This is my Ideal Rental Property (size, materials used, buy box)

so I'm going to go through a list of Ideal characteristics of what makes the ideal rental property for me in my [Music] town welcome to the podcast real estate investing with Coach Carson I'm your host Chad Carson you can also call me coach and this is a show to help you build a profitable and passive rental property business so you can get out of the financial grind and do more of what matters you know one of the hardest things about learning to invest in real estate is taking all the ideas you watch on YouTube or that you listen to on a podcast and then translate those to the actual specifics of your situation on the ground in your town or your city where you're actually trying to invest in you know sometimes you listen to an episode and they say you know you need to buy properties that grow in value or that you can add value to they have positive cash flow that's how you build wealth but what does that specifically look like so in this episode I'm going to give you some detail now the point here isn't to say you should copy my criteria exactly although you're welcome to do that the point's going to be to get specific so you can see what actually is included in what's called a buy box this is a term that a lot of Real Estate Investors use and they create one for themselves to help them find the ideal rental property so my encouragement to you is after you listen to this list of specific ideas that I have is to make your own buy box and I'm going to help you learn how to do that today so this topic of creating a buy box your ideal location your ideal property type is actually something I spend a lot of time on two full chapters on in the book The small Mighty real estate investor so if you go through this whole episode and you think this is something you want even more depth on definitely check that out I'll have links to get the book in the show description and the podcast description and if you're listening to this soon after the episode comes out it's actually available now on Amazon for the first time on Barnes & Noble on Audible it's been available for about a month on Bigger Pockets and I just want to take a moment to thank many of you many of you watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast have already bought the book and you've reached out to me I'm blown away I had high expectations I had high hopes for how the book would do I spent 6 months of my life last year just writing it another 5 to six months preparing and organizing and really 21 years of my life living and experiencing this and practicing it to put together the ideas that I would hope be would be a handbook not for scaling to the moon and being the biggest real estate investor in the room but for being the best small Mighty investor who has the most Lifestyle the most time and how do you do that in a business model so so far the feedback has been amazing from you and I'm really honored that you would get the feedback I want to read a little bit just a couple of comments I've gotten on social media one said this is from Matt rowski Chad I've just read about every I've read about every Bigger Pockets book and this was absolutely fantastic I'm tempted to say this was my favorite real estate investing book of all time thank you for sharing the knowledge amazing to hear that had another one from Beverly Rogers demon said what a gem or Diamond of a book Chad has knocked it out of the park again thanks Chad had another comment here from Mark Brogan said man I love this book thanks for the knowledge and experiences you've shared and then I had a final comment here from Shawn McKay said this book is incredible hands down the best real estate Financial Independence book I've ever read so tons of those kind of comments it makes me happy I love that but it makes me happy most of all because I want all of you if you haven't read it if you haven't shared it with a friend go check out the book this episode though I'm going to I want to give you value and understand what's in the book I'm going to share one of the best parts of the book I think which is the specific details of what I'm doing sharing those stories so that you can then apply it so the information I'm going to share with you about my ideal rental property the buy box for what I'm looking for in a rental property is going to be broken down into four different areas number one we're going to talk about the location of the property number two we're going to talk about the type of property whether it's single family multif family that type of thing number three we're going to look at the lot itself which maybe you might not have thought about I didn't think about it much early in my career but the value of most real estate is actually in the lot so we're going to talk about that and the number before we're going to talk about the materials the types of materials you use in your rental property so we're going to get into some nitty-gritty and let's start with location you probably heard the old cliche in real estate location location location your realtor has probably told you this your friend who invests in real estate has probably told you this the reason it's cliche is because it is the foundational piece of value and real estate investing of whether you have a good investment or a bad investment and I can talk for hours about this topic I have I've written about it but I want to try to boil it down to you really simply about what I look for in an investment location and I break it down into kind of big picture macro criteria so you could think about it like if you're zooming out on Google Maps the regional level criteria and then I think about it on micro level like Street by Street neighborhood by neighborhood so on the macro level if I had to summarize what I look for I'm looking for major attractions or major economic centers so major attractions and but what I mean by that is a reason for someone to come to this region typically that's going to be jobs and the economy so people go to Metro areas that people go near New York City because there's opportunity there's work there are jobs there are things to do people also go to other parts of the country people go to yose National Park and areas around there because that's an attraction that has longevity it's not going away that's a a major place that people want to go to Glacier National Park I'm men national parks because I have an investment that I've done with someone near Glacier National Park in cisel Montana so still a pretty small City but there's a major attraction there there's a major International Airport that people can fly to from the rest of the country so if you kind of think outside the box and say regionally what you're looking for typically it's going to be jobs and economic Center so I grew up in Atlanta Georgia Atlanta is a area of six to8 million people I don't even know how many people it has anymore but it is a major Hub and you can think about it like a network of people of jobs of economy it's got infrastructure so there's a ton of investment and you as a small Mighty investor are just trying to piggyback on that you're trying to go to the places where all the action is happening and you're particularly looking for places where there's longevity you don't want something that's going to be kind of a Fly by Night type of place you want some deep roots that aren't going anywhere so that when you put your investment Roots down that you have some potential you have some Tailwinds to kind of some momentum pulling you in the right direction and honestly you don't have to do some deep research on the regional level to really understand this you can just do some thinking some analyzing some reading of newspaper articles of Trends to understand which Metro areas which regions have good potential but that's a starting point thinking big picture or macro but think again like a Google map you're going to zoom in and once you've picked a region that you like that has potential you also want to look on the micro level and one of the paradigms that I have learned that's been really helpful for me and other students is you want to think about the major economics Center is like the sun of the solar system and then you're looking what or at least what I'm looking for as a small Mighty investor are these these little satellite cities these satellite planets which are kind of benefiting from the orbit of the Sun so if you're in Atlanta Georgia which is where I grew up again you know Atlanta is the Hub that's the sun I really like the little small Metro areas like n in Georgia where I grew up or fville Georgia you know these cities that have their own economic centers they have their own gravity kind of there but they're benefiting from the jobs from the momentum of the whole metro area so if you go to a place like Nan where I grew up just that I happen to know well it has a little town center it has a hospital has things going on it's a place that people can live and not have to go anywhere but they still have if they one maybe one partner or spouse has a job in Atlanta another part or they want to go to the Atlanta Braves game there's still that attraction to the major city so if you're a small investor looking for opportunities the other benefit of these satellite cities is the prices are often less than going to the center of the city so you can be in the suburbs but still have kind of the character sometimes the walkability I love walkable towns that are in those sub suburbs and so if you can combine that you also will get what's called a better price to rent ratio because that's one of the most important criteria you're looking for and choosing a location is a price to rent ratio that's not off the charts you don't want something like for example Metro San Francisco uh California typically has a price to rent ratio of like 50 maybe in the 40s where the price is out has outrun the rents by a large amount that's not saying it's impossible to buy in Metro San Francisco you're just going have to look for satellite cities that have a little bit better relationship between rent and price and so that's what I look for look for Gen cities in general that have a better price to rent ratio but then satellite cities that are typically going to be in the suburbs going to be a little bit more affordable and then a final comment that I want to make that I look for on my buy box for a location to invest in on the micro level is something called romance now this is an idea that I got from a teacher of mine early in my career named Greg Pineo and what he said is when he's looking for an investment property he wants to have something that has this intangible quality of romance what does that mean it means it has an emotional attraction and this is a kind of fuzzy concept but it's very important because it's fuzzy because every location in the country has a little different take on what romance means but if you're in a big city it might be this block of the city it's close to a park it's close to a bike way it's close to a particular coffee shop or restaurant you know so there's going to be some amenities or something that is a Transportation Hub that might make it have it have Romance if you're in the suburbs it might be you know a little leafy uh Green Street with trees and mature trees maybe it's a good school district maybe it's a park nearby you know every little thing counts and the cool thing about real estate is when you're picking locations on a micro level it's an emotional evaluation because people rent and buy houses on emotional level yes there's a price and yes they have to afford it but the things that attract them the things that make the best investments are also the things that attract people to live in places as well so you canuse use your kind of romance meter a little bit and add that to the quantitative part of real estate that is what I have found to be the best locations to invest in real estate and I'll give you one example of my own particular town I'm in Clemson South Carolina it's a college town so it's a kind of combination of students that I rent to but also faculty members and one of the locations we've really farmed in within Clemson was it was walkable to the downtown area so the romance for a college student is being able to walk to Parks there's a lake nearby to be able to walk to the downtown where restaurants and bars are and the the social atmosphere the fun part of life but also walk to the campus so we like to be within like a mile mile and a half a campus that's a pretty long walk for some people but college students can ride a bike or they can get on the the bus so I like to be on the bus line and so those things that convenience but also the streets the the places we buy in are a little bit older neighborhoods that have older trees feel a little bit more walkable the buildings feel not necessarily the brand new stuff with the big pools and the lazy rivers and all that that's kind of a different type of invest investment in a college town we're looking for the older Investments have character that are walkable and the walkability itself is the romance that's the appeal and so we look for properties in those locations and I'll talk a little bit more specifically here in a minute about what types of properties we look for within that overall location so we've talked about location criteria now I want to move to the type of property that you buy so this can be a confusing one especially if you're early in your career should you buy a single family house a duplex a Triplex a fourplex maybe you should just go big and start buying like 50 unit apartments or even bigger start buying hundreds of apartment units or maybe you should buy mobile homes RVs you know the choices are almost endless on the property types you should buy and so the first comment I want to make to you about this topic is a maxim principle that I've learned in 21 years of investing having bought a lot of these types of properties and it's this you should insist on value and be flexible on property type insist on value so I'm going to give you specifics of what property type I like but the way I'm getting value in my market Clemson South Carolina would probably be different if you plot me down in a different location in a different city I might have to adjust my strategy the types of properties I buy if I'm in a city where for example single family houses are much more expensive I might have to look to a different property type so keep that in mind be flexible on the property type but always insist on the value the value you financially get out of real estate investing this is an investment for you and remember financially there's two ways you are going to get value out of your real estate you're going to get income from the property and it's going to grow in value so income cash flow or you're going to grow your equity in the property there's only two ways to make money in real estate investing if you're not getting one or both of those then you're not getting value out of the property so you're always going to look for property types that deliver that kind of value you got to be flexible depending on where you are so with all that said in my location in Clemson South Carolina which just to give you context this is in the Southeastern United States is halfway between the big city of Atlanta the big city city of Charlotte so two hours in either direction we're nearby Greenville South Carolina which is a beautiful small City and kind of near the foothills of the appachan mountains we're near Asheville North Carolina as well but our little thing in our town is Clemson University or a college town as well so I think we have about 20,000 people who live in the towns or a very small college town There's 25,000 students who go to the university so we cater to re uh re hes who live in town that's some people who live there but mainly students and faculty and staff of the University that's our core customer base so what that means for us is I like best single family houses and I like small multif Family Properties I'm going tell you a couple reasons I like those in my case the first reason is strategic when I'm looking at real estate investing over the long run I think of it a lot like a chess board in a chess board to be good in chess you want to have a lot of pieces that you can move a lot of different places if you just had one big piece that'd be like the equivalent of one 100 unit apartment building and that's all you had that'd be like having a big ship on the ocean it'd be really hard to steer there's a lot of benefits of that economies of scale those kind of things but if you're playing chess you it's better to have a lot of small pieces that you can move around for example you can sell one property get the money out of that property or choose to move to a different location you can sell a couple properties and then redeploy the money somewhere else keep it makes you much more flexible small Mighty investors are flexible and we can pivot and we can move a lot easier than the big boats again benefits of that too but you don't hear about that often when everybody saying go big and scale and get these big properties strategically I love being the small investor with a lot of small properties and for me that means single family small multif family properties which also have the benefit of having good financing you can get long-term 30-year financing residential financing on a house on a one to four unit which means when I'm going to sell that property my buyer has access to the biggest best financing Market uh in the world being able to get those kind of loans you can get loans on Commercial properties but it's just a different animal that has played by a different set of rules so those are strategic reasons I like small properties the other reason I like it if you flip it around and think about your end customer think about all the different people you know no matter what location you're in even if you're in a big city if you could if you could pick your location and say all right I'm going to live in this location which property type would you live in all things being equal most people would not say I would love to live in this big tower of an apartment building or I'd love to have you know people below me and above me in an apartment building that's not the idea of a romantic you know beautiful uh location to live in some people settle for that because wow this is an amazing location next to a park or in this view of the city but if they had their choice if they could live on that same location with a townhouse or single family house it was simpler but it was a they had their own space they had a little yard who would not choose that right and so what that means is that you have a higher you have a better selection of tenants when you have a great a house in a great location people want to live there there's a tendency to have a higher demand if you start with the location criteria I talked about and then you buy a house or a small even a small multif family property they can have a yard they can have fewer people living next to them and those are more attractive so I find it's easier to have people tenants that stay longer I've had people stay in a house or a small uh small unit for five 10 even longer than 10 years I have a mentor John sha who wrote the book Building Wealth one house at a time who's had tenants stay 30 or 40 years in one house and what happens is practically speaking they have more storage in that house they put stuff in there they get settled they like the neighborhood and they don't leave it's a good place to live so houses if you have people staying in your your properties for many many years you make money as an investor it's also good for the tenant as well that's a when- whenn relationship ship so when you combine those two things for me if you can get the financial benefits from it if your location allows it single family houses small multif family properties are the ideal for me so now we've come to the third category within my buy box for what makes an ideal rental property we've talked about the location we've talked about the property type now I want to talk to you about the lot itself and a lot of times you might not think about the lot I know I didn't until one of my mentors John sha who I mentioned earlier who wrote Building Wealth one house at a time he used to talk about the fact that when you buy an investment property it's not the house itself the sticks and the bricks that's not what goes up in value in fact that actually breaks down over time you got to keep putting money into it to keep those Sticks and Bricks together the lot the location is what goes up in value that's why I spent so much time talking about the number one criteria of a location both on the macro level and the micro level it's the one thing about your property you can't theoretically put get up and move like you could theoretically cut the foundation of the house off and move the house somewhere else and I've seen people do it it's pretty interesting to watch moving a huge Brick House on the back of a truck not easy to do not typically financially feasible or it doesn't make sense to do that and make a lot of money off of it but it's possible but that's not going to make you a lot of money the lot itself is the thing that if you buy it correctly is in demand it's a limited commodity if you're in the right location and so you want to think about the lot itself and the first thing I like to think about is the size of the lot and I would sort of differentiate between single family houses and small apartment buildings or larger apartment buildings for what makes a good lot for me when it comes to a single family house it's nice to have a big backyard it's nice to have a fence thin backyard but I don't want to have too big of a lot I want it big enough that my tenant can enjoy it get some satisfaction out of it have a garden perhaps that's really nice part about having a house and being able to do that kind of stuff but the bigger you get the more trees you have on the lot the more bushes that have to be upkept either your tenant has to keep them up which doesn't always happen or you have to do that yourself when the property turns over and there's always a cost to maintaining something and that's a theme you're going to hear both with a lot and also the building that I'm going to talk about next the criteria for a good rental property building the smaller more efficient buildings typically make more money so you're always looking for something that's big enough to satisfy your tenant and to get the best tenant but not so big that you're having to put a lot of money into maintenance and so lots are the same way now when you get into multif Family Properties I like even smaller Lots than that so especially if I'm buying in the right locations that are walkable that are on bus lines in my case in Clemson having an extra big lot for my Apartments is not beneficial unless I I could redevelop it which is some cases that's kind of the aster in this rule I like to have small efficient Lots unless you have future plans to re redevelop the property so if you had a 10un building on a lot this like a couple acres and you could build 50 or 100 units on that property there's a ton of value and that potential to redevelop the property and in that case having a bigger lot is even more beneficial you're going to lose some on the having to cut the grass all the time and maintain that property on the short run but you're going to make a lot of money over the long run because of the zoning so there's a give and take there with the size of the lot and the density you can get out of it but in general when you're thinking about from an operational standpoint I like to have the smallest most efficient lot possible another thing I like to think about with lots is water so I'm in an area of the country that rains a lot we're almost in a rainforest near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and rain is a problem water is a problem most of the big long-term maintenance problems that we have with rental properties relate to water going somewhere and sometimes that means there's a leak inside the house or there's too much moisture inside the property but often it's because the slope of the lot so ideally I like to have a property that sits higher than What's called the grade of the road so you think about like the level of where the road is if you have a a property that is sitting sitting below the grade of the road so that water can run downhill to that property that's a negative now I have a couple properties that fit that criteria of that negative criteria and they give me more heartburn than my other properties I have other properties that sit up you know four five 10et from the road and guess what all the water runs off the roof it runs down the lot into the road and it goes somewhere else whereas if the property that is sitting below grade I have one that's at the bottom of a neighborhood entire water from the whole neighborhood runs down to my lot and we've had to dig uh ditches around the property do waterproofing we have to redo that and yes there's ways to solve those problems but it's another maintenance cost and it's another thing that could break and something you have to think about and adding to that with water I would like to have a property that's not in a flood plane pretty simple with that criteria yes I know there's Insurance out there and you can deal with it but just a non-factor for me I don't want to be in a flood plane I don't want to deal with it and worry about it with my rental property another criteria with a lot are trees so trees are beautiful I love trees you can I consider myself a tree hugger I go out hiking and I like to sit under trees and I enjoy it but when you have a rental property and you have big trees next to your rental property guess what they drop limbs on your house they tend to fall down during storms and that causes problems even if you have insurance you have deductibles on your insurance and you don't want to make a bunch of claims on insurance having insurance for calamities is good but if you have trees that are always falling and causing problems it could be a big expense so if I looked I've looked at all my properties the ones that have big trees next to them are causing much more problems much more cost over the long run than properties that do that don't have big trees next to them so you know there's a balance here because that's a lot of character having big old oak trees for example in our area but it's also a big maintenance issue so I would rather have the oak tree on the lot farther away from the house people can sit under it they can do a swing or whatever they want to do but not having to be next to the house with the roots and the limbs and the storms are a big concern the final thing I'll say about criteria for Lots is that when I own a multif family property I like to have as few amenities as possible because those are another maintenance issue so this kind of seems counterintuitive you might think hey wouldn't you want your tennants to have pools and to have you know things to do on the on the property that are attractive to them and yes that would be nice to have but what I want to have is I want to have the location itself be the amenity I want to have parks near by I want to have a downtown nearby I want the lot to be small and efficient in a great location near public transportation walkable so that they can go to these other places for the amenities that are paid for by the town by the community by our property taxes but not me having to maintain that amenity on the property so that's just a very particular uh criteria for me with small multif family property but just something to think about if you're making a list of criteria so now we come to the fourth category within my buy box which is the bill building itself so we've talked about the location we've talked about the property type we've talked about the lot now I have some specific criteria on the type of building and the characteristics of the building that I buy now with a single family house I like for something to be big enough but again with my theme of Maintenance and efficiency not to be too much so that tends to be a house in the, 1500 ft to 1,800 ft range and if you think about that size-wise if you're having a hard time imagining that it's kind of like half the size of a tennis court now why, 1500 to 1800t it's just it's big enough to have a three-bedroom two bath layout that's kind of an ideal for me with a house I like to have a garage as well so if you add the bedrooms plus the garage plus as much storage as you can get if you had like a storage unit you know people putting stuff into storage makes them comfortable they want to stay for a while they don't have to have a bunch of storage units somewhere else so in in the interest of them having a place that they enjoy and stay for a long time single family houses that's it's an ideal size if you get above that size you start getting to like 2, 2500 ft you might think that'd be more attractive yeah people would like more space but think about it now you have two heating and air units that you have to replace and maintain every time that property turns over you have to paint even more wall space you have to replace even more flooring there's just more things to break so this is always a game of desirability of the property versus size and maintenance and if you look at it on a money per square foot basis how much return are you getting on a per square foot a smaller property will do even better so the best rental properties I have are very simple rectangular boxes and so that's another criteria I'll go ahead and go into I like simple layouts I don't want the fancy you know complicated roof line with all sorts of lines that might be beautiful and architect might make that and think that's a wonderful place to display uh you know to be attractive but as a rental property investor who's looking for efficiency you want a nice solid good-look house but you want a simple roof line like a rectangular box with a nice pitched roof meaning not a flat roof but have having a pitch the rain can run off is ideal in my location that's what I'm looking for I'm also looking for that rectangular box to have a crawl space because when you have a crawl space you can get underneath to deal with a plumbing to fix things to you know to be able to get access to the rest of the house I have some properties that are on slabs not many but a concrete slab underneath the house is what a lot of new construction is built on but think about what happens if you have a plumbing issue you have to Jackhammer the floor you got to get a big Jackhammer somebody does to dig up that pipe and replace it now that doesn't happen very often but the maintenance on that is a much more complicated thing I've also had houses because they're on a slab and if things get really cold in the winter we had pipes in the walls instead of in the crawl space and those walls froze and the pipes burst and the water came out the side of the the house so it depends on the construction how well insulated it is but I like crawl spaces I like rectangular houses simple roof lines efficiency that's the type of property I want to buy so all of that was kind of the single family house criteria let's switch to small multif family or just think about an apartment specifically so a two unit a duplex a threx a fourplex or even a larger apartment building you could break it down into the kind of the basic unit is an apartment and for me in my town in Clemson South Carolina I really like the smaller apartment units I like one-bedroom maybe a two-bedroom apartment and this is very Niche for my customer so I have grad students I have more mature college students who are living remember in these walkable areas or places where they can get on a bus and for them being able to live by themselves without a roommate is typically more attractive for them than having a three or a four bedroom apartment it's typically just harder for them to find three or four roommates this has been a trend that when I was in college people you know would rent would team up and go buy a house or rent a house and have four bedrooms and that was what they did or they get a four-bedroom apartment is the trend has been away from those larger apartment apartment apartment units at least in my area and so so people want the one bedroom they want the studio they want the two-bedroom that they could have an extra bedroom just for friends or to suble it out or something like that and so that's the kind of property we're looking for for our customer and the smaller the better so just like with my single family houses if you have a 400 foot apartment or a 700 foot two-bedroom apartment that's going to be much more efficient on a rent per square foot basis so if you're looking at it on just return on investment return on the maintenance you have to do the paint you have to do the amount of heating you have to do the smaller units are going to be much more efficient so you'll find kind of a sweet spot there and for us those Studio one-bedroom you know 4 to 500t apartments are great and then for a two-bedroom apartment 7 750 maybe 800 square ft has kind of been the ideal size for us so let me say a couple more things about building and you might be thinking man you're getting really detailed here Chad you're giving all sorts of criteria and when I first started I didn't have all of these criteria a lot of these were mistakes I made I bought a property that had one of these things that I didn't like and I learned from that and we sold that property and over time we've kind of called out the bad properties of the ones that were less ideal to where we had the properties that had these best criteria and then when we buy new properties we have a list of things that worked really well from the other properties so if you've never heard of this if you don't have quite as detailed of a list that's okay remember you can borrow some of these if you like if your Market happens to be similar or what I would recommend and I'm going to give you a takeaway you can download a PDF at the end of the episode I'll give you a link where it's actually in the show notes you can check it out where you can get a copy of my basic buy box some of these basic criteria to use for yourself I would take the principles the ideas the categories and then go look in your market and figure out what works for you but back to the building itself I like to have properties have simple layouts I have bought properties in the past a couple of them that I could think of they had weird layouts for example where you walk into one bedroom to get to another bedroom or you walk into a bedroom and there's no closet or there's just a tiny little weird closet or just a number of other things things where they converted a space that used to be a garage but they turned into this weird big kind of bedroom or bedroom or room that doesn't really make sense you know there's good ways to convert garages and there's bad ways so the point is if you have weird layouts or somebody did kind of their own handy person Remodel and it just didn't work out those are the kind of things you want to avoid or either budget money to fix that so that's another thing that I look for my criteria for the building itself and then finally under this theme of low maintenance which you've heard throughout my criteria I like to have build buing materials that are low maintenance so on the exterior of the property my ideal property is a brick or a masonry uh property on the outside so the walls are typically brick those are my favorites I like it if the trim of the property and the windows are either metal or vinyl so those are surfaces that are not wood that's the theme so if I have wood properties if I have wood sighting wood trim it's beautiful like I love wood looks but you have to paint that three every 3 to five years you're going to have to do some work to it and so it's just a more cost is more hassle to have to do it if you have a low maintenance exterior it's a lot easier to deal with with a rental property and the same applies to the inside so if you have materials like flooring if you have hardwood floors tile if you have luxury vinyl plank those are very durable versatile materials you can think about the same thing with really anything you use whether it's Plumbing or electrical you want to go with materials that are going to last longer if you buy cheaper materials are ones that you have to redo often so for example flooring if you had carpet throughout your house that's nice that's nice to walk on it and I typically have carpet in the bedroom but if you're going to have it on surfaces like in the living room in the kitchen people spill Kool-Aid people spill wine there's just things that they walk in and and track in from somewhere else outside you're going to have you could have a brand new carpet that has to be replaced a year or two later yes you might have some security deposit but what if you can't collect enough what if it costs you a lot more than security deposit it's just better to build your rental property or buy it this that is much more durable and the materials are much more durable and this isn't just a small thing you might think this is just like a checklist that you would have just a tiny little thing that can make a big big difference in having like a $50 per month maintenance budget for a property and having A2 or $300 per month maintenance budget is these types of decisions so I had to take a deep breath there I felt like I was going through a list one after another one detail after another but I hope that detail that level of depth was helpful for you because my goal here if we go back to the very beginning is that you get information on the internet you get YouTube videos that might go into specific techniques of how to run the numbers you might get specific techniques of how to make money over the long run and build wealth but what does the property itself actually look like that's where the rubber meets the road and building a buy box building your own buy box using what you heard today to make a list of criteria that you can use is the takeaway that's kind of the call to action of this episode and to help you do that just to offer a free resource for you I'm going to give you a free pdf of a simplified version of what my buy box that that I went over today looks like and so if you just look in the show notes or the podcast or YouTube description I'll have a link at the top there where you can go and get that for free and use that as a starting point for creating your own buy box one of the best decisions I ever made was to start putting and writing what my criteria were for a good property now I did the same thing for running the numbers which you know I talk a lot about here on this channel what makes a good deal from the number standpoint today was all about what makes a good deal from the property itself and the location itself but here's the thing the clearer you get about what it means to have a good deal for you your particular buy box an interesting thing happens you start noticing it more often it's kind of like when you buy a Toyota you know Avalon which is the type of car that I happen to drive you know all of a sudden you get a Toyota Avalon and you start seeing the same color the same type of property all over town now why is that is it because more people are driving the Toyota Avalon or is it maybe because there's this part of your brain called the reticular activating system that when you tell it this is what I'm looking for it starts noticing it it's like you put a detective an auto detective on on on the on the case and so you building a buybox criteria tells your reticular activating system as a real estate investor this is what I'm looking for and so you'll be looking for it when you're looking on the MLS when you're talking to your friends I even put an email PS in my this is a good little little takeaway tip you know build a a summarized version of what a buy box is for you have a PS that says by the way if you ever run across a property like this single family house small multif family in Clemson I'm always looking for these please give me a call here's my number let me know even if it needs work I'm happy to buy it you know something simple like that I have bought properties off of that PS which I've had for many many years and this is when you're applying to family to friends to Realtors to whoever that's just an automatic thing you can put that in your Gmail and it but it starts with the buy box it's helping you identify what it means to have a good deal so that you and the people in your world can bring these deals to you so I hope you see the value of this idea hope you see the value of getting granular with your real estate investing business this is what I spent the meat of the small Mighty investor writing if you're not watching this on YouTube I'm holding up the book and showing how thick this 337 page book was two chapters of the book were on these topics I had a lot more to say about it but the theme Here is if you want to be a good real estate investor The Details Matter yes this's the big picture strategy but you got to get into this the tiny stuff the tiny stuff matters whether you're in real estate investing whether you're in sports it's those little details that if you get good at them if you study them if you copy other people model other people who are doing this and then you replicate that and go out there and do it in your Market that's where big success comes from these little tiny steps so I hope you found that helpful I would love to get feedback from you if you're listening to this on the podcast send me an email at podcast coach carson.com if you're watching it on YouTube leave me a comment below I'd love to hear some feedback from you if you have any additional questions and if you hadn't got the book yet I want to keep keep saying this but this is the manual everything you've heard here and everything I the best of what I've learned for the last 21 years is in that book and it's going to be something that I'm going to continue go back to on this episode of the podcast if there's other topics that you're interested in within the book I'd like to go into depth and kind of teach almost like an audio like extended audio version of the book for free here on the podcast just going in depth on the different topics that I covered in the book so if you like that idea let me know as well in the comments and I will see you in the next episode we're going to have more interviews coming a few more solo episodes as well but I'm really excited about the content we have coming the rest of the Fall here on the real estate investing with Coach Carson podcast see you next time

Channel: Coach Carson

Views: 23,157

Keywords: Coach Carson, Coach Carson podcast, Coach Carson rental, Real estate investing, Rental property strategy, Buy box criteria, Personalized investment strategy, Real estate market analysis, Property appreciation, Adding value to properties, Positive cash flow properties, Real estate investment tips, Real estate market insights, Investing in rental properties, Investment blueprint, Rental property success, Property market trends, Real estate education, Investment criteria

Id: r5C_Lvw5aWw

Length: 36min 36sec (2196 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023