Avery: Hey y’all, welcome back to another episode of the Short-Term Shop Show. Today we have some super cool guests, Ethan and Brooklyn McCarty. They are long-time Short-Term Shop clients, even before it was officially the Short-Term Shop. So, they own in several markets. I’ll let them introduce themselves. How are you guys doing today?

Ethan: We are very good, thank you for allowing us to be on here. We’re proud of that title, to be a member of the Short-Term Shop before it was the Short-Term Shop. We’re very good. I’m Ethan, and this is Brooklyn. We’re obviously from Southern Ohio, close to Cincinnati. We have four total doors: a cabin in the Smokies, a cabin in Pigeon Forge, another cabin in Gatlinburg, and then a duplex down in Gulf Shores, down towards Fort Morgan.

Avery: Awesome, awesome. Tell us a little bit more about yourselves. How did you get into real estate? What made you decide to start buying these things?

Brooklyn: Well, that’s a great story. Ethan always says that this is a “we” story as in an Ethan and Brooklyn story, not a “me” story, like just the Ethan story, because he’s typically the one that tells our story. But it actually started out just as an Ethan story. He was interested in real estate probably eight years ago, and I don’t know exactly what sparked that interest, but he just started consuming everything he could.

Avery: Interesting.

Brooklyn: BiggerPockets podcast, he was on the forums, he was watching YouTube, reading books, business books, and mindset books. I didn’t really want anything to do with it. I was not interested at all. But he was very persistent, almost to the point of annoyance. I remember one day we were in the car, and he had been wanting me to listen to those BiggerPockets podcasts. Finally, I gave him a mercy ‘like,’ and said, “Fine, I’ll listen to it.”

Avery: So, what happened next?

Brooklyn: We were listening, and it was Brandon Turner and Josh Dorkin, but I don’t remember anything about the podcast other than it was about a 25-unit apartment building they had bought and burned. They took all their money out of the deal, and now they’re making like three thousand dollars a month on it. I remember pressing pause on his podcast, and I was like, “Ethan, people like us don’t do things like this; this just doesn’t happen to people like us.”

Ethan: And why did you feel that way?

Brooklyn: Well, Ethan said we’re from about an hour east of Cincinnati, from the very southern tip of Ohio. It’s the poorest county in the state. Ninety percent of the population here has a “Poor Dad” mentality, and we were raised with that mindset. So, he kind of backed off after that. But he was still consuming everything, though not being outward and verbal about it with me. We went on to build our first trial house, and one day our daughter was in bed, and he sat down and said, “Listen, there’s this agent in the Smokies. She’s constantly on BiggerPockets forums, always talking about these cabins and the Smokies.” And that’s really how things started taking off.