I Was Burned Out in Healthcare, Now I Have 10 Rentals (Just 3 Years Later!)

Ashley:
In today’s market, finding cashflow takes extra effort and creativity. Finding the right market can make all the difference. And today’s guests cracked this code by looking far beyond her backyard, discovering these overlooked cities where $55,000 can buy a property that generates $1,100 a month in rent. These numbers simply don’t exist in coastal markets.

Tony:
Lindsay Bartos has built a 10 property portfolio with consistent cashflow through hard work and some pretty good networking. Her journey from covid Nurse to successful real estate investor is a blueprint for anyone looking to leverage real estate as an escape hatch from a stressful career.

Ashley:
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. And I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:
And I’m Tony j Robinson. And Lindsey, we want to give you a big warm welcome to the Real Estate Rookie podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

Lindsay:
No, thank you. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been listening to your podcast for almost three years and this is surreal for me to be able to share my story here today.

Ashley:
Yes, Lindsay, and we’ve heard you have a pretty inspiring backstory starting when you were 16. Can you share that experience?

Lindsay:
Yes. So I’m Peruvian. I come from Lima, Peru. I immigrated to the US in 2006. A little background before that, both of my grandparents were indigenous Peruvians who lived in rural areas of Peru. Neither of my grandmothers know how to read or write. They did not have access to education or medical care. My parents didn’t graduate high school. They both had to work very early on. So growing up I was never homeless, but I experienced a lot of financial hardship. I remember times where my parents were unemployed during my childhood and we had to eat out of soup kitchens because it was less expensive than buying your own food. Growing up, college was never an expectation for me. It was simply too expensive, but I did grow up with more things than my parents had. Everything changed, and 2006, when my dad won a US Diversity visa, that gave us the opportunity to immigrate here to the United States legally in 2006.

Lindsay:
When I arrived, I was 16 years old and I didn’t know any English, neither did my parents, many immigrant kids. I became my parents translator and navigator in this new world. My parents at the time, they were under fifties, I had to fill up job applications for them, DMB ID applications. I had to explain to them credit scores, and at the same time, I was learning the language because this was the land of opportunities. My parents wanted me to become a doctor and me going to college, I realized becoming a doctor, I had to have a lot of money or take out a lot of loans. So what I instead decided to do is become a nurse and I went to community college. I had to work all throughout college, and ever since I received my first paycheck, I learned that I had to save for everything. I grew up so poor with so much scarcity, I did not want to go back. At age 26, I learned about fire financial independence, retire early, and I started getting involved in investing by maxing out my 4 0 1 Ks, learning about IRAs and contributing to brokerage accounts. This was my introduction to building any kind of wealth.

Ashley:
Well, Lindsey, I can’t imagine at 16 having to move to a different country, learn a whole new language, but also educate yourself on different financial aspects like you mentioned the credit scores, things like that. But it’s just amazing your story and congratulations to your success that you have had thus far and everything that you have achieved. Why don’t you tell us about that very first deal once you found out about real estate investing?

Lindsay:
Yeah, so in 2019, I bought my first family home in Los Angeles for myself, and I did that by liquidating my 401k.

Ashley:
That seems very opposite of what I would expect you to do.

Lindsay:
Yeah, not very fire friendly for sure, but that was the American dream, right? To be able to own your own home. And in Los Angeles, everything is very expensive, and for me to afford a monthly payment, I had to put a little bit more down, 10%, and I didn’t know anything about FHAs or I didn’t know anything about down assistant programs. I hadn’t found BiggerPockets, so the Real Estate Rookie podcast yet to guide me. But what I did was I started renting out rooms to traveling nurses because I was a nurse, I had the hookup per se, so I didn’t know I was house hacking before house hacking was a thing. I was able to refinance my home in 2020 to allow interest rate, which almost created more room for my mortgage to be paid out by me. However, in 2020, the pandemic changed everything for me.

Lindsay:
I was a nurse, I became a Covid nurse right away. I was working on a major hospital in Los Angeles, and it became one of the darkest times in my life watching multiple people die in my hands every day led to severe depression through therapy and medication. It helped me that I needed to search for a new path. I looked up on Google, how do you make money? And real estate came up. I was already sort of landlording, so I thought I needed to learn more about real estate investing. I looked at my backyard in LA and decided cannot afford anything here in the state

Tony:
I want to get into because I know you end up going out of state to kind of build your portfolio and definitely want to get into that, but even before, I think the first deal that you did, Lindsay, with house hacking that primary residence in one of the most expensive markets in LA, you say, yeah, you had to liquidate your 401k, but you got it an asset not only that you got to live in, but one that was producing money for you as well. Just really quickly for, because you said you bought in 2019, what was the purchase price on that deal?

Lindsay:
600 K.

Tony:
Okay. It was pretty good for SoCal in 2019. And you said you put 10% down. How much were you able to earn from renting out the spare bedrooms?

Lindsay:
I was making about anywhere between 500 to a thousand dollars a month at different times.

Tony:
And then what was your mortgage? Just like ballpark.

Lindsay:
Before I refinanced, my mortgage was 35 or three 600,

Tony:
And after the refi

Lindsay:
It went all the way down to 3000.

Tony:
You’ve got real estate in Southern California, 3000 bucks a month, you’re making upwards of a thousand dollars per month by renting out extra rooms. So you’re living in one of the highest costs of living areas in the planet for 2000 bucks a month. So even if it meant sacrificing a little bit, it still feels like you kind of came out on top, right? By having this place that you could live in that was paying you to live there. So love that. So you get that deal first and it kind of sparks this desire. You say you can’t go in your own backyard. What steps do you take next Lindsay, to decide where you actually want to go? There’s 30 whatever, 30,000 cities in the United States. What did you do to say, okay, this is where I think I want to actually invest.

Lindsay:
I’m really good at learning. I bought books, I look up podcasts, I learn about BiggerPockets real estate rug. I learn about economic market indicators. I went to YouTube University and I was looking for small people like me starting to invest out of state. And at the time I found two creators, millennial, Mike and Masky Finance. I was looking in the Chicago area since I was a nurse, I had the opportunity to take a contract down there, but it was 2022, and I knew when I was looking at Chicago, the moratoriums evictions were still happening and a lot of people were not paying rent. So me as a single person investing just for myself with no backup, I need a landlord friendly state. So I found these two small creators investing in Indiana, and they were investing in Gary, Indiana, which they were completely under channels.

Lindsay:
They were completely transparent, showing you down payments, closing costs, interest rates, and most importantly, cashflow at over 10%. My mind was blown. I could not find cashflow like that anywhere else. I reached out to both of them, I emailed them, I asked them all kinds of questions, and they gave me their time for free at new. Those two investors were investing out of state successfully, and so I was excited, but I still was very scared of Gary Deana because if you make a quick Google search, you can find an article called Most Miserable Cities in America by Business Insider. So for my first deal out of state, I chose the nearby neighborhood. So if you know anything about downtown Chicago, between downtown Chicago and Gary, there’s a market called Hammond, and it’s just 20 minutes from downtown Chicago. So since I was going to be there, I thought it was going to be a good idea. So in 2022, I bought my first out-of-state property for $135,000. I put 20% down, and I rented it out for $1,400 a month. The seller paid the closing cost. My PITI was $880 a month, and it rented out the week after I closed.

Ashley:
And I’m assuming the tenant paid most of the other expenses such as the utilities and lawn care being a single family home.

Lindsay:
Yes, I did not pay any utilities out of,

Ashley:
Yeah, so you were cashflowing over $500 a month at that point. That’s awesome.

Lindsay:
That was my first experience. So what I did was I took it as a proof of concept. I let it run. Thus for one year, I did not touch any of the gains, any of the profits, and for one year I had no problems. So I proved I did not die by investing out of state. And so the following year I was still talking to these creators, Michael Merck, and I was more confident. So I said, okay, maybe I can look up a Gary again. Now I feel a little bit more season.

Tony:
Lindsay, I just want to comment. I think that’s the power of that first deal is giving you that confidence, right? You use the phrase proof of concept, and I think that’s what most rookies should be focused on with that first deal is the proof of concept and not necessarily it’s this home run deal that just drastically changed your life. Now for you actually it was a home run deal. You actually did really well on it financially as well, but I think the bigger takeaway was that it gave you the confidence to go out and do your second deal in your third deal and all those subsequent deals. So we want to get into what happened after that first property in the Chicago area. But we’re going to take a quick break and when we get back we’ll hear what Lindsay did next and her journey of building her portfolio. Alright guys, we are back with Lindsay. Lindsay, proof of concept first deal goes incredibly well, but you’re not done right. You still have this desire to keep adding to your portfolio. So once you see the success of that first deal again, you said you were cash flow about 500 bucks per month, which is phenomenal. What does that second deal look like for you?

Lindsay:
Yeah, so my second property was a two bedroom, one bat that I purchased for $55,000 and I was able to rent it out for 1100 a month to a section eight voucher holder. And so when I started seeing that kind of cashflow, I realized this is why the other investors are investing here. This is not a no brainer, I’m just going to keep buying here.

Ashley:
So is that what you continued to do was to invest in that same market?

Lindsay:
Yeah, so after the second deal, I ran out of money and I needed to find another way of funding my deals out of state. So what I did was getting a HELOC out of my primary residence to be able to continue to fund other bigger deals.

Ashley:
So did you use that HELOC to make the purchase and then once you purchase the property you’d refinance and pay your HELOC back?

Lindsay:
Yeah, so that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m investing in births and major rehabs and I purchased cash, I rehabbed them, and then I pay back my HELOC once I cash out refi.

Ashley:
Now that is something we definitely have to touch on is doing a rehab now on these projects, especially out of state. So what does this process look like for you? How are you finding contractors? How are you managing the rehab on these projects?

Lindsay:
Since I had the connection of the two other people that were already investing, they were doing similar deals like me. So when they linked me up to their property manager, the property manager had three major contractors that they use. And then normally what I do is I pit them against each other to getting estimates. Thankfully in my market when I tried to get contractors out on my own, they always come up with higher estimates than the property manager’s contractors. So it’s been more of a seamless trajectory for me because they had the contacts already in place.

Ashley:
That’s really interesting. And it could be because they’re getting so much business from this property manager that they’re able to offer a discount or something like that. But what a way to point out how your property manager, your real estate agent, can be resources to find contractors in your area. Now for these properties, how are you finding them? Were they on the MLS? Did you use a real estate agent? Were they off market?

Lindsay:
For the first three, I found them on the MLS property. Number three needed extensive rehab. So that was my first bur for properties. After that, I’ve been on wholesalers, I purchased homes through wholesalers. I also purchased home through seller financing via my network, which is one of the most amazing tools that I have, is that my agent is an investor friendly agent and he has directed me into a big network of other investors. We have a WhatsApp group chat that we all talk to about 27 investors that are investing in the same area, and we just share stories and strategies and any tips that we can to help each other out.

Tony:
So Lindsay, the hardest part for a lot of rookies is finding these deals, and you said some MLS, but you said wholesalers have started giving you deals as well. What’s the secret to finding wholesalers who feed you off market deals?

Lindsay:
I don’t think there’s a major secret, but if you do join any groups on Facebook or you find people, I don’t know about you guys, but I started getting text messages from random people asking me, do you own this property? Do you own that property? And instead of being like, no, leave me alone, I would be like, oh no, let me get you on your mailing list. I’m a buyer. I’m trying to get on my next deal. So that was one way. And then Facebook marketplace, if you do see on your market, there’s people that list from their owners or wholesalers that lease properties there to all get them on their mailing list as well and joined Facebook groups that are investing in your area, even other investors created maybe.

Tony:
I love the idea of leveraging the local Facebook groups to find wholesalers. I think that’s where I found quite a few of the wholesalers that we work with here locally as well. But you also mentioned networking and seller financing. I guess let’s separate those two and tackle ’em one by one on the seller financing piece, was this from one of the deals that was wholesale to you or was it a deal you found yourself and how do you even kind of open up those negotiations to see if seller financing is an option?

Lindsay:
Seller financing has been a goal of mine since last year since I learned about it because the idea that you can get a house without an interest rate attached to it, it’s kind of crazy. So I was talking to my agent and asking him to play seller finance offers on the MLS. So for properties that were there for more than 120 days or anything like that, I was submitting seller financing offers. So he already knew I wanted my next deal to be a creative deal. And so from his local network of investors, he learned that one of the investors that has been in my market for a long wanted to offload their property portfolio. They connected us. So my agent connected me to another investor that was willing to sell B asset financing, and that’s how I negotiated getting actually three houses from him.

Ashley:
So with this seller financing piece, what would be your advice to a rookie investor that maybe hasn’t even done their first deal, or maybe they’re looking, trying to do seller finance too? What are three actionable things they should be doing when they’re looking at properties to actually see if a seller is interested in doing seller financing?

Lindsay:
First, I would say I was very intimidated too by a seller finance deal because I thought it was this kind of wild, wild west area in which anything can happen. Educating yourself what a seller finance deal would be, number one, if you look at your normal, if you ever purchase a home and then you get all the documents at the end of closing table, they’re like 300 pages. You look at the mortgage note from that lender, from that bank that give you that loan, it’s like only three or four pages. That mortgage note that you see, it’s basically what your seller finance agreement is going to look like. There’s going to be a note, there’s going to be a seller, there’s going to be a buyer, there’s going to be an interest rate, there’s going to be a down payment amortization period, and a monthly payment, and that’s going to be the rules that are set up, for example, late payments or anything other that you guys agree on.

Lindsay:
That’s basically what the seller finance agreement looks like. So you can call any title company and if you feel like a scare, you can ask them for what does a seller finance deal look like? They’ll send you a normal contract that is empty, that has no specific details around it, but just normalizing that because it’s just another document. Another note, another payment structure. Number two would be telling everybody that you’re needing, you’re wanting to do a creative finance deal because majority of the people that I found that do creative financing is other investors. So if somebody that already knows how to sell properties or how to buy properties, they probably have heard about seller finance. Another tip I could say would be just getting in rooms with other investors, like networking your way into who else is pouring money into your market, because I think that’s been the one thing that I came into referrals from people that are already investing in there successfully. So if you talk to more people, more will know about you and will learn more about anything around you. So just getting in groups that are investing in your market and getting on the face of them so they can tell you about, Hey, so-and-so selling or so and so, it’s moving out of the state, and then they can connect you both.

Ashley:
Yeah, Lindsay, you bring up networking and I think that’s a really key piece to not only finding deals, but funding deals. Also, I’ve probably, a large majority of my portfolio has been deals acquired through word of mouth, as in this agent knew that I buy this type of property, reached out to me before the property even went out of market, a friend of a friend who wanted to sell these properties and connected me to buy the off market deal. I think that is such a huge advantage, especially in your market. But we have the BiggerPockets conference coming up in Las Vegas this year, in October, and even just not working with investors across the country can really give you ideas of ways to fund and finance deals in your market too. The seller financing piece, I had no idea what that was. Then I started getting engaged in the BiggerPockets forums and I was like, oh my God, wow, you can do that. And that year I bought somebody’s nine unit portfolio using seller financing because of just being able to pick other people’s brains. And yo also, once you get into some of these rooms, like at the BiggerPockets conference, you actually start to realize, you know more than you thought as a rookie investor, and you can answer people’s questions just from consuming the podcast, but you also learn so much. So hopefully a lot of you guys will be able to join me. And Tony, you can go to biggerpockets.com/conference.

Tony:
Lindsay, I just want to set the stage too, because you’ve obviously grown a lot in your real estate journey since you started, but I want to set the stage for the rookie. So just give us a quick snapshot. What does your overall portfolio and just ballpark cashflow numbers look like today?

Lindsay:
Yes. So right now I have 10 properties. Six of them are fully rented. I’m bringing in about 2,400 in cashflow from the six. By June, I should have all 10 rented, and I will be bringing about 4,500 a month.

Speaker 4:
That is amazing. Congratulations.

Lindsay:
Thank you.

Ashley:
So Lindsay, are you still working as a nurse right now?

Lindsay:
Not currently. I became a nurse practitioner, so I work in a different setting of nursing.

Ashley:
My sister’s actually going right now to school. She has her white coat ceremony in two days. So that’s exciting for you? Yeah.

Lindsay:
Oh, awesome.

Ashley:
I’ve seen how stressed she has been studying and it does not look like an easy licensing to get,

Lindsay:
And she’s not going to stop. She’s have to learn for the rest of her life too.

Ashley:
So in the beginning of the episode, you did talk about how you had originally been on that fire path. How have your goals changed and pivoted since you’ve purchased your rental properties?

Lindsay:
Initially, I wanted to get out of nursing and I thought real estate was going to be the answer. Since then, it is provided a lot more options for me. So with the cashflow, not only can I stop, not stop, but decrease my hours of working. I can also look at different things like moving to a lower cost of living city, for example, and that would accelerate my way out of a W2 job per se, but also just giving me a lot of options. I could be a traveling nomad, leaving in Mexico and just getting money from my real estate portfolio. That’s something that could be doable, and it’s just the sky is the limit really.

Tony:
Well, we’ve got to take one final break and we’ll be right back with Lindsay after this, and Ricky’s while we’re gone. If you’re not yet, make sure you are subscribed to the Real Estate Rookie YouTube channel. You can find us at realestate Rookie. We just crossed over 100,000 subs. So thank you to all of you who have already, but again, if you’re not, make sure you subscribe. We’ll be right back after this. Alright guys, welcome back. We’re here with Lindsay again. Now, Lindsay, again, you just told us before the break that by the time you stabilize these last couple of properties, you’ll be at 10 units cash flowing 4,500 bucks per month, which is absolutely amazing. But we also know it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies to get you to that point and you had some kind of scary moment. So there was a fire that I heard about it at one of your properties. So can you share that story and how you handled that setback?

Lindsay:
Yeah, it was actually my first birth. Come think about it. It’s my third house that I knew I was purchasing to put some value add into it. So I purchased the home for $35,000 and I estimated renovations to be somewhere between 30 to $40,000 and it ended up being $33,000. So all in, I was at 68. And so I contacted my lender. I proceeded to start the process of cashing out re five and two days before I was supposed to have the appraisal done, my property manager calls me on the phone and tells me there’s been, we have an emergency, there’s a fire in the house, firefighters are there, I’ll call you back with more details. And I was just like, what? What’s going on a fire? Oh my God. Okay. Anyways, fire was put out. It turned out to be a faulty kitchen lighting in the kitchen, but nobody was hurt, nobody was in the house.

Lindsay:
It was not rented yet. I was just refinancing, refinancing out in the majority of the damage. Actually, it was a quite small fire. It was from the water hose that the firefighters used all the water damage and blowing out the door to get into the house since it was not rented at the time. So like I said, it was two days before my appraisal was supposed to happen. So I called my lender, I told they were going to drop me, that they were not going to cash out refi of the house. Now there’s a fire. Now the rehab that had happened, it’s all destroyed. He said, oh, okay, let’s just wait. Let’s see what you can turn over, how you can repair the house, and we will put a pause on the appraisal and then just call me back when everything is done. So immediately I got into the phone with contractors trying to fix up the house again. It was the damage turned out to be all in at $11,000. So that was renovation number two.

Ashley:
So did you have to pay all of that upfront and then the insurance reimbursed you for that?

Lindsay:
In this particular, I did not use the insurance because at that time last year, I thought that I was needing to continue to get insurance, and during that time that insurance was really hard to get for everybody. So I thought if I had a claim that it was going to lower my possibility of getting insurance later for my future houses. So I decided to take on the risk upon myself, so I rehabbed it out of my own pocket. So with the second renovation, I was all in at $79,000. Appraisal came back out, the house appraised higher than I thought I was going to appraise for the appraised for $150,000.

Ashley:
Oh my God. Wow.

Lindsay:
And I was able to get all my money out of the deal and my PITI was $810 and cash flowing $340 from that house.

Speaker 4:
That’s amazing.

Ashley:
Oh, congratulations. That’s awesome.

Lindsay:
But it was not fun.

Ashley:
Oh, I just can’t imagine what you were thinking when you get that phone call. I had an incident a couple weeks ago where I get a text that there’s a fire on this street and it’s a small street where I have a six unit. Then I am getting a call from my mom saying she saw on Facebook there’s a fire on this street, which my five unit is on. They’re in completely different towns. I am scouring the internet, I’m looking at the police blogger Facebook pages trying to, I’m zooming in on these photos people are posting of where these fires are trying to pinpoint. And it was so weird. The same exact day, at the same exact time across the street from two of my properties and down two houses were house fires. That exact same thing was really, really weird. But it was just like you have no control over the situation and especially when your property manager says there’s a fire, we’ll call you back when we know more, having to sit and wait and you really can’t take action on doing anything until everything has taken place.

Lindsay:
And thank God there was nobody on the property. That’s immediately a relief out of my back, just like there was nobody there. Yes, it was a house. Yes, I could have lost money, but nobody actually was hurt. And that was like

Tony:
Everyone walked away. Safe is always important. And even for you, Lindsay, the fact that with a somewhat traumatic thing to happen pretty early in your investing journey, it didn’t derail you or discourage you from moving forward. You just kind of took this as like, Hey, this is part of being a real estate investor. And luckily it worked out. You were still able to kind of get all your cash back. Everyone was safe, everything worked out. But I think there are some folks who would see that and be like, see, this is why you should never invest in real estate. But I’m just happy that you took a slightly different approach and obviously you’re still looking to scale and you’ve had some amazing success already. But I guess looking ahead, Lindsay, what exactly are your goals? How big do you plan to get your portfolio? Are you looking at any other strategies? What’s next for Lindsay?

Lindsay:
Gary is great for cashflow, but I still think that there needs to be a balance. Just like when you invest in the stock market and you try to diversify, I am looking at different strategies to bring cashflow as well as appreciation. So what I’m doing right now in my home in la, I am building an A DU in the back and I’m looking to do that midterm rental. Since I have experience of renting out to traveling nurses, I think it will be a great addition to my portfolio and also bring that cashflow that I want.

Ashley:
Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your story and your real estate investing journey. Where can people reach out to you and find out more information?

Lindsay:
Yeah, so I have a G YouTube channel since I started in real estate investing through other smaller creators that were very transparent with their numbers. I do share my numbers and everything that I gone through in real estate investing out of state. I am at Lynn, Dustin investing, LIN, Dustin Investing. And I’m also an Instagram and TikTok now.

Ashley:
Well, Lindsay, thank you again so much. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you on the next episode of Real Estate Rick.