Unlocking Real Estate Success: Dan Bernal’s Journey in Massachusetts

Dylan Silver (01:32)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a Salem-based real estate professional who works in the residential space helping home sellers and buyers as well as small portfolio investors. Please welcome Dan Bernal. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Bernal (01:48)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (01:50)
I always like to start off at the top by asking folks how they got into real estate.

Dan Bernal (01:56)
So, ⁓ strangely enough, my aunt, ⁓ I used to, worked in a publishing company for 11 years. And ⁓ when the…

economy died back in the recession. My aunt suggested that she had a patient, she’s a doctor, who was a real estate agent and she was very happy with it. And it was one of those things where I couldn’t see the trees for the wood because my parents both own multiple property. My dad used to own like 15 properties and I just didn’t realize how much I knew about it until the thought of actually getting my license happened. So I got my license.

in like 10 minutes because it was like I kind of knew the answers to everything and at first I thought it was just going to be sort of a side gig and then it snowballed within about a year.

Dylan Silver (02:52)
So

what was the growth process like as an agent and as someone working with investors all across Massachusetts? And then I know now you’re focused regionally on the Salem area. What was the business like North Shore? I have to differentiate, The North Shore, right? But what was business like initially and then how did it kind of grow and scale over time?

Dan Bernal (02:55)
The process like us.

Yeah, well, not the North Shore, which is, yeah.

⁓ I was lucky enough to have a mentor at my second company ⁓ a year into it and ⁓ I tripled my income within a year working with her and

What it came down to is, so I used to be a traveling musician. I did that for many, many years. I continued doing that while I was in real estate. It’s the same hustle, which is you just have to make yourself known to everybody around you. Social media is great, but also just out and about. If you can steer a conversation towards real estate, ⁓ you will be surprised how many people are interested, and you just have to know what you’re talking about. And so I’m very data-driven.

I’ve always had a lot of facts with me that I can just throw out as little tidbits and that has gotten me a lot of business.

Dylan Silver (04:12)
You know, I think it’s interesting talking

about working with investors as agents. I’m an agent. I’m a newly licensed agent. Got licensed in April of this year. I’d been working with and thank you. I’ve been working with investors for two years prior since 2023 and on wholesale and then also just going to investor meetings and things of the like. And what I noticed was

Dan Bernal (04:22)
congrats.

Dylan Silver (04:39)
in Texas where we got so many people from all over investing in Texas, right? There seemed to be a rift between agents who worked with investors, agents who were open to working maybe with wholesalers and then everybody else. And I said, ⁓ no, did I maybe bring ⁓ a different vibe in here by saying that I work with investors and that I’m a former

and still wholesaler. And so I’m curious, you work a lot with investors now and then parents were investors.

Did that steer a lot of your thinking in the real estate space?

Dan Bernal (06:00)
Absolutely, because I understand the nature of so for instance around here There’s a lot of section 8 housing and I’ve sold a lot of buildings to people who there’s they have section 8 tenants and They don’t know what the hell they’re doing when it comes to renewing those, you know those leases and dealing with because there’s multiple multiple offices around here the issue the the the certificates for those for those tenants, so I’ve done

I’ve just had, I’ve been so immersed in all the particularities of how to rent a place, how to keep a tenant, how to get rid of a tenant. So it makes me, you know, basically selling and buying is a small fraction of what I actually do. My job is to help people holistically. And I’m not a manager, but it’s big picture. And ⁓ that I think is what I add value to.

Dylan Silver (07:01)
I want to ask you about ⁓ working, maybe get a little granular here without giving away all the gold, Working with investors in Massachusetts, think if I compare it, because I’m originally from the East Coast, I didn’t let you know this, but I’m from New Jersey, right? If I compare that to where I’m at here in Texas, I think you have to be, I would say,

Dan Bernal (07:05)
Yep. ⁓

Dylan Silver (07:23)
even more accurate on your numbers when you’re buying in the East Coast because it’s more risk, more leverage, and there’s more at stake.

Dan Bernal (07:31)
Absolutely.

Dylan Silver (07:32)
When

you’re coming in and you’re working with investors in these contexts, even single family, right? If you’re buying multiple homes at a time and you want to establish longstanding relationships with investors, the kind of feedback that they might be looking for might be as much strategy as it is, represent me in this. But it’s probably a lot of strategy as well.

Dan Bernal (07:51)
100.

There is. ⁓ because I work, ⁓ like I said, mostly small portfolio, which is people who own anywhere from three to 20 units, ⁓ is you have to, like, are you looking to gain monthly income ⁓ using a mortgage, for instance, or are you looking to gain long-term equity and maybe have it pay for itself? ⁓ And around here, you can do both. ⁓ This part of Massachusetts, you’re basically gonna gain a huge amount

equity but for your income properties that are just going to bring income you got to go further out of town to lower income areas because the fact of the matter is it’s really expensive to buy something like say in Salem or our adjacent towns Beverly, Peabody, Swampskirt, Marblehead but you will also triple your value in 10 years. ⁓ these are the choices that investors need to make and that I need to elucidate.

for them by showing them the data, which is easy to do. MLS gives you all the data. can show people how much prices have gone up in particular areas, and that helps them make a ⁓ conscious decision. It’s not my… Yeah, go ahead.

Dylan Silver (09:08)
What

is the average, I mean, if there is one, an average price of a middle class home going for if you had to take the whole North Shore as a whole?

Dan Bernal (09:19)
700.

Dylan Silver (09:21)
700,000. Okay, so I’m comparing that to Texas where I’m in DFW is probably between 350 to 450. Are you seeing a lot of people who who are investing in that area saying, hey, I can invest over here, I can go Midwest, or I can go, you know, further west, and I can find maybe two of these properties for the same thing. Are you seeing that kind of thought process?

Dan Bernal (09:44)
One of my bigger investors whose building I’m selling literally right now, which is 10 units in a building in a lower income part of the North Shore, he is buying, I think, something like a 28 unit building somewhere in Kansas.

Dylan Silver (10:04)
Yeah.

Dan Bernal (10:40)
So yeah, that does happen. But around here, more likely people have a tendency to hang on to those properties, leverage them,

buy other properties, leverage those. Like I sold a guy 11 houses in the Lowell area. And this was back when foreclosures were everywhere. And he would buy the first, he borrowed against his primary home, which I sold him also, ⁓ bought a small single family house for 100 grand. This is back in 2007, 2008. ⁓ And then he would immediately take a mortgage on that, borrow against it, buy another one.

Dylan Silver (10:56)
Yeah.

Dan Bernal (11:17)
All he had to do was put five or ten grand into fixing it up and put a tenant in it and he could borrow against it and keep going. And he did that over and over again. We did that for, I don’t know, two or three years together. that kind of thing happens. The prices have gone way up. But that happens a lot around here.

Dylan Silver (11:33)
Yeah.

Now

I’m thinking, know, one of the risks anywhere, but we have it in DFW. I’ve heard it in Florida as well. I don’t want to say too much in DFW, although I have heard this happening, is that we’ll have new builds, you know, kind of Lenard, D.R. Horton type of build, subdivisions where they’re trying to get all these homes filled and they will get them filled. But if you have ⁓ a rental property or something along the like and people are maybe thinking about

Well, I might go here, I might go here. You could potentially have vacancies, which is unusual, I would say, but you do see vacancies. I don’t think you see vacancies. I mean, I lived in Massachusetts. I think it’s probably rare.

Dan Bernal (12:18)
out

I’ll disagree with that because I’ve been running into that with a couple of my investors who basically just buy anything that looks interesting and renovate it. And it’s time of year here. So beginning of June, beginning of September are rental gold. if you flip something over the fall and you try and sell it in the end of November, or try to rent it in November, you’re going to run into a problem.

Dylan Silver (12:28)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Dan Bernal (12:49)
that’s

not when people tend to move around here. if you can’t afford the cost of holding it, or if the cost of holding it is problematic, and I’ve run into this a lot with some of my investors, like literally this year, ⁓ that can be a problem because you can drain your resources real fast.

Dylan Silver (12:51)
Yeah.

Thanks

The timeframes

you said was it November and what was there another time?

Dan Bernal (13:12)
Basically from November to February nobody’s moving so You just like your best your best move-in times are mid April May June and early September and then No one’s gonna move here in October. This is where we’re the Halloween capital of the world We have we have like a hundred and fifty thousand people here every day. So it’s it’s crazy

Dylan Silver (13:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Is there a huge short-term rental market out there? Is there big regulation when it relates to rent?

Dan Bernal (13:43)
Yes.

Yes, and to be honest, that’s my next acquisition is something Airbnb. So there are rules. So if you occupy the property, they initiated this in Boston and it took on to the rest of the North Shore. If you occupy the property, you can Airbnb it all year long. But if you don’t occupy it and it’s just an investment, you can only do 120 days, which in Salem works great because we have all of October and buffer on.

side of that and most of the summer wherever we have a lot of tourists which that’s all you need you need four months ⁓ or three and a half months whatever ⁓ and but if you live in it you can you can do it all year

Dylan Silver (14:28)
So what happens the rest of the year if you can only do 120? Are they sitting vacant in those areas?

Dan Bernal (14:33)
Yeah.

For the Airbnb ones, ⁓ I don’t I don’t know them one yet. But for the rest of them, there’s a whole lot of rental around here. I mean, I own a rental property. And you’ll never run out of tenants. It’s just a matter of timing. ⁓

Dylan Silver (14:42)
You

Dan Bernal (15:36)
For instance, this condo I’m selling a guy right now, it’s gonna be challenge and I’m working on helping him with it before we even close on it because we’re kind of past the due date for the rhythm of this market for rental. I got to find a Yeah, this is a one bedroom that’s been renovated and it’s gonna be two grand. So no.

Dylan Silver (15:53)
Can you give me some idea as far as rents?

That’s not bad. I was prepared for you to say

four.

Dan Bernal (16:04)
No, no, section eight, ⁓ can get up to, for a two bedroom, you can get up to about $2,800. And that’s just section eight. That’s not going, you know, mass market. This one is not section eight. This one, no, this one’s not section eight, but it’s only a one bedroom. It’s 650 square feet. you know, you can get, and it doesn’t have any parking, and you can get two grand for it.

Dylan Silver (16:15)
This one is section eight.

Just not section it, okay.

Okay.

I want to ask

you also about pivoting a bit here, Dan, the appreciation side of things. So we’ve seen homes in DFW, I would say stutter, go down over the last two years. Probably some of them may be coming back up in some areas, but if you bought two years ago, it’s not where it was. And so you may be in a negative equity position. ⁓ Is it a similar trend that you’re seeing out there or is it just because, you know, there’s still a housing crisis and it’s accentuated out there that if you’re holding a home,

Dan Bernal (16:34)
Yeah.

Right.

Dylan Silver (16:59)
Even for maybe two years, it’s basically guaranteed to be on the upswing at that point.

Dan Bernal (17:05)
We’re exactly the opposite of you guys. This part of Massachusetts only goes up and I did a lot of data stuff during the, when people were really freaked out during the recession. even during the recession, was one period of time where Massachusetts, not Northeastern Massachusetts, but Massachusetts as a whole was down about 11 % and it recovered within, I don’t know, nine months.

Northeastern Massachusetts only goes up. It’s just the angle of the vector. During COVID, we went up by something like 14 % a year. A healthy market is supposed to go up by 2.5 % a year. I would say right now we’re going up in the neighborhood of 7 % a year. So we are more than healthy in equity growth, and it just always goes up.

Dylan Silver (17:55)
So if people are prepared, you know, maybe to weather some storms of vacancy issues and they say, hey, you know, six months or whatever, hopefully not that long, but they say, hey, there might be some vacancy issues, but we know that it’s going to appreciate with time. We could also do some force appreciation if we want to, you know, of course, better countertops, bathroom, so on and so forth. But it seems like if you have, and correct me if I’m wrong here, if you have the ability to,

Dan Bernal (18:16)
Absolutely.

Dylan Silver (18:23)
you are basically sitting on a sure bet if you’re buying in that area because you’re as long as you’re comfortable with some of the holding costs, it’s going to increase in value and it will rent out at some point.

Dan Bernal (18:36)
I have one investor who literally buys anything that looks interesting without purpose. Like he might flip it, he might rent it, he just buys it because it’s going to go up in value. luckily he owns enough properties that are ⁓ drawing income that he can cover the holding costs. But the reality is anything around here that you can get your hands on is going to go up in value. ⁓

It’s up to you to figure out what you want to do with it.

Dylan Silver (19:11)
Maybe we might see some Texas investors investing in Massachusetts. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Dan, are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they’d maybe like to learn more about your business or reach out to you if they’re looking at properties for themselves in that area?

Dan Bernal (19:15)
Bring him on, buddy. Bring him on.

The best way to reach me, I have a website which is danbernell.com, but the best way to reach me is ⁓ my Facebook page which I use a lot and I ⁓ I’m locked into about 78,000 people. ⁓ So it’s a good resource. And that is just Facebook, Dan Bernal Real Estate.

Dylan Silver (19:49)
Dan, thank you for coming on the show here today.

Dan Bernal (19:51)
Thank you, I really appreciate your