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Show Summary
In this conversation, Justin Noe shares his journey from being a Marine veteran to becoming a successful real estate investor and sales team leader. He discusses his early experiences with real estate, the pivotal year of 2019, and the challenges he faced in a changing market. Justin emphasizes the importance of hard work, adaptability, and having a clear vision in the real estate industry.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Justin Noe (00:00)
Yeah, great question. And that is how I felt. was like, wow, you know, this is people are saying this is hard, but I’m like growing my business and it’s scaling and you know, everything else. I don’t know if it’s because, you know, I have that marine mentality of get up early and, you know, go to home late or, you know, you’re there until the work is done, you know, kind of kind of thought process. ⁓ But.That has, I think, I allude some of that success to that kind of work ethic that I learned as a Marine and then transitioning that over and just coming to the office every day, getting up, you know, 5 a.m., getting my exercise in, getting my Bible time in, you know, those types of things to get my head right for the day and then going out and crushing it,
Dylan Silver (02:11)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a Marine veteran who’s investing in single family and multi-family properties and is really a Swiss army knife of real estate investing and leads a sales team as well as a flipping team. Please welcome Justin Noe. Justin, welcome to the show.Justin Noe (02:31)
Thank you, glad to be here Dylan.Dylan Silver (02:32)
Great to have you on the show here, Justin. I always like to start off at the top by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.Justin Noe (02:39)
Yeah, so my parents actually owned a few rentals. We lived in one and then we moved to another spot. So I kind of have ⁓ a little background there with it, but they were landlords that were never like did it professionally. So mom and pop stuff. ⁓ anyway, so had a bad, you know, taste about like what it would own to rentals. And then in 2010, I was on my like third duty station as a Marine and my wife.that Christmas gave me a book and a couple of books and the one of them that every real estate investor I believe has read at this point ⁓ is Rich Dad Poor Dad crushed through that and it just got completely changed my mindset about real estate and wealth building in general. And so I went down the rabbit hole ⁓ in the.
in 2011 and we bought our first home as like a live-in flip that we eventually turned into a rental, our first rental property when we PCS out of that state.
Dylan Silver (03:32)
I want to ask you about ⁓ investing while also being military. think a lot of people are maybe proceeding with a degree of caution because they’re thinking about, I have to make sure that ⁓ I’m able to focus and I don’t want to have my attention split. But you also had family that was involved in real estate. your thought process at the time when you were in the Marines, hey, I’m going to be a real estate investor and this is part of the process? Or was it really more of, let’s see how this goes?Justin Noe (04:00)
Yeah, so I was super motivated at the time to get into wealth building was essentially was my driving factor. I had reenlisted in Iraq a couple of years before and had received about a $50,000. ⁓tax free bonus, thought I was the richest guy in the world at the time. And I had placed it in the stock market, I don’t know, in 2007, I don’t know if you what happened in 2008, but the stock market took a big dump. And so anyway, long story short, that book came into my life at the end of 2010 and saw an opportunity there, got.
Dylan Silver (04:24)
Thank you.Justin Noe (04:36)
Excited, looked at a ton of different homes in 2011. I’m sure you could just imagine how many options were available to people to buy. And so, you know, we finally found one in a neighborhood that our friends already lived in and it was a short sale. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. They told me it was going to take a long time to get through it because the banks were, you know, stopping up. It ended up going really fast for me and we bought a house that was.Dylan Silver (04:56)
Right.Justin Noe (05:00)
Fairly new, you it only like six years old when we purchased it. That person had…bought it for $300,000 and we were buying it from him for $150,000.
And so right off the bat, I felt like we were getting a 50 % discount on a property. He had had a tenant living at the time. We spoke to the tenant and she was paying $1,500. I didn’t understand real estate math at the time, but I was like, my payment’s gonna be about 700. This person’s paying 1,500. Sounds like there’s money to be made there. Again, yeah, again, no.
Dylan Silver (06:18)
Ideal.Justin Noe (06:20)
cluehow like how that was gonna work but it was it did end up working in our favor at the end of that I did the math on it I believe over the eight-year period that we owned it it was about a hundred and twenty five thousand dollar net gain to us that’s from the sale that we had on it and then also the rent that we collected over that eight year about the five years that we rented it out
Dylan Silver (06:47)
So, Maureen, you’re also seeing that there may be some difficulties on Wall Street. You’re getting into real estate investing yourself. You’ve got the family that had the background in real estate, but also plotting your own path. Were you thinking at that point in time, you know, I’m gonna be building sales teams and have a real estate portfolio? Or were you thinking, this is a good wealth building tool, but let me see how the first couple of them go. And then also, what was the process like scaling to now you’ve got the sales team?and the flipping team, how did that scaling process look?
Justin Noe (07:20)
Yeah, I did not have…a dialed in like exact vision, like a vivid vision if you will. And we were in Maryland where we bought that first house. We ended up getting orders to California and we went into California and the market had heated back up there a little bit. I kicked myself in the butt the fact that we didn’t buy anything while we moved back to California. ⁓ And we basically took like a three year hiatus until we moved to North Carolina. So back to the other coast where we bought another home and got more dialed into it. And that was in 2016. ⁓
2016 onward we bought another home in North Carolina and then we in 2019 got really serious ⁓ and dug in deep and started investing down here in Florida solely buying you know rental properties not where we were living in them or anything like that and the rest was kind of history at that point where and got me to where I am at today so ⁓
Yeah, it was definitely back then not the case of having a vision. like today, as today, like we do have a vision of where we’re going and what we’re gonna be doing. ⁓ And I looked at getting my license at one point in time, but I didn’t wanna work weekends or nights. And so I second guessed it. But, you know, that’s not how I have set my business up now. I’m not afraid to work nights and I’m not afraid to work weekends. But, you know, I have an office that we come to every single day and we get after it.
Dylan Silver (08:43)
That would be an interesting thing. I don’t know how many people are active duty and then also have a real estate license.I actually have not had anyone on the show do that. I’ve had a law enforcement law enforcement do that, but it would be an interesting niche to do because you’re probably unable to go really full time, of course, because you would have a very full career, but also you’d be able to partake in it in a different way. I want to pivot and ask you about 2019 because that sounds like a pivotal year for you. And I think it was a pivotal year for a lot of people. Great year, I’d say, for for real estate. You were in Tampa at the time in 2019.
Justin Noe (09:19)
So I was in transition from North Carolina to Colorado. And in between that, I took a trip back to my hometown and dropped my kids off. My wife and I went to Colorado, came back to pick them up and leave. But we spent a couple of days. And in that time period, we just drove around showing them the town where I grew up, that kind of stuff. And ended up seeing some houses for sale. And I was just like, I’ve been looking for an investment property. So let me just run some numbers on the ones here. And I started running numbers. And I was like, wow.we can pick this thing up for like $65,000 and then it’ll rent out for like $800. I was like, man, 1 % rule plus. I was like, it’s gonna make money. So anyway, call that agent. That house is under contract, but she’s like, hey, I’ve got some other ones that are similar. So we went and looked at one of them and we ended up putting in an offer and buying it at about 30 days later. And that kind of kickstarted what we were doing down here. I took that vignette and I had a Marine buddy of mine. We had like an accountability group together, just him and I.
about our real estate goals and our professional goals in the Marines. We were both went to officer school together and all that kind of thing so we would just talk about it and I was like hey man check this out I think we should look further down where I grew up and start investing down there because I you know look at this deal that we put together.
Dylan Silver (10:20)
Yum.Justin Noe (11:11)
He thought I had a bias because it was my hometown. So he went and dug in on the data. We were Intel Marines. And so he’s big on analysis. And so he looked at it from a different perspective and noticed that, yes, this is a great place to invest. You can buy cash flowing properties down in this area. And at the time, obviously rates were much better. So it made cash flow a little bit easier to get. Little did we know what was gonna happen in 2020 at the time. So him and I kind of started a company together in 19…2019 bought a couple more properties ended up having a big failure on one of them one of them was like a solid like Double we got a duplex out of it another one. thought was gonna be a triplex We ended up selling it for like a hundred and twenty thousand dollar loss that was a tough deal you can hear about it on another podcast, but we learned a ton there we Lost it all like there in 2020 and then in 2021 we boosted back up and we went on and you know collected four more
properties and ⁓ continued on from there.
Dylan Silver (12:15)
I wanna ask you about the investing path. It sounds like you were looking at single family, looked like maybe a couple multi-family. Were you thinking at that point in time, 2019, 2020, 2021, right? You still had low interest rates then. Were you thinking, hey, we’re gonna really stack up as much as we can in a portfolio of these single family homes, couple duplexes, and they’re all 1 % rule and above. This is great for us.Justin Noe (12:36)
Yeah, that was the plan at that point in time. We were doing the BRRRR method at the time by Rehab Rent Refinance Repeat. And so we got a lot of those in 2021 and we were going to be refinancing them out in like 2022 timeframe. And so we got into 2022 and we had this big refinance package that we were going to do. And then rates went up and banks got scared. And these were like more of like a commercial style loan. And so we actually ended up notrefinancing those into that ⁓
loan product because the banks were now only going to give us, they were going to give us less money out and we were going to have a higher interest rate. And so it didn’t make sense to trade what we had for that package. So we ended up spending months putting it together just for it basically to die at the end. I think we’ve refinanced one that we had the most equity in and we pulled that out and got all of our private investors paid back out. went to one of our other private investors and we just, you know,
refinance specifically with him for like a longer term note. So a 30 year AM schedule, but a five year balloon. We’re still on that right now, but we’re just looking to offload that asset before we have to make that balloon payment on there. So, that was a tricky time, but we learned a ton about timelines, getting stuff done faster and making sure it can happen because things can change pretty quickly ⁓ when…
people get scared and then they, know, banks start changing their rules on you. And if you’re doing conventional style mortgages like DSCRs, ⁓ there’s not the same requirements as like a primary residence that you’re purchasing, you know, that you’re gonna live in and stuff like that. So we learned a ton about it and yeah, so it was good overall because now we’re in a better position to offload those assets now. ⁓
Dylan Silver (14:16)
Rain.I want
to pivot a bit here and ask you about scaling the sales team that you’ve done. ⁓ It’s an interesting space because you’ve got the real estate license, so you can put it on the MLS. You can also assign it to investors. You’re also actively looking for deals. You mentioned before hopping on here, land deals as well. Walk me through how that business came about and how it’s evolved over time and how you scaled out the team.
Justin Noe (15:31)
Yeah, so in 2019, the first property my partner and I bought together, we…ended up negotiating. It was like a for sale by owner called the guy directly, find out that the guy went to school with my mom and all that kind of stuff. But that was till later, but we negotiated the deal ourselves. I, you know, found a contract. I was a Florida as his contract and you know, we put it together and then we ended up closing on that. And then in 2021, we found another deal that, you know, I had kind of put together. And at that point I was like, I need to get my license. And so I think in 2020 I had gotten it, but I was activated in Colorado and really wasn’t
and putting it to use until later in 2021. And so just kind of transition planning for the Marines, like what am I gonna do? Am I gonna be able to do real estate investments and potentially sales long-term? I was a little nervous about the sales piece, because I’d never been in a sales position or anything like that. I’ve done negotiations, but normally had a sales representative that we would go between for our negotiations. And so…
After doing a couple of my own, I was like, man, I feel like this would be great and it would be an asset for our team moving forward. so went all in on sales right around retirement time. And yeah, it’s been a crazy ride in 2022. In June of 2022 is when I really went full time, no W2 job necessarily. I was still an active duty Marine, but I had like this early out program. So I was going through that.
and was able to scale up in 2022, kind of get my name out there. Oh, sorry, no, 2022 wasn’t the case. I get these mixed up because of all the transition stuff that happened, but it was 2023. June of 2023 is when I really went all in on it, because I was still a Marine and I didn’t have the time. But in June of 2023 is when I went all in. ever since then, like our business has really scaled and taken off. We have a couple more agents. Actually, we have four more agents on our team now and we all have various responses.
Dylan Silver (17:10)
Yeah.Justin Noe (17:29)
within the team structure and everyone that’s on the team also enjoys investments and so we try to find deals to be able to partner on with each other and things like that.Dylan Silver (17:40)
Ithink what’s really interesting about hearing your journey is, ⁓ you know, this was an uncertain time for anybody, let alone someone going through a career transition. If you take real estate as a whole, Florida real estate, for instance, 2019 to today, we’re looking at two totally different things. It’s harder to be a fix and flipper today in many cases than it would have been to be a fix and flipper in 2019. You’ve got slimmer margins, you’ve got higher rates, you’ve got different market pressures. And so when you were getting in, going full time, you mentioned
there was still a lot of change and uncertainty and that was where you were going full-time with it. So it was an interesting time to really dive in. Were you feeling any of that or was it because you were really immersing yourself for the first time fully that you were like, is all I really know. This has got to be the new norm.
Justin Noe (18:30)
Yeah, great question. And that is how I felt. was like, wow, you know, this is people are saying this is hard, but I’m like growing my business and it’s scaling and you know, everything else. I don’t know if it’s because, you know, I have that marine mentality of get up early and, you know, go to home late or, you know, you’re there until the work is done, you know, kind of kind of thought process. ⁓ But.That has, I think, I allude some of that success to that kind of work ethic that I learned as a Marine and then transitioning that over and just coming to the office every day, getting up, you know, 5 a.m., getting my exercise in, getting my Bible time in, you know, those types of things to get my head right for the day and then going out and crushing it,
going to, you know, all kinds of networking meetings as part of, you know, various boards in the community. And then, you know, so serving my community as well as is a big factor for me personally. I enjoy that. I love where
grew up and so ⁓
I definitely can feel that it is difficult out there, right? When we were buying stuff, you know, as investors in 2019, 2020, 2021, it was like, it’s hard to find a deal because they’re moving so fast. And then now things move slower, but it’s like, oh, it’s hard to find a deal because they can’t make money. So people are always having the excuses of why things are hard. And we try to just, you know, find areas that it isn’t hard, right? And get in there.
Dylan Silver (19:36)
Right.Justin Noe (19:52)
I shouldn’t say hard, it’s gonna be hard, but challenging, know, in trying to find ⁓ in deals. There’s a deal in every type of market, you just have to be willing to look and you have to be willing to put in the work and the effort every single day to get it done.Dylan Silver (20:04)
Justin, we are coming up on time here. can folks go if maybe they’re in the greater Tampa area and they’re looking at deals, would like some feedback, or if they’ve got a deal and they’d like to reach out to you?Justin Noe (20:15)
Yeah, so.Most active on Instagram, my handle is Justin Noe Real Estate. Noe is spelled N-O-E. So again, Justin Noe and then real estate, all one word. And then we do have a website that you can check out as well, and that is justinnoerealestate.com. That is like the first place that you can interact with us, leave us messages. You’ll get my contact information there if you want to give us a call. And yeah, love to help anybody out, at least evaluate the deal for you, give it a second look.
kind of give you an opinion on that.
Dylan Silver (20:48)
Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.Justin Noe (20:50)
All right, thank you, Dylan.
