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
I Funded This $60K Rental Property in Just 31 Minutes
Ever wonder how some investors seem to close deals overnight while others struggle for months? The secret isn't luck or connections—it's preparation and relationships.
I recently transformed an ordinary text message into a fully-funded real estate deal in just 35 minutes. This wasn't through some complex strategy or inside connection, but rather by applying fundamental principles anyone can use: emotional discipline during negotiations, strong relationships with lenders, and a clear understanding of my investment numbers.
The property—a $60,000 three-bedroom house in Milwaukee—demonstrates why staying grounded in your investment criteria is crucial. When competing offers pushed the price up, I increased my offer by only $1,000 rather than getting caught in an emotional bidding war. As I often remind myself: if your deal is good at $60K but bad at $61K, it probably wasn't a good deal to begin with. This disciplined approach has protected my portfolio numerous times.
The most powerful moment came when funding was secured. Because I had built trust with my hard money lender through multiple successful deals, they pre-approved my loan within 31 minutes of my email—no lengthy applications or endless documentation required. This efficiency illustrates why relationship-building might be the most underrated skill in real estate investing.
While the $600 monthly cashflow this property will generate isn't life-changing, the $60-70K in equity potential absolutely is. This perfectly captures why focusing on buying below market value creates wealth far faster than chasing cash flow alone. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is a sustainable real estate portfolio.
What steps are you taking to build relationships with potential funding partners? Your next deal might be just one text message away.
What is up everybody? My name is Colm, a part-time real estate investor, full-time legacy airline pilot and a part-time military instructor pilot. Today's video is all about how I went from not having a deal to having something fully funded and ready to close in 35 minutes, and how you can do the same thing. I've spent so much time on the internet watching guys talk in generalities about how to be successful in business and in real estate specifically Work harder, buy better deals, save your money and no one actually talks about any practical advice. So today I'm going to disclose all the texts, all the emails, everything that I did to get this deal closed and, hopefully, how you can implement the same in your own business.
Speaker 1:So how did this actually come together? First off, I got a text from a local wholesaler. I bought one property from him before, but I get his emails all the time and usually I'm not really that interested. But this property came through three bed, one and a half bath single family house and they wanted $60,000 for it. So immediately I was like okay, this is interesting. Where is it? How bad is the interior of it? Because I was kind of expecting this thing was going to be pretty rough and it definitely needs some work, but it's not more than maybe five $10,000 worth of work in my eyes. So I was immediately interested in it. So I reached out to him and said hey, what's the catch? Basically is what I said in the email. And we ended up talking briefly and then he reached out to me and said hey, we had an offer coming way over asking and it was sight unseen and we're going to go with that offer. And to me I was like, okay, it is what it is Like. I haven't seen this place. I'm not a sight unseen type of buyer generally, because you just never know what's lurking in the deep, but specifically the basement. If you walk into a property where you didn't inspect it and you end up getting basement problems, you could be way in over your head and you're spending $40,000 plus on a basement that's never going to return a dime to you. So it's just part of keeping the property in good working order and that's not a great position to be in. So I was kind of like you know what it is what it is and I totally forgot that the deal even existed.
Speaker 1:Then I think within a day or two later, he reaches out and says, hey, that buyer fell through. We're actually gonna do a tour on the property. Are you interested? And of course I was like, yeah, I'm absolutely interested. I was supposed to go and lo and behold, the airline called me to fly off reserve, so I couldn't be there. I was like, okay, what am I doing now? Like how am I going to get somebody into this property? Because I really would like to see what it looks like firsthand. So shout out to John, my partner, my friend for a long time. He was able to go and tour the property while I was working and he took a bunch of pictures and videos and whatnot, so that way we could get a second set of eyes on the property. The wholesaler had his own pictures, but you just, you never know had his own pictures, but you just, you never know. So I'm like you know what, let's just get in there and see what it's all about.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, I reach out to the wholesaler and say, hey, we'll take it for 60. We'll take it for asking $60,000. And he comes back and says, hey, we got a bunch of people here at 60,000. Are you willing to come up? And in my thought process I was like, yeah, sure, I'll come up to 61, let's.
Speaker 1:Some people maybe would stay firm at 60 because that's their original offer. But to me, if your deal is good at 60 and bad at 61, then it's probably a bad deal to begin with. If $1,000 makes the difference of a good or bad deal for you, then you probably were overpaying for the property, right? So that's a rule of thumb that I would always use in the back of your mind Do a little stress test on it. If $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 makes the difference of whether it's a good deal or a bad deal, then you probably should put the brakes on and say, hey, is this a bad deal in general? Because $1,000 is easy to lose in a flip house. $1,000 is easy to lose in funding and trying to manage a deal. So I really think that you should take a moment of pause and say I don't know if this is for us. So long story short, offered a 61.
Speaker 1:He came back again and said up, we had a different offer that was higher and we're going to go that direction. So I said, okay, sounds good. And both of these instances a lot of people will be like, oh wait, I'll pay more, I'll do whatever I can to get this property and let the emotions take over and you'll see my texts. I'm just totally emotionless. Hey, sounds good, man, no big deal, keep it moving Because guess what, in the city of Milwaukee and the United States at large there's endless amounts of single family houses. So I'm not going to get wrapped up about this one deal. From that point he comes back, I think maybe a day later and says good morning.
Speaker 1:That deal also fell through, which was maybe giving me a little bit of pause to say, okay, why are all these deals falling through? Am I missing something? Am I the biggest idiot now? But I put that to the side and said, okay, yeah, 61,000, I think we can make it work. The second deal fell through and that they were willing to take mine at 61, gave me all the terms and conditions which you'll see in there, and I sat there for a little bit and thought about it.
Speaker 1:I reached out to some of the people that I trust the most in this business to see what they thought about it and I was like, yeah, I think we're willing to go for it. You can see in the email that they sent out and everything. It's going to rent for $1,200, $1,300 a month. It's going to cost me after it's back off of hard money onto a long-term loan maybe $600 a month. So $600 a month in cashflow not bad.
Speaker 1:Again, this business is built one step at a time, brick by brick, they say. Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither is my crappy Milwaukee rental portfolio either. So it's all little things that one at a time when you're starting out with a full-time job and you've got other things going on, you're trying to manage your life and start to build something. It's not going to be these whirlwind deals every time. Sometimes it is a $60,000 single family house that starts to get the momentum that you need to build something. We ended up getting it under contract.
Speaker 1:Now this is the interesting part. Now I have a property that's under contract, but I never actually reached out to anybody about funding it. I didn't talk to any hard money lenders. We have the money set aside in cash, but we don't really want to use it for that because we have some other deals that are closing soon that we're going to need to put 20% down on. So we're in a situation that we don't actually have any funding secured, which is a position that you don't necessarily want to be in unless you've built relationships where people trust you and people are going to take care of you In this case, the lender that I've used for almost every other hard money deal in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1:I sent them an email and within 31 minutes I think it was they actually reached out to me and already gave me a pre-approval. That's a really big illustrator of how important it is to take care of people that are taking care of you right. I've never once missed a payment with this hard money lender. I've never given them any problems. Really, it's always been very seamless transactions and when they're dealing with somebody like you and they know your track record they dealt with you for a couple of deals or they know that you're a reliable buyer they're going to treat you well.
Speaker 1:And in this case, it's just a quick two sentences in an email. There's no anything else for me. It saves me a ton of time. It saves me a ton of energy. I just did a DSCR loan and I'll maybe I'll make a video about that. But, my God, they want everything about me. They want 17 different documents. They would need they had to have a reappraisal to make sure that there was no leaks out of the sink and all these stupid things like just a lot of extra red tape, and it's been taking months. Meanwhile, with these guys, it's literally overnight no-transcript market value. So when I take it to a lender, they're going into the future.
Speaker 1:I'm not just focused on the finish line of getting this deal closed, but I'm also looking at what does this look like three, four, five months from now, because that's really where the big money is made is buying stuff that's under market value, getting it stabilized and bring it to a larger bank to get onto a long-term loan where my interest rate is going to go down from maybe 14% down to 7%. Right, Then that again feeds into the video I just talked about yesterday, where the equity part of it is really where you make your big money. $600 a month is not going to change my life, but $60,000 in equity, $70,000 in equity down the road, that could change your life. Right, and this deal is something that anybody could do. You didn't have to have a massive amount of real estate experience or any sort of connections really to get this deal done. This was a deal that was sent out to the masses and I just happened to secure it, and certainly it could go wrong. And I'm gonna document every step of this deal so that way somebody that's starting out can get an idea of how it all works.
Speaker 1:But really it's pretty straightforward. I get an email. I figure out, okay, what do I think the market rent is. You can just go look on Zillow and see what things are renting for. Or you can use other apps. There's a million other apps that would show you average rents in the area. I figure out what the average rents are. I take that value of the property and I put it on a long-term, 30-year loan in a calculator, put it at 7.25% interest, put in the property taxes, maybe put in a little bit extra for property management fees, utilities, things that I've talked about in other videos, and then look at that number and see, okay, what does that look compared to what I would need to put down? How does that feel? And that's really as simple as it is.
Speaker 1:The math I'm doing is very basic. You don't have to be a scientist to do it, I promise you, and it's literally just a matter of putting in a little bit of effort. Granted, I had a friend that was able to tour the property for me while I was out, but he's going to benefit from ownership of this property too. So you can do things to make this all work for everybody, but you just have to put a little bit of effort into it and think about it a little bit. And some people are just unwilling to do that, hence why they never actually grow. A lot of people just get to the first sign of resistance and they just give up there.
Speaker 1:I think another thing that this illustrates is that when you pick a number and this is the number you're comfortable with you don't need to stray from that. In this example, I actually came up $1,000. So I did stray from it slightly, but I didn't come in and say, oh, I'll pay an extra $10,000 just to get this deal. I didn't get emotional about it, I just said an extra thousand. Sure, whatever, I'm not going to lose sleep over that. But some people get really emotional and it gets them into positions that they can't recover from. And I actually have another deal in the works right now where the same exact thing is happening.
Speaker 1:They wanted some I don't know $130,000, $140,000. They dropped the price down to $115,000. And my buddy toured it, john, again same day, actually, a bunch of other people toured it. The realtor came out and said hey, we've got a bunch of offers, send your best. And I sent $95,000, which is what I was comfortable with. And then he said can you do $110,000? And I said no. And then he said can you do $105,000? I think it was and I said no. And they said how about $98,000? And we're back down to $95,000.
Speaker 1:Now me, because in my mind, I'm playing this for the 30 year, 40 year game and I can't make big mistakes early on. I need to stick to my gut, stick to what works and let the other people that want to overpay do it, because they're going to be out of business long before I ever will be. That's essentially how this deal worked. There's a lot of nuance to it, but I'll try to include all the texts and emails so you can get an idea of exactly what I say, how I operate, and maybe it'll give you some insight at how you can apply that to your own deals.
Speaker 1:Again, hard money is something that anybody could use. Getting deals from wholesalers is something that anybody can do. So much of this is just anybody could do it. You don't have to have a real estate license. You don't have to have anything to accomplish something like this, you just have to put in a little else. But anyways, that's the video for today, short and sweet, about how this deal worked. Hopefully, somebody gets some value out of this and, as always, I really appreciate it. If you're watching this video, literally could be doing anything, like I always say on the internet, you could be doing absolutely anything out there. There's so many ways to spend your time, but you're here listening to me, so that means the world to me, and if you have any other video recommendations, let me know. I'm still cooking up a couple of the other ones that we've discussed in the comments, but if you have any other ideas, shoot them to me and I'll get to them as soon as I can. Again, appreciate it, and I'll talk to you guys soon, see ya.