Generating cash flow and building long-term wealth in today’s real estate market can be tough, but House Hacking and Co-Living offer game-changing solutions. House hacking helps homeowners offset mortgage costs by renting out part of their property, often reducing or eliminating housing expenses. Co-living maximizes rental income by creating shared spaces with multiple tenants.
We recently covered these strategies in a webinar with Josh Mettle, Jesse Ray, and Sam Wegert, diving into real-life applications and expert insights. Along with these wealth-building tactics, we also broke down the 2025 real estate forecast—covering market trends, interest rates, and supply shifts—to help investors make informed decisions and capitalize on new opportunities.
Key Insights Covered:
- Current trends and projections in the real estate market for 2025
- How house hacking can help you reduce living costs
- The benefits of co-living for optimizing rental cash flow
- How demographics and housing supply affect long-term property values
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Jesse Ray:
Hello, i’m your co host Jesse Ray. I’ll be alongside two legends in the real estate space. You see him here, Josh Mettle and Sam Wegert. Now I’m extra excited because we’re going to narrow in on two main strategies that have changed my life and I built generational wealth for a lot of others. These two strategies are my favorite because not only are you able to actually generate cashflow, which is hard to do in today’s market, but we’re able to generate way more than the traditional single family rental. So instead of a couple hundred dollars, we’re looking to generate at least a thousand dollars per property. And if you’re a new investor looking to get started, you can also potentially live for free. So what are these two strategies? They are house hacking and co-living. So I’m going to let these two legends I mentioned earlier, dive down deeper and break down all the advantages of this market and how to create cashflow and build generational wealth.
First off, leading us off Mr. Josh Mettle. He’ll be giving us a background and painting a picture of what the residential real estate market here in the US looks like. Before I get started with that, I want to give a little bit of a background on Josh. He’s a mortgage banker, private money lender, entrepreneur, and real estate investor based in Park City, Utah. As a division president at Neo Home Loans and a business owner, he specializes in custom financial solutions for medical professionals, entrepreneurs, and real estate investors. And I didn’t know this about you, Josh. You actually played football at the University of Northern Colorado and you began investing in real estate in 2001 with your mother, Cynthia Hale and your family office now manages a portfolio consisting of 170 commercial and residential doors, a portfolio valued at over a hundred million dollars generating more than 6.5 million annual rental revenue. Speaker, author, podcaster, Josh shares his expertise through podcast books and seminars and outside of your work you enjoy spending time with your family in outdoor adventures. Josh, the floor is yours.
Josh Mettle:
Thank you my friend. It’s great to be here with you both. This is the first webinar I’ve done with Sam, so I’m so excited to learn from you. My friend and I thought where we would maybe kick off today is a little bit of a look back at the 2024 housing market and then look into 2025. Now here’s an interesting fact. Over the last 10 years, I have only purchased eight residential properties. We moved from the first 10 years in real estate investing. We were in commercial, or excuse me, in residential. Then we moved into commercial, but in the last year we have purchased eight residential properties. So when I put together a thesis, a presentation like I’m going to show you today, selfishly, it’s not for you, it’s for me because I’m trying to figure out where to put my dollars and what’s going to appreciate and where do I have the greatest amount of opportunity to grow my wealth.
So the presentation I’m going to show you today is the why. I have decided after 10 years of not investing in residential real estate to acquire what is now, I believe we actually acquired our eighth residential unit in the last 12 months. So with that, let me dive in and I’m going to go numbers heavy because I hate when people say, oh, just buy. It’s a great time to buy. Should I buy? It’s always a great time to buy. I hate that. I want to give you the information you need so that you have the confidence to enter this market, whether this is an owner occupied purchase or if this is an investment property, you want to make sure you’re not doing that at 2008 right before the floor is about to drop out. So here we go. Let’s jump in with the data before we go into 2025.
Let’s look at 2024. US existing home sales are set to close at 4 million in 2024, marking the worst year since 1995. Did you guys know we sold less existing homes in 2024 than we did in 2008? You have to go back to 1995 to see that low of a number of sales. And here’s another interesting piece of information. The population today is 28% larger than it was in 1995. So we have 342, 340 2 million Americans that only bought 4 million homes. Larger population, lowest number of sales. Sales are lower than the financial crisis. The lack of demand for existing homes comes as home prices have jumped 50% since 2020, and over that same period of time, mortgage rates have nearly tripled making affordability even worse. The average rate on a 30 year mortgage is up a hundred basis points. That’s 1% since September alone to 7.1% despite the fed cutting rates by over a hundred basis points.
So the fed cut short-term rates, long-term mortgage rates go the opposite direction up a full percent, and they end off by pointing out the US housing market is frozen. So my question to you is this, if we sold less homes than we have since 1995, if mortgage rates have tripled and the housing market is frozen, how is it that home prices nationally are still going up? That’s the biggest question in the real estate market that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about. How is it that we didn’t see a 20% housing rate, or excuse me, a 20% housing market correction? If we look back at appreciation rates, this data comes from Redfin and one is MLS data. The other line is CoreLogics k Shiller home price index. They basically shadow each other, but you can see the percentage of appreciation coming out of the Great recession.
We peaked at appreciation over 10% at about 2014. We then moved sideways with about 5% annual appreciation. Then we saw covid and the super low mortgage rates, and then we saw just an unbelievable spike in appreciation and a leveling off around 5%. How’s that possible? How we still seeing 5% year over year appreciation despite mortgage rates that topped 8% in 2023 and despite the fact that we sold so few homes? Well, I’m going to answer that question in today’s data and spoiler alert, it comes down to supply and demand. So a lot of people have pointed out, a lot of the media have pointed out that we have a growing amount of inventory. This is the number of active listings for sale across the United States going back to 2012, and if you look in 2024, we have this kind of upward growth here where inventory is starting to grow.
In fact, year over year, our inventory levels are about 12% higher than they were in the previous year, and that is causing some in the media to say the sky is falling and we’re going to see another housing market crash. As they’re saying that, I’m rushing back into the residential housing market for the first time in a decade because what I know is up 12%, but compared to what, if we look back to the pre pandemic period 2012 to 2019, which I just showed you, we’ve vacillated between 10% and 5% annual appreciation rates. We still have 32% less inventory for sale today than we did pre pandemic. That tells me that we’re likely to see appreciation greater than this previous decade where we still saw five to 10% appreciation. It all comes down to supply and demand. Now I want to get into where are mortgage rates headed and why do I believe residential real estate will do incredibly well over the next 10 years?
And why did I buy eight properties last year when I haven’t done so for almost a decade? Here’s what I know. Inflation is the predominant predictor of mortgage interest rates. It’s not the Federal Reserve. It is inflation and the predominant driver of inflation is the job market. So let’s take a look at the job market because that is the precursor to where inflation is going, and that is the precursor to where mortgage rates are going. So the unemployment rate bottomed in 2023 at 3.4%, and today it’s about 4.1%. So we can see we hit a cyclical bottom in unemployment, meaning the rate of unemployment is rising. We also know that once somebody is unemployed, the duration of their employment is increasing. In fact, it’s a 21% increase in the duration of time to find a new job over the last seven months. That means once I get let go, I’m having a harder time to find a new job.
If we have less people in the employment market, that’s less dollars in the economy, that means you have lower inflation ahead and that’s going to be a harbinger for lower mortgage rates. How about closing time? These are businesses that have closed. This is Party City that’s closed, 850 stores, big lots sold, closed, 580 stores. You get the point. There’s lots of businesses that are closing. We also see corporate bankruptcies on the rise. Don’t look now, but in 2024 we had more corporate bankruptcies than we did in any time since 2010. So you see store closures, you see bankruptcies, you see the unemployment rate going higher and you have people having a harder time to find jobs. All of that points to lower inflation ahead. And if you’re looking at the Jolts report, which is widely reported, this is the number of job openings across America.
It has sharply dropped over the last two years from over 12 million job openings down to over 7.6 million job openings. Now, this is in conflict to the narrative that we hear from the mainstream media about this strong and resilient economy, but is it really all that strong and resilient? You see, we’ve been getting our job numbers over the last few years from what’s called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s kind of the headline job number that we get every month, and they might have a little bit of funny books with the election year being last year, and we’re about to find out what those real numbers might be. Non-farm payrolls, which is normally what you hear when they talk about a job report. They survey 670 businesses to come up with this indicator of how many jobs the economy is adding each month. And they have said that we’ve added 2.5 million jobs over the last year.
That’s from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024. Interestingly enough, there’s another report. This is an initial report that only interviews 670,000 businesses to try to get an indication of the economy and jobs growing or contracting. There’s what is called the QCEW. This is the quarterly census of employment and wages, and this survey is where the rubber meets the road because they actually get data from 12 million businesses. The BLS report, 670,000 businesses, the QCEW 12 million businesses, and their initial report that came in in October, their final report will come out in February 19th. So just a couple of weeks from now. They surveyed 95% of the labor market and they said, Uhuh, we think there’s only been 1.24 million jobs created over the previous year. That strong and resilient economy is not that strong and resilient. There may have been a hundred thousand job per month overstatement in the number of jobs added last year, which is weird.
It was an election year, so I can’t really figure that out, but you guys are smarter than me. Maybe you could help me figure it out. Alright, so where does that put mortgage rates? Okay, we think that we’re going to see a slowing labor market. We think we’re going to see slowing inflation. That means that we should have a benefit to mortgage rates. Now we think that mortgage rates will come down because we believe that the 10 year treasury will go down and there’s a very close relationship, if you will, between the 10 year treasury rate and mortgage rates, which I’ll get into a little bit on the next slide. Right now we sit about 4.4 on the 10 year treasury. We think it’s going to come down to about 3.6, which is a level it hit in 2023 a level. It almost hit in 2024 and a level that it’s hit almost, well, let’s see, twice in 2023 and hit again in 2024.
We believe we’re going to hit this 3.6 floor with the slowing economy in the year ahead. And we’ll also see mortgage rates improve because there’s a relationship between mortgage rates and the 10 year treasury called the spread. They tend to move in lockstep with one another. I’ll show you over the last 25 years here that this is the spread between the 30 year fixed mortgage rate and the 10 year treasury. And you can see it trades sideways here, normally between 1.6 and 2%. There are times when it gets really blown out. Like in the great recession, mortgage rates were 3% higher than the 10 year treasury, and we saw the same thing last year. Mortgage rates were 3.1% higher than the 10 year treasury. Right now, they’re 2.5% we believe those will continue to come down. This spread will narrow and we’ll see mortgage rates closer to two, maybe two and a quarter percent above the 10 year treasury.
So if we have the 10 year treasury coming down, we have down to 3.6%. We have the spread between the 10 year treasury and the 30 year fixed narrowing to 2.25%. That means we are estimating we’re going to see 30 year fixed mortgages here in 2025 down to 5.85, which is massive relief because today we’re sitting right around 7%. So what happens when real estate payments get cheaper? Well, we bring people off the sidelines. When your payments are lower, you have more people leaving the rental market and entering the buying market. So this bodes well for the appreciation rates in the year ahead. Lemme get into, and I’m going to go through this as quick as possible, but I want to make sure I get you all of the information. You need to understand the massive wave of demand that’s coming for housing, and it all comes down to supply and demand and demographics.
First, let’s just look at the US housing market really quickly so we understand how 2025 is very different than 2008, 2010. So currently there’s 136 million households in the United States. 45 million of them rent 91 million of them own, and collectively they have $37.3 trillion in homeowner equity. The average homeowner has a net worth or equity in their home of 407,000. Of those owners, that 91,000,035 million homes are free and clear. That’s 20 trillion in equity. 56 million have a mortgage on them. That’s another $17 trillion in equity. And the average amount of equity of a mortgaged home is $311,000. That is the big difference between now and 2008, 2010, depending where you were in the country when the great recession hits you, is the massive amount of equity. So even if we did have a slight pullback in home values, you wouldn’t see people panicking and short sailing and going to foreclosure because the averaged mortgaged home has $311,000 in equity.
Okay, where’s all this future demand going to come from, Josh? Well, I believe that demographics are destiny. So I want to walk you through the tsunami of buyers that are about to come into the housing market over the next 10 years. So I’ll break this slide down really quickly. I’ve broken these down into different generations. So we have the boomers, which are now age 60 to 78, and there’s 71 million. This was the biggest generation our country has ever seen at that time, followed by the Gen Xers. They’re age 44 to 59, big demographic drop off there, only 65 million Gen Xers. Then the millennials, the biggest cohort of all time, age 28 to 43 70 3 million in this cohort followed closely by Gen Z. They’re age 12 to 27 and they’re 69 million Gen Zs. So huge demographic numbers here, especially compared to Gen X. And these folks are starting to become the age of first time home buyers. So let’s break that down.
There’s 73 million total millennials and their median age is 35 because they’re between 43 and 28. So their median age is 35. Their current home ownership rate is 45%. If we look at the younger millennials, let’s look at the millennials that are age 30. So they’re on kind of the trailing edge of this millennial curve. There’s 40 million of these folks and their home ownership rate is only 33%. You can see as they get older, their percentage of home ownership spikes. So currently the 30 year olds are only 33% owners. We can then deduct that as they get older. We will see a lot more homeowners and a lot higher home ownership percentage. And check this out. When millennials reach the age of 40, 55% of them own homes, so over the next 10 years, the home ownership rate should rise 33% to 55% as they get older, which equates to 8.5 million more homeowners.
But that’s not all. Gen Z is right behind them. Another huge cohort, the median age of the Gen Z is age 20, and the homeownership rate is only 8% because this is a very young cohort, but over the next 10 years, the homeownership rate, if they follow in the footsteps of the millennials, should increase from 8% to 33%, which means you have 17 million more homeowners. So if we add this up team, we’ve got 25 million new homeowners moving into home ownership over the next 10 years, that’s about two and a half million buyers per year. Well, the issue is we’re not building that many homes. So where are these people going to go? What’s going to happen to the housing market? I’ll give you one other graphic just to look at. We know that the average age of a first time home buyer is age 38.
So if we go back 38 years ago from 2025, we arrive in 1987. And what was happening with the demographics at this time? Well, it was exploding over here. This is your Gen Xers. This is my generation. My generation was impacted by things like Roe versus Wade when abortion was legalized, my generation was impacted by things like contraceptives becoming mainstream and acceptable, and we had a huge fall off in demographics which pulled demand out of the housing market. The exact opposite is happening with the millennials, and you can see that these folks born in 1987 had extremely strong demographics with the US birth rate rising from about, well, it’s low of 3.6 million now. These demographics going forward over the next 10 years are extraordinarily strong. We see the US birth rate go up to 4.2 million. So this is the huge wave of buyers that are waiting to come off the sidelines as they get a little older and perhaps as they wait for a little bit lower mortgage rates.
I’ll give you one other picture of supply and demand and then I’m going to turn it over to you guys here in about five minutes. So this is household formations. What’s a household formation? Okay, so currently I’m married and I have two kids and we have one household. But what’s likely to happen is when my son turns 18, my wife is going to kick him out. Now I will have two households because that’ll create another household. Then four years later, my daughter turns 18, she goes away to college. That creates another household. Shortly thereafter, I’m sure my wife will kick me out and then we’ll have four households. So anytime there’s a divorce or a kid moves out, that’s called the household formation. And if we go back over the last four years, we can see roughly we are creating about 1.9 million household formations every year.
Now, somebody leaves their parents’ house, they got to do one of three things, buy a house, rent a house, or move in under the bridge, right? Those are the only three options that I’m aware of. So if we know that the large percentage of these people are going to buy or rent, we can kind of get a gauge for what is the demand for housing going forward? Well, let’s overlay this with the number of new homes coming to market. This is homes that builders are building each year, and you can see going back over that same period of time, this number’s vacillated a little bit. This would be 1.5 million over here, but roughly we have this band over the last four years where home builders are building between 1.3 million and 1.6 million new homes per year. So what does that do for supply and demand? Well, we have 1.9 million household formations and we have 1.3 million housing starts.
And these housing starts, by the way, guys, they include residential, single family homes and apartment units. So you’ve got a gap here of 600,000 people. The new household formations, they got to move somewhere you can. By the way, isn’t this a great setup for co-living you guys, because the builders just cannot keep up. So where do these people go? Alright, teeing you guys up. Alright, lemme get to the rest of the forecast. I’ll turn it back to you, Jesse. So here’s what we think is going to happen. Team. We think that home price appreciation for 2025 is going to be somewhere between four and 4.5%. If we see mortgage rates come down in the first half of the year, I think we’ll drive that number north of five. If we don’t see mortgage rates come down to the middle or the second half of the year, we’ll still end up in about four to 4.5%, which is roughly where we finished 2024.
We believe that the unemployment rate is going to rise to 4.5 to 4.6% from 4.1. That’s going to slow down inflation. And inflation is the primary driver of mortgage rates, and we think mortgage rates should decline to that 5.75 to 6% range from current 7%. I’m going to show you one more slide and then I’m going to stop sharing my screen and send it back to you, Jesse. A lot of people I talk to say, Josh, how do you know that 2025 isn’t going to be a repeat of 2008? How do you know we’re not on the precipice of another great housing crash? And what I like to show them is this graph of appreciation of US residential homes going back to 1942. We have a tremendous amount of data to look back on so that we can kind of erase our recency bias and not just be looking at the period of the great recession, which is what so many of us are anchored into.
So lemme walk you through this. Starting in 1942, we tracked the national appreciation rate of residential homes according to the s and PK Shiller and the BLS report. And what you’ll see is in 1942, home values went up 3 19 43, 11%, so on and so forth. And for this decade, we saw 129% appreciation. That was a good decade to be a residential landlord baby. Now the decade before was obviously the Great Depression, probably not that great of a decade, but came out that very strong. How about the 1950s, 36% appreciation over that 10 year period of time. Excuse me, that was the fifties. How about the sixties? 23% appreciation. How about the seventies? 130% appreciation. How about the eighties? 77% appreciation and team, not one down year. In 1955, there was 0% appreciation, but not one down year of real estate values through the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, that’s amazing.
1990s, down 1%, 1991, down 0.1%. But if you hung on for the decade, you still had 30% real estate appreciation. How about the two thousands? 66% appreciation despite the worst housing disruption since the Great Depression, down 5% in seven, down 12% in 2008, down 4% in 2009. But if you were in a home for a decade, you still had 66% appreciation, 2010s started the decade off, 4% depreciation, 4% depreciation in 2011. But if you had the stamina to hold on through that decade, you still saw 45% appreciation. And team in the first five years here of the 2020s we’re already at 51% appreciation. So I would just simply point out, trying to time the market is a fool’s errand. Time in the market is the predictor of your ability to grow wealth in real estate. Jesse, that’s all I got over to you, my friend.
Jesse Ray:
Would a mic drop to end it time in the market, not timing the market? Oh my goodness. That was good. That was great, Josh. That was a great deep dive and I’m excited to have some questions. I know Fernando, he said, how’d you get the 3.6% number? I think that was on, yeah, you want to answer that
Josh Mettle:
One? Yep. That was on the 10 year treasury. I study a gentleman who is the foremost forecaster for mortgage interest rates, and he teaches us a lot about candlesticks and technical analysis of different charts. Those same charting can be applied to Bitcoin stocks, bonds, mortgage backed securities, the 10 year treasury. But generally speaking, there are lines of ceilings of resistance and floors that there are trading floors. And so what I pointed out was three times over the last three years, we’ve seen the 10 year treasury hit 3.6% and that’s kind of been the floor. And so with the pullback in jobs, the slowdown, I think we’re going to see in the economy, I think we’ll easily see that 10 year hit that floor of support and perhaps even go lower. But it’s based on a technical analysis and where I see the slowdown of the economy and inflation.
Jesse Ray:
Got it. And one of my main takeaways, because people always talk about, Hey, is this going to be another 2008? And just seeing that graph and painting that picture, that there’s so much amount of equity that people have and that’s one of the biggest differences. That was a big takeaway from me. Sam, what about you? Is there anything that you saw that you were like, oh man, I never realized that.
Sam Wegert:
Yeah, I mean, as someone who coaches real estate investors, I loved, I screenshotted that last slide. We were talking about all the different years of appreciation. What I think is really interesting about that is that is, I don’t know if the technical term, Josh, you might even know is that’s appreciation on the total value of the home.
That’s not appreciation on the equity that’s in the home. So meaning if I had a home through all of those decades, but I had a mortgage on it, so therefore the equity that I had is actually appreciated at a much, much, much faster rate depending on how much leverage I have in those homes. I think I’m explaining that too complex. Maybe you guys could make that sound simpler for people, but basically the depreciation’s even off the chart on your equity if you use leverage, if you use bank’s money, if you use other people’s money. So yeah, pretty freaking cool. I’m going to talk to my investors about this is another huge reason why we’re in residential real estate.
Jesse Ray:
A hundred percent. Well said. Josh, is there anything else you want to mention before we kind of go into my story and then Sam, and then maybe we can wrap it up with some q and a at the end?
Josh Mettle:
Nope, I’m super stoked to learn from you guys. Let’s roll. Cool. That was awesome. Thanks
Jesse Ray:
Josh. Yes, Josh, that was amazing. Well, you mentioned a couple times the people that are on the sideline, and I was that person on the sideline in my mid twenties. I was always nervous, how do I get into real estate? It seems like such a, everyone’s got to be super successful and have a ton of money before they get in. And so I finally decided to make it happen and I did pretty much the most basic way to get in, which was through house hacking. And I just want to share my quick story because I think this tees up well to what Sam’s going to talk about. So 2021, I bought my first property out here in Phoenix, Arizona house hack, lived in one of the bedrooms, rented out the rest. And with that, I was actually able to live for free with everyone else who was living in my house paying the mortgage.
Plus I had an excess in cashflow at the end of the month. So that was my introduction. I think that’s probably the easiest way for people to get started. And then fast forward another year, I’m like, let me do this same concept. So I got another house the next year, so everything’s going great. I have two houses within two years, jobs going well. But then here comes the twist. And this twist is something that I really want to share with a lot of the people listening. So I just get the second house and I’m getting everything ready for people to start moving in. And literally a month later I get an email from hr. Now I come from a sales background. I was number one in my company in sales, but I transferred to a different company. And in that company I was still in training.
So in my head I’m thinking, nothing bad ever happens with hr. I’ve never experienced that. Very naive. So I hop on the call with hr, I say, Jesse, I know you’re doing well in the training, but because the time of the year and economics, whatever, we have to cut half your team. I’m like, awesome, great. Did not see this coming. And at the time I was definitely nervous, but they said, Hey Jesse, guess what? We have another level of our division that you can apply for. I’m like, perfect. Obviously they’re going to beg me to come work with them because it’s a lower level sales team. I already got the other job. So I remember just going in, I remember it was yesterday, I go in and have a meeting with these two managers and we’re sitting down and they say, Hey Jesse, your schedule’s not full.
Why aren’t you booking meetings? In my head, I’m like, I just got fired. I’m not going to set up meetings for someone else to make all the money. So we’re having this back and forth, this dialogue, they’re interviewing me and at the very end they’re just like, you know what? You’re in sales, Jesse, sell yourself to us. And I don’t know, at that time I was, everything was kind of happening at once. And I looked at them, I’m like, actually in my head I’m like, I don’t even know if I want to work with this company anymore. And then I asked them this question, I said, how much is a salary? And they said, right around six figures. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about this. They said Right around six figures, and I’m adding up all the rental income from the first house from the second house. And then when I move out, I’m like, that’s about six figures right there. I stop and I look at them, I say, Hey, appreciate the opportunity, but I’m not going to sell myself because you guys can’t afford
Josh Mettle:
Me.
Jesse Ray:
That was my last time ever working in corporate. And yeah, I mean, I’ve been happily unemployed ever since 2022, but amazing how that works. Crazy. And I want to kind of give people two takeaways there. Number one, I think it’s really important to dig your well before you’re thirsty,
Right? If I didn’t set this up, if I didn’t have these two homes, if I didn’t do this co-living strategy, I would’ve been hands tied behind my back, been like, okay guys, let me sell myself to you. Whatever it takes, I want to do the job. But I was in a position of power at that time because I had this rental income. I think I’m very grateful for that opportunity. And so just be sure to invest in yourself, invest in assets. And then also co-living is just an awesome strategy because if I would’ve done a regular short term, or not short term, but a regular long-term rental with the properties that I had, it would’ve just gave me a couple hundred dollars of cash flow, not the thousands that was able to give me that leverage during that interview. I want to have some inspiration out there before we turn it over to Mr.
Stan Weer AKA, the Co-living King. And I want to give people a little background about you. You’re known as the co-living king, the number one authority in co-living, and you’re on a mission to solve the affordable housing crisis while empowering others to achieve financial freedom. And you do this by creating quiet, clean and safe code living communities, which I stole that slogan just to let you know, Sam. And you’re really transforming lives just by helping other people get affordable places, but also helping the investors get into real estate and able to generate cash flow. At 23 years old, you and your wife were able to achieve financial freedom through this strategy, and now you passionately share about co-living and you’re a mentor of mine. So I just want to say I appreciate you and the floor is yours.
Sam Wegert:
Thanks, brother. Well, I don’t think there’s any greater sales pitch that needs to be done for co-living other than I had two homes and I retired from a six figure job. Seriously, I don’t know if I can add anything to that brother. That’s pretty badass. I always used you as an example. I know we’ve done some collaborations before, but that is so soap. I don’t know. When I grew up in real estate, my mentors in real estate, Brandon Turner being one of ’em, have a huge appreciation for Brandon Turner to love him to death. But it was like, okay, you need a hundred dollars in cashflow per unit. What the lifestyle, my wife likes to live and I like to live. That’s hundreds of units. And so I’m trying to shift people’s mindsets from, you used to need hundreds of units to retire in real estate. And I did a seminar, I’m doing a seminar this week and yesterday I said, guys, based on what I’m showing you with co-living, put in the chat how many homes you need to get to your first level of financial freedom, which we call ramen noodle financial freedom, where all your basics are taken care of.
And there was not a number above four in the chat of out of 200 people on a Zoom call yesterday, above four. There might been, that’s not true. There might’ve been one guy that was a baller at five, and he is like, I need five homes to do this, but still it’s five. So I think that’s the really, really, really, really cool opportunity here that I think is really beautiful. So I’ll share a couple of things. I’ll rapid fire through this so we can just open it up and chat about this. And Jesse, you’ve got so much knowledge in this space too, man, I don’t want to steal the show from you as well just because I think there’s a lot here despite what the big bobblehead. So co-living real estate is really simple. If you’ve had a roommate, you’ve done that. Simple, it’s as simple as saying, I’ll get through this here, but this is basically how to retire where this fewest five rental properties are left without this insane time commitment of short-term rentals or needing millions of dollars and all this real estate experience, you don’t need that.
So co-living is really simple. Instead of renting out a home to a single family, you’ll rent it to multiple renters who each take a room. As guy from Berlin called me and said, Sam, you’re talking about this. It’s brand new. It ain’t brand new. We’ve been living like this way for decades in Germany. And he gave me this phrase that I really liked and it stuck with me. He said, Sam, in Germany, the room is the new apartment. He’s like, millennials don’t rent an apartment in Germany. It’s too expensive, but not in Germany, in Berlin specifically. So they share a common kitchen, common living space, and it helps solve affordable housing because it provides the local workforce with a lower cost option. I made the mistake of talking to a city municipality one time their housing authority, and I said, we’re doing affordable housing. She goes, well, how much money do the people make that are in your homes?
And I was like, well, they make between 15 and $25 an hour. She’s like, that’s not affordable housing. It’s workforce housing. And she gave me some. So there’s levels to this pyramid of affordable housing, but it’s really, think about it as affordable housing. Think about it as solving workforce housing and you as the investor investing in co-living homes, guys, that means you need less homes because you’re getting more cashflow, Jesse being case in point. So it means you need less homes to achieve financial freedom. So I always love to give this example because people, especially investors, they can’t really fully wrap their head around this until I give this example. I bought a house, this house I bought two years ago, and it’s just a good example of this strategy and the power of how it can set you financially free. So this house that I bought, it was 3,200 dents in place, Charlotte, North Carolina. It would’ve rented for $1,985 a month. That’s the single family rent on this property. I didn’t throw that number in here. That’s what the bank appraised it at as what it would rent for monthly called a rent appraisal. And let’s say we throw some in for maintenance. Let’s say we put zero for utilities. If I’m renting it to a single family, usually that family is going to put utilities in their name.
And then let’s throw 10% in for management. So we got 200 management, and then we get to this number, it’s $1,635. That’s technically called the net operating income. That’s the money I have left over to pay the mortgage, the taxes and my insurance and hopefully cashflow. The problem with this particular home, and this is a real home, this is not a theoretical example. I’m giving you guys, this is a real home and was that I would’ve lost like $350 a month every month by renting it to a single family because my mortgage and my insurance and my taxes were higher than that. And if somebody’s listening to this call or you’re watching to replay this later, how many of you really want to get into real estate and lose money every month? Not me, but I didn’t. I rented this to eight individuals and we rented it out for six.
And by the way, we rented it in two weeks. It was filled for $6,450 a month. Can’t help but smile at that number. It’s just such a nicer number than the first one. And you might say, well see, I’m okay I you’re renting it for more, but surely there’s more maintenance. Sometimes there can be more maintenance. So we’re going to more than double the maintenance budget, right? Well, Sam, you’re also paying for utilities, right? Well, yeah. I want it to be a one fee and everything’s included, so I’m going to stick in my budget for utilities. Well, Sam, you’ve got to be paying someone more for managing that thing. And the answer is, yeah, you’re going to pay more for management. But even with increase in maintenance and utilities and management, it left me with $4,950 to now pay my mortgage, pay my taxes, pay my insurance, and cashflow about two grand a month on this home.
Huge difference, huge strategy difference. And of course now we’re providing housing to eight different people that need it. That might be under the bridge, Josh, if they don’t, they’re not renting a house, buying a house at the end, the bridge. And so we’re solving these two big problems here. We’re helping investors and we’re helping have affordable housing. So a little bit about my journey into co-living. This was actually a picture of the actual apartment. I walked through that hallway many times in my teens and early twenties, and I bought a three bedroom, three bath, similar to your story. Jesse just kind of bought this place, lived in one room and house hacked it, meaning I was living in it. And I think it becomes co-living when it becomes an investment, a pure investment. And I lived for free. I made a little bit of money.
I didn’t think anything of it. And I moved to Charlotte for work. I was building a chain of martial arts schools at this time in my life. That was my main gig. And I had no leases. I had no house rules, I had no parking arrangements. All things you need for a good co-living home, by the way. It’s why I’m dedicated large portion of my life to teaching the systems of co-living. I had none of that. I even had this one guy he squatted for three months. I couldn’t get him out because I didn’t have any agreement with him. It was the weirdest thing. And I was fantasizing about how I could go lock the breaker box and turn off the breaker to his specific room. I didn’t do that, but that was in my fantasy of how I could get this guy out of my house.
I didn’t have the systems. I didn’t know how this was run. I was just totally winging it. But I had fun actually, despite the story about that guy. My other roommates were really fun. We’d do a bunch of cool stuff together and it was a cool environment. And I had four bedrooms. I had three baths. And one day I’m walking with my friend and my friend was a vice president of a local bank. And he goes, Sam, how much are you renting that house for? He’s like, I know you’re doing it by the room. And I was like, well, I’m doing it for $2,870. And his jaw dropped. And he was like, that’s more than double that house at the time. It’s like a decade ago that house would’ve rented for $1,300. He’s like, you’re doubling the rent. And he’s a numbers guy. And at that time, I wasn’t as big of a numbers guy.
He’s like, wow, that’s amazing. And the fact that it impressed him impressed me. I was like, wait, maybe. And that’s where it kind of clicked. And I thought, maybe it’ll work with five bedrooms. And I’m a crazy like you Josh, and like you, Jesse, we are limit pushers. I can tell that we we’re limit pushers. We want to see if it’ll work with bigger numbers. So I’m like, well, it work with five bedrooms. And we had these things called peanut butter problems with this particular home is the actual picture of the home I’ve sent sold it. But you’d, you’d get a call from Johnny and he’d call you and be like, Sam Susie’s in the kitchen. And she ate my peanut butter last night and now I have no peanut butter. And I remember the first time I got a call like this, I was like, if I ever have to deal with this again, I never want to another co-living home in my entire life.
So then we started labeling stuff. We started putting systems. We’re like, okay, we’re going to label cabinets. We’re going to label refrigerator space. Heck, we’re going to label where they put their damn disc detergent, not their disc detergent. This shows you, my wife always makes fun of me. The laundry detergent, I can’t have them steal. There’s a space in a spot for everything. So we solved it and then I went crazy and I said, well, it worked with six bedrooms and that home, by the way, funny story, the reason I was late is I just sold that home literally an hour ago, which is really cool. We bought it for 3 0 5 and we sold it for 700,000. Side note, super excited about that.
Josh Mettle:
That is really cool.
Sam Wegert:
But in this home, we had per appreciation, appreciation that Josh showed earlier like thinks this works. We all should be buying. And I had parking problems and HOA problems and all this stuff. And the HOA actually sued me over this house. They were like, you can’t do co-living. And I was like, I can do why we stay away from h HOAs. But I say that to say I had to figure out some more systems. I had to figure out some parking and some challenges, but the cashflow in every single one of these homes was worth it. And soon we started filling 7, 8, 9. My student just launched an 11 bedroom home in Concord. It’s crazy. I know that may sound crazy to the people on this call, but when I had three homes, I met this guy. And if anybody’s into real estate, you know who this is?
This is Robert Kiyosaki. And I went up to him at a conference I was at and I said, Robert, I have three. I think at this point I had four co-living homes. And I said, look man, I’m nervous because I don’t see anybody else doing this. This was like 8, 9, 10 years ago. It’s way bigger now than it was back then. But is this a thing? Should I go all in on co-living this room rental thing? Am I going to get in trouble? Is this illegal? I didn’t know a lot of things back then. And Robert looks at me and he goes, Sam, co-living is definitely the wave of the future. You should go all in on it. He just gave me that vo of confidence. And so I went all in. It was I needed that little push. And then he leans in over the table that I was talking to him on and he was like, actually, when crap hits the fan, he’s a little dooms day-ish, and he still is now, but he’s like, I know exactly how I’m going to relive my home that I live in on a lake.
He’s like, I’m going to put a wall here, a wall here. He is like, I’m going to turn it into six units and if I get desperate enough, and I thought, if it’s good enough for Robert Kiyosaki, it’s good enough for me. So Josh already covered a bunch of numbers and talked about the supply and the demand and affordability. So I’m not going to go into this a bunch, but basically the net of this slide is that point number three is the one want to draw everyone’s attention to. We are 7.3 depending on which economist you talk to. At least 7.3 million affordable and available rental homes for renters with low incomes, that’s up 8% and 8% when we’re talking about millions is a lot of guys, we’re not talking like, oh, that’s hundreds of thousands if not millions. So beautiful. And then obviously all the debt that kids are coming out of school with, they don’t have the same debt to income ratio that they used to have.
And so I always tell people, because people always ask me, Sam, how does the government view this? Is that legal? Can you actually put that many people at home? And I usually draw attention to this thing that the US Department for Housing and Urban Development came out with where they basically said, we believe in co-living. I’m not going to read the whole thing. It’s a three page article. If anybody dms me, I can send the article to them. But it basically says shared housing. They call it shared housing. They call it co-living is legit. We believe in it. We believe it can solve affordable housing, and you can now use government vouchers for a room and not just apartment for a house. And the vouchers are actually in Charlotte. The voucher rate is like 870 bucks a room if you include utilities. And that’s higher than I would normally rent it for.
So the government is overpaying you if you want to accept vouchers. Now you got to deal with the red tape of vouchers. So you may not want to do that, but that is what HUD has come out and just give it a huge thumbs up, a huge endorsement. That’s page three of that. So anybody who makes 15 to $25 an hour that cannot afford easily a studio apartment in that city, a baggage handler, Frank, he makes $20 an hour. He works for the Houston airport, right? Sally makes $15 an hour plus commissions working for a sales call center, John Smash repair worker. He makes 2250 an hour plus some little commissions if his center does well, but it’s very small. These are all people that are living in co-living homes, and if you do it right, you’re solving loneliness at the same time. You’re bringing people together.
And Jesse, I know you’re freaking the OG at this, right? Because you bring people together and Jesse’s got this whole concept where it’s only entrepreneurs and you have to cold plunge at 4:30 AM every morning and you have to be buff and big like Jesse to live there’s, but he’s building this really cool tight knit community in each one of his living homes. That’s just awesome. It’s his niche. It’s for entrepreneurs, right? It’s called the Growth House. For that reason. It’s really, really, really beautiful in how he’s solving loneliness and building community in his homes. We give our students, I call ’em students that aren’t not our students. We give our members that live in these homes a thrive journal, that they get money if they fill out and learn about meditation and all of that. So what I want to do really fast is I want to leave everybody just with something tactical.
This is what the perfect co-living home looks like. I’m going to give you seven criteria that we look for. So if you were to go out today and you’re like, I get it, Sam, I want houses that cashflow, two grand a month. I want to be like Jesse and retire a six figure job off two co-living homes. Like this is what the perfect co-living house looks like. Now this one, the example I gave you guys at the beginning, this is the actual house. This is 3,200 dents in place, the one I gave you the numbers, and it turned into an eight room home. So as you see, you walked into the foyer. This living room became a bedroom. This sunroom became a bedroom. So there was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on the top floor, and then downstairs, the family room became a bedroom. This was already a bedroom, and the rec room became a bedroom.
So it was an eight bedroom home. That’s how I was able to get $6,450 in revenue off of that. There’s some pictures of the inside. We already went over some of the numbers on that. This is another one that we just recently, actually, I say recently, last two years, bought in Fairview, North Carolina. This is on a septic system. It’s way up in the middle of nowhere, but it’s near Asheville, which Asheville has a huge affordable housing need. Just trying to give you guys a vibe for what it looks like. They told us it would rent for 2,250. We rented it for 5,250, more than doubled the rent. This is one of my favorite homes right here. We did a full rehab on this home. It looks beautiful. My wife staged it and designed it. They said, Hey, Sam, if you rent this house out, you’ll rent it for 1985 a month to a single family.
We rented it for 64 50 a month, and this is the floor plan of that house. This is how we got nine rooms out of it. We got a room, a room, a room. So whenever you are looking for a good co-living home, you’re looking for something that’s a little boxy, right? So real fast, I’m going to wrap it through this. You’re looking for ample parking. A good co-living home has the ability to park at least two thirds the number of people that you have living in the home. You might say, well, Sam, why two thirds? I don’t know. We have hundreds and hundreds of rooms. Just trust me. That’s the formula. If you have nine people in a home, you need six parking spots. Someone’s at grandma’s, someone’s out. You have one vacancy, someone’s working second shift, someone’s working first shift. You just don’t need a hundred percent of those parking spots.
So you’re looking for on street parking, add a little parking, whatever you got to do. No, HOA unless you love lawsuits. Anybody here love lawsuits then? No HOAs. Split level homes are good. They flow really well. So we always are looking for split level homes. You’re looking for anything that’s 2000 square feet or larger, which means it’s going to be a six bedrooms or larger. You can always get six bedrooms out of 2000 square feet. I know that from looking at thousands and thousands of homes. So that formula is 2000 square feet equals six rooms, and then every 250 square feet that home is bigger is usually means I can get another room in that home. So if you bring me a 2,500 square foot home, that’s going to be eight rooms. Bring me a 3000 square foot home. That’s going to be 10 rooms.
So it starts at six, and then 2250 is 7 20, 500 is eight 20. That’s just almost always 99% of the time that formula works in houses. We’re looking at around the country, we’re looking for funky layouts, weird layouts, homes that are more boxy, I call them. We don’t like doing massive rehab. So we always say minor rehab work. I want to fill this home and I want it to cash on. I want to move on to the next one, right? Not too old. We’re looking for something. 1970s or newer, plumbing, electrical, got a bunch of updates around the United States around that time. So it’s just better. And the more bathrooms the better. We always keep at least a three to one bedroom to bathroom ratio. And I get, if you’re listening to this and your mind is like, how do people share bathrooms like that? You just kind of have to trust me that it works and I don’t have time to dive into all the nuances, but it works.
And it’s being proved times thousands and thousands of rooms around the United States. And then you want to make the common spaces amazing. So what you really want from co-living guys is you want them to walk in and go, holy cow, I can buy this. I can live in a room in this house, and it feels like an Airbnb. Now we don’t furnish the bedrooms because the room is the new apartment. So I want them moving their stuff in. I want them signing a 12 month lease. I don’t agree with this concept of week by week rentals and co-living homes. That’s not the vibe. That’s not what I’m promoting. It’s not what I’m teaching. But you want that common space, which is the only part that we do furnish for everybody to be like pop in an amazing and place for them to work and cowork.
And if you walk in one of Jesse’s homes, it’s like you think you’re walking into a five star co-living space. It’s absolutely amazing. You got lighted signs and neon signs and strip and things like that, right. Jesse, don’t you have that? No. Okay. I might’ve made the strip poll. So I just discovered guys to kind of put a bow on this. And Jesse, I’ll turn it back over to you, brother. I’d love for you to put a bow on it if you want to add anything to what I’ve shared. But just that co-living for me is the best way to solve forward housing. In my opinion, it is the best way to create financial freedom without needing millions and millions in capital and having to go buy huge multifamily units where you’re competing against hedge funds and insurance companies and everybody and their brother that wants to buy a multifamily unit.
You don’t need any real estate experience, not like you’re managing at massive scale to become financially free. You can do it three homes, two homes in Jesse’s case. So I’ve got some cool examples here just for time’s sake. I’m not going to run through them, but just some people who have been through this model, been through our program and have come out with thousands of dollars in cashflow and have been able to either quit their job or move part-time or done what Jesse’s done and just do real estate and coaching full-time now, which is really cool. So I’ll end with this. If anybody’s listening to this and you’re saying, wow, Sam sounds cool, but there’s no way that’ll work. I get it. I don’t get it. I’d invite you to think about what you thought when the first time you heard Uber, when the first time you ever heard about Uber.
It was like, wait, an app is going to tell me to go pick up a random stranger. They’re going to jump in the backseat of my car. They’re going to take me some other random place, not murder, kill me or hijack the car. And that’s the new taxi. Yeah, that sounds suss and dangerous as hell. Or Airbnb, it was like, wait, you’re going to let a bunch of 20 some year olds rent your second home on the lake and they’re not going to destroy it and that’s going to be a multi-billion dollar company, but now we just accept it. Right? And Coli is in that same place where it’s like, wait, eight people sharing a home, nine people sharing a home, no way that’ll work. But people are saying that this is new, this is up and coming, but it is truly solving affordable housing.
So you got to kind of just open your mind to the concepts. Jesse and I have both lived in co-living homes for years and years and years. For me, almost a decade and a half, I lived in co-living homes when my wife met me, I had six roommates. She was like, this isn’t going to work for us. But I say all that to say it does work if you start to lean in and you study it and you move forward with it. So Jesse, I’ll kind of end with that. I could go into some other stuff, but I just for time sake, I want to move it on,
Jesse Ray:
Man. So good, Sam. So good. And I think another thing is some people have a perception of landlord slumlord. At the end of the day, co-living is so amazing because you as an investor, as a landlord get the feeling of being thanked and people are grateful for you to provide these type of environments for ’em. You have a nice house you’re able to live in. You have a great community of friends. I mean, there really is a loneliness pandemic going on in the world where people craving in person interaction. And so besides the fact that we’re able to make amazing money through this strategy, it’s the fulfillment from the people that are renting from us that honestly is almost just as, I almost like it just as much I,
Josh Mettle:
Jesse, will you
Sam Wegert:
Get a ton of loans with Josh’s company and go buy as many freaky living homes as you can. That’s the message of today. Get loans, leverage, buy presidential real estate.
Josh Mettle:
I was really bummed when you said people only needed to buy four homes, Sam, I was like, dang it. I liked it when they needed to buy 40. It was way better. No, no. Jesse, tell me a little bit about growth House because we work with a lot of medical professionals, we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, we work with a lot of real estate investors, and what I know about those people is they like to hang out with other doctors, they like to hang out with other entrepreneurs, they like to hang out with other real estate investors. So give me the growth house model that you’ve put over what Sam teaches.
Jesse Ray:
Absolutely. Yeah. It was really more just niching down into a specific industry or type of person that wanted to, like you said, live with other people that were like that. So for my example, I moved to Arizona, didn’t know a single person, and what did I want to do? I want to get it out of the corporate, corporate rat race and be an entrepreneur and a real estate investor. So guess what? I literally went on Facebook and just said, Hey, I’m creating this entrepreneur house because I want to live with other entrepreneurs. And that’s exactly how everything really started was just that simply and that organic. So yeah, it’s just like there’s a lot of different people in the market where they’re musicians or they’re travel nurses and because of some people’s schedules, they all kind of operate on the same hours of the day and they like living with each other. There’s now even houses for flight attendants or pilots. And so yeah, it’s just kind of adding another layer on top of what Sam teaches with co-living where it’s niching down and basically catering to a certain type of person that has a certain type of lifestyle.
Josh Mettle:
I think if you said to me, Josh, would you feel comfortable living with nine strangers? I may go, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it. Now, if you said, Hey, would you feel comfortable living with nine entrepreneurs? It would not take me one second for the word yes to come out of my mouth if I’m going through medical school or I’m in residency and I said, Hey, would you feel comfortable going through living with nine other residents in one second? They would say yes. So I think that familiarity, it’s like, oh, I’m going to move into this house and I already have a built-in tribe I’m in. So I think what you’ve layered on top of that is just absolutely brilliant.
Sam Wegert:
I appreciate that commonality for sure. Yeah.
Josh Mettle:
So guys, we’ve got three minutes left. I would like to have time for perhaps closing thoughts and maybe I’ll just kick us off. I had three kind of takeaways that I wanted to give. Number one, Sam should go first on the next webinar. We do because Incredible. Thank you, Sam. That was absolutely awesome. Love your energy.
Sam Wegert:
You’re incredible. You’re incredible,
Josh Mettle:
Man. Love it. Thank you, buddy. Your content was incredible. I mean, the numbers for me was so helpful. Here’s what it rents. If you rent it to one person, here’s what it rents if you rent it to six people. That was just so insightful for me. Thank you very much. The other thing that I just wanted to share with folks really quickly in closing thought was I gave a bunch of macro data on the real estate and housing market, and that’s only half the picture because the macro picture, I can be right a hundred percent right in the macro picture. And if you buy in the wrong neighborhood, you’re still going to lose money. So you need to understand the macro market and the micro market. So one of the things that we’ve developed, we pay a lot of money to subscribe to this professional grade analytics tool that enables us to dial down and get neighborhood level data.
So I can go in and I can say, Hey, the median home in 8 4 1 2 7 is selling for 580,000. There’s only 7,600 homes being built there this year. And in that area there are 89,000 renters who have sufficient income to buy. And that’s just one of the data points here. It gets into demographics. Well, the biggest cohort of demographics are 27 to 35, which means there’s a lot of new home buyers coming into the market. So if you want something like this that I can help chart for you, your future appreciation in this neighborhood, it can even be dialed down into a different price. If you were buying a 380,000, oops, let’s not do that. If you were buying a $380,000 house, then these numbers may change based on your area. So if you want micro market data specific to the zip code or area you want to buy in, I will create this for you for free. You can email me at josh@joshMettle.com or you can drop your email in the chat. I’m more than happy to prepare that for you. Let’s send it over to, should we send it over to Sam next? And Jesse, you can close this out.
Jesse Ray:
Let’s do it.
Josh Mettle:
Cool.
Sam Wegert:
Hey guys, listening to you, Josh, about just the forecast. I think it’s what Jesse said earlier of so often, even in my generation, I’m a millennial, so I guess we like to try to get rich quick a lot of times by timing things. I’ll buy this stock now and I’ll sell this. I’ll do the GameStop kind of play, right? And I think that sometimes I feel like when I talk to my generation, I have to talk and genzer is for sure, which is my siblings generation. It’s like, Hey guys, this is a long-term game to not just become rich, but to become wealthy and rich in my mind is like, you can get a lot of cash, but are you going to be wealthy over the long term and have equity in your homes and all these things? So I love this strategy of like, I’m going to try to buy a home a year for the next 10 years.
And I think just playing that out and knowing that you shared with us, appreciation’s going to take over. Maybe there’s a down year or an up, but it’s over time, this is headed in that direction and we’re not trying to time things. And I know that, and I think a lot of people for listening to this probably know that. But it’s just great to hear that as a consistent reminder. Even in my strategy as my wife and I are going and building assets and building our wealth, it’s like, no, just stay the core. Stay the game. Sometimes I get a little greedy and I’m like, well, maybe I’ll pull all my money to this stock. I really think it could go great. Uranium’s going to be hot, right? I’m going to buy my uranium mining stocks. I really want to, my point in saying that is I just think we all have kind of that temptation. But seriously, if you guys have some tips on uranium mining stocks, my takeaway, stay the long term appreciation. I want to wake up and pay 50-year-old Sam, 50-year-old Sam wakes up and goes, oh, I’m so glad I bought real estate and I’m so glad I paid down those loans. And I’m so glad I got fixed rate debt from Joshua’s company. And that’s nice.
Josh Mettle:
And Sam, the 50-year-old Sam’s rent checks are a lot bigger than current Sam’s rent checks, meaning true, your mortgage payment’s the same, your rents go up every single year. And the first apartment building we bought was in 2001, 850 square foot apartment downtown. Salt Lake looks over the great Salt Lake, beautiful sunsets like beautiful building. They rented for $375 a month. Now we rent those same buildings, that same units for 1695 a month. Holy cow. And we charge for parking and we charge for pets and we charge for storage. So some of those are almost $2,000 a month. That’s only 20 years. And guess what? My mortgage payment’s exactly the same. Actually, it’s less because refinanced it down four times over that period of time. So when you start thinking in terms of decades instead of days and weeks, that’s where you shift from being rich to wealthy.
Sam Wegert:
Beautiful. Well said, man. Great example too. That’s beautiful. Thank you brother.
Jesse Ray:
I got nothing to add after both of you guys, man. That was too good. So I’m just honored to be on this webinar with you too. And Sam, if people want to find out more about co-living, you have an amazing five day challenge. I want you to shout it out because you personally helped me make another $24,000 back in 2023 by me joining that five day challenge, even as someone that already is unquote in the game and a co-living person already.
Sam Wegert:
Yeah, man, you just got to go to scale your realestate.com, www.scaleyourrealestate.com, get on the waiting list for the next event that I’m doing, where we will deep dive into how to find these co-living homes, how to run them, how to get them to cash flow. I’m in the middle of one this week, so the next one will be probably in a month or so. But get on the waiting list. I dropped it in the panelist notes as well. www.scaleyourrealestate.com. Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse Ray:
Amazing. And you can find me, I’m mostly on Facebook or Instagram at the Jesse Ray, and we have a podcast and both of you guys have been on the podcast. So if you ever want to listen to some amazing real estate and investing podcasts, growth House by Jesse Ray,
Josh Mettle:
Appreciate you guys being here. This has been a ton of fun. I dropped my email josh@joshMettle.com. If anybody wants a neighborhood report card, wants any information on how to move from thinking about buying a home to actually getting prepared and inspired to buy a home, reach out to me. I’d love to help y’all. But guys, thanks so much. You’ve added a tremendous amount of value to our listeners today, and it’s just a blessing for me to be with you both.
Sam Wegert:
Thanks, Josh. Same. I feel the same way. Thanks Jesse. Appreciate you guys.
Josh Mettle:
Thanks guys. Have a great rest of your day. Appreciate y’all being here. God bless. Take care. God bless.
