How I Bought 10 Properties (14 Units) for $1.1M with Just $37K Down

A late-night email turned into 10 properties, 14 units, and a 21% bulk discount—proof that disciplined outreach and clean underwriting can still win on market. We pull back the curtain on how the deal came together: from the first message to the final wire, including the appraisal that valued the portfolio near $1.21M and the lender-friendly DSCR that made financing workable even at a 6.75% rate. It’s not a highlight reel; it’s the actual math, the trade-offs, and the parts that sting.

We break down the rent roll assumptions, the 5% vacancy modeling, and the expense stack that kept projections grounded. Then we contrast those careful numbers with reality: six units vacant at takeover, turn costs in the $2.5K–$3.5K range, and a plan to stabilize without losing the thread on cash flow. You’ll hear how bulk pricing created a spread versus selling individually, why a “sleepy” Milwaukee submarket fits a long-term strategy, and how small, targeted upgrades can shift value without overcapitalizing.

We also talk leverage with clear eyes. A cash-out refinance from older assets provided most of the down payment, trimming fresh cash at close to about $35K. That choice isn’t for purists, but when debt is sized to durable income and backed by conservative underwriting, it can accelerate growth without gambling the portfolio. If you’re trying to source your next buy, we share the exact outreach approach used on MLS listings, the framing that earns responses, and the checklist for turning interest into a bankable deal.

Hit play, get the numbers, and steal the playbook. If this breakdown helps, follow the show, leave a review, and tell a friend who’s hunting their next multifamily deal.

Transcript

Biggest Deal Overview

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is up everybody? My name is 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 break down my biggest deal yet. My first deal over a million dollars, uh, just under 1.1 was the purchase price. It was 10 properties, 14 units. Not the biggest deal in the world, but uh for me it was the biggest one, and I'm pretty excited about it. It puts me at 85 units total um while still working my full-time job, just living like everybody else does, still renting my apartment. Nothing has changed. Uh, but at the same time, it feels like a lot of things have changed. So um, I wanted to give a shout out to everybody that follows the channel and maybe was excited for me to post a video. I do apologize. Uh, like I said, life just gets in the way sometimes. And I want to give a shout out to Tim Dillon. I doesn't sponsor this or anything, of course, but I'm wearing the old fake business hoodie right now because sometimes that's exactly what it feels like I'm doing. So uh, anyways, the deal that I got put together, I'm gonna go through everything from the original email that I sent. This was an on-market deal. It wasn't like I knew somebody or had a connection. I literally just sent an email among many other emails that I've sent at like 11 o'clock at night on like a Tuesday, and it turned into uh this deal coming together. So I think it's gonna be kind of interesting to talk about it from the beginning to the end. So I'll talk about what email I sent, what I was thinking about for purchase price, the Excel spreadsheet I built out to see what the deal actually does as far as revenue and and actually like net profit goes, um, the appraisal and basically everything all the way through financing and closing the deal. So I can talk to you exactly how it worked out as far as this deal goes. We only brought about$30 something thousand dollars,$35,000 of our own cash to close the deal. The rest of it was refinance out of a different property, two properties really that I've owned uh from 2021. We cash out, refinance those and apply that money to this deal. So our skin in the game is relatively small, and we got these at a pretty good discount, I think. Uh, in four or five years, I expect to look back at this and be really excited about where things have gone with it. So, with all that being said, I'm gonna cut to my computer because I'm still filming off my iPhone, so I can't do split screen or anything like that. And if I can, I don't know how. So, hopefully, eventually I'll get a real camera and I can do both at the same time. We'll cover the computer and then we'll go from there. Appreciate everybody watching the channel, and let's get to it. Welcome to my computer. This is like my fifth time trying to record this, so I'm using the snipping tool on Windows 11, and we're gonna go through everything that I planned on talking about. So, what I've got going on here email 11 o'clock at night. I was emailing everybody in the city. Everybody I could find that had a property that I thought was interesting to try to buy, I was emailing. And the reason that old Ben here got my attention is because he did a price drop on 10 properties that he all had listed, right? And when I saw that, they were all done in the same day, which made me think, what are the chances that they're individual owners? What are the chances that these are all owned by separate people? If they're reducing their price all at the same time, it seems interesting and possible that these might be owned by the same person. So I looked up the tax records and I found out sure enough, it's the same owner. So I sent them an email saying, Hey, is there any room if I buy them all together? And they basically said yes. We've had some offers that were down in the forty-fifty percent of list price range, but we didn't take those. So I knew where my far limit was, right? So I had to operate within that. But it gave me hope that there was a there was something that I could do with this. So what I did was I took all of the information that I could gather about the properties, I looked at them, they looked pretty solid. So I took all the data and I said, okay, this is what they're making in rent. So I gathered all the data from the rents, I applied it over here, I said, okay, 14 units, an average of$1,061 a month in rent, 14,854 is the number that comes up with. Coming down here, gross annual rent is the monthly rent times 12 for 12 months in the year. Gives me 178. Vacancy rate of 5%. Could be higher, could be lower. I always tend to run a 5% average for me in the year is probably close to that. It just depends. Uh sometimes we have a lot of move outs year by year. Just it really seems like it depends. But you lose about$10,000 a year in just the fact of people leaving, basically. And then you got all your normal expenses before principal interest. So you got taxes, insurance, management fees. I'm paying 8% of my gross rents to the manager. So I went a little high on that, the estimate. And I try to be conservative with these estimates. I want to be on the expensive side, more so than on the lean side, because this will help protect me later on in the spreadsheet. Long story short, you guys can pause this at any time and read through these line items. But long story short, 66,571 is what I come to. That's my total expenses before principal interest, which leaves me a net income of 102. And so I looked over here and said, okay, I'm gonna get 876 on the loan with 20% down, 6.5% interest. It actually was six and three quarters, so not quite as good as I thought. And uh$55.41 would be my payment. So my total payments a year would be$66,000 a year. I have 102 left over, so there's a delta there, obviously. I have enough money to pay my debt, and that's where the debt service coverage ratio goes into. This is basically saying I have 155% of what I need to pay this debt down here with the 102 that's left over, and to the bank, that's a favorable situation. A lot of times you'll see DSCRs in the 1.25, 1.35 range, and this one was significantly higher at that purchase price. So I really felt like I had a leg to stand on here and that this was worth taking to the bank. So I took this spreadsheet, I took the rent rolls, I took all the information I could and I provided it to a couple different banks and shopped it around. I had some trouble with the loan, had a couple issues, and long story short, I settled on a bank. They eventually got the appraisal scheduled for just 37, I think it's like$3,750 to do this appraisal. So LA appraisals did all 10 properties as one big appraisal, 10 buildings, 14 units, and here's some pictures of what they look like. I condensed this down. This was a 220-page document. I condensed it down to what I thought was applicable, and even some of this stuff might be a little extra, but I want to give you guys an idea of what this stuff looks like. A lot of words to say they did 10 buildings, 14 units, and they came up with 1,210,000. That was their opinion of value for it as a package. And the reason that I make that distinction is later on you'll see that individually these properties are likely worth more as a package. You know, they obviously discounted it slightly because selling 10 properties all together is a lot simpler and therefore can sometimes justify the lower price, which is exactly what I was trying to do. Coming through here, they talk about the individual prices of the buildings. Not really too important. The big number at the bottom is really what mattered to me as a borrower, and honestly to the bank as well. Potential rent, uh, gross income and whatnot, kind of important, kind of not. This is where it kind of gets interesting though. Talks about what I offered, 1,096,000. It talks about the original list price of 1.438. Then they lowered the list prices to 1388, and then I, a week later, came in and got them under contract where it says uh these list prices were lowered to a combined 1,388,500 for one week before going under contract, and that is me. Under contract is me. The buyer was given a 21% bulk discount for purchasing the properties as part of a portfolio. The bulk discount of 21% is considered to be greater than typical and contributes to the pending purchase price being below market. And this is a depiction of that numerically. So this is the original list price, this is the new prices, and then this is where I ended up 21% off of what they wanted. So as you can see here, about$300,000 off the mark, and that's because I'm buying them all together. If I was to resell these individually, I'm sure I could get maybe not 1.388, but maybe 1.3 flat. And in that case, that's about a$200,000 delta. So I really believe that there's some meat on the bones here, and I really believe that in three, four, five years, you're gonna see this number is closer to$1.5,$1.6,$1.7. Time will tell there, and I could be totally wrong, but I'm feeling very comfortable in this situation, even though I have some challenges ahead with the rent, because uh they ended up handing over a lot more vacancies than I was expecting, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Uh, this is talking about the central Milwaukee area, multifamily rent is just slowly going up and to the right, but so is inflation, so are expenses. So take it with a grain of salt. I just like to show that Milwaukee as a whole is a pretty steady market. I mean, even in some of the lower years, we're still getting 1% rent growth. It's not the 10, 20% rent growth that you'll see in some Metroplexes, but you also don't see you know major deflation or you know, any really uh major changes either direction, and I'm okay with it. I like slow and steady. That's what I'm building my whole career off of. As far as uh new builds in Milwaukee, they got a lot planned for the east side, but nothing planned elsewhere. I own a bunch over here and I own a bunch on the south side. Nothing's covered in here, it's all east side stuff. Interestingly enough, the properties I bought are mostly between 43 Highway 43, right here, and uh the river right here. So they're all kind of in this little center area. Kind of near to some of these new builds, but a little bit north. Sales are down 11.7 million in transactions in the last 12 months compared to an average of 28.1 million for the same time period the last five years. I mean, by myself, I contributed to almost 10% of the sales on my own. Uh, but uh market cap in Milwaukee continues to be higher than elsewhere because you know it is kind of a sleepy market that nobody cares about, and that's exactly why I love it. And like I said, this was 220 pages. I distilled it down to what I thought was applicable, and here's just it's just pictures of all the properties. So I'll continue to scroll through the pick the properties. Feel free to pause at any point in time so you can try to get a good look at these. But the idea is good water heaters, good furnaces, straight basements, no water in the basement, newer roofs, newer gutters. I mean, a lot of these have new roofs and gutters, so the bones of the properties are good, the exterior is relatively good. This is the worst of the bunch, actually. This property, and it happens to be the largest one and in the best area. So it's a good problem to have, honestly. Your worst property as far as condition, being in the best area and being the largest is good. We're gonna want to replace the windows and the trim siding. Uh, the roof also needs some repairs, but uh honestly, all in all, it's a pretty solid property, so I'm excited about that one. Um, and the rest of these are all just pretty straightforward. They're boxes with windows and doors and you know, all the standard stuff. Not a whole lot to see here, but honestly, that's exactly how I want it. I don't really need anything flashy and fancy. I plan to build my entire career off of stuff like this, and we'll see how it goes. I could be wrong, maybe I do want, maybe I should want to get into the flashy, cool stuff, but slow and steady, boring stuff is kind of won the race for me. So I'm gonna stick to what I know. And as they say, if it's not broke, don't fix it. But as you can see, these properties are pretty well taken care of. I mean, nice, nice finishes. Uh, I think he did a pretty good job of taking care of them, you know, some better than others, of course, but as an average, I'd say it's pretty looking pretty good. So that's 51 pages of the reprisal report. Again, this is about a quarter of what is available uh in the full report, but I want to give you guys an insight as to what that looks like. It's very comprehensive, they talk a lot about the Milwaukee market as a whole, but that's what it looks like. And really what matters when you get an appraisal is this number right here. Whatever they say they think is worth, their opinion of value is really what matters. So we'll keep pushing. When closing comes, you get a settlement statement, probably the day or two before closing. And this is gonna show on the left column everything that the seller had to pay for, and what they walked away with, and everything I had to pay for, and credits I got and debts that I had. Uh, on the seller side, I found it interesting. You know, he had a decent amount of debt on these properties, not a ton, but still pretty healthy amount. I would say this has got to add up to us north of 700,000, um, which again is not insane, but it's definitely more debt than I expected him to be covering. And with all these expenses included, he's walking away with$352,000. I can only imagine that must be a far cry from what he's expecting. Because remember, I offered$300,000 off of what his new asking price was. So when he started this, he's probably expecting to walk away with about seven, maybe six fifty, and he's walking away with three fifty. So for the lar for the size of the portfolio, I was a little surprised to see that was as little as he was walking away with. Again,$350,000 is plenty of money, don't get me wrong. But it was a little bit less than what I was expecting. So go to my side.$1,009 to six thousand was what I was paying,$20,000 at an earnest money deposit. That's basically me saying I'm gonna do what I say is in this contract, and if I don't do it, you can take the money and run. Uh, it doesn't necessarily always work out that way, but that's the idea behind earnest money. And you can see it just as a line item deposit over here. I get a bunch of prorations and adjustments for taxes and for uh security deposits and rent. The good news about that is it it really decreases your cash to close. The bad news is you eventually owe this money back to somebody. I'm gonna owe taxes, I'm gonna owe rents, uh, or security deposits rather back to tenants. So it's not free money, but it definitely helps you with your cash to close. And so when you're thinking about a 20% down payment, that shit adds up pretty fast. You can offset it uh with stuff like this. So as you can see here, my appraisal pe appraisal fee, not too bad for 10 properties, uh, reviewing the appraisal, loan, you know, the points for the loan and whatnot. Really not honestly that bad though. Pretty lean as far as all that goes. And it left me with about 166,390 to bring to closing. And what that looked like to me was I was gonna go to uh those two other properties I refinanced. That brought me about 140,000, just under 140,000 to put towards this. We had another 10,000 we could allocate of rent money just sitting in the bank that we added to that. So I did one wire transfer for 150,000, and there was that difference. You know, 150,000 off of this is still sixteen thousand three hundred ninety and forty-three cents remaining. And what I did with that is one separate wire. So if you add that sixteen thousand three ninety up to the twenty thousand earnest money, we're effectively in it for thirty-six thousand dollars cash out of pocket, money that I had to go to work and sit in the plane and earn. So, uh, not too bad for the size of exposure that we're getting. Again, is it the perfect deal? Maybe, maybe not. I tend to think that it's a pretty good deal, but time will tell. Um, you know, six twelve months from now, maybe I'll be crying and say that I wish I wouldn't have bought this. But that's what the closing statement looks like. Again, pause any point in the video and you can take a look at all the line items here. I don't want to bore you guys too much with it, but that's what it looks like. And here's the rent rule. So, this is what they send you over, obviously, without all this redacted information. Uh, but basically it would give you an idea of who lives in what unit, how to reach them, what they're paying, and whatnot. As you see over here, there were three vacancies that I was expecting to inherit when I bought these buildings, but yesterday I got an email with a surprise. You actually have these three, the ones that I highlighted for you guys. These three are also vacant. So now I have six vacancies out of 14 units, leaving me eight to pay the bills with. This comes down to like I think seven thousand nine hundred dollars after you add up these rents that are missing. So, not super great. Definitely not pumped about that. A little annoyed. Um, the one saving grace is that I did get credit for those rents on this uh closing statement. The bad news is it's gonna cost probably$2,500 to$3,500 a unit to turn them and make them livable outside of maybe one that's already ready to rock. So not super pumped about that. But the way I look at this stuff is it all comes out in the wash, and I'm not gonna get burnt bent out of shape about a couple thousand here and there. Granted, that isn't no money, but I'm worried about the big numbers, buying right and selling right. Um, and that's the stuff that I really focus on. So a little bit of a kick to the nuts, but I think we'll be able to get through it and somehow find a way into next year, and uh things will be stable before the end of the year, I hope. So um, that's what the rent roll looks like. That's kind of an inside look as to all the paperwork on the backside and kind of give you an idea of what we are working with on this deal. I'll cut back to my other camera, but I like I said, I just want to give you guys an actual practical view into what a deal like this looks like. Again, it's the biggest deal I've done, but very small in comparison to many others out there. But uh wanted to give you a good idea of it. So uh let me know what you think of it, feedback. Um, I love interacting in the comments, so let me know what you think. I'm back now in front of my camera, and that's just a little look inside of that deal. Like I said, we took out a larger loan on two of the properties we already had from 2021. Um, I put very little into those, thankfully, as far as the purchase price goes, we did do some improvements over the over time, but uh I took that money out. So I have a larger loan on that property and I roll it into these ones, so it's a calculated risk, right? You don't want to get too high off your own supply. A lot of people will just start taking out loans and larger loans and larger loans, and before you know it, they start drowning under their own debt, just like you would if you kept buying expensive cars and houses and things like that. Real estate uh as an investment tool doesn't work any differently than that. So be very cautious when you're doing that stuff. Uh, if you choose to do that, Dave Ramsey would be just like you know, beating his head against the wall right now, listening to this deal, probably. But I really believe in it. I think that it can well cover its debt, as you saw in the pro forma. Even if we have another$20,000 in repairs, we're still doing just fine. Um, we're not gonna get rich off of this one deal, but I think it's gonna be pretty solid for the future. So it was a calculated risk. This could also blow up in my face, we could have some major issues, but the way things are trending right now, I feel pretty safe with it. And I think that if we piece this off individually and we made maybe$5,000 improvements to each property,$50,000 invested, we could get another two, three, four hundred thousand dollars out of them in maybe a six to eighteen month window. So that's the way I'm looking at it. I could be totally wrong, I've been wrong before, but at least for now, um, I'm not bankrupt just yet. So maybe next month, who knows what's gonna happen. But uh, anyways, if you're a new investor trying to get into real estate, obviously this deal might be a little bit larger than what you could handle. It's something that I never dreamed that I could really handle, uh, at least when I started out. Um, so think about this deal in the way that I was able to put it together by just cold calling people instead of actually calling them, just shooting them an email, just say, Hey, you know what? You could go send emails to people on MLS all day long, uh, in whatever state you're in, and just see what happens. Maybe you can come up with a duplex or two that actually work out. This isn't the only deal that I've come up with that way. I bought a couple things off of MLS this year just by sending emails and giving them a rough estimate of what I would pay for it. The way I usually frame it is saying, Hey, I own a place down the road, even if I don't. Hey, I own a place down the road and I paid this much per unit,$50,000 a unit,$60,000 a unit. Would you be able to entertain an offer like that just to kind of get the wheels rolling? If you say something like that, it keys them into saying, Okay, this person already has properties, maybe they're a little bit more reliable of a buyer. Um, but it also kind of gives you a frame of reference. You're not just giving them a number out of the blue, you're giving them a number that you actually paid for something. So it may not work too well for you if you're just starting out because you don't really have a track record, but uh it's worth trying because it literally costs you nothing except for your time. And if you're starting out, you've got plenty of time to give away, right? So, anyways, uh really appreciate everybody that takes the time to watch these videos. My last video did pretty well, probably because I was calling out Dave Ramsey, but uh this is just another video basically double tapping that because I really am doing the exact opposite of what he would probably recommend. But I really do believe that if you just were just gonna pay cash for every property and never take out a loan, I wouldn't have any of this stuff. I wouldn't have made any of the moves that I've been able to make, I wouldn't have any of the equity that I've been able to generate, and not let alone the cash flow. And right now it's still pretty small because we do have a lot of leverage. But I think as time goes on, I could do nothing right for the next 20 years and just pay down the debt and eventually have an 85 unit portfolio that's totally paid off. So I don't really see the harm in that right now, but who knows? Maybe in six months I'll be making a video about how I'm going bankrupt, and Dave was right. So, anyways, really appreciate everybody watching it. Like I said, um, if you have any thoughts about this video, any want any more information, I can either make more videos or reply in the comments. The comments are my favorite part about the videos because I get to interact with everybody, and I know there's plenty of you that have stayed in touch with me uh that are probably eager to comment on another video and give me the updates on your life. So let me know what's been going on in your life, too. I know for me it's been busy flying. Um, I recently found out with the airline that I fly with, I'll be going to the big jet, uh, one of our big jets, the 777 off of the 737, which is on my wall back there. So I'm excited to check that out and see what it's like to do the long haul flying. Otherwise, uh there's been a lot of changes in the government and the military. So it's been an interesting time right now. Uh, but I'm enjoying it just like I always do. So that's what's kind of been going on with me. Let me know what's been going on with you. And I would can't wait to talk to you guys in the comments. Appreciate it as always and I'll talk to you soon. See ya.