Why Patience Beats FOMO in Real Estate with Lucas Papageorgiou

**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** (0:29)
Hey, y'all, welcome back to another episode of The Short Term Show. Today we have a really cool guest. We have Lucas Papageorgiou. I, as always, am your host, Avery Carl, and let's get right into it. So Lucas, you are a short term and long term rental investor.
And tell us a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself, tell us who you are and how you got into real estate.

**Lucas Papageorgiou** (0:52)
Yeah. So thank you for having me, first of all. And hello, everybody. So my name is Lucas.
As you said, I have a little bit of long term, a little bit of short term. Who I am, I work a corporate job, so I wouldn't really say anyone's special. But on the side, I've decided to start investing in real estate because I always thought that it would help accelerate my path to wealth. And more than that, it's more so just having another income stream so that I'm not always dependent on a W2 job because just me personally, having someone else control your destiny is not something I'm a huge fan of. In terms of how I got into it, the long story short, and I can elaborate if you'd like, but the long story short is I bought a four flat because the concept of someone else paying for me to live was something I liked. Or maybe not fully live, but tenants paying for majority of my mortgage while I live in one of the units was something that I thought was quite enticing for my first step. So that's how I got into it.

**Avery Carl** (1:47)
All right. So what is your day job occupation?

**Lucas Papageorgiou** (1:52)
Yeah. So my background is engineering, but I work in a consulting company. So I do manufacturing consulting. So quite a few hours.
And then we'll see on the side.

**Avery Carl** (2:04)
Consulting is a lot of hours. So you live in the Chicago area, right?

**Lucas Papageorgiou** (2:09)
I do. I came here after college and I've been here since eight years.

**Avery Carl** (2:13)
Eight years. Okay. So what made you decide to buy a fourplex and live in one of the units? So what prompted you to do that?

**Lucas Papageorgiou** (2:22)
Yeah. So I don't deserve any credit, to be honest. The credit goes to when I was in college, I had an internship. In one of my internships, basically, I had a manager who basically my last meeting with him said, ask me whatever questions you want, which to him was like, for me was the best thing ever. To him, it was the worst thing ever because I just bombarded him with questions. Anyway, one of the questions was like, what's something you wish in you when you're my age? His response was, people will buy a house or a building or some type of real estate that allows you to have either roommates or other people giving you rent, and in exchange, you live for significantly cheaper than you would live if you had rented that place out or if you rented somewhere else in the area.
That's what got me into it or that's how it got started. Then why a four-flat? To be honest, I got on the MLS with a realtor here, and I just daily e-mails once the listing is live, I would run the numbers. I think the property I ended up buying was like my 157th property I reviewed, so it took quite a bit of time. Yeah, that's what the environment was like back then, but I toured a bunch, reviewed numbers for 157, and then eventually I found one that worked, and here we are.

**Avery Carl** (3:36)
Okay, so guys, what I want you to hear and pull out of just the beginning of this is that he reviewed 157 properties before he even made an offer. So when I hear some of you come and say, oh, well, I was looking in this market or I was looking in that market, but the numbers don't work, maybe just the numbers that you've looked at so far don't work. If you haven't made at least 10 offers, then you don't get to say that the market doesn't work. You have not put in the work. And reviewing 157 properties is a lot of work. So what were you looking at in terms of purchase price and what you wanted each unit to make? What was...