Migrating to the US, Fix & Flip Real Estate Investing
If you thought about quitting your day job and getting into real estate investing. Our next guest is a must to listen.
Leka Devatha moved to the US from India 13 years ago. She quit her corporate job at Nordstrom in 2014 and started Rehabit Homes, Inc. It's a company focused on residential redevelopment.
She has now flipped over 40 homes and has expanded her focus to include land development, additions, acquiring long term rentals both in state and out of state. Her strength is finding creative exit strategies on every deal.
She also serves as an advisor on the board of Certain Lending, a FinTech company based in SF. She enjoys inspiring and motivating other entrepreneurs to build successful businesses. And she's even co-authored a book.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
· [2:25] How she started doing family fixing flips back in 2014, Real Estate business and more projects she’d been involved with
· [6:25] How does she find a house to work with and her background in design and esthetics
· [9:52] How the details are very important on her projects, every house has to be different designed
· [11:37] What kind of research and decisions she does on every deal, the neighborhood location around and the rehab budget
· [14:57] Everything it’s all about the numbers, not emotion
· [17:07] The importance of do not over flipped properties and what needs to take into consideration in this
· [18:41] Who’s the typical buyer once she flips and how her market changes due to demographic
· [21:12] Her networking Real Estate investors and events to sponsor to different charities which she’s passionate about
· [25:55] How works her other project, land development deal
· [28:26] The book she’s been working on and how it can inspire other women and even men. And other projects she’s so excited about like Self-Storage, investing place
Leka’s Top Tip’s
· “If you have a 9-5 job, I don’t recommend doing more than one fix & flip project at a time, you can still do it if you’re going at your own pace, over the weekends, or you’re not paying heavy, hard money, the cost for financing”
· “I highly recommend patterning with someone that’s doing this full-term, because it’s just not easy, a lot of can go wrong”.
· “I bought from different channels, as you start to do more flips and start networking with the right people, you’re gonna find better ways to find a deal”
· “Most of my projects now come with a minimum of 100 to 150K spread. They’re much larger remodels. I have to work with architects, design engineers, and structural engineers and really take the house back down to the studs to rebuild”
· “I am essentially buying it at a pretty steep discount because of all the work that it's gonna take to fix it up”
· “I really pay attention to the details, I like designing, focusing, and coming up with creative ways to design the same home”
· “Before I buy, I go to look at the property, like I can look into it on the map, I can look the neighborhood and the location. I can always work backward and say, ok, it doesn’t matter what the fix-ups gonna be, once I walk the property, I can come up with that”.
· “I’ve done about 50 single family flips myself, but to do those I’ve walked over 500 properties. So, just going in evaluating every single deal, I’ve gotten pretty good at coming up with the rehab budget”
· “Sometimes I take my architect in there to evaluate whether or not the house needs to be seismically retrofitted. But pretty much, for the most part, I’m able to walk my self and come up with that repair estimate”
Mike’s Top Tip’s
· “Don’t overdo it, it’s all about the bottom line. You’re into investing to make money not to make houses, the bottom line is to diversify your portfolio, diversify your income and make some money”
Resources about Leka
ABOUT LEKA DEVATHA
Leka Devatha moved to the US from India 13 years ago. She quit her corporate job at Nordstrom in 2014 and started Rehabit Homes, Inc. a company focused on residential redevelopment. After a string of successful flips, she obtained her broker's license in 2017 and became one of the top-producing agents in her office.
She has now flipped over 40 homes and has expanded her focus to include land development, additions, acquiring long-term rentals both in state and out of state. Her strength is finding creative exit strategies on every deal. She also serves as an advisor on the board of Certain Lending, a FinTech company based in SF. She enjoys inspiring and motivating other entrepreneurs to build successful businesses and for this reason hosts a monthly meetup, 'Real Estate at Work' to bring new and seasoned investors together and she has even co-authored a book!
