How Much Real Estate Did We Buy in 2024?

Ashley:
2024 has been a wild ride in real estate. And today we’re looking back at the highs, the challenges and the lessons learned from unexpected market shifts to personal wins. We’re sharing how this year shaped our investing journeys, but we’re not just reflecting, we’re also looking ahead to 2025. What’s on our radar? What trends are we watching and how are we planning to level up in the new year? Join us as we wrap up the year with insights, reflections, and a game plan for what’s next. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with Tony J Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to kickstart your investing journey. And I’m super excited to get into this year review. So let’s maybe start, Ashley with a quick overview of maybe some of the goals that you and I both had going into 2024 and maybe talk about what went wrong or what went well with those goals. So as you think back to this year, what was one of the big goals or some of the big goals you had, Ash?

Ashley:
Yeah. For me, the biggest goal that I had was to purchase a lake house. So that was something that I’ve wanted for a while now, and I hit that goal in July. I closed on that property, but it definitely came with some challenges that I didn’t expect and definitely a lot of lessons learned and all the investing I did throughout the year, but that was my main goal was to get a lake house to find one, get it under contract and to close on it. And I was able to do that. Tony, what was your big goal from last year?

Tony:
I think the first big goal was just to keep the new baby alive, so we succeeded in that. So that was a good one. Survive raising a teenager, which I think we’ve done a decent job with that as well. So we got the teenager, got the baby at home. One more on the way, but no, I think from a real estate side, the biggest goal was stabilizing the motel. We had closed on it right before the end of 2023, so we knew that was going to be a big project for us going into 2024. And much like you, I think we succeeded in getting it up and running. Learned a lot. I think though, once we went live and there were some assumptions we made about going from single family, short-term rentals over to the commercial side with the motel and some of those assumptions held, some of those did not. So that was I think the biggest goal for us was getting that property launched.

Ashley:
So looking into this past year of the lessons you learned and creating the operations, what was maybe something that looking back now you didn’t expect and you could share with the rookie audience?

Tony:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll talk kind of just business level lessons and then I’ll kind of talk more specifically to the hotel. I think one of the bigger lessons that I just learned is, is that there are really two different ways to grow and scale a business. You can do it top down or you can do it bottom up. And the top down approach is you’re basically picking one person and saying, Hey, I want you to be the guy or girl spearheading this new thing and go figure everything out. That’s the top down approach. The bottom up approach is you do everything yourself and then as the business grows and scales to a certain point, you can kind of offload certain tasks to other people and you’re kind of building the team up beneath you. And in talking with folks who I look up to, a lot of ’em encourage the top down approach, which I think works in certain scenarios, but in other scenarios it doesn’t.

Tony:
Like the folks who were giving me that advice they had I think much bigger reach than I have. And maybe the appeal that folks, there’s a bigger pool of potential people who want to go work for them as opposed to someone who wants to work for me at the size of business that I have right now. And we tried to spin off a few ancillary businesses this year that just didn’t pan out because I wasn’t giving the time, attention and energy that those folks needed to really see it through. So we briefly kind of dabbled in Airbnb and we kind of pulled back on that piece. And it wasn’t because the person that I brought on wasn’t skilled or wasn’t amazing, it was because I wasn’t able to give them the time and effort and energy that they needed to really put that business together.

Tony:
So it was a light bulb moment for me to say, Hey, first slow down. Don’t try and do so much at the same time. So this year was really the year of trying to do less. But second, if you are going to spin up a new business, make sure you’re doing it from the bottom up so you can really make sure that whoever you bring on, you’re giving them the support. So again, it has nothing to do with the hotel, but you set lessons. That was a big lesson that kind stuck with me this year as well,

Ashley:
Tony, I could not agree more in looking at some of my other businesses. For the liquor store, for example, since we finished the renovation, we are very hands-on for the renovation, me and my partner. But once the renovation was done, we pretty much handed it off to a manager and said, run with it. Figure out what you need to do. Everything like that. And now here we are four years later and it’s becoming almost a headache for us because we never learned those processes or what’s involved. And now things are coming up that we have to be engaged in. And it’s definitely something I wish we could go back and we could have implemented the operations and built them out. So that’s definitely been a lesson learned for myself too, because I compared to my property management company where I went through and I’ve done every single job involved in the property management company, I’ve built out the SOPs, I’ve interacted to test how the systems are working and I’ve been in the nitty gritty and that is a very much operating machine compared to just the liquor store itself.

Ashley:
So I think that is a really great point. And I do hear a lot of people saying outsource, outsource, outsource, build your team. And I think that is something that isn’t talked about as to the value of doing that position, building out what that position is, instead of bringing someone in and saying, here’s what I want you to do, figure out the operations. And there are the integrator people who actually are very skilled, but I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s when you have a smaller operation, your pool of people is limited that are actually skilled and qualified and have that skillset to come in for what they’re able to do. They can probably go for to a larger company and make more money to invest in their investing. Yeah,

Tony:
Exactly right. So if you want to get a real rockstar type of person, it’s like they’re going to expect rockstar compensation, which is understandably how it should be. But if that thing that you’re trying to grow is in scaling fast enough to get them there, there’s kind of the rub. So that was definitely a big lesson that I learned this year.

Ashley:
The last point I want to touch on that too is I actually had a position where I was giving it to somebody, I was doing this for another investor and I said, there’s more opportunity to go with this, grow with this. I don’t want to take it on anymore. And so when I interviewed someone, they said to me, will I have a mentor or someone to guide me? And I said, no, this is on your own. You have to make decisions on your own. And they declined the job because they didn’t have that type of mentorship. And I just highly respected that person because they knew that they wouldn’t excel in that position or succeed in it without having someone to guide them and mentor them too. So I think that could be a great question when interviewing people is like, how much of my time are you going to need? Do you expect mentorship and things like that. And I’ve felt as a leader in those parts of not being there to respond to questions and making decisions and things like that too.

Tony:
Yeah, such a good point. And I also respect that person for having that foresight to know that, hey, I may not be set up for success if I don’t get a, B and C. I love that. I think the other, and again, just kind of bigger business lesson that I learned this year was it’s super important to make sure that not only, and this is maybe more so related to my industry, but I’m sure it can probably apply to long-term, flipping, whatever it may be. But as important as it is to kind of set money aside for reserves, it’s also important to set money aside for experience improvements in the short-term rental industry. There’s this, and I’ve shared this story before, but there’s this all inclusive resort that Sarah and I like to go to in Mexico and almost every time we go there, they’re always doing something to improve the place.

Tony:
It could be big, could be small things like they’re replanting plants, they’re repainting handrails, they’re whatever it may be, small things that maybe you don’t notice but that still keep the place filling fresh. And then there are bigger things. They’ve added a new wing, they’ve added a new gym. Every time we go back, there’s something that’s different. And it was a big kind of wake up call for me and in our short-term rental business where it’s like some of these properties we turned on and we just kind of not set it and forget it, but we didn’t really go back to reinvesting into them. So we spent a lot of time in 2024 reinvesting into a lot of our existing properties to continue to elevate their performance. And I think from the beginning, setting money aside, just like you do for reserves, just like you do for CapEx, is something we should be doing at least in the short term rental industry as well.

Ashley:
Rookies, we want to hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and we need your help while we take a quick ad break. You can go over to youtube.com at realestate rookie, make sure you’re subscribed to the channel and stay tuned after this break for more.

Tony:
Alright guys, welcome back to the show.

Ashley:
Says there’s something you and I are both doing this year. You already did it. I’m about to do it. And I think this might align with that reasoning of taking money and investing it into added experiences and also contributing money to increase the daily rate at properties you already have, but both of us have decided to close down our Airbnb. So you did yours, when was that?

Tony:
Yeah, we shut it down this summer. So it was like June, July of this year.

Ashley:
Summer, okay. Yeah, yeah. And I’m shutting mine down December 1st. But part of that reasoning was we had the one since 2018. Part of the reasoning was we have two other cabins and the revenue and the daily rate and the experience on these cabins is so much better than these other two that are in an apartment complex and they’re really just convenience. There’s no really great amenity except that they’re a nice place to stay when you come into town instead of staying at the really dumpy hotel that nobody likes that’s there, but there’s not really any room for revenue growth. You can’t add amenities into this apartment complex because you don’t own the apartment complex. So we decided to shut those down so that we can really focus and our team isn’t having to manage those, our cleaners, not having to worry about those. We can put money into the other properties instead of worrying about the operations of this other one and be more focused in the guest experience on the two cabins that have the room for that potential growth and do really well. So that was one of the reasons we decided to actually shut down those two units.

Tony:
And honestly, I do think that even that concept applies to traditional long-term rentals as well. I don’t know. Say you have a property where maybe you’re paying for utilities for your tenants, what would happen if you swapped out the old five gallon, however much water it flushes with each flush toilet for maybe a better efficiency newer toilet where it’s 20% of that? What does that do for your water bill? What if you swap out, I dunno, the old HVAC system that’s pulling twice as much electricity to whatever it works, but just think about going through all the different parts of your property and saying, are there smaller investments that I can make that can either reduce the expenses of owning that property or increase the revenue and the profits that I generate? Because sometimes you can get a better return by reinvesting into an existing property than you can by taking that same capital and deploying it elsewhere.

Tony:
I’ll give a really quick example, but again, we’ve been reinvesting into a lot of our properties and one of our properties, we spent $12,000 to convert to add like a really cool game room to this property. And in the first two months, it was April and May I believe of this year is when we launched. So April and May were the first two months with this new game room. We compared April and May of this year to April and May of last year. We did just over $8,000 more in revenue during that two month period. Assuming all of our other expenses are about the same, which they are, that 8,000 is pretty much going to the bottom line. So if we take 8,000 over the $12,000 investment just in those two months, we’ve already gotten back 75% of what we invested into that improvement. Could I have deployed that money elsewhere and gotten a 75% cash from cash return? Probably not. So you just got to do the math sometimes to say, does it make sense to really double down on the assets we already have to generate more revenue?

Ashley:
And I think it’s definitely easier on the short-term rental side to add those guest experiences, things like that, to increase the daily rate. But there definitely is on the long-term rental side too. So for example, you had met, you mentioned maybe putting in an HVAC system that’s more energy efficient, so the gas bill isn’t as high. I mean that’s something you can advertise as this is a high efficiency furnace. The building’s well insulated, the average gas bill on this is only X amount. And that can be attractive to when you’re leasing it to say, my rent is higher because you’re not going to be paying as much. It’s a fixed rental amount and you’re not going to have to worry about getting this huge gas bill every winter. Or I have a property where I pay all of the utilities in it where the utilities aren’t separated for the tenants. And that would be huge saving costs. If I went in and I decided to do some improvements that are more energy efficient onto this property, it would eliminate my bottom line. So yeah, I think there’s definitely different ways that you can, depending on what your strategy is.

Tony:
Yeah. Well what about you, Ash? I’ve been talking a lot about the lessons that I’ve learned. What about on your side with the lakehouse?

Ashley:
Yeah, so the lake house, the funding experience was a lesson learned for me. I’ve done a lot. It’s very rare that I will go and purchase a property with a loan. I’m usually using cash, my lines of credit, private money, even hard money I’ve done. But to go out and get a bank loan to make a purchase was very different. So when I found this leak house, I found it a Saturday night. There was three of ’em I saw and I sent them to an agent. I also used an agent that I didn’t know at all. I literally clicked on one on Zillow, you fill out the form, say connecting me with an agent. I was just curious as to what it would, and I was like, you know what? I’m just looking at showings. That same night the agent called me, got me into showings the merry next day.

Ashley:
So that was a wonderful start. So I went and I did three showings, made my offer. My offer was accepted, and here we are, we’re ready to roll. And the agent’s like, do you have a pre-approval? And I’m like, no. And so I was like, oh yeah, that’s something you have to do when you’re buying with a bank loan. So I went in, I got pre-approved, we got it under contract. Well, my experience going through the lending process was, oh my god, they want so much information from me, my God. Whereas I feel like when I go and refinance, there’s no timeline really. It’s kind of at your own pace. It’s like, okay, they need this. You’re not rushed as to we need to hit the commitment date by this time. Things like that. So it had been a very long time since I’ve had to do this, probably honestly five years since I’ve purchased with a bank loan.

Ashley:
And so that was just a really big refresher that if I’m going to do that again, I need to be more prepared ahead of time to get that information to move faster. So it ended up working out. But another lesson learned was the agent, I wish I would’ve gone to the BiggerPockets agent finder and looked for an agent there instead of just clicking on the one on Zillow that was in that area. The agent didn’t seem to have a lot of experience working with investors, things like that. But one of the things that happened that really stuck out to me was the day that we closed, the agent said, I can’t give you the keys until it’s filed with the county. And so whenever I have done a closing, whenever the attorneys sit down and they give them my checks and all the documents are signed and the checks are handed over to the seller’s attorney, you are considered closed.

Ashley:
You have a right to the key. Okay. She refused. She would not, this is my agent. I had to call my attorney and she said that they have the checks that’s considered closed. My attorney had to reach out to the seller’s agent and he had to leave the keys outside of me under a rock of their office for me to drive out here that night of closing to get the keys. So it was very inconvenient. The agent never messaged me back. I never heard from her again, as in even the next day, be like, oh, okay, you can get the keys then blah, blah, blah, whatever. Or I apologize, you’re able to get the keys, blah, blah, blah. Nothing, never. And I remember thinking of, you see in the movie sometimes when you go and actually purchase your first home and your agent comes and gives you a little gift, housewarming, gifts, whatever, blah, blah, blah. None of that happened.

Tony:
She just ghosted you.

Ashley:
Yeah. So that was a big, there was other things, other issues that we had with this agent throughout the way, but it was such a big lesson learned as to how thankful I am for the agent that I’ve used on all my other investments that are in the Buffalo area. So that was, do your due diligence with an agent and really take the time to interview them and don’t rush like I did, and like, oh, I want to see these houses tonight. Get an agent first, then start browsing

Tony:
Lessons learned. But that’s why we’re doing this episode so all of our rookies can hear from our mistakes. I just want to touch a little bit on some of the more, because I talked a bit about the business level stuff, but just more specific to the hotel itself. One of the thing that the lessons that, or a few of the lessons that we learned, number one is that the, I guess lemme give some context here. Part of the reason why we chose this city for the motel was because we felt that in looking at some of the other hotel options in that market, we felt that we could bring a product that would compete at a very high level and the purchase price, the seller financing, all the terms of the deals of the deal were fantastic. The one thing that we did not do our due diligence on was the available labor pool in that market.

Tony:
Now, I don’t know if it would’ve shifted whether or not we would’ve said yes, I think we still would’ve bought the deal, but we would’ve potentially approached the labor from a slightly different perspective because we’re recording this right before Thanksgiving, November, 2024. We launched the hotel in late April, and since then, we are now on our fourth onsite manager. So we had the onsite managers that we inherited, they quit two weeks into the job, we replaced them with someone that we moved out California, they were fantastic, did everything the right way. But then the girl, there was a couple, the girlfriend ended up getting pregnant, they had to move back to California. That was I think 90 days in replace them with someone else who we found through a recommendation. He was probably the worst hire that we could have made. We ended up having to let him go, and then we had to replace him with someone else that we found just through general job board type posting.

Tony:
And they’ve been off to a really decent start. So we feel like we’ve got a good long-term solution. But I think for us, we had four months while we were in rehab, and I think I probably would’ve vetted the folks that we inherited maybe a little bit more and maybe tried to lay a stronger foundation to find someone who we felt comfortable scaling with because it definitely did give us some headaches during the peak season when we had our weakest person of the four as the onsite manager there. So definitely some lessons learned around that piece.

Ashley:
Well, I think too, when you are transitioning the complete operation of the motel too, you have people who have worked there for a long time set in their ways and they’re used to everything being a certain way, and then you come in and change everything. Change is hard for a lot of people, especially in their job. And I think that’s very common to see turnover from when you’re completely changing a business model, the change that there’s a lot of turnover within a company when that happens.

Tony:
There is, and we’ve been subject to that. So four managers in, what is that, seven months? That’s not easy. But like I said, I think we found a good long-term solution there for us. Alright, Ricky. So we have to take one final a break, but we’ll be right back after this

Ashley:
And let’s jump back into today’s episode. Yeah, I guess another lesson that I could touch on too is my flip house. So I’ve only done a flip partnering with James Dard from on the market podcast and I’m more just bringing capital to the deal and he runs the flip, takes care of it, does the flips in his market of Seattle. So I bought my first flip in May of this year and I hired my general contractor that had done smaller remodels for me. He did some apartment turnovers for me and it worked out great. It was a great process. Everything was good. So I hired him for this. One thing that happened throughout the course of this was at closing. So it was the property went under contract right away. It was over asking that we got, everything was great. This was one of the most passive investments that I’ve done where my contractor took care of a lot.

Ashley:
I barely had to do anything for this project. I picked out tile basically. So once we’re under contract and we’re set to close, the purchaser’s attorney asked for the sump pump inspection. I have no idea what this is. I mean, I know what a sump pump is, but I’ve never asked for a certification from anyone before. Come to find out the city, the town that this property is located in. Anytime a property transfers hands, if there’s a sump pump in the basement, there needs to be a certification done unless the certification was done in the past two years when I purchased the property from the people I bought it from, this was never done as to whose fault that is. It’s still unknown. Was that my attorney’s fault, the town’s fault? Was it my agent’s fault? Which I definitely don’t think hers, but I was not knowledgeable about this and so I did not know to ask.

Ashley:
So on my part too, if you’re going to be investing in a city, you should know more about the code and the rules that go along with actually purchasing a house in there. So I call the city and say that I need to make a sump pump inspection. Their next appointment is not for three more weeks, so this is going to delay my closing by three weeks, which puts it closer to when my private money loan is due, which makes me very uncomfortable. And then it also, I’m paying holding costs for another three weeks on this property and just the interest payment I think ended up being $55 a day. But then you get the utilities, all the other stuff, the lawn care, the insurance, the property taxes allocated for each day, you’re holding it and it starts to add up. My agent was amazing and she made so many phone calls, again, back to my agent lessons of the year as to my agent has done a lot of deals, very well known in the area and has a lot of connections in her network.

Ashley:
Ended up a couple years ago, she sold the house next door to the one that I was selling, and the guy that lived there actually had a best friend that worked in code enforcement there. And she made a phone call to him and he called his friend and we got the inspection moved up, then the inspection fails, there’s issues. And I am like, oh my God. And they’re like, you need to have the reinspection. Once the repairs are done, I call my contractor. He calls the plumbers that did some of the work in there. They get out there the same day. So it’s like this is working out so amazing that I have this agent that has these contacts. My general contractor has these contacts that are making me a priority. They’ve never met me. They don’t know anything about me. And all of this is aligning because of the amazing people that I’ve put on my team to make this deal work. And so it ends up being $300 repair. We get the inspection done the next day and we’re ready to roll, we’re ready to go. We get the closing done, everything is wrapped up. But lemme tell you, that was a very stressful time period, but I’ve learned a lot through that experience as to my contractor may have been a little bit more expensive than other contractors, but he’s worked in that area. He has the network, he has the connections, and that really, really pulled through to make this property to close on time.

Tony:
300 bucks isn’t too bad, right?

Ashley:
No, no. I was like, oh my God, we’re going to have to rip out the sump pump. How expensive can this get?

Tony:
We don’t have basements in California or in any of the markets really that I invest in. So the sump pump is beneath, it’s in the foundation in the basement floor. So you’d have to literally cut the concrete open is that

Ashley:
There is a hole in the floor already. It’s usually in the corner of the basement and usually a little slope that if water did come in, which in this town there is really bad drainage issues. And so that was one of the things we actually did have to fix on the property was the drainage. But the water will flow to the sump pump and then the sump pump is in the ground in a hole and the concrete and it basically sucks up the water and pumps it out of the basement through a drain tile that goes out into, I dunno if it goes into the gray water or whatever. So yeah, that’s what a sump pump does, but it needs to be on it. There’s certain things that I had never come across before. I have some pumps in a lot of properties, and one thing was it needed to be on its own electrical breaker and things like that, which thankfully the sum pump was, but it had been a really long time since it had been inspected since the same person lived there for a long time.

Tony:
Well, crisis diverted and hopefully the flip went well.

Ashley:
It did. It did. And big thanks to my contractor and to my agent. It ended up going very well. And I have to say there was the stressful times, but my contractor and I actually were texting about it the other day as to how I just get stressed immediately and just want to freak out. And he just stays so calm, cool and collected like, okay, let’s just call this person. It’s no big deal. And we laughed about it. He’s like, you know what? I deal with this stuff every single day. There’s always these things that come up and I have to let it roll off my back. And it made me think of dealing with tenants. I learned that with tenants. I haven’t learned it yet through the rehab process, but with tenants, I had to let things roll off my back and stay calm and cool and collected.

Tony:
So you’re looking to flip a few more homes going into next year?

Ashley:
Yeah, I actually have one under contract and that one I’m waiting for the well, which Tony knows what a well now is. And the sump.

Tony:
And the sump pump. Did you also do the sump pump inspection this time or No,

Ashley:
This town doesn’t require a sump pump inspection. So now I didn’t, but we’re doing the well in septic inspection on this property, so that’s what we’re waiting for to close on that one.

Tony:
We did another flip, and this is just recently actually just got listed yesterday, but we had kind of stopped flipping because we got our butts handed to us last year and lost over six figures on a flip that we did and just a little bit of PTSD after you lose money like that. And I tried to lick my wounds and re-identify, okay, where did we miss what went wrong? And this flip very much we were to the budget almost down to the penny, the exact, whenever we do a flip now, I always set up a separate account just for that flip. That way there’s no money getting mingled with anything else. And the amount of money that we had set aside for contingency is literally exactly what’s left in that account right now, give or take a couple hundred bucks. I was like, we were on budget, did everything how we’re supposed to instead of the contingency left over. So now it’s just, hey, we just listed, fingers crossed so we can kind of get it for what we’re asking on. And that’ll kind of give me the confidence to get back into flipping as well. So hopefully more of that in 2025 for us also.

Ashley:
Yeah, congratulations on getting it listed, being on budget

Tony:
And on budget because that was the bigger issue before I think, is that we missed the budget a couple of times. So

Ashley:
Let me ask you this about, so how long has it been listed so far?

Tony:
Literally like 24 hours.

Ashley:
Have you had any interest in it that you know of or heard about?

Tony:
Not that I’ve heard of yet,

Ashley:
Because when I listed mine, it was back in September and for the first 48 hours we had no interest, no showings, nothing, no questions on it. And I was sweating bullets. And then we had three showings set up and then the third person they put in an offer and it was over asking, but that was very nerve wracking. But also just trying to, in Buffalo, it slows down in the winter months. So right now I don’t have a super great gauge on what the market is. I went to a property that was listed and they had an open house. You couldn’t schedule an appointment, you had to go to the open house first, then you can make an appointment, you couldn’t even park in the driveway. And this was a huge driveway long thing. There was so many people there to look at this property. So I was just trying to gauge your market a little bit as to what are you seeing and what market is this flip in?

Tony:
It’s in SoCal. It’s not too far from where I live, but it is, it’s a smaller kind of mountain town. So it’s a lot of second homes that people have who live in the suburbs where I’m at. So we thought about selling it as a turnkey short-term rental, but unfortunately this specific county has a moratorium on permits right now. So they’re not issuing any new permits someone could buy, but they’d have to sit and wait for the moratorium to get lifted. So really it is just focused on that person who wants a nice little cabin home, a second home in this town. So I would assume it probably some of the comps that we were looking at, they were on market close to 60 days. That’s kind of what we anticipated. When I underwrote the deal. I had us at I think an eight month hold period and we wrapped, we wrapped rehab in six weeks I think. So I’m giving ourselves a lot of time for potentially selling this thing just to make sure that we still got some breathing room there.

Ashley:
Okay. And you never did a flip before in this market, right?

Tony:
Not in that specific city first time. So

Ashley:
This timeline is amazing. Who did you use for your contractors? Did you have to find new contractors?

Tony:
Same crew that we took out to Utah. Good old, good old nacho, he’s our go-to, luckily it’s not too far from where they’re at, it’s like an hour drive. So they would go up, work there and then be back home in the evening. So it wasn’t too bad. But part of what Sarah and I have talked about this before as well is I think we almost use that crew as a crutch. And I think what we really want to do, at least going into next year is just force ourselves to use a different crew. Because we’ve tried different crews in the past and didn’t work out either time. We tried two different crews that we like in the SoCal market. So I think the goal for us is just really, can we find some folks that we haven’t worked with before that could be a good option B. So that way we’ve got a slightly bigger roster of folks to choose from.

Ashley:
Well Tony, besides that, looking forward to 2025, I think we should definitely do an episode in the beginning of 2025 really breaking down our goals and why we’re choosing those. But just kind of looking ahead, do you have a couple of goals in mind that you want to reach in 2025?

Tony:
Yeah, and we were talking about this before we hit record. I feel like I’m in a weird spot in life right now. It’s like when we first started the podcast, my oldest son was becoming a teenager. He was getting into that phase where he was becoming more independent. I think Sarah and I had a little bit more freedom as parents because he’s driving out doing different things that don’t necessarily require us and he’s got friends and try to spend more time with them. But now that we’re kind of starting over with more younger kids coming in, it’s forcing us to maybe slow down and recalibrate a little bit. So before I had very aggressive goals and like, Hey, I want to scale, scale, scale, scale, scale. But I’m starting to kind of swing that pendulum back in the other direction now is the younger part of our family is coming into focus.

Tony:
So anyway, all that to say that I think for us, the goal in 2025 is if we can pick up one additional commercial property, hotel, motel, that would be fantastic. Flip maybe one house a quarter, nothing super crazy. I think that’ll be a really good pace for us. And the only other third thing that’s a maybe is I would love to do some ground up construction for a short-term rental specifically. We interviewed Chase on this podcast a few episodes ago and he’s actually a of mine and he and I have kind of kept in touch and he’s doing some amazing new build short-term rental construction. So I think that is on the board for 2025 as well. So single family development, short-term rental, another commercial property, and then flip a couple more houses in 2025. That’s the goal. What about for you, Ashley?

Ashley:
Yeah, the first thing is for the flip that I have under contract, I actually had it under contract a year and a half. It was from an estate, the person had passed away and so we had to wait for who was assigned as trustees, things like that. And so we finally got under contract and then now it’s delay of the well and septic and things like that. So to close on that. And also I would like to make a hundred thousand dollars off of that deal, and that’s with a six month hold time. And then for the lake house, we actually, we’ve almost done with all the renovations for it, but we have a long-term tenant that’s going to be in place over the winter months for it. So we’ll get some rental income over the winter months from that. So I’m kind of not sure what the next steps will be for the lake house, but I think my primary goal would be to not have to rent it out to be in a position where we can actually take it over this coming summer and keep it as a personal residence, a second home, but I’ll have to figure that piece out.

Ashley:
So those are kind of the two big things. And then just systems and processes and operations. I just love going in and building out how to make things more efficient and effective. So just like you, Tony, I can spend more time with my kids and when we talked about in the very beginning is not just saying, Hey, take this over and then letting it go. And as time goes on, you find out maybe it’s not even done the correct way, but me actually taking the time to build out the framework of how I want someone to do something and kind of give it from there and then they take their experience and make it even better. But yeah, so those are the big things is build out better operations and continuously make them more efficient and spend time with the kids. I mean that’s been one of the best things about being a real estate investor is being able to, I drive them to school every single day. I pick ’em up most days. But having all that time to be able to spend with them and do different things and travel together

Tony:
Well, it feels like next year is shaping up to be a good one for both of us. And I hope for all the rookies that are listening, so many people actually I think assume that because we’re the voices behind the podcast that everything just goes right on everything that we do. But just like every other real estate investor that’s out there, as Ash and I are continuing to scale up our businesses, there’s lessons that we’re learning. There’s failures and setbacks that we experience and there’s wins as well, but it’s just a matter of continuing to put one foot in front of the other and taking those lessons and allowing them to help turn you into a better investor, not to necessarily discourage you from investing at all. So I think that’s the goal of today’s episode is to share the wins, the losses, the lessons learned, and that we’re still looking forward optimistically into 2025.

Ashley:
And I think part of it too is that not getting too cocky when you have overcome these hard hurdles, like, oh, if I overcame that, I could take out anything. And the last thing I want to say to wrap up the 2024 goals is Tony and I do have a goal this year to hit a hundred thousand subscribers on the rookie YouTube channel. So if you’re not already, try to head over to the rookie YouTube channel and hit subscribe. We also have some exciting things coming for 2025 to build out the rookie community. One of those first things is doing in person podcast recordings. So we’re doing one at the end of this year and hopefully many more we can actually chat with investors in person. But we just want to continuously grow the rookie community because each and every one of you deserves the opportunity to build wealth for your family and to have the option for financial freedom. And every time you learn, you’re sharing your knowledge with the people around you and it’s just growing and growing the rookie network. So we just want to thank all of you for wonderful 2024 and can’t wait to see what the rookie community does in 2025. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next real estate rookie episode.