Drew and Jonathan Scott of HGTV’s new series, “Backed by the Bros,” spoke with Quartz to talk about breaking into real estate.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): You guys got your star around 2008 in the real estate business, is that right?
JONATHAN SCOTT (JS): So the show started around 2008, but we started our, our business way before that. So actually we were 18 when we bought our first house.
DREW SCOTT (DS): It was mid-nineties. Frosted tips on our hair.
JS: Oh yeah. I was looking surfer cool. We were actors as kids, but I wanted to be a magician and Drew wanted to be an actor and we’re like, we’re going to fund our own efforts. So we read every book we could on real estate. Bought the infomercials for making millions with no money down. We had no money. And we learned enough that we bought our first house for $250 out of pocket. The owner had to sell so bad that he did a vendor take-back mortgage for all of his equity. So 250 bucks. We owned a house, we fixed it up. We came from a handy family. I built a ranch with dad at 14 and, and he taught us all kinds of stuff. Fixed it up, lived rent free for about a year ‘cause we rented out some of the other rooms, sold it for a 50 grand profit. And that’s when the light bulb went on and we’re like, Oh my gosh, this could be a thing!
DS: Yeah. We kept rolling that over. We did two houses at the time, then we did three. But there are a lot of different ways to get into real estate and in a market that’s so expensive like it is right now what we’re seeing is a lot of people are partnering up on projects. You’re not just going in on your own with a project. Bring in a friend or somebody else that can help you afford to qualify. I like the idea of people trying to move forward as long as they’re being smart and people tackling projects without a plan or not working with professionals when you should be… Those are a bunch of errors. We made some of the same mistakes in the beginning as well, but hopefully our show ‘Backed by the Bros’ can help people bypass those mistakes so they don’t get themselves in a deep hole.
AM: Gotcha. Well, thanks a lot guys.
Read more: The biggest real estate mistakes you can make, according to the Property Brothers