Aileen: [00:00:00] Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcast. We are your hosts Seyla and Aileen and today’s guest is Troy Gandee.  Troy is the founder and broker in charge of Maven Realty, which has helped clients buy, sell, lease, improve, and construct investment properties all over the Charleston, South Carolina area.

Troy also founded Pragma properties in 2014, which is an investment vehicle to acquire renovate and resell distressed properties. In addition to rehabbing properties, Pragma Properties also develops real estate and adds value to other existing construction properties.  He is also the co-founder of REI Central where they host monthly events with real estate investors to share knowledge, resources, and deals.  Troy also believes that buying and holding properties for cash flow and long-term holdings is the true key to wealth.  So we’re very excited to have you on the show today, Troy. How are you doing?

Troy: [00:00:48] I’m great. Thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here. I’m excited to talk about what I do and try to help some other people get into investing and get some financial freedom.

Aileen: [00:00:59] Great. We’re really excited. So before we get started, can you just tell the listeners a little bit more about your background and how you got started in real estate?

Troy: [00:01:06] Sure. I graduated college in 2012, which was, and I’m at the tail end of the recession, as things were starting to come back up. So there wasn’t a great job market.

I had a lot of friends that were older than me by a few years, and they were graduating and were having a hard time finding work. So I just coincidentally ran into a family friend who was a real estate agent and my mom was kind of at her retirement age and she had been interested in real estate as a vehicle for investing.

So she kind of pushed me towards that a little bit. So I simultaneously got my license, started working for a small little independent brokerage. And at the same time I was learning a lot about investing. I did do one of the very expensive mastermind things. I  don’t recommend that for everyone. For me, it was helpful because I was very young and I knew really nothing about finances, nothing about real estate other than how to sell it. But I knew nothing about construction and those types of things. So within the first, probably a year or two, my investing kind of overtook the sales, the brokering. And we started to make some movement with that, which was great.  The last few years, now, my brokerage has really been the bulk of my time suck. I have so many agents now and we do a lot of sales stuff. So I try to keep on kind of neck and neck cause the longterm is the investing and the cashflow and things like that. But it’s great to have the active income from the brokering that I can then translate into the investing.

Seyla: [00:02:31] Awesome. So thank you for sharing that background.

And could you, let us know how did you get started with purchasing your first property.

Troy: [00:02:40] Yeah, sure. That’s actually a pretty cool story. So I didn’t really come from means up in Southern West Virginia. There’s a lot of poverty there. I was fortunate to be able to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina, which is a really strong market.

Um, there’s a lot of investors here, a lot of transplants from other places that bring with them. Cash. So there’s a lot of private lenders and things out there too. I was sick of renting and I knew how powerful having a rental property was. So my first deal was, I think I was like 25. I bought a really cheap two bedroom property.

It was like $40,000, needed like $15,000 probably in work, something like that. And I did almost all of it myself. I had the time, then I had the time, cause I wasn’t quite as busy. I didn’t have kids, I wasn’t married or anything yet. So I swung a hammer and I learned how to fix stuff, which is super for valuable as a landlord cause I can run by any of my properties and fix something in 10 minutes, cost me like 20 bucks. Otherwise it might cost me a few hundred, but even if you want to be completely passive, I would recommend just trying to understand that construction side. It helps a lot. So we lived in that property for about a year.

Well, then I bought one across the street and turns the little two bedroom into a rental. I rent that one now for a thousand, probably in it for like $55,000. So it just about meets the 2% rule, which it’s almost impossible, really to find anymore, unless you go to the Midwest. And I was able to do that with two more properties, following that.

And it really was the sacrifice of living in like a D-class neighborhood that I wouldn’t have chosen to live in, but didn’t have a longterm plan, but because I was willing to do that and to be cheap, I got a few hundred my belt and that particular one, I had to borrow private money cause I didn’t really have any income.

So I had to borrow private money from a family friend. And that that was a little difficult. It was expensive. The rate was really high, but it was such a cheap property. It would have probably been that way. Anyways, had I even gotten some kind of commercial financing, it would have been comfortable. So that, that was a huge blessing.

And that was really just sort of fortuitous because this was an old family, my friend who had some extra cash and he knew that it was a great deal. So he felt safe and we’re off to the races.

Aileen: [00:04:46] So do you still hold those properties and are self-managing them or, do you have a property manager?

Troy: [00:04:51] Yeah, self-manage, I don’t love to do that, but for me, the imperative is to try to get a couple of them paid off as quickly as I can.

I’m trying to reach a certain, just like free and clear, a hundred percent income level where all of our costs are covered. So that, uh, you know, we can live even through issues like this. I’ve been expecting some sort of an economic event like we’re experiencing right now. Fortunately it hasn’t really impacted my businesses too much.

I think we’ll talk about that later in more detail, but I self manage them. They’re also close to me and I’m pretty strenuous on my tenant screening. So my tenants are great. And one of those three, I did sell, but the other two, I still hold. And I’ve had both of those tenants for like three years or longer.

So maybe twice a year I have to do something for them. So at some point I’ll manage them all out really when it gets  I just can’t take the calls anymore. That’s when I’ll, I’ll drop it all. I have done hybrid management things with them in the past, but finding a really good PM is challenging. So I get frustrated and I take a lot of pride in my property.

So I’d rather just do it myself.

Aileen: [00:05:58] That’s great. I have to ask Troy, what is one of the craziest things that you’ve heard from your tenants or you had to deal with?

Troy: [00:06:04] Yeah, I’ve had a few good ones. So this is a really good story. And it’s, it’s a cautionary tale. That same property, actually, I had a young, a younger couple living there for like two years.

They’re the best tenants ever. They were fantastic. Always paid on time, hardly ever needed anything from me when they did it was always reasonable. I don’t mind fixing stuff. If it’s reasonable. I really don’t mind at all. They were awesome tenants and I got to know their kids really well, all that stuff.

All of a sudden, I started getting phone calls from both of them. Like in the middle of the night, they were having a domestic dispute. I guess the wife had started using drugs again. And it had been a really long time since she had done that. And there were months worth of police reports leading up to this moment that I didn’t even know about.

And it all kind of came to a head, they got into a big fight. Yeah. And then she stole his truck and she tried to run him over and he drove out of the way, and she drove through the shed that I just put in a couple of years before that I, it was just a nightmare. And then I had to evict them. And so they stopped paying around that same time too.

And they would call me and say, we hate to do this to you, but we have nowhere to go and don’t have any money. So I had to basically just wait the system out until they moved. But honestly, from that experience, and because I was able to call a Lieutenant that I knew in the police department, he was able to get me all the police reports did expedite the eviction process a little bit, but because of that, I worked with that same Lieutenant to relaunch a landlord police association in the city of North Charleston, so that we have an open line of communication.

So when there’s a problem property like that, the police can access the landlord to tell them what’s going on so that we can cooperate and try to snuff out problems like that quicker.

Aileen: [00:07:48] Oh, that’s really great. Because now you’re just improving the, not just your tenant’s place, but like the people around them to the neighborhood.

Troy: [00:07:56] Yeah. It’s been great. How I would highly recommend any landlords out there. There’s probably some version of a, an organization like that. If there’s not talk to somebody. At the police department about trying to set that up. It’s, it’s a lot of landlords that go to those meetings and everyone’s on the same page.

These are all very responsible landlords that work better communities. So it is a great thing to have that, that community occasional the police. And we help them to, if we see suspicious activity, any of our rentals, we’ll call the police and then, well, they’ll go and investigate it. And if there’s a drug issue, crime issue, anything like that.

It helps everybody.

Seyla: [00:08:30] And one of the things that you mentioned that you have a system in place to screen your tenants, to making sure that you get good tenants, will you be able to share tips and tricks of how you screen your tenant and making sure you pick the right one?

Troy: [00:08:40] Yeah, absolutely. So I use cozy for my rent collection. I’m cheap. So cozy is nice because they don’t charge you anything. Once you surpass a certain amount of units, I think it does start to charge you. But you, they have an internal tenant screening system and you can put that cost on the tenant. I think it’s $25.

So it automatically will pull all of the significant information. So it’ll be like, get a credit check, it’ll check for any kind of back payments that need delinquent payments on things. It’ll give you sort of a tertiary, uh, crime report too, which is really good to know about. I have another thing that I do, and I, I try to be very infancy, very inconspicuous when I do this, but, I always try to get a peak in their car. So if they come around to do an open house or something like that, I’ll try to, you know, kind of crane my neck, I’ll go make a phone call and I’ll take a look. If the car is really messy, if it’s in really bad shape, you can kind of see that as foretelling about the way that they’re going to treat your property.

I think that’s a very good, uh, representation.

Aileen: [00:09:37] A pretty good tip.

Seyla: [00:09:38] Yeah.  Aileen’s also mentioned that you have a brokerage business. What does your brokerage focus on buying now that differentiates you from other brokerage business?

Troy: [00:09:48] Yeah, sure.

So that’s been really interesting when I started, I thought I would be an investor first and then an agent or a realtor second that kind of flipped on me. The brokering just took off. Um, so in South Carolina, after you’ve been licensed for three years, you can go out on your own and you can start your own brokerage.

Um, it’s a lot more liability and more costs, but I went ahead and did it because I was giving late 20, 25% of my checks back to my company. And then as an investor, some companies are weird about you being an investor and an agent when you’re selling your own properties, leasing your own properties.

So I started my own brokerage, really just to save money. But I had a lot of agents come to me that want to be an investor more than an agent. And they wanted somewhere to hang their license and they wanted somebody to help them and to just bounce problems and stuff like that off of. So we went from that.

That’s a fairly new enterprise. I think my brokerage Maven Realty is only like two and a half years now. Actually I think it’s only two years old now. I’ve found that on Halloween. So at the moment we have eight agents we’ve had add up to 15, but what I found is a lot of those are new agents and they do better with the really big companies that have the training.

So I like agents that have like a year or two under their belt and they want to be investors. So everybody at my company is an investor and probably about half of our sales are investment property. The other half are just your traditional retail sales, which are great. They’re for active income. Those are fantastic, but it’s really, really fun to help other investors buy and sell stuff because we all do it.

So we have the knowledge, but it also keeps our finger on the pulse of the market. So I see stuff with them. That is a great deal that I would buy if it did come to me first, but because we all do it, we can give them way more specific knowledge and understanding, and we can help them avoid a lot of pitfalls to theirs.  The majority of the time, when someone reaches out to me about a deal, I tell them not to buy Mike don’t even do it. It’s a bad deal. Let’s find you a better deal. It’s fun.

Seyla: [00:11:46] Okay. So when do you get a deal or do you do your agents actually help the investors do the underwriting as well?

Troy: [00:11:54] Yeah. To a degree, we try not to go too crazy with that because we don’t want to be held liable for any kind of bad accounting or anything that’s in there, but we definitely will help people understand market rent, hopefully their lenders giving them a good idea of what their costs are going to be.

So then we’ll compare that market rent and we’ll help them understand how to withhold for the necessary expenses. So whatever their management fees are going to be, if they want to have it managed, what an average repair and cap X budget kind of thing is. And then days on market for vacancies too, because I haven’t had anything be vacant in the Charleston market for more than two weeks in like five years.

So you don’t have to withhold a whole month vacancy here, you can do a little bit less. So we try to give them everything they need. We also have a lot of calculators that are built out myself on our website. So we’ll direct people there and we’ll say, run your numbers and then send them to us. We’ll look over them and try to verify them for you.

But that kind of stuff, we help people with every single day. It honestly gets kind of taxing, just whatever analyzing deal after deal after deal. It’s different when it’s your deal. But when you’re analyzing like 10 year old deals a day and then like 15 deals for clients, it can get just kinda confusing.

There’s just so many numbers floating around.

Aileen: [00:13:05] So, is there a particular asset class that you guys are mainly focused in or is it, I know there’s a lot of different ones, but is there like a specific one that you focus on?

Troy: [00:13:13] Yeah, me personally, I like a C class rental property. I really liked single families.

I just liked the flexibility of that. So I like the fact that if that neighborhood takes off, if the value starts spiking, you can sell it and you can roll that over into two rentals. I just feel like you have a little bit more flexibility there. You can also do weird stuff too, where you’ll do like a lease option or seller finance or things like that.

This particular market here is weird because we have a lot of poverty on one end, and then we have like extreme wealth on the other. So you can really do anything in between a lot of vacation rental stuff here too. So we help a lot of people with Airbnbs, which is just a whole different beast. It takes a different mentality.

But, um, most of my, my agents, it’s kind of a C,D class property primarily cause those tend to be the ones that cash flow the best and the way that our market is gentrifying and changing here, those turn into a B class property pretty quickly. It’s a matter of, you know, a couple of years you see things go from like a strong seed, like a, a pretty, pretty strong B class property very quickly.

Aileen: [00:14:14] So what are the different metrics that you look at when you’re looking at the different markets?

Troy: [00:14:19] For me, it’s mostly cashflow. That’s really what I care about. So the end of the day, the dollar amount, right. I’m going to cashflow on the property. I think that that’s a good way to look at it. You can do you mean cap rates and things like that are fantastic too.

But what I normally tell people to do is to be a little bit more realistic about finances behind it. So I am under no impression that I’m going to be a billionaire. But I think that I can be very much a financially free where it takes me just a matter of hours a week to do work. I might only have to work five, six hours a week and be able to surpass a very comfortable quality of life and enjoy stuff.

So I’m not going to have to manage managers constantly. So I work backwards from a net cashflow that I want monthly. And then every unit that I  pumped  into that, I just want to try to chip that number down. And I need my cashflow to be high enough to make it really worth it, especially with a fluctuating market.

But from there, if I’m buying a single family, I wanted the cash flow at least 400 bucks per door, usually four to 500 bucks for door, which is not really easy to find here anymore. It used to be easy in Charleston, then Charleston markets exploded. So it’s become a little bit more difficult. We see around three to 400 net cash flow per door really frequently here.

Seyla: [00:15:27] Got it. So  has your investing strategy changed, especially now with the Covid?

Troy: [00:15:32] Yeah, it has not dramatically. From the brokering side, it’s been weird because our inventory is way, way, way down. It’s like 35% below where it was like share, but our sales are only down like one or 2%, but because so many of my clients are investors, it’s become really difficult to find good deals and that spills over to even to stuff I buy that I’m in the same market as well. So, you know, I’m not finding great deals all the time.

Probably the biggest impact that it had on me this year was. My again, because I’m in a C class sort of asset that’s normal where I like to be. I knew those people were going to be hurting pretty bad from this financial situation.  So what I did preemptively was offered all of them from like Feb to June basically that they could pay half their rent if they needed to, to just get through it.

And me, my mentality was, well, that’s about what my costs are going to be, so I can at least cover my costs. They’re going to be there. For when this recovers they’ve also just been really good tenants and I kind of wanted to help them out, but I knew the eviction process was also going to be horrible because evictions were backed up.

So that could have been no rent for however many months, if I’d stretch them out too far. And then it could have been two, three months waiting for evictions. Um, and now we’re seeing even more eviction moratoriums. So they were really glad to get that. And as a. June or July, they all started paying me back in full and I was able to basically, you know, just cover my costs for four months or something like that.

Now we’re back to normal. So that’s been great, but because our inventory has been so bad, I was in two birds when it first started. So I wasn’t really impacted that terribly cause I got both of those properties right before the shoe dropped. So we renovated those basically throughout the beginning of the quarantine situation.

It wasn’t too bad, but. Now, I’m looking really strongly at notes investing because there’s just more opportunity out there for how little our inventory is at the moment. That’s been a new, uh, prism for me to try to understand this stuff. I think most of us are so used to the actual asset of the property.

I just had the conversation with my wife about this. She was like, yeah, but you know, houses are tangible. Like I know, but I think that’s the pitfall is we all get tripped up on that when I have a lot of friends that are multimillionaires and all they do is lend money. They don’t want to own any property.

They just lend money and hanging out and collect their checks.

Seyla: [00:17:51] also you mentioned about the property, especially like a single family properties, class C and class B. Can you elaborate a little bit more? What is defined as class C and what is defined as class B?

Troy: [00:18:04] Sure it’s gonna mostly be income primarily. So B class properties tend to cashflow a little bit less because they’re just more expensive and there’s sort of a market cap on the rents you’re going to get on those. I mean, that’s for all asset classes, but I feel like the purchase price to rent ratio in the C and D class is just a lot higher. Now the downside to that, obviously the con is, is your maintenance. And management’s going to be higher because those are folks with less income. There might be more crime and things like that involved with those neighborhoods.

So you’re going to see people kind of go off the rails a little bit more in your class C. Your class to be is normally just, you know, more. Let’s say you’re blue collar. You’re going to have a lot more white collar folks in those neighborhoods. They tend to take care of the property much better too.

They just are more responsible in most cases. For me though, it’s sort of riding that line between like having a good relation. I live with my tenants while making a cash flow really well. Because that’s the end goal is cashflow cashflow, cashflow. Cause I don’t want to have to grind so hard forever.

There’s nothing wrong with B class properties, but you know, I’m limited. I don’t get a salary either. So I can’t really count on every two weeks. I’m going to shave off X amount of money. And then in six months I can go buy a property for me. It’s all commission. So I’m a little bit more precious with my resources as far as the capital goes cause it’s all sales based. So every time I get paid, it’s a direct representation of a certain amount of work that I put into whatever it was. Right. So, same thing of flips I’ll I’ll periodically I’ve slowed down on my flips a lot. I flipped like 20, 15, 20 houses or something like that. I’ve slowed down a lot with that because labor has been.

Very challenging in my market. And again, the competition, the prices are crazy, but I’ll still buy one and flip it. And if I make a decent little profit, that’ll go in the pot for more doors for long term stuff.

Aileen: [00:19:53] I wanted to talk a little bit about, um, like when you first started to where you are today, how have you been able to do to scale your business? Like what kind of strategies have you implemented to get to where you are today?

Troy: [00:20:06] Sure. Bringing on more agents has helped a lot. You know, those they’re all independent agents. So as far as like that kind of administrative stuff goes, sometimes I’ll be inundated with so many investor leads looking for things that I just can’t handle it.

So although those guys out, those investor leads out to my agents, but in doing so they can help me. So if I need somebody to drop off a sign or to do any of this rudimentary stuff, let a termite inspector into a house. That kind of stuff. I’ve got these agents that I help on a daily basis. So they’re willing to help me as well.

My wife also left her nine to five. She had a very comfortable normal nine to five and she just wasn’t happy. And we have a little boy he’s two years old now. So when we had our little boy. We have an Airbnb as well, um, at our house and a guest house. That’s, it’s a really cool little thing too. We could talk about if y’all want to get into that, but that income, she was able to replace probably 60, 70% of her nine to five income.

And she does other little things on the side for additional money. But she helps me a lot with my administrative stuff. So really just helping me with my schedule. I’m always jumping around and going back and forth, but the longer you do it, you know, in the beginning, one of the biggest issues is capital.

That was always my biggest hang up was money, money, money. I can’t find money. You can always get it if you have a good deal. But sometimes it’s very expensive. Now that I’ve been doing it long enough and I’ve built the relationships. I have more money now than I do deals cause I have so many friends that have graduated to that point where they they’re lending a lot now.

They want to lend their money out. And it’s a much better rate than what I was used to cause their relationships. But I also have a number of lines of credit that I’ve gotten from just, you know, as your income goes up, you’re more bankable. So you can get lines of credit. You can get, he walks, things like that.

And those are a tremendous help because that’s ready to be deployed at any time. Another thing I do a lot is I work with wholesalers. A lot of agents are weird. What about working with wholesalers? I love wholesalers. I think that they serve a purpose. Those are properties that I would not want to try to broker because there’s problems.

I just had a client call me right before this because he was buying an assignment I refer to too. And there was a probate issue. So I wouldn’t want to have that on the market, have it listed and have to deal with that problem. You know, the wholesaler can deal with that. Um, but they all send me their deals.

I know almost all the wholesalers in our market, so they send me their deals. So. I have the pick of the litter on those if I want them, but I can also shoot them amount to my clients quicker. And then once a week or so I’ll consolidate all those wholesale it, this wholesale deals I get, I’ll put them in a flyer and I’ll send them out to my buyers list.

So. That’s another way where I’m able to just try to consolidate all that kind of stuff into one, one action.

Aileen: [00:22:47] So you also talked about building up your investor base. Can you talk a little bit about your strategy behind that and how did you, how did you start building up your investor base and getting it to where it is today?

Troy: [00:22:57] That, so for clients that’s all just been referral and word of mouth. I don’t do any marketing at all, which is astounding. I normally end up in the top 10% of agents in our market. Without doing any marketing. I’ll sometimes do a weird little thing here and there. One of my top producer is a really strong agent investor named Dan Rivers.

He’s going to start, he’s going to end in the top 2% of agents for our market this year, again, without doing really any marketing. So it’s just keeping your head down and working hard. I believe in systemizing your businesses, but I think that quality can lack and suffer really quickly if you over systemized, because you, if you remove yourself from that supply line. I mean, you’re, you’re basically worthless at that point to the process. So I like to stay involved and by doing that, I’m able to get three or four sales out of any one deal that we do. And it’s the same thing with building a buyer’s list or anything like that. You just have to make contact with people, show your face, go to your meetings.

We’ve started that’s sort of an Anti REI. We didn’t really like the stuffiness of the traditional REI. So myself and three other friends that are big investors here started more of a networking group. And we did that because all of us were being asked to go get coffee. Like, can, can I get some coffee and pick your brain?

And like, how did you do how’d you do that? So we were like, let’s just start a REI. And just once a month, bring all these, just say, tell them to come here to just come to us. And it’s not just us that they’re learning from because there’s people in the room that know more than we do. So more of a networking thing.

People just shoot off in every corner and they make relationships and things like that. So just being cooperative, it’ll, it’ll get you far.

Seyla: [00:24:37] I just want to talk about a little bit about your opinions. What do you think about the current market situation right now for housing and long term rentals or short term rental?

what do you think?

Troy: [00:24:48] It’s tough. Affordable housing is a big problem in my market. The South, especially wages are stagnant. They’ve not kept up with the cost of living. It’s really sad how difficult it is for people to actually have quality of life. We used to say here below 200 was considered $200,000 purchase price was your affordable housing.

Range now it’s 300 that happened in just a couple of years. Most people with an average salary can’t afford a purchase price here of $300,000. This is a lot of money, especially with your down payment. And what we saw here was an 8% rent increase year over year for like six years. I mean, it was crazy.

Charleston went from being, you know, quiet little beach town to now being on all these top 10 investor markets. And we’re a very small area and we’re here, very constrained by water. We have rivers everywhere and wetlands. So we can’t sprawl like other places. It takes a significant amount of engineering to build neighborhoods and to expand.

But because of that, we have a very difficult market. Like I said earlier, the inventory is down 30 to 40% from last year, but sales are only down 2%. That’s just here a local level. I think that’ll slow down. It’ll fizzle out a little bit.  What we’re seeing in some of these smaller cities like this, which is good and bad.

A lot of folks are moving from bigger cities to these smaller areas because they can work with more remote. Now they can be satellite employees, so they may sell a brick ranch in New Jersey for a million and come down here and a million dollars goes a lot further here than it does up there. So those smaller markets like that, especially in the South are going, I see a big influx of more cash.

And as an investor, what you’re also probably going to see, come with them is more expendable liquid capital. So that could be an opportunity for partnerships, syndications, lending opportunities, things like that. So, yeah. Market’s changed like that all the time. You just have to try to figure out a way to take advantage of it.

I’m being told a lot in the next 12 to 18 months is when we’re probably going to see a bigger actual economic fallout from everything that’s happened. November is going to get weird. We want to talk about politics, but regardless of who wins, there’s going to be a market reaction. And then following that, depending on if there’s any kind of federal help or not for different folks in different places, that’s going to have some sort of a longterm economic impact. So just trying to keep an eye on it, if it looks like there’s going to be things that come from the federal government that aid the economy, then you can probably continue on business as normal.

If not, you might want to try to squirrel away some of your cash and wait for possibly another fallout like we had 10, 15 years ago.

Seyla: [00:27:31] How has real estate investing impacted your life so far?

Troy: [00:27:35] Yeah, it’s been good. It’s a freedom of time and the passive income is great. So I’m still not at a place for my passive income has surpassed my active income completely, but yeah.

We can just do whatever we want for the most part throughout the week. I mean, that’s fantastic. That I don’t have to punch a clock is great especially when you have kids. I have a two year old now, so that’s a lot of fun. Just three o’clock. I can just take him to the park or go do whatever. I don’t have to worry about any of the implications.

I just have to have my phone around so I can put out any fires that come up. For him too. It’ll be great to have hopefully some sort of legacy wealth for him.  I don’t want that to be something he takes for granted. So the minute he’s big enough to work, he’s going to be mowing and grass and, you know, doing all kinds of stuff.

But, I mean, I can’t imagine I’ve never had a real job. I’ve never really had a nine to five job. So, all I know is that I’m glad that I have it. And I talked to a lot of friends that were in that grind for a really long time. And, I try not to take it for granted, but the ability to just sort of swerve off if I want to and go do whatever we can go on international trips whenever we want to, I can go see family.

I can just stop and go have lunch with people if I want. So there’s almost always some sort of a business dynamic in there someplace, but if you enjoy what you’re doing, it’s not hard work, you know, it’s just production. You’re just building your thing that you enjoy being a part of.

Seyla: [00:29:06] So throughout your real estate journey so far, what is the one thing that, you know now that you wish that you knew when you first started?

Troy: [00:29:15] Probably that you don’t need to try to scale and grow to an outrageous extent. That’s great. If you can do that successfully, but I know a lot of people who have listened to too many gurus and their circumstances are different.

So you can listen to Gary V or you can listen to any of these really big guys. Talk about how they went from nothing to billions of dollars in a matter of years. Your circumstances are different than them. You might be able to do that, but there’s a lot of danger involved with that too. So I know so many people, I’m fairly young to be doing this and to have accomplished as much as I have at this point.

Most of my immediate friends and colleagues are in their fifties. Now their fifties and sixties are getting closer to retirement age. Half of them lost it all at the last recession. And it’s because they were stretched too thin. They were over leveraged. They had too many people on the payroll. They had to start over and I would rather not have to do that.

I mean, I have no, like I said earlier, I have no ill conceived notions that I’m going to be worth a billion dollars. You know, I don’t expect or intend or even want to be like a Grant Cardone. I would rather be the millionaire next door. That has more quality of life and doesn’t feel like I have to match out PE or output constantly.

So I would just tell people to slow down. I have a lot of agents that try to take on too much debt, way too much leverage, way too quick, and they get behind the gun and they’re in the weeds. And when you haven’t built that solid foundation, it’s a house of cards and it can come down really, really quickly.

So just be slow and steady. I mean, you’re not racing anybody. You set a goal for yourself and you reach your goal on your own terms and within your own time constraints, you don’t need to beat anybody to a finish.

Seyla: [00:31:00] If someone wanted to start with this real estate business, what is the one thing that you can recommend to make that person to be successful or set that person apart?

Troy: [00:31:10] Sure. Ask for help. Don’t be too proud to go tell somebody that you need help, that you don’t know. Now that the flip side to that is always provide value for them. Like I said earlier, with our REAs central meetings, we were being asked to go get coffee and lunch and all those things constantly, which is fun.

I mean, there’s a lot of mentorship involved. Like I wouldn’t be where I am without my mentors, but I helped my mentors anytime they needed anything. And I ask them almost on a weekly basis, what do you need? What do you need me to do? I’m signing tomorrow trustee documents for one of my mentors. He makes me a trustee on some of his land trust deals, and I have to go sign all kinds of stuff and like show up, get all these things done.

I don’t get paid anything for that, but I learned from him. Just by leaps and bounds anytime I need something. So don’t be afraid to ask for help, but make sure that you can provide some kind of value. You’re not, don’t expect to get it for free, help them with something, make some money, phone calls, drop off some signs, whatever it is, ask them if they need some sort of administrative help. If there’s a project they’ve put off, if you can take an hour to help them systemize something or produce something, do that, there’ll be more than happy to help you. And. Find mentors and coaches, even if it costs you a little bit of money, these big mega masterminds that we’ve seen in the past are starting to fade away.

There’s a lot more local options like that, where you can get much more immediate access to people for a fraction of the cost. So if you’re really serious about it, Try to find a local coach who has really good reviews and talk to some of their other students and see if you can get a referral from them.

And if they think that it’s been worth it, talk to those coaches, cause they’re gonna, they’re gonna save you a lot more money than what you spent by helping you avoid your, you know, their pitfalls. You’re going to learn from them.  

Seyla: [00:33:01] What tools or techniques have you used to improve the efficiency of your business or personal life?

Troy: [00:33:08] Quite a few things on a on a personal front. We’ve tried to, now that we have a toddler, he’s a lot of work. We’ve tried to systemize a lot of stuff around our house, which is kind of fun too. So we try to make our house pretty smart. Like, you know, a Roomba is amazing. That’ll save you like a couple hours a week.

If you don’t have to sweep and things like that meal kits are awesome. I like to cook. So I was always kind of a snob about meal kits. But once we had our kid, it just is difficult when you’re this busy to like go and craft dinner and all these things. So meal kits have been amazing for me. I just love knowing that there’s always food in the house.

If we can take care of on a business front, my agents. That’s been really helpful. And my wife, it was a lot of shifting and changes over the last couple of years, financially for us, my wife left her nine to five. We had a kid, we bought a real house. We bought a house we intended to live in for a really long time.

So that was a pretty big cost. And then all of a sudden we didn’t have her insurance. We didn’t have her biweekly income. We had to start paying for school and daycare, which is criminally expensive. So our money just got flipped upside down a couple of years ago. But we figured it out and that’s a huge blessing.

I mean, it sounds like a detriment, but most people can’t do that they can’t just say, well, you don’t like your job. Let’s figure it out. Let’s figure out how you can be productive at home and help me grow my things so that we can all be here.

Aileen: [00:34:34] We hear you. We have a two year old also. So we are right there with you.

So we totally understand.

Troy: [00:34:39] Yeah, it’s cool. I mean, it’s so much fun and he’s a great kid. He’s awesome. We’ve had him in school since he was six months, which has been really good. I think the socialization has been awesome for him, but I really can’t wait for him to help me do stuff because I don’t want him to, I didn’t really come from anything.

Um, my mom had a single working mother who worked really hard. She made good money, but she had to work just absurd hours, 100 hours a week and commute an hour, both ways. So I just really don’t want my kid to feel entitled. I want him to understand that it’s not free. Somebody had to do something somewhere along the way to get you these things.

Aileen: [00:35:18] Yeah, absolutely. And at the same time you’re building the bond and relationship with him as you’re sharing with him what you do.

Troy: [00:35:24] Yeah. Yeah. He’s already taken a big liking to tools. So you gotta be learning how to use a saw pretty soon.

Aileen: [00:35:32] Gotta be careful with that. So, Troy, can you please tell our listeners a little bit more where they can find you, if they want to learn more about you and about your business and your, meetup.

Troy: [00:35:46] Yeah. Sure. So for the brokerage, if you’re interested in investing in Charleston, really in South Carolina residentially, we do more stuff just in Charleston, but commercial apartments and things like that. We do statewide when you can find us at MavenRealtysc.com as in South Carolina. Another cool thing that we do is the REI central meetups.

So that’s rei-central.com. That’s just a standalone little REI that we do. Maven Realty is one of the partners. And then three of my friends that are coaches, they run clear vision coaching, which is a smaller sort of cottage boutique coaching program that they have we’ve partnered on REIcentral. So we did have to take a break on all that during COVID-19 trying to do some zoom stuff, but we just got those back together about two weeks ago. So those meetups are monthly six to 8:00 PM. We’re doing them in personalities. It’s a lot of fun. We have somebody come in and talk about something weird that the rest of us don’t know anything about. You know, you’re trying to learn a little thing or two here or there, and then we break out into small groups.

So whatever your interest is, you can go. If you want to talk to Danny Randazzo about syndications, you can go to that corner. If you want to talk to me about being a landlord go to this one and you’ll talk about wholesales or flips or whatever, go there. So that’s been really great. And we do a podcast with that as well.

It’s called the REI central podcast by Maven. That’s on iTunes and Spotify and all that stuff. That’s myself and one of my agents. And we bring in just a friend from our market that does whatever and we just have conversations with them about investing.

Aileen: [00:37:18] Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing Troy. We really appreciated it.

Troy: [00:37:21] No problem at all.

Thank you guys for having me. It’s been a blast.