Retire Early with Less Than 10 Rentals? Dion McNeeley’s “Boring” Strategy

Dave:
This investor went from $40,000 in debt to cash flowing $20,000 per month. He only owns eight rentals and they’re all in his local market. Today, he’s sharing his secrets. Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer. I’m a rental property investor and the head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. Back on the show today is an investor who was the breakout star of BPCon 2025 in Vegas if you were there. And he’s also the host of the Dion Talk Financial Freedom YouTube channel. It’s Dion McNeely. If you don’t know Dion yet, he has an incredible story. He went from crippling debt as a single dad in his 40s to $200,000 in annual cashflow by buying rental properties near Tacoma, Washington. Dion, he calls himself a lazy investor. He says he only wants to do boring deals. He doesn’t like risky strategies or even huge rehabs. He likes basic, fundamentally sound, long-term rentals that will make him money while reducing his headaches, and clearly he’s been able to pull that off.
Today on the show, Dion is going to tell us how he is continuing to evolve his portfolio, but he’s doing it without adding any stress to his life. And he’ll even update for us a couple of his signature Dionisms for investing in 2026. I’d call these tips secrets to investing success, but Dion is giving them all away for free right here, right now. Let’s bring them on. Dion, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Dion:
Super excited to get the invitation. I’m happy to come and see if there is a way to get more people on the path to financial freedom.

Dave:
Well, I think you’re going to do a very good job at that. You are always very compelling and have such a good perspective on real estate. But before we jump into that, can you please just tell everyone what you’re up to right now?

Dion:
I always like to start with the end, because if you tell everybody just about those first few years, you might scare them away from this. But the end result is what makes it worth going through the five years of suck is I’m currently in Thailand. I’ll be here for the winter, probably a little over three months. And the best part of this trip isn’t that it’s warm or that the scuba diving is amazing or that the dollar goes farther here. It’s that I don’t currently have a return home ticket.

Dave:
Oh my God, that is unbelievable. I’m extremely jealous, but you have obviously earned it. But I wanted to bring this up because I think it’s important for everyone to remember exactly what you said, that real estate investing, it’s not complicated, but it takes effort.You’re going to have to put work into it and there are going to be some frustrating days for sure. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And Dion, you have figured out financial freedom in a way better than me, man. I got to say. I’m sitting here in Washington State. It’s been raining for five days. My heat went out this morning. I’m shivering and you just look comfy as can be and calm and happy. So good for you.

Dion:
No, here I have to have the jacket on because of the air conditioning, not because of the weather.

Dave:
Now you’re just rubbing it in. Let’s go back to the beginning. For those of you, Dion’s been on the show before, great episodes we’ll link to below. But for those of the people who haven’t listened to your episodes yet, Dion, maybe you could just fill everyone in about how you got started, what year that was, and just give us some

Dion:
Background. Now everybody will understand why I wanted to start with the end first, but my starting position was I basically made it to 40 without ever having $1,000 in the bank. And if I ever did, I spent it faster than I could think and then never on anything productive. I found myself a single parent with three kids, got laid off from law enforcement because of the 2008 recession when there’s the municipalities aren’t making money. They lay off cops to save money. And I found a job teaching at a truck driving school making $17 an hour. But in the divorce, I found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name I didn’t know existed until the divorce. So my starting position was broke, low income, three kids. And I decided to make my own pension because first I tried the Marine Corps and they downsized after desert storm.
Then I tried law enforcement and they downsized after 2008 and I thought, oh, my pensions keep going away. I have no control. How can I make my own? And starting at 40, it really wasn’t even the idea of retiring early. I loved my job at the CDL school. I got demoted all the way down eventually to president of the company and loved what I was doing there. I used to say, “I don’t think I’ll retire early. I’m probably not going to retire late. I love the job so much.”
My goal when investing was I didn’t want to become a financial burden to my kids if I ever got too old to work. That was the starting point. And then the income snowball kicked in around year five and maybe year six. The cashflow got much more than I expected. The self-management got a lot easier than I expected. And in 2022, I finally just said, “Time freedom wins. I love the job, but I’d rather travel and scuba and enjoy my 50s instead of continue to build someone else’s dream. I’m just going to live my own.”

Dave:
That’s an incredible story. I won’t spoil it for you because we will link to Dion’s full episode and you can really hear about it. But it really is inspiring, Dion, because I mean, I don’t mean to be disparaging, but it just shows that anyone can do it. You were starting with what? You said negative $86,000, not even at the starting line when you first got started, and yet still you are here. How many years later is that?

Dion:
Well, it took eight years to reach basically financial independence where I could have retired,
But then I did four years, so it was 12 years total. So that eight to 12 that you named is basically perfect for my situation. I could have retired anytime between eight and 12 years, but I loved my job, so I wasn’t in a hurry to leave. And I did a four-year litmus test where from year eight to year 12, I didn’t touch one penny from my W-2 income. That was always rolled into investing. Wow. So for those years, I lived off rental income and I continued to save and invest most of the rental income. I live on a round, even when I’m traveling like this in Thailand, I’m going to struggle to spend five grand this month. A round trip ticket’s 800 bucks. The five star hotels are 60 or $70 a day. It’s crazy. Food’s super cheap. So even at home or here because I still house hack, I don’t spend that much.
But my passive cashflow coming in after every expense and after setting aside about 60 grand a year for future expenses, those roofs and things that are going to happen and down the road, I make about $21,000 off of eight properties with 18 rental units. So I’m still going to continue to add properties, but I’m not actively growing. It’s just going to happen as a byproduct. And the goal was never a bigger portfolio. The goal was the right amount of cash flow from the least amount of units. And that’s where I find myself now after a decade basically.

Dave:
Are all those units paid off or how are they generating so much cash flow?

Dion:
It’s one of my favorite questions. I actually make a video every now and then on why so much cashflow? And part of it is I recycled cash flow, not capital. So I’ve never taken out a home equity line of credit, never done a cash out refinance. I’ve not sold a property for a 1031. I might sell my first property in 2026. So it’s save a down payment, buy a property. I’m the creator of the binder strategy where my tenants ask me to raise the rent. That helps a lot. To reach financial freedom, I never did a rehab or a BRRR. I did my first Burr after retiring, and I also call it my last Burr. I’m not going to do that again. It’s too much work, even though it generated about $300,000 in profit, not doing it. But I buy duplexes. All my properties are small multifamily, except for the one single family house I owned before I was an investor.
But I look for places that have a family room, a dent or a bonus room. This is something I learned from bigger pockets. How can you create more income from the same property? And I never bought a property and kicked a tenant out, but when I had tenant turnover, then I would go to the family room or the dent and add a closet. Now I have a three bedroom each side instead of a two bedroom and the rent increases over $1,000 a month with that extra bedroom and then the tenant turnover. And then the missing element that most people have is time. If I say I have eight properties with 18 units and it makes 21,000 a month in profit, they would think if they went and bought eight properties, that’s where they would be and that’s not it.
I bought one, owned it for a decade. I bought another two years later, owned it for eight years. I bought another a year and a half later, had it for almost seven years. It’s owning a property for several years, having possibility for rent increases, value add, refinance. As I saved more reserves, I could increase the deductible on my insurance and bring the premiums down to increase income. So it’s a combination of multiple levers that you don’t have in the beginning. It’s once you have three or four properties and you start making an adjustment like a three or $400 a month rent increase from the binder strategy on one property is nice. But on seven, it’s thousands a month.

Dave:
And compounded over five years every year. I think that’s a great point because I bet when people hear eight to 10 years, they think that’s all because it takes time for acquisition or it takes time to save up money to buy that next deal, which does take time. But the benefits of real estate really do increase over time. That’s why it’s a long-term game because your rents will increase, your debt is hopefully fixed and is staying the same amount. You get better at management, so your margins start to grow and all the things Dion just mentioned. Even if you had all the money to go out and buy eight to 10 properties like Dion said right now today, you still wouldn’t have the performance that Dion has a couple years into his portfolio because of the things he just said and gaining new experience.

Dion:
We did an episode in February of 2025 on things I do backwards or these things that I call Dionisms, right? There’s one here, and I’m just going to ask the question, how many times in the real estate investing community have we heard the growth phase and the stabilization phase? It’s very common to hear those talked about as phases. Of course, yeah. Okay. Well, the growth phase includes stabilization on the properties that you own. So when you buy a property, it’s not like you just kind of ignore it while you add other ones. That’s the one you’re looking for when you have tenant turnover, what value add can you do? Can you add a fence to split up the backyards of a duplex? Can you do the closet thing? Can you add a storage shed for increased income? So you’re stabilizing and optimizing along the way.
So it’s not like once you reach financial freedom or the perfect size portfolio, now you focus on doing that. You do that the whole time.

Dave:
And that’s how you get to hang out in Thailand because you’re already optimized by the time you get all those deals. You have it all figured out. So tell me a little bit about your plan going forward, because you said you’re not necessarily in growth mode. So how do you decide at this point in your investing career whether you’re going to acquire new properties or do something else?

Dion:
Well, there’s two things that tell me when to buy property. And there’s some things that people say that tell me they’re never going to be an investor. If they say, “I’m going to wait for prices to come down or I’m going to wait for interest rates to come down.” If they’re waiting for prices to come down and they won’t buy in an upmarket, fear isn’t going to let them buy in a down market. And if they want to wait for interest rates to come down, that happens the same day prices go up because people buy based on payment, they can pay more. But the two things that tell me when to buy is, am I ready? Which a lot of people associate with math. They’re going to think, do I have the reserves? Do I have the down payment? But am I ready as have I studied my market?
Do I know my asset class? And is there nothing major going on in my life like birth, death, divorce, traveling to Thailand, proposing at the Tiger Kingdom? I actually have that short video out, so I’m now traveling with a fiance.

Dave:
Oh, congratulations. That’s so cool. Well,

Dion:
Thank you.

Dave:
That’s so exciting. Well,

Dion:
Now in retirement, I basically wait. I’m ready means the money’s piled up. So if I’m spending, if I try 5,000 a month, I have over 15,000 a month that’s going into an account that slowly accrues a couple hundred thousand dollars every year or two. And I’ll think, okay, I’m uncomfortable with that amount of money sitting in the bank. I don’t like that. Inflation is the enemy when it’s in the bank and it’s your best friend when it’s in a property. And then so in 2026, I’ll be adding another property because the money’s piled up. And so I’ll probably spend 90 days, even though I know my market, I know my asset class, I’m going to take 90 days to study current rents, current deals, current valuations, watch deals, and then I’ll be making offers and buy a deal. And then I’ll take another year or two off because I’m not an active real estate investor.
It’s just the best use of my money at this point.

Dave:
Tell me a little bit about the market conditions because you said it sounds like you don’t look at prices to come down. You’re not looking for interest rates to change. How do you view a market in 2026 and not be scared of it and say, “I’m not going to invest, but learn something about it so that you can choose the right kind of deal for you going forward.”

Dion:
So I’m never concerned about a crash coming. Interest rates or prices don’t impact how I invest. It’s, am I ready? Did I find a great deal? And the definition of a great deal for me is 5% math, 95% criteria.
So the math is important. We don’t practice the math until we get it right. This is right from bigger pockets. We practice the math until we can’t get it wrong. Then we stop focusing on math. So I’m looking for, even with setting aside for repairs, maintenance and vacancy, I don’t want to lose money, so no alligators. I want to make profit. I shoot for a return that’s better than my average area. That’s why I want to take 90 days before I buy. I want to figure out is currently in my market and sometimes markets shift. In 2021 and 2023, I bought deals because remote work had changed the landscape. Remote workers can live a little farther out from the bigger cities, which pushed rents up, but not prices because they weren’t buying. They were afraid they might get called back to the office. So I thought if friends have pushed up and prices haven’t, which deals make the most sense and I got the yield I was looking for.
But that’s the math. The criteria is I’m a long-term buy and hold investor. I want the minimum amount of interaction with tenants, keep them happy so I can travel. I’m not doing short-term, mid-term, and I don’t want tenant turnover even though it sometimes gets the best rent increase.
And that means I want to own single family houses. They have the longest tenant turnover. It’s like the average tenancy in a house is seven years. The average tenancy and apartment is two years. But single family houses in my market, they’ve never cash flowed in a decade. I’ve never seen one. The one I own only works because I owned it for a decade before I turned it into a rental.
And I even lost money the first year. So I want small multifamily because they have the yield I’m looking for with this caveat as similar to a single family house as possible. So I want side by side with fence yards, washer, dryer, hookup, separate parking, decent neighborhood. I avoid good school districts. We’ve talked about that before because most people priororitize that. I don’t want the tenant turnover or the higher taxes that comes with being in a good school district. So I’ve got all of this criteria. So in 2026, at some point when I’m ready, I’m going to study the market for about 60 to 90 days to understand what current rents and current prices and rates. What is the average yield? I’ll look for deals that beat that, but then I’m going to focus most of my time on side-by-side fence jards, washer-dryer hookups, safe neighborhood, all of the other criteria that lets me be financially free with the minimum amount of time involved with my rentals.
The rental you hunt for dictates what your life will be in 10 years.

Dave:
So let me just make sure I understand and summarize this because I think this is very, very smart. And I agree, especially in this kind of market conditions. For me, I’m just like, how do I find the best asset that I want to hold for 20 years? That’s my number one thing that I think about. But does it mean then that you create that buy box, right? Let’s just say you work with an agent, you go on Zillow, you set those criteria, and then you analyze deals for 90 days, basically everything that meets that criteria for 90 days. And then you say, “Hey, I found the needle in the haystack.” Now because I’ve analyzed so many of these deals, I know what average is. I want to beat average and by benchmarking myself against all of these other listings, now I can be confident that I’m going to beat average.

Dion:
When I first started, I would say take 90 days to learn your market minimum. When I was in growth mode, I never had to take 90 days because I was always actively tracking rents and tracking prices and rates. And it was, like I said, life consuming those first five years,
It took way more time. In retirement, since it’s just when the money piles up, I’m not going to go every two years and go buy a property. It’s every two years. I will now learn my market because everything changes. You have seasonality, what time of the year am I buying, what’s happened with remote work or the economy or universal basic income that might come if AI takes too many jobs or anything that could shift in the future that will benefit landlords. I want to make sure I’m optimizing how I’m buying based on what’s going on at that time.

Dave:
The way deals look today versus 10 years ago, interesting history lesson does not matter. It just doesn’t matter because your job as the investor, you had mentioned it earlier, Dion, what’s the best use of your time and money today? If it’s real estate, do it. If you think there’s something else you can do with your time and money, fine, go do that. But what happened 10 years ago? Totally irrelevant. You can’t go back and do deals that looked like that. So I love your advice of relearning your market because that’s the process for saying, “Hey, I’ve got some cash to spend right now. I have this goal that I’m working towards. How can I execute on that as best as possible with the conditions that are realistic on the ground and not thinking about, hey, could I have done a short-term rental five years ago?” Who knows?
But it’s honestly irrelevant. Maybe short-term rentals work today, maybe something else works today, but that’s the question you need to be asking yourself. So Dion, I do want to get your advice because you are a very wise man. You have a lot of good advice for people, especially who are getting started. I want to hear your advice for people getting started in 2026 or maybe just getting back into the market after a few years off in 2026, but we do got to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. As a real estate investor, the last thing I want to do or have time for is play accountant, banker, and debt collector all at once. But that’s what I was doing every weekend, flipping between a bunch of apps, bank statements and receipts, trying to sort it all out by property and figure out who’s late on rent.
Then I found Baseline and it takes all of that off my plate. It’s BiggerPockets official banking platform that automatically sorts my transactions, matches receipts, and collects rents for every property. My tax prep is done and my weekends are mine again. Plus, I’m saving a ton of money on banking fees and apps that I don’t even need anymore. Get $100 bonus when you sign up today at baselane.com/bp. BiggerPockets Pro members also get a free upgrade to Baselane Smart, which is awesome because it’s packed with advanced automations and features to save you even more time. So go to baselane.com/bp. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with Dion McNeely talking about the 2026 market. We’ve talked about Dion’s philosophy, how he spends a lot of time relearning his market every couple of years when he’s going to buy a new deal. So Dion, for people who are doing this, getting back into the market, or maybe they’re just buying their first deal ever, what advice do you have for people who are just trying to get into it right now?

Dion:
The first thing to consider would be imagine the cost of waiting. When I hear the people that say it must be nice to have invested five or 10 years ago, whatever the market conditions are, whether they think it was a pandemic or the recovery from the crash that made that more attractive, there will be a point in time, picture 2035 when people are saying, “You are so lucky because you bought in 2025. At BPCON 2025 in Las Vegas, look how many lenders were there looking for people to give money to.
” In 2035, that might not be the case. Lending might disappear like it did in 2012, 13, 14, when all of a sudden you can only have four conventional loans in your own name instead of 10 like we have now or whatever benefit we have now. So the advice to somebody starting today first to steal your words, it’s a 10-year journey. Don’t expect the first deal to be life-changing. Don’t expect the first few years to be fun. They’re going to be very slow. They’re going to be very boring. The expectation is from year one to year 10 that the cashflow grows like a diagonal and really it is almost flat line. I don’t think I broke $1,000 a month in cashflow for four years,
And then it still stayed pretty low until year eight and maybe eight and a half. It hockey stick growth kicked in, and that happens way later when you have multiple levers to pull. And this gets talked about often, but if somebody’s starting today, it was a requirement for me. It might not be a requirement for everyone else, but I suggest some form of house hacking. I’m not saying go add roommates. I like duplex, triplex, fourplex, but if that turns peoples off because of their spouse or their kids, I had three kids too. They were excited about moving, but a house with an ADU. And when I say that, most people think a house with a small house behind it because that’s what we can build today. It’s got to be behind the other unless you get a waiver. It’s only so many square feet. Derek, that ADU guy who you guys have had on the channel, he just builds ADUs.
What I did is look for houses with ADUs from before all of the laws and regulations. So I own a house with an ADU, which is a 2,500 square foot house and a duplex on one property. Somehow that’s an ADU situation. They’re not attached, they’re separate, but it’s one property, house with ADU. I’m not actually sure which building is the ADU. I was looking at another one that was a five bedroom house and a four bedroom house on one property. They just hadn’t divided it. And so the people who say they can’t start with a house hack because they have family, do they somehow magically live somewhere now where they have no neighbors because that’s how house hacking can be done.

Dave:
I know. I think for most people who have experienced some sort of city or even suburban living, it’s really not that big of a difference to your lifestyle.

Dion:
The second thing is the steps are the same to start or for me between deals eight and nine or whatever, it’s you’re saving. How do you increase your income and decrease your expenses? Saving isn’t just about spending less, it’s about increasing your income. So for me, that’s staying on top of what goes on with my rents, how do I do value ads? How do I mitigate my expenses, increase my deductible to decrease my premiums or whatever the strategy is. In growth mode, it was overtime, side hustle. I was playing World of Warcraft and selling things online as a side hustle, making hundreds of dollars a month, playing games with my kids to increase the savings rate, but then decrease the expenses. In growth mode, it was no streaming services, not eating out. I went eight years without a vacation so that the rest of my life can be a vacation.
So if you’re starting, what can you eliminate without making life unbearable? Maybe don’t eliminate all streaming services, but they’re really good at having one show you like on Netflix, one series on Hulu and the movie on HBO. So you got to have to have all of them. But if you can cut that back and you cut out the eating out meal, prep, less vacations, maybe not none like we did, then what is your credit score?
The steps are the same. You’re increasing your income and decreasing your expenses, work on your credit score, and then actually go talk with a lender. And the first three steps here, there’s no agent involved. There’s no auto searches, there’s no deal hunting, no funnels because you have to get all of this right. First. If you talk to an agent, one of their first questions, if they’re good, should be, “What did your lender say?” Because why look at anything until we know what you are able to do? Totally

Dave:
Agree.

Dion:
And I guarantee right now there’s some agent listening, going, nodding their head going, “Yes, please do that. Please talk to a lender to understand your options.” And I would never have gotten started if I had talked to agents first. They would’ve said, “Well, you hunt for a property or go talk to a lender.” And then I talked to a lender and the lender said, “You can’t borrow anything.”
My debt to income was so bad. The agents wouldn’t have understand usually to say, “Well, rent your house out for a couple of years, get rental income on your tax returns, and now your debt to income means almost nothing because we’ll look at the rental income on the property you’re purchasing.” And one conversation, the lender accidentally, she just kind of threw it into the conversation. I grabbed onto that and I thought, wait, that’s a thing and that changed everything for me. Once you talk to a lender and you know your steps, now it’s study your market to pick a strategy. So I worked in law enforcement for about eight years, and one thing a cop can’t do is you can’t show up on scene and go, “I think this happened. Let me find evidence to back it up.”
You have to show up on scene and go, “Let me look at the evidence and based on the evidence, here’s what I think happened.” And then as I’m studying it, as more evidence comes in, I will change my opinion based on that evidence. So market’s the same way. I looked at my market, I wanted to own single family houses, I understood them, I could house act them, I could buy it without having roommates or anything and then move out and rent it out, but they don’t cash flow in my market. So studying my market shifted me to small multifamily. I have a friend, she sold her stuff in Washington, 1031 to Ohio. And where she invested, single family houses made more sense than small multifamily. So you have to study the market to figure out what works, where you’re investing, what matches your resources, your abilities, and what matches your strategy.
And then after you’ve done all of that, that’s where the agent comes in. Your strategy could be driving for dollars, setting up mailers, working with wholesalers. Mine was working full-time, raising three kids. I had agents sending me emails and I filtered through those looking for the ones that I wanted. Kindergarten simple, wasn’t in a hurry. It took two years to buy the first duplex, two years to buy the next one. So in four years I did two whole deals, but that’s how you get to financial freedom is having a repeatable process. The work is not so much that you’re actually going to be able to do it.

Dave:
All right. That is great advice for beginners and people who are starting to get started, but I want to hear some of your best tips for managing and optimizing your portfolio next year because this is sort of your thing, Diana. I’d love to get your insights on it. If you had to pick two or three of your top pieces of advice for people who want to optimize their portfolio in the coming year, what would those things be?

Dion:
Well, thank you very much for the compliment. It’s very weird to have that because I am a product of bigger pockets. My starting position was so bad. I lost money that first year. I rented out the house. I didn’t see myself as a real landlord, so I rented to a friend because I couldn’t trust a stranger and I didn’t want the contract between friends. So we didn’t have a lease. And it was just every nightmare mistake I could make I was making. So I realized I was the problem. Landlording is not complicated. It’s simple. It’s not easy, but I was the problem because I was uneducated, 13 week bootcamp to become a Marine six-month academy to become a cop, and I’m just going to jump into real estate with no education and replace my income. So I started hunting for Rich Dad, Poor Dad, podcast.
At the time, BiggerPockets YouTube channel wasn’t very big, but I found the website. And there was guys like Michael Zuber from One Rental at a time who were writing on the website. So some article talked about how small multifamily lending was the same as single family, and that made a shift for me. And how do you find a lease and how do you screen tenants and all of the really basic stuff that I just was winging it. And because I found BiggerPockets in written form, that’s the dinosaur days, I’m financially free. So I want to thank you for the compliment, but thank you for the content that is helping people get here.

Dave:
I mean, you deserve all of it, man. I appreciate that. And BiggerPockets is really that resource and we love hearing that. And for anyone who hasn’t been on our website, it’s honestly crazy. A lot of people think we’re just a podcast. We have an amazing website. Go to biggerpockets.com. We have all of this free content, networking, the forums, these ways that you could have your answers questioned. It’s an incredible experience. We love that. But BiggerPockets is just like anything else where it’s like, it is what you make it. You have to go out and work hard and figure out your own flavor of how you’re going to be an investor. Because even though thousands, tens of thousands of BiggerPockets members have done this before, no two people are exactly alike. And I just want to, I think your story’s so cool because you’ve really come up with your own way of doing it.
And it’s based in fundamentals. It’s not like you’re completely just starting from scratch, but you have come up with a really unique and sometimes contrarian way of looking at problems as a real estate investor. And I don’t say this lightly. I don’t think there are all that many true thought leaders in our space where people are coming up with new ideas, but I think you’ve absolutely done that. So I think the praise is light compared to what you are deserving of. So we are very grateful of you continuing to be a member of the broader BiggerPockets community here, Dion. With that, I want people to hear this because you are a though leader. You have some really cool ideas about real estate investing. Give us your three top ones for how you recommend managing and sort of optimizing.

Dion:
So this is going to be a teachable moment that I take away from McDonald’s. We would all have to admit fairly successful business model. And if
People are familiar with Robert Kiyosaki, they know that McDonald’s is not in the hamburger business, they are in the real estate business. But in the 1990s, early 1990s, McDonald’s started broadening their menu. They said, “We have the chicken this, we have a salad that we have all of these different options.” And their profits tanked. Other people were able to duplicate it easier because they were smaller businesses. It was easier to implement. And in the mid ’90s when McDonald’s realized they had diversified their menu so much they were losing clients, they came out with their jingle about the Big Mac and they focused back on that hamburger that is the iconic thing of McDonald’s does Successful to this day. So in real estate, we tend to do the same thing. I wanted to buy long-term buy and hold rentals. So you fall down into the rabbit hole of how do I educate myself on this and what do you hear?
Burr, flipping, wholesaling, investing at a distance, short-term rental, midterm rental, all of these things that you can try. You’ll diversify your menu so much that you’ll spread yourself so thin. It’s like investing in real estate and stocks and crypto that you won’t master an asset class
Well enough to be successful at it. Well, in your asset class, pick the strategy that matches your resources, your timeline, and your goals, and try to focus on your hamburger. Mine is, even in retirement, because I save up money and I could easily do burrs. I could self-fund burrs. I’m not going to. I like to travel. I don’t like to do rehabs. I don’t like to pull permits. I hate going to the city and begging for permission to improve my property. Me too. That’s not me. There’s people who love that. If you thrive on that and the negotiation with the city and the contractors, go for it. That’s your hamburger. So that’s the first advice, is really focus in on what you can master so that you can get to the point where it’s boring. That’s where success comes from. It doesn’t come from the excitement of learning new things when you’ve been doing the same thing for 10 years.
Get that mastered.

Dave:
This is probably one of the more common questions I get is people say, “Hey, I’ve done two burrs, I’ve done a flip, I’ve done a single family out. What do I do next? Or where should I go from here?” And I usually ask, “Do you have to change? Is there a reason other than social media or the shiny object syndrome that you would do that? ” Because maybe if your stuff’s not working, you should go do something different. But why do you think it is so much in this industry that people have this tendency to want to just move on, try something either bigger or not even necessarily bigger, but just different from the kinds of deals they’ve done in the past?

Dion:
It is a part of the brain that we can’t remove. When I was reaching financial freedom, I have this friend who was also reaching financial freedom the same year, and he retired the same year that I did, but he has shiny object syndrome. Every time he would reach out to me for advice, he would say, “What do you think of RV pads? What do you think of buy the room? What do you think of short-term rentals?” And I would have to reel him back into what we’re doing is working. It’s very boring. I understand you don’t have excitement with what we’re doing, but if you repeat it one or two more times, let’s run the numbers again. And then he ended up sticking with it with his nice boring strategy and he’s been retired now for three years as well. And I have that conversation a lot of times with newer investors or people that I run into is they go, “How can I do what you did but faster?
Or how can I do what you did if I use a different strategy?”

Speaker 3:
And

Dion:
My strategy’s very boring. It’s one property, save a down payment, buy the property, keep a tenant long-term. I prefer to buy rent ready or already occupied properties. I’m all I can to buy and spend a bunch of time fixing it up. That’s very boring. But financial freedom after a decade is anything but boring.

Dave:
I love that. Yeah, I think that’s kind of the whole thing is just keeping your eye on the prize and realizing that your excitement doesn’t have to come from real estate. You can have your excitement come from anywhere else. There are some people, like my friend who’s on the show a lot, James Dinard, he loves flipping houses. He would do it for free if no one … I’m just the opposite of that. I like real estate. I find it enjoying. I like the problem solving, but I like the sort of big picture. Hey, I’m doing this because I know the other stuff it achieves for me in my life. I am not in it because I have this love of physical dwellings the same way that someone like James Dainer does. So I think it’s just really important for people, one, to have that long-term perspective.
And two, recognize what side of that line you’re on. There’s no right or wrong. If you’re someone who’s passionate about it, by all means, go be passionate about doing the kinds of value add. I know a lot of people who are contractors or architects or engineers who love building. That’s super cool. Go do that. If you’re lazy like me and Dion, maybe just do the more boring approach because that could work for you too and you can find that passion with the free time that you generate from your real estate investing. We got to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast here with investor Dion McNeely, talking about his very unique, memorable, I think super inspiring and relatable approach to real estate investing. So I love that as number one. You got to find your hamburger. What’s number two?

Dion:
So I think a smart person learns from their mistakes and a genius learns from other people’s mistakes. But the second piece of advice is, and this is kind of like a thing the way I put it in my head is amateurs chase deals, professionals chase repeatability. While I was starting, I was working full-time, raising three kids, didn’t have a lot of free time. Deals would be creative financing, seller financing, the Burr method so I could recycle my capital faster to get more deals faster. But when you don’t have a lot of time, well, that strategy is repeatable for some people, it wouldn’t be repeatable for me. So it was save a down payment, buy a property. Two years to keep studying the market, save the down payment, increase income, decrease expenses, and then two years again, sounds super boring, but it was repeatable to the point where more units didn’t mean more work.
I can manage my 17 rented out units because it basically feels exactly the same as when I had seven or 10. I don’t notice the difference. Two or three techs a month, maybe one email. I have my systems in place that well. In the beginning, that wasn’t the case. So getting my systems in place was more valuable to me than adding properties. And in the beginning, what is everybody focusing on? How do I get the next deal? It’s once you have the deal, how do I get my system? So how do I have a list of contractors for plumbing and electricity? So when I have an emergency, I have no stress because I’ve already got their phone numbers in my phone. Do I have a contact in my phone for every property so I know what tenants are there, when their leases are due, what their current rents are, what jobs have in my notes section, in my contacts, in my phone for every property, there is what’s been done there and when it was done and when I expect certain maintenance to happen.
All of these systems that make it very easy to travel, the entire business can be in a device. You don’t have to have anything, no spreadsheets or anything. You can have them, but you don’t have to have them to travel. So since my system is repeatable in growth mode, I didn’t even subconsciously resist adding units because it didn’t mean more time. And that’s very important to me in growth mode, especially because if it takes more work, your brain will say, “Oh, we’ve got enough. Don’t add any more. We can’t handle any more.”

Dave:
Yeah. I think this is one of the things that held me back the most as a real estate investor. I self-managed from 10 years. And if I had just figured out what you were just talking about, I would’ve probably doubled. I would add more properties because I wasn’t actually … I was lucky I had a high paying job and I could have bought more, but I just mentally never sat down to invest time upfront to clear time for myself later that would allow me to do that. And instead I was just like, “You know what? Real estate, I have another career. I’m not going to be working on my rental portfolio right now.” And I did that for years. And if I just recognized that I didn’t have a very good business at that point, I had good investments, but I didn’t have a good business or a good system or a good … The way you’ve put it, I couldn’t repeat stuff.
I was calling different plumbers every time. I was okay, but I could have done better and I could have grown faster. And it took me, God, way too long to figure that out, probably three or four years longer than it should have. And I missed out on probably scaling some of the stuff that I should have. And like you said, I don’t regret things because it all worked out in the end, the butterfly effect. But if I were to go back and could tweak some of the things, I think that’s the number one thing I would focus on more is systems early.

Dion:
And looking back, my systems weren’t there in the beginning either. My first few years were just like yours. It felt like it took 20 hours a week to manage my one tenant, let alone two hours a month to manage all of the tenants that I have now. So it was developing those systems over time, educating myself on bigger pockets, finding the people in the community to spend time around with to figure out how they do things. An example is the lumberjack landlord. For years, I would list my properties the wrong way when I had a rental. I would put them out there and I’ll get to the last piece of advice as quick because I can’t hear the … I would list a property the way an owner thinks. Here are the amenities. Here’s the age of the building. Here’s the square footage. Here’s the parking.
Here’s the distance maybe to the freeway. The Lumberjack landlord, he optimized my interacting with him, optimized my advertising my rental so much that I no longer hunt for a tenant. I have to filter through applications. And it’s by not talking about the property. The tenants don’t really care about the property as much as they care about the quality of life they’re going to have in the property. So take your address of your rental and put it in ChatGPT and say, “What are five to 10 things that my tenants might find attractive about the area that this rental is in? ” And it’ll pull up parks, it’ll pull up walking trails, dog parks, ChatGPT or Grock or whichever you use will tell you those things and have that in the listing, just bullet point. These are five things that could affect your quality of life if you lived in this area.
And now I get 30 to 50 applicants instead of five.

Dave:
Wow. I love that.

Dion:
Those are the systems. And the third thing that I hope people could take away, whether they’re just starting in real estate or they’ve been doing this for a while and they’re optimizing now, is ask yourself this question, what skill could you dedicate the time to mastering that will change the entire game for you? And for some of us, that’s deal hunting, deal analyzing. For some of us, it’s negotiation. It could be communication, it could be networking. There is a skill out there that you haven’t focused on that you could take the next couple of months and dedicate the time to that will impact the rest of your life as far as investing goes.

Dave:
I love this. Actually, in one of my books, I talk about this that there’s just no way you can feasibly learn every skill. There is just so many different things real estate investors need to do. Some of them, I’m sorry you’re going to be bad at. It’s such a broad, different type of thing. Some people are really analytical. Some people are great people person. Some people just love sales. There’s just so many different things. It’s really hard to be good at it. And the great thing about real estate investing is that you could specialize and trade people who are good at these other things. You can hire someone who’s handy if you’re not. You can work with a property manager. Deon’s a great property manager, but if that’s something that you’re not into, you could probably learn another skill and hire out being a property manager.
You don’t need to be good at everything to be a good investor. You need to be self-aware, I think, to know what you’re good at and what you could feasibly learn. And which things, like for me being handy, you should probably just quit because I’m never going to do maintenance on myself. I’ve tried that stuff and it never worked for me. It was a huge waste of time. I’m better at learning. For me, I think my skillsets are deal finding and deal analysis. That’s what I’m good at. Not a great property management, decent enough, but I trade for everything else. So Dan, what are some examples of these skills that … Well, what’s yours, first of all? What’s the thing you invested in and what are some of the skills you think are the best ROI for people to invest their time into?

Dion:
So the one skill that I’m not arrogant enough to say I’ve mastered, but I’ve focused on mastering is teaching. The highest form of learning is teaching. And when I look at every aspect of real estate investing or owning the property or managing the property, I think whenever I’m doing anything, talking with a tenant, doing the binder strategy or anything that involves a skill, networking, presenting, I think if I had to teach somebody how to do this, if I had to teach somebody how to screen tenants, how would I make the lesson outline?
How would I convey the information in at least three different audible, kinesthetic, whatever version they learn in? Doing that, it makes it sound when I talk like I’m super organized and I know what I’m doing. I’m not and I don’t. But when it comes to an aspect of real estate, if I’ve had to think, how would I teach this to somebody? I’m very organized and I know what I’m doing about that thing. And so that might not be everyone else’s thing they need to master about how to teach, but at least think if you had to explain what you’re doing to someone else, if you could articulate it, you’ll be better at doing it.

Dave:
Do you think it overlaps the things often if people are trying to figure out what skill they’re good at, is it always the thing that you love doing or have you found it’s also sometimes you’re just good at things that maybe you don’t like doing? I

Dion:
Think people benefit more from improving the things that they’re good at than working on the things that they’re terrible at. Like you said earlier, outsource the things you don’t like doing or you’re not good at doing. I had no idea until I started working at the CDL school that I liked teaching. I was a driver for years. I was an officer for eight years and I was in the Marines, but between that, I was a truck driver for over a decade. My first month at a CDL school as an instructor, I became 10 times the driver that I ever was.
I think I’ve translated that into real estate, but I have friends who aren’t teachers who are more successful than I am. And I mentioned them a couple times in this video, the lumberjack landlord, Millennial Mike and Michael Zuber, they’re not teachers. They worked in IT sales and they took skills from their job that they had to master for their work and they’ve used that in real estate. The lumberjack, self-managing over 1150 units while Burr’s and rehabs are going on, that is a project manager thing. That’s his skillset. That’s not me. I’m not the project manager. I didn’t like doing one bird, but he’s doing three or four at a time sometimes. And so everyone listening or watching, what are you doing for work that has required you to master certain skills?
Will those skills translate to investing? You might already have a type of superpower. And for me, I think it’s putting myself in the shoes of who I’m talking to. So it’s sometimes teaching, but sometimes the binder strategy comes from why are my tenants so stressed out about rent increases or thinking they’re going to get kicked out? How can I alleviate that? Put myself in their shoes, came up with a system that made it a lot easier to get the rents up, keep tenants, low turnover, happier tenants. But I think almost every job out there has some transferable skill that people are already mastering that they can bring to real estate.

Dave:
That’s awesome. I absolutely agree with that. I’m just resonating this while you’re talking about it because I get a deal analysis. I was a data analyst before as a podcast host. I’ve been doing this for a lot of my career. It’s something I feel comfortable doing. I went into that career because I enjoy doing it. I know people think that’s crazy that you like looking at spreadsheets, but I do. So there’s something out there for everyone. And I’ll also say, I also think there’s sometimes, it could be even a hobby that you like, something that you’ve gravitated towards over your career, even if it’s not your vocation and you don’t like your job, there’s probably something that you’ve learned or dedicated, committed time to, whether it’s a sport or an instrument or something that you have to learn, patience or attention to detail. These are great things to do.
So before we get out of here though, Dion, other than your skillset, mine, which is more analytical, are there other skills that you think have really high ROIs for people?

Dion:
I think people underestimate the value of communication, whether it’s with your tenants, a contractor, most people will call it negotiation, but it really comes down to communication. And there’s a whole rabbit hole on YouTube of NLP or negotiations. Chris Voss was at BiggerPockets in 2025 and he talked about different negotiation tactics and you might not have to get so technical or so detailed, but if you can learn the difference between parroting, mirroring, memory anchoring, some really simple things that can make your communication easier, easier to gain someone’s trust, easier to either get what you want or at least understand why you didn’t in negotiation. I think communication, I hear some people often say, the most money to an employee goes to the sales department, and that’s because they can communicate. In real estate, the money goes to the people who can communicate. If you can keep your tenants happy or your property manager happy, or you can communicate with your contractors.
And an example is I communicate with my lenders. And when I give this example, it sounds like a ton of work, but it’s really four or five emails. I’ll go to a big bank and I’ll say, “What do I qualify for? ” And I’ll get it in writing. When I go under contract with the property, I’ll go to all the different types of lenders, credit union, mortgage brokers, use Matt, the mortgage guy or somebody like that, and I’ll say, “Here’s what the bank is offering. Can you beat it? ” In a communication style that says, “I’m offering you business, if you can beat their business, and then if they can beat it, I take it back to the bank and say, if you can match this, you can keep my business.” And so it’s a really simple communication skill seeing from their perspective that they want the business, I want to give them the business, but they have to give me the best deal.
A small communication skill like that has saved me tens or probably hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years with the best interest rate, the lowest amount to buy down the rate. And that’s just one aspect. When you add that to contractors and handymen and tenants and the tenant who wants their ESA pets in or the tenant who has a noise complaint with their tenant next door, if you can master or get better at communication, even if you have a property manager, so many people use the excuse of, “I don’t like conflict, so I’m going to have a property … You’re going to spend more time managing your property. You’d probably spend more time with the property manager than I spend managing my tenants because you have to verify everything or I just have to do

Dave:
Everything.”

Dion:
But that communication skill, it pays off in every aspect of investing.

Dave:
Yeah. The thing I’ve always loved about Chris Voss, I’ve been a fan of his forever. And we were both at BPCon talking about it is the stuff he’s teaching, people hear this word negotiation and they think it’s like manipulation, but it’s not. The way I think of it at least is just emotional intelligence. You’re learning how to create mutual benefit to people, explaining to people what you need, what works for you, learning from them what’s important to them and trying to find an agreeable solution for both of you. I self-managed properties for 10 years. I now have property managers, knock on wood, I’ve never had to evict someone. I’ve always just been able to have conversations with people and work it out. And you still have to convey where your lines are as a property owner, where your lines are as a property manager. But if you’re good at this, you can figure out the right ways to build your business in a really mutually beneficial way.
You’re not negotiating trying to manipulate your bank, right? You’re just trying to find a loan product that works for both of you. And if you take that kind of approach to every relationship that you have in real estate investing, I totally agree with Dion. You are going to be better off in your entire portfolio if you learn that one skill.That’s a very good high ROI piece of advice there, Dion. Not surprised though. You are full of high ROI pieces of advice. So thank you so much for joining us here today, Dion. This was a lot of fun.

Dion:
I appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity to come on here anytime that I can. I really loved coming to BiggerPockets in Las Vegas, and we have this one coming up next year. I hope people get surrounded by people who are doing what they want to do because then you’re more likely to do it yourself.

Dave:
Absolutely. That’s what the BiggerPockets community is all about. So check out our website. There’s literally hundreds of thousands, millions of members who are there helping one another succeed in real estate investing. Check out all the live events that we’re doing over the next couple of years. Get into the same room as real estate investors. It is going to help you more than you can possibly know. On top of that, if you want to learn more from Dion, you can check out his YouTube channel at Dion Talks Financial Freedom, where he’s always giving out great advice. Thanks again, Dion.

Dion:
Thank you so much.

Dave:
And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. We’ll see you next time.