RG 159 – Shifting YOUR Mindset from Employee to Entrepreneur w/ Jens Nielsen
Nuts and Bolts
Jens lives in the US and came over in 1996 from his home country of Denmark where he originally had a career in IT but in the last 3 years he’s found his true calling for real estate. Jens has a personal portfolio of 82 units, and has passively invested in 12 multi and mobile home park syndications. Jens made his first krone has a child working at local farms helping out and tending to animals. In his early 20’s he was working in telecoms and received a call from a vendor in London saying that they needed someone to help them over there and so at 23 he moved to the UK. A few years after this the same company moved him to the US. He didn’t have a college degree at the time so went to school in the US at the University of Maryland to study IT.
About 5 years ago he realised that if he stopped working tomorrow he’s stop making money and although he’d worked in IT for 20 years and made good money he didn’t have a good work/life balance. A friend recommended real estate so he jumped in, he’s based in SW Colorado and his portfolio is mostly based in Albuquerque. He made a mindshift change to get control of his future and not to just get another job as a private contractor. He worked out his freedom number and worked towards that. When he started doing real estate on the side the main problem was time management. He started by looking for places to carve out time; weekends, every other Friday and evenings. He set goals to plan the next day and week and kept motivated by eating well and exercising. He recommends working out what’s important for you and prioritising your time – be intentional about how you want to spend your time.
When he started to build his portfolio he wanted to go straight into multifamily and got into it through a friend who connected him with a broker. He identified a few 4-plexes that weren’t too expensive and started there. Soon afterwards he found an 11 unit property that was seller financed and needed a lot of work. He got a term on seller financing where he didn’t have to pay anything for a year so he could put the money back into the property. Within 6 months of starting in real estate Jens had accumulated 19 units. Jens’ future plans are to quit the day job and continue to raise money for the syndications and to replace the amount of incomes and do real estate all the time. Jens is also passionate about coaching and teaching other people the steps into real estate.
Top tips
- Most important habit – his morning goals
- Most influential person – his business partner – Chuck Sheldon
- Most important tool – Streak for Gmail
- Most important failure – Not creating proper relationships and going straight for the sale
- Contact – jens@opendoorscapital.com