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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Micah Johnson interviews Luke Nesler, a successful entrepreneur who transitioned from a media company to real estate investing. Luke shares his journey, including the challenges he faced during a difficult personal period and how it led him to pursue real estate. He emphasizes the importance of staying focused on business growth, learning from adversity, and the value of community and networking in achieving success.
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Luke Nesler (00:00)
It was the hardest time of my life ever. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s up there with somebody having cancer as far as like what it just does to a more on the the woman, but on the family, it’s awful. And so what it made me realize was, man, I absolutely hate this business that I’ve built. I can’t get away from it. I’m like a hamster that’s chained to a hamster wheel. And if I get off of it. The thing stops and I can’t be present with my wife.Micah Johnson (00:13)
Yeah.Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Luke Nesler, who’s been making some serious moves in the single-family residential space for about five years now. Luke, welcome in, man.
Luke Nesler (02:12)
Nice to be here, man. I appreciate you having me on, MicahMicah Johnson (02:15)
Absolutely, absolutely excited to dig into what we have to talk about today. I think our listeners are really gonna take something away from how you’re approaching your business, the way you’re staying laser focused and even find some inspiration in your story on how you arrived here in general. So pump the dig in. To get started for people who may not know you yet, what’s that main focus you’re doing right now and what markets are you operating in?Luke Nesler (02:37)
Yeah, main focus, we primarily execute on the the BRRRR single family strategy at scale. We’ll do three to five deals a month and we’re in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, technically a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s Morgantown, West Virginia. It’s a division one university, two nationally renowned hospitals. So that’s where I live. That’s the market that we currently operate in.Micah Johnson (03:01)
Nice, excellent. So what, did you go to school there? Are you a mountaineer? Yeah.Luke Nesler (03:05)
I did. I’m a Mountaineer. Yeah,proud Mountaineer. We donate a bunch of money to the athletic department, and we’re pretty involved with that community as well.
Micah Johnson (03:13)
Love that man. Now did you live there prior? Were you always from this area or you moved there to go to college?Luke Nesler (03:19)
Yeah, I’ve always been from what’s considered the North Central West Virginia area. I went to high school about 30 minutes south of Morgantown, moved up here, followed a girlfriend up here in college. ⁓ man, really loved it. A lot of the state is very rural ⁓ and Morgantown is not. It feels a lot more like, like I said, a suburb of Pittsburgh. So once I got here, I fell in love and, you know, I’ve never left. Met my wife.Micah Johnson (03:47)
Heard that?Luke Nesler (03:47)
Now we’re here.Micah Johnson (03:49)
Heck yeah, man. Now you’re part of the community. That’s what’s fun about that. Especially the college thing, when you end up staying, you get rooted, now you’re building something. So take us from there. You got there in college. What led you ultimately to real estate? How’d you end up owning the company you do now?Luke Nesler (04:05)
Yeah, so it’s funny,long road, but short story is I’ve never worked for anybody my entire life. My senior year of college at Western University, second semester, I started a media company which turned into a digital ad agency that I started from scratch with now a former partner. And we grew that thing from 2012 from nothing to…
you know, to a business that did multiple seven figures a year at its peak. think we had 20 ⁓ employees that worked for us. COVID changed a lot of that, changed our business model. And ⁓ what also started to happen during COVID was my wife and I decided, hey, let’s start trying to grow a family. ⁓ after a while realized, hey, we’re not getting pregnant. And so we started to seek medical help and started to go through the fertility treatment route.
Long story short, that was turned into a three year grueling journey that changed who I was, turned me from a boy into a man, made me grow up a lot, helped really exposed where I was selfish and ⁓ exposed areas of my life that I wasn’t happy in, ⁓ which in turn was ⁓ preventing me from being able to be there physically and emotionally for my wife at a time that she needed it the most.
It was the hardest time of my life ever. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s up there with somebody having cancer as far as like what it just does to a more on the the woman, but on the family, it’s awful. And so what it made me realize was, man, I absolutely hate this business that I’ve built. I can’t get away from it. I’m like a hamster that’s chained to a hamster wheel. And if I get off of it. The thing stops and I can’t be present with my wife.
Micah Johnson (05:45)
Yeah.Luke Nesler (06:00)
⁓ made me really resent my partner, my team, my clients, and everything about that business was just exposed. ⁓ Over the years, I had followed some of the internet gurus like Grant Cardone and some of these others that had talked about real estate. It was always something of interest to me, but ⁓ that was kind of it. And one day I was going to own real estate. That was kind of what I always told myself. Well, it all came to a head one day. ⁓ Won’t go into that story in particular because it’s a longer one, butMicah Johnson (06:21)
Right.Luke Nesler (07:16)
Something made me realize like dude, you got to make a change and you got to make it now. So in 2020, that happened. I bought my first piece of I joined a group that started to teach me what was going on in that community in the real estate world. And by 2021, I bought my first piece of real estate ⁓ and just went to work to try to build my escape plan from that advertising agency. Fast forward to 2025, June.⁓ 8th of 2025, I walked away. I didn’t exit. didn’t have some big multi, know, hundreds of thousands or million dollar exit. I walked away and actually paid money to leave my ad agency because I’d built a real estate business that was 10x the size of what that ad agency ever was. So now we’re sitting just under 100 doors. We do three to five deals a month. ⁓ It’s a lot. It’s mass chaos all the time, which I enjoy it.
But it set me free from what was a prison that I had built previously in my previous business.
Micah Johnson (08:21)
That’s a powerful story, man. And thanks for sharing it because it’s, lot of folks don’t understand that about entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of great ideas and you can build a lot of things to a level. And then you go through a life experience that also says, Hey, wait a second. What are we actually doing here? What do you actually really want to do here? And one thing I appreciated about it is,You followed the path. didn’t just abandon. You didn’t just like blow up a ship to start a new ship. You layered upon, okay, I’m interested here. Now I’m going to go learn this and then I’m going to do this. How much was that previous experience? How valuable was it to building the new thing? How much crossover was there for you and the understanding of it? ⁓
Luke Nesler (09:04)
It was massive.mean, as much as I absolutely hated that other business, I wouldn’t change it. You know, I’m sure people that go through BUD’s training in the military, like don’t enjoy it. But when they get out, like the person that that pain and suffering made them, they wouldn’t take it back. They wouldn’t change anything. That’s kind of how I feel about it. I you can go to Harvard, you can get these great degrees, but
you’ve never actually done anything until you get out and do it. Well, I did it. I made the mistakes. You know, we lost a lot of money. We made a lot of money. And through that, I learned a lot. And the biggest thing that’s changed this business is I know how to market myself. I know how to get loud and how to get attention and how to generate leads that in turn turn into our, our, you know, investors and our deals. So I wouldn’t change that for the world. ⁓ It definitely turned me into who I am today.
Micah Johnson (10:00)
Love that man, because someone who can truly embrace the idea that life’s happening for you, not to you, gets the most out of the hard. That’s what I’ve learned. Because hard finds all of us in all different ways. And when you can leverage that experience, one of my mentors calls it, paying it forward to your future self. Like, how can you do that every moment when things are good, when they’re not good? Because how you handle that is creating the life of your future, always.Luke Nesler (10:08)
Yeah.Micah Johnson (10:27)
That’s powerful, man. So let’s jump to up to date right now. You’ve leveraged all that knowledge and you’ve been building a business almost to 100 doors. What are you excited about for 2026? What’s that that y’all are focused on? What are you pulling off?Luke Nesler (10:41)
Yeah, for this year, my biggest thing was cutting out all the other noise, ⁓ you know, really staying focused on the strategy at hand. Sat down, primarily myself, but I do have a leadership team, sat down with them, shared with them the vision, the goals, mapped out a plan as well as my executive assistant. So all of them were part of building this plan and then reallycommitting to just staying laser focused on that and hitting those targets. And we hit those targets. It’s a business that is double the size that it is now. I mean, recording this in January, it’s off to a good start already. So just, that’s what I’m most excited about. That’s the thing that is ⁓ the path forward is just really staying laser focused on that, not implementing new strategies, not getting, know, ⁓ squirrel syndrome and thinking, okay, cool, we can implement this.
I’ve done that for years and I was still able to grow and implement and scale. But where I would be now, I think would be a lot greater if I would have just 100 % stayed focused on that one thing, even if it got boring and just did it the best that we could do. that’s our mission this year.
Micah Johnson (12:29)
Man, that’s it. It’s so true. And I love that you’re saying that because that is how you get good at anything, right? It’s doing that same thing over and over and over again. And I see it a lot of time in the business, a new tactic, a new strategy comes out and it’s easy to go get excited about it, especially entrepreneurs. We like that itch. We like that feeling of learning and doing the things that makes us feel good. that I can say this, it’s not rookies who arrive at your conclusion.Right? Like it’s not, it’s what the best do. You’ve been in rooms just like I have with some of the best investors in the nation. And it’s what they say is stay focused, do the thing that you’re doing and get really good at it. That’s how you build the business. And later you can decide to add, but the more you’re trying to do it once, the more things that can go wrong, the more that your time gets spread out and doing deals at scale. already takes time.
It’s already occupying a large amount of your time. So trying to do four different strategies at once. Now you’re inviting chaos that you’re not going to be fond of.
Luke Nesler (13:33)
100%.Micah Johnson (13:36)
What’s helped you do that? What’s helped you maintain that consistency?Luke Nesler (13:42)
think the biggest thing is knowing what I want at the end of it. ⁓ Knowing what target I, and I call them targets, not goals. A goal is like, well, gee, I hope I can get to this. I don’t really play by that. have targets for each specific thing and measurable benchmarks that we, or milestones that we have to hit to get to that. And I think that has been the biggest thing is each year, you know, I spend the last week, sometimes two weeksprimarily focusing on what we’ve achieved now and what our target needs to be over the next 12 months and then reverse engineering it from that and figuring out, okay, that target might seem massive right now, but what’s the next sprint look like to get us a little bit closer to that? And just staying 100 % focused on that and pushing everything else out. And I struggle with it. I mean, I’ve never been an analysis by paralysis guy. ⁓
by any means, but even being an action taker and an executor, like I love business. So it’s easy for me to go home and watch business, you know, Dan Martell vlogs and all these things, but then these little ideas creep in, which throw me off track. So now I force myself, it might sound funny because I think this is what the average American probably does unknowingly. I force myself to, I mean, yeah, I spend a lot of time with my family in the evenings, but I don’t continue to try to learn new things. watch
Football, or not football, I watch baseball, I watch hockey and I do that strategically. It doesn’t put new ideas in my mind that’s gonna get me sidetracked, which might sound complete opposite of what we’re always told, try to be learning these new things. I know what I need to do and I don’t know what I need to execute on. So I push everything out and just stay focused on that.
Micah Johnson (16:12)
I’m telling you the higher level coaches I work with, this is what they say. What you just said is what they say. One, Dr. ⁓ Jeff Spencer, he was an Olympian. He trained Tiger Woods, Russell Branson, like really high level folks in the industry. And what he was saying when I was working with him was one, the greatest word in a champion’s vocabulary is restraint. And he’s very intentional on building what he calls receivership into your life.You have to put your place self in a place of rest. can’t always be going. That’s not what the best do. And knowing yourself and how to do that, right? Cause a lot of times it’s easy to feel bad when you’re not in action as an entrepreneur, where the reality is the rest is an action. The fact that you’re watching the sport, it’s not random. You’re not tuning out. You’re tuning in. Like you’re being participant in your life because that’s what you want to do. And I couldn’t agree more. That’s what you need to add in. Cause this
If work life balance is real, that’s more what it’s about than anything is making sure you’re just not always burning both ends of the candle. Give yourself space to let things settle, integrate, enjoy your life. life only happens a day at a time. There’s nothing we can rush to. That’s what it’s taught me. I spent years going as fast as I could to be like, wait a second, hold on. I missed a lot here. There’s a lot of time where I didn’t need to be going as hard right then. And I guess it’s still got in the same place. Honestly, maybe even further.
because I wasn’t so tired all the time.
Luke Nesler (17:42)
Yeah. 100 % man. I agree.Micah Johnson (17:47)
So for our listeners who are earlier in their journey, trying to level up, how has being a part of communities in the past and building that network for yourself, how has that helped you grow and maintain that stability you have?Luke Nesler (18:02)
Oh, it’s been massive.I mean, it’s the, it’s the only reason that I’m where I’m at today is being part investing in those communities. mean, over the last, since 2020, I think I’ve spent a minimum of 10,000. think the most I spent in a year was probably 30, 35,000 on, I just called it continued education, but it’s being part of these communities. And initially, um, you remember, I’m sure you know, the name Jimmy Vreeland, he was part of a community that we were both in.
I was in that community because the very first community that I joined was a coaching group at the time that Jimmy ran. And I thought that I was investing in the three coaches that were part of that. And what changed my life was when I realized, and I don’t use that word lightly, changed my life. it genuinely changed my life. And it wasn’t those three coaches. Yes, they were brilliant. It was the community members and the quick.
The sooner that I realized that, that’s when things started to take off. It was the other people in that community that were one to 10 steps further than where I was and learn understanding that I wasn’t there to just learn from these three coaches. I was there to learn from the community. That’s when the concept of the whole mastermind thing became big for me. Being in mastermind groups over the last five, six years has completely taken me from a miserable point of my life to where I’m at now.
Micah Johnson (18:54)
inRight.
Luke Nesler (19:24)
If you have a mastermind and then you have the ability to execute, you can do whatever you want to do and you will achieve the things that you want to do. You’ve got to have the community and you’ve got to have the ability to actually execute when you leave that community and the events you have. Those are the big things forMicah Johnson (19:35)
Right.I couldn’t agree more, man. once you learn the process and once you’re in a group and around a group of people who see, you’re all looking at the same thing and you each got your own point of view and you get to actually experience, this is one thing I love about real estate, especially in those groups, is that giving mentality. The way high level operators will show you, hey, this is where I’m at, this is where you’re at, and if you skip these couple steps, you can save yourself a bunch of time and money. And it’s, I tell people, the process is the shortcut.
That’s how you do it. You don’t have to waste as much time and energy. And one thing I learned from business owners there is it’s easy to feel like you’re on an island, especially the more successful you get, the higher level you get, like the less people you have to talk to, especially in real estate, less people even understand what you’re talking about and enjoy talking about it. So putting yourself in those rooms where you can get that information, again, not just from stage. I’m glad you said that it’s way bigger than that. It’s the people at the table with you.
It’s the dinners that you go to. It’s the hangout in the hallway. That event did a good job of doing things before the day started with different games and things like that, where it’s the actual relationship part. Gets the walls down, gets you mutually invested in each other’s lives beyond just superficial stuff. And that is, man, it creates tons of traction.
Luke Nesler (21:00)
Yeah, 100%.Micah Johnson (21:04)
Luke, man, I really appreciate your time, your story, your perspective today for those listeners that are out there that would be interested in following along, learning more about you and your story and how you maintain that laser focus to be successful. What’s the best way to find you?Luke Nesler (21:18)
Yeah, the easiest wayis our Instagram channel. I mean, you can definitely go to our website as well. But Instagram is where I put most of my content. We put a lot out. I I have a full-time content creator that follows me around the video camera. So if you’re interested in what that world looks like from a day-to-day perspective, we do our best to put that out. It’s at Luke Nesler. It’s L-U-K-E.
⁓ n-e-s-l-e-r on Instagram and then our website is lucaspg.com. It’s L-U-C-A-S-P as in property, G as in group.com. Those would be the two best ways and love to connect with anybody.
Micah Johnson (21:56)
Excellent, and if you’re listening, make sure to check the show notes. We’ll have Luke’s information there so you can reach out and follow along. For someone who’s known him for a little bit, it’s worth the follow. Following people in this industry that are actually doing it right and sharing the truth with you, that is what I value most is.You can do this if you’re interested in it. It’s just knowing how to do it. Learn, get that information, educate yourself. So again, Luke, I appreciate you being on today. Thanks for what you shared. Those of you tuning in, if you got value out of today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with their friends, someone that you think can get value to. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast. We appreciate everybody that does. Till the next episode. We’ll see you all soon.
