Property Profits Real Estate Podcast

A few years ago, Heather Dreves was sitting in rooms where investors were excited about opportunities promising returns above 20 percent. Today, she says she hears something very different: people want boring investments.
Heather has spent more than 20 years around private lending. Today, she works with Central Lending, where her main focus is investor relations and capital raising. She is also an active real estate investor who has borrowed private money herself.
That experience gives Heather a view from several sides of the same deal.
She explains how Central Lending funds mainly residential real estate, with fix and flip loans making up much of its business. She also breaks down why the company sells about 90 percent of the loans it originates and how that allows capital to be used again.
The conversation then turns to investors. Heather talks about how changing interest rates affected some syndication exits and why she now sees more interest in debt funds, regular cash flow, reinvestment, and consistency.
Key topics and takeaways:
Why Heather values seeing a deal as a borrower, investor, and lender
Why Central Lending focuses mainly on short term residential debt
How selling originated loans helps capital get deployed again
Why Heather says investors are asking for more vanilla investments
How reinvesting earnings can compound returns over time
Why self directed IRA money is commonly used with their type of product
Guest Information:
Heather Dreves works with Central Lending and focuses mainly on investor relations and capital raising.
Email: heather@CentralLending.com
Website: centrallending.com
Heather also mentioned that she has a LinkedIn profile.
Call to Action:
Heather welcomes conversations with people learning about alternative investments and people who want to understand how to perform due diligence on an operator.
For real estate operators looking for funding in the United States, Heather can also connect them with someone from the Central Lending account executive team. Central Lending can lend to Canadian residents when the property being financed is in the United States.
Contact Heather at heather@CentralLending.com or visit centrallending.com

Higher interest rates have made financing more expensive, but Steffany Boldrini believes the discount available on commercial real estate can more than make up for it. With cap rates rising and properties taking longer to sell, she says buyers finally have more time to look at deals.
Steffany focuses mainly on self storage. She has completed storage syndications as well as a condo conversion and an industrial deal with partners.
Her long term preference is simple: buy and hold. She believes flipping can still have a place when it creates cash to fund more properties. Her current goal is to acquire about four self storage facilities each year, holding two and flipping two.
She also talks about the difficult period self storage went through after 2022. Steffany says people across her storage mastermind felt the downturn, and some operators left the business. Her own deals remained intact, and she says rents have slowly started improving.
When looking for value, Steffany pays attention to facilities that may be missing basic revenue and operating tools. Some properties have no website or tenant insurance. Others may have management costs that can be reduced. Extra land can also create an expansion opportunity.
Key Topics and Takeaways
Why Steffany believes higher cap rates are creating buying opportunities
Why she prefers self storage in Sun Belt markets
Why buy and hold remains her main strategy
How selected flips can help fund future acquisitions
Ways underperforming facilities can increase revenue or lower costs
Why she has become cautious about syndications
Her typical focus on facilities around 20,000 to 50,000 square feet
Guest Information
Steffany Boldrini is a real estate investor focused mainly on self storage.
She is interested in connecting with people in the self storage industry and potentially passive investors who like storage.
Email: steff@montecarlorei.com
Steffany explained that the Monte Carlo name comes from the Monte Carlo Ranch in Brazil, where she grew up. She chose the name in honor of her family and her mother, who raised the family largely on her own.
Call to Action
To connect with Steffany about self storage, email:
steff@montecarlorei.com

A vacant Kmart can sit empty for years. Neil Henderson sees something different: a building shell that may already have much of what a self storage project needs.
Neil and his team at Nomad Capital Group have built a portfolio that includes about 12 syndicated self storage properties, with most involving adaptive reuse. They have converted old retail stores, grocery stores, mills, warehouses, and former Kmarts into climate controlled storage.
Neil walks Dave through a 100,000 square foot Kmart conversion in Danville, Virginia. The deal faced permitting delays, lost bank financing after U Haul bought land across the street, and a storage market that weakened just as the property opened. Despite those challenges, Neil says the property was sold after a 37 month hold and gave investors a slightly better return than originally projected, although there were no distributions during the hold.
Neil also shares what has happened across the storage market as higher interest rates slowed home sales and fewer people moved. He explains why this has hurt lease up rates and pushed storage operators to compete harder on price.
Key Topics and Takeaways
Why Nomad Capital Group focuses heavily on adaptive reuse
How an empty Kmart can become climate controlled self storage
Why conversions can open much faster than ground up projects
How slower home sales affected demand for storage
Why some facilities went from roughly 3 percent monthly lease up to about 1 percent
Why Neil says patience matters for investors in development deals
Why Nomad has not bought a facility so far in 2026
Guest Information
Neil Henderson is with Nomad Capital Group and is also the host of Truly Passive Income, a podcast with more than 150 episodes at the time of this conversation.
Neil said he is interested in connecting with people who want to learn about passive investing in commercial real estate.
Website:
nomadcapital.us
LinkedIn:
Search for Neil Henderson with Nomad Capital
Podcast:
Truly Passive Income
Call to Action
To learn more about Neil and Nomad Capital Group, visit nomadcapital.us.
Neil also welcomes connections on LinkedIn from people interested in passive commercial real estate investing, whether or not they eventually invest with him.

After close to 600 flips, Brandon Rickman wanted to move beyond a business where every completed deal meant starting over and finding the next one.
Brandon shares how his real estate business expanded from single family flipping into self storage and private lending. His first self storage development started as two houses on four and a half acres that a wholesaler was selling as potential flips. During due diligence, Brandon discovered the county's future land use map showed the land as general commercial. That discovery eventually led to an 865 unit self storage facility.
He also talks about what happened to his flipping business when the Atlanta market changed. Before August 2022, his operation was doing roughly 8 to 10 deals per month. Volume later dropped sharply, and Brandon says the experience reinforced one of his biggest lessons from more than 20 years in real estate: you have to be willing to shift with the market.
Key topics and takeaways:
Why Brandon calls flipping a transactional business
How two residential properties became an 865 unit self storage development
Why his flipping volume fell as the Atlanta market changed
The gap Brandon saw between private lenders and hard money lenders
Why direct mail remains his top outbound channel for off market properties
How he combines direct mail, cold calls, and texts around the same seller data
Guest Information:
Brandon Rickman has been working full time in real estate for more than 20 years. He has completed close to 600 flips and appeared on HGTV's Flip or Flop Atlanta. He is also involved in self storage and is a partner in ProLend Capital.
ProLend Capital: ProLendCapital.com
Email: brandon@ProLendCapital.com
Call to Action:
To learn more about Brandon's private lending business and how ProLend Capital works with investors and borrowers, visit ProLendCapital.com.

Why the Same Real Estate Formula Never Works Forever with Simi Mehta
The strategy that worked yesterday may not be the strategy that makes sense today.
Simi Mehta has stayed focused on real estate for years, but she has not stayed tied to one type of property or one way of investing.
She began with single-family homes, fixing them up, adding value, refinancing, and keeping them as long-term rentals. After seeing how the same amount of capital could be used differently in multifamily real estate, she started educating herself and eventually moved into 8-unit, 20-unit, and 38-unit properties.
More recently, she has become involved with townhouse projects and ground-up development.
One thing has remained consistent. Simi prefers to add value and hold rather than buy, fix, and quickly sell. She says selling one property showed her how much money could go toward commissions, legal fees, and land transfer taxes.
Her approach to evaluating deals is also cautious. Simi looks at where value can be added, what the exit could look like, what programs may be available, and whether the rental market makes sense. If market rent is $1,800, for example, she says she may run her numbers using $1,500 instead.
Simi also shares what she has learned about fear during changing markets. In 2021, she moved forward with a semi-detached property while several people she approached were worried the market would crash. She says she used private money at 11% interest, remained cash flow positive, and made $250,000 on the house within nine months.
In This Conversation
How Simi moved from single-family properties into multifamily real estate
Why she prefers refinancing and holding instead of selling
Why she believes investors must keep up with changing market conditions
How she uses conservative rental numbers when reviewing deals
What a 2021 property taught her about fear and opportunity
Why building a reliable mortgage and renovation team became essential
How she approaches different investor needs and changing timelines
Why she believes investors should understand exactly what they are getting into and their role in a deal
About Simi Mehta
Simi Mehta is a real estate investor, operator, and realtor. Her experience includes single-family properties, multifamily buildings, townhouses, and ground-up development, with her investments to date focused in Ontario.
She says she has built enough of the portfolio she wanted for herself and is now open to opportunities that make sense for both her and the investors she works with.
Connect With Simi
Website: jsswealth.com
LinkedIn: Search for Simi Mehta

A $500,000 house renting for around $3,000 a month does not meet the old 1 percent rule. Anne Curry is finding another way to make the numbers work.
Anne is a longtime buy and hold investor in Tacoma, Washington. She explains how she is looking for properties with something extra: enough backyard space for DADUs and, when possible, an unfinished basement with a separate entrance.
Anne walks through the numbers she is seeing in Tacoma. She says a 1,000 square foot, three bedroom, two bath DADU can cost around $300,000 to build and rent for roughly $3,000 to $3,200 per month. She also explains why the original house can sometimes be sold while the new backyard rentals are kept.
Her newest approach adds another piece. Anne is buying homes where the basement can become another unit. That can help the main property work as a rental today while she holds the backyard for possible development later.
Key topics and takeaways:
Why Anne still prefers buy and hold investing
Why the old 1 percent rule is harder to reach in Tacoma
Using DADUs to create rental income from backyard space
Anne's example of a $300,000 DADU renting for $3,000 to $3,200
Why unfinished basements with separate entrances are getting Anne's attention
Land banking backyard space for future DADUs
Why Anne starts with an investor's goal before choosing a strategy
Guest information:
Anne Curry is based in Tacoma, Washington. She works with real estate investors and also offers mentorship using an hourly model.
Website: anncurryhomes.com
Anne also mentioned free events in Tacoma, with information available through her website.
Call to action:
To learn more about Anne, her mentorship, and her Tacoma events, visit anncurryhomes.com.