Perry Keenan
Perry Keenan has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
A Rental Strategy to Maximize Cash Flow: Lessons from the Flippin' Mayor, Perry Keenan
Perry Keenan, a part-time investor and former mayor of Pleasant View, Tennessee, walks through how he went from nearly filing bankruptcy after the 2008 crash to owning roughly 45 doors and a mobile home park. He explains the "power of 10" advice that pushed him from flipping into holding rentals, how he uses cash partners instead of syndication, and the weekly rent collection setup that produces a thirteenth month of rent each year.
Key takeaways
- A mentor told Perry to get to 10 doors as fast as possible; once he did, single vacancies and CapEx items like a water heater stopped being emergencies because the other nine units covered the bills.
- Collecting rent every two weeks (26 payments) instead of monthly (12) means you collect 13 months of rent against 12 mortgage and insurance payments — he inherited this from the mobile home park's prior owners and rolled it out to his single-family rentals.
- Biweekly rent, timed to land the Monday after tenants' Friday paychecks, cut his late payments and evictions sharply because a $600 payment is easier to manage than $1,200 on the first.
- Perry avoids syndication. He uses his own flip profits plus straight partnership agreements with people who want to be cash partners but don't want to learn or manage real estate — his track record and conservative reputation are what attract them.