How to Invest in Real Estate Remotely Using AI, Private Capital, and Global Markets

Andre Stewart (00:00)
He had 60,000 in equity in a house that he had as a rental. I like, okay, he’s like my goal though, I wanna be a millionaire. I said, okay, this is what we’ll do. Give me the house that you have that’s a rental in Miami. It was in Miami. We refinanced that house and he has $60,000 worth of equity in it. So we refinanced this house. We took out the 60,000 in equity that he had in the house. He kept it as a rental. So this is a person with no money.

Cody Crabb (01:55)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb. And today I’ve got André Stewart, Founder of InvestFar, a company helping investors by real estate remotely around the world through software, private capital, and AI-powered deal underwriting. I’m very interested to hear about this. ⁓ Just hearing a little bit about what you do, I definitely have some questions. So I’m glad that you’re on the show today. Thanks so much for hopping on.

Andre Stewart (02:20)
you

Thank you for having me on. I’m looking forward to it.

Cody Crabb (02:23)
So tell us a little bit about kind of your journey into real estate, how you got started, when did the real estate bug bite you per se, ⁓ and if it was rich dad, poor dad, which I hear from about two thirds of the people that are on this podcast.

Andre Stewart (02:39)
Well, I mean, I grew up in poverty. And so I grew up in a deep South of Georgia. And, you know, I’m a, I don’t want to age myself, but I just grew up in a time where, you know, things were a little bit different. So growing up in an environment like that, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. So as I got older, I started being in different environments. And one thing that was common between all those environments where people were always talking about investing in real estate,

and making money through passive income and then making money off the equity later on and then making the money out the depreciation. So that just got me interested in being able to, you know, get into a vehicle that will allow me to build wealth long-term and for my family. So they didn’t have to go through something that I grew up, you know, in the kind of environment that I grew up in.

Cody Crabb (03:17)
Yeah, that’s totally understandable. And I think ⁓ that’s another very common one that I hear is like, I looked it up what all the rich people do and they all invest in real estate. like it’s, definitely attracts people that are kind of like want to make a big change and stuff. So how did you start out? you study it in school? Kind of what was your journey?

Andre Stewart (03:36)
actually, you know, fast forward, you know, I worked in entertainment for a little while. Um, and then I got a job in banking during a 2008 collapse. And while I was working in banking as a banker, you get, you know, see so many different deals coming through people coming through and wanting to do mortgages. I ended up running into one of my clients when I got into private wealth was a big real estate developer in LA. And so, you know, being able to see what he did and what he started building as far as commercial

He wanted me to come work for him. At some point he tried to post me from my job. And so that made me be a little bit more interested in real estate. Cause at that time I was trying to figure out how to like transition out. Exactly. I’m just like, he just brought me a check for $3 million. What, what is he doing that I’m not doing? And I work at the bank, right? So, so then eventually I ended up diving into it. And at first I started out doing single family. And then from there, ⁓ you know,

Cody Crabb (04:07)
Like you’re looking at you’re looking at his bank account at the ⁓

Exactly, yeah.

Andre Stewart (04:32)
Let me go back. So at that point, you know, when he tried to give me the job, didn’t take it. So then I ended up going over to Silicon Valley bank and working there. And I was able to work with like different companies that were like Uber, Snapchat, like different companies that were doing great things. So fast forward. Now I got into real estate because I got more capital from working in Silicon Valley, but I also got different ideas on how to like, you know, get into real estate and do it passively. ⁓

I got into single family and then I think I’m going forward faster than we should based on what we’re going to get to in a conversation.

Cody Crabb (05:54)
Probably not because honestly like it’s it mostly we’re talking about if we’re mostly talking about the real estate thing I think it’s important to know how someone got there, but like You know there’s only so much that you that happened before that you know what I mean

Andre Stewart (06:07)
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So trying to get to the point of like getting into single family and then creating a real estate platform that will allow other people to do it. Kind of what you mentioned in the beginning, what I do.

Cody Crabb (06:18)
Yeah, so this is interesting to me. ⁓ So I want to hear the when you ran into this problem that you felt like needed solving here.

Andre Stewart (06:25)
Got it. So when I got into doing the real estate, working in single family, I lived in LA. And so the cost of living in LA is super expensive. Like to buy a house in South Central is like $600,000. But because I grew up in the South in Georgia, I knew that you can get a house in Georgia for like $80,000, right? So for me, it made sense for me to start investing remotely or abroad because I can buy 10 houses for the price of one in LA. And so that kind of gave me the idea of investing remotely.

Cody Crabb (06:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure, yeah.

Andre Stewart (06:53)
But then like going to like different meetup groups that I was a part of, they were like, where are you finding these deals at? So I started funneling deals to the people in these meetup groups out here. And so because of my background at Silicon Valley bank and seeing the different products that were coming along, it just gave me the idea of how can I automate real estate investing remotely so that more people can do it. And that’s kind of how came up with the idea for InvestFar and Investing Remote.

Cody Crabb (06:54)
Hmm.

is the perfect

storm. You’re in Silicon Valley, you’re constantly seeing this. You’re at Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, they’ll give a little thumbs up there, that’s fun. You’re at Silicon Valley Bank, you’re from Georgia, you’ve seen these places that it really is like just everything came together for you.

Andre Stewart (07:28)
Yeah, started just, you know, the idea started percolating. like, man, what can I do? Because you can make money, but you can make a lot of money faster when you’re helping more people who have the same problem, right?

Cody Crabb (07:39)
Sure, yeah,

yeah. You always think if this person has a problem, then there’s gotta be more. ⁓ So now kind of fast forward to today. What does it look like now compared to then?

Andre Stewart (07:53)
So back then it was just us doing deals for people in Georgia, in like Florida. And then eventually I started traveling with the company to start expanding it because my idea was like, if I can do this locally, there’s properties that are a lot cheaper because I go to Columbia live. So properties in Columbia are obviously gonna be cheaper than in the States. Then I went to Spain. So then I started traveling more as I started making more money. And I’m like, man.

people can invest remotely in other countries to stretch their money even further. And so that’s what made me come up with the software and started building out teams in other countries to make this something that can really go global. Because I mean, if you have $25,000, you can buy a two bedroom, two bath apartment in Columbia and cashflow that way, right? And people don’t know that. you, a lot of people think you’ve got to have a lot of money to invest, but it’s really not the case.

Cody Crabb (08:43)
Hmm. So, okay, my question is ⁓ probably the one that you get the most, is, so just anywhere? Like, I could just go find some suburb in rural Mexico and buy a… How does this work exactly?

Andre Stewart (09:34)
So that’s the idea. So what we do is on our platform and that’s why we created Farsight IQ because it’s a platform that you can go in and enter an address and then it’ll give you data on that market to let you know, should I invest in this market? We also have a tool that’s under Farsight IQ that’s called Blueprint that will allow you to basically underwrite a deal in less than five minutes by typing in the address and a couple of different things that you need to put in to make sure that the analysis is correct. So you will do something like that to start out where you can do your own due diligence.

within a quick amount of time to let you know what markets you should invest in. So the way we have it all set up, we only chose the markets that make the most sense, that’ll stretch a person’s money based. So you enter in, say you’re your income or say you have a hundred thousand in the bank, the app will allow you to basically filter our properties that are recommended based on your own situation. So that’s what makes it amazing.

Cody Crabb (10:24)
really interesting. ⁓ what kind of markets are there ⁓ out there? as somebody that I’ve really only looked at stuff that’s near me in the United States and I haven’t even remotely started, I’ve kind of started to hear about Puerto Rico, which is still part of the US. So I’d be curious to know what’s out there globally. That’s really interesting.

Andre Stewart (10:42)
Yeah.

And it’s funny cause we have a couple of clients that are in Utah and it’s so expensive. Like I think Utah is along the same lines of how much it costs to buy a property in California. It’s pretty close because a lot of people move from here to there. So the prices have gone up. Exactly. So then for anybody listening to us in the States, you can go to a market like Memphis and get like a three bedroom house.

Cody Crabb (10:54)
Yeah, yeah, just without all the big salaries. Yeah, exactly.

Andre Stewart (11:09)
for like $75,000, right? And then the way our platform works, we invest for our capital, we provide the funding. So if you have, I’m just using the States for right now, then we get to international. So if you’re in Memphis for say, you get a property that’s $75,000, we provide the capital. So you only got to come to the table with like 10 or 15 % down to be able to buy a property like that. for example, if you have a good credit score, you only got to pay $7,000 to get a $75,000 house. How many people can come together

Cody Crabb (11:11)
Cheers.

Andre Stewart (11:37)
and get $7,000 to buy a cash flowing property in Memphis that you can get someone to manage remotely. You know what I mean? Right?

Cody Crabb (11:41)
Yeah.

Yeah,

so that’s my next question, right? So I’m coming at this like it’s a brand new idea to me, because it is. ⁓ just devil’s advocate here. So how does it work? Like let’s say I want to do this, right? I pull together a little bit of cash, right? ⁓ I want to go, I want to invest somewhere. What does the due diligence look like? You said that there’s some AI tools, but what does the due diligence look like outside of that? Because I’m assuming that you’re not just saying.

Okay, AI, tell me where to buy, boom, and then you just own a property somewhere. What other due diligence should there be here? Obviously, my instinct is go see it, but tell me more about what you would recommend there.

Andre Stewart (12:26)
So this what we would do. just start, we’ll do a deal real quick. I like doing deals so people can get a clear picture. So we’re going to use a hundred thousand dollars. But when you’re doing real estate deals and you’re doing fix and flip deals, you want to buy properties that have a lot of equity in it. So for example, you found a house after you get it fixed up, it’s going to be worth $200,000. But because the economy is bad and people are going to foreclosure, you were able to get this deal for a hundred thousand dollars and it needs $30,000 worth of rehab in order for it to be worth $200,000.

Cody Crabb (12:32)
Love that, yeah.

Andre Stewart (12:55)
So the purchase price is a hundred grand. You have a good credit score. You’re to send that bill over to us through the app or just, you know, if you want to go to Farsight IQ or anywhere. just say you send it to us directly. We’re going to just look at the deal. We’re going to look and see what the properties have sold for in their market. We call them comps. So we’re going to find comps in your market to see if this house will really be worth $200,000 once it’s done. If that’s a yes.

We’re going to look at your credit score and see if you have a decent credit score and say you do have a good credit score. We’re going to be like, Hey, based on our due diligence, what we’ve looked up, we see that this property will be worth $200,000. You have a good credit score and you are paying a hundred thousand for this house. So therefore you only got to put 10 % down and we’ll give you the $30,000 that you need to rehab the house. So now you get to get $130,000 loan for $10,000. Right. And then you get the money, you rehab the house.

and then you turn around and either sell it or you do a refinance and pull out the cash that you put into the house or the equity. And then you turn it into a rental or you sell it for $200,000. You pay up to $130,000 alone. And now you have $70,000 that you can put into the bank.

Cody Crabb (14:43)
That’s great way to do it. So I’d be more curious about the actual practicality of, who is this for? Is this for somebody that’s like, just want to go invest and hopefully just manage it from here? Is this for somebody that’s like, I have, just using your example, Columbia, I have family back in Columbia, I might as well buy something there because of that. Who is this for? You know what I mean?

thinking about someone that would, is this for someone that travels a lot? Is this for someone that already lives in multiple places? I’m just trying to get my head around how this would work for your average investor that’s in one market.

Andre Stewart (15:17)
So we have clients that have millions of dollars. have new investors. So for example, someone came to me and I think anyone can benefit from this. It doesn’t matter what level of income that you have. And I think the less you have, the more you should be trying to get with people to raise capital considering the economic climate that we’re in, considering that we’re at 39 trillion in debt. So this could be for anybody. I don’t want people to think you have to have a lot of money. So I’ll give you an example of one person who didn’t have any money.

He had 60,000 in equity in a house that he had as a rental. I like, okay, he’s like my goal though, I wanna be a millionaire. I said, okay, this is what we’ll do. Give me the house that you have that’s a rental in Miami. It was in Miami. We refinanced that house and he has $60,000 worth of equity in it. So we refinanced this house. We took out the 60,000 in equity that he had in the house. He kept it as a rental. So this is a person with no money.

He had one job, but he had a house that had equity.

And so we scaled him from that because we took his 60 grand and we did the idea that I just told you, we went to markets like Georgia where he can get a property that he only had to put down 10 grand. He had 60,000. So how many houses could he get? He could get six houses based on a scenario that I gave you. So within 13 months, his net worth from that one house went from that $60,000 that he had to $2.2 million. And then he had seven houses, right? So this, doesn’t really matter. So this is a person with no money.

but take someone who has $25,000 in the bank and they might have somebody in Columbia or a family member there, we can, even if they didn’t have a family member, we have a team in Columbia that can manage this property or we can set them up with somebody in Columbia to build out a property management team for them if they don’t want to use us. So say for instance, someone has $25,000, then they want to use cash and they want to get into a market like Columbia, then we will facilitate that transaction with our agents in Columbia.

And then, you know, you got to go through the paperwork and all that kind of stuff like that. It’s a little bit more tricky than obviously the U.S., but it could still be done. So it’s safer if you want to go to Medellin. You can get a property in Medellin for twenty five thousand. It could be a one bedroom or two bedroom condo and then you put it on Airbnb. Then you have cash flow that way. So that’s just one example of like a person, depending on how much money they have or if they have an asset that they can transition into building wealth by having no money like the first guy or having twenty five thousand to invest internationally.

Cody Crabb (17:34)
Hmm. So ⁓ let’s say that, well, I guess the reason I’m kind of approaching it this way is because I’m thinking of someone who is probably not going to be wanting to go back and forth to this property constantly. ⁓ do you have ways to help them build their… I mean, you mentioned that that’s something you can help facilitate. How does that work exactly? Do you kind of connect them with people?

Andre Stewart (17:41)
Okay.

Cody Crabb (18:02)
Do you have, ⁓ yeah, just how do you do that?

Andre Stewart (18:05)
So if you go on the InvestFar app or on our website, say for instance, we’re going to go with building out the construction team on the control, on the website that you can just go in and put in a zip code. And once you put in a zip code, it’s going to bring up, I would say 20 to 30 different contractors that are certified GCs that are in this market that you put the zip code in. So you can find someone that’s going to manage the project from start to finish if it’s a rehab and they’ll finish the construction. They’ll do all of it.

and you don’t ever have to go there. So even within the InvestFar app, you can just do a kind of like what you were saying. We have like a Uber for inspection, so you can go in there and pay $99 and someone will drive by and they’ll do 20 photos and they’ll do a one minute video of the interior and exterior of the property. So therefore you get to see it without even having to go there. So that’s one other option. If you don’t believe your contracting team is doing right, right? So you have those two options for you to be able to see.

what’s going on without even being there, right?

Cody Crabb (19:02)
That’s really interesting. Yeah, I think this is something I’ve always thought about because the global market is so different than the US. even inside the US, you can go to these little pockets where it’s so much cheaper. And I’ve always been interested in like, well, yeah, of course you can go buy a tiny little house in, or a giant house in Missouri in the middle of nowhere for barely any money, but who wants to go there? Who wants to live there? But it makes a lot more sense when you look at it like this, where you’re…

Andre Stewart (19:28)
Correct. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (19:30)
you’re pitching it to the people that already live there and you’re able to just kind of manage it remotely. That’s pretty neat. I think this is definitely something that, especially now that ⁓ working remotely is a thing, I think a lot more people are kind of thinking about, you know, maybe if they’re going to move or if they want to invest somewhere, it’s, it’s being rural is not as much of a deal breaker as it used to be too. So have you noticed that much in, in what you’ve been doing?

Andre Stewart (19:54)
And it’s funny because

Yeah, to pick back off what you said, one thing I always say is live where you want to live and invest where the numbers make sense. So I’ve never bought a property in California because it didn’t make sense to me. Why would I do that? So, but I want to live here because Southern California is a nice place to live, right? But you just, the ultimate goal is to just make sure that your income surpasses your expenses and regardless of wherever you live. So if you could do that by, for example, if you live in LA and you have $70,000 in a bank here,

Cody Crabb (20:01)
Hmm.

Andre Stewart (20:22)
it’s going to be hard to put down 20 % of our property, but $70,000 like I just explained to you in multiple markets will go a long way, especially if you don’t have to really worry about it and you’re just getting a check deposited into your account or you’re doing a flip and you don’t, I’ve saw flipped over 40 houses. I think I’ve only seen three. One was in Vegas, which is only a 30 minute flight. And then one was in Georgia and my mother lives in Georgia. Right? So other than that, I’ve never saw these houses.

and I still made money doing it. You know what I mean?

Cody Crabb (20:51)
This is really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I’ll definitely be checking this out for sure. ⁓ So one last question I have as we’re kind of winding down here. ⁓ I’m curious how you kind of accumulated these lists. Is this like all your teams or is these people that you’ve kind of vetted? who are these people that are on the list for the contacts?

Andre Stewart (21:12)
So the contracting lists, we partnered up with a large contracting company. I forgot the name of it. It was Crawford. I can’t think of the name of it off the of my head, right? Cause it’s been so long. So we partnered up with them. So they provide the contractors that are general, you know, they’re insured, insured, they’re licensed. So it’s not like someone that’s a person that we just found on the street. Like these are certified contractors that’ll make sure that the job is done in their bondage. So they have to make sure that it gets done. So from that standpoint,

Cody Crabb (21:34)
Yeah.

Andre Stewart (21:40)
That’s a partnership that we have. And then for the property managers and other markets, we just supply those people. We found them over time because of us and because we have a team in Columbia, but we always tell people to do their own due diligence when it comes to any of these, even where there’d be property management or even a contractor that is through the partnership that we do have. I think you still want to vet them out based on, know, doing your own research.

Cody Crabb (22:02)
Yeah, well, this is absolutely fascinating. I definitely want to look into this more. ⁓ So if people want to learn more about how to do this or if they want to check out the app and everything, how can they do that?

Andre Stewart (22:12)
I would tell anyone to go to investfar.com or go to investfarcapital.com that breaks down the funding that I’ve mentioned for people that want to get into that area because sometimes you might not want to buy a house. Maybe you want to find your own house and that’s where we come in and provide the capital. And as far as InvestFar, the mobile app, you can just go to any app store and download the mobile app and that’ll give you more information on how to, you know, be able to find the contractors and you know, find the deals that are abroad.

Cody Crabb (22:33)
Awesome.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for all this. I’m definitely found my rabbit hole for this weekend. So thank you so much for that. My wife will be so mad at you. ⁓ And I appreciate your time today and audience. Thank you as well for giving us some of your time. If you liked what you heard today, go ahead and give us a like, subscribe, all the things and make sure you don’t miss another episode. So you don’t miss more awesome stuff like this. Andre, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.

Andre Stewart (23:05)
It’s been great. Thank you for having me on.

Cody Crabb (23:07)
Yeah, of course. Have a good one.