Cash flow—the two words every rookie real estate investor loves to hear. It’s always about cash flow. “If the property doesn’t bring in a healthy amount of pure profit every month, there’s no point in buying it!” This sentiment could cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions over the lifetime of your real estate investing career. Don’t get us wrong, cash flow is important, but focusing on this metric alone may lead to your downfall.
Chris Lopez hopped off the “buy only for cash flow” bandwagon long ago, and he’s much richer for doing so. Chris has become successful quickly in the real estate game, which is doubly impressive if you look at his past business history. He didn’t start in real estate sales, investing, or anything of that nature—he was more interested in building content for other businesses he was pursuing. After realizing that rental property investing was the way to go, Chris took a hard pivot, repurposing the same skills he used in his businesses to work in real estate.
Now, he’s got eight units of his own, passive investments he doesn’t need to worry about, and a successful real estate brokerage situated in the real estate mecca of Denver, Colorado. He’s become the foremost expert on Denver real estate not because he’s done thousands of deals, but because he knows the area well enough to teach those who don’t. Chris talks about business building, mentorship, and a much better calculation than cash flow in this episode.
David:
This is The BiggerPockets podcast, show 662.
Chris:
I think everyone’s played Monopoly and I consider return on equity the way to go from a greenhouse to a red hotel and kind of skipping that second, third, and fourth greenhouse. So it’s a powerful way to scale up your properties and also scale up your portfolio. And this took me about nine months to truly wrap my head around, but once it clicked, it changed everything. It changed my own investing. It changed [inaudible 00:00:29]…