- Lukas Vanagaitis needed to flip residences but did not have the resources to do it.
- He began by wholesaling home and then began to invest in and flip homes.
- But it wasn’t till he commenced to devote in St. Petersburg, Florida that he turned rewarding.
Lukas Vanagaitis immigrated to the US from Lithuania in 2015 soon after winning the environmentally friendly card lottery.
“I experienced $3,000 in my pocket and didn’t discuss any English. I landed in LA with a one particular-way ticket and a bunch of career interviews,” Vanagaitis claimed.
He experienced a degree in architecture that landed him his 1st work in Las Vegas. He was earning $31,200 a 12 months, according to an supply letter viewed by Insider. But even though functioning there in excess of two years, he realized it was an quantity that would not go quite far. A restricted income in an costly town meant he was paying extra than he was producing and racking up credit history card debt.
“I was barely making finishes satisfy. I was dwelling in the condominium with literally no furnishings,” Vanagaitis reported. “The very first position that I stayed in had bullet holes. So my get started in The us was really really hard.”
He instructed Insider that when he labored his desk work, he’d pop on his headphones and pay attention to unlimited several hours of podcast content about actual-estate investing. Vanagaitis savored the notion of obtaining and flipping households. When he was only 15 many years previous, he inherited a piece of property from his grandparents that he spent yrs repairing up with his allowance. And he needed to make a vocation out of it.
“Each individual single day I was educating myself,” Vanagaitis explained. “At the same time, I failed to have any money. I was trying to arrive up with a technique [to start] since I was as broke as you can get.”
His initial sale
He listened to about wholesaling, a approach that did not require any money to start. It just necessary securing a contract with the residence owner to resell their home for a little percentage of the sale price in return. This is a popular and potentially monotonous way to get into actual estate with out having on as well much possibility.
The most important obstacle would be acquiring a assets operator who’d be keen to take part.
Vanagaitis mentioned he made the decision to come across absentee house owners who did not reside at their addresses in the Las Vegas region. It was an plan and useful resource he took from the “Even bigger Pockets” podcast.
The downside of this approach was initially, the checklist price $400, and next, he experienced to achieve out to 1000’s of house owners just before he located one particular that agreed to promote.
“It is really pretty significant for anyone who’s just receiving begun to not give up since it took me 9 months. Just about every working day I would occur again from do the job and very substantially from 6 to midnight, for 6 hrs, I was crafting handwritten letters and I was mailing them to these absentee proprietors,” Vanagaitis explained.
“There are companies who will mail them immediately for you. I was handwriting them because I did not have the cash to shell out for that services,” Vanagaitis reported.
He at last discovered an owner who experienced a distressed residence they desired to get off their hands. Vanagaitis satisfied with the owner and viewed the house. They then negotiated for a pair of weeks until eventually signing a acquiring arrangement.
Vanagaitis said he then utilised on the web resources such as Craigslist and Fb Market to locate possible prospective buyers. And inside of three weeks, he found a buyer. His quite to start with transaction netted him $5,000, a check out which he framed. A several months later, he quit his task.
But the decision to leave failed to occur from a assured area. In fact, Vanagaitis hadn’t been able to abide by by means of with a 2nd profitable deal in advance of he decided to forfeit his paycheck.
“I could not relate to Vegas. I hated my career, I was possessing panic attacks and I didn’t have any funds to go,” Vanagaitis claimed. “It was incredibly tricky on me to make that final decision for the reason that I felt trapped in Vegas. And I consider the determination to go away was way a lot more essential than the amount of cash that I had at the time.”
He also made the decision to provide the home he inherited in Lithuania. This banked him about $100,000, which gave him a perception of monetary comfort and ease, he said. He then moved to Houston, Texas.
“And then just after two several years, so we are talking about late 2018, I was broke again. I was again to square 1,” Vanagaitis claimed.
Highly-priced faults
He had partnered up with three other people today and they commenced flipping property that had been ruined by Hurricane Harvey. They employed hard cash financial loans to fund the process. But these properties experienced critical damages and essential a large amount of function.
A 2nd main oversight was that a lot of other true estate investors were doing the exact same, flipping broken residences. So by the time they concluded about 6 houses, there were being many other houses for sale.
The sum of offer that instantly grew to become accessible intended that customers experienced options and could underbid the asking.
“We didn’t have encounter. We overspent for renovations mainly because they were being flooded homes. We experienced to employ skilled companies to remediate these properties. We experienced to place new drywall, and do all of these further matters that we failed to finances for,” Vanagaitis stated.
He ongoing, “And then we bought them for unquestionably a lot less revenue than we originally believed. As well as our renovations took way extended than expected. So our desire accumulated on this residence. And we were being shelling out our personal personal savings to spend for our very own living fees.”
“I didn’t like Houston, just as substantially as I did not like Vegas. It was also a cultural distinction. I didn’t vibe with the metropolis. And I commenced getting worry assaults once again,” Vanagaitis reported.
Lastly, Vanagaitis determined to move to Florida where he had loved ones. He sooner or later zeroed in on St. Petersburg, a city that’s surrounded by drinking water. This indicates there’s confined supply. He took all the classes he experienced uncovered along the way and started to flip houses there. This time, he utilized a diverse technique.
Due to the fact he no extended experienced funds on hand, intrigued investors would invest in the home and fund the rehab, although Vanagaitis would place in only sweat equity during the rehab process. As soon as the house was completely ready, the investor would be assured 10% earnings, and nearly anything over that would go to him and his small business partners. This meant he did not need funds or a loan to continue performing what he enjoys.
In 2020, one of the LLCs Vanagaitis co-owns with a company associate, which retains 6 qualities and flips a couple properties a calendar year, gained $600,000 in sales, according to a duplicate of its tax return viewed by Insider.