How to Build Passive Income With Real Estate and Stop Depending on Your Job

Christin Kingsbury (00:00)
Man, if I had a team speech to give to newcomers, I would tell them don’t get distracted. There’s a lot of shiny objects everywhere that will pull your attention. And it all comes back to the bases, like the basic foundation of business. It all still comes to, you know, how many people are you meeting? How many new relationships do you have?

How are you following up with those people? How are you offering them value? Like it’s not about how many social media posts or what that guy’s doing on YouTube. It’s literally the same foundational business practices that have been around for hundreds of years.

Joseph Crooms (02:07)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Joseph Crooms, and today I’m going to be—I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with. Her name is Christin

Kingsbury, what a name. I’ve been looking forward to chatting with her, and therefore let’s get right into it. Christin, say hello to everyone.

Christin Kingsbury (02:31)
Hi, everybody. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Always fun to be in a new group of people, and investment talk is my favorite. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joseph Crooms (02:41)
All right, so so Christin already teased us on what she does. So let’s so so first of all, for people who may not be familiar with your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days?

Christin Kingsbury (02:54)
I run a real estate team and have twenty-one investment properties and am just working on building a a life that funds itself and is designed the way I want it.

Joseph Crooms (03:05)
Those twenty-one investment properties, are they yours or individually or are they teams?

Christin Kingsbury (03:12)
No, they’re mine individually. I have twenty-one tenants, not twenty-one investment properties. I said that wrong. I have twenty-one tenants. So I own a mobile home park, some multifamily, different things like that, some Airbnbs. And no, they’re mine exclusively. My husband and I own them personally with no partners.

Joseph Crooms (03:28)
Okay, okay. So now how you were talking to me about developing your team. Yeah. And how what shifts have you made since you’ve been doing this and how long have you been in this team leadership position?

Christin Kingsbury (03:42)
I started a team in 2014 out of necessity because we were in the REO world and you couldn’t do all the things the banks were required and carry all the listings if you didn’t have a team. And so since then, you know, the market has changed and shifted. The systems and the requirements have changed and shifted. And really the the thing that has changed the most in my world is just, you know, I can be really good at selling real estate or buying real estate.

But it doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader of people. So really growing in the leader of people side of things.

Joseph Crooms (04:14)
And and what have you learned?

Christin Kingsbury (04:16)
I’ve learned that it can look good on paper and the math can make you know perfect sense on paper and then you add humans and you add their lives and you add all of these things and and it gets really messy. And so I’ve learned that there has to be systems and love. There has to be accountability and you can’t just save people.

You have to teach them how to think and you have to help them and grow them into the best version of themselves while you’re doing the same. So it’s it’s a journey and it’s never perfect. One of the things I’ve learned is it never you it back in the day I thought you would build a business and you get to a time when you have succeeded. And the truth is like businesses are always learning, are always growing and changing and the markets change and so.

It’s a live breathing thing that’s just constantly always evolving to the next level.

Joseph Crooms (05:53)
Christin, what other businesses are you involved in?

Christin Kingsbury (05:55)
I’ve got property management. I’ve got a title company that I have ownership in. I’ve got a pre-IPO tech company for real estate. So all things real estate related, but several different versions from managing properties to the technology that helps us find them and helps us run teams and things like that.

Joseph Crooms (06:15)
Volume question. What is your book of business? I mean, you got multi-businesses, all real estate related. What would you say your monthly book of business looks like?

Christin Kingsbury (06:22)
Volume wise, it’s it’s shifted over the years. I mean, we as a real estate team, if we’re talking sales, have always been at about just about 40 million, about a hundred transactions. As market shifts, sometimes that goes up, sometimes that goes down. But that’s kind of been our average over the years. I’ve got a team that only it’s a small team. I don’t have a massive team. A lot of people have, you know, 30, 40 people. I’ve got three or four regular producers.

And so it’s looked different over the years. On the investment side of things, that that’s a separate entity and that’s the more consistent kind of cash flow, but I reinvest that back into itself to pay its mortgages down and to go buy new investment properties.

Joseph Crooms (07:07)
And on those personal business, what is your value of your book of business, may I ask?

Christin Kingsbury (07:11)
Volume like the forty million on the on the real estate side of it?

Joseph Crooms (07:15)
Yeah, you told me on the real estate side and then you told me about you have your own investment business. So what would you say on a personal business level your volume of business is? The

Christin Kingsbury (07:23)
Rental, if you’re calling that personal business, I guess is what I think you’re asking me. We bring in about $14,000 a month. Okay. Most things are paid for or a couple of them are still on mortgages. We’re improving them to increase the income, different things like that. So it it sometimes we have vacancy.

Joseph Crooms (07:45)
So what caught my attention about what you were saying is and and the metrics that you’re—how do you manage both all these businesses?

Christin Kingsbury (07:52)
And I have two children and a husband and a farm.

Joseph Crooms (07:56)
I

Christin Kingsbury (07:58)
Lots of systems and people that are helpful. Obviously you can’t do all of this alone. And so I have a couple of partners that are I call them partners. They’re they’re not employees. They are they help me with different aspects of the business as independent contractors. And I lean on them and I have trustworthy people that

know the role that they hold and I leverage them because I couldn’t possibly do it all by myself, but I do do a lot of it myself.

Joseph Crooms (08:27)
What’s been the key to keeping your machine running smoothly?

Christin Kingsbury (08:29)
Loving people and having good systems and checking in on them. When you quit paying attention to the metrics, you lose really fast. And so constantly keeping your eyes on the metrics.

Joseph Crooms (08:40)
Mm. Now every operator I know has has a moment when things just got real. And you can talk about a couple of them if you want. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that you had to pivot fast. Do you mind sharing a couple of those moments with us?

Christin Kingsbury (08:54)
Gosh. Yes. You know, over the years I would say one that stands out when you say that was

partnering with a company that the owner decided she was just done with the business. And I was there running my business under her business. And she was like, I’m not doing this anymore. And literally just kind of blew it up. The doors got locked and we were like, my gosh, like we don’t have an office space. Our computers are locked inside. What do we do? And just being able to stay calm and ask yourself, what’s the next best thing? Like what do I need to execute on next so that all of this doesn’t go sideways? And you just

I dunno, you stay calm and you pay atten—you prioritize what needs to happen and you let fly and let drop off the things that really don’t matter in those moments.

Joseph Crooms (10:17)
What did you do to get operation systems in place? What did you realize?

Christin Kingsbury (10:21)
I realized I didn’t need anybody. Like, I think in a lot of businesses you feel like you need somebody in order to

In order for things to work. And at that moment I realized, hey, wait a second. Like I’m perfectly capable of feeding myself, of taking this to I a mentor of mine looked at me and he goes, “What does it have to do with you?” And I thought to myself, “What do you mean? The whole damn business is falling apart in front of my eyes. What do you mean what’s it have to do with me?” He’s like, “Put your head down, stay focused on your income and your income-generating activities and just keep going. And the building and the owner and the franchise and all the things around you will fix itself. But you keep your head down and you keep going.” So that’s what I

did and it seemed crazy at the moment. But, you know, we internally had at that time spreadsheets that were running everything that we needed to do and all the tasks that needed to happen, and we just kept on our daily activities and our consistency with our clients and with our with our processes

and put our head down and it didn’t matter that the franchise crumbled around us because internally we were running our own little bubble and it just kept going regardless of the brand around us.

Joseph Crooms (11:27)
What are you focused on solving or scaling next? What’s the next real goal?

Christin Kingsbury (11:31)
Hmm, I just wrote a book on building a banking system within a family. So using real estate as the asset. And so I’ve been working on a podcast around that that goes with the book and just training people to self-fund their lives because people are so dependent on job income that the economy is scaring them. And and it’s it’s hard on people right now. And so helping them to change from job income to passive income and really build

just a self-funding mechanism that helps them to fund generations is my passion and is what I’m working on right now.

Joseph Crooms (12:06)
I hear you sorta giving a team speech to newcomers. What does that sound like?

Christin Kingsbury (12:12)
Man, if I had a team speech to give to newcomers, I would tell them don’t get distracted. There’s a lot of shiny objects everywhere that will pull your attention. And it all comes back to the bases, like the basic foundation of business. It all still comes to, you know, how many people are you meeting? How many new relationships do you have?

How are you following up with those people? How are you offering them value? Like it’s not about how many social media posts or what that guy’s doing on YouTube. It’s literally the same foundational business practices that have been around for hundreds of years.

The media has just changed a little bit to where you can do it with tools now.

But the foundation of it is still the same. So do the things every day. I tell people all the time I used to have a three-by-five card and it said, add five new people, follow up with five people that you’ve met before, write five handwritten notes, and study your market so that you’ll be knowledgeable about the product you’re selling. I did those things every day relentlessly, like it was my job that somebody was gonna fire me for if I didn’t.

And it has always carried me through. And it was a three-by-five card, like with handwriting. It was none of this fancy things. But we get so caught up in what other people are doing and the basic foundations of business have not changed.

Joseph Crooms (13:28)
I know a lot of our people and listener are are early in their journey and looking to level. I think that they’re gonna benefit for this. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Christin Kingsbury (13:39)
Getting belly to belly with people, going to the grocery store instead of ordering the Instacart, talking to people in the line, going into the bank, going like the things that we used to do to get in front of real humans and see their face and shake their hand and make eye contact. There’s so many conveniences now that have robbed us of the opportunity to

to build rapport and relationship fast. And so the going into the office, the talking to the agents, the, you know, meeting with people physically. And I find that people crave it because since COVID, there’s been just, you know, people have have gone so remote and they kind of stay home and they really crave real interaction. So finding ways, whether it’s at church or at the kids’ school or we do rodeos. So

whether wherever it is, just the old school back to basics, real relationship, give a hug kind of opportunities.

Joseph Crooms (14:36)
That’s great.

You do rodeos. Well, and that got my attention. So I can imagine you. Christin, let me ask you this. So how is AI, how are you leveraging AI?

Christin Kingsbury (14:48)
I love it. It’s so much fun. Like, my goodness, things that used to take me forever and cost me a fortune. I’m an idea person. And so when I get an idea, I can run it by AI. I’ll give you an example. I’ve been kind of stuck in some processing, some thoughts, as far as my team goes. And this morning I was asking AI. I’m like, in my life, whenever I’ve been super clear on what I want, I’ve always got it.

I see it clearly, I know the next steps, I’m after it, and it’s mine from relationships to businesses to investment opportunities, all of it. But when I get these gray areas where I have no clarity and I’m like, I kind of have all the things that I want. I’m happy, I’m like I live an awesome life. I’m it it’s not that things aren’t hard, but I’m very grateful. So I don’t have a lot of want. And so this morning I was asking it like, help me to clarify the next thing I want to work towards because I don’t

want anything and normally I did. And so it starts, I asked it to ask me questions to help me bring clarity so that I could make a path and a direction for the next step. I use it in investment opportunities, in helping analyze properties. I use it in helping me analyze my expenses and my P&L. I use it in helping me craft the message for my hiring and my my messaging for my audience.

I literally use it every day for all kinds of things. But you gotta be careful because people are also getting sick of it in some ways. They don’t wanna see a bunch of AI inauthentic ads and things like that. So use it to amplify your already like your gifts, but not to be you.

Joseph Crooms (16:20)
Thank you for sharing that, Christin. So I want to know what’s the name of your book, what’s the name of your podcast, and then you know we’re coming to the end. But we want to know how people can connect with you, how they can collaborate, learn more, and what’s the best way to reach you. But go in that order, talk about your book, talk about your podcast, and then tell us how to get in touch with you, Christin.

Christin Kingsbury (16:38)
So the book is called The Family Banking Blueprint. And it is essentially what my hundred-year-old grandmother, who has invested and funded a really great life for a lot of family members, taught me about real estate and investing and funding an awesome life for a family. You can find it on Amazon.

Joseph Crooms (16:56)
Hold

up. Take take your time. Let us see it. And I’m gonna tell you why. You’re gonna love what I share with you. Thank you very much. We got I love the picture. All right. All right. We got that. All right, continue.

Christin Kingsbury (17:08)
The podcast is based on that. So it’s me taking the words and the lessons in the book and having a conversation with people every day about it. And so it’s called The Family Banking Blueprint Podcast. And I’ve been doing that and working on that in the mornings and it’s fun. And I’m just coming up with real-life scenarios that apply to this and like walking people through it. And so

the best place to find information on me is either on Facebook by just searching Christin Kingsbury or christinkingsbury.com takes you to all my stuff. And so there’s just kind of a a Linktree type setup that has links to all the things.

Joseph Crooms (17:45)
So you know what Christin, somebody was looking for a pen, they was fumbling, so give it to them one more time.

Christin Kingsbury (17:50)
Christin Kingsbury. So C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N kingsbury.com will get you to me.

Joseph Crooms (17:56)
Great. Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time. I your diversity in business. All the best with your team, your perspective, your philosophy that you’ve developed. We need more people in this space who are doing it the right way. Thanks again for being here, Christin. Thanks.

Christin Kingsbury (18:12)
I appreciate you.

Joseph Crooms (18:13)
And for those of you tuning in, I know you got some value for this. Make sure you subscribe.

We got more conversations coming from operators just like Christin Kingsbury, you know how to reach her, who out there building real businesses, helping people not just in gain employment and eventually branching up to where they need to go, but helping communities as well. So we’ll see you on the next episode of Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. And we had today, hey Christin, Kingsbury say.

I’ll talk to everybody soon.

Christin Kingsbury (18:47)
I’ll see you soon. I hope to hear from you.