From $0 to $12,000,000 Net Worth by 29. Here Are All My Secrets & Proof.

My credit card was maxed out, I was going to school full time, and making 600 cold calls per week...

Before we start, I want to show you the receipts.

Here are the properties that I invested in, re-developed, and exited:

Here is a snapshot of my google sheet with all of my 341 brokerage closings:

I have been getting a lot of hate on X lately from people saying I’m making up my story. Fair enough. I’m 29 years old and I look like I’m 19. I get it.

I will be sharing a timeline of my career, my most important lessons, and what’s next for me.

If you’re building something right now and you feel stuck, burnt out, or lost, I hope this article shows you what’s possible when you don’t quit.

The Beginning

At 20 years old, I was a money hungry kid starving for success and recognition. I never had either growing up.

I was the perfect formula for an overachiever: somebody who grew up in a blue collar family, but had friends who were in the upper class.

All of my hardest working hires shared a similar background. If you are hiring, look for this in your interviews.

At night, my parents were arguing about the mortgage payment. Earlier that day, I was at my friend’s house playing basketball in the nicest neighborhood in town.

When I got to San Diego State, I realized I didn’t even know what real wealth looked like growing up.

I met people whose parents owned massive corporations, real estate portfolios, and liquid assets I couldn’t even comprehend. I was surrounded by a whole new level of money, and I felt more inadequate than ever.

Everyone I knew was a business major and I was Pre-Med. Why? Because I was never exposed to business growing up. My family and I didn’t understand the possibilities here in America.

So we chose the “safe” route. Go to school for half your life, become a doctor who pays half their income to the government, and graduate with $500,000+ in student loans.

Then in my 5th semester, something clicked. I gained the confidence to switch my major and found my first real estate internship within a couple of months.

I started at a boutique commercial real estate firm in San Diego in March of 2018. I would come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 2 hours a day and didn’t learn much. The owners had better things to do before I proved myself.

I would cold call property owners off an Excel spreadsheet asking if they needed property management services for their buildings.

That summer I stayed in San Diego and worked at the Sheraton as a poolside server full time while still interning at the office.

Walking six miles a day in the hot sun serving drinks five days a week and making cold calls two days a week. I hated my life as a server. Living paycheck to paycheck and going to a job I despised only fueled my motivation even more.

By the end of that summer, I passed my real estate license test.

I don’t know why, but walking to my car and opening that envelope gave me a bigger adrenaline rush than closing my largest deal ever for $24,460,000 a few months ago.

Probably because I was a young, ignorant kid dreaming about all the possibilities ahead of me.

Can you blame me for being numb to closings now? I’ve closed 341 transactions as a broker and 47 as an investor. Every deal is stressful. It gets old.

August 2018

This is when I got my RE license. My last year of college starts. I stack all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can work at the office Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

I cold called my face off. 150+ dials per day. 35 conversations per day.

For 3 months I got zero leads. Just a bunch of angry people hanging up on me.

I was broke and I maxed out my credit card. To pay my bills, I started a side business running Facebook ads for a couple of musicians and coffee shops.

November 2018: My Big Break (That Almost Wasn’t)

I get my first listing. A fourplex on 3776-78 47th St, San Diego, CA 92105 for $800,000. My big break. Finally.

Three days later, the property owner dies. The property goes into probate. We can’t sell it until their attorney gets it out.

Imagine this….

You are broke. You are going to school full time taking 15 units. Your mom is texting you links to apply for a “real job.” Your first listing feels like it just got cancelled, and you are still making 600+ cold calls per week.

I thought about quitting every single day for three months straight. Felt like there was no light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

February 2019

The property finally gets out of probate. A colleague finds a buyer, and I FINALLY close my first deal.

Guess what?

The commission check was under $2,000. The seller grinded us down significantly on commission when the buyer asked for a price reduction.

I had been working since June of 2018 for this??? $2,000?????????

I probably would have quit if I had no other traction, but by this point I had built a solid pipeline from all my prospecting efforts.

May 2019

I graduate from San Diego State. By graduation, I had closed 4 more deals, made $65,000, and paid off my student loans before leaving campus.

I couldn’t believe it. The struggle was finally starting to pay off.

June 2019 to December 2019

I moved into a 250 square foot studio three minutes from the office. Best decision of my early career. No commute. I would get there at 8am and come home at 9pm.

Living below my means was more important to me than a highrise in Downtown.

I close 8 more deals for $12 million in volume. I finish the year at over $200,000 in net income as a 22 year old kid who looks like he could be 16.

I was awarded top producer associate at the company Christmas Party.

December 2019 is also when I met Kristyna, my fiancee. She taught me that when you have the right partner with the same vision and values, you achieve your goals 10x faster.

I see a lot of young guys preaching on social media nowadays saying women are a distraction and a waste of money. That comes from a lack of experience and a few bad dates they couldn’t afford.

The right partner will skyrocket whatever you’re building. Warren Buffet said his biggest reason for success was choosing the right woman.

2020: COVID Changes Everything

Up until March, I had an incredible start to the year. Over 6 transactions under contract and a pipeline larger than ever.

Then the world shut down.

When COVID hit, every trigger from my childhood fired at once. I thought my business was going to end. I thought I was going back to being broke. The market was going to crash. I was going to lose everything.

After a week, I snapped out of it.

I couldn’t control what was happening in the world. But I could control how I spent my time every day.

I could sit on the couch and watch the news, or I could go to the office. I chose the office.

Most of my competition stopped working. This is when I separated myself from the pack.

The government was handing out stimulus checks to everyone. Interest rates were at 0%. Investors were rich, bored, and borrowing money was cheaper than it had ever been.

I could see the bull market coming before anyone else acted on it.

I ended 2020 bringing in over $1,200,000 in gross commission income to the firm. I took home $600,000 after splits.

Then I put 90% of that money into real estate.

I bought a duplex in Normal Heights for $630,000 and a fourplex in Imperial Beach for $975,000. Both were full gut renovations.

I sold the Imperial Beach fourplex for $1,885,000. Over $600,000 in profit. Reinvested all of it into a larger 8 unit property.

The Normal Heights duplex I still own. I bought it for $630,000, converted the garages into two new units, and the property appraised at $2,100,000.

I refinanced out $700,000 in cash, tax free, and reinvested it into a 6 unit building in National City that I flipped for another $575,000 profit.

Here’s the normal heights property after I renovated it.

April 2021: I Start My Own Company

At my old brokerage, there were 25+ people doing the same thing. Prospecting investors in the multifamily market. It was a mess. People constantly calling each other’s clients. No organization & No territories.

I kept getting called into the principal’s office because senior agents claimed my clients were theirs. The last time some of these guys did a deal was 5+ years ago. But somehow the client was still “theirs.”

This happened four times in six months. I was done.

The timing was funny. I had just been promoted to senior associate with my own private office and better compensation. On paper, I should have stayed.

But my instinct was to leave and level up.

I weighed my options and boiled it down to two paths: join the biggest company in our space, or start my own.

I was 24 years old. Three years of experience. Every person I asked for advice told me starting my own firm was a terrible mistake.

Here’s what I learned: The people giving me advice had never started a business before. Of course they thought it was stupid and risky. It was a mistake for me to seek advice from people who wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, but I didn’t have many business owners in my network at the time.

Get other people’s perspectives. But do NOT let another person make decisions for YOUR life.

I hired three people fresh out of college and JLM Real Estate was born.

July 2021: Business is Booming.

22 escrows in contract. 6 active listings. Over $1,200,000 in commissions in my pipeline.

People asked me all the time how I was creating that kind of volume at my age.

My best answer: real estate sales is about connecting dots.

Matching the right buyer to the right seller. I was thinking about my buyers and sellers 24 hours a day.

That’s a skill, not a talent. I learned it. I wasn’t born with it.

December 2021: The Peak

I ran the numbers on what I made that year between my 10+ investment properties and my brokerage commissions.

I added almost $4,000,000 to my net worth and made over $2,000,000 in net commissions after all expenses.

In the fall of 2018, a friend visited me in San Diego. I told him I was going to make $5,000,000 in a year one day. He thought I was insane.

Three years later, I was past that.

January 2022 to May 2022: The Strongest Stretch of My Career

40 properties closed and under contract. I expanded my team to six agents. I bought more apartment complexes.

Business had never been better.

I also partnered with a colleague and started a syndication business. We syndicated 7 or 8 properties in the first year. Great for business. Not so good for my personal life.

June 2022: The Market Starts to Shift

Interest rates rise fast. Transaction volume drops.

Then the news starts hitting. Large, reputable companies are losing properties to banks across the sunbelt. 95% of people who bought during the 2021-2022 boom are in trouble.

We were fortunate. We bought in San Diego at a low basis. We hit our projections on every deal and never lost a dollar of investor capital.

But I could see the glory days ending right in front of me.

December 2022: $10M Net Worth at 25

Despite the slowdown, 2022 was my best year financially. My brokerage netted over $2.5 million and closed $106 million in total transactions. I owned over 100 units across San Diego County.

My net worth in real estate alone crossed $10 million.

$10M at 25 coming from a blue collar family. I felt like the coolest person in the world. And my ego got way too big.

I wanted to keep scaling as fast as possible. I thought nothing could stop me.

I was so wrong.

2023: The Most Humbling Year of My Life

My brokerage income dropped 50% from the prior year. And I burned over $350,000 on marketing.

I got scammed by a marketing company out of New York City. They convinced me that launching a book and a TV show would make me the Ryan Serhant of commercial real estate. My dumbass believed them.

They charged me over $200,000 and delivered on almost nothing. Their social media team was awful. The book deal was way worse than they promised. They never even released the edited content for the first season of the “TV show” my team filmed.

The worst part? A guest on my podcast warned me about this company before I went all in. I brought it up to the company’s owner and he pressured the guest into taking it back.

I should have trusted the guest. That mistake cost me over $200,000.

The real gut punch: All of the marketing they did for me generated $0 in business. Zero. I got more business from posting on social media myself, which costs nothing but my time.

2023 taught me lessons that still sting to write about today.

2024: Scaling a House of Cards

At the end of 2023, I announced at our team retreat in Joshua Tree that we were going to become a national company.

In the first 3 months of 2024, I doubled the team from 9 to 18.

In September, I opened a second office in Irvine, CA. Got four brokers in there quickly. One of my San Diego agents said he needed to relocate to Orange County for personal reasons. I believed in his skills. I signed a 3 year lease on expensive 1,500 square foot office space for him and one more sales person.

In 2025, he left the company. Claimed that he was tired of fixing the printer and doing managerial tasks. He’s still doing the same thing in Orange County at a different firm.

I still don’t think he told me the real reason he left. That one hurt, and broke my trust in people for a while.

Our revenue almost doubled to $3.25 million in 2024, but the net profit was less than $500,000 because everything went back into growth.

Meanwhile, my investment properties were making me 3x what the brokerage was paying me. And I was spending only 5% of my time on them.

My biggest mistake was not going all in on the investment side years earlier.

2025: The Most Insane Year of My Life

I opened three more offices in six months. Long Beach. Inland Empire. Chicago. Signed 3 year leases on all of them, except Long Beach.

Then two of my original employees decided to leave. They left with a high producer who was good at making money but terrible for the culture of the company.

The worst six months of my career.

Right after I opened the Chicago office, I knew I had gone over my skis.

My expenses were too high. The issues were endless and the stress was unbearable. I had no consistent recurring revenue to support the overhead I had built.

I had to sell while the numbers still looked good. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was out of fumes.

November 2025: The Exit

Nara Advisors (formerly JLM) gets acquired by The Greysteel Company.

Most people think this was a huge win. For me, it was a failure. I fell way short of the vision I set at that retreat in Joshua Tree.

But here’s what I know now. If I hadn’t scaled, if I hadn’t made every mistake in this article, I wouldn’t have learned the lessons that I’m now building my entire next business on.

It was an insane ride. I don’t regret it. I just wish I had been more honest with myself about why I was doing it.

Where I Am Now

My current portfolio.

Here are the final numbers.

Current Portfolio:

• 23 properties

• 271 total units (once all development is completed)

• $63.2 million in current value

• $10.58 million net worth in real estate / $2 Million in liquid assets

Exited Deals:

• 24 properties bought and sold

• 113.5% avg weighted IRR

• 2.53x blended multiple on invested capital (net to investors)

Lifetime:

• 47 properties acquired

• $46 million in deals exited (realized)

• 341 transactions closed as a broker for $550M

• 3 companies started (brokerage, syndication, investment partnership)

I’m slowing down in real estate. I’ll manage my portfolio and buy a deal here and there, but the brokerage grind is behind me.

My focus now is on building something that matters more to me than money. Money will just be a byproduct of the problems that I am solving - that others aren’t willing to.

If you are building right now and something doesn’t feel right, pay attention to that feeling. I ignored it for years. Don’t make the same mistake.

Here are my list of “secrets” and biggest lessons learned:

Stop chasing scale for the sake of scale. I was netting $2.5 million a year with one office and six employees. Then I decided to become a “national company” and my income dropped 75% while my stress went up 10x. Bigger is not always better. It’s okay to be lean and mean.

Focus on assets, not revenue. My investments made me 4x what my brokerage did, and I barely paid attention to them. Every dollar I put into real estate compounded. Every dollar I put into marketing and office leases disappeared.

Don’t chase shiny objects. Focus is your secret weapon in a world filled with distraction. If you try to build two companies at once, your competitor who is focused on only one company will kick your ass.

Don’t trust marketing companies with big promises. If someone tells you they’ll make you the next Ryan Serhant for $200,000, run. The best marketing I ever did was free. I just told my story on social media.

Listen to your gut over other people’s advice. Starting my own company was the best decision I ever made, and every single person told me not to do it. Get perspective from others, but don’t let them sway your decisions.

Find your ride or die. Kristyna has been with me through every single moment in this article. The wins and the disasters. The right partner doesn’t slow you down. They speed you up and keep you sane while everything else is chaos.

Don’t grow a business that doesn’t have recurring revenue. Inconsistent revenue and steadily rising expenses skyrocketed my stress and anxiety. Start a business that has steady monthly income from the start!

It’s only considered a failure if you quit. It’s just lessons learned if you keep going. I “failed” thousands of conversations before I got my first deal closed. I failed to create a large company, but I’m still alive and ready to take my next swing.

Don’t take risks on your own. I was the sole founder and risk taker of my business. I should have made other people sign leases with me in exchange for equity. I should have recruited a true COO and given them a stock option or phantom equity plan. Take risks on your own is stupid and lonely. I’ll have partners in all of my future companies.

Money doesn’t matter over $500,000 per year. I have never spent over $500,000 a year on personal expenses, and I was a big spender when I was on my bull run.

First class flights, fancy dinners, and the nicest hotels.

Anyone reading this can build a career or a business that generates $500,000/year without killing themselves.

I know several people that make well over that, and work less than 20 hours per week. Balance is everything. Work. Family. Friends. Faith. Health.

What’s Next

I’m not done building. I’m just done building things that don’t matter to me.

If you know me personally or follow me on Instagram, you know that dogs are my greatest passion in life. I have three rescue doggos. They changed my life:

Over 100 dogs get euthanized every single day in California because our shelters are too full. During COVID, everyone got a dog. Then a lot of selfish, irresponsible people gave them back.

My next company is centered around solving this problem. I’m building a platform to make adopting more popular, connect shelter dogs with adopters, educate new dog parents, and give these animals a real chance at life.

I will be documenting the entire journey of building this company from scratch on this newsletter. Every win, every failure, and every big decision we make.

The same transparency you just read in this article, but in real time as it happens.

If you want to follow that journey, get involved, or if you have experience in the animal space and want to connect, reach out to me. I want to hear from you.