Many who pursue a real estate career want to get out of the limiting corporate space and write their own success stories. This mindset pushed Bailey Kramer to invest in this space even before graduating college. Now, he manages short-term rentals across four states. He joins Craig Curelop and Zeona McIntyre to share how he started in multi-family, tried fix and flip, and did long-term rentals before becoming an Airbnb host. Bailey talks about how acquiring an old lake house allowed him to generate huge profits from bookings even without putting proper marketing plans in place.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Becoming An Expert On Short-Term Rentals At 20 With Bailey Kramer
Z, how are you doing?
I’m doing great.
I want to tell you something I’m excited about. We were looking at some deals in Coeur d’Alene, and one of the people I know, the seller, was like, “We already have a second home. They don’t need the money from this sale to purchase the second home.” I’m thinking that they might be poised for some seller financing. I’m about to ask right after we hop off. I’m excited.
I don’t even have a yes yet. I have never brought it up to them yet. I’m excited to ask for it. Everything that we’re learning about, I’m going to put this into place and take action. I’m doing it. Speaking of taking action, we got a young gun on the show who has taken action extremely quickly. This dude was born in 2000, which is weird to me because I feel those people shouldn’t be running around with actual brains yet, but here we are.
They are not fully formed until they are 25.
That is why they can’t rent a car at that age yet. Let’s bring Bailey on the show.
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Bailey Kramer, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
I’m doing fantastic. Thank you guys both so much for having me on.
Bailey, we want to hear all about your financial independence journey. Why don’t you take us back to the beginning as to where it all started and how you first heard about financial independence?
I was always interested in entrepreneurship. One of the big indicators for me or one of the big motivations was Shark Tank. I watched that when I was a kid, and that had a huge impact on me. I realized I wanted to have a lot of money, time, and freedom. That was one thing that got my entrepreneurial wheels spinning.
The second thing is my parents. My dad worked a W-2 job or corporate job for his entire life. To make the long story short, we moved a couple of times because he got a promotion. That was awesome. No one complains about a promotion. We went from Florida to Wisconsin and back to Florida, and we, as a family, enjoyed being in Wisconsin more than when we were in Florida. Since my dad had the golden handcuffs in Florida, he would commute back and forth every single weekend from Florida to Wisconsin. He did it for about 7 to 10 years back and forth.
I didn’t know what financial independence was at that point, but I realized I could not work for somebody else or be tied to a location. That was my big like, “I cannot do that.” As far as financial independence goes, something that opened my eyes up to it was the five-hour work week, where I was like, “I can combine my desires to not do what my dad did as far as not having a corporate job but use some of the things from the five hour work week to have independence.” Those were two big factors for me.
It is The 4-Hour Workweek, and Bailey, I see you hustling. You are adding that extra hour. For the rest of the world is four hours.
It sounded weird, but I was like, “No, I’m pretty sure it is that book.” It is the four hours.
I love that you say that because everybody says Rich Dad Poor Dad. I’m like, “Don’t you say it.” You gave us another book.
That comes in later.
No, you are not allowed to say it.
Bailey, I’m with you too. I read The 4-Hour Workweek before I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. That was the book that got me thinking about my income on a monthly basis and my expenses on a monthly basis versus an annual basis. He does talk about financial independence in that book, but not as explicitly as Rich Dad Poor Dad. That book got my wheels turning, and Rich Dad Poor Dad articulated everything that I was thinking, and I wanted to take that book like football, I will spike it. The 4-Hour Workweek was what caught your wheels turning. What happened after you read that book, and when was this?
I read The 4-Hour Workweek either during my senior year of high school or my freshman year of college when I was about 17 to 18 years old.
What happened next?
I believe I read it in high school because I went off to college. When I went to college, I had one goal for myself, and I was too embarrassed to tell people about it. When I tried to tell people about it, no one believed in it. I was going to finish college, not get a corporate job and build a business in college that I could run after. I wasn’t going to retire after college, but I was going to have a business. Every time I told someone that or indicated it, they were like, “That is cool. What are you going to do after college? What job are you going to get?” No one that I talked to encouraged that.
I kept it to myself. I made a video of me talking about the idea that I posted to show the full picture. That was my goal and mindset. In my freshman year, nothing happened. I went down to YouTube University to look at different business models and stuff. In my sophomore year, I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. That is when I was like, “This real estate thing, this is the path to get me to what I learned from The 4-Hour Workweek and the whole idea of financial independence.” I was like, “I see the path through Rich Dad Poor Dad.”
You are like, “This is the business that I’m going to start.” You got it figured out.
It was a perfect match. I was like, “This makes sense. Let me learn about real estate.” No one in my family does real estate investing or anything like that. I found BiggerPockets. I looked up online how to get started in real estate investing. BiggerPockets came up. I went down the whole BiggerPockets university of podcasts, webinars, and forums. I felt like I have learned a lot of different things from listening to their podcast.
I ended up networking with hundreds of people through BiggerPockets, messaging people, “I’m interested in real estate.” I would sort by people who were nearby me and had certain indicators. I listen to a podcast, and I would be like, “Multifamily sounds cool. Let me look for multifamily people.” I started networking. Ultimately, I was like, “I’m going all in on multifamily real estate. This is what I want to do.”
What year was that?
This was still my sophomore year of college.
What year?
You didn’t think, “I will buy a house and try it out.” You were like, “Let me get right into apartments or something bigger than that.”
That was my initial thinking.
Why?
To be honest, with multifamily and a spoiler, I don’t do multifamily right now, but when I first got into it, I saw all these people on social media talking about how much money you can make on multifamily. I heard numbers like $100 million assets under management. Those numbers sounded cool. I didn’t know what they meant and didn’t understand how to get there, but it sounded not flashy the way of like flashy to others. It sounded like, if I can get that, that is a success. I was like, “Multifamily is the way to go.” That is what I was thinking at the time. I dove all in. I joined a mastermind group and started networking with people in the space.
This is a funny theme because we were talking about this in our last episode. I feel like we need another way to measure success. It is easy to measure by the number of dollars or the number of homes, and people get so caught up in those metrics. That is the dark side of KPIs. People will work themselves to death because once you get to 30, you are like, “What do I do now? I must go to 100.” It doesn’t mean anything. A hundred isn’t more happy.
I don’t know where the rest of your story goes, but I’m talking to the readers going, “If you are early in, don’t get stuck in that trap. Figure out what the metrics are for you and measure whatever is important, the happiness, health, or whatever else.” All we need is financial independence. We don’t need to be multimillionaires and have generational wealth. Off of my soapbox. Continue, Bailey.
I was still bought into the idea at the time. This was still 2020, going into my junior year. I joined a mastermind group. I only exclusively listened to multifamily podcasts. I was doing the motions of a multifamily investor. I was talking to brokers. I was underwriting deals. I was learning a lot. Nothing happened. I spent a lot of months practicing, but I didn’t get anywhere with it. I learned a ton from it. It for sure was not a waste at all. It is just I didn’t get any multifamily deals.
My junior year was approaching coming into my senior year. I need to get something going here because I’m doing a lot of research and networking, but I have no money coming in. I’m still a college student at this point, but I had that end-of-senior-year timeline to hit. Throughout networking with people, I would underwrite deals for this person. I would help this person write blog articles. I was always trying to get my way in.
Someone from the mastermind group said, “I do single-family right now. I do want to get in into multifamily, but I’m not there yet mentally. I want to continue growing on the single-family side. Do you want to help me out with lead generation?” I was like, “Sure. I don’t know anything about it, but I’m happy to learn and help out.” He and I started doing off-market lead generation, cold calling and texting the find motivated sellers to buy their houses in any way, shape, or form. Whether that was a fix and flip or rental, let’s get a motivated seller and buy single-family houses.
Let me ask a little bit about it. Where were you guys? Were you in the same town? Were you guys focusing on a market, but neither of you was there?
I was in Orlando, Florida. He was in Northern Illinois. I had no experience with this area, but he lived in the area and already had properties in the area. It gave me decent comfort. He has properties there. He is experienced. It is only about an hour and a half away from where my family lived in Wisconsin. It wasn’t some random place. It was slightly random.
Did you guys have an arrangement that he was going to buy them, and you would get a kickoff? Were you going to do a partnership at some point when you guys find something?
The deal was that we were going to do a partnership when a deal came about.
I want to say one thing too, and take it back to how you got to this person is that you joined a multifamily group to get around people. It sounded like you were networking with no idea where you would end up. You knew these were the right steps, and look at the opportunity presented. It is something that was different.
You never know the path. You never know how far you are going to go or where it is going to take you. You know that taking that one next step of networking, getting to know people, and helping people write blogs or underwriting deals is going to present you with more opportunities that are unbeknownst to you, and here you are. I want to remind people that the path is very rarely what you think it is going to be.
To get to him, I even found the mastermind group by networking with hundreds of people on BiggerPockets. It was not a straight line there. It was talking to a lot of people over a long period of time.
What is the first deal? Tell us about it.
Z, is this the for real deal?
Sorry, we are just being nerds.
This is the first deal that makes you a true real estate investor, whether intentional or non-intentional. Bailey, hit us with it. Give us the numbers and not the deeds.
The first deal we found through our lead generation that we were doing. We found somebody who bought it originally as a fix and flip. When I initially called him, I was curious about like, “We are interested in your property. Are you interested in selling it?” He told us his story that he bought it as a fix and flip. He had already gutted the house.
He already put in new windows, but he has a bunch of other projects going on. If we buy it at the same price that he bought it for, he will be cool with it and walk away. That is what happened. We bought this property. This is in Illinois for $85,000. It was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom property. It was down to the studs. We put $35,000 into it and ended up selling it for $175,000.
How long did that take? Did your friend have everything together? He already had the contractors and all this stuff. It sounds, kind of.
It took way too long. I have no construction background. He had some. He is more handy himself, but he’s not a professional renovation guy or specializes in that by any means. It took us six months to get it finished. It was sold after six months, but it took five months to renovate this property. It was a small three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. It took way too long. We learned a lot. We fired a lot of contractors. A lot of people didn’t show up. Things went over budget. That was not a perfect flip by any means.
It seems that everyone has something in common in their first deal. They royally mess it up somehow. Whether it takes too long, it is too much, bought too high, and sold too low. That is not the point of your first deal. You are not in your first deal to make $1 million. It is to gain experience because there is some stuff you can’t learn from a book or podcast. You can only learn it by doing it and being in it. That is the first deal. Your first deal is paying your dues. You went to college. Hopefully, you didn’t pay too much, but you paid there, and you got to go pay your dues again in the school of real estate. That is what this sounds like.
The learning experience alone is worth more than anything. It is like a momentum thing. I went over a year talking about real estate, talking to family and friends, and posting things that I’m learning on social media. It got to a point where I have been talking about this for a long time, but I got to buy real estate. I’m like, “I’m talking about it. I got to do it.” The money was cool, but it was more just the experience.
The learning experience is worth more than anything. Share on XWhere did you guys go from there? Do you still want to be with this partner in this market? What happened?
From when we started our lead generation, like texting and calling people, it took two months to finally get this one. After we got this one to say, “Yes,” the momentum started to build super-fast. From February, when we closed on this deal, until June, we bought five more houses, all within the same relative area. Another one was a fix and flip. Two of them were long-term rentals, and two of them were short-term rentals.
I want to highlight that. That momentum is important. This happens with people that are new agents and also new wholesalers or investors. At first, it seems slow, but what you don’t realize is you are putting a lot of little sticks in the fire because some of these take a little while to burn. Even though it took two months, you got all these leads, and they started building over time because now people are getting the mail or something is happening in their lives. Don’t be discouraged. If you are going to do something like this, give yourself a year or two if you can.
To add to that, too, look at a tire kicker. All these agents are hearing people that may or may not be interested. They are intrigued, but they are not going to do anything. Once you start doing something and you got a record, people will be like, “He is going to take action. He is legit.” That happens. My question there is, how do you buy five deals in four months? How do you finance all that?
The financing piece comes back to the group that I joined and the people that I networked with. First of all, they were creative finance deals. Seller financing is subject to and using private money. We still had to raise money for all of them or get money for most of them except one. We leveraged the network that I have been building for over a year at this point and from the groups that I joined.
Let’s go in a deep way because it sounds like there are some cool tools in here that people could benefit from. Let’s go into deal number one. How did you finance that $85,000 and the $35,000 to do the renovation?
For that deal, we had two investors on the deal, one who did the $85,000 and one who did the $35,000. My partner knew the person with the $85,000. That was from something that he has already worked with. The $35,0000 was somebody from our mastermind group.
Even though it netted $50,000, you probably had a bunch of holding costs with different people and your time. What did you guys walk away with? People think flips make more money than they often do.
To be honest with you, I don’t know the exact answer, but I can tell you it was nowhere near $50,000. If I gave a rough estimate from it, it is probably $10,000, maybe $15,000. It was not by any means a home run deal. The thing about this is $10,000, but it took me forever to sell the deal or finish the deal. In that time, you have those like, “What if the market turns? What if this?” It was a decent payday, especially for me being in college, but it was no glorious thing.
How did you set it up with your partners there with your lending partners? Did you pay them interest monthly? Was it a lump sum at the end? How did you pitch that and structure that to them?
We did a lump sum at the end.
Let’s go into the second one because the second one is a flip. Once you start going into buy and hold, it does change the structure because you can’t do the same short-term money for a long time. What did the second one look like?
The second and third ones came as a package deal because we found an owner who had two properties. One of them that was that I still have now, and one of them we flipped. I learned a new term after I did it. It is technically a wholetail, where you buy it, clean it up, and sell it. We bought this property for $68,000. We are like, “It is going to be worth probably close to $200,000 once we fix it up.” It needs about $50,000 at the time. We are like, “This is going to be a nice little flip.” We started looking into it, and we are like, “This is a mess. It needs a new roof. It needs this.”
We still could have made money with it, but the market was heating up at this point. We are like, “Honestly, if we can get rid of this asap, I way rather take even half.” Especially after starting that first flip, we are like, “I don’t need another flip to go on right now.” We put it on the market for $130,000, and we were confident. This was a week later.
We owned from buying it for $68,000 using seller financing. We put $500 down. We had no money in this deal except we had to pay the mortgage payments to the seller. We listed it for $130,000. Within a couple of days, we had an accepted offer of $120,000. We were going crazy. We are like, “This is the greatest thing ever.” Nothing goes according to plan. That buyer backed out. They were to close in three weeks and backed out the second week. We are like, “Oh my God.” That was one of the worst feelings ever. I thought it was.
We re-listed it. We got it under contract a couple of days later, and that person backed out as well. We lowered the price. It was $130,000, under contract for $120,000 and we eventually got it under contract for the second time at $110,000. We are like, “It is still going to be a good payday, but let’s get this thing close. I’m sick and tired of it.” We are also paying the mortgage payments at this time too. That wasn’t fun. They weren’t huge, but it wasn’t fun.
That second person backed out, and I was broken. I was driving my car, and my partner called me. He goes, “The deal is done.” I was like, “What do you mean the deal is done?” He was like, “The attorney called me, and they backed out.” I pulled over, and I was like, “Holy crap.” This is at the point where I was like, “I don’t want to do any more fix and flips.”
They backed out, we put it back on the market, and it was sitting for two weeks. We finally found someone to buy it, and they closed on it for $99,000. We made some money on it. It was good. It still took a couple of more months than we wanted it to be, and it was less money, but we finally got it off our hands. At this point, I didn’t even care if we sold it for $75,000. I was ready to give it up to whoever was going to buy it because I couldn’t deal with it anymore.
Tell us how you negotiated the seller financing. Since you are going after distressed sellers, you probably were working with them directly, but did you propose terms, or did they have some ideas? Where did you get those ideas from?
For the seller finance terms, my partner Moore handled that. He has this more sales experience. He has done a couple of creative deals, but I was still there learning with him. He asked them what they wanted for pricing, and we said, “We can do that pricing, but it is got to be on terms.” We sometimes propose the terms, or they would. It depended on the property. Some owners were like, “I want this or nothing.” I don’t remember this exact situation, but I remember that when we asked this guy if he was open to selling in the first place, his wife was on the phone with him, too, and she was like, “Sell it. I’m done with this property.” We knew there was motivation.
You could hear it.
We could hear it.
It is not a good negotiation tactic.
You have the owner’s background.
These properties were his personal projects that he was fixing up himself, and he wasn’t doing anything properly on them. They lived an hour or something away. She was like, “Get rid of them.”
You said it was a package. You ended up buying something else with it. That shows the best thing you can ask somebody is, what else do you own? You never know if they have a huge portfolio behind them and if this is a relationship you are going to build for years or if they are willing to give something else up right now. What else do you get?
We bought this deal. We are at three now. We bought another single-family rental, which was using the subject two strategies. The fourth one was a long-term rental that I still have. The next two were short-term rentals.
What else came in the deal with the flip that didn’t flip?
That property needed some work as well, but it was more cosmetic stuff, and it wasn’t anything major. It was a double lot. It was a big yard. What we did with that one is we got a new carpet and new flooring. I painted all the cabinets in the kitchen. They were outdated, but they weren’t bad enough to throw away. It was just cosmetic. We redid the outdated bathroom. We painted the entire house. It is a full cosmetic job. This one was a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom as well. Fairly close to the other ones. It is right on the main side road. It is not super busy, but it is not Airbnb.
For this one, we spent our own money renovating the deal. It was only $10,000 total for rehab because we did a lot of it ourselves. We had to hire a couple of specialists to install the bathtub. The materials were not anything crazy, paint and stuff like that. We did a lot of the work ourselves to save money on that. We made it a long-term rental. We had a phenomenal tenant in there. The cashflow is nice. They were in there for at least six months. They stopped paying, and we evicted them. That is a whole other rabbit hole. When we first got it up and running for the first six months or so, it was phenomenal, super easy tenants, and everything was going well.
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Before Bailey gets into his Airbnbs, we are going to take a moment to talk about my Airbnb group. I have a group on Facebook called Airbnb Investing. Search that if you want to get in with other people that are doing Airbnb deals all across the country. We have a Meetup in Boulder, Colorado, where I live. You can come out and meet other investors there and network like Bailey said he has been doing. We are having our book launch party with BiggerPockets in December 2022. You can get your exclusive invite there. We will hope to see you in the group now, back to the show.
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Bailey, what were the numbers of this deal to breeze through it quickly? What did you pay for it? How are you doing with the mortgage and whatnot?
The numbers on the deal are approximately $150,000 in the purchase price. We had $0 down. We might have given $500 as an earnest money deposit in a 10-year balloon. We put $10,000 to rehab the deal. We rented it out for $1,800. The mortgage was fairly low. We negotiated with him somewhere in the 3% interest rates. I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head, but payments are fairly low. That is what we are still running now.
For $150,000, your payments are probably, $500 to 4600 or something like that. Maybe it is more.
It is somewhere in that range.
You are clearing over $1,000. That is amazing. It sounds like we need to do a little 1, 2, and skip a fruit, but let Craig ask his question first.
It sounds like you are out of college. You are jumping right into this real estate investing thing. Where are your living expenses coming from? It takes some time to make some money. Usually, you got to spend some money before you make some in real estate. Where are you getting this?
In the deals that I have been part of so far that I have talked about, the first deal was no money out of my pocket because we raised it. The only money I put in was the $5,000 we got from the hotel. No money out of my pocket at this point.
Were you working part-time somewhere else?
I was still a college student. I was in school. Thankfully and luckily, my parents were supporting me in college. My expenses are still low. I’m not a big spender. I was focused on real estate.
I wanted to get some context there. Brief us on the next deal that you did because you said you got five. It sounds like these are two short-term rentals. What made you want to make that switch from long-term to short-term? What did those look like?
When we got to the short-term rental deal, we didn’t go into it saying, “This is going to be a short-term rental.” What we did for every single deal was how can we solve the owner’s issues and how can we make money from the deal. We didn’t have an agenda for any of the properties. That was cool to try to make money any way I could from these properties.
We found this one property, and it was a huge lake house. It was on the market previously. It was a failed listing. The owner was stuck on his price, and it needed some rehab. It was outdated. When we looked at the deal, we were like, “What can we do with this property?” We know that we can work something out with the seller. We asked him, “Would you be interested in seller financing?” He knew exactly what it was. He was like, “Yes.” There was no objection from him for it. All he wanted was his price. That was his big thing.
We were looking at the property, and we were like, “Could we fix and flip it?” We were like, “Probably, but I don’t want to do another fix and flip. I’m not interested.” This property was $779,000. I went from buying properties from $60,000 to $150,000-ish to this property, which was $779,000. This was a lot bigger deal. I was like, “I’m not trying to take on risk to buy this for that much, put in $100,000, and try to sell it for over $1 million. This is not going to happen for me.” There is too much risk, and I didn’t enjoy the rehab part.
We were like, “Could we make this a long-term rental?” We thought, “Could we? Maybe. Is that what it is going be best for? No.” We were like, “Could we make this short-term rental?” At this point, I had no idea or no real knowledge. I followed a couple of people who did short-term rentals. I listened to a couple of podcasts, but as far as knowledge goes, I didn’t have any.
We looked on Airbnb and said, “What properties are even around here?” Our next-door neighbor’s property popped up. We are at this property. The one that we were looking to buy was bigger, had better amenities, and could fit more people. We said, “Our neighbor had his property listed for $1,300 a night.” This was in the summer. This isn’t all year round, but he had a $1,300 per night. We could see from his calendar. It looked like he was getting booked.
We were like, “Ours is bigger and better, but let’s say we did $1,000 a night.” We said, “How many days in the summer season are there?” We were like, “There are 90 phenomenal days and probably 120 to 140 other total decent days.” We have winter, which we know is fairly dead. We were like, “If we can do $1,000 per day for 75 days in the summer, and we can do the weekends in the winter at $500 a night. If we can pull in $5,000 in the winter and this in the summer, this deal is going to work.”
That is all the analysis we did on this first one to give us a little bit of confidence that this deal was going to work. We knew that it was a good area. People would like it. We didn’t know about the revenue side. We did raise some capital for this one. We brought in a couple of partners. We raised $180,000 total, and $100,000 of that was for a down payment. The percentage was 12% something.
We spent $80,000 rehabbing the property, which included a brand-new roof, all new bathrooms, and painting. There was a tennis court on the property. We turned it into a basketball court. We did a lot. The driveway, we even fixed up a little bit. It was outdated. We have to furnish this thing because it is a short-term rental, which we had no experience. I had no idea how much it was going to cost to furnish it.
We went the Facebook marketplace route. I went to Goodwill and got a bunch of stuff. It is not a super nice property, but it is a big and expensive property. We bought a couple of new things like dining room tables and beds, but the couch I picked up for free on Facebook Marketplace. We were extremely scrappy for this first short-term rental deal.
How did it end up turning out?
It turned out a lot better than we expected. This is in the summer. These are the best months of the year. We started at $1,000. We were getting booked up fast. We were like, “Let’s go $1,300, $1,500, $1,600.” At that point, the season ended for summer, and we had to lower our prices for the winter as expected. We said, “We did pretty good in the summer for our first launch without professional pictures and without having any idea of what we were doing. What if we made it $2,000 for next summer?”
It was this summer of 2021 that we experienced. In July 2021, the property brought in $20,000 something. In August 2021, it brought in $20,000 something. Going off of our initial projections, we were decently aligned. We were accurate but didn’t have the amenities we wanted. We didn’t have the photos and experience.
It was 2021, which was the best year ever.
We were going to winter and doing well according to expectations. We made our prices $2,000 per night for the summer of 2022. In October or November, we already got a seven-day booking for $2,000 a night for summer 2022. Someone booked way in advance at our crazy high rate. I was going crazy at this. I was like, “I cannot believe this person is spending $2,000 a night for this property this far in advance. It was unbelievable.”
We filled up a decent amount of our calendar before even 2021 ended. We had a couple of bookings because we were doing 7 to 10-day bookings at this point. It only takes a couple of those to fill up a month and a couple more to fill up your summer, which isn’t a very long season. We ended up doing around $40,000 to $45,000 per month for June, July, and August for this property.
Imagine if you had professional photos. From what I’m hearing, I bet your furniture is not as good as it could be. Imagine if you reinvested and put some real energy in there. This is a way of me saying that your place looks shitty. Send me that listing. I would love to take a look.
The furniture is still pretty similar, but we did reinvest a lot into the property. We have a volleyball court now. It is a sand volleyball in the backyard. It is super awesome. We have a boat dock now. Our guests bring their own boat. We also offer a boat rental. It is a third-party company. It is not us, but we made it a lot better of an experience for sure. We can still reinvest in some more furniture, but we are still getting books, I don’t know. We are rolling with it.
The lesson I’m gathering from this is that I can furnish rentals with the Facebook marketplace with free things, and it is not as bad as people make it sound. Zeona is going to be like, “No.” He is making $40,000 a month with a free couch.
He found a good market because some markets are so competitive that it is not going to work. It is a good market and also a stellar property because, being on a lake, there are only many houses that are like that.
The Facebook market strategy is not something that we have gone to. I do not recommend it at all.
It is a time waster.
It is not the most visually appealing, and we advertise it as more of a historic type. We play into it a little bit, but it is not recommended to do that.
The Facebook market strategy is a time waster and not visually appealing. Real estate investors should not bother to give it a try. Share on XWhat is your recommendation for furnishing a place if it is not Facebook marketplace?
My favorite sites are Wayfair, Target, and Amazon. Those are my big three places for furnishing.
I’m going to put in HomeGoods. That would be a good spot if you got a HomeGoods near you. We always do our finishings with that. That is good stuff. We need to pivot into the final part of our show, but Bailey, do you have any final words of wisdom for our readers?
Truthfully, the most important thing that matter is your network. I would not have done anything without the people that I met. You don’t need to have a network when you begin, but you need to start networking when you begin. That is number one. Number two, know that your fear of steel is not going to make you rich, or don’t have that expectation going in and have it be a solid deal. Don’t go, “It has to be perfect or nothing.” The fact of getting started is going to help push the next deals forward. That is what, for me, has been huge.
Do you know what time it is, Z? It is time for the final four.
I will ask you four questions that we ask all of our guests. The first one is, what are you reading right now?
I am honestly not reading anything at the moment. The most recent book that I read was Alex Hormozi’s $100 Offers book. I transitioned from podcasts to YouTube nowadays.
Who are you watching?
Who do you follow on YouTube?
There are a couple of people, but the biggest one right now is Ryan Pineda.
What is his shtick? I have heard his name. I just can’t remember.
Fix and flip, turn serial entrepreneur. That is the gist of it.
What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?
Don’t take advice from anybody that isn’t where you want to be. That is huge for me.
It is easy to take advice from people like family or old mentors that are no longer where you want to be.
Number three. What is your why because you are young? What is keeping you hustling?
The thing that keeps me hustling is being able to continue to build to the point where when I do have a family, I can be 1,000% present and having freedom. I can go where and when I want. I don’t want money to be an issue in the future. That is one thing that keeps me going. I don’t have an endpoint. I’m not the type of guy to be like, “I want to retire at 25.” I want the idea of financial independence and financial freedom. I don’t want to stop working, I love it, but I want to have full options to do whatever I want.
The main thing is having that timepiece, where if someone says, “Do you want to go here this weekend? Do you want to do this this weekend?” Down the road, when I have a family, and something pops up, I’m in. I’m there for it. One quick thing to note is that when I was in college, my girlfriend and I did long-distance. She went to school. Now we live together, and all of her friends are doing long distances now.
It feels good to me because I spend a lot of time making sure that I can have location freedom, which is also big for me, that I can work from wherever I want. It is super intentional for me. Everyone is doing long distance, and I’m thankful that I went the route, pursued and continue to pursue what I’m pursuing in real estate and financial independence because the location freedom is huge for me.
Bailey, final question. Would you rather own a dragon or be a dragon?
I would rather own a dragon. I could sell that to different Airbnbs and say, “We got a dragon coming.” They can take it every semester or whatever. I’m thinking about how I can monetize this dragon.
I don’t know what I would rather do. I think I’m with you. I rather own a dragon than be a dragon. Being a dragon would be a little clumsy getting into bed and stuff. Where can people find out more about you?
The best place is on Instagram. Look up Bailey Kramer. It should pop up. I’m also on TikTok, but Instagram is my main hub.
Go ahead and follow him. Bailey, thank you so much for coming to the show. It has been a pleasure to get to know you and get to know your story. It is truly inspiring. How old are you? I don’t think we ever got that, but you seem like you are young.
I was born in 2000.
They are starting to exist in the real world. That is inspirational for a lot of the younger folks out there. You are clearly crushing it. It is good to have you on.
Thanks for having me on, guys.
—
That was Bailey Kramer. Z, what do you think about Bailey?
I love how young he is, and it is funny when you are young. It feels like, “I have been doing this for several months. It has been forever.” In the beginning, it felt like a slow start for him, but honestly, he has done so much in a short period of time. It is great to see how a little bit of networking is. A mastermind led him down this road. He has tried three different strategies. He has experienced a lot of ways to buy real estate and learned all about creative financing. It has been like a master’s degree in real estate in a year and a half. It is a pretty incredible story.
It is crazy that he did most of this while still in college. If you are reading this and you are not yet in college, or in college, now is the time to start. Wherever position you are in, get out there and start networking. You can do that whenever. Go to the next meetup. Start reaching out to people on BiggerPockets. Start posting on Instagram that you are starting to invest in real estate and see who flocks to you. It is incredible. Once you get that one person, it leads you down this other path that you could never have imagined.
Especially at meetups, older people love to invest time in younger people because it is exciting to see somebody excited about it. You are probably trying to talk to all your friends and family all your life. Nobody is listening. You find this young person, and they are all lit up. You are like, “Let me help you as much as I can.” It is a great opportunity to get in there and get a mentor.
Reach out to Bailey on Instagram. If you haven’t already, please leave us a rating in review on iTunes or wherever platform. It super helps us get the word out there. Share this with your friends, whatever it is. We want to spread this word about financial independence to everybody. If you know already, give me a follow on Instagram. I’m @TheFiGuy. Zeona is Zeona McIntyre. With that being said, Z, anything else you want to leave with before we head out for the week?
No, that is it. See you next episode.
The dragon goes back to her lair.
That’s right.
Important Links
- Bailey Kramer
- The 4-Hour Workweek
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- BiggerPockets
- Airbnb Investing
- Wayfair
- Target
- Amazon
- HomeGoods
- $100M Offers
- Instagram – Bailey Kramer
- TikTok – Bailey Kramer
- iTunes – Invest2Fi
- @TheFiGuy – Instagram
- Zeona McIntyre – Instagram
- www.RentRedi.com
- https://www.KAPRE.com/
- https://www.StepByStepbnb.com/a/2147508384/zG79Sujh
- https://www.KQZYFJ.com/click-100586418-13920066
- https://PersonalCapital.sjv.io/zaMMqx
- Beyond.sjv.io/b3XBN9
- https://PriceLabs.co/users/sign_up?referral=7GlSXn
- https://Invest2Fi–rethinktheratrace.thrivecart.com/remote-airbnb-management/
About Bailey Kramer
Bailey is a Real Estate Investor & Entrepreneur. Bailey uncovered his passion for real estate early in his life and bought his 1st investment property at just 20 years old! Since then Bailey has focused on growing his portfolio of long-term rentals and short-term rentals! Bailey also founded his own co-hosting company and manages 8 Airbnb properties in 4 different states! In his free time, Bailey enjoys traveling, playing sports & eating delicious food!
