I’ve been consuming a lot of real estate content lately — some of it is noise, some of it genuinely shifts how you think. This one shifted how I think.
The strategy comes from investor Pace Morby, and what I like about it is that it’s not a “quit your job and go all in” pitch. It’s a realistic, step-by-step framework for someone who’s still working, still learning, and doesn’t have a ton of cash sitting around. Which, honestly, describes a lot of us.
Here’s what I took away.
The First 6 Months: What You’re Actually Supposed to Be Doing
Most people who want to get into real estate investing spend months — sometimes years — consuming content without doing anything. I know because I’ve been guilty of this myself. There’s always one more podcast, one more YouTube video, one more thing to learn before you feel ready.
Pace’s framework gives you a structured reason to stop waiting.
Months 1–3: Learn to see bad deals first.
Before you can recognize a good deal, you have to train your eye to spot bad ones. The exercise he recommends: join underwriting calls — basically group deal analysis sessions where investors walk through real properties and explain why something doesn’t work. Do this every week.
On top of that, spend 20 minutes a day looking at listings. Not to buy anything. Just to look. Run the numbers. Ask yourself: does this cash flow? What’s the cap rate? What would it take to make this work?
He calls this building your “real estate kung fu” — the instinct that eventually lets you look at a deal and know in 30 seconds whether it’s worth your time. You can’t rush it, but you can speed it up by being intentional about the reps.
In Philadelphia, this means getting familiar with what properties actually sell for versus what they list for, what rents look like in different neighborhoods, and what the typical rehab costs are here. The Germantown and North Philly numbers are very different from Fishtown or Graduate Hospital. You need to know your market.
Months 4–6: Attach yourself to someone already doing it.
This is the part that most beginner frameworks skip, and I think it’s the most valuable advice in the whole thing.
Instead of trying to do your first deal solo, find an investor who’s already actively buying — in Pace’s case, RV parks specifically, but this applies to any asset class — and bring them deals. In exchange, you ask for two things: a finder’s fee (he mentions around $50,000 for a good deal) and a 10% equity stake in the asset.
You’re not putting in capital. You’re putting in time, research, and hustle. And in exchange, you get paid and you get a seat at the table on a real deal — with someone who already knows what they’re doing.
Deal two: negotiate 20–40% equity. Deal three: you’re doing it yourself.
That’s how you go from zero to owning real estate without a massive down payment or years of solo grinding.
Seller Finance: How to Buy Without a Bank
This is the part that sounds too good to be true until you understand the mechanics.
Seller financing means the seller acts as the bank. Instead of you going to Wells Fargo or a hard money lender, you go directly to the person who owns the property and structure a payment plan with them. No credit check. No debt-to-income ratio scrutiny. No bank committees.
Pace explains it with what he calls “reverse engineering” the deal. Here’s how it works:
Start with what you need the deal to cash flow. Let’s say you want $10,000/month in net income from a property. Work backwards: what purchase price, interest rate, and repayment term would make that possible? Then go present those numbers to the seller.
The seller doesn’t have to agree. But if they’re motivated — if the property has been sitting on the market for 100+ days, if they’re exhausted from managing it, if they just want out — they might be surprisingly open to terms that a bank would never offer.
The real example he shares is a guy named Mario who owned a 43-unit apartment building worth $3 million. Mario was missing his son’s baseball games to deal with broken toilets. He was burned out and done.
Pace’s pitch wasn’t about cap rates or cash-on-cash returns. It was: “What if your son grew up knowing that every single month, for the rest of his life, a check for $16,000 shows up — because of you?”
Mario became the bank. He gets $16,000/month for the next 50–60 years. Pace structured the repayment term long enough that his net income on the deal lands around $11,000/month.
No bank. No traditional financing. Just a conversation about what the seller actually needed.
For someone in my situation — where conventional financing is complicated because of irregular income — this framework is genuinely interesting. Philadelphia has a lot of tired landlords. People who’ve been managing rowhouses for 20 years and just want out. That’s a motivated seller pool.
Acquisition Strategy vs. Exit Strategy: You’re Probably Thinking About This Backwards
This reframe hit me harder than I expected.
Most people start by deciding on an exit strategy. “I want to do Airbnb.” “I want to flip.” “I want Section 8 tenants.” Then they go look for properties that fit that plan.
Pace argues this is backwards — and I think he’s right.
The property tells you the exit strategy. You can’t decide you’re going to Airbnb something if the HOA prohibits short-term rentals. You can’t flip if the ARV doesn’t support the numbers. The property’s conditions, location, zoning, and price are what determine what’s possible.
What you can control is your acquisition strategy — how you find deals that other people miss. Foreclosures, inherited properties, tax liens, motivated sellers, sheriff sales. These are skills you build. The more acquisition tools you have, the more flexibility you have to work with whatever deal you find.
I think about this in the context of Philadelphia’s sheriff sale and tax sale market. The properties that come through those channels don’t arrive with a neat bow on them. You don’t always know going in whether a property is going to be a flip, a rental, or something you wholesale. What matters is that you got it right on the acquisition — and then you let the property tell you what to do with it.
Why RV Parks? (And Why It Matters Even If You’re Not Buying One)
This might seem random if you’re focused on Philadelphia rowhouses. But hear me out.
Pace’s argument for RV parks in 2026:
Airbnb is oversaturated. Supply has flooded the market, regulations are tightening in cities (including Philadelphia — the STR permit situation here is real), and the margins have compressed significantly. A lot of people who went all-in on short-term rentals three years ago are quietly struggling.
RV parks, by contrast, attract long-stay guests — people like oil field workers in Texas who book for 3–4 months at a time. Low turnover, stable income, less management intensity. And the tax benefits are significant: the time you spend managing an RV park counts toward the IRS’s “real estate professional” designation, which unlocks much more powerful depreciation deductions.
You’re probably not going to buy an RV park in Germantown. Neither am I. But the underlying principle — look for the asset class that’s undervalued and under-competed right now, not the one that’s been on every podcast for the last three years — applies everywhere.
In Philadelphia, I think that’s still multifamily. 2–4 units. Below the radar, manageable, and with seller finance opportunities if you find the right tired landlord.
Pulling It Together
What I like about Pace’s framework is that it meets you where you are. No money? Find deals for people who have money. No experience? Attach yourself to someone with experience. No conventional financing? Learn creative finance.
The throughline is this: stop waiting for the perfect conditions and start building the skills. The market will always have something going on — rates, regulations, uncertainty. The investors who build portfolios anyway are the ones who develop enough tools to work with whatever’s in front of them.
I’m still in the learning phase on a lot of this. But the 6-month roadmap is something I’m actually taking seriously — including the part about spending 20 minutes a day just looking at deals. It sounds small. It adds up fast.
Not financial advice — just someone doing a lot of research and asking a lot of questions.