- Emily and Adam’s journey from engineering careers at GE Aviation to full-time real estate investing, emphasizing the importance of passive income and financial freedom.
- Transitioning from single-family flips to multifamily investments for scalability and business growth.
- Managing and controlling a portfolio over $225 million, primarily in Texas but also invested in other regions as limited partners.
- Importance of tracking financials (income, expenses, balance sheet) to make informed decisions about quitting corporate jobs and pursuing real estate full-time.
- Acknowledging the difficulties and risks in transitioning to real estate, and how understanding the worst-case scenario can provide confidence.
- Being in full control of their destiny and not relying on corporate stability as a major motivator for Emily and Adam.
- Explanation of Other People’s Money (OPM) and Other People’s Time (OPT) as crucial concepts for scaling business and investments.
- The importance of partnerships and joint ventures for business growth, especially for those not good at certain aspects of the business.
- Initial hard work and bootstrapping are necessary before leveraging OPM and OPT for exponential growth in business.
- Website: https://www.aeinvest.net/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE1dOH6KXwOn5b7VqSjS8PQ
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-roberts-23918aa/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ae_investments/
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
- Email: corwyn@corwynmelette.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exitstrategiesradioshow/
- FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/exitstrategiessc/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoSuynJd5c4qQ_eDXLJaZA
- Website: https://www.exitstrategiesradioshow.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/
ROBYN:
Do you want something more? More meaningful moments, opportunities, deeper relationships, and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you said yes, a career in real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for. Guiding people through one of the most important decisions they ever made, the purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative. Exit Realty’s revolutionary compensation model, training, and technology that provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call me today, Robyn Collins, R – O – B – Y – N Collins with Red Robin Homes at 843-557-5003. Again, that’s 843-557-5003 or visit us at redrobinhomes.com/joinexit and make your exit today
CORWYN:
So good morning, good morning, and great morning to you, our listening audience. Guys, welcome to another fabulous episode of Exit Strategy’s radio show. Hey, I am your host, Corwyn J. Melette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Lowcountry Group in beautiful North Charleston, South Carolina. So guys, look, thank y’all for tuning in. Y’all know what our mission here is, and I want y’all to say it with me as we kind of level this thing off, because we got to set the foundation today. Our mission here is very simple, that is to empower our community through financial literacy and real estate education. Y’all get excited when we talk about real estate. So guys, for our listeners that listen to us from the coast of Charleston to inland to monkey’s corner, but those who passing through, who catch us on the eye, but those who tune in and listen from around the globe to our podcast version of this content, guys, thank y’all from the bottom of my heart for tuning in. This is my baby. This is how I give back to our community, and I intend to keep giving as long as y’all keep receiving. So thank y’all so much for all of that. So look, today, guys, look, hey, oh, we got us some guests today. Now they talk my language. Anytime somebody talking about real estate, I automatically perk up. My ears start to flap sometimes because I get all excited. And then when you couple that with some people and someone that is seasoned, that is out here, not only talking the talk, but also walking the walk, guys, we’re going to have an amazing show today. So I want you to go ahead right now and get your pen and paper because you’re going to need to catch some of this and write this notes.
So look here, we have with us Emily Cortright and Adam Roberts. They are the co-founders of A&E Investments. I love it.
Y’all already got investment in there. Now, let me tell you what they do. Now, Adam, he’s a coach and a mentor for multifamily, again, talking my language, education. He teaches this. He preaches it. Emily does a variety of wealth building classes. She teaches for, and we’ll never call them a competitor because we’re all in this industry together, over at Keller Williams. She teaches them how to invest. They talk my language. You guys, please welcome to the show, Emily Cortright and Adam Roberts. How are you guys doing today?
ADAM:
Doing great. We are so honored to be here, Corwyn.
EMILY:
Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having us.
CORWYN:
Well, you are more than welcome. If you could, high level overview of who you are, A&E Investments, what got you here and in this space?
EMILY:
So again, my name is Emily Cortright. This is my husband, Adam Roberts, and we started as engineers. We were climbing the corporate ladder. We were with GE Aviation, moving across the country, and finally, GE sold off the businesses we were in, and that was really the kick in the butt that we needed to realize that the corporate world wasn’t the long-term game and they didn’t care about you. We just happened to have gone to a real estate investing seminar a few months prior, and we literally looked at each other and we said, this is it. This is what’s going to make a difference in our lives, in our financial freedom. We heard words that they didn’t teach us in engineering school, like passive income, assets, financial freedom, and so we were hooked from that day. I left my corporate job over 11 years ago to jump into real estate investing. We moved from California to Texas, and about five years into it, we did single family flips and rentals, and then we transitioned to multifamily, which allowed Adam to quit his job as well and join me full-time.
CORWYN:
That is huge. You guys started, so you just laid out really a foundation of how to build a successful real estate practice.
You guys now focus on, you said, more along the multifamily line. That’s what allows you to make that transition, Adam, the quote-unquote come from punching someone else’s clock, so to speak, or keeping time for somebody else, and allows you to keep time for yourself. So why? Why multifamily? What got you into that arena? What caused you to make that step over, if you will, from the onesie-twosie single family, single doors, over into these clusters of doors? Tell us about it.
ADAM:
The best thing about single family is you get real boots-on-the-ground experience, right? Dealing with tenants, fixing troubled homes, but it can be tough to scale, depending on what market you’re in. In Texas, around 2016 or so, single family home investing was all the rage. You’d go watch an episode of HGTV, and then go buy a house the next day, and people were just flipping homes left and right. For us, moving into multifamily, not only was it a step in the more business owner direction, it was more sophisticated. Now that we had the experience working the day-to-day issues, owning our own rentals and things like that, we’re able to step into the business owner seat and start to lead the property management company around our strategies and our expectations. It’s easier to scale, right? More doors, investors, and a business that you can actually scale.
CORWYN:
So multifamily, you guys currently are running a portfolio over $200 million, I believe over $225 million in assets currently in that particular market. Do you guys focus solely in that market? Do you expand into others? What is that looking like?
ADAM:
Yeah, it’s predominantly Texas. For the assets that we manage and control as general partners, it’s here in Texas, but we have invested in a diverse set of regions as limited partners, silent investors, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, so all landlord and business-friendly locations.
CORWYN:
Let’s reset this a little bit, and let’s go back, and let’s get that person, our listener who may be trying to figure out how to, and then let’s accelerate and talk about a little bit more how you continue to. You guys traded, quote-unquote, as you term it, the rat race to get into this, and you found out about an entire world that you didn’t know existed because in your world, you didn’t talk about that. It’s interesting that you guys are engineers because now, instead of you building for others, you’re building for yourself.
I really love that. But let’s talk about how you were able to make that transition from, quote-unquote, the rat race into this freedom that you now have.
EMILY:
I think one of the most important habits that we formed really early on in our relationship, even before we were married, was tracking our financials and understanding how much income we were bringing in, how much expenses, our balance sheet, which is your assets and your liabilities, because that has really been our roadmap to a lot of the big decisions that we made over the years.
When the decision came for me to quit my job, we had to go back to our financials and say, can we afford to do this? And then when the decision came for Adam to quit his job, we went back to our financials again and said, can we afford to do this? What would this look like for our income and our financials? And so that was one of the foundational habits that really helped us throughout the years, make those decisions, because without knowing your numbers, you don’t have the confidence in saying, oh, well, how is that going to look when we drop a W-2 wage?
CORWYN:
So keeping track of your finances, obviously, is very important. Sometimes people just take the wing in their prayer method, I’m going to jump, hopefully I got wings enough for this, let’s see how this thing here go. Sometimes we got little short wings and sometimes we find out we actually got them. But actually knowing by tracking and keeping up with, again, your balance sheet is important to have as understanding and how to transition into this. So I’m going to ask you the question that I already know the answer to, but sometimes in Emily, Adam, sometimes people just don’t get it. They see someone else do a particular thing and they think, well, it’s just easy and anybody can do it. But I want to touch on something that I know that you’re going to bring out when I asked this question, which the question I’m going to ask is, was it hard?
ADAM:
Yeah. Anytime you jump in and do something you’ve never done before, where you can’t even define really, beyond the financials, which great point by Emily, you can’t really define the risk if you don’t quite understand the pool you’re jumping into. It’s not easy. And so for someone who goes off and says, I’m going to go do this, that can be very difficult. And even today, as you grow a business, you’re continuing to do that, right? That uncertainty of, okay, well, I need to grow this part of my business. I’m going to add this aspect or I’m going to bring in this team or whatever. And that just, you redefine the term fear really, because you get over that aspect of it, but it’s never certain. There’s always that element of challenge that you have to kind of work around.
CORWYN:
So what carried you through in those moments when my imaginations and please, but I’m pretty sure there was, there’s been some mornings over the breakfast table that you guys have looked at each other and somebody just pushed their whole plate to the side and said, man, look here, what are we doing? So what is it that in those moments that you’re able to tap into that allows you or keeps you encouraged and motivated to trudge forward?
ADAM:
I mean, for us, I believe it’s just being in full control of your destiny, 100%. Not having someone else in control, not even allowing someone else to have input on it. Because while we went through our little deal with GE and the layoffs and the divestiture of our corporate gigs, that was very early in our professional careers. So obviously there’s plenty of years to make up lost ground there.
But that was really a symbol for us because it just, we went from being first name basis with high up executives at the company to, I don’t even know you. And it’s like, okay, well, I guess that’s not going to take me to where I need to be and provide for my family and for generations to come. And it really, I think, impacted us.
EMILY:
And I would say for me, it was all about what’s the worst thing that could happen. If I failed on starting our real estate business, then I would just go get another corporate job. If we failed when we both quit our jobs on starting our multifamily ventures, then we just might have to move back in with mom and dad. Like that is the absolute worst case. And that just didn’t sound that bad. And so I think our moms would actually be happy if we moved back in. But you think about for the financial freedom and for the journey in the end, it is completely worth it because the worst things that could happen aren’t really that bad.
CORWYN:
I like that. I love that. Because that is so true. Unfortunately, sometimes we get so bent out of shape, so afraid of quote unquote being reset that we forget technically where we came from. I’ve heard this thing repeatedly that the average millionaire goes broke three times. And the reason why they still make it is because even in the midst of all of that, what they know fundamentally is one thing. If I made it to this point and have to go back and start over, then I know how to get back to that point. And I know what caused me to go wrong. So I change something to go further. If I end up back again, then I know how I got here. I know how I got there. I know what I did wrong. Let me change that up and go further. Usually that third time is when they make it quote unquote all the way over into that land. So let’s change up. So we talked about that thing that, okay, I got started with this. I’m doing this and then, okay, now we’re ready to go into this and we’re going to make this additional transition. Now, I want you to define for our listening audience, two terms, OPM, OPT. I want you to give that definition and let’s talk about how we can leverage that and when. So let’s go.
EMILY:
OPM, other people’s money and other people’s money is so critical. Whether you’re talking about real estate investing, whether you’re talking about any other type of investing, it allows you to skyrocket your returns. Because when you put all your own money into something and you get the same amount of returns, it’s minuscule compared to if you would have leveraged other people’s money. You want to talk about OPT?
ADAM:
Yes. Other people’s time, which is OPM’s close cousin. Essentially, if you think about it, and honestly, this took me years to realize, but regardless of whether you’re getting started or you’re a veteran in any industry, your time is extremely valued.
People undervalue their time so much. And so whether it’s hiring an assistant or a virtual assistant, or maybe finding a business partner who shares your passions and your energy, I mean, leveraging the skillset and the time of another individual can allow you, the investor or the business owner, to go off and do what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about. And it’s amazing to just see how much even an hour or two hours in your day can add to the leverage of your business, the growth of your business.
So other people’s time, very undervalued in practice, but by definition, very powerful.
CORWYN:
So you just like right here, joint ventures, partnerships, these things allow people to get further. You guys are in the real estate space, so you get it. So from the agent perspective, I tell agents all the time, look, you’re trying to figure out how to reinvent the wheel or trying to do this. You’re not good at this. So why don’t you do what you’re good at, partner with someone who’s good at what you’re not good at, and you both can have a massive business together versus you having a piddling business alone.
But many people will take the piddling business versus the massive business, not because they don’t desire the massive business, but simply because they don’t want to work with anybody else. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I get it, but it’s ridiculous. So I love that. So look, let’s take this to another point, because you guys talk about, because it’s about scale. I mean, you’re referencing in, as we call it in your bio, you reference the 10 times. I love that because I’m a Greg Cardozo fan. You’ve got a 10 times everything, whatever it is that you do, you’ve got to do 10 times that, you’ll blow this thing all up. I love this, and I love his energy. So how does someone entering in, figuring out, how do they manage to 10 times that income over a 10 year period? Well, I think it really does start with measuring what you want to control. And like Emily said earlier, if you can find a cadence where you review your financials, what you’re making, what you’re spending, the assets you’re purchasing, and how that’s affecting your financial life, that’s step one.
I think step two is when you pick a business that you want to go after, and maybe that’s being a successful real estate agent, building that business, or maybe it’s investing in homes, I think you have to do the hard work for a period of time. I think you do have to bootstrap the business in a linear fashion. For us, that was buying single family homes, fixing them up, and selling them, sometime doing the work ourselves. I think you bootstrap to some extent before you realize the leverage piece of it, the other people’s time and money piece of it, and then you become really smart about it. And once you figure out the leverage portion of it, like, oh gosh, I could borrow people’s money to buy 10 homes that I can’t afford on my own, with all my systems in place, or maybe it’s I could organize a team of real estate agents to help me do the work that I’m not good at, or that I’m not valuable with, and then spend my time doing things, building my business. That is where you learn, hey, I did it the hard way for a period of time.
I learned how to do it, I’ve got the ability, and I’ve done the sweat equity, now I’m smart about it, and you say, hey, maybe you could do that in a couple years, but that truly does take time, right? Some folks master it very quickly, but depending on your risk tolerance and how fast you go at it, that could take a couple years to get to that leveraging point. I was just going to add that there’s really two types of investors.
EMILY:
There’s the active investor, and there’s the passive investor. You just have to know that as the active investor, you’re going to be able to 10X your money a lot quicker, but that takes a lot more work, it’s harder, it has more responsibility, but if you can pick a niche, an investing niche, and you can go and be the active investor and lead the deals and leverage OPM and OPT, then you will 10X your financials, your income within five years, 10 years, because the active investor is the person that brings back the highest return, the passive investor is along for the ride, but you can still do it. You can 10X your money as a passive investor, it’s just going to take a little bit longer.
Tune in for the second part of this episode next week, Monday at 11 AM.
