We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Isaac Camargo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Isaac below.

Isaac, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

The biggest challenge for any growing company is to maintain their culture and quality. We wanted to establish a culture and company where people like to come to work, grow and learn, and feel they are doing something with a sense of purpose. After working in both startups and large corporate companies I was able to see how young companies tend to have very passionate employees and how in large companies the passion tends to fade as people focus more on one specific role rather than the overall mission of the company. Currently, we are a young company with very passionate employees and as one of the leaders of the company the company’s culture is something I am constantly thinking about as we grow. Determining what keeps people passionate about their role in the company and having a sense of contribution is one of the most challenging aspects for any company. For us, it’s the sense that we are serving people and helping people achieve their dreams. We serve both our tenants and clients. We take pride in providing amazing homes for people to live in. When a client of ours makes their first rental property purchase after years of saving money, it gives us a true sense of accomplishment. This is what we explain to each of our new hires and we continue to celebrate each of these achievements because they are really changing peoples’ lives.

We are also a very process-oriented company that strives for excellence. We strive to identify ways to reduce redundant processes yet ensuring that there are multiple checks along the way to avoid mistakes. In our hiring process we look for people who also have demonstrated ways that they have strived for excellence in either their career or personal achievements. Building a culture, we believe, around providing excellent service to our clients and tenants will ensure that we are on a successful path towards reaching our company goals.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Isaac Camargo and I am a co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Thirdstone Properties. I like to say that my career background did not take a linear path to get to this point. I started my career in printing and graphic design, then web development and digital marketing for the music industry, and finally asset management on Wall Street.

While my wife, Elenis, and I were living in Gainesville, FL attending the University of Florida we were renting a townhome from an owner that lived in Texas. We had no background or understanding of how rental properties worked, but what we did notice was that every month we mailed our rent check to the owner and for the two years we lived in his property we spoke with him maybe two times at most. This experience stuck with us on how passive investing works and we loved how little involved the owner was while receiving income.

During our time in New York City, Elenis and I saved a portion of our income and eventually we were ready to invest in a rental property for ourselves. After making our first rental property purchase in Jacksonville, FL we were hooked and bought four more properties while we were living out of state. We also managed these properties out of state, which presented some challenges. The biggest challenge was finding the right people that were local to help us with maintenance issues and listing the properties for rent. We were enjoying managing our properties so much that we decided to relocate back to Florida so we could open a property management company to help other out of state investors with the acquisition and management of their rental properties.

We found from our own experience that having the right team to help with managing the properties is extremely important to build a successful rental portfolio. Just like us, many of our clients save their hard-earned money for years to achieve their goal of purchasing a rental property. We also remember the joy we felt when we closed on our first rental. It was just a dream at one point and then when it became reality it was an exciting experience. Our goal is to make all of our clients, whether they are new to rental property investing or seasoned investors, have that same experience we did. It’s essential that we provide confidence to our clients that we will successfully manage their properties to generate cash flow and protect their asset while delivering a safe and comfortable home for the residents.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

A large part of what helped build our reputation was blogging about our personal real estate journey. We read many real estate investing blogs and listened to countless hours of podcasts before we actually pulled the trigger to purchase our first rental property. There was a lot that we learned from other investors who kindly shared their journey by blogging or on a podcast. They spoke about their successes and their losses. There are important lessons to learn in both situations. Since so many people shared their lessons we felt it would be a great way to give back by sharing our journey and what we have learned along the way. As we wrote about our first, second and third rental property purchases, how we financed them, and our experiences with tenants, many investors reached out to us to thank us for sharing our story. Some said it gave them confidence to purchase their first rental property and that they appreciated how transparent we were when sharing the financing of our properties. As we wrote blogs on all different real estate investing topics, more people continued to contact us. Our blogging created a small following and some of our readers eventually turned into our very first clients. I believe the transparency of our journey that we wrote about in our blogs was key to building our reputation as people who can be trusted and others who are likeminded can relate to.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Our business partner is Michael Braddock and his focus is on acquisition and sales. Michael represented us as our agent while we were living in New York City to purchase a couple of our rental properties. He was very detailed with his property walk throughs and we never felt pressured to proceed with a purchase if the property didn’t work for us. As we worked with Michael, other investors would ask us who we used as our agent. Since not many real estate agents work with investors or know how to we generously passed along Michael’s contact information. Eventually Elenis became a licensed real estate agent in Florida and she would receive a small commission from each transaction for the referral.

We moved down to Florida in 2020 and we really focused on building our real estate business. As we continued to refer clients to Michael and we saw how well he was at helping them acquire properties we started to think how we can all partner up together. Fortunately, Michael was wanting a change as well from his current brokerage where he was doing both property management and sales. He just wanted to focus on sales and we felt like our business could really grow if we were able to provide both sales and property management to our clients. This would allow clients to stay completely in-house and not have to find different agencies to handle their property acquisition and property management.

Michael joined Thirdstone Properties in the summer of 2021. Even though Michael focuses on sales he also advises on our property management business, since his real estate career stared in property management. It was important that each of us have the same business goals and want to provide excellent service to our clients. After all of us having several discussions about our goals, future plans, and business ideas we all felt like we could benefit by joining forces which we did and it has been great ever since.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thirdstoneproperties.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thirdstoneproperties/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thirdstoneproperties
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaaccamargo/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDpctk1aMIj1ODO4p6ju_UQ