From Single-Family Rentals to Apartments, RV Parks and Creative Finance | Becky Baker

Becky Baker (00:00)
The only thing on my heart that I think everybody needs to know is anything’s possible. If there’s something you’ve been thinking or been itching on your heart or in your mind or you’re wondering could it be possible? It absolutely is. with God all things are possible and do it. you got the you got the power, you got the faith, where there’s a vision. God doesn’t put a vision in our mind, in our heart, without a way to get there. So go get it.

Quentin Edmonds (01:00)
Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I am excited today. y’all know I always say that, and I genuinely mean it. If you ever hear me say I’m not excited, it’s literally because I’m not excited. But I say that probably 99% of the time because I’m excited, because you guys know I love gleaming from other people’s experience. That’s what I love. I love looking at life and business through other people’s lens. And we could all literally be doing the same thing, but we still will do it differently because we are differently. We’re wired differently, we process differently. And so I’m so excited that I have someone here who we get to peek through her experience. And I’m excited. I’m gonna let her tell you everything that she does, a little bit about her history and different things. But please I really know this is gonna be a great part. So I’m so happy to introduce you all to, I believe, for the first time in the podcast world to Miss. Becky Baker, Miss Becky, I don’t know anything there.

Becky Baker (01:57)
Hey, doing fabulous. Super happy to greet you from the beautiful Pensacola, Florida. A lot of excitement going on here. We got a hurricane coming our way, but not a better place to greet you from. We got sunny skies now and super happy. Yeah, number one podcast is going down in my life history. Been on a lot of stages, but number one podcast, thank you. Appreciate being here.

Quentin Edmonds (02:21)
We check this off the box. I absolutely love

Becky Baker (02:24)
Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (02:25)
it. So Miss Becky, I love it. I’m glad you’re here. listen, you’ll hear me say this again at the end. I think time is our most precious commodity. So thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I value you being here today. And so I’m the type, Miss Becky. I love to dive right in. So I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little origin story, kind of how you got started. And then also if you don’t mind, tell them we well, you already said where you are in the world. So if you want to piggyback on that, that’s fine. But tell them, again, what which what’s your main focus and a little a little journey of your origin story? And so Miss Becky, you have the floor, ma’am.

Becky Baker (03:01)
Yeah, absolutely. So born and raised in beautiful California, raised in a little ag town in the San Francisco Bay Area, a real quiet town. It got too big too quick. did raise my family down in Bakersfield, the Central Valley. Great place to raise them. They grew up. I ended up being an empty nester and said, Lord, where do want me to go and learn about Pensacola? Well, I landed here about six weeks ago, semi-retired. I had an insurance business that afforded me a residual income and so moved here and absolutely love it. It’s the beautiful South. And I was introduced to real estate or got myself into real estate way back when I was married at 24. And I said we’re not renting an apartment, we’re gonna we’re gonna purchase something, purchased a condo and realized a huge gain. Just to give you a small synapse of what happened there, we purchased in San Diego about nine months. No, I’m sorry, about nine weeks before 9/11. And so we’re in San Diego, 9/11 happens. I’m a flight attendant at the time, did not work on the day of 9/11, but had a good good friend from from flight attendant school who went down on flight 93. It was absolutely tragic. And all we wanted to do was move from San Diego back to the Bay Area to be with family. We were blessed to be able to do that, put tenants in that condominium that we had scraped by to be able to afford. And then began our family. We were we were pregnant when we moved back to the Bay Area to be with family, had that baby. we’re renting, but just from it was a cottage on my own parents’ property. They were very nice to us, didn’t gouge us. And by the time it was time to have a second baby, we said, We gotta we gotta buy a home. We can’t keep living in this cottage. So we said, let’s let’s call a realtor, see what that, see what our condo is worth. just to give you the purchase price was eighty two thousand that we had paid back when we purchased that little condo. We called a realtor and said, Hey, we have no idea what’s going on in San Diego. We just know that we’ve had good tenants and they’ve, They’ve been keeping things even for us. we haven’t had to do too many repairs. what is the market looking like? And that realtor said, it’s worth 292. And we said, Excuse me? Do you mean do you mean 92? Yeah, we were clueless, we’re young and married, we’re focused on our baby, a second baby’s coming, we’re just like, Excuse me. And she said, Yeah, it would it would probably sell for about two hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars. And we looked at each other. We were just thinking of down payment for a home and we were blown away, And of course, we were able to work a 1031 exchange and So I learned very quickly, it was worth all the scrimping and saving to put money into real estate. And so that was my first lesson, in my twenties. real estate is absolutely the way to go. And I had been a financial planner and knew then how wisely it was to invest. And I didn’t, I still understand why this isn’t taught in, your basic economics in eleventh grade or twelfth grade, whenever that class is taught. So that’s kind of my background. I am a big advocate. I tell I was told Quentin I absolutely love people and don’t mean to get nosy into people’s business, but it’s like, I I’ve I’ve worked in a lot of youth ministries and it’s like I talk to kids about, what are your financial plans and be sure in college what you’re thinking about, buying a place and be saving now for your financial future. It’s just it’s it needs to be spoken about, more clearly and more often. Yeah. So that’s kind of my real estate background. always have invested and found ways to invest in single family because they’re they’re really quite simple. The traditional financing is what all banks and lenders are used to. I’ve spent the last year really expanding my mind, getting to know creative finance. And so I made the move to Pensacola about six weeks ago and was blessed at a networking meeting to find a business partner here who was looking to get is tired of single family investing and is looking to get into apartments and micro resorts and R V parks. And so we’re on a venture together and have actually found quite a few opportunities right in this area. And so we’re gonna be working together and are super excited about getting on that. I mean it’s amazing the different things that have just been placed on our lap. And so we’re just kind of picking and choosing and sorting through those and doing some homework to figure out how to best tackle those, in a in a concise and wise way. So we’re getting together on that and working on bigger and better things. We thought we were gonna be liquidating some of the properties that we have, but with creative finance we’re like, wow, we can actually, get things rolling without having to even worry about selling off some of the properties that we have. So very exciting time in my life. I, just thought, I’ll go to Pensacola and kind of get my real estate venture going a little bigger in that direction. Didn’t know that I’d have a partner so quickly and abruptly. And didn’t know that all of these opportunities would be thrown in my lap. So feeling extremely blessed. didn’t know that podcasts like these were available. I think I finally slowed down at a point in my life where I’m like, I I’ve been a real estate investor my whole life. Let’s make this more of a full time profession instead of just so part-time and kind of on the side. I actually have time, that I’m dedicating. So that’s kind of who I am in a nutshell. any any things that you wanna add or places you wanna lead me, Quentin.

Quentin Edmonds (09:04)
Listen, I appreciate that well thought out, well-paced answer. Like I think that was brilliant you taking us through how you got started, where you landed, even where you are now. And so I’m gonna love asking you this because Miss Becky, I say probably every podcast, destiny has no wasted moments. Like we are Borrowing from every leg of our journey. Nothing is wasted. Like we are learning the people who we are, we reinforcing the people that we are. We’re learning from trial and error and we’re learning where we landed. And so I would love to know for you, Miss Becky, what has the journey revealed to Miss Becky about Miss Becky? Has it made you more humble? Has it increased your tenacity? Like what has the journey revealed to you about yourself?

Becky Baker (09:52)
I think both of those things. I think, building what I had, collecting single family residents. I was also, a full-time business owner. I was working that full time. And it was like, I, I’m kind of stretching myself and, bringing on these single family residents and self managing those and then eventually turn those over to property managers. But I was doing all that I could in real estate. And then, retiring and then switching my the pace of my life to I can I can take on real estate. I think it’s been very humbling to realize that like that wasn’t even a teeny tiny little drop of a drop in the ocean. There is so much more. My vision has just been expanded and I’ve just been so humbled. Like I thought I really wasn’t a real estate investor. I was really just kind of I mean, I thought that, yeah, I get with my attorney and I go over these contracts. I thought I understood real estate contracts and it’s like, no, I really didn’t understand anything, And so it’s been very humbling now to see see what’s out there, what’s available. and just to be able I think I’ve expanded my mind, but the Old adage, the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. And it’s actually quite a good feeling because again, like you said there’s so much to glean. every every person I meet, whether it’s at the store or sitting down, the neighbors when I go out to dinner or the neighbors next door, it’s like, you know about that? school me on it.

Quentin Edmonds (11:19)
So

Becky Baker (11:20)
So I just I like I said, I love people. there’s so much to learn. And then so in this, in this business, it’s like everyone I meet is just I just feel it’s invaluable invaluable. Yes, ma’am. So so yeah, I appreciate that. It’s been very humbling, to learn and I’m excited to be able to keep growing.

Quentin Edmonds (11:37)
Yes, ma’am. I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Again, just for the authentic answers. Like, yeah, I I’m absolutely loving this conversation so far. I would love to know. I mean, obviously, you know, you have moved, you got this new partnership, been through some pivot pivot moments in your life. I want to talk some operational system things, right? Some things that have worked well, some things that have served you well. So I’ll ask you like this. What is maybe one operational thing you’ve put in place, let’s say maybe the last two years, that has really helped you be successful or actually caused you to kind of pivot a little bit? But talk to me a little bit about operational things that really serve you.

Becky Baker (12:15)
it’s been more of a small family type business, as far as managing the single family residents. And I think it’s already kind of been man mentioned. I went from self managing the single family residents, which were all within a two or three hours drive, to turning those over to professional management. So that was kind of a nice thing. I mean, d as small as the business was, it was it was a move that went From trying to do it all myself to let’s delegate. and then as far as studying creative finance and expanding my mind with that, I’ve gone from, learning about the community to paying to be part of a community and then actually building relationships and trusting those people and being able to just become more alive in the community and reaching out and checking out deals and just really getting more involved in the community that way. So and kind of built a system of just really plugging in and becoming very active instead of more of a an onlooking participant. So getting more involved. And of course developing the habits of when I search for deals, it’s consistently, a couple hours every day. It’s not, it used to be more passive. So it’s just building those habits that we all do as we become professionals. So

Quentin Edmonds (13:32)
Yep, nope. I mean so I didn’t I was gonna mention it’s funny and then I chose to pivot away, but I’ll you kept saying the words, so I’ll pivot back. One of my favorite books is *Atomic Habits*. Not sure if you heard

Becky Baker (13:44)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (13:46)
of habit building, like absolutely that’s being one percent better every single day. So I love how you talking about the little habits

Becky Baker (13:53)
Did you read *The Power of Consistency*?

Quentin Edmonds (13:55)
No and no not even heard.

Becky Baker (13:57)
Another good book. Same idea. *Power of Consistency*. I can’t think of the author right now. But if you pull up *Power of Consistency*.

Quentin Edmonds (14:04)
Writing it down right now. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Becky Baker (14:07)
Basically do the thing, get the result. Do the thing, get the result. Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (14:11)
So yeah, my one of my mentors say consistency beats intensity any day. And so I have tried my best to be consistent. So *The Power of Consistency*, that’s on that’s on that’s on the that’s on the watch the watch list right now and on the listen list. So yeah.

Becky Baker (14:25)
And what you do in private gets gets seen in public,

Quentin Edmonds (14:28)
Come on. So speaking of that, what’s next for you? Like what is your next real goal? What are you looking to solve at scale next, Miss Miss, Miss Becky?

Becky Baker (14:37)
again, it’s we’re gonna seize an apartment building. Yeah. We’re looking at we’ve got a hundred and one unit and a twelve unit that just fell in our laps in the last week. So we’ve gotta wait for this hurricane to pass and check those out. But the T twelves and the photos and the everything we’ve checked out looks good. We just gotta get our title companies and transaction coordinators to do some of the homework with us. And so And we’ve got some others, that we’re investigating and looking into. So it’s just taking that next step and seizing something bigger and then we’ve got yeah, we’ve got an eighty acre parcel that would that the guy’s willing to work with us on, he wants to get rid of it but hold on to it as a creative financer and He’s like, I want to help develop it, but I don’t want to do it alone. what are your ideas for developing it? And we’re like, Have you heard of a micro resort? what do you think about an R V park? He’s like, well, the guy these doctors I purchased it from have it pre-zoned with the city for 300 or 400 our at R V park. And so we’ve got some creative things, in the works, but nothing solidifies, but we’re going down that route. we don’t really want to. chew off anything as huge as an eighty acre park to begin with. So we’re like, hey, how about a little, apartment building? So it will be something, within the realms of a multifamily or, an apartment building. but it’s so nice to be able to collaborate and spread the risk and do it with a partner and do it wisely. but that is our next step, it should happen within the next, two or three weeks. And that will just be the first of many. So

Quentin Edmonds (16:13)
I love it. I love it. I love this conversation. So everybody that comes on, I always want to get their unique perspective around the word relationship. So when you hear the word within business, sometimes that bleeds within personal rights. So I want to hear Miss Becky’s unique perspective when it comes to relationship, building healthy relationships. Has relationships served you well? Give me your unique perspective on relationships, Miss Becky.

Becky Baker (16:40)
I love that word relationship. when I think of that, I think of Boy, I just think of the people that I’m closest to. I think of Boy, I just have to say it the first and foremost, I think of my father in heaven. I think of I think of my savior. I think of the angels around me that support me and lift me up. I think of my grandparents who passed on that I know are just like, go Becky, go Becky, and they’re right here with me. I think of my kids who’ve who’ve grown up. And they’re with their spouses. And I just think of something that’s so vital and living, and it’s ebb and flow, it’s my life, it’s my heartbeat, it’s the air that comes and goes that gives me life. and it’s almost something that I don’t have to think about. a healthy relationship is something that feeds me, that gives me energy. And yet I’m mortal. And so mortal relationships do they do take work? they do take energy, they do take concentration, they do take, hey, if we’re gonna work together, ooh, I think I think what I meant to say was, hey, that was that was a great idea, and I think that’s gonna work, but I think we need to tweak it a little bit, And sometimes it means it means, recommunicating. It means and so I think a relationship is something that is give and take. but we gotta we gotta put in a hundred, a hundred and ten percent, on both sides. So yeah, I think relationships are what make life rich and make give life energy and our what life is meant one of life’s great purposes is being in relationship with people. Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (18:19)
So well said. I mean, as you was talking, and I say this scripture enough on this podcast, and sometimes I quote it, sometimes I don’t say the scripture, sometimes I give the address, but I’m talking to my sister, so I’m gonna go ahead and give the scripture right. So it’s James 5:16. And I and I preface it by saying, Healing happens in community. And so the scripture says, confess your faults one to another so that you can be healed. That faults it means things that are not always adequate. And that’s a summation of the definition. So like we it’s like you talked about it’s communicating, it’s recommunicating. It’s saying like where they work, where they don’t work. Like these are some of the faults that we are constantly communicating. I think things that are favorable, things that are unfavorable. So I absolutely love the way you laid out relationships and communication and How you didn’t might didn’t say healing, but you kind of hit into it like things work when the relationship works, it works. And so, Miss Becky, I appreciate that. That was so well said. So, well said. Miss Becky, I time is just flying by. I’m looking at, I got a stopwatch that I’m looking, and I’m like, I cannot believe we’re actually at this point already. Cause I feel like I so much more I can talk to you about, but I will do this. Before we tell people how to get in contact with you and stuff, I just want to make sure, and this is not to put you too much on the spot, but I just want to make sure we don’t miss anything. So if there was something, or is this if there’s something that’s burning on your heart that you just feel like people may need to know about you, about your your business, about anything, I kind of want to open up space that if there’s something on your heart that you want the viewers to know, that you can kind of land that message before we get out of here.

Becky Baker (20:39)
The only thing on my heart that I think everybody needs to know is anything’s possible. If there’s something you’ve been thinking or been itching on your heart or in your mind or you’re wondering could it be possible? It absolutely is. with God all things are possible and do it. you got the you got the power, you got the faith, where there’s a vision. God doesn’t put a vision in our mind, in our heart, without a way to get there. So go get it. And if you if you want to get in touch with me, it’s very simple. [email protected]. That’s it.

Quentin Edmonds (21:13)
There it is. Well, let me say three things to you sincerely. One is a reiteration. Thank you for your time. I value what people give us your time. I think it’s our most precious commodity. So thank you for your time. Secondly, Miss Becky, thank you for the gift of your integrity, the gift of your authenticity. I believe when we show up as our authentic self, we plant seeds. And those seeds may take root at any given time, but the seed is there. It can take root next week, ten years from now. But I believe you be your authentic self. You planted some seeds for people. And so I appreciate that. And lastly, Miss Becky, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today.

Becky Baker (21:56)
Absolutely. I really appreciate being on. I appreciate what you’ve taught me, the way you’ve got me to think and really go deep.

Quentin Edmonds (22:02)
I appreciate that. Listen, you and I know I got a little secret to my sauce. That’s not all me. I live, I pray about my questions. So I’ll give you a little bit about this. That ain’t no me. I I’m just the best. I am very intentional about what I hear. So I appreciate you saying that. I really do. now listen, y’all heard Miss Becky. Her information is in the show notes. Get in contact with her. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here because I promise you we’re gonna continue to bring up amazing people. Just like thee, Becky Baker. So, ma’am, I say thank you again. And everyone else, listen, y’all have a fantastic day.