Brandon Baker
Brandon Baker has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Mastering Virtual Real Estate Investment While Keeping a Full-Time Job with Brandon Baker
Brandon Baker, a Dallas-based investor with a full-time sales job, explains how he built a 21-door portfolio in Little Rock, Arkansas (plus new deals in Jackson, Mississippi) without ever living in either market. He walks through starting with turnkey rentals in 2020, switching to doing his own BRRRR rehabs once he reverse-engineered the turnkey provider's margins, and how he self-manages remotely using a VA, Asana, and a local part-time showing agent. He also breaks down his goal-setting process of turning a three-year vivid vision into weekly activity numbers.
Key takeaways
- Turnkey rentals can serve as a paid education: Brandon used the itemized upgrade lists from his first four turnkey buys, plus calls to local trades for pricing, to learn rehab costs line by line before running his own projects.
- He found turnkey providers were making roughly 25% per deal, which convinced him to source and rehab properties himself so he could scale faster and keep that margin.
- Build the team before you have a deal. He called lenders, attorneys, agents and trades cold, and always asked "who else should I know?" — that single question built his teams in both markets.
- Remote self-management is possible without a property manager: a VA runs recurring workflows in Asana (e.g., a 90-day lease-expiration task that triggers turnover steps) while a local part-time helper puts out signs, installs lockboxes, and does showings.