Want to Invest in Real Estate in 2026? Listen to This First

Dave Meyer:
These were the BiggerPockets Podcast episodes that defined real estate investing in 2025. Hey everyone, Dave here. I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season with your friends and family. It has been another transformative year in real estate. The market continues to evolve and the investors who are thriving are the ones who’ve adapted their strategies to match current conditions rather than waiting for things to go back to normal. On today’s show, we’re going to recap some of the biggest investing trends and topics we focused on in 2025 by replaying portions of the year’s most popular BiggerPockets podcast episodes. These are the shows that resonated most with the BiggerPockets community when they were first published. And so I hope revisiting them today will help inspire you as you plan for investing in 2026. We’re going to republish a few other popular episodes of the show and from across the entire BiggerPockets network over the next week, and then we will return with brand new podcasts starting on January 2nd.
The first episode I’m going to revisit today is back from January because last year I started off the year by sharing my upside era framework for the first time. The idea behind it is that we are in a new era of investing. And even though real estate may not be as obvious as it was a few years ago, it is still the best path to securing your financial future, and it’s better than any other way to invest your money. This episode was called The Real Estate Financial Freeda Formula Has Changed. It was released in January 2025. And I think my conversation with Henry Washington holds up just as well now as it did almost a full year ago. I think the problem is that we treat financial independence as binary. It’s like either you’re financially free or you’re not. When reality, it is a path.
And the goal, at least for me, has always been to just become more financially independent. Every deal you do, every financial decision you make will hopefully put you in a better financial position so you have more flexibility. For some people like Henry, that flexibility might be going to Europe and just not working for a couple weeks. For me, I rest easy knowing that if BiggerPockets decided to fire me tomorrow, I could not work for a couple of years and be very comfortable. And to me, wouldn’t consider myself fully financially independent because if I left my job today, I would need to figure out active income just like you, Henry. But I am more financially independent than I was 15 years ago before I started investing.

Henry Washington:
Absolutely.

Dave Meyer:
And I am more financially independent this year than I was last year and the year before that and the year before that. And I feel like that really needs to be the goal is just to keep moving in that direction because honestly, your definition of what financial independence is going to change. The amount of money I thought that I would’ve needed to feel comfortable when I started 15 years ago, I passed that number a while ago. And my expectations, I try not to have lifestyle creep, but when you get older and you just have a more sophisticated life, your expenses just go up. And so that’s why I feel like setting this goal and saying I am financial independent or not, it’s just not realistic. The goal is just to keep making progress.

Henry Washington:
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I was one of those people when I got started that I thought I would buy enough rental properties to produce enough cashflow in current days
That I would be able to take the cashflow from the rental properties. And then when that number of cashflow hit the number of money I made per month in my day job, that I could leave my day job and live off of my cashflow. But as I started to buy properties, I started to realize that that wasn’t necessarily going to be a thing. I was absolutely buying properties that cashflow, but your business and your properties, they don’t function linearly. It’s not like you buy it and then it cash flows and nothing ever happens or goes wrong. It just makes you just print that money every month and it’s perfect and the world is great. But that’s not the case. The more properties you buy, things break at different times, things break all at the same time, people move in, people move out. There’s this constant flow of money that it’s hard for you to be able to say, “Okay, well, I bought 10 properties and each property cash flows $500 a month.
And so now I have $5,000 every month that I just will take out of this account and spend on my bills.” And the money is flowing too fluidly for that to be a reality. And so I realized that if I truly want these properties to pay me cash flow that I could live off of passively, then it’s going to happen far into the future
When these assets are paid off. And so I had to pivot my strategy to think, okay, well, how can I use real estate to still buy rentals, but also make cash now so that I can A, continue to grow my portfolio, but also stabilize my portfolio and then start to aggressively pay off those properties so I can hit that goal sooner. That wasn’t what I thought starting out.

Dave Meyer:
Totally. Yeah. And I want to ask you about how you pivoted your business, but I’m just curious first, was that disappointing to you realizing that?

Henry Washington:
You know, that’s an interesting question. I don’t remember feeling disappointed about it just because I was actively in the business at that point and I had the foundational skill, which is I know how to go buy a good deal. All I had to change was the way I was monetizing that deal, which was flipping it and getting more cash upfront versus holding onto it and taking a couple hundred dollars here or there. So no, it wasn’t disappointing because I just love the business of real estate.

Dave Meyer:
Feels like people are avoiding getting into real estate because we, people who are real estate educators, BiggerPockets is part of this, have been saying, “Hey, you can get real estate financial freedom in a couple of years.” And like I said, during the 2010s, it was always difficult, but it was easier than it was today. It was

Henry Washington:
Easier.

Dave Meyer:
For sure. But I guess I still feel like the prospect and the value of real estate investing is still so strong that it frustrates me when people are like, “I’m not going to get in because now it’s going to take 10 years to be financially freedom or 15 years to financial freedom.” That’s incredible. It’s amazing. Career in the United States is like 45 years. So you’re saying you cut it into a third. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t really know what would, but I do feel like, I don’t know if you hear this too, but I hear people saying like, “Oh, I can’t find cashflow, I’m not going to get into it. ” But the fundamentals haven’t really changed. This is kind of always how it’s worked.

Henry Washington:
The fundamentals haven’t changed. They’re more important now than they’ve ever been. It’s the fundamentals you have to stick to now in order to be successful, but yeah, this is the best way to accelerate that path in any manner that a normal person could. Can you do it in other pathways? Can you do it in the stock market? Yeah, but you got to get really good at trading stocks. But the average person in real estate can do this without being a professional real estate investor, and that’s incredible.

Dave Meyer:
Given this, given the reality, it sounds like we agree that it’s going to take you 12 to 15 years to do it. In my mind, that’s fantastic. And you can sort of be agnostic, at least to me, about how you pursue that active income. I think there’s a good argument to be made that you should just pursue whatever active income makes you the most money. And for me, that’s continuing in a regular job, but it sounds like for you, why did you make that choice knowing that you needed active income to do it through real estate rather than … You had a good job, right? You had a good corporate job and you chose to leave that.

Henry Washington:
Yes, I did have a great corporate job and I enjoyed my job. That’s why I kept it as long as humanly possible. I was going to do both until I could not do both anymore until someone was going to stop me from doing both. And I did. That’s what happened is I quit when it cost me money to have the job when they wanted me to work more hours and I just couldn’t give them more hours because it would take away from what I was doing in real estate. But the answer to your question is I had to choose the real estate because I’m throwing all out here. I was making $110,000 a year, which isn’t a ton of money, but it’s good money, right? It’s good money. It’s hard not to choose real estate as your full-time income path when I’d have to trade 40 hours a week for 12 months to make $110,000.
If you count my bonus, I was probably making closer to $140,000 when I could flip two houses and make that, and I could flip two houses in the same month. Yeah.

Dave Meyer:
Would you put it that way? Right,

Henry Washington:
Right. We just sold a deal and made 70K last week. And yeah, it took us five months to make 70K, but that wasn’t the only house I was flipping. I had to choose the real estate. It made more financial sense. And also, I love it so much more than I loved my day job. I liked my day job. I love doing this.

Dave Meyer:
So that was me and Henry on episode number 1069 from January. Our next episode today was our most popular show of the year on YouTube. It’s an investor story with Deandra McDonald. This episode really struck a chord with many of you because it proves you can start investing in real estate and change your financial trajectory from almost any starting point. DeAndra had $35,000 in debt and got rejected by a lender the first time she tried to buy a property. She eventually got her first deal though with a down payment of less than $4,000, and four years later, she was able to quit her job and become a full-time real estate investor. This is an incredibly inspiring story of taking incremental steps to improve your financial position, one property at a time. Here’s my conversation with Deandra McDonald from episode 1105 back in April. What did you buy?
Because you said you wanted to live in it. Were you looking for a house hack kind of situation?

Deandra McDonald:
Exactly, because that’s all I had. With all that savings, that extra two years, I still could come up with about $5,000 because I had to pay down the credit card debt and just live.That was also a necessity. But my first purchase was a two bedroom townhouse, just half a duplex where the plan was just to lower my rent. But what actually happened was I moved in, I took the smaller room and I rented out the second room to a roommate, which covered my mortgage. And that started the full addiction to this whole process of like, “Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Meyer:
” Yeah. I would imagine that generating that income or saving that money was a lot easier than lifeguarding parts.

Deandra McDonald:
For

Dave Meyer:
Sure. So you didn’t get to quit your job fully, right? I imagine you were still working full-time, but sounds like at least improve your quality of life just off that first deal, right?

Deandra McDonald:
Yeah. Even just I got to stop lifeguarding.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah.

Deandra McDonald:
Even just that. I had weekends again. I had a day off that I wasn’t thinking about how can I pick up an extra shift? How can I make an extra $20 this weekend because that adds to the pot? I could rest. So even if it was just that, my goodness.

Dave Meyer:
I think this is so important because I think of this industry, a lot of the focus has been turned to just quitting your job, but I love hearing stories like yours where you show that every incremental deal can improve your financial situation and can improve, like you’re saying, your quality of life. You actually had this tangible benefit to your life just by buying a single real estate deal. And I really encourage everyone, maybe if you haven’t gotten that first deal yet, to think about that because it’s a lot less daunting to think about how do I replace my full W2 job. It’s like, well, just think about how can you work a little bit less? We’ll give you a little bit more peace of mind just to get that first deal. It sounds like you did that, but then you got the bug. So what did you do after you got first house hack?

Deandra McDonald:
I kept house hacking for a while. I got a better job where I was making more money, but didn’t change my lifestyle. And so every year on the dot, we used to have a joke that I have boxes that didn’t even bother on packing because it was like, I’m going to be gone in a year because now I have this system in like, oh, I live here for a year. I rent it while I’m here. I rent it when I leave. All that extra money goes into the next property so that every property is bigger, better, more efficient than the last one. I can fix stuff up as I go. For years is just what I focused on.

Dave Meyer:
What area of the country is this?

Deandra McDonald:
I’m in Central Virginia, specifically Charlottesville.

Dave Meyer:
Okay. And it sounds like that first deal, did you just put in five grand? Was that all you had to come up with?

Deandra McDonald:
I think we looked at the numbers and wound up being like $3,800.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. Oh my God, that’s amazing. And so everyone listening to this is jealous. But just as a reminder, back then it was a lot harder to get a loan to, as Deandra mentioned, there were trade-offs to every time. So was that sort of the amount you were shooting to save every single year? Could you repeat the strategy you were using just saving up $3,800, $5,000 a year and buying something new?

Deandra McDonald:
Exactly. It was like, “Hey, there is an abundance of properties here under $1150,000.” I remember now times are different. Like Dave was saying, I remember having a $200,000 budget and being picky going in and say like, “I don’t like those cabinets. Show me something else. I don’t like the wall colors.” And that was okay because you had other options. And I want to say this, in certain parts of my state, that is still very true.
My area has gotten very, very popular. It got very, very popular after the world kind of shut down in 2020, but it wasn’t that popular six years ago where it was still like you had options. And there are surrounding counties and surrounding cities where there are still plenty of options if you were to walk in right now with $200,000 and a desire to live there. But yeah, what happened was I was paying 700 a month in rent. So I went from paying 700 month of rent to nothing. So all I did was save that money. So now instead of saving 3,000, I can save a lot more per month. I took out HELOCs as I would shift from place to place. My Airbnbs would do well. All that money just kept being saved and going to the next property.

Dave Meyer:
And how long were you doing house hacking? When did you start doing something else?

Deandra McDonald:
I was house hacking exclusively for about three years. On year four is when I started experimenting with midterm and short term because I had duplexes or I had quads that sometimes I would have two or three months between when this tenant ended and the next tenant who wants to come starts. So what do I do in this timeframe? Oh, I could rent to a traveling nurse for two months or put it on short-term rentals because I had some extra furniture. And they’re like, “Oh, this is great. I can play with all of these whenever I need them instead of sticking to one thing.”

Dave Meyer:
That was my conversation with Deandra McDonald on BiggerPockets Podcast, episode 1105. We’ll be back with more of 2025’s defining episodes after a quick break. Managing rentals shouldn’t be stressful. That’s why landlords love rent ready. Get rent in your account in just two days, faster cashflow and less waiting. Need to message a tenant? Chat instantly in app so you have no more lost emails or texts. Plus you can schedule maintenance repairs with just a few taps so you’re not stuck playing phone tag. Ready to simplify your rentals? Get six months of rent ready for just $1 using promo code BP2025. Sign up at the Lincoln Bio because the best landlords are using rent ready. Henry, it’s holiday season. What do you get a real estate investor for the holidays?

Henry Washington:
Well, if that real estate investor is me, you can get me a 15-unit apartment building.

Dave Meyer:
Oh, does that work? Do people just send you apartment buildings?

Henry Washington:
They are now.

Dave Meyer:
Well, I got a suggestion actually. If you are looking for a gift to get a real estate investor, buy them a ticket to the upcoming Texas Cashflow Roadshow. We’re going to be in Texas. We’re going to Austin, Houston, and Dallas from January 13th to 16th, and we’re going to be having meetups, workshops, live podcast recording. We’d love to see you all there. So if you’re thinking you got a friend in the Texas area and they’re trying to get into real estate investing, they’re trying to scale their portfolio, go to biggerpockets.com/texas and go buy them a ticket.
Welcome back. Today, we’re revisiting some of the show’s most popular episodes from the year that was. Our next clip has a similar theme. Antoinette Monroe was feeling unfulfilled with her corporate career when she fell into real estate investing almost accidentally. Investing, however, not only gave her the financial freedom to ultimately leave her job, but it also gave her a sense of purpose when she began operating assisted living facilities. Like DeAndra, Antoinette’s story shows that even a small portfolio can make a huge impact on your financial future and your community. This is me with Antoinette from episode number 1120.

Antoinette Monroe:
So I spent that entire first year kind of digging through all of the BiggerPockets forums, listening to all the podcasts to understand, okay, what do you do next when you’ve done this? I learned about house hacking. I realized that that’s what I was doing, but then also the birth strategy. And that is how I got my second deal. So in 2019, I purchased an off-market deal from my neighbor in the neighborhood I grew up in. So I had a direct connect to the seller and that deal I was able to get under contract for under 200,000. It only needed about 30 or 40 worth of work. And through some tips that I got off the bigger pockets for them, I was able to refinance that house and get all of my cash back within 45 days of closing.

Dave Meyer:
Wow. Amazing. I’d love to dig into that because I think this is one of these deals that people listening are going to be like, “I want one of those.” Give me that. So tell me a little bit how the off-market deal comes up because we always hear about off-market deals, they’re great and they kind of are just this magical thing. And I think how did this one come about? Did your neighbor know you were buying houses or tell us about it?

Antoinette Monroe:
Well, no, because at the time I wasn’t. I just had the one house. But my mom knew that I was learning to be a real estate investor and I wanted to do that. So talking to her one day, she mentioned, “Hey, the neighbor across the street, she’s planning to move to Georgia to be with her kids because she’s getting older.” And I was like, “Ah, I know what this is. I heard that podcast. This is a wholesale deal.” So I was like, “Give me her number. I’m going to call her.” And so I called her, found out what she was interested in doing. I went through all of the steps of the things that I learned about from a wholesale deal. I was not a good negotiator. So I was just like, what is it that you want for it? I’ll agree to that because

Dave Meyer:
The numbers worked out. Yeah. Which is kind of a win-win situation, right?

Antoinette Monroe:
Yeah. And so she still talked to a couple different wholesalers and I explained to her, I was like, “They’re going to give you offers. Then they’re going to come and look at it, and then they’re going to whittle that offer down based on the expenses that they have. So they’ll do whatever to get you under contract.” But ultimately, I think I was able to get that deal because of the personal relationship and she was getting the price that she wanted and that was enough for her. So it’s one of those, sometimes the right place, right time. You never know when that deal will come, but if you’re putting out what you’re interested in or what you’re looking for, then people usually try to help. So I told my mom, I want to be a real estate investor. I want to buy more properties. So anytime, now her ears are open when she hears about opportunities, she’s going to think of me and give me a call.

Dave Meyer:
Well, I love that. Good for you. That’s amazing story about sort of this combination of serendipity and circumstance, but also being prepared for it.

Antoinette Monroe:
Being prepared. Yes. If I hadn’t been listening to the podcast, if I hadn’t been doing the research and understanding, that opportunity would’ve came and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it or how to actually make it work.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. Your mom would’ve said, “Hey, our neighbor’s moving.” You’ve been like, “Oh, cool. I hope they enjoy Georgia.” You wouldn’t have been thinking about how could you potentially create a mutually beneficial situation for yourself and for this person. So it was a single family home, I assume, and your plan was to turn into a rental?

Antoinette Monroe:
Yes. So it was a single family. I put it under contract before I saw it. I just had the memories. I’d been in here before as a kid, similar to my house. That’s kind of fun. But once I closed on it, I came down and saw that they had done an addition to it that made it a much larger single family than I knew. And the layout made it conducive for a split, which is what I did with the first house. I bought a single family, split it in half and kind of made two units out of it right up to the line of being in trouble with code. Just-

Dave Meyer:
Just towing

Antoinette Monroe:
That line.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. Okay.

Antoinette Monroe:
Yeah. So I saw this opportunity in that house as well, and I did the same thing. I just dropped a wall through the middle of it, made a one bed, one bath studio in the back with a kitchenette because kitchens mean code issues, and then kept the three one in the front. And I was able to rent both sides out, one to a family member, because anytime you’re doing something, there’s always somebody watching. So immediately one half went to a family member, and the other half I used a realtor to get rented out.

Dave Meyer:
Okay, great. You said you bought it for under 200 grand, you had to put 30 or 40 grand in. How did you finance all of that?

Antoinette Monroe:
So with the first project, I had improved it and then added 700 square feet. So there was a good bit of equity in that home.
Nice. I learned on the forms that I should pull home equity lines of credit. So I had one existing and ready to go on that first home. So I was able to buy this outright in cash using the equity from the home equity loan. And then I borrowed private money from my brother-in-law to complete the renovation on that second home. So it was a combination of all the things you learned. There was that home equity line of credit, there was borrowing money from my brother-in-law, and then the hack that I use is my strategy to make single families have twice as much cash flow.

Dave Meyer:
That’s great.

Antoinette Monroe:
Which is splitting them in half.

Dave Meyer:
If you want to hear more of Antoinette’s amazing investing journey, make sure to check out episode 1120. Next up is a conversation I had with Henry Washington in August about the BRRR method. Popularizing the BER is one of BiggerPockets’ biggest contributions to real estate investing. It’s an extremely powerful strategy that allows investors to recycle their cash and scale quickly. But there has been a narrative recently that the BRRR is debt. Some people say it’s outdated in an era with mortgage rates over 6%. So Henry and I wanted to talk this through and discuss whether that’s true and how you can update the BER to still make it work today. This is from episode 1165.

Henry Washington:
It was a whole lot easier to find deals to BER three years ago. We still find them now, but less frequently. Flip numbers tend to make more sense in this market than rental numbers, but because we’re looking for deals in volume and we’re finding deals in volume, every so often we get one that makes a great BER. And then I think you have to put some parameters around BER, mostly like a timeline because you can buy, renovate, rent, and then refinance in a short period of time, or you can do it in a much longer period of time. I’ve refinanced multiple properties this year and pulled cash out of them when I bought them three to five years ago and I just put them on adjustable rates and that adjustable rate now came due. I refinanced it into a 30-year fixed and pulled cash out.
And those long-term BERS are still BERS.

Dave Meyer:
Hernia, that’s a great point. I think it’s a really important caveat because I’ve been calling it the delayed BER or people in YouTube gave me new ideas of what to call it because I suck at this, but I couldn’t come up with a better name of it. We’ll call it the delayed bur. But I think there’s two different things that you can do. One thing I’ve been doing is delaying the renovation. You buy something that’s actually fully occupied rather than vacant and not trying to do the BER on this flipped timeline. Because as you said, there is this approach to doing the BRRR method, which is like, I’m going to do this in six months or whatever. I’m going to get in there, I’m going to renovate it quickly, I’m going to get rent up to market rate, then I’m going to do this cash out and I’m going to go acquire the next deal really rapidly.
And that did work really well for a while. I think it’s hard to line up two deals. Like you’re saying, I can’t do it right now realistically, but even you, Henry, it sounds like it would be hard to even line up to Burr’s in that timeframe where it would even be advantageous for you to even do that. And so what you could do is either take sort of the more delayed approach, which is getting the occupied units and opportunistically renovating when there’s time, or doing the renovation upfront, but not refinancing until you need the capital. I’m actually looking at refinancing a deal I bought like six years ago because it’s cash flowing well, but I think that there’s going to be good deals coming and I’m seeing more deals coming and I just might want to free up some capital. And so I’ll just do the refinance, but it’s way

Henry Washington:
Later. Yep. I think when Burr was originally pitched, it was pitched as a way to scale a real estate business because you could line up back to back Burr’s and you could repeat this process and you can still repeat it. I think the timeline for the normal investor is just going to be longer.

Dave Meyer:
I think that’s right. There is this assumption in this question, and I get this question all the time. I’m sure you do too. Do BER’s work? Is it dead? There is this assumption that the only reason to do a BERR is that you can refinance 100% of your capital out.

Henry Washington:
Full BERS. You got a full BER.

Dave Meyer:
Right, exactly. You need the quote unquote perfect Burr or full BER. But that is not that common. Maybe if you’re doing Henry’s kind of deals and you’re in the right market at the right time, that can be common. But I think if you just kind of like reframe the conversation and don’t assume that you need to take 100% of your capital out, then I would say Burr is absolutely still a way to grow your business. You’re still able to refinance some of your money out and you’re buying, ideally, if you’re doing it right, a cash flowing rental property that you have built equity in, you’re getting some of your money out of it to go scale again. That’s still a win, even if it’s not perfectly super 100% recycling of your capital like it was for that brief moment in time.

Henry Washington:
Can I give you a hot take?

Dave Meyer:
Yes. That’s why you’re here.

Henry Washington:
Even when Burrs were easy to do, I didn’t really like doing them.

Dave Meyer:
Really? Why?

Henry Washington:
I didn’t like pulling my cash out. I liked the cash flow.

Dave Meyer:
That’s the other thing. Yeah.

Henry Washington:
When you refinance a deal, what’s essentially what you’re doing is you’re getting a new loan at a higher amount and that new loan at a higher amount comes with a mortgage payment and that mortgage payment is going to be higher than the previous one because now it’s a higher mortgage. When you get a new mortgage, they front load the interest in the first five to seven years,
And so most of your payment is going to interest. And so you put this money in your pocket and a lot of people, especially the casual investor, may not have had the next Burr lined up. They pulled the cash out of their last Burr and then they blow a chunk of it before they get to their next deal. And then it kills the purpose. What I was doing and what I still like to do is instead of refinance, I just get access to a line of credit on that equity and then that way I don’t get a new loan at a higher amount. I keep my lower mortgage payment, which keeps my cash flow. And then I have access to the money in the event I need it instead of just pulling it out and starting to pay on a new loan and then not spending that money wisely.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah, because that’s a great point. If you don’t immediately reinvest your capital that you pull out, you’re essentially just reducing your cashflow for no reason.

Henry Washington:
Yeah, right.

Dave Meyer:
That to me is a really important thing. If you want to hear more about the slow bur and how Henry and I are both using it in our own portfolios, make sure to go back and check out episode 1165. We’ll be right back. We’re back on the BiggerPockets Podcast going through some of our best episodes of 2025. One of the reasons I personally love having Henry on the show is because he brings so much knowledge and experience when it comes to renovations and value add investing. You heard it on that previous BRRR episode before the break, and you’re going to hear it in our next clip too. Adding value to your properties is one of the key skills for almost every investor making deals right now, because in most places, you can’t just go out there and buy properties off the MLS and get a lot of cash flow.
But with just a little bit of effort, a little bit of improvement, you can drive up values and rent at the same time and make deals work. That’s what episode 1088 from February was all about. Here’s me and Henry again.

Henry Washington:
Now, before we move on, you can sometimes add direct value for under five grand if your property is set up for you to do so.

Dave Meyer:
Yes.

Henry Washington:
An example of this that we did recently, this was in a flip, but could have been a rental, right? And so what happened was we had a two bed, one bath house, and that one bath house had a laundry room, and that laundry room was very big, big enough that it could have been a small bedroom. This house also had a sunroom. Now, this sunroom was not heated and cooled and was dilapidated. And so what we were able What to do was to move the laundry into the sunroom. We finished the sunroom by just putting insulation in the walls and drywalling the ceiling because it was just kind of like an open beam ceiling. We added insulation and drywall in the ceiling. We painted the concrete floor. We moved the laundry in there, and then we added a mini split air conditioning unit into that sunroom.

Dave Meyer:
Nice.

Henry Washington:
So by doing that, we were able to spend probably about five grand. And so we added square footage. Even though it was already under roof, that square footage wasn’t counted in the heated and cooled square footage of the house because there was no air conditioning. So by adding a mini split, we added about 200 square feet to the house. And by moving the laundry into that room, we were able to create a third bedroom. And so that $5,000 allowed us to sell this house for $220,000 instead of $200,000. So I spent five and I sold it for an extra 20. So that’s $15,000 worth of additional value for spending 5,000.

Dave Meyer:
And not that much work. And not even that. Now that’s time.

Henry Washington:
So if you have a property, if you’re listening to this and you have a property and you’re considering doing something like this, do you have a room in that property that is not under roof? Do you have a room in that property that could be a bedroom instead of a dining room? People don’t really use formal dining rooms. I like to convert those to bedrooms.

Dave Meyer:
I just did that in a property the other day. There was a front little thing. I just put a door up. It costs like $600. I’m getting probably two, 250 more a month in rent because of that.

Henry Washington:
Boom. Can you convert a garage? A lot of the times, single car garages, people don’t use to park in. They use to store stuff. I have a couple units in Joplin, Missouri where there’s single car garages. And when I bought the properties, every single one of the garages was stored stuff. No one was parking in it. So we spend about five grand, convert the garage into a bedroom, and now we get an extra three to $500 a month of rent out of each one of those units.

Dave Meyer:
This is really sort of the best advice because I think it’s important for people to realize that this isn’t luck. It’s not like Henry bought this house and was like, “Oh, I found this sunroom and I can convert it. “This is the stuff you need to be looking for when you’re actually going to buy properties because anyone can theoretically add a bedroom. But if you’re popping a top and taking off a roof and rebuilding that, that’s going to be a very expensive proposition. That’s going to take a long time. Or you can find these properties that are set up for it. Those are good examples. I did something very similar with my short-term rental. I wanted a four bedroom house. I needed that to get my revenue. All of them were super expensive, but I found a three bedroom house that had a 400 square foot second living room.
No one was using it. And it’s in a walkout, but it already had an egress window built. So I didn’t even have to do that. It had a closet. It was basically all I needed to do was put up drywall, another bedroom, especially if you’re new to value add. These are the kinds of properties that you can really start to target. The other thing where I invest a lot of places at basements and finishing them out is kind of a no-brainer. You look for ones that have the right ceiling height,
That have a good foundation, that have big enough windows for egress. You don’t want to dig out the foundation, but those types of things, that’s just really easy types of value add that really have a tangible, measurable, proven way of adding value.

Henry Washington:
One of the first things you want to look for are look for homes that have bedroom and bathroom counts where the square footage seems too big for that bedroom and bathroom

Dave Meyer:
Count. Yes. Yeah. Like a 2,400 square foot with two beds.

Henry Washington:
Yes,

Dave Meyer:
Exactly. That’s not right.

Henry Washington:
If you’ve got over 2,000 square feet, two bedroom house, there is room to convert something to a bedroom. There is room to add some value. If you’re looking at a three bed, two bathhouse and it’s got 2,500 to 3,500 square feet, there’s probably room. Look for properties that have sunrooms. Sunrooms typically are not heated and cooled. And you can easily add some drywall and add some flooring and add some insulation and a mini split air conditioning unit and you can get added square footage.

Dave Meyer:
No, sorry. I’m just laughing because this is just bringing up my childhood. My dad did this where he converted a sunroom to my bedroom. I just think he skipped the insulation and adding heat part because it was just freezing my entire life. And this was in New York. I was just always cold. There was never heat. I think he might’ve missed that critical step.

Henry Washington:
Yes. Yes. Sunrooms, we have made a lot of money by converting sunrooms to heated and cooled square footage. And they’re easy properties to find. It’s typically called out on the MLS listings that they have those features. And so you can literally search for them. A lot of them are not heated and cooled. And yes, you can look for properties with basement units. And Dave is absolutely right. When you’re looking at properties with basements, you want to make sure you check that ceiling height and check the egress size of the windows because you want to be able to legally get somebody in and out of that window in the case of an emergency for it to be counted as an actual bedroom. And then you can also look at properties with single car garages because properties with single car garages give you the option. You can convert those single car garages to bedrooms.
But when you’re looking for that, you want to make sure you check the competing properties in that neighborhood because you don’t want to be the only house with a converted garage. You want to make sure that that is something that is happening within the neighborhood because if you’re the only one, then your desirability goes down.

Dave Meyer:
My personal favorite these days that I’ve been looking for, and I’ve done this in the past too, is I love a basement that is the ceiling height that has a separate entrance.

Henry Washington:
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Dave Meyer:
Especially now with all the upzoning that’s going on in areas, you could turn places into second units. Check the zoning, but the upside of adding a whole nother unit
Is just enormous. And yeah, we’ve sort of gone on a tangent here. We started with five grand. Now we’re just talking about the best value. That’s 30 grand, 40 grand, something like that. But a whole unit, I mean, that’s going to pay for itself in a year or two. That’s an incredible return on your investment. So that’s something I definitely look for. All right. Those were highlights from our top episodes of 2025. I hope you all enjoyed revisiting these great episodes as much as I did. I hope you are all enjoying the holiday season as well with your friends and family. We will be back in the new year with brand new episodes starting on January 2nd. I’ll see you then.