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Show Summary
In this conversation, Nick Ahrens, a seasoned real estate broker, shares valuable insights on navigating the Denver Metro real estate market, particularly for first-time buyers and new investors. He emphasizes the importance of professional guidance, strategic financial planning, and the potential of homeownership as an investment vehicle. Nick also offers advice for new real estate agents on building a successful career and discusses the dynamics between retail and investor markets.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Nick Ahrens (00:00)
One of the biggest suggestions I have, it’s actually learned this from somebody else. It’s called, I call it, play the game. I bought a house. So you have your expenses now, and then you have expenses that are gonna be there for after you’re purchased. It’s probably gonna be a higher monthly payment. So for easy math, let’s just take the difference of those two and force that into a savings account. So if you buy a home and it’s gonna cost you $2,500 a month,but your current rent is $1,500 a month. I run through numbers real quick, but basically it’s $1,000 a month difference in payment. If you buy a home versus rent. I go, great, take $1,000 a month, force it into a savings account. Do that for three months.
Dylan Silver (02:14)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Nick Ahrens is a real estate broker in the North Denver Metro with over 350 closing, is 15 years active. Nick specializes in prep, move up strategy and relocation. He is the founder of North Denver Report and delivers hyper local video content, market insights and community stories. He’s also an outdoor enthusiast, guitar player and travel lover.You can check out his YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash at North Denver report. Nick, thanks for taking the time today.
Nick Ahrens (02:48)
Hey Dylan, thank you so much for having me on today. I’m excited to jump right into things.Dylan Silver (02:54)
when we talk about ⁓ the Denver Metro, I’m a little bit of a fish out of water. So I’m looking forward to this conversation. But we were talking beforehand, and I wanna start off at the top of the show, about folks who are first-time buyers or are newer investors, really some of the trends that they should be looking at and ways that they can get into home ownership, right?Nick Ahrens (03:19)
Yeah, there’s so much to it. I personally have a huge passion for coaching people, especially first time home buyers, as to why they should buy certain homes because it’s going to make such a significant impact to them financially in the future. Whereas a lot of people aren’t thinking that way. Hey, I just want a roof over my head and I’d rather pay my mortgage than some investor’s mortgage. I go, that’s great, but let’s unpack that.Dylan Silver (03:44)
Yeah.Nick Ahrens (03:48)
so you can look at your personal wealth building goals through this.Dylan Silver (03:52)
Now, when we talk specifically about this on ramp into homeownership, I think a lot of people, a lot of younger people kind of throw their hands up and be like, gosh, this just seems impossible. Like one lender turns me away. I’m told I need these stipulations in order to get approved. I’m going to need that much money down. Gosh, just seems so overwhelming. Help help assuage some of folks concerns if they’re in the North Denver Metro. What can folks do if it seems like, gosh, this is such an uphill battle?Nick Ahrens (04:23)
I’d say first step is talk to an actual professional. If they’re trying to jam you into home or jam you into pre-approval, go to somebody else. Ask them a question, hey, have you sold at least 100 homes in this area or in your career? Are you familiar with the community in Broomfield or Thornton or wherever here in the North Denver area? Start there, then start asking those people questions of, hey, how do I save to get into a home?Right?
One of the biggest suggestions I have, it’s actually learned this from somebody else. It’s called, I call it, play the game. I bought a house. So you have your expenses now, and then you have expenses that are gonna be there for after you’re purchased. It’s probably gonna be a higher monthly payment. So for easy math, let’s just take the difference of those two and force that into a savings account. So if you buy a home and it’s gonna cost you $2,500 a month,
but your current rent is $1,500 a month. I run through numbers real quick, but basically it’s $1,000 a month difference in payment. If you buy a home versus rent. I go, great, take $1,000 a month, force it into a savings account. Do that for three months.
They go, that’s a lot. I go, just try it for three months. If you’re desperate and you’re eating rice and beans every day for the end of three months, well, you have your three grand there. Just use that, go get some sushi and enjoy, right? But see if you can financially do it.
before jumping in and that’s a great way to test it. It’s literally risk free. You’re just moving that money into a savings account.
Dylan Silver (06:43)
I have a house, I have a house. I like that strategy. I’m gonna co-op that. When we talk specifically about folks who are, of course, proceeding with some level of caution, and it makes sense, right? They’ve been maybe told up until this point in time that…this is gonna be an uphill battle for them. Maybe someone else turned them away. They could have preconceived notions that the average homebuyer is whatever age that it is and makes this much money. It of course lends itself to you kind of psyching yourself out of the game. And we were actually talking beforehand, unrelated to this, about this idea of imposter syndrome. And I think a lot of buyers right now have this imposter syndrome that they can be homeowners. I get it, I understand it.
Is there a segment of the, you know, ⁓ homes that you would tell people to look at, whether that’s, you know, homes that are not necessarily modernized or homes that may have multiple doors, like a duplex or a triplex? Is there one better way for them to get in than another?
Nick Ahrens (07:47)
That’s a great question too, I love that. I think it really depends on each specific person, where they’re at financially, where they’re going to be at financially, and what they want to accomplish. I think a great model is, hey, try to buy a triplex that you can rent out. Find somebody who can look at, hey, here’s what rents are gonna be in those other two doors today, here’s what they’re likely to be in five years from now. Now combine all that with, here’s your equity position and appreciation in five years.Now you know exactly where you’re to be at. Whether you have a job relocation coming up in five to 10 years because you just don’t like your boss and you don’t know where you’re going to be. Right. You might be moving out of Boulder and over to call it Columbus, Ohio. ⁓ At least you know where you’ll be financially in that real estate game within that period of time. We can do that and get a pretty good estimate based off of historic trends, not of the last 10 years because we had COVID unicorn years.
But over the last like, you know, 40, 50, 60 years, what’s that trend look like? One thing I will say to stay away from is a one bed, one bath, if you can. don’t rents, don’t go up as much for those. And they don’t appreciate as well as the rest of the market. They take a little bit longer to sell as well. Now from an investment standpoint, if it’s cash flowing well, well, there’s a lot of exceptions and that can be one of them. But if you’re looking at the
Dylan Silver (09:02)
I saw that.Nick Ahrens (09:11)
Yeah, the appreciation and the resale value, try to stay away from a one-one.Dylan Silver (09:16)
I saw that actually recently in San Antonio. I was looking at…rental properties for a renter and there was a one-one. said, gosh, that’s remarkably well priced. It looks like a beautiful home. I wonder what’s going on there. So I can definitely echo that sentiment. Now I do want to pivot a bit here and ask you about your experience growing a business as an agent and ⁓ advice to younger agents who are either in the business or getting into the business. And they’re trying to think, well, hey, how do I make a career out of
this and also how do I sell my first 10, 15 homes?
Nick Ahrens (09:55)
That is a greatquestion and I love it. ⁓ I’ve coached agents, I love mentoring people and I love this question. First and foremost, I would say find a good mentor, whether it’s a team, whether it’s a broker in an office, find somebody who you’re gonna be able to ask a lot of questions to. Try to stay as humble as you can and…
Even with things like we were talking about before, like I had really bad imposter syndrome, even though I was selling 30, 40, 50, 60 homes a year. I was thinking to myself at times, like, I don’t know if I can do this. And all the time about, you know, once every couple of weeks or once a month, my real estate coach would say, no, Nick, you know, your shit way better than 99 % of realtors out there. Even the ones who’ve been in the business for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. He goes, keep
leveraging the team, the resources, myself, our other coach, as much as he can to grow and to learn. I would suggest to new agents, ignore commission splits. The difference of a couple grand a deal is not as significant as the number of units you’re going to be able to close with that team for future business. It’s a vast, vast spread there.
Dylan Silver (11:46)
Yeah, I mean, when we talk about, you know, splitting hairs over a commission split versus having someone who’s going to help you, you know, get onto the on-ramp ofmultiple home sales, you know multiple buyer’s reps, right? And you really need to get going. You need to start making the snowball, right? It’s hard to have anything when you’re starting with nothing. Especially for folks like myself, I didn’t have a connection to real estate. There wasn’t family or friends or people that I knew. It was me. I went to a RIA meetup. I got a job as a wholesaler and then before you knew it, I was like, wow, I’m actually doing this. And uh
there was no one like aha moment. It was eventually brick by brick by brick, you start doing deals. You mentioned doing you know not just 10, not just 20, but 50 deals in a year. That’s a huge number for anybody. People would be happy with that over two or three years, right? 50 deals in a year. At that point, scaling up to 50, were you doing it all by yourself? Did you have an assistant or VA’s helping you? How did you get to 50?
Nick Ahrens (12:54)
Got it, so I was coached to, so when I was doing that, I was in Southern California rebuilding here in Denver area, trending to going to need an assistant pretty quick here. So what I did is I needed somebody for showing homes. I needed somebody who’s actually boots on the ground. And my biggest other time suck was not the marketing piece because I was on a team. They took care of 85 % of the amount of time spent on the marketing stuff.Dylan Silver (12:54)
Thanks.Nick Ahrens (13:21)
So there was not much time spent there. Fortunately, I just needed somebody to help show homes, manage my calendar, schedule my showings. my first hire I do, I got so lucky. She was just phenomenal. absolute just on it sharp, hungry, hardworking. And I even knew hiring her. was like, there’s no way she’s going to last more than about a year in this position. She’s just going to outgrow it. She’s going to be a beast.And yeah, she got poached to one of the largest real estate teams as the head of all listings for the entire organization about a year and a half later. Yeah, but so happy for it. And I’d rather have that kind of person I know is going to stay for one to three years and then move on, then have somebody who’s going to be a headache for me, but last 10 years. It’s worth it. But yeah, you have to be on a team in that situation.
Dylan Silver (13:58)
We got a good one for the year.Nick Ahrens (14:14)
You have to rely heavily on the people around you. The advice you’re getting from your coaches, transaction coordinator, your assistant. Like I said, I needed to know that I could be fairly hands off with things that I didn’t need to be involved in. Again, like scheduling a home inspection. Now when it came to negotiating price repairs, that type of stuff, hard conversations around finances, I had to have all of that type of stuff.in that knowledge database ready to go for every single client every day. So I was able to pull myself out of some things and really stay in some others.
Dylan Silver (15:31)
You’re also in another interesting niche, which is the investor space. And this puts you in a different category, investor agent, right? And as someone, I’m an investor friendly agent and a wholesaler agent, right?I realized that these are two different worlds and I didn’t know this until I became a realtor and I saw that people were like, I don’t want to work with investors, you know low ball offers or if you, if you get any of these creative offers run and I was like, well, I was making those offers as a wholesaler. So, how did you get into the investment side of the game? And then also, do you think that there’s maybe more in common
people make it seem between the investor world quote unquote and the retail world.
Nick Ahrens (16:14)
Absolutely. If you’ve got a couple who’s a first time home buyer, just again here in the Broomfield area, they’re, I don’t know. Or let’s say they’re in Westminster, they have the condo, they want to trade up to Anthem Highlands, which is a nice community here. There’s a lot of similarities between that person and the person who’s owned down the street in Boulder for 20 years, who buys one home every three years with the amount of money they’re saving. There’s a lot more similarity there thanwhat we hear, which is the rhetoric of Blackstone, which is the rhetoric of large corporations and hedge funds making offers, which yes, we see within about three days of any home going on the market, we’re to get something that’s 40 to 50 % of list price cash offer, three day closing, whatever it is, they’re throwing out there what they can. There’s a significant difference between those two kinds of people. Yeah.
Dylan Silver (17:11)
Yeah, yeah, noquestion.
I mean, when we talk about mom and pop investors, and you had mentioned something interesting to me, which is that, you know, not every market, I think specifically where you’re at is this idea of like, you know, the mom and pop investors super prevalent. Where I grew up in Northern New Jersey, I didn’t know any real estate investors. It was not, no one was around saying, hey, let’s go, you know, get an assignable contract or, you know, find some off-market property. No one was saying that. And in Texas, where I’m licensed, it’s a totally different thing.
There’s whole you know, it seems like communities of people around the idea of off-market acquisition, about fixing and flipping, around subject to all different types. Now you’ve got land in RV parks, self-storage, and a lot of this is because you’ve got so much vacant land, but I do want to connect this to where you’re at in Denver. You’re not seeing as much of that, but is there an opportunity there? Are there opportunities for people?
you know, everyday mom and pop investors with a W-2 job to get into investing out there.
Nick Ahrens (18:17)
Absolutely, absolutely. There’s a lot of opportunity. Depending on the market, it might take more work versus less work to find it, but absolutely it’s there. Like I know we were talking about before the show, I try to coach people into treating home ownership as an investment vehicle. Let’s look at it through that lens and then have the opportunity to start buying multiple pieces of real estate. Whether you do or don’t in the future, you’re gonna be set up for financial success.Dylan Silver (18:45)
Yeah.Nick Ahrens (18:45)
⁓and yeah, there’s, groups out here. There’s fixer, fixing flippers here. There’s, there’s a lot of opportunity. It’s just, ⁓ you know, it’s, it’s finding it in a hot market. That’s a seller’s market there. It’s harder to find a really good investment deal in a buyer’s market, any declining market. It’s going to be a lot easier to typically, to find, some sort of investment type of opportunity.
Dylan Silver (18:56)
It’s done.Well, when in doubt, start. Someone earlier told that to me. When in doubt, start. You’ve got to make the first step, right? We are coming up on time here though, Nick. For our audience and folks who are listening, would like to reach out to you or your team, how can folks get in contact with you? Also any new projects that you’re working on?
Nick Ahrens (19:29)
I got all kinds of stuff in the works right now. I’m so excited for it. Yeah, reach out. It’s real easy to find me. Just basically put my name into Google Nick, Ahren’s A-H-R-E-N-S. I’m there. Yeah, my Instagram page is NickAhrensRealEstate. My Zillow page, NickAhrensRealEstate. And I’m to be really doubling down on YouTube starting in about three months from now at the North Denver Report. And yeah.I would highly encourage you to watch it and rip off and duplicate what I’m doing. If you have questions on how to just reach out, I’m an open book. I’ll tell you exactly everything I’m doing, where I’m getting all my data sources, how I’m coaching buyers and sellers, investors, all of it.
Dylan Silver (20:10)
Nick, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for coming on the show.Nick Ahrens (20:13)
Yep. Hey, thank you guys. Appreciate it Dylan.
