Scale Your Real Estate Business with No Marketing Budget w/ David Niehaus

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Really quick before the show starts, in case you haven't heard, we have a growing community of investors called the scale community, which is full of people learning to make massive income with their real estate businesses so they can reach financial freedom a little bit faster than building a rental portfolio solely over time, because honestly, that takes decades. And who has time for that? So if you're an investor who is serious about growing and creating a scalable business without needing to be a slave to it twenty four seven, then go to collectingkeys.com/scale and apply. And if you're a good fit, we would love to have you join the community. So again, collectingkeys.com/scale. Go ahead and apply, and we'll see if you're a good fit.

Dylan Koch: [0:38] David, in my opinion, is the definition of a value add investor. He would take properties that are one bedrooms and be able to convert them into three bedrooms and an apartment.

Mike DeHaan: [0:47] What is going on, guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. Today is Monday. This is the scale show, and our guest today is somebody that has a slightly different spin on the business than we normally preach. And his name is David Newhouse, and he is a friend of Dylan's over there in the Cincinnati area. And he has built a pretty awesome business for himself with no direct to seller marketing or anything. Everything's based off, like, referrals and networks and everything else. And on this show, we tend to really preach a lot of marketing and sales systems, and David has shown that you don't need any of that shit if you don't want it. So, David, super excited to have you on the show, man. Get us started. Maybe give us a quick three minute rundown who exactly you are, what exactly your business looks like, and we already know you're based out of Cincinnati area. So we can skip back.

David Niehaus: [1:39] Thanks for the intro, Mike. So I first started real estate in 2019, went to a seminar to learn about wholesaling, and then the next week, they pretty much said, put signs on the side of the road. So that's what I did for the next few months, and I got a deal within like three weeks. It was crazy. I was like, holy cow, this stuff works. And so kept putting out signs, kept putting out signs, eventually transitioned to just a lot of cold calling. Man, I made so many calls to join the Brent Daniels program, did a lot of cold calling, got a bunch of deals there. But my main goal was always to be a buy and hold investor. So I did a couple flips and had a really big wholesale deal close and quit my w two job back in April 2022. So I've been full time this about two and a half years now. But at that point, mainly went to buy and hold. And since that point, I bought about 21 properties. I've sold bought and sold a little bit more than that. I got about 35 units now. And my current business model, I used to cold call, I used to put out signs on the side of the road, but now, since I put in all that effort over the years, I built up a really good personal network, and I have a bunch of people pretty much bringing me deals.

David Niehaus: [2:53] There's probably six to seven emails I get per day of properties, and I can just kinda pick which ones I think are the best. A lot of times, sellers will ask if I'm still buying and they'll just sell me another property, which is really cool. So my personal network's really great. And some of the best deals I've had are just from most people would offer like a thousand dollar finder's fee if someone brought them a property. I'm like, I'll make that like 1,500 to $2. So I would normally double someone else's finder's fee, and that actually got me a lot of deals. But yeah, right now, I'm kinda just a sole proprietor, run the business on my own. I got a bookkeeper helping me out. I self manage all these rentals, and I just have a lot of subcontractors. I GC a decent amount of the jobs I've done until now, and then I have a general contractor that will do my bigger jobs, and I'm starting to transition to hand him most of my stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [3:46] Nice. That's awesome. So you had backtracked on a little bit. You got one big deal, and that enabled you to quit your job?

David Niehaus: [3:52] Yeah. I had one big deal and one flip closed basically two weeks from each other. So I had almost $200,000 in the bank, and I'm just like, alright. I mean, it'll take me, like, three years to make this much of my job, so I'm done with that, and and I'll figure it out.

Mike DeHaan: [4:08] I love that you did that because this is something that I preach so heavily all the time, you know, with our scale members and just in general about, like, you had the runway at that point. Like, just take the freaking jump.

David Niehaus: [4:20] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [4:20] Like, so often people, they get, like, addicted. It's almost like heroin to, like, needing that money, like, that comes in every month that's consistent. I'm like, if you realistically have a runway for, like, three years, if you can't bet on yourself and figure it out in that period of time, you're not gonna fucking make it anyway. So stop trying to be an entrepreneur. That's awesome, dude. Yeah. Very, very cool.

David Niehaus: [4:39] Yeah. Thanks, man.

Dylan Koch: [4:40] So I'm gonna jump in a little bit just because I obviously am David for a while now, and I've sold David some deals, deals I think I probably should have kept. But I know the landscape of I know you wanted to be buy and hold all the way through, like and by the way, for the audience, he bought these 35 units from 2022 until now. So, like, he's done this with the higher rates and all of that Dylan.

Mike DeHaan: [4:59] You can't do it at 7% rates. Don't lie to people.

Dylan Koch: [5:02] But when you first started and you started to get active in, our buyer pool here in Cincinnati was, I would say, lot easier. We had hedge funds here that were pretty easy to sell to. Did any of that influence your decision of, hey, I'm not gonna do this wholesaling as much for the buy and hold, or just because it got harder to dispo and some of your big buyers went away, or is it just like, hey, I've got enough runway, and I wanna just do rentals at this point?

David Niehaus: [5:24] A little bit of both. You know, you always hear of all these hedge funds buying up all these properties, making the market bad. So I didn't really wanna keep contributing to that even though it did make me a good deal of money. I didn't wanna see a market where everyone had to rent, nobody could really own kinda what you're seeing a decent amount here in The US. I think it was always my goal to be a buy and hold investor and have what I thought was completely passive income, but it's definitely not the case, coming in every month and then be able to do the kind of things I wanna do. Originally, you know, my whole goal was to have enough money coming in that I could do, like, ministry stuff, and I've taken mission trips. Real estate's actually funded a couple of those, so I really loved that. Growing up, didn't really have much money, and but I would always see these people that were very wealthy, and they they worked hard, but then, like, at some points, they didn't have to keep grinding and putting all these hours in, and then I realized and I got some good mentors along the way that kinda showed me, like, this could be my life if I just put in the work and keep it moving.

Dylan Koch: [6:22] And for the audience that hears that has similar sentiments about hedge funds that we've talked about in the show, those hedge funds that me and David both sold deals to, there's a couple of them, have since sold probably over 50% of my portfolio because they bought shitty deals.

David Niehaus: [6:34] I actually bought some back from them.

Dylan Koch: [6:35] Yes. Exactly.

David Niehaus: [6:36] At a better deal, I sold it to them for. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [6:38] Exactly. So there are there are cycles to this, and this kinda let it work itself out naturally. So

Mike DeHaan: [6:45] So doing this kind of business model, how many deals you say you've done total? 20 something deals?

David Niehaus: [6:51] No. That's how many I own.

Mike DeHaan: [6:52] You own?

David Niehaus: [6:53] Yeah. I've done about a 105 deals total

Mike DeHaan: [6:56] Holy shit.

David Niehaus: [6:56] In the five years that I've been in business.

Mike DeHaan: [6:59] That's great. So how do you balance because you built a decent portfolio. How do you balance, like, the income piece of this with, like, the long term buy and hold mentality. Because it's always something where people get really stuck is they end up keeping too much too early, and they're trying to figure out how to pay their bills. Right? Or they're wholesaling everything, and they build no wealth for themselves. But you seem to have found, like, a good little middle area, which is especially hard to do in 7% interest rates. So what's kinda like your mentality? Like, how do you kinda balance that? Do you have, like, any sort of policies that you follow for yourself? Like, you wholesale or you flip three and then you keep one? Like, what does that entire part of your business look like?

David Niehaus: [7:41] So when first starting the portfolio, I couldn't keep everything because just didn't have the money and, like, couldn't just live off of cash flow. Even now, I just can't I can't just live off of cash flow. Even though it's pretty good cash flow, there's always maintenance stuff that needs to be done. Cash flow is never completely a 100% cut and dry. This is how much money I'm gonna make this month because things come up.

Mike DeHaan: [8:00] Yeah. And and how much cash flow do you make off your your rentals? Am I sharing that?

David Niehaus: [8:04] So right now, it's roughly 41,000 a month gross, and then a profit depending on, you know, maintenance throughout the months and stuff like that. It's about 12 or $13 a month. That's

Mike DeHaan: [8:16] That's that's net after mortgages and everything? Yeah. That's pretty good, though, man. Like, that's a significant income.

David Niehaus: [8:21] Yeah. It's pretty nice. But I joined this mentorship group called the Burr Invest Academy, giving a little shout out. Taught me exact I knew about cash out refinances, but I didn't know them entirely. But getting in that mentorship group, basically buying a property, putting in the budget to fix most things that are gonna go wrong in five years, and then I was like, okay, this deal is gonna be a keeper. If I could do all that, get it at the right price, it's not a full gut rehab, or if it is a full gut rehab, it better be at a very deep, deep discount in a great area that's gonna appreciate over time. And then I'm gonna cash out refi at least $30 from one property is what my goals were. And if it wasn't bad, then I'm gonna wholesale that or I'm gonna flip it. I could buy this property and put some money into it, and then not get stuck waiting and not being able to finish it, because then I could pull cash out at the end. So it kinda like, it just kept going and kept going. I never got stalled out and like had to quit, you know?

Dylan Koch: [9:16] So if I'm speaking for you, David, it was a couple things. First, you're buying them at such deep discounts that you're getting paid on these properties. You do mostly, like, almost full gut rehab, so your CapEx has been rather low for most of your places. Yeah. And the velocity of which you're doing them, we both have, like, decent lenders here that didn't require a six month seasoning period, so you could scale a little bit faster.

David Niehaus: [9:38] And I also built a great relationship with my hard money lender where he basically became, like, a private lender where I can do no money down and first draw at closing. So most hard money, you're putting like 15% down, and then you gotta pay the first draw out and then get refunded. So that's like probably $25. You just gotta have that.

Dylan Koch: [9:58] For each project. Yeah. Yeah. If you have four or five going on at one time, exactly.

David Niehaus: [10:01] But being able to do that with my lender, and it happened after I did probably about seven or eight deals with him, then I was able to transition, and and I just asked for it. It's like, hey. This will really help me out, and Mhmm. We could do a lot more deals together. And like, yeah. No problem. Like, you're doing great. You're killing it. So that definitely helped me out as well.

Dylan Koch: [10:19] The one thing I forgot to mention too is some of ones you've been keeping. I would say they're in better areas of Cincinnati, probably. The ones that are flips, wholesales might be on on a more of a c class area.

David Niehaus: [10:28] Yeah. That's entirely true. And just the great deals I've been getting on them. I a lot of times, it'll be with wholesalers, and sometimes you can't really negotiate those deals a lot of time unless you get a feeling that you might be the only buyer, then you can try to negotiate. But a lot of times it's like, all right, I'm walking through it, I gotta buy it the next day, or I gotta say, hey, I want it right now for this price. But being able to be direct to seller, I've been able to negotiate prices, and sometimes I'll get inspections and like do a price drop after the inspection, or just keep at my number and not come up, and either they'll come down or they won't, and I'll go on to the next deal. So making sure the numbers work and not trying to force a deal definitely helped me in the beginning, and I'd say that helped out a lot in the long run.

Mike DeHaan: [11:14] Yeah. I mean, that's such a huge piece too is not trying to force deals. That's another area where a lot of people end up getting bit. I think early on is they either get greedy or they get desperate and all of a sudden they're buying deals they probably shouldn't. And when you're early phase in this business, one or two bad deals can take you down. Right? You know, you have a little bit more leeway once you're doing some volume. But in the early phases where $50,000 loss might be in, you gotta be pretty careful. So that's awesome, man. And so that that financing partner that you have through the hard money, do they transfer you right into long term stuff too? Or what is your lender that doesn't require seasoning for you to be able to refinance out? Because that's a big thing that gets caught. It's like you're having to carry hard money costs for six months, you know, and then that long term lender, they're always not the easiest to work with. Are they, like, commercial loans, or is it like a 30 fixed product that you're getting?

David Niehaus: [12:04] It's a commercial ARM loan, but it's with a small local bank here in Cincinnati. The hard money lender I use does not do long term loans, so I have to get somebody else. So my first first six I did was that small bank, and I got tapped out. They have a limit of like, it's like $1,250,000 limit per borrower. So I tapped that out kind of quick. And now I'm kind of like, I've been moving from lender to lender because a lot of lenders will promise you things. And then once he gets to the closing table, all of a sudden, oh, you know, this lender required six months of mortgage payments, insurance, and taxes escrowed. So we're gonna drop your cash out from 45,000 down to 20. And it's like, dude, are you kidding me? Like, well, I just spent a month with you guys and you didn't tell me this until the very end, but So I've had a bad taste in my mouth from national lenders trying to find some good lenders right now, honestly, because that's a big part. But if you can find a small local bank in your area, shout out to People's First Savings Bank in Mason, Ohio. They did my first six properties. 80% LTV. I could do like five year ARMs. My first one's only at 6%, so I was like, yeah, I'll jump on that.

Dylan Koch: [13:15] No seasoning and no prepayment.

David Niehaus: [13:17] Yep. I've done more stuff since that with other lenders, but I've never been satisfied with the lenders, so

Dylan Koch: [13:23] They just hope you're committed by the end of it, and like, then they hopefully that you will not not go with them at the end of it. But Definitely. I mean, you stuck your ground with the lace guy, but 20 grand's a lot of money to just give up. Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [13:34] If you do have, like, flexibility on that, we've had the same thing happen, and we just tell them, cool. We're just gonna go start somewhere else again. And they will give you some leeway a lot of the time just like you talked about negotiating with the wholesalers. Because they want your business too, especially that loan officer you've been working with. They usually work off commission. And if all of a sudden they're not gonna be in that commission, they can pull some strings. So we've we've dealt with the same shit, like, especially back in in 2020 and 2021. A lot of those sort of like local banks, they were their risk level was changing, like, constantly. Right? Like, from, like, month to month depending on what the COVID situation look like and everything else. And there would be some months they would be like, here, I'm just gonna, like, give you money in a paper bag. You can go wherever the fuck you want. And there would be other days where they would be like, actually, today, we're not gonna do your loan anymore at all. Sorry. And then, like, the next week, it would be fine again. It was just all over. And you do have more sway than you think. But, yeah, that's good, though, that you're getting those arms at, a higher rate because, you know, those of us that were buying four or five years ago, we were getting those those arms at, like, three and a half percent. And I'm looking at 2025 coming up pretty quick, and I'm like, damn. I have a quite a few loans you're gonna be adjusting here, and I don't know what I'm gonna do because the deals aren't nearly as sexy as 7% like they were at three and a half.

Mike DeHaan: [14:54] So, yeah, it'll be a challenge.

David Niehaus: [14:56] I definitely shifted to thirty year fixed. I I don't do ARMs anymore for that reason.

Mike DeHaan: [15:01] Nice. Yeah. That's awesome.

Dylan Koch: [15:02] David, in my opinion, is the definition of a value add investor. You know, you take properties that are one bedrooms and be able to convert them into three bedrooms and an apartment, or stuff like that. Right? And so I've seen David buy stuff and thought to myself, damn, think that's a little high. Then he always works it out because he's able to kinda do some of this stuff. Know, David, want you to talk to this too, but you have your rehab numbers down so well that you're not really surprised by things when you're going through the process. And I think that's been a large part of your success.

David Niehaus: [15:29] Yeah, for sure. Like that mentorship group I talked about, literally, they have you take a spreadsheet and go room by room, and literally write down everything that needs to happen in that one room. And the way I've been able to do that is just take a whole video of the property, and just slow down the video. And sometimes I'll do it while I'm there as well. You might not have two hours to go through something while you're walking through a property, but take a video and just go room by room, write down everything that needs to be done. And I know how much, through experience and through firing a lot of contractors, I figured out the right guys for the job, how much I'm gonna pay them, how much is it gonna cost me, what absolutely needs to be replaced. Sometimes I'll miss one or two things, but it's not gonna like, it's not gonna be more than $10,000 that I missed. So I but I always build a little bit, maybe like five or 10% contingency on the back end in case I miss something. And if the deal still works with that, great. If it doesn't, I can still back that down a little bit, knowing that I'll be able to cash out refi in the end, it'll make it worth it. But that's definitely helped out a lot in being able to get guys that can do great work. I mean, that's a really hard part too, if I own the right contractors. I've gone through a lot of trial and error with that and found the found the right crew that works for me. And, you know, it's it's probably not gonna be all rainbows and butterflies when you first start. You know, you gotta be able to be stern with people and not you have to withhold paying them until the job is done or else you're gonna get screwed there.

David Niehaus: [16:56] But being able to practice those skills and actually work on them and do it instead of being afraid of doing it has definitely helped me a lot.

Mike DeHaan: [17:03] Yeah. Being afraid of confrontation is always such a tough thing for new investors, whether it's with sellers or with agents or with contractors, but it's kinda part of business, especially this business where it's very human driven. Yo. If you don't follow me on Instagram, which is that Mike underscore invests, by the way, then you might not know that we officially have a new mission as a brand, and that is to help 2,000 real estate investors build million dollar businesses. Obviously, to do that, we need to get in front of as many people as possible. So quick little ask to help us reach that goal. First, shoot me a follow on Instagram at Mike underscore invests. Second, follow collecting keys podcast on Instagram. That's at collecting keys podcast all written out. And third, every time the algorithm is kind enough to show you a post from either of us, share it on your story or in your post and tag us. If you do that, I'll DM you, and we can have a little DM conversation about what is preventing you from having that million dollar business that everyone is seeking. And we can see if we can come up with a plan to help you make that massive income, not just passive income. So again, if you see any of our posts, just go ahead, reshare them, tag us, and let everyone know that you enjoy the content we produce. It will help us a ton, and then we'll be happy to help you as well. So you manage all your rehabs.

Mike DeHaan: [18:23] You do, I guess, your own acquisitions, negotiations with agents, wholesalers, whatever that looks like. Do you also do your own property management?

David Niehaus: [18:30] I do. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [18:31] How does that all balance out? Because that's pretty busy schedule. Especially being a solopreneur, you also have all just like the back end business shit that you need to do, you know, odds and ends and the random stuff where you spend an entire day being busy and you look at the whole day and you go, don't even know what I did today.

David Niehaus: [18:48] Yeah. That happens quite a lot.

Mike DeHaan: [18:50] Yeah. So, like, what is your, like, day to day look like? Like, how do you manage all that? Do you, like, have it time blocked, or is it kinda just you're fighting fires all the time?

David Niehaus: [18:57] A little bit of both. I mainly have it time blocked because I know sit down before the week. I know what's going on this week and allot some time to it. So, like, Monday to Tuesday is really gonna be catching up from the weekend, making sure all the projects are running smoothly. I did manage all my projects up until recently. I've I've shifted a lot over to a GC, so he helps out with all that. But you 'll still get calls of like, you know, we need to do this, we need to do that, and you gotta make those decisions. And you can't really time block that because you don't know when that's gonna come. So, you have to be really flexible to be able to respond to those in a timely manner, but not letting things linger and dealing with them right away instead of, you know, waiting, oh, I'll deal with that tomorrow, has really saved me a lot of time. But some weeks are really, really busy, some weeks not so busy. You know, the average I'm working, sometimes it'll be, you know, fifteen hours this week, sometimes it'll be sixty this week. But like I said, in the part of my rehab process, I try to fix everything I know for a fact will probably have to be replaced within five years. So I still have maintenance requests, but it's not like humongous maintenance requests. Like, the most common thing I get is some kind of plumbing issue where, like, most of the time the electric's gonna get rewired, the plumbing's gonna be replumbed, so it's not like I'm dealing with a whole host of issues. Maybe, you know, five years down the line, I might be dealing with a lot of issues.

David Niehaus: [20:18] And at that point, I might get a property manager. But right now, it's pretty manageable because I deal with it on the front end, and I just have minor maintenance requests from my tenants. So

Dylan Koch: [20:28] And because you have those connections, you know, with all the rehab guys too, it's pretty simply now take a screenshot of the issue, you know, send it to the guy, the responsible guy, and they know how to take care of it.

David Niehaus: [20:38] Yeah. Every time I have an issue, I'm not, like, going out to, okay. I need I really need to find a plumber to fix this. Now I've already got somebody. I can get it scheduled. You know, he can take care of it and go from there.

Mike DeHaan: [20:49] Yeah. That's nice. It is the older stuff. This is what we find too. It's it's our properties that are, like, five, or I have a couple that I bought back in, 2018. It's the way it's when they've had churn of, like, several tenants over a, you know, six or seven year timeline where you start to have, like, little stuff because every tenant that goes in beats it up a different way. And then all of a sudden, you're like, well, cool. I renovated this unit seven years ago, and now I need to redo the entire thing again. That's when it becomes a pain in the ass, but

Dylan Koch: [21:16] Have you had a lot of turn in your units, David? Like, kinda what Mike's describing? I mean, you've only owned these for, three years, so

David Niehaus: [21:22] I've had a decent amount of turn, but I normally try to keep all my units the same. I'll use the same paint color. I'll use the same appliances, same countertops, same cabinets. So, if something does go wrong, it's not like I'm having to decide, okay, what kind of cabinet am I gonna put here to match or like so that takes a lot of the decision making out of the way. But for like example, I bought a duplex and just had a a turn on that unit, and the lady left a lot of trash. She kinda just left the place, but I got a couple maintenance guys that came and cleaned up the place in a day. Think I paid them, like, four or five hundred bucks. They cleaned it all up, spent, you know, another $300 painting it, but then it was ready to go. So it wasn't like a huge, like, oh, I gotta do a lot of drywall work and a lot of like so I haven't had any really heavy unit turns like that, so I've been pretty fortunate there so far.

Mike DeHaan: [22:08] Yeah. You haven't had anyone get thrown through the drywall yet? I had one of those in mine.

Dylan Koch: [22:12] Or for liquid cement in your toilet or something like that?

Mike DeHaan: [22:15] Yeah. I literally I'll have to send you a picture after that. I literally had it where someone had gotten shoved into the drywall, and you could see, like, the head,

Dylan Koch: [22:23] shoulders, the butt, and then

Mike DeHaan: [22:24] they took a piece of, like, freaking wood, like, wood plank, and they, like, screwed it up to the wall and then painted it white. And they're like, yeah. No way he's gonna notice.

Dylan Koch: [22:33] Was like Should've just put a poster over it. Come on, man.

Mike DeHaan: [22:36] Right. Yeah. No kidding. That honestly, I would have been less likely to see that if they'd taken, like, a nice photo. You know? And they read them, they put it up. I'd be like, oh, nice. They left some art here. So That

David Niehaus: [22:47] was funny.

Mike DeHaan: [22:48] Nice, man. What's the of all the stuff that you've added into your business, is there, like, one system in particular, whether that's like a software system or like a process that you run that's been super beneficial for you?

David Niehaus: [23:01] Yeah. I definitely say I thought about using Buildium for collecting rents and stuff, but one of my buddies actually put me onto a company that was free to use that is actually locally started in Cincinnati called inago.com, and basically I just that's my online, manage my portfolio, all the tenants information is in there, they can pay with their bank account, and then of course I have some tenants that pay with cash that for whatever reason they can't figure out how to set up their bank account online, it's like, come on man, it's pretty simple, but that helps me out because I also have the system where if they're paying with cash, I'll give the tenant my first and last name, my zip code, and then like the last four of my account, and so they'll never be able to take money out of it, but they can deposit it, and they have to send me a receipt when they pay, and I can just go in and that software and mark it as paid. So I'd say that's really helped me out. QuickBooks helped me out a lot, except have a bookkeeper keeping track of stuff, but literally any transaction from my bank account will just go to QuickBooks Online, and that helps out a lot with bookkeeping. So, I'd say those two main things have helped out a lot with managing the portfolio and making sure taxes get done on time. That has been a struggle though because QuickBooks can be very complicated and you need to get somebody that knows what they're doing. But I was able to file last year before the deadline even though I was backed up like four or five months. So having a really good bookkeeper that knows what they're doing, QuickBooks, and then that online payment software has helped out a lot.

Mike DeHaan: [24:23] Yeah. I bet. I mean, it's huge for you too, especially because the buy and hold stuff is such a massive part of your business. I mean, I would imagine you have almost no recorded taxable income because of having a bookkeeper and accountant probably depreciates the hell out of everything.

Dylan Koch: [24:37] Yep. I think that's true. I I actually know that's true.

David Niehaus: [24:41] That's Yeah. That that does work well.

Dylan Koch: [24:43] Dave, I wanna ask you, because I think I know the answer we've talked about before, but what is the long term goal? You know, like, how do you want a specific unit count, revenue, or I guess cash flow number, you plan on doing this for the next fifty years, what does kinda that look like?

David Niehaus: [24:55] That's a great question. So that's it's always a work in progress, you know, when I first when you first get into it, you're kinda just trying to keep your head above water and make money and keep going. But then once you get to a certain point, know, you're just like, dang, like, what what do I really wanna do? So I definitely wanna get more involved into my church ministry. I really like that a lot. A lot of my time will go into that. And going forward, growing the portfolio is just like, I wanna keep growing it, but at a manageable pace. So, for example, 2023, I had 12 rehabs going at one time. It's like, never wanna never wanna do that again. That was miserable and terrible and, you know, not so great. But going forward, I know I can manage, you know, at least three or four projects on my own. And with a GC, I mean, he can do three or four more, but I don't ever wanna be that busy again. So, I think just constantly having three or four projects going, and it's like, it's not something that I absolutely hate. Like, I could see myself, you know, just keep So, there's no like end goal in growing the portfolio. I have thought, you know, once I get to a certain point, maybe I'll just stop and just, you know, keep this cash flow going, but I haven't really completely determined that yet.

Mike DeHaan: [26:04] Sure. Do you have a spouse, kids?

David Niehaus: [26:06] Yeah. Have a wife and no kids, but she works a full time job. So secretly, that might be one of my goals, trying to get her to I always joke with her that she can become my property manager.

Dylan Koch: [26:16] Oh, that's a good way to get her a good her job. Yeah. How enticing.

David Niehaus: [26:20] She'd be really good at that kind of stuff of like, she's really into details, and I'm not. I just wanna keep moving and keep stuff going. But, yeah, she gets really good PTO. We like to take trips and stuff, so

Dylan Koch: [26:32] And we're just in Hawaii for how long? What, ten days?

David Niehaus: [26:34] It was like twelve days. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [26:35] Nice. Yeah. I'm also part of the the no kid club, and it definitely is harder to have goals. Like, especially my my business partner has kids, and we have a lot of, like, scale community members that have kids. And they always definitely seem to have more of, a linear growth versus like the the folks that don't have kids. They're always kinda like,

David Niehaus: [26:56] I don't know.

Mike DeHaan: [26:56] I'm just kinda like doing shit now. Like, I'm don't mind working. I wanna be able to go on trips. Like, I wanna be able to do whatever. We had a little meetup this past weekend out here in in Idaho. And one of the members came out, and he's single, single guy, 28, 29. And he's like, I don't even wanna, like, forecast three months from now, let alone, like, years. He's like, I make you money, and that's literally all that I care about.

Dylan Koch: [27:21] Yeah. Teach his own too. Like, it's your own personal decision with everybody. Well,

Mike DeHaan: [27:26] awesome stuff, David. Alright. We're gonna dive into our end of show questions here to wrap up. And first in the fan favorite question is, what is your craziest real estate investing story? This can be a crazy tenant, crazy deal, time that you found a giraffe in an apartment complex. Don't know. We've had we've had some odd ones over the years. So let's hear it.

David Niehaus: [27:50] So I have a couple different ones. I'll start off with the first one, and that's pretty short. But I had an electrician do a job. I had a few different quotes on the property. You know, some came in at, like, 10 or $11. He was at, like, $6 to do the work. I hadn't really worked with him before, but other people had worked with him before. And he rewired the whole house. It ended up being like a very high dollar flip, my highest flip I've ever sold, that he did it. But I ended up having to hire an electrician to help finish. But he basically rewired the whole thing, like 80%, 90% got done. And then he's wanting to get paid, but I'm like, during the process, he cut holes in the wall of this, you know, 120 year old house that has all this plaster, and it had really cool artwork on the wall that I was trying to save, but like, he cut through it to do his work without even asking me, like, just went ahead and made these holes in these wall. So it's time to pay him. I'm like, no, I have to, you know, withhold a thousand dollars to fix this, and that's not even the amount it was gonna cost to fix it. Was like, I had to get something from this guy. Like, you did this, like, you need to pay for it. He got super, super mad, super angry, and we got to yell at each other, and like, you know, saying F you, I kinda said it back. And then he he went outside, and I kinda I didn't really chase him. Yeah. I kinda just said, you're fired.

David Niehaus: [29:04] Like, get out of here. You know, I don't wanna see you again. And then he picks up a rock, accolades, you know, throw it at me, and then I actually lunge forward and run at him because I don't know why I was doing that, but he Adrenaline? Dropped the Yeah. So he dropped he dropped the rock, and nothing happened because one of his buddies like grabbed his arm and was like, no, don't like. So the police didn't get called on that. Another one was actually my biggest wholesale deal I've ever done. I got it under contract. And then come to closing day, this one I sold to Vine, broke a hedge fund here. This was like one of the deals that set me up to like quit my job that was closing that month. But so come closing day, the people are not out. The hedge fund's like, we can't buy this. People are not out. But I had to go ahead and close and spend my money to buy it. So at that point, had, you know, some cash to buy the house. But so I bought it, and then they're in there for another three days. And at this point, I thought they were gonna be gone. I'm in Florida because my grandpa needed somebody. He's older and needed somebody to help drive his truck back up here to Cincinnati. So I flew down there, and I basically had to threaten to call like, I'm gonna call the cops.

David Niehaus: [30:14] Like, you know, you guys need to leave. And they even came back to try to get more of their stuff, and I'm just like, no, you can't. I'm changing the locks, and if you're here, I'm calling the cops, you made me trespassing. And there was a lot of words said there. They tried to squeeze me for more money at that point.

Dylan Koch: [30:28] Even though you had already bought it, like even though you're past closing?

David Niehaus: [30:30] Sorry. So right right before I bought it, they tried to squeeze me for a little so I ended up giving them, like, 2 or 3,000 more dollars just to get the deal done because it was my biggest deal ever, and I I wanted to close, like so that was a whole saga, and it finally got in. So my dad had to go and change the locks while I was there, but you should have seen some of the text messages they were texting me. Like, I could tell they were definitely using drugs at that point, because whenever you're around them, you can tell somebody is just like real skittish or like real like, can't sit still, always pick at themselves. Like, that was pretty wild, but then so they actually moved to like somewhere in Kentucky, and they were gonna buy some I don't know if it was a trailer or a small house with the cash that I gave them, which was like $40,000 they were going to buy this place. And these sellers that were crazy gave the people the house they're trying to buy my phone number and they called me and they was like, do you know these people? Like, like, are they do they have the money? Like, and then I was like, yes, they have the money. And because they did, and I was trying to, you know, get them out of there and actually buy the place, like, well, they just showed up in a U Haul and they said they're moving in. I'm like, oh my goodness.

David Niehaus: [31:37] Like, you guys haven't even bought that house yet

Dylan Koch: [31:40] and you're trying

David Niehaus: [31:40] to move in? So who knows if they ended up buying it or not, but I hope they're doing well. Yeah. That's That was definitely the craziest one. That's funny.

Mike DeHaan: [31:50] At least, like, the messiest part was that other guy's problem and not yours at the end of it.

David Niehaus: [31:54] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least he didn't show up at my house with a U Haul.

Mike DeHaan: [31:57] Yeah. No kidding.

Dylan Koch: [31:58] Cool, David. I know at the beginning, you know, you're doing the bandit signs and all that stuff, but if you could go back to the very beginning of this again, is there anything you would do differently?

David Niehaus: [32:06] I would put more signs out. I wouldn't just stop a 100 signs a week. I'd put 500 out a week. Now I'd do a lot more. So a lot of people kinda underestimate in the beginning how much work, and how much time, and how much effort it takes. You know, was

Dylan Koch: [32:20] like, it your actual watch cell phone, or did you have like a Google Voice number or something

David Niehaus: [32:23] like A Google Voice number.

Dylan Koch: [32:24] Yeah. Yeah. Just curious.

David Niehaus: [32:26] Yeah. So I I would do more in the beginning because I had two deals within like four months, but then I almost went a year without doing a deal. So like, you know, I would I would do more and just put out more signs, talk to more people. Yeah. I think that's what I would do if I could do it again.

Mike DeHaan: [32:40] There you go. I think that's generally the most common answer to that question is just they had worked harder and done more outbound work.

David Niehaus: [32:47] Yep. Oh, yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [32:49] Sweet. And then, David, last question. Where can people find you, follow you, and reach out to you?

David Niehaus: [32:53] Sure. Yeah. They can find me at Facebook. My name is David Niehaus from Cincinnati. I mean, that might be hard to find, but my Instagram is tree dot h a u s is my Instagram, tree house. They can find me there. And then, yeah, if they really wanna reach out for help, I don't care. I'll throw my phone number in there. It's (513) 967-2963. I did that on Brad Daniel's podcast as well, so I don't mind talking to people that they'll wanna reach out and help. But, yeah, that's how they can find me.

Mike DeHaan: [33:23] Cool. There you go. Awesome, man. You might might get doxxed by a bunch of weirdos trying to do deals or something.

David Niehaus: [33:28] That's alright. Bring bring it on. I'm I'm down to help.

Mike DeHaan: [33:31] Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, David, thanks so much for coming on show, man. Congrats on your success, And you are the epitome of showing what hard work can actually lead to because that's a very, very quick run up story that you had, and you're crushing it, man. So super happy for that. Thanks, man.

Dylan Koch: [33:46] Yeah. Thanks for coming on, David. Yeah.

David Niehaus: [33:48] Thanks for having me on.

Mike DeHaan: [33:49] Yeah. And, guys, thanks for listening. If you're trying to sell any deals in Cincinnati or the greater Ohio area, go and hit up David. He got his cell phone in here. That is about as open as someone has been on this show. So, go and sell some deals, guys. He wants to buy. He made that very clear, And hopefully, you guys all got some value from that one. So thanks for listening, everybody. We'll talk to you

Dylan Koch: [34:08] guys next week. See you.