159. I Didn't Sleep for Weeks Before Buying My First Rental Property — Here's What Happened!

🌟 How to Buy Your First Rental Property: The Step-by-Step Blueprint 🌟

Welcome to the Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Webinar! In this session, host Niyi Adewole pulls back the curtain on exactly what it takes to buy your first rental property — from the fear and sleepless nights before closing, to building a portfolio that lets your money work harder than you do. If you've been thinking about getting into real estate but don't know where to start, this episode is your roadmap.

🔥 Quote of the Day: "The first deal is not gonna make you rich. The whole point of the first deal is to get you into the game." — Niyi Adewole

💡 What This Means: Too many people wait for the perfect deal or the perfect moment, and never take action at all. Your first property isn't about hitting a home run — it's about learning the game, building your team, and positioning yourself for the next deal, and the one after that. Wealth in real estate is built through consistency, not a single transaction.

🎙️ What You'll Learn:

1. The Fear Is Normal — Here's How to Push Through It: Niyi opens up about how he didn't sleep for weeks before and after closing on his first triplex, and why every investor goes through this on their first deal.
2. House Hack vs. Pure Investment — Which Financing Path Is Right for You: Learn the key differences between owner-occupant financing (as little as 5% down) and investor loans (20–25% down), and why choosing the right path can save you tens of thousands upfront.
3. Why You Need an Investor-Friendly Lender: Understand why big banks like Bank of America and Chase are not built for what real estate investors need, and how working with a mortgage broker that shops across 95+ lenders can unlock better rates and lower down payments.
4. Crystal Clear Criteria — The Red Car Theory Applied to Real Estate: Niyi explains why getting laser-focused on your target neighborhoods, price range, and property type is the secret to spotting deals everyone else is missing on Zillow.
5. The 1% Rule and the Atlanta 0.8% Rule: Learn the simple rules of thumb Niyi uses to quickly evaluate whether a long-term rental deal is worth pursuing — and how to apply them in your specific market.
6. Managing Your Property Without Losing Your Mind: From online rent collection to automated maintenance requests, Niyi walks through the exact tools and systems he uses — including Buildium — to manage rentals without being on call 24/7.
7. LLCs — Do You Really Need One Before You Buy? Niyi breaks down exactly when and how to use an LLC for legal protection, and why buying in your personal name first actually gives you far better lending terms.

🏡 Key Takeaways:

➤ You Don't Need Hundreds of Thousands to Start — With as little as 5% down on a primary home or house hack, you can get into your first investment property and start building wealth immediately.

➤ Build Your Team Before You Buy — An investor-friendly realtor, lender, and lawyer aren't just nice to have. They're the difference between a deal that works and one that falls apart.

➤ Stop Waiting, Start Moving — Analysis paralysis is the biggest deal killer. Do the upfront work, define your criteria, get pre-approved, and when the right property shows up — move fast.

⚛️ Why This Matters:

Real estate investing isn't about one big win — it's about getting into the game and letting time, appreciation, and rental income do the heavy lifting. Niyi went from a $190K triplex with $5,000 down, to 30 units in Louisville, to a 13-unit portfolio in Atlanta plus 25 short-term rentals under management. It all started with one decision to stop waiting and take action. The tools, the financing, and the team are all available to you right now — the only thing missing is the first step.

🗓️ Tune in every Wednesday at 7 PM Eastern! Don’t miss out on our journey toward financial freedom through smart investments.

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 Our Links

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➣ Ekabo Home Network (IG, Youtube, Email) https://linktr.ee/ekabohome

Niyi Adewole is a licensed realtor in Georgia, brokered by EXP Realty. Feel free to reach out at Niyi.Adewole@exprealty.com if you would like to work with an investor friendly real estate agent.

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Goal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Financial Freedom Master Money Group Podcast. Here we're all about breaking free from the 40 to 50 year work grind and accelerating our journey towards financial freedom. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast track your path to financial independence. We serve as a hub for connecting with fellow members during our sessions so you can share successes, ask questions, and keep the momentum going.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Okay, we're gonna kick this thing off. I hope everybody is having an awesome week. Uh, my name is Nehi Adawale. For those who do not know, I'm the founder of the Akaaba Home Team, which is brokered by EXP Realty, and we are the investor-friendly realtors, most of us based in Georgia, servicing all of Georgia. I'm actually based in the Atlanta Metro and we have team members all over. And we recently branched out to Texas uh with a base in Dallas as well as are in

The First House Hack Fear

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Florida. And today what we're gonna start with is a story. Because if you're thinking about buying your first rental property, I know exactly what's going through your head right now because I've been there, right? Uh when I was 24 years old, I bought my first rental property, and it was a house hack in Louisville, Kentucky. And full transparency, before I moved to Louisville for work, I could not pick it out on a map. I actually thought Louisville was where Louisiana is. So, you know, just a fun fact. And I gotta be real with you, when I purchased this first property, I didn't sleep for about two weeks before closing or a month after. I kept thinking to myself, like, man, I've messed up, I'm gonna completely ruin my whole financial life. This whole thing is gonna take me down. Cause in my mind, I was still coming from you know, being a kid in high school during the financial crisis and seeing what it did to my family and my mom when she had to, you know, give back and short sell these houses. And I was thinking, man, am I gonna make the same mistake? But what actually ended up happening, right, is I started to learn over time that hey, I actually do know what I'm doing with managing. I have read a lot of books and listened to podcasts, and I do have the support systems around me to be able to make this thing happen. And so before I bought that first house hack triplex, right, and lived in one unit and rent the other two out, I was paying $1,200 per month to live in an amazing apartment in Louisville. $1,200 a month, you know, back in 2016 went very far, right? You were able to go and get a two-bed, two-bath loft right next to the pool in this brand new kind of converted commercial space, and it was awesome. But when I moved into that triplex, I went from paying $1,200 a month to now my mortgage was $13.50. But the cool thing about that is the other two tenants that were living in the other units were paying a total of $1,400. And so I went from paying $1,200 a month to now bringing in when you subtract the mortgage, $50 a month to live, which is my biggest expense. And so I was able to essentially live for free and make money. I'm not gonna paint this as all roses, there's gonna be issues that popped up, and there were plenty that did that I had to solve and figure out, but it helped that I was now saving twelve hundred dollars per month and really twelve fifty if you count that fifty dollars, and was able to use that for some of the items that popped up as I learned what I was doing. And so, what I would say is the fear that I felt before purchasing the house and even after ownership was handed over to me is normal. Every investor is gonna feel this on their first deal, right? This is completely normal, and that first deal is not gonna make you rich. The whole point of the first deal is to get you into the game so that you can get to the next deal, right? Which will then start to allow you to figure out which portion of this you actually like, right? Find your niche, get excited about it, and start to be able to build out a whole portfolio. Similar to you know, doing a 401k investment or stocks, right? There's not one investment that's gonna make you rich, it happens over time. It's the same thing when it comes to real estate. The first deal is so that you can get in, make the mistakes, learn how to do this thing, and continue to get better as you buy the next and the next. And so, what we're gonna talk about today is just the whole process behind buying that first property and and kind of what that entails and how it can help you, and then all the different pieces that you need to put in place to be able to scale that after you get the first one. Because once you realize that you can earn money in your sleep that you don't actively have to work for, it's a major unlock. From that first house hack, I ended up building my units from that one triplex up to 30 units in Louisville, Kentucky, that I eventually was able to trade in for building self-storage from the ground up. And then when I moved out to Atlanta, I've now built up a portfolio of 13 units out here, and we manage, you know, an additional 25 from a short-term rental standpoint. But the main piece of that first investment property is to show you that you can stop trading time for money and have that money earn for you in your sleep. And the reason that I personally like real estate investing over, say stocks, and I do do both, I think everybody should do both, but real estate's where I lean heavy toward is because stocks will pay you maybe a minor dividend if you have a heck of a lot in there, but you don't actually make the bulk of the profit from stocks while you own the stock, right? Everybody's like, hey, if you owned Apple stock for 40 years, you'd be a the a multi-millionaire, and that sounds great, but why wouldn't you sell during that 40 years? Don't you still need to live? The cool thing about real estate is, and I'll dive into that first property I bought, it gets better over time, right? Not only are you getting the tax benefits and the appreciation of the property going up, but the rents also appreciating. And so I mentioned before when I lived in that first property, I was earning $1,400 from the other units and my mortgage was $13.50. When I moved out and got promoted with my work and moved to another state, I rented my unit out and the total rent coming in was $2,200, right?

Cash Flow Plus Appreciation Math

SPEAKER_01 5:40

And actually, let me share my screen and write write this down so you can kind of see it visually for those. And we're gonna continue to do and get better at these webinars, but let's see if this will work. Okay, so when I first bought that property, right? Before that, this was Ne the renter, and excuse my chicken scratch, I was paying $1,200 per month, right? Now, after I bought that triplex, I lived in unit one. So this is me, right? Ni lived here. My mortgage was a total of $13.50. Unit two brought in $700, and unit three brought in $700. And so I was able to essentially live for free, and I was actually in the positive by $50, right? Which was amazing when I lived there. Now, when I got promoted and I moved up and out to another unit, I was able to rent my unit out for $800. And so when I moved out, I was able to get somebody into my unit for $800 per month, which brought me up to $2,200 per month. And my mortgage stayed the same at $1,350. And so I was cash flowing when I moved out of there. Now, four years later, I traded that property in for more property and to get into that storage. And when I did that, the rent after four years across the board had appreciated from $2,200 to $2,850. And my mortgage was still $1350. And so this was just extra dollars that I was pulling in on the same mortgage and just cash flowing and making money month over month on that first property. And the cool thing about this is when I sold that, because I didn't mention this, this is back in the day, this is a decade ago, right? So you're not going to find this right now. The prices have increased and people have found out about it. But I bought this house for 190K and I sold it four years later for 310K. And so I walked away with a six-figure check of over 100K. And at the time, right, when I had first joined the corporate world, my first year I made 65k, right? And so this was essentially close to double what I made my first year in corporate without having to do much except sacrifice a little bit of comfort to go from living in a two-bed, two bath by the pool, which was amazing, to a triplex where I now own that triplex. And so that's the power of what a rental can do for you. And it allowed me to see that hey, I can have my money work for me even harder than I work for my money. And it allowed me to get to where I am today when it comes from that standpoint. And so I want to dive into just the main steps here, and we're going to do one

Financing Choices That Change Everything

SPEAKER_01 7:48

at a time. So the first step when it comes to getting ready to go and buy your first rental property is financing, right? You need to understand your financing. And so, um, the way to understand your financing is to one, you need to know yourself, right? I was comfortable at that time period doing a house hack. I now have a family that's expanding, and so we still do house hacks, but it's getting a lot more difficult to find the ones that actually fit our lifestyle. And pretty soon we're just gonna move to that single family house with a picket fence, right? But if you're open to it, right, and you are willing to sacrifice a little bit right now so that you can make so much more later, I would highly recommend starting out with a house hack, which is essentially buying a duplex, triplex, or quadplex, living in one unit and renting the others out. And you only have to do that for one year. When you sign the documents, you're committing to living there for one year. The reason that I recommend that from a financing standpoint is the bank loves lending on a place that you are gonna live in, right? When the bank lends on a place that you are gonna live in, right, as a primary home, they give you down payments of FHA, where you can do three and a half percent if it's your first property of the purchase price, and they give you conventional where you can do as little as five percent down on your first property, right? And so I'm gonna use the median price of a property across the nation, which is roughly around 400k right now to give you the example. So on a 400k purchase price, right, you could put down as little as 20K to get into that property. And if it's gonna drastically lower how much you're paying per month out of pocket in a house hack, it's more than worth it, right? You'll make that 20K back in savings in like a year or two, right? Based on what you're paying for rent and mortgage and things of that nature right now. Um, so that's if you're gonna do as a primary. If you're gonna buy it as a pure investment, say you're not in a position or you've gotten used to the good life, right? And you're like, hey, listen, I'm not gonna do a house hack, that's more than fine. I'd still encourage you to buy some form of real estate and make sure that's cash flowing so you can start to see those dollars work for you even while you sleep. And so that would be more of an investor loan. And if you're gonna go the investor loan route, you're gonna have to put down a bit more. The bank typically requires you to put down 20%. If you're gonna go the investor route, sometimes they'll make you put down 25%. There's other loans that can allow you to put down as little as 15%, but it's definitely not gonna be as little as you can with the primary. And the reason being, if anything happens to your financial situation or like AI takes all our jobs, you know, tomorrow and all of a sudden we're we're kind of in trouble, they know that you would give up an investment property before you gave up your primary home where you come to lay your head at night. And so they want you to have more skin in the game at 20% down. So in the same example, instead of putting 20K, you would be putting down 80K to get that house, right? And they want you to do that so that they know they can sell it at a 20% discount and still get their money back, and they know that they're they're they're covered from that standpoint. So that's the reasoning behind the different lending. And so if you're willing to sacrifice a little bit, you can put down one-fourth of what you'd be have to put down as an investor to go and purchase that first property. But understanding finance is understanding how you want to get that property, whether it's gonna be as an investor purely, like you're not gonna stay there, or as a house hack. And once you have that piece, you want to go find an investor-friendly lender, right? And the reason that I say this is a lot of people will go to their bank, right? And they'll go to like Bank of America or you know, Chase and say, Hey, you know, I want to go buy a house. Can you help me with a loan? And those individuals are not geared toward what we're trying to do, right? A lot of those, like Bank of America or Chase, they're not gonna be working behind the scenes for you at certain hours. Like they're literally gonna have it, hey, you know, between the hours of nine and and five, maybe we'll help you Monday through Friday. But if you had a question on the weekend or if you were trying to work through, you know, a deal where it's it's kind of time sensitive, those guys like I've seen deals fall apart because people wanted to go with like the Bank of Americas of the world and things of that nature. And they usually service more of the high net worth individuals really well. Like if you're worth multiple millions, absolutely, they're gonna be able to give you some products that you probably can't get anywhere else because of the banking relation that they have. But if you're getting your first property and you don't have multiple millions in the bank with them, they they tend to not care as much, we'll say. And so we recommend going with a broker, like an investor-friendly broker from a mortgage standpoint. And we're happy to share our resources with you if you reach out or if you want to send a message to me or the team, we can give you the contacts that we have because the brokers we have work across the nation. A broker is gonna be able to shop your deal to multiple different lenders, right? The broker that we use shops with 95 different lenders, and then they're able to find the best one that fits what you're trying to do, whether that be a house hack, whether that be an investment. And that's what I mean. So when you go back to the top, when I was talking about the investor piece, if you go to Bank of America or JP Morgan Chase, it's gonna be 20% or 25%. You go to investor-friendly lender, we've been able to put down as little as 15% and sometimes 10% on an investment property that we're not gonna be in, just based on the appetite of that investor to take on that deal. And so that's pretty incredible when you look at that. And so you want to find an investor-friendly lender and get pre-approved. And the reason you want to get pre-approved first is you don't want to open Pandora's box, right? You don't want to go looking for two million dollar quadplexes if your pre-approval is 800K, right? Because that pre-approval is gonna tell us what neighborhoods we can play in and which properties we should focus on. And so once you get that pre-approval, now you want to go find that investor-friendly realtor. And again, if it's in Georgia, Florida, or Texas, holla at your people. Hit me up, hit up the Akaaba home team, we will help you out. If it's anywhere else around the nation, you can still hit us up. We do partner and connect with other investor-friendly lenders because this is our investor-friendly realtors around the nation, and so we can connect you with somebody. But when you talk about that pre-approval piece, once you have that, you want to find that investor-friendly realtor. And if they truly are investor-friendly, meaning that they own investment property and understand the market. Like when you talk about house hacks, it's not a new concept to them, right? Because a lot of realtors say, Yeah, I can help investors, and then you are teaching them more so than being able to learn, especially for your first deal. That's not ideal. You want to have somebody that can help you and guide you and give you all the resources to where if you reach out to them in the middle of the night, like, hey, I need a plumber or I need a roofer, they're not calling, you know, the roofing company that's gonna charge you 20K because they got ads on TV. They're giving you the roofer that'll charge you 5K or 7K for the same job because they have a relationship with them. And so, what that investor-friendly realtor should be doing for you is helping you build your team, right? They're gonna help you build your team with all the other pieces that you need to be successful, and they should help you run the numbers on your property to make sure that it works. And so, after this, I'm actually gonna send out to everybody that has joined the webinar or reaches out to us a house hack calculator that we put together for those that are looking to do

Clear Criteria For A House Hack

SPEAKER_01 14:17

a house hack. But this is something that we use for our clients to help bring it down to a granular level. What makes sense? When I'm looking at, you know, somebody who's looking to buy their first property and it's gonna be a house hack. I always ask the question, what are you paying for rent right now? Right. And I'll actually ask to the group here those that feel comfortable, bro. I think it's gonna be anonymous and probably just go to me. Just drop in what you're paying for rent right now. You could even be a range, and I'll see how to do that. Actually, let me boom. I'm gonna do a poll. We're gonna create a poll live for the first time. So I'm gonna do a range. How much do you pay for rent right now? We're gonna go 2,000 to 2,000, 3,000, and then we're gonna do one that is 3,000 plus. Okay, so I'm going to boom and and save. Let's see if that actually works. And while that's loading to see if it works, we're going to oh okay, there we go. Just launched it. Perfect. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, I love this webinar format. But so while we're doing that, I'll just talk through this piece. So when it comes to rents, I talked about what I was paying before in Louisville, and that's what I felt comfortable with. I actually had a percentage set aside that I felt comfortable paying for rent, and that was roughly 25% of what I was making. I was like, hey, I feel comfortable paying that toward rent. I wanted to keep it way lower than what the American average is. And so that's gone up over the years, right? Now I like living a lot more comfortably, but I'm always looking at hey, how can I limit the amount I'm paying out of pocket for for rent? And so I see a couple responses. Some of you are paying between two and three grand, cut people paying three grand or more. The way I look at a house hack, at least for it to be a win, right? If you are able to cut your living expenses by half, right? That's a major win. Imagine you're paying three grand a month for rent, and now you can go own a duplex, triplex, or quadplex that's gonna appreciate in value, appreciate in rents over time, but your mortgage is gonna stay the same, and you can save, you know, fifteen hundred dollars per month, or even if you're just saving a thousand dollars per month, right? That's twelve thousand per year that you could save and put to the side or put in the market, however, you want to do with that, save toward the next investment while owning a property, and you only have to do that for up to one year, and you can move if there's a change or a life event. For example, I lived in my first triplex in Louisville for six months and I got promoted and moved all the way to Boston, like a thousand miles away. And so, because it was a job change, there was no penalty or anything. I just picked up and moved and kept doing my house hack thing up there, right? It looked a little different, but I kept doing my house hack thing up there. And so that's one of the major benefits. So I'd make it super simple. I'd look at where you're paying right now and say, Hey, if I can go buy another house and after factoring in the rents from the other tenants, if my out of pocket is significantly less than what I'm paying right now, we're shooting for half or less, right? Or even a thousand dollars less. That's a major win. Like that's money that's going back to you that you can save and you're getting the tax benefits and you're getting an investment property. So shifting over to creating that crystal clear criteria. That's what I'm trying to help you with right now. You want to be super clear on what you're looking for. It's gonna help those realtors that you're working with, especially if you don't find an investor-friendly realtor, it will hopefully help guide them toward what you are looking for. And so, for example, right, I don't know if everybody on here has heard about the the red car theory, right? Essentially, what it says is if you go buy like a red car, you're gonna start to see a lot of red cars all over the place. And better yet, I'll bring it down to a more granular level. A few years ago, uh, I bought a Tesla Model Y. This is before Elon went crazy, right? So I just want to put that out there. But I bought a Tesla Model Y, and all of a sudden I see these things all over the place. And you could probably say the same, right? If you just look at the car that you have, when you're driving down the road, you probably see a bunch of them, but it's really just you seeing that because you're used to having that car. It's the same thing when you have a crystal clear criteria. I can't tell you how many people I talk to on a day-to-day basis that are trying to get into investing, you know, in the areas we cover, and they're like, Man, I've been looking on Zillow, but I just can't find the properties. It seems like there's no deals out there. I promise you, there's people doing deals on the daily, and we're we're helping a lot of them. It's just that you don't have a trained eye, at least yet, to see those deals because you're looking at it for the first time. And so that's the benefit of working with people that can help you do that. But what can help you start to see those deals is getting really clear on what you need. So if you're going after that house act that we were talking about before, you need to know what neighborhoods you're willing to be in and not willing to be in. You need to know that pre-approval amount. All these things help you narrow down that criteria so that you can be laser focused. And when a property pops up, you can snatch it up. The reason I was able to build my units even from afar, from three units with that first triplex up to 30 units all along the same area in Louisville is because I had lived there for a little bit and I bought in the same literal street. Like all the properties I own were in like within a mile of each other because I knew that area. And anytime a property popped up, I immediately knew the numbers. I'm like, hey, I'm renting this for a lot more. This person's not maximized. I'm buying that, right? And kind of going from there. And so it helps you when you really define your criteria.

Move Faster With Simple Rules

SPEAKER_01 19:04

And then the next thing that I want to talk about is not allowing analysis paralysis to slow you down. The reason that you do all this upfront work of getting the pre-approval, getting the investor friendly realtor, understanding your crystal criteria, crystal clear criteria and what you're willing to do and not do is so that you can move fast when you do see one that pops up that makes a lot of sense, right? Because the worst thing you can do is put in all this time and then not take action. The best thing you can do is at least take action on that first one. And even if you make mistakes, you're gonna learn from them and it's gonna help you on the next one and the next one, which will eventually build that financial freedom that you're looking for. And so when you look at ways that we help people kind of pull that trigger first, we use rules of thumb to help us move a little bit quicker, right? So, for example, when you're looking at a long-term rental, meaning a 12-month lease, right, with tenants and things of that nature for a property, there's something called the 1% rule that used to make sense in many different areas. Now it doesn't make sense in most markets, it really only makes sense in markets like Kentucky or like Ohio, where it's a bit cheaper and it hasn't appreciated as much. But for example, for the Georgia market, Atlanta, I know that we have something called the 0.8% rule. And what that means, and I'll show you here, is if you if you can purchase a property, right? Here goes what the 1% rule means for 1% rule for long-term rentals. If you can purchase a property, I'm gonna use 100K because it's easy math for 100K and that property will rent for a thousand dollars per month, right? Or you know, twelve thousand in a year, that is a deal worth purchasing. It hits the one percent rule, it's more than likely gonna cash flow for you, right? Now, I just mentioned this only exists in some of like the Midwest markets where prices haven't gone up as much, but in Atlanta, we still have something called the 0.8% rule, meaning if in this same scenario you're buying a house for 100k, if you can rent it for $800 per month, this is a deal that you want to pursue. And the reason for that is you have a lot of appreciation in this market, not only of the price, but also of the rent. And so it's not gonna be at 1% initially because those deals they don't even come to market. And if it does, it's gone so quickly, like and it's it's overbidding and things of that nature. This is a sweet spot where you can get that property, and then within a year or two, you can be at that one percent rule, especially if you're in the right neighborhood, and have that home continue to appreciate for you. So, this is what we found to be a major win. And you want to understand what that looks like in your market in Louisville, it was about 1.2% when I was purchasing out there, right? Like 1.2% was the sweet spot, and you could get that. Now it's probably changed. I'm not fully active over there as I was before. Told you I moved more into that

Property Management Tools That Help

SPEAKER_01 21:36

storage. Okay, let's dive into management, right? Managing what you own. So, this is super important. This is like the next question that we get is like, okay, I've purchased the property. Now I'm the landlord. What am I supposed to do? How the heck do I do this thing? And so the cool thing about living in 2026 with you know all these AI tools and everything that's come out is man, it's getting easier and easier to manage your properties. Okay, back in 2016, the Is not that long ago. It seems like, man, you should have had all this technology. There wasn't that much out there. A lot of people were still doing this manual. I knew many investors that would go to their literal tenants' desks, their tenants' doors on the first of the month and collect money like cash, right? And I was like, hey, I don't want to be that guy. And so I kept looking online for different tools. And I personally use something called building.com, building for the management of my long-term rentals. There's also Zillow Rent Manager and many other pieces that you can use. And a lot of these softwares are now free, right? They really just want your subscription. Building.com actually costs like $50 a month, but that was what was available back then. And what that allows me to do is to not be the face that's coming there to collect rent or the face the tenant has to call for anything. Literally, with the job that I was doing, that would have been the worst case scenario to have somebody blowing my phone up in the middle of a meeting. And so what this allowed us to do is to move everything to online. Anytime there was a maintenance request, right? The tenant submitted it online. I didn't even give him really a phone number. It's like, hey, if the house is on fire, first call the fire department and get the heck out of there. Second, submit a maintenance request online, right? Because it sends a message to me and I'm able to forward that to the right maintenance contact. And eventually, as you continue down this road, what I've been able to evolve to is now I have it automatically go to the maintenance guy and he just goes and handles it. And it sends them the tenant's contact info, it sends them their unit number, uh, it sends all the pictures that the tenant put in there and exactly what the issue is to where they can go there and resolve it without me even being there. And now some of these tools are starting to implement AI to where it can parse it and send it to the right person on your behalf, which is incredible. We're still working through exactly how that's gonna work, but it's been awesome. So it helps with that, it helps with payment, right? Now tenants can pay online, right? They can use their bank account, they can use a credit card, they can use a debit card, whatever they want. They can pay online. And if they don't pay on time, if they don't pay on time, it automatically adds the late fee, and you're not the bad guy, you're just following the lease agreement and it's automated for you. And so that was another piece that I truly enjoyed. It was the maintenance, the payment, and then also the conversation history, right? Every message that we would have always was kept within that system and it had had a feature where you could text the tenant in there, and to them, it just looked like a text message, but to you, it was all online. You can do it from an app, you can do it from the computer, but it allows you to be able to have other people step in when the time comes that you've built this portfolio large enough to have some help, and that just makes it super easy. And so, even when it comes to evictions, which is something that if you're in this game long enough and you have enough units, it will happen eventually, right? When we had to go to do like evictions and things of that nature, for one, I didn't do the eviction, right? I always recommend having an investor-friendly lawyer as well that understands tenant evictions and just working out a deal with them where you can send them X amount of payment. Usually it's anywhere between $300 and $500 for eviction. Send them the documents, send them the whole conversation history, the payment history, all the stuff, and they will handle that whole process and get that tenant out of there. But anytime you need to do that, you have the whole history saved here. And it's not, oh, well, you told me this. No, listen, this is exactly what happened. You have all the details right there, and so that has been incredible as well. Now, when you talk about going and purchasing that first property, I hope that this allowed you to see that it may cost a lot less than you think. People think you need to have hundreds of thousands to go buy your first property. You don't, you do not, and literally, we've helped plenty of people build a whole portfolio over a five-year period just doing house hacks with like five percent down payments, right? And so it's just up to you and your comfort level and and how you want to approach that. But if you're willing to delay gratification for even a little bit, one year, two years, you know, five years, you can build out a portfolio that will get you financially free. And so I hope this

LLC Timing And Final Q&A

SPEAKER_01 25:40

has helped. I realize we didn't dive deep into these pieces, we kind of kept it more high-level, but I want to kick off a QA. If there are any questions, and if I can figure it out here, it goes. If I can figure it out, feel free to drop any questions in the chat and I can answer those, and I'll give it about five. I'm still trying to figure this webinar out. There we go. Okay, we got our first question. So, okay, and this is one I should have covered. This is good. So when it comes to the LLC piece, right? This is a question we get all the time. Like, spend a lot of time answering this. You do not need an LLC to buy that first property. Or let me take a step back. I don't buy most of my properties except for that storage through an LLC. I usually buy it through my personal name, right? Because you're gonna get way better lending. That's where you get the minimal down payment and the good interest rates. And then after you own the property for 30, 60 days, that's when you transfer it to the LLC for the legal protection, right? That it provides for you. So if you look up any of the properties that I quote unquote own, it's now in LLCs, but the mortgage is in my name because that's how you get the really good lending. When you buy through an LLC, they now look at it as more commercial loans, and those commercial loans look completely different. In the US, one of the main benefits that we have is that we have this 30-year loan where it's a fixed interest rate, which is incredible. If you've traveled outside the country, you know that other countries, it's like, hey, we're gonna build you a house from the ground up, but you're gonna put 50% right now, 50% later, or you need to put 30% down to secure financing or something of that nature for a primary house. In the US, we subsidize it heavily with Fandy Mae and Freddie Mac, and you're able to put down as little as three and a half percent with an FHA or five percent to go buy a whole building or house. That's incredible. And so, long story short, you get that because you're buying, you know, in your personal and they know that they can tie it back to you. Like, hey, you're personally guaranteeing it. When you remove that personal guarantee and you buy through an LLC, they now have to factor in the risk. And usually it comes with some terms like, Hey, we're gonna have it amortized over 20 years instead of 30 years, right? So your payment's gonna be more, and there's gonna be a balloon payment for the whole mortgage due in five years. That way, if interest rates have gone up, we can we can assess that. If they've gone down, we can assess that and kind of go from there. And so commercial loans or loans that you would get through an LLC do not match up to what you would get through a personal. So I'd recommend, especially for the first one, buy it personal and then move it to an LLC and go from there. But good question. Okay.

Wrap Up And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Well, everyone, I appreciate you joining. Again, my name is Ni Adawale with the ECABO Home team. And we actually just got our Cabo Home website. And I hope the links actually work on there. But feel free to check that out if you want to get more info on investing. And I look forward to catching you guys here next week. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast-track your path to financial independence.