Dave:
The general mood in the real estate investing industry this year seems to be that there’s not really a lot of good deals and things are slow and not as good as they used to be, but at least for me in my portfolio, I’ve had some surprisingly good deals in 2024 and I was curious if other people were having this experience. So I called my friends Kathy Fettke, Henry Washington and James Dainard, and turns out they all had some surprisingly good deals as well. Today we’re walking you through what’s working and what we’re going to continue doing in the coming years. Hey everyone, it’s Dave. Welcome to On the Market. Kathy, it sounds like you woke up to another surprise today. An unfortunate one. I’m sorry to hear it, but it sounds like you had to evacuate your home.

Kathy:
Yeah, if you’re watching this on YouTube, then I look like a robber. It’s one of those moments where you hear sirens on your road and you have to get up and go, what should I take with me? So I grabbed a few things in the dark because there’s no electricity and there’s no wifi, and this is what I grabbed anyway, it’s life in California. Right? Just another day.

Henry:
So you grabbed a hat in podcast equipment. Of course. Of course. I

Kathy:
Grabbed my computer. My microphone is always in

Dave:
My backpack.

Kathy:
That’s

James:
In your emergency evacuation kit.

Dave:
Wow. My bug out bag looks a little bit different than yours, Kathy, sorry, BiggerPockets. I don’t keep a microphone in mind. Not to make light of the situation though. I’m sorry to hear that, Kathy, that’s a really scary situation for you and your neighbors in Malibu. Hopefully that fire gets resolved quickly.

Kathy:
Yeah,

Dave:
James was 20, 24 a year surprise just for you.

James:
Yeah, 2024 was definitely a year of surprise. It was funny. I was talking to my accountant yesterday and it was one of the best flipping years we ever had.

Dave:
Wow.

James:
It’s like in the top two to three most profitable flip years we’ve ever had. I was not expecting that.

Dave:
That’s unbelievable. That’s a very good surprise to have, James. Hopefully we’ll hear more about that in the course of this episode. Henry, tell us about a deal that you’re doing. What is one of the best happy surprises that came from your portfolio this year?

Henry:
Yeah, so I have a recent deal. We just sold it last week as a matter of fact, and this year we’ve been trying to keep it simple because of the market conditions and we bought a lot of properties, but we ended up flipping most of them. So this is falling into that flip category. It’s one we purchased for about $145,000. What the plan was to put about $45,000 into the renovation, and that’s pretty close to what we spent. I think we went just over around $50,000 on the renovation and we underwrote it at a repair value of 265,000. So pretty conservative base hit deal, but it turns out that this base hit turned into an inside the park home run. So there were good surprises and bad surprises along the way. One of the bad surprises, we’ll start there, was I made such a rookie mistake with this deal, like rookie flipper mistake.
I bought the property, we did the entire renovation, staged the property, took listing photos, got it on the market. It was looking good, got it under contract, and then my agent walks the house and he’s like, Hey dude, how do you turn on the air conditioning? I’m like, the thermostat? He was like, no, there’s no air conditioning. Well, there’s air conditioning. They had vents and duct work. We had to buy all new vents. I’m like, there’s air conditioning. There’s no condenser at this house. I walked to this house every week, didn’t even notice there was no condenser. So it had heat but no air. We’re under contract. The buyer’s like, well, what do we do now? So I had to start getting bids to add air conditioning to this property after we already had it under contract. So rookie mistake cost me about, well, it ended up only cost me about five grand, but we had bids as high as $13,000. So

Dave:
Is AC just required in Arkansas?

Henry:
Yeah, dude, it’s hot here. We get Texas heat and we get Minnesota cold. It’s stupid here. We get all of it,

Kathy:
But you don’t get fires.

Henry:
We don’t get fires. We get tornadoes.

Kathy:
Okay.

Dave:
Okay. Wait, I have one question about this. You said you already had a buyer under contract. Isn’t it on them that they didn’t know that there was air conditioning? Were you obligated to add AC or did you just do it?

Henry:
I was not obligated, but I did have to risk them backing out after finding out, and also I just feel like it was my responsibility to do it, so I was going to do it anyway.
Okay. So we ended up putting the HVAC in, so that cost us a little bit more money. But here’s the good news. This is an older house and I thought for sure it was going to sit on the market a little longer. Things are moving slower if the properties don’t conform to what everybody wants, and this is an older house, so smaller bedrooms, a little bit of a weird layout and I just was like, nah, it’s probably going to sit, so let’s price it aggressively. And we went under contract in just two days at 290,000. Wow. That’s a win, bro. We went from a $40,000 ish net profit up to like a 70, $75,000 net profit and it appraised. It appraised for what there was. We went with a pretty aggressive listing style, so the comps all said that we should list at about two 80 to 2 85 and we underwrote it at 2 65 and I want to capitalize on the buyers that are out there.
There’s fewer buyers and so you want to make sure every buyer that was going to see a house in that neighborhood, I wanted to make sure they saw my house too, and if I would’ve priced it like everybody else, then I wouldn’t guarantee they’d come see my house. But if I priced it below everybody else and I had better finishes, well that pretty much almost guarantees that they’re going to come and look at mine because why wouldn’t they look at mine that’s priced less than the competition that has a nicer finish. So at worked in our favor, we got so, I mean we probably had 30 some odd showings in just a couple of days. It was crazy.

James:
Goodness. Wow. So Henry, what was your competition price at because we’ve been doing the opposite a little bit where we’ve been going out heavier trying to negotiate back.

Henry:
Competition was priced between 2 75 and two 90. There were about five houses within a one mile radius that were all priced in that price range with similar square footage,

James:
But yours was shinier,

Henry:
But mine was

James:
Shinier. It’s that shine that gets the buyer in the door.

Henry:
So much so that one of the listings. So my sister-in-law is dating a realtor and he had one of the listings around the corner and when we went on the market, his buyer called him throwing a fit that they’re never going to sell their house if this is the competition that’s out there. So I knew I did good, hey, but it’s gone now. It’s gone now. We closed. We were able to, like I said, turn to 40 K profit into about a $70,000 net profit and I mean that’s a great net profit for a fairly cosmetic flip in what people are saying is a rough market, so I’m super happy with that one.

Dave:
Sounds like we’re recording this December 10th. You sold this a couple of days ago. You probably went to market early December. Late November. Yeah,

Henry:
Exactly, exactly. Late November.

Dave:
Do you think if you had done this in October, it would’ve sold for the same amount?

Henry:
Yes, I do. The market’s been pretty steady here. My concern was not getting it done in time and having to list it now right before Christmas, so we’re in early December, almost mid-December now, so that I think might’ve been a little slow. I’ve got five flips about to hit the market and I’m debating whether we just put ’em on the market or we wait until after Christmas.

Dave:
Yeah, I don’t know. What do you do about

James:
That? You drop it on for five days, you tease it. If you don’t get a hit, you cancel. Then you let the brokers reach out to you over Christmas. That’s what we like doing. We like just giving a little teaser, but don’t let the days rack drop it out for three to five days, show it, pull it.

Dave:
That’s how James wants to spend his Christmas is taking calls from brokers.

Henry:
Yes, he does. Are you kidding me? That sounds like exactly what he wants to do. The

Dave:
Best kind Christmas present under James’ trees are just signed contracts. He just unwraps for his whole

Henry:
Family. But the lesson on this one was to not be overly aggressive with the list price and try to go after every dollar on the list. People are going to pay what the house is worth based on the comps pretty much regardless of what you listed at, but they’re going to be more enticed to look at your property. If it’s priced lower, it’s better to get the eyeballs and hopefully get that price up. Even if they made offers at 2 65, I can still counter hire. I don’t have to take those offers. So for us it just seemed like with limited buyers to list lower and try to get them to bid the price up versus to list at the tippy top of the market and hope you get that right buyer.

Dave:
Do you think because of what happened during the pandemic where there was just so much competition, buyers and agents have gotten maybe a little bit smarter or at least more comfortable with bidding over asking price and trying to figure out the actual value of the property, looking at comps rather than just bidding based on list price?

Henry:
I think the answer to that is yes, because as the market’s gotten tougher, the agents who weren’t sophisticated enough to figure that out have been getting weeded out because it’s harder now. It’s a harder business, and so the more sophisticated agents are figuring out ways to help their clients either get their properties sold because we listed at this price point because my agent came to me and said, I want to try this strategy instead of us listing for what I think we could really list for to try to maximize this. So a much more sophisticated agent comes and brings strategies that can help you maximize either your sale or help you to buy properties at the right price.

James:
I feel like the buyers are leading the brokers quite a bit right now, at least in our market where the buyers are really dictating the terms and the brokers are really just writing it up and passing along the message because it feels like everything’s a negotiation at this point and there’s no logic behind it. They throw out the number and we see if we get to where we need to be or they miss the house.

Dave:
It’s so interesting. It feels like, at least in my limited experience, Henry and James tell me more, but the spread between the list price and what is actually paid is higher than I feel like it’s been in the past in both directions. I see a lot of times where just like the listing price is really off from what it actually winds up selling for in both positive and negative,

Henry:
I still think we’ve got some outliers from 20 21, 20 22 who want to shoot for the moon and get the most that they can get, and so they’re just listed way too high. We have tons of houses on our market that have been sitting past 60 days and it’s not like they’re bad homes, it’s just that they’re not realistically priced and we do get properties like the one we just did that come on the market and end up selling for a lot more. It’s just a more sophisticated listing agent that understands how to get the most money.

Dave:
So that’s why you’re saying price drops are higher than they were in the past, but at the same time you just priced one and sold it for 10% over asking price. You have it going in both directions. Absolutely. It just shows you have to really do your own work and your own comps to figure out what the actual value of this property is.

Henry:
Of our last six flips listed, there was only one that we had to do a price drop on and we only did one price drop.

Dave:
That’s pretty good. Alright, time for a quick word from our sponsors, but when we come back, how did Kathy end up with an extra a hundred thousand dollars in tax write-offs and what’s the deal that netted James so much profit. It actually broke his calculator. Stay tuned. Hey everyone, welcome back to On the Market. Alright, well let’s move on to our next surprise of the year. Kathy, what was your portfolio surprise? Sounds like there’s some other surprises going on, but let’s just keep to your portfolio for this one.

Kathy:
Well, I want to say there would’ve been a property I would’ve been really excited about, but we’ve had such an opposite experience from how you introduced the show. As you probably know, we have a company that helps investors find properties nationwide and we have been so busy, so busy that we took a group on tour to San Antonio to this neighborhood that I really wanted to buy one of the properties and I told the guy when I called, they were all gone. They sold out so I didn’t get the deal that I wanted and so we’ve kind of had a different experience. We’ve been super busy, but the one in my personal portfolio that did work out is not for everybody for sure. I’m calling it fancy and fun
And you have to look at your circumstances in life and figure out your strategy and when I started many years ago, we were buying cashflow properties and Ohio and Detroit and kind of all over the country and some of those properties have performed better than others and I’m kind of at a stage at life, I think you guys know I turned 60 this year. It’s a different stage. So it’s like do we really want all these properties spread out or maybe something that we can use and enjoy? So we sold some of the lower performing properties. They weren’t really seeing appreciation and the cashflow was just okay and we took that and we bought a lot in Park City for $350,000. We got a construction loan on that, that’s a construction to perm, so it was a 1.5 million construction loan where you only pay on the money that’s being used.
So for the time that the house was being billed, it really wasn’t costing us very much and then it automatically converted into a permanent loan that was completed, I think it was May or June of this year. We furnished it, put it on the rental market, put it in place, and it’s renting really well and covering the cost, but more exciting is the incredible bonus depreciation. We just hired a cost segregation company to go in and do the cost savings so you could get the bonus depreciation and it was massive. For a new property of this size, you get to count the furnishings. This is sort of that short-term rental, I don’t want to call it loophole, but if you’re having a year where you need some good tax breaks, people are buying short-term rentals for this purpose and I didn’t realize, wow, it’s a lot of money that we’re going to be saving on taxes because of this.
Now unfortunately, the part that didn’t go as well as this was supposed to be completed in 2023, but there were delays as there almost always are in construction, so it didn’t get completed until 2024. We couldn’t put it in service until 2024, which means we don’t get as good the bonus depreciation as we would’ve last year. Last year we would’ve been able to take 80% of the deductions. This year we get 60%, unless somehow that changes with the new administration, but still with that set it’s like a hundred thousand dollars that we get to write off.

Dave:
Wow, that’s unbelievable. A hundred thousand dollars to write off

Kathy:
That’s

Dave:
Going to save you serious money. When you think about your return on this, Kathy, do you add that tax savings back into your ROI?

Kathy:
Well this, I’m calling a legacy property because it’s in Park City. I don’t know if I’ll ever sell it. The kids will probably inherit it. What I didn’t say is that we’re all in around 2 million on this and it’s appraising for about 2.8, so we would probably refi because again with new construction it takes a while to finish it. So what you thought it was going to be worth? I thought it was going to be about 2.3 prices have gone up, so it’s like 2.8 is a just a couple houses down. Wow. Very similar. So there’s a lot of equity we could refi again and get all our money back out if and when we ever see rates come down because right now we’re at like six and a quarter percent on it, but no, we just, I’m at that phase of life where I want more properties I can use. We’re going to spend Christmas there, we’re going to have family memories there, but it’s also going to pay for itself because when we’re not using it, we’re going to rent it out. So it’s a little bit different. Again, for my stage of life, something to think about for a future strategy plan for people who maybe are accumulating a lot of properties but in the future might not want to have all those properties to manage. They might want just a few really quality properties.

Dave:
I want to have a place I can use it right now. I don’t want to wait for it. That sounds awesome.

Kathy:
Again, if you had a big year where you sold a business or you sold a lot of properties, you have a huge income tax. Looking at the short-term rental opportunity is something to look into, especially with the new administration where people are thinking that the bonus depreciation may increase again.

Dave:
Yeah, it sounds like it will be. So it’s definitely something people should keep an eye on.

Kathy:
Yeah,

James:
I got to say this whole short-term rental depreciation tax savings, if bonus depreciation goes up, I’m going to start short-term renting. I need to be coached on it, but I’m doing it because the write-offs are real. I mean picking up a hundred grand and you picked up nearly 800 grand in equity and you get to ski

Kathy:
And we get to have a cool family vacation.

Dave:
Amazing. What a good deal. That’s awesome. All right, so there is enough juice for James. Kathy, you have urged James’s stamp of approval. Yeah, James approval means the world. James, let’s talk about your surprise. What was your deal of the year?

James:
So my deal of the year was Grandma’s Gold Mine.

Dave:
Oh,

James:
I

Dave:
Like the title of this.

James:
We bought a house, a very very neighborhood of Seattle. It’s in the Blue Ridge neighborhood and it’s just north of Ballard, which is a great part of our city and it’s a really cool community. It’s got tennis courts, it’s got some swimming and then the lots are a little bit bigger in the neighborhood, very restrictive HOA. But what that does is it produces a very family friendly neighborhood in the metro market and then not that it has sweeping views throughout this neighborhood. And so we bought this property on market grandma’s house and it’s because it was in no Man’s land.

Dave:
Wait, why is it called Grandma’s house?

James:
It was like a grandma’s time capsule, right? You walked in and everything. I buy some pretty gnarly houses. This one was very, very clean. I almost would’ve laid on the carpet. Wow.

Kathy:
Glad you didn’t.

James:
Very rare, but it was just a very clean house but very original. It was built in the 1930s. It was a two bed, two bath, 1,980 square foot finished house, but had potential to be finished and add an additional a thousand square feet to where we could bring the square footage up to 31 90. We bought this property for $1.1 million on market. It was listed at 900 ish. We paid 200 over list and we came in aggressive to secure it because I think we put up like $250,000 earnest money and released the seller on Mutual just to get the deal. The reason I really liked this property was because it just had all the things and when we were looking at the beginning of the year, we really looked at what our buy box is. What do we want to be flipping? And we wanted to be flipping good product that everybody wants because when the market’s a little cooler, a little bit flatter, there’s more inventory days are racking up.
If you put out that really good product in the sweet spot of the market, it always sells. So we knew we were going to have a ViewHouse 3000 square feet very sought after neighborhood and we pulled the trigger on it. So originally we wanted it to be just a quicker deal and we could kind of get in and out of this thing a lot quicker and simpler and move less things around. So we were going to do a full renovation, but we were going to spend 175,000 and then target a price of 1.8 and try to be in and out of this deal in five to six months. The unexpected thing on this house is the HOA is very restrictive and they’re very pleasant to work with and slow.

Dave:
That’s a very nice way to say it. I was like, is he being sarcastic? He’s restrictive ad pleasant to work with. That doesn’t seem right.

James:
Yeah, it was all the things. At the end of the day, they’re just trying to keep their neighborhood cohesive and in looking good, but it was very slow and so what happened is right out the gate we started seeing there’s no way we’re hitting our five month timeline because the amount of HOA approval for everything that we were doing was going to drag us out at least 60, 90 days throughout the project with every check-in that we had to do and they wanted to do some walks together and because we knew it was slowing down, I decided to pivot the plan because the deal worked really well getting in and out five and six months on a quick cash on cash, but if it was going to take nine to 10 months, it was going to look a lot worse. The interest cost was going to rack up and so about 60 days in, I switched the plan, decided to spend a hundred thousand dollars more on the renovation and go for it. We upgraded the specs, upgraded the floor plans, and then we ended up listing the property and it just closed three weeks ago, listed it for 2.1 million because we ended up

Kathy:
Spending

James:
A lot more going for more of the custom renovation and we got multiple offers, all cash closed in 10 days,

Henry:
All cash.

James:
Amazing. My god. Cash, 2.2 million. We ended up selling it for

Dave:
Seattle’s got some stupid money.

James:
Okay, 1.1 we put in 2 75, sold it for 2.2 all in 10 months.

Dave:
Yeah. That’s awesome.

James:
Alright,

Henry:
What’s the net though? What’s the net profit on that one After everything

James:
It’s a rip. I can get my, oh, I think I have my p and l in my email right now. You guys want to know the true, true no fluff number?

Henry:
Yeah,

Kathy:
Of

James:
Course. Yeah, we do

Henry:
Net net not the Instagram number. We want the true net number.

James:
Okay, there we go. Net profit on this deal. That’s so big. My calculator broke.

Dave:
Doesn’t have enough numbers. Doesn’t have enough numbers.

James:
Here we go. It’s not my final p and l, but there is about $575,000 in profit. My god.

Henry:
On a single family home. That’s

James:
Nuts. What On a single family home. And we also ended up putting no money in this deal. I funded the deal, we were about out of pocket, about 200 and thousand and change and then I ended up selling off the note and raising the capital with a private investor for 10%. Investor made a healthy return 10%. We ended up backfilling the money, so we made 555,000 and changed. No money in the deal.

Dave:
Unbelievable. Dude. You just made money come out of 50, just you made 600 grand just appear. That’s

James:
Unbelievable. My takeaway of this is buy good locations. When we were looking at buying this property originally, I mean it was not a home run and we weren’t competing against investors, we were competing against end users on the property. No other investor was writing this deal. But what I learned is in a flat market when buyers are picking and there’s less buyers, if you have that piece of gold, that novelty product, people will pay you for it. And location, location, location. Don’t buy stuff with weird objections because originally we were looking at making, which was still going to be great, it’s like 210 grand in a six month period and we went with it because it had the right product, right location, right price point and then it turned into a ripper and that’s what we saw consistently through 2024.

Kathy:
I mean that’s kind of the theme, right? With Henry’s legacy property that it was located Well mine is located well.

Henry:
Location. Location man.

Dave:
Yeah, well I’ve learned an important lesson, which is that when we do shows revealing profits to make James go last because it’s not fair to have to follow James in these kinds of these types of episodes.

James:
You know what though? They all I was, when Henry’s going his numbers, it’s like, oh man, this is some good numbers. They are right. At the end of the day, the cash on cash returns are very, very similar. Henry’s deal. I was looking at that. He put in 38 grand for a buyer. If you’re putting 20% down, they’re making 75. That’s a hundred percent return in how many days?

Henry:
Yeah, four months.

James:
Four months. So that deal is actually twice as profitable on a cash cash return is my deal.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s pretty good. That’s true.

James:
And so I was listening to those Henry numbers. I was like, man, I like those numbers. It’s all about that cash on cash return and just depending on the market end, sometimes things cost more and that’s just what you see differently.

Dave:
Alright, time for one final break, but when we come back I’m going to share not one, but two really valuable surprises about how I grew my own portfolio in 2024. And I think there are lessons that you can really apply to your investing career. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show. Let’s jump back in. Alright, well let’s move on to our last surprises, which are mine and I’m going to cheat. I have two because my biggest surprise of the year you all were actually a part of because back in February, March, I don’t know, we did a flip off show where James and Henry did a competition and I basically on a whim was like, I’m going to bet on James. And James called me and was like, do you actually want to invest in this deal? And I’m going to be honest, I did next to no due diligence. James sent me some stuff, I looked it over for maybe an hour, far less than I would normally do and I was like, I just believe James, so I’m going to do the bet. And it turns out I made 120% return in three months, three and a half months. So I think I got a 350 400% annualized return. I made James this trophy, if you’re watching this on YouTube and to say thank you for this giant surprise,

James:
It was five 90%.

Dave:
Yeah, for James it was a 590% return annualized return. So that is quite an impressive return. That was my biggest surprise.

Henry:
I lost this bet by the hair of my 10 attention. I had a 550% cash on cash return.

Dave:
Yeah, yours was actually incredible. So both of you incredibly good, but I don’t flip houses so I don’t get those types of returns very frequently. So that was a very, very nice surprise for me during this year. My actual surprise, just like one that I added to my normal portfolio, which is more of a long-term buy and hold, definitely not as big numbers, but when you calculate the cash on cash return and the return that I got on this deal, it actually did quite well. So I am calling this the overpaid for an on-market deal because people aren’t looking at on-market deals right now. I bought this one, it was listed in the Midwest. It was a duplex in a really good neighborhood listed for $215,000 and I had never bought a deal in this city before the whole metro area and I just kept doing comps and I know the agent in this area and we were doing comps and doing comps and it all kept coming out that this was literally listed 50% under asking price or under market value.
Excuse me. The closest comp I could find was three 10. This was at two 15. So I actually wound up overpaying. So what people would say overpaying for this, I bid 20% over asking, bought it for 2 55 and actually was comping it up the other day and I think it’s actually close to three 40 right now. Conservatively. There’s one I’m curious to see. There’s one on the market right across the street listed at three 80 right now. That’s a pretty good comp. We’ll see if it sells for that. But I just thought this was a great surprise because one, it was a new city for me, but two people keep talking about how there’s nothing good on market, but if you actually are diligent and don’t just look at list price and actually figure out what the value of these properties are, similar to what Henry was saying, this one is going to turn out as a really good win for me.
Additionally, I had a bad surprise, which was during the transition between myself and the previous owner. A tenant seemed fed up for some reason and just left the property, which created some vacancy, which was disappointing, but I actually just wound up then renovating that unit and was able to increase rents by 30%. So it actually worked out really well. So there was just a whole bunch of fortuitous things here. I’ve still actually never seen the property, so I’m actually going next week to go check it out, but hopefully I’ll be delightfully surprised when I see this thing in person.

Henry:
What do you think was the situation that caused that deal to be such a good deal?

Dave:
So there’s two things. One is this was buying in the Midwest over New Year’s, over Christmas. I mean the agent must have just missed this to be honest. My
Agent was speaking to the seller’s agent and he said she was a lot older, maybe wasn’t keeping up with the times and how much something was worth the seller actually similar to me at the time, lived out of the country and kind of just was ready to get this done with and I came in with a cash offer, but it was really, they just mised the price and I think that maybe there wasn’t a lot of comps on the market, but I was able to comp it out. So it just seems like sometimes the agents aren’t good, sellers aren’t good. We all look at real estate all the time and assume people are as knowledgeable as we are. But there are a lot of times where it creates these inefficiencies in the market that you being knowledgeable can take advantage of.

Kathy:
Oh, I love me a lazy listing agent. They’re the best, not doing their research, don’t know how to use a computer. The homeowner just used a friend who hadn’t probably sold real estate in years, whatever it is, those are the best.

Henry:
The listing agent was still using those real estate magazines. You used to forget by the newspaper to run their comps.

Dave:
But the thing is, it’s so funny because I wonder if it is just one of these fast growing neighborhoods and maybe people are just, if sticker shock, they don’t think anyone would ever buy a duplex for $250,000, which compared to everywhere else is still really cheap. But I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. I think there was something like nine or 10 cash offers on this.

Kathy:
Oh my goodness.

Dave:
Yeah, so people noticed, the buyers knew this was underpriced, but thankfully I was able to beat ’em out with some of my terms and it seems like it’s going to be still a good one even though I had to bid really aggressively in a bad season in a down market.

James:
David, what term do you think got you that deal though? Everyone always thinks that price, is that the winner of deals? Oh well you got to pay more. You got to pay more. No terms. Terms are just as important as price. What do you think that little extra term that you threw in? I know with my deal it was putting up big earnest money and throwing it at the seller so they knew we were for real.

Dave:
I didn’t do that. I can’t remember what the earnest money was off the top of my head, but I did a 14 day cash close. So that’s what people tend to really like. And what’s worked for me on buy and hold is basically the yes or no inspection where you’re just saying, I’m not going to nickel and dime you. I’m going to get an inspection and then I’m going to tell you if I’m going to buy the property or not, but I’m not going to ask you for additional money. And a bunch of stuff came up the inspection, there was some knob and tube electrical that I knew I was going to have to replace, but it still seemed like a good enough deal to me. And I am not going to give up this property over two or three grand, whatever it’s going to cost to fix those little things.

Henry:
That’s a win man. It’s just the diligence of make deals like this. You land when you’re consistently looking. If you’re just onesie twosie looking every once in a blue moon, you’re not going to find these needles in the haystack. It’s the time and effort that you have to put in to consistent analysis and offers. I mean, I love it.

Dave:
I mean this is a pretty small market. I analyze literally every duplex that hits the market, every single one. And it takes some time, but it allows you to see the outliers and when you see what the average is and then you see one that’s much better, you can be aggressive about it.

Kathy:
The importance of knowing your market.

James:
And Dave, you dug into this market for a while. I remember when you were talking like, I’m going to go get some more rental properties. You did the data deli research that just shows the power of research in really forecasting and how that works.

Dave:
And I should mention, I did go and walked around and I knew the neighborhood, I knew the block even though I haven’t seen this specific property in person, I have been to the market in person and I targeted very specific areas of the city and this just fell into the right area. Alright, well those are good surprises. I am excited to see what happens next year. I feel like it’s going to be of many more surprises. It seems like every year of the last few and we have been something that I wasn’t expecting comes up and I’m sure 2025 will be the same. But thank you all three of you for coming and sharing some of your best deals from 2024. Congrats on such a good successful year for all of you.

Henry:
Thank you,

Dave:
Thank you. Alright, and thank you all so much for listening. Hopefully you had some good surprises in your real estate portfolio or in your life this year. We want to thank you all as we’re winding down the year for listening to on the Market. We hope that this podcast has been super helpful to you. If it has, make sure to share it with a friend or give us a positive review. We always appreciate it. Thanks again and we’ll see you soon.