7 Powerful Tips from Andrea Lane to Dominate the Rental Market

Dylan Silver (00:00)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host Dylan Silver and today on the show I have Andrea Lane out of New Jersey. Andrea is a seasoned real estate investor, coach and co-founder of the Coast to Coast Real Estate Group. Andrea, welcome to the show.

Andrea Lane (00:17)
Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Dylan Silver (00:21)
Absolutely.

I like to start at the top by asking folks, how did they get into the real estate space?

Andrea Lane (00:28)
So I got into the real estate business more than 40 years ago.

And I got in not because I understood real estate because I knew houses and I knew what I was doing. I didn’t know any of those. I also didn’t have a network. I didn’t know where to go to find people who were interested in the same thing I was. But here’s what I knew. If you got into real estate and you had paper losses, you could take them against your income tax and I could reduce my income taxes. That is why I got into real estate. And so I bought my first property. I bought it in the wrong location, got the wrong tenants.

rehab did. mean if you can do something wrong in real estate, I’ve been there and done that and I started real early. And I didn’t have a network which now I know is the most important thing to build your real estate business. So yeah.

Dylan Silver (01:15)
Let’s talk about starting. What were

you doing at the time? I’m imagining you had some other ⁓ passions or career that were ⁓ running parallel to real estate. What was your life like at that point?

Andrea Lane (01:25)
Yeah. So

back then, I worked, I was in technology, I was in technology my entire corporate career. I grew from a teller at a bank to running their wealth management technology bank. ⁓ So it was always changing jobs. At the time, I always had something in the background because I am not good at being doing nothing and being lazy. So I always had some side hustle. ⁓

And real estate was a good side hustle because it didn’t take a lot of energy to keep the business rolling. I now know it would have taken a little more up front and I could have done it better. But it was easy to get into. And so I had real estate. And then I said, well, that’s not enough because it’s not busy enough. So I got another business. So I’ve always been an entrepreneur moving forward. It’s just like…

what I was doing at any given time. But my career at the company, I was there for 37 years. When I retired, I had to decide what I wanted to do. And I did not go full-time into real estate, believe it or not. I became an organization person. I organized people’s files and homes and offices. I did it all. And then my son came to me and said, I want to be in real estate. And so in 2015, we started a company. And this company now, there’s four people.

his friends, Brooke and Danielle, William and myself, and we decided that we were going to do rehabs to make a lot of money so that we can buy rentals. And that’s how we started. ⁓ We did one rehab and decided that may not be our key way of making money. So, because we did it wrong, but we did it. And then we decided, you know, rentals, which is what I thought anyway. So now we do both. So yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:15)
So talking

about this real estate journey, and it sounds like you’re a serial entrepreneur, and then it’s in the family too, multiple generations here. ⁓ talk about that rehab that you did with your son and then realizing that the rentals were a better play for you. How did that rehab go?

⁓ how did managing that rehab go and what what was ultimately the the factors that made you decide you know what we’re going to go to this the rental space

Andrea Lane (03:48)
But we’re in both. We still do rehabs, but we learned. So we decided we were going to rehab a house and we came up with a plan. Our plan was really good. We knew what we were going to do three blocks from the ocean. So we could either sell it or hold it. So we had two opportunities to begin with. We had a great plan. We were going in there. We had our specs. had contractors come take a look at the property. So our numbers were in good shape. And we got into the deal and

The house was 100 years old.

So we were opening the first floor and making it an open floor plan and the house had radiators. So we took the walls down and we’re like, those radiators, know, they’re really old fashioned. And you know, the walls were putting up, we’re gonna have a good couple of inches between the radiator and the walls. So we’re wasting space. So we were geniuses. We replaced the radiator, we put in all new duct work, we got air conditioning and heating in the house, which wasn’t in the plan. ⁓

And then we were looking outside and we had plans to do landscaping but we looked at the outside and we said, you know, the house is brown and brown really isn’t a good color right now. We really should change it. Now, now did we paint it? no, we put on new siding, new suffix, new leaders, new gutters, new shades, new, no, not shades, the wall. I can’t remember the name of them. The siding on the side of the windows.

So we did it all. The house, I have to tell you, is beautiful. And I know it is, because it’s three blocks from where I live. ⁓ It is gorgeous. However, we went in with a budget and a time frame. And our budget, you know, that siding and that heating system, you we’re not talking a couple of thousand dollars. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars that we spent on this house.

Dylan Silver (05:41)
Yeah, can almost double.

Yeah.

Andrea Lane (05:43)
And the time frame, we were good. We planned on, we thought we could do it in nine months, but we made it a 12 month time frame just in case, because it was our first deal. No, no, 18 months later. And I will tell you, costs will kill you. So ⁓ we were like, maybe this isn’t, ⁓ wait, let me step back. A lot of the work, my,

Dylan Silver (05:54)
a lot of holding.

Andrea Lane (06:04)
team members, not me, were planning on doing themselves. I worked outside, so I knew I was doing the landscaping and I was okay with that, but I’m not picking up a hammer and doing anything, but they wanted to do some of it. So we learned a lot of lessons from that. When we do rehabs now, we hire contractors. And by the way, one of my partners now is a contractor, so he manages the contractors. ⁓

Dylan Silver (06:18)
I can imagine.

Andrea Lane (06:28)
but we really decided that being in the rental space is gonna give us the long term. So short term, we made money on that deal by the way, but it was an accident. It wasn’t because we were smart, it was because the market changed and the market increased the value of the house. ⁓ So we were lucky and most real estate investors at some point are lucky. They should realize it’s luck and not talent. So.

Dylan Silver (06:52)
That’s

a lot of fortuitous things, but also you put yourself in that position to make that happen. Pivoting a bit here, Andrea, you mentioned after that going into the rental space, you still do rehabs, but going into the rental space. I’ve spoken with so many avatars of real estate investor. People do short term, people do midterm, corporate housing. Of course you have annual leases, six month leases. Which space are you in?

Andrea Lane (07:07)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (07:22)
currently.

Andrea Lane (07:22)
So we are in single, multi, and small apartments, but we are in the process of divesting ourselves of these small apartments and the larger multis. My avatar for a home is a single family home with three bedrooms and one and half to two baths. That is the ideal, in my mind, rental property.

The reason I’m dumbing down where most people go into single families and then they want to be in apartments, they think it’s great. Well, you know, if you go in bigger…

apartment buildings, the 20 units you can usually handle on your own or with a partner. But when you go to larger apartment buildings, usually it’s a syndication. Now I’ve created syndications. I know how expensive they are and what it takes to run them. Not interested. ⁓ And the people who live in single families, they tend to stay longer. They have kids, they go to the school, they like where they’re at, and they also take better care of the property. Now this isn’t necessarily true in a large urban area like New York City.

Most people live in apartments, but in most of the country people live in houses and they can’t say their landlord isn’t maintaining it. No, you’re a slop, right? So you’re the one responsible. So I love single-family houses. Plus I like owning as much ground as I can. They’re not making any more and I like to have it.

Dylan Silver (08:41)
Sure.

they are certainly not making any more. I’m curious what

your feedback is on the ⁓ short-term space. So I’m in Texas, I think all over, but definitely out here. Airbnb is huge, huge. ⁓ What’s your perspective?

Andrea Lane (09:02)
Yeah. So

I personally am not interested in Airbnb. What I am interested in going into is ⁓ shared housing.

not group homes for people with problems, just people who need a place to live and don’t want to spend the money on a full apartment or a full house. I’m interested in that market and that’s probably our next venue. ⁓ Airbnbs, I think, work well if you understand your marketplace and are pretty confident that the government’s not going to change the laws and you’re going to be kicked out. And so it’s in the area, if I were to do

that kind of ⁓ rental, I would do it close to home.

because I want to make sure that if anything goes wrong and my cleaning company can’t make it, I can be there to take care of it, right? ⁓ And this, in the market I’m in, they’re closing down, where then they’re opening up the ability to do Airbnbs. I don’t want a neighbor who comes in every month or every week. I want a neighbor who’s there. And I’m going to go to my city hall and complain, and I live there, I’m probably going to win. ⁓ So yeah, I don’t do them, but they can be very profitable. know many of my real estate investor friends are in

market space.

Dylan Silver (10:18)
Yeah,

there’s this interesting company that I heard of called PadSplit. And I don’t have any personal experience with it, but I went to an event, gentleman was talking about PadSplit, talking about how his returns compared to long-term rentals was just so much greater because he was able to have more cash flow coming in by giving up the home. And I was so intrigued to this, I was like, well, what’s the downside? said, well, we haven’t lost any money on

Andrea Lane (10:23)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (10:47)
on any of the pad splits, I was like, wow, what a great idea. And so, you know, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, I’m a newer real estate entrepreneur, newer real estate investor. When I get some ⁓ deeds in my name or in an LLC that I own, do I want to go short term? Do I want to go midterm? Do I want to go long term? Airbnb, ⁓ pad splits. So there’s all these different options. ⁓

Andrea Lane (11:10)
So the pad

split, if I can just say, is really shared housing. And that is not a short-term gain. I mean, it’s short-term and there could be six-month renters, but it’s not weekly or monthly. It really is a longer term that people stay for.

Dylan Silver (11:13)
Go ahead.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Andrea Lane (11:30)
That would be something, that’s one of the reasons I got interested in looking at it at all was I heard about Pad Split and looked into it. I don’t think I would use them. I would do it on my own just because of the number of properties. But I think it’s a great opportunity for people to increase their income on a single family home.

Dylan Silver (11:50)
You mentioned partnering with a general contractor. That’s a great connection to have. So talk about, you know, fanatical networking and making that connection. How did that connection come about? I think there’s a lot of people who do flips, do rehabs, who would love to have a partner that’s a GC.

Andrea Lane (12:05)
Yeah, so ⁓ in my case, my GC is one of my partners. They were to begin with, so it wasn’t a new partner. But I do partner across the United States with people for different things. So most of the time, it’s equity partnerships. But we’ve partnered with GCs where ⁓ they do the job and we pay them for the materials. But their payment is really in the equity in the house when we sell it. And you meet people like that by going to networks.

you go to online networks and networks in person. love in person. ⁓ In the case of partnering with the GC, it really is going to the place that contractors are, meeting with them and building a relationship, and then building the trust that they know that you know what you’re doing and they know what they’re doing and they’re going to actually sell and make a profit at the end. So many contractors don’t understand

that they can actually own, make money in real estate, not just in the build, right? So when you teach them how to do it, it builds for good partnerships.

Dylan Silver (13:09)
I spoke with a gentleman in Minnesota. I’ve said this story before on the podcast that he was a builder, ended up ⁓ building hospitals in Minnesota, and somewhere along the way realized that he could be the investor himself. And I just was totally blown away by the growth. And it was really inspiring, you know, talk about going from effectively being a tradesman to now building and

brokering or owning hospitals is mind blowing growth in one lifespan. And so to your point, people who are the builders, I think are the perfect real estate investors because in many cases, if for instance, if they’re giving a quote to somebody and they realize, well, in order to fix the home, it’s going to be X expensive, they can make a cash offer on the home themselves and either buy it or, you know, assign that deal.

Andrea Lane (14:03)
Yeah, they can also ⁓ work with the people who want the work done if they’re planning on staying there for a little bit ⁓ and getting a piece of the equity in the pie, right? There’s so many ways to make money in real estate without moving forward and having to worry about all the trash, tenants, and toilets.

Dylan Silver (14:23)
Yeah.

Now without giving away all the game on Andrea ⁓ pivoting a bit here investing in New Jersey. I’m in Texas. I’m originally from New Jersey. We talked about that. I miss I miss the food. I miss the food. I miss the people. I miss talking with my hands. I really can’t do that so much here but I you’re bringing it out of me. You bring it on. So in New Jersey I’m thinking about the real estate space. Of course it’s a higher entry point just to get into the ⁓ real estate investing. What is your

a buy box currently. When you’re looking for deals, what are you looking for?

Andrea Lane (14:57)
Okay, so I don’t buy in New Jersey. ⁓ My buy box is in Middle America, where they are landlord friendly, not ⁓ tenant friendly, ⁓ or they’re at least agnostic to either side of the coin. The taxes are lower, the price points are lower. ⁓ So I have properties up and down the East Coast.

Dylan Silver (14:59)
Okay.

Andrea Lane (15:23)
And every state I have property in, I have a partner who actually lives in that state and understands the rules and the laws of that state. When I say I, of course I’m talking about our partnership of four partners with people across the country. ⁓ And many times we partner with them to ⁓

teach them how to do it right. So we may partner on a couple of units in one area, but they learn the business. They learn how to do it, and then they can go out on their own if they don’t want to continue to work with us. But they’re our backbone partner to make sure that we’re doing things right in the areas that we’re in, because every area is different.

Dylan Silver (16:02)
Yeah, I believe, you know, partnering with people is the ⁓ way to get in for folks who might not have the knowledge or the capital. When I was doing what I would call the preliminary work to even figure out if I could become a real estate person, I was selling cars at the time and I had no idea anything about anything. So in Texas, we have kind of a unique real estate situation because we’ve got mineral rights and we’ve got ranches and we kind of have this

sense that texas is its own thing you know was his own country at one point so ⁓ it was all confusing to me and i hear i was just selling cars working for nissan dealership trying to be like can i be a real estate person and much like you know you yourself i i believe i was looking at it from how many people can i meet how much networking can i do and ultimately through that networking i ended up getting a job with w two job working for a wholesale company

Ultimately through that networking, ended up meeting a real estate investor who ended up becoming my friend and a mentor to me. And ⁓ honestly, networking has been like the root of everything. At this point, if I have a problem and I can’t solve it, I’m like, it’s not that I’m, you know, unable to work through this problem. It’s that I don’t know the people who can help me solve this.

Andrea Lane (17:20)
And your network knows the person. If you have a big enough network, I am a big believer in networking. That’s what I do for my business. I network around the country and build relationships with people.

And that’s how we end up with partnerships all over the place, right? That’s how we find some money. ⁓ You know, it’s amazing what’s available if you put yourself out there and tell people, is what I do, and get to know them and make sure that they know and like you as well, right?

Dylan Silver (17:50)
Let’s dive into that on Andrea. ⁓ Networking, this is my approach to it. I’m very curious to hear yours because I talk to some people and it’s kind of remarkable because everyone’s got a different approach and some people don’t even really have much of an approach. There’s just kind of their wing in it. For me, I try to go to networking events. I do that fairly regularly, probably more than most people. I go to about two a week.

I have this podcast, I have my own podcast outside of here, and then I’m also constantly on Zoom calls with people or on the phone with people, and I’ll book out my calendar and I try to have it every day, Monday through Saturday. It just looks like the day’s been booked out for me. So that’s kind of my proactive approach to networking. What’s your approach?

Andrea Lane (18:39)
So ⁓ it actually is similar to yours, right? go to, this week I actually have four in-person real estate events, four nights in a row. ⁓ So I go to real estate events. I belong to networks, that network in the morning, because that’s what works best for me. ⁓ So I belong to four morning network ⁓ groups that I join every week.

You know, the key is being there consistently. I don’t care which one. Go once a month, but go all the time so people get to know you and you get to know the people. ⁓ But those are the groups that I go to all the time. And then I have, you know, one-off groups that I go to. I am the vice president of my local REA chapter. ⁓ I ran a REA online for five years. Once COVID came, I was running an in-person one and then I went online. So, you know, it’s the

lifeblood of what helps people grow in this business. Your network is so important.

Dylan Silver (19:40)
I love

Ria’s, that’s what started my whole journey. I had no idea where to start, I think it was at a hotel somewhere in San Antonio, Texas. And then it ended up, I paid a bunch of money to get to a conference. It was really a lot of money for me at the time. When I was at that conference, I was just faking it to make it. I had no idea about anything, Andrea. And then here I am two years later, know, 20 plus deals under my belt, real estate license.

and I feel like I’m entrenched in this game here. And so it’s really remarkable what Ria’s do. You’ve probably launched countless careers with what you’ve done.

Andrea Lane (20:16)
I did.

actually, my goal every two years is to build 100 people to the millionaire status in real estate. So that’s my goal. Every two years it’s reset and I work on the next 100 people. ⁓

Dylan Silver (20:30)
That’s phenomenal.

⁓ Andrea, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Andrea Lane (20:37)
So LinkedIn would be probably the easiest place. I’m Andrea Lane, the Fearless Real Estate Investor. You can reach me at thefearlessrealestateinvestor at gmail.com or you can text me at 732-735-9076.

Dylan Silver (20:56)
Thank you so much for hopping on here, for ⁓ talking with us about investing and how you scaled in your career and networking. thanks for hopping on here.

Andrea Lane (21:06)
and thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (21:08)
Absolutely.