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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PODCAST: 1:09 - How Curt got into real estate 6:43 - Value of Education 10:49 - Talk about the first deal you made 13:36 - Failures in Real Estate 17:47 - Areas in Atlanta that Curt invests in 22:43 - Method for growing his Rental Portfolio 26:19 - How did he decide to go full time? Contact: (678)948-7151 [email protected] FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE PODCAST AUDIO: Curt Smith: When you know who you're after, your job is not to buy houses and look for residents. Your job is to choose your resident and then you buy houses to suit your resident's needs. Spencer Sutton: All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Atlanta Real Estate Investor podcast. I am one of your hosts, Spencer Sutton, and I'm here with Matthew Whitaker. Matthew, welcome to the show. Matthew Whitaker: Thank you. Glad to be back. Spencer Sutton: We're glad to have Matthew back in today. We've got a special guest with us. We have Curt Smith joining us from Atlanta. And Curt, welcome to the show. We're excited to hear your story and learn from you today. Curt Smith: Oh, that's great. I'm honored that you invited me, Spencer and Matthew. I'm glad to tell everything and help folks both on this podcast and maybe in the future if anyone wants to reach out to me. Matthew Whitaker: I'm very excited to talk to somebody that has retired using their rental portfolios. We want to find out all about that, but I think the first question is, why real estate? Why did you... Tell us how you got into it and why you chose real estate? Curt Smith: Well, yeah I suppose that's a good question. Especially, if you have a maybe 30 years old perspective. I remember when I was 30-ish sometime ago, I was going to the trade shows for, not syndications, but for franchises, franchise trade shows. And this was 30 years ago. I would come away from the Post Office Box R Us booth. They would say, "Well, typically folks who live off the Mailboxes R Us, whatever, they own five or six or seven of them." Five or six or seven of them? What? Because they don't cash all that much, right? These franchises they - Matthew Whitaker: ... In other words, there's no money. No money in this Curt, but we want you to invest. Curt Smith: Right? And McDonald's is a million- dollar franchise and at any rate, so that laid dormant for some period of time. And then I was just I'm reticent to buying into something that was retail facing. Where you were depending on people walking in off the street and you're providing a transactional service. I had a gut adversion to transactional income, and I still do. Curt Smith: But then my wife and I started growing gray hair. And this is really the honest truth. The more gray hair you have, the more you start thinking about whats next. Is my made for you by the federal government and your company retirement system going to work for you? Are you going to be able to have a decent life or are you basically going to be cornering the market on refrigerator boxes? Curt Smith: We thought about it and low and behold, it was one of these matches that was random luck. I ran across Wendy Patton's book in Amazon, highly rated. I bought Wendy Patton's, Lease Options book her first entry, and she still is lease options subject-to. I read that book and my day gig was an engineer, educated as an engineer. The definition of an engineer is you solve problems you've never seen before. Curt Smith: So, self-education, which is the mantra of, or the bread and butter of real estate investors. Like going to REIA'S, taking education and reading books and just learning how to do it because, well, that's just the way most real estate people bootstrap themselves. So, it was natural for me to read a book. Curt Smith: It was the beginning days of, of internet. I mean, it was that long ago. Spencer Sutton: I remember those days. Curt Smith: There was a very early website called Atlanta Wholesale Deals or something to that effect. People were posting their deals for sale, both fixed and prefixed. Being an engineer, your middle name is network. So, I started emailing folks who put up their recent fixes in Norcross. Norcross, was a hotbed, this was 2011. Curt Smith: I met a young guy. I says, "Hey, I know how to network." So I started off by saying, "Hey, I love your house. How did you do it? Can I meet you at your house?" You know, classic. Real estate people are almost a 100% friendly. "Sure, I'll be at my house tomorrow, putting in the AC, come on out." Curt Smith: So, I met this young fellow who was flipping and also fixing rentals using his dad's money. He said, "You ought to join your local REIA." And he said, "Georgia REIA, gareia.com." And I said, "Well, how do I buy a house like this?" It was 2011. Because I didn't know that it was a candy store. He literally spun around 360 degrees standing in the front yard, saw one across the street and an over one that had the HUD papers in the window. He says, "That one." Curt Smith: Oh my God. I just went to hudhomestore.com... And he said, use my agent, he's HUD-approved. I made an offer, and I bought that house across the street. Spencer Sutton: Wow. Curt Smith: And then I told my wife. Matthew Whitaker: There's so much here to unpack. I think it's ridiculous. So, you basically bought your first house because a gentleman you met at his house just pointed across the street and said, "You need to buy that one." Curt Smith: I did skip... I didn't embellish on the gray hair part. I did say, we were thinking about what next, "How will we live in retirement?" My wife was a school teacher and 2009 kind of drilled into everyone. You can't trust what you think is a given. They were thinking about Social Security is going to evaporate, which we still are. And we're thinking that the pension funds for all public employees was going to evaporate. Well, if you live in New Jersey or Illinois, that's probably still true. But Georgia, fortunately hasn't evaporated. Curt Smith: When you have that mindset, it's actually an advantage. It's a huge motivator. And we had enough gray hair and my wife is very astute. She's a full business partner. She was at a rental house with me today, solving a resident problem, German roaches. Let me tell you that's another problem. Spencer Sutton: That's not good. Matthew Whitaker: That is, we could do a whole show on solving the German roach issue. Curt Smith: Give me American roaches. Matthew Whitaker: Yeah. I'm not sure how we blamed it on the Germans, but maybe it is an actual German roach. But my grandmother is German. Spencer Sutton: They are bad, man. Matthew Whitaker: She probably wouldn't have been excited about us blaming it on her. Talk a little bit about the value. It seems like being an engineer, you like to have questions and answer questions. Talk about the value of education before you got started. You got started with the Georgia REIA. For everybody who's listening, tell them about the Georgia REIA, and just the value of reading. My guess is you still read a lot of books and invest in your own education. Curt Smith: Yeah, even now. We've done about 40, 41-2, 3 doors. We've sold some. So how many doors do we actually still have? In the 30s somewhere. And we still take Dyches Boddiford's classes twice a year. Pete Fortunato in the fall, Dyches in the spring. Curt Smith: But in the early days there weren't that many books. So I read both of Wendy Patton's books, bless her heart that she was an early book author. And then the Georgia REIA had boot camps. Then it was face-to-face learning from meeting people at their rental. Curt Smith: I had no interest in flips or wholesaling of course, is that adversion to transactional income was in play. Plus both my wife and I fairly well-educated. Me as an engineer, and she as a teacher, that we knew that to augment our retirement income, it had to be passive rental income. So, fortunately, in the early days, 2011, 12, 13, 14, you could buy houses that cash-flowed too easily. Curt Smith: Now, today, that problem of do you buy for appreciation and break even, and then look for cash-flow in the next rent raises. I know today's a different story than when we got started. But are the whole purpose for getting started was to augment our retirement. And, if it's possible, to not depend on Social Security or her pension, in case they both blew up. Our goal was to have enough to live on without anything else. Curt Smith: So, that was our goal 10 years ago, not so much written down, but we kind of dinner table talked about it and we don't have any kids. We have several advantages that maybe other folks don't have. We had two white-collar jobs. We lived way below our means, we were savers. We had some cash, not a lot of cash, but we had free cash-flow. And free cash-flow with bankable, lendable incomes allows you to serially get purchase rehab money loans in the early days. Curt Smith: The beginning was we have to buy enough houses that we can live off them. And that is as soon as possible because my wife also is an amateur medical doctor. She knew that the body and the brain has an aging process, that your capability to work hard and to solve difficult problems rolls off as you age. Curt Smith: So, we had consciously, we talked about this. We had a race, a time clock, that we had to get this done as soon as possible, or else we'll run off the edge of our body's ability to work hard. And our brain's ability to work. We're a little older than we look and I won't say my age, but it was, we had to just go all out. Matthew Whitaker: Yeah, you had to get it done. I know you're, you're like solving a lot of problems in my head for while Spencer knocks off at three o'clock every day. Spencer Sutton: Exactly. I was wondering why. Matthew Whitaker: It makes total sense. Spencer Sutton: I used to work hard. Matthew Whitaker: Spencer used to work hard, back when we first started seven years ago together. One of the interesting things I have found is that engineers are great investors. And one of the reasons I feel like they're great investors is because you're very process-oriented. You follow the process, you stick to the details. You make sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. Spencer Sutton: Very disciplined. Matthew Whitaker: Very disciplined. Yeah. So one of the things I would think though, is that being an engineer, there's probably some anxiety to what I would call, "Get all the lights green before you start putting your foot on the gas." Talk about your first deal in the anxiety around getting started being an engineer personality. I would imagine an accountant or a doctor may have some similar attributes as you. Curt Smith: I've met a lot of folks who are, know it all, educate yourself thoroughly before you take the first step. And we know that's actually the hardest way to get started. Curt Smith: Someone in Georgia REIA who is part of education. I'll mention his name, Kyle Kufeldt, coined something... I'll attribute it to him because I don't know who else to, he's very smart. Just-in-Time Learning is a fantastic strategy. And really, if you want to get from point A to point Z, that involves multiple steps and complications. Curt Smith: You can't educate yourself on the entirety before you take the first step. Well, for one your brain won't hold it. You'll forget. So, educate yourself on the first and maybe the second step partially. Just-in-Time Learning is a fantastic strategy, but it's very difficult for people because of insecurity, worries about failure. Mainly, I think when it comes down to it, it's worried about failure. Curt Smith: Why, most folks have difficulty jumping in the deep end, taking that first step, and making an offer. Making a viable offer, where you have proof of funds and the ability to get the loan and close, and they just won't make that offer. But I did, I seemed to, without knowing this catchphrase, which I only heard about like three years ago. I was instinctively a fail-fast person, not worrying about failure. I probably failed practically every day. Tuition failure that includes a lot of zeros... My wife and I, fortunately, is very supportive. We've lost a lot of money. Curt Smith: Most of the biggest zeroes are have been in the stock market in 2009... I didn't know when to sell. But all of that we call tuition. And so I've got great support here at home for failure. And so we don't worry about failure. We just worry about how fast you get up. Matthew Whitaker: Failure, I think everybody intuitively understands at this point that, and especially if you listen to any podcasts on success, that failure is part of the process. But I think in reality, it's hard, right? Because you make some mistakes, especially getting started. You don't want to make a fatal error getting started. But you're absolutely right. I mean, it is, treating failure as something as a tuition it's what you paid. Matthew Whitaker: My partner used to always say back in 2009, that I had a Harvard education in the housing industry. And that is true. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars lost at the time when the market crashed. I appreciate you sharing that. Do you have any stories of failure that you'd love to share with the audience? Curt Smith: I don't want to say that I didn't fail. We're so lucky. None of our failures in real estate... Now the stock market, different story, in real estate have not been that serious. But one small story that still is burnt in my brain because it was such a catastrophic, dumb move. Curt Smith: I was a partner and five people in Georgia REIA pooled their money and we bought a mobile home park. A beautiful park, a beautiful starter park in South Alabama, as you know, any kind of sizable commercial deal is not going to be close to home. They're always going to be some distance away. Curt Smith: This was a half built-out mobile home park, so we were buying homes, putting them in. I had the most real estate experience in the other partners, but I proved not to be. I didn't put enough focus on it. Anyway, so move them mobile homes in. I'm working with the installer. We get the power hooked up to the homes and the installer was supposed to hook the water up. But I didn't go to the mobile home and eyeball it. You always have to eyeball, never trust someone else for final inspection. It was all hooked up. It was all supposed to be hooked up. We rented it out, someone moved in and turned on the water spigot, there was no water. I didn't have the water hooked up. There was no water in this home and someone moved in. What do you do? Matthew Whitaker: And the homes in South Alabama. Curt Smith: And South Alabama, I had the phone number to the neighbor next door. I said, "Hey, I'm in a bad way. I'll give you $50 and $20 a month. Can I run a garden hose between your outdoor spigot and the mobile home next door is outdoor spigot?" Because if you shut the cutoff and hook the spigots together, you're going to actually power up the water in the house through a garden hose. So, the next day I had water in that place through a garden hose. Matthew Whitaker: It's like being super resourceful, also a credit to being an investor. Do you know what we call South Alabama? Curt Smith: Yeah, South LA, right? Matthew Whitaker: LA lower Alabama, LA. So when we talk to people from California and they say they're from LA, we're like, "Is that lower Alabama? Or is that Los Angeles?" They always get a kick out of that. Matthew Whitaker: I had a funny story, Curt, that I'll share, I bought this house, probably it was 2007, 2008. It was right before the historic recession. It's in a super desirable neighborhood, I felt like I competed for the house. Won this house, went in and renovated it and put the house back on the market. As I put it on the market, the house, essentially all the housing market is collapsing around this house. I keep dropping price, dropping price, dropping price. Matthew Whitaker: I sold it a year later, almost to the day, literally almost to the day. My net proceeds was the exact number of the check that I had brought to closing a year before. I'd put about $70,000 or $80,000 in the house, plus all the utilities, plus the insurance, plus all the carrying costs. The moral of that story is you can lose a lot of money and still remain viable. Matthew Whitaker: Now, the funniest thing about that story too is now... I always swore I was never going to ride down that street and now I'll live two doors down from that house. It's just ironic, like no kidding. My wife found a house, she had to have it. It's two doors down from this house and I see it every day. It's just a good reminder that you're not as good as you think you are. Curt Smith: Yeah. Well, my lesson that I think I can share with everyone is eyeball, eyeball eyeball, and don't leave important things to someone else. Especially, an out-of-state distance deal. Before you move someone in, you better go through and do a personal checkout yourself. Matthew Whitaker: Yeah, make sure... Go see these properties. Talk a little bit about your rental. Are there areas in Atlanta that you really like that you'd be willing to share with our audience? Curt Smith: Sure, anything. Unfortunately, the bulk of our current inventory is in an area that you can't afford to buy anymore. In 2012, 13, 14, we were buying off HUD Homestore and also Zillow email alerts in Norcross. Matthew Whitaker: Unfortunately, but fortunately for you, nobody can buy in there anymore. You are the reigning champ over there right now, right? Curt Smith: We got a tailwind of Norcross high school. So, this was on the north side of 85 and north side of Jimmy Carter, zip code 30071, which is one of the poor, lower-priced zip codes of the Norcross high school district. You can't today by good high schools and cash-flow. So my wife being a retired school teacher, she was a teacher then, instinctively knew to buy in good schools. And that's today is a goal, but in Atlanta, you can't afford to. And I don't think there's any large metropolitans that you can afford to buy in a five or above that. I've got another mitigation that when you are relaxed buying in good schools that there's a mitigator. Curt Smith: So we started in Norcross, bought one in Roswell. A cheap house, same price, right off Holcomb Bridge close to 400. We then got into two years' worth of buying double wides on land. Curt Smith: We discovered like blindfolded urbanites that once you leave a certain distance from an urban center, 80% of the inventory are double wides on land. Not including the mobile home parks, which I ended up buying a fifth of some years later. But double wides on land are everywhere outside, and that's standard blue-collar housing. We didn't realize that, until they start showing up on HUD Homestore. Curt Smith: Georgia was unique in the country where they were running through foreclosure. We don't know why there weren't many foreclosed double-wides in other states. So, we ended up buying about 18 of those things. Using the Wendy Patton model of rent-to-own as a way to skim off higher quality residents, resident-buyers, in each area with the goal to put them in a contract for deed after a year of dating. They date before a marriage. Plus long-term capital gains, plus selling an investment property, qualifies you to get installment sale tax treatment, as opposed to selling inventory, which is buy, fix, sell seller-finance. At least in my view, that you don't qualify for an installment sale. Curt Smith: So, for two years, we bought double-wides, and they ran out in 2015. We circled back to buying stick-built houses, regular houses. Bought some in small towns, Stockbridge. But the whole bunch up near Chattanooga in Rossville, Ringgold, we discovered there's a pocket of undiscovered houses that are leveraging the huge jobs' engine of Chattanooga. Curt Smith: I love Chattanooga. Chattanooga has so many jobs. They have three auto plants, a VW plant that's exploding, even today. They're converting their VW plant up in Chattanooga to their electric car manufacturing. But, all the foreclosures ran out in Rossville, Ringgold in Chattanooga. So there are no more. It's very difficult to find good deals. Curt Smith: We bought a bunch up there while the going was good. And then that took us to about 2018, 19, and had a dry spell or a taking it easy spell, I suppose. By that point, we had around 35, 6, 7 doors. Some in contract for deed, mostly standard rental. Curt Smith: Then started doing subject-tos. Trained myself on subject-to, by taking a weekend education from a local educator. I got a good document set for subject-to, it's a very complicated deal. Buying them to keep, I don't do wraps and sell subject-tos, I keep them for rentals. Curt Smith: I did two of them in the last eight months one in Rossville, one in Rex, which is on the east side of Clayton. But, very nice houses that I picked up just by... Nothing to the seller and Rex and $2000 so that the occupants could put a security deposit down on a rental they wanted. Curt Smith: So, that's now my current gig is marketing for subject-tos. They leverage off... Those deal sellers are sitting tight right now. They aren't motivated to sell because of forbearance and foreclosure ban due to the Cares Act. So I've only done two of those deals recently. Matthew Whitaker: I think it's pretty interesting that you have kind of changed strategies as the market progresses... Changed areas. I think there's a big lesson in there that you need to remain flexible as you invest and always keep your eyes open for the next opportunity. If you stop learning, then you're going to run into some problems because, if you're a one-trick pony, then you're just going to be stuck doing the same thing over and over again. Then that, at some point it's going to run its course. Matthew Whitaker: How do you think about your... It seems to me you are kind of a, you said you're a saver. Then now, I kind of think of that in light of your rental portfolio. My guess is you're just an accumulator, right? You might sell one or two every now and then, but you're more interested in growing and accumulating those over time. Would you say, even in this hot market? Tell us a little bit about how you think about that. Curt Smith: So, if you would take our age and categorize us in one of three buckets; starter, maintainer, ender. Enders should be annuitizing or selling their inventories, winnowing down the amount of work. We are not doing what we should be doing based on our age. Curt Smith: So, what are we doing? We're selling on notes, houses that are further away or more difficult to manage one or two for cash, the real dogs. The paper that I wrote that Spencer found me is, How to Buy a Bulletproof Rental Portfolio. It's a file linked off my bigger pockets profile, first paragraph. One of the focuses of that paper is how to choose your resident, then the house type. We ended up buying some houses that were great houses, great prices. We thought we're in great areas, but we actually didn't know what we didn't know. Curt Smith: We didn't know that rentals run on the backs of local jobs. We didn't understand that Franklin County, where Toccoa, Georgia is located, is dirt poor. There are no jobs up there. And if you lose a job, it's very difficult to find another job. And there's a lot of counties in Georgia that are dirt poor. Curt Smith: We bought a house in Albany... It's called Albany actually. A beautiful house... Couldn't keep it rented. Albany is dirt poor. Then we bought some other houses in these small towns, and they didn't have the jobs. That was an expensive lesson. We ended up selling those houses for either cash or on notes to local investors because those houses can work as rentals, but it's the business model where you got to collect rent face-to-face and sometimes with a pistol in your pocket. And that's not us. We do rent-to-own of nicer houses. We couldn't find anyone who even knew what rent-to-own was, or wanted to own a house because they just had low aspirations. Curt Smith: Another key in our business, it's not that we buy fantastic houses. We just buy okay houses in okay neighborhoods. We fix them nicer, we don't spend a fortune. We just do a few nice things to them, like put Italian pendants over the sink, that's a $45 decision. And appeal to aspirational residents who view themselves, in five years, to be in a better place. Living in this nice home in a nice neighborhood and raising a family. Curt Smith: So, aspirational residents will never call you. They'll fix stuff. They'll pay the rent on time. When you know who you're after, your job is not to buy houses and look for residents, your job is to choose your resident and then you buy houses to suit your resident's needs. Curt Smith: After we learned that, it's Rossville, south of Chattanooga, that was all about blue-collar and is fixing houses nicely that the blue-collar residents wanted up there. I never hear from those guys, the houses stay fixed. No German roaches. It's a Maytag repairman management job. Matthew Whitaker: That's great. That's a great story. Tell us about your decision to go full-time real estate investor. Did you have a goal in mind and what was that goal? We have a lot of people that listen that I would bet would love to be a full-time real estate entrepreneur, but what's the point when it's safe to cross over into full-time? Curt Smith: So, that's again where we're unique and it's hard to replicate when you have only one person working on investing. You have, usually the wife who's full-time mom, or she has a job, but not making as much and she's not working the business. Curt Smith: We had the luxury of both me and my wife going full-bore, she was part of the business. The math was not mathematical, it was just a gut feel. "Do we have enough net income from these rentals that I could quit?" And I didn't have a goal. Some say, because of tax advantages, if your W2 job netted, let's say, $5,000 a month, that if you had $5,000 or $6,000 coming in passively from rentals, net of major expenses, that you can quit. And that's true. But, the disadvantage that is well talked about, it's not hidden, is that once you quit, you are unbankable. It's hard to borrow money. Curt Smith: Something no one talks about is, that depending on your personality, and you can actually start feeling poor. And sleep well at night can become a factor. If you feel poor and you feel that your flexibility is hindered because you don't have enough income, or you're not bankable. Not this, not that. Because if you quit too soon with too tight of an income versus your expenses, you actually are. Your reserves are... Tend to be low, and your ability to grow reserves. If you have an event that eats two ACs and a roof in one season, and your reserves are down to $2,000 or $3,000, you might not sleep very well. Curt Smith: So, because we just worked our butts off, we ended up with a net income of about twice what, certainly my income, and maybe our combined income, from passive income. And at that point, we just had one more loan to get. It had to be an employee the day of that loan closing and the loan closing date was on the calendar. I went into my boss and I said it's Johnny Paycheck day, I quit. I absolutely hate the word retired because I'm not retired and I didn't retire, I quit. I am still working. Curt Smith: I was at a rental today and I went through a rehab, not so much from hell... But I do it to myself. I squeezed the full rehab into two and a half weeks, and that's with a handyman shortage. I was very lucky that I got a painter by pulling in some karma chips. He's been painting for me in the area and he lives in the neighborhood and he rearranged things. Curt Smith: I discovered a new flooring outfit. Sherwin Williams Flooring has a division, who's been doing flip houses and new builds for all along. But, Sherman Williams Flooring really hasn't become known in the rental rehabber circles. Their prices for LVT, including removal of carpet, putting in LVT and quarter round is around $350-375 a square foot, all said and done. $375, including the quarter round, is insane. It's good LVT. Curt Smith: I got those guys in because I scheduled them out because I knew this resident was leaving. Before they left, I had all these schedules. I instinctively do these things. It's not that I'm organized or I'm systematized, my brain is failing. That thing that my wife was worried about of running over the edge of physical and mental capacity near the curve is happening. Curt Smith: But I still managed to get this thing done in two and a half weeks, and man, I'm tired. And then German roaches just wouldn't go away and residents are moving in and they're calling me this morning. German roaches crawling. Spencer Sutton: In the life of a landlord, right? Curt Smith: My wife and I got in the car. I had a sprayer, I had glue boards. I had the whole nine yards. I bought McDonald's hamburgers to put in a little cup in the center of this cardboard, surrounded by glue boards. That was the litmus test for how many bugs are coming out per day. Plus, I added a little more spray, and they still weren't happy, of course, they are not happy. They were just livid. They were more frustrated than mad. And of course I'm mortified because I do good product. Matthew Whitaker: I think German roaches is a great place to end it. Curt, great job. Loved catching up. Hey Curt, if people want to get in touch with you, everybody who's listening. We're going to leave Curt's information in the show notes, but you can also reach him. His number is (678) 948-7151. And his email is csmith@javadepot. Is that right? Yeah. I'm sitting here trying to read this. [email protected] Spencer Sutton: All right, Curt. Thanks for being on the show with us. We really enjoyed it. Curt Smith: I enjoyed it too. Thanks, guys, for having just a great outfit and trying to help folks with all your good info, you guys take care. Spencer Sutton: Absolutely. So listen, if you are listening to this for the first time, go ahead and share it with some friends and subscribe to this podcast. We will be back next week with another episode. Talk to you soon.