How to Fast Track your Financial Success with Casey Quinn
As Co-Founder and CEO of CityLife Realty Group, a real estate investment company located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Casey Quinn is not your average real estate investor. In his chat with host Tim Herriage, shares the strategies and methods that fast-tracked his financial success in real estate investing. He emphasizes the value of having a team and highlights the importance of chasing happiness, whatever that may mean for each individual in the organization. Learn the basic principles and values that Casey instills in his approach and the culture he builds for his organization. There’s a lot to learn from Casey and his way of managing, investing, and planning for the future. Tune in to learn all about it. — Watch the episode here Listen to the podcast here How to Fast Track your Financial Success with Casey Quinn Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for stopping by. I’m here with one of the most impressive people I’ve met in 2022, Casey Quinn. Casey, thanks for stopping by. I’m looking forward to it. The first thing up is the BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front. A lot is changing in this market. You got up to two minutes. What are the most important things you see in the market? These are things you think people should be doing and things should be avoided at the most important part of the day. What I’m paying attention to the most is what’s happening in the rates and how they affect me in my business and the local markets that I invest in. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and I invest in Pittsburgh. We’re a small-to-middle market. We’re not national. Therefore, how are the rates climbing impacting our business? We’re BRRRR model investors. These rates directly impact how we’re able to borrow on the refinance end of our investments. That directly affects our debt service coverage ratio and how we can get our money back out of our deals. Number two, for home buyers, it’s affecting the local market and what they can pay. What is their purchasing power and how is that changing the markets and their ability to buy? In our market, locally in Pittsburgh, we have properties sitting on the market for months when before, the last couple of years, they haven’t been. What opportunities is that creating for us to go out and buy? There are negatives and positives to everything that’s going on. When the rates are climbing, how is that directly impacting your business? Number two, what I’m paying the most attention to is what’s happening within my network. The people that I’m paying attention to, the people that I’m following and the education that I’m getting in this market, what are they saying? What are they doing? How am I then taking that information and applying it back to my business? Some of it could be good. Some of it could be bad. We have to be able to think through, fantastically process that information and apply it directly to what we’re doing. As I look through the winter, values are still a very important part of the BRRRR model. You got to get an appraisal. There’s a loan-to-value on the back end. I won’t say, “If we,” because you and I talk about this all the time. Markets are different. If a market has another 5% slide and you were buying at $75,000 and you needed a refi at $75,000, you have to plan for that. For our business, with the rates doing what they’re doing, the property values have not come down enough that the BRRRR model’s making sense for us. We still are paying a heavier price but with what we’re paying on a monthly basis, we can’t afford the back end to get out of those. We’ve had to shift our model. We were doing 10, 12 or 15 deals on a monthly basis in the BRRRR for the past couple of years. We’re averaging about one a month. It’s been a tremendous change in our business. Let’s talk about your business. Why don’t you take a minute and tell everybody a little bit about yourself? A few years ago, I was fired from my job. I had zero real estate experience at the time. I didn’t know what I was about to do in my future. I went into this real estate business and found my partner. We built a $70 million portfolio in the past couple of years. We didn’t start with any money so we had a BRRRR model. We are working with folks, like you, on the hard money front end, borrowing and understanding, “We’ve got to do whatever it takes.” It didn’t matter what the price of that was. We started a BRRRR model investment and built our portfolio. We built a $17 million-a-year revenue company off of that. How many rental units is that? It’s about 520 doors. It’s about 225 properties. That is our mixture. It’s about 160 single-family homes. At about a year and a half in, we realized we could BRRRR. We could value-add properties at the multifamily level, whether it be duplexes or triplexes. They’re not necessarily multifamily. We got into more of the commercial multifamily space. We have 5 up to our largest, which is 43. There is less competition there ultimately in that mid-market. It’s a lot cheaper. You come out here to Dallas or anywhere else and the prices are different. The management of that many units with only four years of true experience has got to be super hard. We certainly had our growing pains when it comes to its management of it. In my previous background in Corporate America, I wanted to take a business approach. To me, it was, “How do we create operational companies’ enterprise value off of the real estate that we’re buying?” With that, we took the approach on the management side. We were like, “Let’s run a management
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