Are you stuck in analysis paralysis when it comes to investing in real estate? Joel Miller, author of Build Real Estate Wealth, joins us for a powerful conversation packed with actionable advice, personal insights, and a wealth of real-world experience. In this episode, Joel breaks down the foundational steps to becoming a successful real estate investor—starting with mindset and moving all the way through to tenant selection and cash flow management.
He reveals how the book, originally written as a guide for his son, has become a comprehensive manual for anyone interested in income-producing properties. From understanding why the first investment is often the hardest to navigating the complexities of entity structures (LLC, partnership, S Corp, etc.), Joel emphasizes the importance of getting your business house in order before making offers. He also shares why tenant selection starts long before someone fills out an application, and how every decision—location, property type, and even ad language—affects your pool of potential renters.
You’ll also hear how his 18-year-old son purchased his first rental property just after high school graduation and is already closing on his second one. Joel’s message is clear: with the right knowledge and tools, building wealth through real estate is possible for anyone willing to follow the blueprint.
Key Takeaways:
- (02:13) Why the first investment is the hardest—and how to move past the fear
- (09:25) The #1 advantage of small properties for first-time investors
- (14:08) How Joel’s son started investing at 18—and what you can learn from it
- (20:04) Choosing the right entity structure: LLC, partnership, S Corp, and more
- (21:07) Tenant selection starts before your property search even begins
- (26:30) How to scale from zero to $10,000/month in net cash flow
Resources Mentioned:
Grab a copy of Build Real Estate Wealth by Joel Miller on Amazon or visit JoelMillerBooks.com to view the full table of contents, sample chapters, and access exclusive house-flipping content via QR code.
Connect with Joel:
- Buy the Book: Build Real Estate Wealth on Amazon
- Website: https://www.joelmillerbooks.com/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-miller-42981811/
Connect with Corwyn @:
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
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- 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/
Shoutout to our Sponsor: EXIT Realty Lowcountry Group
Do you want something more? More Meaningful Moments opportunities, deeper relationships and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you say YES, a career and real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for guiding people to one of the most important decisions they ever made, the purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative.
EXIT Realty has a revolutionary compensation model training and technology that provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call EXIT Realty Lowcountry group today at 843-619-3005 that is 843-619-3005 or visit https://exitlowcountry.com/joinexit and make your Exit today.
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CORWYN:
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 to any of that, 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 provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call Exit Realty Lowcountry Group today at 843-619-3005, that’s 843-619-3005 or visit join.exitlowcountry.com and make your exit today.
Hey, I am your host, Corwyn J. Millette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Low Country Group and beautiful guys, North Charleston, South Carolina. Hey, if this is your first time listening to this show, you sir or ma’am are in for a treat because our mission here is very simple. That is to empower our community through financial literacy and real estate education, guys. We are legacy building. That is what we do. So as I always tell you, as I always encourage you guys, as you’re out here making these moves financially, setting yourself up and your family up for success not only today but for generations yet to come, guys, we want you to be sure that you put a hashtag on that thing that says that you are legacy building. So guys, I’m super excited. I always want to give a shout out to our loyal listeners that listen to us from one end. Look here. Y’all dragged me from the water all the way to the country. Now, I love it. From Charleston all the way up through the mud, Muddy Mullins, guys, we love you. We love you. I want to thank you all for tuning in and being a part of the Exit Strategies Radio Show family. So, guys, I’m super excited. One of my favorite subjects is money, period, money. I love it. So we want to encourage you, but we also want to give you access to financial vehicles in order to propel you forward. So I am super excited and super stoked today to have on air with us today the author of the bestselling book, Build Real Estate Wealth, Enjoy the Journey of Rental Property Investment, that latter part we have to talk about. But Joe Miller is the guy, started with a BA in accounting, learned about finance, learned about how money moved that into the real estate realm. And he has done a number of things investing in real estate. He’s done flips. He’s been a hard money lender and an educator in this arena for 40 years. So guys, look, I need y’all to turn the stove off. I know it’s hard to get them grits right if you don’t turn them off. But I need you to turn them grits off this morning. Look here and don’t crack them eggs. Them eggs expensive. Don’t you crack them eggs yet because I need y’all to pay attention to what’s going on here on this show. So guys, please do me the solid of welcoming Joe Miller to the Exit Strategies radio show this morning. Joe, how are you doing? Great.
JOEL:
I can just hear them all clapping out there and putting their eggs down on the table and they’re not going to crack them yet.
CORWYN:
You’re going to put a drum roll on it. Man, that’s costing them eggs, man. Look, you committed when you cracked the egg.
JOEL:
Oh, I know. I know. And I’ve been looking forward to this because I understand you’ve got quite the radio show slash podcast going down there and I’ve been looking forward to getting on here because I think I got some information that is perfect for your audience.
CORWYN:
Well, look here, I’m excited because, look, you’re talking my language, man. You’re talking about money and real estate. You got them two things together. Yeah, I’m there like a straight attention, like stone face, like eyes locked. I’m in. Joel, if you don’t mind, give our listeners like a high level overview of who you are, what you do.
JOEL:
OK, well, I’m coming to you from Erie, Pennsylvania. Right on Lake Erie, halfway between Cleveland or Buffalo, right north of Pittsburgh. And I actually, I’m in my 48th year as a landlord. But I can tell you that this all started in junior high. I had two things happen to me in junior high that really set my life going as far as my work life goes. And that is some investor built four four unit apartment buildings on my paper route. And I got all those people as customers on my paper route, of course. But I distinctly remember kind of doing the math. Hey, these people don’t own that place. They’re paying this guy and they’re paying him more than what it costs him to put these buildings up and maintain. I said, I want to do that sometime in the future. Keep in mind, I’m in like eighth grade. So as much as I could understand it at the time, I put that in my back pocket and said, I want to do that someday. The other thing that happened was one of the older kids in our neighborhood built a pirate radio station in his basement and used a flagpole behind their house for an antenna. And I got to hang out there. So the second thing was I decided I was going to be a DJ. So I actually did some radio production work in high school and then went away to college and worked at college radio stations and commercial radio stations in college. About halfway through, a big station back in my home town called me back and said, hey, we got a spot for you on the weekends here on the big 50,000 watt top 40 radio station. Come on down. So they said, you can go back to college. Well, I transferred. I stayed. I switched to the college in my town here and I did end up going through in four years and get my BA in accounting. But then about two months before I graduated from college, my part-time weekend job went full time. And now I could take the calls from the kids at the high schools that wanted the DJ to come out and do the sock ops in the gym, you know, changed my life. I made $75 in one night and then I raised my price and I soon found out I was making more money in one night than I could make all week at the radio station. So I left the radio station. I opened an accounting practice and I bought my first rental property. And I had those three things going for a while. And then it wasn’t more than four or five years later, I had to sell the accounting practice because the DJ work was just blowing up and I was buying more rental property. I ended up doing the DJ. I pioneered the mobile DJ work in this part of the country where I did 5,051 appearances in 35 years. But I retired from that in 2011 and I’ve been just doing more and more with the real estate. But like you said, it was about 1991 or so, I started flipping houses. I have flipped over a hundred houses. Then in 2018, I got into hard money lending where I’m part of the equation for the other investors in the area. Them do their projects, providing financing for their projects for flips or keep a rental that they’re going to stabilize and then get a loan from a bank or something in order to come onto it. And I get a lot of pleasure on that because I enjoy being a part of the journey for people, investors that are earlier on in the journey. And of course, tying in with that is I did start, I’ve been very heavily involved with the professional organization of landlords in this part of the state. And I helped teach the class that we offer like Landlord 101 and some of the more advanced And out of that, eventually when I had a lot of time on my hand in 2020 during COVID, started writing and finally this book came out last fall and it’s called Build Real Estate Wealth, Enjoy the Journey of Rental Property Investment. And it’s really taken off and that’s what put me on this podcast here to talk about it. I’m just loving it. But it’s really amazing. And see, it’s the big book on doing this sort of thing. It’s like the go-to resource for getting involved with rental property or supercharging a portfolio you already have. You know who Ron Legrand is? Big real estate guru, Ron Legrand. He read the book and reviewed it and he says, I wish I would have had his book when I was getting started.
CORWYN:
So that’s where we’re at. So tell me, one of the things that I, as I, I killed, I’m sorry, I’m losing my word here.
JOEL:
Acclimate.
CORWYN:
There you go. Thank you. I had a U in there versus an L, but thank you so much for that. But as I’ve read, looked the title and essentially the construct of the book, it was fascinating to me. You say as the end of the title, enjoy the journey because oftentimes you hear the horror stories. You hear, and you probably got some. I know where you’re going with this question. And that’s one of the things I think sometimes that turns people away from becoming a real estate investor and accumulating rental properties. I know several investors. They look, I don’t want to deal with tenants. Tenants come with toilets. And typically you use the other word. Exactly. So tell us about what’s overall the tone of this book. What can our listeners as they delve into it, what can they expect to pick up from you? Like the tone of how did you figure out how to enjoy this process in his journey?
JOEL:
Okay. Well, first let me say that the book is written to establish investors who are looking maybe for some game changing information to supercharge the portfolio they’ve already got. But it’s also written for people who haven’t started yet and maybe don’t even think that real estate is for them. Perhaps they’ve got a career or a passion of some sort, a hobby even that they put a lot of time into and they don’t want to give up and they think they don’t have time to do real estate. But they recognize that when you have rental property, it can not only provide extra income for you along the way as you have another career as I had the mobile DJ career for 35 years. It then also bolsters your retirement because a lot of times the things that people are involved in and even passionate about, they don’t offer any retirement, but this could be the retirement. But they think, yeah, real estate is not for me. And they bring up things like what you just said. There’s three main reasons why people don’t invest in income producing property. Number one, they think that it’s all about toilets and bad tenants. And the other thing is that they think they’re going to lose money. And I will actually add a fourth thing. They think that they don’t have money to get into it. So to answer your question, I actually wrote this because I have now a 19 year old son who just graduated from high school last year, which would be 2024. And I wrote this lovingly as though if he was the only one that ever read it, that would make me happy. So anybody reading this should understand that there’s no BS here. I am telling you, just like if you were my child, what you would have to do to be successful in this business. And the key to that is education. First of all, understanding that if you develop good tenant selection criteria, you’re rarely going to have a bad tenant. And if you also get educated, you will know what to do as you go through your relationship with that tenant when things get off center a little bit. Also, you got to understand that you don’t have to repair the toilets yourself. First of all, that’s a myth. In 46 years, I’ve never repaired a toilet in the middle of the night in somebody’s apartment. It’s just toilets are not an emergency. Moving parts that go bad, but they’re very simple to repair. But the point is that you don’t even have to do any of the repairs on it. You have to know who to call. Everybody would have their certain level that they want to get involved. Like for me, if I can’t fix it with a hammer, duct tape, goop glue, or a hot glue gun, I’m probably calling somebody. So anyway, there’s that. And then if you have the right education, that’s where you get an edge about keeping yourself from losing money, which also flows into the education about how you can do this without a lot of money, especially like I’m a hard money lender. I’m typically lending 100% of a purchase price of a property and 100% of the rehab costs. My investors haven’t put any money. They leave the closing with money, start on their project. So the thing about education is there are people that they get into a rut of thinking that, hey, I just go to this one more seminar. If I just take this one more class, it’s going to make me rich. That’s the thing. I’m going, I’m buying airplane tickets, and I’m going across the country. When I come back, I’m going to be rich. No, you got to start when you don’t have all the information. General Colin Powell, who led the world’s most powerful army, being that of the United States, said, we generally make our decisions in battle when we know about 70% of what we need to know. So you have to understand that you just need to get enough education to take the right first steps, and then you will learn as you go, particularly if you associate yourself with other professionals. I highly recommend joining up with whatever local organization of like-minded investors you can find. They’re in every community, and you sit down at a table and just rub elbows with people that are doing the same thing you’re doing. And you’ll start to learn more of what you need to know as you get larger and larger projects.
CORWYN:
So one of the things you touched on, Joel, and you’re starting to mix it in, you sprinkled it, and now you’re starting to mix it in, which is the mindset piece. We talk about that a lot here. Limiting beliefs, building essentially the walls that hinder versus destroying the walls or the obstacles so you have a clearer path forward. So getting into those groups I think is very important, and I don’t want to spend too much time there. But I want you to, if you don’t mind, share what was the mindset and what shift did you have to make mentally to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to get it done, and let’s go.
JOEL:
Corwyn, you’re absolutely right to bring this up because no matter whether you’re investing in rental property or just some other path that you have that involves a lot of commitment and things like that, you have to start with the mindset. In fact, that’s the beginning of my book. My book takes you from mindset all the way through acquiring the property and managing the property and getting rid of the property and managing the tenants and all kinds of other stuff beyond that. But you have to have the right mindset, and the thing is that people get real excited and they want to take action sometimes. Well, first of all, we talked about the people that get educated and never take action. You’ve got to move beyond that. You’ve got to take action. But beyond that, you have to have commitment because with commitment on top of your action, that’s when you’re going to see success. You can have a lot of action and not follow it through, and you don’t end up with success. But one of the biggest things that if I were to look back and say, Joel, what would you do different? I would think about how from virtually every part of the journey, I didn’t think as big as I could have. I’m guilty of not thinking as big as I could have. I was always a little behind where my thinking should be in terms of thinking big. It’s not like I stayed in the way I thought about things right at the beginning. As you go by or go on, you get more and more confidence in what you’re doing. And I just want your listeners to know that the other mindset is understanding that owning something like an income-producing property, like an income property, my own property, commercial or residential, it doesn’t have to be an either-or thing to your life in terms of where all your money comes from. Like we talked about earlier, if you learn the how-to of doing this, you can add it to your life and not give up what you’ve got going. But some people in the audience, and it’s in the title, Exit Strategies Radio Show, some people are trying to exit out of whatever they got that they don’t want to stick with for their life. And it’s totally possible with income property simply by understanding the fact that the more of it you have, the more income you have. And the more income you have, the more you can buy more. It’s a domino thing. You can stop whenever you want. There’s no right answer for how many rental units you should own if you’re going to be involved in rental. But if your answer is, I need to own enough so that I can exit this job, you know what job stands for, it’s just overbroke, then you can do that. And my book provides the tools for that.
CORWYN:
So let’s touch on, so let’s get, peel some additional layers back of the book and of what’s talked about. So mindset obviously is the first thing. So then once we get that, once we get out of the analysis paralysis, because that do that, but once we get out of that, that first action, that first property, what was kind of your, okay, this is what I’m looking for. What bosses did it have to check in order for them to represent a good opportunity for you?
JOEL:
What bosses did the property have to check?
CORWYN:
Yes.
JOEL:
Well, first of all, no negative cashflow. I have a guy that’s a real successful investor right now that has been in it for about 10 years. He’s on the board with me and he never fails to bring it up. He says, Joel, I remember when you talked to us before we bought our first property, he and his wife, right? They had the opportunity to buy someplace and it was going to probably have a negative cashflow of only about $50 a month. And I said, Joe, how many properties can you own with a negative cashflow of $50 a month? And he didn’t buy that property, but he’s very successful now with a lot of properties that do cashflow really nice. So that’s the thing is you want to make wise choices in terms of the location, the condition of the property, the ability to force appreciation, force equity by making improvements in the property. In other words, if you buy something that’s pristine, it’s nice to own that, but you probably don’t have much that you could do to boost its value by making updates or improvements because they’ve already been done. And of course, I mentioned cashflow. You don’t want to have a negative cashflow and you want it to be in a condition or in a type of property or in an area where you know that as time goes by, you’ll be able to get financing on it because you might refinance and get different mortgages on that property over time. I’ve had some properties for, I still have that first one I bought 48 years ago almost, and I’ve just had it earlier today as a matter of fact. And yeah, you can guess I’ve refinanced in a few times over the years and pulled out tax-free loan proceeds.
CORWYN:
So that’s one of the things that as I’ve talked to and as we talk with newer and sometimes prospective investors, again, getting past analysis paralysis, that’s probably the first thing. People just got so caught up and hung up that they quote-unquote failed to launch. That’s probably a good way to put it. But just identifying like what are your must-haves because you literally could look at nearly everything. You could be pulled in so many different directions and never make the decision or move forward with. You got to get past that and keep in mind that need to be in mind versus the things that you have in your mind. So let’s go maybe a touch beyond that. Let’s assume that we’ve identified a property. We perceive it. Our numbers check. We again, hit our boxes, what we need to have. And it looks, you know, obviously there’s various methods and I know you talk and touch on everything. Again, thank you for sharing that you wrote this book as a gift to your son. If you had to do this thing and I wasn’t, here’s what it looks like. We talk about entities at times, like what type of entity do we need to structure or should we structure in order to better facilitate our investments going forward? So do you touch on that heavily within the book?
JOEL:
Yeah, actually it’s in the very early part of the book because you need to have your entity in existence before you go start making offers on property. You can’t be putting in offers with people that expect to close soon and then say, well, you know what, let me go form an LLC or something like that. And then that takes a while. I covered extensively every different major type of entity that you would want to consider if you’re going to invest in property from owning it in your own name all the way through owning it with a partner, a spouse, an LLC, a limited partnership, a sub-chapter S corporation, a regular C corporation. Yeah, it’s all covered in there from every aspect, like the ease of formation, the cost of formation of that entity to other considerations, like how easy is it to change the ownership of that entity? Obviously with a C corporation that you just sell a share of stock, changing a partner in a partnership is a lot more involved. So yeah, it covers all that. That’s important. But I want to touch on something else here about tenant selection. The success or the good time that you’re going to have, the journey, enjoying the journey, let me say it that way, in real estate is directly proportionate to your ability to develop skills with tenant selection and tenant screening and so on. And let me just say, I asked the question, when does that begin? They say, well, when they call you up on the phone and you start asking questions. No, tenant selection actually begins when you start to think about possibly maybe perhaps buying some real estate because every decision you make after that narrows down the possible universe of who your tenants are going to be. If you say, well, I want to buy property in my hometown here, and you’re talking about residential, well, then you’ve just narrowed your universe to people that live in your town. You might say, well, I want to buy commercial property in the next state. Well, then that’s different. And then the type of property you choose, is it residential? Is it commercial? Is it a single family? Is it a multifamily? What part of town is it in? What condition is it in? What type of construction is it? Old style, new style. Every little decision like that narrows the universe of who is going to be interested in living. So it’s partway through that process of getting a tenant that you actually enter into direct contact with somebody that might be responding to an ad, which is also part of tenant selection is what do you put in the ad? Who are the people that are prompted to call as a result of your ad? So then when you finally interface with them live, you got to know the right questions to ask because it’s your job. This is a big point that I make with the classes. It is not your job to qualify a tenant. It is the tenant’s job to qualify themselves with their information. Your job as a landlord is to work to eliminate every possible person in the world until you find somebody that is going to pay the rent on time and not beat the place up. And in other words, you don’t want to be saying stuff. Well, you know what? I normally rent a non-smoker, but you seem nice. You know what? I’ll just rent. And then three years later, you’re repaying your apartment when they move out. And your job is to eliminate, just keep eliminating until you don’t find any more reasons to eliminate people. They make enough money. They’re not smokers. If you are no pets property, then they don’t have pets or they have the type of pets you will allow. Then you may have a good tenant, but only time will tell. There’s no worker tenant. But you have to understand this. There’s a lot of unevenness in residential and commercial rental property. But if you can put up with things like a friend that lets you down, a movie doesn’t blow you away, a vacation that’s not all that it is, a spouse that isn’t the greatest all the time and all those things, you can put up with the unevenness that comes with relationship with a tenant and rental property. I mean, you don’t not go on vacation or not get married or not do all those things because you have heard anything negative about it. You still do.
CORWYN:
That’s very true. Joel, look, we’re quickly getting to the end of today’s show. I want to take a moment here. First of all, where can people find your book? Where can people find this book?
JOEL:
Well, first of all, it’s available on all the normal book selling platforms, primarily Amazon. You can search my name or you can search the title. My name, J-O-E-L Miller, and build real estate wealth. But you can also find me on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn. But the main thing to do is to go to the websites that’s dedicated to the book, which is JoelMillerBooks.com, J-O-E-L-M-I-L-L-E-R, books is plural, JoelMillerBooks.com. And on the front page or the homepage of that, there’s a button that you can click on and it’ll show you the entire table of contents for the book. So you can see that we’re covering the whole thing here. This is all you need. And there’s another button you can click on that will give you sample writings from sample content from each of the chapters. So you can see what’s mainly going on there. And also, I will tell you that this is primarily about income property, both commercial and residential. But there is a chapter in there on what is house flipping. It’s the about house flipping. And at the end of that chapter, there’s a QR code that you can use your phone camera to connect with. And it’ll take you to the how-to of house flipping. I didn’t want to put the whole how-to thing in with a book on rental property, but if you have the book, which also comes as an ebook, by the way, you can find out how to flip property as well.
CORWYN:
So, Joel, I’m looking at this table of contents, man. So if our listeners look, y’all are going to be blown away. Y’all need to buy the book. All right. Let’s stop procrastinating. Let’s put a manual on your bookshelf or your nightstand or what have you, that guide to follow as to what you need to be doing, how you should get it done. So you guys can accomplish the dream, the ambition or the goal that you set before yourself, which is to be in real estate investing, to acquire rental properties, increase your cash flow, and you can increase your cash flow and eliminate or either overshadow your primary job. What does retirement look like?
JOEL:
There’s a chapter in there you’re looking at right now. I think it’s chapter 10, how to go from zero to $10,000 in net income, net cash flow from real estate.
CORWYN:
So for our listeners, I’m pretty sure y’all could use an additional 10 grand a month in cash flow. Let’s get this book. So Joel, I want to quickly thank you for being on the show with us today. So taking time out of your busy schedule, I really appreciate you doing so.
JOEL:
Sure. And I just want to add my 19 year old. He was still 18 when he graduated last year, bought his first rental property about a week after he got out of high school. And next week from when we’re recording this, he’s closing on his second one. So he’s on his way.
CORWYN:
He’s in college. Let me get my referee hand, my field goal. That’s it right there. That’s it. We made it. We crossed the goal line. I’m talking about. That is awesome. So congratulations to him and congratulations to you because that is a demonstration of seeing the blueprint of action and following it.
JOEL:
So kudos to him. Thank you for what you’re saying about the book. It reminds me of some of the reviews that are coming in there saying this is not a book that you buy and read and say, oh, that’s great. Put that on your shelf. This is a book you buy and read and park on your desk because you’re going to be referring to it. This is a reference book. This has over 150 checklists of everything from the questions to ask people when they call about an apartment to what to say to a contractor, to doing due diligence when you put an offer in on a property, even to the tools you need. It’s all in there.
CORWYN:
Exactly. Exactly. So again, Joel, thank you so much for taking time out to be with us today for being on our show, being a part of exit strategy radio show family. I look forward to the opportunity to get you back on the show so we can continue this conversation as we move forward.
JOEL:
Corwyn, I love that we’ll drill down on some of these topics.
CORWYN:
I really appreciate you having me. I love it. You’re quite welcome. So for our listeners, guys, look, you know what I say, you know how I feel. I always put the two of those things and I always keep it real. And I tell you that I love you. I love you. And we’re going to see you guys out there in those streets.
