BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 15: From $80k in Credit Card Debt to 100+ Deals with Glenn and Amber Schworm

Episode Date: April 25, 2013

Starting out with nothing is not easy. Luckily – this week on the BiggerPockets Podcast we are talking with husband and wife team Glenn and Amber Schworm, who have successfully done just this and scaled their real estate business to over 100 deals! On today’s show, Glenn and Amber share a ton of great tips and advice about flipping, wholesaling, and marketing for real estate investors – both new and seasoned. Read the Transcript for episode 15 with Glenn and Amber Schworm In This Show, We Cover: How desperation (and $80,000 in credit card debt) forced Glenn and Amber to succeed Using a mail-carrier to find deals for you The mistakes made on the first flip that helped them prosper on over 100 other flips Working with your spouse as your business partner Creating systems and teams to build a bigger business Tips for finding private investors to fund your real estate investing The toughest thing Glenn and Amber ever have to face in their business Tips for making money from wholesaling Marketing for motivated sellers Books Mentioned in the Show: The BiggerPockets Book on Flipping Houses Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey Think and Grow Rich by N. Hill The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz Links from the Show: BiggerPockets’ Facebook Page BP Podcast 010 : Flipping Houses 101 with J Scott Do You Have the Mindset to be on Shark Tank? Deals that Keep you Moving Forward….$20K into $85K in 5 days! BP Podcast 012 : Wholesaling and Marketing with Sharon Vornholt Tweetable Topics Don’t be afraid to ask. (Click to Tweet!) You can read the books and go to the seminars, but in the end – it’s a people business.(Click to Tweet!) Behavior that is rewarded is usually repeated. (Click to Tweet!) Invest in your people… they are your future. (Click to Tweet!) Action equal results. Massive action equals massive results.(Click to Tweet!) Learn More about Glenn and Amber SignatureHomeBuyers.com Glenn’s BiggerPockets Account Glenn’s BiggerPockets’ Blog Posts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show 15. 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 height, 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. Hey, everyone.

This is Josh Dorkin, founder and CEO of BiggerPockets.com, the Real Estate Investing Social Network, Information Hub, and Marketplace. And this is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Here I am with my co-host, Brandon Turner, live and in the flesh. We're actually sitting in the same room. It's kind of weird. That is kind of weird. We've never actually done this.

I don't know. People might not know it. But when we're recording this podcast, we're usually like 1,000 miles away from each other. But for the first time ever, we are at the same awkward kitchen table, about six inches from each other. It's a little bit weird. A little weird. He's a little close, and his breath, not that good. I'll blame it on the steak we just ate.

It was good. Yes. So, yeah, no, listen, we've got Brandon in town. It's been a lot of fun. We actually did something pretty exciting today. Actually, yesterday we did something pretty cool. We had a little Denver Bigger Pockets meetup, which is really, really cool. And here's a quick tip, not the quick dick, but a quick tip.

All these Denver guys got together because they all have keyword alerts set up for the word Denver on bigger pockets. So when we were like, hey, everyone in Denver, let's get together, they all showed up. It was pretty cool. It was. But today, the, the cool thing that we did was, we went skydiving. Yes. But not like jumping out of a plane at a million feet and freaking out skydiving. We did the indoor skydiving. And it was awesome. It was, it was very fun. It was, For those of you who don't know, Brandon is 6.5, he's not 6'12, as I decided last week. But watching this ginormously tall guy in this round chamber spin around was lots of fun. And you can actually see photos of Brandon and myself indoor skydiving on the Bigger Pockets Facebook page, correct?

Correct. And that leads us to today's official quick tip. So real quick, our quick tip is go to the Facebook page of Bigger Pockets and go like us because we like friends and we have a lot of conversation going on over there. And we need friends. And we need friends. So, yeah, head on over there. Facebook.com slash bigger pockets. There you go.

Facebook.com slash bigger pockets. So head over there. Yeah, like I said, it's great. So come connect with us there and check out the picture of me and Josh floating and flying. Lots of fun. Lots of fun. So today we're going to talk to Glenn and Amber Schwarm. Glenn and Amber are house flippers.

They do a little bit of wholesaling. They've actually flipped over 100 houses and counting. And they own a company called Signature Homebuyers, which is now, I think they're talking about being on pace of doing over 60 houses a year now. They're fun couple. They like to do crazy stuff like skydiving, which, you know, this is a perfect lead-in. And, you know, we're doing. We're really excited to have them.

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Thank you. Thank you. This is our first four-way conversation. We're very excited about it. So thanks for coming on board. And why don't we just jump right into this thing. What kind of investing do you guys do? We primarily buy homes, renovate, and sell.

So we're flippers. We do a lot of wholesaling as well lately, but we kind of cut our teeth on full renovation. and selling. That's what we did. Gotcha. Gotcha. So flippers and wholesalers, perfect because that is the plan. We want to talk about both of those things today. How long have you guys been at it? About four and a half years, right? Yep. Four and a half years so far. Excellent. Excellent. Oh, by the way, I do want to make note that they do, Glenn and Amber, do have a new baby who is actually hanging out with us in the room, well, virtual room here.

And so if there's any kind of interference from said baby, you know, deal with it, guys. It may be me crying and maybe the baby. Nice. Okay. So you guys have been at it for about four and a half years, which means you kind of got into it right as the bubble was, you know, had popped and things are, you know, getting a little chaotic. How did that play into the whole decision making on getting in? Was that part of your decision? was, hey, real estate is going crazy.

It's hot. It's cold. I mean, what made you guys jump in? No, I don't think that was our decision at all. I think we did it out of, I mean, desperation. We started the business. I was about $80,000 in credit card debt, and we were both going through divorces at the time,

not from each other from different people. And we were going through that. And so really difficult time, I think we had always talked about doing real estate. And I have always, you know, I had read books. I had bought courses many, many years ago, 20 years ago plus. And so always had an interest in real estate, always followed it, had friends that did it for a living. And, you know, I think we just, we wanted to get started.

So we did our first house and, you know, kind of went all in with it. And I don't know if you want details of that now. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, tell us about that first deal, what it looked like. So the first deal, we, we put. purchased a home that was in a neighborhood that I lived in for 10 years. And we actually, I'll give you a little background on how we found that we, uh, I became, uh, friends with the mail carrier because I'd see her every day. I'd see her every day. And I'd say, boy,

if you ever see any houses, let me know. And so she did. She let me know about one. I was actually in the shower and she came in and yelled and say, hey, there's a, there's a, there's a house up the road. There's some people working on it. So I got to the shower and actually, I actually ran up to the house and walked in. And there was a couple that were Probably, what would you say in their 80s? Yeah. Probably in their 80s. And they were putting a countertop in.

If you ever put a countertop in, you know that it's not easy. And they were trying to cut the sinkhole, and they're in their 80s. And it's probably about 85 degrees outside, probably about 95 in the house. And I walked in and said, you guys have any interest in in selling the house to us. And so we met them on a few different times. We really had no idea what we were doing. I called a friend that we could still obtain financing at that time. It was just at the tail end of when you could get, if you had good credit, you could get a loan, a no income or no dock loan.

And that was the very tail end of that. So I called the buddy of mine and called the buddy of mine and said, look, I said, can I get a mortgage in this house? And we did. The funny part of that story is that with the at closing, at the closing table as we're buying the house, I said to the woman, I said, you know, I'm just out of curiosity. When did you guys decide you wanted to sell the house? and she said, the minute you walked in the door. So looking back, you know, you're 80 years old. It's hot. It's sticky.

It was her. She inherited the house and they were just trying to get, they were trying to essentially flip it themselves, but realize, I think they realized the first few weeks in, my God, what have we done? Yeah. So we walked in, bought the house. We did all the work ourselves. We really had no money. We maxed out every credit card we had, every line of credit. I had a little bit of home equity on one of the houses that I owned.

we maxed everything out. Still maintained our good credit rating, but we maxed everything out. We actually, by the time we did all the work ourselves, right? Yeah. Except for what? Except for the hardwood floors and some of the painting. Okay. Yeah.

So that's right. Yeah, we had a gentleman come help us with that. But other than that, we did all the work ourselves. It took us, what, three months, four months? Yeah. I think we planned on having it done in two weeks, and it wound up taking like four months. Yeah. That sounds very familiar.

Didn't. didn't have any contracting background at all, really didn't know much about it. And, you know, just, again, we needed the money. We needed the money. We wanted a lifestyle change. We wanted to do it. We thought that that would be the way to do it. So we sold the house and wound up at the end of the day.

I think we held it for like six months, eight months, something like that. And at the end of the day, we were down to our last $1,500 of cash credit. line of credit, whatever. We were done to our absolute last pennies to survive. And we weren't sure when that ran out what we were going to do. We're just praying that house is going to sell. And thankfully it finally did. And I think we cleared around 15,000 profit at the end of the day,

which, you know, looking back, that was, you know, it's not certainly not what we try and shoot for an hour on a deal. But for us, after we paid all the credit card debt back off, we made $15,000. and we realized that, you know, this had potential. It wasn't life-changing money by any stretch of the imagination, but it had potential. That's great. So we went to the next house.

I think we, the next one was probably the one that really got us hooked. And if you want to hear about that, I'd be happy to share with that one. Well, before you jump into that really quickly, you know, you mentioned talking to the mail carrier. And I just wanted to reiterate that point because I think it's a really, really good piece of advice that anyone who's listening wants to jump on. you know, using your mail care. I mean, they walk the neighborhoods. They know it. They're a really good source for insider information. So definitely, you know, get a relationship with them. It's a great way to find deals. And Brandon's pointing at himself. So I don't know if that means he's the man or if that means he wants to talk. But once you say something. I just wanted to add, the thing that really stood out to me there is something that people talk about a lot, you know, seasoned investors, is that you were solving somebody's problem. You know, price is not the only issue.

I mean, these older people, like their problem, like you said, was the heat and the fact that they were over their heads and they, you know, they couldn't remodel the house themselves and didn't want to. So, you know, that that was much more important to them than, you know, price. So I just wanted to point that out because I think that's huge. So I guess I'm also wondering, Amber, actually, I have a question specifically for you is what was your thought? I mean, I'm assuming maybe I could be wrong, but Glenn, you were probably the one that, I'm guessing that was driving this since you kind of had a, you had read the books and the courses. Like, what was your thought, Amber, going into this? Well, Glenn and I make a really good team because Glenn's more of the numbers guy. Like, in our business, what he does is the buying and selling and dealing with all the attorneys and all the paperwork.

And I kind of have the role that most people would not anticipate that what I would have. And that's the project management role. And even in the beginning, I'm, you know, I'm the designer. I pick out all the fixtures and the colors and the textiles and all that for the house. So we make a really good team in that aspect, I think. She's an amazing designer. really makes our houses set apart, but she's great at that part. I don't have vision when I walk in a house at all. I see the numbers very clearly. I walk in. I can see if it's going to work

or not. And she looks at it. Sometimes I'll say, is this going to work? And she'll say, yeah, I can make it work. And I say, really? She says, you got to trust me, I can do it. So we are a really good team in that respect. Yeah, I can go in a house that is a hoarder house that smells like cat pee and tell him if it's going to work or not. Nice. Yeah, she's great like that. And, you know, it's a lot like we did a show with Jay Scott. I don't remember which show number it is at this point, but he and his wife are very similar in their team. She does the visual, the staging stuff. And it's great to have a team, a husband-wife team. It's really important if you're lacking in one area to have your spouse or partner really

fill that gap. So that's awesome. My wife and I do the same thing. She's the smart one. I think we knew that. Yes. That's always the way it is. You know, the older you get, the more you realize that. They are the smart ones. They are. So, you know, that probably segues nicely into the next piece because that next house I want to tell you about that's the one that hooked us.

But that, I'll tell you about our teamwork on that. This next house was in the same neighborhood. We actually bought our first, I think, four houses or out of our first six houses, four of them were from the mail carrier. And we paid her referral every time she brought them to us. And, you know, listen, they're not supposed to tell you a lot of stuff like that, but they're people. They're humans. And, you know, it's, they'll give you information if you can ask for it, you know, if you become friendly with them. So we do take care of her and give them referral fees and that kind of stuff.

But this next deal we found was about two doors down from the home that I own for 10 years. And my ex-wife and kids still live there when they weren't living with us. and we got some inside information on the home from the person across the street. They kind of told us, they said, listen, we own the house. We have a problem. Someone's living there. We want to get them out. Here's what we'll take.

Instead of having to negotiate, they said, here's it we'll take. And we looked at the numbers and said, we can make that work. So we bought that home, and we had the same type of financing, but we had, we really were back down. We'd used the $15,000 we had to survive for the next month or two. Then we had to max our credit cards out again. But here's where it kind of got interesting. We bought that house and was it 33 days? Yep.

33 days. We did all the work ourselves, teamwork. We worked 15 to 18 hour days. Yeah, they were long. So, I mean, the neighbors felt so bad. They were bringing food across to us and coming to see us. And, you know, it was a good thing. But we, in 33 days, we turned that house over.

We had an open house that was jam-packed with people. and we sold that house in a multiple bid situation for $2,000 over what we were asking. And this is definitely, I think this is 2008. This is definitely the time that people were saying, you know, run for the hills, real estate's no good, no one's buying houses. And we actually made about $33,000 profit on that deal. And we were in and out of that thing in no time. I think one of the differences with that house that new people could, a nice little tidbit for someone that's getting started is we had a better.

plan for that house. Every night, we would sit down and say, what do we need to do the next day? And we would stay there until we got that list done. And that's why we were able to accomplish that in 33 days, whereas the first house took us considerably longer. We went over budget on. But the second house, we had more of a detailed plan, and that made all the difference in the world. Yeah, for sure. Well, that reminds me, Glenn, you had a post on the bigger pockets, I guess the blog the other day called, do you have the mindset to be on? shark tank and you talked about um you talked about the importance of you know not setting a how much your time is worth and saying well you know i'm not going to work that many hours that

you know what can you tell us about that because i thought that was an awesome post uh tell us in what respect what would you like to know well i guess i if you could just kind of explain like your your theory behind you know if you work people like to say well i'm not going to work 18 hours a day because that would only account to you know ten dollars an hour and i'm worth more than that I guess you have any thoughts on that? You know, I think it's a matter of, you know, like I said, I think it was that post, another post. We invest our time. And when you invest something, you're hoping for a greater return.

And so you may not get it. People invest money all the time and don't get a great return. But if you invest your time, you may not get a great return. It might be $10 an hour. But I can tell you in this case, we invested our time. I've never done the math on it. I actually never do the math to determine an hourly rate. It's just not how my brain works.

But there was two of us who worked 18 hours a day for 33 days straight. May have had a half a day off here and there if we slept in one morning. But, and we, you know, we profited. It was a little over $33,000. So even if you split our time, that's, you know, that's not a bad income for a month. So I don't care how many hours you worked for it. So it's $55 an hour. All right.

I'm an iron man. That was nice. Just out of curiosity, is that per, is that for each of us? Oh, we, actually, you each worked 18 hour days. Yeah, cut that in half. So that's $27. So be it. So 27 bucks an hour.

People may say, I'm not worth that. Or I'm, I'm, you know, that's too small for me. Maybe so. But the education that we learned from that deal, I forgot all about that. That's a good point you brought up that we had a daily plan. Every, every night we went home and said, you know, as exhaust as we were. And, you know, tensions can run high when you've got too tight. pay personalities and they're working too, you know, but we managed through. We had that plan every day.

And we learned so much by that because that plan, if you look back, I'd never thought about this till now, but that was the beginnings of what we have our scope of work now. Right. That was the early days of what a scope of work look like. We just did it ourselves. You know, we held ourselves accountable every day. But, you know, and now, if you look at that time invest, maybe it was $27 an hour, but now we're not on job sites. You know, we have, I think right now we have, I just counted this morning. I think I have 14, we have 14 houses that are in process, whether it be they're just finishing up, they're staging, we're shooting video, or they're under construction, or we're just about to close on them. So, you know. I think there's a real good point to be made that Glenn mentioned

too about the education that you get from your first several deals. I mean, we still, we've been in the business for four and a half years and we still learn stuff, but especially in the very beginning, maybe you're not making as much as you want to make. Maybe you have to partner up with somebody Yelts and make less because they've got the money or whatever. But just the sheer education you get, you can't put a dollar figure on that. So I think that's a huge aspect. And wasn't that the house, too, that I sold my car? So we had the money to do. Yeah. She has to tell you this is a good story. So we didn't have quite enough money to finish the renovations. So talk about not only the education you get, but the sacrifices sometimes you have to make in order to get your business started.

I had a C230 compressor sport Mercedes that I really, really liked. I had about $10,000 equity in it, and we needed that money to finish the renovation so we could finish the house and get it on the market. So I actually had to sell my car just so we'd have enough money to finish. Wow. We spent the next few months. Oh, a year with one car. Yeah, a year with one car as we're building the business.

And that, you know, you may say boo-hoo, but we still, we had two kids that had to go back and forth to everything under the sun and school and everything else with one car. So it was, you know, definitely a sacrifice. My point to that before was that now we've got all these houses going. and we're not going to all of them. We have teams of people that do things because we've built a system that helps us to do that. So that time invested now is able to train other people to do that work for us. Yeah, for sure.

And we'll get into that. We definitely want to talk about how you guys kind of started to build out your system and grow it. And, you know, boo-hoo to you and your sacrifice on that Mercedes. Gosh, done it. Her ruby slippers were way too tight. So, you know, before we get it, you know, before we get it. get into some of the more detailed stuff on that. Have you guys, so have you guys have any failure, you know, obviously you've made mistakes,

everybody makes mistakes. Have you had projects where you guys have actually lost money or, you know, have you guys always been successful in terms of turning profit on your deals? No, we've had out of 100 plus deals, we're well over 100 deals now. I think we've had about three that were not profitable. I can certainly share some details, but that happens. You know, you don't need to get into the details. I don't mind.

No, no, no. I mean, we're not going to have time if we do that. But let's talk about like there's got to be one or two things that led to those losses, right? So, you know, what would you say the keys were in actually losing money on 3% of your deals or so? I would say the first deal that I'm thinking about, the tip is to do your own homework and make sure you do it thoroughly and run your numbers realistically. I've seen a lot of great posts on bigger pockets of people that say, you know, trust the numbers. And even as someone who's done 100 deals, I read that. I forgot who wrote that post.

Sorry, I should give them credit. But it was something about trusting the numbers. And I thought, boy, that is so true. You know, we didn't trust the numbers on our first deal. An agent came to us and said, I know this neighborhood. These houses sell fast. It's a quick flip. Every time I hear quick flip down, the skin and my neck crawls.

I go, quick flip, huh? Yeah, good for you. Well, you invest in it that if it's so quick. And we invested in it in something that was, you know, she said it was a quick flip. And it wasn't. We had every problem under the sun and it didn't sell for what they thought. And we wound up losing about $4,000 on the deal. You know, and it was, it was.

It was, believe it or not, it was probably at the time not a good experience, but now, again, from what we learned, it's been a fantastic experience because those mistakes we don't make anymore. Someone says, I have a quick flip. I say, yeah, call somebody else. I would also like to add that in our business, we grew a little bit too fast at one point, and we had too many projects going at once so we couldn't start them as soon as we wanted to. So preparation, I think, is key. Yeah. maintaining your, you know, controlling your holding cost and your soft cost that you don't see every day, that will kill you if you don't maintain that. And that's what happened on the other two deals. Yeah, that's true. And I think you hit on something really important there was don't just trust your realtor to tell you what the property is going to be worth. I had a property once that the realtor said it would be worth 110 when it was finished. And we bought it, I think, for 40, put 20 into it. By the time we sold it, we sold it for 60. I mean, we sold it for 60. I don't know how you get that far off, 110 versus 60.

And I know the market was dropping then, but still, like, I should have never just, I mean, realtors are, they're the optimistic. And, you know, that's their job to be optimistic. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They're fine. Right. They want you to, and not that they're trying to be dishonest, they may really believe that the house myself for that. But let me tell you, until it's your own money, you think very differently about it. Yep. And that's a great point, by the way, Glenn, because I got to tell you, I mean, you know, I've been doing this for eight and a half years.

And I know a ton of realtors who are, you know, they work with investors. A good, good, good chunk of them all want to be investors. And they haven't had the experience of working from the other side. I'm not saying all of them, but, you know, that's a really good point. Until they've kind of walked in your shoes, you know, you've got to be really careful. You've got to be really careful. Yeah, the numbers might look large. You know, you say, well, I can buy a house for 100 and sell it.

for 140, wow. And people, they always think that. They look at the outside and say, wow, you're going to make $40,000. I'm not going to make it. No, I'm going to lose money on that deal. There's not enough money to do the deal. You know, people don't understand all the costs that are associated with it. And for somebody that's brand new into this industry, I would say double what you think

your timeline is going to be and double your budget. That's great advice. That's great advice. Yeah, definitely. Well, let's go. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Let's go a little bit more into that flipping stuff because now we're, you know,

we're talking about flipping. So what do you look for in a good flip? I mean, what kind of property do you flip? We single family primarily. We've only done one, two family, but we actually converted that back to a single family. So single families, we try, though we've done, we have some exceptions to this rule. Primarily, we try and find a house that we can purchase renovate and then sell it for our profit, but be able to have the final price be under 200,000, preferably in the 150 to 170 range. And two bathrooms.

Oh, yeah. That's a huge. Yeah, we learned out the hard way. It's worth it to add a bathroom to a house in today's market for sure. Hey, really quick, let's talk about that. So I'm presumably, you guys are looking at what, three-twos? Is that kind of your bread and butter? Four-toes, yes.

That's what we turn them into. We buy a lot of three ones or four ones that turn them into those. Actually, we buy a lot of houses that are two bedrooms in one bath that has an attic and we convert the attic into a master suite. Can we talk about that? Because I had a conversation with somebody, who's flipping right now and he's like, yeah, you know, I just started flipping these one bedrooms and I'm like, you know, you got to go to the twos, man, you got to go to the twos. And, you know,

since you guys are here, let's talk about that. Why do people want these three twos? Why is that called the bread and butter house for these investors? You know, why are we focusing on them? I think it probably depends on where you live. Like if you live in a pretty metropolitan city, maybe two bedrooms are okay if people are used to living in apartments or whatever. So I think that is probably kind of area dependent. In our area, though, we sell primarily to first-time home buyers, people that are just starting their families, people that have kids. So they want two bathrooms. People love the master suite thing. And they need three to four bedrooms. That's the desirable home here. You know, I think right now, okay. Well, that was the mistake I made on that house from the 110 to 60.

it was a two-bedroom and I didn't realize two-bedrooms don't sell in my neighborhood. I don't look at a lot of other markets around the country, but I know for our market, there's just so much inventory that they have to choose from that people, the buyers want what they want now. And we've noticed that, you know, if we don't put an extra bath in that house, that we're going to take a lot less for that house. Exactly. Cool. Cool. Well, that was the point I made. So I just, you know, I thought it's important because I don't think we've ever actually. actually talked about that on the podcast. And I know a lot of people probably have that same question.

Why three, two? Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And we try and be over a thousand square feet, preferably 1,200 and that kind of thing. That makes sense. And I'm assuming you don't do your own work anymore like when you started. You can't do your own work right with that numbers that you deal with. Oh, no. We've, I'll let Amber speak on that because Amber, right now Amber runs all the crews temporarily. We have a project manager in training here. So we'll go ahead. But we did the first three houses. we did all the work ourselves. And after that, this was more Glenn's big vision thinking. We started subbing things out because we could do more houses at once by doing that.

Yeah, the first time that happened, you know, I don't know that it happened by choice as much as it just sort of, we wound up with two houses at the same time. And we thought to ourselves, how are we going to do this? It just happened to both come up, and it didn't have the money. And the bank financing disappeared. And that literally happened overnight. I called up my buddy and said, hey, I want to get the loan. He said, all done. What you mean all done?

I said, I paid those off. Yeah, no, it's not you. It's all done. Wow. We proceeded to look for private investors, and we found a good friend of ours who we asked her to take our home equity loan out. And we agreed to pay her 14%, I think it was. Or at the time, this is going back a little bit. And her home equity is costing her 4%.

So she was clearing 10% of money that wasn't hers. and, you know, we started our private investor base. We now have about $2.5 million in private investor funds, but that's how it started. And then we realized that we can't be at two sites. So we started to hire contractors. And that's kind of how that started to blossom. No, that's awesome. So do you have any tips for finding, you know, good contractors?

No, next question. Yep. It's, that I would say, is probably been the, would you say it's part of the toughest thing we've had to deal with? Yeah, that's the toughest thing. I think you've really got to have a good, solid interviewing process. And again, I saw a great article that just came out. I read as many articles as I can on the bigger pockets. Even being a seasoned vet, I love reading the things on there.

Logged, by the way, thank you. Yeah, no, no problem. There was an article that I saw. It was all about interviewing contractors, and I said, man, I was reading thinking, oh, boy, I lived that every day. But I want to Amber speak to that because she's done a lot of that. That is definitely tough. We have been lucky enough to find some really good ones. In the beginning, we made the mistake of going with some of the cheaper ones and paying the price for that.

And so now we tell the guys, look, we don't pay top dollar rates. We don't pay bottom dollar rates. We're somewhere in the middle. But here's your cherry on top is we'll give you your realm work. And you don't have to go out and advertise for it. You don't have to go out and bid on jobs that you're not going to get. So let's keep a balanced approach at this with the pricing and timeline and everything. And I had one contractor tell me that there's three things.

You're looking for quality. You're looking for time. And you're looking for budget. Pick two. And that is like so true. And you know it's fascinating. I've done a couple projects recently. And I got to tell you, I try not to kind of talk about this network, this bigger

pocket site. But when it comes to a contractor, I'm going to use whatever leverage I can. So like, hey guy, you know, I've got this site. We've got, I know investors all over this area and everywhere else, but this area in particular. So do me a favor. Do a good job. And you will not have to advertise. You will have work forever.

And they still screw up. And it's astonishing. You know, I think, you know, I'm not saying all, obviously not all contractors screw up and not all contractors are bad. But I can't, I just can't. I still can't get myself around. Why on earth these guys in general, broad terms. I'm going to get lots of hate mail from the contractor. Can't figure it out.

I think, oh, go ahead. I think another thing that we've encountered personally is that they have a tendency to get a little bitter too. They, you know, they're businessmen too. So they ask questions, hey, what did you buy this house for? And then they find out what we're selling it for. And they think they know what the spread is, even though they probably aren't counting all of the holding costs.

But so they look at the difference there. And, well, they should be paying me more. But the fact of the matter is, they're not the way. ones that are taking the risk. Yeah, they get paid either way. Yeah. So we, one of the very first seminars we ever went to together five years ago or whatever it was, the woman that spoke said, you know, I'm looking for mature, responsible adults. And she went on and she hammered that point home. And, you know, at the time, I thought, boy, you're getting little powerful about that. What's the big deal? Now I know exactly what the big deal was now that we've lived through it.

And it's so important. You know, Amber and I have said before, it's like, it's almost like dating. You have to go through, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to, you know, find your, not that we kiss our contract. You know, we, we, you know, you have to go, you have to sort through and sort through and sort through. We now are fortunate to have three or four, maybe even five now, solid people that seem to have our back. We've done with us for a while. And it's, it's been a good, once you find those guys, your business will start to look very different. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Hey, so you had talked about the private investors. and we'll jump back to flipping in a sec. Can you talk a little bit about building that private investor base? Sure. That was kind of my side of the business when we got started. And ironically, like I said, the first investor we had was a friend of Ambers. And we just kind of sat down and proposed that to her. I think one of the key things we did that made us successful was that we had a property.

So we sat down with them. We said, here, we have a property. We need funding for. And that sort of creates urgency on the part of someone that might be considering becoming an investor. If you go to somebody to say, hey, do you want to invest with me? And they say, well, I don't know.

What do you have? Well, nothing yet. And there's nothing wrong with putting those seeds. But when you have something tangible in your hand, there's a timeline to it, people start to think a little more serious about it. So we start with that first one. That went well.

But then again, we had another house coming up very shortly after, and we needed additional. So I actually put together a packet that just kind of explained who we are, what we do, the type of charity we do in the town, we sponsor some baseball teams and that kind of stuff. We had our picture in there and with the team. I put a nice package together and I sent it out to maybe, you know, 20 or 30 people that I knew. I went and met with some people that I knew who I thought may have money or may have known of people to have money. And I didn't take a direct approach. In other words, I didn't call and say, hey, do you want

to invest money with me? I sent it out to everybody because I know people don't always like to be sold on things. So I sent out to everybody and said, hey, do you know anybody that? You know anybody that might want to invest with us. You know, we're paying 12%. At the time we're paying 12, I said, do you, do you know anybody that might want to invest? And by the way, I'm happy to pay you a 1% referral fee. If they invest $100,000, we'll pay you $1,000 bonus. So, you know, a referral fee. And that's sort of how it started. And we are fortunate enough to have a, I call him my sugar daddy. We had a guy from Massachusetts. And he was an old friend. We had done business together in the past. I hadn't talked to him for a number of years, and he kind of called up and said, what does this

have going on? It was right when the stock market had crashed, and he had cashed out and had some cash on the sidelines. And, you know, it was a substantial amount. It was enough to do three or four deals. And we started our dance. Then he started for other friends. And then, you know, as we grew, this is sort of a cute, funny story.

One of our investors was actually a delivery man for Home Depot. So talk about not knowing. who you're talking to and to treat everybody the same. We're never ones to condescend or we try and treat everybody the same, just wherever we meet in life, you know? And I don't care if the President of the United States, you're taking my garbage out. I could care less what you do for a living. I just want to know who you are as a person.

So this driver had been investigating us. We didn't even know that, but he was going to job sites and saying, I keep delivering to these guys, signature home buyers. Who are these guys? I keep delivering stuff to him. And he called us up one day and said, I've been checking you out. I've been asking your contractors if you pay your bills. I've been asking a lot about you.

And we were becoming the top buyer at Home Depot. We actually have been for many years now, the top buyer there. And he said, I've got some money to invest in my IRA. Can you help me out with that? And we have people set up. We use self-directed IRAs. We help them do that. And we got them set up.

But what a great story that he investigated us and came to us and approached us because he saw how we ran our business. That's awesome. I think another thing is two people have a fear of rejections. so they're afraid to even ask. And there's money all around us from people that you wouldn't think, I mean, you wouldn't think the Home Depot driver would have had money.

But another kind of cute story, our third house, we actually partnered with a couple. And at the closing table, they got like $60,000 back. So I was sitting there and I said, so what's you going to do with that money? Yeah.

So they actually invested in our company. And it's from the sale of that house that we bought from them, one of the rehabs that we did. And they've now invested all of their retirement income with us as If Amber hadn't asked that question, I don't know if we'd have them as investors today, but we got down with a deal and she said, that was a good line. I looked up and she said, I don't know. What do you have in mind?

Well, let's talk. Don't be afraid to ask. That's great. Oh, that's for sure. You never know. Never know. The rise of the tech savvy investors here. You don't need a huge team or tons of overhead to manage rental properties.

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we're talking about flipping here before I jumped over to the private money. One of the early posts in the blog talked about how you flipped a property from 20K to 85 and it was under a week, I think it was. So tell us a little bit about that one. That seems like an interesting story for folks. We do about three a day of those, don't we? We, you know, those do not happen all the time. I want to make sure people know that.

That's, I know sometimes people have a deal like that and they tend to go on and on. Like, that's how their life is every day, but that's just not the way it is. But if you're in the game long enough, I think eventually you're going to find one of those. And that was, you know, someone called off a band-a-sign, which we use a lot of. I personally think they're kind of cheesy, but by God, people call them every day. So we use them. So, I don't mean to offend anybody that uses them if they think they're cheesy, but they just, you know. I'm not a fan.

I'm not either, but they work. So I have a hard time not using them. So because people call them all the time. So anyways, someone called off this and we met with the family. They'd owned the house for a number of years. It was full of stuff. And they just wanted out. And, you know, I think I had written in the blog, we offered them 20,000.

And they, without hesitation, said yes. And I thought, I should offer them 10. You know, they just, they had inherited it, and they didn't really need the money. They just wanted to get out. And we bought it, and we have an agreement with a guy that owns a local shop here that he pays us to clean the house out. Because it's just like storage wars. You know, he wants to go in there and get all that stuff to sell. So he paid us, whatever the few hundred bucks, whatever it was, and went in, cleaned it out, made it broom swept.

We put it on the market, and we had all kinds of offers and sold it right away. It was actually a neighbor that wanted to, like a neighbor wanted to buy it so his son could live there. So we had to have it in the neighborhood. So we, I literally walked in the house once. I walked in and said, let's get this cleaned out. We made a couple of phone calls. And, you know, we had to do some stuff to sell it and whatnot. But we actually had to purchase it.

But, I mean, at 20 grand, you could just about buy it on a credit card. You know, so that was a, that was a good day. Those don't happen every day. That was a good day. Another kind of fun story was we had a guy working for us and someone called off of a bandit sign again. And he came to Glenn. said, this lady said she'd sell us her house for a dollar. And he said, how much should we offer her? She said, a dollar. So it goes back to your point about solving other people's problems.

You know, one person might look at that scenario and say, oh, you really took advantage of that person. But what really happened, that lady didn't want the house. It was in a bad neighborhood. She had to pay taxes. She lived out of state. She didn't want the headache of it. She wanted to get rid of it. So she was happy to sell it for a dollar. We bought that for a dollar. We paid a crew, I think, $600 to clean it out. It had about 30,000 dead pigeon carcasses in it. That was a lovely smell.

But they cleaned it out. Again, she didn't want to deal with it. She's out of state, and she was paying, I think, $6 grand a year in taxes. So it was killing her. So we bought it and sold it about two months later for $7,000 and made a few dollars there and walked away. So it was, you know, helped run out of a situation and made a few bucks for ourselves. You have photos of the 30,000 pigeons? No, I think the smell still has some of my clothes.

So I burn those. Yeah, that was bad. Well, we'll be sure we're going to link in the show notes as well to that story about the, you know, the 20 to 85,000 thing because that was a really, really good article. So that'll be on the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 15. Yeah, show 15. So, well, let's go over to because that was a really quick turnaround. Let's go to even maybe quicker turnarounds. Talk about wholesaling.

You said you've been kind of moving into more. wholesaling lately. It sounds like your business model might be expanding anyway. So, you know, we talked a lot about it in episode 12 with Sharon Vornholt about wholesaling. But what does the process look like for you guys? Like, how do you do a wholesale deal? What's it look like? Well, number one, we, you know, wholesaling came as a byproduct of doing a lot of marketing and then find, you know, for years, people would call it when we'd ask a few questions and then we turn our back and say, no, that's not a property for us, and we let it go. And then, you know, one day we started thinking about, you know, there are people that,

just because we don't like that neighborhood, doesn't mean there are other investors that don't like that neighborhood. So what are we doing? That doesn't make any sense. Someone calls, I want to sell a property. Why aren't we selling it to another investor? And so that's kind of how wholesaling was born. And I think for the first deal we ever did, we actually purchased a home.

So this time, we actually purchased one, but we bought it. And a woman called me up. The day we bought, we put a sign in the yard, the first. day said coming soon and she called that day and said how about I give you 10 grand for the house above what you paid and I said what? And I actually had to say I said do you want to see it? She goes, no, I'm all saying. I go, no, I'd feel better if you actually saw the house. I want to get back and out. I went back out. I went short of the house and she bought it. So I said, that was interesting. So that got our brains thinking in that direction. So for us now, here's a whole thing looks like.

We have consultants that work for us with the phone rings here every day with people that want to sell house. Our consultants go out and they look at those properties and we place them under contract if we can and then we go out and find a, you know, we have a huge buyers list. We'll market to that buyer's list and find a seller and then we'll, you know, we make the spread. So if we buy it for 10 and sell up for 15, there's a 5,000 spread there. Our girl's get a sizable commission on that every time they do that. And that's how that's how we do things. Now, I don't, I don't know how everybody else does it. I really don't have any idea, but I've heard different ways over the years and certainly everybody has their own way they do things but we're very

upfront with people when we talk to them um i've heard of stories in the past where people put them under contract and put you know um uh on the contract under the name they might just put a you know and or signs or something like that then they run around they try and find a buyer right um and you're maybe not and i don't want to offend anybody if they're doing it this way certainly if it works keep doing it but if you're bringing people into the house and you're saying they're a contractor but really they're an investor and that kind of stuff. We don't ever want our image to be shady at all. So just because of what we heard happened before we were in the business.

So we have an agreement up front that we have them sign. It states out exactly what we're going to do. It says, look at, you know, you have a house you want to sell. You don't want to necessarily put it on the market. You want quick money. We know people. We're going to buy it from you for this price. We give them a price.

We're going to then go out and sell it for more money. And whatever we get is what we get. You get what you want. We get what we want. There's no extra fees out of you. And we get the difference. If it's a couple thousand bucks or ten thousand bucks, that's what we get. So they know going in exactly what we're going to do.

I think they respect us for it. We have to explain it a little differently. But I think it opens up a lot of trust right there because they know what we're doing. We're not just coming back trying to be, oh, hey, here's our contract. And really it's an investor. You're trying to sneak them in the door and all that kind of stuff. Do you do a double closing then? Or do you do, you said you don't go to do assignment?

Okay. Yeah, it happens right there at the table. Okay, do you want to explain real quick what a double closing is just in case they didn't listen to the Sharon Bornholds podcast? Yeah, we literally buy it officially. We buy it right there with the end user's money, so to speak, so it's not our money. The end user's money comes in and purchases that house, but we buy it and sell it within five minutes. It literally is a close to buy and then a close to sell a few minutes later. all happens in the same day maybe the few minutes but all happens in the same day okay so here's a question

me and josh were talking about wholesale the other day and here's a question i don't um i don't know the answer to and so maybe you can answer it for me so let's say you find a house and you want to wholesale it and let's say i don't know 20,000 dollars you can buy this house for and you go talk to another investor you know what happens if the other investor doesn't end up coming through what if on the day of closing he backs out who pays for you know all you know all all the title company who had to do their work and all that. Like, does that ever happen? I've never had it happen.

We've probably done 50 of them, I think, maybe or so. And I've never had that happen. I think we stay right with it. Well, so here, this is one thing we do. We get a very large deposit. If the house is 20 grand, we want $5,000 down. You know, not too long ago we did a deal where we bought a house for, I remember what the numbers were, but we bought it for a price.

We ended up selling it for $18,000. but the person, because it was a multiple bid situation, they said, what should our deposit be? We said, your deposit should be 18,000. And that's what they gave, certified funds, 18,000. And if they're that committed, they don't walk away. So I don't take $25 or $100 or even $1,000 on a cash transaction. It's got to be something that's going to hurt if they walk away from it.

That way they're committed. So maybe that's why it's never happened to me. Yeah, no, I think that's great. Yeah. So. Well, cool. Let's talk about marketing a little bit because you, you know, this is funny. I actually see your ads all over the internet for We Buy Houses for your company.

I think it's because I went to your website and then, you know, Google knows that I've been there. But you guys have great ads. I mean, they stand out. So you guys, I consider you like expert marketers. So obviously you're getting people. So what can you tell us about your marketing, I guess? What do you do? I've got to be honest.

I don't think we're expert marketing at all. I think, you know, you know, we found you guys back a few months. back through Sharon. Oh, right. I love Sharon. I mean, I was reading Sharon's articles, and I don't, I'm not a guy that spends a lot of time on blogs and that kind of stuff. And honestly, I've seen that, you know, there's a lot of real estate blogs out there.

You guys, you know, bigger pockets, and I'm not just, you know, I know you're going to pay me after for saying this, Josh. It really, no, but in all seriousness, it was, it caught my attention as the way we run our business. So when I was reading Sharon's articles, it was about marketing. And her and I started some dialogue on the, on the blog. and have developed a little friendship there, so we kind of exchange ideas. But I think she's much more of a master out than we are.

You know, I think we, again, those signs are ridiculous. I don't love them, but they make the phone ring. We do direct mail now. That's been successful. It makes a phone ring. We sponsor a lot of organizations around here, baseball teams and that kind of stuff. We've purchased. What's that?

We're part of a local investor group. Yeah, I heard that from one of our mentors early on. They said, you know, become the person in your local circle. and your local. We don't have a RIA here. I think they're still called Rias around the nation, but we have a group called Action Investor Network that's here in Albany. And it's a very similar thing. Guys that have the same philosophy as Amber and I do started this organization. And now there's, you know, 100 plus people that show up at the meeting all the time, every once a month. And they know to come to us if there's a deal. So that's, I think get out there in the neighborhood, make sure people know who you are, make sure your name is out there.

And do what you say you're going to do, have integrity, do it with character, don't be shady. I think your name will get out that people will know that if they want to sell a house they can come to you. That's awesome. That's great.

Hey, I do want to do my famous disclaimers here on the bandit signs because we talked about it and I had my little smart Alec comment back there. This is a G-rated show guys. I can't say it.

But, you know, a lot of folks look at bandit signs. You know, and they are effective. We're not going to deny that. But, you know, I will say they are illegal in a lot of places. And so if you are putting them out in places where they are not allowed, you know, it's going to reflect upon you.

So, you know, be sure that you're allowed to use them if you're thinking about it because they will reflect upon you if you're doing so otherwise. And to your other point on, you know, credibility, you know, can't reiterate that enough. I mean, it's so important. And particularly since we're talking about wholesaling, you know, we see this day in and day out on our site and everywhere on the internet. You'll see people who just come in.

They're brand new. They just came from some guru, and they're all ready to, you know, jump in. And they're so excited. And suddenly they're talking about, you know, 300 deals that they have. And I've got property in 50 states. And, you know, come on. Give me a break.

I mean, you know, seriously. I will never work with you. You know, most people, who have been doing this will never work with you the second you do that. And so you got to be smart. You got to be credible. And I'm very glad that you guys have focused on that right now. It's so important to be yourself, I think. Every time we have the same thing. Every time a guru comes through here, the town, we get a million phone calls and people say, hey, I want to work with a bar. And I take it on my wing and say, look, I'm happy to help you. You know, bring something to us.

I'd be happy to step you through if you have a deal. but just be yourself. Don't call up being like that. Being salesy. Just be yourself. For sure. And let's talk really, really quickly. You had talked about having a local group that wasn't a RIA.

I think that's another kind of important point that we should emphasize here for folks. You know, there are, you know, if there are not real estate clubs, RIAs in your area, and there aren't any local investor meetups or anything, start your own. I mean, the value of networking face-to-face with local people is unbelievably important, isn't it? Very much so. I mean, again, just being out there, you'll find deals, you'll find people. When a deal does come along, you'll know who to talk to, and you'll have the confidence to walk up to somebody to say, hey, I know we've talked a few times, but I've got something here.

You know, and you know where to go. So I think it's important that you do that. And certainly these guys that started the group here, we were one of the early, your sponsors of the group, but not certainly at the very beginning, but it was two guys that just wanted to have a group here and they did it. It's tried to be a great resource for us. For buying and selling. But yeah, buying and selling for sure. We bought homes in there and sold homes and wholesale and all that stuff. Okay. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more on that about, you know,

the integrity and the thing. In one of your recent blog posts, you talked about relationships and how they're one of the biggest reasons for your success. I think you mentioned that you guys send thank you letters to people and cards. Can you talk a little bit about that, about why that's important? Sure. I mean, I think you could read all the books you want and go to all the seminars you want, but at the end of the day, it's a people business. You know, we're out there talking to people.

We're buying houses from people. We sell houses to people. We're real good realtors who are people, you know, and on and on and on. We're all people. So all of us like to feel appreciated. We all like to feel like we mean something to somebody else or, you know, that we're doing the right thing. I think that, you know, behavior that is rewarded is usually repeated.

That's a good parent tip there for us. That's a good quotable quote. It is. Yep. So I think that if you can, you know, thank somebody for doing a good job for you, how often those realtors get a thank you? I mean, they might get a thank you, but we set out a little thing with brownies to them. At every transaction, every time we do a deal, they get brownies.

And I can't tell you how many times we get the phone call, hey, I've got a bunch of brownies here. Thanks. But they remember us. And every time they, anytime any agent does a showing on one of our houses, just a showing, we send a card. And it has our logo. And it says, thanks for doing it. It's a standard card. After they've gone to a few, they see they get the same one.

But it has their name on it. And it just says, thank you for doing this. And so I had an interesting thing that happened not too long ago. There was someone who came to work for us. And when she came to work for us, of course, the brokerage was not happy in losing her, especially to an investment company. And we're not a brokerage, but we needed consultants to work our deals. so they were not happy, and so they were trying everything they could to sort of, sort of bash us. And all I heard was, I didn't hear the details, but I heard that, you know, they were saying some things that made us look not so favorable.

And I take a lot of pride and Amber does to it in our reputation. And so a lot of people, I think, would have called them in confrontational and said, why do you say that? Why did you do that? You know, why did you say that about us? I took a few days to think about it, and I wrote them each a card. and the car just said I heard some things that I wasn't sure what was said, but I just wanted to make sure that we were still good, because obviously we're going to have a long relationship together.

We've done business in the past. We're going to do business in the future. So here's some cookies, just to say, no hard feelings. I know it's business and all's fair and love and more, but I just wanted to make sure that you knew that, you know, the no hard feelings on my part. I understand it's hard to lose somebody. I got phone calls from every one of those people saying,

I didn't say anything bad. I just, you know, I said, I know, it's all good. I'm just letting you know. And so I think I tried to. take a situation that, you know, could have been bad. I could have burned some bridges with some top agents in the area. And I turned it around to something that they remember that we're a decent company to work with. Yeah, that's great. Great story. Awesome. Sure. All right. So we're starting to run out a little bit of time here. And I know I definitely wanted to talk about

the buildup of your team. So we're going to try and compress that into a short little segment here, but let's talk about, you know, the actual growth, the emergence of a team beyond the two of you, and then, you know, potentially, if you can get into, you know, tips that you have on managing your team, you know, you've got these consultants and the contractors and everybody else. So, yeah, I'll let you just run with it. Okay. I think we started out when we, again, it was Amber and I, when we started to expand, we realized we had too much on our plate, we couldn't handle all the clerical stuff.

We hired an office manager, which you came work right. right in our home, right our kitchen table. Her name is Susan, and she's been now with us for three and a half years. She has been the rock, kind of the cornerstone that holds a lot of things together around here. So that was the best decision and investment we ever made. We did a very long interview process because there was going to be someone who's going to be in our home. And we wanted to make sure we didn't do this again. We didn't want to be professional interviewers.

We wanted to have the right person, and we made the right choice. You know, from there, we've definitely been through our share of people to try and find the right team members. And again, just like finding contractors, it's the same thing with your team members. Things changed for us. We found the right inside consultant. We have a woman here now named Heidi that's been doing just a tremendous amount of work, bringing in new deals, and we now, I've, I've released the reins to let her sell the properties. That was difficult for me to do, because that was always my side of the business, but I think any successful business owner knows that to grow, you have to start to trust other people to do your work for you once you train them.

And so she's been a wonderful student and has learned a lot about what we do. So that started from there. We've hired a few other consultants on after her. You know, we've been through our share of project managers. We now recently brought a guy named Bill, who's Amber's assistant right now as a project manager, and we are grooming him to take over a lot of the jobs to give us some freedom. So we can focus more on marketing to bring in better sweeter deals for ourselves and for the company. So, you know, it's tough to do it in a quick segment, but I guess it's just like the dating thing.

You want to find the right people. It's going to take time when you find the right people, take care of them. Same thing I just said with the people that we do business with, make them feel appreciated. I think it's important that you make them feel, do something special, buy them lunch once in a while, have a Christmas party. Oh, it's going to cost you 500 bucks. So what? You know, spend time investing your people because that's your future. When you find the right people, do that.

On the other side of the coin, when you know your gut starts telling you it's the wrong person, you got to cut that cord, even though it's not fun sometimes. So that's the best way you can build your team. Any thoughts on that, baby? I would say also don't make a decision out of desperation, which we've learned the hard way. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sometimes it's easier just to grab the first person because they might sound good on paper, but without doing your full due diligence. With Susan, I think it was like a three. at least three part interview we spent the whole day with her one day taking her out showing her the

properties it was down to her and one other girl and we definitely made the right decision because we took the time to get to know her and the same is true whether you're hiring contractors you know sometimes it's kind of a pain in the butt to go out and meet three different contractors at a job because it's you know three different appointments and three different hours out of your schedule but if you hire the right one up front oh my gosh does it save you tons of headaches in the long run it's exactly like what I said, we kind of started this with today, it was about investing your time. Now you're investing your time in people and other people.

And I think if you do that and you invest it wisely and do your homework and make the tough decisions when you have to, you can start to get relief pressure off yourself so you don't have to work 85 hours a day, man, it starts to feel a little different. You know, so I think that's important in team building. You just appreciate your people. And when you have good people, appreciate them and build them and train them.

Make sure they know what the heck they're doing. Because if they don't, they're going to be confused. Trust your gut. Yeah, and trust your gut. Amber just said that's a great point. All of our guts are pretty smart. Yeah. Yeah.

So just trust them. Hey, really quick, I just want to chime in and say, hey, Brandon, I really appreciate you, man. Thank you, Josh. If I could somehow get commissioned for that. Yeah, it'll be good if you work that out. Can I get some cookies or brownies or something? I'm going to have Glenn send you some brownies. All right.

Now, listen, that's, that's great. great, great, great advice. With that, we're going to segue to our final segment here, which is our usual thing here. The famous four. The famous four. We need a title for it. Yeah, we do. But let's get to the four final questions here. And both of you are welcome to answer independently, if need be.

Let's talk about your favorite real estate book. What would that be? I have a favorite real estate book. The Bigger Pockets book on flipping houses. Yep, me too. That's a great book, Glenn. I bought that, by the way. I was supporting.

It was good. I did read it. So that was good. There you go. I listened to a lot more seminars, I think, than I have read books. But I've, not one is jumping out of me right now, but I certainly, I learn a little bit from all of them. There's always a little golden nugget whenever I read, or I listen to something.

I try and find that golden nugget. I don't really have something off the tip of my tongue. I would say the same thing that Glenn just said, especially, somebody was just asking me a question the other day about what do you think is the most important thing to do? And my answer was be educated, educate yourself in the field. And whether it's that you're paying $10 for a book or $10,000 to be personally coached by someone,

let's say it was $10,000. If you get one nugget out of that relationship and that nugget helps you to flip, you know, 25 houses in the next few years. That was so worth it. So I don't know that there's one particular one that's the best. It's just really knowing your field and being educated. But the bigger pockets book, certainly. Yes.

What about business books, non-real estate business books? Anything hop out or? You know, probably for me, I think one of the ones that changed my life was back reading Stephen Covey was it seven habits of highly effective people that was one that she liked it by the way the baby baby likes that way

that was one I think if you know a lot of the relationships stuff that we do is probably driven off of that you know as I look back that's probably 15 years ago I read that book

but that's you know that's one that's always kind of stuck with me and just kind of again invest in your time in the right place not that I always do but I certainly try I like think and grow rich yeah that was a really good book

and I think in addition to learning about your field I think personal development and personal growth is also a very big key because there's a lot of things about each of us as individuals that can hold us back. Like, you know, fear of rejection. They may not talk about in a real estate book. But if you can grow as a person that can be really advantageous not only to your business, but your whole life. Nice. I think Amber's really favorite book, though, is my husband is awesome.

Wait, how do I get a copy of that? I need to get one myself. Yeah, there really is a one. The four agreements is a really good one for personal development. What's that? The Four Agreements. Yeah, the Four Agreements. That was a good book too for personal development.

How about hobbies? Any scuba diving. Yeah, we're avid scuba divers. We're about a year ago this time. We were in Thailand scuba diving. We'd like a lot of adventure stuff. We've been skydiving in Aruba. We've been kite surfing.

We rode elephants. We swim with sharks. Yeah, I rode elephants. Wow. Wild monkeys. Yeah, if you have wild monkeys and crocodiles and all that. Fear is not a factor with you. Not so much.

No, no, we kind of, yeah, it makes our private investors very nervous sometimes. But we don't think it's after we return. I would take an insurance policy out on you guys if I were one of those private investors. I know. Now, we enjoy our lives. Our kids are a big part of our lives. That's probably the biggest hobby. Now they're all in sports and they do things.

And, well, the one is just her only sport is spitting up. But it's, you know, our kids are our lives. They're our number one thing. That's cool. With the real estate, though, I do have to say, I really like taking something ugly and making it beautiful. So even, you know, these rundown houses, we're really helping communities look better and we're increasing, you know, just the overall fields of the community, not to mention how many jobs we provide the community as well. I'm her biggest project taking something ugly, making it prettier. Well, that goes with that thing.

I'm a lifehouse project for her. Nice. All right. So last question before we wrap up here, and this is one that asked everybody, so what do you believe, and each of you, yeah, I can answer this. I'd love to get both your opinion. What do you believe sets successful investors apart from the non-successful ones? Action.

Yeah, that was my answer, too. Nice. I mean, just, I think just taking action. By the very first real estate seminar I ever bought, I think, I don't, the guy's not either on Dave Delgado, I think of Dave Delgado, whatever it was. This is back in 1987. Don't even tell me you weren't born yet, or I'm going to. Barely.

I was about your daughter's age there. Don't like you at all anymore. That was the first thing I ever bought up the TV, and they upsold me on the phone. I think I spent $6,700, but I learned a line. Here's the nugget I learned in that. I didn't use anything else in it, but I learned a nugget. And he said, action equals results, but massive action equals massive results. That always stuck with me.

So I paid $600 for that, 25 years ago, but that always stuck with me. And I think that's always driven me to know that if I take little bits of action, that I'll have a little bit of results. But if I take massive action, I can get massive results. So you decide what you want to do. When you start your business or in life, just decide what you want to do. And you'll get results if you take action. If you take no action, just read and think of – if you read bigger pockets every day,

but never make a phone call, you'll never own a piece of real estate. It can be really scary doing your first deal or even your first several deals. We kind of went in with a sink or swim mentality. I got to tell you this quick story as you wrap it up. it'll be appropriate it'll be good that one house we did the one house we did that was that we made $33,000 on during the open house the woman comes in

she's probably 75 years old from across the street now picture she's kind of a grandma type and she walks in she said we've been watching you guys work all month you know what you two have now she's 75 years like I go what's that she goes you guys have balls you can't say that and she said no I just wanted so I think

you know I laugh about it because of who said it and how it was said in the context We all laughed hysterically, but if you take action, you know, and you can go after some things, it takes some courage to do it. But if you just take the little bit of steps, you can do what we do. Anybody can do what we do. You just have to do it. Yep.

That's great. That's great. Well, listen, guys, it's been a pleasure having you. We really appreciate your time. And I think people are going to definitely get some good nuggets out of this show as well. So thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. I want to thank you guys both for doing this bigger pockets.

I think, like I said, never been attracted to any big blogs before. but I've been really impressed what you guys put together. So keep up the good work. Thank you. Thank you, guys. And that was our show with Glenn and Amber Swarm. So quick, quick story. We actually record this.

We're recording this outro about a week after we did the interview with Glenn and Amber. And in the mail today, I kid you not, was a package with two chocolate brownies and a thank you card from Glenn and Amber. And first of all, those brownies were awesome. They were. They were great. I enjoyed them, Brandon, my kids. And it just goes to show you that these guys are the real deal. They're actually doing what they say they do, which is, I don't know, it's pretty awesome.

It's rare that you see it, huh? It is. It's great, though. And it's really inspired me. Like, I totally want to start doing that now with everybody that I come in contact with. So if you get some brownies from me, you can thank Glenn and Amber. Yes, yes, yes. And of course, Brandon living in Washington State, you might enjoy those brownies more than others.

Listen, I hope it goes to show you that even if you're broke, even if you're in debt, even if you're new to this game, you can succeed. If you just jump in and get yourself educated. And that's exactly what BiggerPockets is all about. Real estate investing, education. As always, you can become part of the community by heading over to BiggerPockets.com and signing up for a free membership. Then be sure to head over to the forums and leave a new member introduction and let us a note. a little bit about who you are, what you're doing. Also, big thanks to everybody for leaving us reviews on the iTunes store and for subscribing to the show. We really, really appreciate it.

We appreciate all the reviews we've been getting. And if you like the show, but haven't left a review yet, please do jump over to iTunes. Help us out and do so every single one of those ratings help. Every time you hit the subscribe button on iTunes, it helps us out. So we definitely They appreciate it. Finally, be sure to connect it with us over on Facebook at facebook.com slash bigger pockets. And until next time, this is Joshua Dorkin, signing all. 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.

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