Flipping Junkie Podcast with Danny Johnson: Recent Episodes
Danny Johnson
Flipping Junkie is a podcast for people addicted to flipping houses and real estate investing. Danny and Melissa Johnson started flipping houses over 15 years ago and have chronicled their journey to help house flippers both new and experienced. Subscribe for weekly episodes featuring interviews with people just getting started as well as big name investors like Brandon Turner of Bigger Pockets and Justin Williams from House Flipping HQ. The podcast covers a range of topics like what is working today to find great deals for flipping, how to properly analyze deals for flipping, renting and owner financing, determining repair costs, finding contractors and managing rehab crews, what improvements to make and how to quickly sell your houses for big profits and so much more. Don’t worry, we won’t leave out the serious mistakes that you need to avoid when get starting and growing your real estate investing business. Join Danny Johnson to get the inside scoop on how to get started and how to stay successful to create true financial freedom for yourself and your family.
Rod Wilson from Anchor Loans is with us today to help us thinking like a lender to get the best financing for our deals. This is especially important with the tightening up of lending that has started. Rod says they are continuing to be somewhat aggressive with lending which is great news for real estate investors.
In this episode, discover:
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How to adjust and navigate through the new lending environment
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Ideas on how to get the best financing
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How to think like a lender, and underwrite deals accordingly
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What most lenders want to hear and see from an investor/borrower
Justin Treadwell has been a part-time real estate investor since 2003. He went full-time in 2020 and now does over 40 deals per year. Listen in to find out what changes his business needed to undergo for him to ramp up to generating more leads and doing more deals from those leads. Justin buys houses so that you can sell your Knoxville, TN house fast at https://ReliantHomeBuyersTN.com
When we waste leads, we lose money...lot's of it! Discover the 5 ways seller leads are wasted by real estate investors and wholesalers on the daily. Be sure to take advantage of the 75% holiday sale for your first month of Forefront CRM. Visit https://forefrontcrm.com/pricing to find out more.
Use coupon code HOLIDAY75 to take advantage of our holiday special for Forefront CRM to get 75% off! Https://forefrontcrm.com/pricing In this episode, Danny discusses the changes happening in his market that are coming to most places. The shift is going from sellers market to buyers market. He covers 3 critical areas of our business that need to be addressed so that we can make our money when we buy houses. He also discusses the special offer for Forefront CRM to help you to ensure these 3 critical phases of your business operations are covered and automated. Check out a demo of Forefront CRM at https://forefrontcrm.com/demo and then use coupon code HOLIDAY75 to get 75% off!
Colin Spivey shares how he's increased his deal flow by improving his response rates using automated follow up.
Danny shares with us how he’s always waited too long to hire. If you are feeling pulled in a thousand different directions and have to be the one to make a thousands decisions every day, you’re going to feel overwhelmed and burned out. You are going to make decisions quickly, without weighing the facts. You’re going to get frustrated. That frustration will likely cause problems because it will come out sideways after being buried for a long time. How do we avoid this? First, we need to realize that we cannot do it all ourselves. We need help. We need to hire people to take some work off our plates.
Brent Daniels from Talk To People (TTP) shares with us his proactive method to getting deals through cold calling. Find out how to overcome hesitation to talk to you as a real estate investor and ALL 6 responses you'll get when making cold calls.
Jason Lavender joins Danny on the podcast to give an update since his last appearance in 2018. Jason has made the transition to delegating tasks to the appropriate people so that he can focus on guiding the business and preparing for any change in the market.
Steve Trang joins Danny to discuss what active listening 2.0 is all about. If you're looking to improve your close ratio, this episode is a must. The insights into how to dig deep into the true reason for selling for each motivated seller is priceless.
Are you wasting time every month, week, and day dealing with symptoms of bigger problems in your real estate investing business? It's time to cut the crap and get to the core of the issue. Knock over the big domino that drops hundreds of small dominos.
Greg Helbeck joins us to share the exact steps he takes to take a wholesale deal and absolutely push the boundaries of what he gets for it. This is truly fascinating and a game changer. He and Danny also discuss what it takes to increase the lead to deal conversion rate so you can do more deals with fewer leads. Danny shares that he is putting on a free online workshop to show how improve your lead to deal conversion rate with a strategy shift that took him and his team to landing 1 deal for every 5 leads! You can register for the free workshop at https://flippingjunkie.com/workshop
Join Danny for a live workshop at https://forefrontcrm.com/workshop to find out how he took his business from doing 1 out of ever 45 leads becoming a deal to 1 out of just 5 leads becoming a deal.
In this episode, Danny shares how he went from working really hard but not feeling like he was making much progress and what he learned to overcome that. He is now passionate again about what he is doing because he has a very clear vision of where he is ultimately headed.
Paul Moore from Wellings Capital shares with us how he went from being an entrepreneur chasing shiny objects to becoming on expert on commercial doing multifamily and self-storage. He goes into detail on several methods to move into self-storage along with risks and mistakes to be careful to avoid. He also mentions a cool app you can use to determine if an area is oversaturated with storage units.
In this episode, Danny gets interviewed by Bill Allen on his 7 Figure Flipping podcast. Get an in-depth look at Danny's start in this business and what characteristics helped him to grow his own flipping business.
Ben Gaines out of Greensboro, NC shares with us the massive traction he has gained in his first year of business. This guy has bought deals off vehicle decals, TV commercials, PPC, Driving for Dollars. He shares it all. Listen in and learn how to crank up your own real estate investing business in no time.
Nick Aalerud shares with us the mistakes he's made with large multi-family, run in with the SEC and luxury house flip. The beautiful thing about his story is how he was able to move beyond those massive set backs to be very successful as a real estate investor. I absolutely loved his approach to getting seller testimonials EVEN IF YOU DO NOT BUY THEIR HOUSE!
Brett Snodgrass from Simple Wholesaling shares with us his 4 pillars of freedom: 1 Money 2 Time 3 Sanity 4 Purpose. Find out how he structures his decisions based on these pillars to the freedom to have the life he wants.
Jay Conner shares with us how he found the answer to where to get the money in private lenders. His approach to finding and working with private lenders has changed the game and allowed him to be a part of over 400 deals. Find out how to get his book free!
Mike Hambright, the founder of the Investor Fuel mastermind, Investor Machine direct mail marketing agency, and host of the Flip Nerd Podcast joins us today to talk about mastering Direct Mail in 2021 and beyond.
Randy Lawrence is known as a veteran real estate investor with decades of experience with single- and multi-family properties as well as a transformational community leader and church founder. After receiving a degree in Finance with a minor in Economics, Randy began his career as a traditional wealth manager. Randy understands finance and investing strategies in the broadest sense. Randy previously held Series 7 and 65 licenses from the National Association of Securities Dealers as a Securities Dealer and Registered Investment Advisor. Randy worked in the Money Management sector for fifteen years and owned his own company which he sold in 2006. Ultimately Randy determined that real estate was the ideal investment vehicle for his own portfolio, and early on (over sixteen years ago), he began partnering with other investors, to their mutual benefit. Today, Randy oversees a real estate portfolio of $250MM in multi-family assets and is on track to double these holdings in the next two years.
Lauren Hardy talks about her difficult start in investing in Southern California and her transition to easier deals in Nashville and then into Oklahoma City. Find out how she is able to successfully wholesale real estate in other markets without living there!
Daran Olaleye shares with us how he got started, took massive action, made mistakes, failed, came back and found the way to what is working for him to achieve financial freedom and live life on his terms.
Bill Allen shares with us how he's been able to achieve so much so quickly. We dig into how action produces results where as overthinking jams us up and causes analysis paralysis. Find out how you can get free recordings of past Flip Hacking Live events as well!
Chad Carson is an entrepreneur, writer, and teacher who used real estate investing to reach financial independence before the age of 37. Soon after he traveled with his wife and two kids to live in Cuenca, Ecuador for 17 months. Chad also wrote a best-selling book Retire Early With Real Estate and hosts the popular podcast Real Estate & Financial Independence. When not writing about himself in 3rd person, vying for the silliest dad award, playing pick-up basketball, or publishing in-depth posts and podcasts at coachcarson.com, Chad enjoys volunteering with a local non-profit he co-founded to create a network of walking and bike paths in his hometown of Clemson, SC. In this episode, Chad shares with us what he means by Do What Matters. He realized what he was after was time currency more than anything to create the ideal day he longed for. This episode is full of great tips on getting started, taking action, finding a mentor, working with a money partner, etc. It's got everything! Enjoy!
Sean Pan shares with us the ins and outs of working with hard money loans. He also shares the special 30 year hard money loans his company is now offering.
Danny shares why he started a new podcast geared towards investors that are currently running the business without a team. Check out the new podcast called Braver on iTunes or at braver.fm
Mike Simmons, a veteran house flipper and wholesaler, shares insights into the fears that inevitably come up when going from doing it all yourself to building a small team. Overcoming initial business starting fears is one thing. That leads to success. But we can get complacent in that success and get focused on only continuing that same success instead of transforming our business to get to the next level. Why does the next level matter? If you don't grow, you get bogged down in always having to do everything. That will only be fun for so long. If you want to steer your ship, you've got to overcome the fears that come with getting to the next level.
Jaren Barnes is a real estate educator who spends the majority of his time serving the community at Retipster.com. Additionally, he runs a full-scale land flipping business, house hacks and has interest in vacation rentals and long term buy-and-hold. Jaren got his start in real estate doorknocking pre-forecloses, briefly worked at BiggerPockets.com, was responsible for selling 25-30 properties per month at Simple Wholesaling, and has interviewed hundreds of real estate, business and financial experts across multiple podcasts. In this episode, Jaren Barnes shares with us what was causing him to hold on for too long before he got to the growth phase of his land investing business.
Alex Pardo explains how he went from burned out and doing everything himself for about 7 years in the business to building a team that has taken over. He now has the time to work on the business so that it keeps working for him rather than him having to work for it. This episode is full of gold and I highly recommend it to anyone that either doesn't have a team or has a team but still feels like the ball is being dropped.
Erik Bee joins Danny on the podcast this week. Erik is the owner and operator of Real Estate Funnel Systems and UltimateSellerAppointment.com. He's been the industry for years and has had huge roles in Fortune Builders and CT Homes. In this episode he explains why lead management is the most important aspect of building and growing your real estate investing business. Generating viable leads is important, but if you don't dial in converting those leads to deals, it won't matter. This episode is full of gold!
In this episode Danny shares a story about how it took 8 years of follow up to land a home run deal. He then delves into the perceived versus the REAL problems in your real estate investing business. These are the problems keeping you from deal consistency and building a team.
John Martinez is a sales giant in the real estate investing industry. I've known John for 6 years now. What he teaches completely transformed our real estate investing business...helping us get to where we were putting one out of every 5 leads under contract!!! This episode is full of so many gold nuggets, you'll need a bigger wheel barrow.
Danny shares his single question that can make the biggest difference in you moving past winging it in your business to building a consistent real estate investing business that supports and awesome team.
In this episode, Jerryll Noorden and Jess share with us how they add unique touches to make their rehabs stand out. This allows them to get multiple offers on the houses they flip. They also share with us about their new YouTube channel called That Flipping Couple. Enjoy!
In this episode, Laurel shares with Danny how she focuses on serving motivated sellers even if she doesn't get the deal. Give in order to receive. This is how she has been so successful for so many years. Lots to learn here! Laurel Sagen is a Sacramento based author, entrepreneur, and founder of Laurel Buys Houses. Laurel first began flipping homes in 1999 and has continued to expand her business and team over the years. Today, Laurel and her team have flipped over 1,000 homes and her work has been featured on HGTV and multiple home tours.
In this episode, Adam and Danny talk about the importance of making multiple attempts to reach motivated sellers in order to get the deal. Adam is an entrepreneur and the founder of Smarter Contact which is a popular sms lead generation tool for investors. Adam started his career as an investor for 8 years buying and flipping 500+ homes. Adam currently lives in Europe building his software and managing his development team for Smarter Contact.
In this episode, Tim Randle shares the deets on what One Deal Away means to him and why it matters. If you're struggling to get that first deal and finding doubts creeping in, you'll want to hear this episode!
On this episode John Dwyer discusses how most financial planning is broken. Yeah, just plain broken. It doesn't work to really create and grow wealth. There are opportunity losses by many of the tried and true and heavily promoted forms of investment. Listen in to find out how to look at the whole picture so that you actually can retire at the standard of living you want.
On today's episode we cover an awesome topic! Blair noticed that some investors would generate great deals from leads his company was generating for them, while others didn't. Why? The leads were virtually the same. We talk about what the winning investors do that help them convert leads into deals. This one will knock your socks off!! Blair Halver is the founder of Dealbot, a motivated seller marketing company based near Charlotte, NC. He's been investing in real estate since 2007 and specializes in doing creative financing deals nationwide. He's also trained and coached over 500 real estate investors to success using his "Pipeline Method" of creative acquisition and disposition.
On this podcast, Danny interviews branding expert Stace Caseria. Tough questions are asked on both sides to understand why branding is sooooo important for real estate investors and how to go about properly branding your business. Enjoy the show!
Week 8 of the follow along series of podcast episodes where Danny is showing what is doing to generate motivated seller leads and deals!
In this special episode I talk with my good friend, Mike Simmons, about Flip Hacking Live 2020. Make sure to listen all the way through (or at least skip to the end) because I share with you how to get tickets for dirt cheap AND GET ALL PREVIOUS FLIP HACKING LIVE RECORDINGS SINCE 2016 AS A BONUS. We discuss the power of this transformative event. You do not want to miss it!
Another installment on the follow along journey where Danny is documenting the building up of his house buying business. This week he talks about making a hire for someone to do lead management (cold calls, inbound calls, lead intake, research, direct mail management). He also discusses his story of getting started and how it wasn't an easy thing to do. Check it out in this week's episode! https://flippingjunkie.com/185
Danny shares what's happened over the last week in his getting back into buying houses. Issues with closing prevented him from getting the deal wrapped up that he put under contract several weeks ago. He also discusses how easy it is to procrastinate and do things within our comfort zone rather than doing the things that are going to move the needle the most. It's a quick episode but with a powerful message. Enjoy!
In this week's episode I share a couple stories related to maintaining control over a deal when necessary. I also share what it means to have patience and belief that deals will come. Forcing things to happen rather than allowing things to happen is the opposite of what we want. Make sense of that! :)
Paul Lizell has been buying houses nationwide and coaching for years. He knows this industry inside and out. In this episode, Paul shares his incredibly creative auction website buying strategy. He also shares how he routinely buys from real estate wholesalers and off the MLS. Two things I always believed were too competitive to buy from these days. Not true!!! Paul is buying from these sources often. He shares how in today's episode!
Yo! Follow Along (https://flippingjunkie.com/followalong) and see how week 3 went. I report on my KPI's and about the house I put under contract. I also go into showing how I'm finding owners' of vacant houses phone numbers and entering them into FlipPilot to help me manage my prospecting.
Got my marketing processes in place and ready to start skip tracing and calling probate and driving for dollars prospects that I've put into FlipPilot. This week I got 2 motivated seller leads from my LeadPropeller website. 1 didn't have enough equity and the other...that one accepted my offer! The numbers work out better to fix and flip this one. I'll let you know more details after I close on it! Follow along by visiting: https://flippingjunkie.com/followalong
In this episode, I'm discussing my "To Do's" for the week along with how I chose them. Last week was full of overwhelm because I set myself up for failure in the number of items on my To Do list for my software business (LeadPropeller real estate investor websites and FlipPilot lead/deal management software). This required some reflection so that I could see why I felt it necessary to complete so many items. Was it because I lost focus and was spreading myself thin? Was it because I hadn't accomplished as much as I wanted to this far into this quarter? Was it because I was inadvertently shrinking the timeline because I need it all off my plate? Was it because I was afraid that if I didn't get it done things would all fall apart? These were great introspective questions to answer so that I could adjust my planning for this week. Remember, I'm excited to jump back into real estate investing, but I want to be able to completely enjoy the process while I do it. I know I have a full-time job right now with the software business so I'm not going to be spending every free waking hour on that and the house buying. Life can be lived and enjoyed even while accomplishing a lot. Listen or watch the episode to find out what came of the introspection and how I planned my week this week for success and enjoyment rather than overwhelm and disappointment.
Joe Mendoza is a rock star when it comes to real estate. He's been fascinated by real estate as early as when he was a teenager. While in high school he attended college classes to get his real estate license. He's done so much since then and now offers coaching. We cover a lot of ground in this episode with a thick focus on removing barriers to success. I loved this episode and I feel you will as well. Enjoy the show!
I'm putting it out there. Throwing down the gauntlet. In this episode, I'm sharing my goal for the rest of this year and through 2021 and what I'm going to do to attain it. And, I'm sharing the journey and invite you to join me!
I’m starting over real estate investing!!! And this time, I’m inviting you to join me on the adventure. Seriously! This is a chance for you to get a REAL look at what it’s like for a successful real estate investor that is… well… a bit rusty to navigate a market that has changed. Everything has to be relearned. This is a perfect opportunity to learn what works and doesn’t together. Why I am I doing this? What exactly will I be sharing? How can you be a part of this at no cost? Listen to this episode!
In this episode, Danny shares how as he's getting back into house buying, there has been overwhelm and analysis paralysis setting in. He gets into what's caused it and what he's doing to forge a path forward to create momentum. He's also hinting at some awesome news about the future of this podcast and FlippingJunkie in general.
Mike Simmons is the host of the Just Start Real Estate podcast and specializes in helping real estate investors get out of the endless education trap and to finally take action. He just released his new book, Level Jumping (which is pretty darn freaking good if I do say so myself). On this episode, Mike shares how the book helps to map out a proven growth strategy that covers many of the mistakes that so many of make as we build a team. Listen in and find out how to get the book absolutely free right now!
In this episode of the FlippingJunkie podcast, Doug Price shares how he took action without overly complicating things to jump right into this business! I love his story. He had fear but did it anyway. He didn't let fear cause him to get caught up in analysis paralysis. He sent letters out without fretting over all the wording. He just took the next action that needed to be taken each step along the way.
Danny is sharing how you can get FlipPilot 2.0 lead/deal management software for FREE! Find out what FlipPilot is, how it helps real estate investors, house flippers, wholesalers to turn more leads into deals, make more money and have more time. You will also find out how to get lead generation training for free as well as proven drip follow up message sequences that you can copy and paste. Listen in to find out more!
Special announcement in this podcast! Join Danny for a Zoom call to learn the 3 steps to creating your REI "machine" on Wednesday, March 27th at 10:00 am central: Get your zoom link here and find out more: https://flippilot.com/demo In this episode of the FlippingJunkie podcast, Danny talks about the #1 problem new and experienced investors experience that causes them to feel overwhelmed/stuck/frazzled/fried at the end of each and every day. As Danny jumps back into creating a real estate investing business from scratch, he has discovered the key to proper organization that allows house flippers/wholesalers/real estate investors to create "true" businesses. This organization allows us to enjoy the business and get what we truly set out to get by starting flipping houses: freedom of time, money, lifestyle, to be our own boss, all of it! Find out how by joining Danny for a Zoom call Wednesday, May 27th, at 10:00 am central time. Go here to register to get your Zoom link: https://flippilot.com/demo
Gary Ochoa went full-time in 2017. He focused on never giving up and pushing through to become consistent with generating leads and deals. He shares his storing of overcoming the challenges and growing his real estate investing business.
Don Chamberlin joins us on the show to discuss how he's setup an incredible system for his house flipping business to ensure no lead is ever left behind. He walks us through how he funnels all calls/texts/website leads/networking leads etc automatically into his FlipPilot system. Don's passion is creating the machine. That's why he got involved in real estate investing to begin with. He wanted something that he could build and then manage and tweak. Technology now allows him the ability to build a machine to ensure his house flipping business runs as efficiently as possible. Listen in to learn what's he put together and how it helps him.
Without being able to meet sellers at their homes how are we to determine what we can pay and buy houses? Jonathon and Johanna Federwisch buy nationally and already have processes in place for doing so. Check out hey they do it and make motivated sellers feel comfortable during the process.
Were you getting started flipping houses or real estate investing or wholesaling and then this crazy coronavirus (Covid-19) had to pop up and dash your hopes and dreams of financial freedom? Danny too was looking to get back into the day-to-day of buying/flipping/wholesaling houses and had to determine whether to sit it out or jump on the horse. He decided to go ahead and move forward with flipping homes. Here’s what he decided to do to get the ball rolling and help insure he limited his risk and chance of sleepless nights. He asked 8 of his close, highly experienced, real estate investing friends what 20% of the things they do produce 80% of their results in generating motivated seller leads for their house flipping business. He then asked them what changes they were making during this pandemic because of the Coronavirus.
In this episode Danny and Don Costa talk about what's happening right now with the Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic and its implications on the real estate market in these here United States. Danny brought Don on this episode because he's not acting like he knows what to expect. He's not preaching to do specifically X, Y, Z to take advantage of the situation. He's speaking intelligently about how to manage your finances and set yourself up to do as well as you can regardless of what happens.
In this episode Danny talks about the cosmic shit storm that was his life in 2019. From saying goodbye to $1,000,000 used to develop software he had to shut down to his divorce from Melissa. It's not all sob story though. Quite the contrary. Danny goes into powerful insights that he would not have had had Life/God not piled it on thick enough to make him surrender and see the Truth. Just another transformative moment in a life that is bringing about big change including a surprise related to real estate investing. Listen in and find out what Danny is going to do with the Flipping Junkie Podcast. Thanks for listening friends.
Erik Bee shares with us his method of closing more leads and creating killer deals with his iPad based comparison tool for making offers to motivated sellers.
This week’s episode of the FlippingJunkie podcast is a special one for a few different reasons! First, we get a much-anticipated update from Danny on the development and release of FlipPilot, and what you can expect from this awesome software. Then, Mike Newby joins Danny to discuss what he’s done in his business since he first appeared on the show back in 2017. Mike walks us through a few of his past deals and very openly shares his mistakes and the bad calls that were made throughout the process. He even walks us through the actual numbers for a deal and gives a ton of great advice on how you can avoid making the same mistakes (and so you can follow in his footsteps on the good stuff!). Mike also gets pretty honest with Danny when discussing his best practices for achieving the life that he set out to build when he first started investing in real estate. The two deep dive into Mike’s weekly goal setting practice which involves sitting down at the beginning of every week and laying out your schedule for yourself. It can be easy to fall out of our patterns when we’re the only ones holding ourselves accountable, but he shares tips on how you can combat this and stop fooling yourself. With the help of 10 introspective questions, Mike is finally starting to create the life that he saw for himself and his family. Join them and learn more about what exactly those questions look like!
In this episode Danny is joined by fellow San Antonio investor, Geremy Heath. This is Geremy’s third time on the show (check out episodes 3 and 74!) and once again he did not disappoint. This time he shares with us the 5 key benefits of real estate, more specifically single-family and turnkey properties. Coming all the way from Australia, Geremy has helped to build a community of fellow Aussies investing here in America. He walks us through why he chose to invest in real estate and why he believes the US is a virtual playground for people looking to invest and work toward financial freedom. He also talks a bit about his new book, “10,000 Miles to the American Dream,” written with 8 other experienced investors, each with a unique area of expertise. In this episode he shares what he’s learned about management, and the value of investing in higher quality properties for the long term. This is a great episode for both newbie investors as well as experienced investors looking to create more passive income in their business.
This week Danny is joined once again by his business coach, Greg Dickerson. Greg is an entrepreneur, real estate investor and developer. Over the past 20 years he has bought, developed and sold over $200 million in real estate, built and remodeled hundreds of custom homes and commercial buildings, and started 12 different companies from the ground up- yes, 12!
Greg is arguably an expert on the topics of Real Estate and Construction. He has spoken at many real estate investing groups, masterminds, and events. Greg has also been featured as a guest commentator on the Fox Business Network with Neil Cavuto and Dave Ramsey, and he has written articles for various magazines and newspapers, and is a featured contributor in the book, “Walking with the Wise Real Estate Investor,” and, “Walking with the Wise Entrepreneur,” featuring, Suze Orman, Rachel Barnes and others.
In this episode he joins Danny to talk about real estate investor marketing and what it means to reverse engineer your marketing. It’s a concept that we hear all of the time from experienced investors, but what exactly does it mean? And are you actually tracking your marketing as well as you could (and should!) be? Greg is a self-proclaimed leader, delegator, and motivator, and his expertise lies in maximizing every single deal and he shares with us how he is able to help business owners across any industry make the most out of their spending. Greg and Danny go into great detail about tracking your marketing, identifying the patterns and outliers, and using the insight to react and pivot if necessary so that you can stay ahead of the game and cut off what’s not working quickly or efficiently. He’s not reinventing the wheel, but instead, he is showing people how to turn it by opening up the awareness of people that may not have had any experience as business owners before.
Gary Boomershine founded RealEstateInvestor.com in 2005 out of the need to scale and grow his own real estate investing and home buying business. With a family legacy in the real estate niche, and a long successful career in enterprise and emerging technology markets, Gary saw the vision for RealEstateInvestor.com. He noticed the glaring opportunity to leverage people, processes and technology to gain a leg up in a changing and competitive marketplace. As he worked to develop and use the initial product and service, he saw his real estate business flourish by allowing him to work smarter - not harder and focusing on the one thing that makes money - talking to sellers and making offers. That’s when RealEstateInvestor.com began offering its flagship product, REIvault, to the savvy investor market.
In this episode Gary holds nothing back when it comes to talking about his marketing strategies. He and Danny get down and dirty into hard data on what works and what really, really works! From direct mail to cold calling, Gary shares with us what he’s learned over the last two decades in the real estate industry and how he’s truly built a business that can run without him (no really, he took a 6-week sabbatical and never touched the business once!). If you’re interested in scaling and growing your passive income, then this is the episode for you. Full of great tips on marketing, everyone is guaranteed to benefit from this episode.
Anna Myers serves as Vice President at Grocapitus, a commercial real estate investment company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Anna is a modern entrepreneur who applies her 20+ years of experience in technology and business to the finding, analyzation, and acquisition of commercial properties in key markets across the U.S. Together with her business partner, Neal Bawa, they approach real estate as data scientists to create compelling profits for 300+ investors. As the lead underwriter for the company, Anna also teaches deal analysis for MultifamilyU both monthly via webinars as well as quarterly in MultifamilyU Boot Camps. MultifamilyU is an apartment investing education company owned by the principal Neal Bawa. In addition, she is an AirBnB Superhost in two markets in the US. Related to Syndication, Anna has participated with Neal Bawa and Grocapitus in equity raises of 8.5 million dollars for multifamily acquisitions in 2018, resulting in over 500+ units purchased.
In this episode Anna sits down with Danny to share a wealth of actionable tips, tools, and advice for investors. Anna shares with us how she made a complete pivot in her life and business multiple times, making the transition from computer science, to photography, and eventually on to real estate investing. She talks about how she makes the most out of a total pivot, which is great for anyone looking to break free from corporate America or another business!
Anna and Danny also touch on the art of market analysis and what it really means to be aware of your KPI’s and what they mean. They discuss why you need to not only be aware of your numbers but you need to fully KNOW and UNDERSTAND them to be able to make any real difference in your business, as well as what you should be looking for in a market. Anna also shares plenty of helpful tools for studying your market and more, so don’t miss out!
Bio: Scott Krone is a Chicago native whose career in architecture began in 1991 by pursuing his Masters of Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. While obtaining his degree, he also worked as a Project Manager for Optima, Inc. During his time at Optima, Krone’s responsibilities included such notable projects as the 400 unit Cormandel in Deerfield, IL, the 40 unit HedgeRow in Winnetka, IL, and the 51 unit Optima Center Wilmette in Wilmette, IL. In 2012, Krone founded Coda Management Group – a firm who specializes in managing real estate assets. Since its inception, Coda has managed a wide range of real estate including single and multi-family homes, retail, commercial warehouse and self-storage and multi-use flex athletic spaces. Currently, the platform of investments is in excess of $54 million. In 1998, Krone founded Coda, an award winning Design + Build | Sustainability | Consulting firm. Since its inception, Coda has won numerous design/build awards including the international Green GOOD Design Award in 2010, Best of Houzz 2014 and 2015, and Design Evanston Award. Their work has been featured in notable publications as Dream Homes - Chicago, Midwest Luxury Homes, Crate & Barrel 2010 Best Catalogs, NBC TV Show Taste, and national ACE Hardware Commercials. In addition, Krone has authored High Performance Homes – Navigating the Green Road to Your Dream Home, a book for homeowner’s seeking to incorporate green technology into their home. Show Notes: Danny is joined this week by Scott Krone, Founder of CODA Management that teams up investors to purchase undervalued warehouse space and convert it into climate controlled, self-storage facilities that are managed by a top 3 operator. In this episode, Scott shares with us what he considers to be the most valuable lessons he’s learned throughout his career. He begins by saying “develop a strong team,” and explains how he relies on a strong team of brokers, contractors, lenders, and more to be able to keep everything running smoothly. Similarly, he stresses the importance of building relationships with brokers, attorneys, and title companies because they can be a major lead source for you in the future. Scott also shares with us how to deal with upset neighbors when working on a new project, much less one as large as the properties he’s dealing with. The advice he shares can be applied to many situations, ranging from the large-scale example he gives down to your local REIA meetup. The most important thing that Scott says he hopes people take away from the interview is to really, truly know your market. He mentions that if you can’t give specifics about exactly where your market is in the cycle and why, then you could probably stand to learn a bit more. This episode is jam-packed with helpful tips and advice that applies to investors at any point in their career.
Marty: Marty started investing in real estate in 2001 after working as a television news cameraman at the CBS affiliate in Phoenix. He quit his job in 2002 and went on to build a $16 million real estate portfolio. But when the market crashed in 2008 he lost it all. In 2009 he started rebuilding his business by purchasing foreclosed properties at the auction. His strength is finding, analyzing and buying distressed real estate. Marty wrote Fixing and Flipping Houses: Strategies for the Post Boom Era in 2012, a book detailing his approach to rehabbing and selling single-family homes. He’s a licensed Realtor in Arizona and Wisconsin. Manny: Originally from Pasadena, California, Manny Romero moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 2001. Soon after arriving in the valley of the sun he developed an interest in real estate. Home prices in Arizona were much lower compared to his home state of California and he saw a lot of opportunity. Manny went to the real estate investing school of hard knocks. He had tremendous success from 2004-2007 but when the market crashed he learned some very hard lessons. His strength is developing relationships with investors and raising capital. He’s also an excellent project manager. In this episode, Manny and Marty of Fix and Flip Hub join Danny to talk about each of their journeys in real estate investing and how they’ve found steady success in the industry. The experienced partners now specialize in various types of fix and flips such as turnkey and value add. They touch on the pros and cons of each method and how they were able to make each work for them and their business. They also share the simple way that they’re able to save money in their projects. This is a great episode for anyone looking to possibly scale their business and explore all of the different options available to them when it comes to achieving freedom by flipping.
This week Danny is joined by Rita Medeiros, an investor out of Florida who focuses on out-of-state, single-family properties and has acquired over 21 residences in 11 months and 21 rehabs. In this episode Rita breaks down how she manages the properties from states away and how she’s used this model to create a long term flow of passive income, something she claims to be very serious about (as we probably all should be!). She walks us through her cash flow criteria and how she took care of estimating repairs from states away. Rita and Danny also discuss both the positives and the negatives of managing affordable housing within Section 8 areas. Rita breaks the stereotypes that a lot of us might have about certain types of tenants and explains the reward that comes with helping provide a single mother who might be struggling just to find a home for her and her family. Other topics covered in the episode include how she’s limiting her competition, funding the deals, and what she considers to be the biggest factor in her success as a real estate investor.
This is a very special episode of the podcast with guest Anabella, our youngest guest ever! Annabella is a big fan of the podcast and when Danny ran into her mother around the neighborhood, he knew he had to bring her on. In this episode she stops by to switch things up and interview Danny with some great, thoughtful questions that will be especially helpful to any newbies out there looking to gather the basics. We’re talking about how to be successful, how to find a mentor, the most effective way to get deals for your business, and so much more!
In episode 154 Danny and Josh get into the “secret sauce” of a successful Google Ads campaign. They walk us through the 4 best practices for managing your Google Ads, as well as 3 bonus KPI’s that Josh and his team swear by when creating strategies for their LeadPropeller Fuel clients (this includes Danny and Melissa’s very own business!). This is the final piece to our 5-part series all about Google Ads and what a real estate investor should expect if they decide to take on one of the highest-generating lead generation techniques.
A lot of people assume that Google Ads is for a more advanced investor with a huge budget, but that isn’t always the case. In this episode Josh answers what is probably the biggest question: The When. This episode answers that question and more so that you can be educated and confident that you’re making the right call for you business when you decide to start taking action to bring in more deals. Josh explains to Danny what expectation investors need to have as well as the resources you need to have in place to be successful. A lot of big questions about Google Ads are answered in this episode that you don’t want to miss out on if you’re thinking about starting your own campaign.
This episode is about how Google Ads directly impacts your ROI (return on investment) as a real estate investor. Danny and Josh get into “the why” behind advertising on Google and how you can use analytics to find patterns in your marketing, as well as measure the data at every step of the way so that you can continue to improve your deal flow. Google Ads can be a huge shortcut to getting your first deal when done correctly, and that’s what this episode is all about.
This week Danny is back with PPC and Google Ads expert Josh McRay to talk about what Google ads actually are and how they work. Josh breaks down how the auction system works within Google and walks us through the process from start to finish, covering everything from Impressions to Click-Through-Rate. In today’s online world these practices are starting to become a necessity and you don’t want to be left behind, so we’re sharing it all with you now! Learn more about our managed Adwords service: http://bit.ly/2I6FGt3. Please send any questions you have to @LeadPropeller on Twitter or to josh@leadpropeller.com
Welcome to part 1 of our mini series all about Google advertising and our in-house managed services provider, LeadPropeller Fuel! This series is all about how to use Google to help your business bring in more leads as well as how to turn those leads into deals. Please send any questions you have to @LeadPropeller on Twitter or to josh@leadpropeller.com and we promise to answer them before we get to the end of the series.
In this episode, Danny is joined by industry expert, Mitch Stephen, an experienced investor from Texas. Mitch, together with his wife, Tommi, and his daughter, Shannon created their company, Independence Day, Inc. They have bought and sold over 1,500 properties in and about San Antonio since 1996. This company specializes in buying distressed properties with OPM and selling those properties with Owner Financing. Mitch also offers Online Education, Group Coaching, and Full-on Mentorships as it relates to all the aspects of Owner Financing.
This week Mitch goes into great detail with Danny about what an owner financing deal looks like. He holds nothing back as he walks us through a case study with specific numbers and examples. Mitch also touches on the importance of being good at one thing before you move on to the next shiny, new thing, and he even goes on to explain how that ideology can be carried over into all aspects of your real estate investing business. We also get to hear one of the craziest scammer stories we’ve had on the show so far, so you definitely don’t want to miss this one!
This week's episode is a special edition! We're sharing the audio from this past week's FlipPilot Update and Transparency Webinar because we want everyone to be up-to-date and aware of the changes to the software. In the webinar Danny covers things such as updates to the software, tentative timelines, and specifics about what the software is and what it can do for you and your real estate investment business.
This week Danny is joined by Jim Huntzicker, a licensed real estate broker with over 500 deals under his belt after nearly 15 years in the business. Jim Huntzicker is also the creator of MLS domination, and was featured in episode 46 of the FlippingJunkie Podcast where he dives more into how he finds his deals. He stops by to discuss how he finds success across the country with multi-family units as long-term investments. Jim walks us through a detailed example of what a multi-family deal looks like including how he analyzes the numbers, how he puts together funding for these more expensive deals, and how he has scaled his REI business across the country. Jim also discusses his future goals for his business as well as how he plans to actually achieve them.
This week Danny is joined by Brad Smotherman, an investor from Tennessee with a successful 7-figure flipping business spanning across the U.S. Brad shares with us the methods and strategies, specifically in marketing, that helped push his business to where it is now, as well as the ins-and-outs of how he prefers to run his business today. Brad breaks it all down with thorough examples and real-world data that he’s gathered through his time as an investor to really break down topics like owner financing, pay per click, direct mail, and more.
This episode is all about innovative ways to make real estate investing work both for you, and your tenants! Anne Amagrande joins Danny to discuss her creative approach to leasing that has helped her business generate even more passive income by finding new ways to both save money on renovations as well as keep her tenants happy; she calls it “rentovation” and it’s a game changer! She also touches on the 3:1 ratio and how it can and has helped many investors create more income for their business. We recommend this episode for investors at any stage in their journey. Anne is a serial entrepreneur, owner of Grande AMA & Associates and 2 other businesses. She is an expert on investing, specifically Real Estate Investing, Generational Wealth, and owning and growing a business, and her passion is creating businesses that help one another.
This episode Danny speaks about what to do when those leads start coming in from your LeadPropeller website (or wherever you purchased your REI website)! We’ve seen too many people cancel their accounts with us because they started receiving TOO MANY leads from their website so Danny is here to tell you the proven methods for handling them. No matter who you purchased your REI site from, these are important lessons every investor with a new site should be aware of.
We must be on a marketing kick because this week’s episode is all about knowing your numbers for your marketing campaigns!! It’s not enough just to send mailers out into the world and doing that over and over and over and over without ever taking the time to analyze your data and see if what you’re doing is even working! Don Costa of the FlipTalk podcast joins Danny this week to talk about why investors should be regularly looking at their marketing numbers. He walks us through an actual marketing campaign of his and shares how he would analyze the results, and most importantly the decisions that would come out of the analyzation. Data and numbers are an investors very best friend and this episode tells you why and how!
This week Danny is joined by Brian Ellwood of Virtue Real Estate Investing to talk about how he tackles direct mail, and what has and hasn’t worked for him in the past. The two discuss the essence of “No B.S.” marketing and what it means to disrupt the constant feed of “We Buy Houses” mailers and really position yourself from the rest of the crowd. Brian even shares with us his top 4 favorite lists to mail that have shown the highest ROI overall. Brian teaches 9-5'ers how to stop trading their time for dollars by purchasing their first 12 rental properties, but VREI’s underlying message is that you CAN live a life you truly love and you don't have to make sacrifices! Brian was able to "retire" from the working world at the age of 30 by accumulating several dozen properties, and is now passionate about helping others do the same.
This episode is a super, super, must for all investors!! This is a special episode of the FlippingJunkie podcast because Danny shares with us the top 3 secrets that provide consistent success with online motivated seller lead generation (yes, the actual stuff he and Melissa did and are still doing!). Most investors fail at generating motivated seller leads online because of these 3 crucial missing pieces, and he’s here to talk about what investors can do to prevent their business from falling through the cracks because of something that could have been prevented if they’d only known! Danny dives deep into how they’re able to maintain a successful flipping business while also running a podcast AND a blog AND a youtube channel AND a training course AND providing REI websites AND a business management software and so on and so on… He explains why house flipping is a numbers game and how they were able to use that to their advantage to generate exactly how many leads they would need to get a real, genuine, “worth-it” deal! Absolutely a great episode full of a ton of great info that anyone considering getting a website, or wondering how they can best use their website to find more, quality leads for their real estate investing business!!
Chris and Jamie Bounds are real estate investors out of Houston, TX. They own and operate Texas Ideal Properties, and live in Richmond, TX with their two children, Nathan and Ellie. Chris got started in real estate in 2005 while attending Texas A&M University. He bought 4 properties in his first year before graduating, and took a sales job in Houston. Shortly before getting married in 2011, Chris and Jamie started investing in real estate part-time. By August 2015, they were both full-time real estate investors and have since bought over 100 propertie. In 2018 they closed on roughly 50 houses, nearly doubling their business since the year before. Their goals are to continue to grow and scale their flipping & wholesaling business while continually adding properties to their rental portfolio. In this episode Chris and Jamie share what it’s like working together as a couple, and the steps they took from day one to ensure that their business would be on the right track for growth and success. They tell Danny how they worked to figure out what they should be doing fromthe very beginning, and how they worked on not only their skillset, but who they are as people in order to take their business where it is now. With over $11 million raised in private money, you won’t want to miss out on what they have to say!
Jason Lavender has owned and operated a painting company for 25 years, but caught the real estate investing bug listening to podcasts and reading Danny Johnson’s book, Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 weeks in the life of a successful house flipper. Jason began flipping houses in September of 2017 and has since completed 5 flips, with 2 more underway. After this, he took on wholesaling in October of 2018, and has completed 4 deals with one more in the pipeline. He’s now a member of Justin Williams’ coaching program, and is focusing on learning to scale and automate. In this episode Jason joins Danny to talk about what it was like to move from reading the book to getting established in the market and in a position to grow. Jason shares the do’s and don’ts of starting out and the lessons he’s learned along his journey (some of them the hard way!), so this is a perfect episode for those who are still a little hesitant about taking that first step and making it happen.
This week Danny is joined by Doug Watts Jr, a new investor born and raised in Austin, Texas. His story starts out as a commercial general contractor where he stayed for 10 years as a field engineer and later superintendent. Like many of us, he was drawn in by the freedom that real estate investing can give you and he dove straight into educating himself and taking action to get started! Doug actually completed 2 flips while working full time, making a profit of $63,000 on the first and $109,000 on the second. Just 6 months ago, he decided to take his investing business full-time, and has since listed 2 houses for sale that he flipped (that’s a projected profit of $50,000 in his first 6 months working for himself. In this episode, Doug also shares a cautionary tale of sorts that anyone should be looking out for, about the importance of making sure that every box is checked when it comes to your business. While Doug may not be your typical, “House Flipping Guru,” he is determined to make it happen for him and his family and his resilience is something to be admired. His open-book take on both his successes and his mistakes allows us to see what a new investor actually looks like, as well as take a look at the internal struggle of being afraid to lose all of your money, but also knowing that it takes spending money to make money.
In this episode, James and Alan sit down with Danny to talk about the strategy they created and followed to create a partnership that moved them into 3 different markets in only 8 short months! Alan Biel Alan Biel bought and renovated his first house in 2004, just after he graduated from college and married his wife, Amber. Their original plan was to live in the house, but they ended up selling it for a decent profit and this led them to do the same thing several more times in the next 10+ years or so. In 2016, he began flipping on a larger scale, and by the end of 2017, he knew he needed to make some changes to his semi “solo-preneur” operation. He decided that he would finish the flips he was working on and then try something different. So, he joined a top Mastermind group in January of 2018, learned what wholesaling was, partnered up with James Hodges in March of 2018, and they began wholesaling full time! James Hodges In 2013 he graduated from College and got married to my wife Meagan. They lived in College Station for a year after they got married and then spent the next two years traveling to various countries around the world doing volunteer and missions work. At the end of 2015, their first daughter was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Shortly after she was born they moved back to Texas and began a career as a personal fitness trainer. He did this for 2 years, eventually starting his own online fitness business. At the beginning of 2018, he made the decision to pursue Wholesaling, as was not getting the traction he wanted in my fitness business, nor was he living the lifestyle he wanted. He began his wholesaling journey February 2, 2018, and started to gain quick traction within weeks of starting. In March of 2018, he met and partnered up with Alan Biel, and they began Wholesaling full time.
This week Danny is joined by Danny Carter, a Los Angeles based manager for songwriters and music producers who has been actively investing since 2016 (Fun fact- he did the intro for this episode!). Carter enjoys taking on challenges, as shown by his very first deal which was a remote burn house located halfway across the country. In just a few short years, his real estate investing business has acquired 9 rental units, completed 8 flip/wholetail deals, and 10 wholesale deals! In his own words, Carter says that this episode is concentrated on, “showing people how to go from sitting at the starting line, wondering how they’re going to get started, car parked, transferring into neutral, to getting into drive, into about 25 mph, then getting them started in those first few steps to get them to 100.”
Carson Olinger journey with real estate investing began after the birth of his children, when he realized that his current job was keeping him from being home with his family like he wanted to be. In 2017, he owned a packaging company that unfortunately went under due to some unforeseen circumstances. This led him and his wife to build an investing business so that they could leave the 9-5 world behind them and finally start living the life they had wanted. In July 2017, he started his own Real Estate Business – Capital City Equity Group. He had started looking at deals in January, and actually closed on his first deal already by February. However, he saw this as a “side gig,” and the overall business plan was not realized. Once he started using Lead Propeller and had leads regularly coming in, it was then a matter of closing deals and figuring out what to do with them. Carson was able to quickly learn all the different acquisition strategies as he had some friends that opened him up to some creative concepts and he was able to start closing on deals. Carson soon realized that he had not just created a business, but a job. If he wanted to find true freedom, he knew he was going to have to diversify. He began pickup up rental properties to create a more passive income, and within six months of really focusing in on real estate, he sold 10 homes via wholesaling and pocketed one long-term rental. He didn’t have any of his own money in any of the deals, other than marketing dollars and web site management fees (which he says are totally worth it by the way!). By using creative acquisition methods and having multiple exit strategies, he was able to gain a lot of traction, and could begin to see the broader picture. By spending time with others and listening to their needs and motivations, he could easily discern what solutions to provide them. He’s now says that he’s having fun doing this, and enjoys getting to help others at the same time.
Greg Dickerson is an entrepreneur, real estate investor and developer. Over the past 20 years he has bought, developed and sold over $200 million in real estate, built and remodeled hundreds of custom homes and commercial buildings, and started 12 different companies from the ground up- yes, 12! Greg is arguably an expert on the topics of Real Estate and Construction. He has spoken at many real estate investing groups, masterminds, and events. Greg has also been featured as a guest commentator on the Fox Business Network with Neil Cavuto and Dave Ramsey, and he has written articles for various magazines and newspapers, and is a featured contributor in the book, “Walking with the Wise Real Estate Investor," and, "Walking with the Wise Entrepreneur," featuring Donald Trump, Suze Orman, Rachel Barnes and others. Greg has always been a very active member of his church and community (both in his personal and business life) serving on the boards of several non-profit organizations including Realtors Association, Home Builders Association, Remodeling Council, Community Foundation, Heart Association, Cancer Center, Education Foundation, Babe Ruth Softball, YMCA, Parks and Recreation, SPCA, PTA, School Boosters, Youth Ministry Council, Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Christian Surfers. Listen along as he shares with Danny the story of his investing journey and how he came to be the successful real estate investor he is today.
Joe Spence is an investor from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose journey began after he was laid off from his sales job in early 2016. It had always been his and his wife Sarah’s dream to become real estate investors, and this quick turn of events made them ask, “Do I really want to go back to a 9 to 5?” With a baby on the way Joe knew he had to do something, and there was no better time than the present to take action and make it happen.
Joe began by calling anyone and everyone he knew in real estate, asking if there was possibly anything for him. Within a week and a half he had his first deal from someone who knew someone who knew someone, and so on. He shares that his first time walking through the house calculating costs to make an offer, he had almost no clue what he was doing. He was familiar with the formulas because he had educated himself with books and podcasts, but he says that “there’s no substitute for the real thing.”
Joe and Danny also discuss contractors, and the importance of checking up on the progress when you’re rehabbing houses. Joe talks about the many lessons he’s learned along the way in regards to trusting and overseeing those carrying out his flips. He says that at first, it was intimidating to ask contractors what was going on in the rehabs out of fear of sounding uneducated or unqualified. Once he was able to get past this fear and speak openly with the contractor about what was going on in the project, he says that their relationship only grew stronger and now there is a mutual trust and respect between the two throughout the process.
In the beginning of 2018 he turned his business more towards wholesaling rather than rehabbing houses. When asked if it can be difficult sometimes to walk away from a bigger check by deciding to wholesale instead of rehab it yourself. “I’m not afraid to leave a little meat on the bones for the next guy,” says Joe. He gives a lot of credit to those who helped him in the beginning of his journey, and he hopes to be able to help others in the same way.
Zach Betters started investing in real estate in 2015 with his wife Stephanie. After taking 4 months to get their first deal, they jumped into it and did 11 deals that first year. Since then, they have been on an upward trajectory, 27 deals in 2017. So far in 2018 they have done 49 deals and with a recent merger are now on pace to explode even further. Along the way they have branched off into a Social Media Marketing company (Social Media REI) and have a few more secret businesses in planning. All of this while both working, up until recently, full time in healthcare as a PA and NP and raising three little ones. Zach shares with Danny how he was able to achieve such growth by “developing a team around [his] weaknesses,” and a constant update to the processes and systems that his business is using. He mentions that every business has problems, you’re problems just change. By recognizing this, Zach and his team are able to actively stay on top of their business and its growth. When discussing how he got started in the industry, Zach and wife were working 12-14 hour shifts, then they would come home and eat, workout, and take care of their three little ones. This makes it no surprise that their first hire was a virtual assistant from the Philippines to help him sift through leads and answer any calls. They’ve since built an entire team that works in combination with their established systems to really get the most of everyone in the business. Humble Brag Zach shares a story about a time in which his LeadPropeller website helped him find his first private money lender JUST by him looking at it- even though he hadn’t done a single deal yet at this point!! Zach also shares with Danny his excitement for the upcoming release of FlipPilot (December 5th, sign up now!) and says that he is very much looking forward to saying goodbye to programs like Google Drive and Excel for tracking KPI’s. “If it were up to me, it wouldn’t get done,” he says in regards to sifting through data. Luckily, FlipPilot is already ahead of him on that one with everything in one place so you can start working ON your business instead of IN it.
This week Danny takes a break from interviews and instead focuses on the upcoming release of FlipPilot. We will be hosting another great webinar and this time Danny will be talking about the one thing that your stupid CRM can’t do that is causing major problems for your business. Danny will be doing real life demos for you guys and answering a few questions if possible. This is taking place DECEMBER 3RD, 2018 at flippilot.com/demo. Register now to reserve your seat, and we’ll remind you when it’s time to show up, learn, and see FlipPilot working in real time! FlipPilot is so much more than a CRM, and we hope you join us next week (12/3) so that you truly start working ON your business instead of IN it.
Victor Alves started investing in 2015 with his wife Nina, after leaving a job in sales. They attended a seminar about real estate investing and from there made the decision to invest $25,000 into their education and getting started on their business. They knew that if they were going to do it, they wanted to go all in- and that’s exactly what they did! They started wholesaling to learn the market and within their first year had done 6 wholesale deals. The following year they continued wholesaling, but also completed 2 flips and ended the year with 13 deals under their belt. In the beginning of 2017 Victor started working with his current partner, whom he met at the same training course that he and his wife took years before. This is when business really began to take off exponentially. Today they’ve now done over 50 flips in total, acquired 9 rentals, and raised over $5M of private capital. Their success is credited to their balanced relationship within the business as a team. Victor’s partner is more involved with the construction side of things, while Victor focuses his attention on marketing. They’re individual skills and interests compliment each other in a way that allows each of them to focus on the things that they should be. Victor also shares with Danny how he shifted his business when he made the decision to shift his message across his business’ marketing. He says that he began studying data and pulling insights that eventually helped him tailor his message to whichever audience that he was targeting. From there, the business has only continued to grow and find success.
“Your problem is to bridge the gap which exists between where you are now and the goal you intend to reach.” -Earl Nightingale Why are you reading this? Why are you listening? Learning? Taking action? It’s simple- FREEDOM!! We’re all doing this because we want the financial freedom that comes with being your own boss and real estate investing. We want to be able to spend time with our families and friends, not with the stacks of work that are probably sitting on your desk right now. Melissa and I wanted the same thing, but once we got started we realized it wasn’t so simple. As our business grew, our need for new technology that could support us grew, we quickly found that everything that was already out in the market just wasn’t cutting it anymore. We had all of these systems that were supposed to be making our lives and business better, and all it was doing was adding stress because of the impossible upkeep and hours of analyzing required to get any true insights for our business. They were just work-arounds for other work-arounds, and we knew that our technology was holding us back. We were absolutely not living the life that we thought we would be once we started investing. There was a clear gap between where we were in our business and where we wanted and needed to be, but nothing in our entire arsenal of programs we were using for our business were going to get us there. I had years of investing experience at this point, and in combination with my background in software (#tbt to my corporate America days) we decided that if we wanted it to happen then we were going to have to do it ourselves. Thus, FlipPilot was born. FlipPilot is more than a CRM. There’s not really a single word or phrase to describe what it does, because it really is the very first of its kind for real estate investors. It is everything in one place. We were evolving as investors, and we needed a software that was going to continue to evolve with us. All of the existing technology only allowed us to work IN our business, but it wasn’t giving us the freedom that we wanted. FlipPilot changes all of that. No more Podio, CallRail, MailChimp, Globiflow, NOTHING. FlipPilot has it all. Everything. One place. It is actually that simple. You’ll finally have a system that doesn’t require 20 integrations to work, a system with KPI’s you should be tracking and other data so you know what’s actually working and what isn’t. You can automate your follow up sequences, establish systems and processes, manage your team and tasks, and our brand new Dashboards give you a quick view of how your business is doing at any moment like no other software has been able to do so far.
Jordan Lagrassa is a real estate investor in Texas who’s been in the game for about three years now- on top of running an entirely separate roofing business! In partnership with another investor, he has established a small business wholesaling houses part-time, and has also accumulated a few rentals along the way. Jordan started with his roofing business, and moved into investing after trying to find different opportunities and ways to support his family and make money (sound familiar?). Jordan shares with Danny how he balances the two jobs, mentioning how it really depends on the season when deciding where he can and should focus his attention. Due to a slow down in the rainfall and other harsh weather in Texas, his roofing business has not been as busy and he has been able to dedicate more time to establishing himself in the market. He says an average day would consist of about 4 hours working on his wholesaling business, and about 2-4 on the other. While right now this method works for him, he sees a value in being able to shift all of his attention on wholesaling and hopes to be able to move toward that direction in the future. When talking about how he got his start, he talks about using PPC via his LeadPropeller site, and how that process worked out for him. They mention their concern with the sentiment that simply signing up for a website will bring you the leads that you are looking for and express the importance of quality over quantity. “With direct mail you might get more leads, but the number of actual qualified leads that become appointments, that then become deals, tend to become a little bit worse than [those] from PPC,” says Danny. Jordan shares that it was a mix of direct mail for the first three months, and then PPC for the following three that brought him his first deal after 6 months. They also talk about what training programs did for them as beginners, and both Danny and Jordan urge investors to make the investment. “You’re using your money to gain more knowledge that’s gonna help you make more money as long as you’re willing to take action and make it work,” expresses Danny. Moving forward, Jordan shares that at this point in time he’s working on building a buyer’s list as he begins to see how the market is starting to change. He hopes to keep wholesaling houses part-time, but wants to shift more toward rental properties in hopes of creating a passive income so he can commit himself where he feels his time is best spent.
Lee Taylor is a real estate investor in the Middle Georgia area. Like many, he had a corporate job in transportation managing a trucking company. His career in investing began after he reached out to a friend of his who went on to help Lee with his first property. Lee bought his first investment property in August 2016, his first flip in August 2017, and was able to quit his job and begin investing full-time. With over 34 properties purchased already- most of those with some type of partnership- he has big plans for house flipping in 2018. “It was a challenge but we scraped and hustled and made it work, and we’ve just taken a lot of action,” says Lee. Lee shares with Danny the ins and outs of his business and how he decides which options are the best for house flipping in 2018. He explains that one of the most proven methods for finding deals and private lenders is networking and relationship building, and contributes much of his success to these methods. “I don’t believe in competition, I believe in collaboration.” He now focuses on lead generation, and later goes into detail about his various exit strategies depending on what is the best option for the given property. After establishing himself in his market, Lee made the decision to co-run his local REIA with a fellow investor, and dedicates a great deal of his time to helping and educating other investors in his area. He is appreciative of the opportunities that came to him from different events and groups, and wants to be able to share what he learned with others in a collaborative effort, rather than strictly competitive. As the market appears to be beginning to change, he hopes to one day expand into other areas of the industry such as property management and construction.
This week’s FlippingJunkie podcast episode begins with a FlipPilot update!! We’re so excited as we get closer and closer to the launch, and we appreciate your patience. “We’re working to make sure that when we do launch, everything that you need to run your business is in that minimum viable product,” says Danny. In the meantime, check out our FlipPilot Key Feature Videos on YouTube and join our private FlipPilot Facebook Group, and know that we’re working hard to put out the best product that we can!
Brad Woodall’s real estate investing journey began all the way back in 2005, when he was only 21. The market crash led him to a job in corporate America where he worked in fraud prevention and investigation for about 10 years. When his first son was born in 2015, he knew he wanted to be able to be around and involved in his children’s daily lives and knew that going from part-time to full-time real estate investing would provide him with the lifestyle he wanted.
Along with a new baby came a new mindset, and Brad dove back into investing while still working full-time. Like many of us, he binged on every podcast and book on real estate investing he could find. That same year, he set up his LeadPropeller website and now uses LeadPropeller Fuel to handle his site’s SEO (Brad mentions that he once got a lead from a blog post, and one even from a YouTube video thanks to his site ranking). In May of 2016, he sent out roughly 300 pieces of direct mail and in October of the same year he landed his first deal.
Fast forward to January of 2018, Brad was able to quit his job and go from part-time to full-time real estate investing. He goes on to discuss his typical walk-through method and what he’s found has worked for him in the past. With an offer already in his head, he tours the house with the seller and gets to know them and try to learn their motive for selling. Brad and Danny emphasize the importance of building rapport with your sellers. “Just be conversational, just be a real person. They just want a real person there to talk to,” says Brad, who prefers to take the time to sit and get to know the sellers and establishing a relationship beyond just the numbers.
Mike Hambright has been investing for a little over 10 years and operates FlipNerd.com where he educates real estate investors. After losing his corporate job due to downsizing and with a newborn son, Mike decided to dive into real estate investing. “I didn’t want to work really hard for somebody else anymore,” said Mike. He got into the business right before the market crash in 2008 (despite everyone’s advice not to), and he and his wife found great success in the downturn. When he first began, Mike was a little naive to the market. He had no interest in networking because he saw others as competition, but after a year of building his business he realized the value of networking and building relationships with others in your market. After doing a deal with another investor, he had the realization of, “why wouldn’t I want to be around more people like me?” Mike discusses with Danny how he formed his relationship with his bank in the beginning. While at first the lenders were hesitant, once he showed them his past deals and the transformations they went through it was much easier to get their support. He also mentions his “rehab live” method, where he takes people through the house at 3 different points: beginning, middle, and end. This is to really showcase the transformation that takes place in his rehabs and talk about the work he was doing, and through this he established many relationships and really built up his network. Mike also stresses the importance of laying your business’ foundation before anything else. Without systems and processes, your business will not be able to grow like it could. He mentions that while you may have gotten into the business for freedom, it’s going to take work to get there. After coaching other investors for almost 9 years, Mike says that those who have trouble finding success are the people not willing to put in the hours and work, and realize that the business is so much more than the glamour that you may see on tv.
Frank has done 38 deals using LeadPropeller Fuel.
Frank Heron from Naples, Florida. He covers the Southwest Florida market which is Naples, Florida, up the coast to Bradenton. He is married to his wife and business partner Jazmin of 12 years. They have two beautiful little girls, Valentina who's eight years old and the youngest Francesca who's two years old. Who often drive around saying, “Daddy that house needs money.” He has been in the business since 2012 and been a part of over 1,000 transactions. Now he just concentrates on 100% wholesaling.
This week’s episode is about the real estate success principles necessary for you to build your best possible business. Danny is joined by James Steffy, listen along as they talk about following up, making offers and the importance of understanding your sellers. James Steffy first got into the real estate investing industry 4 years ago after returning home from South Korea where he and his wife taught English classes. Taking the decision into their own hands, they took a mini tour across the U.S. to cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Sacramento so they could make the best decision about which market to dive into. Ultimately, they decided to stay in the Tampa-Bay area of Florida and it was there that Steffy started his own real estate investor business. Steffy started out by listening to various podcasts and the FlippingJunkie blog, but like many people, he was overwhelmed and unsure of where or how to start. “I was brand new to real estate investing at that time. I had been reading a lot about the business and knew it was what I wanted to do, but was feeling overwhelmed with actually taking the first steps to get started,” says Steffy in an email to Danny. After following a course offered by Danny at the time, he was able to find the courage to take action in his journey. His first deal was less-than-perfect and in a rough part of town, and while he put almost all of his money into it he soon realized he couldn’t sell it. At the same time, he began going to local investor meetings and networking, which pointed him in the right direction to take his business to the next level. Steffy also discusses his experience with cash offers versus owner financed offers. After finding that he was not having as much luck with his cash offers, he began offering the two options to sellers at the same time. “You never know what someone is after,” says Steffy. He goes on to say it’s important to know where your seller is coming from financially, but more importantly, emotionally, so that you can really understand their situation and better cater to it, which will in turn mean a better turnout for you as well. “The more appointments you go on, the easier it gets.” Danny and James go on into further detail about the importance of following up even after a no, the importance of making an offer, how they’re adjusting to the changing market, and more of the real estate investing success principles involved in building a successful real estate business. While there are some key steps you can take to set you apart from your competition, both agree that there is no “magic answer” to it all.
In episode 120 of the FlippingJunkie Podcast, Danny is joined by Mike Cowper to discuss how he got into real estate investing, his rapid growth, and how he did it all with the help of a CRM software. After tossing the idea around for many years, Cowper jumped into the industry in 2014 when he realized that it was time to stop talking about it and finally make it happen. He started out by trying to obtain as much knowledge as he could by joining every group and attending every meet-up, constantly surrounding himself with people who were better than him at what he was trying to accomplish. Through the help of a mentorship program, he quickly bought his first house. Cowper went on to work for Mike Simmons, a real estate investor who at the time was moving toward wholesaling rather than flipping. With a strong sales background, Cowper had a skill to offer Simmons so it became his responsibility to acquire properties. Now the two have a division of labor that allows for a system of checks and balances and really pulls to each of their strengths, and both credit their success to “creating systems, processes, and hiring people,” which ultimately pushed their business from earning $250,000 a year to $1,000,000 a year. Cowper later discusses his hiring process with Danny, and how he’s found a great significance in systemizing the entire process. He compares it to his LeadPropeller website, saying “We always want to find leads, you have to do that with people also.” This leads to a conversation about the necessity of a software to help your flipping business. Danny and Cowper discuss the problem with the automation softwares available now, and Cowper shares how his current systems are unreliable and often make mistakes that have potential to cost his business money. He states how this is not just an issue of liability, but an issue of credibility in how his business is perceived by the public. Ultimately, he hopes to find a CRM software for his flipping business that will make him feel confident that things are going to be taken care and can trust the system and let the stress go, and mentions his eagerness to see how FlipPilot will solve any problems he’s currently facing in running his business.
Darren Smith has been into real estate investing since 2003, and throughout that time his business has been through a series of dramatic changes via the help of a solid team and business coach. After spending many years in the army and later in IT, Smith became attracted to the idea of real estate investing through a good friend. However, not long after taking action he realized he was in over his head and his business shortly crashed. After deciding to go back to school to get his masters, Smith shifted his focus back to his job in computers, but he found that his love for real estate never left so he decided to jump back in about 5 years ago. After signing up for every wholesalers website he could find, including LeadPropeller, he got a call from someone in the market who took Smith under his wing. While he made next to nothing, he was able to learn things like rehabbing, contracts, and more without any of the financial risk of losing his own money in the process. Smith and his wife moved to Colorado shortly after and he began his own business there- Sell My House To Smith. At the time, he was running the entire business himself as he always felt like he just wasn’t there yet and was concerned about the added stress that came with being responsible for others and their livelihoods. With the help of the Mastermind group that both he and Danny are apart of, he finally found the courage and within 30 days had hired 3 new team members to work for him. He found himself surprised at the talent that came in to apply for him and the experience helped him to realize the, “huge difference between having someone who’s good at their job and having someone who is just so much better than you at what they do.” Aside from a strong team, Smith and Danny also discuss the guidance and the peace of mind that a business coach provides for their real estate businesses. “I wouldn’t be here today without him,” says Smith in regards to his own business coach whom he met at via The Alternative Board, which offers business coaching and advisory board services. All it took was one session for Smith to realize what his business coach had to offer him, his real estate business, and his team. In fact, Smith is so confident in the help that his coach provides him that he meets with him himself every two weeks, and his operations manager meets with him monthly, as well as a team session that Smith says helped to really bring his team together and form a stronger unit. Smith also discusses his excitement for the upcoming release of FlipPilot, and mentions how his own team was blown away after the chance to sit in on an hour-long demo with Danny. “We love all your other products you’re doing for us, so we can’t wait to get FlipPilot going.”
In a few short years time, Henry found himself transitioning from a single lifestyle- where he only had to worry only about himself- into a married man trying to provide for his family. That’s why one year ago, Henry Washington decided that taking action and pursuing his real estate investment journey was the next step, and it’s been a whirlwind ever since.
Even with a full-time day job in IT Project Management, Henry was unsure how we was going to be able to take care of his family. Desperate, he began looking into his options and decided that the financial freedom that comes with real estate investing was the best option for him. Still though, the fear of spending it all for nothing in return kept him from making the first leap. This fear was essentially keeping him from taking action to achieve his dreams. “We wouldn’t have had as much success that we’d had if my mindset wasn’t in the right place,” says Washington.
Entirely unsure of where to even start, Henry starting taking action and began by reading books and listening to the FlippingJunkie podcast. This education led him to the decision to take action again and create his own real estate investment website using LeadPropeller. After first taking action, in his first year alone, he has acquired roughly 30 deals, including flips, wholesales, and rentals and his business only continue to grow. Listen along as Henry and Danny discuss taking action and how Henry was able to get over those fears with creative problem solving, the first steps he took to get into the industry, and how he’s expanding his clientele and establishing credibility and trust in his area through networking and maintaining relationships!
Dave Rose has been flipping houses in San Antonio, Texas, for over 8 years. He is a firm believer in keeping it simple. His plan is to build a huge rental portfolio that will allow him to achieve true freedom. Dave has been interested in real estate from the time he was young. He started as an adult with wholesaling, then started picking up rental properties in any condition and has continued to grow his real estate portfolio. He occasionally does flips to bring some variety into his routine. Dave talks about being a pioneer and using the BRRRR Process, (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance and Repeat) that helps you be in with little to no money on the deals if you buy them right. Danny and Dave talk about how the deal volume and how the wholesale market is being driven up by competition and watered down product raising prices that caused Dave to shift from wholesaling to focusing on building a rental portfolio and doing more rehabs. The power of networking is what helped Dave get started in the industry and when the opportunity presented itself, Dave wasn’t scared, didn’t hesitate, he jumped in and hasn’t looked back. He started on a 100% commission based structure working as acquisitions for both buying and selling. This experience helped him understand the industry and that many people don’t “think like he does” and are willing to take different offers on their properties. He learned a lot about making offers and ultimately that you don’t know what people are willing to accept, especially when they are treated with respect and care. Dave says, “we aren’t here to make their decisions, we are here to solve their problems.” when it comes to talking with potential sellers and before he goes about making an offer on the property. Danny reflects on how important it is to connect with motivated sellers to understand where they are coming from to really serve a need and help them. Only around 10% of people they buy homes from are in a really sticky situation where they need their homes purchased right away. A small percentage of the overall. Understanding these components can really help you understand how to convert to more deals when making offers. They discuss an example of a property where Dave worked with the seller to give an extended closing date and how things like help with moving, help with finding a place to go are factors in the seller’s decision making process. Dave takes a more personal approach instead of a cut and dry business approach when making offers and conducting his business. Money isn’t everything, there’s a lot more to the business than just making money - they discuss how they are in the business of truly helping people and how this factors into every offer they make. Dave still goes on appointments and discusses his approach to this more personal than business approach. He talks through several examples of how he’s able to connect with the different sellers he meets with on a regular basis. Danny and Dave talk about strategies to still be able to spend the time with potential sellers rather than just treating the deals like a conveyor belt and how this has helped him when making offers. . Especially when you have a team working for you and you aren’t on every call. Dave speaks about how majority of his business at this point is repeat, word of mouth and referrals, he credits a lot of this to the personal connection he’s making with the sellers and his ability to hear and help them. Danny asks Dave for any predictions for the changing marketing upcoming and how that might affect them making offers. They discuss how their strategies and integrity can help them weather the storm. Dave predicts the market slowing and prices dropping, he predicts that certain areas that are really overpriced will come down and will be helped by the interest rates to bring that down. He doesn’t expecting anything like ’08-09 but more of a healthy dip in the market. Dave is wanting to buy more rentals and do more flips moving forward, isn’t as interested in owner finance. Dave is more interested in building his portfolio so he has a steady stream of regular income. He feels like rental properties are the path to creating his true freedom. He’s looking to bring in around 120 rentals in 5 years and wants to be at 300 rentals in ten years. Dave and Danny talk about different types of rental properties he seeks out and what is in his portfolio. His portfolio carries a blend of different types of properties including multi-unit and single family homes in all different areas of the city. Dave talks about what materials he uses in his rentals. He uses IKEA cabinets in all of his rentals and actually uses quite a bit of materials from IKEA. He buys higher quality materials that are used every day like door handles, and even uses solid doors. Even though they cost more up-front they end up saving money in the long run. He recommends to make sure there’s a clean out on your sewer line because they will always back up. They talk about how the process doesn’t change from a flip to a rental, putting in floors is putting in floors. Take it room by room and follow the process. Dave talks about how he doesn’t want a big business so he’s not looking to bring in a big staff but is looking to hire someone to help with property management and possibly some sales and acquisitions. Dave had a first look demo of the new FlipPilot software so he reflects and gives his first reaction to seeing the system. He says that what’s out there to manage REI businesses isn’t really that great, and says he saw a very well polished system. He said the system was thoughtful and seemed to include a lot of functionality. Dave mentions the value of what you will be getting with all of the different parts at the cost and that at first glance if you utilize the program it should make you 10 fold what you pay for it if you use it properly. For more information on FlipPIlot, sign up for our emails on flippilot.com and get ready for our beta launch in September. Dave’s contact information: 210-632-1432
Listen as Danny and Melissa talk about their parent company, FreedomDriven LLC, what it entails, why they started it, and how they even got to this point in their business.
Danny and Melissa have an open and honest conversation as they talk through the journey of their house flipping business. From starting out part time and doing everything themselves, to now having a team, and providing quality tools for other real estate investors to be successful.
Danny and Melissa talk through their business journey. From first starting out part time to now having a company with multiple facets to help other real estate investors.
They talk about what the company means to them individually and how they came together to achieve the goal of helping others.
It all started driving around on evenings and weekends with the kids to find properties, Danny and Melissa remember how it all started with bandit signs and discuss their fears when starting early on and laugh through some of the early bandit sign bloopers.
Of course, after hanging the signs, the first call has to come in. They reminisce about not knowing what to do when that first call came in, Danny’s phone is ringing from the bandit signs they put out, he freaked out and threw the phone at Melissa to answer. They talk about how after some time, they got pretty good…3 or 4 phone calls and knew essentially what to ask. Even they didn’t know what to do when they were first starting.
Then once they got their marketing going, there is the story of signing the first contract. They remember how it took 6 or 9 months to get the first property under contract. Melissa and Danny talk about how their hands were literally shaking and how they called their mentor to get advice on what to say to even say to the Title Company.
After getting through the early learning curve of flipping came their next chapter. Moving from flipping part-time to full-time. They continued working on nights and weekends and flipped part-time for about 3 years. Danny got laid off from his job (what he attributes is the kick in the butt to start flipping full time) and Melissa stayed on full-time at her job for about 6 months before she joined Danny full time.
The next milestone was figuring out how to flip full time being that the business was still just Melissa + Danny at this point. They talk about how they started to systematize the business a little bit with the additional time they had to focus on their business instead of their day jobs. In 2008, during the housing crisis they stayed determined together that they were going to be successful and not go back to full-time day jobs.
Ultimately, they trusted each other and their vision and go through the storm that was the housing crisis of 2008. Fast forward to 2010, their business made it through the housing crisis. In 2010, their family took a three week vacation on the west coast. Part of the trip, Mcminnville, Oregon to see an old wooden plane, it was here on this trip that Danny decided when they got back to San Antonio that he was going to get his pilot’s license and chase his passion.
Slowed down on the house flipping business to focus on Danny’s passion which offered them a hard lesson to learn. Most of the deals you are doing now, come from your marketing from 3-4 months prior. They were at the end of their lead pool and hadn’t spent the time over the last few months marketing the business.
Back to square one, with no leads built up in the pipeline. They started the FlippingJunkie blog to support the process and creative energy Danny needed to jumpstart hitting the pavement again for leads. Little did they know this would serve as a platform for their creative outlet as well as creating a community for people looking to learn more and grow their own businesses.
Danny blogged for 34-weeks, showing everything they did, marketing, analysis, everything behind the scenes of rebuilding their pipeline. Showed people how to get the deals and how to profit from them. Danny later turned these blog posts into his best-selling book “Flipping Houses Exposed.”
Just recently published the book in print, should be available for purchase soon. It’s always been available digitally but now it’s a physical copy. www.flippingjunkie.com/book
Danny and Melissa wanted to help people have something that can help fill more of the gaps when starting your house flipping business, wanted to help people get into flipping. Most people mentioned a lack of capital starting so they started developing Freedom by Flipping, a Wholesaling course for people starting out without the capital.
Danny talks about his software background before he started house flipping and how he had naturally made systems for their own business to be successful. It was at this point in 2013, when Danny and Melissa got serious about creating REImobile (a CRM system for real estate investors) to help other investors outside of their own business.
A conversation with Brandon Turner from BiggerPockets helped Danny realize how most of their deals come from online and how many investors don’t have a tool to help them build their own online presence. This conversation lead to LeadPropeller being born and launching in 2014. LeadPropeller is a way for investors to have a website built for them that is mobile-friend, SEO-optimized, without needing any coding skills or developers. Piggybacking off of Danny and Melissa’s experience.
Danny and Melissa learned by experience that first contact usually gets the deal so they added text capabilities for every lead that comes in, plus other features like automated follow ups, etc.
At this point, Danny and Melissa were still doing everything themselves. Right before launching LeadPropeller, they realized they needed help and hired their first employee.
Danny and Melissa met Justin Williams around 2014, he was a master delegator and team builder. Danny visited him in California to see how he had his team structured and how he was able to not be involved in every bit of the day to day.
After this meeting, they started hiring people to help with the day to day operations, starting with an Acquisitions Manager to take some of that weight off Danny so he could keep developing the software side of the company. Melissa also stepped in to be more involved to offer Danny more time on the software side.
May 2015, REImobile finally launched.
In October 2015 Danny and Melissa started the FlippingJunkie Podcast. Loved the idea of interviewing other real estate investors rather than just having the singular perspective on the blog.
In November 2015, they started doing more with LeadPropeller. Started managed online lead generation with LeadPropeller Services (Fuel). Started with Josh managing the internal SEO, lead generation, AdWords, Facebook, PPC for Danny and Melissa’s business. Now taking the knowledge gained from internal promotion to offer to other investors. Because of demand the company only takes on a certain number of investors in any given area, that’s why there’s a need to check availability.
In October 2016 they got serious about building the house flipping team. They both joined Justin William’s master mind group to continue to grow their business with motivation and like-minded investors…Melissa had an idea after their first experience, to split the company into two focuses. Danny would focus on the software side and Melissa would focus on the house flipping side of the company so they could both grow.
They learned that building a team is more than just hiring a team, it’s what are you doing it for and really building the right company culture as well. Melissa has kept the flipping business up and running if not more successfully now that that’s her sole focus.
Fast forward to 2017, most leads for the company are coming from online, they had LeadPropeller sites but were missing comprehensive blueprint to build the lead generation machine for online lead generation. Danny spent his time creating this blueprint, Danny put together outlines and scripts and eventually recorded over 16 hours of video training called Seller Lead Hacks.
After the road map was done, Danny started working on the updated software to replace REImobile. It’s called FlipPilot and it’s so much more than a CRM, it includes automation, call management, task management and KPI dashboards to name a few.
Danny and Melissa created FreedomDriven to help busy real estate investors achieve true freedom by building businesses that run without them. FreedomDriven is the parent company that includes subsidiaries: FlippingJunkie (Podcast), LeadPropeller (Sites + Lead Generation Services), SellerLeadHacks (Digital Marketing Training) and FlipPilot (REI Business Management Software).
In this episode, Danny sits down with Don Costa from the Flip Talk podcast to discuss how he has built a successful team that is flipping over 200 properties per year. We will walk through the ups and downs and lessons learned along the way to building the right team, the training that goes into making that team successful, and ultimately how to trust them to make their own decisions and go their own way in their positions.
Don Costa is a married father of three incredible kids and has the popular podcast Flip Talk. He has been in the real estate business since 2003. He started by knocking on doors and wholesaling properties, and then quickly moved into flipping houses. Fast forward to 2018, and Don has built a successful flipping business that will flip over 200 properties this year. Today, we go in depth on how Don built his team effectively and what lessons he learned along the way.
Don talks about starting out as an investor and trying to grow the business and realizing that he was the bottle neck. Trying to do too many things himself and not necessarily trusting the employees he had around him. It didn’t take long to realize this model wasn’t going to work.
Don talks about rebuilding his business in 2012, he still had a lot of the tendencies to control everything but this time around he had learned the lesson to release some control.
Danny and Don talk about how as entrepreneurs it’s easy to be a “control freak” and to think your way is the only way. They talk about how they still catch themselves in old habits of not wanting to give up control even though they know better. It’s something you have to work on daily.
Danny asks, “At what point did you decide to start building a team?”
Don’s answer? Right out of the gate on the second go around, he used the mantra “hire for where you want to be.” A good friend asked how he could be involved and Don knew he needed a property manager so he was his first hire.
After the first hire, he reached out to a “broker” and asked him to come join their endeavor and he decided to come on board.
Don remembers how it was just the three of them for about a year and half or two years and how they sat on the floor in the office they still have today to put the furniture together.
Building a team definitely didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t perfect, Don remembers.
Don talks about having his a-ha moment on an afternoon when he was spread too thin. He was supposed to be at school to pick up his son and was also supposed to be at a property to pick out paint color and so he thought “it’s time to get out of the way and let them make mistakes, it’s okay they’ll learn from it - I make mistakes every day.”
Letting your team make mistakes is one of the hardest things that Don has had to do.
Danny asks if there’s a good way to transition your knowledge into new team members. Don mentions that a lot of times hiring managers and business owners make the mistake of not spending enough time with their new hires. According to Don, this is on the key components of building a successful team.
He says, when you’re hiring someone you can’t just dump the entire job on them or they’ll be overwhelmed and potentially not stay on with your organization. Don recommends to give new employees a piece of the puzzle, educate them on how the process works and advise them to come back when they have time available. This ensures they learn the process and are able to execute to the right standards and build their knowledge and skill set strategically.
Don mentions how when hiring you want “plug and play” someone to just step into the role and start running but really that’s one of the worst things you can do for your organization because you won’t have stability. Taking time to train is key.
Want teachable and coachable employees, to put this into action Don is looking to hire an Admin Assistant to develop into a TC, give me a blank slate and let me build upon it. All of our best employees have been the “blank slate” who are teachable and coachable and who have good attitudes.
Danny asks if Don has any specific interview questions to help him find the right people. Don mentions specifically asking what motivates them and to really get to know them.
Danny talks about a new strategy at FreedomDriven LLC where they are doing group interviews of three people. They talk through the strategy and experience and how it’s been a really great strategy for the company.
Don talks through his vision of the company and then strategically planning how to get there. He knew he wanted to be a 100+ flip company and that kind of set the tone for hiring and what that meant to the bottom line. Being able to paint the picture of the vision is what helped him hire when the company was young.
Don mentions looking outside the books and finding strategic ways to get what you need, from hiring part-time employees to looking at people with skill-sets that fit a job rather than looking for someone with specific experience for a job.
Danny mentions if there’s not a mission or a goal for what you’re doing how can anyone, including your employees be excited about it? He recommends to include language around your mission and vision on job descriptions so people can connect with the bigger picture and who are truly passionate for the vision and not just the work.
Danny and Don talk about what it really means to “trust your gut” and how that plays into the team. Don reflects on how the instincts come from making mistakes and learning and if you want your team to have that instinct as well they will have to learn from mistakes and making their own judgement calls. It’s not something you’re born with.
Danny asks, “How do you monitor the progress of your team and the success of your team?”
Don offers several examples of how this works in his organization and how to use mistakes as teachable moments so the employees grow and learn how to more forward successfully.
Don talks about how they fine tune their internal systems to be more successful. He mentions 40% of the contracts they’ve received this year has come from follow ups so this is an extremely important part of the business model. He monitors stats and looks at the big picture to focus on the right areas to grow the business efficiently.
Danny and Don talk about how sometimes focusing on getting new leads is the easy narrative and something all businesses get caught up in. Don speaks more to the fact that 40% of their deals this year have been through follow ups. Don mentions that 50% of their appointments now are from follow up contact with leads and that this is currently the best converting audience he has.
Danny talks to Don about the automated follow up functionality in the upcoming software launch of FlipPilot, Don will be beta testing the software starting next week.
Don talks about changing his business model over the last year to really focus on the follow up. He speaks to the fact that his business has close to doubled because of their effort on follow ups. They talk about the right technology to support your team and your operations.
Don concludes with how important communication is and how important leading the team towards a vision as the owner is extremely important. Don meets with him team informally each week to make sure they are all on the same page.
Matt Recore first started working in the tech industry but realized it wasn’t his calling. He then began inviting in the pre-foreclosure world, focusing on houses that were on the way to auction. Matt would negotiate deals with sellers just before they would bring their houses to foreclosure auctions. “It’s not a great way to get into buying houses because of how stressful and emotional it is for the seller,” Matt says, “but you have to really put a lot of trust and look out for people in those situations. It was challenging, but that’s how I learned.”
The market began really heating up in California in the early 2000’s. This made Matt nervous. He sold all of his rentals and stopped flipping to try and avoid the crash that he felt was coming up. Matt got back into tech and had gotten out of the real estate industry just before the deep decline in California. “The peak season for us was in 2005,” Matt says, “But I got back into real estate in 2012.”
Once Matt got back into full time investing when the market began to get back to a safe place, Matt started building a strategy that was safer for the future. He wrote a book titled “How to Purchase Real Estate at 0% Interest” (the link is in the link section below). This book was written before the housing market crash with a strategy that’s been working for him. Let’s talk about what the strategy is!
There are benefits on both ends. Buying at 0% interest means that every bit being paid is going toward the principal which means you’re building your net worth a lot faster than a normal 30-year mortgage loan. A 15-year loan is much better because you begin to see the principal paid out sooner. Basically, your net worth is going to be much better when you buy this way.
The benefits to the seller are avoiding capital gains taxes. In California, the capital gains tax includes a state tax. When you sell with an installment sale, you can completely avoid paying those taxes. “It’s amazing how many sellers don’t want to pay the IRS,” Matt remarks, “The 1031 strategy is great, but you have to find another property that way. With an installment sale you can skip all of that.”
There are a lot more details about the strategy that Matt’s been working on in his book. The link is in the link section below. Check it out so that you can start buying houses with a 0% interest rate too!
Brandon Turner is the janitor at BiggerPockets.com, stumbling around in the dark looking for stuff to clean up. He also writes books. And he's a slumlord. Jokes aside, this episode goes over the books that all real estate investors should be reading as well as Brandon’s adventures in mobile home park investing.
Today’s book is “High Performance Habits” by Brendon Burchard. Brandon has been devouring this book and talking about it every chance he gets. This book isn’t specifically a real estate investing book, however it covers topics that are applicable to real estate investors such as staying on track with your business.
“Most books tell you ‘hey you’re a moron, do these things’ but what I like about this book,” Brandon tells, “is that it tells you you’re already doing well, here’s how to make it work for the long haul.”
One of the biggest risks with real estate investing is how volatile the market can be. While it’s been a good 5 or 6 years for real estate so far, what would happen if there was another housing crisis? How would your business be able to handle that? That’s where the lessons in this book come in. Knowing how to build a long-term successful plan for your real estate investing business will keep you on top, even if the worst should happen again.
“When things are going good we tend to ease off the gas a little bit,” Brandon says, “That’s when people get burnt out and quit. This book shows those high performers who maintain that status for years and what they do differently.”
There are six things that Burchard identifies in the book that will keep your business successful; threes personal habits and three social habits. They are…
- High Performing People Seek Clarity (they know what they want)
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- High performing people are looking for the clarity of what they want. The problem with a lot of people’s mindsets is that they either don’t know what they want in life, or are too vague about it. “I want to be rich.” Ok, how rich? How do you want to go about doing that? What will you do once you’re rich? There are too many variables. Being clear on your goals and what you want to achieve will keep you focused in your efforts to do so.
- Not just to be an energetic force, but to make sure you’re energizing yourself the right way. A lot of people get slowed down by the food they eat without even knowing it. Making sure you’re body and mind are healthy first will give you the energy you need to accomplish your goals.
- Have energy
- If you don’t have a need to do something then you probably won’t get around to it. You have to want it, but you have to need it, too. Brandon tells us the story of when he was first married and working in a minimum wage job. His wife had to drive with her head out of the window in the cold because they didn’t have the money for a new car. That was the moment he knew that investing in real estate wasn’t an option, it was a necessity for his family.
- Raise Necessity
- “This one’s kind of obvious, so I won’t spend much time talking about it,” Brandon jokes.
- Increase Productivity
- Everything you want in life, you have to get from other people. You need to know how to work with people and be around them in every capacity. When you’re working on a deal you’re never alone in the process. You have to talk to the sellers, the buyers, the title companies, the contractors, your own team, lawyers, and so on. Because you have to work with so many other people, you need to create an influence in that sphere. Let them know that you’re a good investor to work with and foster that business dependency.
- Develop Influence
- High performing people are bold and chance takers. The more confidence you show in your real estate investing business, the more people are going to want to work with you and be around you. If you’re taking calculated risks, then you’re pushing your business onto the next level.
- Demonstrate Courage
What books are you reading? What books do you suggest? Let us know in the comments! And don’t forget to check out the BiggerPockets Podcast and website to learn from more active real estate investors!
Seth Williams is a land investor and residential landlord, with nearly a decade of experience in the commercial real estate banking industry. He is also the Founder of REtipster.com - a real estate investing blog that offers real world guidance for part-time real estate investors.
Seth got started in land investing in 2005 while he was in college. He had first learned about real estate investing from the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. “I was fascinated by the book,” Seth tells, “It totally changed my perspective on a lot of things.”
The book wasn’t specific about how to get into real estate, though, so Seth dug into the MLS to find houses to flip or rent. He learned how to calculate the numbers to figure out what a good deal was, but then the housing market crisis hit. In 2007 he couldn’t find anything that made sense for him to make a profit with.
Because the market was so hostile and Seth was a beginning investor, he went into the work force after college. In 2008 he took a course in land investing where he got the information he was looking for. With that course Seth began finding motivated sellers by using delinquent tax lists. Land was a more simple type of real estate for him to get into with a much lower risk than house flipping. Seth found that you could buy land from people on the delinquent tax lists for pocket change.
“I could buy these plots free and clear with the money I had in my pocket,” Seth says, “When I realized you could do that I was like ‘Whoa, this is a game changer’!”
Without needing to deal with loans or mortgages, Seth was able to build a safe foundation for his land flipping business. House flipping takes time to learn the safe way to invest. For someone who’s been in the industry for a while, it’s not as risky for them to invest in houses because they know what they’re doing. When Seth was was just starting out, he knew nothing about how to safely invest in houses, which is why land investing was so appealing to him.
“With land, I could set myself up with these deals,” Seth explains, “and no matter how the cards fell I would make money from it.”
For example, if you buy a plot of land that’s worth $5,000 and you’re only paying $500 for it, it’s a no-brainer that you’re going to make a profit when you sell it in return. Because this made so much sense to Seth, he started looking at counties that weren’t densely populated and buy land there.
There are three counties in Detroit that are very densely populated, which makes those plots not desirable. The problem with buying land “in the armpit of town”, the only use for it is to build another house. It has less market appeal. On the other hand, land near those densely populated counties has more potential, which is what makes that land a better investment.
Husband and father to a 4 month old baby. I started investing about a year and a half ago. Ended up with a loss of $700 for 2017 but the first half of 2018 we will gross over $125,000 with a goal of $250k for the year.
Kyle started out in real estate investing just like most investors do. He was unhappy at his desk job and wanted a way to achieve financial freedom. There were some learning curves he had to overcome, though. When he and his wife got married they used the money from the condo she sold to buy their first house to flip. Unfortunately Kyle ended up losing money in that investment.
One of the biggest learning moments in that first house was figuring out how to manage contractors the right way. Kyle found that the contractors weren’t showing up to the property frequently, they were taking other jobs while still working for him, and were spending too much money on supplies from hardware stores. “That was a learning experience,” Kyle says, “Now I check in with my contractors every day to make sure everything is going smoothly.”
Luckily for Kyle he had another property already being worked on by the time the first house was sold. This property went smoother, getting him a decent profit. “You have to stumble a few times before you get the hang of it,” Kyle admits. That’s so true. Starting your own real estate investing business is a learning experience.
Once the first two properties were done with Kyle started getting in the groove with his business. As far as marketing goes, Kyle has been doing direct mail and managing leads on his website. He has his phone number on the postcards he sends with a call to action to text him if they’re interested. “I haven’t gotten too many texts,” Kyle admits, “but a lot of people go to my website from the postcard.”
A mixture of direct mail marketing and having a websites for people to go to has been working really well for Kyle. “I think it’s from people not wanting to make a call, but feeling a lot more comfortable filling out a form online,” he tells. To be honest, that’s what we’ve found works best too. There are so many motivated sellers who get nervous about talking to someone asking to buy their house. The detachment of filling out a form online is more comforting for them.
So what made Kyle get into real estate investing? Well, the condo his wife sold when they got married gave the couple roughly $20k. Initially Kyle wasn’t planning on getting into real estate investing. In fact, it all started with a Google search for what to do to invest the money. “I knew I didn’t want to spend it or just put it in retirement,” he says, “Honestly I just Googled ’ways to invest’ or something like that and real estate kept coming up.”
Kyle knew he didn’t want to build a renting portfolio. “Flipping was more appealing to me. I didn’t like how long you have to commit to renting,” Kyle says, “I didn’t start with Rich Dad Poor Dad or anything. I just searched in Google and did research there.”
It just goes to show important it is to appear online. If you want to get in contact with Kyle you can reach him on his website or email him at kburnett@ibuyhouses513.com.
Jason Rios has spent about 30 years of his life in Las Vegas and entered the real estate industry there over a decade ago after graduating cum laude from Pepperdine University with a degree in Business Administration. He started out as a traditional Realtor before transitioning into the investing side several years back.
Mr. Rios is familiar with a wide array of investing strategies and enjoys utilizing his entrepreneurial skills along with Alex to help expand their investments. His goal by 2020 is $100,000/month in passive income. In his spare time, Jason enjoys time with his loved ones, attending sports games & concerts, traveling, thrill-seeking, playing softball and giving back as president of his local alumni chapter.
Alex Wentland was born and raised in Chicago,IL and has been living in Las Vegas for 3 years. Prior to getting into real estate he went to a community college and was planning to work in the medical imaging field. He was waiting tables for the last 7 years and finally decided to pursue an entrepreneurial path after reading an impactful book despite most people’s opposing opinions. He chose real estate as it seemed like the most traveled path to financial success.
Alex's goal by 2020 is also $100K/month in passive income and to become a millionaire by age 30 with the help and teamwork with his partner Jason. Alex loves spending time with his fiancée and 2 dogs, taking hikes, going to movies, sporting games and traveling.
Their dissimilar paths brought them to the same REI circles, leading to a partnership in 2016 that started as wholesaling and has evolved into a multi-faceted investing approach. Their first deal together closed in 2017 and has since led to over 100 completed transactions. Alex and Jason feel this is truly just the start of what they will accomplish together.
Danny was casually watching YouTube and found a video of the growth and collapse of civilizations in Europe. What he found especially interesting was the huge expanse of the Roman Empire and its eventual decline. Similarly, Dan Sullivan’s program called “Pure Genius” talks about self improvement and growth. In the last CD, Sullivan talked about how great civilizations started on top of the world but still fell apart. Why is that?
Sullivan puts it like this: take something like the Roman Empire and and scale it down to you and your business. When an individual is at the top of their game at some point, inevitably, something is going to happen that makes you take a tumble. Whether this tumble will cause a downward spiral or not is entirely up to how you manage the situation. Sullivan says, “Progress stops when people stop being grateful. People come to a point when there’s so much success that they start losing touch with what got them there.”
That’s such an important lesson for anyone, let alone a real estate investor. When you’re so used to looking far in the future and achieving huge goals that you’re not noticing what you’ve accomplished, you’re going to start getting overwhelmed and fall apart. Celebrate your wins more! After you close a deal, celebrate it. After you covert a lead, celebrate it! Take a second to see how hard you worked to get to this point. Look at all of the effort you put into a deal that you profited off of. See how far you’ve come and know that it took you time and effort to do it. You didn’t get where you are now overnight.
The most important thing to keep in mine is that you’re doing well. You have a successful business that you built. Don’t always look so far ahead that you lose sight of where you came from. You did it, and you’re going to keep on doing it.
What’s your best win? Let us know in the comments, or in the Flip Pilot group on Facebook! Join for free by following the link in the section below :)
Melissa Johnson has been on the Flipping Junkie Podcast multiple times (she and Danny run the business together and are married, so it goes without saying she’s an important member of the REI community). She runs the house flipping side of their business and does a great job doing it!
After years of running their real estate investing business, Melissa made the decision to cut out direct mail marketing at the start of 2018. Their yearly goal was to stop direct mail marketing all together. But why?? Hasn’t direct mail been working for so many investors?
The truth is…direct mail is dead. Real estate investing direct mail marketing has been declining for years, so much so that Melissa said it’s time to stop. In it’s place, Danny and Melissa are going to be focusing on online lead generation.
Melissa didn’t make the decision to cut out direct mail overnight, though. At the beginning of 2017 she had noticed that their direct mail wasn’t consistent and wasn’t performing well. Instead of cutting it off then, she decided to go all in and get that marketing strategy back up and running.
“We started a bunch of mailing campaigns and the year went on, and we were getting some deals, but it wasn’t performing the way I hoped it would when I looked at what we were spending on it,” Melissa tells. “I started looking at the numbers half way through the year and was pretty disappointed.”
Melissa’s direct mail plan started by mailing to high equity for most of the year, then they started adding in unknown equity. The unknown equity didn’t produce any leads at all, so they quickly stopped that campaign.
“We had about 30k addresses in our mailing list, based on our criteria,” Melissa explains, “We were had them separated by zip codes so that it wouldn’t be so much at one time. Every mailing was between $2400 - $2500 per week.”
The criteria for the high equity lists was anything under $250k with more than 50% equity, at people over age 40. The criteria for the unknown equity lists was just not stated how much equity the homeowners had. The equity could be unknown, unstated, they could have some, they could have none; it just means that the equity field wasn’t filled in. This list did not produce leads, so Melissa stopped that campaign.
“About half way through the year I took a look at the numbers,” Melissa says, “In September I said ‘look we’ve been spending a lot of money on this and it’s not getting us leads. We need to stop what we’re doing and reevaluate all of it’.”
The mailing lists were the same addresses, but it was all sent in a cycle. Each address would get a piece of mail from them every 4 - 6 weeks. With 30,000 addresses, that adds up.
Once Melissa looked deeper into the process and the direct mail findings, she learned that direct mail just isn’t enough to keep a business at this scale going. There’s a huge difference between a high quality lead and just another throw-away lead.
Melissa sat down and took about 8 hours just looking over every single lead from 2017 to see which ones were high quality and which ones weren’t. She read all of the notes on every property to see where that lead went, how far it got, and if it turned into a deal or not. And if it did turn into a deal, how profitable was the deal?
Overall, Melissa found that the cost of direct mail wasn’t worth the kinds of leads that they were getting. Their higher quality leads were coming from online marketing strategies and their website. The leads that came in through direct mail either weren’t quality leads or weren’t leads that converted to deals.
So when the question is asked: is direct mail dead? Melissa’s answer is, “For us, direct mail died about a year ago. We dropped it and moved to online lead generation.”
Ryan Robson has been helping sellers sell their homes for the last 8 years. He has averaged 100 plus flips since that time. He has experienced a lot of ups and a lot more downs on his journey a long the way. From these experiences he has built a real restate empire flipping houses in 3 different markets.
Ryan didn’t start in real estate right away. Right out of college his father suggested he go into accounting and let the real estate knowledge come to him. So, he did that. Ryan quickly realized that sitting at a shared desk with 6 other people was not his idea of a perfect job, so he decided to get his feet wet in the real estate investing market.
First Ryan started working other real estate investors, using his experience and knowledge he had gained from his previous accounting job. All was going well for a while, but on his return from a trip to Europe the investor he was working for had to let him go because of the housing market crash. This devastated Ryan. He spent two weeks spending his time doing what he had thought was fun, watching TV, playing video games, and so on. Ryan quickly got restless and though, “This isn’t fun. I need to do something!”
That’s when Ryan started his solo real estate investing journey. With the housing market the way it was in the early 2000’s, Ryan had to buy and sell fast. “I had to be careful about what I bought the houses for,” he says, “because tomorrow it’s not going to be worth as much, you know?” As time progressed and Ryan started getting comfortable with short sales and flipping houses. As a result. Ryan began to grow his team. For a long time everything was working smoothly. “I had about 10 or so acquisitions managers, or sales reps,” Ryan remembers, “I had a good sized team.”
Things were running smoothly, that is, until one of his employees turned out to be a bad seed. Ryan describes it like this:
“Most people are trusting. I’m a trusting person. I want to believe that everyone is doing the right thing all the time, but that’s not always the case. This person…he ended up taking 6 of my people with him, then after I had to end up firing 2 more because I didn’t know where they stood on the issue. I’m not mad that it happened, I’m mad because I let it get to that point. I mean, we ended up shouting at each other in the office, right in front of everyone. It was a big blow out. It should never have gotten there. That was my mistake, but I learned from it.”
This caused Ryan to need to transition his business. Because of the way short sales were going at this point in the housing market, Ryan admits he was needing to let a few people go anyway. They had gone from closing about 100 deals a year to a slower decline. In the end this shift wasn’t all terrible.
“I really enjoy investing in people,” Ryan says, “I’m at that stage where I like to see them grow. It’s fulfilling.”
Now Ryan is a very successful real estate investor with a wife and three children. He has been able to keep his business alive despite getting it started in a very volatile time for buying and selling houses. In fact, Ryan has transitioned again to online marketing to make sure his real estate investing business is bringing in high quality leads.
“I use LeadPropeller PPC,” Ryan tells us, “I know I’m not on here to give you guys a plug, but it’s great and what you and Josh are doing is amazing. It was in 2016 that I made the dive into PPC and it’s been great!”
It’s awesome to hear from Ryan Robson and see the success of his real estate investing business!
Danny spoke at this year’s Flip Hacking Live event! His presentation covers lead generation for real estate investors and how the market is shifting. Are you staying on top of it? This is the audio from the presentation, but you can watch the video on Flipping Junkie’s YouTube channel, check it out in the link section of the show notes.
How many people are sending direct mail? When that potential seller gets your postcard or letter, what do they do? They go online. The next thing they know, they can’t find you online. If you’re not online, you’ve just missed a lead. If you are online, but not optimized, then they’re seeing you beside your competition. You competition has more reviews than you, and looks more accessible to the seller. If you were in the seller’s position, who would you pick? It’s pretty obvious you’d go with the one that has the better reviews.
That’s why you can’t just have a website anymore. You have to have a fully optimized, built out, lead generation machine. There’s no way you can compete with your competition if you get a website, set it up, and then do nothing with it. It’s an on-going thing.
You need a website online that’s credible, trustworthy, and that builds you recognition. Danny and Melissa have generated thousands of leads and deals through their website, but it didn’t happen over night. It was a long road to building their website and grow their ranking. Search engine optimization takes time and practice.
If you’re not at the top of page 1, you’re missing leads. But how can you get it to rank that high? Keyword research is the first step. As a real estate investor, it’s obvious you need to rank for keywords like “sell house fast”, or “sell my house for cash”. Those keywords are what all of your competitors are using as well. So how can you beat the competition when it comes to ranking?
You have to set realistic expectations for yourself. You’re not going to rank for these keywords in the first month. You’re just not. You have to constantly keep working on your website, you have to be adding content that’s going to keep helping you rank, and you have to be patient. SEO can take 6 months to a year to start showing progress in Google. That’s a long time, but it’s worth it. Why?
SEO is the cheapest was to generate leads. How much does it cost to optimize your website? Time. That’s it. You have to invest the time into building it right, but once it starts ranking you’re going to start getting in organic traffic that converts.
The next step, after you have your SEO set up to start getting you organic leads, is marketing. PPC, or Pay Per Click, is a pay to play marketing strategy but it works. Danny uses a combination of PPC platforms, but the one that performs the best is Google AdWords.
Google AdWords places your ad, website, or landing page as a search result that appears above organic results. So if a seller is searching the phrase “sell my house for cash in San Antonio” and your AdWords campaign matches that search, you’re going to appear as 1 of the top 3 results on page 1. Why? Because you paid for that spot.
Now, yes, PPC can get expensive. But the cost per deal is worth it. If you’re spending a few thousand running an ad and it gets you a deal that nets you tens of thousands, is it worth it? Yes! Because you put yourself above the competition who doesn’t have the time or the money to run ads.
Starting to get a taste for online marketing? We don’t blame you. It’s worked for Danny and Melissa, and it can work for you too. That’s why Danny hosts weekly webinars to teach you about the latest online marketing strategies that work. You can get your free seat by following the links in the section below!
Hillary and Marco got married and became pregnant in 2015. In an effort to build the future they both wanted their family, they both quit their jobs that same year. Since then, they have built their real estate portfolio and build a wholesaling company that closes numerous transactions each month. With a team of six people in Hilco Homes, they look to grow strong in the new year of 2018!
Marco and Hillary got their start like most investors do. They were looking for a way to generate an income for their growing family and needed something that worked. Having already known the business, they decided to go for it and start their real estate investing journey. Hillary started studying up on everything she could. She read all of the books she could find on real estate investing and dove in. Marco helped her with some concepts, and together their wholesaling team was born. Now the two are unstoppable!
“I’m learning the best that I can,” Hillary says, “But Marco has 10 years on me.”
They had two major focuses.
1 - Marco and Hillary wanted to generate cash flow, or a passive income. This consisted of getting houses to rent. Marco points out that, even though the rent is paying for the house, that’s not a huge passive income for a family to live off of.
2 - Marco and Hillary needed an active income. This came to them through wholesaling houses. While they were building up their rental properties business, the two focused on finding wholesale deals to keep their lifestyle afloat.
Their wholesaling houses team started when a gentleman named Juan contacted Marco and asked for guidance in the real estate investing market. He was let go of a previous position and was looking for a job in the real estate market. Marco taught him how to bring in wholesaling deals with the profits being split between the two 50/50. The rest is history! Juan became a part of their team, and everything grew from there.
“We refined all of our systems and processes,” Hillary says, “It’s all about finding the people who work best with us.”
Their wholesaling houses team is up to 7, including their virtual assistant, and is still looking to grow. “We’re bringing on an eighth next week,” Marco says, “It’s a constantly evolving thing. Some people work out, and some people don’t.”
What are some of the lessons learned from hiring and letting people go?
Marco and Hillary have the idea of not hiring good people, but hiring great people. “We don’t just want to hire to fill a seat,” says Hillary.
Hiring high quality team members will only strengthen your wholesaling houses team over the long run. In the past, they required that applicants submit a resume, but have recently changed that policy. Seeing the pen and paper resume as an “out-dated system”, Hillary has decided to do video resumes instead. Marco and Hillary ask that applicants answer 3 questions in their 2 - 3 minute video submissions.
“I feel we’re a pretty good judge of character,” she replies.
If an applicant makes it past the pre-screening questions and video application, then they move on to a full interview with Juan. At that point, if Juan thinks this person is qualified and a good fit for the company, then they get moved on to Hillary for the final interview. This process has taken Marco and Hillary a few years to work out, but they’ve found it’s the most successful for finding people to add to their wholesaling houses team.
After meeting his mentor Josh Rudin started buying and flipping houses 6 years ago when he was 19 years old. He went through a lot of negative experiences and learned from them and grew in the process. Now he’s making positive cash flow and doing flips. He primarily focuses his flips in 4 cities near Victorville, Ca. He hired a project manager double his age to handle all his deals and having the help has given him the time to focus his efforts on finding deals and even traveling the world.
My name is Josh Rudin, I am 25 years old, and I grew up in a small city called Agoura Hills, CA in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The way I got started in real estate is my dad introduced me to a mentor he had heard about through a friend. Every Tuesday my mentor was holding meetings at Red Robin. He would bring a board game every day called the millionaire maker by Laurel Langemeier. The point of the game was to grow your balance sheet. I learned about assets, liabilities, income, and expenses and how to account for every dollar. The game really opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking. One day I told my mentor I want to start doing this in real life. He let me know I am ready and that I need to be up at 4 am Saturday because he is picking me up and taking me to an area he’s been intrigued with the growth. That Saturday morning after driving for 2 hours we had made it to the “High Desert”. We would drove around all day asking questions to locals and writing down addresses of vacant properties, so we can really understand the market and the area. After a few months of driving out there almost every weekend I decided I feel comfortable with the area enough to make my first offer. It was accepted and at age 19 I owned my first home. It was one of the best feelings I have ever felt. Ever since then, I have slowly grown my business to where I am now, buying over 10 houses a year for the past couple years.
Scott Smith is an Asset Protection attorney and real estate investor with experience in everything to flipping houses to buying notes. Scott specializes on how to make sure you never lose money from lawsuits.
Scott wanted to focus his business on giving people the top level of protection possible, without complicating anything or increasing taxes. “Is it possible to have the best of all worlds?” He asked himself. Turns out it is. And that’s how his business was formed. The types of protections offered, and the way people can scale infinitely with their help makes Scott’s law firm the most competitive in the country.
Scott has been a real estate investor for 8 years, which is why he exclusively works with real estate investors. Now you don’t have to hunt down a lawyer who might know some things about real estate investing. Because Scott’s law firm is so specialized, not only can he help with any of your real estate investing needs, but his team can help anyone in all 50 states. Don’t worry, we’ll have contact information further down in the show notes.
One of the biggest ways to lose money as a real estate investor is holding property in your personal name. Scott explains it like this:
“If you’re holding property in your personal name, what you’re really saying is that if anything goes wrong anywhere in your life, you’re ok with someone being able to attack anything and everything that you own.”
What Scott focuses on in his law firm is separating the assets from the operations. You should have 2 companies. One that holds your assets, cash, stocks, personal investments, etc. Then the second one is what Scott calls your “Operating Company”. That company handles the actual “business”. It’s the company that manages the hiring of new employees, dealing with contracts, handling your leases, etc.
“Lawsuits work because there has to be a connection,” Scott tells us, “between the thing people are complaining about, and the business people are complaining about.”
So if all of your operations are going through one company and someone has a problem with it, they can only sue that company. They wouldn’t be able to attack your assets because their relationship is only with the operating company you have. It’s a way to protect what you’ve worked so hard to get.
Let’s say you’re flipping in your personal name and you’re hiring all of the contractors yourself, basically acting as the GC. That means that if anyone has a complaint against you, or the property, or anything that extends to insurance liability, that whole property gets locked up if they decide to sue you. Once that property is locked like that, you won’t be able to do anything to it until the law suite is settled.
The way to get around that is by setting up your asset company as an LLC. the best place to set it up is in Texas, but there are about 10 other states that make it easy to set up. You can use that company anywhere in the US, just like any other LLC. This is your asset company. Then, from there, you would set up a local LLC for your operations company. This one has to be local because it’s where you’re doing your day to day operations of your real estate investing business.
So let’s say you get a contractor and he makes some terrible cabinets for you and you tell him that they’re not good and you’re not going to pay for them. Of course he’s going to be upset, so he decides to sue you. Well, since you hired him through your local shell LLC, he’s not able to attack your personal name or your asset holding company. That means that while the lawsuit is going on, you can still work on that property and get it sold, and all of your assets are safe in the process. Again, this is a great way to protect yourself, your assets, and your business.
In your worst case scenario, you wind the LLC down that got sued and then open up another one to act as your operations company. In the end, you might be out court fees and a settlement, but your properties are all protected. Plus, you were still able to conduct business while the court case was happening, meaning you still made money. This is a really efficient way of getting rid of issues like that.
Hey Flip Pilots! You know that book Danny wrote a few years back called “Flipping Houses Exposed”? It’s been a free kindle e-book for the longest time, but now it’s finally coming into print! How cool, right?
A lot of investors have told Danny that this book has helped them with their real estate investing business. This isn’t just any book that tells you the basics of flipping houses. No. What Danny and Melissa did was document every single lead and deal that they had so that you can see what they did, what they planned, what worked, and what didn’t.
And when we say everything, we mean everything. See, Danny had taken some time off of the flipping business so he could get his private pilot’s license. When he came back he knew he would have to wear a lot of hats to get his real estate investing business back on track. Keeping documents of every aspect of their business helped him to be able to plan better in the future. When these documents became a book, Danny saw that they were helping other real estate investors grow their business too.
In no time it was obvious to everyone reading the book that the majority of Danny and Melissa’s leads came from their real estate investing website. If you’re struggling to get the deals in your area, it’s because you’re doing the same thing that every other investor in your area is doing.
Now it’s no secret that online leads are better leads. I mean, c’mon, it’s 2018. You have to be online so that when people go to search for someone to buy their house they find you instead of your competition.
Now, this isn’t to try and promote LeadPropeller websites (even though they are the best), this is to let you all know that Danny will be hosting coaching calls to answer any and all questions that you guys might have. So many investors see that it’s possible to get leads online, but have no idea how to do it. Having a website just isn’t enough anymore.
If you want to dominate your local market, come to Danny’s coaching call. He’s going to be going over the best strategy to get online motivated seller leads. Don’t get lost in direct mail, don’t let your competition beat you in Google searches. Come make your real estate investing business stronger with Danny’s help.
No one thought Mark Evans would graduate from high school. Even his teachers thought he should probably just try to pass and then get a minimum wage job.
But Mark had different plans for his life! He did his first two real estate deals before he turned 19… and that changed everything.
Today, he’s called “The Deal Maker” (The DM) and “The Digital Nomad” (The DN) because he owns a massive real estate empire, which he runs while traveling the world.
Whether he’s sipping an ice cold beer on a Caribbean beach or walking the famous Camino de Santiago or riding on the back of an elephant in India, he’s also doing real estate deals.
In today’s episode, I’m sharing my favorite 11 books that I read in 2017. I read more but, these are the books that ended up with tons of dog-eared pages. Melissa also shares a bonus book she wanted me to recommend for the ladies.
Learn a little about each book and why it is recommended. At the end of the episode you will learn a process for getting the most out of these books. Find out how to take notes you can later find easily based on author and topic. This is a great way to make sure you revisit the key points from each book you read.
The Advantage -
This book is awesome for organization. If you need to focus on organizational health, this is definitely one of those books for real estate investors that you need to add to your list. Stop struggling with managing everything and focusing on processes but not actually getting anything done. Get organized, get working, build your team, and become the Flip Pilot you know you can be.
The Obstacle is The Way -
This is a book that's based on the ideas of stoicism philosophy. If you're trying to achieve change in your life, you're going to face obstacles. When you face them, face them. Embrace the obstacle to be able to overcome it so that you can grow and become a better person.
Bigger, Leaner, Stronger -
This book is more for the health and fitness crowd. Why is this on the list of books for real estate investors, you might ask? Strong mental health starts with strong physical health. Now we're not saying to become a body builder, we're simply saying that you need to be healthy. What's the point in growing old as a successful real estate investor if you've got poor health? This book is awesome because it breaks everything down into the science of healthy living. Definitely a great read to get you motivated and off the couch!
Essentialism -
I've already talked about this book in another podcast episode. If you haven't listened to it, the link will be in the link section of the show notes. This is a must read for real estate investors. The tips in this book will help you eliminate what you don't need to focus on so that only the essential parts of your business remain.
Lifeonaire -
We had a recent podcast episode where Steve Cook came on and talked about his book. Check it out in the link section of the show notes! This book is written as a story, so it's easier to process all of the lessons from it. I love this book because it helps you understand that the life that you want isn't always about getting the most money. As far as one of the books for real estate investors, this one is one of my favorites. This is an eye opening message about living the best life right now instead of always focusing on the future.
As a Man Thinketh -
This is a super short book (so it's easy to re-read). This is taken from some Biblical text and really helps you connect with yourself. A quote from the back reads: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he". This is a great book for keeping yourself motivated. If you think you're going to fail, you will. If you think you're going to succeed, then you will too. This book is all about keeping yourself in a positive train of though to accomplish your goals.
Leadership Axioms -
If you're struggling with leadership strategies then this is the book for you. In fact, Melissa has suggested this one to Danny and it really stuck. Every 3 or so pages of this book have an axiom on them so that you keep yourself going through the books. This is one of the great books for real estate investors because you can go back to it when you have a leadership problem that you need to address. Each axiom will help you accomplish your leadership goals and keep your team moving forward.
How to Win Friends and Influence People -
This is a classic. If you've heard of it, read it. If you've already read it, read it again! This book will help you to build relationships that are perfect for networking your real estate investing business. Definitely a must read.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living -
Often times as real estate investors, we find ourselves worrying a lot. Didn't you become a real estate investor so that you could have the freedom your old job wasn't giving you? What good is that freedom if you're always worrying? Stop that! This is one of the great books for real estate investors because it will help you to take the stress out of your life so you can actually enjoy your financial freedom.
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment -
In the beginning of this book there's a passage that tells you to focus on practicing for the sake of practicing. That's such a great lesson for real estate investors to implement in their business, but also in their lives. Everything you do you need to practice at in order to become better. Beyond that, though, you need to practice for the sake of practicing because it will make you appreciate the work that goes into mastering something.
Seneca: Letters From a Stoic -
This book is included because a lot of the problems that people face these days are basically the same problems that people were facing hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Things at their core don't change that much. That's why Danny has been so in to stoicism, because that philosophy keeps everything in perspective. The letters in this book survived thousands of years that are jam packed with philosophy. It's an engaging read, which is why it's one of the books for real estate investors on this list.
(Bonus) You Are a Badass -
Melissa specifically wanted all of the ladies out there to read this book. This is a great book for identifying and eliminating the self sabotaging behavior that a lot of people tend to have these days. If you're keeping yourself down, definitely check out this book to give yourself a boost. You're a badass real estate investor. Go be a badass!
Paul Del Pozo is an ex competitive bodybuilder turned real estate investor and entrepreneur. The last 2 years for him have been about personal and business evolution. He has learned to use his unique ability, his gym mindset, to drive and push forward through business failures to success. Listen in to hear about his journey flipping houses.
When Paul got his first deal from knocking on doors, he realized that real estate investing was a great opportunity for him. He made his own luck by starting with knocking on preforeclosures and hunting them down. When he landed his first wholesale deal, Paul started going after the next steps to call himself a real estate investor.
"I always had this idea of a rich guy buying buildings," Paul says, "so it was difficult to picture myself as that guy."
This seems to be a struggle that a lot of investors have when they're first starting out. When is it ok to call yourself a real estate investor? When do you start introducing yourself as one in networking events, or to potential clients? After Paul's first deal, he had the confidence to go to local REIA meetings and call himself an investor.
Paul got into real estate investing out of a need to make money. Originally doing wholesaling deals, Paul has continued down that path with the types of properties he has in his inventory. Now that he's more stable in real estate investing, he is hungry to learn more and build his business.
"Staying excited is what drives you. If you're not excited then what are you doing?" Paul tells us, "No matter what I'm doing in the business, I find it all exciting."
Staying excited is great, but staying focused is better. Knowing where to go and what's important for building your business is key to making your real estate investing business a success. Everything you do when running your business is about being intentional with what you want to work toward.
It's just like in the book "Essentialism". If you haven't heard Danny's response to that book, definitely check out that podcast episodes further down in the link section.
Steve is the author and founder of Lifeonaire. Teaching thousands of people how to live and experience abundant lives. He has flipped over 500 houses in his investing career and helps investors to transform their businesses from life sucking to life giving ventures.
As a teenager, Steve was building his own businesses. At the age of 21, Steve bought a restaurant and bar as his first real estate investment. Without going into detail, it didn’t end up being a long-term success. But he was able to get started in this highly competitive industry at a young age and set a great foundation for his future!
When Steve turned 25 he bought another bar that ended up working much better for him. He used creative real estate investing techniques to get it. Once the bar was his, he thought he would be on easy street raking in the wealth.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s run a business that what he thought was not the case. “Turns out,” Steve says, “all I did was buy myself two jobs. I was lucky if I could pay myself for one!”
When the second bar went under, Steve found himself deep in debt with terrible credit. Not knowing what to do, he started working a day job with a steady paycheck. While getting paid for his work felt good, having someone working over him did not. “When someone else was dictating my life, that entrepreneurial spirit was starting to fire up again,” Steve mentions.
That was when he made the decision to becoming a successful real estate investor. However, Steve barely had an income, was deep in debt, and terrible credit. What was he going to do?
With everything going against him, Steve started doing his homework. He studied successful methods and researched different types of investing. Wholesaling appealed to Steve because you didn’t need good credit to start, you didn’t need a lot of money, and you didn’t need the means to flip a house. It took him about 8 months to get his first deal closed, but he didn’t give up.
That first deal was it for Steve. Real estate investing is mostly a mind game, and he understood that now. When the first deal was closed, Steve started getting offers within the first 48 hours. The man he ended up selling to took him on as an acquisitions manager, finding 7 houses in 6 weeks for his new partner.
Steve came back with an eighth property that got rejected. Instead of letting it go, Steve flipped that property to someone else and made a profit off of it himself.
When he made the full profit from that sale, Steve knew what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He was going to become a successful real estate investor. In his first 2 years of real estate investing, Steve flipped 105 houses!
At the end of the day, taking action is about being motivated. Steve was motivated to reach financial freedom, he never stopped, and he made it happen. There’s nothing more important in real estate investing than that.
After 2 years, Steve realized that working with a partner wasn’t for him. In Jan 2001, he made $40,000 with his partner. “At that time I only needed $25,000 to get by,” Steve explains, “My lifestyle was very lean.”
When he began working on his own, Steve easily made more than that in the first few months. One month made $60,000, then the next month he made $70,000. He didn’t know what to do with all of this money, so he decided to give back.
Steve found people in the community who offered to help him organize his income to live comfortably and to give back. Since he was making a great living now, they suggested for him to buy his own home. Steve bought a 5 bedroom, 4.5 bath house on a 5 acre lot in Baltimore as a single guy in his mid to late twenties. That’s amazing!
After that, Steve put together his rental portfolio, bought himself a vacation home, and went from having zero assets to over 7 million dollars in assets in just 3 short years.
Seeing his success, Steve started getting people coming to him for training. People were flying across the country to be coached by Steve. “In the back of my mind,” he tells, “I’m thinking ‘they don’t really want what I’ve got’. I don’t feel successful yet.”
Realizing he was happier before getting all of his properties and assets and worth, Steve was at a loss. He finally figured out that, although he had all of these things now, he didn’t have a life. Real estate investing is time consuming. Steve quickly saw that he was spending all of his time running his real estate investing business and not doing much else for himself.
One week there were 2 gentlemen who approached Steve asking him to teach them how to become a millionaire. He responded simply with, “Why do you want to be a millionaire?” To which both men replied: “So I can be a better father and husband.”
Steve told them a piece of great advice. He said, “You don’t need to be a millionaire to be a good father or husband. That’s done in the choices you make. Do the things that good fathers and husbands do, and you’ll be that.”
Needless to say, they didn’t like that answer. Steve was contemplating why these men thought they needed to be millionaires to be good people and heard the word “Lifeionaire” come to him. That’s what those men wanted to be, not millionaires. They wanted to experience an abundant life and they believed that money would get them there.
Money is just a vehicle. Having lots of money wasn’t the goal, having a great life is. Once Steve understood that, he was able to become a successful Lifeionaire, instead of just a real estate investor.
We'll be hosting a webinar about online lead generation once a week! Reserve your free seat to discover the secret to online lead generation at LeadPropeller.com/webinar!
Joni Yates
Joni has an extensive career in administration working with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike. Her career has spanned sectors including retail, automotive, and the legal field. She has been working with Quickbooks for 7 years. Joni has helped several companies start their Quickbooks bookkeeping accounts from the ground up. Joni holds a Bachelor’s degree in Counseling Psychology from Rochester College.
Kirk Yates
Kirk has worked for Fortune 500 companies and run small businesses. His expertise includes sales management, the automotive aftermarket, mortgages, and banking. He first worked with Quickbooks in 2001 and prior to that worked with Peachtree Accounting software. Kirk is skilled in P&L and financial projections. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising from Bradley University and a MBA from Walsh College.
Joni and Kirk live in Rochester Hills, MI with their two children. Together they have owned rental properties and know all too well, the ups and downs of being landlords.
Together, Joni and Kirk got in to bookkeeping for real estate investors when Joni did consulting work for Mike Simmons and his partner. When they were looking over the books, Joni and Kirk noticed that there was a hole in market because there weren't many people doing bookkeeping for real estate investors.
The biggest mistakes Joni and Kirk see when it comes to bookkeeping for real estate investors are:
- Not keeping track of small transactions
- Not keeping receipts
- Not categorizing transactions
The reason Joni and Kirk use Quick Books is because it helps keep everything organized for their clients. Quick Books makes it easy to see every aspect of bookkeeping for real estate investors. Which is why they say that not having any type of system is the worst thing to do for your business. Not tracking every single expense will end up costing your business lots of money in the long run.
If you're in the need of a good bookkeeper, Joni and Kirk are the way to go. The first step is building up a report for your real estate investing business that's broken down by property so that you know where your money was spent.
"You're not going to send us too much paper," Kirk says, half jokingly. The more a real estate investor can provide for them, the better. 6 or so months down the road of working with Joni and Kirk, there won't be as many questions. The more you two work together, the better their understanding of your business will be, and the more streamline the process will become.
Because clients want specific reports, Joni and Kirk keep everything categorized and organized. Want to know where your marketing expenses are? They have reports for that! Knowing where your money is going and what's being spent will help keep your real estate investing business out of bookkeeping trouble.
Justin Williams had a conference, Flip Hacking Live 2017, that Danny spoke at that got him thinking about the kind of growth he needed to take for his business to grow too. In 2016, Justin asked Danny to speak at this year’s event, so this was a long time coming. Between doing the Flipping Junkie podcast, and the videos, and being in front of people online, speaking in front of people in live events has always been a bit difficult for Danny. Never the less, Danny commit to it, overcame it that stage fright, and presented in front of 600 - 800 people.
In preparation for the talk coming up, Danny went to public speaking classes every Wednesday evening. After Flip Hack Live was finished, Danny was talking to the instructor who said something profound. He said:
“I didn’t think you would have any trouble at all. You know why? Because you are humble and hungry. You’re hungry because you’re willing to put in the work, and do what it takes, to make something you want happen. But you’re also humble. You’re willing to accept criticism and knowledge from others, and not go into it thinking you know more than you do.”
Those words stuck with Danny. When you’re willing to be humble enough to be open to learn something from anyone, you will be a success. When you’re hungry enough to drive yourself forward, you will be a success. When it comes to success for real estate investors, you need to be hungry enough to always keep going, but humble enough to take every opportunity as a learning experience.
You can learn how to do this from anybody, no matter how new they are in the business. The more open you are to getting knowledge on things that you’re struggling with, the better your real estate investing business will be. The number one key when it comes to success for real estate investors is knowing when to ask for help. That’s not a bad thing. That shows that you are both hungry for the opportunity, and humble enough to know you can’t do it alone. Saying “I don’t know how to do this and I need help” is a way to grow your business and make it a success.
You’re already taking a big step forward by listening to the Flipping Junkie podcast! The more you learn in these episodes, the stronger you’re making your real estate investing business. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, so that you can keep learning how to make your real estate investing business a success. And don’t forget to check out this video, and others like it, on the Flipping Junkie YouTube page!
This is basically just a review of a book that I re-read for the second time. Grayson (on our house flipping team) suggested this book to me, and it’s really been helping me deal with feeling overwhelmed with everything.
Sometimes you read a book at one point in your life, but don’t get all of the advice and actionable material. This book is called “Essentialism” by Greg Mckeown, and it’s just great. There are so many visual representations of how you get overwhelmed. The circle with all of the short arrows are definitely where I was at. Then, there’s another circle with a single long arrow that shows where the most essential things are, and should be going. This is where we should all be, and this is where I want to take Flip Pilot and LeadPropeller.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s the most essential part the business, taking time to look at the big picture, to get a clear idea of what we really should be doing. What’s most important to us so that we can get rid of those little arrows. So many of us as real estate investors can tend to feel really overwhelming. If you burn yourself out, you’re not going to be running a successful business.
One story in this book is about journalism, but can definitely be applied to other aspects. When Greg was in a journalism class, the professor said to come up with a lead for a story about faculty meetings. Every student was coming up with stories about the different departments, and the goals from those meetings, and the overall impact on the university. The lead that the students didn’t take into account was that there wouldn’t be class on this day. The important take away was thinking about the audience’s point of view. The people reading this journal were the students - they didn’t care what the meetings were going to be about. The students reading just cared about if there was going to be class or not. So, thinking about things from the audience’s point of view helped to shape the best possible story about a subject that the students would have otherwise not cared about.
Seeing the bigger picture and coming up with a strategy that’s intentional is the best thing you can do for your business. The trade off should never be a detriment to your business. If you’re giving something up to do something else, make sure that something else is worth it.
Another clear point in this book is taking time to play. That’s so true. If you’re not taking time for yourself, then you’re going to burn out and give up. If you keep running forward, you’ll die. Taking time for yourself will help you get more creative in your real estate investing business.
I take my time on Sunday to plan my week, but I always start with scheduling the fun things to do with my family. Then, when I’ve put time aside for that, I add in the work stuff. If you’re not giving yourself time to have fun, you’re not going to be running a successful real estate investing business. Do it to get recharged.
If you guys haven’t read this book, do. It’s a great game changer for running the best business possible. Knowing what’s important and what’s not is difficult, but essential (hah, get it?). It’s like cleaning out your closet. If you see a shirt and think “I don’t wear this, but I might”, you end up keeping all of the close instead of clearing things out.
If something you need to make essential isn’t a clear “yes”, then it’s a “no”. Think about it like a scale of 1 - 10. If it’s not a 10, then it has to go. Plane and simple. That will keep you on the right track that your real estate investing business needs.
You can get this book in the link below! I highly recommend it if you need help with finding out what’s essential and what’s not. And don’t forget to join the Flip Pilot group on Facebook to network with other active real estate investors who have a 30k foot view of their business!
Kyle Burnett asks:
I've been full time in the flipping business for about a year and I feel like I need to get over the hump. I've done 4 deals in the last year and am behind on my goals. My wife and I have our first kid due in December and I have to ramp this business up to support our family.
Danny Johnson replies:
I've thought about this a lot and recently gave it more thought as I moved offices. Melissa and I switched offices in our suite and I went through a lot of my old training courses and meeting notes from years ago. What struck me was how many different things I got interested in and tried to learn.
I had books on land investing. Books on real estate taxes. Books on investing in IRAs. Books on raising private money. Granted all have been helpful but I realized that the success came from when we had focus. Focus on marketing. Focus on working the hell out of just 3 or 4 lead sources. Putting out bandit signs religiously. Driving for dollars religiously. Making the effort to get the phone ringing. Making a plan and sticking to it. Not constantly thinking about new ways to get leads. Just ways to being consistent and working the sources that have worked for decades for successful investors. Investors that struggle almost always do so because they didn't master a handful of marketing strategies that the stayed consistent with.
If you can't be consistent with your marketing and focused each week and thinking about what to tweak WITHIN that same marketing channel, you've got to hire someone even if just part time to do it.
Mike is brand new in the investing world but brings a construction engineering degree, and 10+ years of construction background, knowledge and business sense. Alongside him is his beautiful wife, Sarah, and loving father, Jim, who have helped get their real estate investing company, Newbyginnings, off the ground and now full steam ahead. They have big dreams for the company and hope to help thousands of families create their new beginning. Mike is also currently a full time construction consultant and his wife is a full time cardiac ICU nurse at a local Children's hospital.
When Mike started studying real estate investing, it only took him about 6 - 8 months for him to make the decision to jump into the industry. Mike found a wholesaler and got his first deal done. With a good foundation and knowledge base, he was confident in working his first deal for his real estate investing business. Where so many people give up before they hit this point, Mike kept going and is working everyday at making his business a success.
As soon as he decided to get into real estate investing, Mike found a wholesaler posting houses on Instagram. He sent a message, got into communication with someone on this wholesaler’s team, and started communication. This group has a wide range of buyers, so they were eager to talk to Mike. They walked through a few houses, and on the third property Mike made a bid and got it. It took 2 or 3 weeks staying in communication with this wholesaler before the property was Mike’s. What a great first deal!
For more connections, Mike has been networking in the Flip Pilot group on FaceBook. Finding other wholesalers is the key to starting up a successful real estate investing business. With both Mike and his wife still working full time jobs, and being full time parents, wholesaling felt like an easy way into real estate investing. As long as the numbers make sense, there’s no reason not to jump into it.
There’s a perception that wholesale deals don’t have much meat on their bones, but that’s just not true. Mike’s rule is 70% is the golden number. In his market, that’s tough to get, but you can expect to be around 80% - 85% ARV minus repairs. BiggerPockets has an ARV calculator, but Mike made his own in a spreadsheet to keep track of his numbers. With his spreadsheet, he determines if the numbers work for his marketing and business. This is the spreadsheet Mike uses, so if you decide to use this method, be aware that your numbers need to reflect your market.
For Mike’s first deal, Mike went through 2 wholesalers. Despite them both taking their cuts, there was still meat left on the deal. The property was a little rough, though. The property was supposed to be vacant, but it wasn’t. The sellers were there for 3 or 4 days after Mike closed on the house, which they weren’t supposed to be. Mike was still working on the plan for the property, but everything went well in the end. When the sellers eventually left, they left behind much more stuff than Mike was expecting.
Despite the unforeseen difficulties with this first property, Mike’s ultimate concern in with helping people like the sellers of this property. That’s where the name of his business, Newbyginnings comes from (in addition to it being a play on his last name). “You never know where your next deal is going to come from,” Mike said.
The sister of the seller had been waiting for someone like Mike to buy her sister’s house. After seeing the amazing success with her sister’s property, she mentioned that she’s going to be selling her house next year and wants to go through Mike. She even offered to make a testimonial, and took a picture with Mike, and wrote an awesome review for him. Her property will, hopefully, be Mike’s 5th deal for his business.
When it comes to actually rehabbing your property, communication is always key. Mike’s GC had brought in someone from other projects to help with the rehab, but staying in communication was a bit of an issue. Mike would talk with his GC, and thought that word was getting passed down to the other contractors, but with the mix up it didn’t. The plan in the future is to sit down over dinner with their GC and other contractors to get to know each other better, and keep the communication channels open. Making sure you know who’s responsible for what is important for keeping a real estate investing business organized.
Chance started getting serious about real estate around 2 years ago. He did 16 flips last year and has been doing 2-3 a month this year. He gets around 30% of his deals through wholesalers and market for the others.
Chance and Danny were talking at the Mastermind class about deal sources and where their deals come from. Chance had mentioned to Danny that about 30% of his deals were coming from other wholesalers, which is amazing! Let’s see how he’s working these relationships to keep that percentage up.
Chance got started in real estate investing when he bought a house from his mother in 2008 / 2009. A subject 2 property (even though he didn’t know what that meant at the time), turned into his first house he took over. It needed the work to get it to market value, but Chance lived in it for a few years. When he decided to sell it in 20013, he ended up making a profit for roughly $50k with little work put into the house. When he moved, he told his wife, “We have to get into real estate!” And that’s how it started!
The benefit of working with wholesalers came around by networking as much as possible. Meeting anyone in the business opened doors and opportunities to connect with active investors who have profitable deals for flippers and rehabbers. There were always wholesalers who were more reliable than others, but it’s all about making quick decisions to get the deals done. Chance spent his time networking with other investors to grow his business.
Other than just networking with other investors, you can talk to homeowners and business owners to get your name out. When it comes to bandit signs, as long as you’re in communication with them, they tend to be ok with you posting your sign in their yard. For example, offer to pay their water bill for the month to keep your sign in their yard if it’s near a busy road. It’s something simple to get your business’s name out there and expose you to other investors.
The deals that are coming to Chance, as of now, are coming from Facebook groups (Mastermind, Flip Pilot, etc), mailing lists, and networking. Mailing lists tend to be for lower experienced buyers who are willing to spend more and make a little less. As far as the work that Chance does, the majority of mailing lists that come to him tend to not have the deals he’s looking for, but there’s always the occasional solid lead.
IFTTT.com (If This Then That) is a great place to look for the best keywords to search on sites like Craigslist and Backpage. Chance looks for “fixer upper”, “rehab”, “ARV”, “vacant house”, “motivated seller”, and finds a good amount of leads. IFTTT.com is a great place to set up ‘recipes’ to look for Craigslist queries to see which keywords you should be searching to find the best leads online. If you’re interested in hunting for leads from your desk, this is definitely a place to start.
Chance’s focus for the future is leaning toward sourcing their own deals. Their ability to source their own has grown, and in order to turn the dial up and flip more properties, the best option is to work for themselves and find more deals. As long as there’s someone to do the busy work and go to those properties, it’s very manageable.
Kyle is a founder and managing partner at H L Homes, a Houston based real estate investment company, founded in 2011.
He and his partner, Eric, formed their LLC to start flipping houses as a side gig. In 2014, though, the business expanded into a larger business to grow it and make it official. When Kyle first quit his job, the situation became “how do I monetize this and start making money quickly?” He started heavy marketing and going to appointments, but their buyers list was growing from the start. His first move became to network with other investors throughout the Houston area to meet other wholesalers. He would ask for their biggest problem and be there to fill their issues. Buying houses from wholesalers that no other investors wanted became their niche area, and generated lots of revenue in their first year.
The tactics depend on the wholesaler or the other investor. Sometimes, they’re just looking for exposure. At that point, Kyle and his partner just look for a percentage of the fee. As long as the other investors are happy and continue sending deals to them, they want to make it as equitable as possible. There are also a few investors who are just looking to entirely wholesale the property, in which case Kyle and Eric take it on and become the assignees for the property.
What contracts in place do you have? Is it just trust built?
It depends on the individuals. When Kyle first started marketing deals to people, it was exclusively a trust thing. The majority of people are honest, that’s just how business works. If you’re helpful, you will get help in return. The few people who were either dishonest, or didn’t close the deals, ended up parting ways with Kyle.
A few years in, the title company gets invoiced for either a set amount or percentage depending on what got negotiated. If H L Homes took it, it would be a standard assignment. Because of the invoice to the title company, you know you’ll be paid at the closing. Definitely something to keep in mind. No title company will close a property without fulfilling the invoice. “Shout out to Allegiance Title Sugar Land!” We know the title company wouldn’t turn their backs on an invoice.
Why are you transitioning away from wholesaling?
There are several things that lead up to that transition.
H L Homes started taking feedback from their sellers. “Of course, we thought we were great,” Kyle said, “but how can we make it better?” What they found is that what a seller wants more than anything is to be respected and be told the truth, and to have as few inconveniences as possible.
Start off being honest with intentions when it comes to price, and if it doesn’t work then we can market to other investors with different buy criteria. There are other wholesalers saying they would close on a property, and then not come through. Kyle found that they were losing deals by being honest when others were closing by not being honest. Going on a private money raise and tweaking the buy model helped them to be able to buy fast to help the sellers.
Being able to take properties down to wholesale gives Kyle more time with the properties. Because of this, Kyle is able to access different buyers because of the time allowed to advertise the market to.
Have there been times when you’ve lost money for taking down the prices?
Short answer: yes. It’s going to happen, but not frequently. Usually, money isn’t lost on “short take downs”. Typically, it’s on rehabs where estimates are done wrong, or a contracting issue comes up. Most of the time, the worst case scenario is already known. There are the buyers who have bought from us in the past, so we know what to sell to them. Because Kyle knows his buyers, the confidence in closing is significant.
What’s the process after closing?
As long as they have access to the property before hand, they try to do pre-market, however, most things are done at the same time. Listing, blasting to the buyers list, etc. Whatever the property will be sold for at open market value is what Kyle and his business sell for, which makes great deals for the end buyers and his business.
As far as listing, H L Homes does it themselves. There are 7 people in-office who all have different jobs to do. Eric, Kyle’s business partner, is on the sales side. Most of what happens in the business is done in-house. “Except our online marketing,” Kyle says, “LeadPropeller does that for us.”
All of the property management, construction management, etc. is all done in-house. The long answer is: they manage sales, closing, and acquisitions in house.
This is the answer to a Flipping Junkie Podcast #Just Ask question. Erik Drentlaw asked what my exact direct mail strategy is.
While I think it’s true that you need to become an expert at one thing before moving on to another is a great strategy, with highly specific things like online marketing, it’s best to let the experts take over. If you need to focus on becoming the expert at direct mail, do it! But allow the people who are already experts at SEO and PPC to manage that side for you. That way, you’re getting the benefit of both online and off-line marketing without wasting your time trying to learn strategies for both.
Erik, I see that you mentioned you have a competitor website but would have liked to switch. You still can! In fact, we have a team of professional PPC and SEO experts here who would gladly manage your online marketing so that you can focus on direct mail. That way, your business will benefit from marketing on two fronts. These guys manage my PPC marketing, so I can promise you they’re great.
As far direct mail goes, we’ve done something like $80k+ on direct mail in the last 12 months. I have absolutely no problem sharing my direct mail strategies. There seems to be some level of secrecy when it comes to asking about direct mail strategies, as if some investors are doing things that no one else would think about. The truth is, direct mail strategies doesn’t vary that much.
What is rare is people actually doing it and sticking to it. It’s difficult to keep it up, but as long as you do it and stay consistent, it’ll pay off in the end. Just stick to what’s being taught, and actually do it
The biggest list we mail to is the high equity list. This is key. Mail to owner-occupied, and absentee-owner high equity direct mail list, targeting ages 45+ of the household. That demographic has been the highest converting as far as direct mail is concerned.
The next question becomes, “Where do you get that list?” You can get this information from ListSource.com, you can get your rates down by calling and asking. Definitely do that. You go into the site, and specify the types of properties you’re looking for in your target area. Look in your farm area, the spot where you expect most of your leads to come from. Choose the property value next. Don’t go high-end properties; you should limit the appraised value to just above medium home price to avoid the crazy expensive ones. After that, you target equity.
There are two ways to do equity targeting:
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Mortgage Amount
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Equity percentage.
Stick with equity percentage. We tend to go with 50% equity because you want the seller to have enough equity to actually be able to sell to you instead of needing to go through a 3rd party. This helps you to weed out any bad leads before you start pooling.
What it takes in direct mail is money. The people who are succeeding are spending lots of money. Just from this list that we have, and sending direct mail, we’ve got about 12 leads this year from direct mail. To make direct mail a success, you need to get a large enough number of calls to justify the amount you’re spending on it.
We’re sending out roughly 10k - 20k postcards a month, spending about $5k per deal (which is a little more than I would like to be spending). But we want the deal volume, so we’re spending it to get it.
The key to success with direct mail is to keep your list decent enough, but not too big. If it’s too big, you’re going to not be able to mail enough because it’s going to be too expensive. As far as what to put on your postcard, you need to include:
- A picture of you / a house
- The BBB logo
- Your website URL
- Your business name and information
Branding is super important, and not enough investors know about it. You need to make sure your postcard is unique to your business and stands out to your motivated sellers. The reality is, you’re not the only one in your market mailing, so you’re probably not the only piece of mail that they get. Avoid looking like spam by making your postcards individualized.
On that same note, you need to have a large pool to mail to. Don’t just be sending out 200 letters a month and wonder why you haven’t heard anything. The minimum you should be mailing is 1,000/month, but even that’s a little low depending on your city and market size.
It’s very easy to make your own postcards. That helps your business stand out from all of the others that are just using templates. You don’t need fancy software, goto Canva.com and design your own for free. What we do to get them mailed out is we go to a local print and mail house, tell them how many we want, and negotiate prices from there. As long as you get it out and in front of people, you’ll be in the clear. Make sure you give them variable printing so that each postcard is individualized so that your leads feel like you mailed personally to them.
We mail roughly 45 days apart to the different lists. Remember, you have to spend money to make money. Direct mail is an investment, just like everything else. Work on your acquisitions skills to get them under contract. My friend, John Martinez, has a lot of sales training on that sort of thing. Check out his stuff in the links.
Don’t neglect online leads, either. If you want, reach out to us at Sales@LeadPropeller.com so that you can let our experts manage it for you. Or, call (210) 999 5187. Our pros here would be more than happy to help manage your PPC to get you quality leads online.
If you have a question that you want answered, post it in the group with the hashtag #JustAsk, and tag me @DannyJohnson. I’ll make a podcast episode to answer your question for you!
Thank you again for the question, Erik. Hope this helped!
I'm the youngest of 4 daughters and I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Being the favorite child has given me an overabundance of confidence, which I use to my advantage quite often. (My sisters will kill me for saying that, but only because it's true. :)). I've always been an exuberantly tenacious person, setting stretch goals and moving on to the next one.
Looking back at my life I find certain experiences really stand out. I spent my junior year of high school as a congressional Page, working and living in DC running errands for Congress. It was a truly amazing experience and I'm sad the program doesn't exist anymore. (But the fiscally conservative side of me totally gets it.)
I went to WPI for mechanical engineering on an ROTC scholarship, where I met my husband and some of my amazing best friends. When I graduated I became a US Naval Officer. My dream was to be a pilot, but unfortunately my eyes disagreed; instead I served on an Aircraft Carrier. It was a great consolation prize, and even though it was incredibly tough at times, I will treasure it.
After about 4 years in the Navy, I got a job as an engineer working in the energy arena, helping to build a power plant to support aircraft carriers stationed in Japan, and then a bunch of other awesome projects. I felt way out of my league and also incredibly excited to be a part of something so massively cool. I worked with that company for 7 years, and again was fortunate to be around some seriously amazing people.
When my 3rd daughter was born, I decided to spend less time traveling and more time at home. We bought our first rehab, which was a hoarder house that we essentially gutted, and I was hooked. Making ugly things pretty is my favorite. The first year I flipped 3 houses, the second year I flipped 6, and then I moved up to one a month and started building out a team to support that. This year we're on track to do 20+ flips and a few wholesales, as well as venturing into the rental arena.
As an aside - It's crazy that I always feel like the little fish because I keep moving to bigger ponds. If you had told me 3 years ago where I would be now, I would not believe it. But here I am, and it still doesn't feel like "enough"!
Books
Getting the Money - Susan Lassiter-Lyons
12 Week Year
Links
latedaysun.blogspot.com
This is the answer to a Flipping Junkie Podcast ‘Just Ask’ question. Steve L. asked: How do you avoid offending motivated sellers when making an offer.
Great question! The biggest issue with real estate is that it’s such an emotional thing for the sellers to be going through. It’s a difficult thing to deal with.
My first thought was, you’ve got the wrong mindset. If you think you’re going into a deal, or talking to a lead, with the idea that you’re offending them, you need to change your approach. You should always be presented as a problem solver, as an investor who is there to help them out of their situation. Helping them out of those problems with a genuine interest in helping the sellers out.
If you go into talking with the leads only thinking about the price points, then you probably will offend them. Some people will get offended with a low offer on their house, but at the end of the day you’re there to help them.
There was something from Brian Buffini’s podcast about listening. It boiled down to 2 things:
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People do things for logical reasons
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People do things for emotional reasons - the reason they typically won’t say.
When you’re helping a seller, you need to get to the core of the reason for why they’re selling their house. And, like we said above, selling a house is an emotional thing. So the more you can present yourself as someone who’s there to help them through their situation, the more likely they are to work with you, and the less likely they are to get offended.
Not every seller wants the most money they can get for the property. There have been lots of sellers who have sold to us for lower than what someone else was offering because we got down to the emotional reason for their sell and were there to help them out of it. If you can learn this, then you’re golden.
You need to go into each deal with this in mind:
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You’re there to genuinely help them through their problem.
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Find the emotional core reason for why they’re selling their house.
Bonus tip if you’re wondering “well how the heck do I get to that?!”
Ask them what they’re most worried about with the selling of this property. Ask what’s on their mind. If you don’t ask questions then you won’t understand why they want to sell, and what problems their having with selling.
The question, “How do I not offend a seller?” is a misunderstanding of how the process should work. You need to go into leads without any assumptions on why they’re selling. The amount of money the house is worth isn’t always the core reason for selling.
When you walk into a property, don’t assume who’s in charge. Listen to everyone attached to the house, they’re sharing the same concerns. It’s your job to be there to help them. Often times, the spouse not saying anything is the one who’s in charge, so be sure you’re talking to everyone.
If you understand these core ideas and game changers, then you won’t offend anyone.
Thanks for the question, Steve!
If you have question you want answered, post it in the Flip Pilot Group on FaceBook with the hashtag #JustAsk. Stay tuned for more answers!
Craig S. Cody is an ex-NYC cop and certified public accountant of 17 years, he's a certified tax coach and business owner in his own right. Here's a few things he can speak on (one sheet also attached).
Cody has worked with a lot of businesses through out his life. The best practices he has seen, and the 3 practices that don’t tend to be done right, are here. So let’s take a look at the 3 Proactive Tax Practices:
- Failing to plan.
People go out and buy a car and spend time researching it, but not looking at the tax codes on it. The average person doesn’t plan.
- The wrong business entity.
Are you holding your business in your name? Real Estate is best held in an LLC, but you need to talk to your own attorney to see. If it’s in a corporation, there could be tax issues when or if you go to sell.
- Find low cost ways to manage your properties with employees.
This could be as simple as having your kids go to the properties to mow the lawn, or clean. If you’re paying them a reasonable amount, they don’t have to pay taxes on it. Their pay comes out of your income, which lowers your taxes, and they don’t have to pay taxes. It’s a win-win!
Interview Questions
- What is the biggest mistake real estate investors make regarding taxes?
Typically, most real estate is held in a LLC. The reason for this is because as a real estate investor you fall under “ordinary income”. Basically, it’s short-term capital gain. If you’ve been in for a while, it’s just ordinary income
Some investors treat it all like it’s short-term capital gains. The problem with this thinking is the expenses of operating a business are subject to 2% threshold on schedule 8 of your tax return. They’re also subject to alternative minimum tax. This is a problem because, if you make too much money, they get added in without you getting the benefit of them.
If you do it properly, and actually in the business, then you don’t deal with those itemized deduction. The lesson is to ALWAYS document what you’re doing. This is something where we saved a client almost $80k because they were reporting their income incorrectly. More often than not, you’re in a better position by having your real estate investing business as an LLC instead of a corporation.
-Why not be a part of a C-Corporation?
A C-Corporation has the first $15k taxed at 15%. Getting that money out when you sell the property is double taxation. It’s just not efficient for a real estate investor to be a part of a C-Corporation. I just doesn’t help this kind of business.
However, if you’re using a C-Corp to manage your properties, it could work better. The best practice is having multiple LLC.
Here’s a story: There was a client who was a private business, not even an LLC, who was sued for mold injuries. The house was valued at $25k, and the verdict was $155k+ with interest. She had a pretty significant portfolio, and everything was attacked. If you umbrella it under one large LLC, you’d be safer.
- What are the tax write-offs real estate investors miss?
As a flipper, you can write off a lot of things since you’re being run as a normal business.
For example, if you have a home gym or a pool, that can be written off as a work rec area. The space you work in at your home is your home office. The gas you spend going to and from properties and locations can be written off as work expenses. Medical bills that are paid out of pocket can be written off as well.
Let’s talk about the home office for a bit, though. Take the space that you use to work in, in square feet, and compare it to the rest of the house. Let’s say your home office is 8% of your houses’s square footage. That means that 8% all of your utilities can be deducted in your taxes as a work expense: electricity, water, air conditioning, internet, etc. Your real estate taxes can be written off with that 8% as well. As long as there’s an office used exclusive to your business, it can be written off. Retirement plans can be worked in as well. If you’re working on your own, you can make a self appointed retirement plan. Food and entertainment can also be deducted.
Just keep track of your expenses. Make sure you’re keeping your receipts and keeping track of everything. Do it as you go instead of trying to pull things up at the end of the year.
-What are the limitations of the arms length transaction and self directed IRA.
The whole thing can be contributed to the LLC. Which means, the LLC owns that property. You cannot, yourself, do work on that property or it becomes an issue. You can, however, act as a lender in your own LLC. As long as you don’t have active involvement in the property, then it won’t be an issue.
Active involvement means that you, yourself, cannot be doing repairs with your hands. If there’s something you can pay someone else to do, get them to do it. IF you’re working on your own properties, you’re jeopardizing your involvement in the IRA. You can lend to other investors, as long as their not family. Tend to stay away from family!
The interests rates are subject to typical rules, 8 - 10% + a piece of gain, secure by real estate. However, this all depends on the investor. The better the track record, the less you’ll have to give and visa versa.
- What is Cross Segregation?
Let’s use a rental property worth $100k as an example. Typically, you would depreciate that building over 27.5 years. Let’s say your depreciate expenses are roughly $4k a year.
When you do a cross segregation strategy, the building gets broken up into parts. Take the property that would be depreciated over 3 years, 5 years, and so on, and depreciate it faster. Which means, over 27.5 years you’re still getting the $100k worth, but in the first few years you would 20% more expense from depreciation because it’s accelerating. From a tax perspective, that’s money that isn’t being taxed. That’s the smarter way to go for the best gains in your business.
Focus, focus, focus. That’s the key to success.
You don’t want to be distracted by your first ideas. You need to stay focused when it comes to growing your business so that you’re on top of your game.
The steps to staying focused isn’t that difficult. Here’s what we do to stay focused:
Hunting leads can be difficult to find, we know. Searching on the MLS can be exhausting. The biggest mistake an investor can make is staying in their comfort zone. If you only ever do bandit signs, how are you going to generate consistent deals?
That was just an example, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with bandit signs. But you need to focus in on at least one method - direct mail, bandit signs, PPC, SEO, online marketing, driving for dollars, etc. - and become an expert at that.
Send out as much as you can, be active. The more you do, the more you’ll learn. Stay hyper focused, gather data, find a way to turn it into a system, become the master at it. Only then should you move on to the next thing. In no time, you’ll be an expert at every aspect of real estate investing. At the end of the day, you need to be making progress.
In these podcast episodes coming up, we’re going to be having an open Q & A with you guys. Your questions are important to us. It’ll help you learn, but it will also help us to know what it is you’re struggling with so that we can make content that’s helpful for growing your business.
Have a burning question to build your business? Just ask! The steps are easy:
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Share this podcast so that other investors can ask their questions.
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Join the Flip Pilot Group by searching on FaceBook, or going to FlipPilot.com
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Tag @DannyJohnson with #JustAsk in your post
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Stay tuned for your question to be answered on the podcast!
There’s no such thing as a bad question. Anything that you’re curious about, we’ll help you through it. Let’s stay focused, let’s become experts, and let’s make progress in building our businesses!
Danny and Melissa share the secret to the massive growth in their flipping business over the last year.
The story begins several years ago when they were wearing all of the hats in their business. They were killing themselves trying to do it all.
Danny shares how he met Justin and learned how to scale his business without having to do everything.
This episode shares the story and shows how you can do the same.
Jason and Pili have two beautiful children, two awesome bulldogs, one flipping and wholesaling business, a Multifamily Acquisition company, a Beer Company, and are the hosts of the REI Foundation Podcast.
Having met in New York, Jason and Pili got into real estate investing shortly after hurricane Sandy struck the east coast. Jason’s family construction business had to help homeowners lift their houses to meet the new FEMA requirements because of the massive amount of flooding. Before the hurricane, Jason’s family business would do maybe 12 lifts a year. After the hurricane, the numbers skyrocketed to nearly 400 in a single year to avoid future flooding.
Because of his background with houses and construction, Jason and Pili made the choice to move into real estate investing! When they were expecting their first child, Jason’s dad asked if he and Pili would be interested in becoming real estate agents to work in their investing business. When a lot of businesses were getting overwhelmed in the east coast, Jason and Pili found a great opportunity and took it.
Ted Thomas, best-selling author and publisher is best known as America’s Tax Lien Certificate and Tax Deed Authority. Thomas has sat for more than 200 radio and TV interviews, most recently on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and he has been recognized in Newsweek, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Ted Thomas is the go-to guy when people want to discover how to invest in secure government certificates that pay 16% and 18%.
Ted’s best selling Home Study Course titled, Quick Start to Buying Government Tax Lien Certificates & Tax Deeds, is considered the benchmark standard for the Tax Lien Certificate and Tax Deed industry. Thomas also conducts live tours of Tax Lien Certificate and Tax Deed auctions.
Houses with tax liens are a safe, secure investment because you won’t run the risk of losing large sums of money.
Ted’s number one suggestions is this: Start out buying vacant residential land. Most mentors won’t suggest this, but Ted does for this reason. He wants to make sure his students are staying conservative in their investments. Buying land is a low risk investment, and sell for 10 - 20 cent on the dollar. If you sell it for 50 cent to buyers then you’ve made a profit! Ted’s suggestion is to go slow, stay conservative, and watch your income build.
There will never be a shortage of properties. There are 100 million properties in the United States alone, and 2 - 3% of that will go into tax lien territory. Ted’s point is that there’s no reason to try and rush your business. Let it grow steadily. You’ll always have properties to buy and sell.
Ted answers these common questions:
Q: What is a tax deed auction?
A: A Public auction where real estate is sold on property that is delinquent in taxes. A deed sale happens after a tax certificate applies to the tax collector for a tax deed after the certificate has been held for the statutory period.
Q: What is a tax lien certification?
A: Tax lien certificates pay you guaranteed fixed rates of return interest per year.
Q: Which states are tax deed states?
A: Tax Deed States:
- Alaska
- Arkansas
- California
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Kansas
- Maine
- Michigan
- Missouri
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Virginia
- Washington
- Wisconsin
Q: Which states are tax lien certificate states?
A: Tax Lien Certificate States-
- Alabama
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Florida
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Indiana
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Mississippi
- Montana
- Nebraska
- New Jersey
- New York
- Ohio
- South Carolina
- Vermont
- Washington DC
- West Virginia
- Wyoming
Just a few years ago, Cody was selling insurance and didn’t know much about Real Estate. He heard about a little niche known as “Wholesaling” and got interested. He quickly decided to go “All in” on Wholesaling and generated over $500,000 in his first year and has since created a 7 figure Wholesaling business.
After going to a seminar in Utah, Cody jumped in to wholesaling. He took on what advice he was given and found a mentor. In 2015, Cody started listening to every real estate investing podcast he could find and that was it. He found a mentor and got in to wholesaling as fast as he could!
Wholesaling appealed to Cody because it was a great start. “I started with the end in mind,” he says. “You’ve got to build a cash buyers list. If you don’t have an end game in mind, it doesn’t matter because you can’t do anything with it.”
Building cash buyers is simple. There are a few ways to find them:
1 - Go to REIA meetings in your local town.
2 - Get on the phone on Craigslist. Call land lords or people trying to sell their rentals, they’re always interested in listening to what a wholesaler has to say. You want to look at a vacant landlord. See if those landlords are willing to sell. If they are, great! If they’re not, then try to see if they’re interested in becoming a cash buyer. Take notes from them on where they would prefer their properties to be, and boom. You just got another buyer to add to your list!
3 - Get with a realtor and have them run all of the cash deals that have been done in a certain market. From that list, look for the address and names of the buyer on the title and add them to your direct mail list. By doing this, you can see what they’re willing to buy for, and how active they are in purchasing for cash.
The bigger the buyers list, the better. 600 or more is preferable for such a large market like Salt Lake City. If you can get 20 people to inspect a home at the same time, you’ve just build up a feeding frenzy. Making scarcity and providing competition drives up your properties prices, which makes your profit even better. You want people to pay top dollar for your deals.
Because Cody markets the contract and not the property, he sends out a suggested price for the house in the promotional material material. That way, you can use that as a negotiation point to drive your profit.
Cody does anywhere from 7 - 10 deals a month, and every time there are always multiple buyers interested. Even though the market has been competitive, Cody is still bringing in a great flow of business!
A question Cody gets asked a lot is “Why don’t you just keep the properties to fix and flip?” The answer is simple:
If Cody can focus on one thing really well, and continue to do it really well, then why not keep doing that? With house flippers, you have to focus on so many things. You have to deal with contractors, title companies, realtors, all of that. When you’re wholesaling, you don’t have to. “I’m in and out quick,” Cody said.
When it comes to marketing, it’s about 3 things.
The right thing, to the right person, at the right time.
In his first year, Cody had a budget of $1200 for marketing with direct mail. He was told to get uncomfortable because that’s where the profit comes from. At day 44 in his mentoring program, his first deal landed him $24,000.
That covered the course, the marketing, and still had a lot left over. So now, Cody puts aside 50% of his profit toward marketing so that he can continue to grow his business.
Over all, marketing is expensive. It needs to be. But you have to hit a lot of people or else you won’t hear back. $1200 is a great starting point, but you need to keep your marketing budget up to make sure you’re marketing the right way.
Rob leads property acquisitions for Holdfolio, a real estate crowdfunding company headquartered in Indianapolis. Under the name Buy To Renew, Rob leads a team focused on purchasing properties and gentrifying neighborhoods. Since relocating to Indiana in 2015, Rob and his partners have purchased over 100 properties for crowdfunding and wholesale opportunities. For fun, Rob and his wife enjoy traveling, soccer, and recently took up competing in triathlons.
Books
Set For Life by Scott Trench
Relentless by Tim Grover
Jason has been in construction over 25 years. He started out of highschool working with his dad on misc projects and went on to own and operate a cabinet company for 12 years. After closing the company he started lending to rehabbers for Gap funding and learning about this thing called flipping and started flipping in 2010. Jason has been flipping ever since and joined up with Peter in 2014 and have flipped or wholesaled 50 + deals together.
Jason is married with a split family of 4 kids. All who are very active in sports, Competitive Dance, Swimming, Gymnastics, and basketball and football. They just moved into their new home they had built a couple weeks ago.
Jason and his wife Megan who is a Vancouver school Principal enjoy traveling together, are very active in Crossfit at their local Box.
Share your backgrounds and how you started flipping houses and working together.
Been in construction since 1993 owned a cabinet shop for 12 years build a few houses, Started in 2009 lending gap funding to a rehabber. Started doing all the work on flips in 2010-13 flipping about 15 in that time, Peter’s roofing company did all my roofs and we became friends during that time. We partnered on our first deal July 1st 2014 closed 3 deals that year together 2015 we did 11 deals, 2016 completed 22 deals wholesaled 10 and started a wholesale business we are partners on.
What are your goals for 2017?
Goals are 50 flips we have 25 on the books so far this year Plan is to wholesale 50 also min
Sold 12
Pending 5
Rehabs 4
Closing within 2 weeks 4
What are your favorite and/or most profitable types of houses to rehab where you are?
We love 2/1 800sqft houses we are in an out within 3-4 weeks
What do you do to prepare to start rehabbing before you close on the purchase?
We make sure we are ready to start the rehab the min we record we have a crew there to start and usually have house demod within a few hours.
Walk us through your rehabbing process from determining scope of work to lining up contractors to getting it ready for sale.
My business partner is my GC so he keeps our numbers in line.
What issues have you encountered when trying to sell rehabs?
Squatters homeless
Appraisal issues
Portland is a really hot market so our product sells within 2 weeks max most within the 1st weekend
How can anyone from the audience get in contact with either of you?
Nwpropertyinvestmentswholesale.com
Nwpropertyinvestmentsllc.com
What are some of the things you do before putting the finished product on the market?
- Re-run comps
- Final walk through
- Staging - where get staging stuff from
How to work with our Realtor Laura to get the property on the market?
- Docusign docs
- Take pics and upload - what kind of camera and lens?
- Agent sets up showing and feedback notifications
With the real estate market still going strong here, how fast have the houses been selling?
- The fastest closing was up on the market on Thursday night, by Sunday it had 42 showings and 13 offers.
- Not every property is like this. The sweet spot is between $140 - $165 for San Antonio properties that fly off the market.
How do you handle when we get multiple offers?
- Use spreadsheets with all of the details of the properties, locations, contracts, and people offering.
- Separate each thing that’s a negotiation point for when you come to the contract phase.
I know we’ve accepted offers before in the past only to find out the buyers couldn’t qualify. How do we now avoid this problem?
- Look for how someone is paying for the house. Melissa prefers cash for the house. Conventional financing is ok, and FHA would be the last one to look for only because FHA tends to have more hoops to jump through.
- Ask for a proof of funds if the buyer is paying cash.
- Who’s the lender? Melissa has a “black list” of lenders that are a no-go for the final sale.
- Look for a lender letter attached to the contract.
So a common situation is where a buyer will get an inspection and ask for tons of repairs. What is our procedure for handling which repairs we’ll agree to do and which we won’t?
- Anything electrical (especially in the attic) should be taken care of before buyers even get an inspection.
- Having a good agent will help the buyers not to be worried if you have an inspector that’s freaking them out by nit picking.
- Always double check your punch list!
On FlippingJunkie we get the question all the time about the FHA 90 day rule. What is that and how do we deal with it?
- “Payment terms need to be conventional or cash”.
- Between 90 - 180 days you will need 2 appraisals, or if the resale price is over %100 of the purchase price.
What do you do after acceptance of an offer to make sure all is on track to close?
- Start doing property updates with your title company twice a week.
- Set up a schedule for the updates so that everyone is on the same track and staying focused.
- Property updates every Monday from our realtor to the lenders to make sure everything is still on track to close.
What’s your top tip for being more efficient in this part of the house flip process?
- Add a special touch when you’re selling a home to a buyer. Melissa puts little gift baskets for the new buyers to have.
- Always work with your realtor and title companies to make sure things are moving smoothly.
Melissa Johnson has been flipping houses for 14 years, and man have they come a long way.
From brown (and one time green) carpet to sleek new tile, Melissa has been transforming the way she rehabs properties. But before you can make the houses look nicer, you have to have your team together.
Start with a contractor you can trust. Melissa has been working with her contractor for a long time now, to the point where they have an amazing working relationship. One of the key point of making sure you and your contractor are on the same page is to set the ground rules from the beginning.
Making sure you and your contractor have the same payment schedule agreed on will keep everyone involved happy. Melissa talks about going through the property with the contractors before hand and looking at every single detail of the house. That way, everyone is on the same page for what needs to be fixed.
There’s much more to your team than just you and the contractor, though. Melissa has been working with a realtor she trusts, and has become great friends with. It’s so important to work with people who are great at their jobs, and who are there for you.
For example, there was an issue with some buyers not being able to qualify for the property they wanted to buy and, instead of just closing out the deal, Melissa’s realtor fought and negotiated until all parties were happy. Having a realtor who will work with you, and also your buyers, is great for having your properties sold quickly.
All in all, Melissa has been working hard at showing what an amazing Flip Pilot she is. If you want to network with other Flip Pilots, join our closed FaceBook group by going to FlipPilot.com here: https://flippilot.com/beta-notify
This vlog, Danny talks about how important it is for you to do what needs to be done for your business even if you’re afraid. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Making big steps is scary for just about everyone. When Danny was working on getting his pilot’s license, he would stop in the parking lot and think about two things: how exciting flying is, but also how dangerous it is. Even though learning was a lot of fun, there was still that risk involved.
The same is true for running your own real estate investing business. Especially when you’re getting started. When Danny and Melissa first started buying and selling houses and the first call came in he was so nervous to talk to the motivated seller that he threw the phone at Melissa so she would talk to them! And while that was scary, the reward to going through with the lead was bigger than any nerves they had.
So that’s the takeaway from this vlog. Knowing that being afraid is ok, but pushing past that to get to the good stuff is even better!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
Geremy Heath is the owner and founder of Texas All Cash Home Buyers.
Geremy was on the podcast during the early days for episode 3 where we talked about http://flippingjunkie.com/episode-3-the-mindset-that-guarantees-flipping-houses-success/" target="_blank">The Mindset That Guarantees Flipping Houses Success - Click Here To Listen
We talk about his Miracle Morning routine…which is incredible. If you want to find out more check out my interview with the author, Hal Elrod: http://flippingjunkie.com/episode-24-foundation-the-miracle-morning-whal-elrod/" target="_blank">Click Here To Listen to My Interview with Hal Elrod
There’s a lot that goes on in between contracting and closing on a house. Especially when it comes to the numbers. You have to make detailed estimates of the labor costs, material costs, and other specific skew costs. If you’re not precise in your estimates, then you’ll run into some funding roadblocks.
Geremy makes the suggestion of not going through with a property if the exact estimate is higher than 10% more than the original estimate. When Melissa and I were doing it before we got our team, we would know if something was off when we got to the rehab (which wasn’t too fun).
This work does need to be done regardless. And Geremy makes the point that it’s better to get it over with sooner rather than later. It’s better to know what you’re getting into before you start the closing process.
To get your invite to the new Flip Pilot closed Facebook Group, visit the http://flippilot” target="_blank">Flip Pilot Invitation Page - Click Here.
This vlog, Danny talks expands on what it means to be a Flip Pilot, and what it takes to make measurable progress with your real estate investing business. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
What does it really mean to have a 30,000 foot view of your business? You have to really take a deep look at it and where your business is going, but you also really need to take a look at yourself.
Staying in place without anything driving you personally will affect how your business expands. You need to take a closer look at why you get up in the mornings, what keeps you motivated, and how you’re growing as an entrepreneur.
The biggest concern is making sure you’re not overloading yourself with too many goals that aren’t realistic, or that are too distracting. “Shiny Objects” can get in the way of you developing what you need to for your business to continue to be a success. That’s something that we struggle with. Staying focused and on track, and completing one goal before you move on to the next one is essential for a healthy business.
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This vlog, Danny talks about the beginnings of his house flipping business, and the learning curves it took to get the hang of it. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Learning what to do to run your business the right way takes time, but mostly trial and error. There is a huge difference between running your business and working in your business, and what it takes to be the pilot instead of the crew.
So here’s a story. When Danny first started rehabbing houses, he showed up to his first demo site the day before to get it prepped. He went and personally started taking nails out of the walls so that the sheetrock could be laid properly, thinking he was doing a great job and showing that he has what it takes to be an investor.
And then his mentor showed up, mad. He started telling Danny that it’s not his job to be taking nails out of the wall. Not because he was somehow better, but because he was supposed to be running the business and not working in it.
The takeaway is that as an investor you shouldn’t be swinging the hammers. It’s your job to work on your business, not IN your business - that’s what it means to be a Flip Pilot!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This vlog, Danny talks about the difficulties that running a real estate investing business can cause, like attorneys talking sellers out of deals. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
You know what really grinds my gears? Attorneys. And thieves (but we’ll talk about that second).
Do you ever run into issues with attorneys? For the most part, they’re not too much of an issue, but when they start making sellers or buyers question the deal it gets a little frustrating. For example, the attorney mentioned in the vlog wrote the buyer’s contract in such a way that it, basically, made the contract null. Just a little frustration.
Ok, those thieves. Long story short, our entire website got copied and pasted. Word for word, code for code. Understandably, Danny wasn’t happy. But, after taking a step back and looking at how poorly this is being taken care of, these thieves aren’t as intimidating as they think they are. We won’t get too much into it here. Just know that if Danny isn’t worried, no one else needs to be!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This this vlog, Danny talks about the idea of being the pilot of your flipping business instead of someone working on the ground. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Are you working in your business or on your business? That might sound like a small difference, but it’s more important than you’d think. If you started your business from the ground up (like most real estate investors have) then you’re the boss. And being the boss means you can’t be spending your time running around within your business. You need to be taking care of things from above - working on your business.
That’s where the idea of being a Flip Pilot comes in. You need to be able to see your business from 30,000 feet up to be able to take it to the places you want to go. So focusing on managing your business means that you’re going to have to give up some of the hands on work to take on the bigger issues.
Let’s break it down. If you’re working in your business, you have to wear a lot of hats. You have to be the marketer, and the hiring manager, and the sales guy, and the foreman, and the legal team, and the boss. It’s too much. If you’re spread too thin then you aren’t replenishing your inventory fat enough to continue to make money.
Take Danny’s example. When he and Melissa were spread too thin, they would focus all of their energy on one property at a time. Which worked, for a little while. But once that property was finished, there was nothing left on deck. So then the marketing had to start all over with nothing generating money in the meantime.
Basically what we’re getting at is, are you switching hats too much in your business or are you taking charge? Be a Flip Pilot, not the ground crew! Let us know what you think in the comments :)
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This this vlog, Danny talks about the similarities between PPC marketing and direct mail marketing tactics, and why sticking with PPC is so important for constant deal flow. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Doing direct mail marketing is great for growing your reach to motivated sellers, but can often be discouraging (as we found out) when getting a 0.1% response is a good response…
Investing only about $500 to direct mail just wasn’t working for a few reasons: there wasn’t a targeted enough audience, and there wasn’t enough funding behind it.
The same rule applies to PPC marketing. If you’re only allotting $500 a month for pay per click, how can you expect to get the best ROI? You can’t. True, PPC is much more targeted, so your ads are getting in front of your exact audience, but as Danny points out this is a pay-to-play strategy. And it WORKS.
The other thing to consider when budgeting for PPC is how much a single deal is costing you. The more you pay, the better the return. You can’t just rely on getting lucky for every deal. So, let’s say you spent $3000 on getting one deal. That one deal will last you, what, about 3 months? That’s great! But you need to be generating other deals in the meantime. That’s why PPC isn’t a one-and-done thing, it’s on-going.
You can learn all about it in this vlog episode, and on the podcast.
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This this vlog, Danny talks the crazy storms in San Antonio, and his upcoming Masterminds Meeting with Justin Williams and Andy McFarland. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Aside from the insane storms in San Antonio (right near the office too! Yikes), Melissa and Danny are heading to Justin Williams’ and Andy McFarland’s 7 Figure Flipping Masterminds Meeting!
Not only is this an important networking opportunity, but it’s a great place to learn. Expanding your understanding of what you’re doing will keep you improving and make you a more worth while real estate investor.
There’s a saying that goes something like: “10 years of experience is only 10 years if you’re learning. If you’re not, it’s just 1 year repeated 9 times.”
Don’t be someone who’s just repeating one year of experience for the rest of your real estate investing business’s career. You want to be learning and expanding all of the time so that you can always be on top of what’s changing in the industry.
And there’s no better place to start that at the 7 Figure Flipping Masterminds Meetings! You can learn more at this link below. And we’re in the video! Neat :)
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This this vlog, Danny talks about why you should be using a vision board to keep you on track both professionally and personally, and the steps needed to achieve those vision. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Are you using a vision board? They’re great for keeping you on track, and motivated to reach those goals. Danny had a lake house and a plane on his vision board, as things that he never thought he would actually achieve. It wasn’t until this past weekend at Danny’s lake house that he realized he had achieved both of those things.
Melissa turned to him and said, “Hey this looks like the one on our vision board!” (Talking about their lake house). And she was right! Danny had reached the lake house goal, and (for personal reasons) he had gotten his pilot’s license! All from keeping himself motivated with his vision board.
Having a vision board will keep you organized and motivated. So, are you using a vision board? Use it to set personal goals, and business goals. Where do you want your business to go? What goals are you setting for your own self growth? Let us know in the comments!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
This this vlog, Danny takes a drive up to his lake house where the family is spending the weekend, and talks about the importance of stepping away from the computer. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Aside from just spending time with his family, it’s important for Danny to get away from the office and clear his head so that he can return to work on Monday ready to tackle the week. It’s important for everyone to do that! Danny spent his weekend with his family at his lake house, but how are you spending yours?
Stepping away from your computer is something Danny found valuable when he was on BiggerPocket’s show talking with them. This is something that’s just stuck with Danny, and has helped keep him grounded and focused on what needs to be done. Getting out there and talking to people in person, and driving around your city, are great ways to expand your knowledge of your target area. So don’t just sit in front of your computer all day, get out there and start talking to other investors and motivated sellers!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
In the third vlog episode, Danny talks about his morning routine with his wife, Melissa, in the car with him on their way to the office. Don’t forget, all of the vlog episodes (and more) are available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Danny’s morning routine got started when he found Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning. Basically, the start of anyone’s day should be used to set up the rest of the day for success. So Danny talks about how he used his mornings for self reflection, exercise, and breakfast (or course).
Is your morning routine like Danny’s? Are you setting up your day for success from the moment you get out of bed, or are you pushing through everything instead of taking your time? Your morning should be a time to make sure your day will be a success, use it wisely!
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
In the second vlog episode, Danny talks about working the system to better run his real estate investing system. Don’t forget, these episodes are all available on the Flipping Junkie YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
Knowing how to run a business and making it successful has to do with how you work the system and react to things in a professional way. Danny talks about the ‘homework’ (because you never stop learning, even when you’re done with school) that he and his team have: reading.
The book Work the System, by Sam Carpenter, talks about how to manage a business with an emotionally detached point of view. Which really isn’t heartless, it’s objective for running a business efficiently. One of the best quotes that has helped Danny run his business is about looking at the work from above. The analogy goes something like this:
There are a lot of workers cutting down trees in a forest. They’re working really hard all day for weeks, and then the leader climbs up on of the trees to see their progress and finds out that they’ve been working in the wrong forest all this time. Danny keeps this in mind when working on his business instead of in it.
You can find the book at: http://www.workthesystem.com/get-the-book-free/
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
Danny has decided to start sharing the day-to-day inner workings of his businesses vlog (video log) style. Yes, the videos recorded for these shows is available on the FlippingJunkie YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/FlippingJunkie
These will be quick episodes sharing stories of the days happenings and what it looks like for him and his team as they achieve their goals.
He (this seems awkward as I’m writing this in the third person… anyway) wanted to have a platform to share all the epiphanies, struggles and wins experienced as each week goes by. A video log seemed the best way to do so. Each episode will be included as audio on the podcast.
It’s going to be awesome sharing each day in the life of a real estate investor with the vlog and podcast.
In the inaugural edition of the Flipping Junkie Day In The Life vlog series, Danny talks about his breakfast meeting with his dad and brother. As a real estate investor himself, Danny’s dad shared some stories of already installed flooring being stolen and Danny shared that the furniture, rugs, pictures and knick knacks from a fully staged house were stolen.
This first episode gives us a glimpse of what to look forward in the coming episodes.
Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the FlippingJunkie Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/flippingjunkie
I’ve been hearing more and more investors talk about how they buy houses using online auctions like auction.com. I’ve been fascinated by the strategy and was glad to get Paul Lizell on the show.
He’s buying 8 to 15 houses a month that he buys from online real estate auctions….all over the country. How cool is that?
Paul started in Real estate in 1999, became a full time investor in the fall of 2004. He had a background in commercial business loan underwriting and 4 years as a business development officer. He’s been a licensed Realtor since 2006. As a national real estate wholesaler, he does 6-12 fix and flips per year and owner finances 10 properties per year, mostly to investors.
You’d think that the ratio of houses to bid on to the number of deals he gets would be pretty crazy but he actually does pretty well. He’s got online real estate auction thing figured out to where he bids on about 150 properties and ends up with between and 8 to 15 per month. That’s awesome!
His favorite auction websites are:
auction.com
xome.com
hudsonandmarshall.com
realtybid.com
hubzu.com
He mentioned that hubzu is nice because you can get away with small earnest money deposits than the typical $2,500 the other auction sites require.
When looking for properties to bid on, he focuses on the smaller markets and targets in on the houses that have been listed for a long time. The houses that are for sale for over 180 days or more are the ones that he puts bids in on.
During the episode he also gave several reasons why he prefers to close each of the deals at the title company of his choosing rather than the one preferred by the bank that owns the auction property. The main reason was their hidden title company fees and lack of control over what is going on with the deal.
He was also kind enough to share with us his technique to get Realtors to tell us their BPO (which most don’t want to give out). He does this by not asking for a BPO but by asking, “what would you list it at for a 30 day quick sale?”
Brilliant!
Be aware that when buying auction houses online and then trying to wholesale them, you will not be able to assign them. You will need to double-close…yet another reason to have a title company you know that can close the deals.
John Martinez, founder of Midwest Revenue Group, LLC (www.midwestrev.com) is a sales development expert and a highly sought after consultant who brings humor, insight and real-world advice to his audiences. His practical, street-smart approach to selling has helped hundreds of investors, sales organizations, call centers, business owners, and independent professionals increase their revenue with more control, greater confidence and less effort.
Today I wanted to talk about how to handle negotiations with sellers so that we get the price we want and they feel good about the whole process.
This is an aspect of buying directly from motivated sellers that keeps a lot of people on the sidelines.
John shares with us today several tips for working with motivated sellers so that they feel good about the process and everyone gets what they want.
John’s first tip involves empathy. You’ve got to have empathy for each and every seller and what they are going through. Period.
Don’t hide what you’re feeling and how you feel about their situation. Let them know that what they are going through is not easy and that you know it must be hard.
John’s second tip is to make use of price anchoring. You’ve got to reset whatever initial price the seller is expecting to get so that your offer doesn’t hit them like a huge punch to the gut. One way to do this is to share recent comps for nearby houses that have sold for low amounts.
As you negotiate price, continuously lower the increment that you come up in your offer. This will signal to the seller that you are nearing your max. He also advises that you end with an odd number as your final as it appears to be your highest calculated offer. Great tip!
If your max offer doesn’t do the trick, make non-financial concessions. Offer to allow them to leave stuff they don’t want behind.
I asked John about common objections from sellers and how to handle them. I absolutely love the approach he offered.
He doesn’t feel like there is ever any canned objection/counter that will work. It’s always more of a situation by situation ordeal. His approach is to find out the real reason for why they are selling and have them hash out what objections or problems they have with doing so.
Then, understand that you can never overcome sellers’ objections. They must overcome their own objections. You can aid this by asking them questions that plays their objection against what they are trying to accomplish. In this way, they will see that accomplishing the sale of the house and resolving the situation is much bigger than the smaller problem of the objection.
Bill Allen has been flipping for over 3 years now and has done an incredible amount of growing in that short amount of time. He’s a full-time flight instructor for the Navy and has managed to grow a house flipping business from himself to a team running like a well-oiled machine.
I highly respect Bill and how he thinks. He’s the type of guy that loves to think through all types of situations and coming up with solutions. I think we’re wired the same.
In this episode, Bill shares with us how he got started. We then go into how he analyzes deals. His method of analysis is very similar to mine.
He uses the 70% rule of deal analysis for a quick idea of whether a deal is feasible or not and then goes into more detail.
A very important thing he mentioned was that the 70% rule works well for houses in the over $100k to about $180k range but not so much for anything outside of that. I tend to agree.
His quick method for repair cost estimation is to use $20 per soft of the house and then add costs for major items on top of that. Now, if a house needs major repair, this number will be low. This is more for typical updating, not relocating walls and re-sheetrocking, etc.
Bill became a father again recently. His son, James was born with a heart defect. Though he’s been through a lot, James is doing well.
You can read the story here on Bill’s blog: http://blackjackre.com/james/
Bill is an awesome father and person as he decided to set up donation page for the Children’s Heart Foundation and has pledged to match all donations.
This is incredible and I highly encourage everyone to make a donation. There’s nothing more important than our kids and I can’t think of a better cause.
Please pledge a donation here: Bill’s Children’s Heart Foundation Donation Page: http://www.childrensheartfoundation.org/donate-now
Please be sure to leave a mention of your donation on Bill’s Facebook page so that he can match your donation: http://facebook.com/blackjackestate
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/59
Happy New Year! 2017. Hustle
Goals. Have you set them? Go back and listen to:
Episode 18: [Foundation] 5 Steps To Setting and Actually Achieving Goals w/Marcus Maloney
Where the podcast is going
Finishing up series on investing
Mindset and foundation to get you prepared to be a real estate investor.
Team Building
Funding
Marketing - 19 episodes - You need leads!
Coming up…
Deal Analysis
Estimating Repairs
Making offers
Follow up
Rehabbing
Selling houses
Wholesaling houses
Share more of the day to day. My friend Erik always complains that I never talk about what I’m doing. Everything is top secret and it drives him nuts.
What’s happening in 2017 - bringing the hustle back
House Flipping Business Goals
- 108 deals (2/3 or more wholesale)
- Growing team
- Expanding online lead generation and testing
- Melissa heading up the operation - me more consulting role
Real Estate Investor Software Business
- Major improvements to LeadPropeller (editor improvements, custom forms, more services)
- REImobile will be transformed to fit our operation better and focus on the needs of growing flipping businesses
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/58
Register for the SEO and Content Marketing Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
This is the final of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.
In this episode the focus is mainly on search engine optimization and using content marketing to rank your site. We’re covering white hat versus black hat SEO, on-page and off-page SEO and all about content marketing in this episode.
Find out why Danny chose not to build LeadPropeller real estate investor websites on Wordpress and why you should care.
Discover these 4 Steps to Creating a Great Blog Post
- Determine the best keyword to focus on
- Come up with a great title
- Write the article
- Search engine optimize (SEO) the blog post
Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on December 13th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/57
Register for the Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
This is the third of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.
In this episode the focus is mainly on pay per click. We’re covering using Google Adwords as a real estate investor to generate awesome motivated seller leads…even within a week of setting up a new website.
Today, we’re talking about PPC (which stands for Pay Per Click) and generating leads the first week of having your website live.
Pay per click, not paperclip, is where you post ads online and pay for each click on those ads. The main services for pay per click are Google’s Adwords and Bing Ads.
This is the absolute best way to start generating leads for your website immediately. With adwords and bing ads, you pay money to have your ads displayed in the search results. Based on several factors that we’ll cover shortly, you can have your ads displayed above ALL organic search results. Basically at the top of the page for the best keywords out there.
Think about how awesome that is! You can beat websites that have been online for years, your first week getting leads online. Of course, you will have to pay for those leads, but these tend to be some of the best motivated seller leads available.
This is because these motivated sellers are seeking you out. They are ready to sell and are looking for a buyer.
Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to rank your site faster and higher using SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing for real estate investors.
Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on November 15th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/56
Register for the Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
This is the second of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.
In this episode the focus is mainly on generating traffic to your website. So, let’s get going and talk about how to promote your website to start generating leads right away without waiting for your site to rank at the top of the search engines...which can take up to a year with diligent effort. We’ll talk about that and SEO a lot more in a couple weeks on the 4th podcast episode in this subseries.
Don’t Expect: ‘Build it and they will come’
The internet isn’t the field of dreams.
Just building a website doesn’t do anything for you unless people know about it. They either find out about it through promotion: which is what we are talking about today or through finding it online themselves: which is what we are covering in the next 2 episodes.
The biggest mistake real estate investors make with a website is getting a website and then doing nothing to promote it.
Promotion does require some work, but the results can land you great deals that generate tens of thousands of dollars.
Whenever I hear someone say, “I haven’t received a single lead from my website”, it’s almost always because they never promoted it or didn’t promote it long enough. It’s the equivalent of complaining you didn’t get a deal from your direct mail campaign after you send out 500 postcards one time.
You Need a Plan
Just as you plan your direct mail with who you are mailing, when and how often and which letters, you need to have a plan to constantly promote your website. You wouldn’t print 1,000 letters and never mail them, so don’t build a website and not promote it.
The ideas I give you today will allow you to create your website promotion plan.
Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to generate the best motivated seller leads using pay per click (adwords) marketing.
Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on November 15th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/55
Register for the Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
This is the first of three episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.
In this episode the focus is mainly on what makes a high-converting website. Danny covers all of the details to make sure you build credibility, how forms should be structured, what questions should be asked, how to eliminate competition.
Be sure to listen to next weeks podcast where Danny will share with you how to promote your website to start generating leads even before it ranks in the search engines. It’s going to be awesome.
Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on November 15th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar
Ask your questions about online lead generation at https://facebook.com/flippingjunkie
This episode is short and sweet just covering what's coming up on the next episodes of the podcast. We'll be talking about online lead generation and how it is the top lead and deal generating marketing we are doing. If you have questions about online lead generation that you want answered, please visit https://facebook.com/flippingjunkie and ask there. I'll do my best to answer all questions in the coming episodes.
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/53
Brett Snodgrass is an awesome real estate investor in Indianapolis, IN. He’s been a full time real estate wholesaler for about 10 years now, and it has been an incredible business that God has used to provide for him and his family. He’s a simple guy, He loves taking his little beater-boat out on the lake, spending time with his wife and kids and enjoying the relationships he has around him.
Today, Brett shared with us his direct mail strategy where he sends out over 20,000 pieces per month and landing roughly 10 deals.
What I enjoyed was the discussion on getting leads from HUD. HUD stands for Housing and Urban Development and they are responsible for selling off FHA foreclosures.
HUD sells there homes auction style through the HUD Home Store (hudhomestore.com). You can bid on these houses and land some awesome deals.
Brett shares with us his exact system for making offers on these HUD houses. I especially like how he describes his filtering process to make sure that he’s not wasting his time. This is information that took him months to determine and we get to listen in and save all that time and effort.
Brett knows how to buy houses from HUD, HUD foreclosures. His system for buying they HUD homes is awesome, from offering 25% of list price and just fishing for counters to knowing when they are more likely to accept an offer, it’s all here in this episode.
Learn how to buy houses from HUD with this episode where I interview Brett Snodgrass.
Show notes at http://flippingjunkie.com/52
We’ve all heard those Jeff Foxworthy jokes about how you might be a redneck if you…
For example:
- You think “loading the dishwasher” means getting your wife drunk.
- You own a homemade fur coat.
- You think a chain saw is a musical instrument.
- You read the Auto Trader with a highlight pen.
What might make you a real estate investor…
We as real estate investors have our own quirks and situations that make us who we are. These are the things that create a special bond between us.
If you find yourself nodding and laughing at the following truisms, well…you just might be a real estate investor.
I’m afraid I haven’t found a cure for it so you’re tough out of luck.
You might be a real estate investor if…
- you have a thousand keys and you have no idea which house they belong to.
- you buy every directional sign in stock at home depot, then go to another home depot and buy their stock.
- you are proud of your lockbox collection.
- you happily sit on urine-stained couches. (cheers to Rob Caldwell for this one)
Listen to the podcast for more…
Justin Williams has been a full-time investor for over 9 years. He’s flipped over 500 houses. He considers himself a house flipping machinist. What he means by that is that he is all about building systems so that he could scale quickly and do more with his time.
Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/51
In today’s episode, we talk about what amounts to a paradigm shift for most investors. There are three steps to revolutionize your house flipping business:
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Generating leads on a regular basis
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Converting those leads
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Increasing profit
Justin’s whole approach is to focus on those three points, nail down the processes and then scale it. It’s really that simple. Maybe not easy to do, but simple.
Justin has done this with his own business and helped many other investors do the same. Trying to figure it all out yourself would not be the best use of your time.
The best use of your time is learning from someone with the experience and ability to teach you every step of the way.
Justin has just opened the doors to his House Flipping Formula program. You can get access to it here: http://houseflippingformula.com/danny
Rod Khleif is a passionate real estate investor who has personally owned and managed over 2000 apartments and homes. As an entrepreneur, Rod has built several multi-million dollar businesses. As a community philanthropist, Rod’s work has benefited more than 45,000 underprivileged children and families.
Rod discusses culling a list to make it more accurate and actual outbound calling which he’s done successfully. He speaks to knocking on doors which he did in Denver to buy some of the 500 houses he owned there on a buy and hold strategy. He’s found if you’re willing to do what others aren’t you’ll be successful and he happily talks about all of that in today’s episode of the Flipping Junkie Podcast.
Rod has bought hundreds of houses by door knocking on houses that were facing foreclosure. Here’s what he did:
He would get the pre-foreclosure list (sometimes referred to as the Notice of Default or NOD list) and then design a route to go to the houses.
He focused on going in the evening after 5:15 when people were more likely to be at home. If they were not home, he would leave his card (that said something along the lines of ‘Foreclosure Assistance Specialist’). He would then try again on Saturday.
Persistence. That’s what lands deals. Huge deals. He was doing what most investors still won’t do to this day!
When the homeowner is home, you must genuinely care about helping them. If you only care about making a buck, go and chase bank-owned MLS properties….door knocking is not for you. Homeowners will smell a shark a mile away.
Ask them questions to guide them through the conversation. You’ll need to build rapport so that they’ll talk openly with you so that you can offer up solutions to their foreclosure.
Rod liked to ask them what options they’ve already considered. This is a good way to get the conversation going.
Rod makes sure to verify the accuracy of his mailing lists and will look for phone numbers of the owners. This is also something most real estate investors do not do. If you are serious about real estate investing, finding the owners, finding their phone numbers and calling them can net you big deals.
You can find out what service he uses to verify the accuracy of his lists and find phone numbers by visiting the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/50
Over 6 years of developing and building a owner finance real estate investment company. Starting from scratch he has figured out the best way to create and sell real estate notes. He currently "flips” 75+ houses and notes a year and are shooting for 100. He’s been in real estate for over 15 years and have done a little bit of every kind of investing. His passion is in the creation of real estate notes because it affects the most people. You are helping the seller by buying their house. Then the neighborhood by rehabbing it. The buyer by offering owner finance and the investor by creating a good quality real estate note.
Erik was on episode 27 where we talked about Finding and Working with the “Right” Contractors
Erik is on track to do 100 deals this year. Obviously, to do a 100 deals in a year, you’ve got to be good at marketing for motivated seller leads. While Erik does do direct mail to find motivated sellers, he also uses other methods.
Today we talk about those other methods. We focus today’s episode on using bandit signs. Disclaimer: Check with your local city offices to make sure it’s legal for you to put signs out. They are illegal in a lot of places.
He shares a great tip on getting 4x8 sheets of corrugated plastic that he cuts down into bandit signs that have odd shapes. These signs grab much more attention than printed signs. He then writes on them with giant markers.
This is the way to go to get maximum benefit out of bandit signs.
The next thing we talk about is using newspaper ads to generate motivated seller leads. While print newspapers are dying and don’t get the readership they used to, you can still get ads displayed in them and online as most have a website now.
The great thing about online newspaper classifieds is that you can now have your ad show to visitors that might not even go into the classified section of the newspaper. There are a lot of possibilities here and not a lot of competition.
We also talk about using Facebook to target the exact demographics of people investors normally buy from. This varies greatly by area and also by investor, so it’s more up to you to determine which demographics you should target.
Facebook is just another medium to have your message displayed in front of people that might need your services. Why not take advantage of the power of Facebook ads to generate motivated sellers leads for your real estate investing business?
Don was on episode 36. Be sure to visit the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/36 to download his Joint Venture Agreement.
Don Costa, is a married father of 3 kids. He has been in the real estate business for over 10 years. He started Knocking on doors and wholesaling properties, and then quickly moved to flipping houses. Currently his office is on track to do a 100 flips this year.
Don is a networking machine! He is on track to do more than 20 flips this year solely from his networking efforts. Crazy!
Networking as a real estate investor is one of the cheapest ways to generate leads and deals and is probably the least utilized method of all.
Don mentions that he feels networking to be the best way to use Other People’s Marketing. Many investors use Other People’s Money, but few use Other People’s Marketing.
He calls all the marketing from other investors in his area and quickly asks if the investor is a wholesaler or a cash buyer.
His conversation is then guided by whichever the investor mentions they are.
If they are a cash buyer, Don wants to find out if they’d be interested in lending on a deal or joint venturing and splitting profits.
If they are a real estate wholesaler, he wants to know how many deals they’ve done. If they haven’t done many deals, he invites them to his offer and provides coaching. This is awesome because he is building a relationship with a new wholesaler that could bring him deals for years to come.
He even offers to do deal analysis for wholesalers so they know they already have a buyer at a given price. This takes almost all the risk out of the deal for them…which is invaluable when you are new to this business.
In this episode, we do a little role playing to see exactly what Don says when he calls real estate investors. The insights are incredible.
Listen to the episode to get the tips that have helped Don Costa to generate over 20 flip deals this year alone.
Get show notes at http://flippingjunkie.com/47
Jim has been a real estate investor in Northern Illinois since 2007, He is also a licensed real estate agent (IL) and has been since 2005. He started out as an aggressive new agent helping investors buy and sell their rehab properties. Then he quickly realized he was on the wrong side of that transaction and that is when he decided to become a real estate investor myself. These days his primary focus as an investor is residential redevelopment (aka rehabbing). He primarily works in Chicago and its NW suburbs and had used his local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) to get 75% of his rehab deals over the last 8 years. Since he got into the real estate business he has been involved in over 450 transactions.His company does 8-10 rehabs at any one time. Though Jim is an active investor he spends as much of his time as possible with his 4 year old twins, Liam & Claire, and his awesome wife who stays home with them. He told us "Everything changed when I had kids. Suddenly I looked at everything differently and literally changed almost everything in my life. I got healthy, quit drinking, lost 50lbs and have never looked back. Life is much more enjoyable on this side of your health".
Jim’s secret to getting great deals on the MLS starts with planting the right seeds with the real estate agents involved. Effective communication is absolutely necessary.
You have to convince the listing agent so that they will convince the seller that your offer is worth considering and ultimately worth accepting.
Jim has bought tons of houses where his offer wasn’t the highest but he convinced the agents that his was the best offer. To make his offers more appealing he does the following:
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Waives the inspection
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Informs the agent that other investors and potential buyers include inspections because they will likely renegotiate after the inspection.
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If not a bank-owned property, he tells the listing agent to inform the seller that, when he through fixing up the house, most of his houses are sold to young families.
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He puts up a strong earnest money deposit (around $5,000 for a house with an ARV between $400k and $500k).
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He puts in for a 2 week closing.
Agents hardly ever know what a seller is going to be willing to take for their house. They all have assumptions and we know what assumptions do…
So, don’t ever rely on a listing agent telling you their client will never entertain a low offer. This is crap. They are obligated to submit all offers, so go ahead and submit yours and try to convince the agent of the real benefits of your offer (not just price).
Jim also mentioned that 90% of his MLS deals required follow up. He usually does this using hotsheets to automatically check for status changes for the listings.
If you want to win even more deals, it’s best to have a system in place to remind you to follow up just before typical price changes. There’s no way to guarantee when there will be a price change but you can set up reminders for yourself for each property very easily in REImobile so that you can set it and forget it.
The criteria for properties he makes offers on are usually based on location but also the presence of one of the following keywords:
estate sale, REO, bank-owned, motivated, needs work, original owner, handyman special, as-is, fixer
As a Wholesaler with just over 3 years of experience, Tom has had explosive growth. As head “Rhino” of the most successful Tribe of Wholesalers on the planet he has had the fortune of meeting true Go Givers and being a part of some of the best real estate deals in the industry.
When he’s not writing, podcasting or creating courses that force others to succeed, you’ll find him spending time with his wife and 4 children or vacationing in favorite spots like Key Largo, Hilton Head, Charleston and Savanah.
Currently he is writing his first book, working title “Wholesaling Real Estate Like A Rhino, A No BS No Fluff Step-By-Step Blueprint To Wholesale A House Right Now” is slated for release this fall.
In this episode, Tom shares his top 8 direct mail lists for motivated sellers as a real estate investor.
The best direct mail lists are:
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Tax Delinquent List - criteria: 2 years behind, are still the homeowner
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Code Violation List - no criteria
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Equity List - Absentee Owner, Owner Occupied and Global (all) - criteria: over 45 years old owner, last sale date between 1990 and 3 years ago.
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Inheritance List - USLeadList
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Evictions - no criteria
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Yard Sale/Garage Sale List - tenants sell before they move
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Probate - Recommends getting course from Rick Ginn
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Arrest Record List - list of people recently arrested
Tom shares lots of pearls of wisdom in this episode that pertain to investing in general. One of these nuggets is from Jack Bosch. He says that you will get 5 no’s before you get a yes when asking people at your local government offices for each of these lists.
The first, second, third, fourth, and even fifth person you talk will tell you the list doesn’t exist or that they cannot give it to you. The sixth person will say, ‘Here ya go!”
Tom also shares a great tip from his friend, Mark Evans: ‘Data not Drama’ He is referring to keeping track of your mailing campaigns and the results you are getting.
We make this super easy in REImobile with our Direct Mail Module. Check it out here: http://reimobile.com
Tom also talks about how ‘Money is in the Database’. You have to keep track of your leads and follow up! …this is also exactly the reason why we developed REImobile…
I’m telling you, you’ve got to check out the system.
Husband. Father to His Two Year old Son, Nolan!
He’s a graduate of Ball State University living with my beautiful and super supportive wife in Indianapolis, Indiana. Prior to becoming a real estate professional he worked as Healthcare Technology Education Consultant at Indiana University Health. He’s also a successful poker player with a few TV final tables…which I found super interesting.
He’s spent the past several years learning all that he could about real estate and applying it so that he could provide enough income to support his family.
The education has paid off and he’s now a full-time real estate investor in Indianapolis.
Ben started by following my Flipping Junkie blog and went on to take my wholesaling training course FreedomByFlipping (http://freedombyflipping.com).
He’s grown his business and has staff helping him already. During this episode, Ben shares how he doesn’t focus at all on what his letters say as he simply outsources them to Jerry Puckett who handles the list and mailing them for Ben.
During the conversation we make special note of the importance of credibility when marketing to motivated sellers through direct mail.
Ben mentions how important it is to be a member of the chamber of commerce, better business bureau and have other professional credibility and endorsements.
Testimonials are huge. Ben advises to get and show testimonials whenever possible.
He always has motivated sellers tell him they called him because of the testimonials and reviews they saw.
Doug was born in Colorado Springs, CO and raised in Carlsbad New Mexico. After high school he ventured west to the sunny coast of Southern California. It was there he met his beautiful bride Andrea, who happens to share his entrepreneurial spirit!
As newlyweds, they ventured back to Colorado and started Mountain High Concessions, a Kettle Corn vender for special events and sporting/concert venues. Mountain High Concessions became the first Kettle popcorn vender for the Denver Broncos at Mile High Stadium. They were itching to get back to So Cal and they sold the concessions company and got started in Real Estate!
16 years and 3 kids later, they are the proud owners of one of Southern California's largest wholesale real estate purchasing companies! They operate the business together along with our incredible team! Over the past decade he has worked as a California Certified Residential Appraiser from 2003-2010. Since 2008, he and Andrea have purchased and sold over 250 properties in Southern California and manage their in-house rental property portfolio.
In this episode, Doug shares with us how he started by sending out about 1,000 postcards each month that had the ‘Urgent Notice’ message on them to absentee owners. His response rate then was about 2% to 4%…which is incredible!
Too bad everyone else started doing it and now the response rates are much, much lower. Typical investor response rates on direct mail is around .5% (half a percent).
Doug is now mailing around 20,000 pieces PER MONTH! He’s definitely dialed in his message and list in order to be comfortable mailing that much.
Instead of post cards, Doug now mails letters that are more professional. They have his business name and logo on them. He also includes a picture of himself and his family.
I think this is where direct mail for real estate investors is headed. Too many people are mailing yellow letters that come across as “iffy”. If you get a letter in the mail from a complete stranger that says they want to buy your house and to call them…and that’s all…your BS meter is probably being pegged.
Doug uses propertyradar.com for his lists. They are only available for west coast states. He used to get his lists from listsource.com (where most investors still get their lists).
His criteria for his absentee owners list is:
House older than 20 years
Bought 4+ years ago
With more than 60% equity
Less than 3,000 sqft
Many investors have trouble figuring out what benefits to motivated sellers to list in their letters. Here are some we discussed in this episode:
We buy As-Is. Make no repairs.
Fast Cash so you can Sell Quickly
Sell without dealing with Tenants or Family Members
Pay No Commissions
Skip the Hassles
Have Confidence the Deal with Close
To come up with your own benefits, just put yourself in the shoes of motivated sellers. Consider why you would seller to investor rather than the conventional way of listing with a Realtor.
Be sure to check out the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/44 to download your free guide from Doug entitled, ’11 Tips to Working Successfully with your Spouse’
Danny Johnson is the host of the Flipping Junkie podcast and today he shares with us incredible tips for driving for dollars in a world where technology has made things so much easier.
In this episode, we discuss:
What driving for dollars is
When to drive for dollars
Where to drive for dollars
How to drive for dollars
What to do after you get the addresses
Common questions about driving for dollars
How to outsource driving for dollars
Check out the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/43 to download a pdf of all the points talked about in this episode so that you have a roadmap for driving for dollars more efficiently.
Justin Colby is the Co-Founder and President of The Science of Flipping, Omni Investment Group and Phoenix Wealth Builders. The Science of Flipping is a free Podcast on itunes, Omni and PWB are both professional real estate investment companies specializing in purchase, rehab, and flipping of distressed property in the Metro Phoenix Area.
In this episode, Justin shares his story of getting started and struggling through 9 months to get his first deal. He simply didn’t have any money to get started and had to door knock and do things that cost very little.
In starting out this way, Justin was forced to learn the most efficient ways to get deals. This continued as he began using direct mail to generate motivated seller leads.
He shares with us that he had just sent out 47,000 direct mail pieces. So he’s grown over the years but knows what it takes to get started with very little money.
An important fact that he shares is that most direct mail response rates are below 1%. This fact tends to be ignored by most investors just starting out with direct mail to motivated sellers.
They might send out 500 mail pieces and only get 3 calls. This is very disheartening if you aren’t prepared for it. This is the reason we figure more than 80 to 90% of investors discontinue or change their list after only mailing one time!
When starting to send direct mail, you want to send as many as you can afford to send at least 6 times. You’ve got to mail the same mailing list your postcards and/or letters at least 6 times. The reason is that studies have shown that, for direct mail in general, 80% of sales happen after 6 touches.
Don’t be the guy that mails once and quits. Also, don’t be the guy that mails 5 times and quits. They’re almost equivalent.
The guy/gal that mails 6 or 7 times will generate a very disproportionate amount of motivated sellers leads.
Regarding whether to use postcards or letters and first class versus bulk rate or metered, it all boils down to which will be cheaper so that you can mail more pieces. When on a budget, you should always defer to what will allow you to send more.
In this episode, Justin also shares with us what he says in his postcards and letters. This is super valuable information.
We also talk about the A/B test he performed that cost him $15,000 and didn’t show any measurable difference.
Listen to the show to find out what the test was so that you can benefit from his big expense and save some money for yourself.
Joe McCall has been investing since 2006 and has an excellent podcast called the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast that he does with Alex Joungblood. He’s doing deals in multiple markets across the us while traveling for months at a time in Europe and traveling the us in an RV. He’s been teaching and coaching investing since 2011.
In this episode, Joe goes into incredible detail on how he set up and runs his direct mail marketing for motivated sellers leads.
We talk about the lists that he targets and how to get them.
He even shares when he sends postcards and when he sends letters.
A funny story during the interview was when Joe realized that he had been sending a postcard for years that he got from FlippingJunkie.com and didn’t put two and two together until that moment.
Bonus: get that postcard here http://flippingjunkie.com/41
Joe focuses on absentee owner mailings using postcards. When there is a lot of competition, he focuses on high equity owner occupied houses.
He gets his list from Listsource.com using the following criteria:
Bought at least 10 years ago
At least 40% equity
At least 3 bedroom house
Owner at least 55 years old
Specific zip codes with lots of rehab activity
One way Joe finds the most sought after areas is Trulia heat maps. He targets a county and the heat map shows cheap, median and expensive houses. There is even a table of data that can be sorted to show the most popular areas.
During the conversation we shared some numbers for the typical marketing spend per deal for investors. The numbers vary between $1,000 and $3,000 per deal and go as high as $5,000 per deal for some very competitive areas.
Mailing intervals for probates should be about once per week for the first 6 weeks or so. Mailing intervals for other lists usually are spread out from 30 to 90 days in between mailings.
One recurring theme throughout the episode was the discussion of how most investors fail to answer their phones. If there is one thing you can do to eliminate 75% or more of your competition, it’s answering your phone or calling back a seller IMMEDIATELY. Take that to the bank.
Nick Baldo started investing in real estate in 2011 with a focus on flipping houses in the Buffalo, NY area. He has since expanded his business to focus on value-added rental investments. Nick created and manages the real estate educational site, Income Digs to help aspiring real estate investors get started. He has a focus on leveraging technology to create an investment business that is both efficient and scalable.
Overview of Strategy:
- Tell everyone what you do
- You never know where good deals can come from
- The more interactions you have, the more you are working in the industry, the more that will come to you
11 Actionable Tips for getting yourself out there and finding deals
- Tell your friends
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- Email blast
- Social Media bio
- You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars
- You want people to see your brand and ask more questions
- Simple business cards, shirt, signs
- Set up brand
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REI Meetings/ Investor meetups
- Neighbors get excited about flips
- They often have people in their lives who need to sell quickly
- They see that flipping is not “as scary as it seems on TV”
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Meet the neighbors
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They might not know that they want to sell
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Reach out to other landlords/ property managers in the areas where you have rentals
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You should probably have one (or more) agent looking for properties for you.
- Agents have pocket listings and access to info you don’t have.
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Real Estate Agents
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Even if you’re not doing the rehab, be on the job site. You want to be there if and when people come up and ask what is going on with the house.
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Be Hands on
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I personally use Podio...but if you are just starting, a simple spreadsheet will do
- REImobile is setup with great features from the start
- Some people like to see tangible leads.
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Use sort of tracking mechanism
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Building inspector
- Mayor
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Wholesalers
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Attorneys
- Accountants
- Bankers
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Professionals
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Driving by...have a hunch about about a house? Doesn’t hurt to start the conversation.
- Don’t be afraid to ask
“Bonus” - Even if it’s not a deal you find, a solid consolation prize is finding a private lender
Visit the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/40 to download Nick's 10 Tangible Tips to Find More Solid Rehab Deals
Lamar Cannon is a real estate investor who loves to travel the world. He set up his business to allow him to do deals no matter where he is on the globe. His strengths are strategy, marketing and a strong mentality. He enjoys experiencing new cultures, trying new foods, reading, writing poetry and playing basketball.
In today’s episode Lamar and I talk about how he goes about determining which part of a city to focus his marketing on. He’s been investing in a lot of different cities outside of his home city of Austin, TX.
Investing in other cities forced him to develop a data-driven system to determine where to focus his marketing.
As a wholesaler (but almost equally as important for rehabbers), he wanted to determine which zip codes have the most action.
What he does is goes to ListSource.com and generates a list based on the following criteria:
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Entire City (and surround areas)
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Single-Family Houses Only
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Last Sale Date within last 6 months
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99-100% Equity (shows most likely was cash buyer)
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Absentee Owners (most likely investors bought)
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Companies Only (filter to filter down further to make sure getting investor buys)
This is how he gets the data he wants for free…
On the last page right before checkout, you can preview your data and filter it by zip code. All he’s really interested in is the count of the matching transactions so just the record count per zip code will tell him which zip codes have the most investor transactions.
How cool is that?
Another filter he uses from time to time to determine great areas for wholesaling is the foreclosure rate for the zip codes. The more foreclosures, the more likely it is that the area isn’t being served well by investors as the houses aren’t being bought before foreclosures are happening…LESS COMPETITION!
For someone like myself that does mostly rehabs, I wouldn’t focus as much on foreclosures, rather I’d include price ranges that are near the city’s media home value as that will be the where the biggest pool of buyers is.
All in all, we shared a lot of great info in this episode to help you determine where to focus your mailing and claim your target farm area.
Melissa and I generate all of our deals almost entirely from marketing to motivated sellers. When I got my first call from my motivated seller marketing I froze….
I actually threw the phone to her for her to answer! She fumbled through it but we learned a heck of a lot from that first call.
It takes time to build up confidence when talking to motivated sellers. These 15 questions that I cover in this podcast episode will help you trim the time to develop awesome motivated seller talking to skills.
It’s important to go into each phone call from a seller with these 4 goals in mind:
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Determine if a deal is even remotely possible (focus on what is owed… not what their asking price is)
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Determine how motivated they are
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Build rapport
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Schedule an appointment immediately
The 15 questions talked about the podcast episode are presented in the order they should be asked. There is a reason for their ordering.
The biggest focus is on building rapport and getting information about their situation that they wouldn’t give something that is just hitting them up with questions without being conversational.
Enjoy the episode and be sure to down the PDF checklist of the 15 questions to make sure you ask them in the correct order. You can download the checklist at http://flippingjunkie.com/38
Chris Jameson started investing in the San Antonio real estate market in 2011 and soon after entered the private financing market. He has facilitated over $60M in loans and acquired over 60 units for his personal portfolio.
In this episode, Chris and I talk about the ins and outs of hard money loans and how to work with hard money lenders.
One of the biggest benefits for new investors is that hard money lenders can help keep you out of trouble. They usually won’t lend if the deals isn’t likely to make you money.
There are some hard money lenders that Chris calls “Loan To Own”. These lenders are more interested in creating the loan with the intention of getting the house from you when you default on the loan… usually after it’s already partially or mostly rehabbed!
Check out the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/37 to download Chris’s hard money lender checklist, hard money lending exposed pdf, repair estimates guide and his contact information.
In this episode we answer all of the following questions and more.
What exactly is a hard money lender?
Why are they better than getting traditional financing?
What characterizes a “good” hard money lender?
What is typically required from a borrower for a loan?
What kinds of deals and/or how do you analyze whether you will lend on a given deal?
What is the process from start to finish for someone wanting to get a loan for the first time?
You guys loan throughout Texas right? For people outside of Texas, how would you suggest they find a “good” lender?
Do you have any interesting stories about deals or borrowers that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Don Costa, is a married father of 3 incredible kids. He has been in the real estate business for over 10 years. He started Knocking on doors and wholesaling properties, and then quickly moved to flipping houses. He took some time off during the crash and jumped back in 2012. Currently our office is on track to do a 100 flips this year. He loves what he does and he loves helping others get into the business.
Don started flipping houses when he was unemployed. The unemployment check only covered his living expenses and so he had to find a way to find deals, get funding for them and to fix them so that he could sell them and profit.
He got a notice of default list and began going door to door to try to buy houses from the people about to face foreclosure.
To buy and fix up the houses, he worked out a deal with a money partner to joint venture. The money partner would put up the funds. He would find the deals and manage the fix up and they would split the profits 50/50.
Not all deals are 50/50, we discuss some of the other terms investors use and how those are determined. Basically, the more value you bring to the table for the joint venture, the more you should make out of the deal. If you are finding incredible deals, managing the rehabs and getting them sold, shouldn’t you be asking for a 60/40 split. Heck yes.
Don didn’t have money to make monthly payments to hard money and private money lenders. He didn’t have money to spend on rehabs before getting draws from lenders. He had to joint venture.
He still joint ventures to this day. The reason is that he always wants to do as many deals as he can. Joint venturing allows him to be able to do that.
Finding joint venture partners can be had by networking. You hear it all the time, but do you do it? That’s the real question.
Don recommends using a written agreement to make sure everybody is on the same page and understands the deal. You can click here to download the agreement he uses. (Please be sure to have an attorney review this before using it - the agreement is only provided for educational purposes)
He talks about some of the situations he’s encountered with different JVs. One wanted to know if paint from one job was going to another job if it wasn’t all used. You probably don’t want to have someone partnering with you that is concerned with such minute details.
Another thing to be careful of is partnering with someone that wants to give too much input on rehabs. You do not want to have too many chiefs trying to run things. Contractors won’t know who to listen to or to check in with about change orders, etc. You should control as much as you can.
Jason has been on the show now 3 times! It’s because he’s awesome and doing great things in his real estate investing business in Houston.
We have in on the show today to talk about finding and working with private lenders for your house flips.
Now, if you’re new to real estate investing, you probably want to start with working with a partner to fund the deal and split the profits or use hard money until you have a proven track record of several successful flips. This will make it easier to build relationships with private lenders.
In this episode we talk about:
What a private lender is
How they are different than hard money lenders
What criteria Jason uses to determine good lenders from ones he’d rather not work with
How to find these lenders during networking events
Jason really focuses on the “working” part of networking events. I think most investors in general just don’t fully appreciate the power of these events if worked properly.
When negotiating with lenders on terms, Jason likes to frame the argument by showing how he uses the lenders that give the best terms first and then moves up to more expensive ones afters he’s used all of the cheaper one’s money. So, they can ask for higher rates, but they won’t get their money out until the cheaper ones have theirs out first.
Jason also talks about his vanilla and chocolate options he gives private lenders. You’ll need to listen to the episode for that one though. :)
Learn how to flip houses through this free house flipping training course. Weekly podcast episodes show you how to get started and go from newbie to pro.
In this episode, I talk about what we've been doing with this series of podcast episodes that is meant to be a sort of weekly training that follows a specific path to take you from absolute beginner real estate investor to master pro house flipper extraordinaire.
APIA is an investor friendly insurance company owned and operated by Gloria Kelley in Castroville, TX. Gloria has over 42 years experience in the insurance industry and services a niche market-unoccupied, vacant, or "distressed" properties. She got her start providing insurance for large financial institution's Real Estate Owned (REO) portfolios and has been employed by various large insurance companies over the course of her career. She has experienced all types of claims in her ever-growing knowledge in the insurance world.
Gloria shared some great tips and gotchas that all real estate investors need to be aware of when it comes to insuring vacant houses. As investors, we have a lot going on and can sometimes make decisions without knowing all the facts.
I’m willing to bet that 90% of real estate investors don’t properly insure their investment properties.
In this episode we talk about the importance of understanding insurance policy vacancy clauses. This is a super important clause because it can basically allow insurance companies to deny claims.
Another important topic we cover is what happens when you under insure a property. I know most investors do this as well. It’s important to understand the ramifications when you don’t put a proper insured value on your vacant real estate investments.
They currently service investors all over the U.S. We build strong relationships with clients because of our customer service, competitive pricing, responsiveness, and flexibility to meet the unique demands of investors. They offer the investor the opportunity to pay insurance in arrears. This is especially important since you know investors are cash /cash flow focused. Most insurance providers require insurance 3 months in advance and you probably won't get a refund of the premium if you do not use it all. With them you pay for what you use after the fact-not beforehand.
Their policies is underwritten by Lloyd's of London.
Andy McFarland is a self-made real estate entrepreneur who started with nothing and currently makes seven figures a year in his real estate business.
After getting fired from his last W-2 job in 2004, Andy went into real estate full time and has never looked back. Andy currently focuses on wholesaling properties in three different states; Utah, New Mexico, and Indiana. In 2015 alone, Andy did over 150 deals.
Andy has been married for 10 years and currently resides in Farmington Utah with his beautiful wife and three amazing children. Andy enjoys being around family and friends and continuing to grow and learn every day. You can follow Andy on his real estate journey by going to his website: www.iloverealestatestories.com or on his YouTube channel by searching for I Love Real Estate Stories.
He was also with us on episode 19 where we discussed ‘how much do you really need to know before getting started flipping houses?’
In today’s episode we talk about how real estate wholesalers operate and how to become one of their VIP buyers.
There is a very common misconception that wholesalers don’t leave enough meat on the bone when they sell their deals. That can and does happen, but it’s not every deal and not every wholesaler.
We discuss how we’ve seen wholesalers put out great deals at crazy prices because they made assumptions that were invalid.
Andy gives an example of how he just bought a house from a wholesaler that thought the house would only work as a rental. Andy determined it would work as a flip and snatched the deal up and wholesaled it himself at a higher price.
Some key points to take away from this episode are as follows:
- Be top of mind with good wholesalers (call them on a regular basis and befriend them)
- Develop friendships. Don’t just say, ‘Give me, give me, give me.’
- Be prepared. Be ready with funding, earnest money, offers, etc.
- Don’t make assumptions. Do your own due diligence.
Andy wholesales a TON of deals every year and his insights on how to build a great buyers list and how he operates his business are priceless.
Mike Arch is a founder of Alamo Home Source and is partners with Erik Saengerhausen who joined us for episode 27. Mike has been flipping for many years and has flipped hundreds of houses. He currently focuses on creating and selling real estate notes.
On today’s episode, we talk about how to find the “right” real estate agents, attorney, title company/closer for your house flipping business.
This biggest take away from this episode is that taking the time to find the team members that care as much about your business as you do is paramount. There are agents out there that always work with a sense of urgency and are great for real estate investors because you cannot steal in slow motion (meaning not to steal, but to get the great deals :)).
We discussed the best way to find agents doing great things in the areas you are investing or want to flip in and how to approach them so that they know who you are and can send you great deals.
It might surprise you to know that many agents that list a lot of houses don’t necessarily want their name on a junker house so they’d prefer not to list it. If they know you are a ready and able buyer, they can let you know about those properties before they go on the market. It’s a true win, win.
We also discussed how to find the right escrow officer or closer at a title company to close your transactions. Find out what fees are negotiable as well as the tips that pros use to save themselves time and money.
We also discuss the right kind of attorney to find. Obviously, you’ll want a real estate focused attorney. We talk about how we both have spent too much money in the past because we didn’t know how to approach and talk with attorneys. Don’t make the same mistakes, listen to this episode and gain the advantage.
Robert Nickell is a national speaker, published author and one of the most successful real estate investors in the nation. Robert is known for his unique ability to teach, train, and run successful virtual businesses. Robert co-created Investor Virtual Assistant Services, LLC (IVAS) with the purpose of sharing his knowledge, experience and success with fellow investors around the world that are looking to take more control of their time while increasing productivity and reducing costs.
Are you a solopreneur? Most real estate investors are. We try to do everything ourselves and think that it’s very hard to find someone to care about each task as much as we do.
It’s what keeps us mediocre as real estate investors.
If you want to really kick butt as a house flipper and real estate investor, you simply need to learn how to delegate and have other people do the busy work.
If you don’t, you won’t make as much money and you won’t truly get the freedom you started doing this to get in the first place.
Virtual assistants are great for investors that cannot afford full-time in-house employees. I’m sure there are dozens of tasks you can think of that you’d rather never do again in your life. Those are tasks that you can have someone else do. And, guess what? They don’t need to be in the same city, state or even country as you.
Robert Nickell runs a very successful wholesaling business and uses almost entirely virtual assistants from the Philippines to do it! Sounds crazy, but it’s true.
He’s done so well with it that he’s started to train and provide these virtual assistants to real estate investors so that we can all benefit from their help.
Not sure where to go to find virtual assistants? Not sure what qualities to look for? Not sure how to streamline your processes and coordinate and make the most out of the virtual assistants’ time? Not sure how much you should be paying for virtual assistants?
We cover all of these questions in this episode. I learned a tremendous amount from Robert in this podcast episode and I’m sure you will to. Even if you’re not immediately considering needing help, it’s best to know that it exists so that when you start getting bogged down, you’ll know where to go and how to handle it.
To find out more about Robert’s virtual assistants service, visit MyRockstarVA.com
Brandon is a painter, extortionist, exorcist, and lover (not a fighter.) He' would also like everyone to know he is not a robot, despite claims to the contrary. Little known fact: He’s the VP of Growth and Communications here at BiggerPockets.com.
Brandon joined me on the Flipping Junkie podcast way back in episode 2 of the show. He’s very busy and I really appreciate him taking the time to be on the show again. I enjoy talking with Brandon and consider him a great friend.
On this episode, we cover over 22 actionable tips for beginner real estate investors. Even though we say these are tips for beginners, I think we can all say that even experiences house flippers do not do all of these things. If we all would work at putting these tips into action, we’d all make more money and have more free time.
The important thing to always remember is that this is a marathon, not an all out sprint. Do not try to go out and do all of these things this next week as you will burn yourself out and half-ass all of them. That’s just a waste of time.
Take your time. Pick 3 and commit to do them well.
My favorite actionable tips from the show are:
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Eliminate 2 words from your vocabulary completely: ‘I Can’t’ and replace them with ‘How Can I?’
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Write your first “yellow letter.” Simply get a yellow pad of paper and write, Dear Johnny Appleseed, I’m interested in buying your house at 123 Plum Orchard Rd. If you would consider selling, please call me at 222-2222. Very sincerely, Joe Investor. Yes, it’s really as simple as that. Drive for dollars and find a vacant house. Look up the owners address from your county’s tax assessor website. It’s very simple.
Matt Theriault, a fifth-generation California native, Desert Storm Veteran (US Marine Corps), has worked as a full-time real estate professional since 2003. After building a small real estate empire (100+ income units) with hardly using one dime of his own money or one point of his own credit, he discovered that he had a knack for simplifying the complicated, implementing systems and producing desirable results for both himself and his investor partners. His “knack” has manifested itself via consistently better-than-average market returns for both himself and his investor partners, a thriving online real estate investing academy (EpicProAcademy.com), as well as one of the more popular Real Estate Investing Podcasts (Epic Real Estate Investing) on iTunes.
On this episode we talk about how Matt got started. He had made a fortune with his own record label and then lost everything when Napster and everything in the music industry changed.
He ended up going from being a millionaire to bagging groceries at the grocery store.
But, he didn’t let that stop him from trying. He went on to become a real estate agent and working with investors. He wasn’t making much money, so he decided he was on the wrong side of the action.
He became a real estate investor right away and started doing tons of short sales back around 2008 when the real estate market was tanking.
In this episode, Matt makes it clear that you’ve got to see things from the agent’s perspective when you are trying to work with them. He shares the fact that almost all agents will immediately think you will want to submit hundreds of low-ball offers with almost no chance of getting any accepted or that you will want to have the list your properties with a severely reduced commission.
Prove them wrong on those counts and you’ll have someone happy to work with you.
In this episode, you’ll also learn how to find the agents you should be working with and how to filter out very quickly, the ones you shouldn’t be working with.
Erik Saengerhausen has been developing his owner financing real estate investment company for over 6 years. He and his business partner, Mike Arch, run Alamo Home Source. They buy houses, fix them up and sell them with owner financing. Then, they sell the notes to investors for incredible returns.
They currently flip more than 75 houses a year and are working up to 100 houses. That’s a lot of fixing up of houses! They know a thing or two about finding and working with the right contractors to be able to do that kind of volume consistently.
In this episode, we cover the definition of the “right” contractor for the typical real estate investor. We also talk about what negative aspects to look for when trying to find the “right” contractor.
Erik has a different model for paying contractors than I do. He has guys that he pays on a weekly basis rather than per job. I hire on a per job basis so that the contractor is paid per job rather than for the amount of hours worked.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind — there isn’t simply one correct way to work with contractors. There are lots of strategies for how to work with contractors and you should find the one that works best for you and your contractors.
Many times these discussions will focus on the point of view of the investor and not on what it means for the contractors. We discuss how important it is to make sure you see things from the contractor’s point of view as finding and keeping the right contractors working for you can mean the difference between success and failure in this business.
Marco Romero is a real estate investor and a licensed real estate agent. In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of getting your real estate license. There is no cut and dry answer to this question as it's more about your specific situation and goals. We take an in-depth look at all possible scenarios so that you can make an informed decision on which way you want to go.
Justin Williams has grown a very successful real estate investing business that flips hundreds of houses every year. He does this all while having the time to teach other investors and help out in his community.
The reason he has all of this time is that he focused on creating a team that runs his business so he only has to focus on what he wants to do.
In this episode we talk about how Justin hired his first person to take over some of the tasks in his business and how she grew to run his entire operation. It’s a very interesting story that all of us investors who spend way too much time working on our business should pay close attention to.
Have you thought about bringing on people to do some of the day to day for you but worried that they might learn from you and go off on their own? Don’t do it! In this episode Justin explains the fallacy in that kind of thinking.
Enjoy the episode and be sure to subscribe on iTunes.
Hal Elrod is the #1 best-selling author of what is now being widely regarded
as “one of the most life-changing books ever written” titled, The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed To Transform Your Life… Before 8AM. It is also one of the highest rated books on Amazon with over 1,300 five-star reviews!
What’s even more incredible is that Hal actually died at age 20. He was hit head on by a drunk driver at 70 mph, broke 11 bones, died for 6 minutes, and spent 6 days in a coma only to wake up to face the news that he may never walk again...
Not only did Hal walk, he went on to run a 52-mile ultra marathon, become a hall of fame business achiever, an international keynote speaker, one of the world’s top success coaches, he’s a hip-hop recording artist, has been featured in the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, writes for Entrepreneur.com, has appeared on radio and TV shows across the country, and the list just goes on and on.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad said the following about Hal: “Hal Elrod is a genius and his book The Miracle Morning has been magical in my life. As my rich dad often said, ‘I can always make another dollar, but I cannot make another day.’ If you want to maximize every day of your life, read The Miracle Morning.”
As the bestselling author of The Miracle Morning, I brought Hal on today to talk about how you can change any—or literally EVERY area of your life, by simply changing the way you wake up in the morning—even if you’ve never been a morning person.
During this episode, Hal talks about the ‘5 minute rule’ he learned as a salesman. It’s what helped him to stay positive after his experience with the car accident. This is a power rule to live by in and of itself.
A favorite quote of his is from Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn said, “Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become.”
That quote is HUGE! You must become the person required to achieve the success you want. Focus on improving yourself.
During the interview we also talked about SAVERS. That’s an acronym for each of the 6 practices that make up a miracle morning.
S stands for silence. This is where you spend 10 minutes practicing deep breathing and meditation.
A stands for affirmations. This is where you affirm who you are and who you want to be.
V stands for visualization. This is where you envision yourself doing the things necessary to become who you want to be in order to achieve what you want to achieve.
E stands for exercise. Do it. Feel better. Live better.
R stands for reading. Read and learn to grow.
S stands for scribing. Journal. It’s a great way to reflect on your days and how you are progressing. Plus, it will become a treasure that you can share and pass on to generations after you.
I want to personally thank Hal for being on the show and taking the time to share his story.
Marco has been interested in real estate since reading Rich Dad Poor Dad at an early age. After laying out a success strategy, he began to acquire the skills he would need in order to build a career as an investor. He gained valuable people skills by working in sales and the restaurant field. The experience he gained by working with a wide spectrum of individuals was critical to his success with investment properties.
Since obtaining his real estate license over seven years ago, he has worked for several investment companies in San Antonio and now successfully runs his own business independently.
He has spent time in all realms of residential real estate, from standard single family homes to small multi-family properties. Taking what he has learned in other fields, Marco has followed the philosophy that a transaction is never about the property, but the people.
In this episode Marco walks us through his start in real estate investing. He walks us through his reasons and how he setup his companies for asset and liability protection.
So many new investors use the question of which entity to set up to stay in their comfort zone and not take action. Marco advises against that and recommends you take action and then setup your company.
Obviously, if you have a lot of assets to protect you might want to set up the entity first. Otherwise, you should just get out there and make it happen and worry about it later.
Nathan Brooks is a dad, husband, worship leader, and real estate investor in Kansas City. He’s also a foodie, coffee addict and Crossfit junkie. He’s a real deal real estate investor that did about 60 deals last year and plans to do even more this year.
On today’s episode we talk about how to quickly realize what you’re good at and should focus on, and what you’re not so good at and shouldn’t be doing.
Nathan mentions that if there is a pile of papers on your desk, that’s a pretty good way to figure out what you don’t like doing…
A great piece of advice for hiring people to do tasks for you that won’t require a full-time position is to hire friends, family, neighbors, etc to work with you part-time. It’s a great way to spend time with people that you don’t get to see too often and get things off your plate.
We also talk about how being able to explain the exact processes you use in your work to other people helps you to clarify exactly what you exactly do, and improves the processes because you realize things that you wouldn’t if you just continued to mindlessly do the tasks.
An unexpected turn for the podcast was also a powerful realization. Forgiveness is a big deal in the health of organizations. As you start to work with more and more people, it’s very important to be open to forgiveness so that you can work through issues and improve the processes along the way.
This is the fifth episode of the flipping houses training series we are doing on the podcast.
We’re still in the foundation stage where we help you work on your mindset and improve yourself so that you are prepared to get out of your comfort zone and make things happen.
The podcast is being released every Monday now. This way you can listen in while headed to or from that job that you are working on leaving behind. :)
Mark J. Podolsky (AKA The Land Geek) is widely considered the Country’s most trusted and foremost authority on buying and selling raw, undeveloped land within the United States.
He has been actively investing in Real Estate and Raw Land since 2001, and has completed over 5,000 unique transactions. Mark’s company, Frontier Equity Properties, LLC, is an A+ rated BBB real estate company.
Mark has achieved this level of success largely due to his core business philosophy – “Happy Customers Guaranteed.”
Mark is the host of one of the top rated podcast in the Investing Category on iTunes, aptly titled: The Best Passive Income Model. He is also the host of the Land Geek Podcast: Work Smart. Earn More. Learn How.
In this episode, Mark shares with us his views on when you should quit your day job and start flipping houses.
We know that everybody is at a different place when it comes to how much money they make, what responsibilities they have, families to care for, etc. so we decided to talk about 3 different scenarios for where you might be when making the decision to go full time or get started in this business.
I think this boils down to each persons situation, so let’s try to cover several common scenarios:
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In college, but realizing the corporate world isn’t what they really want. Have the opportunity to live and their parents’ house. Single, so don’t have to support a family. Don’t really have much money at all because either not working or working an entry level job. What do you recommend in this situation?
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Second scenario: working an entry level job making just above minimum wage and have a family to support. They don’t really have any money available at the end of each month, creating a shoestring budget for finding deals. What do you recommend for this person that really wants to stop trading dollars for hours and provide much more for their family?
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Working at a corporate job making a decent salary that is sufficient for themselves and their family. They’ve got a little extra money each month and can afford to take a little time off. What do you recommend for this person that wants to exit the rat race and choose their own hours and be their own boss?
The answers to these three questions are in the interview. Listen and enjoy. Thanks!
Jason got his first taste of real estate investing after joining a local real estate club. In 2012, he made his first transaction and hasn’t looked back since. Jason founded HoustonHouseBuyers in July of 2013. In its' first year they produced $3MM of gross revenue, through wholesaling, leasing, and flipping 70 houses. HoustonHouseBuyer's is expected to buy 100 houses in 2015 and produce nearly $6M in gross revenue.
In this episode Jason talks about some of the realities he feels most new investors aren’t prepared for. We want you to be prepared so we discussed them in length.
Key takeaways are that this should always be looked at as a business and not just something you can do willy nilly.
Always focus on a strategy and become the best at it because you will get nowhere fast by trying to learn and use every tactic out there.
Things I’ve run into:
Contractors don’t all do a great job, manage themselves, get done on time and all for a great price and you will have to have the courage to fire them.
There are a lot of people out there that are will to sign a contract and then not honor it (sellers, buyers, everybody in between).
When a seller says the house doesn’t need any work, rarely is it true.
There are places in town where druggies will attempt to jump into your moving vehicle.
Nobody is going to care about your work as much as you will (realtors, contractors, other investors)
The hours aren’t going to be 9-5.
I’m sure you’ve run into issues that you didn’t expect. What were they (let us know in the comments)?
Andy McFarland is a self-made real estate entrepreneur who started with nothing and currently makes seven figures a year in his real estate business.
After getting fired from his last W-2 job in 2004, Andy went into real estate full time and has never looked back. Andy currently focuses on wholesaling properties in three different states; Utah, New Mexico, and Indiana. In 2015 alone, he did over 150 deals!
Andy has been married for 10 years and currently resides in Farmington Utah with his beautiful wife and three amazing children. Andy enjoys being around family and friends and continuing to grow and learn every day. You can follow Andy on his real estate journey by going to his website: www.iloverealestatestories.com or on his YouTube channel by searching for I Love Real Estate Stories.
In today’s episode we talk about how people need to take action to overcome fear and find out what they need to learn.
Too many new real estate investors spend countless hours, days, weeks, months and even years study all there is to know about flipping houses but never take any action.
The reason for this has to do with fear and the Confidence/Competence Loop. Here’s an excerpt from the http://blog.kevineikenberry.com/leadership-supervisory-skills/the-confidencecompetence-loop/” target=“_blank”>Leadership and Learning Blog with Kevin Eikenberry:
Let’s take a task you likely know how to do well, like riding a bicycle. Are you afraid to ride a bike? Likely not, because you know how to do it. So if I give you a bicycle and invite you to ride, you likely will do it right away – there is no reason to delay, there is no real fear, you just ride. If I gave you a unicycle instead, for most people, fear would well up – and they wouldn’t even get on the seat.
So how do we get started?
We put our butt in the seat.
Action overcomes fear.
In the Podcast episode, Andy talks us through how he did his first deal by just jumping in and figuring it out.
We only need to focus on the immediate steps to achieve a simple, clearly defined goal. These simple goals can be, ‘get my first deal’, ‘get my first motivated seller call’, and/or ‘go to an open house’.
It doesn’t really matter what it is, just choose one. Focus on it and do the things that will get you to accomplish that goal. DO NOT waste time learning about sandwich lease options before you ever talk to a motivated seller. Work first on talking to some motivated sellers.
Marcus E. Maloney is a Real Estate Investment Strategist that has an eye for real estate oriented solutions. As the Founder and Principle of 3rd Generation Mgmt & Holding LLC, the firm has done and assisted with an innumerable amount of real estate transactions. Marcus holds a Master of Business Administration; which provides him a proper knowledge and understanding of business applications and practices. As a philanthropic effort Mr. Maloney also has assisted with the development of State licensed facilities that acquire property for transitioning youth.
Marcus’s childhood was a lot like mine in that we both did demo on rehabs as children. His parents were fixing and flipping and my dad was working as a contractor for real estate investors. We both learned how hard that kind of work was and that may be one of the reasons we both decided to aim bigger.
This episode covers a very important step in your path to becoming a successful real estate investor.
Marcus’s first goals when he was getting serious about real estate investing revolved around building the right connections. He hustled and hustled and stayed persistent. He talked to a lot of people and built lasting relationships where he was able to provide value and gain education.
This isn’t just for new investors. This is for anybody, at any stage in their life. There is always something to be learned and the best way to learn it is from someone already doing it.
Marcus talked about some of his goals for 2016 which include:
Writing his first Ebook about birddogging
Increase his deal conversion rate to closing 1 deal per 25 leads
Writing 26 blog articles
Giving away more money than he did last year
Here are the steps Marcus outlined and went into detail on during the interview:
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Define Purpose - Who you are. What you are trying to do.
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Visualize and Confess - Visualize yourself the way you want to be with regards to Spiritual goals, physical goals, family goals, community goals and business goals.
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Association - Find someone that is doing what you want to do or being the way you want to be and ask them for help so that you can do what they did
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Strategize - Determine your results for the end of the year and reverse engineer your goals so that you can get specific in what you need to do this week to get started
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Take Action - Goals are worthless without action. If you don’t have your “why” figured out correctly, you won’t last outside of your comfort zone, which is where you need to be if you are to grow. Welcome embarrassment. Challenge your fears.
Brant is a full-time real estate investor, business owner, entrepreneur, author & speaker. He has been featured on Fox News, hosts local seminars and is even being considered to star in one of those “Flipping Houses” TV shows.
Brant is a proverbial ‘rags to riches’ story, while living in an apartment and having no money, was able to purchase his first investment property on a credit card! He went on to by 10 properties that same year with no money down and within only a few years later, has rehabbed hundreds of homes and now owns a portfolio of rental properties worth millions and routinely flips houses for fast cash.
Brant is a former police officer who prides himself on integrity and serving others. He is a husband and father of three and enjoys helping and teaching people to experience the freedom and success he has achieved through successfully investing in real estate.
“I want to see you succeed and I don’t want to let you down, I hope you take action today and see incredible results soon!”
In this episode Brant shares with us what he calls the 4 Pillars of Power: Mindset, Skill set, Environment and Accountability
His main takeaway here is that it’s of the utmost importance to be clear about what you want and who you want to be before anything else.
You’ve got to work on all aspects of your life to be a true success. His 4 Pillars of Success are Business, Faith, Family and Fitness. Work on all of these things.
Don’t just focus on business. You will grow much faster in each area when working on the others.
He has a “power hour” each day where his kids know that he has to turn off the computer and turn off the cell phone and focus and be present for them. They hold him accountable.
His wife and kids also send him a score card email each month that rate him on different aspects of his life. This is an incredibly good idea that we should all incorporate.
Here’s Brant’s process to determine what you want and how to find out who you are
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Be ok with where you’re at - Eliminate self-abuse - That was the past, let it go
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Go to a quiet place and really consider where you want to be within the 4 pillars of success
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Start Living Your Passion Right Now by commitment to work on each area DAILY
He also like to create names for targets of goals so that they become more fun and easy to keep in his mind. He has Operation Adoption which is his goal to adopt by the end of the year (he already has 4 kids of his own).
Make a plan for yourself, otherwise you’ll end up a part of someone else’s plan. - Jim Rohn
Danny is explaining the new direction for the Flipping Junkie Podcast in this episode.
We are moving to a format where each episode flows from the previous one. The first episodes will cover mindset and then move into building your team, funding, analyzing deals, finding deals, negotiating, working with contractors, determine repair costs etc.
It’s basically a free real estate investing training course in podcast format!
Let us know what topics you want covered and who you’d like to hear Danny interview for each topic by leaving a comment on the Facebook page at http://facebook.com/flippingjunkie
Also Melissa (Danny’s wife) is going to be sharing more of what we are doing in our house flipping business for 2016 on the FlippingJunkie.com blog and on Instagram (http://instagram.com/flippingjunkie).
We’re going to flip over 100 houses this year. Follow along and let us know what you want to learn about.
Jason got his first taste of real estate investing after joining a local real estate club. In 2012, he made his first transaction and hasn’t looked back. Jason founded HoustonHouseBuyers in July of 2013, in its' first year produced $3M of gross revenue, through wholesaling, leasing, and flipping 70 houses. HoustonHouseBuyer's is expected to buy 100 houses in 2015 and produce nearly $6M in gross revenue.
Jason has more than a decade of experience in risk management in the private and public sector. He managed the risk finance program for The University Of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. During his tenure he managed the workers’ compensation program for 5,000 employees, property conservation program for $2B in insured assets, business continuity and emergency response program. He also managed the Fire and Life Safety program responsible for nearly 5MM gross square feet of laboratory, class room and office space. His program additionally reviewed plans for new biomedical research facilities, one facility built annually during his tenure at $250MM per project.
Jason has a BS in environmental Science from Sam Houston State, Masters in Security Management from The University of Houston and an MBA in finance from Houston Baptist University. He lives in Houston with his wife Sarah and two sons, Cameron and Carson.
This episode is full of great tips on getting funding from when you don’t have any experience real estate investing up until you’ve built relationships with small local banks.
It took Jason 6 weeks to buy his first house which was a rental. He worked through the tough times making 15-20 offers per week and not getting very far.
Then he decided to partner with someone and put a 40k budget to work for marketing.
That’s how you get the ball rolling!
So many people are afraid to spend money to get the deals. The fact of the matter is you can net over 40k on a rehab and do it multiple times for that 40k budget in marketing.
The numbers don’t have to be that big, but an investment will likely need to be made to get going.
Jason’s tips for finding a good hard money lender to get funding for your first deals are as follows:
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Go to local Real Estate Investor Association meetings
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Find out who does lending and how long they’ve been lending and how many deals they’re funding per month
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Narrow down your list to the ones that are doing the most and for the longest amount of time
He was paying roughly 3 points and 13% interest for his hard money loans in the beginning. Those aren’t bad numbers for hard money.
After getting some deals under your belt, put together a packet showing before and after pictures and the numbers for the deals to show to potential private lenders.
Private lenders are people that lend money to investors to fund their deals. They typical lend the money because the interest paid is much better than other forms of investing and a lot less risky.
The best thing to do when looking for private lenders and who to borrow from is to find the ones that are already lending to other investors. This way you don’t have to convince them to lend money. You don’t ever want to have to do that.
Nathan Cron is the broker at New Western in San Antonio and Austin. They did 370 deals last year!
Nathan is also a good friend of mine and we have done a lot of business together. He is one of my ‘go-to’ guys whenever I wholesale a deal.
In this episode, Nathan shares how he got started in this business by answering a newspaper ad after college. He credits his success to being blessed to get started with that company and getting the proper training. He now gives back by helping people get started through New Western.
He shares the stories of a couple of deals where he bought them, fixed them up and then rented them out for incredible cash flow.
Nathan shares my belief that it’s important to buy conservatively (cheap) and try to stay as debt free as possible. We talk for a while about how the market is always cyclical and if you want to be successful throughout each cycle, you have to be somewhat conservative.
Nathan’s strategy for attaining his goal of $10,000 month in passive income is just plain smart. He waits until he has the cash to buy the house without a loan. This way he gets incredible cash flow, tax benefits and security. He’s also a little different in that he rehabs these houses as if he is going to sell them. Most landlords do lesser rehabs for rentals to save money. He doesn’t want to have calls about broken toilets and clogged drains so he makes sure his rentals will be as maintenance free as possible. This also does wonders with attracting the “right” tenants. The tenants that won’t make your life miserable.
We also talk about how being resourceful is what separates those that succeed at real estate investing from those that do not
Anybody that’s followed the flipping junkie blog for any length of time knows I don’t care much for rentals (really, more specifically, managing rental properties). I really enjoy just fixing up a piece of junk house and selling it quickly for a nice profit. I’m sure I could learn to love rentals if I just knew how to do it with as little hassle as possible. That’s why I decided to have todays guest on the show. He is an expert on cash flowing houses and apartments.
This episode was packed for of information from Joe Fairless. He controls more than $21 million worth of real estate, attends more Third Eye Blind concerts than anyone else, is an author and comedian, and host of the very popular Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever podcast.
Joe was very courteous today as I had problems with audio that delayed the recording of the interview for about 5 hours…. Luckily, he was flexible and was still able to be on the show. So, extra thanks to him for that.
In this episode Joe talks about the four single family properties he bought in Texas (he lives in New York) for cash flow (he sold one to cash out). He shares with us how he calculates the cash flow using the calculator mentioned in the links below.
He also shares insight into his first big apartment complex deal….168 units that he had to raise over a million dollars for!!!!
Do you know the difference between economic occupancy and physical occupancy? I didn’t. Joe breaks it down for us and why it’s so important to find out about economic occupancy when evaluating an apartment deal.
Joe also shares his ingenious strategy for determining if an area is improving or decaying by checking out two local restaurant chains that are in almost every city.
There are some great rules of thumb also mentioned throughout the show. Some are:
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1 manager for every 100 tenants
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$250 per unit per year should be set aside for cap ex (capital expenses like roof replacement, exterior maintenance etc)
Enjoy the episode!
Mitch Stephen has been flipping houses in San Antonio for over 20 years. Over that time, he’s managed to purchase over 1000 houses!
He specializes in owner financing properties.
He is also the author of several books. One is My Life and 1000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom, which details his journey in real estate investing and My Life and 1000 Houses: 200+ Ways to Find Bargain Properties.
And just to show you what kind of guy Mitch is, I want to share the story of how I got his first book.
I found out about it when it first came out and ordered it right away. I didn’t receive it within a day or 2 and, honestly just wanted to say hello to Mitch so I called him. He promptly drove 45 minutes to my houses and personally delivered the book to me. That’s incredible service!
In this episode Mitch talked us through a typical owner finance deal where he can buy a house cheap and owner finance it to a buyer as-is. There are a ton of benefits to doing this instead of renting.
First, he makes money on the sell with a down payment from the buyer. The buyer does the fix up so that Mitch doesn’t have to. The collateral for the loan is improved by the buyer making the loan even more secure. Mitch doesn’t have to pay the property taxes and insurance as he’s sold the house to the buyer. He also is not the landlord so he doesn’t have to fix toilets or anything else.
There was a lot more detail shared within the episode, so be sure to listen and be ready to take notes.
If you are planning on owner financing properties, you really need to be aware of Dodd-Frank. Mitch discusses how to make sure you are in compliance using a cool short-cut.
Mitch also discusses why he likes driving for dollars so much and some tips to make it even more profitable. He also discusses why he doesn’t feel bandit signs work as well as they used to.
You will also find out about his system for knowing which marketing he is doing is producing the calls he receives
Tucker owned a mortgage company and switched to investing around 2008-2009.
He wholesales, rehabs and does new construction.
Tucker talks about the transition from rehabbing to adding additions and moving into knock down and new build.
Learn how he determines which strategy he is going to pursue with the deals he gets.
He also tells us how he uses driving for dollars and direct mail to get his deals.
Tucker shares how he deals with the high levels of competition with key tips on how to talk to sellers to improve your chances of getting them to sell to you because they like you more.
Motivated sellers sell at a discount because they want the ease of disposing of a property. They know they are giving up equity in exchange for a quick, hassle-free sale.
“We’re in the business of getting people to exchange equity for ease of transaction.”
Mark Ferguson fixes and flips 10 to 15 houses a year and owns 15 long-term rentals. His grand plan is to purchase 100 rental properties by January 2023.
Mark tells us about how he got started working with his dad, who is a Realtor and house flipper.
In this episode, Mark shares his strategies for competing for properties on the MLS. Key points include:
- checking for new listings multiple times a day
- getting out to see each house and make an offer within hours
- have assistant in his office draw up the offer contract and send it to him to docusign and then forward to the listing agent
He was also gracious enough to share his strategies on making his offers stand out by making them stronger. Some of them include, increasing the amount of earnest money, remove any contingencies (including the inspection contingency) and offering to close quickly.
Mark is smart because, even though his market is crazy hot right now as it is in many other places around the country, he has kept to his buying criteria. Others stray from their buying criteria and start to offer more for houses in order to get more deals. These are the same people that end up going broke when the market changes.
Seth Williams is an experienced land investor, residential income property owner and commercial real estate banker. He is also the Founder of REtipster.com - a real estate investing blog providing real world guidance for part time real estate investors.
This interview is packed full of interesting information about buying and selling vacant lots….and the really cool thing is that most of it relates to buying and selling houses.
Find out how he builds a mailing list that typically gets better than a 10% response rate along with the exact message he puts on his postcards.
Learn how he analyzes these deals so that he knows what he can offer and still make a great profit.
Seth also shares how he is able to sell these lots for passive income and make even more money.
There were several things that surprised me during the interview, like when he informed me that most people that buy lots from him aren’t going to build houses on them. Find out why, in today’s episode.
Top 3 Things We Love (and Hate) About Our Businesses
Love
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Freedom to do what I want, when I want
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Large pay days (and thrill of the chase getting deals)
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Working the business with my wife
Hate - strong word, dislike is more accurate
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Fleas
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Bad contractors
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Dishonest investors
Never a dull moment…ups and downs…
Seth’s Loves and Dislikes
Love
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Thrill of getting accepted offers - that it’s possible to get great deals
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Passive Income
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Large Paydays
Dislikes
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Times when properties don’t sell immediately
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Uncertainty of whether deals will be consistent in his pipeline
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Cumbersome and time-consuming processes for buying and selling
He got started investing in real estate during college around 2005 and 2006. The real estate market then was white hot and that made it difficult to get good deals.
Seth decided to start buying and selling land.
Seth finds his deals by tracking down people that own vacant lots that are delinquent on their property taxes. He does this by contacting the tax assessors and treasures for the counties where the properties are and asks for a spreadsheet with the addresses and owner’s information.
Some will give out this information quickly and without hesitation and then some counties will make it very difficult, if not impossible.
He gets these records anywhere from free to up to 25 cents per record.
With records in hand, he then sends out post cards to the people that are delinquent on their property taxes. He says he typically gets better than a 10% response rate (which is pretty damn good) with these postcards!
Kevin Ramirez is from Venezuela living and is doing business in Raleigh, North Carolina.
He started in Real Estate at 19 years old with a flip, found a JV partner to fund the whole deal and after that fell in love with the business. He currently focuses on rehabbing and wholesaling. Every deal he has done has been without his own money.
Currently 21 years old, still a one man operation, he is working on building systems to automate his business. With 19 deals to date in 2015 he is looking to close the year with 25.
He doesn’t yet consider himself an expert and stays open to learning more and more every day.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How Kevin Ramirez was able to get funding for his first deals even though he was 19 years and new to the business
- Find out how his first flip made a total profit of $65,000
- Where he found his money partners and how he got them on board with him
- What key points need to be covered in a Joint Venture agreement when flipping
Kevin’s first deal generated a total profit of about $65,000! Not bad for any deal, let alone a first rehab deal.
Sharon Vornholt is the owner of Innovative Property Solutions in Louisville, KY. She has been investing in real estate since 1998 and has been a full time wholesaler since 2008.
Sharon is the creator of the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog and the popular podcast “Let’s Talk Real Estate Investing”. She is also a mentor and a coach who loves teaching others how to succeed in this business.
How she got her start
Sharon’s dad was a contractor that used to drag her to a lot of different job sites. She owned and operated a house inspection company for 17 years.
She then attended a Real Estate Investor Association meeting and learned about flipping houses. She then started rehabbing. Her initial plan was to rehab and get big chunks of money to buy rental properties with. That worked for a while, but then the market changed….big time.
Wholesaling houses
In 2008, she found it difficult to sell houses (as did everybody across the country). This is when she found out how awesome wholesaling was. She decided to try and sell a house she was going to rehab to another investor and see if she could make money quickly, without doing any fix up.
She’s been wholesaling ever since.
In this episode, Sharon talks about the differences between an assignment of contract and a double-close. The gist is that assigning a contract involves getting a house under contract and then selling the contract (as well as the obligation to close on the contract) to another investor for a fee.
Double-closing involves a little more complexity. Not much though. There are two transactions with a double-close. You have a A B transaction where the seller of the house sells the house to you as the buyer. Then you have a B C transaction where you are the seller and the investor that is buying the house ‘as-is’ from you is the buyer. he funding from the sale from you to the end buyer goes to fund the first transaction between you and the seller of the house.
For many people considering wholesaling houses, the fear of not being to find a buyer and not be able to close the deal if they can’t find a buyer scares them from ever getting started. Sharon shares how she allows for an ‘out’ by using escape clauses. During the show, we went over three good escape clauses that included: ‘subject to accepted inspected’, ‘subject to partner approval’, and ‘subject to funding approval’.
In this episode, Mike Simmons shares awesome information about his house flipping business.
Having an accountability partner in this business can make all the difference in the world. Mike’s wife was his main accountability partner that kept him in line and working to make his business a success.
Keys to finding and approaching a mentor:
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Go to REIAs and Network
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Provide value - If don’t have much money, donate your time
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Ask around for who is doing the most deals and approach them to be your mentor
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Get started by educating yourself and start taking action by doing some marketing to find some leads - when you have a lead you can take to a potential mentor, they will for sure listen to you and be more inclined to work with you
Mike shares how he found a great real estate agent to find him deals.
He also reads the copy of the post card that he uses to generate lots of leads and the criteria he uses for generating his mailing list.
Mike Hambright is a Real Estate Entrepreneur. He’s purchased hundreds of houses over the past few years, along with his wife, Lindsay.
Mike is a professional rehabber, wholesaler, and owns a single family rental portfolio. He is also a mentor and coach.
Some of you may know Mike as the founder of FlipNerd.com, the leading social platform for real estate investors where investors find and market wholesale deals, find and build a vendor team, build community with other investors, and much more…. a super cool site.
He and his wife were in the corporate world before getting into real estate and he came to the realization that he needed to be in control of his income. That’s when he got into real estate investing.
In this episode, we delve deep into how to determine repairs costs for typical rehabs. This is something many of you out there are struggling with and definitely something I struggled with early on.
If you can accurately determine repair costs for a rehab, you could lose money on a flip. Not good.
You’re going to get to hear some great rules of thumb for determine the most common repair costs.
Learn what domino effect to avoid when doing repairs to a house and hear how to determine just how far you should take a rehab and how to know the level of fixtures and finishes to use.
You will also hear how to make a decent guesstimate for an unknown so that you can go ahead with your calculations and make an offer quickly.
We covered a lot of repair estimate rules of thumb in this episode while virtually walking through a house.
Justin Williams has been a full-time investor for over 8 years. He’s flipped over 500 houses. He considers himself a house flipping machinist. What he means by that is that he is all about building systems so that he could scale quickly and do more with his time.
Here’s what you will learn in this episode:
- How he won a car for a house flipping challenge from his mentor but never received it
- How Justin doesn’t stress about those things and just focuses on the future and the fact that he learned how to make so much more money flipping houses that the car didn’t matter
- How Justin was in a really tough spot when the economy changed and found the opportunities out of the adversity and ended up doing better than ever before
- The question to ask yourself every time you do something during the day
- Why it’s wrong to think you can do everything better than someone you could hire to do it
- How he found the person that basically runs his house flipping business
- What he’s noticed from the people that he coaches that succeed that is the reason for their success
I was busy doing most of the work in my flipping business and had a talk on the phone with Justin.
His excitement and approach to flipping through systems really inspired, so much so that I asked if he’d mind if I flew to California to hang out with him for a day to learn more. This was out of the blue, mind you and he still accepted.
I immediately booked a flight and spent a day of crash course learning from him.
Geremy Heath is the owner and founder of Texas All Cash Home Buyers. Texas all Cash is a residential redevelopment that turns around distressed properties for profit in the both the San Antonio and Austin areas. Since starting the company in 2009 Geremy has successfully completed over 150 rehab projects.
Geremy came to the US from Australia in 2006 and met his wife a couple months later. While at the airport to leave for their honeymoon, he purchased a book about real estate investing. Much to his bride’s dislike he burned through the book during their trip.
The fire was lit and he became passionate about leaving the rat race and working his way to financial freedom through real estate investing.
In this episode Geremy tells us how he developed the right mindset to be able to become a success with house flipping.
You have to expect to achieve the outcome you want. You have to believe you are going to make it.
Find out how to get the proper mindset in this episode so that your odds of success are greatly improved.
Brandon, house flipper, landlord, senior editor at Bigger Pockets, all around real estate investor shares what he feels is the best way to get started in house flipping.
He recommends people start with a live-in flip. The strategy involves buying a house that needs work and living in it while you fix it up and then selling it, either right away or several years later.
I completely agree with Brandon that this is an awesome way to get in the business and learn the ropes.
The benefits he describes makes this insanely obvious. Those benefits include:
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Getting a much cheaper loan than hard money
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Learning how to properly fix up houses
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Avoiding capital gains taxes when you sell the house (if you live in it for more than 2 out of the last five years - reference link here)
You can also get first dibs on HUD foreclosures as they usually give a 10+ day window where only homeowners can buy their houses. During that period, investors cannot bid on them. How awesome is that?!
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How my father inspired me to start flipping houses, which led to my wife and I flipping over 200 houses and changing our lives forever
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You’re going to learn the simple house buying rule that will make sure every deal you do will make you money
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Also, find out what major problem arouse when trying to buy 30 houses within 30 days…and it wasn’t buying bad deals
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He also shares his thoughts on what separates the people that make it in this business from the ones that don’t
Who is Frank Johnson? Frank Johnson has been flipping houses in south central Texas for over 18 years. He also happens to be my father.
He was my first mentor in this business and still helps me through tough situations and reminds me of things that I’ve forgotten…like always making an offer no matter what. If you go and see a house, even if it’s the last house you would ever want to buy…you should make an offer.
Hello! Welcome to the brand new Flipping Junkie podcast!
This podcast was started to allow you to learn how to flip houses so that you can become your own boss and take control of your life. Don't you want to be able to take vacations whenever and for as long as you want? Don't you want to be able to take your kids to school, pick them up and make it to every single function they have? Don't you want to ditch that life-draining job?
I wanted all of those things and flipping houses has allowed me to attain them.
Now, my mission is to help you do the same with the awesome business of real estate investing. Thanks for listening!