Chad Carson’s 2 Deals/Year Strategy That Makes You a Rental Millionaire

**Dave Meyer** (0:00)
Is buying rental properties still worth it in 2026? Rising interest rates, sluggish rent growth, and other factors have taken the shine off properties that would have been home run deals only a couple of years ago. But this is real estate we're talking about. Buy and hold investing tends to reward people in the long run. It's just that to buy in this market, you've got to adapt. Chad Coach Carson believes these market conditions actually heavily favor the small and mighty investor. The person who isn't looking to buy at a massive scale, but who will actually handpick one or two great high upside assets every year. But there is one caveat. You've got to go out and find the real estate deals that the more experienced, sometimes lazy investors can't be bothered with. And Chad's about to show you exactly how you can do that. He shares how his own buy box has evolved in the last 12 months, his favorite strategies for buying off market properties today, and what every investor can do to slowly and steadily build a rental portfolio that provides the lifestyle they want, no matter the market.
Hey everyone, I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at Bigger Pockets. Henry Washington is here too.
And today, we are joined by one of your favorite guests on the show, Chad Carson. Chad is an investor in South Carolina who has pioneered the small but mighty real estate investing strategy, which is still working even in today's housing market. Let's bring on Chad. Chad Carson, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets Podcast. Always fun to have you here, Chad. Thanks for your time.

**Chad Carson** (1:48)
It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me back.

**Dave Meyer** (1:50)
Well, let's just talk a little bit about what is going on with you. What do you see in the market today and how are you adapting your own portfolio and behavior?

**Chad Carson** (2:00)
Yeah, I've got a couple of lenses. One is just my own portfolio, which is in Clemson, South Carolina. People haven't heard where I am and I'm in a later stage investing strategy. So I'm not trying to make major moves, but buying two or three new properties a year or in my case, building two or three new properties a year is the pace I'm at. And I prune my portfolio a little bit. I'll sell off one or two properties that are not ideal and then build a couple. So I've built two houses, right? I haven't built them with my own hands. I have a builder partner who's built them for me. Yeah. That's one part of the story. But the other part of the story, I think a lot of us are just trying to figure out the market. Like where is this? Where's my micro market? What's going on? And I think that's the name of the game for people like me, small and mighty investors is just experimenting, trying little things. I think that's one of our advantages.
We can do one or two deals. Does that work? Does that not work? And if something works, you keep doing it. If it doesn't, you stop and you pivot and you didn't put all of your resources on one thing. And that's sort of where I am. I'm experimenting and testing, but I'm always in the market just trying to continue moving forward.

**Dave Meyer** (3:00)
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the whole, if you're familiar with startups, you know, the whole lean methodology, like the fail fast, fail often ideas that like not everything's going to work out. But the goal, at least early in your investing career, is to maximize your rate of learning. Like how quickly can you learn what you're good at, what you like doing, what is actually profitable for you? And I think that makes a lot of sense with real estate. What types of projects, though, do you think people can get into and learn quickly?
Because it does take a lot of capital. Does that mean people should be raising private capital or partnering on multiple different types of deals? How do you go about having this iterative approach to real estate?

**Chad Carson** (3:48)
Well, I would start with what Henry teaches in his book. I would start iterating on marketing strategies, because that's your number one investment before you buy the property. And I think today in 2026 and beyond, this is such a normal investing market in that you can't just buy retail. And it makes sense. You have to buy something low. You've got to buy the price low. You've got to negotiate the financing low. Something's got to be low.