Achieve Financial Independence: Create a Rental Portfolio That Works for You

Brett McCollum (00:00.286)
All right, guys, welcome back to the show. I am your host, Brett McCollum, and I’m here today with Curtis Waters. Today we’re going to be talking about building real estate portfolios. Before we do, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs to 5x their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Without further ado, Curtis, how are you?

Curtis Waters (00:23.657)
I’m fantastic. Great day.

Brett McCollum (00:26.35)
Perfect, good, I really appreciate you being here. This is great, I’m looking forward to the conversation. Before we get into all the, you know, there’s a lot we’re gonna talk about. Before we get into everything, can you do me a favor, like, kinda rewind a little bit, build some context and history. Who is Mr. Curtis Waters?

Curtis Waters (00:44.054)
All right. Well, I’m Curtis Waters and I’m an investor of rental properties. So previous to getting involved with real estate, you know, I’ve got a degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in business. And I was in the corporate world and high tech sales for a number of years. You know, but I saw cracks in that.

I was with a company, they didn’t receive their round of venture capital funding. And they said, well, you know, if you’re not in Texas where our office is, you know, we’re scaling back. Here’s four weeks of severance. Good luck. And I had been investigating real estate. And I said, you know, now’s the time. And so I jumped in.

Brett McCollum (01:39.918)
Hmm.

Curtis Waters (01:41.182)
And it’s been quite a journey.

Brett McCollum (01:44.59)
When was that? was the first Dip the Toe the Water in the Real State, so to speak? 2014, okay. you were, all right, so you were coming out of high tech, it the sales side of that though, is that correct? Okay, what was the kind of a normal everyday kind of life like for that?

Curtis Waters (01:49.598)
2014.

Curtis Waters (02:01.329)
Yes.

Curtis Waters (02:08.894)
Well, probably three days a week I was on the road visiting some enterprise company or, you know, I also dealt with universities and selling them technical solutions. So, Yeah.

Brett McCollum (02:24.333)
Okay, definitely more B2B then, right? Okay, how long were you doing that for, give or take?

Curtis Waters (02:32.094)
About 25 years.

Brett McCollum (02:34.317)
Okay, wow, okay. Yeah, and I hope I’m not overstepping to ask this. Three days a week, 25 years on the road, like three days a week is, that’s gotta be a lot mentally and physically even.

Curtis Waters (02:46.47)
Yeah, I got lifetime status with a number of airlines and hotels and so on. Yeah, I remember I would take my family on vacation and we’d open the door to hotel room and I go, hey, welcome to my second home.

Brett McCollum (02:52.877)
one.

Brett McCollum (02:56.447)
Yeah, I bet.

Brett McCollum (03:05.579)
Yeah. So when we do some travel from time to time, different things, I bring, I’m able, if I’m able to bring my family, you know, a lot of times we do it on the back end of like, cause I do some B2B things too, that we, from different things that we work on and I’ll bring them like, okay, I have to work for two days and then we’re going to have vacation for the next five, you know, kind of thing, you know? So I just bring them with, and then we just kind of continue and hang out afterwards.

Yeah, because that’s tough, know, with that much travel all the time. Did it ever like, I was before I got into real estate, I got into real estate right around 2015. And right before that I was driving, doing B2B for physical therapy, like for auto accident care. So our company had seven offices and six cities and my job was driving between all of them every single day.

Curtis Waters (04:05.533)
Hmm.

Brett McCollum (04:05.769)
And it was, that was a toll. And I started realizing, I was curious your experience, because you did it for much longer than I did. My back and my hips started hurting so bad after about a year of doing that. Did you ever experience anything with that at all?

Curtis Waters (04:22.75)
Yeah, you you end up with some physical pain. Honestly, when you’re traveling, you’re not eating well. You know, the days are long. The sleep isn’t great. You know, but it’s part of what you put up with.

Brett McCollum (04:31.501)
Mmm.

Brett McCollum (04:40.493)
Sure. Yeah, I was just curious because I remember going through that and I’m like, man, you’re not wrong on the eating side. I’ve always been very high metabolism, very lean. And next thing I know, I’m like, oh no. I started realizing that that changed real quickly. But yeah. So all right. So it’s 2014. What was the first experience in real estate? What was the first move?

Curtis Waters (04:57.127)
Yes.

Curtis Waters (05:07.048)
So a little before the company said, good luck, goodbye, I bought a turnkey rental in my self-directed IRA. And then once they said goodbye, probably five weeks later, I bought my first rental. So it was a two-bedroom home in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Brett McCollum (05:20.545)
Okay.

Brett McCollum (05:35.415)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (05:36.314)
I think I paid $33,000 for it and it was missing an HVAC. And I asked the tenant, said, hey, this only makes sense if the rent is higher. And she goes, well, during the winter, you know, we do get some cold weather here in Charlotte. I’m running space heaters. She goes, I’d be willing to pay more if I had central.

So the pad was there, the wiring was there. Her landlord had simply moved the unit somewhere else and figured she could put up with it. So I raised the rent $150 and put in an HVAC system. So at that time, I figured out how to buy them wholesale. And I found a contractor and negotiated, you know, like $1,000 to put it in. And I had my first rental.

Brett McCollum (06:13.901)
Mmm.

Brett McCollum (06:21.463)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (06:35.947)
Wow, did you, so you found, okay, let’s back up a little bit. So you had the turnkey property that you bought. That was before this one, is that correct? All right, was that just because you just were looking for something, or was that, were you already like, you know I’ve always been really itching in the real estate side of things, what was going on? Because buying two properties within a short amount of time of each other,

Curtis Waters (06:46.877)
Correct.

Brett McCollum (07:04.141)
typically doesn’t happen by chance. What was going on at that point that you were like, yep, going into real estate. Like obviously the job situation, but what makes you go into real estate at that point?

Curtis Waters (07:13.064)
Right.

Curtis Waters (07:17.758)
So I looked at 90 % of the millionaires in US had significant real estate in their portfolio. Also at that, a year before I bought my first rental, I met Bonnie Laszlo, would end up, I would end up partnering with her later. And I’d been going to local real estate meetups.

Brett McCollum (07:24.023)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (07:46.062)
And people were talking about wholesaling and fix and flip. And I have a minor knowledge of taxes. And I looked at, whoa, the taxes on this is high. And, you know, at that time I was in my mid-50s and I was looking for, hey, I want to really juice up my retirement. And it became, hey, I’m going to go build cash flowing assets.

Brett McCollum (08:09.037)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (08:15.457)
There you go. Yeah, that’s incredible. think, and good for you, I I really, really, really commend a person that looks at, all right, I’m just gonna say it. Starting in real estate at coming into the end of your working career, right, your quote unquote professional years, and starting real estate is not something we see a lot of.

because people typically want to start sooner and then have something for later kind of thing. But man, what a blessing. Because we’ve talked a little, what a blessing you just starting has done for what you’ve done. I think that’s incredible that you just did it. There’s some kind of mental fortitude that happens that I think as entrepreneurs, some of us have and some don’t.

the things that something as an entrepreneur that you’ve always had in you, even if it was you just started it. So good, good for you. I’m that’s incredible, Curtis. I think that’s such a phenomenal thing that you’ve done. So you bought those first two properties, you got your second one, you raised the rents $150. Now is it cash flowing at that point? Okay. Yeah.

Curtis Waters (09:33.628)
Yes. Yeah. Now the other decision I made to get started is I don’t like using my own money. You know, I think maybe it was Kiyosaki that says lazy people use their own money. So at that time, you know, I had a great credit score. I went and got business funding. So, you know, some of it was lines of credit and credit cards.

Brett McCollum (09:42.893)
Mm.

Brett McCollum (09:57.163)
Hmm.

Curtis Waters (10:01.647)
And that’s how I bought my first couple of rentals. So I did that and I followed that. I don’t use my money.

Brett McCollum (10:05.591)
Wow.

Brett McCollum (10:13.133)
Yeah, so all right, so this is 2014, you’re buying property. Were you buying pretty rapidly or are you kind of doing like a couple here and there? Like what was the plan back when you started?

Curtis Waters (10:27.078)
Well, the plan was to expand and to expand quickly. So whenever I started, I think the number I ran, because I just looked at this the other day, in my first year I bought 17 doors.

Brett McCollum (10:31.169)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (10:43.009)
Wow, okay.

Curtis Waters (10:45.694)
So.

Brett McCollum (10:46.017)
Wow. Yeah, that answers the question. So you obviously came from a high level of business background. You mentioned in your masters and things like that and then running B2B for so many years having high level of business experience. Do you think that’s maybe allowed you, mean, out of the gate just buying 17 doors is without experience in the real estate world, quote unquote, right?

Curtis Waters (11:13.703)
We are.

Brett McCollum (11:14.903)
Do you think that’s what led you to be able to have, I mean I’m sure you had some roadblocks and some speed humps on the way in doing some of that. But do you think that’s what led you to be able to like, you know what, I feel confident to be able to do this?

Curtis Waters (11:22.142)
Sure. Sure.

Curtis Waters (11:31.166)
So the thing that I had to my benefit was one, the relationships. I I found this out, you know, in my business career, especially in sales, how important building relationships was to your success. So first major relationship I started was, you know, with the person that kind of led me to

buy and hold as a strategy. And that was Bonnie Laszlo. And, you know, she had meetings every week. And what made it, and they were all free of charge. And what made it great for me is you can come to these meetings, you’re meeting with other local investors. And, you know, I’m also in a situation where there are other people.

that were doing renovations and purchasing and financing. And, you know, I was in a community that essentially supported the growth that I was looking for.

Brett McCollum (12:42.327)
Yeah, that’s really the support side of it too, right? That’s incredible. And I want to get to Bonnie here in a moment. Your first year, 17 doors, moving on. Can you talk about, because a lot of people listening, Curtis, are, you know, right now they’re taking the plunge into the real estate world and they’re getting to that, you know, they’ve bought a couple of houses here and there kind of thing and they’re in the game, you know. Do you really?

And I’m gonna ask you to rewind a bit, because I know it’s been 10, 11 years at this point. Do you remember any significant challenges that you kind of faced that maybe were unexpected from doing that?

Curtis Waters (13:24.56)
Yeah, I remember in my first year, I bought three homes and I think I bought them for under $30,000. And, you know, I faced some challenges there. I was partnered with another investor at the time that

Brett McCollum (13:33.453)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (13:50.906)
you know, like the idea of growing rentals. However, you know, based upon what we were doing, he needed the money out of them. So we keep them for a year, sell them long term, take the long term capital gain. So we got to sell these after a year, and we hadn’t done any inspection on them. You know, we had

Brett McCollum (14:17.172)
wow.

Curtis Waters (14:18.182)
We had a contractor who looked and he goes, yeah, these are great. Well, I learned a valuable lesson at that point. When you’re starting out, always use a licensed home inspector because you don’t know what you don’t know. So whenever I went to sell these homes, I found out one of them had a brand new electrical panel. But behind the electrical panel, the wiring, this was built on a crawl space.

Brett McCollum (14:32.493)
Sure.

Curtis Waters (14:47.506)
The wiring to the rest of the house, they hadn’t touched. So behind there, the inspector found that all the wires to outlets and other things in the house were just wrapped together. Nothing was in any boxes for safety. There were outlets that didn’t work. And, you know, that certainly didn’t meet building code.

Brett McCollum (15:03.783)
no. Right.

Brett McCollum (15:14.369)
Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, I’ve been there before.

Curtis Waters (15:18.622)
So, you know, that was, a $4,500 hit to what I got out of it.

Brett McCollum (15:24.607)
Easy, depending on the standards, for sure. We had a property not even long ago, and I’ve been doing this a long time, you know, and I thought we stripped that property down to the studs, right? And it was kind of a full, full, like, know, roof to slab rehab kind of thing. And when we listed it and put it on the market,

I never had anybody go in the attic and check wiring issues.

Brett McCollum (15:59.102)
So we get the power turned on, everything’s like, we kind of waited till the end to turn everything on. There’s just some little, you know, people that flip houses, they’ll tell you, like, sometimes you don’t want to get a bunch of inspections along the way, because it’ll slow things down, they’ll shut you down, stuff like that. So we kind of waited, hindsight being what it is, you probably should have had this going a long time ago. So I tried to take some shortcuts and, you know, that sort of thing. We had a small fire in the attic.

because once we turned everything on, things started sparking. We would have caught that if we would have been checking it as we should have. That was recently. I’m like, I know better. I’ve been there, And then again, it was like $6,200 was the hit on that one. And we were done. We were on the market already. So it happened.

Curtis Waters (16:27.614)
Mm.

Right.

Curtis Waters (16:48.102)
Yeah, it’s a lesson you learn that even though you have years of experience, there are shortcuts that you’re taking a risk on.

Brett McCollum (16:59.477)
Yeah, for sure. Well, man, let’s talk about this. So you meet Bonnie, you get things, you know, and then eventually, because we talked pre-show a little bit, and eventually you guys, you know, kind of partner up on things. When did that happen?

Curtis Waters (17:14.824)
So let me step back for a minute that leads up to this. So I had been involved with Lani. has a group that since COVID, we went from in-person meetings to Zoom meetings. so I was involved with these. If she couldn’t make a meeting, I would facilitate it. And I had done a number of

Brett McCollum (17:29.623)
Okay.

Curtis Waters (17:43.94)
renovations on properties in a town close to Charlotte and they were under code enforcement violation. So I bought them a killer deal. I bought five houses. There’s one one-bedroom, three two-bedrooms, and a three-bedroom that I bought for $50,000 apiece. Code enforcement had told

Brett McCollum (17:55.146)
Okay.

Brett McCollum (18:11.05)
wow.

Curtis Waters (18:12.956)
The owner, hey, you need to do something with these or we’re going to demolish three of your houses. So, you know, the guy was a tired landlord. So I bought them for 15, used other people’s money and I got them all done. They had to go through multiple inspections, not only inspections for permits, but then code enforcement had to come and look at them.

And occasionally they would find things that the building inspectors didn’t find. So I got it all done and somebody in code enforcement said, hey, we’re really amazed that you got these done. You got them done in a relatively short period of time. Typically people will come in, buy these properties, fail. And now they’re back in code enforcement violation.

Brett McCollum (18:48.045)
Sure.

Curtis Waters (19:07.984)
So what I had done is I was meeting with code enforcement, you know, probably every four to six weeks. I just dropped by their office, say hi. And one day I asked the fateful question, do you know any other person that has properties under code enforcement that might be looking to sell? And they said, well, there’s an out-of-state company that

owns about a hundred and they told us that if you know you find anybody that we would be open to sell. So I remember it was a Tuesday sometime in late 2016 and I was going into one of our hobby millionaire meetings

Brett McCollum (19:57.568)
Okay.

Curtis Waters (20:02.75)
And my phone rang. It was a call back from a guy. It was a small family office. And I said, look, I’m just about to go into a meeting. Can I call you back in two hours? Because I a meeting was an hour. And after the meeting was done, Bonnie was there. And I said, hey, Bonnie, I have an opportunity to buy 100 houses, the entire portfolio.

and I’d like you to partner with me. Now, Bonnie actually was looking at downsizing, but, you know, both of us have kind of a house addiction. I asked Bonnie, said, hey, do you want to partner? I said 50-50. And she said, yes. So we started negotiations, eventually negotiated $50 a house option fee.

Brett McCollum (20:34.754)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (21:01.52)
a three-year option, which meant we had three years to buy the house. Vacant houses, like 19,000, occupied 29,000. In order to do this, also, the family office wanted to get rid of their property manager. So Bonnie and I are both real estate agents, so she formed a property management company.

Brett McCollum (21:12.876)
Okay.

Curtis Waters (21:29.022)
And we took off from there and within that three year period, we bought out all of those hundred properties. And it changed my life.

Brett McCollum (21:39.579)
wow.

Brett McCollum (21:42.905)
man, that’s incredible. That’s really cool. And I love that you were doing it on a creative structure, you know.

You know, a lot of the nature of social media in the influencer world is that, you know, things become more popularized very quickly, you know, with a microscope or a magnifying glass under it. I think a lot of the creative finance thing has gotten up since really post-COVID, I think, got really big, you know.

but I mean obviously well before that, mean honestly, people have been doing creative finance since the dawn of time, right? Like this is, when you study real estate, you tend to see that, but man, I love that you guys have the foresight to do that. It gave you three years to work out 100 properties versus I have to come up with it all at once right now for 100 properties.

Curtis Waters (22:40.947)
Right.

Brett McCollum (22:41.837)
That could have been, I mean especially, because you’re still fairly, I mean you’ve been buying houses, I mean that’s a fairly new concept to a newer investor for, you’ve only been in a couple years to go, I gotta tackle 100 houses at once.

Curtis Waters (22:57.373)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (23:00.897)
I like to share a lot of my mistakes too, right? So I’ve wholesale hundreds and hundreds of houses, you know, and I thought at this point in my, and I thought, you know what, the next step Curtis, I’m gonna flip all the houses too, right? And so I flipped houses here and there, that sort of thing. But what I did was I took on a bunch of them all at once.

And so the relation I’m making here is it’s one thing to flip a house or two. It’s one thing to buy, you know, onesie twosies on the rentals and stuff. It’s another thing to try to flip that volume all at once. So way to have the foresight to go, hey, let’s spread this out over three years, not all at once.

Man, that was one of the longest year and a halfs of my life, was trying to navigate all these flips that I had no idea what I was doing. Because flipping one or two houses is one thing. Flipping 20 at the same time is a different.

Curtis Waters (23:59.708)
Yeah, managing all those teams, managing your cash flow as well.

Brett McCollum (24:04.749)
Oh, the cashflow part of it. No doubt. That’s where I honestly, you know, somebody told me, I was like, you know what, don’t think I’m ever gonna after that. I was like, I’m never gonna flip another house again. And the guy looked at me and he said, you just got the PhD and whatnot to do. You can’t quit now. You know, and it’s when he said that to me, something clicked and I was like, you know what, like, yeah, I did learn a lot of hard, hard lessons cost me a lot, a lot of money.

But man, good for you guys, that’s really cool. So, catch me, all right, so bring it kind of current. So you guys, that three year run there, you buy all these properties, what has life been like since then and where are you at today?

Curtis Waters (24:49.214)
So since then, some of the houses we kept, some we sold, like we got down toward the end and we sold some of the houses. I think in one transaction we sold seven or eight and then 1031 them. So, you know, the tax free exchange into 15.

Brett McCollum (25:12.118)
Okay.

Curtis Waters (25:13.47)
So, you know, we did things like that. We also bought multi-family. So our first, our first foray into, you know, something over five was we had a local wholesaler come to us and he had 20 doors under contract for 20,000 a door offer to us for 25,000 a door. So we bought that.

Brett McCollum (25:18.966)
Mmm.

Brett McCollum (25:38.988)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (25:43.312)
that allowed me to develop a relationship with that owner, look him up in tax records and find he owns 76 doors, apartments, all small apartments. you know, that led to developing that relationship. I mean, he was getting on in years. And, you know, I remember I bought all but his last 45 and he goes, hey, I’m not going to sell the

Brett McCollum (25:52.464)
wow.

Curtis Waters (26:12.446)
you know, my remaining 45, I’m going to leave these to my kids. So, you know, with my belief and follow up, back in late 2022, I stopped in to see him at the office, office that he had at his 45 unit apartment. And I walk in and he goes, oh, geez, he’s here to get me to sell him something.

I said, nah, I’m just stopping by and see how you are, know, landlord to landlord. About 10 seconds later, a guy comes in to pay his rent. Now this guy collects cash. And whenever the tenant comes in to pay, the guy sitting in there at his desk reaches over with his left hand and puts his hand on his pistol. Always kept a pistol on his desk. And so the tenant leaves and I said,

Brett McCollum (26:52.609)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (27:11.102)
Do you like having to have a pistol on your desk? And he goes, well, I don’t have these fancy property management systems like you guys do. You know, I’m collecting cash. And, you know, that got me thinking. I said, you know, you only come in for a couple hours a day. Why do you still do this? He goes, I like the money. And I said, do you think your son still want this when you pass? And he goes,

Brett McCollum (27:35.031)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (27:39.782)
Yeah, at one point I thought they did, but I don’t think they want it. I said, look, if I made you an offer that I would give you, 10 grand a month, would you sell our finance to me? And he thought for a minute and we negotiated a sales price and everything, a down payment. And he said, OK.

I found someone else to put up the down payment and we took on those 45.

Brett McCollum (28:14.421)
Wow, all from relationships too, man. That’s really beautiful. So how many doors today, because I know it ebbs and flows, you’re buying, you’re selling, but what’s the holding amount today?

Curtis Waters (28:24.552)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (28:28.914)
gee, I’m always trying to keep count. We bought, recently bought a portfolio of 10 single family. I mean, I know a lot of people love multi-family, even small, you know, but people talk about small apartments. They’re nice if you can buy them at the right price, but you know, the demand is really driven up the per door price. So in many cases, it’s easier to buy single family.

Brett McCollum (28:53.163)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (28:57.626)
If you need to liquidate them, know, tenant leaves, you put it on the market and they’re valued at more than the apartments are. So I think, you know, we’re over, I think it’s somewhere over 140, 150.

Brett McCollum (29:03.639)
Right.

Brett McCollum (29:13.665)
Wow, and you’ve been at this 11 years. Like that’s the crazy part, you know.

Curtis Waters (29:20.368)
Yeah, and these came together starting in late 2016. That’s everything I had with the previous partner we sold.

Brett McCollum (29:30.677)
Okay, wow, there you go. This kinda leads me to a point though, if what we were talking about with you’re building relationships, you’re doing, like that’s how this is built. It wasn’t from just let me make a bunch of offers. It was relationship driven. Correct me if I’m wrong, because we kinda touched on it briefly.

Curtis Waters (29:50.046)
Yeah, yeah, it’s primarily relationship driven to find the opportunities. mean, a lot of opportunities, they come to me. Occasionally, I will find one out in the wild. You know, I bought 13 units off of MLS back in 2022. You know, they were fantastically priced.

Brett McCollum (30:03.895)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (30:10.498)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (30:19.383)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (30:19.74)
So, you know, occasionally that does come up. But primarily the deals come to me the last 10. They came, they were on a Facebook group in the chat.

Brett McCollum (30:23.28)
Probably early relationship.

Brett McCollum (30:34.209)
wow. Yeah, that’s cool. Didn’t you, and correct me if wrong here, I’m pretty sure you wrote a book on this whole thing too though, am I right?

Curtis Waters (30:35.592)
that.

Curtis Waters (30:43.28)
Yes, yeah. I wrote a book called The Relationship Blueprint Unleashing the Power of Business Connections. So I had people ask me about, gee, how did you do this? And, you know, my mantra is I don’t spend my own money to buy property. You know, I either find someone that’s going to loan me the money whenever I start it out.

Brett McCollum (30:45.956)
there it is.

Brett McCollum (30:51.489)
That’s killing.

Brett McCollum (30:56.525)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (31:03.479)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (31:11.128)
I built a network of other investors that had money in their self-directed IRA. And, you know, I still have that that I use. You know, so building these relationships was key. So in my book, I talk about my path from no properties to plenty of properties. And then I talk about other things in the book about the importance of follow-up.

Brett McCollum (31:17.814)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (31:35.82)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (31:41.086)
the importance of adding value. You know, when you meet someone, it’s real easy to talk about, you know, hey, I’m doing this, I did this, whatever. People today are looking at, know, what value can I add? You know, typically someone says, oh, you got a lot. Can I have breakfast with you or get coffee or lunch? I can buy my own meals. I’m busy. So, you know,

Brett McCollum (31:41.719)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (32:08.567)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (32:10.27)
Find me at an event I’m at, a local meeting. Find me on Zoom. Bonnie has a Zoom. She does multiple times a week and I’m on 99 % of those.

Brett McCollum (32:26.091)
Yeah. And you wrote the book there. How can people find that? Because that’s a great way to connect with you, honestly. It’s on Amazon.

Curtis Waters (32:30.595)
It’s on Amazon.

Yeah, it’s on Amazon. You can buy it in paperback, hardback, Kindle, even have an audible version.

Brett McCollum (32:41.675)
Yeah, incredible. Yeah, I mean, because that’s such a powerful, I talk about it from time to time, is it’s relationship capital. You know, it’s, yeah, you’ve been making deposits into all these relationships. So the natural withdrawal process is the quote unquote relationship money is already in that bank. So the withdrawal is very easy.

Curtis Waters (32:50.173)
Yes.

Curtis Waters (33:04.955)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (33:05.855)
Yeah, I love that Curtis. That’s incredible. We’ll make sure we put that in the show notes for everybody as well. if any other opportunities like social media, things like that, people can reach out if they want to find out a little bit more on the Zooms and things like that.

Curtis Waters (33:19.39)
I do have a website called entrepreneursreport.com where I talk about real estate investing. I also have some calculators on there like if you’re doing a commercial loan and that’s all I do. Everything I own is in an LLC. You you’re looking at a debt service coverage ratio loan, DSCR loan. I have calculators for that.

Brett McCollum (33:27.968)
Okay.

Brett McCollum (33:41.399)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Waters (33:48.99)
I have calculators for the benchmarks that Bonnie started. You know, for instance, she has a $200 benchmark. You buy a house for $100,000. $1,000 breaks you even. So you want to run it for $1,200. So you have that $200. And she even looks at cap rate on single-family homes. So, you know, everything you buy should have a 10 % cap rate.

Brett McCollum (34:14.38)
Yeah.

Curtis Waters (34:18.48)
Any appreciation you get? Hey, that’s icing on the cake.

Brett McCollum (34:22.709)
Right. Love that. man, this has been great. We’ll make sure all of that’s in the show notes for everybody to follow along as well. I encourage you guys to reach out, connect, jump on Amazon, check out the book there as well. man, Curtis, this has been so good. Thanks for being here with me today.

Curtis Waters (34:38.226)
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Brett McCollum (34:40.493)
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. And guys, to you as well, thank you for being here and spending your time. We will see each of you on the next episode. Take care, everybody.