We Sold Our Home and Lived in an RV to Invest (It Worked!)

Real Estate Rookie

BiggerPockets

How To, Education, Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Real estate investing isn’t always pretty. Today’s guests had to make some serious sacrifices to buy their first investment property—living out of an RV, with a newborn, in the middle of winter. This bold move not only made them $180,000 on their first deal but also helped them snowball to five properties! Welcome back to the Real Estate Rookie podcast! Nichole and AJ Frandanisa sold their house to start investing in real estate. But not only that—they bought a rundown property and lived in an RV while doing their first live-in flip. This gave them the confidence (and the money!) to buy more properties using this same investing strategy—putting low money down, adding value, and selling renovated homes for a huge profit. They’ve already completed five real estate deals and are now moving into multifamily properties to build wealth even faster! In this episode, you’ll learn how to get your spouse on board with your real estate investing dream, as well as how to use various negotiation tactics to get a better deal—especially in this market where buyers have more leverage. You’ll also learn the secrets to building your investing network, finding top-notch contractors, and keeping great tenants! In This Episode We Cover How selling their home (and living in an RV) helped this couple snowball to five properties The powerful mindset shift that got Nichole on board with real estate investing How solving one seller’s pain point helped Nichole and AJ buy their first house hack How to put low money down and force appreciation with the live-in flip strategy Building your network through the power of investor meetups and referrals Seller concessions, escrow holdbacks, and seller invoices explained And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/rookie-605 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's guests are AJ and Nicole, mortgage lender, agent, live in flippers, house hackers, and community builders.
0:06.9	Their journey started in a snow-covered RV with a newborn, and now they're flipping full guts and scaling into multifamily.
0:15.6	And today we'll talk about living in a driveway with a baby, getting robs during a flip, and why their secret weapon isn't a tool,
0:23.2	it's community.
0:28.9	This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, and I'm Ashley Care.
0:32.5	And I'm Tony J. Robinson.
0:33.7	And today we've got A.J. and Nicole, Fran Denisa, joining us today.
0:37.2	Agent and Cole, super excited to have you both here with us today. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Now, for me as a father of three and having two under two, I have to ask right off the bat, how did you manage living in an RV with a newborn to make your real estate dreams come true? Oh, my goodness. I think that's such a great question.
0:55.3	We look back on that season and I go, how in the heck did we accomplish that? But really, we look at
1:00.9	our RV as our little guy's first nursery. It was his house, that everything from the front to the back
1:07.9	was full of baby stuff. But it probably helped that it wasn't all three of us living in the RV.
1:14.2	I was in there with the baby.
1:15.9	His name's Wes.
1:17.1	We like him a whole bunch.
1:18.7	But AJ was basically never in the RV because he was remodeling our very first live-in flip.
1:24.7	It wasn't live-in and that we lived in the RV in the driveway.
1:29.5	But we barely saw him. He came in to do a quick shower and he was right back out remodeling that house. That's how we
1:35.0	managed. What a creative idea, though, to remodel a house and instead of renting or living
1:41.2	somewhere else while it's being remodeled and it's not livable yet,
1:44.7	to park an RV in there. Actually, the live and flip I'm doing right now,
1:48.9	it actually, in the driveway, there is a hookup for an RV that, like, the previous owners
1:54.7	must have had an RV here at some point or whatever. So this sounds you could definitely do it.
	...

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