165. How I Went From $5,000 to 30 Rental Units — The Simplest Plan!

🌟 From House Hack to 30 Units in 5 Years — The Simple Portfolio Blueprint🌟

Welcome to the Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Webinar! In this session, host Niyi Adewole breaks down the exact strategy he used to go from one house hack triplex to 30 units in less than 5 years — without overcomplicating it. If you've been stuck in analysis paralysis wondering how to scale, this episode is your roadmap.

🔥 Quote of the Day: "The trap that most new investors fall into is analysis paralysis. You end up doing nothing, and a year from now you're looking back with zero progress." — Niyi Adewole

💡 What This Means: Real estate gives you so many paths that most people try all of them at once and end up paralyzed. The investors who win pick a lane and take consistent action — one deal at a time.

🎙️ What You'll Learn:

1. Why the House Hack Is Always the Best First Deal: Put down as little as 5% instead of 20–25% on a pure investment. On an $800K fourplex, that's $40K down instead of $160K — leaving $120K ready for the next deal.
2. How to Play Offense and Defense Simultaneously: When Niyi moved into his first triplex, his two tenants paid $1,400 while his mortgage was $1,350 — he lived for free. He then automated his old $1,200 rent payment into his investment account, saving over $14,000 in one year for his next down payment.
3. House Hacking Doesn't Mean Sacrificing Comfort: Niyi shows a real live example — a 4,800 square foot duplex with no HOA, each unit a 4-bed, 3.5 bath — available for as little as 5% down. Live in one unit, rent the other.
4. How to Scale After Your First House Hack: Niyi lived off his salary and put 90% of his commissions straight into his investment account — buying duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes with 20–25% down until he hit 30 units in under 5 years and left his W-2 within 7.
5. The Power of Small Multifamily Over Single-Family: A client bought a Snellville quadplex where each unit is a 3-bed, 2.5 bath — same size as a $350–$400K single-family nearby — but paid only $250K per unit by buying all 4 together, while still charging the same rent.
6. A Real Client Success Story: A couple with a goal of having the wife stop working within 5 years bought a quadplex house hack, rented their previous home, then just closed on a second house hack duplex — controlling 5+ rental units in under 18 months.
7. How Much Do You Need Saved? Less than you think. Niyi's first triplex required just $5,000 total out of pocket. His $800K fourplex only needed $40K down. Save 3.5% for FHA or 5% for a conventional house hack loan.

🏡 Key Takeaways:

➤ Pick a Market and Commit — Give yourself a deadline. By end of next Friday, pick one market and focus on it exclusively.

➤ Automate Your Savings — Keep paying what you used to pay in rent — but to yourself. Direct it to your investment account every month without fail.

➤ Stay Flexible and Focused — Start with a house hack, move out, convert it to a rental, and stack strategies as the market shifts. Real estate gives you control that stocks never will.

⚛️ Why This Matters:

Niyi went from a $190K triplex with $5,000 down to 30 units and full financial freedom — all while traveling to Costa Rica, Hawaii, and beyond without missing a beat. The strategy isn't complicated, the sacrifice is temporary, and the freedom on the other side is permanent. One house hack is all it takes to start.

🗓️ 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

➣ Financial Freedom Mastermind Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/53083... 

➣ Peer Space Host Referral Link https://www.peerspace.com/referrals/g... 

➣ AirBNB Host Referral Link https://www.airbnb.com/r/niyia41 

➣ 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 Meeting Rhythm

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 0:27

My name is Nii Adawale, leader of the Acaba Home Team in the Akaba Home Short-Term Rental Management Team and host of the Acaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Group. I'm excited to be joining you

Build Daily Momentum With One Step

SPEAKER_01 0:40

here on Wednesday, July 1st. This is literally the beginning of the second half of the year. It feels like the first half went by so fast, right? And it's one of those things where you have to constantly be moving towards your goals and taking baby steps every day if you want to truly see progress at the end of the year. One of the things that I've actually implemented with my team, my realty team, is there's 10 or really like 13 of us now. And our WhatsApp group chat, each day we put into the chat what our most important next step is for that day to move the ball forward, whatever that means. And then we also put in a win from the day before. And that win could be hey, I completed my most important next step yesterday, and now I have this new most important next step.

House Hacking Strategy And Common Traps

SPEAKER_01 1:20

That's the key. Start building that muscle of making progress daily, and you will be successful. Now, when you look at what we're gonna talk about today, I am gonna make this semi-shap, right? I'm gonna run through how to go from house hack to building a rental portfolio. And I'm making it semi short for two reasons. One, I literally just got back from a fan fest with the England and condo Congo game. So I'm still in World Cup mode. And there's another game that's on right now that's pretty incredible with Belgium versus Senegal that I want to see the end of. And so as I'm going through this, feel free to jump in and ask any questions that you have, throw it into the questions chat. We will make it happen, but I'm gonna dive in. Okay, so this is taking it from a single house hack to a rental portfolio, and we're gonna talk about scaling your wealth strategy without overcomplicating it. I personally went from one house hack triplex to 30 units in less than five years, and I did not overcomplicate it. I used a simple plan. The trap that most new investors fall into is analysis paralysis. There's so many different things that you can get into and be successful with in real estate that you tend to want to try all of them at the same time. And what happens is you end up doing nothing. And then a year from now, you looking back and saying, Hey, you know, what progress have I actually made outside of just quote unquote education? And it's it's none, right? The progress that you can see on paper when it comes to real estate is how many deals have you bought, how much net worth are you adding, what deals did you dispo, and things of that nature. And so whether it's doing short-term or long-term rental, you got to make a decision, right? Whether it's doing a flip, hey, I'm gonna fix and flip, you gotta make a decision. Which market has the best cash flow, you got to make a decision. And is a house hack even worth it? Is one that you have to decide personally as well. Now, when you look at this, I always believe in the house hack as the first deal. And honestly, if you can continue doing that for as long as possible, I'd highly recommend. I currently have a growing family, right? I've got a son that's turning one year old next week. And so, as you can imagine, you know, convincing the wife, like, hey, let's go do another house hack was a little more difficult than when I was doing this solo back in 2016. But she understands it once I sat down and walked through it multiple times and she's on board because we don't necessarily need to be in the best school district and things that nature right now. What we need is a place that we can live safely, right? And another unit that's gonna cover a lot of our expenses to allow us to do more. And so I'd even recommend if you're still able to do this while you're building your family, my goodness, it's delaying gratification to

The Down Payment Math That Frees Cash

SPEAKER_01 3:50

allow you to on the back end have an amazing portfolio that you got for cheap. And so when you look at this, it allows you to learn with training wheels, right? If you go out and buy a whole property like a duplex, triplex, quadplex that's gonna be, you know, long-term rental for you, you typically have to put down somewhere in the range of 20% to 25%. And so let's say that property, right? Because I just bought a four-plex a couple of years ago and it cost me 800K. That fourplex, right? If I were to put down, you know, the 20%, that would be 160k that I would need to save up, put down this property and really kind of try to make it work, right? Especially if it was my first one. Now it should if we run the numbers right, but still, that's a lot of pressure on you. Whereas if you were to do a house hack, that same property, you can put down, call it five percent, and that would only be 40k, right? The other 120k would be sitting in a bank account somewhere waiting for the next property that I want to buy after I got my lessons learned from this property. And so I highly recommend that piece, right? It also allows you to play offense and defense. So, one of the things that I did, and I highly recommend for people if you're looking to go from house hack to a full-on portfolio is when I bought my first triplex, prior to that, I was paying to live in this dope apartment. It was a two-bed, two-bath loft that was next to the pool. And I was paying $1,200 a month back in 2016 to live there, right? When I moved into this house hack, my mortgage was $1,350, but the other two units of that triplex that I was not living in was bringing in $1,400 a month. So I essentially was living for free. And so what I did is because I was used to paying that $1,200 per month, I took that $1,200 and I paid it to myself. I literally had it on auto pay. And what it allowed me to do over a year is instead of having twelve hundred dollars go into the ether, right? Because that's what will happen if you don't direct your funds. I had twelve hundred dollars going into my investment account every single month, which equated to over $14,000 in a year. I then was able to use for the next down payment of the property I was looking for. So not only was I playing offense by acquiring units, but now I was playing defense by allowing my savings to now go toward the investment. Because when you look at the pie chart of where your money goes, I would venture a guess that 30 to 50 percent of that is probably going toward housing or housing related things. So why not take a chunk out of that? Yes, you could go and stop buying Starbucks coffee or whatever your vice is, right? But I would venture a guess you're not spending twelve hundred dollars you know a month on Starbucks

What A House Hack Can Look Like

SPEAKER_01 6:10

or whatever the rents are now, because that was a decade ago. The rents are probably more like $2,000 a month. So one of the things I'd also recommend is looking into your backyard first. If it's at all possible to get the first property in your backyard, I'd recommend it and I'd recommend the house act. If that's not possible, the second best thing in my mind is doing something like a vacation rental out of town where you can put down 10%. And again, the way I think about this may not be the way that you do, but I think about how can I put the least amount of powder down to get the investment and still make it work because you can take the time to find and search for the investments that are gonna make sense. And as an investor-friendly realtor, this is what we do. And I'm constantly looking at how I can save my clients money to where their cash on cash return goes higher because they have less into the deal and that deal starts to pay itself off with the tenants and they still have powder dry to go get the next deal when that time comes. And so that's not a strategy for everyone. I have some clients who are like, Hey, I have all this cash, I need to use it, and I want to put 50% down, I want to put 25% down, and things of that nature. But majority of the case, if a client's like, hey, how can I, you know, maximize my dollars? I'm usually looking to do something like that. Now, I wanted to give you an actual example, right? Because this is something that I think a lot of people kind of have, you know, some misnomers about. They start thinking about house act, they're like, man, the duplexes and triplexes that I've seen are always on the bad part of town and it's not nice. And what I would say is it's because it's almost like the the red car theory, right? If you go buy a red car, or better yet, I drive a Tesla. When not before I bought a Tesla, I would see them every so often. After I bought one, right, back in 2021, I see them everywhere, right? It's because now your ventricular system is used to seeing that because you have one, and so you notice it out there as well. Same thing when it comes to going after these small multifamilies and things that nature's and/or a single family in-law suite for a house hack. And so I actually pulled this up just before the meeting just to find an example. And this is just an example of what a house hack could look like, right? Not a normal one. And I'm not saying the numbers work on this one. I have not run the numbers, full transparency. Looking at the purchase price, this one would probably only work if you're gonna do like a short-term rental in the other unit. But when people think of apartments, they're always like, ah, one bedroom or two bedroom, this is not gonna be nice. This is 4,800 square feet. You have no HOA, each unit has 2,400 square feet, and it's a four-bed three and a half and a four, two and a half. Are you telling me that your family can't live in a four-bed three and a half, essentially townhome for one year to build financial freedom? I think you can, right? And when you look at this, it's been sitting for a while, so there's probably some negotiation room. But when you get inside, I mean, this thing is nice. I think it was built pretty recently within the last five years, if I remember correctly. And when you're looking at this, it's like, okay, this doesn't even feel like you're living in a house hack, but you actually are, and you could get this for as little as five percent down. You could put down 50k or so and buy this property as opposed to trying to go after, like, you know, a whole investment and put down 20, which in this case would be 200k, right? But so this is what I'm saying, and this is what we open the eyes of our clients to is like, hey, this is a great way to get started, and it absolutely

From First Triplex To 30 Units

SPEAKER_01 9:10

is. Now, when you move past this point and you've gotten the training wheels off and you start to feel comfortable to move to that next step, that's where we start really accelerating the portfolio. And so for me, I bought that first house hack and then I got promoted in my workplace and moved up to Massachusetts, where I was able to continue to excel in my role, and I actually started to earn a heck of a lot more. And I was in a sales commission role, and so what I ended up doing is I took literally 90% of the commissions that I made, right? I lived off of my salary. That was where I had my savings and things of that nature all automated. And then 90% of the commissions I made, I took and I put into my investment account to go and buy more real estate. And with those, I was putting down a bit more. I was putting down the 20%, sometimes 25% to buy as many deals as I could that made sense. And it was a bit of a sacrifice because those other people that were in my company who were making similar money, and those folks would have the new Range Rover or a new, you know, house like that they were living in. I'm like, man, that's pretty dope. I'm still living in a house account or a condo, but it was all worth it in the end because over a seven-year period, right, I was able to go from zero to 30 units and leave my W-2. I did the 30 units in less than five years, but I left my W-2 in a total of seven years working because I was focused. And now it allows me to have the free time to actually spend time with my one-year-old son, right? And not miss the moments, and also have the freedom to go and travel. Like we've taken, I don't know how many trips this year already. We've been to Costa Rica, Hawaii, we've been to weddings in North Carolina, we've been to South Carolina to go hang out, we've been to graduations up in Boston, we've been to Philly to go hang out for a weekend. And all of these things, I was able to just block my calendar and not do anything really work-related because I felt like it. And so that's the freedom that you're playing for. And my question to you is is it worth sacrificing one year of full-on comfort to go live in a house like the one I just showed you, which is dope, right? And build out the portfolio. In my case, I would say hell yes. And it's worth convincing your partner or your spouse to make that happen as well. And so when you look at this, when you're building out the rest of the portfolio, there's a couple things to keep in mind. One, it's gonna cost a little bit more to buy a house that you're not gonna live in, but that's fair. If you want to go outside of your market, at least 50 miles away from where you personally live, you can put down as little as 10% to do a vacation home. We've helped a lot of people do this, right, with short-term rentals. And the key to short-term rentals is you want to make sure that the home is gonna stand out and be more luxury. And so we have designers and things of that nature where we've helped people do this. And we typically shoot for a minimum of a 20 to 25% cash on cash return when you're buying a short-term rental. And so those are amazing. If you want to go with the more traditional long-term rental, I'd highly recommend not seeking out single family right now and going more toward duplex, triplex, quadplex, because it gives you economies of scale. For example, we just had a client purchase Quadplex in Snellville, which is an awesome school district, Gwinnett County, up in you know, 40 minutes outside of Atlanta. And Quadplex costs close to a million dollars, right? But each of the units is a three-bed two and a half, which is huge. It's basically like a townhome. If you were to go buy a single family three-bed two and a half, you'd be paying in the 350 or 400 range in that neighborhood. But with this one, because you're buying four units, you're essentially paying 250 for each of them. So you're getting a hundred K discount on each unit because you're buying four at the same time and you can still charge the same because it's still a huge unit. And so it's hard to hit things like the 1% rule, which we've talked

The Simple Portfolio Playbook

SPEAKER_01 12:40

about before, where if you purchase a house and you can rent it for 1% of the purchase price, it makes a heck of a lot of sense as a screaming deal. But this is one where it was very close to it and it will be there after about a year of ownership. Now, when you talk about a couple things, I don't want to overcomplicate this, right? And then I'm here to answer any questions, but don't overcomplicate your next step. You need to boil it down to the simplest terms as possible. If you're still looking at five different markets, the first thing you need to do is narrow down your market. Do whatever research you need to do over the next week and say, hey, by the end of the day, next Friday, I'm gonna pick a market and that's the one I'm gonna focus on, and don't shift from there. There's people that are successful in literally every market, from the expensive ones like Hawaii and LA to the cheap ones like Louisville and Ohio, right? To the in-betweens like Atlanta. And so you got to pick a market, stick with it. The next piece, if you're able to delay gratification for just a little bit, house hack is the way to go. Don't overcomplicate it. This is gonna allow you to put the least amount of money down. You're gonna be able to play offense and defense because you're gonna save money on your living expenses while also earning money from another property, right? And then when you move out, you've got a full-on investment. And even for those that own a property, I remember one client that we have right now where we helped them buy two house hacks in 18 months. They bought one 18 months ago and they just closed on their second house hack to move into that one. Before that, they had a single family, and that was what they had, right? And they're like, hey, you know, it's gonna be tough to move from this. They had a small child at that time as well, but they shared their goal of being able to have the wife stop working within five years. And I just asked them on that call, I said, guys, like it we can it can absolutely happen, but are you willing to make some comfort sacrifices over these five years to make it happen? And both of them agreed wholeheartedly, and so we went down this path and now they're starting to reap the rewards. They moved into the first house hack, which was a quadplex, lived in one unit, rented the other three out, and they rented out their previous home as well, right? So now they really had four rental units and one unit they lived in. And then fast forward to just recently, they purchased the next one, which is a duplex that was a little bit bigger on each side, nicer on each side that they moved into, and now they've got that full-on rental, and they want to continue doing this until their kid is of age to go to you know school districts. And then at that point, the wife should be able to, if they continue down this pathway for another two, three years, move into you know, more full-time entrepreneurship, right? And kind of managing the portfolio for the family, and they should be able to move into more of that dream house that they're looking for. The next thing, automate your savings. If you're gonna go down the house hack route, whatever you were paying for mortgage or rent that you were comfortable paying, maybe take a little bit off of that or keep it exactly the same if you can and automate that toward your savings. Pay yourself, right? Put that toward the next investment, automate that money. You're already used to it coming out. Don't just have that blend into the money that you have for spending because you will start to spend it, right? And then it'll be like, hey, I have to do this. Absolutely. When you're moving into that house act, just continue paying that money to yourself now instead of a landlord and go from there. And then when it comes to number three tip, stack strategies, right? I've purchased some multifamily like that quadplex I talked about for ANRK, and I turned two of those units into short-term rentals at least the first couple of years to make the numbers work a bit better while I was renovating and kind of updating some of the things, and it's been incredible for me. And now I'm down to one short-term rental in there, all long-term rentals in there, and I plan to convert that last short-term rental once I purchase another house and move all that furniture to the next house. So there's ways that you can mix and match strategies to get and maximize the value as well. And then the last thing is to stay flexible and focused, right? You can start off with a house hack strategy and then move out and turn it into a short-term rental, or you can move out and turn it into a long-term rental, or you could buy a duplex where you're like, hey, I'm gonna long-term rent each side, but then you get the opportunity when you move out to say, Hey, I don't need this furniture, let me leave it here, do a few more updates and short-term rent this to maximize cash flow. And so that's the cool thing about real estate is that you are the one controlling it. When it comes to some of the stocks, the thing that drives me crazy from time to time is that we have no control, right? Like we can't tell Elon Musk, like, hey man, let's focus on you know Tesla and getting this thing to the top of the market. You have to just, you know, invest money and let them go do their thing, right? With real estate, at least as of 2026, right? And I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. You are able to control a lot with that property. If you want to do updates to a property to give it more value, you can do that. If you want to do short-term, long-term, midterm rental with that property because it one of these strategies makes more sense, you can do that. And you can also take equity out as it continues to grow within that property to buy more, and it just allows you some peace of mind. I can tell you that before I started getting into real estate investing and really building up the portfolio, Sundays were a little bit tough, right? Sundays were like, man, you know, like I'm going back to work, especially in my last role. Some of the roles, it was really fun, but my last role was like, man, these headaches are coming. Like this is tough, right? As I built up more real estate and more financial freedom, it gave me the leverage to say, you know what? I actually don't need this job. And if the day comes where I'm no longer happy here, I can just bounce and do my own thing. And that's what happened, right? I made the decision in 2022, like, hey man, I want to move into full-time real estate. This is where my passion is. I want to help others. And so I would encourage you, even if you don't feel the need to do it right now, to start investing, start thinking about your strategy, start narrowing it down and get out there and

Q&A: How Much To Save

SPEAKER_01 18:05

take actions. And so that is what I have. I'm gonna kick it over to QA. If you have any questions, feel free to send it into the QA chat. There should be a button at the bottom of your screen where you could do this and we will make it happen. That is fair. No questions today. I think you guys are watching the World Cup too. Go USA tonight. We will see if they can keep this dream run going. Oh, here goes a question. Here we go. How much do you recommend having saved up for your first house hack? So this is the cool thing about house hacking, right? If you're running the numbers correctly, you should be saving money on what you're spending right now. And so, for example, if you're paying two grand a month for rent or for your mortgage, right? When you house hack, my goal would be to cut that number in half. If I can now go from paying $2,000 a month out of pocket mandatory to a thousand a month out of pocket, that is a major win. So, first define a win. And when you talk about saving up money, it's a lot less than you think. My first triplex in 2016 cost 190K. Now you can't get that now, right? But at that time, I put down three and a half percent plus a little bit of closing. I paid a total of five thousand dollars down, which is all I had to purchase that property. And now I still do the same thing. That fourplex I talked about, I put down five percent, 40k. And so I'd recommend saving down either three and a half percent of the purchase price if you're gonna buy a FHA property, or if you're gonna do conventional personal for a house hack, five percent of the purchase price. And so if you're tracking with me, 50k save can get you up to a million dollar property, like the one that we were looking at before, but you you don't even need that. Like five percent of it, I think is a good safe bet of what to save. Any other questions? All right, guys, go USA. I will catch you later. Thank you for joining. Everybody be safe.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

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.