4 Ways to Start Investing in Real Estate with NO or LOW Money

David:

This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show, 9 36. What’s going on everyone? This is David Green, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. Join today, as always with Rob ab. Delighted

Rob:

To be here, my friend. Bringing real estate knowledge to the people by the people. For the people.

David:

Yeah, for the people. Way to tie that thing together. Awesome. Rob, when you bought your first property, how much money did you put down?

Rob:

I only had to put down six, $7,000 because I put three and a half percent down and that got me into my first property I ever purchased, which I then ended up house hacking and it was all history from there. And I know that this is a very common thing that a lot of investors face finding funding. It’s a really big struggle. Maybe some of the people at home are struggling with this today, but that’s exactly why we’re doing today’s episode to give you a few ideas.

David:

Alright, so in today’s show we’re going to be covering four strategies to get started in real estate with low money down. We’re going to be covering what they are, the risks and benefits of each, who should consider them and steps to take to get started with all four strategies. But before we get into those, we want to make sure we give a little disclaimer. It doesn’t always take a lot of money to get into real estate, but it usually does require some money to be able to own it safely.

Rob:

Yeah, coils in your AC need to be replaced. Refrigerators break down. Oh man, I dunno. The list goes on and on.

David:

You’re also going to need to remember that when you put less money down, you usually take on more debt. So remember that nothing comes free. However, for those who are in a position where they don’t have a ton of cash sitting in the bank account and they still want to break into this game, we’ve got some options for you. All right, let’s move on to our first one. It’s going to be arbitrage. Rob, I’m going to let you describe for our listeners what arbitrage is.

Rob:

Sure. So in this specific scenario, we’re talking about rental arbitrage and it’s a pretty simple concept, but it’s effectively where you go and you pitch a landlord on the idea of renting their property and then turning it into an Airbnb. In this instance, the landlord is giving you a locked in rate, usually for a year, sometimes for two or three depending on how you negotiate it, and then you are then furnishing it, listing it on Airbnb, running it as a small business if you will, and you are making the delta on how much revenue you gross and all of your expenses. So let’s say your rent is a thousand dollars and let’s say you gross $3,000 in all of your expenses after your rent and utilities and all that stuff come out to $2,000, you would then make a profit of $1,000. That is arbitrage in a nutshell.

David:

So instead of owning an Airbnb and collecting income and then having expenses that you pay for, you manage an Airbnb, collect the income, and your expenses are something you pay to the owner of the property. So you lease it from them to then turn around and rent it out. Now, what due diligence do investors need to do if they want to try this method?

Rob:

Well, first and foremost, more than the due diligence itself, you want to make sure that you’re actually pitching a landlord on exactly, you’re going to be doing. I think back in the day it was a bit more wild west. They actually used to call arbitrage. It used to actually be called lying to the landlord. No, I’m just kidding. So don’t do that. There’s a lot of people out there that do that. There’s just no reason to do it. You’re going to get evicted. You really want your landlord to be on the same page as you for many different reasons, but if they know that you’re running a business and they agree to it, well it’s great. It can actually be beneficial for both sides. If the landlord is down, you can negotiate a two three year lease and actually have a short little business there where you don’t have to worry about your lease ending or market rent increases or anything like that. But I would say that what I just explained is a very oversimplification of how that goes. It’s not that easy. Most of the time landlords aren’t down for this and you really have to romance the idea a bit and get them on board, and that’s what’s not really talked about.

David:

Okay, so the upside here with this strategy is that you don’t need a down payment. You just need to be able to convince somebody to let you lease their property. Maybe you need first and last month’s rent or a security deposit, but it’s less money, which is why it’s in this category. But the downside is you don’t get any of the benefits like loan pay down, appreciation, tax benefits. So what do investors need to know if they’re going to go into this strategy thinking, Hey, that sounds great, I don’t need money.

Rob:

Well, I guess investors should probably know that it’s not really investing, in my opinion. I guess you are investing money into this small business to make cashflow, but it’s not really a permanent business and it’s not real estate. It is in the real estate world, much like a property management company is, but it’s more hospitality than the real estate side of things.

David:

Yeah, that’s a good point. You’re kind of a souped up property manager.

Rob:

I also think that it’s a little risky for a lot of the reasons that you mention. You don’t get the debt pay down, you don’t get the tax appreciation and you don’t get the, there’s one more thing there, the appreciation.

David:

The main reason I like to invest in real estate, right?

Rob:

So I mean the reason I say it’s risky is because the only thing you have to count on is cashflow, and thus if you don’t cashflow, you really don’t have much to show for it. You didn’t get the other three benefits in the real estate side of things. All right.

David:

Now what happens if you rent this out to a short-term rental tenant and then they trash the property?

Rob:

Well, yeah. So basically whenever you rent this from a landlord, you’re kind of assuming a lot of the risk and a lot of the wear and tear and a lot of the damages that might result as you being a tenant. So if a landlord charges you a deposit, they have every right to hold it back from you if you return the unit in much worse condition than you rented it in. So you do have to keep that in mind. You are running a transient business where people are coming in and out and there’s a lot of wear and tear and furniture is breaking, and you might have the occasional hole in the drywall and that’s pretty much on you to take care of. I mean, every single lease is different, but it’s usually on the actual tenant. You’re kind of

David:

Getting all the parts of owning real estate that we don’t love and not the parts you do. You don’t actually own it, but it does get your foot in the door and you can learn the business and then you can transition out of that and into a strategy that has a little bit more ice cream and a little bit less broccoli, so to speak. Alright, so we’ve covered the basics of arbitrage, but Rob here has an alternative for you that has a lot of benefits without so much risk. And what if you’re ready to get into the game and build equity? Well, we’ve got three more strategies for you that will allow you to do just that right after the break.

Rob:

Welcome back investors. We’re here breaking down different ways to get started in real estate for low money down, the risks, the benefits, and how to get started. So let’s jump back in.

David:

There is a less risky option here that’s a little bit different than arbitrage, and I know you’re a bigger fan of this. Can you talk about co-hosting?

Rob:

Yeah, so first and foremost, let me just say I have rental arbitrage units and it is my least favorite version of short-term rentals in general. Mostly because at the end of the day you have a rent that you have to pay for, meaning if you have a thousand dollars rent and you rent your place for zero days out of the month, you have to pay $1,000. That’s what you owe. And then of course your utilities and all that stuff. That’s one thing that I think is overlooked because people just assume they’re going to book. Now let’s talk about co-hosting and what the actual difference there is, and it’s a small one, but it’s what makes it a much better strategy and actually requires no money down. So co-hosting is basically property management. The only difference between a property manager and a co-host is that typically property managers collect the money and then they remit it back to the owner and there’s usually some kind of licensing that’s involved with being a property manager with the co-host.

You are actually getting paid by the owner of the property for your services. So it’s a little bit easier to get into from a license standpoint, but effectively you are managing a property for a landlord, you’re managing it on Airbnb maybe as a short-term rental, maybe as a midterm rental, and you are getting a percentage of the bookings that come in. Now that is really important because as I mentioned in my other example, if you make $0 that month, you don’t make any money, but you don’t lose any money. If you make a thousand dollars and you charge 20%, which is more or less the standard, you’ll make 200 bucks on the a thousand dollars that come in. But regardless, you don’t lose money. You have every opportunity to lose money on the rental arbitrage side of things in my opinion. Okay.

David:

So what are the biggest benefits and potential return that you can make with the arbitrage method?

Rob:

Benefits are that you can basically cold call landlords all day and all night and probably have a rental or arbitrage unit negotiated and signed within a week or two. Benefits are, you can get into a rental arbitrage unit on the really low end, and I really don’t like saying this, but $10,000, but typically it’s going to cost you 10 to $20,000. You’ll hear a lot of talkers and stuff talk about business credit and $7,000 to start. I don’t really subscribe to that. I think 10 to $20,000 is pretty realistic benefit is it’s high cashflow, very possible to make 500 to $2,000 a month net profit on the right unit, sometimes more. Usually a thousand dollars is what I’m targeting. So it’s high cashflow. And then the other benefit is that you are only in this thing for a year. So if it doesn’t work out, if you don’t like it, you don’t own the home, you don’t have to worry about selling it at a loss, you can just walk away after a year. Of course, that also being a downside that you could possibly be locked into a terrible apartment or condo for a year and lose money for that amount of time too.

David:

Okay, so next steps for arbitrage and for hostessing, what do people need to do if they want to pursue either of these routes?

Rob:

I would say best thing you could do is go to the BiggerPockets forums, read about others’ experiences and try to find someone that’s doing it because I think there’s a lot of glamor to both to be honest, because they’re low money down to get into it, but it is a grind and you really aren’t, it’s a bit of a job because you’re still grinding to make cashflow on something you don’t own. So I think first steps is find someone who’s doing arbitrage and find someone that’s doing co-hosting. You can do this by going to different meetups, like I said, the BiggerPockets forums, and try to talk to them and try to understand the key differences for both and understanding the risk for both because there’s a nuance to it, although I’m trying to think, I don’t really know the risk of co-hosting. I think that one’s a pretty solid strategy.

David:

Alright, moving on. Our next low down payment strategy is house hacking. House hacking is when you buy a house as a primary residence and you rent out parts of it to different people. There’s lots of different ways to do it. Rob, I understand the first house that you bought was a house hack, is that correct?

Rob:

Yeah, that’s right. And you’re a bit of a experienced bloke in the world of house hacking too, right?

David:

Yeah, I haven’t written a book on house hacking, so people think that I don’t love it, but I’m in love with it. It’s my favorite strategy of every real estate strategy there is. I always tell people before you do a bur, before you do long distance investing, before you buy short-term rental, you should buy at least one property every single year as a house hack.

Rob:

Okay, yeah. And so the idea here is that you can actually get into a house hack using an FHA loan or some kind of low money down payment loan program living it for a year, and then after about the year mark, you can requalify for another one of those loans.

David:

That’s exactly right. Yeah, you could get a new primary residence loan every year, and the real hack here is that you can get a primary residence loan with way less money than an investment property. Investment property loans, the cheapest one you’re going to get is 20% down. If you go the vacation home route, you could get 10% down, but you can get 3% down on a primary residence loan. I mean, that’s the closing cost equivalent for a lot of people. So if capital is your biggest hurdle, getting into a primary residence is the obvious answer. Yeah.

Rob:

Let me ask you this. So you mentioned you can get in for 3%. Are there two different loan programs? Is there a 3% one and then a three and a half percent one or are they the same thing?

David:

No, sir, you are correct in your estimate there, the three and a half percent loans are FHA loans. So the benefit of those is that you can get in with a lower credit score and it’s harder to turn people down. The downside of those is they come with a form of mortgage insurance that will never go away. So we typically just say F-H-A-F-H-A because it’s the easiest loan for people to qualify for and it’s only three and a half down, but there are conventional home loans that we do where you can get 3% down and the mortgage insurance will go away when you hit that point. So that’s typically why I say three instead of three and a half.

Rob:

Got it. Okay. So yeah, let’s break that down a little bit and why this is a powerful strategy. So let’s talk about just a conventional or an investment loan. You have to put down 20%, maybe 25%, and let’s say you live in a market where the median price home is $300,000. Well, 20% of that is 60 K. So every time you want to buy an investment property, you’re looking at roughly $60,000 as your down payment and it takes a long time to save $60,000. I mean, obviously it depends on your job and everything like that, but I feel like no matter who you are, that’s a pretty large sum to save up.

David:

It’s massive. And if you want to save 60 K, you probably got to make 80 to 90 K because you’re going to be taxed and then you’re going to have to spend things to stay alive. So this turns into several years of dedicated effort for a normal American to be able to buy an investment property versus a primary residence. That same house you just said you can get for $9,000 down super cheap.

Rob:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Much easier I guess. Not cheap, but obtainable. Totally. And for me, the first house I ever bought, I think it was $159,000, so whatever, roughly three and a half percent is of that. But I got a tax refund and I used that towards my down payment and I just was thinking through this the other day and I had a guitar amp that was kind of expensive and I sold things to get into my first property and it was super painful at that moment because I was like, dang it, I don’t think I’ll ever buy this again if I sell it, which is true. I never ended up rebuying that thing again, but it put me into this house that I then started thinking and I was like, man, if I rented a room out, I could really subsidize 30% of my mortgage, which I did. It was $400 off of my $1,100 mortgage. And then from there I was like, oh my goodness, what if I could just pay no mortgage? And that’s sort of what really laid down the fundamental philosophy of how can I get other people to pay for my things?

David:

Yeah, if you were able to save a thousand bucks a month, then that’s $12,000 a year. That’s literally the down payment for the next house that you could buy that we said is 9,000. So if you can save up that first 9,000 and you can find a property that will cashflow when you move out of it, you theoretically will have the house you bought this year, pay for the one that you’re going to get into next year and forever in perpetuity. So

Rob:

Can we break this down into maybe a few steps for someone that’s like, okay, I’m interested. I’ve heard y’all talk about this a long time. This is clearly your favorite strategy, Robin, Dave, what’s a first step someone could take towards actually getting into a house

David:

Hack? First thing is you need the down payment. So you start with saving, put yourself on a budget, start saving money, have a gold. You can also sell some stuff. As you were talking, I just thought, what if somebody was driving A BMW and that’s why they don’t have a lot of money and they sold it and they bought a used Honda of Civic. I bet you they could. A lot of people could get more than $9,000 out of that transaction, which could be the down payment for a house. Your BMW might be what’s stopping you from owning a home. The next step is you have to have a little bit of an understanding on the different ways you can house hack. So we say house hacking. House hacking is a principle. There are many strategies within house hacking. So for instance, you can rent, you can live in one room and you can rent out the other rooms.

You could buy a two, three, or four unit property live in an entire unit and rent out the other units. You can get a fourplex with all two bedrooms. You can live in one unit and rent out a bedroom in that unit and then rent out the other units. You can rent out the other units by bedroom or by unit. You can rent out some of those units as a short-term rental or a medium term rental, and you can rent out other ones as long-term rentals. You can take all the tools that we give you here on the podcast and you can put them together in a house hat casserole, and pretty much no matter how you do it, it tastes good. This is why I love the strategy. You can also use other strategies like value add where you buy a really nice house in a neighborhood you love and you finish the basement or you have an A DU on the property, or you turn one of the garage units into an A DU and you create a house hack, but still you got in for 3%.

The key in my opinion, is when you move out of it at the end of that year, you want to make sure that it’s covering the mortgage with the rent that it comes in, and then you could do this forever. If people want to get into this, the first thing you need to do is get pre-approved. Getting pre-approved is going to tell you how much you can buy, what your payment’s going to be, and most importantly, this part gets left out what could be improved in your financial picture to get a better loan. So if you see that your credit score is low and you come up with a plan to improve it, we have rapid rescore available that can get people’s credit to boost up. If you realize, oh, I don’t qualify for enough, maybe you need to pay off some of that debt so you can qualify for more and get into the houses that you want to buy after that, you want to talk to a real estate agent and tell ’em what you’re looking for. You typically want to look for as big of a house as you can get because the more square footage it has, the more places there are to create a bedroom or create something that could be rented out. You want to make sure it has sufficient parking and sufficient bathrooms, especially if it’s going to be a shared space and then you want to buy in the best neighborhood that you can get into where you think rents are going to continually increase over time. High walk scores will help you also

Rob:

Love it. Yeah, well that’s house hacking in a nutshell. There’s so much more we could do. Maybe we can co-write a book one of these days on that. I love house hacking too. Okay, we have to take one more quick break, but don’t go anywhere. We’ve got two more strategies for you that I think you’re going to like. And while we’re away, if you feel like you’ve learned something on today’s show that might be helpful to a friend or family, go ahead and share this episode with them and we’ll be right back.

David:

Hey, hey everyone. Welcome back. We’re talking about ways that you could get started investing for a little money down. So far we’ve covered arbitrage and house hacking. Let’s get into our next strategy now.

Rob:

Alright, so let’s get into number three here, which is partnerships. And this is a pretty simple concept. You partner with someone else to acquire a property. There are a bunch of different ways you can do this, but you can go to someone and you can say, Hey, will you put up the cash or the capital, maybe even the borrowing power, and I will run the property. It can also be, Hey, I want to buy a property that’s going to cashflow well, but I only have $50,000 and I need someone else that also has $50,000 so that we can buy a property that’s optimized for short-term rentals, long-term rentals, commercial, whatever it is. And so you can actually just partner with someone, split the funds, split the operations, all that good stuff. There are a thousand ways that you can do partnerships, but those are two simple ones, but it’s effectively you’re leveraging someone else’s time, money, expertise to advance your real estate goals. Well,

David:

If you’re listening to this show and you’re interested in this stuff, you don’t have a lot of cash. So you’re probably wanting to partner with someone that does have more cash, which means you need to be asking yourself the question, what am I bringing to the table if they’re bringing the cash

Rob:

Totally. Now, I’m pretty sure you’ve had some good partnerships, bad partnerships. What are some words of advice you’d give to someone looking to step into a partnership with someone else? Do

David:

Look for a partner that has the same values as you and complimentary goals. So you want to be moving in the same direction. Don’t look for a partner that has the exact same skills with you because you get along with somebody like that. Do look for a partner that is open to flexibility. You may not want to own the house with that person forever. Don’t look for a partner just because you’re scared to take the jump and you’re doing it for emotional reasons. I don’t want to buy a house, so me just do it with somebody else. That’s not good. Do look for a partner that has experience or resources that you don’t have. Don’t look for a partner thinking that it’s going to cut the work in half. What happens is everybody just ends up doing all the same work and the workload is actually increased.

So if you don’t have money and you don’t have experience and you don’t have skills and you don’t have networking, you’re not necessarily bringing anything of value to a partnership just because you’re coming. So listening to podcasts like this one looking into different strategies. Let’s say you were someone who was doing arbitrage for a while. Now you know how Airbnbs work. You know how short-term rentals operate. Now you can go to somebody else and say, Hey, let’s buy a house together. I will manage the short-term rental component of it, and I know what to look for. We want to buy a house that has two Aus in the back. We want to buy a house in this neighborhood. This is where all the demand is. I want to furnish it this way. I want to make it look this way. I could show you what it’s going to rent for. You’re actually bringing experience into this partnership where you don’t have money. That’s a much better example.

Rob:

Totally. Yeah. And I think probably for me, going back to one of the points you made, which is find someone that’s complimentary. One of my mentors told me one time, if both of us are the same, one of us is unnecessary. And there’s no reason. If you’re a visionary, if you’re a kind of more vision forward person, that’s strategy and all that stuff. You don’t want someone else that’s like that. You don’t need to be in a partnership like that because then all you’re going to do is be dreaming, scheming, and figuring out like, what if we did this? What if we did this? If you’re a visionary, you need probably more of an integrator or operator to compliment your skillset. I am not a detail oriented person, so whenever I’m partnering with someone, I need someone that can bring that to the table. Now let’s talk about partnership splits, structures.

There’s a lot of different ways you can do that. Typically, one of the easiest ways to do it that I’ve done it is 50 50. I bring half the money, you bring half the money, and we figure out what side of the operations we’re doing. But I’ve also been in, the way I scaled my portfolio is I went to investors after I had experience and I said, Hey, if you fund it, I’ll run it. And basically we would do 50 50 cashflow and equity appreciation in that instance, but that’s not always going to be the case. And you got to get creative with how you negotiate your partnerships with other people. But one of the ways that you can negotiate this, if you’re really coming into this with an investor that might be a little bit more, I dunno, conservative if you will, is you can do what’s called a waterfall where let’s say the investor puts up the cash AKA taking on really most of the risk here.

Well, you can structure it in a way where you get 25% of the cashflow, they get 75% of the cashflow until their initial investment is paid back and then it waterfalls down to 50 50. That to me, is a pretty fair arrangement. I’ve also seen different splits where, hey, sometimes investors don’t care about the cashflow, but they want the tax benefits. So maybe the investor can get a hundred percent of the tax benefits and you can get the lion’s share of the cashflow. You can really get creative with How you split things up is kind of the moral of the story there.

David:

So there’s a lot of creativity that goes into partnerships, and that’s what we want people to walk away from. There’s not just, well, give me a blueprint, I don’t have money, so how do I find a partner? But there’s no way that you go out there and you just say, Hey, I’m the person with no money. Who are the people with money? You’re going to have to convince somebody why they should partner with you. But if you do have experience in real estate investing, if you do have education, if you’ve been a property manager, if you’ve done arbitrage, if you’ve done some of the strategies we talk about, you do have some value to bring. So learn from mistakes of people who have done this in the past. Check out podcasts like this one. Check out forums, talk to other people about partnerships and what worked and what went wrong, and really get into the nitty gritty details. That’s a big piece of it. It’s often unmet expectations that create bad partnerships.

Rob:

Well, let’s get into the fourth in final tip here. And this one, there’s a lot of caveats to it, but creative finance and specifically the one that I want to talk about today is seller finance. Creative finance is effectively the way of buying properties or really buying anything unconventionally not using a bank. And in the instance of seller finance, the seller is the one acting as the bank. So if I go and I find a seller who’s willing to finance it to me, I’m making payments to them because in a lot of those cases, they own the property outright. So I’m setting the terms, setting the down payment, I’m setting everything directly with the seller and not having to go through the vigorous underwriting of a property with a bank.

David:

Alright, so what are some of the benefits of creative finance?

Rob:

Well, there’s a lot. I think in the world of seller finance, you’re dealing directly with the seller oftentimes, many times in my experience, I don’t have an agent as the middle person. So I’m able to really set not only the price, but the interest rate and the down payment. And for me, this can be really huge because there’s a lot of different levers that you can pull to make a deal work. But in the one that I did recently, I put 10% down. Now granted it was a $400,000 home, so it was $40,000 down, but to me, that’s still half of what I would’ve had to have paid going through a bank and putting down 20%, and I got a 3% interest rate. So I was able to not only get a 10% down payment, I was also able to get an interest rate that is more than half of what current rates are. And so for me, this turned this deal that would’ve lost money and not actually been a good investment into a property that cash flows about a thousand dollars every month. That’s the plan for the property anyways. So I think the ability to negotiate terms that make it cashflow is probably the biggest upside.

David:

And how do people go about finding these creative finance opportunities?

Rob:

There’s a lot of different ways to do it. I mean, I wish there was a lot of super easy ones, but for me, I think the easiest strategy, you’d be surprised at how easy this is, but you could go to Redfin. You could go to Zillow, and there’s a little keyword section at the bottom of the criteria form where you can type in seller financing, seller financed owner financing. Owner will consider financing, creative finance, any combination of those words, and it’ll populate different properties where those words are in the description. And I was actually, someone I know recently found a deal by doing exactly what I just said. She was like, Rob, it worked. And she did this, and she found a property where the seller took zero money down and he wanted a 4% interest rate. And she was like, I just can’t believe I found a deal on the MLS. So sometimes it’s actually just as easy as typing in the keywords on Zillow. There you

David:

Go. All right. What are the downsides of the strategy?

Rob:

Downsides is the downside. Really the biggest one is I think a lot of people get into the creative finance space with stars in their eyes and they hear, oh, free house, or I can get in with no money down. And so I think the downside is that a lot of inexperienced investors that don’t have a real relationship with debt yet get into these properties that might be 0% interest or 0% down, and they acquire properties too quickly without understanding the nuances of real estate. And it can be very easy to over-Leverage yourself in these types of scenarios. And if you’re just gobbling up houses that are free or low money down,

David:

Alright, and if somebody wants to get into this, what’s the first steps that they can take?

Rob:

Own other properties first and understand debt and cut your teeth on the industry and build some experience before you start trying to gobble up 10 houses in your first

David:

Year. Good deal. All right, there you have it folks. We’ve covered four strategies for you, arbitrage and co-hosting, house hacking partnerships, and creative financing. If you like this stuff, please do us a favor and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening, as well as leaving us a review. That’s huge. And if you’re listening on YouTube, leave us a comment and let us know if we missed a low down payment option that you think we should cover in the future. If you’d like to know more information about Rob or I, our information are in the show notes. And if you want to dive deeper into these strategies, I recommend you check out biggerpockets.com, check out the forums, check out the blogs, learn as much as you can. Rob, anything you want to say before I let you go?

Rob:

No, man. I love a good short and crunchy episode. So yeah, this was a good

David:

One. That’s exactly right. This is David Green for Rob Short and crunchy himself. Abi Solo signing up.