BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

What if, within ten years, you could reach financial freedom? Imagine it. You may have a high-stress job where you’re working long hours and making good money but feeling burnout creeping in. You NEED an exit strategy if you’re going to keep up with this lifestyle because before long, you may need an early retirement. That’s precisely how Benjamin Aaker, emergency medicine physician, felt. Benjamin loves his work, and he’s still working today, but now, he has the option to leave when the burnout gets too much. After becoming an “accidental landlord,” Benjamin quickly saw the benefits of investing in real estate. He bought a few more houses and a multifamily building, then went bigger and bigger. Now, he’s equity-rich with a real estate portfolio that can support his lifestyle if he decides not to work. Even if you’re not stressed out at your job (yet), Benjamin encourages you to financially prepare to exit your career, if just for peace of mind. He talks about how you can scale smarter, faster, and better with partners, why sometimes you need to get dirty to succeed in real estate, and how to juggle investing with your full-time job. 

What makes a “good” real estate deal in 2025 and beyond? How much of a return should your investment property be producing? Are real estate returns good enough in this tough housing market to beat out other performing assets like stocks? Today, we’re sharing our exact investing criteria, defining what makes a “good” real estate deal to us, and how you can use key indicators to identify deals worth the effort. We’re breaking this episode into a few parts as we touch on the primary types of investment properties: long-term rentals, short-term rentals, and house flips. Garrett Brown is our resident vacation rental expert and shares how he’s routinely getting twenty percent (or greater) returns by reinvesting in his short-term rentals. Next, familiar face James Dainard discusses the unbelievable house-flipping returns he nets, but are they worth the risk? Finally, Dave shares the metric he goes after when investing in long-term, low-risk rental properties. Plus, we’ll share when it’s a better use of your money to reinvest in your current properties vs. going out and buying new ones!

Today, we’re talking about the easiest way to find profitable rental properties in 2024 (and 2025!). It’s not through cold calling homeowners, sending mailers, networking with wholesalers, or doing any other “off-market” strategy. It’s so easy that even real estate investing beginners will have no trouble finding deals. What are we talking about? On-market, MLS (multiple listing service) properties for sale. You might think, “But everything on the market is overpriced; there are NO good deals left!” That’s where you’re wrong, and today’s guest proves it. Dan Nelson has been buying on-market investment properties for two decades now, and he’s built an entire portfolio doing so (even in recent years). Dan knows there’s a time and place for off-market deals, but he has found so many hidden opportunities on the market that he keeps returning to buy. During this episode, Dan shows YOU precisely what to look for when browsing listing websites for rental properties or potential house flips. He shares the hidden opportunities most investors miss and why you should NOT be focused on properties that make money from day one. Instead, he walks through his simple strategy to create serious cash flow only a couple of years after purchasing properties most investors overlook.

Clay White has done the seemingly impossible. He’s bought five rental properties, completed multiple flips, and done it all in the past fifteen months with high mortgage rates. To make it more impressive, he did it WITHOUT a W2 job at just twenty-three years old! So what sets Clay apart from ninety-nine percent of other investors? As you’ll hear in today’s episode, he went through an almost comical amount of failures, but how he solved them makes him an elite investor. If you think you missed the boat on real estate investing, Clay proves that you couldn’t be more wrong. He not only built an entire rental portfolio in one of the most challenging times to invest but did it with no consistent income, no experience, and in a market you’ve probably never heard of. If you can follow Clay’s advice, mimic his ingenuity and tenacity for problem-solving, and are willing to put up with small failures to achieve massive success, you, too, will be able to build serious wealth, no matter your timeline, no matter your age, and no matter your job.

So you want to start investing in real estate but have ZERO experience. What should you do? The good news is that even if you don’t know how to invest in real estate, you can get started relatively quickly, especially if you avoid the common rookie mistakes. To help you jump over the investing hurdles, instead of running right into them, Dave brought on Tony Robinson, top short-term rental investor, and Henry Washington, repeat co-host and long-term rental investor, to share exactly what they’d do if they were starting from scratch in 2025. Both Henry and Tony have scaled very fast. They own seven-figure real estate portfolios producing hundreds of thousands in rent yearly. But neither of them has been investing for more than ten years. How did they scale their real estate portfolios so quickly? They learned from their mistakes FAST and are teaching you the same lessons on today’s show. In this episode, we’re going through the beginner steps you should take to build a real estate portfolio starting in 2025. We’ll discuss whether you should buy long-term or short-term rentals, how to choose a market to invest in, knowing how much you can afford, the many ways to find real estate deals, and the one thing Henry and Tony WISHED they had done earlier. Ready to start investing in 2025? This is your quick guide!