The Ultimate Guide: How to Create Confident Real Estate Investors

Brett McCollum (00:00.884)
All right, guys, welcome back to the show. I am your host, Brett McCollum, and I’m here today with Tamairo Moutry. And today we’re going to be talking about creating investors. But before we do, at Investor Field, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs to five extra businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Without further ado, Tamairo, how are you?

Tamairo Moutry (00:25.222)
I’m fine. Thank you for having me to join your show.

Brett McCollum (00:28.622)
I am honored and thrilled to be here with you. We, like I said, we got to know each other a little bit before the show, everything here, genuinely, genuinely excited to get your story out there and talk about everything and that. But before we do, I do want to give some context, some background, some history. Back us up a bit, give us some context. Who is Tamairo?

Tamairo Moutry (00:52.282)
I am a former elementary education teacher, born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I, again, came from the teaching arena and I retired from corporate America at 32 years old. I’m the first self-made millionaire in my family. I retired from 32 years old, but I retired with 50 doors of real estate. And I ended up owning a mortgage company back around that time.

Brett McCollum (01:22.03)
Mm-hmm.

Tamairo Moutry (01:22.132)
I got into real estate because I had a son who was misbehaving in school and I had an older brother that was in prison at the time. He was the one who sparked my energy and fuel to get into the real estate profession. I did not know what I was doing at the time, but I researched and I found out.

Brett McCollum (01:42.808)
Wow, all right, let’s back up a bit, okay? So elementary school teacher, you did that for how long?

Tamairo Moutry (01:46.164)
He

Tamairo Moutry (01:50.352)
about nine years and because my son started misbehaving in school I needed a flexible schedule and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Brett McCollum (01:58.902)
Okay, so you did that for, so it’s funny, my wife is an elementary educator, she did that also for nine years. Yup, and we have four kids, so we decided to bring our kids home in homeschool. My kids don’t know how lucky and blessed they are that their mom is a professional educator, right? Someday they will, right now they don’t, because they’re too little to understand how blessed they are. But, definitely get that, mean.

Tamairo Moutry (02:05.575)
Wow.

Brett McCollum (02:27.147)
That teaching, I don’t know, were you in the public school system? Were you in a private? Yeah, yeah, so the public school, I don’t know Wisconsin, but here in Florida, the public school system, it’s an ever-changing landscape of, you gotta meet this new metric, that new metric, gotta, even at an early age, in the elementary, it’s like, I thought it was just like, I, gosh, guys, if you’re listening to this, I hope I don’t offend you when I say this, but my mindset was,

Tamairo Moutry (02:29.746)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (02:54.497)
you’re just teaching them the basics in elementary school, guys. Like, what are we doing here? Why are we creating these weird curriculums and stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, it was just a crazy time for us. yeah, we did that about three or four years ago now. We brought the kids home. But same thing, gives us the flexible schedule. So you mentioned your brother.

Tamairo Moutry (03:19.227)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (03:21.325)
And was it at a, were you guys, were you visiting him at the time? Like when did that conversation, or was it a series of conversations? Like talk about kind of that time when that was going, those conversations about real estate.

Tamairo Moutry (03:32.818)
Well, my brother actually just told me that that’s what I should do because I explained to him my issues that I was having with my son and the school kept calling me in my classroom and I didn’t have a flexible schedule. And believe it or not, a lot of the winners come from the prisons. They just made a poor mistake or they made a bad decision and sometimes one bad decision can land them there.

And I guess they speak amongst each other. And that’s what he told me to do. He said, you need to get into real estate. And that only happened with one conversation. And I just took action. I did everything I could to learn about real estate. I became a real estate investor first. So that was my first and foremost. Then I became a loan originator. After that, I became mortgage broker. After the mortgage broker, when the market crashed in 2008, I actually became

realtor I had to close my company I had to liquidate my 50 door real estate portfolio and by the way I started all the way over from scratch back in 2018 with being a buy and hold real estate investor again and I did it actually with a lot of creative financing options at that time so from 2018 back to 2022 is actually when I

built up my portfolio again to 41 doors and I actually have not had not had a bank loan in 19-20 years.

Brett McCollum (05:06.125)
Isn’t that incredible? That is, all right, we’re gonna go back to that in a second too. Let’s hold that thought for a second, because that’s incredible. And we will be remiss to not go into that, okay? So, I have, if you listen to the podcast a little bit, you’ve probably heard me say this once or twice, that the three most successful people that I’ve found in real estate.

Tamairo Moutry (05:15.475)
Okay, thanks.

Okay.

Brett McCollum (05:32.597)
routinely on a consistent basis. And this is going to probably surprise you a little bit. The first two maybe won’t surprise you as much. But the first one is, they’re ex-military. You see that a lot. Ex-athletes, you see that quite a bit. The third one is, they’ve been to prison.

Tamairo Moutry (05:50.383)
Ex-offenders. Wow.

Brett McCollum (05:55.79)
And it’s interesting because most people aren’t thinking of that. But the common theme that I’ve found is there’s discipline amongst all three. And it’s just funny to me that directly and directly, that’s the same story from your side. All right? And.

Tamairo Moutry (06:06.003)
That is true.

Brett McCollum (06:19.327)
And I say indirectly because it wasn’t you that was in prison, but your brother who is and around people that may. And I love the fact that, all right, I’m going to go here for a second. Something’s telling me to go here and I’m just going to do it. it’s really easy because we have family members as well that, you know, in prison, that sort of thing. And it’s really easy to look at the mistakes they may have made or not and just dismiss what they say. Because like, how do I trust this person now that they’re in jail?

Tamairo Moutry (06:46.717)
Bye.

Brett McCollum (06:47.657)
Right? Like, it’s a very easy thing for people to do. And I have to commend you on the fact that, like, that’s not what happened here. Like, dude, you’re in jail. Why are you telling me what to do? Right?

Tamairo Moutry (06:57.523)
Well, you know what, Brett? Let me say this, not to interrupt you, but let me say this. You can learn something from everybody.

Brett McCollum (07:06.271)
Yes.

Tamairo Moutry (07:06.765)
I don’t care what walk of life that they are, you can learn something from any and everybody. It doesn’t mean mean anything if they are on the streets and they are homeless. It doesn’t mean if they have 10 degrees. It doesn’t matter if they’re just a regular W-2 worker, which I was a W-2 worker for the majority of my life. I just didn’t know. And with everything that I’ve learned from me doing the research,

Brett McCollum (07:12.416)
I love it.

Brett McCollum (07:30.295)
Right.

Tamairo Moutry (07:35.186)
getting in the right rooms with the right people, doing the right things is the reason why I am where I am today. And that one conversation from him made me research and find what it is that I needed to do. And I worked my way out of that real estate, out of that elementary education system. And I have so many titles behind my name because of that one conversation. So I kind of owe a little bit of it to him, but.

He needs to work on doing this stuff himself, haha. But at the same time, you know, not saying that I would have never done it, but I didn’t have this idea at first. And after we get a chance to get back into it, I want to talk about what I did to acquire all of those doors.

Brett McCollum (08:05.453)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (08:20.801)
Yeah, and I love that. Yeah, that’s the, I just love the fact that you have an open mind and an open heart to receive, right? And I think that’s probably a large degree of where your success has come from is I’m not too high and mighty to learn. I’m not too proud that, you know, what you’re here and I’m not, I just wanted to commend you for, you know, being able to, you know, receive even from that situation. And we, you know, I just.

I want to highlight that, it’s a really special thing. alright, so you go through the 08 crisis, everything goes to hell in a hand basket, we know that whole story. That’s kind of, everybody knows that whole 08 stuff, you know? But liquidating 50 plus door, 51 or 50 doors, whatever it is, talk about that time for me and what that was like liquidating assets you’d work so hard to acquire.

Tamairo Moutry (08:56.647)
you

Tamairo Moutry (09:18.481)
didn’t want to let go of anything at the time, but I was one of the last of the Mohicans because I had perfected my credit at that time. And I’m like, you know, wait a minute. My credit is flawless. If I just let go, then my credit’s gonna go to crap and everything. So I held on to those properties much longer than a lot of my counterparts did. A lot of people…

Brett McCollum (09:46.189)
Hmm.

Tamairo Moutry (09:47.442)
They kind of threw in the towel right away and I kind of waited like, want to say maybe two to at least two or three more years after that happened before I actually started letting go of the properties. And at that point in time, I didn’t give up on real estate. I wanted to continue on. So that was the time where I continued to be a landlord and I just kind of took advantage of the market myself. I actually

Brett McCollum (10:02.594)
Right.

Tamairo Moutry (10:17.651)
I had a lot of money saved. So I started doing more buying and flipping at the time and I purchased a condo in Florida. What I did because I’m a risk taker. So I went to a foreclosure website and I kind of clicked a button on a place that I had never heard of, had never been there a day in my life. And it was $28,750. It was a 3-2 condo.

Brett McCollum (10:20.365)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (10:28.322)
Mm-hmm.

Tamairo Moutry (10:47.429)
in Fort Myers, Florida. So that’s how I ended up back on that end. No friends, no family, no nothing. then me and my husband said, girl, are you crazy? I said, yeah. And so we went down and flew down, closed on it. And look, the rest is history.

Brett McCollum (10:49.164)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (11:04.169)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean to go to have the I Guess where you’re hitting at is like the hanging on sometimes thing of like not wanting to let go of things too Because this will bring us to a current time and climate to when I say this is all a correlation right now with 2000 and not the same but there’s some similarities in maybe today’s market stuff, but Holding on to stuff longer than you should

the lessons we may have learned through that, right? Now, did you come out on top? It sounds like it, but it also meant you had to rebuild at some point. What was that like?

Tamairo Moutry (11:43.048)
So, yeah, so what I did is I just let the properties go. mean, sometimes you have to listen. You gotta know when to hold them and when to fold them. I wish I had, in hindsight, I wish I had done it sooner, but it really didn’t hurt me. And the reason I say that is because I didn’t need to use my credit because I went on a hiatus for like 10 years. And I started using my cash.

Brett McCollum (11:54.508)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (12:10.717)
to buy and flip and I continued to help other real estate investors to come into the market. I taught them how to buy and flip. We managed their portfolios for them, because that’s part of what I have for real estate companies in four different states and I help investors to build their real estate portfolios. I help them to acquire the real estate with the funding. I have my own private lending company where I help investors to fund their properties. also

Brett McCollum (12:32.759)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (12:40.379)
have the 50 state lending with Texana Bank where I help the first timers help investors. So I’ve transformed since then. And I think that whatever happened to me, wouldn’t change a thing because it made me more conscious about ways that I can do things. And at this point, for those 10 years, I continued to think about how I was going to move forward. And I again, started buying and flipping. And by the time

Brett McCollum (12:51.554)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (13:09.427)
2022 came back, I was back up the 41 doors and I did not even use any bank financing to do it. I used different investment strategies to get back to that 41 doors. And I just recently, after 19, 20 years, got my first mortgage again and it was not in my name. I did it in my LLC with a DSCR loan, which I offered to all of my other investors. And I have a one-stop shop concierge service.

for all of my other investors that I help. Again, with the funding, the management, the acquisition, since I’m a broker in all of those four states, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, and Illinois. I haven’t been doing much in Illinois, but Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, those are my main three. But again, lending everywhere, helping the real estate investors, and just moving on.

Brett McCollum (13:59.362)
Yeah, yeah, do you think that, and the sentiment that comes to mind when you were saying that is, it didn’t happen to me, it happened for me. Do you think a lot of that was kind of going through that, kind of what led you to kind of what your current place in the marketplace is? Do you think like going through that 2008 crash and going through those, you know, like you said, it kind of led you to do more things, is that right?

Tamairo Moutry (14:25.733)
Yeah, I think it actually just kind of made me see that there are more ways to get funding and more ways to do things other than relying on the bank because there was a time when the bank tightened up and they weren’t able to fund any more deals back in 2008. And what it made me do is really just become more creative at doing different strategies to get real estate transactions to the table without their money.

I, know, it’s OPM or whatever, but to be honest, I was just really strategic in what I did moving forward from 2018 to 2022.

Brett McCollum (14:55.711)
Right.

Brett McCollum (15:05.803)
Yeah. talk to me like so currently you just got your first mortgage in place. What is the future for you look like? What are you looking to do next?

Tamairo Moutry (15:15.623)
Well, it’s what I’ve been doing and what I’m continuing to do. Real estate magazine, podcast, I’ve been on a ton of podcasts. I’m into new construction. During all of this time, I went down to Florida and I bought some land. So I’m looking to do some new construction, bring investors in to do that, work with more affordable housing. I’m getting into the group home space. I have a…

multitude of different Facebook groups and I’ve started a clothing and merchandise line for one of my real estate groups, Top Women in Real Estate. So I have jackets, have backpacks, I have keychains. I’m doing that. I do a lot of coaching, mentoring, and training teaching ladies how to invest. I just got back from Paris speaking on real estate investing.

I’m doing a bunch of speaking engagements. People are booking me on podcasts, booking me to go to different countries. I could go on and on. I could go on and on about the things that are coming. I have a real estate school. I’m a real estate instructor in the state of Wisconsin. So again, this teaching profession that I’ve been in actually catapulted me to be able to teach others how to invest in real estate, how to build their real estate portfolios, how to maintain those.

Brett McCollum (16:19.723)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (16:39.919)
and to also for new people and new real estate investors how to teach them how to build wealth in real estate, how to take that one property and turn it into many.

Brett McCollum (16:50.837)
I love that. Let me ask you this. You have a unique space and then you operate in different markets throughout the country,

Tamairo Moutry (16:59.271)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (17:01.229)
So we know that there’s a lot of things in the last couple of years that have shifted in in real estate like rates insurance taxes everything so you know and and albeit It’s not the wait recession, but there’s still some crazy stuff going on And I think well, I think when we look back on this market like we did the 2008 We’re gonna be like wow there were some that was a wild time

Tamairo Moutry (17:20.947)
You

Brett McCollum (17:22.675)
What are you telling, let’s say that it’s the first time investor, know, they’re just getting into the game and you’re giving them, obviously we know a lot of the main benefits of investing in real estate, we know what a flip can do, we know what some buy and hold can do, but how are you, what would you recommend from a protection side of it for the first time investor? Because you’re seeing it across different markets, how are you?

Yes, it’s risky, but how do you, what are you saying for people like, hey, this is how I, it’s risky, but this is how you mitigate risk. What would you give that advice to?

Tamairo Moutry (17:54.354)
telling a lot of my investors to not be afraid to get into the group home market. And what I mean when I say that is there’s unlicensed and licensed group homes. What I’m telling people is don’t be afraid to rent out the rooms in their homes because you can realize a lot more benefit as well as a lot more cashflow doing things like that. There is different populations such as the elderly population.

Brett McCollum (18:00.759)
Thank

Brett McCollum (18:06.151)
huh.

Tamairo Moutry (18:24.135)
the reentry population, the veteran population, people who are on social security that don’t have enough income for them to be able to move into a home themselves and you can have two people to a room. And that is a way that you can actually bring in a lot more cashflow from the home rather than just renting to one or two tenants. Like if you have a duplex and you have an upper and a lower, one tenant up, one tenant down, then if you have three,

three bedrooms in each unit. That’s six bedrooms. If you could put two people to each room, that’s 12 people. That’s 12 incomes coming in from that one house. I met up with a guy in November who’s doing this in Milwaukee, my hometown, and I asked, he walked me through his whole operation. He showed me how he does the fingerprint locks and everything and how he had everything situated. He said his cashflow on that house is like five grand after

All expenses and everything. Five grand off the one house and he runs five houses.

Brett McCollum (19:25.963)
Yeah. Yeah. So more just kind of because I mean that and that tracks because right now with an economic climate where everything’s more expensive and wages haven’t necessarily increased, you how are we making affordable like we still have. And I think our job as the investor market is to continue to create affordability for people. Right.

Tamairo Moutry (19:36.893)
Exactly.

Tamairo Moutry (19:46.159)
Exactly.

Brett McCollum (19:46.542)
But that’s also a challenge, right? Because it’s not like you can just go out and get construction. You’re building new construction. You know this. Build a new construction home that you can sell at the below median home sales price right now. It’s hard to do, isn’t it? Because of just the construction cost. So it’s really difficult.

Tamairo Moutry (20:03.644)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (20:08.149)
in that way, but that what you’re talking about is renting more doors out and doing creates more affordability for people in an economic climate that’s difficult. I think that tracks a lot and that’s good advice. Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (20:10.727)
You

Tamairo Moutry (20:19.771)
The other thing I wanted to bring up is making sure that investors still understand that the other way to go instead of doing the new construction piece with all this tariff stuff going on is maybe they take these dilapidated properties, fix them up and sell them to people who are lower income and they can actually buy those properties from them. The profit margin is still gonna be there if you buy them in the right.

area at the right prices. You can still renovate those and sell them to lower income people or you can work with HUD to be able to get these properties section 8 approved and do some affordable housing things. I think that that’s the other way that people should go.

Brett McCollum (20:51.488)
Yep.

Brett McCollum (20:57.303)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (21:02.911)
Yeah, I like that a lot too. What we continue to coach and things on our side of things is if you’re going to flip houses right now, you know.

It’s not that you can’t sell the higher end product. You can. I mean, it just depends on the market, I guess. But for consistency’s sake, target your after repaired value, your ARV price. Target it at the median sales price or below ARV. And then you buy it well below that part, obviously. So then when you rehab it and fix it up, you can sell it. Because we’re still seeing, like you said,

the FHA qualified buyer that it’s their first time home, that sort of thing. That market’s still pretty strong. People still want, and you know this from 2008, Tamairo. What happens when affordability, let’s say rates are now higher, insurance taxes, the whole thing, The person, so my market where I live, the median home sales price is roughly $350,000, give or take, okay?

Tamairo Moutry (21:49.905)
Thank

Brett McCollum (22:06.829)
That means the person that was affordably, so you also know this from a mortgage background too, they were pre-approved in a market where there’s three and 4 % rates, they were pre-approved for $500,000 let’s say. And so that’s their target. But now in today’s climate, that 500k is now probably that 350k number, right?

Tamairo Moutry (22:28.541)
That’s true.

Brett McCollum (22:29.653)
So we’re getting people that are up in this buyer bracket buying down into 350, and we’re getting those people that are in the lower bracket buying up to, so now we’re doubling our opportunity from a buyer’s pool. So that’s something I still believe in as a investor. Curious, do you think that tracks with what you saw from 08 to present? does that kind of, do those correlations exist, do think?

Tamairo Moutry (22:32.466)
it.

Tamairo Moutry (22:43.123)
you

Tamairo Moutry (22:52.495)
It’s really not the same. You could say it’s a little similar. The difference between what’s happening right now and 08 is the riskier lending practices back then, they don’t correlate to now. I know that there are a lot of people seeing that a lot of people are running scared right now due to the interest rates. They were, I’m going to call them brainwashed right now because they couldn’t, they couldn’t think that

Brett McCollum (23:08.255)
Right.

Brett McCollum (23:18.794)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (23:21.221)
an interest rate was going to stay in the twos and threes. You know, what goes down must come up and what goes up must come down. you know, real estate is in cycles. It doesn’t always stay the same. But there are some people that keep saying they’re going to wait until the interest rates drop in the threes. And I’ll never forget that Facebook meme up where they had a skeleton leaning back like this.

saying the buyer is waiting for the interest rates to drop back into the threes. It probably won’t ever happen. I’m still telling everybody to pull the trigger, but like you said, making sure that they buy the properties with the ARV being in the right position, making sure that you purchase with the right number. And also for the investors that are buying and the properties don’t move quick enough, they need to have a plan B. Me, I didn’t have a plan B when I started.

Brett McCollum (24:12.258)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (24:15.958)
Mmm.

Tamairo Moutry (24:16.037)
It was only plan A because I never wanted to go back to corporate America ever again. But people who can make a plan B at this time, who are already investors, what they should be doing is if they’re trying to sell a property that won’t move, the next best thing for them to do is to go ahead and refinance out of it. Do a DSCR loan to get them out of it because a lot of times they use hard money to buy the property.

Brett McCollum (24:22.305)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (24:44.033)
Yep.

Tamairo Moutry (24:45.713)
They need to go ahead and refinance out of it and do what I said. They can also do a rent to own at least option with a buyer who may be moving to the area or they may not quite have the credit score. There are so many different strategies and ways for people to acquire real estate now and for the investors. If they get themselves in the jam, they can get a huge down payment on it, a pricier down payment for the person that’s coming in that want to purchase or they can keep the property after they’ve

gotten their cash back from the DFCR loan, they can take that money. Now it’s a cushion for them and they can go ahead and use the Group Home model that I was speaking of.

Brett McCollum (25:24.939)
Yeah.

And I like that having multiple exit strategies. I think a lot of, yeah, I think a lot of the people that I’ve talked to that’s come out of the 08 recession and things like that and are now in today’s market, a lot of you included obviously here are screaming that from the rooftops have multiple exit strategies. Why do know that? Because you went through it, you know? And that’s what I meant earlier to kind of dovetail that back is it didn’t happen to you, it happened for you. Because now guess what? You now have a, you you’re not walking into this with the same

Tamairo Moutry (25:28.219)
Exactly.

Tamairo Moutry (25:41.005)
Exactly.

Brett McCollum (25:55.634)
through the same lens. You’re having opportunity, looking for opportunities in multiple ways. Every deal has multiple opportunity. There’s a lot of wisdom. Yeah, I love that you said that. And it just shows the wisdom that you can get from going through hard and difficult things, right? think there’s wisdom there. Tamera, if people want to reach out and they do want to connect with you, get to know you further, that sort of thing, how would you, how could they do that? What’s the best way?

Tamairo Moutry (26:01.831)
Yep, it’s a totally different mindset.

Tamairo Moutry (26:11.804)
Yeah!

Tamairo Moutry (26:24.403)
I am mostly on Facebook, but I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. I’m also on, finally, finally, TikTok. I’m late to the party, but I’m there on TikTok. But any of those methods, they can reach out to me there. Like I said, I’m helping investors to do any and everything. I do a bunch of portfolios, packages. I do have stuff for sale. I have those dilapidated properties that people may want to

Brett McCollum (26:36.962)
Yeah.

Tamairo Moutry (26:54.193)
Dwell into and maybe create a project I do have a 10th property package deal right now that I’m trying to get rid of So people may want to reach out to me about that, you know You know if they have cash and they want to buy it and they want to fix it up and they want to sell it to lower income borrowers There’s still a benefit there for them to do that or to hold them and keep them since they are single families So there’s a multitude of things that people can do with this I’m on all of those platforms they can

DM me and I’ll be happy to talk with just about anybody even with the funding piece. I’m able to help first timers, second timers, downsizers, investors, just whatever. I’m willing to help.

Brett McCollum (27:35.426)
Yeah.

I love that and that speaks to your heart and I appreciate that and guys sincerely we’ll make sure we have that from your bio tomorrow we’ll make sure we get that in the show notes for everybody to reach out and connect and sincerely guys I encourage you to do that to marry your wealth of knowledge in your I can just sense it from our conversation you’re a giver and you and you want to help people and and that speaks to your success and how you’ve been able to bounce back the way you’ve done and but yeah I appreciate you taking the time like I said I knew this is gonna be a great show thanks for hanging out with us

Tamairo Moutry (28:05.917)
Thank you very much and you do have my telephone number, right? Yeah, just let everybody know on the back end that I have a team of successful people that will help them to renovate these properties. My husband is a large part of this and he pulls together those strings for the management and the rehab and alternate complaints and everything, okay?

Brett McCollum (28:09.729)
Yes, ma’am.

Brett McCollum (28:25.133)
I love that.

fantastic yeah guys sincerely I strongly encourage you reach out to tomorrow get to know that you get to know her and her family and you won’t be sorry you did but tomorrow again thanks for being here appreciate your time alright and guys thanks for hanging out with us we appreciate you and we’ll see each of you on the next episode take care everybody

Tamairo Moutry (28:38.621)
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Take care.