From 9-to-5 Job to 75 Rental Units – Real Estate Freedom Story

Kyle Doriety (00:00)
It’s not a always about getting 75 or 100 or 300 rentals and making tons of money, but Just two or three could really have a life-altering effect in a good way for you.

There’s this guy I worked with, great, super good guy.

He worked at this company that I worked at and he had a wife that was sick. She had gotten cancer. He had a daughter that was special needs. And I talked to him one morning and I said, you know, how’s your wife doing? He said, she’s not doing great. I’ve had to bring in a nurse or to take care of her. And she used to take care of our daughter, our daughter, but now she can’t because she’s sick. So I’m hiring someone to take care of her. He says, I want to leave and take care of my

My wife and daughter, but I need insurance and my 401k doesn’t really provide me enough income to do all the lifestyle that I need and insurance. anyways, we’ll fast forward about four weeks, I guess it was, as wife passed away. And then maybe a year after that, out of the blue, his daughter passed away. And I just thought to myself,

40 hours a week, every week, maybe 50, 60 hours a week, whatever it is, of time that he’ll never get back with his wife or his daughter. And if he had bought two or three little single family houses 30 years ago, they could be paid for free and clear. They would have appreciated like crazy. They would probably be cash flowing like crazy. And ⁓ he could have used those rentals to pay for his insurance.

Then use the 401k or whatever to pay for his his groceries and his bills or whatever and he could have walked out of his job He was old enough to retire.

Erika (03:10)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika, and today I’m so excited to be joined by Kyle Doriety who’s been making serious moves in the residential real estate investing space. Kyle, I’m so glad to have you on the show today.

Kyle Doriety (03:25)
Thank you, thanks, I’m glad to be here, I’m excited.

Erika (03:27)
So let’s dive in, Kyle, for people who may not be familiar with your world. Give us the rundown. How did you get started in investing?

Kyle Doriety (03:36)
Yeah, so when I was about 17 or so, my mom, I got a wonderful family, hardworking mom and dad. And my mom’s always been, she had high expectations for me and my sisters. And she was asking me, hey, what are you gonna do when you get out of school? You to be thinking about this, you’re becoming an adult. And I remember telling her I wanted to

to own my own business. And she was like, well, you need to have a job with benefits and insurance and stuff like that. So I guess I just took it for what she said. And I said, well, I guess that’s what I should do then. So I started thinking about different jobs and stuff. And there’s a company from my hometown that is kind of the envy place to work in a way. A lot of people like,

desire to work there. So I ended up getting a job there, or got an internship actually in college. And then I worked really hard, I wanted to get hired, I got hired on. Then I wanted to work in a specific department, so I worked really hard and I got a job there. Then I wanted to kind of move up through my pay progression and I did all that. And then

after I was about 24 probably I realized I did all of that stuff and I said, I’m still…

still not happy, I still don’t like this. And so I had to do some thinking and some praying, some soul searching and I finally figured that, you know, I’ve just done what everybody else wanted me to do and maybe not what I was supposed to do. so then I said, I just want to be an entrepreneur like I did when I was 17. And so then I started working, trying to figure out what business do I want to start and through YouTube and

Instagram and watching all kinds of videos and stuff. I got led to Rich Dad Poor Dad and you know it just blew my mind. I’d never heard of anything like that. I didn’t know anybody with money or anything about wealth or time freedom and so I’ve read that book and within 90 days I went and bought a rental.

Erika (06:22)
And then Kyle, what markets are you operating in?

Kyle Doriety (06:26)
Yeah, I’m in Florence, South Carolina is my home market, but we buy property all in from Florence and the surrounding ⁓ areas here, all within, I would say within an hour or so of Florence.

Erika (06:39)
Awesome, awesome. And then what would you say is like your specialty within the market? Like what kind of properties are you focusing on?

Kyle Doriety (06:45)
Yeah, so primarily we’re buying single-family houses that are about 1500, say 1000 to 1500 square feet. And anything that is in the, let’s say 1000 to 1500 in rents is kind of stuff that we’re hanging on to, that we’re keeping as rentals. And then,

If it doesn’t quite make sense to fall into that buy box as a rental anything above that that’s a nicer property That maybe doesn’t make sense as a rental we’ll flip it and sell it and anything that’s not as attractive As a rental or a flip that may be on the lower end of the spectrum there We will introduce those to other investors Sometimes we’ll partner with them, you know with another investor or something if it’s

That’s just not my thing. It’s not my thing that those lower, lower end rentals, but if I can partner with somebody who’s got some experience in it, then we’ll consider that too.

Erika (07:37)
Yeah, Kyle, you told me before that you’re a numbers guy. So tell me a little bit like your process with what you’re looking for. If a property is like a good fit for you or not.

Kyle Doriety (07:47)
Yeah, so I look for probably B or C class rentals. Normally like young professionals. I want it in a decent neighborhood. If I wouldn’t want my wife walking the dog at 7 p.m. or 730 in the neighborhood, I’m probably not gonna hang on to it as a rental. Another trick that I’ve learned along the way is ⁓

is I like for there to be like I get leads that are in these real rural areas but if there’s not a Starbucks, a Chick-fil-A, a Publix or something close by I’m probably not going to buy it. Those companies have big market analysis teams that they pay millions of dollars a year for and so they do all the hard work, they analyze the market and then they decide whether it’s worth their investment so

If it’s good enough for Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, or Publix, or Harris Teeter, something like that, then it’s probably good enough for me.

Erika (09:12)
Yeah, yeah. And as I’m sure you know, the market is competitive too. How do you source your deals to get something before another person might find it?

Kyle Doriety (09:21)
Yeah, so we do, I do all kinds of different marketing. You know, we do direct mail, cold call, and I’m cold calling right now. It’s me. So it’s not, you know, some strange voice when someone picks up the phone. They pick up the phone and I say, hey, my name is Kyle Doriety. I live probably 15 minutes away from this property, whatever. I’m not here to blow your phone up. I’m not.

really a telemarketer, I’m just curious, are you interested in selling? And if you’re not, that’s fine, I won’t bother you. So it works pretty well, especially in a small town where a lot of times you get in those conversations and the seller or the potential seller could know some of my family or something like that. So direct mail, cold calling, I’ve even got some little flyers made that… ⁓

You know, just has a picture of my wife and I says we’d like to buy your property. It’s a little story about, you know, how we, we live in Florence, we invest in Florence. We want to see Florence get better. And, ⁓ and as I’m riding along and I just see a property’s got tall grass, looks like it hasn’t been lived in in a while. I’ll swing in there and, you know, sit it on the doorstep or maybe throw it in the mailbox or whatever. So, and then, you know, once you get those leads,

answer your question you know with all the competition you just gotta you gotta stay in touch with them you gotta be serious you need to be quick you can’t kick tires so to speak so when i get a when i get a lead they’re interested in selling i’m very respectful of their time and we try to make an offer as quickly as possible within 24 hours i really try to make them an offer on the property and

You know to be honest nine times out of ten the answer is no But ⁓ but that one time you get a deal and it makes it worth it and you and you keep chasing the next one

Erika (11:01)
When we were talking earlier, you said that one of your strengths is construction and that you deal with a lot of renovations. Kyle, how do you decide what kind of renovations you want to do on a property, whether it’s worth your time or fits in your budget?

Kyle Doriety (11:16)
Yeah, so for most of my rentals, we do BRRRR the BRRRR strategy. And for anybody who doesn’t know what that is, it’s an acronym for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. So basically, we look at the property and we can analyze what do we think that this rehab is gonna take. So,

So let’s say the purchase price is $100,000. We’re going to put $20,000 into it in renovation. Well, we want to be able to, after renovation, put a renter in there and then go and refinance and get, hopefully, all of our money back out of it. But in some cases, you if you leave a couple thousand dollars in the deal, it’s not the end of the world. I mean, that’s still a good deal. So we will take the purchase price plus the renovations.

and then we will look at the comps in the neighborhood and we’ll see what is this house gonna appraise for after we renovate it. So let’s say this house appraises for $150,000 after we renovate it, the bank will loan you 75 % of that price. So I’m not a math whiz, but let’s see what is that real quick. So 150,000.

Times point seven five. So that’s a hundred and twelve thousand dollars So on this particular deal if we were in it for 120 the bank would loan us 112 we would walk away with 120 minus 112 We’d have eight thousand dollars left in the deal at that point. I mean, that’s a that’s a pretty cheap down payment on a property, you know, so After that we take our all of our expenses we run them out for a year

our rents minus our expenses, that should be your cash flow, and then we calculate our cash on cash return. We’re normally looking for 12 to 15 percent cash on cash return and a minimum of $200 a month in pure cash flow after all expenses. So that was a long way of answer, a long-winded detailed way of answering your question.

just trying to give some value and help as much as I can. So that’s exactly what we do.

Erika (14:00)
Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff we love to hear and having that process, it protects you in terms of having a good deal and a worthwhile investment. But let’s talk about when things go sideways. Has there ever been a property that you were working on or a deal and you had the pivot fast, do something totally different? Any challenges like that along your journey that you’d like to share?

Kyle Doriety (14:26)
sure I’ve definitely definitely had challenges. I mean nothing real estate is pretty forgiving. You know I don’t think a lot of people realize that but in my experience I mean there’s been times I’ve gone over budget and you know I didn’t blow the budget by thousands of dollars but or tens of thousands of dollars but but maybe I went a little over budget and you know we sit back and we run our numbers

And maybe the return doesn’t look as good as we wanted. And at this point, you’re already in the deal and you’re going to rent it out. And one particular instance I’m thinking of, we ended up renting it for a hundred dollars. I think it was a month more than what we had ran our numbers at. So where we went over budget, we were protected luckily by the market. know, admittedly it was luck, but the market rents were higher than what we had projected.

I say luckily but but also we’re running our rents conservative as well so you know you talk about these numbers running these numbers and stuff that’s a big safety net for you you know if you’re conservative before you ever buy the property it’ll it’ll really save your bacon on ⁓ making a few mistakes after the closing and and stuff like that so I’ve had that I’ve had properties fall out of contract you know you

You get something, you’re fired up, you’re looking at it, you think you’re going to make 30 grand on a flip. And one particular instance I can think of, we went in and measured the property after we put it under contract and it measured a hundred square feet less than what it was listed as. And at $160 a square foot for the after repair value, a hundred square feet is $16,000 off of the purchase price.

So, or off of the sale price, I should say. So, that’s a big hitter. And then you gotta have that conversation with the seller where you say, hey, this house is not gonna sell for what we thought. We either need to come off of the price or we can’t buy it. And it’s not an easy conversation to have, but we try to avoid that. mean, but it’s part of the game, I think. You gotta fall down and scrape your knees a little bit.

to ever really learn to ride the bicycle, so to speak.

Erika (16:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Kyle, what kind of advice would you give someone who’s new to investing and they’re working on their first deal or I should say they’re trying to get that first deal?

Kyle Doriety (16:39)
Yeah, so To start with I would say take action that that’s probably The biggest mistake. I guess you could say that I see people making There’s a there’s a story that that someone has told on a podcast I’m pretty sure it was Brandon Turner from bigger pockets now. He’s got his own thing

But it’s something like he had, I don’t know what belt you get when you first start karate, but he has like, I guess it’s a blue belt or whatever it is. He’s like, I got a blue belt. And the instructor says, that’s the hardest belt to get. 90 % of the population never gets that belt. So it’s the same thing with investing. You just gotta do it. Your first deal is not going to bankrupt you, probably. And it’s also probably not going to make you super rich.

but you got to do the first one. just got to take action. You’ll learn from that one and you’ll build on it and you’ll snowball into the second and the third and the fourth deal. And so taking action would be a huge piece of advice. And then for me, something I wish someone would have told me or maybe they did and I just didn’t listen or didn’t understand, but marketing is such a huge deal. I went for several years, a few years at least.

just waiting on deals to follow my lap. Maybe I’d look on Zillow or talk to some people here and there, but I was really afraid to embrace the I’m an investor, I buy property kind of, that’s the word I’m looking for, that identity is the word I’m looking It’s hard for me to embrace that identity to begin with.

And but but if you just from day one start telling people I buy property don’t worry about how you’re going to do it just start saying it and and embracing it and and really marketing as far as ⁓ whether it’s direct mail or cold calling leads or whatever it takes but so so take an action and and do some sort of marketing for yourself.

Erika (18:32)
Yeah, excuse me. That’s really solid advice. Kyle, what do you see next on the horizon for yourself when it comes to investing? What are you looking to do?

Kyle Doriety (18:40)
Yeah, so we talked a little earlier. My goals right now are I wanna get to 75 rental units. That’s one of my biggest goals. I’m a buy and holder at heart. Everything that I look at, I have a hard time coaching myself out of keeping it as a rental. So rentals are a big focus for me. want to take…

have that buy and hold wealth that that’s you can flip a hundred houses a year and make a bunch of money but but if you if you don’t keep flipping your income stops so it’s important for me to have those buy and hold rentals the goal like I said now is 75 maybe I’ll go beyond that once I get there but but I got to start at something so so right now we’re aiming for that and then ⁓

I want to be doing $500,000 a year in net profit across my businesses. So I have two different businesses, the real estate business and another one. between rentals, flipping, and the other business, I want to blend that for a $500,000 a year profit. So that gives you a mix of that slow wealth building

rental income that just keeps happening. It’s like a little oil rig pumping over and over and over every month. And then that mixes with the fast, so to speak, money of flipping houses and getting chunks of cash coming in. So those are my biggest goals in business for right now.

Erika (20:04)
That’s exciting, Kyle. Before we wrap up, if someone wants to reach out to you, connect, maybe they want to work on a deal with you, how should they contact you?

Kyle Doriety (20:13)
Yeah, yeah. So check me out on Instagram or Facebook. Instagram’s probably best. I respond to any kind of DMs or anything I get. I’m not that famous or really not famous at all. So I don’t have to worry about my DMs being flooded with people trying to hit me up or whatever. So yeah, hit me up on Instagram. I love to talk to people about investing and trying to help people as much as I can.

I’d be happy to help you out any way I can there.

Erika (20:39)
Thanks so much for sharing your time and your story and all the helpful insight for our listeners today.

Kyle Doriety (20:45)
Yeah, sure, thanks. I had one story I wanted to throw in here if that’s cool with you, Erika. Okay, so this is something that I tell folks all the time to drive home the importance of investing and outside of a 401k or whatever your employer may provide,

Erika (20:51)
Go for it. Go for it.

Kyle Doriety (21:05)
there’s this guy I worked with, great, super good guy.

He worked at this company that I worked at and he had a wife that was sick. She had gotten cancer. He had a daughter that was special needs. And I talked to him one morning and I said, you know, how’s your wife doing? He said, she’s not doing great. I’ve had to bring in a nurse or to take care of her. And she used to take care of our daughter, our daughter, but now she can’t because she’s sick. So I’m hiring someone to take care of her. He says, I want to leave and take care of my

my wife and daughter, but I need insurance and my 401k doesn’t really provide me enough income to do all the lifestyle that I need and insurance. anyways, we’ll fast forward about four weeks, I guess it was, as wife passed away. And then maybe a year after that, out of the blue, his daughter passed away. And I just thought to myself,

40 hours a week, every week, maybe 50, 60 hours a week, whatever it is, of time that he’ll never get back with his wife or his daughter. And if he had bought two or three little single family houses 30 years ago, they could be paid for free and clear. They would have appreciated like crazy. They would probably be cash flowing like crazy. And ⁓ he could have used those rentals to pay for his insurance.

Then use the 401k or whatever to pay for his his groceries and his bills or whatever and he could have walked out of his job He was old enough to retire. I should mention he was in his 60s. I think early 60s, but um but yeah,

it’s not a always about getting 75 or 100 or 300 rentals and making tons of money, but Just two or three could really have a life-altering effect in a good way for you

Erika (22:48)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so many people, what they’re looking for isn’t just that wealth, it’s getting that time back.

Kyle Doriety (22:55)
Yep, yeah, that’s exactly right. And at the time, as we know, it’s the most important asset that we got,

Erika (22:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Kyle, it was so awesome having you on for our listeners. If you got value from this episode, make sure that you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pro Show. We’ve got more conversations coming up with heavy hitters like Kyle who are transforming the investing space. We’ll see you on the next episode.