20-year-old Marine Jabbar Adesada, who started off with just $2,500, persistently reached out to other investors until he found one willing to partner with him.
Jabbar Adesada
At just 20 years old, Jabbar Adesada owns a multi-unit real estate portfolio, from which he earns about $3,000 per month in profit. It’s even more astonishing when taking into consideration that Adesada started out with only $2,500 in savings two years ago. And as an active-duty Marine, his take-home pay is roughly around $1,800 a month from the military.
To save for his first investment property, Adesada diligently built up his savings and for extra cash picked up side hustles, like delivering food for DoorDash and taking on other Marines’ assignments and 24-hour weekend posts. Adesada was able to use a Veterans Affairs loan to buy his first house, of which he put down 5% of the 30-year mortgage, or around $12,300 in cash. Closing costs and furniture cost him an additional $10,000 out of pocket.
But while closing on his first investment property, Adesada was already thinking about the next one — especially after hearing from his friend about the lucrative market of short-term vacation rentals in the Great Smoky Mountains. Unfortunately, he’d already poured his entire savings into his first property.
“So then I was like, well, BiggerPockets says to just tell everyone you’re a real estate investor and tell everybody what you’re looking for. So that’s exactly what I did,” Adesada told Insider. “At the grocery store, at the supermarket. I would just meet people, ask about them, and then throw in there that I’m a real estate investor.”
Adesada clarified that he wasn’t necessarily trying to pitch these strangers, rather, he was just trying to spark some interest. Adesada also tried to pitch to his family and friends, to no avail. He even reached out to so many people in his network of short-term rental investors that there was some overlap where he discovered he’d sent the same message to multiple people.
At the end of May 2021, Adesada received interest from his first potential investor — the mother of someone he worked with.
“That was my first lead; it’s just because I shot it all over the place,” he said. Adesada was so nervous during the conversation that his voice was trembling and his hands were shaking, to the point where he hung up the call on purpose to recollect himself, he recalled.
“I just was like, ‘Oh, the call dropped. I’m so sorry.’ She did not give me money,” Adesada said, laughing. “But then after feeling that pain, I was like, okay, it’s not that bad.”
Eventually, the breakthrough came in June 2021, when Adesada was called into the office of a senior master sergeant who was about to retire and had heard through the grapevine about Adesada’s real estate prospects.
“It’s like me talking to upper, upper, upper, upper management. I have to ask for permission to talk to this person with my hands behind my back,” Adesada recalled, laughing at his own astonishment. “It is that big of a disparity between where I am and where he was.”
In total, Adesada borrowed $60,000 from the master sergeant, on which he pays $417 a month on a five-year balloon loan with 10% interest. This type of lending is commonly referred to as a hard money loan within real estate professional circles. Through a masterclass for young real estate investors, Adesada found someone else willing to partner with him on the deal, and the pair eventually closed on an upscale cabin in the Tennessee mountains for $600,000 in October 2021.
Adesada and his partner evenly split the house’s $20,000 closing costs and furniture, and even though the house’s 10% down payment of $60,000 was entirely covered by Adesada’s hard money loan, they also split the house’s equity evenly.
“It’s 50/50 because he’s the one who took the risk on a 19-year-old who had one property, and he’s carrying the mortgage in his name,” Adesada said. “The reality is, the first 10 deals you do in real estate are not as important as the experience you gain from it.”