How Military Veterans Built A 50-Flip Real Estate Business Through Relationships

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (00:00)

We had a property that we bought in a new market. We never bought a house there before. This was when we were kind of like, we’re going to expand. We’re going to buy more. This is a beach market. Beach houses do great. ⁓ And then it was around the time after we bought that and getting ready to list that the market kind of dropped off. Interest rates skyrocketed. We found out something we should have known was that beach markets are kind of seasonal and that we kind of missed the wave and we ended up sitting on that house 18 to 20 months, something like that with interest of probably about three to three, 3,300 bucks a month, which is a lot.

Micah Johnson (00:00)
Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Codie and Chris, who’ve been making some serious moves in real estate investing now for the last five years. Fellas, welcome in. Glad to have you.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (00:13)
Hey, Micah. Thanks for having us.

Micah Johnson (00:15)
Absolutely, I’m pumped for our call today. You guys’ story excites me. One, because I love seeing veterans and military members use what they learn in the service to just, man, blow up life outside of it. I have a couple other good friends who I’ve seen do similar things, and it’s just awesome. And there’s an edge that we talked about pre-call that I think leans to that, and more people need to know about it. And especially if you’re young out there and not sure what you want.

there’s a path that leads to entrepreneurship which could leverage this very same thing. So let’s be open today, listen to this. I think a lot of value is gonna come from the call. So Codie, Chris, for those out there who aren’t familiar with you yet, tell us a little more about yourself and what y’all’s main focus is right now. Sure. So we run a fix and flip, primarily fix and flip company called Easy Day REI. That’s right outside Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in Jacksonville. ⁓ Primarily fix and flip about

50 to 60 homes a year in the Anzal County or what we call Eastern North Carolina market. ⁓ I handle more of that project management front end dealing with contractors, walking deals, wholesalers, agents, and Codie’s very much kind of back end, you know, doing the underwriting, working with lenders and attorneys and managing the books and that kind of stuff. So yeah, it’s pretty scaled operation that we’ve grown over the last several years. Heck yeah. Codie, what’s your take, man?

Tell us some more.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (01:43)
Yeah, I think he hit most of it, Micah. know, really the other other side of that story is kind of the back end. We have an integrated property management team and we have a lot of rentals. That’s kind of why we why we’re doing what we’re doing is to kind of build up a more passive side. It’s not entirely passive as much as it’s pitched, but you know, we really want to build up a legacy and something that will last longer than this month’s flip revenue. So, you know, the flipping into the buy and hold is kind of our game.

Micah Johnson (02:12)
Excellent man. I love to hear that. Well, we’ll take us back What what led y’all to where you are today the partnership what birth that you know as you one thing I’ve heard about what you just described you’re both offset to your strengths, right? You you each get to do the thing that makes you tick and that is a huge thing when it comes to partnerships and building businesses is Spending the majority of your time in that strength activity Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Codie and I met in the military. We went to the same school together. This was back in

2021, 2020. Yeah, and we were running partners just, you know, doing marathons and races on the weekend and naturally it led to a lot of conversing and eventually kind of real estate started to take over more of the conversations. It seemed to be something we’re both interested in. We both had a couple of rental properties at the time and I ended up finding this little two bedroom, one bath downtown in the ghetto and reached out to Codie to see if he’d want to partner on it. And we did. that

led to two, three, four, five, six rentals. And then at that point, we ran out of money, which most people do, and it doesn’t grow on trees. ⁓ So we said, OK, we have to start flipping houses. And we flipped one house. And that’s where really Easy Day was born out of, was ⁓ flipping houses actively to build rental income or rental property portfolio passively. And it’s not quite passive yet, but that is the.

That is the goal of Easy Day is to get to the point of having an easy day. Gotcha. Gotcha. And why real estate? So both of you are a little interested in it beforehand, but what led to real estate? There’s a lot of things to do in the world.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (03:50)
Yeah, so we viewed real estate as something that we could do a little bit more passively than, you know, a storefront or some other more actively involved job while we were both active in the Marine Corps. And so, you know, me personally, I caught the bug from ⁓ Robert Kiyosaki reading that book and just thought about making money grow while I sleep and that kind of thing. And it just naturally became what was going to be the easiest for us based on our day jobs.

Micah Johnson (04:19)
Right. Now, Chris, you’ve you’re not in the military anymore, correct? Is this what you’re doing full time? Yeah. So I got out and did a couple odd jobs because the business wasn’t ready to take me on full time. And I think twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three is when I kind of we were scaling enough where I said, OK, we’re going to need to take that jump because that’s going to allow me to, you know, take that business to the next level. I know I can earn my own keep if I’m able to commit more time to my business. So.

That was the very scary thing to do, obviously, when you have a family and that’s a big jump to go from W2 to self-employed, but it’s panned out for the best. We skyrocket our business. We were able to take it from one or two deals a month at our highest seven or eight deals a month. So it’s been a blessing. And now we’re just kind of waiting for Codie to join that side as well. Well, what allowed that growth? What allowed you to, besides your time, and that is such an important thing, especially in that fear side.

I want to touch there for a second. If you’re out there listening or watching and you’re you’re in that place where you’re making that jump. Chris, how much would how much could you explain showing when you have all your time to do it, the exponential nature of what you get to create, right? Because there’s a fear there. It’s like, know what it’s doing now, but can you dive into that a little bit? What you experienced? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is a real fear, like I especially when you have a family and you’re like, OK, I’m.

I’m going from this guaranteed paycheck to like, okay, what if we don’t sell, you know, the amount of flips that we need next month to, you know, pay the interest only payments on our loans, but then also pay my payroll and all the other expenses that you have in operating a business. And you kind of need to have that understanding. Like even if it’s my worst, like, you know, maybe I take a little bit of pay cut for the time being, knowing that I’m not building someone else’s dream, I’m building mine. And that’s really the key there is, you know, I was tired of paying for someone else’s beach house. wanted to.

to build our own and build our grow our own net worth. So yeah, it really is just kind of, you have to take that shot. You have to have some background of like, I know that the business is doing something. You don’t wanna do your first flip and decide to leave, but once you kind of get a little bit of a steady line, you know you’re gonna be able to commit 40 hours instead of 10 hours. You’ll find that line of success and you just keep growing on.

How much would you say and y’all still, did the military prepare you for just what it’s like to be an entrepreneur? Just the things you got to deal with.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (06:53)
Yeah, so we both work in budget and finance, supply chain management, those types of things. And it didn’t really aid a whole lot to our success in real estate and what we were doing. But I think it was more about the teamwork that was kind of imbued into us in the military, in the Marine Corps. Teamwork, effectiveness under stress. We’ve had some really tough days, weeks, months, maybe even a year. But being able to manage that stress and overcome that,

was ⁓ not as challenging for us as I think it probably was for some of our friends and colleagues and people we’ve talked to that have left the industry. ⁓ We’re not getting shot out here. We can overcome this. We believe in ourself. We have a goal and a future that we want to ⁓ strive towards. And so our ability to manage the stress and push through as a team, being able to communicate really well with each other, it’s really that kind of stuff. And then as our team has grown, we have

⁓ Several employees now, virtual assistants and one local employee as well here in North Carolina is the organizational leadership, right? Like, understanding what tools that we need to be providing and getting to know the people that we work with and those types of things. So teamwork, communication, effectiveness, under stress, all those types of things have been huge for us as we’ve continued to grow and scale.

Micah Johnson (08:14)
And I love it because that’s the nuts and bolts of a business. It’s the, that’s real estate’s a funny environment to me where all life, all your life experience counts somehow. Like somehow everything you’ve ever been through counts towards how good you can be at real estate. And especially when you can handle hard things well. And when you, I love y’all’s viewpoint. I didn’t have it. I did not serve. Thank y’all for serving the, but to know that when you can compare it to something

as extreme as y’all have the possibility to experience. You get this viewpoint, this perspective on it, that it’s different. Because each person kind of goes until they tap out. And in y’all’s journey through the military, I imagine that’s what basic is. It’s tapping out over and over and over again and expanding yourself. Because it’s not tapping out, it doesn’t matter. It’s just knowing, OK, that was the end of me. That’s as far as I’ve got. How far can I get next time? And how far can I get next time? Because it’s like weightlifting. It’s that.

That lesson is everywhere that the more hard you’re exposed to, you’re gonna handle hard things better. So I mean, don’t pick stupid stuff, hard stuff to expose yourself to, but there’s like a way, I call it testing, literally putting your fight or flight mechanism, training it on purpose. Go expose yourself to useful environments that fire your systems off, get you tweaked out, get to have to force you to focus, because business is gonna do it, life’s gonna do it. You’re gonna go through hard things.

And if you don’t fall apart during them, it’s way easier to keep going after, right? There was a, I think it was a quote from the end of one of the Hunger Games series movies, but it hit me hard. He said, it’s way easier to keep ourselves together right now than to put ourselves back together if we all fall apart. And it’s like, dang.

Dang, how can you just not blow yourself up? And it’s that steady just exposure to harsher things knowing that you got it. What do y’all think? Am I on or not on?

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (10:12)
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely on and you know, it’s not just like, you know, brave fart, like high risk things that were just okay with the the collateral damage, right? Like, again, we’re making risk based decisions with things that we’ve put in place to mitigate risk, you know, again, that’s just something that has been imbued in us. And so when we’re making decisions and taking risks and doing these types of things, it’s not just, you know, random blind bravery, it’s planning and contingencies and alternate plans. And so

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And you’ve got to you got to be calculated for sure.

Micah Johnson (10:44)
that hope isn’t a strategy and that is real estate. it’s not really, and you were talking about a little bit on this more earlier, Codie, I want to nail into it because the main place where hope can’t be a strategy is in your underwriting. You make your money on the buy in this business. Like that’s where you win. If you win there, the other side doesn’t bite you normally. It’s when you got a lot of things that need to go right, more chances it’s going to go wrong.

Okay, so take us into how y’all how you plug that into your underwriting how you disciplined it more to make sure that look If we don’t take on bad deals, you know, I’d rather have no deal than a bad deal, right? Right

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (11:25)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So underwriting has been something that we spent a lot of time on. ⁓ know, we’ve got to give towards the end of this an underwriting tool. But, you know, we really, as we take on deals and we see our nets not really reflecting what we expected them to reflect, we really did a deep dive and figured out like what is going wrong here. know, HGTV will tell you purchase price, renovation and profit, but there’s a big chunk in there that’s not accounted for. And that’s all the hurting costs and the expenses associated with.

with a buy and a sell. And so, you know, we got to a point where we weren’t making what we expected to make. ⁓ And so we went down the line and looked at all of our HUDs over the last several months and looked at like, hey, what’s the average that we’re giving in this market for closing costs? You know, people need closing costs in this market. And so then we started adding that to our underwriting. That’s a four or five, $6,000 line item now that we put into every project ⁓ that we were just letting go out the back door. didn’t plan for it.

And then we look at all of our attorney costs, all the detailed information on every HUD and be like, okay, I never really accounted for, you know, when the taxes aren’t prepaid for that year, we have to pay for the whole taxes at once there at the end of the year. There’s just a lot of variables that you really have to be dialed in on. And some of them are market specific and others are just vendor specific. And so you, you really have to be careful to be as close as possible and then start to analyze what did I actually net and why was it different and make changes fast because you know,

Again, we’re buying five, six a month. so, you by the time you make changes, already third, twenty five deals deep. And so the repercussions can be poor. So, you know, our biggest thing, you know, as we’ve gone along is like really looking at the numbers, looking at the details and making sure we’re dialed in to our initial assumptions were.

Micah Johnson (13:12)
Do you have a lesson you can share with us? We all love sharing our – I love the highlight reels, but I like for folks to hear the hard part too of is there a particular home or deal that jumps out at you when you think about that calculator of this is why I made this. Here’s where I paid for my education right here that you wouldn’t mind sharing.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (13:36)
You want to do it or I can throw one out there? Doesn’t matter.

Micah Johnson (13:39)
Yeah, yeah, I think we’re thinking of the same one. ⁓ But if I’m not thinking of the same one, then Codie can definitely. But we had a property that we bought in a new market. We never bought a house there before. This was when we were kind of like, we’re going to expand. We’re going to buy more. This is a beach market. Beach houses do great. ⁓ And then it was around the time after we bought that and getting ready to list that the market kind of dropped off. Interest rates skyrocketed. We found out something we should have known was that beach markets are kind of seasonal.

And that we kind of missed the wave and we ended up sitting on that house 18 to 20 months, something like that with interest of probably about three to three, 3,300 bucks a month, which is a lot. And I think when it’s all said and done, I don’t know, maybe $70,000 in the negative. So a very expensive course on, buying wrong, not understanding the asset you’re buying, the location of it. And that’s been a repeatable lesson. Still we’re learning today. Like this is not

day one, was like literally we just sold it in January. ⁓ So we’re still we’re still making corrections to our business of of where we buy and what we buy. And that’s why the underwriting sheet has gone under five different sets of revisions right now. So there’s still a couple more deals like that. And you will with any business, you’re to have the the ups and the downs. But, you know, just like what you might learn in the military, just kind of, you know, brush yourself off, put your pack back on, take a sip of water and just keep going.

Right. It’s part of it. And then if you’re listening or watching into this, it’s how many can you learn from other people? Do you have to make the mistake yourself? If so, it’s going to be very expensive and take a long time. Or can you learn from other people? Because I mean, Codie, you nailed something a second ago, which talks about why most wholesalers are failing in the industry right now is because the 70 % minus repairs is not the whole formula. It’s not the whole thing. It’s leaving out a

25 to $35,000 section every time and it’s weird how most wholesalers are always off by $35,000 these days. It’s cuz you just aren’t accounting for it. I Forgot where I was going with that ADHD got me cuz y’all were on so many good points there ⁓ Now Codie words at the same house you were thinking of

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (15:57)
Yeah, that was exactly the same house I was thinking ⁓ of. There was a hidden line item, there was a hidden factor in there and that was just location, the market. You don’t see that when you’re walking in, you have your contractor quoted, the purchase price, the most likely sales price. One thing that was missing was some of the important market data ⁓ and some of the ways that that market was trending. so, yeah, that was the house.

Micah Johnson (16:22)
How do y’all go about getting that data now?

I honestly, I think now we’re just, understand our core market, Onso County, Jacksonville so well, like I could just do it on the back of my hand. That was just an extension of that. And I think we just took that risk and we learned that lesson. We felt that, that burn. And so now we just made a business decision in this current market. Let’s stick close with what we know. Houses over where we know are moving much faster. The prices are a little bit lower. You know, we have a lot of, ⁓

Military, you know members buying housing so they could the VA loan so it’s just a little bit easier to get through that process So that that was the biggest the biggest thing that we made was just buying back in our core market in the current market Buy box is an interesting lesson to learn and and from 2018 to 2020 I was selling houses to hedge funds in Tampa, Florida and Jacksonville, Florida were my main markets and I was blown away By how well they work?

When I first got the opportunity to move them and I saw what it was, I’m like, I’m never gonna be able to sell y’all a house. This is crazy. And then I ended up selling them 50 of them a month for month after month. And I was just like, what did y’all crack here? Wait a second. What is this actually? And it really goes into the concept of business itself. If everyone’s your customer, nobody is your customer. Like, what do you do well? What’s the product that moves through your system? Wear it out.

Amazon only sold us books for nine years. That’s it Then they could sell us everything else and we a lot of us get that wrong up front because we do one house man Don’t flip a house. You’re gonna feel really incredible out there and then you’re just gonna be like where’s next Give me that thing over there. I don’t care. We’re gonna make it work and it it it gets us that way so it’s that It’s just a funny industry where? You got it you need to believe in yourself maximum while also using data

Data and belief heavily correlate because there’s just the nature of the risks that we deal with. Most folks aren’t prepared for that. Like when you go to sleep with a lot of debt, that’s useful functional debt for your business. You still got to fall asleep with that on your chest. Like you got to handle that well. So if you don’t handle stress well, definitely not the world for you. Absolutely. Now.

One thing that really got me for y’all’s business as we discussed it before and chris this leads more towards your world is how y’all leverage relationships and codie you were dropping on it as a Really a thing y’all were learning in the military how to communicate well how to build network well how to work well with other people Y’all literally have what almost no marketing budget and relationships drive 50 to 60 deals a year How do you do it take us into?

what y’all work on Chris and how important that is for what y’all do. Yeah. And we kind of use it as a tagline around our business, but it’s probably the biggest thing that I can drop on somebody else is your, your net worth is your network. And that’s, that’s never been more important for our business. We’ve from the time we had one deal was, you know, a real estate mentor of ours to now doing, you know, 50, 60 year, you know, meeting with agents and teaching them how to use investors as friends and not enemies, uh, meeting with wholesalers, telling them how to properly underwrite deals.

You know, just telling people what you’re doing, your lawyer, your notary, your lender, know, just leveraging people in your community, going to Facebook, Rio groups, you know, it’s probably one of the biggest things that we’ve done to impact our business. And it’s something we still use today. We don’t have any sort of marketing budget to get leads. We have a website, but that’s pretty much, you know, self-sufficient. ⁓ But it really is just networking with people, telling them what we’re doing.

showing them the kind of buyer that we are because that builds relationships. And we just walked up a deal last week with a new wholesaler and he’s like, man, I called around to the attorney to drop the contract off. And he’s like, they just, they, they sung your guys’s praises. Then I reached out to another investor. know in this area is like, yeah, you want to link up with them. So it’s just, have this like natural aura now because we built this relationship in our market. And that just leads to more business because now you’re trusted and you’re proven and you know,

Now the data, like you said earlier, is backed up when someone goes and looks Easy Day. man, they’re holding on to 40, 50 deals right now. Like they are active in this market. And that’s a huge, huge thing for our business that we’ll continue to use. Folks like to work with people they like, know, and trust. That’s it. And real estate is a team sport, especially this industry. We can’t do anything alone. You can’t buy a house by yourself.

You can’t be all the people necessary to do it. Like there’s just so many and

over, I used to not work well with people. I just had an, it just didn’t come out, you know, wanting to butt heads. grew up playing football. If you can’t get around to just run through it, right? Like, let’s go. And that was a lesson that I had to learn was the better you work with people in this industry, the further you can go. It creates everything because uniquely homes touch humans in a way that’s just different than most commodities.

And whether you’re buying a distressed property from someone or getting ready to sell it post-it, you’re plugging into life in a way that’s a very unique industry. And I tell folks, especially getting into real estate, you’re solving two problems, especially if you’re going direct to seller marketing. One’s the math problem. The second one’s the person, the people problem. You don’t convince them with math. That’s not the solution there.

They’re selling their house at a discount for a reason. That reason is a very, very heavy reason. It takes emotional intelligence to handle it, to walk through it with people, because if you’re a crappy person, you can take. You can really take. Or you can do it in a way where they thank you for doing it and they don’t care how much money you made. They know all of it. They see the line. They see it with you too. that’s how f****g

For a, and y’all are in a smaller market. I love that in a smaller market where you can get out and get around places. What other ways are y’all leveraging relationships is coming up here.

I think something we’re kind of getting into as like I said, we finished our underwriting sheet. We’re trying to share that with other investors. ⁓ You know, I think we joined a mastermind last year called Collective Genius that kind of, you know, kind of has some of the top investors in the country that need up. So I used to taking that that net next level of, you know, network is finding like minded individuals like us and just working with them sharing best practices and just

just really, especially in difficult market, it’s really time to kind of get together and say, how are you getting through this? What are you guys doing? What do I need to change? So we’ve taken a closer look at that over the last year. So it’s less local networking and now it’s just more nationwide. How are the other people like Easy Day and, and investors getting through this? And I think that’s just as important as your local market as well. It’s a different kind of networking.

especially for entrepreneurs. you go to a group like CG or Investor Fuel, there’s another one that’s out there. When you’re going, you were going for a peer to peer network. You were going to talk to other skilled investors doing what you’re doing so that you can get a real freaking answer from someone that you trust. And we call it, I nickname them country clubs for real estate. That’s what it is. You’re getting in a room with other people who paid money to be in that same room so you can get through the riff raff. Okay. That’s why we

That’s why those folks belong to Augusta. It’s to get through the riff raff because the other ones that are out there. Because that’s the thing about the nature of free groups and things. It’s really good for your local market, but it doesn’t feed the soul of the investor as you get bigger because there’s not that many out there in reality. The company I was with when I was a member of CG, we studied it. We looked up data to see how many skilled investors existed in 2022 nationwide.

It was less than 800 doing 40 a year more. Right? It’s not that many. It’s a small group. And when you get into a niche of a niche of a niche, having folks like you find in these groups is, it’s priceless. The ROI is on so many different levels because one, man, it feels good to be around humans who get you.

Like there’s just, it gets you off your Island. I remember my first event where I just got chills thinking about it. If you can see it, like truly it’s just like, whoo, you can kind of take a deep breath. You can talk about, you’re not performing. You’re presenting, right? You’re getting real answers. It’s game changer. Love that from, from when y’all been in, what’s the biggest thing you’ve seen from being in a high network group like that for your business.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (25:32)
Yeah, it’s been an awesome peek behind the curtain. Like you said, it’s a peer-to-peer thing and it’s a really small community of people who are doing things at this level. so, going to local meetups sometimes or going to other communities and things like that, it’s…

It’s a lot of chatter, it’s a lot of what I would like to be doing. It’s a lot of this is what I’m doing, but you have the conversation. They’ve only done it one time those types of things. And so getting into a room with a bunch of people that are doing the same things that you’re doing at that level, ⁓ you talk less about what you’re actually doing and talk more about what’s going wrong and how you’ve overcome it. And so.

Nobody in these rooms are really trying to prove themselves or talk about all their successes. They’re really talking about what’s not working for them and how the collective group can help address that problem, how they’ve overcome it or through a different vendor or those types of things. so, you know, we’ve gone so far past this casual conversation about what we do in real estate to like, you know, managing an actual scaling business. And it’s just, it’s a different level of discussion and it’s been amazing.

Micah Johnson (26:39)
You said it, I love the way you said that. It’s a room where people are more impressed by what you’ve overcome than what you’ve accomplished. Because everyone in them knows what an accomplishment is. It’s action times time. You can do whatever the heck you want if you just do it long enough. So the accomplishment itself was a byproduct, but what you went through to get there, that’s that knowledge that we all have. And that’s where it hits like the real life. Like entrepreneurs, one, I want to tell you all this.

Congratulations on what you’ve done. I don’t think entrepreneurs get told congratulations enough because when you pull it off, it’s all, yeah, they’re always going to do it. And when you don’t, I told you so, right? There’s like no love in the middle, but it’s really, it’s hard. It’s hard to wake up each day and handle the uncertainty. One of my favorite quotes is by Virginia Satir. Most people prefer the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty.

Yeah, and entrepreneurs are the ones willing to wake up every day and not have the answer to be like, I just don’t know yet. Okay. Like, I don’t know who can I talk to? Who can I go find out? And that’s where those rooms start to change the game. Cause now you’re not just learning local. You’re getting nationwide heartbeats. Cause markets are nuanced. Each market’s its own thing.

New business, new market, new business. That’s the reality. Cause you got to set up everything again. Y’all may have went through it a little with the beach house, but this gives you like, if you could ask someone in the group, Hey, what do you think about this? Right? What’s the chances you bought the beach house? Cause again, that’s what you’re going through is what’s not working because that’s all that really matters.

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (28:17)
Yeah, no, absolutely. ⁓ Chris says it all the time, but he really traded a nine to five or a five to nine. And the entrepreneurial journey is just incredible. It’s an amazing accomplishment and the amount of work that it takes to keep it going and that kind of thing. I think it’s definitely taken for granted. And it’s something that I’ve taken for granted up until this point in the last five years. It’s a lot of work, a lot of stress and a lot of unknowns. Like you said, you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

But you just have to believe in yourself, right? And again, have the appropriate risk mitigations and planning in place to push forward and accomplish your dreams.

Micah Johnson (28:52)
That’s right, It’s that balance, the belief and the data. Because at the point that y’all are at, you have the data. Up front in it, it’s heavy belief, work with somebody, right? If you don’t know how to get the data, go learn. But it is both of those. And they start to govern your decisions. And what I’ve found throughout my life, just applying more more, that’s what creates real freedom. Because you got peace. You got systems. You got processes. It’s not so much, I have to hope this works? It’s no, based on all these

indicators this should do this and maybe this could happen but I can account for it this way and I mean you know when you’re talking to a professional because they got at least three dispo strategies on every property they’re bringing down because it’s not random it’s not it is a business it’s and it’s it’s on purpose it’s intentional and that’s what leads to the life that we all say we want which is that time and that freedom but it’s it’s along the way are you willing to do what’s necessary to create it

And that’s where the real estate market in America gives us. I didn’t come from much, so it gave me an opportunity I never had. And that’s where, man, if you’re here and you can capitalize and you are interested in it, Codie, Chris, where can folks go to see more about what y’all have going on? Where can they possibly submit you a deal if you have going on? Because guys, before you answer that, there’s a reason I bring folks like Chris and Codie on this show. They’re actually doing it.

There are people every day in the trenches learning and who were willing on this show to tell you the hard parts. That’s who you want to follow. That’s who you want to work with. You heard him talking about their reputation in their market. These are the professionals you want to learn from. So for folks that want to learn more about you possibly submit deals. What’s the best way for them to find you get a hold of you. Yes. So for social media we have our Facebook page which we stay pretty active just posting.

informational content, as well as deals that we’re doing or sold or buying. Um, that’s our handle here.
Easy Day REI LLC. Um, it’s got a red, white and blue house on it. Um, and then we have a website as well. If you want to submit a deal, um, separate kind of entity there, but it’s www.ibuync.com. And there’s just a form that you could fill out. If you have a deal you want to dispo, but, know, happy to, if you want to, you know, DM us or email us through there, we can, uh, we can work a deal work.

coaching opportunities or any sort of mentorship or just, you know, where we’re finishing up this underwriting calculator, we can, you know, share that with, with investors as well. Like I said, we don’t want people to say, make the same mistakes that we did. So if we can help anybody else coming on the way and save them that, that $68,000 loss, like let’s do it. Love that. Another one of my favorite things about high level real estate operators. Most of them have the abundance mindset. Like you just said,

It’s how can I help? It’s truly a heart to serve. So I appreciate that. So for signing off, Codie, what do you want to leave folks with, man? For someone out there thinking about it, already going, what’s one of those messages you can leave them with as we sign off?

Chris Tarpey and Codie Gauthier (32:03)
Yeah, absolutely. Some of the things we really want to touch on is the importance of network and underwriting and the details. But the other thing is, ⁓ you know, getting to the top of the mountain is where you want to be. But that’s just a really short time sitting on top of the mountain. It’s really the journey that you really need to enjoy. You know, there’s nothing new under the sun. People have probably heard this advice before, but I needed to hear this advice. You know, sometimes every other month, like, why am I frustrated? And so it’s like, you know, you’ve got to really take a step back and

Celebrate small wins, like small, small wins, and have a good time. ⁓ Don’t wreck relationships. Don’t get overly frustrated in a situation. Just overcome the situation as a team and do your best to enjoy it. Enjoy the ride.

Micah Johnson (32:45)
Hmm. Chris, what you got, man? Kind of picking off that. But the biggest thing that we see, you know, talking to other investors, we kind of lead courses and things like that is, is actually taking action. You know, a lot of people wait for that perfect house, that perfect market, that perfect opportunity analysis paralysis. It’s just not quite there. I mean, you really learn through taking action. That’s the only way you’re going to get to the top of the mountain. So, you know, find that opportunity, underwrite it, make sure things work and numbers make sense, but ultimately take that next step.

I promise you it’ll be 100 % worth it. definitely, you know, do your do your analysis, but don’t, know, don’t wait forever to take that first step. Love that man. Codie, Chris, thank you all for being with us today. Appreciate y’all’s time, your story. I think we need more folks like y’all out there doing it, especially from the military community. If you’re out there in the military or have retired, leverage this market, leverage this into your world. It’s life changing and you’re uniquely equipped to do it.

Truly, truly. So thank you all for being here. For those that are watching, listening in, thank you all for joining us. If you got value out of today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with someone else you think you get value out of it. And if you’re not a subscriber yet, you know what to do. Click the button, follow along. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators just like Codie and Chris, folks out there building a real business in the industry. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you all in the next episode.