From Sleeping in His Car to Real Estate Millions

Manny Khoshbin was born in Iran. According to the BiggerPockets interview, his father moved the family out of the country about two weeks before Manny's 14th birthday so that he would not be drafted into the war with Iraq, which called up boys at 14. The family arrived in the United States in 1985 with a little over 2,000 dollars. A gas station job his father had been promised was no longer available, and Khoshbin spoke no English and knew no one. He says the family lived in a car for a couple of months, six people in a 1972 Datsun station wagon.

He started working young. He sold items he had found outside a dumpster at a swap meet, a business he and his brother ran for about two years, then worked at Kmart. At about 18 he started his own wholesale business, which was shut down by the health department because he had not known a permit was needed. He lost around 20,000 dollars on a gas station deal after the loan broker turned out to be a fraud.

Fortune's account places his time sleeping in his car after several failed ventures and a period out of work. He then earned a real estate licence, worked as a loan officer, and started a mortgage company, and later a company buying distressed and bank-owned properties. His first property was a bank-owned home bought in 1996 for 142,000 dollars with about 1,800 dollars down, which he sold a year later for 80,000 dollars more.

Khoshbin now oversees multiple commercial real estate companies. He says he has done close to one billion dollars in deals, and that he has been close to broke twice in 35 years. He bought his parents a ranch and, more recently, a house in Orange Park Acres.