Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli. Well, I wanted to grab one of my Ask Marco questions, and someone wrote in and asked me, what was your first ever real estate deal? And interestingly enough, I get asked this question from time to time. In fact, in the last two weeks, I've probably been asked three times. So I thought, well, I might as well just answer it as one of my Ask Marco episodes.

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So, short story, long, my first deal was when I was about 18 years old. I actually knew around the age of 18 that I wanted to get involved in entrepreneurship, have a business, and invest in real estate. And at the time, I thought real estate was the way to go because it was what a lot of wealthy people who I noticed around me from time to time had and held.

And I know that in the community that I grew up in, which was made up of a lot of Italians, they were really bullish, if you will, but pro real estate, they all thought that real estate was the way to create wealth. And later in life, I learned that it's not just a great way to create wealth, but a good way to actually preserve your wealth. So I set out to make my first real estate investment. Now, fortunately, I had a really good paying job at a grocery store at the time, so I was able to save up a down payment while I was working there. And then when I became an adult, I was able to qualify for mortgage financing through the credit union attached to the grocery store chain that I worked at. So it was convenient in the sense that I was already an employee, had credit, and had the ability to borrow through the credit unions attached to the place of employment I was working at.

So I looked around and I found myself a nice end unit town home unit, and it was a pretty decent property. It needed some work. It wasn't dilapidated or distressed or anything like that. It just needed a fair amount of updating. So my uncle at the time was a carpenter, so he was pretty handy with tools. He knew how to do renovations from cabinets to countertops to flooring, and you name it. So I essentially hired him to help me. He gave me a good deal in renovating this town home unit that I had purchased in the northeast quadrant of the city I grew up in. And it wasn't a very expensive property. Now, this was so long ago, we're talking decades ago that I don't remember the exact numbers. So obviously I don't have that property today. In fact, I sold it a long, long time ago.

But I do remember that it was relatively speaking, affordable just because of the area it was in. It was what I would call maybe a BB minus type of neighborhood. So it was, it wasn't expensive, it was affordable. It was probably a mixed class neighborhood with white and blue collar workers. And it was a somewhere between a middle to lower middle income type of area. So this town home unit was under a hundred thousand dollars. I I don't remember the exact number, but I know that it was priced right and that it would rent in this area for enough to cover all the expenses and leave something left over for cash flow. So I did my analysis, I ran the numbers. I made sure that I could cover all my expenses with this particular property. Well, I acquired the property, I did the renovation to the property, and then back then there was no internet.

So for me to lease this property, I literally had to put a sign in the lawn and print flyers and run an ad in the newspaper. And so that is what I did in order to attract potential tenants. So ultimately, some people came through and I didn't know exactly what I was doing as far as screening tenants. I could tell you it would've been a lot different back then than it what it is today. But I had them fill out a simple one page application form...