Success Stories

From Broke on Bed Rest with 3rd Child to Million Dollar Real Estate Company in less than 1 year.

It only seems fitting for my story to be the first success story here.  One year I couldn’t afford a hotel room for my best friend’s wedding in Chicago and the next year I was building an 8 bedroom 6 ½ bathroom house because of my real estate investments.  Now to get a full grasp on why gaining financial freedom is possible for everyone no matter how bad or good your current situation is, you need to understand fully what I was up against. 

My husband had been laid off from the music industry and we had been running through our savings while I was on bed rest with our third child.  His unemployment and severance payments were ending and to make matters worse, we were going to be hit with a $1,200 health insurance monthly charge if we wanted to keep our health insurance.  Well, with a third baby on the way and faced with the uncertainty of the further complications ahead, insurance was mandatory.  That in addition to all of our other bills (the mortgage, car note, maintenance on our NYC co-op, school tuition for our daughter and a myriad of other bills and debt from my previous Web development business) left us wondering how we would survive financially.

We had entered the Buffalo NY market over three years prior to build our own rental property portfolio because of the low cost of investment properties in the area.  I had conceived of the concept of selling such properties on eBay as I had seen done but after parting ways with the original realtor with whom we working in the Buffalo area, the idea was placed on the back burner.  This seemed like a perfect time to resurrect it and figure out a way to make it happen in order to provide for my family.

So with no credit and no cash, I went into contract on my first property in Buffalo, listed it on eBay and sold it for what would have been about a $3,500 profit.  Boy was that exciting!  Well I had just started and made a crucial mistake in structuring the deal which ended up with my first client having no property to sell and my not having made any profit.  This definitely did not deter me.  I knew the idea would work, I had seen others doing it,  I just needed to figure out the best system to implement in order to be successful at it.  Meanwhile, I’m doing all of this from my living room couch on my lap top while on bed rest with my third pregnancy.
I forged along and for the next few months I bought and sold properties through the Internet in the Buffalo area.  Now if you want to talk about the problems when your spouse doesn’t support you, my husband, said give it a try but didn’t see how I could make it work.  When that first investor wired us ten thousand dollars he saw it worked but then he said it wasn’t going to be as consistent as I thought it would be.  Then when we were able to pay our bills every month of at least ten thousand dollars each month, he then suggested he still needed to find a job.  Within just a few more months he announced he wasn’t going back to work.  Through all of his doubts I could have just given up and who knows where we would be now?  But I kept moving forward even when he didn’t want to join the business.

That didn’t last long.  When three failed attempts to forge a working relationship with a property management company in Buffalo ended, I knew we needed to hire our own full time employees to handle property management.  You see, without someone to watch the investments, it didn’t make sense for our clients, now as far away as Australia, the UK and all over the United States, to buy from us.  My husband recognized that I wouldn’t be able to handle the sales and marketing as well as the property management.  So he decided to put his music industry endeavors on hold and use his administrative skills to create the property management division of our business and handle our bookkeeping.

In that first year we generated over a million dollars in sales just helping other investors build their real estate portfolios.  Today, we not only are in the Buffalo market but we’ve expanded to Detroit, MI and Charlotte, NC but we’re always looking for new markets.  Additionally, we don’t only work with our investors in rental properties, but in rehab projects, townhouse development and mortgage notes.  We’ve launched this site to serve as a hub for real estate investors looking not just in their own backyards but where the deals are, hence the name DistanceInvesting.Com. 
I choose to work because I love building businesses.  We have the tools now to make as much money as we want.  I choose to live well but not to sacrifice being available to my children.  I can still do whatever, whenever or I can do nothing at all….now that’s financial freedom, thank you real estate a million times over!

- Nechelle Vanias, First Lady Holdings, LLC

If you have a success story you would like to share, let us know, no matter how big or small.  Whether you finally did your first deal or whether you made your first million, your story could be the thing that takes the person reading it to the next level.  Send your stories to success@distanceinvesting.com.