Why This Expert Investor Owns Only ONE Rental Property

Tony:
Ho ho. We hope that you’re having a Holly Jolly and festive holiday season with the BiggerPockets Elves off tinkering to make even greater shows for next year, we bring you one of our favorite episodes from the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast. Now, in this show, we’ll hear from Mike Baum, who owns just one rental property, but this one property alone has changed his life. So why does he have just one rental property and why doesn’t he grow it using his expertise? Listen on to find out why.

Dave:
As real estate investors, there’s a question we always need to be wrestling with. Is now the right time to expand our portfolios or should we be sitting back enjoying the portfolio we have or being patient and more opportunistic about finding deals? For a lot of people who come on the show, either as guests or hosts, the answer is that they want to always be expanding and growing and scaling. But for other investors, being content with what they have is just fine, even for years at a time. And today we’re talking to an investor who has carefully weighed all the factors. He’s done the analysis, and he has chosen to keep his portfolio literally as small as he possibly can. He has only one property. It’s very successful, but he only has one and he’s very knowledgeable. He knows everything there is to know about real estate, but he’s just kept it at that one property. And I was sort of fascinated by this, and I think there’s a lot that we could all learn from this strategy.
Hey everyone, it’s Dave. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Every Monday we like to start our week off by featuring a member of the BiggerPockets community and hearing about their investing journey. And today we’re hearing from an investor named Mike Baum. And fun fact, Mike is actually one of BiggerPockets community’s top forum contributors. He has spent over 10,000 hours on biggerpockets.com posting and helping fellow investors learn about real estate. So if you’re a frequent visitor to our website, you’ve probably seen his name pop up, but Mike has a lot to share on top of just what he does for the community already. And in today’s episode, I’m going to talk to Mike about how an unexpected life change for Mike and a serious one started his journey in real estate. We’ll talk about how he selected his preferred strategy of short-term rentals and also why Mike has chosen to keep his portfolio small and how not investing can be an active and strategic decision. And this is going to be a great episode because I think it provides a really helpful and interesting counter narrative to what we hear most commonly in the real estate investing industry. And I get it. Not everyone wants to stay small, not everyone wants to scale, but I think it’s really beneficial for all of us to learn from people who are doing something a little bit different. And Mike fits that bill perfectly. So let’s bring ’em on.

Mike:
Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for

Dave:
Being here.

Mike:
Thanks for having me, guys.

Dave:
Well, I am very curious to hear about your journey. And so let’s just start with your career. Prior to becoming a real estate investor, what were you up to?

Mike:
So I was a engineer at Intel for 19 years. I was a product owner and what they call a technical marketing guy. So what I did was work with our IBM or Lenovo with some of those platforms and help them integrate our technology and supported our field sales staff. Plus I did demonstrations all over the country on stage and show prep and did shows and stuff like that. And then I did a ton of videos and how tos and wrote a ton of technical documents. So that was my gig. Wow. Yeah. And I did that until 2011 when I had a huge undertaking, was working 70 hours a week, actually slept in the couch in our lab, just go, go, go, go, go to get a product launch completed. And then one morning I woke up and I couldn’t see. The next morning I could see, but I had one eye pointing up this way and one eye pointing this way, and it was a sixth and a third cranial nerve palsy. So that was the first indication. The stress of the work had put me over the edge. So basically Intel put me on disability short term, and then after about a year of, there was no improvement. There never really is in a neurological degeneration. You can kind of arrest it as much as you can, but you can’t bring it back to where it was. So they put me on full-time disability, and that’s been 13 years now.

Dave:
Well, I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds like quite an ordeal. So did that mean you were left without an income after all of that?

Mike:
Yep. For me, yes. I mean, it’s not that we didn’t have any income. Intel has a very good taking care of their employees, so there’s a good solid long-term disability plan. And of course it requires that I sign up for Social security disability, which I did. So yeah, I’m on disability. It was a pretty drastic income reduction. My wife is working, so that is good. So it’s not like we’re broke, but we certainly went from upper middle class to middle class, I guess you could say. We were never rich,

Dave:
I’m sure as a change financially, but just emotionally and psychologically, that’s like a big just life shift to being someone who’s working really hard to having to manage your output in a more concerted way at this point. Is that when you discovered estate or started thinking about real

Mike:
Estate? We’ve had a few rental houses we’ve bought and sold some stuff over time. Our vacation rentals located in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on Lake Coeur. And I’ve always wanted, I grew up there, always wanted to have a lake house, and a bunch of things kind of lined up for us to be able to afford to buy this house on the lake. And it was a way for us to replace, not contributing to retirement any longer because I have no way to, in normal ways, there are certain ways, but for the most part it’s very difficult to, when you’re on disability, you don’t have an actual earned income anymore, so you got to do something for retirement. So I figured, and initially we were not going to rent the house, we weren’t going to do a short-term rental. And basically BiggerPockets is what turned me all around to that. I have three kids, we have three kids and we have three grandkids now. So we figured, oh, we’ll have this lake house and we can go and all hang out there, but I came to realize it’s going to sit empty 80% of the time. It’s eight hour drive from where we’re at to get there. It’s not something you can just kind of bop on over. And traveling with grandkids is certainly not easy for their age to
Pick up, pack up and drive eight hours across the state to get there. It’s easier now that they’re older, but back then it was, they were very young. And what year was this? 2017.

Dave:
Okay. So you, for a while after your diagnosis, had it got into real estate, it took a couple years for you to start?

Mike:
Yeah, well, we had a couple of long-term rentals we had sold.

Dave:
Okay.

Mike:
Yeah, so I mean, it’s not that we were completely green, but never really looked at short-term rentals in 2017. It was kind of, that wasn’t say the wild, wild west of short-term rentals, but it was a different world than it is today. So I mean, I got to get to know Luke Carl and Avery Carl on BiggerPockets. We joined, I think I joined a little after they did. And I started hanging out on the BiggerPockets short-term rental forum and was reading everything I possibly could about doing this. And we were a little nervous. I mean, when you’re first thinking about doing a short-term rental, you have this asset as like you’re basically handing the keys over. It’s not a 1973 Toyota Corona, you’re letting your buddy borrow. It’s a whole house sitting on the lake filled with furniture. And when we got started, the house was completely empty, so we had to furnish it and get it all ready to go. And that took a long time, not really that long, but it’s an expense and trying to figure it all out. But if it wasn’t for BiggerPockets, I don’t think I would’ve done it.

Dave:
Well, we’re glad to hear that and you’ve paid us back in spades because as I mentioned at the top the show, Mike is one of the most prolific members of the BiggerPockets Forum communities, which we greatly appreciate. You’re always in there answering people’s questions. We got to take a quick break, but stick around because later in the show Mike’s going to explain why he’s almost immune to fomo or fear of missing out, and it’s super interesting. So stick around. We’re back with investor Mike F. So what was the learning curve like for you? Because I imagine going from being in product development and software engineering, are there overlaps between that and managing a short-term rental?

Mike:
There is because 50% of my job at least, was creating processes for people that needed to understand how to implement our technology. So you really just take that and you apply it to processes for short-term rental. I’m a huge believer in self-management of your short-term rental, but you have to have all your ducks in a row. You have to have everything working. You have to make sure your maintenance schedule is on right, on the money because the last thing you want is this X, Y, or Z breaking down. So all your hard systems need to have steady maintenance. You need to hire the right people to be a handy person to come over and take care of something. So you have to have somebody there. You have to have a top-notch cleaner. And sometimes it’s going to take a while. I’ve been through four cleaners since we started.

Dave:
That’s actually not that bad. I think I’ve been to way more,

Mike:
It isn’t that bad considering we’re really rural. I mean, we are 36 miles down the lake from Coeur over an hour to drive down there. And it’s a tiny little town and there’s very few professionals of this kind. There’s another town about 18 miles farther south called St. Mary’s that has some, but the cleaner comes all the way from Coeur d’Alene. It’s a whole day job for her. Drive down there, clean the whole house, top to bottom, do all the laundry, and then drive back. So that’s always the key, but getting all everything in place and all the processes in place, once those are running, then management becomes a lot easier. I’m a huge believer in personal communication with the guests. I don’t rely on automated communication. I don’t rely on bots of any kind to answer things. Somebody asks a question, does an inquiry on Airbnb or VRB on the guy who answers the question, I give them my personal cell phone number that they can get ahold of me anytime and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been contacted for problems.

Dave:
Really?

Mike:
Yeah. It’s been seven years.

Dave:
Is that because the house is just in great condition or you find great guests?

Mike:
Both. I think I vet every guest. We do not have auto book turned on for anybody. Everybody has to talk to me and I got to get a feel for they are. We get a lot of fake bookings.

Dave:
Really.

Mike:
Hi, this is Steve. We are looking at staying at your house. Are these dates available? You can almost hear it and it’s obvious the dates are available. We had one just come in the other day, November 1st through the 26th. I’m like, wow, that’d be a great booking. I’ve only had two bookings that long ever that were real, but I knew right away because of the wording. And then it takes them about a week and a half to get back to me when I say yes, great. My wife and I and kids are going to be going on a vacation and my business is going to be paying for it. Can I please send you this fake third party out of country check?

Dave:
Oh gosh,

Mike:
Give me all your personal information so we can make this happen. Yay. And you’re like, Nope, only work through the tool. I only take payments through the tool. Sorry. And then they disappear.

Dave:
Good for you. I mean, it sounds like you’ve got some really good systems in place. I want to take a step back quickly though, because you’re sort of in your timeline. You bought this house for personal use, you found BiggerPockets, and I think one of the common challenges that a lot of our audience here is how long do you research and learn before just jumping in? Was it quick for you to just start renting it out or are you more the type that spent a lot of time educating yourself prior to, like you said, handing over the keys to this very valuable asset to people you’ve never met before?

Mike:
Right. So analysis paralysis is probably the biggest hurdle for most folks who have never done anything like this before. It is a gigantic expense for most people, and it’s a real risk and role of the ds. So I’m both sides of that. What you just stated, because I am not risk averse, but I plan, plan, plan. If you fail to plan, plan to fail, you look at everything, you read everything. And I was had an advantage being disabled. I basically had time so I could learn everything there was to learn. And being more technical minded, it basically allows me to get a better understanding of the way finance is supposed to work and how insurance is going to play out. And I have a couple of algorithms that I have written that hunt the web that are for data that that’s why I can post Mike’s deals of the day because I scrub, I can scrub the internet on my own and find stuff that takes a while to become public to everybody else. That’s why BiggerPockets, and I hate to keep coming back to that. I’m not trying to be a shill for BiggerPockets here, but that forum is so valuable because there’s so many of us on there that have done this and been doing it. And if you have a question, I can answer that question or John Underwood could answer that question or a dozen other people can answer that question.

Dave:
Well, first of all, Mike, if you want to be a shill for BiggerPockets, you’re in the right place. This is the one podcast you’re probably allowed to shill BiggerPockets
As much as you want. We really appreciate it. But just so everyone knows, what Mike is talking about is a completely free resource to everyone. The forums are free. If you want to learn something about real estate, go ask a question. I think there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who don’t even know we have these forums. Go check it out, ask a question, go see what other questions people are asking. I promise you’re going to learn something. And I think you’re right, Mike, I wanted to just get back to this idea of finding the right balance between preparation and fear. Everyone’s going to have some fear. That’s just a normal part of it, but you have to find the right level and the right way to cut it off and say, educating myself is not going to help me anymore once I’ve spent dozens or hundreds of hours, whatever it is, learning and reading, listening to the podcast at a certain point, you just sort of have to jump in. And it sounds like you did that and were you successful right away or did it take a while for your business to

Mike:
It’s going to take a while.

Dave:
Yeah.

Mike:
How long? The first year was lean, we lost money the first year because I was a little hesitant. We’re getting the house set up, we’re filling the house with all kinds of new stuff and I want to make sure that it works. I went through two different types of sheets before settled on a sheet brand that worked really, really well because the first one, really soft, super nice satine weave sheets that the first person with heels that were kind of needed some work on because they were sandals all the time, pour the heck out of the sheets.

Dave:
Oh gosh.

Mike:
They were peeled up, you wouldn’t believe. So I had to toss ’em out after one stay, things like that. So your first year, anybody who’s going to do a short-term rental, your first year is probably going to be on the lean side. My area has got low saturation on Lake Coeur. There are not a lot of places for rent on the lake. I have dozens of people in competition, not thousands. So I price everything accordingly. But even then you can have a rough year. So you just really never a hundred percent all your analysis and all your thoughts and air DNA and the enemy method and going through and comparing everything, trying to set your prices and figuring out your occupancy and making sure you have the right amenities and the right stuff in the house isn’t a guarantee that you’re just going to knock it out of the park. So you have to go into it with a understanding that this is something that you could do less than break even. But like anything, no risk, no reward.

Dave:
Absolutely. And it sounds like Mike, you got together pretty quickly, I mean relatively quickly and in 2017, and by all accounts, from what we’ve talked about, you’ve run a successful short-term rental business. But one of the main reasons I was so excited to talk to you, Mike, is that you are clearly very passionate about real estate and about short-term rentals. You’re on the forums all the time. I can hear it in your voice, but you’ve also chosen not to scale your portfolio. You have one short-term rental and you’re happy with that. Tell me why you’ve made that decision.

Mike:
So we have tried to buy a few other places. Unfortunately, as the farther down the road after Covid is when we really starting to look well, the interest rates went nuts, and that was crazy. And property values went up and property values in our area, we were choosing to do our investing in Idaho. Shot through the roof. I mean, it was one of the highest in the country.

Dave:
Oh yeah. I mean, for everyone listening, if you are not aware, places like quarterly and Boise just had some of the fastest appreciation in the whole country, was kind of going crazy during that time. But Idaho might’ve been the epicenter. Idaho and Austin I think were the two places that were just booming even more than the rest of the country. So sorry to interrupt, but go ahead

Mike:
Matt. No, no, that’s okay. Yeah, absolutely. Our house are Lakehouse is worth four times what we paid for it now.

Dave:
Oh my God. In seven years.

Mike:
Yeah.

Dave:
So yeah, why buy poor if you’re doing it that well with your first one?

Mike:
Well, we’ve looked at other places. We did a scouting trip down to Sedona, Arizona, looking around there, we went out to New Mexico, angel Fire, looked at some things like that and all. We liked all of it, but unfortunately the places that we liked the best ended up either selling before we even got home, started talking about it. They got pulled off the market or there was various different reasons. We took out a pretty good size HELOC on our primary. So we have cash for down payment and to get the house all prepped, and now we’re kind of in a holding pattern, but we found a place out on the ocean that we were looking at. It was a successful short-term rental. It was doing pretty well, and we were ready to pull the trigger on. It needed some updating, but we were ready for that.
And then the people pulled it off the market. That was late last year. So we looked at a couple other places, one in Coeur d’Alene, it was on a ponder river, which is a major inflow into Lake Ponderay, which is an enormous lake north of where we’re at. And it was beautiful. It was great. And they pulled it off the market as well. So it’s not that we don’t want to expand it, but now we’re getting to the point where my wife’s going to retire in a couple of years, and we started kind of late in life in this particular game. So had we known more earlier, I think we would’ve done better. If you’re younger, I think there’s a lot more, still going to be a lot more opportunity moving forward. It’s a more sophisticated market now than it was seven, eight years ago. So,

Dave:
All right. We got to take a pause for some ads, but we’ll be back with this week’s investor story on the other side. Let’s get back to the show. Has it been hard, Mike, to be patient? So much has gone on in the last couple of years. What is it like to take the patient approach?

Mike:
Well, you know what? I’m not really much of a FOMO guy. Fear of missing out. It happens on occasion that I get frustrated, but for the most part, I look at it like, well, you know what? It just wasn’t meant to be, so I’m not going to worry about it. I’m just going to move on and see what else I find. I still scan. I spend actually a lot of time on Craigslist looking at buy owner stuff and what people have been trying to sell. I’ve been driving around north Idaho quite a bit, down back roads, seeing if there’s something interesting, just kind of floating around and I’ll write an address down. Nothing’s popped up, but if you get mad and try to jump on every single deal that comes along, it’s going to bite you, in my opinion. Eventually it’s going to bite you. You really got to watch that.

Dave:
And what do you attribute that lack of FOMO to? I mean, I think it takes confidence to not be jealous or running, chasing every little shiny object. How do you stay disciplined?

Mike:
Well, I would have to say that it’s easier for me being someone who is older than, I mean most of the investors that come in that are asking questions, they’re in their twenties, twenties and early thirties, husband and wife or a single person trying to get started because they like the idea of short-term rentals. And when I was younger, I was probably way more aggressive than I would be. Now, we have to plan for retirement. We can’t be, you have that looming over your head the entire time. Do I sit there and I just take $200,000 and put it down on black? Because sometimes you feel like that’s what you’re doing. You’re putting it all on black,
Hoping that it’s going to pay out in the end. Now, it’s not like that, but every real estate deal is a bit of a gamble. You can plan and you can get processed, you can do all kinds of things and you could still lose and nobody wants to lose. We saw a lot of that in the last few years. I think things have evened out now. So experience and just life in general and seeing things come and go and come and go, and your life isn’t worse because you didn’t jump on this or you didn’t jump on that. I mean, I don’t spend a lot of time kicking myself in the butt for not buying Apple at $25.

Dave:
Right? Yeah. That wasn’t the part of life you were in

Mike:
Right at that time. I just don’t think about it. We get quite a few young folks coming in. They want to do short-term rentals. Off the bat, they’re single. And my advice to every young investor wanting to get started is to not do short-term rentals.

Dave:
Oh, really? Why is that?

Mike:
Well, because there are better options to build a base off of.
There was one young guy, he’s 19, he’s in the military. He’s going to be able to take advantage of VA loans and he wants to get into short-term rentals once he gets out in about three years. And I told him, what you should really do is take advantage of the VA loan, or for those who don’t have access to VA loan would be FHA low down 3% down loans, buy a duplex, buy a triplex, buy a fourplex. You buy something like that. You live in one and you have three renters. You do some minor rehab, you do it after a year, you have to live in the place for a year. Then you basically exit the place, rent that last unit, and then do it all over again. You have to convert that one FHA loan to a conventional, you refinance. Then you move over here and you do it again, and then you do it again and maybe one more time.
And now you’ve got duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, all of them producing all of them, income producing for you, maybe 10, 15, 20% at this point. After doing it for a few years, maybe you have one that’s paid off. You have all these assets that form this really, really nice piece of bedrock that you can build the rest. So if you’re young, you don’t have kids, you can move every couple of years or every other year or whatever without dragging a whole family and changing school districts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that’s what I would do. And then once you do four or five years of that, then you can start looking at some other things.

Dave:
You’re speaking my language. I mean, that’s sort of what I did is just started with long-term rentals. And over time I’ve branched out. I started investing in syndications. I do some private lending. Now you do some different stuff, but I feel comfortable taking risk because I have a solid portfolio of low risk, high performing assets. And not all of them were amazing when I first bought them, but I bought 10, 15 years ago. And that’s the beauty of real estate is over time you hold onto these things, they perform.

Mike:
Yep.

Dave:
Well, Mike, I wanted to say thank you because I have only been hosting this podcast for a few months, but I’ve been a member of the BiggerPockets community for a long time, an employee for a long time. And it’s honestly, people like you who choose to share their time and share their knowledge with people for free out of the goodness of their heart, that it’s made the community so strong. So I just wanted to personally thank you. Thanks. So last question, Mike, what are you excited about in the short-term rental or real estate industry right now?

Mike:
I think there’s a lot of opportunity to be had, unfortunately, at the expense of folks that were overzealous in their FOMO purchases of short-term rentals. I guess you could say. Sometimes you can almost feel the desperation of some folks just to get out from underneath that mortgage because they bought high at the top of the market. Their interest rate is crazy. Interest rates are starting to drop. I think we’re going to see a couple more drops in the next few months. I think it’s going to be a very interesting 2025.

Dave:
Yeah, likewise. Well, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your story and your insights with it. We really appreciate it. And if you want to connect with Mike, we’ll put his contact information, but just go check out the BiggerPockets forums. You’ll see him all over the BiggerPockets community. Thanks again, Mike.

Mike:
Thank you. Have a good day guys.