Chris Miles is joined by Mike Fisher about real estate investing in Illinois.
Mike Fisher is the Founder and CEO of Get CashFlow Today Inc. and MF CashFlow. Starting his career as a builder/contractor, he gained 20+ years of experience building customer relationships, negotiating supplier and subcontractor contracts, and performing hands-on building, renovations, and rehabilitation of homes, apartments, and other commercial structures.
In 2008, he decided to embark on a career in real estate investing, building his own investment portfolio while helping others learn and explore opportunities for developing their own real estate investment strategy.
As a dedicated real estate investor, he has developed his personal portfolio to nearly 90 units and growing strong!
Tune in to learn about his career and the advice he can provide for yours.
Listen to our Podcast:
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Chris Miles (00:08):
Hello! My fellow Ripplers. This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show. A Show that’s for you and about you, those of you that work so hard for your money and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom, that cash flow, that prosperity. Today, not 30 or 40 years from now, but right now! So you have that life that you love, being with those you love, doing whatever the heck you love, right? But so much more than just doing that, so much more than just about yourself. It’s about creating and blessing more lives around you by creating that ripple effect, because that’s what you do as a Rippler. You create a ripple effect with people’s lives, with the gifts and the resources and everything you’ve been blessed with to be able to make the world a better place.
Chris Miles (00:54):
And guys, I’m so proud that I can be a part of that with you. Thank you so much for bingeing and sharing this with others and making this awesome. Like guys, I’ve really been so grateful for how you guys show up. And by the way, I’m grateful the fact that you guys are just real true, genuine people like you are by far the best listeners out there. I might be biased, but I know that’s the case. So I know my next guest may disagree a little bit, but Hey, you know what? We’ll fight it over later. But anyways, quick reminder, check out our website, WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM You got the free E-book on there, Beyond Rice and Beans. You can check out to be able to find some more cash today. And also of course there’s the, all the video blogs that these we got on there from other episodes too. So check those out.
Chris Miles (01:36):
All right. So I got special guest here. So, as you know, I love real estate, right? There’s no secret about that. I know that real estate is not all inclusive. We talk about other things too. We’ve mentioned things like oil and gas before. We’ve mentioned things with, you know, different types of funds and different types of investments. But the one thing, you know, I’ll never teach about very fondly is going to be about the stock market, right? Despite the experience I’ve had there, I don’t like it, but Mike is different. Like Mike actually is all about cash flow. Just like we’re all about in this show too. He’s actually the Founder and CEO of the website. I probably should have gotten it years ago, which is called Get Cashflow Today, Inc. He’s also the owner of MF Cashflow.
Chris Miles (02:16):
He started out as a Building Contractor. We’ll talk about that, where he had 20 experiences building customer relations and negotiating supplier and contracts and things like that. And being hands-on and dealing with these homes. Well, after a while he got burned out and he said, Hey, I’m going to go the real estate investment route and was able to do that from self-creating the freedom for himself, building his own turnkey real estate portfolio, where he’s got his own properties and now even offers them to other people as well. So, excited to have them out here from Good old out, just out near Chicago. But Hey! Mike, welcome to our show.
Mike Fisher (02:48):
Yeah!, Dude. Thank you! Thank you! I love it, man. You’re calling your viewers Ripplers man.
Chris Miles (02:55):
That’s right. They were ripped. That’s all I can say. You know, like.
Mike Fisher (02:59):
Jacked up Ripplers, man.
Chris Miles (03:02):
That’s right, man. So tell us more about you. Like, honestly you started in construction, but what led you down this path of real estate investing?
Mike Fisher (03:10):
Yeah, so you know, I’ve been self-employed now for 29 years and you know, just doing a lot of remodeling and new construction and went through a few waves, you know real estate waves and 2003, I was like, you know what? Like, man, my body’s not going to sustain physically like this for a long time. Because I’m literally beating it up. Carrying drywall and plywood and shingles and ladders and compressors. I mean it says crunch into the bones, the back, the bit, I mean, I was going to the chiropractor two or three times a week just getting adjusted and stuff and they’re like, dude, you gotta make it. You gotta figure something out here, you know, stretch, stretch, stretch.
Mike Fisher (03:56):
So I was like, you know what? I’m going to just buy one house a year and I can manage it myself. I could do the maintenance on it. It’ll be easy. This will be my long-term goal here. You know, this is my way of getting out, you know, I just, that was my vision back in 2003, like, Oh, you know, Hey one a year. So I did, I bought one in 2003, it was a house with a house in the back. So it was not a bad start, started out pretty quick. 2004, I skipped not up to a very fast start, but I had two with the first year, 2005 bought another one, now I’m buying all these in A-class communities. So, and then 2006 went through a divorce and things kinda got crazy and I couldn’t do much. So I was just doing some flips again out in A-class communities and 2007, 2008, and even adding a few more to my portfolio, still all in the A-class communities.
Mike Fisher (05:00):
And I think I had like five now in 2009 and just doing some flips, really trying to really focus on homes around my area. Well, 2009 I educated myself and I said, you know what? I, there’s a huge opportunity about 15 miles East of me. And I’m like, man, I could buy these homes for, you know, 20, $30,000, $40,000 at that time 40,000 would have been a lot, but like, and then just put another, you know, fix them up. Cause that’s my background. I can fix them up, take my guys, put them over there and fix them up and put them into my portfolio and I’d be paying cash for it, go into the bank and do like five at a time or something, pull out all the equity and go out and do it again and again and again and again, and I got to the point to where I’m building up my own portfolio and there’s so much inventory out there.
Mike Fisher (05:55):
I’m like, man, I could be like selling these properties off to investors and they can be cash flowing.
Chris Miles (06:02):
Right.
Mike Fisher (06:03):
Man, I’m helping them. And I’m moving product. I’m making a difference in the neighborhood. I’m helping the investor out. I’m making some money, of course. And I’m providing housing for people like, you know, clean, safe, affordable housing for people. And I’m like, this is awesome. So of course I have to also manage their properties and manage my own properties. So I went to a mastermind out in LA and I was just really, it was just me and a Part-time Assistant. And from there I he said, look, he gave me, I talked to him for like 20 minutes and it was a three day mastermind. I don’t know what the hell was said in the three days, but I could tell you what was said in the 20 minutes prior to even meeting in that mastermind, like the group.
Mike Fisher (06:50):
Cause it was, I could have left at that point and came home and bam! And I just did what he said to do and I’ve just, I’ve never looked back. I just took off and today we’re managing 300 and I think it’s 368 properties. I’ve got my own portfolio that my team manages we’re cranking up. We’re building up right now to go to over 600 properties. So yeah, I mean, it’s just, it’s been a, it’s not a great ride. I love it. You know, I love to be able to live fully love openly and make a difference, you know, and, and just help people, man. It’s just so great. And it came to a point where you know, property management became more of a priority for me than building my own portfolio is the value of the homes went up and the rents kind of stayed level there.
Mike Fisher (07:39):
So right now we’re, as far as adding to my portfolio, I’m not too anxious about adding to it. But however, we do have properties that are investors want to sell off, because they want to get into something else. Maybe it’s oil or something. You know, they’ve gotten the next new wave and they’re like, out of real estate and into oil or something, even though it was, but yeah. So that’s it, that’s how I got into it.
Chris Miles (08:02):
That’s awesome. And in your Illinois, which I know like Illinois is best way to describe it. I mean, it’s not as bad as inside Chicago. Chicago’s like, you know, I call it the big HOA, right? It’s so hard to do real estate, but I know guys, like you have figured that out. Like, what have you done to maneuver that? you know.
Mike Fisher (08:21):
You know, there’s a lot of little, it’s not any one thing. It’s a lot of little things, right? Because you have to know just, you have to know what to say, what when to do it, who to talk to. It’s not what you know, it’s who, you know, also it’s just, there’s so many little key factors there, especially in this business, in real estate business, if you’re an investor and say 80% of our investors are in the West Coast and I’ve not even met probably 90% of those, I’ve never even met. I just talk to them over the phone build a relationship. And you know, a lot of them never even seen the house, man. So, but like they’re so far away, they were managing their properties and that is the key thing to this business. If you don’t have amazing property management in place, it’s not a matter of if you fail, it’s a matter of when you’ll fail and when you fail, you’re going to be like what?
Mike Fisher (09:19):
Like going into real estate investing that was stupid. I lost 10 grand. I lost 20 grand. Oh, that’s stupid. Well, the fact is you didn’t have the right property manager in place.
Chris Miles (09:29):
Right. Especially when you’re going do it yourself or too. I’ve still got yourself around that problem as well.
Mike Fisher (09:35):
Yeah. If you want to self-manage and grow, you’re not going to do it. Cause I had 30 some doors back when I went to that mastermind and I took off from there is like 30 some that’s nothing, man. I almost tripled that now. So, If you want to grow, you’re not going to do it. Even if you just want to self-manage one, my recommendation is let the professionals do it.
Chris Miles (10:02):
Yes.
Mike Fisher (10:02):
You know, there’s so many reasons why, and we don’t have time to get into each one of these reasons, but there are so many reasons why you should just let somebody else manage your own properties.
Mike Fisher (10:13):
And if there’s any questions, I’d be happy to speak with somebody. Why? Or just go to my YouTube channel to MF Cashflow, Reasons Why Not to Self-Manage but yeah, that’s a disaster.
Chris Miles (10:25):
Most people would agree on this show, people listening here, they’re saying, Hey, I’d like it to be passive as possible. Even buying the property they’re going through that. Headache sometimes seems like a lot for people, right? That’s always that barrier of entry is just buying the property. Once you do that and you have a good property manager, it’s really like watching grass grow, it’s kind of boring, you know?
Mike Fisher (10:44):
Yeah. Well, we get a lot of that too Illinois, a lot of grass growing. So I, from what I understand it, California Grass doesn’t grow that much.
Chris Miles (10:52):
Right.
Mike Fisher (10:52):
So we got to get the grass cut, you know, four or five times in a month.
Mike Fisher (10:56):
They’re like, what the hell are you guys feeding that grass out there? It’s called rain. Something you guys don’t get in California either. Right?
Chris Miles (11:03):
Exactly. Well tell us, like I know a lot of people, even some of my own clients, like they’ve really, even though I’ve said differently, they’ve said, Oh, I’m so nervous about buying real estate right now because everything going on in the country and everything’s shutting down, like what if renters don’t pay and everything else? What would you say to them?
Mike Fisher (11:23):
So over 60, I think it’s like 62% of our portfolio is section eight. That’s guaranteed money coming in, now a lot of people,
Chris Miles (11:33):
That’s government sponsored, right?
Mike Fisher (11:35):
Yeah. Some people are like, Hey the government. No, no that they’re bad tenants. Whoa! Remember what I just said a few minutes ago? If you don’t have good property management in place, be prepared to fail.
Mike Fisher (11:48):
Well that goes back to putting good tenants in place.
Chris Miles (11:51):
Yes.
Mike Fisher (11:52):
So we screen our tenants again. If somebody wants to know more, I’ll just refer them back to the MF Cashflow, a YouTube page. We go into great, great detail on that. I know where to look. We got one person. That’s all she does is just screen tenants, very successful at it. And we know all the little scams and self like five, Oh, is it a Fiverr? Like, I’ll give you one thing. Fiverr. People can go to Fiverr and come up and they’ll make fake pay stubs, fake bank statements. Like what the hell man? So we have ways to find out about all this and just call them out on their crap and no, sorry. But yeah, that’s guaranteed income coming in is sweet. Right? The first one a month comes in. Bam! It’s you know, and they might have a small portion.
Mike Fisher (12:41):
It could be, you know, I’ve seen people as small as $3 a month, as high as you know, on a $1,200 a month rent, maybe they’re paying $900 or something out of their own pocket. But the thing is that section 8 is not going to set them up for failure. And we always get.
Chris Miles (12:59):
It’s hard to get approved for that too. For the section eight tenants, they have to go through a process just to get approved that property. They don’t want to move. Right?
Mike Fisher (13:06):
Right. Yeah. They don’t know. And the thing is that their, that money is coming in and they’re not going to set them up for failure. That is coming. And if there is a problem, guess what? Now we go back to section eight, we got leverage.
Chris Miles (13:18):
Yeah.
Mike Fisher (13:19):
Back to say, Hey look, we took pictures or that tenant’s is not paying their rent. And they’re going to go call them and say, Hey, what’s going on? They don’t straighten up. Then they’re going to be out of the program. So you don’t have that with a cash paid tenant, right? Your don’t. So, I mean, there’s so many more, even with the cash pay, we don’t want to lose tenants. Cause it causes vacancy causes cashflow loss, and you got attorneys involved and you got a refresh cost and the cost of putting another tenant in place, which you’re talking about thousands of dollars, real money, man. So we want to keep those tenants in place, keep them happy and keep them in there, man. Like, cause you know, everybody goes through hard times. We’ve all gone through them. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It just means we going through some bad times and we’ll be like, you know what, how much extra can you pay him on? An extra 200 that’s way, better than five grand losing five grand, you know?
Mike Fisher (14:14):
And not knowing when it’s going to end. So we’ve been doing this a long time for sure. Yeah. Good question though.
Chris Miles (14:20):
Yeah. And right now you probably aren’t seeing the default rate really happening, are you?
Mike Fisher (14:24):
No, no, no, no, no.
Chris Miles (14:26):
I’d had the same experience. Yeah.
Mike Fisher (14:29):
Even through Covid and you know, went into it. It’s a lot of uncertainty. Right? And it’s still coming out, shining very happy to see the smile on my face. My own portfolio is will be 100% occupied in five days. So,
Chris Miles (14:48):
Wow!
Mike Fisher (14:48):
Yeah, I know!
Chris Miles (14:48):
That’s great!
Mike Fisher (14:52):
That’s incredible. So very happy.
Chris Miles (14:54):
Well, that’s fantastic. Well, if people want to like follow you or learn more about your properties, cause I know there’s plenty of people here looking for good turnkey providers in different areas. Right? And I know we’ve got a lot of people from Illinois in fact that are there saying, Hey, that’s in my backyard.
Chris Miles (15:09):
How would they follow you? Like how would they find or reach out to you in contact you about that kind of thing?
Mike Fisher (15:13):
Yeah. So you can just go to WWW.MFCASHFLOW.COM And there’s a contact us page on there. Go ahead and fill that out. And you can even schedule some time, you know, if you want to schedule a few minutes to talk or whatever, I’d love to talk to you also we’ve got what we call a Friday Email blast. So on a Friday Email Blast, our cash flowing properties that we already manage. And the cool part is, is that being that we manage it, chances are we’ve managed it for quite a while. And like I mentioned earlier, these investors just got, you know, the shiny object syndrome or whatever, and they want to get into oil or maybe they want to diversify and they have a large portfolio or something they just want to diversify, which is cool.
Mike Fisher (15:54):
So they want to get out and you know, they they’re getting out of a home that, you know, we didn’t have the maintenance history on it. We have the tenant history on it. They’ve been with us for whatever three to five years or something. And we know the whole thing, but like where are you going? Just buy something off the MLS or some other site. You don’t know what the hell you’re here, you know? And we really have the great systems in place, the people in place to grow. And I really just want to see somebody that wants to get into real estate for that passive income, because I feel like we got such an edge on on what’s going on out there and just really like we’ve got the right systems and processes and then the edge coming that we know the history on this home already we’re here.
Chris Miles (16:42):
And when somebody is on board with us, like they don’t get just a little bit of us. They get all of us, like we’re going to set them up. Like, the scary process, the draining process of the lender. Right? So we’ll set you up with two lenders, we’ll set you up with two people to do a home inspection and also for home insurance. So we make the process as simple as possible for the person coming on board. And as we’ve done this so many times, like I had a goal of a hundred doors for two years in a row and I both years I did 92 flips both. I couldn’t break a hundred, you know? So we’ve done a lot of flips, literally thousands in my life. And just to get to this point where I just like want is help people.
Mike Fisher (17:30):
Cause it’s like, it’s in my blood. I love what I do. You know? And, I’ve mentioned it to you before live fully love openly and make a difference. Right? I can certainly live-off my own portfolio. I’d be bored out of his, out of my mind because I love what I do and I love helping people and I love to help making a difference. You know? Like there’s people, Chris that come over to us and be like Mike, regarding your property management, I’m with ABC property management and you know, I’ve got this vacancy been going on for three months or to maintenance is killing me or all these problems. They’re like, yeah, we’ll help you just remember though. It didn’t get like that in a week or two or even a month. It took months to get like, you know, and though I’ve had a guy from Stanford, I brought over eight units.
Mike Fisher (18:24):
He was less than 50% occupied and we’ve got them a hundred percent occupied now. And it took while I was like one of the buildings, the tenant started on fire her. So it took a little while to get that building back up. But you know, and that was a multifamily. So we have multi-family and single family. I would recommend anybody if you’re going to have one get to,
Chris Miles (18:45):
Yes.
Mike Fisher (18:46):
You don’t want just one. Cause that’s your single point of failure. And you know, multi-family, you know, we got two unit four unit building, so that are fully-tenanted and cash flowing. So yeah, WWW.MFCASHFLOW.COM
Chris Miles (19:00):
Awesome! Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes as well, but yeah, I really check that out. Like it’s so good to have options, right? And so good to have those things in place.
Chris Miles (19:08):
And I can’t tell you how amazing is from my own personal experience as an investor to have a team on your side saying, Hey, we got this handled. You don’t have to go shop around looking for this lender or looking for that insurance agent or whatever you have to do. Like it’s all done in house. It makes it so, so nice because you’re too busy. You’re too busy. You have to worry about that crap. You’re trying to build that active income right now to use that, create this passive income. So you shouldn’t be stressed yourself, that kind of stuff. So the guys check it out. MFCASHFLOW.COM Also check out his podcast, MF CASHFLOW as well, which is a fantastic show. So definitely check that out too. So yeah,
Mike Fisher (19:49):
Yeah man, you need one more thing. You need four things to create every deal and maybe there’s more, sure there is, you need time, money, credit and knowledge.
Chris Miles (20:01):
Yeah.
Mike Fisher (20:01):
I’m sure you’ve heard it say, other people’s time. Other people’s money. Other people’s credit other people’s knowledge, but like the investors have the money and the credit leverage our time and our knowledge and you got something that is going to be cash flowing, man. That’s going to make a difference in your life. Have the Ripple effect. Right? That’s it.
Chris Miles (20:23):
Right. Well, it’s so good to have a team because you can’t afford to screw it up yourself. You know like when people try and do it themselves, I’m like, okay, you probably should have bought that property in the first place. Let’s go to a turnkey person. Let’s have them look at it, you know, get to something and get it done. Right. You know, and I totally agree. So Mike, again, appreciate your time man. And appreciate having you on. And, and again, everybody check out his stuff, you know, should go MF Cashflow guys, and WWW.MFCASHFLOW.COM
Chris Miles (20:48):
So everybody hoping to make a wonderful and prosperous week! We’ll see you later.
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