About
The house we could not afford is the reason we own five.
Victoria and Zach Reece, Atlanta, Georgia.
How it started
We bought the dream house and it ate us alive.
On paper we were doing great. We were making good money and taking incredible trips. But the house was so far out of proportion to our income that we had exactly two options. Keep traveling and save nothing, or stop traveling and save a little.
We were not willing to give up the travel, so we saved nothing. People give me a hard time for calling that house poor. Call it whatever you want. Our living expense was outsized to our income and our savings rate was zero.
He was not crazy. We listed it on Airbnb for the weekends we were gone and it booked. One month we pocketed four thousand dollars, more than half our mortgage. That is the moment this stopped being a side idea and became the plan.
Door one
We did not have cash. We had equity.
This is the part that gets skipped in every other version of this story. We did not have money sitting in an account waiting to buy a rental. What we had was a house with equity in it.
So we took a home equity line of credit against our house, used it like a construction loan, and built a guest house in the backyard. I had never built anything. I called a dozen companies, found an architect and an ADU builder, pulled permits, and got it done. That backyard guest house was our first purpose built Airbnb.
Door two
Then the A-frame in Blue Ridge.
When Zach sold his company, we bought Whisper Creek Retreat. That was the first real acquisition, and we could only underwrite it with confidence because the guest house had already taught us what we were doing.
Order matters. Most people think they need the Blue Ridge cabin first. They need the thing they can fund today first.
Who does what
Two very different brains, which is the only reason this works.
Zach
Strategy, underwriting, negotiation
He is the finance brain and the reason I take risk at all. He taught me how to underwrite, how to negotiate, and how to tell a good IRR from a story someone is telling me. He is also the one who had the idea to rent our own house, which I hated at the time and have never lived down since.
Victoria
Systems, operations, execution
I am the CPA, the operator, the list maker, the one who builds the process and then runs it. Nine years at Deloitte, the last of them as a Senior Manager in real estate tax, most of it inside institutional funds and REITs. If the deal is Zach's, the machine that runs it afterward is mine.
Why I left
Every hour I work now is mine.
Deloitte was hard work. This is also hard work. That was never the difference.
The difference is that every single thing I do here hits me, my life, and my family, dollar for dollar. At Deloitte everything I did was tied to a fixed paycheck, and someone else got to decide whether that turned into a bonus, a raise, or a promotion. Someone else decided if I could take PTO. Someone else decided if I could go play tennis in the middle of the day or make a doctor's appointment and finish the work later. There was always someone to report to.
Now there is not. It is worth every bit of the work.