BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 169: Using Hustle and Persistence to Build Wealth Through Real Estate with David Greene

Episode Date: April 7, 2016

What does it take to truly find success in real estate — especially when you make an average salary and live in an expensive city? That’s the topic of today’s show, where we sit down with David Greene, a full-time police officer in the San Francisco market who’s managed to buy multiple deals in the past several years through mass hustle and persistent deal-finding. You’ll learn how David finds deals, invests both in-and-out-of-state, and finances those deals on a cop’s salary! This show is sure to motivate and educate you to do more deals this year! In This Episode We Cover: Who David Greene is and how he bought a $565k house for $195k The challenges of renting out a house His tips for first time landlords Thoughts on credit checks How to use property managers as advisors Steps for buying property from afar The second hurdle he met while investing What you want in a real estate agent How he got financing despite his profession Looking at investing like the Golden Real Estate Warriors to save money The importance of working hard to reach your goals A discussion on investing in notes — the downsides and upsides David’s game plan Why consistency is key to reaching success And SO much more! Links from the Show Keyword Alerts Tenant Screening: The Ultimate Guide How To Rent Your House: The Definitive Step by Step Guide How to Invest in Real Estate with Just 5 Spare Hours Per Week Be Like Elon (image) BackstreetBoys Documentary on MTV Jeff Brown’s BiggerPockets Profile Compound Interest Spreadsheet BiggerPockets Instagram Post (Quote) BP Podcast 034: Virtual Real Estate Investing and How to Find Great Deals in a Hot Market with Anson Young Andrew Cushman’s BiggerPockets Profile BiggerPockets Webinar Books Mentioned in this Show The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport The Millionaire Real Estate Agent by Gary Keller The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Tweetable Topics: “You can do everything wrong in real estate at the beginning. If you hold on long enough, it’s going to work out.” (Tweet This!) “You have to embrace that it’s hard and be glad that it is.” (Tweet This!) Connect with David David’s BiggerPockets Profile David’s Website David’s Facebook Profile David’s LinkedIn Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 169. The rest of my life is going to go on hold for a little while, and I'm going to work like a dog to make as much money as I possibly can to come up with a down payment for these houses. 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 Dorkin. Host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's going on, Brandon? Hey, Josh Dorkin. So yesterday, to jump right into things.

I don't really care. You do. I did something more dangerous than skydiving. Oh, this story. I was going to tell you earlier and then I told you I'd tell you doing the intro. So guess what I did yesterday

that was more dangerous than skydiving? A. A super hot pepper. I did not. No, I actually went flying again in my introductory flight because I want to learn. I'm going to get my pilot's license with a, this rickety old like notes of self. Call that shirt and say,

yeah, make sure you, check out policy on Brandon. There you go. Yeah, it was like this rickety old, like a 70 year old plane or 60 year old plane that he restored himself with a 70, sounds great.

71 year old guy driving it. So you trust the 71 year old guy to restore and fly the plane that you're putting your life in that, wow. It was, it was amazing. So yeah, I'm getting my license.

and he might sound like his plane to sell you. Oh, hi, I'm Brandon Turner. Not just a Tesla, but my airplane. You and Brian Burke and argue over. I don't have a cooler airplane. I don't have a Tesla. No, but here's actually the real estate connection to that.

This guy's actually like a massive, or has been a massive real estate investor, built tons of homes. So I got to sit in a plane with him for four hours, and we just talked to real estate for like four hours up in the air. It was amazing. Wow. And why was this so scary and dangerous?

Just because he was a 70-year-old guy, I read as old as him. And there was no toilet in this airplane for four hours. Oh, we stopped at a couple of pilots' lounges. It was pretty cool. Nice. Anyway, long story, short, go network with local people. Yeah.

You never know what you'll find. It's great story. It's a great story. Yeah. You know, it's also a great story? What's it? Today's guest. Today's guest is a great story.

But, you know, you're not going to ask me how I'm doing. So whatever. Today's guest is David. Josh, I already know how you're doing. You're always doing well. But what are you doing? What's up? Well, you know, I don't.

just got back from a week in the mountains, man. Oh, that's right. You do have something cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to ask you. You're like, I don't know. I cleaned up poop because I got 40 kids and that's about it. Coming soon, man. Coming soon. I know. Two more months. It's coming. It's coming. No, yeah, it took a nice week off. And, yeah, I was a working vacation, but mostly vacation, which was kind of nice. And got to teach my kids to ski. That's cool. That was so exciting. It's one of my favorite passions is skiing. and being able to get my kids on some skis. And we didn't want to pay for ski school because it's expensive

and I'm a pretty good skier. And so taught my kids how to ski. And by the end of third day skiing, my seven-year-old was skiing down black. So yeah, it was fun, exciting. And I don't know, you're going to love having kids, man. It's a whole lot of fun sharing those experiences. I mean, I thought there'd be nothing better than just the freedom of skiing on my own. But being able to do it with my kids.

was incredible. That's awesome. That's magical. I like that. It was magical. Almost as magical is flying in a plane. Almost a year-on-year-old guy with no air conditioning and no toilet. It was a sweaty ride.

I went to a birthing class on Saturday, so now I know how to like breastfeed and stuff too. So I'm going to be good. That's good. Get your boobs out there, man. I got this. All right. So on today's show. Yeah, we have an amazing show today.

Yeah, really, really great show with a fantastic guest. Before we get there, let's bust out today's queer tip. All right. You know, this is probably the most overplay tip, but it's probably the most important tip that we have. If you are looking to network, if you're looking to connect with folks, if you're looking to build your business, if you're looking to learn, you need to get on bigger pockets

and set up keyword alerts for areas that you live in or want to invest in. So a prime example would be Brandon lives in Podunk, comma Washington. And so Brandon will go to biggerpockets.com slash alerts and enter Podunk as a keyword alert. He'll also put the zip code, which is 0,000,000, because Podunk is a big fat zero. Anytime somebody is talking about Podunk or puts in the zip code in the Bigger Pock's forums and discussions and things like that, Brandon will get alerted and can jump in. and it's just probably one of the greatest ways for people to connect and get together with other folks who are either local or investing in the same area as they are.

So I definitely recommend it. Definitely check it out and go create your alerts today, biggerpockets.com slash alerts. There you go. Yeah. You've upgraded how to buy properties, but did your insurance get the memo? When investors start scaling, insurance can't be an afterthought. Most policies were designed for a single property, not multiple rentals, LLC ownership, short-term stays, or property. companies mid-rehab. That's where blind spots can creep in. N-Reg works exclusively with real estate investors. They understand portfolios, how risk compounds as you grow, and why insurance should protect your upside, not just a checkbox. One uncovered claim can undo years of progress.

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of their down payment back at closing, plus interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've partnered with bigger pockets for over a decade, helping thousands invest smarter. If you want to do the same, visit biggerpockets.com slash retirement to learn more. All right, really quickly, this is show 169 of the BiggerPockets podcast.

Check out the show notes of biggerpockets.com slash 169. If you have not yet taken a chance to leave us a rating and review on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, any of the places, YouTube, where our shows are available, or if you're not listening or watching it on iTunes video, we now have a video podcast of the show. are missing out. But please do leave us a rating and review. And with that said, let's bring in today's guest. Today's guest is David Green. David is a real estate investor over the past,

I think, five, six, seven years now. He is a full-time police officer in the Northern California area who has built a very impressive portfolio while working his full-time job as a cop. And he's an awesome guy, super cool guy. He and I've been chatting back and forth for a couple of now. And it was a fantastic conversation that we had today on the podcast. You just like that you got to make fun of me for like 20 minutes. That's how you came about. That was really funny. You guys got to stay to you. And Brandon takes his foot and sticks it so funny in his mouth. I was being humble. And you had made me look like an arrogant. You are the antithesis of humble, my friend. You are absolutely. I was over here not trying to make a

big deal of my awesomeness. You don't do what you did when you're humble. So, you know, Stay tuned and jump on the show notes, bigger pockets slash show 169, or jump on Twitter and tweet at Brandon at BP and let Brandon know how humble you think he really is. Hashtag not so humble. All right, guys. Let's bring them on. David Green. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you.

Thanks, guys. Glad to be here. Yeah. So let's jump right into it. You are a what? Before you jump into it David and I have been having this ongoing conversation

since I bitched and moaned about San Francisco I think one or two years ago and we've had this just really funny back and forth via Bigger Pockets private message and it's really nice to put the face with the guy that I've been chatting with and

what have been talking about Josh? I don't know how much you love. He's just going to let me like roll down the streets of Compton with him or something. I don't know. Tell us about who you are and why you and I have been kind of at it. So I'm a full-time police officer.

I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. I recently got my real estate license about six months ago, so I've been doing that on the side as well. I've been investing in real estate for about seven or eight years now. And Josh and I both agree that San Francisco is a little overhyped. It doesn't quite live up to the promise of the most beautiful city in America. It can actually be kind of gross in some places. Yeah, yep.

And we just lost half our listeners. Yeah, well. That's right. That's okay. Yeah, we don't care about Sanchez. They don't need to make money with real estate. They're already loaded. They'll work at Google or something.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, well, cool. Well, it's good to have you on the show, David. Thanks, guys. Yeah, so let's talk about that. You live in one of the most expensive areas in the United States. And, I mean, Northern California is crazy.

I could not buy a parking spot for what I buy my houses for. So how are you able to invest for the last seven years while working a full-time job? Let's start the beginning. How did you get started? Why real estate and why did you choose that avenue? All right. So originally I was going to college and I was working at a restaurant and I didn't know I wanted to be a real estate investor.

I just knew that I wanted to be wise with my money. So I would save money. I would work. Every day I had off, I'd pretty much go into work. I'd stay late when everybody else went home and pick up the last couple tables. And I did pretty well for a kid right out of high school. working in a restaurant, was able to save up quite a bit of money. And then I had reconstructive surgery on my ankle.

When I came back, I went to a different restaurant. It was about 45 minutes away, but it was much nicer. This was right around 2005 when the economy was doing awesome, and we were killing it at that place. So I was able to save up even more money while I finished college. I knew I needed at some point to buy a house, but I was watching house prices increase around 2005, and it was just frustrating.

I didn't understand how housing could be this expensive. At one point, I actually figured out I could build a house. house from the ground up for like three quarters of what it cost to buy a 25-year-old house. And I just thought, well, I'm just going to do that. I'm not going to waste my time chasing these home prices that keep going up and up and up. I believe Josh talked about. He knew a police officer that was buying like a million dollar house somewhere, right? So there were signs that it didn't make sense. Why would a police officer be able to afford a million dollar house? So I kept saving my money. I graduated college. I got a job as a police officer. And that was right around 2010 and the market just completely

tanked. So I'm watching home prices fall, fall, fall. And I was like, like, oh man, I've hit the golden goose here, right? If I just wait long enough, it's going to hit the bottom. And it did. I bought my first place. It had sold in the peak of the market for $5,000 and I bought it for $195. And it was actually, I didn't even know I was going to be a real estate investor. A friend was going to buy the house. He had it under contract at $2.15. And he ended up getting accepted to a Bible college and he was going to be leaving and he was going to lose his earnest money deposit. So he was telling me about it and I thought, oh, I'll go take a look. Maybe if I can buy it and just rent it out, you'll get your money back. And I'll have a house that when I'm

ready to move into it, I can just move in then. So I did. I was able to close on it. We got it for a little less than his 215. And I ended up renting it out. It's kind of a separate story, but it went horrible when I first tried to rent it out. I didn't use a property manager. I know what I was doing. The whole thing went terrible. But eventually I figured it out. I hired property managers to do the stuff that I didn't know how to do. And the place cash flowed pretty well. And I just caught that little bug that most of us get like, I could probably do this again with another house. So before we go to that house, I want to go back to this horrible experience of the first property.

Because a lot of people, when they're jumping into their first deal, they say that. I don't want to be a landlord or I don't want to buy rentals because I don't want to have a horrible experience like you had. So what made it bad? I mean, why was it so tough for you? Why did you go with property management then? And how did that whole process work? All right. So the truth is, I advertised it on Craigslist.

I had several people call me. one of them was the most interested. I met him. He seemed like a decent guy. I didn't run a credit check. I didn't call any referrals. I was brand new at this. I didn't even know anyone else that was a real estate investor.

I did all the mistakes that every one of you, I'm sure not in your head right now. Oh, yeah, I want to do the stories, right? We hear it all the time. And he ended up taking me. He paid his first month's rent. And then the second month's rent he paid. But I found out later that he actually paid me with my own money. The tax county assessor's office sent a refund check to the house for the extra.

property taxes that I had paid because the house had been worth so much money before. He was able to get that check, cash it, and then pay his rent for two months with that check. What? Yes. So three months in, I'm thinking, oh, this went okay. I call about the check. They tell me, oh, we sent that to your house. I said, no, you didn't.

They said, oh, we sent it to the rental property. After I yelled at them, I went investigating what had happened. Of course, he would admit that he had done that, but he's only one that had access to the mailbox. So then he stopped paying the rent. He started telling me, oh, I went and dropped it off at your parents' house. I left it under the mat. It wasn't there. We played this game for like two months as he lied about the fact that he was paying and he never was.

So then I started the eviction process, and I was working full time. I lived about 45 minutes away. I had no time to go there to follow up with any of this kind of stuff. It took me like six months to finally get the guy out of there. He kind of trashed the house. I was super discouraged. I was ready to quit, but the house hadn't gone up in value enough to where I even would have made sense to sell. thank God because I didn't. And as I was looking for new clients, one of them said, yeah, I heard

about this place from a property manager. He sent me here. He seems like a good guy. And I just had that little light bulb. Oh, maybe I should call this guy and see what he has the offer. So I ended up doing that. He wasn't a great property manager, but just the fact that they knew what to do and they could tell me, hey, this went wrong. This is what we should do. And I could just focus on going to work and making more money, made all the difference in the world. And then I was kicking myself like, what was I thinking, trying to buy these landlord for dummies books and read them in my spare and I didn't know about bigger pockets yet. I didn't have anyone to talk to.

I just thought this was stupid and I'm an idiot for even trying. And I'm really glad that I didn't stay in that frame of mind, that I did trust an expert and follow their advice because I've gone on to buy 14 homes after that one and all cash flow really well. And I'm glad that that experience turned out better than I thought it was going to. That's awesome.

That's awesome. So tell me about the part that actually doesn't really matter, which is what happened with the money. I mean, did the, they buy? The guy for, you know, check fraud? What happened? No, they went and they interviewed him and he wouldn't cop to it. And they basically, they sent me a copy of the check and they had just signed like a, my name's

David. So they put D with a squiggly line and that's how they signed my name. But they weren't able to prove that he was the one that had done it. The bank didn't have surveillance footage by the time that we went around to doing it. So this guy got along, Scott Free. I ended up getting a judgment against him for like $7,000 from all the back rent that he owed me and the damage to the house. And then because I was not an experienced landlord, I didn't even know how to go about collecting it.

So who knows, you got away with that $7,000 there. But that house has appreciated over $200,000 since I bought it. So, you know, long run, that's kind of the lesson in this real estate. You can do everything wrong in the beginning. If you hold on long enough, it's going to work out. Now, did the bank make good on the check that he had cast or no? Yeah, that was cool. The tax assessor's office admitted they made a mistake and they had me fell out the police report and I got money back from them.

Oh, that's cool. That's cool. That's great. So real quickly, I mean, besides obviously your advice of hire a property manager, looking at your mistakes that were made on that, if somebody was today listening to this podcast and they're starting to be a landlord and maybe they don't have a property manager or can't do it, what are some of the things that you would suggest for them? And maybe I know you have a manager so you're not, maybe the ideal person to answer this, but I'm sure you know some of the mistakes you made. What are some things you could offer people tips to make sure they don't run into the same problem? The first thing would be go on bigger pockets and read articles that people wrote about what you just said right there. The second thing would be if like I didn't know how to run a credit check so I just kind of rolled the dice and said, oh, he seems like a nice guy. There shouldn't be, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how to run a credit check. That's definitely worth your time to do. Call a couple referrals that these guys have had from previous landlords.

If I would have done that, I'm sure I would have found out that either he doesn't have any referrals or he's done this at every place that we had before. It's a pretty big investment. And an eviction can eat up tons of time that you've spent collecting money on there. It's better to make less money per month and not have. to deal with an eviction than to try to get top dollar like I did and end up with this problem. Yeah. Great advice. Yeah. Solid, solid. Well, cool. And also just to throw out there, if people are managing their own properties, yeah, don't just jump into it thinking you can, it's just easy. Anybody can do it. I mean, you will make a lot of mistakes. You'll make a ton. So if you are going to

manage yourself, go pick up some books on landlording on figuring out how to do it or hire somebody else to do it for you. But don't do the in between. I can just do it myself and not learn how to do it. So, yeah. And really, really quick. Six months. Six months to evict the guy. Yeah. And was that because he was a professional tenant that knew how to work the system? Or was that just the municipality that you're in where, you know, that's the process? Part of it's that I live in California and were a tenant-friendly state.

But part of it is this guy was just way better than me. He knew how to play the game so much better. Right? Like I couldn't serve him with the court papers. And he's and someone needed to. So I would send somebody by there to wait to serve him with the papers and they'd send their little kid out. He was like five years old and he would walk outside the door and he'd look around and if you saw a car in the front yard, he would go back and tell them and they wouldn't come back outside. They had this little scout, right?

Like this little homing pigeon that they would send out to figure out if I was waiting for him. So I was living about 45 minutes away and I'd drive down to meet someone to serve the papers and we'd be sitting there for two or three hours hoping that the guy would come outside because they wouldn't answer the door when we knocked on it. and if we did leave something on the door, it would be gone. And I didn't know at the time if that would count as serving the person or not. I didn't want to risk it. So there's people out there are just really good at this. I mean, the guy paid me one month of rent and then another month or two months with my own money. And then he stayed there for another six months after that.

So you're at a disadvantage if you don't know what you're doing because you're dealing people that usually do. That's great. That's great. Yeah. And we've got a couple articles on the blog. And I think we could probably link to them in the show notes, It's at biggerpockets.com slash show 169. Plus, we wrote a book on the book on managing rental properties.

We did. We did. We did. The book on managing rental properties by this guy right here and my awesome wife, Heather. I was actually going to talk about the articles on professional tenants and things like that. But, you know, if you want to plug, you know, just plug all day long. I mean, you know, I'm here to actually do an interview. You know, I'm here.

I'm here to make my wife happy. That's it. Okay. Anyway, so, yeah, there's some great articles on professional tenants. what's a lookout for and things like that, especially for the new folks. I mean, there are people, and I've heard this from some of our longtime members who've been in the game for years and years and years. You get one of those guys in.

If they slip through, it's really hard, really, really hard to get rid of them if they know how to work the system. So be very careful. Read this stuff. Do your best to screen. You do not want a professional tenant in your place. It'll lead to a lot of trouble. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Well, what came next, David? You bought your second property then. How did that go?

So I saved up money again, working overtime as a police officer. I bought my second property. It was down the street from where my mom lived. I was pretty much targeting houses at this point. So literally at this point in the market, you could drive down a street and every three or four houses had a four sales sign. It was, I'm not exaggerating about that. Every single thing was for sale. It was all REO. There was tons of things in foreclosure. You can see a house listed for 200,000 and go make an office. offer of 150 and just wait to see what stuck. And that's what I would do. I'd probably make about 10 to 20 offers a month on different homes. And that was taking a long time. And a lot of them were short sales so you wouldn't hear back for a while. So then I started targeting houses that had already fallen out of escrow a couple times. I got a real estate agent that was really good. And I just had her go look for homes that had already fallen out of escrow. I thought we'd have a better chance. It ended up working on this one. I was able to buy it for $183,000. It was down the street from my mom's house. And this time I was wise and I used a property

management company right away. And I started to figure out, hey, these guys are more for good than just managing the property. You can use these guys at like your own personal advisor. I can ask them, hey, what do you think about this neighborhood? What kind of tenants are we getting in there? How long are you guys typically waiting before you find someone that wants the place? Right. What are the things in a house that tenants are willing to pay more for to get? So then I started learning, you know, if I, if I'm using these people as advisors, I can kind of tailor my search for what they're saying and I can have more success. I love that.

Oh, yeah. Because, I mean, people always ask me, how do I know what a private is going to rent for? How do I know if it's a good neighborhood? Or how do I know what the utility is going to be? The property manager knows all those things. So make some good relationships with them. That's an awesome tip, David. Yeah, I wouldn't do it without that because now I have to buy in other states, right?

California is way too expensive to make any sense to buy here. And so I had to start moving out of state to do it. And a lot of people get really jittery about that whole idea of buying property out of state. And I don't know what I'm buying. But you don't really need to. if you know people who know what you're buying, right? If you get a good team in place, I've bought in Arizona six homes and I never saw any of them.

I never flew out there to see them. I've never seen them one time. And I've even sold one of them and owned them for several years, all based on the advice of people that live out there between my real estate agent, my property manager, and the rehab people. Wow. I think we should probably dig into that a little bit because a lot of people are in the same situation.

You are prices are too expensive where they live. And so they're stuck and they don't know what to do. So, okay, so what's the first step then in any way? really quick. I mean, one path, which we talk about a lot, is invest within a couple hours of where you are. Typically, you can usually find stuff. But if you decide you're going to go and look, you know, out of state or at a distance, I guess we'll kind of proceed with those questions. Yeah. So what's the first step? I mean, what do you, what should I do if I know that I'm not going to buy my area? What do I do? First of all, how do I even find an area? How did you find Arizona? Why there? So the first thing, the first thing you had is big area. First thing I did is I thought, okay, what are the positive? and negatives I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with the fact that I live in California where I make a really good wage, especially in the Bay Area, we make good money here. The negative is that properties are too expensive to cash flow. So I spent probably about a year being frustrated and

depressed about that kind of in a woes me state. Oh, it doesn't make sense to buy. Prices are too expensive. Rather than looking at the positive that my homes have all appreciated, I have equity that I can tap into to buy other places I was just thinking about the negative. At a certain point, I kind of realized like, well, who's to say that I need to stay here? I ended up finding an agent on Fox Business News who was talking about Arizona real estate. She seemed really squared away. I emailed her about a thousand times and finally got her to reply to me. And one night she was driving from Arizona back from Nevada. And she called me and we spent like two hours talking on the phone and basically she could see how it's pretty serious. I wanted to buy several properties.

So she agreed to work with me. That's honestly how I got started in Arizona, right? Then I started talking to her about, okay, which parts of Arizona are people moving to? Where are you guys getting the most demand? Where do you see jobs going? I would take what she told me. and then I would just Google it. And I would see, is she feed me a load here or is this actually pretty accurate information? Then I would talk to other real estate agents that are around there. And I would say, hey, what do you guys think about this? The general consensus was like, yeah, these are all the areas that we see people going to.

Unless there was some conspiracy to lie to David and five different people were in on it, I kind of figured like, okay, I can trust this information, right? Then I reached out to a couple different property managers. I found one that I was most comfortable with. He managed quite a few properties. And I would basically kind of cross-reference what she had told. me by what he was telling me and whatever areas they both agreed on were the areas that I told her we wanted to focus on like that's a good tip right there yeah get multiple people and look

for the overlap in their advice yep I love that okay so you found the area now you found the agent you found the area he's got the manager in town he knows where to look so now all you have to do is find the properties who's shopping those for you the agent sending me the properties and then I'm you know you want to it's okay to listen to the advice the people you're talking to but you do want to check it for yourself because people make mistakes. And you do need to know in the back of your mind. These people are motivated by making money. They want to sell you things. So they're going to put a good spin on it regardless of who they are. Your own mom would be doing that if she would trade. So there's a couple websites like rentometer that I would use to check the rents to see if they looked accurate for where I was looking. Or Craigsus is another way that you can check. And I basically was like, well, the rents looked like they're good. The houses were only five or six years old that I was looking at. They were foreclosures. So I would take whatever they were asking. And I'd usually. offer about 80% of a price that I thought was already pretty good. And we just made deal after deal after deal or offer after offer after offer until we finally were able to get a couple accepted.

That's awesome. That's awesome. I understand really quickly that there's somewhat of a story. Maybe I'm wrong with the agent. Yeah. So this would be the second hurdle that I ran into that almost ruined my career. This agent who will remain nameless for now ended up going down for a form of fraud. where she was convicted of helping drug dealers line her money through real estate.

Yeah. Shut out. Wow. Right? So I've closed on these houses. We're working on trying to get them filled. I've got offers in on all these other ones. I'm moving money around to build to buy more homes.

And the next thing I know, I get a message saying I'm not allowed to talk about real estate in any form or fashion on any medium at all. And that's all I can say. Right. So I do some Googling and I see, oh, there's a video. her in her orange jumpsuit, you know, in front of the judge. And I'm a police officer, right? So that was a little embarrassing. It was my second moment where I was like, oh, my gosh, is this?

I might not cut out for this, right? I can't do anything. I found her on Fox Business News. You'd think that this would be someone you could trust. But I ended up keeping the property manager that she referred me to. And then it just became a game of, okay, I need to find a new real estate agent. So I would go through person after person after person. Because, you know, anyone in sales, their first answer is yes, right?

When you ask them, can they do something? And then after you dig in, you find out if they really can. This is the problem I'm running into with lenders right now all the time. Because now that I have more than 10 finance properties, finding loans is very hard. As hard as I work to find investment properties, I'm probably working three times as hard to find a lender right now that will lend to someone who doesn't conform to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, right? So this is kind of where I put together the system of when I go to new areas, how I put a team together kind of got refined during this process as I went through different real estate. at agents and I found the ones. They don't need to be the absolute best with the most contacts.

All that helps. I needed a guy that was hungry that was willing to work hard, right? If I said, hey, man, this is what I'm looking for. I needed him to go and dig through and call the agents and find out, hey, these are the people that are serious about selling. And, you know, this guy, you know, they say they want to sell, but the house has been listed for nine months or not willing to move on the price. So I'm not wasting my time making offers on houses we're not going to get.

Yeah. So I think that's fantastic advice. I mean, you want an agent who's hungry. You want somebody who's going to be willing to do that. Somebody said the other day I read a, I think it was on one of the webinars I did recently, where a person said, what was it, experienced agents are lazy, new agents are hungry, or something like that. And it doesn't always go across the board. But in general, when agents have been doing this for 20 years, they've got just this line of leads that come in.

They don't have to constantly go out and hustle to get the new leads in. So you want to find those guys that are hungry and willing to hustle. Yep, absolutely. I'd say that look for, like I was talking about, I looked at the podcast. positives and negatives of where I was living versus where I could go invest. You can do the same thing with agents, right? You can have an experienced agent that you have a good rapport with that you can bounce ideas off of and have him say, yeah, that seems like a really good deal. Or, hey, have you thought about this issue with the area? And then you want a younger, more hungry agent who's going to

actually be out there tearing stuff up, plowing the field, seeing what you can find for you. Yeah, I love it. All right. So let me go back a little bit. You're buying all these properties, but I mean, no offense at all here, but you're a cop, right? And you don't make a million dollars a year. So like how? So, you know, just be careful. I've ever seen cops make very, like, average salaries for an area. Like they don't make, you know, five times the average for their area. I'm assuming anyway. And so how are you able to buy these properties living on an average American salary?

Okay. So when I realized that, man, I can buy a property that will pay for itself and have extra money coming in and if I get enough of these, I can live off the money that they're making me. That whole concept just kind of blew my mind, right? And I've heard a lot of other people, when they see the same thing, that little light bulb goes off in their head and they realize, man, we got to throw everything we have into this. You got one of your earlier guests, I don't remember her name, but she talked about them being little oil wells, right? Yeah, I remember that. Like, it's a little worker that you have working for you that's bringing you money, right? And then I realize, okay, we're also at a time where prices are really low. There's tons of foreclosure

inventory and interest rates are super low, right? You can borrow money at 4% to buy a house that's going to make you like a 12% return on average. So that was another thing I thought, it almost felt like I'm in the bonus round, right? Like while I have this little window of opportunity, I need to hit as hard as I can because everything I make it is going to be amplified by four when you look at the interest rate and the low prices of the properties and what our government's doing right now with how much money that they're putting into the economy and where inflation is going to take us, right? So I kind of said the rest of my life is going to go on hold for a little while and I'm going to work like a dog to make as much money as I

possibly can to come up with the down payment for these houses. So the job that I work at, we get three days off. We work four, 10-hour days. And I just started taking those three days and I'd work a shift or a double shift every single day of my days off, saving up as much money as I could. I was always pretty good at playing defense as far as not spending much money. I didn't have, didn't spend money on clothes. I had six rentals while I was living in a room of another cop. So I didn't even have a house for myself. I was able to save a lot of money doing that. And I basically just said, okay, how long can I keep this sprint going where I'm making as much money as I can to put it all into real estate? Because I know 10, 20, 30 years down the road, I'm going to look back and say that was an

awesome time. And I'm so glad I did that. Yeah, you know, I feel like there's two camps that people go into when they're talking about personal finance. There's the camp that's like, you need to save money and you know, make your own soap and stop showering because, you know, like you're using water. And then there's a camp that's... You said something about not showering for like a month and a half. We know what camp that ran into since. I'm just, I'm just saying. I said it's been 60 days since I was taking a shower. You know, I don't believe in that.

I believe in saving the money from the... Oh, that's how you buy... All right, I took a shower last night. Yeah, but that is the mentality people have is I'm going to save money by not doing... I'm going to make my own clothes. And if you want to do that great. But the other side of it is what I'm more subscribed to is let's see how much I can make from hustling to make a lot more money. Can I double my income this year?

Can I triple my income? How can I do that? Not just saying, you know, can I can't die, but how can I? And it seemed like you took that approach. You said, look, I'm going to figure out how to make this work. Even living, you know, being in a typical America. Well, he kind of ran both strategies, living in that guy's house and working extra shifts. I love that.

Yeah, I look at it like the Golden State Warriors, right? They won the NBA championship last year. They were obviously a great offensive team. They have tons of offensive firepower, right? But a lot of people don't know. Last year they were the number one defensive team in the NBA, right? that's what makes them not just the best team, but far in a way the best team in the NBA. They found a way to have great offense, which in this aspect would be how much money you're making.

And then they found a way to have great defense, which was I'm not going to give up any points to the opponent. And in this case, I'm not going to spend my money on things other than real estate, right? And if you can work on increasing both of them, your returns are going to amplify to the point that you can really make a difference in an industry where typically you wouldn't think a police officer would be able to. Yeah, that's so true. That's great. It's one of the reasons I also like to encourage people. Not that you have to, but I encourage people a lot to look into the whole concept of house hacking, right? Where you buy maybe a single family house and rent the bedrooms out or buy a duplex or triplex and rent the other units out.

Because it helps you to be able to live for cheap, if not for free, while you're learning how to be an investor and a landlord. And so it's just another one of those. You kind of play an offense and defense at the same time. I like that analogy a lot, offense defense. Yeah. Yeah, I tell people that all the time when they look at what do I need to do to save money, right? When you start talking to them, it's pretty clear that they don't really want to play defense because they don't want to make cuts and things. they're comfortable with. And they don't want to play offense. They don't want to turn their offense up because they don't want to work overtime. They like their time off. They kind of want to have all the perks of not working hard, but also have the perks of successful investing. And so far, unless you're some kind of genius, I haven't learned a way to be able to do that. At some point, something has to give. And it's not going to be that way forever. I'm not going to work overtime like this for my entire life, right? But while real estate has been really cheap and interest rates have been really low and I've been able to buy it, it would be silly of me not to take advantage of that. So for the last couple of years, I've

between 80 and 100 hours a week. And I haven't really done much else other than work, save money and do deals. I've had to learn to buy a lot of these properties with technology, right? Because I don't have time to take off to go drive by all these houses and see them for myself or meet with the agents and stuff, right? Like there's a ton of ways that you can use to find properties and close on deals and manage your rentals without ever even being there. Yeah, I love that.

I just wrote a blog post actually. You should be out any minute. I guess when people are listening to this, it'll be out for a few days. But it was on the topic of how do you invest in real estate if you only have a few hours every week to spare. So people can check that out, biggerpockets.com slash blog. Josh, we're going to say something. I was, but you've cut me off for like 10 minutes. I got one more thing.

Book recommendation, so good they can't ignore you by Cal Newton. Best book I've read of the year. Oh, you're still talking. Oh, I am. Best book I've read this year. Wow. And it's all on this topic, David, this idea of working hard at your job, hustling, getting whatever. It's excellent.

Josh, go ahead. Oh, thank you. Wait, one more thing. Okay, go ahead. Dave is not amused. He's amused. I love that. And you did what you have to do, and you're doing what you have to do to get where you have to go.

And, you know, I did that with bigger pockets working the 80-100-hour weeks, busted my backside. You know, and if you want to accomplish something, you're going to find a way to do it. I read this really cool meme on Facebook the other day. It was another Elon Musk meme. and I think I'll read it because I think it's pretty telling. This is Elon. Elon wanted a new payment method on the Internet, so he created PayPal.

Elon wanted to drive an electric car, so he founded Tesla Motors. Elon wanted to go to space cheaper, so he created SpaceX. Elon wanted faster transportation, so he's developing Hyperloop. Elon does not tell everyone how bad the world is. Elon's working on changing the world, be like Elon. And that's, it's so perfect. You know, you run across people every single day who talk about how hard things are and how difficult things are, and they are. They're not always going to be easy for people. You know, for me to get my business to a place where, you know, we can start hiring people and things are going, well, it took a ton of work.

You're dealing with the same thing. I will admit this freely to the world. I was watching the Backstreet Boys documentary on MTV last night. and they were talking They were just showing Yeah see I couldn't sing the songs Brandon can I can sing them all Right They were talking

You know they talked about the years of buildup until they became you know world famous And these guys busted their back sides off They worked so hard for so long Until any of us even had heard of them And that's what it's all about I mean you can't just whine and complain

You gotta work hard You gotta hustle and you've got to find ways. And, you know, you're a perfect demonstration. You had, you know, these days off, use the days off to work. You know, I know a lot of people who are teachers and, you know, they make teacher salaries, which isn't great, but they have their entire summer off. They have all these other times off, tons of vacation time.

You know, those are great times to find other jobs, work, you know, get other opportunities. There's a lot of ways to make it happen. And I don't know, I just love that story. Yeah, I think you have to embrace that. it's hard and be glad that it is, okay? Because if for whatever reason we had a country where you were getting this money without having to earn it or work very hard or it was just falling in your lap, everyone would be able to buy these investment properties.

The prices of them would be much higher because of the demand would be higher. It would be way harder to make a profit. And the truth is you'd have to probably pinch pennies at every corner because it was so easy to do it and so many other people were doing it that you wouldn't be able to make much money. The harder it is to break into it, the more likely you're going to be able to find some success in that area because you're one of the only people that's doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, if it was easy, everyone would do it. Exactly. There are two kinds of real real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most

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Exactly. For those who can't see, David is completely bald. And I didn't realize that before the show. And so he sent me a message and said, hey, by the way, I'm having a bad hair day. I said, oh, don't worry, me too. I really am having a bad hair day. I prefer the term shaven. Okay.

I like that. Shaven guy. You can be shaven guy, and he can be bald guy and bald guy and shaving guy. I like Batman and Robin. Exactly. You can be Robin. You got to wear tights though. Okay.

So you met Jeff Brown. Yeah. So Jeff invited me to one of his conferences where he talked about different investment strategies. And Dave Van Horn, who also writes articles for you guys, was there. So I got to meet Dave as well. Right. And the gist of it's not very complicated at all.

What you're doing is when you're buying a note, you're buying the right to collect a mortgage from somebody else, right? Just like when you buy a house, you get a loan from a bank. Well, that bank has the right to collect a mortgage because they gave you the money. They can sell that right to sell that right to sell. someone else who then inherits the terms of that loan. We call it a note because it's money. Somebody owes you secured by real estate in this case, right? Well, a lot of these people, they stop paying their mortgage. And then the note because of what we call non-performing, right?

So if you own a non-performing note, it's kind of useless because it's not making you any money. It's not likely to. And the only way you get your money back is by going to foreclosing on the house. Depending on who you are, if you're a big bank with millions of these things, you don't want to go foreclose on every house. And we saw what happened earlier in the podcast. And I was talking about when all these houses were for sale, it pushed prices down really far. So a lot of these banks have learned, hey, let's just sell the notes to different investors. We won't flood the market with a ton of property so we won't push prices down and we can still get it off our books. So Dave's company, PPR, they basically buy these non-performing notes from banks in bulk with investors' money.

So I was one of those investors. They then contact the people who own the note and they basically get them paying again. They say, okay, hey man, why did you stop paying your mortgage? Well, my house went down $50,000 in value and I lost my job for six months, so I fell behind six months on the mortgage payment. I'm not working like a dog to make up six months of payments on a house that's worth $50,000 and less than what I owe. So they'll basically say, okay, what if we raise your interest rate a little bit, but we drop your principal down so that your house is evening, you're not underwater? Almost everyone says, heck yeah, I'll do that. My kids don't have to leave their school.

I don't have to move. I can stay in my house, and they agree to it, right? Well, these notes were purchased from banks at pennies on the dollar because you're buying a non-performing note that's not worth very much. So if the note was worth $100,000 and they're able to buy it for $10,000 or $15,000 and they can drop the principal down to $75,000, they can then sell the note to me for maybe $10,000 more than what they paid for it. And I'm getting a note for $25,000 that, oh, they owe $75,000 on it. So that note income now starts coming in. And typically it's about a 12% return on your money. and I take that and I apply it to the principal of rental properties that I have to pay them down faster.

So the strategy is I take the cash flow from a rental and I add the note income. I pay down the mortgage faster. Let's say I do it in like five years. And then I refinance that house, pull money out again and do this by either note income or more rental property with it and repeat the process. This time I probably paid off in three years, right? And then I can pay the next one off in two years and then one and a half. And I keep going like that until I get to the point that the house is paying itself off maybe every six months. And I actually have a compound interest spreadsheet on my website where you can see,

taking like $125,000 investment in 30 years, you're going to be making $100,000 a month from following that practice and just letting compound interest do its thing. And we'll link to that in the show notes, of course, at biggerpockets.com. So you're just buying, I mean, basically you're buying streams of cash flow that you're then reinvesting into new streams of cash flow. I mean, it's just this compounding effect here. Yeah, exactly. It's beautiful. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that strategy. I've never done with notes and I would love to get into them. Now, what are the downsides of notes? I mean, that sounds all wonderful and stuff, but why, what are the downsides of it? All right, so when you're buying

real estate, you get used to certain perks to come with it. One of them is depreciation. You get to write off a percentage of the income that you get comes in. With a note, you're not going to get that. You can tax a full amount on the income that you're getting. Your note's also not going to appreciate and value like a house can, right? With a rental property, you're usually going to charge more for the rent every year, assuming the economy is doing well. With the note, the income that you're getting is the income you're getting, and that's not going to change. It's also a little bit harder to sell it. There's less of a market to sell notes to other people, and someone who's buying it is going to be expecting a discount when he buys it from you. So it's definitely not as liquid as real estate is.

Another positive about note buying, though, is that oftentimes they pay out early. So in the example, I gave you if I bought a note for $25,000, it was worth $75,000. The person may pay for five years on it, and he's paid off five grants. And now the note's holding a $70,000 balance. Well, when he sells the house, refinances the house, moves, he has to pay me the full balance of $70,000. Right. So now my $25 is worth $70, and I can go buy three notes, basically, for the price of what I pay for the first one and triple my income. But what if they don't pay the note?

I mean, what are the downside they just decide not to pay you? And you have to foreclose. I actually am kind of hoping that's going to happen because whenever I buy a note, I make sure that the value of the house is more than the value of the note. So if somebody stops paying and it becomes a non-performing note like it was when I bought it, I can either go back to them and I can rework the terms and get them paying again. I can foreclose on them and sell the house to somebody else. Or I can foreclose on them and I can inherit a rental property that I just bought at pennies on the dollar.

and now I have a rental property that's cash flowing probably just as good or better than the note was. Yeah. Now, is this something that you're actually doing yourself? I know you said you were using Dave's company, PPR, or is their company the company that does all that stuff for you? If you want to foreclose, they go ahead and they help you out with that, or are you doing it all on your own? Oh, God, no.

As soon as I met them, I asked, okay, worst case scenario, what if this happens? And they said, hey, we've got attorneys you can use. We've done this a thousand times. use our process. It's a very reasonable fee to do it. Just like with property managers where I let them handle all the stuff that I'm not good at, it's the very same thing. This note thing, I would not have entered into it if it was going to be a time suck that was going to take a bunch of my time, just like it did the very first time I had an eviction in a rental property. That's awesome. Well, sounds pretty hands-off, fairly turn-keyish, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that's great. That's great.

Cool. So, I mean, what's the plan? What's the strategy? You're going to just keep going until what are you going to retire from the force? Are you, you know, hopefully all of your friends are listening and decide to spread the word and they should all do the same thing. But no, I mean, what's your game plan here? Yeah, it's tough to get other cops to buy into this stuff because by nature we're just an untrusting bunch. We don't deal with nice folks like you too most of the time, right?

We're getting lied to all the time. So when you tell a cop, hey, you should buy a rental property. The first thing he thinks is all the people they've had to evict and all the people that lie. and it's not a very appealing process for a lot of them. My plan is to kind of be the example that doesn't have to be the way that it is, right? If you work really hard, if you save your money, if you're good at doing that and you invest it wisely, you'll eventually get to a point where that money is making you money and you have

enough to live off of and enough left over to invest. So, you know, my short-term goal is to read $25,000 a month in passive income. I'm not close to that right now. So I've got some work cut out for me. But that was the goal that I set for myself. I figure if I have a 12% return on my money, that I need to have a net worth of about 2.5 million to be able to get there. And real estate's a medium that I'm using to try to do that in.

I love it. I love it. And you know, what's interesting is, yeah, I watch a lot of cop shows and stuff. I just, you know,

that's pretty much all that stuff. So Josh knows everything about being a cop. I know nothing about it. But here's what I know. It's like, you know, again, we talked back about the cop who,

bought the million dollar house, right? I mean, you are methodically and systematically building your net worth, building your wealth. And, you know, you find these situations where people, you know, in 10, 20 years, they're like, well, how the hell did this guy come out of nowhere and be worth, you know, two, four, five million dollars plus on a cop salary? And he wasn't skimming. He wasn't doing anything shady. It was like anybody, like I said, anybody can do this. You just have to be thought. You have to be methodical. You have to get your hands dirty, figure out a plan, and just get behind it, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It's kind of like working out, right? Most of the time when I think about working out, I think I need to be more intense. I need to work out harder. I need to push it even more, right? The truth is you just need to be more consistent. You just got to go to the gym more often. Three semi-good workouts are way better than one amazing one and then you miss your next two or three workouts.

Money is the exact same way, right? If you're able to start off just saving 10% of your money, that will take you pretty far. And then as you get good at that, you should be able to start saving a little bit more and a little bit more, especially as you're making more. The way you look at it is if you want, once you see how compound interest can work for you, it should put a little white ball block in your head where you want to start saving more money. And then you need to look at it like every dollar that comes my way is mine until I give to somebody else. How can I find a way to keep as much of these dollars, if not all of them, so that I can invest them and have them working for me. You know, I've been lucky enough that I have got to a place in my investing where the income from my rental properties pays for all my bills and I'm able to take 100% of the money that I make it work and put that into buying more properties, right? So the trajectory of that graph is starting to get pretty steep once you get to that point, right? But most people can do this within five or six years if they're just really concentrated, like you said, Josh, and focused on hitting that goal.

Yeah, I think that's just your advice on like it's the workouts, right? Like it's the everyday action that matters more than anything. I shared a quote on, Instagram earlier today. It just said, so often people think that the key to success is superb intelligence, unnatural luck, excessive time to devote to big tasks or knowing the right people at the right time. In reality, success is the reward given to those who take small steps daily towards their goal. And I thought that was just like, it fits exactly with that, like every day, do something or, you know, regularly at least just move forward on your goal. Instead of like trying to always hit a home run, just keep hitting those base hits. And over time, that'll compound to do amazing things. Like your story.

What was that quote from? That quote? That was from a blog post I wrote. Oh, you wrote that? I wrote that. Yeah, it's pretty good, right? So you just, you just, because you just said I read something on Instagram. No, I said I shared a quote on Instagram.

So you were quoting yourself. I didn't want to say that I made up this quote because it was really good. See, I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to say how awesome that quote was. But you just did. No, you called me out on it. I was going to be humble. I was going to be humble about it, not say that that's my amazing quote.

yourself. I can. Of course I can't. I can't put my name on it, which I put bigger pockets name on it. So now you know. How long before Brandon's speaking in the third person on these podcasts? He's getting close. Brandon. Brandon thinks. No, I'm just saying that was a line that I thought was good. Sheesh. All right, we're moving on. It was a very good quote. It was a good quote. I did not. I did not say that was me. See, David agrees. Right. David's on my side. You're going to have a side hustle riding fortune cookie little strips there. These folks are going to go. Don't give them any ideas.

Instagrams. All right. Enough mocking me now. I'm going to, I'm going to go and close this thing up to the, why don't we go to the fire round? Does that sound good? Sounds good.

It's time for the fire round. All right. Let's get to today's fire round. Question number one from the fire round. Josh is still laughing over there. I quoted myself, sheesh, this guy. I never said that I'm moving on. Moving on.

Is it a good idea for a newbie? Is it a good idea for a newbie to purchase non-performing notes? Or should that be saved for an experienced investor? I have a hard time seeing how a newbie knows what to do with the non-performing note. I wouldn't have touched it. You need the resources to reach out to the person, to contact them, to figure out what they need to do to start paying again, to know the laws in the state where you are. If you're willing to put that much time in to save a couple thousand bucks, then go ahead.

But I would say when you're starting off, let someone who's good at it do it. And if you start to notice that you have a knack for it, then you can start worrying about that stuff. There you go. Sounds good. Sounds good. You're still laughing over there. I'm at a loss. All right.

Next question, are short sales still a good investment today? Oh, I love short sales. I'd buy nothing but short sales if I could. The thing that's awesome about a short sale is you get it on your. contract and then you have no idea when the bank is actually going to close right they're going to jerk you around they're going to make you work on their timetable and so i figure that's fine if that's the way you guys want to do i'm probably going to be the same way back with you if the house appreciates in value like they have been then you close on the deal and you're getting a better deal than when you

got it under contract if something changes in the market you can say no never mind i don't want to do the deal and you can cancel it at any time because these short sales can take sometimes a year so for investment purpose is short sales are amazing. If you're a first-time home buyer, I would say that it's not a good idea. You can answer that if you want to. Sorry about that. No, you should answer it. Did it like? Answer it right on the air. No, I don't know who by. That's even better. I want to hear, I want to hear the telemarketer. I want to hear what you say to them. No, I think I think that's great. Anson Young on the episode we did with him, the first one we did with him. I think he talked about the short sale time machine.

That was kind of what he used the terminology. And I thought that was like a good way of putting that is like, hey, you buy the property. It's like you get the past price at a future value. And it's like an option. Yeah. Yeah, it's like an option. That's a great way to look at it. Yeah.

Look at you, Josh. Using all fancy stock terms. Oh, wait. Hold on. Let me create a quote card for myself. It's like an option. That was a great quote that I read somewhere on Instagram. I wonder who wrote it.

I didn't say I read it. I shared it on Instagram. Hold on. That was an, I'm making you an Instagram. It's a famous quote. He called it famous the first. I did not. I did not call it famous.

I just said, all right. All right. Stop. Number three. Stop. Get the next question. Come on. Number three.

Should investors be stockpiling cash right now or should they keep buying? Okay. So that depends where you live. Cash is only good if you can use it. to leverage a better investment. So if you're able to buy a place all cash for less than somebody could, if they're putting a loan, cash helps you. Personally, in my opinion, I think that I don't know when it's going to come, but we're going to see massive inflation in America from quantitative easing in the way that we've been handling the recession, in which case your cash is going to be

worth less every day than it was the day before. I think owning real estate is awesome, considering that inflation's coming because your properties are going to appreciate more. And the money that you're borrowing to buy them, you'll be paying back with dollars that are worth less than when you borrowed it. There you go. This is show 169 of the Bigger Pockets podcast with David Green. Next episode, show 170, we'll have economist David Green back to tell you more. I was going to say that was an awkward transition, Josh, but then you made it funny.

It's okay. I was like, why? That's a weird way to plug the show. All right. Last question. Last question. All right. Dave, would you pay all cash if you had $150,000 cash?

Or would you try to leverage other people's money for your first deal? So I don't like leveraging other people's money on houses this small because you have too many other people's interests you have to take into consideration. Somebody may say, hey, I want my money back in five years. Somebody may say, I want a cash for the rest of my life. And someone may say, hey, I'm behind on my own mortgage. We need to sell this place now. And I need to get my money back. I think if you pay $150,000 cash, you buy it under market value and then you refinance it.

You can usually pull out all of or most of the money that you put into it and have a number. another $150,000 to go get another good deal. I know what Brandon's thinking. This is his Burr strategy. I was just going to say something about that. How'd you know? Yeah. Psychic.

I've watched a few of your podcasts. And you're famous now, so I follow everything that you say. I will be making an Instagram quote about the birth strategy later, apparently. I love how you talked about other people's interests. It's a really, really important thing. You know, bigger pockets, you know, is in this space of startups and internet companies and things like that. And I talk to so many people who create companies and the first thing is, hey, I'm going to go and take somebody's money. And they don't realize that that person has a

clock waiting and you better return their money plus whatever X they want in three years or else they're going to start dictating how you're going to run your company, whether you like it or not. And so when you're beholden to other people, obviously you have folks who are going to dictate some things to you and I think that's a great point that we don't really hear a lot. Yeah, absolutely. I do invest with other people. One of your future guests, Andrew Cushman, he's a partner of mine. We've invested in apartment buildings together.

Something like that where there's enough cash coming in and you spell it in the beginning when you can expect to get your money back, that's a different story. But for properties like what you were talking about, you have to remember you're sharing risk as well, right? Let's say the place that you're buying, the roof caves in and everyone needs to come up with $10,000 to put a new roof on the house. Well, one of your partners might not have it, right? How are you going to deal with that problem?

You have that many people with their hands in the pot. So for properties of this value, I think it's much cleaner to do it yourself if you can. Perfect. Cool. Perfect. And I love how you know who our future guests are because I don't even know. We're recording tomorrow, Josh. Come on.

Oh, fantastic. Way to be on it. Good job, Dorkman. All right. So I think the Andrew Cushman or Cushman. Cushman. Cushman. Cushman.

Okay. Yeah, that is tomorrow at 1.30. We are recording that tomorrow. So anyway, I believe that episode comes out. next week for those people listening right now. So stay tuned for that. All right. Yeah, yeah.

We got to do our world famous. Famous for. All right. These questions are the ones that we throw at every guest. And so you are no exception, David. Number one, what is your favorite real estate book that isn't the book on rental property investing by Brandon Turner? What if that was actually his favorite book? You just screwed yourself.

I got to think fast now. No, dang it. So believe it or not, the millionaire real estate agent is actually such a well-written book that investors can benefit a lot from reading that book. I've read the millionaire real estate investor and it's good, but it's not as good as the millionaire agent. The principles in that book will absolutely help you build your business up way faster and way bigger than you ever would have if you didn't read it. Awesome.

I think that's the first time somebody's mentioned that. So that's great. All right, favorite business book? It's the richest man in Babylon. I'm not going to say rich dad, poor dad. That is a good book. But the richest man in Babylon is an amazing book. Everybody should read that.

They should have kids reading it in school. If you're considering getting starting real estate investing, that's one of the first things that you should do. Agreed. Great choice. Great choice. All right, while you're not working 100-hour weeks locking people up and listening to bigger pockets and buying properties, what on earth do you do for fun? Oh, man, typical guy stuff. I like to ride motorcycle and shoot guns.

I still play video games. I read quite a bit. I watch football. I don't drink, but I do watch a lot of sports. I'm a huge basketball fan. The Warriors are pretty amazing to watch right now. So I try to catch all their games. 2016 Warriors versus 94-95 Bulls because it's all over the damn news.

That is. Well, what era are we playing in? Yeah, that's a good question. Whose rules, right? Right. Yeah. Thank you. That's all you had to say.

Every time I hear people. Yeah, there's no answer. No, when they argue that question, I just typically kind of think these people are dumb because you're asking a question that you can't. There's no answer to what's the point of having this conversation? The Warriors would have been built different if they were in 1994 and the Bulls would have different players that they're playing in today's era.

Exactly. Cool. So you're a Golden State guy. Yeah. Are they going to beat the 72 win record? Oh, man. That loss of the Telstakes kind of scared me the other day. I wasn't expecting that.

I think if the Spurs rest their players, which they probably will, the Warriors will get it. Okay. All right. Let's see if you're right. We'll find out. We'll find out. I don't know a single thing you guys just said the last like 20 minutes.

Ball in hole. I know something about a basket unit goal thing. All right. Last question from me. David, what do you think sets apart the successful real estate investors from those who give up fail or never bothered to get started? So a successful real estate investor is someone who's going to be persistent. Like I told you, my first deal went bad. my second experience in Arizona went bad.

But I hang on and those properties have appreciated quite a bit, right? And I would be kicking myself if I had sold those back in the day when things went wrong. It's the whole idea of you're going to take punches and not quit that makes you successful as opposed to just being this brilliant mind that is able to analyze deals. And we all look at that person like, oh, he's so smart. He's great. Look at what he's doing. Most of the work you need to do can be done on a spreadsheet.

You don't need to be that smart. You need to have a plan. you need to stick with it. You need to keep your head up and pay attention to what's going on around you and adjust your plan if necessary. And most importantly, just keep getting up when you get knocked down. We can't all be Brandon Turner. You can't all be Brandon Turner.

I've never been knocked down. Actually, it's been smooth sailing for me my whole life. That is not true. I know your first deal went terrible. Every deal goes terrible. All right. All right, David. Before I let you go, since I am obsessed with police television program,

Actually, I'm not. My wife just likes it. What's the best cop show on TV? Okay. So I would say if you, cop show, probably Southland. That was probably the most accurate. The movie, what's the Jake Gillinghall movie? End of watch.

Oh, that's such a good one. That's a very, oh, you got to watch it. That's probably the most accurate police movie that I've ever seen as far as getting down the demeanor in the last of the office. Is it like 12 guys sitting in an office doing paperwork for like nine hours? Because that seems like it would probably be. I thought you were going to talk about like donuts at the 7-11. I was going to.

Cops have a complex. I got to tell you. Complex about donuts because we get teased all the time about it, right? So if you ever see a cop with like donuts, he's trying to hide it in a bag or something to know if he's up. It's really bad. There's guys with like donut PTSD out there. I was up at 4.30 this morning because the fire alarm smoke detector in my house started, you know, doing the low battery thing. And every minute it gives this high-pitched.

chime every single minute. Of course, I'm out of batteries. I've got nothing. So at 4.30, I get a run down to 7-Eleven. And yes, I did run across to find officers doing whatever it is that they do at 7-Eleven. But, uh, all right, here's a quick tip for everyone including Josh. If you open up the smoke detectors, the little wire, you just pull it and it will hopefully stop beeping. Oh, it doesn't work.

Didn't work. You tried to pull the wire? No, no, this was the smoke. No, not only just pulling the. battery out and pulling the wire and not stop it. But like, you know, I was going to drown it in the bathtub after a few minutes, but you have to go through this whole procedure. Like you got to pull the battery, you got to unplug it. You have to read. You have to actually, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. You have to push the test button. Now, when do smoke detector batteries go out? Every single time,

it's in the middle of the night. So you have to run that damn thing. I got three kids that are sleeping. My wife is up pissed off. We woke up the entire house to shut it. And, and and yeah, it took like an hour to get this whole ordeal over with. But anyway, I don't know why we're still talking about it. So, David, thank you so much for coming on. We do appreciate it. Before we let you go, you said you had a website. Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, so my website is www.davidgreen24.com. I've got a blog on real estate articles on there, and I've got a couple calculators that you can use for doing real estate-related math. You can also find me on Facebook. it's the Facebook.com slash David Green 24 and I'm on LinkedIn as well. And that's called me.

Green with an E. Yes. Thank you, Brandon. There's an E at the end of green. Don't forget that. Cool. And they can find you also on your bigger pockets profile, which we'll link to on the show.

Absolutely. I talk to people on there all the time. I love talking real estate. Awesome, man. David, thank you so much for coming on, man. We really do appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, guys.

It was awesome to meet you. And I hope we keep in touch. Sounds good. See you there. All bye. All right, guys, that was David Green. Thanks, Dave, for an awesome show. Thank you for helping me just completely make fun of Brandon.

That was a whole lot of fun. That was a riot. That was fun. Yeah, that was really fun. Feeling weird. You still feel weird about it. It's really fun. It's really fun.

Thanks. Hey, Josh, knock, knock. Is it time for me? Knock, knock. Yeah, that's awesome. That's not going to work. Knock, knock. I can't even focus.

You're like that troll who was on your webinar the other day. Yeah, there was a troll on my webinar the other day. Like some guy left probably 40,000 messages in the chat room on my webinar. Oh, man. People are crazy, especially that guy. Speaking of webinars, if people want to show up, my next webinar, you should come. It's probably going to be on Wednesday. They usually are.

BiggerPockets.com slash webinar. You'll learn cool stuff. Hang out with me for an hour and talk about real estate. Do it, do it, do it. All right, guys, David Green. It was a pleasure. Great show. Learned a whole lot.

You know, lots of great tips as always. And he's just a super cool guy. I love his strategy. Just love what he's doing. So good stuff there. All right, show 169 is in the books. And, of course, check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 169. Before we go, Brandon, anything you want to get off your chest?

I got nothing. I didn't think so. Okay, this is Josh Dorkin. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com.

Your home for real estate investing online. I've done that to me. I still get people who do knock, knock on my Twitter, by the way. That's really funny. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question. What if you could buy brand new construction homes, 10% below market value,

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