Todd Dexheimer
Todd Dexheimer has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
From a $35K Salary to $500 Million Real Estate Portfolio: How Todd Dexheimer Built a Real Estate Empire
Todd Dexheimer explains how he went from a $32,000-a-year high school shop teacher to owning roughly $500 million in assets, mostly 100-300 unit value-add multifamily plus 400 units of assisted living. He walks through his first multifamily deal (a 22-unit in Cincinnati bought with seller financing after banks refused), how podcasting and getting visible built his investor network, and why assisted living cost him about $500,000 in losses before it turned around.
Key takeaways
- Todd flipped and held single family to fourplex properties for roughly seven to eight years (100+ deals, about 100 rental units) before concluding he couldn't scale that way and moving to apartments.
- On his first real multifamily deal, a 22-unit in Cincinnati with only 9 units occupied, banks wouldn't lend. He met the seller, showed an amortization schedule, cut the price from about $450K to $435K, and got seller financing with a renovation escrow in place of a down payment and a five-year balloon — the payments beat the cash flow the seller was earning himself.
- Instead of hiring one coach, he cold-called dozens of mortgage brokers, banks, property managers, appraisers, attorneys, CPAs, brokers and city inspectors, then sifted for patterns — brokers are optimists, bankers are pessimists, and the truth sits in between.
- His biggest obstacle to raising real capital was not legal or technical — it was his discomfort talking about what he did. Going on a podcast in 2017 and then starting his own blew up his investor network.