Waiter to Financial Freedom with 5 Rentals and $5,000/Month Cash Flow

Ashley:Hey rookies. On the show, we always talk about having a bias toward action.

Tony:Our guest today never gave up on making real estate work for him. He partnered with other real estate investors and used co-living as his real estate investing strategy to be able to quit his W2 this year.

Ashley:This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, and I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:And I’m Tony J. Robinson, and welcome to the show, Andres. What’s up, brother? How you doing, man? Good. How you doing guys? Thank you so much for having me.

Ashley:Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Andres, can you share a little bit of your background before we actually get into real estate? What were some of the critical steps you took in your current state before you started your real estate journey?

Andres:Well, let’s start from the beginning, like they said. I came to this country when I was 18 years old, worked my way through every possible job that you can work as an immigrant. I started washing dishes, basketball, kitchen, eventually became a waiter, assistant manager, did ballet parking, cutting yards, some construction work. Put myself through college. After college, I got married and my wife is like, “Hey, we need to buy a house.” And at that time I was working full-time as a waiter, so I couldn’t qualify for a loan despite making good enough money. We were expecting to qualify for a house, we just couldn’t. And it’s upsetting because you’re making almost six figures and just because you get paid in cash, they don’t want to take it. So I made a quick Google search, how to buy houses without any banks, any credit. And as you guys know, that’s like Pace’s slogan.So I found Pace. I started watching Pace’s videos. I found bigger pockets and a week later I was like, “I’m going to find myself a deal.” So I joined Pace’s mentorship and a couple weeks later I found my first house up too. And that was the beginning of my real estate journey. For a year, I did wholesaling with dad to build cash. And one of the last deals that I wholesale was to this guy who I didn’t know what he was doing with the house because the house didn’t really have an exited strategy. And when you wholesale creative deals, you got to make sure that your buyer is … They’re not going to default on the loan. So I went with him to the property, we walk it, his GC is there and he’s like, “I’m going to put a wall here. I’m going to put a wall here.We need another bathroom here.” I was like, “Man, what are you doing?” He’s like, “Oh, I do room rentals.” I was like, “That doesn’t exist.That’s false.” So I went with a different buyer who was going to do an Airbnb in there, but that piqued my curiosity because he sent me his spreadsheet like, “Hey, we’re going to make 3,000 net in this house.” But I just couldn’t believe it because who’s going to share a room? Who’s going to share a bathroom? And then after that, I started researching room rentals because at this point, this is now December 2023, a year after starting wholesale, I’m like, “I need to buy my first house. I build this capital. I want to be an investor.” So I started researching that. I was like, “Okay, this sounds like a good strategy.” Because that year when I started real estate, when I was doing wholesaling, I really dove into short-term rentals and mid-term rentals because I thought that’s what I wanted to do.It is so hard. I’m not a smart person. I don’t know how you guys do short-term rentals, minter rentals. I don’t understand how to run the numbers. I’ve joined a lot of coaching programs that I’ve paid for. I’ve seen every YouTube video possible. I still don’t get it.

Ashley:Hey, we never let anybody on the show say they are not smart because you have been smart in some aspect to be able to made it this far in your real estate investing journey.

Tony:Andres, there’s a couple things in your story too, because I want to get into it, how you made the transition over to co-living, but there’s a couple things I want to get into. First, you mentioned Pace. So for our Ricky, we’re referencing Pace Morby, and Pace actually wrote a book for BiggerPockets. It’s called Wealth Without Cash. If you guys head over to the BiggerPockets Bookstore, you can pick up a copy of that and learn about the strategy that Andres was leveraging to help them kind of get started in real estate investing. But it sounds like Andreas that you said you started wholesaling first, which is a way to generate some cash. And then you decided, “Hey, let’s get into actually owning the real estate as an asset.” And I just want to point out for a lot of our rookies that are listening, you might find yourself in a similar position where you have the desire to go out there and start building your portfolio, but from a cash perspective, maybe you’re not ready.So even if you can’t necessarily put down 20% to go out and buy that first rental, are there other things you can do within the world of real estate investing to generate the cash, which would then eventually allow you to go out and buy something? So Andres, just really quickly before we get into the co-living, how long were you focused on that active income strategy before you had enough cash set aside to go out and actually get your first buy and hold rental?

Andres:About 10 months, 10 to 11 months.

Tony:10 months. Holy crap, that was a lot faster than what I was thinking, man.

Andres:I wasn’t that successful, honestly. That year, I mean, at that point I was before that working full-time as assistant manager/waiter. So I was making pretty good money, but I was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, no days off. If they call me, I have to be there. But with wholesaling, well, how I get into wholesaling, right? While doing the full-time job, I was flipping clothing online, like going to the thrift stores and selling it on eBay, postmark. I was flipping furniture, I was flipping appliances.

Ashley:We love side hustle ideas on the show, and that is a great one.

Andres:I’ve always hide hassle. When I was in the community college, my sister-in-law used to work for Beoworld, which is a company that produces those things for hot topic, the kind of anime, toys and backpacks. They would have a clearance every three months and sell everything for a dollar. So I would go buy a hundred things, put it in the trunk of my car and go to college, park right outside the arts building and sell it to all the taco guys there that play music and do arts. So I would pay my tuition that way. So I’ve always liked the idea of side hustling. If we go back to when I was a kid, reselling candy, deflating other people’s bicycles so I can sell them air. I’ve always had that mindset. I was four or five, don’t judge me.

Ashley:I’ve seen this Instagram reel where a girl pranks her dad and she goes to her dad and says, “Yeah, I went to the mechanics and actually they have premium air there. It was only $100 and I got premium air in my tires just to get a reaction out of her dad of it. ” Is that you or are you selling the premium air?

Andres:I’ve always had these little side hustles. In college, I run a poker room undertable until I got kicked out. But that mindset of always doing something on the side, I think that’s something my parents gave me because when you come from poverty, all you have is hustle, greed, and you cannot give up, right? The hopes of my ancestors lay on my shoulders, I got to keep going no matter what. So now we jump into wholesaling, right? I wasn’t very successful. I only do like six deals in one year, which is not a lot, but it gave me enough cash where I wanted to buy a house. And I decided to go with co-living because it sounded doable. I started putting some test ads to people. I was like, “Hey, yeah, I need a room. I need a room.” Studio apartments at that time in Fort Worth are going for 1,200, 1,300.So if I can get somebody in a room for 700 to 800, that sounds like a good model.

Tony:Sorry, just before we go on, I just want you to define what co-living is. We’ve had a couple of guests on the podcast who have kind of gone through this strategy, but for folks who are listening and they’ve maybe never heard the phrase co-living, what exactly is this and how does it differ from traditional long-term rentals or traditional short-term rentals?

Andres:Because of various names, co-living, room rentals, a lot of people know it as pet split the same way we know short-term rentals as Airbnb because that’s the biggest platform that does it, but it’s pretty much renting a room inside a house and you’re sharing the kitchen. A lot of the times you’re sharing the bathrooms. Now a lot of people right now, a lot of the big coaches, they’re fighting into, oh, if there’s no community in it, it’s not a co-living, it’s just like you’re renting a room. I would say that’s the landlord’s taste depending on your tenants. A lot of people really try to do a lot of extracurricular activities for their tenants, like pizza parties and trying to do this, trying to do that. I don’t do anything like that. I just let them be. And I’ve had only one turnover since I started in 10 months, so I think I’m doing something right.A lot of people don’t believe me. It’s like, “That’s not possible. You have 42 tenants and only one has left.” I was like, “Yeah, give them a good product.”

Ashley:We’re going to take a quick ad break, but when we come back, we are going to hear more from Andres on his portfolio and how he cash flows from his co-living strategy. Okay. Now let’s get back into the show. So Andreas, I have a question for you as far as the co-living. I always think of co-living as college.That’s what everybody did in college. It was rent by the room. That’s how you got places. And you mentioned a couple places where you can list the apartment such as PadSplit and several others, and those are the Airbnb platform for co-living. What do you think is the big reason that co-living is becoming more popular right now? People talked about rent by the room throughout time, I guess, but it seems like this year, going into 2025, co-living is the hot new thing. Several years ago, it was Airbnb and then after that it was midterm rentals.What do you think is the major shift that has made this a hot commodity right now for investors, but also for people who want to live in co-living?

Andres:It’s real estate cyclical, right? 28, 29, the borrow was the biggest thing because you could get all your money out, you could get paid, you can get cashflow. 16, 17, Airbnb is a boom. Two years ago, everybody was like, “Oh, the interest rate is so low. Let’s get it at that low and resell it on a wrap.” Also at the same time, “Hey, let’s do traveling nurses, let’s do midterm rentals.” And now everybody’s failing on that. Now it’s like, “Oh, co-living because it’s secure cash flow.” The thing is that co-living is actually really good because just as a general economical principle, we’re targeting the people who make the least amount of money and we are taking care of the most principal need, which is shelter. So that’s always going to be there because what happens, studio apartments, which is the efficiency apartments, the cheapest thing that you can buy, those prices have gone so high that people can’t qualify for them.For example, this studio apartment in this area that is 1,200, you need to make about 43, $44,000 a year to live in. What happens with the people who are making 36, 35? What happens to the people that are making minimum wage? Where are they living?So even middle school teachers, high school teachers, they don’t make that much money. I have one teacher and then one of my properties. And when she came, she was crying and I was explaining to her like, “Look, this is not a group home.” There’s an engineer here, he was from home, there’s nurse, the other guys work locally because she couldn’t believe it. She went to college, she has a master’s degree and she has to share a bathroom with a couple guys. So it is what it is.

Tony:Andres, let me ask, because you mentioned something that you did a little bit of a test before you actually dove into this strategy. And I’m just curious, what was that test? How did you try and validate this idea before you actually committed to it?

Andres:Advertising because my biggest fear it was like, how long is it going to take to get full? Because at that time I was using other companies’ numbers. They’re telling you like, “Hey, it takes like this long. They stay for that long.” And then talking with investors actually in the platforms like, dude, we’re barely breaking even, right? As soon as you launch, they get you full, but then after that, they start taking tenants because so many people are diving in. And at that time there was no control, which is about a year ago, landlords can do whatever they want. So I was like, “Let me just run my own ads, do my own marketing, see if I can get my own tenants.” So I started researching how to do that. I found Sam Wigert, who’s probably the biggest investor in this market. He’s out of North Carolina or South Carolina, somewhere in there.And then he does a five day free course where you can learn how to do this yourself for free. So I copied that and I started marketing on Zillow, apartment.com, Facebook Marketplace, Craiglist, all the room rental websites, Rumis, Room Sear, Sumper. I only got leads from Facebook Marketplace, but I started getting like 13, 14 messages a day.

Ashley:Was it like, is this still available?

Andres:All of them were still available. And a lot of investors told me, “Don’t do it because people just click on it and they will respond.” And I was like, “Okay, do you respond to this still available?” “No, never. “”Well, let me do it. ” So I started replying and guess what? People do respond, right? They don’t type room for rental just because they’re crazy. So I started having conversations with them and the property was barely under contract. I had just gotten out of contract with the seller and I was already people like, “I’m ready to move in. ” So I was like, “Okay, this works.” And then something else happened where the person who was going to onboard me into our company, they said a few things that my lawyer didn’t agree with. And that’s something a lot of colleaguing groups and investors don’t talk about, which is the legalities of it.And that’s something we have to be aware of. Otherwise, your investment is going to go belly up.

Tony:Yeah. It’s a super cool way to test this strategy before going into it fully. And I guess two follow up questions for me. Number one, what did you actually put into the post that you think garnered such strong attention? And then second, how did you actually land on the pricing for the room rental? Like you said, hey, for you, it’s difficult how to underwrite and analyze properties as a short term. I know how to do that really well because we’ve done it a lot. But like the idea of the single room rental, I feel like there’s a little bit less clarity around how to do that. So first, what did you put into the post to generate so much attention? And then second, how did you decide how much to actually charge for your rooms?

Andres:Yeah. So the way you underwrite a room rental, you go from the comms in the area, right? You can go, you can use comms from Zillow. Silo’s great, realtor.com because it tells you what the apartments in the area are going for. So once you find that price in your area, let’s say it’s between 1,000, 1,200, you want to be within 65 to 70% of it because it has to be a deal. You’re telling people you’re going to share a bathroom, you’re going to share a kitchen, so it has to be a deal. So I started testing ads at 60%, 65%, 70%, 75% and 80% of the price of the studio apartment, which is at that time the cheapest available option. And I started getting responses in all of them. And I was like, okay, so it’s not about the price, right? Because now we’re talking about 750, 775, 800, 825, 850.My cheapest advertising at that point was 600 and I started getting people who would not have qualified anyways. They just got out of jail. They have multiple felonies, DUIs. And one thing I really like about Facebook Marketplace is that you can click on their profile and see their pictures. As a general rule of thumb, if their profile picture is themselves holding a few guns with a lot of weed and a couple pit bulls, they’re probably not going to qualify. And so you don’t even have to waste time betting this possible tenant.

Ashley:I’ve done that before too, is where when I haven’t done in a while, but I used to post long-term rentals on Facebook and I would go and I’d also look at their interactions with comments or if they had pictures of them in their own house trying to look like, “Is it kept clean? Is it nice?” You definitely can find a lot about a person by going through their Facebook page for sure.

Andres:I think yes, because they are deliberately choosing that to be their avatar. They want the world to know them as that. So if you want the world to know just that, well, I might as well treat you like that. And there’s so much volume right now from my ad, so I can choose the better tenants. So right now I have a criteria where I’m really just looking for introverts and when they respond like, “Hey, tell me a little bit about yourself. I’m a night owl.” I keep to myself. That’s perfect because what happens before I was looking for building the community type of thing and that usually means you’re going to get people who want to talk to others. They might be friends for a month or six weeks, eventually they’re going to crash because you don’t know that person, you don’t know their background.So while building my lease, I was like, “What is the middle ground where…” Because eventually they’re going to come to you if there’s a problem and you have to be the referee, right? You broke the lease, you’re out. So what happened? The people that have a good background check that we’re living with people who don’t have a good background check, they start texting me. So I was like, “What you don’t like about this? ” And I was like, “Man, they’re forcing us to do this. They’re forcing us to do that. They want us to buy the towel papers together, the toilet paper together. They want us to share this and that. ” I was like, “What would you like? ” I was like, “I just want to buy my own business. Done. You’re allowed.” And I kind of let each house self-regulate. Right now I have five closing one more in two weeks, hopefully we’re almost there.

Tony:And Andres, on those five, can you just kind of walk us through in a little bit more detail? So you have five properties currently. How many rooms is that and how many specific tenants is that across all those rooms?

Andres:It’s 36, 36 rooms. So about seven per house. One has eight.

Ashley:Oh my God, those are big houses.

Andres:Yes.

Ashley:Did you buy these big houses or did you add rooms to them, like take a dining room and add?

Andres:We definitely add rooms because it’s really rare to find a seven room house. And actually, I don’t know if my Instagram is going to be someone in here, but I have videos of there because now I’m the GC on the property. So I do walkthroughs of the properties, how to do the layout, how to do the construction quickly. A lot of people when they’re acquiring these properties, they have a three month holding period plus another month of renting. The fastest one we did was we closed on August 13. By September 1st, it was fully renovated, fully listed. So we didn’t have any holding costs. We added four rooms. We find all the people. My longest time has been three weeks, except for the first one. The first one, I went with a contractor and she stole my money. That’s how I ended up doing the construction myself.

Tony:Well, you got to tell us a little bit about that story, Andres. I mean, I feel like every real estate investor’s got at least one bad contractor story. So tell us about yours.

Andres:So she came recommended to me by another couple of investors in the area. I went to check her work that was close to my property. She was doing two full sleeps, full gut, changing plumbing. I was like, “Okay, that’s a big job. This is not a small time contractor.” And then they started doing my job and then the guys are not showing up every two, three days, which sometimes is normal when they have multiple projects. And then spring break hits and I asked for LPP flooring that was in the contract and I get to the home and I see the guys cutting the flooring with the meter saw and putting dust. So I was like, “That’s this wood. LBP doesn’t have any wood. This is laminate.” Then I see the brand and it’s the cheapest thing that you can find at a Home Depot. And I was like, “Hey, we didn’t agree on this.” And she’s like, “Well, we already put it. If you want to leap here, I have to pay more.” And that was it. So, okay. Yeah, sorry, but I already knew that it was going to happen. But she immediately, three days later, she doesn’t deliver the rest of the flooring. She took it. It was about $5,000 worth of flooring. She didn’t pay the guys for two weeks that I didn’t know. And then they come to the house, it’s like, “Hey, she said you didn’t pay her. We’re going to destroy our work.”

Ashley:Oh my God, geez. I’d be crying at this point, just so you know.

Andres:I have to say at the property, right? The subs who did the tile work for the bathroom tried to break in a Saturday at 2:00 AM. So luckily I’m there. So I have to get on a fight with them. I have to call the police. So after that, I stay at the property every night and I had to finish the work myself. I’m kind of hundred and YouTube is your best friend. You can learn everything on YouTube right now. So I was going to Home Depot at 6:00 AM, buying material, going to work from 9:00 AM to 11:00 PM, going back to the job site, 11:30 to 2:00 AM, sleeping next day, for two weeks. So there was no delay in my first property. We were like, we’re going to go live April 1st, we are going to go live April 1st, no matter what.Because I bought that house with other people’s money, so I cannot fail them. Even though I have the money to pay for another crew, at this point, because I don’t know how to hire them. I don’t know if what they’re doing is right. The only way that I knew that it’s right is if I can do it myself and I can see that they’re doing it like I’m supposed to do it, then they’re doing it right.So that was a big experience. I almost have a heart attack during those two weeks. I had to go to the emergency room. My heart would just not stop because it’s a lot of stress. At the same time, I had some bad news with my wife. We needed to do an IVF treatment, so I had to put another 25,000 into there. So my reserves are like … So anyways, we went live, the property wasn’t even finished, and I already had five people moving in. So I made the rooms upstairs ready, the bathroom’s ready. I was like, “Look, the kitchen is not ready, downstairs is not ready.” Cool. They didn’t even see the room. So that’s, I think it was a blessing because now everybody wants to come see the rooms. But for the first one, it was all online. I didn’t even have pictures because the house wasn’t ready and these guys moved in.They paid a deposit. They liked the area so much, they just moved in.

Ashley:I have to say, I’m so impressed with your hustle. I mean, just all the side hustles that you’ve done throughout your life so far, but in this circumstance, not many people are willing to roll up the sleeves and to spend every night after working a full-time job, working on their property just to meet their deadline, to be able to pay back the people that invested with them. And that really does take some character and I commend you on that hustle. We had a similar experience happen and I’m very thankful. I had a partner on the deal who was the one that went in and did all of the work on it when we had to fire our contractors and had no one else to lean on. So just from watching him kind of go through that grind, I share a little bit of your experience, but I just want to commend you on that hustle.And I hope everyone listening knows that sometimes things like this will happen in real estate where you are going to have these really stressful periods, but sometimes just working hard and putting in that labor, putting in that sweat equity, and that may not even be actually doing the physical labor of a rehab. That might be sitting behind your computer trying to find money or analyzing deals every single night. That grind is what’s going to get you through that hard time in your investing journey. Just like Andres just showed us. There’s light at the end of the tunnel as to renting out the whole house without even having pictures available for people to look at.

Andres:That was a blessing. I don’t know how I got that. And actually, those guys are still there, right? So when I do my monthly check-ins, it’s funny, in January, everybody got sick. So I do my monthly check-in around January 3rd to go to the house and there are all of them sitting in the dining area drinking chicken soup. And I was sick too. So I sat with them and we’re talking about it. And I was like, “Do you guys remember when you walked in? ” And I was like, “Yeah, man, I don’t know how. I would never move anywhere else without pictures.” Because I would literally send them pictures and it’s a war zone. It’s a construction zone. We build the walls. There is drywall everywhere. It was a bad area. I don’t know how they did it, but it worked out. Thank God they’re still there.It is what it is.

Tony:Andres, you said that there’s not many just seven bedrooms laying around that you’re able to go out and purchase. So you’re converting a lot of these and adding the additional living space. So I guess as you’re sourcing your properties, what is it exactly that you’re looking for? What is your buy box? How do I know as someone who’s never done this before, what type of property is a good candidate to turn into a seven or eight bedroom property?

Andres:Pretty much you’re going to go buy a square feet, right? Each room, you want to be around 250 square feet, so you can multiply that by seven. But a lot of the times, if you stay above 2,000 square feet, you’re going to make it work for seven to eight rooms, but that really depends on the mortgage payment. Again, I bought all of these creatively. They are all sub two seller finance. So we have 3% interest rate, 2.75% interest rate. Our PITIs are pretty low for Texas, 1,900, $2,000. So we get a good spread on the end. So even though I can put eight rooms, I stay at seven, just to give it a little bit more space. And parking is really important. So if I had to define my buy box, it would be minimum three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1600 square feet plus. So if it’s 1600 square feet, I need a PI to be at 1600 or less.If the PITI is above $2,000 a month, I need the square feet to be above 2000 as well because I need to add a seventh to make the cashflow work. And given all the work that you have to put into this, I think you need at least 2,000 net every month. Otherwise, the property is not really worth it. And I pass on a lot of deals because it’s like, oh, 1800, 1700. And I was like, “Yeah, no, I need 2,000.” Because a lot of work and I do everything myself right now. I’m still training my replacement, but it is very hands-on. I think to me, that’s one of the biggest things when I talk to other Collibra investors. The moment they tell me it’s easy, I stop talking to them because that means that they just started a month, they only have one property, they haven’t gone through it yet.But just think about it, right? And you’re going to see it in the comments. You have seven people from seven different backgrounds now sharing a house, right? You are the referee for everything. Everybody’s going to be texting you this and this and that. And now when I do coaching, it’s like the first three months, you’re going to be very intense because you have to put some people in line. You have to other people let it go until you find the right fit. But after three months, like my other houses that have been open for six, nine months, I don’t get a message for two 60 days because those three months were very intense. I was on top. I was checking the security cameras outside like, “Hey, you parked in the wrong place, this and that, no guess, blah, blah, blah.” But once you set up the culture of the house and you have like two or three guys there with the culture of the house like, “Hey, we’re clean, everybody parks in the right place and this is how we do it.” Then the new people that move in, they’re going to follow that.

Ashley:We have to take the final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this. While we are gone, make sure you are subscribed to the Real Estate Rookie YouTube channel. Okay. Welcome back from our short break. So Andrea, as you kind of mentioned there that you are doing all of your rehabs. Are you still working a W2 job?

Andres:No. So I quit my job two days before Thanksgiving last year.

Tony:Congratulations.

Andres:I just couldn’t do it anymore. We were setting up a house. At that time, I had three houses under contract for December, so it was going to be a lot of work. And I don’t have any money in my saving accounts for the rookies listening to that. At that point, I had $300 in my cashflow.

Ashley:And you quit your job?

Andres:And I quit my job. And when I said I bought my first house with my own money, I used credit cards. I didn’t have cash because we’ve missed a lot of like all my savings went away with my wife’s treatment and my heart problems, right? Every penny that I saved since I was 18 to this point when I’m 30, every dollar, every night I didn’t go out, every saving that I was like for my investments, it went away in three months because of health issues, but I had to keep going. And I quit my job, I got another property, and that’s how I kind of started doing side jobs as a general contractor because now I have good subs and a lot of people wants to do co-leaving. So I kind of help them with the layout, helping them with the construction, I make some money there.Now from the properties is enough cashflow to cover my basic needs. So it’s the first stage of financial freedom where if I really don’t want to get out of my house, I don’t have to, but we want to keep going.

Ashley:And you found a business that integrates well with your real estate too. For a long time, I was a property manager and I did it for myself and I did it for another investor and it worked out really well having that income alongside my real estate investments also too. So now that you’ve started this GC business, how are you becoming bankable or what are you doing without your W2 income to actually finance deals?

Andres:Well, so all the deals, even the first one were bought with OPM. So for the rookies, that means other people’s money. So I actually got paid to buy each house, right? Because I’m acquiring the deals myself. So I have my wholesale fee there or acquisition fee. Now I call it a management fee. So because all of these are creative deals, we buy themselves too. We don’t have to go to bank. We don’t have to talk to anybody. We just go to title company, direct to seller, direct to agent, and we acquire the houses, right? So each deal comes out around 65 to 80,000 total from acquisition, repairs and to furnishing, and I usually bring a private money partner to each deal and then we split the deal half and a half. So they bring all the money to closing and they do everything else. That’s That’s why also I don’t think a property is worth if I don’t make less than 2,000 a month because I have to split that with my prior money partners.So their cash on cash per property is between 40 and 50%. That’s a lot. You don’t find that laying around. That’s why I’ve had so much success raising money at the beginning because that’s really hard to find. And people that have money to invest, they want to make sure that it’s in a recession proof kind of investment and affordable housing is always going to be around.

Tony:Andres, let me ask, have you ever thought about doing co-living but through ground up development? Just buying a plot of land or redeveloping small house, tearing it down and just building something built specifically for co-living?

Andres:Yes, that’s the next stage. And if we go back, I’m pretty new in real estate. I still don’t know how to do the better. And that’s what I’m saying I have to do right now. I still don’t get it. How do you guys refinance those properties? Those numbers are so wild because I get to the ARB, but then the appraisal is going to give me a different number. I really don’t get it. It’s a lot harder than creative financing. But yes, ground up is going to be the next step. So right now I have five closing six. I want to get to 10. And then after that, do only ground up. Because at that point, the cashflow is good enough where I can feel free and I can focus on funding land and develop that.

Ashley:Well, Andres, thank you so much for coming onto the show today. Just real quick before we wrap up here, would you just give us an overview of what your monthly cash flow is off of these five properties that you’ve been able to generate?

Andres:Yes. So in total, we make a little bit over 10,000. So depending month, 10,500, 10,400, and once I split that half and a half with my private money partners, they get their half, I get my half. I’ve had this year 97% occupancy rate. I have only one turnover. Yeah, it’s been great so far. Honestly, I don’t see me slowing down with this. The only thing that slows me down is finding good deals because parking is very important here in Texas. Almost everybody drives a car and I don’t want to bother the neighbors.

Ashley:Well, you just gave everybody shiny object syndrome looking to get that type of cash flow and everyone’s going to be looking into co-living. So Andres, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people reach out to you and find out more information?

Andres:By Instagram is probably the best way. My handle is Andres Martinez, like my name underscore C. And you can leave a question here in the comments. I’ll try to be here and respond because I have also some videos on YouTube, so you guys can go sit there and check and just reach out if you have any questions. Be ready to work because if you tell me you’re lazy, I’m not going to respond.

Ashley:Yeah. Love that motto. Thank you so much for watching this episode of Real Estate Rookie. I’m Ashley and he’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.