Who has done this, in their own words?
A few people you have heard of started small, with one property and rent coming in. The best-known lines are about patience: owning something for years and waiting. We found no household name on record living in a duplex they owned and renting out the other home.
WHAT MOST PEOPLE ARE NEVER TOLD
The famous line about getting rich slowly is secondhand. Jeff Bezos has recounted asking Warren Buffett why more people do not copy his investing. Buffett's answer, as Bezos tells it, was that getting rich slowly is not something people like.
- Alex Rodriguez has said his first property was a duplex, bought at 22.
- Paula Pant of Afford Anything lived in one home of her Atlanta triplex and rented out the rest.
- Jonathan and Drew Scott of Property Brothers bought a house at 18 and rented out rooms.
- Barbara Corcoran, asked where she would put real estate money, named a two-family house lived in on one side, GOBankingRates reported.
"I thought only of what the properties would produce and cared not at all about their daily valuations," Warren Buffett wrote of a farm and a building in his 2013 letter to shareholders. The 2010 letter argues for "a house they can afford".
- "It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can't stand to wait," Charlie Munger told Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal in 2014.
- "His skill is investing, but his secret is time," Morgan Housel wrote of Buffett in The Psychology of Money.
- "I became a millionaire because of real estate," Arnold Schwarzenegger has said.
None of the people quoted here is connected with Series Homes.
GOOD TO KNOW
None of them is a reason to buy. A famous name does not change the arithmetic on a home, and the ones who get quoted are the ones it worked for. Several of these lines are about investing in general, not homes. Run your own numbers, starting with the month the rental is empty.
Yours is a little different. They all are.
Tell us what you are looking at and what you are trying to do. We answer with the numbers on your situation.
Free. No credit pull.
WHERE THIS COMES FROM
- Warren Buffett, letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders for 2013, section Some Thoughts About Investing
- Warren Buffett, letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders for 2010
- Jason Zweig, Charles Munger: Secrets of Buffett's Success? (The Wall Street Journal, September 2014, on the author's site)
- Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money (Harriman House, 2020), chapter 4, Confounding Compounding. Excerpted in Derek Sivers's notes on the book
- Yahoo: Arnold Schwarzenegger Explains How He Became a Millionaire Before His Acting Career Took Off (his remarks at Grant Cardone's 10X Growth Conference)
- Yahoo Finance: Jeff Bezos at the America Business Forum, Miami, November 2025, recalling what Warren Buffett told him
- National Association of Realtors, Be a Master of Bouncing Back: Alex Rodriguez on the duplex he bought at 22
- Money, I'm 34 Years Old and Own 8 Homes. Here's How I Did It: Paula Pant and the Atlanta triplex
- Paula Pant, Afford Anything: Slowly Building a Real Estate Empire
- Quartz, interview with Jonathan and Drew Scott on the first house they bought
- GOBankingRates, carried by AOL: The Best Real Estate People Should Look To Buy in 2025, According to Barbara Corcoran
Researched and written by Series Homes. Checked against its sources on . Lending rules change. This page is general information, not a loan offer or legal or tax advice.