Six years. 24 deals. 4 states. I've never visited most of what I own.

How this started

I finished my MBA and had some money saved. I knew I wanted real estate — it always felt like the clearest path to financial freedom. But the Israeli market was a different problem: expensive, tax-heavy, and not friendly to the kind of value-add investing I wanted to do.

So I looked at the US. The numbers made sense. The market was accessible. And I had enough capital to get started if I was careful.

The part nobody warned me about: almost everything I read was written for a US investor buying in a different US state. That's not the same problem as investing from outside the country. No credit history. No SSN. Can't visit the property. Can't walk into a bank. Different legal exposure. Different financing options.

I figured it out by doing it. In 2020 I bought my first property — a flip in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I paid $65,000. Put $35,000 into the rehab. Sold it for $150,000. I never set foot in the city. The $50,000 profit landed in my account from 7,000 miles away, and something shifted in how I thought about what was possible.

The next deal was a BRRRR. Same market, different property. $102,000 purchase, $18,000 rehab, $165,000 appraisal. DSCR refinance pulled out all my original capital. That property still cash flows $350 a month and I own it with none of my own money left in it. That's when I understood the strategy wasn't just about the first deal — it was about building a machine that repeats.

The part I don't hide

In 2021 I also bought five properties in Cleveland, Ohio. I chased cash flow, trusted a turnkey operator's pitch, and didn't do the market selection work first.

Three of those deals went wrong. Bad tenants, high maintenance, a market with landlord law issues I hadn't fully understood. I sold three of them at a loss or break-even between 2023 and 2025. The other two I held longer and eventually exited the market entirely.

Cleveland didn't ruin me. But it cost real money and real time. The lesson it left behind was the most important one I've learned: markets matter more than deals. A mediocre deal in a good market beats a good deal in a bad market almost every time — and that's especially true when you're managing remotely.

Most real estate blogs only publish the wins. I don't think that's honest, and I don't think it's useful. If you're going to trust the framework, you need to see where it came from — including the mistakes that built it.

Where it is now

24 deals across North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas. Strategies used: BRRRR, fix-and-flip, new construction, creative finance (subject-to, seller finance). Active cash flow from rentals: approximately $2,300 a month. Active projects with over $1.9 million in projected sale value under construction or rehab as of 2026.

The current work is bigger and more complex — a $450,000 Durham acquisition where the lot is being subdivided into three parcels, two new builds projected at $500,000 each. A 2026 portfolio refinance that pulled equity to fund two new deals in South Carolina and Texas with $30,000 each into $280,000 assets.

Six years in, the portfolio compounds differently than it did at the start. The early work was building infrastructure. The current work is deploying equity from deals that are already done into deals that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning.