From Nonprofit to Profit: Carry Joseph’s Inspiring Real Estate Evolution

Dylan Silver (00:01.324)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have lender, real estate investor and founder of Propvana. We’ll be talking about that here today. Based out of Cali, Columbia, right now, Carrie Joseph. Carrie, welcome to the show.

Carry Joseph (00:21.74)
How’s it going? Thanks for having me Dylan.

Dylan Silver (00:23.99)
It’s a pleasure to have you. I always like to start off at the top and you’re involved in quite a bit in the real estate space. How did you get into the real estate space?

Carry Joseph (00:34.776)
First, I was a real estate agent with this company called NACA. So it’s like a nonprofit that gives people the opportunity to buy homes with no money out of pocket other than like closing costs. So I was doing that for about two, three years and it’s a nonprofit. So you weren’t really getting realtor commissions, but I was learning a lot and being able to take that information and roll it into wholesaling or investing or things of that nature.

Dylan Silver (01:03.446)
And so did you know from an early age that you wanted to be involved in real estate or what made you decide, hey, I’m going to pursue this career versus any other.

Carry Joseph (01:14.52)
Honestly, you get these gut feelings or these… I didn’t plan any of this. I was just kind of going with what I could do best. Before the real estate stuff, I was doing sales. So I just wanted something that gave me freedom. That’s basically where it started. And then everybody tries to go to real estate first. That’s what I did.

Dylan Silver (01:40.45)
Yeah. You know, I think that is somewhat common, but also everyone has a different story. I’ve said this before in a podcast for me. I was working for a Nissan dealership and I was also seeing that I couldn’t control my income. And although it was W2, I felt like there was instability in the fact that I don’t know what’s going to happen with with pay plans. And also, you know, they might phase certain jobs out. So how do I gain more control?

and real estate seem to be the way. I want to pivot a bit here and ask you about your entry point into real estate. So you mentioned you were working for the nonprofit. But also before hopping on here, we talked a little bit about wholesale. Were you doing wholesale while working for the nonprofit? How did that come into the mix?

Carry Joseph (02:10.904)
Yeah.

Carry Joseph (02:27.256)
I just it was I have I remember the exact day I helped somebody buy forplex in DC And I was looking at the HUD right and then it said the commission’s will be 15k And I looked at my check it was $3,000 like man who are they the $12,000 go? so it just From there like I just decided I was like, you know what? I’m gonna do my own marketing. This is the difference between

$15K and $3,000 is just a marketing aspect of it, then I’m going to figure this out. Then I just honed in and started just trying to hold my seals on marketing, because that’s the most important thing, trying to find that deal. Then everything else kind of falls into place.

Dylan Silver (03:08.256)
Yeah, I mean, once you’re able to do it on your own, take it, I like to say take it from the cradle to the grave. That’s where you take on more liability, but then you also get to reap more of the rewards. So you mentioned that deal. Was it a multifamily? Was it a quadplex, I think you said?

Carry Joseph (03:24.024)
It goes four plex DC. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:25.486)
And so how’d you find that deal? it come to you? Were you doing outbound outreach?

Carry Joseph (03:32.684)
Well, this is for the the I was a realtor on that deal. But my first deal came from, you know, I just started cold calling, you know, as many people as possible. I was living in a basement at a time within D.C. And yes, I just remember I was using my laptop.

and then on the dollar system. So I was using a dollar, it was like 10 hours. Yeah, I’m pretty intense dude. I was on there for a while, like at least eight to 10 hours a day nonstop for like three weeks, then I landed my first deal.

Dylan Silver (04:01.454)
getting through the numbers.

Dylan Silver (04:14.008)
Do you remember what kind of list you pulled to get that?

Carry Joseph (04:17.718)
Yeah, it was, I pulled multiple different lists. it was like, like code violations was like one of my favorite ones. Then I stacked it on top of like a foreclosure list. So I just, I have a whole bunch of data that I’ve compiled together. And then I, that’s how I got to deal so fast is I just stack a whole bunch of data and whatever came up multiple different times. Those are the first people I called. So that’s, that’s.

you know, whenever I go to try to find out the house, that’s what I always do. I’ll like find all the bad, good data on bad properties in the area, stack it all together. I’d rather call a list of versus a list of 5,000. Yeah, of course.

Dylan Silver (04:57.878)
Yeah, if it’s good data. Did you once you got that property under contract? How did you find your end buyer? That’s a I mean, it’s a difficult thing when you’re doing it on your own, right?

Carry Joseph (05:09.086)
Yes, and this one, I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I had a contract from Google, from some sort of podcast that I got. actually, I didn’t even know about Subject 2. The person told me that I could take over his mortgage. So I had couple of commission checks stacked up from…

from being a realtor, I was like, all right, cool. I don’t even know if the numbers work out on this, but I’ll go ahead and give you $15,000 to take over your mortgage. And it did work out very well. I moved back home to Virginia, lived in the house, fixed it myself, and then sold it creatively. So I’m getting a check from it, even to this day now. So it was a good deal.

Dylan Silver (05:58.446)
So that was a was that your first deal that you did for yourself purchasing it yourself?

Carry Joseph (06:05.738)
Yeah, purchasing myself, yeah. First thought.

Dylan Silver (06:08.302)
That must have been pretty exciting. That must have been a roller coaster.

Carry Joseph (06:12.504)
Oh yeah, like learning as, I learned a lot of lessons. First, the first, okay, if I have like a specific example, it would be upstairs, was like a floor that was being like.

It was like rotting from the water coming from the tub and I ended up having to pay twice to fix the same issue. So like even from that point on, like I was like, yo, whenever you do something, do it right the first time or you’re pay for it double. So like literally every scenario that pops up where I’m like, I wanna like.

Dylan Silver (06:40.014)
Right,

Carry Joseph (06:46.252)
do my best job or like I’m tired I always remember that time like you have to pay twice as much this is a common rule of the universe do the best you can the first time around you know so I’ve learned a lot of lessons from that that was a that was one of the biggest ones and but they carried me throughout my whole real estate investment career

Dylan Silver (07:04.77)
So you have this deal that that goes down from Do you remember from time to acquisition to time that you sold it creatively, you also live in it. How long we live in it for and what was that time period like from time of acquisition to the time that you sold it?

Carry Joseph (07:19.64)
About four months. Well, yeah, retrospect now, looking at all these other deals. Yeah, it is pretty decent. And at the same time, like I went door knocking within the same neighborhood and found another deal with a wholesaling commission check for like 50K. So it helped me with the renovations, helped me with my other deal. yeah, so was, everything was moving really quick. So yeah.

Dylan Silver (07:21.806)
That pretty quick, pretty quick.

Dylan Silver (07:45.55)
That’s I mean, I’m sure you’re aware of this, Carrie, but that’s actually very uncommon to have this kind of success. And also, we went all in in retelling the story. You had you were working for the nonprofit, but then you also had this proof of concept, you get the deal, you sub to it. And then you go all in 50k wholesale assignment. That’s huge, right? When the average assignment is somewhere between eight and 15k and you, you know, five times that five x that at that point, are you then leaning all into wholesale?

are you starting looking at other verticals to get into? What was your mindset once you got those two deals done?

Carry Joseph (08:21.615)
I was just trying to at that point I’m trying to make as much money as possible. So I’ll find more wholesale deals I try to find more then I found like More sub 2 deals where I could take that that that 50k will 25 25k minus for like living expenses and then buy two other houses with that first with sub 2 deals and then cash flow so You know, it just helped me roll into multiple other deals I started buying mostly more sub 2 deals

I built everything from the real estate investment portfolio to the PropVana app at the same time. I basically just did that.

Dylan Silver (09:00.14)
What year was this that you got those, you were getting started with wholesale? Was this recently or what year was this?

Carry Joseph (09:06.616)
2022 I was on my Instagram before this call and I saw it was June 2022 I made a post about me fixing the first house. So wow, yeah, it’s about four years ago.

Dylan Silver (09:17.742)
So if you if you had to go 2022 today, but then also pre 2022, was it was there a big shift and uptick in both income and lifestyle and, you know, overall between prior to doing those two deals and then once you did those two deals going to today, the life really changed after that.

Carry Joseph (09:37.812)
No, no, no, no. Like that house didn’t have any AC. I was living in a house, no AC was cold. Fixing at the same time. So true grit was tested between June 2022 and even now, you know. So like I always live below my means even now. Like I try my best to do some like zero arbitrage so that I don’t really have to spend much money. I can take all my time, energy and focus and invest it into other avenues.

Dylan Silver (09:43.854)
you

Carry Joseph (10:07.48)
So now.

Dylan Silver (10:09.506)
I want to pivot a bit here, Kerry, and ask you about lending. So I can hear, you know, based on what you’re saying that you’re looking at everything from an asset management perspective, you know, I if I’m making a bunch of money, I have to put it into something because otherwise it’s going to go and you know, I have to be continuing to stack these victories. A lot of people will stay in one vertical for long period of time or until it breaks or it doesn’t work. But you got into lending. How did that come about?

Carry Joseph (10:38.492)
You know, I’m realizing you really can’t invest even though sub two deals are nice Some of these people sometimes you know, they don’t pay you their rent, right? So you can’t just have Unless you get over like a Certain amount of cash will come to you on a monthly basis You really can’t 100 % rely on the rents coming through your properties, especially single-family to like hold you so then that’s when You know, I’m a serial entrepreneur. So I started the

financial and then rent financials is good too at the same time but I felt like I was always chasing the next deal just like wholesaling and then that’s why I felt like the rentals were the only stable things and I was like you know what everything I work on in my life 24-7 has to be passive I don’t care if I’m not getting paid you know there’s multiple opportunities I’ve seen where I can make 30-50k a month

Dylan Silver (11:15.63)
Yeah.

Carry Joseph (11:36.418)
then I’m actively working to get that. So that’s my mindset. Whatever I work on has to be passive. So the rental properties. And then now I kind of like, I’m only dealing with the clients I currently have for rent financial. You know, if they call me, I’ll go there. But right now I’m 100 % focused on the Propvana app, you know, so.

Dylan Silver (11:38.946)
Yeah, you leave.

Dylan Silver (11:58.638)
So I want to ask you about Propvana. We were talking a little bit about it before hopping on here, but it’s AI property management. AI is, of course, huge. Where did you think about, hey, I’m going to make property management AI? It seems like a tough undertaking.

Carry Joseph (12:17.016)
Yeah, because you know, like if you have a normal property management company, they’re going to be charging you about 10%. So I didn’t want to take 10 % of my rental portfolio income and pay it to somebody. So I was managing myself.

Right. And I’m rental properties. I’m managing, uh, Ram financial and then trying to find the properties. it was about a point six months ago where I was like, it’s gotta be easy way to do this. Don’t we have like, um, AI here? Like, is there, and I was like, I asked myself, is there any app out there right now where you could just connect all your properties? It’ll list it for you. Um, it’ll take all the complaints needed. It’ll talk directly with the maintenance vendor. Um, you know, and then like,

I was seeing all these legacy apps, nobody was adapting to it. So that’s when I was like, yo, this is what I meant to do. Stop whatever you’re doing and focus completely on Propvana and go as intense as possible. And right now we’re about a month from launch. So when this airs, it’ll be 100 % live. So mid-August time frame.

Dylan Silver (13:27.34)
Now I want to ask you about creating a tech tool like that. Had you had experience in development of that variety? Was this totally new to you? How’d you get these skills?

Carry Joseph (13:41.75)
No, so I did go to school for chemical engineering. So my mindset is about processes and steps and things of that nature. But I wasn’t really a developer. I’d never developed an app a day before in my life. So my chief technology officer is Chach VT. So I have daily conversations with this app to be able to improve.

Dylan Silver (14:03.672)
Yeah.

Carry Joseph (14:11.576)
Tell me how to use AI into the best of its ability. So basically, I built it with AI. AI told me how to build the app. I was coding myself. I’m a self-starter, right? You need to kind of have that to be a real estate investor. And I was like, OK, cool. Same scenario you find in real estate. You can’t really do everything by yourself. So I refinded this house, and I hired a whole bunch of developers.

apparently putting it together.

Dylan Silver (14:43.862)
Now, are you planning to release it online? Is it be mobile app? How are people gonna be able to get on there?

Carry Joseph (14:51.384)
Yeah, it’s going be a mobile app, desktop. So basically, you could go to your phone and be like, hey, I just bought a property at 123 Main Street. Add this here. It’ll automatically populate everything for you off your phone. Basically, I want it to be a property management assistant that you can have in your pocket. That’s the end bill.

Dylan Silver (15:11.842)
Wow. And maybe you don’t have this written out yet, but are people with short term rentals, Airbnb is going to be able to utilize this as well or is this more of a long term month to month rental situation?

Carry Joseph (15:26.264)
every of these as well. So I was doing a lot of market research while I was running rent financials, my lending company. So I would, you know, give them, give them a, give them a loan, right on the property and ask them, Hey, I have this app that I’m building. What do you guys want to see in this? So I took all their pain points and I did that. So we’ll have a hospitable integration. So hospitals, you know, hospitals, right. It’s like a probably management software for

Dylan Silver (15:51.746)
Yeah.

Carry Joseph (15:53.922)
for Airbnbs and short-term rentals. So the integration would connect to hospitable. And they could automatically reply. They’ll have a phone number that the person could call to at the same time. And that’s what connects Airbnbs midterm rentals to the app, is if you’re using hospitable or if you don’t use hospitable and you just want to put a number in there and say, call this number, then they could call that number 24-7.

Dylan Silver (16:22.552)
So are you also looking at outside of the US, too, people who have rentals and Airbnb’s outside of the US? You mentioned you’re in Cali, Columbia. Will they be able to use your service as well?

Carry Joseph (16:36.244)
I’m specifically going after English speaking areas first. from from zero to 3000 users is all going to be in the United States. And then my next jump is going to be Australia. I have a friend that I met while traveling. owns a couple of real estate. He’s like, yeah, I want this for my properties as soon as possible. So it will be first United States, then Australia, UK. And then after that, I’ll probably go into.

Dylan Silver (16:40.312)
Got it.

Carry Joseph (17:05.45)
know, different languages, but English first.

Dylan Silver (17:08.544)
Very cool. We’ve got our rooster going off in the background. I don’t know if you can hear that, but we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to learn more about the app, to get in touch with you, or contact you in any way?

Carry Joseph (17:21.474)
You could go to get propvana.com. That’s our landing page or propvana.io. So P-R-O-P-VANA. You know, we have an Instagram, TikTok. If you go to our website, you’ll be able to see all the social media links. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (17:41.368)
Kerry, thank you so much for coming on the show here today. I’m excited to check out the app when it is released. Thanks for coming on.

Carry Joseph (17:49.432)
problem Dylan thanks for having me.