72. From Bankhead to Buckhead, Strategies for Financial Freedom

This is Niyi Adewole host of the Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Mastermind podcast, and I'm excited to join you on June 7th for our open session Mastermind. And each of these sessions, I'd like to start off with kind of a topic or a word for that night, and I can tell you that the word for tonight, or really sentence is that you need to build a financial fortress to where you can pull from a lot of different areas. If need be to make something happen.

And it's, it's funny cuz we just had a, a conversation a couple weeks ago where we were talking about where can you invest a hundred k both in real estate and outside of it. And there was a lot of great suggestions for maximizing your money so that you can have different areas to pull from. And I can tell you that on top of that, a deal is never closed until it's fully closed. Right. Until it's fully done.

Keys are in your hand and everybody signed off over the last week, there's been two things that have happened. One on a deal that I'm personally closing on, and two on a, well, both of 'em are personal and two, one that I'm selling as well. So a deal that I'm selling in Kentucky. Is was supposed to close today and it actually is going to not close for a couple weeks. Reason being the buyer committed a cardinal sin within the real estate world.

Of borrowing funds that were supposed to be used for the down payment and using it as a gift, which is not allowed for an investor paid loan that's gonna go conventional. And so that piece was found out maybe just a couple days ago, and it started a bit of a domino effect because the money that was gonna use for a down payment for the fourplex that I'm supposed to close on late this week, which is probably not gonna happen until next week was gonna come from that deal.

Now, thankfully, and luckily I do have a bunch of other areas that I can pull from. It just makes it a little bit more inconvenient and it takes a little while for those areas to kind of like hit the actual account it needs to be in. Now I gotta send all these documents and lot stuff, but long story short, this could potentially have put this deal at risk if I didn't have that fortress built up. And other areas that can pull funds from to make it happen. Is it ideal?

No. But at least we can still make that deal happen. And then when this one closes a couple weeks from now, I can replenish the places that I'm pulling from to make it happen. So word of the day is to continue building your fortress, right? Early on it makes sense to put kind of all your eggs in the basket, but as you start to get more income, get more wealth. Do better at work, things of that nature.

You should start to diversify where you're putting those funds and as much as you can, try to automate it so that you can be pleasantly surprised that, hey, you know, I gotta pull 80 K and I tend to have it right. Just need to pull it from a couple different places. So that's the word of the day, but we are gonna kick this session off and kind of open it up to you guys and make this an open session.

So if anybody wants to join or throw any questions in the chat, please feel free to join the live talk and or to submit any questions in the chat. Okay. I see one rules on finding a good deal. Okay, so this is a good one. So there's some rules of thumb, right? And I tend to. I like rules of thumb for one reason. One, it allows you to look at a bunch of deals and kind of weed some of them out very quickly. So you're not stuck on, oh man, aesthetically this looks beautiful.

You can see pretty quickly, Hey, did the numbers work? Are they even close? If it's not, let's move on. And so I like the 1% rule when it comes to long-term rentals, which is very tough to do in Georgia. You've gotta get multiple units and they may need some work. To be able to make something like that work for the 1% rule for long-term rentals. And then for short-term rentals are like the 15% rule.

Meaning if you plug a short-term rental into air d n a and it comes out as 15% of the purchase price, that's usually a deal that's going to work. So we can move forward and try to put it under contract and then from there be able to. Run the more detailed numbers, plug in your cleaning fees, plug in electric internet, things of that nature.

What I've seen happen a lot of times is individuals will get stuck on trying to go into the, the microscopic details and trying to run like all the numbers for a property, and by the time they finish, the property's gone. Right? And so you want to use, at least in my mind, some of those rules of thumb to understand, okay, does this look like it'll work? Let's see if we can get it under contract. And now with the contract numbers, it's going microscopic on. But Darius, welcome man. How you doing?

That is good. I can hear you. And I'm assuming you're, you're not calling from, from your, your your studio right now. From the studio that you got set up. Nice. Hey, come on now. We all wanna be like you one day. That's good. Hey, you take it one day at a time, but I'm pumped for you and Kwame. Welcome to your first Financial Freedom Mastermind Group in Kwame. You may be on mute. We'll give him a second, but Darius, what you got, man? What else you working on?

Yeah, no, and this is a good problem to have. First and foremost, congrats on the one month booking. I mean, that's awesome. Right out the gate to see like, okay, got some cash coming into my pocket. And also getting those six month, you know, furnish finder pieces. People reaching out and saying, Hey, this price point and this location work. It's always exciting.

We've gotten a couple of those and been able to kind of lease those up, but you're running into the issue that we tend to run into too. Which is the timing? Like, does it match up? Cause typically they're trying to get people in quickly, like they wanna get somebody in next week, and does it make sense for that family? Are they able to go somewhere and then come to your career afterwards? Or are they gonna try to seek alternative options?

And so it, it gets a little difficult if you're able to lock something in. It may even make sense to try to work something out with the current guest where you like, Hey, I'm gonna give you back x amount. If you're able to find somewhere, because that six month is kind of the ideal booking, and I mean that two week period, it may make sense, two, three week period, it may make sense, but we could talk about that more. But to your point, you're talking about the leasing.

So anytime somebody stays in a place over 30 days, right, they're considered a quote unquote tenant. And so they do get the tenant landlord laws. Thankfully, Georgia is a more landlord friendly state. That being said, you can still have to evict somebody and things of that nature if it gets to that point. And so what we tend to do with those longer term rentals, like, you know, the six months things of that nature is we will start to actually run the credit and background check.

And then we will put them onto a property management software like a Buildium or a Zillow Rent manager, something that's, you know, free or low cost and have it as a reoccurring payment. And we'll also take a security deposit, right? Because this is somebody that is gonna be there for a significant amount of time unless they're trying to book it through the platform, if they wanna book it through the platform and pay those extra fees.

Sure we, we'll take that and we got the liability protection from Airbnb, but typically they're looking at it and saying, Hey, this is kind of a lot, you may actually be able to make more off platform. The main thing is getting the phone number or the email, which you may have access to now of that person and talking through it with them. And if it's from Furnish Finder, then I'd be looking to a lease agreement and I can help you with some templates for, for Georgia leases.

But the key to this is, is a couple things. One, if you're gonna do a lease agreement, you wanna make sure you do the credit and background checks, and you make sure like you know exactly where the funds are coming from. It sounds like it may be an insurance claim potentially. Okay, so the insurance, but you still want to know that the person's not like convicted what, whatever, right? To make sure you're gonna be safe from that standpoint. And you do want to get security deposit on hand.

And one thing that I would also put in there is a clause where if they break early for any reason, right? That you get, you know, to keep the security deposit or they have to give you a 30 day notice and you keep X amount just so you're protected from that standpoint as well. Any other thoughts on that? Kwame? I know you got a couple long-term rentals. How would you handle that? Hey, and that's fair. And keep your head up. Literally.

This is this is kind of like a, a session where we can all kind of hold each other up as well. I feel your pain literally because the deal that I was supposed to sell literally today in Louisville fell apart last minute because the person, like accepted gift funds. You're not supposed to do that on an investment property, like they did the cardinal sin and they were buying it from like Scotland. It, it was a whole thing, but long story short, it fell apart literally 24 hours before closing.

And so that was, the funds supposed to be used for the four unit and now I gotta kind of pull a bunch of money from place I didn't wanna pull to kind of make it happen. So I feel your pain. I feel your pain, man. It, it's all gonna be good. There'll be more opportunities. Mm-hmm. And you're focusing primarily just for everybody else, and, and we usually do this when somebody jumps on for the first time, we usually ask, Hey, what are you investing in? Kind of, what's your portfolio look like?

Do you mind sharing with the rest of the group kind of where that deal was and, and areas you're focused in. Okay. Love it man. Love it. And welcome to the group. Hey, come on now. We're gonna make it happen. We are going to make it happen. Of course, of course. Andon. Welcome, man. I think this is the first time you've joined. It is like actually live. Yeah. Yeah, it is. This is my first time. We're gonna put you on the spot too, man.

Like, hey, what, what's, what is your whole career look like? What are you looking to do here? What are you looking to learn? What are you looking to teach, man? Yeah, so, hi, my name's Lee Bon. I'm pretty sure I know everyone here except for Kwame. Nice to meet you. I'm an agent. I work with me. My goal is to get unit one. This year get started and then, you know, hopefully go from there. Just try to get like y'all, Hey, come on now. I love it. I love it. I love Iton welcome.

And Desmond, one of the old guards, man. Welcome back. What's up man? How's it going? Can y'all hear me all right? We can hear. You can hear. All right. Cool. Man. I'm reporting from the, from the arbitrage, man. That's what I was about to say. Is it official or what? Official or what? Man, we out here, dude. Wow. Yeah. Out here. So yeah, I signed a lease June 1st. Right. And it's a three bed, three bath on the west end of town. And during the arbitrage method, right.

But specifically even past that, during rent by the room. So trying out a whole bunch of new stuff. And the reason I'm planning on doing that is because it's, it's a crazy kind of setup they got going, but every bedroom has an in suite bathroom, which is super nice. And then also there are a lot of pieces of furniture that came with the place. Say, what's up? A lot of furniture's like chairs. Now I'll peek in here really quick, like a little mattress beds and desk and whatnot.

So a bunch of furniture came with it, which is gonna be super helpful. And I'm saving a ton of money on the setup cost because of that. And man, when I heard three bed, three bath, 1800, some pieces of furniture, and now I was like, what do I sign? So I really didn't even, like, I, I ran the numbers, right? And it's projected to do, I think around 32. Which is solid. Right. So hopefully it'll, it'll be able to, you know, meet those expectations. But yeah, I'm hoping to do, well, we'll see.

I'll keep y'all updated for sure. Hopefully the first room will go live, if not this weekend, very soon, next week. I'm not doing what I did, you know, the first time where I was getting the grass manicured. Well, you know, I'm keeping the grass together, but I'm not doing. Everything, you know, possible to, you know, get it set up. I'm kind of doing what we need to, to start getting this cash coming in. Right. Especially because I'm on the hook for this lease.

So, with my own, you know, fourplex, it was a little different. Like I could kind of get away with, you know, waiting a month or so, or like, I felt a little more okay with it. Cause I'm like, oh, like that's just equity, right? Like, I'm, I'm still like building money regardless, right? I don't know. But here it is like, no, like, That's cash. I, you know, I gotta put up like outta my pocket every day. Right. So yeah, hopefully it'll be up live first room here soon. I'll let y'all know.

Nice. So first off, love that you're doing this. Love the fact that you are taking the skills that you learned from doing two of 'em with the fourplex and now transitioning over to, you know, more cash flow heavy. Kind of arbitrage model. I know a lot of people, and I talk to so many people on a, a weekly basis that are looking to get into something like this. I know there's probably gonna be a bunch of questions from the rest of the group. I'm like, Hey, how'd you make this work?

What are the numbers gonna look like? You kind of shared a little bit of that, but my questions around the rent by the room. So when you talk about ripped by the room, are you looking for a long-term lease rent by the room, mid-term rental, or are you gonna short-term rent like by the room? So the idea's gonna be to do mostly short term. And I've done a fair amount of kind of comparisons, like looking on furnish finder, at least for the one bedroom, one bath that I have.

And I've just seen that you can get more, you know, by the month and like on the nightly rate when you're doing the short term, at least of what I've seen. So plans to do short term. And we'll see how it goes. But I also want to make it available for the entire place to be booked if a family or if someone wants to do that. Right.

So that's gonna be a bit interesting because like, I'm gonna have cabinets labeled right for each room and like certain stuff like that where when you book the whole unit it'll, it'll kind of be apparent that it is like a rent by the room. Right? And lighting's a little weird, but. You know, I think that'll be okay and it's not gonna be too big of a deal. There's a washer dryer hookup, so I think I'm probably gonna put a washer and dryer in. Hopefully I can get those cheap.

But I think that'll really help me attract if I need to midterm guests. Cause I know a lot of times that's what they look for. Even like bigger families coming in for a week. I know like that'll attract them too. So. Yeah. I think that's a good segue to the question that you had earlier around appreciation versus cash flow. The Bankhead area, ti Killer Mike and a lot of others have been investing heavily over there.

It's still a little rough, it's still a little street by street, but they've been investing heavily over there and you can see some of the benefit just in the West end in general. Right? Like earlier this year I was looking at a house hack personally. That was literally 10 feet off the BeltLine. Still a little bit rougher neighborhood, but the house was immaculate. It was beautiful. It just didn't sit long enough for my taxes to get done to go after it.

So I was, I still got a little bit of heartache, which you could probably hear right now, but, but that's an area that's rapidly kind of improving. If you look at what happened on the East side line, I mean, east Atlanta used to be what? Gucci future all these guys rad about like, Hey, east Atlanta Center, all that stuff. And now East Atlanta has a couple million dollar homes. You know, my neighbor just built a house right next door. His, his house is worth a million. Right.

Which is crazy to me. So those are some areas that are fully developed. Right. And that's where you're looking more for appreciation though. I could tell you like Edgewood Kirkwood. Buckhead obviously, right. These are all appreciation plays. If you're looking for, Like cash flow though, you want to go to more up and coming neighborhoods like you know, the Pittsburghs of the world. I'm personally big on Decatur and Marietta just because they're near.

Like Decatur's right near getting to Midtown and all that stuff. It's just outside East Atlanta. But it's so big that there's still ways that you can get into properties for 300, 400, 4 50, that make sense from a numbers perspective. And I like Marietta cuz it's only like 15 minutes to the battery, but you're not getting the Smyrna and bindings prices where it's like 600 k to get a town home right out there.

And so those are a couple areas that I like, but I would love to hear everybody else areas that you'd like as well. To add to his point where I currently live, stone Mountain is really good. And Stone Mountain actually had the most iyer activity, and actually, funnily enough, compared the, the condo I'm currently sitting in last year, or I guess two years ago now, my mom bought it for 70,000. This house is now worth 155 and it's sold.

And the reason I can say that is because three condos in the neighborhood sold for 1 50, 1 55, 1 52. All in like the last three months. So I think Tan's point, this is in, it's very close to Decatur. It's to close to, it's very close to Tucker. So because you're right outside of that 2 85, you can kind of jump on 2 85 and kind of go into Atlanta. You can go up to Norcross, you can go to Gwinnett.

So all those areas, I guess anywhere that has easy highway access and is still like very much low pricing, I'd say are good areas for appreciation. One of the things you just mentioned, Levon, too, is like condos, right? Help the client spend early LA or maybe it's been, it's been probably two years now but help the client close on a condo in Stone Mountain for like a hundred k, maybe a year and a half ago. And those still work for long-term rentals. Like condos actually work.

You can rent those for maybe $1,200, things of that nature. It's just hoa the. The appreciation was the piece that always questioned, but what you're talking about that, that's amazing, right to go, you know, a little bit over double. Yeah, I'll take that all day. Yeah, yeah. No, it's insane. And I mean the H HOA too, I think the specific HOA does a particularly good job at managing, because you can tell that.

They have, they have a rental restriction in this neighborhood, but you can get on the wait list. And they, I called and they said that the, an investor's been on for a year. So that goes to show how no one wants to sell in this area, you know? So, I mean, that's also a good point. Yeah. And that's one piece to kind of watch out for. I was actually helping another one of our clients look for a house hack and they were looking in the Alpharetta area cuz they just, they liked that spot.

I mean, Alpharetta's nice. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And most of the houses up there have HOAs. Yeah. And so we had one under contract for maybe eight hours. Right. And we started calling the HOA and kind of getting more details and it was strict as anything. It was like, hey, only 10% could be rentals. The wait list was crazy. Nobody was selling the ones that had as rentals, but it was a home that had an in-law suite, but the only way it would make sense is if they lived there. Right.

And then when they moved out, which they were planning to do and do this once a year, it would not make sense anymore cuz you could not rent out the whole unit without that permit. And it's only 10% of 115 homes. So it's, you really gotta watch out with those HOAs as well. Yeah. And make sure that if you get one under contracts, you have a good due diligence and you're making, you know, a lot of calls to the hoa, two different individuals to make sure, hey, Is this gonna work when I move out?

Or is this gonna work as an investment period? Like the one that we, that we're working on. Right? I think that's a good deal because it's more some cosmetic updates, a couple items that we negotiated for and you're able to, you know, walk into some equity. But you know, in other neighborhoods you can get a deal. I've seen houses that are for a hundred, 150, but it's a full gut rehab, right? It's like, Hey, you've gotta take this down to the studs. There's probably some foundation issues.

And so the first question I'm always asking, cause everybody's always like, Hey, lemme find a deal. Lemme find a deal. It's like, hey. What is your comfort level with the repairs? We, we gotta get to that point and are, are you open to sinking some money into this for, you know, six months to do all these updates, you know, with no certain future of, of that end, end goal? Right. For me personally, I'm looking more at.

Like cosmetic updates where no, it may not cash flow initially, and this is for my personal portfolio, but if I make some of these updates and I boost the rents or it's undermanaged something of that nature, I'm gonna be able to kind of capitalize in the backend. And so like that fourplex in Snellville, right? I put it under contract for 8 75. The appraisal came back at 8 0 1, so we negotiated that piece down. Had to give back some credits, but we negotiated down, so now it's at 800.

But the rents across the board are an average of 1500 a unit that's six grand. That doesn't actually make sense with the lending that I have, right? It's, it's, it's barely breakeven, right? I may actually have to put some money in initially, but what I plan to do is update one of the units, turn that into a short-term rental to kind of make up for it while the other units are waiting for the lease to end. And the reason I sought this deal out is, It's one, it's huge.

Two, it's in Gwinnett County, which is one of the best school districts. And three, it's under rented. The people that purchased that house bought it for one 20 and 2010, and so they haven't had the pressure to raise the rent right now. They had to fix it up. But one 20 and you're gonna walk away with, you know, 700 k. That's not bad, right? And it kind of keeps you focused on continuing to invest.

But long story short, the reason it's under rented and the median rent for the area is 2100 now, right? So they're 600 below on average. But the reason it's under rent is cuz they didn't feel the pressure to move it up because they're like, Hey, we've had the same tenants, literally had a tenant since 2011, tenants since 2015. They're just, they're chilling, right?

So we're gonna change that piece, kind of raise the rents, and once we get it to the 2100 across the board, Because we're getting it at 8 0 1 now, 2100 times four is 8,400. That's over the 1% rule. That makes a lot of sense. Especially if you short term rent one or two of them. So you gotta kind of that, that's how I look at it, because the, the unit's good itself, the foundation's good. All that stuff is good. Roof's good. It's just, you know, updating some kitchens, bathrooms.

And I got the quotes kind of ready to go now. You can definitely walk into some deals, but you've gotta do one or two things. One, you've either gotta go for a bigger deal, right? Where there's more units to kind of spread it out. Right. So like the fourplex allows you to get each of these for 200 K. And if you're running it out for 2100 a piece, it makes sense, right? Or you've got to get a little more active, right?

In metro Atlanta and kind of surrounding cities, it's getting more and more difficult to walk into a long-term deal. That will make sense cuz people know what they have when they list these things. If it's, if it's not a value add, They're listing it, you know, pretty high and you've gotta come in ready to rock cuz there's other people bidding on it.

And so you've gotta use a different strategy like short term and midterm rental, which we've talked about at nauseum, for example, the duplex and Smyrna was going for five 80. I put in a bid at like six 10 with, with a lot of credit store closing and I lost. Right. But as a long-term rental that deal would not work as a long-term rental. I think the numbers, if I remember correctly, was like 1600, 1600, something like that. So that makes no sense. I was looking at it as short term.

Short term, and then over time being able to move that over to a long term. And the thing that I always keep in mind is the rents. Don't typically go down over time. It goes up over time. And so like when I look at this single family I purchased in EAV V in 2021 when I bought it, that single family I bought for four 60 would rent as a long term for 2,700 a month, which makes no sense, right?

I'd be paying out of pocket every month, but I've been short term renting it, which gives me cash flow now. It's gone up in value. It's worth 5 75 now, and if I wanted to long-term rent it in the past two years, it's gone from that 2,700 to now, I can get 3,300. That's not bad. It's still not the best, but if that number gets up to 35, 3800, it may be worth moving it over. But initially I could not do it as a long term. I had to do short term.

So that's, you can walk into a deal, but you may have to be more active shortterm midterm to make it work. And I was gonna mention that too. Oh, sorry. You were asking about like what areas you were interested in or just, you know, some that might do. Well, I'm kind of bullish on. Any street in Atlanta right now where I could find an arbitrage and get it before they start enforcing this ordinance that they've been debating for what, like a year or so now.

So now I've started to plug into that conversation and I was doing a ton of research and I know Nina had sent out some stuff as well. Cuz now I'm like, you know, in the Atlanta short term market. So I'm trying to understand. At first I was trying to see did that affect me?

And I think with the current rules it would, but like, They're not enforcing it at the moment as I understand it, because they're still kind of debating the provisions and I think, I don't think they've even forced it since its creation. Right? So I think I'm kind of good to hold off on the permit if they're not enforcing it right now, at least until they kind of make those final changes.

And then once they do get it right, because A, as they have it right now, I think a lot of people are in the same boat, right? Like, like, I wouldn't be eligible. Cause I don't, I don't live in Atlanta now. I could probably make this my primary residence. My name's Elise, like what does primary residence really mean? Right. But yeah, so that's something I, I plugged into and me or you know, anyone I'd be curious to know, you know.

Has this affected y'all or like has this, I know you mentioned on one of the previous episodes that you're trying to snatch up some right now as well before they kind of kick this into gear. And I'm curious to know, do we have any like, update on that? Have they made any advancements on when they're gonna enforce that or if, when that's gonna start affecting folks? Cause I'm trying to snatch up as many as I can, like now realizing this more and more. Right. So yeah. No, and that's solid.

And to that point, you're bringing up some really good points. So ATO is where I was focused on initially trying to find something like duplex, triplex. I mean, Desmond, I think you got the last solid fourplex out here, and you know it, I'm happy for you, but dang it. I wish, I wish I could have one in here, but, but long story short you're a hundred percent right.

So the initial rules that came out that were supposed to start being enforced in March of last year, We're stating that, hey, you had to be an owner occupant, right? You had to, it could be your primary and you could have one more, but you had to live within the city of Atlanta. But there's been a lot of legal backlash around the country for cities trying to do that. I can tell you that New Orleans released that same law, like very similar. In 2019. They got a bunch of lawsuits against them.

It was taken to a higher court, superior court, and the city of New Orleans lost. That battle because let's just change up the terms, right? Let's say, hey, if you if you don't live in the city of Atlanta, you can't rent a long-term, right? You can't have a long-term rental unless you live here. That wouldn't make any sense.

There's so many people from all over the country that do this, and so you can make laws around restricting the number of units and things of that nature, but it's gotta be a fair ground. It can't just be that you live here. And so they've actually struck that portion out of their proposed plans now, and that just happened earlier this year. Cause they keep pushing it back, pushing it back. To your point, it has not been enforced. It still is not enforced.

I would still recommend going through the application process just to get it. I've gotten the ones that I have within city limits permitted and we've gotten our owners permitted. I can tell you, you just reminded me, I sent in the message cuz I did the whole renewal thing and they're still trying to figure it out within the office how to actually like, Say like, okay, he's completed it and you're renewed, and I need to follow up on that. So it's not being enforced.

They don't not have enough bodies to actually like get it done. I can tell you there's about 10,000 or so BMBs operating within the city and only like, you know, 1700 have been permitted. And so they're trying to figure out a way to get to the end here. But a lot of people are lobbying and right now what they have proposed is that you no longer have to be an owner occupant. If you have a b and B up and running, when they release and start enforcing this, you'll get grandfathered in.

But then anybody else, you'll not be able to get A, B and B within 2000 feet of another one, which is huge. And so hopefully they changed that piece too, cuz 2000 feet's kind of excessive. That means like for three blocks basically, you can't have another one. But that's what they got proposed right now. And you mentioned, I'm trying to think, so you said you, if you have a bmb up and running, is that a permanent BM B? Yeah. Right, because they haven't made it clear. Clear.

Okay. Okay. Cause when you mentioned, I assume right, the grandfathered in, so I'm wondering like, do I, should I go ahead and get that permit? So I can potentially avoid stricter regulations in the future and then try to be grandfathered in. And even now, I mean it's kind of cra like I looked at the restrictions cause I thought about applying like, oh, like it won't be too tough. But like they want a good amount of things for you to kind of, they wanna some hoops for you to jump through, right?

It was like you have to get the deed from the owner. I think that was the piece that I found as like ridiculous and especially like doing an arbitrage. Me going to the landlord and saying, Hey, like could you send me a copy of the deed? Like I don't know how that's gonna go over. So that is one I wanted to kind of wait and see, Hey, are they gonna take that out? Cuz like, that seems kind of absurd. I read some articles too that they were mentioning like some of the rules are kind of absurd.

So I wanna see if they changed that. Cause I especially just now starting this lease, I don't wanna. Go to my landlord six days in, Hey like, can I see your, your deed? And like, let me, let's go change the, you know, lease too. Cuz like Atlanta doesn't like that, right? So I don't want to do that right now. But still I'm bullish on snatching up these BMBs cause I know they're coming with the rules. So. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. With the arbitrage right now, I, I think you're good.

I think you got the right line, I think, and just continue kind of doing what you're doing. That's, that's kind of what I would do. But if you quote unquote own a home within city limits, I would go ahead and go through the application process, at least to have like the paper trail of doing it. I could tell you that when I was going through it. It is a heck of a lot. You've gotta send like letters to the neighbors that are certified, then upload that. Doing full transparency. It's a lot.

It's a lot. And full transparency. I got lucky cuz we, I started doing it immediately. It was like February last year when they were talking about it. And I called him to the office and I got somebody's personal number. I don't even know if he still works in the office anymore, but I was calling him like, Hey man, can I just send this directly to you? Could you help me out? And so they were able to kind of expedite some stuff and, you know, so yeah, they're trying to figure it out.

That office is made up of like three or four people that are trying to work through all these applications and. It, they're, they're not doing a good job so far. And on, on that flip side too, I'm also bullish in the same vein on BMBs outside of Atlanta because as the restrictions get tougher, folks are gonna all have the same idea. Oh, well I'll just get one right outside of Atlanta. Right. And, you know, I'll just be right on the outskirt and I'll smart them. Right. But then I feel like.

Other counties and I'm scared. I'm in College Park now. That's where my primary house is. I'm scared College Park is gonna take notes from East Point and try to start putting in a permitting process. So I wanna snatch up some there. I, I wanna snatch up some everywhere, right? Basically is what it boils down to before. Cause it seems like we're slowly moving around the country and especially in Atlanta and in Georgia toward a stricter market, right?

So if you can get grandfathered into that, I feel like that's like. Definitely to your benefit. So yeah, agreed. Because now people are used to staying in BMBs. Like even when I, I book anything that's more than just myself, right? If it's two, three people, I'm looking at BMBs and BBOs first. And so. Yeah, the whole thing is not many people, as you can see, only 1700 have been approved and 10,000 BMBs operating in the city.

Not many people are gonna go through all those loops and, and, and are not professional with it to actually go and get those kind of permits and things of that nature. And so if they do release something in College Park, I would recommend going after it just because you're gonna be one of the few that will go through all these hoops and send out the letters and everything. And when you do get permitted, You're gonna be one of the last ones remaining.

Hopefully. So I'm actually excited about some of this regulation and I want to be able to get as many as I can. And to your point, people going a little further and further outside the city, when I looked at the b and b numbers for Snellville, it's not that great, but it's not that great because there's not a lot of comps to pull from. Right. And so I'm actually pumped about it because I'm like, man, if we put something nice together, we've done enough of these.

Like I get surprised about certain areas, like we got. One that we manage out in Riverdale, some that we manage out in Peachtree Corners Lithonia that are crushing it. It's like, why are people staying out here? But you never know. So that one up in Snellville, I'm excited about trying to set the market for that one up there just by putting together a nice product. Yeah, I, I kind of feel the same way, like with the projections too, right?

Because like, You know, you don't want to like, like try to guess too much or like think, you know, you know too much. But like sometime I look at the projection, I'm like, you know, is that really right? Like, you know, if I put together a quality product, right, which I try to do, you know, being a host, can I beat that? Right? And now I'm not like, put, I'm not basing my, you know, Decisions off that necessarily. Right. I still want the numbers to make sense based off the projections.

And the projections I do are super simple. Like it's, I don't even know if I would call it like legit projections, to be honest. I don't have like an air d n a subscription. I don't have like fancy spreadsheets. I just found like the Airbnb bigger pockets calculator, and that's based off of air DNA data. And I've just used that literally for pretty much every, well, my fourplex and then this property here.

And you know, it doesn't show me like all the graphs and all, like the history and whatnot, but I really just need like a ballpark idea of like, can I maybe make cash flow with this? And that's the nice thing too about the arbitrage is like, if I'm not making cash, I mean the lease is gonna be up in 12 months. Push comes to shove. I don't want to do this, but like, I'll back outta my lease for, you know, my, my lease is 1800. I, I paid 3,600.

Right now to not lose, you know, 10 grand over the year. So, you know, that's kind of where I see it. But yeah. What you mentioned is kind of cool and it's, it's one that you get by just getting in the market. You have to, I talk to people about this all the time. You've gotta just get that first deal under your belt and then just continue to try to buy and do deals consistently because you start to get a fill. Like you don't actually need to go fully through it. Yeah, you should, right?

The numbers should, especially for the first one. For the first one, I'm always trying to steer people toward like, Hey, let's make sure the numbers work out. And point to the data. So it's not like, Hey, ni told me this. It's like, no, no, no, no. This is what the data said. Right? Let's look at the data. This deal on paper doesn't work, but if you wanna move forward, we could do that, but I wouldn't recommend it. Right. That's for initial people.

But once you kind of get a fill for it and you understand, okay, you can actually adjust this, you can impact this with how you're hosting things of that nature. Yeah. You can take a little bit of a leap of faith. There's not as much data around there and say, okay, I think I can beat this by, you know, Plus 5%, things of that nature. All right guys. Hey, have a good night. We'll catch you later. And go heat. Yeah, all. Hey.