David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show, 745.

Henry:
I love, obviously love house hacking as a strategy and oftentimes when I’m talking to investors, the main objection that I hear is, “I don’t want to share walls.” Or, “My spouse, I can’t. I’m not going to get my spouse to share walls.” Or, “I don’t want to live next door to my tenants.”
I’m living in my dream house right now because I bought a house hack for two years. Two years of uncomfortability, one year of uncomfortability could change the trajectory of your life. Do you want to be wealthy or do you want to be comfortable? And if you want to be comfortable, why are you even here?

David:
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Podcast here today with my co-host, Rob Abasolo and Henry Washington as we break into the most important phenomenally underrated strategy you cannot afford to miss in 2023. Yes, that’s right. We are talking about house hacking.
Today, we’re going to cover what you always need to keep in mind if you’re house hacking, and how things might have changed in 2023 causing you to look at this a little bit differently. We get into affordability, risk, cash flow, why experts are doing this, why more experts should be doing this. And for those of you with capital and experience, make sure you tune in because I think everyone should be house hacking throughout the real estate investing journey. I know I do. And so do others like James Dainard, Brandon Turner, Mindy Jensen, Rob Abasolo, Henry Washington, and more.
Today’s quick tip. Don’t just house hack, adopt house hacking as a mindset. There are a lot of ways that you can find expenses in your life and you can either eliminate them or turn them into income. I was blown away the first time that I heard Amazon would do this, is they would literally look at their expense sheet and say, “What do we spend money on? Well, we’re spending a lot of money for servers to host our thing. Well, why don’t we start our own company where we have our own servers and then hey, we can rent them out to other companies that need them.” That’s a company that became AWS.
That mindset, that way of looking at expenses and asking, “How can I turn them into income?” Can change your financial situation for the future. Train yourself now to start thinking like that.
Today’s show, we’re going to get into three things, we’re going to cover in today’s show and more. Why house hacking in 2023 is one of your best options? Both the benefits and the opportunity that you may not be thinking about. How you can get started and why this is not something just for beginners? Why you shouldn’t be stopping at just one or two?
House hacking isn’t just about houses, it can unlock capital everywhere. All right, Rob, Henry, anything you guys want to say before we get into the show?

Rob:
I think this is one of those episodes that spouses are going to send to their spouse and they’re going to say, “See? See? Rob, Henry and David said to do it, we got to do it.” And I think a lot of people will kind of change their tune on their stance on this.

Henry:
I agree. I think you hit the nail on the head when you kicked us off by saying, “Underrated.” I can’t reiterate that enough how underrated of a strategy this is and people do, they stick their nose up at it either because they’re experienced and don’t think they need to do that anymore or because they don’t want to deal with some of the uncomfortability or inconveniences that come with it. But I’m telling you, stick around and hear us out. This is something we all need to continue to do.

David:
Yes, sir. And you need to understand the cost of not doing this. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars if not, millions of dollars in money that you could be making and saving in the future. And Rob tells a story about how his first deal turned into his first house hack, which turned into a million dollar empire that he’s sitting on now built at the feet of real estate.
And after your spouse does listen to this and they finally agree and the weight is lifted off your shoulders and the two of you are approaching real estate together and you’re full of gratitude, simply DM me on Instagram for my mailing address and you can send me the gift that you no doubt will want to, after they listen to this show.
All right, let’s get into it.
All right, welcome my friends, Rob and Henry to our show today. We are going to dive into probably the most oatmeal bran muffin, boring strategy in real estate yet by far my favorite strategy. I cannot stop talking about it. I’m an evangelist for this. I do long distance investing. I do BRRRR investing. I do short-term rental investing. I do multifamily. I do commercial. I do all of it and I still can’t stop preaching the gospel of house hacking. It’s just way too good.
So house hacking for those that have been living under rock and haven’t heard, is turning your house into an investment property. Basically it’s taking the place you live and using it to journey income. There is a host of benefits to using it and we are going to talk about why 2023 is your year to house hack. Rob, what’s your thoughts on this?

Rob:
I am a big fan of house hacking. I have said for many years that I attribute all of the wealth that I’ve ever built, because of house hacking, because I was able to really sacrifice the short-term comfort for long-term gain.
I shared my space with strangers, with friends. I’ve rented, I’ve Airbnb’ed tiny homes on my property, little studios. I’ve mingled with people. I’ve had awkward conversations with people, but all in all, the rent that I’ve been paid from house hacking has saved me from ever paying a mortgage and I could not be more grateful for this niche in real estate.

David:
Awesome, man. Henry, what about you?

Henry:
Man. House hacking literally changed my life. I have multiple long-term rental properties and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, that I am literally sitting here right now in my dream home that we bought because we were able to house hack for two years.
I can also tell you that, even if I had never bought a single other rental property for my portfolio, I still could have got into this property and lived here and afford to live here just because of the house hack I did alone, changed my life.

David:
That’s awesome, man. Now, house hacking helps you in so many ways, one of which is it covers your housing costs, why you’re trying to break into real estate investing. So few investors understand how important it’s to actually manage their own money, have a budget, track your expenses, know where your money’s going to be going. They just think, “No, no. I want to buy real estate estate so that I can spend money on whatever I want.” And it rarely ever works out like that.
When you start tracking your income, one of the first things that you’ll find is your biggest expense is housing, right? So it’s very common to get these books about saving your way to being a millionaire over 700 years of putting your money in the stock market and it’ll grow. The problem is that whole save a cup of coffee every day, don’t spend five bucks model. It’s such a small chunk of your income that if we were Methuselah and lived to be 900, that might actually work. By the time you hit four or 500 years old, you’d have a lot of money, but we die before that. There needs to be something more aggressive.
Eliminating your biggest expense, your housing allowance is a far, far sounder and wiser way to get money saved so that you can get into real estate. And the problem is when you don’t house hack, you’re giving up more than just what the property is going to be worth. You’re giving up all the future properties that you would’ve made.
See, real estate works in this exponentially progressive manner, whereas snowball forms. You get your first deal, you create equity, you pull the equity out, you buy three more. Those get even more cash flow, you save that and equities growing, you reinvest the cash flow, you reinvest the equity. Now, you went from one to three to eight and it exponentially grows.
That’s why you hear people like us that have been investing for five to 10 years that are having conversations that are, it just seems so easy to us. Well, it wasn’t when we were starting. It’s hard for every snowball to pick up steam when you first get started. When you don’t house hack, you’re giving up the future 10, 20, 30 years down the road of tens of millions of dollars that real estate will build for you.
There’s several ways that you can get involved. There’s the low down payment options. This is probably why I like it the most, it requires less money. FHA loans or you put 3.5% down if you’re having trouble coming up at the rehab and you can find a contractor that’ll work with it. There’s a 203(k) loan, which is like an extension to an FHA loan where you can borrow a 97 and a half percent of the construction cost as well.
And when you’re only putting down a small amount of money, this is why I think it’s even better than BRRRR when you can pull it off. The value of BRRRR is that you get your money back out of the deal. Well, if you only put three and a half percent into the deal, there’s nothing to get out. You don’t need to go through all the headache of finding this fixer upper property and going through a construction and hoping the appraisal comes in.
Doing all the things we do to make real estate work, it’s easy. You just buy the best house in the best area that you can afford with as much money as you can get pre-approved for and put as little down as possible and boom, you’re started with real estate investing. Anyone can do it, people can do it, families can do it.
If you want to get investing in real estate, but your spouse isn’t completely on board, you can often get them into this as opposed to, “Let’s go put 25% down on a $500,000 house. Let’s take our whole a hundred thousand dollars nest egg.” Dump it in one property and hope that it works out, versus, “Yeah, let’s just take out of that a hundred thousand dollars to buy a $500,000 property. We only need about 17 grand, 17,500.” That’s a much easier pill to swallow than the full a hundred thousand dollars.
So that’s what I think about it. Do each of you have anything you want to share on just how people should be looking at house hacking in 2023?

Rob:
Well, what I like about house hacking is that you can get very creative with it. So when you talk about what the actual definition of house hacking is, it’s renting a room or a space or a unit on your property to subsidize your mortgage. That’s ultimately what it boils down to.
And so a lot of people will say, “Well, I don’t really want to. I don’t want a stranger in my house living with me. I don’t think I can do it.” I think I’ve got some thoughts around that. I think Henry does too, but you don’t have to let people live in your house.
When I bought my house in LA, it had a 279 square foot apartment studio underneath it, and I Airbnb’ed that studio for a long time and then I rented that to a long-term tenant. I never had to see those guests or those tenants, and they subsidized 50 to 75% of my mortgage, of my $4,400 mortgage. And then I built a tiny house in my backyard, and again, that’s not connected to my home. I would see guests walking in and out of that house, but there are just so many ways you can break into it.
I talked about this on another episode where I actually rented an Airbnb, that was an Airstream in someone’s backyard that they craned back there and they were charging a hundred bucks a night and that subsidized their mortgage. So you can get super creative with it and depending on how introverted or extroverted or social you are, I think you can sort of adjust what house hacking means for you.

David:
All right. Henry, let’s move to you. What are some ways that people can get started if they want to get into house hacking?

Henry:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think the best way, what I like about what Rob said is you’re absolutely right, you can get creative. But the best way to get started is obviously you need to find a place that you’re going to want to live and house hack.
So it’s all about that property search and it’s all about, to me, it’s about getting creative because if you don’t want to live in the same direct home as somebody else, then you look for a duplex, quadplex, multifamily. If you don’t want to live in a duplex, quadplex, multifamily, you can look for properties that have mother-in-law suites or in-law quarters or some sort of other detached type of living situation.
So whatever your comfort level is, there is probably a property out there that will fit your comfort level and needs. You just have to be diligent and smart and creative about how you’re searching and what you’re searching for. So it’s about that open communication with your real estate agent who’s helping you to look, setting up the right keywords with your searches.
I was fortunate enough that my house hack was a whole separate house behind mine, so didn’t have to share the walls. And then what Rob said is also true. The true definition is just monetizing that house to subsidize your mortgage. And so people hear house hack and they go, “I don’t want to be next to my tenants.” Or, “I don’t want to share walls.” But that doesn’t have to be the case. Just like Rob said, you can also look at something like, I call them super short-term rentals.
You can look at something like a platform like Peerspace, where you just rent maybe a room that you’ve curated to look a certain way or maybe an office or some other small space, where you can rent that space by the hour to somebody who wants to come in and shoot a commercial or a video or all kinds of things. People look for curated spaces for hourly rates.
There’s even ways where you can just ranked out random space in your garage for other people to store their stuff. There’s so many ways to house hack. So being able to find a property that fits your comfort level and your needs, is huge.

Rob:
Yeah. I think there’s a website called Rooster. I don’t know if they’re still in business but, and it is basically Airbnb for storage where you say, “Hey, I got a whole garage. Come put your storage into my garage and pay me $75 a month.” Or something like that.
And I was like, “Man, they’ve really thought of everything.” You can really rent out anything in your house, and it probably makes sense. They’re going to start renting out fridge space here pretty soon, I feel.

David:
I’ve had clients that bought a house with us and they’ve rented out the pool in their backyard. People would pay 150 bucks for two hours to go swim laps or teach their kid how to swim. I’ve seen people put little mini putting greens in their backyard and people will pay to go back there and use that. They’ll rent out the RV access and someone will pay a couple hundred bucks, kind of like a mobile home park to put a trailer back there.
As we were talking, Henry, I was thinking about how there’s people that will teach, make 200 cold calls or drive around for seven hours looking at houses and mail a letter to someone with a shabby yard, but they’re not willing to look on Zillow for a property that has more bedrooms or more space in the backyard that they could use. Unfinished square footage that could be very easily converted. I think house hacking is, it’s the one of those things that’s so obvious that you just look right over it.
Now, it can’t be that easy, it has to be harder. Let me go try to find something that’s more difficult. What do you guys think about… Oh, no, first, Henry tell us about your Washington Wealthy Walls principle.

Rob:
The WWWP.

Henry:
WWWP. So we here at the WWWP, our firm believers in that wealth is not built inside of your comfort zone. No one ever builds wealth in a comfort zone. You’ve got to get at least a little uncomfortable if you want to start building wealth.
I love, obviously love house hacking as a strategy and oftentimes when I’m talking to investors, the main objection that I hear is, “I don’t want to share walls.” Or, “My spouse, I can’t. I’m not going to get my spouse to share walls.” Or, “I don’t want to live next door to my tenants.” And those things are or can be viewed as minor inconveniences.
Why are you looking into a way to build wealth? To replace your income, replace your job, get to financial freedom. These are tall tasks, life-changing tasks. And you’re concerned about sharing a wall for a short period of time? Are you kidding me? You’ve got to get a little uncomfortable. Who cares if you have to share?
I’m living in my dream house right now because I bought a house hack for two years. Two years of uncomfortability, one year of uncomfortability could change the trajectory of your life. Do you want to be wealthy or do you want to be comfortable? And if you want to be comfortable, why are you even here?

David:
That’s a great point. Rob, one of the big issues in 2023 that we’re all struggling with, is affordability. Sellers don’t want to drop their prices to the point that we think it’s a great deal as a buyer, but interest rates are so high that even as prices come down a little bit, they’re still not at a point where they’re going to cash flow really strong or sometimes at all. So there’s a bit of a stalemate. What do you think about house hacking in 2023 as a solution to this affordability standoff?

Rob:
Personally, I think that house hacking is the most important pivot that real estate investors can start to consider for 2023 because you’re right, things are really expensive, and now I do think that sellers are starting to drop prices a little bit, but even with that, the interest rates are still really high. So even if a seller drops their price $50,000, interest rates being what they are, still makes that a relatively expensive place to live, relative to what it was a year ago.
And so I think people now, are at this standpoint, that at the fork in the road, “Do I want to live in a house and sacrifice a little bit of comfort?” Or, “Do I want to keep renting?” And I think for the people in the former group who are willing to rent a room to subsidize the mortgage, it can effectively make it significantly more affordable.
Let’s say that you’re talking about a $3,000 mortgage, that a year ago might have been $2,300 with lower interest rates. Well, if you’re willing to sacrifice some of that comfort and you can get a house, that you can rent a room out for a thousand dollars, now, you effectively have subsidized it to where it is a little bit more normal to what prices were a year ago.
So I think people really have to start opening their minds to this, especially for the people that are very impatient and have been waiting a long time to get into a home and are really frustrated with the interest rates. We got to do things that make us a little uncomfortable to get ahead.
Just like Henry was saying, “Do you want to be uncomfortable? Do you want to be wealthy?” And I think most people that are in this space and that are listening to this podcast right now, I think we all have the similar mindset that we want to build wealth.

David:
Yeah. And I think there’s a huge contingency of people listening to this right now who’ve got some money saved up, who’ve been waiting for the market to crash. They want to buy real estate. They know that they don’t want to be a renter forever. They’ve already committed to that. They don’t know when. “When do I jump in?” It’s like game of Double Dutch and you’re like, “Urgh.” You’re waiting, you’re watching that rope go. You’re trying to time it, but it never quite feels like the right moment. And then oftentimes the market can take off on you before you realize what happened and you’re like, “Oh, that was my window right when I blinked.”
One thing I love about it is the hesitation that you get to buy real estate when you’re not sure what the market’s going to do is you feel like, “I got one shot.” You’re Eminem. It’s the beginning of eight mile. You’re sitting there with vomit on your sweater, you’re super nervous. You’re like, “I only get one chance to go crush this.” And that’s massive pressure.
When you’re house hacking, you take that a hundred thousand dollars, $50,000 savings, whatever it is that you’ve earned over time. And you only have to spend a small chunk of it. You are decreasing your risk and preventing yourself from spending your entire nest egg on one deal at the wrong time. Instead of spending the whole hundred grand, you’re spending 17,000 of it, which you could save back again over a period of time.
So that it’s not like it’s the end of the world if you jumped in too soon. It’s better that you actually got the property. And then when you’re extending that over the next 30 years, there was no perfect time. The perfect time was 30 years ago. When you’re looking at it in the moment, you’re really trying to get the timing right. When you’re looking at it over a longer period of time, it doesn’t matter quite as much.
And so when you’re house hacking, you’re reducing your risk of even buying in at the wrong time, because you still have a lot of capital for it to buy another one next year to buy another one next year, versus when you’re going in there trying to buy that perfect Airbnb, you got to put 25% down on the deal, then you got to dump the money into furnishing it. You can run out of cash. Rob, what say you?

Rob:
Well, let me ask you this, David. If you’re going the FHA route and you’re putting down three and a half percent, can you tell me a little bit how often can you do that? What does the FHA guideline say? Can you buy a house every year or is it every two years?

David:
You can buy a house every single year, but you can only have one FHA loan at a time.

Rob:
Okay.

David:
So you’ll get an FHA loan, you’ll put three and a half percent down. The next year you’ll just use a 5% down like a regular conventional loan, and then maybe you can refinance out of the FHA, when you have more equity and then use the FHA on a future deal. And this is so important in 2023 because we don’t know what the market’s going to do. That’s what I’m getting at. It could go down. It could go up. There is no sound advice we can tell you guys because no one knows.
We don’t know what the fed’s going to do. We don’t know what the Biden administration’s going to do. We don’t know what the next president administration’s going to do. But we know that if you don’t buy real estate at all, you never actually get out of your situation. So this to me is like the perfect medium.
You don’t want to spend all your money and hope that you bought in at the right time, but you don’t want to do nothing and just keep watching as life gets away from you. So you reduce your risk by taking on more discomfort just like Henry said. You rent out rooms to people, maybe you got to deal with some noisy walls, you learn the fundamentals of real estate, but you put as little down as possible to get as much real estate as you can.

Rob:
I mean, ultimately my personal belief for house hacking, it’s not about printing money and making gobs of cash. I just genuinely feel that house hacking is about getting out of your mortgage, because the faster you can get out of paying for your mortgage, the faster you can start saving that money and compounding it over time.
So if you’re able to get into a home, let’s say that $3,000 mortgage example I was talking about earlier, and you’re able to get two or three roommates in that home that pay your $3,000 mortgage, what have you done? You have saved yourself $36,000 a year that you would not have otherwise, and now you can use that $36,000 to invest in real estate, in some other capacity.
And we just did an episode, I don’t know if it’s aired yet, that talks about how to get into real estate for $10,000. 36,000 bucks, you can do all the things we talked about three times, three and a half times.

Henry:
I’m so glad you brought that up, Rob, because that was exactly where I was going to go next. I talk about house hacking changed my life and it did, but what really changed my life was the amount of money that I was intentional about saving because I didn’t have to spend it on the mortgage.
We actually took what we were currently paying in our mortgage before we bought that house and put that up against what we then had to pay or not have to pay by doing the house hacking. And we were intentional about continuing to make that mortgage payment we were used to making. We just made it to ourselves in a savings account, and we could watch that money grow. And as we watched that money grow, it triggered the chemicals in your brain that want to continue to see that grow, and so every time we found some extra money, we were throwing it in the savings account.
Just by doing that house hacking and seeing that money grow, it helped us to get more creative with more saving, that helped us save up the money that we could then use to invest in another property. So it’s really, yes, house hacking is a phenomenal strategy, but if you’re not intelligent or diligent about the savings that the house hacking provides, then you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.

Rob:
Yeah, it’s basically meaningless at that point, right?

David:
All right. So we’re all on board with house hacking as the best strategy that we can think of in 2023. It’s a combination of the lowest risk and the highest returns. It also sets you up to buy more real estate in the future, hopefully when the market crashes and we all want to jump in.
Now, you’ve got all this money set aside that you’ve been able to save from the examples that Henry and Rob both provided. So when it comes to getting started, Henry, what are some things that people need to know about underwriting the deal, what it looks like to get your first property? Et cetera.

Henry:
Yeah. I mean, if you’re shopping for a home, people are very familiar with shopping for the home process. It’s very similar. You’re just shopping for a home that’s going to meet your particular house hacking requirements. So you need to connect with a real estate agent, preferably one who’s either worked with investors before or understands the concepts of house hacking, so that they’re sending you deals that make sense to kind of save you the time of waiting through lots of listings that aren’t going to make sense for you or your goals.
You want to also get pre-approved for the loan product that you are going to use, to be able to buy that property. So you can know how much you are going to have to put down or how much you are able to get approved for. Now, there are some caveats to that as well, because there may be some education that you have to provide to either your agent or your lender on the process or what they’re looking for, because there are multiple loan products for this, and not every lender is familiar with the types of loan products that you can use to do this.
And so you do need to do some of your own education, but you want to make sure that you’re working with people who, if they don’t understand, are open to you educating them. I know, that you have this, you are in the mortgage industry David, what do you think about being able to connect with the proper lender to meet your house hacking needs?

David:
Well, you want a lender that has worked with people doing the similar thing before, because a normal lender can get you a loan, but now you’re sort of on the hook to figure out what pieces you might not be aware of.
So there are different down payment requirements for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes and single-family houses. That wasn’t the case a couple years ago. If your lender isn’t aware of that or doesn’t tell you that, you’re like, “Oh, I’m pre-approved for $500,000.” And then you go find a duplex or a triplex that’s 500,000, they go, “Oh no, those you got to put 10% down or 15% down. It’s not like a single-family home.” You did all that work. Now, it’s not going to be helping you.
There’s other lenders that can propose creative solutions. So you find a property and you don’t quite have enough money to buy it and they say, “Well, if you can get a gift from a family member, you can use that for the down payment.” You might not have even known that was a possibility if your lender didn’t bring that up to you.
And then you also have the good lenders, like how we train ours. They’re going to look at your other assets and they’re like, “Well, you got an FHA loan on this property you bought seven years ago, that you’re at a 5.75 interest rate. We can refinance you out of that, get your PMI dropped off of it.” It’s called something different on an FHA loan, but it’s the same idea as PMI.
“Save you some money there. Maybe your rate goes from 5.75 to 6.25, but your payment’s actually less because you don’t have PMI. And you can pull a little bit of cash out of that property and now you can use an FHA loan on the next deal.” And you go from like, “Oh, how am I going to do this?” To, “Oh, that’s super simple and there’s other benefits.”

Rob:
Well, isn’t there an opportunity as well to use the rents from a house hack towards your DTI? I don’t know… What are the rules there? Because I know that probably you can’t use rents from a room, but if you bought a duplex, couldn’t you apply the rents that you’d get from that duplex towards your DTI?

David:
They kind of swing back and forth on if you’re allowed to do it in a multifamily property. Most of the time they don’t want you to. But what you can do is buy a house as a house hack, move into a new house next year, and now you can use the rents from the first one to help you qualify for future ones.

Rob:
Got it.

David:
So you may not be able to do it on every individual house, but when the minute you get your second one, you start to get that snowball effect we were talking about and everything gets easier for you with progressive deals.
What’s your guys’ thoughts on how they can use BiggerPockets calculators to help them figure out what their payments would be on the property in case their agents aren’t David Greene team agents that are experienced and helping run numbers for them?

Rob:
My thoughts are, they should use it. It’s a very easy calculator to comp out a deal. Put in the numbers, put in your price, put in the rent, and it’ll split out basically if it’s a good deal or not. But it’s a very intuitive tool. I think you can go over to…

David:
biggerpockets.com/calc.

Rob:
And use it for free. I think you get several uses for free before you have to make an account or something like that.

David:
That’s right.

Henry:
It’s funny because this sounds like a shameless plug, but it’s not. Before I was ever associated with BiggerPockets, I was using that calculator. I still use those calculators today. They’re there because they’re good. So just use them.

David:
They’re easy. They just tell you exactly what to do and you don’t know what to do there’s a little question mark, you’re like, “Oh, that’s what that’s asking me. Thank you.” That’s what BiggerPockets does. We make things very easy for people that want to complicate it.
The highlight that I want to that take out of this how to get started here, is the goal is not to create a lot of cash flow out of a house hack. Occasionally that happens, sometimes a pitcher leaves a fastball right over the middle of the play and you just crush it. Those deals sometimes come your way.
Generally speaking, the goal is not to get cash flow. The goal is to remove your mortgage payment. The goal is to allow you to save more money. And when you do that over several properties, the savings of your mortgage turns into cash flow when you move out of it, and you eventually live the rest of your life never making a mortgage payment again. Which is how Henry was saying he’s able to live in his dream house.
It’s just a little bit of delayed gratification, getting that snowball rolling down the hill early that becomes something big that you then can use to take on some of the big cool multifamily projects or stuff that we talk about here.
All right. I want to transition a little bit into picking the market. Henry, are there markets you’ve seen where house hacking doesn’t work or doesn’t work as well?

Henry:
Yeah. I mean obviously, the more expensive coastal markets, the New York’s and San Francisco, sometimes even the LA’s and the San Diego’s, right? Where the cost of a house is so expensive that even when you house hack, you’re not going to be able to completely offset your mortgage and you’re still going to have to cover a significant amount of that mortgage. And then you start, and then you’re moving into the realm where house hacking could get risky because not everything goes perfectly.
If you end up in a timeframe where you don’t have a tenant, that’s all on you to carry that. And if you’re buying something with a mortgage that you can’t afford to pay, unless you’re house hacking in a very expensive market, you can find yourself in a sticky situation.
And so in those very expensive markets, I think you have to be super diligent with the numbers, super and be very open with yourself about your budget and what you can afford to do in a worst case scenario. And in those situations, maybe it makes sense to look at a different strategy, but make sure that you have budgeted and done the numbers and understand exactly what you would be comfortable paying above and beyond what your share of that mortgage would be. And if it becomes unaffordable at that point, then you look at pivoting strategies.

David:
Oh, first let me ask you, Rob, what do you think? You agree?

Rob:
Yeah, mostly. I don’t know. I think you can make it work in any market. I mean, I moved to LA and I made it work there. Now, you may not be able to rent it to somebody in the long-term sense, but I bought my house in LA, 624,000, it was about four times the amount that we bought the house in Kansas City, and that was a lot.
It was actually a very scary amount. We were scared to tell anybody in our family or friends how much this house was because we just didn’t want them to judge us for buying this expensive houses. And so in my mind I was like, “Well, I had heard about Airbnb.” And that’s kind of the beginning of everything, and I was like, “Well, I think this little 279 square foot apartment, if I rented it long-term, I could make maybe 12 to 1500 bucks a month month, which isn’t bad, but if I put it onto Airbnb and list it for a hundred bucks a night, I think I can make two to $3,000 a month.” And that’s exactly what happened.
So I was able to make that property work. When I was making $3,000 a month there on my $4,400 mortgage, now my mortgage is 1400 bucks and I was able to make that work. And then I built the tiny house in the backyard and I was renting that out for at its peak, three to $4,000 a month. So I was actually making money on that property very quickly once I figured out how to make that deal work.
But I didn’t walk into that deal blind. I had done the math, I had done my comps, I had run the numbers on Airbnb and I made that work for me. And even on the flip side of that, I mean I’ve looked at, I think it’s, you find the house that you want and you figure out how to make it work, right? Because I looked at a lot of houses in LA that were under 624.
There were houses that were $500,000 that I was like, “I would never dare put my wife in this house.” And so when I mapped it out, I was like, “If I don’t house hack and I buy a house at half a million dollars, we’re going to spend so much more money than if we just spent an extra $124,000 to buy our house.” And then we house hacked the little studio apartment under it. And so we made that deal work.
So it was actually a lot more affordable to us to buy a house in LA and house hack, than it would’ve been to buy a house, otherwise, it actually would’ve been impossible otherwise.

David:
I think you guys both make super good points and it’s this, I love that I now get to be the one to sort of parse out what each of you said and simplify it after hearing your cases.
Henry’s case is right. In more expensive markets make it difficult to get your mortgage covered completely or cash flow. A hundred percent true. So if you buy a triplex in the Midwest, maybe your mortgage on that’s 1200 bucks, you rent out each side for 600, so you end up living completely for free in that case. The tenants are paying 1200 and you’re living for free. Then you move out and you’re making 1800 on the triplex, but it only costs 1200. Boom. You got some cash flow right out the gate.
But if you go into a coastal market, you’re probably not getting a hundred percent of it paid for. The other side of that coin is that the person who bought the triplex is now making, they’re saving a total of $1,800 a month because that’s what they’re getting in rents. But the person in LA who was paying 4,800 for their rent and now only has to pay a thousand dollars, is actually adding $3,400 to their wealth every single month. So you end up making more in coastal markets, but it doesn’t show up on the balance sheet of cash flow. Okay?
So each of you are right in a sense, and that’s something that people need to be aware of, when they’re deciding how to house hack in their market. If you’re in California where we are, you’re not going to get a hundred percent of your rent paid, but you’re ultimately going to make more money every month than someone in a cheaper market.
And if you’re in a cheaper market, you do have the opportunity to get a hundred percent of your rent paid or maybe even get some cash flow, but you probably need to buy more properties to make up for the fact that not as much money’s coming in per property. That’s where you’re going to need to make sure what you’re doing. It’s even more important to save your cash so you can keep buying.
They work in both. You just approach it a little bit differently. So for some context here, if Henry was able to drop his mortgage from $2,500 a month down to $500 a month from house hacking, so he’s saving two grand a month, that’s about $24,000. And you buy a house for about 500 grand and put 5% down, that’s about $25,000. That is pretty much a hundred percent return on your money.
Where else in 2023 can you get a hundred percent return on your money and get real estate, where rents are going to go up every year and have a loan that you’re paying off? We haven’t even included in that return. And beginning appreciation and know that instead of your rent going up every single year, the tenants are paying you more every year in addition to the hundred percent return. I don’t think there’s anything even close in 2023 that will give you that, that isn’t wildly risky.
Okay, we’re not talking about a crazy cannabis enterprise here. We’re just talking about boring real estate. They get you a hundred percent return and all the future upsides. So now Rob, when it comes to house hacking, there’s more than one way to do it.
People typically look right down the box and they’re like, “This is the only way to house hack.” It’s actually tons of options available, many of which fall within your specific purview.
So tell me, what are some of the ways that when someone buys a house as a primary residence in 2023, that they can take advantage of some of the other more lucrative strategies with their home that maybe they couldn’t in other circumstances?

Rob:
Yeah, man. This is where the sky’s the limit. And I’m, before we even dive into buying a house, I actually think that you can house hack without owning a property. This is a very popular model in New York specifically, where you go and you obtain the lease and you effectively find the roommates. You’re the one on the hook with the landlord, but you actually find the roommates and you basically decide what they pay you for their room and you subsidize your cost that way.
At my wife’s best friend was part of this, and she understood that where she went and basically applied for a room at this lady’s apartment, and she knew that she was paying a lot more than market rate, but it was furnished and she didn’t even have to do anything. She didn’t have to pay a deposit or anything like that, but the person who was running that lease paid $500 a month versus the other two roommates paying $1,200 a month. So that’s just a quick example of a way to supercharge house hacking.
If you really don’t even own the property, if you’re like, “Man, I don’t have the three and a half percent, I got to stay renting.” That’s a total option for you too. Another way, obviously we’re talking about the 12-month rentals, but what I wish I would’ve done when I got started, I just didn’t know about short-term rentals. And we all know that that’s my thing and I love it.
But if you’re not the kind of person that wants to commit to somebody for 12 months at a time, which is super fair because you don’t know how your tenants are going to shake out, you could rent your room on Airbnb. There is a section on Airbnb that says private home, and then there’s entire home, shared space, shared room.
You can actually rent to two people to share the room, hostile style. You can rent the room one at a time, and you can actually make a lot more money doing this than finding a long-term tenant because you can charge 50 to $125 a night for your room. And if you did that 10 times a month, like 10 days for example, that might actually pay you more than renting to a long-term tenant for 30 days at a time.
And then there’s also the fact that you can do medium-term rentals as well. With short-term rentals, you never really know what types of regulations there are. And so if there are regulations against short-term rentals, the medium-term rental bucket actually gets you out of short-term rental regulation. And when you’re renting to people 30 days at a time, you’re allowed to do that in every city because that falls under long-term rental jurisdiction. So you could rent to people on a medium-term rental basis.
And also there are a lot of cities that will allow you to rent your property on Airbnb if you live in that specific property. It might be illegal if you don’t live at that property, but if you live there, they understand that they’ll write rules in place for those types of Airbnb hosts that are legitimately trying to subsidize their mortgage.
So it isn’t just, we’re not in the age of 12-month leases anymore. I think you could do medium-term rentals. You can rent your room five days a month if you want to. You don’t even have to own the property. The sky’s the limit here. So you find a deal that you like and you make it work however you want to based on your comfort level and how much money you need to make off that property.

David:
So where else in 2023 can you find a strategy that lets you do a short-term rental in a market that won’t let you do short-term rentals? It’s Los Angeles, Southern California, my real estate team down there. This is one of the ways we’ve figured out around all the restrictions against short-term rentals because the neighbors hate it. They just, “We don’t want it.” So then the city restricts how many permits that they issue, and they put all these ridiculous restrictions in place and it makes it so hard to do. And so you just, “I guess I can’t do short-term rentals in 2023.” Not so.
You buy that property, all of a sudden a lot of those laws that affect tenants don’t apply to you. It’s an absolute awesome loophole. So one of the things that you’ll see in a city like Los Angeles is they’ll say, “If you buy a property that has tenants in it and they’re paying $400 a month instead of $2,500 a month, you can’t raise the rent. You have to honor the lease that’s in place.” And it just makes it so those properties don’t make sense.
But if you’re going to live in it, you could absolutely bump them out of one of the units. I think of it as long as it’s the biggest one and you can move into it. And then after you’ve lived in it for a while, if you choose to want to rent it out, you can do that at market rents.
A lot of the stuff that stops investors doesn’t stop homeowners, and you have to start thinking of house hacking as a homeowner strategy that works for investing, and you couldn’t get around a lot of this stuff. That’s one of the reasons that I just wanted to highlight. House hacking in 2023 has so many benefits that other strategies don’t have.
All right, Henry, once you’ve gotten the strategy down, tell me what’s next? How do you get into this snowball that we talk about? Should you just get one or two house hacks and stop, or should you keep going?

Henry:
Oh, man. My personal opinion is you should house hack every single year until your spouse or your significant other says, “I do not want to share walls or live in a duplex ever again.” Until I hear those exact words. I would just rinse and repeat and repeat because of all of the highlights we talked about leading up until this, it’s such a phenomenal way to build wealth.

Rob:
Are you there yet by the way, or are you still house hacking? What’s your current situation?

Henry:
I am not house hacking in this one, but as we are, we have looked at other homes and I literally won’t look at them unless there’s a way I can monetize part of that home, going forward.

David:
It is, once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Henry:
Yeah. My wife knows, man.

Rob:
We’ve house hacked for so many years. I’m at that point, she’s like, “Uh-huh, we’re good.” The money is not meaningful to us anymore. She’s like, “I know you want the content and I know you want to talk about it on you… No more.” And I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine. We did it.” We earned our badge of honor. I’ve done it. I’ve got my rite of passage.

Henry:
You got your merit badge.

Rob:
Yeah. Exactly.

David:
One of the things to highlight here is that house hacking is not just a strategy, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a way of looking at the world like Henry was just saying, “I can’t not look at a property and think, how could this produce income? Because if it doesn’t produce income, I don’t want it.” We’ll find some way to make that rhyme and it’ll be a fun thing that we start saying, “This is especially important for new investors that are trying to get started, that are trying to get that momentum going with the snowball.”
We know people, I think Craig Curelop wasn’t just renting out his house, he was renting out his couch and we were teasing him like, “At one point, he is going to rent out his clothes.” People start renting out their cars on Turo, and they’re renting out the pools in the backyard. They’re renting out saunas. There’s the Peerspace movement that’s starting.
This is not going to make you a multi-millionaire, okay? We’re not saying just start renting out your goldfish for other people to play with or something like let people take your dog home for a day if they want a dog. But the point is, you can learn the fundamentals using some of these strategies and those will make you a multi-millionaire in the future.
You’re not going to stay at this level of house hacking or clothes hacking or whatever we’re talking about forever, but it can kind of get you over that initial fear of, “I don’t really know how to do this.” And then once you get comfortable with it, you stop doing it in a small scale. You start doing it at a bigger scale.
Rob, you’re a great example of how that worked out. Can you just paint us a short picture of how you went from house hacking, an ADU in your backyard to now considering rental arbitrage on a 50-unit portfolio in Pigeon Forge?

Rob:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that first house that I bought was $159,000, and we sold it three years later for $215,000, after all fees and costs and everything like that, we had a $40,000 profit. We used that $40,000 to put three and a half percent down on that property in LA, and after seller credits and everything, we actually only paid $18,500. And now that property today has gotten me over $200,000 in rents. It’s worth $1.3 million.
So just from house hacking, literally half a million dollars in net worth or are a little bit over half a million dollars, in net worth from sacrificing that. I could sell that house today and have half a million dollars in my pocket, because for four years I chose to be a little uncomfortable and have a roommate and have people in my backyard and people under my house. And that’s obviously led to the $200,000 in rents that I’ve gotten from that property has obviously led to me just reinvesting that into all of my Airbnbs.
I’m at 35 doors now, like you said, I just got approached about a 52-unit rental arbitrage, master lease in Pigeon Forge, and I can do everything that I am doing today because of what house hacking did for me, and I just can’t vouch for this strategy enough because it has opened every door in my life that I’ve ever wanted open.

David:
So here’s the magic. It’s not should I house hack or long-term rental, house hack or short-term rental, house hack or BRRRR. House hack can get you in the door, and then you can use medium-term rentals, long-term rentals, short-term rentals, renting out your pool, refinancing the house later, live in flip. You can buy a fixer upper as house hack, fix it up over a couple years, sell it, not have to pay any capital gain taxes because it was your primary residence as long as you were there for two out of five years.
All the stuff you hear us talk about at BiggerPockets, almost all of it is compatible with a house hack. I’m trying to think of the right analogy. You know that website Zapier? You guys familiar with that? It basically makes any computer program talk to anything else. If you have Zapier, you can do anything else with it.
House hack becomes that, at its flexibility, it’s low risk, it’s big upside, all of this together. It just over time and time again, shows up as the best strategy possible. And going into 2023, this is the one I can confidently tell everybody, this is what you should be doing. You guys have any last words on what you want to tell the audience about why 2023 is the year that they should be house hacking?

Rob:
I don’t, no. I put it all out there. I’m very staunch supporter of house hacking.

Henry:
Lift it all.

Rob:
I think it’s pretty clear. Yeah. I’m like, “I put it all out there on the podcast.” Just do it. It really is one of those things that at the very least, it builds thick skin and it allows you to just understand some of the discipline that goes into being a real estate investor.
And even if you do it for a month, you can at least say, “I did that.” And everything else after that is, I think it makes everything a little bit easier because once you’ve kind of done a house hack, it kind of just puts you out of the comfort zone that prepares you for the rest of your real estate journey.

Henry:
Exactly, man. What a low risk way to try several of these different strategies that you’re seeing, you’re interested in. A lot of people say they want to be landlords and then they’re landlords and they may not like it. Well, this is a low risk way for you to try it. A lot of people say they want to do Airbnb and then they do Airbnb and they don’t like it. What a low risk way to try it, man.
You can kind of cut your teeth on several strategies, learn what you do, love what you like best, and you don’t have to take on a ton of risks to do it with this strategy. And by the way, you’re going to be building wealth, so do it.

David:
Thank you guys. Rob, where can people find out more about you?

Rob:
You can find me over @robuilt on YouTube and Instagram. What about you?

David:
You can find me @davidgreene24, and please do on Instagram, social media and YouTube. Henry, what about you?

Henry:
@thehenrywashington on Instagram or henrywashington.com.

David:
And if you’re hearing this message and you are intrigued, you’re like, “Oh, this is what house hacking is. I’ve heard people talk about it.” Or maybe you’ve been knocked off of your perch of the ivory tower elite thing. “I’m too good for house hacking.” And you realized, “2023 is my year. I need to actually get in and do this.”
Head over to biggerpockets.com. We are more than a podcast. We are a website, and you can simply put in the phrase, “house hack” into the forums and literally have more information than you could possibly digest if you tried on that forum. Advice people that do it, challenges they’ve run into, how they overcame them, strategies that work, how people became millionaires just from house hacking.
Plus, you can get those calculators we talked about at biggerpockets.com/calc, and you can analyze to figure out what your property would cost in case your agent is not as good as one of us and doesn’t know how to do that.
But here’s what’s important. You don’t want to let 2023 pass and look back 10 years later and say, “That was one of those open windows where I could get into the best neighborhood. I could still get an inspection contingency, I could still get an appraisal contingency. Rates were a little bit higher, but they dropped after that I could have refinanced out of my 8% loan into a 5% loan and saved even more money, and I let it pass because I was too busy waiting for NFTs to make their comeback.” Don’t be that person. Get into real estate while you can and do it smart. You will not regret it.
This is David Greene for the BiggerPockets podcast host signing out.

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie, Episode 272. I have purchased two properties before that had back taxes on them, but I had to negotiate with the owner. Part of the closing, the agreement was I was paying their back taxes for them, or it was taken out of the sale proceeds. So my recommendation would be going and finding the owner of that property because you actually might be able to put them in a better situation than if that property is put up for sale and they get nothing from the property if it’s put up for those back taxes. My name is Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with my co-host, Tony Robinson.

Tony:
Welcome to the Real Estate Rookie podcast where every week, twice a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kick start your investing journey. I want to start off today’s episode by shouting out someone by the username of Leo Zang. Leo says, “This is a goldmine for real estate investing, tons of valuable information and suggestions for real estate investors. You will find the roadmaps to success here.” Leo, we appreciate you for leaving that honest review. If you are part of the rookie audience and you have not yet left us an honest rating and review, please do us a huge favor, take the 90 seconds it takes to log into your phone and open up the app and leave that review. The more reviews we get, the more folks who can help, and that is always our goal here at the Real Estate Rookie podcast. All right, Ashley Kehr, what’s up? How you doing?

Ashley:
Good. I just got back from a girls’ trip in Las Vegas. I went with some other real estate investors. It was a nice little weekend getaway.

Tony:
Here’s the million dollar question. Was that trip better than the trip that you had with me and Sarah to Vegas? And there’s only one right answer to this.

Ashley:
When I went with you guys, that was my first time at a pool party. When I went this weekend, it was my first time at a Vegas club. I’ve probably been to Vegas almost 20 times now, but I just never had any interest in doing any of those, except with you and Sarah, I did the pool party. Then this weekend with my friends, I did the nightclub. I hated the nightclub. I hated it.
Sarah, first of all, gave us the advice to not buy a table and said that we need to get invited to a table, so that’s what we did. We didn’t buy a table. We get in, get on the guest list, whatever. We’re in there. It’s so crowded, like awful. People are elbowing you. Not enjoyable for me. My friend Serena, got to give it to her, girl, gets a guy to invite us up to the table. So there we go. We’re in the table. We’re not crowded and packed. That was somewhat better. But I still have the music just banging and vibrating through my body. What do they… like EMD music? I don’t know where it’s just like… But, yeah, definitely, pool party, way better, for sure. You got sunshine. There’s better drinks. So Sarah ordered the good white tequila with the juices, way better.

Tony:
I know that you’re a real estate investor because you call it the genre of music, which is called EDM, you call it EMD, which is short for earnest money deposit.

Ashley:
[inaudible 00:03:11].

Tony:
That’s like the most real estate investor thing. I love that EMD music. It just gets me going.

Ashley:
I feel like this episode is really aging me, too.

Tony:
Well, look, we’ve got a slate of awesome questions for you guys today. We’re going to talk about driving for dollars and finding properties with tax liens. We’re going to talk about being a real estate agent and if you can use your real estate agent license to help you with your down payment. We’ll talk about renovations and how we estimate project costs. We give a big shout out to James Dainard. Then we talk about taxes, which are always an important topic for real estate rookies. We finish off talking about some FHA loans and some permitting for renovations as well. So lots of really good questions. Hopefully, you guys get some [inaudible 00:03:56] from this as you always hopefully do from the Real Estate Rookie Reply episodes.

Ashley:
Our first question today is from Lucas Dominique. “After driving for dollars, I’ve come across a house that on county records says that the absentee owner has delinquent taxes on the property. The property is vacant as well. My question for anyone who can help is, is this considered a tax lien? If so, would I be better to address the courthouse about my interest or the owner? I would love to get a better understanding of this scenario with someone who has acquired property through this method. Thanks in advance.”
My personal experience with this is that if the property is delinquent on taxes, the county has no right or the courthouse has no right to sell the property until it is put up for auction. In Erie County where I live, they do an annual tax auction where the properties that have back taxes that fulfill the requirements of it’s been a certain amount of time that they haven’t been paid, they will go up for auction, and that is when the county can sell those properties.
I have purchased two properties before that had back taxes on them, but I had to negotiate with the owner. Part of the closing, the agreement was I was paying their back taxes for them, or it was taken out of the sale proceeds. So if I bought the house for $50,000, there’s $20,000 in back taxes, $20,000 went to pay those back taxes and then $30,000 went to the owner. So my recommendation would be going and finding the owner of that property because you actually might be able to put them in a better situation than if that property is put up for sale and they get nothing from the property if it’s put up for those back taxes where maybe they can walk away with a little bit of money if you are going to purchase it directly from them.

Tony:
Great advice, Ashley. When we talk about sellers who are sometimes motivated to sell below market value, someone being in a situation where there’s a tax lien against the property is one of those potential situations where the seller might be willing to sell to you at a price that’s lower than what they could sell in the market because they do know that there’s this tax situation happening in the background.
Lucas, if you use a software like PropStream, or there’s tons of other software tools out there, but punching the address, you can usually find the owner and just reach out to them. Maybe you can bring up the tax lien if you want. From a lot of the folks that I know that go direct to seller, they usually don’t mention the exact reason that they’re reaching out. Even if this person’s working a tax lien list, they won’t usually call the person up and say, “Hey, Ashley. I see you got a tax lien on your property. Can I buy it from you?” They’ll just say, “Hey, Ashley. I’m calling local owners in your area, and I came across your property. Would you be interested in having a conversation?” and see if you can, like Ashley said, solve that problem for them. Yeah, I think it’s a great idea. There are people that literally do nothing but tax liens, so it’s a great way to get some off market deal flow.

Ashley:
The next question is, “If I’m a real estate agent, when I buy my own properties, would I be able to apply my commission towards the down payment?” This question is from Amber Yanhart, and it is from the Real Estate Rookie Facebook group. Tony, what’s your take on that?

Tony:
Neither Ashley nor I are agents, but I do know that there are a lot of agents who represent themselves on deals for that exact purpose of being able to either collect that commission themselves or save the commission of paying it to someone else. Yeah, you should be able to take your commission and use that towards the down payment.

Ashley:
Can you use it towards the down payment, or is it just going to decrease the purchase price? I don’t actually know the answer to that. If you go to the bank and you’re buying the property and you’re buying it, say, for $100,000 and you’re getting your commission, I guess at the closing table you are getting that check for your commission of the property, if that can be applied as a credit to your down payment or if that’s just going to be money off of what you’re getting. I would think that you could put it towards your down payment as a credit.

Tony:
Here’s the only reason why I say that. Maybe it varies from state to state. We did a deal in the past where we essentially wholesaled the property to ourselves, and we were able to get that cash from the wholesale deal at closing as well. To your point, I think it would just be a line item on the settlement statement that says commission, and then instead of it going into your pocket, it’s just applied towards your cash to close at the end.

Ashley:
Tony, can you tell us a little bit about that wholesaling to yourself? How did that happen, and what does that look like?

Tony:
Wholesaling to yourself is a great way to pay yourself twice on any deal. For example, we had a deal that we were working on where we found it off-market. Usually, if you find a property off-market and you’re buying it from a wholesaler, when you go to close, there’s all of your regular closing costs, but then there’s an additional line item on your settlement statement that says wholesale fee or transaction fee, whatever it is, to the person that you’re buying it from. At closing, those funds get distributed to the wholesaler, and then you pay your funds out afterwards.
But if you wholesale the property to yourself, what happens is you get to essentially get paid at closing a small amount. Then if you go to flip that property, then you get paid again. Essentially, we close on a property, we got a check for 5,000 bucks when we closed because we wholesaled it to ourselves. Then when we flip that property on the back end, we got another bigger check for actually completing the rehab. You do take a little bit less money on the backend because you’re giving it to yourself upfront, so your private money loan, your hard money loan’s going to account for that fee, but it is a way to get some cash in the short run if you need that for whatever reason.

Ashley:
That’s awesome to know. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Tony:
I actually learned that from Derrick Acuff, who was a previous guest on the podcast. I can’t remember which episode number he was, but if you guys look up “flipping a house” on Instagram, Derrick’s a really smart guy. They do a lot of flipping in wholesaling out in Texas.

Ashley:
Our next question is from David Sargente. “What’s the best way for someone with no renovation experience to get a working understanding of the processes, cost, and basic construction knowledge before going into it? Can any of you recommend books or YouTube channels, etc.? For books, J Scott has a phenomenal book with BiggerPockets called Estimating Rehab Costs. Obviously, it’s not going to tell you that this is what you should be paying for the price per square footage, of laying down luxury vinyl planks, or how much it will cost to have somebody come in and install that vinyl plank for you. But it gives you an idea of what you need to get costs for and how to build your estimates and what goes into actually rehabbing a property. So I highly recommend checking out that book. It’s a easy read but a great reference to go back to.
The other thing I recommend doing is kind of practicing with figuring out how much a rehab cost, so find a YouTube video about how to install a toilet. Look at all the materials you need, go to Lowe’s, homedepot.com, and actually pull up each of the items that it tells you so you’re looking at what is the cost of a toilet, what is the cost of the wax seal, all the things that go into installing a toilet, looking at what those cost. You can even go further beyond and then start to build out an Excel spreadsheet with links to all of these different materials so that when you are going in and rehabbing a project, you have the cost of materials right there to really help you build some kind of estimate.
Then you’ll want to find out what labor costs are, so you can reach out to different contractors. Call a plumber and estimate… Just ask them, “What’s your average cost to have a toilet installed? How much does it if you’re…? I’m going to ask for water lines. Maybe they can give you a general idea, like per foot how much it costs to install a water line. There are definitely a few things that are going to be really hard to estimate without having somebody come out and look at your project. But there are things you can at least get an idea.
Like to install tile, “Do you charge per square footage of tile?” Obviously, it will vary on the type of tile you’re having installed, too. So call around and get ideas of what that is. Flooring is usually a very easy one, or even painting where you can get a general number of price per square foot of how much it costs to install those things. Even going to your local hardware store, you’ll see signs all the time: “Ask us about getting your flooring installed.” Ask them, “What is your price per square foot?” and you can use that to run your numbers off of. Tony, I took on a business partner to kind of learn rehabbing, but for you, you’ve outsourced a lot of your rehabs. How did you learn how to actually come up with these estimates?

Tony:
First I’ll say, David, we interviewed James Dainard back on Episode 165. Actually, it was a two-parter, 165 and either 166 or 167. Anyway, go back and listen to that episode because James Dainard gives a world-class breakdown of how he estimates his rehab costs. A lot of it aligns with what Ashley said. But if you want two hours of deep diving how someone that’s flipped, I don’t know, probably a thousand [inaudible 00:13:46] homes-

Ashley:
That’s because I was trained by James Dainard.

Tony:
James gives a really amazing breakdown in that episode. So David, I encouraged you to go back and listen to that. There’s a couple of things that we’ve done in the past when we were kind of dipping our toes into the world of rehabbing. When we first started our business back in 2019, we were buying long distance. This was my first time ever taking on a rehab project, my first time ever just doing a real estate deal in general. I had zero basis for something like that might cost. So what I did was I went onto Zillow and I found properties that were recently sold that were renovated to the level that I wanted to renovate this prop that I had under contract. I showed those photos to a couple different contractors and I said, “Look, here’s what the current photos of this property look like. Here’s the kind of vibe that I’m going for. Can you give me a ballpark, without you even going to the property, on what you think something like that might cost?” They can give you a very rough estimate of what that might cost.
The second thing you can do is ask the contractors for photos of their previous work and ask them what the actual project cost was on that, and now that number gets even a little bit more concrete. While the individual project costs might vary depending on what you’re doing, what you’re really trying to identify is the average cost per square foot for that type of rehab. You hear a lot of flippers say this, that there’s the light cosmetic, the medium, and then the full-on gut rehab. Every single one of those has a different price per square foot that they apply to that. Gosh, it’s been a while now, but I want to say for the houses we were doing in Louisiana, they were pretty heavy rehabs. We were at 30-something bucks a square foot back in 2019. I kind of backed into that number by talking with contractors and understanding what they were charging other clients for similar work.
The last thing you can do is just pay them to go walk the job. This is something else that we leveraged when we were doing these remote rehabs in Louisiana is I found a contractor, I found a couple, and I said, “Look, I’ll pay you take an hour or two, whatever, go walk the property and give me a more detailed bid on what it might be.” Honestly, a lot of them didn’t even take the money because they were just open to getting the work. So they say, “I’ll walk the job for free.” That, today, is maybe a little bit harder because a lot of the good contractors, I think, are still kind of busy. They’re probably starting to lighten up a little bit now just because things have slowed. Trying to do that a year ago to get a contractor to go walk a job for free probably wasn’t happening because they were all booked out for years. So depending on where we’re at in the market cycle, that’s a little bit easier said than done.

Ashley:
I think that the contractors, you’ve used them before, they’re more willing to go and walk those properties for free wanting to continue business with you. Even if contractors do have the time, for them to give you a detailed scope of work takes a lot of time, and then especially if you take that scope of work and you end up hiring someone else based off of that scope of work.
The property management company that I currently use, they actually sent out an email recently saying that they are no longer providing scope of works to owners for turnovers. They have found that too many owners are taking that scope of work and going and doing the project themselves or hiring other contractors or whatever it is. They’re having owners that aren’t even responding to accept or decline the bid on doing the estimate. Now they’re also charging. They did charge to have their maintenance guy come, whatever their hourly rate is, I think it was $45, I think it just increased to $55, but they were charging their hourly rate to have that scope built out. But now they’re also charging a $250 flat fee. That’s on top of their project management fee, too, because they felt like so much time was wasted going and doing these scope of work, so they’re only going to be doing it now if you pay that fee.

Tony:
It’s solely understandable. I feel like as a business owner, I can understand why they might feel that way. That’s why I think a lot of it comes down to relationship, Ashley. If you have a relationship with this contracting crew already, there’s some trust that’s built up there. I think it’s easier for them to go out and just walk a job for you. Our crew in Joshua Tree, they’ve never charged us for a bid, but it’s because they know that we’re pretty much going to use them for every single job that we do out there. So I think the more repetitions you get, the easier it becomes, I guess.
The last thing I’d say, David, is if you can find another rehabber/flipper in your market and walk one of their jobs, that’s one of the best ways to really get hands-on, tactical, tangible data on what a rehab might cost. That’s what Sarah and I did when we started rehabbing out in Joshua Tree. We found a buddy of ours, Brian Davila, who’s a flipper here in SoCal, and we spent the day with him just walking a few of his jobs and asking a bunch of different questions around pricing. “Hey, what does it cost to do this? How are you paying for this?” That gave us the confidence to go out there and start doing it ourselves at a higher level. If you can find someone, David, that is already doing it, walking their jobs is a great way to get that insight as well.

Ashley:
Where do you find people like that? You attend in-person meetups in your markets, or you go onto the BiggerPockets forums and ask if there are any investors in the area that are doing rehabs in your market. The best is when you can actually find an investor who is also a contractor. I love that because you’ll be able to get both sides of it. You’ll get the contractor side of him, but also the investor side as to these are the ways that you can save money as an investor because you don’t need to do this, you don’t need to do that. Where residential contractors that are just doing for people’s homes are going to have a different mindset going in.
James Dainard even talked about this on his podcast episode. He’ll only work with contractors that work with investors. He doesn’t want people that do residential remodels because there is a different end game. There’s a different result of those remodels. For residentials, for the people to enjoy their home, it’s not what’s the most cost-effective way to get my maximum return on my dollar by having renters in there or by flipping the property. I think go to a meetup, go into the BiggerPockets forums, go to the Real Estate Rookie Facebook page and connect with contractors or even investors that are contractors, too, and see what kind of guidance or information they can give you. Of course, think of a way that you can also provide some assistance to them or help them out in some way, some value to them, too.
Our next question is from Bill Seth, “Sorry for the newbie question.” Bill, please don’t apologize. We love these newbie questions. That is what we are here for. This question is, “Do flippers get taxed heavily when selling since most don’t own it for more than a year?” The answer is, yes, you are taxed at ordinary income. Almost just like you had a W2 job, but when you sell the property, that tax isn’t being withheld from you like most companies do. As a W2 employee, they’ll withhold some of that and pay some of your taxes throughout the year for you. You are also self-employed. When you work a W2 job, your company is paying part of your payroll taxes and now you have to pay, I think, it’s another 6% as self-employed since you don’t have a company you work for paying that on your behalf anymore. So it does end up being more taxes that you are paying for the property and definitely a lot more taxes than you’d pay if this was a long-term buying homes and you’d be paying a lower capital gains tax.

Tony:
We had Amanda Han back on Episode 255. One of the last questions that we asked Amanda in that episode was, if you had to rank all of the different real estate investment strategies by preferred tax treatment or best tax treatments or worse tax treatment, flipping and wholesaling were at the very bottom because those are considered active income, and things like long-term rentals and short-term rentals were at the top because those are more passive income, and there’s some other things you can do along with those. Yeah, you are definitely getting the absolute worst tax treatment when you are doing things like flipping homes.
One of the suggestions that I’ve been given, and again, I’m not a CPA, I’m not an attorney, but one of the suggestions that I’ve been given is that if you plan to both flip and hold rentals, ideally to set yourself up to get the best tax treatment, you should have one entity or LLC for your rentals and then a separate entity for all of your active income. So if you’re flipping and wholesaling, you do that in one business, and then if you have your rentals, you do that in a separate business. Doing so allows you to get some slightly preferred tax treatment as opposed to doing it all under one entity. Definitely not a bad question, Bill. There’s thousands and thousands of pages of the tax code, so I think Ash and I are always happy to give some more insight on what’s worked for us and what hasn’t.

Ashley:
I feel like we’ve been talking about this a lot more recently is the tax planning and talking to a tax specialist who can help you figure out all these things. It’s something that’s very easy to outsource is somebody who is knowledgeable in taxes and bookkeeping and accounting where it’s something you don’t need to take the time to learn the ins and outs. Yes, you should have some knowledge of how the tax system works, but working and paying for a specialist is highly worth it. Tony, you’ve been working, doing tax planning. I think it was you and Tyler Madden, who was also a guest on here, who recently told me that the cost of paying for that tax planning has far outweighed what you’re going to save in taxes going forward.

Tony:
Absolutely, right? One of the biggest mistakes I made was waiting too long to get great tax strategy help. We’d already built up… we had 10 or 14 properties before I even thought about hiring a tax strategist to help me with those things and even longer before we got a really good bookkeeper on hand. So for all of the rookies that are listening, I know it can seem daunting to invest money up front to get the right bookkeeper, to get a good tax strategist, get a good person doing your tax preparation. But if your goal is to make this a full-time business and to have a relatively large portfolio, you will literally save yourself money and make more money, keep more money at the end if you invest a little bit more upfront to set your business up the right way from a tax perspective when you have one property as opposed to trying to go back and do it when you have 30. Ashley, how big was your portfolio before you hired professional tax help?

Ashley:
I’ve always had a CPA. When I worked at the accounting firm, I did my taxes on my own just because I had access to nice tax software and everything and it was pretty easy. But our farm income has always been somewhat complicated, so I always had the guidance of an experienced CPA when I worked as an accountant to help me through the farm income and how to do depreciation and things like that. Then I quit. Then after that, we have always just used a CPA to do our taxes again. As far as the tax planning, that was just recently where we ended up signing up with Amanda Han, too.

Tony:
I can’t say it enough. All of our rookies that are listening, find a good tax strategist today, day one. Even if you have zero properties, just pay for a consultation and say, “Hey look, here’s what I’m planning to do in the next year. What is your recommendation?” Then as you start to get those properties under contract, then actually put that person on retainer and make sure you chat with them on a regular basis.

Ashley:
You know what? It’s going to be cheaper probably, too, going in with one property or two properties, instead of waiting until you have 10 properties and they need to go back and look at previous years and be like, “What did you do? How can we make it better?” Where if you only have those couple properties to start with, they’ll be like, “Let’s start here,” and then you add on a little more each year. It’s just easy to add those on because they already have you in their plans.

Tony:
We always talk about real estate investing as being about, how much cash flow are you getting on a monthly basis? What’s your cash-on-cash return? How much equity are you building? But one of the other amazing benefits of investing in real estate are the tax benefits. I have a friend who still works a W2 job. He’s a six-figure income earner, but he has a small portfolio of short-term rentals. He literally pays zero in taxes from his day job because he was able to take the passive losses from his short-term rental portfolio and apply that to his W2 income. So for the three years that he’s had his properties, he’s paid zero dollars in income taxes for his W2. Outside of all the big things, cash flow is sexy and appreciation, don’t forget, the tax benefits and depreciation are some of the biggest levers you can pull as a real estate investor.

Ashley:
Our next question is from Ryan Hoffman. “With FHA, how often is it possible to roll the closing costs into the loan? I’m ready to purchase my first multi-family house hack, but I would like to be sure that I will have enough reserves remaining after paying the down payment, if, say, I were to purchase a fourplex instead of a duplex.” With this question, I honestly don’t know the answer specifically to an FHA loan. I’ve never done an FHA loan, but I helped my sister get one. We bought a house together, but she got the FHA mortgage, and I actually gifted her the proceeds for the down payment and for the closing costs.
I do know that banks, especially small local banks, will offer no closing cost mortgages where you can actually wrap the closing costs into the loan. Sometimes you’ll have to pay a little bit higher interest rate than if you went ahead and paid those closing costs. So you have to kind of weigh that out. Is it better to pay more upfront and get that lower interest rate for 30 years, or is it better to… it’s going to take you a while to save that money, but you want to get into a property now to pay a little bit higher interest rate going forward?
There’s also programs where you can get assistance to help with your closing costs. I know banks will sometimes offer to first-time buyers where if you save so much money, they’ll match it, and then you go ahead and buy a property with them. It’s like a first-time home buyer loan. It’s completely separate and different from the FHA, but there’s more strict regulations and rules around it. For example, my friend, his girlfriend did it. She has to live in that property she bought for five years, so they’re kind of stuck there for five years because she did the loan that way. So just be cautious of the different rules that come with some of these assistance programs.

Tony:
Like Ashley, I’ve never closed on an FHA loan myself. We’ve used a lot of different types of debt, but never an FHA. But just like you, Ash, there are so many down payment assistance programs out there, especially if you’re doing something where you’re house hacking. When Sarah and I bought our primary residence back in 2018, there was a program called CalHFA in California that essentially covered all of our down payment. So we had our primary, our first mortgage with loanDepot, or whoever it was that we closed with, and then we had a small second that covered our down payment. Then a year later, we were able to refinance, pay off that small second, and then we have one long-term fixed debt.
There are so many good options out there. I’d say the more you can chat with different loan officers and mortgage companies, the better idea you get of what the options are. I think, Ryan, the mistake that a lot of new investors make is that they only talk to one person. They talk to one bank. They talk to one loan officer, one mortgage officer. Whatever that person tells them, they think that that is the absolute truth and there’s nothing else outside of that. I think the more exposure you can get to different lending institutions, credit unions, banks, mortgage officers, mortgage brokers, the more flexibility you’ll have and the better options you’ll have as you look to close on this deal.
For example, we bought a lot of our homes using 10% down second home loans, and a lot of lenders didn’t even know what that was. I would have people that were messaging me on Instagram and said, “Hey, I had up my mortgage person and they don’t even know what a second home loan or a vacation home loan is.” Just know that just because these people, it’s their profession, they don’t have all of the answers to every single question that pops up. So I think exposure to more people is how you tend to get better options when it comes to loans and mortgages.

Ashley:
Just like we always stress here, tell them what you want to do. Don’t ask for some specific loan product. Tell them how much reserves you have, tell them that you want to buy a fourplex, and see what they can offer to you as options that you have because you may be surprised what a bank can come up with.
We have one more question for you guys this week. This question comes from Rebecca Tillman. She has a question about renovation permits. “Does anybody actually check these when it’s time to sell your property?” James Dainard, when he purchases a property, since this episode is all about things we’ve learned from James Dainard, is that he will always pull permits when he purchases a property. Part of it, he wants to see what actually is legal in there.
I think one of the reasons he does this… We just had a couple on our show that talked about, they were purchasing a property that they knew there was not a permit for an addition. They didn’t think it was a big deal because they didn’t need to use it as a bedroom or whatever. When they went to actually go and get a permit for other things in the property, I think it was maybe the plumbing or something, the inspector came in and told them they would not issue the permits for the other things until the addition was taken off the back because it’s not permitted. So I don’t really hear of just a residential home buyer going in and asking for permits or pulling permits on a property. Tony, have you ever sold a house or know a family friend or anybody who just went and pulled the permits on a property? I only know of investors that do that. I think that’s something that people should do in their due diligence.

Tony:
Yeah. A lot of times, especially if it’s your primary residence, you’re like, “This is my home. I’m going to do what I want with it.” You’re not as concerned about the permits or things like that. It was Devana and Reid. I can’t recall what episode number they were. They had the sober living facilities. They ended up spending a ton of money trying to get that addition permitted, and it wasn’t even part of their initial budget. So that is a big risk that I think you run into where, if the property wasn’t permitted correctly, you can end up paying for that person’s mistakes out of pocket yourself.

Ashley:
I think especially if you’re going in and rehabbing the property, check and pull permits. I hope you’re not asking that question to see if you can get away without pulling permits because you definitely want to pull permits because it can cause way worse issues down the road. I think we had a couple guests on before that have talked about running into this where maybe they thought their contractor actually pulled the permit and got it issued when they didn’t. Then the building inspector comes in. They have to rip out all the new drywall so he can actually check out the electric inside the walls, and they have to go back and put the walls together. So you never want something like that to happen. You never want to take that risk.

Tony:
That’s why when you’re analyzing these deals as rehabs, it’s important to maybe give yourself a little bit more time. If you think you can finish a job in three months, maybe underwrite the deal so that it takes you eight months. That way you have some breathing room in there to pull permits for the first time and understand what that process looks like. If your county’s anything like the counties that we rehab in, permits that used to take 30 days are taking 90 days right now. Just make sure that you’re giving yourself that flexibility to account for things like pulling permits, that you’re not up against the gun and your budget gets blown because you didn’t account for those timelines.

Ashley:
Well, thank you guys so much for joining us for this week’s Rookie Reply. I’m Ashley @wealthfromrentals, and he’s Tony @TonyJRobinson on Instagram. We will be back on Wednesday with a guest. See you guys then. (singing)