Deal Diary: How a Math Teacher Bought 19 Doors

In This Article

Name

Christle Stezskal

Location
Northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois (investing in Kansas City, MO, and Rock County, WI)

Occupation
Full-time real estate investor (former high school math teacher and IT professional)

Assets
19 rental units, including 18 long-term rentals and one Airbnb

Investment strategy
Sub-$100K single-family and small multifamily, buy-renovate-refinance, out-of-state, and local direct mail

Financing
Delayed financing, foreclosure auction cash purchase, conventional mortgage, local community bank line of credit and cash-out refinance

Christle Stezskal spent seven years as a high school math teacher, but after her second daughter was born, her paycheck wasn’t covering daycare anymore. 

Her husband came home from a book club discussing Rich Dad Poor Dad, and they started listening to every real estate podcast they could find. Home prices near Chicago were too high for the money they had, so they looked at Kansas City instead, found an agent through BiggerPockets, and got on a plane just to walk the neighborhoods before buying anything. 

Their first property cost $52,000. Today, she’s left her job entirely, self-manages 19 units across two states, and is still buying properties for around $100,000 that cash flow. 

Here’s how she built it.

Your first deal was $52,000 out of state. How did you actually find and finance it?

We networked through BiggerPockets, found an agent in Kansas City, and flew out just to meet him and see the neighborhoods before buying anything. He eventually brought us a property from a wholesaler for $52,000. It already had a tenant, needed radon mitigation and a new roof, and we did a full inspection since it was our first deal. 

We bought it in cash and used delayed financing instead of waiting the usual seasoning period, which let us refinance at 75% of the appraised value right away. It appraised for $75,000, and we only left about $13,000 of our own money in it. We still own it today.

Your second deal came from a foreclosure auction with a stranger you’d never worked with before. How did that partnership actually work?

We found a guy whose whole business was identifying auction properties, inspecting them the morning of the sale, and bidding on behalf of buyers for a fee. We vetted him by asking for references from three other investors he’d worked with, and we even rode along with him to an auction before committing any money. 

We won an 800-square-foot house for $21,000. The previous owner had gutted it and started renovations before running out of money, so it was already stripped down and ready for us to finish. Our renovation, including new electrical and AC, came to about $40,000, so we were all-in around $60,000. 

It appraised at $88,000 right after, and we pulled almost everything back out, leaving about $13,000 in it. It rented for $800 at first and rents for $925 now.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down that auction pipeline. How did your strategy shift after that?

Foreclosures dried up almost completely, so we decided to invest closer to home instead, in Rock County, Wisconsin, just over the Illinois border.

Our first property there was a 600-square-foot single-family home we bought for $57,000 in fall 2020, already fully renovated, and we financed it conventionally with 25% down instead of using cash and refinancing. It rented for $725 right away.

Around this time, our first few deals were clearly working, so I decided to leave my IT job entirely. My husband kept his W-2 as an engineer, and we’ve never actually needed my real estate income to cover our bills. We put all of it straight back into the business.

Once you were investing full time, how did you actually generate off-market deal flow?

I tried bandit signs first and got nothing useful, just bad calls. Then I tested direct mail with a small batch of 83 postcards pulled from a PropStream list, including one to myself just to check the design worked. Of the 82 that went to actual homeowners, two turned into real deals. 

I also started working with a small local community bank that set us up with a line of credit for renovations, then refinanced the properties into permanent financing once the work was done. 

On our most recent deal, we bought it for $110,000, put about $40,000 into renovations, and it appraised at $187,000. The bank’s cash-out refi let us pull out everything except $11,000, and it now rents for $1,825.

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You self-manage 19 units across two states while raising two kids. How do you actually make that manageable?

I handle every maintenance request, lease renewal, and new tenant search myself. The key has been building the same systems in every market: an HVAC company I can call in each city, plumbers I already know, and a process with Lowe’s where they’ll deliver a new appliance and haul away the old one within 24 hours if something breaks. 

In Kansas City, I have someone on the ground who runs quarterly inspections using my own form so everything stays consistent. Here locally, I do the inspections myself so I can check in with tenants directly. We keep turnover low because we treat this like a mom-and-pop business and actually build relationships with our tenants, not run it like a faceless property management company.