Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast Volume 3

I started in real estate right before the crash, so I have to be honest and say that I made a lot of mistakes when I entered the real estate market. I’m embarrassed to say that I lost homes to short sales and foreclosures before I finally figured out what I was doing. And I learned that lease options in a down market work really, really well. The 3 things you need to be focusing on right now are making more lease option offers, making buyer offers, and following up with your old leads. Increase the amount of offers you get accepted by being flexible in your financing when you use lease options. There’s a lot of power in being able to give the seller any price they want as long as they wait for it. I walk you through my philosophy and how I make my three main offers. In addition, in my Mind Map, I’m giving you a calculator for the three different kinds of offers: —Cash offer —Seller financing interest only —Seller financing principal only This free Mind Map will help you figure out how to handle this changing market. It’ll include calculators, marketing tools, letters, and a lot of other things that will help you pivot and shift. When you get the link, you’ll only have View privileges only. If you want to make changes, go to File and make a copy or download it and save it as an Excel spreadsheet. I walk you through how to find a rental house on Zillow to make an offer on. Remembering that you want 15 percent equity and 25 percent cash flow for the properties you’re looking for, I run the numbers on a couple of houses to show you how to find a great deal. What’s Inside: —You can give a seller any price they want as long as they wait for it. —Remember the sandwich lease option rules: cash now, cash flow, cash later. —I share examples of a cash offer, wholesaling lease option offer, and a sandwich lease option. —I walk you through how to use Zillow and Redfin to find rentals to buy. —Get my free Mind Map with the tools you need to make better offers.

The three keys to success are marketing, automation, and delegation. Using automation requires you to find the best tools to streamline your business, so I’m really excited today to talk about the automation that Howard Zonder has created with his Land Speed business. For new investors who are just getting into land investing, Howard and I talk about some different strategies for figuring out where to buy. Howard’s had great success in Colorado and Utah, but you might be more interested in infill land. Infill land is smaller lots in a town or around a town in the “doughnut” area. Howard gives his thoughts on this as a long term strategy. If property taxes are really high, that may not be the best place to start your land investing journey. If property values are really high, or bureaucracy is common in that area, those also might be signs that that’s not a great place to start. There are a lot of land investing courses out there that tend to focus on the same handful of counties. There are tens of thousands of counties across the U.S. where you can turn a profit. Howard and I talk about our criteria for where to look for empty lots. Constantly mailing in small batches creates some good business flow for Howard. He talks about how this strategy allows him to adjust bad offers or rely on data instead of blindly mailing out thousands of letters with no feedback. And because his software Land Speed Price Boss pools together all of its mailings, he can still save money on the bulk mail price. This attention to data is why Howard created Land Speed. Hard numbers don’t give you a rough idea. Hard numbers give you solid data to make good business decisions, and to help you find the best place to invest in land. What’s Inside: —Does tax assessed values play into land comps? —How I teach my boys to find comps for vacant lots. —Your offers are only as good as your data, and outliers will wreck that data. —Everyone figures out investor comps a little differently, and Howard walks me through how he comes up with his comps. —Break away from the land investor pack by investing in different counties.

We opened up our show today to you to answer the questions on your minds, and we had some really, really great questions that touched on where you’re at, and how this market is doing. Gavin covered the basics, we talked about partnering with local Realtors, and we shared our favorite real estate tools. One of the top questions on everyone’s mind is: Have prices started to drop? We’d love to give you a solid answer, but right now we have no idea what the market’s going to do. The numbers we’ve been given show a delay in closings, but that’s all so far. There are some things you can do to prepare, and Gavin talks about what they are. Don’t get carried away by new and flashy real estate ideas. The basics have been and will always be: —Marketing —Talking to Sellers —Making Offers —Following Up Right now one of the most important things that you can be doing is building your buyers’ list. Gavin shares a huge variety of ways to find buyers, starting with Realtors and going all the way through skip tracing buyers or chasing them down at meetups. Gavin’s super simple marketing plan requires some pre-planning, but most of all it requires action from you. And we know there’s a lot of information constantly coming at you. That’s why you should write down and just do what he’s telling you. Stick to the basics, listen to what the master of basics is laying out for you. In this current market, the normal sandwich lease options need to be looked at more closely. Gavin feels a little more comfortable with 25 percent instead of 15 percent, and he explains why he feels that way. I talk about some different scenarios you might find yourself in, and what I’d do. We also discuss some of the huge benefits for working with a Realtor. What’s Inside: —How to reconnect with old leads and warm them up again. —Training a VA will free up your valuable time to make offers. —Success in this business comes from doing the simple, basic things. —Some ideas on how to tap into the distressed Airbnb market from me. —The three most important questions when you’re looking for buyers. —Do you need an LLC to operate in other states for lease options?

I started in the wholesaling business when it just didn’t seem like a great time to be moving into real estate. Gavin Timms started in real estate with literally zero experience. We both believe though, that real estate is always a great industry to be in. If you’re short on money, but long on time, we have some solid pointers for how you can make money starting today. First of all, money is made on the phone, and sales is going to be a million dollar skill for you. You have got to learn how to talk to people. When Gavin first started out, he knew that he could get on the phone and talk to anyone. So by partnering with a wholesaler, he chased down her old leads and brought her some new deals. Get on the phone and call everybody you know in the business. Start networking and connecting with other wholesalers to see if you can follow up on their leads for them. Or, if it was just me, I’d make 50 phone calls a day, calling every broker, property manager, or landlord that I know. And I’d ask them two questions: —Are you looking to buy anything? —Are you looking to sell anything? Serious investors are still out there looking for good deals, so here’s what you absolutely need to be doing. Fire up your buyer marketing. You need to start building a relationship with buyers. I share some of my best resources for finding buyers, including my favorite CRM. If you need a little help getting started, Gavin and I are offering virtual coaching. We want you to succeed, so we will set you up with the systems that we’ve had great success with. What’s Inside: —The one skill you absolutely need, no matter the market you’re in. —People do business with people they like, so build rapport. —The absolutely huge opportunity coming up with Airbnbs. —The many, many ways you can chase down buyers. —Become a broker, and how that can help you earn money today.

I am so excited about this side hustle opportunity from Lee Arnold of Capital Syndicate. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Lee is a private money lender based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and because he doesn’t rely on Wall Street money, he’s not pulling back during this market upheaval. Instead, he’s looking to invest in more secure, lucrative real estate deals. Lee has all of this private money and he wants to invest it, but he needs help finding deals. He’s looking for a handful of people willing to go through his capital syndicate model to get educated on the types of borrowers and loans that work for his business model, and he’s willing to pay a fee for this work. The biggest distinction that Lee wants you to understand is that he does not lend to owner-occupants or to individuals. He’s looking for a specific kind of borrowing in a specific kind of circumstance. He offers investment-grade loans to LLC, or an S or a C Corp, and his program will explain clearly how to find the right kind of deals that he wants. This private money brokering used to be a lot more prevalent in the market, so it’s nothing new. The beautiful thing about brokering, Lee says, is that it merely requires you to have access to capital. And he’s got plenty of that. Taking Lee’s Capital Syndicate program doesn’t limit you to Lee’s company. It teaches you to become an independent private money broker originator, and then you can work with hundreds of lenders across 40 states But make no mistake about it, Lee absolutely wants you to work with him, so he plans on offering the best competitive rates for your clients. Whether you’re looking at just supplementing your income while you work on your real estate business, or this is something you want to pursue full-time, this is a great way to use your real estate network in a way that nobody else is. What’s Inside: —Use the real estate networks you already have to start a new side hustle. —The absolute best markets to go into with private money brokering right now. —Who pays the fee for the loans, and how is that structured? —How you can get paid to broker your own deals.

The first thing to realize is that there are no answers. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s focus on the things you can actually do to prepare your business to survive during this economic uncertainty. I talk with Jason Medley from Collective Genius, one of the best real estate masterminds in the country, about the advice he gives to all of his investors. It’s like we’re a bike that’s shifting gears, and right now the gears are grinding and haven’t caught yet. They’re making a terrible sound, and everything feels uncertain, and we’re waiting for them to catch so that we can take off again. We’re in the gap right now. Everything in real estate is paused or waiting. Buyers are pulling out, trying to sit out for a better deal. Sellers don’t want to admit that they can’t make as much money now as they could a few months ago. And you can’t buy. We’re all just waiting for everything to catch and go together again so we can shift into a different gear. While you’re waiting for the gears of the economy to catch, Jason says you need to: —Manage your costs and expenses. —Manage your liquidity and cash. —Communicate at a level you’ve never communicated at before. —Be planning and stabilizing the ship. Jason explains the profit-first model of revenue minus profit equals expenses, and how it makes a difference for a business during lean times. The PNL statement is going to be your key in helping you make some of those tough decisions coming at you. Jason walks through what that might look like for you. The virus is not the problem. The virus is only revealing the problems in your business that have been neglected prior to its showing. What’s Inside: —Scaling responsibly will turn your business into a cash cow. —How money and liquidity aren’t the same, but still both matter for your profitability. —Why you absolutely have to have a PNL, and utilize it. —Going through and figuring out what you need to let go before you need to do it will free up a lot of your mental headspace. —Why now is the absolute worst time to quit your mastermind.

Forward thinking Cris Chico from Virtual Wholesaling knows how to look ahead and predict where things might end up because he’s already been down this road before in the last market upheaval. Cris is an expert in using Facebook ads to find seller leads, so he talks about where he sees online marketing heading as the real estate market changes. Picking a market isn’t as simple as pulling out a map and pointing to a part of the country that you think would provide steady returns. Cris shares his leads strategy that decides for him where his next market should be. If you’re ready to get started on Facebook advertising, because it’s the easiest platform to start with online advertising, start with a Facebook business page that makes you look like a real person, and not a robot. Cris shares how he targets his audience, and I was completely surprised since it’s the opposite approach I thought he’d take. How sellers want to communicate in the online world is totally different. They might prefer the entire exchange over text message or email, and you need to follow their lead to keep that relationship casual enough that they’re not turned off by your pushiness. Cris’s Public Service Announcement: We all have to contribute to keeping the wheels of real estate moving forward. For Cris, this means keeping Realtors and brokers included in transactions and possibly making less money on each deal. As the market changes, so will the amount of money that everybody can make. But there’s still plenty of deals to find. Sellers who might’ve ignored you a few months ago are ready and aware that they’re in a different position now. Contact your leads and make some offers. What’s Inside: —The trigger that changed the Miami market in ‘06, and what that means for today. —How Cris Chico creates targeted audiences in his Facebook ads. —The three things everyone should learn how to do to thrive in this economy. —The key to creating a memorable website name. —The best image to use for your Facebook ads, and how to make that image pop.

Check out the 5 Sellers A Day Accountability Group @ https://www.5sellersaday.com/join-challenge

An indisputable law of business is that the more revenue you make, the less profit in terms of net margin you’re going to make. It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. Alex Pardo from The Flip Empire podcast and I talk about how to shift and scale business as we navigate the shift in today’s market. Do you know those checks on social media showing someone’s profit from their latest deal? They’re fake. They don’t tell the whole story, and Alex has discovered like I have, that a bigger business doesn’t always mean more money. It also means more overhead, more pressure, and more time away from your family. So using the Gino Wickman book Traction, and an EOS implementer, he redesigned his business to fit his purpose and his life. We’re coming out of a seller’s market and going into a buyer’s market. Alex describes how the smaller teams he’s downsized to is pivoting to this new market, and what marketing is working for him. To him, it seems like the hottest marketing trend quickly becomes old, so shifting back to the classics works better for him. He’s going old-school a little bit with bandit signs, postcards, and he’s even considering newspaper ads. But he’s still focused on building those relationships because follow-ups and personal contacts are still key for him. If you’re looking for a high level mastermind/coaching group, he’s started one up to fill the void he felt was in mastermind groups. He’s doing some pretty awesome work with missions trips to Guatemala to help others, and he’s still got a few spots left. What’s Inside: —Scaling your business with a lack of focus in your organization is a recipe for disaster. —Have a vision for your personal life and then design your business around that. —Transparency and vulnerability is going to be the new currency in 2020. —The marketing that’s working for Alex as we move to a buyer’s market. —Alex’s racey bandit sign that pulls in more deals than you’d think.

If you’re a collector of courses, then what you need is this 30-day challenge group in your life. Gavin Timms and I have done this before and it was hugely successful for our previous coaching students, so we wanted to offer it up at a time when everyone has a lot more time on their hands. Starting April 13th, jump in with us and start making offers. Gavin and I are going to be teaching you, with simple, easy scripts, how to make offers on the phone. We’re going to teach you marketing tactics that work. Gavin and I even role play a couple of scripts to show you how easy this can be. We’re going to be teaching you the fastest way to get leads, using cold calling and SMS texting. We’re not going to overcomplicate this with VAs and fancy, complicated triple dialers, although you can use those things if you want. The challenge group will offer daily support the first week, and then coaching calls three times a week after that. Plus, you’ll have access to a private Facebook group where you can show up with your offers and lean on us for support all month long. We don’t want to complicate this because we are challenging you to make five offers a day. So in this challenge, we’re going to teach the easy way to make offers so that you can make more of them more often. And here’s the thing. If you get a deal under contract, we’ll partner with you on it, or help you find a buyer. We want you to succeed, and this group is going to give you the support you need to stop taking courses and start making deals. And if you complete everything in the course, you’ll get your money back. There’s only winning in our 30-day challenge group. What’s Inside: —Our 30-day challenge group is designed to help you make real progress in real estate while everything is shut down. —We don’t care about perfection, we care about progress. —This challenge will put in a structure to your day that will give you some momentum. —Find out how to complete the group challenge and earn your money back. —All the support you need in the accountability group, including goals, weekly zoom calls, and tons of help on your offers. —Super simple scripts to help you start conversations with sellers and Realtors.