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Show Summary
In this episode of the Investor Field Podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Alex Murillo, a young and dynamic real estate investor. Alex shares his journey from starting in real estate with house hacking to specializing in creative financing methods. He discusses the importance of helping others in the community achieve homeownership and the role of mentorship in his success. The conversation also touches on the keys to running a successful business and Alex’s aspirations for the future.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Alex Murillo (00:00)
Yeah, absolutely. So creative financing or seller financing, it’s basically just there are more ways that people realize to buy a house than just walking into a bank, Wells Fargo or Chase, asking them for a mortgage and hoping they qualify you. So I learned this probably two and a half years ago that you can contact the seller of the home directly and you can negotiate.whatever terms everybody’s happy with, and that seller can actually become your bank. like, it saves so much time, it saves so much in fees, and there are a lot of people, like self-employed individuals like myself, who have a really hard time qualifying for loans at reasonable terms. like, seller financing opens up another door of
Michelle Kesil (02:27)
everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Alex Murillo, who’s been making serious moves in the investing space. So yeah, excited to have you here on the show today, Alex.Alex Murillo (02:46)
Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for responding to my request to be on the podcast.Michelle Kesil (02:52)
Yeah, absolutely. think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching starting your real estate business at such a young age. So yeah, let’s dive in.Alex Murillo (03:04)
Okay, perfect.Michelle Kesil (03:06)
Awesome. So yeah, first off for people who are not familiar with you and your world, can you give a short version of what your main focus is?Alex Murillo (03:17)
Yeah, so my main focus has changed a lot over the last six years. I’m 28 years old right now. When I first started in 2019, my main focus was just to buy literally anything that I could afford or find my way into with the goal of just investing in real estate and accumulating wealth, cashflow ideally. So I started out just house hacking everything. I would buy a place. I wouldmove all my friends into all the other bedrooms and then I would just buy it. As soon as I saved up a down payment for the next house, I would do it. So that’s kind how I started and that was my focus in the beginning. Right now my focus has shifted. Right now I specialize in creative financing methods. I do a lot of seller financing subject to transactions. I love teaching people in my local community how to buy houses like this. I love
Helping them become homeowners when maybe they couldn’t qualify for it with a bank for whatever reason. So that’s kind of one of my biggest focuses right now.
Michelle Kesil (04:28)
Awesome and what markets are you operating in?Alex Murillo (04:33)
So I’m located in St. George, Utah. Very southern border of Utah. So I have properties here locally. I have properties a little further north in Utah in a town called Cedar City. I have properties in Texas, Arizona, and Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. So those are the markets I’m familiar with, but right now I’m mostly focusing on southern Utah and Texas, Dallas County area.Michelle Kesil (05:08)
Amazing. Yeah, I would love for you to expand on the creative financing because yeah, maybe there’s people listening to this show that are newer to this space and are looking for more ways to get into real estate. So maybe you can share some of your expertise there.Alex Murillo (06:13)
Yeah, absolutely. So creative financing or seller financing, it’s basically just there are more ways that people realize to buy a house than just walking into a bank, Wells Fargo or Chase, asking them for a mortgage and hoping they qualify you. So I learned this probably two and a half years ago that you can contact the seller of the home directly and you can negotiate.whatever terms everybody’s happy with, and that seller can actually become your bank. like, it saves so much time, it saves so much in fees, and there are a lot of people, like self-employed individuals like myself, who have a really hard time qualifying for loans at reasonable terms. like, seller financing opens up another door of
of houses that you can buy without.
without needing credit without needing to pay stubs without needing ⁓ you know w two job essentially
So that’s kind of what I do right now. I’ll buy houses like that myself. If they work for me in my portfolio, they have to cash flow or they have to need a lot of work to where I can turn them around really quickly and sell them as a fix and flip. But one of the things I I love doing right now is people in my local market. I’m just teaching them how to do it. So I find houses, I negotiate terms with the sellers of the homes.
seller financing and then I find families or individuals that have been dreaming of becoming homeowners for years or who knows how long. They have a down payment saved up and I teach those people how to buy these houses that I found. So I just kind of connect the dots and it’s really fulfilling to me because a lot of these families they had no idea that they could buy a house. they, like a lot of people in the market today they’ve just kind of given up on that idea.
I love connecting them and showing them that it’s possible.
Michelle Kesil (08:30)
Amazing. How did you discover this? I know that you mentioned to me before we started recording that you just started this right out of college, but like, where did you learn all of these tools?Alex Murillo (08:46)
So I first got interested in investing in real estate while I was in college from BiggerPockets. I used listen to the BiggerPockets podcast, like, religiously. I was a big fan of Brandon Turner. I remember seeing a YouTube video of his. I was working a graveyard shift. I had three jobs at the time paying for my schooling and all this stuff. And one of those jobs was working at night. So I would sit there and I would watch YouTube videos of Brandon Turner.posted a video of how he became financially free when he was 27 years old through real estate. So that’s kind of where it started, where I got interested in it, where I started diving into all the information, all the different ways you can invest. ⁓ And from that point on, I kind of just accumulated, little by little, with every new deal that I did, a different tool to add to my tool belt.
So that was in 2019. I didn’t learn about seller financing until 2023. So it took a few years before I got to that point, but now I have that tool in my tool belt and it’s one of my favorite ones. And I learned that stuff from primarily Pace Morby. I’m sure a lot of your listeners know who Pace Morby is, but I’ve learned a lot from that guy just on being creative and finding ways to do deals that
other people don’t think of.
Michelle Kesil (10:51)
I love that. Yeah, creativity and listening to educational mentors is so important when you’re starting out with new roles. So amazing. What has been like your key to keeping your business running smoothly?Alex Murillo (11:11)
The key to keeping my business running smoothly would probably just be consistency in showing up and making an effort to serve people. what that means is like, the times in my business where I flourish the most, where I have the most deals, where I have the most opportunities are also the times where I am putting the most effort into helping people invest or helping people learn.So I’m very active on Facebook groups, local Facebook groups. I tell people what I do and I teach them what I do. I’m very active in my local investor community here in southern Utah. I answer questions, we have meetups every month, and I I try to help people invest. Like I focus on that and I really want them to build wealth. So I’ve learned that by doing that, by answering questions, by helping people who
are right now where I once was. The universe seems to just give me more opportunities to grow myself, more deals, more things to learn.
Michelle Kesil (12:21)
Amazing. So let me ask you this, where do you see your business heading? Like what are you most focused on scaling next?Alex Murillo
Right now I’m most focused on, for me personally, cash flow. ⁓ We have enough cash flow from our current rental properties to sustain a pretty basic life. We’re probably close to maybe five grand passively. I’d like to get to… Well, we did the math, my wife and I, and we kind of figured out how much money would be like…how much could we possibly spend if we had enough passive income coming in? So our big goal is to get to $25,000 a month in passive income through real estate. So that’s kind of the big goal and I want to do that primarily through creative financing and co-living properties where we’re renting bedrooms out to people who need affordable places to live. And so that would be kind of like the more passive side of my business. The active side, I want to help
I haven’t set a specific goal yet, but I want to help more families, specifically Latino families. My family’s from El Salvador, but more families ⁓ gain access to investment opportunities and home ownership that didn’t have it prior. And I can do that through seller financing and just education. So there’s a lot of Latino families that know me now in my local area that reach out to me for help because they’ve just never known what to do with their money.
They never know where to invest it, they never know how to grow it, they never know how to stop working. So that’s kind of a demographic that I want to help achieve financial freedom.
Michelle Kesil
Yeah, that’s so beautiful. I love that you’re wanting to give back to your community. ⁓ Yeah, amazing. So what are some lessons that you have learned as you’ve started your business? Are there any like obstacles that you overcome and lessons that you’ve learned from them that you can share?Alex Murillo
Yeah, so I mean the biggest obstacle, think probably the first one that literally everybody who wants to invest has to overcome at some point would be just the… just the decision… what do you call it? The analysis paralysis, right? The ability to just act without knowing fully how something is going to go without being completely certain that everything will be perfect to take action knowing that…worst-case scenario you’re going to learn a ton. So I think that is something that I’m constantly getting better at. It’s something that I’ve always been good at. That’s probably why I was able to start so young. But as I learn new skills, as I try to scale and do bigger things, there’s constantly a feeling of like where you want to freeze and wait and think before you make a decision and pull the trigger on something. So I think that would be…
The first one that comes to mind, at least.
Michelle Kesil
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a big one to take action even when you don’t know what’s next. I love that. So what are some like goals that you have for your business? I know you shared some, but maybe like thinking farther into the future, like where are you looking to take your investing business? Like maybe some projects that you would love towork on in the future or where you see it heading.
Alex Murillo
So aside from just replacing our income through real estate income, I haven’t really thought too much further ahead, right? Because I mean, I have a wife and a baby and probably the things that bring me the most happiness and joy in my life are just spending time with them. So, and we love doing things like, like spending time outside, backpacking, hiking. So,haven’t thought that far ahead honestly besides the cash flow goal right with with $25,000 a month in passive income we did the math we’re like that would be a that would cover about as much travel as we could possibly manage that would cover all our expenses with planning for future children as well and that would be like having thousands of dollars a month to give away right like that’s
like we couldn’t even come up with what else to spend money on. So maybe I’m not thinking big enough, but that’s just where we’re at right now. And yeah.
Michelle Kesil
Yeah.That’s beautiful. That’s enough. I love that answer. Amazing. So yeah, I know that you mentor or educate people who are looking to get started. Is that something that you do online or locally? Like how can people learn from you specifically?
Alex Murillo
I probably should come up with a more streamlined way to give that access to people but I am sometimes semi-active on social media, my Instagram or Facebook so most of the people that I spend time helping or answering questions for they just send me DMs and I respond to everybody DMs through social media and then through there you can get my cellphone number andI love helping people kind of walk through a deal that they’ve potentially found and telling them what’s wrong with it, what they can do better, and how they can negotiate, and just educating them that way. So that would be how you can reach me.
Michelle Kesil
Amazing and are you offering like classes or is this just primarily one-on-one? Like how does that? education service workAlex Murillo
Yeah, I mean, I just don’t have any, like I said, any official education platform, right? I don’t charge for this. One of the benefits that comes from it is a lot of people will, they’ll get to a point where they can’t go any further without help. So sometimes people will come ask me to partner with them or ask me to help them fund a deal, things like that. So it can…that’s kind of one way that it benefits me other than just the satisfaction of like helping somebody invest in real estate so yeah I don’t have like a class or anything like that if you’re local to st. George Utah then we have meetups twice a month and I go to every single one so a lot of people will show up and just sit down have lunch with me because they know I’m going to be there and ask me questions that way so if you’re not here in person then DM me on social media
Michelle Kesil
Amazing. I love that. Yeah. So before we wrap up here, where can people find you on social media? Like, what are your handles? Share how people can connect with you more.Alex Murillo
My Instagram is kingmurillo.rei and my Facebook… I don’t know how I would… I don’t know if there’s a handle for Facebook, it’s just my name. Alexander Murillo.Michelle Kesil
Perfect, well listen, I appreciate your time, your story and perspective. Thank you so much for being here.Alex Murillo
Yeah, thank you for the interview.Michelle Kesil
Absolutely. And for those of you tuning in, you got value from this episode, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming with operators just like Alex who are building real businesses and we’ll see you all on our next episode.
