How to Maximize Profits as a Real Estate Investor-Agent | Niyi Adewole’s Tips

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Show Summary

In this conversation, Niyi Adewole, an investor agent with EXP in Atlanta, shares his journey from being an investor to becoming an investor-friendly realtor. He discusses the current trends in the Atlanta real estate market, particularly the growing interest in small multifamily properties. Niyi also delves into the nuances of short-term rentals, offering insights on how to stand out in a competitive market. He emphasizes the importance of a structured approach when engaging with investor clients and provides guidance for new investors looking to navigate the complexities of real estate investing.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • Niyi Adewole’s Website
    • Niyi Adewole on Instagram
    • Niyi Adewole on Youtube
    • Niyi Adewole on LinkedIn

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  Niyi (00:00)
  Absolutely. And when you look at Atlanta and ATL in general, over the next decade, this is one of the hot spots that you want to be in. You got 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies based here. Recently, Microsoft started building their 90 acre campus out here. Nike put their tech up here during the pandemic. Airbnb put their East Coast headquarters here. There’s just a lot going on for the Metro of Atlanta. There’s a diversity of industries here and diversity of employment.

  Dylan Silver (01:57)
  Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Niyi Adewole, is an investor agent with EXP in Atlanta and he’s active across short-term rentals, long-term rentals, and rental management. Niyi, welcome to the show.

  Niyi (02:13)
  Dylan, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

  Dylan Silver (02:16)
  It’s great to have you on here. And I typically like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got started in real estate as a whole. But you’re involved in so many different areas of real estate, different segments. I want to ask you specifically how you got started as an investor agent.

  Niyi (02:35)
  Man, so getting started as an investor agent started by first being an investor, right? I’ve been an investor for about a decade and that started back in 2015 when I listened to a small podcast called Bigger Pockets and kind of was off to the races from there. I invested in real estate while I was in my medical device sales career for about seven years. And in that timeframe, I was able to move from, hey, I don’t know what I’m doing to, hey, I’m starting to get proficient to, I actually really like this. And I’m starting to see the returns come back.

  And I was able to move out of the W-2 into full-time real estate. And that’s when I became the investor agent, roughly four years ago.

  Dylan Silver (03:12)
  Now I consider myself an investor friendly agent licensed in Texas. When I got into the business, it was coming from the background of being a wholesaler working with distressed sellers and buyers who are looking for flips. Your day to day as a realtor. Are you looking for let me find you know, investors who are looking for single family multifamily is there one specific avatar or is it a mix of multiple different segments?

  Niyi (03:41)
  Yeah. So you can niche down a lot of different ways as an investor friendly realtor. There’s some teams that are like, Hey, we only do short term rentals. Other teams where we only do large multifamily, we focused on the residential, right? And so that’s anything up to a quadplex, even going a little bit into the smaller large multifamily, like up to 20 units, we’ve been able to help people and coming down to long-term rental, short-term rental, midterm rental. And so we do across the board.

  because that’s literally what I invest in is across the board from those different avenues, depending on what deal it looks like.

  Dylan Silver (04:15)
  Now, I want to get a little bit granular talking about Atlanta because I’ve noticed it does seem to me that there’s a lot of interest across the country in that duplex, triplex, quadplex, you know, that that small multifamily space. Right. And when we talk about that, I’ve noticed specifically in Atlanta that there’s increased interest. I’ve had people from Atlanta reach out to me on my posts in Texas.

  asking me, hey, can I find them something similar in Atlanta? Are you seeing that that trend as well that there’s a lot of interest in this sector?

  Niyi (05:36)
  Absolutely. And when you look at Atlanta and ATL in general, over the next decade, this is one of the hot spots that you want to be in. You got 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies based here. Recently, Microsoft started building their 90 acre campus out here. Nike put their tech up here during the pandemic. Airbnb put their East Coast headquarters here. There’s just a lot going on for the Metro of Atlanta. There’s a diversity of industries here and diversity of employment.

  And it allows you to, when you look at the greater picture,

  and you start to zoom out and say, hey, where do I want to be over the next decade? That’s going to be kind of rock solid. This is an awesome area.

  Dylan Silver (06:11)
  Now I know that in your personal portfolio you’ve got some short term, you’ve got some long term. Do you have a preference when you’re looking at acquisitions? Airbnb short term versus something on a year to year lease?

  Niyi (06:25)
  Yeah, so my general philosophy is if I can make it work as a long term rental and I like the property, I like the area, I’m going to go long term rental. That’s plug and play. You can just set it and forget it. I’ve got all the systems in place to make it happen. That being said, I’ve tended to do at least one short term rental personally per year because you got to take advantage of this hundred percent bonus depreciation. And as a realtor or 1099, or even if you’re somebody that’s working a W-2, if you buy one short term rental per year,

  and you do a cost segregation bonus depreciation on it, my goodness, you can save a lot on your taxes. And so that was part of the reason I started getting into short-term rentals. And then I found I had a knack for it and kind of built it out. But if you look at my career, I started off the first five years of my investing was all long-term, small multifamily investments, duplex to quadplex. And then I moved into a house hack where I used the bottom unit as a short-term rental to try it out. And then I built out this whole portfolio of short-term rentals.

  and short-term rental management company and now have leaned fully into that.

  Dylan Silver (07:26)
  Do you have any feedback for folks who may be getting into the short-term rental space? Because it’s a different animal than long-term rentals.

  Niyi (07:35)
  Absolutely. If you’re going to get in, you cannot have the cookie cutter listing that everybody had back in, you know, 2020. You either have to go luxury with it, right? And it doesn’t it doesn’t have to be a crazy expense. It’s just putting some time and energy into it. Hiring a designer to come in and really make sure the whole feng shui is on when it comes to looking at the pictures of that property so that you’re not competing on on, hey, price. And you’re also competing on just that experience. Otherwise, you get stuck competing on price.

  And also you want to try differentiate the property itself. And so if we’re doing the analysis with you and we see a whole bunch of three bed, baths and a whole bunch of two bed, two baths, you want to either go bigger or go smaller and unique. Right. And so we’ve been able to help a lot of our clients kind of navigate those waters, but it’s all about running the numbers. Airbnb, although it or in short term rentals, although it’s a little bit different from long term rentals and hasn’t been around as long as long term rentals.

  there’s still ways to run the numbers pretty accurately to what you will pull in if we get it set up correctly.

  Dylan Silver (08:37)
  Now, I want to talk acquisitions. I come from off market distressed seller acquisitions. As realtors, we have access to to on market as well. In working with investors, I’ve noticed that sometimes, especially when there’s no pre existing relationship, you’ve got to really demonstrate value and why they would need a realtor in the first place when they could go and do their own acquisitions, or at least they think they can in many cases.

  How do you go about, you know, breaching these conversations with newer investors or established investors who may be new to you?

  Niyi (09:13)
  Sure. We just all about the process, right? We have a proven process of having success with our clients as well as personally. And that’s how we go about finding deals. And we just walk every single potential client through that process. Doesn’t matter if this is your first property or if this is your hundredth property. The first thing is just the initial conversation, kind of like what we’re having right now. 15 minutes to talk through, hey, what are some of your goals? What is your past experience? What are you looking for? What are you looking to achieve over the next couple of years with this?

  Then we set up a 30 minute buyer consultation where we will hop on a zoom call to walk through the whole buying process and more specifically what it looks like when we run the numbers so that when we send you a deal, it’s not like, Hey, did they pull this out of a hat? It’s like, no, you can reverse engineer how we got there at that juncture is a place where we tend to get a little bit of friction from somebody who’s been buying a lot of deals. They’re like, no, just send me something. I’m like, listen, guys, I hear you, but if you can’t spend 30 minutes for us to build this relationship and actually understand each other,

  and become sniper accurate at to what we’re looking for and not just a shotgun approach, we’re sending you a million properties. We don’t want to work with you either. And so it’s one where you have to set your standard, make sure that you have a process and follow that process to a T to get success. The big companies that are not real estate related, this is exactly how they achieve success over and over again. And so we have achieved success personally. Most of my team are investors ⁓ and actually were clients that went and got their license and joined my team after we helped them buy investments.

  And so that’s kind of how we weed it out is by going through that process. And if somebody missteps during that process, just to say, hey, I don’t want to do this, just send me deals. We’re not going to send you deals and we just won’t work together.

  Dylan Silver (11:24)
  You know, this conversation that we’re having right now is the first time that I’ve spoken with an investor agent who’s broken down this idea of, you know, how to engage clients in the investor world, because to your point, you often get a little bit of friction, like just send me send me some properties to look at and

  you have to push back on that. I mean, if you just send them properties, then they could borderline do that themselves through like an email subscription to someone who’s going to be, you know, sending them blast properties whenever. So how do you differentiate? If we can dive in a little bit more into this without giving away all the gold here, Niyi, when folks are coming to you, let’s say they’re specifically looking for quadplexes in Atlanta, how granular will you get with them? Will you say like neighborhoods? Will you say

  price points, what are with?

  Niyi (12:23)
  Pretty granular, because again, we want to take that sniper approach versus the shotgun. What I found over time is that if you leave it vague, then they can come back and start to change up a lot of the metrics over time. But if you get super focused, it makes it a little easier if we find that type of property and you’re still like, I got a gut feeling and things of that nature, we can dive in and fine tune our search so that we can find you the property. And so, for example, right, you just gave me the quadplex example. Somebody’s looking for a quadplex.

  One of the first things that we would do in that 15 minute call is ask them, have you been pre-approved? Some people are gonna say, well, I can get pre-approved when we find a deal. Listen, I hear you on that, but I need you to go get pre-approved now before we have that buyer console. Just talk to a lender. If you need one, we have an investor friendly lender. He does it in all 50 States and I’ll connect them with them. And they’re usually able to get that before our call. So now we know the price range that they can go up to.

  And so on that call, I’m already going to have to identify at least three or four potential deals, maybe some off market as well, because we’re constantly out in the field until we hear about deals coming. And during that call, we walk through the whole process. We walk through how we run the numbers on properties just to make sure it aligns with their expectations. Hey, this is what you can expect. What are your goals? What is your why? And why do you want to do this as your next property? And then we actually pull up examples.

  And potentially at times we’re putting offers on those properties within 48 hours after showing it to them on that buyer console, because now you’ve built up that no like and trust factor. They understand how we operate and it helps us fine tune. Right. Because when we show them these properties, somebody can say, hey, I’m looking for a cosmetic rehab or somebody can say, hey, I’m good with everything except fire damage. But then you show them a property on that call. Right. And it’s like, hey guys, check this out. Like, look at this, da da da da da. And they’re like, nah, I actually don’t like that. And I dig into the why it’s it’s never a

  Dylan Silver (14:04)
  next event.

  Niyi (14:09)
  And I teach my team this, if somebody texts you or says a message like, don’t really like that property, you spent how much time looking at this property and running all these numbers to get it over to them. And you’re going to let a 10 second text tell you what you need to know. You need to get on the phone with that person and ask questions. Hey, okay, why was there something about this? Was it a neighborhood? Was it that? So that you can fine tune. And the next one you send to them will be even closer to the target.

  Dylan Silver (14:32)
  I want to ask you specifically, what are investor agents doing wrong? And we talked about maybe being too general. And I think that’s a very common mistake. Is there any other feedback you would give to agents? Hey, stop doing this, because this is preventing you from, you know, getting more clients.

  Niyi (15:34)
  Yeah, I would say you really got to protect your time and value yourself, which is hard to do as a newer agent working with investors. And so there’s plenty of groups and plenty of investors that will send out a million texts. Hey, here goes my buy box. Just send me something when you find it. And an agent who’s not necessarily tied to that person, this is the guy who’s working with a bunch of different people. You haven’t had a real conversation with them is going to go off and start trying to find all these deals and send it to them. and

  And that tends to get lost in the works. And then you start to get burnt out and tired from that piece. And so I’d say having those upfront conversations, making sure that you’re aligned and that you’ve actually met with this person to figure out their goals and how you’re going to help them before spinning your wheels. That’s the most important piece.

  Dylan Silver (16:05)
  Yeah.

  Now for folks who are, let’s say, looking at a high rehab, things that are going to require more intensive work foundation, let’s say, for instance, plumbing issues, and they may be newer. Do you tend to advise folks against that if it’s, one of their first flips or one of their first rehabs? Or would you say, look, this, is a big undertaking. And if you’re going to do this, you have to be aware that

  This is the scope of what could or could not go wrong, right?

  Niyi (16:54)
  think it’s more of that second piece, making them aware of the undertaking. And typically if it’s a brand new investor and they’re like, I want to get into a flip, we’re asking questions as to why. And if they live here, why not go after like a house hack or something, right? Why not go after something where you can, you can go and learn how to invest with training wheels versus a flip where you’re on a motorcycle, no helmet in the middle of the highway, right? So that’s the first piece. The other piece is this is why you work with investor friendly realtors. We are out in the field doing this personally.

  Dylan Silver (17:15)
  Check.

  Niyi (17:21)
  And so we open up our whole Rolodex of vendors and contractors to get things done. And now it’s up to you to reach out to them and have that conversation, but we can help guide that process and give you at least some high level pricing. Hey, this is typically what it should cost to get this type of rehab done. That being said, I’d over budget X percent and hey, I’d structure my contract this way to make sure you’re not giving up too much money upfront. And if the person is properly incentivized to get the work done.

  Dylan Silver (17:49)
  If someone was coming to you saying I want to do let’s say a short term rental, they don’t have any prior experience in STRs, would you be able to guide them as far as hey, here’s the person that I use for design. This is maybe the types of deals that I would be looking at. Are you able to provide feedback for them that may help them if they’re newer or is it more of hey, I can find the property for you, but you need to go handle the design and so forth.

  Niyi (18:15)
  No, absolutely. It’s a full service. So when you talk about handing them the designer, handing them the handyman, the contractors, the cleaners, ⁓ the whole system, like, hey, this is how we set up ours. This is the automations. That’s the value of an investor-friendly realtor, a true investor-friendly realtor. Because when you look at all the other realtors, anybody can open a door. Anybody can, once you teach them, run numbers on a property and then get that thing over to you and put an offer. The piece comes with everything else, right? The fact that I’m investing constantly,

  means that I’ve personally vetted a lot of these individuals and use them on my own projects. And I know there’s strengths and weaknesses. Hey, this contractor is gonna come in a little bit less, but my goodness, you’re gonna have to chase them around because they’re gonna take on a whole bunch of business and forget about yours unless you structure the money this way. Hey, this person is gonna cost more, but they’re gonna do an excellent job. You don’t really gotta oversee that person. Hey, this designer is gonna cost X, but my goodness, you’re not gonna have to do anything, right? You’re gonna literally let this person come in and do it from the ground up.

  And so that’s the piece. It’s the contacts and connections that we have that will help you be successful.

  Dylan Silver (19:13)
  Thank

  We are coming up on time here, Niyi. Where can folks go if they are in the Atlanta area, they’re looking at deals, they’d like to reach out to you or your team. How can folks get in contact with you?

  Niyi (19:26)
  Come on now, and it’s not just the Atlanta area. We cover all of Georgia as well as Florida. I have a team of 10 agents and you can go to ekabohome.com. That is E-K-A-B-O, home.com. Or you can check us out on Instagram at ekabohome, same spelling. We’d be happy to connect with you and help, or even just have a discussion on your real estate investing goals.

  Dylan Silver (19:49)
  Niyi, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

  Niyi (19:52)
  Thank you, Dylan. I appreciate you, man.