Sara Witz and Anthony Gair are a soon-to-be husband and wife real estate investing team focused on wholesaling, flipping, and the BRRRR strategy. Two oil and gas employees from Houston, Texas who decided to take advantage of the extra time they had after their wedding was delayed by the Covid pandemic. They started investing less than 12 months ago and already have 13 deals under their belt. At the beginning of 2021, they set a goal for themselves of earning $100,000 in three months from real estate, and as of this recording, they are just $15,000 away from that goal. 

In this episode, we talk to Anthony and Sara about how they got into their first BRRRR property for less than $10,000, the multiple exit strategies that they use to make use of nearly every deal they come across, why they now have a rule against doing any rehabs after dark, and the key expense many people forget about when buying a property to wholesale, flip or BRRRR.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• How Anthony Gair and Sara Witz got into real estate investing
• How working from home during the pandemic accelerated their investing journey
• How they bought their first rental property using almost none of their own money
• Why not do the rehab on the rental property themselves
• How they were able to do 13 deals in less than one year
• How they are finding their deals
• The challenges of finding deals during the pandemic
• How getting their July 2020 wedding canceled help their real estate investing journey
• The one thing they would throw money at to improve their real estate investing business
• How they are using door knocking to build rapport with sellers and find deals
• Why they no longer do renovations in the dark
• What's the most important thing to know when analyzing a potential BRRRR deal

Books and Resources Mentioned

• The Road to Family Freedom: roadtofamilyfreedom.com
• Instagram: @Gair.RealEstate
• Resource: Deal Machine

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Sara wits and Anthony Garr are assumed to be husband and wife real estate investing team focused on wholesaling, flipping and the burst strategy to oil and gas employees from Houston, Texas, who decided to take advantage of the extra time they had after their wedding was delayed by the COVID pandemic. They started investing less than 12 months ago and already have 13 deals under their belt. At the beginning of 2021, they set a goal for themselves of earning $100,000 in three months from real estate investing. And as of this recording, they're just $15,000 away from that goal.

In this episode, we talked to Anthony and Sarah about how they got into their first burger property for less than $10,000. The multiple exit strategies that they use to make use of nearly every deal they come across why they now have a rule against doing any rehabs after dark, and the key expense many people forget about when buying a property to wholesale flip or burn. I'm Brittany. And I'm Neil. And this is the road to family freedom.

Before we get to this week's show, we'd like to make you aware of something we are self storage investors. We buy existing self storage facilities and vacant buildings that can be converted to self storage in the Sunbelt. We buy them with cash and some with loans. And we use private lenders who become Equity Partners in our deals, these Equity Partners share in the cash flow and the profits when we sell when we find a deal that we're considering. We call the Equity Partners and offer them share the ownership secured by the property. So if you've ever driven by a self storage facility and thought I've wondered who owns those things, and you have any interest in learning more about the storage business, we'd love to chat with you head on over to rove to family freedom comm slash storage cats road to family freedom.com slash s t o r h g and set up a time to chat. We look forward to speaking with you.

All right. And that thought of us Let's hit the road to family freedom.

Well, Sara wits and Anthony gear, welcome to the road to family freedom.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. We appreciate it.

Absolutely. So you guys are new real estate investors relatively. But you in less than one year, you've done 13 deals before we dig into those deals. Can you give us kind of a quick story of how you got into real estate investing?

Yeah, so I have a couple of mentors that are heavily involved in real estate and that have been trying to get me to invest, you know, for the last four or five years, and I've been just kind of, you know, pushing it off. And so finally, Sarah and I just thought that during the coronavirus pandemic thing that since we're both working from home, this was the perfect opportunity for us to really dive in learn as much as we possibly could and get the thing going right. And so once we figured out how to run the numbers, figured out who the big players were in town, how to find deals and analyze deals, etc, we felt that this was a perfect opportunity to get started. So,

you know, most people would say the best time to start getting into real estate is maybe not during a global pandemic. But I like that you guys just like, Hey, we got we're working from home, now we got some extra time we're gonna go for it.

There's always something that works.

So the mentorship that you were doing was that primarily focused on wholesaling, flipping, what was it focused on?

focused on rental properties, right. And so that's kind of how we got started, you know, really turnkey, right? So they were just saying, you know, buy buy something for 20% down, you know, and they just continue to do that. And so for us, we were like, Well, you know, if we buy a property for 100,000, we got to put 20 20,000 down, well, we can only buy so many of those, right. And so we wanted to figure out how we can invest without having to put too much money down. And so that's kind of how we discovered the birth strategy. Right? I'm sure you guys have heard of that. It's our first deal. We only put 6000 down. And so just continue to to utilize that strategy. And then we kind of incorporated Lipson wholesale, just continue to build capital to buy more so.

Alright, so since you mentioned it, let's dig into that first deal. What did that first deal look like?

Sure. So this is a deal. We found the MLS was listed for like 45 days and Anthony called it was listed at 145,000. And we can only offer like 93. So we call they said no. And then we call back. They said no, we probably back and forth with them for a couple weeks, maybe a month or so. And then finally they they accepted our offer at 93,000. So we purchased it for 93. And we were going to do a $15,000. Rehab leads a hard money lender and they gave us 75% of the ARV. So the ARV was 145. So the hard money lender gave us 108. So the 108 covered the 93 purchase and the $15,000 rehab. So all we had to come out of pocket was closing costs, which was the $6,000 he's talking about. So we fixed it up and refinance, pull our money out and now we're in a 30 year conventional loan and we have tenants and everything but there's actually one of our ears. These properties. Yeah. The first ones the easiest.

So,

gotcha. And then did you obviously the hard money lender? Do you recall what your first time? First time real estate investors? What were the points and interest rate like?

Yeah, so our we had two points on origination, and the interest rate was 10% for a year. And then if you go over a year, you'd have to pay some more points to kind of extend that.

That's actually not all that bad for? Yeah, yeah.

I actually think it was it was lower than I think it was, like 6.99 minute one. Then it goes up to 14. After two months. Yeah. So we got out of it by within basically six weeks. So yeah, I mean, it was like 6.99 for the first couple. weeks, few weeks. Yeah, for sure.

We need to let it work. We're talking about the guy we work with that does the longer term or longer term loans as opposed to the to two months? Because the two months kind of makes me worried? Because then you jump to that 14? Yeah. So anything that you think is gonna take longer than two months? You're kind of risking it a little bit?

And then did you swing the hammers yourself?

Oh, no. Not

at all. And I would love to be, but my concern with us actually doing the rehab as opposed to hiring a general contractor is that it's going to take us way longer to do it than if we just hired general contractors to the money you're saving or money we would save. Doing it by ourselves, we would make up an interest from the hard money lender. So we typically hire a general contractor to do it all for us.

How did you how did you find someone? Is that someone that you've worked with since then, or?

Yeah, so we have kind of our go to guy and found him just through networking. I mean, one of my mentors does a lot in the Houston area, a minimum bar. She kicked me out of the house, went to watch the LSU game.

I did not take him out. I was having something we were getting married in April. So I was having something done with like my girlfriends for some Bachelorette bridles.

Yeah, so I went to the bar, watching the game guide set right next to me started, you know, having a conversation, he said that he believed in real estate. And I was like, wow, we want to do real estate, you know, can you teach us? And so he sat down at lunch with them, he picked his brain a little bit, he referred us to a couple contractors. And here we are, a month later. So yeah,

awesome. You know, we often talk about, you know, don't ask other real estate investors for contractor referrals, because they're almost always not going to give you their best guy. Do you? Is there anything about this guy that made you feel more comfortable about working with him?

He's an older guy. And so, you know, I don't I don't think that he felt like I was a threat or that I was gonna, you know, be taking deals from him because he's a multifamily, right. So he's not looking for these one offs, or single family deals. So a contract that was only at the property for three, four or five weeks. So you know, I don't think he saw me as competition. So he was more than happy to help

you.

So you have that first property, you've done 13 deals in less than a year, which is a lot for new investors. Is there anything? I mean, you've had your mentors? Is there anything else that you feel you've brought to the table that's made it that's allowed you to do this? Well, so quickly,

when we first started out, we were very tied to doing the birth strategy. So if a property didn't work as a birth, then we would pass on it. And then we kind of had this realization that we were passing on too many deals. So that's when we kind of started saying, Okay, well, what if we don't want to do a burger, we know how to do a flip. Since we've learned the process, I think we could probably do more sales too. So if we had a property under contract, and we couldn't use it as a rental property beside, we would flip it. And if it wouldn't work with the flip, then we would wholesale it whichever way is the fastest way we can do it and still make money. That's kind of what we were going to do. And then that that mindset shift has really enabled us to move faster and supercharge our investing and

growing our portfolio, you bring up a great point, which is something I think so many people forget about, which is to have multiple exit strategies. When you go into a deal, you know, going into a deal. We're going to wholesale this deal. Oh, actually, this might make a good flip. All right, let's do it as a flip. Oh, actually, it might actually make a good long term bur, hold it as a burger. And so you've always got you when you go into a deal. You're not having to go mad didn't fit our criteria. You've got multiple criteria, you can say, Yep, we're gonna keep this one. No, we're gonna we're just gonna flip the contract or no, we're gonna we're just gonna flip it because we don't think it's gonna make a good rental or the timings not right or whatever. So I kind of how the mindset you guys have.

Yeah, absolutely. So right now we're kind of steering away from getting rentals just because we're trying to we're getting married in April. So we're kind of slowing down on that. We want to be out of a property more quickly, and we want to move into multifamily. So being able to shift the strategies you're doing has been very important for us to make sure we're kind of keeping up to date. Personally, as well as over investing,

what are you doing? How are you marketing for deals?

So we use the MLS, I got my real estate license, which which has helped tremendously because we save a lot on the commission and deals that might not necessarily work for someone will work for us. And then we can also make deal make offers way more quickly and analyze quickly. So we do MLS deals, we also go go door knocking, he does a lot of cold calling. Yeah.

Yeah. And then we work with wholesalers to

is there an area that you guys are focused on?

I mean, yeah, there's a couple zip codes that we like to focus on. But the bark is just so crazy right now that we don't really have the luxury of just identify one specific zip zip code. So, you know, we're open to really anything in Houston. As long as the numbers work in the streets, you know, desirable for someone that wants to buy it or lease it out, get it, evaluate as many deals as possible right now.

So gotcha. And what would you say are some of the what's some of the thought process that you go through on whether to decide to wholesale flip or burn?

So in the past, we would always, when we first started, we're like, okay, ever, we want to do burgers on anything we can, that's our strategy was to do it for recently, we've decided we want to do more flips in wholesales because we're trying to gain more capitals, so we can get into the multifamily. Honestly, doing a wholesale deal, and probably better just because you're in and out more quickly, you have less work less risk, and you're probably making around the same amount of money. So we can wholesale. That's kind of our first option. If we're making way more money on doing a flip, we would do that. But sometimes the numbers don't work for us where it would work for a more seasoned investor who has who's doing the work themselves and not using a general contractor, or who has been paying cash or he has different terms with their there are many lenders to make it work a little better as a flipper than it would for us.

How many of you hold on to

so he, yeah, six rentals. We've done three flips, and then we have done for wholesales. And then I have a couple of our contract right now. But I'm trying to move it's been difficult, but hopefully I can find a buyer for him. So

I'm and what are the rentals? Like they're all single family homes? Yeah. And are they I mean, they're all they're all positive cash flow?

Yeah, yeah. That's so when we learned one of the biggest things for us when we first got started was learning how to run the numbers accurately. So we always go into the buffer in there to make sure that we have money set aside for vacancy, you might set aside for maintenance. And then if we just get to keep that that's just an extra added bonus, but definitely positive cash flow.

Yeah. And our strategy is to only hold them for a year in a day, and then do a 1031 and use that capital gains to put it into another property, either multifamily or single family. So here we're looking to basically get in about a year or so.

So even even the ones that you're holding your plan is to only hold them for about a year. Correct. Gotcha. And is the you know, I know the Houston market is doing pretty well right now cuz it got kind of it was quite a bit of opportunity that came about because of Hurricane Harvey is still an appreciating market.

Yeah, so the different neighborhoods are definitely appreciating very quickly. Right now, it's really difficult to find deals just because there's just not that many houses for sale and everyone's looking for houses. So there's something listed on the MLS, and it's ARV which is after repair value is like 145. It's listed at 130. And people were paying like 150 for it. I don't know how they were making these words. Their homeowners are not but the markets definitely, definitely difficult to get deals right now.

Yes, we're. Oh, yeah, yeah, somebody I think I've seen a meme going around where Remember, you know, remember back in March, when it was really hard to find toilet paper? Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Yeah, yeah.

That's too funny.

It's like, it's, I don't know that it's bad, because I don't wish like ill, you know, things on other people. But with everything with the pandemic, it was kind of like, well, there's a decent likelihood that down the road, we're gonna see like a cascade of where people lost their job, and then finally couldn't pay for it, you know, and we're getting foreclosures or things are changing. And it doesn't seem like that really happened. And and that's probably a good thing. That means that like, maybe there was some regulatory stuff that helps people not lose their homes. I don't want to lose your homes. But you know, it was just it was one of those things that we were kind of expecting, and then just really did the opposite.

And speaking of foreclosures, like she just finished a book about auctions. So that'll be kind of our next step two, is to look at how we can buy the homes at auction. And maybe that's like a niche that not too many people are involved in so we'll probably try to dive into that after the after the wedding. So

gotcha. And I'm sorry, you guys were planning on getting married and then the pet And then a cat My apologies. Well, so what's, what's the plan there?

So we were supposed to get married July 4 of 2020. And honestly, it kind of was a blessing that we had to hold off, because we really got to dive into our real estate investing. And I don't think if we had pushed if we didn't push the wedding back, and I don't think we would have really jumped this as quickly and as deep as we did, that we push the wedding to April. So I think we're like 40 days or something away. So it's been crazy. But it's been fun.

It's exciting.

I will congratulations to you both. I can't I think I came over. I read this recently, but somebody was talking about the curse of weddings, and mainly the curse of expensive weddings, that people you know that when they don't do the math on a $50,000 wedding. And what you could do, you know, especially if you're a new couple who's trying to start a life together, what you could do with that $50,000 to jumpstart your life, you know, not to begrudge anybody a really nice wedding, we had a really gorgeous wedding. We didn't pay for we didn't pay for, you know, oiled? Yes. But it's just the sort of the thing, you know, you have to so you're asking yourselves that question is whether or not we would have done the same thing. Had we already had the wedding, you know, because now you're suddenly you've got a life together. And now Now it's time to start building it, you know, get a house and things like that, is that sort of kind of what you're talking about?

Yeah, so we just the wedding planning in general took up a lot of time. So pushing it back a year gave us more time to plan it. So it was more time to kind of jump into real estate. And so instead of going to cake tastings on the weekends, we were, but yes, also the money part of it. We also are very fortunate record to help us with the wedding. But it's just crazy thing if we took that money, and instead of having a having a wedding that lasted weekends, like how many houses could be, and we talked about that all the time, but we're very excited to have the wedding, very thankful that we're here to help them with the whole thing. But it's just like, wow, we could have really bought some some other house. And

speaking of that, you know, $50,000 if you if someone had $50,000 today that they could use to invest in something, what do you think that you would recommend that they do with it?

I think probably the birth strategy. You know, I think realistically, you could probably buy that, depending on your market, obviously, you know, 234 single family homes with 50,000. And even maybe have some leftover, you know, but I think the most important, you know aspect of it all is maybe having a mentor that can actually teach you how to do real estate, how to invest how to find the deals, because I mean, if you have the $1,000, you don't really know what you're doing, you'll probably lose it really fast. So maybe investing just a little bit in like a mentorship program. And then I would probably focus on the growth strategy for sure. One

of the things you love about the birth strategy is this the possibility of being able to recycle your capital, you know, you're you're forcing the appreciation to the property, you know, by improving it, and hopefully you can get most or all of your capital back.

Alright, so how much time do you think you guys are spending on this?

Oh, my God. So I wasn't going to the office, when this whole thing started, I was working from home. So now that I'm going back into the office, we'll wake up at like four or 5am we'll do work, we'll go to the gym. And then we do work probably for two to three hours in the morning before I go to office. And then during my lunch break, I take an hour and I'm doing real estate, and then we get home around five. And we're doing real estate until like 10 or 11 during the weekends. We're doing it all day every day. But yeah, it keeps us very busy. It takes a lot of time. So

I think I think after the wedding, we'll probably gonna try to build systems that will allow us to have more time to do other things like I mean we're both working full time and doing real estate full time you know, in the pandemic has slowed down a little bit but you know, we're we're at home so it's not like we would have been able to do many other things. So it's kind of it kind of worked out our favor but once things kind of slow down and then we want to make sure we have enough systems in place so that we can enjoy life as well. Right? Yeah,

yeah. So you can continue to to excel but not have that beat your entire life.

Yeah, and one of our hesitations to with doing systems beforehand was just wanting to prove to ourselves that we could do this whole real estate investing thing and make money from it before we started spending money more money on just like having systems in place. But now we're at the point where it's like if we want to, if we want to grow as much as we want to grow, we really need to automate a lot of things and we need to pay for it. So spend money make more money.

So that leads to my next question, if you could throw money at something to remove you from it, what would you be spending money on?

marketing?

Yeah, marketing lead generation for sure. I just spent a lot I'm on the phone, talking to potential clients that want to so talking to buyers all the time, like what you mentioned earlier, knocking on doors, you know, passing out cards, it's just a lot of time and we enjoy doing it. But I think there's a way that we can automate it or to spend a little bit of money on it. I think they'll definitely be for the business. Yeah.

Do you guys do letters or anything? We've tried. So we we've done letters, we do like a mailing campaign, we didn't have any responses from that. Well, we really have worked for us as cold calling, and actually going door knocking, because it's a lot easier for people to be rude to you over the phone or hang up on you, we're not going to hold someone but when you knock on someone's door, a lot of times they'll answer. And if you're standing there and you're like, a little bit likable, they're not going to be mean to you slam the door in your face. So definitely have a face the name has shown that that's worked for

you. And how do you start the conversation?

So if I'm, if I'm knocking on somebody's door, somebody's like, you know, hey, we're in the neighborhood, we just bought a house, a couple shoots over just wanted to stop by to see if there's maybe any interest in selling your home for cash or you know, anybody that'd be a cash offer. And that's it. I mean, some people like, think about it. Okay, well, here's our card, reach out without question to then know, I can always skip trace that address. So I'll you know, have my phone or tablet, I'll write down that specific address that showed a little bit of interest. And I'll follow up in a couple of days or a week and say, Hey, I got this, you know, that talk to you on Wednesday of last week. So they were slightly interested in just wanting to reach out to see if you know, it had any questions or if you're ready to move forward to have to do so. That's typically how the conversation goes.

Gotcha. Are you working off any kind of particular list? Are you just looking, you're just sort of driving for dollars and looking for places that look a little beaten up?

Yeah, so driving for dollars physically and virtually. So one of the things that I've done is, you know, when a house is posted, right, fixer upper was just posted online, I'll get an email and I'll actually drive that same shirt. And so in doing that, I know that one best was like bay area they already spent money in to that area may be turning. And so kind of gotten some luck doing that. So I'll drive down that street, that particular street or around the corner, buying houses that are distressed, and then just call and have the conversation to see if there should have cash offer.

So gotcha. Are there any apps or any sort of is any software thing you using to sort of helping your business?

Yeah, I was using the deal machine now a little bit. But it was kind of getting confusion confusing, because I had my own Excel spreadsheet that I was using deal machine. And so I just kind of scrapped it and just have my own Excel doc. But like, like I said, after the wedding, we'll probably have software, we can just kind of have everything, we can kind of see everything in one view. So if you have any apps that you'd recommend or any software

for that,

I used, I use deal machine for a little while as well. I use Trello a little bit as kind of a processes set up I can sort of as I start to do something I try to document or what I'm doing, I'll use a software called loom l o m comm which allows you to sort of do a quick screen recordings, and then you can post it's like your own little personal YouTube. And so if I'm, if I'm trying, if I'm going through a process that I know, eventually I'm going to want to try and get somebody else to do. I tried to document what it is that I do, and the process as best I can. And then delegate document.

We have a couple of other podcast episodes that deal with people who use a lot of like virtual assistants, so people in you know other countries to to do a lot of different things for them. And that might be something since you guys do a lot of speaking to Pete like actually having conversations with people that might be a part of your process that you can bring someone in and Neal bawa is the main one that talks about really goes through detailed on how he finds people and you know, his process for, you know, he has someone who's his like head person, and she like has his bank account number and stuff. So he's like, basically, you know, created this team, and he has created these relationships. And so anyway, it's a it's a cool episode. And it might be something that that would be helpful for you guys because you can only use so many, you know, just like apps or things for some things, but for what you guys are doing with the wholesaling piece or you know, trying to buy in that that way you really need, like an actual person probably.

Yeah, no, definitely check that podcast out for sure. Yeah.

And so you would say this is right now this is pretty much like a second job. Yeah, yeah. Okay, for both of you, are you both putting in about 40? An additional 40 hours a week?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we enjoy it, right. We want to do it for you. But it's just not something that we want to do forever, right? I mean, if we can just put systems in place that, you know, at least cut the time in half, like I said, we still enjoy it. We want to be actively involved in the business. I think it'll just kind of free up time to focus on other other aspects of the business. So

it's awesome. Can you tell us why you no longer do renovations in the dark?

Oh, sure. We got our rental property, one of our first rental properties, and I it was nighttime, we were showing my parents like the night before the tenant moved in or whatever, like, look up, cool. It looks whatever. So exciting. So what it looked like before is it looked like after, and I wanted to change mailbox out. And so I was very adamant about changing mailbox out. So my dad standing there, and he's like shaking the old mailbox. And he's standing and he shaking it trying to pull it out of the ground. And he's like, Oh, my God, I had the answer all over me. So he is sitting there in the middle, the street starts taking his pants off. He started getting his cowboy boots on to you're standing on the street with his cowboy boots, these ants all over his legs. No. They're inside his cowboy boots. It was horrible. So you take his boots off. We're like, Okay, fine. We'll come back later, when we will change mailbox and on the way back to our house. He's like falling over in the front seat. And he's driving. And he's like, I don't feel so good. And my dad has like, never doesn't feel good. Like he doesn't ever show emotion like this very, like straight at baseline. And so he's like, I really don't feel good. And we need to pull over. I'm all sitting in the front seat. She's a physician's assistant, so kind of knows what's going on. And she's like, Oh, it's okay, whatever. So he pulls out a report a parking lot. And I get out of car and I want to call the police cuz my dad this point is like not answering questions and stuff. So I run on the street and calling the police. I'm like, I need an ambulance. I've no idea where I am. So I'm on the phone with him and I get back. And it is my dad's like on the street laying or on the street in the parking lot. Thank God he was there to pull this man up my dad out of the car because I don't know how long I would have gotten out of the car. They call my mom was there because she knew what position to put them in like what to do. She was talking to the ambulance people saying okay, we need epi we need all this other stuff because you're asking me all these questions and I have no idea. Anything out and I'm like screaming like Where are you guys? I've never seen this before. Ambulance shows up and think all they should have when they did because he was my mom said that his like heartstopper jumping? Because he's allergic to x went to the hospital that night was tragic. It was during COVID so no one could go back into the ER anything. Oh my god. It was a horrible so we don't do any renovations at night because you standing in a pile. But he's fine. And now we joke about it. It's great, but it was it was

terrifying. Yeah, it was crazy.

I was sitting there screaming on the phone. Where's the ambulance yelling at that? Oh

my god. That can't be a common allergy. I mean, like everyone like makes you itchy but like that extreme like an electric shock allergy

where the fire ants.

I don't even know. An epi pen now. Wow. Everything happened really well. So like he was there to pull them out of car. My mom was there. He didn't know what to do are called the ambulance. Like everything just lined up super well. If it hadn't, I don't know if it would it yeah, it might have been way worse.

I'm glad he's okay, lesson. Lesson learned don't renovate the dark in areas where there's, you know, aggressive insects.

I was expecting I was like to get hit by like a black widow or a brown reckless or something. I was like,

that's a joke. She's like, Oh my god, I was gonna take it out. Right. Like it wasn't even cool. Like, that's a running joke now.

Well, I'm glad he's I'm glad he's okay. So you You did a paid you did a paid mentorship to, to learn correct?

Yeah, yeah, we did. It was a shorter shoot like weekend course. And we really did that to kind of learn how to run the numbers. And so that the biggest takeaway from that was how to run the numbers and be confident with that.

So and give us a quick, you know, I mean, I sort of know the answer this, but for you know, somebody who's kind of new and maybe, you know, what are some of the key things you're looking for when you're trying to run the numbers on a property.

So you want to know the air. The biggest thing is what's the ARV because that's what you're the hard money lenders going to lend on ARV again is the after repair value. So it's the first thing you need to know. You know, if you're doing the burst strategy, you know, what the rents gonna be? Is this going to actually cash flow for you? And then you need to know taxes? If there's an HOA, basically, what are your monthly expenses? missing one more? Oh, what's your renovation budget? So how much is this going to take to fix that? So once Have all those numbers, you can calculate what's your ROI, which is your return on investment, you can calculate what your unrealized capital gain is your return on capital, then you can calculate all these different numbers, if you want to calculate to realize that this is a big deal, but those are the things that you need to have first in order to calculate everything.

And don't forget holding costs.

No, well, yes, that was one of our lessons learned is what's your holding costs while you're rehabbing it? How much money? Are you paying for utilities? How much your money anything for interest? How much are you paying on taxes, all the other stuff? Because that will that will drastically change your numbers?

Just it's Well, I

mean, we have so you can't do this from just anywhere in the world. Correct.

You're not doing any virtual wholesaling, correct?

No, we were not done. One. We helped a buddy move a single family home in Detroit. But we typically only focus on Houston, because it's there's so many homes here, so many buyers here and investors so that we just focus here, you know, if we felt like we if we needed to I'm sure we could do it virtually. But we don't we don't really feel that we need to do that. Yeah. So

I think it was before the interview, you said that you guys are looking to move into like a small multifamily situation. Are you going to be staying there in the Houston area for that?

Yep. Yep. Yep. And so my mentor will actually end and he's actually going to partner with us and kind of hold on. Yeah, hold our hand for the first couple. So yeah, it'll be it'll be in the scenario.

So you guys, in addition to learning, you guys have started actually teaching a little bit of what you've learned as well. Is that correct? Yes. So can you tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of what you're what you're teaching people to do?

Yeah, so we have two different things we do, we do have a weekend course, where you kind of learn everything we know. We show you every all the processes, we gave you the different templates with everything. So you can run your own numbers, teach you the questions to ask to build your team, basically, you get a step by step from A to Z on how to do a burr flip, or a wholesale, whatever strategy it is that you want to learn about, or that we kind of decide on the best strategy for you to kind of start with. And then we have a mentorship program, which is like a hand holding and worship program. And we literally hold your hand from start to finish. So we have a couple mentees doing that. And we literally help you build your team. Or if you're in the Houston area, just get our team. And by working with us, a lot of our contracts will give you like discounts and stuff because you're in the program, we've kind of established connections with them. And then we help you find the deal, analyze the deal. Get bids for the contractors refinance, basically, the whole process, so someone's there, along with you kind of makes it a less, less scary.

I always tell people, if you have doubts, and you almost always do when you're starting off, you know, just fine tag along with somebody who you know, who knows what they're doing, who's at least been through it a couple of times? Because you're never you never know what you don't know until you've been through it at least once or twice. Is there anything about wholesaling burring or flipping that people underestimate the difficulty of

it, I think, I think finding the deal is incredibly hard. And it's tough to find a good deal. And so if if you're a newbie, and you know, you'd have to try to figure out how to find the deal and been trying to analyze it, if you have, if you don't have a mentor, you don't have anybody that can help you like, it can be very challenging with talking to lenders and knowing what points are and how to calculate the point in the interest. And, you know, I think after you've done it for a little bit of time, it's easy, but you know, everything going on, and if you're working a full time job and trying to figure out it was even get very complicated. So I definitely think having a mental payoff for sure. And maybe finding a niche, right, maybe try to focus on one or two things at a time, as opposed to trying to do everything will definitely help out.

And you guys have you're sort of carving out a little bit of a niche for yourselves. Because Anthony, you're a former football player and you've actually some of your some of your partners have been pro football players correct. I always tell people you know whether or not you're you're a doctor or an airline pilot or a professional football player, if that is like the primary way that you're earning money is you might be better off just focusing on what it is your core competency and letting someone else rather than trying to learn how to be a house flipper and you know, be a outstanding professional football player or doctor you know, find a way to invest Fido find a way to invest passively with somebody who's got the time and knowledge and expertise

is that exactly i mean obviously with our investors we want to teach them as much as we can, but they just are so busy with you know aptitude the bit athletics and camp and games and films that That, you know, we want to make sure that they are comfortable obviously investing with us, they obviously know that we have a trust that we know we're doing. We want to teach them as much as we possibly can, at a high level. But yeah, I think you're exactly right, like focus on football and basketball will handle the investing. Will will give you a call, we find another deals. So

I think this last question. Okay. All right. I'm curious. This is on my mind, because we're writing like a blog freebie thing. What is your guy's like, end goal? or Why are you doing this.

So end goal is basically to have multifamily properties, I would love to build like a high rise and a really luxurious high rise. So the reason why we're doing those things, I want to make sure we have the time and the freedom to spend time with our family. So we are making cash flow, if we want to keep building we can, but we have enough cash to cover our expenses coming in every month. And there's a bunch of other benefits with real estate investing as well like tax benefits, etc. But the reason why is because we want to make I want to be at every single soccer game, I want to be every single Valentine's Day party, every everything that my kids are doing, and I want to spend time with him, as opposed to nine to five and then getting to enjoy the evenings after you're exhausted from a full day of work. So and I wouldn't love doing this, it's this is really fun for us, we get to do it together. And it doesn't feel like work. It's very exciting. So I want to do something I love make money, making money in a way that I love doing it. And then also just have time to do what we want to do.

Okay, so are you, you know, the strategy you're doing right now you're, you're doing a high volume of deals right now. Are you trying to sort of build yourself a capital stack?

Yeah, so we set a goal to make $100,000 in three months. So we could basically build our savings up. So we had we felt comfortable with that's it. That's our savings goal. And so we did that we were doing wholesale splits to reach that goal. And now we really want to focus on like the rental portfolio part right having multifamily. So the rental portfolio will basically be our cash flow. So we have our monthly expenses covered, but we also have this savings account that should anything happen. Absolutely the fallback.

Well, Anthony and Sarah, thank you so much for sharing with us today. You've got you've got your Instagram account, which looks fantastic. I may hire you to do ours.

Don't have time.

That's true. If any of our listeners want to reach out to you and find out more about what it is you're doing, what would be the best way for them to do that.

Instagram is probably the best. It's the gear dot real estate.

It's just it's Garr dot real estate, correct?

Yeah. Ga IR dot real estate.

Yep. All right. Well

about in the show notes. Thanks for chatting with us today.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, we enjoyed it. You guys have a great day. You too. Okay, that was Anthony Garr and Sarah Wits from Gary. Real estate on Instagram, I highly recommend you go and check out their feed. She does a really great job of of making it cohesive feed.

Why do you assume it's her?

She said it was her. Okay.

I missed that. It does have a feminine quality to it. It's really pretty this way pretty. Do you have a lesson learned?

Yes. Don't forget to estimate holding costs. A lot of people when they're buying a burger or a flipper or whatever, you forget to calculate the amount of money it's going to take you to hold it. We actually did a pretty good job on our first deal. doing that, but you always you know, it's it's a little hard to figure out you got to figure out you know, what's, what's your cost of money, are you spending money on interest, you got to turn on the water, you got to turn the electricity, you know, you got to pay the taxes during that period, you know, insurance, all those things, a lot of people kind of forget about that. So don't forget to factor in holding costs, especially if you're doing a flip. If you're doing Berg you know, I mean you can it may mean you leave a bit more money in the deal. If you forget but if you forget a flip, you're gonna lose money.

I think the idea of if you've got some money into them to invest and you really don't know what you're doing to invest a little bit of that into a mentorship. It's a it is a great way to make sure that you know what you're doing so you can avoid some of those mistakes and just get you know, you don't have to spend a lot of money on good mentorship for you know, kind of a burger and, and flipping and wholesaling. While time intensive don't have to be super complicated in a lot of ways if you have the systems or you know the team in place. So working with someone that already has some of those things can make it just that much easier to get Started

money, how much money to take him to get started?

That is on the other pieces my paper. So

sorry, I just happened to have flipped over to that piece of paper, okay $6,000. They the first deal was had an ARV of $145,000, they bought it for 93, they put about 100. And sorry, they put about 15,000 into it. All of that was through a hard money lender. And that $6,000 was basically their holding costs. So that's, I think that's a great first deal. And they said it was the easiest one. So

first time's a charm, all right.

knowledge he paid for, they paid for a mentorship. And they really just did. You know, they said just kind of a weekend boot camp is what they did. But I think it allowed them to network with somebody who continues to mentor them, because they kept on mentioning that. And then as far as the knowledge that she said was really important for them to come away with was just how to how to analyze a deal. From the ARV to the rehab costs to the holding costs, all those things, it's really

circles back around, how did they know those because they did a week, in course, there's

and it also, it's something people should be doing on a regular basis, you should if you have an interest in this, you should be finding an online calculator. BiggerPockets has one, there's other ones that are totally free, I think bigger pockets, you got to pay for a membership to have access to it. But just analyze deals just you know, create a spreadsheet for yourself, whatever it takes to just constantly be looking at a deal and so that you can get to the point where you can very quickly look at a deal and know whether or not that's going to work for what you're trying to do time might not be on the right page.

Alright, so time, it's a another full time job for them right now. Currently,

they're young, they're working from home, they don't have kids, not, you know, not that doesn't mean they're hard workers, they're obviously both highly motivated. And, but I can I can speak from experience that once you have kids and and you get to be a little older, you don't have quite that much energy.

Well, also, I mean, when you have another person, you have to spend time with set other person and like beat them and stuff. But you know, their goal is to reduce those. And I think you know, that's something that you can keep in to keep in mind, if you have less time that you may need to have a bigger team have a deeper mentorship with someone that has the systems already put into place to make it a little bit less time consuming. There was another word that is active active, that's the word a little bit more active, you know, someone that can help you can help you pacify some of that a little bit, which is their goal, but they have the opportunity of youth and stuff. I don't even know how well they might be.

They look pretty. Yeah. location. Is this something that they could do from anywhere in the world?

Not the way they're doing it right now. I mean, they could go to another city and do this, but they also can't, you know, when we ask that question, we look at it in two different ways. One, they're specifically working in Houston. They're not doing a lot of deals from Houston and different places, you know, long distance wise, they could go to other areas and do that. And they could do a little bit more long distance, but they're probably not going to be able to travel for a significant amount of time. And still have this be successful without said systems. Okay, once again,

that was Anthony Garr and Sarah Wits from Gary, real estate on Instagram, I highly recommend you go check them out. We're doing this all again next week.

Let's hit the road by

Hey, before you go. If you liked the show, we would be delighted if you'd head over to pod chaser and leave us an honest review. And do let us know why you like the show how long you've been listening, and in particular what you find really useful or entertaining. And let us know if there's anything you think we should change. Also, if you have specific questions about real estate investing, especially self storage or short term rentals, shoot us an email at info at road to family freedom calm, and we'll be happy to answer your question on the show. We might even turn it into an entire episode. Thanks for listening. We're doing this all again next week. Until then Safe travels on your road to financial freedom.

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In this episode, we talked to Anthony and Sarah about how they got into their First birth property for Sorry, I didn't read ahead.

Who are you?

We already did that.

If she's a magician, then she can put that in. Alright. I'm Brittany. And I Neal. And this is the route of Am I right? I'm

by

sure question.

No, go ahead. Just

We do this every once a while. Sorry.

I have not been on an interview in a little while because we have a six year old and so a lot of times I'm like doing homeschool with him or trying to make that work. So sorry, our bar like, yeah, yeah. All right. So that was our child. He went he took the dog for a walk and there's no poop bags. Like she poked in the neighbor's yard and I can't pick it up. He's very concerned. He wants to be like a good neighbor. Which is great but like to wait.

Okay.