How Justin Found Balance in Life and His Portfolio

0:00When you want your spring break to feel like and your kids pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like oh and room service to feel like because at Hilton hospitality feels like your cabana is ready would you like fresh towels it matters where you stay book now at hilton.com Hilton for this day. Howdy welcome back to one rental at a time. I am here at the center for the blind in Las Vegas at the 2026 one rental at a time event with Justin camera and we're gonna go through a few things first but let's start with where do you live and where do you invest. I'm in Seattle Washington area actually about an hour north it just moved and then I invest pretty much one hour of Seattle a couple in eastern Washington then the rest are in Milwaukee Wisconsin and

1:04DeMoei and Iowa. Okay how did so that's a lot of markets yeah yeah and that's down from last year down down I was in Detroit and then I got out of Detroit yeah okay what did your portfolio look like before we met I'm trying to think when we met it was I did a zoom training for your Amazon yeah when was that that would have been like 2021 maybe 20 19 2020 I was still working yeah it would have been what 2019 was I didn't start until December 2019 so it's probably 2020 okay yeah so at that point in time gosh I think back I would imagine this is a guesstimate I was probably in the 20 to 25-ish priorities at about that time because I started in 2016 2017 Eastern Washington and then got into Milwaukee

2:0517 18 19 20 okay what's the biggest change for you since you found this like one went to a time community and so I actually had Michael Zuber came in and presented at the Amazon real estate group okay and he would talk about no allocators and so I used to think because I was I had the W2 job right so I had I had allocators in there some of them by design because they're seller finance and they're negative cash swing but there's 0% interest so I'm like to me that's fine but then when you leave the W2 world you don't want any of these allocators hanging around so that's my big explain what an alligator is so an alligator is something is a property that is negative cash flowing so meaning you're having to feed the beast every month to keep this property right which is not the goal no that's what homeowner now not what investors should do exactly okay so the biggest change since finding Zuber is re-looking or

3:06rethinking your idea on cash flow not using your job to subsidize that assets right that's that and then as I've evolved into the the community and some other people within it it has been more downsizing actually hanging out with you a lot more seeing the the finer things of the lives with less so the last couple years have been selling properties some of them were just problem properties but a lot of them I had in partnership so instead of being you know more units I shrunk it down to less units or it's you know predominantly just me now to where it's easier for me to manage so less units to manage less tenants toilets and turbines less partnerships how did that impact cash flow so cash flow is definitely down because it is less units because I get the peak who is 145 and I'm at 83 units today and so cash flow for you not for you and your partners yes got it well quite frankly lately and the cash flow has been

4:10all wiped out from two development deals so when you're working on rehab you're taking money from that I mean when you're in growth one technically you take all of your disposable income from your job and all of the rent money and that's funneled into the business yeah okay so it one of those two jobs weren't happening how would your portfolio have performed oh probably around 12,000 is being okay did you make more than 12,000 when you had the bigger unit count it was about the same okay so now you have less tenants to deal with less partnerships to deal with and your cash flow that you get when you're not just giving it away to your projects exactly is the same yeah some of that's because of what I've been selling with some of the alligators and then 10-thirty one into other properties so as I'm rolling forward I'm trying to get more profitable stuff with higher appreciation play in the one rental at a time community have you heard anything that you didn't know existed before you found it I guess the one

5:13most recently has been the rent by the room stuff so with Jared I've kind of heard a little bit about it but I hear more about it in this community tell us a little bit about how you make money parking okay so I have this my very first property bought in 2016 by the airport it's a long narrow property it's kind of like a ski slope it kind of has like a couple humps and you know it's like 65 by like 450 feet and so I used to live there and then I was like I was doing nothing with the back lot and I had a painter come in and he was like man you got all this space in the back what are you doing with the space I'm like long doing nothing he's like you need to be renting this out so that kind of got my mind thinking about it and then I was in Detroit meeting up with uh as there for a conference met up with a friend while I was there and he's like man I'm renting my my garage out for 150 bucks I'm like oh tell me more about this so from when I left him at the Starbucks

6:15to getting to the Detroit airport I created went logged logged in the app created my listing and put it online within about a month I got my first booking which was in I think around 2023 and I'm almost up to getting close to $60,000 lifetime today in under three years which is just pretty amazing because right now I'm down a little bit at the peak I was at almost 3500 a month right now I'm probably around 2600-ish so how many rentals would it take to get $2600 in that's cash flow I mean you really had the they weren't being used there's no real that's just pure gravy or like it's just all income and when I was buying out of state the typical cash flow would be about you know 200 per size up 400 so that would be like seven rentals you know just by utilizing the space that you already have yeah so I wonder how many people

7:16watching have properties with parking space right it isn't being used by the tenant and you don't store anything there you could rent what's the name of the app there's two of them out there the main one that I'm using is called neighbor it's more user-friendly if you guys are familiar with short terminals there's Airbnb and the RBO like Airbnb is the most user-friendly one to use that's like neighbor the other one is called pure storage it's more it's new up and coming it's not really an app it's only on online on the web okay how do you think your life would look right now if you never met any of us at one rent so in a time I probably would have been trying to still sling it out trying to get to thousand units you know because like quite honestly I had an addiction and I was just like I mean I just needed more like every time I bought something that was like the juice that I needed to keep me rolling right and then once I was out of the W2 world then I realized hey this likes sporadic income because these I was buying a lot of these C class properties is not not great

8:21and so that's when I started paying attention more to the community and then like okay let me reevaluate what I'm doing and restructuring these assets that sounds very different than what you're actually doing now yeah if somebody wants to I got one more question before we get to that if you were in a room with Michael super there's just the two of you nobody can hear you and he asked you for feedback on one rental at a time the books the podcast YouTube these events what would you say my biggest thing is him like obviously we know and we literally wake up to him every day I can't wait for the the day they financially they say but I honestly don't know much about his portfolio I know it's very large portfolio and kind of you hear like the very first couple of properties he bought and then he scaled into large multi-family you know I'm assuming he has like hundreds of properties but I don't know I'd love to see more like tactical real world whether it's stuff that he just bought or like stuff that he just sold I think he was trying to do a daddy that

9:26didn't go so hot just kind of like that Graham Stefan one that he talked about like sound like one of my projects if like constantly getting hosed by other other people these are the like the when I see like a real thing a real address real dollar amount real tenant issue whatever those to me are like the most learning experiences cool Bible and if somebody wants to reach out to you with questions how do they find you right now everything on instagram is at w2 to freedom youtube is at w2 to freedom okay well thank you so much right you know thank you everybody have a day full of amazing president Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by april 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by april 21st paid for by virginians for fair

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