Uncovering the Secrets to Real Estate Success

Dylan Silver (00:00.994)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host Dylan Silver and today on the show I have Steve Yoak in Ohio. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Yoak (00:12.883)
Thanks for having me on Dylan, I really appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (00:15.306)
Absolutely. Before we hopped on here, I was saying, I’ve got some Ohio investors coming on here today. Is there something in the water out there in Hawaii and Ohio?

Steve Yoak (00:23.859)
Hawaii for sure something in the water. Akron, No, no, probably not. Just a lot of good cash flowing assets out here in the Midwest regions, right? I mean, that’s where all the cash flowing assets still exist. Everyone always jokes the rust belts where you find the cash, right?

Dylan Silver (00:41.87)
Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard lots of great things. It makes me want to go and invest out there. I’m in Texas. So us Texans tend to think that, you know, we’re the hotbed of all things real estate and in many ways we are. But I’ve heard so many great things about Ohio that I said, man, I got to go check out these deals. But you have an interesting background, former teacher, real estate investor. Now, how did you get into real estate investing?

Steve Yoak (01:04.339)
Yeah, so I bought my first house when I was 23. I’d just graduated college. I was house hacking right before it was cool back in 2013. Before that, kind of piqued my interest. I was cleaning out rental properties for a couple of my buddies’ dads who had some rental properties in the Akron area. And I was like, man, you’re getting paid for this? This is great. And they were…

Dylan Silver (01:28.259)
Yeah.

Steve Yoak (01:28.819)
You’re a little bit beat up. You know, we were mixing 30 different cans of paint together to put on the walls. you know, that’s not my style, but that was his style, you know? And after, you know, house hacking a few different houses, buying a turnkey rental from a fellow investor in Maple Heights, Ohio, which is kind of like Cleveland, I kept buying properties and finally started selling turnkey rentals to out of state investors and then managing them on the back end.

And then just kind of from about four years ago, I quit teaching. So my son was born April 17th, 2021. And that was my last day as a middle school teacher. And this year we’re on pace to renovate about 200 houses between ones that were flipping and ones that were keeping. I don’t really work for anyone else per se, but you know, the flips do get sold.

Dylan Silver (02:23.352)
Let’s talk about scaling a business, Going from being a teacher to now, you mentioned 200 deals. That’s incredible scale. Congratulations on all your success. What were some turning points there for you and, you know, aha moments where you said, OK, this is what I’m really going to dive into. This is my niche.

Steve Yoak (02:32.008)
Yeah.

Thanks.

Steve Yoak (02:44.371)
Yeah, so I was doing these burrs and I was holding the properties and then I met someone that said, hey, I have an out of state investor that wants to buy a cash flowing asset here in Akron. And I was like, all right, like great, cool, whatever. I was just linear focused on finding the house and then burr out. Right. And he’s like, you do a lot of updates to your property, Steve, like they’re really nice. And I was like,

Well yeah, I want him to cash flow for a long time to come, right? I don’t want to have furnaces go out, I don’t want to have a leaking roof, I want to have updated stuff so I get good tenants. And he’s like, yeah, that’s exactly what this person wants. And I was like, okay. And he’s like, it’s like a turnkey rental, it’s already done. Someone was living in it at the time, I ran it to her for already six months and he’s like, yeah, here’s what they’ll pay for it and we’ll do an inspection and close on the property in 30 days. And I was like, okay.

You know, so it happened and I was like, well that was pretty simple. It’s just what I already do every day. And not every day, but at night when I wasn’t teaching school and on summer and weekends and all that stuff, but was just stuff I already did. was like, this is super repeatable. I just updated how I would update the property for myself. And then either I keep it or I sell it to someone and then manage it on the back end.

Dylan Silver (03:44.91)
to an out of state now.

Steve Yoak (04:05.775)
So we joke that you can go in any house and it’s identical. You won’t know where you’re at besides with the layout of the property.

Dylan Silver (04:15.094)
And in a way, when you’re doing these deals at scale, you have to have that kind of approach to it. And I think a lot of people stumble on that because they come at it from a perspective of each home is unique, which it is. But in order to scale, you have to have systems and processes. And I’ve spoken to a number of people who do this remotely. And it’s even more important then, because if you’re not there, if it’s not

in your area where you can physically go and visit a site, then you have to have not just trust in the people, but trust in the process to be smooth.

Steve Yoak (04:53.011)
Yeah, 100 % about having process and I don’t know how I would do it virtually just because of the relationships that I try to build with people on a daily basis being here. I don’t necessarily work on.

any of the, I don’t do any work in the rehabs, start there, right? Two left thumbs or whatever you want to call it. I don’t swing the hammer. I might stop in and check at things like, but I have two project managers now full time that manage the projects. I’m in the background kind of orchestrating, making sure things are flowing and whatnot. But I just try to make those relationships with new contractors, with new buyers.

Maybe it’s some private money that wants to invest, whatever it might be. I just kind of make sure everything’s kind of moving status quo when we’re meeting those new wholesalers that are in the market. I always joke I am the largest buyer of real estate in Akron, Canton, Ohio. I am the wholesaler’s best friend. So there’s so many virtual wholesalers nowadays, right? And you said you do some wholesaling, correct? Right. So you’ve used investor base before?

Dylan Silver (05:48.163)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:54.146)
Yeah. I’m one of them. Yeah.

haven’t used Investorbase. I’ve used quite a number of other tools, but talk to me about Investorbase.

Steve Yoak (06:06.289)
Yes, I found out this is from other wholesalers. Multiple people have told me this. They’re like, we have to go into Akron, Ohio and we look at like, hey, I got this deal. And they look at people around there who have bought deals and they’re like, it’s Steve Yoak, Steve Yoak, Steve Yoak , Steve Yoak. And they’re like, so we just call you and say, hey, we have this deal. And they run down what they know about the property. And if they have photos, I kind of give them a rough estimate of where I’ll be. then usually they don’t even half the time, they don’t even lock the deal up. They just send me in and they’re like, Steve,

go give me your number.” So we walk it and we text the number within 10 minutes of leaving the property. I say, hey I need to be at 40 and I’m like go have fun.

Dylan Silver (06:49.954)
That is very interesting because that’s exactly how I met my mentor. Not through InvestorBase, there’s one InvestorLift, if I’m not mistaken, where I had a property under contract west of Dallas in a town called Aisle. I cold called this guy Ryan. He ended up passing on the property. didn’t really know what I was, I shouldn’t say, I didn’t really, I did not know what I was doing back then. And so I had this property under contract. Photos were taken by…

Steve Yoak (06:57.896)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (07:17.516)
the individual owned the property. It was in, of course, distress condition. it was like zoomed in photos of a closet were like the first four photos. And he’s like, brother, these are terrible photos. You know, but here’s my offer on the property. And then we ended up becoming friends from there. He never ended up buying one of my deals while I was living in San Antonio. But I’m actually now in a podcast studio that I made on a ranch that he owns in Dallas, Fort Worth Metro. It’s crazy.

Steve Yoak (07:45.287)
Man, real estate, the places it’ll take you.

Dylan Silver (07:48.418)
for real. When you left the teaching world to go do this full time, was there a period of growth where you had to then do this on another level or was it a smooth transition because you knew that, well, I’m preparing to leave, this is now going to just be the new chapter?

Steve Yoak (08:08.593)
Yeah, so I mean the big, I guess the big push that I always talk about when people ask me are like, my wife was eight months pregnant, the school district said if these levies don’t pass, these teachers are gonna be let go. And I was already eight years deep into it, and me and my wife both got riff letters or layoff letters if the levy didn’t pass. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:25.836)
Really? Holy smokes.

Steve Yoak (08:29.551)
So my wife’s out there, eight months pregnant, and we just built a house in the city we teach in, Brunswick, Ohio, and she was walking door to door, eight months pregnant, hanging vote for the levy signs.

Dylan Silver (08:41.774)
So can you break this down for us because I’m not familiar with any of this terminology here. So basically if they weren’t going to get funding they were going to have to cut teachers. Wow. So they let you know ahead of time that if this doesn’t pass that unfortunately you can’t stay here.

Steve Yoak (08:50.183)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve Yoak (08:57.331)
Yeah, via the contract they had to let you know by May 1st. I’m sorry, before May 1st, I think was the deadline. And the levy was like May 6th or 7th or something like that. So they let us know in early April. Yeah. It was, I was pretty obvious. mean, like the district kind of made it known that like, we’re going to have to riff teachers if this doesn’t pass. But they had to give those notices in advance of the levy in case it didn’t. So me and my wife both would say.

Dylan Silver (09:03.694)
huh.

Dylan Silver (09:09.046)
a one month out. Wow. Okay.

Dylan Silver (09:21.336)
Where school’s closing too? Where school’s closing?

Steve Yoak (09:25.747)
No, they were just reducing the amount of teachers so class sizes would grow. We were in a district that had like, I don’t know, 400 teachers, 450 teachers. It was pretty large for the area, right? So they were cutting like 10 % of teachers, like 40-ish. Yeah, so was…

Dylan Silver (09:27.758)
reducing.

Dylan Silver (09:34.456)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (09:40.344)
Wow. So I’m imagining that in reflecting on that, it’s kind of a, what would you say, bittersweet because of course teacher eight years probably thought you were gonna do that extended, but now here you have this booming business. So it’s almost a great thing that that happened in a way.

Steve Yoak (09:57.361)
I can’t, and you know what’s really funny? We found out after the fact, after I’ve already made the decision I was gonna try this full time, that they riffed more teachers than they should’ve. I shouldn’t have been on the list. They didn’t do their due diligence and find out how many teachers they actually needed to riff or lay off. They’ve overlaid, they’ve sent out letters to twice as many teachers as they needed to. So just, yeah, just because some admin didn’t wanna do their job efficiently,

Dylan Silver (10:12.899)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:19.03)
Wow, I’m at a loss for words. don’t even know.

Steve Yoak (10:25.703)
they scared an extra 50 teachers, right?

Dylan Silver (10:29.07)
Steve, do you ever have folks coming to you from that community, from the education community, whether it’s people you worked with or people maybe in other areas saying, you know, I really don’t know anything about real estate, but I heard of your story, you know, I’m facing a layoff or something, so I’m kind of scared. Do you have any guidance or so on and so forth?

Steve Yoak (10:44.915)
I’ve never had the layoff thing necessarily, but I’ve had teachers that are in real estate already talk to me like, hey, how was that transition? What did you do with your state teacher retirement? What did you do with this? And I rolled it over into a self-directed IRA. So that was kind of nice to just tie it directly into real estate and start lending it out immediately. But yeah, no, it’s definitely a conversation people have when I leave my job, but I don’t know how to do it.

Dylan Silver (11:04.151)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Yoak (11:11.219)
You remember I was always kind of like teetering with real estate since 2013 to 2021. So I was like building a foundation over those eight, nine years.

Dylan Silver (11:19.566)
Yeah. At that point in time, it was it wasn’t like you were just jumping right into it. Had never done it. You had you had lots of foundation there established. But pivoting a bit here, Steve. So 2021 going full time today, you mentioned 200 deals. Do you have a specific buy box you’re looking at single multifamily corporate housing short term? What’s your what are you looking for in your deals out there?

Steve Yoak (11:44.295)
Yes, I keep it pretty simple. 900 square feet plus. And then I do a 20 minute radius of my office building in Barberton, Ohio, which is in between Akron and Canton.

And so that includes like the suburbs and the city because you know the cities aren’t huge so 20-minute radius we can get to pretty quickly. And then I like to have a value add, right, so can put in that equity by renovating stuff. And then after we renovate them we either refinance them or we sell them to an investor that wants to buy an updated asset. And I know Turnkey gets like a sleazy name I believe because a lot of people say something’s Turnkey but the furnace is 35 years

Dylan Silver (12:25.823)
problems. Yeah.

Steve Yoak (12:27.253)
years old and things like that. So we always update all the mechanicals to have 10 years of life plus on them. So for example, if the furnace is older than 10 years when I buy it, I replace it. If the hot water tank is older than five, I replace it. I always add a first floor half bathroom, redo the bathrooms, kitchen, flooring, paint, lights. That’s a simple thing to do. And then we don’t do like tile. go like direct to studs, tubs, surrounds, three piece, you know, so they’re efficient, easy.

to clean on unit turns. If they have old wood windows like the original windows in houses, we always replace them with vinyl hunks. So we do those updates that a lot of people would consider, know, oh it’s turnkey, it works. No, I’m not going to leave the fuse box there, okay? Like, we’re going to put in a…yeah.

Dylan Silver (13:14.252)
And that’s a huge liability to I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position, especially at like if I was doing one off and I’m an unscrupulous character, you know, I might not get, you know, dinged, I might not get sued for that. But if you’re doing it on scale, it’s like you have to you have to

Steve Yoak (13:32.475)
And we do inspections and all that stuff and buyers buy it, appraisals, things of that nature, an everyday thing, right? Every house gets inspected, buy a licensed home inspector before the sale.

Dylan Silver (13:44.14)
I do want to talk about scaling a business. of course, when people talk about fixing flips or, you know, fixing and refi, the process tends to be, you know, I’m going to start with a couple, then before you know it, I’ve got 15 going at once. And now you’re at a point where you’re doing this in such great volume. What was the scaling process like for you? How did you do it? What were the mentors that were around you? How did you go about scaling?

Steve Yoak (14:09.575)
So I’ve never paid for formal education per se. I’ve never joined a mastermind, I’ve never joined a whatever. I’ve always just tried to…

give as much I can or help out or just become friends with people that, you know, do things that you’re looking to do and or just in the business, right? So I have a local group of buddies that they all have 50 plus rentals that we have a group chat, right? We’re always talking about things we’re seeing, what’s going on. We hang out on a regular basis. And then scaling wise, like, I think the first thing someone does is they flip three houses, they make some money, right? And then they go buy a Lamborghini. They go buy crazy.

I still live in the same house that me and my wife built when I was a teacher.

I drive a Ford F-150 XLT, not a Raptor. I don’t have any crazy collection habits or exotic cars or anything like that. I still have the Walmart hoodie that my mother-in-law stitched on Yoak Properties. Actually, she used an iron. I still wear it.

Mean I just reinvest everything into the company to help it grow I mean that’s That’s if you don’t have the capital to continue to scale You’re not gonna be able to do it whether that’s you know down payments for fixing flip loan whether that’s buying it in cash because you need to close in two days or You know, whatever it is Just staying, you know really? Mindful and living underneath your means you can reinvest it and then hiring good people you know, I always

Dylan Silver (15:21.538)
There you go.

Dylan Silver (15:49.87)
Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Steve Yoak (15:51.399)
Yeah, hiring good people’s tough. you gotta, good people don’t wanna work for a shitty person. Off the rip, right? Everyone knows that. So you have to be a good person at heart and have to have people’s best interests in mind. There’s still crews that from four or five years ago when I met them when I was doing burrs or whatever, they still work for me today as a 1099 sub crew, right? I still have my first two crews I ever hired.

The one cruise, he’s like, I haven’t worked for anyone in five years, Steve. He’s like, you just send me a house. I know the drill. We do it. And then when I’m done or close to it, you send the next address. He’s like, I haven’t done anything else.

Dylan Silver (16:24.28)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (16:32.535)
Wow.

That’s a testament to your ability to have those trusted relationships. was speaking with some investors who do this remotely and they mentioned a realtor that they worked with who sold them a property ended up her or her husband was a contractor. And so they were able to get a deal done that way with incredible trust. But I think that how often, Steve, do we hear about, you know, the wrong contractor and so on and so forth. But very rarely do people talk about the wrong investor.

And so you have to look at it from both sides of it. if your contractors don’t want to work for you and you get this issue repeatedly and now you’re saying, you know, maybe it’s what am I doing in my communication that’s causing my contractors? Is it a pay issue? Is it I’m not giving them the right information? What’s going on here?

Steve Yoak (17:24.359)
You need to set up expectations the best you can up front and lay out a process of what happens throughout the rehab. So our current pay situation is, hey, whatever is completed by Monday and the invoice is in by 8 a.m. is paid out on Friday. We do labor only quotes. We pay for materials. You pick them up at Home Depot. We pay for them via phone sale. And that’s the process. We get one bulk delivery sent to every house with all

or big items and then they’re responsible for picking up all the switches, the cover plates, the connection lines, the little shutoffs, the little things they need and we just try to make sure we hammer up, hey this is the process, this is what you do. The first one’s always a little bumpy so a lot of check-ins daily every other day just to make sure it’s going well and then the second, third, fourth one, once they’ve made six, seven, eight houses, they’re hooked. They’re not going anywhere.

Because we don’t micro manage the crew, right? We manage them to where they need to be and then we say, this is the process repeated every time. There’s no variation. We’re not doing a half million dollar flip. My guys are not half million dollar flip guys. They’re rental grade, everything will work, everything will look good, but it’s not gonna be above and beyond.

Dylan Silver (18:37.315)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:48.002)
Yeah, it’s not you’re not you’re not selling it to beat the highest in the neighborhood on the MLS. I get it. Now, as far as scaling at this point that you’re at today, and I’m curious because I’ve heard a number of different, you know, career paths, so to speak, in the real estate space, I’ve heard people the path that I’m on is wholesaler. I’m still trying to get my first fix and flip here, Steve, I’m about a year and a half deep into this wholesaler fix and flip. And then I’ve heard people go.

short term midterm long term you know corporate housing I’ve heard people go commercial I’ve heard people go note buyer so on and so forth but I’ve also heard people just say hey I’m gonna do do the fix and flip and just scale it even bigger maybe start getting to developing building out subdivisions what what’s your take on this and where do you see the next expansion for you

Steve Yoak (19:40.081)
Yeah, so I like doing the fix and flip and I think the big thing is just keep hiring people to make my role smaller and smaller on a daily basis. So before I had to walk every house and then me and my project manager, one of the two of us had to walk the house. Now I have a person, like an acquisitions person, that he does all the walkings of every house.

And then now I have two project managers and all they focus on now is just project management, right? So I keep building people into the business to make it easier and easier for me not to have to work 24 seven on the flips. I do enjoy the note lending. I do enjoy my rental properties. I don’t have a goal to do a $50 million subdivision or buy a $50 million asset. I don’t know if that’s just the Midwest mindset and I need to grow out of it and shoot

for the stars, rocket ship 10X, Grant Cardone my life. But I have two young kids, they’re two and four. I get to go home to them every night. I’m home between three and five every day. Wake up in the morning, they go to school or daycare I leave. It seems like a normal life to me and something I enjoy.

That’s kind cool. My wife gets to work part time now as a teacher because she was a teacher in the district, right? So now she has a job share. So she works two days, one week, three days the next. Gets to be at home with the kids. And you know, when we want to go on vacation, we’re able to do that. You know, nothing too wild just to Florida because I got to have cell service, right?

Dylan Silver (21:16.29)
Yeah. Where do you go in Florida? I love Florida. I love Florida.

Steve Yoak (21:19.763)
Going to St. Pete’s next week actually. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:22.786)
No way. St. Pete, just had a guest yesterday tell me, because I’m a big Fort Lauderdale guy, I love Fort Lauderdale, he said, you know, I’m a realtor, this is what he said to me, I’m a realtor in West Florida, Dylan, you gotta go West Florida. I said, well, I don’t know any, where, Tampa? And he said, well, if you were a little older, I would have told you, I think he said Saratoga, but if you’re little younger, St. Pete. And I had never really looked into St. Pete, and I’m like, man, how come I never heard of St. Pete? What am I doing? It’s beautiful.

Steve Yoak (21:29.171)
Okay.

Steve Yoak (21:39.805)
them.

Steve Yoak (21:51.527)
Yeah, so I stay in Isabel’s Soul, which is like right over the bridge from St. Pete. They have like a half mile bridge on a waterway, but you can go to Fort De Soto, which is like a little more quiet, not like beach bars, but more like nature preserve with a beach. Or you have St. Pete Beach, which is like your everyday beach traffic that you would imagine, right?

So you have a few different options beach wise depending on what you like. There’s tons of activities in Tampa’s right there. There’s downtown St. Pete as well. I used to like to go down there for race week. It was always packed for like Indy car stuff.

Dylan Silver (22:27.394)
Yeah, that’s awesome, man. I love, I tell people this. I’m gonna, I don’t know how, but I’m gonna figure out a way. I’m in Dallas area right now. I’m gonna figure out a way to move out to Florida. I was thinking Fort Lauderdale, but who knows St. Pete? But Steve, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get ahold of you?

Steve Yoak (22:45.747)
Yeah, so you can follow me on Instagram at Steve Yoak. I post all my real estate content there. I do like four shorts a week. And then if you’re looking for a Turnkey updated property, you can go to AkronTurnkey.com. So it’s just Akron, A-K-R-O-N, Turnkey.com. And then in the top, just request info on the website and we’ll have myself or one of my employees reach out, just kind of see what you’re looking for.

do these properties cash flow between three and four hundred bucks a month with your standard mortgage down payment all that stuff.

Dylan Silver (23:24.43)
Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show, for talking with us about your journey. Thank you for your time,

Steve Yoak (23:31.293)
Thanks for having me, Dylan. I really appreciate it.