Andrew Freed turned one condo into a rental property portfolio that makes him $10,000 per month! Just four years ago, Andrew had little to his name—around $50,000 and a $200,000 condo. That’s what a decade of working had gotten him, but to Andrew, it was a sign he wasn’t doing enough. Like most real estate investors, Andrew stumbled upon Rich Dad Poor Dad and made an immediate change that would propel him to financial freedom. Four years later, he’s there—quitting his job and going full-time into real estate.
How did he do it? Simple. “Recycling” his money is what allowed Andrew to scale so quickly. A HELOC (home equity line of credit) on his condo gave him the money for his first small multifamily—a house hack that would help him live for free. With each new property, he’d get a new HELOC and use it to grow his portfolio even faster.
Now, Andrew has a sizable real estate portfolio, personally paying him six figures a year, while he focuses on the next property. If you want to quit your job and give real estate your all, you can do what Andrew did, recycling your money to build your wealth—and you can start with just a condo!
Dave:
This investor grew his portfolio to 25 properties and was able to quit his job in less than four years by repeating the same real estate strategy over and over. You do need to identify the right type of real estate investing for your goals and your market, and it’s totally okay if that takes some time and some trial and error. But once you do that, once you have it, you can basically execute that one deal, type to perfection, rinse and repeat, all the way to game changing wealth. Today’s guests proved that this is possible in the Boston area, and he did it in the current market, not during that crazy pandemic era. So let’s find out how.
Hey everyone, I’m Dave Meyer, head of real Estate investing here at BiggerPockets. Today on the show we’re bringing you an investor story with Andrew Freed who invested Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Andrew was previously on the Real Estate Rookie podcast back in March of 2023, but I wanted to bring him on this show because he’s progressed a lot in the last two years, but he’s done it by doing pretty much the same thing. So we’re going to talk to Andrew about why he primarily buys rental properties in the six to 12 unit range, why almost all of his deals are with two to four partners and how he achieved his goal of quitting his day job to invest full time. Andrew is a total open book with all of his deals and numbers, so there’s a lot to learn in this conversation. Let’s get into it. Andrew, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks for being here.
Andrew:
I’m excited to be here. Thank you so much.
Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. And I know you’ve been on our rookie podcast or sister podcast here, but for those who didn’t listen to that episode, maybe just give us a little bit of background. Tell us about yourself.
Andrew:
So like many people here, I went after the American Dream. I get a good education, get a good job, get a nice swanky condo in a city, make six figures. I essentially did that. I did that all through my twenties. And after I did that, I came home and at the end of the day I realized I was paycheck to paycheck. Yeah, maybe I had six months, maybe I have 12 months of reserves, but at the end of the day, I had to go crawling back to that job, and that ultimately scared the living hell out of me. So come around covid when I ran out of vices to do video games, to play movies to watch, I really had to come face to face with is this the life I really wanted to live? And the answer to that was absolutely no. So thankfully I found Rich Dad, poor Dad at that time, and that opened my eyes to the power of real estate. And at that point I looked at my net worth, which is about $250,000 at that point,
$200,000 of which came from that one bedroom condo I completely forgot about. It literally took me 10 years to save up $50,000. And at that point I realized maybe there’s something to this real estate thing. So I literally just fomo. I took a HELOC on my one bedroom condo for $200,000 and I utilized that to start buying multifamily specifically in Worcester, Massachusetts. So I completely uprooted my life in Boston. I knew absolutely nobody in Worcester, Massachusetts, which about 45 minutes from Boston. And I decided to start buying MALS in that market where I started with House Hacks and I kind of moved on to joint ventures and kind of moved on to syndications and larger projects from there.
Dave:
Awesome. Well, I want to hear the fairytale story. So it started in Worcester. I’m sort of familiar with the area why Worcester, just Boston too expensive or
Andrew:
So when you’re planning on investing and creating a real estate portfolio, you really have to come up with a thesis. And my thesis was I wanted to buy multifamily, and it’s way easier to buy multifamily when there’s a lot of that asset class in the market. So the way I really decided on Worcester was I looked at it at all the markets in Massachusetts had a lot of Malteses, Brockton, Massachusetts, new Bedford, Massachusetts, Worcester, Providence, Rhode Island, had a lot of mals, Manchester, New Hampshire had a lot of malteses. So I looked at all the markets and out of all those markets, I felt like Worcester had the best fundamentals. It was one of the largest growing cities in Massachusetts in New England, but not only that, 30 to 40% of the housing stock are multifamilies.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Andrew:
So it’s way easier to get that asset class if there’s a plethora of that asset class.
Dave:
I’m so glad you said that because I think a lot of people overlook that element of picking and selecting markets. You need fundamentals of the economy, you need job growth, all that stuff. But there are markets, as you’ve alluded to, where the concept of a duplex or a chip, Lex is basically non-existent. I actually invest in a market where it’s almost impossible to find something bigger than a duplex. I started my career investing in three unit, four unit buildings and I can’t find any there, and that changes my approach and strategy, so I really appreciate you said that, but I’m curious, so the multifamily approach sounds like you were doing small multifamily, right? Sort of the still residential four units or fewer. Was that where you went first?
Andrew:
I started with house hacking. I started with house sacking, residential properties two through four unit. Then I graduated to five to 10 plexes commercial Maltese, primarily residential. And then from there, then I graduated to buying portfolios a plethora of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 units buying 10, 12 of them all in one foul swoop.
Dave:
Just tell me a little bit about how you financed that first deal. You had a solid net worth $250,000, nothing to sneeze at. Most of it was locked up right into a condo. You said you he locked, or how did you wind up doing that first deal?
Andrew:
I wound up doing that first deal by utilizing a heloc, a home line of credit on my one bedroom condo, and it ended up taking out 85% of the value in the form of a HELOC and got about $200,000 out of it. And when I utilized that heloc, I want people to keep in mind the concept of return on net worth. I had about $250,000 of net worth, $200,000 of which was locked up in this one bedroom condo that’s providing a 0% return on an annual basis. So my hypothesis was why don’t I take this $200,000 and actually put in the assets that can provide me an eight, nine, 10% return. Meanwhile, I’m borrowing it a three out of four. That was during covid, right? So with the simple concept of arbitrage, that’s really how I kind of built my net worth from there. And going back to your original question, how did I finance that health hack? I ended up financing it with a FHA loan. So I combined that with the heloc. So I took around 30 to $40,000 for my heloc and I used that combined with an FAKA loan, and I got a three unit in Worcester, Massachusetts for around $560,000.
I could rent two units for 3,200 $1,600 each, and I ended up living in the third for free, and my mortgage was $3,200. I ended up kind of breaking even on that property, but my savings rate went through the roof because I didn’t have to pay rent or overhead In that regard.
Dave:
With your rookie episode, you had gotten to a point where I think you had 24 units and eight properties. How long did it take you to get to that level of scale
Andrew:
To get to 24 units? It probably took me a good year and a half to two years of investing in real estate.
Dave:
That’s fast.
Andrew:
One thing I think people sleep on a lot of times is everybody knows about the house hack. It’s the easy way to reduce your living expenses to zero. But very few people talk about the heloc, and I recommend so many people prior to leaving your first house hack, get a HELOC on it because when it’s your primary residence, you can HELOC sometimes up to a hundred percent, so you can actually access that equity before you leave it and it becomes an investment property. Once it converts to an investment property, then your line of credit is limited to 75% of the value of the property greatly reducing your ability to leverage. So you asked, how did I do that? I ended up he locking my first house hack. I got another $75,000 heloc and I used that to buy a couple more house hacks as well.
Dave:
Okay, got it. And just for everyone to understand, HELOC stands for home equity line of credit. This is a way that you can access equity in properties without actually having to sell or doing a cash out refinance where you might be getting a different mortgage rate. And so I think for that reason alone, it’s a pretty attractive option right now because say you bought something during the pandemic and you have a three or 4% interest rate, you’ve built up a ton of equity in your property, which you want to leverage like Andrew’s talking about to go out and buy future properties, but you don’t want to give up that three or 4% mortgage, totally understandable,
Andrew:
Take
Dave:
Out a HELOC or consider talk to a lender about taking out a heloc. This is a way that you can borrow against your assets. So that’s a really great way to do it. And the other benefit of a HELOC that I love is you only pay interest when you’re using it. It’s called a revolving line of credit. And so let’s say you use a HELOC to finance a renovation on a new rental property, and then you’re going to refinance that. Sure you pay when you’ve drawn on that line of credit and you’re paying it, but when you go refinance that burr, you could repay off your HELOC and pay nothing for a time and then use it again in the future. And so this is a really good strategy that people can use and I think it’s going to become increasingly popular in the next few years because of that sort of dual advantage of allowing you to recycle your equity but not giving up historical mortgage rates.
Andrew:
And you bring up a really good point, and I just want people to be clear about interest rates do have a higher interest rate. You’re talking six, seven, 8%, but you really have to look at the loan holistically. And what do I mean by that? It’s like if 70% of your loan is at a three and 20% of the loan is at a seven, what is your blended interest rate? And is that blended interest rate better than what you can get from a refinance or is it not
Dave:
Right? That’s right.
Andrew:
So you kind of want to weigh those options or maybe a cashflow refinance makes sense. Maybe the blended rate of your current low mortgage rate combined with the HELOC makes sense. So these are the sort of calculations I utilize when I decide how am I going to recycle this equity to buy more property?
Dave:
Totally. And I think this is just one of the natural evolutions that has to take place because during covid or the years leading up to that, it was kind of a no-brainer to do a burn refi, right? Because rates were going down, so why wouldn’t you refinance and get a lower interest rate on your new property that is higher equity? That was a no-brainer. Now in our new upside era that we’re in, you just need to think about this stuff a little bit more critically. As Andrew said, there’s options now there’s just different options and there’s different ways to do it, but it’s not just as cut and dry. Just do the bird, do the refi every single time. Alright, we do need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, but we’ll be back with Andrew Freed right after this. If you’re in real estate like I am, you don’t want to lose deals juggling multiple tools. That’s where simply comes in. A true all-in-one CRM designed for real estate investors like us. With s simply, you can connect with motivated sellers through calls, texts, emails, or direct mail. Plus, you can enjoy free skip tracing, cash buyer searches, customizable websites, and automated drip campaigns that turn cold leads into successful deals. Head over to ssim.com/biggerpockets now to start your free trial and get 50% off your first month. Once again, that’s R-E-S-I-M pli.com/biggerpockets.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We are here with investor Andrew free talking about how he scaled his portfolio in the last couple of years in the Boston area. Let’s catch up then. So you were at eight properties in 24 units. Obviously investing conditions have changed pretty dramatically. What have you been up to in the last two years?
Andrew:
So as we alluded to earlier, I went from 24 units and now I’m at 300. People are like, how do you make that dramatic growth? And I’ll give you some catalyst that really brought me to that level. So the first catalyst that really brought me to that level was becoming an investor focused agent while having my W2, ultimately I didn’t need the Asian income. It was ice on the cake. It allowed me to buy more real estate. But ultimately, why did I become an investor focused agent? I became an investor focused agent to find a mentor.
Speaker 3:
The
Andrew:
Broker of that agency has over 300 doors, and I wanted to leverage him as much as I could. So I decided I’m going to provide him value in the form of bringing him commissions and if I bring commissions that he is going to feel a need to help me along my journey. So that was number one. I found the mentor and I found ways to provide a value in the form of commissions. Number two, I started the largest real estate meetup in Worcester. Nice. Through that meetup I found capital partners, I found deals, I found my current partner. We were me and him own hundreds of units together that really allowed me to grow to the next scale. And lastly, the catalyst that really pushed me to the next level, and thanks to BiggerPockets for this was being on podcasts, providing value on social media, and just putting yourself out there and operating in the light. Ultimately, people aren’t going to know what you’re doing if you operate in the dark, so it’s extremely important to put out there your wins, but also your losses.
Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m glad you said that because wins and losses, it is important to sort of build credibility. Can you maybe give us some examples of how you did this? What’s a property that you bought when you sort of stepped away from using your own equity and started using Capital Partners externally?
Andrew:
I’ll talk about a deal first that I bird into three other deals. It was with my own capital, but I recycled the money over and over and over again. So me and my partner now, Zach Gray, we ended up buying this five unit in Worcester, Massachusetts, up Sory about for $650,000, three units in the area sold for $600,000. This was a deal all day and it was right on the MLS. So what did we decide to do? We decided to put an offer out day one, right when it was on the MLS, within two days of being on the MLS, we had it under contract. That particular property, the current rent roll on it was around $3,500 proforma or market rents on the property. The ability to bring the rents up was about $9,000.
Dave:
Oh wow.
Andrew:
Okay. Yeah. So it was bought a big upside, right? But the downside is the cost was six 50 and the monthly income was 3,500. If anybody knows anything about commercial debt and debt service coverage ratio, you can’t get a loan at that 75% loan to value. It is impossible. Right?
Dave:
That’s tough.
Andrew:
But what did we do? Thankfully I had a mentor and he guided me through this process and he advised me rather than do a conventional finance and go to these portfolio lenders, these small local credit unions and asked them for construction money, and when you ask them for construction money, they do it before appraisal and they do an after appraisal and that after appraisal takes to account proforma or market rents.
Speaker 3:
So
Andrew:
That allowed us to get a loan based off the proforma rents only bringing 25% down. We ended up bringing this property from 3,500 revenue to nine grand in revenue over the course of six, seven months.
Dave:
So not bad. Yeah, it’s quick.
Andrew:
We ended up bringing the value from six 50 to $1.1 million. So we had a ton of equity, but we wanted to access that equity. So what did we do? We ended up going to the bank that gave us the first lead and we got a rental line of credit for the equity up to 75%. So that bank gave us a line of credit for $156,000, more or less. All of the money we put in the deal, we put about one 60. Right. Fantastic opportunity. What do we do with that money? We took the one 60 and we ended up using that combined with hard money to buy a nine unit in Westward Rhode Island with four gutted units and five occupied units. We bought it for $715,000 with hard money. So we only brought 10% of the purchase price. We ended up putting around $220,000 into it. We got the units rented, we brought the market rents up to 14 grand, and we refied that at $1.52 million.
Dave:
Wow. Oh my God. So yeah, I can’t keep up with your math, but you built what, half a million, three quarters of a million dollars in equity just off those two deals alone.
Andrew:
And I split that 50 50 with my partner. So that was only 80 grand for me. So I built half a million dollars in net worth off 80 grand within a year. Right. Wow. And then the next, no, what did I do with this property? So we ended up doing a cash or refinance for 1.52 million. We got about $230,000 out of that. Me and my partner ended up transitioning that $230,000 into a 21 unit in Lowell, Massachusetts that we just closed on this week.
Dave:
Wow, congrats. And so all this has been done in this higher interest rate environment?
Andrew:
Yes.
Dave:
And did you have any qualms? Did you worry that the market was going to crash or this was bad timing?
Andrew:
I did not whatsoever. Right. Because ultimately I’m investing in high cap rate markets, right? I’m investing in assets that pro forma, once I’m done stabilizing the asset, have an eight, nine, 10% cap rate. So 10% cash on cash return. So if I’m borrowing at a six or a seven, that asset far exceeds the debt. I would get more worried if I was in a low cap rate mark, you’re talking a Boston or a Phoenix where the cap rate’s a four or a five and borrowing it a six or a seven, then the assets literally operating in the negative, right?
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Andrew:
So the way I really got around the high interest rates was I operated in high cap rate markets in tertiary markets, outside high growth cities. Think Providence, think Boston.
Dave:
That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think hopefully everyone’s following this, but in certain markets, especially when you’re evaluating deals on cap rate, and this is just a way of measuring how much you’re paying for a property based on how much cashflow that potential it has to generate. And some of these markets, Phoenix, the fastest growing markets, because they’re generally considered low risk, have lower cap rates, which means they’re more expensive. And generally speaking, when you have a cap rate that is lower than your interest rate on your loan, that is negative leverage. You don’t want to have that. But Andrew basically said if you go into these tertiary or smaller markets where the cap rates are higher than the interest rate, it reduces your risk and it allows you to sort of operate and grow in a way that is frankly just much more challenging in these lower cap markets.
Right now, Andrew, I want to talk to you a little bit more about this sweet spot you seem to have found with multifamily right after this break. So everyone, stick with us. We’ll be right back if you want to attend BB Con, but you are worried that you missed out on the best rates. I’ve got great news. We just opened up a surprise Early bird extension through the end of April. BP Con 2025 is in Vegas this year at Caesar’s Palace from October 5th through seventh. And the early bird savings will get you a hundred dollars off the regular registration price. And if you haven’t been to BP Con before, there’s so much value to it. People are doing deals there. The networking is top notch. Plus you’ll learn from some of the best investors in the industry. This year’s agenda features over 60 focus sessions across four specialized tracks, so you can completely customize your learning experience. For example, our advanced and passive investor track includes sessions on portfolio management, scaling your business, and transitioning to larger deals. This year actually be giving one of the keynotes. So if you love this podcast, which I hope you do, you won’t want to miss that. Head to biggerpockets.com/conference now to learn more and get your early bird discount before May 1st.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with investor Andrew Freed talking about how he scaled very rapidly from just owning a single condo a couple of years ago to hundreds of doors that he manages and owns. Now, Andrew, before the break, you were talking about how you’ve really effectively recycled capital, which is awesome, but you’ve also seem to have honed in on sort of a sweet spot of commercial multifamily more than four units, but it’s not huge, at least right now. It doesn’t sound like you’re buying these 200 unit deals. Do you do that intentionally? And if so, why?
Andrew:
So the sweet spot that we’re really playing in is the multi space between two and 50 units. So the reason why we like these smaller assets is because first of all, there’s not as much competition. These deals are way too small for the big players. Additionally, these deals are really easy to stabilize. It’s way easier to stabilize a six eight PLX than it is a 50 a hundred unit. You can get that stabilized in six months versus a hundred, 200 that’s going to take you a couple years. So what does that mean? That it means that you can have a velocity of capital. You can keep utilizing that money quicker and quicker and quicker. And the last sweet spot that we really have been playing in that’s been very effective is buying scattered site portfolios, right? Buying 10, 12 properties all at once. And because we’re buying in bulk, just like you go to BJ’s and you buy toilet paper, you get in bulk. It’s the same with property. If I’m buying 10 properties, I’m expecting a 20 to 30% discount for buying all those
Dave:
All
Andrew:
At once. So that’s kind of the sweet spot we’re playing in. And we also have started to flip, but we are only flipping multifamily. The reason for that is because it allows multiple exit strategies. So if we can’t sell it for the price want, we could toss a renter and then it still works as a buy and hold rental and we could simply refinance most of the cash out.
Dave:
I’m curious, Andrew, this is a lot of work. So are you doing this all yourself?
Andrew:
So currently me and my partner, we own a property management company. We self-manage around 250 doors. So it was a crap dental work come around the start of 2022. I think we had about 150 doors that me and my partner and we had one employee, and I was doing this on top of being an investor focused agent on top of having my W2, I didn’t leave my W until June of 2024. It was a lot of work. But since then, we’ve increased our staff from one to around 16 employees.
Dave:
Oh wow, okay.
Andrew:
So we have a really, really strong staff that allow us to kind of stabilize these assets ourselves. Real estate is made in three ways. The debt on the property, the operations, and the price and operations is really important. You can turn a really good deal bad or you can turn a bad deal with solid and good operations, right?
Dave:
Totally. Everyone always says you make money real estate on the buy, right? I think you need to caveat that you get the potential to make money from real estate on the buy, but you actually make the money by operating that program successfully. Sure, you’ve seen this too, but I’ve seen a lot of people buy good deals and run ’em into the ground.
Andrew:
Totally.
Dave:
Or you see someone buy a thin deal, run it effectively and manage to turn it into a pretty solid return. It’s not just as simple as getting a good deal. It’s an important component for sure, but as you said, there’s a lot more to it.
Andrew:
A perfect example of that, I bought this duplex in Killingly, Connecticut for $160,000. We were playing on renovating it completely. We budget around $80,000. We come to realize the foundation is straight messed up, and our renovation budget went from 80 K to one 20, and we were planning on selling these duplexes of $320,000. We were going to make no money on this deal. So this is an exact reason why operations is so important. So what do we decide to do? We actually looked at the property and we were like, Hey, if we actually reconfigure this to a single family, we’ll get a better price per unit, and by the way, our renovation costs will go down. Now we’re not doing two bathrooms now. We’re not doing two kitchens. So we ended up doing that. We ended up bringing our renovation costs down to one 10, and we got the ARV from three 20 to four 50. And that’s just a prime example of how operations can turn a bad deal. Good.
Dave:
Yeah, it works both ways for sure. If you’re good at this, you’ll find a way to make it work. If you’re bad at it, you could find a way to destroy what should be a really good deal.
Andrew:
Totally.
Dave:
At what point did you quit your job? You said at the beginning of the show that you had been working in corporate America, then you took on being an investor friendly agent. Can you give us just a timeline here of when you stopped working sort of more traditional corporate job?
Andrew:
So I’ll be honest with you, it was really, really challenging leaving my job. I worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a project manager. So there was a certain level of identity associated with that that I had to escape, right? Additionally, my job paid me one 30 a year and I was probably working 10 to 15 hours a week. It was so freaking easy,
Speaker 3:
But
Andrew:
At a certain point, it came to the point where my activities in real estate from a dollar per hour perspective completely outweigh the money I was making at my W2.
So I put it off as long as possible to leave my W2, but what really pushed me over the edge was going to a mastermind. I think I went there in March, 2024, and the host asked the question to the table. He’s like, what’s one thing you can do that’s holding you back that would bring your business to the next level? I ended up getting on stage and I’m taking the mic and I said, quitting my job. And the host, he’s like, so as of now, we’re going to set a deadline for you that you have to quit your job by this date, and if you don’t quit your job by this date, we’re going to shave that beer to yours. And then after that, the crowd of 500 people proceeded to yell, quit your job, quit your job, quit your job. No one can say
Dave:
No to that level of chanting, you just have to give it.
Andrew:
No, it was such peer pressure. I literally felt like I was naked in a dream, not have everybody staring at me. It was so awkward. But that ended up pushing me to take the leap to leave my job in June. And since leaving my job, I probably forex my annual income.
Dave:
Tell me a little bit about that, because there’s a big debate about how long you should work in a corporate job, when you should quit and go full-time into real estate. So can you just tell me a little bit about where your income comes from now? Because it sounds like you do a couple of different things. You have a property management company, you do your own deals, you’re an agent. What does your income look like?
Andrew:
So ultimately, I was very strong on the defensive side, but I was also very strong on the offensive side. So I actually moved into a house hack that the three unit, I rent two units for two grand, and I live in the third unit. It’s a three bedroom, one bath. I rent two bedrooms and I live in the third. Oh,
Dave:
Wow.
Andrew:
So I literally bring in 5,500 in revenue on that three unit property, and my mortgage is 3,200 bucks.
Dave:
That’s pretty good.
Andrew:
So my living expenses are really, really, really low. I probably spend four to five grand a month on probably food’s my largest expense. So I didn’t allow life creep to creep up. I mean, ultimately I’m a multimillionaire. I don’t have to be living in a house app with roommates, but I do it because I see the long-term vision. And to answer your question, my other income comes from cashflow. I probably get nine to $10,000 in monthly cashflow combined from my own personal rentals that I built over the years and combined with some of the investments part with my investors, I also get buyer agent commissions or acquisition fees for deals that we close, right? That’s another form of income. I’m an investor focused agent, even though I’ve kind of taken a step back from that. So those are primarily the sources of my income.
Dave:
Thank you for sharing that because I think a lot of times what happens is people quit their corporate job, they tell everyone they’re quitting, they’re going full-time into real estate, and that means some combination of cashflow and maybe working as an agent or a loan officer, and that’s totally fine. There is nothing wrong with that, but sometimes when you’re doing that, you might be working 40 hours as an agent. It sounds like you’re not in that bucket, Andrew. But the reason I’m asking the question is I think it’s really important when people say, I quit my job, I’m working in real estate. What does that look like? How many hours a week do you spend in each of these different buckets? But it sounds like it’s really cool for you. You can spend the majority of your time on your own investments and then syndicating other deals to some LPs that you have. Other investors.
Andrew:
So let me be clear. Syndications are not great at building wealth. They are great at building network capital. When it comes to a syndication, the way it’s usually set up is the investor has to get paid first before you get paid, right?
Dave:
That’s right.
Andrew:
And that more or less means that you’re not getting paid until year three or five are the business plan. So you’re essentially working for free a lot of times. So syndications are fantastic for deals that you simply don’t have the cash to take down, but they’re also fantastic for building network capital to build credibility and also allow you to raise capital in some of these more profitable deals, maybe a six or plx. You’re talking about a fix and flip. So I think people should be clear. Syndications are not a get rich quick scheme. They’re a get rich slow scheme.
Dave:
Yeah, it’s a business. It’s really a business that you’re operating similar to other operations intensive businesses. You need investor relations, you need to do property management. It’s a different thing. It’s a great thing if you want to do it. But as Andrew said, there are trade-offs to this and you need to consider pretty carefully if it’s right for you at this point in your investing career, and it sort of fits into your overall portfolio strategy. Andrew, this has been a lot of fun. Great lessons for everyone here. Before we get out of here though, just tell me a little bit, what are your goals for 2025? What are you looking to do next?
Andrew:
So my goal for 2025 is I want to close on 200 more units.
Speaker 3:
Nice.
Andrew:
I think we’ve already closed on around 120. We have another 30 or 40 in the pipeline. So we are way ahead of schedule. I’m also planning, I want to travel to 12 different places. I want to help 10,000 people reach. Financial independence is probably a 10 year goal, and I want to travel six months out of the year, and I only want to work two hours a day. That’s my ultimate vision of 10 years from now. And that’s really why I am working on growing, building my team and kind of building a self-sufficient business so I could really live the dream life that I want to because ultimately my life sounds great and I did reach financial independence, but it does come with a lot of responsibility and a lot of time commitment, and I’m trying to build systems to kind of get out of that down the road.
Dave:
I love that. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, start with Strategy, but I feel like having that clear of a vision that you have is sort of the most important part of building a real estate portfolio. What you do to actually achieve that goal becomes so much easier if you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Because you could say, alright, yeah, I should syndicate for the next couple of years. I should own a property management company for the next couple of years. And that will, even though property management is a loss leader for me right now, that means in a couple of years I’ll be working two hours a day and I’ll be able to travel six months a year. And it makes those decisions so much easier rather than obsessing about the fact like, oh, I’m losing $500 a month. Well, it’s like, yeah, that’s fine, because it’s getting me to this longer term goal.
Speaker 3:
Totally.
Dave:
It’s easier said than done too. Having that clearer vision, I don’t know about you. It took me a while to really nail down what I wanted to achieve with real estate and not just try and grow it all costs and scale in every which way. Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for being here. We really appreciate it.
Andrew:
Thank you.
Dave:
And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. We appreciate each and every one of you. If you enjoy this episode, make sure to leave us a review either on Apple or Spotify or give us a thumbs up on YouTube. We’ll see you all next time.
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