From W2 to Wealth: Brett Bedwell’s Real Estate Success Story

Dylan Silver (00:01.103)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver, and today on the show I have real estate investor, entrepreneur, based out of Atlanta, Georgia, Brett Bedwell. Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett (00:17.483)
Glad to be here Dylan

Dylan Silver (00:19.319)
It’s a pleasure to have you. We were chopping it up before hopping on here. I got to learn a little bit about your backstory and your real estate business out there. you mentioned, you you’ve been involved in real estate and even studied it in school. Where did the interest in real estate come from initially?

Brett (00:38.989)
Oh man, that’s a loaded question right there. It kind of started when I basically got my first W2 job and realized, oh man, I got to do this for the next 40 years.

Dylan Silver (00:51.663)
Yeah.

Brett (00:54.145)
But I’d say right around the time I got into, so let’s take a step back. I went to University of Georgia, which is about an hour and 15 minutes outside of Atlanta in Athens, Georgia. And I got a degree in accounting back then, it was 2009. We’re all suffering if you’re coming out of school around that time because of the great recession.

So finding a job is all I wanted at that point. I was working at a restaurant out of school for a little bit, Taco Mac for any of y’all that have heard of it in Atlanta. So I was just trying to survive and pay bills, but I got into a public accounting company and got my own desk and got my own office and sat down. was like, man, this is the life. And about a week later, I was like, wait a second, this is my life for the rest of my…

working years, so the best years of my life. So I started exploring, way back then even, that was probably 2014-ish, how am I gonna get out of this? So the first thing comes to mind is, try to max out your retirement accounts and whatnot. So, right, right, that’s what they tell you, invest money. So what I didn’t realize at the time is you’re an outside investor.

Dylan Silver (01:52.122)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (02:06.553)
Yeah. Accounting, right? Yeah.

Brett (02:18.108)
if you’re investing in stocks. You’re not an insider. And so I started doing a little bit of research and about 2015 or 16 or so I started learning about BiggerPockets. You’ve probably heard of it. And Brandon Turner and David Green were the leaders of that podcast and they were kind of just starting out way back then. So I started learning how to analyze real estate deals and

It was pretty simple back then. Brandon Turner’s got this methodology called the four square method. He just looks at revenue, expenses, capex, operating costs, cash flow. He analyzes those things real quick and dirty. I already knew how to do that because I was a CPA, right? I was already crunching numbers for other businesses. It made sense to me to go look at this. Back then, I started saying, wait a second, you can make money renting out properties

and be passive basically and not, you can go to sleep and be making money. Back then Warren Buffett always talked about if you can’t figure out how to make money in your sleep then you’re gonna die broke. I hadn’t worked up the courage yet back then. I just had a buddy, my buddy Sam Crochet, who’s also a real estate investor now. He was

We were meeting every year in Park City. We’ve been friends since we were three years old. So we were meeting up in Park City, Utah to ski every day. And every day after we get off the lifts and come home and we’d in a hot tub and drink some beers, he would ask me, how many properties you’ve invested in now, Brett? And every year I would say, just one. So I bought a property in 2014 as a place to live and was renting out a room. Didn’t know I was.

doing what they call house hacking at the time and building some equity and having someone else pay down that loan for me, which was nice. flash forward back to having conversations with Sam, every year I’d show up in that hot tub and I would say, have one property. And then so by 2019, I had been fed up with his questions. So that’s around the time I met my wife, Emily, and she also had a property, but it had an HOA.

Dylan Silver (04:09.177)
I’ll speak.

Brett (04:37.707)
So we couldn’t even rent out her property. Our initial thought was, okay, let’s rent out my property and let’s rent out your property. So we decided to sell her property and that gave us the first capital we needed to invest in some rental properties in Atlanta. So we started looking in 2019 into 2020 and we decided to buy our first rental properties. Ended up being some of the best investments we’ve ever made, obviously, because of COVID, doubling prices everywhere.

Dylan Silver (05:03.397)
Yeah.

Brett (05:07.473)
But so I started actually racking up some momentum with Emily and we did all our renovations on our own. We I would do the plumbing, electrical. Her mom would come in and help us do the floors. know, do we do countertops, we do paint cabinets, anything you can name. We were doing it DIY, man. That’s how you build credibility in that industry is sweat equity in the beginning. But so.

Flash forward to now, we’ve got seven properties, six in Atlanta and one on Lake Hartwell in Georgia, North Georgia, and we’re turning into an Airbnb right now. We’re trying to systematize things now though. That’s where we’re at.

Dylan Silver (05:50.853)
I want to back up a bit. mentioned you were listening to Bigger Pockets. That was kind of your education as far as learning a little bit more about the real estate space. But was there real estate in your blood? Did you know family that was involved in it? What made you think real estate is going to be a good option for me versus so many other paths?

Brett (06:13.706)
So that’s funny you said that actually my my great-grandfather was a builder and He actually lost all his money. So he was He was building houses and then he was the bank too So he would let people do owner financing on the properties he built and during the Great Recession He lost everything he had so That was the end of the the bedwell family owning real estate until Brett came along Hang on one second. I’m gonna grab a charger

But before that it was really, I mean after that I mean it was really just me trying to learn about how you can get out of a W-2 and that’s kind of where it started.

Dylan Silver (07:00.175)
think it’s interesting, right? Because even fields that are related to real estate or to finance, know, tax strategy, people don’t always hop into real estate. But I had a, I wasn’t an accountant, I was working for Nissan. And I had a feeling, because I was seeing people who were 20, 30 years my senior, and I was not.

really thrilled with what I was seeing. I was like, they’re making a lot of money, don’t seem to have tons of savings. I don’t know how they’re going to retire. I know how much I think it costs to retire. You know, seems like it costs like two to $4 million. I don’t know, maybe more. I’m not an accountant. But I’m like, when I’m older, it’s going to be more than that. How am I going to do this? And so I was also looking at not owning a house and I had what I thought was really great circumstances. I had lived in this really nice

apartment in San Antonio had this nice car. remember thinking I’d made it because we had two pools at the apartment complex and two gyms. And I live next door to Topgolf. And I was like, this is amazing. Yeah, that was for me. I was like, I can’t do better than this. And but what I was seeing was every year they would raise the rent by like $50. And I was like, grateful that it wasn’t raising it by 100. But I was also thinking, you know,

Brett (08:03.189)
That’s fancy, huh?

Dylan Silver (08:20.741)
It does feel like real estate was stacked not in my favor. So I was thinking, I’m working all these hours for Nissan, like 12, 14, legitimately 12, 14 hour days, Monday through Friday, and then eight hours on Sunday at the time. And I was also feeling like, is this, is this it? Is this it? Is it like, it was a kind of an existential pressure that was put on me. And I would just be wiped out, going home at the end of the day and, uh,

thinking like, well, what do I do from here? And it was honestly, that that it’s the funniest thing, if they weren’t increasing my rents $50 every year, I don’t think I would be in real estate. But I saw them doing that. And it got me to think like, how come all of these however many hundreds or 1000s of people are just carte blanche being like, yeah, we’ll pay more this year. And I was asking people, did they raise your rents to Yeah, they raise our rent, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Brett (09:12.456)
.

Dylan Silver (09:17.081)
And I was thinking, well, if they’re doing this with everybody and no one’s putting up that much of a resistance or like we can’t, I can’t beat them. How do I join them? And so I remember I started putting in applications to companies involved in real estate and ended up getting hired at the time. And that was how I got into the real estate space.

Brett (09:38.039)
Yeah, I mean

It’ll change your mindset real quick when you have to go into an office, know, and you’re only getting 3 % raises per year, but they’re increasing your rent 5%. It’s like, okay, well you telling me I’m gonna take a pay cut for working this hard every day when I’m this young, you know, and they really get you when you’re young, right? That’s when everybody’s fucked up.

Dylan Silver (09:56.836)
Yeah.

I think we you probably had that similar it was it was I was looking around too because I’m 31 now but at the time I was like 26 27 28 when I was really realizing what was to me like a pressure I was feeling this like stress for lack of a better word and I was looking around to the people my age younger and older and I was saying like are they stressed out about this too or is it just me?

And I think it’s a unique thing, you probably share this experience, where not everyone has that, sinking feeling, but I definitely had. It sounds, seems like you had that same kind of idea, like, I hope I’m not just doing this forever.

Brett (10:39.567)
You know, I think we’re kind of a special kind of person. I’d say 10 % of us probably think like me and you Dylan. And 90 % of the world just want to go to work, get it done, come home, and then, and that’s it. It takes a special mind to say, am I really going to spend the rest of my life doing this or am I going to try something different?

Dylan Silver (11:01.829)
I want to talk pivot a bit here, Brett, about scaling. So you mentioned you house hacked that first situation kind of without realizing it was house hacking.

Now you’ve got seven properties in the portfolio. But also because you’re an accountant, and that’s your background, we talked before hopping on here about some of the ways that you’re analyzing the market and trends. you mentioned going to Austin, Texas. I’m in Dallas for a conference here recently. What things have you done to scale? And what are you excited about in the future of your real estate business?

Brett (11:43.079)
Good question. So really scaling has just popped into our mind in the past year, pretty much. We’ve just acquired enough properties to where it’s pushed us into an uncomfortable position. Because here’s the fact, when you’re in that in-between stage, between getting your first property and having the eye-opening moment of this is real estate versus you go all the way on the other end of the spectrum and you’re a builder.

you know, you’re making lots of cash flow and you’re financially free. There’s this middle ground. We’re stuck in the middle right now. So we’ve not reduced our work, which is the goal of real estate, right? I think when we got into real estate, everybody can agree. It wasn’t to work more hours. It wasn’t to, you know, bust your butt more at the end of the day. But that’s what you end up doing sometimes for the sake of generating more income or

you know, down your costs. In the beginning, sweat equity is a real asset, to be honest. And that’s how, you know, we were able to do some of these projects is going to Home Depot five times a day, doing it on the weekends and the nights over and over again. Like that’s the part people miss. And that’s why a lot of people don’t invest in real estate is because it’s not passive. Even though the IRS says it’s a passive investment, it is by far the most, you know,

Dylan Silver (12:43.353)
Yeah.

Brett (13:11.68)
active investment of the passive investments. So going back to your systems question, we haven’t really made a necessity because I’ve always enjoyed doing those DIY tasks. We were always DIYers. I was always trying to figure out how do I, I wanted to know, you know, I had a curiosity, how do I run plumbing? How do I run electrical? How do I put drywall up? How do I, you know, there’s this extra space in this house. How do we do it? And

Dylan Silver (13:14.775)
Yeah, lots of investments.

Brett (13:41.09)
Now my time has become more of an asset more than ever because I have a child now. I’m 38 years old. So we had a kid in December. I want to spend time with Blair over spending time at a house on a night or weekend. Emily’s not with me anymore because she’s got to watch the baby. So that’s changed our philosophies a lot. We try to utilize chat GPT a lot and say, how can I systematize my business?

Scaling issue is how do we get our time back right so right? I’m At first I was looking at third-party Property managers realized okay, maybe that’s not the sweet spot It is the most passive direction right now But is it gonna be good for me scaling my business and the answer to that was maybe I need to look into hiring somebody so right now we’re looking into hiring either a virtual assistant or we’re gonna

Dylan Silver (14:15.62)
Yeah.

Brett (14:38.726)
hire somebody local who can take over all the long-term property management. And then for the Airbnb, we’re trying to use software to help us systematize that. We want to use hospitable, which was somebody who was at the REI Summit that we met. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s like Guestly and Logify. There’s a few different softwares out there for running Airbnbs, but they’re critical as far as using AI and

Dylan Silver (15:04.335)
Mm-hmm.

Brett (15:08.005)
automating the whole process. So the past couple days I’ve put a lot of work into automating questions on there. So just those kinds of automations make it easier to scale. If I’m not spending time answering questions to people checking into our Airbnb, then I have more time to look for deals. So a lot of what they talk about at REI Summit too is like, do I spend time on the $5,000 an hour jobs and less on the $50 an hour jobs?

Well, to be honest, deal finding is really the most important and the thing that’s gonna make you scale. Finding deal, meet your criteria and analyzing the hell out of them. Because you can hire somebody to change this fan, right? Let’s put this fan up. 50 bucks an hour. I promise you, you will get somebody to do something for $50 an hour. So the key is to take yourself, in the beginning it’s how do I work those $50 an hour jobs?

Dylan Silver (15:45.754)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:54.659)
Yeah.

Brett (16:06.681)
to build sweat equity and as you grow it becomes how do I offload those to other people so I can do the tasks that keep me growing instead of just surviving.

Dylan Silver (16:17.327)
You know, Brett, you mentioned a couple topics that I think a lot of people may be thinking about but not implementing yet. And then you also mentioned that you’re starting to implement some of these. You mentioned AI, chat GPT. You mentioned a tool that you’re using for the Airbnbs. You know, when I think about all of this, I think about really

people have to make a decision between how much they want to manage everything themselves, because they may take some pride in that, versus their desire to scale their business. I’ll give you an example. So I was talking with someone who specifically did Airbnb management for other people. This person was based out of, I believe it was South Florida, and they didn’t do the cleaning, they didn’t do, you know.

Brett (16:59.912)
So, thank

Dylan Silver (17:04.343)
the staging of the Airbnb, all they did was the communications and the advertising. And that was a whole business based out of that. And so, you I was asking him and some other people, you know, what makes a good Airbnb host in general? And they said, well, actually you have to like to host people. And so what’s interesting is liking hosting people isn’t necessarily easy to be done at scale because now you’re, if you have, you know, three Airbnbs,

Brett (17:26.7)
So, thank

Dylan Silver (17:34.275)
you can kind of treat it like a hobby. But if you’ve got 50, it’s hard to be dialed in on each one. So you do have to give up the reins a little bit, whether it’s to AI or whether it’s to someone that you hire or whether it’s to a third party. And that process can both seem like a lot of overhead, especially if people are scaling and maybe bootstrapping. And it can also feel like, well, this isn’t how we’ve done things to this point, but…

Brett (17:56.283)
So, thank

Dylan Silver (18:02.381)
just being a real estate operator. And the thing that I’ve noticed is like continuity similarities between high level real estate operators as they have the ability to adapt like every five years, it seems like strategies that work before COVID don’t necessarily work now. Fixing flips, it might be getting harder to do so people are doing new builds. You’ve got one Airbnb and you know, six, seven rental properties. Well, how do we get people involved so that we’re not managing all this stuff ourselves?

Brett (18:31.186)
Right, yeah, I think it’s important to analyze macro and micro trends along with, you know, figuring out what you’re good at and what niches are available in your markets. I mean, there’s just a million ways to analyze real estate. And that’s honestly what I love about it. And going back to buying stocks, right?

That’s what everybody wants to do. Why do they want to do that? Because it’s 100 % passive. You literally just sit and hope for it to go up and down or maybe it gives you dividend. Well, if it’s that passive, you can expect it to give you lower returns at the end of the day. Doesn’t matter what it is, right? The more you’re involved with it, the more ROI you’re gonna get. So real estate, that’s an insider’s game. mean, think about it. You have, I’m telling you about

I know what the permits are gonna do, especially in Atlanta for 2026 and 2027. That’s insider information. That would be considered illegal if you knew that for stocks, right? Yeah, it’s called insider trading. Like you have information that other people don’t have, that’s against the law. Well, real estate, I can go up to a realtor, I can get information from somebody local. They can tell me, this brand new park is going in over in this area.

Dylan Silver (19:32.845)
It was spirit eyes,

Brett (19:50.881)
that’s gonna drive up property values. That’s insider information. If I can utilize that to go buy a single family home in that area, or if I know about regulations, I mean, it’s just endless that you can get so much knowledge about real estate in particular areas and create niches. But here’s the thing, like you said, it goes in and out of, know, okay, we took advantage of our time. Like Atlanta, we bought single family homes.

when they were $250,000, now they’re worth 500, interest rates have gone up. We had our time for that, right? And here’s another thing, we’ve got a lot of mentors too in our lives, that’s an important part of real estate investing. I’ve got mentors not only in the public realm, like people that work under Brandon Turner and his network, we all talk to each other.

On top of that, have people in the Emory Network in Atlanta, and they’re all real estate investors. One of my best mentors, his name’s Jeff, he runs an investment firm in Atlanta, and I meet with him quarterly. I set that up, and I was just persistent about it, and he knew I valued the information he was gonna give me, and he challenges me. He tells me I’m unsophisticated, buying single-family homes. That’s what you need to hear to keep growing, though.

It’s the truth. If you want to get bigger and better, the more properties you acquire, the more people are going to come along and be like, how did you do that? You don’t need to. Okay, don’t listen to that. That’s not going to help you. What’s going to help you is go into the people that are worth $100 million who are juggling 500 AUM and ask them, how did you get here? How do I get here? And not only utilizing those people,

Dylan Silver (21:22.511)
Yeah.

Brett (21:41.736)
Utilizing chat GPT to build these systems if you can utilize chat GPT say give me all you have to do is prompt it to say give me a game plan to be at 50 million dollars net worth in 10 years if you’re realistic with it It’ll say I think you can do this and it’ll build you a game plan. You can say today What do I do tomorrow? What do I do? It’ll give you day by day. Are you gonna go do it? Who knows? That’s the question

Dylan Silver (22:08.613)
love that. have some chat GPT prompts that I’ve done myself that are, I think, know, what would I do without some of these things? I’ve got one that I said, adopt the persona of the top performing real estate broker in Texas. I’m a newly licensed agent. I’m also a wholesaler. I’m going to present you some situations, some deals. I’d like you to assist me in evaluating them and I’ll provide feedback as necessary. this, you know, chat GPT.

Brokers, phenomenal. It’s amazing. I’ve even gotten more into land looking at infill lots and modular homes, which you talked about before hopping on here because of that. But Brett, are coming up on time here. Where can folks go maybe to reach out to you or to learn more about what you got going on out there in Atlanta?

Brett (22:57.247)
Yeah, we’re on Instagram, redheaded real estate. So we have properties on Airbnb too, and we’re still growing, but I think the main place to find us is Instagram. And we try to post as much as we can on there about what we’re doing. And if you want to reach out, feel free to DM us and we’d love to hear from you.

Dylan Silver (23:23.653)
Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Brett (23:27.477)
Thank you Dylan, I appreciate it