How to Turn a Single-Family Home Into an Assisted Living Facility

Boris and Amanda Palomino (00:00)
But this is what we always hear at the end of the conversation is waiting for the right time. I was pregnant. My daughter was born when we started our first facility. When we opened our second facility, the day after we signed escrow, I found out I was pregnant with my son. And we had full—yeah, we had full construction ahead, so many expenses. You figure it out as you go, and I think people are afraid of that. I think they’re—the—the fear holds them back. There is never a perfect time.

Quentin (02:05)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and your eyes does not deceive you. We get two for the price of one. So I’m excited today. I’m excited about our guests here today in Palomino Residential Care. They specialize in senior living. They’re licensed in California. I love what these people are doing. Not only do they have the Palomino Residential Care—

Boris and Amanda Palomino (02:23)
Yeah. Correct.

Quentin (02:34)
They have the Palomino Academy. And I may be pronouncing that wrong, but I’m sure they’re gonna clear me up. But this—these two people right here are innovators. They are helping a—a sect of people sometimes that’s, quite frankly, forgotten. So I love the way that they’re serving people. I love the way that they’re serving the—the clientele that they have. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Boris and Amanda Palomino. How you guys doing today?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (03:00)
Hi, we’re doing really great. Thanks for having us on. Hey, Q. Thanks for having us, man. It’s a pleasure being here.

Quentin (03:04)
Excellent. Man, thank you so much for being here. You know, I appreciate it so much. And listen, I—I am the type, I like to dive right in. So I would love for you two to tell us like, what’s the main focus? What’s your main focus these days? And then also give us a little bit of an origin story. Like, how did this become your passion? How did you get into this—this space? And so please, if y’all don’t—if y’all don’t mind, talk to us a little bit.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (03:30)
So I’ll start with the background and where we began. So, yeah, we currently own and operate residential assisted livings. I know a lot—many of your audience might have heard about it because it’s starting to become a buzz now. So almost eleven years we—we started the process. We were working our nine-to-fives just like everybody else. We were sick and tired of being sick and tired and making somebody else rich and, you know, I would always see the boss of my dealership. I work in the auto shops. I was at the dealership. He was a cool guy. Owner was always on—on trips, doing his own thing, barely came in. I’m like, what the hell? Why can’t that be us? Why can’t—why can’t we do that? Right? So we gave up our two thousand square foot home, which was her childhood home that we were living in. And we moved into a three hundred square foot ADU and I said, “Hey, this is what we’re gonna do. To save enough money to get this started, it’s gonna take us forever, we’re gonna have to move back.”

And like they say, nothing worthwhile, you know, come easy, right? So we made the set twice and it said we’re gonna get the process started. Well, come to find out she was pregnant with our first kid in the middle of all that. So you want to talk about a perfect storm and things kind of going, you know, the—the worst possible way and get—getting that—that resistance. So fast forward two years we opened up our first facility. Fast forward two years later, we opened up a second facility. We just recently opened—what, three years ago we opened up a third. And this past year we actually moved our first facility out of her childhood home into another property. We completely remodeled it and so we finally were able to take out—take our house back, which was our—our goal all along. We’re working on our fourth facility now.

But here’s something funny. Eleven years ago, we accidentally became real estate investors. I had no idea that we would become real estate investors. We now own five pieces of property because of this business model and what it’s given our family. So the way it works is with residential senior care, you purchase a piece of real estate—residential home, does not have to be in any approved zoning, just a single family home converted into a residential senior care facility with proper licensing to do so. In California, that’s our specialty, our bread and butter. You’re allowed to have six seniors in a residential setting and your city cannot deny you because of the Fair Housing Act. So we get to purchase real estate that my business runs a senior care facility out of, and we get to help the community while doing so.

Quentin (06:53)
See, I love it. I love it. Thank you. Thank you for taking us through the journey. Thank you for telling us, you know, kind of what it is that you do. Now I want to peek into you two, into your mindset just a little bit, right? And so I often say destiny has no wasted moments, right? No meaning no matter where, what you’re doing, you’re building momentum to the people we are now. And we’re borrowing from each part of the journey. So I would love to know, what has the moments, what has the journey taught you about yourself? Has it taught you discipline, resilience? Has it made you humble? Like, has it changed your innovation? Like, what has the moments taught you about you?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (07:32)
Yeah, I would say all of the above. All of the above because entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, right? I know it sounds cliché-ish, but I—I will speak—I mean, I’ll speak for myself. It has taught me and I think both of us resilience because we’ve gone through some very difficult moments. Yeah. From the beginning, and it—it—it doesn’t let up. You just—you have—you find a way. You gotta find a way, you can’t give up. Like they say, you fail when you give up.

Quentin (07:34)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (08:00)
It—it teaches you patience, it teaches you just that grit to keep going. And you know, you have your—f—you know, our—our—our why is our—are our kids, our family, right? And so that’s why you—you never give up and you continue to fight for, you know, you continue to fight for what you—what—what you’re trying to—to build and achieve. It’s taught me a couple different things, actually. Being in senior care and we see so many different family dynamics. We’ve been there to help residents in—at their most difficult time, their families at the most difficult time. Everybody wants their aging parent to stay home, but unfortunately it’s not possible all the—the time. So we’ve been able to assist them through that process. And what I’ve learned is how to take care of my own family. I have two kids now, ages nine and eleven, and how do I make sure that my children are going to be secure, financially secure, and not have to worry about mom and dad. So setting up a living trust, having a power of attorney in place, getting your healthcare directive, and all the things that we never think about until it’s too late because I’ve seen the headaches that our families have gone through. And then on like the business side of it, how to pivot. Because times get hard. You can either sit back and say, “Well, that sucked. I guess I gave it a go,” and—and let it happen or you can learn how to pivot your way out of any situation to keep your business moving forward.

Quentin (09:28)
Such great reflective answers. I love that you guys—you brought your family, you put your family into it. So we know where the root, where the anchor is, right? One of my mentors said, “When you know who you are, you know what to do.” And so when you know who you are, when you know what your why is, you know how to proceed forward in any situation that you’re in. And so I absolutely love that reflective answer. So let me ask you, what’s—what’s one operational thing you put into place, like the last two years, that has made the biggest difference in how you do business?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (09:37)
Mm. Yeah.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (10:37)
I want to be your operation. It is. Gosh. What is one thing I put in place? Okay, this is—okay, I’m gonna s—I’m gonna touch a little bit on AI, but I’m not talking about robots. We don’t have robot caregivers. We—you know that I care for residents who have dementia. Can you imagine how afraid they would be if they saw this robot walking into the facility? No. But in creating like process and procedure manuals and—and just simplifying the process for our caregivers. Their main job is to care for somebody’s parent. And I will always make that our number one priority. So, how do I simplify all administrative and the back end of it so that my caregivers aren’t focusing on that so much and more on actual resident patient care? And then just really pushing hard on the culture that we have created within our care facilities. Our families, our residents, our caregivers. We treat them like family, and that’s always been at the forefront of our—our startup of our business eleven years ago.

Yeah, I’ll—I’ll actually—I thought of one, and one that was creating a lot of internal havoc in our business. And this is for all of you that are gonna have either a partner, which is, you know, your husband, wife, or whatever. No, and this is something we—that was huge that we learned from our mentor. Stay in your lane. Understand your strengths and understand that you don’t have to do everything. Understand that you can hire someone smarter than you, because believe it or not, there is somebody smarter than you that can do your job better. Even though you’re the entrepreneur and you think you know everything, then it’s your baby. You can hire somebody to do the job much better, which frees you to do other things. Right. And so in terms of our partnership here, because we’re not only business partners, we’re husband and wife, we’re mom and dad. And that—that comes with a lot of responsibilities. And so knowing what your place is, right? Knowing what your jobs and responsibilities are and staying in your lane, that has been just a huge game changer for us because for the longest time we would step on each other’s toes and we get nothing accomplished. Yeah.

Quentin (12:48)
Yeah, yeah. Again, when you know who you are, you know what to do. That’s even—even the way that you kind of, you know, interact with each other, right? When you know you’re strong, see, you know your superpower. So I all—I often say, there’s a difference between a self-confident leader and a self-aware leader, right? A self-confident leader, they will lead at the detriment of everybody, but a self-aware leader will lead at the compliment of everybody. When you self-confident, you know who you are. You know your strength, you know your weaknesses, but you inflate your strengths and absolutely do nothing about your weaknesses. Not even let somebody compliment the weaknesses that you have, but a self-aware leader, that know—they—they know their strengths, but also when it comes to their weaknesses, they allow somebody to compliment them with their weaknesses so that everybody wins. So everybody gets the compliment and the collaboration. And so it sounds like you two have found that self-aware way of leading with each other. And that’s a beautiful thing. Absolutely beautiful thing. Absolutely beautiful thing.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (13:48)
Took us some time to get there, but we got there. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes we’re, you know, I like to call it the fur starts to fly. We go out. It’s not always pretty. It’s not all the stuff you see on—on Instagram, you know. We’re not gonna post the fights and the—you know, the door slammings and all that, but at the end of the day we come back, we figure it out, and here we are.

Quentin (13:50)
Yeah. So this is the beautiful thing I found out about tension. You grow by holding tension. You grow by holding the weight. Like if you go to the gym, nobody goes to the gym and just lift air, right? They go to the gym and they lift weight and they hold the weight. That’s what builds the muscle. That’s what builds the tension. And so it’s only right that you’ve grown to it. You had to grow to it because you held that tension. That way you grew together. So it’s just a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. Beautiful thing. Would you want to say something?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (14:19)
But yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. No, I—no, I love the analogy.

Quentin (14:38)
Okay. Okay. Absolutely. So what’s next? Like, you—you guys gotta tell me, what’s the next real goal? What are you looking to solve or scale next?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (15:28)
Yeah, so setting—we can only care for six seniors at a time, and it takes six months to get licensed on each individual location. We currently turn down maybe four to five residents per week looking for a senior care facility. We just don’t have enough open beds for them. So two years ago, being on a podcast, just sharing our business and our story—

Quentin (15:46)
Mm.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (15:55)
Somebody reached out to us and said, “I want to learn what you do. Do you have a mentorship program?” And we said, “No,” we didn’t at the time. And they’re like, “Well, we want to come and tour your location. We want to know, we want to learn everything about what you do, and we’re willing to pay you.” And we said, “Okay, sure. Come on over, we’ll give you a tour.” Sat down with them, and that one meeting turned into a full-blown academy. Over eight licensed facilities in the past year alone, another 12 opening up in the next six months in California. We are helping so many people. Not only are we helping our mentees, the—the students within our academy, create a business for the very first time, but we’re helping so many families needing places for their mom and dad at home or their loved one at home because there aren’t enough quality care homes out there.

Yeah, just think about this for a second. In California right now, I’m about to throw you some numbers real quick. There’s close to seven million seniors in California. Okay. Let’s just put this in perspective. I can only have six per home. Let’s just say I open up a massive facility with like 300 beds, 400 beds. That still doesn’t make a dent, right?

Quentin (17:00)
Mm. Yeah, yeah.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (17:16)
So how—

Quentin (17:15)
Yeah.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (17:16)
can we help our senior community by helping others who want to open up these homes? Unfortunately in our industry, there’s a lot of gatekeeping. And what we did is after we had that—that one meeting with our first student, who we didn’t even know it was going to be a student. It just—it happened, right? What—what do they say? And so we locked ourselves in an office for about two to three weeks. We got on a—on a whiteboard and said, “What if we were—”

Quentin (17:31)
Right, right.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (17:45)
From scratch, what would we need? And so we basically pulled all the knowledge, everything, ten years of experience, mistakes, headaches, heartaches, and put it all into our academy. And we’re still making changes, we’re still doing things, and we’re still improving it. And right now we have—what, close to over a hundred members in our community, and it continues to grow every month. We—we, you know, we want to make a big impact in the senior community of—nationwide, but we’re starting with California, right? And as Amanda mentioned, in just one year, eight facilities were licensed. We have over twelve right now that are waiting in the pipeline to get licensed. And there is no shortage for anyone. There’s plenty for all of us to eat. I always talk about an abundance mentality.

Quentin (18:35)
Yes, sir. I love it. I absolutely love it. So you got—y’all literally kind of welcome me to my next question. When people come on, I—I always like to get their perspective on relationship. Mainly business relationships. So, but I want to hit y’all from maybe a trifecta. I would love for y’all to tell me, you know, is business relationships important to you? But just also relationships in general, because of course, you two together have a working relationship, and then also just a relationship with the people that you serve. So business relationships, personal relationships, and the people that you serve. Talk to me about your philosophy when it comes to relationships.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (19:13)
Yeah. Said this, it is who you know that will get you through that door. It’s what you know that keeps you there. So you can’t just show up and expect free things, free information, and expect to stay in those same rooms. At that point, you have to give something back. But it’s always relationships that will make that in—introduction, that first step forward.

Yeah, for—I’m gonna add one more thing to that is never burn a bridge. Never. Never burn a bridge. Now, there are bridges you do need to burn immediately. And understand which bridges you need to burn and which bridges you have to maintain. Relationships is everything, whether it’s in business, whether it just in life, right? You don’t need to have a million relationships, you just need to have the right ones in place and foster them. And I’m gonna echo what Amanda says. Always value back to the people that give value to you. Unfortunately our society now, there—it’s a lot of “what’s in it for me,” take, take, take. And what I notice is when relationships growth is when there’s mutual value. And it doesn’t have to be monetary. Value can come in so many different ways. Understand what the other person could value from your gifts, your God-given gifts, and—and don’t be afraid to give that out. Do be—just be aware that when you are the one that’s giving, giving, giving all the time, you do have to pull back at some sort—at some time. Yeah.

Quentin (20:41)
Yeah. I love it. Well, listen, I want to create space for one more thought. So I’ll kind of frame it like this. Is there any last words of inspiration, education, or motivation? Or did you two come on—come—come here kind of with something on your mind that you want to avoid—that definitely know? I just want to kind of create space that if there’s one final thought that you came in with—

Boris and Amanda Palomino (20:49)
Okay.

Quentin (21:08)
That you had a land—that you had a t—a chance to land that message.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (21:11)
Go for it. I was gonna go back to you. That’s my thought. You’re the pretty one. We all—we all have big dreams. We all want to do big things in life. And Boris and I speak to over maybe over twenty people every single week who want to start a business, who want to get into the industry, who want to create something different for their family. And in fact, we—we hear from a lot of Airbnb owners. Airbnb is not working out for them anymore and they don’t want to let go of their property. They’re looking to pivot and transition into senior care, which I think is great. We hear from a lot of nurses as well. But this is what we always hear at the end of the conversation is waiting for the right time. I was pregnant. My daughter was born when we started our first facility. When we opened our second facility, the day after we signed escrow, I found out I was pregnant with my son. And we had full—yeah, we had full construction ahead, so many expenses. You figure it out as you go, and I think people are afraid of that. I think they’re—the—the fear holds them back. There is never a perfect time. Even now we’re jumping into our next construction project. Do I feel like it’s perfect time? No, I don’t think it’s a perfect time. I’m creating the time, though. I’m creating that perfect moment, that perfect time, and—and I know that it’s gonna do really well.

Yeah, I’ll just touch on the inspirational part a little bit real quick. And I always talk about this. I—I—I was born in Mexico. I came here when I was seven years old. And I’ve been able to create along a life that I—we dreamed of and now sometimes we kind of look at ourselves and we’re like, is this really happening? Is this really what we’re doing? Is—are we really here? And we live in the greatest country in the world. I always talk about that where the opportunities are so abundant. However, you gotta put in the work. You gotta put in the at-bats. You gotta put in the reps. A lot of people want the cars, the watches, the lifestyle, whatever it is that they think success is, but they want it now. They don’t want any sacrifices. And so if you’re—if—if you want all these things in life, you can have, but if you don’t have them it’s because you don’t want bad enough and you haven’t put in the work to—to get it.

And the last thing I want to talk about is there’s a biz—misconception about senior care. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of places that do give us a bad rep. Yeah, unlicensed facilities, the abuse, the neglect, the—the big facilities that sometimes are just in it for the money. Even the fraud that we’re hearing about now. There’s a lot of things that are out there that just give us a bad reputation. And so part of one of the main reasons we started the academy is to make sure that we open up quality care for our seniors. Our seniors deserve the best. Right? We’re living longer, they’re around longer, and they require the best care. And so a lot of people think, “you’re charging, you know, five thousand, ten thousand for a bed.” They’re getting exceptional care, right? And the—for all homes that are out there that are not doing that, they should not be around. And so our priority is senior care, quality senior care, and there’s a lot of overhead that comes with it and that’s why the prices are what they are. Would it be a perfect world, it would be very affordable and in a perfect world families can keep their loved ones at home and care for them. Yeah, but unfortunately that’s not the case. So we do get a lot of hate of like, “you guys are gouging seniors, you guys are taking advantage of the vulnerable.” No, we’re actually offering the best possible resources for them for quality care at the best price out there.

Quentin (25:00)
Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, I’m excited about what you guys do. I often say I feel at the foundation of any successful business is servitude. And so the way that y’all are serving the community that y’all are serving is exceptional to me. And so listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can I get in contact with you?

Boris and Amanda Palomino (25:15)
So, yeah, we are both on Instagram. You can find me @theamandapalomino. Boris is @borisvpalomino. You can also go to our website, palominoseniorliving.com and find us there. We have all of our socials and podcast information, all the stuff at the bottom. Yeah, we also have a podcast. If you look us up on YouTube, it’s called Built Different the Palomino Way. And yeah, we’re on TikTok, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere. So, and we show everything. Personal life, the business life, the fun stuff we do. The dogs that are therapy dogs now. Yeah, we didn’t even talk about that. We didn’t talk about the tax advantages. My god, we do it all. Yeah, yeah. There’s depreciation, tax advantages, how you can utilize your home, you know, to—all of the equity that you build to roll it into the next one. There’s just so many facets to this industry that are phenomenal. So yeah, our dogs are employees, they’re legal, they’re employees of the company because they’re trained therapy dogs. I just posted one on social media so you can go find him there. He just passed. Like our kids, they work for—they work for our facilities, so we don’t take family vacations. We take business retreats.

Quentin (26:30)
What you guys are doing. So listen, I’m so glad I had a chance to spend some time with you two. I want to say three things to you sincerely. Thank you for your time. I think time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for your time. I value your time. I value you—value you for being here with us. So thank you. Secondly, thank you for your story, thank you for your authenticity, thank you for your integrity. I believe our story is a plant—a seed. And we may never see the full growth, but the seed is there and it can grow at any given time. So thank you for planting some seeds today. And lastly, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you two think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate y’all coming on today.

Boris and Amanda Palomino (27:09)
Thanks for having us. Thank you, man. We really appreciate all your kind words.

Quentin (27:11)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all, y’all heard—y’all heard Amanda and Mr. Boris. Y’all heard them. Their information is in the show notes. Please get in contact with them. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here. Cause I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people, just like the Palominos. So y’all, I thank y’all again for so much for being here. And listen, everyone else, have a fantastic day.