Member Guest Blog: The Real Estate Career of David VanSteenkiste

My RE career started by accident with my first home, a condo in Tempe, AZ near the university. In 1996 with a solid engineering job and a partner in that business, I bought a 3/2 condo and rented out two of my bedrooms to roommates. The rent from these roommates paid my mortgage, enabling me to save quickly. With these savings I bought another and moved into it and kept the first one as a rental, enabling me to get “owner occupied financing.” I did this a few more times before getting married. I did all of this with no RE education.

I wish I knew then what I know today.

At the time I got married, the business I was partnered in also started to see greater success, which took any spare time I had, leaving no time for REI. We grew the business and sold it to a competitor for far less than it could have sold for had all the partners been on the same page. Needless to say, by the time we split the proceeds and paid taxes, we all still needed to work… a lot!

I moved my family to Sweden in 2006 to work for an acquiring company until late 2008. We moved to Boulder, Colorado, landing just after the first crash of the great recession, unemployed. My goal was to acquire a small business. I spent about a year evaluating businesses and came very close to buying one, which fell apart at the last minute. Then I went to work for a college buddy through 2011.

In mid-2011 I began my REI education with Rich Dad. A great education, but very expensive (I’ll save some important take aways in later writings that will save would-be investors a lot of time and money.) At the end of 2011, I was given the ultimatum “move to San Francisco or get laid off.” I elected to stay in Colorado, but thank God, they allowed me to work as a consultant part time for six months and finish up some projects.

The part time consulting income was enough to pay our bills while jumping into REI. I had six months to generate income. I found a house to rehab and flip. I did it pretty quickly with only cosmetic rehab and made 20k. It was surprisingly easy. Definitely a great first flip to establish confidence and get me excited. Then I found another and made 40k and on and on.

2012 was a pretty good and 2013 was very good, making more than I had ever made as a W2 employee. But in 2014 the inventory dried up very quickly. If you could buy a deal, you knew you could sell it quickly, but now investors were competing with retail buyers for fixer uppers, squeezing margins and limiting the number of deals.

Pretty soon I, and many other rehabbers, found ourselves chasing deals with too thin of margins and at higher price points.

With the perfect storm of not enough deals, too thin of margins, and higher price points, I saw no future in a business model of flipping only. My original goal was to branch the business into multiple streams- rehab, rentals, and wholesaling. But the market tightened more quickly than expected. I did not have the cash flow to pay for proper marketing to wholesale and could not yet qualify for loans to keep properties as rentals.

In mid-2014 I learned about the land flipping business. I did a handful of land deals, but my main income from house flipping simply was insufficient to support my family. My wife also had a start up insurance business that was not producing income and I was playing dad, mom and breadwinner. We were sinking fast and I did not have confidence yet that I could increase the land income quickly enough.

Then a blessing came out of the blue. A dear friend of over 20 years called to offer me a fantastic sales job in the industry where I cut my teeth. The instant $150K income at that point was a no-brainer. I knew that this position would provide the security of income, benefits and stability for my family, while providing a lot of freedom to eventually re-start land investing.

After 1.5 years in the new job (which I enjoy a lot btw) completely divorced from any real estate, I felt comfortable enough to re-start something on the side. My biggest challenge from my previous land investing experience via The Land Geek was acquiring data and creating mailing lists large enough, quickly enough. Then, via one of the Facebook groups, I found Land Academy. After reading up, asking some opinions in the FB group and talking to Jill, the value proposition was obvious. The access to the data is THE KEY to this business. All the rest of the business happens naturally once you start getting deals.

But the key to the deals is the data.

At the time of this writing, we are at Halloween weekend of 2016. I did my first mailer in May of 2016 using (Land Academy’s) data. I was a little overwhelmed by the May and June mailers and stopped to make sure I could handle the sales and get my system right. I restarted mailing in late September and Early October and am again slammed with accepted offers to sift through.

To date, I have created $1,100.00/month in passive income with 100% of the capital already recouped and have made $40K in cash flips. All in 6 months part time from the point of my first mailer.

I am ready to rock it out of the park in 2017!