From Homes to Businesses: Ashley Coates Shares Her Entrepreneurial Journey

Dylan Silver (00:01.016)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host Dylan Silver and today we have Ashley Coates. Am I saying your name right? Ashley Coates on the podcast. Ashley is a second generation real estate entrepreneur, been a broker since 2006, former financial advisor, restaurant owner and has owned some laundromats. Ashley, welcome to the show.

Ashley Coates (00:12.418)
Yes.

Ashley Coates (00:29.464)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:31.242)
Absolutely. So I think the first question people are going to ask is you’ve been a broker since 2006, second generation. So how did you get into the business?

Ashley Coates (00:43.086)
Well, it wasn’t really not really a choice. My mom was a Serial real estate entrepreneur. It’s what she did. She owned a brokerage small little town I was Very different as a child. I always wanted to work. I didn’t want to go to school that kind of thing so I homeschooled at an early age got really involved in her business was property managing at 14 and

started doing, she would do new builds for some of the developers around and I would get to be the person that helped the clients pick out all of their finishes essentially. So I would be in charge of doing all the finish work and stuff. So that’s kind of where it started. Then my mom got sick at 16 or when I was 16 and she passed away. So I just, I took over the business. It was all I knew and what I had to do. So I kind of kept it going, did a rent a broker type thing, had someone that was willing, luckily a friend willing to broker.

me so I could keep the business going and I did that up until 2006.

Dylan Silver (01:43.661)
So you’re in Northern California, and I know you mentioned the name of the town before we started. What was the town where you were at? Replif, okay, so you’re 14 years old and getting involved in the business. Did you have siblings and was this just, you were passionate about it, you were curious what your mom was doing? How did you get in at 14? I think a lot of people are happy that they can get in at 40 or later. They’re just trying to find their way in and you had the good fortune to get in at.

Ashley Coates (01:46.318)
Yep.

Ashley Coates (01:50.562)
Red bluff.

Ashley Coates (02:08.16)
you

Dylan Silver (02:12.173)
at 14. How did you get in at 14?

Ashley Coates (02:15.501)
It was my mom. She just kind of pulled me in. It was a job. She paid me $600 a month, which was great to do all of

Dylan Silver (02:23.659)
You’re the richest person alive in your head. You’re like, this is, I’m wealthy.

Ashley Coates (02:27.713)
Absolutely, I 600 bucks a month and all I had to just manage her the entire rental portfolio Which I wasn’t I mean I was doing a lot of the contracts and stuff like that I wasn’t the one signing with them because you can’t but I would write them up have them ready for she’d have to go get them signed I’d be entering in rents and depositing rents and Sending out, you know take taking maintenance tickets sending those people out to get the maintenance done All the all the dirty work that she didn’t want to do basically is what I would

I had to do.

Dylan Silver (02:58.807)
So did she have her, this was her own personal portfolio of rental properties or was this someone else’s?

Ashley Coates (03:05.306)
She was a property manager on Hopup. Yeah, exactly.

Dylan Silver (03:07.23)
Okay, and you were her assistant. This is phenomenal. I hope I have the good fortune to have children who are that involved. I think a lot of people, you know, we have our investor fuel mastermind group and the average avatar of the person in the group is someone who’s doing 50 plus deals. But people talk about, how do I get my kids into the business? And you could have a 17 year old who wants nothing to do with it. And it seems like

you were the opposite. Maybe to some degree you didn’t have another option because you had a parent pass away at a young age, but when you first got in, it was out of your mom saying, hey, here’s this opportunity. you ran with

Ashley Coates (03:49.964)
Yeah, I was excited. I always wanted to be older than I was. I always wanted to grow up so fast. And so I, and she didn’t discourage that in any way. She didn’t try to just know, be a kid, be a kid. She just let it be. And she told, you know, took me to everything. So I was just really interested getting to go, you know, like I said, the developer and going to the new builds. It’s always been like my one goal. want to do a development at some point, cause I got to watch that from such a, such a young age. And I just thought it was so neat watching the, you know, the subdivision plans and dealing with the building department.

Dylan Silver (04:15.819)
Yeah.

Ashley Coates (04:19.897)
would take me everywhere she went. So when I started doing it, wasn’t, I don’t know, it wasn’t hard or weird. knew, I knew where to go to the building department. I knew the questions to ask and so it just kind of felt okay to me.

Dylan Silver (04:31.852)
For folks listening, think a lot of us are thinking, it wasn’t weird to you, but to be 16 years old and get handed a brokerage is probably overwhelming. To be 30 years old and get handed a brokerage when you haven’t run a brokerage could be overwhelming. So how did that happen? Of course it was under some difficult circumstances, but how did that happen and then how did you learn?

Ashley Coates (04:55.851)
We had a year to plan from it, from her diagnosis to the day she passed. So as soon as she was diagnosed, she started making steps. She recruited a broker that would be willing to, in the event, maintain the brokerage. And she talked to all the agents to make sure that they’d be willing to stay on, talked to the developers that we were working with on the subdivisions and made sure that they would be willing to stay on as long as things were set up correctly. And she started, what else did she do?

She just kind of paved the way basically to where she, know, I homeschooled and got, I graduated right after I turned 16 December. So a month after I turned 16, I graduated. So I was full time at this point. She didn’t pass away for another four months after I graduated. You can’t till you’re 18. So I would already taken the test because you could take the test.

Dylan Silver (05:39.112)
Did you have your real estate license at that point? Okay.

Ashley Coates (05:46.974)
I had passed the test, they wouldn’t give you the license till you turned 18. So I went two years without even a license, operating basically with this broker that worked hand in hand with me, everything I did, he just looked it over and made sure it was good and signed off on it. Today’s world probably not legal, but it’s.

Dylan Silver (06:06.427)
It was this was before 2006. So this was before there were rules.

Ashley Coates (06:08.961)
Yeah, well, we were also doing loans back then. Because that was before all of that happened. So we were broker as well. yeah, exactly. Well, just kind of made sure that we were set up. I made sure I positioned myself to be ready. I moved out. So I was ready to live on my own. And we just kind of it was what else do you do? You’re dealt with the card you’re dealt with.

Dylan Silver (06:15.561)
Yeah, you get a house, you get a house, you know.

Dylan Silver (06:34.128)
And did you have siblings? Were you an only child? What was the rest of the dynamic like?

Ashley Coates (06:39.531)
do have siblings, they’re much older and they’re like split family. They were not my mom’s, I’m my mom’s only child.

Dylan Silver (06:46.109)
Okay, I just know that a lot of people already are super impressed. am because I haven’t spoken with a single real estate investor entrepreneur who got started even at 18, let alone 14. So a lot of people are probably listening thinking, I wish I had the good fortune to start then. But from there you you go and you become a real estate broker.

That takes some years. So I imagine from 18 till what 22 is when you became a broker.

Ashley Coates (07:17.805)
Yes.

Dylan Silver (07:19.434)
22. And at that point in time, you mentioned before the show started that you did become a financial advisor. Did that happen like almost immediately at that point in time? Or did you were you a broker for some years before you went ahead to that financial advising?

Ashley Coates (07:34.584)
Well, oddly enough, I’d actually sold the brokerage by the time I got my broker’s license. It was just something I always knew I was going to do. I was never not going to do it. I had already sold the brokerage and I had went into mortgage brokering instead or mortgage, basically the sale selling mortgage, started working for a bank. Financial crisis hit and mortgage banking business kind of collapsed, as we all know now. So that was just.

Dylan Silver (07:43.615)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (07:55.006)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:01.802)
Tough time to be a mortgage brain. Tough time.

Ashley Coates (08:04.333)
It was fun though. Honestly, it was fun. We were literally at a convention on like the day and we We were there and training and all this stuff and then the owner came out and was like so Actually, we just went bankrupt. You guys are done. Yeah, we’re in Arizona at the time Phoenix, Arizona I was 20 years old it was it was crazy but fun and so I left there and

Dylan Silver (08:12.007)
Really?

Dylan Silver (08:21.481)
You’re kidding!

Ashley Coates (08:33.709)
had a friend who owned a friend’s parents who owned a dealership in town and he approached me and he’s like, hey, heard what happened. I’ve got a financial, what they called? The finance people at the car lot. He’s like, got finance. He’s like, you want it? And I’m like, okay. I don’t know anything about cars, but sure. I’m not doing anything right now.

Dylan Silver (08:46.12)
Yeah, FNI.

Dylan Silver (08:54.877)
What make dealer was this?

Ashley Coates (08:57.941)
It was a Ford, Ford dealership.

Dylan Silver (08:59.53)
Ford dealership in Northern California. I sold cars for the better part of five years before I got into real estate and all the car, if there’s people, car guys and gals listening, they’re all jealous because they’re like, she goes from being a broker to then immediately F and I. That’s how, how do I make that jump? I know there’s a lot of people. I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine in San Antonio this morning who,

Ashley Coates (09:06.998)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (09:25.278)
This gentleman has been working for years and never got that spot in FNI. So there was a little bit of divine intervention for you there. But how did that end up going? Yeah.

Ashley Coates (09:33.321)
All in who you know. Yeah. For sure. It was fun. I didn’t last long there though. Six months. I didn’t like it. That was not my cup of tea.

Dylan Silver (09:42.673)
A lot of hours, that’s what I remember distinctly.

Ashley Coates (09:45.664)
It was, it was a lot of hours and I just, I gotta believe what I’m selling and I didn’t. So that was where I just couldn’t, I couldn’t get it. And they just like, they tried everything. I’m like, sorry guys, like this isn’t for me.

Dylan Silver (09:54.45)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:00.733)
For me, it was the surveys. This was before they really did the surveys, but what ended up happening during COVID is they made these surveys for the commissions for the car salespeople. And it wasn’t the car itself that made money. It was that made the salespeople money. was how well you did on like a 40 question survey. And so I was like, man, this is really hard. You would think that just selling the car would be good enough and having, you know, that relationship. But now it’s like, did the managers treat you well?

Was the dealership clean? And you’re like, dang, I can’t control all this. So that was my experience. But after you went through F &I at the Ford store, what was the next step for you?

Ashley Coates (10:41.869)
applied for Edward Jones and got hired on. I had to take my Series 7, Series 66.

Knew absolutely nothing about stocks bonds or finance anything like that 401ks. That was not something my mom She didn’t do it. We didn’t talk about it. I knew nothing Which I think is what allured me to it. I’m just I heard I’ve Edward Jones had really good sales training So that was a big bonus for me I wanted to get some better sales training and then I I wanted to learn about that side of the world anyways So it was really it was more of an education. I think journey and at this point see Edward Jones

When I started at Edward Jones, my second daughter was like two months old at the time.

Dylan Silver (11:25.894)
What was your prospecting technique of your preferred method at Edward Jones? I know my buddy who’s my mentor. He said I learned all the salesmanship that I know from AT &T. He was a manager at AT &T and from Edward Jones. That’s where I learned all my hustle from. So what was some of the training that they put you through or what was the techniques?

Ashley Coates (11:48.01)
Yeah, Edward Jones is like door knocking, that is their thing. They are all about door knocking and I, like anyone else, I hated it. But it’s surprisingly effective.

Dylan Silver (11:55.707)
Very tough.

Ashley Coates (11:58.318)
And I think the really the big takeaway is it’s just a numbers game. You know, it really is. The more people you call, the more doors you talk on, the more people you talk to, it’s just a numbers game. You just gotta ask enough times and be told no enough times before someone finally says yes. And so that was kind of the takeaway there. It’s still probably my favorite thing to do. I don’t actually enjoy sales, oddly enough.

Dylan Silver (12:20.613)
The door knocking is so hard. I’ve tried, I think you have to have a really warm personality, super warm, you’ve got to think on your feet. You can’t be even a little bit afraid because that’ll come across.

Ashley Coates (12:33.965)
It was so shocking though, how many people would open their door and you gotta think I’m 20 at this point, open their door, let me in and open up their life of everything. Here’s my 401k statement, here’s my IRS statement, here’s this, here’s that. And I’m just in my mind going, you don’t know me, why are you telling me this? I know I asked, but say no.

Dylan Silver (12:59.995)
Yeah, please. You know what I mean? That’s

Ashley Coates (13:03.725)
I don’t wonder what they’re training today and if it’s changed because I feel like today it’s different. mean people are so much more skeptical of scams and strangers and all the things. can’t imagine they’re still promoting.

Dylan Silver (13:12.816)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (13:16.615)
Back in that time, did they have the no solicit signs? They still had those. They’re everywhere in Texas, like everywhere, because we have the solar, we have pest control, all types of door knocking. And so I remember when I was trying to be a door-to-door salesperson, it was just so, I was like, I’m not cut out for this. You have to have a super thick skin, which leads me to a question.

I’ve seen this and some some people say, know, well, it’s just tough. That’s how it is. But some realtors, I get a laugh out of this. I’m going to be a realtor here soon. I’m sitting for my exam on the 31st. And thank you. And I’ve seen in groups realtors will say this was my territory. However, new agent came in and is knocking all my doors. How dare they? And I’m thinking like you’re getting out hustled, sir.

Ashley Coates (13:58.467)
Thanks

Ashley Coates (14:11.436)
You

Dylan Silver (14:14.31)
This person is coming in and knocking your doors.

Ashley Coates (14:15.085)
Yeah, do better.

Dylan Silver (14:19.504)
Do better, do better. So after Edward Jones, what happened next in the journey?

Ashley Coates (14:27.593)
So during my stint at Edward Jones, I married and his family came from residential care. They did small group residential care facilities for adults with disabilities and I knew nothing about that. And while I was still working there, he approached me and said, hey, well actually it was a broker locally who called us and brought it to us. And they said, there’s a lady not too far from you that’s selling her two facilities, thought you guys might be interested.

So I dove into it just looking at it as a business. just, I underwrote it, looked at it like a business. I had just checked the numbers and I’m like, it looks great on paper. And I’m like, but I don’t know anything about this business. So you tell me what you think. And he’s like.

you I can’t run anymore, you would have to, you know, leave at for Jones and do this and learn it. And so that was when the decision was made. I’m like, all right, let’s do it. So we bought those two facilities. I spent the next year to just really learning the business and understanding the dynamics of it. And basically decided at that point to.

convert all of my rental portfolio into residential care because their need was so high. There was so there were so many individuals that needed placement. There wasn’t placement for them. And so I’m like, we’ve got these houses that are making, you know, normal rent. I’m barely cash flowing on them. Like, let’s let’s just get these licensed and convert them. And he had never opened one from the ground up. But I’m like, I got this. It’s fine. So that’s what that’s what we did.

Dylan Silver (15:55.845)
Are those all staffed? We were talking about this beforehand. For people who are not familiar with what those facilities are, tell us a little bit about that and then how did you staff those?

Ashley Coates (16:04.823)
So they are staff operated, they’re residential care facilities. We have two that are six bed, well, I have two that are six bed now. And then the rest are four bed, which is what the industry is going to now is four bed facilities. So they’re just a basic residential home. And for us, we do adults with disabilities, 18 to 59. I have a couple that are actually RCFEs now, but they’re still for adults with disabilities, just the aging population. And they are fully staffed. At this point, I have a director of operations who runs all

I have five total under me. She runs all five under her. There are administrators that run each facility and then we have staffing that actually do like the direct care. So I spend about three hours at this point on those businesses.

Dylan Silver (16:52.207)
So you, this is now after Edward Jones, but this is before COVID, right? This is before COVID and you still have these facilities.

Ashley Coates (16:59.0)
yeah.

Ashley Coates (17:03.021)
This was, I think 2010 is when I bought the two in Los Malinas. And then I want to say it was probably 2011, 2012 when I converted the portfolio of rentals into residential care. And then during COVID, we divorced and split our portfolio. He took his two, I took my two and then of the two we converted, we each took one essentially. So we left with three.

Dylan Silver (17:05.655)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (17:29.039)
So you still have three or one? Five. The reason why I ask is the biggest regret of all the real estate investors who I talk with, the single biggest regret is I sold my rentals or I sold my flips or I sold whatever it was that they had had and had I known, I would have kept at least one. And so for folks listening, know, it can seem

Ashley Coates (17:31.625)
I have five. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (17:57.207)
enticing even now to to generate some quick cash flow. But if you can’t afford to hold on to it, and is that your experience to

Ashley Coates (18:06.221)
I hold anything I can if it can my philosophy is if it can cash flow or Close to cash flow. I’m even willing to lose a little bit But I’m in a position to do so to maintain and hold it especially in today’s environment You know, I feel like they know which we’re doing more flipping than I’ve ever done. So don’t get me wrong We’re flipping at this point because it’s really hard to hold real estate. Like everyone knows that so You know, but if I can take a little loss for a little while I’m betting on appreciation and I’m betting on rates coming

down eventually. I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon, but I think as a whole eventually if you know if say it cash flows at 6 % and I’m paying 7 % right now I’m probably still gonna hold that because I know eventually I should be able to get there and then appreciation too.

Dylan Silver (18:48.803)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:54.87)
I like to talk a little bit. You mentioned before we hopped on here, laundromats, laundromats. I’d like to talk a little bit of, yeah, about about these laundromats. So Ashley was the you were the sole owner of the laundromats in a town and to all the laundromats were yours. If you were going to a laundromat in what was the town?

Ashley Coates (19:18.315)
Red bluff. Yep.

Dylan Silver (19:19.672)
that town during during COVID, right?

Ashley Coates (19:23.821)
No, let’s see, laundry mats I bought in 2016? I think 2016. I sold them in, oh no, was way before 2016. No, I sold them in 2018, so it was before then. Probably 2012, I think.

Dylan Silver (19:34.98)
2016 until…

Dylan Silver (19:43.052)
Okay. Sometime before then you were going to Ashley’s laundromats, but nowadays we were just, I was just mentioning this before I thought like people are aware they’re so aware. Hey, laundromats are great. It’s like the media and social media. They’re like, great. But you had the, the, the insight to get into that probably before it was popularized. Where did you see that as being an opportunity? And also how did that go for you owning laundromats?

Ashley Coates (20:09.933)
It was great. So actually this was one of my mom’s things. She had bought one of them prior to, for my dad basically, because she wanted him to have a solid income as well. And so she had bought one. Well then after she passed and a little while later another one came for sale and I ended up buying my dad’s and that one.

and then he just ran them. didn’t want to own them, but he was okay with just running the day-to-day, dealing with the maintenance and stuff like that. it was just cashflow and it just made sense. If you can pay all the debt to service it and pay someone to run them and you’re still making money, why not buy them?

Dylan Silver (20:52.546)
And it was your dad who was running it, right? So as far as your, your other than, managing it from afar, it wasn’t too intensive on your end because you didn’t have to be there.

Ashley Coates (21:04.097)
No, I just did the books. That was it.

Dylan Silver (21:05.463)
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of people’s concerns. It’s even one of my concerns. I’ve asked people, is it possible to do this remotely? And by this, mean, be active as a real estate investor remotely. the answer that I continually get is if you have the right systems and processes in place and trust someone on the ground that you can do it. Otherwise, it’s going to be hard in my case, you know, to move to Santo Domingo.

If I if I don’t have that in place, you’re probably going to have to be there. And it sounds like that’s your experience as well.

Ashley Coates (21:36.374)
Yeah, it comes with risks. mean, I think today, you know, it is one of those things I look back and man, I wish I wouldn’t have sold those. Like I really probably do wish I wouldn’t have sold those. But when my dad passed and I didn’t have anyone and I just at the time was so focused on my other portions of my career, I didn’t want to dive into figuring out how to systematize it and how to replace him. So it was just made sense to sell them at that point for me. But now I would have never sold. would have

Dylan Silver (21:59.5)
Yeah, when these things happen, it’s like, what do do?

Ashley Coates (22:04.513)
put the systems in place and hired the person. And it’s totally possible now.

Dylan Silver (22:07.104)
Yeah.

I think also hiring good people is hard too. There’s more systems in place now and there was some then, but you know, it is hard, it is hard. It’s like you’ve gotta find, if you’re doing, we get a lot of people with Airbnbs, you gotta find consistent people who are there day in and day out to clean it to the same standard. Otherwise you’re gonna get dinged on Airbnb. And with a laundromat, it’s got reviews just the same way, it’s just a little different. You’ll get Google reviews, so on and so forth. And so,

Ashley Coates (22:14.882)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (22:37.472)
You know, having those peoples is critical.

Ashley Coates (22:40.779)
And on top of that, someone might get clothes stuck in the dryer at 2 a.m. and who’s gonna do that? there are, you know, it’s not probably as glamorous as it seems with all the social media, but if you have the right people, it can be done.

Dylan Silver (22:46.198)
Yeah!

Dylan Silver (22:56.482)
Speaking of glamorous, there’s a little glamour in this I think is maybe a lot of glamour is owning a restaurant. I’m jealous. I’m a foodie. All I need to do is open up TikTok and look at the vibe. I don’t even need to look at the food. I need to look at the vibe and say, wow, that looks like a really great, you know, Mexican sushi place. Let me go there. So how did you become a restaurant owner? Tell us how that happened.

Ashley Coates (23:19.117)
It was I just I’m constantly browsing businesses for sale and there was one that came up multiple times and the numbers just looked good and so finally I reached out to the broker and I’m like just can you send me the packet on this I’m just curious which I Didn’t think I’d ever want to own a restaurant, but when I did the numbers and it was semi absentee owner

It made sense. It seemed like a great business. It’s been around since 1968. So it’s not new. It’s like the it’s in a neighboring town about 30 minutes from here. And it’s kind of like a local favorite. It’s a glamorous restaurant. is a order at the counter kind of, you know, quick service type thing. Super cheap. We’ve had I think we’ve been cheap eats for the last 20 years or maybe longer. I don’t know. So

Dylan Silver (23:59.321)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (24:11.35)
And so how much I think for me and for people listening, it seems like a lot of effort owning a restaurant, even if you’re detached on some level, like you bought in, right? But is it, I mean, I can’t imagine a restaurant being not a lot of effort.

Ashley Coates (24:27.245)
Could be, I’m lucky. It was a great business and I hired the right person. He’s phenomenal. I hired him as a of a transition coordinator. He was gonna transition the restaurant from the previous owners to me and management was already in place. He’s kind of just morphed into becoming.

the general manager or director of operations there, whatever you want to call it. And he’s phenomenal. So my, spend an hour a month, I attend a meeting. He gives me the breakdown of here’s how it went this month. Here’s how it was last month. I get the snapshots of all the finances. Here’s our problems. If he needs something from me, he’ll message me and say, I’ve got a problem. I want to go over the solutions with you. See what you think.

And that’s it. So no, it’s my, it is my least headache business, honestly, at this point. And I don’t think that’s, so I don’t encourage restaurant buying because I don’t think that’s normal.

Dylan Silver (25:23.514)
Wow. Wow. This is awesome.

I think when this comes out, there’ll be a lot of people who have questions. How do I buy a restaurant? How did you find the GM? How did you know that it wasn’t gonna be a headache like when you’re doing a fix and flip, you take down the wall and you see there’s all this stuff behind the wall that needs to get remediated. Restaurants can be like that. And so you had almost the exact opposite experience.

Ashley Coates (25:52.824)
Yeah, the general managers were already in place. So more than anything, his focus has been like, we need to systematize the business because the general managers may or may not be there forever, obviously, so they won’t be. So it’s just been documenting processes and getting it to where we just talk about like, let’s just get it franchisable. I don’t think we’re gonna franchise, but if we were, let’s get it there to where this is how you do it. And then we, it’s Mexican food.

Dylan Silver (26:12.448)
Mmm.

Dylan Silver (26:18.656)
What kind of food is it? Mexican food. Okay, there’s a huge debate in Texas. This is an aside. There’s a huge debate in Texas. Do Californians have better Mexican food or do the Texans? And I’m in Texas, so this may be sacrilege. This may be sacrilege.

But I feel like the Californian food is just a little bit less heavy, so you can eat a little bit more of it. Whereas the Texas food could put you potentially in a food coma.

Ashley Coates (26:57.101)
So I’m pretty sure we are Texas style Mexican. Joke that we like the American Mexican, like it’s not really Mexican. that’s the way it was founded. We changed nothing because everybody loves the place. So we changed absolutely nothing. And you know, it is not, you don’t get cojito on your tacos. We don’t even carry cilantro, that kind of Mexican. it’s.

Dylan Silver (27:01.638)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (27:08.518)
Okay, okay.

Dylan Silver (27:23.241)
Well, if you franchise it, maybe there’s Texans listening to this who saying, okay, it’s Texan Mexican food. Let’s get one of these over here. How do I get in touch with?

Ashley Coates (27:32.438)
We have what’s called a Tex-Mex taco.

Dylan Silver (27:34.921)
There you go. There you go. So right now you’ve got the restaurant, you’ve got the residential care facilities, anything else that you have going on.

Ashley Coates (27:42.321)
huh.

Flips, we buy and sell a lot of homes. Currently we’ve got three projects in San Antonio, oddly enough, going on. And then we have three or four here in Northern California as well.

Dylan Silver (27:46.729)
flips.

Dylan Silver (27:54.706)
yeah.

Dylan Silver (28:00.306)
Okay, so I just moved up to Denton, which is considered the greater Dallas DFW area. And I was in San Antonio for five years. And how did you land on San Antonio of all places being in California? How did you pick San Antonio?

Ashley Coates (28:16.749)
I just did a lot of market research and I kind of honed in on San Antonio. I liked it. I didn’t feel like it had seen the huge capital appreciation of some of the other Texas markets that have already exploded. It seemed like its rent to price ratio was pretty good in the hopes that I could hold some of them, although taxes are crazy in Texas.

Yeah, I’m not really sure exactly why I ended up there. There was a few in the running and it’s just kind of where I settled. It was there in Tulsa initially and the plan is to, I would like to have teams all over the US and be able to flip in multiple areas. That’s the goal. The goal was one new market a quarter. My husband’s pulling me back a little.

Dylan Silver (29:06.527)
The flipping is hard now. My mentor here in Denton was saying, you know, it’s tougher to flip now. It’s tougher to flip. You go from doing seven flips at once, you’re shaking your head, you’re saying we’re still flipping. We’re full speed ahead.

Ashley Coates (29:20.557)
Well, we’ve actually changed to flipping because I feel like at this point, I mean, it’s definitely easier to flip than it is to buy and hold or burr or anything like that right now. know, margins are definitely tighter and you got to be really good at your numbers and you have to have great rehab team and you know, you got to plan for longer hold times. But if you’re planning for all of that and you’re running your numbers correctly, I think that it’s still it’s still a great business and.

Dylan Silver (29:33.576)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (29:46.622)
How did you choose flipping versus new builds?

Ashley Coates (29:50.414)
just because it’s the only thing I’ve really done. cause like I said, I bought a few here locally and then kind of flipped them, but flipped them and converted them into residential care after my divorce to rebuild my portfolio. That’s kind of what I did. And so I just really enjoyed the process of redesigning an entire house and, you know, just making it what I wanted. It was a lot of fun. I really liked it. And so that’s really why I would love to do a new build. It’s one of the goals this year. I want to do one new build.

Dylan Silver (29:55.24)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (30:19.77)
Yeah, I think it’s fascinating because I get these perspectives and up to this point, a lot of the people I’ve been speaking to who are doing flips in Texas have been telling me and I haven’t done one, but they’ve been telling me it’s just harder. It’s harder to do flips now. it’s it’s like if you can have a flip and a new build and it’s they’re both going to be maybe difficult to sell. You might as well do the new build. But.

Ashley Coates (30:48.065)
want to.

Dylan Silver (30:48.84)
To your credit, I said this before getting on the call, think San Antonio is ripe for someone to come in and put a bunch of money into San Antonio because I moved up from San Antonio to the DFW area because I felt like there wasn’t enough investors. There wasn’t enough going on. And in DFW, I feel like there’s a ton, but it’s not as easy to find a good deal.

for an investor in my mind because there’s so much more competition. Whereas in San Antonio, you have, I would say, a better market for investors. And I think you were able to figure that out from California. So kudos on that.

Ashley Coates (31:32.301)
The affordability there is, I think, the biggest drive for me. I like that. I want to be able to flip and sell to the average American family. If I can shoot for ARVs between 250 or even 200 to 350, 400 max, I love that. A lot of people that can afford that. No, it’s not.

Dylan Silver (31:36.339)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (31:52.135)
Yeah.

It’s not the same in California. think it’s not the same in California. Well, we’re coming up on time here. Ashley, how can people get a hold of you?

Ashley Coates (32:06.445)
Instagram, Small Town Investors, my husband and I, and Facebook, Mike and Ashley Coates.

Dylan Silver (32:15.325)
Terrific. Well, that wraps up another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Until next time. See you later. Thank you very much.

Ashley Coates (32:24.844)
you.