Faith, Family & Real Estate Freedom: How Matt Holmes Found Purpose in Recreational Investing

Share via:

• Facebook
• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• More

Subscribe via:

Show Summary

In this conversation, Matt Holmes shares his extensive experience in recreational real estate investing, discussing his journey from a part-time investor to a full-time entrepreneur. He emphasizes the importance of community, authenticity, and the lifestyle that comes with investing in recreational properties. Matt also reflects on the challenges of balancing a W-2 job with real estate and the emotional ties that come with managing properties. He encourages aspiring investors to consider their motivations and the impact they want to have on others through their investments.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • Matt Holmes’ Website
    • Matt Holmes on LinkedIn
    • Matt Holmes on Facebook
    • Matt Holmes on Instagram
    • Matt Holmes’ Phone Number: (218) 301-7171
    • Matt Holmes’ Email Address: [email protected]

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  Matt Holmes (00:00)
  picture this, I have all nine of my family members, my closest intermediate family members, including my grandson, my wife, my kiddos, ⁓ my daughter-in-law, all living on a campground together, completely rehabbing a campground together, hardest work you could imagine, best summer of my life. Epic.

  Dylan Silver (00:19)
  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (00:20)
  It was incredible. Probably never be able to get that again. So, you know, what do you want? What do you want in life? Because I’m not guaranteed tomorrow. You’re not guaranteed tomorrow.

  Dylan Silver (00:21)

  Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Matt Holmes has been investing in recreational real estate for over 25 years, including a recent purchase of a campground that has been operating for quite some time. And he’s a man of faith, family, and believes that real estate is the best way to impact people’s lives. Matt, welcome to the show.

  Matt Holmes (02:23)
  Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

  Dylan Silver (02:26)
  Great to have you on here, Matt. I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking guests how they got into real estate.

  Matt Holmes (02:35)
  Yeah, I actually had to think about that. As you mentioned, been doing it for quite some time, kind of in an unorthodox way. But I remember driving with my wife down the interstate through Iowa and looking at the landscape, the trees, the rolling hills, the cornfields, and just being enamored with passion for the land, you know, for dirt. And so my real estate journey all started by buying a chunk of dirt, ⁓ 30 acres. ⁓

  in looking back, probably no business buying it, couldn’t afford it, and I had to work really, really hard on creative financing before creative financing was even a term ⁓ being used. So that’s how my real estate journey started. I bought 30 acres of dirt to ⁓ farm and hunt and recreate on. And it was really hard to sell that one, to be honest with you. There was a lot of sentimental value to that one, but we sold that. ⁓

  Dylan Silver (03:16)
  Yep.

  You

  Okay.

  Matt Holmes (03:34)
  two, three years ago and

  it was kind of a big line in the sand so to speak of what’s next.

  Dylan Silver (03:42)
  Did you have family, friends, mentors at that point in time who were in the business?

  Matt Holmes (03:49)
  Definitely, you know throughout the years but real estate I feel like it’s changed, you know back then it was I was pretty naive to maybe the business side of it I actually Ended up getting my real estate license a few years later But I kept I never had the courage to just go all-in. I always just did it part-time so I as you can imagine I was working on a regular full-time w-2 and then

  doing real estate stuff on the side and it’s actually pretty successful with it, but I just, I didn’t have the courage to go all the way in. so, ⁓ basically it was an agent on a part-time basis, but that was, that was kind of eye-opening just how cutthroat the business was. And then on like one side of the spectrum, there were people literally like, it was all about the money. And for me, I was super naive to that, that on one side of this coin, like there are real estate investors and it still exists today that literally it’s bottom line.

  Dylan Silver (04:38)
  Yep.

  Matt Holmes (04:46)
  You know, nothing else matters other than making more and more money. And so I kind of fight against that, honestly. Not that I don’t want to make a living, ⁓ but for me at the end of the day, it’s not only about that. And I would actually say my priority is to help people and impact people through real estate, which is a great vessel.

  Dylan Silver (05:53)
  Now when we’re talking about really wearing multiple hats, right? So bought that first deal ⁓ when you talk about recreational hunting, know, lots of acres, probably an opportunity to do some type of improvement to the land. You also had a W-2. Couple of years later, you get a real estate license. Let’s go back to that point in time. You get the real estate license. What’s your day to day like? Are you every day putting some time into the business and real estate?

  Is it like, you sending referrals out? What’s your day to day life?

  Matt Holmes (06:26)
  Yeah, I love that. That’s a great question. My nickname is million mile Matt, which means I actually in my life have calculated well over a million miles driving for different sales careers. So you can imagine your car becomes your classroom, your car becomes your remote office. And so ⁓ while traveling, was conducting a lot wearing that’s where a lot of my hats were being managed because I always wanted to prioritize.

  my faith walk and I always wanted to prioritize my family and in order to do that, you got to burn it at both ends. You know, that’s kind of the myth I think that exists is it’s easy, it’s not. And so not to skip, you know, 20 some years ahead, but what I’ve done recently is I’ve basically made a decision. You know, if you love what you’re doing, you are, you have no clue mentally, physically, spiritually, what you can outpour. Like I had no clue how hard I could work, how many hours I could work.

  Dylan Silver (07:14)
  Okay.

  Matt Holmes (07:23)
  But to be honest, even right now, like am I working? Am I not working? I just grind, you know, and I just do it. And so wearing the hats is something I’ve gotten accustomed to, but I actually have surprised myself. I didn’t realize I could work as hard as I work now. And it’s a lifestyle. It is not a punch the clock ⁓ type business. So to answer your question directly, it was a lot of multitasking. know, hey, I got an hour and a half on the road. I’m gonna…

  Dylan Silver (07:41)
  Okay.

  Matt Holmes (07:51)
  start calling people and talking and planting seeds. So even now, a lot of my investment, I’ve removed a lot of emotions and I still care about the purchases I make in a deep way. I actually don’t invest in a lot of things I don’t personally believe in, which may sound crazy to entrepreneurs, but for me, it is not just about the money. And so I’ve gotten very comfortable with surrendering transactions. I went and looked at a place yesterday. I love it.

  I really emotionally loved it and at the end of the day, I know where I need to be for it to work and so I’m not emotionally tied to it. And that’s been a big step to kind of remove the emotion from the investment is very difficult.

  Dylan Silver (08:31)
  Yeah.

  For sure, mean when you talk about recreational spaces, you talk about that first deal that you did, but then also too, you have the exposure of lot of people will treat real estate ⁓ purely about the numbers. you know, that’s definitely one way to go about it for sure. I want to get a little bit granular here Matt, talking about…

  meshing real estate with having a W-2 and then what those years looked like. Were you at that point in time thinking, you know, I would like to make real estate a full-time? Were you thinking more along the lines of, me see how this is going to pan out? That first deal was not easy, right? What was the thought process about real estate when you had the W-2?

  Matt Holmes (09:21)
  Yeah, I think if I’m just brutally transparent ⁓ in answering, think my goal, I looked at people who, what I was seeing was they were selling ⁓ multi-million dollar properties. ⁓ It was obvious that they were making a lot of money and then they were like hunting, fishing, hanging out with family, traveling, like all the things ⁓ that I thought, at least at that time, that was my dream, my desire. Kind of that, wow, they’re just living the dream, man.

  Dylan Silver (09:47)
  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (09:51)
  They just hunt and fish whenever they want. They own these thousand acre properties. They make these million dollar transactions. You know, they probably hardly work and

  stuff just comes to them like that. That was what I ⁓ desired. But what I realized really quick is if you think about just the way a W-2 is structured, you start working your way up the command line on a W-2. At some point along the line, you get to where you’re building somebody else’s dream.

  Now the person who owns the business, they don’t want to say that because they got a good sales guy who’s driven. But most people who are going to be killer W2 salespeople, like I was, like a high performer, high earner, they’re very entrepreneurial. That’s what makes them successful. And so there just comes this point life where it’s like, whose dream am I going to build? And for me, what gave me the courage now to go do that.

  was life circumstances. was seeing people who are close to me pass away. It was seeing the closest people to me have health issues and just this myth that, I’m going to punch a clock for 20, 30 years and then I’m going to retire someday. Guess what? Most people who do that when they retire happens. A lot of them, they die, you know, and they don’t even get a chance to enjoy it. So I’m like, if I’m going to grind, I’m going to enjoy what I’m doing. I’m going to work towards a dream, small family business.

  Dylan Silver (11:24)
  Yeah.

  Yeah, it’s true.

  Matt Holmes (11:48)
  It really, ⁓ I didn’t realize how much entrepreneurial muscle I had, honestly, until I started, ⁓ until I took that leap, you know, and even to this day, it’s so hard, you know.

  Dylan Silver (11:58)
  Have you

  ever heard the term intrapreneur? Not entrepreneur, but intrapreneur. Have you ever heard this term?

  Matt Holmes (12:05)
  I’ve heard the term like ⁓ solopreneur and ⁓ like social enterprise, but no, guess I never have really heard that.

  Dylan Silver (12:14)
  I forget where I heard this term. It’s probably a colloquial phrase, probably not a term that exists in a dictionary. But basically someone who’s working within a business, doing everything that an entrepreneur would do within a business, an entrepreneur. And so I’ve found myself in many situations like this. it takes a fair degree of, I would say,

  risk to then say, well now I’m gonna go out and do this for myself. But at the same point in time, to your point, Matt, you’re actually risking something working for someone else because there is no guarantee that if you retire in your 60s that you’re going to be of full health, able to enjoy. And you know, there’s unfortunately people who won’t be able to enjoy at all because something could happen. I do wanna pivot here and ask you about the recreational space, which is where it seems you’ve really found a niche in.

  How is the recreational real estate space when you compare it to other asset classes like say, know, self storage or, single family and then walk us through what the typical deal is like if there is an avatar of a deal in the recreational real estate space.

  Matt Holmes (13:28)
  Yeah, there’s a lot of facets within the recreational real estate space. Some of them are becoming ultra popular right now. know, everybody’s talking about them kind of the from the investment standpoint. ⁓ One thing I think a lot of people overlook in my opinion is that there’s a geographical culture that impacts your investments in the recreational space. So for example, ⁓

  Everybody right now is looking at purchasing, you know RV parks like it’s become it’s probably part of my algorithm You know on YouTube stuff, but everybody’s going that way, you know from a financial investment or mobile home parks or you know those types of things and What I found like where I’m at in northern, Minnesota It’s a completely different culture. It’s a it’s a mining culture. It’s the Iron Range It’s you have people who are leaving and driving three hours north of Minneapolis to escape the hustle and bustle and just the

  the grind of city life, but they got good paying jobs. So they’re buying cabins, they’re buying lakefront properties ⁓ to escape that. And they’re coming up on the weekend. So that’s one culture. But then the other culture is the local folks. These are people who literally grew up, you know, mining communities, those types of things. And what I’ve found, and I love it, I love the people up north is ⁓ the people are very transparent, very authentic.

  And to run a resort, which is very popular up there, or a campground, which is very popular up there, you have to be embedded in the community

  for it to successful. And so a lot of investors in and of itself, that statement, they go, no, I’ll just hire somebody to do it. Well, the amount of work, I’m just analyzing like this most recent investment of this campground, the amount of work that myself and my family had done.

  Dylan Silver (15:43)
  Hmm.

  Matt Holmes (16:01)
  I don’t care how much salary you would have paid me, I wouldn’t have done it. And I certainly wouldn’t have done it to the level we did it. But when it’s your own dream, your own family, your own future, your own passion area, it just becomes lifestyle. And so you have like this built in motivation to do things. For example, on a 4th July weekend on a Saturday when you get a text from someone in the seasonal aspect, the campground says, hey, you got to come clean the bathroom because somebody had a

  Dylan Silver (16:14)
  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (16:31)
  Accident I won’t go into details and it’s Saturday night on the 4th of July Like those are the things if you’re hiring someone to do it, you know, they don’t get super motivated long term to do it But when it is yours you you care about it So much like you just do what you got to do. And so I guess my point is to get back to your your granular Question there is I think some of the recreational space ⁓

  Dylan Silver (16:34)
  Yeah.

  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (16:59)
  What you’re going to see is this pendulum swing back to the authentic, the raw, transparent with this market shift. The market is obviously shifting and at least in the geographical areas I invest in and everybody, I get probably since I bought this campground, I probably get an average of two to three AI calls a day. can spot it. I literally can just tell it’s AI immediately.

  Everybody, as you know, all the investors are using AI. AI is just going bonkers. Everybody who owns a home is going to be getting hit with AI. And there’s going to come this pendulum swing back at some point where people actually value authenticity, transparent, less is more, time with the family, mental health. Our culture with AI is at risk. And I believe I get to contribute to a positive side, which is

  Dylan Silver (17:24)
  All

  it.

  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (17:49)
  getting people in the outdoors, fishing, hunting, spending time with family, sitting around a campfire, having deep, slow paced conversations, camping. ⁓ This is what I’m all about. And ⁓ so I’ll continue to invest ⁓ in recreational real estate. But if there’s somebody out there that’s like, hey, I want to get into this. My first question is, well, what’s the end goal? If the end goal is simply money for the least amount of time investment, I’d steer them to a different investment class.

  If the end goal is a lifestyle where you can live on a lake in the middle of the woods, make a little money while doing it, truly help and impact people. I could take someone under my wing right now and I could train them up on how to do that very successfully. Cause that’s what we’ve done.

  Dylan Silver (18:38)
  I want to ask you specifically about the management. You mentioned, you know, Fourth of July, you get a call, have to go out there, someone who’s, you know, not personally tied to it, would not necessarily have the motivation to go do that. And there might be turnover and all these types of things. You mentioned earlier, as when I’ve seen it too, that there’s tons of interest from private equity in RV parks, for instance. How are folks

  buying and then managing these RV parks when they’re not tied into that region, it does seem to me to be challenging, right? I mean, is this successful for most of them or is this like a new phase that time will tell if this is truly, you know, a good strategy?

  Matt Holmes (19:26)
  Yeah, you know, mean, I guess I have mixed feelings about it. There is definitely ⁓ private equity firms and companies that their pockets are much deeper than anybody I associate with, ⁓ you know, at this stature. And I’m okay with that. But so I think there’s this balance of like they can almost buy. Their pockets are so deep and almost they basically eliminate the risk or they go, hey, we can go

  Dylan Silver (19:50)
  loyalty, yeah, stuff like that.

  Matt Holmes (19:56)
  We can go dump, you know, $800,000 back into a couple of cabins and like lose money for 10 years in a row. And it just, it’s doesn’t impact anything. It’s like for the average person to go eat out, you know, that’s not me. And that’s not my passion. And that’s not my experience. I think there are resorts up in my neck of the woods, ⁓ in Northern Minnesota that have existed forever. They’re not fancy. They’re your picturesque.

  Get away from it all, set in a lakeshore, fish. They are not fancy. They’re not glamping. They’re not all the trends. They’re not the glass houses. They’re none of that. Those exist. There’s nothing wrong with them. But people want family time. They want community. They want a breather from technology. And there’s repeat customers because what they consistently say, and I get it all the time at the campground on my other investments is, wow, we experienced something.

  Dylan Silver (20:35)
  Right. ⁓

  Matt Holmes (20:54)
  that is intangible. We don’t even know how to describe it. It was such a breather from the norm that it was priceless and it focused so much on what we really are desiring, which is time with family. And because these other equity firms are kind of like, how do I say it, manufacturing experiences, you you’ve seen all these hotel chains getting into outdoor spaces and experiences, nothing wrong with it.

  Dylan Silver (20:58)
  Thank

  Yeah.

  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (21:24)
  ⁓ I think at end of the day, an investor has to decide what they value the most. And for me, this

  picture this, I have all nine of my family members, my closest intermediate family members, including my grandson, my wife, my kiddos, ⁓ my daughter-in-law, all living on a campground together, completely rehabbing a campground together, hardest work you could imagine, best summer of my life. Epic.

  Dylan Silver (21:50)
  Yeah.

  Matt Holmes (21:52)
  It was incredible. Probably never be able to get that again. So, you know, what do you want? What do you want in life? Because I’m not guaranteed tomorrow. You’re not guaranteed tomorrow.

  Dylan Silver (21:53)
  That is phenomenal.

  Matt Holmes (22:00)
  So I’m always just like, this is what I’m all about, man. It is it is exciting. It’s hard. It’s fun. The future is bright. I’m always wanting to collaborate and connect with people because conversation is free, you know, and there’s a lot of people in our society who are so tied to their phone. They believe myths. I’m going to live forever.

  Someday that’s the biggest myth I bought into someday. I’ll do this. I still fight that myth So good question

  Dylan Silver (22:26)
  Yeah.

  Hey,

  I’m right there with you. Ultimately, that’s part of the reason why I moved, big reason why I moved to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. But it’s interesting you talk about community because when people think about phones, one of the things that they do is they connect us instantaneously, but they also disconnect us instantaneously as well because then you never have even the desire. Someone in your family could be sitting right next to you and you’ll be more tied in and distracted on your phone than you will be.

  Asking them about their day and so I can understand so many of the the topics that we went into here today on the podcast We are coming up on time here though Matt where can folks go if they’d like to reach out to you Maybe they have a deal they’d like you to look at a recreational area. How can folks get in contact?

  Matt Holmes (23:14)
  I love that. my phone number is 218-301-7171. So if someone calls me, I will ⁓ do my best to answer. I certainly will call them back. ⁓ My email is [email protected]. Or you can look me up or my business, getupnorthretreats.com would be probably the best place to contact me. ⁓

  That’s a business with a variety of recreational real estate investments. yeah, someone found me on LinkedIn, Matt Holmes 30 or Instagram or Facebook, Get Up North Retreats. Matt Holmes would love to connect. And I’d say on two sides. One, is there young entrepreneurs that are looking to kind of get into this and they buy into some of the things I’m saying like, hey, there’s got to be something more. I’d love to help them. I’d really love to coach them, mentor them, help them in a generous way. ⁓

  Dylan Silver (23:56)
  .

  Okay.

  Matt Holmes (24:10)
  Otherwise, like right now, I’m working on a project

  right now that I’m very excited about that’s going to offer what we were talking about, retreats away from all these issues that are happening to help, you know, adoptive families, mental health, ⁓ using recreation to train and educate, impact lives. And so I’m looking for people who believe in that, maybe that are faith driven.

  Dylan Silver (24:22)
  Okay. ⁓

  Matt Holmes (24:36)
  ⁓ That’s one of my latest ventures that I’m looking to develop some support for that ⁓ is pretty high on the priority list right now.

  Dylan Silver (24:45)
  Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show today.