Steven Carroll - Learn How To "Do Money Better"
Steven Carroll is a former financial planner who has discovered the benefits of real investing and is focused on helping others learn how to "do money better." Through the power of building great relationships with amazing real estate investors and entrepreneurs, Steven has been able to invest in multi-family properties, mobile home parks, motels, short-term rentals, as well as other small businesses. Find out how Steven took the principles he learned as a financial planner, combined them with his obsession for personal finance and all things money, along with his love for entrepreneurship and real estate investment, and is putting it all together to build a life & future he's excited about, and how he wants to help you do the same!
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Discover how investing in real estate for beginners can set the foundation for long-term financial freedom.
- Uncover hidden benefits of owning multifamily properties and why they could be your smartest investment move.
- Maximize your wealth by tapping into the powerful tax advantages that real estate investing offers.
- Learn to find off-market real estate deals that most investors overlook, giving you a competitive edge.
- Build a rock-solid investment portfolio by diversifying with real estate to reduce risk and boost returns.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - The Importance of Diversifying Income Beyond Stocks
00:02:00 - Steven Carroll’s Journey Into Real Estate and Wealth Management
00:06:00 - Balancing a Full-Time Job with Real Estate Investing Success
00:09:30 - Starting Small with Duplexes: A Practical Entry into Real Estate Investing
00:14:35 - Redefining Risk and Diversifying Income Streams
00:17:38 - Unlocking Significant Tax Benefits Through Real Estate Investment
00:22:33 - Exploring Diverse Real Estate Asset Classes Beyond Multifamily
00:24:32 - Investing in Niche Businesses for Growth and Value Creation
00:27:59 - The Power of Relationships in Real Estate Investing
00:28:49 - Connecting and Learning More About Real Estate Investing with Steven Carroll
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Full Transcript Here:
Steven Carroll
So imagine only having one source of income and only having stocks which, which, by the way, could go up and down and could. The market could crash in the next few days. I'm not saying it would, but then all of a sudden your balance gets cut in half. What are you going to do then? So in my mind, the bigger risk is in action because that's also a choice. And not having a backup plan is. Is also a huge risk that you take.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the Real Freedom show where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Real Freedom, Real Estate Leverage Freedom, where we talk about different ways that you can build time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. If you want to get started on your real estate investing journey, check out our website, Freedom through Real Estate dot com. We put all of our episodes on their articles. Really. We want to just tell great stories to inspire you. Hopefully a story that you listen to. There's some connection point, something that pushes you in the direction to take action and pursue your dreams in real estate because there's a lot of great reasons to invest in real estate. And I know our guest today, Stevenn Carroll, is going to be able to tell you why there's so many awesome ways to invest in real estate. So Steven has a background in wealth and money management. Realize that so many people are doing that through real estate. Got more into real estate and you are exploring pretty much every asset class that's out there, from multifamily mobile home parks, hospitality, business ownership, you name it, as well as working a W2 job. So you've got a lot of great stories, a lot of great information for us to share. So excited to have you on the show today.
Steven Carroll
Thanks for having me, Mike. Great connecting with you and I'm excited to share a lot of this stuff. I've made a lot of mistakes over the years and learned a lot, too. So happy to help people learn from my experience and also accelerate their journey by people not making the same mistakes. But I think the biggest thing that excites me about all of this real estate investing and everything that people like you and I are doing is it's looking at things a little differently than the traditional way of investing. Most people know about mutual funds. You hear about investing in stocks and bonds. People don't really talk about real estate and they don't even know how to get started. And if they do, they kind of, they're a little afraid of it. Don't even know where to begin. And so that's why I love the fact that you're educating people and we get the opportunity to have conversations like this so more people are aware of what you can do and, and they can educate themselves on how to do it for themselves, if it makes sense.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. I think with stocks and mutual funds, obviously there's complexity to it. But like I know if I buy Apple stock, I can watch the ticker and I can see what happens to it. Or if I buy a stock that has dividends, like I can see all that stuff. Real estate, there's just so much more to it because there's different asset classes, there's different markets, whole different ways that you can structure things. And that's the hard thing for people to wrap their head around, especially if they haven't done real estate before. But talk about kind of your initial interest into real est and kind of digging into real estate to hear the why behind it. Because. Yeah, and then we can unpack all the reasons and the hows to it. But in terms of the why, like why real estate versus some of those other things that you've seen and to remind people, you can also diversify, you can do both. So there's, there's lots of things to do. But kind of what were those seeds planted in real estate as you started to dig more into it?
Steven Carroll
Well, when I graduated from college, I was trying to get my first finance job in corporate finance. It was just, you know, what you did in the tri state New York area that you went to school, got my degree, you get job, you become successful, whatever that means, and life is good. And I graduated in June of 2008. If you all remember what happened in 2008, the legs fell out of the financial markets. And then next thing you know, I was interviewing for entry level jobs with 20 year bond traders. So it was very difficult to find a good job. But what I did was I actually got a job in customer service with a wealth management. I was actually a retirement planning company back when the joke was your 2, your 401k became a 201k. That was the joke. It wasn't a joke for a lot of people. It's very difficult. And I, you know, when I got into that business, I realized first of all, how many people didn't even realize what investing was. They didn't know how to properly manage their money. But then as I worked My way up into becoming basically a financial advisor. I got all the licenses that all the financial advisors have and I started working with clients. I realized that the people with money were not the financial advisors, although they did well, but it was the people on the other side of the table who own businesses and real estate had great tax deductions. And I realized like that I want to, I want to do that. And then I also met my wife who is a nurse. She's a cardiac nurse and one of the best nurses out there. She's so compassionate. But working her job, it's very heavy labor and you know, she's doing CPR for two to three hours a day and it's, it's very demanding physically. And she doesn't have a retirement plan. Like there's no pensions anymore. Like you know she's going to work this job until she physically isn't is stable. And so that's why I looked at how do we build a backup plan. And so we look to real estate for not only just the benefits and the income, but more of the long term strategy around alternatives to like pensions. There is no pension. Okay, so we can create our own through real estate if we pay this off in 30 years. Great. We've got a, we each have a duplex and now that'll pay for our income or for our expenses when we retire to supplement Social Security. So we got into that. So my wife and I got into each buying a duplex. We bought some short term rentals just to explore that asset class and then moved up into larger real estate from there to the tune of 105th, 116 multi family units, 135 mobile home park pads, a 24 key boutique motel and a small business, a commercial kitchen hood cleaning business in Kansas City. That's a little bit of my background and how I got started and why I love real estate. But I will tell you it is a get rich slow plan. I don't believe in any get rich quick plan but it is, it's one of the best strategies and is going to be a huge point for our future.
Mike Swenson
I mean obviously you're working you're job during the day too. To be able to do all that stuff is, is pretty impressive. Outside of you know, kind of regular work hours, how are you able to, to balance or not necessarily balance but even like keep kicking the can down the road and keep things moving forward while working, you know, a normal job during the day as well?
Steven Carroll
Yeah, that's a really great question. And I should Mention that after my wealth management career I did that for 12 years but then I got my MBA and actually went back to, went to work as a switch careers as into got into tech sales. So I, I work at W2 now in tech sales. But to your point, it is a lot and I hear a lot of people say, oh well, I have a family, I just don't have time. I've got, I've got two jobs or I've got a job or I've got, you know, I just don't have time. You will make time for the things that are important to you. And in fact most of the people that I talk to that say I don't have time. And then you ask them have you seen this or this show on Netflix? And they're like, oh yeah, I binge the whole season. Like, well you got time for what you make time for. So I spend a good amount of time focusing on investing in real estate, but most importantly surrounding myself with other people because real estate's a team sport. So I've met people through masterminds, through meetups, through speaking to my community and I've got individuals who help. So I know my skill set is communicating with people. I know that I, I love talking to brokers. I'll talk to people who have money that want to invest because they're like, I don't know how to do this stuff but I don't want to swing a hammer. And, and we help them do that and get double digit returns. But I found people that are great at the things I don't like, like underwriting, I don't like underwriting. I can do it right. I understand it and I understand exactly how it works, but I don't enjoy sitting in front of a spreadsheet right in front of a computer all day. So I like to just to trade that off or give that to someone else. And so partnering is really important. Finding people that do the things that you don't want to do and have that alternative skill set. And we'll help partner with you throughout this process because you're going to have a lot of questions when you get into it and it's, you know, there's, every day there's something new, right? There's a new scenario that you didn't, there's, you know, something goes wrong with the property, a landlord issue. There's things that go wrong and it's always great to be able to lean on someone while you're in and invested in real estate too.
Mike Swenson
And you mentioned partnering through people? Yeah, I mean for, for you to be able to invest in multifamily mobile home parks, hospitality, business ownership. Like I think sometimes people listening to this feel like they have to know everything about everything. And so it's like, well, geez, I got to learn five different asset classes. How can I even get good at that? Well, the, the secret sauce there is go find people in each of those asset classes that know what they're doing and build a relationship and find out how you can add value to them and help them grow their businesses. Are you looking to get started or scale in real estate investing but don't know your next step? Are you overwhelmed thinking about finding deals, analyzing deals, doing due diligence and managing properties on top of it? Go ahead and push the easy button and invest with us. Real estate investing is what we do full time. We've done dozens of deals with hundreds of doors. We have the knowledge and experience to hand pick the best deals that most investors can't find. We've got large off market deals all the time where you can hopefully find returns and economies of scale that you just can't find on your own. The best thing is it's 100% passive to you for less capital than you put down trying to acquire a property on your own. Don't let this year go by where you don't make the leap, add to your portfolio or you just sit in analysis by paralysis. To find out more, visit freedom through real estate.com and click on Invest. You can book a call and learn more there. So get to scaling your portfolio now with us by your side real quick. I just wanted to back up. You had mentioned about buying duplexes for somebody starting off, you know, I know you had mentioned, you know, being able to have a duplex for each of you to kind of offset retirement expenses. Like for a lot of people that might be where, where your real estate investing journey begins and ends just as a starting point, right? Because just to be able to do that, have an asset that over 30 years is going to pay off. You know, you've seen that for people like, you know, we can talk about the super complex, different asset classes and doing all that stuff where a lot of people, it might just be, go do that thing first, get that accomplished and then after that you can look at some of these other things but just talk about that conversation about, you know, a duplex each for each of you.
Steven Carroll
Great point. I was actually talking to someone the other day about this and she was like, you know, I want to get into big multifamily and I want to scale all these, I don't have 100 units. And we kind of slowed down the conversation. I backed it up and I was like, what's, what's your goal? Like why are you trying to do all this? And, and I love that you go big fast. Like I love that, that concept. But she's a very young person. And I said, well, hang on. First, if I were to look back at what I was doing when I was living with my buddies back in post college, I would have bought a four plex, lived in it, right? Because you only have to put, you can, you can get an FHA loan on a 3, 4 up to 4 units, live in one unit, run out the rest, have them pay for your rent, and then you can move out in the future. Now you own this thing. You only had to put 3% down. If I just bought a property, as an investor, I have to put 25% down. Most banks will require you unless you're using private money, right? So you're able to put less money down. You live in it for a little while, you get your feet under you, you learn the game and then you're able to move out. And now you've got a four plex working for you. So that's a really great way to get started. And so to your point, my wife and I, when we were getting started, she actually quot was buying a duplex because she wanted to do travel nursing and she wanted to have a home base but be able to go to do travel nursing and then come back and have a place to stay. And that was it for her. Like she was, she didn't even realize that like this could have long term benefits. And then she started learning, oh wow, there's depreciation. And then when they renovate, you know, those are write offs and things like that. So, but anyway, so a duplex for her, like that was the end of the investing journey. And then her and I met and then we realized, hey, this town that we're living in is blowing up and, and it's doing really well and we should buy another one. And so we did. In fact, I'm sitting in one of our rentals right now because we had owned a single family home and it was great and, but it was old and it needed a lot of repair, didn't have central air. And so two, two years ago I said, you know, we could sell, make money on this and live in the rental for a while. We don't have A family yet. And so we moved into the rental, we renovated it, and the town is going. Is just blowing up. But we live in a rental unit. Our tenants pay most of our mortgage. We barely have a mortgage. And so even just for that, if you can do that, yeah, some people would say, I don't want to do that, but think about what that will do for the rest of your life. And now that we've renovated the apartment downstairs and this one, it's gonna. When we actually just bought a house, it's gonna pay for with the. Just the. The positive net income is gonna pay for half our mortgage. And that's the power of all this. So to your point, you don't necessarily need to go hundreds of units and all that. Start small, learn the game. And I'll say one other thing, not to go too long of a tangent, but I remember getting into it and I was like, I'm a little nervous. I don't know if this is going to work. Is this property, is it the right one? I want something a little bit more up to date. And my wife asked me and she was like, are you trying to make it work? Are you trying to make it not work? And I realized I was so nervous about finding the perfect property, I was like, I don't know if this is going to work. And sometimes it just takes taking the risk and learning as you go. You don't have to know how to be a landlord. Learn the rules, learn your laws. But sometimes jumping into things is the best way to get started. Worst case scenario, you have a physical object with wood and nails that you could sell in the future if you had to. But it's only been great for me.
Mike Swenson
And once you stretch that risk taking muscle, it helps you to be able to take bigger risks. I remember I used to tell people when I worked in my W2 job, I said I would describe myself as somebody that doesn't take a lot of risks. And then I go back and I look at it and it's like, well, we did turn, you know, our first initial property into a rental. Bought a house, fixed it up, bought a short sale, fixed it up and, you know, operated. And I still remember at that time when we owned all three of those properties, a good friend of ours had a daughter and somehow we were talking about it and she overheard and she had asked like, well, how come they have three properties? And they had just kind of. I don't remember what exact example they had given her and she's like three or four at the time. And she's like, wow, they must have a lot of money if they have three properties. And in my head I'm thinking, I work for a nonprofit making basically nothing. My wife is still in grad school, and to this little child, she thinks like, oh, we've got a lot of money because we have three properties when we were underwater on the one. Right. Like, that's the reason why. But that stretched my risk taking muscle for the future to be able to do other things. And so I still would describe myself as somebody that has a hard time taking risks, but once you stretch that muscle, it allows you to do it more.
Steven Carroll
Yeah. And risk is an interesting thing because people will look at certain things in terms of risk in a matter of what lens they look through. Right. They may look as real estate, as like, oh, that's risky because the tenant may not pay or whatnot. I look at risk as if you only have one source of income. Right. Imagine you're working a job and look at what's happening in the marketplace now. And the market's doing pretty well right now. But I work, I sell a lot of recruitment products in my enterprise sales job. And a lot of companies, they're not hiring as much. They're trying to find ways to do things with AI before they're hiring. There's still mass layoffs. Things are not going as well. And the jobs report just came out that we apparently didn't have as good of a jobs season in the last three months than we thought. So imagine only having one source of income and only having stocks, which. Which by the way, could go up and down and could the market could crash in the next few days. I'm not saying it would. But then all of a sudden your balance gets cut in half. What are you going to do then? So in my mind, the bigger risk is inaction because that's also a choice. And not having a backup plan is, is also a huge risk that you take.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. And I go back to my parents, both of them, when they were within five years of kind of retiring, had their job taken away from them and live in a small town so, like, they can't find anything else. And their whole life had been save, put your money, you know, into something safe and stable and, you know, might go get a W2 job because it's safe and stable. And those things can be taken away from you just as easy as they're given from you. And so, you know, the struggles that I have or the challenges that I have investing in real estate, I look Back and say, wow, you know, I still have 20 years to kind of figure this thing out and continue to grow in this before I get to the age where my parents that had put all their eggs in that basket and it was just, you know, yanked out from under them. And so that isn't very safe either. And so I'd rather have built that momentum over the next 20 years than not.
Steven Carroll
Yeah, my similar thing happened to my parents and a pretty traumatic thing happened. Not traumatic thing happened to my dad, but he was, he was let go very quickly, very suddenly and in a. In a way where all of a sudden left without a job, where he thought he had a few years left to get ready. But he'd only invested in safe things, you know, to money market accounts. But then he looked back at his portfolio and he was talking to me about it one day. We didn't really talk a lot of money when I was growing up. He was like, look, I've got this much saved. And, and we looked at returns and it was only like a 2 to 3% rate of return. And you look at what he could have made if he looked at real estate, which on Average grows between 4 and 10%. And, you know, rent has only gone up. Real estate values have really only gone up on average over the last hundred years. It's one of the only more asset classes that exist. So if you think about that where you could have been, as opposed to just investing in just safe things, you could be a lot farther along financially. And I think things are changing so much. What worked for our parents doesn't work for us anymore, especially with how expensive things are getting. And that's why I think real estate is a great way to offset and have some sort of backup plan, because people will always need a place to live. Especially now when people can't afford to buy a house, they're going to need a place to live too.
Mike Swenson
Talk a little bit about the tax benefits. I want to make sure that we touch on that because without investing in real estate and not experiencing that, oftentimes when you hear people talking about investing in real estate, it's, well, you know, somebody's paying your mortgage, you get a little bit of cash flow. Oh, and there's tax benefits, right? That is often just the asterisk aside, that is like, oh, yeah, and then there's some tax benefits. Talk about the real benefits that you can experience investing in real estate, because that's huge, to the point where a lot of people, that is why they invest in real estate. And oh yeah, the income is nice. But if, if you, if you're a high income earner, the tax benefits are well worth it. Well, you know, other people might just see like, oh, I make 200amonth in cash flow. Wonderful. But the tax benefits are huge. So talk about that.
Steven Carroll
Yeah, for sure. So there's a lot of really great tax benefits and I've learned this through, through buying my, this property which, and, but there's a lot you're going to want to make sure you do properly talk to your cpa. I will say, of course I'm not an accountant. Right. However, I've worked with accountants before and I learned a lot of tax strategies in my wealth management career. And so the first thing, like very simply we can talk about is the very standard fact that the government allows you when you buy an investment property to depreciate that basically you take whatever value that of the property you buy. Let's say you spend a million dollars, right? Let's just say that's the figure. To keep it nice and easy, you can divide the value of that building over a period of 27.9 years. And so whatever that dollar amount is on a million dollars would be $27,900 you can offset that can write off against your income, your taxable income. So that's the first thing which is really helpful. The second thing is especially if you buy your property and you own it in an LLC or a business, number one, for asset protection. But number two, if you buy within a business, that can offset some of the income that from that property. If you do repairs, if you fix it, you know, when you go put in a new kitchen in your own house, you're paying that with after tax money, right? You made $50,000 after taxes, it's now $35,000. And that's what you used to build your kitchen. But if you have a property and it's a business and you file properly, if you're renovating, some of the, those repairs are tax deductible. And so that can offset your income on the property. It can offset the pass through income that come to you as an individual. And so those are some of the big things. Just as an individual investor, if you have one or two properties, those are absolutely helpful. And then as you get into the bigger scale properties, I mean we have a property that I'm invested in and actively working on as a general partner and we did a lot of renovations. We did something called a cost segregation study. Now this is taking it to the next level. Right. So just keep that in mind. But we did a cost segregation study, and because I was an active partner on that deal, I was able to get a, a deduction this year of $44,000 against my active income. And I end up getting a $26,000 tax return this year, where usually it was like I owed $3,000. So for high income earners, this is how the wealthy don't exploit, but use the tax law to their advantage. And unless you knew that was a thing people that were, they're missing free, not free money, but you're missing out on money that should be yours. So I always try to educate people on not only about how to make money, but how to keep more of the make because you pay a lot of taxes anyway.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. And I know for me, I shared our first cost segregation study that we did. Like when I'm presenting to people or you know, doing a little webinar talking about things, I can just share the example of what we were able to deduct and I just show the actual statement of, hey, I think it was like $74,000. Like that is real money. And so now, you know, the cost segregation study is a part of, you know, all of our purchases that we have because, and we, you know, we figure that into our costs when we're analyzing deals is like, well, here's how much the cost segregation study, because that can, like you mentioned, you know, help offset your income. And those things are, are big, right? A lot more than a, you know, $200 a month cash flow on a, on a rental property. And so that's big real quick. Then you'd mention about partners and investing in other asset classes. Talk a bit about going from, okay, now we're, we're starting with our duplex and now we're pursuing some of those other asset classes. What was it about exploring the other asset classes? Maybe it was diversification. It was obviously meeting the new people and the folks that, you know that, that they're investing in these other. Talk about that kind of going asset class by asset class as you go to, to have these other cool investment opportunities that you guys are now a part of.
Steven Carroll
Yeah, I probably do things a little bit differently. My wife and I both, we, we joke that we kind of do things in the backwards order. And I do advocate that, you know, once, if you want to get into an asset class and you want to really learn it, dive in and learn it and understand it. And this has been happening over the last decade. Right. So this didn't all happen within a year. But I like to diversify whenever I'm looking at investing in case one asset class, right, let's multifamily. I in multifamily, it's been doing great. But then I thought, okay, multifamily is great. There's only so much you can raise rents, there's only so much that you can do in terms of the cost segregation study and pulling those deductions forward. But once you've done that, it's like, okay, that's great. What else is out there? And let's see, what else could be a faster way to either accelerate benefits or depreciation or whatnot. And then I got involved with a partner who was looking at a mobile home parks and is very popular in the mobile home park space, Tim Woodbridge. And so with that I had an old IRA sitting around and it wasn't doing much. And so I used a self directed IRA and knowing that, that Tim does this very well professionally and I said, hey, I want to learn this asset class. And I invested with him in one of his syndications in order to take part in that and learn the asset class and decide, hey, is this something I want to get into? And through doing that I realized that's a great asset class and it's really cool because you have the mobile home itself and then you have the land that it sits on and sometimes you're just charging for the land, which is really neat, huge margins there. But I realized it wasn't the asset class for me and I invest with the people that do it, keep it in my portfolio. But okay, great, I learned and now I can keep going and I can see what really works for me. Some of the other asset classes I got into, so I got into a boutique motel, I knew the South Carolina market because of my short term rentals and had a partner who found a really great deal and we were able to buy it with our without going to a bank by raising capital. So that was really cool. One get into the little bit of the boutique hotel space and expand short term rentals. And then from there I realized again, that's great and I trust an operator. Sometimes short term rentals can be like a full time job. And so that's where I was like, okay, what kind of asset class will allow you to create value and generate value over time? Is a surface that's necessary and is something where I can invest in it and actually affect the growth faster than you can with just bumping rents. And so I had again with making Partnerships. I had a friend, Pearson Charbonneau, who was buying a kitchen exhaust hood cleaning company. So whenever you sit at a restaurant, they have those big kitchen kitchen ovens and back and fryers and all that. And all the grease and smoke goes up and gets sucked out. And his company cleans that. And so he was, he was buying one of the. His. He bought a hood clean company and then he was buying one of his main competitors to shrink the competition in the market that needed a lot of opportunity for growth or had a lot of opportunity for growth, and he was looking for partners. And so I invested with him and I was helping out with the sales side because that's my experience. So now we've been able to take that and grow that exponentially because every, every, you know, dollar he brings in is added to the value of the business. And then he can either sell that in a few years and exponentially, 1, 2, 3, 4x the revenue he's generating. And then I get a return on that, too. So I try to look at different asset classes, things that are necessary, and try to diversify. So in case the stock market changes, I do have some money invest in the market, too. But if things do turn around in one asset class, the others end up kind of shaking it all out and I end up riding the wave up.
Mike Swenson
One thing I want to quick highlight that you mentioned and would love to hear about it. You mentioned about your boutique hotel in South Carolina, getting it directly from the seller, not having to get a mortgage, right. When we talk about benefits of real estate ownership, a lot of times people go back to like, what were they programmed to think? And right. It's like, I want to buy something in real estate. I've got to go get a mortgage on it. I got to go talk to a bank or I've got to go talk to a lender. Well, there's ways to do that where you don't have to do that, right? You just go work with the seller and you can buy it directly from them. And, you know, I know when I was purchasing my first property, it's like, okay, I got to get my W2 statements together, I got to get my taxes together. And when you work with other owners like that, you don't have to do that now. They still might want that information or something like that. But that's the other cool thing about real estate is you can buy property from people without going through that process to qualify for a mortgage if you come to the right terms with them, because they understand my property Makes money. I can count on these rents every month. And so they know if somebody else is managing that, that same thing is going to happen. And so these are the incredible benefits that we sometimes gloss over when talking about real estate is that's, that's an amazing opportunity to be able to do that.
Steven Carroll
Yeah, a lot of times people think, okay, even to buy the properties, I have to go to the market and see what's out there. And there's a lot of compet and I'm going to get bid up. But there are ways to find properties off market. It's a little more hard to do. But in the case of this one, right. We're able to buy a property without having to go to a bank, without having to, you know, come up, go to those, go come up with the same, like with the bank statements, personal guarantees, all that. We were able to work with the seller and understand what the seller wanted. And the seller just wanted to be able to go, you know, retire, go back to a country that their family was in and, and not have to worry about paying all that taxes up front. Imagine if they did sell, traditionally they were going to pay, they, let's say sold it for a million bucks. They're going to pay taxes on a million bucks. We have the property. But you know, we created a win win situation when we said, hey, we're going to pay you over time. You want X amount of money, okay. You know, the property can do that. You trust us, we'll personally guarantee it and then we'll pay you. We can pay them less than the bank. We don't have to jump through all the hoops, we don't have to go through all of that. And then we have a property that was off market, not as much competition, and we're able to pay less than traditionally we would have at a bank. So everybody wins, the seller wins. They're still getting a return on their money and, and we win because we get the property. So so many different ways you can get into real estate and it's all about relationships. I think that's the thing people look overlook the most. They see the property, they see all these units and how many doors. But don't forget a lot of these properties, some are owned by some of the big gut players, but some are just owned by mom and pop or passed down to the family. These are human beings and they want to retire. Right. There's a lot of tired landlords out there that just, they want, they want to break. And so there's, and there's lots of companies that help you connect with those individuals, so keep your eyes open.
Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, geez, there's so many great things that we could talk about. I mean, we could have dug deeper into any of these. But thank you so much for kind of allowing us to water ski through your experience and talk kind of high level on what you've done. For people that want to reach out to you or learn more about you or connect with you, how can they do so?
Steven Carroll
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm on on Instagram, you'll find me on the I created a profile called the Do Money Better Guy because at work I'm the guy that come to when people want to do money better. And then you can see I'm on LinkedIn LinkedIn.com in StephenP Carroll and you can reach out to me. I'm on Facebook. I'm you can reach out to [email protected] I'm very accessible and love these conversations. So connect with me. Love to talk and help you understand a little more how you can get into real estate too.
Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your wisdom, a ton of great stories, ton of great experience and excited to see where things continue to grow for you in the future.
Steven Carroll
Thanks, Mike. Great to meet you and thanks for the time.
