How to Get 10%+ Off Your Next Real Estate Deal Right Now

Dave Meyer (0:00)

Is this the best rental property opportunity of 2027?

Today, I'm sitting down with another real estate investing veteran, Zach Lemaster. Zach has been purchasing real estate since 2013 and has bought rentals every single year since then. When interest rates were high, he bought. When prices were low, he bought. And everything in between, he bought. Through pure consistency, picking the right markets and learning from many failed management experiences, he replaced the income of his full time job and started Rent to Retirement, one of the nation's leading turnkey real estate companies.

Now, while everyone is waiting for interest rates to drop, Zach is doing the opposite, consistently unlocking 10% plus discounts on some of the newest rental properties in the country. And that's on the low end of the discounts he's getting. Today, we're getting into why this could be one of the greatest and most heavily discounted rental investing opportunities of 2027, and how anyone can get in on these deals.

Zach Lemaster, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm excited to have you here today, Zach, because Zach, if you guys haven't heard, Zach's been on the show, he's been on the YouTube channel many times. He's the CEO of Rent to Retirement. One of the biggest trusted partners, BiggerPockets does turnkey rental properties. But we're talking about the show, we've actually never heard your story, Zach, but you are an active investor yourself. So maybe you could just fill us in a little bit about where were you in life when you got into real estate investing?

Zach Lemaster (1:38)

Yeah, I'm excited to share.

And it's been an evolution and it's still a journey, right? I view real estate investing in business as a lifelong journey, but like I think many of the audience, Dave, I started in a career path that had nothing to do with real estate. My wife and I are both optometrists by education.

I was on military scholarship HPSP, so I was commissioned as a captain in the Air Force. They paid for part of school and then I practiced optometry in the Air Force. This is probably about 15 years ago at this point. And that's where I started investing with military and generally get access to VA loans, which are fantastic loans because in a lot of cases you put no money down, you don't have PMI to pay. I didn't have any money to put down anyways early in my career, so that worked out. But I read all the books. I was a BiggerPockets member and just really liked real estate simply because it was a tangible asset. And candidly, Dave, I didn't understand any other forms of investing, stocks, anything else. So real estate made sense. So I bought my first property, I house hacked it before I knew house hacking the term, but bought a duplex with VA loan, put no money down, lived in half, rented out the other half. Again, this is probably about 15 years ago at this point. I was stationed in North Dakota at the time. The next house I bought was another duplex locally, and I continued to buy locally over the next few years. And really just liked real estate. I learned how to scale my portfolio through different creative methods, because of course, like everyone, I ran out of capital to put down as down payments. We all do at some point.

And then just continually invested. At some point, Dave, I found that investing locally was maybe not what I wanted to continue to do and started to explore other markets where there was possibly higher returns. My wife and I started to look at other locations and invested out of state. We had a terrible experience. We lost a lot of money on the first few deals, which is a learning experience. But then we refined our process and our system and then really just learned how to identify markets that fit our goals of best, offer the best returns and aggressively invested out of state. Eventually replaced our active income as optometrists, left the Air Force and started Rent to Retirement. But that was really the foundation in the early stages is just learning how to invest out of state because that made more sense for us.

Dave Meyer (3:46)

You were early on that. When were you starting to invest out of state? Do you remember what year it was?

Zach Lemaster (3:51)

I think our first out of state property was probably 2013-ish. We invested in Southside Chicago because the numbers were really good. We invested in Section 8 housing, so low-income housing. That was CHA Chicago Housing Authority. They call them two flats there, which are basically duplexes or tri-flats where it's three levels. Did some renovation on the properties. The numbers on paper looked really good, but we really had a challenge with keeping the homes leased, with ongoing maintenance, dealing with the housing authority. So it was just kind of an uphill battle of continual expenses, death by a thousand paper cuts type of thing.