Persistence in Real Estate Investing with Stephanie Wankel

Transcript:

Stephanie Wankel  0:00  

At one point, I had two of them vacant, and the third had like a major Kappa x expense. I the furnace went out I think it was thousands of dollars.  I I was so stressed.

Taylor   0:17  

Welcome to passive wealth strategies for busy professionals. today. Our guest is Stephanie Wankel Stephanie is going to teach you about the power of perseverance, and how it can take your real estate investing to the next level. Stephanie is a single mom with a day job, who got started as a real estate investor at a really tough time when everybody everybody was saying, Get out of real estate. 

She persevered through a lot of tough situations over the last 10 years plus as a real estate investor and has grown her wealth massively. She's done very well over time. She's going to teach you her story of perseverance and what it did for her, what it can do for you how you can get started with your perseverance strategy. This is a fun interview. This is a topic I love to talk about, because it's so important and it impacts all of us in our own ways.   without any further ado, here we go. Here's the interview. Stephanie Wankel, thank you for joining us today.

Stephanie Wankel  1:16  

Thank you for being here. Happy

Taylor   1:18  

to be talking with you.  today we're going to talk about the power and importance of perseverance. But before we get into that before we key our listeners in on the great lessons that you've learned, can you tell us about your background and introduce us to your investing history?

Stephanie Wankel  1:34  

Sure, I have been a professional product developer in the software space for over 25 years. So bit mostly in corporate environments.  I have been a real estate investor for over 12 years, starting in like most people and single families small multifamily, and now I do I do You'll have my portfolio but I predominantly do multifamily syndication.

Taylor   2:04  

Hmm. Okay.  when did you start investing in real estate? What year

Stephanie Wankel  2:10  

in 2008? So thousand eight Yes.

Taylor   2:12  

Great time to get started.

Stephanie Wankel  2:14  

Yeah. I, I really I always wanted to have a rental. My grandmother had rentals in a college town.  I just thought it I didn't really have all the facts about what what made it such a great wealth building tool, but I just knew it was.  so I always wanted a rental portfolio. I had recently gotten divorced and become a single mom, parenting my kids on my own. you know what happened in 2008. 

A lot of people were unloading properties, and I kind of put it out there that I wanted to have a rental and a wholesaler in town contacted me at just the wrong time in my life,  after a divorce and he's like, have I got an opportunity for you? And I thought I can't do that I, I, I'm doubled down and fear and stress and what's going to happen in my life and I actually don't know anything about being a landlord.  so of course, I did it. I just jumped. I did the numbers, and at that time there maybe there was a bigger pockets, but I didn't know about it. I scoured around and researched and, and just did the basic numbers and thought, Okay, this thing's gonna provide me a lot of cash.  so I did that.  

then this wholesaler had a couple more because  everyone was unloading. I basically bought three single family homes in less than desirable location. So I didn't follow some of the basic rules about that.  those I have a lot of, scary, unhappy tenant stories, because of that, a lot of turnovers and a lot of pain, basically. But, that's how we learn lessons sometimes is through pain. So I had those three properties and I landlord them myself for many, many years that entailed dragging young kids in the car, going to yell at tenants and chase rent that was always in cash.   telling them to wait in the car under the seat don't move while I go in and hash it out. So that's, that's where, where, and when I got my start and investing.

Taylor   4:45  

That's great.  you've you've had a nice run, and you're I'm sure you're still everything's still going great.  you mentioned a few things in there that I think set you and other successful investors apart from kind of Average Joe, if you will. But can you tell us more about your specific situation? I mean, being a single mom,  having kids and having a, you persevering through that situation and really overcoming those doubts and those those rough times. I mean, overcoming that and pushing through it is what sets the great apart from the maybe not so great, right?

Stephanie Wankel  5:23  

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it starts with taking an action too. So I wasn't prepared to take that on at that moment. But an opportunity was presented,  I can either pass on or I could take action and if you stick to the fundamentals of something, and in real estate, the fundamentals are the mass or the underwriting or they're there. So if you stick to that, and it works, then  your decision actually shouldn't be that hard, necessarily. I think people get wrapped up in analysis paralysis a lot, which is mostly associated with fear. 

So the first step to kind of being unlike other people and is is taking action researched well intended, you know at not not ridiculous action that isn't based on any facts, but taking action is really important.  then like with anything, it's not going to be a smooth road. There's going to be bumps in the road and so there were so many times when I had friends and family members that were like what are sell those things already? My kids say we call them the Julian's because two of them were on a street called Julian and we were constantly having to go spray paint the fence because it would get graffiti all over it. I would make my 11 year old son, mow the weeds because there was no grass and All kinds of bad stuff in the weeds. 

Anyway, not getting a parenting award at this point. But,  I brought that they had to come along because they were too little to stay by themselves.  there were many times when I wanted to quit. I was just committed, I was committed to this is a thing that I do, and I'm going to keep doing it. it wasn't until years later that I figured out a way, there's easier ways to do this.  on hindsight, I would advise anyone that wants to jump in like I did to bake property management into your numbers and hire a property manager. 

Maybe you're great at it, and maybe you love it, but maybe you don't.  that's where the passive investing, passive investing, being a landlord. There's nothing passive about it, and I think a lot of people take on one are two properties and landlord them and regret it because it's horrible.  you don't have to just put just pay someone who is skilled and expert at it. So that was a lesson that I learned, after years of not really knowing that that was a thing.

Taylor   8:18  

learning lessons the hard way. But you push through those tough lessons and you're still in the game today. I mean, you change your strategy, of course, and we'll we'll get to some of the changes that you've made. But in buying these properties, you have a day job, you have two kids, and you bought yourself more jobs by buying properties and then managing them yourself and you still push through. Do you have any kind of like daily practices are really big today to keep people focused on their goals? I have a daily practice. Lots of people do. Do you have anything like that or what? You know what really pushed you to persevere and to not  No, just listen to friends and family saying just sell those things, man and just put the money in your 401k or whatever and invest in that market. I mean, what pushed you through the tough times?

Stephanie Wankel  9:10  

Yeah, I've always been a very goal oriented person. So I definitely have a practice and have for years around setting,  having a vision setting goals. At a very young age, I was a big follower of Tony Robbins. So I was a learner and listener and apply a lot of the lessons that he taught. I do have currently a morning practice. I follow the Miracle Morning by hal Elrod if you haven't read that book. It's just fantastic.  basically how focus is on savers where you meditate, visualize, scribe a lot like a lot of the morning practices and that's just one that I'm committed to That I do almost every single morning.

Taylor   10:04  

There are quite a few formulas out there that people can follow to establish their own morning practice Miracle Morning is a great formula. I've listened to the audio book, I haven't read the book book, but I've listened to the audio book and the and take some few things, a few things from it. Very, very popular. Can you walk us through maybe a specific scenario that that really tested your determination and your perseverance that,  you push through and maybe you had a daily practice at that point or not, but you were able to overcome that situation and get to where you are today?

Stephanie Wankel  10:38  

Yeah, so in the, in the early days, when I have these three properties, like I mentioned, they were in less than desirable location. So the turnover was frequent.  a lot of times the turnover was, people would just like to leave in the middle of the night. So At one point, I had two of them vacant and the third had like a major cap at extra expense. I the furnace went out I think it was thousands of dollars. I was so stressed.  

I honestly was almost paralyzed and riddled with like, what am I going to do? And I just kept I just kept kept taking action so I didn't sit and dwell and and freak out even though I really wanted to. I was like, okay, you have to fix the furnace. So you just fix the furnace now that's off the plate for now.  then how can I get these least up? 

How can you so I just literally put one foot in front of the other and did got the stuff done that needed to get done? Rather than spend my time freaking out? Because, I mean, what was I going to do like All of them right then that's a process. 

after evaluating my pros and cons, it's like I just need to get through this.  the hindsight I've learned is that whatever comes your way, you can get through it like you that someone can and I've had this they destroy your property, and you fix it, like you can get, you can fix anything, it costs money. 

But if you're sticking to the fundamentals, which is,  putting aside enough for vacancy maintenance capex, every single month, and you do the things we're taught to do, then you're going to weather all of these storms.  it's the same with an economic downturn. People are always asking, what about the economy when it dies and housing market if you're sticking to the fundamentals, and you're buying rental property, whether it be single family or multi family, the way that we're taught to do it You're going to be fine.  you're actually going to be better than the rest of the world.

Taylor   13:04  

You know, I like that I like that a lot.  that the thing is it like you said, you get yourself in a sticky situation, but the solution is just not to freak out is to continue to take action and people, it's easy to I suppose it's easy to freak out. It's it's easier maybe to freak out than it is to, to actually take that action. But the antidote to a hard time to difficult times is to, to work your way out of them. It's the only solution. Right?

Stephanie Wankel  13:32  

Yeah. That's why I think that morning practice or whatever you call it is really important because that's when you're in a fresh time of day. You're quiet.  you can just do whatever practice you do, to think about and get through some of the challenges in a way that helps you work through it rather than, against you basically.

Taylor   13:59  

Yeah, you start your Day by setting your intentions and setting a plan for yourself and all those things so that your as you go throughout your day, you're not avoiding dealing with whatever situation it is by spending a couple hours looking at stuff on Amazon or

Stephanie Wankel  14:16  

wherever your

Taylor   14:18  

destination might be. Our Netflix Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the internet is a wealth of distractions. But yeah, that's that's great information. I saw, I saw something recently. I'm glad we're having this conversation in a Facebook group that I'm in, somebody was saying, I can invest in real estate because I'm a teacher. I'm a busy teacher and I had a thought about that. ,  no disrespect to teachers whatsoever. It's hard to be a teacher. I can never be a teacher. I know teachers couldn't do it. 

But I know a lot of former teachers who are now exceptionally wealthy real estate investors because they did not accept that false limitation that They're, they're allowing themselves.  you did not accept the potential false limitation of I'm a single mother with a job, I got these kids, I have all these other things, you push through it. So I, I tip my hat to you, and a lot of respect for not accepting those limitations.

Stephanie Wankel  15:18  

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I think we all have them, right. There's, there's some reason we can't do something we want to do. Whether you're too old, or you're too young, or you don't have the education. I mean, there's just a million reasons.  if you unpack all that you can, there's something like if I said, I couldn't do this, because I'm too old or too young. Then there's solutions right there. That's a problem. then there's some solution out there, whether you partner with someone or this or that.  

Being open instead of sticking with “I can't because of ‘something’.” What if you could? How could you make that happen? Why

Taylor   16:00  

If you could, Wow, that is awesome. We're gonna have to make a quote card out of that, or

Stephanie Wankel  16:04  

we're gonna have to Tweet,

Taylor   16:06  

tweet, tweet. I like that. I like that a lot. So this is a, there are a lot of great lessons in here,  not accepting these limitations. I mean, I'm a single guy, I'm 30 my limitation is I want to go do jujitsu all day after I'm done.  that's it. That's my limitation. I want to go basically play, but we've all got them no matter what it is, and we have to push through them. So that's awesome. We're going to take a quick break for our sponsor. All right, Stephanie. We got three questions we ask every guest on the show. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. What is the best investment that you ever made?

Stephanie Wankel  16:47  

So I'm going to go real estate investment on this. Perfect. I invested in an Airbnb and a ski resort here in Colorado.  that's was the best investment a because financially it just was a cash flowing beauty but be and most importantly to me is that I was able to use it with my kids we whenever there wasn't a guest in it we use that to ski and we build up so many memories with that investment so that that investment not only provided you know passive income which is what we love about real estate investing, but it contributed to some great memories for my family

Taylor   17:35  

that's awesome that is a great best investment now you said you invested in it was this an Airbnb arbitrage scenario Did you buy the property and then Airbnb it can you tell us about the strategy? Yeah investment

Stephanie Wankel  17:46  

I purchased the property and then Airbnb debt so I actually VOB Yoda and all kinds of ways to get guests in there but I hire I did all the marketing on booking on My side which is extremely easy.  I use a local property management company to run the cleanings and that type of stuff.

Taylor   18:10  

That's great. I mean, I love I stay in Airbnb I haven't invested in them. But I do have a few friends who have created financial freedom for themselves by doing this VRBo strategy and then some Airbnb arbitrage if you're in the right market, the amount of cash flow that you can create is is really incredible. Plus, you mentioned the the memories you were able to create with the property. So that's great as well. Yeah. On the other side of that, what is the worst investment that you've ever made?

Stephanie Wankel  18:40  

So I'm going to this this worst one has that has both worst and and good, but I'm going to focus on the worst. The two single family homes that I first the very first ones that I bought that we've been talking about today. They were in like I mentioned a less than desirable area.  they were positive as far as cash flow, but they were the worst investment as far as bad stuff happening. Like, I have so many they were bad and the landlord at them and I didn't know what I was doing. They were bad and that the tenants just were less than desirable because of the neighborhood, which made it challenging. I spent a lot of time and a lot of money that could have been reinvest, invested into something better. So it was bad. But it was great because I learned so many lessons from that experience.  honestly, the lessons I learned in those years, I apply even to this day, so So even though financially it could have been way better. The hard knock lessons are Very grateful for

Taylor   20:01  

nice and one of those. I mean, you've we kind of touched on you've changed your strategy over the years from when you got started buying single families to your current strategy you mentioned doing multifamily. Can you tell us a bit about what you're doing in multifamily now?

Stephanie Wankel  20:17  

Sure. So So what I did is over, over the years, I expanded my single family small multifamily, and then ended up the Denver market appreciate it a lot.  so I ended up sitting on a lot of cash in those properties. So I 1031 exchanged them all out of the Colorado market into other emerging better cash flowing markets in the way of buying turnkey properties.  as I was doing that, as when you buy a property, you do all the financing like it's quite a quite an event. doing that, Time after time after time and doing the math that I want. 

To be financially free, I want let's say over 100 doors and I'm exhausted at the 10. So what am I going to 100 and so then it became obvious that to scale and expand I need to jump into multifamily and that's when I jumped in and started learning all about multifamily. I hired a multifamily coach and just got into the world and love it. I'm sure people say this all the time, but I wish I had started in multifamily. But I it's a great, I am passionate about it and I love being able to help other people learn about how to do it.

Taylor   21:45  

That's great. I mean, a lot of people say they wish they'd started in multifamily. I started in multifamily

Taylor   21:52  

but there you go. I mean, but you learn a lot of lessons along the way learned a lot of lessons along the way, with your single family portfolio that many people, if you started multifamily, like I had, I'm sure there's there's a lot that  from your experience that I don't know, by virtue of experience.

Stephanie Wankel  22:11  

Yeah, yeah.  some of it is the mental part of it also, like, I don't really get too freaked out about stuff because I know that there's, I've had a lot of scenarios. So  some of that, I guess that's just having different experiences. So that makes it helpful as you get into different areas.

Taylor   22:38  

Yeah, absolutely. You've kind of gotten used to the situation, so to speak of, oh, unexpected, fairly major maintenance items. Alright, well, we'll fix it. I mean, that's our option. We're not going to sell the property. We have to fix it. So that's what we're going to do.

Stephanie Wankel  22:54  

Yeah, yeah.  those things are going to happen.

Taylor   22:59  

So My favorite question that I asked every guest on the show is what is the most important lesson that you've learned in investing

Stephanie Wankel  23:07  

is to take action, take action and then be committed. So persevere stick with it be committed. I really do think that if I as a single mom, two young kids, corporate full time job can get into real estate. So Can anyone in and there's a million different ways you can do it.  we've been talking about us you, but if you stop using excuses and being busy as your Roadblock, and think about what if I could do this? What would that look like? And then just start doing it?

Taylor   23:48  

Absolutely. I like that a lot. That's a great, a great principle. What if I could do this? What would it look like? And yeah, you're right. I mean, we all start from Different places and there's a there's so many different strategies, maybe somebody, if you don't have a lot of cash in the bank and you're just you want to get into real estate, okay, maybe you're not going to start by buying the triple net retail properties, all cash, that's probably not the strategy you're going to do. But there are other low money down strategy out there that are working for lots of people making a lot of money. So there are many options out there to take advantage of.

Stephanie Wankel  24:27  

Yeah, I a product development principle is try things experiment. Just get out there, talk to people try some stuff and see what resonates.

Taylor   24:41  

That's great. I love it. So you've mentioned a couple times throughout our conversation, I think you have your own podcast. You tell us about that a little bit.

Stephanie Wankel  24:50  

Yeah. It's called the frenzy to financial freedom.  it's targeted. We have female guests targeted to female audience. women that are either entrepreneurs or corporate corporate employees that have side hustlers.  one of our passionate entrepreneurial pursuits is real estate investing. So have a lot of real estate investors of all different kinds of women doing really cool things in the real estate space, not just syndication, and then also have guests on that are doing cool other entrepreneurial pursuits.

Taylor   25:32  

That's craziness and its frenzy to financial freedom. Correct. What's the URL where can people get it?

Stephanie Wankel  25:40  

So you can get it off any podcasting, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, any anywhere. Also on my investment website, NewHeightsInvestmentGroup.com. There's all the podcasts are also on there.

Taylor   25:56  

Nice and if people want to get in touch with you, they can probably go to NewHeightsInvestmentGroup.com. Yeah, yeah, great. Great if they want to talk more about investing in multifamily. I understand you're I think you're syndicating properties now. Yeah. Yeah. People what markets are you in? By the way while we've got you

Stephanie Wankel  26:15  

for my apartment syndication, I'm predominantly in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Taylor   26:20  

Nice DFW. Classic growing market. Yeah, it's very popular for a lot of reasons. A lot of a lot of job growth. business with very great there. So awesome. Well, thank you for everything today. You have a very inspiring story. I think anyone should be inspired by your story, your experience and your perseverance. So thank you for bringing that to us today.

Stephanie Wankel  26:41  

Thank you.

Taylor   26:42  

been a lot of fun to everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you learned a lot today. I know I sure did. If you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Very big help helps other people learn about the show. If you know someone who could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives, please share the show with them and bring them into You the fold. Once again, thank you for tuning in. I hope you have a great rest of your day and a great week and we will talk to you on the next one. Take care Bye

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