I Bought a Cash-Flow Machine with $0 of My Own Money (Here's How I Did It)

So this building right here makes us $21,000 per month in cash flow after investors are paid, after expenses, $21,000 every single month without us having to chase tenants, having to get the call at 3:00 AM in the morning when the toilet's flooded or whatever happens. $21,000 per month. If you don't know who I am, my name is Jonathan Cronin. Just not too long ago, I was in full-time ministry making $40,000, $50,000 a year and trying to do single-family Airbnbs on the side. And then it was a deal just like this that just changed my life. And so what I want to do in this video is break down exactly how we did it, how we got into deals like this using capital partners to fund the deal and how we are able to generate $21,000 off a 45-unit apartment complex. So let's dive in. First thing, before we jump into the numbers, you got to understand that most people get hung up when they see a deal like this because either one, They are intimidated by the numbers. They look at the finances and they're like, man, there's no way I could do that. Or they feel like they don't have the capital or they feel like these deals aren't accessible to them.

All right.

And so just so you understand what I did and where I was is what most people do and what everybody talks about is that you got to get into single-family first, start with small deals.

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And what you're going to do is you're going to go and find a small deal, duplex, triplex, single-family, even worse. You're going to go find to bank to put the loan on there. You're going to put in on a $200,000 house.

You're going to put in $40,000, $50,000 for the down payment.

That's $40,000, $50,000 of your capital parked in the deal. And then you're going to fix it up, renovate it, get it up to where it needs to be, put a tenant in there, all for what? An extra $200, $300, maybe $400 a month. You got to do that 15 to 20 times just to make considerable income and replace your $10K a month or whatever it is. Whereas one of these deals can pay you $1 million, $2 million from the equity increase plus cash flow plus forced appreciation. Now you say, if it was so good, so easy or so good, you know, then why isn't everybody doing it? Well, number one, because it is— you got to find the best deals. You got to learn how to get in. And the best deals are off market. They're from relationships. Right. We bought a $7.2 million deal, a 90-unit., and other people were bidding $10 million for it. But we had the relationships, we had the, the stance and the positioning to be able to acquire that property and be able to bring the most confidence to the closing table, right, to the sellers. And then number 2, people don't have the capital. You gotta learn how to access capital. You learn those 2 things, how to find really good deals and how to acquire capital, and you're dangerous in this industry. So I want to walk you through the numbers Let's break it down right now.

All right. So let's break down the deal. And by the way, you know, when me and my partner Larry first connected and we're starting to do deals together, I'm starting to learn this stuff. And it was over my head. I was like doing it. It's like Chinese, you know, if you're Chinese, it's like American, you know what I'm saying? So it was, it was hard to understand. But the more I got in the room, the more I got with Larry, the more I kept just getting in the weeds, more understood this. And so the first deal, one of the first deals in the portfolio, was The COVID in Columbus, Georgia. All right. So if you look that up, you'll see our property. It is a 45-unit property. So 45 units, first deal. All right. Now let's talk about the numbers. What are the numbers for this deal? We bought this deal for $2.4 million. All right. $2.4 million purchase price. Purchase price, $2.4 million. We put a little bit of money into it, but it was already pretty good. It didn't have a whole lot of renovations. And that is really important if you're just starting out. Don't go into a deal where you've got a heavy renovation that you've got to conduct on the deal, right? It's increasing the risk. It's increasing the lag time, right? The time it takes to get it from where it's at. Typically, if it's a heavy renovation, you don't have cash flow. So we buy out the gate for cash flow and then the longer it takes, if it's not cash flowing, to get money in there to start getting income and start being profitable, that's called lag time. Right. And so the market can do all kinds of different things during that time. So you want as a newer investor, you want to minimize the risk. But we bought it for $2.4 million. Down payment was $500,000. So we raised this $500K. I'll talk in a little bit about how we raise capital, but we didn't put any of our own money into the deal. And you say, why didn't you put any money, any of your own money in the deal? Simple. All right. People want to be a part of these deals. We can better leverage our capital if we spread it out over multiple properties. Right. But if people are knocking on our door trying to get in these deals, we're going to let them in. Right. And we have plenty of investors after acquiring, learning the systems to attract capital partners, they want to— I'm telling you, if you are in single family and you raise capital in single family, there's people that want to be a part of single family, but there's way more investors who want to be a part of these deals. So $500,000. What happened? Here's the next thing. So we increased the rents to market rate. All right. So we added value to the tenants. We increased the quality of life to the tenants. We made sure we took care of them, took better care of the property. So it made sense that we would get the rents up to what they're supposed to be. So we bought the deal under market rents. Down the street, there's another property that's charging more. And so we got the rents up to around $1,100, $1,200 per month. Okay. For this particular property, 45 units. All right. So currently today, The property is bringing in about the gross rents, $620,000, $620,000 per year. Now, our NOI, the net operating income after expenses, after repairs and maintenance, after management fees, after marketing, leasing costs, everything like that, our net operating income, which is how these deals are valued, which I'm going to get to in just a second because this deal after 12 to 15 months, I want to say, we had increased the value another $2 million. So we increased the equity $2 million. And this is how we did it. The NOI, $387,000. $387,000 in NOI. Our, our mortgage on the property— mortgage is $100,000. $133,000. $133,000. All right. Now we have the investor, we gave them 10% preferred returns on their money. So in other words, we give them $50,000 a year on that $500,000. However, after the refinance, which was around 12 to 15 months after the refinance, we gave them half their money back. All right. And now we're in a place where we're giving them the rest of their money back. And so that's— we don't even pay them anymore, right? That's not even— we don't pay that 10% anymore. So all we have is the NOI minus our mortgage. What does that give us? That gives us a profit of about $254,000 per year. This property pays us $21.6K per month cash flow on a $0 investment. We put $0 into this thing. All it cost was our time to find this deal. It cost us guaranteeing the loan as well. Now, if you are somebody that— if you don't have the ability to guarantee the loan, which the 3 requirements from the bank, they're looking for somebody to, to get, I believe it was $1.7 million or something like that for the bank loan. They need you to have a net worth equal to the loan amount. They need you to have 10% liquid of the loan amount. And they need you to have experience operating a deal like this, right? Or you need to have a relationship with that banker that gives them confidence that you have this kind of experience. Okay. Now, if you don't have one of those three, you need to partner with somebody who does, which is me coming in here, partnering with Larry. All right. So this deal, if you want to get in this deal right here, you've got to learn three key things. Number one is how to find really good deals like this. Number two is how to bring this capital in. And number three is how to actually get in there and underwrite and assess these deals, what it can actually return for you and your capital partners. Because we gave these people— or actually, it was just one person that put in this $500K. We gave them 10% ownership of the deal. Now, that may sound wild, but the reality is, if you do the math, they ended up walking away with 30-plus percent annualized return. You say, why would an investor want to get into a deal, put all the money up for only 10% of the deal. Because if you add up their preferred return, plus the equity increase on this deal, they end up walking away with 30% plus, 35% annualized return. And that's not a bad deal, right?

Anybody would do that deal.

So this is how you make money. This is enough to replace 2 or 3 full-time incomes for the average American. So if I had to start all over again, what would I do?

Number one, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what I would do. Number one is going to be going narrow. All right, what you want to do is choose a buy box. So it's what you're willing to buy, what types of properties, what types of financing, all those different things. But I'm gonna be very specific. If I were to start over, I'd be very specific. I'd draw a 100-mile radius of myself, maybe in a certain market. If you don't want to be investing in your market, then draw a 100-mile radius of another market. Learn that market, learn every detail of that market, understand what deals are going for, what deals that, you know, and you're going to invest in light to moderate value-add. We're not going into heavy guts, right? I talked about that already, but you do not want to go into properties where it's going to take a long time to get it to cash flowing, right? We're not doing new construction or doing heavy value-adds, right? We're doing light to moderate value-adds. From there, we're looking at Class C+ to B properties. This is about as low as we want to go from a standpoint of the type of property, right? This was built in the '70s, but it's been recently fixed up and it's in a good area, right? So that's one of the big things. Draw a 100-mile radius, you know, light to moderate value-add, value-add apartments in Class C+ to B locations or, or types of properties that can increase value. We're looking for forced appreciation.

All right.

And then you're going to get very clear on how much you need to replace your income. Number 2 is you got to build relationships and systems to find good deals. All right. The best deals. We are in a buyer's market right now. But the thing about that is it's not going to be any buyer. It's going to be about a buyer that brings confidence, that brings credibility. 'Cause like I said, we bought a $7.2 million deal where other people were bidding $10 million, right? We bought that deal because we leveraged relationships. So you gotta get in the room with other people. And what's really good, if you need a partner, right? If you, if you need a partner to help you get credibility, find somebody who wants to be in there. Find somebody who's got a million dollars in assets, who already has 10 units or 20 units or whatever that is. Partner up with them, right? Or just understand the dynamics of how to create trust in today's market because brokers are hungry to get you the best deals if they know you can close. All right. So you need to be able to leverage partners. The third thing is raising capital is a system. Number one thing, you've got to learn how to raise capital as a system, not just going to friends and family.

Right.

So raising capital, I mean, you could choose one or two lanes. And you just want to go all in there, right? So you could be going to events and doing event funnels. You can be, you know, just using bankers, using different people, loans brokers. Loan brokers are very important. You can do webinar funnels, you can do ads, you can do— here's a big one right here that a lot of our people that we help get break into this type of property, they go and find someone whose specialty is capital raising. They find someone who's willing to go all in on capital raising. Maybe they have a big network, or maybe they have systems in place. Go partner with people. There are so many people that want to raise capital. They're literally going to be able to get a GP, an equity stake in the property, as an owner, as an active operator, for coming in and helping you raise capital. Alright, now the big thing that we do, that we've been able to generate over $100 million in capital raised. And, and just recently, over the past 4 months, over $50 million has been raised just through our group. All right, $50 million just in the past 4 months. It's July 2026, about to be August. Just in the past 4 months. That's how powerful of a time we're in right now and how much people want to invest in deals like this. If you can just put the systems in place and build trust, right? Capital raising is simply building trust at scale.

To scale.

And so the way that we've been able to raise so much money is, is for us specifically, we picked the lane of webinar funnels. All right, so we put on webinars weekly and we just go on Zoom and we invite people to the Zoom, right? We use social media, we use ads, we use different things, but you can get out there. People want to be a part of these. You invite people from free traffic, from paid traffic, or whatever it is you want to use had a guy come to our event and speak. He just raised $40 million in 12 months just on Instagram. One guy, $40 million in 12 months just on Instagram. That's how powerful social media is. If you know how to get your message out there, you know how to talk, you know how to position yourself. So webinar funnels is a massive opportunity. Get in there, hone that. That builds trust and very quickly, and it allows people to come in and place their capital.

So I hope that helps.

If you want to know anything else about the topics I'm sharing right now, drop in the comments, ask questions, let me know what you want to learn about, and I'll go deep into whatever it is that you need help with. We're out here, we want to help people. We're a faith-based group. We want to help people drive impact. Again, I met my partner. The only reason I'm standing here today, the only reason I'm at this apartment complex is because my partner, my business partner, Larry, donated a house to a ministry I was leading. All right, so in other words, this is about impact. If you're the type of person that wants to make an impact, you're the type of person that wants to grow and scale your income for your family, for generational wealth, for, uh, ministry, whatever that is for you, I want to encourage you, connect with us. Let us know what you need help with, and I'll drop a link in the description. Book a call with our team. We'd love to connect with you and see if our mastermind, which helps people find, fund, and scale their portfolios in the next 6 months— we typically help people who have just a few units, we go to 50 units plus in just 6 months, all right? And so that's what our mastermind is. If that's something you want help with, you want to get around the room with people that are high level and that are going to the next level, that are hungry to grow, book a call with our team. We'd love to see if it'd be a good fit for you. But, uh, God bless you. Thanks for checking it out. Have a great day.