# How Real Estate Agents Build Lasting Wealth Through Turnkey Investing: Mike Azzam's Playbook > Published: 2026-07-28 | Category: podcast-episode **Guest:** Mike Azzam Ohio's #1 agent Mike Azzam shows how agents turn commissions into cash-flowing turnkey rentals using BRRRR and patient singles-and-doubles investing. ## Content # How Real Estate Agents Build Lasting Wealth Through Turnkey Investing: Mike Azzam's Playbook Most real estate agents spend their careers chasing the next commission check. Mike Azzam thinks that's leaving the best part of the business on the table. A former registered nurse who traded scrubs for a real estate license, Mike now leads the Azzam Group at RE/MAX Haven Realty, was named Ohio Realtors' number one individual sales producer in 2019, and has completed more than 500 flips through Azzam Turnkey in Cleveland, Ohio. On this episode of the REI Agent Podcast, he sat down with host Mattias to explain how agents can convert their active sales income into durable, cash-flowing assets — and why the smartest move most agents can make is simply to buy their first property. If you sell homes for a living but haven't yet used your own industry knowledge to build wealth, this conversation is your roadmap. ## Why Should Real Estate Agents Invest Instead of Just Selling? Mike's core argument is that agents are sitting on an unfair advantage and most of them never use it. "In any other industry, the knowledge and insight you guys have and information in terms of just knowing what's coming up, it'd be insider trading," he told a local panel of colleagues a few years back. Agents see deals first, understand local pricing, and have relationships with lenders, contractors, and title companies. Yet they hand those opportunities to out-of-state investors instead of acting on them. The reason to invest, in Mike's framing, isn't just extra money — it's a different kind of money. Sales income is active; it stops when you stop working. Rental income keeps arriving. "The holy grail of where I want REI agents to be is to get to a point where they are increasing their lifestyle with their passive income, not with just their sales income," he said. In that model, your commissions become the fuel that accelerates your investing, while your portfolio quietly builds the freedom that drew most agents to the business in the first place. That freedom, both Mike and Mattias agreed, is the real prize. Neither of them left their previous careers to get rich overnight — they left to control their time. Investing is what turns a good sales year into a resilient financial foundation that survives market shifts, seasonality, and the inevitable slow months every agent eventually faces. ## What Is Turnkey Investing and How Does the BRRRR Model Work? Azzam Turnkey runs two parallel models, and understanding the difference is key to picking your entry point. In the first, Mike's team front-loads all the capital: they prospect off-market deals, completely renovate the properties, place tenants, and hold the homes until a turnkey buyer is ready. That buyer gets a one-stop shop — a stabilized, cash-flowing, professionally managed asset they can purchase from across the country while "just sitting from their computer screen, clicking a button." The second model is for investors who have some experience and want to force appreciation themselves. Here the buyer brings the capital from day one, and Mike's team helps them target on- and off-market properties, provides scopes of work and renovation quotes, and manages the rehab and tenant placement remotely. This is the BRRRR method in action — buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat — where the investor recycles their capital out of each deal to fund the next one. "You need to be strategic when you're scaling your portfolio. You need to scale your capital. You need to find ways to recycle it," Mike explained. The lesson for agents is that you don't have to choose one lane forever. Turnkey is a low-friction way to get your first door. But, as Mike put it, "you can't buy turnkey forever" — eventually you graduate to adding value yourself, which is where the real capital efficiency and long-term wealth are built. ## Are Investment Numbers Still Working With Higher Interest Rates? This is the question on every agent's mind, and Mike didn't sugarcoat it: the math has shifted, but it still works if you shift with it. Back in the 20-teens, his team was buying distressed Cleveland houses for $20,000 to $30,000 and pouring $60,000 to $80,000 into rehab — sometimes with another $50,000 to $60,000 held in city-required escrow. Those extreme numbers are gone. Today he's buying properties around $140,000 instead of $30,000, and the strategy has adjusted accordingly. What matters is how much capital you leave trapped in a finished deal. Mike now advises investors to anticipate leaving $10,000 to $15,000 in a property after refinancing, and his team often outperforms that. "Our last refinance, which was I think a month ago, we have about $11K left in the deal — for a house that is fully rehabbed and still cash flowing. In today's market, that's a no-brainer home run," he said. Compared to the 20 to 25 percent down payment plus closing costs a typical buyer would expect on an investment property, leaving eleven grand in a stabilized, income-producing asset is a dramatically better position. Mike also pushed agents to look past monthly cash flow alone. Real estate professionals can depreciate the asset, accelerate that depreciation, and take bonus depreciation to offset income today — then sell the property whenever they choose, without waiting until retirement age. Between cash flow, tax advantages, tenant-funded principal paydown, and appreciation, he argued the total return is far stronger than the cash-on-cash number suggests. And in his home market specifically, he pushed back on the tired coastal-versus-Midwest stereotype: Cleveland has delivered both. His pro formas assume 2 to 3 percent appreciation, but several neighborhoods have doubled or tripled that. ## Why Do "Singles and Doubles" Beat Chasing Home Runs? If there's one mindset Mike wants agents to abandon, it's the obsession with door count. In investor circles, he noted, people "walk around with this badge of how many doors they have" — but the number is nearly meaningless. Ten $30,000 doors are worth a fraction of ten $400,000 doors, yet the door count looks identical. He's stopped quoting his own door count entirely. > My badge of honor is $35K a month in net passive rental income. That's my badge of honor. I couldn't care if it was one door or a thousand doors that got me to that number. The deeper problem is that chasing home runs paralyzes new investors. "The biggest misconception I hear from investors is, I want to get to 50 doors, I want to get to 10K a month," Mike said. "It's like, let's get to one first. It's okay that you don't have any yet." Because they're fixated on a huge back-end goal and demanding a 12 or 15 percent ROI on every deal, they let good, boring, cash-flowing opportunities pass them by. Mike's prescription is the opposite: "Not everything needs to be a home run. You can hit singles and doubles, get in the game, and start to scale from there." For agents who don't have a pile of cash, Mattias laid out a realistic on-ramp that dovetails with Mike's philosophy. Start with your own home, convert it to a rental later, tap the equity through a line of credit, and repeat. A base hit every year compounds. Over time that same patient approach can build a seven-figure net worth outside your personal residence — and open doors to more passive vehicles like syndications if you eventually want them. ## How Does Construction Knowledge Make You a Better Agent? One of the most practical takeaways applies even to agents who never buy a single investment property. Mike argued that understanding renovation costs is simply part of doing your job well. "It's a disservice to your clients if you don't have any concept of what things cost," he said. "How do you negotiate? How do you leverage any situation for your clients? How do you strategize?" An agent who can't tell a seller what upgrades will actually move the needle on ROI — or reassure a buyer that a repair costs $8,000, not the $100,000 everyone loves to throw around — is negotiating blind. You don't need to be a contractor. Mike's bar is reasonable: you should know roughly what it costs to install vinyl plank flooring per square foot, even if you never learn what exterior waterproofing excavation runs. Talk to contractors, research online, and walk through a few renovations. Mattias added that living through the stages of a flip — seeing what a fresh coat of paint does to a "drab" listing — gives you real ammunition to educate and persuade clients. Mike's team has turned this knowledge into revenue. Because they built a construction arm to handle investor rehabs, they now offer repair services to retail sellers too. When a listing client needs a few fixes before going to market, the team handles it — capturing both the listing and margin on the repairs. That kind of vertical integration, extended across title, lending, insurance, and cleaning, is how Mike converts expertise into "a win-win" for clients and the business alike. ## What's the Highest-Leverage Habit for Doubling Production? Asked to name the single highest-leverage habit for an agent who wants to double production over 24 months without burning out, Mike didn't hesitate: prospecting, and above all, consistency. "How many people did you touch today? How many people are you touching tomorrow?" is a broken record in his office. He compared inconsistent, twice-a-week power-dialing sessions to crash dieting: "I need to lose 10 pounds — not eat for two days. It just doesn't work." The fix is to treat your pipeline like an investment, not a contact list. "Manage your pipeline like it's an investment," Mike said — with drip campaigns, action plans, and steady daily touches by email, text, and call. Mattias described running his own touch list every morning, reaching out to just five people a day in a meaningful, relationship-based way using a FORD framework (family, occupation, recreation, dreams). Five a day isn't insane; the consistency is what compounds. Mike's other golden nuggets reinforced the theme: build systems so you can vertically integrate and sustain volume, focus on activity rather than outcomes ("as long as the activity is there, the outcome will follow"), and above all, don't overcomplicate it. He's been openly skeptical of shiny AI tools — he scrapped AI-driven calls and texts on his own team because clients could "smell the fake AI," and both he and Mattias agreed that in a relationship business, genuine human connection is the one thing automation can't replace. ## Keep Building the Life You Want Mike Azzam's message to real estate agents is refreshingly grounded: you already have the knowledge, the access, and the relationships to build lasting wealth — you just have to start. Buy one door. Leave a little capital in the deal. Learn what a rehab costs. Prospect consistently. Then let the singles and doubles compound into the kind of passive income that buys back your time. For the full conversation, including Mike's take on the Cleveland market's best current opportunities and his favorite business book, listen to this episode of the REI Agent Podcast wherever you get your shows. And if you're ready to put these ideas to work in your own business, explore REI Agent Advisor at [advisor.reiagent.com](https://advisor.reiagent.com) for tools and guidance built to help agents turn active income into lasting assets. Until next time, keep building the life you want.
Full Episode Transcript Welcome back to the REI Agent. My guest today is Mike Azzam. He's a team lead of the Azzam Group at REMAX Haven Realty and founder of the Azzam Turnkey in Cleveland, Ohio. For real estate, Mike was a registered nurse and he brought the same systems thinking and attention to detail from healthcare into building one of the most productive real estate operations in the state. He was named Ohio Realtors number one individual sales producer in 2019, has completed over 500 flips through Azzam Turnkey, and now runs a team that services both retail buyers and sellers and out-of-state investors looking for turnkey cashflow. Mike, welcome to the REI Agent Podcast. Hey, Matthias. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Look forward to it. Yeah, man. You're a perfect guest for us. I'm excited to talk to you about some of the stuff that we just went over, I mean, flipping. It sounds like, well, I don't want to get into it too much yet because I want to hear first how you got into real estate, what took you from healthcare into real estate. It feels like ages ago on the healthcare side. When I hear the introduction now, it's like, oh my God, I was, I can't believe it. Just maybe not the most unique story, but I got a job, entry level, it's like a first year associate at a firm working in the mailroom. I got a job as a leasing agent for a startup management company and was showing some rentals in the inner city of Cleveland and just started really gravitating towards real estate then. At a certain point, about a year or two into it, I'm like, I got to make the jump here. I wanted the freedom and I think that was the most important thing and decided this was the path that fate had for me, so here we are. Yeah, man, I can relate with that a lot. We kind of always was seeking that freedom, the being my own boss, doing my own thing, kind of always had my own ideas, little side hustles, whatever you will, throughout my whole life. When we bought our first house, the agent made it seem like so much fun, I was like, this is it. Yeah. I had that aha moment where I really, it's like, this is what I want to do. So many of my colleagues, that's how they started. They bought a house and they just gravitated towards the process, just how the realtor handled things and it's like, oh, I can do this too. It's commendable. I think we all want freedom in life, not just with income, but the money is great, but really, we do this for the freedom. That's what I do it for. I want to control my time, my schedule, my destiny, as cliche as it may sound, and that's what's so important every day, to be able to just come and go as I please, even though we end up working more when we are self-employed, right? That's what I was just going to say. It's not like we're sitting around, we've made it, man, we're just drinking cocktails on the beach all day. I know. I know. It's good to choose what 16 hours a day you want to work. So were you always interested in the investment side of things as well? Did that, I mean, coming from seeing the rental side of things, I see some people maybe being a little bit scared off from some of the horror stories of the investment side of real estate, but did you always have that interest as well as getting into the sales end, or what came first? No, it was the investor side. That's what catapulted everything, and because I was at a startup management company, Cleveland's always been a very investor-driven market, so that's what I was exposed to. And then at that time, this is back in 2010, 2011, 2012, it was mostly international clients, so buying rentals in Cleveland. So it just started to grow from there, and that's what was always so interesting, more so even than the, I honestly never really had a lot of desire to go and show Forever Homes and talk about floor plans and color schemes for Sally and Joe looking to upsize or downsize. I liked the aspect of scaling, and that's what the investor side allowed us to do, allowed them to do. So investor, the growth with them was mutual growth with us, and we really took off with it. Look, when you're talking about investment properties, it's just a different approach. It's more numbers-driven, right? It's more analytical. It's more process-oriented, and that's what allowed us to vertically integrate with a lot of our, and we can get into this later, but a lot of our other businesses as well. And the scaling part, though, was so crucial. Sally and Joe buy a house, Matthias, you might not hear from them for another five, six years, right? Average first-time homebuyers in a house for, I think it's statistically speaking, around three years. Fine. Three years, best-case scenario, you'll hear from them again. That investor is going to buy next week, maybe a couple of weeks later. And we built that pipeline out of investors just scaling to 10, 15, 20 properties, and that was always so much more attractive in terms of a business model. So the investor side seems so much more lucrative from the onset. Yeah, especially, I would say, I think Cleveland would have what it takes, really. You can really get a consistent buyer pool. I would imagine the cash flow numbers look a lot better. And actually, really, I heard here recently when I think it was somebody I was interviewing was talking about different markets, and the stereotype is that the Midwest will cash flow better and the coasts will appreciate better, but this person was saying that the Cleveland market that they were investing in actually appreciated really well and was kind of the best of both worlds. Would that be true? I mean, are we still getting pretty good return now? I know it's a lot harder with both having seen appreciation and having, obviously, the higher interest rates. No, it's been one of the biggest misconceptions of our market. Look, we're not a coastal city. Those are the growth markets, I'm aware. But what we preach to our investor pool, I feel like I'm in a consultation call with the new investor here. It's what we preach, and it's not lip service, as you've found and seen. You get a little bit of everything, you get a little bit of cash flow, you get, obviously, this stable upper midsize market, and then you do get to capture some appreciation. We've had healthy growth over the last decade. We'll run in pro forma as 2% to 3% appreciation. We have outpaced that 2x, 3x in some of the markets around the Cleveland area that we've invested in. Yeah, that's been really promising, and it's a nice little bonus for our own portfolio, for our investors, something that maybe wasn't necessarily anticipated. But I think one of the best things about our market is that we've been able to capture both. Sure. One of the approaches that I've heard of as well, and I'm wondering if this is what you all do, is looking at a property, you have an investor that wants to buy something, just finding a property. I don't know if it's off market or on market, but essentially saying, look, we're going to buy this for X amount. This was, I think, an agent I was talking to out of Pennsylvania somewhere, and their numbers were just nuts. You buy the property for $20,000, you put $60,000 into it, and then you get rented for... This was a few years ago, but is that the type of flipping turnkey rental operation you all are doing? You have the investor and you're getting the whole thing together for them, or are you out there prospecting, finding things off market, renovating them, et cetera? Little bit of both. To touch on that, that's what the market was back in the 20-teens. It's wild. To think that we were putting in four times the value of the house in construction, or four times the purchase of the house in construction, a little side note, some of these cities were so hell-bent on trying to stabilize the housing stock. They have city inspections, and they would be required escrow. Escrow would be, think of it like collateral, so if you were to buy the house, you had to take care of X violations, it would be pages, because this is post-crash, so the houses were distressed. In Cleveland, most Midwest got hammered after the recession and the crash, so these cities would then impose these high escrow requirements. You'd have a house that was, I kid you not, $20,000, and you'd have to put $80,000, $60,000 to $80,000 in rehab, and here's the kicker. You'd also have to have another $50,000 to $60,000 in collateral held to ensure that you did the violations and you couldn't touch it until it was released. Think about how capital intensive that was. The house is $20,000, $30,000, when it's all said and done, just crazy numbers. It's where a lot of the international clients came in is because of that so heavy capital. It is, but it's also not insane. It's maybe not typical. You hear $20,000 house, you don't think you're going to have to have that $130,000 or whatever in it, but 20% down of a lot of investment properties, it's not that much further away now. I imagine they're doing basically the Burr method then where they're going to refinance and get the capital back, so they could rinse and repeat if they kept doing this with other properties. That's the goal, and then it was a lot tougher to get lending on lower-priced properties when loan value was low, so you're talking, again, a lot of cash. It was just tough to scale when you're talking about needing $150,000 in capital, but the objective as we've matured, as our markets improved and developed and grown, the aspect of what our business model is has also grown, so we go out and we prospect, and we find these off-market deals, and we stabilize them, and stabilize, I mean, that's an understatement. We completely renovate them, and then we'll get tenants in place, and we'll hold onto them until a turnkey buyer comes along, and we'll present them numbers, and we'll provide them a one-stop shop. We have management in place. I mean, everything they could think of, all the resources ready to go at their fingertips, and we just streamline the process, but then we also get the investors that have a little more experience under their belt or have gravitated from buying the turnkey model, so to speak, and want to get into forcing some appreciation, adding the value themselves. We have an entire arm designed for that, and we'll help them find the property, so we'll actually go with them, so to speak, and target specific properties on and off-market, and then we'll provide them quotes, scopes of work, and we streamline that process for them after closing, so they'll actually get in there, and I mean, it's crazy. They'll be across the country, and the house is getting rehabbed for them, and then a tenant's place for them, then it's managed for them, all the while they're just sitting from their computer screen, clicking a button, and then they refine the backend, and they do it again. So the difference between those two models you just described is that you're kind of front-loading the capital to get that job done, whereas somebody else would be kind of bringing the capital in from square one, basically, right? Exactly. We allow clients that have worked with us for X period of time to take that path once they have a little bit of experience under their belt. We want, like, you can't buy turnkey forever. You need to scale your portfolio. You need to be strategic when you're scaling your portfolio. You need to scale your capital. You need to find ways to recycle it, right? So we're not shy to that, and we have the entire system down, so we've helped countless investors over the years take that same approach, like, hey, we have all the services and resources here. Oh, you want to buy this distressed asset? Sure. We'll help you sell it, we'll help manage it, we'll help rehab it, and then here's the kicker, Mattias. We're going to sell it in the future when they're ready to exit. So it's just like we're planting seeds, and we have tens of thousands of seeds that we've planted in this decade-plus of doing it, so it's a good long-term investment for our sales team as well. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Now, how much are you keeping any of these properties as well, as a company, personally, et cetera? It's hard not to. You just get to a point where it's like you don't want to sell these. So many of these that I almost looked at and thought, man, I just should have held on to it. We have over 70 properties that we've held on to. Our portfolio is over 10 mil now, which is crazy to think in a market like Cleveland. It's just so many opportunities that we've looked at, stepped into, and said, you know what? We're going to hold on to this, or we're going to let the season a bit. We had one, we were on the market, had a buyer at 265. One of my agents walked in and said, Mike, you're crazy. This place is beautiful. We pivoted and said, all right. You know what? We released it, and we just refinanced it and kept it. It's hit a point where capital is not an issue for us. It's more long-term growth. It's wealth building. So if we can grow the portfolio, why not? Yeah. I think it's just, if you get into the game of rehabs, et cetera, and our market is completely different than yours. This is not really a system that we could replicate at scale like you in our market. But I do, to a lot less of a volume, get opportunities to renovate properties. And essentially, yeah. When there's a one that comes up that is one that I like, it's in a location I like, that I want to keep long-term, yeah, I look at the BRRRR method. And it's been harder. The last one we did, we had to turn it into a midterm rental to make it a cash flow. But that's actually done really well. And so I can't complain on it. But are you seeing that it's tougher now to make the numbers work, pencil out with the interest rates where they're at? A little bit. You're not cash flowing as high. I mean, you just have to pivot with the market. We're advising investors to anticipate leaving $10K to $15K in the deal. And sometimes we're outperforming that. Recently we had an investor, I think he ended up pulling out the majority of his capital. But we'd rather play conservative upfront. Our last refinance, which was I think a month ago, we have about $11K left in the deal. Matthias, for a house that is fully rehabbed and still cash flowing, and I have $10K left in the deal. And today's market, that's a no-brainer home run. It's just like anything. I can't buy houses for $30K, $40K anymore. I'm buying them for $140K now. And that's how the market shifts. You just have to shift with it. In 10 years, you're going to be like, I'm not buying houses for $140K anymore. Exactly. Exactly. Or now I'm leaving $24K left in the deal instead of $10K left, $14K left in the deal. And you're looking at it going, well, that's how the market shifted. So you just roll the punches. It's still awesome. Those numbers are still awesome to only have that much in a deal. It's definitely not what anybody around here would expect for buying an investment property. They would be expecting 20%, 25% down, closing costs, et cetera. And that would be a lot more. And when you look at it from a different perspective, if you have a nine-to-five job and you're investing in a portfolio to offset taxes to whatever, you're probably investing a good amount of money similar to that, maybe a higher percentage of your income, depending, than what that would be. But you get tax benefits as a real estate professional and you can depreciate this asset. If you want to, you can just accelerate the depreciation, take the bonus depreciation. And you can take advantage of that stuff now. You can sell that asset later. You can sell that asset when you want to. You don't have to wait until you're 65. You get cash flow. You can start using that to offset your expenses. You can get to the point where you are actually living on your passive income or you can sustain your lifestyle with your passive income. And I think that's the holy grail of where I want REI agents to be, is to get to a point where they are increasing their lifestyle with their passive income, not with just their sales income. Their sales income is like kind of bonus and able to accelerate their investing. But that's just like the iceberg, right? It's the underneath the water part, right? You just build this big, massive thing and then you become really unstoppable. And when there are shifts in the market, when there is seasonality, all that kind of stuff, when the perfect storms happen, you're set, you're gold. There are so many examples of that. And the issue is, and you're right, that should be the primary focus. I sat on a panel a few years ago, and this is a local panel, and one of my main points to a bunch of my colleagues and agents in the area was, in any other industry, the knowledge and insight you guys have and information in terms of just knowing what's coming up, be insider trading. Yeah. Take advantage of it. You guys are letting all of these opportunities go to out-of-state investors. Take advantage of it. We are fortunate to have grown up and worked in a market that has the opportunity that our market has. If I was in Miami or New York, would I have that sort of portfolio? Would I have a $10 million plus flipping portfolio? It doesn't equate to those markets and it's tough to scale there. What I feel like is a big issue is, is there's so much information around. Everything becomes like the hot and trendy new thing with investing. And these opportunities are looked at as just average and everyone's looking for the home run and this just doesn't cash flow enough. So many of my opportunities, so many of the properties in my portfolio, those are long-term plays. Why are we not looking at tax savings as a reason for investing? Why are we not taking advantage of some of those tax savings? You talked about bonus depreciation, cost segregations, so much at your fingertips to pay less in taxes. You can still sell the asset later and you still have the cash flow. It's not an IRA. Exactly. And you're getting the benefit of the tenant, potentially if it's a tenant place, they're paying it down as well. Maybe some growth and upside in terms of appreciation. There's so much opportunity and we're just so short-sighted because maybe it doesn't hit a 10 or 12 or 15% ROI and it doesn't cash flow what we want it to and it's just not worth it. I don't understand that thought process. I don't understand that ideology. Not everything needs to be a home run. You can hit singles and doubles, get in the game and start to scale from there and you'll find that there's so many advantages to investing in real estate. That's it. That's it. I think one of the things I talk about is if you don't have tons of cash and you just outlined an ability to invest with not tons of cash, depending on the strategy, you might have to have the cash up front to get the deal done before it's refinanced out. But if you just start with your own house and buy a house that you want to live in that you can turn into a rental later, over time that's going to get equity, get an equity line of credit. You've just tapped into that can be $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $100,000 pretty quickly. Rinse and repeat that a couple of times. Now you're getting dangerous. You can get into the $200,000 price point all cash. You can flip a property. There's a lot of opportunity if you do it. But the point is it's not immediate home runs. If you take a base hit every year, that adds up. That adds up to the compound. One of the things I talk about too is syndications. If you don't want to be an active investor where your passive income is kind of bullshit, it takes work. Rentals take work. There's things. Even if you have a manager, there's still some decisions you have to make. It's not all passive. You need to be really careful and you need to make sure that you're investing with the right people. This turnkey option you're talking about, this is a great opportunity for somebody to do something that would be a lot easier than flipping a property themselves. It's just about slowly building up. If you're doing these base hits, getting these properties over years, you can then have that million dollar net worth outside of your personal residence and invest in syndications if you choose to. But the more doors open, the more that you're doing this. It's why we offer those services because you need to have opportunity and different routes. An investor wants to come through and buy a turnkey property, sure, but then what? I've had investors that have invested in syndications. I'm not implying that that isn't the right path, but if you're looking for a way to still maintain some control, still have some involvement, find an operator to work with like us, where we can help navigate you through it like your lifeguard. Syndication, you're literally a passive, silent investor. They'll update you, get you quarterly updates, but you're at the mercy of the operator. You find a good operator locally in a market that you're comfortable with. There's ways and opportunity for you to scale your portfolio in other ways where you can still retain that involvement because you're right. You're always going to have that. Passive is not easy. You're always going to have involvement, even if you have a manager. One of my favorite lines is, you need to manage the manager. You're still going to have that, but you're talking about front-loading some of that stability, getting in there, stabilizing the assets. Now it's something a little bit easier for that manager, something a little bit easier for you in terms of maintaining that passive income. You got to get your feet wet and getting in the game is the first step. As long as you take that approach methodically, good things will happen. I hate to get on a soapbox here, but for years, one of the biggest misconceptions I hear from investors is, I want to get to 50 doors. I want to get to 10K a month, really get to 50 doors, 50 or 100 doors. It's like, let's get to one first. It's okay that you don't have any yet. It's okay. This is not anything that's intended to be disparaging because you're now just starting to invest. Not by any means. But let's start. We'll worry about 50 to 100 later. That's the issue. They're so focused on, okay, fast and I need to get home run so I can get to 50 to 100 doors. They're letting good opportunities pass them by. They're letting the situation overwhelm them because they only have that one objective on the back end. Go for gold. That's fine, but let's get some singles and doubles and all of a sudden you'll score some runs and things will be working. It's funny. If any agents listening to this right now that aren't familiar with or haven't really been in the investor circle as much, the doors badge. It's almost like this. People walk around with this badge of how many doors they have. It really is almost an arbitrary thing because people can have a bunch of $30,000 door properties or whatever, and if somebody else has 10, that's worth way more. Each one of those is worth $400,000. The math is really different. There's all sorts of different metrics, but it is funny how that's this badge that people seem to care about. It's good to set goals, but like you said, it's better. It's more important to make progress and to continue. To agents listening, you can still focus on your sales, but these are some options of ways you can build up that income as you go and not have to be obsessed with the investment part. You're not in there doing drywall in a flip or whatever. You can do this stuff passively. The more access to capital you have, the better off you are or the more hands-off you can be. You do a BRRRR one time and it's kind of addicting because you're like, this is a magic trick. If you get a full BRRRR, you're like, I just got this property for free and it's cash flowing really well. What's happening? Yeah. Tax-free. I mean, literally a tax-free. That cash out refi is tax-free on top of it. That's just... I mean, it is. It's a cheat code. You're in the industry. I chat with investors that are engineers and firefighters and physicians that they have no concept of resources. You're in the industry. You have resources. You have the experience and exposure. It's almost a shame. It's almost criminal that you're not taking advantage of that. Finding the opportunity there. I mean, just find a local networking group and just meet up once a week just to get your feet wet at the very least because it's right there for you and you have that opportunity. It's something that I've been preaching for years. Every agent on my team, that's one of the biggest objectives for them is they want to come on, learn that side of things and start investing. Every agent on my team invests. They have a couple of flips going, buy and hold. One of my agents just did his first Airbnb. It's not door count. I stopped saying the door count to your point years ago. When people ask, I'll say, if you want to know, I'll give you a kind of a volume valuation. My badge of honor is $35K a month in net passive rental income. That's my badge of honor. That's what's important. I couldn't care if it was one door or a thousand doors that got me to that number. You can take that portfolio, drop it down to a door. As long as that number's not impacted, I couldn't care less. Yeah, I mean, it'd be better, right? Yeah, I know. Less headaches, right? Less to manage. Well, I mean, you've obviously built this pretty awesome operation. The sales team, this whole thing is this really interesting business that you've created that, again, like I said, might be hard to replicate depending on the market you're in. What do you think is the key to that success? Have you figured out the operational kind of discipline that makes the growth that you've seen durable? So, long-winded answer here. And you're right. Maybe it is difficult to replicate this specifically in other markets. You're in Tampa, Florida, a huge growth market. But there are ways that you can find opportunities to scale aspects of what we do. The construction arm, which we built out because we are doing so many investor rehabs, we have scaled that and moved that into our retail sector here. We have an immense amount of local homeowners, Sally and Joe, that need to sell their home but need to get some things buttoned up. And what that's done is it's allowed us to capture additional revenue. And that's been a huge part of our growth. Keeps our crews busy. Keeps our contractors busy. So there's ways you can replicate functions of what we've done. And from there, you'll start to vertically integrate other aspects as well. We have a cleaning arm. We have a cleaning business as well. We just bought our second trailer for haul-offs, for trash haul-offs. We've really scaled to almost every service aspect of this. So you have a listing. You know how valuable it is? What a value proposition that would be for you to come with your folder and comparables and CMA and cute presentation, but also be able to leverage your resources and processes on the repair side. And that's where it is extremely helpful. I have a listing appointment with one of my agents next week, a half million dollar listing in Cleveland. That's a great listing, by the way. Half million dollar listing, guys relocating to, sorry, North or South Carolina. What's important is, is he has a couple of repairs that are needed at his home. And he does not have the patience, time, or energy to go around on Thumbtack and Angie's List and start calling handymen. He loves that we can handle that for him. Not only can we... So we're going to handle it for him, which is basically going to capture the listing. And we're going to get revenue off of those repairs. What a win-win. Yeah, that's awesome. What a win-win. I mean, it's huge. Revenue on the repairs and the listing itself. So that's, I think, one of the biggest value propositions any agent can provide is those vertically integrating those resources and aspects of what we do in their day-to-day. So if I may, even to dial that back even further, just having some experience and having some insight to what things will cost to think, no, if you have a contractor that does a lot of work for you that will be willing to jump and come in and do a job for you, punch list. If you're showing a house to buyers and they want to, they can't imagine what something might cost or everybody throws out around here, that's going to be $100,000 to fix. That's not true at all. It's a great point. It's a disservice to your clients if you don't have any concept of what things cost. You need to. You don't even... You could have no intention of getting into the investment real estate space. That's fine. But to work with clients, buying and selling homes, you're in the business of buying and selling homes and you have no concept in what things cost, it's unfathomable to be honest with you. You're doing a disservice. How do you negotiate? How do you leverage any situation for your clients? How do you strategize? How do you negotiate with another agent when the ROC terms come back? You need to be able to help them understand what things will cost. What if they are in the planning stage of getting it listed and they don't know what's going to bring them the most ROI in terms of specific upgrades and you don't know what that stuff is going to cost. It's lunacy. You need to familiarize yourself with that. Talk to contractors. Research online. There's so much available for you. Find opportunities to better educate yourself on construction costs. I'm not asking you guys to... You don't need to know what exterior waterproofing excavation costs, but how much it costs to install vinyl plank flooring per square foot. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think that was the benefit I didn't foresee or didn't really think about that when I got into investing, when I started doing some flips, when I started doing some burs. I didn't understand how much more value I was going to be able to give to my clients from that knowledge, from the connections. It really was huge. And just seeing the difference, really seeing the difference, which you can do as just a listing agent, having something painted. If a place is really drab and you get a fresh coat of paint on it, the difference, the life that comes into that listing or that house is a huge difference. Going through a property that is like you almost don't want to walk in it, it's so gross, having it fully renovated. You live through each of those stages and you experience more. You have more ammunition to convince and to educate and help your clients. It really does. It really can help your residential sales to have this kind of experience, for sure. It's there to provide you value, any of that. On the title side, the lending side, insurance, we either find ways to vertically integrate it or we find ways to monetize it. I think that's the name of the game as a real estate agent. Providing the value to your client will help you monetize additional revenue, I'm telling you. At the very least, it will give you a leg up to get that listing or work with that client. One thing about our team is they are experienced or at least have exposure in almost every facet of the industry. They can tell you how title insurance works and the lending side and construction. They're not experts, but they know just enough. That's what you should be able to have and possess as an agent. Then you'll be able to monetize it all the way across, somehow, some way. Again, I can get on a soapbox with this. You're preaching to the choir. It was a great point. You need to have a little bit of construction exposure. I think it's like if you're a used car salesman and have some mechanical experience working on different cars, you might be able to give better advice, like, stay away from this brand of this year or whatever it is. I think that's what people really want in good representation. I just want to quickly say, if you're catching this, if you're listening to this and you're on the road and you're wanting to take notes but you can't, check out REIagent.com. You can sign up for the newsletter and you don't feel like you have to have everything right now. This will become a blog or this will be a blog as well, so you can capture the highlights there. Definitely, there'll be show notes, et cetera, with Mike's contact information or his social website, that kind of stuff as well. Definitely don't feel like you need to get in a wreck to write some of these awesome tips here down. Mike, quickly, can you talk a little bit about what the Cleveland market is looking like now? We talked about how things have changed a little bit, interest rates, appreciation, et cetera. Where are you finding some pockets of opportunity still for the people you serve? I love those B and C class, working class neighborhoods where you get a mix of owner-occupants but still investor-friendly. I want to have flexibility. If you are looking in a market like ours, you want to maintain that flexibility so when it comes to exiting, you have a bigger pool of buyers, investors, owner-occupants. A lot of those suburbs around the Cleveland area are typically where we've been hot and heavy. As the markets improved, those areas have continued to still remain affordable. They still cash flow. I don't think rising prices and rising interest rates means we need to get into the mega-risky inner city areas that really take experience and thorough boots on the ground. You can still find good opportunities in some of these more stable, matured, seasoned pockets. For an agent doing about 50,000 to 150,000 GCI and who generally wants to double their production over the next 24 months without burning out, can you think of a single highest leverage habit or system change that you'd point to them to succeed in that? Prospecting. It's prospecting, without a doubt. Prospecting is so heavily reliant on consistency. Every day, it's a broken record in my office. To my team, to my agents, prospecting. How many people did you touch today? How many people are you touching tomorrow? I have a couple of agents on my team. It's not consistent. You know what they do? It's in a vacuum. Twice a week, they'll try to power dial. It doesn't work. I need to lose 10 pounds. Not eat for two days. It just doesn't work. You need to find ways to maintain consistency with prospecting, email, text, call. You need to set up action plans. You need to make drip campaigns. You need to make sure you're constantly touching and staying in front of your client base, your pipeline. Manage your pipeline like it's an investment, not a bunch of people in there with names and emails. It's an investment. You need to nurture and manage that investment. It's a really good segue and a plug for the CRM that we have launched. I go through every morning, I go through my touch list. I'm only doing about five a day. It's not insane. It's a consistency that adds up over time, like you just said. But I'm going to my A's and B's. I'm going and looking at their touching base with them in a meaningful way. We're talking about their family. We're talking about their occupation. This whole CRM is set up to be that Ford type relationship based marketing prospecting thing. The next time that I reach out to this person, again, I have all this data of their family, their occupation, their recreation, their dreams in there. Every time we update it, it gets stronger and smarter. We have prompts that will come from that data. But I think it's most important to be authentic. I think people can sense the fake AI messages, the things that are automated a little bit. There's a place for things like your emails, et cetera. But I think when you're looking at the relationship based marketing, talking to your sphere, they're going to want to work with somebody that they know, like, and trust. And if they feel like they smell the fake AI, they're probably not going to be as excited about it. But if you have a genuine conversation with the person, you're asking them questions about things they care about, their work, their family, et cetera, and then you remember things like their birthdays, all built into the CRM, is where it becomes really powerful. And again, only five a day is all I'm really doing. And it has been awesome. So you can also check that out at theraiagent.com. Mike, I wanted to ask you next about your golden nuggets for our listeners here. You've covered a ton already. But do you have any other specific golden nuggets for us? Building systems. Building systems so that you can vertically integrate, so you can help build and sustain that volume, the processes, the systems, all the way across the board. Activity not outcomes. We, a couple years ago, were getting metrics in place for our agents and we were, embarrassingly, I set more outcome-oriented metrics and I scrapped it after a few months. And I realized, as long as the activity is there, the outcome will follow. Good things will come. So maintaining that sort of consistency level from an activity standpoint, specifically even with the prospecting I mentioned earlier, that's what's most important. I'd say the last thing is just don't overcomplicate it. We tried out, obviously we run a robust, we have a robust operation, but it's more of just everything we've been able to kind of consume. But each business that we run at its simplistic form is just that. Simplistic processes, simple processes, simple follow-ups, simple approaches. There's so much driven towards AI and there's so much driven, there's just like advanced technological CRMs and systems and sometimes it can get a little bit overwhelming and take away from what you're good at and what you guys are trying to accomplish. So just maintaining simplicity, I think, is very important. And it's a good way to also maintain good habits as well. Yeah, I think to your point, there's a lot of shiny objects out there and the dream of something taking care of stuff for you is always out there. But I think, again, in a relationship business, I think it's really important to make sure that that relationship is maintained. And yeah. We talked about AI. We were using it a bit. And I mean, there's another thing. I'm not shy about scrapping something that's not working. It just seems so disingenuous, so forced. I just didn't see a lot of value being provided. So I scrapped the AI calls and texts and we went back to just fully... My hope was that it could help fill in the gaps for where the agents are missing. I'd rather have a delayed response, to be honest with you at this point. It just felt like there wasn't any value it was providing. Shiny objects. That's interesting. I thought about having a receptionist type thing where it's an AI, but I would want it to be honest where it's like, hey, this is an AI system. I'm going to help answer any questions I can and I'm going to help set up an appointment with talking to a real person, that kind of thing. But not pretending to be like, this is Matthias Kleimer. I've got 11 labs set up. I think I was most annoyed because it couldn't say my last name correctly. I remember how many ways I prompted it. The Zoom group. That's what it just kept saying. So we were already behind the eight ball at that point. There was just no way to fix it. You can't fix the dialect with these things. So yeah, I don't know. These systems are going to get better, but you have to understand the amount of noise in social media and all this stuff from AI now is so much that I think there's just this bullshit sensor that as soon as you sense that it's not real, you're not interested anymore. I think that's what you have to be really careful about when you're experimenting with this kind of stuff. It has to feel genuine. That's what we want. We want genuine connection with people. I think that's the thing that it's not going to have. Would you ever have thought that the typical consumer would be relieved or it'd be refreshing to hear a call center in India as opposed to AI? That's where we're at right now. To your point, you're absolutely correct. Even in calls that aren't AI, they're just so on edge wondering, hold on, is this a computer that I'm chatting with? Yeah. I've heard it in some of our CRM calls with a couple of the agents and it's like, oh my God. It's like PTSD. We'll go to a call center in India and we'll probably have better results. It's so scrutinized now. There's so much out there. It's hard to decipher what's legitimate, what's not, who's actually, everybody's an expert in it. Yeah. It's there. Use it. Use it. It's going to grow your business, but if you don't know where and how, it's just going to overwhelm you. Yeah. It can be really complicated, some of these systems. Mike, what about a favorite book or a fundamental book that you think everybody should read? I've read a lot of the typical entrepreneurship books. I started, I've been listening to podcasts on novations and so I got bored, so I started reading Zero to One. I think it's by Peter Thiel, probably a quarter of the way through. I really like it. Building a business, getting through some of the noise, honestly, some of it's getting through some of the technological noise as well. I highly recommend it, especially if you're looking to start a business, have started it, you're kind of at the infancy stage. I think there's a lot of value in terms of just helping understand what's important and what's really going to help you kind of scale. Replicating what works is a kind of a big theme in the book so far, so I've enjoyed it. Next time we chat, I'll let you know how it turns out. That sounds perfect. And then if anybody is interested in learning more about turnkey opportunities, whatever opportunities you provide, social media, where can people find you? You can email me, info at theazamgroup.com, it goes right to my inbox. But my social media, Azam Mike, you can see some of our content, videos, you can just drop me a DM, happy to chat. Awesome. Well, Mike, hey, it's been a pleasure talking to you today. This has been a great conversation. If you like this, definitely hit subscribe to this podcast wherever you get it. Give us a review if you have the time as well. We're on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, every platform pretty much that you can find it. Give Mike a follow over on his Instagram as well. Again, Mike, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure and I'm sure people got a lot of value out of this episode. I really appreciate it. Good meeting you guys. Take care. Thanks for listening to the REI Agent. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week. Visit REIAgent.com for more content. Until next time, keep building the life you want. All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.
## Related Episode This post is based on Episode 209 of the WELLthy Investor Podcast. - [Listen to Episode 209](https://reiagent.com/episodes/) ## Links - [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzdS3oTBtzc) - [Full HTML version](https://reiagent.com/blog/how-agents-build-lasting-wealth-turnkey-investing-mike-azzam/)