Regular Investor Makes $1.5M by Recognizing This Rare “Upside” on Her Rental

Imagine making $1,500,000 on one regular real estate deal.Imagine generating one and a half million dollars in a single deal, in an expensive market in 2025. I know these numbers may sound impossible to believe, but today we are talking to a normal everyday investor who took a regular deal and found upside in it to the tune of one and a half million dollars. Dina oir over the course of her career started a few different businesses, some of which failed and left her in pretty bad financial situations, but eventually she discovered real estate and gradually accumulated a handful of properties near Boston and it was sort of a modest, sustainable portfolio until she accidentally stumbled onto a once in a lifetime deal. We’re going to get into Dina’s full story today and how you can look for the same types of upsides as you look for your next property. Let’s bring on Dina. Dina on welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast.Thank you so much for having me, Dave. I’m so excited pinch me that I’m here.Well, we’re excited to have you as well. From everything I’ve read about you and heard about you, you have a really cool story that I’m eager to dig into. So maybe you can just start by giving us a little bit of background on you and how you first started investing or at least thinking about real estate investing.Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I’m an immigrant. I came to this country about 25 years ago with my family, my father’s entrepreneur. He threw me into his business sourcing different type of materials that we exported to different countries. So got married, moved to New York, had my two kids, me and my husband started the business together. We made not such a good decision, so within six months we filed a bankruptcy, had to move relocate from New York to Boston and that was very difficult times. That’s when my husband restarted his life. I started to going back to school, got my master’s. I got myself into a corporate world, which I did not like a lot. I was working in the medical device industry and after that I decided to research what else can I do and I loved home healthcare business. I quit my job and started my own company. So my home healthcare company has been open now for 10 years.Thank you for sharing your story, Dina. It sounds like you’ve had a lot of the ups and downs of an entrepreneur over the course of your career and have somehow figured it out. I’m curious what gave you the drive to keep going and start another business after? Unfortunately, I’m sorry to hear that you had a business that had failed in the past, but what was it about either your background or your personality that gave you sort of that drive to keep going and keep trying new entrepreneurial things?Sure. So I think that was from the early age, my father who threw me into the business at age 16 and 17, trying to find products in us, sourcing them, connecting with vendors. So he gave me a lot of push. My father really built my business skillsAndI didn’t even know at that time what he was doing, but I became who I am today just because of him.Yeah, I grew up in obviously not the exact same situation, but my dad was always kind of pushing me in these situations where I’d have to figure things out for myself. And I find that people either go in one or two directions, they either take to it or really like it and then want to become entrepreneurs themselves, or people just go the complete opposite direction. They’re like, I want to be an accountant and I want the most stable, predictable, possible job. But it sounds like you sort of caught the entrepreneurial bug, started this home healthcare business, which is awesome. And tell us how that led into real estate for you.People started to just ask questions. I would get a phone call from reception, well, this family is looking for real estate agents. Do you know someone? And that’s what I started to think, why am I not buying those properties directly from my clients?Interesting.And majority of those clients actually had single family homes. They didn’t have multifamilies. And at that time when I started to read, I realized single family homes are not for me. I’m looking for multis. I want less risk because when you have a single family, you only have one payment coming in. So I was minimizing the risks. I knew from the entrepreneurship working with my dad that things can go up and down very fast, and I did not want that for sure. So healthcare company made me really open up my eyes into a real estate world.So people were looking to sell their homes because unfortunately someone in their family was either passed away or needed to move into some sort of assisted facility. So by accident, you found yourself with a deal flow pipeline that was sort of unexpected to you at that point. You said you wanted multifamily, but had you even been thinking about becoming a rental property investor or was this kind of just a fortunate opportunity?No, it was just like one business was leading to another one. A couple of years later down the line, I was thinking about it, I’m like, oh my gosh, this is incredible how this has pushed me into something else. And I pivot and I listened to a lot of BiggerPockets stuff, which I loved. I joined networking groups, masterminds, and read a lot of books. And actually it felt really lonely, to be honest with you. When I realized and found real estate, I needed to find my people, I needed to find who can I talk to who can give me some guidance? And especially like a woman, it’s more like male dominant industry.It’s definitely a part of entrepreneurship. People don’t talk about that. It is lonely when you’re trying to figure everything out by yourself and you’re not necessarily following the path that a lot of your friends or your family members are doing. And if you don’t have a community or support group, it can be really challenging. So how did you go about finding a community that would help you? Was it just BiggerPockets or were there other things you were doing as well?So BiggerPockets was one of them. I religiously listened to the podcast. Brenda Turner was at that time, the host of the show. He’s amazing guy forSure.One of my dreams is to meet him one day and also masterminds. And I was able to network with people, learn a lot of stuff that people were doing, a lot of different things they were doing, not what I had my mind set on. So some of those people grew into very close relationships that we can bounce off ideas, like ask questions. It’s just like community of people that have the same mindset, same goals.So you found yourself with this deal flow, which is really interesting. How did you go from seeing an opportunity but not being an investor? So probably not knowing exactly how to make the most of that opportunity and then go and develop a strategy and a plan to build a business that was in line with your personal goals.It was really hard to pull the trigger. I really was pushed into it. It wasn’t the client from home healthcare company that I purchased my first deal from it was actually the employee. Because you have so many employees, you have 15 employees, they come and you talk and you communicate. And she told me that her landlord was selling the property because he’s moving to assisted living facility. And I offered her to introduce me to him in return for a commission and she could stay at the property. So that’s how I ended up purchasing my first deal. And then I was all the way in into rehab. I was trying to figure it out, things that I need to do, pull the permits, and I ended up skipping some of the steps.We all do, not on purpose, it just happens.So I was finding my deals throughout my employees and through my clients, but my clients were having single family homes, majority of them. So I passed on a lot of those deals to real estate agents because my focus was on the multifamily homes primarily. That is what I wanted to do. I had very straight focus, multifamilies rehabbing them following the birth strategy just like it was written in the book. I got the book and I got the recipe. So that was pretty amazing.Alright, we do have to take a quick break, but before we go, I wanted to announce to everyone, if you haven’t heard yet, that the BiggerPockets Conference, BP Con is back and this year we’re heading to Las Vegas. Tickets are on sale now with early bird pricing, which means that you can save a hundred dollars if you don’t know why you should be attending BP Con. It’s for a lot of reasons, but first and foremost, to build your network, you can join a community of like-minded investors ready to share insights, offer support, and grow together. Second, close more deals, step into this purpose-built approachable environment designed to accelerate your growth and expand your portfolio beyond expectations. And third, and there are more than this, but the third one I just want to mention is just really unlocking your own personal potential. We have inspiring keynotes and expert teachers who will fill you with the momentum and confidence to begin or improve your financial freedom journey. Alright, we’ll be right back. Thanks for sticking with us. Here’s more of this week’s investor story. You mentioned that your goal was small, multifamily. You liked that it was relatively lower risk because if you have four units and someone unfortunately doesn’t pay, you still have three other incomes as just one example. Tell us about your first couple of deals. It sounds like you were doing heavy rehabs right off the bat. Yeah,I did that. So first property was a three family home, purchased it for 289,000, put in about $70,000 into the property. I like to go in and make it look nice. I like to update all electrical, plumbing kitchens. I don’t want to have a phone calls because I’m managing properties myself. So my goal is always to get this to the highest A RVI can so I can refinance out, pull my construction money out and move on to the next project. So when I purchased them, I purchased them as a portfolio loans at 25% down payment. I was very skeptical about people suing you and this and that. So I wanted all my properties to be under the LLC.And where was this? Just in what area of the country?So this is in North Attleboro in Massachusetts, sovereign part of Boston. So I rehabbed it, refinanced out in a year. I was able to pull my money completely out.Oh, that’s great.And make about $15,000, which actually $15,000 I subtracted from the down payment.And what year was this?I purchased 20 18, 20 19 I refinanced. Then I did another refi in 2023 and I was able to pull my down payment out and make $70,000. So the property value went from 289 to 650 in about five years.Okay, great. That’s awesome. That’s a huge jump. Some it sounds like due to your work and forced appreciation and value add and then some due to sort of market conditions that helped everything goUp. Exactly.That’s great. Awesome. So what have you done since then? I mean, I can see why after a deal like that, very successful, you’d want to keep going. So what did you do after that?So I did another one, which was a six family home. It was next door and the lady who owned it, it was a six family house. It was just falling apart. I sent her a couple of letters, I handwritten them, followed up with a couple of phone calls. Six months went by. She called me, she said she wasn’t interested. Then a couple more months,Patience,And then I get a phone call. Then she told me she was ready to sell. So it was very interesting how this deal was working out. She was 80 years old, she was leaving an hour and a half away. So I had to arrange for an attorney to go out to her house. At that time, it wasn’t really a thing. Attorneys were going places. Usually you come to their offices. So this was 2019. So she sold it to me for $420,000 a six family home, which was a complete mess. We needed to take down the roof, take down the walls, put new windows, siding. There was a major rehab, I think it was like $165,000 invested in that project and the money it was saving and the HELOC that I was able to pull on my house. So combination of both of those helped me go from project to project.You were saving money from your home healthcare business essentially, or was some of it also coming from the rental income from the first one,It wasn’t that much. You can’t really, you getting 300, $500 per due and it’s only three family homes. There is income,But it’s good income, but it takes a long time for a down payment and a renovation budget that would take a long time.So that took a year itselfA year. Wow.And because it’s six family home, you can’t really move people out. You have to wait for them to leave and it’s just on its own very intense.And so I just want to make a point to people that that’s one of the things when you take on a rehab with these multifamily homes, if they’re not vacant when you get them, it can be really slow and you should really plan for that. And a lot of vacancy in the first year. And it’s totally fine if you underwrite your deal and forecast at least one or two of your units being vacant at all times for the next year. It hurts. But if it still makes sense when you’re running your numbers, that’s fine. But pay close attention to that when the leases are coming up, how long the construction’s going to be dragged out too. At least in my experience, Dina, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s also hard to keep your contractors on a good schedule when you have these sort of rotating things. A lot of times you want to maximize the work that you can do when you have the person there every single day and you don’t want ’em coming and going. So did you learn how to sort of manage your subs and your construction during the course of this project?I was trying different subs. That’s when it was kind of like my learning curve. Who is my team of people? Who do I want to continue working with? It is hard because they go from project to project, sometimes they don’t show up. Sometimes people take your material. It happens. So this is just trial and error. You learn. I mean, you get referrals and stuff, but you never know who’s going to be working with you by your side. So you have to supervise it. And I was the one actually onsite with my husband checking out what’s happening? Do we need to order materials? Do we need another person in here? Do we need to fire someone? So it’s just like it gets real. When you’re talking about big projects like this,How did you manage all this? You were doing had three kids, you’re running a home healthcare business, you have one property that you’re self managing, and then you’re doing this big rehab. Were you just busy all the time? How did you manage that?So my home healthcare business, I was only already at that time, I think it was established five years ago. I was only doing just the finance, just the billing part of it. The first two years when I started my home healthcare company, I was grinding. My husband was saying to me, you’re married to your business, not to me. So it was a lot of time spent for the first two years establishing the business. And then I had the freedom to actually learn what the real estate is all about, managing kids. That’s also my part-time work that I do.Yeah, of course,Yes, it is a lot. But you juggle where you’re going to be needing more or less. So it’s just planning out and running with it. If you want to reach your goals, you just have to work hard.Yeah, of course. I want to get into your most recent deal. I think it’s going to be fun to talk about with everyone, but just question. You’ve done so many things and it seems like been honing more and more in on real estate. Is it just because the most profitable? Do you like it or why have all these different things that you could be doing with your time? Are you doing real estate?I love it. I’m very passionate about it. Whenever we do a rehab, actually, I do some work myself there as well. I love to tile. I think that’s what gives me peace and quiet. Maybe it’s like a therapeutic, like your meditation. So I put things, so every single unit, every single house that we bought, I would put my stamp on it. I would tile, do the backsplash in the kitchen. That’s just my thing.That’s nice. Yeah. And then when you go visit it, you’re like, I did that. That’s a good feeling. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, we have to pause for one final ad, but on the other side, Dina’s going to tell us about one of the most incredible real estate deals I’ve ever heard of. We’ll be right back. We’re back with the BiggerPockets podcast. Tell me a little bit about your most recent deal, because obviously market conditions have changed a lot, but you’re still active. What are you doing right now?So in 2023, me and my husband, we were talking about moving closer to where his business is and it’s in suburbs of Boston. About 15 minutes away, we found a house that we wanted to buy and we thought we are going to expand it because two kids were going off to college and we have the little child with us. So we purchased it and when we were closing, I realized we purchased not only a single family home, we purchased a house in a multifamily zoning. And that changed the whole strategy. YouLike, oh, I’m going to live here and now I’m going to build an apartment built kind of. Yeah, which is great. So you didn’t know that you were shopping for a primary residence, right?Yes, we purchased it like a primary residence too. So that’s why me and my husband were like, well, what do we do? And I was like, this is an opportunity to build in this very expensive market. We took six months to really sit and think, are we going to do it? Let’s put strategy together. Are we going to? And he’s like, okay, let’s not move. Let’s just rented it out, developed the project, knock it down and build two beautiful town homes. And they both town homes about 7,000 square feet altogether. Not each.Whoa. So big houses, 3,500 pop. Those are serious townhouses. Yeah,Huge townhouses. And I thought that I can pull it off and I did. I thinkI love how modest, I just pulled it off. I did. But that’s great. Let’s dig into this because one of the things if you’ve been listening to the show recently, I’ve been talking about a lot is looking for deals that work today but have upside. And this zoning upside is one of the sneaky things that can really go from buying a good deal, even if you’re buying it as a rental property from a good deal to an amazing deal. And it sounds like Dina, you found this on your primary too. So you were going to move in, you decided not to,Right? Not to. Yeah.But did you say you rented it outThen? Yes. We decided to not move in, stay where we were and rented it out to college kids and they paid $3,700 mortgage.Wow, that’s so pretty good for college kids, I guess. Was it a big house?No, this is 900 square foot home. Wait, what? Yeah. Where’d college kids get that money? Babson College kids.Wow. I’m going to date myself, but my rent, my last year of college was like $210. Oh myGod.I just can’t.That’s amazing.Okay. So I guess the other nice thing about that is I would always worry about renting to college kids, but you’re going to tear down the house anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.I didn’t care. I didn’t care. The only thing I cared about is they’re going to disturb the neighbor is we had a couple of phone calls. The cops came by, they said, turned down the music, but that was fine.Okay. So you’ve done rehab at this point, but this is development,New development, ground up construction, knocking down, putting the footings is a big project that took a whole year and we are doing the finishes right now.How did you go about learning that? Something frankly I’ve thought about and always been a little bit wary of because it just seems like a lot of bureaucracy, especially this is in Massachusetts, I would imagine there’s a lot of red tape. There’s red tape everywhere, to be honest, when you go through development. But certain areas, certain states are definitely more infamous for bureaucracy.It took a year and a half to go through all the paperwork.Okay, so good thing you rented out. So you rented it out that whole time hopefully and basically broke even.No, I decided to rent only for one year and one year the $44,000 came out of my pocket because I had all those permits with the special due dates and timelines and I could not afford to have a tenant in there that needs more time to move or this or that. So I didn’t want to play around because I was investing a hundred K into architect, wetland specialist, our burritos, you name it. I had to assemble a team of people, prepare all these documents to submit to the town and have all those permits with special due dates. So I had to really put the schedule together, how this is all going to work out. I’ve never done it before. I just listened to a lot of stuff, read stuff, ask questions. The biggest challenge for me was finances my project. If we’re talking about converting the mortgage, which is the primary resident mortgage that we had with 5% down into construction loans. So that whole amount came into $2 million.Yeah, I was thinking in my head it’s like what, 300 bucks a square foot, roughly? It sounds like a little cheaper, but 2 million to build?No, well, to get the land, so you have to convert the primary resident loan into a construction loan. So 740,000 plus 1.3 million is the construction budget to build two townhouses.That’s a ton of money. So how do you doThat? For me, it took a lot of time. I went to a lot of banks. I went to actually private lenders that offered to buy my project. They offered to give me 200 K on top of what I paid. I refuse. Well,That’s annoying, but that’s a vote of confidence, right? You’re like, I’m onto something. If they want to buy from me, then I’m probably doing something.So I had to figure out two years from now, how am I going to qualify for $2 million loan? I had to go pick everyone’s brain, talk to people, increase my income, start the property management for family and friends.So you have eight jobs at this point, but they’reLike small jobs that require very little time. You have to press this button, that button.Well, that’s good. I mean you’ve clearly made it sustainable for yourself even though you have a lot of things going on.Yeah, so figuring out the finances was the fun part.How do you call that fun?So I wanted to build for myself, so I call this primary residence house hack, like a development house hack that I created on my own. I found the bank that would land me as a construction, primary residence for two family or less with very special terms, amazing terms that I’ve never heard of when we went to the closing bank. Paid me.Wait, tell me more about that. How does that work?Cash to close to borrow $113,000 because they do two appraisals. When you come to the closing, they do ASIS appraisal and they do future appraisal. So I bought it for seven 40 in two years it depreciated to 1.2 million. After that, after the construction, when the building is ready, they do future appraisal future value, and that came in at 3.725. So the equity that I was generating in that project was $1.5 million.Oh my God. That’s insane. Oh my God.Wow.Congratulations. That’s so cool. Yeah, I know. Wow. So it’s like 1.5 million on one deal? Yes. Oh my God, that’s so cool. And you’ve bought this as a primary residence, so cool. What a great story.Yeah, so my plan is to move in and rent the other apartment and I’m going to house hack. I’m going to probably only pay 10 to 20% of the mortgage.Perfect. Amazing. Congratulations. Super cool. So that’s probably one of the bigger equity pops I’ve ever heard of on this show, which is saying a lot. We hear some pretty cool stories. That’s one of the coolest ones I’ve heard, so amazing. Are you addicted to development now? Are you looking to do it again?It’s very risky too. So when we were excavating, we found the ledge on the ground and that costed me an additional $70,000, which is a change order that we didn’t account for. So could be a lot of stuff. Then when you’re doing a construction you can bump into that you didn’t account for and bank is not going to give you the money. You have to have your own savings and you’ll be able to pull it off and the market changes a lot. There’s just aTiming risk with it too. It took you how long? Three years basically. Two and a half years.Yeah, we are almost done. And from the time when we bought it development, all those regulations permits until we broke the ground, it took three years with 1.5. Yeah.So obviously everyone, you could see the upside of development, but in my mind there’s sort of this spectrum of real estate investing strategies like rental property investing, single family homes and small multifamilies like low risk, but solid return. So that’s one side of the risk spectrum. And then development’s on the other side. There’s a lot of upside. There’s amazing opportunities, but there’s also a lot of risk. And so it’s great to hear this $1.5 million pop, but I’m glad that you called out the risk to it as well because it’s not just something easy and you have to find great deals and there are risks in timeline and market conditions changing from the time you start a project to the time you end the project. You got to think about all of that. But obviously by Dina’s story, we know that it can be very, very worth it.Yeah.So Dhar next for you. What’s your plan and your goals for your portfolio over the next few years?Yeah. Well right now it’s very hard. The prices are very high interest rates there as well. So I’m continuously looking, I listened to your podcast. It’s like you have to find opportunities, you have to create them yourself, and that’s what I’m looking at right now in Massachusetts, we have this new law that’s been passed recently, A DU and accessory dwelling units, which you can add to the single family homes, but you have to be a primary, I believe you have to be a primary residence for you. But I’m looking to continue looking for different opportunities where you can create square footage or where you can maybe partner up with someone and do a DU. So I love the game. I know how to play it, I think.Yeah, soundsLike it. You have to be comfortable to win and lose. SoYeah, for sure.That’s what that’s comfortable with.Awesome. Well, good luck to you. If your track record is any indication, I’m sure you’re going to find more ways to find upside in this new changing era of real estate investing that we’re in. But Dina, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us your story. This was a lot of fun.Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me.Of course. And thank you all so much for listening. We appreciate it. Make sure to share this story. If you know someone who might want to get into real estate investing but doesn’t know how to do it or thinks that they can’t, Dina’s story is such a great example of how you can figure it out, hustle your way, work hard to build a great portfolio, find financial freedom through real estate. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you again soon for another episode of the BiggerPockets podcast.