How We Acquired 3 Rental Properties in 3 Years

This has been a crazy year, to say the least. When we first moved to the Tampa Bay Area from the San Francisco Bay Area we had an idea of how investing in rental properties could work for us but never in a million years did we imagine our journey would happen so quickly. Similar to most things in life just jumping into an industry to learn along the way is how success happens. To break down the headline – we’ve purchased 4 properties and 3 are rentals that have a total of 6 units (each has 2 units).

To start from the beginning, we closed on a 4 bedroom 3 bath house in January 2019 as a secondary home loan given the extremely high rents in California. The home was vacant, smelled like cigarettes, was damp everywhere, and had carpet throughout soaked in dog pee. We closed on the property while living in San Mateo, CA, and didn’t really know the extent of how bad the house was. Fast forward to us moving across the country I’m pretty sure neither of us got a wink of sleep the first night in that property on our inflatable mattress with the smell of smoke.

After spending around 100-ish hours fixing the property up we decided we should move into a newer home and settle down a bit for our first baby. We sat down and mapped out what our plan was and the timeline associated with every task that needed to happen. The next 2 months we spent looking for the right 4 bed 3 bathroom property that would make sense to move into. At the end of 2019, we moved into a newly remodeled 4/3 property in the same neighborhood as the first. It was an amazing property that both of us were proud of and most of all it was clean! Ultimately, we did need to have a new HVAC installed and put about $30k into fixing this property to get it into prime living condition.

Friends and family close to us know what happened next but long story short we ended up moving out of that property to get into the best school district when Scooch was 5 months pregnant with Charlie. It was a faster move than we wanted but it was needed to get into the best area for a newborn and toddler.

Once we got settled in our 3rd property in the best school district and both the previous ones were rented with awesome tenants we began looking into Saint Petersburg’s national neighborhood of the year Historic Kenwood. After roughly 6 months of looking at properties, we found a perfect place to buy as an investment. It’s important to note that we lived in the previous 2 rental properties for 12 months as our primary residence and ultimately this was the first one we intended to be a rental property from the start.

All this happened really quickly and we’ve made a lot of sacrifices to get to where we are now. We attribute a lot of our success with real estate so far to surrounding ourselves with other investors that have accomplished much more than us. “You are who you hang out with” There is no one correct way to build wealth but we’ve found rental properties are one of the strongest and safest routes.

5 Key Tools We’d Recommend For Beginners

The most important takeaway from real estate investing we’ve learned so far is to find and stick with GOOD TOOLS to keep everything organized.

1. We use AVAIL (owned by Realtor.com) for managing tenant payments
2. We use Zillow for lease agreements
3. Google spreadsheets to manage contractors in the area and track their rates
4. Legal Zoom and the best local asset protection attorney to setup our LLCs
5. Personal Captial and Stessa to keep track of equity

In conclusion, our short-term discomfort has been a lot to handle over the last 3 years. However, now with a 1-year-old and strong cash flow from 6 rental units, the long-term gain will make the short-term discomfort virtually non-existent in 10 years.

We’ve had a handful of friends and family ask us about how all this has been possible but for readers who want to learn more leave us a comment or DM us on Twitter @ScoochandSteve

Love,

Scooch and Steve