent.
  • How to manage long-distance properties.
  • And much, much more!

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Robert Leonard (00:02):

On today’s show, it’s just me again behind the mic, and I’m going to be talking about my story and how I got into real estate investing, how I got into long-distance real estate investing. And then, we’re going to talk a bit about the details of how to actually invest long-distance. The goal of this episode isn’t for you to memorize my background or anything like that, it’s so that you can hear my story and see how I got into real estate and maybe compare it or relate to it for your own story and see how you might be able to get into real estate. And also, I know a lot of people are really interested in long-distance investing, so this episode has been long overdue. I know a lot of people have asked me to record quite a bit about my process for long-distance investing. So, that’s where this episode came from. I hope you guys enjoy it. Let’s dive right in.

Intro (00:48):

You’re listening to Real Estate Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network where your host, Robert Leonard, interview successful investors from various real estate investing niches to help educate you on your real estate investing journey.

Robert Leonard (01:14):

Hey everyone, I’m your host, Robert Leonard. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, welcome back. If you’re new to the show, I appreciate you checking it out, appreciate you being here. So, as I mentioned in the intro in today’s episode, we are going to be talking a bit about my story and how I got into real estate. Then, we’re going to talk a bit about how I got into long-distance investing. And then, we’re just going to talk a bit about the actual process of long-distance investing and how you guys might be able to replicate what I do and do it for yourself. So, to kick off the episode, we’re going to start with a little bit about my background, and I always go whenever I’m asked, whenever I guest on another podcast and I’m asked to tell about myself, I always go back to when I was four years old and I don’t think that’s what most people are asking for.

Robert Leonard (02:01):

I think most people are meaning more recently, but I go back as far as I do to when I was four years old because I think it not only tells an interesting story, but also gives some important details about who I am as a person and also you guys might be able to relate to it. So, back when I was four years old, I entered my first motocross race on ATVs, and ultimately, I ended up racing for about 10 years or so until I was about 14. And over those eight to 10 years or so, I did pretty well. You race your local area in your local series for a while and then eventually, you can go on to what they consider the national circuit and race against all the best racers in the country, more really even the world. There were people from all over the world that came. And so, ultimately, we did really, really well locally. And I say we because it was my dad and I, we were a team.

Robert Leonard (02:55):

And so, we did really well locally and then we ended up going around the nationals, and we did really well at the nationals as well. We finished second a couple times, not just in races but in the overall championship, we ended up second which technically ranked us as number two in the world in the age group that I was racing. So, I was doing pretty well and you can turn professional, I believe back then it was 16, so I was really close to going pro and it’s kind of the best way I can explain it for somebody who isn’t in the motocross world is that when you’re a kid, there are classes that you race and you basically are in like the minor leagues. If professional is like professional sports, then there are other classes that you race in until you go pro and were considered like the minor leagues.

Robert Leonard (03:40):

And so, I was in the minor leagues and I was one of say, maybe 10 prospects that were expected to kind of be the face of motocross going forward in the future, the pro motocross. Ultimately though, when I was about 12 or 14, there was a few things that kind of came together. Unfortunately, there was a couple people close to us that passed away racing, or they got paralyzed, or something very tragic happened to them. And also, this was right around 2007, 2008 so the economy was crashing, things weren’t doing very well financially for my father. So, it was just overall a really hard time. And so, with the risk of injury and also money, my dad made me stop racing. That was really hard for me because I didn’t plan on necessarily going to college or doing anything other than racing motocross. I thought my future was professional motocross.

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Robert Leonard (04:34):

I was going into my freshman year, right around there, and I kind of had to figure out what I was going to do now. I came from a single dad with one brother. We grew up in a trailer park. No one in my family ever went to college, anything like that. So, even going to college was going to be difficult for me. I’d be the first one to do it in my family. I had to figure it out. I did talk to the guidance counselors but they weren’t super, super helpful. And so, I ended up going to college. I figured it out instead of going to some of the dream schools that I really wanted to go to, I ended up staying local to home, commuting so I didn’t have to pay for a dorm or anything like that. I did well in high school so I got a scholarship. But basically, I worked nearly full-time all throughout college so that I could pay for it and I tried to do everything I could to keep my costs low.

Robert Leonard (05:24):

I actually found a little loophole that, because I was looking to save as much money as I could, so what I realized was the financial structure was that if you took up to four classes, you paid per class. But if it was over four classes, you paid the same rate as four classes. So, you could take six classes and pay the same price as if you were taking four. So, I tried to load up on as many classes as I could take and try to get out as soon as I could so that I had to pay as little as possible. And so, I did that, and then the other thing I did also was because I was in the honors college, I was able to take MBA or grad level courses and count them towards my undergrad. So, if there was a course that I had to take in grad school and in undergrad, then if I just took it at the grad level, it counted towards both programs. And so, I did that and that saved some money.

Robert Leonard (06:15):

That allowed me to get both my undergrad at and my grad degree quicker which saved me some money. So, all along, I thought I was doing the right thing. I was going to college, went into the corporate world, I climbed the corporate ladder pretty fast. And I thought I was doing well, I was doing what everybody told me that I was supposed to do because I didn’t know any better. And then, I realized that maybe I didn’t want to necessarily go that route and that’s kind of led me to where I am today. But in there, I had found Warren Buffett. I actually didn’t go right to Warren Buffett, I was on Facebook. I think it was, again, my freshman year because when I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, I was trying to figure it out. And this was right around when Facebook was starting. But as I was going around on Facebook, I ended up seeing an ad for this guy who offered a day trading program.

Robert Leonard (07:03):

And he basically promised that you get rich very quickly from his day trading program. As an impressionable 14-year-old kid who didn’t know what he was going to do with his life, that sounded really interesting. So, I looked into it, I didn’t know anything about investing business, I had no interest in any of it. I started to look into him and his course and stuff like that and then I realized that what he was selling probably wasn’t legit. And I realized that just something wasn’t right about it. And so, thankfully, I didn’t get into any day trading, I didn’t buy the program or anything like that. But what it did teach me or what it led me to was Warren Buffett. Because you can’t really start studying any type of investing without hearing about or learning about Warren Buffett. And as soon as I learned about Warren Buffett, it just really made a lot of sense to me.

Robert Leonard (07:50):

I really became passionate about investing and that’s how I decided what I wanted to do with my career. That’s how I decided on finance as I went through college and accounting because Buffett talked about how important it is to be able to read financial statements and understand accounting. So, that’s what I went into for college. And so, I got really passionate about stock investing. And then, a few years later, I learned about real estate investing and I had heard that a lot of people made well through real estate investing. But I never really thought that it was something that I could do. I thought you had to be multi-millionaire or already wealthy to get started in real estate. So, I always thought that I would just make as much money as I could, I’d save my way and make my wealth through the stock market by investing in individual companies like Warren Buffett.

Robert Leonard (08:32):

And then, once I was wealthy, I would then take that money and start real estate investing. That seemed to make the most sense to me. But what actually happened was that as I was entering my freshman year of college, my dad said to me that when I graduate and I start earning a salary, that I would need to start paying him rent to live in his house. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I thought that that was reasonable and I thought something that’s very fair for a parent to do, I think that’s their choice. But it just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. And I knew I was going to be able to live there rent free while I was in college. But once I graduated is when it would start. So, I told him, and my friends, and my family that once I graduated, I was going to buy a house. As soon as I graduated, I was going to buy a house so that I didn’t have to pay my dad rent.

Robert Leonard (09:16):

And so, I saved as much money as I could and I learned as much as I could over the four years about what I needed to do for credit, and how mortgages worked, and basically how the whole process of home buying worked and so that I was ready when I graduated college. Also, I got a job working at a local credit union and part of that credit union’s job was that when you first start, you have to go through a week of training about personal finance. And so, that taught me a ton. And so, literally, on my 18th birthday, I stayed up until 12:01 so that I could open my first credit card and start building my credit as soon as possible. So, when I graduated college at like 21, I had already had three years of credit history and I had been working nearly full-time at the credit union so I had a job history that I could use to qualify for a loan.

Robert Leonard (10:07):

I saved up some money and I went to buy my first house, and it was roughly $140,000. It was a two-bedroom condo, townhouse style condo, and I needed to bring approximately $8,000 to closing. And I was able to get a conventional loan. I forgot the exact percentage that I put down but it was, I think, 5% down. And then, I negotiated a seller credit. So, this is a very overlooked thing that I don’t think enough real estate investors, especially new real estate investors realize is out there. But when you buy a house, you can ask the seller for what’s called a seller credit. Basically, they give you cash back at closing to cover your closing costs. And so, for me, what I did was I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of cash. I knew I could cover the down payment and I could potentially come up with the money for the closing costs, but why not try to get the seller to close it?

Robert Leonard (10:59):

Let’s just say the price of the property was 130,000 and the closing costs were going to be 5,000. Instead of me offering 130,000 to their asking price, I offered 135,000 and asked for a $5,000 seller credit. So, they’d give me $5,000 back at closing. And so, they still go out their net price of 130,000 that they were asking and I also got $5,000 back at closing to cover my closing costs. Essentially, what I’m doing is financing the closing costs because now my loan amount is going to be based on a higher amount. But for somebody like me who didn’t have a lot of cash or maybe if you’re just getting started, somebody who doesn’t have a lot of cash, that could be a great, great strategy to get into a deal for less money. And so, that really worked out well for me. I only had to save up like $7,000 or $8,000 to buy that property.

Robert Leonard (11:47):

Now, I wasn’t doing that as a real estate investment, I was buying it as an owner-occupied. And I didn’t know anything about real estate at this point, I was just buying this property so I could move into it when I graduated and didn’t have to pay my dad rent. But what happened was after about a month or two of living there, I realized that I had never even opened the second door, the second bedroom that was there and I just wasn’t using it, it was just empty space. So, I said, “Well, why don’t I just rent this space out and try to make some money off of it?” I’ve always been entrepreneurial so it kind of just made sense to me. And so, my all-in cost, because it was a condo, I did have an HOA fee, but with HOA fee, taxes, insurance, mortgage, everything included was about $1,100 a month. And so, I rented it out for about $700 or $750, the second bedroom.

Robert Leonard (12:31):

And so, I was living for about $350 to $400 per month. I thought it was the best thing ever, but I realized a few months after that probably wasn’t the first person to ever do this. There was no way that, I’m not that smart so definitely wasn’t the first person to ever think of this. And so, I started to do a little bit of research online and that’s when I found BiggerPockets. And BiggerPockets showed me thousands and thousands and thousands of people across the country that are doing the exact type of real estate investing that I thought was only possible to the wealthy. But they were just normal people doing what I thought that I couldn’t do and I realized that they were no different than me. And so, when I eventually learned that, it just basically knocked down every limiting belief that I had. I said, “If these people can do this, they’re no different than me and if I can buy this first deal on my own, then I could do this too.”

Robert Leonard (13:25):

And so, from there, I started to really study as much as I could about real estate investing. I read as many books as I could, I listened to as many podcasts as I could. Podcasts were starting to get popular at that point so I was listening and doing as much as I could. And I decided that I wanted to get started in real estate. Now, coincidentally, this guy named Ryan that I had kind of known, he is the brother of one of my friends at the time, I had been lifting, working out with this kid named Brandon and this other kid named Nick, and Ryan was the brother of Brandon, and so that’s how I had met Ryan a couple times at the gym. I didn’t know him super well but he texted me out of the blue and he knew I was into stock investing and he asked me to manage some money for him. He said he had a little bit of money. He’s in sales so he made good money, and he basically wanted me to invest his money for him.

Robert Leonard (14:12):

We had lunch and I told him, “Listen, I’m not comfortable investing your money in the stock market but I’m starting to get interested in this real estate thing if you’re interested in potentially doing that.” And so, he and I became partners and we decided to go into the real estate journey together. I continued to house hack. I ended up selling that condo because the condo association went through a major renovation and the values of the properties went way up, so I decided to sell and cash out. And I put that money into another house hack. This time, I actually did was called the live-in flip where you buy a property that is livable but needs some renovations and needs some things fixed. And so, I moved into that property. But all while doing that, Ryan and I were on the hunt for real estate. We were looking for our first rental property.

Robert Leonard (15:03):

Where we live in New England, just outside of Boston, is really expensive. And we saw to buy a deal, was probably going to be 400,000 or more to make sense. And at the time, we didn’t know anything about BRRRR or other low and no money down strategies where you could put less than 20% or 25% down, so we thought, because we didn’t know any better that we were going to have to put 20% or 25% down on these properties, so we’re talking 100,000 or more in cash needed just to close on these rental properties with a conventional mortgage, a conventional investment mortgage, so we were talking $100,000 or more just for the down payment and closing costs on a traditional investment mortgage at 20%, 25% down. Obviously, we didn’t have that money. I was 23 at the time, Ryan was 25. We were both relatively young and we didn’t have that kind of money.

Robert Leonard (15:56):

So, what we did, we didn’t give up there, we really wanted to get into real estate. So, we reached out to a couple people that we knew that were wealthy and we really tried to raise money from them for deals and we tried to partner with them. But what ended up happening was we just spent some months and months going through all the nitty gritty details with these investors and they were just like, we’re just going through all the fine print of these contracts, and talking about legal structures, and setting up LLCs, and just meeting and meeting and meeting, and we’re doing all this stuff that was not moving us forward at all. Eventually, we got sick of all that. And when it actually came time, the investors didn’t want to put up the money. We got sick of that process and dealing with all of that. So, we said, “How can we do this on our own?” And that was when I read David Greene from BiggerPockets’ book about long-distance real estate investing.

Robert Leonard (16:45):

And I said to Ryan, I said, “Ryan, we can do this. What David talks about in this book, we can do. And if we do this, we can go to an area where the property prices are much smaller. Say, we buy a property for 100,000 and now we need $20,000 to $30,000 for a 20% to 25% down payment. And that’s still a lot of money, but that’s a lot more reasonable for us to come up with than 100,000.” And so, we decided to do it. At the same time, I had heard about a gentleman named Neal Bawa on a podcast. I believe it was actually on the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, but basically what Neal does is Neal is a data scientist out in Silicon Valley, in the tech world, and so he knows a lot about data, how to analyze data and he also is a turned real estate investor. So, what he does is he takes his background in data science and applies it to real estate data and uses that to form his real estate investing.

Robert Leonard (17:45):

My background’s not in data in that sense but I did study finance and accounting for a while so I do like data and numbers and things like that. So, Neal’s approach really, really spoke to me. And so, when I heard Neal talk about it, it just really made a lot of sense to me. I said, “Why don’t I couple this data-driven approach that he is talking about on how to find cities to what I learned with David Greene’s long-distance investing?” And so, what I did was I coupled the two together and that’s how we got started long-distance investing. We found a city to invest in, we found a property for $65,000, and we needed $15,000 to close, and we purchased it. And that was our first rental property. It was about 2,000 miles away. Ryan and I had never been to that city, we’ve never even heard of it before we did our research. And so, we just kind of went for it and we still own that property today.

Robert Leonard (18:39):

It’s been four or five years since we’ve purchased that property. It’s doing really, really well and we’ve added more in that same area. And so, that’s how we got into long-distance. But I don’t want to just leave it there. That’s my story about how I got into long-distance investing, but there was a lot of details that I left out in that story because I want to talk about them as the strategy of long-distance investing. Because a lot of people are thinking, “Well, how did you find that city? What were the things you were looking at? What are the demographic data points? How did you find a real estate agent?” All those types of things. So, I want to talk about that now. To find a city to actually implement Neal Bawa’s strategy, basically, what I did was I analyzed 7,000 cities across the U.S. for these six demographic data points that Neal says that you need to look at.

Robert Leonard (19:27):

They are population growth, income growth, property value growth, job growth, crime level, like how much crime is there, and then how is crime changing? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? And so, basically, what Neal says is rate cities on these six demographic data points, find the one that’s the best, and then invest there. Based on his back tested data, these are the markets that are great for rental properties and rental investing. It might not be great for flipping, but for rental properties, they’re great. And so, what I did was I hired a software… I don’t know if he’s a software developer, but I hired somebody that could code and could scrape this data off the internet for me because there are websites that all had this data but it was very manual. And so, what I did was I just went on Upwork and I hired a freelancer who could scrape this data from the websites for me and put it into an Excel spreadsheet.

Robert Leonard (20:28):

And so, I had these six demographic data points for 7,000 cities across the U.S. and I started to do my analysis across all the cities. And then, I ranked them from basically one to 7,000, and I just started going through from one to 7,000 to try and see which was the most valuable for us. And so, I took basically the top 25 and I crossed off any that didn’t have any inventory because… So the first thing I did was, “Are there any type of properties that I’d be willing to buy or is there anything even available?” Some of these cities that were the best are really expensive or way without our price range. So, if there was nothing that was even on the market, then it wouldn’t make sense for us. So, I’d cross those off. And then, if there wasn’t a lot of real estate professionals, if there wasn’t a lot of real estate agents, or electricians, or plumbers, or contractors, then I crossed them off the list as well.

Robert Leonard (21:22):

And so, from the top 25, I ended up with like maybe 10 or 15 that still met all of the criteria and also had inventory. We started to make offers across all of these cities, essentially. I think we had like 13 offers out at once across maybe 12 or 13 different cities. We were making offers in Texas, Idaho, Alabama, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and a bunch more. And we basically said we’re comfortable investing in all of these areas so we’ll just go with whichever one hits first, whichever one we get a deal in first is where we’ll actually invest. And so, we just so happened to get our first deal in a small town in Texas. Because of that, we continued to invest there, and that’s where we’ve scaled today. To find our real estate agent to help us with this, it takes a very special kind of agent. You got to find somebody who is also an investor, because if they’ve only helped traditional homeowners purchase properties, then they’re not going to understand the specific needs of an investor.

Robert Leonard (22:28):

And if they’ve never worked with an investor, they’re probably not going to be willing to do the extra work necessary for somebody who’s investing, not only an investor, but also investing long-distance. What we needed was we needed somebody that was good with technology and willing to go above and beyond. Agents really aren’t incentivized to go above and beyond because they make the same commission. If they spend 10 hours doing the normal traditional stuff that they need to do, they’ll make the same commission as if they spend 50 hours going above and beyond for us because they need to as investors. So, they’re not really incentivized to go above and beyond. They can do, they get paid the same amount whether they do or they don’t as long as the deal closes. So, it took a bit of research. We, again, similar to the cities, we made a list of maybe 20 agents and we called them all and we talked about what we wanted to do.

Robert Leonard (23:18):

We talked about them, we asked them a bunch of questions, and we just went with who we felt was right. And we figured we’d give one a shot, the one that we thought was the best, and then if it worked out, we’d continue to purchase with him. If it didn’t work out, then we would go to somebody else, we’d try to find somebody else. But thankfully, it worked out really, really well and we still work with him to this day. It’s five or six years later now and we still purchase properties with him. We’ve bought in four or five deals through him and it’s been great. And so, what he does for us is since we could go there if we wanted, but we don’t want to, we want to really run this as a business, we want to run it like we’re working on the business, not in the business. And the reality is, these are small single-family properties that don’t make a ton.

Robert Leonard (24:00):

They make great returns in terms of percentage but the absolute dollar amount isn’t very high, so we would wipe out a lot of cashflow if we flew there just to see the property. Essentially, what we did is we relied on professionals who know what they’re looking at. Our real estate agent would take videos of the property for us and then send them to us, he would walk through the properties on FaceTime with us. And for us, that was essentially like us being there. And during the inspections, things like that, he would just go on FaceTime. We could talk to the inspector, we could see what he was looking at, we could see everything. And so, because of technology, it was essentially just like we were there. We were comfortable with it and we moved forward. That’s very similar to how we’re able to self-manage.

Robert Leonard (24:47):

And when people hear about me investing long-distance, almost always the first thing they ask is, “Oh, well, you must have a property manager, right?” And the answer is no. We actually self-manage all of our properties down there. And that’s for a couple reasons. One is because of technology, we utilize technology, and two, it’s because of the asset class that we’ve decided to buy. And so, I’ll talk about the asset class first and then I’ll talk a little bit about our technology stack and how we go about that. A lot of people look down on or recommend against single-family investing. I’ve come to somewhat agree with that and I definitely agreed with it at first when I first started investing. I basically said that I would never buy a single-family property. It seemed super risky to me. You only have one renter and if they move out, then you have nobody covering the mortgage.

Robert Leonard (25:36):

But when we started to search, we couldn’t find any multi-family and I got really sick of not doing any deals, so I basically just said, “I need to get my first deal done.” And it happened to be single-family. A lot of people think single family’s bad for the risk reasons that I mentioned, but also because it’s not scalable. It’s just as hard to buy a two-unit, a seven-unit, a 10-unit. You go through the same paperwork and process as you do with a single-family. So, it’s not super scalable and it’s not as profitable for the most part and you have to put in the same amount of effort. So, people just often say, “Why would you go with single-family instead of multi-family?” And I do agree with that, but what I’ve found in why I kind of like the single-family space is because we buy houses that are great quality in great areas, in great school districts and so we are able to get really good tenants.

Robert Leonard (26:31):

We’re able to get families that really care about the property, they take pride of ownership, they have families, they have students or they have kids that go to the schools. And so, they really take care of it. That makes it much easier for us to self-manage. If we were buying an apartment building typically with apartments, you get a little bit lower quality tenant from time to time or at least they don’t feel the same pride of ownership. And so, that can be a little bit harder to manage, and typically why apartment buildings have to be outsourced to a property manager. So, because of the single-family, we don’t have a lot of issues from the tenants. And when we do, this is where we leverage technology. We have a platform set up, there are softwares out there to help people property manage, and they basically submit, the tenants will submit a maintenance request through the software, and then all we do is we take whatever the type of maintenance request is and we send it to the person that will solve that problem.

Robert Leonard (27:25):

So, if it’s an electrical thing, we’ll talk to our electrician. If it’s a plumbing issue, we’ll call our plumber and just say, “Hey, can you go to this property and take care of it?” Then they send us the bill and we either mail them a check or we pay them direct deposit. However, they would prefer to get paid. And it’s really that simple. We built the relationships with those different handyman or contractors through our agent. So, when we first started, if we needed a plumber, since he was an investor as well, we just asked him, “Hey, do you have a plumber that you use?” And he would tell us or, “Hey, do you have an electrician or do you have a contractor or anything that we needed?” And he would give us the contacts for those people. And then, after we’ve used them a couple of times, they became part of our own team. We had their contact information and we just reach out to them directly ourselves and that was it.

Robert Leonard (28:08):

And it really is much more simple than I think people make it out to be. A lot of people are like, “Well, don’t you want to see the property? What if something goes wrong?” And this is probably my favorite thing to talk about when it comes to long-distance investing because they’re like, “Well, don’t you want to see the property before you buy it?” In a sense, I understand where they’re coming from, but also, when I go and walk through a property, even if it’s my own property that I’m buying where I’m going to live, I have no idea what I’m looking at. Because I’m not a handy guy. I mean, I could do a little bit now, but especially when I first started, I didn’t know anything. So, when I’m walking through that property, all I can tell is if I like the paint on the walls or if I like the floor layout for me to personally live there.

Robert Leonard (28:51):

But if it’s a rental, I don’t know if things are the right quality, I don’t know if something’s broken, I don’t know if there’s something wrong. So, I just rely on a professional, basically, even if I could see the property, even if it was my next-door neighbor, I would call a professional in, which is your inspector, and they’ll tell you everything that’s wrong with the property or what’s going on. And so, it’s the same when you go long-distance. It doesn’t really matter if I can see it because I don’t know what I’m looking at anyway. I have a professional come in and they give me their opinion. And it’s the same when something breaks. If I live in a house hack duplex right now, so I live in one unit and I rent out the other unit, and even if the toilet breaks next-door unit where I can literally walk over there, I don’t know how to fix a toilet. So, what I’m going to do is call a plumber and the plumber’s going to come over and they’re going to fix it for me.

Robert Leonard (29:35):

And it’s the exact same process just 2,000 miles away in Texas. So, basically, if a toilet breaks there, I couldn’t go there and fix it, so I just call a plumber and have them go over and fix it for me and they send me the bill. And so, I understand where people are coming from. But at the same time, I think they’re making it more complex than it needs to be. I think they might be looking for or making excuses that don’t need to be there. Because there are ways to go about this and to really run it like a business. And maybe if you’re super handy, then maybe you would go over there and fix the toilet or whatever the issue is. But my, not really an argument, but my argument to that would be, now you just built yourself a job. Do you want a job or do you want to build passive income? Do you want to have a business that you work on or do you want to work in the business?

Robert Leonard (30:24):

I know for me, even if I knew how to fix the toilet, I don’t want to go over there and fix the toilet. I want to work on my business and hire somebody to go fix that for me. And so, that would be my argument to that is even if you know how to fix it, even if it is local and you know how, is that really what you want to be doing? Is that how you want to build your business? Do you want another job? And that’s pretty much everything about my long-distance investing process and that’s really all that goes into the long-distance process. But there are two other questions that I often get that I want to cover really quick. And that is, “Why don’t you just invest where a lot of other people are already investing long-distance?” And then also, “How do you handle tenants moving in and moving out?” For the first one, there are some cities in the U.S. that are very popular for out-of-state investors.

Robert Leonard (31:13):

A lot of times, people that make high incomes say, California, New York, Chicago, other big cities, instead of investing in that city, they’ll go to these Midwest markets that you could buy properties for much cheaper. Those are markets like in Alabama, Birmingham, Indianapolis, things like that. There are a bunch of cities like this. There are some in Tennessee as well. And people just say, “Well, why wouldn’t you just invest there?” For me, this is when I kind of rely on my stock investing background because Warren Buffett says that you want a fish where there are less fishermen. You still want there to be deals, you still want there to be fish in that pond, but you don’t want a hundred other fishermen to be fishing in that same pond for the same number of deals. So, I said, “Well, why would I invest where there’s way more competition? And what if those cities don’t even meet my criteria?”

Robert Leonard (32:01):

We talked about the six demographic data points that you’re looking for in a city, “What if those criteria aren’t met for me? So, I’m going to invest in a subpar city that doesn’t meet my criteria and where there’s more competition?” That just never really made sense to me. And so, I said, “I can find a city that has all of my criteria met and because it’s under the radar, there’s going to be less competition.” And that’s exactly what has happened in my Texas market is there’s not, there is still homeowners and there are still investors, but there’s far less than there is in these markets with turnkey companies and a lot of other out-of-state interests. So, for me, it just doesn’t make sense to go where there’s a lot more competition and potentially subpar demographic data. The second question was about the tenants.

Robert Leonard (32:43):

And so, this is again where your real estate agent is really important. When we close on a property, our real estate agent holds the keys to the property until a tenant is found. So, we can post this if we want through our property management software. But usually, what we do is we just let our agent list it on all of the major platforms like Zillow, realtor.com, Trulia, any other site that there is, he posted on the MLS and it goes out to all of them for rent. And so, he helps us find the tenants and he’ll do all the showings for the potential tenants, and then once we do the decision making, so we’ll run the background checks, we’ll run the credit checks, we’ll look at all the applications, he collects the applications and sends them to us and then we decide who we want to rent to.

Robert Leonard (33:30):

And once we decide who we want to rent to, he shows up on move-in day and gives them the keys. And then, for him doing this, we give him 50% of the first month’s rent. So, let’s just say the rent is $1,000, then he’ll get $500 for helping us through that process. And it’s a win-win for him. He makes money, we get our tenant, we get somebody that can handle the move-in, and he also helps us with the move-out process and he holds the keys for us until they move in. So, it’s really guys, there is a solution partially because of technology but also because of building relationships, and I guess you could argue that technology allows you to build those relationships, but there is a solution to almost any excuse that you could find or any reason that you could find to not invest long-distance.

Robert Leonard (34:17):

I really love long-distance investing. I don’t think I’ll ever invest again where I live unless the numbers make sense. I’m all about the numbers. There’s a quote that says, “Live where you want to live and invest where the numbers make sense.” And that is my philosophy always for real estate right now. I still live in the Boston area and I’m looking in Florida now. I’d really like to get an Airbnb there. So, whatever the reason is, whatever your kind of excuse is, I guess, you could say for not buying a rental property, if that’s what you want to do, I’m not saying you have to buy a rental property, but if it’s something you want to do and you’re just finding excuses as to why you can’t, there’s probably a reason or a solution as to how to do it.

Robert Leonard (34:52):

And if you don’t know what the answer or solution is, reach out to me. Send me a DM on Instagram or Twitter. My handles are @therobertleonard. Just send me a DM or tweet at me and ask me your questions and I’ll do the best I can to help you respond. And I might even answer your questions here on the podcast in a future episode. I’m trying to mix it up and do some Q and A and do some episodes without guests like this one. That’ll be filled with questions from the audience. So, love to hear from you guys, love to help you get over that hurdle, whatever it might be that you’re dealing with. But that’s it for this episode. I hope you guys really enjoyed it, I hope you learned a lot about the long-distance investing process, and I hope I answered most of, if not all of the questions you guys had. And I’ll see you guys next week. See you.

Outro (35:36):

Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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