August 2026

Most tax strategies operate in the background. You set them up, they work quietly and you don’t think about them until tax season.

The Qualified Opportunity Zone program doesn’t work like that. It has a hard deadline. And for a specific group of investors sitting on deferred capital gains right now, that deadline arrives at the end of 2026.

Here’s why this matters even if you have no Opportunity Zone position yourself… and what the capital displaced by that deadline is likely to do next.

The QOZ program launched as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The basic idea: if you sell an asset and realize a capital gain, you can defer paying tax on that gain by rolling the proceeds into a Qualified Opportunity Fund within 180 days. The fund invests in designated distressed communities, the “Opportunity Zones” and if you hold long enough, a portion of that original gain gets reduced and any appreciation on the new investment becomes tax-free.

It was a genuinely attractive structure for the right investor. Someone who sold a business, a property or a large stock position and faced a significant capital gains bill suddenly had a way to keep that money working rather than writing a check to the IRS.

Billions of dollars flowed in. Funds launched in markets across the country. Sponsors built ground-up projects in designated zones specifically to attract QOZ capital.

And then Congress added a wrinkle that’s now coming due.

Current QOZ designations expire at the end of 2026. The gains that investors deferred become taxable at that point regardless of whether they’ve exited their fund position.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the Opportunity Zone program permanent going forward which sounds like good news. But it comes with a catch: entirely new zone designations take effect starting in 2027. The zones investors poured capital into since 2017 don’t automatically carry over. There’s a rolling redesignation process beginning in mid-2026 and the new rules introduce different thresholds and enhanced benefits for rural areas that didn’t exist under the original program.

What this means in practice: investors who rolled gains into QOZ funds between 2017 and roughly 2022 face a taxable event at end of 2026 on their original deferred gain. The tax bill they postponed for years is arriving whether they’re ready or not.

For some of those investors, that creates a decision they need to make right now.

Let me walk through the situation a real investor faces today.

Say someone sold their small business in 2021 and realized a $2 million capital gain. They rolled those proceeds into a Qualified Opportunity Fund within the 180-day window. They deferred the tax, the fund invested in a mixed-use development in a designated zone and they’ve been holding while the project was built out and stabilized.

End of 2026 arrives. That original $2 million gain becomes taxable. They owe capital gains tax on it regardless of what they do next. The appreciation they’ve accumulated inside the QOZ fund since 2021 still has potential for tax-free treatment if they hold their fund position for 10 years …  but that 10-year clock started when they invested, not when the original gain was deferred.

So they have a few options and none of them are simple.

They can accept the tax bill, pay it from other liquidity and continue holding the fund position toward the 10-year mark for tax-free appreciation on the gain inside the fund.

They can exit the fund position, trigger whatever gain or loss they’ve accumulated and move that capital somewhere else.

Or they can look at the new program rules taking effect in 2027 and evaluate whether reinvesting into a newly designated zone makes sense for their situation.

Each of those paths has different tax consequences, different liquidity implications and different assumptions about what the fund’s underlying assets will do over the next several years. It’s not a decision to make without a CPA and probably a tax attorney.

Here’s what I find interesting about this from an investing perspective, though. The decision thousands of investors are quietly working through right now has a second-order effect that most people aren’t tracking.

Henry:
Three years ago, Andres Martinez was waiting tables. Today, he owns 10 rental properties, manages another four, and has a rental portfolio that brings in over $13,000 in monthly cashflow. He’s even been able to quit his job and focus on his rentals full-time. So how’d he pull all this off starting in 2024? Early on, Andres had one goal, maximize the cashflow on every property he bought. This led him to co-living, a strategy where you have multiple tenants living under the same roof. The cashflow was so strong that he deployed this strategy across his entire portfolio, but the journey hasn’t been easy. In today’s episode, Andres shares all the growing pains from making 200 cold calls a day to find off-market deals, to working with shady contractors and navigating difficult tenant disputes. Through it all, his pure hustle and grit have paid off. Whether you’re looking for creative ways to scale your portfolio or create enough cashflow to replace your salary, Andres has the blueprint that works even here in 2026.
What’s going on everybody? I am Henry Washington. And today on the BiggerPockets Podcast, we’re bringing you an investor story with Andres Martinez from Dallas, Texas. Let’s jump right in. Mr. Andres Martinez, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. How you

Andres:
Doing, Henry? Thanks so much for having me.

Henry:
Glad to have you, man. Excited for you to be here. Now, I understand you’ve been on the rookie podcast before, but for those who haven’t heard your story, why don’t you give us a little bit of your background and how you first got into real estate?

Andres:
I’ve been doing real estate since January 2023. I was working full-time as a waiter. I went to college for music. I studied jazz, as you can tell from my

Henry:
Albums

Andres:
Here. That did not go well. I realized a starving artist. I was working as a full-time in a restaurant business. And then I started making pretty good money as a waiter, honestly. I was very close to the six figures on the years. And then I got married and my wife is like, “You need to buy a house.” Perfect. We need to buy a house. And then even though I was reporting all my income because it was cash, we couldn’t really qualify for the house that we wanted. This is the time where the interest rates are just starting to go high. So we missed the three or 4%, but now there are seven

Henry:
And a half. Oh, so this was like 2023, late 2023. Late

Andres:
2023, exactly. November, December. And we missed it because we couldn’t find the right lender. So now when we find the lender in December, he’s like, “Well, sorry, now it’s 7%.”

Henry:
Oh, wow. So

Andres:
I was like, “Okay, how do you buy a house without a mortgage?” So I fell into the rabbit hole of creative finance. I jump into there. I didn’t know what wholesaling was back then. I just started making calls. I found my first deal in two weeks, take my wife to see the house. She’s like, “Absolutely not.” So I was like, “Okay.” So I told her agent, “Look, it didn’t work for us. Thank you.” So now I was part of a real estate mastermind. So I go to our local meetup and I told the guys like, “Yeah, I found this deal. I just didn’t know what to do with it.” And this guy’s like, “Why don’t you wholesale it?” I said, “What do you mean?” He was like, “You can make money just by flipping the contract.” And I was like, “Teach me.” So we call the agent again on that same meetup, called the agent.
I was like, “We’ll see the property again tomorrow.” We go, he runs the numbers and he’s like, “This is a good deal, man. We can make some money here.” He get under contract and he showed me how to flip that paper. And I was like, “We just make $10,000 in a few phone calls?”
At that time when I was doing the waiter stuff, I was flipping furniture online. I was trying to start any type of side hustle, flipping phones, washers, dryers, clothing on eBay, anything I could get my hands off, make money. But I never really thought I could make money on real estate because I don’t come from a family with money. I’m an immigrant. I’ve been here since I was 18 only. So when that happened and I was like, okay, this is it. I saw Dr. Strange and the Marvel movies.This is the one. And I went straight ahead, started calling nonstop.

Henry:
Okay. So you said you found that first deal in two weeks that you ended up eventually wholesaling. How’d you find that deal? Just calling agents on the MLS? Calling

Andres:
Agents on the MLS. Wow. Imagine three days into real estate. Yeah, do you want to do seller finance or sub two? No, I getting 500 calls every day. I was like, okay. And then eventually this girl’s like, “Yeah, we had this property on a contract with somebody else, but they couldn’t perform. Do you want to come see it?” And she sends me the terms, she sends me the mortgage sheet. I got lucky. After

Henry:
500,

Andres:
600 calls, somebody say yes.

Henry:
You called 500 to 600 people?

Andres:
Every single listing on Zillow.

Henry:
Folks, if you are listening right now, that is absolutely not luck. That is hard work paying off. Yes, that seems like a long shot. Sure. But if you sit down and you put effort in and you call 600 people determined to get a deal, you’re probably going to get a deal. And that goes for almost anyone. If you are in a market and you call the right list and you have that much dedication, you’re going to stumble across a deal. So no, that’s not luck. I call that positioning. You put yourself in the position to be ready to capitalize on a deal. You got paid to get an education in how to do a wholesale deal. So how long did it take you to land your

Andres:
Next one? Nine

Henry:
Months. Nine months. I didn’t

Andres:
Know that you can pull lists of low equity or seller finance. I was just calling every single listing.

Henry:
So

Andres:
Now I’m pulling lists. I’m making calls. I’m getting better at sales. I’m getting better at my pitch. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nine months later, it was a very humbling lesson because I was about to give up. Actually, I had given up two weeks prior to that because we went to the doctor with my wife and we found out she was having some health leisure. So I need a lot of money. I was about to sell the house. All my savings were about to go there. No more wholesaling. Because at this point, these nine months, I got fired from my job twice because every time a seller calls me back on a Friday night, instead of having fajitas on my hand, I have my phone.

Henry:
And a

Andres:
Manager’s yelling at me. I was like, “Hold on. If this is the 10K call, I’m about to walk out. This is my real proof of concept.” It never happened. So we’re driving back from the doctor’s appointment and I’m just like, “Okay.” I tried. I tried. I made two, 300 calls every day manually and somebody pick up the phone. It didn’t work. I really did my best. I didn’t take days off Monday to Sunday. It’s not for me. And then on that drive home, I get a text message back. “Hey, Andres, this is Andre. You called me a few months ago. You explained to me about the seller financing and you were right. The person who got me in their contract for this price, they couldn’t close. Can you help me out? Because now I already moved out of the house and I am behind one month of the payments.
And I’m a human person and we got under contract and that was my first wholesale assignment fee of $10,000. A week later, I got another message back. Hey, do you still want to buy this house? And then the cycle of wholesaling, you need to build a pipeline. The pilot came back to me. So

Henry:
I

Andres:
Started making money now.

Henry:
This is how direct-to-seller marketing typically works for anything, whether you’re going to wholesale it, whether you’re going to keep them for yourself. When you’re doing direct-to-seller marketing, sometimes what you’re doing is you’re starting to roll that snowball, right? Because you’re putting in effort and people are saying no, but you’re also giving them the idea that working with you or your creative strategy or even the idea to think about selling is just now popped in their head because they weren’t thinking about it before until you called. And so they said no, maybe because they didn’t understand it, maybe because it wasn’t the right time. But once you plant that seed, it starts to grow. And then at some point they may decide, oh, let me call Andreas. He called. He said he could do this. Now I’m in the right space. So you got to get the snowball started.
And where people fail with direct to sell and marketing is they quit before their snowball gets big enough to start producing results for them. And so they say it doesn’t work and they’re done. And then they miss their opportunity because maybe somebody else starts marketing in the meantime to that same list. And then those leads that they started to foster end up going to somebody else, man. So that’s super cool. So you’re wholesaling, your proof of concept worked, then you start popping off $10,000 checks, $7,000 checks, $9,000 checks. So it’s working. What did you move into after that?

Andres:
When I got it started, even before real estate, the reason I was doing the side hustles is because I’ve always wanted to achieve the point that I achieve now where I have enough cash flow. I don’t have to leave my house. I leave my house right now once or twice a month. I don’t pick up the phone for anybody except if it’s an emergency for my tenants because now I have AI running everything. That level of freedom for somebody like me who had to start working at 14, who has always, depending on somebody else, I wanted to flavor that. And once I did, I realized I really like it and I don’t want to go back to being on the hustle. A lot of people think because I hustle hard, it’s because I have the alpha type. I want to be the big CEO. I want to make the billion dollars.
I am very okay making my 20, 30K a month passive income, working maybe 20, 30 hours a month. Not having to talk to anybody on the phone. I don’t have to talk to sellers. I don’t have to talk to agents. But the transition was, it’s very interesting. So going back to the beginning, on that deal with the real estate investor, we went to the home and he’s like, “Okay, I will make this work, but I need to put 10 rooms.” I was like, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to raise money for that. You’re going to borrow from somebody money. You’re going to steal it. Then you’re going to walk away.”

Henry:
No,

Andres:
I pass on that deal, but I got me thinking, hold on, maybe there’s something here I don’t know about room rentals. And I’m already part of a mastermind, so I start talking with people, “Have you heard of this?” I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this. I have that. Yeah. This, this and that.” I was like, “Holy shit, look, okay, that’s it. That’s the end goal, cashflow.”

Henry:
So I have several more questions about how you transitioned from this, but I want to get into those right after this break. All right, we are back on the BiggerPockets podcast with investor Andreas Martinez. Andres started off wholesaling, did several wholesale deals, made good money, and then decided, you know what? I’m not going to do that anymore because I want to try this co-living thing. So you started to research, you learned about co-living. Did that deal that you were trying to wholesale become your first co-living property or did you end up wholesaling that?

Andres:
No. That same meetup that I went where I made my first wholesale deal for $500, it happens every Saturday of the first month. I was on the way there and I got a call from my boss because I’m still working at the restaurant. I was like, “I need you.” And I was like, it was like January 2nd, brand new year. I woke up early, I shave a workout. I was like, “I’m going to go meet a lot of people. This is my year. And I miss a meetup.” And I get a text message from another guy that I was kind of coaching, teaching how to do wholesale. He was like, “Hey, this agent was walking around the meetup.” And this is a creative finance meetup, full of creative finance investors. He was describing this property, these five rooms, three bedrooms, and the seller is in pre-foreclosure and he doesn’t really want to make a lot of money.
He just wants to help the seller. But nobody else pay attention to it. And I automatically, nobody pay attention because they don’t know co-living. Text the agent, I was like, “I’ll call you as soon as I get out of work.” I was supposed to get out at four. I didn’t get out until 110. I gave him a call. He was like, “I was waiting for your call.” I was like, “Can we jump on a Zoom?” Saturday at 11:30 at night, we’re on a call for an hour. The next morning, we’re meeting at the property with the seller before I go to work. Property under contract. $3,000 down. I got a 2019 house, corner lot, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, ready to go for co-living.

Henry:
And so you essentially take over payments on this property and you convert it to co-living. Did you have to add any bedrooms or did you just do it co-living as it sat?

Andres:
So I bring the deal to my mastermind to make sure that, even though I already knew it was a good deal, I just needed. I was about to put a lot of money in the conversion. It was about $40,000 to add three more rooms. We needed to redo the flooring because it was carpet. I needed to put now LVP paint. I don’t know anything about construction yet. And the guy who’s hosting the mastermind, he’s like, “Andres, do you want to sell me this?” And I was like, “Oh, I really got a deal. I really got a deal.” And he was like, “This works long-term rental, section eight, meantime rental, Airbnb, and you’re going to go for the world strategical living.” I was like, “That’s what I want to try because it’s in a great area. It has already five rooms, but I need to put three more to make maximum profit.” And on that call, I was like, “It’s going to be a lot of money, but I wish I could partner with somebody.
I don’t have to use my money.”

Henry:
So the money you were raising was the money for the renovation because you bought it sub two, but when you buy it sub two, that just gives you the money to buy it. If you’re going to renovate it, that’s got to come out of your pocket. You

Andres:
Need the renovation, you need the furniture, you need the refrigerators and stuff, holding costs.

Henry:
So about how much were you trying to raise to get all this done?

Andres:
58,000. And on that Zoom chat, somebody text me. He was like, “Hey, Andres, we have money. Can we partner?” I was like, “Okay, let’s talk about it. You bring all the money. I’ll bring everything else. I’ll manage it and then we’ll go from there.” We go under contract, we close, we start renovations. My contractors end up stealing a lot of money, no performing. I lost at that point because it was my responsibility, $40,000 out of my pocket to rebuy all the flooring. Oh, boy. The guys who were doing the work at the house, she never paid them. So they were trying to come back and to destroy the bathrooms that they had built. I had to stay at the property. Oh

Henry:
My goodness.

Andres:
Heart attack after heart attack. I was going to Home Depot in the morning, doing the renovation myself at the end, going back to work all day, double shift because now I needed money. Everything that I went from home selling was kind of gone.

Henry:
Going

Andres:
Back at night. Anyways, we went live on March 1st. I was fooled in two weeks.

Henry:
Oh my goodness. And how much were you renting each bedroom for? At

Andres:
The beginning, it was between eight and 850. The private bathroom was for $1,000. So the total income was somewhere around 6,500.

Henry:
$6,500 a month. And what was your mortgage taxes insurance?

Andres:
2,100.

Henry:
Oh my goodness. After

Andres:
Expenses and everything, the net was at the beginning, somewhere around 27, 2,800.

Henry:
Yeah, man, that’s a phenomenal cash flowing deal. What area of the country or what city are these deals being done in?

Andres:
Mainly Fort Worth, Texas. Now I’m in DFW, but at that point I started mainly in Fort Worth, Texas.

Henry:
So what did the next deal look like and how long did it take you to get that? Well,

Andres:
I was finished the renovation. I contacted everybody that I knew. I need help. I end to meet this investor who already had another property coming up. And he was like, “Hey, since you know how to operate, you can get the properties, you can find the tenants, let’s partner up.” Because I’m already partners with a contractor. And I was like, “Okay, perfect. That’s the second property.” We jump into it. Turns out the contractor ends up scamming him and scamming me. Boy.

Henry:
Oh for two on contractors. The

Andres:
Main guy who was working for the contractor ends up renting a room in the second house.
So I’m walking through the house. I was like, “Hey bro, you’re still missing trim here and there and there.” Eventually three days later, I was like, “Hey, rent is due.” And then he explodes like, “You haven’t paid my boss. She says you haven’t paid her for a month.That’s why she doesn’t have money, blah, blah, blah.” And I showed him the receipts like, “We already pay her.” She was gone. So he was like, “I don’t have money.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s get to work.” And then I started just asking people, “Do you need a contractor?” He did a good job. And he’s the main guy.

Henry:
Find

Andres:
Him a job, find a second one. I was like, “Okay, can you find bigger houses?” I was like, “Yeah, let me keep buying them.” So now I was doing my food renovation. I learned a lot of construction there because he’s been doing construction for 20 years. So we started doing more co-living for me, co-living for other investors, working with code enforcement, learning how to do permits. Now I had an already under contract that was a fix and flip. We did the flip, we did another flip. I bought another co-living. So now instead of doing the wholesaling, now the contractor gig took up. And if you ask me between being a contractor and a wholesaler, I would say being the contractor.

Henry:
So that first co-living deal, you had a partner because the partner gave you the money for the renovation, the furniture, and then you guys were fifty fifty. Second deal was a different investor than who you were partnered with before? Yes,

Andres:
It was a different investor. He already wanted to invest in co-living, but he was missing the operations because operations is very heavy in co-living. So it was the same deal, fifty fifty. But he was like, since you are messing up on the contractor stuff, let me bring my partner because she’s the contractor and then the whole thing. Got it.

Henry:
So that ended up being a debacle from the contractor side. But it sounds like you were still able to get the house fixed up. And then were you able to get that one rented out? And how many bedrooms were in that one?

Andres:
That one was eight bedrooms with an ADU in the back. And

Henry:
You were renting the rooms in that one for about how much? A little

Andres:
Bit less, between 750 and 800.

Henry:
So give us the breakdown on that. What was your mortgage, taxes, insurance, and what were you bringing in a month?

Andres:
Gross income was around 64, 6,500 as well. Pretty similar because we didn’t have the ADU fully functional yet. That would’ve been an extra thousand.

Henry:
Wow. We

Andres:
Would kill it. PITI on that one was like 2,300, but we had a HELOC that we also took on second position because the star had a HILOC. So it was like an extra 300. But the net was still around the same, 22, 2300 at that time.

Henry:
Yes. That’s super cool. You were finding the people who either have the deals or can find the deals, and you bring the operations and the experience. And then you’re typically fifty fifty in those deals. So either somebody brings the money or the deal, you bring the operations, the experience, and then you fifty fifty. But it sounds like you realized after two failed renovation projects with contractors running off with some money that you were like, “This is a gap that I need to fill.” So tell me about that. Did you go out and hire guys that you keep in-house or do you have just other GCs that you work with that mainly only work for you? What does that structure look like?

Andres:
So what I realized at that point was this contractor, she didn’t know anything about a contractor. She just happened to find her main guy and his team was doing the stuff. So I was like, “I can do the same. I can find the deals, I can find the houses. With the difference, I can work because I already finished my house. I did the flooring, I did the tile, I did drywall.” I have a better understanding of that. So I was like, “Look, if you help me learn this more, I can get you jobs.” Because as a wholesaler, if I come with a contractor, at that point I was still thinking about wholesaling. It’s a double win. So we started doing that.

Henry:
So this was the guy who was living in the place. You said he did good work. So you said, “I’ll be your new GC if you start working for me.” And so you kept him busy. So now you’re able to manage the renovation and then manage operating the property. So that’s the value that you bring to the deal. And then somebody else either brings the deal or brings the money and then you fifty fifty on the co-living.

Andres:
Yes. So we did that one a month after I did one more because I still had the leads coming from wholesaling. So I bought one more house, I raised the money, I did my own construction. Usually contractors are telling six to eight weeks. I was able to do it in two weeks. And I started realizing, okay, all these people are just talking bullshit because they need to split their teams here and need to split their damn. If you keep a group in one house, framing takes one or two days. Drywall takes two more. Then you put the texture, it dries, it paints. That’s done.Because the electrician can come in the morning, can come at nine, the AC. So it doesn’t take unless you’re doing plumbing, electrical course, all of that. So I started keeping the guys busy. I started making money there. Slowly fade away from wholesaling.

Henry:
So you’re GCing for other investors either on flips or other co-living properties? Mainly

Andres:
Co-living. I’ve done 29 now.

Henry:
That’s really cool, man. I love to see that transition. So that’s on the GC side. Would you mind just giving us a total breakdown of your portfolio as a whole to get an idea of what your business looks like?

Andres:
Yes. So I have right now 14 properties. I own 10 of them and I have four under management. On average, each one nets 1,900, 2,000 right now. All

Henry:
Right. So across that portfolio, Andreas, what is the net cashflow? What do you put in your pocket every month?

Andres:
So all the properties net around 26, 28,000 a month, depending on the vacancies and all of that. And I take 50% of that. So I take home myself 12 to $14,000 a month. Man,

Henry:
That’s super cool. Congrats on building that. I do have some more questions because I know there’s people listening who are very curious about co-living. So I’d love to get some of your thoughts around best practices, things people should avoid if they’re getting into this business. And also just thoughts around the management because it is a very management heavy business. Leases are a big thing and making sure all that’s sorted out. And so I’d like to dive into that, but first I want to take a quick break. All right, we are back on the BiggerPockets Podcast with investor Andreas Martinez, who started off in this business wholesaling, but transitioned into a niche called co-living. Now, co-living has been a buzzword for the past couple of years. It’s really started to pick up steam. More people are getting into this space mostly because affordability of housing is tough, especially in larger metro areas where real estate prices are higher.
And so for people who are interested, what are some of the most important things they need to be thinking about when operating a co-living business? This

Andres:
Is not a passive strategy at all.

Henry:
You’re

Andres:
Having the complexity of having multiple personalities living under one building. So everything that you’re thinking right on your head that is a red flag, it is a red flag. But there are ways to go around it. There are ways to fix it. There are ways to manage it. So you need to develop a lot of systems to be able to run this because for people who are starting it out, if you’ve never run a side hustle, if you’ve never run a business on the side, if you’ve never had that mentality, it could be overwhelming for you if you start growing your portfolio a lot. So just to start with one, start with two, give it a few months, see if you like it, and then decide to move forward.

Henry:
Okay. Let’s play a game of myth busters because there’s a lot of assumptions that people make with co-living. Myth number one or truth is that co-living’s going to have high turnover. So you’re going to have people moving in and out all the time, short leases. It

Andres:
Depends what type of business you want to run. If you allow somebody to come for three months in your house because they are on an internship or just because they’re getting divorced, then yes, you’re going to have turnovers. And this is what I try to explain to people when they come to my groups and want to learn about co-living. I am focused on co-living because of the affordability issue. I don’t want to have people out of state coming here for a month or two. I am targeting the guy that works at the gas station, the lady that works down at the McDonald’s. They don’t make enough to rent their own studio, but they have a job here. They have their family here, and they want to be independent. So they come to my house. I always start on a month-to-month lease because in Texas, if I don’t like them, I can let them go.
If they don’t like me, we can just part ways amicably. And I always tell them that, look, it’s a month, maybe two months, make sure you like it. And at that point, either you sign a 12-month lease or you’re out.
So once you stabilize the property, you don’t have turnovers. And it’s 107 rooms that I have. It will be impossible for me to run all of these by myself with no BAs if I had high turnover. The problem of the weekly rental and all of that, imagine you have to move so many people

Henry:
Weekly.

Andres:
You need a big team. And every time you bring a personality into the house, like, oh my God, who’s coming now? It’s a big gamble.

Henry:
Given this method, do you find that you usually have people that stay there entire term and then re-lease up with you? I have

Andres:
Five people that I’ve had since my first house. Actually, three of them on my first house just signed in January an order one-year lease.

Henry:
Oh man, that’s really cool. You

Andres:
Have to think about it. And that’s what I tell people. Why would they leave? They have the same job. They haven’t gotten a pay raise. They are not going to college. They’re not going to get a higher paying job. And they have not found a partner yet. And this is people between 25 and 35. We’re not talking about elderly or any people disabled. The house runs well, the house is clean, the house is safe. They know that management is on top of everything. Why would they leave?

Henry:
All right. Myth number two or truth is that there’s too many people issues and my phone is going to be going off all day long with tenants complaining about their housemates. Yes,

Andres:
If you don’t know what you’re doing. For example, a lot of people don’t want to talk to them upfront. They want to have a message and auto approval ratings, like no background checks. If you allow that type of people in your house and then you get mad because they didn’t wash the dishes, that’s on you. You’re a terrible operator, you’re a terrible manager because you have to realize everybody comes from a different background. For this person, that means clean. If you rent the same house and you have somebody else who comes from a different background who they know what clean is and they come in and they see dishes all the time, I’m out of here, bro. The model that we run is we are very upfront. Before they even come to see the house, there’s eight people here. You’re going to have to be extremely clean, especially in the bathrooms.
If you don’t like it, just let me know, cancel the showing. And a lot of people do. And that’s good. Go leave somewhere else. I want to have people here who need it in my houses. And when they come, they follow the rules. I really have almost no problems with dirty dishes or people fighting in the house or that they don’t take the trash. It’s all about pre-screening, man. It’s every landlord’s secret is pre-screening. We

Henry:
As landlords have to stop putting off our failures on our tenants. Our job as landlords, no matter what type of landlord, is to be great at tenant selection. The better we are at tenant selection, the more profitable that we’re going to be. All right, here’s one that you may not have had to experience yet, but it is one that people think about. When going to sell a property, do you have to un-renovate and put it back in its original condition? You

Andres:
Can sell it as a co-libian to another investor. But you heard me say, I bought a five bedroom house and I added three rooms. That’s only two by fours on drywall that can be taken out in one day. Maybe going to cost me three to 4,000 to report a house and put it back to normal. Now I can resell my property to the normal world. I don’t have to wait for a Collibian investor to come and buy this house because if you’re buying a house that is already renovated, if the investment was so good, why are you selling? On top of that, an appraiser walks into the house and they don’t see a living room. They’re like, “What is this? How do I compete?” So there are very few lenders who will help you finance a ready converted co-libian. But as an investor, I want to keep my options open.
The

Henry:
Other myth slash truth is parking is going to be an issue. Everybody’s going to fight over parking spots. The neighbors are going to complain because there’s cars on the street.

Andres:
Yes, that’s true.

Henry:
And how do we deal with it? My first

Andres:
House, my neighbor, he wanted to call the city on me. He was very mad that we were going to rent. And I was like, “I have my own parking in my corner lot, bro. And all my houses are either corner lot. I have parking in my backyard. So there is absolutely no reason why my tenants would park against their houses. In fact, it is in my lease. If you own to any more houses, we have parking pictures there where they’re supposed to park. I check the cameras once a week at the beginning. Once the tenants are on their behavior like, okay, we only park in our house. They stick to it. So I don’t have parking issues after that. But it’s true. If I didn’t buy the right house with parking, I will be struggling. All right,

Henry:
Andreas, thank you so much for playing that game. I know a lot of people have similar questions. There’s probably even more questions. So if you’re listening and you’ve got questions, drop a comment below and maybe we can help you get some answers to those questions. Or check out the BiggerPockets forums and make a post in there and there will be tons of investors who can help you with some of these ideas. Andreas, is there a way people can find you if they want to learn more about co-living or just learn more about you in general?

Andres:
Yes. My name is Andres Martinez, REI on YouTube and Instagram. I have a lot of free content on YouTube. So for people who are curious and want to hear more about the actual Colibean, you can go in there. If you want to message me, you can find me on Instagram, Andres Martinez REI. And also I have a school group now that is free to join. We meet once a week and I hold two or three hour calls for people to come ask me because my inbox is full of the same questions over and over and over. And it’s not that I don’t want to answer, but I don’t have time. So if you want to get free game, I host a call once a week, come in, ask me. I’m live for two or three hours. And then after that, go home.

Henry:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Andreas. Thank you for sharing your journey. Thank you for the lessons and being open and honest with us. And thank you so much to the BiggerPockets community for listening. We’ll see everybody on the next episode of BiggerPockets. Thanks

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I spent three hours staring at my phone, certain I had just made the dumbest decision of my career. We were low on revenue. We had bills. And I had just told a franchise brand, on the verge of signing a deal worth roughly $100,000, that we would not do the work. My heart was racing. A voice in my head kept repeating the same thing: you idiot, you should have just said yes.

Here is how I got there, and why that phone call ended up being one of the best things that has happened to my company.

Values are free until the day they cost you something

We had been working toward this deal for a while. The franchisor wanted its stories told, and telling real stories is the whole reason Franchise Filming exists. We have not used AI to fabricate a single video since we started in 2020. We use it to enhance our work, never to manufacture it. No fake people, no invented testimonials.

Then, at the last second, the brand called with a change. Its board had met. It had decided that its franchisees and customers would not want to make time to be filmed. So instead of real people, it wanted us to use actors and AI-generated faces to tell the story. Sign the proposal, and we were good to go.

I sat with it. I could have said yes. We needed the money, and yes was the easy, rational, pay-the-bills answer. But we run our company on a short list of values, and we do not treat them as suggestions:

• Be authentic
• Be confident
• Be on time
• Be a creative, passionate storyteller
• Learn, coach and continuously grow
• Use AI to be more productive, never to fake the story

Those are not posters in the lobby. We hire against them, we retain people and clients who live them, and we fire the ones who do not. If I signed this deal, I would be breaking at least three of my own values for one check, and asking my team to do the same.

That is the moment most founders never plan for. Values are easy to print on a wall. They are free right up until the day honoring them costs you a deal. And if you do not actually make decisions around your values, you do not have values. You have words on a wall.

The trust gap is the whole business case

People are using AI everywhere, and trusting it less as they do. The most comprehensive global study on the subject, conducted by the University of Melbourne with KPMG, involving more than 48,000 people across 47 countries, found that while 66% of people now use AI regularly, fewer than half are willing to trust it. Trust has gone down as adoption has gone up.

It shows up in how people consume content, too. In a 2025 consumer survey reported by Search Engine Land, more than 80% of consumers said they want AI-generated content labeled, and the demand was highest for video at 91%. Gartner found that 53% of consumers distrust AI-powered search results.

Read that as an operator. Your audience can feel fake, and when they suspect it, they pull back. So when a client asks you to fake the thing your reputation is built on, the question is not only “is this right?” It is “is this even going to work?” Faking the story to save time is how you spend trust you cannot easily earn back.

AI belongs in the workflow, not in the story

I want to be clear, because this gets flattened into “AI bad.” We are not anti-AI. One of our values is to use it to be more productive. We use it to move faster, organize footage, draft and plan. The line we hold is simple. AI can support how we make the work. It does not get to invent the human at the center of it.

A real story has things you cannot prompt into existence. The pause before someone tears up. The laugh that was not scripted. An actor reading lines about a franchisee’s first location is not that. It is a commercial pretending to be a testimonial, and people can tell. AI can create content. It cannot create a connection.

The practical takeaway for any operator: separate the two uses out loud. Decide where AI makes you faster, and draw a bright line at the place where it would make you fake. Write that line down before a client offers you money to cross it.

Saying no is a filter, not a loss

So I called the brand back. I told it that if it needed actors and fake people, we were not the right partner, and I could not break our values to win the deal. I braced for the person on the other end to be upset. Instead, the line went quiet, and the board would have to be consulted.

Then came the three hours. I doubted everything. We have bills, I kept thinking. I should have just done it.

The phone rang. The board, I was told, loved that we were the only vendor who held the line on our values. It signed.

I do not tell that story because it always ends with the check. Sometimes you walk and the deal is just gone. I tell it because your values are a filter, and you have to actually use them on both sides of the business. You hire, fire and retain your team by them. You take and turn away clients by them. That is the only thing that makes them real, and it is exactly what the right partners are looking for proof of.

Hold your line, especially when you cannot afford to. Tell your real story over and over until the people who want a real partner can find you in the noise. The check is not the reward. The reputation is. Go define your line before someone offers to buy it.

I spent three hours staring at my phone, certain I had just made the dumbest decision of my career. We were low on revenue. We had bills. And I had just told a franchise brand, on the verge of signing a deal worth roughly $100,000, that we would not do the work. My heart was racing. A voice in my head kept repeating the same thing: you idiot, you should have just said yes.

Here is how I got there, and why that phone call ended up being one of the best things that has happened to my company.

Values are free until the day they cost you something

We had been working toward this deal for a while. The franchisor wanted its stories told, and telling real stories is the whole reason Franchise Filming exists. We have not used AI to fabricate a single video since we started in 2020. We use it to enhance our work, never to manufacture it. No fake people, no invented testimonials.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit. 

The business is fully bootstrapped. I had some savings from my previous full-time job, and that was it. We have two full-time employees in addition to freelancers and consultants. 

Through talking about this on social media, I built two funnels. One was for buyers from LinkedIn, so more corporate. And then from X, it was more founder-to-founder. Like, “Hey, I’m building this company. Today I saw this. Today I spoke with this founder. We are doing a founder’s dinner.” So it was community building on X.

Our focus on mobile app companies only is an advantage. We don’t do commerce, SaaS. We don’t try to do it all and accept any client. Just apps. Also, it’s not simple enough to be an app; you must have good metrics and not be a copy of another app.

Managing half a billion dollars in active deal value

EHVM Apps Capital is managing half a billion dollars in active deal value. I’ve unlocked that milestone by focusing on the firm’s service and results — because people talk. Particularly in smaller industries, everyone knows each other. So for us, every time we close one deal, we get five to 10 referrals. Roughly 60% to 70% of our deals are through referrals, and then the rest through inbound. 

Another valuable strategy is meeting people in person. Right now, we’re touring 22 cities in four to five weeks, and I’ll be meeting 50 CEOs many other industry players haven’t met before. An additional secret is, if I’m at a table of five, I want to have at least one or two people who already work with me, either on the buy or sell side, who can advocate for my services. 

Making a case to major players as a young founder

One of the biggest challenges is when we talk with investors in different Fortune 500 companies and public companies and try to convince them that this industry is worth their time and investment. You might get a music app that wants to be sold to Spotify. But Spotify might see it as, “Oh, this is a very small business. Nothing new for me.” 

Also, I’m 27 years old, and my team members are 25, 26, so sometimes people see us and make judgments on age and gender or how we talk, because I don’t speak as formally as a typical corporate leader. 

Educating founders on the mobile app industry

Another challenge is educating founders. Now with social media, so many people post YouTube videos claiming they became millionaires overnight. Maybe, but you also paid 50% of that in taxes. There are so many details people leave out. Also, the App Store takes 30% of your revenue. So right away you have a 30% tax. If you’re just starting, they have some small business programs that take 15%, but as soon as you get big, they charge 30%. 

AI is making the market more competitive too. For an app that has one use case, like you take a picture of your food and get the nutrients, that’s so easy to develop. To create a business 15 years ago, you needed to provide much more value than today. Now, you have influencers selling an ebook that they created with AI for $150. And then you have apps that have one functionality charging $29 per month on subscription.

M&A is a finance business that hinges on relationships

EHVM Apps Capital relies more on automations than AI. For instance, when we get an NDA signed it notifies the team, or when we sign a new agreement it prepares a potential list of buyers, and so on. But AI itself for us, I only see that it decreases value. If I create an AI summary and send it to my team, they don’t read it. They give it to their AI to give them a summary. And then it’s just communication through AIs. I need my team to use their brains. 

M&A is a finance business, but it’s also a relationship business. If I send you an AI document that I didn’t clean up first myself, I’m putting the work on you to go through AI slop. I don’t like to run our process based on AI. I run it based on knowing who’s on the buy side and what they want to see. We also customize material depending on the reader, and so on. 

Why every Fortune 500 company should have a mobile app

Looking ahead, I want every single Fortune 500 company, public company to have their own mobile app business because it makes so much sense. If you’re any business that doesn’t have an app, you’re not interacting with your users daily. An app is the only way of interacting daily because everyone uses their phone for hours every single day. It doesn’t matter if you’re retail, experiences, pretty much anything — it’s the only opportunity that you have to have daily touch points. And that’s so crazy valuable. It’s the only way to become part of people’s lifestyle. 

The industry is only getting bigger, and entrepreneurs interested in breaking into it should talk to people who have been doing this for five years. Then decide if you want to be a seven-figure, eight-figure or nine-figure business, because it’s a totally different path, and there are only a few apps that hit the $1 billion range. Deciding that upfront can help you come up with your vision as a founder. Maybe you want to build a portfolio company and have 10 apps in health and fitness, or maybe you bet on one to become a $200 million company. That’s very important. The execution is completely different depending on your goal: the team, the vision, the audience. 

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit. 

A tenant in a downtown high-rise reports a broken HVAC unit at 6:45 a.m. Before the property manager’s office opens, the tenant has already asked an AI assistant which local vendors handle emergency repairs and messaged one of them. The building’s own contractor never came up. That’s the new customer journey: compressed, automated, often over before anyone on the business side knows it started.

The old model, awareness leading to consideration leading to conversion, assumed people moved through a funnel at human pace. Today, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and voice assistants collapse that sequence into one exchange.

Businesses aren’t just competing for search rankings anymore. They are competing to be the answer an algorithm decides to give — a shift that’s already reshaping how companies think about visibility.

The shift in discovery: From search engines to AI interfaces

Property managers, contractors and infrastructure firms used to win business by ranking on page one. Now users ask a question and get a synthesized answer with no list of links to scroll through. Fewer clicks reach any single website, even the one whose data trained the response.

Being cited now counts more than being ranked. Organic click-through rates have dropped sharply wherever AI Overviews appear on a search page, meaning visibility without citation is close to invisible.

Understanding how AI systems choose citations is becoming as important for a facilities contractor or a real estate brokerage as domain authority once was for SEO.

Visibility alone is no longer enough

Getting mentioned by an AI system doesn’t guarantee a closed deal. Traffic still doesn’t equal conversion.

• Slow response times or clunky contact forms push prospects toward the next name on the AI-generated list.
• Customers expect answers around the clock, not just during a leasing office’s posted hours.
• Roughly 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated answers for a large share of their research, and unprepared businesses see significant traffic and revenue erosion.

A property developer can win the citation and still lose the client if intake stalls.

The new bottleneck: Lead response and conversion speed

Once discovery happens, speed decides the outcome. A prospective tenant, a homeowner needing an electrician, or a commercial buyer evaluating a grid-upgrade contractor typically contacts more than one provider at once.

Contacting a prospect within minutes rather than hours dramatically increases the odds of qualifying them, and most companies still respond far too slowly to compete. A missed call during a power outage or a delayed reply to a maintenance request doesn’t just cost one job. It signals that a competitor answers faster, which shapes future recommendations as well.

AI-powered conversion: Turning attention into action

This is where automation earns its keep. AI answering systems, chat interfaces, and voice agents now handle the first touch instantly, day or night, across shift changes that used to leave phones unanswered.

The shift is already visible as businesses move from chatbots to full agentic workflows that qualify and route leads without waiting on staff availability. Legal and professional service firms are among the fastest adopters. Many are turning to AI-powered client intake systems so no inquiry sits unanswered after hours — a lesson that applies just as directly to leasing offices and infrastructure contractors fielding urgent requests.

The AI-powered funnel: Discovery + conversion integrated

Treating discovery and conversion as separate problems is the mistake. The two now function as one system. A prospect asks a question, gets an answer that includes a business, and expects the next step (scheduling, pricing, or a callback) to happen just as fast.

A grid-repair contractor cited by an AI assistant but slow to schedule a site visit loses the job to a rival with a faster intake process, regardless of who ranked higher.

Who wins in this new model?

Some sectors feel this shift first because their customers already expect real-time answers.

Service businesses like legal, healthcare and home services depend on intake speed as much as reputation. At T-Mobile, AI now handles half of customer calls, freeing staff for complex cases.

Ecommerce benefits from AI recommendations paired with instant checkout support, shortening the path from question to purchase.

Local and infrastructure-adjacent businesses, from HVAC repair to power-grid contractors, gain most from voice and AI discovery because customers search in moments of urgency.

What businesses should do now

Founders and developers don’t need to overhaul everything at once, but a few priorities separate businesses gaining ground from the ones losing it.

• Optimize content and data structure for AI systems, not just Google rankings.
• Cut response time with automation, even though some chatbot deployments still frustrate customers when companies prioritize deflection over resolution.
• Align marketing claims with operational capacity, since a promise of 24/7 service only helps if the backend can deliver it.
• Build around user intent rather than keyword lists, especially for urgent, location-specific requests common in real estate and infrastructure services.

The Future: Real-time, AI-driven customer journeys

Predictive engagement is coming next. Systems will anticipate a maintenance request before a tenant files one, based on equipment age or usage patterns, and route it automatically.

Personalized AI responses will replace generic scripts, and fully automated funnels will handle both the question and the transaction, with AI agents managing discovery and conversion as one continuous process rather than two separate departments.

The new competitive advantage

Visibility gets a business noticed. Speed converts the customer who noticed it. Neither works well without the other, and AI is now the connective layer between them, deciding who gets mentioned and how fast that mention turns into action.

For founders and operators managing physical infrastructure where delay carries real cost, the task ahead is straightforward: Treat discovery and response as one pipeline, measured on the same clock. The businesses that own both ends, not just the ones that rank well, will set the pace for the next decade.

A tenant in a downtown high-rise reports a broken HVAC unit at 6:45 a.m. Before the property manager’s office opens, the tenant has already asked an AI assistant which local vendors handle emergency repairs and messaged one of them. The building’s own contractor never came up. That’s the new customer journey: compressed, automated, often over before anyone on the business side knows it started.

The old model, awareness leading to consideration leading to conversion, assumed people moved through a funnel at human pace. Today, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and voice assistants collapse that sequence into one exchange.

Businesses aren’t just competing for search rankings anymore. They are competing to be the answer an algorithm decides to give — a shift that’s already reshaping how companies think about visibility.

Almost every dealership owner right now is hearing the same warning: get on AI or get left behind. So they move fast. A chatbot on the website. A scheduling assistant in service. Another tool for sales. One for texting. Another for marketing.

On their own, most AI solutions do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The problem is that these tools rarely share context with each other, so they usually don’t know what the others already know. That’s where customer experience starts to break down.

Every new AI tool creates another customer touchpoint.

If those touchpoints don’t work together, customers feel it.

Whether you sell cars or software, the goal isn’t simply to add AI. It’s to create a customer experience that feels connected from beginning to end. Here are five ways to get there.

Shop your own business

Before you think about adding another AI tool, become your own customer. Visit your own website, fill out the form, ask your bot the question a nervous first-time buyer would ask. You’ll quickly discover whether the experience feels seamless or stitched together. Maybe the chatbot asks for information the customer has already entered. Maybe the follow-up email arrives hours later, or the salesperson has no idea which vehicle the customer was looking at.

Individually, these moments seem minor. Together, they shape how customers judge your business.

Shop your own store like a stranger, and do it often, not once. Whatever you sell, spending one hour as your own customer will answer half your AI questions before you spend a dime.

You’ll learn more from one hour as your own customer than from a month of vendor demos.

Build accountability before you build automation

AI should make good decisions, not every decision. That starts with clear ownership and accountability.

Every AI tool should have an owner.

Too often, businesses buy AI, turn it on and expect it to run itself. But AI isn’t a “set it and forget it” technology.

Someone should be responsible for making sure the information it’s using is accurate, that promotions are current, that pricing changes are reflected and that responses still match how the business wants to communicate with customers.

Just as you coach employees, AI needs oversight. It should be reviewed, tested and updated regularly.

That also means checking how it performs over time. Are customers getting the answers they need? Is it escalating conversations appropriately? Is it reflecting changes to inventory, pricing and promotions? Like any member of your team, AI performs better when someone is responsible for it.

Pick one story and stick to it

One of the fastest ways to lose trust is conflicting information.

A promotion on your homepage doesn’t match what’s in a text message. The chatbot quotes something different than your sales team. Service has no idea what happened online.

Every AI tool becomes another voice speaking on behalf of your business. Before adding another one, make sure they’re telling the same story. Customers don’t know which system generated the message. They only know your dealership gave them conflicting information.

Trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose. If customers have to stop and wonder which message is correct, they’ll start questioning the overall experience.

Think beyond the feature you’re buying

It’s easy to evaluate AI one feature at a time.

Will this answer chats?

Will this schedule appointments?

Will this write emails?

Those are important questions. But the more important question is what happens after the tool does its job.

Before buying another AI tool, ask a different question: What happens after this tool does its job? Does the information flow into your CRM? Can sales, service and marketing all see it? Or have you simply created another silo? The feature may work exactly as advertised, but if it can’t share context with the rest of your business, you’ve created another disconnect.

Design for continuity

Nobody wants to introduce themselves twice. Customers shouldn’t have to start over simply because they moved from your website to a text conversation, or from sales to service.

The goal isn’t to give every department its own AI.

The goal is to create one customer experience, even if multiple systems are working behind the scenes.

The best AI is almost invisible. Customers shouldn’t have to think about which tool they’re interacting with or whether they’re talking to a bot or a person. They should simply feel like your business remembers who they are and picks up where the last conversation left off. That’s what great customer experience has always been about.

AI will continue getting better. New tools will keep arriving. But at the end of the day, customers don’t walk away asking for your AI strategy. They leave remembering whether it was easy or difficult to do business with you. That’s the question every AI investment should answer.

Almost every dealership owner right now is hearing the same warning: get on AI or get left behind. So they move fast. A chatbot on the website. A scheduling assistant in service. Another tool for sales. One for texting. Another for marketing.

On their own, most AI solutions do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The problem is that these tools rarely share context with each other, so they usually don’t know what the others already know. That’s where customer experience starts to break down.

Every new AI tool creates another customer touchpoint.

Want to work for yourself? You’re in good company; 62% of U.S. adults would prefer to be their own boss. 

But with no shortage of business ideas, which ones do people gravitate toward? Business lender OnDeck decided to find out. 

Researchers analyzed the number of searches for advice for particular business types to see which are most popular across the U.S. and determine where interest is surging rapidly. 

Across the country, people are searching for advice on starting cleaning, real estate and restaurant businesses most frequently, according to OnDeck’s report. 

However, those aren’t the same businesses seeing the greatest uptick in interest. Starting a Spotify podcast has become the fastest-growing new business idea, the research found. 

And entrepreneurs who host a successful one can generate significant income. A “mid-size” podcast boasting 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners might bring in $5,000 to $20,000 a month, while a top 1% podcast surpassing 50,000 monthly listeners can exceed $100,000 in that period, Backstage reported. 

Read on to see the top 10 trending business ideas, per OnDeck’s analysis: 

Want to work for yourself? You’re in good company; 62% of U.S. adults would prefer to be their own boss. 

But with no shortage of business ideas, which ones do people gravitate toward? Business lender OnDeck decided to find out. 

Researchers analyzed the number of searches for advice for particular business types to see which are most popular across the U.S. and determine where interest is surging rapidly. 

Across the country, people are searching for advice on starting cleaning, real estate and restaurant businesses most frequently, according to OnDeck’s report. 

However, those aren’t the same businesses seeing the greatest uptick in interest. Starting a Spotify podcast has become the fastest-growing new business idea, the research found. 

And entrepreneurs who host a successful one can generate significant income. A “mid-size” podcast boasting 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners might bring in $5,000 to $20,000 a month, while a top 1% podcast surpassing 50,000 monthly listeners can exceed $100,000 in that period, Backstage reported. 

Read on to see the top 10 trending business ideas, per OnDeck’s analysis: 

According to Silicon Valley Bank’s February 2026 State of the Markets report, U.S. VC fundraising dollars fell almost 20% year over year to their lowest level since 2019. For founders outside the AI boom, the odds are already stacked. Luxury and lifestyle tech founders face an additional layer: a category that’s harder to model, harder to benchmark and, frankly, harder for most investors to intuitively grasp.

When I was raising for InList, a members-only platform for booking curated nightlife and events, I heard a version of the same hesitation in room after room: “This seems great, but we don’t really invest in this space.”

That sentence is where the pitch actually begins. Here’s how to turn skeptical investors into convinced ones:

1. Reframe your market size before they ask

The first thing a consumer-skeptic investor looks at is total addressable market (TAM). If your pitch deck doesn’t answer the market-size question preemptively and credibly, you’ve already lost them. The instinct for many founders in experience-driven verticals is to go broad — “the global events industry is worth $2 trillion” — but that breadth actually signals weakness. Sophisticated investors know you can’t chase it all.

Instead, define a tight, defensible wedge and then show the path to expand it. When pitching InList, we didn’t lead with nightlife. We led with the behavior: high-net-worth individuals who pay a premium to skip friction and guarantee access. That behavior cuts across dining, travel, private events and beyond. The niche entry point was a feature, not a ceiling.

That same thinking also helped us broaden the conversation with investors by shifting the focus from the product to the customer. Our members were affluent consumers who travel frequently, spend on experiences and luxury goods and influence purchasing across categories, from hospitality and private aviation to watches, spirits and other premium brands. When investors understand the value of the customer you’re acquiring, not just the transaction you’re facilitating, they can more easily see the long-term opportunity.

Uber employed a similar approach in its earliest days. Rather than pitching itself as a taxi alternative, it framed the opportunity around a specific behavior: professionals in New York and San Francisco who wanted a black car at the push of a button. That tight wedge gave investors a believable entry point while signaling a much larger platform opportunity beyond it.

2. Speak the investor’s language, not your customer’s

The words that make your members feel special are often the words that make investors nervous. “Curated.” “Exclusive.” “Premium.” These land beautifully in consumer marketing; in a pitch room, they can sound like soft proxies for “small” and “hard to scale.” You have to translate.

When your product relies on high lifetime value and low churn rather than high volume and fast growth, say that explicitly and bring the numbers to prove it. For InList, instead of describing the vibe of the member experience, we anchored every qualitative claim to a data point: average booking value, repeat usage rates, referral-driven acquisition cost. Investors who don’t know the luxury market still know what great unit economics look like.

Rent the Runway navigated this same tension head-on. Jennifer Hyman has said that as a female founder pitching a fashion concept, she had to walk into investor meetings with what she called “15 spreadsheets,” while male founders got by with “a PowerPoint and a dream.” The luxury experience was the hook; the data was what closed the room.

3. Use your waitlist as a proof point

In exclusive consumer platforms, demand signals carry unusual weight if you frame them correctly. A 10,000-person waitlist is nearly meaningless as a raw number. The same waitlist becomes compelling when you can say, “These are verified high-net-worth individuals; they converted from a referral-only funnel, and 40% completed a detailed application to get on it.” Now you’ve turned a vanity metric into evidence of real, qualified demand.

During InList’s raise, the quality of our waitlist mattered more than its size. We could demonstrate that our prospective members matched the profile investors recognized from other luxury verticals: the kind of spender who doesn’t churn over price, who refers organically and who elevates the brand simply by belonging. Scarcity was a deliberate product decision, and we treated it like one.

This approach mirrors what Soho House did in its early expansion. The brand used its waitlists not as marketing theater, but as evidence of concentrated demand in specific cities — a city-by-city proof point that made each new location look like a pre-sold asset rather than a speculative bet.

4. Build the relationships that make the raise inevitable

Traditional venture capital isn’t always the right first call for luxury and lifestyle tech, and waiting for it can cost you momentum you can’t afford to lose. Before raising institutional capital for InList, my co-founder and I structured a creative development partnership to get the product built, which meant we arrived at investor conversations with a working app, real users and proof of concept rather than a deck and a dream.

When we did raise, the $3 million round came through relationships built inside the world InList served. My co-founder and I had deep roots in the Miami nightlife and events scene, exactly the ecosystem our product was designed for. That credibility opened doors that a cold pitch process never would have.

According to a survey published in Harvard Business Review, more than 30% of deals come from a VC’s former colleagues or work acquaintances, with another 20% coming from referrals by other investors. Only 10% result from cold email pitches. In a niche vertical such as luxury or lifestyle tech, that ratio almost certainly skews even further toward relationships. Build your investor network the same way you build your member network: through deliberate access, not broadcast outreach.

Raising capital for a luxury or lifestyle tech company is a different game — not a harder one, once you understand the rules. The investors are out there. They just need the right translator.

According to Silicon Valley Bank’s February 2026 State of the Markets report, U.S. VC fundraising dollars fell almost 20% year over year to their lowest level since 2019. For founders outside the AI boom, the odds are already stacked. Luxury and lifestyle tech founders face an additional layer: a category that’s harder to model, harder to benchmark and, frankly, harder for most investors to intuitively grasp.

When I was raising for InList, a members-only platform for booking curated nightlife and events, I heard a version of the same hesitation in room after room: “This seems great, but we don’t really invest in this space.”

That sentence is where the pitch actually begins. Here’s how to turn skeptical investors into convinced ones:

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.

1. What problem keeps showing up repeatedly?

One of my favorite tools for self-awareness is the Enneagram because it highlights how you behave when you’re thriving versus when you’re stressed. The greatest strength a leader can have is knowing their own weaknesses.

When I notice the same frustration appearing over and over again, I stop focusing on the individual situation and start looking for the pattern. If the same challenge keeps showing up with different people or under different circumstances, there’s usually something deeper worth examining. Patterns often reveal issues that a single event cannot.

2. What role might I be playing in that pattern?

This is often the hardest question to answer honestly. For years, I thought I had a delegation problem. I couldn’t understand why everything seemed to come back to me. Then I realized I wasn’t struggling with delegation at all. I was struggling with my own understanding of my role.

I explained this recently using family photos. When my children were little, I was always the one holding the camera. I was organizing everyone and managing the moment instead of simply being in it. In business, I was doing the same thing. Instead of focusing on my responsibilities as the owner, I kept stepping into responsibilities that belonged to other people. I was unintentionally preventing ownership.

3. Am I expecting my team to be as invested as I am?

One of the hardest lessons I learned was accepting that my team will never care about the business the way I do. That’s not because they aren’t committed. In fact, they work for me because they’re committed to educating children and care about it deeply. However, that investment has a different lens than that of an owner. They’re simply not going to care about the same things I care about to the same degree that I care as the owner.

For a long time, I found myself frustrated when people didn’t show the same level of passion or urgency that I felt. Eventually, I realized I was expecting people to experience the business through my lens instead of theirs. Once I adjusted that expectation, I became a better leader because I stopped measuring commitment by whether someone thought exactly like me.

Sometimes, the feedback we’re least willing to hear is that we need to adjust our expectations, not our people.

4. Who has permission to tell me when I’m off course?

Every leader needs someone who can see what they can’t. For me, that’s often my husband. I’m a visionary by nature, which means I’m usually thinking years ahead. While that’s one of my greatest strengths, it can also become a blind spot.

Whenever I get too focused on the future, my husband jokes that I’m Icarus flying too close to the sun. What he’s really telling me is that while I’m looking at the horizon, there are things happening right in front of me that need my attention. I have similar people at work, too, people who can prod me back onto the right path.

The best leaders don’t surround themselves with people who always agree with them. They surround themselves with people who are willing to tell them the truth.

5. Am I acting from intention or habit?

Once you’ve identified a pattern, the next question is whether it’s something that can actually change. There are things about me that I can improve. I can communicate more clearly. I can create better systems. I can be more intentional in how I lead. There are also things that are simply part of who I am. I’m always going to be a visionary. I’m always going to care deeply about people.

Growth doesn’t happen when we try to become someone else, but when we learn to refine the habits that hold us back while leaning into the strengths that make us effective.

Turning awareness into action

Identifying a pattern is only the beginning. The next step is deciding whether it’s something you can change and then creating a simple plan to address it. One mistake I see leaders make is trying to fix everything at once. If you discover that you’re avoiding difficult conversations, struggling with delegation or creating confusion through unclear communication, don’t create a ten-step improvement plan. Pick one area and focus on making consistent progress.

I like to identify no more than three action items. For example, if clarity is the issue, I might commit to ending every meeting with clearly defined ownership and next steps. If delegation is the issue, I might choose one responsibility to fully hand off instead of continuing to check in on it. If emotional awareness is the issue, I might ask a trusted colleague to tell me when they notice I’m operating from stress instead of intention.

Just as importantly, check back in with the people affected by the change. Ask whether they’re seeing improvement and whether there’s anything you’re still missing. Leadership growth isn’t about making assumptions. It’s about creating feedback loops that help you improve over time.

The leaders who grow the fastest aren’t the ones who never have blind spots. They’re the ones willing to identify them, work on them, and measure their progress honestly.

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.