Here’s a New York real estate fantasy. You own a two-family house. You live in one unit, rent out the other, and the tenant covers your mortgage.
Now here’s the New York reality. You’re refreshing listings at midnight, doing math that never works, and wondering if a down payment is a myth invented by your parents’ generation.
Mike Orakpo thinks you’re looking at the wrong map. “When you compare Cleveland to LA or New York, the difference is just insane,” said Mike Orakpo, founder of InvestorIQ, a firm that helps investors buy rental and renovation property in the Midwest.
How insane? When he started buying in Cleveland, duplexes in decent parts of the city were going for about $50,000. In New York, that won’t cover the closing costs on a lot of places. By his math, a property that runs about $600,000 in a city like Denver has an equivalent in Ohio for around $105,000. The research backs him up. A Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies analysis of the 100 largest U.S. metros found that a typical single-family home in the New York area cost about 7.3 times the median household income in 2024. Only three big markets came in under three times income, and two of them were in Ohio: Toledo and Akron.
The $420,000 lesson
Mike Orakpo didn’t come to the Midwest out of theory. He came out of frustration. He bought a duplex in the Dallas–Fort Worth area for about $420,000 and put 20% down, close to $50,000 of his own money. Then he waited for the checks. Some months, the place netted him less than $200. “I put all this money down, and the property isn’t netting nearly enough,” he said. “Nobody has $50,000 every few months to keep reloading on properties. There’s just no way to scale like that.”
By then he had been around the business long enough to know the problem wasn’t him. It was the market. He started in 2015 for a brokerage with more than a dozen offices. Then he built a short-term rental operation of more than 30 units across 12 to 13 states, including New York, California and Florida. He watched investors in those cities struggle with the same thing he did: everything costs too much.
The rental business taught him something else, too. Every time a homeowners association or city council changed the rules on short-term rentals, his business took the hit. “It puts your business in somebody else’s hands,” he said. He wanted something he actually owned.
So he went to Ohio, where the numbers worked. Other investors noticed. They started calling him for help, and the team he’d built to find his own deals became InvestorIQ.
Cheap is easy. Far is hard.
Here’s the catch nobody puts in the listing photos. That $50,000 duplex is about 460 miles from your apartment. You don’t know the neighborhood. You don’t know a plumber. You definitely don’t know whether the contractor you just wired $30,000 to is going to show up on Monday, or ever. “The number one reason people are scared to invest out of state is that they’re not local,” Mike said. “They don’t know where their money is going. They don’t trust contractors. People can run off with their money, and they’re not there to see it.”
InvestorIQ’s pitch is that it can be there for you. The company keeps an insured team on the ground. Properties are vetted and appraised before any money moves. Renovations go to licensed, insured contractors. And the renovation budget doesn’t go straight into anyone’s pocket. It sits in escrow until the work is checked. “The money doesn’t just get handed over to the contractors,” Mike Orakpo said. “It goes into escrow, and the work is verified before anything is released.”
“Wait, what’s the catch?”
This is the part where investors narrow their eyes. For qualified clients, InvestorIQ funds the entire purchase price and the renovation. Clients pay closing costs instead of a down payment. Mike Orakpo knows how that sounds. He says a lot of people hear “100% funding” and immediately assume it’s too good to be true. Good. Keep that instinct. Then put it to work.
Ask who does the appraisal. Ask how the escrow works and who signs off on the renovation. Ask to see the full cost breakdown on a real property, not a brochure. A legitimate operation will answer all of it. And remember that “no down payment” isn’t the same as “free.” You’ll still pay closing costs. You’ll carry costs while the place gets fixed up or sits waiting for a tenant. Run your own numbers, and keep enough cash to survive a bad month.
Be smarter
Mike says the company’s name is the whole philosophy. “We’re bringing the IQ part of investing,” he said, “so people can invest smartly, remotely.” You may never own a brownstone. Most of us won’t. But the dream of being a landlord doesn’t have to die in a one-bedroom in Bushwick. It might just need a Cleveland address.