Increase Cash Flow with Student Housing

John Harcar (00:01.1)
All right, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar.

And we’re here today with Ryan Chaw. And what we’re going to talk about is doubling your rental income using student housing or doing some rent by the room stuff. right, guys, remember here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, mean, all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business. And we do that by providing tools and resources to build the business they want to build, which in turn helps them live the life they’ve dreamed of. So, Ryan, welcome to our show.

Ryan Chaw (00:31.65)
Thank you for having me on, John.

John Harcar (00:33.162)
Yeah, I’m definitely interested in getting into this whole part about renting by the room. know, know, pad split and other type of things are out there. A great way to grow more income. But before we get into the weeds of everything, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about you, kind of where you came from, how you got into this game of real estate and what got you here?

Ryan Chaw (00:51.714)
Yeah, so what inspired me was actually my grandpa. He bought a couple properties back in the 1950s and they were dirt cheap and it was in the SF San Francisco Bay Area. So as we all know, appreciation went up like crazy, rents went up and he was not only able to retire early but help cover part of my college tuition and that of my brothers as well. So I realized that real estate is one of the best ways to create generational wealth from that example. And so I just got started as soon as I could.

John Harcar (01:02.399)
Hmm.

John Harcar (01:17.973)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (01:20.574)
I graduated as a pharmacist in 2015 and I just saved up as much capital as I could. I would work a lot of overtime shifts, 14 to 16 hour shifts from 7.30 a.m. to 11 p.m. I would work retail pharmacy and hospital pharmacy so I had two jobs at the time and I just tried to amass as much capital as possible because real estate is very capital intensive. So I bought my first property for $262,000.

John Harcar (01:33.546)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (01:44.971)
Yes.

Ryan Chaw (01:49.454)
back in 2016 and it was in Stockton, California. And what I did was I did what my buddy did in college where he lived in a room and he rented out all the other rooms to his buddies and he was able to live for free and make cashflow as well. So I was like, wow, this is a really cool strategy. I also recently graduated from the pharmacy school. So I was like, why don’t I just rent out to other pharmacy students? And that’s how I got started.

John Harcar (02:05.206)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (02:16.813)
I took a single family home, basically divided it into five or six bedrooms. And then I just rented out by the room for $600 or $700 per room, which means that six bedroom usually makes $3,600 to $4,200.

John Harcar (02:32.47)
Now, your grandfather bought some properties. Was he like an investor or did he just buy properties on the side just kind of wanting to dabble in real estate or something like that?

Ryan Chaw (02:43.447)
He was an investor, but he basically he had a military salary. He was a draftsman in the military and him and his wife at the time who passed away early, unfortunately, they had actually a lot of racism. had racism against them. They were trying to buy all these properties and everyone was like slamming the doors on their face. Eventually they met a nice Italian family that was able to sell this set of six flats to them.

And so they basically rented out the other five flats, stayed in one of them, and that was the rest is history. Actually, I think my mother, or uncle stayed in one of the other ones, but yeah, the rest of them were rented out.

John Harcar (03:18.56)
Okay.

John Harcar (03:25.31)
Okay, so you have this figure in your life that’s obviously doing things good in real estate and being successful. Why did you not go into real estate? Why not? Or why pharmaceutical?

Ryan Chaw (03:38.414)
yeah, that’s a good question. You know, back in high school, I always wanted to have a career helping people. And I was really good at chemistry, science, biology. so pharmacy just kind of seemed right up my alley. And real estate, obviously, having Asian parents, my parents are like, No, don’t do that. Do what’s safe, you know, be a doctor, a doctor, pharmacist, lawyer, engineer, right? Those were my pretty much my main options.

John Harcar (04:00.064)
course.

Ryan Chaw (04:08.297)
So they had a very strong influence with that. Back then, obviously as a high schooler, I had no idea what I was doing and I was like, sure, why not, right? So I got into this accelerated pharmacy program that was a five year program, two years of undergrad and three years of graduate. So I was like, yeah, I’ll be out pretty quickly. So I might as well do that. And also it actually, if I were to go back, I would do the same thing because pharmacy it’s a…

John Harcar (04:16.342)
Sure.

Ryan Chaw (04:33.037)
pretty good income and for real estate you need to have a pretty good income to purchase properties. You want to have a very stable high income job and you need to have enough capital to buy those properties. Now of course you can do things like house hacking where you live at the house so you only put like a three or three and a half percent down payment but typically those loan terms aren’t as great you have PMI that you have to pay.

John Harcar (04:34.208)
Mm.

John Harcar (04:57.696)
Great.

Ryan Chaw (04:58.622)
There’s just a lot of money that you have to put into the property too. So that’s why it’s really good to have a Strong stable income before you get into real estate investing in my opinion

John Harcar (05:08.938)
Got it. OK, so you went to school, you graduated with your pharmacy degree. How long did it take you before you bought your first property?

Ryan Chaw (05:17.293)
About a year. I saved up $100,000. Back in high school, I was like tutoring and so I just saved up, put all that money into stocks. And then I just worked my butt off basically for the first like two or three years. And I bought a property with it, whatever funds I had available. I think the second one, I only could put a 10 % down payment on it because I didn’t have enough funds.

John Harcar (05:18.538)
Bye to you.

John Harcar (05:35.328)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:40.64)
didn’t have the funds. This first one, was it a property that you lived in? Or was it a pure rental investment property? Okay.

Ryan Chaw (05:44.761)
The first one was an investment. The first one was an investment. The second one was essentially a second home.

John Harcar (05:51.678)
Okay. And then how did you go out and find these properties?

Ryan Chaw (05:56.044)
Yeah, so I went on to Zillow. Actually, you know what, I first contacted an agent and he showed me kind of around the properties. He actually mentored me a little bit. He would go to the house and say, this house, avoid this because if you take a look at the roof, it’s in really bad shape and you know, the seller is not going to be willing to fix it. And yeah, I would definitely walk away from that deal. So he kind of showed me the ropes a little bit and that’s

Pretty much how I got started is just having that phone call with the realtor and he said, yeah, why don’t you come down to Stockton and start looking at houses?

John Harcar (06:30.819)
Okay. All right. And at what point, you know, did you decide to go full time into real estate?

Ryan Chaw (06:37.345)
I would say around the year four, year five, so by the fourth year of working as a pharmacist, I essentially, I was making $10,755 per month in passive, like just rental income. And I was like, wow, this strategy really works very well. By renting by the room, I’m doubling the typical rental income. And I was like, if I just do this for another three years, I basically have my pharmacist’s income fully replaced. And so I could retire.

So I think around the age of 28 or so, was like, I calculated it out and it turned out by the age of 31, I could replace the pharmacist’s salary and retire. So by 31, I was like, I set my quit date, it was August of 2023, and then I quit on that date.

John Harcar (07:15.958)
Good for you.

John Harcar (07:22.728)
Okay, what are some of the challenges that you ran into when you started to get, you know, obviously more involved in real estate, buying these properties? I mean, what are some of the things that you came up against in this specific model?

Ryan Chaw (07:34.99)
Sure, yeah, so one thing that happens that not everyone thinks about is because there’s like a human element to it There’s potential for tenant versus tenant conflicts or housemate conflicts So it could be like over the dishes being dirty. For example, it could be over loud noise at night Maybe somebody’s staying up late playing video games and shouting at their you know in their mic or whatever You’ve probably heard of that happen before people like rage, you know

John Harcar (07:57.022)
Right, right, right, yeah.

John Harcar (08:03.638)
Mm.

Ryan Chaw (08:03.661)
So what happens for that is I typically have the student That’s complaining have a one-on-one conversation with the person they’re complaining about state why they’re upset Come up with some sort of action plan that they can kind of implement for the next two weeks It could be just like quiet hours after 10 or whatever or use your headphones But basically come up with an action plan directly with them and then if it’s still a problem come back to me after those two weeks after those two weeks I

Like 95, 99 % of cases, I don’t hear anything. It’s either they learn how to tolerate each other or they actually work something out. But in either case, most times, you know, goes away. If it doesn’t, then I will actually call up the person who is causing the issue. I’ll state like, oh, the other tenants are telling me this. What can you do? Like, what are your thoughts and what do you think you can do about this, right? And if that doesn’t work, you can always go to potentially the parents.

John Harcar (08:57.462)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (09:01.313)
because a lot of these students, because I invest in college towns specifically, bring in like grad students a lot of times, they do have parents as well. So I can potentially go to the parent and say, hey, this is what’s going on. Can you help out with this, with the policing of this?

John Harcar (09:15.958)
Okay, so what it sounds like is that as compared to a traditional rental, right, where I just have a family in there, you got to have some conflict resolution skills to be able to mitigate these things.

Ryan Chaw (09:26.701)
Yeah, as long as you have like a system or strategy nowadays I have a virtual assistant who kind of handles all this type of stuff and I have the know, the SOP I just basically gave you

John Harcar (09:39.168)
Sure. Is there any specific vetting process or something that you go maybe above and beyond what traditional, you know, kind of vetting would be for a tenant?

Ryan Chaw (09:50.456)
So the most important thing to get high quality tenants is to be near a college or like a hospital so that you can get like a top college I would say so that you can get like really good tenants who let’s say they had like maybe straight A’s in high school, they’re very well rounded, they’ve done a lot extra curriculars, all of that type of stuff. They tend to be a lot more responsible, especially the graduate students. So I typically invest in schools that have a lot of grad programs.

John Harcar (10:15.168)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (10:20.081)
and don’t provide housing for grad students. In fact, most colleges do not provide any housing for graduate students. They might have like maybe one building, but they provide enough for undergrad, but the grad students are basically left to find housing for themselves. out of necessity, grad students have to live off campus. So that’s kind of my main clientele is I go to these schools that have like pharmacy, dentistry, doctorate programs, know, MBA and law programs.

John Harcar (10:43.679)
Right.

Ryan Chaw (10:46.549)
And so by doing that, I really bring in that high quality tenant base for the most part. typically I try to match people up as well. I might have like a pharmacy house, a dental house, a law house, et cetera.

John Harcar (10:59.542)
Okay, right. So they all have mutual type of interests, And kind of peer class, right?

Ryan Chaw (11:07.903)
Yeah, and as far as like payment, you never like get unpaid rent because it’s usually the parents who are paying, right? No parent is going to just stop paying for their child and have their child get evicted from where they’re staying at school, right? So that’s a big thing about this as well is it’s very consistent with the income that comes in. And I only do one year leases. They’re allowed to sublet during the summer to, you know, summer school students, but they do have, you know, it is basically August to August leases for

John Harcar (11:19.262)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Harcar (11:36.352)
Got it. What’s the kind of craziest situation you’ve had arise at one of your… I’ve heard some crazy stuff at some like pad splits. So what’s kind of like the craziest situation you’ve ever encountered or had to deal with?

Ryan Chaw (11:44.129)
her.

Ryan Chaw (11:49.038)
Mmm, I mean there’s a couple things like one I’ve had a sewage line break where I get a call at 11 p.m Saying that there’s sewage that’s all over the kitchen floor backing out in the shower, etc And I had to get a sanitation crew out there and I found that the line was broken as well So I had to replace the whole sewage line which cost like nine thousand dollars And so I realized from there like I really have to do the due diligence During my inspection phase and I could have done a sewage lateral line inspection

and found that break while the seller was still selling me the property so that I can negotiate with them credit towards paying for that sewage line repair. Now there is that, but there’s also a student who, it was like my very first year, he was smoking like marijuana when it was illegal in California. And so that became a big issue. lot of the housemates were like upset about it, obviously. And then he also was a little bit of a party type.

John Harcar (12:39.434)
Right.

Ryan Chaw (12:46.967)
He was actually part of my fraternity, which is funny. I went on a trip with him and I knew he was a very loud person, very party type mentality, but I kind of ignored it and I was like, you know what, I need to just fill this as soon as possible. So I took him on and I was like, yeah, he’s my buddy, it should be fine. Little did I know, he brought over like 80 people for a wild Halloween party and I got the cops called on us and…

John Harcar (13:14.044)
jeez.

Ryan Chaw (13:15.905)
You know, the cop was like saying, hey, your occupancy, you can’t have 80 people at the house like this. Fire codes, blah, blah, blah. Right. And so, yeah, I got in trouble because I brought in a tenant that I didn’t fully. Well, I actually vetted him. I knew his personality, but I still brought him in because I was desperate to get my first tenants in to try to avoid vacancies.

John Harcar (13:32.854)
Alright.

John Harcar (13:38.694)
So would you say don’t rent to friends or certain people?

Ryan Chaw (13:41.582)
I think yeah, you just have to you kind of can tell based off of how they interact with you and respond to you kind of what type of person they are Also, though if you do bring in a couple good one like maybe two or three like really serious students who are trying to get their MD for example They kind of keep the other tenants in check if one tenants like I want to have a house party The others are like no, I got midterms and finals. Sorry

John Harcar (14:01.334)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (14:09.366)
And that’s I was going to ask, you know, is a reason why you focus on like grad students and those to kind of, you know, mitigate that party possibility? I mean, we all like to party. I was in college. I liked the party. I grads that like to party. But is that kind of where you’re targeting that people are more focused?

Ryan Chaw (14:25.773)
Sure, yeah, I really advertise my places as quiet study environment type houses and so people who contact me they’re kind of looking for that and they want to keep the place like that too. So that’s kind of how I do that. But the other thing I do is I keep a very good security deposit. I keep one month rent for the security deposit from each tenant. So it ends up being like $3,600, $4,200. And so if something does happen, I do have a lot of

John Harcar (14:39.094)
Sure.

John Harcar (14:49.354)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (14:55.789)
deposit to use to cover it, potentially.

John Harcar (14:59.05)
Got it, got it. And just for anybody else that might be listening, that might be looking to do some like rent by the rooms, is there any specific things that you put in like a lease for each person? Because you have four different people, maybe four different personalities. Like you said, one person wants to party, the rest are like, no. So is there like a certain, they have to have a majority or something like that to where, you know, it kind of dictates how things happen.

Ryan Chaw (15:26.977)
Yeah, I do put in the lease that they do have to take care of the common spaces together. Things like leaving dirty dishes in the sink, for example, that’s violation of the lease. And what we do a lot of times if there is dishes left in the sink is we will have our boots on the ground person go in there, take pictures of it, and then we’ll email them those pictures and say, hey guys, if this continues, we basically have to hire a cleaner to do this job. And then you would

basically be passed on the bill, the bill, the cleaning bill would be passed on to you guys. So I mean, it’ll be split equally among everyone. So it’s everyone’s responsibility to take care of that situation. So if you know, even if you maybe you did some of the dirty dishes, but not all of them, you might want to just, you know, help clean up after all of them so that you guys don’t get charged for that. The other thing is obviously I do have like a dishwasher so that they can use that to, you know, just get the

John Harcar (16:04.726)
Sure.

Ryan Chaw (16:21.805)
dishes out of the sink. So that’s probably the biggest concern. But other things in the lease, I mean, I do charge like a $90 cleaning fee at the very end of the lease. Sometimes people are on group leases if they’re all like friends, for example, and they know each other, I might have them on a group lease. But yeah, other than that, usually they’re just individual leases. And there’s there’s little intricacies like that, the details that I mentioned, that, you know, will differ than a standard.

John Harcar (16:36.16)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (16:51.149)
full family lease.

John Harcar (16:52.79)
Sure. Um, and I just forgot what I was gonna say. Oh, no, that’s it. I know like, and I’ve seen in the news, you know, stuff with pad split and, you know, counties or cities trying to push regulations and stuff. I mean, is there, have you run across any situations to where, you know, a specific area maybe didn’t want the rent by the room area because there’s so many people that, you know, five cars in place. Any situations like that that might have came up? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Chaw (17:13.505)
Yeah, yeah, that’s something PatSplit is fighting a lot for sure. It’s something that’s like high on the agenda for PatSplit and they have a lot of lawyers behind that. So there are some cities that have regulations around occupancy. So, you know, they might say you have you can only have five unrelated tenants at a house or something like this. However, there are usually ways like there’s things in the law that say you can do it if you get a specific permit, for example. So for me,

John Harcar (17:31.808)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (17:42.399)
Right.

Ryan Chaw (17:42.986)
I got like a change of use permit to be a rooming house or a boarding house. So like rooming houses and boarding houses, you just have to get that special designation. For me, it required having a smoke detector in every room, which is pretty standard anyways, a carbon monoxide detector on every floor. And then it required an exit sign as well. So the little exit sign that lights up and shows you where the back door is or whatever, that’s what I had to put in.

John Harcar (17:52.416)
Okay.

John Harcar (17:57.643)
Yep.

John Harcar (18:06.762)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (18:09.385)
And then it took like maybe three weeks, four weeks to get approved and that was it. And then I was approved as a rooming house. Now that doesn’t have to be, it depends on like what zoning district you’re in. It depends on what city you’re in. I would say like a majority of cities in California don’t even have that regulations like that. So it just, again, it depends on the city.

John Harcar (18:14.227)
Okay.

John Harcar (18:29.962)
Are you strictly up in Northern California? Where do you have your properties? Like around what colleges?

Ryan Chaw (18:34.615)
So I have, yeah, have Sacramento, Stockton, California, Cleveland, Ohio, Huntsville, Alabama. I have 14 student rentals at this time.

John Harcar (18:45.152)
What made you decide to branch out into those other areas outside of where you’re at?

Ryan Chaw (18:49.355)
Yeah, I started in California because that’s where I’m from. So Stockton was only an hour and 15 minute drive for me. So I was very comfortable that I could go down there, see the property, make any, you know, changes, whatever, do my marketing locally if I really wanted to. But then I realized that most of the stuff can be done online, especially if you have a team. And so the key is having that team, having a good boots on the ground, a contractor handyman. I also

John Harcar (19:10.4)
Yeah.

Ryan Chaw (19:16.429)
make a list of really trustworthy plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, roofers, and just having one of each, you know, skill set essentially allows me to, like, if there’s a, I don’t know, a pipe that leaks, call up the plumber and just have them come out and fix the issue. Nowadays I also have a virtual assistant who calls the plumber for me when there’s an issue, so.

John Harcar (19:36.074)
Mmm.

Ryan Chaw (19:41.518)
Just having those good people on hand to call is really important. And a lot of people wait until the emergency happens. You shouldn’t wait till it happens. You get, you you start building your team now so that if it does happen, that’s when you can go ahead and just look down your list and call them up.

John Harcar (19:48.886)
No.

John Harcar (20:00.244)
These properties in, you said Alabama and Ohio, are you using a property manager or no? Just kind of keep.

Ryan Chaw (20:09.293)
So I don’t use, okay, so there’s two parts of property management, right? There’s marketing and there’s management, like actually maintaining the property. So marketing, I do in-house marketing. So my virtual assistant kind of does all the marketing, all the stuff is online. A lot of it is automated. I have like programs kind of behind the scenes that just respond to people. And then for the management piece, I do have somebody whose boots on the ground who will…

John Harcar (20:15.626)
Right.

John Harcar (20:30.614)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (20:35.478)
Okay.

Ryan Chaw (20:35.681)
go through the houses with a checklist and say, yeah, there’s no mold, there’s no dry rot, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’ll do that once a quarter. And I pay them on a per cases basis. So for them to go through the house on a quarterly basis, I pay them maybe somewhere between 65 and 75 bucks or something like this. And they also kind of go in there to maybe do some house tours for a group of students who are interested.

John Harcar (20:46.558)
Okay.

John Harcar (20:55.422)
Okay.

Ryan Chaw (21:03.265)
Now normally I have my students actually do the tours and I’ll pay them like 25 bucks for each tour that they do but if you know they’re not available I’ll have the property manager do that part and again I pay them on a per case basis I don’t pay them 8 to 12 percent of the total rental income because they’re not doing any of the marketing for me they’re kind of there to help with the move-in, move-outs help with the house checklists help with coordinating any tours or deliveries and setting up

John Harcar (21:09.59)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (21:18.358)
per month,

Ryan Chaw (21:32.525)
appliances, that type of stuff.

John Harcar (21:34.454)
Okay, what are some of the pros and cons versus traditional renting?

Ryan Chaw (21:39.192)
Sure, pros, a lot more cash flow. In fact, in today’s market, everyone, feel like it’s an up and coming thing, student housing that is, student housing slash co-living, because right now with multifamily getting hit really, really hard, with single family home investing not really making any cash flow, this is kind of like the thing you have to do, you have to be creative in order to make cash flow, right? And Airbnb, right, used to,

John Harcar (21:48.918)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (22:02.475)
Yeah.

Ryan Chaw (22:06.849)
be a great method to invest, now because there’s so much competition in it, it’s just, you know, it’s really hard to get in, especially if you’re a new Airbnb owner. So that’s why like student housing is so great. It has double the cashflow. It’s the parents paying the rent. So you always have that consistency versus, you know, people coming in and out all the time like Airbnb. And it’s like a very undervalued niche. There’s like over a hundred colleges in every single state.

John Harcar (22:29.046)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (22:36.109)
And you know, there’s pharmacy colleges, medical colleges, law colleges, etc. And so this can be done in anywhere essentially and double, at least double the cash flow, I mean double the rental income and sometimes even triple the rental income.

John Harcar (22:43.178)
Yeah, yeah.

John Harcar (22:52.166)
are you seeing like, so you mentioned you’re seeing more of a trend, people starting to do this more. when you go out and buy your properties, are you buying turnkey? Are you buying stuff that needs a little bit of love? I mean, what are you, how, like what type of level are you buying at? Turnkey.

Ryan Chaw (23:08.429)
turnkey pretty much. Yeah I don’t do things like burrs or anything like that. It’s uh the thing is if I’m gonna spend like three months renovating the property and I basically look at the opportunity cost of that well if I bought a property now and rented it out right away and I rented out for $4200 a month well three months times $4200 is like 12,000 bucks right so unless I’m gonna make a like a

John Harcar (23:32.714)
Mmm.

Ryan Chaw (23:35.277)
$50,000 return or $40,000 return and that’s like a guaranteed return. I don’t even want to take that risk I just you know cut all that out just do a simple strategy buy a house That’s already in good shape put in those extra bedrooms which cost maybe 1,500 to 2,500 dollars per room and then just rent it out as soon as I can which is pretty much right away

John Harcar (23:41.918)
Now, makes sense.

John Harcar (23:55.626)
Right. Are you buying on or off market?

Ryan Chaw (23:59.438)
It depends. I do have an agent who kind of sends me off-market deals. So sometimes I will buy an off-market deal, but most of the time it’s just a property that pops up on Zillow and you know, has one day on market and I’ll go ahead and put an offer on it because I’m pretty quick with that. It’s almost like being like a in real estate. It’s almost like being like a cheetah, you know, you have to wait and then when when it the prey comes you pounce on it, right?

John Harcar (24:20.918)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Chaw (24:24.525)
So you really want to pounce on the deal before like others get to it otherwise you get into a bidding war and then you know it just keeps going up and up and up and doesn’t make sense anymore. So I check it a little every day and I will usually I would say most of the properties majority of my properties I bought within a day or two of it hitting the market.

John Harcar (24:32.757)
Yeah.

John Harcar (24:44.086)
Awesome. Are you using hard money, private money, traditional bank financing? What are you doing? Your own money.

Ryan Chaw (24:49.803)
my own money. yeah, recently I took on I guess a few like two family members essentially, but all the rentals like since I started was pretty much my own money. I would say like the first five years, the first like five in California were all my own money. And then what I did was I leveraged the first house that I had, I sold that one and used it to buy seven in Ohio. Well now it’s eight.

John Harcar (25:18.102)
Hmm.

Ryan Chaw (25:18.999)
But basically, it was still my own money. I took that and used that to buy out of the state.

John Harcar (25:22.784)
Right.

John Harcar (25:26.26)
Okay. What mistakes do you see people that are getting into something like this make?

Ryan Chaw (25:33.518)
Hmm I would say I mean there’s a ton of mistakes that people can make I think the most important thing is having a very good stable job Having good income so that in case something happens on the house You can you know make those repairs without it really stressing your budget out the second mistake I would say is just not knowing how to market well, you got to have good systems to find those tenants and

really do targeted marketing for college students. And then I would say, you know, maybe not having very firm house rules in place. So one thing that we do is the VA will help with their move in, they will go through the whole, the house rules, they’ll have them sign off on it. You know, they’ll go one at a time, don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that really minimizes the conflicts.

John Harcar (26:21.896)
Right. Okay. And if someone wants to get into renting by the room and doing what you’re doing, how, you what advice would you give to them? How do they get started?

Ryan Chaw (26:32.141)
Yeah, get started as soon as you can. It’s one of the best ways, like even if you have three people live there, you’re essentially covering your mortgage payment at least, just having three people. And then the other three are just gravy, right? If you get to a six bedroom house. Other advice I would say is you really have to know where to buy. So a lot of times I’ll go to Reddit and I’ll read through the student forums specifically for that school. And it’ll say like, yeah, grad students like living here or there, right? And typical, you know,

John Harcar (26:44.639)
Right.

Ryan Chaw (27:02.253)
searches I do is like off-campus housing nearby, I don’t know, Sacramento State, and then I’ll look through like, okay, what are people recommending for best places to stay off-campus housing near Sacramento State? And then I’ll try to buy houses in those neighborhoods that the students are mentioned.

John Harcar (27:15.307)
Got it.

John Harcar (27:19.254)
That’s awesome, man. I love the idea. I love the business plan and how you’re making this extra income. It’s incredible. If folks wanna get in touch with you, right? If they wanna learn more about this, maybe have some questions on some of the stuff you mentioned, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Ryan Chaw (27:37.623)
Sure, yeah, feel free to ask any questions you guys have. Just go to www.newbierealestateinvesting.com slash guide and I give a free PDF guide on how to get started in student housing, just how to get started in real estate investing in general, like what are some of my struggles and how I overcome them. And that’s again at www.newbierealestateinvesting.com slash guide.

Nubia is spelled N-E-W-B-I-E. And then once you get the email from me, you can go ahead and click Reply to that email and then ask whatever questions you have.

John Harcar (28:10.882)
Sweet guys. I hope you took some good notes here man, because I took some well I did in my head as well It’s a fantastic sounding strategy, right? It’s a way to really like like you Retired early and get a lot better income Ryan thank you again man for coming on the show

There’s a lot of good nuggets that you dropped. Folks, I hope you guys enjoyed this show as much as I did. And reach out. I think it’s something that more people should learn about. And I think it’s a good trend that’s happening right now. So hope you guys enjoyed the show. I know as I did. I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers.

Ryan Chaw (28:47.086)
Thanks John.