Making $5K/Month Cash Flow from ONE Property (and Dodging a $100K Mistake)

Ashley:
Many guests have their sights set on financial independence, and today’s guest is no exception. Leading a frugal lifestyle allowed rocky to build capital to build an RV park, which nearly ended in a $100,000 mistake. Now his portfolio cashflow is $5,000 a month. Listen on how he was able to do that. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I am Ashley Kehr and I’m here with Tony J Robinson,

Tony:
And welcome to the podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And guys, we are so excited to chat with Rocky Gibson today about how he’s building his real estate portfolio in 2024. So Rocky Gibson, welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast.

Rocky:
Hey, nice to be here.

Ashley:
Well, before we get into how you’ve accomplished all of this thus far, what was it about real estate that attracted you?

Rocky:
Funny enough, I think, I mean that journey and education on that started years ago for me. So I’m one of seven siblings, a big family on my end. So my sister, she’s about 14 years older than me. She graduated as a chemical engineer at, worked as an engineer, but she wasn’t in real estate investing. She ended up, her and her husband, he’s in the Air Force, both made pretty modest money. She worked for the state, not for a chemical or oil gas company. So for all chemical engineer people out there go private pays more. But that being said, she ended up buying her first house. She wanted to move somewhere else when she got pregnant because she wanted a better area for her kids, ended up keeping that house. Then that other house had another kid upgraded houses. Again, slowly but surely after I think two or three houses, it was like, oh, hey, we’re doing really well on this financially from owning these homes.

Rocky:
Not only from an appreciation standpoint, they leveraged some the equity in their home to do some upgrades and other things in their lives, so they ended up buying more houses from there. So her doing that, obviously much older, younger age or older than me at the time, for me, she told me about BiggerPockets when I was 17, 18 years old, mean, and obviously BiggerPockets has grown tremendously since then, but I was in college just ripping through podcasts, reading through these forums. I didn’t do a single thing with any of that knowledge obviously at the time, but I’d been intaking all this information for years and I’d been really looking forward to it and doing things with it. And then ultimately after about five, four to five years, probably a little bit earlier, sooner than that really with the purchase of my first home and the house hacking, which we’ll get into is kind of where everything started, but it was somebody teaching me and then showing me where the resources were.

Ashley:
When you started to really think about starting to invest, what was the reasoning behind that?

Rocky:
I think the biggest thing was all the different areas of growth that you see and the reasons that people invest. A, even though I was a finance major and I probably should have just bought index funds and left them alone, I decided that I’m a guru. I’m a finance major, even though I work in sales and don’t do anything with spreadsheets anymore. I tanked on a few stocks. I was like, God, that hurt. I’m an idiot. I was like, I’ve been wanting to get into real estate for quite some time. I bought my first house and probably my second year out of school, I think I had just cleared like 70, 80 k on my W2 at that point. And first off, I couldn’t believe that they approved me to buy a $220,000 home at the time, but I knew that I was going to get it rented out. Funny enough that my girlfriend, now wife, we had been dating I think for a year at that point, her lease just ended. So she was actually my first tenant, my girlfriend, now wife. Unfortunately, she had to share my bedroom.

Tony:
I was going to say, is that how you vet a spouse is just get them to be your tenant first? Yeah.

Rocky:
Oh, I thought you were going to ask, is that how I’ve t all my tenants? I was like, yeah, we have to go out. That’s a really thorough way. It’s a year to two year process. But no, I think I averaged three year relationships. Shout out to all my exes out there. But no, she moved in with me. I told her from the get, I was like, look. I was like, I’ll give you a good deal. It’s cheaper than what you’re staying at. It’s closer to your work. I was like, but I’m planning to rent those other two rooms out, so I just need you to make sure that you know that that’s happening before you move in here.

Tony:
So it sounds like Rocky, that first deal was a traditional house hack, and for folks that maybe aren’t familiar with what that phrase is you’re explaining, but maybe just give us a quick 32nd explanation of what a house hack actually is.

Rocky:
Yeah, I mean, ultimately you purchase the property and then any extra rooms in the house, you rent them out. At first, it was friends. I had a couple of different friends that moved in with me. I was still young at the time. Every one of my friends was renting a bunch of guys. I knew local in Atlanta, obviously except my girlfriend. So poor her. I think we had a one female roommate one time. Other than that, a bunch of dudes, but so they paid my mortgage. At the time I purchased my house, I think it was 212004%, 30 year, no, I did a FHA, first time home buyer’s loan. So I think, and I ended up over offering, over asking price so I could ask for the maximum contributions. I didn’t have a bunch of cash even at three and a 5% down. It was like what? I dunno, seven, eight grand or a little bit more. And I was like, no. I was like, I ain’t got that right. So how do I get this thing? So I offered more. They helped me purchase it. But anyways.

Ashley:
What year was this, Rocky?

Rocky:
This was 2019, August of 2019, and I had started working in January of 2017, so two and a half years into my corporate career.

Tony:
And Rocky, I just want to clarify one thing because the strategy that you just outlined is something I think a lot of folks aren’t familiar with. So you said you offered over asking, so the sellers could help you with the purchase. Break down exactly what you meant by that.

Rocky:
When it comes to purchasing a home, there is a certain amount of money that the seller can contribute to your closing costs and your closing costs are, there’s different ways to look at it. There’s different pieces of that closing cost, whether that’s the title, the actual, the taxes and escrow and things that they might want upfront. Then there’s also the down payment itself. Now with the FHA first time home buyers loan, I was at a three and a half percent down purchase. But even at that amount, I think on $212,000, you’re looking at seven, eight grand, maybe a little bit more than that, and that’s just on the down payment, the seven or eight grand. So there’s additional costs in addition to the down payment that you have to actually cover when you’re purchasing the home. There’s loan origination fees, there’s points if you’re trying to buy down your interest rate. There’s a bunch of different factors that I can’t list off all in front of me at the same side, but there’s more to it just than just the down payment. And I didn’t have enough money, so I went above asking price and asked for the legal maximum that they could give me on helping with those closing costs so I could minimize my out of pocket purchase.

Tony:
And it’s a strategy that a lot of investors have used, especially now as rates have gotten higher, they’ll go slightly over asking, get a credit back from the seller and then use that credit to maybe buy down their interest rate or to help with down payment or closing costs or whatever it may be. So if you’re in a situation where the property that you’re looking to purchase will potentially appraise for more than the contract price, sometimes it might make more sense to increase the purchase price and then get a credit back from the seller for that delta so you can get help with some of your closing costs. So still coordinate with your real estate agent, with your lender, make sure that you’re following all local rules and regulations, but just know there are some ways that the seller can help reduce the cash out of pocket for you to purchase some of these deals. So thank you for sharing that record. Just wanted to jump in and clarify that for those before we kept going.

Rocky:
No, for sure. It’s actually my sister’s recommendation at the time, so I had no idea to do that at the time, and it saved me multiple thousands of dollars on the front end, which every dollar was crucial at that point in my life. So

Ashley:
Rookies, we want to thank you so much for being here and listening to the podcast. As you may know, we air every episode of this podcast on YouTube as well as original content. We want to hit 100,000 subscribers and we need your help. If you aren’t already, please head over to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/at realestate rookie and subscribe to our channel more from Rocky after a quick break.

Tony:
Alright, welcome back to the show where we are joined by Rocky Gibson.

Ashley:
So Rocky, during that first deal, the purchase and even the house packing piece, managing your roommates, what were some of the key lessons that you learned during this time that helped you with your real estate investing journey?

Rocky:
I think one of the biggest things at the time was that I was hunting for a house and most of the houses that you go out there, they’re not rent ready or there’s a lot of projects, a lot of rehab, a lot of work that needs to be done to them. I walked into this one and it was move in ready and I was just blown away. Now, five years later, I realized that Joe Schmoe did most of the work that had blown me away as a first time home buyer, and most of the work was crap, to be perfectly honest with you. Still really happy with the purchase and appreciation in Atlanta as the market has been unreal. So Joe Schmo did a great job in my opinion as of today, but I think those, that was one of my biggest lessons was how many things that I missed and didn’t check out and a little bit, I’m going to hold it over my realtor’s head for not pointing those things out to me here years later.

Ashley:
And I think too, the lesson that was actually learned was that you still took action and it didn’t end up being a bad deal. That yes, there was unexpected things that happened, you found out after you closed on the deal, but down the road, like you said, the appreciation, you were able to tap into the equity of that property. And so kind of a word of caution is I think it’s better that you didn’t get stuck in analysis paralysis and you did take action on that first deal. Do you have any regrets about that first deal?

Rocky:
No, absolutely not. I mean, it’s the home. We’ve poured a lot of money into it after the fact. I think it’s going to be a home for me and my wife and my son for quite some time. But it started me down the journey and seeing the path and just even the house hacking part and shout out to my wife for being the best tenant I’ve ever had. But five

Ashley:
Most G seems she must be the only one you kept. It seems like you kicked out all the other ones.

Rocky:
They’re all gone now, and actually she was about six months pregnant before the last one left and had, yeah, so I was pretty hell bent on keeping them until we had a kid and the last three months, I think every time I came to pay the mortgage, I told my wife, I was like, like this damn kid’s cost me 1700 a month and he hasn’t even here yet. I was like, so, because up until that point, literally what, he was born in January or he was born in February, last person left last November maybe. But no, I hadn’t paid a mortgage payment in five years or four years up until that point.

Tony:
And I think that’s why the House Act is so powerful, Rocky, and you did a great job of explaining those benefits, is that you get to get in for a very low down payment, right? You’re at 3.5%, maybe even less when you factored the credit you got from the seller and you get the ability to reduce your own housing expense at the same time, which for most people is probably the biggest expense they have every single month. So you’re getting this asset for significantly little cash out of pocket and you’re significantly reducing one of the biggest expenses you have as a person living in the United States. So it’s a win-win situation.

Rocky:
That’s $8,000 I ever spent.

Tony:
So let’s talk about the next deal, Rocky, because we said at the beginning that you built an RV park, which I think is an incredible journey, and there’s probably a lot of moving pieces that went into that.

Rocky:
So it was late 2020, early 2021. At that point, I had had a couple successful years working in sales, and I had put back a lot of that money. Obviously I had maxed out my IRA 401k, I’d done all that stuff, but a lot of the extra money that I had at the time, I was just putting back in my brokerage account, majority of it, I put in index funds, traditional investment vehicles, but there was obviously a couple of those where I think I bought some meme stocks, spent too much time on Reddit or something, and I burned myself on a couple of different items and I was like, all right, look, at this point, I had maybe a hundred grand in a brokerage account, and I was like, I don’t want to touch my 401k, I don’t want to touch all the tax havens, but what I do want to do is I’ve been talking about getting real estate.

Rocky:
I wanted to because there’s a lull there. While I was really focused on my corporate and my W2 job where I wasn’t really focused on anything but trying to make more money at my W2 job, and I work in sales, so there’s not really a finish line in sales unfortunately. So you just keep going, right? So at that point, I’ve got about a hundred grand. I’m like, okay, cool. I can turn this into what, two, maybe three rental houses depending on where I go. I started looking around in Atlanta. I was like, oh my God, Atlanta’s expensive. Let me find some less expensive places in Atlanta. Then I found some less expensive places in Atlanta. Then I went to go see some of those places. Then I said, there’s no way I would ever buy anything in this place. My dad calls me one day. My grandmother had passed away a couple at that point, maybe like a year before there was land, a duplex in a single family home. That was my dad’s and my aunt’s. Two different things. One, we were talking a little bit about, there is a pretty heavy lien from Medicaid. It’s Medicaid or Medicare. What’s the one that’s for older people?

Ashley:
I never remember either.

Rocky:
I never remember either. I’m pretty sure it’s Medicare. So there is a lien from Medicare due to my grandmother being in hospice for about two years. It was a little over a hundred thousand dollars. My dad was talking about how he’s got to figure out a way to solve that. My dad was also talking about, he was renting both sides of the duplex and a single family home. He had just lost a renter, and while we were talking, he, I posted on Facebook and he’s communicating with all these different types of people, and he’s like, I got a hundred people that reached out and I was a hundred people. I was like, Ashlyn has 10% of the population there. How did you, I was like, what? Anyway, so it turns out from there, so there’s a cabinet factory in the county that the land that we own, and the house is two miles down the street from, they have over 3,500 employees.

Rocky:
I think they do like 380 million a year in revenue, but people are driving from 45 minutes to an hour away. There’s no local options whatsoever. And within that demographic, I mean they’re starting at 17, 18 an hour for anyone basically off the street. It’s pretty good money for a lot of people in that area, and there’s nowhere to live. And so whenever one of my dad’s properties comes available, it’s like he gets bombarded. So from there I was like, well, what if we tried to put something out there to capture some of that demand? I feel like there’s plenty of people that need some type of affordable option. I was like, obviously I got a hundred grand, so I’m not going to start building apartment complexes. So the next thing I looked into was mobile homes, manufactured homes. I actually, I went to Auburn and I lived in one for two years, which I think everyone’s going to say that’s the most Bama thing ever, but it’s totally a thing in Auburn. There’s lots of student trailer parts and a lot of people live in them, and I really enjoyed it.

Ashley:
That actually sounds pretty fun to live in a student housing trailer park.

Rocky:
We always had parties at my house because I actually had a house technically, but I started to look into that. I mean, hell, the first thing you got to look into is how much is a fricking mobile home? I mean, not only you can buy brand new. Now I know more I’ve been researching it. I think I want to still build some, now I have the capital available to do so. But at the time it was like, okay, even if you buy a dumpy one, they’re 40 grand, 40, 50 grand. You’re still going to have to fix ’em up. You got to pay 10. It’s five to $10,000 to get a move there. I got to lay a concrete slab, I got to put the foundation. There’s city water and electric, but there’s no septic system. So I ended up, I’ve learned a lot about development somehow along the way because anyways, it was just too high of a price point and it was going to put me into one rental on something that, because a cashflow play, you’re not necessarily buying building that for an appreciation standpoint.

Rocky:
Now the infrastructure and the land itself and the fact that it’s a cash flowing business is something that can be sold and as a business to someone who might be interested, but it’s not the same as a single family home that’s just appreciate three to whatever percentage per year. So I had to make sure that whatever I was going to do up front was going to be something. So I was like, what about RVs? So my dad lives full-time in Gulf Shores, Alabama in an rv. I’ve spent time there and I’m like, it’s not bad. I was like, people could do that. I was like, we could do that really affordable. I was like, so what we’ll do is we’ll just build the RV slots. People will buy their own RVs. You can buy ’em for like 20 grand. Then they can move it in and they’ll just rent from us and we will make 500 a month and we’ll pay all their utilities and everything. Cool. I was like, this is a perfect idea. So what I ended up doing from there is I bought the property from my dad. I bought him out on the property. Also, I negotiated with Medicare for a pay down, so we owed a little over a hundred thousand. I offered ’em 50. They took it immediately, which I was like, I guess they’d never get paid.

Rocky:
I was like, holy hell, we could have gone lower. I guess I bought it for my dad, bought the land, bought the houses, but was all that was mostly debt that on that purchase. And then I still had the a hundred thousand dollars in my brokerage account that I was going to work with. I ended up spending, I think roughly $75,000 to put in the infrastructure that includes all the electrical work. They had to run power out there, they had to put a meter. I had to pay some civil engineers to do different tests and put some different survey work out there. I had to put in water meters and water lines. I had to put in septic system. That was probably one of the biggest things. And then I also had to pay a, I’m trying to think of the right word for it. I just call him the Dozier man. But anyways, he’s out there in a machine flattening the land, making it level, and he’s also making the individual lots and packing them so that they’ll have a good foundation for these campers to be parked on.

Tony:
Alright, guys, we have to take one final outbreak, but stick around to hear how Rocky turned his $100,000 mistake into four figures of monthly cashflow.

Ashley:
Let’s jump back in.

Tony:
Let me ask, I want to make sure that we’re giving the rookies the tactical steps here because you took this leap, which I think is amazing. It sounds like the right deal kind of fell into your lap and you said, Hey, let me capitalize on this opportunity. But you had never done an RV park before, right? So when you closed on the land, when you actually purchased it from your family, what was the first step that you took to even know, Hey, I got to start doing all these things? Were you working with an architect? Were you working with an RV developer?

Rocky:
No, no, no. That’s a great question. I think some of this is just a little bit of know-how I’m like, okay, I know that this has to be done. Some of these things are already kind of new, but as far as the details and getting them accomplished and figuring out who the hell is going to do the work, there’s two people. My dad shout out to him. I mean, he’s a local guy. It’s a small community, so my dad’s from there, so he knows people. They can do all this different type of work and knows some of these people that need to do the work. I got two really good friends of mine that work in one works in residential construction, the other works in commercial for commercial buildings for two of the bigger builders here in Atlanta. It was anything I didn’t know I either.

Rocky:
I looked to my own network first, who do I know that does anything or might know somebody who does something, and I just started having conversations and started asking questions, asking for their time, buying ’em a coffee, buying ’em a lunch, and a lot of times they’ll teach you, and I think that’s even more so now with other things that I’ve gotten into. It’s the same with strangers a lot of times. Funny enough, I feel like a lot of people in real estate, investors in the community are really good about sharing their knowledge, and I think that it’s for the betterment of everybody, a rising tide lose all ships type deal. But I started with my own personal network. Anything I didn’t know or I wasn’t sure about, I just started making calls, whether it was real estate agents, whether it was Google searches, whatever it might be, or if someone didn’t know something, they might know somebody who might know something, and then I’d call that someone and then they didn’t know crap either. So then I had to call somebody else that they knew, and it was just this rabbit hole of, and it takes a lot of time, which is one of the tougher parts of it. But eventually I landed on all the different information that I need, and I knew what had to be done. Then I had to find the people to do what needed to be done.

Ashley:
What was the timeline of that from buying out your dad to having it set and ready to go?

Rocky:
Probably about a six month period between the idea of coming to fruition, securing the funding, the purchase from the property from my father, and then lining up all the different contractors and the work necessary to get done about a six month period before, and I put up a nice fence. I did some other things to the park and put a lot of landscaping and spend a lot of plants. But as far as just getting to, here’s a big old flat piece of land that’s graded, and now you can now park RVs and there’s water power hookups and the whole nine, that was about six months. So there’s a lot of work that was done after the fact. But yeah, about six months.

Ashley:
And then what was the outcome of this property?

Rocky:
Well, yeah. So it was like, okay, look, we’re just going to go with physical ads. We know the target base that we’re going after is a lot of these people that work at this factory and they need places to live. I was like, so I had physical signs. I went out there and we built this fricking out of two by fours and this big old piece of plastic I got from some graphic designer, my dad knew close by, and I went and cemented this massive sign into the ground. So that was the peak of our advertising right there, sign in the ground. Do not hire me to do a marketing campaign anytime soon.

Tony:
I think it’s super interesting, Rocky, and kudos to you for knowing your demographic because you said, Hey, we know that the majority of the people that are going to end up staying in this place are physically congregating in this one location. So let’s go to where the people are and let’s not overcomplicate it. How much do you think you spent on the big cemented sign and whatever little flyers you pass out at?

Rocky:
Probably like six, 700 bucks and probably a bottle of Advil from my back. That sign was really freaking heavy.

Tony:
So did it work? Were you actually able to fill those spots with that marketing?

Rocky:
We generated a little bit of interest, and so we had people calling us. They were calling myself. I had my number on the sign. Also, my dad had people reach out to him, but everyone’s like, Hey, do you got anything? So how much is it? What do you got to rent? And my dad’s like me and I’m like, yeah, just go buy your own thing and pull it up 500 a month, month to month. You can do year long leases and we’ll give you a little bit of discount if you commit, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so nobody wanted to buy it their own RVs, and nobody just sits around with RVs and wants to live in them full time, apparently. Didn’t really think that one through, but I was like, well, I’ve got an RV park here that’s sitting empty and I need this to work. So I was like, what if we just buy the unit? What if we buy the unit? What if we put it in there and then we list it? I was like, what if we do that? So

Ashley:
By unit, are you talking a trailer, a mobile home? What kind of

Rocky:
It’s fifth wheel. So when we say RVs, I think a lot of people think of motor homes. They have an engine in them and they drive pretty much all the units that we have are fifth wheels, which is a large attachment that they can actually pull the unit behind them. There’s also bumper pools that can actually be pulled off a hitch off the back of your truck. They tend to be a little bit smaller,

Ashley:
I’m assuming more cost effective than buying a whole motor, buying an engine with your camper.

Rocky:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, because buying a massive engine and those are, yeah, no, no. So it is just the actual camper, the piece that you live in that we were purchasing now, to be fair here, and a different barrier of entry for other people. I am from Alabama and we do have trucks and we got a big one, an F five 50. So we were able to pull and go procure and acquire these ourselves. I say ourselves, I worked at W2 jobs. It was hard for me a lot of times when my dad’s retired, so I pulled him out of retirement to go haul fifth wheel campers across the southeast for me, and it’s something that he’ll probably never do again, but we made it. So that being said, we bought the first one, it was $42,000. I was like, cool, we got a sick deal. It looks great. I was like, the pictures, it was super nice. It was like a 2012, not a lot of use, not a lot of wear and tear, and we put it in the park. We hard plumbed the lines in the electrical and we got everything kind of cleaned up, and then we posted it on Facebook. I mean, just like where my dad did with the houses, and then I rented it out three days later for $1,100 a month, and I was like, that worked. I was like, so we should do that again.

Rocky:
And in this time I did have some people traveling that did come stay in the park. I had a few people that came in and out that I was charging weeks, week or month to month, and so there was a little bit of income coming off of that, but ultimately I wasn’t trying to run a vacation center. I wanted long-term renters. That’s what I was looking for. So after the 42,000, we went and found another one. This one we ended up purchasing for $20,500, rented it out within a week at about a grand a month.

Tony:
So Rocky, let me ask, right? I think the question that’s going to be in all the listeners’ minds are how are you financing all of these purchases because you had 60 K, just between those two, are you getting financing from the dealers that you’re buying from? Are you paying cash? What are you using? Actually finance, the cost of the fifth wheels.

Rocky:
Yep. So overall, we talked about, I pulled the money out of my brokerage account. I think an exact number on that is probably like 120,000, something along those lines. I’d spent about 80 to 90 of it at that point. I pulled a line of credit out on my house, and so my house at the time, I think I probably, it was worth, I think like 360 or something. When I got the appraisal, I had only owed like 180, 170 on it at that point. So I was able to access a good bit from it. And with the property itself that I purchased from my father, there was enough equity in that. I also opened a line of credit on it as well. So I leveraged myself in multiple areas now after the first purchase, which was exploratory, I was like, okay, here we go. I think this works. Then I opened as many lines of credit as I could and took out on every piece of equity that I own.

Ashley:
Did you ever go to a dealer and actually get a loan on one because maybe this is just for motor homes, but isn’t it crazy you can get 30 year fixed rate financing on some of them

Rocky:
There a, there is some pretty crazy financing terms because of the fact that after we purchased the first one, then we purchased the second one. It’s just like buying a car that if you go to a dealership, you’re going to get that. You could buy that same car if a private priority was selling it for 20 to 25% less. So in our minds, as long as we had the cash, we’re able to pay cash and we were willing to put in the legwork and identify and procure these units at good prices, we were going to save more money that way, and that’s the route that we went. The dealerships, they’re going to upcharge you pretty hard, and so for us, if wanting to fill out the park, that’s what we ended up doing. So I call every one of these from private parties. The only one, I mean we had a couple bad ones. I mean, drove all the way to Mississippi one time. The thing was an absolute dump, and we were both really disappointed. My dad says he’ll never drive through Mississippi again in his life. So we bought the second one that worked, and then just from there the last, I expanded the park from eight slots to 11, and I bought the last three units in January of this year. So in total, I own all 11 units in the park.

Tony:
What would you say, now that you’ve been stabilized for a bit here, what’s the overall revenue on all 11 of those?

Rocky:
So right now they’re all on long-term leases, and it currently are all leased out for $10,375 a month. And as far as the amount on the RVs themselves, I have it calculated. I’ve spent 170, 175,000 on the 11 units total. Then you add in the initial infrastructure that I spent on the property, but 250,000 or so, probably there’s a lot of operating costs in between here and there, but I think I’m all in around 300 to three 50 with most of that being debt, probably about a hundred thousand of it being cash out of my own pocket.

Tony:
And then what do you think you’re netting on that 10 and a half or whatever that number was?

Rocky:
So it’s right about on a good month, it’s about 5,045 to five. But I think one of the biggest things, and some of the drawbacks of this is the fact I don’t have it is not necessarily an appreciating asset. It’s a depreciating one, which is why we had such a big emphasis on when we are finding the units that you’re already finding ones that are in good shape and they’re only losing so much per year. At that point, if I drive one off the lot, same thing as buying a brand new car, you’re instantly getting hit pretty hard on your asset. So I do depreciate them on the taxes, which helps. The other thing being that maintenance is a pretty big cost that comes into play. Most of the units we’ve had great luck with, but there are times that I had to redo the roof on one.

Rocky:
What I’m also looking into, I have covers over three out of the 11 slots. I just haven’t had enough money yet to put covers on all of them. One of the biggest maintenance concerns with an RV in general is the roofs. It’s not a question of if they will leak, it’s a question of when. So if you take that part, you remove that from the equation, then you’re fine. But ultimately, if I can keep them standing upright with the margins that we have in four to five years, they’re completely paid off and then some, and you could probably just ball it up, throw it away by a new one and do it again.

Ashley:
So Rocky, is there kind of a financial independence number you’re trying to reach with your real estate investing? You kind of mentioned you’re looking into Detroit, Michigan. What are the next steps for you?

Rocky:
I’m not really sure. I think that’s one thing that’s a bit of a weakness for me is that I work pretty hard at my WC job. I just had my first kid, he’s eight months old now, and I think that’s really changed the game for me as far as evaluating how far I want to go with this and what I want to build. This has been a great stepping stone, a very unique one as far as expanding it. I’ve looked into that, but I also think that now that I have enough capital that I want to work with a little bit higher level product, and that’s why I’m searching into manufactured homes. So I’ve actually taken all that background that I had in development and now working on how do I clear this land, how I’ve been talking to manufactured homes dealers across the country, getting quotes on different things.

Rocky:
There’s still demand in the market that I think needs to be met. So I’m looking into that. I’ve actually started doing a couple single family home flips in Detroit, funny enough. So I just got my first one done. It’s for sale. Anyone buying turnkey, please call me. And I’m working on my second one there. Now. I think one thing I am missing and that everybody should have though, is a goal, right? Because what am I trying to hit? What am I trying to accomplish? And when you set your goals high and then you work on all the sub goals underneath them to accomplish those things, then you have something that you’re really driving towards. I think I’ve been in such a, I don’t know, just day to day, there’s just so much going on now with my kid being sick, my job, I’m working like three jobs, which may not be what everyone wants to hear on the beginning part because achieving true independence, I don’t think that it’s one of those things where you just don’t work and just money just flows to you. I think it’s really that independence. What comes down to is being able to make decisions and choices for yourself and use your time as you see fit when you need to, but it still being an entrepreneur and working for yourself is you’re going to work harder, but it’s going to be for something that’s for you and for your family that you can grow.

Tony:
Love, love, love that perspective. Rocky, you touched on it a little bit. It sounds like you’re doing some flips out in Detroit right now, but I guess what is the overall portfolio look like today?

Rocky:
So as of today, so I guess 11 doors technically over at the RV park, there’s the duplex in the single family home. I did a burr on a house that was for sale down the street from where I grew up. Obviously, I just ran into it and I was like, I think that’ll work. Yeah, let’s do it. That was its own mess in itself, and then I wanted to, so I got that one. So there are what, 1, 2, 3, 4 plus 11, 15. Then I have the two houses in Detroit, so I’m at 17 now and starting from about, what? Three, four years ago? Three, four years ago.

Ashley:
Yeah. Congratulations.

Rocky:
Thank you.

Ashley:
Well, Rocky, thank you so much for joining us today. We are going to put Rocky’s information into the show notes, or if you’re watching on YouTube, you can check it out in the description. You can reach out to Rocky to learn more about his real estate investing journey or to ask him for help or advice on your own journey. If you haven’t already, make sure you are subscribed to the Real Estate Rookie YouTube series. We are doing a new series called Ricky Resource, where we give you a downloadable checklist template, SOP, anything you need for your business. So make sure you check it out. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. Thank you for joining Real Estate Rookie Podcast.