We were lucky to catch up with Maria & Lane Koch recently and have shared our conversation below.

Maria & Lane , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

Our investing journey began in 2015. When Maria graduated from nursing school and bought her first home. She decided to rent out the spare rooms to her friends and began a strategy called “house hacking”. House hacking is when you buy a property and rent out parts of it so you essentially have no out of pocket mortgage costs per month. Lane (her friend at the time) also decided to do this in early 2016.

For the next 4 years they were not able to purchase another property. They spent their time focusing on their full time careers as ICU nurses. It wasn’t until 2020 that they realized that they needed to take more control of their financial future. The world of ICU nurses was completely turned upside down in 2020 and they quickly made a plan to start their own business. They spent about a year focusing on soaking up all the education they could find regarding real estate investing. Podcasts. Books. They went to local real estate meet ups all over the country because they were travel nurses. They asked experienced investors what to do about their fears and analysis paralysis. Most had the same answer- “You just need to start, that’s the hardest part”.

In 2021, they bought 7 rental properties in KC Metro. They focused on one strategy of investing called “buy and hold”. They learned how to acquire the properties, fix them up and then rent them out. It sounds straightforward and it did to them too but it came with many lessons. How do you vet a tenant? Who do you call when there’s a leak? What do you do if a tenant has an emergency? What do you do if a tenant can’t pay their rent? Every new property came with its own unique lessons and a wealth of experience.

In 2022, they continued buying properties. This time with more experience that made it possible to flip houses, manage large rehabs, hire contractors, outsource roles like book keeping and administrative tasks, and ultimately grow their business.

The biggest factor that made it possible to scale their business so quickly- leveraging other people’s knowledge. Studying other successful real estate investors. Listening to their methods and copying them. Finding like-minded investors and brainstorming when problems would arise. Going to local meetups and telling others who they were and what they wanted to do. Finding people they could trust and lean on became such powerful and pivotal time in their new business.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Maria and Lane are local real estate investors in Kansas City. Maria was born and raised in Kansas City and Lane is from Sabetha, KS. The two met while working as ICU nurses at The University of Kansas Hospital. They began investing in real estate in 2015/2016 but really grew their business in 2020.

Now they are both full time real estate investors. Maria is a local agent in the Kansas City area helping others buy and sell their homes. Lane is a project manager for their residential rehabs and rentals.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A huge lesson that we had to unlearn in order to start our business was “you have to come from money or have wealthy parents to invest in real estate”.

This just simply isn’t true and wasn’t the case for either of us.

Investing in real estate can be for anyone. There are ways to purchase properties with 0-5% down. It can be as creative of an industry as you can imagine. A lot of our peers , as well as us, began the investing journey with a method called “house hacking”. This required a 3.5% downpayment. You buy a home and rent out other rooms or units. It’s as simple as it sounds. You can become a homeowner and landlord in one transaction.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We felt silly when we initially put our story on social media. We had all the imposter syndrome thoughts of “no one will be interested” or “people don’t care about what we are doing”.

This became another pivotal action in our business. Once we began posting about our projects and our investments we were able to find other people doing the same thing. People from all across America and several other countries. We were able to connect, learn from and go through business together with these new internet friends.

Since creating our social media account in 2020 we have met many other investors and real estate professionals that have quite frankly changed our lives. We started going to in-person masterminds and meet-ups that we heard about through Instagram. When investor would come to KC they would message us and ask if we could grab coffee. We absolutely would not be where we are in our business without having met some of the people through social media that we did. We have met strangers that turned into business partners, close friends, mentors, referral partners, capital partners and clients.

The power of social media is real and can greatly impact your business if you use it to genuinely connect with like-minded individuals.

Contact Info:

• Website: *coming soon*
• Instagram: nocoastinvesting
• Facebook: Maria Koch- Realtor

Image Credits
Cassandra Marie Photography