Why Melissa Nash Started Flipping STRs

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

Welcome to The Short Term Show, the show about short term rentals and long term wealth. With real property owners hosting real properties, who are crushing it in the vacation and short term rental space.

And here's your host, Avery Carl.

Avery Carl (0:28)

Hey, y'all. Welcome to another episode of The Short Term Show. Today, we have Melissa Nash, the founder of Passively Rich with Rentals. She's got a really great story, and I am really excited to interview her today. How are you, Melissa?

Melissa Nash (0:40)

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Avery Carl (0:43)

Yeah. Thanks for coming on. So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into real estate investing.

Melissa Nash (0:50)

Yeah. Well, I'll start off by saying I live here in Southern California, and for a while there, I thought I couldn't be a real estate investor. I mean, it's expensive here. It's not landlord friendly. The math just doesn't math. And so I just thought, I guess I can't do this and kind of gave up. And I ended up investing thousands of miles away from where I live. And that was how I got into the game. And then since then, my goal has been to be as lazy as possible with my real estate portfolio. And what I mean by that is I'm not trying to actually be like, you know, couch potato lazy, but I have created systems that enable me to free up my time. And I call it the lazy investor system. And so everything that I do, whether I'm buying a long term rental or short term rental, I'm like, hey, is this going to free up more time for me either now or in the future? So that's kind of just the overall view of what I got going on.

Awesome.

Avery Carl (1:51)

So let's hear a little bit about how you bought that first rental. Like what made you decide to do that? Why didn't you do it in Southern California? All that stuff.

Melissa Nash (2:02)

Yeah. So I had very little money. I mean, we're talking, my husband and I had just shut down and kind of, I say shut down, lost, sold. Our business that we built for the last 15 years, and it happened during the Great Recession. We actually owned a children's clothing business, manufacturing business. Yeah, we were importing from overseas and we had worldwide distribution, and it was a pretty big company.

After the Great Recession, nobody was buying $85 baby jeans.

We made the decision to close it down slash sell it for what it was leftovers there. And we were just struggling, like, what are we going to do next? Like, what is the next thing? And so I had very little money, very little capital. When I was looking around here in Southern California, I'm like, you know, at the time, this was, you know, 12 years ago, I was like, I'm not going to buy a $500,000 property that rents for, you know, $1,200 a month or whatever it was. And coming up with the capital for all of that. And so I started looking in affordable areas. I had family that lived in the South and it was way more affordable. So I was like, wow, I could get a property for under $100,000. You know, my total end could be maybe $15,000 to get a property. And so I really started my journey there. Of course, read Rich Dad Poor Dad and, you know, was binging the podcasts and, you know, all the things. And I went, you know what, I'm just going to do this. I met somebody who was in the Turnkey real estate space. And what that means is you can buy a long-term rental that's already renovated with a local property manager in place. So I kind of met somebody through that world. And I just, the right property came up with the right budget. And I went, hell, Mary, let's just do this. You know, I was like, I'm either going to do it now or I'm not going to do it. I had done enough research and I was, you know, I was never going to take action unless I took action. So I was like, this is it, going to do it. And I did that. So, you know, never, I've never seen that property to this day. I still own it.

I have no plans to ever see it. So it's a 100 percent, set it and forget it. And I have a property management company that really does everything for me.

Avery Carl (4:21)

Wow. Okay. And so then did you just repeat that same process with the same company for multiple properties or did you branch out?