JOIN FREELane Kawaoka
About Lane Kawaoka
Lane Kawaoka is a real estate investor and the author of The Wealth Elevator. He trained as a civil engineer and spent his mid-twenties as a construction supervisor, traveling constantly for work. The portfolio he has since built runs to more than 10,000 units and over $2.1 billion in assets under management. None of it started as a plan. He bought a house in Seattle to live in, rented it out while he was away on jobs, and found he had started what he calls a little cashflow machine.
From that first rental he scaled to eleven properties by 2015, buying in markets outside Seattle where rent-to-value ratios made more sense, most of which he had never visited. The framework in his book sorts that journey into floors. The basement is under $100,000 to invest and income below six figures. The first floor is small rentals building toward a net worth near $250,000. The second floor opens at a net worth of $500,000 to $1 million and income above $150,000, where an investor can skip straight to passive syndications instead of managing buildings.
On The Daily Mastermind, Lane sat down with George Wright III for a walk up the floors of the Wealth Elevator. They covered the line between active and passive investing, why wholesaling and flipping become a second job, and how depreciation and passive losses change a high earner's tax picture on the way to roughly four or five million in investable assets. Lane was blunt about who to learn from: other purely passive accredited investors, not the local real estate club and not the syndicator pitching you.
