How to be the G.O.A.T. real estate investor with James Wilcox

James Wilcox is a Real estate investor out of Central Kentucky, a Stessa power-user, and host of the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/REIJames In this episode, James shares his investment journey, his strategy, an insider's view of the Central Kentucky market, and some tips on being an effective real estate investor. --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On this episode, I'm joined by James Wilcox, who has been investing since 2012. James is a buy and hold investor in Kentucky. And he is a power user on the stessa platform. Alright, let's get into it.   James, thank you so much for joining us.   James: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and share a little bit of my real estate investing knowledge and journey with all your listeners.   Tom: Awesome. I'd love to go back to the beginning. But before we do that, let's start with one of your best days as a real estate investor. So can you think of a day that stood out like, Wow, it's so awesome being a real estate investor XYZ happened? That'll be my opener, upper question.   James: Yeah. So I mean, that's a really great question. And, actually, I've had a lot of great days, but I really want to focus on like, my best day was also probably my worst day possible, during my whole journey. So a little bit kind of background on that I purchased my first property back in late 2012. And through that process, you know, everybody's got to work with contractors and kind of get the property back up to snuff, so to speak, this one had a lot of deferred maintenance on it.   So I did some of the work myself, but I had to call in a GC to do like some more of the heavy lifting. And like we redid the foundation and stuff like that things that I couldn't personally do. And I'm not really a big, super good handyman, I might know how to do it, but making it go from my brain   Tom: Know enough to be dangerous   James: for my brain to the hand, you know, it gets mixed up a little bit. But so I had hired someone to come in and do some of those things. And whenever we got toward the end of the project in 2013, they had kind of basically skipped out on a lot of the punch list items. So I was left with a property that was you know, probably like 80% done of where I wanted it to be. And so I work a full time job. And at that time, you know, like I said, I'm not super skilled at handyman type stuff. And so I'm going over there, you know, after five at night, and also working when I can on the weekends and stuff to try and get this property back up and back on the market at the time we had wanted to sell it ended up becoming a rental. And that's kind of how the journey got started.   But I'm over there and had no power on at the house, and no lights or anything. So I'm sitting there basically, like late at night trying to get things done, I'm sweating, because there's no HVAC on anything like that. And I just just Yeah, really, really frustrated because I had this giant punch list of things to do. And it just seemed extremely overwhelming.   So I just took them in and just sat down. I won't say that I shed a few tears. But it definitely got very emotional because it just felt so overwhelming have so many things to do. But right then and there is when I decided that I wasn't going to give up. And then I was going to get this across the finish line. It did take a little bit longer. But that's when I decided that real estate investing was for me because o