Realtor Lancelot Lenard on Smart Real Estate Investing in Daytona

Lancelot S. Lenard (00:00)
No, no, this was premeditated, all of it. Trying to build Sir Lancelot Enterprises as a whole, which will be somewhat like D.R. Horton, but better homes, basically. Sales under one roof, mortgages under one roof, title under one roof, at one point insurance under one roof, construction under one roof.

Dylan Silver (01:53)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Lancelot Lenard is a Florida realtor and leader of the Sir Lancelot Group. Welcome to the show today, Lancelot.

Lancelot S. Lenard (02:01)
Thank you Dylan.

Dylan Silver (02:03)
It’s great to have you on here. And when we talk Florida real estate, we were talking a little bit in the green room, you’re in the greater Daytona area and an area, Port Orange is the name of it, correct?

Lancelot S. Lenard (02:14)
Correct. Little town in Port Orange. We have a few residents here. It is an awesome coastal town, I’d like to say.

Dylan Silver (02:25)
Now we were also talking in the green room about, you you’ve lived in other areas of Florida. You mentioned South Florida as well years ago. How did you get up to where you’re at now, Port Orange?

Lancelot S. Lenard (02:35)
So I was searching for an investment property, which is interesting. ⁓ My wife got pregnant and ⁓ we decided to move out of Miami and raise our kids in a smaller, ⁓ friendlier for children to grow up environment in Miami. And I was looking around to substitute her income with something ⁓ while she’s watching the kiddo grow up. ⁓

really conservative, ⁓ Western, sorry, yes, Eastern European ⁓ heritage. So we like our household to be a household, as in the wife, the homemaker, the husband, the worker. So that’s what we were aiming for at that point. So we found the floor planks for a really good price up here in Daytona about seven years ago. We got it for $165,000. It was one of the best sales that guys told me that they ever had.

lowest per door price ⁓ back then. And since then, that property has been blooming for us. It’s generating more than what her income was in Miami. ⁓ Yes, cash flowing actually more than what her income was. In Daytona. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we did a lot of work to it. Don’t get me wrong. It was basically a block home. No drive.

Dylan Silver (03:45)
It’s a fourplex you mentioned in Daytona.

Now

you’ve also got a background doing some work as a contractor. ⁓ How did you get involved in that space?

Lancelot S. Lenard (04:04)
So contracting is really interesting. Last year when the market started to go down, we felt really heavily as a realtor going from selling 48 homes a year to down to three homes last year, really, you know, cut it underneath us. And I was like, what else can I do to maintain the same kind of lifestyle for my family? So I got my license for contracting and I got my mortgage license. So

multiple avenues, streams of income basically, and that got us into the contracting space.

Dylan Silver (04:40)
Now I’ve said this. ⁓

So other guests in the show, and I’ve been thinking about it more recently, how important it is to be able to pivot your business when markets fluctuate or shift. You mentioned three segments of real estate, know, contracting, mortgage, right? And then of course, you’re a realtor. Was that something very intentional that you did? Hey, I’ve got to be able to move in different climates, or was this something where you had an opportunity and then that just morphed into something larger?

Lancelot S. Lenard (05:58)
No, no, this was premeditated, all of it. Trying to build Sir Lancelot Enterprises as a whole, which will be somewhat like D.R. Horton, but better homes, basically. Sales under one roof, mortgages under one roof, title under one roof, at one point insurance under one roof, construction under one

So I want to build out the service separate divisions for the company where we can ⁓ flow as in one whole and work together.

So it’s easier to control everything in the way of steps, if you know what I mean.

Dylan Silver (06:33)
Yeah,

and the vertical integration aspect of it is I think super helpful for a lot of people, both residential buyers and investors, because when you’re having to juggle spinning plates in the air with, I’ve got to go to this mortgage ⁓ lender or loan officer. I’ve got to deal with this realtor over here. Hey, there’s this builder and they’ve got their own financing over here. Do I really need a realtor to go buy from the builder? So on and so forth. People don’t really know where to start, right?

Lancelot S. Lenard (07:00)
No, they don’t. And a lot of times what we’re doing right now is helping out our sellers and buyers. With me having the knowledge of construction and mortgages and real estate, I can guide them much better in the process of purchasing or selling. There is a lot to a purchase and a sale. As a realtor, wasn’t, you know, I knew this, that, you know, AST is supposed to be this old and we’re supposed to be that old. But now I can give them advice on how much it will cost to replace that. So they don’t get that.

Staker shock so called when they go look at homes that need to be renovated a little bit or touched up and they can get a decent deal or a good deal even ⁓ with the input that I can give them on how much it will cost to get it fixed up. They can still get a mortgage on an FH or VA loan or a conventional loan ⁓ because I can guide them which direction they should go in. They purchased a home and I can give them quotes on how much the renovations cost.

pre-purchasing the home, which then gives them the, so if it’s gonna cost me this much to fix up the home, then let’s negotiate kind of into the deal. And that happens really easily at this point.

Dylan Silver (08:06)
You know, pivoting a bid here, Lancelot, I’ve had this thought that it’s becoming more challenging, it feels like, for folks to get into the on-ramp into real estate home ownership. That just to become a homeowner, you got to start thinking like an investor, right? You got to put the pieces together, make the relationships, find a good lender, find a property that you’re not going to get outbid on in an area that still makes sense for you to live and raise a family in. And so people are really having a dive.

pretty deep into the weeds as far as, ⁓ you know, just understanding real estate in general, whereas maybe in previous years and generations, you could kind of have a job, pick an area and you could find a home. It’s now a little bit different.

Lancelot S. Lenard (08:51)
It is definitely different. Prices have gone up, interest rates have gone up. It’s harder to find the deal deals, ⁓ which you could afford five, six years ago. It looks totally different now. So we have to guide our buyers in the direction of, maybe it’s actually a first time home. It’s not like you’re jumping into your forever home right now because six years ago, they could buy a house that they could picture themselves living for 40 years in. Now it’s like, get a townhouse.

or get a smaller two-bedroom home or a smaller three-bedroom home and then grow into it, then collect equity into it. And then when time comes, you have a baby or something else or your parents need to move in or something, then you can combine that equity, sell the home, go into a bigger home. And I think that is a crucial thing that people need to start figuring out the saving part for their first investments.

Dylan Silver (09:47)
Now, townhomes, I think

is an interesting space because ⁓ you’re seeing a little bit of multiple segments when you look at townhomes. Some townhomes almost have a feel of single family, but then

you don’t always have the same ⁓ yard size. And then the homes are, of course, conjoined. The garages may be in different spaces. And it’s definitely a unique space. But I also think that when…

Buyers are looking at townhomes. You different types of people that might be looking at townhomes. You have that pool where maybe this is, know, they’re on ramp into real estate, or you may have some people who are like, hey, look, I’m actually not looking for, you know, a condo, and I’m not looking to have a, you know, single family home with a yard, but this really works great for me, even if it is, you know, my quote unquote forever home.

Lancelot S. Lenard (11:10)
Guess what else is townhomes good for? Because I know your audience are investors, really good investment properties too. Because low maintenance, a lot of times HOAs are much lower than a condo, ⁓ but you don’t have to maintain the yard. They probably have a pool, community pool or playground for kids or some kind of amenities that you don’t have any single family residence. And you can buy multiple of them in a row. So you’re fairly close. If you have enough townhomes, guess what? You can manage the HOA in a way too.

because you have the most votes on the HOA. At that point, you’re looking at a good investment portfolio of homes that rent above average or close to what a single-family home rents for. ⁓ Not as much, but really close, but not little as a condo rents for, let’s say. Because you get the space with it. You get 15, 16, 1700 square foot, maybe a one or two car garage, which you don’t get with a condo.

Dylan Silver (11:39)
Hey.

Lancelot S. Lenard (12:05)
single-family home you get a yard which you have to maintain or that you have to maintain or roof and everything like that which could be under the HOA’s umbrella that they take care of those things for a hierarchy of course. But I think that it is a reasonable investment for a lot of people and I really emphasize this for first-time buyers like hey you buying this property guess what you can do with it when you move along you save up money while you’re here

give the money away, you have equity built up, might take out a key lock so you can use that money to purchase your next home. And then what you do with this one is you keep it as an investment.

Dylan Silver (12:42)
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned HELOCs, right? And getting the equity out.

Again, think that a lot of people who are now becoming homeowners are thinking about what they had to do to become homeowners and they’re realizing, hey, I wanna keep this ball rolling. I wanna become an investor and roll this into a second property. And how are they gonna do that? Well, they can do that through a cash out refinance, through a HELOC or a HELOC. And I think we’re gonna start to see more and more people do that. And we may also start to see people who may not have been investors but have ridden the wave

of appreciation in their homes start to access that as well for investment properties. I do wanna ask you about ⁓ development in the greater Daytona area. Are you seeing a lot of town homes being built, subdivisions being built? Is there a lot of development in general happening out there?

Lancelot S. Lenard (13:32)
So we do have a lot of development, mostly residential. We do have a couple big players in the game coming into town, like I told you earlier, Amazon with their largest warehouse automated, but they have probably around 2000 jobs opening up there. We have Boeing coming into town with their, I don’t know, they’re probably going to be attached to Henry Riddle, which is one of the best aeronautical schools in the country.

⁓ We also have Palmer, which is a chiropractor school, is, I think, two out of the whole country, only has like two of them. So that’s really cool to have locally. They come state, we have Bethune Cooke, one of the oldest color universities in the country. And a lot of history comes with that, most famous beach, et cetera, et cetera, spring breaks ⁓ and whatnot. But if you look at the single family development, it is booming.

Around LPGA area, we have a lot of rental communities being built. I think about four story ⁓ condo style buildings, frame buildings with amazing amenities, gyms, ⁓ spas, everything that a person would like to live in. We also had ⁓ just finished Margaritaville’s completed Totally Now, which was a Jimmy Buffett themed

neighborhood.

We have a lot of golf communities LPGA has I don’t know the NAR, the Orton and a lot of other builders that are building in there. We have a lot of building going on at the North side in the Worman Beach. We have some here in Port Orange, not as much as the other two cities, but we have some here in Port Orange as well. But all in all, it’s still a booming industry, I think and as

As as speed goes, think they have toned down a little bit. They’re not building as fast as they did the last few years, but it is still going on.

Dylan Silver (16:11)
⁓

It’s been interesting, right? It’s been interesting to see all this development happening because in what feels like the span of five years, there went from being a shortage of housing to now, you know, some people will say that there’s a surplus of housing. Some people will say that there’s ⁓ maybe not a surplus of housing, but not ⁓ enough affordable housing. And so really, you know, there’s enough people to fill those homes, but you know, is it affordable for middle class?

That’s a separate discussion. I did want to ask you, know, it’s March 20th when we’re speaking today. So we are in the thick of spring break, I believe. And I’m imagining it’s an interesting time to be living out there. What’s the vibe like right now? You know, late March and we’re coming up on April in Florida.

Lancelot S. Lenard (16:58)
So it is different, I’ll tell you that. For us, it’s not as bad as I think Miami got hit way worse for Spring Breakers. We do get hit with Spring Breakers. They’re mostly in Daytona Beach, the Port Islands. You can’t even feel the crowds, Spring Breakers. We really do have a big event at the beginning of March called Bike Week where we have…

14 days of bikers from all over the country come into town and they clog up our roads, but it’s great to have them. They’re bringing us business that we need in this town and you can see a lot of awesome bikes riding around all day long. We also have other events, the truck events. We have a lot of motor events because of our international speedway, the birthplace of NASCAR. It’s interesting. This town is really interesting. It has so much history.

Dylan Silver (17:45)
That’s right.

Lancelot S. Lenard (17:52)
You wouldn’t think that. like, why wouldn’t, like this town was one of the pivotal towns in Florida. I Flagler put up his first hotel here. You know who Flagler is, you’ve been to Miami. ⁓ He’s one of the pioneers of Florida. He brought the railroad here, et cetera. He built his first hotel in Ormond Beach. So we also have ⁓ Ponce de Leon Springs where he had a massive hotel and every northerner used to go there to vacation during the summer. So we have a lot of interesting areas.

just around the greater Daytona Beach area that brings people in, for sure.

Dylan Silver (18:29)
We are coming up on time here, Lancelot. Any new projects that you’re working on and then as well, what’s the best way for folks to reach out to you or your team?

Lancelot S. Lenard (18:38)
So yes, I’m working on building my first home this year. That’s going to be on the list of projects to do, ⁓ looking for land to place my first home on. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I interviewed a lot of people on my podcast, the Real estate round table, by the way, if anybody wants to look at that as well. I interviewed this gentleman, he’s not so far from me, he’s in the Northern Orlando area and he builds wellness homes.

that are affordable like 350 to 450 price range, I think. And I really like the concept and I really want to focus on that. I’m a big health maniac. I’ve been through all the Tony Robbins universities. I exercise every day. I eat healthy. know, everything I could think of to expend my lifespan for my kids, you know? Because you’re doing it for them at the end of the day. You know, I love that meme that goes around. It’s like you would die for your family, but would you eat right?

Dylan Silver (19:28)
Yeah.

Lancelot S. Lenard (19:36)
you or would you exercise for your family? Because that is the same thing as dying for them. You’re not dying, but as in living for them.

Dylan Silver (19:44)
Yeah, it’s like, do I really want

to go run this 5k, but I’m going to do it for them.

Lancelot S. Lenard (19:49)
Kind of, kind of. That’s the idea. You’re doing it for them so can be around to help them. I lost my father early in my 20s. So I understand what that void is like. I don’t want my kids to go through that as well. So I want to be there for them. They can reach me on www.thesirlancelotgroup.com. You have all my socials there and you can look me up on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter X, ⁓ TikTok.

I’m on every platform basically. Put in my name and you’ll probably find me.