#097: How Millennials Invest in Real Estate

Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.   

Josh: So, hey, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you’ve been following the podcast for a long time or whether you just joined us on a welcome you back. And if this is your first episode, welcome to Accelerated Investor. We’ve had amazing guests on over the years, including Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank and Barbara Corcoran and Jack Canfield and Rod Khalif and Michael Blanc and just amazing, amazing guests. And we are excited to be able to interview today someone who speaks to a sort of a specific niche. Those of you that are millennials recently graduated recently out of college and looking for whether it’s building longterm wealth or whether it’s a silver bullet strategy to make big income. His name is Antwan Martell and he joins us from Southern California. It’s been investing for a few years. He’s built up a portfolio of over a hundred single-family rentals and multifamily units.   

Josh: He’s now into syndications. And we’re going to talk today about the process for building wealth. We’re going to talk about building wealth through, you know, singles and doubles and base hits and building longterm wealth and making good longterm decisions. And also talk a little bit about Antwan’s, you know, core audience of millennials and how those people can build wealth. And also for those of you that are maybe more my age, you know, 43 or older, and if you haven’t jumped into real estate yet, why you have absolutely no excuse. And so Antwan, welcome to Accelerated Investor. How are you?    

Antoine: Absolutely. Very good. Thanks so much for having me on the show.  

Josh: Absolutely. You bet. You bet. So Antwan, you got started in your dorm room in college. Take us back to that moment when you thought you heard about real estate, you thought about college, maybe you thought about getting out of school and going into a regular job and you thought, you know what, there’s a better way and the better way is real estate. Help us understand your mindset.   

Antoine: Yeah, sure. So it was 2015 my brother took me and my dad to a real estate investing seminar. We learned about flipping houses, wholesaling, apartment buildings, all that kind of stuff. Very, very high level stuff. But it just got the juices flowing for me, my dad and my brother about real estate and that this is something we needed to do. I don’t come from a real estate family or anything like that. My dad had a full time job and you know, had been doing that for 30 years, doing project management for software companies. And stuff like that. And my brother was in college, I was in college and we went to the seminar, learned about investing. We were like, Oh wow, this is super exciting. This is something we want to do. My dad had some money, saved up $40,000 bucks and we tried to do the whole, you know, the sexy thing of flipping houses in LA, flipping houses in our backyard, blah, blah blah.   

Antoine: Because we were in California at the time and it was just after about a year of trying to do that, what everybody else was jumping on the bandwagon of flipping houses for, you know, $1,000,000 $2,000,000 million bucks in California. We realized that we didn’t have enough money and enough experience that we didn’t know enough people to even make that a successful mission or dream. And so after like about a year, I, you know, my dad went back to his job. My brother went, tried to become a realtor or became a realtor in San Francisco. And then I was like, you know, still in college I was like, I still don’t want to go. And I was going to graduate in one year and I didn’t want to go and graduate and work for somebody else. I was studying entrepreneurship. I’m an entrepreneur at heart ever since I was a little kid and I was like, I need to do something myself.   

Antoine: I want to do something that, you know, I can create wealth and eventually retire my parents. This is one of my main goals. And doing that through a job is going to take a whole lot more time than doing something and figure out something like creatively or passively to use their money. So I started just networking my ass off in LA and meeting people who were having success on bigger pockets, networking events, you name it. I was networking with people and collecting a bunch of different information about how they were having success, what they were doing, where they were investing and over and over again, it was out of state, out of state, out of state. And then I started grilling these people that, how do you build your team? How did you choose your market, all this kind of stuff. And that’s kind of how I came up with the out-of-state model and buying single families, rehabbing them, renting them out, doing a refinance or what’s called like the burst strategy today.   

Josh: Sure.   

Antoine: So it was my last semester at university, took my dad’s $40,000 bucks, built a team in Memphis, Tennessee, found a couple of good neighborhoods, found a property manager, all that stuff. Bought a house for $30,000, rehabbed it for $10,000 bucks and then did a refinance and it was worth like $55,000 $60 ,000grand after pull all the money out, gave my dad his money back and I was like, Hey, I can keep doing this after graduating college. If you want me to just cover my living expenses, let me try to figure this thing out. We got a model down, let me just try to scale it up. And so graduated in May, I think we had like two or three houses at that point and then by December had 10 single-family homes. And so yeah, that’s really how it’s really how it all got started.  

Antoine: And then from there people started reaching out to us then for advice. So I was on the other end of the table now where I was interviewing other people or networking with a bunch of other people. They were kind of asking me a bunch of questions now and I started telling them how I did it, how the whole process, and they’re like, wow, that sounds like a lot of work. And I was like, yeah, well it was a lot of work. It took me a couple of years to figure out this model and then that’s kind of when the turnkey business started. So now instead of refinancing, we would just sell it to our friends and family. They would buy the house, we would help them with property management, insurance the loan, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, now we would go and buy that property, rehab it, rent it out, and then sell it instead of refinance. So they were pretty much flips for us.   

Josh: What’s interesting, Antwan is people’s perspective, right? Like so God, that sounds like a lot of work versus they actually go to work, right. For 35 years, you were able to basically retire your parents in less than two years. And put yourself in a position to retire very, very quickly doing something. You actually love doing it even remotely from LA into Memphis. And they think that’s a lot of work versus 35 years on a job and then barely being able to retire themselves, let alone retire their parents. So maybe just talk about the mindset. So what you know, the people that, you know, some of the millennial mindset versus, you know, those people that are maybe in their fifties sixties seventies that all they know is the slave and save model, right.   

Antoine: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think definitely, definitely the model has changed by to generation to generation and you know, a lot of people pick on us millennials as being lazy or everything given to us and stuff like that. And maybe that’s different because I wasn’t born here and didn’t grow up here and my parents had to move from Canada to here and my dad had to by necessity keep his job in order for us to get citizenship. So maybe that’s something that triggered me as well, where it’s like my dad has to work, he doesn’t really have a choice. He can’t go and really start his own business because then if it’s not successful then we have to go back to Canada if anything. And we can’t get our, so maybe that…   

Josh: If I don’t have a job, I’m not allowed in this country. It’s quite literally quite a bit of  motivation.   

Antoine: Exactly. Yeah. Literally. And then so my dad kept his job, kept his job, and then my mom was very entrepreneurial so she started a couple of different businesses. Nothing really blew up or has success. But it also helped educate me while growing up like, hey, this is  what it takes to be a business owner. This is all the hard work and this is the hard work, the after hours, the networking, all this kind of stuff that, you know, nobody really gets to see. There’s no like, you know, videos or blogs you can watch to see actually how much work it takes. And so growing up helping my mom out, you know, when I wasn’t in school, helping her out with her companies and even starting at like eight years old, I was, she had a retail store and I was there with a box cutter stacking the shelves at eight, nine years old running the cash register.   

Antoine: So I think that you’re right, the amount of work it takes is kind of skewed, but it’s also, people have a lot of risk later on in life. And I realized that too, like being in college, being 22 years old about to graduate, I was like, now is the opportunity to go out there and to go and start my own thing. Because when I’m 30, 40, 50 years old and have a family, have a wife, it’s not going to really be possible. It’s going to be much more risky for me to take the jump and go start my own thing.   

Josh: Sure. Yeah. And even though that risk might be more to me, it’s still less risk than just trying to hold down a job for 30 or 35 years, right. Because real estate is one of those businesses where you just, you stack and you stack and you stack and you grow up portfolio and you stack a portfolio. And the amazing thing is, is leverage, like fixed leverage of rental loans, fixed leverage from that. And ultimately the longterm equity growth, especially if you’re in a fairly stable market, you know, there’s obviously, you know, boom or bust markets that are typically on the coastlines, but stable markets, you know, they don’t really lose value they maybe really gain a lot of value in the short term, but they gain value over the longterm. Those are predictable risks versus like losing a job or a company totally downsizing.   

Josh: And I wonder how many people, although the market’s really good right now in two years or a year, you don’t got another presidential election coming up. Things could change there. You know, we’re at the top of an economic cycle. It doesn’t matter who you talk to or at the top of a cycle. And I wonder how many people are going to be losing jobs right in the next three to five years. And if they lose their jobs or wonder where their income is going to come from, when in all actuality, with real estate, when people lose their jobs, rent rates actually go up. So you make more money if you’re a landlord in that cycle.   

Josh: So Antwan I’m interested, you know, since you have a pulse on the millennial market, being a millennial and friends and you have a millennial podcast for real estate investors, how are millennials, this is not just about real estate, but how are millennials misunderstood in their approach when people say they’re lazy, you could also make the argument that they’re more calculated. They’re using technology to their advantage. They don’t want to stay in one place and plant roots and slave and see for 35 years. And the older generation says, oh, that’s lazy. But is that not just a misunderstanding of really how millennials want the rest of their lives to go?   

Antoine: Yeah, I mean, I think with any generation, most people are technically lazy in the eyes of other people, right? There’s only very few people that are actually hardworking and work from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM for X amount of years, right. and I think also like something with millennials too, is what you mentioned, like the work smarter methods.  So, like for example, this week we automated five different things in our CRM that like we had been waiting on doing for a couple of months that we’ve been doing all this menial tasks that could have been automated months ago by, so, you know, it’s not that now I’m going to I get to work less and my team doesn’t have to do all these random emails because I created a system then and I put in the time up front to create a system that’s doing all these automations.   

Antoine: And so, I mean, definitely in the past where there wasn’t all this technology, all these automations, I think that, you know, maybe they had to put in more hours of time to get the same output, but now we can put in less time or put in more time on working smarter or building a system or, you know, like we hired a bunch of cold callers in the Philippines as well, which is, you know, maybe something back in the day that people had to do made, you know, you couldn’t even connect with Philipino cold callers and hire them from a computer with the internet as well. So, you know, I think that every generation was probably has the same thing where they’re misunderstood. And I think that a lot of just being a millennial today, we’re given a lot of stuff and we have everything at our fingertips and it’s kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time.  

Antoine: So you can either do great with that or you’re never going to get started because everything’s at your fingertips. And so I think that’s what a lot of people are struggling with today. Is kind of, you know, even just getting started in real estate for example is like everything is like I can go and Google at really type anything into the computer and I’ll get at least a, not a correct answer, but I’ll get an answer that’s pretty close to what the actual output is going to be and what the actual result is going to be. And I think that because people, you know, we know that in the back of our minds that we actually never go out and do it because it’s always there. Oh, it’s just going to be a quick little five minute thing. I can do that later.   

Antoine: And then you have a huge task list of quick little stuff, but you actually never even go through it because of the procrastination because everything is right here ready to go when I need it. And I can always go back and reference it later. And so I think that’s a huge thing that you know, we’re seeing now is just the amount of information out there is making people not get started. Because there’s, and there’s always like a new thing pop every single day there’s a new investment strategy and different way and somebody’s putting up a new YouTube video about how they made $1 million doing this and you know, it’s a shiny object syndrome that we all have now because of it.  

Josh: No doubt, no doubt. I’m curious to hear in general, if you were to categorize, you know, your 5, 10, 20, 30 closest friends, how many of them are either in real estate or interested in real estate? How many of them are, you know, millennials are really jumping into the game buying properties or interested how many people have a positive view of real estate? Obviously if you look at somebody who’s 30 years and under, you know, a lot of them were in high school or a college when the last, you know, crash happened in 2007, 2008, 2009. So they don’t really feel the pain of it. So I’m curious to see how many people, whether they’re in tech, whether they’re in e-com, are still investing in real estate where they’re full time or part time. And how do you think that audience is going to fare if there is a crash?   

Antoine: Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, very good question. I think that, I mean I just hired both of my roommates to come into real estate before that they had full time jobs. They both just quit their jobs in the last month to come and join me. So let’s not include those two people because that’s kind of cheating. But let’s include, let’s say the top 20 people close to me that just, I grew up with in middle school, high school, college out of those people that are so like less than 30 years old, interested or investing in real estate with people I grew up with. I would say there’s probably one or zero people.   

Josh: Oh really? Okay.  

Antoine: Yeah. That are interested in real estate investing or have made effort to invest in real estate or have and I mean like serious effort, not like reading a blog post and then thinking about it and then like actually somebody actually took action to go out and invest in real estate. I would say maybe one zero to three people maximum that have actually gone out and done something real estate related. And I think like it’s a couple of reasons why too, because first of all to get the financing you need to have two years of the W-2 income. So that kind of extends people, which makes them procrastinate or just forget about it.   

Antoine: And then the other thing too is just the amount of cash needed to save up. So like with everybody that I grew up with still lives in California, most of them still live in California. Let’s assume they’re all in California. Many of them do want to move out of their parents house or have moved out of their parents’ house. So that’s their objective number one, right. So yeah, like getting away from mom and dad and so they’re saving up all this cash. They have all this student debt to get away from mom and dad and then that’s their goal number one. And a lot of them are still trying to achieve that or have recently achieved that. And because they’ve recently achieved that, now they’re cash depleted and now they don’t have the investment funds to go off there.   

Antoine: And even though it could just be $20,000 to buy that first turnkey property out of state, it still is a far stretch because of the cost of living and the income is not really matched or not going up at the same scale as the cost of living as here in LA or San Francisco Bay area. So I think it’s just very difficult. And then you take into student loans into account because a lot of these people out of that group of 20 or 30 people, like you know, 90% of them are going to have student loans. And then maybe you know, that they’re paying for their parents are paying for in some way and their parents want their money back and so they’re forcing them to stay at home, etc. So there’s a lot of other things that are going on right now that are kind of impeding people from actually going out there and doing something.   

Josh: So that’s your immediate group. I wanted to ask you a second question. Similar topic around your subscribers. You’ve got 48,000 followers and subscribers on Instagram. You’ve got a podcast of your own that specifically caters to millennial real estate investors. Tell me more about your audience instead of your immediate connections, your immediate family and friends. Tell me more about your audience. Tell me more about them. What’s attracting them to real estate? How many of them are jumping in? Even though they’re very young, they’re able to get the capital to do the deals upfront or they’re able to get private lender loans or hard money loans and then pivot into  rental loans, which is one of the things that we do is we actually fund rental loans in 39 different states, rates as low as 5.375.   

Josh: So maybe some of your audience could benefit by using some of my money. But tell me more about them. Like how many of them are really doing it or are they just fishing for information or are they able to actually execute on it? And again, how do you think they’ll fare in an upcoming crash or do they have the flexibility, the skill, the knowhow to be able to pivot if the market corrects?   

Antoine: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that depends on what kind of market correction we have, right? So like, I don’t know if real estate is going to get hit too hard, especially in my markets. Tertiary markets, Memphis, Cleveland, St Louis, Birmingham, Midwest. I don’t know if it’s going to get too hard because even if there’s a 10% recession on a $80,000 house, you know, you’re still going to be above the water, you know? And then so I think that if people are going down that road, then great. If you’re flipping houses or doing Airbnb and LA, then yeah, it’s going to be a, especially the Airbnb model, it freaks me out because if there is a recession, the first thing people are going to do is going to be stop traveling and stop getting to very nice expensive Airbnbs.   

Antoine: So I think that’s a very scary model to get into right now. But let’s go back to the, so the 50,000 followers that I do have, I think that out of those people, I think, you know, the people that are actually going out there and no matter what the ages, so the age range for me is really like 17 years old to 27 years old is probably the age range of my following. And so those people, out of those people, I would say like 70% or 70%, 80% are out there fishing for information. And then out of those people, I would say that anything from 20% to 30% of those people are actually out there doing something. Whether it’s as simple as wholesaling and sending direct mail or doing something like that. I would say a quarter of them are actually out there doing it, taking action, whether it’s successful or failing, it doesn’t really matter to me. As long as you’re out there, taking action, you’re going to learn, it’s just going to take time for you to figure out what’s the best strategy for you with your budget, you know?   

Josh: Yeah. You don’t win or lose, right? You win or learn. And that’s really what it’s all about. So let’s talk a little bit more about some of the myths about real estate, right? This doesn’t matter age doesn’t matter if you’re 23, 43 or 73, you don’t have to have millions of dollars to invest in real estate. You’ve been able to build up a hundred unit plus rental portfolio in a very short amount of time, retire your parents and didn’t have millions of dollars at your disposal. So imagine you used, you know, you are creative, you are flexible, you used resources, you were resourceful trying to get access to private lender loans, hard money loans, private, you know, private money, acquiring properties, and then refinancing. So how were you able to build up this portfolio without having, you know, a silver spoon in your mouth?   

Antoine: Yeah, great question. So it all started with that $40,000 bucks and that’s how we went out and bought that first house, rehabbed it, rented it out, and I did the cash out refinance. So great. Now I have my money back and I was like, how do I scale this thing with just $40,000 bucks? It’s going to be through leveraging guys like you or other  private money lenders, whatever you want to call them. And so leveraging other people’s money was the way that I was able to do it. And so then I was like, hey, what if I took my $40,000 grand and put $4,000 grand into each house and fund the rest of it? Now I can do 10 houses at once instead of just one house and then, you know, paying them back, whatever it was, interest or equity in the deal or, or percentage of the cashflow, whatever I needed to do because as long as the team on the ground could handle that capacity, then I was like, all I needed the money.   

Antoine: The team on the ground, you know, we’ve done one deal. Now we’ve done two deals and we’ve done three deals. Like, you know, we building a system in place that’s working. All I need is more money. And so I realized that and that’s when I went back out there and started networking my ass off again and now it was a different kind of networking. It wasn’t just learning, it was now educating people and then asking them, hey, I know you want to invest in real estate because I found you on Bigger Pockets. How about investing with me? Here’s some deals I’ve done and here’s the deal I have under contract that I’m looking for an investor on do you want to partner up with me? And so that’s how I was able to really go from, you know, one house a quarter to you know, one house a month to 10 houses a month and keep scaling up.   

Josh: That’s great. Great. Tell us about your favorite acquisition strategies. You’re essentially investing virtually. You’re investing from LA, you’re using VA’s in the Philippines, but you’re investing in Memphis. You’re investing in my backyard. I’m in Cleveland, right? This is the market that we dominate in and we’re a heavy, big lender in. We have a landmark property in downtown Cleveland under contract to buy 350,000 square feet. And so we’re a big player in the Cleveland market. So talk a little bit more about your favorite acquisition techniques and a little bit about investing virtually what are some systems, what are some techniques that you’ve used to successfully do that?  

Antoine: Yeah, so we, so our acquisitions, again, we’re buying around 10 houses a month right now. And so I would say half of those come from the MLS still today. So there’s still a ton of deals on the MLS. It’s just a numbers game on how many offers you can get out. And then the other quarter, or then one quarter would probably be from broker relationships. So brokers sending us deals because we’ve done past deals with them. They like working with us. We’re easy to work with. We close when we say we’re going to close. We don’t go back around and try to ask for huge reductions or anything like that. And then the last quarter would be through wholesalers. So just building up that list of wholesalers and just keep getting deals and keep giving them feedback. You know, it slowly snowballs from there. Once you buy one deal, then they use that money and go find more deals for you, and then it kind of keeps snowballing like that.  

Josh: Yeah. That’s great. And tell us a little bit more about again, some of the automation strategies that you use, like using VA’s, using VA’s in the Philippines is an automation strategy. Building tech into a CRM is an automation strategy. You use ringless voicemail for private investors. That’s, you know, using tech, these are automation strategies. So what are some of your favorite ways to automate your business and some tech that you’ve built or CRM that you use to allow you to do this at scale?   

Antoine: Yeah, great question. So the biggest and best one is the Zoho CRM. So that’s our CRM system use. Again, it’s pretty affordable and the beautiful thing is you can customize the hell out of it. So we made it very custom and you know, now we have our whole team of, you know, 8 or 10 people in that CRM putting in information that helps manage our cashflow so that we’re utilizing our cashflow the best that we can. It helps keep track of all the different stages, all the contracts, all that kind of stuff. And then you could automate a bunch of different emails. For example, when you go and buy a house, you want to get insurance on that property, right? So we have an automated email going to our go to insurance guy, hey, we just bought this house. Can you get us insurance? This is what it’s worth. This is when we bought it. This is what we bought it for.  

Antoine: Boom. Done. So I just click a button that says we bought this house, it’s now under construction and it fires off all these emails. So that’s an amazing thing. And that’s just one example. But we have, you know, for every single stage there’s like 20 to 30 automations that are happening at any given time.   

Josh: That’s killer.  

Antoine: Yeah. So that’s one of them. And then the most, the other biggest one that we just implemented about a month or so ago that we were doing all manually, it was managing cashflow. So with the turnkey business just like any other business, managing cashflow was the key. And it’s the demise of a lot of companies as well because I can’t manage our cashflow. So what we did is we actually using a tool called Zapier. We were able to scrape all the information from our CRM onto pretty much a Google sheet and that does all the math for us about our cashflow.   

Antoine: How much unpaid, because think about it, you have all this stuff under contract, 10 houses that you need to buy and rehab. So you need money for that. You have all these unpaid bills for houses under construction for invoices, and then you have money coming in from properties being sold. So it’s kind of like this whole equation that’s never ending and it’s continuously adding and subtracting. And so just did this a couple of weeks ago and we made like a Google sheet that does all the math for us. Everybody on the team could go in there and kind of see where we are, how much money we have left over, how many more houses we can buy.   

Antoine: And kind of helps us gauge if we need to go buy more houses or sell more houses or just chill out for a little bit. So that’s a huge thing for us. And it’s something that we, we were doing all manually. We just, we all last year were doing it manually and we’re like, how the hell can we fix this? And blah, blah, blah. And we finally figured it out through Zapier. So we’ve been doing a lot of stuff through Zapier now to automate a bunch of other tasks we were doing manually.   

Josh: That’s phenomenal. That’s phenomenal. So Antwan as we kind of round third here and head for home with this interview tell us a little bit more about, you know, I have a lot of passive investors who just, they have a job, maybe they like it or they’re retired and they’re just looking for income and they want to buy turnkey rentals. So talk about Martell Turnkey as far as a turnkey rental business. You did over $10 million worth of real estate. You’re going to double that in the next year. Tell us about a little bit more  about that company. If somebody wanted to buy turnkey rentals, how can they get in touch with you guys? How does the process work for that?   

Antoine: Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. So yeah, were a full service turnkey rental property company. So we’ll go out, buy properties, renovate them, rent them out, put a property manager in place and then sell them. We help all our clients get financing insurance and give them the third party property manager on the ground. So it’s super, super simple, super easy to use, and we connect you with the whole team on the ground. That’s not like under my umbrella or anything like that. And then we normally, those houses sell for like around $80,000 bucks. So people come in and put 20% down, $16,000, a couple thousand bucks in closing costs. So they’re all in for just shy of $20,000. And then for that investment, they make, you know, $200 to $300 per month in positive cashflow.  

Antoine: So it’s a great way for people to get started if they do have that full time job, have $20,000 grand in the bank, good credit score W-2 income for the last couple of years, and they can go and get financing and kind of, it’s a great way to kind of dip your feet into the real estate investing game. And you know, it’s not a very, not a longterm strategy for a lot of people, but it’s just a great way to kind of get started, get your feet wet and get your money working for you in the real estate investment world.  

Josh: No doubt. Yeah. With $20,000 down, if they’re making about $2,400 bucks a year, you know, that’s a 12% cash on cash return. If they’re making $300 bucks a month, $36,000 hundred a year, it’s more like a 15% to 17%, 18% cash on cash return. It’s a great place to start. Right? Plus you have depreciation appreciation of the property. And again, my company at Freeland, we step in and fund those types of investments for investors all the time as the first mortgage debt with rates as low as 5.375. So you know, using, you know, Antwan’s turnkey rental business, if you need financing to buy those turnkey rentals, definitely reach out to us at FreelandLending.com. And so yeah, Antwan, we’ll have to talk a little bit more on a different call about, you know, us kind of partnering up on some of that stuff because those are the types of deals you guys are doing.  

Josh: We can fund them. You guys can turn more properties, more happy clients, and for us more borrowers and clients as well. So let’s definitely have that conversation offline. So Antwan, listen, you’ve got 48 almost over 50,000 followers on Instagram. You can find him at Instagram.com/MartellAntwan. Also, his podcast is called The Millennial Real Estate Investor. You can find that anywhere podcasts are found, including iTunes, Stitcher, and other places like that. Also look him up on his personal website at MartellAntwan.com Antwan, listen, thank you so much for sharing us a little bit about your mindset, how you built over a hundred single family rentals, retired your parents, and continue to build on that as a young millennial. I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for being a guest on Accelerated Investor.  

Antoine: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.  

Josh: You bet.

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Millennials get a bad rap for their different approaches to nearly everything from fast food choices to internet shopping. So I was excited to talk with millennial real estate investor Antoine Martel about his own approach to investing, and the trends he sees within his audience too.

Starting out with $40,000 of his father’s money, Antoine started investing while he was in college. It took a couple of tries before he could find the right formula for his business though. He tried the sexy flipping houses thing in California, but he quickly realized that he was priced out of the market. He shares how moving to out of state investing was the best path for him.

Once he made his dad’s investment money back, people started coming to him with deals. He talks about how he still continues to find deals on the MLS, but the relationships he’s built with brokers and agents are starting to yield deals as well.

Millennials are famous for their “working smarter” approach to nearly everything. Antoine takes that approach to real estate, and shares how he uses automation to streamline his tasks. He talks about how he’s using the Zoho CRM, Zapier, and VAs to make his business work for him.

Of course, because they’re young, millennials have some investing obstacles in their paths. Simply having 2 years of W-2 experience is one of them, but so is the elephant in the room, student loans. Antoine explains how student loans are holding back millennial investors.

If you’re interested in turnkey rentals, Antoine runs a full-service turnkey company. He’ll connect you with the whole team on the ground, and it’s a great way to dip your feet into real estate and create some cash flow.

Antoine’s audience is millennials, but most of them are still just sitting out on investing. So here’s my advice to them: You don’t win or lose, you win or learn.

What’s Inside:

  • How millennials are misunderstood in their approach to real estate.
  • Why Antoine wouldn’t recommend the AirBnB model right now.
  • The tools Antoine uses to automate parts of his business.
  • The biggest hurdles for millennial real estate investors.
  • Millennial myths about real estate busted open by Antoine.
  • Antoine’s favorite acquisition strategy.

Mentioned in this episode​

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