Andres Martinez studied jazz in college, waited tables for years, and never considered real estate until a mortgage rate hike locked him out of buying a house with his wife in late 2023. 

Determined to find another way in, he fell down a rabbit hole of creative financing and started cold-calling every listing on Zillow, sometimes 500 to 600 calls a day. His first deal was a wholesale assignment that took nine months and nearly broke him before it paid off. 

From there, Andres discovered co-living, a strategy of renting properties out room by room, and rebuilt his entire business around it. Two years later, he owns 10 properties, manages four more, and takes home $12,000 to $14,000 a month while leaving the house once or twice a week. 

Here’s how he built it.

Your first deal took hundreds of cold calls and nine months to close. Walk us through what actually happened.

I couldn’t qualify for a mortgage once rates jumped to 7.5%, so I started calling every single listing on Zillow, asking about seller financing and subject-to deals. After about 500 to 600 calls, I found my first deal and wholesaled it for a $10,000 assignment fee.

My next deal took nine months of nothing but nos, calling 200 to 300 people a day, and getting fired from my restaurant job twice for taking seller calls during shifts. 

I’d actually given up two weeks before it finally happened: A seller who’d told me no months earlier texted me back because the person under contract with him couldn’t close, and he was already behind on payments. That became my first real proof that the process worked.

What made you pivot from wholesaling into co-living?

I passed on a deal where another investor wanted to add 10 rooms to a house, since I thought it sounded like he was going to overextend himself financially to do it. But it planted a question in my head about room rentals in general. Through my real estate mastermind, I learned co-living was a real, replicable strategy, not something sketchy. 

Shortly after, I found a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in pre-foreclosure through an agent at a meetup that nobody else wanted because they didn’t understand co-living. I put it under contract for $3,000 down using a subject-to structure, taking over the seller’s existing payments instead of getting a new mortgage.

That first co-living conversion needed real renovation money. How did you fund it, and what went wrong?

I needed about $58,000 to add three more bedrooms, redo the flooring, and furnish the property. A partner offered to bring all the capital in exchange for a 50/50 split, with me managing the project. 

My contractor ended up stealing money and not finishing the work, and the subcontractors she’d hired hadn’t been paid, so I ended up covering roughly $40,000 out of pocket to redo the flooring myself and finish the renovation. 

Once it opened, I rented rooms for $800 to $850 each, with one private-bathroom room at $1,000, bringing in about $6,500 a month gross against a $2,100 mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That netted around $2,700 to $2,800 a month from a single property.

After getting burned by contractors twice, how did you fix that gap in your business?

On my second co-living deal, an eight-bedroom house with an ADU, the same pattern happened: My new contractor’s crew leader ended up doing the actual work while the contractor herself disappeared without paying anyone. 

Instead of finding a third contractor, I offered that crew leader steady work if he helped me learn construction directly: tile, drywall, and flooring. I became my own general contractor from that point forward, which let me finish renovations in about two weeks instead of the standard six to eight, since I kept one crew moving through a single property instead of splitting their time across multiple job sites. 

That skill set became a business of its own. I’ve now GCed 29 co-living conversions for other investors in addition to running my own portfolio.

What do people misunderstand about co-living as a business model?

The biggest myth is that it’s a passive strategy with constant turnover and tenant conflicts. I target working adults making enough to need housing but not enough to rent their own place, and I always start on a month-to-month lease so either side can walk away cleanly before committing to a full year. 

Once a house stabilizes, turnover mostly disappears. I have tenants from my very first property who just signed another one-year lease.

The other misconception is that a co-living conversion locks you out of a normal resale. Since I only add interior walls and drywall, not permanent structural changes, converting a property back to a standard layout costs about $3,000 to $4,000, which keeps my exit options open to any buyer, not just another co-living investor.