Tag Archive

Tag Archives for " Rental Business "

Helping Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis By Investing In Mobile Home Parks With Charlotte Dunford – Real Estate Women

REW Charlotte Dunford | Mobile Home Parks

 

Real estate investors have two options: wait and do nothing or be creative and find opportunities. One of the hottest of these opportunities right now is investing in mobile home parks. In this episode, Charlotte Dunford, the managing partner of John Creek Capital and Investment Managing Company, sees a great opportunity in mobile home parks, which is a long-ignored niche that people were not looking at. She shares why she is attracted to mobile home parks, given their nature; it fights off inflation and is also recession resistant. And because of this nature, the mobile home park industry and the market is not as correlated to the overall market health. Tune in and learn how Charlotte tackles the affordable housing crisis by investing in mobile home parks.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Helping Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis By Investing In Mobile Home Parks With Charlotte Dunford – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Charlotte Dunford. Charlotte is the managing partner of Johns Creek Capital, an investment managing company that focuses on mobile home park investments with a total investor subscription amount of over $4.2 million. Numbers-wise, they have twenty park investments, and Charlotte, herself, has also created over $500,000 of assets value in the past. She comes from humble beginnings and is a first-generation American citizen and college graduate after leaving China with just her belongings at age sixteen. Welcome to the show, Charlotte. How are you?

I am doing well. Thanks so much for having me.

I am so excited about this conversation. We have not had anybody come on the show and talk about mobile home parks. I am super excited about that. Before we dive into that, could you tell us your immigration story and all of that stuff?

I came from China. I pretty much jumped on the plane and left for the United States when I was sixteen years old to go to a high school here in America. It was Pennsylvania. I did not speak any English. I did not have money, not even a cell phone, or anything. I remember being picked up from the Philadelphia airport and being dropped off. He drove through the woods like a forest wooded area and to my host family’s house. It is a host family I never met before. To me, it was all new. I had to try to integrate and learn the language, learn the culture, and try to climb up the American society through different steps. First, I studied hard to get into a top college here in the south, an engineering college at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Shortly after graduation, I was able to land a job here in Alpharetta as a business analyst and also doing real estate on the side. I found that using my salary to qualify for larger deals became more difficult as my salary was not going up at the rate of me wanting to acquire. Therefore, I quit my job. It was risky for me and it was a calculated risk because, at the time, I have only been working for one and a half years. My husband did not have a job because he was still at school. He just graduated, so he did not have a job. I quit my job. My little bit of savings and other investments we had were not enough to launch a company, let alone make it succeed.

However, I was thorough in my education and also learned a ton before I quit my job to educate myself on how real estate works and had to start learning from scratch. Fortunately, I was able to do deals when I was still holding my job. I had some experience. After I quit my job, I was quick to start the Johns Creek Capital and grow the company with my partner from 2 parks in 2019 to 27 parks.

Why did you leave China?

There are a lot of Chinese immigrants everywhere and they leave for different or similar reasons. I wanted to pursue better opportunities because in a communist regime, such as China that I grew up under, owning real estate or having any business, you have to have relationships with the government or your family needs to be very wealthy to be able to make the cut. For me, nobody in China owns their own real estate. They lease it from the government for 70 years. The lack of capitalism or entrepreneurial opportunities and a better environment for people like me to grow in was what prompted me to travel to the United States to pursue a new life.

You made that decision at the age of 15 or 16. That is incredible. I want to dive into this a little bit deeper because I want to understand the mindset. I am a first-generation American. My parents are first-generation. It depends on how you define it, but my parents came here as immigrants. There is an immigrant mentality that happens that us Americans, even me as a first generation, having seen my parents, I do not have that drive. They come here for better opportunities because they see something that is not working in their home country. They do not come here, against popular belief, to mooch off the government to try to take our jobs or to do any of this stuff.

They come here because there is something that is not working at home and they want out so bad. They are willing to leave their families, everything they know, and their culture, even if they do not speak the language, to come to create something better for their life to have more choices. We all know that I am all about choice. In most parts of the world, you do not have the level of choice that you have here in the United States. Most immigrants come here and they work their butts off to create something better because it was so hard to get here. At the age of 15 or 16, how do you make that decision?

I never saw the opportunities in China for me, like a lot of people or kids who come to the United States, they come with their parents or a relative. I came by myself. My parents never came with me. They did not even attend my high school graduation. It is that they are very far away. They do not speak English. They are not familiar with anything here. I came by myself. I made the decision because from a young age, I was inspired to achieve more and I did not see the opportunities for me in China. Even in the school system, I knew that I did not belong there.

This independent move on your own, talk to me about how that shifted your mindset. How did it change your outlook on success?

I had nobody. I had to start from scratch. I had to learn English. I had to get along with the host family and get along with the locals and make myself useful. From a young age, for a girl who had to adjust to that, a young girl who was just trying to make it. I was constantly in survival mode. When you are in survival mode, being embarrassed is the least of your worries. That gives me the assertiveness that is required to do what I do. Also, in that survival mode, I knew that was a decision that I cannot go back on. I have to succeed.

Having this belief of having to succeed no matter what, really propels you towards your goals. I think that changed me forever. I was already a very motivated and driven person, but that made me even more ambitious and driven because the more efforts or sacrifice I put into something, the more outcome I would like to see. There is no stopping me now or ever since I got here.

REW Charlotte Dunford | Mobile Home Parks

Mobile Home Parks: Not many people are hunting the ocean in mobile home parks.

 

I love what you just said about being in survival mode. Being embarrassed is the least of your problems or your concerns. It is so interesting how many of us will make choices because we do not want to look stupid. We do not want to do the wrong thing because we have got choices. We have got all of our security, our homes, our parents, and our money. We have got the luxury of being embarrassed. When you are just surviving and you are in a completely different place with very little support, you had your host family. That is fantastic.

My parents did not even have that. You have yourself. You do not have the luxury of being embarrassed, of not being bold, of not pushing yourself to the absolute limits just to survive. It is a beautiful story. Talk to me about how you got into real estate. It sounded like you knew about real estate even in China. Could you tell me a little bit about your real estate story?

Chinese always love real estate, especially when I was growing up. Buying a house and holding that house is always a good investment in Chinese society. However, under the regime, you are not allowed to own your own real estate. You only lease it from the government for 70 years and you have to renew the lease. You never own anything. You have a lot less rights. Owning real estate is extremely hard in China. It is much harder than it would be in the United States. I came here thinking that this is an opportunity that I would never dream of having where I was born into.

I made a promise to myself that I have to start buying real estate as soon as I had the opportunity to, which is right after I landed a job after college to use my salary to qualify for my first single-family home deal. After that, I was able to qualify for another deal. It was a duplex. That is what kicked it off. I quit my job and started mobile home parks because it was a great niche. It was a long ignored niche that people were not looking at. For me, that was a great opportunity.

How are you turned on to the mobile home niche?

I wanted to scale the business. I quit my job and I wanted to go into multifamily originally because the logical thing to do at first is single-family, duplex, 3, 4, 5, and then going to multifamily. The thing is in the multifamily industry, the big boys have been in this game for decades. As a newbie, once you get into real estate and multifamily, that was almost impossible. The brokers will not even talk to you unless you have a pretty big portfolio. That was the red ocean there. I am a big believer in blue ocean strategies, which is a somewhere where not a lot of people are hunting the same ocean. The mobile home park was one of those. I was able to hunt in this blue ocean and get in at a very early part of the cycle to make profits.

When did you get in?

I got in, in late-2019. I quit my job in 2019. I bought my first mobile home park along with my partners. My first private equity deal was n August of 2019 and then the second park in November of 2019. The third park was in December of 2019. 2020 was a big year for us. We acquired many more parks in 2021 as well. We have been closing deals and selling deals and doing the real estate game.

You consider buying mobile home parks more like buying land. Is that true?

Yes. Mobile home parks are a parking lot business. It is a land business. It is not as much of a rental business as multifamily would be.

Talk to me a little bit about the benefits of being in a land of business like that. It is just buying empty land. That is a different land of business. This is a very specific case. Talk to me a little bit about how you view buying this land.

A mobile home park is not an empty land. It is more of a parking lot. It already has utilities set up with homes on it. People are paying a lot fee, parks on your lot. That is where the most valuable things come from. It is the occupied lot with a tenant-owned home on it, paying lot rents versus renting out the mobile home or renting out a home. You have to be in charge of all the utilities, repairs, and maintenance within the home versus a mobile home park business where you do not have the home. You do not want to own the home. You are just in charge of the land, the utilities that are in the park, common area maintenance, general, and then real estate taxes, insurance, and the general parking stuff, not the rental stuff.

The reason why it is attractive, not only because it has a lower expense ratio, it is because the lot rents are incredibly low to start with. It has got a lot more meat on the bone than most other asset classes. A lot of the mobile home park owners are mom-and-pop owners and they do not tend to increase the rent a lot. There is a huge gap usually between the lot rent and the apartment rent, which is another housing product in town, and the market rent. You have a lot more room to make them money. The meat on the bone is the difference between the lot rent into the market with the market handle. There is a lot of room to value add the mobile home park. That is why it is a profitable business.

The mobile home park is an affordable housing business. You are providing affordable housing options for your tenants and giving them that privacy, giving them that home ownership, and boosting the pride of home ownership in the community is what you want. I think it is because it is an affordable housing business and the demand for affordable housing, especially in a recession that we seem to find ourselves in this economy. We become more of a recession-resistant asset. That is why it is attractive. It fights off inflation and recession.

Mobile home parks were a great niche; it was a long-ignored niche that people were not looking at. Click To Tweet

It is not recession-proof, but it is recession-resistant, given the nature of mobile home parks because lot rents are incredibly low to start with. People tend to move to less expensive housing options. Also, our tenant base is not as affected by the recession as many other people would be. For example, a lot of them live on social security income. That is a very stable income source. That is why the mobile home park industry and this market are not as correlated to the overall market health as some other asset classes may be.

You said that there were a lot of opportunities for value add. Talk to me a little bit more about that. When I think about value adds, I buy a place as crappy and I make it beautiful. With a lot that there is already a mobile home on top of or renting, how do you do a value add? What is the process of raising those lot rents? Talk to me a little bit more about how that whole thing works.

The value add of a mobile home park is a neighborhood that you are owning. It is the land that you are owning. Think of yourself as an HOA. You are beautifying the park. You are beautifying the environment around the homes. You are fixing roads. You are fixing potholes. You own the road. You are upgrading utilities. You are adding fences to the neighborhood, making it more pretty, and giving it cosmetic upgrades. You can add a new sign to the community.

You can do all kinds of things to make it cosmetically more attractive. Also, you are responsible for more effective management. You want to build this pride of ownership into your tenants so that they take care of the properties and the park. You are also in charge of common area landscaping, trees, and manicure. All those things are up a value add. Those value add benefits you give to your tenants.

That is when you raise the lot rent. You usually do not want to raise it for more than $50 per year because you do not want to give them too much of a raise that they cannot afford it. $50 per year should not be a problem. As far as raising lot rents, you have to stick to the state regulations. Every state has its own regulations as far as how much notice you need to give your tenants before you can raise the rent.

Some states are 30, 60, and 90 days, but most of them are within 30 to 60 days. You want to give them the notice and you want to work with your tenants and you want to be advocates for your tenants. They are a lot more value out in there. Sometimes the park has a vacant lot and it has already got utilities set up. That is a very expensive process. You can get someone else to move their home into your lot. You can give them some incentives in several months of free rent. That is well worth it to have someone bring a home into your park. Also, you can build back utilities. People tend to use less water when they have to pay for utilities. You can submeter. Those are some of the major ways to value add in a mobile home park.

You mentioned a vacancy. Talk to me a little bit about vacancies and rents. If you went into multifamily, you would be like, “We expect 8% vacancies per year, which means that this many units, we are planning on having this many empty.” Talk to me a little bit about how vacancies work in a mobile home park.

For mobile home parks, the turnover and vacancy are two separate things. The turnover tends to be slightly lower in all tenant-owned parks because they own the home. It is like leaving your home behind. If you own the home, you have to pride ownership of this home. You are a lot less likely to walk away. It does happen, but it is a lot less likely than packing away your stuff and leaving the apartment building. You do not own the apartment building or the condo, but in this case, you own your home. You maybe have a mortgage on the home. The turnover is lower.

Vacancy-wise depends on what you buy it as. If you buy at 80% occupied, it tends to stay that way for an extended period of time. The turnover is more regular in a park-owned home than in a tenant-owned home because the tenants own the home. They would want to take their home with them, but since mobile homes are extremely expensive and hard to move, it is almost impossible to move the home.

How would you feel if you moved in with a 20% vacancy? How do you fill those vacant spots?

You can choose to fill it, which is inexpensive, but very much value add approach. There are several ways to go about it. Number one is to advertise the lot for people to move their own home into the lot so they can bear the costs of moving and home purchase. You have to take care of hooking up the utilities and making sure that utilities are working. That is number one. It is probably the best way, but you do not get those opportunities a lot because it is expensive to move home.

Number two is when you buy a brand new home or a used home and move it to your lot yourself, and then sell this home on a rent credit program, similar to a rental home arrangement. You give it to the tenant based on installments or you sell it to them straight up. Those are the two primary ways to fill lots. The second option is a lot more expensive than the first one, but that is more achievable. You will have to do everything yourself.

Where do you buy them?

You can buy them from mobile home dealers. You can buy them from other mobile home park owners. You can buy from other people who want to sell their mobile homes. The primary source will be a mobile home dealer.

REW Charlotte Dunford | Mobile Home Parks

Mobile Home Parks: Many mobile home park owners don’t tend to increase rent much. So there is a vast gap between the lot rent and the apartment rent, another housing product in town, and the market rent.

 

Where are most of the parks that you own?

Our parks are across ten different states. They are primarily focused in the Midwest and the Southeast. We have a couple up in the Northeast and a couple out West, but most of them are in the Midwest and Southeast.

Why did you choose those markets?

They provide the biggest spread between the cap rate and the interest rate. We want to spread our parks for diversification purposes to diversify our portfolio from a geographic standpoint. Those markets are chosen based on the legislature as well. A lot of times, we do not own a lot of parts in the Northeast, in states like New York or New Jersey, or out West states like California or Oregon or some of the very coastal states. We are in Washington because they are tenant friendly to the point where it makes it extremely difficult to operate in a mobile home park, given the special challenges in this industry. That is why we focus on mostly landlord-friendly places, such as many states in the Midwest and the Southeast.

Could you tell me a little bit more about finding locations and what that process looks like? How do you find the different parks? I understand you want some diversification, which is why you start to go looking. There are some legal things. There are some things about the state laws that impose obligations on some people or not. How do you find the parks, the locations, or the communities? Could you give us some insights on that?

Throughout the time that we have been in the industry, we have built relationships with brokers, sellers, and other professionals in the mobile home park industry that we have enough deal flow going to our desk directly. Once we get those deals, we have a proprietary algorithm utilizing fifteen different parameters to analyze the park and give it a score. The score is going to help us determine how successful this park is going to be. The parameters and the scores are solely based on our own experience and our own data analysis. It is like machine learning, feeding the machine the data that it needs to know the machine starts to learn what is better and was not. It is an algorithm developed by ourselves. It is a simple algorithm, but all the parameters are based on our experience to make a decision.

There are millions of brokers around the country. You are not going to be able to build relationships with all of them. How did you choose which communities to build those relationships in so that those deals would start to come to you?

The brokers we have relationships with usually start with a deal. Mobile home park brokers are not that many. There are a lot of real estate single-family brokers and even multifamily brokers, but brokers who focus or have expertise in mobile home parks are not that many. We usually start the relationship with the deal and see how the broker performs throughout the deal. If we make the deal successful, then usually we would like to continue working with them. The deal is the conversation starter and the relationship starter.

How can people get started investing in mobile home parks?

If you want to start investing passively, you are welcome to visit our website at JohnsCreekCapital.com and talk to me. That way we can get connected. You can invest as an LP, Limited Partner, passively. If you want to start your own mobile home park investing journey, invest actively and turn this into a career, find your niche, and get yourself educated through resources within the mobile home park community. It is a tough asset to manage. You want to understand as much as you can about the asset.

Could you talk a little bit about the challenges of managing a mobile home park? I have friends that have done it and they are like, “It is hard.”

The demographic the mobile home parks have. It is difficult to find good tenants. They are out there. A lot of our parks have wonderful tenants, but there are parks where a lot of tenants are not the most responsible people ever and they would turn your real estate into a mess. That not only does exist in mobile home parks, but I am sure that tenant problems are everywhere. That is in any real estate asset class, multifamily, single-family, or commercial. You have bad tenants and you have good tenants. You want to make sure that you understand the local landlord-tenant laws. Think of the tenants at your mobile home park as a stakeholder because they own their homes there. You want to make sure that there are no bad actors in your company as a stakeholder.

If you have a lot of bad stakeholders, then your company is in danger. That is one challenge. Also, other challenges have to do with the government’s regulations. A lot of times, their job is to find problems in your parks and their job is to find violations that cost thousands of dollars to manage and fix. That is another issue. The biggest money loser in the mobile home park industry is utilities. If you have a utility leak, water leak, or sewer leak, then you not only are subject to the thousand dollars plumbing bills. You are also subject to health department regulations and they could particularly shut your park down. That is a nerve-wracking experience.

The third challenge, last but not the least, is throughout COVID because of the eviction moratorium. Tenants take that as a weapon against the landlords, especially mobile home parks because they take it as they do not have to pay rent. If they own a home that is worth $10,000 and eviction moratorium in some states lasted more than two years. If you have that long of eviction moratorium, they cannot be evicted for non-payment. They can owe you up to $10,000 to $20,000. If they owe you more than what their trailer is worth, they are going to walk away. They are going to walk away, leaving you a problem property, an empty trailer, and trash with things. You are left with an empty trailer that you do not have a title to. You cannot rent out again.

A mobile home park is a parking lot. It is a land business. It's not as much of a rental business as a multifamily would be. Click To Tweet

You have to go through the entire legal process to regain the title, which is another headache and because of the abandoned home, the city is going to cite you for violations of an inhumane environment. You are stuck in the pickle. We have parks where cities go after us for homes that we do not own. During the eviction moratorium, we have no right to evict them, but the city wanted to shut us down for not removing them. We will be breaking the law if we were to remove them. Those are the situations you have to face. You have to be very diplomatic and creative in your solutions to dealing with these people.

Do you have a whole team of people that do those things?

My partner is generally more in charge of the operational side of things. We do have boots on the ground and usually a watch person at each park. For each park, because they are far away from each other, we have a local team. He has good business and real estate experience and management experience. We usually assemble a local team that consists of contractors, government officials, and local park tenants to take care of all the repairs and maintenance issues.

Did you find that during the eviction moratorium, you did have a lot of people not paying rent? What were those numbers like? What percentage stopped paying?

5% to 10%.

That is not as bad as I thought.

It is not as bad as multifamily or commercial. During the COVID pandemic, the hospitality industry went down 70% to 80%. Multifamily went down 15% to 20% and mobile home park revenue went down only by 5%. It is not as impacted, but still, it can be a problem. It becomes more difficult. This is a nationwide problem, not just mobile home parks. All real estate professionals face this issue. It is the lack of labor. Contractors are impossible to find.

Could you talk to me a little bit about what it is like to work with you and your team? If people want to invest in mobile home parks, they want to diversify their asset base, but they do not want to do it themselves. Tell us a little bit about what it is like to work with you and what kinds of returns people can expect.

Working with us, the first step is to go to our website at JohnsCreekCapital.com and have a short conversation with us. We always have an initial phone call with our investors and get to understand their goals, their needs, and their questions. After the initial phone call, we usually follow up with a deal that we have. We will start the relationship from there. Usually, if the investor is interested in a particular deal, the time between they make the commitment, either verbal or heart commitment, to the time of closing is usually 30 to 45 days. You will have access to our online portal where you can have your own investment account, where you have all of your investments listed there.

As far as returns, we offer an 8% preferred return followed by a waterfall structure of 70/30 of 8% preferred return. It jumps by four points each time. It goes up to 12% then the split becomes 60/40. 60 being the investor, 40 being us, and then it jumps by another 4 points at 16%. That is the highest return waterfall in a given year. That becomes 50/50 and stops there.

The preferred rate of return, which is 8%, is accumulative cash on cash rate return, which means that if in a particular given year, the 8% preferred return is not achieved. That means that deficiency whatever the difference is will be carried over to the next year so that the investors will be made whole. However, the 12% and 60% are extra. They are not the preferred rate of return. We will talk more about that on our phone call and all the offering packages we sent you.

What is the minimum investment with you guys?

It is $50,000.

Could you explain the waterfall? People say this on the show so often. I know what it means, but I am sure people are like, “When will someone tell me what that means?”

REW Charlotte Dunford | Mobile Home Parks

Mobile Home Parks: Given the nature of mobile home parks, it fights off all-time inflation high. Still, it’s recession-resistant because many runs are low to start with, and people tend to move to less expensive potting options.

 

A waterfall is a way to align the interests of the sponsors, which are us and the investors together. It motivates the sponsors to work harder at the deal so that we can achieve a higher return for an investor to trigger a split of profits. The higher return we have, the more split we are going to get. That aligns our interests together. You do not want to work with operators or sponsors who do not have the same interests as you do. You want them to work harder for their dollars. That is the structure that we set up. Think of all the cash as a waterfall. Once you hit a hurdle, every return is a hurdle. Once you hit a 12% hurdle, the waterfall starts splitting. That is why it is a waterfall.

The 8% preferred rate of return means that we are not going to get paid unless you get your 8% and anything after that will be split. Once we get our 8% and then it splits and then 12% it splits again. The higher, the return the more split the sponsors are getting. That is, in a nutshell, what waterfall. It is a return structure to align interests together and make us work harder. Overall, all of our offerings offer an approximately 15% internal rate of return over 2 to 3 years, sometimes up to 5 years of holding time. The annualized return is anywhere from 19% to 20% and above, depending on the holding time.

With a waterfall, you have a preferred rate of return, which is what you are guaranteed each year. If there is additional profit above and beyond that, then they get paid different amounts based on what that is. You said that the annual rate of return is between 19% and 20%. Is that because you sell the mobile home park? Talk to me a little bit about that.

Cash on cash annually without a sale. Mobile home park investment has a cycle. It starts low at the beginning because there are things that we need you to fix and their value add opportunities we need to conduct, which costs money. The expenses go up, which means your returns are staying low in the first year. You are usually looking at 4%. Sometimes we do better than that, but conservatively speaking, that is 4%.

In the second year, you are looking at slightly going up to 6% and then it goes up as time goes on after we finish our value add cycle. For example, the one that we sold, we bought this mobile home park in Iowa. We bought this mobile home park in June of 2020 for $325,000. We had an average of over 8% cash on cash per year, even without the sale for this deal. After a 22-month hold, we sold this deal in May of 2022 for $495,000. This deal delivered a total of over 18% internal rate of return and over 19% annualized cash on cash return.

Tell people how they can reach you. This is all very interesting. I have to confess. I am not sure that I would want to play this game on my own. You would need a team that knows what they are doing, but if you are looking to diversify, this is a great opportunity. Tell everybody how they can reach you.

The best way to find me is to go to our website at www.JohnsCreekCapital.com and hit the contact form. I will reach back out usually within the same business day. I would be excited to talk to you about this recession-resistant asset.

Tell us a few more insights and advice on investing in this mobile home market.

The biggest insight or advice I would give is to understand your niche, your parameters, and what you are looking for. We have a saying in the industry, real estate in general, “You make the money when you buy.” You cannot buy when you do not know what you are doing. You cannot just buy randomly just because something is cheap. You have to have a strong reason and strong logic behind the reasons you are buying a particular asset. Know your parameters, know your requirements, and stick with them. That is the number one thing I would advise.

Do you teach any of this stuff or do you know anybody that teaches about mobile home parks and what to look for?

I personally do not teach yet, but I would not mind that being an option in the future. The biggest mobile home park education, I did not personally go to his boot camps or educational programs, but I heard so many good things about it. Go to Frank Rolfe’s Mobile Home University. He has bootcamps that tells you every single thing that you need to know about mobile home parks.

How did you learn?

I learned from actual experience. That is the best way to learn. You can learn everything on a piece of paper and learning everything. You will not get to understand what it is like until you are in the game. You have to buy. You have to get yourself into the actual investing.

Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?

The mobile home park is an affordable housing business. You're providing affordable housing options for your tenants and giving them that privacy, giving them that homeownership. Click To Tweet

Yes.

Tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

Take action. Don’t do analysis paralysis. Don’t overthink things too much and then you never take action. Take the best action that you can find and move forward.

What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

One strategy is to have enough reserves. The one thing you can always expect from any real estate investment are surprises. You are going to have surprise expenses. To counter that, you need enough reserves in your account to account for that. If you do not have enough reserves, you are out of business.

Do you have a formula for that?

We usually use $10,000 plus 6 months of income, at least, in the account.

What is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

Reading business books or reading all kinds of good books that educate yourself and inspire yourself to achieve more.

Do you have anything you want to close with before we go?

We live in a great nation with many opportunities that you cannot find elsewhere in the world. I encourage everyone to take advantage of the opportunities that you have in front of you and take action. Do not be afraid of fail. You want to fail early and fail often, but get up often as well. Take action and move forward.

I think that we get afraid of failure because we feel like it reflects badly on us. The problem is that unless you fail, you will never get to the next level. I think about children. How many times did they fail to walk before they took their first step? What if they had never kept trying?

It reflects back on us. That is back to the embarrassment topic. If you are in survival mode, that is the least of your worries. If you push yourself hard, the reflection means nothing. Do not worry about how other people look at you. You have to know what you want and go for it.

This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you for joining us, Charlotte.

REW Charlotte Dunford | Mobile Home Parks

Mobile Home Parks: The mobile home park industry and this market are not as correlated to the overall market health as other asset classes.

 

Thank you so much for having me.

Ladies, thank you for joining Charlotte and I for the show. I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I will see you soon.

 

Important Links

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join the Real Estate Investing for Women Community today:

 

——————————————————

To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

>