How Dan Built Cashflow with Airbnbs, Duplexes & Smart Systems

Dan Cartagena (00:00)
And have an Instagram, we have a Facebook page, and I built those up. And what I did one day, you always gotta have your camera on, you gotta record around your properties, especially if you’re renting them out on an Airbnb, right? Because it’s always about a theme or something good about that property. Well, it was raining that day. Now we sit on half an acre with a bunch of 100 foot tall pine trees, right? And so it was raining. I’m just recording walking up because we can hear the rain hitting off the metal roof. And you can hear my boots, though, on the on the deck. It’s going clunk, clunk, clunk. And I just lock it down. And in the backyard, we got this bear head that’s a beer bottle opener. Right. So I get a close up of him go around and then I hit that view I talked about off the deck. I posted that video on Instagram and it got over 50,000 views.

Quentin (02:23)
Hello, everyone. Hello. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Q Edmonds. Super excited about my guest who’s here today. And I’m going tell you this. This guy is just as passionate about his wife as he is about his real estate. I can tell you this now. His wife not name, but she’s definitely going to come up today because she is the yin to his yang, which I absolutely love because that’s how I feel about my wife as well. But they are doing some remarkable things in the real estate space.

And I’m so excited. I mean, I have a whole list of things that he talked about that he did, but I’m gonna let him get into it for himself. But I’m so, so, so happy to introduce you guys to Dan Cartagena. How did I do with that last thing? That’s right. I did the Cartagena, right? Did I? Awesome. How you doing today,

Dan Cartagena (03:08)
Perfect. Perfect.

I’m doing great. How are you?

Quentin (03:15)
man, man, I’m doing great. I’m so happy to have this conversation with you. So happy that our viewers get to listen and see things through your lens. so listen, Mr. Dan, I just want to dive in. I want you to kind of take us into your world, you know, make us familiar with the things that you do, tell us, you know, what your main focus are, tell us, you know, a little bit about yourself. And so I just want you just for you to submerge our viewers into your, to your world, man. So.

I turn the floor over to you, sir.

Dan Cartagena (03:46)
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah, so just a little background on me. 30 year railroader, drive trains all across the country. That’s my, been my primary income for our family for that many years and raising a family out of, Tempe and Chandler, Arizona, Paso, Texas, and now the DFW area. I continue to do that. Another part of what I do that I’ve done since 1995.

is ⁓ software ⁓ items. So I’m kind of in the tech industry. I build websites, built a live streaming platform in 2010 that I sold to my competition in 2013. They kept me on as a consultant for 10 years. ⁓ That was Flow Sports. And, ⁓ you know, with that knowledge and everything and learning that I got into, you know, quality assurance and software automation.

with a friend of mine who’s in the mortgage business, mortgage exchange there out of Texas, ⁓ he needed automation. And so I got into the automation of lead generation with him, Facebook to ⁓ Salesforce, automation, all kinds of stuff with ⁓ like tools like Zapier and there’s other automation tools like low code, no code stuff. And just kind of keeping my nose.

Like I like to I’ve been a coach for 25 years in wrestling as well. So I’ve coached thousands of people from youth all the way up to Olympic level even at an ASU and all my life. And what I like to say is, if you have any interest, just keep your nose to the mat. You’re smelling the mat. And so in real estate, I like to be involved in whatever it may be. Lead generation, mortgage. I held a mortgage license for several years there early 2020.

through 23. And so you just because you learn things, right? You learn things about other people, real estate agents, mortgage lenders and everything. And I just use that. ⁓ Where all that foundation came from and that passion is I grew up in a real estate family. My dad owned many apartment buildings in Jersey City, New Jersey growing up. ⁓ We used to gut those old brownstone apartment buildings ⁓ in Jersey City and redo them.

and he would flip them. He was a flipper before anybody knew the word burr or flip or anything like that. So I just kind of had that in my back pocket. Tried a bunch of different businesses over the years and I told my wife, hey, why aren’t we focusing on real estate? We finally did in 2019. ⁓ We followed a bunch of communities online, YouTube U, as I like to call it, YouTube University. And ⁓ we just put our best tools together and…

From 2019 to now, we have five doors in two different states and two different areas of Texas. Texas is huge, right? We got the DFW area in ⁓ West Texas and in New Mexico. So, that’s where we started.

Quentin (07:46)
Yeah, I absolutely love it. I mean, what a stellar career from being in software to 1995. Since I’m starting in 1995, selling your business, building a software automation. I didn’t even know the wrestling coach. I’m just finding that part out. know, I mean, just what a man, like a stellar career, man. And then you and your wife with doors in two different places, two different states.

Dan Cartagena (08:05)
Yeah. ⁓

Quentin (08:15)
Man, that’s a lot to have in place. And so what it seems to me, it seems that you have systems in place so all this stuff can go off the way it’s supposed to. So I guess my question is, because I know it’s not easy in this climate, so what’s been the key to keeping that machine running smoothly, Mr. Dan?

Dan Cartagena (08:35)
Well, we’ve got lucky and tried different systems, know, from bed and breakfast, Airbnb. You know, we were kind of forced into that situation. It worked out because my wife is great with logistics. She was great with responding quickly to people, you know, in the platform. And so we started out there. We got a duplex. You know, we followed the community and they said, hey, buy a duplex, in one half, rent the other out.

So we did that and we just got lucky and found a Duplex brand new that was sitting on the market for a little too long. was a new builder and he gave us a great deal, you know, but it was just by, probably look at, you know, and I’ll scroll through maybe a hundred properties a day, right? On all the big websites, know, Zillow, you know, it doesn’t matter. And looking at it, um,

You gotta be smelling the mat all the time, right? You gotta be sniffing around and understanding what’s happening. Focus on a community, that’s what we like to do. And ⁓ I just go through and just kinda see, okay, who’s dropping prices? Who’s raising prices? Who’s coming on the market with what? Is there a big difference in pricing with similar size houses, why?

And I really realized you got to click into the descriptions. You got to read it. Can’t just look at the pictures. You got to understand because in there is where we found some of the gold nuggets. Like for instance, we got a cabin in Ridoso, New Mexico. Pictures lie.

So if you see ugly pictures online, dig in. If you see nice pictures online, get away. That’s one of our rules. It really is. And so my wife found this one cabin. She’s like, you’re going to love this cabin.

Quentin (10:49)
Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Dan Cartagena (10:56)
and it had white carpet around the toilets. And I was like, no, this is horrible. But we went and we went to see it and it’s got the most beautiful view of the forest. I wish I could share my screen because I had it here, but you know, the most beautiful screen shot of the forest on a big old deck. was 2,100 square feet.

And following the YouTube University, you know, the communities, said, hey, always look for an ability to, you know, leverage something like being able to renovate a basement or something like that. And sure enough, it had a set of staircases that went halfway down into the basement, fully permitted, never finished dirt floor basement. So we were able to put in a wood, you know, suspended wood floor, finish it out.

Quentin (11:36)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Dan Cartagena (11:46)
All we had to do was sheetrock the electric was already in. You know, we made it into a complete game room. So we added 650 square feet to a 2100 foot cabin. And that gave us instant, you know, equity, right? So it just catapulted that property. Now in saying that, that’s just one aspect that we looked for. And the other aspect was we were doing Airbnb on our own, right? And we tried that in the duplex.

Quentin (12:04)
Yes sir.

Dan Cartagena (12:16)
And so we went from short-term rental, we tried midterm, which is to me 12 months and over, but not like your Airbnb, right? So in other words, one, three, six, nine months. And those generate a lot more income because the sell is, well, I got to turn this property over. And every time I turn it over, I might not rent it out for a month or two. So you want it for six months. You take that one or two months of vacancy.

when you charge a rent, let’s say, let’s make for simplicity, $1,200, right? So a hundred bucks a month. Well, I might be vacant for two months because I’m turning it over in six. So I’ll add $200 to the rent. So it was normally 15. Well, you can rent it for 17. So I would get above market rentals based on the flexibility I had, but you’re going to pay a premium for that. Another thing we would do is my wife’s great at

⁓ know logistics and resourcing things on a super tight budget ⁓ and so she would furnish out the duplex with you know furniture from Amazon or IKEA or whatever and then we rent it furnished and so

Few times we got lucky with a person who needed flexible rental agreement and needed it furnished. Why? Because there’s a hospital nearby and they were a nurse and they needed this flexibility. Okay, well furnish is an extra $500 a month plus the short-term flexibility another $200. So, know, we’re almost getting $2,000 just under $2,000 a month for something that should only be going for $1,300. You know, so these are kind of things that we utilize in the day-to-day of doing the rentals like.

Now that cabin, yeah, it had the addition on the bottom that we were able to do, but we put that with a full-time property manager. Now that property manager charges a steep percentage, but he’s got 24-7 maintenance, a full maid service at his facility. He’s got to check in like a hotel.

Right? So people can actually go in and they see a gift shop in the whole nine yards. And then it’s totally hands off from us. Cause I, cause I told my wife, you know, we were hands on and we wanted to progress to hands off. He’s truly the handoff called upper Canyon lodging. He’s great Robert Duncan. And, ⁓ he just takes all the worry off my mind. And we were able to do that and rent that out and solid rental because he promotes.

through his website on Airbnb, his own website, booking.com, he handles that. I don’t have to do any of that. We know how to do it, but I didn’t do it. Now, special story about that cabin, I told you I do the automation engineering, right? So I do automated social media posts, ⁓ All things like that. So I created a channel for the cabin. We call it Bearadise. So if you go to uppercanyonlodging.com and you search Bearadise, you’re gonna see my property.

Quentin (15:14)
Hmm

Dan Cartagena (16:01)
and have an Instagram, we have a Facebook page, and I built those up. And what I did one day, you always gotta have your camera on, you gotta record around your properties, especially if you’re renting them out on an Airbnb, right? Because it’s always about a theme or something good about that property. Well, it was raining that day. Now we sit on half an acre with a bunch of 100 foot tall pine trees, right?

And so it was raining. I’m just recording walking up because we can hear the rain hitting off the metal roof. And you can hear my boots, though, on the on the deck. It’s going clunk, clunk, clunk. And I just lock it down. And in the backyard, we got this bear head that’s a beer bottle opener. Right. So I get a close up of him go around and then I hit that view I talked about off the deck. I posted that video on Instagram and it got over 50,000 views.

Quentin (16:52)
Wow.

Dan Cartagena (16:52)
And

then what I went up and did is I said, all right, well, I was here with these influencers on Instagram and whatnot. So I looked up cabin rental channels and I found a few somewhere, you know, giving me robot links and, know, know, users or viewers, but I found a legit one that just shows beautiful cabins all over the world. And I mean like ones that we only dream of type of cabins, right? Multi-million dollar ones.

Well, they saw my video and they put it in with theirs for $100. And that got over a million and a half views worldwide. So all of a sudden I get rentals from Australia, from Europe, from everything. So you gotta just give your property that uniqueness. And in case of Airbnb, right, you always want to show why you stand out.

Quentin (17:25)
Wow.

Dan Cartagena (17:47)
over the hotels and below everybody else competing for Airbnb business. And that just skyrocketed that property. And we have now, I think about 10,000 followers on Instagram.

And we built up from zero on Facebook to several thousand on Facebook just by doing these videos. And then I started doing funny meme videos. know, remember when the breakdance lady came out in the Olympics and everybody was making front of Australia and her breakdancing? Well, I made a little meme. I made a meme of her like breakdancing in the game room we made at that cabin and everybody just laughing and stuff. But, you know, it’s just to be front of mind with people when they want to take their family on a vacation.

Quentin (18:15)
Yeah

Dan Cartagena (18:28)
know, go to a place or something like that. those are things we try to leverage all the time outside of the financial structure of knocking down the deal.

Quentin (18:38)
man, I absolutely love it. Thank you for these stories. I love how you leverage your creativity. I love it. And just being creative, the mindset that you have, I mean, you’ve been doing like, you approach things from so many different directions. So like we talked about, it’s that unique lens that you can see a situation and grab it and turn into a money making revenue or at least a lead generator or a connection point. Like you’re not wasting any moments. You’re like.

Dan Cartagena (19:01)
Yeah, yeah.

Quentin (19:05)
We’re going to make all these facets work together. So I love it. And to me, listening to you talk, it helps me see how, how you separate yourself from folks who just dabble to someone that’s in it for the long term. And I absolutely love it. and so let me ask you this. What are you most focused on solving or scaling next? Mr. Dan, what’s the next real goal?

Dan Cartagena (19:05)
Hahaha

Well, the next goal is, you know, we’ve tackled doors. We’ve tried the criteria between Airbnb and full property management. You know, I’m single family, right? We’ve got a duplex in there. ⁓ But we want to leverage that, We either want to bring those properties closer together and get more of them, right? So they’re easy to manage. Or look towards more doors in one location, you know? ⁓

And it’s to knock down that, know, something always comes up and you need your team of people to help you and whatnot. And so, you know, I’d like to see where that can go, right? Because we use a metric. I buy that cash flow has to be $50 per $50,000 of investment. OK, so $100,000 cash flow, 100. Now, that’s the minimum. That’s like min, min, min,

So when we buy at $300,000, $400,000, it’s got to do four, five, $600 and more cash flow a And so that’s one of our big criteria, right? So when I look at them, you know, the next level, we need to make sure our leverage is not beyond the point where we can do that per door, right? So if we buy a million dollar property, right, it should be a thousand or more a month cash flow. And

It needs to have also the benefit of appreciation, ⁓ value improvement, you know? So if we keep checking boxes, that’s what we’re looking for.

Quentin (21:03)
absolutely love it. love that you got the system in place. That way it keeps you from getting emotional with decision making. You got the system in place. You already know the numbers. The numbers are the numbers. And that type of structure, again, keeps you from making emotional decisions. And so I absolutely, absolutely love that. I absolutely love that.

Dan Cartagena (21:21)
Absolutely.

Yeah, and it’s

like, I got a mortgage license for a little bit, but what it taught me was when they talk about being conservative in your numbers, I knew exactly what numbers to put. Like people don’t know what to put as a value in life for PMI for instance. They don’t know how to calculate it. I did because we did deals with customers where we had to put that percentage in, whether it was 0.8 % of the sale or 1.25 % of sale. And you could be conservative or.

or on the not so conservative side with that. But that’s a ⁓ real monthly cost, right? If you’re not gonna put in the investment down payment and you’re gonna get it as a second property and turn it to a rental, things like

Quentin (22:08)
living. Nope, I love it. I love that. Love the system, love the perspective behind it. I love the fact, again, I love the fact you talk about your wife, your partner and all of this. And so I want to talk about relationships for a little bit. know, people that’s listening, they’re even early in their journey, they’re looking to level up. But I think their benefit hearing is from you. When it comes to relationships and growing your network, what has made the biggest difference for you?

Dan Cartagena (22:37)
Well, think, you know, everybody does their own thing, right? Like, so I don’t expect my wife to come to work with me on the railroad or the software stuff. goes right overhead, right? So you got to find some, but you both need something different. But when it comes to doing something together, whether it be cooking together, ⁓ you know, movie time, if you got grandkids in the picture or your kids in sports, right? You got to figure that out.

Along this journey, we had a real question of, okay, what are we gonna do investment wise? So we’re prepared for that annuity type structure when we retire, right? Because time’s just gonna keep ticking. And we tried our hand at eight, nine different businesses that we’ve bought and built, bought and closed, bought and sold. We’ve tried it. The software one that I sold in 2013, that was successful.

but it took seven, eight, nine failures before that. And we went bankrupt three times. And that’s one of the things I found out from YouTube U, right? It’s like one of them.

little outcast there, a damn pain, yeah, I listened to him once in a while. He said, if you’re not going to break up, you’re not effing doing anything, right? And so that’s the thing, right? You there’s a, you don’t want to put your family at risk, but the fact that you’re investing, right? You better put in your time research, your due diligence, because you are putting a lot of things at risk. And so, you know, I look at things like that, but you got to answer the question of how do we want the end game to look like?

Quentin (23:55)
Yeah.

Dan Cartagena (24:18)
What do we do together? And so, real estate became the thing we did together and we use our superpowers as we were talking about earlier to do those things. Like I said, my wife’s superpower is juggling. She can juggle logistics when we’re doing renovations, the material, ⁓ when it’s being delivered, in the order it’s being delivered in, getting a hold of those people, maybe making like small terms.

We’re not a big outfit. They don’t want to give you credit per se, but I will say this to anybody listening. You can make a cash account and you’re to have terms on cash, which means you get the better pricing. You might have to pay it off sooner, right? You might only pay half upfront, half when you pick up, but you have to create those relationships because they start to grow over time. They trust you. They give you better better terms. So work on it early.

You can create a cash account with any company on planet Earth. They will not deny you. It’s looking for the credit, Give me free money to buy stuff. That’s where it’s a little trickier, right? And they want, you know, guarantors and stuff like that. You don’t have to get into that.

Quentin (25:27)
Yeah, yeah. No, I love it, man. Knowing your superpower, what works for you. I love the notes that you drop because there’s different angles that work for different people. And so I absolutely love that. Listen, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, maybe collaborate and learn more about what you’re doing, Mr. Dan, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you,

Dan Cartagena (25:50)
You can reach out to me directly Danny at trsnllc.com another email is just [email protected] so either one of those. I got a LinkedIn page it’s more based on the automation and lead gen I provide that’s just my name Danny Cartagena you’ll find me on LinkedIn and you’ll find my business on there too. ⁓

Now for the automation, have a website, trsnllc.com. You’ll see our services there and you can fill out a form and shoot that over to them.

Quentin (26:28)
I absolutely love it. Listen, sir, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for your story. I want to thank you for your perspective. We absolutely need more people like you within this space that’s doing it the way you’re doing it, that’s coming at it with your creative lens. And so I just want to, again, say thank you for being here today.

Dan Cartagena (26:48)
I appreciate it. got one last story. So mistakes can be a benefit too. One time I hit that Facebook button and I said I wanted to spend $200 over a week. Well it was $200 a day. It cost me $1,000 but the place rented out instantly for a whole month. So it was a good mistake. you know. But don’t make that one too often because your wife will get mad at you.

Quentin (26:51)
Yes, sir.

I love it. Listen, I love it. Listen, one last nugget that he had to drop for us. And so I absolutely love it. So again, I thank you, Mr. Dan. Thank you so much. And so everyone else tuning in, listen, he gave value all the way up to the last second. So listen, you got to make sure you’re subscribed. You do not want to miss out on these amazing conversations that we’re having. So again, thank you, Mr. Dan and to everyone else. We’ll see you on the next episode.

Dan Cartagena (27:22)
Ha ha ha ha!