Ludomir Wanot, a Seattle-based real estate investor and the co-founder of Evergreen Housing Network. This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.
Ludomir Wanot knew early on that he wanted to use real estate as a tool to build wealth.
He bought his first property with his brother in 2016. They used an FHA loan and put 3.5% down.
His main revenue stream is wholesaling. On his first wholesale deal, he profited $160,000.
Ludomir Wanot tapped into his entrepreneurial spirit early on.
He started selling candy in elementary school. He’d buy jawbreakers with the couple of dollars his mom could afford to give him each day and sell them for a profit to his classmates.
When he was 15, he started buying and selling cars on Craigslist. He’d been working for his dad since he was 13 — mostly installing floors — and saved up enough money to buy his first car, a used Volkswagen Jetta, for $4,000. Less than two weeks later, he sold it for $5,500, he told Insider. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, I just made $1,500 in a week and a half. Can I do this again?'”
Wanot, who grew up in Federal Way, Washington, researched the car market in the area and found that Volkswagens were very popular and in high demand. So he started buying and reselling that specific car brand. He earned $1,000 on average per flip — and he barely did any work on the cars, he said. “I never fixed them up or anything. I’d just clean them and take professional photos.”
His key advantage was his ability to negotiate, he added: “I would buy directly from owners and I would just negotiate prices with them over the phone.” While he was not a licensed dealer, within two years, Wanot earned about $35,000 selling 35 cars. He says that he gave most of the money to his mom so she could visit family in Poland, where she’d emigrated from before he was born.
His business mentality emerged out of necessity. After his parents split up when he was seven, Wanot’s mom raised him and his two brothers. She worked three different jobs to provide for her sons, but still struggled to stay afloat and gradually accumulated a significant amount of credit card debt. Every two years or so, she had to move her family into a different apartment when the rent would inevitably go up. Wanot used the money he earned from his various businesses to pay for food on days his mom couldn’t afford to give him and his brothers money for breakfast.
“From a very young age, I knew that money could give me options, and I wanted more options in my life,” said Wanot, now 30. “So I started thinking about how to earn more money.”
A quick Google search piqued his interest in real estate investing: “I found online that 90% of all millionaires became so through owning real estate.” He was a teen at the time and didn’t have the means to invest, but after developing a knack for sales and understanding the principles of risk, he decided that real estate would one day be his path to wealth. Buying his first property with his brother with less than $10,000 upfront
Wanot graduated from University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in 2014. His education was completely funded by scholarships and grants, he said. Plus, he worked all throughout college. He installed flooring and built a construction business, WA Flooring, out of it.
After graduating, Wanot tried to grow his company, but the income wasn’t as consistent as he wanted it to be. He still aspired to buy properties one day and knew that mortgage lenders would want to see a stable income history before offering him a loan, so he started thinking about transitioning into the corporate world. In the meantime, though, he was able to get his foot in the door by partnering with his older brother, Jan.
Jan, who’d been working at Boeing for about two years, qualified for a loan and the brothers started searching for properties in the Seattle area in 2016. Jan would be listed as the buyer but they agreed to split expenses and profits evenly.
“I knew from my Craigslist experience that there were so many opportunities out there at a discount,” said Wanot, who would specifically seek out properties listed for sale by their owner, which cut out agent commissions and typically meant a lower sale […]
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