195: Financing College Rentals & Mobile Home Parks Using Remarkable Creativity with Rudy Curtler

This is the BiggerPockets podcast show 195.

If I compare the dollars I invested in the six single family homes compared to the dollars I've invested in the mobile home parks, I'm returning about 6 to 1 in terms of dollars. And I don't have the headache.

You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the million who have benefited from biggerpockets.com your home for real estate investing online.

What's going on, everybody?

This is Josh Dworkin, host to the BiggerPockets podcast, here with my co host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's up, man?

Hey, I'm back.

Guess who's back in the house. Brandon Turner's in the I am house.

I'm back and Dave did a good job. So I'll publicly say, dave, last week you did a great job covering for me, so. So good job, buddy.

Yeah.

For those who are so sweet.

For those who didn't listen to that show, it was a first episode where I was not there. I was in California for the FinCon Financial Bloggers Conference, which was a lot of fun. So.

Yeah, we didn't miss you at all.

Yeah, you did. I could tell in your voice you had this, like, sadness. You're very. Oh, yeah, deep sadness. I felt it the whole time.

It seemed like there was a lot of joy.

No, there was like a weight off my shoulders. It was fake laughing. You were like, ha, ha ha. Dave, you're so funny. But I really miss Brandon. That was. I could tell the whole time. So you can't pull it over my.

Eyes, you know, whatever, man. Whatever you have to say to make yourself feel better, we'll agree to disagree. Yeah, yeah. It's all good. Yeah. Well, good. I'm glad you had a good time. Yeah, it was good. I surfed, you know, that would be fun to watch.

I hung out near a surfboard in the water. It's not the same thing as surfing.

Like watching a beached whale on a top of a giant beach whale.

It's like a narwhal. Narwhal? Is that what they're called? You know, the big white ones? Yeah, with the horn. Yeah, that's me pretty much. But without the horn. Just the big white, you know.

Well, if you look at your hair, it looks.

That's true. My hair is kind of horny. Ish I got horny hair.

Good.

All right, moving on.

Hey.

Hey.

Guess what?

What's that?

We get a new office.

I heard you're moving now.

We are moving to downtown Denver. Yeah, we got a new space. We're almost tripling our space.

I might have to fly in to see that when you move in.

Yeah.

Very excited, man. So, yeah, we'll hopefully have you here locally in Denver in November when that happens. But yeah, very, very, very exciting. Cool.

Cool. Well, shall we?

Let's get to the show, man.

What's going on?

We got a really good show. We cover a couple topics that we haven't done a lot of stuff on lately, and some interesting stuff here. Before we get into that, why don't we get to today's quick, quick tip?

I was trying to harmonize.

I don't know. Yeah, that didn't work.

Yeah, whatever.

That didn't work. All right, guys, Today's quick tip is if you have a BiggerPockets profile. If you don't, you should go create one today. Free. Go to biggerpockets.com create a free profile. But there are lots and lots of people who go and they create an account and they don't ever fill in their profile. It's like John Smith and the About Me field is empty and everything's empty except their location.

But, Josh, why do I care? I mean, I just want to read articles.

Well, you care because if you want to read articles and ultimately want to be a real estate investor, you need to start meeting other people in your area or outside your area who may be looking for somebody that meets your criteria. Right. If you're a lender, if you're, whatever it is, an agent, if you're a professional, or if you're just a regular investor, by filling in the information on your profile, you're helping other people to find you. You're helping to build your network. You're creating opportunities for yourself and possibilities for yourself, for finding deals, for finding partners, for finding money, for finding mentors. So it just take a minute and fill it in. It's better than having nothing take five minutes and put time into it and build something amazing. It's going to, you know, improve the likelihood that other people are going to find you and your opportunities are going to grow. Just tell people who you are, what you do, what you're looking for, and, you know, we're going to help you and help other people find you.

Yeah, there's time to time people reach out to me and be like, hey, I want to work On a deal together or hey, let's, you know, let's do this. I go to their profile, they have nothing. Not even a picture.

No.

No information. I'm like, I don't know who you are. I don't nothing about you. How can I build that trust? Speaking of trust, a video. If you are a BiggerPockets Pro member, you can add a video to your profile, which is like a billion times cooler than just a picture. So it builds trust in a really powerful way.

And do make sure to upload that photo, a personal photo of your face. We want to see who you are. We want to connect with you on a personalized level. So get in there. Create your profile today. Www.biggerpockets.com and if you want to edit your profile, you'll go to biggerpockets.com.

What is it? Profile, slash basics.

Oh, fancy. Big long URL.

Just go to biggerpockets.com and figure it out. Yeah, your picture. And go to profile options. But yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

Remember when rent day meant chasing payments, waiting on checks and playing phone tag? The worst. Not anymore. With Avail's online rent collection, rent comes straight to your bank account automatically and on time. Tenants set up autopay. You set up automatic late fees and reminders. And with FastPay, you can get paid as soon as the next day. No more awkward texts, no more waiting. Just reliable cash flow. Set up free for landlords rent collection today at avail CO BiggerPockets. That's a V A I L CO BiggerPockets. Because rent collection should be the easiest part of being a landlord.

What if I told you you could forget everything you know about investment property loans? Because Host Financial is rewriting the rulebook, tossing out those pesky DTI restrictions. They focus on your property's income potential. No tax returns or personal income statements needed. Simple, efficient, and tailored for investors like you. And imagine a lender that sees the gold mine in your property, not just the numbers on your paycheck. That's the Host Financial difference. And they're approved in 47 different states. So your next big deal could be just around the corner. Ready to unlock your property's true potential, visit hostfinancial.com don't let old school lending hold you back another day. That's hostfinancial.com My assistant's great.

He's also terrible because he's me. Turns out multitasking isn't a great business model. Belay knows real estate investors grow faster when they spend time closing deals. Not Buried in admin work. That's why they built the Executive Assistant Task Calculator, a free tool that reveals how much valuable time and money you're losing every week. Once you know your number, Belay can match you with a US based executive assistant to take those tasks off your plate so you can get back to building wealth. You're just one assistant away from doubling your deal flow. Text biggerpockets. No space to 55123 to download the.

Free calculator today, guys, this is show 195. We're almost there. Almost at 200. Show 195 of the bigger Pockets podcast. You can check out the show notes@biggerpockets.com show195. And if you have not yet left us a rating or review on iTunes, Stitch or SoundCloud, wherever you listen to this podcast, please do that. Please, please do that. Hey, Spotify. You guys know Spotify?

I love Spotify.

Yeah, Spotify has podcasts. Did you know that?

I did not know that. Yeah.

And they do not have our podcast.

That's a problem.

That is a problem. If you listen to Spotify and you want to hear our podcast, maybe we can ask our users to contact Spotify and request that the BiggerPockets podcast be added.

Sure. Anybody? Yeah, do that. We want to be on there.

That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing. All right, guys. So today's guest is Rudy Kurtler. Rudy's a real estate investor focused on single family homes, specifically college rentals. We also cover things like mobile home parks. Creative financing, getting started. If you have no money, you being a, quote, sweat equity partner, which I.

Yeah, I love that stuff that he was talking about. People will love that.

Yeah, it's a really cool concept, working with partners, creative financing, a whole lot more. It's great. It's a great show. Really exciting. By the way, I'm a little bit sick. Have somewhat lost my voice, which is why I sound more like a little girl than I normally do.

Good.

Yeah, I can tell.

Yeah, thanks anyway. So listen up, guys. Stay tuned and let's bring them in. All right, Rudy, welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, this should be fun. I don't know when the last time we had somebody from my home state of Minnesota. It's been a while.

I hope. I don't talk that way.

I haven't noticed the Minnesota accent too much yet.

Are you like a cartoon character, Brandon?

That's how my mom talks in Minnesota. She talks Just like this.

As opposed to mine in New York, who walks like this.

Exactly.

Oh, moms are great. Anyway, let's go back to Rudy.

Guy is sitting here just dying to talk and tell us his story.

I'm loving life. It's all good.

All right, all right, well, good. Let's get to your life. Let's talk about that. What makes you love it so much. And we'll start with your story. How did you get started with real estate investing?

Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. So I think the easiest way to explain it is out of college, I actually changed my career path that I wanted to go into. And so I was kind of hanging out waiting for my then girlfriend and now my wife to figure out what she was doing and finish college. And while I was sitting around waiting and kind of changed, going through a career change, actually jumped myself into retail. So not real estate, but retail. And I've been in retail ever since. And the reason that's relevant is, you know, in retail, at least in my particular example in my career, I moved around a lot in order to kind of grab some promotions and so forth. I moved and so I rented quite a bit. And about the age of 26, 27, 28, somewhere in that time frame, I started regretting to some degree the amount of money that I was putting into rent without having a lot to show for it. And so that really kind of became the catalyst for me to start thinking differently. And while I did well in my career from a financial standpoint and making the salary, and then had the good fortune I guess, to be, you know, earned some stock options and so forth, and did well in that regard, I began to think about boys. There another way for me to increase the speed at which I attain wealth. And that led me to having conversations with actually a couple of brother in laws of mine who live in South Dakota, which is where all my in laws live. And you know, for me, living in the Twin Cities at the time, I didn't have the time or capacity personally necessarily, or didn't think I did anyway, to start investing myself and do it in my backyard. But I was able to form a partnership with one of my brother in laws where he became the sweat equity partner in the business that we started and we started getting into single family homes in a. In a college town.

Nice.

So that was the start.

No, that's awesome. And you started by, by selling women's dresses, right? Al Bundy style?

Absolutely. Shoes.

That was shoes, wasn't it?

I don't even know what you're talking Is that like.

Is that really.

No. You mean, I don't. I'm too young, apparently.

Rudy, seriously?

Yeah, can't help you.

Married with Children reference.

Oh, come on. Okay.

Oh, yeah, for sure. But no shoes. Come on.

All right, fine, fine.

Jeez.

Come on. All right, so you're in retail now.

I'll give you a hand. See that?

Oh, I do see that.

Oh, yes. There you go.

Can we say that? Can we say that on the podcast?

A big electronic chain. Big part of a big electronic chain. Okay, so. So. So it wasn't your company. You just realized that, you know, paying rent as a business owner doesn't necessarily make sense. And oftentimes or you can make more money, obviously, or do better potentially through. Yeah, okay, gotcha.

Yeah, absolutely. And so what was unique about it was when we started getting interested very heavily, I think we moved from interest to commitment. I think there's a big difference between somebody that's just interested in something versus actually being committed. Want to commit dollars and time and, you know, additional resources to something that was in about 2007. So we bought it absolutely the perfect time, which was spring of 07.

Okay.

The market was at an all time high.

Oh, yeah, Great. Time to buy.

Yeah. So. So you. This is. You're getting into bed with your brother in law, right.

Which is family with shoes, apparently.

I don't know. I don't know what you guys do in Minnesota, but you're, you know, brothers, loving brothers or something. But.

I don't even know what to say.

Sometimes you just roll your eyes at Josh and move on.

All right, you're in business with your brother in law. You guys had this transition, the interest to commitment. I want to talk about that a little bit because again, I think it's probably the thing that people struggle with most. I think it's the biggest block of people who want to become investors who never do is because they can never overcome that. So how did you go from interest to commitment? What did you do to commit yourself and how did that whole process take place?

For sure. So part of that story is we had looked at a couple of different businesses to buy, and for whatever reason, I couldn't figure out how to make that work with his business that he was running and me kind of being long distance from where that would have been. We struggled with that. But through some family trips back into the, you know, into the state and being with family through holidays and whatever, we realized that the economy in that part of the state continued to do incredibly well. We realized that there was significant upside. And we also happen to have a connection through him with a local realtor who was more of an investor than he was a realtor. So he knew numbers very well. He could speak the game from an investor standpoint on investor language versus just a sales standpoint. I think that's really important too, as you start thinking about how do you move into and what investors want versus just being sold to and finding any old house. So anyhow, it was a fairly hot real estate market just like probably anywhere at about that time. But we did know that we could feel pretty confident that the community was going to continue to do well because it was a strong college community, even though it's fairly rural relative to what you and I think about. But that is, you know, we knew that there was going to be a very large college student population that would look for rental type housing. And so we felt very confident in that. Our first investment was actually a single family home with a two bedroom, one bath home. And if you run the numbers on a two bedroom, one bath, you're not very lucrative.

Yeah.

And we realized there's a couple of spaces in the basement where we could do some, convert some of that space into bedrooms. And we're able to make what was sort of a pseudo kind of half bath into a full bath down in the basement as well. And we're able to convert that two bedroom, one bath into essentially a four bedroom, two bath.

Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah, it did work well and we knew, you know, just from around on the numbers that would work well for us.

So can you talk about really quickly the two bed, the two one, what would that have rented for? And what did you end up renting the 42 for? And obviously what'd you also pay for this property?

Yeah, absolutely. So we paid 120,000. We were at the time encouraged to do an interest only loan so we could maximize the cash flow because that was still available. And then we, as a two bedroom, one bath, we would have been able to rent that for about $600 a month. So on average it's running for about $300 a bedroom in that community. And by converting that, we doubled it to and we actually earned 1200amonth in rent.

Okay, so are you renting them to like college kids by the bedroom? I know we've had some guys on the podcast doing that. Or is it just one?

Okay, well that's the rent for the house is twelve hundred dollars. And so whoever comes to us and says we've got twelve hundred dollars A month that we can give to you or we're in.

Okay.

So you still, you're not like, you're not like collecting checks.

Yeah.

You're not rent. Okay. Yeah. That makes it a little bit easier. I think that would be a nightmare having to have like, you know, going over there and getting $300 checks from all these guys.

No, no. Yeah. We're not, we're not collecting from each individual separately or something like that. We say essentially there's one point person. If there are multiple people or multiple groups in the house, then we go to that point person.

So as a 2:1, were you still intending on purchasing it or only when you realized that you can switch it over and convert it into that 42.

Future potential more so than the current. The challenge for us is, and it's still true to this day in that community is there's very little inventory on the market at anything less than $100,000. Generally speaking, anything less than 100 grand is going to take a lot of work to make it, you know, anything that anybody would want to be in. So we're just in a position to say, hey, let's get started. Let's dip our feet in water and kind of get going and try to understand what can we do, what does the market look like and can we grow based on the current market dynamics?

Got it. So your tenants though, you get it converted now you're renting to college kids, correct? Yep. Okay, cool. So let's talk about that for a little bit. It is somewhat of a niche and potentially a great niche, potentially terrible if you don't know what you're doing. So you own other single families now. What makes a college rental different? What things do you need to think about when renting out to college kids?

From my perspective, some of the things that are different are, you know, that you're going to turn the over in a matter of a couple years. Maximum is going to be a matter of four years. You're going to turn that over. You're going to have different tenants. I think some of the wear and tear in the house is potentially higher. We're not overly concerned about it. I'm not overly concerned. I don't go driving by the houses, I don't go walking through them very often. My brother in law, who's there, who's my business partner does. He'll look at him, he'll take a, you know, make sure that things are looking good. I think generally speaking, there's a little bit of the herding of the Cats for him. You know, while there might be one person that's responsible for contact back and forth from him, if somebody chooses not to pay the rent out of that group of four or three or however it's, you know, divided up in those, you know, that particular situation, somebody has to go and get the money at some point. And we've had a couple issues where that's happened, where there's finger pointing. Well, it's not my responsibility, it's their responsibility kind of thing. And at the end of the day they realize that there are multiple names on the lease and if their names are on the lease, they're legally responsible for us. And we actually had a situation or two. We've got to go back, you know, go to rent collectors and debt collectors and try to chase people down. So not very unfortunately.

I'm assuming you're having parents co sign on all these?

Yeah, no.

Oh, you're not?

Nope.

Okay.

Why? Or why?

That's a good idea though. I like it.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

We had somebody, somebody on the show recently who did that and they had parents co sign and it's kind of.

Cool idea that way you have somebody to, to go after versus, you know, a kid. So. Yeah, I mean it just didn't happen because it just was one of those, hey, we really never had the need or thought about it or.

Right. Yeah, to this point. Yeah, we've really not had the need. We have one house right now where the parents are actually going to pay the rent. They didn't sign a lease necessarily. No.

Sure, sure. And how many total single family houses have you done? Like, I mean, are they all your color rentals or what do you do with that?

Yeah, we have, we have single. I'm sorry, we have six single family homes in that community. Okay. That are what you consider college rentals by and large. And we do have, in one case, we have hard working family that's in there. It's not, it's not college kids. So back to my point earlier. But it depends on who's able to come up with the money and.

Sure. And it's not like specifically I'm only renting to college kids here. Just this is what the price is. Who wants to rent? Okay, cool.

Yeah, yeah.

So I want to, I want to go back and talk about something you mentioned earlier and that was when you got started. You didn't, you, I mean you're working full time, you didn't have a lot of ability to do it. So you worked with a partner on this and you called him a sweat equity partner. And I like that, I like that name. So what exactly does that mean and how does that work in your guys case?

Yeah, the way it worked. And to this day it's still working this way. So his we created an LLC and we split our ownership structure. So he's got an equity in the business and in any business, any home, or I'll talk about mobile home parks here in a second. But anything that we acquire, he'll have a percentage ownership in that without necessarily having to come to the table with cash on his end. And so I became essentially the financing partner in the agreement and he became the face of our business in that community where people would, when they needed to call him about renting something, they would go to him and we needed to place an ad, it was him. If there was a, you know, God forbid there's a toilet that needed to be fixed, then, you know, he'd take care of that.

God forbid.

God forbid. Nobody wants to handle toilets at 2:00am, right?

No, no. Well, you know, I love toilets at 2am now. It's a lot of fun.

Yeah.

You know what I love about this is that like this is like the other perspective. So a lot of people that are listening to the show don't have any money, but they've got some time. And other people have your problem of not time but they've got money. Right. Like this is that perfect. Like if you can find somebody with your missing puzzle piece that, you know. So if you're just getting started, if you're listening to show right now and you're like, I want to get started with real estate, I don't have any money. Find a guy like Rudy, find a family member. Find Rudy, find a family member, partner, whatever, friend, interact on bigger pockets to find somebody and work with them. Because I mean, it just, it's such a fantastic way to put together a deal when neither person would invest normally. It's one of those like one plus one equals greater than two, right? Yeah, I love that. So that's very cool.

Good point.

Brandon.

Thank you.

Good to have you.

Thank you. You know, you guys struggle to say about you, you guys struggled with Dave last week. So, you know, there was, there was absolutely lots of struggling. I heard my picture was brought up, I heard my picture was brought up on the screen. Whatever, we're moving on. All right, so anyway, what equity partners.

It is the perfect balance. It is very like that. Yeah, I like it a lot.

One more before I move on from that. Sorry. The other point I want to make on that. Was you invested at a distance? I mean, I got that question last night on a Bigger Pockets webinar is what about flipping at a distance? And that was my answer to them as well. I mean, yeah, you can maybe do it, but I know a lot of investors who have tried and really struggled with it. And if I'm going to do it, I'm going to invest with somebody who has boots on the ground. Even if they don't have money in the deal, I want them to be there involved in it, because you have to have that person.

I would agree. From my perspective, it's about trusting somebody. And it doesn't mean trust without inspecting. It doesn't mean trust blindly 100%. It just means you have to be able to trust that they've got very similar, if not identical interests to what you have and that they're going to make good business decisions at the end of the day. And we talk about some things quite often where we have different points of view in terms of how we want to handle those scenarios and situations, and that's fine, but we have an opportunity to talk those through and continue to move forward.

How involved are you at a distance then from. I mean, if you're in the twin cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul area, for those who are not familiar with the lingo, if you're in the Twin Cities and this is in North Dakota, you said, or South Dakota?

South. Yep.

Which town? You might be asking?

Just north of Sioux Falls.

Okay, cool. So, I mean, they're not. What's that, 500 miles? I don't know, maybe 200. Is it really that small? Okay, whatever. So how often do you go out there? I mean, how often do you have to drive out there or do you at all?

The only times I'm going out that way is for family. Generally speaking, there are a couple of minor. Over the course of the last 10 years, there's probably two or three situations where I've had to drive out there to close on a property where they wanted me to physically be there because they hadn't met me, those kinds of things. But I think as technology evolves and gets simpler and simpler, we can do those things at a distance anymore. But I don't go there to check on the business, to be honest with you. I go there for family functions. And while I'm there, I'll check on some stuff and we'll talk and we'll strategize.

And potentially, again, I'm not a cpa, but potentially tax deduct that entire trip because you're there for. For business, right? I don't know if that's how you guys pull that, but.

Yeah, I think you can read a book about that.

I think you could read a book on that called the Book on. No, the Book on Tax Strategies for the Savvy Real Estate Investor by Amanda Hahn. You can pick it up@biggerpockets.com bookstore.

Taxbook or tax Book.

You can get. You can just go that one. Whatever.

Yeah, yeah, but go to bookstore.

Yeah.

I've got a couple questions I want. I want to kind of go back to.

Please. I'll allow it.

Go ahead.

Are you having fun?

I'm having fun. This is great. Rudy.

I'm.

I'm sorry.

I understand.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad. He's special.

I'm from Minnesota.

Yeah.

All right.

So are you doing anything to tenant proof these properties? You know, being that they are college rentals? You know, five out of your six are college rentals. Are you, you know, hardening the floors and walls? Are you, you know, putting better materials in doing anything like that?

No. Heavy duty carpet's probably about it. Other than that, there's nothing unique or special that I would do for that house compared to, you know, if I rented a family. No.

Okay. And. And what would you. What would, what would you recommend to somebody who's. Who's thinking, like you? You know, I live near a college town. You know, this. This might be a good opportunity for me. What advice would you give to that person should they do it? Should they not, you know, horror stories, things to look out for. Tips like adding. You got to get in there, Rudy. You got to get those parents to cosign, man. Like, you know, what. What kind of tips would you. Would you have for those folks?

I think the first tip is to understand the market, number one is understand what the current market is. So what is an average rental going for in your community? So is that. And are they typically rented, you know, the cost per bedroom? Is that how it's typically done in the community? Doesn't mean you have to do it that way, but it gives you a starting point. And so I think where people probably tend to get in trouble is going to be when they don't do those analytics and they don't understand the financials and they don't understand some of the things that, you know, do I have enough in reserve in the event that, you know, the wheels fall off the wagon and I, you know, somebody didn't pay the rent, or everybody didn't pay the rent. Do I have enough in reserves that I can actually cover myself? So those are things that. Start asking yourself and understand that market specifically.

Okay, any kind of marketing that you're doing, that's different. I mean, is it just billboards on the. On the campus? Is it Craigslist?

It's Craigslist. Amazingly, it's Facebook. And there's also a local community. In the college itself, there's a virtual billboard, if you want to call it that way. You can post and put in that our homes are for rent. They're available on these dates. The only really unique thing that we learned was that in that particular community, about 55% of the homes that are in that community are rental homes, which actually puts a lot of pressure on pricing. That's why it's so hard to find something that's at a real attractive price. And so from that standpoint, it's just unique in terms of, okay, we'll pay a little bit more for it, but we want to understand how does that relate to what I can get in terms of return? And I want to understand the entire market, again, for us, in that particular case, our Realtor happened to know because he was an investor, so he was able to help us understand some of the uniquenesses of the dynamics in that market. And that's what's important, I think, for any investor.

And that's one reason why I think it's important to find an agent. Your agent doesn't have to invest, but when your agent does invest, it's really helpful. Like when they know.

Yeah.

When they get it. Because it's a different culture. It's not like, oh, look at this cute little front porch. It's. Look at this cute little cash flow. It's a different kind of a scenario there. So very cool.

No, that's great. And the reason you tell this is because, you know, we get people to tell things. I mean, you know, it's like being on Oprah's couch. Here it is. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Am I Oprah? Can I be Oprah? You can be Steadman.

You can be whatever you want, Brandon. Whatever makes you happy, bud.

All right, so I want to be Dr. Phil then. But anyway, moving on.

Okay, so as long as I'm not Tom Cruise, Jump on the couch, we're good.

Okay.

Working with family. I want to shift back to that. So you are working with family. That is potentially very risky. I, you know, I would not do it. I don't like the idea of working with family, I just, you know, I think there's too many potential complications that can come of it. You know, what do we do to make sure that, you know, holiday dinners are not an absolute nightmare? How do we make sure that working with our family is done in a manner where there's that separation? What do you do?

Obviously, from my perspective, what we've done is we're very careful to kind of keep business separate from personal conversations. We talk when we want to, quote, unquote, talk shop, talk about the houses, talk about, you know, the parks that we've acquired. We'll do that. We tend to not do that around the Thanksgiving table when a lot of the other family members are present. And we tend to be very, very on point with what is it we're trying to accomplish, what we want to do. What are some of the specific tasks in front of us? I think the. I don't know how to say this without it not being relevant, but we have a real good working relationship, and that was something I considered before we started. He is an entrepreneur himself, so that entrepreneurial spirit is important. There's no question in my mind of whether or not he's doing the work and he has similar goals and similar aspirations around what we're trying to accomplish with the investments. Yeah, those are conversations to have up front before you actually dive in and just do it.

Yeah. And do you guys, I'm assuming you guys have like a written contract between you?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So that would be my advice to anyone who's thinking about working with families. Put the relationship in writing, write it down, make it a business agreement, business relationship, and keep all the personal stuff separate. Yeah, that's great.

We also try to be upfront and share numbers on a regular basis and make sure that, you know, he's seeing what I'm seeing and I'm seeing what he's seeing. And we try to. We have those kinds of conversations on a regular basis. That way it's not, well, gosh, what is going on with the money? Because essentially the way we're running the business now, I'll. I still handle the money, I see that. I pay the bills and so forth, by and large. And he still kind of handles that, you know, the day to day focus where I'm. I'm really dipping my toe into it for an hour a week, two hours a week kind of thing.

Okay, cool.

You had something I was going to say, you know, it does. It feels silly sometimes when you're working with a close Family member or a friend, Because I work with a lot of friends and family, and it feels silly to be, like, signing this agreement. Like, why are we signing this stupid little agreement? Like, it feels dumb, but, like, it is so important because you don't remember two, three years down the line, what exactly did we talk about? And then it gets. It just gets weird. And then somebody gets offended very easily. And so, like, even if it feels dumb and stupid and it's almost, like, humorous, like, okay, we better sign this document here. Like, it's so important still to do.

But if they don't want to do it, that's probably a pretty bad sign.

Right?

I mean, I would think it means that they're not taking it seriously.

Yeah, right. Maybe they have different aspirations or different.

Outcomes.

Or they're trying to screw you.

Hopefully not.

All right, well, so what are you trying to accomplish? You said a few times, like, hey, what we're trying to accomplish. What we're trying to accomplish. What's your goal? What are you doing here? Why are you creating this business? Where are you going with it?

Yeah, for me, my specific situation is I want to actually just replace the income that I'm earning from my corporate job, my retail job that I have today and create that passive income. Enough passive income to replace that, you know, corporate job income and be able to step back from working 60 to 70 hours a week and do something else.

Yeah, cool. So I was gonna say really quickly, by the way, your corporate job, if ever they want to offer discounts to me or to the nation of biggerpockets, people, you know, we're always open to.

In case people are wondering, it's Best Buy. So people are like, why won't they just say the name?

Yeah, I'll put a good word in for you, Josh.

Yeah, all right.

I know.

Yeah, I just. I just. I just say things. They come out, and with no intention there at all.

None at all. All right, so you're trying to build up this passive income, which a lot of people who are listening to the show are trying to do, right? Replace their income. Whether they want to quit their job or not, it's still a really nice thing to have the. Replace your income, basically. So one way that you're doing that I've read in kind of the pre notes here, is through mobile home parks. And we haven't talked about that since. It's been months and months, maybe even a year since we last talked to somebody who was doing mobile home parks. I know. Specifically, we talked to Jefferson Lilly about It. And I don't remember what show that was, but it was a fantastic show.

It was a great show.

Yeah, I love that show. And I'd never even considered mobile home parks until then.

This show's good so far.

This show is good, but we're gonna make it fantastic right now.

Amazing.

Let's talk about go downhill and hurry.

Well, it started downhill with Brandon, but, you know, we were creeping our way through.

You can't get much lower. So mobile home parks. Why mobile home parks? Yeah. Okay. What is it and why? Why did you get into that?

No, I asked, what is it? Because I think there's a lot of confusion about the difference between a mobile home park and just a mobile home itself. So, you know, please speak to that.

Yep.

And by the way, I think there is a great podcast that you mentioned, Brandon, which is Jefferson Lilly, and I think there was 1:11 if you wanted to go back and look for it, I think. But anyway, fantastic information that he provides. What a mobile home park is owning the land that the mobile homes sit on and the actual park itself. And you collect a lot rent from each resident every month or whatever. The agreed upon timeframe is so very similar to regular rentals in terms of the timeframe. But, yeah, we actually, we stumbled into our first one, back to the point about the realtor that we were using, who is an investor. We had noticed that there was a park in the area. It's not in the community that we're investing in, but it was about five miles away. It was in a very small town. We thought that was really interesting. I wasn't really sure about the price because it was about. The price for the whole park is about three times more than the price of any home that I purchased at that point. So I was a little nervous. So I just reached out to him and started asking him some questions to help me understand the numbers. And how would he run the numbers? And so that. That's how we started getting in.

Cool. And by the way, that was show 111111. Go to biggerpockets.com show 1111 if you want to check out that podcast with Jefferson. So the price was 3x. You're trying to understand it. What got you hooked? What got you, you know, I mean, what really got you?

Yeah, the numbers, really. But here's why the numbers. So specifically, the park was a. What's considered a small park. It's a 21 unit set up to be a 21 unit park. But in addition to the mobile homes that are on there. There's also a commercial building that's part of the park. There's. The actual entire parcel of land is almost 12 acres. Wow. And as part of that 12 acres, the only developed parts of it accounted for about 7ish acres. So there's another five that are undeveloped that we started looking at. We thought, boy, that's interesting. It's not a major highway in the area. Very easy access to get into the community, where we figured this was more of a bedroom community. But in order to get into Brookings, the very quick, easy drive for people, very easy commute, those are kind of the first piece of information that I really wanted to understand. And then also for this particular town, that the mobile home park was in the direction that community is growing is actually toward the park. So in a matter of about three to five years, that park will be part of the city limits. We believe, you know, things continue to go because they've kind of hit some natural barriers. You know, there's a river on the other side of town and there's some other, you know, things that are preventing them, the city from actually moving that direction and growing and expanding. And so they actually move in that direction. So we figured those are all positive signs and very interesting. In addition to that, we actually looked at the rent roll and we tried to understand what is, you know, what are the current rents set at, even at current rents and current dollars with all the units that are there. Even if I was only able to collect, we used around and we just said, what if it was 75%, I can only collect 75% of the rents that are on the rent rule that were provided, Would I still be okay and still be able to make the loan payments and move forward? And then do I have enough in reserve that if that were to happen, can I cover myself for a couple months? And so once all those boxes are kind of checked and we say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, this looks good, Then we started playing the what if game of great. Where are current market rents for lots in Brookings, where it's a little bit more competitive? And while it's only a 5 mile commute, could we be closer to those prices? Are there some other things that could go up in value, go up in terms of rent that might make sense for us as well? And all those things, once we start saying, again, continue the list, and kept saying, yes, yes, yes, we got real serious about it and real excited, real quick.

Nice, nice. So I understand if you're a landlord in a single family and you're going to raise the rent some small nominal percentage. Or if you're taking over a building, an apartment building, and you're turning it around, right, you're redoing the landscaping lobbies, making it really nice. How do you raise the rent on a mobile home park, on tenants in a mobile home park? Is it creating amenities? Is it adding better landscaping? What are you doing there?

A couple things. From our experience, it's been cleaning up the park. So if there are maybe troubled residents that are there that aren't doing their part to keep the community clean, that's step one. Step two is the normal things like the landscaping. Even though it's on a bigger scale, it still applies the grass mowed, keep the weeds down, keep the edge around some other properties. If that's how that particular park is set up, we'll handle that. If that's part of the community, lawn care or whatever. We haven't necessarily added a ton of playgrounds or amenities in that regard. We haven't done that kind of work. It's just been more showing that we care about the park, care about them having a clean, safe community to live in and being very responsive to needs. Just, I think being good business partners and good partners in general has been kind of our strategy.

Cool. And you said something else that I thought was really interesting. So you talked about developed parts of the park accounting for seven of the 12 acres. So I'm assuming you went in with the intention to continue to develop out this plot of land. Did you actually end up doing that? What did you do? How'd you do it and tell us about that?

Absolutely. So part of, part of. One of the things that we noticed not only on that particular first park, there was the. I mentioned the commercial building. I mentioned the. There was 21 units. Two of the pads of the 21 were actually empty. And so our initial plan was to bring in mobile homes and turn around and sell those to new residents in those two empty pads. There was also eight RV sites that were positioned, I would say not ideally positioned in the park. It just happened to be where they put them, and you couldn't see them from the highway that runs in front of the land. There's also a couple of extra storage buildings that are being rented out for storage. And so one of the first things we looked at is we're trying to understand. We felt like the RV sites were nice to have, but we weren't going to guarantee any income coming in off that. So when we ran the numbers, we didn't assume that we were going to get any kind of rep on those again, because we didn't understand that market. I don't. They have no idea about RV rent, site rental and all that kind of stuff. And what does that mean? And is there potential for, you know, embezzlement or people to park there and not pay that kind of stuff? Anyway, so. But as we considered it and we started looking, we actually took a chunk of land that was right off of the highway in the front corner that you could see as people drove by and we put in eight more RV sites. Essentially we were moving those, the existing eight, we moved them to the front of the park where there's visibility, where people driving by can see. And then based on putting those units in, that cost us about, let's call it $2,000 per pad per site to run the electrical and run the utilities to it and then put the, you know, put the gravel down and so forth and put a little bit of landscaping there. That was about $2,000 per. That turned out to be just an incredible, incredibly lucrative move on our part. Just, you know, kind of going on a little bit of a hunch and kind of what we have learned from the first eight that move to move them to the front because it created visibility very quickly and awareness. And people that have lived in that community for 30, 40 plus years said, boy, I didn't know you had RV sites. How long have you had those? And we actually have a waiting list now where every. The two. Yeah, the two pads that we were going to bring mobile homes in to, we actually rent it to long term renters with RVs. So imagine transient construction workers. So people that are working on a big construction project and they need a place to stay, they don't want to stay in a hotel. In a lot of cases they'll actually have their RVs that they'll pull with them and they want to go into a spot and have the utilities paid for and get the utility bills and their names and so forth. And so those two mobile home spots we actually converted and Those have been RVs parked in there for two years.

Hey Rudy, what do you charge? You said $2,000 a pad to get them up to par, but.

What'S the rent on that per night?

I guess? Yeah, it depends on how they want to structure it. Meaning if they're a daily, a weekly or a monthly rate. So if it's daily, it's 25 bucks a day. If it's monthly, it's 375 plus they pay the utilities.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And so you can see how the numbers work very quickly.

Yeah.

You make back your money in a year or far less than a year.

Probably about nine months. Yeah. That's awesome. We actually have. So once we kind of got that done and people started realizing there's these RV sites there, we filled those RV sites up, actually filled the other two that I mentioned and plus the other eight. We typically have about six out of those eight ran out on any, any given day. And we actually have like my brother in law was telling me he probably gets one or two calls a day looking for more RVs.

That's awesome.

Wow.

Yeah, that's very cool.

We'd never had anybody on the show talking about renting out RV pads.

Yeah.

That's amazing. That's really cool.

Yep.

Tired of traditional lenders holding you back, Host Financial is here to change the game. They've ditched the DTI restrictions and they zero in on what really matters. Your property's income potential. So no more chasing papers for tax returns or personal income statements. Think about it. A lender that values your property's worth over your paycheck, that's the host Financial difference. Approved in 47 states. They are ready to help you make your next big move. Curious if you qualify? Just head over to host financial.com and find out. Stop letting outdated lending practices hold you back. That's HostFinancial.com where your property's potential meets unlimited financing.

You know you're in trouble when your assistant is also you. Imagine getting hours back each week so you can focus on growing your portfolio, not managing busy work. That's the reality with Belay. They match real estate investors like you with remote staffing solutions that save time and help you scale faster. Because the truth is, you're just one assistant away from spending your time where it matters, finding deals, funding opportunities, and closing contracts. Belay even created a free tool that shows you how much time and money you're leaving on the table by not delegating. Want to see Your number? Text BiggerPockets no space to 55123 to get Belay's free executive assistant task calculator.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on my bookkeeping. My system was stuffing folded receipts in my wallet and dealing with them eventually. Shockingly, not the best plan. That's why I started using Found. It's the first time I've felt truly in control of my business finances. Found eliminates the chaos by putting everything you need. Banking, bookkeeping, invoicing and taxes directly into your business checking account. No more juggling disconnected apps or paying for tools you barely use. Found automatically tracks expenses, finds potential write offs, and helps you budget for tax season. I can send invoices right from the app and pay contractors without jumping between platforms. It's like having a tiny finance team in my phone minus the payroll. As a small business owner, clarity and time are the two things I never have enough of. Found gives me both so I can get back to running my business and maybe even sleeping at night. Take back control of your business today. Open a Found account for free. Found.com that's f o-u n d.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with foundation.

So are you. You've got other mobile home parks, correct?

Yeah. Yep.

Are you, are you doing the same thing with them, with the RVs?

Well, each one is a little bit unique. We actually had. So I'll go to the second park. And the second park that we purchased was just north of north of the Brookings area. So very similar to other real estate in town. Most real estate in town is very, is priced very high because the demand is high and supply is low. But north of town, we actually found a mobile home park that had been sitting listed for sale, I think it had been listed for sale for a year and a half at one point and then it fell off the market for about a year and was relisted and been sitting there for about six or eight months. And I talked to a realtor about that and just help me understand the numbers, Help me understand that part. What's unique about it, what's unique about the dynamics, etc. And what we found was under market rents in the majority of that park. So again, we ran the numbers. Same deal, we ran the numbers on, okay, at current rents, can we make the rent? Can we make a loan payment? Can we make sense of the numbers? And once we said yes, then that got us real excited and we said, okay, great. Now what's the upside? What are market rents? How far below market are we? In Most cases, about $50 per lot lower than the market rents should be. We also saw that the utilities were billed and paid for by the owner of the park. In general, those should be built back to the residents. So there's more upside from a profit standpoint. And it was, generally speaking, wasn't in great physical repair. So again, similar dynamics to what we Talked about with the other one so we could come in and clean it up, make it a better looking community, repair a couple of roads and in general kick out some of the folks that were having a harder time keeping their property clean and make it look nicer overall and feel safer. And we did that as well. Nothing to do with RVs? Yeah, we didn't do anything with RVs in that.

Sure.

In that particular part.

So for those people who did not listen to episode 111 with Jefferson Lilly, like, can you explain why would somebody even want to buy a mobile home park? What are the benefits of a mobile home park over a single family house? I mean, nobody grows up thinking, you know, someday I want to grow up and own a mobile home park. Like that Just seems they don't. Yeah, I guess maybe you did.

Why? Why did you get into that? I mean, what's the benefit?

Yeah, you know, so I would say to a large degree we stumbled into it because my vision had always been we wanted to own apartment buildings. We wanted to own. We wanted to own 18 Plex or 36 Plex or whatever we could get our hands on in that community. Unfortunately, the majority of those apartment buildings are owned by three or four families. Keep in mind it's a smaller community. There's about 22,000 residents that live in that community. There's about 16,000 college students in the community. Not part of that. 22. So you can see how the dynamics are very strong. From a rental standpoint. We really had a desire to own apartment buildings and we could never get our hands on any because the cap rates were so high for those apartment buildings when they did come open and come out of the open market, or the families or ownership groups that had owned the land that was zoned or apartment buildings was owned by those families and ownership groups are ready or the apartment buildings themselves are owned by them. So we really think as a small investment year, we couldn't crack into that. So we really stumbled onto the mobile home parks as another way for us to grow and find some of the exponential growth potential that's there, you know, that we weren't able to kind of get our hands on. So I would completely agree with you, Brandon. I would have said five years ago, I would never or four years ago would never have thought, hey, I'm going to be owning some mobile home parks and now we own four of them. I would say probably the most compelling for the listeners for this show, the most compelling part to me is from a dollars invested standpoint, if I compare the dollars I invested in the six single family homes compared to the dollars I've invested in the mobile home parks, I'm returning about 6 to 1 in terms of dollars. And I don't have the headache. Josh, thought you were going to say something. I don't have the headache of.

I just said, wow. I was astounded.

Okay. And I don't have the headache of worrying about toilet at 2am headache worrying about furnaces and you know, I don't worry about roofs in generally there are a couple homes that we still own in a couple of our parks and certainly I've got those responsibilities, but by and large I'm not worried about those things. That's the owner's responsibility and they were responsible for keeping the community good, keeping a good upkeep and clean and safe and they're responsible for keeping their home to their standards. Yeah, I love that.

I love that. So, so what about managing? I mean, are you managing yourself? Do you have a resident manager there? How does that work?

Yeah, so I have essentially two different entities. So the one entity with my brother in law in South Dakota, we have three mobile home parks plus the six single family homes. And in that scenario, in that situation, my brother in law is still the owner and we have a couple of point people in each of the parks where, you know, we'll call that person if they can run a check on something for him.

Okay.

But by and large he's responsible or you know, make sure the park continues to represent what we want it to represent.

Okay.

Yeah. And in the new, I formed a new partnership with another individual who I've known for 20 years at the company that I work for. And he and I actually look for dynamics in a community that tell us or would indicate to us that there's going to be strength in the rental market for a long time to come. And I'm talking about Rochester, Minnesota. Rochester, Minnesota, for those that don't know, is home to the Mayo Clinic and the Mayo Clinic's on a $6 billion infrastructure drive. They're about three years into a 20 year project of improving the entire community of Rochester to make it more desirable for their doctors so they can recruit doctors. The reason that's interesting to us is because as that happens, very similar dynamics to what we saw in Brookings, which is the pricing of the real estate in town continues to go up. They can't keep up with the demand fast enough as the infrastructure improves. And so the hard working families need an affordable place to live. And we actually found a park out there that he and I bought. And he and I are in the process right now of kind of rehabbing that park as a whole. And we have yet to find our manager. So we've kind of taken some of the, you know, some of the day to day function on that, which is really, really interesting, by the way. So it's harder than it sounds, but so that's a little bit different dynamic.

Okay.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I've heard good things about that market, the Rochester market. So the Mayo Clinic, of course, is one of the best hospitals in the world, so very cool. All right, so one more question on the mobile home thing, as you mentioned. Well, I read in kind of the notes before the show that you were applied for and earned your mobile home dealer's license in South Dakota. I'm wondering, what is that? And why did you do that?

Yeah. So trying to do some research on just mobile home parks in general and trying to understand what other people are doing. And I was also kind of snooping around to try to see if I can find other deals in the upper Midwest or in the Midwest in general, to see if I could find other mobile home parks and actually stumbled on a program that's actually run by a company called 21st Mortgage, and they're in partnership with Clayton Homes. Both of those companies are owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which most people probably know as Warren Buffett. And those companies actually solve for a very common need that mobile park owners have. And that very common need is many mobile home parks have empty spaces. You know, they have empty pads that they're trying to rent out. Well, it can be very expensive for somebody to actually buy a home and try to move it in. On average, it's between 5 to $7,000 to move a home into a mobile home park space. And so for that particular resident that that generally may appeal to, that's a lot of money. A lot of money for anybody, frankly. Right. And so anyhow, and so in kind of snooping around, we stumbled on this program. We have 21st mortgage in Clayton Homes, and they will actually pick up the majority of those costs and they'll actually provide the financing for the homeowners. In those cases, we try to bring homes in. So from a part owner standpoint, the way you grow your revenue and grow your profitability is you get all of your lots filled and then gradually you raise your rent. Well, so for us, we have a need where we have multiple spaces that are either. We've got really old homes we'd rather yank out of there and bring something newer in. So it appeals to a somebody that's able to or willing to pay a little bit more, so that would be great. Or we just want to build a park in general, so we get that done. Well, as I inquired about those programs, I found out that I have to have a mobile home dealer's license. I've got to be considered a mobile home dealer. They said, oh, well, that's interesting. They start doing the research to try to understand that where would it make sense for me and what's the process to go through that? And we found that in South Dakota, you could do that fairly straightforward. It costs some money and it takes a little bit of time. There's background process and so forth and inspection process, but we're able to do it. And we got our mobile home DOA license. So we're actually. That just happened about a month ago. So I don't have a big success story to say, hey, here's what we've done because of it. But the plan is then to start bringing in those homes and filling in those empty spots and upgrading homes over time, and I might sell some homes on the side. But that wasn't the purpose of doing it.

But, yeah, that's cool.

That's cool. All right, so before we get to the fire round, I. I read something and kind of, you know, we send out notes ahead of time and just ask, you know, all the guests on the podcast here just to answer a few basic questions about what they've done. So we kind of have an idea of what. Where to take the conversation. So anyway, you wrote something here that I just want to read this entire little section here because this is fantastic. But we don't have time to dive into all of it. We could spend a month on this. It's about creative financing. It says that I can speak to multiple examples of using creative financing from using my own assets, cash and stocks, home equity lines of credit, contract for deed, commercial loans for the mobile home parks, 401k loans, loans against my life insurance cash value. Collateralize the cash value, my life insurance policy with a bank loan for the down payment, thus leaving my cash value and annuity to continue to grow. Pulling in a business. Yeah, pulling in a business partner for capital harp refinancing to lower my interest rates and increasing cash flows, et cetera. I mean, it keeps going.

He's not. He's not, like, thinking about these things at all.

Yeah, not at all. I mean, how do you get a mind for creative finance? I mean, we could spend again an entire show on every one of those things. And maybe we're gonna have to draft you in to be a writer on the BiggerPockets blog or something because you could talk about all this stuff.

Would love it.

Yeah, good. So, I mean, how do you, how do you give a mind that figures this creative stuff out?

Wow. Well, first of all, thank you for bringing that up. I don't know that I could take a lot of credit for or personally, but I think it's just asking questions, talking to people that are in the industry. It's being curious because I think my goals and my financial goals are really clear. Like a lot of people's, they get really clear goals and I'm committed to hitting those goals. It forced me to say, okay, great, I've hit a limit. So in 2009, we kind of quote, unquote hit our limit in terms of what could we purchase from single family homes. But in talking to my financial advisor and talking to my realtor and talking to other folks that have similar interest in kind of growing their assets, you started asking different questions and what we started finding. Well, sure. Have you considered a home equity line of credit? No, I hadn't considered that. Well, let's start considering that that was very early on. The business partner idea was certainly a way to spread some of the risk and spread some of the need for capital that you've got to come to the table with. I think some of the. More of that list that you read, Brandon, I think a couple of more really creative ones were using the life insurance, the cash value, my life insurance policies, as collateral for a loan. When we were able to find a bank through my financial advisor, you had a partner, business partner at a bank who said, sure, we don't have any belief that cash value in your life insurance policy is going to go down. We're willing to collateralize that and provide you a loan that you can use then to continue to grow your portfolio. So now my cash value and life insurance continues to grow and appreciate. I'm using the loan and deducting the interest on that loan because it's directly related to my investments. And I didn't have to take any of my own assets and put them into these investments. And so it just worked fantastically. You got to look, you have to look and look, you know, search around to try to find those, you know, those banks that want to do those kinds of deals, but they were very open to doing it.

That's what's.

It's asking questions, talking to the right people being curious and just thinking, I mean, you know, don't. Don't just assume that there's one way to do things right.

Yeah. And I didn't want to stop. We wanted to keep growing and doing stuff and do more deals, and so, you know, we found a way to do it.

I think it just kind of comes back to that. You know, one of the most famous lines at rich dad, poor dad, which people quote a lot, is that, don't say, I can't afford it. Ask how can I afford it. Right. That. That curiosity of how do I make this work? So many people are like, oh, I got my four loans from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. They said, I can't get any more, so I'm done. And they just stop. Right. Like, it's so stupid. I'm like, there are so many ways to finance deals if you ask the right questions. So I love that you said that.

Don't call people stupid, Brandon.

I didn't say people are stupid. You know, situations stupid. Listening to a bank say you can't get any more and then never doing anything.

But if you don't know, if you don't know, otherwise, if you're not a listener of bigger pockets, you're not listening.

You'Re not asking questions.

Yeah. I mean, you assume that people who are in these positions know what they're talking about and have all the answers. And I think that's. Isn't that the whole point of the show? I mean, the whole point of bigger pockets. Right? I mean, this show is like questions, question stuff. Yeah. Don't just take a no for an answer and find a way to do it.

If I could share a quick thought on that, I would say I've learned more in the last year since I've been kind of part of the biggerpockets community that I feel like I learned in the entire nine years that I was doing it on my own. And I know that.

Some people may not realize that the wealth of knowledge that's available in biggerpockets is amazing. And I think you guys do a fantastic, fantastic job bringing that to light for people, so.

Well, thank you.

Appreciate it. Take a look. Yeah, dig around. If you guys aren't digging around, dig around. So very cool.

I love to hear that. Love it. All right, well, that's a good way to wrap up that segment of the show. So let's shift gears here and head over to the world famous fire.

It's time for the fire round.

There we go. Let's get into the fire round. Again, these questions come direct out of the Bigger Pockets forums, which of course our users can get to, listeners can get to by going to biggerpockets.com forums. So let's see what you got here. Rudy. Number one, if someone is looking to purchase a mobile home park, what is the first thing they should look into to make sure it's going to be profitable?

Well, I think there's several things. So first and foremost, what are the, you know, what are the rent rates of comparable parks in the area? So think about anything in the 10 to 15 mile radius near them or near that park. That'd be the first thing. So what are the current rents? Number two, assume that anything that you get for a rent that you're being provided as a rent rule from the current owner is not 100% accurate. Just an assumption. Don't assume that it's all, it's all there. I think they should be looking at is it on city water or city sewer instead of on a lagoon or septic type system because those can have very, very high hidden costs like into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix those and be EPA up to EPA compliance. So ask a lot of questions. One of the good things, great thing to do is talk to the residents in the park. Just knock around, knock on some doors and say, hi, hey, I got some questions. I'm curious about the community here. I'm curious about, you know, xyz, ask them what they pay for rent, if you don't mind my asking, what do you pay for rent here? And you can very, very easily snoop out some information and find some good insight.

Nice. I love that.

That's a great answer. Great answer. All right. When you own a mobile home park, what are the added responsibilities and costs that you wouldn't have with a home purchase? So we talked about the things that don't, you know, the opposite. But what are the added responsibilities for a mobile homeowner, park owner, park owner?

I think the answer to that depends on the scenario with the park. So it depends on if it's a, you know, is it a rural park that's not on city water, city sewer, and then you have added responsibilities financially from a septic standpoint and keeping the water clean because that's a very important obviously component of any, you know, for anybody. I think, I don't know if there's actually more responsibilities outside of having a summit point person or a manager in the park is a responsibility, something you have to think about differently and you're going to have to do a better job figuring it out who that person could be or should be. And then otherwise, you know, you have fewer roofs, you have fewer furnaces, you have fewer toilets, you have fewer. But I think those are advantages. But I don't know that there's a ton more that I could think of. Maybe on a bigger scale you have to think about. For us, at least in Minnesota, you got to think about, you know, snow removal costs on a bigger area, significantly bigger than what you'd experience in a single family home, and then, you know, mowing the grass and those kinds of things. But cool.

Yeah, I think it's great.

It's perfect.

All right, number three, when someone needs to find a quick, creative way to fund a deal, what is your favorite way to do it? Or what's the. They asked what's the best route? But I'll say, what's your favorite?

Depends on the individual. My favorite that I used was actually the loan against my cash value and life insurance. So using that, collateralizing the cash value. Very cool.

All right, last question of the fire round. Where should a new investor look for a mobile home park to purchase? Can you find them on Craigslist? I mean, are there flyers at the supermarket? Where do you go?

I would look online. I would Google anything that says, you know, the area that you're looking for mobile home parks for sale. I would look at that. We did find one of our parks on Craigslist. We've also just by looking at local commercial. So on local real estate websites, we looked under the commercial tab, you can click on LoopNet, look for multifamily and LoopNet, and you'll see mobile home parks listed there as well. Cool.

Awesome.

That's awesome.

Cool. That's great. All right, guys. So Last week on Show 194 with my excellent co host, Dave Meyer, who I really regret is not here today.

We'll have Dave take your place someday and then we'll talk trash about you. It'll be fun.

But so anyway, on that show, we tried a new segment. It was Facebook Live. We had questions from our Facebook followers. We did a Facebook Live video, a prerecord, and we got questions. Today we actually didn't get a lot of questions because I think people just really don't understand how lucrative these things could be. But next time, if you're not following us on Facebook, go to facebook.com biggerpockets we do record these Facebook Live segments. We're going to be testing them out for a little bit and generally we'll let you guys know who we're interviewing, what kind of topics we're going to be exploring and we allow you to ask questions. So stay tuned. Jump on that if you ever see it. We'd love to get your questions so that we can throw them out to folks again. That's facebook.com biggerpockets with that said then I think it's time to move to Famous Four.

All right, Famous four. These are the same four questions we ask every guest every week. And I know Rudy, you've heard the show so you know what's coming. Number one, what is your favorite real estate related book?

I know, I knew this question was coming for sure. I would say a couple things. So one, my favorite real estate related book was actually probably not exactly something you say is real estate related. It's actually called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and more. So for the ideas behind it and less about the, you know, specifically what I do with real estate, I would say like I mentioned a minute ago from the how do I learn more information about actual real estate ideas, suggestions, tips? Bigger Pockets has been just amazing for me.

I like it.

We'll plug for you.

Thanks.

Pretty good book or you know, novella.

There you go.

Yes. With the villain Brandon Turner.

I'm a villain now.

I don't know what you're chilling like a villain. All right, stop. Favorite business book, Rudy?

Yeah. Favorite business book for me was actually the Millionaire Fast Lane. Actually heard it recommended on your show. I can't remember who was Dale Hansel I think was where I heard it first and after watching Dale show with you guys, I went and grabbed that book and I absolutely loved it.

So yeah, I've reread that a couple times. I love that too. Cool. Number three.

Yes. What do you do for fun?

My current hobby involves a stick and a white ball and I would love to call it golf, but I'm not good enough to call it golf. So as I've gotten older, my former passion was playing basketball and I was okay at that. And I have yet to figure out this stupid game but golf would be golf. Is it. I spent a lot of time with my wife and the kids. We swim a lot in the summer and my daughters and my wife actually have talked me into doing a lot of stage dancing. Stage dancing?

Really?

Yeah. We were on full look at the time.

So we're going to have to get a video of said stage dancing. And by the way, on this golf thing. Yeah. Nobody actually perfects it. So good luck spending the rest of your Life trying a game that sucks.

Right.

So. Yeah, good for you.

No, nice, Nice. Do you have a.

Do you have a cab far away from golf?

I like golf, actually. I'm trying to pick it up more often. But do you have a. Do you have a cabin up north like everyone in Minnesota seems to have?

No, I don't. I don't put the pool in the backyard because I don't want to have to drive up to the cabin every Friday night and drive home every Sunday night. That's smart, you know? Yeah, yeah.

You don't want that traffic going up north on a Friday night.

Weird cultural thing happening here. Can we finish this?

All right, we're moving on to the last question.

He said. He said dancing, right?

Yeah, there's something about dancing, but I can't hear you.

All right, question number four, Rudy. What do you believe sets apart successful investors from all those who give up, fail, or never get started?

Yeah, I think it's the difference between being interested and committed. I think it's the difference between people that say, what I'd like to versus I'm going to. And there's a psychologist who's actually done quite a few studies on the difference between certain people. It has nothing to do with their socioeconomic status, by and large. It has nothing to do with their access to assets and investments. Her name is Angela Duckworth, and you might have heard about grit. She's talked quite a bit about grit. And that's the difference that people have in terms of saying, this is what I want to do. They've created a very compelling reason why they want to do something, and they knock down those roadblocks. And I think that's no different in real estate as it is in many aspects of life. Right. So why would people with the same athletic ability, you know, certain individuals play at the highest level that they can actually achieve, and some never even break it up, break out of college, as an example. Why is that? Well, according to. According to her, it's the grit factor and that ability to kind of push past those. Those obstacles, many of which, by the way, are imaginary obstacles. They're not really an obstacle. A matter of trying to find a different solution compared to what you've been looking at.

I love that. That's awesome.

I love it.

Cool. Well, that about does it, doesn't it?

That about does it, doesn't it?

All right, Rudy, well, listen, before we let you go, where can people find out more about you?

Well, they can find out about me on Biggerpockets, and I would say my LinkedIn profile is probably the best for the majority of the information they can find about. About me. So Rudy Kurtler on LinkedIn.

Rudy, thank you so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it. We'll definitely have to talk more about this writing thing that we had hinted on and potentially might even have to bring you back to do a creative finance show or something. I don't know. We'll talk about it.

I'd love it. I would absolutely love it. Cool. Perfect.

All right, Rudy, thank you very much. Take it easy.

Thanks, guys.

All right, see you around.

Bye. All right, guys, that was Rudy Kurtler. Big thanks to Rudy and my God, where is Dave Meyer when you need.

Dave Meyer is over, you know, I don't know. Running.

Actually.

He's in Italy right now.

Is he really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, he just for a 10 day jaunt to Italy, so I am left.

Out of the loop. Well, whatever.

Yeah, he's gone. But yeah, Dave's away and I'm stuck with you.

You're stuck with me. Well, that's all right. Well, we had a good show anyway. It was a great, great show anyway. Yeah. I mean, this guy is on, on fire. I love mobile home. Brandon.

What?

What? I missed you a little bit.

Thanks, Josh. I missed.

I did. I mean, as much as I like Dave, like, yeah, you know, you're all right.

Thank you. That's very nice to hear. I missed you too.

You know, as much as I, you know, like to bag on you and.

I, you know, it's, it's a rare moment of, of seriousness from Josh Dorkin.

Is this, is this male bonding? Is this what it feels like?

You want to hug? I can hug you if you're in the room with me.

I, I would go for a hug right now.

Well, I miss you too. You know, I was, I don't know, hanging out with a bunch of finance nerds.

Yeah.

Nerds.

And if that sounds mean, that's not actually. That's like their slogan this year. Yeah. Was finance nerds unite. I don't know.

It's not me. No. They, they, we, they consider themselves nerds. We consider ourselves nerves. But nerds. But yeah, yeah. Today, I mean, Rudy's. Rudy's awesome.

Yeah. I love the idea he started. We talked about the sweat equity partner and from both angles, right. If you've got money but no time, find somebody who's got no money and got time and, and vice versa. Like, it's such a good way. You know, that's that partnership thing. We talk a lot about it is. Yeah. It's a very cool way to invest.

Yeah, well. Yeah. Hey, I'm watching a new show, by the way.

What are you watching?

Designated Survivor.

You know, I. It's on my list. It's my number one show to watch. I haven't started it yet, but it's interesting.

It's interesting. I mean, you know the concept, right?

Yeah. And Kiefer Sutherland's just, like, the coolest actor since 24.

But, yeah, I read reviews. People are like, whatever about it, but I don't know, it's just kind of. It's fascinating and frightening as hell to think about, and they dig into some stuff. You're like, oh, God, what if this happens? Like, this is. This is horrifying.

Oh, wow.

I will. I'll check that out.

Yeah, you should check it out. What are you watching these days?

I just finished all eight Harry Potter movies. Yeah.

Interesting. I think my daughter just finished book six. She's reading them.

Those are scary books. They get scarier and scarier.

They are. And she. She has nightmares.

You should have her watch the movie. That'll be even better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway.

Harry Potter, huh?

Harry Potter. I just. I read the whole series of books, and now I had to watch all the movies.

And you'd never seen the movies before?

I'd seen the movies, but I watched the movies first, then I read the books, and now I rewatched. So now I'm kind of on, like, a fantasy kick. I think I'm gonna go start the Chronicles of Narnia next. I haven't read those.

More and more children's reading.

Good. I like those books.

Yeah, Good for you.

Easy, happy books. You know, like, if they have more than, like, seven letters in a word, I just skip it, you know? Why read those?

Yeah, why. Why bother? I gotcha. I gotcha.

Cool, man.

Well, let's get out of here.

All right, I'm. I'm ready.

You do it. All right, well, listen, guys, it's a great show. Again. Listen to that quick tip that we left in the beginning of the show. If you haven't yet created that profile and filled it in with details, please go do so today@biggerpockets.com Otherwise, we'll see around the community. We'll see on the site. Please spread the word of Biggerpockets. Post about us on Facebook, on Twitter, wherever the heck you are. Instagram, I don't know.

Share my space. MySpace.

My space.

Love that site.

Yeah, share us. Spread the word. And stay tuned for next week on the Bigger Pockets podcast, and we got to figure out who we're going to have for show 200. I know the big one. Yeah, we'll sort it out. All right, guys. Till then, I'm Josh Dworkin, signing off.

You're listening to BiggerPockets radio, simplifying real estate for investors large, large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com your home for real estate investing online.

Thank you all for listening to the Biggerpockets Real Estate Podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calico, content and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com. the content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk, so use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose, and remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.