How to Do a “Slow BRRRR” in 2025 (Better Than BRRRR)

The “Slow BRRRR” methodThis is how you do the Slow Brr. My personal favorite real estate investing strategy of 2025, and I’m going to tell you how to do it step by step. The Brr has been a very popular way to quickly scale a profitable real estate portfolio even if you’re starting without a lot of capital and it can still absolutely work in today’s market, but you got to make a couple essential updates to the tried and true formula and today I’m going to show you how to do it. Hey, what’s up everyone? I’m Dave Meyer host here at BiggerPockets and on the show we help you pursue financial independence through real estate and we’re glad to have you all here today. We released a recent episode of the podcast episode 1165. It was back on August 25th and it was called This is Better than The Burr Method, all about how to do burrs in 2025, and you guys seem to love that episode so much that today I’m going to go into more detail and more depth and explain exactly how you can execute a slow burr rental property deal step by step.
To me, this is the best strategy right now to use to add value and increase the upside of your deals, but you just need to take into account current prices and current rates when you’re figuring out how to actually go about executing one of these deals. Let’s dive into it. So first things first, what is a burr in the first place? Then we’ll get to what is a slow burr and how you actually go about it, but Burr is an acronym. It stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, and repeat. And the idea behind a burr is that you buy a property that’s not up to its highest and best use. It can be fully distressed or it might just be a property that needs a little bit of love, but you’re buying something that’s not really stabilized and being used in its best possible way.
Then you renovate that property to not just raise the value of the property like you would do with a flip, but also to raise the rents that you can generate because this is a rental property deal. Once you’ve done that, you rent it out at the new market rate that you’ve brought those rents up to. At that point you could call the property stabilize, right? You’ve brought it up to its highest and best use. You’ve got market rents going for you and at that point you can refinance at the new appraised value, pull some cash out and then use the cash that you just used to get that first deal and use it basically a second time. Recycle at least some of that money into the next deal that you want to go and acquire, and there are scales to how effective or how aggressive you want to be on a burr.
You could refinance some of it. There is something that some people call the quote perfect burr where the cash out refinance pays back 100% of your initial capital, both your down payment, your rehab costs, your closing costs. You’re able to in a perfect burr, refinance all of that so you can basically recycle 100% of your money, but there are other ways to use a burr effectively to increase your cashflow, to improve your net worth, to grow your portfolio, but no matter how you actually utilize the Burr strategy, it is just overall a super appealing option for people who are looking to scale and who are maybe starting with a limited amount of capital because as I said, the Burr method allows you to recycle that capital and that means you can use your money that you have very, very efficiently to scale a rental property portfolio.
Now of course some things have changed since 20 12, 20 15, even since 2021, rates aren’t near zero anymore. Underwriting is a little bit tighter appraisals that you’re getting and are super important to the refinance portion of the bur are a little bit more conservative and as we all know, renovations have gotten considerably more expensive and I should also say in the last year or two, rents have sort of stagnated and this has changed the way that Burr works, but is Burr dead? No, absolutely not. None of these things kill burr. If you’ve been listening to the show, I think you all know I think this has crazy that this has killed Burr. It just changes the approach. You have to tweak the strategy and the tactics that you use based on what has changed over the last couple of years. One thing, and I think the main thing that you really need to change if you’re going to succeed with Burr in 2025 and get all these amazing benefits and be able to recycle your capital is that you have to change your expectations a little bit because during the Burr heyday right from whatever 2017 to 2022, this sort of idea emerged where that the only burr that is worth doing is that perfect burr that I mentioned before where you take out a hundred percent of your equity and of course if you can do that, you should, but the idea that that’s the only thing that makes Burr worth it I think is really crazy and it’s honestly really detrimental to the majority of investors out there because they’re overlooking what could be great wealth building, cashflow producing deals because it’s not a hundred percent perfect.
There’s a saying that perfect is the enemy of good, and I think that applies really well to the situation with Burr. To be clear, I am not saying that it’s wrong to look for an a hundred percent burr. If you can find that perfect burr, go out and do that, that is absolutely awesome. But it is important to note that in today’s market, being able to do that is an outlier. That is not what should be expected. That is not normal. If you can find it, you found yourself a home run or a grand slam, but you should not overlook deals that don’t meet that very strict criteria because that means you’re going to overlook what could be a lot of great, great deals. By all means, if you can find it, do it, but it’s just not normal and that’s okay. You could still use the many fundamentals of bird to scale and grow and I’m going to share with you the approach that I’ve been using to bur over the last couple of years.
I’ve done several deals like this, it works well for me and I think it’s just the right approach to real estate investing in the current environment that we’re in. So this is the approach that I have been using. I call it the slow burr still uses the same fundamentals as Burr just tweaks it for modern conditions. Here is my basic thesis because I think before I share with you exactly how to do this, I want to share with you at least my thinking and how I came about this strategy. Number one, value add investing works really well right now. Some people call this forced appreciation, but value add investing is basically buying a property that’s not being used that well or is fallen into disrepair or needs a little bit of love, renovating it to drive up the value of that property. And if you’re doing it right, you’re increasing the value of the property by more than you’re paying to increase the value of that property.
So just as an example, you buy a property for 200 grand, you put 50 grand into it, then it’s worth 300 grand. That’s value add investing because you spent $50,000 to increase the value of your property a hundred thousand dollars and I hope you all agree with me that if you can do a deal like that, you do it all day long and right now in today’s market, even though cashflow is harder to find and there are real obstacles to real estate investing, value add investing is working really well. There’s all sorts of macroeconomic reasons for this, but you see this with flippers who are still making money in today’s environment even though prices aren’t going up like crazy. And the same thing applies to Burr investing, which is why I use it as the foundation of the investing strategy I’m using right now. The second thesis that I have that drives this belief is that on market deals are getting better, they’re becoming more abundant, and you can negotiate better deals.
If you listen to me on the show, you know that I am not someone who has some sophisticated deal flow operation out there. I am not sending direct letters. I don’t do Facebook ads, I don’t do any of that. I find my deals either through my real estate agent, so on market deals or from pocket listings that again usually come to me through my real estate agent. But in my experience over I’d say the last year really the number of good opportunities on the MLS just on market deals is increasing. And as we enter an increasingly strong buyer’s market, I think those deals are going to come more and more and it means that you’re going to be able to negotiate better and that is really key to the burrs strategy because if you’re buying a distressed property, you need to buy it deep, you need to buy it under market comps, and I have seen this myself and I’ve talked to tons of investors who are also seeing this, but your ability to negotiate down particularly properties that haven’t been renovated yet is going up.
Your ability to do that is increasing and is probably going to keep increasing, which is another reason I like this slow bur third properties are sitting on the market a little bit longer, which not only means that you can negotiate, which is key to the bur, but it means that you can take a little bit longer to close, which I’ll explain it a little bit is an important element of the step-by-step guide I’m going to give you because I think the way you finance a bur right now really matters. And I actually have sort of a contrarian take about how you should finance burrs. I’ll get into that, but it requires that you can close at a slower pace, which I know is possible in today’s day and age. And this is just an example. These are just a couple of examples that you can invest in any kind of market, but you have to think about how you can use market conditions to your advantage because right now prices across the country are relatively flat.
I think that’s going to continue. I think they might even go down a little bit on a national basis in the next year or two. And so what I’m looking at is how can you take advantage of this because just like in the stock market, people don’t stop investing in the stock if the market’s going sideways or a little bit down, they just adjust their strategy and this is exactly what we’re doing with the slow burn. The last part of my thesis here never change. This is always my thesis on real estate investing is you got to do it for the long-term. You are in this for long-term wealth creation and the Brr as the name implies, it means you’re being a little bit more patient about a brr, but that doesn’t really matter because to me, real estate investing is a long-term game anyway, and I will take as much time as I need to lock up a great deal and the slow bird is a perfect example of that. So these are my baseline beliefs right now, and if you’re with me, which I’m hoping you are, then you ask what is the play? How do you take these market conditions and use them to your advantage? We’re going to get to that right after this break.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer sharing my strategy for 2025 rental property investing, which is using the slow brr strategy. Before I explained my thesis why I think this works, and now let’s talk about the playbook. How do you adjust the great fundamentals of burr to the market conditions I just talked about to benefit you and your portfolio? Number one, you find an on-market deal that is habitable and eligible for conventional debt. This is a big difference from the way a lot of people do a bur a way most people do. A bur is similar to flipping a house where you look for something that is unoccupied so that you can start your renovation immediately. And because of that, you traditionally have to use hard money, private money or other forms of high interest debt because what you’re going to do is try and renovate this really quickly, refinance as quickly as possible.
And so paying high interest debt is not as big of a deal, but when you’re doing slower burr like I am advocating for, you don’t want to get caught with that high interest debt. So you need to find something that is habitable and you can get a normal mortgage rate on. The difference in this is if you go out and get a normal mortgage rate right now, even for investors putting 25% down, you’re probably around 7%. If you’re getting hard money loan, you’re probably playing close to 12 or 13% and that’s going to make a huge difference in your returns over the lifetime of this deal. And so getting that conventional debt is absolutely critical for the slow burn. So that’s step one and we’ll talk about what to look for in your buy box in just a minute, but that’s the thing you need to remember.
This is an on-market habitable deal that can qualify for conventional debt. Second criteria you’re looking for is to find a place that can cashflow within three to six months. Ideally the way that I’ve been doing this is that you look for deals that are occupied and cashflow today. So I like to buy small multifamilies two to four units, and what I look for is a place that is going to be at least break even ideally a little bit better cashflow today. Or if I were buying a duplex, I would take one where it’s not cashflowing right away if one of the units is vacant or is going to be vacant very soon because what I’m thinking in that scenario is if one of the units becomes vacant and I can do my renovation of that unit soon and the new rents are going to get me above cashflow breakeven and to cashflow positive, I’m okay with that.
That’s why I said it needs to be able to cashflow within three to six months. And the reason I’m thinking this and doing this approach, same reason I specified an on-market conventional debt deal is because we’re in a weird market and my number one priority for any deal that I buy right now is to protect myself against downside risk. I of course want to make as much money as possible on any of those deals, but that is actually a secondary thing for me right now. First things first is how do I protect my principal and make sure even if things go really poorly in the macroeconomic environment, things that I can’t control, that I know that I’m okay, I can hold onto this property as long as I need and I’ll have flexibility in how I execute my business plan. So these two things go along with that idea of protecting myself.
So that’s what you need to do within a couple of months. You need at least let’s call it a 2% cash on cash return, but then you obviously need more upside than that. I just mentioned you got to protect against the downside, but then you also need to make sure that you’re earning a good return on this over the long run. And so for me that means at least an 8% cash on cash return after stabilization. If you haven’t heard this term stabilization, it just means the point at which you’ve taken a property that was a little bit rundown and needs a renovation and it is actually not just renovated but rented out at market rates. So you’ve basically taken something that wasn’t being used well and you’re using it really well. That’s the point of stabilization. And for me, when I do a slow brewer deal, I need at least an 8% cash on cash return once I’ve stabilized the property.
Now 8% is the minimum if it’s in a great neighborhood, if this is an awesome asset in a great location, I’ll take 8%. To be honest, I probably take 7% also, but I’d try to find 8%. If the property is not in a great neighborhood and is maybe going to have a little bit more risk, I would target a 10 to 12% cash on cash return. Now those might seem like random numbers and everyone’s going to make up these numbers for themselves, but the way I think about it is that the stock market, which is another place that I could choose to put my money, I put the vast majority of my wealth into real estate, but I could put in the stock market but the stock market to returns eight or 9% per year and that is really passive. I’m doing nothing for that and so I want my cashflow alone to get close to that number of eight or 9%.
And then the other benefits of real estate investing like appreciation, the tax benefits, the amortization, all of that stuff is taking me from an 8% cash on cash return to a total return that’s somewhere between 12 or ideally a closer to 15%. And to me, that’s what makes real estate worth it. If I can get a 12 to 15% return that is so much better than the stock market that it is worth my time and energy, and I know that might not sound a lot the difference between eight or nine to 12 to 15%, do yourself a favor. Go look at a compound interest calculator, put in $10,000 and see what compounding at 8% over 30 years does and look at what compounding 12% for 30 years does. You’ll be absolutely shocked and you will see why the difference between an 8% return and a 12% return can actually be truly life-changing over the course of an investing career.
So I want that 8% cash on cash return minimum, and I am targeting my stabilization period to be between 18 and 24 months. So just as a reminder, I needed to be breaking even in cashflow within six months, but if it’s not fully stabilized for a year after that or 18 months after that, I’m okay. Those are the deadlines I set for myself. Six months, it’s got to be break even ideally a little bit better, and by two years it has to be beating the stock market by a considerable margin to be worth my time. So then next you execute the value add, and again, like I said before, ideally you want to do it quickly, but the thing about the slow and buying something that’s occupied is that could take a little bit longer because if you have a duplex and your tenant chooses to move out after a year, then you can’t do the renovation for a year.
And personally, I’m okay with that precisely because I am looking for something that is already cash flowing. I am not going to skip over a good deal because I can’t do that renovation in the first three months. If it’s a great asset and it’s going to be a good long-term addition to my portfolio, I’ll wait. I’ll wait 12 months, I’ll wait 18 months, I’ll wait 24 months to do that deal. And I know for some people that’s not appealing because that means you can’t recycle your capital as quickly, but for me, this is the best risk adjusted return that I can earn in this kind of market. It might mean that I don’t buy another deal for a couple months using that capital, but that’s okay to me because it means that I’m protecting myself and getting a rock solid deal with great risk adjusted returns.
Then once you’ve stabilized it, you have the option to refi, and I know that most people listening to this are going to choose to refi. I do in most situations as well, but I just want to call out that you don’t have to. You can just keep the equity in your deal if it’s a great deal or you want to preserve your cashflow because if you refinance, then that means you are taking out additional debt on top of what your original mortgage was and hopefully you’re still cash flowing. If not, you should not be refinancing, but your mortgage payments are going to go up in most cases unless rates really drop, but in most cases your mortgage rates are going to go up and so you’re basically have a trade off, you have a decision to make. Do I want to take out more capital to recycle and use in future deals or do I value higher cashflow?
And what you decide is totally up to you. I think eventually most people do want to recapture some of that equity to put into another deal, but my recommendation with the slow bur is only do that when you’re ready to do your next deal. Don’t just go and refinance in three months or six months or nine months just because you can do it when you have an idea of how you’re going to use that money because if you just leave the money into your first deal and not refinance, your cashflow is going to be better. And so the only reason, at least in my mind, the only reason to reduce your cashflow is because you have another great deal lined up. And so I recommend just refinancing when it’s opportunistic, when it’s a good time for you to do that. And all these things together are why I call it slow, not because it’s lazy or anything like that, it’s just opportunistic and it’s sequenced.
You can capture value in stages. You don’t need to get it all upfront because yes, ideally you do want it all upfront, but when you try and cram all this value creation into just a couple of months, more things can go wrong. It’s like anything in investing, there is more opportunity. Yeah, you have a higher potential for return, but more things can go wrong, your appraisal might not come back, you might not be on budget. You have a lot of time pressure to execute your renovation really, really quickly. And if you’re a new investor, that can be really intimidating. The slow basically takes that time pressure away and says, you got two years to maximize the value out of this property. And to me, that’s a great timeline for pretty much anyone regardless of how much experience you have to maximize the value of any asset, and that’s why I like this strategy so much. Alright, so that’s the high level overview of the slow brr. We got to take a quick break, but when we come back I’m going to give you some real numbers and real examples of how you can do this and then walk you through the step-by-step guide to pulling this thing off. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer talking about my favorite rental property strategy right now, which is the slow, before I gave you a high level overview of the things you should be thinking about if you’re going to do the slow brr, but let’s talk some real world numbers of how you can actually go make this work. I just threw this into a BiggerPockets calculator and ran some of the numbers and came up with I think is a pretty realistic deal for you to target that people can actually go and do. So I like small multifamily, so let’s talk about doing a duplex. You’re going to target in this example, target a duplex for $320,000 and I know if you’re in California, that might not make sense, but most of the country you can find a duplex. Again, we’re finding something that’s not been renovated.
You can find a duplex for $320,000. That means you’re putting $80,000 down and I’m expecting to put about 20 grand into each units. So buying for 3 20 80 down and I’m putting all in $40,000, meaning my total cost that I’m putting into this deal is my 80 K down payment, 40 k for rehab, which comes out to $120,000 because this is an investor loan. That means that I can take out a loan for 75% of the value of the property, meaning I’m putting 25% down if it’s owner occupied, you could do 20% down, but I’m going to just assume you’re not doing that and you’re putting 25% down, which means you’re getting a loan for $240,000. And let’s just assume in this scenario, I’ve seen deals like this in the Midwest that pre-hab rents will be about $3,000 per month. If you run the numbers on that kind of deal and you are using a 7% interest rate like you’re getting today, you’re accounting for vacancies, capital expenditures, turnover costs, insurance taxes, you’re doing the whole thing, right?
You’re really doing the underwriting. Those numbers will actually come close to break even and probably will do a little bit better than that. So if you can target a deal like that, again, these are available in the Midwest. You can find some of these in western New York in parts of the Mid-Atlantic, in parts of the southeast. You can absolutely find these kinds of deals. You might be able to find these kinds of deals in expensive markets, but you’re going to have obviously a higher acquisition price, but you’ll also have higher rents. But this is sort of just the flavor of deal that you should be looking at. So if you bought this deal and wound up never renovating it, it would still probably be a pretty good deal because it’s a cash flowing rental property that you have ownership over. But if you do the slow burn, let’s just imagine that this takes us 18 months in which time we renovate the two units that we have here and we actually drive the property value from three $20,000 up to $420,000.
And that’s not just pie in the sky made up math. We invested $40,000 into that renovation and if we are doing this right, you are going to be earning well more than that $40,000 investment in terms of equity. And in this example, I’m assuming you earned a hundred thousand dollars in equity by investing that 40,000. Now that renovation didn’t just drive up the value of the property, it also drove up your rents from what was about $3,000 per month to I’m going to estimate 3,900. I actually grant these numbers on a real deal and tried to figure out what this was and in my experience just doing my own investing, taking a property that’s not really renovated and renovating it, really nice 30% jump in rents is not unheard of. That is pretty common from what is going to be the lower end of the rent spectrum in this neighborhood to probably what I would hope would be mid to higher end of the spectrum in rents, 30% growth, definitely not unattainable.
So that’s amazing. You’ve driven up value in terms of the property value but also rents. And now once you have that appraisal, you can go and try and refinance. Now because this property is now worth $420,000, you got to keep 25% equity in it, right? You’re basically getting a new mortgage and that 25% equity you’re keeping in the deal is going to be your down payment for that new loan. That means you can borrow $315,000, which is awesome. You have a loan that you have to pay off, which was 2 35, and that means that after closing costs, you’re going to walk between 65 and $75,000 in equity that you’re pulling out of this property. And even after that refinance, you are getting rents at 8% cash on cash return. That is an unbelievable value proposition, right? You are getting an excellent cash flowing property and although you are not taking out a hundred percent of your equity, remember we put $120,000 into this, you’re getting more than half of that back out, which means that you are more than half to getting your next deal, and that is awesome.
I know it’s not the same thing as getting a hundred percent out, but if you’re starting with limited capital, the ability to reuse half of it is phenomenal. There is no other strategy, there is no other asset class that you can do this in, and being able to recycle 60, 70% of your capital is amazing. I’m tired of people saying that that is not good enough for your deal. I would take this deal all day. I am taking this deal, I’m doing deals just like this and I’m doing it because you’re getting a cash flowing asset. You are building equity, you are recycling some of your capital, so you can go do another one. This is a rinse and repeat kind of deal that everyone should be considering. Alright, so now that we’ve talked about those numbers, I do want to go through this step-by-step guide and I covered some of this earlier, so we’ll go through some of this quickly, but there are a couple of things that I omitted that I think are important for us to talk about.
Step number one that you need to figure out is define a buy box that you can repeatedly source. So figure out what market you’re going to be investing in and also figure out what level of renovation that you are willing to take on. For me, I prefer things that are, I would call cosmetic plus. I won’t only do cosmetic, but since I do a lot of these deals out of state, I don’t want to be moving a lot of walls. I don’t want to be doing foundations. I ideally don’t really want to be doing systems like electrical and plumbing. I’ll do floors, I’ll do roofs, I’ll do windows, that kind of thing, but I don’t want to really be taking out the walls. So that’s personally the buy box that I feel like I can do confidently at a distance that might be a little bit different for you, but that is the first thing I would do is figure out where that buy box is.
The second thing I would do is figure out where you’re going to get that deal flow. And to me, especially if you’re investing in the Midwest or honestly in most markets in the country right now, we are in a buyer’s market, which means that more deals are going to come on the market. So I would go out. Step two would be go out, find a real estate agent who can help find the specific types of deals that you’re looking for. You’re going to give them your price point, how much you want to spend, and you’re going to give them the condition of the property that we just talked about. What level of renovation are you looking for? And you’re probably going to need to talk to that real estate agent about what a RV you’re targeting a RV stands for after repair value. But basically you want to be able to say, I’m looking for duplexes that are $320,000 and after a stable them, they have to be worth north of $400,000.
That’s the kind of guidance that you should be giving to your real estate agent, and hopefully your real estate agent is able to find that in your market, and if not, hopefully they’ll be honest with you and tell you that’s not possible. And if they say that, adjust your strategy, adjust your numbers, or you can consider investing in a different market. So those are the things you need to do. Set up that buy box, and sure, you can target things like specific numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms. I do that, but that is less important to me in this birth strategy right now. I think figuring out how much you’re willing to pay, what condition you’re looking for, and what the A RV in your neighborhood is are the most important parts of your pie box. If you have other things you care about like having a ranch or you don’t like properties with crawlspaces or whatever, put that into your buy box as well.
But those are the first three criteria I would define. Then go find an agent who’s going to send you those deals consistently. Next thing to do, you can do this at the same time, but step three here is to figure out how you’re going to finance this. So what I would do personally is while you’re waiting for these deals to come in or you’re starting to analyze these deals, go out and talk to a mortgage broker or your bank or your local community, credit union, whoever you want to and get pre-approved or pre-qualified for your acquisition. This is one of the main differences between the slow bur and the fast bur a regular bur using hard money, these people can usually close on a loan in a week, two weeks, three weeks. Conventional mortgages take more time, and so you want to get a head start.
You want to go out and whether you’re working with Chase or Wells Fargo or Rocket Mortgage or whatever, start getting your paperwork together so that when you find a good deal, you’ll be able to execute on it quickly. Now, these loans, even if you do it right, it’s probably going to take 21, 30, 35 days to close. That’s okay because we’re in a buyer’ss market. Again, this is one of the reasons I like the slow bur in this market. It’s because it allows you to do these types of things because sellers frankly aren’t going to have as many buyers competing for this property, and that gives you the ability to negotiate for these longer closes. This is something I talked about earlier. You will in almost all cases be able to negotiate a 30 day, 45 day close, whereas a couple of years ago, people were closing for two weeks in cash.
This is what I mean by taking what the market is giving you and taking advantage of these conditions. So go get your financing in order. Now, one thing we haven’t talked about yet is that if you get a conventional mortgage, you probably won’t be able to finance the renovation using that conventional mortgage unless you do a 2 0 3 K loan, but that’s the other thing you need to figure out here, and is one of the challenges of the slow burr is how do you finance that renovation? Now, there are different ways to do it. You can look for a 2 0 3 K loan, which is a conventional mortgage that wraps your renovation costs into that mortgage. That’s one good way to consider it. The other way to do it is to pay cash. So if you have the money to be able to do that, you can pay cash.
Another way to do it is if you own your primary residence, you could take out a home equity line of credit and use that to pay for the financing. That’s probably going to be cheaper than a hard money loan. So that is an advantageous thing to do, and when you go and refinance the deal later, you just pay down that line of credit or you could partner with someone to take on that renovation cost, or you can also just take out a hard money loan for the renovation costs, not the acquisition costs that would allow you to get that six, 7% loan on the acquisition. And then for the 40,000, using our example, you take out a hard money loan, but that’s a much smaller loan, and so that high interest debt is on a lower principle, and that’s going to make your deal pencil out a lot better.
Those are just some ideas, but whatever you do, think about how you’re going to finance the renovation. That is probably the biggest hurdle I think people come across in the slow burner is that you’re not going to be able to wrap this loan altogether, or you might not want to because then you’d be giving up that benefit of the conventional mortgage. The other thing I should mention about paying for the renovation is if you have a positive savings rate, if you are working a full-time job and you are saving more money than you were earning every month, you could also just save up money and make these renovations over time. That’s the beautiful thing about this little burry is you only need to do it in 1824 months, and so you can save up maybe a thousand bucks a month, 2000 bucks a month. I don’t know what your financial situation is, but if you’re in that kind of situation and you need 10 grand per unit, maybe you can save up that money between renovating two units and that’s part of your strategy.
But whatever you choose, just figure out the way that you intend to pay for that financing. If none of these work for you, then the slow bear probably won’t work, but I’m confident that most people can figure out a way to finance this if they have the money for the down payment. Next up, when you find a deal that you like, negotiate hard on that deal right now because right now, sellers, they need you. They need investors to come out of the woodwork and buy deals. I just saw something today that the percentage of homeowners that are first time homeowners is the lowest it’s been in history, and that’s bad for society in all sorts of ways, but what it means is that increasingly most of the transaction volume in the housing market is coming from investors, and so that means that sellers of these homes that are distressed want investors to come in and renovate and beautify and make these properties nicer.
They are going to be willing to work with you because they need you. Use that leverage and negotiate as much as you can. This is going to really allow you to build more equity. It’s going to allow you to take out more when you go to refinance, and it’s just going to generally give you better numbers on your return. Once you’ve done that, go through the transaction process. Not going to get into detail of that today, but just go through escrow, figure out how to close next step, do your rehab opportunistically. The first thing I would do when I close is figure out the scope of work that you want to do. You can even do this before you close, but figure out the scope of work that you want to do for your renovation, even if you’re not going to do that right away.
So go walk the property, figure out in every unit what you need to do. Does it need floors? Does it need a bathroom? Does it need a kitchen? Does it need paint? Whatever it is, get that list together so that when your tenants move out on their own accord, you are ready to strike right away and start that renovation as quickly as possible. The last thing you want is a tenant tells you, Hey, I’m moving out in 30 days. And you have to say, oh, shoot. Now I need to figure out the scope. I need to go find a contractor. And then what should be a one month vacancy or a two month vacancy turns into a three or four month vacancy? You don’t want that. You want to have your plan ready to go. Ideally, you have your contractor ready to go, and that way when the opportunity arises is to do that value add project, you are ready to go, and you could do it as quickly as possible.
You get your rents up as quickly as possible, and you minimize vacancies at all costs. And that’s really it. Once you’ve stabilized these properties and you’ve made them nice, you lease them up at market rents. And once you’ve done that to all the units in the building, you can go and decide if you want to refinance or wait if you don’t have a good use of the money that you’re going to pull out of that deal. And honestly, that’s it. I know it sounds pretty simple, but I like simple investing. That is kind of my whole thing, is I for strategies that are repeatable and easy and that the average person could do, because that’s me. I just am an average person. I’ve been buying rental properties for a long time, but I don’t have any secrets. I’m not trying to do time intensive, super complicated things.
This kind of deal can get you financial freedom. It has worked well for me, and so I’m going to keep doing this as long as market conditions allow me to do it. So that is my guide to the slow bur. Just as a reminder, the slow bur is a way that you can acquire a cashflowing rental property. You can build equity, and you can recycle a considerable amount of your capital, all using low risk on market deals. To me, that’s an incredible value proposition. That’s a great investment that you can make in today’s market or really in any market. So I hope you all consider using a strategy like this because I think it’s a great thing for whether you’re starting your investing career or you’ve done a bunch of deals. I think this can work for almost anyone. If you have any questions about how to pull this off, please don’t hesitate to ask me. You can find me on BiggerPockets or on Instagram where I’m at the data deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you next time.