$100M In Real Estate From Scratch

Immigrating from Vietnam to owning a $100 million rental portfolio and earning six figures in passive income, Thach Nguyen reveals all, from how anyone can start a real estate empire without having a dollar to their name, to a simple yet overlooked formula for getting two houses for the price of one. If you don't have the money at the beginning, you can still learn how to come in and find the opportunity. I'm going to get $20,000, $25,000 a month in positive cash flow for the rest of my life. That's the way to do the flipping house. And once you do that, now you've got 12 paid off houses and you can live a good life. What are some signs that you look out for of knowing whether that's going to be a good investment or not? I want to show you what's really cool, what I'm teaching my kid how to do and own right now. You ready? Okay. All right, here we go. Wow. My name is Caleb Hoevener, the show's new host, and I'm very excited to be in the heart of Seattle with real estate entrepreneur and investor, Thach Nguyen. What up, baby? What up? Hey, so glad to be here with you. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Welcome to Seattle, beautiful city of Seattle. Yes. All right. Well, let's get right into your story, if you don't mind. So tell us how long have you been in real estate and how did you get started in this business? So I got into real estate in 1991. I was 21 years old. I was the youngest realtor in Seattle and I started as a real estate agent. In 1997, I met my first mentor who says, if you want to be rich, you can keep selling real estate, but you want to be wealthy, you got to own real estate. And so he started to teach you how to own real estate. And from there, I started selling real estate to make the money. And I started taking that money and started buying real estate. And that's just how I got started. So this is your townhouse here? Yes, sir. It's five townhouses right here. We're all rooftop deck, looking all through downtown Seattle. Awesome. Should we go check it out? Yeah. And before we check it out, just to give you an idea, that lot behind there, we built five more townhouses just like this. Just FYI. So let's go inside. All right. Let's check it out. Welcome in, brother. Wow. All right. So you got started at a very young age, 21, and your career grew steadily from that point forward. So did you get any help from, say, a mentor and what sort of advice did they give you that changed your career? When I got started, I started as a real estate agent and I had a mentor named Mike Ferry taught me how to basically be a top real estate agent. And he taught me there's two group of people. There's people you know, people you don't know. People you don't know is a big group. Spend more time marketing to them so you get more business. And then on my journey, I met another mentor named Saul and he taught me a lot about investing in real estate, how to own real estate. Let's hold that right there because later on, Thatch is going to share about how a mentor drastically changed the trajectory of his life and his business. And he's going to share how you can get a mentor yourself too. How long does it take after purchasing a property to see a return on that investment? Yeah. If you was buying something to fix and flip, you should automatically know if you buy that property at a certain price and it's going to cost this much to rehab or build and you should already know what the end price will be. It should always be a profit. You should know that. And so as soon as you get done, you should make a profit automatically. Now for rental property work the same way. Now you buy property, you know what it costs to rehab and clean it up or build it in this scenario. We build brand new. You should already know what the value is. You should already know what the mortgage, what you can rent it for, and you should make profit from day one. Like this building, the rent for this is going to be probably 49,000 a month. And the mortgage on this is going to be about $25,000, $26,000 a month. So you automatically make positive cashflow every single month when they're building. How does your experience as a real estate agent grow you to be able to be a good investor in making those purchases? And how did that transition affect your overall profit margins? Yeah. You know, when I started, I didn't know all the areas. Well, like what area has better appreciation, what area has better rent? And so when I was showing houses to clientele, I started to notice, man, my client bought this house in this area of Seattle. And then, you know, 10, 20 years later, they end up selling it. I go back and sell it. And it went up massively in value. And in a certain area, it didn't do the same. So I knew I was going to buy real estate. I want to be in those areas where I have good appreciation and high rent. Okay. Have you ever wondered what the profit margins are in the real estate industry? Well, keep watching as Stach is going to share what he's seen for his profit margins on the deals he's made in real estate. What is one thing that you did differently than other real estate companies around here? And how has that driven your success? I am like a fanatic on social media. I realized that if you really want to have influence in this real estate business, you got to actually use social media. And I learned this two years ago when I started my Instagram channel. You got to give a lot of tips, free tips, free jam every day consistently about every aspect of real estate. Here's the path of generational wealth. Step one, you got to have knowledge. And that's how I grew my brand. That's how I find a lot of my deals today. Yeah. How often are you posting on these social media accounts? I post seven days a week. We post two on TikTok, two on Instagram, two on Facebook, two on YouTube shorts. And then once a week we post YouTube. So seven days a week, that really is intense. Like you're talking about. So why do you have to have that sort of consistency? You know, when I started, I want to make sure the algorithm is going to work to my advantage and frequency is one and create a good content to other ones. So I wanted to make sure I've always given a good content and I want to create a lot of volume. That's why I do it. You don't have to do it, but if you want to grow your follow fast and you got to do both. All right, that's where we're at now. And what was built here? So we're in the heart of the Seattle area. This is called Clemens City. This is a very hip area now. What used to be here was an old purple house. And then we tore it down and we put a 31 unit apartment building. These are micro apartments. We'll make this very well. It's this area. It did not require parking for any unit. Oh, because when you put a parking, all the parking garages, you don't make any money on it. How much did you invest to buy your first property and where did that money come from? Yeah. So my first property I bought, which is not too far from this location, my house was $105,000. And since I never owned a house, all I had to put down was 5% of the first time home buyer. And that 5% of 110 is about what? 5,500 bucks. And I actually got that money from selling real estate as a realtor. I saved my commission money. I bought that. And then after I bought the property, I went in and cleaned it up. I may have stayed here for maybe a few months and decided, you know what? I'm going to turn it into a rental. And I turned that into a rental from there. And it's been a rental since now. I still own it today. Today, that probably worth $750,000. So how about the viewers that want to get into real estate, but they don't have any money? What's their first step? I think the first step for those people is they got to learn the opportunity in real estate. The second thing once they learn about the real estate, you can flip property, but ultimately, you want to own real estate. If you don't have the money at the beginning, you can still learn how to come in and find the opportunity. Because if you can find the opportunity, you can actually sell those to people who have money. And then you can get a fee for every time you find these deals. There's a terminology in real estate called wholesaling. So the key is learn how to find deals. Okay. So we're at the bottom of a four-story micro apartment building. We're in the lobby and there's micro apartments above us. Yeah. There's some all along this hallway. There's something below it and there's a bunch above us also. Oh, okay. Let's go check it out. Let's go. So we are standing in a micro apartment. This is super interesting. Share with us how many square feet is this and what do you offer inside of these? Depending on the layout, it can range anywhere between probably 250 square feet up to maybe 325 square feet. Okay. So this layout right here, it's about 280 to 290 square feet. Okay. And so the concept here, we want to create apartments where it is brand new, but make it affordable for people. And that's up my alley because I want to really help, you know, the people that are more of the beginner, right? Just like I came from Vietnam, we didn't have a lot of money. And so the people I love to help are what I call the underdog or the less fortunate and then help them get a leg up. Yeah. I want to touch on that more too later in the video. But what's the price point out for a place like this? This unit right here range from $1,250 to $1,350 a month. So you have micro apartments and townhomes. So what are the differences investing in those? If you compare the site that we just talked about earlier, that lot is about also, you know, $5,500, $6,000. This lot is about the same size, but this one didn't require parking. And so when there's no parking required, then the best use is to build apartments. And so we can get more unit on the same lot size than we did on the townhouse. So at the end of the day, you make more money building apartment building and you get more rent every single month compared to the five unit row house. Okay. You do a lot of coaching. So how did you get into that and how can people find mentors nowadays? Well, when I started, I had no plan on doing mentorship. I just was just doing thatch, out building, buying property, renting it out. And when social media started two years ago, I just went on the platform and I just started sharing everything I'm learning, all the tips that I learned how to do, all the failure I've made. And the more I share all these ideas and thoughts and experience, people started DMing me asking me, man, thanks for the tip. Next thing you knew, 10 people, 20 people, a hundred people, thousands of people just start emailing me asking me, do you have a coaching program? And then about two years ago, we started the coaching business and just giving people more of a structure on how to invest in real estate. Okay. Can we get a little bit of a insight into that? How much are you making? What's revenue like on that? Yeah. My springboard company, that's my coaching business. You know, we help probably about five to 10 new students a day to come in. We generate close to 8 million bucks last year. 8 million in one to two years of starting your coaching business. So last year we did about 8 million bucks. The year before that, we did about seven this year. We're probably going to fly over 12 million bucks this year. It just, people want to learn how to do this. And I teach the real basic on how to do real estate. Most of that's what I teach is residential real estate. I don't find homes that need a lot of work, flip them, I'll fix them up, put the ADU in the backyard, keep my rental. Wow. Yeah. All right, guys, there you go. Become a master at what you do. And in one to two years, you could have a multi-million dollar coaching program too. All right. So if somebody makes a bad investment, what's next for them? First of all, you got to learn what you actually did to make that mistake. And after that, then you got to figure out, hey, if you can actually solve it, sometimes you got to take a hit on it. And if you can't fix it, sometimes better off to let it go and walk away and start fresh again. And just take that as a learning lesson. So what are some ways that you can recoup some of the losses or salvage that investment? Like if I was buying real estate and I overpaid for something, and then by the time I get done rehabbing it and the property is worth less than what it should have sold for. And sometimes either you can hold it right out of the market a little longer or take a hit, just sell it, take a loss on it, just get some of your investment back and then just move on and learn for the next time you don't make that mistake again. Have you had to do that quite a bit? Many times when I was younger. Hey, UpFlip gang. Almost 50 years ago, my family came in Vietnam with a hundred dollars in their pocket. Fast forward today, I managed to build over 300 homes and apartment buildings and complete over a hundred flips and currently have over a hundred million dollars in real estate that generate me monthly income. I want to help everyone do that. In order to do that, I've broken everything down from A to Z in my Springboard to Wealth course. I'm going to share with you the unique method and unique strategy on what I use to actually get to a hundred million dollars in real estate. The method I teach, it works in any economic cycle. In this course, you're going to learn how to find an undervalued property, how to structure your deal, learn the financing options available to you, and more importantly, set yourself for success by owning enough rental property so you can retire. It took me 30 years to develop the proven method and strategy, and I If you're going to build generational wealth for you and your family with real estate investing, I invite you to go visit the link in the description below now and learn more about my mentorship program, Springboard to Wealth. So thank you for your time. Let's get back to the video. What's the most difficult part of investing in real estate today? And what's your strategy for coping with those problems? I think the most difficult right now is the high interest rate causes the mortgage to be high. And if rent is not rising because of the economy going right now, you really have to think, how do you actually find property where you can actually add value and create a lot of value so that you can still make money in these kinds of times? And this is why the niche for Seattle right now is the multi-unit townhouse I built and the single family home and that's how I cope with this today's market and how to do real estate with the high interest rate because these type of property make good equity and good rent. So today with interest high, you got to really get creative and find the right type of property, know how to create that extra value so you can get good equity on them and where you can get more than one unit on one property so you can get better rent. So I saw on your TikTok, you've mentioned something about the mindset of abundance. Can you tell us what that is and how that's impacted your life? There's two point of view. One is there's not enough and then there's other point of view, there's plenty of enough out there. So many people focus on lack, not enough opportunity, not enough deals, not enough air to breathe, not enough, just not enough. I have learned early on from a lot of my great teacher that there is plenty opportunity, plenty of deal, plenty of friend, plenty of air so you don't ever have to worry and fight about it because I know there's plenty of opportunity out there and there's enough for everybody to share. Yeah. So you do you, you focus on your deals and you don't compare yourself to the good or the bad competition. Nope. I just say, you know what? There's plenty out there. It's enough for everybody. I'm going to give mine, you guys can get yours. Did you write a business plan and what should a new investor do in terms of planning before they purchase their first property? The business plan owner rental is pretty simple in my opinion. They got to ask themselves right now, at what age do I want to have the option to work or not work? Let's say you pick 45. Then I will say to you, how much passive income do you need to have every month to live comfortably if you're debt free? Let's say you pick 25,000. Then I would say, what's the average rate in your area? And you say it's two grand. So then we figure out 24,000 or 25,000 divided by two, you need about 12 houses. So now the business plan is you need to focus on getting and accumulating 12 houses. Once you feel like accumulating a 12 house, then just stop for a minute and start paying down those 12 houses. And once you do that, now you got 12 paid off houses and 25,000 and you're debt free. You can live a good life forever. Okay. So it's important to have a plan in place before you really get going. And on top of that, why do you want to have it? Do you want to learn how to raise capital the right way to invest in real estate? Well, episode 32 of our podcast, we interview Emma Powell of Powell Ventures and she reveals her tricks. So you follow an interesting, but often overlooked formula that includes purchasing a property with a big enough yard that you could do a second construction on that. So can you break down that formula and exactly how that works? Yeah. In Seattle right now, and that's happening all across the United States, city council are all having a problem with how do we create more housing for the growth and how do we create more affordable housing? And so what they've done in Seattle, which I see across now, all across the United States, it's happening more and more now, especially in density. They take a single family lot and they say, you know what? We want to create more housing. So they allow the owner to actually put a second structure in the backyard. Okay. Because the backyard is big enough. So what I do when I buy a property, I remodel the house in the front and then I will keep the house. And then in the backyard, I'll build another house in the back. Like for example, this property right behind you got right here. So how many times have you done this? A lot. I'm doing it right now. I got like 10 of them going right now. And it's crazy how much money you make for it. That's a fixer for like 500,000. We'll put about a hundred, a hundred grand into it. And that thing, now we all in for like seven. Those houses are worth easy eight, but then I get a backyard for free. Then I build me a house in the back, which is about a thousand square feet for 350 grand. And that house in the back, I can sell for like $750,000. You make 400 grand on the back house instantly like that. So two for the price of one? Yeah. That's crazy, right? What are the key skills that you need to succeed in real estate? Number one, you have to be someone that got to know how to go out and find the opportunity, these great deals that I'll keep talking about. You got to have the skill to go out there and go find them. Then you got to have the skill to know how to evaluate them and have multiple different lens and know what you can do with that property. And then of course, the last skill is, you know, you got to know how to basically have a team put together so you can actually build that thing out. And what type of person tends to do better in the real estate industry? For me, I actually have both skills. I love hunting for the deals and I love analyzing and putting deals together. My wife is not a hunter. She's more of a person where if I find it, I'll bring it to her. She'll analyze it and then she will execute and put it together. So my wife and I, we work together well because we both got both of those skills, the front end skill and the back end skill. What's the best business advice you've received and how did that help you grow your business? I think the best one was from my friend Saul, my mentor still today. You can be rich by flipping houses, selling real estate, but you only can be wealthy if you own real estate. Because later on, when you get into your 50s, you should have plenty of rental property and enough passive income where if you choose to want to work anymore, you can. If you don't want to work, you don't have to. So he said, that's what I call freedom, option and choice. So my goal was when I was young, go make a lot of money doing this, take a lot of cash and buy a lot of real estate holdings. And that's why today I'm a big advocate on holding real estate more than flipping real estate. So some of these just starting out, they don't have friends or other people that they know of that are in the business. So how can somebody build a good support system around them, professional networks, and how do they go about cultivating that and building that network? Yeah, that's a good question. Real estate is a scary thing when you're new and you need to hang on people who actually have done it so you can learn from them. My springboard mentorship program, we have a whole big giant community. We have students from all across the United States. We have over 3000 students. And like in Seattle, we have probably 100, 150 students. So all the springboard students in Seattle, they all hang out with each other. Now, if you're not part of springboard, for example, there's Facebook group, and then they host live meetup to go there and learn from there. But you definitely want to have some kind of a network in your town in the area where you invest, go hang out there and be in those circles monthly. So you can actually build the courage, the confidence, know your market better, and people will share that. But you definitely need to be part of a community. Otherwise, it can be a lonely, scary thing doing real estate without nobody. All right, we got some blitz questions from our viewers. So you got 10 seconds to answer these. Let's do it, baby. I'm ready. Let's go. All right. Well, thank you to The Real JC for submitting this question. This one is how did you get started on the development side? I used to sell land to my friend and today partner named Paula Velarde. And then we started to build a relationship. And then him and I started partnering together and we started building stuff together. And today we still build stuff together. That's how I got started. This one's from Ronnie Sharma. I heard about the depreciation of real estate to reduce taxes. How does it work exactly? So let's say I make on earned income a million dollars a year. And let's say all my real estate, when I start to write off all the taxes, let's say there is $200,000 depreciation. So now instead of paying tax on a million dollars, I pay tax on $800,000. All right. This one's asked by Ira. Do you use the same construction company for remodeling? Where do you find reliable workers? Yes. So I have the same general contractor for remodeling houses. And then I have a different general contractor that does new construction. Okay. And I get them from referral from other people who have used them and have good things to say about them. And that's the best way to get them through referral. What is your average monthly revenue and how does that break down between your various businesses? Yeah. So if we talk about real estate, I have probably hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of houses and apartment buildings. When I take all my revenue, the gross rent that comes every month, and I minus the mortgage, I minus all the property tax, the property insurance, property manager. At the end of the day, the positive profit cashflow every month, I get about a little over a hundred grand a month. So for example, like these, I might get $3,500 a month in rent, but I have a mortgage on it. Each one of these, I make about a thousand dollar positive profit per unit. So this is like $5,000. So every day I wake up in the morning, I still got five grand just for this, not including all the other buildings. Yep. And so with how many other properties you have, it's kind of tricky to the top number because it gets cut so much part of those mortgages. Yeah. I have probably close to a hundred single family houses and I have probably hundreds of these townhouses and apartment building all around Seattle. Wow. Yeah. How many total properties do you currently own? And what's the most common type of property? Is it residential, commercial, industrial? Yeah. In single family, I probably own maybe close to a hundred houses all around Seattle. I pretty much invest in Seattle. And then I have multi-unit like these townhouses. We probably own 50 plus, 60 plus of these townhouses. Then I own a bunch of apartment and I actually like all three of these. That's why I don't go out of this space. I do residential, I do multi-unit, and I do apartment building. To me, Dream Big is not about going wide. Dream Big to me is knowing what you initiate and going deep. What is the best way to grow revenue as a real estate business? You got to have earned income to buy rental. The more earned income you make, the more rental you can buy. The faster you make more income, the faster you can buy more rental. So there's a lot to actually create earned income. You can be a realtor. If you're an agent, sell more houses, or you can go out there and you can buy houses. You can fix them up and flip them. And then also what I do is I buy property and I actually rehab the house on the front. I put the ADU in the back. And early in my career, I didn't have enough money. So I would sell one of them, keep one of them. Probably 25% of my portfolio, I sell them to make revenue coming through the front door. So I have money to actually keep the rest of them. Okay. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah. How have you used social media to grow your business? I realized that social media now is the big giant billboard now. It's free. And so how I have used it, I have basically go on there and I just give away free gem, free education, free tip all day, seven days a week. And I make massive profit using the BRRRR strategy. And by doing that, it did help me become an expert in my real estate business. From there, a lot of people just DM me and they asked me for coaching. They asked me for, Hey, I got a deal. You want to buy it? We make money for doing that. It's crucial that people learn how to do social media today, because pretty much 99% of my business comes from social media now. What tools and strategies do you use to keep track of and manage your leads? View Machine is an app that we use a lot to help us find the fixer. They help us track how to actually drive them in a nice area. So you don't lose time. And it has a CRM in there where we could track, you know, and post all our lead in there. It has a mailing system that go out of there. So we use a lot of that and I have a little CRM on a side that I do, but anybody can have that service because they make it available for everybody. You are managing so many different projects and your financials are probably all over the place. So how do you manage that? Keep track of that? What software do you use? Yeah. So what's funny about it, I don't even know all the details, like software. My wife is the head boss of the financing. My brother-in-law and his wife, they manage all the property. They're the property managers. So basically we create a whole bunch of different business banking accounts. We have a bank account for all the residential and then all my commercial, we have our own banking. So when rent comes in, if it's residential, it goes to this bank. If it's commercial, all the rent goes to this bank. And then our property manager, which is my brother-in-law and his wife, they will take a look at that and they go, okay, we got bills for all these houses. We have bills for all these commercial buildings. They write all the checks. They confirm with my wife, Cami. And then basically after they pay everything out, then the leftover every month is basically our profit every month. And that's how they manage it. What are the key metrics that somebody should be looking after when they're looking over their financials and real estate investing? Oh yeah, that's a good one. Let's just say real simple. You got to make sure that when you get your rent and you got to make sure you pay attention to all the different things like, you know, mortgage insurance, right? Property manager, right? All these fees, you got to make sure you track those because people, sometimes they don't look at them. They write the check and they don't realize sometimes there's extra bills in there that not supposed to be in there that somebody wouldn't pay attention and you end up paying a lot of expenses out and you don't know. My wife, Cami and brother-in-law and his wife, they look at all the line items. They make sure that we're not paying more than we should be paying. So they track it, every little detail on the bills. So what is the best place to find properties to invest in? Again, if I'm just using Seattle, for example, you have to do your research through say, multiple list of service. Redfin, we have a lot of, you know, different apps that we use like, you know, deal machine, right? They have Apple and you can figure out what area does better than others. Then you got to figure out what area that does well. And then you want to go in that area and go, what is doing well in this area? And what's good about this area is the city of up zone, single family zoning to multi-unit zoning. And that's why I like buying these because the play and the hidden gem is you buy an ugly house and then you tear it down and you put five townhouse on it. And that's where you make big money. Okay. So you talk about using Redfin, Zillow. Can somebody go and do that on their own? Or do they have to have a real estate license and use a professional to find those properties? Nope. You can do it on your own. You can figure out, you know, in Redfin, what area that's hot, where are people buying, right? Where's all the hotspots. Then when you see those are the hot items, everybody is buying those. Then you want to go out and find, where can I find a house that needs some work that has a backyard where I can I can do the same thing. And that's how I actually did it. So you've touched on this a little bit, but how do you choose the properties that you invest in? And what are some signs that you look out for of knowing whether that's going to be a good investment or not? Yeah, that's a good question. I look for a home where the house need a lot of work. The house sits more to the front and there's a yard in the back. And when there's a yard in the back, I know I can put the ADU in the back and I want to make sure there's an alley. This is very important and even better if I have a corner and it has to be in the area where I can get high appreciation and the area where I can get higher rent. Okay. And so those are the component. And I do the same thing when it comes down to multi-unit and apartment buildings. I look for those kinds of little things that really separate a good deal and average deal. Okay. Now, on the other hand, what are some red flags for an investment property? And what about those red flags would give an investor pause? There's so many red flags. People can watch my social media, TikTok, Instagram. I share a lot about that, but I'll give you a couple. One, if you buy a property that has bad design or bad feng shui, for example, right? Meaning the door is facing a certain way. Sometimes you can't change that. You have to re-get the whole time, have to redo the whole thing. Sometimes it ain't worth it no more. Another one is buying a house or buy property next to like elementary school or high school. There's so much traffic there. Or another one, if you ever develop or build new construction, try to stay off the main drag. Sometimes when you have to bring lumber in or you hook up utility, you got to shut down the street. And when you shut down the street, you're paying for the shut down the street and it costs a lot of money to do that. Those are red flags. Okay. What about those common things that people think about like the age of the home and the foundation and things that you can filter on Redfin? That's right. If you are buying a house that's nice to live in, you definitely got to watch out for the age or foundation problem. But if you're an investor, you like that because you want the house to really be really tired. A lot of problems because you get out of your price and then you can always rehab and fix it. It's a negative for people who are buying it who don't know how to fix it up. Yeah. But it's a positive for an investor like me because we want them like that. All right. So tell us about the difference between investing in real estate and flipping properties. And which one do you think is better for a new person into the real estate game? Yeah. So when you're new in the game, you probably don't have a lot of money or credit to actually own real estate. So of course you got to go out and flip property. You got to buy it, you got to fix it up, and you got to flip it. Now, if you're smart, you're flipping. And same time you're flipping, you're making money. Make sure you don't spend all that money. Save some of that so that you can actually buy some real estate tomorrow. Yeah. At the same time, get your credit ready so you can actually own real estate. There used to be a house right here, the purple little house. Most investors would have sold this property. They would have fixed it up and flipped it and probably made maybe 150, 200 grand. Yeah. But I see something bigger. I tore down and I built a 31 unit apartment building. This building, I'm going to have probably close to $2 million worth of profit. And then every month I'm going to get probably 20, 25,000 a month in positive cashflow every single month for the rest of my life. That's the way better deal than flipping a house. Yeah. And how many years do you see until you pay this property off? I would probably say in the next property campaign year, I get this thing paid off. And then it's just straight cash income. And when that's paid off, this is probably going to bring me 40 grand a month every single month of life. Yeah. Because it's going to appreciate. That's it. That's it. What are the key roles of team members on a real estate business team and how many employees do you have right now? Yeah. So first of all, my wife, my wife has an assistant that managed a lot of the backend. And then I have Lorenz who handled the social media. And then also myself and my brother, we actually go out and handle basically how to find a deal. And then I have a lot of my students that I've trained in Seattle. They go out and find deals around Seattle and some of them they buy and they can't buy them all. Then they also become my army to find deals, which is a great way. I don't have to pay them. But for employees, my wife, sister, and then Lorenz, we pay him. And that's my whole entire staff. Now, when it comes down to the construction, then we hire a general contractor. Like this building here, we hired my friend, Chris Walsh. He owns CMAQ. He's got an all payroll. We pay him to build for us. So the only person to pay out of my payroll is Cami's sister and Lorenz and everybody else, all contract that I pay. I keep my company very clean and small. Yeah. So a little bit of a family business. That's pretty much it. All right. So what are your profit margins on your revenue? And is that typical for the real estate industry? Yeah. So when I buy a house called a purchase price and whatever cost of rehabbing, I like to be all in that 70% of the value when it's done. So let's say a finished product worth a million bucks. I like to be all in purchase price and my margin is 30%. So is that typical? No. Most investor 15 to 20% max. What I learned about real estate is the higher the standard, the more peace of mind you have. The lower the standard, the less peace of mind you have in real estate investing. So what are some of the tips and tricks that you have for how to get to that 30% level? If most people are at the 15% margins. That's right. Two things. One, you got to know what type of property to buy, where you can actually add a lot of value to it. Like for example, buying a single family home and then putting something in the backyard. The key is for the front house, you got to make sure you got to buy it where it's more beat up. So you can create some value there. And then when you put the second building, you add a lot more value together that gives you the 30%. Yeah. Then the second part is you got to have standard. If you know, it's not going to be at your standard walk, but in order for you to walk, you got to have more leads. And most people, they don't spend time marketing enough to get enough lead. So they definitely got to buy what they can buy. So earlier on, you mentioned that you found a mentor that shifted the trajectory of your life and you have tips for how somebody can find a mentor of their own. Tell us about that. Yeah. So when I met my mentor, Saul, he was the owner of the John Scott real estate office I work at us. And Saul says, look, come to my office and just be you. And if anyone want to help, you know, how to do better real estate, just give some tip. In return, what I do, I teach you how to make money when you're sleeping. And I was like, I love it. So Saul taught me when you're 21, 24 years old at that time, he said, you got to think beyond, you got to think long-term. You want to think if you're 50 years old, how much cashflow do you want to have every month coming in every month where you can actually have the option of work or not work. And he says, okay. And he asked me how much. And at that time I said, if I had 25 grand a month, when I tell him I'm 40, 45, I'm good. Then he said to me, how many houses do you need to actually have that happen? What's the average rent in Seattle? So I realized I need about 15 houses bought and paid off at a $2,000 rent, somewhere right around the zone. And I realized after that, I need to go make some money selling real estate. And I take all the money and I start buying 12 houses. My focus was buy houses, buy houses. And when I got to around 12, I started paying them down and 12 times 2,000 is $24,000 a month. And that was my biggest tip I learned. And that's been my tip all the way since. And that's why I teach other people the same thing. Yeah. So that mentor, the goal that that mentor gave you of 15 houses, you've far exceeded that. Yeah. And how can somebody find their own mentor? Like you were mentioning? Find someone, you can find them on, you can read about them. You can actually watch them on YouTube. You can listen to podcasts. You can go into different networking. Someone that's actually doing and have the life that you want. Ask them, can you interview them? Ask them, can you work as an intern? And people like that, they love to actually help other people also. Let's get back to that point you were making about helping underprivileged families, raising money for kids. Tell us what you do and how you got involved with these organizations. So it all started because when we came from Vietnam in 1975, my dad, he was a social worker in the Seattle area. He helped a lot of the refugees come over here and get housing and get situated. And when he passed away in 2007 from cancer, at his eulogy, a lot of people showed up and said, man, your dad was amazing. He helped so many underprivileged people. And in Seattle, if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be where I'm at. And right before my dad passed away, I asked my aunt, why did my dad leave so early? And my aunt says, because your dad is getting old and your dad is going to hand the baton to you. That way you can go out there and do more of his works as you're younger. So then that started for me. And so I started partnering up with a lot of non-profits around Seattle. There's a non-profit in Seattle called First Place. And so I started buying houses, building houses, and I was renting them to First Place. And then First Place will house these families to give them a place to come out of the homeless shelter until they get back on their feet, until they can go out there and buy their own houses. About two and a half years ago, I partnered with the Seattle Sounders. So the Seattle Sounders has a campaign called 26 by 2026. And so they came to me two years ago and asked me, would I like to be involved in maybe fundraising to do two fields over in this area called New Holly. New Holly is where I grew up when I came from Vietnam. And so I went and took a look at it and I said, what does it take to do this field? It's going to take $400,000 and Seattle Sounders is going to match it. So I made a commitment two years ago, I was going to fundraise and I'm going to do that. So last year I raised $450,000 and that field was done now. And we're going to have a grand opening here in a few months. Wow. Let's go. Come on. And then this year I want to do six, seven more fields. And I got all my vendors that I do work with and I told them what I'm doing. They decided, you know, I want to help. So they donated all the material, all the cabinet, all the flooring, all the lighting, all the window. They donated like $120,000 worth of materials and products, labor. And we built this house and then we just sold it the other day. And a hundred percent of that proceed is going to go donated to the $400,000 I'm going to raise. So the house is sold, it's going to close here in a few months. We're probably going to get over $200,000 of that. So together in the last two years, I've probably raised close to $900,000 to $1,000,000 that I'm going to build a lot of soccer field with the Seattle Sounders for the underprivileged kids. That's amazing. Now, why should I give back with investor? It's in my wheelhouse. It's in our wheelhouse. You're already doing it. Go out there and fix the house, flip it, and then donate one of the houses, you know, as charity, and then everybody wins. And that's why they should do it too, to give back. It feels good. What is it like being in business with family and what's the best part of it? Yeah. Fortunately for us, all family get along very well. It's awesome because, you know, Cam and I, we go out and find the opportunities. And then my family, they manage the property. They pay the bill for us. Anything that's wrong with it, you know what I mean? They fix it. On top of being successful in this business, I think the biggest blessing is being able to teach my kid how to invest in real estate, teaching them passive income, teaching them generational wealth. And so, I want to show you what's really cool, what I'm teaching my kid how to do and own right now. You want to go see it? Yeah, let's go check it out. Let's go check it out. Let me show you. Okay. You're going to be impressed when you see this, my friend. All right. Can't wait. And the goal is to inspire all the viewers to do the same thing for their kids. You ready? Okay. All right, here we go. This is the laundry room. There is three floors of laundry room. So, in my last apartment building that we built, my kids, Russell and Hudson, they're a junior and a freshman now, but my old apartment building, they needed three sets of wash and dry machine. And I said to them, Hey, you want to learn how to create passive income? And then they said, yeah, how? They said, look, why don't you and brother, you got to put your own money up and you buy the wash and dry machine because you got money. Okay. And I think back then it was like to buy three sets of wash and dry machine, it was like eight or $10,000. That was pretty much all their money put together and they had, they're like, well, I don't have any more money. We figured out it's going to, they got to make about 1500 bucks. I asked them how long would it take to actually make your money back? Six, seven months, after that I told them, man, it's all passive income. It's all positive after that you winning. So they said, they did it. They bring in 1500 bucks a month, 1500 a month, a month from how many machines? There are three machine over there. Now we're in the new building. They just bought all the wash and dryer in this room and the other laundry room. And you know, it costs them a little more, but when this is done, all the machine in here and the other units down below, they probably got to bring in probably two grand a month on all of it. So this is their way, how they learn how to actually own their own machine, buy their own machine. And on top of that, when something's wrong with it, they will fix it themselves with their own money. Daj, thank you so much. It's been an amazing time with you. Dropped a lot of good nuggets. Thank you, sir. I'm sure our viewers really appreciate it. So we appreciate you. Awesome. And that's a wrap. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. Before you go, make sure you check out our other interview with Mike Andes, where he talks about getting into real estate investing for the first time and other advice for first-time investors.