In this informal YouTube discussion, hosts Cody and Christian (Speaker A) reflect on the three core lessons they discovered while growing a rental portfolio from a handful of units to roughly 150 properties in under two years. The first lesson is that real‑estate projects take far longer than most investors anticipate; typical renovation cycles that seem to be a few weeks stretch to many months, especially when coordinating multiple contractors, permits, evictions, and unexpected issues like bug infestations. The second lesson is that costs balloon dramatically—budget estimates often need to be doubled or even tripled. They cite per‑unit renovation budgets that jump from $5,000 to $15,000, a 38‑plex that was initially budgeted at $0.5 million but ultimately cost $1.5‑2 million, and the need for extra capital to cover vacancy loss and unforeseen expenses. The third lesson is that scaling requires a far larger human workforce and strong people‑management skills. Their operation now involves about 40 contractors, a 7‑person property‑management team, and an 8‑person staff at the Robin Hood Village Resort, illustrating that a solo‑entrepreneur model cannot sustain growth beyond a few dozen units. They also discuss the pandemic‑driven cash‑flow shock, the importance of having access to capital, and the cultural principle that happy, ownership‑driven employees produce better results. The conversation ends with a reminder that any large goal demands more time, money, and people than initially expected, and that fostering a positive, ownership‑focused work environment is essential for long‑term stability.
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It takes a lot of humans to go towards a huge goal. Like, you need people and you need to be really good at managing people. Here's the top 3 things that we learned scaling to 150 units, counting our resort.
Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cody, this is Christian, and today we're talking about our biggest learning lessons, of which there are 3, when it comes to building up your portfolio in 2 years or less. Now we did this from zero— I had 30 apartments, he had 4— to now 150 rentals together. And number one, it takes more time than you think to get your projects done. Numbers can look phenomenal, however it will take you more time to execute on it.
The big thing that I learned going into this was the amount of time that it actually takes to do anything in real estate is always longer. Like there's things that you just know are gonna be hard in Washington State, like I mean, like, evictions are gonna take a long time. So if you have to get people out, it's gonna take a while to cycle. But little things like, hey, how long is it going to take to renovate? Logically, a unit could be turned in just a few days. If you have a ton of units though, and you're doing a bunch of renovation, it actually does take months and months and months. You have to build out teams of contractors. Those contractors have to coordinate with the other contractors. If you have issues that come up, electric, plumbing, roofing, anything that needs to get permits. Like, your projects— and I see this all the time when people start— they plan for a really quick project. They do their math based on, hey, I'm going to be able to get rents up in, say, 3 months, 6 months. Most projects take 18 months realistically to turn property.
Absolutely. And it also, in addition to taking more time, it's going to take a lot more money. Things cost money. If you want to scale your team, if you want to get your renovations done, if you want professional management to do your big CapEx deals, it's going to take a lot more money than you project. I promise you that. A lot of people go into this thinking that they can just wing it and pay it off with their cash flow. You usually will have to inject more capital into your deals than you're projecting. So make sure to at least double your budget when you're going in. And if you have extra money, phenomenal. But When you don't, just remember that we told you this first.
And in many cases, you have to triple that budget. I see a lot of people go into renovation projects saying, hey, I expect $5,000 per unit. It's going to be expensive. I'm going to make it happen. $15,000 is not uncommon for a unit that needs a heavy turn, or if you find anything that delays your project, it's really easy to bump from $10,000 to $15,000. We've had units where we're mid-project and we learn, oh, there's actually a bug infestation that we weren't even aware of. Well, that can delay your project 4 to 6 weeks right there, getting that remediated. That's going to be a few extra thousand dollars. You have another thousand or so dollars of vacancy loss in a lot of our buildings. It gets really expensive really fast. When we got started, I believe we set a budget of, hey, we can do a lot of— like, a lot, lot on our 38-plex with half a million dollars.
Realistically, we already burned more than that.
I was gonna say we've burned through that. I think we've done that this year already, and we did a lot last year. That project completed is probably about $1.5 million, maybe $2 million if we really go all out to get that property pristine, exactly where it needs to be. Now, we made money along the way. That project was fantastic, but you need to go into these realizing whatever time I think it's going to take double it. Whatever money I think it's going to take, double or maybe even triple that, because there are a lot of expenses that come up here. There's times where we look at each other like, we're not rich enough to own the stuff that we own, which is just true. It takes a lot of money to run these. Uh, you need to have access to capital.
Yeah. And then number 3 is you're going to need more people than you think. When you're getting started, you might be able to do the the solopreneur thing and run it yourself. I did that for a couple years, then I met Christian, and then we scaled up the teams. Now we've got up to 40 people at any given time working on the portfolio. You need people more so than you will think in the beginning. If you want to scale up past 100 units, 200, 400 units, you're going to need to build out your team. And that is a lesson that we learned the hard way, because when we had a bunch of vacancies and not a solid team, that was a rough place to be.
Yeah, during the vacancy process, uh, we had a few things happen at once, and this was planned, like we knew this was coming, but the government support that happened through the whole pandemic thing, that all dried up, which was going to happen. Governments have a habit of spending their money, and so they ran out of money. That happened at the same time we were doing a bunch of unit turns. So now we have a bunch of non-pays, a few evictions we need to do, a few people getting onto payment plans, and a bunch of renovations. This suddenly goes from, hey, we're cash flowing a lot, to, hey, we're still cash flowing a lot, just negative. Again, planned. We knew this was happening. Just everything happened to happen at the exact same time. When you're floating through these things, we had a construction team of about 3 people turning a lot of units. Nothing was moving even— I mean, not even like within a ballpark of fast enough. It would have taken years for this team to try to get our vacancy problem fixed. Today we have about 40 people— that's just contractors— working on the portfolio at pretty much all times. We have a 7-person property management team of all full-time, part-time employees, both in and out of market. And the Robin Hood Village Resort has 8 employees, and we are short-staffed by 1. It takes a lot of humans to go towards a huge goal. Like, you need people, and you need to be really good at managing people because people are variables. We talk a lot on this channel about variables. People are the biggest variable consistently that you'll work with in business. One of my favorite sayings: business easy until you have people.
Yep, and there's only 24 hours in a day till you add people, so best figure out how to add more people and get them going in the same direction as your ship. Because it's great to have people on the ship, but it's also great to have a fleet of everyone going in the same direction towards the same goal. And it just adds a lot more stability to your universe in the long term.
So in summary, we have everything takes more time than you expect by a lot.
Costs more people— or costs more money.
It costs more money, and it does cost more people. People do not come for free, so that still works. It does cost more human resources, and you want to work with people. I'm gonna add one more thing to this. You want to be a great person to work with. Happy people do good work. It is very consistent. It is in your best interest financially and just altruistically to be fantastic to work at with. If you have all these people working alongside you with a common goal where they feel ownership in, hey, this is a company or a property that I am helping make better and I have a piece in that— if they have that feeling of ownership they're gonna work really, really well with you and for you. And that's what you wanna do. You wanna set a big goal, just know, a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of people to hit that goal. That is something that we learned in 2 years. Can't wait to see what we learn in the next decade.
In addition to goals, one other thing you should hit is the like button. We appreciate you following along, and we'll see you next time. Mm-hmm.
