Investors Ashley Wilson and Brittany Arnason: ‘The Only Women in the Room’

With Ashley Wilson and Brittany Arnason, https://www.therealestateinvesther.com/book

Ashley Wilson co-authored the book with other women investors like Brittany Arnason

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This week, Tim and Carolina meet with real estate investors Ashley Wilson, based in the U.S., and Brittany Anarson, based in Canada, to discuss their experience in the field along with tips for others in the industry.

More About the Show

The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.

In this episode, Ashley and Brittany offer their perspectives on the industry and advice for people entering or currently working in the field, along with insights on how they have become successful in their own rights.

Background

Ashley got started investing in real estate around 10 years ago for several reasons. First, she grew up with a general contractor as a father who had his own business, which was definitely influential in her life. In addition, her mother was a manager for a small company. Combined, those two elements and influences really inspired her to be in the position that she’s in today.

She’s done everything from single-family rental, short-term rentals, long-term rentals and flipping both high-end and low-end price ranges. One of her current focuses now is buying large apartment buildings and offering them as investment opportunities to passive investors who are looking to diversify their retirement strategy.

Brittany bought her first rental property when she was 18 years old. Her mom was a real estate investor, so she learned a lot from growing up. On the construction side, Brittany worked with her mom when she was just a little kid, so she has had a lot of experience in construction leading up to now, but she really went full out into it four years ago.

She now has 27 doors and is doing it full-time. She loves to be hands-on with a lot of the construction work. It has allowed her to grow this platform on social media, which has given her a lot of opportunities.

Defining: “Doors”

All of their rental properties are long-term buy and holds. When Ashley first started investing, it was more like single-family houses or duplexes, but then she started looking for apartment complexes because it just made more sense with the numbers and where she wanted her portfolio to go. She recently bought a 14 unit apartment building, equating to 14 doors, then her duplexes do doors and so forth.

You don’t want more doors if they’re not cash flowing for you. It doesn’t matter how many doors you have unless it’s actually making you some money. A lot of real estate investors do talk about thousands and thousands of doors, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not making any money.

Determining Cash Flow

It all comes down to numbers — that’s the only thing that matters. If you’re a new investor, you have to get out there, analyze deals and then take all your expenses minus your income for the rental income. Then, if it’s cash flowing and it makes sense, that’s what you’re looking for. It takes time to figure that out. You have to get good at analyzing and figuring out exactly all of your expenses because you don’t want to miss something and all of a sudden, you have negative cash flow.

There’s a lot of different reasons why people invest. Typically, with the cashflow component, there’s a general rule of thumb called the 1% role, which is the value of the property. Let’s say $100,000 should be collecting approximately $1,000 in rent. 50% of that should be going towards your expenses. The remaining 50% should be going towards whatever debt you have on the property, then also putting away for reserves for capital expenses that you have along the way.

For example, a capital expense would be something like a roof, a hot water heater or something that’s a major expense. That’s not an operational expense, it’s more of a one-time expense.

There are other reasons why people invest, too.

There might be tax benefits to investing. Cash flowing is definitely the majority of the reasons why people are investing, but there are a lot of people who invest for the tax benefits. So for example, someone could be buying a property because of a 1031 exchange, which is basically a way in which you can defer your capital gains from the sale of one property and put it in the acquisition of another property, differing that tax burden. That could be another reason why someone’s investing — pushing off that tax hit.

There are people who invest because of bonus depreciation, which is another tax benefit. So that can offset other passive investment income that they are collecting. It could also be because they’re pushing against inflation. There’s a lot of different reasons why people invest, but ultimately, it’s the whole concept of using your door count to substantiate your investing.

You need to have a purpose as to why you’re investing and seeking the doors, because if you don’t want the extra burden of all the extra work that you’re doing, maybe only 10 doors is sufficient. Maybe 10 doors provide the cash flow, the tax benefits and everything else you need to live a financially free life. For other people, it might be a hundred doors. It’s a very case-by-case basis.

Getting in the Mindset

For many, the goal is financial freedom. Some of it may be offsetting income and tax burden with some losses or the depreciation value of tax benefits of real estate. Tim mentions that he’s hooked on the first calculator he used for cash flow, which was on BiggerPockets. People can go on BiggerPockets and fiddle around with those tools and get started, even if they don’t have the money to invest and start thinking about a career in real estate investing or, or side hustle and real estate investing.

Ashley thinks that the number one misnomer about investing in real estate is that people think you need wealth to invest in real estate. They don’t realize that, actually, real estate is the vehicle that provides that wealth. You can use seller financing in which the seller holds back the note; in essence, they’re acting as the mortgage company or the lender. You can also get private money loans or hard money loans, but you can invest in real estate with zero money out of pocket.

There’s always a way; you just have to have the right mindset and the determination to do it. When Brittany was starting, she tried to get a loan, but no one would give her financing right at the beginning stages. She was thinking, “I can’t buy a place in the city because they’re too expensive. I’m could go out of town and buy property for $40,000, but no one will give me a mortgage on that. What else can I do?”

She got a personal line of credit at around 8% interest, a bit high but the numbers still worked. It was still an awesome cashflow property. She always looked for another way around those hurdles. So many people told her no, so she went to someone who finally gave her a line of credit and it worked. You just have to keep trying.

Getting Started

The best advice - Just get started — The best advice – Just get started

Ashley was working in pharmaceuticals and was doing clinical research and development. Her husband was a professional ice hockey player. They were both making pretty good salaries and weren’t firm believers in the stock market. They were looking for alternative investments, and they landed on real estate for three reasons:

It’s an asset-backed investment.
The tax incentives are great.
It’s a great hedge against inflation.

For those three factors, they started investing as a hobby to diversify their retirement strategy, but it quickly became their primary source of income coupled with their retirement strategy.

Her father and mother worked so hard because they did not want Ashley and her brother to work in construction. The crazy thing it is they both now do. The fact of the matter is there’s a way in which you can work smarter, not harder, within construction. A lot of people aren’t talking about it. Her dad has had his own general contracting business for over 40 years. Ashley has seen him go through really tough times in different market cycles. He did not want her to ever be in that position.

She was the first person in her family to attend college and the first person to get a Master’s degree. Her parents really didn’t want her to pursue a path within construction. But they see where she is now, and they have obviously a completely different mindset.

Brittany started like her mom. Her mom would renovate rental properties and did everything herself because she didn’t have money to pay people to do anything. It started with her investing in an idea.

She was working as a bookkeeper at a restaurant, and the landlord came in to collect the rent check. She wrote the rent check for $10,000. She handed that to him and she thought, “This is insane. I can’t believe they’re paying this much rent.” It was in an expensive, touristy town. She saw that all these rich people in town were real estate investors. She started just talking to everyone and decided she was going to do it too. Everyone thought she was insane, but she bought an empty lot and built a house.

She did that when Brittany was around eight years old and her brother was six. They would help her do some projects here and there, but Brittany saw her work so hard trying to achieve this dream. No one really thought she could do it, but she put in all those hours and hard work and did what she had to do. And the market boomed. They bought in the 90’s when it was a nothing town, then it just went up insane amounts. She made $300,000 on that property and that was her start.

She grew up seeing those major struggles, but she saw if you set your mind to something, you can do anything. She saw that example in her mom.

Brittany’s start is a little odd. When she was a little kid, she got food poisoning and got really sick, and the insurance company paid out money to everyone who got sick at this restaurant. She had money sitting in an account, and when she turned 18 years old, she got the cash. She used that to buy her first investment property, and she still owns that one today.

Brittany didn’t have a lot of fear revolving around rental properties like lots of people do. She had confidence because she saw her mom do it, and she was successful at it. It’s definitely not easy. She didn’t know what to do to start. The first few years were extremely difficult, but she learned as she went along and she’s happy she got started so young. She considers herself lucky that it’s still a good cash flowing property because she doesn’t know if she actually ran the numbers right at that time because she didn’t exactly know what to do.

Pros and Cons of the Industry

Brittany loves the hands-on side and being able to be creative. She can have her career and then have this creative outlet too, which is definitely her favorite part. She loves doing all the work and coming up with designs in her head. She’ll go through Pinterest and find things she likes, then she makes it happen. Seeing that vision come to life by taking an old property and then making it beautiful again is super rewarding for Brittany.

Looking at the downside, Brittany mentions that it is such a struggle at the beginning. You really don’t know what you’re doing and everything takes more time than expected. She still goes through that. Things that she thought would take one day take three days, so she gets frustrated. It’s like a roller coaster with a lot of ups and downs. Getting through it at the beginning is so hard, but you learn and get better after each time and each mistake and failure. She advises you don’t give up too early. Too many people are giving up right at the beginning when it’s really hard, but you have to push through that initial stage.

Like Brittany, Ashley likes the creative side of it. She likes the fact that you can build whatever your mind can imagine. She is also a very numbers-oriented person, so she likes it when she can go into a market and the cost per square foot to build is significantly less than the cost per square foot selling. She can find the creativity on the business side of it as well as on the aesthetic side. She really enjoys the numbers part of it.

Ashley was only physically in it for a very short period of time because when she was working with her dad, they had a different business than Brittany had, where when they started, they were just working on flips and the numbers weren’t sustainable to physically do the work.

They had to figure out another way in which they could create a sustainable business model that made more money doing less work. For their first house, they took over nine months to renovate. Ashley and her dad did most of the work. They only hired out trades that they absolutely had to, such as an electrician for permitting and plumbers for that part of the process, but everything else they did. For nine and a half months, from acquisition to close, it took them about a year to sell the property.

Afterward, they made $66,000, which people might think is fantastic. Ashley and her dad split it 50-50. Her dad came into it like most flippers, knowing they don’t make a lot of money on their first flip, so he thought it was great. Ashley told him, “I can’t live off at $33,000 a year. Can you?” And he said “No.” So, it wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t a good business model.

Ultimately, they decided to go more on the outsourcing model. They changed their numbers to be able to outsource as much as possible, so it didn’t create a bottleneck. They had a greater capacity they could handle as opposed to them being in the trenches, but that’s because they were flipping. Brittany is doing buy and hold, and it’s a different business strategy. The numbers are different, the margins are different, so it’s a completely different system, but ultimately, Ashley and her dad outsourced everything and to put it in perspective, in terms of numbers a year to date. They bought a very comparable property, except a larger, and it was a full gut rehab.

They did it in nine and a half weeks, and they made almost a hundred grand. That’s a sustainable business model. In terms of things that Ashley doesn’t like about the business, with construction, it’s very easy to be too close to it and get too emotional about it. Ashley tries to remove herself as much as possible and focus on it as black and white. Even with her personal residence, she doesn’t have any emotional connection to it. That sounds really cold-hearted, but at the end of the day, it’s just an investment. Her connections with her family and friends are the things that bring her great joy. It doesn’t matter what four walls are surrounding that situation. It’s that situation that she has more energy invested into.

Brittany adds that it does make sense to do the DIY side of it in the beginning, but in order to scale, you really have to remove yourself because once you are working in the business, you just get too wrapped up in the day-to-day and you’re never working actually on the business. That’s like what Brittany is transitioning out of, which has been a difficult transition for her because of how she grew up.

Carolina mentions that it is really hard for all entrepreneurs. She remembers reading in Ashley’s book, and just leveraging your passion and your strengths is so important. Find what you’re good at and what you love to do and try to focus on that.

The other work has to get done, too. The accounting has to get done, the bookkeeping has to get done, all those pesky things we hate to have to get done. When you don’t have the cash flow to pay someone else to do it, it’s hard to make that transition.

Ultimately, entrepreneurs are typically people who like to do things themselves. They’re the people who didn’t let others help in group projects in school because they didn’t trust that the others would do the work correctly. So an entrepreneur naturally is going to be really strong at taking the initiative and doing the work themselves, and it’s their greatest strength. Now, the reason they’ve become an entrepreneur has become their weakness. That’s the struggle.

Once you push past or push through the hardest part, you’re starting the process. If you push through, it actually becomes so much easier. After that, maybe there are other outlets in which you can find your creativity. Ashley brings up that Brittany is good at another thing, which is painting. She’s an incredible artist. That might open up opportunities that she can go back to painting again, which she didn’t have before because you’re physically drained from working all day on the project.

Creating Authority and Voice

Creating valuable content for your audience builds credibility and network

Ashley mentions that everyone has expertise to offer. Everyone has a core genius, and they can leverage that. She says, “You can’t really be an amazing goal scorer and amazing goalie.” You have to pick and choose what you want to have expertise in. If you really hone in on that, you can do great things. She believes the reason probably why she and Brittany are known and seen throughout the real estate industry is because they are very giving with our information. They’re very willing to share how they are doing their projects.

Brittany does these amazing videos of exactly how she’s doing these projects, and she shares her time speaking about her journey and encouraging a lot of younger people to come in. Ashley’s sharing her journey as well and sharing how she’s doing different things and giving business strategy ideas.

When you’re willing to give as much as you have the capacity to give, then it just naturally comes back to tenfold. That’s why Ashley thinks she and Brittany had a stance in the market, just because they were willing to share. They aren’t people just talking about how many doors they have and standing on those metrics, they are really being authentic with their journey.

Ashley’s book, The Only Woman in the Room, is available on Kindle Unlimited. Anyone can read it for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Carolina found so many things interesting in the book. Carolina is a mechanical engineer, and she’s definitely been the only woman in the room for most of her career. It’s only until the last year that she transitioned into the interiors world where it’s basically dominated by women.

Tim and Carolina went to the housing innovation, Alliance. There were definitely the most women that had ever been there, but it was still only about 4%. This is something that needs to change because there are a lot of women like Carolina, Ashley and Brittany out there.

Ashley’s book touches on her relating more to boys than to girls growing up. Carolina has three brothers, and she relates to Ashley on this. She played in construction sites when she was little, but her mother was a civil engineer, and she worked in public works. She was at job sites all the time. Carolina had that role model like Brittany had. Carolina would think to herself, “Oh, I can go to school and be an engineer.”

Carolina has wondered how many girls are out there now feeling that same way: that they can relate more to boys. Maybe it’s because boys can be free to talk, and we secretly want to be who we are and not have to be constrained by societal expectations.

Ashley completely agrees with Carolina. The point is that somewhere along Carolina’s journey, whether it was consciously or subconsciously, she was able to look at someone and say, “I can do that because she’s doing that.” That’s what book is trying to create. Ashley states that it isn’t her book, it’s our book. The whole point is it’s our book in terms of it is all women’s voices. It’s supposed to give all of the women in the book an opportunity to tell their story, have their voice heard and have other women be able to too while having men look up and see all of these women killing it in the industry.

Women and Men in the Field

There’s a systemic issue going on where women aren’t and haven’t historically been encouraged to go into STEM fields. Ultimately mathematics, if we want to compare it to a house, is the foundation, finance is the walls and investing is the roof.

No one is going to invest without a structure underneath them, without having an understanding of finance and a basic understanding of mathematics. We’re really doing our society a disadvantage by not encouraging women to get into these fields and give them confidence. Coupled with the fact that there are historic industries, engineering, mathematics, physicians, medicine and science fields, are historically male-dominated.

Ashley says that she will never ever for her entire life forget how she opened the book. The intro was about an 80-year-old woman astrophysicist, who went to the University of Pennsylvania, said to Ashley, “The day I quit my job was the day I realized that I could invest. My income would not be limited by my gender.”

That had such a profound impact on Ashley and for this woman to still say that today means we’re not out of the woods yet. This is something that we can all collectively come together on because this is a problem that we’re all-seeing.

The unemployment numbers for September came out. The COVID situation that we’re all facing is actually being called a “she session” in a “pink color recession” because it is definitely hurting women more than men. In September, 1.1 million people left the workforce — 865,000 of them were women. Whether we’re reverting back to women being the primary caregivers, whether it’s because women are making 79 cents to the dollar to the man, it doesn’t matter. We are all in this situation together.

Women are outliving men six to eight years with a cost of living anywhere from $280,000 to $380,000 during that latter part of their lifetime. That doesn’t fall on the shoulders of just other women. It falls on the shoulders of women and men. Why not be in a society where women and men are equally encouraged to go into different fields and earn equal amounts so that we have an equal ability to live life with financial freedom? Real estate investing gives you that because it removes the gender bias. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we lived in a world where every field had that opportunity, construction or any sort of corporate position or really anything?

Ashley is a huge proponent for it. People like Brittany and other co-authors were so vulnerable to share their stories and where their pain points were and to be so honest with giving information is definitely a start. Ashley is very proud to have people like Brittany as friends, plus the other co-authors who were just so open to coming on for this book.

Tim adds that this book is really eye-opening. It’s a very easy read to take in small chunks because every chapter is dedicated to one woman’s experience. One thing that stood out to him was talking about the wage gap in chapter four. Tim and Carolina actually interviewed a modular builder out of Pittsburgh earlier and brought this up. Affordable housing isn’t necessarily about lowering the cost of construction. A lot of it is going to be about increasing income opportunities for people, and that’s a lot of the wage gap.

This book will help show women of any age in any field what’s possible to do part-time or full-time.

Brittany brought up in the book that not attending university created a limiting belief that someone’s not smart enough because they didn’t go to college and that maybe people feel under-qualified. How those two topics are tied together in empowering to close that wage gap on your own is great.

However, there are other industries, like in construction, in the lumber building materials, supplier industry, where there still just isn’t enough of that closing and not enough awareness that people in any of these fields can get involved in real estate investing and take it on themselves while, culturally, those shifts are being made.

Brittany has no student loan debt because she chose not to go that route. Tim and Carolina love to focus on careers on this podcast because they want to show that college isn’t for everyone. There are plenty of personalities, weaknesses and strengths to be had in this industry and every single type of talent is needed. It can be used virtually anywhere on the construction site, whether that’s on the real estate, the building, the materials, the lumberyard, the design or the shop drawings or whatever.

Building a Network

One of the most important parts of Brittany’s investing career is building that network of people. At first, she didn’t understand the importance. She remembers going to a day seminar where they said, “You have to talk to every person in this room and put yourself out there.” She thought to herself, “No, I’m going to put my head down and study and learn.” She went up to someone later and said a little bit of her background and story. They said to her, “You have to start a blog, and you have to gain credibility.” She didn’t really want to, as it sounded like a lot of work. But she ended up taking their advice, and she started a blog called “Little Investments on the Prairie.”

She had doubts, thinking, “I’m not a writer. I can’t do this. I can’t keep up with a blog.” However, then she got into Instagram. She loves the photos and the video side of it. She just kept putting herself out there. She realized people were connecting to her work and what she was doing. Because she is very open and honest, the audience can see the struggles and the failures and successes.

By doing that, she’s really built a connection with her audience, and it’s brought her a lot of opportunities at this point. For example, she just got on the BiggerPockets podcast. She just kept tagging them in all of her videos and photos on Instagram. They eventually started paying attention to her, which was a huge accomplishment. It does take a while to build that following, but the more authentic and willing you are to share that information, the better you’re going to be able to build that brand and that community. Opportunities just flow from there.

A lot of people do feel alone too. If you post, ‘This isn’t easy. It’s not an Instagram highlight real. I’m actually really struggling right now!’ The followers or audience are saying, ‘Oh, well like Brit struggles with doing backsplashes, it’s okay if I struggle. I didn’t think she would struggle like me.’ Once you start to really be vulnerable with that side of it, you can help people know they’re not alone. Nobody wants to look up to a perfect person.

Recommended Resources

Ashley is a huge proponent for free information as much as possible when you first get started. Ultimately, you pay with your time or you pay monetarily, but when you first get started, the best investment you could possibly make is with your time. There is a tremendous amount of resources available that weren’t available 10 years ago that people should exploit. They’ll be fast-tracked much further along than Ashley or Brittany were at the same age if they started at the same time.

Ashley started listening to BiggerPockets about 12 years ago. BiggerPockets was in its infancy, and it took us two years to digest the information and pull the trigger. Ultimately, if you take the information that they have now, with all their podcasts, the real estate investor show, plus the other shows, you can listen to the content they have. Now, they have such superstars on there that you can fast track.

You could probably dedicate a whole month on your commute to work or before you go to bed, where you listen to podcasts. If you have it playing in the background and you start to take in all this information, you can really set aside just a month and then be able to pull the trigger within a month’s time by just digesting free content.

Even on Brittany’s Instagram, she does a really good job of going through the process, speaking to the numbers and showing you a real snapshot. A lot of other accounts do that too. Brittany also shows you the actual construction side of things, where other people are just showing you numbers and not really showing you behind the scenes.

It’s like the HGTV shorthand version of what’s really going on, but Ashley recommends absorbing as much free content as possible first. Then, look for some really valuable people in the industry. She’s not a huge guru person, but she does think that there are really strong mentors out there that you can link up with. Be very wary of the “get rich quick,” or the “come join the seminar over the weekend and you’ll make millions by Monday” kind of pitches.

Tim says that learning on podcasts has been really great for him. From the real estate space, he challenges listeners to listen https://www.therealestateinvesther.com with Liz.

Brittany agrees with everything Ashley said. She encourages people to follow Ashley’s Instagram too, as there is amazing content there as well. Brittany has done the three-day courses and it actually really propelled her into it because she never knew that there were real estate podcasts out there. She learned a lot from the three-day course, but then it’s a lot of money. If she knew about BiggerPockets beforehand, she wouldn’t have probably taken it. While taking in all the information, get your mindset right. Decide and commit to it and then you’ll figure out the plan from there because you’re going to take action.

Another way to learn is to just have podcasts on while you work. Brittany remembers specifically listening to Ashley’s Bigger Pockets episode when she was painting a wall. She can remember the house, the room and she thought to herself, “Wow! This girl’s amazing!” Then, all of a sudden, they are best friends.

Favorite Project

Brittany enjoyed this particular project because she got to be more free with the design

Brittany mentions a favorite project, a favorite because the budget allowed her be more free on since it was renovated as an Airbnb property.

She could do a little bit crazier stuff than normal because, with other rental properties, you can’t over renovate for the area. You can’t do really cool, high-end finishes because it’s just not worth the time and the money if it doesn’t make sense for the area. This one did make sense to put a little bit more creativity and higher-end products into it. Most of the other properties were just smaller, lower rent towns. She got to have a little bit more fun with

Ashley has two that come to mind. One is a single-family, and one is multifamily. On the single-family side, the first project stands out in her mind because she got to work hand in hand with her father. She learned so much from someone so proficient in historic codes. Every time the inspector came, he was educating the inspector on historic codes. The amount of information he knows is so impressive. She got to work firsthand with him and because she changed their business so it would be sustainable, they no longer got to work in that capacity together.

She really misses that. It was an incredible and hilarious experience. She was nine months pregnant, and he had her up on the roof. Later, they said, “Oh, that roof needs to be torn down because it’s about to fall down.” She looked at him as she was nine months pregnant on a roof, but those are moments that she’ll never forget with her dad.

On the multifamily side, they have a property that was one of the hardest properties. Once it was taken over and they had to deplete occupancy and build it back up. It has been the hardest property Ashley has ever had and hopes she’ll ever have in her entire life. She has had many sleepless nights on this property, and it has been a huge struggle.

What stands out about this property is two days ago, they hit 90% occupancy and in August of 2019, they were at 64.4% and it’s a 225 unit property. So every net move-in is only 0.4%, and they were able to build that all through COVID. With the increase of change over the tenant base from what they’ve billed versus what they’ve collected since March is average of 99.52%. That has been really impressive as well.

Ashley says that the team on that property makes all the tough days worth it. She feels like every single time they have a challenge, it’s a group full of the most brilliant minds that if she was to handpick, she’d handpick the same people to really figure out these challenges.

Ashley’s husband asked her, “If someone said to you, would you pay to be in a mastermind with these people to talk about this topic, you would pay, right?” Ashley said that she would absolutely pay. He replied, “You’re getting all this value because you’re going through all these challenges with the most brilliant minds in the room.” That really put things in perspective for Ashley. Because of that, this project really stands out to Ashley.

Important Topics

Ashley believes that people should talk about the importance of having someone on your investing team who understands and knows construction. There’s a lot of value when you have someone who knows construction, and they can really be that point of contact. For example, in the multifamily space that she’s in, a lot of people in that space don’t have someone with construction knowledge on their team.

This is a really good opportunity for people in construction to really position themselves and leverage their expertise to join these teams. If you want to get into investing, you can really parlay your skills and leverage them to get your foot in the door. People are very quick to discount two parts of Ashley’s journey:

She and her husband ‘had good incomes starting off’ – arguably a pretty bug advantage. People look and discount her story because they had their own capital to invest when they got started, as opposed to not having capital. Well, all that did is kick the ball down the road in terms of when financing would become an issue. Because she didn’t realize alternative ways to use financing and leverage other people’s financing early on in the game, that’s something she learned years later, and that became a detriment to her continued progress and journey in real estate. Brittany was challenged early on, and Ashley was challenged later. Either way, they both faced it because you always have a capacity of bandwidth for how much money you have to invest.
Her father was her partner in single-family flipping the first one. People would say, “Oh, well look at you. You have a general contractor as a contact. I don’t have someone like that. You’re just lucky.” If you look at her story and dive into the details, the secrets in the details are there. Her father, who’s had his own business for over 40 years, was an excellent partner. Why is he an excellent partner beside him being her father? He has the knowledge which she always talks about, and he physically can’t do the work anymore. So you harness someone’s knowledge, and you put them on as the project manager and you leverage their skill.

Look for someone who is looking to retire out of the physical labor and leverage that skillset, so you can still have a great partnership together. Hopefully that helps, even for someone who’s looking to retire or switch industries because it’s too much wear and tear on their body that you can still leverage their knowledge and skills in a very impactful and lucrative way.

Brittany feels that there are so many tradespeople or people in construction, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of them are investors, which people need to talk about. It’s such a huge asset and skill to have, but it seems like people aren’t talking about it, from what Brittany has seen. It’s just so overlooked and just having this understanding of the construction and background of it. It should be talked about way more than it actually is right now. People need to acknowledge that and really dig into it.

Tim mentions when he started in construction, he didn’t know anything about anything, but he was a pretty good carpenter. He didn’t know where the money came from or how the financing worked. There just wasn’t enough information on it, or he didn’t take advantage of any resources to learn that until now that he’s in his forties.