BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 144: Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone and Kicking Butt at Real Estate with Danny Johnson

Episode Date: October 15, 2015

Do you have an “A-type” personality? If not, don’t worry–you can still build wealth through real estate! In this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we talk with Danny Johnson (a real estate investor from San Antonio, Texas) about overcoming fears, age, and inexperience to successfully do more than 200 real estate transactions in the past decade! You’ll love the tips and advice Danny offers, and the role-playing phone call between Danny and Brandon will improve your phone skills with motivated sellers dramatically! Don’t miss this powerful show! In This Episode We Cover: Who Danny Johnson is What’s happened with his business in the two years since he’s been on the show A better definition of wholesaling How to find a buyer you can count on How Danny gets his deals A call simulation with Danny in action (you don’t want to miss this!) The story that starts with a tattoo What you should know about buying REO properties Tips for people who are just starting out Important strategies for effective marketing Why it’s all about getting leads How to set the right mindset as a real estate investor How introverts can get into investing How Danny manages to stay in business Tips on SEO and setting up a website to get leads Cool tools that are free to have in your site And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Calculators BP Podcast 018 : Flipping, Marketing, and Wholesaling with Danny Johnson LeadPropeller SumoMe BiggerPockets Pro Perks BiggerPockets Forums Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The Book on Investing with No or Low Money Down by Brandon Turner The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller The ONE Thing by Gary Keller Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life Of A Successful House Flipper by Danny Johnson Tweetable Topics: “People spend all that time and energy in doing marketing but not answering their phone.” (Tweet This!) “We still get advice from mentors and everybody should.” (Tweet This!) “Until you get to that first deal it’s going so much on faith.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Danny Danny’s BiggerPockets Profile Danny’s Blog FlippingJunkie Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 144. Ring, ring, ring. Hi, I just called yourself. Hi. Hi, this is Danny. Hi, my name is Brandon. I found your website online about your house that you buy. Yeah, yeah.

Do you have a house that you'd like to sell? 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. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Jorken. To the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner.

Hey, Brandon. Hey, what's up? I'm recording live inside of an actual coffee can right now. Do you hear that echo? Echo, echo, echo. Where are you? I'm at a co-working space in North Dakota because I'm driving. driving to a wedding in Minnesota. But how are you, Josh? Wow, they have co-working spaces in North Dakota. They do. Fargo. I know. Pretty cool.

Check it out sometimes. It's called the Prairie Den. If you're in Fargo, the Prairie Den. How you doing? I'm good, man. I'm good. Why are you in Fargo, by the way? I'm just driving through. Wedding. Minnesota. Which way? Minnesota. Okay. We know your life. We want to know more. Talk to us. My friend Jessica, who is one of my best friends in the world. Jessica. Jessica is getting married to an awesome guy.

I don't know his name. And I am playing guitar in the wedding on Friday night. For Jessica and what's his name? For Jessica and what's his name. Nice. So, yeah. That's awesome. Jessica's my homie.

We're buds. Apparently not her husband. I don't know him. Yeah, I don't know him very well. Well, all is well here. We're doing well, man. You know, rocking and rolling. BP continues to plug away.

And it's getting cool. Finally, I'm pretty excited. about the fall. Finally. Oh, I think you meant like cool as in like, this is cool,

like Fonzie cool. Yeah. Big pockets is finally cool. It's finally cool. Yeah. It's not, it is not cool yet. All right,

we'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there. Awesome, man. Well, got a good show as we typically do. Yeah.

I really like today's show and all. We just got done it. I really, really, really liked it. Probably because I'm kind of introverted. You know,

people might not know that because I'm on the podcast, but that's why I'm here because you can't see me. I will tell a funny story. I will. I think you've told a million introvert stories about. So when we had our 10-year party here at Bigger Pockets,

Brandon was in attendance. And, yeah, there were a lot of people. The room was packed. And Brandon Turner, this, you know, tall guy that everybody knows. Good looking, handsome, muscular. Keep going. We're talking about a different guy.

The guy I'm talking about was hiding in a corner. Oh, that guy. Yeah. I forgot about him. You literally sit in the corner, sat in the corner, the entire. I stood. Stood in the corner. Even if you sat, you'd be taller than.

And it wasn't quite, it was like the bathroom wall. It's not quite corner. Close enough to the corners. You guys remember high school? Like the nerdy kids were like by the bathroom. Yeah, so that was Brandon the entire time. Didn't really move from that area. Now, granted, lots of people came to him.

Yes, that's what I do. See a mountain in a room. I just stand there and left. people come to me. I just draw them in. The law of attraction right here. It's our running joke at Bigger Pockets about how Brandon is going to go hide in the corner when that's what I do. People show up. So anyway, that's why this show is going to be good. But we'll get to that in a minute. Before we do, let's do today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip is we've got a lot of changes happening to the Bigger Pockets calculators, especially the rental property calculator. And I mean,

because we're recording this a few weeks before the show comes out, I don't know exactly the state it'll be in, but every other day or so, it changes dramatically. So go check it out, biggerpockse.com slash kelk, see what's different today. And it's becoming very, very helpful in my life. And it's going to become increasingly helpful in your life as well over the coming months. So check it out, biggerpock.com slash kelk. And not just that, but we're we're revamping a lot of stuff right now. We've got a lot of stuff coming, guys, a lot of big changes coming soon, look, feel, tools.

things like that. So definitely if you haven't been on the site in a while, check back at biggerpockets.com. Before we introduce our guest, just big thanks to everybody for all the ratings and reviews. You guys have been amazing. They're coming in and they're fantastic, especially the ones that tell me to shut up.

I love those. Those are awesome. Those are my favorite. Yeah. No, no, you guys, they're really supportive. We really appreciate them. And if you haven't yet left this one, please do so on iTunes. We have 1,567 reviews on iTunes.

Not enough. Thank you. Not enough. We're waiting for 2,000. There we are. We are. All right, cool. So here's the thing about traveling.

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Flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Here's the thing about traveling. If you buy food at the airport, a burrito, salad, bag of peanuts, you start wondering if you should have opened a savings account for snacks. So wouldn't it be great if you could actually earn money while you're traveling?

Well, you can. Airbnb has something called the co-host network. While you're away, you can hire a vetted local co-host with hosting experience to help take care of things, communicating with guests, preparing your space, managing reservations, everything runs smoothly while you're off making memories. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Let's do this. Today's show featuring Danny Johnson. Danny has, has, Danny's been around for about 12 years as a real estate investor. He's done all sorts of stuff, wholesaling, flipping. He's probably one of the better marketers out there. He's really great at online. He's great at offline as well. But he's a little shy, a little bit quiet. And I know for me, like I said earlier, that obviously appeals to me. That's why I like today's show.

And if you guys are not super A-type personality and angry New Yorker like Josh here, you might pick up some really good tips today on how to invest in real estate when maybe you're not as outgoing as you would like to be angry like me. I mean, you know. Not many people are as angry as you. Wow. It's not true what they say, folks. It is.

It is true. I'm not that angry. All right. Yeah, anyway, so Danny's great. We're really excited to have him. And let's just get to this thing and make moves. Cool. All right, Danny.

Welcome back to the show, man. It's been a while. Show 18, I believe, was your episode. Welcome. Welcome back. Yeah, welcome. Or thank you. Let's interview Brandon here.

It's been so long. I was like, what is your name again? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, last time, you know, we talked to you, we talked a lot about, I don't know, we talked about flipping, we talked about wholesaling, we talked about marketing. Yeah, we did a lot of cool stuff like that. So today, you know, we're going to talk about a little bit of that as well.

First of all, I want to know, for those people, well, maybe I don't want to know. I know. For those people who don't know you, maybe didn't listen to the last episode. Who are you? What do you do? Well, I'm Danny Johnson, and I flip houses in San Antonio. My wife and I've been flipping houses, I think, it's 12 years now, maybe a little bit more. Time flies like crazy. But we've rehabbed and flipped over 200 houses over that amount of time, and we're still actively doing it. I blog at flipping junkie is my blog where I talk about a lot of that.

But the flipping is what we mainly do with rehabbing and then wholesale. and some bird dogging and stuff like that. Okay, cool, cool. And you've been doing this, you said 12 years. So in that time, you've clearly seen the market being really, really good and then really, really bad. Yeah. And then really, really good.

At least, and when I say good and bad, I'm talking about in terms of, I don't know, maybe a buyer's market. I mean, houses are selling really well and then houses are not selling very well. And then houses are selling well. Because, I mean, honestly, right? To a lot of investors, we can say it's the opposite. The market was really, really bad for us. And then it was really, really good for us.

and then it was really, really bad for us. And that's the thing. It's going to be either easy to find deals or easier to find deals and a little bit tougher to sell the houses or it's going to be harder to find good deals but really easy to sell them. And right now we're in a position where it's pretty hard to find good deals, but selling them is pretty easy. You know, like houses here in San Antonio are flying off the market really fast.

Typically when we have something for sale, as soon as it's listed, you know, it's sold within a day or too. Wow. And, you know, it's been like that for a little while. So, yeah, that's great. So I kind of want to get caught up to here. So we had, you know, it was about two and a half years ago, give or take. Again, at that point, you were doing, I think it was a bit of wholesaling and a bunch of flipping. Take us through the last two years. You know, what was the shift? You said you're primarily doing the flipping now. Does that mean you've totally stopped doing any wholesaling or No, we still do wholesaling and really the rehabbing, you know, you make more money on a rehab typically than you do on a wholesale.

And when the market's so good, you know, houses selling, you know, really fast that anything that makes sense to rehab gets rehabed and sold, you know, retail. And so what I mean by anything that makes sense for a rehab and retail is that house is in the area where I get the lead, wherever that house is, if there's houses selling there on the MLS, you know, people are. getting new loans for them. Then that's going to be one that we're going to pick up to fix up and sell. Now, the ones that I wholesale, typically the houses that are in areas that are a little bit lesser, you know, they're less than medium home price, median home price, and they're just not in that grade of areas where the prices in the retail sales aren't there. So it just makes more sense for me to wholesale those to landlords and other people doing

owner finance and things like that. Okay. By the way, I just realized something. I feel like I'm interviewing Sean Penn. Has anyone ever told you that you are like the doppel of Sean Penn? Yeah, my old job, I got that all the time. Oh my God, I just realized.

It's been a while. It's fascinating. Yeah, look at that. That's funny. I can see it. Do you see it? I see it. I see it. I like it.

Yeah, it's crazy. I'm always hearing the Maroon 5 thing with you. I forgot that guy's name. Yeah. Yeah, and I. But he was the sex thing on Earth. So, you know, I'll take that. I'll take that.

Brandon is now. Yeah, I don't know. I'm like shaggy. do or something. Well, there's that, there's that Slim Jim commercial with the Cascuatch. Okay, yeah, that's me. Okay. So, let's talk about wholesaling real quickly because I realize, you know,

I do a lot of webinars on BP and people ask a lot of questions during them. And one of the questions they always ask is, what the heck is wholesaling? And I feel like we talk about it all the time and so people should know, but honestly, newbies don't know what necessarily about wholesaling is. So real quickly, can you kind of explain what is wholesaling? What are we talking about?

Okay, with the wholesaling, what we're talking about, well, there could be several things that we're talking about, But in general, the way I see wholesaling is where you are buying a house, but you're not actually going to close on the house and fix it up yourself and sell it. You might actually close it, but your intention is to not really fix it up. And so the ways to do that are you have the assignment of contracts. So if you put the house under contract to buy, so let's say Joe Seller is selling their house for $50,000, and you put it in an contract for $50,000. and let's say that house is worth $100,000, and I have a ton of investors that are willing to buy that at 70% minus repairs.

And not to get too far into math here, but if we bought it at $50,000, there's $20,000 between what my investor would pay for it and what I'm buying it for. So if the repairs are less than that, I get to pocket the difference. So let's say for sake of simplicity, 10,000 repairs. So now I can sell that to my investor for $10,000 because he'll be interested buying it for 60, which is the $100,000 retail value minus the 30% because he wants to buy it 70% of market value. So that's 70,000 minus the 10,000 repairs. So he's willing to pay 60,000 for it,

and I put it under contract for 60, I mean 50, I'm sorry. And so I would then sign an assignment of contract with him where he agrees to pay me the difference, which is the $10,000 when he closes on it. So I don't even close on the house. He closes and I get paid once he closes. Typically, I'll accept a non-refundable earnest money deposit to make sure he's serious because I don't want an investor tying up the deal and then not being able to close because it makes me look bad because I'm the one that signed the original contract saying I would close. And so that gets into where you really need to have strong buyers. And we can go a long ways down that path of like, you know, how to determine who's a serious investor buyer that you would assign these contracts to.

And, you know, but quickly we could talk about the other part of wholesaleing, which is a double close, which is a lot safer these days because there's states like Ohio and things like that. Brandon, you and I were talking about that the other day, where there's some issues with assignments of contract or, you know, just with things being a little bit unclear and... Brokering and all that. Yeah, brokering, where if you're not an agent and they look at it like you're brokering, you're finding a buyer for a seller of a house. And some people look at it like, well, if you have it under contract, you have a vested interest in, and so you're actually selling the contract, not the house. But, you know, that's where it's sort of a grayer in some of those states. So one of the ways that we talked about being able to get around that is to do the double close, where you actually do close on it.

And then you have your buyer turn around and close. So it's two transactions, like you and the homeowner. So the homeowner is a seller. You're the buyer. And in the second transaction, you're the seller and your investor buyer is the buyer. And so with that, you're actually owning the property before you sell it, even if that's just for like 15 minutes. Sure. Yeah. So I like that you brought up finding a buyer you can count on. I know we've talked about it, but I think it'd be a good topic to kind of dip into a little bit here. How do you do that? I mean, you know, how do I know that you, the flipper, right, are somebody that I can count on or you the landlord or somebody that I can count on to actually end up closing the deal as a wholesaler? How can I trust you? How can I trust you?

Yeah, and that comes into the research of how you found out about me. And what I like to do is find the people that I know bought houses. You know, and they paid cash for them. They closed quickly. Either other people told me that they did or I saw that they actually did. And there's ways to check the MLS for properties that were sold and then check deed records online. Most places have deed records online and you can see who bought them. So you can find out who's buying a lot of the deal.

So if you have a list of people that paid cash for properties, then you can start to contact them and say, hey, you know, you want more deals. I'm a wholesale. I can find exact deal just like this one that you bought at X and, you know, X, Y, Z address. And then you know that they're pretty serious. And one quick way that I also determine whether, you know, somebody is real serious is when you talk to them about a deal. If the person, the investor buyer says, okay, what's the address? What's the price? Is there a way to get in? I know they're usually pretty serious. The guy that's asking how old's the roof? or what shape is the carpet in, you know, you could go either way. But typically, I'm going to say that that person's probably not going to be able to commit very quickly. It doesn't, you know, typically the guys that are buying a lot and quickly are straight to the point. I just want to know how I can look at it, what the price is, and I'll tell you yes or no. Interesting. And so, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, you know, those guys, they know when they go in, they're going to figure it out, right? So what do they need to waste your time with the details? going to come to their own evaluation on what it's worth regardless and what the repairs are regardless, right? Right. And some people, you know, it's one of those things with finding a contractor's similar to this. You know, sometimes people don't want to, and I know, I say that because I had this trouble.

Like, you know, we're busy. We're rock and roll and doing deals, getting looking at leads, making offers. And, you know, it comes time where we have trouble with our contractor. I've got to find a new contractor. And then I'm thinking, man, I don't really feel like spending time trying to find a good contractor. So, you know, I talk to a couple if he seems decent, like, all right, let's go. But then you run into problems quickly, and it's like a nightmare. And typically as a rehab, or if you've got bad contractors, it's a nightmare. Yeah, it's as simple as that. So taking

the time to find the right contractor, taking the time to find the right buyer, cash buyer for properties is well worth all the time spent. And so you can build up a big buyer's list as a safety net, but really what you want to do is find the four or five guys that are really serious, really good, or not going to waste your time. It just saves so much time, hassle, and effort, and then you don't have to worry, like, is this kind of closed? You know, I'm so worried, I've got to check in. I don't know if this guy's going to be able to close,

then I'm, you know, scrambling to find another buyer and all that. Because you definitely don't want to end up going back to the seller and say, hey, I couldn't close. I need more time. You know, all those kind of things. When you're promising a quick close, you need to be able to do it. So find the serious buyers for that. Yeah, makes sense.

No, that's great. Good explanation. I think it's awesome. So, all right. you are in Texas. The market is pretty good on the sales side. It's fairly competitive on the acquisition side. So what are you doing? How are we getting in there and scrapping up deals that the other thousands of investors aren't getting their hands on? All right. So that's, that gets into what we're doing. I mean, basically these days, all I'm really using is my website, Danny By's

house is to generate my leads for me. And that said, you know, you can get leads and everything, but with the competition, typically where we're picking some things up is where others follow up. You know, so there may be a lot of competition, but you've got to look at how much competition of your competition is actually following up with people. And not only that, who's picking up their phone? I just talked to a seller yesterday. He called me up and said, you know, I called, you know, five people, I think, before me.

And my first thought was, man, how come I wasn't first? But, you know, he called five people before me. and he said all of those were machines. And he said, you know what I do? I hang up on those. I don't want to talk to the machine. I want to talk to a person. He said, you're the first one that picked up his phone.

And so if he's got that kind of attitude, and I talk to him, set up an appointment to see his house, and let him feel like he's accomplished what he set out to, even if those other people call him back a lot of times, he might not even want to mess with them, you know? And I guarantee you that probably if the four or five that he called before me, if any of them did call back, it was probably only one anyway. you know, that's just the way it goes. It's weird. People spend all that time and energy,

you know, doing marketing, but not answering their phone. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Fascinating. And it's like, it's, it's the small things in business that give you that competitive advantage. And yeah, you're right. I mean, I think people, you know, you even see it on the forums, they talk about, well, what's the best, you know, how do I leave my voicemail? And what, what should it sound like and things like that? And you're like, just answer. Just pick or pay for a service to answer the phone for you so that at least you get those people on the phone because it's true.

These people, you know, the folks that you're marketing to primarily as a wholesaler are people who, you know, they don't have a lot of time for the BS, so to speak. Typically, their folks who are in a position where, you know, they could list it on the MLS if they had time for the BS. If they want to be done with it, right. You know, they want to talk to somebody and knock it out.

Right. Yeah. So anyway, all right. So, you know, your website. If I could say it real quick, too, like a thing with answering the phone that I, you know, I hear a lot of people, you know, talking about using Google Voice. And I'm not sure what, I don't know if the thinking is like, I need another number because I don't want people calling my cell phone.

Like, honestly, you're not going to have your phone ringing off the hook. If it did, that's awesome. You know, I'd love for my phone to ring off the hook with leads. But, you know, when you first do that marketing, you feel like, oh, it's going to ring off the hook and then it doesn't. And you're just like, wow, what I do wrong? But you just don't get a lot of calls for people wanting to sell that. house super cheap but the you know the google voice thing really bugs me because i know i myself when i

call a number and it's a it says you know say your name so i can try to reach the subscriber it's like you know i don't want to mess with that i don't know i just hang up i i turn that off on my google voice because i want it just to ring my phone like a normal phone can you do that yeah you can turn that off and i don't know you can i didn't even yeah i turn that thing too and so yeah you can definitely turn it off and so people should if they use one definitely i think a lot of people just hang up on it. Yep. I think so too. I definitely think so. Yeah, I mean, like, honestly, it's easy to send out direct mail letters.

I mean, relatively, it's not very scary. It's easy to drive for dollars somewhat. It's easy to look out properties on the MLS. It's scary to answer your phone and talk to somebody live. So maybe, can we just do something kind of fun here? I think it'll be fun. You guys want to do some role playing? Well, sure. I want to work through this with you because I want to pretend that I am, uh, Let's say you're Danny and I just called your website and I'm a house seller. You guys up for this?

Brandon! Who's out of the phone? Yeah, okay. So I just found your website online and I... Stop calling those telemarketers. Thanks, Mom. I'm your wife. That's what Heather sounds like.

She'll love you for that. All right. So let's just do some quick role plane here. So I'm just calling you. So ring, ring, ring. ring, ring. Hi, I just called yourself. Hi, hi, this is Danny. Hi, my name is Brandon. I found your website online about your house that you buy. Yeah, yeah, do you have a house that you'd like to sell? I do. Well, I think so anyway. I mean, I got it as a, is a inheritance. My father passed away last

year. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, and can you tell me a little bit about the house, you know, what part of town it is? Sure. It's over, you know, by, you know, the safe way over on, you know, third street, kind of back in that area. It's a pretty good area. And, you know, it was rented for a long time to my brother-in-law who ended up not paying rent for a couple years. And now it's just kind of trashed. And so I just kind of want to get rid of it at this point. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's a common, actually common situation that I hear a lot. People want to help out their family and siblings and gets a little bit taken advantage of sometimes the house gets destroyed. Do you mind giving me the address of the house?

Sure. It's a one, two, three, third street. Easy. Yeah, it's pretty easy. And how many bedrooms and bathrooms does the house have? No, we've got, I think there's three bedrooms on the main floor and then one upstairs and there's two bathrooms total. Okay, and what kind of general shape is the house? And any major repairs needed? Foundation problems? You know, the roof looks pretty bad. I mean, I can just kind of see a lot of water spots coming through the ceiling. and other than that, I think I think it's okay.

I mean, it's not great. I'm not going to lie. It's not in great condition because, you know, he didn't clean for a couple years. And then we just shut the door and left it for six months. So that's what I'm... Is there anything owed still on the property? No, it was given to us just, you know, free and clear. All right.

And you have an asking price in mind for it? I don't know. I was kind of hoping you could tell me that. Sure. Yeah, that wouldn't be a problem. What time can I come over there today to see it? Oh, today. I mean, I'm around right now.

I can meet you anytime. I don't have a job, so I just retire. Okay, well, that's great. Yeah, I can make it right over there, so I'll be there in about 30 minutes, and it doesn't take very long for me to go through the house, so I won't be keeping you in there forever. I'm not going to, you'll crawl underneath it

or crawl over top of it or anything like that up in the attic or anything, so it's pretty quick. So can I get your... your name and best way to reach you, telephone number? Sure, sure. All right, I'm ending this. That was good. That was good. That was good. It's kind of weird when I'm looking at you on a field.

You're very, what's the word I'm trying to think of? Disarming. You know, there's no way to be angry at Danny or like, you know, even if you were just like pissed off for some reason. Like, he's so soft-spoken and gentle that like, you know, like I feel like I'm going to get a hug. Yeah, a couple things that I noticed. that I liked. I mean, first of all, you definitely like identified me with me in a number of

cases. Like, oh, yeah, I know that happens a lot. You know, people get taken advantage of, you know, it was, it wasn't, you're stupid, why'd you rent to your brother-in-law or, you know, why didn't you, why is he there for two years? I mean, it was very much like, oh, yeah, this happens. I mean, almost like, yeah, you're the victim, you know, like, you know, it wasn't my fault. Yeah, it's relating to the other person so that they, you know, and the general, general flow of my conversations because it changes depending on what they tell me. It's like he started talking about, you know, Brandon, you started talking about, you know, the situation.

So I wanted to be quite as much as I could to let you talk about all the situation so that I can get to really what the bottom of the story is, you know. I like that. And then going from there, just find out some details about the house really quick. And then when you get to the point where you can talk about what's owed, because that's obviously really important. If they owe a whole lot of money on it, you don't want to waste their time. So, you know, find that out.

And really, people are afraid to ask people about how much is owed on it. And really, if you're talking to somebody that's, you know, like selling the house on the MLS for top dollar, it's been completely fixed up, looks brand new, asking them what they owe, they might take offense to it. But motivated sellers or just sellers that want to sell something like in your situation in that role playing, it's just like how you handled it. You know, they just tell you. It's not a big deal to them. Yeah. Well, if you just ask. Let me ask you, what would you have said?

had I said, you know, oh yeah, we owe quite a bit on that. He, you know, he leveraged it out pretty well. We had a high mortgage. I don't know, let's say $150,000 we owe on it. And you knew it was worth like 160. Like what would you say at that point? At that point, I think, well, it depends on how much I really felt like I knew whether that was the value. You know, a big city like San Antonio, there's some areas I do know pretty well, but I still, there can still be some pockets that are a little bit more or whatever. So I don't typically say, you know, one way or the other, like, oh, I can't do it right away. I still want to do a little bit of research.

And some things that you can ask is if you know what other houses in the area are selling for. Because sometimes they have done research. They've talked to realtors and they know. And then the other thing is to ask maybe what the county has it, you know, assess that. Because a lot of times I can give you at least a rough idea. But if there's any, if they, and then you could also ask how long, you know, how long ago did they buy it? If they bought it last year and then you ask how much they put down and they didn't put barely anything down, maybe it was FHA or something,

then likely there's not much room. You know what I mean? But otherwise, if I have any doubt or I'm not really completely sure of what it could sell for, I still try to set the appointment. And, you know, obviously it won't be

like where if they're going to be over there, like leaving to go over there right away, it's something where there's a little bit of time, then I can quickly get off the phone and do the research. And then if it's like definitely I can't do anything with it, if I know another investor I think might be able to, then I'll contact the seller again, say, I'm sorry. It doesn't really fit my criteria after I did the research. But Johnny,

you know, my good friend said he was looking for some houses recently. He's willing to pay a little bit more. So would you mind me having him give you a call? And then that way you still, you know, you can still refer, you know, the lead maybe. But otherwise it's, you know, just sorry, I don't want to waste your time. I don't think I could buy the house. Yeah. Oh, that's great. That's great. And then sometimes if they're, you know, if they don't maybe seem really motivated too and it seems like they want, they don't owe that much. but they seem like they really want a lot of money for it. You know, sometimes then also I'll do the research

and then call them back and say, look, I don't want to waste any of your time. It seems like you want to be a little bit more than I might be able to pay. I can probably get you something around this number, like a ballpark figure. You know, that way I can feel them out just a little bit more. Yeah.

You know, a lot of times you'll think that, oh, they're not that motivated. Then you tell them I can pay this ballpark and they say, oh, that sounds reasonable. You know, it's like they're a little bit more motivated than they let on. So be careful with this something. The phone call thing, the phone marketing, you know, is something that a lot of people associate with wholesaling, right? It's the, you know, build the lead website to get those off market deals so that you can wholesale them. At least that's what I tend to hear, right? Why do you think more flippers and landlords are not actually doing the full marketing push that the average wholesaler is doing? Well, see, that's sort of surprising to me because I've always, you know, done, well, I haven't always done the motivated social marketing.

But, you know, we, and it's actually funny because my wife and I were just sort of talking about this the other day when we were going on for a walk. See, I had, I guess the story starts with a tattoo. Okay. Oh, my God, really? So, Melissa, my wife and I, she's in the business with me, has been since the beginning. And we went and did a long vacation to San Francisco just a couple, like a week. I guess it's already been a week and a half ago. So the tattoocation?

Yeah. Well, we didn't plan on it until we got there. So you know what? Let's get tattoo. So I got a bigger pockets tattoo. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, Danny has pulled his shirt off and is showing us a giant pocket on his chest. It's too bad we changed our logo and nobody knows what the hell that is.

You mean it's not in Old English now? But anyway, so we got the tattoos. and everything. And it was sort of, anyway, that was fun and interesting. But the reason why I'm talking about that is we came back. And I had lunch with one of our first mentors that we had, one of the very first ones. And I wanted to talk with him, get some advice from him, because we still get advice from mentors and everybody should, but about estate planning.

And, you know, that's really important because it's so easy to put off things like that. But, man, it's really important to take care of a lot of your estate stuff, especially once you get into business and start doing things and get assets. I was talking with him and the conversation started out. We talked about the trip and everything that my wife and I told him I got a tattoo and he said, well, I'd like to see it. So I showed him my arm. And, you know, he looked really interested and then the look changed to a look of concern. That looks like it might be infected. It was like swollen and red. And I had been looking at it think, yeah, it's kind of tender still, but it'd been like almost, you know, like a,

probably five days, I guess. And so I started wondering the whole time, like, is this thing really infected? It's the whole talk that we were having about estate planning, like, he's telling me all this awesome advice and everything, but I'm kind of like switching my mind between two things. I'm thinking about infection and then like everything he's trying to tell me. So that was hilarious. But anyway, it's not infected, by the way. It's, it's healing nicely. Oh, good. Actually waiting for the scabs to fall off. No, but...

Okay, so, wow. Said that, didn't I? All right. So my wife and I were... So we were talking on our walk about, you know, when I was meeting with one of our mentors and, you know, sort of, you know, talking about what it was like when we got started, right? And, you know, the struggles that we went through and how hard, like, just trying to put ourselves back in that position again. Like, you know, it's been a while.

But, you know, we were able to... It's sort of like when you smell something and it makes you remember of a place you're at or whatever. Like talking with my mentor and all that kind of stuff brought a lot of the memories back. But when we got started, and this ties in, trust me. By the way, I was going to say the smell of infection reminds me of San Francisco, so I get it. See, now you're going to be thinking infections sometime. Yeah. You're going to make me lose my train of thought here.

Okay, so we're with your wife. If you're walking down the street and you get a tattoo, it gets infected. I don't know. I'm lost already myself. You guys are talking about why people, like a lot of other people, rehabbers and stuff, don't go with the motivation of marketing. So when we were talking, whenever I first was getting started, like figuring out how I was going to get deals, my father had, I forgot who it was.

It was somebody's course, and it was on BHS tapes, it was old. and it was like grainy, grainy VHS video footage stuff. But this guy's like making calls, like cold calls to FISBO for sale by owner people in the ads and the newspaper classifieds and trying to do creative real estate with them. So he'd call them and say, oh, how much you're asking? And all this weird stuff, you know, if I were to do this and this and five years from now, give you a nickel and then, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, you know, I was thinking, man, I can't do that.

Like, first of all, I'm mostly an introvert and just like the thought. lot of calling these people out of the blue saying I'm going to buy their house from them, cash or these other weird things, terrified me, right? And so I watched that, and I don't know if I maybe took something from it or not, but I don't think so. I was like, I definitely don't want to do that. So what can we do to find deals? And so then it was, well, let's get listed properties. When we researched things on the internet and we found like people are buying what's called REO properties, the bank owned properties off the MLS. So these are bank foreclosures that realtors list. And so we started going to look at those, right? So we went and looked at those and

we were trying to make offers and build relationships because people in the forums and everything say, well, build relationships, get pocket listings. And, you know, it sounds so simple, right? Well, I'm just going to go build a relationship and get pocket listings. But when you've never done a deal, how the heck do you do that, right? You know, like you can't, give me your pocket listings. They're going to laugh at you, you know, or hang up on you or, you know, put you on the black list. but so there's there's got to be some strategy involved and I think that most people starting out that's just not probably a good place to start because you're going to get disheartened and find out that people don't want to do that and it's just not as easy as people made it out to be

you know and so then the next step was and so that's something that you can do and obviously we ended up building relationships but that's after several years in the business and it really actually even took the market downturn in 2008 because a lot of our companies competition went by the wayside. And so those realtors didn't have a lot of the people they were selling to because they went out of business. So then we were able to build relationships. But anyway, so that led us to, okay, well, MLS stuff seems like there's a lot of people chasing after that. It's really kind of difficult.

And then I'm not going to cold call FISBO people and offer them a nickel in three years. And so it was like, well, let's do the marketing that we see. There's people put the bandit signs up and things like that. And for the people that don't know what a bandit sign is, it's the ones on the telephone polls. But you have to be careful because most places they're illegal. And I honestly don't really recommend it anymore in most places. Some places you can get permits for them. So you can look into that with your city.

That sounds like a great idea, Danny. Yeah. I don't know. Somebody told me that was a good idea to, you know, put the disclaimer on that. But I don't do signs anymore. But anyway, so this is the other marketing, though, that you can do. And we were doing, what we started with was driving for dollars and driving around looking for vacant houses and sending letters to the owners and postcards. And, you know, I was interested in just getting some deals.

So I just didn't really worry too much about what was on the postcards. I think some of our initial ones had like a sky background with like some cash, like some $100 bills like spread across the front. on the back it just said, you know, I want to buy it. You know, I'd like to buy your house at so-and-so address and then give us a call. And it worked. You know, people called us. You know, it wasn't from every one of them, but, you know, we didn't send up that many to begin with and got some calls. But it was really interesting how that works because then before we were chasing after deals.

And sort of now it's like you get deals coming to you or leads at least. They may not be deals. But then, you know, you have people calling you and instead of you chasing them. You're sort of chasing them by putting the marketing out. So we always, like from the beginning, so we tried the MLS stuff and then went to that. And so I've always been under the impression that a lot of people do go after, you know, the seller marketing. That's a long way around that company. I was going to ask, why did your wife get involved?

I mean, like, you guys were debating. We never heard that part. We never heard what the tattoo is actually of. Yeah. Okay, so the tattoo is a three-bladed. airplane propeller because I'm crazy about aviation. And so I got a three-bladed propeller on my forearm. And then the debate with your wife was, it was just general conversation.

Like, why are more people not doing this is kind of what I'm hearing. Well, I don't know that we debated it. It was just more of a, yeah, I don't recall really debating. I don't know where that came from. I might have put words in your mouth that's possible. That was a really long story. Oh, yeah. It was somewhat interesting at least.

But, you know, I think a lot of people go through that, though. They struggle with where to, like, that's the talk that we had. It wasn't a debate. It was more of like talking about, you know, how it used to be with us trying to figure out everything that we can to find a lead. Because really, until you have leads, like you're not going anywhere in the business. So you don't need to buy the buyer's list. You don't need to do all this drama. You just got to get the leads, right?

Right. Start taking calls, right? You know, and talk to even if you're not sure where to get the money. And I can go into a whole other long story about how we start. I'm starting. Please don't. I mean, yeah, sure. Later.

Later. Well, here's what I want to know. I mean, how old are you right now? Do you mind me asking? I'm 37. Okay. So 12 years ago, you're 25-ish years old. And I looked 16.

Okay, you look 16. What advice does 37-year-old Danny give to 25-year-old Danny? Just getting started out. You're sitting down with you and your wife. You're the mentor now. What do you tell these, you know, complete newbies? how do you get going? Okay, so what I would tell myself is, first of all,

don't worry that you look too young. Have confidence in people will take you seriously. I don't know how many times. I'm sorry, I always think going to these stories and stuff, but how many times I went to the house and the people would actually tell me, so is your dad the one that buys the house? And I'm taking them back a little bit by it,

but you know, you just have to be confident and say, no, I'm actually the one. We've bought, you know, 20 ounces or, you know, whatever. But anyway, so I'm taking them back a little bit. I would tell myself because basically don't worry about people thinking I'm too young. Confidence goes a long way in all of this. When you're dealing with sellers, you know, honestly, they're trusting you to be actually able to close and buy their house so that these big decisions that they make with whatever

they're doing with the money or wherever they're moving to and all that sort of thing is going to be taken care of. So that's huge. You know, not enough people talk about, you know, how much trust they're having in us to be able to do what we're saying we're going to do. So having that confidence, I think, goes a long way. And that gets into sort of the mindset. So I'm going to take this answer and go forever with it.

But the mindset of like knowing, you know, like having the confidence of building and knowing that you're going to get deals, changes the way you approach all this, whether you know it or not. And I think the people that that can come to that conclusion and feel that way and be that way with the confidence when they're doing this end up with a lot more deals than the people that don't. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think there's so much conversation about getting going. There's so much conversation about building your business. There's so much conversation about the fears and things that people are afraid of. I wish there were more conversation about just getting that mindset that you need in order to be successful.

Right. I mean, because there is a frame of mind that you have to be in. And I think lots of people never start because of that frame of mind. It's why we ask the last question on every single show that Brandon asks about people succeeding versus not getting started. There is a frame of mind that you have to get to. And it's kind of fun to think back, particularly when there's folks who have been doing this for a long time to say, what has changed for me since then? because I had to be in the right mindset to get to the starting point. How did that mindset transition over time?

You've been doing this for 12 years. So my question to you is, what has that transition been? Because you first had to get to the place. Let me get started. How did you get to the place? I want to really start to grow this and scale this, become full time, and kind of go on and going on and on. Yeah, and that's interesting because you can make transitions in the positive direction,

but then you can also transition back to negative directions, even over this many years. And I was telling Brandon that, you know, that recently I sort of dealt with that. But in the beginning, you know, when there's the wondering about, is this possible in my area? You know, my father was flipping houses. So I knew it was possible. Even though he was in a different area, we're in San Antonio. He buys outside of San Antonio.

You know, so I saw other people doing it. And then, you know, we met our mentor and everything. And I knew that he had been doing it for a long time. So I knew. But even though you know other people that do it, you wonder if you're at a lot of. able to, right? You wonder if you are going to be able to do some of those things that they're going to be able, that they do. And until you really get that first deal, it's going so much on faith. It's going so much on, you know, having the ability to work through and just know that no matter

what you're going to make it. You're going to change things up as you go. And no matter what you're going to make it, do what has to be done and eventually you're going to make it. And so, I don't know, that seems like a lot of words for some people, but really there's a lot of meaning behind it. it and after you get that first one, you've done it. You know, you've done it and it becomes so much easier and the next one's come quicker and quicker and before you know it, you're wondering why you ever doubted it, right? So it's just getting that first one and the whole thing is just plowing ahead going, you know, I'm not giving up. If this isn't working, I'm not just going to throw my arms to say it doesn't work here. I can't do it. And it's funny because I used to think

before we had done our first deal because I think it took a six months or so to do it for, or six months or something. And I remember thinking, well, maybe, you know, like our mentor and other people we know, it was easier for them because there weren't as many investors. And probably a lot these days, people are thinking that same thing, right? So it's like you get the excuse, you know, the bail yourself out, like, you know, a reason, excuse to be able to give up because it's different now. But it's not. And that's where I'm coming back to this whole thing where I said that sometimes you make the transition back even, because things have gotten real heated here. and I went through several months of not getting a deal

and I was starting to think oh the competition's gotten to the level where it's crazy I'm just having more trouble getting deals and I started getting that mindset it was weird you know and I wasn't getting anything and then one day just I don't know I think I was talking to my dad or somebody I think it was my dad we were having breakfast and I think he said you know what just just put more effort into it

like you used to and I'm sure within this week you're going to have a deal. Well, I was able to call him like early the next week and say, I put three houses in a contract. That's awesome. Like it's just getting that mental shift again. And it's like I didn't even really do different marketing over that time period. It's just that all a sudden things, you know, it's the whole law of attraction thing maybe, but, you know, if you expect to get something, you're more likely to get it. So it's to always, you know, it seems hokey, pokey. Is that the right thing? Yeah. You know, it seems kind of funny. But, but there's a lot truth to that, I think. And so even experience investors can fall into that trap of thinking negatively.

It's not just new investors. So it's always good to take a step back and say, you know, am I just making excuses? Is this really the reality? I don't, you know, it is still easy to get deals. Wouldn't it be great if your houseplants paid rent while you were out of town? I mean, they've got the whole place to themselves, lots of sunlight, zero responsibilities. But no, they just sit there waiting for someone to spray them with some cool mist like a bunch of leafy loafers. But guess what? Your home actually could be earning you money while you're not there. Airbnb has a great feature called the co-host network, which makes hosting your home so easy. If you live far from your property or are away for extended periods, you can hire a local co-host to take care of the hosting for you.

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I mean, your path seems like a pretty good path for somebody who doesn't want to necessarily bang on doors or pick up the phone outbound, things like that. what other advice do you have for introverts who might just be afraid because they're like, well, I don't particularly love talking to people. I love the numbers. I love real estate. But man, I'm just afraid of people or whatever it is. I don't know. I'm not afraid of people. Drink lots of coffee. Power up with coffee. Nice. No, but seriously, no, it's a great question, though. I mean, because I really did struggle

with like how the heck am I going to go and talk to strangers and be confident and everything. but it's funny because about other things, I guess. Maybe I have trouble with small talk with people sometimes and things like that. But when it comes to real estate, I don't know what it is. You can't shut me up a lot of times with some of it. So you might find something out about yourself if you do do the marketing and you get a call and you've got to take the call and find out some things. And you might just find out that you are great at talking to people with these situations

and have a lot of fun with it. So it's just a matter of trying it because you might be surprised. I was completely surprised. I think during the other podcast episode we did, I think it was 18 was what we said. Yeah. With bigger pockets, I think I told the story of the first phone call that we got.

That was the number I didn't recognize. So it was from a marketing, and I threw the phone to my wife. Yeah, I remember that. Yep. And she fumbled around with it, but she, you know,

at least she took the call. I think we called them back two or three times afterwards and had to like ask them additional questions. But you know the next time the phone rang with another caller, I knew what I needed to ask. And you developed that over time. I like that. So I've got really one last set of quick questions before we move to the fire round.

I know Brandon wanted to ask something as well. So you're in a good market. Market's hot, you know, at least on the upside or, you know, positive side. It's hard to find deals, but you can get rid of them pretty quickly. I don't foresee that continuing forever. In fact, I think things are going to start getting a lot tougher pretty soon for a lot of markets. So you've been, you know, you've been doing this for a few cycles now, a cycle and a half, two cycles-ish. How does somebody continue running a flipping business when the market is turning

the other way and prices are potentially coming down? It's easier to, you know, to buy those deals, but getting rid of them might be a little more of a challenge. What do you do to remain competitive? And earlier you had spoken about, you know, buying properties from people who didn't survive. So how do you avoid being that guy? I think it's kind of one general question. Yeah, and it's actually very simple. No, but it really boils down to my whole thing all along. Like anytime I hear people talking about a lot of like crazy creative deal type stuff, it really, I don't know. It's just not me. I've never, maybe I'm just a simple person. I don't like to get into complex, crazy, risky situations that sound good on paper, but when you bring in the human

element just completely falls apart. Yeah. You know, so my whole thing has always been, like, so as an example, somebody says, I'm willing to buy that house as a lease option or a subject to or something, and I'll pay, like, you know, 20% more than I normally would because it's this type of financing and say, I don't like that at all. It's still, you're buying a thin deal. I don't care how you try to spice it up and make it seem like something's going to be

better because you've got some kind of other thing. What the numbers boiled down to is all. care about. I mean, if I can get it with subject to or something awesome, lower interest rate or something, you know, that's just an extra, it's a cherry on top or something, but I always just make sure that you stick with those conservative numbers because the, and if you always do stick with conservative numbers and buy and never adjust too much to try to, you know, get more deals, then you're not going to be that person that ends up when the down turn and prices start dropping stuck and then all of a sudden wondering what the heck you're going to do.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good advice. Well, I was going to say, you know, there's that famous quote, right, that says, like, I think Warren Buffett said about, you know, like, a rising tide lifts all ships, but what is it? Like, the falling tide shows who's swimming naked. You know, like, a lot of, like, really creative, clever, like, you said, like, I'll pay you more now and I'll weigh overpay for this property because I think the, you know, whatever. Like, that stuff might work in a great market, but when the market turns, those are the people left swimming naked.

I see that. In the last one, a lot of people lost a lot of stuff because they didn't think that could happen to them. Well, I was going to say really quick, I think it's a lot of that. But I think it's also a lot of untrained investors. I think it's a lot of folks who get in and don't know what they're doing, don't know how to evaluate the deals, by thin deals. Not because they're trying to do something fancy, but because they don't know their head from their tail and they're trusting an agent who probably doesn't know their head from their tail. And I think that's the bulk of the losers. but I think there's also a big set of losers

not besmirching these folks just saying financially losing who do exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, so I know I agree with you, Josh. You know, anytime anyone's trying to tell you the numbers for a deal and they're selling you that deal, you know, you might want to get

another opinion from somebody else if you're not capable of being real sure about your due diligence and making sure those numbers are accurate. So, yeah. And a good way do that is at biggerpock.com slash calc or bigger pockets calculator suites designed for just that purpose. Nice. Nice plug, Josh. That was good. Do you like that? Thank you. Thank you. All right, cool. Well, before we get out of here

and go to the fire round, I want to talk a little bit about the website idea, right? So people know you often as like the lead propeller guy, right? You run leadpropeller.com and that is an affiliate of Bigger Pockets. So full disclosure, you know, obviously you are an affiliate of you. But I love the idea of generating leads from a website. And clearly you're the expert on that. So I just want to talk a little bit about, like, you know, what should a good website, a good lead website? Like, what does that need to have?

Like, you know, I have one of, I have a lead propeller website, and it does really, really well for me. Why is that? I mean, what SEO things or what, you know, what can you tell us about that? Yeah, so with the websites, you know, no matter what type of website you have, you know, whether it's Leapel or not,

I think more so, like, you know, generating leads through SEO and getting your site up in the rankings. And for people I don't know SEO search engine optimization, so you optimize your website and try to get back links from other sites and things to get your site to show up in the search results for when people type in things like, you know, we buy houses or sell my house fast and things like that. But that takes time. And so what you want to do is include websites on your marketing and things like that. and then you can start with also pay-per-click advertising, which is Google AdWords and things like that, where you pay to have your ad displayed, but you don't pay to display it.

You just pay when someone clicks on your ad. And so you can generate traffic and leads that way. But as far as the website goes, so if you, you know, there's ways to get traffic, right? And we talked about SEO and then AdWords, pay per-click, so you can do things now and then build up SEO over time so you get some free traffic. But once you have the traffic to your website, what happens, right?

So they're coming there with a purpose. They have a situation. If we go back to the role playing where you called me and said you had a house for sale, like what is the mindset of what was your mindset? So if you were visiting the website and you wanted to sell a house quick because that situation, you sort of you want to have the website speak to you. Because that's what you're looking for it. You don't want to go to a site and have it say something like,

you know, we're awesome real estate people sold 20 houses in 2010. You know, it's like it doesn't matter to you. It doesn't speak to what you're looking for. before. So it's got to be very specific. And people don't understand sometimes, like, there's so many websites now and everything. When people go to a website, typically they're not reading, like you might think you have a website, people are going to read all the way through it, fall in love with it, all that kind of stuff. But really, they're scanning. Like, they go to the site. If they can't tell what it is about, it doesn't speak to them right away. They're probably bouncing, which means going

back, hitting the back button. So the headline goes a long way. So the headline, you know, needs to speak to them. And even just things as simple as we buy houses, get cash for your house within a week or something. Like something that's going to tell them exactly maybe what they're looking to do and get. And knowing that people aren't typically going to scroll down to the bottom of a website.

So you want to have your form up at the top to where they know and they know what you want them to do with your website. So when they go to the website, they need to know really quickly what it's about so it speaks to them and then know what you want them to do on your website. website so you have to have a clear call to action to get them to submit that form and and what we've

done with the websites is a two step process basically where we have a short form that just gets their contact information and property address and so it's not overwhelming like it's just a real quick thing and once they submit that you get a text and an email with those details and they're taken to a longer forum that asks more questions in a specific order so that you maximize how much they answer because it sort of walks them through the reasoning of why they're wanting to sell and all that kind of stuff. And so even if they don't fill out the second one, although in my experience, 95% of people fill out the second one also. But of the ones that don't, you can still contact them because you at least got their initial contact information. Now, I wanted to share real quick a couple tools that are free, free to use, and it's great because it really shows you, no matter what type of site you have.

it will show you what people are doing on your site. And the company, the product is SumoMe, so it's S-U-M-O-M-E, and they've got free, and I'm not affiliated with them or associated with them at all. So I just think they have really cool tools that are free. So you can get those and put those on your site, and what the two of the tools that I like to use are the heat map tool and the content analysis tool. And so the heat map tool, it's really cool,

it'll show you a heat map. It'll have an overlay on your website, and you can see where everybody's clicking on your website and the frequency of the clicks and everything. So you can see, like, the hot spots are where they're clicking more and all that kind of stuff. And so you set this thing up to record on your website on whatever page you want to find out where they're clicking, and you can view those. And then the content analysis tool shows you sort of, like, how far they're scrolling down. So it shows what they're looking at, and if they scroll down, so when you look at it, like,

typically the top part is really bright, orange, red, yellow, because, That's where people see when they get to it. But you'll be amazed a lot of times when you go to the bottom, like no one goes to the bottom. But anyway, those tools are awesome. Well, I was going to say, because if most people run a software like that, I mean, if you run that on your website, you're going to find out that majority people, like you said,

don't even read your whole site. And when, like, they're there for like two seconds, and if they don't know exactly what to do within those two seconds, they're going to leave. They're gone. And so you've got to have a very clear call to action at the top, you know, a clear headline. and hook them in.

And yeah, you don't need to spend, I mean, whatever. I think it's important. And yeah, I've used SumoMea number of times. I actually really like the product as well. And yeah, it's free. So I know that you, I'm going to put up in, you sent me a picture of your actual lead gen site. I'm going to put that in the show notes page at biggerpockets.com slash show 144.

I'll put up the actual picture of what yours, people can see where they clicked on your site. It's kind of cool. Just kind of neat things. So check it out. Also, two things really quick. Sumo Me, a friend of ours, Noah Kagan runs that, and it's a great product. And, you know, I'm not getting paid to plug this, plug it either. But, you know, we love Noah and we love what

he's got there. And so, yeah, definitely recommend folks, check out Sumo Me. And then, you know, we've been talking about your site's lead propeller. And we've got a perk on BiggerPockets for our pro members. If you go to BiggerPockets.com slash perks, we offer a discount to folks. who purchased lead propeller websites. And we are affiliates. We actually make some money for it. It's a good way to support us, support Danny with great websites.

But we only really kind of get behind products that we like and believe in with founders that we like and believe in as well. So definitely check that out. And if you like it, you like it. If you don't, go find something else. One more cool thing. I just wanted to say that because I think this is just cool.

It's a really an example. And this could be used in negotiation at all, but it's something that you do, Danny, with lead propeller, and you've done on your site. But again, people could take this, even if they don't use lead propeller, they could use it anywhere. The idea that you ask on that secondary form, how much, or what's your asking price? And then you ask a second question, and you said, what's the lowest you'll take? I got a lead in like three days ago on an apartment complex, and the guy wrote, what's the, you know, what is your asking price? 250. What's the least you'll take?

230. And in 20 grand in half a second. He just told me. I mean, now I can, now that's the point I start negotiating is at 230, not at 250, where had that not been, I mean, it's so simple yet so effective. And I just, I had to share that. I think that's awesome. No, it is awesome. And it's amazing how many people actually give you the lower price.

Almost every single person will. Yep. They'll fill you an asking price. I mean, I don't know if they're like saying least and then they put that and then they go and change their asking price to be higher. You know, but they're always different and they're always lower, you know, so they'll give you a, you know, the site will negotiate for you. is pretty cool to see. I use that just in general negotiation everywhere. So I think it's just a cool tip.

So very cool. All right. Well, let's move over to the last segment of the show, which we lovingly call our... It's time for the fire round. All right. These questions come direct out of the Bigger Pockets forums. I pulled everyone about an hour and a half ago. So these are all fresh, hot off the grill.

So number one, I just started a business and I quit my job. How do I get funding now? How do you get funding for his real estate, for his real estate deals? How does he get funding? He might want to get a job for yourself for a little while. But anyway, you know, because you've got to have something to live on. Real estate deal, the paychecks might be a little bit of time between them, but they can be big, which is great.

But yeah, you don't want to end up doing things quickly, making bad decisions because you don't have income coming in. So that's always recommended. But, you know, yeah, so if you're not maybe, And I'm guessing what you're meaning is like you can't go to the bank and get funding for a deal. We never went to a bank to get funding for our digals either, so you can definitely do this. The way that my wife and I got started was with a mentor that put up the money for the deals. And we did all the work.

We found the deals, negotiated, put them on a contract, handled the rehabs and sold them, and then we split the profits 50-50. So we didn't really have any risk because we didn't put any money into it. The mentor did. And the way to get – and so a lot of people leave the answer at that, right? So it's like, get a mentor and they'll put half the money. So how do you get that person, though? So I could pay $50,000 to get that mentor, can I?

Oh, no, that's not what I mean. Well, you don't have money, so you're not going to pay the $15,000. Yeah, right, all right. So that's, yeah, so you can go to real estate investor association meetings, right? And most cities have these. Most of the time I think they're free to go to. It's been a long time since I've been to one. But you need to talk around.

Get out of your comfort zone. and talk to people, and it can just be about asking who here has been doing this the longest. Who's, like, who can you give me a name of somebody in town that's been doing a lot of deals for a long time? And even ask, hey, do you know if they mentor people? And you want to find out who that is, right? So there's probably a couple people in most places that people know of that do this to train other people. And not necessarily for money either. You know, not like someone that's going to be like, well, it's 50,000 and I'll train you for a day or something.

But you can find out who's like active investor and willing to mentor and stuff like that. And I don't recommend going immediately to that person and introducing yourself and saying, hey, mentor me or hey, can you mentor me? Don't do that. Don't do it. It's awkward. It's weird. It's like going up to a girl and being like, will you marry me?

I don't know you, but, you know, will you marry me? Absolutely. Did that work? It's weird. Absolutely. It took a few years. Not a good idea. So then, so what you do, though, is you make sure that you get your education, right?

because you don't want to be asking them questions that you can easily learn on bigger pockets or somewhere else. Get as much education as you can. Start your marketing. Start getting calls. You get a good lead. You can call that person

or talk to that person. You might want to introduce yourself to them at some point and make some small talk stuff. But you know, you get that lead and then you contact them and just basically say, look, I got this hot lead. I think it's a good deal.

You know, would you mind helping me analyze it and maybe we can do this deal together or I can wholesale it to you or something. Get your foot in the door. and the fact that you're out there going after it is going to tell them so many things about you and they're going to want to work with.

So that's how you do it. I think that that tip was fantastic. I mean, because so many people asked me, will you mentor me, where you mentor me? But nobody's ever brought a deal and said, will you mentor me through this deal? That would make all the difference, right? I mean, I would be happy to help somebody with a deal

that they bring if they want to split the deal with me, right? I mean, like, come on. Like, I don't have to do anything. You're greedy, greedy. I'm just saying, like, I mean, it would tell me that they're serious, that they've already started their marketing. Anyway, I think that's fantastic. So, all right, next fire round question.

Yes, our fire round is become a not-so-firing fire-round. We got to keep these snappy. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's me. No, it's okay. I just rambled on about this stuff. Yeah, a little bit. But it's okay.

We don't, you know, we're not mad at you. You know, surely this next question is going to have like a 10-minute answer as well. But we'll, no, I'll make it five words. All right. All right. Hi, guys. Should I do it in the voice? No, I'm not care.

You should do it in the voice. Hi, guys. My name is Jen. Hi, Jennifer. Hi, Jennifer. Oh, hi. How are you? Are we going to role play?

Hi, guys. My name is Jennifer and I'm new to wholesaling. I just sent out a batch of yellow letters and got my first phone call. Unfortunately, it was an angry caller. I guess he was upset because he received my letter. He left a voicemail because I didn't get to answer. How do you guys react to these calls? Okay, see, I was born in 19...

I was born in 19... Shapiro. This is going somewhere. Trust me, we just have to get through my... But anyway, okay, so, yeah, you're going to get those calls when you do marketing. And you just have to ignore them. Take them off your mailing list and move on, because you will get calls from people that are like, I need your help, and I'm so glad I found you.

So, yeah. Yeah, I love that. So the ones who say, I'm going to call the cops if you keep mailing me or, you know, I'm going to come kick your butt. Just move on, ignore them. Yeah, and that's always the, well, I don't know if it's funny, but I've had somebody call me before and, you know, go through this long rant where they were going to kick my butt and all kinds of stuff. And at the end, I had to say, well, I need your address so I can take you off my list. And obviously, they didn't want to do it at that thing, all this thing, so they just hung up.

But the next time I mailed, I got a call. And I know it's the same guy, but it was like a different voice. And he's like, could you please take me off your list? Yeah, here's my address. That's funny. But anyway. Cool. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, that's just what it is. You ignore them. If you're getting, if you're getting critics and you're getting people angry, it means you're probably doing something right. I mean, generally speaking. So, cool. All right. I just sent out a collection of 550 direct mail letters and I got zero phone calls. What am I doing wrong? All right. So the first thing to look at is your list. So I guess you were, did he say absentee owner? It didn't say. Okay. Yeah. So the first thing to look at, is your list? Is it old? Is it not narrowed down to have any signs of why people might be motivated? So, you know, a lot of people target absentee owner. And that could be something with competition, because if you're getting some list that's really easy to get, you might have a lot of other people mailing that list. So the first thing I would do is look at your list and drill it down. So if you look at your list and, you know, if it's not very targeted, so you could, even if you said I want

maps the owner, but you just select it on a map somewhere. And maybe you're targeting areas where the property values are like way above median. You know, the likelihood of someone with a house that value calling you is pretty slim. So you sort of need to narrow down your criteria. And I don't know, if you want me to go into a little bit of criteria, I can. But we can. That's up to you. Josh? I mean, I think we're, I think we're good at the, you know, quick and dirty. Check your list. make sure you're sending to a solid list that not everyone in their mom is sending to.

And then, you know, if that list looks like it's okay, you know, you may want to look at the content of what you're actually sending. Most of the time it's a list though. Yeah, for sure. All right, cool. All right, last question of the fire round. Somebody offered me a free property.

What's the worst that could happen? Well, is this real? Yeah, somebody put that in the forums. That is a legitimate question. Like, is it a slam dunk? no matter if there's a free property, that's slam dunk for sure. It's a good deal. Wow, free property. Let's see. I've offered a thousand dollars for a house before. That's close to free. Yeah, I mean, I guess if there's not certain problems with the house that could end up getting you sued or something.

Yeah. You know, or some like liens or something. I mean, if you do your due diligence, to still make sure there's not some sort of lawsuits or, you know, first of all, you have to ask, why is it, you know, why are you giving it away for free? I mean, that's what I would find out. But, you know, probably if, if, there's, everything title is clear and everything's good. I don't know that you could really lose. But you said the key things, right? Check title. Make sure there's no liens. Make sure there's no lawsuits. If all that stuff kind of checks out and there's no problems with the property, then you're probably in a fairly decent position, right? Sure, yeah. I got a lead one time on a house that was,

I think they were asking like $10,000 for it or something like that. I went to look at it. And even if I put it paid full price for it, it would have cost me $10,000 to tear the thing down. and the property value itself was worth like nothing. I mean, it maybe even cost me, like, let's say I offered them, yeah, even their full price. I could not have made money on it probably. Maybe a couple grand, maybe after closing costs, but I don't even know. So anyway, so. Well, I mean, there's other stuff for mediation, right?

I mean, yeah, if it's all for the best or something. I mean, there's a lot of. Yeah, it gets into a lot of the why. Why is it free? Yeah, yeah. What's the issue? And free doesn't always, I mean, at the end of the day, I think what we're all here saying is don't necessarily just say, yeah.

because somebody's giving you a free property because there's plenty of free properties up in Detroit that may not be worth having. The property that I offered $1,000 on, the house actually was a house that had Piram Beam Foundation, so it had Cedar Post supporting it. Well, at some point in the past, the owner at some point decided he wanted a slab, right?

A slab foundation. So what did he do? He went the easy route and just pumped concrete underneath the house. I'm not kidding. Oh my gosh. This thing was all cracked up with like four inch wide cracks and say it was crazy. Wow. Awesome. Don't do that either, people.

Yeah, don't do that. All right. Moving on to the end of the show, which we call our... These questions are asked of every guest every week. And I know you've been on the show before, so you answered these, but we'll ask them again. Maybe they've changed. Number one, what is your favorite real estate book? I would say, I should have prepared for this.

I've never heard of that title. Who's it by? Who's that one? No, no, it's not. Yeah, I don't know. For some reason, I'm just thinking rich dad, poor dad. It's not really real estate, but just thinking in general of... A good choice is always the book in investing with no and low money down.

Oh, yeah, my book is always a good choice to choose. Sometimes I... Absolutely. Thanks, good. Or a millionaire, real estate investor. Okay, that's a good way, too. All right, cool, cool. What about business book?

Any business books that you've read lately that have captivated you? Yeah, the one thing. Yeah, I love that book. Good book. Nice, nice. Cool. All right, hobbies, what have you been doing for fun lately? Well, I wish I've had more time to fly.

So I fly a little airplane, but a little two-seat prop plane. I have a lot of fun on in. That's the little one that's on your arm, you kind of like, you know. That's exactly what he does, Josh. This guy's an idiot. Danny, I apologize. That's true. That's right.

Yeah, so that. And then I've got five kids, so they love my kids and my family. We spend a lot of time and have a lot of things to do with them. So we've got twins that turned 16 this year and got cars, and so that's interesting. Wow. Yeah. Twin and 16. Good luck to you, buddy.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. My final question of the day, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? They go into it without thinking there's a chance they're going to fail. Right. So it's, I'm going to make it happen.

And it's like what we talked about earlier. We're going to make it happen no matter what. No matter what happens as things come our way and things, problems come up. I'm just going to find out how to get past them or change what I'm doing. But no matter what, I'm going to make this happen. Perfect. Love it. Love it.

All right. Where can people find out more about you? They can find out more about me at flippingjunky.com. That's my blog. So flippingjunky. com. I've been blogging there for a long time. And then I've got a book on Amazon called,

Flipping House is exposed, and that's 34 weeks of my life as real estate investor, all the leads that I got, and analysis of all those and all that kind of stuff. And then also just released the Flipping Junkie Podcast, and it's awesome, I think. I was on it, so must be. I think, yeah. No, but the first person I interview with my father, and so anybody that's followed the blog for a while probably would be pretty interested in that conversation. And then the second interview, I actually had Brandon in the hot seat. So more about Brandon. There you go. Right on. Right on. Cool, man. Well, thank you for coming back on the show. We definitely appreciate it. I think there was a lot of pretty good information,

you know, as always. So we definitely appreciate you being here. And of course, you know, we thank you for being part of the community of bigger pockets. And, and, you know, I look forward to seeing you around. All right. Well, thanks for having me back. It shows that I didn't really mess it up too much on the first place. Maybe the bigger pockets tattoo helped get me back on the show. It did.

That was your ticket. Thank you, Danny. All right, Danny. Thanks so much, man. See you around. All right, guys. Big thanks to Danny Johnson again for coming on the show. We definitely appreciate him coming out of his shell for today's show.

A great interview, a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. It was good. So I guess, you know, ratings reviews, all that good stuff. You guys know the drill. And we'll see you around. We'll see around for sure.

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