Tim Bratz bought $400 million worth of real estate by age 35. What that actually means, nobody knows.
In college Tim had a painting company. He had 12 of his buddies working for him, going around town, touching up and repainting exteriors. This was like ’03 to ’07 when the market was a malfunctioning game at Chuck E. Cheese that just kept spitting out tickets.
So when Tim graduates he decides he’s gonna get into real estate investing. But we know what happens in 2008.
An attendant came and fixed the machine, almost too good, and now it’s just taking everyone’s money.
House prices tumble. Tim looks on the MLS, finds the cheapest crib listed. Twenty-five Gs. Only he doesn’t have that much and no one will give it to him ’cause he’s just this punk kid who’s never done a deal, and oh yeah the market is melting.
So he calls up his credit card company, gets ’em to raise his limit from $3k to $15k, negotiates with the seller and talks ’em down to $14k which he puts on the credit card.
Makes some minor repairs, flips it to one of the neighbors three months later for $33k. Boom. Biggest, easiest check he’s ever made.
And people are saying don’t do real estate? Tim couldn’t help but laugh. He went and did another deal, and another, and another.
Met some people with money, they saw that he was a guy who could get things done, so they let him in on some JV deals.
Everything’s going great but he gets distracted by this MLM, thinks he’s gonna make more money, faster, with that. Had 10 doors at the time, all single family. Sells all of ’em so he can focus on growing his downline. Jesus. Must’ve been some tasty Kool-Aid.
Whaddya know, the MLM sucks him dry. Same goes for the 900+ people he had recruited.
So Tim walks away from that, gets back into real estate, finds some private money lenders, does a few flips, some wholesales, then stumbles across this dumpy little apartment building that they pick up for $30,000.
They put another $50k into it, so all in for $80k. But it ended up making Tim $27k a year in net income. His smile stretched wide enough to a nibble a hot dog from both ends.
It was so nice and neat, too. Apartments. Instead of going to eight houses and talking to eight sellers and finding money for eight different deals, having eight closings, eight tax bills, eight water bills, eight foundations, eight roofs to worry about, he could go find one apartment complex with eight units and make the same or more with only a fraction of the chaos.
“There’s so many economies of scale by buying apartments versus many single family doors,” Tim says.
So he goes and picks up another eight-unit, a 12-unit, a 14-unit, sold the 14-unit, bought a 23-unit, a 15-unit, then a 31-unit building. So on and so forth, right? Gets up to something like 140 doors, and then his partnership with the two dudes who had been funding all the deals blows up.
They liquidate everything and now once again Tim’s pressing the reset button.
Builds a new team, finds new money, dilly-dallies in single family for a bit, remembers why he loves apartments so much, goes HAM on apartments, acquires hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of units.
All the while he’s posting about it on social media. His followers are intrigued, some of ’em start reaching out. Yo, I wanna invest with you; I want you to coach me, they’d say.
That led to Legacy Wealth Holdings where Tim sells a three-day virtual event called Commercial Empire for $297 a ticket, a Legacy Family Mastermind for $2,500 plus $1,000 a month, and a Legacy Wealth Academy that costs $9.95 per month and has courses on everything from mobile home parks to ecom to crypto and more.
Gotta say, in the grand scale of real estate guru douchiness, Tim barely registered a blip. I like him.