Allow us to introduce ourselves

Welcome to our blog! We are Charleston Tru Homebuyers.  We are a husband-and-wife team working in Charleston, South Carolina investing in distressed homes and rehabbing them to reinvigorate neighborhoods in our city. It’s our goal to leave the areas we work in better for those who live there. 

We’ve been doing this for two years now and we want to use this blog to talk about the projects we’re working on, how we invest in real estate, our past work, plus all the steps that we take when deciding to invest in a house successfully.  Really, the whole path to house investment and rehabilitation.  We have done all the homework, made the mistakes, and we want to show others how to do what we do. Working and investing in real estate can be daunting, but we have found it to be so rewarding. 

Now to introduce ourselves so you can follow along in our story from the very beginning.  Nicole is the organized, type A half, from Pennsylvania and Khalil is the creative, hardworking, left brained half from Ohio. We met in 2000 something in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and fell in love. We spent days at the beach, nights bartending together, later nights playing with his band, Bret Hush. Slowly falling in love with each other.

Fast forward a few fun years, and a proposal later, and in 2010 we decided to have our wedding on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Little did we know that piece of paradise would change our lives forever. Puerto Viejo is the quintessential Caribbean beach town with palm trees, great surf breaks, and laidback salty people. It is the last town before Panama so it gets lots of travelers and wash-ashores. 

Khalil loved it right away. Nicole, was not as sure.  After a little convincing and a lot of enjoying the town, we bought bar and hostel with Kahlil’s brother in law, his now wife, and two friends. We named it Lazy Mon. It was the perfect beach bar. Right on the water, it sat across from a great surf break, it had gorgeous sunset views almost every night, and great little tidal pools surrounded by coral to swim in. Happy hour was every day from four till six, and live music played every night as the sun went down.

On the second floor over the bar, we created a traveler’s hostel, Lazy Loft. We had people  come from all over the world to stay there. It featured two dorms and four private rooms and overlooked the Caribbean Sea. The hammocks on the wrap around porch were the perfect place to relax and unwind while looking at the blue waters. 

We worked hard and found some time to play too. In those ten years we learned A LOT of lessons about running a business, working with people, and working together as a couple. It is these lessons that have helped us to be so successful in house flipping today. 

A few years after moving to Puerto Viejo, while running the bar and hostel,  we had our son Makai. Watching him in such a wild place for his first few years was unmatched, the perfect place for a little boy to grow up. We walked through the jungle to get to the beach, spent long days surfing and playing soccer. He went to elementary school in Costa Rica so he is bilingual. Hearing him speak with his friends in both English and Spanish still warms our hearts and is a skill he will have forever. 

We also bought our first piece of land there, technically the first project of Charleston Tru Homebuyers. It was about three miles down the road from our bar, on a huge hill in Punta Uva.  It was beautiful rainforest property with one old house. We had big plans for it, but we decided to move its sale, which allowed us to start our first project in Charleston. (More on that story later!) It’s funny how life works out sometimes. 

We made amazing friends who we still are close with today. It was a true paradise for us.  But, like anything there were down sides. Long days, running a busy bar and restaurant in a different country all while raising a family and making sure the hostel guests were happy, just became too much.  As Kai got older, and we had been running the bar for ten years, we decided it was time to make a change. Nicole was ready to move back, the boys weren’t so sure, but looking back, we are so happy we made the leap back to the United States.   

In the start of 2020, mid pandemic after living in the Caribbean of Costa Rica we moved to Charleston, South Carolina. We had always loved the state, plus Khalil’s brother and his family (who we’d partnered with to open Lazy Mon) had moved there 5 years earlier. It was time to get the family back together! We were so excited for a new adventure back where it all started. Moving with three dogs, everything we owned, and Kai, would have been a challenge no matter when we did it, but doing it during a pandemic? It added some extra layers and complications. We moved four times in that first year alone, but we made it, relatively unscathed.

Nicole had always wanted to invest in real estate. We had lived Khalil’s dream in the Caribbean successfully, but it was time to take a chance at doing something else. Nicole is the planner and the driving force behind the business. She researches and figures out all the little things that make us go. We had big plans in Costa Rica for our property, but the timing wasn’t right. This would be a chance to try it in Charleston. 

We even teamed up with Khalil’s brother in law, Abasi who works as a real estate agent and his wife, Krysta who is a marketing whiz and has a great design eye on some of our projects. It really has been a full circle moment coming back and working together!

As of August 2022, we have completed seven projects with two more currently in the works. It has been an amazing ride! We have done quick one-month projects, a remote renovation to short term rental, full renovations of distressed homes, and more.  And we want to share all our stories and missteps along the way. 

If you have thought about investing in real estate but were not sure how to do it, this is the blog for you. If you wondered how house flipping works, this is for you. If you just want to follow along and see what we dive into next, keep reading. We love our journey, and we are so excited to share it with you.