RG 207 – Channelling Your Inner Greatness: From Mechanic to Financial FREEDOM w/ Juan Vargas
Juan is a multifamily real estate investor and syndicator, he’s also a podcast host on the Commit to Wealth podcast. Juan made his first dollar helping out his father as a child when he was doing his job as a welder. He was good at helping his father and working with his hands so he started doing this straight out of high school to help his parents financially. After a few years he realised he didn’t want to go back to normal school so he went to trade school to work on cars and ended up at BMW. He was really good in these positions but that was also a trap because he came to rely on the income and became pigeon holed and didn’t feel he could leave. He felt undervalued at BMW but he had pride in his team and what he did, he tried to find passive income on the side by doing real estate. With leverage and scale he got into single family homes and did that while juggling the day job.
With his first few deals he did single family homes and financed it the traditional way through a bank. When one of his tenants moved out and he struggled to fill the space he realised that with a single family if it’s empty then you’re at 100% vacancy but it this was a 10 unit multi family then he would only be at 10% vacancy. He learned more about the economy of scale by reading books and blogs and got started with multifamily in 2016.
It was hard to get credibility with brokers initially, they liked what he’d done with single family but they didn’t want to let him into the multifamily club. So he reached out to owners directly by finding them through a tax assessors list site and filtering for owners who had owned for 3 years or over. He sent them hand written letters and got a few hits straight away.
Top tips
- Most important habit – staying on top of whats happening in the markets
- Most influential person – wife
- Most important tool – google drive and asana
- Contact – juan@genwealthcapital.com