How I Transformed My Career: From Paramedic to Property Manager

Stephen S. (00:04.29)
Welcome back to the show. Welcome for the first time. If it’s your first time here, we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs. And today I’ve got an incredible guest with us. Welcome back. If you’re joining us for a second, third or hundredth time, this is your host, Steven Schmidt. And I’m here today with Nathan Derksen. And today we’re going to be talking about Nathan’s rise in real estate. He is in several different verticals within the space, including property management.

has over 45 million under management, does long-term rental, short-term rentals, and also has some interesting plays in the construction, handyman, cleaning company spaces. we’re gonna dive right into it, but before we do that, just remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investor service providers and real estate entrepreneurs 2 to 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted, to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed up. So with all that being said, Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan Derksen (00:57.569)
Well, thanks for having me, Stephen. This is awesome.

Stephen S. (01:00.426)
Yeah, super glad you were able to make it for us. We had some technical difficulties, so it’s fun because it doesn’t always happen, but I know absolutely nothing about Nathan yet. And so we’re going to dive right in just with some little bit of rapport here. But for everybody listening to the show, I know I gave you a little intro there kind of about what you’re doing in the real estate space. But just so that way, for my sake and for all of our listeners, they give us a little background of what got you started in real estate and how you ended up where you’re at now.

Nathan Derksen (01:30.291)
Absolutely, it all started. about 10 years in on this real estate journey, so it’s wild. 10 years, not that long and yet holy cow, industry changes in the last 10 years. So when I started, I bought fixer uppers, never got into the flip world. I much preferred to fix it up, rent it, call it the BRRR method before Brandon made that term popular. But we would do that. got to where we had a fair number of properties just

inside and was beginning to impact my full-time job. I was a full-time paramedic and so I had a couple of days off every week but then when I was at work I had no way to do anything so I started looking at property management and as we started looking and going down that road realized I actually like property management. Why not do this for other people? Make a little bit of extra money to buy more properties and you know feed my addiction and the next thing we knew you know 10 years has passed and like you’d mentioned we’re

We had gotten into the short-term rental space, the long-term rental space. That’s why even though our numbers aren’t massive, the average short-term rental is between $600 and $1.2 million in our area. And our industry or our geographical location is kind of unique in that tourism is the number three industry in my entire state.

Nathan Derksen (03:18.441)
If you remember in 2020.

Nathan Derksen (03:33.521)
Is everything okay? keep getting a recording resumed ending notification.

Stephen S. (03:42.742)
Yeah, your audio has been kind of bouncing in and out a little bit. I’ve been able to kind of pick up most of what you’re saying, but.

Nathan Derksen (03:47.304)
No, no, sorry. Maybe a second Mike will help.

Nathan Derksen (03:57.668)
Maybe this will be a little bit better. what I was saying was, so we got into the short-term rental industry and then everything crashed because it was COVID. All of our bookings stopped. We went from full calendars to totally empty calendars. And then two months later, busier than we could have ever thought. But as everything started booming, if you’re in a boom market, labor becomes very hard to deal with. So we tried subcontractors and we started

Stephen S. (04:00.374)
Yeah, that’s perfect.

Nathan Derksen (04:26.605)
just needing to have our own cleaners. So we started an in-house cleaning company and now we’re up to 10 cleaners just on that one portion of it where we clean all of our own vacation rentals. And then it worked out really well when you have a long-term rental turnover, we happened to have a cleaning team. And then same thing with maintenance, when you’ve got a six hour time window, we needed maintenance and we needed a handyman who could be there exactly when we wanted them to be there. So we started a maintenance team.

And my passion has always been construction inside of real estate, taking old homes and fixing them. So we started construction to have always done remodels. But this year we’re actually going to be doing our first from the ground up new construction as well on top of several, you know, 2000, 3000 square foot down to stud remodels. And we’re in a pretty small market located out in the Black Hills of South Dakota. So if you think Mount Rushmore, that’s where we’re at. And that’s the

demographic that we’re dealing with. But it’s been fun. I love it.

Stephen S. (05:27.852)
So now you said you started as a paramedic, right? Are you still working in that space at all? Are you full-time doing real estate now?

Nathan Derksen (05:38.306)
Yes and yes. then I went part time. January was two years on the paramedic world, but with the way the search work and I’ve done it for 15 years, it’s hard to let that certification go. So I’m still working one shift a month to keep my search up and then the program I’m with pays for all of our research and continuing ed. So mostly done on the paramedic side, but enough to keep my skills up.

Stephen S. (05:39.775)
Okay.

Stephen S. (06:05.856)
Yeah, that makes sense. Why do you still do it if you don’t mind me asking?

Nathan Derksen (06:09.803)
I like it. It’s a high adrenaline, just fun job, cool people that I get to work with. We get to help people in some of their worst days. And then sometimes we’re just helping people go home from the hospital. Most people think paramedic and you think the TV shows. That’s what I thought when I got into it. That’s why I picked it was the old TV show ER, if you remember that from way back when. I rarely like that, but we get to do things like,

Stephen S. (06:31.874)
Yeah, right.

Nathan Derksen (06:39.341)
When somebody who can’t walk anymore, but they don’t need to be in the hospital, you know, say they’re just weak enough and they just need to recover. We would get to take them home, help them get into their house and make sure they get set up with, you know, the different types of in-house treatments that they need to get and start doing some of the more community paramedic side of things. And then we’ll do, you know, high intensity transfers where people are on vents. And, you know, again, I live in a rural community. We don’t have the things like Denver or Minneapolis as far as the level of care that those places can have.

But sometimes, you know, an airplane trip might be $70,000, whereas an ambulance ride is $20,000. So for the sake of the patient, they’ll ask us transport by ground. And I’ve done the flight as well, where you just fly into these small places and then fly them in with, you know, anything from they need surgery to they’re completely vented and on 10 to 12 different medications that you’re trying to keep balanced throughout their trip. So it’s just a nice skill to have to

Stephen S. (07:36.672)
Now, out of curiosity, what skills have you picked up or that you’ve developed in the healthcare space that have then translated over into what you’re now doing in construction, real estate, cleaning, all of that?

Nathan Derksen (07:52.149)
So the first one is on the long-term side of it. The patients that we deal with, for the majority of them, tend to also be the same people we deal with on the property management side. So it’s kind of interesting seeing the aftermath as the property manager versus when you show up on an ambulance, you’re there for 20 minutes. But then what happens afterwards? Who cleans up the property? Who makes sure the renter’s okay and can pay their rent if that’s the case? Whatever it might be. They tend to be generally the same people.

So that part’s been really fun and interesting. The protocol side of it, so our world in the medical world is very dictated by you show up and it’s, this is the first thing you do, this is the second thing you do, this is the third thing, and then that’s just how you run your scene. And so then construction’s the same way. You start with framing, then you go to your electrician, then you go to your plumber.

or whatever your order of industry that you want to have in your building. And that’s the one nice thing about construction is you get to have a little more control than the medical world, but it’s still very ordered, very structured, very first, second, third, and so on, so forth. And then the last is just chaos. As much as you want to order everything and have a plan for everything, life doesn’t like that and will throw you a curve ball in the middle of it you just have to roll with it. And that’s then business as well.

You you think you have everything figured out and then COVID happens. That turns out to be the best thing that ever happened for our business instead of the worst as we all expected.

Stephen S. (09:27.714)
What was that like when it hit, you know, February 2020 and you guys were like, no, versus like three months later and then you’re like, wait a second, what was that like riding that roller coaster?

Nathan Derksen (09:27.837)
So.

Nathan Derksen (09:39.325)
Yeah.

Lord, it was terrifying. had so 2020 was just a big year in general. I just had ACL surgery, so I was on leave from work, so I didn’t have any income coming in. We were fully on board with the rentals at that point. And had just started our second or third Airbnb.

And we still had mortgages to pay because I wanted to test out before we roll it out to our customers. I’ll typically roll it out in house, test out, see how we like it. And it was terrifying to go see all that income dry up and go, man, I sure hope that we’re going to be OK too much from now. You calling the banks, calling investors. Hey, I’ve got this property that might be coming for sale. Are you interested? So on, so forth. Answering renters. We had a number of renters that called up and said, hey.

I saw on the news that I don’t have to pay rents anymore while we figure this out. Is that true? And it’s like, no, no, no, no, you gotta pay. And it ended up being great. The renters all hung through, they paid their rents. We tried to take care of them on the flip side of it too. And it ended up being the best thing that happened, but for two months or so it was terrifying.

Stephen S. (10:54.134)
What, so and with that, you have a primary focus on property management now. Like that seems to be your niche, is that correct? And so what is it about property management that made you fall in love with that aspect of the business? Because there’s not a whole lot of real estate entrepreneurs we speak with or pros that are just like, I love property management. That seems to be most people’s biggest nightmare, which means…

Nathan Derksen (11:03.667)
Yes, sir. Yep.

Nathan Derksen (11:15.195)
Right?

Stephen S. (11:19.104)
Maybe there’s major opportunity, right? But what is it about that side of things that you fell in love with and why you decided to niche down there?

Nathan Derksen (11:22.226)
Yup.

Nathan Derksen (11:27.525)
No, that’s a good question. Honestly, purely selfish reasons. I needed a property manager for my own properties and I wanted it done a specific way. And that was the easiest way to do it. You know, paramedic doesn’t pay a huge amount of money, so part of it was, hey, here’s an easy way to make a little bit more money instead of paying for my own property management. I’ll actually get paid to manage the properties. So from the number standpoint, that was cool. But the other side.

I often wonder, because we did sign up with a property manager and she ended up having some health issues and wasn’t able to take us on again. Pure coincidence that just changed the entire impact of my life. And I’ve often wondered if she would have taken it over. I may never have gotten into property management. I’d be doing, maybe I’d just be doing construction or just paramedicine and investing in real estate on the side, or maybe that’d be the full-time gig.

But most property management companies, they don’t manage everything. They do a little piece here or there, but in the end, it’s still the owner feels like everything’s on them. And my goal was, let’s see if we can just turn it passive. Let’s find the people who, you your doctors, your people, they got the money to do real estate, but they don’t have the time. Let’s take all of the complexity out of it. No more midnight, you know, this way, anyone can do real estate. And then the other side of it,

As we started going down that I realized that it actually wasn’t doctors. Most of our clients are blue collar folks that are just hard working. They found a way to buy one or two rental properties, but they’re working full time as plumbers and electricians and general managers of different stores and whatnot. They’re normal people. They weren’t the high income earners and they love that we’ve got the expertise. We can handle it. And if you think about what we cost versus what that person could make in an hour or two, generally speaking, two or three hours of their wages pays for the property management.

And they don’t have to worry about any of it. You start going down all the tertiary ways property management is beneficial for a real estate investor. It’s a no brainer, honestly, unless you’re huge and then you just do in-house property management. But you need to be in the 300 unit range before you’ll actually start having the economy of scale to do what we can do for you for, you know, 100, 200 bucks a month.

Stephen S. (13:51.234)
fraction of the cost. Yeah, and I know there’s got to be a fine balance between that now, especially with higher interest rates because properties, cash flowing, that one 200 bucks might be all the meat that’s on the bone that’s left, but still, I’ve got a guy who I grew up around, I say grew up, it was more in my early adult years, but he was an investor, owned 110 rental properties, and he was the main guy, and the guy worked 120 hours

Nathan Derksen (13:53.695)
Exactly.

Nathan Derksen (13:59.358)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Derksen (14:03.486)
Exactly.

Stephen S. (14:21.188)
a week on his own properties. And you look at that and it almost even gave me like this jaded perspective in the beginning before I got to where I’m at now of like, I would never want to own real estate, you know, because I saw him beating himself to death and really not making that much money. And so, you know, your service is so all encompassing that you’re able to actually help investors buy back their time.

Nathan Derksen (14:22.603)
Yep. Yep.

Nathan Derksen (14:28.918)
Yeah?

Nathan Derksen (14:32.585)
Right? Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Derksen (14:47.905)
Well, that’s exactly it. know, that’s the thing. Real estate investors, especially if you don’t have either a huge risk tolerance or some way to create a ton of money to go out and you’re comfortable with narrow margins. You don’t have the bandwidth to handle all of this stuff. And why should you though? Again, like I was talking a little bit before.

Why do you need to know how to manage a property? If you’re, let’s say your skillset is you can find the best deal on the market. You can find it 20 % under cap. Why on earth would you then deal with the renter, deal with the emotional that comes along with it, deal with all of the legal that comes along with it. When if you found one more deal a year, it would pay for all your property management. Instead of looking at, this service costs so much. It comes down to what am I doing that’s

I could be doing with that same amount of time. And then if you come out like I didn’t realize well my time, I don’t have any other job that I want to do, and that’s why I got into it because it was profitable for me. Sure, and we’ve helped lots of people do that. Had a guy yesterday. He’s a plumber, but he’s out of work at the moment. Said don’t hire us. This is how you do it. Here’s a copy of our leases. This is what you can do. And then that’s the best decision for him because he has an abundance of time and a lack of resource.

But on the flip side, that guy who had 120 properties, he either bought them wrong. If he can’t afford property management and that’s why he’s doing 120 houses, he should sell 50 of them and relocate or reallocate his equities. Or whatever he’s got to do to get that portfolio to be able to pay even an in-house property manager, you know, let’s just say five grand a month. That’s not a huge amount of money when 120 houses you should be pushing what?

15 million in gross equity. So we’re talking a minor percentage of that and you can have your own in-house personal property manager. And that’s the thing is property management in of itself is we actually make you money by giving you your time back to put into whatever that high skill is. But yeah, it’s. It’s an interesting thing. People what I’ve learned anybody with a little bit of money.

Nathan Derksen (17:08.784)
have to have at least one really quirky money habit. If you don’t, then you’re not rich. That’s my goal is to have a really quirky habit where you’ll step over dollars to pick up a penny because that’s where you’ve learned to do it. And my best owners, that’s what they’ve done. It always makes me laugh though.

Stephen S. (17:26.85)
Yeah, absolutely. I see that myself too. Now, one of the things that’s interesting in your pre-show notes that I was able to kind read over is you mentioned in there that your city where you’re currently at is considering banning vacation rentals. if that was the case, what’s the creative solution? Because one of the things that you listed as one of your greatest strengths is you always are able to find creative solutions

Nathan Derksen (17:47.109)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen S. (17:56.997)
to the problems that you’ve faced, right? So if that’s the case, how does that affect things for you now and how would you get around that to continue growing, scaling, et cetera?

Nathan Derksen (18:09.989)
So it’s one of the great problems that we’re still attempting to see which creative solution will be the right answer. And this isn’t unique to our area. This is happening across the country where you’re having one group decide that we shouldn’t do vacation rentals, the other group saying we should do vacation rentals and very few people actually in the middle. One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve actually started getting political. So in my state, we formed a short-term rental association that statewide

We attempted taking a bill to states learned about what the lobbying process is like, what it takes to get a bill through. We didn’t succeed, but it was a great learning experience and met a lot of cool people along the way that have been beneficial. And if we can’t win the state level, we can at least attempt to win the city level. So I’ve been involved with different local government task forces that look at. The different arguments of why we should or shouldn’t get rid of Airbnb’s or short term rentals as.

More commonly known and. Seeing if there’s actually truth in it and you know, is there a way that we can compromise? know in our area there are.

let’s just make up a number and say 75 hotels. Of those 75 hotels, I can think of about 30 to 40 of them that are owned by two families. I’m friends with them, they’re super cool folks. But if I were them, if I could get rid of some of my competition by just making it harder, and I’m not even saying they’re a part of it, I don’t know. But just for example, if those two individuals, whereas,

Yeah, there’s 3500 vacation rentals in the entire Black Hills, including rally rentals where they’re only open for two weeks. But that’s 3500 owners. Typically two. There are very few short term owners that have more than two. And so the dilution of power because of how many owners there are versus hotels tend to be owned by a group. One group will typically own multiple hotels because once you’ve learned the system.

Nathan Derksen (20:18.553)
You can start repeating it and it’s like printing money, especially in our location where it’s again very, very high touristy area. Mount Rushmore brings in between 3 and 5 million people in a 12 month period on a good year. On a bad year like 2008, they’re still bringing in 2 million people in that summer. So huge amount of purse into us. Into a state that has, you know, our state has 800,000 people in the entire state.

So, you know, we’re bringing in huge amounts of this tourism. And so that’s what we see is, is it just that, you know, the affordable housing, but we do building, we also do long-term, we see where the actual costs are. And again, most people would still say a $600,000 house in most areas is not considered cheap. It’s not considered affordable. And yet out of the 50 vacation rentals we manage,

The average cost is 600,000 and that ranges. have a couple that are in the $300,000 range. We have a couple that are in the one and a half million dollar range, but average value to cross of them. When we were taking that build estate, we wanted to just see where we were at was just shy of 600,000. It’s like 592,000 per door. Well, so you start doing stuff like that. Hard to see how it’s affecting long term, but.

So that’s been our solutions. I’m getting on a soapbox now rather than answering your question, but a lot of it is just educating the public and trying to change their opinion on realizing, hey, we’re not the bad guys. We’re not actually, you most of our people, even though that number I told you of all the people that come to visit, most of those are coming from a 200 mile area. And most people in our area, because again, we’re in the middle of the prairie to where 200 miles is only a three hour drive.

So most of the people that come to our area are within three hours of here. We’d almost consider them locals anyways. It’s just part of South Dakota. It’s part of Wyoming. It’s part of North Dakota. And realizing that, hey, we’re not actually the bad guy. We’re not this corporate people that’s coming and taking over. It’s just you and me finding a way to buy my retirement home and own it until I’m ready to move into it. That’s the majority of our owners. But yeah, I mean, it is scary because if we

Nathan Derksen (22:41.011)
If for some reason they did ban everything, which I’ve learned enough about politics and it was unlikely, they’re just going to make it harder. It’s rare that you’ll get a sweeping ban or a sweeping endorsement. But if that were to happen, yeah, we’d have to put 10 people and lay them off tomorrow because we don’t have the cleaning otherwise for the cleaning company. And it would, you know, it would decrease probably 30 % of the top line off the company and gross sales. But

then we just find a way and maybe we would capture that into construction then, or we’d push it into, there’s always another way to go rather than getting stuck on, woe is me.

Stephen S. (23:21.344)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Hey, sorry, you’re not gonna pick up a broom today. You’re gonna pick up a drill. Let’s go build something.

Nathan Derksen (23:26.071)
Well, so I mean, actually, exactly. So one of our struggles in the off season is cleaners. We pay them to go do deep cleans at properties that we’re not getting to charge for because we just need to keep our cleaners to where they’re making money. Well, I don’t want to just pay them to sit at home. So we pay them to go do stuff. But one of the things in long term is I have to check every property every year. Are your smoke detectors, do they have fresh batteries?

Stephen S. (23:52.14)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Derksen (23:52.294)
Is it, you know, what is the condition of the property? Well, right now our property managers are doing that, but they cost more than a cleaner. So that’s one of the things we’re looking into is, can we roll that into the cleaners? And then again, that diversifies. Now those free hours that we, you know, are paying for can all of sudden become billable hours. And yeah, are there other things? How many other opportunities are we overlooking? Maybe we become a commercial, you know, we’ll clean the Walmarts or whatever stores locally.

Instead of doing vacation rentals, it’d be kind of nice if it was a set schedule instead of, hey, guess what? Today we have 22 houses to turn over. And then tomorrow, literally nothing.

Stephen S. (24:33.836)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me ask you one last question because we’re coming up on the end of our time and I like to ask this to quite a few people that have been experienced, been in the business a while, real expert at what they do and you clearly are that in your specific space and niche and you’ve got a lot going. But if you had to go back to the beginning and like really put yourself in the shoes that you were in, but…

Nathan Derksen (24:39.315)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (25:02.11)
you were able to take all of the knowledge, all of the lessons, all of the failures, all of the wins along the past decade or so. What would you do different and what would you do the same?

Nathan Derksen (25:18.655)
That’s a good question. I mean, the cheating answer would be I would buy more real estate because holy cow, that or I’d buy some stock if I could take today’s, I would have bought some Bitcoin. What are we talking about? I just would have spent more money on Bitcoin. We’d be set. But.

Stephen S. (25:29.512)
Ha ha ha.

I had a real high level lawyer that said that exact same thing. says, I would have bought Bitcoin.

Nathan Derksen (25:38.996)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, but that being said, just talking more journey aspect of it, if I if I had to start over again.

Nathan Derksen (25:49.897)
hate to it, but I’d probably do it the same way. mean, this has got me to this level. I heard a quote once that a company, and if you’re a real estate investor, you’re a company. So this applies to everyone. But your finances, your family, all of it is a reflection of the level of the understanding of your knowledge. Not just your knowledge, but the understanding of it. And

Like right now as we’re growing, have one of our bigger issues that I’m learning to deal with is I’m managing the managers. I’ve managed the people doing the work lots of times. I’ve been in leadership most of my life in that sense, but call that low level. This is the first time to where I don’t even know some of our cleaners anymore because I’m not involved in the cleaning side of it. I’m involved with the cleaning directors and managers. Well, at those levels and they’re starting to where they’re doing the hiring.

Now that’s the level of knowledge that I’m trying to learn. And the faster I can learn it, the faster the company can then take the next step. And what you’ll see when I look back at my journey is every time my knowledge increased significantly, the company or the real estate that we invested also increased significantly shortly thereafter.

Stephen S. (27:09.058)
Let me make sure I got that right. So you said, everything is a reflection of your understanding of the knowledge you have. Is that the quote? And love that. Do you remember who said that?

Nathan Derksen (27:14.376)
Mm-hmm. Yup.

I don’t. It was I listened to podcasts 24 seven and I don’t remember who said it. I wish I did.

Stephen S. (27:21.644)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (27:25.218)
I really like that a lot. That’s great. Now, Nathan, thanks so much for being on the show today. If people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about you, see what you’re up to, what you’ve got going on, what you’re working on, where would they go for that?

Nathan Derksen (27:31.188)
Yeah, absolutely.

Nathan Derksen (27:40.467)
They could go to either our website, bear-pm.com, or on Facebook, Instagram, or shoot, give us a call and ask for Nate. And I’d be happy to talk. I love real estate. Like I’ll talk it all day, every day. There are so many different ways it can win for just normal people, which is, that’s what I’m passionate about.

Stephen S. (27:51.49)
There you go.

Stephen S. (28:01.846)
You got man. Love that. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here and everyone. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed today’s show and we will see y’all on the next episode till next time.

Nathan Derksen (28:10.804)
Sounds good, take care.