From Web Developer to Revitalizing a Small Town

Dylan Silver (00:01.442)
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Today we have Chad with us. Chad, how do I pronounce your last name? didn’t even get that. Shoket, I’m glad I did not attempt that. We have Chad Shoket here with us. And he was formerly a full stack web developer for 15 years, transitioned into real estate with fixing and flipping, did that for five years and is now

Chad Choquette (00:12.034)
it’s Showcat. Like, S-H-O-W-K-T. It’s hard.

Dylan Silver (00:29.996)
Revitalizing a Small Town. So Chad, let’s start from the top. Tell us how you got into real estate. Tell us about your background. I’ll let you have the floor.

Chad Choquette (00:39.662)
Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. So my background was in, you know, web development in general transition more into full stack. So if you know anything about the tech space and you’ve ever dealt with, you know, web development, there’s a whole variety of things you can do. You know, you’ve got WordPress engineers, people who just handle design, people who just handle like how the front end works, server maintenance. There’s just everything. And, essentially my job over time as I transitioned through companies became manage it all. So

Generally, I wasn’t in charge of making the beautiful picture, but I was in charge of turning the beautiful picture the designers would send me into the actual functioning thing. And then, you know, we’d set up the server side things and the front end stuff. So that was kind of the background. I went through probably three companies. I did some of my own clients on the side and that was fun and I learned a lot, but I’m very creative and I like to make things. And so it worked well for that time. But in the middle of that journey, we had already started

buying properties. had our primary home and then we had every two years. This is one thing that I’m surprised people don’t even know is if you live in a house for two years, you can sell it and you can take the profits tax free. If you’re single, it’s up to 250,000. If you’re married, it’s up to 500,000. So that’s a great way to build that trapped equity that you have typically in your house. You move every two years, you can just take it up size, you know, whatever you’re living in or just take that money and you know, tax free. It’s, it’s really great.

And that is what really allowed us to the point where we got, hopefully I’m not doing any echo feedback. I couldn’t get my AirPods to work. But if I, if, so it allowed us taking that money that, you know, the appreciation in the market, pulling out the equity, moved up in size. Eventually we got to a point where we sold our house. So this was kind of like a crazy time where my wife was in the hospital with one of my oldest daughter.

Dylan Silver (02:09.067)
but really allow them to.

Dylan Silver (02:17.261)
You’re good.

Chad Choquette (02:34.99)
which we later on had open heart surgery for her. But she was in the hospital. We were selling our house and closing on it in like a few weeks to sell it. And because our daughter had, I don’t remember, she had some kind of sickness, RSV or something, and it was just where we’re at. And a house came on market. We didn’t have another house to go to. And so I saw a house come on market. I called my realtor. I FaceTimed her while I was there and we were just like, boom, we just bought the house.

so there was just like these crazy stories for every property we’ve gotten into, but come to selling that house, we couldn’t find anything that really worked. So we ended up moving into apartment and that’s when we really did more of a fix and flip without being involved. And that was like just prior to 2020. And so we flipped a house, man, I would love to get into all the details and every story. Like some of this one house we’re supposed to know my first house.

I, it’s because I stepped on a nail in Florida on my birthday.

Dylan Silver (03:31.661)
Selfishly, selfishly, Chad, I want to know, and we were talking about this before we hopped on the podcast here. I’m actually in a real estate bootcamp and excuse me, not a real estate, a coding bootcamp. And I think there’s a lot of similarities, but also some rather glaring differences between the typical person that does real estate and the typical person that does kind of the software engineering or IT type background. And, you know,

sometimes people need partners for a reason. First of all, tell us about how you discovered that you could be a real estate investor. Was it in your blood or was it, know, I’ve been doing this web development for a while and I’ve got either a nest egg or I want to branch out. How did you end up getting into it?

Chad Choquette (04:20.364)
Yeah, so I grew up in New Hampshire and my dad built houses in New England. So I’d always been around real estate and business. And what allowed us to get into it was really the fact that we bought a house and then sold it and bought another house. And we just kept doing that for a couple of years. And that, you know, pent up equity that we were able to recapture in the form of, you know, cash out from selling our house and buying something less expensive or getting a HELOC.

was what allowed us to get into real estate more formally. So when we got to moving into an apartment, we had sold our house and now we had all this money that we didn’t have to pay taxes on because it was our primary, but we didn’t have anywhere to go. And so we flipped a house on the side and we paid for it out of pocket entirely. You know, we just bought this house, that property we saw on market. We approached them, got a really good deal on it because you know, a whole different variety of scenarios. And then we just funded the whole deal ourselves.

And then made more money on that, which we have tax on that.

Dylan Silver (05:20.874)
Were you keeping these as any of these as rentals or was it all like that deal fix and flip?

Chad Choquette (05:26.146)
Yeah, I was just fixing flips initially. And some days I kind of regret having sold anything given where prices are now.

Dylan Silver (05:33.952)
I hear that as the big thing and the avatar for the person who listens to our podcast is someone who’s doing 50 plus deals a month, or excuse me, a year. Not a month, that would be tremendous, but 50 plus deals a year. But we also have some newer investors and for folks who are like, know, I’m a software engineer or I just had a gentleman who was an accountant on the podcast, it can seem daunting to go into this totally new industry

where you hear so many different ways, wholesaling, fix and flip, short-term rental, getting things from the foreclosures, it’s daunting. And so it sounds like it was almost a divine intervention way for you to get into this from selling your house, realizing that you had these tax benefits really, because you don’t have to pay taxes every two years, which I didn’t even know. And then you flipped it and you realized, hey, you know.

I can do this. And now maybe thinking like, I wish I would have kept one, but you know.

Chad Choquette (06:37.55)
Well, now I’ve learned my lesson. I’m trying to keep a little bit more, but ironically I am trying to sell off some of my assets that actually produce income, which we’ll get into that in a minute. yeah, like I think for most people who want to get started, starting any business takes a level of risk that you’re willing to accept. it’s a lot, I will say it’s a lot easier if you’re not married and you don’t have kids. It’s a little bit harder once you have people that rely on you.

So if you’re young and you have the time and energy, go for it. If you’re older or whatever, you have people that you need to take care of or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. You have to figure out and assess your own risk in that because there’s, with any investment, like there’s a potential of losing everything. So it takes a good bit of putting the right people in place to underwrite and look at a deal and assess and find good deals or learning that yourself.

Dylan Silver (07:28.515)
Yeah, and for folks who are on that, you know, jumping into it, trying to figure out what can I do, you know, it can be scary, for sure. You did 15 years in full stack web development. So it wasn’t like this was something where you have no professional experience and you’re jumping into that. But there’s people who do do that. I know a couple of them. And so

When people do this, it’s like what you said, you do have to assess your level of risk because someone might say, hey, I’m willing to risk it all. I’m willing to leave my job, but I also have no dependence versus that person who does. And in your case, was, hey, we happened to get this home. We flipped it. We did several of those to now getting into something very interesting, which is revitalizing a small town.

and then also doing private money lending, which is a whole other aspect of the business. So tell us how you got into that.

Chad Choquette (08:30.434)
Yeah, so we have owned and operated Airbnbs for about four years since COVID and

During that time, that was kind of like our primary income over the past two years. I was a full-stacked web developer until about two years ago. And then I got laid off because the company was, you know, didn’t have as many clients coming in at the time. And we had kind of been praying about it, thinking about it. And then it’s just like, okay, well, here’s our chance. Let’s do it. And we ended up selling off one of our Airbnbs in North Carolina. And that gave us an influx of cash. And we ended up going by another property, launching another Airbnb. And what happened over the past two years since I left my job

was we did some fixes and flips and we operate our Airbnbs and we automated the processes, but there was just some level of growing pains that we couldn’t figure out how to overcome some of the levels in which prices have gone up. know, everybody’s cost of living has gone up, whether it be food or gas or whatever you’re talking about.

And our Airbnbs were doing really well. Like we have fed our family essentially on running two Airbnbs and that has gone really well for us, but they didn’t really keep up with the way inflation is and, and getting to where we are now. So about, I think it was six months ago, sometime in June last year, the, somebody from pace Morbys team reached out to me. I don’t even remember how they got in contact with me and like they just found me. People just come find me. And it was like,

Okay, sounds good. They were like, how about you join this new program we have called Gator and it’s all about money lending and stuff. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. Like, I mean, it makes sense. So yeah, I’m going to side tangent soapbox for a minute. If you pay to be in a program, you should do the things that they talk about in the program or why are you there? Cause I just joined a business coaching program as well. And I meet so many people in these programs and things they pay like ridiculous amounts of money. Like one of them, I didn’t even pay to do it, be in the program for this.

Chad Choquette (10:26.978)
tax structuring business thing. I just went and did all the things because I had all the connections to it. People had already paid like 50 grams. Somebody paid a hundred thousand dollars to be in this thing and didn’t even do the thing. And I was like, it’s blown away. So when I joined that program, Pace’s Gator program, I just started doing everything. Like I just watched all the videos, the content, and I just literally do everything. Cause I think he talks about this, Pace talks about it and several other people talk about, there’s different personalities. There’s some people who,

They’re sitting in the airplane. I think it was Eddie Wilson and Andrew Cordova talking about this. Eddie Wilson, he runs a family office and stuff, and he’s talking about how if they’re in an airplane, they’re gonna find the parachute, they’re gonna put it on, assess how far they have to jump, evaluate the wrist, how’s the airplane actually doing before you jump. Andrew Cordova’s over there like, parachute what? And dive bomb, jump out. And I’m a little bit more that way in which I think of an idea.

and let’s just go figure out how to do it. Like just, you know, jump into a deeper pool and you’ll figure out if you can swim. And that is definitely a hard way to go. Experience is the best teacher, but it’s also the hardest teacher. And you’ll learn a lot of that. am Pace was talking about him and Cody were discussing how Cody Sanchez will do a little more research and Pace just like jumps in and usually by the end in which Cody has figured out like this is the appropriate path to move down this venture.

Pace has like failed like five or six times and learned how to do it and like even better. And you you kind of have to figure out what your personality is. Go read some books. There’s so much good literature out there that can teach you a little bit more about yourself and the proper way to do things.

Dylan Silver (12:07.068)
You know, it’s surprising. You’re probably, you are the first full stack web developer that I’ve talked to who’s transitioned into real estate. But I think traditionally when people hear, you know, engineer web developer, they think super analytical. Like you’re gonna map everything out before you make a move, you know? But in your case, it sounds like the opposite. You’re like, let’s just go, let’s go.

Chad Choquette (12:32.438)
Yes. Well, cause that’s how I programmed because the way it was is you ever see a picture of like a car running down the road and somebody sitting on the engine with the hood open and like working on it. That’s like, were working in stuff in production. Like I was like breaking stuff in real time while people were probably actively using the website. And there’s not the way you should be doing it, but like when you’re launching big stuff or things need to be changed and we had, found a bug. like, we’re not going to take the website off. We’re just going to keep going. And like, we’re going to fix it while it’s being, you know, being used. So.

Dylan Silver (13:00.936)
That’s right. People are not going to be without their major media, whatever it is, financial tool. in that space, well, first, there’s two different spaces that I’m thinking about here, the fix and flip space and the Airbnb space. And they can intertwine. You can fix and flip and do an Airbnb. Did you have partners in this? Was it you and your wife? Was it you alone? How did you get the skills? Was it from your father, who was the home builder?

Chad Choquette (13:01.888)
Hahaha

Chad Choquette (13:08.216)
Exactly.

Chad Choquette (13:28.78)
Yeah, so mostly it was ourselves. My first house, I didn’t even tell my parents that I had bought it. We just, they showed up and were coming to visit me and my wife, were about to be engaged at that time and my parents were coming to visit and they’re like, I was like, yeah, you can stay here. And we show up at the house and like, whose house is this? And I was like, this is my house. And they’re like, what? So they’ve always been around what we’re doing, but they haven’t directly been part of what we’re doing.

My wife and I have mostly done everything. I’ll give her, here’s a bunch. This is how much money we have to design this space. Um, and we have a private money lender who has kind of helped us along over the past, I guess, four years, four or five years. Um, that’s really accelerated some of our acquisitions cause it’s a lot easier to buy with private money. Uh, you know, if you have that personal relationship and so outside of him until recently, I hadn’t had as much of a team. I’ve had people I bounce ideas off of.

But we’ve mostly been kind of going on our own.

Dylan Silver (14:29.35)
Are you in the Carolinas? Is that where you’re out of?

Chad Choquette (14:31.584)
Upstate, South Carolina, I’m Taylor’s just outside of Greenville.

Dylan Silver (14:34.799)
Okay, so what’s your perspective? ask our guests this often. If you’re doing fix and flips, do you have to be there or is it potentially possible or even profitable to do it remotely somehow?

Chad Choquette (14:51.81)
I would say you can do it remotely and be profitable, but if you read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, he says, you never rise to your level of your ambitions, you always fall to your systems or processes. And that is just like the epitome of whether or not you’re gonna be successful in everything. Because we had an Airbnb in North Carolina, I didn’t live there, and it would take me like three hours to drive up to our unit. And so if something went awry, I had to…

rely on the people that I already had connection with up there. And it was somewhat easier to manage that one just because of that. So once you put systems and processes in, like sure, you have to find reliable people. You have to know those people. You have to set the standard of what you’re trying to do and have those systems and processes to be successful. So I’d say, yeah, you can do it, but you really have to know what you’re about. You have to have the right people in place.

Dylan Silver (15:45.824)
That’s good for me because one of my long-term goals is I’d love to move to Latin America, but I’ve asked everybody this. said, can you really do fix and flipping if you’re not there? It sounds crazy. You’re just going to trust someone with lots of valuable equipment. You know, they’re going to have to go to Home Depot for me. You know what I mean? So, also, for the folks who are looking at the Airbnb model, it sounds like there was some growing pain. It sounds like you were very active in that space for five years of the fix and flip space.

Chad Choquette (16:03.384)
Yep. Yep.

Dylan Silver (16:15.97)
What advice would you have? What growing pains were there? I know you touched on it a little bit and what advice would you have for folks?

Chad Choquette (16:22.242)
Yeah, so in Airbnb in particular, I would say make sure you are spending a good bit of time doing market research before you invest and then make sure you have the right systems and processes in place. So we have a lot of automations. We use hospitable and price labs. We have a whole stack. We’re on every platform. We do direct booking.

And AI writes like our reviews and our messages and it just kind of assists us because I can’t be available day and night as much as I really want to be like, you know, top post respond instantly. Um, and we ask a lot for the customer feedback, but putting those automations in place, like I don’t, our, um, our grass is actually cut by robots. have robots that cut all the grass at our properties too.

Dylan Silver (17:06.405)
To our listeners, this is the engineer coming out. The grass is getting cut by robots.

Chad Choquette (17:09.089)
Hahaha

That’s the way to do it, know? Automate everything, if we could. Like, I imagine the future of humanity is sitting back on a hammock, exploring the mountaintops, eating grapes, and robots do everything.

Dylan Silver (17:22.469)
As an aside, a little quick aside, these humanoid robots that we’re seeing from all these companies, know, Boston Dynamics, they’re scary. What do you think about them?

Chad Choquette (17:33.142)
I don’t, I’m not like particularly scared of them. Computers only do what you tell them to do. And so I was mentioning, I have four kids. And so I was mentioning to my wife, I was like, we always have this trouble getting a babysitter. I was like, you know, if we bought one of those Tesla bots, it could babysit for us. And she did not like that idea. No, no, no. But I thought I think there’s a big opportunity to offload a bunch of our work that we just need done that people don’t.

Dylan Silver (17:49.529)
She’s not for it.

Chad Choquette (17:59.788)
really want to do those jobs. What? Well, have you seen some of those robots with like professional chef controls the hands? Yep.

Dylan Silver (18:01.103)
Cook me dinner. Cook me dinner. I have none.

So the iRobot, and we’ll get back to the real estate stuff, the iRobot scenario where you’re Will Smith and all the robots are coming to get you type deal, you don’t think that that’s gonna happen, at least not in our lifetime.

Chad Choquette (18:12.894)
Okay.

Chad Choquette (18:22.24)
It’s not the robots that will be coming to get us. It’s just other people.

Dylan Silver (18:25.678)
Fair enough, fair enough. Well, back to the real estate stuff. the Airbnb model for those folks who are looking into it, automation is key.

Chad Choquette (18:36.852)
and a reliable team because your cleaner is like number one person on the ground, boots on the ground, the person who should inform you about everything, understanding exactly how you pay them when they show up, how the processes are, like that person has to be key and on point. So you can.

Dylan Silver (18:54.283)
Very, very key, the cleaner, I can only imagine. For folks who are North Carolinians, if I said that right, North Carolinians, does Airbnb work well out there? Is it tricky? Is it becoming more difficult? I know in a lot of places it is.

Chad Choquette (19:12.801)
Yeah, it depends on where you’re operating. like Greenville City, like proper is really strict. And so you have to look into the particular jurisdiction you’re operating in. We operate in the county, which doesn’t have regulations and you, you know, it’s, it’s really easy. You have to kind of look at the market. like in our particular market, I can make a quick pitch. I’m trying to sell my Airbnb’s. It’s not because I’m, I have anything against them. love the hospitality business, but I was sitting down with one of my lenders and they were like,

Dylan Silver (19:18.948)
Mm.

Dylan Silver (19:33.784)
Go ahead.

Chad Choquette (19:41.528)
I was like, how do I be more like you? How do I, you you buy and sell insurance agencies and merge them and you’re lending me money and stuff. And he said, the problem is you’re young, you have all this ambition, but you’re not cash heavy. And so you need to be cash heavy to do more of what you want. You already have these assets and you may be making money here, but given the returns you’ve already given me, or you’ve told me that you make, it makes more sense for you to sell them. So I did the numbers and I was like, okay, given where the direction we’re going, makes more sense to sell. So I have a couple here, Simpsonville, Taylor’s.

Even my primary home is wrapped into that because we’re just trying to go a different direction. what I’m seeing is every market is very specific and the types of returns that you’re going to be getting. And you can outpace the market by investing in the types of amenities and the design. like if you’re on, have views or you’re on water and stuff, making sure you understand the market, the type of people like I can tell you exactly.

You know, last year we had 700 guests. So I say next door because I’m at my house right now and I own the property next door we bought from a neighbor. I operate that as an Airbnb so that we could have our family come and stay with us. And I can say like, okay, we had 700 people stay at that one property alone across all of our channels. We primarily had people coming for weddings, family reunions, graduations, and then work cruises are other primary demographic. And then you can calculate out if you know what your average daily rate is, your occupancy rate.

You watch the market, you adjust prices like you have to be involved in that. But when you go and look online and you’re trying to assess whether or not a deal makes sense, make sure you’re looking at not just what airDNA or awning.com is a great resource and look at Zillow on the valuation and stuff. You want to look at what the market itself is procuring as far as tourists. We don’t have tourists as much right now. We’re shifting to that as far as Greenville is concerned.

Dylan Silver (21:13.133)
Thank

Dylan Silver (21:23.81)
Right.

Chad Choquette (21:31.64)
but you wanna see like what’s the type of people that are becoming and we cater because we have four kids, we cater to the family friendly market and that also happens to be obviously our highest demographic. A ton of people come here for work or family related events. So understanding that.

Dylan Silver (21:46.244)
Do you find that, I know someone who does quite a bit of this here in DFW, and they’ve found that sometimes having vacancies in Airbnb can be beneficial. So if you’re tracking and you’re like, darn, I’m not getting a bunch of bookings, you could get a 60 day booking. I don’t know exactly how that works, but do you find that to be true at all, or is it like you want the shorter term?

Chad Choquette (22:10.658)
Yeah, so it depends on what you’re trying to do. So we have a studio and that one I want short-term people. That doesn’t have a laundry unit. Like we want them short and you know, we don’t really cater to long-term stuff there. The family house, I like to turn over on a weekly basis at least just because we may want to house our friends or our missionaries or our family members. Our Simpsonville house, that one I’m fine with it being booked for a long time because the last year we had a…

three or four month booking for somebody who was building a burger restaurant here and they were the project manager. And then we had people come for the new Fennico company that’s planning on building a new facility here in Greenville, or people come work for some of the other foreign, like we have a lot of people from Poland and France and Germany and things like that who are here for production, you know, building stuff. So I’m like.

Dylan Silver (22:58.336)
Wow, I know it’s exciting to get that notification. Three months? Gosh.

Chad Choquette (23:02.433)
yeah, yeah. They’re typically on Verbo for some reason, or booking.com, not usually Airbnb.

Dylan Silver (23:09.204)
We could get into that even more, but I want to make sure that we fit in the new endeavor that you’ve been doing the last six months, which is private money lending and revitalizing a small town. So going from fix and flipping to revitalizing a small town, this is another scale, another level. How did that work?

Chad Choquette (23:20.536)
Yes.

Chad Choquette (23:28.526)
So as far as the money lending is, you know, I joined Gator and I just started doing everything they said to do. And so I spent like two weeks watching all the videos, connecting with all the organizations that would support you in this journey and just started doing it. And over that time, there was definitely some connections I’d wish I’d made sooner, but at this point we primarily lend second position. So typically when you’re buying a property, you’re getting a first position note, somebody who’s paying, you know, the hard money lender, the private money lender, they’re helping you buy it.

And then sometimes they’ll fund some of the invest, the, rehab costs or the renovations. And sometimes you have to bring that, or you could also get somebody who will fund the closing costs and the rehab as a gap. There’ll be second position note. And those are typically at a higher percentage, a higher rate. And that’s typically where I come in. I don’t do it with most people though. I just do it with some of my financial friends that I trade money. They support my projects. I support theirs and they’re a little more expensive and they’re

Usually we do the notes at like two, three, four months or something like that. Most of them are at six months, I think, but.

Dylan Silver (24:34.037)
those relationships and I tell this to everybody. So if the typical investor who’s doing that we have as a listener is doing 50 deals a year, they already know this, but for newcomers, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re out there fanatically networking, it’s those relationships that really get you paid for lack of a better term. You can do all the knowledge, you can do all the knowledge, but it’s making those relationships where you really see the power of

You know, your time. It’s in the relationships.

Chad Choquette (25:06.542)
You’ve got to have good relationships and if you ever go to Aspire tour with Andrew Cordele and Eddie Wilson, they talk about that a lot in the financial game of creators versus contributors. And we’re not going to get into that, but they said like, that’s the biggest thing is having financial friends as you move up the money game ladder and you work with other people. And I see so many people, so I connected on a few deals. I brought some people’s money to another deal and I’ve seen some borrowers who have…

I don’t know, not that they’d have no intention in paying back the lender, but they also don’t seem to make it their problem. They’re like, I’m sorry, I’m losing and you kind of have a problem now. I can’t pay you back. And that is just a poor way to look at the way this whole game works out. Cause that’s kind of the end of your journey there. If you don’t pay somebody back, cause that work. So don’t do that.

Dylan Silver (25:50.981)
That’s it. How did you, how did you get into the, small town revitalization? I don’t think a lot of people will get that you’d be blessed to get an opportunity to do this. And I think a lot of people are happy doing what you’ve been doing so far. That could be their end game. That would, they would, that would be thrilling to them, but you have the opportunity to revitalize a small town.

Chad Choquette (26:13.454)
Yeah. So I had, as I call it, the opportunity, the crossroads of opportunity and desire. Where I live, the main street here is nothing, you know, fancy. We don’t have a local government for our town, Taylor’s. And several months ago, you know, after hearing for years, everybody’s like, oh, I wish something would happen over here. It’d be really cool. Somebody approached me and they’re like, hey, we’ll sell off these two properties. And another person said, I’ll sell you a property on Main Street.

And we just kind of had this opportunity to buy several properties on Main Street all at once. And I kind of took that as the sign of like, maybe we can do something here. And then one of my friends in the sub two community and owners club and paces community, uh, and McNamara, she was throwing a workshop for small town revitalization in down in Palatka, Florida, where she’s doing that. And hers is more of a revitalization and mine’s more of a redeveloped because our town is, you know, it’s growing and people are moving here, but

Dylan Silver (27:08.992)
Yup,

Chad Choquette (27:12.588)
We’re more looking at a redevelopment and she’s looking at an actual revitalization of a town that’s not really growing. She’s trying to make it grow. so we were able to buy those three properties and then several other properties came up. So I just closed on two more. We’re negotiating with several more on that. And I kind of just laid out this plan of if I’m living here, what are the things that I want? So one of the things, you know, after church, I went out to eat with my friends. I got four kids. They got eight kids. Another one’s got three kids.

Dylan Silver (27:27.456)
She was so.

Dylan Silver (27:33.866)
So, ciao.

Chad Choquette (27:40.302)
Where do we go to eat? down in Dallas, you have the, what is it called? The burger place with the playground outside.

Dylan Silver (27:47.426)
gosh, I’m too new here to know. I’ve only been here since September and I live an hour north, but I should know. I should know.

Chad Choquette (27:50.529)
Okay.

I love that place because our kids can play and then we can eat and talk as adults. And I love that. And we don’t have anything. We have some stuff further over like 30 minutes downtown in Greenville, but I was like, it’d be nice if it was here. So we went to Chipotle and then after two hours of our kids not particularly being happy about hanging out there, that was the end of the conversation. And it would be ideal if we had something where community people could get together.

Dylan Silver (27:55.794)
huh.

Chad Choquette (28:18.414)
So we initially pitched the idea of building a restaurant on Main Street. That didn’t really work out with some of the costs on the building because it’s older. But now we have a new property that we’re looking on that backs up to Main Street. We’re calling it Taylor Station. It’s a former 7-Eleven. And we’re looking at developing a 36-hole miniature golf course, a pizza restaurant, and then an outdoor pavilion with outdoor seating and a fenced-in play structure area for kids. Because we’d be able to have the opportunity to go there.

Adults can hang out, talk. Younger kids can go in the fencing area. The older kids can go play mini golf. There’s a few other things we’re thinking about adding. And the unique thing about that particular one is we’re allowing anybody to invest in it, take apart ownership and take an equity stake for like, I think right now the minimum investment is like $12,000 and we’re working on getting some additional funding so we can lower that minimum. But that’s on investintaylors.com or you can see it, taylorsstation.com. But that’s just like one of six major points I’m building out.

or designing out in our town.

Dylan Silver (29:16.425)
could probably talk about this expansion of this town, revitalizing of this town for probably two and a half, three hours. Cause I want to know, I mean, just some of the questions, you know, how is it talking with the city officials zoning, you know, how, how does one even start connecting with that type of network and, know, the, the difficulties associated with that. I sat in on a podcast,

recently where someone was talking about, know, rather than it being combative, you got to try to really nurture that relationship just like you would with an investor or with a seller. And I think a lot of people are not doing that, but unfortunately we don’t have all the time for that. So Chad, where can people go to get in touch with you?

Chad Choquette (30:03.682)
Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever it is, at Chad Choquette, C-H-O-Q-E-E-T-T, just simple, my name. I primarily focus on Instagram right now, like I mentioned before, I’m in a business coaching program with Dan Martel. One of the things we have to do every day is post three times a day, and I’m also working on reels and content. I’m talking with some marketing people that I can put out some more content about our projects, but that’s primarily where we’re at.

if you want to be involved in our project, invest in tailors.com, can see tailorstation.com and I’m going to work on putting out more, but at right now, like Instagram is the place for us.

Dylan Silver (30:43.145)
Well, Chad, thank you for coming on the podcast and to our listeners. If you are a full stack web developer, if you’re in the engineering space and you’re saying, how do I do this? Well, if you listen today, Chad’s journey details that and then some until next time. See you on the real estate pros podcast.