From Waiting Tables to $13,000+/Month in Just 3 Years (Thanks to Rentals)

0:00Brandon Turner:Three years ago, Andres Martinez was waiting tables. Today, he owns 10 rental properties, manages another four, and has a rental portfolio that brings in over$13 ,000 in monthly cash flow. He's even been able to quit his job and focus on his rentals full time. So how did he pull all this off starting in 2024? Early on, Andres had one goal, maximize the cash flow on every property he bought. But this led him to co-living, a strategy where you have multiple tenants living under the same roof. The cash flow was so strong that he deployed this strategy across his entire portfolio. But the journey hasn't been easy.

0:40Brandon Turner:In today's episode, Andre shares all the growing pains, from making 200 cold calls a day to find off-market deals, to working with shady contractors and navigating difficult tenant disputes. Through it all, his pure hustle and grit have paid off. Whether you're looking for creative ways to scale your portfolio or create enough cash flow to replace your salary, Andres has the blueprint that works, even here in 2026.

1:09Brandon Turner:What's going on, everybody? I am Henry Washington. And today on the BiggerPockets podcast, we're bringing you an investor story with Andres Martinez from Dallas, Texas. Let's jump right in. Mr. Andres Martinez, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. How you doing, Henry? Thanks so much for having me. Glad to have you, man. Excited for you to be here. Now, I understand you've been on the Rookie Podcast before, but for those who haven't heard your story, why don't you give us a little bit of your background and how you first got into real estate? I've been doing real estate since January 2023. I was working full-time as a waiter.

1:41I went to college for music. I studied jazz, as you can tell from my audience here. That did not go well. every other starving artist i was working as a full-time as a rest in a restaurant business and then i started making pretty good money as a waiter honestly i was i was very close to the six figures uh yeah on the years and then i got married my wife is like you need to buy a house so perfect we need to buy a house and then even though i was reporting all my income because it was cash we couldn't really qualify for the house that we wanted this is the time where the interest rates are just starting to go high so we missed the three or four percent but now there are seven

2:16Brandon Turner:and a half. So this was like 2023, late 2023. Late 2023, exactly. November, December. And we missed it because we couldn't find the right lender. So now when we find the lender in December, he's like, well, sorry, now it's 7%. Oh, wow. So I was like, how do you buy a house without a mortgage? So I fell into the rabbit hole of creative finance. I jumped into there. I didn't know what wholesaling was back then. I just started making calls. I found my first deal in two weeks, take my wife to see the house and she's like absolutely not so i was like okay so i told the agent look uh it didn't work for us thank you so you know now i was part of a real estate mastermind so i go to our local meetup meetup and i told the guys like yeah i found this deal i just didn't know what to do with it and this guy is like why why don't you wholesale it i said what do you mean he's like you can make money just by flipping the contract and i was like teach me so we go call the agent again that same on that same meetup call the agent i was like we'll be we'll see the property again tomorrow we go he runs the numbers he's like this is a good deal man we can make some money here he get under contract and he showed me how to flip that paper and i was like we just make ten thousand dollars in a few phone calls yeah i at that time when i was doing the waiter stuff i was flipping furniture online i was trying to start any type of side hassle flipping phones uh washers dryers clothing on on ebay anything i could get my man my hands of make money.

3:38But I never really thought I could make money on real estate because, you know, I don't come from a family with money. I'm an immigrant. I've been here since I was 18 only. So when that happened and I was like, OK, this is this is this is it. You know, I saw Doctor Strange and the Marvel movies, you know, this is the one. And I just I went straight ahead, start calling nonstop.

3:59Brandon Turner:OK, so you said you found that first deal in two weeks that you ended up eventually wholesaling. How did you find that deal? Just calling agents on the MLS? obligations in the LMLS. Imagine three days in the real estate. Yeah. Do you want to do seller finance or sub two? No. Like I get 500 calls every day. I was like, okay. And then eventually this girl's like, yeah, we had this property on a contract with somebody else, but they couldn't perform. Do you want to come see it? And she sends me the terms. She sends me the mortgage sheet. I got lucky. You know, after 500, 600 calls, somebody say yes.

4:30You called 500 to 600 people? Every single listing in SILO.

4:34Brandon Turner:Folks, if you are listening right now, that is absolutely not luck. That is hard work paying off. Yes, that seems like a long shot. Sure. But if you sit down and you put effort in and you call 600 people determined to get a deal, you're probably going to get a deal. And that goes for almost anyone. If you are in a market and you call the right list and you have that much dedication, you're going to stumble across a deal. So no, that's not luck. I call that positioning, right? You put yourself in the position to be ready to capitalize on a deal. You got paid to get an education in how to do a wholesale deal.

5:16Brandon Turner:So how long did it take you to land your next one? Nine months. Nine months. I didn't know that you can pull lists of low equity or seller finance. I was just calling every single listing. Yeah. So now I'm pulling lists. I'm making calls. I'm getting better at sales. I'm getting better at my pitch. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. nine months later, it was a very humbling lesson because I was about to give up. Actually, I had given up two weeks prior to that because we went to the doctor with my wife and we found out she was having some hell of a leisure. So I need a lot of money.

5:45I was about to sell the house. All my servants were about to go there. No more wholesaling. I was like, because at this point, in these nine months, I got fired from my job twice because every time a seller calls me back on a Friday night, instead of having fajitas on my hand, I have my phone. And my manager's yelling at me. I was like, hold on. If this is the 10K call, I'm about to walk out. right this is my my real proof of concept it never happened so we're driving back from the doctor's appointment and i'm just like okay uh i tried i tried i like i made two 300 calls every day manually until somebody pick up the phone right it didn't work like i really did my best i didn't take this off monday to sunday like it's not for me and then on that drive home i get a text message back hey andres this is andre you called me a few months ago uh you explained me about the seller financing and you were right the person who got me in their contract for this price they couldn't close can you help me out because now i already moved out of the house and i am behind one month of the payments and i met him in person and we got under contract and that was my first wholesale assignment fee of ten thousand dollars a week later i get another message back hey do you still want to buy this house and then you know the cycle of wholesaling you need to build a pipeline the pilot came back to me so yes i start making money now this is how direct to seller marketing typically works for anything, whether you're going to wholesale it, whether you're

7:02Brandon Turner:going to keep them for yourself. When you're doing direct to seller marketing, sometimes what you're doing is you're starting to roll that snowball, right? Because you're putting in effort and people are saying no, but you're also giving them the idea that working with you or your creative strategy, or even the idea to think about selling is just now popped in their head because they weren't thinking about it before until you called. And so they said no, maybe because they didn't understand it, maybe because it wasn't the right time. But once you plant that seed, it starts to grow. And then at some point they may decide, oh, let me call Andreas.

7:38Brandon Turner:He called, he said he could do this. Now I'm in the right space. So you got to get the snowball started. And where people fail with direct-to-selling marketing is they quit before their snowball gets big enough to start producing results for them. And so they say it doesn't work and they're done. And then they missed their opportunity because maybe somebody else starts marketing in the meantime to that same list. And then those leads that they started to foster end up going to somebody else, man. So that's super cool. So you're wholesaling, your proof of concept worked. Then you start popping off$10 ,000 checks,$7 ,000 checks,$9 ,000 checks.

8:14Brandon Turner:So it's working. What did you move into after that? When I got started, even before real estate, the reason I was doing the side hassles is because I've always wanted to achieve the point that I achieve now where like I have enough cash flow. I don't have to leave my house. I leave my house right now once or twice a month. I don't pick up the phone for anybody except if it's an emergency for my tenants because now I have AI running everything. That level of freedom for somebody like me who had to start working at 14, right? who has always depending on somebody else. I wanted to flavor that. And once I did, I realized I really like it and I don't want to go back to being on the hustle.

8:53A lot of people think because I hustle hard is because I have the alpha type. I want to be the big CEO. I want to make the billion dollars. I am very okay making my 20, 30K a month passive income, working maybe 20, 30 hours a month, not having to talk to anybody on the phone. I don't have to talk to sellers. I don't have to talk to agents. But the transition was, it's very interesting. So going back to the beginning, on that deal with the real estate investor, we went to the home and he's like, okay, I will make this work, but I need to put 10 rooms. I was like, absolutely not. You're not going to raise money for that.

9:24You're going to borrow from somebody money. You're going to steal it. Then you're going to walk away. No, I passed on that deal. But I kept me thinking, hold on. Maybe there is something here I don't know about room rentals. And, you know, I'm already part of a mastermind. So I start talking with people. Have you heard of this? I was like, oh, yeah, I've heard about this. I have it. Yeah, this, this, and that. I was like, holy shit. Okay, that's it. That's the end goal, cash flow.

9:43Brandon Turner:So I have several more questions about how you transition from this, but I want to get into those right after this break. Most deals don't fall apart because of the numbers. They fall apart because of the financing. You find a property that cash flows, the deal makes sense. But then the lender looks at your personal income, your tax returns, your debt to income ratio, and suddenly the deal doesn't qualify. That's the disconnect. Because as investors, we're not buying based on our W-2, we're buying based on the asset. That's why Host Financial offers DSCR loans designed for real estate investors, where qualification is based primarily on the property's income, not your personal finances.

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13:26Brandon Turner:All right, we are back on the BiggerPockets podcast with investor Andreas Martinez. Andreas started off wholesaling, did several wholesale deals, made good money, and then decided, you know what? I'm not going to do that anymore because I want to try this co-living thing. So you started to research, you learned about co-living. Did that deal that you were trying to wholesale become your first co-living property or did you end up wholesaling that? No, that same meetup that I went where I made my first wholesale deal for$500, it happens every Saturday of the first month. I was on the way there and I get a call from my boss because I'm still working at a restaurant.

14:04I was like, I need you. And I was like, you know, it was like January 2nd, brand new year. Like, you know, I woke up early, I shaved, I worked out. I was like, I'm going to go meet a lot of people. This is my year. And I missed the meetup. and I get a text message from another guy that I was kind of coaching, teaching how to do wholesale. He's like, hey, this agent was walking around the meetup. And this is a creative finance meetup full of creative finance investors. He was describing this property, these five rooms, three bedrooms, and the seller is in pre-foreclosure and he doesn't really want to make a lot of money.

14:33He just wants to help the seller. But nobody else pay attention to it. And I automatically, nobody pay attention because they don't know calling me. Text the agent, I was like, I'll call you as soon as I get out of work. I was supposed to get out of four. I didn't get out until 11. I give him a call. He's like, I was waiting for your call. I was like, can we jump on a Zoom? Saturday at 1130 at night, we're on a call for an hour. The next morning, we're meeting at the property with the seller before I go to work. Property under contract. $3 ,000 down. I got a 2019 house, quarter lot, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, ready to go for co-living.

15:03Brandon Turner:And so you essentially take over payments on this property and you convert it to co-living. Did you have to add any bedrooms or did you just do it co-living as it sat? So I bring the deal to my mastermind and to make sure that even though I already knew it was a good deal, I just needed, you know, I was about to put a lot of money in the conversion. It was about$40 ,000 to have three more rooms. We needed to redo the flooring because it was carpet. I need to put now LBP paint. And I don't know anything about construction yet. And the guy who's hosting those mastermind, he's like, Andres, do you want to sell me this?

15:34And I was like, oh, I really got a deal. You know, I really got a deal. and he was like, this works long-term rental, section A, mid-term rental, Airbnb, and you're going to go for the worst strategy called living. I was like, that's what I want to try because it's in a great area. It has already five rooms, but I need to put three more to make maximum profit. And on that call, I was like, it's going to be a lot of money, but I wish I could partner with somebody. I don't have to use my money.

15:56Brandon Turner:So the money you were raising was the money for the renovation because you bought it sub two, but when you buy it sub two, that just gives you the money to buy it. You don't, if you're going to renovate it, that's got to come out of your pocket. You need the renovation. You need the furniture. You need the refrigerator, the stove, holding costs. So about how much were you trying to raise to get all this done? $58 ,000. And on that Zoom chat, somebody texted me. He said, hey, Andres, we have money. Can we partner? And I said, okay, let's talk about it. You bring all the money. I'll bring everything else.

16:24I'll manage it. And then we'll go from there. We go under contract. We close. We start renovations. My contractors end up stealing a lot of money. No problem. I lost at that point because it was my responsibility,$40 ,000 out of my pocket to rebuy all the flooring. The guys who were doing the work at the house, she never paid them. So they were trying to come back and to destroy the bathrooms that they had built. I had to stay at the property. Oh my goodness. Heart attack after heart attack. I was going to home depot in the morning, doing the renovation of myself at the end, going back to work all day, double shift because now I needed money.

16:54Everything that I made from all selling was kind of gone. Yeah. Going back at night. Anyways, we went live on March 1st. I was full in two weeks. Oh my goodness. And how much were you renting each bedroom for? At the beginning, it was between$8 and$8.50. The private bathroom was for$1 ,000. So the total income was somewhere around$6 ,500.

17:11Brandon Turner:$6 ,500 a month. And what was your mortgage taxes insurance? $2 ,100. Oh my goodness. After expenses and everything, the net was at the beginning somewhere around$2 ,700,$2 ,800. Yeah, man. That's a phenomenal cash flowing deal. What area of the country or what city are these deals being done in? Mainly Fort Worth, Texas. Now I'm in DFW, you, but at that point I started mainly in Fort Worth, Texas. So what did the next deal look like and how long did it take you to get that? Well, I was finished the renovation. I contacted everybody that I knew, like I need help. I ended up meeting this investor who already had another property coming up.

17:47And he was like, Hey, since you know how to operate, right? You can get the properties. You can find the tenants. Let's partner up because I'm already partners with a contractor. And I was like, okay, perfect. That's the second property. We jump into it. Turns out the contractor ends up scamming him and scamming me. Boy. 0 for 2 on contractors. The main guy who was working for the contractor ends up renting a room in the second house. Oh. So I'm walking through the house. I was like, hey, bro, like you're still missing trim here and there and there. Eventually, three days later, I was like, hey, rent is due.

18:17And then he explodes like, you haven't paid my boss. She says you haven't paid her for a month. That's why she doesn't have money. And I showed him the receipt like we already pay her. She was gone. So he was like, I don't have money. And I was like, OK, let's get to work. And then I started just asking people, hey, do you need a contractor? He did a good job. And you know, he's the main guy. Find him a job, find him a second one. I was like, okay, can you find bigger houses? Like, yeah, let me keep buying them. So now I was doing my food renovation. I learned a lot of construction there because he's been doing construction for 20 years.

18:46So we started doing more co-living for me, co-living for other investors, working with Coder Force, we're learning how to do permits. Now I had another deal on their contract that was a fix and flip. We did the flip, we did another flip. I bought another co-living. So now, instead of doing the wholesaling, now the contractor gig took up. And if you ask me between being a contractor and a wholesaler, I would take being the contractor.

19:08Brandon Turner:So that first co-living deal, you had a partner. So because the partner gave you the money for the renovation, the furniture, and then you guys were 50-50. Second deal was a different investor than who you were partnered with before? Yes, it was a different investor. He already wanted to invest in co-living, but he was missing the operations because operations is very heavy in co-living. So it was the same deal, 50-50. But he was like, since you are messing up on the contractor stuff, let me bring my partner. Because she's the contractor and then the whole thing. Got it. So that ended up being a debacle from the contractor side.

19:40Brandon Turner:But it sounds like you were still able to get the house fixed up. And then were you able to get that one rented out? And how many bedrooms were in that one? That one was eight bedrooms with an ADU in the back. And you were renting the rooms in that one for about how much? A little bit less, like between 750 and 800. So give us the breakdown on that. What was your mortgage taxes, insurance, and what were you bringing in a month? Gross income was around$6 ,400,$6 ,500 as well. Pretty similar because we didn't have the ADU fully functional yet. That would have been an extra$1 ,000. Wow. We would have killed it.

20:10PITI on that one was like$2 ,300, but we had a HELOC that we also took on second position because the start had a HELOC, so it was like an extra$300. But the net was still around the same,$2 ,200,$2 ,300 at that time. Yes.

20:23Brandon Turner:That's super cool. You're finding the people who either have the deals or can find the deals and you bring the operations and the experience. And then you're typically 50 50 in those deals. So either somebody brings the money or the deal, you bring the operations, the experience, and then you 50 50. But it sounds like you realized after two failed renovation projects with contractors running off with some money that you were like, this is a gap that I need to fill. So tell me about that. Did you go out and hire guys that you keep in-house? Or do you have just like other GCs that you work with that mainly only work for you?

20:59Brandon Turner:Like, what does that structure look like? So what I realized at that point was this contractor, she did not anything about a contractor. She just happened to find her main guy and his team was doing the stuff. So I was like, I can do the same. I can find the deals. I can find the houses. With a difference, I can work. Because I already finished my house. I did the flooring. I did the tile. I did the drivel. I have a better understanding of that. So I was like, look, if you help me learn this more, I can get you jobs, right? Because as a wholesaler, if I come with a contractor, at that point, I was still thinking about wholesaling.

21:28It's a double win. So we started doing that.