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Scott: Today, we’re going to hear from a real estate investor who started on a teacher’s salary, bought rentals in one of the most volatile real estate markets in the country and entered the great recession with maximum leverage in a very vulnerable financial position.
Scott: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Scott Trench and it’ll be just me this week while Mindy is traveling in Amsterdam. How’s that for a Dutch intro? All right, Corby Goat is going to tell us what it was like navigating this extremely difficult stretch of financial markets back through 2007 and through about 2011, 2012ish and how he scrimped, saved and swung a hammer for nearly 10 years before building the next round of his business. And then we’re going to talk about how that trial ultimately resulted in an unbelievable amount of business success, real estate wealth, and lifestyle optionality and how he lives a pretty wonderful life with a lot of fantastic options today.
Scott: Corby, thank you so much for joining us here today on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.
Guest: Thanks for having me on. I I appreciate you guys having me on and I I’m excited to chat with you, Scott. Thanks for having me.
Scott: Awesome. Well, let’s kick things off and let’s hear about how you started investing as a teacher. What was your first deal?
Guest: Actually, I did my first deal before I even had a teaching job. I was in college and I came from a pretty modest family where we we didn’t have extra money or extra cash. So, I was going to school and paying my own tuition and part of the deal was in order to do that, I had to have a full-time job. And so I was working full-time and taking as many classes as I could. I’ll get into detail wherever you want, but the short version of the story is is my my girlfriend at the time who’s my wife now, she inherited a little bit of money from her grandparents. It it was not a ton, but a little bit. It was enough for down payment on a house and the stipulation was, it was supposed to be down payment on a house. So she had her parents co-sign on a house for her and got roommates and kind of did a house hack. And I decided that she couldn’t have a house and me be living with a bunch of my buddies in a tiny little apartment. So I I just called a lender and asked if there was any chance I could get approved for a loan. I had no idea what a mortgage took like or what an FHA deal was and kind of walked me through some of that and and I ended up buying a live-in Burr as my first kind of house hack before there was such a thing as house hacking, using FHA loan and and a couple of my roommates from my old place followed me over and that’s kind of the very first deal that I did and and didn’t really have any plans or expectations with that.
Scott: What year did you start this with this first deal? And how much were you making approximately?
Guest: Oh, you’re calling me out on on my age. I can tell what’s going on here. I was 21, I think. 21 or 22. This would have been in 2001, I think. It’s either 2000 or 2001. I remember buying the place in December because it was really, really cold and I couldn’t really afford to keep the heat up, and so we had lots of blankets going on. The specific numbers, at that time, this house I bought for $105,000. I put 3.5% down on FHA loan. It was a cosmetic fix. Actually, I still have that property today.
Scott: Oh, awesome. So it was it was more of like a burr like you said and and and a long-term rental than it was a live-in flip.
Guest: Yeah, yeah. I mean, my my intention, oh, you asked me how much I was making when I did that. I actually I remember very clearly my I was salaried working at the time for a non-profit organization. Uh, I worked for the YMCA in the youth sports department here in Boyce where I live and my salary was $17,500 a year. I was working 60 hours a week and I was taking between 8 and 12 credits in college at the time. So I was pretty busy, but, um, yeah, $17,500 was my salary at the time.
Scott: All right, so we’ve got you’re you’re 21 and we’ve got our first deal underway. Tell us about the numbers. Was this allowing you to live mostly for free or how did this impact your finances?
Guest: I ended up basically paying about the same rent as I was before. I wasn’t living for free. I think at the time I was paying about 300 bucks a month in rent in an apartment with a bunch of my buddies. And in this single family home, I had a couple of my buddies move in and after they paid me rent, I think I was charging them 250 bucks, something like that. My payment was a couple hundred bucks. So my out-of-pocket expenses were about the same, a little bit less. But I owned my own house and we could do whatever we wanted with it. And it need a little bit of love and I understood the idea of being able to build equity. I didn’t really understand how it worked, but I I think I lived there for a couple years. and over the course of a couple years on the weekends, me and my buddies would would run to Home Depot and I’d pony up 50 bucks for paint and we’d paint a couple rooms. and the next weekend I’d spend 100 bucks on tile and we’d figure out how to lay tile and we tile a bathroom. So we just kind of like slowly work through the house and I actually had a really fun time just doing that with my buddies.
Scott: This is very similar to what I did in 2014 when I bought my first, my first house hack. One of the things that I always struggle with is buying in 2014, I could have really made a bunch of bad decisions and still made a ton of money because the Denver market appreciated so much over the next six, seven years through to 2021. I think that’s probably a similar story for you to a certain degree, given you had bought in 2001 and markets appreciated dramatically into 2007, 2008. But you’ve held this thing for 20 years now through various market cycles, through the great recession. What was it like holding this property, seeing all this equity built and then probably giving back a lot of that for a few years there in the recession?
Guest: Yeah, you know, I think about that a lot because in the the business that I I run now, we deal with a lot of people that are trying to invest for their first time. And so I think about the ratios and the difference in the market now versus what it was like 20 or 25 years ago. I fully acknowledge that people that are starting today, it’s a lot more difficult. There’s, especially in markets like Denver and Boise where I am, there’s more competition than there used to be, but I think the the biggest challenge really is that it it’s a lot harder to get loans and the products are a lot different than they were back then. So those are a couple of the biggest challenges. In all honesty, I I think the ratios are pretty similar as far as like income to purchase price and values of of properties now. It’s not it’s not that far off. So for instance, I was making about $20,000 give or take back then. It was a little bit less than that. and that house was $100,000. So it was about five times what my income was. And now, if you’re a couple are making $100,000, the average home in the city I live in is about $500,000. And I think it’s not unreasonable to think fresh out of college that at least a couple would be making $100,000 and those ratios would be very similar.
Scott: I think you’re on to something here that’s uncomfortable and probably unpopular to state, but we’re going to state it anyway, which is, you know, five years ago, the narrative that incomes were not keeping pace with home price explosions was completely true. But for the last five years, real and inflation adjusted incomes have been going up while housing prices have been lagging behind inflation over that same period of time. Now, it’s still more expensive than it was five years ago, six years ago to buy a house if you’re going to get a mortgage because of interest rates, right? And for the forseeable future, that may compress price growth until we see interest rates decline. But yeah, I think we are sneakily over the past five years catching up, not maybe not to historical averages, but to a much more normalized, you know, price to income threshold for for housing in many parts of the the country, not all of them. So, I think that is catching up to people and it’s not going to be a popular topic because it gets a lot more engagement to to talk about how unaffordable housing is and how price to income ratios are out of whack, but I think that gap has been slowly closing because income growth has been sneaking up and housing prices have not gone far.
Guest: I would agree with that and it’s realistic also to say, you know, at least in in my market, the the median house, the median single family home is a little bit over $50_000,000 and I’d be remiss not to say, I fully acknowledge half a million bucks for a start home. it’s still a ton of money, but those ratios still play out. It it’s still attainable for quite a few people. So I I agree with you. It it may not be the most fun thing to say and a lot of people don’t love hearing that and I’m not really putting a value on it, but it it’s the facts.
Scott: What another point though going back to my other question is, again, I I just take myself at 23, 24 when I bought that first property in 2014 and I say, if I just transplant myself and I happened to have been 23 or 24 and starting my career in 2022, 2021, I would have bought at the relative peak, that first house hack and that could have completely changed the directory of my life. Like there’s a luck, complete luck element to being that age and having that drive to house hack at that point, which paid off for both of us. But I’m wondering if that if you ever think about that counterfactual if you just happened to have started this process in 2006, you know, how different the outcome would have been.
Guest: I acknowledge that there is some some luck definitely because I I was completely ignorant to how things worked or the fact that I would still have this house 20 or 25 years later and what that might look like. I had no clue. I think the reality of it is, you have to take action, no matter what. We we can’t control where the market goes. Generally speaking, we can’t control what demand looks like. I can’t control what interest rates look like, but I can’t control putting myself in a position where I can take action and do something to influence my future. To me, that’s the biggest thing is I I bought lots of properties over the years and some have done much better than others and generally didn’t have a whole lot to do with me or the timing beyond what the market did at that time. And I can’t control that and I can’t predict it.
Scott: I completely agree. You have to take action. A house hack is for many people and pushing all the chips in the table early in life into this thing. And there’s an element of luck to it and an element of it’s a really good bet and it’s not going to work out all the time, but across a 10-year cycle, there’s a very good chance that you’re going to hit winners over and over and over again on this with one loser out of 10 uh across that process. You have to make peace with that at some point along this journey. Now, next question, what a lot of people I think when they get their first house hack, keep putting the chips all in and buying more and more and more and leveraging and all that. and then that eventually catches up with you whenever the cycle changes. You’ve clearly survived this 2007, 2010, you know, crash in the real estate markets, which I’m sure impacted Boise pretty heavily here. Can you tell us about your journey from this first house hack and how it set you up? And then how you somehow managed to not get in over your skis in real estate at that point.
Guest: That’s a really good question because I remember being that age and to fast forward a little bit, we had done a few more deals before the crash happened. My wife and I had done a few more. And they were basically burs and we had those places rented out and we had locked in obviously our monthly payments with traditional 30-year mortgages. And when the market crashed, values came down here 40, 45%. And so we were underwater on every property that we owned. And especially being fresh out of college, we had a lot of friends who were doing short sales and letting their houses go strictly because they were underwater, not because they couldn’t afford their loans, just because they thought they were upside down and they didn’t want to have this weight hanging over them. I had family members and friends that were all telling us like, you guys are crazy, like you need to just cut and run and dump these properties. My wife and I talked about it. I mean, we never really considered doing that because I I’m a firm believer like I signed a contract saying I was going to do something and I’m going to fulfill my end of the bargain. So from an ethical standpoint, walking away just because I changed my mind didn’t feel okay to me. But beyond that, we had tenants in these properties that were making payments and it was covering all of our bills and there was plenty of demand for rental properties in our market. And so even though rents had come down a little bit across the board, it hadn’t come down as much as values came down. And so we never really had any trouble filling them with tenants and keeping the bills paid. and so we just kind of kept our heads down and waited and I had no experience to justify it, but I I just I always felt during that time that like values have to come back. like over the course of time, obviously the stock market’s gonna come back and lenders are going to start lending on houses again and and that there’s still demand in my market and and our population was growing and if we waited out, things would be fine. and whether that’s completely dumb luck or whatever you want to call it, it paid off for us to just keep our heads down. We didn’t buy any new properties in recession. It’s funny, you hear a lot of people, especially younger people like saying, I can’t wait for the market to crash so I can get a house. Well, if the market crashes like it did in 2008, you’re not getting a loan anyway. If you don’t have cash, you’re not buying a property. And so we didn’t buy properties during the recession because we didn’t have any cash and and we we had very modest income, but we kept our heads down and just waited for equity to return and it did.
Scott: So let’s go back to this this concept of luck, right? So you bought in this market and you did, you basically went all in. You kept going all in, right? You’re buying the next one, refinancing to the maximum. And then that caught up with you in 2007 and 2008 and 2009. But because you cash flowed, presumably self-managing these properties and just lived a frugal life over time, you were able to recoup the huge appreciation, the luck, if you will, of Boise’s growth in the last decade or so, last last 15 years in particular.
Guest: Yep, absolutely. I I can’t argue with that.
Scott: What was life like in these early days building that portfolio? and what was it like during the recession?
Guest: My wife and I did everything with our properties. and and for the record, we did everything wrong. On the first few deals that we did, we were self managing. we had no idea how to do that and we learned a lot of lessons the hard way. We did most of the like the renovations ourselves, anything that we possibly could do, we did on our own. and it was lean. Honestly, we like I said, we were fresh out of college, we had a couple properties and I remember looking back and we had we had friends that were getting married, starting to have kids and we’d get calls all the time that like, hey, we’re having a barbecue this weekend. You guys should come over and we’re going to hang out in the in the backyard in the afternoon and and drink beers all day long and and have fun. And my wife and I, we said no forever because no, I’m sorry, we’re we’re putting a roof on or we’re we’re going to be painting a house this weekend. And we we were always and they’d constantly our friends were always telling us how boring we were. and eventually they stopped calling, but the funny thing is, after things came back and and we started getting more equity and our and our lifestyle was changing a little bit. I I’ve had a lot of my old friends call back and be like, man, how did you do all this? Like where did this all come from? When did you start doing this? And I just tell them like, you know, remember the times when when you guys were all hanging out on the weekends drinking beers and my my wife and I were out, we were working. We were putting in the hours.
Scott: How long did that period of hustle and heads down last for you guys?
Guest: It was a combination between us just wanting to live lean and the recession and us having these properties. It was probably five or six years where we were, we were on a pretty strict budget as far as like, we we had envelopes for groceries, we had envelopes for like date nights and if that money was gone the second week of the month, it was gone. And we didn’t do anything. We didn’t buy more groceries. We were eating the Dave Ramsey thing, you know, beans and rice. We if the money was gone, it was gone. We weren’t using credit cards, we weren’t going into debt. and so we lived really lean for a good five or six years just making sure that we were keeping our heads above water and and keeping our fingers crossed and and waiting for the market to come back.
Scott: Okay, and and what year did you kind of begin popping up and being like, okay, I can actually, I’m cash is now starting to flow back into my life in a more meaningful way and I’ve got money to begin accelerating here. When did the tides begin to turn?
Guest: It was around 2012, 2013. So in our market, things started picking up again towards the end of 2011 and 2012 and there’s kind of a slow roll, but we went from being upside down on all our properties to the valuation was kind of what we owed and then it just kind of kept growing and I want to say around 2014, we were able to refinance a couple of the properties that we had before and pull that equity and then go out and buy more properties and we did more burs and we started doing more burs using the equity. Again, just to go back to the whole point of this conversation, we didn’t have huge incomes and so we really had to use the equity that we had in these properties that we’ve been sitting on forever. and if it weren’t for that, we couldn’t have done anything anyway.
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Scott: And so what happens next from 2014 on? How does the portfolio scale and how does your lifestyle evolve?
Guest: It was kind of a combination of a lot of things. So, when we did that refinance, aside from our personal home, which we had, we had built a lot of equity in our personal home at the time too. So we had a Heloc on our personal home, and then we had three rental properties when the mark came back around 2014. So we did a refinance on on those ones with the equity and we had enough for a down payment on two more properties. And so we went out and bought two duplexes at the same time just using that refinance. Like I said, it was a down payment, so we were getting conventional loans on these new ones we bought. So we bought two duplexes at the same time when we refinanced these properties. From that point on, Boise had a pretty steady and reliable appreciation growth, probably not terribly far from Denver. It wasn’t the craziness of COVID, but between 2014 and 2020, we were generally appreciating in the range of like 68% a year. That might not seem like a ton if you’ve got a $200,000 property, but we had five properties that were appreciating at 6 8% a year. And so when you add all that up, it grows and grows. And then at the same time our our rents were appreciating by 5 to 10% per year. And so the cash flow started getting better and better. We were able to kind of breathe a little bit at that time. My wife and I were both still working full-time jobs, not making a ton of money, but things started loosening up and getting better. we started seeing more opportunity in real estate for our future.
Scott: What were you guys doing during this time period for work?
Guest: So my my wife was still teaching, so she has a teaching degree and she’d been teaching at the time for, oh, I don’t know, 13 years, something like that. I had worked for nonprofits for a while and actually I took a job for a little bit as uh an outside sales rep for a company that one of my friends worked at. and so I was traveling all over the place. We had our first kid in 2012. I’ll try to be brief about like, there’s kind of a confluence of things that happened all at the same time that changed things for us. So, I was traveling all the time, two or three weeks a month. We had a newborn at home. He was born with a heart defect. And so he was in and out of the hospital and it it really was uncomfortable for me to not be around when he was in the hospital and seeing cardiologists. So I didn’t love that, but I I can remember very specifically sitting in the airport at probably midnight in Kansas City. My flight had been delayed several times and my wife sent me a video that day of our son taking his first steps and I was gone. I I didn’t get to experience that. And so this combination of things, I was like, I I I got to get a new job. The impetus for that was because I was gone all the time, I couldn’t really be involved in the local real estate market and I wanted to have my hands in it a little bit more. So I I found a job working actually for the state, for the state health department here in Idaho. So I started doing that and it wasn’t a ton of money, but the benefits were great and it allowed me to to be here to go look at possible deals and network a little bit better. So because of of these heart issues that my son had, my wife took a leave of absence from work and in the meantime, we had spent so much time managing properties that she kind of just put some feelers out with some friends of hers that had rental properties and said, hey, I’m I’m looking for a little more income. I’m I’m interested in possibly managing properties. just on the side, we started this little property management company and that started really getting steam and picking up. And that in combination with our equity growth and the rent growth, it all kind of like came together over the course of a two or three-year period where we just created an opportunity for us to go all in on real estate at that point.
Scott: What two or three-year period was that?
Guest: That was between like 2015 and 2018 when things really started taking off for us.
Scott: That corresponds with Boise really beginning to to come into its own before the flood of Californians moved there when COVID hit, right? But but still you’re seeing a ton of appreciation again, like you said, just like Denver. But it seems to all come together at that point. It only took you 11, 12, 13, 14 years of patience in your market to realize that boom. But man, that seems to have hit and and I imagine that’s when a lot of lifestyle factors or things could beginning to get a little looser for you guys.
Guest: Yeah, I mean essentially what had happened was between the the few property management contracts my wife had taken on and the cash flow we were getting from our properties. We didn’t have a grand plan. I don’t have a spreadsheet that I plug in every deal. I’m I’m not a big planner. I’m kind of more like I jump in head first and then figure things out later. I came home from work one day and my wife just said, hey, I’m going to need to get a little bit of help with the property management thing. We need we need more handyman help and I was going through all of our finances and basically our cash flow was about what my paychecks were at my job anyway. And we started running numbers on what we were paying for contractors to go do kind of basic handy man stuff that I could do anyway on on the properties we were managing. She was like, I think you can quit your job. And I thought she was joking. We hadn’t even been talking about this. It was just one day after work, I I think you can quit your job. And we spent probably 10 minutes talking about what it would look like and I went in the next day and quit my job and the rest is history, honestly.
Scott: Tell me about this property management business that you built from there and and how meaningful that became for you guys.
Guest: It’s actually been great. We had a handful of friends that had properties and they referred us to other people who referred us to other people and that started growing. So when I quit my job, we were managing or she was doing on on her own, but it was about 35 or 40 properties and that was a lot for her to do on her own. And so what I did was I took night class to get a real estate license and and the idea was we’re going to talk to our clients about doing 1031 exchanges and maybe expanding their portfolios and so I can kind of handle some of that while while I’m pitching in with the property management thing, but it almost immediately blew up for us and I started doing deals with friends and family members and referrals that we were getting from property management and she had to hire other people, I had to bring other people on to help me with real estate deals and honestly, I I shouldn’t say immediately, but so you guys like to talk specific numbers and without getting into like the nitty gritty, I quit my my state job, my my day job in May and between May and December in May 2015?
Guest: No, sorry, this was 2018. 2018. Yeah. So the property manager thing was building up over that period and then 2018, I quit my job. So between May and December in 2018, in real estate commissions, I made as much as I would have made the entire year at my day job. and then the next year, commissions were five times what my day job would have been and every year thereafter, it’s been 15 to 20 times what my income was before just and it’s something that I love. It’s it’s super fun. and that’s fed our property management company which has become its own beast. I’m actually, I’m in my office right now and in our building but we we just we bought a building last year just to house our staff and there’s other suites or renting them out to other people. But the the real estate thing took off, the property management thing took off. We we manage almost 350 properties now in Boise. and those things all together, it’s been a really interesting way that everything feeds each other because now we have the ability to go out and do more deals like we want to do for ourselves. but in addition to that, because of the work that we do, we’re really integrated into the community here that’s investing and wholesaling properties and developing Infield deals and that sort of thing just due to the nature of of what we do.
Scott: A lot of people right now are in a position where they bought a bunch of properties from 2015 to 2022 and they’ve got those properties and they’re not really going anywhere, right? This is this is something that’s that that’s going on with my portfolio and we we kind of hear it from a lot of people. They’re locked into these low interest rate debt loans here. They really can’t refinance them. It’s different than 2007, 2008 because there is equity in a majority of these folks positions. But what what can we learn from your experience going through 2007 to 2011 and the 10- year grind, I would say from 27, I’m hearing to 2017, 2018 when it actually began to provide the propulsive tailwind to the big business and the, what I imagine, where where where I what I’m imagining is the explosion in wealth and income that you enjoy today.
Guest: You know, Brandon Turner used to say this a lot on bigger pockets too that real estate investing, it’s it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I think a lot of people come in having watched some reels or read a book and feel like they should be able to take extreme action and have extreme results really quickly. And I’m not saying that that’s impossible, but it’s not terribly likely that that’s gonna happen. And I usually use an analogy with a lot of clients that I work. So I I have people that will call me and and will meet for coffee, they’ll come into our office and they have no resources and no experience and their expectations are that they’re going to quit their job within a month and they’re going to quadruple their salary because Grant Cardone said that they could do that. While that is possible for certain people with certain personalities, I think a more reasonable balanced approach and it is is similar to what I did and I I’m not an incredibly intelligent person. I don’t have a lot of resources. I I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. The reason I’ve been successful is partially because my timing was good and and I I have had some luck. The timing was terrible. The timing was absolutely awful from what I can tell, right? Like you got you bought in 200 a one sure and then there was a run up, but you just told us that all your properties were underwater going into the recession, which means you bought these three properties and then you’re you you refinance them to the hilt and you went into the recession in the most vulnerable possible position that you could have at that point in time. Is that, is that the right way to read what happened here?
Guest: You know what, that’s a much a much more accurate view of it, I guess. I I’ve always kind of looked at myself as being a little bit lucky, but if you look at it through that perspective, yeah, I did buy it a terrible time and I guess I was just willing to put up with the pain and discomfort for longer than anybody else I knew was.
Scott: I’m again, I’m I’m inferring this but I believe that you guys were in a position of pretty heavy scarcity for a good 10 years or so to get through that dynamic because of that bad timing. I think you bought in 2001 and and up to 2007 and then because of that leverage, it wasn’t until 2012, 2013 where things began to loosen up. That’s a long time to float these deals basically to begin getting the payoff at that point.
Guest: That’s true, but also, I could not have bought properties any other way. I didn’t have the means to do it any other way through that entire period. and so even when the market crashed and everything was cheap, no one was going to give me a loan and I certainly didn’t have cash and so going upside down and going through that in those properties would have been the only way that someone with my means and experience could have done it.
Scott: Yes, and I’m saying I don’t think that that like I think a lot of people that were with your means and experience gave up and let the properties go. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Scott: That’s the challenge people are grappling with right now. I don’t this time is different, every time is different, but I think that I don’t think that many people are underwater, maybe outside of like Florida and Austin, Texas and a couple of those markets. But I think that’s the question is like, do I just sell this thing? It’s a pain in the rear, it hasn’t gone anywhere in a few years, and that payoff comes so far down the road, it seems like in terms of like compounding and that kind of experience. and in your case, what it really did is I’m assuming, and I’m, I’m inferring here and I’m, I would love to see if you agree or disagree, but a lot of what it really did is it built credibility for you with these lenders, the investors in the community who saw what you were doing over 10 years and not going anywhere, not going anywhere, not going anywhere. and then that all of a sudden exploded into business and referrals that are very good will coming into 2018 and 2019 when you made it your job. how’s that? am I getting close?
Guest: I can’t argue with that at all. And then I to be honest with you, in our business now, I I use the story that I’m I’m telling you pretty regularly just so that people can see I I didn’t come from a lot and I’ve done it all. I mean, I I’ve cleaned toilets. I the the stuff that I’ve hauled out of houses is unbelievable. And none of that stuff bothers me. I mean, I’m I’m willing to do whatever it takes to to make a deal work. And so that’s part of it. But also, I have the experience and the history to see that if you’re holding property over a long period of time, it it makes it really hard to lose. If you buy a property that there’s a little bit of equity in it and it’s paying for itself or a little bit better, that over time, it it’s probably just going to get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. but you have to put up with the pain and discomfort in the meantime. A lot of people, that’s tough. They still want to have a nice car and they still want to eat at a nice restaurant every weekend and and we went a long time without doing that. I still, I’ve never bought a new car myself. I’ve never owned a new car in my life. I still don’t.
Scott: I’m curious about your response to this, but the way I my brain works is I set a goal, I have a very clear end state that I want to work towards, and then I engineer the most efficient path to that end state. I don’t think that’s what you’re doing here with your portfolio. I think you bought these properties and then you you pushed through, you got this job, you you built a property management company, or at least you didn’t up till the point of the story that we’re at. Is that accurate and if not, what was your goal? What is your goal? What is the end state vision that you’re working towards here?
Guest: No, I think that that’s completely accurate. When I bought that first house and turned it into a rental a couple years later, my my mindset at the time was that I’m going to be a teacher for my entire life and I think the first lease I had on the house was $700 a month that I rented it out for $700 a month and my payment was like $625. And so in my mind, if by the time I retire, inflation and all that came together and that house would rent out for $1,000, which that was what my mind thought at the time was that 30 years from from then rent was going to be $1000, not $700. But that would be an extra thousand bucks in my pocket every month and I didn’t think beyond that. I just thought like maybe my retirement’s going to be a couple thousand bucks a month from teaching, this will be another thousand bucks in my pocket and we can go on another weekend away a couple times a year. That was as far as my goals went at that time. And as we’ve done more and more of this, honestly, I don’t have an end goal. I love the process so much and that’s why my wife and I are a really great match because I tend to just jump into things that I have a feel for if if I think that there’s equity or there’s a deal, I’ll just jump into it and then she comes behind me and she sweep up the mess and figure out the numbers and make sure that I’m behaving myself and that that everything will will line up the way that I hope it will in the end. And so we’re a pretty good team in that regard. We’re we’re big believers in like rocket fuel, the the idea that that each one of our personalities kind of offsets each other’s weaknesses and strengths and we’ve been fortunate enough to to bring people on to work on our team that fulfill other needs that we have. I’ve probably got way off from what you were asking, but I I generally don’t have an end goal beyond the deal that I’m working on at that time. and when I get to the end of that, I figure out how to dispose of it coming into every deal, I I just if when I’m done, is it going to cash flow and will there be equity? And I have basic criteria that I want to see for each one of those. And if I think it’s going to do it, then I’ll do the deal. and then when we get to the end, I’ll figure out if we’re going to keep it or sell it based on on how the numbers panned out.
Scott: This is fun because like I feel like what we are so used to here at Bigger Pockets money is like, here’s my number, I’m going to hit it and then I’m going to do this. And there’s none of that here. It sounds more like a game of Monopoly where they’re just keep continuing to move on to the the next piece. Can you tell us about what a day in the life looks like or how you are, are you able to enjoy any of this wealth that you’ve created and this major income stream that you’ve built with these businesses? What does the life of Corby look like today?
Guest: My my life is amazing. Honestly. I mean when talking about luck, I really do feel like the luckiest person out there. One of the things my wife and I connected on originally when we first started our journey was that we both wanted to travel. When I was a kid, I had never been west of the Rockies. I didn’t get on a plane until I was 19 years old and I wanted to see the world and I had no idea what that looked like and she traveled a little bit more than me, but not a lot and that was something that we really connected on. We didn’t have a quantitative goal, but we both that was what we wanted to do is find a way that we could travel as much as we could. And so now we have three little boys. little, they’re they’re 13, 10 and nine right now. But we as a family, we travel about four months a year. We can do our work pretty much from anywhere in the world. And part of this is because we have really cool people that we work with that kind of do some boots on the ground stuff, but I can, I can do my part from anywhere in the world. So we travel a lot, which is awesome. but beyond that, like I’ll I’ll tell you what today look like. This is a pretty standard day. I got up, I went to the gym, came back and kind of helped get the kids ready for school, walked to school with the kids, came to the office and we just ordered a conference table that came last night, so I put the conference table together. We had our staff meeting at our new conference table at 10:00. I went and had lunch with a general contractor who’s going to start building some ADUs for us and for our clients and now I’m on a Bigger Pockets podcast. So it’s all over the place. I have a couple clients that want to go look at properties later today and part of the beauty of what I do working as a a real estate agent with investors is I can go look at those properties anytime and I just do video walkthroughs and send them to them. So I I’m not dependent on their schedule, they’re not dependent on my schedule. I’ll go to a video walkthrough, send it over to them, and I I who knows, maybe I’ll be writing an offer later tonight, but these days at home and when I’m working, every day is totally different, but we spend a lot of time traveling too, and and honestly, a whole lot of it is fun for me. I I love coming back from our vacations because day-to-day life is so interesting anyway.
Scott: A wonderful life that you’ve constructed for yourself and I think that it’s a a combination of of luck and resilience really that have that have driven this, but I would say resilience more for those first 10 years. And if there’s been any luck, it’s probably been the Boise market, being in the Boise market specifically from that 2015 point to the present. But you had to endure some real challenges to get to that point. One other framework I think that you’re going to blow up for me here is in terms of portfolio construction, I think that a rational approach, at least the one that I would apply to my finances is is this concept of a very aggressive accumulation portfolio until you get to your number and then a more conservative breakdown at that point, you know, paying off the rentals, for example, or using much less leverage. But if you go on to then build a huge business that produces way more income than you can spend in any given year, you overshoot the need for that conservative portfolio and you can get aggressive again and keep leveraging up everything and and might why not maximize ROI and think about it as a a mathematical expression. Did that pattern manifested all in your portfolio, or have you just been consistently aggressive with the portfolio returns and optimizing for ROI the entire way through?
Guest: We’re probably just as aggressive as we were before as far as leverage. It’s just that we have a bigger cushion on the back end, which is is nice. It’s not as stressful as it used to be. And so now, if we buy a single family home and it cash flows 200 bucks a month, that’s fine. It can just sit in the background and we can wait and let that grow. where we’ve really been able to to kind of lean in is because of the the business we’ve built and the people we’re working with, it’s been really fun because now people bring us deals and ask us to partner with them on them. And so I’m getting into stuff now where I know nothing, but I have a partner who they have all the knowledge and they need other support. They they might need help fundraising or they might need some capital or something like that. So the way that we’ve approached things have changed. And that’s been really the fun part is that we have this portfolio in the background that we grow. I’m not aggressively outlooking for deals, but because of what we do a couple times a year, something will come across our plate that works for us and we’ll make a move. and beyond that, we’re out doing deals for other people. And sometimes we’re we’re working with them on a flip, sometimes we’re helping them get uh entitlements done on some property that they have that we’re going to manage on the back end. There’s just it’s so much different than just building a portfolio. There’s just all these little things that we have our fingers in and I’m learning every single day and every single day is different and it’s changed the way that we make money. and we’ve been fortunate enough to get to the point where not only is our our own personal portfolio kicking off money, but we can also use some of the capital that we’ve raised to to do hard money loans or finance flips and partner with people and and that kind of stuff. So it’s just it’s a whole different beast than it used to be. And when that kicks off a little bit more money, then maybe maybe that’s what we use on the next buy and hold property and then we start the process all over again.
Scott: Do you take full advantage of the real estate professional status, the losses from buying new properties, and then the benefits of being a business owner and using, you know, huge deferral amounts in, you know, solo for 1K’s and that kind of stuff?
Guest: Absolutely. Not as much on the retirement account side of things. but I mean, the reason I’m sitting in this building, we closed on this building on like December 27th for that very specific reason is that we wanted to have the accelerated appreciation for this last year. and and it was already in service because we had tenants, we inherited with tenants already in place. and so, yeah, absolutely, that’s become a big part of our strategy is is making sure that we’re we’re taking advantage of all the tax benefits of owning property and being self-employed.
Scott: One follow up question there, thank you, by the way, this is fun. I’m having a lot of fun with this. This is wonderfully transparent with how you do all this stuff. On the the depreciation side, if you take a lot of buy a lot of properties, lever them up and cost them, then the recaptureable basis on sale is much lower than your loan amount presumably or very, you know, very close to that because you have to pay taxes when you sell it because you’ve taken the depreciation got to recapture that. Do you ever kind of think about that in the context of your portfolio as a risk continu continuously buying, keeping big pretty high leverage, it sounds like across the portfolio and using this rapid depreciation that will eventually have to be recaptured. How do you how do you think about that in the context of when you think about your net worth?
Guest: This is not really great financial advice, but I’m I’m not really a worrier. I don’t stress about stuff very much. And so for me, the way that I look at that is, it’s funny, I’m actually going to be meeting with our account here in a couple weeks and and talk about this exact same thing and have kind of a quick overview of what we’ve got because I know that we have a handful of properties now that have kind of lived their useful life in that regard. And so what we’ll most likely do is 1031 those and and scale those up too. So I’ve got a couple single family homes. as a matter of fact, that first house I bought, I might sell it this year because it’s producing good cash flow, but we’ve used all the depreciation out of that property and I could sell that and take the equity and buy a fourplex or an eight unit and kind of start that clock all over again. Obviously, we’d be reupping our leverage and increasing our risk in that way, but by moving that equity, it won’t really affect our cash flow in any way and it’ll give us a higher deable basis on that next property. And so I plan to just continue doing that as long as I can, having faith in our market that there will always be demand for the products that we’re buying and that will manage them well and treat our tenants well and that that’ll continue to be a win for us and for our tenants and the people we work with.
Scott: Tell us about the the market in Boise right now. at the risk of asking a local broker and wholesaler, uh is it a good time to buy? you know, is is it a good time to buy? Can you find, can you find good deals in that market right now?
Guest: You know, the funny thing is the short version of course, I’m going to say yes. That’s the short answer. Of course I’m going to say it’s yes for a lot of different reasons, but the reality of it is I get phone calls like this from people all the time that is it a good time to buy and are there good deals. And it’s kind of a loaded question because a good deal is very dependent on where you are in life and what your risk tolerance is and there’s give and take to everything. For instance, if you bought a single family home in Boise right now that was sort of turnkey that you could rent out right away, you’d probably for an entry level home spend $350,000, you’ll probably rent it out for $2,200, something like that right now. I’m a firm believer that over time the the our market will continue to appreciate and rents will continue to go up. We don’t have a vacancy problem or a demand problem here. Demand is huge, vacancy is incredibly low. On the long-term rental side of things, the Boise area has not been over 2% vacancy for nearly a decade now. And so that’s not really an issue here. It’s more of an issue with wages supporting appreciation and and all the challenges people have with income right now. But demand is really high. There’s high quality tenants here. It’s probably the most property owner and landlord- friendly state in the country. It’s just small and there’s not a lot of people here. Anyway, I’m kind of going off on a tangent, but the difference is that over time, properties here I think are going to appreciate significantly, maybe not next year, the year after.
Scott: What’s a bread and butter deal that a investor, retailer, mom and pop investor buying their first to through fifth rental is buying with you these days?
Guest: We do a lot of deals on small multis and single family homes but kind of bread and butter deals. We we do rehabs for our clients too. and I’m not trying to give a sales pitch, but part of the thing is is we our business is really built on return business. so I want to make sure that every deal we do with somebody works really great for them. And so we’ll handle rehabs for them as project managers. We don’t charge fees or anything like that because I want them to have as much equity as possible on the back end. Anyhow, we do a lot of deals on single family homes here that are kind of in that 300 to maybe 325 range that are cosmetic fixers. Generally they’re putting $20 to maybe $40,000 into those and we end up with an ARV in the 400 to 425 range. We rent those out for $2,200 bucks. So depending on their financing, they might be cash a little bit, but they’ve got a chunk of equity. and if we ride that for a while, I think that those are going to be good long-term investments. but the the kicker for me and with the clients that I I work with is if the property is not taking money out of your pocket every month, if it’s cashlowing in some way and you have a minimum of 20% equity, you have options. And as long as you have those two things in place, if you don’t like the deal when the rehab’s done or what the rent is going to look like, then you sell it, you make a couple dollars, you move on to the next thing. In my opinion, when people start really leaning into the cash flow and they’re giving up equity or terms, they can get backed into a corner. and so that equity, a lot of people and I know it’s a kind of an old school bigger pockets thing, but talking about cash flow is the only thing that matters, but if you’re only talking about cash flow, you only have one exit strategy to a property and that can be a dangerous place to be.
Scott: Well, love it. What would you say would be the number one tip you have for somebody who’s stuck or unsure in today’s market? What would you tell them to to do? What’s the one action they can take?
Guest: The one action you can take is get out and talk to people who have done what you want to do and I know you talk about this a lot, Scott, but I mean, house hacking your first property, it’s it is like you said, pushing all all the the chips in your favor. You’re going to have to pay to live somewhere. You’re going to be paying somebody else’s mortgage down and building equity for somebody else if you’re not doing it for yourself. So if you house hack a multi and get roommates, rent out another unit, that sort of thing. In almost any market in the country, if you lean really hard into that, it’s going to be really hard to not cash flow positively, especially if you’re taking your own living expense in into account. I think that that’s absolutely the best way to start is for somebody to house hack small multi-family, especially if there’s a value add componentewhere they can do some landscaping, some paint, take really good care of that. I think that that’s the first place to start. but beyond that, just getting out networking and talking to other people who are doing it. Every, every town has a group of investors that they get together on a regular basis and and there’s usually Facebook groups, there’s definitely Reddit chats about people that are out doing this kind of stuff. And just connecting with other people who are doing it, you’d be shocked at the resources that are out there and the other people who have a skill or resource that you don’t have that are looking for somebody that that has what you have. And if you are new to this, you might have time or energy that other people don’t have that they could make good use of.
Scott: Well is there anything else that you’d like to share before we kind of uh wrap up here, Corby?
Guest: I want everybody who’s listening to this who has never done a deal or you’re thinking about getting into real estate or something like that. I I’m just a firm believer that building wealth through real estate is something that literally anybody can do. I don’t care where you are financially. You might not be able to buy a house tomorrow, but you can start taking steps on your journey to doing something six months or a year from now. Growing and scaling is something that anybody can do. and I I think anybody could be living the life that I live. and I feel very very fortunate to do that. but like you said, I I didn’t start year one and say like, this is what my life’s going to look like in a year. It it was something that took us a really long time to get to and I didn’t go into it with any preconceived notions. So I think just understanding that anybody can do this and having realistic expectations that it’s going to take some time, but as far as I know, it’s the only way for an average person to to truly change the trajectory of their life is is through going in and buying real estate and influencing the value of that and and managing it well and holding on as long as you can.
Scott: Well, congratulations on the 25 years career that you’ve had in real estate in in Boise. The resilience to get through the great recession. I I would argue you had terrible timing. I really think that especially because not because you, you know, the 2001 purchase probably did fine in that case, but the ones that came later that had financing attached to them and the refinance presumably you did on the first one close to that that recession. I think that that’s that’s a real challenge to get through. and the rewards, I don’t think really did show up for you in terms of lifestyle and opportunity until 2012, 2013 from this set of decisions and then they began to really compound and explode. And wow, congratulations on the huge portfolio and the big business that you’ve built today and the wonderful reputation you have on Bigger Pockets, the Bigger Pockets Money Facebook group, the Bigger Pockets forums and locally in in Boise and around the country as a as an expert in real estate. So I mean you’ve really built something impressive here and it has not been all luck like we started out with.
Guest: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And and honestly, you’re, you’re perspective about maybe timing being terrible. It’s something I have to think about and it actually is another great kind of feather in my cap that I I can use to to encourage people to take take some action and make some move. So I appreciate that. Thanks.
Scott: Yeah, man, if you just saved a bunch of cash and then you accumulated that and, you know, put it into a CD or something for those 10 years, and then you went in in 2012, 2013, you might have even gotten more wealthy than that. I don’t know. I don’t know that’s the case. I was not making any money, but fair enough. Okay, fair enough. I think that would be really interesting for you to do a counterfactual and say like what is the other alternative I could have invested in at this time and how would it have performed relative to that real estate? because I think your real estate crushed it from the last 15 years and I think it stunk probably from a returns perspective in those first 10 years relatively speaking. But I don’t I could be wrong.
Guest: No, no, no, no. I love that perspective. I I I’m actually going to go back and do that. I’ll I’ll follow up with you.
Scott: I could be completely wrong but I just guess at the top of this, but where can people find out more about you, Corby?
Guest: I post on Bigger Pockets whenever I can. So I’m on there quite a bit. Um they can jump on our website it’s just Boise Turn key.com. I blog on there pretty regularly. and and in all honesty if anybody’s listening to this and they just want to chat real estate or they want some advice, my email is is on our website. Shoot me an email, shoot me a text. I I’m happy to chat with anybody, even if you’re not anticipating doing business with me or in my market. If there’s some way that I can help somebody out there, I love giving back, so don’t be shy.
Scott: Corby, how many forum posts do you have again?
Guest: I have no idea. A couple thousand, I think, I’m not sure.
Scott: You are a power contributor for the Bigger Pockets forum here with thousands of posts. You’re all over the Bigger Pockets money group, the Bigger Pockets group. Thank you for all you do. It’s just wonderful. But 3,250 posts with 33,000 votes.
Guest: All right. It’s funny, I always want to have more votes than posts. So if my if my post get up too high, I’ll wait for the votes to get up there. But we didn’t mention earlier. When I was really getting into this is when Bigger Pockets was really starting and I connected with some local people through bigger pockets here that I never would have connected with otherwise and hearing other people around the country doing the same stuff on the podcast, it was awesome. So Bigger Pockets has been a huge part of of my experience too. So I appreciate what you guys do.
Scott: Well, thanks for being part of the community and sharing that and uh look forward to staying in touch.
Guest: Thanks for having me on.
Scott: And that was Corby Goat. Go check him out. He’s uh he’s all over Bigger Pockets forums. He’s in the Bigger Pockets Money Facebook group and he has been a wonderful friend to Bigger Pockets and to to me personally and supporting me online in particular over the past 10 years. So really grateful to him and many other the other folks who contribute regularly to our forums, it’s always fantastic especially to get to meet those folks in person at various points. I thought that it was pretty interesting that Corby thought he was really lucky and in some ways he was lucky, right? Being a Boise real estate investor, you experienced some of the hottest real estate appreciation in the country during one stretch there from 2015 to probably 2022. But there was a lot of trial and error and it wasn’t always like that for the first 10 15 years of Corby’s career. So, I think there’s I think it’s a pretty interesting lesson there and that these appreciation waves come in waves, come in cycles. It’s kind of hard to predict them and that staying power can really be beneficial over long periods of time. So maybe that’s a lesson for folks that are struggling through challenging rental dynamics today. I think there’s a lot of really good arguments that with lower supply on the horizon in real estate, there’s a good argument to be made that this is potentially close to maximum pressure or maximum pain in many markets around the country and that things will abate over the next several years. We’ll see if that comes true, but that’s something that I would probably be biased towards at this point and I said so publicly on a couple of past Bigger Pockets appearances. If you’d like to get more financial independence information, head to biggerpocketsmoney.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter and you can also find free resources at biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources. You can find calculators there in the navigation bar and templates that we’re building to accelerate your fire journey. This is a big project of mine for 2026. We’re building these templates, uh financial plan templates, calculators, front-end apps, those kinds of things. I’m having a blast doing it. I’m building them all front end. There’s no email required. Go check them out. Go give me feedback. My email Scott at bigger pocketsmoney.com or give me suggestions for what you want to see next. I’m having a blast doing this and love building stuff that people actually use. Again, these are free. There’s no email required. We don’t store or touch any of the data in these spreadsheets once you download them, of course. So, go check them out and uh and give me your feedback. I’d love to just make better and better versions of these based on that feedback. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. We’ll see you next time.
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