299: The 4 Steps to Financial Freedom Through Rental Property Investing

Hey everyone. Welcome to this very special episode of the Rookie Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer and I'm going to be your host today, filling in for Ashley and Tony. And the reason I'm here is because recently in my responsibilities as the VP of Data and analytics at BiggerPockets, I created a webinar to help the BiggerPockets audience understand, step by step, how to pursue financial freedom even during the confusing economic and housing market conditions that we find ourselves in. And this webinar r has really gotten a lot of positive feedback and because of that, we wanted to share it with our podcast listeners.

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In this webinar, I'm going to talk about a lot. We talk about goal setting and how to determine why you're investing and what you're really looking for. Then from there, we'll help you pick the right market that is sort of aligned with your goals. We'll help you find deals and then ultimately analyze deals so that you can pick the right ones for you in this market. And honestly, in this type of market, it'll also help you avoid really bad deals as well, which is equally, if not more important. Now, throughout the webinar I'm going to be dropping really practical tips and I'm also going to be using a couple of tools to find markets and analyze deals. Just so you know, some of those tools, like the calculator that I use at the end, are parts of the bigger pockets. Pro Membership that is a paid membership. It is designed to help you find financial freedom through real estate. Tens of thousands of people have succeeded using the Pro membership, but I did just want to call out that those tools are for paid members, but we're going to give you a deal just for watching this webinar. If you want access to all the tools that I'm using to analyze deals, you can get 20% off right now on the Pro membership if you just use the code Freedom. So when you check out, they'll put a link in the description for the show on YouTube as well. If you want to just go to Pro, just check out and use the code Freedom F R E E D O M and you'll get access to all the tools I use in this video. All right? With that said, I hope you all enjoy this webinar. Four Steps to Financial Freedom Settle in and focus because the topics and tricks and tactics that I'm going to be talking about today they're not hard, but they are incredibly powerful tools to help you achieve whatever financial goals you might have in mind and sort of the financial goals that got you to attend this webinar in the first place. I'll give you first, before we jump into everything, I'll just give you a quick high level overview of what we're going to talk about today. What at the end of this webinar you can expect to have learned how to set your goals, how to find the right market to invest in, find the right deals within that market, and to analyze those deals to determine which ones are actually worth pursuing. So as the topic and title of this webinar implicates, we're talking about four steps to financial freedom and we're not going to, you know, make you wait for them. Those are the four steps, how to set your goals, pick the right market, find the right deals and analyze those deals and those four steps. I know it sounds really simple, but it is true. Those things can help you and they are really the essential things to getting you to financial freedom. And I'm actually just going to add a fifth thing that yes, you can do this in today's market. And I know we are in a weird housing market, a weird economic climate, but let me just tell you something. I have bought deals in the last couple of weeks. I know every single, every single experienced investor that I know is still buying deals right now because they know how to adapt their strategy and to find the right deals in really any type of economic climate. Steps that I am going to walk you through today. These four things work in really any type of economic climate. And as we get through the webinar I'm going to talk about some tactics or things that you can change in your shiftings, particularly when you're analyzing deals and finding deals that can help you adjust and still make profitable good long term decisions about your finances even during this type of economic climate that we're in. Let me just quickly introduce myself, if you don't know me already. My name is Dave Meyer. I'm the Vice president of Data and Analytics at Biggerpockets. That means I get to work at Bigger Pockets for full time, which is amazing. I've also been investing in real estate for more than 12 years, mostly in rental properties. I have one short term rental, I live in Europe now in Amsterdam and so I also do a lot of passive investing in syndications and in lending funds. I host the on the Market podcast which if you like staying on top of the economy and the Housing Market News. You should check that out. It comes out every Monday and Friday on either Spotify or Apple. I wrote a book with Jay Scott called Real Estate by the Numbers, which teaches you how to analyze deals like a pro. But most of all, what I want you to know is that just like all of you, I'm guessing a lot of you are probably relatively new to real estate. Maybe some of your experience. But just like all of you, I was once new to real estate too. I really was unsure what I was doing for the first several years that I was investing in real estate. But ultimately I came up with some simple frameworks that I use to pursue my long term goal of financial freedom. And that has helped me through ups and downs, through bear markets, through bull markets. All of that is really manageable. Once you know some of the tactics and simple strategies that real estate investors have been using really for decades. Like none of this stuff is really revolutionary. It's not new. It is pretty proven. These are proven things that literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have done before you. You just need to learn to do them for yourself. And that's what we're going to do. If you do have any questions about this, you can always find me on Bigger Pockets. You know, after the webinar, you can hit me up on Bigger Pockets or on Instagram where I am at the data deli. I post all sorts of news, data, econ type stuff there. You should check it out. Okay, so we talked about four steps to financial freedom. And we're just going to jump right into this right now. No more waiting. Let's get to the first step. The first step to financial freedom is knowing what you want. Like what does financial freedom mean to you? And I know when you think of this, sometimes people start thinking of financial freedom as being rich, right? Maybe you dream of buying a fancy car or going shopping or, you know, extravagant vacations, but for most people, and at least for me, that that is not what financial independence and financial freedom is about. And rather than, you know, finding these showy things, it's much more about being able to do the things that you want, when you want, and with who you want. And for some people like me, love traveling. That is something that, it really motivates me in my own investing and pursuit of financial independence. For some people, that's, you know, taking time with their family or being able to start a family and not having to work all the time. And ultimately, I think the most common theme that I see among people who want to pursue Financial independence is what they're really looking for is not money, but it's actually time they want to pursue, have more freedom in their day to do what they want. Some people like me, still continue to work even once you've achieved financial freedom. But that's because we like to, not because we have to. I get to choose what I do with my time. And I think that is the most important thing about financial freedom, is that time, unlike money, is a finite resource. You can't make more of it. And so that, to me, is the most precious thing you can have in this life. And so financial freedom, although it's focused on money, what it's really about is allowing you the time to do what you want. So I think the first step for people, and I found this very, very helpful. And I see people all the time benefit from this, is figuring out what that number is. Like, how much money do you actually need? Because so many people come up to me and they're like, dave, you know, should I flip houses? Should I buy rental property? Should I do a syndication? I'm like, well, what are you trying to get to? And most people, they don't actually know what they want, and that's super hard, right? How can you enact a plan? How can you get somewhere if you don't even know where you're trying to go? It's like if you were asking someone, if you, like, pulled over on the side of the road and you asked someone for directions, and they're like, yeah, I'd love to give you directions. Where do you want to go? And you're like, well, I don't know. How could that person possibly give you directions, right? You need to have in your mind where you want to be going. And for financial freedom, that is extremely important. And so as you're thinking about this, I recommend you make your goal. You make a financial freedom goal, and you want to make it smart. If you. Maybe you've heard of this before, I don't know. A lot of people use this. It's very common in business, something called a smart goal. And I find that making goals in this format helps you stick with them better than other types of goals. And so. So when I say a smart goal, what that means is that the goal is specific. So it has to be like a very specific number. So you don't want to just say, like, I want to be financial free. Like, that's not a smart goal. To make it smart, you need to be specific. So what is financial freedom to you? Maybe it's that you want $7,000 per month in cash flow or in passive income, right? So that's specific, it's also measurable, right? You can, you know, through accounting, you can figure out how much cash flow your portfolio is making you every month. So by saying I want thousand dollars per month in cash flow, it is both specific and measurable. You also want to make it actionable, which you're doing right now. You are making a goal that is actionable because real estate is an actionable way to pursue financial freedom. Relevant, you know, by saying cash flow, that is, you know, by most people's metrics, cash flow is what you want if you're pursuing financial freedom. And so cash flow, as long as your goal is about cash flow, it's probably relevant. And then the last one, don't forget about this, is time bound. So that means you have to put an end date to this goal, right? You can't just say I want $7,000 per month in cashflow. That's pretty good goal. But if you say I want 7,000 per month in cash flow within five years, now that is a powerful goal. It has put the clock, it has started the clock in your head which will start motivating you hopefully to start getting towards this goal. And so I really encourage you, you don't have to do it right this second, but you probably have a number in your head. I'm guessing I' of you are sitting there, it's like, oh, mine's 6,000, mine's 10,000, I don't know. But after this webinar, you know, take some notes, write this down. If you don't have something in your mind right now, write it down. Go after this webinar, go think about what it is that you want out of pursuing real estate. Because I, I promise you, getting a crystal clear idea of what actually matters to you is going to be motivating. It's going to help you stay on pace, on track. It's going to help you through the difficult times. There are difficult times in real estate investing. It's not hard, but there's going to be challenges. And having that crystal clear goal is going to be really helpful to you. So ask yourself, are you ready to achieve that goal? I mean, once you have written that down on paper, once you know in your mind what it's going to be, are you actually ready to put in the time and the effort to do this? It's not hard, like I said, but it does take action. It does take you actually doing something real. Estate, they say, is passive, and it is much more passive than a normal job. But it's not like you could do nothing. You actually have to get up and take action to start pursuing that goal that you have. So let's do that. That is the goal, number one guys set. Or, sorry, that is step number one is to set your goal and come up with that intention that you have that's going to guide you through the rest of your real estate investing. All right? Step number two is picking the right market. Right. Once you know what your goals are, you have to start backing into the how you're actually going to pursue that. And the number one thing I'd recommend you do next is picking the right market. And when I say market, I'm talking about like a location. So you could say California or you could say Los Angeles, or maybe, you know, like the specific neighborhood within your metro area that you want to invest in. But maybe you don't know. So there are two key questions that I think you need to ask yourself when determining what kind of market you want to invest in. So number one question, is your goal related to net worth or cash flow? So as I said, if you are pursuing financial freedom, most people want their goal to be about cash flow. Because cash flow, unlike building equity, which is sort of the other way you earn a return as a real estate investor. Unlike building equity, cash flow can Easily replace your 9 to 5 income or your W2 income or whatever your income is. Right? So you know that that is really important. So I'm going to assume most people are talking about cash flow here. Personally, sometimes I look at both. Sometimes I invest for cash flow, sometimes I work, I invest for net worth. That is really up to you. But I. I think the important thing here is that historically there is a trade off in certain markets between cash flow and appreciation. So there are certain markets that just appreciate the prep. And when I say appreciation, I just mean like the prep. The value of the homes go up. So some markets appreciate far more than other ones. So some that come to mind are like San Francisco or Seattle or Boise. Over the last couple of years, these cities have exploded in popularity and property prices have followed suit. The thing is, though, when properties appreciate like that, it makes cash flow harder to find, right? Because rent doesn't usually grow as quickly as home prices. And so when home prices grow faster than rent, it makes cash flow hard to find. So that means that the cities that appreciate a lot are typically harder to find cash flow. It doesn't mean it's impossible but it's just harder. The other thing that you should consider is that some markets are better for cash flow. So when you look at a city like Philadelphia or Baltimore or Birmingham, Alabama, for example, these cities are, the property prices are not as expensive and so they actually cash flow better. So on one end of the spectrum you can look at a market that really cash flows well. On the other end of the spectrum you might have one that really appreciates well. Or you could pick one that's right in between. These are cities like Tampa Bay or Tampa in Florida or Atlanta or Nashville. These are good sort of hybrid markets that you'll want to, that you can consider. The second question that you need to ask is do you want to invest close by? So some people are really just sleep better at night knowing that they could drive to their investments if they want to and they can go take care of problems themselves. Other people don't really care and are willing to invest wherever you know the best deals are. And so ask yourself that question. There's really no right or wrong answer. But you know, you should know for yourself, like, are you the kind of person that wants to see your property physically on a regular basis? Like, then you should invest close by. You should just find the best market, the best neighborhood within, let's say an hour or two hour drive of your primary residence. If you are willing to invest long distance, which is what I do now that I live in Europe, I only invest long distance. It sort of opens up almost any market to you and you can start to examine markets for different qualities, different characteristics. For example, I like to look at a couple of different.

Criteria for evaluating markets and this works for long distance investing. So if you're going to invest somewhere far away, these work. But also it also works even if you want to invest close by. Because you know, I, you know, I used to invest in Denver primarily. I still own a bunch of property there. And even within Denver, you know, certain areas had good cash flow. Even though Denver as a whole not a great cash flow city, there were still zip codes, there were areas that had good cash flow. There are other ones that were just exploding in property price. So this, these metrics that I'm about to show you work well both for long distance and local investing. The first one I love is, is called the rent to income ratio. And this is super easy to calculate. All you have to do is take the annual rent for a given area and you can find this. I publish spreadsheets on bigger pockets that you can check out. There's it's called the file place. On biggerpockets.com you can find these spreadsheets that I published there. But you just take the annual rent. So take the monthly rent multiplied by 12, that's annual rent and divided by the average household income for the area. You can find this by Googling it. So again, you do have to take some action on your own. So just go Google it and figure this out for yourself. Most finance experts, personal finance experts, budgeting people, say that you don't want to spend more, much more than 30% of your income on shelter. And so when you evaluate rent to income ratio, if you see that the rent to income is about 30%, that's pretty good. That means that the market is pretty well balance. If you see that it's well above 30%, that to me is a little bit of a red flag because it means that that area is quote unquote, rent burdened, which means that people, you know, are probably stretched a little bit thin for rent as it is currently. And hopefully that means tenants can still pay their rent, but it does increase the risk that they can't. If they're paying a large share of their income for rent, that's a little bit of a red flag. And it also probably hampers future rent growth because there's just a limit to how much people can realistically pay for rent. And so if the rent to income ratio is really high, that, you know, if it's 33, 34%, it's not a huge deal. But if it gets to 40%, that is a red flag for me. On the other hand, if the rent income ratio is well below 30%, let's say it's 22%, that's, to me, something looks really good. Tenants are probably very easily able to pay as agreed on their leases, and, and it bodes well for future rent growth. So rent to income ratio, great way to evaluate markets. The second one is called the rent to price ratio. And this one's also super easy to calculate. All you got to do is divide the at the rent, the monthly rent by the average purchase price. Sorry, on this deck it says annual rent, but that was a mistake. My bad, guys. It is monthly rent divided by the average purchase price for, for the rent to price ratio. And rent to price ratio is awesome because it's a proxy for cash flow, right? So when you do this, you're basically saying, how much income are you getting? That's the monthly rent, and comparing it to your biggest expense, which is the purchase price, and that Ratio helps you understand how much cash flow you're likely to get in. You're probably going to get a number when you evaluate this, somewhere between 1% and 0.5%. And the higher the better, right? So the higher the number, if it's around 1%, it's probably going to be a market that has abundant deals with cash flow. If you get something below 0.5%, it's probably a market that doesn't have a lot of cash flowing deals. Again, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that it's going to be harder to find them. Because generally speaking, on average, when the rent to price ratio is below, let's say 0.6% is probably going to be tough to find those deals. But because we're talking about averages, that means that even in a market with a rent to price ratio of let's say 0.7, it means there's going to be deals better than that, maybe point 8.9, even 1% or, and there's going to be deals worse than that. But as an investor, it's your job to find the deals that are better than that average and pursue them, which we're going to talk about in just a minute in steps three and four. So that's the rent to price ratio. Great proxy for cash flow. When I'm looking at markets, where I want to buy is one of the first things I look at. Again, it's, it's kind of a crude metric. So you still want to evaluate deals and analyze each and every one of them, which we'll talk about. But it is a good way to screen markets if you're considering a bunch of different markets. A third one is population growth. When it comes to rent and home and home appreciations, everything really, it comes down to supply and demand, right? The more demand there is, relative supply, the higher prices are going to go. And as investors, once you buy an asset, you want the price to go up and you want your rent to grow up. And population growth is one of the best predictors of future rent growth and property appreciation because it just means there's more demand. So check out population growth. There's tons of free websites where you can find this. The FRED website, the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis, they offer a lot of data for free. You can go check that out there. The last one is economic growth. Again, another Fred website is another good place to do that. But basically when you want to predict appreciation and rent growth, you need people who can pay the higher rates, right? The whole economy in the area, in that market need to get better. And so tracking economic growth, like job growth, the unemployment rate and gdp, which stands for gross domestic product, it's basically just like an aggregate number that measures all the economic output for a given area. If you look at any of those things, you want to find markets that they're going well, right? You want to see an area with good high paying jobs, you want to see relatively low unemployment rates and you want to see strong GDP growth. So when you're looking for markets, these are my top four things that I recommend you look at. Again, it's the rent to income ratio, the rent to price ratio, population growth and economic growth. So check those things out. So that's step number two, guys. So as you can see so far, these are not super hard things that we're talking about. Talked about setting a goal that's just looking inward and deciding what you want, what you need to achieve financial freedom. Step number two is selecting your market and figuring out where you physically want to buy an asset. And the next step, step three. And again, we only have four steps, so we're moving along here. Step three is finding a property. Okay, this gets a little bit harder, but it's not hard. This is really about developing a system where you can look at a lot of properties. So the number one thing I want you to know about finding a property is that most of the properties, almost all of them, are going to be bad. That's okay. So don't get discouraged. I, I talk to so many people are like, oh, I've looked at five deals and none of them work. It's like, yeah, exactly. If they were all super easy, people would all be going out and doing that. 99% of the properties, maybe 98% of the properties that you look at are not going to be right for your goals. Right. Maybe they offer strong appreciation, but you're looking for cash flow. Or maybe the seller is delusional and is trying to sell it for a price that is not reasonable in any universe. Or maybe it has a lot of deferred maintenance and you don't want to pay for pay to fix up the property. There's a million different properties out there. There's actually 140 million different properties in the United States out there. All you need to do is find the right one for you, or at least the next one. If you're just getting started, you need to find the first one, but you always need to find sort of the next one that is good for you. And so the way that I recommend that you look for deals is by using a system at BiggerPockets, we called the laps system, lap s lapsed system. And basically the laps system is designed as a funnel, right? If you're into marketing or know anything about sales, this is all. This is similar, right? It's all about a funnel where at the top of the funnel you need a broad, as broad of an exposure as possible. And that in real estate investing is leads, right? You need as many leads as you can possibly get. So let's say we're trying to buy just one deal. What you need to do is find a way to get 100 leads, right? 100 leads are going to help you get to that one deal. So that. And the lead is basically just like a property that you're kind of interested in. You don't have to run the numbers yet. It's just something you see. You're like, oh, that's in the right market. You know, it's a duplex. I'm looking for a duplex. The price point is about what I'm looking for. So that, that would be a lead. You don't have to even see it yet. You just need to know that it, like, has sort of the right basic ingredients for the kind of deal that you're looking for. Then step two of the funnel in the lap system is analysis. So once you've got 100 deals, it's time to actually analyze those deals and see which one ones make sense for you on paper, like which one. Offer the right cash on cash, return, offer the right potential for appreciation, offer the right, you know, economics for you, for you to actually pursue that deal. And so you need to go out and analyze all those deals. Maybe not 100 of them, maybe some of them. You know, you look at them and you decide that, you know what, of these hundreds, I'm going to analyze 40 of them. And if that sounds daunting, don't worry. I'm going to show you how to analyze deals quickly in just a second. But just stick with me on the lap system right now. So you get 100 leads, then you need to analyze 40 of them, and then you need to start pursuing them. So of those 40, maybe there's 10 that are really, really good. So, right, we've gone from 100 to 40 now to 10. And those 10, you actually go out and start making offers on them. And you know what? Some of the offers are going to get rejected. And again, that is okay because you just need that one and so this is the system, right? It's about going and looking at tons of deals and being okay with the fact that a lot of them are not going to work out for you as long as you find that one that meets the criteria that you are going to support your long term financial freedom goals. So that's the lap system. So let me just walk you through and like help you a little bit with each of these things. So again, last systems, leads, let's say you need 100 for your first deal. Where can you find them? Well, number one is MLS and agents. So one of the great things about the economic climate we're in right now, and there's not too many great things, there's a lot of confusing, frustrating things about it. But one good thing that's happened through the housing market is that there are way more deals right now. This is because we've gone from a seller's market to a buyer's market, which means there's much more inventory and it means that sellers are much more likely to negotiate. I participated in a deal recently where we bought a multifamily unit for three. 30% lower than it was last summer. 30% lower. And that's not what they listed it for, but after a lot of negotiation that's what we were able to get it for. Because sellers know that housing prices are rocky right now and they're willing to accept deals under list price. And so it used to be, you know, over the last couple of years, like during the pandemic, you really sort of had to find off market deals. Or at least that was the most reliable way to find good deals was off market. That is not true anymore. You can now find very good deals on the mls, on Zillow, whatever website you want to use. There are a lot of good deals. So that's the number one way to do it. If you don't have an agent, I'm sure an agent can help you find that. If you don't have an agent, you should check out biggerpockets.com agent. You can get matched with a investor friendly agent for free there. So that's a good way to do it online. Obviously you can do your own searching either on bigger pockets. We have a listing platform where you can find some on and off market deals or you can do off market deals as well. Which is sort of like private marketing, right? You're looking to identify someone who would be willing to sell a property before they actually list it for sale. You might have heard of the term driving for dollars this is an off market strategy. You might have heard of yellow letters or mailing postcards. These are all similar strategies to get off market deals. But basically what it is, is like you go out and find a property that you want to buy and you make an offer before they go and put it on Zillow. And there's a lot of other people who have the opportunity to make bids on that property. I did this, I've done this, you know, found an area where I want to buy and just called some sellers, negotiated with them and I've been able to successfully do that. It does work and you can find great deals like that, but it does take a little bit more effort. Just so you know, like you have to, you know, actually go out and make a lot of phone calls. You usually have to spend a little bit of money on, on marketing for off market deals. But it does work. But again, one of the benefits of the housing market that we're in today is that you can find good deals on the MLS, on Zillow. And so that's probably the easiest way to do it if you're new to this. The second thing of the LAP system. So that's how to get leads, right? The second thing is analysis. Right? And let me just tell you the three things about analysis. So analysis is a little bit more complicated with deals. You know, with leads you can find an agent, go on Zillow, you can do that. But deal analysis actually has three components to it. The first one is the crystal clear criteria. Again, this is sort of similar to our first step in the webinar today when we were talking about coming up with a goal. The same exact premise is true. When you're analyzing deals. You have to know what you're looking for, right? If you start analyzing deals and you don't know what a good cash on cash return is or what a good, you know, ROI is, then you're never going to be able to actually pull the trigger. You're going to be stuck in analysis paralysis, going to be like, is this a good deal? I have no idea. The trick is to set your criteria before you start analyzing deals. If you already know, like, hey, if I find a deal with a 7% or an 8% cash on cash return, I'm pulling the trigger, then you are less likely to get stuck in that analysis paralysis loophole. Instead you can start actually going out and buying deals instead. So when it comes to crystal clear criteria, I think there are five things that you should really be thinking about. So think about this. After this webinar, you can start writing this stuff down. But basically one is property type. Like, do you want to buy a duplex? Do you want to buy a single family? Do you not care? If you don't care, that's also okay. Just write down, like when you're writing down your criteria, be like, I'm open to anything under four units. Like, you know, like, personally, that's me. Like, I'll buy a single family if it's right, or a duplex or a triplex. Some people, like, if you're house hacking, you might only want a duplex, right, Or a triplex. So write down the property type. The second is location, which we've already talked about in finding your market. But the more specific you can get, the better. So maybe, you know, when you think about the market and go through the steps, look at those metrics that I told you about, you decide that you want to invest in. No, no. Jacksonville, Florida. Maybe once you, once you know Jacksonville, go one step further and find a great location that you're super excited about. Talk to your real estate agent, talk to other investors about where they want to buy, and then put that in your criteria. It doesn't have to be one zip code. It could be like, I want anywhere in north Jacksonville or anywhere west of the downtown area. I've never been to Jacksonville. I don't know anything about it. But yeah, so just like write down some criteria that in your head. You'll know if you find that property, you're going to like it. Price range should be pretty obvious, but, you know, given how much money you have. Once you talk to your lender and determine how much you can qualify for for a loan, figure out what your price ranges and write that down as well. Condition is really important. I think this is one that people really miss and that is, you know, do you want something that is quote, unquote, turnkey or stabilized? Which means like, it's in really good shape and renters are going to like it right off the bat. They're going to want to move in. It's going to be super nice. That's great. I mean, everyone kind of wants that, but they're more expensive and they tend to offer lower cash on cash returns out of the box if they're really in good shape already. On the other hand, you can buy something that needs a little work, but that those are usually cheaper, but you have to put money into it to rehabilitate it. But they tend to offer higher upside. So if you do some, this is called Value add, right? Like if you buy something that needs some paint and it needs a new kitchen and it needs new carpet and you're willing to do that work, you can usually earn a better cash on cash return because of it. And so that's something you should think about. And then the last one is profitability, which I sort of alluded to a minute ago when I was saying, like, oh, I'll know if I get a 7% cash on cash return. That's when you should get this good deal. And so profitability. Let's just talk about that for a second because I think this is a common question here. Ask yourself, like, what is a reasonable rate of return? Right? We're going to talk about the metrics in just a minute. In just a minute. But think to yourself, like, what do you want? Like, some people come out and say, I want a 15 cash on cash return. Okay, that is possible. But risk and return are sort of counterbalances to each other, right? So any deal that has an amazing reward, there's going to be associated risk with it. That is just how investing works, right? So, for example, you can buy a U.S. treasury bond, you get 3 or 4% right? Now, that's super low risk. But a 3 to 4% return is not very good. If you want an 8% return, you can probably do something that's still relatively low risk, but it's not going to be a crazy amount of. It's not going to be no risk like a bond or a savings account. And as you go up in the amount of return that you're targeting, you have to understand that there's more risk. So like flipping, for example, you can earn a 30% ROI on a flip. But flipping houses is relatively risky in terms of the spectrum of real estate investing. Buying a rental property, you can easily expect to get an 8, 10, 12, even a 15% total return on your property with relatively low risk. So I think that is a great rate of return that you should target. Some of that could be cash flow, some of that could be through amortization or appreciation. So but that's something for you to think about what level of risk and return you're comfortable with. And then you need to think about, like, what's a good deal in your area, right? You pick a market and find out what a good deal is. Like, are you looking at deals and all of them, you know, like all of your friends who are investors or every deal that you look at is a 7% cash on cash return, then all of a sudden you're analyzing your 40 deals like we talked about and you see one that's a 9% cash on cash return. That's when you know it's time to pull the trigger, right? Like that's how you know what deal is the right one for you to pursue is once you establish what's a reasonable rate of return and what's a good deal in your area. And if you're saying, oh, I don't know, I don't have friends, I don't know what a good deal in my areas, we'll get to that because that will come from analyzing a lot of deals, right? If you analyze 40 deals, you'll know what the average cash on cash return is for those 40 deals, right? Because you've just done it. We're going to show you, I'm going to show you how to do that in just a minute. But you know that's a great way to do it, is just analyze a lot of deals. You'll understand what a reasonable rate of return is and then you'll be able to spot the ones that are even better than the average. And those are the ones you want to go after.

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All right, so what you know, once you know these criteria like what metrics should you be looking at and I'll show you how to calculate these in just a minute. But number one, as we talked about for financial freedom is cash flow. Right? And if you probably heard this term I'd imagine but if you don't know what it actually means. Basically cash flow is if you take all the income from a property for a rental property that's you know, rent for a short term rental that's you know, your also income coming from your guests. So you take your total income and then you take all of your expenses. That's your insurance, your mortgage, your we'll get into all this but all of your expenses, you just subtract it. That's your cash flow. Super easy. Right? So we're going to talk about how we're going to calculate that in just a minute. But that's what cash flow means. I just want you to understand, like what it means. We'll do the math in an easier way in a minute. Second one is cash on cash return. And so we just talked about cash flow. But you know, if I told you, you know, I earned $300 a month in cash flow and asked you if that was good, what would you say? Well, if I spent, you know, $10,000 to earn 3, 300 bucks a month in cash flow, that would be great, that'd be fantastic. But what if I spent a million dollars in on my investment in order to earn 300 bucks a month in cash? That's not so good. So you need to measure the cash flow as a percentage of your total investment. And so that's what you do at cash on cash return. Basically, you take your annual cash flow, you divide it by the amount of money, your cash that you invest, and you get a percentage. Right. And so one of the most common questions is, I'm going to cheat. I don't usually do this. I don't usually tell people what like a good cash on cash return is, but I'm going to give you some rules of thumb that I use for myself. So I would say that a base hit, you know, like a decent deal was a 5% cash on cash return. Now I wouldn't do a deal with a 5% cash on cash return unless there's some upside as well. So maybe I'm doing a value add. Maybe it's in a really good look, like a really good location that's likely to appreciate. Maybe I know something about the zoning where I'm going to be able to add another bedroom or an ADU in the future. That's when I would consider a 5% cash on cash return. If I'm just looking at a deal for pure cash flow, I usually look for something at least 7 or 8%. If you can hit 10%, I think that's a fantastic cash on cash return. And if you get a 15% that is a grand slam, you found a great deal. But like I said, make sure that you're not taking on an excess amount of risk to get that cash on cash return. It might be in a bad neighborhood, it might be a property with structural problems or something like that in order to get that 15% cash on cash return. So when you see a great deal that is way better than every other deal, you want to be interested and jump on it, but also be a little skeptical. Make sure you say like to yourself, is this real? Is it too good to be true? Because again, risk and reward, they are counterbalances to each other. And where there's one, there is usually the other. So that's two metrics. We have cash flow and cash and cash return. We also have equity. I talked about building your net worth earlier. And equity is the amount of money that you have sitting in your deal, right? So if you take the property value, which hopefully is going up over time, and then you subtract all of your liabilities, which is basically like your mortgage, like the amount of money that you owe the bank and, you know, any other debts that you have to pay off when you go to sell the property, that's how you get equity. And that grows over time through different, different ways that I'll show you. But basically, you know, your property value going up, paying down your loan helps that if you do any value add and improve the property at all, you can build equity. And that's another way, in addition to cash flow, that you earn a great return as a real estate investor. The last one is total profit, which is basically combining the two things I just talked about, which is equity and cash flow. So if you add your equity and cash flow together, you get your total profit, which is at the end of the day, you know, sort of like the highest, most important number for a lot of investors is like, how much are you making on this deal? Total. All right, so enough talking. Let's actually do this. We're going to run the numbers together. That's the third step. So now we know the criteria, we know what metrics we're going to look at. And now let's do it. We're going to run the numbers. I'm going to show you how to do this. So we're going to actually just do this together. We are going to analyze a real, live real estate deal and I'm going to show you how easy this is. Right. Remember I said during the lap system that you need to be able to, you know, look at a lot of deals, you need to analyze a lot of deals. I'm going to show you how to do it quickly using the bigger pockets calculator. So I'm just going to jump over here and just show this to you. So I'm just going to jump over here. Biggerpockets.com you can find this if you go to the tools area. There's all these calculators here. I just hit rental property, so I'm going to just hit View my reports just to show you that I really do use these calculators all the time. I have a master's degree in business analytics, and I still use these calculators all the time because they allow me to run deals really quickly, which, as we've talked about, is sort of the essential component to the LAP system. You need to look at those hundred leads. You need to analyze, let's say 40 of them. And, you know, doing a spreadsheet for every One of those 40 is going to take a long time. So I use these calculators. I'm going to show you how to use this. We just hit start a new report and I'll just show you that I found a property here on the BiggerPockets deal finder. So if you just go over here to Tools and hit real estate listings, you can find deals. I was talking to an agent in Tulsa the other day, so I wanted to look for properties in Tulsa, and I picked this one right here. It is an occupied duplex that's selling for $165,000. Each side is two bed, one bath. And this is again, is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So this is what we're going to look. We're going to analyze this deal. I have not analyzed this before. I did find the listing before, but I don't know what's going on. Dalia is the agent I was talking to. She's a great agent if you are looking to invest in Tulsa. Okay, so let's just go back to the property calculator. I'm just going to paste in the address here, and it should auto find that and fill that in for us, which is great. And I'm also going to add a photo. And you don't have to do this, but because the LAP system, you know, sort of necessitates that you are looking at a lot of deals. You probably might forget the address. At least I do. Like, I will never remember 1050 N Irvington Ave, but I will remember this photo. I guess that's just like the way I remember stuff. So I add photos to it because I think it's helpful. And then next we're moving on to purchase. So what was it for? It was going for 165. So I'm just going to assume at the beginning and we'll talk about this, because I do want to talk about offering under list price, especially in this kind of environment, economic environment. But for now, I'm just going to put it in at list price and say that we're going to buy this for $165,000 and closing costs are going to be around four grand. And if you're wondering how I know that number of four grand, well, I've been investing for a long time, so I have a pretty good idea. But if you don't, you could just check out these help things over here. So just click on calculator, calculate closing costs and you can see, for example, typical closing costs are around 1 to 2% of the purchase price of the property. But it can differ. I'm going to assume it's actually above 2% because for lower price properties I actually think it's about 2%, but check that out. So I'm going to assume then we need to discuss are we rehabbing the property? I don't really know anything about this property, but let's just assume that we're going to put some money into it, right? That's one of the best ways to make money as a real estate investor. So let's assume. And I'm making this up, guys. I just want to show you how to use these calculators, how to run a lot of deals. I don't know if these are accurate. When you're running your own deals, you're going to want to think through each of these pretty carefully. I run a lot of deals, so I could do these pretty quickly. But you'll get there. So after a fair value, let's say that we get up to 200. Let we think we can make the value of this property, 200 grand by putting in, let's say $15,000. Right. So now we know what a lot of our costs are and we're ready to move on. There's something here that you should look at, which is this property value growth here. So we at BiggerPockets and we built these calculators put an assumption at 2% property value growth. And as you probably know, over the last couple of years property values were going insane. Right. Sometimes we saw 10% year over year growth, 20% year over year growth. But the reality is that for most markets, properties appreciate about the pace of inflation, which I know inflation is really high right now, but normally inflation averages about 2 to 3% a year. And so what I recommend for people right now is to estimate low on the property value growth to mitigate the risk of housing prices going down. And you know, we just saw so much price appreciation, I don't think we're going to see a lot of that in the next year or two. So I would say 2% is fine. You can even put one. Let's just put 1% in there just to be super cautious. All right, next, loan details. Because I'm an investor, I have to put 25% down. But if you want a house hack or you're going to own or occupy a property, you could usually put 20% down. And again, if you need help on any of these inputs into the calculator, when you're first getting started analyzing deals, just click on this stuff. It will help you fill this out. Next we're going to do interest rate. They're about six and a half percent. I'm just going to put that in there. Points charged again, I don't think I'm going to get charged points. But if you put less than 20% down like on a house hack, sometimes you get charged a little bit of extra money. And then I'm going to do a 30 year fixed rate loan. I love a fixed rate loan. I'm going to do it for 30 years and hit next. So as you can see over here, we're already doing pretty well on this property. We've done property info on the purchase price. Now I've done low loan details. Now it's time for rent. This is one of the, you know, questions I get the most is like, how do you figure out rent? Cool thing about the bigger pockets calculator is it's already telling us that for each of these units it's $795 per month. But let me show you how BiggerPockets actually comes up with that. We have this other tool called the rent estimator over here. It's actually a tool I helped build, which I'm pretty proud of. So if you check this out, I could just type in. I'm going to, I'm just copying and pasting the address. I'm going to do this and hit search address. Right. So what this does is it pulls comps for rent near this property. So we can see that in this area there are a bunch of different comps. You know, this one's a one bed, one bath for 650 nearby. But this is a two bed, one bath. And so it's going to average. There's an algorithm that's going to look into it and tell us like here's probably the best comp right here. Two bed, one bath, similar size for 800. So we can look at each individual thing. We can learn some stuff about the property. Like that the property taxes are $2,000 a year. We can learn all this great stuff about it. The cool thing about the calculator that I really like is that this says the confidence level and it's telling you that the confidence level is low, which is not ideal. But as an investor, I appreciate the fact that this is saying like we think it's 295, but we're not super sure. So the best way to use this tool, in my opinion is use it when you're analyzing those 40 deals. Like, this is genuinely what I use when I'm doing 40 deals. When I get to that pursue level of laps, right. Remember, leads, analyze, pursue. When I'm making offers, I will do a much deeper dive into the rents to make sure that I'm accurate because that's a super important component of analysis. And the way I do that is when I look at Zillow and see what other things are renting for. But I'll also call property managers or other investors that I know in the area and sort of get their read on what it will rent for to make sure that I'm accurate. So the good thing about the calculator is it told us this at 795, but it's the important thing is that this is a duplex. So that's 795 per unit. So that would be 1590 total for gross income. So that's what I'm going to put in there. Again here we're going to put in income growth, annual income growth. I actually think it's going to be low the next year. So I'm going to say 1%. That is very conservative because when I buy a rental property, I plan to hold it for five to 10 years. And I do think that income will average more than 5 to 10, 1% per year over 5 to 10 years. But like we've been talking about, I want to be conservative in this type of economic climate. And so I'm just going to put 1% annual growth just to be safe. Then going on to the last section, as you can see, we already, you know, the calculator knows all this public information. It knows what your property taxes are. I'm going to estimate insurance around 1200 bucks. I just have a good sense for these kinds of things. But you could just Google this. So just like Google Tulsa, Oklahoma, average insurance and you'll be able to find this. I'm going to put 1200 bucks a year for this. And then it's time to do some of the variable expenses. So I think, you know, right here, repairs and maintenance, I'm going to Put you know, let's say 5%, you know, if I was you could. It depends on the property condition. But the reason I'm saying 5% is because I just said at the top of this calculator that I was going to put 15 grand into this property. That's 10 on the property price. Right. I'm going to put 15 grand into it to upgrade it. And so I don't think my repairs and maintenance are going to be the as high as they might be had I not put that initial investment in. Right. They can see I like to put 5% and capital expenditures, I'll also put 5%. Capital expenditures are similar to repairs and maintenance but they're for the big stuff. Right. So it's like for your roof or the H vac system or the foundation, whatever, you want to make an improvement to the property, that's a capital expenditure. But again because I'm Investing you know, 10% of the purchase price back into this property, I think that the capex is going to be low. I live in Europe so I'm not self managing this thing. So I'm going to say 8% as a management fees and then that is it for me. I personally like to let my tenants just pay utilities directly. Like if they have electricity they should pay what they owe. I don't need to get involved in that nonsense. So I put 0% here. If you get a duplex that's not metered separately, again I just recommend googling it. Just say like what is the Google like median or average electricity cost for a two bedroom apartment. You'll be able to find it in your area. Specify the area and you'll be able to see that water and sewers usually like 10 bucks a month garbage. I usually pay this stuff 10 bucks a month and that's it guys, that is it. That is analyzing a property. I've been you know, blabbering on here and this took me like five minutes. So if I wasn't talking to you I could probably do this in two or three minutes. And you know when you first get started this is going to take you 10 or 15 minutes. But I promise you after you do like 3, 5, 10 of these things, you're going to be able to do them really quickly and all you got to do is hit finish analysis here. So that's it. Now we can see that was all it took, just that little effort. And now we can get all the numbers for analyzing a deal. And remember what I said, 99% of properties you analyze are probably not going to be the right ones. Actually, what I said was 10, you know, you're going to want to pursue 10 properties, so let's say 90%, you probably won't want to go past the analysis stage. Let's see if this is one that we think that we would pursue. So at first glance, this is probably not up to the standard I personally would invest in. Because Even though there's $151 a month in cash flow, not bad. The cash on cash return is a little light. It said 3%, which is not great. But the annualized return, remember we talked about total profit, that's at 11%, which is good. Just for reference, the average stock market is 8 or 9%. So even though this is below my standard, it's still better than what most people get investing in index funds in the stock market. So this, if you're thinking, oh, that's too bad, it's not a great deal, don't think that just yet. Because while a lot of people think you can just go out there and find deals, and sometimes you can, sometimes you need to make your deal. And so when we were looking at this deal, I assumed at first that I would just pay full asking price. But I think the cool thing about the biggerpockets calculator is I can actually say, like, all right, 3% isn't good enough for me. What happens if I offer, I don't know, 155 instead? I can drag this here and now. I can say, all right, now it's at a 4% cash on cash return. That's not bad. What if I could offer, let's just say I can get it down to 152. What are we at here? All right, four and a half percent cash on cash return. Probably still too low for me, but now we're getting closer. So in my mind I'm thinking, all right, maybe I can pursue this deal if I can get the seller to accept whatever I put in here. 151700. How about this? During today's current market conditions, this is a trick for you all because we are in a buyer's market. A lot of sellers are willing to buy down the interest rates of their buyers. That means they pay like three grand or five grand so that the buyer gets a lower interest rate. It's really cool. Ask your real estate agent about it. A lot of sellers are willing to do this right now. So let's just say, okay, let's say our seller will buy down our rate to 6% all right, now we're talking. Now we're getting a 5.3% cash on cash return. Maybe they'll do a 2:1 buy down where I actually get my rate bought down by 2%. So let's say it goes down to 4.6%. Now these are temporary. You would only get that rate buy down for a couple of years, not permanently. But a lot of people think interest rates will go down in the next couple of years and then you could refinance. So now we're looking at a deal that I would consider, right? So these, these are big assumptions, but let's just say I can get it for 150 and I could get that seller to do a two point buy down where I can get 4.5%. Now we're talking about, first of all, an 18% annualized return. That's almost double the stock market. A cash on cash return of over 7% and you're making $360 a month. That to me is a deal that is very much worth worth pursuing. Will the seller accept this? I have no idea. Right, but this is what it's about, that LAP system, right? You need to analyze these deals so that you know what you're willing to accept. This is about that criteria, right? I knew, I said to you before that I would accept something around 7 or 8% cash on cash return. And I'm going to stick to that and I'm going to go to the seller and say I will offer you, you know, 151 and I need a two point pie down for the next two years. If the seller says yes, great. But that might only happen 1 out of 10 times. You might have to pursue, remember the lap system, you might have to pursue 10 deals before one seller accepts it. And you know, when the seller, if a seller, nine sellers reject it, that's okay because you have your crystal clear criteria and you need to stick to that. Absolutely need to stick to it. So that's what you got here. So that's the power of these calculators. It's super helpful. You can not just analyze deals quickly, but you can play with them to see what you should actually be offering sellers right now. If you scroll down, you can see some of those other metrics that I was talking about, like how much cash flow you'll be earning per year, the profit if you sold. So if you held this property for five years, you would earn $73,000, which is amazing because you're not really investing that much into it. Remember, you're putting 25% down on a, on a 155, $50,000 property. So you're probably putting 40, 50 grand into this. And you had more than double your money in five years, which is phenomenal. And you could see your analyzed return after five years is almost 18%, which is incredible. So that's. Oh, I have one more thing to show you. So one other thing here is this share button and this is super important when you're going to negotiate with a seller or you want to find private money to help you or bringing your spouse on board. But if you hit Enable Share Reporting and then hit Download PDF, you can get this. If you click on that button, you get a super nice looking PDF that shows you all of the numbers. And I think this is super important because when you go to a seller, right, and you're like, this is what I can pay you, they might, you know, take offense to that and say like, oh, you're just trying to, you know, like work me over. You're not willing to pay what it's worth. And you can show that, listen, I expect a 7% cash on cash return and these are the numbers that make it work. You can convince people, you can show them that you're not just making this number up, you are actually putting together a thoughtful offer and you are offering them what you think the value is worth. And so I think that is super important. It's just the last thing I want to show you here. Again, if you, you know, talking to a lender, you can bring these reports or anything like that. So that's analyzing deals guys. This is the lap system. I'm going to get back to our PowerPoint here, but as you can see if you use the bigger pockets calculator, it is not really that hard. You can do all the analysis that you need to do. So again, this is the last system. Just as a summary, got to get all those leads, analyze as many of them as makes sense to you, pursue the ones where you think there is a realistic path to a good deal for you and then all you need is one. Every time you run the system, you just need one. So now that we've talked about you, I just want to talk to you a little bit more about buying in this type of market that you know, it's super hard to time the market. I spend my whole life basically analyzing the housing market and I don't try and do it because it's super hard. I will try and offer below asking right now, you know, if someone says, you know, If I'm buying out, looking at a property that's 200 grand, I'm not going to offer 200 grand right away. I'm going to offer below, asking to provide myself a little bit of a cushion. But what I know and other experts know is that timing the market is nearly impossible. But time in the market is what really matters, right? So over time, if you get that amortization, that, that cash flow, that is what leads to financial freedom. And this is, you know, real estate is not a get rich quick scheme. It is about, you know, building property and portfolio over time. And when I, you know, when I encounter people and I guide people and coach people on investing. Right now a lot of people say, you know, what's happening next year? You know what's gonna happen six months from now? I don't know, no one knows. But that is okay because real estate is a long term game. It's about where your property value is and where your portfolio is going to be five years from now, seven years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And so if you can find deals that you think are going to help you over that life, life period that lifespan that 10 years, then it's not as important what happens next year. Again, don't go out and buy anything. If you think the property value is going to go down 5%, offer 5% below asking. I'm not saying to just like go spend willy nilly, but I'm telling you to just focus on the things that are, you know, focus on the long term because that's what financial freedom is all about. You're not going to get there in a year or two unless you have several million dollars already. But if you concentrate on the systems that I've talked to you about today, you can get there in the next couple of years. So let's just quickly review one. Do you have a goal in mind? Do you have a crystal clear idea of what you want and why you're pursuing financial freedom in the first place? Number two, do you know some strategies for evaluating real estate markets? There are four metrics. If you, hopefully you wrote them down, but you can go check those out or you can watch this webinar again to get those again. Do you know how to begin analyzing your next deal? Hopefully that demonstration I just did shows you that this is not hard and you can do that. You can run dozens of deals in a single day if you just put commit yourself to it. Well, I hope all those things are true and that you know how to do those things. But unfortunately knowing those three things is. It's just not enough. It's super important. But you have one more thing you need to do. Because if information was the answer, we would all be rich, right? We would all be billionaires with perfect abs, as Derek Siver says. But that's not the reality. Instead, you actually have to start going out and doing stuff you need to. Yes, it's important to learn the four steps that I just gave you, but you actually have to start taking action. So for some people, the right next step to start taking action is Bigger Pockets Pro, Bigger Buckets. Pro is a set of tools and services that we have created and it really provides you everything you need to succeed in real estate investing. We have tools, we have premium content, we have access to our community and services. It is all part of BiggerPockets Pro. It's really just like when we design these tools and I've helped design these tools over the last seven years. What we focus on is creating a one stop shop where you have basically everything you need to start and scale and manage your portfolio over the long term. Up until that point, you hit financial freedom and beyond. So if you were wondering how one subscription can really provide you with all the tools that you need for everything, let me just quickly explain some of the features and values that it has. So the first thing is that those calculators, you can go try them for free and I recommend that you do that. But after you use them five times, you do need to pay for them. But as we talked about with the LAP system, you need to analyze a lot of deals and that's what these calculators are built for. And so if you are interested in getting your first deal and you want to analyze a lot of deals, calculators are super helpful. We also have the Rent Estimator tool, which I walked you through as well. That is hard information to find, but BiggerPockets makes it super easy. We also have premium content. BiggerPockets puts out a lot of content, but we for our Pro members, we have curated videos, we have courses, we have webinar replays that really help you get to that next step, get to your first deal and build that financial freedom. We also have a couple workshops that you can attend. So David Green and Brandon Turner put together an Investing with no or low money down workshop. It's worth 200 bucks, but if you go pro, that's completely free. We also have a Finding Great Deals masterclass as we talked about in the LAP system, Finding deals, finding Leads is super important and we have a masterclass for you that you know has been sold in the past for a thousand dollars that is part of the pro subscription, so you can check that out. You also get to show the community you need mean business with your Pro badge. And I think this is super important because personally I get asked for investing advice all the time by people and I never know if they're really serious. Like are they just tire kickers, are they entrepreneurs or are they actually people who are going to take action and start investing in real estate? And the Pro badge is one way I know when I'm interacting with people on bigger pockets that they're serious, that they are willing to put some skin in the game and start working on their financial freedom. And so that's I think a really overlooked value of the BiggerPockets Pro membership. Next we have lawyer approved lease documents. So if you need a lease, if you need a break lease form, a pet, a dum dum, whatever it is. Every state in the country we have up to date legal forms for all, anything you need as a landlord. So that's super valuable. We also have tools and services which are incredible. This is new stuff. I so valuable. It's like kind of crazy that we include this in the Pro membership but you get free property management software from Rent Ready which is one of the most reputable, best property management softwares. You get that completely for free. You get discounts on Air DNA which will help you if you want to be a short term renter. You get discounts for CPA courses and you even get access to Envelope which is a tool for finding off market deals, which is really incredible. All these things cost honestly hundreds of dollars but you get them for free. The last thing I'll mention about our bigger pockets post boot camp, so you can learn from some of the most experienced investors in the world. These are only open to Pro members, but if you want to learn from Ashley Care or Tyler Madden or Avery Carr, Craig Kurlop or Matt Faircloth, any of these experienced investors that you hear and see on the BiggerPockets platforms, they teach courses that are only available to pro and you can do that if you join Pro. But all these features, all the things I'm talking about, they're great. But the number one reason to consider pro after all this, the number one reason is just simply because it works. Guys, I have worked at BiggerPockets for more than seven years now and I genuinely mean that. I have seen tens of thousands, probably 30, 40, 50,000 people pursue and get close and achieve financial freedom through BiggerPockets Pro. Because it works. Let me just read you a testimonial from Aaron C. Who said that the BiggerPockets calculators are my go to for analyzing potential properties. There's no way I could analyze the volume of properties I do without being a Pro member. I locked up my first 3 unit almost a year ago and I'm now selling for almost a 70k profit that will go towards something larger. The Bigger Pockets calculators were a huge factor in making sure my numbers were right. I also got a note from Patrick M. Who said, back in June I attended one of your webinars. Right afterwards I signed up for Pro. In the next couple of weeks I analyzed a bunch of deals. Note that guys, right? Remember, analyzing a bunch of deals is important. Eventually I found a 4 Plex. I got under contract 3 weeks later after signing up for Pro and a week later closed on another property that was six units. Big thank you to you and the entire team. Final quick tip. Sign up for Pro Annual I made my money back at the closing table. So as you can see, this is a system that really works and I do believe that it can work for you. If you're curious how much it costs, you know, you probably are used to seeing real estate coaching and mentorships that are in the thousands of dollars. BiggerPockets Pro because of what we believe at BiggerPockets is only $390 and that might be shocking. It's honestly an incredible value because at BiggerPockets our whole mission is to help anyone achieve real estate investing. We don't believe that you need to have thousands of dollars to get started. We believe that if you can afford $390 that, you know, a very reasonable amount for the amount of value that Pro offers you, you can pursue financial freedom. That said, just for attending this webinar, we're going to actually even make it cheaper for you. We're going to give you 20% off and you're going to get it for $312 if you go Pro right now. So you can save 20% off BiggerPockets Pro, you can use the Code Freedom F.

Freedom and you will get 20% off the bigger Pockets Pro membership, which is already a great deal. And if you use the Code Freedom, it's going to be an even better deal. Just use that and get 20% off. If this isn't convincing enough, I have one more thing for you guys. I have one more bonus for you and it's my book. I wrote a book, Real Estate by the Numbers with the incredible Jay Scott. And it's all about deal analysis. That's what this whole book is about. And as we've talked about, financial freedom is about being able to run the numbers and identify which deals are right for you. This book has everything you need for it. It's normally a $46 value because you get the audiobook, you get the Kindle book, you get the physical copy. That's all for free. As if you go pro today because of this webinar using that code analysis. 20. So I hope you guys will consider it. It is an incredible deal that we're offering you just use. If you want to do it, just go to biggerpockets.com pro so that's where you can go and get all these bonuses that we're offering to you on top of the normal Pro value. So BiggerPockets.comPro enter the code Freedom. If you are already pro and you want some bonuses, go to biggerpockets.compro/videos where you can look for boot camps or get some of the other content there. The last thing I'll just say, guys, is, you know, we at BiggerPockets want to stand behind the Pro membership. We truly believe that it is the key to following the four steps to financial freedom that I've walked you through today. And so if you go pro and you don't love it, we will give you all of your money back. We don't care. We'll give you 100% of your money back if you're not using it, if you're not actively working towards financial freedom, we don't want your money. We don't want you to be pro so you can try it for free for 30 days. We are very confident that you're going to see the value and all the things that we've created for you in the Pro membership and think that you'll love it. So I'll leave you with some parting words from the very wise Jim Rome. He said, if you really want to do something, you'll find a way, but if you don't, you'll find an excuse. So I encourage you, whether it's going pro or some other way, to start taking action, to take the knowledge that you've learned here today in this webinar and then start applying it in your life every single day. If you do consistent actions every single day, I promise you, you will get on that path towards financial freedom and you will get there faster than you think. That's it for me today, guys. Thank you so much for joining. I hope you learned a lot. If you have any questions for me, you can always find me on biggerpockets or on Instagram where I'm at the data Del. I appreciate you all and I'll see you again soon. All right, thanks everyone for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the webinar again. If you do want to go pro today, it is a great time to do that. Thanks again for listening. I really hope that you've learned something about pursuing your financial freedom, your financial independence, whatever those financial goals are for you. I hope you learned and have some ideas on how to take some practical action towards those goals. If you have any questions for me again, you can always find me on Bigger Pockets, either in the forums or you can just send me a direct message or. Or you can find me on Instagram where I'm Hedata Deli. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

Hey rookies. If you're watching this, we want you to apply to be a guest on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. That's right. Ashley and I are looking for amazing stories just like yours to be a part of our Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Now look, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have done thousands of deals. Even if you've done one deal, your story could help inspire the next listener.

As a rookie investor, especially if you just got your first deal, it is all fresh in your minds and you are the best person to tell your story. Give your experience on how you got it done to help someone else get their first deal.

So head over to biggerpockets.com guest if you want to be a part of our show again, that's biggerpockets.com guest and we'd love to have you on.