From $2M Flip to $5M Sale: How Alan McGeever Built His Real Estate Empire

Michelle Kesil (00:01.221)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Alan McGeever, who’s been making serious moves in the real estate space with renovations and his multiple businesses. So Alan, we’re really glad to have you here today. I really think our listeners are going to take something away from how you’re approaching

home remodeling and development and your investments. So yeah, you have a lot of knowledge to share. So let’s dive in.

Alan Mcgeever (00:39.554)
Hi Michelle, thank you, I really appreciate you being here and giving me the opportunity to speak with you.

Michelle Kesil (00:44.281)
Yeah, we’re excited. So first off, for people who may not be familiar with you and your world, can you give us the short version of what your main focus is these days?

Alan Mcgeever (00:56.718)
So currently my main focus is in a number of different areas within the real estate sector. We do a lot of developments, so everything from our fix and flip, buying the stressed properties, completely renovating them and getting them back on the market for a new family to come in and purchase turnkey. We’re doing a lot of that at the moment and we’re scaling every quarter, every six months we’re scaling on that to try and add more properties. We’re also doing a lot of home renovations for people.

company does, we two separate companies, one’s more on the development side which buys the distressed properties and then the other one is your home retail remodeling company. So basically if you have a

your home is dated or you purchased a home and it’s not exactly right up to today’s standards or aesthetically pleasing to you, we can come in there, our team will come in, sit down with you, we’ll devise a complete plan, help you with your design aspect of it and we can do everything from changing your home layout, you wanna remove walls, in load bearing beams, open up maybe a cantina door that opens out into your backyard. So we do everything with home remodeling in general.

So they’re two separate entities but they kind of are the same thing really. At the end of the day we’re trying to improve your home as a homeowner or we’re trying to purchase one and completely improve that and get it back on the market. So that’s generally what we’re doing at the moment. We’re also diving in to ground up multi-family units as well. So we’re going through permitting in some of the areas in San Diego here that we purchased land or very distressed homes and we’re taking a look at them and saying hey this property

is, you know, it’s almost beyond repair. need to build a new home. But hey, instead of building a new home, can we put units here? We look at the zone in there and we do our due diligence. And then if we can put on some units on that property, that’s going to be working more and can house more people. And it’s in the correct zone for that. Maybe the surrounding area, like for example, one in City Heights we have, in that particular area, that street, it’s multifamily everywhere. So putting a one-off house again in that

Alan Mcgeever (03:08.452)
site is not going to really appeal to somebody as a homebuyer to come in and purchase a house when each side of it you already have multifamily units. The best use for that land, we take a look at the use for the land and we can go ahead and you know get some permits in there and see can we put some units on it. So we’re also doing more in the development side and that’s the way we’re planning to go is on the larger developments.

Michelle Kesil (03:33.507)
Amazing. And what markets are you operating in?

Alan Mcgeever (03:37.55)
Really it’s all markets in general in San Diego. We don’t have a specific market that we’re like, hey, we’re not going to work up there. We do a lot of work from North County, from Ivey South to right up to Oceanside.

You know, we do some work in Orange County as well. Just for past clients and returning clients, we will go up there and do that. We do some work in Palm Springs. We’re actually doing some high-end kitchen renovations at Palm Springs. There’s a lot of demand for that out there. But other than that, it’s mainly San Diego here. But anywhere in San Diego that we can pick up a deal, you know, and the numbers work out, we’re okay to travel.

Michelle Kesil (04:17.957)
Yeah, amazing. So what caught my attention is how you’re managing these multiple businesses and doing all of these, yeah, wonderful home renovations for people. That’s not easy, especially in this climate. So, yeah. Yeah.

Alan Mcgeever (04:28.856)
Bye.

Alan Mcgeever (04:32.974)
Right, so lots of coffee and lots of hours and that’s it, right? The country was founded on coffee, think more than anything. So that’s always something that helps. No, you’re right, it’s definitely not easy. you know, it’s about building a team. It’s about building a team really. There was one stage, I want to say maybe three years ago, I was wearing all the hats. You know, I was the manager and running the crew.

Michelle Kesil (04:41.593)
Hahaha

Michelle Kesil (04:52.613)
Thank you.

Alan Mcgeever (05:01.954)
you know, doing the Home Depot runs, material runs, orderings, invoices, doing all of the above and, you know, coming home and working for two or three hours in the office then. But thankfully I have a couple of managers, two managers who are really well qualified and great at their jobs and they run my crews now. Then I also have a second brain, I call it. I have my assistant and he comes with me every day and he’s the one taking down the notes, doing a lot of the backend work.

and just dividing and conquering really is how we do it. It was a natural progression, know, and sometimes you get to a point and you look back and you’re like, oh my God, we have six or eight jobs on right now.

understanding what more people you know asking for appointments and so on and so forth and it can get overwhelming and like that you just you kind of build a structure as you go and you take you know your limits you know and you take on the work as you need to you stagger it as you need to and you just go with it and that’s that’s the best you can do until you need to expand and maybe add you know going from one manager to two and maybe there’s going to be a third one within the next year so that’s kind of how you do it you just

you kind of jump off the cliff and assemble the airplane on the way down. That’s what I like to do.

Michelle Kesil (06:17.741)
Yeah, that’s super valuable, absolutely. Now, every operator I know also had moments when things got real, maybe a deal went sideways or a time where you had to pivot fast. Is there a moment like that that you could share?

Alan Mcgeever (06:39.564)
There is, you know, probably many. There’s ones that stand out to me more than others. You know, there always comes a time when you think, you know, why did I pick this industry or this industry has so many moving parts? It really is. It’s very hands on. You know, I think to myself, why didn’t I go into something tech and AI that I could…

work from my laptop on a nice beach somewhere. you know what I mean? I do have those days, of course. And then I take a look back and I’m like, what I do, I feel really rewarded for doing it because I believe it helps people bringing homes to the market and a family that loves their home or renovating for somebody. There’s a really good feeling when you can walk away from that and you get a referral and people sing your praises or give you good reviews. There’s a part of that for me that is

so rewarding that I’m glad I am doing what I’m doing. I feel like I am the…

Last of a kind of breed for my age group, all the young people right now are not thinking about going into construction or learning a trade or anything within the construction field. It’s just not thought about now as a kid, you know, when you’re late teens or coming out of high school, that’s generally not what you’re thinking about. So I feel like there’s not as many of us left. But getting back to your actual question, we’re not going down too much of a rabbit hole there. So if I want to make an example, was a time

took on my second flip. My second flip was very big property 6200 square foot and it was actually Jenny Craig’s old house and I found an investor and we

Michelle Kesil (08:21.669)
Hello?

Alan Mcgeever (08:25.41)
We ended up purchasing the property for two million, great home, huge, property. It was very heavily distressed. Everything was needed in this property. So I probably bit off more than I could chew there, but yet again, I believed in myself in the process and we got through it. So.

Basically we needed to renovate the whole home, it three floors. We had a budget from six to eight hundred thousand on that property. Ended up costing us one point three. So I had to put in a lot more money than…

first plan, so did my investor. Things got a bit tough, you know, with him during periods, you know, we bounced heads with different ideas. He wasn’t himself in the construction business, so sometimes it was difficult for him to understand the methods and why we do things in a certain way. But yet again, he’s forking out a lot of money. I am too. My main focus was on that, was on that home. So I wasn’t doing a huge amount of other retail remodelling for people. So the income on my end,

was pretty low and I had put in a lot of money myself initially into the house to get it going. So just to kind of wrap it up on there, we got to a stage where we had, I want to say, know, 500,000 more out of pocket between me and my investor, you know, and it was difficult because now once we had spent that money, brought a beautiful product that was, we purchased for 2 million, we listed it for 5.99 million.

So put 1.3 million involved in it and there’s a lot of money at stake, a lot of time and money at stake. So, you know, at that time, as we put it on the market and you know, and also once we put it on the market was between the time that the interest rates jumped within a six month period. From May, they jumped from 3.5 to 6 % by September and we were coming on the market in August, September. Now, mind you, there’s obviously a smaller buyer pool at home.

Alan Mcgeever (10:25.232)
homes above 5 million as you go up in the price point the buyer pool is smaller so the homes aren’t you know at that price point they’re they’re taking a minute to sell so basically at that stage yes that was probably a really difficult period because I had taken out

other loans and leveraged myself in every way I possibly could. Family, friends, everybody had thrown into my kitty, you know, to get me there to the end with the dream that the product will sell and that everybody gets squared away, you know, with interest. And then I obviously get the deal done and the job done.

So there was a period when we were on the market, we’re obviously still paying a huge mortgage and we’re all out of pocket and we’re waiting essentially, it’s a waiting period and it’s a pretty uncomfortable period. When you put all in, I put all my chips on the table, I put other people’s chips on the table as well. It’s different for an investor coming in with a certain amount of money.

They still have their own business or businesses and they’re fine, you know, and they can sit back But for me, I had I had given everything and it was a make or break now thankfully and we ended up getting a getting a great offer and we worked it up not exactly where we wanted it we worked it up to to a point where we were happy with it and we got the deal closed at five point one five million and That left us with great margins on what

we did so the work that I had done over the past year to 18 months you know we got it closed it was even a rough escrow and we just that was really it that was probably the toughest time that I’ve had in the last five six years of my growing career like I said I bit off more than I could chew but I placed the bets on myself that I could do this I knew I could we got it done even though it was like a roller coaster getting there we still got it sold in four months which is

Alan Mcgeever (12:25.181)
actually that long for a home at that price point and yeah that was that was the year I

I became a millionaire and it was amazing. that was probably the most difficult period I had since then. Not that everything’s been rosy, it’s business. You’ll always have your ups and downs. But I want to say that was probably one of my most stressful periods was waiting on finishing up that home, waiting on the home to sell, the leveraging that I put myself under and the pressure that I did was just overwhelming. Would I like to do it again? Probably not.

Michelle Kesil (12:59.851)
Yeah, thank you for sharing. That’s the kind of stuff people don’t talk about enough and it’s super valuable.

Alan Mcgeever (13:06.722)
They don’t.

They don’t because people see the glamour, the glitz when you put a home like that to market you usually do you know a sunset soiree or you do an evening event where you have your band there and the red carpet and everybody’s coming in to view this property and you know nobody sees what went into it the last year nobody sees that you’re there shaking hands and smiling but you’re in debt by hundreds of thousands maybe you know they get you to that point you know and you’re you’re hoping that it’s a whole

Michelle Kesil (13:27.896)
Yeah.

Alan Mcgeever (13:37.664)
and that you’re good to go on to the next one. And I always try and say, if you’re confident in what you do, it’s a calculated risk because you’re calculating it and betting on yourself. And I’d rather bet on myself than anybody else because they trust me more to know that I’m going to show up and get it done. I have no options. Your options are get up and get it done and do what you need to do and see it through. And I like to place the bets on me and so far it’s been going all right.

Michelle Kesil (14:07.212)
Yeah, that’s super important. So let me ask you this. What are you most focused on solving or scaling next? Like what’s that next big goal for you?

Alan Mcgeever (14:17.646)
My next big goal really is I feel like as I go through my growth pattern with where I’ve been and where I came from, I’m always trying to go on to bigger and better things, whether it’s better or not, but I like challenges. So I started off in real estate, I’d done a couple of years as a real estate agent. I feel like I conquered the buying and selling process. It doesn’t matter whether it’s at home.

it’s 10 million or 500,000. It’s still the same paperwork. still have to, you know, obviously there is some differences in what you need to do, but the process is very similar. I feel like I conquered that. went on to building a home remodeling company. You know, I’ve done upwards of 150 home remodels here in San Diego. Then I went ahead and introduced my fix and flips into that. I probably have done about 30 flips now. And I feel like I’ve conquered the ability. Like I spoke about a huge remodel like that at 6200 square

were feed to a smaller condo. So I understand that process. For me now, where I wanna go is I wanna go into ground up developments, custom home builds, buying land and developing on the land or like that, buying a…

home that is distressed by putting units on it, doing like multi-family units. I’m starting off, I’m already in the process of getting permits for eight units in City Heights here. And, you know, I also have another offer in on one that comes with plans, it’s 12 units in North Park. I’m trying to expand. What I’m trying to do is conquer the ground ups. And then, you know, if I can do 10 units or 12 units.

why can’t I do 35 or 40 units? And then when I get to that stage, then it’s a huge jump when you start going into your high rise and you start going into staff and the units. Once you go above three floors, it changes into commercial. You know, if you do three floors and you can do 20 units, that’s fine. It’s still classed as residential, but you you want to go into bigger stuff. If I do get to that stage, it’s commercial. So you got to learn a whole other side of things as well. So for me, I want to…

Alan Mcgeever (16:26.988)
dive into that and the process of doing it. you know, I’m very excited to get going and trying to build here and add to the housing crisis that already exists and try and bring more affordable homes here in San Diego. you know, hopefully help everybody out and reach my goals while doing so.

Michelle Kesil (16:47.478)
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really big goal.

Alan Mcgeever (16:50.798)
Yeah it is and I think that hopefully when I do achieve it, whether it takes the next year or three years, I can look back and have the same conversation again and maybe have a lot more challenges and maybe discuss with you guys going through that process because it is a bigger process. It’s not a fix and flip. You know can do it in a few months and the ground-ups you’re talking about years doing that project and a lot more can go wrong when you’re dealing with it.

Michelle Kesil (17:04.824)
Yeah.

Alan Mcgeever (17:19.274)
stuff from scratching the surface or demolishing an already existing home and you’re trying to multiple units on that. You’ve just got lot more hoops to jump through and stuff like that. So it’s certainly going to be a challenge, but hey, what else are going to do?

Michelle Kesil (17:36.684)
Yeah, it’s a good challenge. Now, I know a lot of people listening to this are either earlier in their journey or they’re looking to level up and they would benefit from hearing this. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what do you feel made the biggest difference for you?

Alan Mcgeever (17:38.86)
challenge exactly.

Alan Mcgeever (17:57.999)
That’s a great question. So, you know, for me it came from multiple sources, I want to say, but what really did help was being a real estate agent at the beginning. I done so much networking being a real estate agent that when I then went in to build my other businesses, had…

I guess this network of real estate agents that was in direct contact with the home buyers on a daily basis. So for me, that was the biggest thing for me was, you know, being a real estate agent first, I got to know a lot of people, just the deals with houses in general, you know, whether it’s buying and selling and you know, as a real estate agent, you have to promote yourself a lot at the start in order to get the work. So, you know, I got known.

by quite a few agents here and then as I developed into my business, know, they were able to see what I did and here as a real estate agent, everybody loves having a contact for something. So I was kind of their contact for, hey, this guy, I know a guy that does this and they put my contact forward. Besides from that, in terms of networking, what I would say to anybody, because not everybody wants to start off being a real estate agent, right? And people still want to go into the housing sector, whether they want to be a wholesaler, you know, or

they just want to get in as an investor some way or maybe purchase their first home with the intentions of doing a value add themselves. There’s a lot of different methods to get into real estate right and they could even you know some people don’t even want to do it as a full-time job they got their full-time job but maybe they’ve some money saved and they’re like hey you know what I just want to do two or three flips a year I see this all the time hey we have some money we’re interested in the flip game we want to make some side money that’s going to bring us in some more chunks because we need a down payment for our home.

It can be hard sometimes to save money on a salary. You’re putting away two or three grand a month and it becomes difficult. to those people, the best thing to really do is there’s so many great networking events here in San Diego, honestly. There’s a couple of apps, one of them is called Meetup. That’s an app. There’s another one, it appears in deals. If you even research any of them on Google, you can find real estate investing meetup groups. You can see Airbnb.

Alan Mcgeever (20:20.13)
meetup groups, groups for wholesaling, know, real estate themselves in terms of wanting to become a real estate agent. I would definitely recommend anybody, whatever area they’re trying to get into, to just go to these networking events.

meet people, you go in there, okay, you might be nervous at the start, I feel like I don’t know anything. There’s not only you that’s in there, there’s people that’s experienced for 15, 20 years, there’s people like me that’s 10 years or eight years experience, there’s guys in there just a couple of years, maybe they’ve done a handful of flips, and there’s people that’s coming in there being like, hey, I have some money but I don’t know where to start. You’re gonna find a wide range of people at some of these events that the first person you meet mightn’t be able to help you, but…

Go around and shake as many hands as you can, talk to as much people, tell them what you want to do. And there’s always somebody there to help. know, the best way you can say get involved, just for example, if you did want to get into flips, because I see this a lot.

And you do have some money try and partner with somebody try and partner with somebody that knows what they’re doing has done it for a number of years I wouldn’t say try and partner with somebody that has done two or three of them because they’re still learning try and partner with somebody like me that has you know a number of years experience I know what I’m doing and I’m happy to come in and JV Do a joint venture on a flip with you. Hey, you’re able to bring in some cash

Okay, I may be bringing some cash or you bring in the cash, I bring in the knowledge. I can find the property, analyze the property. I actually have a couple of investors that’s doing it now with me. They’re bringing in the capital and they’re learning slowly from me. I’m bringing in the expertise, the construction team. I have everything. I have all the tools from analyzing the property to handing the keys over to the new buyer. I have everybody right along the way, you know, from title companies, escrow companies.

Alan Mcgeever (22:19.818)
that have worked with loads to give us discounts. You know, I have everybody I need to get that property back on the market and sold in every way, shape and form. So what I would tell anybody that wants to get into this industry, whatever angle or whatever side to see themselves in there, is go in. Maybe you want to do wholesaling. Speak with some guys that do wholesale and say, I would love to be part of your team. Is your team looking for some more wholesalers? There’s companies out there that, you know, most wholesalers commission-based, they’re able to take on.

as many guys as they can. And you’ll just start from the ground up, ask as many questions and keep going to them, try and pick one every week, every Thursday or Wednesday and go to them as many as you can, try and get all the answers and you will find good people. There’s a lot of, I wanna say 99.9 % of people here has good intentions. They’re trying to do the same themselves or have done the same themselves and…

Everybody just really wants to win, right? There’s nobody out there that’s trying to get involved in a deal or bring somebody in on the deal and lose. Everybody respects their time because it’s only you doing it, right? It’s your own time, your own business, mostly for people. So everybody wants to win out of the scenario.

whoever’s involved in it, nobody wants to leave a scenario with a bad taste in their mouth. It’s all about building the relationships. So I know I didn’t really sum it up all in a couple of minutes there, but it’s, I’m trying to give a broad enough opinion on how I would go about it if I was to do it again.

Michelle Kesil (23:54.006)
Yeah, relationships are everything in this space. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah. All right. So before we wrap up, if someone wants to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate or just learn more from you, where can they find you? What’s the best way to reach you?

Alan Mcgeever (23:58.51)
Absolutely.

Alan Mcgeever (24:14.062)
A couple of ways to reach me, honestly the best is either a text message or an email. So if you want to leave my number with you guys I can tell you what it is now, it’s 619-560-1166. Text message is the best way, you can obviously call me of course, I don’t always answer, I’m always in and out of meetings, get a lot of calls during the day. If you do want to call and I don’t answer please leave a voicemail and I’ll get back to you. Text message is the best way because I can reach

and then I’ll get back to you probably within a 24-hour period. Also another great way is my emails. I’m on my emails every day, so is my assistant. if you reach out that way, and my email is celtickitchensandfloreen at gmail.com. That’s C-E-L-T-I-C, kitchens, plural.

and florian at gmail.com. Also, I never miss an email rarely. So either of those ways, you can get in contact with me and I would love to help somebody out in whatever way we can. And maybe we can collaborate and get a deal done together. I’d love it.

Michelle Kesil (25:18.79)
Well listen, I appreciate your time, your story and perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing things in this great way, in this innovative way. So thank you for being here.

Alan Mcgeever (25:30.456)
Thank you so much, I really appreciate the time.

Michelle Kesil (25:32.854)
Yeah, and for those of you tuning in, you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming with operators just like Ellen out here building real businesses, and we’ll see you all in the next episode.