Many people follow the real estate advice from Brandon Turner. He is the VP of growth at Biggerpockets.com and the co-host of the Biggerpockets Podcast.
What is Brandon Turner’s Net Worth?
Brandon Turner’s net worth is an estimated 3-5 Million.
This is based on his business, book sales, and known real estate holdings.
Brandon Turner has built a lot of his money investing in real estate. He focuses on owning cash-flow generating properties. In comparison, not a bigger part of his business model has experience flipping houses and building capital faster.
How Does Brandon Turner Make Money?
Brandon Turner has several different streams of income contributing to his wealth. Many experts point to having multiple streams of income as being a key to building wealth.
- Apartments
- Trailer Parks
- Book Sales
- BiggerPockets position and stock options
- Open Door Capital
Open Door Capital
Brandon’s newest venture is Open Door Capital. It is a real estate syndication fund aimed at mobile home parks, apartment buildings, and self-storage. The fund currently manages over 2000 doors, according to his interview on the bigger pockets podcast.
The portfolio of Open Door Capital is currently above 50 Million Dollars.
Funds like Open Door Capital are designed to provide the investor with dividends from cash flow. To become an investor in Open Door Capital, you must be an accredited investor.
The Bigger Pockets Podcast
Brandon Turner is the host of the Bigger Pockets Podcast. There are currently 510 episodes. The first episode was released on January 17, 2013
Books Written By Brandon Turner
Brandon Turner has authored several successful books through the BiggerPockets Publishing platform.
The Book on Real Estate Investing by Brandon Turner is ranked #2 on Amazon for the real estate investing category at the time of publishing. It was published in 2015 with more than half a million copies sold. This book covers the basics of how to invest in cash-flowing real estate.
His newest book, The Multifamily Millionaire, Was published in August of 2021. It claims you will become a real estate millionaire in 5 years using the stack method.
Real Estate Investing with No (and Low) Money Down was republished in June 2020.
Career Before Real Estate
“I’ll tell you my story here in a nutshell then we’ll get to the quick tip and everything else. But I worked at a Cold Stone Creamery. I was scooping ice cream. Had a bunch of student loan debt. Had a bunch of credit card debt. Didn’t know what I was doing. Worked at a bank for like $12 an hour, 13 bucks an hour. Hated every second.”
Brandon Turner BiggerPockets Podcast Episode 503
Brandon Turner did not come from money before real estate. He worked up from doing shift work service style jobs.
He had one idea for a business before getting into real estate. It was a mobile oil change service. They would go to people’s homes and change their car’s oil; he came up with this idea at 19. He made up a logo for it, and the progress stopped there.
“Ideas are dime a dozen, it is what you do with it that matters… The reason it didn’t work is probably because I wasn’t passionate about it”
Brandon Turner
When he was 20, he worked in a group home and had a lot of extra time. So he started watching flipping shows on TV. His friend recommended he bought a house rather than renting. He ended up buying a duplex and renting the other side out. Later coining this as house hacking.
He was 21 when he found BiggerPockets through a google search.
The BRRRR Method
One of the notable points of Brandon’s career is that he coined the term the BRRRR Method. David Green wrote the book on it. Also published on the BiggerPockets platform.
The BRRRR Method stands for Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat. It contrasts the typical buy-and-hold method where an investor buys a property with a mortgage and then pays it off over 15 to 30 years. Keeping the property in modest repair over this time period. The BRRRR method, in contrast, is about adding value after purchasing and then pulling the equity gained back out of the property.
Quotes by Brandon Turner
“Success is a process.”
“The key to rehabbing a BRRRR property is to make the property as “tenant proof” as possible, using materials that will last a long time and won’t need to be redone later.”
“Some people want it to happen. Some wish it would happen. Others make it happen.”
“When I first started, I remember asking my wife to read Rich Dad Poor Dad, because it changed my thinking in such a profound way.”
― Brandon Turner, The Book on Rental Property Investing
Involvement with Real Estate and BiggerPockets
Brandon Turner got into real estate when he was 21 years old. His first real estate investment was a live-in flip. He houses hacked it by renting out the extra bedrooms while he was working on improving it. From his first deal, he made 20k.
Once he was done with his first deal, he bought a duplex. Brandon rented half of it out and lived in the other half.
When he received his first rent check for $650, he had a lightbulb moment. Since his mortgage was only $620, he was effectively living rent-free.
He started buying houses to flip in 2007. Of course, this was not great timing to get into house flipping as the Great Recession was in this same time period. However, he basically was forced into holding onto them. This is sometimes referred to as being an accidental landlord. This story shows the importance of having multiple exit strategies for a house you are flipping.
“I got into the business of collecting units. Each one was a little oil well producing revenue.”
Brandon Turner
At 27, Brandon made over 3k a month in passive revenue and quit his job working at a bank.
After about 6 months of sitting on the couch, he started to get bored. So he started a blog, which led him to email Josh Dorkin, the owner of BiggerPockets.
He Didn’t Respond.
4 months later, Josh finally responds and asks Brandon if he would be interested in writing for him.
After a few interviews, Brandon became the first employee of BiggerPockets. He was brought on to edit blog posts.
He attributes the team’s success between Brandon Turner and Josh Dorkin to be because Josh is the “visionary” and Brandon is the “integrator.” A concept from Rocket Fuel, where any good business needs 2 both a visionary and an integrator to succeed.
Brandon became the integrator, and he just started doing things for the business. Brandon started writing guest posts across the internet. In the first year, Brandon wrote 50 of them. This is a pretty impressive stat, given it was not his only role. Now there are hundreds of guest posts on the internet pointing back to BiggerPockets that Brandon wrote.
He spent 5 years at BiggerPockets with the role of an integrator.
When he started working at BiggerPockets, Brandon had 30 units in his portfolio. Before starting Open Door Capital, he had 100 units.
Advice Given By Brandon Turner
Brandon turner is a big advocate of the house hack. It is a term he coined but a practice that has been around for a long time. A house hack is when you buy a house and live in it but purchase it for investment purposes. For instance, you could buy a small multi-family property, live in one unit, and rent the other part out. Once the other part is leased out to renters, they will be paying your mortgage.
House hacking is great for building a real estate investor mindset. For example, you can go from renting someone else’s property helping make the mortgage payment of other landlords to having tenants pay down your own mortgage loan.
There are also shallow barriers to entry for a house hack compared to other commercial real estate investing options. This is because the FHA offers loan options with as low as a 3% down payment. Many other banks offer programs with a 5% down payment. But, again, this is in contrast to typical investment loans that require a 20-25% down payment.
Brandon is definitely a member of the “just start” movement. In nearly every podcast, he encourages people to start investing in getting over the analysis paralysis that plagues so many investors out there. Analysis paralysis is where an investor gets confounded by the plethora of investment strategies out there.
Brandon Turner is a major proponent of growing your mind. He says that people often buy rental properties or invest in the stock market but rarely invest in learning. However, for real estate investors, learning about market cycles, doing due diligence, doing underwriting, and market and manage apartment units can pay off big time down the road.
Since Brandon got his start in a single-family investment property, he tends to recommend others look into that route as well. It is Robert Kiyosaki-style advice of failing early and responsibly since most new investors can afford some learning curve mistakes on a single-family property that might otherwise bankrupt them on a large apartment building.
Brandon Turner commonly tells people to avoid anything in real estate that feels like a get-rich-quick scheme. However, referring to real estate as the ultimate get rich slowly method is definitely a good description of real estate investing. One of the major benefits of owning real estate is capital appreciation, which is a process that takes time.
Brandon is a big advocate of networking. Whether it is getting on the BiggerPockets forum, going to meetups, or simply letting people know you invest in properties when you strike up a conversation with them. He has stories of how he got in touch with people looking to sell their property from talking to people in a grocery line. By getting in contact directly with investors, you can do more creative deals; for instance, Brandon Turner is the author of the book on investing in real estate with no or low money down. This is an opportunity that only presents itself when you are directly in contact with a seller instead of working through realtors.
He reminds people that appreciation should be viewed as icing on the cake and should not be used to substitute for positive cash flow.
He is a big advocate for after learning something, immediately going and trying it out.
Conclusion
Brandon Turner has used real estate investing and his position at BiggerPockets to grow his wealth. He has many stories of times when investing in properties has not been all roses but has made it positive over the long run.
While he has made some good money so far in investing in properties, he is well-positioned to grow his wealth exponentially with Open Door Capital. If the currently under management deals exit at projected values or greater, it will certainly add a lot to Brandon’s wealth.
