Market Deep Dive: Birmingham Alabama with Matthew Whitaker

In this episode we do a deep dive with Matthew Whitaker from GK Houses on what makes Birmingham Alabama a unique investment market.    --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings and welcome to the remote real estate investor. And today we have a special episode where we'll be doing a market spotlight today. We're going to be focusing on Birmingham and we have a special guest today and Matthew Whitaker, and I'll be joined with my cohost Michael album. All right, let's do it.   Tom: Matthew, thank you for joining us today.   Matthew: Well, thanks for having me. I'm super excited about being on this new spotlight and excited about being able to present Birmingham to you.   Tom: So Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about your, your background and GK housing as well?   Matthew: Yes. So I got into investing when I was 23 years old and bought my first house using a home equity line of credit off of a little house that my wife and I, or a girlfriend, fiancé at the time owned and started buying and selling houses and got really excited about it and quit my job, day job. I was doing it on nights and weekends and started flipping houses for a living thought. I was a big shot real estate investor at 23 and did that for about four or five years and pretty successfully we flipped about a hundred houses. I had some partners, I always joke that they had a lot of money and no time. And I had a lot of time and no money and we got married. So we formed a partnership. I was the operating partner that was out there buying and selling homes. We did about a hundred deals in four years. So for a 25 year old kid, that's out there wheeling and dealing. It was the good old days.   And I thought I had the tiger by the tail. And then as y'all know how the story ends in 2008, 2009 becomes the real estate market crash. And as Warren buffet says, when the tide goes out, you realize who was swimming, found any shorts on? And I looked down and I was one of the ones that didn't have any shorts on. So had I owned about 30 rental houses at the time or 30 homes that we were 15 of, which we were trying to flip 15 of, which were already rentals and we just moved everything into a rental portfolio. And so we started managing, we started out managing as a way to sell more homes though. We were kind of on the front end of turnkey world. And it was very new. The idea of selling homes or packages of homes to investors was very new at the time. And so we did that for three or four years and helped put together a big fund of local investors that bought up a bunch of Birmingham houses. But back in, let's see, 2013, we decided that we enjoyed managing more than the kind of deal of buying and selling.   We were more of a, we call ourselves grinders the more of the plotters. And so we enjoyed management. So we, I still invest on the side about, about 30 or 40 houses a year, still personally, with a partner. And, but my, my day job is I'm the CEO of a company called GK houses. And we started here in Birmingham and started, I always tell the story started with those 15 or 30 houses, depending on how you looked at it. And then started just growing that business. In 2013, we managed about 250 homes. And today we've moved out of Birmingham into eight different markets and manage about 26, 2,700 homes. But Birmingham is still my home. It's where our corporate offices it's where all of our back office accounting and all of our corporate team is. And so, um, Birmingham is the market. I know really well and, and still spend a lot of my time investing in   Tom: Yeah, Matthew and GK houses are great friends of rootstocks and a great partner that we love to advocate for. And we actually are double dipping our podcast. We are having a podcast dedicated specifically to property management that is going to be coming out very soon with Matthew as well. But today, where is the market focus? So great partner.   Matthew: I love anytime I get to get on and sing Birmingham's praises, it ha