Real Estate Underground

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Casey Gregersen worked twelve years as a petroleum engineer at Shell. The job had an unusual rhythm: two weeks on a drilling rig, two weeks completely off with zero work responsibility. He used the off weeks to start buying houses. In October 2022, with three companies running, he walked away from Shell. Today Casey runs Bighorn Capital Fund, Wile Homes, and Gregersen Properties. He invests primar...

Sam Wegert built a chain of martial arts schools for 15 years before pivoting full time into real estate. Today he and his wife own around 250 rooms in Charlotte and manage several hundred more, all under one strategy: co-living. Single-family home, single-family debt, multifamily income. The model is simple to describe and hard to operate. You buy a 2,500-square-foot 1990s house with a boxy floor...

Patrick Grimes lost everything in 2009 and 2010. He was a snot-nosed engineer out of college, indexed all-in on a pre-development real estate deal with a personal guarantee. The market turned. The advice he had ignored, from the founder of his old machine design firm, kept coming back: "Don't put everything in high tech. If you want a financial future for your family, take your high mone...

Shauna Wekherlien is a CPA, a Master's in Tax, and a Certified Tax Strategist. Her firm, Tax Goddess, has saved clients over two billion dollars in taxes. She works mostly with executives and operators taking home a million-plus a year and paying $150,000-plus in federal tax, though the real estate provisions in this conversation matter to anyone in the asset class. Recorded the week the One...

Jason Melillo runs KBKG, a firm that does not prepare tax returns. KBKG works with real estate investors and their CPAs on the specialty tax strategies most tax preparers do not run themselves. Cost segregation is the headline service, and the One Big Beautiful Bill just made it more valuable than it has been in years. 100 percent bonus depreciation is back. For a real estate investor with $150,00...

Joe Downs spent seven years as a financial advisor before 9/11 made him stop and reassess. He moved into real estate. The 2008 mortgage collapse forced a second reinvention. That second pivot landed him in distressed real estate, which eventually landed him in self-storage. Today his firm, Bellrose Asset Management, has acquired 20 storage facilities, mostly with institutional capital. Storage is...

Lon Welsh spent eight years as a strategy consultant before going into real estate full time in 2002. He started a brokerage called Your Castle Real Estate in 2004, grew it to 750 agents (the largest independent in Colorado), and sold it to private equity about three and a half years ago. Around the same time, he sold his title company to Compass. He then launched Ironton Capital, a private equity...

Jon Azar runs Peak 15 Capital out of Charlotte. Peak 15 is his third firm. Before this one, he and his brother transacted a few thousand multifamily units across the Southeast between 2013 and 2020. They started sunsetting that portfolio mid-pandemic, and Jon launched Peak 15 the same year. The new firm is built around something Jon calls an alpha-driven fund: results first, asset class second. Th...

We explore how real estate debt funds work for passive investors and why becoming a limited partner might be the smart solution for steady income without property management headaches. • Investing as a limited partner means putting your money into a professionally managed fund that lends to real estate investors • Limited partners earn consistent returns (typically 7-10% annually) without dealing...

Alec McElhinney runs LandPlay, a flex space development shop in central Texas. He started in industrial value-add. When cap rates compressed and interest rates climbed, he met someone at a conference doing flex space and ran the numbers. The margins held up at higher rates. He pivoted into development. Flex space is the hybrid that sits between warehouse and small office: roughly 10 percent office...

Ben Carmona started his career in 2006 and 2007 selling real estate syndications. The biggest operational problem he and his team had was keeping paper in the fax machine because the new business was coming through so fast. Then 2008 and 2009 happened, the syndications cratered, and baby boomers who had worked their entire lives to accumulate real estate watched it evaporate. Ben was a spring chic...

Mark Schuler has been a practicing architect for over 40 years, licensed in 1992, and has designed and built close to 500 structures across his career. By his own count, the permit set he produces today is 1,000 times more complex than the one he produced when he started. He has the battle scars to prove it. He also owns north of 4,000 multifamily units through SGRE Investments, and is launching a...

Daniel Angel Mejia grew up in Colombia, built a corporate finance career inside the Bogotá funds world, and moved to the US roughly ten years ago for a corporate role at a cement and ready-mix company. He started flipping houses on the side, applying what he had learned from the funds back home. Eventually he closed the chapter on corporate, took the leap, and founded Apex Development Group with a...

Chad Ackerman spent his career in human resources at Cardinal Health — the spreadsheet side of HR, not the people side. A coworker mentioned multiple income streams one day. He started reading. Three years later he liquidated his 401k, ate the 10% early-withdrawal penalty, and went all-in on real estate syndications as a limited partner. Five years after that, BiggerPockets bought the community he...

Episode Resources: Social Media: www.facebook.com/vince.gethings www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-gethings-50420a137 www.instagram.com/vince.gethings Email:  vince@wheelbarrowprofits.com  tricityequitygroup.com Elevista - Speed as a Service™ Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on bui...

Episode Resources: Book: https://a.co/d/hAegcXI Facebook Group: https://urlgeni.us/facebook/unlockedguide Mini Course: https://www.unlockedrentals.com/minicourseoptin Elevista - Speed as a Service™ Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, witho...

Chris Lento spent 17 years as an aerospace engineer before deciding the defense industry wasn't the right runway. He spent that same 17 years buying small multifamily in Boston as a side project. In 2017 he flipped which one was the side project. Today Chris and EM Capital run more than 800 multifamily units across the Southeast: Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia, and Atlanta, with 420 units alrea...

Owen Barrett spent eight years buying multifamily in the Midwest, accumulated 650 units of his own portfolio, and used it as a guinea pig for one specific question: what is the actual way to put solar on existing apartment buildings? Two years of building later, the answer became a company. Shine is built for the messy version of the question. Three states (California, Colorado, Massachusetts) hav...

Bob Frady built and sold Hazard Hub, a natural hazard prediction company. After the exit he tried to retire. Played nine holes, sat in a Best Buy parking lot, got bored. About six months later he bought a house in Minnesota and immediately spotted things about the property that had not been disclosed. He walked them back to the seller with documentation, asked for 10 percent off the price, and got...

Carl Christian came to the United States from Haiti in August 2000. He went to FIU. A friend pointed him at a brother-in-law who taught real estate. Carl was hesitant — "I don't like to sell things and wait for commission." The brother-in-law refused to let him say no. Twenty years later Carl runs four businesses under the Nice brand, and an entire chapter of his memoir is dedicated...

Matt Buchalski has been in technology sales for almost 30 years. Today he's Head of Sales at Ownwell, scaling the commercial real estate and institutional investor side of the AI-driven property tax appeal business. He's also an active multifamily operator concentrated in North Texas. The bridge between the two halves of his life is that he treats both with the same operator discipline,...

Dave Dubeau is in British Columbia, the great white North. Born and raised. He spent almost 14 years in Latin America (ten of them in San Jose, Costa Rica running a language training company) before dragging his Costa Rican family kicking and screaming back to Canada in 2003. He started over from scratch, fell into a late-night real estate infomercial, ran the creative no-money-down playbook, move...

Dr. Jacopo Iasiello grew up in Napoli, Italy. From age seven to seventeen he had one dream: become a professional soccer player. A serious injury at 17 ended that life. His mother told him not to worry, that he would succeed wherever he turned next, and he believed her. By his early twenties he had built a multi-million-dollar jewelry business with more than 20 shops across Italy. At 22 he started...

Nathan Turner is the Canadian Note Guy. He started in real estate the way most operators do: he flipped a house, couldn't sell one of them, accidentally became a landlord. In 2009 someone introduced him to the world of buying the mortgage instead of the house, and he never looked back. He moved from being the hands-on operator (swinging hammers, spreading paint, fielding tenant calls) to bein...