BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 10: Flipping Houses 101 with J Scott

Episode Date: March 21, 2013

House flipping is one of the most popular methods of investing in real estate. However, it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly how to get started, as there are thousands of blog posts, articles, forum posts, and more about the topic. In today’s Podcast, we talk with one of the best in the business, J Scott, about how he got started flipping houses and how you can follow the same strategies to build your own real estate investing business. Read the transcript of Episode 10 with J. Scott here. In Today’s Flipping Podcast, We Cover: How a TV show got J started with flipping How J made every mistake possible on his first flip…but still made money Tips For Working with a wholesaler and tips for wholesalers to work with flippers Multiple exit strategies for flippers What the “sweet spot” is in terms of profit The “flip formula” and how to use it to estimate your profit. How to determine the “after repair value” of your property. Why you should get your real estate license. Why having a construction background might not be great when flipping. How J’s got his days-on-market down to a 17 day average. Tips for finding a great project manager. How to find private lenders to fund your deals. Automating you flipping business to flip while holding a full time job Links From the Flipping 101 Show: J’s Blog: 123Flip.com The New Member Introduction Forum How to Subscribe to a Forum Category [Video] BiggerPockets Forums BP Podcast 001: Building a Successful House Flipping Business and Losing Millions with Marty Boardman Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing The Book on Flipping Houses and The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs Michael Quarles and K Marie Poe Books Mentioned in the Show The Complete Guide to Real Estate Finance for Investors by Steve Burges The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Tweetable Topics: “You gotta be conservative in your numbers, so your ‘beginner mistakes’ will be covered.” (Tweet This!) “Always have 2, 3, or 4 exit strategies as a backup on your house flips.”(Tweet This!) “What you did yesterday may not work tomorrow – you need to be flexible in your business.” (Tweet This!) “Pricing a property right is key.” (Tweet This!) “You don’t raise money if you don’t ask. It’s not rocket science – it’s just hard work.” (Tweet This!) “It takes work and a lot of up-front preparation – but business automation is possible.” (Tweet This!) “Putting together a plan on paper will help you figure out where your gaps in knowledge are.” (Tweet This!) “Real estate investing education shouldn’t cost as much as a college education.” (Tweet This!) “Those who do best in this industry are those who work ON their business, not IN their business.” (Tweet This!) About J J Scott runs Lish Properties LLC, a real estate investment company in the west suburbs of Atlanta, GA that specializes in purchasing, rehabbing and reselling REO properties. Along with his wife, J purchases and renovates about 15-20 houses per year. In addition, they consult to other investors, manage rehabs for other investors, and stage/list/market properties for the investors they work with. J’s BiggerPockets Profile J’s Facebook Page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show number 10, the flipping episode. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm your host, Josh Dorkin, and this is my co-host, Brandon Turner. What's new, Brandon? Life is great, Josh. What's going on with you? Oh, man, actually, this week is kind of crazy. I'm actually out of town scoping out locations for a potential upcoming 2013 Bigger Pockets Summit.

Nice. So, yeah, man. So this week is really, really important. It's kind of exciting. I'm not going to reveal any details yet until. things are set in stone, but hopefully if all goes well when I get back by the time the show airs, we'll have some more information about where this event might be happening. Cool. That's awesome. I'm looking forward to it. I think a lot of people are. I think a lot of people are. But enough about me and the potential event that is to come before we get into it and introduce today's guest. Let's do the Bigger Pockets quick tip if that's cool.

And I promise this time I will actually keep it very, very quick. I just invite you guys to come introduce yourself to the Bigger Pockets community in the new member introduction forum and let us know who you are, where you're from, and a little bit about where you want to go with your investing. The community at Bigger Pockets is, it's really tight. And we want to help you succeed. So again, come on over to the new member introductions. forum and introduce yourself.

And actually, if I could also mention, if you're a regular forum user already, definitely keep an eye on that forum. You can actually subscribe to the category, and whenever a new person introduces themselves, you can jump in and just say hello. So it's an awesome way just to get to know people, make the community even stronger. Build your network.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and of course, we'll have a link to that in today's show notes, which you can access at biggerpockets.com slash showtan. All right. So let's get into this thing because I know we've got a ton to talk about today with one of Bigger Pockets' most active members, Jay Scott. Jay Scott runs a very successful house flipping business and documents his deals in incredible detail on his blog, 123flip.com. Jay is also an active moderator on Bigger Pockets on the forums. And he answers questions all the time for beginners and professionals. Did you know, your house gets bored when you leave? I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action, the footsteps, the late-night

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Thanks, guys. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, man, well, let's get started. So how did you start flipping houses? Basic question. Get on it. Yeah. I think I started the way a lot of people started in this business. My wife was watching way too much HGTV and all the flipping shows. I guess step back a little bit. my wife and I were in the corporate world for a long time living in California. We decided to get married and said, hey, let's quit our jobs, move back east, start a family, figure out something new to do. So we came back to the East Coast. We took the summer off, preparing for our wedding. And one morning my wife was literally sitting on the couch watching HGTV, some episode

of Flip This House or Flip That House or Flip Some house. and she said, hey, let's give that a try. And I said, okay. And she said, no, I'm serious. Let's flip a house. We'll give us something to do for the summer. So your wife was the impetus for this whole thing. Usually it's the other way around.

She was. We talked a little bit about real estate previously, but we had talked about maybe getting into rental properties or apartment buildings or something else. So we hadn't really given it a whole ton of thought. But she said, let's flip a house. give us something to do for the summer, just a fun little project. And so next thing I knew, I was jumping on bigger pockets, learning a little bit about flipping houses.

And a couple months later, we bought our first house. Wow. Wow, wow. So, you know, I try not to make this too promotional, but BP then definitely played some kind of role in your kind of getting your feet off the ground. I think BP was the first site I found when I jumped on the web and started to do some research into flipping houses. And it was definitely, definitely the biggest driver of my education early on. Cool.

And I'm not saying that just to be nice. That's the honesty. Well, we know you're not nice, so it's all good. Cool. So you guys decide to flip houses. It's summer. Your wife's all excited. Let's do this.

How to go? Tell us about that first flip. Oh, it did not go well. So imagine the ugliest 70-style raised ranch you've ever seen, unfinished basement. The basement was filled with graffiti, the powder blue vinyl siding. I mean, this was as ugly of a house as you could possibly imagine. And we had seen maybe 100, 150 houses at this point. We're working with this wholesaler who was just pushing us to buy, pushing us to buy, pushing us to buy.

And we just, we had analysis paralysis, just like most people doing this business. And we had seen this house and like, no, this isn't the one. And my wife looks at me again. She gets all the credit and said, hey, let's buy this house. I was like, well, this house is really not the house I want to start with. She said, we've been pushing this off for six months now. Let's just buy something. We'll figure it out.

Worst case, we'll break even. Maybe we'll lose a little bit of money. But it's better to just go do something than to keep looking at houses. for another six months, never do anything. And she was right. Yeah. So we ended up buying this house with this wholesaler, and we made pretty much every mistake a rehabber can make.

First, we paid too much. So we knew we were paying about $5,000 more than we wanted. We tried negotiating them down. We didn't do a very good job of that. So we overpaid a little bit for the house. Then we spent about $10,000 more on the rehab than we anticipated, so we overpaid for the rehab. Then we gave up trying to sell it after about six weeks.

Middle of winter. We didn't know what we were doing. Six weeks into trying to sell it, we got spooked and said, hey, this isn't working. We've got to figure out a plan B. So we ended up lease optioning this house for two and a half years. Two and a half years later, our tenants pick up in the middle of the night, leave town. I think it was a week later that we realized they were gone. Nice.

We did a second rehab on the house. At this point, we had done 25, 30 others, so we knew what we were doing. we did a quick rehab, got it on the market, sold it in a couple weeks. But we sold it for about 10K less than we were originally planning to sell it for two years earlier, three years earlier. So looking back on this project, we spent too much money, we spent too much on the rehab, we held it for about two and a half years longer than we anticipated, and then we sold it for about 10K less than we had expected to sell it for. So literally we pretty much made every mistake you can make on a project.

All right, man. So apparently, you know, your first flip wasn't quite the get-rich-quick flip that you might see on one of those TV shows, huh? Two and a half years. Yeah, two and a half years, three years by the time we were done. On the bright side, we made a little bit of money. We actually made about $3,000 on the project. And I think that's probably the first tip I would give to any wannabe rehabber. You've got to be conservative in your numbers. And luckily, we were pretty conservative going in, so we knew that even if we made a bunch of mistakes, which clearly we did, we still had some room for profit. And we made a little bit there. That's great. Well, and I think the other thing that I noticed was you actually had other exit

strategies available. I mean, so, you know, a typical flipper who's new at the game may not know that they can go and do a lease option. So that was great that you had this other option available and you were prepared for it. Yeah, that's a great point. So we knew going in that if the flip didn't work out, we can make money as a rental, hold it for as long as we needed to hold it. We can make money as a lease option,

which we ultimately did. And it basically taught us that if we're going to do this, we need to have secondary and even better yet, a third and fourth exit strategy that'll work if the flip doesn't work. And we've been lucky so far. I mean, in the 50 flips we've done since then, We haven't had to rent or do a secondary exit strategy yet, but it's always nice to have that as a backup. That's the lesson I learned on my first flip as well, because a very similar story.

We tried to flip one. We had it on the market for six or seven months, and that's right when the collapse was happening. And so we turned ours into a rental. I still own it to today. Well, I guess that was technically my second flip, but the first one was an accidental flip because it was my own house. No, that's great. I want to go back a little bit real quickly. I have two questions for you.

First of all, when was that time frame? Was that prior to the collapse or was that during the collapse? And then also you talked about wholesalers and you bought your first one from a wholesaler. So I'm just curious on how you found that wholesaler or did the wholesaler find you? Yeah. So time frame, that was 2008. So this was pretty much the bottom of the market in our area. Things had pretty much collapsed and we didn't expect that they'd be getting much work.

and luckily we were right. They didn't get much worse after that. In terms of the wholesaler, I don't remember how we found him, but once we found him, he kind of latched on to us. And he decided he was going to sell us our first deal come hell or high water. And he did. He spent about six months. I mean, I give the guy credit. He was sort of a shady guy. In retrospect, his deals weren't that good, and he didn't really care if he was selling us a good deal or a bad deal. He just wanted to make some money.

But I have to actually give him a lot of credit for sticking with us for about six months and ultimately pushing us to buy that first property. I mean, there's a really good chance that we could have been like the other 60, 70, 80 percent of investors out there who get excited about doing a deal and then never do a deal because they just can't pull the trigger on their first project. So as shady as this guy was, I have to give him a lot of credit for helping us get started in this business. Nice. Nice, nice. Well, so you made some money.

You squeaked by on that one. Have you ever lost money on a flip? We have not yet lost money on a flip. That was about as close as we've come. And again, I'm pretty conservative. And if you ask my wife, she would tell you I'm actually way too conservative. There have probably been 30, 40, 50 deals we've passed up over the past five years. That would have made really good deals.

But because I was so averse to losing money on anything, I passed on them. So in retrospect, not losing money has probably been a negative thing for us. I probably should have taken more chances. And even if I would have lost money on a couple projects here and there, we probably would have picked up a lot of projects that ended up being really good projects that we passed on just because we're a risk averse. I don't know. I get your emails, Jay, like your updates from your website.

And I mean, every single one, I'm blown away at how well you do. Like everyone I'm like, I always call my wife in the room. I'm like, oh, look what Jay just did. He just made, you know, this much on a flip, this much on a flip. So I credit that to you. I mean, being conservative for that, that's awesome. I mean, you've done a really, really good job. Like, you've kind of been my, like, guide for the last couple years on what a good flip is.

I really appreciate that. I think we've gotten really good at hitting the singles, hitting the doubles. We don't go for the home runs too often. I think part of that's a factor of where we live. Atlanta, there's a lot of lower-priced inventory. There's a lot of first-time homebuyers, especially the suburbs that I'm targeting. So we don't do a lot of projects that are over 100, 150, or $200,000. So there's not a whole lot of room for us to be hitting home runs on our deals. But yeah, we've been really good at

consistently hitting those singles and doubles, making $15, $20, $25, $30,000 for project, which is kind of the bread and butter in this game. And if we can continue to do that, we're actually, we're pretty happy. We don't really need to hit those home runs to be doing a good job in this business. That's true. It's true. Hey, so, you know, how do you go about deciding how much you're going to pay for a flip? This is, you know, this is kind of our one-on-one rehabbing podcast here. So let's talk about that a little bit. Do you have a formula? What is it? How does it work? I have a formula that I use. I call it my flip formula and don't get cut up in the name. It's not rocket science. It's nothing I've trademarked or patented. It's actually a formula that a lot of people in this business use. And the simple formula is the most you can pay for, for a property is what you can sell it for, minus how much it costs to rehab, minus all your fixed costs, minus your desired profit. So again, your maximum purchase price is the amount you can sell it for, minus your

rehab costs, minus your fixed costs, minus your profit. That tells you how much you can pay for a property. Now, when I say fixed costs, I know a lot of people think about fixed costs, meaning holding costs, and they forget to add in things like commissions. You're going to have to pay your realtor to sell your house. going to have to pay your buyer's realtor when you sell your house. Closing costs. You're going to have closing costs on the purchase side.

You can have closing costs on the resale side. In a lot of areas of the country, when you sell a house, your buyer is going to ask for you to pay part of their closing costs. Or they're going to ask you to pay for a home warranty or they're going to ask you to pay for furniture or stuff like that. These are things we call concessions. So when I talk about fixed costs, it's important for people to realize that we're not just talking about taxes, insurance, utilities.

We're talking about all the costs that go into a project. And what I found with my typical projects, I'll typically spend about $16, $17,000, $18,000 or about 10% of the resale value of the project in fixed costs. And I've noticed a lot of rehabbers these days, a lot of new rehabbers, don't think about all those costs that go into a project. But think of it this way. If I'm spending $14, 15, $16, $18,000 in fixed costs, and I'm expecting my profits to be somewhere in the $15, $16, $17,000 range, if I forget to add in those fixed costs, they basically eat through my entire profit.

And that's what I see a lot of new rehabers do. They forget to add in those costs and that eats up all their profit. And in the end, when they're making nothing on the project and they've wasted or not wasted, but they spend all that time for no return, they look back and they realize, wow, there are a lot of costs there. I never thought about. So how does that formula then result differently than the 70% ARV that we hear thrown around all the time? Sure. So nothing wrong with the 70% rule. I've actually used it myself on occasion. Basically, that rule says if you take the resale value of the house, you multiply it by 70%, and then you subtract out the rehab costs, that's how much you can pay.

And basically what that formula is doing is it's bundling the fixed costs and the profit into the other 30%. So you have 70% of the resale value is your purchase and your rehab. And the other 30% is your fixed costs and your desired profit. The problem I have with that formula is that when you lump your fixed costs and your profit together all into one number, what it does is it either artificially shrinks or grows your profit based on what your fixed costs are. So some rehabbers are going to have substantially different fixed costs and other rehabbers. If you're using hard money, you're going to pay a whole lot of loan costs that other people aren't going to pay. If you're paying cash, you're obviously not going to have to pay any of those loan costs.

Likewise, if you're in a high tax area, you can be spending a lot of money to hold your property in taxes, insurance, and even things like utilities. whereas if you're in a lower tax area or a lower cost insurance area, well, your fixed cost might be lower because you're spending less on taxes, insurance, and that sort of thing. So instead of lumping in the fixed costs and the profit all into one number and then allowing your profit to just be whatever is left over after your fixed costs, I actually prefer to define what my profit target is on the deal into my formula. So that way, if I'm happy to make 10K on a deal, I can factor that in specifically.

If I'm happy to make 30K or if I need to make 30K in a deal, I can factor that in independent of all the other costs on the project. And how do you choose that? I mean, is that just a number you pull out of the air or where do you get the 10, 30, whatever number you determine? Yep. So the rule of thumb I've used over the past couple years and again, everybody's going to be different. A lot of it's going to depend on your area. I know guys in California who can make 20, 30 percent on a flip, on a high-price flip. In my area, it's pretty tough to do that because things are pretty low priced.

So our margins are a little bit more condensed than other areas of the country. So what we tend to find is we can pretty easily make about 15% of the resale value in profit. So if we're going to sell a project for about $100,000, we're looking to make about $15,000 in profit. If we can resell that same project for $200,000, we'd be looking to make about $30,000 in profit. So that's the general rule of thumb. We use 15% of resale value. To extrapolate that a little bit further, what that means is if our typical project lasts about four months, we can do three of those projects in a year.

If we're getting 15% return on each one, that's a total annual return of about 45%. So that's kind of where we've been tracking over the last couple years. And so that's kind of our minimum profit target on any particular flip. Jay, how do you figure out how much the resale value is going to be? If there's one area that I've struggled with in my flipping, it's taking the wrong guess at what it's going to be worth because it's not a guess. It's a formula or what is it?

What do you do? Well, here's the nice thing. After you've been doing this for a while, and I know this, I'll go back to the question, but what you'll find after you've done 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 flips, especially if you're focused in one area, what we're finding is a lot of the comps that appraiser

are using for our sales are houses that we've previously sold. So the best comps for our sales these days tend to be houses we sold a month ago or three months ago or six months ago. So we have a really good idea of what our houses are going to sell for because it's based on the other houses we've done in the same area recently. And that's why the reasons we like to stick in the same small area we flip houses in. I know a lot of investors, they're happy to go to different parts of the city, different parts of the state, even different parts of the country.

there are a lot of advantages to sticking close to home, and that's one of them. You can kind of set your own comps. Now, stepping back a little bit, when you're first starting out, yeah, I agree with you. Figuring out what a house is going to be worth, especially in a market that's declining or accelerating, figuring out what a property is going to be worth when you're done with it can be really, really difficult. So I recommend to people one of two things. One, either you have to find a really, really great real estate agent, treat that agent really well. and rely and trust that agent when it comes to figuring out your resale value.

Or get your license yourself. I'm a really big fan of people getting their real estate license, and one of the biggest reasons for that is access to the MLS. Once you have access to the MLS, you have access to all the data you need to figure out what a house is going to resale for. Sure, it takes practice, it takes time to learn the methodology, but you have the data at your fingertips, and it's always nice to be able to fall back on the data,

as opposed to having to trust or rely on somebody else to tell you what your house is going to be worth. I think that's great. I wish, I actually took the real estate exam class back a couple years ago, probably three years ago now. I got all the way through the class. I think it was 40 hours and then I never took the test. And I kick myself to this day. Like, you know, at the time I bought a house, I was like, oh, I'm just going to be a flipper instead. But now looking back, I wish I had my license.

I got to retake the class now. And now it's 80 hours in my state. And additionally, you know, we have a lot of rentals ourselves and we manage all our own property. And I would love to have a property management company underneath me because as long as I have the system for my own stuff, why not include others? But I can't because in my state, you have to be a real estate agent for two years before you can be a property manager. So now, you know, yeah, if I could, yeah, advise somebody, don't do what I did. I mean, if you're going to take the class, take the test. Well, let me tell you something. I, from an MLS standpoint, having your license is

invaluable. But I would say that there's even better reasons to have your real estate license. For us, and I say this a lot, the best reason to have your real estate license is control of your deals. By having your license, you have the ability. One, you can show yourself houses. You don't have to wait for your agent to show up to let you into a house. You have a realtor key. You can see houses when and where you want. I mean, it's great. We're driving through a neighborhood. We're looking at a house. We're driving through a neighborhood. And we see three other houses that are for sale, we want to see what our competition is. Instead of having to call a real estate agent and say, hey, can you show me these three houses that you're never going to get a commission on because

we're not even considering buying them. We can just drive up to the house, call the agent and say, hey, we're standing in front of your house. Do you mind if we let ourselves in? And we can see those three houses before we ever leave the neighborhood. Second, when you have your license, you have access to the other parties agent. So you're not translating everything through your agent to their agent down to your buyer or to your seller, you're working directly with the buyer of the seller's agent. So you know exactly what's being said. You know exactly what's going on. A lot of times there's stuff that agents don't communicate to you, not because they're trying to deceive you, but just because they're trying to make communication simpler and more efficient. There are things they don't tell you.

There's little things they don't think are important that if you were part of the conversation with your buyer's agents or your seller's agent, you might think were important. So you had that that flow of communication that you don't have when you're working to another real estate agent. Third, by having your license, you get access to the appraiser that's going to show up to your house. You have access to the buyer's inspector when you're selling a house. You have access to your buyer's mortgage broker. You have access to the closing attorney. And these people are happy to talk to you because you're technically the agent on your side of the deal. They may not want to talk to you if you're the buyer or the seller, but now that you're the agent on your side of the deal,

the appraiser, the inspector, the mortgage broker, the closing attorney, all these people are going to talk to you. So if you have questions, you don't have to rely on or wait for your agent to get those questions answered. You can do it yourself. That's great. That's great. So for me, control is the biggest reason to have your real estate license. You've convinced me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, so, all right, man. Well, how then, you know, we've got all this cool, these tips, this knowledge, this is awesome. I want to go, I want to find houses to flip. Where do I go? How do I find these deals? So for everybody, it's going to be different. There are a lot of different types of deals out there. And when you're trying to decide what types of houses you're

going to flip. So for some people, it's foreclosures. It's a REOs. They want to buy right off the MLS. For some people, they want to go to trustee sales. So these are foreclosure options. houses sold right on the courthouse steps. Other people want to work directly with buyers or with sellers. They want to send out letters and say, hey, you want to sell your house, give me a call. Or they want to put up bandit signs. Or they might even want to knock on doors. There are all different ways of buying houses these days.

But you need to do what's going to suit your personality. Personally, I'm not a really big people person. It's true. I'm pretty introverted. and doesn't always come out when people are talking to me, but I don't like having conversations with people I don't know. So the thought of knocking on somebody's door and asking them if I can buy their house

or even the thought of sending out letters and having phone calls come in, that's always scared me a little bit. Now, the idea of being able to go onto the MLS, write up an offer and negotiate with a nameless, faceless entity like a big bank, that's always been appealing to me. Don't have to talk to anybody.

don't have to deal with somebody's struggles or issues or problems. It's basically a robotic-type negotiation between me and a bank. So when I started in this business, I started just focusing on REOs, focusing on stuff right off the MLS. And it served us well for several years. I think we bought our first 30, 35 properties right off the MLS, with the exception of the first deal, which was a wholesale and one other probate deal that just happened to land in our lap. I think 28 of our first 30 deals were arios that we purchased right off the MLS. And that was great.

I'd have done that forever if I could. Unfortunately, about a year ago, inventory in our area started drying up. New investors were coming out of the woodwork. And so there wasn't much left on the MLS. Stuff that was there was getting bit up too high. And there just wasn't a lot of inventory being released. So we said to ourselves, okay, time to learn something new. Talking to people in bigger pockets mostly, Michael Quarles was actually a great resource for us on bigger pockets.

He's a big fan, and Kay Murray Poe was another one. They're big fans of yellow letters. So we said, okay, let's give this yellow letter thing a try. So we spent a good six months in 2012 honing our yellow letter marketing, creating different, well, not just yellow letters, but white letters also, but basically creating different marketing pieces, using different types of envelope, using different fonts, using different messages,

basically lots of testing over about six months to see what kind of seller response we could get. Ultimately, what we realized was in our market, the bulk of the motivated sellers were people that were underwater on their mortgages. So for the last year, we've spent most of our marketing time and effort on creating yellow letters or white,

letters that try and get people who are underwater in their mortgage to call us and do a short sale with us. So we can actually buy the property as a short sale. And I'd say of our last 15 or 20 properties, 80% of them have been short sales. So that's the other thing people have to realize in this business. You're going to have to be able to zig and zag and you have to be flexible because when the market changes, when the demographic of your buyers and sellers change, when your competition changes, if you can't change with them, what you were doing yesterday may not work today or tomorrow. Hey, that's awesome advice, Jay.

And just a reminder to everyone, all the terms and all the links that we're talking about today, you can actually find them on our show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 10. So definitely head over there. You can also leave a comment on that page and interact with Jay or me and Josh. So right now or either after the show, head over there and check it out. And Jay, I actually want to get back to something you talked about a little bit of, earlier about, you know, you have your realtor. I know your wife works with you on your stuff, and I'd like to talk about that too. But what else, what comprises your team? I guess what makes up,

who do you have working with you? Because obviously, you know, you're on bigger pockets a lot, and we love seeing you there, so you're not out plumbing all day. So what do you, what do you got going on? How do you run your business? Yeah. And I probably should have mentioned this earlier because it really is so important to my particular business. I surround myself with a lot of tremendous people. I have never been in construction. I never, I didn't buy my first house until five years ago, which was my personal residence. I pretty much still can't change a light bulb. Maybe I could, but my wife won't let me try. So for the most part, the reason we've been successful is that I've been really good at finding people who are a whole lot smarter and more talented than I am and

trusting them to kind of take hold of different pieces of the business. For the most part, our business is controlled by three people. There's myself, my wife, Carol, and we have a project manager who basically controls the day-to-day rehab stuff. And we like to think that our business is broken up into three pieces. There's the acquisition piece, there's the rehab piece, and then there's the selling marketing piece. and each of the three of us basically controls a different piece of that. I'm in charge of acquisition. I'm the numbers guy.

I'm the one that kind of does longer-term strategy figuring out where we want to be and when and what types of houses we want to buy. My project manager, he focuses on the day-to-day rehab tasks. He interviews contractors. He puts the other scope of work. He negotiates and hires contractors. He's the guy that's out there every day making sure that the work's getting done on schedule, on budget, high-quality. and then there's my wife who is the marketing genius who really has been the one that's been

most instrumental in our business. She does all of our staging. She has networked with pretty much every realtor in 20 square mile radius of here that has any buyers. I mean, every realtor in this area knows her, knows our product thanks to the marketing she's done and the networking she's done. So we owe a lot of our success to the fact that she can put a house in the market and have it sold within our average days on market is 17 days. And that takes into account the two or three that sat for six or seven months. So it's not uncommon that we get a sale in the first weekend, maybe even before we listed on the MLS,

basically thanks to my wife and her ability to network with the people that are actually purchasing houses in our area. Well, so in order to sell something that quickly, I mean, you really have to nail the pricing down. So, you know, maybe you could talk about that pricing strategy a little bit because I think, and then we could go back to the team a little bit more, but pricing is just essential. And most rehabbers can't say 17 days is their average turnover time over, you know, 20, 30, 50 flips. Yeah. Pricing of property right is definitely key. Looking back through our metrics, we have sold at an average of 96.5% of the original list price.

And the list price that we market day one, we ultimately sell for 96.5% of that price. Part of it is probably that we're pricing our houses a little bit low, but that's strategic for us. We've kind of built a brand in our small area of high quality, reasonable price, focused on first-time homebuyer. there's easy transactions. And part of that is selling houses that aren't over market value that are competitive with some of the stuff in our area that is not fully rehabbed. So when you look at our houses, the competition for our houses, the price point competition for our houses tend to be stuff that isn't nearly as nice.

So by underpricing the market a little bit, or I say perfectly pricing the market, we've done a good job of keeping our gaisal market really, really low. And that's helped us build a really good brand and really have people. I mean, one of the things I like to say is that it's something like 12 agents that we've worked with, of the 50 houses we've sold, have brought us more than one buyer. So when you have agents that are constantly bringing you buyers, it says they like working with you, they like your product, they trust you because they're recommending your product to their buyers.

So yeah, pricing right is definitely a big part of it. And we may be leaving a little bit of money on the table now and again, but the quick turnover means that we can put that money to work again quickly on another project. And it also means that we're building a loyal following of buyers and agents. Well, and I think the other nice thing about that is you're, you know, you are walking away with that profit margin that you're setting up front, right? that 15% and in order to price competitively,

you're definitely buying these things at the right price. I think that's probably the most important thing that I would glean out of this as a potential new investor. I mean, if you're buying it right and you're getting your numbers right, you're going to walk out with a nice profit and you don't have to overcharge for it.

You know, you price it right, people will come in, scoop it up and move on to the next one. Exactly. Yeah, that's great. You know, your house gets bored when you leave. I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action. The footsteps, the late night fridge raids. Yeah, when you're gone, your place is basically on unpaid leave.

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It's an IRS compliance strategy that lets you accelerate depreciation on your properties, which means you're paying less in taxes this year and keeping more cash in your pocket for your next deal. Cost segregation guys is the go-to firm, having done over 12,000 of these studies, with $500 million in total depreciation identified. head to costsegregationguise.com slash BP to get a free proposal and see your potential tax savings. Hey, so back to the team. I just wanted to ask about, you mentioned your project manager. You know, a lot of folks will start out and they're going to want to get their hands dirty and they're going to, you know, go in and probably end up trying to do it on their own. They might want to have a project manager, but they may not know how to how to get one or how to kind of get that going.

How did you find yours, you know, and how did that end up happening? partners with you or how does that work? So yeah when I started in this business like I said I didn't know how to change a light bulb still pretty much don't. I'm not a construction guy. I like to think I have some some business experience. So when I run this business, I don't run it much differently than if I were running a business buying and selling anything other than houses. I could be buying and selling shoes. I could be buying and selling furniture. I can be buying and selling hamburgers. Basically, I focus on the business side of things because I don't know the construction side. And when we first started in this business, I realized that without knowing the construction

side, there's a lot of risks. There's a lot of places where I could make major missteps and the business could go down the tubes. So one of my first priorities was to bring in somebody that did know the real estate side and that did know the construction side that did know the contracting side. and I had a family member who was between jobs, was looking to move across the country. He actually lived on the East Coast, was getting ready to move to the West Coast, and he knew the real estate business.

He had done some contracting. He had been in the mortgage business. And I convinced him, instead of moving to the West Coast, to come down here to Atlanta, and give me a hand for a few months. Well, five years later, he's pretty much our most trusted employee. He, again, he runs the day-to-day. part of the business. He's not officially a partner. He's an employee, but he does get paid a commission. So he gets paid a percentage of every deal that we do. He gets a percentage of the

profits. And the reason I like that is because it aligns his financial incentives with our financial incentives. He makes the most money when we make the most money. And we make the most money when projects get done on schedule, on budget, and high quality. So if he wants to make the most money, his job is to get things done quickly on budget and with the highest quality possible. And this is a little bit different than a typical contractor or general contractor. General contractor is going to make his money by doing the most work. Certainly they want the project to get done high quality and they want the project to get done quickly, but that's secondary to doing the most work possible.

And the more work they do, the more money they make. Well, unfortunately, the more money, the more work they do, the less money we make. So that's why having a project manager is really nice because his goals are the same as ours, and he knows that we need to keep costs down, we need to keep on schedule, and we need to do high-quality work so we make the most money and he makes the most money. You know, one time in the Bigger Pockets forums, I saw our response. Somebody asked a question on how do you? find a good contractor. And your response I thought was perfect. I'd never heard it before,

but I thought it was so great. You said, go to a Home Depot or Lowe's at seven in the morning on a weekday. I thought that was just perfect because, I mean, in my town, that would define who are the good contractors, who are the good guys to work with. Absolutely. The guys that are showing up at 10 or 11 in the morning, that tells you a few things. That says either they're sleeping in and they're not real serious about doing their job. They came earlier, forgot to buy stuff, and now they're taking time away from the job site to come back to Home Depot, or they just don't take their job very seriously. So, yeah, the guys that are there at 6.30, 7 a.m.,

those are the guys that are taking their job seriously. They're getting an early start, and they're trying to spend as much time prepping before they're on the job site so they don't have to leave the job site to get materials and things like that. I love that. And I think that was actually one of people's favorite tips from the 20th, 12 Bigger Pockets Summit. So, you know, I got a lot of comments, and I remember at the boot camp that you did with

Marty Bordman, that, you know, that was really one of people's absolute favorites. That's great to hear. Speaking of Marty Bordman, on the very first BiggerPockets podcast, he had talked about his four flipping boxes, which, you know, everyone can go listen to podcast number one, which is biggerpockets.com slash show one. But he talked about the four flipping boxes, which is kind of what you talked about a minute ago where there's the acquisition, there's the rehab, there's a selling, I think, and then there's the fourth box, which you haven't talked about yet, and I want to get into is the money.

How do you, I guess, how do you, how do you do that? How do you pay for your flips? How did you start out doing it? And how do you do it now? Yep. So I'm not going to lie, we were lucky coming from a corporate background and working for some big companies. We had a little bit of cash saved up when we started.

So we are able to buy some of our properties with our own cash. That said, over the past five years, I've bought properties with conventional financing. I've used portfolio lenders, small banks that loan their own money. I've used private lenders. I've even used hard money. So as we scale, having a lot of cash, you're eventually going to scale above and beyond what you can afford to finance yourself with your own cash. So even for those who are starting out with a little bit of cash, you're eventually going to have to figure out the financing piece.

And we realized early that we wanted to get big enough that we would quickly outgrow our cash reserves. So we've been working with all different types of lenders over the past five years. So these days, our preferred method of financing is working with private lenders. So we find guys who are doctors, lawyers, professionals of some sort who have money sitting around in their retirement funds, who are looking to get better returns than they're getting from the stock market or from the bonds that they're putting their retirement funds into. We're offering them 8, 9, 10 percent to invest the money with us, fully secured by our business, fully secured by our personal assets. And they're thrilled to do it. I mean, if they can make it, if they can make eight, nine, 10 percent consistently on the retirement funds, that's certainly better to them than taking a shot in the stock market, maybe making two or three percent, maybe losing money. So for the most part, the way we're financing a lot of our deals these days is we're working with these private lenders who are happy to lend this extra money they have sitting around from their retirement.

And how do you find those guys? So it's, you start out within your own network. So for me, the first person that ever did it was an in-law. So it was a family member's wife's father. And once he realized the value of his investment and the consistency of the return he was getting, he recommended us to some of his friends. I've gotten investors from Bigger Pockets. I had a guy last week who has been following my blog,

following me on Bigger Pockets for several years, literally sent me an email and said, hey, I have some money I want to invest. How can we do this? And we signed some papers yesterday, and he's going to be loaning us money from his retirement funds for us to do more flips. So networking is key.

Being involved, I mean, the blog has helped me tremendously because it gives us some credibility. People see our blog, and they realize that we're really doing what we say we're doing. I've gotten a lot of people who have contacted me from bigger pockets to talk about financing, whether they want to borrow money, whether they want to lend money, whether they just have questions.

And these are all opportunities to build relationships that are eventually, allow you to either borrow money or when you have money to lend money. But real estate's a small club. And you need to get to know the other people that are doing this because they know people and they know people and they know people. And if you just, if you focus on the networking, the money will come to you. One thing I like about real estate is that it's kind of a cool thing. you know, like, I mean, people, even older people like to be cool. And I mean, because flipping's on TV and stuff, it's a cool activity. So that's one thing I've always used to kind of, I guess, in my business is connecting with other people because it's cool.

And they want to be involved in real estate, but they got a full-time job. They can't do it. And so they'll work with me because it's a way for them to be in a cool club without having to actually do it. Absolutely. And I think one of the things you'll find is a lot of real estate investors, people, think real estate investors always borrowing money, but I know a lot of real estate investors who also have money to lend. I'm actually one of them. So I have a bunch of money in retirement that I love to lend to other real estate investors. And maybe I just open myself up to a bunch of

you guys. But I'm not atypical. There are a lot of other investors who have money sitting around in retirement funds or from some other place that they would love to get 8, 9, 10, 11, 12% return. So the best place to start is start with other investors, start with people you know, start with people in this business, because you might be surprised. The money might be right in front of you and you don't even realize it. And let me tell you something. Here's something I learned from Marty Bordman. Marty's a genius. And I don't just say that because I'm partnering with him on a bunch of stuff. I mean, he truly has taught me a whole lot in this business. But one of the things I've learned from him is you don't get money if you don't ask.

and he's a really good fundraiser. He's got a partner in Phoenix, who's a really good fundraiser. And it's just watching him has made me realize that raising money is about getting out there and talking to people and asking. It's not rocket science. It's just hard work. That's great. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Hey, let's really quickly get to the idea of flipping houses while working a full-time job.

And, you know, there's a lot of talk, especially on bigger pockets, where, you know, most folks say, listen, flipping is a job. You know, flipping houses is not like a passive activity where you can sit around and just collect the checks. You actually have to be out there doing things. Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. So flipping is definitely a job. But it doesn't mean you have to be working long hours. It doesn't even mean you have to be working hard.

And I'd love to come back at some point. Maybe we can talk about this, but we've worked really hard to automate our business. We've worked really hard to figure out when my wife and I left our corporate jobs, it was because we didn't like the 80 hour weeks. We didn't like all the travel. We wanted to start a family and be able to focus on our family. We now have two little kids and our number one priority is our kids. And so that comes before work and we've had to figure out ways that we could automate

this business so that we can go to the zoo, so that we can go to the aquarium, so that we can take trips for a week at a time, basically so that we can raise our kids while we're still earning enough money to raise our kids. And so what we've realized is if you can put processes in place, if you can delegate, if you can prioritize correctly, it's not very tough to automate this. business. It takes work. It takes a lot of upfront preparation, but we've basically gotten to the point where our goal is for my wife and I to work less than 10 to 15 hours a week on this business. We don't always achieve that. And to be honest, I have my phone with me 24-7. I'm

getting calls, but I'm getting calls when I'm at the zoo. Or I'm getting calls when I'm up in New York visiting my in-laws. Or I get calls when I'm in the movie theater. I mean, yes, I'm certainly working hard, we're all working hard, but we've kind of put parameters around what types of stuff we do and what types of stuff we delegate and farm out. And for us, the types of stuff we delegate and farm out is the stuff that would otherwise be taking us away from our family and our kids. So a full-time flipper, there's nothing that's stopping somebody from basically building a business the same way we did. And instead of spending their days like at the zoo, spending their days in a full-time job. Or if they're better than I am at it, they can be spending their days

on a beach somewhere and really make the business pass. We haven't quite figured that part out yet, but I know there's some smarter people than we are that have. So yes, you can certainly be doing this with a full-time job. Oh, that's great. My wife and I have been trying to automate our business as well. So I'm definitely looking forward to another podcast with you sometime where we can talk more about that because, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's huge, just being able to step away and let your business growth. So I want to step back kind of, I know we got to wrap up here in a minute, but what exactly, what's your advice for a first time house flipper? Getting started, if somebody to ask you, you know, hey, Jay, how do I get started with this? I'm a newbie. I don't have a lot

of money. What do I do? Sure. I'm a big fan of writing things down, putting together a plan. And what I tell anybody that wants to get into this business, jot down a plan. It doesn't have to be formal. It's not something you need to present to investors. It's not something that anybody else ever needs to see. But jotting down a plan will serve several functions. First, it'll let you figure out, do you even really want to be doing this? I remember about five years ago, I wrote a business plan for building a real large-scale rental business where I could buy like two or three or four or 500 units over several years. By the time I got done writing that plan, I wanted to throw up. Seriously, I realize that, wow, that's just not a business for me because the type of work that would be required to build that type of business doesn't suit my personality.

So just writing it down was enough to convince me that this isn't something I should be spending a lot of time on. And I think a lot of people, when they start writing things down, they'll realize what they want to do, what they don't want to do, what they're good at, what they're not good at. Second, writing things down will force you to figure out one of the hardest parts of this business, and that's the money piece. It'll force you to figure out where's the money going to come from? Are you going to have to partner with other people, or you're going to have to borrow the money, do you have the money yourself, or maybe some combination thereof? You certainly don't need cash to start in this business, but if you don't have it, you need to have a plan.

And sitting down and putting that plan on paper will definitely go a long way towards getting you towards that first flip, especially if you don't have the cash. And then third, writing things down will help you figure out where your gaps in knowledge are. If you can't fully articulate a plan on paper, you probably can't carry out that plan in real life. So start writing it down and realize, hey, I don't know how to do the marketing stuff. I don't even know where to start on the marketing stuff. Great. Jump on bigger pockets and do some research and figure out the marketing stuff.

I don't know how to find a real estate agent and that paragraph on my business. plan is blank. Okay, great. Jump on bigger pockets and figure out how to find a real estate agents. So putting together a plan on paper will really help you figure out where your gaps and knowledge are and will force you to go and fill those gaps before you actually get out there and start risking your own money. So my biggest piece of advice to any new investor would be jot down your plan. Doesn't have to be formal, doesn't have to be real long, even if it's just a page or two. Just get down on paper what you want to do, how you want to do it, and what you need to accomplish it.

So treat your business like a business. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's great advice. And that's actually something that we really harped upon. We actually just recently put out the Bigger Pockets ultimate beginner's guide to real estate investing at biggerpockets.com slash UBG. and there's going to be a link in the show notes.

But speaking of getting your plan together and getting things organized, you know, there's more than meets the eye to this podcast. And, you know, the transformer reference is referring to the announcement that we're making that Bigger Pockets has actually partnered with Jay on something really exciting. Two books. We've got two books that are coming out. These books were both written by Jay and are really an incredible resource, not just for house flippers, but for any real estate investor.

Now, the first book is called The Book on Flipping Houses, and the second book that comes with it is called The Book on Estimating Rehab Cost. And it's really awesome. So, Jay, why don't you tell us a little bit about how these books came about? Sure, sure. So as a lot of people know, I've been writing my blog for about five years now. And it's kind of been a labor of love. It's been my baby.

And I get feedback constantly from people reading my blog. The two biggest pieces of feedback I've gotten over the years are, one, this is great. I wish your blog were more organized so I could learn step by step how to flip houses as opposed to having to read five years' worth of semi-daily blog posts and lots of articles. And so can you organize this data and can you fill in all the holes that have been left in the blog for the last few years? And then secondly, I've been asked, hey, how do you estimate rehab costs? That is by far the hardest part of this business, a lot of people believe. And they see that I've been pretty good.

We've been pretty good. I don't take a lot of credit. I think my project manager gets most of the credit at accurately estimating the cost in our projects. So having gotten those two questions over and over for the past five years, I started writing about a year, a year and a half ago. And I finished up two books. One is basically a step-by-step guide to flipping houses that basically organizes everything I've been thinking of writing in the last few years, as well as adds about 60% new content that fills in all the gaps.

And secondly, I've written a guide to estimating rehab costs that basically will walk a new investor, even a seasoned investor, through the methodology of putting together. a scope of work on a property and estimating the costs associated with carrying out that scope of work. So we've written these two books, total about 600 pages, 150,000 words. So it was quite an undertaking and it did take me about a year and a half. And I'm thrilled that I'm going to have the opportunity to partner with you guys to be bringing that out to the masses. And you know, the thing that got me really excited about these books is how it fits so closely with the core beliefs of bigger pockets. You know, that real estate investing education shouldn't cost more than a college education. And of course, there shouldn't be any secrets. That's what I love about these books.

And, you know, Jay, you just really didn't hold anything back. Everything is there that a person would need to know to either flip a house or just a remodel or rental. So really good job, Jay. and of course anyone listening who wants to pick up a copy of the book, you can get both the book on flipping houses and the book on estimating rehab costs in e-book version for just $29, or you could get the e-book version and the physical paperback versions of both books shipped to you for $49. And as an extra bonus,

Jay actually included a whole lot of additional material as well with either the e-book or the physical book including a rehab analysis spreadsheet, I believe in the appraisal package, an inspection checklist, a sample flipping chart of accounts file for QuickBooks, which is really, really awesome. So definitely want to check that out. And of course, a whole lot more. So if you want to order your own copy or just want to learn more, head over to biggerpockets.com slash flippingbook and check it out.

Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash flipping book. So once again, thank you, Jay, so much for putting that together. I know it's really going to help a lot of people find their way to success. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Awesome. Well, speaking of books, as we're wrapping this thing up, let's get to these final questions. We love to ask everybody.

And we're definitely going to have Jay back on the show. We're going to talk more about advance flipping. So hold your breath. We will have them back. but Jay, speaking of real estate books, what is your favorite real estate book other than the two that you've spent a year and a half putting together? So I'm a numbers guy and I'd have to say my favorite book is a book by a guy named Steve Burgess. And it's called The Complete Guide to Real Estate Finance for Investors. And it basically is all about real estate financing and the numbers associated with that.

I'm a big believer that if you're going to be in the investment business, you at least have to have a rudimentary understanding of the numbers and the finance and the ability to do financial analysis on basic projects. And that book wasn't too complicated. Again, I'm not far from a genius and I could understand it. So I'd highly recommend that to anybody that's interested in more the finance and the number side of things. And what about your favorite business book, non-real estate? My favorite business book, probably the four-hour work week by Tim Ferriss. Yeah. So he kind of opened my eyes a few years ago to all the possibilities for automating

and basically putting your business on autopilot. And I've taken a lot of what he's written to heart. And so I'd say that's been the biggest influence on me in the past few years. Cool. Cool. What about hobbies? Outside of your kids, of course, which, you know, are probably extremely important, well, I know are very important for you. What's your hobby? And are there any special skills that you have that people might not know about? I know how to juggle. Nice.

Let's see. I think the one that I think a lot of people probably know because it's been mentioned before, but I used to be a professional poker player. So I'd say poker is still definitely a hobby of mine. Don't get to play. playing nearly as much as I used to. We should play, Jay. Would love to. We'd love to. Maybe the next bigger pocket summit we could do. Yes.

It's a great idea. That's a great idea. Your tournament. Okay. Okay. We've got it. Excellent. So, yeah.

And other than that, these days, it's basically trying to figure out how to raise two kids. So that's a full time job. Yes, it is. All right. Last question, Jay. I asked this to everyone. what do you see as setting apart the top performers in our industry,

the guys that are actually making money and building a business, what do you see sets them apart from those who jump in and jump out so quickly? Yep. Again, going back to the same theme, I've touched on a number of times. I think it's those that do best in this industry or those that have the ability to focus on their business as opposed to just in their business, the people that can think about bigger,

things than swinging a hammer. They can think about their long-term strategy. They can think about how they scale the business. They can think about cash flow and raising money. They can think about being more efficient in their business. These are the ones that tend to do the best because they're not so short-sighted and so focused on getting the next house in the market. They think about where their business is going to be six months, 12 months, five years from now and can really guide their business as opposed to allowing their business to guide them. That's great. Very, very good advice.

All right, Jay. So people can find more about you on your site, one, two, three, flip. They can catch you there. They can catch you on bigger pockets at biggerpockets.com slash users slash Jason Scott. And what other places are you on Facebook, Twitter, Gplus, are you everywhere? How else can people get in touch? Don't do a whole lot of social media stuff. We are on Facebook, so Facebook slash, what are we?

I think we're one, two, three flip real estate. We'll find, we'll put you in the show notes. I appreciate that. But like I tell everybody, I try and be as available as I possibly can. I'm pretty busy at the family thing, but over the past five years, I don't think there have been more than a handful of emails. I haven't answered, and those have been stuff that have slipped through the cracks because I'm not as always as organized as I'd like to be.

So basically, anybody can always send me an email. I'm always happy to help however I can and always available on Bigger Pets and on my blog. Yes, absolutely. And Jay is definitely always available on BP. He's amazing at helping people out. So definitely if you want to learn from him, go through his stuff on his site, go through. He's actually, he wrote for us in the Bigger Pockets blog. There's a ton of great articles in there that Jay's written.

My favorite actually, two being one on analysis and the other being on negotiations. and the other being on negotiation, and we'll link to those from the show notes. And otherwise, you know, check him out, go to his profile, and you can look at his forum post. They're deep, they're awesome. So check it out. Jay, it's been a pleasure, man.

Thank you so much for being on the show. We're pumped about the book. So everybody definitely check out the books, the two new books, and we'll definitely have you back. Thanks, guys. Glad to be here. This was great.

Can't wait to do it again. Awesome. Thanks, Jay. All right, everyone. that was our show with Fix and Flipper Jay Scott from 123 Flip.com. I hope you guys were able to pick up a lot of great information from Jay and can apply it to make your business even better. Remember, you could check out more information about the book on flipping houses and the book

on estimating rehab costs at biggerpockets.com slash flipping book. And finally, just to thank everyone who's listening to the show, we've had over 65,000. That's 65,000 listens to the Bigger Pockets podcast. starting out just a couple months ago, which is really, really awesome, guys. Also, we're now up to 145, five-star reviews on iTunes. So if you haven't yet left us a review in your iTunes player or on your devices, please be sure to do so. We'd really appreciate it.

Also, be sure to subscribe to the show. That's it, everyone. Until next time, this is Josh Dorkin, signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hike, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com.

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