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Owning in Exotic Places with Kelly Cronin
Kelly Cronin, founder of Cronin’s Castles, shares her journey from a frugal veterinary medicine career to building a real estate portfolio in off-grid, high-value locations, including an off-grid house in New Mexico and properties in the stunning Kenai Peninsula, Alaska.
Avery: We’ve got a really cool guest today. We do a lot of focusing on regional drivable vacation destinations on this show because of ease of investment—easiest way to get from point A to point B. But today we’re going to flip that script a little bit; we’re going to talk about investing in some kind of crazy places. So, I’ve got Kelly Cronin, she’s the founder of Cronin’s Castles, and she owns some places that I’m jealous of. The locations are amazing, but it just seems like a beast to own in these places. So, she’s going to kind of unwrap that for us. How’s it going, Kelly?
Kelly: It’s amazing, thank you!
Avery: Awesome, so tell us a little bit about yourself. Start from the beginning—how did you get into real estate, and then we’ll get into your portfolio.
Kelly: So, I think that, you know, I’ve spent 30 years in veterinary medicine, and unfortunately, in veterinary medicine, there’s just not a lot of money to be made. Most of my career, I made 20 to 30, or 10 to 20 dollars an hour, really.
Avery: Yeah, as a licensed and certified specialty technician, absolutely.
Kelly: It’s definitely been one of those situations where I’ve always been very frugal, and that’s a bit of a superpower. I’ve always done types of thinking outside the box to make sure that I could save a lot of money. And just to make sure that I could retire, and I think that I’m having done that, has really created a bit of a nest egg for me. What I’ll tell you is that I fell into real estate investing like a lot of people do. I had a house in New Mexico that, um, you know, talking about off-grid, this was the most off-grid house you can think of, on a reservation on something called the land lease we had from a Pueblo in New Mexico, and we just couldn’t get it sold at the time. And so, that was really my first influx into real estate, and we rented that out for several years.
Avery: Had a really good renter?
Kelly: Yeah, ended up trying to do a land contract sale to her. That didn’t work, so I ended up doing a land contract sale to someone else, and that really opened my eyes. Hey, you might not make a lot of money, you might not have a whole lot in terms of what you can actually invest, but there are interesting ways to come about owning real estate and growing your wealth in a different way. That was my first soiree into it, and it was really amazing to have so much of the house paid off just by having a renter there during that time. To be able to get so much more than what our actual mortgage was on this very off-grid, uh, Lambly’s house.
Avery: It wasn’t a subdivision, but it was very outside of town.
Kelly: Exactly, in a place with traditionally extremely high home values, and extremely hard to get into. It really opened my eyes to all the things that there could be.
Avery: Awesome, so let’s dive right into that portfolio. You mentioned crazy places—let’s get right into where you own.
Kelly: So, currently, we own in Casino, which is in the Kenai Peninsula. If you haven’t been there, it’s one of the most beautiful places on the entire planet. The bluest water you’ve ever seen in your entire lifetime. It’s crazy, good fishing, mushing, dog mushing—you know, skiing. You can’t find a cooler place to walk on glaciers. It’s an incredible experience!