A Little Bit About Us

Hello! Thank you for stopping by to visit our blog! My name is Heather, and my husband Lucas and I are a team. We are Brownlee Management! After 15 years together, we are here to tell you that you can work with who you love, and high school sweethearts is a thing! That’s not what this blog is about, though!

I was still in High School when Lucas graduated, and his interest in Real Estate started almost immediately- I am not really sure what triggered it. It just happened! He just knew he didn’t want to work for someone else for the rest of his life, and I supported him in that endeavor.

One night, he was watching TV and an infomercial came on about tax lien sales and personal coaching. Lucas bought the program and began to study, and our journey was born. In 2002, we acquired our first piece of Real Estate, a vacant plot of land in Western WA. In 2005, we purchased our first house! We planned to flip that house, but the market went down a bit right as we finished our remodeling on the home, so we instead did a rent to own sale (more on that in a later post). At that same time, we bought another house, and had it rented out before our first mortgage payment was even due! In 2006, we purchased our third house, which we currently live in.

Over the years, we have kept up a steady pace. We now own several pieces of land throughout the country, and various rental homes in Michigan. We are a young family, and already well on our way to financial freedom thanks to our rental properties and another business that we own (more on that in a later post).

Basically, Lucas and I knew that we wanted financial freedom from the very beginning, and we have really stuck to that desire, and allowed it to motivate our decisions. I am so excited to share this journey with you, to help you avoid the pitfalls that we navigated along the way, and to share with you about getting out of debt, how to go about financing, and other great tips! Welcome!

How it all started

We get asked all the time, "how did this all begin"? It really didn't start off as a big deal- just something that seemed to make sense. So, Lucas gave it a shot!

Our real estate venture started when I was still in high school.  Lucas was thinking about what he wanted to do as his long-term career, and knew he didn't want to work for someone else his entire life.  He was watching TV one night, and an infomercial came on about investing in Real Estate using tax sales and auctions.  He bought the training course and started searching for tax auctions in our state. A quiet beginning that he has no idea would so profoundly change our lives.

After a few weeks he found an auction, and had some money saved to invest with. I'll post a link to the more detailed post about the tax sale/auction process, but for now I'll keep it simple. He purchased our first piece of raw land at that auction. The following year he bought another one,  just a few miles away from the first. I graduated high school, started working and then started college.
We wanted to buy our first house, but found that banks wouldn't lend to us because we had no credit established.  So, we started with a few credit cards, used them and paid them off before the end of the month, and built up our credit. After about a year, we had good credit and were prepared to approach lenders.

After a few months of searching and putting offers in, we bought a house that was in good shape, and were able to get tenants in before our first mortgage payment was due! Let me back up- while we were waiting for that house to close, we saw an ad in the local paper for a fixer-upper with terms available (aka seller financing). We actually closed on that house before the first one closed, so within a few months we had our first two houses. It's not rocket science, it just takes some planning!

And that's how it began!