From Zero to $8,000/Month Cash Flow in Just 2 Years (While Working a W2)

Growing to $8,000 in monthlyHey rookies. We often talk about the importance of consistent action for real estate investing, but there are some investors that take this to an extraordinary level. Today’s guest has built a portfolio of 35 rental units and completed 13 flips in just two years, all while working full-time as a welder.And honestly, what makes this story even more remarkable is how he’s leveraged networking and private money to really accelerate his growth. Starting with literally zero investing experience and no formal business background. Lucas created nearly a million dollars in equity and $8,000 in monthly cashflow. So today he’s going to break down how he went from his first Facebook marketplace deal to recently acquiring an 18 unit mobile home park through creative financing.This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast, and I am Ashley Care.And I’m Tony j Robinson. And let’s give a big warm welcome to Luke. Luke, thank you for joining us today, brother. Thank you guys, I appreciate it.So Luke, you work as a welder for your full-time job, but you’ve told us you don’t love your job per se. So how did you land on real estate for your next steps for financial freedom?Well, I think it kind of started with, it was a little bit more than a dislike of my job. I found myself pretty miserable, just kind of disappointed in myself, how I kind of ended up where I was at in life. I always felt like I should be doing something a lot bigger, a lot more, and I just never felt like I quite fit in with the guys I was working with. The long 60, 80 hours a week we were working and before I knew it I was 25 years old and I started welding straight out of high school. I didn’t go to college, just went kind of straight to work and I just felt like my life just, I snapped and all of a sudden all of my younger years are over and I’m just not really getting anywhere. So that’s kind how I kind of started thinking outside of the box, getting out, what am I going to do? And real estate fell into my lap.
I had one mentor in my life and it was my best friend growing ups. Father, he was a custom home builder. He had a few single family rentals and it was just kind of always topic of conversation. I can remember when we were younger, just he was going to pick up rent or he was going to fix a house. I don’t think I really took much to it when we were in high school. I was 18. Our mind was on some other things, but I think that kind of ingrained somewhere in my mind. I always kind of knew I could fall back on that. So I think once I got to almost a breaking point of where I needed to make a change, I called him up. We had a quick phone call and I was like, yeah, now or never, let’s just try it. I’ll find a deal. And I kind of made an agreement with him where he’d essentially be my first private money guy and I ended up finding the first deal. It kind of all just snowballed from there.I want you to take us through your first deal, Luke, because I’m told that you found your first real estate deal on Facebook marketplace, which is almost the quote of finding a good deal on Craigslist. So walk us through how you found this deal.It gets even better than that because the top off the fact that it was off Facebook marketplace, I set my now fiance to go walk it because I work a lot so it’s hard for me to be free during the day and she’s never done one construction job. She’s never bought a house before. She has zero real estate experience. So she walked it, she’s like, oh, I guess it looks all right. And I negotiated with ’em over Facebook messenger. They didn’t want to take a phone call and I bought it sight unseen to kind of make things a little more interestingAnd did not even talk to the person either that they want to single a phone call. My God.So I guess lemme just ask Luke, did you not at any point feel that this might’ve been a scam given that Facebook marketplace didn’t want to talk on the phone? Were you worried at all about that?Honestly, I had 20 mutual friends with them, so to me that was a real person. So I didn’t know ’em personally, but I was like, it’s got to be legit. And she showed up, they were there when she was there and they walked through it. There was a tenant in there, so she was like her first experience of tenant, she’s walking over all their stuff, they’re kind of walking ’em through the homeowner. She said it was just wild. And yeah, we decided to go through with it.So let me ask you this for your first steps as, okay, you guys negotiate through Messenger, you have a deal. What’s the next thing that happened? Did you hire an attorney? What are those next crucial steps to actually close on the property?Luckily, I kind of really leaned on my mentor there because he’s been doing, he’s been in real estate for 30 years. So as soon as we agreed on a price, I just kind of went to him and he sent me to his attorney. They drew up all the paperwork. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I barely even read the contract if I’m being totally honest. And we just bought it. That was kind of how, I don’t know if it was ignorant, me being naive or just ready to go, I don’t know. But luckily it worked out.And Luke, obviously you are in a unique position because you had this mentor, someone who had a lot of experience in real estate and for a lot of the rookies that are listening, you may not have someone like Luke had that can hold your hand and guide you through this process in real life right next to you. But there is a way to create your own board of mentors. I think a lot of it starts with building the right team to support you. So for me, the folks that really helped me early on were my agents and my lender, and they were kind of my conduit to introduce me to the other people that I needed to meet. So for the Ricky that are listening, use the BiggerPockets agent finder, use the BiggerPockets lender finder to get connected with folks in your specific markets that are already working with real estate investors and can hold your hand to say, Hey, you found this amazing deal, Luke, here’s who you need to go talk to next. So just trying to make sure that for the brickies that are listening, you understand what those options are for you as well. So Luke, you find this deal. I guess give us the numbers on it. What did you end up buying it for and how did you know that it was actually a good deal?So they had it listed for like 85 grand I think. And I mean I really just kind of took it upon myself to comp a property. So I went on Redfin and all the solds and I was kind of doing the whole Ang and I figured it’d probably be worth right around 1 20, 1 30 and it didn’t need much work for what it was. I mean, from the pictures I saw. So I figured my original plan was I was going to be the one to fix it up along with my mom, she helps us do stuff and my fiance. So I figured we could fix it up pretty cheap. I budgeted for 20 grand and I was like, after listening to your guys’ podcast and to some other people, I was like, we could refi out and then move on to the next one. And that’s kind of how it went. We ended up putting a little over 20 grand into it and we got it rented. I took it to the bank and they appraised it at 1 35, 1 33, somewhere in there. And I pulled out as much as I could. I paid him off. We profited. Took home a little less than 20 grand and we were off to the races, I guess you’d say.That’s awesome.WhatA killer first deal.Yeah, at the time I didn’t know that I had done so little research and stuff, but now kind of where I’m at now, it was a pretty good one.So with that property, you ended up renting it out. What was the rents? What was the cashflow?Yeah, so we ended up, now it’s rented for like 1350 and it cashflows about 400 bucks a month.That’s awesome.Yeah. Yep.With no money into the deal, you pulled all your money back out.Yeah. Yep. It worked out great. This might be one of the best first deals, Luke, that we’ve heard on the podcast. You found it in a very unconventional way, messaging someone on Facebook. You had a private money lender line up the whole thing. You estimated 20 K in rehab, you actually spent 20 K in rehab, which isn’t normal. You refinance, pull cash out and you’re still cash flowing, several hundred dollars per month. That is amazing.Looking back now, it is pretty funny that it all worked out that way.Luke, I have a question about your friend’s dad being the private money lender, does your friend at all invest at all too, or is this just something that you’ve done and I guess if your friend hasn’t, why hasn’t he with his dad’s help?No, he does not actually. And I don’t know why me and him as once high school hit me and him kind of went two different ways. He was a great lacrosse player. He went out, he actually won a couple of national championships, unfortunately came from a little different family and I went right to work after high school. So I think we just kind of had different mindsets. I think he, he’s kind of back in town now and I’m sure he’ll eventually get into it, but I also, his dad helped me. I mean, to this day I love him and I call him my dad, but he built his portfolio brick by brick, cash, save up cash for the next house. No banks involved, no nothing. So when I started kind of going this route, it quickly turned into him calling me crazy. So that was the one and only deal we’ve ever done together.I just find it interesting because my story started out very similar where I started working for my childhood of friend’s, father helping him with his real estate as a property manager. He was my first mentor, but my first deal, I actually partnered with his son, my friend growing up, and we did our first deal together and my pitch was like, look what your dad is doing. We should do that. We’re going to take a real quick break, but when we come back, Luke, I want to hear more about your journey and how you were able to scale so quickly to 35 units in two years. We’ll be right back. Okay. Let’s get back into the show with Luke. So Luke, you’ve had your first successful Brr that you completed. What is the next move for you? What did the next couple deals look like?We kind of just kept the ball rolling with the next one. I found, honest to God, another house off Facebook marketplace.What market are you in, Luke? We didn’t mention that. What market are you in?I’m in a small market outside Rochester, Syracuse area of New York in a bunch of, we’ve kind of stuck to the smaller towns and I don’t know if that plays a difference, but I bought quite a few deals off Facebook marketplace. We kind of went, walked it, same deal. It was disgusting. So this was a lot different where we were going to be getting into some real rehab on this one, and I bought it for 40 grand. We put another 40 into it and at the end of it it ended up appraising for 1 45. So that was another great one. But it was a lot of learning lessons along starting to work with contractors because after that first deal I didn’t really mention, but halfway through it is when I started kind of building some relationships with contractors, with guys that do stuff because I got about a month in to me doing the work after I work.
And usually I don’t get out. We usually start working around 5:00 AM I worked till five, six o’clock at night, so by the time I get over there it’s seven. And actually productivity wise, you’re probably only getting an hour and a half of work done at night. And after about a month of that, I sat down with my fiance and I’m like, this isn’t going to work. This isn’t scalable, this isn’t repeatable mean, and I’m miserable. This sucks. And so we started finding people. So then they kind of finished up that first one for us and then we kind of rolled them into this next one and immediately that didn’t work out. So I was on the hunt for contractors. I found some more. They came in and we ended up doing the property pretty decent. They weren’t the best to work with, but it was kind of one of those things where I couldn’t be too picky.
We had the house and we had to get it done. But yeah, we ended up getting it done. We rented it out to an attorney and that come to find out cashflow, a good $40 a month. When I ran my numbers, those are not the numbers I budgeted for. I thought I was going to be like the other one around three, 400 bucks a month. I had made some mistakes, I missed a couple. This was a different town and taxes were way higher for whatever reason, and I skipped it honestly, it was just me not kind of doing my due diligence. So that was kind of an eyeopener to where we got it rented. I was pumped. It was an attorney, she was great. And then we started kind of paying everything and after a few months I’m like, this thing is, we ended up turning that one into an Airbnb now, actually.Interesting. So you guys pivoted the strategy a little bit. And since you made that transition, what has the cashflow look like on that one?That one on average does like a thousand bucks a month.Yeah. That’s amazing. All right, so to take it from 40 to a thousand,What a drastic change in cashflow by make listening that set strategy, how much more did you have to put into the property to furnish it and things like that?Not much. I mean, we only spent five grand on getting, it’s a small little two bedroom, so we definitely went the cheap route, but I mean, it looks great and it does really well in the area. It’s the number one Airbnb.You said something that was pretty amazing. So we got to pause on this, Luke, right, because you said that you were netting 40 bucks per month as a long term. You transitioned to short term and it went from 40 to 1000. Right? So that’s an additional $960. I’m breaking up my calculator here. That’s an extra $960 per month in profits. So nine 60 over 12 months is $11,520. You set the investment to get that additional revenue is only 5,000. So if we take our profit of 11,520, divide that by our investment of 5,000, we get a cash on cash return of 230%. The reason why I point that out is because there are a lot of people who are listening that already have properties that much like yours aren’t meeting their initial projections, but instead of focusing on buying the next deal, sometimes you can get a much better return by reinvesting into the properties that you already own. And that is an amazing proof of concept because you invested 5,000 bucks and got a 230% return. Could you have put that money into a different deal and gotten a 230% return? Probably not. But going back to your story loop, I think it’s amazing. I just want to make sure I have your stats right, 35 rentals, 13 flips AK a monthly cashflow in two years.It’s not entirely correct. We have a few things that are under contract to sell and buying, but it’s right in there. Yeah,Generally speaking, right?Yeah.Yep. So I think the biggest thing is I can’t even wrap my head around that level of activity in such a short timeframe. So how were you able to scale so quickly? What was kind of the secret sauce that allowed you to move at such a rapid pace?I think it was a mixture of just my mindset mentality and kind of really reflecting on the deals we’ve done and looking at those, how we did ’em and how can we kind of do ’em again. So I was just kind going back to where we’ve originally talked and where I was in life, I was ready to get out of it, and I’m the type of person that once I kind of reached that point, I don’t care. I will go and I’ll make it work. So I kind of had that mentality. And then once I did the first deal with my buddy’s dad there, I learned that that was an option. And then obviously exploring all the forums and YouTube and podcasts and stuff, learning about private money, different ways to get money. I actually went out and joined our local country club to try and network, and that’s where I found a couple of the guys that I do all my deals with. Now.What a great idea. I know our local country club, I mean it’s on the sticks, but it’s like a hundred dollars a year for a social membership. If you don’t play golf and you just want to go and be a social member, what a great investment.That was kind of where our head was and that was why we joined. I like to golf, but I didn’t need to necessarily join the nicest place in town, but me and my fiance kind of talked about it and we figured it would probably be good for business and it definitely has been.Luke, let me ask, right, so you joined country club first. What was the cost?It’s like 3,500 bucks a year.Okay, so not a small expense, but definitely not a major expense either.But that’s what somebody would pay on a mastermind.Yeah, exactly. Or even more than that in a lot of situations. So 3,500 bucks for the year you join, you’re a member now, how do you go from, I signed up to getting to the point where the folks who are in this country club are actually lending you money because are you just going in there handing out your business cards saying, I’m Luke, give me your money. I’m Luke, give me your money. What did the actual conversations look like?Well, so luckily for me, I kind of have a foot in the door because I’m very good at golf. So when I go and sign up for leagues or tournaments, everybody wants to be on my team. And that’s not cocky at all. It’s justNo, no, no, no. I love the honesty of it,JustTheRealityOf it. Yeah,It would be the literal opposite for me. No one would want me on their team if we were golfing because I’m terrible. So I’m glad you had that working for you.And that’s kind of how I’ve met so many people. I started to get random text messages like, Hey, there’s a tournament going on next Friday, would you want go? And because of that, I’ve just met the biggest roofer in our town. I know him. I have a cell phone number now, so he does all of our roofs. I met a guy who owns a couple big fence companies, so they do our fence. I mean, just all these relationships that have come of it, it’s worked out great.Tony’s literally looking up golf lessons right now,Not golf lessons, but I am looking up our local country club right now to see, I’ve never even looked into it before,But how cool to take something that you enjoy doing, that you love doing, and turning it in a way to network and to make those connections.That’s just kind of what I did. Whenever we play, I just would make a point of talking about what I had going on, and I’ve learned that guys with money, everyone kind of thinks the same. Everyone’s trying to make money with money, so they hear of a young kid who’s hungry, who’s doing deals, they’re not afraid to throw ’em a hundred grand,And you’re good at golf, so you must be trustworthy.Yeah, of course.I guess Luke, one final question on that piece. Was it a very direct ask on your part after you had built these relationships to go to some of these folks and say, Hey, I’m in real estate. I’ve got this deal. Let me know if you’re interested. Or was it more, I guess kind of the inverse where they were like, Hey, Luke, if you ever have anything, let us know.I work with three main guys now, and two of them came to me, and then the first guy I actually printed out the entire deal. I brought it to his office where he works, and we kind of sat down and went over all the numbers and I kind of sold him on the deal. And since then, now that I have, it’s been a lot easier now that I have stuff going on and people know what I’m doing. And that was the biggest thing I preached to anybody I to was I wouldn’t ask for any money that I couldn’t pay you back whether this house burned up in flames. And I truly meant that, and I truly would never borrow money unless I had a way of getting them paid off in other deals or in other equity lines I have. So being very open and honest about numbers and where I’m at.And then in terms of structuring these deals with the various partners, was it all private money? Were there equity partnerships? And how are you actually structuring the relationships on these different deals?So we do a very basic, depending on who I work with, it’s either 10 to 12% and it’s just a flat 10 to 12% interest, whether I have the money out for a month or a year, and it’s a year, I always cap it at a year. So that’s how I’ve done every deal. I haven’t done any equity positions yet. I’m looking at some bigger deals that we’re trying to possibly talk about that. But as far as everything I’ve done with ’em, it’s kind of been smaller stuff where we buy it, we go in, we fix it up, either sell it or refi ’em out and get ’em out of it pretty quick.Now you mentioned some bigger deals and you’ve got your rentals, you’ve got the flips that you’ve done. So what are these bigger deals that you’re looking at?Obviously I just closed on a 18 unit mobile home park.Congratulations.Thank you. Thank you. That’s been a pretty big learning curve.Is that in New York? You did close on it in New York,Yeah. Yep. It’s like 45 minutes away. So pretty local. And we have a couple larger apartment complexes that we’re looking at as well, but nothing official on those.So let me ask, when you’re looking at these bigger deals, what has been the difference between looking at the single family properties you’re buying to rent or flip compared to the due diligence per se, on a larger multifamily property?Oh, it’s leaps and bounds different. I’m learning now that, so I don’t want to sit here and act like I know what I’m talking about because I don’t feel like I do. Well, yeah, there’s just so much that goes into ’em. So many more tenants in it. I’m in New York, so there’s so many tenant laws, and I am learning for this mobile home park. There’s a seven unit apartment building on the mobile home park that’s condemned that we’re starting with. And one of the apartments, I was like, we were kind of doing our walkthrough and all of their stuff was still in there, but they were gone and supposedly moved out. Well, I’ll come to find out, they did move out, but all their stuff’s there. But in New York, technically I still have to go through an eviction process. If I don’t, they can sue me for getting rid of their stuff. So it’s kind of like one of those things where I wouldn’t have thought that’d be a big deal. I wasn’t told about the tenant. I was told it was a condemned building by everyone. I talked to the previous owner and now come to find out we might have to go through this process,Which do you even know where to find the tenant to serve or anything?I got a number, so I got to make a few phone calls and hopefully I can offer ’em a little money and get out of there.So look, super excited to hear about this 18 mobile home park property that you just purchased. I think the biggest thing for Ricky that are listening is probably the thought of how do you actually put the funds together to buy something this big? So what approach did you take to buy this mobile home park? Was it creative financing, seller financing, private money? What did you do to take this deal down?Yeah, so this deal was very odd situation. How the whole thing happened. It was actually, I saw it for sale on Craigslist about a year ago actually.So we go from fart Facebook marketplace to CraigslistTo even worse. So I talked to the guy, I talked to him for a few months and it was always odd conversations with him. It was just he was super squirrely. There’d be one week where he’s like, I need the money. I need the money, let’s sell it. And then I wouldn’t hear from ’em again for a couple weeks and same kind of cycle. And eventually I just kind gave up on it, moved on, and then a couple months ago, I saw it listed on the MLS, and I’m like, gosh, they wanted a ton for it. So I didn’t even bother. Kind of moved on again. And then I was talking to one of the guys I do deals with and he was kind of talking about how he’s foreclosing on a property up in Addison. I’m like, is that, and I asked, and sure enough, it was the same deal.
He was actually holding the note for this mobile home park. So I started kind of talking to him. He gave me the whole rundown. It was not the best situation. A bunch of back taxes, a bunch of back utilities, nobody’s gotten paid in years, and the whole town wanted them out. So I kind of talked with the seller, I kind of talked with the lender, and I kind of was the middleman trying to wheel and deal. It kind of whiz my way in there. And so the agreement I came up with the lender was if I could get him to just sign the property over me, can I just assume the debt and you’ll start getting paid and we can all move on. You don’t have to worry about going through a foreclosure process. And he already knows I’m good for it. So he’s like, if you could talk him into it, that’s fine by me.
So then the next couple months were just me and the seller kind of going back on forth for basically what extra he was going to pocket on top of a soup of the debt. We ended up agreeing on him not getting a dollar. So at closing, I came out of pocket no money, and I completely assumed the debt. We’re going to defer payments for a year while I fixed the whole property up so I don’t have to worry about mortgage payments. The trailer park cash flows quite a bit of money on its own without the seven unit building in the front. So by the time I’m actually going to have to start making mortgage payments, everything should be up and running, and it should be a really, really good deal.So Luke, you don’t have any on this deal. You didn’t even necessarily raise any private money for this deal. You just assumed the note and came with $0 out of pocket.Yeah, exactly. I actually got paid 50 grand at closing. I had to bumped the note up an extra 50 grand so I could start rolling some of that into renovations.Luke, you might be the best real estate investor we’ve ever interviewed finding deals off of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. And I love the story, man,This guy just got burned for years from this other person, and he is willing to give you an extra $50,000 to take this property.Imagine going to a bank and saying, Hey, bank, give me $50,000 to take over this note.Oh yeah. And if they saw a picture of the property, they would’ve laughed at my face too.Luke, I got to take you with me in my negotiations moving forward, man. You got the gift of gab or something going on there, man.Oh, no, no. I think I’m just lucky.Well, we’ve got to take our final a break, but we’ve got a little bit more to get into here with Luke. But while we’re gone, make sure you guys are subscribed to the real estate Rookie YouTube channel. You guys can find us at realestate Rookie, and we’ll be right back after the short break.Okay. Welcome back from our break. We are here with Luke. So Luke, before we wrap things up, I want to touch on your W2 job. So you were able to actually move your fiance out of her normal W2 to run the business with you. So maybe touch on what she’s helping you do in the business and then also what your plan is to be able to quit your W2 job.I want to preface that none of this would have been possible without her. And I also, my mom used to work for UPS, she would load boxes on the trucks and she quit and she now works as well. So those two are, yeah, those two are kind of full-time during the day, which allows me to still kind of work and pay the bills. And I’ve yet to take $1 from anything we’ve made. It just all goes right back in. And the only thing we’ve paid is just my mom and her and the Airbnb has covered that, so it kind of works out great. And they’re able to, so we kind of split the roles where my mom kind of handles project management, I guess you’d say. And then Mal takes care of all the tenant issues, all the legal documents. She’s extremely, extremely type A, so it works out amazing for emails, calls. I don’t have to worry about a thing if I need something. There’s an Excel spreadsheet that is updated by the hour, and I’m not like that at all. And I think without her, we really would be in a mask because our numbers would be, I’m just, I like to be in the front kind of pushing forward, finding deals, and then luckily she’s able to keep everyone organized. And my mom’s really got good at talking the contractor jargon, so it’s kind of worked out well.And then what about yourself? What’s the plan for you to eventually move out of your W2 job?That’s kind of where my biggest, I guess, hurdle would be right now. It’s obviously a scary thought, leaving a good job that pays all the bills and allows us to kind of do this. I have worries if I do it too soon. It might really hinder us being able to continue to grow, but also I know how productive I can be. So I could only imagine if my two, three hours a day working was 15. So it’s one of those things where I’m nervous, I don’t really know how I should pay myself. I’m afraid to take money from the business. I don’t like the thought of it. And so I guess that’s just kind of where I’m at currently is trying to figure out exactly all the logistics. Do I want to up my flipping? Do I want to just pay myself off of flipping? Should I worry about growing cash flow to get to the point where all my bills are covered and then I can just not worry from that? And so that’s currently where I’m at with everything.Yeah. If I can give you my recommendation, Luca, I think there’s a couple of things you’ve built in expertise in a few areas already. The flipping to generate large chunks of cash, which is great. Obviously you’re really good at finding deals in your market that are undervalued and then stabilizing those properties to generate cash flow. So you’ve got, and your ability to raise money to fund these deals, right? So you’ve got three massive skill sets, flipping for big chunks of cash, buying, renovating for the cashflow, raising money to fund all of your deals. So you’ve got all of the pieces in place, I think to lay that foundation, to get you to step away. I think if I were you, the two things I would focus on are, one, getting your personal reserves to a point where you are comfortable and what that comfortable is, what that number is going to vary from person to person.
Maybe for you it’s six months of your living expenses, maybe it’s two years of your living expenses, whatever the number is. Just decide for yourself, what number do I want have in the bank? Not business reserves, but for Luke personally, to cover my mortgage, my groceries, my bills, my fun, just my life. How much do I want to have set aside? Then get your cashflow to a number to say, okay, well, if I know my living expenses are X, maybe you want two X in cashflow because there’s going to be ups and downs. You’re want to make sure you have money set aside. So I think if you can tackle those two things, getting your personal reserves in place and getting your cashflow to a point, again, whatever threshold you feel makes the most sense, but if you can check both of those boxes, then it’s like, okay, well, I’m almost losing money at this point by not going into the business full time.I guess when you put it that way, I should probably quit tomorrow. There you go, man.Well, Luke, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Real Estate Rookie. Where can people reach out to you?I’m not huge on social medias, but you can look me up on Instagram. It’s Luke Tere Facebook, it’s Luke Tetro,And Luke, how do you spell your last name for folks?It’s T-E-T-R-E-A-U-L-T.I’m Ashley, and he’s Tony. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode, a real estate rookie, and we’ll see you guys soon for another episode.