Deal management for real estate

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this is real estate rookie episode 349ers my name is Ashley care and I'm here with my co-host Tony J Robinson and welcome to the real estate rookie podcast where every week twice a week we bring you the inspiration motivation and stories you need to hear to Kickstart your investing journey and sometimes we bring you data and tools and tips and that is what today's episode is all about so we've got an amazing guest Ariel herera and she's a data science by day real estate investor by night and she's going to give you some really cool tips and tricks about using data to be a better real estate investor all I want to say is happy holidays and this is our present to you from Ariel she is going to give you guys so much information that you are going to want to just sit down and start implementing what she is talking about to accelerate ate your business this was also a Christmas present to Tony if you are watching this on YouTube you will see Tony all smiles and distractions as he tries out every tool that uh she will suggest today yeah at one point you'll you'll hear my brows my browser kind of Crash because I've got so many tabs open from all the tools that she she's rattling off um but I want to give a shout out to someone that love to say five star review on Apple podcast goes by the username of Hammond's fam and uh says a fountain of information every week I've deep dived into real estate investing these past three years and I've been listening for years and this podcast always has great information that I can leverage in my life and in my real estate Journey so Hammond fam we appreciate you for supporting the podcast and listen for all of our rookies that are in the community that haven't yet left us an honest rating and review please do it'll take you two minutes at most but your review helps us reach more people and the more folks we can reach the more folks we can help and that is what we're all about here at the Ricky podcast it will also be your Christmas gift to us so you can go ahead and write that into your uh your review as to Merry Christmas or happy Hanukkah whatever you are celebrating this season um in there for that we would love that so let's welcome Ariel into the show and get right into it Ariel I want to start off with talking about your Epiphany that you had sitting on a bus can you tell us about that yes so about four or five years ago as I started real estate um my real estate journey I was commuting in and out of New York City for my day job and one day as I was sitting on the bus around 6:00 a.m. looking at the New York City skyline I realized I did not want to do this for the rest of my life even though I achieved what my parents wanted which was to go to good school get a good job I was unhappy and the reason being is that the time taken away from the commu working full-time I wasn't able to be with my family as often and when I was I wasn't always present so with that I started to research what are the ways I can get out of the rat race right and there were three things that kept popping up uh one start an Amazon business two daytime stock trading and three real estate so real estate was the one that spoke to me the most uh so I dive deep into about 9 months of research listening to podcasts reading books and watching YouTube videos with that there was one consistent theme that I got from Real Estate was that there are people who have done this for hundreds of years with less resources than I have less time less money so I thought if they could do it why can't I and that's when I decided to make my journey into going into my first house hack in New Jersey and at that stage as I was analyzing my own deals I realized oh my God the data is everywhere it's the spit it's hard to actually analyze a deal quickly and that's how I got my journey into real estate and technology so tell us about your background in Tech uh give us a little bit more and how you've actually progressed that into incorporating it with your real estate sure so my real estate uh my technology Journey kind of uh found me in that I graduated at Rucker University in business management never thought I'd be a programmer but coming out of school as I was in my first job I took a course that another employee was hosting in the middle of the day and really was just to get out of work for an hour but in that process I learned that uh VBA a coding language for Excel uh can help automate tasks that you do every day in Excel like could be lookup or copying and pasting information and I was mind- blown I was like oh my God this task that takes me two hours a day I could just code it and automate it within seconds sign me up so from there started my journey in a data science space and as I started to analyze my own deals I started to utilize uh web scraping apis which I could get into uh to be able to leverage data to really understand the properties that I'm evaluating and analyzing them before we get into more of your backstory and hearing about your investing Journey we are going to take a short break so we've talked a little bit about the The Epiphany that led you into real estate investing and then you you had the shift in your W2 job that led you to data science but before we go too far right like um maybe in layman's terms right it talked to me like I'm a I'm a fifth grader what exactly is data science and how do you think that's helped you on your real estate Journey or just like you're talking to me yeah sure so the exciting thing is that data is all around us it's basically information so say for a property some data you might be familiar with is the size of a home if it's a single family number of bedrooms number of bathrooms for example so you may want to look at this data say on a spreadsheet where you have all that information now you could probably analyze all properties in say New York City within a given spreadsheet but what if you want to do that across all properties in the US a spreadsheet is not going to handle that and that's where data science comes in we look to derive insights from data usually large scale of data and to do that we use programming languages like python to do so and ultimately create charts visualizations and models to help understand uh characteristics about the data and what can happen in the future as well I want to I want to lean into that just a little bit more right um because I think for a lot of new investors is that when they're starting out one of the biggest questions they have to ask themselves is what city do I want to invest in right it's a big question that that a lot of people just honestly never even answer because they're so overwhelmed there's 19,000 cities across United States and trying to whittle that list down to something that makes sense for Tony or for Ariel for Ashley it's hard sometimes so how did you how did you leverage your W2 experience of of data science and taking that list of 19,000 down to a few select cities of M sense for you to invest into yeah so I looked at economic factors such as job growth population growth unemployment rate median household income and some more to analyze a particular area to see if it's improving or if it's on the decline and where I got those metrics from was from government sources like the US Census Bureau of Labor Statistics and was able to aggregate that across cities to see it in one single view within a spreadsheet and then be able to actually draw up charts and analyze which of these were ranking towards the top in their own categories and start to eliminate cities do you think that a new investor starting out needs to be an expert in data science to analyze a market or a deal not at all especially with tools today like chat GPT that helps to Aggregate and lift up information you don't need to learn how to code you can just know how to use the right tools at the right time to answer the specific questions um there's a lot of free tools like for example you could use redin and redin has data section where you could download information on a particular Market understand if it's trending upwards downwards in terms of pricing or if it's um price drops for example and that can help to analyze a market without using code at all can you give us an example of what you would actually type into chat GPT like say you're looking at Buffalo New York and just give us an example what you would say and type in there to get information back what person in their right mind would live in a city where it's negative - 20 de everyone that's what I what's happened in J GPT about Buffalo I literally have two blankets on my lap right now I'm freezing but yes you could use uh chat GPT and ask Buffalo New York new development and growth and from there you'd get a synopsis of probably population growth as well as job growth and the new development part I love to put into place because it will tell you if there's specific areas where there's new construction coming um maybe there's new luxury apartments in the area and that could also signal growth um as well that's very interesting uh a couple other resources that I've used before were um bright investor and neighborhood Scout to actually collect data too but before that I was searching every separate single website myself you know going to crime mapping going to the JIS County uh Maps mapping software every little you know place I could find data from but that is very time consuming um so I appreciate you giving us some insight on that of how to actually uh accelerate getting all of that information together yeah chat GPT they've they've been like making some updates to to their tool as well so it's like 20 bucks a month for like their pro version or whatever it is um and now like you can upload data sets uh to chat GPT and it'll like analyze it for you it'll like automatically browse the web for you now as well so like the tools gotten really really cool in terms of like the information it can it can pull in quickly so I think for a lot of rickes that are doing that initial research using a tool like chat GPT to say like hey what are some some markets across the country that have you know low crime scores and good population growth and that'll at least give you a good starting spot so man like the the way these tools are progressing it's pretty crazy yeah it is at a rapid pace and actually my secret is actually not chat GPT exactly but using Bard Google B it's chat PT equivalent um but I find it a little bit more Superior and it also pulls in data from like Google Maps and the whole Google sweet products so that's actually my favorite one that I use and it's free oh awesome thank you for sharing yeah we need to do like a whole episode on just like all the AI tools that are out there I haven't tried Bard yet Ashley have you no I haven't yeah me neither and you said it's free like yeah it's free you just activate it on your Google account and you could start typing away well we know what Tony's doing the rest of the day holding a baby yeah part playing with some AI tools um well so let's let's go back to your journey though Ariel so you you do all this this data kind of collection um and where where were you living at the time when you first started you said in New Jersey yes in New Jersey gotcha okay you know a somewhat more expensive market right um New Jersey New York California all these places are a little bit more expensive so do you decide to initially invest in Jersey and if so what data did you see that kind of supported that decision yeah so there are three things I was looking into which was one first how am I going to invest what's going to be my strategy and New Jersey being an expensive Market putting 20% down and a 300K home so $60,000 down wasn't viable for me at the time so I started to realized that the strategy I could take was one where I would live in the property first and then rent it out after a year so owner occupying it so once I understood my strategy The Next Step was where was I going to invest in New Jersey even though it's a small state there's a lot of areas you could find so I wanted to do a 50 to one minute 50 minute to 1 hour commute into New York City and there were two options there train or bus bus can have traffic so I chose train I started to look at different train lines and what train stations and cities were were near those train lines um North Jersey was too expensive so that was xed out so the wear ended up becoming on the east coast of New Jersey there were three towns in particular Woodbridge South Amboy mwan that were most interesting and the last piece there was well what am I going to invest in and I really wanted to invest in a duplex but again didn't have the capital to fund that so I decided on a single family home but I used uh data to be able to analyze properties that had an additional bedroom opportunity how did you do that yeah yeah I mean when I think of it I see like okay I'm analyzing a Zillow photo being like no could I turn that ruin into an extra one like trying to figure out what the layout is just from the photos if you know somebody on my team going to look at it or you know on the MLS so please tell us more about that yeah so my agent that I used at the time was one of my friends and I said Jeremy this is getting difficult to go through Zillow property after property could you send me just a list of the properties in a spreadsheet from your view in the MLS so he sent me that and what I was looking for were properties that the size so the square footage was larger than the number of bedrooms to see if there was maybe a dining room or some extra space maybe an office snook that I can transfer into a bedroom in the future so with that I did like a quick calculation of square footage divided by bedrooms and found this one property that was about 1300 ft with two bedrooms which in the area I was targeting I knew there could be possibly a third bedroom in there so we went to visit the property and we saw the master bedroom was facing the street which is kind of unusual and when we went upstairs to it we saw that there were two closets on each end two windows and it looked as if it had been two separate rooms at the time and looking back at court records it actually was so that was what initiated me to put an offer and ultimately go through with that property wait I just I we got to we got to pause there for a second that is like such a ninja trick I've never heard of anyone doing that before like hey I'm going to I'm going to get an export of all of the properties and then just put a little formula in Excel that compares the bedroom count to the square footage and then basically you were just looking for properties that had like a really good ratio between square footage and and bedroom count that is awesome exactly simple but effective yeah because I mean like especially now like given where we're at kind of like in the interest rate environment like the it's getting harder to find good deals so you've got to get more maybe creative on the front end to find those deals that have opportunity to uh maybe add some additional value and what you just described is like that's something that every single person listening right now can do is just ask their agent for an export and then search and filter and do that little that that little trick that was cool I really like that sorry um the the the nerd in me is is geeking out over that one that was School usually you'll hear people talk about you know like scrubbing the detail of the listing the description and looking for you know office or bonus room or something like that to look for an additional bedroom but yeah that is great Insight comparing the square footage to the actual uh bedroom count yeah multiple ways to go about it yeah you find this property and then tell us what happens next yeah so once we signed to the property next thing was actually house hacking it and what that meant was having other people live in the property alongside myself so it was my partner uh him and I as well as a family member so my mortgage of $1,800 I was only paying 600 of it and that really helped to propel me to save more money for my next deal I was just going to add some clarification there because I think a lot of times when people hear the phrase house hack they immediately think like small multif family where I've got to go out and get a fourplex or a Triplex or a duplex but you can house hack in a single family home and I don't remember which episode it was we interviewed Craig kop and you know he he authored the book on house hacking for Bigger Pockets and he said one of his first house hacks it was a single family home I think um but he was like renting out every room in the house and like he was sleeping on the couch right isn't that what he said Ash like he he was renting out every room and he was sleeping on the couch so even if you go out and you buy maybe a big single family home even if you're only one person you can still house hack that so I L that you took that approach once you realize the small multi family wasn't necessarily in your price range yeah 100% And honestly at first I was nervous about living with boys I was like oh my God this is going to be like a PIX die every day but it wasn't at all it worked out very well but you know what there's no drama though yes exactly just sports playing in the background all day that's it okay so after you got this uh first property and your house hacking is this where you got bit by the real estate bug yes it was so I wanted to continue investing I wanted to live in the property for a full year though so I started to look at other um investment opportunities that would be sold ful an investment where I put 20% down and unfortunately New Jersey being expensive I started to look out of state instead and particularly looked at Detroit Michigan uh with the affordability for properties being lower um as well I had someone in my network who had invested there and kind of leveraged their knowledge but what was really exciting there is I started to now get more uh in-depth with my data analytics so I didn't feel as comfortable at that stage asking the agent for just a download of the data um because now I'm looking at like a wider scope since the chit's pretty large so with that I actually use web scraping and web scraping is copying information from the web like as if you were going to Zillow and copying down the property address bedrooms bathrooms but instead of doing that manually you could do it automatically so I was copying that information down and I started to start I started to get a little bit uh down on myself because the duplexes were a little bit out of my price range about 150 160 and I was looking to spend around 130 so I start to look at single family homes and I put them up in a chart I wanted to see the distribution so the characteristics about the data of the properties to see how many were three bedrooms four bedrooms Etc and I saw there was one single property that was five bedroom two bath single family I'm like okay that's kind of odd so I go to look further into that property at the description and long and behold it says duplex so in the description so the agent actually listed it incorrectly and it was priced about 25k lower than the other duplexes so I was able to make an offer um in that case and get it accepted at a lower rate wait so uh sorry I just I just want to pause to make sure I'm understanding what the scraping process was so uh like how did you scrape all of this this data was it is there like a tool that you're using or like like how do you yeah what are the steps to do that if someone wanted to replicate that sure at that time I was using python to do so so programming language but today it's even easier you could use tools like browse AI for example where you basically screen record how you would manually go about the process what information you want to capture and then it will automatically get that data for you either when there's something new on the web page or if you want to set it like every day every week I'll get that information and put it into a spreadsheet um but at that time I did do it with python and I was able to get the information across the city for all properties listed on Market in a spreadsheet to analyze so Ariel you're saying that this tool browse. like I can sign up for this website go to any website that I want screen record the information I want from that website and this tool using AI machine learning whatever will pull whatever data I want from that webs weite automatically yes exactly and there's many tools similar to it that's crazy so like I could go to Zillow because this is like one of the things I've been thinking about recently and now I'm just like asking you selfishly for myself at this point um but uh we're looking to do more rental Arbitrage and you know part of the issue is like man there there's so many listings for for Rens and like what's a super easy way to kind of compare the uh short-term rental Revenue projections to the long-term rental Revenue projections so that way I can kind of see what that margin is and ideally I only want to reach out to listings that have more margin so could I use browse. to like scrape all of the listings that are currently for rent and then also scrape like the revenue projections from like an airdna and then compare those two things together like could I set it up to do that or am I or am I thinking too too far ahead now yes you could definitely set that up and what's really cool about browse AI is that they have readily available Bots for Zillow as well and I think redin too well I know what I'm doing tonight yeah just to add no code and it takes about anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes to set up I better uh text Daryl to get me an Alani because it's goingon to be a late night I'm just gonna go into a a big deep hole of researching on this and setting this all up so to get started you could do it all without code uh using browse Ai and there's actually videos that I have of tutorials where I take you from beginning all the way to the end of creating these web scraping Bots all on your own uh within 20 minutes to set up make sure you check out the show notes after the episode where we are going to link everything um if you get distracted and go to the show notes now you may miss another amazing link uh that Ariel has for us so make sure you wait until the end but we will put them all in there thanks to our great producers and editors that will catch all of these amazing resources that we are learning here and we know Tony has already uh have them all all the web browsers open of each one making sure he do for get to go through it yeah I just you know I'm just I'm just so surprised that you know Ashley and I live eat and breathe real estate investing and that neither one of us have have heard of this this tool like there there were so many things out there now that make it so much easier for the rookie investor to find their first deal so Ariel thank you so much for like showing these tools to people that otherwise never would have heard of them before I want to say something about that real quick because I think that almost in a sense just like real estate investing is when you're starting out with real estate investing there are so many different strategies so many different ways to make money that it's just like overwhelming with all the options and I almost feel that's how AI is getting today that it's so overwhelming with all of these different things and capabilities that you don't even know where to start or things that are available things like that think about just on this podcast all these things that we have learned like oh my God you're doing what to this mobile home like that's amazing we didn't even know that was a thing like you're still constantly learning so much and being educated of all these different ways that you can be make money and also be efficient and effective at running your business so Ariel let's get back to your story now now that we've got on on these tangents and I I'm sure there's going to be another one that me and Tony are wowed by and need to implement immediately into our business uh so we left off that you were looking into Detroit you um were scrubbing for properties so did you find one yes I did so it was that property that was a five bed two bath um listed as single family but was actually a duplex and was able to get that at a discount of around 25k because of that the discount was 25k or you got the house for 25k oh no the discount that would be I was going to say I mean we have heard of a low Like Houses being cheaper in Detroit but I was saying it's been a long time since we've had anyone say they got a house for 25,000 so you said it was listed as a duplex so did you have to go in and do any work to it or was it truly already a duplex and they just listed it incorrectly yeah truly a duplex I went to the County website just to confirm and it was it was just listed incorrectly by the agent wow that is insane so you you found two killer deals just by finding like little nuances in the data which I think is is super interesting yeah um and then just I guess just one one side question Ariel like a lot of people I think have fear of investing out of state um and even more so people you know Detroit with some investing groups has like a a bad stigma um like were you not nervous at all about investing out of state for your second deal I was nervous and I went in person to get some boots on the ground just to solidify what I saw in the data um because prior to I was looking at niche.com which gives like overviews of neighborhoods and I wanted to find a neighborhood in Detroit that was more so skewed of ownership versus is renters since usually there's pride in ownership maybe the lawn is more upkept uh less trash and there was a neighborhood that I was particularly interested in um baggley District in Detroit and luckily having boots on the ground helped me to uh confirm that's where I wanted to invest let's kind of talk about your confidence in investing out of state how did you build your team there and feel comfortable you know investing at a state because sometimes that is a a barrier of entry for people is that they you know don't know anyone in a market and they don't trust a lot of people what are some of the things that you did to feel comfortable and confident investing out of state yeah I read David Green's book investing out of state and that really helped me because as someone who's uh very methodical being like a data scientist I like to have a checklist of what I'm doing and I felt like that book was like my checklist um in the back of my my mom she was always like I yet why do you why are you doing this why are you investing out of state just sell the property you have sell everything that's always her mindset but at the same time she holds me accountable to follow criteria so she read the book too and she was like David Green said to follow the step as well make sure you you know um talk to your agent about these things your learned her about some other topics so I think like properly screening um my agent my lender meeting them in person as well um really helped me to feel confident and uh yeah be able to invest in Detroit so you're starting to talk about before I rudely interrupted you but you were talking about your your next Market that you decided to focus on yeah so now it's March of 2020 and I've been able to save money by house hacking the property that was currently in um so I have some money saved and then the pandemic happens and a lot of people are moving to remote work um I self officially had already been working remotely twice a week and I was like ah I wanted to keep this secret to myself and now everyone's going to work promote realize how amazing it is and I thought though there could be some opportunity here right cuz like we always hear um if you could invest in 2008 way long ago uh you would be well off today so I thought even though despite this what's going on in the world maybe there's opportunity here so there were two things that I noticed that I liked about working remotely uh one thing was or I guess an epiphany was weather like if I could work anywhere why am I working in C New Jersey where I can't do things for six months out of the Year and sorry Ashley I know you're New York girl um but not my preference so then the second piece was income and my head I was like if I could work anywhere and program anywhere in the world why would I do it in a place where I'm getting income tax if I mov somewhere else I could instantly give myself a bonus of 10 to 20K instantly just by leaving the state so I thought if I'm thinking that other people would think that soon too so April 1st is when my partner and I he and I decided we were going to do whatever it took 8 weeks figure out a market figure out a place to live and rent out our property on our own for the first time that's super exciting so do you want to kind of give us some of the numbers on a couple of your deals sure uh property that I have in Tampa Florida a single family home purchased it for 274k uh put 5% down was able to house hack it so at that time my portion I was putting myself was 550 a month um and when I ultimately rented it out the whole house itself it was at 2500 so my cash flow there was about 700 or so wow that is amazing I'm shocked right now like these are such good deals and the way that you're finding them are it's amazing so what has been your favorite deal so far yeah my favorite deal was probably my my property in Tampa Florida in the seal Heights area so at that time I'd already been living in the Tampa area for about a year um but I wanted to find an upand cominging area so I could really leverage having a house that appreciates and then be able to use that money in the future for maybe a future rental property and I was having difficulty at that stage because it was 2021 people were outbidding one another left and right and you know a lot of people people from the north who were coming with all cash offers so I would be sitting in a meeting I would get like a notification on Zillow new property met my criteria but by the time I analyzed it at night there was already people who saw the property and possibly already outbid me so what I decided to do analytics SLS is I paired my notifications that I got from Zillow with zapier so zapier is a tool that allows you to communicate with different applications and what I would do was every time I got that email I would strip the email take out bedrooms bathroom price and property address I would then take that and then go to an API so a way to get uh data externally for that property Next Step was automatically calculating cash flow through zapier just adding a couple calculations and then uh the last piece there was sending myself a text message if it met my criteria so now as a data scientist I'm sitting in meetings throughout the day and I could just get a notification once the property in my criteria also met my certain cash flow metrics um and it saved me a lot of time down the line you know sometimes we interview guests if you guys are watching this on YouTube you need to to watch Tony's facial expressions I mean so like we we use zapier in different parts of our business but I've I've never thought to use it to help with deal analysis and that's that's so you know you're so close to the problem sometimes you don't realize that the easy solution is staring you in the face and like what you just shared is such a simple solution to to be able to move faster when it comes to deal analysis and a lot of that that highle stuff it is just kind of basic formula right and you know you can kind of go in and do some nuances if you want to but man you know sometimes we interview guests and we end up learning more I think than even our our audience does so I love this conversation that's amazing Ash have have you used zier at all before yeah but literally just like my National Fuel invoice comes into my email it gets filed into my Google Drive that's it more of just like filing stuff that the emails that I get regularly but you use it too right yeah we we use it we use it quite a bit more so on like the marketing side but um but yeah never for like actual deal analysis which yeah that just like unlocks a whole new whole new level here yeah and the exciting part there was it was actually no code to set up pretty easy just using all of zapier's readily available tools yeah and guys like for our rookies that are listening uh hopefully you're not feeling like overwhelmed by some of the the talk that's going on because a lot of what Ariel said is like yeah you don't need to know how to code you can probably watch a couple YouTube videos figure this stuff out she's giv you tools that are literally just click the buttons you want to click and the tools going to do what you want it to do so just having the courage to go out there and start playing around with some of these things I think gets you on the road to using them in the way that that Ariel Ariel kind of has here backtracking quite a bit I don't know if we asked this question up up top but um if you can just kind of set the table for us Ariel how like what is your current port portfol look like today six units and across how many different markets four different markets so New Jersey uh Detroit Tampa and then pel Carman pel Carmen all right about that one yeah so did you do kind of the same market analysis or was this because you want to vacation there tell us a little more about sourcing that deal yeah similar market analysis um kind of thinking okay if everyone could work remotely now and they have the choice to work um say out of the country where would they most likely work uh there's two options like if you're going out of internationally probably Canada or Mexico would be the top since they're still in North America uh Mexico is warmer so I thought more people would move down there and I started to look at cities around major airports so Cancun being one of them I saw P de Caren was a city that's had a lot of growth over the last uh several decades and in particular it was already growing as an expat Hub so I was going into the face Market sorry the Facebook groups and seeing people communicate there about loving living and plyo Ken the low cost of living and some information about investing there too uh so with that I started to sync with multiple different agents to talk about new development condos that I could possibly invest in and I was a bit wary at first because there could be scams uh investing abroad so I read up a lot on that and I made sure I went with a developer that already had completed 18 condo buildings so I knew that there was already backing um and was felt more solidified to go through with that deal how did you finance this deal so I financed the deal initially with a down payment that I had um from a 401k from a job that I changed through but I actually didn't have the rest of the money that I would need uh so the deal was 160 put 60k down but I didn't have the 100 Grand I was like well you know what I'm going to figure it out as I go along uh so it helped me to get creative there were two things that I did uh one all the knowledge that I've had about analyzing a market and list building I put that into courses which helped me to uh raise money for my deal but then the second end was that house that I had in Tampa Florida that appreciated quite a bit if in only a year I was able to get a helck so home equity line of credit on that property to then pay off the rest of the Mexico condo and then you just used money from that condo to pay off your line of credit exactly that's such a great like tool to use is to looking at your other properties leveraging them to purchase another property I think sometimes it's easy to get caught up as to like oh well the cash flow on my duplex if I take a helck out on it it's I my rents won't cover the heac well know you take the cash flow for the rents from your new property and go ahead and pay that off just because the collateral isn't the same doesn't mean that you can't take rent payments to pay off debt that you use to purchase and fund that property that's for another property and then for the for the plate Caron uh property aerial are you short-term renting that long-term medium-term what's the the strategy on that property it's a short-term rental and the plan that if I needed to I could always uh live in the property I'm trying to look out your window right now and see what's the background there not Mexico no it's Tampa Florida so uh just you know you being in Florida uh building out that team that you need to run a short-term rental uh you know in a different country I've never even done that before what steps did you take to find good cleaners good handymen in that local APPA Market yeah luckily there's already a property management company that was synced with the condo building as most investors are taking the same strategy so I did speak with them asked a few questions uh felt comfortable and they've handled that part um on their own and then I've also Airbnb my property in Tampa um I've taken a similar approach of working for property manager and let me just just final question on that piece what what made you go the property manager route even for the Tampa home versus doing it yourself oh I wanted to really do it myself completely just to save cost um but I had to take a step back and reflect and realize like all the things that I'm doing doesn't end up being worth my time to answer uh calls to say like clean a property when I could be like coding and developing Solutions and helping out other people so it had to do uh do a give and take but luckily in that case with the Tampa Florida house I was able to get 15% uh for property management fee which is actually like pretty low for the industry standard since my a friend and I did it at the same time for our properties well thank you so much Ariel yeah so much good information I feel like we keep talk we we just got to keep bringing you back CU I I got so many more questions to ask you about all these once we start actually digging into it we're going to have a lot of questions but we are going to turn to your YouTube channel uh to check those out so make sure you go into our show notes to find Ariel's YouTube channel to learn more uh we do have a rookie reply for you today if anyone would like to submit a question you can go to biggerpockets.com reply and insert a question that we may play on a rookie reply episode or we may ask it to a guest so today's question is from Laurel I'm working towards getting my first property and I'm considering going off Market to really be able to find a property that is a deal I see properties posted on Facebook but because I still have my W2 and work during the day I tend to be too late to get in contact with the sellers and the deals are already under contract by the time I found the listing is there a way to see Properties or be notified when properties are posted to social media thank you yeah so here's where we could use web scraping Bots similar to browse AI as well as appify we can take the link of our Facebook group plug it in and then screen record how we would capture a deal what is the information we want to get from that post possibly the listing price maybe an email we want to take from it and then from there we can have it set up on a daily structure where we get information in a spreadsheet that came from that Facebook group that way we don't have to go in manually every single day to get that or we could even set it up another way where we get automatic notifications every time the page changes based on our parameters um so we could set that up with no code at all be able to read in data from Facebook groups put it into a spreadsheet and have that ready to analyze right away wow that is super cool because I actually spend a lot of time like on Facebook Marketplace I can't I really don't like social media in general but there actually been a lot of great off-market deals posted on Facebook Marketplace and they do get traction so fast um I've been looking at lak houses and a lot of times people list their lake house in the Facebook group of like you know I don't know example Lake Association be neighborly or something like that and it will post it people will post it in there or they'll even say you know we're interested or thinking of selling our property and stuff and they you know the next day it's already sold it's gone I'm I'm just going down the rabbit hole right now of all the tools that that Ariel is sharing with us um so I guess just for my own knowledge so between applify and browse. a which one do you like more I like browse AI more um however if there's like a custom site that you want to scrape say it's a foreclosure website or maybe like something about the County website um probably going the appify way would be easier because you can actually contract out specific Freelancers for more like intricate uh web scraping tasks so they both serve a purpose but a little bit differently man amazing all right let's go to our Ricky exam um so these the three these are the same three questions we ask every single guest I'm getting caught up in my words because I'm so excited from the the tools you're sharing with this but um question number one Ariel what's one actionable thing Ricky should do after listening to your episode number one thing is to be data driven so don't just go into Zillow select a property at random and say I'm going to invest in that um you can use data driven tools that are for free and rily available so we could use Bard Google or chat GPT to ask questions start to narrow down what areas you may be interested to invest in you could also use free resources from Zillow and Redfin they have posts every single month from their data centers on meeting listing price rent prices sales cuts and that can help you to start to analyze where you want to invest and where has more growth versus uh areas that are declining what is one tool now this is going to be hard to narrow down one tool software app or system in your business that you use today so selfishly it would be coffee closers the company that I've codeveloped with two other folks to help find cash flowing deals in upand cominging areas and to tag properties that have opportunity uh so we're able to get information from the MLS and aggregate that data to help pinpoint what is the right deal at this moment to be investing in for our last question for you Ariel where do you plan on being 5 years from now five years from now I hope to be full-time within uh my real estate startup company it's accelerating and we're helping people find deals as well I would like to be financially free where I can help underprivileged communities learn how to program uh so one thing that I've taken away from my 10year part of my careers I've never actually worked with another Dominican data scientist I'm always the only one which has come with some barriers but I would love to be able to help others get into the programming space unlike other careers where you sometimes need to have some wealth to um afford the right degree or have the right Network programming you can just get started um instantly all you need is internet connection you could go to the library and use their computer so as long as you have an interest and curiosity it's a great field to go into and I'd love to help people there well Ariel thank you so much and you have helped a lot of people already on today's episode so thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience and for us to learn about your investing Journey well Ariel thank you so much for joining us on this rookie episode I'm Ashley at wealth from rentals and he's Tony at Tony J Robinson and we'll see you guys for our next episode try so hard cover up your own games nobody see all this time