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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Micah Johnson speaks with Brittney Krznaric, a real estate investor from Pennsylvania. Brittney shares her journey from being a registered nurse to becoming a successful real estate investor. She discusses the challenges and lessons learned along the way, the importance of networking and community in real estate, and how her family is involved in her business. Brittney emphasizes the need for continuous education and the value of building relationships in the real estate industry.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Brittney Krznaric (00:00)
I think it’s the reason why you wanted to get into it in the first place. We knew we wanted more time with our family and the more I researched, I knew nothing about real estate. I was telling you earlier, I didn’t even know what drywall was when we first got started. I had no idea the opportunities that real estate presented. just never really knew anyone that did it, had no clue. And the more I learned and the more I educated myself, I was like, wow, this really could be something that could help us get to that goal.Micah Johnson (02:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I am speaking with someone who has been making some really good moves in single family residential space out in Pennsylvania. Brittney welcome in. I’m glad to have you.Brittney Krznaric (02:19)
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.Micah Johnson (02:21)
Iam too. am too. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching real estate in general. our pre-call, before we got on here recorded, I just love the story that you have to share. So I’m excited to dig into it. So for people who may not know you yet, what is your main focus right now and what markets are you operating in?
Brittney Krznaric (02:42)
So I live just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We focus very heavily in our local market. We’re pretty specific on that. But I started out as a registered nurse and a mom and wife and was basically trying to find a way out of the daily work grind and led me into real estate.Micah Johnson (03:03)
Okay, that’s a pretty generic way of saying it. What does lead me into real estate mean? So nurse to real estate, take us through it. How’d you get there?Brittney Krznaric (03:11)
All right, so here’s the funny part, okay? So I had my son, I was working full time as an ER nurse, so I was always hectic and never got out of work on time. My husband was a carpenter, he worked a lot. We just worked our butts off and that’s how we were raised. And you know, once you have kids, it changes your perspective a little bit and we were both just like, this isn’t how we want to live life. You know, we want to enjoy our life, we want to spend time with our kids and not constantly be worrying about work and all the things.So we started kind of looking for ways that we could cut spending and things like that, but nothing really panned out. And we were actually, I was pregnant with my daughter, my second child, and we were on our way to have her. I had a scheduled C-section and we were dropping my son off at my sister-in-law’s house. And as we were driving there, we happened to notice that the house next door, which is where my husband grew up, was for sale.
And my sister-in-law knew the tenant, and she knew the owners. ⁓ She really didn’t want to move. And my husband was like, well, we should buy that house. She really wants, you she wants to stay there. It’ll be a great investment. This could be the thing. And I said, okay, well, let’s go have the baby. And then, you know, we’ll talk about it after. So, yeah, priorities. So that’s how it got started. That’s what started the conversation, I should say.
Micah Johnson (04:39)
Okay, so what happened next? Were you all able to get that house or what was, how’d that conversation keep going? You had your daughter.Brittney Krznaric (04:47)
Yes, so about a week later, we’re home with the baby, all is good. Family’s over. And like I said, he had known the owners of the house. It was actually his mom’s boss who lived in out of state. And turns out at that point that the house was already under contract, so we weren’t able to buy it. But it just kind of got our gears rolling a little bit.And then I think it was maybe like a week or two later, we went to a graduation party. And there was a guy there that we had grown up with who
was a self-made entrepreneur, the only person that we had really known growing up that was kind of doing his own thing. And my husband Sean was like, I really want to get into real estate. ⁓ What should I do? And he basically responded to him, why haven’t you done it yet? What are you waiting for? And he told him to go read the Rich Dad Poor Dad book, which I think is, it’s like the Bible of real estate. And my husband who never reads ever listened to this book like in one day.
And I was so impressed when he read it and he told me all about it that I was like, okay, you know, maybe I really start taking this a little serious. He’s really, he really wants to get into it. And so I read the book and you know, we just kind of started diving into all things learning, you know, watching YouTube, whatever I could get my hands on. And you know, we started looking for houses.
Micah Johnson (06:58)
the parts of the story I want to pull out there for folks listening is that house was under contract and you didn’t let it deter you. And how many people kind of get stuck right there? Like they feel like the stars are aligning and everything’s, ⁓ this is it. It’s all going to happen. And then it doesn’t because that’s just not how it works most of the time. But then they’ll stop right there. Right. What was it that just said, OK, keep going?We wanna keep doing it. Like for y’all, what helps you keep moving past that point? Cause it could maybe help somebody that finds themselves there right now.
Brittney Krznaric (07:34)
I think it’s the reason why you wanted to get into it in the first place. We knew we wanted more time with our family and the more I researched, I knew nothing about real estate. I was telling you earlier, I didn’t even know what drywall was when we first got started. I had no idea the opportunities that real estate presented. just never really knew anyone that did it, had no clue. And the more I learned and the more I educated myself, I was like, wow, this really could be something that could help us get to that goal.So it wasn’t like I grew up and was like, my gosh, I can’t wait to buy rental property. But I was like, I want to be with my family more. And so that was the way that we knew we could get there. And as long as we stayed focused on that, it kept us going and saying, okay, we wanna buy a house, gotta figure this out.
Micah Johnson (08:22)
I like that because it has to connect back to that. What was that original reason why when you drove by on the way to have your daughter, tap him back into it because it’s there was a book I read. It’s by Jensen Chero. It’s called You Are a Badass. And it was the first personal development book I’d ever read a little over 10 years ago now. And one of the things I found so interesting in it that she talked about was whenever you do make the move to like take action, your main character moves in your own life.Don’t be surprised when life does something funny back to see like you serious. Is that what you really want to do? It’s okay if you do, but there’s some things to go through along the way. And a lot of times folks don’t take that as the go sign where it is the green light. It’s almost, and that’s what I’ve learned throughout my own career is that feeling is actually what the one you push through.
Brittney Krznaric (09:13)
Absolutely. Maybe a little bit of delirium too because I wasn’t sleeping much, but yeah.Micah Johnson (09:19)
Right? know, has to, know, early childhood or yeah, kid days. Yeah, I remember those. Mine are 10 and 12 now. So it’s been a little bit, but yeah, the sleepless nights and you never make it up. So that’s what I figured out. I quit keeping count of how much I lost. I was like, it’s fine. It’s okay at this point. So where are y’all at for 2026? What’s your big opportunity this year?Brittney Krznaric (09:27)
Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm. Exactly.
So this year, so we’ve been going pretty steadily for, we closed on our first house in 2019 and we never really stopped. We just kind of kept going, going, going.
And over the last two years, our kids are now 10 and seven and they’re getting into sports and they’re getting into all these things that we really want to be a part of. And now we’re looking more to simplify. We’ve bought a lot of rentals. We’ve kind of went, you know.
We just bought everything and anything we can get our hands on for quite a few years. And now we’re like, okay, know, our long term, our long term goal is to be able to live off of this and use, you know, the income we make to make memories and buy things and do things that we want to do. But we’re tailoring it to our life. I don’t want to own a million doors. You know, I want to own a decent amount that allows me the cashflow I need to live my life. And, you know, we’re not there yet.
but that’s what we’re kind of trying to stay focused on. So we mainly have rental properties. We do have a short-term rental that we bought because it’s in a place that we like to visit and we use it a lot and we want to buy one or two more and at some other places we like to go. ⁓ But we only are really holding on to deals that meet our buy box. Anything else we’re selling or wholesaling or whatevering and we’re just really trying to stay focused on simplifying our life.
and outsourcing as much as possible so that we can enjoy all the hard work that we’ve put in for the last seven years.
Micah Johnson (11:54)
So that’s definitely the answer of someone that’s been through some stuff. Because what you’re saying is what the veteran professional investors say, where you don’t get to what you just talked about by accident. That was learned through lessons. So what have been some of those things you all have learned along the way that you tried and didn’t like, or that’s led you to see, okay, this is how I want to do real estate?Brittney Krznaric (11:58)
HahahaSo I think that both of our personalities are very like I need to fully 100 % understand something in order to be able to like take it on. You know, like if I’m gonna do something I’m gonna go 100 % in I want to understand it. I want to be the best at it and I just sort of picked one thing at a time, you know, like I self-managed all the rental properties in the beginning. So like I said, I started, you know, learning about home inspections and watching YouTube videos on that.
Obviously my husband was in construction so he could guide me and that was more his thing but I still wanted to understand it. But my next thing I dove into was okay, how do I be a landlord? What do I gotta do? And I just went all in, I wanted to learn everything I could and it just, one little thing at a time. It was learning the land learning thing. Okay, I screwed all these things up, now next time I’m gonna do this better. Until I got to a point where I had a really good system in place and I knew what I expected out of a manager.
And within the last two years, I’ve actually switched almost all of my properties over to property management. But for me, I had to know how I wanted my properties run, how I wanted them managed, make sure that the person who I have an incredible property manager now, but make sure that they’re gonna treat my properties the same. But you just can’t know those things unless you do them yourself. The more disconnected you are,
the more things fall through the cracks and I just didn’t want to run our business like that.
Micah Johnson (13:49)
It makes sense. it’s super valuable, whether you’re trying to build a big business or whatever it is you want to look like, is knowing the positions, understanding what whoever’s going to do it, what they’re actually doing. Right. Because it’s a scaled up real estate investment company has 50 positions in it. It’s not like a small amount of things. Doesn’t mean 50 people, but there are 50 different things you got to get done. If you’re going to do that at scale.And if you don’t know what to do or what they are, or even how to relate to the person that’s going through it, you’re gonna have some problems, especially when it comes to property management. I like what you said about someone that would care about it as much as you did, because so often that’s not the case. You’re just another file, just another address, just another person in the pile. And when you’re approaching it the way you are, this is a way bigger deal than that. This is…
your focus on this because right now you’re full time in real estate and is your husband full time with you or what’s he doing now?
Brittney Krznaric (15:30)
No, he works full time currently, but we did take ⁓ two years where he did leave his job and we went full time real estate. We were fixing and flipping. We were doing everything we could. again, didn’t really have a plan. We just kind of did it, went for it and learned a lot and realized that we wanted to have some stability. We weren’t really fully ready. We weren’t able to live the way we wanted to with what we were doing. So we decided one of us are going to go back. ⁓we’re gonna start simplifying and getting to a point where we feel like our rentals and everything that we’re doing, we can not just sustain life, but live it the way that we want to. And so, but we had to screw up a bunch of stuff a long way to get to that point.
Micah Johnson (16:17)
It is truly. And that’s something I try to teach my kids, like it’s part of it. It just has to be part of it. If you’re that upset by failing, you wouldn’t have learned to walk. So deal with it. Right. Like, you know, nobody just stands up and goes, you fall who knows how many times and then you get back up. So like, since we were small little things, we are geared to do that, to get back up. And now.Brittney Krznaric (16:29)
Yep.Fall forward.
Micah Johnson (16:43)
It’s funny, we become adults and we get so butthurt about how hard things can be and about failing in general, it’s like, how you freak out. And it’s like, well, that, didn’t do a whole lot. Like now what are you going to do? You know, and you’re, right. You pay for that stuff and blood, sweat and tears, but you’ll never forget. And now, you know, once you know, and that’s the key to real estate. One thing I’ve really appreciated that you’ve talked about so far is you never stopped educating yourself.You look, you didn’t just run off and do something. You were looking at, okay, what’s this mean? And what’s this mean? And what’s this mean? Because that’s a huge key to being successful in real estate is go be proactive in learning. Don’t just wait for the mistake to try to learn. Like what can you figure out? Now you mentioned in the pre-call that you created your own local meetup. How important has networking and building relationships been to your business?
Brittney Krznaric (17:41)
it’s everything. ⁓ So prior to starting the meetup, ⁓ I actually during COVID time joined a lot of virtual meetups because obviously we had nothing better to do, right? And I met a couple that lived in New York who they were doing creative financing. So seller financing, mortgages, things like that. And I really wanted to learn how to do those things. And I said, let me come work for you. I’m organizing this. I don’t know what you need, but likejust let me come work for you, I wanna learn what you’re doing and I’ll do whatever you need. And that turned into a whole other incredible thing that we can talk about. But to get back to your point, ⁓ I learned through them how much community and networking, because I never even met them in person for like years. We just talked online every single day. ⁓ But I learned so much through them and I got to a point where we really decided we wanted to take things full time and I said, well, if we’re going to,
You know, we’ve made this community in the country, but we don’t really have this community locally where we’re buying and we’re doing deals. So we were like, you know, let’s start our own meetup. And we had seven people show up to the first one and it was really tiny. And, you know, now we average about 20 to 30 people and the people that I’ve met have become some of my closest friends. They’re the people I call when, you know, we’re over budget and under everything and all the things are going wrong because they understand.
And we’ve just, we have such a great support system of local, you know, their business owners, their contractors. We’ve developed such a great team of contractors because of the meetup. There’s just so many, so many great things that have happened because of that. And I just, you know, it’s, really your community and your network is everything. When people say that it’s so true.
Micah Johnson (19:32)
I agree more, is so great. Real estate is a relationship business, and I’m sure you could say that about all businesses, but real estate in particular is one because of how many different pieces and parts are involved. You have your contractors, you have your lenders, you have your title companies, you have your inspectors, have all these different things that all have to touch this thing for it to all work.putting yourself in the position to meet these people. And a lot of folks struggle with it, introverted or whatever. This is so far beyond that. This is if you want to be successful, go be with the people that are doing it. Go, go bring them together. And even if you’re out there and you don’t have a local meetup around you, do a pretty good start your own. There are other people there. I promise that when you get together,
Brittney Krznaric (20:23)
No.Micah Johnson (20:26)
One plus one does not equal two when it comes to humans. Like even just two people together can do way more than one person can do on their own. And then like you said, just having that getting you off your island, that person to call that gets it, right? That there’s not many people you can just, you know, blow some steam off to. And once you grow in real estate, but having people there that can understand, yeah, man, I get that. And then also have a solution to your problem. What about this? Have you thought about that?because that’s where it really comes in. We only have our point of view and it comes from our own life and all that jazz. So it’s like getting out there with other people to point something out. Because what always got me was how obvious it was when they said it. You’re just like, are you serious? That’s, my God, always. Why didn’t I think of that? Because you never would have thought of that. That’s not the way your brain worked. So I love hearing consistent answers on that question where…
It truly levels up your life. And it’s not just work. Like it makes you more money. Great. It makes your business better. Great. But it makes your life better.
Brittney Krznaric (21:30)
Yeah, it does. And I feel like people in real estate, I don’t know what it is, but just like everybody wants to help see everybody grow. You know, it’s like when you’re doing good things, you want to bring other people up with you. And a lot of times, you know, when you’re starting a business or doing, you know, people don’t want to see you do well. And I just find that the more people that come in, you know, likeI will help anybody any day. I’ve sat on the phone for hours with people helping them do deals and it makes me happy because someone did that for me at some point and I’m paying it forward to them. And I just feel like everybody I meet that’s in real estate in some way, or form just has that same mentality. And you it’s, need that because, you know, when you first get started, like everybody’s questioning you, why are you doing this? why do you want to be a landlord? And you’re questioning yourself, but you need people that are going to keep you going. And that’s what having that community.
is just such a great thing for me and for us. It’s like our favorite night of the month to go to our meetup.
Micah Johnson (22:29)
It’s true. It changes the whole game once you have it. It gets you. It’s funny, even in the paid ones, I’m big on the masterminds to like, how the heck do you put yourself around people that are doing it? And you hit a good point there. It’s funny. Real estate folks. I’ll agree with this. They’re the most abundance mindset people I’ve ever met at the highest levels and the highlight, the ones who are really good at it. They are happy to tell you what to do.Brittney Krznaric (22:43)
Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.
Micah Johnson (22:57)
They don’t haveany issues doing it. It ain’t like a secret. It’s like people are good at fishing. They won’t tell you the spot, right? They’ll never share where it is, but people could at real estate, they’ll tell you, Hey, this is how I did that. And this is how I did this. And it’s just like, thank you. Thank you for doing that. And it could does it creates that where when you get, can’t wait to get your chance. I remember one of my first coaches I worked with, I, one of his things about the coaching that he did was you had to pass it on to
Brittney Krznaric (23:03)
Yep.Micah Johnson (23:26)
three to five other people and never charged for it. And as he taught me, I’ve still never charged for what he taught me, but getting to that chance to tell the next person, this changed my life. What did I want to tell you about it? And you actually want to hear, like there’s nothing like someone telling you what you want to hear too, you know, like you’re actually saying something I want to talk about.Brittney Krznaric (23:44)
ThankYup.
Micah Johnson (23:48)
Yeah, I get pretty riled up about that. So, ⁓ it gets me pumped. Well, to get things wrapped up, before we wrap up, if someone wanted to follow along with you or even possibly have a call with you, whatever it is, what’s the best way to find you?Brittney Krznaric (23:50)
Same.So I’m pretty active on Facebook. That is where we advertise our business. And it’s just my name, Brittney Krznaric We also have a business page, which is where we do a lot of deals. We have a lot of referrals, which is triganhomebuyers. And we now very heavily involve our kids. They come and help us work on the properties. And they’re involved in all the things. And we’re trying to teach them and raise them. This is how.
how you make money, is how you do all these things and they’re all part of our growth. So you can find me on either my business or my personal page.
Micah Johnson (24:42)
Awesome. And that’s so cool. You’re teaching your kids that I think that’s something our generation is doing really well. In my opinion, as I get older is our kids are getting to learn things. I was never taught. No one even would mention it to me. And now it’s like they get to be actively involved. So I love hearing that. So I appreciate your time and your story, your perspective ⁓ or just sharing it. Yeah, it’s great. I think we need more people out there doing it like you’re doing it.Brittney Krznaric (24:54)
Mm-hmm.Micah Johnson (25:08)
finding your way, building a business the way that you want to. I just think that’s so powerful. So for those of you tuning in, if you got value from today’s episode, please like this episode, subscribe to our podcast. You’ll find Brittney’s information, their links in the show notes. So check out down there, give her a follow. If you want to reach out to her, feel free. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators just like Brittney who are out there building real businesses and changing their lives. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you on the next one.
