Episode 76: How to Build a Successful Real Estate Investing Business from Scratch with Dustin Heiner

Acquania Escarne 0:03

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Hey guys! Thanks so much for coming back to the show. Today we're gonna talk about how to build a successful real estate investing business from scratch. I'm super excited to have Dustin Heiner on the show. He's a real estate investor, the founder of master passive income, and successfully unemployed. We're gonna talk about real estate investing in rental properties and entrepreneurship. And learn more about Dustin Heiner's story about how he quit his job at 37 years old by investing full time in real estate. And in 2015, he wrote his first book, How To Quit Your Job With Rental Properties, which quickly became a best seller and then he began helping others to do the same. Hi, Dustin, welcome to the show.

Dustin Heiner 2:08

Hi, Acquania. Thank you so much for having me and I'm super, super blessed to be here with you and I just it's great to have, well, it's really great to have real estate that allows me to be successfully unemployed, where I don't have to work for somebody else. And I can do whatever I want. I can go to the gym, hang out with a family, come on podcast and talk to great people like you. So I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Acquania Escarne 2:30

Awesome. We're glad to have you. I'm a fellow real estate investor. But I love to hear other investors stories. So before we dive into the perks of your lifestyle, entrepreneurship and investing, let's talk a little bit more about you and how you became a real estate investor.

Dustin Heiner 2:48

Yeah, totally. So when I was 37 years old, I was blessed to be able to quit my job because I had enough real estate or rental properties that made me money, each one making me $250 or more in passive income from every single door. And so because of that I was able to quit. Now let me go back to the beginning and actually walk you through like this is what catapulted me, like shoved me into becoming a real estate investor. And so all growing up, I was taught the same thing that we are all taught, we're taught to go to school, get good grades, that you take those good grades, you go to college, you get more good grades again, and you can earn thousands and thousands of dollars into debt. And they give you a piece of paper, it's called a degree. You take that degree and you go around to other businesses, and you try to get a job, they call it a career. And then you work in that career for 40 plus years and try to retire when you're 65 and manage, hopefully managed to live on what you saved up your entire life. Well, I was going that entire route, just like we're all taught. But at the same time, I was always entrepreneurial, you know, starting businesses and that type of thought. And so even when I was 13 years old, I had a newspaper route where I would ride my bikes with newspapers, news, there's not many newspapers anymore, but read read, read, read around newspapers and bags and throw them at 5am banging them on garage doors, waking people up. I had a graphic of website design company, I had a skateboard manufacturing business. I even had a pizzeria and a convenience store all built up from scratch. So I was doing that. But at the same time, I was working that nine to five. I really just like well, I'm going that same career path eventually retirement 65 so I was working a desk job and IT job at a local county government in California. And I just got to tell you the story. This is what like shoved me into becoming an investor. So I even though I had a couple businesses going they weren't making me enough money to really do anything like it was okay. But I knew I was going that career path. And then I bought one rental property. And then I realized, man, I bought the property one time and it keeps making me money over and over again. I need to be an investor. But you know how it always happens for everybody life gets in the way. And so I'm working a regular IT job for local county government, and my wife starts having where we start having kids. And so we have one, two, three and eventually we had our fourth child, and I knew I wanted to be an investor but life got in the way. And so I when I went to sorry, my wife gave birth, and then I went on paternity leave. That's where the dad stays home with a mom changes poopy diapers and bobs of the baby and all that good stuff. And I was off for about two weeks. And then I go back to work. And in that week that I go back to work on a Friday at three thirty in the afternoon, I get a call from my boss's boss's boss's Secretary like the top dog. And she says, Dustin, would you please come to the office? And I said, Sure. And then hung up the phone. And I paused for a second I thought, my goodness, why are they calling me the office like this isn't normal. And I've seen plenty of movies, getting your call at Friday at three thirty afternoon is isn't very good. And as I sit there, I remember back about couple months before I went on maternity leave. There was some rumors or some rumblings going on in the office that there could potentially be layoffs. And I shook it off. I said, There's no way I have plenty of seniority. I work at the government, nobody gets fired or later from the government. It's so I shook it off, then I get up and I walked down the hallway to my boss's office. Now, Acquania, this hallway isn't very long but every single step that I take, it feels like the hallway gets longer and longer and longer. It feels like my feet become lead bricks, because the weight of everything of potentially losing my job is just weighing on me. While I turn the corner, and I see my boss's door, his doors closed. And I see his secretary. They're super nice, sweet old lady. And she looks at me, says Dustin, would you please have a seat? And she smiled kind of grinning at me sheepishly grinning at me, as well as trying to console me with her eyes because she knows everything about what's going on. I know nothing about what's going on. So I go, and I take a seat. And I sit there. And I start to think about my life all this time doing this career path that people told me tell me to do. I thought if I lose my job right now, was that all a waste? And I got the most secure job I could ever think of. Doing IT in the government, in California, if that's taken away, was my life waste. And I thought, Oh, my goodness, if I can't make money, I can't feed my family. What does that make me as a as a father? Does that make me a failure as a father? Does it make me a failure as a husband, as a man trying to provide for his family? Well, as I'm sitting on my hands get all sweaty, my forehead gets all clammy, because I've started realized that I could potentially get laid off, while the door to my boss's office opens up and out walks a lady with a piece of paper in her hands, a co worker of mine. And she says she walked by and my boss says Dustin, would you please come to the office, and my co workers notice will be distraught. Notice we have said she's not necessarily crying. But you could tell her world has been devastated. So I go into his office, and I get laid off. And remember, Acquania, this is the government, nobody gets fired or laid off from the government. But I did. So I take that layoff notice. And I go back to my desk, and I realized two things sitting there in the desk. And this is a reason why I tell the story. So the first thing I realized is I need to get another job. I need to be able to provide for my family. So I was really really blessed praise the Lord to be able to find a another job in the same county, a different department. They weren't having the struggles with the money. So I'm blessed to move over to and check got that done. Now sitting in the chair. The second thing that I realized was that I need to make sure that this never ever happens to me again, I need to make sure that nobody has the ability to take away my ability to feed my family. So right then in there. I realized whenever anybody would ask me the question, Dustin, what do you do? And we all get this question, Dustin, what do you do? I would say always just reply, oh, I do IT work for the county, I'm basically projecting my job as my value. My value doesn't come from my job, my value comes from my god, for myself, and for my family. So right then in there, I realized I was going to tell every single person that I am an investor, remember, I needed to be an investor, I knew I should, but life got in the way. But right then in there, I realized my value is so much more than my job. So I started telling everybody that I am an investor, it might so happen that 100% of my money comes to my job. That's now my part time job. I'm a full time investor. So fast forward the story, sort of buying property after property after property, each one making me $250 or more in passive income, I literally don't work and I still make that money, eventually had thirty plus properties. And I realized, even though I'm making $75,000 a year at this job, I'm losing money. So ran up the story by saying, I went to my new boss, great boss, and I said, hey, boss, I'm laying you off. Like, here's your two weeks notice, you know, jokingly and he says, Dustin, what are you going to do? And I said, Well, I don't have to do anything. I own real estate. It works for me and I don't work and I still make money. So the last part of the story. So if you remember me walking down that short hallway, it kept getting longer and longer. That was the worst walk ever. This last walk that I took away from my job a very, very last time. It was a mile and a half walk. I worked in downtown. I didn't want to pay for parking and pretty frugal. And so I've taken this walk a thousand times, but I was I felt like I was walking on clouds because I knew that I would never have to work a job again. So everybody needs to realize that there's some reason why I tell the story. Your value is so much more than anybody could ever pay you. And this is how you'll know, your bosses pay you just enough to keep you working without quitting, but not so much money is taking money out of their pocket. If you get paid for what you're worth, they go broke. So what I did was I found a tool, a way to actually become financially independent, where I was actually making the value for myself, everything I put forth was all the value that I got, eventually, like I said, at thirty plus properties, and I was able to quit my job. And now looking back, I'll never need a job again. So I'll pause the story, because you probably got plenty of questions.

Acquania Escarne 10:38

Oh, Dustin, I love that that was so good. I tell people that all the time. Because some women especially because normally, most of my clients, and people who I work with are women, or married couples, and so many women a tie their value and what they're worth to who they are. I'm a mom, I'm a, you know, college graduate, I have a master's degree, I teach, I do this, I do that. And it's so hard to tell them like you're more than that. And I love what you said, when you said I am god, myself, but not based on my job, right? And that value that you decided was yours, and you were worth more than what they were paying you. But I also want to highlight one of the most profound things you did was you did a mind shift, you did a mindset shift, when you decided that I am wanting to declare I am an investor, even if I only have one investment property. And I really think that did a lot for your mind as well as your brain to take the action in the direction you want it to be in, right? And it's sad that of getting laid off had to be the catalyst to get you into that mindset. But look at how far you've come. Because that incident of not having security for your family pushed you to say I'm going to determine what security for my family, I'm going to be responsible for that, I'm not going to allow someone else to control my destiny and I love that. I feel like more of us need to do that but we're just scared, we're scared that if we don't have this biweekly paycheck, something's gonna happen. But as you pointed out, that department that laid you off kept going right, you were so replaceable to the point where they eliminated your position, and probably gave your work to someone else who they didn't lay off but was making less money, let's be real. And then you went to a new department where yeah, you're leveraging your skills and your IT background but you laid them off. That's so powerful. That's, that's just amazing.

Dustin Heiner 12:51

Thank you. And I quickly got to say that I like I said, I tried to get the most secure job because I'm taught this from my parents and from everybody the most secure like IT in a California local government. Like that's like the most secure job you could ever get. And now I'm realizing that's like the most risky thing I could ever do is put my life and my family's welfare in somebody else's hands. And I realized now that because now I invest in real estate, I have all my life back, I have forty plus hours of my life back, because I don't work on my real estate, I hire other people, they do all the work for me. And I have so much time that now I create more businesses, I create more value for lots of other people and those businesses make me even more money. If I was still working a job, I would be making somebody else a lot of money. Now I want to make money for myself. But all that comes back to your 100%, right? It was in my mind that shift of that mindset thinking that I must do this not like oh, I'd like to or it'd be nice. No, I must do because I never wanted that to ever happen to me again.

Acquania Escarne 14:01

Absolutely, absolutely. So I hope anyone out there who's been laid off or fired, or you know, we're in a recession. So anything can happen, don't get discouraged. It doesn't mean that you don't have value or you're not valuable. It just means it's time to make a shift. So I want to talk to you now about being in the real estate investing business and maybe if we have time, we'll talk about these other businesses you're into because I think that's phenomenal. One of my goals as an entrepreneur is to hire other people who can be empowered by the jobs that I'm creating, by the wealth that we're creating. So I love what you're doing. But I want to also paint a realistic picture for my listeners who are not as familiar with the real estate investing business. What is the hardest part of building a real estate business?

Dustin Heiner 14:54

Oh, I love the way you said it because I definitely am going to answer your question but what you said it a real estate in investing business. Now, I absolutely need to echo that. In fact, you'll hear me tell this. So I coach a lot of people how to invest in real estate. And what happened was, as I was quitting my job I had no idea was going to do this. But I have so many friends and family members and people from church all asking me, how did you how are you quitting your job? And I tell them I invest in real estate. Second question always comes, what can you show me? And so I started sharing people one on one. Anyways, fast forward now I do all the coaching. But here's what happened to me. Also, I'll give you the others quick story. So when I first got started, the very first property that I bought, I followed what the quote unquote gurus tell you. Now, this, I'm going to quickly give you the, what they said and what I did. But I want you to forget it really, really quickly because it's not right. So what they said was, and quickly say, This is what I did. 2006 When I started investing, and at 2006, I was watching probably a late night, like 1am, there's an infomercial, I came on and said, Hey, we're coming to your town, will do a free seminar teach you how to invest in real estate, I went to that it was literally a sales pitch all hype, then they said run to the back, and we'll give us thousands of dollars on your credit card, we'll teach you how to invest in real estate, I did, I ran to the back and went to their next two day seminar, which was another sales pitch for even more like a $30,000 course a 50,000. It was it was ridiculous. So I did not do that. But what I do is what they taught us, and this is what they taught us. And this don't do it because yeah, I'll tell you. So they say find a property anywhere in the country to invest. And then you run the numbers, like you find the property and you run the numbers, that basically means you make sure your expenses are lower than your income. And they say sure to make 50 or $100 a month in passive income but you'll get appreciation, which will love and I will pause this and say I don't invest for appreciation. I literally invest for cash flow and these properties, I can and will give these properties to my kids. So I don't care about appreciation. Now getting back to what they say, find a property anywhere in the country, run the numbers, make sure you make a lot of money passive income, then spend thousands of dollars to buy the property, then spend thousands of dollars to fix up the property, then you find a tenant, and then you find a property manager. Well, in my opinion, that's just about backwards. I did this and my first property. My property manager started stealing from me in six months, because I didn't know what I was doing. But what I realized was because it failed like this was a failure on my part because they started stealing from me, I did scramble, and I thought to myself, well, I could just sit back and say what was me this doesn't work. But I knew it did work. There's been thousands are private property and hundreds of thousands of people that have invested in real estate and gotten it to work. So what I did was, I said, let me approach it differently. Let me approach it as a business mindset. Remember, I've always been entrepreneurial, always. I've started many businesses. I said, Let me approach it from the business mindset because the failure was when somebody that I hired to run my business screwed up. So let me give you a quick example. Because I love that question about being a business. Let me give you a quick example, what building the business first, this is what your homies say all the time build the business first. So if you're gonna start a convenience store, you know, it can be destroyed candy bars, soda machines, fountain machines, all that sort of stuff. Well, you're not going to sign a lease, open the doors on a location and set a box of candy bars in there on the ground. No, you wouldn't do that you go out of business in like two seconds. What you would do though, is you'd build the business first you get the gondolas, those are the shelving units that all the candy bars go on to countertops, a cold storage, the fountain machines, the bank accounts, cash, registers, insurance, everything in the business, before you buy any inventory. Same thing with real estate investing, we build the entire business and every piece of property that we buy, that is not your business. Gurus will tell you that property is your business. No, no, no, no, my business owns inventory. So that property that you buy, is a piece of inventory that you put into the business. And that's how I was able to scale my business so fast, buying property after property within six years, I have thirty plus properties, like man, I gotta quit. So that's what we do is we build the entire business, we find the right area of the country to invest that has good inventory, that we make sure we have property managers that will manage the properties. Like if you're gonna start a convenience store, you're not gonna grab somebody off the street, say, hey, come in here, you got to pulse, manage my inventory, manage my money, manage my employees, manage my business, you're not going to do that you would interview, you'd hire the right people, you take a long time to do that. Same thing with real estate investing. So inventory, then we have people that manage the property that fix up the property, that how to fund the property that we can go into all the details. And the very last thing would be like Realtors like finding the inventory. So that's, that's why I absolutely love what you said we build the business first.

Acquania Escarne 19:36

I really liked that and I think it takes courage to admit that you had to have a business mindset so that you could have structure it sounds like that was your investment strategy, or at least the beginning with setting a foundation that you could scale. And I think it's harder for people to wrap their heads around having more than one or two homes because it's we are trained to buy your home, become an American who owns their own home and has two kids and a dog and a fence. And then, if you grow beyond your house, you sell that one and you get another one. So it's very rare actually, for someone to think, buy this house, live in it, buy other houses, while I'm living in this house, and consider those my new form of passive income, I feel like I agree with you, there's a lot of seminars out there that encourage you to come and they make it seem easy, but they're really selling you education. Let's be real, because I've even fallen into that trap, where I thought I was learning how to invest and someone was gonna teach me how to invest. And what they really did was just give me a lot of videos, and not a lot of instruction, right on how to actually execute. And so they're scaling, but they're scaling education. They're scaling real estate education. And so I do think you made a lot of great points. But if you are willing to share a little bit more detail, because for some people like me, for example, when I decided to scale and go out of state, I chose to partner with another person who had similar interests as me with investing in real estate. So did you also have a partner that you debated or talk through your investment strategy together? Or were you doing all of it by yourself?

Dustin Heiner 21:26

Totally had a partner, and it was my wife. And so she is absolutely the the no risk, like her dad was a teacher, her mom was a stay at home mom, and so no risk, literally no risk. So she married me, and I'll be completely honest with you, Acquania, I told her when we got married, or when we were getting married, I said, Honey, if you marry me, you're not gonna have a boring life. Like, I'm just not a boring person, I do a lot of stuff and So I live to the doctor. And so when I was getting that first part, or sorry, when I was thinking about investing, I went to that seminar, and she's all I don't go there just going to try to get money out. I'm like, I'm gonna go and I went to it. And then I spent the money. And then I went to the second one. And she said, leave your credit cards at home, like don't go with anything as that was really wise. I'm really praise the Lord for my wife. She's fantastic. But every single deal that I ran through actually, let me take, let me say that a different way. The first property that I found, it was out of state, I was live in California and started investing in Ohio. I literally flew there, which I'll say I don't fly anywhere anymore. I start new places. I never visit there. I hire experts on the ground, which we'll get to. But in that first property that I wanted to buy. I told my wife, I said, here's x, y, and z, you're like, this is literally everything about the business and she eventually agreed and said, okay, because I didn't have any money we got married, I was told not to get into debt. But I didn't save. My wife save. So we have like $10,000 or $12,000, or something like that. So I'd said Hey, honey, can I take all your money and buy that first property. So I did that. But the hardest part was convincing her because she was more X's and O's, making sure that's going to run like she's very risk averse. So I literally painted the entire picture said how we're going to run it, how we're going to make money, how we're going to make money in passive income, we're not going to care if the value goes down, we're going to work on not getting as many loans, all that sort of stuff. So that first property it took forever to finish seemed like it took a year to finally get her to buy that first one. But every single property once I figured out the system, how to build the business and then put that property into the business as inventory. I started buying property after property every single time I talked to her, she would note want to know less and less because it was working. And then just I don't know about a year or so ago, I bought three single family homes and a duplex all at one time. And I come home I said Hey, honey, I just bought three single family homes and duplexes she goes, Okay, good, and then moved on because she knows the business works so well. But here's the great thing on top of all this, I don't need anybody else outside that because I build a business. And in building that business, I hire experts that are literally there on the ground. And people that probably have heard of Zillow and Trulia, these these websites, Zillow is not an expert. It's just a database of information. Who are the experts, those are the people that literally live there on the ground anywhere in the country, like I invest in Ohio, Texas, and Arizona. And so the people that live there that are on the ground, they're the experts. They're the property managers, the realtors, the contractors, the insurance agents, they know what a good area looks like what a good property looks like, especially a property manager, they're going to tell you, Hey, that's not a good property. In fact, if you do everything that group quote unquote gurus tell you, and you go in the end, the very last thing you need to do find try to find a property manager, you start calling around and say, Hey, would you manage my property? And you and sadly has happened to many people. And a lot of my students come to me after this happened, they said, Dustin, nobody wants to manage my property. I said, Well, you no longer have an asset anymore. You have a liability, because more than likely, because the property managers say I'm not going to manage that property, I'll get shot. If I go over there. That's a bad area. So we hire the experts who are there on the ground. They're going to make sure we find the right properties. They're going to make sure that we could rent it for a certain amount, which is above our expenses, and our quickly last thing I'll quickly share is, I always suggest to all my students, anybody listen to me, we invest for passive income. And I suggest $250 or more from every single property. And this is how I was able to scale my business so well. So I asked my wife, I said, Hey, honey, I want to be able to quit my job, or I want to be financially stable. How much money do we have in expenses? Basically, how much money do we need to make in order to cover our expenses, and I remember that number as plain as day it was $4,200, you know, mortgage and, you know, expenses, all that sort of stuff. So I realized one property making me $250 A month without working, that is $3,000 a year in passive income. Well, if I just scale it from there, 10 properties at $250 a month, that's $2,500 a month in passive income $30,000 a year without working, 20 properties is $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year without doing anything. And so I just realized, I just need to scale the business. The last part of it is what's great. If you set up your business right, you get the right people in your business, it'll be an automatic business, you hire the people to do the work. And a lot of people have heard the book, The Four Hour Workweek. It's a good book and all. But I think working 44 hours a week is for suckers. I don't want to work four hours a week, I don't even want to work four hours a month, I maybe work 30 minutes a month, I grab the property management statements and make sure they look good set up aside to go back to playing with my kids. And so that's what we do is when you build the business, you're gonna have experts running the business for you.

Acquania Escarne 26:31

Okay, I like that. And I like when couples work together, because then you're going through it together and holding each other accountable. You had to I mean, that was literally your other half. So she knew. If you succeeded, you both win. If you didn't succeed, she was going to be giving you hell for it. So, I love that. So I do want to know, okay, you mentioned you know, going out of town or going to Ohio. And it's so funny. You said that because my first out of state property. I live in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. And the first property out of state we got was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And we chose that area because a colleague of mine had just purchased a really, really good house, that she was literally, she went to school in Philly, and all her friends were there and a lot of family. So she was going to Philadelphia every single weekend with her husband. And they were tired of booking hotels. So they bought a house. And I was like, that's interesting. Like most people would just do Airbnb or figure stay with family or something. But to buy a house isn't that expensive? Like that's what I that was my initial thought. And she said no, because some of these houses are row houses. Very affordable. They do need work sometimes. But if you get a mortgage, I think she had told me some number like her mortgage was like $250. And I said what? Like, that doesn't make any sense. And she said, Yeah, we we bought the house for like less than 50,000. They could use cash to do it. And then they fixed it up. So I said, well give me your realtor, right, and we picked Philadelphia because it was driving distance. And I felt like if I was gonna go out of my way to go out of state, I'd rather do it in a place that if I needed to, I could drive to, right? That was my initial thought, just like you flew to Ohio. But it actually worked out because the realtor had a lot of experience in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland area. So he knew the markets very well. And he also had connections to property managers, contractors, just a system that we could really rely on. But we still you know, I will say, our first property manager, it didn't work out. Like we realized there was questions we forgot to ask right? Or things that we assumed they would help us do because we were out of state and then they wouldn't, or I learned the hard way that there's certain things in Philly that only you as the owner can do like keep the water in your name because they won't let you transfer it or in my business name because I was able to acquire that property under my business. But it was a great learning experience because yes, I was able to get something but because my realtor was so connected not only did we get a property the first time we went up there and he showed us five that day, but we got an estate sale so the family was like eager to get rid of it. They were happy to take cash they were motivated to sell I think we closed in like 10 days and then we could get to work and we only had to do cosmetic stuff. We had an inspection and inspection was fine that the bones of the house were great, but it could use a kitchen upgrade it could use like a little bit of bathroom touch up. So that's what we did. We did floors, we did cabinets, but the appliances were even solid. So it was like a really good opportunity to get in the door, and then get some really competitive rent, because at the time, the market was just going crazy. And you could buy a home for 50 or less cash, and rented for 900 to 1,500 depending on how many bedrooms, how many baths, you know, all the good stuff. So the numbers were really good, too. And I and I learned that occasionally when you're first starting, you might have that desire to be able to see it to check on it to be there. But once we set it up, we never went back. Like literally never went back. And then I now I do all passive real estate investing. And I see stuff after I've purchased it actually. Because I look at the numbers. I have experts also who are looking at it. And we're investing as a group. And we're like, oh, it all looks good. We'll go check on it after we close. So I don't even fly to see properties beforehand.

Dustin Heiner 31:07

Yeah, totally, I have 30 plus properties. I've literally only seen one of them the very first one ever actually seen before I bought it and I'm like, I don't need to ever again. And I have like all my students, they don't fly there because we learn I teach them how to actually build the entire business. So you get trustworthy experts. Now, there's a million realtors, there's a ton of property managers. So we have to do our due diligence to find the right one to get the right ask, like you said, ask the right questions. You didn't know what the right answers should be for those questions as well. Those are some things that you're just going to learn either like if you get coaching or something. But at the same time, if you just over time, you're gonna be like, oh, shoot, I shouldn't ask that. So same thing with me. I did everything wrong. And whatever was wrong, I ripped it out of my business model. Whatever is right, I kept it in there. And now everywhere that I I invest in, like I said, three states now, and my students invest all over the country. And we find that as long as we build the business first, we're going to do so well, because the experts are helping us to make sure we're doing everything right.

Acquania Escarne 32:11

Yeah, yeah. And that's key. And it's also necessary in states like ours, where real estate is super expensive. I live in one of the most expensive counties in the US and California is not cheap, either. I know. So sometimes you're doing it out of necessity. But if you build the network, the rest of it will fall into place, and you'll be able to hire the right people. And that's exactly what we learned when we ended up having to shop around for our property manager to replace the one that we chose not to continue with. And that and that experience was great. Like who we moved to was like, a million times better. And they gave us everything we didn't even know we needed. They they filed stuff for you. They went to go get it for you. You know, they would do your renovations and oversee the general contractors, like so many things that we were told, Oh, no, we don't we don't do this until you have a tenant. And I'm like, But how are we going to get a tenant if we don't fix it up? You know, the little things like that. So I like how you said that. And I like how you're teaching people who needs to be on your team. So that's my next question. Who are the VIPs that you feel you should not invest until you have at a minimum these people on your team? Who are they?

Dustin Heiner 33:28

Yeah, let me start with the process that we go through. So absolutely. Like I will 100% that say this. So I'll teach all my students how to find a new area, that country new invest, there's lots of areas, there's great areas to invest, and they'll find an area and they'll say, hey Dustin, great news. I got, I have five realtors, finding deals and sending me deals. I said, well, well, well, well stop, stop. Do you have anybody to manage those properties if you bought them? Oh no. I'm like, Whoa, stop that. Realtors are literally last and if there's any realtors, I apologize if you're gonna get hurt feelings, but they're a dime a dozen. It's just the way it is. There's so many realtors. But there are so many properties realtors, there's one way to find properties. I have wholesalers, other investors, title companies send me deals my property manager so we can get into that too. But when you think about the VIPs, like I like to term it as, like the people that you need in your business. The first one has to be your property manager, let me quickly take a step back and get you to where you were the area of the country where you can buy that property or find that property manager. So the first thing that we do is we look for cities anywhere in the country, that we can have good inventory to continue to buy because if we're gonna build a business, we don't want to just buy one property and then like we're done because we can't find any more inventory. We need to make sure we find a good city that has really good inventory the homes that we want to buy the right price that make us money in passive income, a three bedroom two bath 1200 to 1400 square feet. Properties everybody either wants to buy or rent and once we find a good city that has lots of inventory that we can buy, we pause looking at the properties, that's when we start building the business. That's where the boots hit the ground for, metaphorically, like we're looking online, we're finding the next thing is our property managers. We're interviewing many property managers, I'll give you guys a quick tip that I give all my students. So texting is not an interview, email is not an interview, a phone call is literally an interview. And you might, you probably will never get a property manager jumping on a zoom call, they're too busy. So a phone call. And I suggest interviewing multiple property managers multiple times, because you need to make sure that you're hiring the right person, these property managers, I'm hoping and this is what I do. I don't want to talk to them every single month, I don't want to talk to him every day, like I literally love going months without talking to them, because they're just making me money. And I want them to be working for me for five, six, even ten or more years, some of my property managers have been with me at least ten years. It's phenomenal, because I trust them, they do the work. So the first thing, inventory. Second thing is private property managers. The third after that is mortgage brokers. Private money lenders, hard money lenders, you need to be able to find the money because we love using other people's money. OPM, I love that term. But we like using other people's money so that we can buy more and more properties. But here's the thing, and you'll understand this ,Acquania. So I don't pay my mortgage on any my properties, I don't pay my taxes, I don't pay my insurance, I don't pay my repairs, the property manager fees, I don't pay for any of that stuff. My tenants pay for that. Now, it so happens that the money comes into me, but then I pay out to all those bills. But I don't have to get a job to hire the property manager. In fact, a lot of people say Dustin, how do you afford a property manager, I say it's simple. I don't have to get a job got paid for the property manager, I account for that expense. Remember, it's a business, I account for that expense, before I buy the property. And if I can not buy the property and afford the expense, I don't buy the property or I offer lower. And if they don't accept the offer, then oh, well, I just move on. Because there's plenty of fish in the sea, there's plenty of properties to buy. So after the property manager, you go to the mortgage broker, private money letters, basically the way to get financing. The next that I suggest is finding people that would fix up so that would be the contractors, plumbers, roofers, electricians, things like that handy. I love handyman. So definitely find at least two or three handyman, they're fantastic. I would also suggest looking for inspectors, and insurance agents. Those are key, you want to make sure how much your insurance is going to be before you buy the property. And so I'll give you a quick example, in Ohio, my insurance, I don't know each each homes that maybe 600, $700 a year in insurance. I went down to Texas, I started investing in Houston, Texas, and I was thinking oh, it's probably going to add most let's say 1200 ones, let me double it. No, no, no, it was $2,000. That's the lowest I could get. So I was like, oh my goodness, good thing I checked before I bought a property. Because if I didn't, I'd be out of luck. Because remember, we're trying to get to under $50 or more. That's how we feed our family. That's how we save for more investing and all that good stuff. So that's those are the necessities, you have to have those. But above all, if you hear anything that me saying is build the business, and your quarterback is your property manager, the other one's going to make you help you to make more money, save your money, protect your investment, help you to score and help you to keep going, your property managers are key. And I even have a list of 22 questions that I give to all my students, I say, here are the questions you must ask. And here are the answers that you want to receive. If they answer differently, you got to start looking at maybe an another property manager. So above all, what we do is build the business and we hire the experts, the right experts that we can trust to do the business for us.

Acquania Escarne 38:43

That is really, really good. And I like that. Your property manager is your quarterback. That's the key person on your team. I love it. So we did mention earlier that now you can spend most of your time buying and running other businesses. So outside of real estate, what else do you do?

Dustin Heiner 39:03

I so real estate is one obviously I have my online business where I coach people and teach them how to invest in real estate. Usually I just give away everything. And if they want my time, I charged them for my time because my wife said because I said Hey, honey shows, you know coach for free. He goes, No, if you're gonna do that, come hang out with us, like we homeschool or my wife homeschools. And kids, I have these huge job and making money. She's got the hard job of homeschooling the kids. So don't do that. If you're gonna just do it for free. Stay here with us. Like, okay, that makes sense. So fast forward. Now, I have a I started a real estate investor conference as well. It's called The Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference. And with that, I wanted to make it a passive income business. And so my goal is to make sure that I'm showing more and more people how to invest in real estate. From there, I said, if I start a conference because all my students like we were always on Zoom calls hanging out together. We're friends online. I said we want to get together and I said, Well, let me figure it out. So I called up 25 of my other friends who have their own audiences, and I created this conference called the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, but I wanted to make it a passive income business. So in creating this, remember, because I have 40 plus hours of my life back. Now what I do is I hire people, because I have money coming in, I could start a business. And then I start hiring people to run the business for me. So this last year, so it's in Phoenix, this last year was in Phoenix and is in March, and I did not do a thing for the conference other than get on stage and speak, and walk around and talk to people, all the logistics, all the everything I had other people do all the work, the great thing is when you realize that other people want to work for you, and you can pay them well, and you can serve more people, you can create businesses that are fantastic. So I have my online business master passive income, where the coaching is, I also have the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, I also have another podcast called successful unemployed, I've also have a business where I actually have a gym and coaching and all that sort of for exercising, I just have so much more time. I build the business, but I hire the right people to run those businesses for me.

Acquania Escarne 41:03

So guys, I hope you see the theme here, start the foundation and scale from there, but you got to have the right team. So I love that that's really good. And I love how it's really related to I mean, you're basically creating a community, you've, you did it for yourself, you're teaching other people how to do it too. And then you're letting the people you teach, get together and gather and collaborate and meet, which everyone wants to do anyway. I mean, if they're having a positive experience, they always want to extend that experience to something in real life. So I love that. So second to last question is, what is the best tip that you would give to someone who's interested in investing in real estate or starting their own real estate investing business? Besides the ones you've already named of course.

Dustin Heiner 41:49

Absolutely. I was gonna say I'll try to add to it. So big ones are build the business first, we already covered that. Next one is make sure you're making a passive income business where you're having other people to work for for you. That's really what you want to do. The other thing that I was, I would definitely love, not just building business and passive income, but also making it automatic. And at the same time hiring the right people. I can't stress this enough. And a lot of people say, well, Dustin, I don't want to hire a property manager, because that's money out of my pocket. I'm like, Well, no, it's not. If you account for that expense, then it's already paid for by somebody else by your tenants. So we make it automatic, if we make sure we set and when I say automatic, it's not just hiring the right people, which is one huge step is hiring the right people. It's also building the systems, the processes, and procedures to have the right people run the business the way that you want that business to run. And so I'll give you a quick example. One process or procedure would be, hey, property manager, this is how you run my business. I don't care how you run anybody else's business, my business, all of my properties, the rent is due on the first, it's late after the third, on the fourth, you put a three day notice on the door. Once that three day notices up, you literally start the eviction, and you have a late fee. And if they want to stay in the property, they need to pay for all the back rent, the late fee, the eviction fees, their attorney fee, they need pay for everything. And then we'll stop the eviction, such as one of many processes that you build, you build the systems, procedures and processes in place so that your property manager will never call you. In fact, in 2017, after I quit my job, I went to Japan with my wife and my four kids, we drove 2000 miles around Japan for a six-week trip. It was amazing. Didn't even talk to my property managers at made money without working. 2018, I went to Europe, six weeks in Europe, 11 different countries on a six week trip, same thing, didn't do anything . In 2019 ,I went to the east coast with you know, we homeschool. So it's kind of like a field trip, going from Florida, drove all the way up to Washington, DC up into New York, and didn't even talk to my property manager. So if you build a business, create the systems and procedures for everything to run itself. You're not going to be bothered and you're gonna be able to get back to your life.

Acquania Escarne 44:02

Yeah, I love that. And six weeks and being able to be 100% present with your family is just amazing. So last question of the day. The name of the podcast is called The Purpose of Money, so, I asked all my guests this question, what is your purpose for money?

Dustin Heiner 44:20

The purpose, my purpose for money? Well, number one, money is not the end goal. And so let me start by saying I originally had a goal when I was 27 years old. I said in 10 years, I want to quit my job. I just want to financial independence. I didn't want to be under somebody else's thumb. Praise the Lord. I was blessed to be able to quit, when I was 37 years old. I was blessed to be able to quit my job. Then after that I was about a year I was just kind of floundering around didn't really do much didn't have any goals because I didn't really need any. But then I thought you know what, I need a goal. I need something to strive for that makes it gets me out of bed. And so what I did was I created a new goal, which was to make a million dollars a year in all of my businesses, that was my my number one goal, and I kid you not, Acquania, after about six months, maybe even a year of this goal, I realized this is a horrible goal. I'm not driven by money, and I had plenty money now be great to have a million dollars a year, that'd be great. But I didn't need it. And it was more of a deterrent. Like I didn't really want that goal. I switched. Now my goal and this is the purpose for me with money is to serve as many people as possible. So my new goal is to help 1 million people get financial freedom through investing in real estate, creating businesses, whatever it might be that's why I created the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference. That's why I have master passive income, where I'm coaching and teaching people. That's why I have my podcast where I literally give everything for free, my YouTube channel, Master Passive Income, literally give it all for free, because my goal is now 1 million people to become financially independent. Because here's, here's the amazing thing, Acquania. If people in life, they should strive for these four legacies to leave in their life, the first legacy that we should all strive for is a money legacy to where we have enough money to afford whatever we want to do whatever we want to buy, check, we need to do that. The second one, so the money leads into the second one. The second one is a time legacy where we have enough time to do whatever it is that we want with our time, then for money leaves at a time time then leads into relationships. We need a relationship legacy so that we our family loves us, our kids love us. They value what we were valued by the people around us, like we're giving our relationship. And so I would say relationships are strong. So money leads into time, timelines and relationships. The last one is a service legacy. The relationship leads into service legacy, and I kid you not, Acquania, the more people that I serve, the better my life gets, the better other people's lives gets. It's a win win win, just like if I buy a great house, and I fix it up and I get a tenant in there. Give me a decent rent for it. They're blessed, I'm blessed at the same time. If I coach and I just give away like on my podcast master passive income podcast, just liberated me I really do interviews. It's just me giving out how to invest that's me just serving and then I get blessed and returned safely the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, the people there are so genuine now they're like hey, Dustin, how do I invest with you? Or how do I get coaching I'm like, as long as I keep giving the my life gets better everybody else's life gets better. So the answer is the purpose of money is so that I can serve more people.

Acquania Escarne 47:25

Yes, I love that. So before we let you go, please tell my listeners where can we find you? I know you drop the name of the podcast but what's your website? What are your handles on social?

Dustin Heiner 47:38

Absolutely, actually, I have a real estate investing course I just love to give away for free, you mind if I share that with everybody?

Acquania Escarne 47:44

Of course. I'll leave it in the show notes so they can click on it directly.

Dustin Heiner 47:49

Awesome. So if you go to masterpassiveincome.com/freecourse. All one word for tax free course I'll give it to you. You can even text the word rental, r e n t a l to 33777. Rental to 33777. All literally give it to you show you how to find an area of the country anywhere in the country to invest how to build the business first, how to find the right properties and the right people, how to scale your business to quit your job and be successfully unemployed. But you can also find me on master passive income literally anywhere from my YouTube channel where it's just literally me giving out how to do this stuff. My podcast, Instagram, I love getting messages on Instagram. So I am thedustinheiner at Instagram but I'm not that arrogant. It's the only one I could find th e Dustin Heiner, so you'll find me on there. But masterpassiveincome.com is my site. I just literally tried to give as much content away as possible. I want to see a million people become financially independent in every single way possible.

Acquania Escarne 48:50

I love that Dustin, thank you so much for being on the show today for sharing your house to your knowledge expertise and your story. Guys, please take advantage of the opportunity to download his free course, check out the podcast, YouTube channel, and remember to follow him on Instagram. Until next time, keep building generational wealth.

Thank you for listening to The Purpose of Money Podcast. For more resources and information, check out my website thepurposeofmoney.com and while you're there, please sign up for our newsletter so you have the latest information on new episodes and blog posts. Until next time, keep creating freedom in your life today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai