Single Family vs. Commercial Real Estate: Which Helps You Quit Your Job Faster? w/ Kathy & Rich Fettke

Brian Luebben (0:00)

The easiest way to become a millionaire is buy a million dollars worth of real estate and have somebody else pay it off.

Rich Fettke (0:03)

Exactly.

Kathy Fettke (0:04)

On one single family home that we turned into a short-term rental, it brings in over about 250,000. That particular property made about a million a year.

Brian Luebben (0:12)

What do we say to people that are looking to enter the market and they're wanting to get started?

Kathy Fettke (0:16)

Let these turnkey properties build your future wealth for you. 10 to 12 years, you're going to be rich.

Brian Luebben (0:21)

Real estate is the single best wealth building vehicle of all time.

Rich Fettke (0:24)

I was diagnosed with melanoma and they thought it had spread to my liver. I got a diagnosis of 6 months to live. We had a 7-year-old daughter, a 3-year-old daughter. It rocked our world. That's why it's called real wealth. It's not just about wealth. It's not just that. We define real wealth as having the money and the freedom to live life on your own terms.

Brian Luebben (0:42)

Well, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to do what I want, what I want, with who I want all the time. And then so you leave that and all of a sudden, now you're working 24-7. I haven't seen anybody else do this and I've done it for 4 years now.

Rich and Kathy. What's up, guys? What's up? Long time coming.

Rich Fettke (0:58)

Oh, yeah. How are you all?

Brian Luebben (0:59)

For sure.

We had a good dinner last night. All this hung out. We had 20 freaking real estate investors all chilling.

Kathy Fettke (1:06)

All amazing.

Brian Luebben (1:06)

Felt like the old days of Bigger Pockets. Yeah. So I'm excited to have you guys on. So I'll allow you to introduce yourselves to the audience for people that are unfamiliar with you guys and maybe haven't listened to a lot of real estate podcasts before. So we'll start with Kathy and then Rich.

Kathy Fettke (1:20)

Yeah, yeah. I'm Kathy Fettke, co-founder of Real Wealth. We have 88,000 members now, or Rich would know better. I'm the host of the Real Wealth Show Podcast, which was one of the first many years ago. And Rich can tell you more about Real Wealth, but in that part of the business, I am now on the syndication side with Build to Rent communities.

We just recently looked at a hotel. We're looking at all kinds of asset classes, but Build to Rent and residential communities is our main thing.

Rich Fettke (1:49)

Awesome. Yeah. Rich Fettke.

A lot of people know he's from my book, The Wise Investor, that parable, and co-founder of Real Wealth. We started in 2003

Kathy's right on with the 80,000 plus members that we've helped over the years. And way back when, we put that stake in the ground of we were the anti-guru. So in the early days, we wanted to become that. It's like not charging for education, not selling the big back of the room courses and all that stuff. So that's what we've done ever since. And we basically help people get into turnkey rental properties around the country in emerging markets. And I think we're closing in on 8,000 properties that we've helped investors acquire and about 1.3 billion in assets now.

Brian Luebben (2:38)

Crazy. And then what do you guys have in your personal portfolio today?

Rich Fettke (2:41)

Mostly single family. Yeah, single family and duplexes, one and two units in the different markets. And when we invest through the same property teams that we help our members invest with.

Kathy Fettke (2:52)

We've kind of been into a little bit more luxury lately, luxury Airbnb and properties we can use because we discovered, you know, when we started, we were helping people buy in the Midwest, which is great, great place to start. The cask flow.

Rich Fettke (3:07)

Yeah.

Kathy Fettke (3:08)

But then we're like, well, we don't really go there that much. And some of the properties we've never even seen, but we wanted to, at this stage in our life, be able to use the assets. So we've got short-term rentals in Park City, where we could go use them ourselves and have great memories. And it actually spits out a lot of cash flow.

Rich Fettke (3:26)

Yeah. We've built more wealth through our higher-end properties over time, obviously, and appreciating markets. Yeah. But it's building a portfolio of the ones that cash flow somewhat, and they used to cash flow a lot, or the ones that we have on good interest rates.

Kathy Fettke (3:44)