An investor who built a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio by buying ‘pigs’ explains how he finds overlooked properties

• Jeremy Barker started buying real estate when his startup needed a bigger headquarters.

• He’s scaled to more than 30 properties that bring in seven figures in annual rental income.

• Barker’s strategy involves finding and buying overlooked properties.

Jeremy Barker stumbled into real estate investing when his startup outgrew its original space, prompting him to look into large commercial properties.

He bought a bigger space than he needed, leased nearly 80% of it to tenants, and started generating rental income from his new headquarters. What’s more, he said the building has more than quadrupled in value within the past decade.

From there, “I just rinsed and repeated,” Barker told Business Insider.

The entrepreneur, who started his business Murphy Door to supplement his $1,600 a month firefighter paycheck, has grown to more than 30 commercial and residential properties that generate seven figures in annual rental income. BI confirmed his property ownership by reviewing his 2024 property tax notices and lease agreements between him and his tenants.

One key to his real estate strategy is buying overlooked properties. That’s how he scores deals and, ultimately, sees millions of dollars in appreciation.

Barker is looking at buildings that most people aren’t.

“I like to look for pigs,” he said — meaning, something that’s dilapidated or doesn’t look nice, but has potential. “We could put lipstick on it and make it look really pretty.”

For example, while driving through his market in Utah, he noticed a 90,000-square-foot call center right off the highway. The old office space, which was still littered with desks, chairs, and servers, had been empty for a couple of years.

“The property is just dilapidated,” he recalled. “The outside’s ugly, the landscape’s overgrown, the trees are too big, the inside looks really overwhelming because it’s a lot of square footage with a lot of stuff.”

While most investors wouldn’t even do a walkthrough, Barker saw an opportunity.

“Coming from a construction background, I’m like, I could cut down the big trees, get the yard cleaned up, paint the exterior for cheap, put new LED on the outside, gut all the cubicles, sell those for some kind of money, and then I can do new flooring,” he said.

He knew he had leverage, since the building had been sitting on the market for years. It was listed for about $3.4 million, and Barker said he initially offered $2 million: “It came back to $2.9 million, and then I found about $500,000 or $600,000 worth of deferred maintenance issues that they credited me at close, so I ended up buying this for $2.4 million.”