Loren Castillo

I'm more of an entrepreneur than employee. I started early, my first company launched during my freshman year of college in Bellingham, WA. It was a clothing company that catered to people, like me, who loved snowboarding, skateboarding, wakeboarding and motocross. It was a fun company to run; we sponsored riders and events all over the Northwest. I eventually left college to run the company full-time because we had distribution in 4 states, and school was just getting in the way of my work. Concurrently, I made a conscious decision to invest 2 years to reading as many books as I could about business, attitude, real estate, creativity and productivity. The more I learned, the more I realised that the clothing industry wasn’t the best vehicle to help me achieve my lofty goals of financial Independence. Having made that choice, I decided to buy a house and rent it to my friends to pay the mortgage. Turned out that I really liked being a landlord and was really good at it, so I bought another and another and another until I hit 5 houses, plus a spec home, by the age of 26. It was during this period that I got my real estate license, so that I keep all the commissions. Eventually, I was asked to join a real estate team, which was part of Keller Williams Realty. After a couple of years in the business, I decided to sell all of my houses (at the top of the market) and move to Portland Oregon, a place I had only driven through prior. I quickly grew a team called Portland Power Search team to 5 agents and number 3 on Google, with over $20 million in sales our first full ye