Making $300K+ Profit Per Rental and Scaling FAST with “DADUs”

Ashley:
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Care and I’m here with Tony j Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to 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. Now today we are bringing Christian and Shannon Nassim. They got their start house hacking in college and since then they’ve grown their portfolio to over 12 properties. So today we’re going to discuss why student housing is both great for appreciation and cashflow. How adding a dadu to a property can land you over $400,000 in profit PS if you know what a dad U is. We’ll break that down today as well. Christian and Shannon, thank you both so much for coming onto the Real Estate Rookie podcast.

Christian :
Yeah, thanks for having us. We’re super excited to be here.

Shannon :
Yes, we’ve been listening to all the podcasts forever, and we’re just thrilled to talk to you guys.

Ashley:
Well, I think the first thing we need to start with is how you got your start in college. How did you even get the forethought to get into real estate investing that young?

Christian :
Yeah, well, my story goes back even further. I won’t bore you with that, but I was a weird entrepreneurial kid and I would buy, I had a paper route and newspaper route, lawn mowing money, all that, and I would buy the no money down infomercial courses as a 10-year-old. And then I would go on different forms like BiggerPockets back in the day and I would learn just a ton about real estate. And when it came time to move out after college, actually I stopped going to school after my second year. When I did that, I moved into a big house with a bunch of roommates near the University of Washington. And my landlord at the time, I was the first person in this 10 bedroom house, and he said, Hey, since you’re kind of into real estate, would you mind helping me fill all the rest of the bedrooms?

Christian :
So when I’ll set up the appointment, you just go show the bedrooms. And I’m like, cool. And he goes, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks for every room you fill. And I was like, sweet, I am broke. I’ll take a hundred bucks to show a bedroom in my own house. This is great. So I started doing that for him, and then he was like, Hey, I got another house across the alley. Can you do that one too? And I said, sure. Soon enough, I was helping him with a bunch of his houses to get them rented. One day I was like, Hey, one day I want to do what you’re doing. I kind of saw behind the scenes how this worked and how great it was and what I thought was profitable. And I was like, I’d love to do this. And he goes, you know what? I’m thinking about selling one of my properties. You should buy it. And I’m like, there’s no way I could afford to buy this. I am 21, 22 years old, I have two grand in my bank account. I am barely broke enough to buy a loaf of bread right now. I cannot buy a house. I’m in Seattle. It’s like a half million dollars for a house. And he goes, you know what? I’ll help you out. So I’ll let you kind of jump in with your part of this story, which is a funny part too.

Shannon :
So I was a sophomore at UDub when this was happening, and we lived just to paint the picture in a bedroom in the basement of a 10 bedroom house with our cat. So we had nothing, we had no money. So I came home from school one day from class and there’s a post-it on the bed that said, I bought a house today and now I know how broke he is. I’m like, what? You bought a house? I don’t understand. And so how he ended up structuring the deal was we got seller financing from our landlord to buy one of his properties that he was getting rid of. And it was two, it was actually a duplex, so it’s two bedroom upstairs, seven bedrooms downstairs. And so we lived in the two bed, rented the seven bed to students who were basically our age.

Christian :
They were literally exact same age as us and

Shannon :
We actually made money living there.

Christian :
So we made 250 bucks a month living in our own house. So we were free. We got to split the internet and utilities with the other tenants. So it was like $20 a month total for all utilities. We were financially free at 22 by making 250 bucks a month cash flow. That’s how we would

Shannon :
Still live there. If we did not have free children, we would be like, this is where we’re living forever, because it’s incredible. How

Ashley:
Much was the rent that you were paying when you lived in the basement at that other property?

Christian :
I think we were paying 450 bucks a month.

Ashley:
So you’re not only saving that amount, but also you’re making two 50 on top of that.

Christian :
Exactly, yeah. It was no brainer. Yeah, I mean this was also like 2005 lending was completely different. You cannot do this exact setup right now. Back then anyone could get a loan for any amount, even if you had no money and had only been a real estate agent for six months making commission only I that is not possible anymore. So while it is a great story, it’s probably pretty hard to duplicate these. The

Shannon :
House hacking you

Christian :
Can do. Yes. But house hacking you can definitely do. And a lot of people do that.

Tony:
Well, I guess let’s get into it just really quickly because you said that it was 2000 bucks. So how was that structured for it to actually get you into the property for only 2000 bucks?

Christian :
Yeah, so I got an 80% loan from the bank and then the seller gave me a 20% loan. So that was a hundred percent. I put 1500 bucks for closing costs and everything else I wrapped into the loan. So I had 500 bucks in my account at the end of the day, but I was making two 50 a month. So I was like, as long as nothing major goes wrong, I should be good for a little bit.

Shannon :
We went big.

Christian :
Yeah, we went big.

Tony:
So you combined a traditional house hack with seller financing to get you into this property. I think that’s the creativity that folks who are listening today need to need to take note of. So you guys started in college and now you largely rent to students. I guess why has student housing been a big focus of your strategy?

Shannon :
So student housing we feel like is one of the, I only ways left that you can have really good cashflow and really good appreciation because these properties, you are renting every single bedroom for so much that you’re just getting rent that isn’t really possible in any other type of normal residential real estate property. And the appreciation is crazy because choose properties that are not needing a commercial loan, they just need a normal loan. So we can get even an owner occupied typical loan, get one of these properties if we’re going to live there and house hack it. And then you can always turn these houses back into a normal single family home. That’s the ones we like to buy. So maybe you add bedrooms in the living room or you add a bunch of bedrooms in the basement or upstairs, you can always tear some walls down and put it back to what it was, and you still are appreciating just like every other house on the block.

Christian :
So we have a few different extra strategies when it does come time to sell if we wanted to. And when that time comes, we just go, all right, well do we want to sell this as a single family house? Do we want to sell this as an investment property and find someone else? How do we want to do this? And we can just flip the house into whatever way makes the most profit.

Ashley:
I think that’s a great option to purchase a property that has different exit strategies, first of all, but also that you can go after a different loan products too, depending on how you’re going to use the property too. But then you could always switch how you use the property too after you do the loan type. If you went and lived there for a year, it’s going to be your primary. You go and just get your FHA loan on the property only putting 5% down after a year you can move out and then you can go and rent all the rooms out and have it as a college rental. So I like that idea of going off to properties where you have different scenarios as to you can figure out what is the best way this property is going to work for us now, and when you’re ready to exit it, what is the best advantage? So I’m assuming when you go and sell, you’re looking at the market as to, okay, is there more of a demand for primary residences? Are we selling this as a single family or is it rentals? There’s investors that want to buy rental properties. And then also, I’m curious about the appraisal process too. Have you ever switched up how you’re getting the property to appraise based on sales comparison or the income based approach based off of how much revenue you’re generating from the rentals?

Christian :
Yeah, so another project, this is actually one that we just did. We actually did a burr. We bought a single family and converted it into an 11 bed. It was a five six bed, I think

Shannon :
It was six.

Christian :
Yeah, six bed, six bed, one bath. We turned it into an 11 bed, three bath and bird out of it. It’s still cash flows. That one, I actually met the appraiser on site and I had two different packets of comparables and I showed him, Hey, here’s the single family packet. If you were to appraise this as a single family, here you go. If you were to appraise this like a rental, here you go. And I had a whole packet showing those. And then I also talked about how, so the ones that we buy are not classified as technically rooming houses and transient housing is the zoning for that. That’s how it’s called in Seattle. And there was one of those on our street, like six houses down, and it sold for way less. And because of it, it was called transient housing or rooming housing.

Christian :
It was, you had to get a commercial loan for it. And so the appraisal process was very different. So I had to actually discredit that with the appraisal or with the appraiser because it was so underpriced compared to what we were doing. So I actually really just went over there, explained it all to ’em and said, Hey, hey, I’m not trying to do your job for you, just trying to help you out. I understand this market. I don’t know if you do, but here you go. Here’s all the info. And it came in way above what we expected, which was awesome, and it all worked out at the end of the day.

Tony:
So I love how you guys are being somewhat proactive in trying to get the after repair value or the appraised value that you feel is fair. I’ve actually never met any of the appraisers who have gone out to my properties, but now I feel like maybe I’ve left a little bit of money on the table because that I shown them, Hey, here’s what it looked like before. Here’s what we did. Here’s the scope of work. Here are some comps that I found maybe that could have influenced the purchase price or the appraised value a little bit. Now guys, I want to ask one other question because you talk about 11 bedrooms and you talk about putting a lot of people into a confined four walls, and my mind just kind of starts turning around the management side of things. So how do you keep the peace with so many college aged people sharing the same space, things like fridge space, laundry days, cleaning up after yourselves, what does the lease look like? How are you guys navigating those types of challenges?

Shannon :
So I manage these myself. I have almost the entire time that we’ve been doing this, so

Christian :
Almost 20 years. I dunno why she’s still married to me anymore after that and I forced that on her. But hey,

Shannon :
Here, go manage all these fault shoot that are older than you. I think part of our strategy, if we can, we try to find a group of people who are already friends who want to come in together and rent the space from us. When we go that route, things work a lot better. They create their own systems of how they want to live. They create their own methods and cleaning practices. So whenever possible, we try to find groups who are already friends and who come to us in that way. That being said, there are some arguments about trash, particularly on some of the duplexes that we have. They tend to have some trash debates, and so I try to get them as big of garbage cans as I possibly can and remind them about compost. But college students have a bad rap, I think, for being challenging and I just don’t think they are. I think especially near UDub, it’s a great school. It’s really hard to get into. So we’re dealing with a caliber of student that’s really smart and really motivated and generally are just wanting to have a great property and keep the peace.

Tony:
Well, guys, I love hearing about the student housing. I’m glad that we’re able to de-stigmatize the idea of to students. Now I want to get into the whole dadoo concept because that’s something that’s become a lot more, I think, popular over the last couple of years, especially as regulations in different cities and states have changed to support the building of things like dadoos in adu. So we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our show sponsors and we’ll be right back. Alright guys, so welcome back. Let’s get into it. Tell us about the construction of your first dadoo and how that kind of played into your whole, I guess, investing idea of the student housing.

Shannon :
So we heard about dadoos, which are detached accessory dwelling units. So you’ll hear about ADUs and you’ll think about them maybe as a basement apartment or something along those lines. And in Seattle, they allowed us to build detached units. So when we first heard about this, we thought, well, that’s interesting. That’s really cool. And we were kind of thinking through how to do that and started learning a lot about them when they first were allowed, I think back in 2019,

Christian :
2021

Shannon :
Or something, somewhere around then. And then we saw this property and we were really interested in it because it was near UDub. It was right by this really nice kind of mall in Seattle, and we thought we can optimize this house for student housing and it’s on an alley, has a big backyard, and we could potentially put one of these dads in the back. So we bought the house. It was a two bed, one bath. We converted it to a nine bed, three bath, so lots of bedrooms. Where are you finding all this square footage?

Christian :
So with this house and specifically it had an unfinished basement, and then the top floor was like an attic space that was finished, but it wasn’t being used. It was

Shannon :
Wide open.

Christian :
They called it two bedrooms. There was literally a sheet in between the two bedrooms. It was not two bedrooms, so there were two bedrooms and one bath on the main floor as well as the living room, kitchen, dining room. What we did, we just finished off the basement, finished off the attic, added bedrooms, bathrooms, all that fun stuff.

Tony:
I just want to know from a permitting perspective, how difficult is it to go from, you said it was a three bedroom or whatever it was before two

Christian :
Bed, two bed, one bath, yeah.

Tony:
Insane. How to go from a two one to a, you said a nine three. From a permitting perspective, how difficult is that?

Christian :
We wouldn’t know. We’ve never, I’m just joking.

Shannon :
It’s not that hard, especially in Seattle, they allow you to have a lot of bedrooms in homes and the space was already finished. It was just a matter of putting up walls and then trenching in for some bathrooms,

Christian :
Plumbing in the basement. You just had to trench into it. Yeah.

Tony:
What is the typical timeframe on the permitting process? Say you close on a property today, you submit the plans tomorrow, how quickly are they typically give you the okay to actually do that work?

Shannon :
It kind of depends on how much work you’re doing. So if you’re just doing a subject to field inspection, STFI, you can get that in about a week. We just did that with another property and that’s where you’re not doing these really big changes. When you are doing bigger changes, maybe about six months. I mean, it can kind of vary depending on how busy they are at the time, but it could be three to six months.

Christian :
And we’re not doing a lot of structural changes. We’re not moving any structural walls. We we’re not tearing down things like that. We’re just adding walls,

Shannon :
Adding a lot of walls, adding a

Christian :
Wall, dry wall, and so it’s usually not a super long time.

Ashley:
What are some of the key indicators that you are looking for when you’re looking to add bedrooms in a property? Are there things you’re looking in the listing descriptions in the picture, or is it when you actually go to the property? If someone wanted to do this same thing as add bedrooms and bathrooms, what are things they should look for in the property?

Christian :
So a lot of times the first thing that we always look for is unfinished basement and down there you’re looking for ceiling height. You just need to make sure that you’re not crouching down and it’s not like you’re in a dark dungeon or something like that. That’s the big one.

Shannon :
A little tip I learned from James Dard, which is that you can look on the listing photos and look at the door jam, and then you can kind of equate from there how tall those ceilings are without having to run

Christian :
Out to have property. So the ceilings right up against the top of the door, it’s probably going to be a little short. If there’s a pretty sizable gap between the top of the door and where the ceiling is, you can probably fit down there. We always want to go down there and see for sure, but that’s a good indicator just to get an idea of how tall it is.

Shannon :
We also look for spaces where there’s too much living space because with college students, we don’t want a lot of living space, partly because that just equals more parties, more parties and less income for us because if there’s dining rooms, formal living rooms, any of that space that can be converted, we try to find those spots too, to add bedrooms as well.

Christian :
So we still want to give them at least a spot to hang out as a living room area. They don’t need a dining room. They’re not generally cooking. So

Shannon :
They have important dinner parties.

Christian :
Yeah, exactly. They’re not hosting dinner parties. Maybe once they become grad students, maybe that’s when that starts, but I don’t even know about that. They don’t even cook. Yeah, exactly. They really don’t. Yeah, so we do generally if there is a big dining room and a living room, depending on where they are, we’ll sometimes remove one of those and make it into a bedroom.

Ashley:
So I want to kind of wrap back to the DA and what you guys actually did to construct this. Walk us through that process. You got the permits you’re ready to build. How did you find your contractor? How did the build actually go?

Shannon :
Yeah, so it was on an alley. This is one of the key points you need access to be able to build da, and so that’s why we like this property. It was on an alley, so because of the shape of it, Seattle’s really, I have to give it to them. I know a lot of times with permitting it can be kind of a pain in the butt. Seattle’s made it really easy. They created a bunch of pre-approved plans, so if you want to build a data, you can kind of pick from these plans that are already in existence and they can push ’em through permit fast. In this case, just because of the layout of our lot, we couldn’t pick one of those. We had to go with custom. But now when we build das, we try to fit within those confines when we can just because easier and faster,

Christian :
So much faster to get the permits in that way.

Shannon :
But in this one, we did a custom plan that took a little bit longer. So I think it was about six to eight months or so. Now our data usually take two to three months to get a permit. Our contractor we found just through referrals from people and interviewed a bunch of ’em and looked at their finished work to try to find somebody who could do it and do it for a good price.

Christian :
So I think we looked on different Facebook groups that were local investor groups. We went to some of the investor meetups, places that anyone can go for free or a very low cost in order to ask everyone that was doing what we wanted to do and just said, Hey, how are you doing this? What are you doing? Who do you like? Just basic stuff, common sense if you think about it, but not so common if you’ve never done it before.

Shannon :
So we found somebody, it took about six months to build and we’re actually closing on selling it when

Christian :
We’re signing today. Yeah.

Ashley:
Oh, congratulations. Yeah.

Christian :
Yeah, it’s funny. So that one was custom, like she said. And in the process we’ve done non-custom ones built and sold them before we even finished our first one, even though this is technically the first one we did.

Ashley:
Let’s talk about that sales process. Are you selling the whole property? Are you selling just the dadou? Walk us through your decision to do this and how you’re actually selling it

Christian :
In Seattle, and this is now going statewide for the whole state of Washington. Within the next year, there were a couple bills that were passed by the Senate in the state of Washington that allows us to go statewide, which is super exciting. It’s going to be a lot more opportunity for stuff like this. But in a nutshell, what we do is you actually make the house and the dadu, you technically make them condos. So when they’re condos, now you can separately sell them off individually, and so you don’t have to go through the whole subdividing short plat, that whole process. You just technically make them condos. You have to have an HOA, you have to have condo dues and insurance that covers certain things, but all of that is super inexpensive in the big scheme of things. Setting up the condo isn’t necessarily inexpensive. It’s about $8,000 ish.

Shannon :
We hire an attorney to do that. And there’s attorneys that specialize. I actually used to be a real estate attorney and I did some condo work, but just doing all these projects, we hired somebody who’s a specialist in that, and they can do this within a couple months, create this condo. And so then that allows you to sell ’em off separate, and you can still get a typical normal loan,

Christian :
Which is single family home loan. You don’t have to get a condo loan even though it’s technically a condo, which is great. And yeah, it’s not that long. It’s not that difficult. It costs, like I said, in our area, about $8,000 give or take to create condos to make them legally condos, and then you can just sell

Shannon :
It off. So we kept the investment property and we’re selling the dadoo piece.

Ashley:
So when you set up this condo, is that that cost that 8,000 per a dadoo? Or is it you’re setting up your condo association and everyone you can create can go under that kind of realm? So

Shannon :
You do this for each separate property. So every time you have one, you set up an association that just includes the original house that you had, and then your detached unit. Usually it’s named the address or something of the house. And then once you sell the last unit, or if you don’t, you pass it on to the owners and they go and manage that and the attorney takes care of transitioning everything over. So they kind of take care of running that on their own after you sell them.

Christian :
And the dues are super minimal. They’re like $21 a month. It’s super. It’s just to cover the cost of keeping the association running for the state. Yeah.

Tony:
I want to hear the numbers on this that you’re about to sell. So what was the overall cost? And I don’t know if we got into the financing portion of it as well, but I’d be curious what that looked like. But what was the overall cost to build this out, and then what are you guys selling this battery for?

Christian :
Yeah, so for this one specifically, this was the house that we bought that was a two bed, one bath that we converted to a nine bed, three bath with this one. This one was a little fun how we did this. So a friend of ours partnered on it with us. He bought it owner occupied 5% down. We were 50 50 partners on it. He partnered on all the costs of converting it into the nine bed, three bath. He lived in that for a year. Like you said, Ashley, with all the college students, with all the college students for a year. We rented it by the room on that one, which is not normally what we do. We usually find one big group and rent it out. But this was a special situation. And then we split the cost of the dadoo build and all the profits and all that stuff.

Shannon :
So for that one, we paid cash for the dad just because we had this partner. So the dadoo on that one cost about 400,000 to build, and we’re selling it for

Christian :
7 65.

Shannon :
7 65.

Ashley:
So $8,000 to set up the condo as jump chains in the whole scheme of things. Yeah, yeah.

Shannon :
And typically dadoos cost three 50 to build. It’s just because that was custom and it ended up being a little bit bigger than your typical dadoo size. But typically they cost three 50 to build. And in our area, we usually try to shoot for a sale price of at least 700, but we have one in the pipeline that’s probably going to sell for eight 50,

Christian :
Possibly

Tony:
900. I was going to say, what’s the size for something to sell at 700 K in that market?

Christian :
So in Seattle, the limit on what you can build is for ADU is a thousand square feet. That said, the square footage that doesn’t count toward that square feet is anything one under seven feet tall or below grade. So underground

Shannon :
Or storage.

Christian :
Or storage, yeah, that’s a good point. And garages don’t count either. So for this custom one we had, the third floor actually has, it’s a big open space that has vaulted ceilings. Part of the vaulted ceiling is not over seven feet, so none of that counts. And then so we

Shannon :
Squeezed in a little bit of extra square footage on that

Christian :
One. So that one’s 1300 plus square feet, so it’s bigger than the average dad. And it’s three stories. Most dadoos are only two stories tall. The

Shannon :
Typical model that we’ve been building though since that, which is our favorite after that first one is a three bed, two and a half bath with a garage and a laundry room,

Christian :
And it’s about 1100 square feet because again, some of that is storage that isn’t counted for the city, but it is livable space. So we get to say it’s about 1100 square feet, and that one sells for usually a minimum of seven 50, sometimes more depending on the area and the finishes.

Ashley:
So what do you think is stopping people from just going and building their own? Is it the acquisition of the land and then having to build because that is a huge margin based off of that? Why do you think people aren’t going in and just doing that themselves and then maybe selling the single family that they bought with the

Shannon :
Lot? Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who want to do it. The hard part in Seattle is that cats out of the bag. Everybody knows this exists. They see the sale prices, so there’s just not that many lots that you can do this. So you have to be on an alley, well, you don’t have to. Being on an alley is really beneficial because of access. You have to be able to get your construction materials back to the backyard. And so the house has to be positioned either to the side or on a corner or has an alley, and most houses aren’t positioned in that way. So there’s just not that many lots that you can do it. And those that are really prime have already been kind of snatched up. And so I think that’s one of the limitations, especially in Seattle. But these laws are passing through the whole state of Washington, basically. You’re going to be able to do this soon. So I think there are bigger lots and more opportunity in other places, but Seattle, it’s really finding the lots where you can do

Christian :
This and it’s getting harder for sure, because everybody and their mom wants to do this now because they are seeing the profit and people are talking about it more. But that said, there’s still some properties out there for sure.

Shannon :
You also have to deal with that front house. And this is the thing people don’t realize when they’re trying to do these daddo deals is when you buy a dadoo lot, you’re also buying another house with it. And so if that house is too nice, if it’s a family house, they’re not going to be thrilled about the yard being taken away about the parking being taken away. And so you have to consider the deduction on that front house, which you usually do lose at least 10% of your value on that front house when you put more congestion on the lot. And so you have to look at the deal as a whole. It’s not just what you’re making on the dad, but your front house is going to lose some value. And so in order to mitigate, we try to find homes that need value add, try to find homes that need a flip, so we flip that front house, give it a little bit more value so that the loss isn’t so extreme on that front house.

Ashley:
Okay, so we’re going to take a little short add break here, but when we come back, we’re going to get it into how to stay competitive in this market even if you don’t have the opportunity to get into a dad on your property. But first a word from our show sponsors. Okay, welcome back. So we talked about how in the Seattle market, other markets people have been able to adjust their strategies, but what have you guys specifically done to stay competitive? And I think you kind of touched on this a little bit before the ad break, which was actually adding value to the property. Is there that first initial property? Is there anything else that you are doing?

Christian :
Yeah, so adding value is by far the biggest thing. And any property that we buy, we’re always trying to find a property that we can add value to because then no matter what happens to the market, we probably have a big enough margin that we’re still going to be all right because we have been able to add so much value even on our dad. That’s why we buy a property that the front house, the main original house needs a lot of work. We have two properties right now that are going on that it’s a flip of the front house and we’re building dads in the back. And then for our long-term rentals, which again, we buy the dads and sell them in order to get that profit to buy another long-term rental, that is our whole, the

Shannon :
Dads are feeding our addiction to buying student

Christian :
Housing. It’s the yin and the yang right there. We do one to get the other. And the whole reason that we started doing Dadoos was because we knew that with prices the way they are in Seattle, we just couldn’t save up fast enough to keep buying these long-term rentals. So we had to speed that up and flipping and building dads was the way to do

Tony:
It. I love that you guys are, like you said, you’re using one property to fund the purchase of the next property in an accelerated fashion. So it’s really interesting, but I totally understand the value of going after these value add opportunities, these properties that maybe you can get below market value where you can increase the value through the data and things like that. But I think the question of the challenge today is just finding those deals. What sources are the two of you going after to find those opportunities? Are you going direct to seller? Are these all just listed on the MLS? Do you have relationships with agents? What steps are you taking to actually find these value add opportunities?

Christian :
Yeah, we’ve actually done a little of everything. So the Burr property that we are doing right now, that one was a wholesale deal, and it wasn’t that they came to us, it was on the market. It had been available for anyone for a couple weeks. They overshot their asking price initially, and it just kind of sat and sat and sat. We came in a really low offer and met somewhere near the middle-ish. So that was just something that was out there for everyone on all investor lift and all the other platforms to see no one else saw the value that we did.

Shannon :
Definitely some of our student housing, we’ve gotten direct from the seller. So I think that’s a powerful method, especially in places where people don’t want to be landlords anymore. There’s a lot of people who are just done with it. And so we found stuff that way. And then a lot of the properties we bought have been on the market. It’s just about seeing the value that other people don’t see having a plan in place that other people aren’t noticing that that’s the way you could do it. And yeah, we will get a deal any way we can really, but sharing your buy box is huge too. At this point. Everyone knows we do student housing and they know we do data, so if something pops up, another investor or a friend or even a client of real estate, client of ours, they, they’re all eyes out there like, oh, this is a student housing place. It’s got a lot of bedrooms, you would like it, and they send it over.

Ashley:
Before we wrap up here, what are some tips that you have for a rookie investor as far as getting started in real estate? And I would say you guys have a more niche strategy than just doing a burr or doing a short-term rental, things like that. What are some ways that a new investor could find their niche, something that they become successful at?

Shannon :
Yeah, I would start with how uncomfortable are you willing to be and think about that because if you can incorporate house hacking, I think it’s really, really powerful at the beginning if you’re willing to be uncomfortable and live with other people just like we did for a while and continue to do. Sometimes I think also figuring out the type of properties that you like. Yes, what gives you energy? I think there’s a lot of different ways you can do real estate investing and some of the ways drain you, maybe you find, oh, flipping just, it’s hard for it. It doesn’t feel right. And maybe hospitality or Airbnb makes you excited, it makes you energized. And so you can think about what those different types of, try the different opportunities, partner with people and see what, oh, development. It feels easy to me. It feels good. I get energy from this.

Christian :
And the biggest thing too is after you do some learning, you actually have to take action. That is the biggest thing. And for me, what my issue early on when I was in my early twenties and learning everything and going to conferences and spending all this money to learn and learn and learn and learn, it didn’t matter that I knew all this stuff because I wasn’t taking action. The scariest thing is actually taking action. So the biggest tip I can give anyone is actually take some action, make an offer on something, add a contingency in there so that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can back out. But make sure that you’re actually taking action on what it is you want. Because when you make that offer, that’s when the rubber really meets the road and you’re like, oh, man, I’m actually doing this. This is exciting. This is fun. Versus theory, theory, theory, learning. Learning. Yeah.

Shannon :
I also think that if you take action, you’re going to learn. This is one of those jobs where I genuinely think some of it, you have to learn on the job and you’re not going to learn it unless you’re doing it. And obviously surround yourself with mentors. Pay for a mentor if you don’t have one. Use BiggerPockets. This is an incredible resource, but you have to do in order to learn some of these things,

Christian :
You’re not going to know everything before you take your first step. It’s just the truth. There’s too many things to learn. Like Shannon said, hire a mentor if you need to or use the forums or use all the

Shannon :
Different partner with more experienced investors and learn from them. But you have to start

Christian :
Doing it. That’s the biggest thing in real estate in my opinion.

Tony:
You guys hit the nail on the head. And what Ash and I echo so many times on this podcast is that at a certain point, you’re going to be listening to the podcast or reading the book or watching the YouTube video, and you’ll start to notice that a lot of the information you’re hearing are things that you’ve already heard before. And I think once you get to that point of information saturation where you’ve already heard it all, that’s the signal to, okay, cool. I actually need to put rubber to the road and make some things happen. So Christian, Shannon, you guys have both done a phenomenal job. I think you’re going to have a lot of people excited about the idea of blending student housing with the dad who concept and the burrs, and you guys have really taken a lot of these niche ideas and putting them together in a really unique way. So really appreciate you guys sharing that. And what’s even cooler is that you guys will be at BP Con 2024. We were just talking about this before we started recording. So for all of our rookies, if you want to come hang out with the awesome nos, head over to biggerpockets.com/events. You guys can grab your tickets and hang out with them there.

Christian :
Yeah, that’s going to be such a fun event. And just rubbing shoulders with everybody is going to be so much fun. You’re going to learn a lot. We’re pumped to be there. Can’t wait. We’re super excited. Cancun. I mean, come on. You really need an excuse. This is not hard, easy decision.

Ashley:
Christian and Shannon, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode, taking the time to provide value. We’ve really appreciate it. We loved hearing your story and also the ideas, the shiny object, Tony and I always get now where we’re going to research everything into what you guys did and go see. We can do it. But thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it. Thank

Christian :
You. Yeah, thank you so much for having us on. This has been awesome. It’s been so much fun. And again, I say awesome because we’re awesome and awesome. That’s our names. And every time you say it, you’re going to think about us just saying. Just say it,

Ashley:
And we’ll link your information into the show notes. So anybody who wants to reach out to them or find out more information, you can find that in the show notes. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys next time on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.

Tony:
This BiggerPockets podcast is produced Daniel ti edited by Exodus Media Copywriting by Calico Content.

Ashley:
I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and you have been listening to Real Estate Rookie.

Tony:
And if you want to be a guest on a BiggerPockets show, apply at biggerpockets.com/guest.