From Maintenance Man to Landlord: Jon Burgher’s Inspiring Real Estate Journey

Dylan Silver (00:00.908)
Hey folks, welcome to another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel, the nation’s premier real estate mastermind. I’m your host Dylan Silver. And today on the show we have Jon Burgher . Jon went from being the maintenance man to the landlord to the bank. today he has over 32 years mastering creative real estate finance. He’s learned through the school of hard knocks and now mentors and entrepreneurs on how to reclaim their most valuable assets.

their time through strategic investing. Get ready to learn from a true industry veteran. Please welcome Jon Burgher . Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon Burgher (00:37.716)
Thank you, thank you for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:39.626)
Absolutely, absolutely. We were talking a little bit about how folks get into the real estate space before we hopped on the show here. So I always like to ask folks, how did you get into the real estate space? What was your first deal like?

Jon Burgher (00:53.246)
You know, I wanted to start getting some passive income and we had a family friend that became my mentor and a partner after that. But I told him I wanted passive income and he brought me a little Triplex and that’s where all the creative stuff started. We, was an older couple that did a seller finance deal for me on a Triplex. Bought the thing for about $62,000. First thing he did is taught me how to write a note properly with a first write a refusal.

With that, about a year and a half, two years into it, the couple came to me wanted to get their money out. So we took a $20,000 reduction. Now, and I went out got a refinance on it. Turned around and got, now I’m in a basis about $42,000. Turned around and kept that for many, many years and ended up selling that property for about $215,000. So that was the very first deal. And we just kept growing the portfolio from there.

And it was all done with creative. My mentor at the time, that was before YouTube’s and the internet and all that kind of stuff. But he knew it. And he taught me how to do what they call sub twos today. They didn’t call that back then as well as seller financing. And we used a lot of private money. So that’s how it all got started.

Dylan Silver (02:11.118)
At that time when you met your mentor, was it divine intervention? Were you actively seeking out a way to get into the real estate space? How did you meet your mentor?

Jon Burgher (02:19.432)
He actually was a good friend of my older sisters and he was one of major brokers right here in Phoenix. And that’s how we met. And it was actually at a party at my sister’s house and we just got to talking. And then he just kind of took the reins and ran with it.

Dylan Silver (02:32.76)
You know.

When I hear these stories, I think about how I was in the automotive space. I was working for a Nissan dealership in San Antonio and I wanted to get into the real estate space. And there was so much information, so many different ways, cash for keys. I didn’t even know what wholesaling was at the time. And I was so confused about what was real and what was not real. And so for me, my entry point was going to a RIA.

Jon Burgher (03:01.022)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (03:04.59)
which some people love real, some people don’t. That’s my entry point, so I’m gonna say I love them. And I realize, okay, this is real. But I always tell folks, if you wanna know how to get into the real estate space, just start asking. Just start asking. You’d be surprised, someone’s cousin, someone in your family, they have a rental property, they can tell you, they can connect you, they can connect the dot. In Jon’s case, it was…

meeting someone at a party and now he got his first deal at Triplex. Like, who would have thought that?

Dylan Silver (03:40.6)
So from there, scaling the business, were you continuing to do sub two deals at the time or how were the deals being structured and what was the next couple of years in the growth period like?

Jon Burgher (03:55.848)
Sure, so he kept bringing me deals, whether they were a house or a fourplex, triplex. So we ended up buying four more fourplexes pretty quickly within about a year and a half of starting. And then he brought me a big portfolio of several fourplexes and I didn’t feel I had the capital to do stuff and actually run them properly. And he says, that’s okay, you’re making too much money. I want a piece of it. And so then my mentor became my partner.

which was fantastic. We did a buy sale agreement. He wasn’t in for the daily income. He wanted the appreciation build on it. So we set up a partnership and we just kept buying and buying and buying. At one point in time we had in just our combined portfolio, him and I, not my own, we had over 120 doors right in Mesa, Arizona. And I was the landlord. I was a maintenance boy. I did it all.

and that was the Hard Knocks. And I learned from all that because you didn’t, again, you didn’t have the internet. And he was not a landlord at the time. He could find deals, desk deals, that kind of stuff, and taught me the creative side, but he was not in the rental space. And so we learned that from Hard Knocks and took it from there and just kept building.

Dylan Silver (05:11.406)
And I know there’s an abundance of information. think you, chat GPT could probably eliminate a lot of the coaching that may go on today. But back then I know they were selling CDs, cassettes, books. You would have it here, an infomercial on TV. And so are you aware how your mentor learned creative finance before maybe that was even well known?

Jon Burgher (05:28.798)
Yep.

Jon Burgher (05:37.106)
That I don’t. I mean, I remember, I’m gonna date myself, but I remember buying Carlton sheets years and years and years ago. And that was one of the first ones, no money out of pocket scenarios. I don’t know how Dale learned it. I have no clue other than just being a main broker here in Phoenix and doing deals all of his life. I don’t know where he got it from.

Dylan Silver (05:55.95)
So he was a, and I probably missed that part, he was a broker as well.

Jon Burgher (06:00.072)
Yeah, so he worked for one of the largest real estate firms here in Phoenix for years and years as well as taught at the real estate board for contingent education. So. Yeah, he was very involved in real estate.

Dylan Silver (06:11.96)
Really? This is really interesting. So believe it or not, of selfishly, divine intervention for me here. I’m talking here because I actually just tested for my real estate license in the state of Texas this morning at 8 a.m. I was cramming for that last night and I passed. I passed. Thank you. I’m super glad because to be honest, I did not think I was gonna pass. I was talking to people last night and they said, we’re excited, we’re for ya.

Jon Burgher (06:25.95)
Congrats. Nice. Nice, congrats. That’s awesome.

Jon Burgher (06:35.857)
Hahaha!

Dylan Silver (06:39.672)
And I said, that’s great, I’m hoping I pass. But I was blessed enough to pass. But my experience was going to the real estate school that I went in Fort Worth, great school, no issues with the school, I would recommend it to other people. But the idea of wholesaling, the idea of creative finance, right now especially, has a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of real estate people, brokers.

Jon Burgher (06:41.544)
Yep. Yep.

Dylan Silver (07:07.99)
and it’s really come to a head with everything that’s happened in the last year. It is almost like real estate agents view wholesalers as their adversaries, someone that’s doing something unscrupulous. And I am a wholesaler. That’s my background. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last better part of two years to get into the business. And so when I hear that your mentor was an active creative financer,

and a broker. I’m thinking he really must have been a pioneer. can’t imagine there were that many people doing that in Arizona at the time.

Jon Burgher (07:44.181)
I don’t think there was no and you know, it really wasn’t a buzz at that time until social media and then social media made it the buzz. But I mean, creative financing and and what they call sub twos today have been going on for decades. We actually had a house we closed on and actually found an old contract that said sub two across the top from the 1930s. It was crazy. Yeah, and it’s actually just a rap is all it is.

Dylan Silver (07:51.618)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:08.76)
Wow. Yeah, I mean…

I mean, you think some of these contracts, you’re exactly right. Some of these contracts are assumable in the contract. And I don’t want to give someone the wrong information here, but I’m fairly certain that many of these contracts have it in their nature that they’re assumable and people just aren’t aware of just all the different ways that you can creatively structure these deals. But pivoting a bit here, Jon, before we hopped on, you mentioned that you’ve

gone out of being the landlord to now, you’re, you’re not doing that. And I think a lot of folks are asking, well, how can you not do that if you’re getting these deals creatively? So walk us through that.

Jon Burgher (08:56.414)
So what my company does is we first put the thing under contract and we try to buy it either subject to with an existing wrap, seller finance, a hybrid, or we use a lot of private money also on new cash deals. But then we put it in the portfolio. So that’s the first thing we look at is put it in my portfolio or one of my associates, one of their portfolios. When we do that, we’re not landlords. We turn it into a lease with an option to purchase.

And then we typically do a five year lease. And the reason why we do that is most of the people that come to us, they don’t want to be a renter. They don’t want to be, or they want to be a homeowner, but they can’t get approved for whatever reason. So that’s the people we work with. So it’s a very niche market. And we, we usually do five years because it’s usually credit. It usually takes a year or two to get your credit fixed. And then of course we have to get them set up because we’re going to sell our finances at the end and become their bank.

We have to go through the safe actor Dodd-Frank and so Dodd-Frank has some certain requirements that they want to see and that is good credit for at least two years, not credit score, but just good score or good no derogatories, no charge off, things like that, as well as they want to see two years of history of employment. So once we get that done, a lot of times that will take three to five years to do. At the end, we turn in the bank, we become the bank for them.

And it’s all about the mailbox money. So when it’s a lease with an option, you have mailbox money. We actually get paid seven different ways when we actually put a property in our portfolio. And then we turn around and do the seller financing at the end, become the bank, and still continue on with the mailbox money for another 10 to 30 years, depending on how long they stay at that house. So that’s kind of the whole thing that we do in our office is from start to finish.

Dylan Silver (10:48.28)
So now I’m gonna have some specific questions and you don’t have to give away all the game here, Jon. You can say, hey, I’m not gonna talk about that. For folks that are interested, you gotta contact me here. And please do that if you don’t want to dive too deep down these rabbit holes here. But Dodd-Frank, so this was, I just tested on this. This was created in what year? This is like mid, are we talking like mid 2000s?

Jon Burgher (11:02.952)
Yeah, no problem.

Jon Burgher (11:14.552)
Yeah, I think it was earlier than that because it stemmed out of the 2008 era when the real estate market went to crap. That’s what caused it. I don’t know when it actually got voted in as a law, but it was mid-2000s, 2010ish, 2009. I don’t know the exact date, but yeah, it stops people from doing seller financing without getting approvals.

Dylan Silver (11:19.337)
huh.

Dylan Silver (11:35.661)
Endless

Dylan Silver (11:41.164)
Right, right, so it’s basically, it’s like taking in the reins on anyone who’s lending money. My question is, I wasn’t aware that people were being limited as far as seller financing because it’s not, and correct me if I’m wrong, if I’m missing a step here, it’s not like they’re being handed a lump sum of money all at once, or is it? No, right? It’s they’re making installment payments.

Jon Burgher (12:05.576)
No. They’re making installment payments. The biggest thing what Dodd-Frank is all about is, and that’s why they call it the Safe Act, is you have to qualify the buyer that they can actually afford to live in that house. And what happened in 2008 is the banks and people were over leveraging the houses and giving them more money than what the house was worth. And then they couldn’t afford it or they’re putting them on arms.

Dylan Silver (12:19.405)
Okay.

Jon Burgher (12:33.852)
and the interest rate would go up to the point that they couldn’t afford the payment. So it’s all about keeping the buyer safe.

Dylan Silver (12:41.282)
Very interesting. Very, very interesting. So this strategy is really and the way that you’re going about it is really relying and not relying, but it’s capitalizing on the fact that there is these people who might not otherwise be able to get a loan through any other means. They’re going to need some time to build their credit up. And then when they do, they still have to qualify. And that’s actually the better way to go about it because then everything

is better for them. Their credit’s better, they’ve not qualified for a loan, they’ve gone through this process. So it’s really a win-win for you and for them.

Jon Burgher (13:18.47)
It is, yes. Absolutely.

Dylan Silver (13:20.172)
Yeah, so talking a little bit about that process of finding these buyers, finding these homes. Right now, I’m imagining it’s not as time intensive for you as it once was, but still wanting to grow and still wanting to expand. How are you finding these homes now and how are you finding your buyers?

Jon Burgher (13:42.43)
Sure. We actually run major PPC campaigns. We have two of them. And with that is where we find the sellers and take the homes down. Right now we own in 15 different states, all landlord friendly states. And so it’s pretty vast marketing across those states and cities. And then as far as the tenant buyers that we’re looking for,

Most of the time that’s going to be through Zillow, through Facebook, stuff like that. Anywhere there’s a rental market and we’re just advertising as a rent to own. And we have a big option fee. Our average option fee is about $15,000 that we get upfront out of my whole portfolio. We actually have two portfolios, but on average we make about $650 per door average on those. And so that’s payday number one, payday number two.

And that’s what I live off of is the mailbox money.

Dylan Silver (14:43.438)
For those homes that you’re putting on Zillow, I think a lot of people who do creative finance are not taking advantage of that. In many cases, because they’re unaware of how to or because they’re thinking, well, the deed’s not in my name. And in some cases, it could be. But has that always been the case for you? Have you always been putting your creative deals on the MLS?

Jon Burgher (15:03.602)
Well, when we go to sell them, yes, because we’re looking for renters. We’re actually looking for tenant buyers, not really renters, the tenant buyers. So tenant buyers look on Zillow and different websites for rentals in the area. So how we are different is it’s a rent to own instead of just a straight rental. That’s the difference.

Dylan Silver (15:24.11)
Gotcha. that ties in with the large option. I’m imagining there’s a number of reasons and benefits for that as a seller. But one of the biggest ones that immediately comes to my mind as an outsider looking in is that they are invested in this. So if they didn’t put so much money up front, maybe they could think, well, it’s an option. I’m not obligated. I can take my good credit now and my two years of employment history and walk away. But

you’re gonna lose your $15,000 option.

Jon Burgher (15:54.738)
That is correct. Yep. And it’s all about skin in the game. Cause if they have skin in the game, they’re going to take care of the house. They’re tenant buyers. They’re not renters. They’re actually pre-owners of the house. So they can go in and make improvements if they want to paint carpet countertops. had one guy who was putting a pool in. Cause it’s their house. mean, they’re vested into this thing to the very end. Just like if you were going to go out and get a regular mortgage, you’re going to take care of that house.

Dylan Silver (16:21.006)
This may be a basic question, but it’s something that came to my mind, so my listeners may be thinking the same thing. Is there a difference, and I might be getting my terminology wrong here, between a lease option and maybe like a purchase, a lease purchase, where they’re like forced to versus they have to, and why are you going for the option versus the lease purchase?

Jon Burgher (16:42.196)
Correct.

Jon Burgher (16:46.866)
because people run into life situations where they can’t purchase it. And if you put them in that situation, you’re also gonna end the contract. So we put an option instead of the purchase in there. At the end of the five years, if you have a life event and they can’t go ahead and exercise the option and purchase it with us being in the bank, then we’ll just extend it one year at a time until they can get to that point. So at the same time,

you’re only going to find maybe 25 % are ever going to exercise their option. They’re going to have a life event where a divorce or a transfer because of a job or whatever it might be. And so people just don’t exercise their options. You know, and that’s their choice. If that happens, we just turn around and remarket the property, usually up the option fee, up the lease price and up the purchase price on it and do it all over again.

Dylan Silver (17:40.75)
Do you also ever assist in any way with the credit restoration or point people in the right direction as far as that goes and what does that look like for them?

Jon Burgher (17:50.128)
Yeah, we are not credit people. However, we because we’ve been doing it for so long, I can point them in the right direction to help them. We can also, you know, advise them on, you know, possibly who to go to. Actually, a lot of the people we talked to, they’re already working with credit rebuilding companies to build their credit back up because they’re wanting to buy that house, but they have to get this done first. And it’s not as hard to get through Dodd-Frank approval as it is a bank approval.

So it gives them little bit more latitude to get approved with us. Plus we don’t turn around and charge all the garbage fees and origination fees, discount points, all that kind of crap. So there are no real additional fees other than title work and prepaid insurance and taxes that they have to pay when they go to close on the house at the end of the option.

Dylan Silver (18:19.522)
Right, right.

Dylan Silver (18:38.754)
Now, is the nucleus of your properties in the Arizona area, or is it all over the country right now?

Jon Burgher (18:44.916)
15 different states right now. We, mean, obviously we’re heavy here in Phoenix and Tucson, but our prices went too high to make the rents work. And so we are big in Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, but basically 15 different states right now.

Dylan Silver (18:48.535)
And so.

Dylan Silver (19:06.806)
And so expanding beyond Arizona without physically being there, I’m selfishly I’m thinking I want to one day be able to do this business remotely. I tell people and I’m dead serious. I want to go move to a Latin American country. I want to speak Spanish every day. I want to be around Bachata and I want there to be no noise regulations blaring Latin American music until two in the morning.

Jon Burgher (19:28.094)
you

Dylan Silver (19:33.922)
But I want to be able to make American money. Spanish you would say, dinero americano rinde mas larga en los países hispanohablantes. And I’ve heard two different perspectives. Perspective number one is if you’re in real estate and you’re not, you know, from the game, meaning you haven’t been doing this your whole life and you’re not, you don’t have tons of money and tons of mentors, that it’s very, very unlikely that you’re going to be able to do this remotely because your processes and people have to be bulletproof. That’s one perspective.

The other perspective that I’ve heard is if you find good people and you have good processes, it’s actually more attainable than you think to be able to do it remotely. And I think you’re a testament to that. Could you talk a little bit about just kind of the remote process and how that has worked for you?

Jon Burgher (20:21.662)
Yeah, so the way we do it, we don’t have boots on the ground in one portfolio. If it’s not in the Phoenix area or Tucson area, I’ve never seen the properties that I own. When we get them under contract, we have a process that we do a pre-market on them to make sure it’s going to be in a good area to put a tenant buyer in. If we get good results from the pre-marketing before we ever close on the property, then we’re going to go out and send a home inspector out there. We rely heavily on the home inspector.

Go through that report. As long as the major stuff is all in good shape, I don’t care about the cosmetic, then at that point, we’ll go ahead and close on that property. When we go to sell the property to a tenant buyer, we usually have either worked with a realtor, work with the inspector. Sometimes we’ll have a handyman in the area that we’ll find to go do a little cleanup. They’ll put lock boxes on for us. We do remote showings.

So the tenants go in and look at it themselves. We have a process for all that. And then if they like it, then at that point, then we do the application, fill out the paperwork and we actually do a zoom call with them to go over all the paperwork at the end so they can actually see our faces, see that we’re real, that kind of stuff. A lot of times they think there are scams out there and there’s a lot of scams out there, but we have enough credibility out there. We can have them talk to our attorneys and

They can look up our LLCs and see that yes, I’ve been around this long and actually doing it for this long. So that’s kind of the process, but I haven’t seen most of our homes that we own.

Dylan Silver (21:56.11)
It’s always good to hear this feedback because I do get about a 50-50 split. I have people telling me I tried it and I ended up losing my shirt on a flip because it was too far out. I didn’t have my own crew. I’ve had people tell me it’s difficult for my strategy with short-term rentals, which I’m curious to your perspective on that because I have my cleaning people that are around here and it was unreliable and then you run into heat cases with Airbnb and you’re losing stars and now it can damage your reputation there.

Have you ever ventured into the short-term rental space with the Airbnb’s and if not, what’s your perspective on that space?

Jon Burgher (22:32.86)
I have not. I like the lease options side of it where I do one contract and I typically have that tenant buyer for three, four, five years and then turn it into seller financing. So I’m dealing with one person. Airbnb, you can make some money on it if you run a good one, in my opinion, but it’s a lot of work. mean, theoretically, you’re writing a contract every day.

Or every five days to keep this thing rented you got to have a dang good maintenance crew and you got to have a dang good cleaning crew and that’s just that’s work to me After building up a certain portfolio and you have the mailbox coming in these people aren’t tenants They’re not calling you for their toilets and broken windows and lockouts and termites and stuff like that. I never hear from them They pay their lease payment once a month either to me or to our servicing company

Dylan Silver (23:19.256)
Yeah, they own it.

Jon Burgher (23:27.7)
And so it’s a matter that my money’s working for me whether I’m awake or asleep and I’m not getting calls at three or four in the morning about crap that you would if you had an Airbnb unless you had a good management company but then the management company is going to get it and eventually it will circle back to you. So I just don’t have those worries. And once you build up a certain portfolio I mean I had a gentleman here in our office that was here about 13 months and after picking my brain and so forth.

I allow these people to build their own portfolios here because I don’t buy everything. I don’t need it, need to anymore. So he started building up his own portfolio and he was buying one a month, got up to about eight properties and it got to the point that, okay, he’s making five, $6,000 a month. He doesn’t really need to be here anymore because I truly believe that you don’t have to be have a million dollars to be a millionaire. You have to have enough cashflow coming in every single month.

Dylan Silver (24:22.584)
Mmm.

Jon Burgher (24:27.048)
to take care of your bottom line nut, all your expenses. And if you have that, now you just bought back your time, because you can never buy time back. You can always get money. So that’s what I believe is wealth.

Dylan Silver (24:36.386)
You can’t. That’s something, you know, that’s something that I have been heard before, but I want to repeat and I may butcher it, but you don’t need a million dollars to be a millionaire. And, know, with my personal mentor, I talk a lot about asset management, which is this, this phrase that he got from his background working for a finance company and bringing that to real estate, which is the idea of like kind of the American way, if you will.

is to get into a lot of consumer debt and flash and know, flashy, which is fun. You know, it’s awesome to drive a Corvette. At the same point in time, it can bleed you down a path which is unforgiving. And so it’s very, very, very, very difficult to make a lot of money and not spend it. Because it’s in your mind, it’s like, I’m making all this money, no one knows.

Jon Burgher (25:29.533)
It is.

Jon Burgher (25:33.46)
Well, if somebody were to really think about it, so I love the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, because if you want to go out and drive that Corvette, as you say, go out and buy an asset with that money you’re making, let that asset buy that Corvette for you. There’s good liability and there’s bad liability. Cars are bad liability, houses are a good liability. You know, leverage that house. I mean, we do, in my portfolio, about every six months, I reanalyze it and I’ll do what they call a DSCR loan.

which the house stands on its own for its refinancing. But you can do cash out with that. So a lot of times I’ll get cash out of 20, 30, $50,000 that you do not have to pay taxes on because it’s loaned money. That’s what you go buy the Corvette with.

Dylan Silver (26:22.754)
Wow, I have a lot of questions about that. Wow, I may have to circle back with you after this, but for folks who are hearing this and we’re talking about a lot of high level stuff here and the avatar of our listener, of our listener, if you will, someone who’s doing 50 plus deals a year, but we also have newcomers. So we’re throwing a lot of terms out them, know, Dodd, Frank, Sub2, Creative Finance, talking about lease with an option to buy.

Jon Burgher (26:24.212)
Hahaha!

Jon Burgher (26:31.016)
That’s right.

Dylan Silver (26:52.846)
And for me, when I was an outsider looking in, I didn’t even know the trajectory of a real estate career. Like in my mind, all I wanted to do was have it like three deeds in my name and I’d be winning. Because I was selling cars and I was like, man, these homes are $400,000. Imagine having two of them. Like imagine actually having two, that would be crazy.

Like how fast can I do that? I’m 30 now. I was, you know, 20, 25 through 28 when I was selling cars and roughly. And, you know, now I look at it I’m like, okay, well, you can break it down into bunk, bite size chunks and you can actually extend that a little bit further. for me looking at like, well, what’s the typical path of the real estate person? I see a lot of you start networking, you start networking, you think you learn, learn, you get your first wholesale deal.

From wholesale, you get bigger assignments. Maybe you do your first fix and flip. From fix and flip, you can do that for a while and then you can transition into maybe a short-term rental, which is what a lot of people are doing with Airbnb. Jon’s strategy, which is very unique, I would say, and great to learn about. And then people can go in quite a number of directions. I’ve heard, A, you could keep doing that forever, but I’ve heard a lot of people that are going into note buying, note buying, and hard money lending. Do you, Jon, feel like there’s a A?

Jon Burgher (28:16.852)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (28:21.902)
Typical pathway did you did you see your pathway from the beginning or do you feel like it’s different for everybody?

Jon Burgher (28:30.396)
It’s different for everybody. mean, I’ve done a little bit of everything in the real estate to the point that we, like I say, we had 120 some rentals just in Mesa and those were crew rentals. We sold those off. We got into developing. We’d buy up raw land, subdivide it, gate it. And we were building million dollar homes for a while. When 08 hit us, we got caught with two lots, moved on from there. That’s when Dale and I actually split our partnership.

I fell into assisted living homes because I wanted to build back up my portfolio because I wanted the net worth back. We’d sold a lot of it off with Dale and I. I still had my personal stuff that my wife and I had built, but we fell into assisted living homes here in Arizona because you couldn’t buy a home here and rent it out and make money on it, but you could with assisted living homes. So we had multiple assisted living homes, started building that portfolio up, and those are cash cows. They were until the health board changed some of the stuff that they did.

we had a general manager that worked for us and she had to go out for back surgery, couldn’t come back. So my wife got involved with the medical side. She didn’t want to do that. So we sold that company, bought another big portfolio of homes down in Tucson. So I wouldn’t go manage them. And those were all rentals. We turned them all into lease options. And then that’s when the, my company actually started up and we started buying nationwide and just kept building another portfolio up. So.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of different things and but some of that from rentals of 120 ish to the assisted living homes with assisted living homes. When I first got into it, you could get residential financing on them. The times changed and you could no longer get residential or you couldn’t get commercial on them either because it was a residential house. So it was very unique. So you had to have private money or you bought them with a lease option.

And that’s where I really got into lease options. So then when I bought the big portfolio in Tucson, getting out of the assisted living, I went, okay, why do I need rentals and have a property manager or be a landlord? Let’s turn all those into lease options. And that’s where it all developed. So it all came little by little and just piecing it all together to make it all happen. And now everything I own is either lease option or I carry the note.

Dylan Silver (30:52.504)
Wow. It was like one big education. One big education. You really mapped it out for me. When we were first talking in the first 15 minutes, I was thinking, lease option is a very interesting strategy to do and it makes a lot of sense. But it was almost like you stumbled upon it through the assisted living. Is that, yeah.

Jon Burgher (30:59.188)
Pretty much.

Jon Burgher (31:14.834)
Kind of, Yeah, because that’s how I had to purchase the assisted living homes. And it’s like, okay, let’s just reverse engineer this and let’s just sell all of our rentals off with lease option. And lease option had been out there, especially in the commercial industry, commercial space, but not necessarily residential. So I just put it together and we found things that worked and yeah, we stumbled along the way.

We feel that we got a really good process now and there’s not many people doing what we do. So it is kind of a niche Yeah, and it’s especially when we find the tenant buyers that want to come in and they they’ve never heard of stuff like this There is some seller finance stuff out there, but not what we do for them

Dylan Silver (31:45.206)
It is very, very niche,

Dylan Silver (31:57.986)
Definitely not definitely not Jon we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Jon Burgher (32:04.221)
Pretty easy. Jon Burger. So J-O-N-B-U-R-G-H-E-R dot com. And I actually coach this stuff now, which I never did. I used to coach it in my office. But now we have a full program together. We have a community that meets every Tuesday. And we have a course put together, but with all the paperwork. And that’s the biggest thing is the paperwork. The course is very small. You’re basically buying paperwork.

But you have access to me if you ever get in that course and join community. All my students have my personal cell phone number so I can help them through deals because every deal we do is different, whether it be from the creative side or the lease option side, they have to be able to get through it.

Dylan Silver (32:47.842)
Yeah, mean, folks, if you’re listening to this and you’re wanting to go learn about creative deals, take a look at Jon’s website. And I think just through this podcast alone, I have so many ways that I have to grow and things that I can do to learn, specifically with the lease option. I’m probably gonna spend 15 minutes on chat GPT and educate myself a little bit here.

Jon Burgher (33:11.124)
The other thing I do too is they can go on that website and just schedule a 30 minute free call with me and just see if I can help them or not. Or if they have outside questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer them for them.

Dylan Silver (33:23.726)
Well, you’ve heard it here, folks. Thank you guys for listening to another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel, the nation’s premier real estate mastermind. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.