If you’ve ever wondered how to navigate the highs and lows of real estate investing, this conversation with Katie Kim is a must-read. Katie shares her journey from growing up in a construction family to becoming an investor and developer. She reveals the hard lessons she learned from early mistakes, the pivotal moments that shaped her approach, and how she now helps others structure profitable deals. We also discuss the power of leveraging virtual assistants to scale a real estate business. Whether you’re just getting started or looking for ways to optimize your investing strategy, this episode is packed with actionable insights.
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Hello, my investor listeners, and welcome! Today, I have with me Katie Kim from Austin, Texas. Katie, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you very much for having me. My pleasure.
I am very excited. Katie is a friend of mine, and she is an experienced developer and investor. So I’m very excited for all that she has to share. And I want to make sure that you are hearing from all of our amazing guests and also the episodes where I share my own experience and wisdom. So if you haven’t already, please make sure to like this episode and subscribe wherever you are listening. If it’s on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, make sure to subscribe because we’re putting two episodes a week out right now for you. I want to make sure you get all of that really helpful content.
As we get started here with Katie, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about where you are, how you got to where you are today, what’s your background, and how you ended up in real estate investing.
Yes, I love it. I grew up in a construction and real estate development family. Usually, I joke that this involved a lot of child labor law violations, right? I would go to volleyball practice and then be building walls, or after soccer, I’d be shingling a roof. Fix and flip projects were really our family bonding time. That was just life, and I didn’t know anything different.
Like a lot of kids who are good at math and science and want to leave their hometown instead of taking over the family business, I went away to college, started in pre-med, switched to computer science, graduated, and moved to Chicago. I worked for a big consulting company, Accenture Technology Labs, in their research and innovation department. We worked with technology three to five years before market launch, developing strategic and profitable solutions and implementing them. I loved going into corporations, figuring out what wasn’t working, and identifying ways to gain a strategic edge through technology.
After seven or eight years, I transitioned to a startup, where I dove deeper into data analytics. When that startup got bought out by a big company, I thought, what now? I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back into the corporate world. I loved the entrepreneurial side of things. Meanwhile, my mother pointed out that I had already started investing in real estate—I had bought a condo when I moved to Chicago, then another, then another. It just became a habit.
After a while, my husband and I decided to get into the development side of real estate investing. That was our negotiation for moving back home: we would run the family construction company, but I wanted to pivot into development. After 10 years in construction, I realized I wasn’t fulfilled. Something was missing. If you’ve been there in your life, you know what I mean—you just don’t feel the passion anymore. So we launched a developer-for-fee program, guiding and teaching people how to do developments or doing developments for them. We hold their hands through the entire process. That became so fulfilling for me because I was able to combine all my experiences—strategic planning, entrepreneurship, and real estate—into one.
We also continued investing in our projects and some of our clients’ projects. Over time, I started looking at our portfolio and thinking about diversification—not just cash flow and future appreciation but also different asset types: commercial, residential, multifamily, and industrial. Every experience has built on itself, allowing me to provide depth and breadth of service to my clients and my team.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that we gain far more from our scars than our successes. It’s easy to talk about wins, but pivotal moments often come from pain points. Early in my investing career, my second deal was in Chicago. I didn’t have my real estate license yet, but I figured I knew what I was doing because I had grown up in the industry. My husband and I bought a new construction property with a tenant locked in at a great rate for two years, so the cash flow looked solid. But we didn’t do our due diligence. We didn’t compare rental rates outside of the building.
Then the 2008-2009 crisis hit. That building had 42 or 43 foreclosures in one year. Refinancing became impossible. Rents plummeted. We had to scramble. That experience fueled my passion for education. I told myself I would never go into a deal without full knowledge. I got my real estate license, pursued advanced certifications, and became a student of the game. I now make sure my clients never go through that kind of pain. I don’t enter a deal until we exhaust our due diligence.
Another major lesson? The importance of having a strong network. In real estate, deals die and come back to life constantly. I call them “zombie contracts.” You need a team to navigate these challenges. On one project, we had eight financial sources lined up, and the main bank backed out a month before closing. Because of our network, we found a mortgage broker who was ready to step in immediately. Relationships matter.
We also talked about leveraging technology and virtual assistants in real estate investing. I’m a control freak, and learning to delegate was a challenge. But virtual assistants have been game-changers for scaling my business. Through structured SOPs and automation, my VAs now handle social media, content creation, and administrative work, freeing up my time for high-level strategy.
If you’re an investor looking to build your portfolio, structure better deals, and scale your operations efficiently, this episode is packed with insights that can help. Be sure to subscribe and check out the full conversation for more wisdom from Katie Kim!