Episode 9: Lisa Hylton: Real estate investor, syndicator, and CPA shares about her investing journey and tips for passive investors

The Real Path to BYOB(Be your own Boss)

Key Point Summary

In this episode of the BYOB Podcast, our guest is Lisa Hylton, a real estate investor, syndicator, and CPA with approximately 15 years of experience in the financial services industry. She has significant experience with hedge funds, offshore funds, private equity funds and private equity fund-of-funds, and registered investment companies, including exposure to many accounting, operational, and reporting issues involving investment securities, swaps, and other derivative products. She's also the host of the Level up REI podcast. Her mission is to provide opportunities to investors to invest passively in US real estate to build long-term wealth and financial freedom.

Key Point Summary

• Lisa grew up around the real estate space. Her father was a contractor who built 14 apartment units. As a child, Lisa was part of cleaning up when people left and turning those units to get them back into the market.
• Lisa's parents did property management themselves, and as she was growing up, she didn't understand or even value real estate. She just saw it as what her parent was doing.
• Lisa says that the universe has a funny sense of humor. She ended up leaving public accounting, which she worked for 10 years. She ended up leaving to go work for an investment manager where she was auditing funds. She now works for a fund manager.
• Lisa didn't have any direct real estate experience, but she had private equity experience. She was always around real estate. She came back to it through her current job, and she then started thinking about house hacking, living in LA, and syndications.
• Lisa has been in commercial real estate for almost 5 years. Her first passive investment was a 600 unit apartment building in Atlanta back in 2019.
• Lisa went from trying to buy duplexes to thinking about house hacking. Then realizing what works for her and that she didn't want to live with other people. She then moved to turnkey. She took a trip from Alabama to Detroit looking for turnkey properties. After a year, she then ran across syndications.
• Lisa would go to a lot of meetups for real estate, out-of-state real estate investing, as well as turnkey investing. She went to the real wealth network and learned about the different markets, about turnkey, and all that stuff.
• The whole idea for investors about Turnkey Properties is that they buy a property that's ready to just open the door, and the tenant can move right in. Some turnkey providers even provide a stabilized property, fully renovated, and they've got a tenant in. That tenant has been in anywhere from three to six months, is paying rent, and it's stabilized. They then will then send or sell those properties.
• Many Turnkey providers will have turnkey standards. When you buy a property just right off of Redfin, you're gonna have to do that research. You're going to get your inspector out and inspect it to see what you need to be doing on it, and then you can do the work.
• Lisa says that if you feel like you want to execute the BRRRR, you won't go with a turnkey provider. You would look for your houses yourself, do all the renovation work, and get your tenant. It just really comes down to you as an investor, like your risk levels and how much time you have.
• Lisa doesn't believe that they guarantee any cash flow. In terms of HFAC and those kinds of other things. Lisa hasn't personally purchased any turnkey, but from the extensive work that she does under a lightly real wealth network, they have a turnkey provider network.
• Lisa has invested passively in 2019 and in 2020. She has done a total of 4 passive investments to date, which is 3 multifamily and one industrial.
• Lisa says that the first thing to do is to start with yourself, and part of that might come from you doing some exploration to start with yourself.
• When it comes to real es