When you own the house, you can’t generate wealth from it if you don’t leverage it. In today’s society, where people are moving five to ten years from now, how can you create wealth by owning that house? In today’s episode, Noel Christopher, the Senior Vice President of Renters Warehouse, shares his insights on homeownership and how you can leverage your house to generate income. Tune in and learn more about how you can optimize homeownership and create a long-term investment plan! — Watch the episode here Listen to the podcast here Renters Warehouse: Leveraging Your House To Generate Income With Noel Christopher Thank you so much for stopping by. I’m here with a good friend of mine, Noel Christopher. Thanks for stopping by, bud. Thanks for having me. Noel, why don’t you take a minute and tell everybody a little bit about yourself? I’m the SVP of Portfolio Services for Renters Warehouse. We are a national property management company. I manage about 15,000 homes in 45 markets around the country. I run our Portfolio Services Division, which focuses on institutional investors, family offices, and private equity that want to invest in a single-family rental scale. Everything from sourcing homes, if you want to buy off the MLS, off-market sourcing, underwriting, acquiring, renovating, leasing, and property management. A little bit of asset management light in there as well. We are going to get into your background. There is probably a lot more in-depth here but you are not just a guy at Renters Warehouse. How long have you been in the investing field, and how many houses have you bought? I started in commercial real estate in Chicago back in the ’90s. That’s where I cut my teeth. It was a doggy dog world. It still is. After the Great Depression or the Great Financial Crisis, I got into real estate investing personally in Chicago, buying 2 and 3 flat buildings. I bought a few hundred of those. Renovated them, and you couldn’t get a purchase loan. We worked with a lender and did refinances. We did Fannie Mae and Freddie’s refinances. We did almost a thousand of those overall but I owned a couple of hundred. In 2012, through a mutual friend that I went to college with in Arizona, the late Todd Farnsworth, who is a good friend of mine from college, introduced me to Dallas Tanner when it was still Treehouse Group, and they were about to go big with Blackstone. My real estate group was the main broker they used in Chicago. Previous to that, as a commercial real estate shop, we were buying other brokerages and doing a lot of different things. We started buying homes from Invitation Homes, and the rest is history. Since then, I’ve worked all through the industry. I bought thousands and thousands of homes, whether that’s buying directly for a fund or representing different funds. I have some very close friends and deep connections in Chicago, some of whom I’m sure you know, that I still do a lot of business with. I decided in 2012 that this was what I was going to do, and I’ve been doing it since. I start each week with a segment we call the bottom line up front. What I’m going to do is I’m going to ask you to look into the camera and spend two minutes talking to that individual investor. That investor that’s out there only heard you blush over, “I bought a couple of hundred homes.” As we know, I’m a client of Renters Warehouse and most of your customers don’t own a hundred homes. There’s a lot of fear out there. There’s a lot of misinformation. There’s a lot of, “What should I do?” Imagine that after these two minutes, they are going to stop tuning in. They are going to stop at a gas station to get some gas. In two minutes, pour into the audience the most important things you are seeing, the things they need to know, things they should be doing, and things they shouldn’t be doing. Take it away. If you look at where the market is now, I talk about this a lot. What’s happened in the last few years is that it’s gone up to about 40%, 42%, and 45% in some areas. A lot of people talk to me if it is time to sell their house. What should they do? What’s going on? The fact is that if you think that the market was going to continue to go, for example, if we were back in 2019 and fast forward now and we said, “The market went up 3.5% to 4% in the last few years. The rent went up from 3.5% to 4%. We had all been clapping each other on the hands, saying it was a good couple of years. Now, it’s gone up 40%, and people are having a little bit of a conniption with it going back down maybe, and I’ve heard some projections, 15% to 20% in certain markets across the country. That’s a huge opportunity because it probably will not go down and what will continue to go up incrementally is rent. That’s what’s going to drive your investment. The cost of the capital is going to adjust over time, so you buy and invest now. In a couple of years, you will probably be able to refinance into a lower term. You are taking a higher equity risk now and for the next year so that you can realize huge gains in 18 or 24 months. That’s whether you are a large institutional investor, whether you are a small or a medium-cap investor. You have a 1031 exchange, you are investing a couple of million dollars or you are a small investor buying one home. Don’t look at where the market is today and where it’s going to be tomorrow. Look at where it’s going to be in 5 or
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