Real Estate Millionaire A PRI L Crossley

Looking to pass some time on vacation about 20 years ago, April Crossley picked up a book her soon-to-be husband brought entitled The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth

Though the longtime respiratory therapist had zero interest in real estate at the time, things got real really fast.

“The book is all about how you can buy houses and rent them out to people and then they’re paying the mortgage for you,” Crossley says. “And I thought the book was lying. There’s no way people do this. Why would you pay off someone else’s mortgage for them? And my husband looked at me and said, ‘That’s exactly what you’re doing.’”

A renter at the time, Crossley had never looked at it that way before. Her husband, who had two rental properties in Reading at the time, helped Crossley buy her first house.

“And then I just became obsessed,” she recalls.

She started taking classes and devouring books about real estate investing. She and her husband began flipping houses with the help of private lenders — people who want to invest in house-flipping without performing the manual labor on the units. And then they just kept buying.

Eventually, she began making more money in her side gig than at her full-time hospital position. Coupled with a rising level of stress on the job, it spurred Crossley to reward herself with an unforgettable birthday gift.

“For my 35th birthday I gave my resignation and I gave up my healthcare license,” says Crossley, now 45. “I decided I didn’t want any safety net. I was either going to succeed in real estate or I wasn’t. So, I didn’t renew my license and quote-unquote retired into real estate.”

That move put the Mohnton resident on her way to completing the transition “from a teenage mom on food stamps to a real estate millionaire.”

Today she owns three companies: Berks County House Buyers, a house-flipping company; Crossley Properties LLC, which owns numerous rental properties; and the interestingly named Lazy Girl Consulting, a company that teaches how to invest in real estate.

“It’s not because I’m lazy,” she says. “I want people to know that you don’t have to have all the pieces to invest in real estate. When I started, I had zero knowledge. I couldn’t even tell you what a hot-water heater was. It’s not about knowing everything; it’s about having the right people in place that do know.”

Lazy Girl has numerous free options, including a YouTube channel overflowing with videos and a weekly Q&A session on Zoom. The company also offers a video course for people who are new to real estate investing and a more involved option that includes marketing and hands-on assistance with purchasing property.

Crossley and her husband own apartment buildings in Berks County and a mobile home park and shared housing in Tennessee. The shared housing is rented to a nonprofit that helps men leaving prison restart their lives. The beneficiary of private lending early in her career, she now offers it to others who are getting started investing in real estate.

“It’s important to me to do projects that have a purpose,” she says. “When I left health care my biggest fear was that I was helping people and making a difference in their lives, and I felt like when I was transitioning to real estate that I would not be able to do that. But I was surprised at how many ways I could still help people.”