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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Mira Atanasova, a real estate investor who shares her journey of investing in properties in Illinois. Mira discusses her unconventional deal sourcing strategies, the challenges she faced in the current market, and her creative financing solutions. She emphasizes the importance of negotiating good deals and shares valuable insights for new investors looking to enter the real estate market.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Mira (00:00)
Both well three of our ⁓ all three of our properties are condos. We have not seen either of them before buying them, so they were all bought sight unseen. ⁓ For the sourcing, you mentioned something. Two of our properties came from an online auction. ⁓ Which is. A more unconventional way of sourcing deals.The first one was also not on the market. We found it through a realtor, but ⁓ basically it was in a conversation. We just asked for a certain community and she said, actually, I might have someone that’s willing to sell and that’s how we landed on our first deal.
Michelle Kesil (02:16)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate ProsI’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Mira Atanasova, who is a real estate investor with her partner in Illinois using unconventional deal sourcing. So excited to have you here today, Mira.
Mira (02:24)
Okay.This is actually the first time I’m sharing publicly our journey.
Michelle Kesil (02:41)
Amazing. Well,excited for you to share with our audience how you’re finding deals and approaching your investment journey so we can dive in.
Mira (02:50)
Thank you so much for having me.Michelle Kesil (02:52)
Of course. So for those not familiar with you and your work yet, can you share what your main focus is?Mira (02:56)
⁓So we’re me and my partner. We’re real estate investors in Illinois. We have two long term rentals ⁓ in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. And then we’re about to list our first flip that’s on the northern side of Chicago. ⁓ We are born and raised in Eastern Europe. ⁓ We immigrated less than
12 years ago. And yeah, we bought our first property in 2022. The second one we bought in 2023 and the flip that we’re working on right now we bought last year.
Both well three of our ⁓ all three of our properties are condos. We have not seen either of them before buying them, so they were all bought sight unseen. ⁓ For the sourcing, you mentioned something. Two of our properties came from an online auction. ⁓ Which is. A more unconventional way of sourcing deals.
The first one was also not on the market. We found it through a realtor, but ⁓ basically it was in a conversation. We just asked for a certain community and she said, actually, I might have someone that’s willing to sell and that’s how we landed on our first deal.
We were just looking to buy something in this community.
Michelle Kesil (04:27)
Amazing. And are your properties outside of Chicago or in that market?Mira (04:33)
⁓ They’re in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago.Michelle Kesil (04:36)
Awesome. What do you feel have been the main keys that made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to grow and to run smoothly?Mira (05:35)
⁓ Well, I think ⁓ sourcing and negotiating the deals at a good discount gave us the security that even though we haven’t stepped a foot inside of them, ⁓ we’ll be able to renovate them and still end up with equity in the deal at the start. ⁓ I can share some numbers if that would be interesting.for your audience. So our first deal, it was a condo, one bedroom. ⁓ When we ended up getting inside after closing, saw ⁓ that it’s actually in a pretty rough shape, even though it had a tenant just a few weeks before that. ⁓ The appliances were gone and the place looked like no one had lived there for years. And as I said,
He just moved out a few weeks before closing. We bought it for 84, 500 and we put only like 3000 into renovation. We changed the flooring. We did some refreshing of the kitchen cabinets. We had to buy new appliances which were not new. We bought them from Facebook Marketplace and all of our other.
materials with source from liquidators and Facebook marketplaces. And we were able to keep our budget very low. ⁓ The other thing that’s interesting about this deal that we were living in it while we were renovating it and we didn’t even have to list it on the market. The realtor that helped us buy it actually found tenants ⁓ that were ready to move in.
When we’re ready to move out so we didn’t have vacancy even a day. ⁓ And we are now cash flowing $900 from it at the beginning. It was around $700 so we raised the rent two times since then. ⁓ But yeah, we haven’t leveraged that one. We bought it cash with our savings. The second one.
Is the one that we bought from an auction. We bought it for very much under. Under market so similar properties were selling around $120,000 and we were able to lock it in for 68. 340 or something like this, so it was almost 50 % discount.
But when we stepped inside after closing, there was ⁓ a leak that was going on for a very long time without anyone noticing because ⁓ the person that owned the unit ⁓ died, I think, two or three years before that. So the bank repossessed it and no one has stepped foot inside.
So we had to deal with the association to get that fixed because it was the main line, but it was in very rough shape. had a lot of well, all the belongings of the previous owner were still inside, so we had to clean all that up. It was a lot of cleaning and a lot of work. Again, we didn’t have to put a lot in the renovation. We put a little over 2000 into it to make it rent ready.
and we were able to rent it out right away. ⁓ Again, no vacancy at all. ⁓ That’s the first two deals. ⁓ the second one, we recently refinanced it because we bought it cash. ⁓ We used a DSCR loan for that.
And even though a lot of the things with this loan didn’t go through as good as
we want to and we hope for. We were able to pull almost all of the cash we invested in this unit out. I think we only have like $1,000 or $1,500 left in the deal and we’re still cash flowing around $400 a month.
Michelle Kesil (10:25)
That’s awesome. What are you most focused on solving or scaling to next when it comes to the next thing?Mira (10:36)
So now we’re working on our flip. We’re ready to list it. We’re just waiting for for the spring months because Chicago is quite slow during the winter, ⁓ so we’re about to list it on the market. We’re hoping that it will sell quickly. The flip that we’re working on ⁓ is also an online auction property. ⁓We bought it ⁓ sight unseen and it was not vacant. Actually, it ended up having tenants that were ⁓ that were from moved in from the ⁓ renting from the association because there was unpaid dues to the association. So even though the building didn’t allow tenants, ⁓ our ⁓ unit that we bought ended up having tenants.
which we had to give two months notice and it took a while for us to take possession. ⁓ But yeah, we’re looking forward to listing it, selling it and moving on to the next one. We’re hoping that this year we’ll be able to do at least another flip and hopefully we’ll buy a rental or two.
Michelle Kesil (11:53)
Amazing. What has been the biggest obstacle or challenge that you’ve faced so far on your journey?Mira (11:59)
Well, ⁓ the biggest obstacle right now I think is the high interest rate environment because we weren’t able to use leverage as much as we wanted. And when we started our real estate education, ⁓ we read a lot of things that are not applicable in the current environment. ⁓ So we were very excited about the brrrr method and it ended up not being ⁓ as easy to apply.in the current market environment as it was before. ⁓ So this is something that is an obstacle right now and I hope now that the market has slowed down a little, we’ll be able to find more good deals like the ones that we found ⁓ and this way we’ll have ⁓ enough margin left to leverage them.
Michelle Kesil (12:52)
Yeah, and how did you learn how to invest? Did you take a course or just trial and error?Mira (12:57)
⁓ Well, the first one it was really trial and error because we have started reading about real estate investing after our first property. ⁓ But I think even our first one was a very good deal, so ⁓ it was trial and error, but ⁓ we didn’t make as many ⁓ mistakes as we could have if we haven’t bought it. ⁓good discount as it was. ⁓ But after that, it was a lot of reading, a lot of podcasting. Like, ⁓ I try to listen to podcasts, whatever I do, when I’m not basically using my brain for something else. So all the even things like at home, like ⁓ running the vacuum, and I have my headphones and just listening to different podcasts and different books.
Michelle Kesil (13:52)
Awesome. Love that.What are you most excited for when it comes to any opportunities that you’re looking into getting for this year?
Mira (14:38)
Yeah.I really hope we’ll be able to add at least one or two rentals to our portfolio, because last year we weren’t able to. We just ⁓ found this flip deal that we’re working on. ⁓ So this is something I’m really excited about. I really want to ⁓ expand into midterm rentals as well. ⁓ Just a way of diversification. We’re also open to other markets.
We’re doing some research in other markets, so we might expand this way as well.
Michelle Kesil (15:18)
Awesome. Do you have any advice for someone that hasn’t started investing yet? What do you wish that someone told you?Mira (15:25)
Hmm, don’t overthink it and just buy it the good discount if you can’t. This way, even if things are not as good as you hoped for, you still have enough equity in the deal to ⁓ be able to fix things.Michelle Kesil (15:42)
Yeah and you mentioned that you do the rehab yourself. What does that look like?Mira (15:43)
It’s not me.Um, so it’s me and my husband. Obviously he’s doing a lot more work than I do, but I’m helping whenever I can. Right now we have a three year old as well, so I cannot help as much as I did before. But yeah, it’s it’s fine. We’re outsourcing only specialized trades, but in condos you don’t need that much of that either. So, um.
He’s changing the flooring. He’s hanging kitchen cabinets. He’s painting. I’m helping. And yeah, as I said, we’re only, we have only done condos so far. So it’s basically always a cosmetic rehab, nothing structural, but it helps us save a lot of the renovation budget because we’re doing the work ourselves.
Michelle Kesil (16:36)
Yeah, that makes sense. Can you expand on how you purchased it through the online auction for those who may have never heard of that?Mira (16:42)
youYeah, well there’s a few websites. Am I allowed to say which one we use?
Michelle Kesil (16:50)
Yeah, sure.Mira (16:51)
We used auction.com and we found the deal ⁓ for our first online auction. We have actually submitted a higher pre auction offer, but they didn’t agree, so we ended up buying it even cheaper at the live auction. ⁓ At first it it haven’t met the reserve the seller wanted, but after going back and forth a few times we were able to reach ⁓ an agreement and.They sold it at the price that I mentioned before.
The thing with the online auctions now that I think about it is that most of them don’t allow financing or at least not conventional financing. There is some auctions that would allow you to use a hard money lender, ⁓ but because a lot of the properties don’t have ⁓ internal access to, they cannot ⁓ get an appraisal done. So most
Michelle Kesil (17:23)
Amazing?Mira (17:49)
most financing options are out of the ⁓ picture.Michelle Kesil (17:54)
Yeah, and so what are some creative financing solutions that maybe you’ve used?Mira (17:59)
⁓ We have actually used a 0 % balance transfer a few times. ⁓ I’m not. Recommending ⁓ using it unless you have a backup plan on how to repay that, ⁓ but because ⁓ we had so much equity in two of our deals, we felt confident enough ⁓ to do that. ⁓ So the way it works is.most banks would offer you 0 % interest balance transfers where you only pay like 4 % transfer fee. And that’s how we ended up getting $60,000 for only 4 % for 18 months. That’s the fee that we had to pay. And 18 months, we only had to pay the minimum payment, which is like $600.
Michelle Kesil (18:53)
Amazing. That is a cool strategy.Mira (18:56)
Yeah, it’s a little risky if you’re not a ⁓ person that knows how to. ⁓ Control their credit card spending, so I would not recommend it to anyone that usually carries kept credit card balance, but since neither me or my husband carry ⁓ any balances other than the balance transfers that we do, ⁓ we felt confident that even if. ⁓we cannot repay another way. We can always refi one of our properties and pay it that way.
Michelle Kesil (19:29)
Yeah, definitely. It seems that you need to know your finance as well to do that.Mira (19:30)
Yeah,yeah, correct.
Michelle Kesil (19:35)
Awesome. Well, before we wrap up here, if somebody wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you and connect with you?Mira (19:45)
So ⁓ last year I actually started documenting our journey in a page, Facebook page. ⁓ It’s Pathway to Wealth. ⁓ My name is Mira Atanasova. They can find me that way as well. ⁓ I’m not into Instagram too much, but I do use Facebook. So if anyone wants to reach me, ⁓ that’s where they can find me.Michelle Kesil (20:09)
Awesome. And when you mentioned the pathway to wealth, is that like a blog or what does that look like?Mira (20:13)
It’sa Facebook page where I’m sharing our journey.
follow us.
Michelle Kesil (20:21)
Perfect. Well,I appreciate your time, your story, your perspective. Thank you for coming on.
Mira (20:27)
Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun.Michelle Kesil (20:30)
Of course. And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Mira who are building real businesses and we will see you on our next episode.
