Building Wealth On the Multifamily Fast Track, with Josh Sterling | Real Estate to Freedom...

About Josh:

Josh Sterling would tell his 17-year-old self to skip school and get directly into real estate. Instead, he pursued a career as a commercial airline pilot, eventually rising to captain. Today, Josh pursues real estate full-time, growing his portfolio to over 260 units and built out his own property management business to boot. On this episode, he walks us through his first deals in the single-family space, how he bought these properties on his credit card, and how that struggle inspired him to multifamily. He also talks about building relationships with a few good brokers, describing how he scaled his multifamily business. He explains his approach to multifamily syndication, sharing how multifamily allowed him to quit his job, go to work on his own terms, and spend time with his family. He even allows us to look inside at his creative finance methods!

Contact him:

email

www.epicpropertymanagement.com

Automated Transcripts:

Hey Josh, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me here. I appreciate the time here.

Please give us a brief introduction about your background and how you got started.

All right. I'll give you the cliff notes version here. Grow about Lake Tahoe. California. Went to a school to be an airline pilot, basically 17- 18 years old. Graduated high school, went through four years of school and did the airline pilot career thing for about five years. During that time, the economy was also in the midst of a big recession and ended up realizing about halfway through that period that I wasn't making any money and I had no job stability and I had no control. So we started getting into real estate, my wife and I, with a single family house in southeast Michigan and grew that into what's today about 265 units in the portfolio and still growing on.

That's nice. Definitely, I want to dig into a little bit more about that. So maybe you can tell me now, what was your primary motivation? I mean obviously, as a pilot you get a lot of attention. I would imagine you get pretty decent money as the lives of all those people in those big tubes to flying through the sky.

You know, the thing for me that the initial motivation going back to the '09 time from when we got into this was the pilot career. It seems great on paper and it is if everything goes well, but what nobody tells you about that, that industry specifically, but there's a lot of other really any job if you really boil it down, is that you don't have control. You don't have stability. So somebody else can make a decision. Someone that you don't even know or have never met or seen and that can greatly impact your life. In my case, it worked out to, we got a 50 percent pay cut with about three weeks notice and that was my big kick to, to do something different, you know, but it could be anything. Companies go out of business, you could, you know, you could be downsized, you can be fired altogether. So just to have no control. I realized that I didn't want to continue the rest of my life that way.

That seems to be the case with pretty much how people are brainwashed into, into doing that same sort of thing in the job. Right?

Right, I never realized that there was another choice until that real low point when I didn't have much else to do. So, you know, my whole life I was taught to go to college, get a good job, buy your own house to live in and retire when you're 65.

Now you mentioned some single families, how you got started and they can tell us about your first deal.

Yeah, sure. So my first ever single family was somewhat of a.. it was a huge learning curve. I had no clue how much I didn't know, but I jumped in and did it. Anyways. We ended up buying a property and a little suburb. We're south of Detroit. I always clarify that we're not in Detroit, clearly can be in some areas a war zone. There's also some really thriving areas now, but we're about 20 minutes south of there in a suburb type area. Your typical house nowadays is going for 120-130. So in that at that time I found a property for a $40,000. That was. I looked at several that weren't fixed up and I'd found one that was looked, looked to be fixed-up, meaning it had new paint, new carpet kind of lipstick on a pig type of type of remodel. And so we had scraped all the money that I could gather with a little tax return money, a little bit of savings, and we were using these zero percent credit cards with balance transfers so you could get the money.

It worked out with a fee, like a three percent interest rate over a year and then you had to pay it off. So it was extremely risky, but we scraped up this, 40 grand or a little bit more than that to close this deal and thought we had basically a turnkey rental, which in theory we kind of did because we moved someone in right away. And the irony in the whole thing was there was a capital was obviously my biggest problem at the time and there was a sign in the window that...