Meet Rising Star Rachael Rhodes
How many years have you been a REALTOR®? Since November of 2021
What is your career volume as a REALTOR®? $13,516,099 including on and off market deals
What was your total volume last year? $5,649,000 million
What awards have you achieved as a REALTOR®? Silver Circle Award at Keller Williams Spokane
Truthfully, my story is far from ordinary. My life has been an incredible journey. It all started where I grew up in a small town called Marietta, Ohio, with a population of only 13,000. That was pretty much as big as it got unless you drove a few hours to Columbus. This, along with a Ukrainian mother and two dads: a pastor and a writer, pushed me to excel in academics. With the support of my family, I ended up starting college at 13 years old, graduating with two Associate’s degrees at 15, and graduating with my Bachelor’s in Political Science Pre-Law at 17 years old. The plan was to go to law school after that and become a lawyer. All of that changed around age 16 when I started drop shipping, along with three other jobs and attending full-time college at Ohio University. This showed me how much of an opportunity passive income provided and how making money in your sleep gives a total sense of freedom. I built my emergency fund as an avid supporter of good debt versus bad debt, paid for my car in cash, and continued working those four jobs until I turned 18.
At 18, I decided to get my real estate license as this was only a natural progression of what would come next in my wealth-building journey. There is so much money to be made by buying and holding real estate, whether it’s an investment or your primary residence. I wanted to help others achieve wealth, too!
During that year, I lived in four different states before settling in Spokane, Washington and experienced all of the different real estate markets. I absolutely loved the feeling of a “big small town” that Spokane had and planted my roots. I always knew I wanted to live in a big city and Spokane scratched that itch for me.
I began selling real estate full-time at 19 years old and did $13.5 million worth of transactions in my first year and a half. Now, I’m able to help myself as well as my clients flip homes and build rental portfolios. My goal is to be financially free by 23 and I know I can do that through real estate. I am now a house flipping, wealth building, real estate agent at 20, and have owned five homes in the past year, four of those being flips, and one of those is a buy and hold that I bought for $11,000 ten minutes from my hometown.
The knowledge that I have from living in four different markets is invaluable and I’m able to help my investors fully, whether they’re out-of-state investors or local investors since I, myself, have owned properties locally as well as out-of-state. I’m better equipped to provide a big-picture view on the real estate market by comparing Spokane to other markets, as well as help investors begin collecting out-of-state rentals and have the insight on how to successfully own real estate out of the local area.
One of my favorite things ever in real estate is debunking myths that investors have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to flip homes, because… I simply don’t. Helping first-time flippers understand nontraditional financing and experience ownership and sweat equity to snowball wealth is incredible. Another piece of this I absolutely love is creative options like seller financing, rent to own, and sub to mortgages.
Although I do cherish helping first-time buyers, too, and have helped more than 15 first-time buyers achieve the dream of home ownership, I really enjoy helping “un-bankable” clients achieve their dream of home ownership through creative financing. My favorite client success story was of a local business owner I helped this year. She and her husband had a credit score in the mid-300s and wrote everything off, so on paper she only made around $30k a year. However, they owned a mobile home free and clear and she knew she could afford up to $2,800 a month. We found her a seller financing home with an incredible interest rate of around three percent that she loved, put her home up for sale, used the proceeds as her down payment, and now she lives in a $525,000 home even though all of the banks told her “no.” With this, I’ve created a brand called “The Creative Agents” where I specialize in all of these things in hopes to one day have a team surrounding this.
Have you ever heard that if you choose a job you love, you'll never have to work a day in your life? I know with real estate I’ve found this. I define my success as a life well lived with no regrets and try to have a servant mentality. One of my favorite books is “The Go Giver,” which demonstrates servant leadership and digs into the importance of helping others. As a pastor’s daughter and a Christian, I’ve always been taught to do unto others as you would have done unto you, and I try to practice this in my everyday life through helping buyers, sellers, and investors in real estate. As one of the biggest purchases in someone’s life, I hope that I can have a positive impact and support my clients’ decisions in taking the next steps to build wealth.
As a first-generation American, I truly see the value in the American Dream, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and working hard to accomplish your goals, giving myself a work ethic to help my clients like no one else. Whether that means showing homes after dark in the middle of winter, answering phone calls at 1 am, or running numbers for an investor at 6 am.
Today, I’m an avid member of the Spokane community participating in volunteer work, teaching dance classes, and being a mentor in Big Brothers Big Sisters. I love working with children, especially teaching, whether that’s English, ballet, jazz, or helping them realize their potential in and out of the classroom. I’m a bit obsessed with sharing my knowledge in real estate with others and helping adults realize their potential, too. Everyone I know thinks it can get pretty annoying when I won’t stop talking about the latest innovative way I’ve found to buy houses! I also enjoy swing dancing, rock climbing at Wild Walls, paddle boarding at The Cove, kayaking, reading, and going shooting at Sharp Shooters.