Tailwind Talks
Tailwind Talks is a podcast for high-performing professionals who want to build serious real estate portfolios without leaving their careers. Hosted by an airline and military pilot turned investor, it dives into actionable strategies for scaling your real estate portfolio while balancing the demands of a full-time job.
Tailwind Talks
How I Got Paid $125,000 to Buy a 4-Unit Rental With $0 Down
Ever wonder how ordinary people create extraordinary wealth through real estate? The answer might be simpler than you think.
Imagine purchasing a multi-unit property, living there at a fraction of market rent, and walking away with a six-figure profit – all without spending a dime from your savings. This isn't some get-rich-quick scheme; it's a legitimate strategy I used to generate $125,000 in profit while drastically reducing my living expenses.
As both an airline pilot and part-time real estate investor, I discovered a powerful combination of tactics that allowed me to purchase a four-unit property using my VA loan (though FHA loans work similarly for non-veterans). The magic happened when I represented myself as my own agent, effectively getting paid over $10,000 at closing just to buy the property. With zero money down and no PMI, I moved into one unit while renting out the others.
The numbers tell the story: while most people in my area were paying $2,000 monthly in rent, my effective housing cost dropped to just $400-500 per month because tenant income covered nearly all expenses. For almost three years, I benefited from tax advantages, equity building, and debt reduction – all while living comfortably at minimal cost.
When it came time to sell, having lived there for the required period, I avoided capital gains tax and pocketed $115,000 in profit. Combined with my initial commission, the total benefit reached approximately $125,000 – from a property I never put a single dollar into purchasing.
The beauty of this approach is its accessibility. You don't need specialized knowledge or expensive courses – just willingness to temporarily live differently than most. In today's economy with inflation outpacing wage growth, this strategy offers a practical solution to the housing affordability crisis facing many Americans.
Ready to transform your financial future? Consider how house hacking a multi-unit property might be your first step toward building lasting wealth. Share your thoughts or questions in the comments – I'd love to hear about your real estate journey or help you start one.
Hey everybody, my name's Cole. I'm a part-time real estate investor, full-time legacy airline pilot and a part-time military instructor pilot. Today I'm gonna make a video simply about how I use a very easy hack to get myself a four unit and I end up getting paid over $10,000 to do it. Here's how it went down. I ended up representing myself as my own agent, so I already had my real estate license In the offer% commission that I want to get paid to represent myself. And because he was listing it off market, he didn't have to pay another agent, so he's more receptive to it. So he actually went for it and he said, okay, sounds good. So I ended up buying it. Throughout the whole loan process it was actually pretty straightforward. No one really cared if I was representing myself or not.
Speaker 0:Long story short, at the closing table I brought $0 down on the property because it was a VA loan, so it requires no money down. There's no PMI. There's a lot of benefits to the VA loan, but not everybody has a VA loan available to them. So if you're watching this and you're like, well, that'd be great, but I'm not a veteran, no big deal. There's FHA loans. There's other loan programs that usually can get you in the 1% to 3% down range.
Speaker 0:If you're a first-time homebuyer and you're going to live in the property, go buy yourself a duplex, a three unit, a four unit. It's not the most glamorous living, but in this day and age, in 2025, where things are so expensive, inflation's through the roof and things are really hard to pull off on a normal income, you can actually use this to reduce your monthly expenses, and I know a lot of people say that their house is their biggest asset, but in most cases it's their biggest liability every month. So if you can reduce that number down in my case I was facing about $2,000 a month for rent and I actually was able to live in this property for about $400 or $500 a month If you can implement that in your own life, especially when you're starting out in a career maybe you just changed jobs, you just had a kid. Whatever the case may be, whatever financial stressors you might have, you can actually offset it by doing this. You don't have to be your own agent, you don't have to represent yourself like I did, but you still could buy a property for relatively cheap and then end up living in it for cheap because the tenants are gonna be paying your mortgage and usually your expenses. In my case, I think I was bringing in about $3,000 a month in income from all the rental units and it ended up actually covering basically exactly what I needed to own the building. Like I said, it was $370,000 purchase price. It was at 2.875 interest, obviously a far cry from the interest rate of today, but the same concept can still apply and you may not be able to live there for free. It may not be exactly breaking even, but you might be able to just feed it a couple hundred dollars a month, maybe five $600 a month, and that's still a far cry from what most people are going to have to pay to rent somewhere. So back to the deal.
Speaker 0:Like I said, represented myself, got to the closing table, didn't put any money down, moved into the property and here's the catch I lived there for almost three years as an owner, occupant and then I ended up renting it out and when I eventually went to sell the building now I'm no longer exposed to capital gains, which is a big drawback for selling a property the whole time I lived there, over the course of almost three years, the tenants were covering my expenses. I was paying down the mortgage. I had the tax benefit of having the mortgage, interest paid, depreciation all these other things working in my favor to help me. So I was hitting it from all different angles and at the end I ended up paying down the mortgage a bunch. When I went to sell the property, I had a pretty big delta between what it was worth and what I paid for it. In only three years I ended up selling it and making about $115,000. At closing I got paid over $10,000 to buy the property. Then I paid down the loan. Over a couple of years I was no longer exposed to capital gains tax and I sold it for $115,000 profit. So I literally never put a single dime into the deal and I ended up clearing about $125,000.
Speaker 0:There's nowhere else you could do that, and this is available to any first-time home buyer. You don't need to buy a course. You don't need to become somebody's mentee to learn how to do this. It's really as simple as go find a deal that you think will at least maybe break even or get close to it and then go use one of these owner-occupied programs to get your foot in the door for a relatively low amount down. That's really important these days, because people are getting squeezed like never before. Inflation is killing people because their wages are not keeping up with it, not even close and so if you need to find a hack to try to get yourself on the right track, no matter where you are in life, I think this one is massively overlooked by people Everyone's chasing, you know, keeping up with the Joneses. They want to be, they want to show people that they've made it and everything. But if you're willing to take a couple of years step back, it can really propel you into a totally different financial future than you might've had otherwise. I know it's not sexy. I know it's not cool.
Speaker 0:I'm living in a rental right now. I have dozens of rental properties and I rent myself, so I totally get it. I'm still living that way, but if you can just take the moment to try to learn about this, I think it's a really powerful tool and it's something that I've used multiple times between FHA loans and VA loans to get myself properties and get in and out of them with a relatively low amount down. Now you can still buy a bad If you do some due diligence, you do some time reading and researching and trying to understand deals from the inside out. I think you can make an educated decision to go buy yourself a solid property and, worst case scenario, you're feeding it a couple hundred dollars a month, but that's way better than what it would cost you to rent, and I know I just made a video about how I rent and how I think that's a great alternative to buying something right now.
Speaker 0:But the caveat that I would have to that is, if you're looking at a rental property and you think you can live there for free or close to free, I think it's worth looking at. And I know a lot of people are going to say, well, you should never buy anything. That's cashflow negative. But in this case it's a little bit different because if you're living there, the dynamics of it all change. It's not a pure investment property, it's also your residence, and so that's exactly what I did.
Speaker 0:Like I said, getting a real estate license is a relatively inexpensive way to get your foot in the door. It still costs money, it still costs your time, which is extremely valuable, but I think it's worth considering because now you can represent yourself in deals and I represented myself as a selling agent. I represented myself as a buying agent for my investments, for the places I've lived in everywhere in between, and then from there I would build on top of that. Keep your day job, though. If you have a job, don't quit your job to try to do this, because you're going to need to be able to qualify for a loan. There's a lot that goes into qualifying for loans. I'm not going to get into that right now because I want to make this video quick, but the idea is to go find a place that you can live in as an owner, occupant and rent it out, live in it while it's partially rented and then either move out of it and sell it or rent it out and continue to hold property for the future. But that's a way to get your foot in the door without having to have 20% down, 25% down, these massive numbers. This is a way you can get in relatively inexpensively and really build yourself a solid foundation for the future. So I implore you to look into this.
Speaker 0:I'm not the end-all, be-all knowledge on this. I just wanted to talk about it and I thought it was important. Headed out for the airline tomorrow, headed to LA, so this will be my last nice video for at least the next day or two, I'll do some layover talks from there. If you spend any amount of time watching this video, and especially if you made it to this point, you could be doing anything on the internet right now and you're listening to me talk about real estate. I genuinely, genuinely appreciate your support. I'm going to continue to try to put out solid videos and if you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. I appreciate any comments likes.