"All right, hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by David Olds. David runs a virtual transaction coordinations company that closed over $14.7 million worth of wholesale assignment fees for their clients just in 2022 alone. He sees tons of transactions, knows a ton about dispositions, has run a successful wholesaling company and many service businesses for Real Estate Investors. Today we're going to talk all about transaction coordination, dispositions, where investors are getting it wrong, and how do you keep on doing that boring hardware that's going to get you to success. How are you doing today, David?"

"Doing amazing. Um, doing actually really great. I missed it, missed... I missed our time a little bit. I showed up a little bit early, but luckily I realized that uh, that I was early and not late. Much better to be early than late. Doing amazing, yes."

"That's fantastic. Yeah, I can see you're one of the first early podcast guests ever. That is typically not the way it works in my office. I am like, 'Okay, I got three minutes to open the meeting, I need to go in there and turn on some lights and get online.' So it does not happen very often, but no, I'm glad we made it and we're gonna have a little bit of time to chat today."

"Yeah, and this is a little tangential, but have you always been that way? Like personally, I've been... I used to be like one of the most punctual people. Like I would never be a minute late to anything. Um, and then I got busy and was running the business, and then I started cramming stuff together, and then I became like the person who they're always waiting for 10 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start."

"Well, not that person, but I am the one-minute-before-it-starts guy. Like I've always been that way my entire life. Um, you know, same like homework in high school, like college. Like you know, I wait till the last minute. Weirdly, you know, and maybe that's just an excuse that we make to convince ourselves that I'm much better under pressure. You know, I do my best work uh, you know, at the very last second."

"Um, and it's weird because I would try to do papers like three weeks ahead of time and you know, maybe I would work out the outline, but I was always better like sitting down those, you know, at 11 o'clock at night. I'm gonna have this done at seven."

"And the other plug you can use... Have you ever seen the memes or graphics memes, whatever it is? Such an old guy on social media where it's like, you know, there are two people that marry each other in life: you know, the one who's early and the one who continues to be late, the one who packs a week before the vacation or the one that packs 10 minutes... I am that guy. My wife rides her out of her mind that she will be waiting. You know, I will go home and have like a seven o'clock dinner. I'll get home at like 6:10. She is sitting in the chair, full makeup, like everything ready to go, and I'm like, 'Well, take a shower, let's put dogs out, like it'll be fine, we'll get through them.' So I've always been that way."

"Yeah, that's funny. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are... There's something in their personality. Um, and I'm super excited for today's episode just because um, I mean you and I have known each other for what, uh, a year? Well, longer than that, I feel like."

"Yeah, maybe maybe as much as two years."

"Um, and I've always looked up to what you were doing in your businesses. I think that there's a lot of uh, I guess very few people see as many transactions as you do, and because of that, not a lot of people have the same perspective that you have, right? And everybody kind of has their unique thing to add when they come on this podcast, and I'm excited for what you might add um, because I think you have a, you know, a more... I'm personally, I'm a huge fan of data, right? I think the more exposure we have to the more scenarios, the smarter we get. Um, and there's a lot of people calling shots based on really small amounts of data, like 'I saw this once, therefore that's how it is,' right? Um, so I personally, I really enjoy talking to people that have like seen it over and over and over again and have that experience to be able to know like what's an anomaly, what's normal."

"Right, and that's weird because I'm not like... I don't feel like I'm the data guy, you know. It comes to Excel or Google Sheets, like the fact that I can get mine to add up or average, like I feel like I have two functions."

"Yeah, all right. Like I feel like we went and played basketball golf, and I had two shots that we used, and I'm done for the day. I'm like, I'm out. So I'm not like really great at it, but I am... I feel like I am pretty good at looking at the numbers out of the church. Oh well, this... if this and this are true, then this is your problem. This is where that, you know, where the flaw is or where we find business. So um, so yeah, I do love looking at the data in that sense."

"Well, I think maybe a better word than data is experience. Okay, because I mean our brains function on data, right? Every input that you've ever had, that's data to your brain. It doesn't have to exist in a spreadsheet. Um, and uh, you know, our brains learn over time as long as we're not horribly irrational people. Um, so so anyways, I'm excited to uh, I'm excited to jump into everything."

"Um, I think an awesome place to start for those listening that don't know you and what you do, if you could explain a little bit about your background, the businesses that you run."

"Yeah, just a very short version. Um, I've been an investor for 20 years, and when I started in 2002, it just started as my wife buying our first house as a foreclosure in Ocala, Florida, Central Florida. And uh, you know, we went to fix it up, sold it, bought one, fixed it, sold it. But um, probably like every other person who's been on your podcast, I picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad."

"And that led me... Well, sure. I get the most cliche thing and I'm like, never guess."

"Um, it's so funny. I still haven't read it myself. I've heard great things."

"You're the guy that hasn't read it. The one guy."

"I'm the one guy that hasn't read it. Well, but I didn't start in real estate. I started in digital marketing and then worked my way into real estate, so it's different. But sorry, you can continue with your start."

"So anyways, in the book, he says, 'Listen, if you want to learn about real estate, you got to join like a real estate group or a Meetup or you know, something like that.' They talk about if you want to do oil or stones, like how to get involved in those. But ultimately, it's you know, get around other people who are doing the thing that you want to do so that you see, 'Oh well, this is a real thing. People are actually doing it.'"

"So um, so I joined the uh, Central Florida Real Estate Investors Group. It was fantastic, and this is in the mid-2000s, long before information was available like it is now. You know, back then it was you joined a REIA, a real estate investment association, or like you picked the book out of the library. Those were really your options. That was the only source for education. There you know, YouTube certainly... Facebook didn't even exist. There were no podcasts like this, you know, guys like you bringing recognition to everybody."

"So um, so yeah, I just got very involved in the REIA and learned and just tried to absorb as much as I could. And you know, that just led to us doing you know, more and more rehabbing. That was our source of investing in the beginning. We both had full-time jobs. I worked for ProBuild at 84 Lumber. I sold doors and millworks and garage doors and windows, you know, stuff like that. My wife was a purchasing manager for Ashton Woods Homes, custom home builder. So we kind of came out of a little bit of this industry, right?"

"And then you know, 2009 happened, which was pretty bad. It was really bad. People that invest now are like, 'Oh, we had a crash.' We did not have a crash. We had a linear adjustment. A crash is when 40% of your value, 50% of your value in six months... That's what happened to us in Florida. So the market was terrible. Short version is, you know, we looked around at other places to go where we could invest, and we had a chapter see. And from here..."

"Yeah, we moved here. We knew... We really knew nobody. I knew one realtor kind of well. We moved here for real estate, and the market was terrible. So we started wholesaling. Wholesaled a lot. Um, started learning, learned how to do some owner-financed. We bought over 100 rental properties over a few years. And then you know, we took that wholesaling business when it's wider and bigger into other markets. Made some terrible mistakes along the way. We failed as hard as anybody possibly could and wasted money and you know, but we learned a lot. And I like to tell people I was just kind of too dumb to quit. And uh, and then about three years ago, we started Easy REI Closing, which is our virtual transaction. So that's the very short version, yes."

"Well, that's fantastic. Um, so as of today, what you have running, it's the... it's the virtual closings company, and then is that it or do you still wholesale?"

"We don't wholesale very, very, very little. Uh, we've moved most of those people that were in our wholesale company over to our transactions company. So and what that is, we are essentially virtual back office for investors and wholesalers across the country. Uh, we do all of their paperwork from the time they get their contracts signed. We take it all the way to closing. So you know, with your seller, collecting documents, yes sir, foreclosure, bankruptcy, tenant docs, like all of that stuff. We collect all that. We do the same thing for your end buyer, and we schedule all the closings."

"And what that does, that just allows our clients to go out and do more deals, right? Our clients are your clients, so that allows them to go talk to more sellers, talk to multiple buyers. So we have that company. We have a small coaching company. We don't do a lot a lot of coaching. It's more really consulting for some larger teams. But we also have our rental company, which now we... I did manage all of that myself, which was silly, for about 10 years, and a few years ago I outsourced that to a local property manager. So they... that's really... they do the bulk of that, and we just luckily get the checks now."

"Um, so let's see... the uh, rental company, the coaching, the transactions company. We also, because we've done some stuff, we were able to buy into an oil and gas company. So so I'm interested in that and a couple of other small companies. So we're a little bit diversified."

"Yeah, I understood. More is what sounds like an LP and in some stuff, but then... then you're active is going to be like your coaching and and the TC."

"Yeah, and then we're... I just came out of a meeting like three minutes before we jumped on that we're... we're getting ready to open a title company that's gonna... maybe not be nationwide, but operate in the focal states. So kind of got that as our next future big..."

"Yeah. I... every time I think about transaction coordination, I think about this uh, this conversation I had with Austin McCurdy. I don't know if you know Austin. He works with Sharper Business Solutions."

"Oh yeah."

"So you probably know Sharper. They just have like 30 coaches. Austin is the one that works with us. Um, and he tells us like repeated story of what always happens when he goes into a wholesale company and he finds the CEO, and he's like, 'What's your job?' and they say, 'Well, I've managed the operations,' and he's like, 'Well, there... there basically are no operations in a wholesale company. You have sales and marketing, and you have transaction coordination. That's the only thing that falls under operation.' So you're telling me the only thing that you manage is transaction coordination, and you're like, 'No, I do all this other stuff.'"

"Um, and but basically what Austin was explaining is that because the nature of transaction coordination is so different from the other aspects of the company, it's just this one little thing like the red-headed stepchild of so many companies because it doesn't follow the pattern that the rest of the company follows. Um, it's, uh, it is kind of ignored or not.

"No, no, I see some weird stuff. I've had clients where like Acquisitions is doing transaction coordination or something like that, which is absolutely horrible. It's like, it's terrible, right? So somebody uses somebody like you. We generate all of these leads, right? And, you know, so we're generally we're filling our funnel, and then I mean, let's talk about that. You know, in a wholesale company, you're gonna hire Acquisitions. You're gonna hire, right? Now they're a little bit different. Acquisitions people need to have, you want them both to be money motivated, right? Without questions. But your Acquisitions people, you're going to want to lean a little bit towards like higher end. Well, right, you have to have more, you have to have a little bit of a heart, right? Whereas on the disposition side, you want those sharks, right? Because on dyspo, it's a constant fight. It just is, right? Because who are we dealing with? We're dealing with investors that if they can knock you down five grand, that's 500. So they're, they're a little bit different personalities, but you've hired them for what they are.

"And, you know, let's just kind of step back and up a little bit. Whether you're a solo, you know, wholesaler entrepreneur or you've got some kind of team built out, right? You're basically the same personality, right? You've got that sales mentality, that hustler mentality. You know, I like to ask questions when I'm presenting to a big group for wholesalers. 'Okay, you know, who got in this to make a lot of money?' Yeah, who loves that rush of contracting the deal? Ah, everybody goes crazy. 'Who got in this business to solve title problems?' Literally just crickets because that's a different personality type that enjoys that type of work.

"Um, you know, you're probably, I could tell you're like super organized. Like you're, you're not the same personality type as me. But wholesalers are like, and like our accountants need us. Why? Because who wants to stop doing what we're doing to go look up this charge from four weeks ago that was, you know, $97.13? That's boring, right? That's not the personality type of somebody who leaves their nine-to-five job to go kind of burn the boats and go start a new business, right? That personality type that makes you successful being a wholesaler and allows you to talk to strangers and make these deals is completely at a 90-degree angle from a person who loves to do paperwork and solve complex title problems, right? So that's why, you know, wholesalers have come to us and said, 'Hey, please, you can do this. I don't have to ever collect paperwork again.' Literally somebody today is like, 'Man, I don't have to ever collect another obituary for the rest of my life.' We'll do all of that stuff for you. And because of that, we see these companies just have exponential growth because now they're just focused on sales and marketing and, you know, getting their contracts.

"And I don't know if this is an observation or a question or whatever, just looking at someone else's company and thinking, 'What the heck is this guy doing?' But basically what it sounds like is you took the worst part of the business and you said you just do that for people. And to me, that sounds like a horrible, like not very fun thing to do as a business owner. So tell me, like, what's going through your mind? What makes you think like, 'Oh, you know, all that like stuff that I hate in my business, I'm just gonna only do that for everybody else?'

"It's funny. Do you know who Corey Geary is?"

"Of course, yeah."

"Yeah, so I was with him in Puerto Rico yesterday or two nights ago, and uh, we were sitting around with Robert Wensley, who had nothing but amazing things to say about you, by the way. And, um, we were talking, and he said, 'Dude, when we were in Cozumel three years ago or four years ago, and you said you wanted to do this, I can't do it. It was the stupidest effing thing I've ever heard in my life.' It's the same thing, right?

"Well, so what it is and this is how most people, you know, how you build a company is to fill in underneath you with somebody to do the thing that you don't want to do. So as we grew, a couple different things. When I started, it was me, myself, you know, myself, maybe myself and I, no, myself, my wife, and my brother. And, um, you know, she did a lot of rental stuff. He did Acquisitions, right? Dyspo, and I also did the transactions. And what I realized is, you know, science tells us there are 24 hours in a day. More, no less, right? Math and science tell us that there's only so much you can do, and I really think you max out three, if you're good, five deals a month if you're doing everything. You're doing the marketing, buying, selling, the transactions, all of that stuff. So, you know, and as entrepreneurs when we're starting, we all know there are a lot of things we should be doing in our business, right? But who has time because you're a solo person.

"So one of the things that I realized when we started scaling up is I brought somebody in that could do transactions, and I was like, 'Oh my God.' It like, it made my life so much better because now I'm not, you know, tracking down, 'Oh, this one, you know, this guy got a contract, I sent it to the title company, now I got this laundry list of stuff to go out and gather up for them.' And it's never one list, like the first list only leads to like six more lists, right? So what happened is like I wasn't having to track that every day and every week, and I was able to just focus on, you know, my part of the business position. And then like wires were just hitting my account on properties that I literally had forgotten I contracted three, four weeks ago to sell because I had somebody that was their job. That was their only job in my office. In fact, we're standing in this room, the podcast room that was our old transaction coordinator office where we had three people just in this room.

"And so we got really good, and that's one of the things that operators enjoy is problem-solving. And so what happened was we were cartel bosses for invested with, and some of the other investors, cartel bosses coming to us like, 'Hey, how do I solve this problem? What's the monumental title? How do I get around probate? What do I do?' Those things. And some of them asked, 'Hey, can you help us close deals?' So the way that we backed into the company was that, right? It was something we were really good at. We had the people that could start doing it for some other people, and it's kind of a bunch of just things came together all at one point. And again, like you said, we realized that there was a huge, huge need for this in our industry, right? Nobody gets into this business to figure out how to do affidavits of heirship. Nowhere, you know.

"And, you know, a lot of people will say, 'Well, I just want to hire my Bill Jesus.' Well, that's awesome. You should go change your own oil too, right? Just because you can do something, that doesn't make it that you should because if you don't, if you're not good at it, how are you going to train someone to come into your company?"

"Yeah, or you have to pay them a ton if you're gonna have that person that's pre-trained. That's the fantasy, right? The fantasy is, 'Oh, I'm gonna go buy or get this, you know, former title agent.' Well, I just came out of a meeting where we're talking about hiring people at $90,000 a year, right? These are not cheap people. These people with 20 years, 10 years experience are not, they're not someone you're gonna get for 10 bucks an hour. It's just not. And you probably, you know, a lot of people listening probably don't have the need for that person, but for a literal fraction of that price, you can have us. You can just leverage our team to just work."

"Right. Somebody gave a great example of, you know, Dave Richter, like we're like fractional transaction coordinators. Certified case has a fractional CFO service. I'm like, 'Well, it's an interesting way to think about it, but I guess so.' You know, you get our team's decades of experience to come in and help them close your deals. And what happens is the biggest, the thing that I didn't realize in the early days when I was trying to do it myself, even though I feel like I was good at it, was the deals that were being lost. That title companies just said, 'Oh, you can't close that one,' because I didn't know the right questions to ask. I didn't understand how title worked. It's the cost of lost opportunity. It's Austin contacts that you canceled that you probably should, you know, that probably could have gotten closed. And I do believe, you know, of all the contracts that don't close

, it probably at least 50% of them should have."

"That's probably a safe bet."

"Yeah, at least 50% of them should have. But what happens is you get one of those calls from the title company, and they tell you that, 'Hey, you can't close because of x, y, or z.' And in reality, if you've got the right people and you know the right questions to ask, you probably could have, should have closed. Um, you know, and you and I, you know, you and I and others, like our job in the front of the business is to generate revenue, right? So I don't need to have an hour conversation about title issues on something that's not going to close. So that's the part of it is the cost of lost opportunity.

"So that's a really important point. So basically the value proposition, right? A lot of people are like, 'Okay, well, what do I get for this, you know, investment?' Well, a lot of people, you're giving them more time back, right? Because that's one of the things I didn't even realize until I got into your guys' system because I got to work with some of your team on a deal and I said, 'Man, I'm so glad you guys are dealing with this crap.' Right? Because I'm literally generating more revenue, right? So we're giving time back. You're giving bandwidth back, mental bandwidth back because all of those things, you don't think about it, but at the end of the day, when you are just doing title problems, title issues all day, it just drains your batteries. So they get time back, they get revenue back, and they get some peace of mind because they know this deal is probably going to get closed because you guys are putting your stamp of approval on it and it takes so much bandwidth out of my brain that I could go focus on things I enjoy."

"What does it actually mean? Well, so for us, I don't want to go into a market where there's not going to be enough cash buyers. That's the thing that I want, right? And I think you mentioned it already earlier. Well, I guess humans, we all presuppose a lot of things, right? So let me give you this example. If I went outside and somebody handed me the keys to an ice cream truck today, I'd be like, 'I'm gonna go buy me some ice cream. I'm gonna get chocolate and vanilla ice cream because I'm a fat guy and I like chocolate and vanilla ice cream.' So, I'm gonna fill up my truck with chocolate and vanilla and I'm gonna go out and start selling ice cream. I may sell some, alright? There are going to be other people like me, right? Maybe 25% of the world is like me, but if I go out there and people start saying, 'We really want pistachio. Why don't you have pistachio?' I'd be like, 'Because I'm allergic to peanuts and I can't be around those, but you know what? I will figure it out.' Alright, I would go figure out a way. I'll put gloves on and a mask and I would sell people pistachio because the point is you have to sell what they want.

So many times, as investors, whether it be wholesalers or rehabbers, we only do the thing that we want. I'm sure you've had people on here talking about rehabbing their biggest mistakes, like over-improving properties, right? Doing cool accent walls in the living room that they think are great, right? But that's not what the public is looking for. So, I say all that to make this point: if you're going to go into a market, do you understand what people want?

The data is pretty easy, right? With tools like PropStream, you can pull the data of all of the cash sales in the last 90, 120, or 180 days, whatever. I could pull all of those. I can very easily sort by square footage, by age, by price range. You can fool with those numbers enough to get yourself, 'Hey, looks like most of the sales that are being sold for cash, or the properties that are being sold for cash because that's what we do as wholesalers, are between 1940 and 1970.' Whatever the numbers are, right? And then you look at the range on square footage, most of them are between 1100 and 1700 square feet. Cool. And now I know that most of them are selling between 140k and 190k, right? So now I've got some data and I know that there are enough of those transactions happening in the market to absorb the inventory that I'm moving. Does that make sense?"

"Oh, absolutely."

"So now I can back into my marketing. If I'm going to do PPC, maybe I run that for a state and now I can see which markets are where the transactions are actually happening. Or if I'm going to run some type of telecommunications or direct mail, I'm going to be pulling a list. Well, now I can really zero in. I can go all the way down to the sub-zip code and say I only want 1100 square foot plus houses built in this range. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, so I can get super targeted because your marketing dollars are like soldiers. You send them out, they cost you money, but for every dollar that goes out, I want them to come back with four or five friends. I do not want to just be spending money for no reason, so we get very tactical when it comes to this. And you know, PPC, of course, I know you're smarter than me, but for me, I can only get it down to a city or a county. I know there are people that say you can get it dialed in closer, but if I want to go super direct on direct mail or SMS or something like that, well, it's like a laser from space. I can point it in there and get a little bit closer. So make sure you're going into a market and evaluate it. Make sure there are enough transactions to support what you're trying to do.

So for me, as an example, I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I know this market better than anybody. Like, we know how many wholesale deals we can put out per week here. There is a limit. If I pump out more than two to three deals a week, what happens is my buyers start seeing too many deals and they can't make a decision. So that's for 200,000 people. There's an absorption rate of how many deals I can put out into the market, so we will never go into a market that's smaller than Chattanooga. That's our baseline. So any other market that we go to, when we run those numbers, we do this a few times a year. We'll simultaneously run current numbers on Chattanooga and say, 'Oh, how does this compare?' Like, this is my baseline. There were 700 cash transactions in the last six months. Over here, it's a little bit bigger and there were 1400 transactions. Good. Okay. Adjust the spread and everything else, too. So we do a little evaluation, kind of back-of-the-envelope chicken scratch, figuring out if this is a place where we should be.

The other thing we'll look at is rentals and price increase. And here's why. Everything that we do is a function of sales and marketing and supply and demand. 100%. So there are a lot of markets where it may be good for a landlord but not necessarily good for a wholesaler."

"You're like, 'Well, that's stupid. How does that even make sense?' Well, because there are certain markets, I'm not going to call out anybody's market, but if we go into that market, maybe there's a 2% rental increase, right? So, rent multiplier is 1% standard. That's kind of like the off-the-cuff. I want a 1% rent multiplier, which means if it rents for $1,000, I should buy it for $100,000. Well, there are some markets where they want it to rent for $1,500. What does that tell you? Why can you buy something that's producing $1,000 per month for $100,000 in some markets but for only $50,000 down here? Because it's a supply and demand issue. There's more supply than demand. Makes sense?"

"Oh, absolutely. Cash flow markets."

"Cash flow markets. Thank you. Do I want to wholesale in that market? Absolutely not. Why wouldn't I? Because there's more supply than demand, right? So, I can't run up my assignments. It's not a great place to do $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 assignments. Great place to be a landlord. Fantastic place. Not a good place to be a wholesaler. Memphis is a cash flow market. Not a great place to be a wholesaler, especially virtually. Now, I will say all of that to say this: if you live in that market, you're going to dominate because you understand that. Going into a virtual market is very different. We could have a whole separate conversation about the difference between virtual and local."

"Got it. I was about to say because Chattanooga is kind of a cash flow market."

"Yeah, a high appreciation market."

"Is it really? I never thought of it like that."

"We are on fire here. We're the next Nashville. Let me tell you this: when I bought properties back in 2009, 10, and 11, like a stone's throw from here, a street and a half away, they were renting at $395. Now they're, I mean, I haven't updated them other than carpet and paint, and those same units are renting for $1,200. They've tripled. No, we're a very high appreciation market."

"Oh, that's fantastic."

"I have properties I bought at $30,000 like six years ago that are now well over $100,000. We're appreciating right now. So you want to be in those markets where, and the way that you tell the difference between a cash flow market and a good market, is if rents have gone up. Because if rents have gone up, it means there's pressure on the market, right? There's more tenants than properties. When there's more tenants than properties, what's going to happen? Investors are going to come in, buy the vacant houses, flip them, turn them into rentals because rents are just going up. So you want to be in a place, for me, y'all do whatever you want, for me, I want to be in a place where I'm seeing rents have gone up over the past four years. Also, you know, the Instagram crowd hates when you say stuff like that because you're a terrible landlord, you're just raising rents. You know, listen, we're in business, right? We're in business to do this to make money."

"Yeah, I mean houses aren't charity last I checked, at least most of them aren't."

"Eat me up on Instagram for stuff like that. It should all be our anxiety. Then again, a whole other podcast but that's hilarious."

"So let me maybe say this in different words and you can tell me if I understand it right or not. For you, what's really important when you're going into a market is the spread. The way you predict the spread the best is by rental increase, price increases because that shows that it's more of an appreciation market and appreciation markets have larger spreads."

"It's a very quick way of looking at it, sure. Yeah, 100%. Because if rents have gone up, that's going to tell you a lot of things, right? That data tells you that there's something happening in that market where either people are moving there, right?

And they're not buying, they're renting, right? Or there is a lack of supply of properties. So people are holding onto what they have, driving up the price. If rents are flat or going down, which I've never seen a place where rents went down, but I guess it's possible, maybe Detroit, maybe something like that, right?

But there's a lack of demand. There are places all across the country right now where rent has flatlined. You can do a quick search and find places where rent has flatlined or where they're not really going up at all, just minor increases, like 1% a year. You know, so there's no pressure. People are just kind of staying where they're at. So you know, there's no upward movement. I don't want to be in those markets, right? So yeah, you're right. If rents are increasing, that gives me some confidence that there's some appreciation that's happened, which means there's pressure on the market, which means there are going to be investors in there trying to scoop up properties because they're seeing the value go up. As wholesalers, the only thing we do is be a little bit quicker than them, right?

So, we get in, get the property under contract, sell it to them before they've had a chance to do the work because we're better at the marketing piece. That's really all we do. So, if you're going to be quicker than them, just understand that's how it's going to happen. I mean, that's my two cents on that. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, it does."

"Yeah, understood."

"Um, all right. So obviously, getting the right product makes it a lot easier to sell if you're selling something that people want. What about finding those people? I talk to a lot of people, and I'm trying to give you a good platform to answer these questions on, like understanding who you're speaking to. Um, let's just picture I'm this guy and I say, 'Okay, I'm expanding into multiple markets. Don't worry, I got dispositions down. Yeah, I have an investor lift. I haven't left which, so investor lift and literally, I was the owner investing two diets ago.'

"Investor lift is the greatest drill that you're ever going to go to Home Depot or Lowe's and buy, like not even close. The next competitor is not even close to the data. But you still have to take that drill out of the box, put the right bits on there, and go do something with it, right? So, for honest, you know, here's something that I learned very early on from my mentors and coaches, and it was 'play every Ace.' All right, so what does that mean? I don't want to leave anything to chance. And the one funny thing about wholesaling is we're on a clock, right? The day you get that first contract signed, whether you're 30, 60, 90 days, whatever your time period is, or 10 days to get that deal closed, you should hear that in your ear, right?"

"Right."

"Like there's a clock going. You should feel that in your soul. So, you know, here's what I see people do a lot. Let's say you've got Investor Lift, right? Um, and I've coached a lot of my best who left on the platform here and privately, but someone's like, 'Oh, I'm just putting it on Investor Lift and I'm gonna go get five pictures and I'm gonna put the address and I'm gonna email it out to the best buyers list in the world because it is the best advantages.' Okay, great, but if you're a buyer, and Brandon and I have gotten these emails, it's, you know, because they don't adjust the pictures right. It's, you know, they make the shed in the backyard the primary picture and it's like, what? I've got to save some place, it's a rusty shed and this is an extreme example, but rusty shed and it literally says, 'This is a great deal, you should buy it,' right?"

"That's not marketing, I mean, I guess it is, right? You did functional marketing, but you didn't..."

"Yeah, it's not good marketing. It's true, this is not good marketing, right? So yeah, let's unpack a couple of things in there. One, for me, right, and I will say this to wholesalers and especially anybody new to the business, or some you know, 2019, 2020, 2021 got incredibly freaking easy because the market was so hot your dog could sell a deal, right? So what happened is you got people just throwing crap like that out there. But here's what I've always, you know, from the very beginning when I started this business, um, like I would go to eat when I was going face to face to houses and I would stand there and I would literally stand in the front yard and just look at the house. I'd look around and people are like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'Trying to figure out the story that I want to use to sell this house.' Right? I'm trying to figure out what about this deal, no different than what we were talking about before, right? So when I'm looking at this house, like am I gonna try to pitch this to a rehabber? Is this an investor? It's kind of a double lock, right by the elementary school. I wonder if they could tear this down and build townhouses here, right? Who am I positioning this deal to?"

"So when that marketing goes out, I want to give every buyer who I can get to open that email, right? I want to be able to tell them, I want to tell them every drop of information about the house, right? Beds, baths, square footage, um, you know, ACS, but unfinished square foot basement, size of the yard, is there a bus stop nearby? You know, what amenities are in the area, right? Are you close to shopping? Because I have to assume that my deal in Georgia, I'm sending it to a buyer who's out of state. Can he sit on his cell phone and make a buying decision based off of one act? I would challenge most people to look at their, look at their posts, their websites, their emails and say, you know, can a buyer make a buying decision? Are there enough pictures? Are there enough good pictures, right? Are your pictures foreign? Do you tell your buyers how they're going to make money, right? Like this is all stuff we did before the little run-up that we just did. People just got lazy and now they're struggling because they don't understand. But you know, if you know, do I, I'll tell them, 'Hey, if you're going to, here's the average rent in the area. Here's what this one could rent for, you know, fixed up, right? Here's, you know, this is a light, medium, full rehab. Here's what similar properties that have been rehabbed are selling for, you know, they're selling for 280. We're selling this for 130, you know, maybe you need 60,000 in it. Here's how you're going to make money or hey, this is, you could make this a, you know, short-term rental. Here's how, uh, you know, here's what those things are paying.' Does that make sense? So we want each story because people are busy, man. I have 16,000 unread emails in my Gmail account and that makes a lot of people skittish, right? But if I don't have a good hook with a good subject line that's going to get them to open that and then once I get them to open it, I've given them all the information, well, they're just going to go, 'Oh, okay, click,' and they're just gonna, it's just gonna..."

"So the first step is like, you've got to provide good information. And then, you know, then my next thought is, how do I, how do I get my deal in front of every single person who should see it? All right, um, you know, so we've got a very, it's not super complex, but there are 10 things that we do on every single deal, right? And you know, Tiffany High, right? She says all the time, like, you know, making a lot of money in this business, it's not sexy, it's just doing the same thing over and over that works and over and over again. And if you don't have that system in place or you know that, okay, we're gonna build out the website, we're gonna send an email, we're gonna RBM, ringless voicemail, we're gonna do texting, we're going to do, you know, some direct mail, you know, we're gonna cold call, we're, you know, we're gonna do all these things on every single deal, you know, you're going to struggle because kind of where I started on all this and I don't want to go on too long but, um, I've seen so many people go, 'Oh, I'm gonna send out an email today. Three days later, oh, I still haven't sold my deal, hey, what else should I do? Oh, let me go post on Facebook, that'll work, I sold a deal that way, you know, last month.' It's been a week, still hasn't gone. Um, somebody said posting on Craigslist still works, let me try that. In two days, nothing. I wonder if I should cold call some buyers. All right, so what's happened is your time just starts to get eaten up. So what we try to teach people is, you know, when we launch a property and that comes from my visa retail, like we, I want a freaking shock and awe of our market, right? I want my deal to be every place, right? I want it on the, someone posting it in the damn bathroom above the urinal, I want it every single place where I think a buyer might possibly be. I want my thing there. So I want to be on Facebook, I want to be in the investor groups, I want to be, you know, emailing, I want to be cold calling, I want to be sending a text out to our preferred buyers, I want to be dropping RBMs, I'm doing every single thing, I'm playing every ace that I know works and what that does is that now, now what happens is you just start, start moving with some consistency. Now people will often ask, 'Which one of those works?' You know, I don't know, I guess if I put a different phone number on every marketing channel, like I could really track it. That's not the thing I'm great at. My goal is I'm just, you know, once I release a property or launch it, I want the phones in my dispositions department melting. I want so many inbound calls coming in that they can't get up to go pee. All right, that's the goal. Like when that happens, I'm very happy, right? Because I've done my job marketing."

"Yeah, well, and I think, uh, I think there's two advantages to what you're talking about. I mean, one is like you said, there's that ticking clock, right? So if you waste some time on this, then you have to do this other thing, you waste some time there. The other one is, I think it's, I think it's just as bad as someone starts with the email and then in that first three days they do

everything, right? It's like email, text blast, cold call, right? And it's like, okay, well, I have, I have a 30-day closing period, right? Like, we got plenty of time to figure this out. Let's spread it out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, I got, you know, and then so then like the next week, we're going to follow up with more cold calls and follow up with another, you know, another email blast. So I think having the plan that you just keep executing on is, I mean, it not only saves you time because you're doing everything you should, but it also, it prevents you from burning yourself out in that first week, right?"

"100%, 100%, and so like, for us, you know, we have a 30-day launch period. Now, I will say in full disclosure, because this happened to us, you know, so, so we use, you know, Investor Lift, there's another platform called deal details. Um, we use both. There's some other ways out there, right? So we had a deal we did, um, that we sent out in the morning, so it went out like 11:15 AM and by the next morning, the guy who runs our marketing team says, 'Hey, we have 11 offers in hand.' Like, it hasn't even been 24 hours. I think our first buyer came in within 18 minutes of the launch. Now, I'm not going to change my strategy. So we ended up, and people say, 'Well, why don't you stop?' Right? I'm not going to change my strategy based on one outlier result, right? Like, so we did what we did. We still launched every channel. You know, one, that buyer was, we took the highest and best, but, you know, let's say a buyer came back and we ended up working a deal out, you know, and he tried to re-trade us. Well, we've now done every step that we're supposed to, we still have six, seven offers in hand, right? So when the offers come in, people get all, get all crazy, like, okay, so now I want to go back and we want to find our, our most reliable buyer, right? Maybe the top offer is some newbie guy and he's already acting weird on the phone and I'm like, 'Ah, this guy might be a pain in the ass to work with, so let's look at offer number two.' And if I'm number two, it's from someone we sell 30 deals to a year. And yeah, it's $2,500 less, but that's my guy. You know, I'm going to make more money long-term, I'm going to build my business long-term doing that."

"Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, no, that's, that's a really good point. And I think that, uh, I think just, just sticking to that plan, right? And being consistent, right? That's the big, uh, that's the big piece of this is, is, and having that plan too. Because like you said, I think, I think a lot of people, especially new, new wholesalers, right? They, they, they think, 'Oh, you know, I'm just going to get out there, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.' And then they, and they don't really have that plan. And so when things don't go, you know, like we were talking earlier about the hamster wheel, right? Things don't go exactly like they planned, they start jumping from thing to thing and they get, they get distracted and they get, and they lose sight of it. So, um, that's really great advice. Um, Eric, I appreciate you being here today. Um, any final thoughts, any, any last, uh, last pieces of advice for, uh, for our listeners out there?"

"Man, um, you know, and again, I said it before, right? But I can't, I can't preach it enough. You know, get back to the fundamentals, right? Do, you know, if you haven't done a deal in a while, pick up the phone, right? Talk to people, you know, go meet people in person, right? I know this is kind of, kind of a new, you know, newfangled way of thinking about it, but like go out and build relationships, go to RIA meetings, go to meetups, go out and talk to people, you know, just, just get back to the fundamentals, get back to the basics. And if you're doing that consistently, um, you know, the business will come back to you, right? It's just, it's just, it's just a matter of time. So, uh, thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it."

"Yeah, Eric, thank you so much. This has been great. And, uh, we'll, we'll talk again soon."

"All right. Take care."

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