RODRIGO AFANADOR INTERVIEW – Becoming a Cash Buyer, Mobile Homes, and Thoughts on Affordable Housing

Welcome to the Next level income show, where it's our goal to take your income, your investments, and your life to the next level. I'm Chris Larson.

And I'm Caleb Welborn.

You can get our book@nextlevelincome.com on today's.

Show, we have Rodrigo Ofanador. Rodrigo is the founder of Asheville Cash Buyers, which is a real estate investment company dedicated to providing fast, easy home buying solutions. With years of real estate experience and a proven track record, Rodrigo has purchased and resold more than 100 properties here in the Asheville, North Carolina area. And he enjoys the challenge that comes with resolving complex financial situations for his clients. In addition, Rodrigo is also the host of Asheville Real Estate News, which is the one and only real estate specific media outlet in the Asheville area. And Chris and I were actually just on his show, so it's a great episode. Check it out. So when he's not working, Rodrigo plays soccer. We're actually on a soccer team together. Goes hiking, backpacking, and mountain biking. So, Rodrigo, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Really excited. It's always been fun when you guys have been on the show and it's kind of nice to switch roles a little bit.

Absolutely.

Welcome.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah.

So Rodrigo and I first met when he was the president of the Carolina Real Estate Investors association. And that's a nonprofit group here that basically is like a networking group for real estate investors. And how old were you when you were the president of that?

Oh, man, I'm not 100% sure. I think it was like 23, 24. Somewhere around that. It was a two year run and then kind of rolled off the board at that point.

Yeah. I thought you were a lot older than you were when I first met you, so I was like, oh, man, that's pretty cool. He's already the president of that. But could you share a bit of your story? So you're from Columbia, then by way of Canada, you ended up here in Asheville and starting your company. Could you share a bit of your background?

Yeah. And, you know, feel free to interject if you have any questions or if you need me to fill in the blanks. But. So I graduated. I was born and raised in Columbia. My dad's Colombian. My mom's American. So I grew up my whole life down there and graduated high school and was like, okay, time to go. And had a lot of different options and ended up doing a outdoor leadership program very similar to like Knowles or Outward Bound in Canada based out of a camp there. So I was up there for 15 months and thought I was going to stay a lot longer until I experienced the Canadian winter. I was like, okay, I'm not doing this again. Canada is great in the summer. But then I was like, I need to get out of here and go somewhere new. And my criteria that I was looking for is what's the furthest south I can go? So I have mild winters, but that still has mountains. There's not really a lot of options. So it's like I was between Asheville and Colorado. And so I ended up here and ended up going to Montreal College for a year, year and a half, playing soccer there a little bit, and then just stuck around after the school, and I just didn't end up. It wasn't a good fit. And worked as a server, as a prep, as a chef, as a prep, in the kitchens, landscaping a little bit, and then as a legal assistant, and then kind of got into real estate in 2012.

Cool. Yeah, it's interesting. So my wife and I, we moved here. She's from Canada, and very similar. We looked at Colorado, we looked at the east coast where our family was, and we settled on Asheville. Right. For a lot of the same reasons. Rodrigo. So tell us about your business, Asheville Cash Buyers, what you guys focus on and really why you found real estate to be the best fit for you and what you wanted to do to accomplish your goals.

Yeah, so I'll say. I did not know real estate was going to be a good fit. It was one of those things. I kind of got into it because I didn't being naive around, it was almost helpful. And then once I was into it, it was kind of reverse engineers. It's like, oh, this does work for who I am and kind of what I like doing. So it's a good fit on the back end. Our motto at actual cash buyers is helping you take the next best possible step. And so a lot of what we do is just work with people who are interested in selling their houses, and we are almost like educating them and guiding them through the process. And, you know, we really end up only buying or working with people at a very small percentage of the time, because oftentimes what we offer is not the best fit for them. And so a lot of what we do is pointing them in the right direction or just encouraging them to pursue or explore other options in the process.

How is that different than working with just a general real estate agent?

So the best example I can always give is like if you get on an airplane, you're going to the same destination that everybody else is on the airplane, but there are different classes. And so you got first class, business class, etc. And your experience on how you get to that destination is different. And so I would argue we're like kind of first class. So instead of paying a lot for your ticket, you're just taking a deeper discount on your house and you're going to get a little bit of a different service. You know, it's going to be a lot of hand holding. We're going to be very involved. I know. For the fact we probably can over communicate more than any other agent, at least here in Asheville with our clients and they don't have to do anything. Right. It's a quick process. Usually from contract to close, it's 20 to 30 days and it's very straightforward and not a lot of variables.

Got it. So are you licensed?

I'm not.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah, because we're only buying for ourselves and if we ever sell then we typically, you know, do work with an agent there and have them list our properties that we're selling.

Gotcha. So if you're, if you're not an agent, you're not buying or you're only buying for yourselves, how do you guys make money?

So it's on the back end either as holding the properties as rentals or doing, you know, a flip, like a traditional flip.

Yeah. So you're a true entrepreneur getting paid on the back end, right?

I guess if that's the definition, then yeah, definitely. It's all back ended.

Yeah. So you have your main business, but I know just through us being friends and everything that you're always moving into new areas, learning about new stuff and you do a good job of doing well with your main business, but also exploring new options and ways to not only make more money for your business but also for your investors. So for people listening, what advice could you give to someone who's wanting to sort of expand into new territory with either their business or their career and how to handle that?

Yeah, so what I'm going to say is just like regurgitated from things that I've heard or listened or read from other people. But it's doing as much things that are congruent with I'm already doing so that the ripple effects support the new venture and the old venture. And so like perfect example is the podcast you referenced, Asheville Real Estate News. And so it's, I love the talking, connecting with people and excuse to have conversations with people I wouldn't have had otherwise, but. But then it's also established, giving me credibility working with different people who may not be familiar with selling to somebody who's not an agent, et cetera, or finding private investors to fund our deals, et cetera. And so it's just kind of overlaps really well.

Yeah, it's been.

I don't know.

I really enjoy listening to the show.

Thank you.

From a. From an Asheville perspective, I don't think there's anything else out there that gives the breadth of guests that you do. And, you know, for people that are into real estate in the local market, I highly recommend it. Um, so kind of getting back to the previous question I had, Rodrigo. You guys are buying for yourselves. You're making money on the back end. Are you buying single family homes or what? What properties do you specialize in? Or do you look at everything?

Yeah, so we look at everything. Try to be as numbers driven as possible and not get caught up into it. Our niche has been mostly mobile homes, though, for just whatever reason. Seems like getting started. I gravitated towards that because it was low barrier to entry, and then just got really comfortable with the properties and the different variables that come with it. And then the tenant base that's there felt very good about it. And so it's been kind of. That's been our highest area of focus, if you will.

Yeah, I think it's a great area going forward. I mean, we've talked a lot about affordable housing on the show between. Between the two, the three of us. And I think it can be a really good fit for a lot of people. I mean, you look all up and down the east coast, all across the country, you know, more and more people are moving towards. Towards mobile homes.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it's probably, especially talking here in Asheville, it's probably one of the biggest pieces that would be the most accessible. That's not talked about often enough.

So why, aside from the affordability, why else is it a good area to invest in? Like from an investor perspective?

From an investor perspective, it's just. I think the ROI is amazing, right? You can buy a mobile home on land for, say, 20 to $30,000. That needs, you know, some work, but let's say you're all into it for 40 to $50,000 here in the actual area, and then you can turn around and rent that same mobile home for 800 to $1,200, depending on how big it is and its exact location. Like, you're not going to get that ROI on a stick built here.

Now, a home is going to cost you 2 to $300,000 for that same rent, right?

Probably, yeah. I mean, if you're lucky, you're like 120 to 150. But that's like very lucky. Right. It's not something that you can consistently expect, but with the mobile homes you can expect that.

Yeah.

Interesting. So is it. Are you seeing that there's new mobile homes coming online or is there restricted supply? How's the zoning locally with respect to that?

So the county's, in my opinion, is not very friendly and neither is the city towards mobile homes. So, like they don't seem to be.

Friendly towards anything real estate related, like the class.

The easiest example is like, if you remove a mobile home.

Yeah.

Don't quote me. It's either six or nine months and if you don't replace it, then you can't put a mobile home on there anymore. And so moving mobile homes is not exactly the easiest thing. It's not like hard. But it's my experience it's always just been a lot of begging people to show up and move the home when they say they're going to and connect everything. So it can take a while to make these things happen. And if you have other things going on or if somebody, you know, if it's an individual and they don't have the money, moving a mobile home can be $5,000, you know, by the time you disconnect and go all the way to hookups again. You know, that's not exactly a small sum if you're owner occupant for that, for that style of housing.

I mean, that's half a year's worth of rent.

It could. Yeah, exactly.

For the numbers you're talking about. So, Rodrigo, you know, we've, we've talked about the affordable housing on a local level. If you look at a national level, I know you've had a lot of guests on your show. What are some of the more interesting solutions that you've heard on that and what are your own personal thoughts on how we kind of move forward on the affordable housing?

Yeah. So I think most people are breaking it down into two options when it comes to affordability. It's like affordability to buy and affordable to rent.

Right.

And most of what our guests are talking about are affordability to buy. And I just think that there should probably be a bigger conversation around trying to figure out how to find rents that are affordable and that Kind of goes back into our mobile home conversation.

Right.

And when you guys are on the show, we talked about this, right. What's the quickest way to kind of scale and increase your income and your financial security? It's by having better cash flow and or cash reserves, et cetera. And the flexibility of renting is going to be really beneficial. So you can make lateral moves, move down, move up, etc. And so I think if we focus on how do we rent more affordably versus how we buy more affordably, I think it's going to be a more sustainable approach.

I agree. I mean, if you look at the cost to buy versus rent, it's about 30% higher to own than to rent in this country. And if you look at it from an investment perspective, I have a blog post coming out. It talks about kind of the myth of homeownership. It's from an investment perspective, it's not always a terrific investment. It's more a personal and emotional decision. One of the more interesting solutions I read just in the past month here was the city of Miami. What they're doing is a private public venture, and they're starting a fund, you know, so they're helping to subsidize some of these costs. But I thought the interesting thing was a lot of cities are building. They're saying, hey, we're going to build this. Well, they're building at a cost of two or three hundred thousand dollars per unit, just because all the red tape. What Miami said was we're going to focus on existing structures, very similar to the value add strategy we employ multifamily. Because if you can buy a unit for 75,000, put 5,000 into it and bring it up to a point, your rents can be a lot lower and you can do a lot more. You know, we need 4.6 million new units by 2030 in this. In this country, but almost 12 million need to be renovated during that same period of time. So, again, as part of the bigger conversation, doesn't seem like we're talking about that.

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. You know, that we could talk about that for a long time. We've talked with a lot of people on the show on the actual real estate news who are city officials. And I'm like, guys, you're almost forcing people into a bad situation. If you encourage somebody to buy who shouldn't be buying, then you're just kicking the can down the road. In three to five years, you're just going to have people going through foreclosure Losing their homes. And there's going to be like a whole different set of issues that get created by that.

You know, it's almost like we've heard this before, 20, 15, 20 years ago. So. No, it is interesting. I think it's all local. It depends on the different municipalities.

Absolutely.

But yeah, there's, I think there's definitely solutions out there. And I know we've talked about, I think the solution is public, private, and I think really number one is we need more units. 100% more units. More units. More units.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great point on focusing on rents rather than home ownership. Because like you said, or one of you said, homeownership isn't the right fit for everyone. It really depends on the market you're in, what situation you're in, all that. So. Yeah, that's a great point. So we've had your friend Bryce Robertson on the show and he's from Australia and came to the US and has a pretty interesting perspective coming from all the way over there to here, and the differences between investing in real estate in these two countries. So as someone who's from Colombia, what perspective do you have on investing in real estate in the United States and see maybe the differences in Colombia versus here?

Man, the differences are so many. And Bryce, great guy, I learned so much from talking to him and he, he put out that great book, the 10,000 Steps to the American Dream, which is a good read as well. If you're curious to know the differences, that's also a good way to kind of have that eye opening perspective to how special it is. I always like when people ask me like, what's the difference? I was like, I couldn't do what I do here in Columbia right now. Like to be where I'm at now, it would probably taken me three, four times as long to get to where I'm at now if I was in Columbia. Just simple things like, you know, going to the bank to do some, something that we would consider routine. Can take you two or three hours down there. Like just standing in line. And there's so much. I don't know if I'd say it's like insecurity or there's just a little bit more of a belief that people are out to get you. So the systems aren't trusted as much. And so there's a lot more like hoops to jump through to just do anything basic, you know. Like my parents live down there still and one of the guys that my dad has on his staff, he uses him a lot to wait in line. And so he's like, oh, I have this appointment I need to go do at ex government institution. Can you please be down there at 6:30 and wait in line for me? Because the doors don't open till 9, but if you don't show up at 9, you're going to be there till 3 in the afternoon.

Wow.

And so it's just some very basic, simple things like that where it's not even how you do things, it's just the process of doing them is just so elongated. It's. It's really hard. Can you imagine having to wait at the bank for three hours to do something like sending a wire?

It gives me anxiety thinking about, yeah, it'd be crazy.

So even John Hyer was saying that in like a lot of Latin cultures it can be more bureaucratic. So he was saying that here in the US getting something notarized is like two seconds.

So easy.

He was saying in other places like it might take even, he was saying up to eight hours. He pays someone 20 bucks to go wait, wait there. And then you just keep working them, they call you and then it's like 150 bucks.

Well, in Columbia you got offices that are notary offices and it's the same thing. Yeah. Go wait in line, jump through hoops since they're going to pick you apart for the smallest things possible.

Interesting. Yeah, that would, that would not work with my person. So I'm a little spoiled here. So as we go into 2020, we're about a month in now, Rodrigo, what are your personal. Some of your business plans that you're looking for this year?

Yeah, no, great question. So we're doing a little bit of a pivot and it's a scary pivot, but exciting pivot as well. So we've been doing a lot of just single family and we're hoping to be able to get into the multifamily space this year. As far as owner and operating, the goal is to do 100 units, whether it's apartments or mobile homes. We're kind of open. We're looking at both things right now.

Love it.

And so that's the 2020 goal. And it's a little daunting right now because it seems so foreign to everything that been working on in the past. But steps are happening and we're hoping to pull something together sooner rather than later.

Awesome. How many units have you done today?

As far as rentals or just in general?

In general?

Oh, transaction wise? I don't know. Couple Hundred at this point now I would assume, yeah, I'd have to sit down and do the math, but been, you know, since 2012 and so it adds up pretty quickly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you share an interesting story from one of those few hundred transactions? I'm interested to hear what, oh, what some of these stories are.

So there's so many. I think the one of the interesting ones just comes to mind right now is there's this property auction, West Asheville here. And for whatever reason, I don't even remember how or why they called us, but they were located out like Raleigh, Durham area. Got the call, had that initial conversation, was like, oh this is really good. So I actually left that same like 10 minutes after the call. I was like, I'm coming to your house right now. We're going to sign this up, get over there, find out that it's an air estate situation. After we talk a little bit more. And one of the heirs was on, is on death row. I forget what, what at what, what prison he was at. But. And so just jumping through those hoops to get somebody who has no, no reason to cooperate to cooperate and to work through this whole process. It was really exciting. And that was just, you know, thanks to like the legal team that we have here, you know, made it happen. But it just walking people through that, it took like three or four months and ended up being one of the best deals that I've been able to be part of and done. So it was really fun.

Do you guys have to go to jail to get signatures and stuff like that?

We did not. But yeah, we had to like send in like bunch of letters, requests and, and just be like, hey, like we'll make it worth your while. Like do you want more money in your account? Like how do we make this happen? So yeah, it was, it was a fun one.

So if you're on death row you can sell a bank account.

So I'm not sure if it was a bank account or like, or if it's just like their account at the jail. I got, I don't remember what that details like he got money in his bank account or his. I think it was a sister just said hey, I promised to send you like a hundred dollars a month or we work something out where he was like five.

Fine.

Like it'll be more comfortable I guess if I agree.

Yeah, that's wild.

What, what did he do to get on death row?

Didn't ask was it relevant. I was like, I don't need to know. Like I'm here to like make this happen for you. And that, you know, wasn't relevant and they never wanted to talk about it. So I was like, you know, I don't even go there.

It's probably for the best. Yeah, you go down that road. So tell me what you do to get in here.

Yeah. So I mean, I mean, we never had any conversations with him at all. It was a lot of just, you know, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle and like orchestrate it from, from the back end, which is a lot of what we do for a lot of the deals we put together.

Yeah, very cool.

Yeah. So one question we always ask on the show, we're gonna tweak it a bit for you because you're younger. You're actually the youngest guest we've had on the show. Oh, wow. So far. So the question is generally if you could go back in time with everything, you know now and give your 25 year old self one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be? But for you, let's just say back to when you were 19 and you first moved here to Ash. You were 19, you moved here.

Right.

What would you. With everything you know now, what piece of advice would you give yourself at that point?

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say that it would be either a combination of finding and hiring a coach or being way more intentional or aggressive in getting into some sort of like intentional growth community or somebody speaking into your life, but a lot more one on one. Not just like books and podcasts, but. No, somebody who knows you, takes the time to really like, see you and ask you the questions that you're never going to get asked from just listening and reading things.

Yeah.

You had a mentor for a few years, right?

Yeah, no, I mean, I still do it. So it's, you know, I only hear just because people have spoken into my life and incredibly thankful and, you know, really blessed for those people who like, thought I was worth their time at the beginning. Yeah, for sure.

So, Rodrigo, thanks for being with us today on the show. Thanks for sharing some different things. Yeah, I know you, you try to give back in a lot of different ways. Can you tell us some ways that people can one, get a hold of you, your business, actual cash buyers to your podcast. Then three, what other organizations you have around town if people are interested in taking a part in those?

Yeah. Thank you for that, Chris. So ActualCashBuyers.com is the best way for getting involved in regards to if you have a house or somebody needs to sell. All of our information's there. Astro Real Estate News. The domain name is AVL realestatenews.com you can find us on any social media channel, Spotify, Apple, podcasts, YouTube, Facebook, Google Play, etc. We're everywhere. As far as organizations here in town, I really a big fan of Homeward Bound and the work that they do and that ties in really nicely to the affordability piece. Big believer in that. And so we do our best to work with them as much as possible and give them shout outs whenever we can.

Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. If you'd like to learn more about Rodrigo and his company, you can go in the show notes. You can find it there. You can also find our previous interview with Bryce Robertson that we were talking about earlier, who's from Australia. And then you can also get your copy of our free book on nextlevelincome.com click on the book link. We also have a lot of different resources. If you're accredited and you're interested in finding out if you can qualify for our next level investor club, you can also find that on our website as well. Rodrigo, appreciate your time today. Thanks so much for being here with us.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for hosting.

Absolutely.