Unlocking Real Estate Success: Emanuel Stafilidis’ Journey from Australia to U.S.

Dylan Silver (00:00.707)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have Emanuel Stafilidis, real estate entrepreneur. Emanuel, welcome to the show.

Emanuel Stafilidis (00:10.776)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:12.663)
Absolutely. Let’s start off at the top, Emanuel. How did you get into the real estate space originally?

Emanuel Stafilidis (00:19.214)
Originally, I started a long time ago. I purchased a property as an investment. I was quite young at the time and had it rented out and then purchased a lot of land and built a home with my then wife.

Emanuel Stafilidis (00:46.322)
and grew the rental portfolio very slowly. This was in Australia. It’s very expensive down there. So real estate there is a difficult business. And I grew a small, very small portfolio, knew it was never really going to grow to be something that I could.

Dylan Silver (00:51.599)
Mmm.

Emanuel Stafilidis (01:14.254)
could live off simply because of the expense and the structure down there. And life changed and moved and I then started looking beyond Australia. And in 2011, I purchased our first property in the US. I was living in Australia at the time.

Dylan Silver (01:41.711)
I actually lived in Australia for a year. 2012-2013 I lived in Melbourne. Where were you based out of in Australia?

Emanuel Stafilidis (01:49.262)
So most, a lot of my time was in Sydney, but I was born and raised in Canberra, the capital.

Dylan Silver (01:59.279)
Okay, very cool. Yeah, I studied. I don’t know if you’ll know this school Swinburne was where I was there for a year. I actually loved the plug to Australia schools. I liked the Australia higher education system the way that it was set up better than the US. And that’s saying something because what I felt like was that the professors there were very much integrated into the actual community of the students like they would.

Emanuel Stafilidis (02:05.07)
You know, I mean, I guess.

Dylan Silver (02:27.407)
even undergrad I was a first year undergrad when I was studying there so I was 18 and there was regular opportunities for us to have one on ones with professors they seemed as friendly with us as we would expect any member of the community and then when I came back to the US it was a stark contrast and I was like whoa this is a whole different ball game here. So you were in Austria. Go ahead.

Emanuel Stafilidis (02:50.584)
Yeah, it’s probably the, I was going to say it’s probably the Australian way of just being a bit laid back and relaxed and

just trying to be a part of, of, you know, every.

Dylan Silver (03:10.027)
It was really great, Emanuel. I genuinely, when I came back, because then I went to school in Boston, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I remember I had a physics question. went and I went to one-on-one with the physics professor. And he looked at me like I had three heads. And I was like, wow, this is totally, totally different. Because I remember, Emanuel, first semester, it was actually my first semester that I studied abroad. I’m over there. And we took a very basic.

Maths course I learned that in Australia at least when I was going there math became maths So I was taking this maths course and it was all the basic arithmetic and the professors were still nonetheless really Passionate about it like and it was all interesting to us and a lot of us were like engineering students I was really interesting to see that their passion there But I’m curious because most of my guests who I have on the show are operators in the real estate space in the United States

Many of them got started through hearing about an infomercial or through reading a book and their strategies were very specific to U.S. real estate. So what was your entry point? How did you educate yourself on this process? Was it in your blood?

Emanuel Stafilidis (04:20.89)
Real estate was in my blood. My family was always involved with real estate and so that was always the vehicle that I was going to use to grow wealth. As far as investing in the US, it was family. I’d gone through a separation and divorce and got a…

my second wife is my current wife. She’s got family here in the US and our daughter here in the US needed accommodation and we used a superannuation which is the retirement fund similar to a self-directed IRA.

And we use that money and purchased a two bedroom unit in North Carolina and rally for her to live in. the investigations were just pretty typical, just remote. You know, you investigate the location and you know, everything to do with buying a typical piece of real estate.

I just thought, you know, there’s psychologically, there’s not much difference between buying out of a city that you live in, in another area or, know, whether it’s across the world or, you know, the other side of the country, it kind of, kind of makes no difference. You’ve got the same investigations to do. And so I did that and I was comfortable and decided to, to purchase a unit.

We held that unit for a few years. wasn’t great. Our daughter lived in it for a little while and then she moved out and we rented it out.

Emanuel Stafilidis (06:33.166)
And then around 2016, we decided to sell it and we sold that and we bought, we used the money and bought two houses in Cleveland, Ohio. I had, in that time, I had investigated a whole lot of different areas to buy in and for some reason I thought Cleveland was a good area and.

Dylan Silver (06:46.127)
Mmm.

Dylan Silver (07:01.005)
Let’s let’s dive into that Cleveland. OK, so I’ve spoken with investors actually just got off a call with an investor in Minnesota. I’ve spoken with investors on both coasts. Of course, I’m in Texas. So us Texans like to think that this is maybe the hotbed of real estate in the United States. And so you saw Cleveland, Ohio, which many would consider maybe a distressed opportunity. And so you said, I’m going to take a look at this area. What was it about Cleveland that specifically drew your attention?

Emanuel Stafilidis (07:31.584)
a few positive articles on the area in bigger pockets at the time. And I dove into the area and just started looking at it. Look, when you look at the US from afar, there are so many markets and so many opportunities. And you look at the amount of money you’ve got and you try and make an idea on what may or may not.

So the article that drew me to that area and I just investigated it and I thought, there’s a couple of areas in Cleveland that I thought would be positive and they were. And the areas that we purchased in were very positive and it worked out quite well.

It’s kind of moved into a different type of strategy there. They both ended up being rentals, but they were both distressed properties and we rehabbed So we bought them, we rehabbed them and refinanced them and rented them out or rented them and then refurbished.

Dylan Silver (08:44.207)
So you rehabbed these properties and I’m assuming you yourself were not in Cleveland. How did you make the connections with the contractors and how did that process work doing it fully remotely?

Emanuel Stafilidis (08:54.2)
So our real estate agent in Cleveland was a godsend. Her and her husband were actually contractors as well. So they helped us buy the property and they gave us really good advice on what could be done to the property and gave us an idea on the rehab and the whole project. And then I engaged her actually to…

to rehab. The first one went really well and so we decided to move forward on the second one. That one didn’t, the rehab didn’t go quite so well. Not all her fault. Some of it was my fault but got it back on track and sorted out the problems and got the house finished and got it rented.

And then, you know, typical rental problems we, you know, you have with property management and, know, just, and I was, I was remote. was still in Australia at the time. We, I moved to the U S at the end of 2018. So from in 2016, when we bought these houses and, and rehab them and, and got them rented, I went a couple of years of.

trying to find a decent property manager, you know, fired and hired.

Eventually we found a really good property manager.

Emanuel Stafilidis (10:31.16)
Bob Collette up there, he was fantastic. And we kept him for a number of years and both those houses we just sold in the last 12 months, one sold just a couple of months ago. Really helped.

Dylan Silver (10:45.839)
So let’s talk about let’s talk about coming to the United States 2018 at this point. Were you in Virginia when you initially moved?

Emanuel Stafilidis (10:54.35)
So yeah, Angela’s kids live in a little city called Elizabeth City, which is just over the border into North Carolina. And I was living in Sydney at the time. Sydney’s five million people. know, it’s like New York, know, a big bustling city. And she, my wife said, you know, we’re moving to the U S and we’ll go live in Elizabeth City. And I kind of laughed and said, you know, 25,000 people, that’s not going to work.

And so we came just on a holiday trip and looked around and I found this area. found Chesapeake and Virginia Beach and the whole Hampton Roads area here in Virginia. And it reminded me of one of the cities that we lived in in Australia. It reminded me of Brisbane. So this whole area. I thought I could make this work. If I could live here, it would it would be really good. There’s a couple of million people in this area. There’s

18 military bases around where I live. It’s, it’s, and you know, the one of the largest military bases the U S has is a Norfolk where they build the ships and maintain all the aircraft carriers and that. And I thought if I could, you know, in this area, we, could make it work. when we moved, we moved straight into, into Chesapeake and have loved it ever since we’ve, we absolutely love it here. It’s a, it’s a beautiful part of the world.

real estate business is really good and thriving and so yeah it’s all been positive.

Dylan Silver (12:28.399)
Now when you got here, I’m imagining because your, of course, start and origin in real estate was in Sydney, Australia. You get here, you have your properties in Cleveland, but now that you’re here in 2018, are you looking at it as, I’m here, I’m going to start really diving in and looking at all the real estate opportunities that I have here in my local area here in Virginia? Or was it still a lot of, let me see where other areas of the country I can look at.

Emanuel Stafilidis (12:56.302)
A bit of both. I went to a seminar here in Virginia. There was a local real estate guy who was doing some training and I thought, you know, we’ll start locally and learn. the person who was putting on the training was a gentleman by the name of Scott Jelinek. And I joined his program.

and it’s a fantastic program. He’s still our mentor today. We’ll talk to him.

But the idea of buying real estate, it’s completely different mindset to Australia. In Australia, if you haven’t got half a million to a million dollars and access to it, then you just can’t buy a house. Here, the idea of buying houses for anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000, the median house price around here is 350,000.

It’s just phenomenal and our wages are very similar to what we were earning back in Australia. So it was quite eye-opening, but I just wanted to dive in and that’s exactly what I did was I dived in and started buying and went through all the processes of starting a business from scratch and making it work. And we started with wholesaling.

selling a few houses and then we got enough money together and we got money from a private investor and we started flipping houses and so I was running two businesses kind of two real estate businesses kind of side by side one was the the long-term hold properties

Emanuel Stafilidis (14:54.35)
And Scott had taught us a new strategy that was different to renting, which I really like, and that’s a seller finance model. So we buy houses.

own the house and then we sell it on terms on seller finance and we make a premium on the on the sale price and on the and on the interest rate so it’s so we were doing that and then at the same time we were also flipping houses as well so the last few years i’ve flipped over 40 houses in the last couple of years

So that was one strategy and then simultaneously we were building the number of houses that we hold and we’ve got about 20 odd houses that we hold now.

Dylan Silver (15:48.953)
When I hear all this, Emanuel, I think about the, you mentioned seller financing, wholesale, when you were getting started, lot of creativity when it came to acquisitions. And so this was, it’s new for everybody who’s in this space, but as someone who you mentioned, this isn’t as common at all in Australia at that time, I don’t know about today, this was entirely new for you as well.

Emanuel Stafilidis (16:15.124)
Absolutely, absolutely, completely new. had never, seller financing was whispered in Australia. It was, you know, there’s the odd bit. Well, back when I was there, there was the odd transaction that could be done with seller financing, but it really wasn’t. Everyone goes, there’s four major banks in Australia and they have 80 % of the market and of the finance market. And everybody goes to one of the big four banks and gets money and goes and buys.

real estate.

Dylan Silver (16:45.935)
I’m a wholesaler myself. And so when I was first starting out, I didn’t come from a real estate background. didn’t know how to, we have the Texas Real Estate Commission out here. I didn’t know how to read a Trek contract. I knew nothing. And so when I was starting out, I went to my local RIA and I’m a big fan of RIAs. Some people say they’re great. Some people say not so much. I’m personally a big fan because that’s how I got started. Paid a bunch of money to go to a conference. That conference pretty much changed my life from

the people in the room. was the people in the room because they were willing to talk to me and explain their business model. And I was like, man, I felt almost in a sense like unworthy because I hadn’t done a deal. I didn’t know anything about real estate at all. And here I was in the room with these other people. And that really changed. This was twenty twenty three August of twenty twenty three. That really just changed the way that I thought about really life, Emanuel, because at that point in time,

I hadn’t really put much serious thought to the fact that I could be a real estate operator. I figured that I needed all this money and that I wasn’t from the cloth. My family wasn’t involved in it. How was I going to get in? And then at that moment, I said, you know, let me let me take a look at this this wholesale thing in greater detail. And that was the moment that it took off for me.

Emanuel Stafilidis (18:11.542)
One thing I love about real estate is the people in it are very open and they want to help. if you, not even if you ask the right questions, if you just ask questions, you know, you’ll get answers and sure there are some people that will ridicule you and make fun of you, but.

but that’s mostly on social media. But when you’re at these meetings and that you, you, you learn so much and people are willing to, you know, to talk and, and, and help you and mentor you in one way or another. I got really lucky getting with Scott and in his group. He taught me wholesaling. He taught me, you know, the long-term hold strategy and the seller finance strategy. And, and then the rest of it was, was my own learning.

and own experiences. It certainly…

looking at different groups and reading blogs and learning from all the different areas that you can hear is exactly what I did. just dug into learning as much as I possibly could and then implementing. I got off my butt and I went out and implemented. When I had enough money,

to flip our first house, there was just no question. was like, instead of, we found the house the same way we found the wholesale houses. The houses that we wholesale, we did our marketing and we went out and found buyers for them and bought them. And the next, we had enough money then to flip a house and we had the investor lined up and.

Emanuel Stafilidis (20:04.27)
And so, uh, you know, found the next house and, you know, put it under contract. And instead of wholesaling it, we bought it, you know, we kept it ourselves and, and then poured all the money in and rehabbed it. And yeah, we were supposed to make $30,000 profit out of that project. And I think we made seven or something. mean, it was, but it was our first flip and, and I put it down as just a

you know, a learning experience, was an education and I made money out of it. So, but then, you know, the flips that came after that, I mean, we basically stopped wholesaling. We just kept up the same marketing and just started buying houses and pouring all the money into building the business. And it grew from, you know, at one stage there, we had 15 houses in rehab all at the same time. You know,

Dylan Silver (20:58.404)
Yeah.

Emanuel Stafilidis (21:03.254)
I remember I had to sell a house to get the profit so that I could pay the interest bill the next month. It was like a $40,000 a month interest bill. was just, it was horrendous. All this gray hair is a result of flipping houses, but it was fantastic. Not every project was great and a lot of them were really good. A lot of them were good, but…

Dylan Silver (21:13.241)
Yeah.

Hehehehe

Emanuel Stafilidis (21:29.87)
The end result of selling a house that you have totally rehabbed is just the best feeling in the world for me. It was fantastic. I really enjoyed it.

Dylan Silver (21:38.127)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:42.031)
Emanuel, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Emanuel Stafilidis (21:47.278)
I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. That would be the best if you search for me on LinkedIn, would be, it’s LinkedIn, Emanuel Stafilidis is my profile. Happy to connect with anyone. And of course we have our website, capablecapital.net.

me through the website. We’ve slowed down the flipping and we’re concentrating now on the buy and hold business and we’re working with investors to help us buy those houses and then we sell them on the seller finance contract and it works really well for everyone. The investors make really good money, we make good money.

other end get a really good

Emanuel Stafilidis (22:47.242)
solving a real problem.

Dylan Silver (22:49.753)
Emanuel, thank you so much for coming on, for talking with us about real estate in Cleveland, real estate in Australia, and on your journey. Thank you for hopping on.

Emanuel Stafilidis (22:59.47)
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.