From Single Mom (Working 3 Jobs!) to 5 Rentals in 2 Years

Ashley:
You need to start at 25 to make real estate work. Well, today’s guest was a single mom with a W2 working four jobs and didn’t close her first deal until 40.

Tony:
Now she’s an out-of-state MTRs fix and flips, and even a Poconos STR. Without a trust fund and without overextending herself

Ashley:
From burnout to buying out of state, Liz Connolly proves you don’t need to have it all figured out to get started.

Tony:
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Tony j Robinson,

Ashley:
And I am Ashley Kehr. Well, Liz, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Let’s start off with what finally made you pull the trigger at 40 after following BiggerPockets for so long.

Liz:
Thanks for having me. I really have been just in research mode for so long and with working multiple jobs as much as I could, I had finally banked enough that I was like, okay, it’s really time to take some action. And that catalyst, I think was really the 30 day stay BiggerPockets book by Sarah Weaver and Ziana McIntyre. It was one of those that really just told me, Hey, the Midwest is a really good market. There’s good price points there. And my get up and go was like, well, what’s the worst case scenario? If I can afford the mortgage and the place just sits vacant, then that’s worst case. So why not jump in and at least try

Tony:
Liz? I think for a lot of folks, they think that maybe they’re too late in life to start investing in real estate. If I didn’t start when I was a 22-year-old college senior, then there’s no point in me even trying. What did you tell yourself to say, no matter how old you are, and obviously 40 is not even that, it’s not even old, but there’s a lot of people who think like, man, if I haven’t started earlier, I shouldn’t start. What was going through your mind to say, Hey, it doesn’t matter where I’m at in my life, I can still start today.

Liz:
Real estate just in general has always been a passion of mine and I’ve tried hobbies like anybody else going through that midlife. As a millennial, we try everything, right, different crafts and things, and I always just kept being drawn back to real estate. And as much as I like to say I’ve started, I’ve probably lived four different lifelines at this point between my first marriage and kid and dealing with military life actually at that point, and then going through my divorce and being single, and I’ve probably done more in the last 20 years than some people have in a lifetime, and I’m hoping I have 40 plus more to go. So I don’t think it’s ever too late. It was just one of those, try another hobby type things and let’s see how it goes.

Ashley:
Liz, you decided to start with the out of state MTR. So what is an MTR and why did you decide to do this path?

Liz:
I’m from the outside of Philadelphia area. There are so many nursing schools around here and it never occurred to me that there are places like the Midwest where they don’t just grow their own nurses, so just logically it really fit in. I have a lot of family and friends in the medical field and then from reading the book, then going and chatting with them to get their input from an inside scoop, it was okay. It was still post COVID, but MTR being a midterm rental was really get it furnished and be a safe haven for those nurses who are traveling. I had heard enough stories from friends and family who had, they don’t know where they’re going. It’s a new city and they’re not always feeling safe. And just to be able to provide that for somebody, what really drew me to MTRs in the first place.

Tony:
And Liz, you went out of state is what I’m hearing. So you’re in the suburbs of Philadelphia. What state did you decide on? And I think more importantly, how did you decide on that specific state?

Liz:
Yeah, so I’m a big proponent of don’t reinvent the wheel, right? So just from reading the book, seeing that specifically Ziana was doing it in St. Louis and then I went, did my own research. I did use BiggerPockets to find a good agent, an investor friendly agent in the area, and I had talked to a few, but found one that I really synced with. They worked with out of state investors a lot and it just helped me feel more comfortable going into a different market, did my own research to see where the need was, what the prices were, and from being outside of Philly, looking at $160,000 single family home that was near turnkey is just unheard of. So I was like, okay. And that was fairly common in St. Louis at the time, so that was very beginning of 2023.

Ashley:
So during this journey of real estate investing, how did you plan financially for this move? Is this, you’ve already had this plan in place for years or what did the financial picture of your situation look like and how did you use that to buy your first investment?

Liz:
Going all the way back to about 2018 when I really found BiggerPockets and doing some research, then I realized I wasn’t in the best financial spot personally to get invested in real estate. So I took that time, I took a step back, really took care of some outstanding debts. I had credit cards, made sure I had my own personal emergency fund. That way I felt more secure. I’m fairly conservative anytime I run numbers or just financially myself. So to have that safety net really helped me feel like, okay, now can start saving for an investment property and making sure I had enough for down payment furnishings that ran about $10,000 just to furnish it and get it up and ready. And I was lucky enough that my realtor had put me in contact with a property manager who lived in the area and they had about a dozen of their own personal MTRs, so they’re very familiar with that landscape versus a long-term rental.

Ashley:
I think that’s an incredible point of being able to recognize that your risk will be reduced if your own personal finances are in order and you have that reserve as a safety net and have that additional savings, you’ve paid off some of your debts, you’re not having those payments. I think that is one of such a great rookie lesson is if you are scared to take action as one of those reasons because if something goes wrong, it will bankrupt you. We’ll put yourself in a situation like Liz where you are getting your financial house in order, you’re building that foundation for yourself personally and you’re setting those reserves in place so you do have that money if something bad does go wrong. And when I first started, my fear was the roof was going to blow off and I’d have to pay for a whole new roof the day that I closed on the property. So ease your mind, ease your fear, and these are things that even if you’re not ready to invest right now, these are things that you can literally start doing today.

Tony:
So Liz, but you also found the courage because it’s one thing to look at the data and say like, yeah, the price points in St. Louis look great. I found a great agent. It’s another thing entirely to say, I have enough confidence to actually buy a property in this market for the very first time that I’ve ever bought a piece of investment property hundreds or maybe thousands of miles away from where I live. What was it that gave you the confidence to actually pull the trigger on buying that first out of state deal?

Liz:
Possibly blind ignorance, it’s just one of those, I really do trust my gut a lot. I am a very conservative person by nature, so just having a really good rapport with my agent at the time doing video walkthroughs, it didn’t pull the trigger on the first property that she walked for me. Just really being able to look through everything and feel comfortable again, people always ask from an out-of-state perspective, well, how do you know it’s not just a piece of dirt somewhere or that there’s actually a property and is what it is? I trust my agent and that’s really, I did talk to a few different agents before finding the one that I really wanted to work with, and I think just having that confidence in them made me feel a little more comfortable being able to pull that trigger.

Tony:
And for all of the rookies that are listening, if you check out the BiggerPockets agent finder, you can hopefully find an investor friendly agent like Liz found for St. Louis. I just recently had my own experience with an agent through BP’s agent Finder in Oklahoma City and my son and I were in OKC about a month ago and we spent two days with this agent and she gave us the lay of the land and showed us around, and we’ve got offers out on deals now. So I do think if you’re going out of state, having an agent who really understands that market is one of the best ways to build confidence.

Ashley:
Today’s show, it’s sponsored by Base Lane. They say real estate investing is passive, but let’s get real chasing rents, drowning in receipts and getting buried in spreadsheets feels anything but passive. If you’re tired of losing valuable hours on financial busy work, I’ve found a solution that will transform your business. It’s Base Lane, a trusted BP Pro partner Base Lane is an all-in-one platform that can help you automate the day-to-day. It automates your rent collection and uses AI powered bookkeeping to auto tag transactions for instant cashflow visibility and reporting. Plus they have tons of other features like recurring payments, multi-user access and free wires to save you more time and money, spend less managing your money and more time growing your portfolio. Ready to automate the busy work and get back to investing. Base Lane is giving BiggerPockets listeners an exclusive $100 bonus when you sign up at base lane.com/biggerpockets.

Tony:
Alright, we’re back here with Liz. So Liz, we talked about how you got over the fear of going outstate. We talked about how you kind of built your team, but let’s talk about the analyzing because I think that’s one step that a lot of rookies maybe miss, and I know you said you were conservative, but walk us through your process for analyzing this property from a distance to know if it was a good deal or not.

Liz:
So again, I was a bigger pockets pro member, so using the calculators in there for rental, to make it a little easier on myself for my first go, I did look for specifically something closer to turnkey. I was not going to go for a full gut rehab my first time out in a state I’ve never been in and I didn’t know any contractors, so I was looking at turnkey. I did focus really on properties that had been on market for a while. There were still things sitting. I come from a very DIY background, so a 40 page inspection report that a homeowner stepped out on because it scared them doesn’t really scare me. I know it’s a couple screws and outlets here and there and it’s not a big deal. So I was looking at something turnkey, something that was more sitting on the market for a while and then from there just running, looking at furnish finder mostly for what are other things in the area renting for at the time a couple years ago, that was really the best place I think to go find some of that data and always shoot on the low end knowing that their seasonality something in the summer in most markets is going to run higher than in the winter and with midterm rentals typically being two to three month contracts or leases, that seasonality would play really high.

Liz:
So I would always shoot on the lower side and my thought was if I could at least break even and just get my foot into this door, that would be a win for me. It doesn’t have to be a home run.

Tony:
Liz, I appreciate you saying that so much because I think that really should be the focus for most rookie investors is to take the financial pressure off of the first deal. Obviously like, Hey, let’s break even. Let’s not lose money on the deal, but if we take the financial pressure off of the first deal and instead reframe it so that the purpose of the first deal is to educate yourself is to provide proof of concept, is to give you the foundation to go on and do your second deal and your third deal and your fifth deal and your 10th deal. A lot of the fear that Ricky’s typically associate with that first deal starts to go away because we’re lowering the expectations of what that deal needs to do. But I love that you took that approach of using the data, using the calculators and really being strict about like, Hey, what actually makes for a good deal? I guess I do want to know, Liz, since this was out of state, did you plan to leverage a property manager? So as you were doing your analysis, did you have that as one of your line items or was your plan to do it on your own?

Liz:
I did. With the first property, it was to have a property manager and really just to have somebody that I could learn from, so knowing that that added expense was there, it definitely hit my bottom line and maybe closer to break even, but at the same time I was able to learn a lot from them, just as much as you can read, seeing it in action, what tech is used, how is everything tied into each other, was really the education that I was looking for really out of my first deal to have a property manager to then be able to go into my next deal and self-manage

Ashley:
At that point in time. When you’re looking to learn from your property manager, what were some of the things that you didn’t learn that maybe you didn’t expect and a rookie investor wouldn’t know either? Doing their first deal

Liz:
Specifically with the midterm rentals, it’s all of the lead follow-up I wasn’t expecting, and really the work it takes where it’s not just, Hey, somebody finds you online, they put in an application and it’s good. It’s a lot more work upfront of, at the time in St. Louis, they were still a lot of travel nurses, but just learning that they throw out a bunch of inquiries and they might not get back to you. Being proactive and getting back to them quick is a big deal that helps you stand out because I’ve heard plenty of times, oh, thanks for such the quick response. They get ghosted by landlords too, so the little extra work in the lead gen that I wasn’t expecting.

Ashley:
After you’ve got this midterm rental wrapped up, you have it rented out, what’s the next step for you?

Liz:
Before I had that one rented out, I was already looking for the next deal. After reading 30 day stay really started jumping into Instagram and following everybody I could who was mentioned in the book. That’s really when I found Grace and Amelia with the wire community and started following them, realized, oh, well, Cedar Rapids, Iowas another one of those markets that Grace was doing really well in. I did some of my own research again, the price point was really great, and again, if I failed, it wasn’t going to be the biggest hit, and that’s when I started looking again, found an agent on BiggerPockets in Cedar Rapids and went down the whole path again and I self-managed that property.

Ashley:
At the time when you decided to self-manage, did you take over your first original property too or did you keep that one with the property manager?

Liz:
I did not. I left my St. Louis properties with that property manager just out of ease. It was doing okay and at the same time, I was a little better than breakeven, so I just kind of let that one roll.

Tony:
What stopped you from just continuing to scale in St. Louis where you already had the team, you already had some processes and systems. What was the thought process to split off into a new market?

Liz:
Part of it was I didn’t want to play competition with my property manager, and I know she probably wouldn’t think of it that way, but I felt like if I did stay in St. Louis, one, it was getting more competitive as time was going on. That market specifically has gotten very competitive from a furnish rental for out-of-state investor, so I didn’t really want to compete with her. I felt like I would keep asking her questions for contacts for landscapers and contractors, so okay, I can go do this by myself in a different market.

Ashley:
I think that brings up a good point as far as finding the landscape as a contractors. When you went into this new market, was that hard to build your team that you needed there on your own without using a pm?

Liz:
Again, I was very lucky just finding the right agent who was an investor friendly and out of state, put me in contact with my handyman, who in the smaller markets, they tend to do a lot more of everything. So he does my landscaping, he does my snow removal in the winter and general handyman stuff, and when the bigger items come up, because he’s local, I just ask him, who’s the plumber I need or HVAC or an electrician for the, if something comes up that’s bigger than what he can handle.

Tony:
Well, Liz, as you’re doing all this work to scale, the question that pops into mind for me is how are you funding all of these deals? Was it plopping down 20% on the first one in St. Louis, another 20% on the second one in Iowa, or was there some other form of financing that you were using to be able to scale in a relatively short period of time?

Liz:
I was lucky enough, I was working multiple full-time jobs. I work from home, which makes it a little more feasible, so I was banking some good money at the time and by taking care of my personal finances before, my living expenses were fairly minimal, so I could definitely save a lot more of my paycheck than typical homeowners can. So on top of that, being in the Midwest, when St. Louis, my single family was $160,000, so 20% of that is not as much as if I had to buy a $400,000 property close to home and in Cedar Rapids it was $115,000 house. So the 20% down is not as hard of a hit at those purchase prices, but I was buying in my own name at the time. I didn’t have my LLC set up yet, and my debt to income ratio because of my jobs was still okay adding those two additional properties to my DTI.

Tony:
It’s just one follow up question for me, because you said you were working multiple jobs, how many jobs were you working and how were you balancing all those with growing your real estate portfolio with being a single parent, that feels like a lot for one person to kind of manage. How were you juggling all those things effectively?

Liz:
I was working three jobs and it was busy days. Thankfully, I work in software, so just having so many computers out and bouncing back and forth as needed was not easy, which is why it was planned to be a short term thing, really just so that I could start funding some of my real estate goals at the time, I would be able to at least keep my hours down to eight 30 to 5, 5 30, still be able to handle with all of the household things and getting my daughter where she needed to go. And at the time it worked, but it wasn’t something I wanted to keep up for too long.

Ashley:
I think that just shows how bad you really want something, and if you’re listening right now and you want to get your first deal, you want to, what are you willing to do even if it’s for a short period of time or longer than you want to, what are you willing to do to actually get to that goal? To get to that point? What sacrifices are you going to make in your own life? I miss out on a ton when my kids were babies and everyone said to me, they’re only babies once. They’re only young once, and I would feel so guilty, so guilty. But yet right now they’re only eight, nine, and 11. They’re only that age once too. They’re only going to be teenagers once and since I worked really hard when they were little, I have so much time with them now, and that was a sacrifice that I chose to make as a mother, but it has got us to where we are today, and I would not go back and trade those hard years. It has been worth it, and I just wanted it so bad that I worked all the time, all the time. I think about it now. I’m so lazy now. I used to stay up till three in the morning and working, working, working, and now I can’t stay up past 10.

Ashley:
But I think that is such a point to drive home to investors of what you said right there is like, yeah, it worked. It wasn’t how you wanted to live at that point, but you made it work because you wanted to reach that goal of investing in real estate.

Liz:
No, I knew it was going to be a short-lived strain, right? You have to choose your heart, and I would rather do it for a shorter time now than for the next 20 years working at a single job and still being able to struggle to take time off to go do school things with my daughter or anything like that and take vacation. So the goal is still to get to where I’m work optional and can choose that time.

Tony:
Such an important point that both of you’re making and one that I think Ricks really need to understand because I think it’s so easy to get caught up in the tactical side of real estate investment gate, here’s this strategy, or Hey, use this kind of loan product, or Hey, ask this question to try and find this off market deal. But I think the piece that so many rookies overlook is the sacrifice and the discipline. It’s like everyone wants the six pack abs, but no one wants to eat egg whites for breakfast every morning. And I think so many of the people who are listening would be further along in their journeys if they could do simple things like, I don’t know, wake up two hours earlier. So you have an uninterrupted block of time every morning to really focus on your business, do like Liz, and either work on really increasing your income or decreasing your expenses or maybe even both so you can save more money faster.

Tony:
So it’s all of these unsexy things that we’ve all experienced as we built our portfolio that doesn’t get talked about enough. And Ash, we probably need to make an entire episode of just like, here are 10 unsexy things you need to do to buy your first real estate deal, and we’ll get no one that listens to it. But those that do, they’ll probably get a lot of benefit from it. But Liz, going back to your story. So you move from St. Louis, you move to Iowa. What’s for you next? Do you keep scaling in that market or what does your portfolio do from there? I

Liz:
Like to say I do have shiny object syndrome, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing this early in my investing career, I’m still learning what I like about it and the different aspects that maybe I don’t like so much. So after Iowa, I went back to St. Louis to get another duplex, and then with working so much, I saw what my tax bill was in one year and said, well, I’m not doing that again. So never thought I would get into short-term rentals, but just for the tax benefits at the time, I went and bought big property up in the Poconos, which are the mountains in northeast Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half from my house and went the short-term rental route and tried that. It’s going pretty well, but then I also just did my first flip. So I’m doing a little bit of everything until I really find what I enjoy.

Tony:
Now, this is a really timely conversation because there was some legislation that was passed recently that impacts tax strategy for real estate investors. But Liz, can you explain what was it about short-term rentals that made you feel from a tax perspective? It was a smart move.

Liz:
So I had done my research at the time, so 2023, when I bought that property, bonus depreciation was at 80%. What that meant was I did buy the property. It was already fully furnished and fairly updated. I ran a cost segregation study, which allowed me to front load a lot of the depreciation on that property in the first year. So because I made so much in my W2 job, the IRS considers short-term rentals as active income. Though we all know all real estate investing is active income, but to the IRS just short-term rentals count. So all of that front loaded depreciation was able to be written off against my taxable income at my W2 jobs. What that allowed me to do was essentially write off, in my case, it was about $84,000 of taxable income in one year with one property.

Tony:
You just gave yourself almost an $84,000 raise, right? It’s insane how the tax code is so favorable to real estate investors, but especially real estate investors who have W2 jobs and own short-term rentals because you do get the material participation and all the bonus depreciation, and just for folks that are listening, if you just go look up bonus depreciation, you’ll find the most recent UpToDate information. But now list said it was 80%, it’s actually back to 100%, which is where it was in years prior. So lots of benefit there.

Ashley:
So we have to take our last at break, but we will be back with more after this. Okay. Welcome back. We are here with Liz. So Liz, what are some of the most common traps or maybe even red flags that rookie investors may miss when they decide to invest out of state?

Liz:
I think it’s really doing the deep dive or getting the information from folks who do know, like a seasoned investor friendly agent in that area of where’s the growth, is their growth, is there not, what is bringing people to that area for the specific type of rental that you’re trying to put on the market? If it’s midterm rentals, I’m looking at the hospital systems in the area. Are there enough large hospital systems or is it just that one little country hospital that they really don’t need that many employees? Is there development going on in Iowa right now? There’s a brand new Google facility that’s being built, so I’m housing a lot of construction teams in the house. So it’s looking for that growth of what’s coming down the line. Maybe not necessarily what’s happening right this moment, but you have to look forward to is it going to continue and get bigger or better? So I think that’s definitely a red flag if people don’t look beyond the here and now to see what could happen down the line and nobody has a magic ball, a crystal ball, but at the same time, you can predict a little.

Ashley:
I think that is such a great point. I think that is so true for many aspects of real estate investing. For example, partnerships like instead of just looking at the partnership structure today and how it works, it makes sure you’re looking down the road and down the line to see if that is going to work in X amount of years too, or what are the different exit strategies to have. I think that’s a very valid point. So I guess the next thing is what’s been the biggest life unlock for you or that has changed your life dramatically since you started getting started in real estate investing?

Liz:
I think the ability to work from my phone anywhere has really released me from the shackles of my desk that I’m so used to for so long that as nice as it is to work from home, I’m at a eight to nine hours a day. So the more I build my real estate portfolio, yes, am I on my phone all the time? Of course, I have guests or inquiries coming through at all times, whether I’m on vacation or I’m out to dinner with friends, but at the same time, a couple minutes on my phone, on vacation or at dinner is nothing compared to the eight to nine hours a day being trapped at my desk. So just the little glimmer of that at a larger scale to finally be able to walk away from my desk at some point is really that aha moment that yes, this is possible.

Liz:
Now I’m also over 40, so I’m not going to retire by 30, but at the same time, any of those extra years I can get is a benefit, and I try to think and everyone says, oh, you’re middle age. But at the same time, I’ve really only been working, what, 20 years of my life so far that I’m hoping I have 40 more to enjoy. So I’ve got plenty of time left that even if it takes me 10 years from now to really be self-sustaining in real estate and being able to walk away from work, it’s still so much sooner than a lot of the population can who just work their job and go to work and come home.

Ashley:
Liz, do you have a number or a time period where it’s you are completely done working and full-time into real estate?

Liz:
I actually just finally started thinking this through, right where I’m not a big vision person, but at the same time I am kind of just doing different things. My daughter just turned nine last week and I said, you know what? When she graduates high school in roughly nine years, I would love for that time to be the time that I’m done, whether it’s being able to spend time with her, whatever she chooses to do, or that’s the time I can go and travel for a month or three if I so choose, because I have nothing tying me really to a set location

Ashley:
Or move to whatever college town she goes to. Be closer that too. Yeah, that would be me.

Tony:
Liz, one last question from me because you mentioned this earlier, and I just fill this in that we should go back to for the sake of the audience. You said that early in a real estate investors journey, there is some value in having a little bit of shiny object syndrome, and I think I agree with that because you’ve got to at some point try different things to know, Hey, what do I actually enjoy? What’s been the biggest benefit to you personally as a real estate investor to trying flipping short-term midterm rentals all within a relatively short period of time?

Liz:
I think I’m able to take some things I’ve learned and put it into the different strategies, which has really helpful. I’ve learned as I just finished my first flip, I really do like that project based with a start and an end date in mind, which from a rental perspective, it’s just ongoing, which has its own benefits and challenges as well. But I found out I really do enjoy the short-term projects from a flip. I mean, my flip took six weeks, so nothing too crazy. But at the same time, I found that I do enjoy the hospitality aspect of the short-term rentals that I didn’t think I would. I actually, in the midst of a divorce last year, was under contract for a motel and was really excited about that potential project that two years ago had you asked me, that would’ve never been in my sights at all. So yeah, it’s just learning more about myself, different things that I find I do enjoy, and the connection between each of the different strategies. There’s always some common threads in there that can prove helpful no matter what you want to do.

Ashley:
Well, Liz, thank you so much for joining us today on Real Estate Rookie. We really enjoyed hearing your story and what an inspiration to others and such great advice along the way too. So thank you. Thanks

Liz:
For having me. Amy,

Ashley:
Can you let everyone know where they can reach out to you and find out more information about your journey?

Liz:
Mostly, I’m on Instagram, not a huge, I’m trying to post better on social media, but I’m not on as much as I should be. But I am at Harlow Homes, so it’s H-A-R-L-O homes on Instagram, and that’s where you can usually find me.

Ashley:
Well, thank you so much. Thank you everyone, for listening today. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you on the next episode.