Grace Gudenkauf
Grace Gudenkauf has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Building a Virtual Cash Flowing Portfolio with Grace Gudenkauf
Grace Gudenkauf started investing in eastern Iowa in 2020 right out of college with an engineering degree, and now runs that cash-flow portfolio virtually from Tucson. She walks through her off-market buy box, how she hired an in-house salaried property/project manager instead of paying a management percentage, and how she built the Women Invest in Real Estate (WIIRE) community into a business of its own.
Key takeaways
- In a small Iowa market, offering a $1,000 referral fee to anyone who brought a deal she closed generated a steady flow of off-market properties through word of mouth.
- Her buy box: purchase around $80–90K, put $20–40K into rehab, all-in near $120K, appraising $150–180K and renting above the 1% rule — strong cash flow but almost no appreciation upside.
- Instead of paying 10% on long-term rentals and 15–20% on midterms to a management company, she hired an in-house project/property manager in Cedar Rapids at a $36,000 salary and does a flip or two a year to cover the cost.
- She started that hire as a 10-hour-per-week remote role found through a local investor Facebook group, then converted it to full time when she moved to Tucson.