- Business partners Kevin Hart and Mike Gorius have built a robust and diverse real estate portfolio.
- Their strategy involves flipping and wholesaling for cash and holding rentals for long-term gains.
- Their advice to new investors is to start with a flip to bring in cash and then expand to rentals.
Kevin Hart started thinking about real estate as a viable business in college when he was renting a duplex with his fraternity brothers.
“We had both sides, there were 10 guys, and we were all paying 500 bucks a month to this landlord,” the University of Kentucky grad told Business Insider. It seemed like a relatively simple way to bring in thousands of dollars a month, “so I always had that in the back of my head.”
He graduated, started a career in accounting, and found his mind wandering as he sat in his cubicle all day “mindlessly sending spreadsheets,” he said. “I was daydreaming about real estate or other businesses, thinking, ‘How do I get out of here?'”
His curiosity led him to websites like BiggerPockets. He learned about various investing strategies, “but I put real estate on the back burner because I just thought it was too hard to get started. I didn’t have any money and didn’t think I could do it.”
A career pivot to insurance in 2017 ended up putting Hart in the red. He started working as an independent contractor for State Farm and took out a business loan to help with marketing expenses.
The one major silver lining was that it introduced him to home flippers in his area in Louisville.
“They were clients of mine on the insurance side and motivated me to flip a house and see if it’s really for me,” said Hart. “I started working with some local wholesalers, found a good deal, and bought this first house with $8,000 down using a hard money lender. My wife was super freaked out about what I was doing because I’d never done it before. Luckily, it went really well.”
He said he and his first business partner bought the property for about $70,000 in March 2019, put roughly $40,000 of work into it, and sold it for around $160,000.
“Together we split probably $30,000 of profit,” said Hart. He was hooked, bought two more flips before the end of the summer, and quit his job later that same year. “I had these paychecks coming in that were triple what I was paying myself at State Farm as a self-employed insurance agent. That was super exciting.”
Courtesy of Kevin Hart and Mike Gorius
Hart’s current business partner, Mike Gorius, took a different approach at the beginning of his real estate career, which began as a side project to help alleviate credit card debt and car loans. He started by purchasing a duplex in Louisville, despite living in Phoenix at the time, and turned it into a long-term rental.
“I spent about $35,000 on the down payment of my own money. When I got my first rental check, the profit was like $400,” said Gorius, who worked in sales and recruiting throughout his corporate career. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, it’s going to take a lot of $35,000 down payments for me to retire off this.”
Gorius and Hart, who initially connected when Gorius was looking to buy in the Louisville market, have been doing deals together since 2022. They formed an official business partnership in 2024 under the Joe Homebuyer franchise and, in their first full year working together, did 50 transactions between wholesales, wholetails, and flips. They also own more than 20 rental properties, including short-, mid-, and long-term, in the Lousiville area. BI verified their property ownership and deal history by looking at settlement statements and closing documents.
Thanks to real estate, Hart says he’s completely rid of bad debt, and Gorius, who quit his corporate job in 2023 to work in real estate full-time, expects to have paid off his in 2025.
“There’s not much else out there where you can make lump sum checks to help you pay off that debt,” said Hart. “It’s a good business to help you build your savings account.”
Their next major milestone is financial freedom and the option to never have to work for income again, though they’re not the types to be on the golf course five days a week. They said the flexibility is more intriguing.
A two-pronged wealth-building strategy: Flip to bring in cash, then buy and hold rentals
Hart and Gorius have narrowed in on a real estate strategy that works for them — and they encourage new investors to use a similar approach: Start with a flip for a cash infusion and then use that money to buy and hold rentals.
“If you have 10 grand you can typically go find a deal, put the down payment down, and hopefully you’re making $15,000 to $30,000. That’s a quick capital boost to help you get going,” said Hart. “If you start flipping a few houses a year, whether you’ve got a W2 or not, that’s definitely going to put you in the right direction to be able to do other things like buying rentals.”
It’s easier said than done.
A common and costly mistake in the flipping world is going with the first contractor you find, rather than interviewing a few.
“Try to get referrals from other flippers. That way, hopefully, you’re not getting burned on a bad contractor,” said Hart. “You definitely don’t want to hire the cheapest one you find. They’re probably cheap and available for a reason.”
Another rookie mistake is taking on too big of a project. You don’t want to be gutting the house or moving walls on your first flip. Instead, start with more of a cosmetic flip where you’re updating the flooring, paint, cabinets, and light fixtures.
“In reality, if you’re doing a lot of flips, flipping is a pretty boring business. You’re using the same paint colors, you’re using similar flooring. Whatever’s in style that year, we’re like, ‘Okay, for the next five houses, this is what we’re doing,'” said Hart. “We’re doing neutral colors, neutral floors, and just making everything fresh and clean so that it appeals to the most amount of people possible.”
The money coming in from their flips and wholesales funds their lifestyle and savings.
“Flipping and the wholesaling, that’s what I love to do. That’s my day job, so I’ve turned that into my ‘salary,'” said Gorius — and it can be lucrative.
He cited their most recent deal: “We got a property under contract 16 days ago, closed on it today, and wholesaled it for $24,000. Because it’s a wholesale, that’s pretty much gross profit. That’s an extreme case. That’s a fantastic deal. I will say there are other deals and flips that have been in our pipeline for two, three months now, so they’re not all like that. But that is the power of this business.”
A successful flip or wholesale can help you build enough savings to start adding rental properties to your portfolio. The problem with starting with a long-term rental is that it likely won’t generate much cash flow, if any. In their market, for example, they can profit about $100 to $200 a month per unit.
“If you don’t have any money in the bank and a tenant calls you because the water heater went out, there goes a whole year of your cash flow,” said Hart. “You really have to be prepared to be able to make these repairs.”
They look at their long-term rentals as their retirement funds.
“They probably won’t make a ton, if any, money in the short term, but if you hold it for that 20, 30 years, then that’s your retirement plan,” said Gorius.
As Hart put it: “Buying rental properties is like a slow burn to retirement. No one is getting super wealth immediately, especially not in Louisville.” But over time, “The tenants pay the mortgage, we build equity every single month, and eventually, we can sell off and have a nice retirement plan with it.”
