Real Estate Real Talk: Chad & Christie Elliott Share Their Secrets

Dylan Silver (00:01.054)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have husband and wife, business partners, Chad and Christie Elliott. Chad is a pastor, Christie is a lender. Guys, welcome to the show.

Chad And Christie Elliott (00:16.814)
Thanks Dylan. Thank you so much.

Dylan Silver (00:18.504)
You guys are in Georgia. Remind me which part of Georgia.

Chad And Christie Elliott (00:21.944)
So just north, about 45 minutes north of Atlanta, in a town called Canton.

Dylan Silver (00:27.336)
Is that still considered Greater Atlanta, or is this too far to be considered Greater Atlanta?

Chad And Christie Elliott (00:32.738)
No, we’re actually like, we’re the last, really the last town that’s considered Metro Atlanta. Yeah. Okay.

Dylan Silver (00:38.11)
So I’m in Metro Dallas and I grew up in New Jersey. So I grew up 27 miles from New York City, but we did not at all consider ourselves New York City. We might as well have been in a different world. I’m now basically an hour from Dallas, but it’s Metro Dallas. So it’s interesting how things change.

Chad And Christie Elliott (00:47.886)
Right.

Chad And Christie Elliott (00:53.334)
Yeah, yeah. I don’t know that we consider ourselves Metro Atlanta up here. not. We still are, technically.

Dylan Silver (00:59.05)
I mean, I’m closer to Oklahoma than I am to Dallas, but I’m in a town called Denton. Any Dentonite will tell you we’re Metro Texas. And I say, wow, Texas, we do things. I was from San Antonio, lived in San Antonio five years, and now Dallas up here, but just things are different. But I digress. I always like to start off at the top of the show, guys, by asking how did you get into the real estate space?

Chad And Christie Elliott (01:06.07)
Okay. Yeah, I know we’re good.

Chad And Christie Elliott (01:27.31)
Pretty good story. You want to start with that? Well, when we first got married, we were young. He was 22 and I was 20. we got pregnant right away. And so he was working and I was staying home. We had very little income. And my brother invited us to buy property to out together. And so we did. And we ended up buying three over the next few years. It was actually not a great experience.

We had some shady lenders back in that time around 04. So we kind of got dragged into things that we really didn’t want to at that point. But we were able to redeem the whole situation eventually. Yeah. So we. That’s how we got. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (02:09.34)
So that was how you got in. The family.

Chad And Christie Elliott (02:12.77)
Yeah, were luckily like her, like she said, like her father let us live in one of his own properties for free. We just had to pay taxes and keep it up and all that kind of stuff. So instead of taking that money and putting it anywhere else that we would normally pay for rent and whatever, we started sticking in in real estate.

Dylan Silver (02:33.938)
So Chad, do you come from a real estate family? Christie, it sounds like your family was involved in some level.

Chad And Christie Elliott (02:40.43)
Yeah, my dad had a few properties. was more like when he would buy something, he would just never sell it. But he didn’t really have it. And this is kind of where we started to like, just were like, okay, we have a rental. But you know, you’re not really making the most out of it, just keeping it and holding it and not doing anything else with it. You know, not really understanding the tax benefit from it or having a plan to of what to do to grow it over time. So our first ones were kind of a

Dylan Silver (03:01.951)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (03:08.704)
not necessarily waste because they did help, you know, give us a very slow on ramp.

Honestly, part of our experiences from back then is what made me want to be a lender because we had such a bad experience and but I loved the numbers and working out and problem solving. So it became a good fit later down the road. And the thing for us is like we just we didn’t have anybody that was speaking into that for us. The only the only people that spoke into us weren’t scaling their own businesses. They they had just bought some rental property or they had a house left over they moved out of and they just rented it to a family or something like that. So it wasn’t really

Dylan Silver (03:20.362)
Hmm.

Chad And Christie Elliott (03:45.776)
being a business of real estate, they just might have had a property or two and they would rent it out. So it wasn’t scaling and we just didn’t have anybody speaking into that for us.

Dylan Silver (03:55.402)
So then you saw something, it sounds like Christie, you saw something with the lender. You said, I didn’t like this experience. And then Chad, this is probably very new to you. So you’re like, oh, this is kind of cool.

Chad And Christie Elliott (04:04.738)
Yeah. Well, and so in our entrepreneur anyway, I’m the risk taker in the, in the relationship. So like it was fun. Like it, you know, it was just, it was a blast and she was like, my gosh, what are we getting into? but you know, it was a, it was a great learning. There were great learning experiences for sure. that, know, that then led into us wanting more. Like we just, we wanted to do more and finally realized that, man, this, this thing can actually turn into a legit business.

Dylan Silver (04:33.87)
I have two questions from there. So first, the importance of family and real estate because you were able to effectively house hack. It wasn’t like you bought a duplex, but you were living with family and saving money. There’s a lot of people that don’t have that opportunity and a lot of people who have that opportunity but aren’t really, you know…

Chad And Christie Elliott (04:42.146)
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.

No.

Dylan Silver (04:52.05)
ripping the cover off the ball, so to speak, and saving as much as they can and looking at different opportunities. know, Christie had the background family, maybe had a couple properties, so there was that there. For you, Chad, this was entirely new, and then you had the bad experience from the lender, but all in all, you kind of had the foundational ability to start something new. Christie, at what point did you get into lending yourself?

Chad And Christie Elliott (04:56.472)
Right.

Chad And Christie Elliott (05:16.142)
Just five years ago. So in 2020 we added on to our house and my mother-in-law moved in with us and I was like we’ve got enough adults in the house, know, especially after COVID and we were all stuck inside. I was like I’m I want to work full time now. So that was when I made that transition. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:33.874)
And Chad, while you were doing real estate activities before then, before this five year period, what did the business look like for you?

Chad And Christie Elliott (05:41.538)
Yeah, had, yeah, we had, we bought that stuff along before then, and we actually ended up selling all three of those properties. we would, unfortunately, we would probably tell you now we wish we wouldn’t have sold them, but the neighborhood had kind of gone downhill. We had a couple of bad tenants and again, nobody’s speaking into, you know, this is how you overcome these things. So we felt like it was time for us to get out. We got out and invested in a few more things, businesses and you know, whatever from there.

Dylan Silver (05:51.359)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (06:02.954)
Turn.

Chad And Christie Elliott (06:11.472)
And then we ended up coming back into real estate with a commercial property that she actually found from a, I think a real estate agent that she- Yeah, I had signed up for some, you know, list some agent to send their new listings or whatever. And so it popped up in Cherokee County. was like, this looks like a really good deal. And this was at the end of 2021. And so when I started working full-time, I had only worked part-time.

We basically just kept saving my income for investing because we knew we weren’t where we wanted to be to retire. And I was 38 at the time, so you would have been about…

I 39 and 41 when we bought that property. And so the end of 21, at that point we just had the commercial duplex. And then like 22, everything started snowballing. Then we got into short-term rentals from there.

Dylan Silver (07:06.524)
So 21 onward, kind of the business pivot and you really start to focus in on how can we really, really make the most of real estate.

Chad And Christie Elliott (07:13.486)
That’s it. Yeah. We got serious about it at that point and realized that we could we could really make a go at this.

Dylan Silver (07:20.874)
like to ask people this because you were involved in real estate for years, But it started to change in 21. Chris, you found this deal through, it sounds like a realtor, a new listing. What was it about that time period that made y’all decide we’re gonna really double, triple down into this?

Chad And Christie Elliott (07:25.08)
We were. Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (07:39.886)
We had bought this ice house business, know, like one of the standalone ice machines, like self-serve, and we were constantly having to go fix it and, and, you know, we improved it and then we were able to sell it for profit. So we had this little bit of money sitting there and we were like, what are we going to do with this? And then we found the commercial duplex. So that was half of the down payment for that property.

Dylan Silver (07:44.873)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (08:02.19)
And then that was the end of 21. We purchased that. And then the beginning of 22. Of course, in 2020, when I first became a lender and rates were so low, we refinanced into a 15-year loan on our house, a 2 % rate. It was great. And then we were like, what the heck are we doing? Equity is not making us money.

Dylan Silver (08:13.353)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (08:23.278)
So January of 22, we took out $200,000 in our house. We did a cash out refi and started investing in real estate. And that’s we like. We are, yes. We haven’t made it the last part though. It’s funny, yeah, we haven’t made it to the last part to refinance yet. From all our stuff, we still kind of, we’re waiting for that. We’re waiting for that.

Dylan Silver (08:33.65)
So you guys must be big fans of like, Burr.

I think that that…

Dylan Silver (08:46.698)
Well, you’re three, what is it, four R’s? So you’re three of the R’s there. You know, when I think about budding real estate entrepreneurs, I’ve had so many people on this show here. It’s one thing to be able to do real estate for a handful of years. It’s another thing to be able to do it for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, right? And you’re coming from 2021 when y’all really doubled down, tripled down in the business to now, different, different market now, right?

Chad And Christie Elliott (08:49.806)
Here we are, yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (09:16.321)
yeah, totally different market now. Absolutely. for sure. Sorry, go ahead.

Dylan Silver (09:18.76)
And so, I was gonna say as a lender, it’s completely different.

Chad And Christie Elliott (09:23.632)
yeah, it’s really funny. And that’s what I was going to say. Like our properties have interest rates from 4 % to eight and an eighth, think. know, I’m like, we, we’ve bought with all of it. And I tell people all the time, I’m like, you can make money in real estate no matter what the interest rates are. So you just have to look at the whole deal. Cause I think people get so scared just looking at that one thing and it’s, you know, it matters, but it’s not the only factor to consider.

Dylan Silver (09:49.17)
I think it’s gotta be huge having a lender and wife who is in the same team as you. It’s gotta be like, this can’t get any, I have the best source of information on rates and everything.

Chad And Christie Elliott (09:57.453)
nothing.

Chad And Christie Elliott (10:02.112)
I recommend it to anybody.

Dylan Silver (10:06.236)
I’m saying if you’re a real estate entrepreneur, mean, I got my real estate license. I really didn’t plan to get and use my real estate license. I’ll probably pick up a couple listings, but I’m really more passionate about investing and wholesaling.

Chad And Christie Elliott (10:15.384)
Sure.

Chad And Christie Elliott (10:20.098)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:20.552)
Honestly, it sometimes comes into conflict because if you’re an investor, there’s a little bit of a conflict there. But I’ve always said, man, I wish I had someone on my team who was a lender. When you were going through that process, Christie, was this a thing like, hey, this could really help our business as well? Or did you just see this opportunity?

Chad And Christie Elliott (10:39.572)
It… I don’t know, it’s…

It was really like just a personality fit that I have always felt like a jack of all trades, but a master of none. And it’s like a conflict in me because I love the numbers in the analytical side. So I had started studying accounting at one point and the numbers just put me to sleep. Like the homework, I was like, I can’t do this. This is horrible. So I found mortgages and it was numbers and people. it’s a perfect fit. then, you know, just the experience that we had been through not, not enjoying it at all and getting really

Dylan Silver (11:04.03)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (11:12.132)
bad information. We were at the closing table and we were purchasing it as an investment, had told the guy all the way through, were, and then they were like, it says that you’re going to live here. And we were like, what? Like, it was so shady. So, you know, that was obviously, like I said, part of my passion and wanting to teach people and do a better job.

Dylan Silver (11:34.57)
Chad, when you’re looking at deals now, what’s the conversation that you have maybe in your head like, hey, I know Christie’s gonna think this is a good deal, this is a bad deal, know, what’s the conversation like between y’all? you like, hey, what kind of a rate can we get on this? Is this something that’s financeable?

Chad And Christie Elliott (11:51.574)
Yeah, and the funny thing is, even our last property, our last short-term rental that we found, we’re laying in the bed early one morning. We both have our phones looking at Redfin and Zillow. And literally, we find this property almost at the same time, and we look at each other, did you see that? And that’s really how it goes. And I say no every time. we can’t do it again.

Dylan Silver (12:17.438)
So you, Christie, you’re like the more, you know, less risk take, Chad is the, let’s dive in, let’s do this.

Chad And Christie Elliott (12:21.838)
Yes. Which makes us such a great team. Because I’m like, go, go, go, let’s make this happen. where are we going to find our next one? And she’s like, OK, well, let’s slow down just a little bit. Let’s analyze this. Let’s look at all the details. And so it makes a really good team. You need the saver and the spender. You need the gas and the brake.

Dylan Silver (12:41.084)
Stay away from the spender, Gaston. Yeah, you do. I can’t imagine a better partner and a better team. I really can’t. I can’t. I think a lot of people really struggle with this side of the business,

Chad And Christie Elliott (12:47.854)
It’s fun. We have a lot of fun.

Yeah, for sure. Well, and that’s tough like I mean we’ve got multiple couples right now Just like just people friends and that are in our church and all that kind of stuff that we’re walking through this clients that of hers that we’re we’re helping Them get started and and it is a lot of trying to figure out the roles That each person is going to play especially a couple that’s doing it together And who’s going to take what task and who’s going to make what decisions and things like that? I think if you can figure out that piece man, it makes it a whole lot

better like from a business standpoint, but a whole lot more enjoyable. Yeah, because we always tell people like they’ll say what’s the first thing to do and we’re like you need to steady your butt off.

Educate yourself. Educate. And someone needs to geek out about all the details. So you need someone that’s going to geek out about each side of it. that’s really, I think, one of the biggest questions you have to ask yourself when you start it is, can I enjoy learning about this? Because if you just don’t enjoy it at all, you’re going to be a really bad property manager. You’re not going to make good money because you’re just not going to make it the best that you can. That’s right.

Dylan Silver (13:45.641)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (13:56.05)
How hard was that test, Christie? It’s RMLO, right? That’s the test, right?

Chad And Christie Elliott (13:59.278)
For her it wasn’t that hard. She’s real smart. I like to make silly phrases to remember all the guidelines so I sailed right through it. was fine.

Dylan Silver (14:05.95)
Okay, that’s good. was everything.

Dylan Silver (14:14.408)
I tell people this, the Texas real estate exam is so hard. It’s so darn hard. I’ve spoken with brokers on this show from other states who took the Texas exam and they failed it. They’re brokers. I said that this Texas exam is no joke. So I’m like, I kinda wanna get my loan originator license, but I’m like, if it’s anything like that, I’m not ready for that headache.

Chad And Christie Elliott (14:28.344)
Yeah.

Wow.

Chad And Christie Elliott (14:36.536)
Yeah. And it’s nothing, you you learn all the laws, but it’s really nothing about what you actually do in the job. They just want to it. yeah. It’s just a hoop to jump through. That’s all it It is. Like, the company is going to keep you compliant. Yeah, for sure. Man.

Dylan Silver (14:43.723)
yeah, here’s all the laws, but don’t use it. You’re not an attorney.

Dylan Silver (14:52.232)
You mentioned a couple different verticals within the real estate space. Commercial, know, short term. What’s your buy box right now? Or what properties are you looking at? Or is it very open-ended?

Chad And Christie Elliott (15:03.202)
Well, we feel like we’ve kind of, so we’ve got four short-term rental cabins in Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is about an hour, 15 minutes north of us. So we’ve got that and we feel like that’s, we’ll probably stick with those four in that side of our portfolio for a while until we change our structure.

We’ve got the commercial property and we would love to find more commercial property. Like if we could, if we could discover some more of those things, we just haven’t come across a ton of those deals lately, especially like the one we have. But right now just, we want to continue to grow our residential side and even get into multifamily. That’s, that’s the thing that we just haven’t broached yet is, is what that looks like for us. I think I feel like that’s our next step. Yeah. I mean, we have a

A duplex, I guess two duplexes. Because one house that rents is a duplex and then a triplex. And then we have another triplex, but it’s not rentable. It’s in bad situation. We’re going to tear it down and rebuild it into a quadplex. I want to get into like 16 unit apartment buildings and stuff like that.

Dylan Silver (16:07.7)
Now

Dylan Silver (16:11.934)
You mentioned short term, is this Airbnb? So for folks who are looking at Airbnb versus these other avenues, Airbnb is more intensive as far as changeover and as far as dealing with communications and so on and so forth, but you’re also potentially less likely to deal with squatters, and there’s also potentially more revenue. What’s your feedback on the model?

Chad And Christie Elliott (16:14.446)
That’s right. Yep.

Chad And Christie Elliott (16:32.814)
There is.

We actually love it. And again, I think it goes back to the fact that we just love real estate.

We love what real estate does for people and that’s just one of those things like it provides a great opportunity for people to come to a beautiful place to hang out on a beautiful piece of property, know, have some great family time, rest and all that kind of stuff. So we love that. We love even the hospitality side of it. So yeah, we’ve really enjoyed that part. we enjoy having the flexibility to stay there ourselves and you know, have our friends go and stay. So there are some perks.

Dylan Silver (17:01.128)
Huge.

Chad And Christie Elliott (17:10.894)
we don’t very much because they’re booked all the time which is great.

Dylan Silver (17:15.399)
People don’t realize how big Airbnb is as a brand as a company. They’re all over the entire world and like it is remarkable. You go pretty much anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, you know, you will find Airbnbs. I was traveling in Latin America. They don’t call it Airbnb. They call it B &B.

and they’re all over the place. so here, you know, we’re looking at potentially, you know, there’s threats on the horizon. I mean, it’s happened in Dallas where, in Addison specifically, I don’t know if it’s still like this now, but two years ago was the case where they at least temporarily, you know, banned Airbnbs. But having, you know, a diversified portfolio and then also the ability to shift that maybe to corporate housing or long term, I think can also help people, you know, hedge against that.

Chad And Christie Elliott (17:53.346)
Yep.

Chad And Christie Elliott (18:03.982)
Correct. Yeah, that’s right. Well, and for us, being in a market that has been a vacation market for decades, that becomes the lifeblood of the economy in Blue Ridge for sure. it’s not one of the big ones, not like Atlinburg or the Florida coast and stuff like that. we have found that it’s a stable, solid vacation rental town.

that we’ve done really well in. And it’s great because they rent year round. Year round. We have a couple of months that are like down season, but they’re booked 80 % of the time. So during that. Well, we don’t get too much. We don’t get too much snow here in Georgia. Not much. Maybe. Last year we got a little bit. Yeah, yeah, not much. That’s not too much of a

Dylan Silver (18:40.137)
Yeah.

in the heavy snow.

Really? There’s no- okay. I’m wrong.

So I’m in Dallas, right? I figured Georgia Dallas, but now that I’m thinking about it, you know, we got so much snow this year. I said, where am I? I said, I moved up from San Antonio to Dallas and now there’s more snow. I was worried about our animals. I said, God. But you know, I’m curious that area where y’all are at, are there a lot of out of state investors in that area? We get a ton over here. Do you see this trend as well?

Chad And Christie Elliott (18:59.586)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (19:06.606)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (19:22.988)
know that we feel we have felt that very much here and I don’t really know honestly just to be honest I don’t know I don’t know that I can answer that question with any certainty.

Dylan Silver (19:31.178)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (19:35.892)
Christie, are most of your clients in that metro area coming to you for lending? Are they from all over the state? Are they from out of the state?

Chad And Christie Elliott (19:44.441)
So a lot of the realtors that I have established relationships with, know, I have some people in Gatlinburg and all around here, you know. So if they’re pulling in people looking at investment properties, like I just worked with a guy from South Carolina. We actually walked him and his wife through the whole process. It was a lot of fun. So yeah, I I end up working with people from different states that are just investing.

Dylan Silver (20:08.692)
Do you do any of the DSCR loans, Kristi?

Chad And Christie Elliott (20:11.17)
Yes, I’m doing one right now. My company’s pretty great. We have a ton of investors for DSCR in-house and we do all of our underwriting in-house. So it’s a pretty sick deal. We have a lot of great options.

Dylan Silver (20:25.332)
We’re about to see some really interesting things in this space.

Chad And Christie Elliott (20:28.994)
Yes. Yeah, we are.

Dylan Silver (20:31.476)
You know, I think about what we’ve seen just the way things have changed over the last couple of years and then the way lenders are going all across the country now with Zoom and it seems like every lender that I talk with as clients in practically every other state. Do you see and do both of you all see any I mean no one has a crystal ball but do you see any trends in this way? Like for instance, are you you getting more people saying I want to buy out of the state or you know I’m looking at deals elsewhere or do think we’re still pretty far away from that where the average person may

Chad And Christie Elliott (20:44.803)
down.

Dylan Silver (21:01.44)
consider investing across state lines.

Chad And Christie Elliott (21:05.805)
I don’t know that I’ve run into, I mean, the people that we talk to, I mean, we’re helping them buy or invest here. And I don’t know that…

Dylan Silver (21:14.12)
Yeah.

Chad And Christie Elliott (21:16.686)
We have been connected with anybody like that. That’s something we would like to grow in. I have some connections. I helped a guy local buy a property in Mobile, Alabama. when you find out about just a good fit for somebody and what the house that he was able to purchase down there, he had a low budget and it was a little over $100,000. But it’s a great rental property, great cash flow. So it’s nice to know about those pockets that you can point people to.

Dylan Silver (21:46.5)
I actually think that this makes a really good investment opportunity for out-of-state investors in this area because if it’s not inundated already with out-of-state investors, that means it’s an opportunity. Here in Texas, so many parts of Texas, I can say the same thing for Florida. You have investors from like all over the country and sometimes the world. So you really never know. You’re having to speak multiple languages on any given day, right? And so I tend to think like these areas where I’ve had conversations with people that I never would have thought of like Iowa,

Chad And Christie Elliott (22:02.254)
Yeah.

Sure. Yeah.

Right.

Dylan Silver (22:16.404)
you know, Cleveland, right? I would have thought that, you know, in Georgia area there’s maybe more, but I’m, guess, pleasantly surprised that there’s not. I’m actually maybe going to look at buying some motivated seller leads in that area, just based off the feedback that you guys have given me here today.

Chad And Christie Elliott (22:18.648)
Right.

Dylan Silver (22:34.739)
We are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Chad And Christie Elliott (22:40.172)
You want to talk about your? Well, I’m on all social platforms as closed.by.Christie. I’m at Cornerstone First Mortgage and I’m sure you can Google and find me there. And we’ve got Instagram and Facebook at Life Legacy Plan for both of those that you can find us and some of our content that we post up there too. Yeah, we’ve been documenting some of our journey.

Dylan Silver (23:06.42)
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Chad And Christie Elliott (23:10.09)
Dylan, thanks for having us. Appreciate it.