Robert Leonard  00:49

Let’s start with your journey into real estate. How’d you go from being a DJ to a real estate investor? Why’d you pick real estate?

Brian Orr  00:57

So yeah, it wasn’t as much of a direct line. I didn’t even necessarily go from one to the other because I actually still am DJing actively. But yeah, I’ve been DJing for a very long time now. I’ll date myself for your audience, I started in the mid-90s. In those years, I’ve had various jobs and careers simultaneous to my DJ career.

was a securities broker in the city before the crash. I was doing project management on furniture and carpentry installations, a bunch of different things. How I discovered real estate was I was actually living in Vegas, and I started dating a girl in Charlotte who is now my wife. I was staying at my mother’s house when I would be back in Charlotte, and basically, my mom was like an HGTV addict. I hang out with my mom on the weekends that I would come to visit Melissa, and I started getting into these flip shows that I thought were pretty cool. I tried doing one, and from that, I’ve just been hooked.

Robert Leonard  02:00

So what are you working on today?

Brian Orr  02:03

Right now, from a real estate perspective, I founded a company called Keaton Capital just about four months ago. We’re still in the really, really early stages of multifamily investing. I did single-family for about four years. I bought a fourplex last year in November of 2018, and in November of 2019, I bought a tenplex. I’m repositioning that currently. We just had about two months. And I’m shopping right now for bigger deals, just trying to really scale that multifamily portfolio.

Robert Leonard  02:33

What exactly are you doing with properties? What strategies are you implementing? Are they just buy-and-hold? Are you doing some renovations? What does that look like?

Brian Orr  02:41

The first deal that I did was a single-family. It was meant to be a flip. I bought it cash. I was driving around with my broker, learning about real estate, and this one just happened to pop up on MLS and we were a block away. I jumped on it, and said, “Let’s go!” We went over there and checked it out. It was completely gutted; not so much the infrastructure, but all the wiring, and HVAC was gone. It ended up being a VA foreclosure. So they took in highest and best, and we put in a cash offer that day, and within 24 hours, I had that property.

I learned on-the-job on that one. It was determined to be a flip, but that didn’t quite work out. We couldn’t get the sale price that we wanted, so we ended up renting it and holding it for three years. We did a refinance strategy, and sold it about three years later and made $25,000 more than we would have on the flip. Most of that was from market timing. It’s funny because until I got into multifamily, in all my single-family deals, I went in with one intention, and ended up executing or exiting in a completely different way than I intended.

As far as the multifamily goes, I’ve been buying Class C to Class B- value add type properties. As for my fourplex, I went in and didn’t do too much, but the rents were way low. I had it at a pretty good deal and just did some minor cosmetic renovation. There were some issues with the septic that I fixed, but nobody outside of us really knew that that happened. We got the rents up on that one. I could tell you the numbers if you want me to. The 10-unit was just another distressed property an owner just wanted to exit. He’s had it for about five years. My guess is his balloon was coming up. I don’t know, but he needed to get out of it. He hadn’t raised the rent in a while and it was mismanaged. It had a lot of CAPEX just to defer maintenance, but we got it. It was a really good deal. In the first unit that we turned in the last two months, the rent was $550, and we rented it at $700-750. But the massive increase was very, very little work in that one. There’s a lot more work to come to that unit.

Robert Leonard  04:42

Where are you doing all this?

Brian Orr  04:44

This is in North Carolina.

Robert Leonard  04:46

So it is all local to where you live?

Brian Orr  04:48

Yeah, for now. I live in Charlotte, but the single-family portfolio was just outside of Charlotte, and the fourplex and the tenplex are much wider. They’re a little bit more rural.

Robert Leonard  05:01

Let’s dive into that first flip, that parent rental. What happened to that? Why weren’t you able to flip it? You mentioned you couldn’t get the sale price, but where did the issue present itself? Was it in the calculations or did the market soften a little bit? What happened?

Brian Orr  05:17

Yeah, I can give the exact numbers on that. We bought it for like $42,000 cash, we put about $40,000 in renovations, so we were on $82,000 or something, and we priced it at $115,000. We put it on the market, but just weren’t getting bites. We weren’t getting bites at all. I don’t know. It was weird. I don’t know what it was, but so we just threw it on the rental market to see if we could get it for rent. Now, we were only in 80,000. The good news is we got it appraised, and the bank appraised at $115,000. That’s where we really came up with our list price, from the bank appraisal. So, when we couldn’t get a buyer we were tried to see if we could just refinance it.

I didn’t know anything about real estate. I didn’t know anything about the finances of real estate until I started doing it and discovered refi. The idea was we basically kept all of our equity in the property, and remove all the equity that we put into it. We cashed back out the full $85,000. Our mortgage was ~$400, and we’re renting it at $925. So we’re making $500 a month on this property. I figured, “That’s not a bad deal! Let’s do that! Let’s just keep doing that more and more.” I didn’t know that that was a thing, but I thought it was a pretty good strategy. They don’t teach it on an HGTV, but I wanted to try to do that. So we just held on to it, and two or three years later, the market was appreciating, and we ended up selling it for $139,000.

Robert Leonard  05:58

How many single-family properties did you purchase before you made the transition to the multifamily space?

Brian Orr  06:48

It was four. When I was here with Melissa, I had moved back to North Carolina from Vegas and that’s when I ended up doing this deal. But we were only here for about a year or so before we decided to move to New York. We were there for about two years and came back down again. My first purchase when we came back down was the fourplex. So, for about two years in that window, I didn’t invest in anything.

Robert Leonard  07:19

What made you want to make that transition from the single-family? It sounds like you’re having some success there, so why did you want to go from single-family to multifamily?

Brian Orr  07:27

Yeah, so we had a good bit of success. I’ll tell you about this wholesale deal when I didn’t even know what wholesaling was. It ended up being like a double close, but I’ll get into that in a minute. Really, it was just education. Once I did those first three or four deals, I started, well, not at the end of that, but in the process of that, I started really diving deep into real estate education. I realized, “There’s so much about this that I don’t know. Let me just learn and learn and learn.” So that’s what I did. I just really sought out education in every form, from books and podcasts; and I took courses I took like Udemy courses. I actually took a graduate certificate course at Cornell in commercial real estate. I just really dove all the way in, and the more that I researched, the more that economies of scale just made sense. I thought, “Wow! If I can do this with one roof, what more if I have four units under one roof, or 10, or 20, or 100? That seems like a much more logical way to go.” Soon, it just became about finding the path to execute that strategy.

Robert Leonard  08:28

What have you found to be the major differences operationally and tactically between not only purchasing single-family but also purchasing, renovating, and filling single-family compared to those multifamily properties?

Brian Orr  08:42

As far as purchasing the single-family, we’ll go back to my first flip on Hoover Street, it was all eggs in one basket. It was just all or nothing, and we sort of executed that strategy. I wouldn’t say necessarily out of panic, but sort of added necessity. It just became something that we didn’t plan for it to be.

There’s definitely a different model when you’re dealing with multifamily, but I think for me, personally, it’s really mostly about knowing and being better prepared to go into the deal, knowing exactly what I want to do with the deal and how I’m going to get out of the deal. That, you can get from experience and education, I think.

If you’re looking for a direct answer, filling the multifamily, for example, I bought this one. It had the 10-unit. It had nine tenants in there already. I was cash flowing before. The vacancy was no sweat off my back. I mean, yeah, it’s great to have more cash flow, but I was cash flowing. Without that tenant, I was able to take my time, plan out the strategy for the value add, execute it, and get the tenant in with the much larger rent increase. And now, I have that model built out for the other nine when they become vacant. I’m actually working on one right now that should be ready for February 1st, and then five more coming up for March 1st, so I feel like it’s less stressful. It’s less stressful because your risk is spread across so many other different people as opposed to having all eggs in one basket.

Robert Leonard  10:08

Now that you’ve done both single-family and multifamily, if you could go back and do it again, do you think you would jump straight into multifamily? The reason I asked that is that there are a lot of new investors listening to the show today, and I think a lot of them wonder, “Should I start in single-family? Should I go right to multifamily?” And so, for someone that’s thinking that to themselves, would you recommend that they go into multifamily directly or should they get their feet wet and maybe start with a single-family before that?

Brian Orr  10:29

From my experience, I don’t think single-family necessarily prepares you for multifamily. It really is two different animals. What single-family did was force me to get my education in real estate. I think just be prepared for whatever asset class you’re going to go into. Also, there’s no substitute for experience.

So, if I could do it again, if I knew then what I know now, yeah, I would go straight into multifamily. If I had the opportunity right now, I wouldn’t even buy the 35-unit that I’m looking at. I would just go right to a 150-unit. I just don’t have the scale nor opportunity right now to get the 150-unit, but I’m working towards it. I’ll have it probably by the end of the year. But, wow, man! That’s a tough question because I only know what I know, because of what I did through single-family and the way that it forced me to learn and the issues that I had with contractors and licenses and permits and all this stuff that I learned on the job. So I would never want to tell somebody where to start, but I definitely advise to be prepared and get as much education and experience as you can.

Robert Leonard  11:37

For me, personally, I like starting with single-family as your first property. I kind of laugh at myself when I say that because I always thought when I got started in real estate was, “I’ll never do a single family.” I always heard everybody that has been successful in real estate say,  go big, go big, go big. And so I always told myself, “I’ll never buy a single-family.” But I wasn’t able to find any good deals in the multifamily space. I wasn’t taking any action, so I decided to buy a single-family for my first rental. I’m so glad that I did that because I learned so many things, and it’s on such a smaller scale. If you go in and you buy multifamily, where you have four to six units, and you don’t know what you’re doing now, you don’t know what you’re doing for six different units. If it’s single-family, and everything goes as bad as it can, it’s only one unit, one family, one situation that you need to fix versus six.

And so, I personally like the single-family as a start. But I mean, I think there’s value in starting with multi-family as well.

Brian Orr  12:26

Yeah, isn’t it wild? There are just so many different schools of thought. I preface it with if you have the education and you can’t get the education without that experience. So yeah, if I had to give you an answer, I would say start with a smaller deal. How about that? Go for a smaller deal with less risk where you can learn and make mistakes without impacting too many people negatively if you screw it up, then go from there.

Robert Leonard  12:53

Yeah, I think a small deal is a good way to phrase it because it doesn’t necessarily have to be single-family but maybe a duplex triplex. Maybe even a fourplex. That’s still not massive, and that’s probably better than going right into 10- to 20-unit deals.

I thought I was well-educated before I got into it. I had read a lot of books, podcasts, I thought I had studied a lot, but that’s all theory. It’s so different when you actually get into practice. Real life is so different than what you read in the books, so you really need to do your first deal to make sure you understand it.

Brian Orr  13:22

Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Also, something else we didn’t touch on yet. We’re talking in this bubble of this ideal world, like, “If you’re starting today, where would you start?” But there are so many other things to consider with just, “Are you able to find that deal?” You mentioned you had trouble finding multifamily. So what’s your network look like? What’s your net worth look like? Do you have access to capital to buy a bigger deal? Does anybody else have trust and confidence in you to execute a bigger deal? Are you going to be able to get investors if you want to go that route? Is the bank going to lend you a $2 million property or whatever it is that you’re shooting for multifamily? So while you may want to start there, how you’re actually able to get there is a whole different story.

Robert Leonard  14:03

This whole dynamic between theoretical and what you actually put into practice reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Mike Tyson where he says, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” So if you think you know everything you’re going into the deal with, and then you get punched in the mouth, and something comes up that you didn’t read in the book, or here somewhere else, now you gotta figure it out.

So it’s definitely an interesting dynamic to think about when you’re just starting out.

Brian Orr  14:28

Yeah, and you know, here’s the thing, too: Action is first and foremost. You have to take action, right? You have to be doing something. You have to get in that first deal. Whatever it is, you’re only going to learn without going through it. I’m never going to know what a 50-unit deal is, like, until I do a 50-unit. I’m never going to know what a 200-unit deal is like until I do a 200-unit deal. No matter how many single-families I do, I’m still going to learn what a 200-unit is when I buy my first 200-unit. So, you’re never going to be endlessly prepared unless you go backward, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing that.

Robert Leonard  14:56

Yeah, I like to get into things, and I like to recommend people get into things, with as little risk as possible. And so on my first deal, the mortgage was like $300. So I said, “Worst case scenario: I can’t rent this, and everything goes sideways, I can cover $300 a month.” I like to recommend something like that when you get started, because you don’t want somebody to not only get put in the hole, but you also don’t want them to get sued. I believe that, no matter what, your first deal is not going to be a home run that makes you wealthy and able to retire. I think it’s better to just get started. Get excited about real estate, not get screwed over by your first deal, and not be interested in real estate anymore.

So when we talk about the different ways that new investors are getting started, or should get started with, what do you think the biggest thing is that holds them back from actually getting started?

Brian Orr  15:40

The biggest thing that holds people back from getting started? I mean, the easy answer is lack of action, right? Because if you don’t act, you’re never going to get started. So that’s kind of the default answer. But what actually holds people back I think is having fear; lack of resources; lack of network, people around you who can instill that confidence in you that have experienced that can share with you. It’s always better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than necessarily having to go through it on your own. So I think what holds people back is just not having the opportunity to do a deal, being afraid, overcommitting or thinking that if you do a real estate deal, that’s it and all of a sudden, you’re a real estate investor and can’t go back to your job ever again. “Well, I can’t invest in real estate because I have a job.” That doesn’t really make sense to me, but that’s one of the fears that people have. They think it’s like a full-on career change. So I would say those might be a few different things that hold people back.

Robert Leonard  16:45

It certainly can be a career change, but it doesn’t have to be. I personally work a full-time job. I have a full career, and then I invest in real estate on the side. I like my corporate job. I enjoy what I do, so I don’t have a need to leave and I commentate on wealth, so I do real estate on the side to build my passive income, and then I do my full-time job at the same time. So it’s definitely not mutually exclusive. You can do both things. But I think that’s a good point. That’s a fear that I think a lot of people have, but not a lot of people talk about, so that was good to bring up.

How can people overcome the general fear of getting into real estate? Not necessarily about it taking over your job, but just real estate in general? Because I agree that I think that is a big thing that holds people back. How can they overcome that?

Brian Orr  17:25

I’ve come across that a few different times with people, whether it at meetings or potential investors. The first thing I would say is, just because you invest in real estate doesn’t catapult you to this other level of whatever. You’re not changing your whole career just because you’re investing in real estate. It’s just a different asset. You’re in your 401-K; that doesn’t make you a securities broker. You can invest in real estate without leaving your nine-to-five, you shouldn’t leave your nine-to-five. I wouldn’t recommend it whether you’re making 20,000 or 200,000.

There has to be a very long road between the time that you buy your first property and decide that you’re not going to work anymore and that you’re just going to do that for a living. A lot of things have to go your way and fall into place in order for that to be your path.

I would say the only way to ever overcome fear, I think, is attacking it head-on, but also being prepared for it. For example, jumping out of a plane, I don’t know that I would ever do it right, but I certainly know that if I ever did do it, I would make sure that I was with somebody who knew what they were doing and that had a parachute. There are certain fundamentals that you want to make sure you’re prepared to take on any fear that you have. So take it on, don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear be something that holds you back, but be prepared to take on the fear. Don’t just go in blind.

Robert Leonard  18:43

Just because you’re fearful doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I think the best way to really overcome that fear is to get educated, understand what you’re doing, and then just do it and do it with as little risk as you can.

Brian Orr  18:53

And don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to partner. Don’t be afraid to look for a mentor. Don’t be afraid to try to find people who have done it before you. Especially what I’ve found in this world, in most cases, but especially in this world, people who have done deals want to tell you about their deals. People who have messed up, want to tell you about the way they messed up and the way that they’ve succeeded. There’s a wealth of information and there are people in your hometown or on the web or on a podcast or whatever who will probably come shop your deal or do a walkthrough and probably help you underwrite. Surround yourself with people who can support you and take the leap and then just go for it.

Robert Leonard  19:29

I couldn’t agree more. You mentioned mistakes. Let’s talk about those. What have been some of the mistakes that you’ve made both in real estate and in business that new real estate investors can learn from?

Brian Orr  19:41

I’ve failed a bunch of different times. Most of my failures, and the light has shined down on this since I just recently started blogging and I started actually talking about it. My failures come when I invest in something that I don’t know or something that I don’t have control over. So, in the securities market, I was a broker for a few years in New York. But when I thought that I could take on the stock market by myself and do my own trading for myself, and I failed. My brokerage account, it’s nothing to talk about. I’ve invested in different businesses. I’ve invested in hospitality businesses. I invested in things that I don’t know about, and I’ve failed.

So mistakes, for one, I feel like I keep falling back to the same answer, but not being educated. If you’re talking about actual mistakes, man, make sure that your contractors are licensed. Make sure that you have a solid team in place, which I didn’t have in the beginning. A real estate-specific attorney or real estate-specific accountant; have a lender that is on your side; small banks. I would go to bat for small banks any day of the week. I’ve had so much more success with local banks than I did with the big banks. It just keeps coming back to that same thing, like learning, learning, learning, studying, and putting it into practice. But man, there are a lot of mistakes.

Robert Leonard  21:05

I know you have written about your mistakes even in the stock market, as well as the restaurant venture you had in Spain. So how have all of these mistakes that you’ve made impacted how you invest in real estate?

Brian Orr  21:18

It really did just come down to finding a vehicle where I felt I had more control over the performance. With securities, you definitely don’t have that. You have none. You’re competition. You’re competing against guys that trade in milliseconds and do it 20 hours a day. With the restaurant, we had a bunch of different issues with the government in Spain, with local ordinances; different things that impacted us that we didn’t have control over. Now, in real estate, you don’t have control over everything, but you do have a lot of control. With making those mistakes, keep a fail forward kind of mentality. Learn from the mistakes, and don’t just let them be mistakes. Observe them. Take the lesson from the mistake and make sure that you don’t repeat that mistake, or one like it, going forward.

For example, the legal stuff in Spain before I started doing multifamily. I spent hours and hours and hours with multiple different attorneys in and around the Charlotte area to make sure that I had all my checks and balances in place, which I didn’t do when I invested overseas in Spain. So that’s a direct lesson that I learned from that, but I will never make that mistake again.

Robert Leonard  22:30

You’re a very busy guy. You must be because you have multiple businesses and a family. So, how can someone listening to the show who’s working a full-time job and wants to invest in real estate manage their time to be successful in both their work in their career and investing?

Brian Orr  22:44

I can tell you what I did. Get up early, earlier than normal, right? I have two kids. I get up before them so I can get some work done. If you’re working a nine-to-five, as I said earlier, don’t stress that. Look, whatever your job is, whether you’re a doctor or if you’re working at McDonald’s, first things first. You have to save and you have to be smart with your money.

Financial literacy is above all else, just to have the opportunity to invest. But let’s say you’ve put yourself in a position where you can invest. You have to look at it and say, “How many hours is it going to take me to actually flip a house?” And you’re not going to know it. You’re not going to know it until you get into it. But talk to as many people as you can build out a map of the business. If you’re getting ready to flip a house, is it gonna be 10 hours a week? Am I doing this work myself? Am I outsourcing these contractors? Who’s going to be there to make sure that the appliances are delivered and or the flooring or whatever? My advice for that would be to get up early and work hard, and stay up late and work hard. But don’t dive off the cliff and think that you’re going to spend all your time like learning and executing real estate deals, and then sacrifice your family or sacrifice your career that’s actually paying because a real estate is not gonna pay you for quite some time. Even if you have a successful first deal, when you really calculate the hours that went into it, you probably didn’t do that well, and it’s not going to pay itself off for a long time.

So, my best piece of advice would be educate, educate, and then find people who are already doing it. Get in on their deals, where you don’t have such an active role, and maybe financially, or maybe spend just a couple of hours that you can volunteer on the weekends or at night and see if you can help someone in whatever your skillset is, and apply that to their deal. It might not benefit you tremendously financially right off the bat, but it’s going to really help you build your internal portfolio, the things that you need your skillset, and your experience. Certainly don’t alienate your nine-to-five and certainly don’t alienate your family.

Robert Leonard  24:37

Why do you think a new investor should consider real estate as the asset class to go into?

Brian Orr  24:44

One, the opportunities to learn are abundant. Like I mentioned, with meetups and with podcasts, there’s just so much opportunity to learn. There are a lot of opportunities to enter. There are so many different ways that you can get into real estate. I can’t speak on things like notes or necessarily wholesaling, but there are so many different ways to enter into real estate and you can invest in real estate. I personally buy a 5-unit or a 10-unit apartment building, and then I personally flip, get tenants, manage them, and fix their toilets. That’s not the way it works for everyone. But when you have ownership, you have control. and I just feel like real estate is really that vehicle where you can do so much, you can leverage.

When I was buying stocks, if I had $10 and I buy $10 worth of Coca Cola stock, I get $10 worth of Coca Cola stock. If I take that $10 to a bank and say, “Hey, can I use this $10 and then you give me the other $90 and we can buy $100 house together?” Assuming the deal makes sense, the bank’s gonna lend you that $90 to buy that $100 property or whatever. Let’s just scale it to something reasonable. With $10,000, you only get $10,000 worth of stock. But also, with $10,000, you can get $100,000 worth of real estate that you have control over. I mean, it really is just an amazing vehicle. Of course, you can also talk about the tax benefits. And you talk about the opportunity to scale if you do bigger deals with outside investors. It’s just such a tremendous, tremendous vehicle.

Robert Leonard  26:21

And what has been your best deal to date?

Brian Orr  26:24

It’s probably that wholesale-ish type deal. It wasn’t a wholesale. I only use that term because it makes the most sense for what it was. We came across this deal right after I finished the flip that we didn’t sell at Hoover Street. Right after that, we came across this deal. It ended up being like a probate sale that we got at $72,000. I went in, I estimated it. I had a few contractors come out and estimate it. We were looking at spending $30,000, and I knew because we had just tested the market with the other one, that it was a similar house, and the renovations that we were going to do would probably stand to sell around $130,000 or so. We were looking at buying it at ~$70,000, putting $30,000 in, and getting $30,000 out. And I know how much work it was to go into that flip.

I spent time in court because of issues with the contractors. They weren’t licensed and they didn’t get permits and that whole other thing. So, I’m sitting there debating, “Is this the type of investment that I want to make right now? Do I want to hire another contractor? I want to spend $30,000 more to make $30,000?” So we closed on the property that day. We went home, and I said, “We can make $30,000 on this after three months of flipping headaches.”

Flipping is a headache. And I was like, “What if we just list it? Let me just list it.” I’m not going to convert the den into a third bedroom. I’m not going to take out the old 1970s cabinets I’m not gonna do whatever to the screen porch, and all this other stuff that we’re going to do. What if we just listed at $105,000? Let’s just list it for $30,000 grand more than we bought it for, and let’s say we sell it at $95,000, we make $20,000. We made $20,000  in 3 hours. I could deal with that instead of $30,000 over three months. So we listed it that day. We had an agent call us and said, “We had a teacher just come in. She just moved to the area. She went and looked at the house, absolutely loves the wood paneling in that den, we were going to convert to a bedroom. She loves it. It’s the perfect size for her. She loves the den. She loves the vintage kitchen. She loved everything about it.” We had a full price offer that day, and we closed in 30 days for $30,000 more than we bought it for. So I would probably chalk that one up as the best deal.

Robert Leonard  28:38

Yeah, I would probably say that that’s a hard deal to beat.

Brian Orr  28:42

So it wasn’t, technically, a wholesale. Anybody who knows real estate knows that that’s not a wholesale deal. But, essentially, what it means is we did take control of the property, but then we listed it again right away. So I didn’t ever I didn’t actually end up doing anything to the property. It’s the easiest explanation. I just call it wholesale.

Robert Leonard  28:57

Yeah, I think that makes sense. As you said, it’s not quite a wholesale but it makes sense in that context too. And not only was it quick, but you didn’t have any risk in terms of the renovation because you said you would make $30,000 after three months of renovating but that’s if everything went the way it was supposed to, right? That’s if everything was perfect not if you ran into any issues or anything like that, that could knock down that margin even more. So in reality Not only did you get the same amount but also you saved yourself a headache, the time, and the risk.

Brian Orr  29:25

Right. It took work to get to that point, get that deal under contract, and go through it, but all of that was sunk already. That was already gone. That’s what was factored in the beginning. So now, we really are. I’m looking at three months’ work, however many hours– because flipping, guys, if you haven’t flipped yet, it’s not what it is on TV, man. It’s hours and hours and hours. Even if you have a contractor, I mean, if you can afford the 20% markup on their work, you know, you probably you’re gonna feel that in the end. So be careful hiring out a contractor at a 20% markup.

You being on-site, whatever it is, it’s a lot of work. Having just gone through that, and just imagining how many hours it would take whatever the math is. $30,000 profit by three months’ work, instead we made $30,000 in three hours. So you know, $10,000 an hour is a pretty good deal. And I’ll tell you what, going back to the question before, there’s not really too many other asset classes that you’re going to be able to execute a deal like that.

Robert Leonard  30:21

Are you doing anything to try and find more deals like this?

Brian Orr  30:25

I did for a little bit. The only problem is that that exists primarily in the single-family space, from the probate standpoint. I mean, it’s rare, at least in my experience, that you’re going to find that in a larger asset. So I did for a little while. What I did there was I was courting lawyers, showing up, bringing doughnuts and all that sort of stuff, saying, “Hey, you guys! Anybody die lately?” That sort of thing, haha. See if existed. Since I shifted, that’s not really a strategy for me anymore, but it’s a great strategy for people who are looking to do single families.

Robert Leonard  30:57

It’s also worth mentioning that now that you’re working on a different strategy, you’re focused on that strategy, specifically. You’re not trying to do all kinds of different things. You’re not trying to do three different strategies at once. You’re really going all-in and focusing in on the strategy that you’re working on, which I think is important because if you start to spread out too much, you lose your expertise, you lose your edge where you can actually really compete and drive successful results.

Brian Orr  31:18

I completely agree with that. Narrow your focus. Early on, we were talking about people who are just getting into it. You don’t know what you’re going to land on. So listen, if you flip a house, and then you decide to try to do some wholesale deals, I understand testing the market a little bit, see what it’s like, see what you like, see what you’re able to actually execute and how you’re able to turn a profit. But once you land on something, just become the master of that, I think. Become the master of that. And then once I have 200 – 1,000units if a couple of single-families pop up if the market adjusts, and there’s a way that I can do a quick turn because I have a contractor now, it’s in an accessible area. I know that there’s a forecloser market skyrocket again, something like that. I wouldn’t say that I would never do a single-family again. But it would have to be an ideal type of scenario. I would completely agree with that, like, find whatever your niche is whatever you’re going to be best at and just become a master of it.

Robert Leonard  32:15

That’s not to say you can’t do multiple things, but it’s having a primary focus, right? I talk to a lot of successful rental property investors. They actually do some flips on the side, but that’s not their primary thing. They’re focused solely on real estate rentals. They do some flipping from time to time. They’re focused on one or the other and then using the other to kind of supplement. A lot of them also use flips to fund, their rental properties.

Brian Orr  32:39

Right, and when you say rental properties, are they doing single-families?

Robert Leonard  32:42

Mostly multifamily.

Brian Orr  32:44

Mostly multifamily, too. I mean, they’re flipping for the quick cash.

Robert Leonard  32:47

Exactly. Oh yeah, in commercial, we had Mark Ferguson on the show recently. He’s doing a lot of flips, but he’s also using all of that cash to find his commercial deals.

Brian Orr  32:55

So you know, what I would say to when you’re talking about how to find deals, right? Finding multifamily deals is very different from finding single-family deals. I think the focus, in that sense, would be more like, with the single-family, you find a good deal, well, then you find what way to make that deal work. So that might be a flip, it might be a buy-and-hold, a smaller renovation, and a long-term hold because it’s going to cash flow. So, I can totally see doing that, where you enter it with this, and then you might be flipping some properties, or you might be buying-and-holding some properties.

For me personally, right now, I couldn’t imagine going into a flip again. Now listen, this 10-unit I bought two months ago, let’s say I’m able to reposition this thing in six months, and I have all new tenants and all the rents raised by $200. And my NOI (net operating income) is through the roof, and now the property value is through the roof. And somebody comes in and says, “Hey, I’ll buy this for $300,000 more than you paid for it.” Technically, that’s a flip, right? So I wouldn’t say, “No, I’m not flipping.” That makes sense at that stage, and I could turn that profit. I’m not against it.

Robert Leonard  33:56

Yeah, absolutely. You can be an opportunistic investor. You just need to make sure that you’re spending most of your time focusing on one thing. If a great deal comes up in a different strategy, you can attack it if it fits within your bandwidth. It’s just really where you focus.

But, Brian, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Where can the audience go to learn more about you, and just all the different things that you have going on?

Brian Orr  34:20

My website is thetwistlife.com. So, I’m launching a podcast myself about my life, as told through the story of my guests on a podcast. My DJ career and Keaton Capital, the investment company, you can just find everything on thetwistlife.com.

Robert Leonard  34:36

I’ll be sure to put links to the various different things that we talked about throughout the show, as well as some books that relate to the different materials we’ve talked about in the show notes, as well as all of Brian’s resources so that you can go connect with him there.

Brian, thanks so much! I really appreciate it.

Brian Orr  34:51

Awesome! I appreciate it. This is great! Thanks for having me.

Robert Leonard  34:55

All right, guys! That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Real Estate Investing. I’ll see you again next week!

Outro  35:01

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