5 Secrets to Real Estate Mastery: Insights from Investor Laura Hicks

Kristen Knapp (00:18.058)
Welcome back to the real estate pros podcast. I’m Kristen Knapp and I’m here with Laura Hicks. Sorry. I keep stumbling over all my words this morning. I’m so sorry. I’m going to do it again. Welcome back to the real estate pros podcast. I’m Kristin Knapp and I’m here with Laura Hicks, real estate investor working on fix and flips. So I’m excited to have you here and we’re going to get a little bit into your business. So

Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your business.

Laura Hicks (00:51.501)
Thank you for very much for having me. And I was going to say, my husband and I have been doing real estate for about 20 years. And I was going to say what I’ll call the newer version of it. We have been doing for the last five or so. And what I mean by that is when we started, we believe what realtors told us, which was,

Kristen Knapp (00:52.75)
Happy Friday.

Laura Hicks (01:19.201)
buy it and eventually it will cash flow. And so that was the old way of doing things, right? And then we read Rich Dad Poor Dad and got involved in a couple of real estate and communities and learned that if you don’t buy it right, it never gets better.

Kristen Knapp (01:39.566)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that’s definitely, yeah, it’s definitely moved towards that for sure. And tell me more about specifically your business and what you do with holding and flipping and all of that.

Laura Hicks (01:52.673)
Yes. there’s currently a couple of things that we do, which is fix and flips is the primary part of what we do. And where we are in the country in the Pacific Northwest, there is no shortage of deferred maintenance. Maybe it’s our weather. And then the other thing is we do long-term buy and holds as well as Airbnb.

fixing and flipping is a part of each of those.

Kristen Knapp (02:23.544)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And how do you decide whether to flip a house quickly or hold onto it as a rental?

Laura Hicks (02:29.815)
numbers. It’s always the numbers. It’s a pretty non-emotional decision based on the numbers and how the numbers come out. And obviously there’s a lot more money to be made, right? When you actually hold, retain, and keep real estate. But there’s different reasons for doing different aspects of the different types, whether you’re buying and holding or you’re doing fix and flipping.

Kristen Knapp (02:30.966)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kristen Knapp (02:54.786)
Yeah, and you said you work a lot with Airbnb as well.

Laura Hicks (02:58.189)
So we do some Airbnb. It’s not a primary part of our business. And we’ve done it from the aspect of not doing it through arbitrage. We are observing, learning, and talking to some of our counterparts that are doing it by not really owning the property. We have done ours through owning a property. I would be, yeah, we’re looking to explore some different avenues as we go forward.

Kristen Knapp (03:15.054)
Mm-hmm.

Kristen Knapp (03:23.064)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. And you mentioned deferred maintenance and dealing with all of that. What would you tell sellers who are worried about that their property won’t sell because it needs repairs or updates?

Laura Hicks (03:37.559)
Well, there’s always a market and the question is how much you will get in value out of your property really depends upon how you maintain it. mean, seriously, because we’re doing fix and flips, we’re forcing equity back into the property that would have been there had the property been maintained.

And so we’re doing it in a short three, four, six month period of time, depending upon the amount of renovation that is needed. And that’s everything from updating electrical systems or plumbing or new roof or windows, whatever the deferred maintenance was, we’re getting the equity out of it instead of a homeowner that held the house. And many times it’s because of lack of cash or understanding of how to get cash to do it.

Kristen Knapp (04:30.402)
That makes a lot of sense. Is there something in particular that you see over and over that just makes you insane?

Laura Hicks (04:39.021)
roofs, roofs, absolutely. And the Pacific Northwest is always roofs. mean, we get on average 15 to 20 years out of a roof, depends upon the material, how well it was put down, all those things, the area you live in, how much wind there is.

Kristen Knapp (04:40.451)
right.

Laura Hicks (04:56.727)
I don’t understand it from a standpoint of the envelope of the building, right? Siding windows, roof, is everything for keeping the inside of the building in shape. So I don’t understand it because if a roof goes, it can take down the entire building and ruin it.

Kristen Knapp (05:16.204)
That’s really good advice. Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And it’s true. It’s the found, well, maybe not technically the foundation, but it’s so huge in maintaining the house. And then is there a specific flip that maybe you learned a big lesson from or was particularly complicated that you could share?

Laura Hicks (05:38.125)
was going to say, one of the other common things that we see, and this is much more attainable for the average house homeowner, is colors, paint colors.

We see a lot of really strange paint colors. And they too impact a homeowner’s decision, a new homeowner’s decision on whether or not they’re going to buy our property.

So that really beautiful, strange, unique color of purple or blue that you chose is probably not everyone’s taste. And so making it more neutral, doesn’t mean you have to live in neutral, but if you’re going to go sell your house, you want to tend more toward neutral, natural colors so that the next people that come in feel like they can walk in and don’t have to do anything to the house. So if you

to gain a little more value out of your house that would be one of the things I would tell people.

Kristen Knapp (06:35.042)
Yeah, I think that’s good advice and I think that there’s probably little tips like that, like even lighting and stuff like that could probably make a big difference in the house.

Laura Hicks (06:43.469)
Instantly, we can tell. We can tell based on a few things, the age of a house and doors are one thing, the hardware is another, and cabinets. They tell us a lot. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t keep things for 10, 20, 30, 50 years, but they just need maintained and updated. I came from a part of the country where things are hundreds of years old. I’ve been the Northeast.

and they maintain those for hundreds of years. And I see where I am now, things are, tend to be a little bit more disposable. And so that’s a tiny bit disappointing. I just think it’s value systems. Value systems are actually different, right?

Kristen Knapp (07:24.706)
Yeah, why do you think that is?

Kristen Knapp (07:35.01)
Yeah, that makes sense. And then how did you even get into this business? Can you tell me about your start in the industry and how you got to where you are today?

Laura Hicks (07:44.939)
I grew up in it. And I mean that from the standpoint of my father is a carpenter. And so I was from age nine carrying tools, working with tools, working in the business with him. And that changed over time, right? The different things that I could do. There’s one end of the business that when you’re little,

You can hold the end of, and I’m going to say something that some people won’t recognize, a plumb line, right, where you snap a chalk line and you’re figuring out things long before we had laser levels, right, things of that nature. So there’s things that you can do and involve and get your kids in early. So that and my parents had two duplexes that they purchased, and we completely renovated them.

So I remember all the work that we did in those. And so I never really thought about it when I was a child that I would repeat the very same patterns that I was taught as an adult.

Kristen Knapp (08:44.738)
Yeah, it sounds like you learned a lot from a young age.

And then kind of, so I can see, you know, there’s two sides of that where that might turn you off completely from the industry or make you obsessed with it. So that’s cool that it made you want to go into it and stay in it as long as you have. What kind of separates an investor who’s in the game long-term and someone who might burn out.

Laura Hicks (09:10.633)
I think part of that is success, right? If you find success in it, you probably continue with it and everybody’s definition of that is little different. I would imagine if I had my first lesson in real estate repeated over and over, there would be no incentive to be in there, which would be to buy the property, fix the property, rent the property, and not have cash flow from it at the end of the day.

There’s not a lot of incentive. mean, there’s reasons to do it. I mean, I understand there’s things like tax write-offs, right? You can get rid of some of the gains against a W-2 or things of that nature. So I’m not saying that doesn’t work for some people. But in general, people looking to go into real estate think about it as being able to make money, right? And or have long-term assets. So long-term wealth creation.

And if you’re not successful in doing that, right, if you’re not finding the math working out at the end of the day, I could imagine it would be discouraging. And the converse, right, people finding success in it would probably do more of it and figure out how to do it more efficiently and more effectively.

Kristen Knapp (10:16.686)
Absolutely.

Kristen Knapp (10:26.072)
Do think it’s a game where you just need most of your properties to be successful or do you find success in pretty much everything you guys do?

Laura Hicks (10:37.655)
There you go. I would say some of the best lessons you learn is through failing. And I probably would never have uttered that about five years ago. Failure’s bad, right? That’s what we’re taught as we grow up. But it’s some of the best lessons that you get is through failure. And it’s how you look at it, right? The most successful people that I know are the ones that have failed the most frequently.

and gotten up over and over and over again. But they’ve taken the lessons they’ve learned and they’ve moved forward. So they’ve applied the lessons. That is what to me constitutes getting closer to where you want faster.

Kristen Knapp (11:20.77)
Definitely, you need a lot of resilience in that game for sure. And then what’s maybe a time or a lesson that you’ve learned along the way that’s been really valuable to your company.

Laura Hicks (11:31.981)
Picking your team. Picking your team.

Kristen Knapp (11:33.582)
Mm.

Laura Hicks (11:36.409)
Clear communication with that too. mean, you know, communication is a two-way street. So in picking your team, you have to pick people who communicate with you, whether you’re going through a really good spot or you’re having challenges. And so just an example is if you have a contractor that doesn’t want to deliver bad news to you, that’s not a great part of your team. That’s not going to be helpful if people are trying to cover up or not talk about the things that are hard, tough or challenging.

a contractor figure out that although I didn’t wield tools every day of the week, I was great at problem solving. So if he came up against a challenge, it’s like don’t try to figure it out on your own for three, six hours, two days or whatever. Just tell me immediately if I have a solution, I’ll offer it up and we move on.

So time is money in this business and communication is key in order to save time every single day.

Kristen Knapp (12:37.784)
I think that’s such a valuable thing to say. think a lot of people, yeah, want to cover their mistakes or not communicate well, but it really is all about communication. And building a team, I can see how that would be such an important part of your business and helping it get to where it is today. What kind of things do you look for when you’re working with people beyond communication? Because I know that that’s a thing that people have a big challenge with, like hiring the right people, people who actually want to work for you.

Laura Hicks (13:06.027)
Yes.

So I hesitate to say it, but I’ll say it. So contractors, a lot of them in my experience, just my opinion, my experience, are people who generally didn’t really want to work for other people. And so the funny part is when I hire them, they’re working for somebody else. And it’s probably their least favorite part of it. So like a lot of us, we like the collecting the paycheck end.

Kristen Knapp (13:31.352)
Yeah.

Laura Hicks (13:40.087)
But there’s a lot of steps in between. that’s that communication part is really key. So I look for people who are curious, who are interested, who are willing to learn. The key principles I hold myself to. Because if you already know everything, you’re not growing. You’re not learning anything. If you already know it all, there’s nothing more to be taught.

So I look for people who are of the same mind and look to be able to learn from them as much as they might be able to learn something different from me.

Kristen Knapp (14:14.764)
Absolutely, and there’s no shame in not knowing something. It’s just a lack of information, doesn’t say anything about the person, but I totally agree with you. Sometimes people get a little insecure about maybe not knowing everything, but you’re not supposed to. so, yeah, absolutely. And so should a seller…

be looking to sell. What should they look for when deciding who to sell their home to, especially when, you know, maybe multiple people are interested in the property?

Laura Hicks (14:48.077)
first and foremost, we’ll go back to math, right? Math is those who are qualified. So when you’re looking for somebody to come into your property, and this is one of the reasons why you have good people on your team. So my husband and I have chosen not to be licensed. We could, one of us could choose to do that, and there are benefits to doing that, having someone on your team that has a license. So from that end, I rely on.

professional realtors, right? And so specifically those are in investment properties. But on the sell side, I have a great team of people that are making sure that the buyers are qualified to actually buy the property. know, a lot of people can look at your property, fall in love with your property, but if they’re not qualified to buy it doesn’t do either of you any service. So that would be top.

Kristen Knapp (15:43.47)
Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that’s valuable to know because especially a lot of people who may be doing it for the first time aren’t really sure of how to go about it and aren’t really sure even what they’re doing.

Laura Hicks (15:58.699)
Yes, and we can definitely tell the realtors on the other end that are very experienced by the paces they put us through, right? We can definitely tell.

Kristen Knapp (16:09.44)
And tell me more about the Pacific Northwest, the market there, and what makes it special.

Laura Hicks (16:14.935)
Well, the two coasts, as you’re probably familiar with, are some of the most expensive real estate that we have in the US.

To me it’s the landscape, right? We have the ocean and the mountains all in view at the same time, depending on where you live. And I live in one of those regions where you have view of the mountains and you have view of the ocean as well.

It’s just a different space to be in and whether it’s temperate, so it typically tends to stay in the range of 40 to we’ll say 70. It’s not that we never get outside of those temperature ranges, but you can be outside doing anything you want year round.

Kristen Knapp (17:03.958)
Absolutely, it’s the best of all worlds for sure. And then, you know, when it comes to networking, it seems like you’re a part of a lot of different communities. How important is networking to you and do you have any tips on that?

Laura Hicks (17:17.001)
It’s very important. And one of the reasons is back to what we talked about earlier, is depending upon the life you’ve lived, the people you’ve been surrounded with, there’s always more to learn, right? And so being connected and networking with people help shorten your learning curve. that saying that they say you are some of the five people that you hang out with.

really want to hang out with successful, educated, motivated, depending on what your goals are, right, people to help you get where you want to go. So that’s an important part of those networks that we’re in, is not only finding resources, education, but the community and networking with the right people.

Kristen Knapp (18:06.892)
Yeah, I love that. I think that’s great advice. And then finally, you kind of touched on this, but just what makes working with you different? What makes it a pleasurable experience for people out there?

Laura Hicks (18:20.525)
I think the transparency, the amount of information and everything that we are willing to share with people, because we don’t look at it as a, I don’t know, a finite bucket of opportunity. There’s lots of opportunity. And so the best thing we think because of people who have helped us, we can do is help transfer that information and knowledge wherever we can. And so that’s one of the things we do is we hold open property tours.

in our area so that people can come learn more about it. So from whatever aspect, whether they want to be a potential new contractor with us, whether they want to be a potential investor, whether they want to invest on their own, whatever it is.

Kristen Knapp (19:09.934)
That’s awesome. And where would someone be able to find those opportunities as well as just more about you and your business?

Laura Hicks (19:18.775)
So one of the things that we do is we network through local REAs. That’s one of the things that we do. Then we also post online meetups, things of that nature. So both online and in the real world, we do those types of things so that we can be found and find like-minded people.

Kristen Knapp (19:41.007)
And then do you have a website people can go to or social media?

Laura Hicks (19:45.867)
I was going to say yes and no. The website’s under construction. So what a time for that to be. And I was going to say we can be found usually through at least our local REA. And that would be, yeah.

Kristen Knapp (19:49.806)
You

Okay, that’s it.

Yeah.

Kristen Knapp (20:05.55)
Awesome, I think that’s wonderful. That’s no problem at all. That’s easy to do. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. This has been so great learning more about your business and yeah, it’s been awesome. Thank you.

Laura Hicks (20:18.561)
Thank you, Kristen. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time today.

Kristen Knapp (20:21.794)
Yes, have a great day.

Laura Hicks (20:24.301)
Thank