A good life gets in the way of a great life.
My real estate investing journey started in college, but it wouldn’t be for several more years before I started building a business to replace my income.
Once married, my wife and I started investing in real estate together and within a few years I was able to quit my job.
Transcript:
Tom Cafarella 00:00
Fast forward a little bit. I know, you know, time has passed. What do you kind of like doing now? Like, what’s your-what’s your? What have you been up to? How did that kind of transform from doing a couple of wholesale deals to where you’re at today?
Chris Bounds 00:14
Me and my business partner, she ended up moving away to different city after graduation, I moved to Houston, got a high pain sales job. This is where a good life gets in the way of a great life. I don’t have any debt, I get a really high paying sales job right out of college, I was making like 80-$90,000 a year with no debt plus I have a roommate, so my living expenses is half.
I’m actually doing really well, I still have two rental properties from the first four deals that I did while in college. I have that. But as far as real estate actually didn’t do anything extra until 2011, when I got married. Now I’m starting to think about the future and college funds and retirement and all these other stuff. I ended up going to my wife and telling her within weeks of getting married, I told her I was like, “Hey, babe, I want to start flipping houses again.”
She tells a story a lot better than I do, because the big guy dropped this bomb on her lap and she grew up more traditional, you just work until you retire. She went along with it and we ended up doing the same thing I did in college, knocking on doors for pre foreclosures, a lot of deal first month ended up being one of our top grossing deals ever. Very significant deal because it’s ultimately what allowed me to go full time in real estate.
Knocking on this door of this pre foreclosure. There was the one and only deal that she actually went on the inspection with me, smelled horrendous. I mean, you know what the deals are. I smelled money. She smelled all the other things in the house. She politely excused herself while I took that deal down, went into Britain and out for a few years and then sold it for well over $100,000 gross profit.
Fast forward that, I ended up getting licensed in 2014. I still had a job. But in 2015, that deal, we sold for 100,000. Another deal that we had bought shortly after that, that deal that Jamie and I bought together sold for about 120,000 gross profit. Then we had another deal that we had bought earlier that we had sold for is probably closer to a $50,000 profit. It was these three, say, consecutive deals like bam, bam, bam and then my employer cut my salary in half.
It’s like, okay, we’ve got this whole real estate thing going and the proof of concept is there. We’ve got the groundwork and foundation there where to the point where we could probably start scaling. And then on top of that, we got some pretty good paydays. And then my employer, which I was already kind of getting bored and disinterested with it, you know, they cut my pay in half. That was 2015 decided to go full time. I ended up quitting my job, it was nothing. There’s no grand ceremony in the actual quitting process or going to HR and doing that.
It’s nothing YouTube worthy. But all in all, we went full scale and flipping because now I needed income. We were buying rental properties. We did a couple flips, but now we needed income. We started flipping. That’s how we’re paying bills and since then we flipped 200 houses. But today, our main focus is buying rental properties. Building wealth and passive income, because ultimately flipping houses, Wholesaling Houses, it’s a great way to make money, and you can make a lot of money doing it.
But it’s really no different than the real estate agent doing commissions. Because once you wholesale a house, once you flip a house, the incomes gone. I mean, you get it, but you’ll never get any more income from that transaction again. But when you buy a rental, you get multiple streams of income, whether it’s equity, equity gain, appreciation, tax depreciation, and then cash flow through the actual rent.
We realized that most of our best deals were from rentals. We started scaling back on the flipping in 2018, and allowing us to actually hold more rentals and then now as of recently, we closed on a 384 unit or general partners and a 384 unit multifamily property in Florida so that’s the main focus now is more the wealth building passive income game versus the very, very exhausting, sometimes active flipping.