How does a teacher with a LOW salary achieve financial freedom, let alone invest in real estate? Surprisingly, it’s not as hard as you think, and if you repeat the strategy from today’s show, you could reach financial freedom much sooner than you’d planned. In this episode, we’re talking to Corby Goade, who, not too long ago, was a teacher making just $17,000 per year at the start of his career. So, how did he begin building wealth and replace his AND his wife’s income?
After fixing up an outdated house he bought after college, Corby was shocked by how much equity he had made. With some basic painting, new flooring, and simple upgrades, Corby made twice as much in equity as he did teaching. From there, a rinse-and-repeat-type strategy formed as Corby slowly began buying rental properties whenever he could, even with his tiny teacher’s salary.
Fast forward to today, and Corby and his wife are financially free, running multiple businesses and living life on their terms. They still own that first rental, even though Corby did “everything wrong” (his words), and his first tenant almost destroyed the property. Still an active investor, Corby says that deals just like his first one are on the market NOW, even in 2024. He shares his exact buy box you can use TODAY to find properties like this, walk into equity, and achieve financial freedom just like he did.
Dave: It’s very common these days to hear people say that you can no longer find cashflow or you can’t buy deals on the MLS and make them pencil. And this is particularly true when people start talking about some more expensive markets. But I’m curious if that’s actually true because I’ve spoken to a lot of investors who say that they are still buying in this market, even in more expensive areas of the country. And so today we’re actually going to do a deep dive into how you can absolutely still make deals pencil, and it’s not using some fancy new creative tactic. It’s using the same old fundamentals that have always worked for real estate investors.
Hey everyone, this is Dave. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Today we’re talking to a super cool, very interesting, fun investor named Corby Goad, who is operating out of Boise, Idaho. He has been investing for a couple of decades now, but he left his W2 job recently. He actually rebuilt his entire career around real estate, not just investing, but also by building real estate services businesses. And we’re going to talk to Corby about a bunch of things, first and foremost, about market cycles and how he’s adapted, his tactics, his strategy, his portfolio being through a lot of different types of market conditions. We’ll also talk to him about the Boise housing market, and we’re going to get into a really great conversation about how to build a buy box that works even in this high interest rate confusing economic climate. Let’s bring on Corby Corby, welcome to the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. It’s so good to have you here. Thanks for joining us.
Corby: Thank you for having me. This has been a dream of mine for many years, so I’m honored to be here. Thanks so much.
Dave: I love hearing that we’re making dreams come true. Absolutely. Well, I’m eager for this conversation, so I’d love to just start by having you tell us about how you first learned about real estate investing and why you decided to pursue it.
Corby: Well, I’m older than probably most of your audience, and back in the day when I was in college, I was studying to be a teacher. And as you guys all know, teachers aren’t known for raking in a ton of money. And so I was trying to think of side gigs that I could do in the summer and that sort of thing.
Dave: You sold out, man, just trying to be a teacher.
Corby: It’s unfortunate, but so I don’t know how many people remember, but back in the day there was basically a wholesale guru, like the original one named Carlton Sheets. And he used to do these late night infomercials selling a kit to go out and learn how to wholesale properties. And I was so broke, I didn’t actually buy it. I went to the library and rented it, and it just kind of planted a seed. I never actually wholesale properties, but it started my mind thinking about real estate. And without into too much detail, when I was in college, I was working full-time, putting myself through school, and I ended up buying a starter home with an FHA loan. And one of my buddies moved in, so I was house hacking and he was paying me rent and he was handier than I was. And so over the year that he lived there, on the weekends we’d put in some tile or we paint a room. And after a year, my lender came back to me and asked if I was interested in getting a heloc. And I didn’t know what that was. He informed me, I filled out an application and they sent an appraiser back out. And the bottom line is, in that year, messing around with my buddy at the house, I had made double the equity that I did teaching full time. Wow. And a light went off for me, and I just thought, what if I could replicate this two times or five times that it would create all kinds of opportunities for me. And so that was the first introduction I had to real estate being something that I thought I could do.
Dave: Very cool. Well, congratulations on that. There are a couple parts of your story that I do want to dig into this. So tell me about this. What was his name? Carlton Sheets. I’ve never heard original sort of late night guru. You went to the library. How much was it, by the way? I’m curious. Do you remember what the course cost?
Corby: It was tapes you would order. I don’t think they were even CDs. That’s how old I am. I think you had order tapes. Tapes, yes. It was hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars. Far more than I could have imagined having for something like that.
Dave: But something in there must have appealed to you even though you didn’t wind up wholesaling. What about that sort of education, even though it was very expensive, sort of made you think that real estate was worthwhile?
Corby: Well, it just was the idea that a lot of the gurus do now. He was selling the idea that anybody could go out and buy a property for less than market value and turn around and sell it for more. And he made it seem really attainable. And obviously as we know, BiggerPockets exist because there are more challenges than just knocking on somebody’s door and buying their property and turning around and making a hundred grand. But it just gave me that idea that this is something that anybody could do and just kind of got my mind thinking about it. And even when I was younger, I always just loved real estate and walking through open houses and just imagining doing projects. I didn’t have any skills or knowledge, but the idea of it was really appealing to me. And so that was something I just continued to explore.
Dave: And do you think any of the education in that high priced course actually made you more successful, or were you able to learn what you needed to learn on your own or through actual just getting in there and doing things?
Corby: Honestly, I don’t think I learned anything from listening to those tapes, but it’s like anything else. It’s like you said about taking action and listening to those tapes or listening to the BiggerPockets podcasts or getting all the forms or reading books. It keeps that fresh in your mind and it kind of keeps the dream alive and the idea that you can go out and do these things forefront. And so I think that’s what it did for me is that it wasn’t just an idea that popped in my head and then I never thought about it again, engaging in those types of things keeps it fresh in your mind and creates some creative thinking around those concepts, I think.
Dave: Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like your first deal went extremely well. How did you wind up landing that first deal? Were you teaching then or were you still studying? When
Corby: I bought the house, I was still studying and I graduated a few months after and got a teaching job. And so it was kind of both when I was there. I’m a big proponent for people going out and just taking action. And this was a property on the MLS. It was a fixer, it was just a cosmetic fixer. I didn’t have any business getting into something heavy, but it needed paint and flooring and things that anybody could do. And so I wasn’t thinking of it as an investment. I just thought it was a house I could afford that I could make nice on my own. And I still have that house today. And that one house that I bought on the MLS with an FHA loan with basically no money to my name has probably bought me five or six other properties
Dave: By refinancing,
Corby: Just pulling the equity out and moving it to another spot. It was a teacher I never made. I don’t think I had more than $3,000 to my name for several years, but I was able to move that equity around.
Dave: That’s incredible. Well, let’s talk about how you did that because where we left off in your first deal, you made double your salary on that first deal and thought, man, if I did this a couple times, I could really improve my financial situation. So what’d you do next?
Corby: So my wife and I, she was my girlfriend at the time, we got engaged and we started looking for a house for ourselves. And she had inherited some money previously and used that as a down payment for her house. Her parents cosigned for her and they put the house on the market. And because of this idea that was planted in my head about investing in real estate, and this was 20, I don’t know, 23 years ago when we went to move into our new house, my wife asked, well, when are you putting your house on the market? And I just said, I think I’m just going to try to rent it out. And she was very unhappy with that idea Dave: Why
Corby: She didn’t like the idea. I think a lot of BiggerPockets listeners and readers struggle with this in their relationships too. She did not like the idea of having an extra mortgage. What if it was vacant for a month? What if the roof needs replacing? And we were both teachers and our first salaries were right in the $17,000 range. If there was a catastrophic issue, there was not cash in the bank to jump on that. And so I mean, she had some legitimate concerns, but a lot of people who are getting into real estate and that are coming to BiggerPockets for education are kind of in that same boat, and you have to take on a little bit of risk and it is going to be a little bit scary. And our first few deals were like that.
Dave: But you did it, so you rented it out, right? I guess it turned out just fine. But I totally understand the concerns, especially if you’re uninitiated. There are a lot of questions, those are totally legitimate questions. But it sounds like you convinced her you knew what you were doing.
Corby: Oh, no, I did not. I did not convince her I knew what I was doing.
Dave: Are you 23 years later, you’re still working on that?
Corby: Well, no, she’s come around. But one of the things that’s most interesting that I hope gives a little bit inspiration to people listening to this podcast is that I did everything wrong. And my wife was very clear about the fact that I was doing things wrong. I mean, she was a great partner, she was encouraging me, but I’m more of a jump in and make things happen kind of person. And she’s a process person. And as a landlord, I was not screening people properly. I was doing all the repairs myself. I was going over knocking on the door and asking for rent increases and just making things as difficult for myself as possible. And the first tenant that I screened, honestly, she was there for three years. She was on section eight. She destroyed the house, destroyed the house. And so she was there for three years. And when it was done, we had to go in and do a full renovation. And really the conversation that I had with my wife was, she said, you’ve been a terrible property manager. You’ve done everything wrong all along the way. And somehow we still made money. Somehow it’s been okay. We had enough money to renovate the house, our mortgage had been paid for. And so that honestly, ironically, that’s when she came on board. She said, if I think that if I help out by creating processes behind what we’re doing and start coming up with some plans to help scale, that we could actually make a run at this thing. Because if we can still make money doing everything wrong, then doing it right. Got to be a lot better than that.
Dave: I love that. I say this on the show a lot that I think I’d love to plan so that even if things go wrong, I still make money. I’m just a conservative investor in that way because I know I’m going to screw up. It’s impossible to get everything exactly right. And it’s probably the most common advice I give to people who ask me about deal analysis or how to pick a market. It’s just like if you’re counting on everything going, that’s not a good business plan. You need a lot of wiggle room in there. And it sounds like you used up some of that wiggle room in the early years, but it still came out ahead, which is great. Yeah. All right. I am loving this conversation, but we do have to take a quick break for our sponsors, but we’ll be back with more from Corbe, God right after this. Welcome back investors. I’m here with Corbe God about how he got started in real estate while working full-time as a teacher I should add, and how he’s making deals work today. So then did you keep doing buy and hold rentals after that first one?
Corby: Yeah, actually, the next few deals we did were just fixer uppers that we found on the MLS that we bought. And she and I went in and did what we could and we brought in contractors to help out with the rest. And we essentially did burrs before Burr was a thing, and we’d put tenants in there and let them pay the bills and just kind of kick back. And over time we’d raise the rents and we were making two or 300 bucks here and there. A lot of times they were breakeven the first year and they just got better and better over time. But we did three or four of those over the course of five or six years there at the beginning. Oh
Dave: Wow. That’s a pretty heavy look. And you were both working full-time at that point, right?
Corby: Yep. Yes, we were.
Dave: And was there a point when you went into real estate?
Corby: Yeah, after those first few deals is when the recession hit in 2008. And so being teachers who didn’t make a bunch of money, and we were upside down in all of our properties at that point because everything in our market had lost probably 40% of its value. Oh, wow. And so we just kept our heads down. Rents didn’t really suffer much here, so we continued to rent our places out and they paid for themselves. And then when things started coming back in our market is when we really started getting serious about getting back into investing and making a career out of it.
Dave: Tell me more about what it was like during that time, because I think a lot of newer investors don’t know about what it was like to live through, myself included. I started investing in 2010, so I didn’t live through 2008. But was there any point where you just thought about selling, closing up shop, just giving up and doing something else?
Corby: No, partly because of ignorance probably. But also, we were negative equity in almost all of our properties, and I wasn’t interested in destroying our credit because I knew I was going to need that if we were going to take a run at it. When equity started coming back and all of my friends thought I was crazy, and all of our family thought we were crazy because we were underwater on everything we had. We had friends that were voluntarily doing short sales and destroying their credit, giving their properties back to the bank just because they had negative equity, not necessarily because they couldn’t afford it. And I mean, that was happening everywhere. And my wife and I just talked and we decided that the houses were paying for themselves and we were confident that our market was going to come back and be strong. And so we just put our heads down and wrote it out. We kept tenants in there and did our best to take good care of them, and it came back with a vengeance, and it’s been gangbusters ever since then. That’s
Dave: Such a good point. I think something that people often overlook is that even in the relatively unusual scenario where housing prices do go down and you are underwater, that is a relatively unlikely thing in US history, the great financial crisis being a very big caveat to that. But even when that happens, if you keep paying your mortgage, you don’t have to sell. And I think that’s why as real estate investors, time is really always on our side. If you have cashflow, if you have appropriate cash reserves and you can withstand some of these difficult times like what Corby and his wife went through, you don’t need to sell at a loss. You could just keep doing what you’re doing, generating the cashflow and have it be a paper loss where in theory, your property is lost value, but you don’t actually realize those losses until you go on and sell. So I commend you for having the foresight and the guts to sort of stick with it. How long did it take for the market to rebound? Well, this was in Boise, right?
Corby: Yeah, yeah. Or in Boise. It was about five years, probably between 2008 and about 2013 where things came about to the point where they were in 2007. But once it came back, our market, I’m sure some of the listeners have probably heard of Boise before
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