From Setback to Success: Lessons From a $60K Flip Loss

Judy Walsh (00:00)
I think I was more assertive on my belief in the ARB than I could have been.

And I really knew the number I wanted to get it for was lower than what I ended up getting it for, but I totally talked myself into it. So I did not listen to my intuition. And I had many times where I was reminded, like, this was not the best thing. So your intuition and your trusted advisors. And then at the end of the day, we ended up, it carried on the market like six extra months that pretty much ate up the profit because it was hard money. And so we ended up

Q Edmonds (00:12)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Judy Walsh (00:36)
behind by, we lost 60,000.

Q Edmonds (02:11)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I am super excited to be here today, have another fantastic guest. And I know I keep saying that it’s, it’s hard to have a bad guest when people come and show up as their authentic self. And this lady, I love her mindset. I love her authenticity. And I am ready for us just to take the journey, take the journey with her learning about

her processes, her experience. And you know how I am. This is what I love. I love learning things from different people. We all have something to serve. We all have our own superpowers. We all have our own processes. And so learning from each other for me is always the best way. And so here’s another phenomenal guest. And I want you to sit back, relax, or maybe take notes. However you do your thing. But I want to introduce you all to Miss Judy Walsh. Miss Judy, how are you doing today, ma’am?

Judy Walsh (03:08)
Doing well, thank you so much. Appreciate you having me on.

Q Edmonds (03:11)
Absolutely.

I appreciate you being here. It’s funny. I just seen in the background, said kindness matters, right? And so Brene Brown is one of my favorite people who I follow. And she says, clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. So I’m glad today that we get to be kind to people and say some things and say some things very clearly. I’m excited about this. And so ⁓ I am a type. I like to dial right in, Ms. Judy. So if you don’t mind.

Tell us what’s your main focus these days, right? If you don’t mind, give us an origin story, kind of how you got to the place that you’re at. And then also tell them a part of the world you’re in. People love to know geographically where people are. So what you’re up to, your origin story, and where you are. Miss Judy, ma’am, you have the floor.

Judy Walsh (04:00)
Perfect, thank you so much. I appreciate again you having me on. really enjoy sharing the things that I’ve learned with people who may be at a similar point in their journey or maybe just starting out. Right now, I’m sort of in a restarting and scaling phase for myself. ⁓ I am located south of Boston and all of my projects so far have been in Rhode Island where I lived for a period of time.

so I can get into that a little bit. But right now I’m very small. Right now I have one property, which is my single family that I lived in. It was my primary. And I’m at a point where my kids are college age. One just graduated, one is still in school. So it’s a big house. There’s only three of us. I didn’t need the space. I said, let me practice downsizing, rent it out to a family, and rent a smaller little house by the beach. I’m in a town called Hull, South.

done right near the beach, which is nice.

So nice arbitrage for the rent, all the things. And I said, now I don’t want to give up the property yet. Let’s see how it goes with them out of the house. So I’m at a point where I had sold my other properties, which I’ll share about in a moment. But I’m at a point where I’m really looking to get into multifamily and scale. And I’ve been looking in the Midwest, primarily Cleveland. I’m also simultaneously still working with my

contractor in Rhode Island who is looking to work together and partner on flips. So I feel like one will fuel the other. We’re starting to get some momentum in both markets, which is kind of exciting. And I have really established systems with that contractor, like we’ve done to flip successfully. Like we know how each other works. He’s done work on my other property that I was renting out. So I think that I’m in a good point. It’s almost like I’m hitting the reset button. So my journey with real estate starts like a long time ago when I

bought my first house, which was, gosh, I’m going look at the dates just because I want to make sure I remember correctly. So when I was married, we bought a house together in Richmond, Rhode Island, which is the southern part of the state. And when we walked in, we were just like so excited of all the things we were going to do to it. I walk into a house and I look at what can I change? What can I add? What can I improve? Like I never just take it off the shelf as it were. So we walked into that house and we decided all these things we were going to do. ⁓

Probably my favorite over enthusiastic homeowner story is when I went to Home Depot and I came home with a book about building decks. And then I got out the graph paper and I designed a deck with two angled staircases and I staked it all out. And then my husband came home from work and he was like, what are you doing? I was like, no, we’re going to build this. And we did. And it took us all summer. It was like 630 square feet. was, I think I’m still sore from it, honestly. But we did everything in the house. We replaced all the woodwork. We replaced.

Q Edmonds (07:18)
Yeah.

You’re right.

Judy Walsh (07:41)
⁓ All of the doors, we hand stained them. I built a built-in bookcase and a window seat and all the things and we did the deck obviously. And we did really well on the profit on that house in a couple of years. So then I was done. Like I was like, this is my thing. I love this. I love everything about improving properties and making them better and making money. I mean, you have to live somewhere. So all my houses have been like live in flips is what I’d say. So.

In addition to that, we did get a two family in Providence and it was sort of marketed as being part of this really kind of nice, fun, trendy Italian neighborhood called like Federal Hill, Italian restaurants, like a lot of that kind of thing. But it was kind of a few blocks out and it’s not the same at all. So anyway, it was fine. We still bought it. We did everything wrong on that one and still made money, which is what I love about real estate. We bought that one.

four, let’s see, we bought that one for like 159, put like 20,000 into it. like a year later we sold it for 295. So that was good math. But when we walked in to do the walkthrough for the closing, the constable was still evicting the tenants. Now everybody knows that you really just should move the closing and not close.

But both of our agents were like, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. And we closed and it was challenging. I mean, I don’t want to go into tons of detail, but I think you can imagine the cleanup. We were a little nervous to go back to the house. We weren’t sure how we were going to be greeted. So we were just super friendly, super accommodating. Like we’re going to leave your stuff on the driveway, but the dumpster’s coming tomorrow. Please get it out of here. And then the cleanup was worse than I’ve ever seen in my life.

And we did it all ourselves.

Q Edmonds (10:10)
Yeah.

Judy Walsh (10:10)
So this is like a total rookie situation, right? We’re doing the cleaning. We’re doing the dumpster, like bags full of dirty diapers. We had rats, we had cockroaches, we had everything, everything that was as disgusting as you can imagine. So cleaned it all top to bottom, fixed some flooring, did some painting. Other than that, it didn’t need a ton, which was good. And we got tenants in there. We put washer dryers in. Everybody told us not to, but we did.

⁓ That ended up not being a disaster, thank God. But anyway, it was interesting and the tenants were very thankful who moved in and we ended up doing well and by the grace of God or good luck or whatever, anything we might have done right, we came out of it with a profit. And the reason we sold it was because at the time I had just had my son and I was working as chief operating officer in a hospital and I had a very busy schedule and I had to pick him up.

after school and I was always having to stop in to pick up the rent from one of the tenants who was always late. And so I was like, let me make it easy for you. I’ll just pick it up. And, you know, probably another thing I wasn’t supposed to do, but I did. So we learn from all these things, right? So that experience taught me a lot about how I would manage everything completely differently on the next multifamily. But by the grace of real estate, right? Like you come out somehow still OK. And then I didn’t do anything.

Q Edmonds (11:27)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Judy Walsh (11:34)
for like a good 10 years. And then we got divorced when the kids were small. I moved to Massachusetts, had my hands full raising two kids and it was amazing, but I just didn’t, I couldn’t, I didn’t have the bandwidth to do anything else except buy my own property, which was my first house on my own and fix that up and it’s difficult to live in flip stuff. So I bought the first rental property for real on my own in 2018 and that was in the market.

in Rhode Island near University of Rhode Island, which is a pretty particular market. And I don’t know if now is a good time to go into that or if you want me to talk about that later.

Q Edmonds (12:12)
Listen,

ma’am, it ain’t no script to it. If you flowin’, go ahead and flow, my dear. Yes, we learnin’ from you. Yes, ma’am.

Judy Walsh (12:17)
All right. All

right. So this is kind of interesting because it’s kind of unique. And I think that ⁓ some other areas of the country that have college rentals do it a little differently. Like in some markets, like I know in Cincinnati, like they’re not furnished rentals because I know a friend who’s somewhat to school there. But, you know, in Narragansett, Rhode Island, which is right near University of Rhode Island, it’s very much the model is it’s furnished.

The more bedrooms, the better because obviously you can charge more rent. And so the move is find a property, try to add a bedroom ⁓ and make sure that you get the parents co-signing the leases. And then you lease it to the kids, but it’s not year round. It’s just for the school year. So it’s like September to May. And then you Airbnb it during the summer, which is, and it’s always Saturday to Saturday in that market, which is great.

It’s also challenging to get a cleaner because they’re all busy on Saturday. So one summer my cleaner was overloaded with other projects and I ended up going down like multiple times to do it myself. And I thought, well, this isn’t ideal. But it’s an interesting model. Not everybody has the stomach for it because, you know, student housing that has a reputation of, you know, they’re going to trash the place. It’s going to be a big problem. Out of the seven years that I did it with one house and I did it for three years with a second house,

I only had one group of tenants that really, really did a lot of damage and left a lot of stuff behind. So they didn’t get their security deposit back. And there was a charge on top of it, which only one family ended up coming back and paying. But at the end of that year, I still was profitable, you know? So you have to just sort of not take it personally, but you also have to know what you’re in for. Like if you’re doing college rentals somewhere, there’s a lot of things to find out about what is the building inspector’s expectation of

you know, adding a bedroom and how what is the code, you know, are you allowed to how much how many parking spaces do you need? All those things have to be vetted any time you’re adding a bedroom for any reason. But also what is the management of like, let’s say there are disruptions, right? Narragansett had a really unique model ⁓ of handling like disturbances. So if the police were called to a college rental because they’re disturbing the peace in the neighborhood, ⁓ they would get an orange sticker on the door.

Q Edmonds (14:39)
you. ⁓

Judy Walsh (14:40)
and they would be fined.

And well, I would be fined, which means their rent would go up, right? So it’s in the lease that their rent will go up and the fine gets sort of passed along to them and the orange stickers on their door. So I was very much, ⁓ I was very real with my tenants. And I was probably the same age as some of their moms. So I feel like it kind of helped in a way, but I was like, look, act like this is your mom’s house. You don’t really want that orange sticker on the door.

Q Edmonds (14:44)
Right,

Exactly,

Judy Walsh (15:50)
Your parents are going to be so mad if they get called and the rent goes up. And who wants to clean up? Like go to somebody else’s party, you know, like go have the party at somebody else’s house. You get to wake up in a clean house if you live in a clean house, but you don’t have to clean up other people’s stuff. most, I mean, they had people over and it’s fine. Most of them did fine. But the one group, like I said, did a lot of damage. The other thing I learned is the importance of having a boots on the ground person there that you trust. So I had the best handyman.

Like this guy had my back, you know, he would and we had this good cop, bad cop thing kind of almost like he would meet the tenants. I would give him the card and say, look, if you break something, you fix it, you call Dan, take care of it. I don’t even need to know. You don’t want to lose your security deposit. But if something’s like wear and tear, like anything with water, I need to know right away. Anything with water, I need to know immediately. Anything that’s broken, I’ll take care of it right away. I will take care of that. But if you punch a hole in the wall, you pay to get it fixed.

I don’t need to know, you know? So we worked that way together and Deon, you know, would go and directly handle things. And when he was there, when he met them for the first time, whatever the first time was, he would really kind of lean on them, don’t mess with this, you know, mess with this lady, you know, like this is her property, do not, you know, make sure you respect it. So it was kind of nice to have. So I feel like knowing

what you’re getting into. And if you’re not sure, like maybe talking to other landlords who have done this. Like the reason I knew what to expect when I did this model was because my agent who sold me the house had rentals himself and he had been a landlord in this model. And I wouldn’t have known some of those things until I, you know, by surprise is no fun. sometimes the question to ask is what question haven’t I asked you that I should ask you? And you know,

If you can talk to other landlords in the area that are doing what you’re doing, they probably will want to help you out. They’re not going to see you as competition. And there’s so many nuances to different markets that you would never know.

Q Edmonds (17:53)
Yeah,

yeah. Well, Miss Judy, thank you. Thank you for taking your time and walking us through where you are, kind of how you got there, and just kind of just some deep in the weeds things that you’re dealing with, some of the day-to-day processes, real life turning points that you’re dealing with.

And I thank you. I thank you. I appreciate it so much.

Ms. Judy, often say destiny has no wasted moments, right? Meaning that we are borrowing from every leg of the journey. We’re borrowing from the success. We’re borrowing from the failures. And so I want to get your thoughts. When you hear this, I want to know what comes to your mind. So when you hear numbers plus intuition plus not giving up, when you hear that, Ms. Judy, what comes to mind to you, my dear, when you hear that?

Judy Walsh (18:47)
Well, it comes to mind to me is me sitting at the kitchen table having coffee this morning when that popped into my head. And I’m so glad you said it because I feel like that’s the formula that, you know, if you were on this journey, right, and you’re either maybe you started and then you stalled or you are worried about getting started or maybe it’s too late. Like that to me is the formula. And I’ll tell you why.

Q Edmonds (18:54)
Yeah.

Judy Walsh (19:14)
The numbers are the numbers, right? Like you have to put a lot of offers in for something to be successful to get a yes, right? So you have to have a lot of those, but the numbers themselves on the property have to work. So that’s one thing. And you can try to talk yourself into the numbers working, but the numbers are the numbers and you have to believe them. Like my dance teacher growing up used to say, the mirror doesn’t lie.

And so I just extrapolate that too. She’s like, either your toes pointed or it’s not, you look, I don’t have to tell you, right? So the mirror doesn’t lie, the numbers don’t lie, right? It’s the same thing unless you try to do the mental gymnastics and talk yourself into things, which is where the intuition comes in. So my first flip was an older house and it ended up, it had a newer electrical panel. We didn’t think we’re to have to do any electrical. And it turned out,

Q Edmonds (19:57)
Right. Yeah.

Judy Walsh (20:13)
that we did based on some things that we found as we uncovered during the renovation. once you get to a certain percentage, you have to upgrade the whole thing. So we had to rewire the whole house and it was horsehair plaster, which means we had to sheetrock the whole house. None of this was in the budget. So now we’re worried about timeline and labor and materials overage. my God, what am I going to do? So we were like very, very meticulous with managing that timeline. We were very successful in getting it on the market within six days of when we said we were going to.

Q Edmonds (20:26)
Yeah.

Judy Walsh (20:42)
which was like miraculous, right? And we sold it. was very, it was, it was a perfect outcome. We had a profit on that one, which was great. It was about 60,000 profit. Now the next one is where the intuition story comes in because I did not listen to myself. and I did not listen to, you know, my trusted advisor. So my lender that I talked about, like, will not lend on things if he doesn’t think they’re going to make you money.

Q Edmonds (21:00)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Judy Walsh (21:11)
So this next property, he turned down. He was like, no, I don’t think the margin’s good enough for this one. I don’t think it’s really gonna work. And I was super confident in the timeline piece because the same crew was gonna do almost the same materials, way lower scope of work. I was like, we can be in and out of here in three weeks. I know we can.

I think I was more assertive on my belief in the ARB than I could have been.

And I really knew the number I wanted to get it for was lower than what I ended up getting it for, but I totally talked myself into it. So I did not listen to my intuition. And I had many times where I was reminded, like, this was not the best thing. So your intuition and your trusted advisors. And then at the end of the day, we ended up, it carried on the market like six extra months that pretty much ate up the profit because it was hard money. And so we ended up

Q Edmonds (21:46)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Judy Walsh (22:09)
behind by, we lost 60,000.

it was a break even, very, very interesting year of learning a lesson. But the intuition piece is real. And like back to the story about the Providence duplex, when we walked in and we saw the constable evicting those tenants and we just looked at each other and said, my God, what are we going to do? And we knew, like we knew like we really should be assertive and say, no, we’re not closing today. We’re going to

Q Edmonds (22:16)
Yes, ma’am.

Judy Walsh (22:38)
push this off, we’ll come back tomorrow and see that it is broom clean, right? And we didn’t because we were a little intimidated, we were new. And when you’re new and you’re little intimidated, you know, you don’t do what you should do. So that was the other trusting intuition piece.

So in terms of the not giving up, because it’s been a bit of a gap since then, since I’ve really done much, getting started again, you can easily talk yourself out of it and say, you know what, this is taking too long. Like I had two deals last quarter that didn’t come together right towards the end because of due diligence and some other factors. And it’s easy to say, well, it’s easier to say, gosh, this isn’t gonna happen, right? I’m doing all this work and all these things and it hasn’t come together yet.

And that’s where the do not quit comes in. you know, numbers in terms of how many offers you’re putting out there, numbers in terms of trusting the numbers and then trusting your intuition. If something feels really wrong about something, you’ve got to question yourself as to why. And maybe you just need to say like, I need more information. What is this trying to tell me?

And then the don’t quit part, because it is so easy to compare yourself to everybody else and say, I should already have this many doors. I’m so embarrassed that I’m not farther along or whatever it is. And that’s just, that’s just you talking to you, you know, nobody’s thinking that. And so the not quitting piece is real and that sometimes is the hardest one.

Q Edmonds (24:12)
Yeah.

I am, Ms. Judy, I am enjoying this conversation. I’m watching time. Time is just flying. I’m like, where’s the time going? You know? So I appreciate it. I know we had the 20 minute mark, but I do want to ask you, and you kind of elaborated on it a little bit, but I’ll ask you point blank. Like, what’s next for you? Like, what’s the next real true goal for you?

Judy Walsh (24:34)
So the next real move is to move into multifamily and leverage the relationships I’ve been able to develop over time. It’s taken longer than I thought it would in a new market to meet the people and get the relationships going with the people who will actually do the work, the new lenders in a new market, ⁓ wholesalers and agents. I have some good relationships there. ⁓ And then at the same time,

partner with my contractor in Rhode Island who is actively looking for deals and motivated to do this model where he’s going to manage the projects, I’m going to provide the design and the financing, and it’s going to be very efficient for both of us really. And so that’s going to fuel the growth on the other side of the portfolio. So I just feel like it’s all finally clicking and coming together. And so we’ll be using the flip proceeds to build the multifamily portfolio in the upcoming months.

Q Edmonds (25:30)
Ms. Judy, I appreciate you so much. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Judy Walsh (25:42)
Sure, so I’m gonna give you my personal Instagram because I have not set up a website for investments yet. I will at some point, but it’s just JudyWalsh13 on Instagram. Pretty easy. And I’d love to hear from folks who wanna collaborate. I’m happy to give a little support to somebody who’s starting out or getting restarted, because it can be super frustrating. I also have done some private lending and I’ve worked with people who do private lending.

If people are looking to learn more about using their self-directed IRA or their HELOC to do some private lending, I have a lot of great resources for people on that as well. A couple of my mentors and one of my favorite closing attorneys are very expert in that area. So if I can be a resource for people or hopefully a cheerleader for anyone, I’m happy to do that.

Q Edmonds (26:33)
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on today. I want to say three things to you sincerely. First, thank you for your time, because I believe time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for your time. I value it. I value you being here today and giving us some of your time. So thank you for that. Secondly, thank you for your story. I personally put a premium on stories. think everybody has a story to tell.

Everybody has a narrative and I believe we all can learn from each other’s stories. And I believe stories have a way of planting seeds. We may never see the growth, but the seed is still there. And that thing can spring up at any given time, 10 years, two years, five years. Like it can spring up whenever.

So thank you for your gift of authenticity, your gift of vulnerability, your gift of integrity. I really, really appreciate you coming on today and sharing your story. Lastly, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly, greatly appreciate you coming on today, Ms. Junie.

Judy Walsh (27:43)
Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you and getting to know you a little bit. And I really hope that some of the stories and some of the insights are helpful to some of your listeners. And just please just remember numbers, intuition, and not giving up. just sometimes the not giving up is the hardest part, but you can do this.

Q Edmonds (28:01)
Mm.

Listen, you heard Ms. Judy. Please look into the show notes. Her information is in the show notes. Get in contact with her. Let her help you out. Definitely make sure you are subscribed here because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Ms. Judy. Thank you so much for being here. Now, Ms. Judy, I’m going to ask this. We can always edit this out.

but I do want to know, do you want to bring up the podcast? I know we talked about a podcast. Do you want to bring it up? Because I think it’s beneficial, what you told me. So I’m not trying to put the pressure on you. Like I said, we can always edit this out, but I do want to bring that up. Yes, ma’am.

Judy Walsh (28:39)
No, right.

Thank you. appreciate that. Yes. So I have recently launched a podcast that is called Own Your Health Today. And I’ve been in healthcare for over 30 years. And my true belief is that we make a plan for everything, but for our personal vitality and energy and how we show up every day, we can be a little haphazard with how we take care of ourselves. And at the end of the day, as a business person, you lose money that way.

So for no other reason than honoring yourself and enjoying your life, you’re relieving a lot on the table if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not showing up consistently with that energy level. You know the days where you feel like, I hope nobody talks to me today. Well, that’s not good. If you have too many of those days, you’re losing a lot and it hurts you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially. So the mission of this podcast is to help people.

put together like a personal plan for your vitality so that you have a plan, even if you only have a few minutes, what could I do to get my energy back on track and what’s my long-term plan? And it’s not something that most people do. So I’m excited about it. It’s brand new. It’s what I call perfectly imperfect, but please check it out on Spotify, own your health today. And if anyone has topics they want to hear about, reach out to me as well. I’m happy to bring the right experts on. We’re interviewing different experts in longevity and vitality each week.

Q Edmonds (30:02)
Absolutely. Again, thank you so much for being on. This was so great. So again, I appreciate you. You have a phenomenal day. And everyone else, listen, you all have a phenomenal day as well.