NEWSHow Property Investor Richard Garcia Achieved A $10M Portfolio
Aug. 16 2022, Published 2:33 p.m. ET
The wealthy and successful do not always come from the richest families; they are ordinary people who recognize opportunity and leverage it to get ahead in life. Richard Garcia is one of these ordinary people. At 33, Garcia is a savvy business owner and author of the bestselling book, The Seven Steps to Wealth Creation through Real Estate Investing. Garcia is also the founder and CEO of Wealty.io. What’s more impressive is that Garcia achieved a $10M portfolio before 30 while still working a 9–5 corporate job, and that didn’t come from rich parents or winning the lottery. What did he do? Here are three things he swears by.
Hard work and relentless dedication to excellence is the first thing that changed Garcia’s life for good. After graduating high school, Garcia left Miami and went to Tallahassee to further his studies at the Tallahassee Community College. While studying, he became a teller at the Bank of America from 2008–2012 and became immersed in corporate culture. At 19, he was promoted to a sales specialist and then a personal banker until he was selected as a top senior personal banker. This was followed by being promoted to work for Merrill Lynch, where he worked for a year and a half as a client advisor to 70 clients with $50M to $1B in assets. Garcia then moved on to high-frequency trading in 2014, where he mastered his trading skills.
From there, Garcia re-entered the workforce and became a head hunter for Robert Half. He was assigned to look for software engineers and other tech developers. He then did a short stint at Citrix Systems before being offered a position at SolarCity, now Tesla, where he reported directly to the founder Peter Rive (Elon Musk’s cousin), and worked with him to hire software engineers. Garcia stayed on after SolarCity was purchased by Tesla, and Garcia was able to work with Elon to build a solar roof product. From 2017–2018, he worked at Google in their Nestlabs teams, focusing on the Google Home device.
This was followed by a year stint at Facebook on the IG team, where Garcia worked on transitioning the platform from text to video. This was when he realized he was using leveraged finance (the VERM method), and he started buying real estate using banks, eventually building a $10M real estate portfolio. Garcia then went onto social media and built a following by talking about his business and real estate experiences. Deciding to become a full-time entrepreneur, Garcia then decided to build Wealty.io.
Leveraging his skills and opportunities also helped him succeed so fast. “Every time I’ve leveled up in life, it’s because there was a new massive opportunity to take advantage of,” Garcia recently shared on a LinkedIn post. “Hustling my way up the corporate ladder made me my first $100K. Working in tech was my first $1M, and building a real estate portfolio made me my first $10M. Don’t doubt what hard work and consistency can do,” he concluded.
Garcia established his entrepreneurial ventures online while still working a full-time job in corporate America. As a finance guy, he did what his peers did and dipped his toes into entrepreneurship by buying and trading stocks. He persisted through the choppy season and used the extra money from his banking days to trade. Garcia earned over $600K in gross profits from trading, which he plowed back into his real estate business.
Risk-taking is the third thing that helped Garcia rise so fast. Many people see property investing as a difficult or impossible feat to achieve, but so is trading and breathing. Garcia says all of life is a risk, but that should not keep you from aiming for more. “People need to take the risk, even if it involves loss or gain,” Garcia says. “Take financial risks and educational risks. In short, risk comes in different forms, and one must learn how to take and conquer them.”
