How to Build Passive Wealth Through Done-For-You Real Estate Investing

Steve Earl (00:00)
And so what I found, what our model is, is every five to seven years you’ve created enough equity and cashflow that you can take that property, do a 1031 exchange or a cash out refinance, and you can turn that one property into two.

And we have helped literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people start with one home and ultimately end with five, six, seven, 10 plus property portfolio. And that’s our goal. That’s our objective is to do it slowly over time. You know, like I mentioned to it’s kind of boring real estate. It’s like, holy cow, you buy a home and you wait for five to seven years. It’s like, yep. But what else can you do that’s passively creating you a hundred thousand dollars of wealth in five to seven years?

Scott Bursey (02:11)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast powered by investor fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey. And today we’re taking the friction out of real estate investing. We’re talking about true scale, true freedom, and true passive income. Our guest, Steve Earl of Done For You Real Estate USA brings the fuel of efficiency to the market. He and his team are masters at building massive wealth without the investor ever having to swing a hammer or chase a tenant. If you’ve been looking…

for the blueprint to remove yourself from the daily grind and still crush your financial goals, then stick around. This is a high octane conversation you can’t afford to miss. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Earl (02:50)
Hey Scott, I’m super happy to be here with you today, excited for this conversation.

Scott Bursey (02:54)
Absolutely, it’s going to be a lot of fun. And for those of our listeners who may not be familiar with your journey, please tell us, how did your career begin and what is your main focus now?

Steve Earl (03:05)
Yeah, sure. you know, starting way back kind of in the beginning, you know, growing up, I grew up in Canada. And as a young person, I was always entrepreneurial. I’ve never really had a real job, which has been interesting throughout my life. You know, as a kid, you know, delivered newspapers and hired my friends to deliver them for me. I learned about leverage at a very young age, not really understanding and knowing.

that that’s what I was doing. But looking back on it now, I see that I kind of naturally discovered that the power of leverage. From there, you know, I went to college, I got a degree in business management. I spent some time in South America and moved down to the States. And, ⁓ you know, I started while I was in college, I started a painting company. And, ⁓ you know, got my first few jobs knocking on doors and, you know, learned ⁓

learned the hard way how to start earning an income. along the way, when I graduated, instead of taking a job, I continued with my contracting company. I grew that into one of the largest local painting companies in the county here where I live in Utah.

In I sold that company. And the reason why I sold is because I had started getting into real estate. I had a business mentor who was in commercial real estate. He always invited me to learn more about it and to do some deals with him. And so I wanted to create some more capital so I could do it full-time. I just fell in love with real estate. So I sold my company in 2004 and became a full-time investor. I started flipping homes.

But very quickly one of the things that I learned from my mentor is that you know flipping homes is a great way to earn a living it’s it’s kind of a job and the way to create wealth is to hold on to real estate long term and ⁓ At the time I was kind of like a kid in a candy store. You know, I I ventured into some commercial stuff. I I I bought land Subdivided it built homes

I bought homes, tore them down, subdivided land. I bought multi-family, I bought single-family. And I finally, you know, kind of found my way into single-family and buying and holding and doing rentals. And what’s interesting, Scott, is in this journey, I found that my friends and family wanted to kind of, you know, see what I was doing. They wanted to do what I was doing. And they’re like, hey, can you help me? And so with a little bit of time, was like, man, I might as well get my real estate license here.

and so I can start helping them in addition to doing my own investing. And before I knew it, I was like the top producer in the real estate brokerage where I worked. so after about three years, I started my own brokerage and then I realized that this is one of the things that I realized, Scott, is that it was kind of second nature to me, but for the regular person, it was pretty tough. I remember helping a buddy of mine buy some real estate and…

⁓ you know, like a month or two later, I called him up. I’m like, Hey, did you got, did you got it all rehabbed? You got attended in there and he hadn’t even done any of the rehab. He’s like, I don’t even know how to call. I don’t know what to do. And, and that’s when I realized that is like, I felt responsible for him, right? Cause I helped him buy this real estate. I’m like, dang, I gotta like figure this out. So I started figuring out how to like do a little bit of education and, then, and then I realized it’s like, man, these people need financing and they need insurance.

And so one thing led to another, I bought a mortgage company and then I started an insurance agency and I kind of created a of a vertically integrated company and then I got involved in property management. so, long story short, I ended up creating this organization that is a done for you real estate model where I take regular, hardworking, busy Americans and I help them own real estate without

you know, a lot of the headaches involved in real estate because as you know, real estate can be very messy. So that’s kind of my journey.

Scott Bursey (06:49)
That’s awesome. You’re definitely playing the long game and what you’re offering has so much value, Steve. So let’s dive in. This is the question that’s been on my mind ever since we booked you. Really? How does having an expert team already in place accelerate a pros path to to portfolio scaling, Steve?

Steve Earl (06:54)
Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, it’s everything, right? So depending on where you live, you might not live in a city or a market where it’s really conducive to single family long term rentals. You know, you might, you know, if you live in, you know, Los Angeles or New York, it’s like, man, like those are two markets where it’d be pretty hard to root pretty tough to buy a single family home and rent it out with sufficient cashflow to even cover your mortgage. And so, you know,

That’s one of the things that we do for our clients is we do all of the research, right? We it’s like hey, we’ve determined X city is the right place to buy because there’s population growth growth There’s you know, there’s a good Industrial industrial base. There’s great job opportunities and so on right so When we identify a market then we go in we create some some infrastructure some boots on the ground and and so

The other thing is that we find markets where the price point is such that you can put 25 % down and it’s affordable. So like our average purchase price is about $285,000 as opposed to where I live in Utah, the average purchase price is pushing $600,000. And yet the rents in the market where I’m buying a $300,000 home or a $285,000 home, they don’t scale with the price, right?

you know, I might get $2,400 in rent on a $600,000 property in Utah. And in Oklahoma City, I’ll get $2,000 rent on a $295,000 home. And so this way, you know, you can get a little bit of cash flow out the gate or at the very least you can break even. so when you have that as part of your model,

where it’s like you know you’re going to a place where you can cash flow like right out the gate, then that becomes scalable, right? Because when you go to buy that second property, know, your mortgage payment does count against you, but you can count 75 % of that income towards balancing off that payment, and it just makes it more doable. The other thing is you got a team who’s finding the property, right? They’re walking you through the process and…

They’re providing the financing for you and then they’re doing all the rehab for you and then placing the tenant and managing it for you. When you do that, that allows a busy, hardworking individual to just keep focused on what they’re doing and doing their job, but yet they got this real estate working in the background.

And so what I found, what our model is, is every five to seven years you’ve created enough equity and cashflow that you can take that property, do a 1031 exchange or a cash out refinance, and you can turn that one property into two.

And we have helped literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people start with one home and ultimately end with five, six, seven, 10 plus property portfolio. And that’s our goal. That’s our objective is to do it slowly over time. You know, like I mentioned to it’s kind of boring real estate. It’s like, holy cow, you buy a home and you wait for five to seven years. It’s like, yep. But what else can you do that’s passively creating you a hundred thousand dollars of wealth in five to seven years?

Scott Bursey (10:53)
Absolutely. speaking of your model, what’s the biggest risk investor takes when they delegate the entire process to a done for you company?

Steve Earl (11:03)
You know what, that’s such a great question, Scott, because it blows my mind every time we get a new customer. We have customers in 42 states. And so we have a lot of clients in Hawaii because it’s hard to buy over there and they want to buy on the mainland. so we’ll have somebody that we’re working with in Hawaii, working with one of our team members here in Utah, buying a property in Florida.

And I’m like, holy cow, that takes so much trust because 90 plus percent of our clients will never step foot in the properties that they buy. And so there’s a massive amount of trust that’s required to move forward. And that’s why most of our clients come from word of mouth is because they have a trusted friend and this has worked for them and they know us and they trust their friend. And so that trust gets, you know, kind of transferred to us via their friend.

And so that man, I think that that’s one of the biggest hurdles is having that level of trust because, know, unfortunately, you know, in our, the world today, there’s a lot of shenanigans that go on and, and you might be buying something that you didn’t think you were buying. And, and so I think that’s, that’s one of the biggest things. And so you’ve got to do your due diligence with whoever you’re working with. And there needs to be systems and processes in place that help.

firm up that trust along the way. And you got to deliver on the expectations that you set, plain and simple.

Scott Bursey (12:25)
Absolutely, it all comes down to the due diligence of your team. You absolutely must trust the quality of that foundation being built for you.

Steve, interested to know with technology making remote investing easier than ever, what new cash flowing markets are opening up for the done for you model?

Steve Earl (13:19)
Yeah, another great question. one of the things that we’ve done in the last few years is so our whole focus has been on long term rental strategy, right? So we don’t do short terms. We don’t do multifamily. We don’t do duplexes, any of that. And we have all kinds of reasons for for sticking to single family residential. You know, our model is three bed, two bath, two car garage, middle income neighborhood, median home price.

so that you attract a good tenant and you attract good property management. And one additional strategy that we’ve implemented recently is what we call midterm rentals. We literally get two to two and a half times the rent and we rent to corporations, but it’s a furnished property. And the reason why I bring this up based on your question is…

Aside from the market being really good, you need to make sure that the strategy that you’re deploying makes sense for a particular area. But based on the two strategies that we have, long-term and mid-term rentals, Oklahoma has been fantastic. We opened that market up about four years ago. Another market that we opened up in the last two and a half years is the Dallas-Fort Worth market. Fantastic market. Property taxes are significantly higher.

So in that market, we deploy more of the midterm rental strategy because of the higher cashflow that makes it more tenable. If you’re doing a long-term rental, it makes it harder to cashflow. You may even be a little bit negative cashflow if you’re just doing a typical regular long-term rental if you’re only putting 25 % down. Another fantastic market. We subscribe to a data service.

And so we’re always looking at markets and so on. We’ve been in the Indianapolis market now for about 10 years. And what’s awesome is that the Indianapolis market today is one of the top markets to be in for single family residential. And so we love that market. We’ve got great infrastructure there. We’ve been there forever. So the people that we work with, they know us, we know them. We’ve been doing business. We’ve literally delivered our clients over a thousand homes in the Indianapolis market.

We’ve been in the Florida market mainly the Orlando Florida market for many years also about 10 11 years now and we’ve we’ve recently in the last Two and a half to two and a half years. We’ve pulled back for that market because there’s been you know a decrease in values based on everything that’s going on there all the way from insurance going up to mortgage rates going up to prices having gone, know gone up quite a bit to

to the hedge funds having picked up nearly 60,000 homes in the Florida market. Now having said that, Florida is going to be, it’s going to be a great market in the long run. We’ve pulled back just a little bit. We’re just waiting for a few different factors to change up there, but we have some incredible partners there. Everything that we deliver there, that we’ve delivered in the last three years is all brand new construction. In fact, half of the properties that we deliver in all of our markets is brand new construction.

We have some great relationships with some really good builders. So those are some of the great markets. Another great market, we haven’t done a whole lot there, but we do have some boots on the ground in Atlanta, Georgia. Fantastic market. Another great market that we’ve done quite a bit of business in over the years is North Carolina, the Charlotte market. Also fantastic.

So those are some good, some really good markets. There are others that are really good markets. We’re just not a big enough company to have enough demand to spread out our clients over too many markets. We like to have a presence wherever we are. So those are the markets that we have focused on over the last, I guess now about 10 years. We did a lot of business in Arizona and Nevada when we first started, but we haven’t done a business there in.

About 10 years.

Scott Bursey (17:09)
was an excellent breakdown. you for that, Steve. And that leads me to our next question. How does relying on a third party property management company impact an investor’s long-term exit strategy?

Steve Earl (17:22)
That is the key to your success or your failure. Your property management company is, aside from like buying the homes right, that first 30 to 60 days of like doing your searching, your due diligence and finding that property, that’s critical, right? But the next most critical thing that you can do is being aligned with a property management company.

who has your interests, who’s going to take care of both the tenant and the property, which is your asset. And if you happen to get a bad property manager, man, you’re just gonna have a horrible experience. But if you can somehow get aligned with a good property manager, that is the key. So we don’t own property management. We have a partner. It’s the same partner in all of the markets that I mentioned to you.

They are in all of the markets that we are in and they are phenomenal. Specialized property management is who we’ve aligned ourselves with. We are their single largest customer with all of our clients combined. And so we have special treatment, meaning all of our clients have special treatment, which means here’s the great thing. If you are the owner of one property in the Dallas Fort Worth market,

If you’re with any other property manager, you’re just like a speck of dust and you really don’t have a lot of leverage with them. You know, I get back to this concept of leverage. But when you are, you know, a property manager’s single largest client and you are just one client, one speck of dust, because you are a part of Done For Your Real Estate, you have a lot of influence. And our property management, the company that we’ve aligned ourselves with, they’ve

So they treat us so well and they’re such a great partner.

And even if you’re not a DFI client, they are fantastic property managers for their other, you know, many clients as well. But we, get a few extra special perks. have our own asset manager who works exclusively with our clients where, know, you make a call, he’s going to answer. He’ll, if he doesn’t have the answer, he’s going to find the answer and

They are an amazing property management company all the way from the technology that they deploy to their communication, to their systems, their processes, and their philosophy. some, property management and owning property, it’s messy, man. And there are, are, I…

Being a, I don’t know how these guys do it because in property management, it is a thankless job because you’re dealing with a physical asset that has issues and problems. You’re dealing with people’s money, you’re dealing with tenants and there are a thousand different things that can go wrong in any given moment in time. But when you have aligned yourself with an excellent property manager and there are many excellent property managers out there. We’ve been very fortunate to align ourselves with specialized.

It is the absolute key. It’s the absolute key to your experience, whether you are pulling your hair out or whether you’re losing money or whether you’re making money and whether your asset is being protected so that as it appreciates, you you don’t, you know, you don’t show up to the, to the table to sell your property. You ask like, like, how do you like maintain that, that property so that five years from now, 10 years from now, when you go to sell it, it’s going to be worth more. Well, part of that is making sure that the bones of the property and that the

Scott Bursey (20:48)
Absolutely.

You

Steve Earl (21:13)
everything about it has been taken care of in such a way that it’s a good solid asset when you go to sell it and you don’t have some massive bill at the end of the day.

Scott Bursey (21:21)
Steve, the key takeaway there is you must ensure alignment.

Steve Earl (21:25)
That is it. 100%.

Scott Bursey (21:26)
And if you could walk us through this, what systems do you see as a non-negotiable for mitigating risk in a fully passive investment?

Steve Earl (21:35)
You know, ⁓ risk and liability, those are huge issues. You need to make sure that you have your entity structure set up. I’m not an attorney, I’m not giving any kind of legal advice or anything here. But man, you need to make sure that that property is vested in an LLC, number one. And then you need to make sure that you maintain the integrity of that LLC by following all of the different rules properly. And then secondarily, you need to have adequate

property insurance. You need to make sure that you have the right coverages, that you have the right limits, that you’ve taken into account the different things involved with like renting to a tenant. One small thing as an example is you want to make sure that, in today’s world, you need to allow pets.

You know, it’s like, I don’t know, 80 % of households in today’s world, they have pets. If you want to have a tenant, a good tenant, you need to allow pets. Now, having said that, you need to have the proper coverage for the types of pets that you allow. And most property insurance is not going to allow you to have aggressive breeds of dogs over certain weight and that kind of a thing. And so then you need to have in your property management agreement then,

you the line item that says, you you exclude certain pets and different things. And if a tenant, you know, they sneak a dog that shouldn’t be in the property and something happens, heaven forbid that dog bites somebody or worse, you need to have your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed to make sure that you went through the proper steps to ensure that there was not an aggressive breed in the home. And so having the, you know, if you’re in Florida, even though, even being in Orlando where, you know, hurricanes,

you know, typically have dissipated by the time they hit the Orlando area. Man, you still need to have the right proper, you know, insurance. You know, your roof blows off and you don’t have coverage. That’s going to be an expensive bill. So you got to have coverages there. So, so mitigating those risks, LLCs, maintaining them properly. And there’s some different things that you can do there. You know, talk to your attorney, make sure you’re set up properly there. Talk to your insurance agent, make sure that you got proper.

proper coverage there as well. And then of course, part of that mitigation is proper, again, going back to property management. Property management companies that’s gonna make sure that they’re anticipating a hurricane or something or that they’re notifying tenants, hey, it’s like, hey, you need to board up your windows or make sure this or that or the other. If you’re in Memphis and you’re in the middle of winter,

and which is one of the other markets I didn’t mention to. We’ve done a ton of business in Memphis over the years. And they have freezes during the winter. It’s like if you have a property and if it’s vacant and your property manager didn’t come in and shut the water off or make sure that there’s heat in the home, you’re gonna have frozen pipes and you’re gonna have a massive flood in your home. So those are the types of things that you wanna make sure that are in place. And if you’re an investor, again,

If you can align yourself with a company like Done For Your Real Estate or a similar type company that you’ve come to trust, these are the types of things that you’re gonna get taught. These are the kinds of services that you’re going to get because they’ve aligned themselves with the right types of property management and real estate agents and title companies and home inspectors and appraisers and the whole thing that just makes getting into real estate doable.

Here’s the other thing that’s really critical really quick. And that is investing on purpose and with a plan. Most people who succeed in real estate have done so by accident. And it’s so funny. I kind of chuckle. I’m happy for them. People get into real estate and they just happen to time the market, you know, out of luck. And so now they think they’re a real estate genius. But the minute there’s, there’s a blip in the market, all of a sudden it’s like, no, you know,

I just lost everything or no, like I, know, this didn’t work. And then they get out of real estate and they lose out on the long-term play of what real estate really is because when you can do it long-term, you take advantage of all the tax stuff, it’s amazing.

Scott Bursey (25:28)
Thanks.

Absolutely. Steve, let’s talk about the secret sauce. When a pro is vetting a done for you provider, what is the one metric or red flag you check that separates the true quality companies from the amateurs, the secret that gets you into the, the pro deal.

Steve Earl (25:51)
Hmm. Well, you know, it depends on what it is that you’re looking for. If it’s a vendor, if it’s a property manager, if it’s a real estate agent, if it’s a data supplier, you just got to do your due diligence. You got to get in. You got to look at their track record. You need to dig a little bit deep into who the principals are, what their experience really is. That’s really key.

That’s one of the critical components of really any business. Doesn’t matter whether it’s real estate or whether you’re a contractor, a builder, or whatever you happen to be doing, right? And that’s not to say that you can’t do business with a new individual, but at the end of the day, you’re doing business with the owner. And you want to just take a look at their track record and their experience and kind of, you know,

⁓ who they are as a person, know, get to know that person at least a little bit and get a good sense of who they are, what their philosophy is, what their, kind of what their business philosophy is in terms of, you know, I have found that you really get to know a business, not when things go good, but when things go bad. How do they respond?

What’s you know, how quickly do they respond? What do they respond with? You know, you know a lot of times when the going gets tough people disappear as opposed to Having a philosophy where when the going gets tough Like that’s your opportunity to shine as a business leader as a business owner as an agent As an investor even if something happens in your tenant something happens and your tenant is having a bad experience How do you show up as the owner of that property?

And how do you take care of the issue and how do you take care of them? That’s really the litmus test, I think, in my mind. I do think you have to be cautious with just the five-star reviews and that kind of thing. I think that those are an initial good litmus test to kind of see generally what’s going on. I think having conversations with people, I mean, you know.

in the real estate world, you’re taking pretty big risks, especially if you’re just getting started or you’re in the middle of kind of your career and you’re trying to get ahead a little bit because you’re dealing in numbers of dollars that are huge. To work with us, to buy one of our homes, like we do, like I say, what we do isn’t for everybody because we don’t do creative real estate, it’s really for individuals who want to be more passive.

involvement. And so, you know, 25 % down plus rehab costs plus your loan closing costs plus our fee, you know, you’re you’re a minimum of $85,000 to buy a single family residential property worth about $300,000. That’s a massive investment. And so you want to make sure that that this investment is is real.

and that there’s some track record and that there’s something behind it.

Scott Bursey (28:39)
Steve, this has been an absolute master class. Before we sign off, I know our pros are going to want to connect with you. For those of our listeners who want to follow your journey or collaborate with you, what is the best way for them to reach you?

Steve Earl (28:52)
Yeah, so our website is www.dfy for done for you. So dfy-realestate.com. You can go there, you can take a look at what we offer. You can take a look at the types of properties that we buy. You can take a look at our philosophy. You can follow it. You can see the About Us page. You can look me up. You can look me up on LinkedIn, whatever. My business partner as well.

And then on our website, there’s the ability to request a meeting to get to know us a little bit better where we’ll sit down with you for 30, 45 minutes and then send you more information and share with you what we do. So that’s probably the best way to get in touch with us.

Scott Bursey (29:32)
Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.

Steve Earl (29:35)
Hey, my pleasure. This has been wonderful. Thanks, Scott.

Scott Bursey (29:37)
And to our listeners, we appreciate each and every one of you. If you got value from today’s show, please subscribe. We have a lineup of exceptional guests, just like Steve, who are making huge moves in the market. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.