Empowering Women in Real Estate with Liz Faircloth

Leah Vinck: Hi, I'm Leah Vinck, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Steadily, America's best-rated landlord insurance provider serving real estate investors nationwide. Today we're joined by Liz Faircloth, who's the co-founder of the Real Estate InvestHER, a global community that empowers women in real estate to live a financially free and balanced life on their own terms. The InvestHER community has many ways for real estate investors to get involved — there's over 21,000 Meetup members, the Strive mentorship program, a weekly podcast series, a really engaging Facebook group, and the annual InvestHER Con, which is coming up in Austin this June. Thanks for joining us today, Liz.

Liz Faircloth: Thank you so much for having me, Leah. I'm excited to have you guys speaking at InvestHER Con — it's going to be a great three-day conference, so excited about it coming up very soon.

Leah: Yeah, we're really looking forward to it. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your journey and what inspired you to take that leap into real estate, and then what also led you to focus on empowering other women to do the same.

Liz: It's funny because I was so focused on getting my degree in social work. I was a psych major, I always wanted to open my own practice — I just loved the idea of helping people. I did a lot of field placements with women who had mental illness and some form of substance abuse, so I actually wrote a business plan on starting a women's center to help women who had those issues. The irony is that was about 20 years ago, and while that's not exactly our mission now, the fact that we're serving women has kind of come full circle.

At that time my brother-in-law, who was literally the only entrepreneur I knew, gave me a book that totally opened my mind to a whole new world of entrepreneurship, building passive income, and building a business. There were a lot of concepts I had literally never thought about prior to that moment. I grew up in a hardworking family — my dad was a schoolteacher, my mother worked in insurance part-time — and going out to dinner and lavish vacations was not the norm. So long story short, that book got me on the road of thinking, wow, real estate — but I don't have any money to do that.

So we got a loan from my father and started educating ourselves — me and my then-boyfriend, who I met right around the same time I read the book. I brought him into the fold and said let's start learning this together. He was an engineer by training, had a job in engineering, hated it, so he was open to anything. A year later we bought our first property — a duplex right outside of Philadelphia for about $150,000, and we needed about $30K to buy the property and do the renovations. My father loaned it to us at a 6% interest rate, we paid it back, and that really gave us the bug for investing.

We then moved our business to New Jersey and grew our portfolio in Trenton in particular, then went from there into other markets. In 2013 I had my first child, my son, and I retired in a sense from my consulting job. My husband was the primary person building the business and I was helping him on a part-time basis while also working full-time for many years. When I left that job and was home with my son, we really started to build up our rental portfolio and our income from there. I had the ability to stay home and my plan was to join him full-time in the real estate business.

But in that moment of being home with my son, I really started to feel very disconnected and alone, honestly. I know I'm not unique in sharing that as a new mom. The consulting work I had done for a decade literally stopped, my whole sense of value went away, and I was a new mom now building a business with my husband. On paper everything was growing — we had a healthy boy, a business that was finally taking care of us after years of building a rental portfolio. Then a few months later I met Andresa and we started connecting, and it really was like, let's start a women's Mastermind. We started pulling women together for free, before InvestHER even existed, because I was a new mom with young kids, now a partner in building this business with my husband, and that opened up this whole ability to serve women in this space.

Fast forward to really building out InvestHER — when you think of investing, it's a male-dominant space. We said, wouldn't it be wonderful to have a space just for women? Statistically, women don't have as much confidence in the investing space as men — not because they're not great investors, we just don't have as many models growing up. I think that's changing, and I think women are going to be controlling more and more wealth. Women actually outperform men as investors, so it's just a matter of having them do it more.

What started as creating space for me and Andresa as we were growing our families and creating balance in our lives became something that most women said, I want to be part of that. We really started to build out this community not just for ourselves but for other women, and for companies like yourselves who have phenomenal products that can serve women in our community. It started as serving myself, honestly, because I was looking for additional purpose and meaning. I loved real estate, but I knew it wasn't enough on its own. This created a passion and purpose I didn't have as just a pure investor, because it's much bigger than investing — it's serving women in a really meaningful way in living life on their own terms.

Leah: I love that. It's so interesting to hear that women investors outperform male investors — I didn't know that. And one of the ways you engage with the community is helping women with all these different facets of life they're constantly juggling — their home life, their investments, their own health and wellbeing. I'm curious what you hear from women in the community and how InvestHER is able to respond to some of those changing needs as women go through different life stages and their priorities shift over time.

Liz: I certainly am not an expert for all women, and I can't speak for all women, but what I can say from talking with so many of them is that so many rely only on themselves — and it's so interesting, because when women don't rely solely on themselves, magic happens. You see that even from an economic perspective. Last summer there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that said women owned the economy. The Barbie movie came out, Beyoncé was touring, Taylor Swift was touring, and what happened was that women were doing all these things together — literally together — and that drove up the sales of all three of those things and made women the primary driving economic force of that summer.

I say that because we see it with mud runs and so many different things — women have this phenomenal spirit when they do things together. Yet when it comes to investing, so many women are doing it alone. There's a stark difference between what we see as success when they do it together versus what so many women are actually doing in their lives. They don't have neighbors who are investing. They ask their mother, and their mother says it's a horrible time, interest rates are high. So we have so many people in our lives who are not actually supporting us.

It's always a good time to invest if you're smart about the right approach, but I don't ask my mother about investing — I go to the women in my Mastermind and ask what they think of X, Y, and Z. So I see this dichotomy: women actually thrive when they're doing things together, yet we just haven't brought that same energy to investing. That's exactly what we're doing with InvestHER — not just buying properties together, but literally supporting each other and saying, I'm analyzing this deal, what do you guys see? Is it a good time in this market? Maybe I should try something different. That's the shift that's happening, and success and magic follow when that happens, especially at our conference when women are doing deals together and connecting. It's called the women's multiplier effect — and there's a lot of not just energy around it, but actual economic force, as we saw very clearly last summer.

Leah: I remember reading headlines about the Taylor Swift effect and how she caused an uplift in the whole domestic economy — super fascinating. And my seven-year-old just had a Taylor Swift themed party this weekend, so I'm a big Swifty over here.

Liz: Oh my God, we were singing songs, we had a karaoke machine — it was great!

Leah: It's interesting you spoke about the relationship with other women in a Mastermind and learning from one another. I was really fortunate that my mother was my role model when it came to investing — I actually bought my first rental property with her a couple years out of college. Without that, a community like InvestHER would have been a phenomenal resource, because I really didn't see it anywhere else. I remember thinking, wow, there's so much to learn — it was my first duplex, two years out of college, so many new things. I'm curious what your advice would be for others looking to take on their first rental property, maybe before they've gotten involved in a community, who are just trying to figure out those first steps to be successful in real estate.

Liz: The biggest thing — and I wish I had done it better but I've learned as I've gone along — is to really zone in on what your superpower is when it comes to investing. Obviously you're investing for some financial gain — whether it's generational wealth, retirement planning, cash flow, or bringing down a high taxable income through writeoffs and depreciation, all those phenomenal things real estate provides. But beyond that, I think it's really helpful to know what side of the coin you're naturally gravitated toward, because there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

Some people thrive because they're so good at managing budgets and timelines and they love renovating. Others love finding deals and are less interested in the management side. Know thyself, and deploy yourself accordingly. Ask yourself: am I more on the front end, finding deals, and I need partners or a team to help me manage things? Or am I great at managing and once I get a property I'm really good at putting systems in place? Real estate investing is not as simple as buying a stock and seeing the return — you are more active in it, and it's an asset that has multiple facets, both operational and creative.

You need all types to be effective, but you can't be all things, so you need to know your sweet spot personally and figure out how to automate, outsource, or build a team around you. That doesn't necessarily mean bringing on employees — you can bring on team members who are paid on commission, who are aligned with your goals but bring something different to the table. If you're a private person who doesn't like talking to homeowners, you want an aggressive realtor on your team who can hustle.

I think what slowed our growth, mine and my husband's, is that we were not good on the operations side and that stifled us because we tried to be. When you try to be something you're not, you don't go as fast or as far as you want. We were able to quadruple our unit count and the size of our portfolio when we brought the right people in and partnered with the right people. When it was just the two of us, we grew steadily but slowly.

Leah: That's really interesting. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses — I'm curious how you found those right partners that you knew you could trust and rely on. How do you vet those partners? How do you know they're the right ones for you?

Liz: We actually have a whole partnership guide — Andresa and I put it together because so many women want a step-by-step resource. It's a free resource and I can share it with you after, Leah, to share with anyone listening. But really, you want alignment in values, goals, philosophy, and integrity — those foundational pieces. And then you want diversity — different personalities, different skills, and different types of experience.

In general, if you're more task-oriented and detail-oriented and just want to get things done, it's great to have a big-picture person who's more relationship-driven. If you're a visionary who loves ideas but doesn't want to execute them, you really need someone who can say, now we need to do this. Me and my husband are actually more similar, and I think that stifled our growth — I ended up becoming more of the operator, not because I was great at it, but because I looked around and he wasn't going to do it. When he brought in new partners for our syndication business, that really helped us propel forward. At the same time, I started InvestHER with Andresa, who is very different from me — very complementary but very different — and both businesses grew when we did that.

So I'd say the diversity you want is in personality, skills, and experience.

Leah: That makes a ton of sense. Taking a step back and looking at the InvestHER community, I'm curious if there are any specific trends you've seen — constant challenges or opportunities — especially for those looking to juggle their careers, family, and investing.

Liz: The biggest thing — we actually read this book called Boundary Boss by Terri Cole, who is going to be one of the speakers at InvestHER Con. What we're finding is that entrepreneurial women want all of it, and then they realize they can't do it all themselves. The need to automate, outsource, and get help — both at home and at work — increases as you play a bigger game. But that's a transition, because we've been taught that doing it all is a badge of honor. That image of women has to shift philosophically. It's not a helpful image.

The first place for it to shift is at home. If you're looking to build a business, you have a full-time job, you want to start investing, and you have kids, it starts to feel so overwhelming that women are just like, I'm out. I actually did this exercise with my husband where we did an audit of our household — all the things that have to happen, from cooking to buying groceries to everything — and I was doing about 95% of it. I've been married 17 years, we have open communication, a pretty healthy marriage, and yet that was the situation.

My point in sharing this is that until we really started to delineate and have a real conversation about what needs to happen in the household — he's growing a business, I'm growing a business and a community, these are our passions — we needed to let go of things at home, figure out who owns what, and more importantly, I don't want to have to think about it. Because it's the mental load that women deal with. It's not so much the doing — it's that they're thinking for everyone. That's got to stop because it's too much.

Those are the conversations we have with a lot of the women in our community who are running multiple businesses. It's deeper than just how to find their next deal — it's about trying to live a life they actually want. The guilt, the self-worth — moving through that and giving women a safe space to do that is what we stand for. We had a woman at a regional event who came up to me, said she was a nurse with four kids, working full-time, also had four rentals — and then she just took a breath and started crying. I didn't even say anything. I can't give myself that much credit — it was just the space to talk about her stuff. You could just tell she had no space anywhere else. Someone asks how you're doing and you just lose it because you're not really staying true to how you actually are.

So I think it's about being true to who you are, not doing it all, asking who you need to rely on, and what you can let go of. Creating that space lets you ask, what do I want more of? What do I want less of?

Leah: So much of what you said resonates with me. Just having that safe space, taking that moment to stop and think — how am I doing, really? I'm curious, you mentioned that story from the community — what other success stories have surfaced in your engagement with the women in InvestHER? From new landlords to seasoned investors, how have you seen people grow over time?

Liz: There are so many, and probably so many more that I don't even know about. What's really neat is that women are not just supporting each other as cheerleaders — real accountability is happening. Women are staying accountable to their goals, and this true accountability and support network has occurred on both a Meetup level and online.

I had a woman at one of our meetups who stood up when we were introducing ourselves and said, I've been to a lot of meetups, I've been wanting to invest for many years, I'm going through a divorce, my husband told me I'd never be a good investor, but I'm not listening to him. I'm here to get the support I need so I can make my dreams come true and leave a property or two — or more — to my kids. And everyone started clapping. We didn't even know this woman. That's the kind of community we have — this shared experience where you don't need to have known someone for a long time.

I've seen relationships get saved. I've seen rental income goals get achieved. I've seen partnerships form. I've seen women retire from jobs they did not want to be doing anymore to go all in on investing and buying property. It's about the lifestyle, about being who you want to be — not just the number of doors. You can own two properties or a million and not be achieving what's truly important to you. It's not about the number of doors.

I had a woman tell me, it's like my Advisory Board. She said, I'm not worried about buying any property because I know I'm going to bring all of you with me. Whatever decision I have to make from offer to acquisition, I know I'll find the answer because all of you are going to jump in and help me. Women are actually more aggressive on their buying because they have people behind them to help them.

Leah: Super powerful. I love the notion of an Advisory Board — the personal board of directors, the people you lean on to help you make decisions in your personal life. I love that it translates so well into real estate. One last thing I want to touch on — you mentioned investing for your children and building generational wealth, which I believe is a lot of the reason women get into real estate. I'm curious how that ties into investing strategy, protecting your risk, and making sure those assets are secure over the lifetime of those properties.

Liz: That's a great question. I think I was more interested in acquiring property when I started than in protecting it, and I think a lot of women are probably more naturally inclined toward protecting what they have and leveraging it. It is about protecting — because you could have a rental property where you're underleveraged from an insurance perspective, and if something happens, all that income and leverage you have in the property could go away.

For a lot of the women we serve — I'd say the 40-and-older demographic who are looking to aggressively acquire — it's actually about protecting and leveraging and maximizing what they have. I can't stress that enough. I wish I had thought about it more when I was younger, but when you're young you're more focused on taking risk and trying new things.

I think if people step back and have a few properties and actually maximize those properties — from a property management perspective, from an insurance perspective, from a financial leverage perspective — are they getting the most return out of their rental income? Maybe it's time to go from a long-term rental to a short-term rental, or make some other strategic shift. Maximizing from a technical income perspective and from managing your expenses and protecting the asset — protecting can then lead to leveraging, and that's the key. There are so many ways you could be leveraging what you already have rather than just going out to get more.

We haven't bought a multifamily property since 2022 — the deals just haven't penciled out — so we've shifted our model to more of a fund where we're lending money out, and in terms of property, we're maximizing and leveraging what we have and making sure things are streamlined versus acquiring. I'm a big fan of that approach, and I think it will never go out of style, especially given the ups and downs of the market and the economy. There's always a good time to protect and manage your assets — it's never a bad time, and right now it's probably more important than ever.

Leah: Very well said — there's never a bad time to protect and leverage your property. I love that. Well, this has been super insightful, I could honestly keep picking your brain all day. I think it's just fantastic what you guys are doing, and we're very much looking forward to InvestHER Con coming up in June. For those looking for more information, where should we direct our listeners?

Liz: We have a lot of free resources on our website and free ways to get involved in our community. If you go to The Real Estate InvestHER website, there's so much information there. One of the simplest ways I'd recommend is to go to the events page — therealestateInvestHER.com/events. We do two free webinars a month, and InvestHER Con is on that same page. We have some phenomenal thought leaders coming at it from a real estate perspective, a business perspective, and a self-care perspective. Join us on one of these free events, get involved, start showing up, and get what you want out of this endeavor. We're here for you.

Leah: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Liz — it's been great chatting with you, really appreciate you being on today.

Liz: Thank you so much for having me.