BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 176: How to Close 100+ Deals In Your First 18 Months with Tom Krol

Episode Date: May 26, 2016

Everyone knows it’s tough to find deals in today’s real estate market — but somehow our guest today, Tom Krol, didn’t get that memo! In his first 18 months, Tom closed over one hundred wholesale dealsand has continued to dominate his market. In this explosive and highly entertaining episode, Tom goes into incredible detail on the exact methods he used to build out a highly automated real estate acquisition machine. And don’t miss the in-depth discussion on nine specific lists that Tom mails to; it just might change your business forever. Hang on tight — this show is about to rock your world! In This Episode We Cover: How Tom got started in real estate Why he had to sell his golf cart The biggest mistakes he made when starting out How he closed 100 deals in the first 18 months The attitude successful wholesalers have How to avoid “shiny object syndrome“ How he finds real estate deals What “the list” is What a motivated seller really looks like Tips for buying owner-occupied deals How Tom became successful in this kind of investing What you should know about “the rule of 5“ Tips for using a virtual assistant Why the money is in the database How much he spends on direct mail How many mailings per month he sends out A discussion on bandit signs How to get comfortable with making mistakes How many hours he works per week And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Calculators Amazon Echo Podio Craigslist ListSource BRRRR Strategy Upwork Dreaming of That 4-Hour Work Week? This App Will Help You Get There! (Blog Post) FindMotivatedSellersNow.com BP Podcast 151: Finding Your “Freedom Number” with Clayton Morris BP Podcast 173: Flipping 100+ Houses in an Expensive, Competitive Market with Steve Jones Books Mentioned in this Show The ONE Thing by Gary Keller Getting Things Done by David Allen The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity by Edwene Gaines Traction by Gino Wickman Tweetable Topics: “Progress not perfection.” (Tweet This!) “Imperfect action instead of perfect planning.” (Tweet This!) “Every single real estate deal, no matter what you do, starts with a good deal.” (Tweet This!) “You’re going to make mistakes whether you have 4 years of education in real estate or none.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Tom Tom’s BiggerPockets Profile Tom’s Company Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 176. There's so much you don't need to know in order to do a deal and you just get in your own way. 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.

House of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. That was very much like the Price's Right style or something. Yeah, baby. Come on down. Come on. Look at you, Mr. Disney. You're back. Oh, my goodness.

You know what? Today's show is just perfect timing for. for what has just happened. Yeah, I am back. For those of you who don't know, which is pretty much everybody, I just went away for my first vacation in nine years. Whoa. Let me let me let me let that marinate for you. Yes, I have not taken an act. You know, I've traveled. I've had events and life events and things, but I've worked every, all but two days up until this trip in which I took. I think it was a total of a 10 or 11 days off in a row. unbelievable.

The best week of my life. Yeah, I know it was. I know it was. Well, the irony is I had the best real estate week of my life the week you were gone. Coincidence? I don't know. Yeah, that's because you didn't do any work the week I was gone. Sat around all day, just buying properties.

No, Disney World, that's exciting. Cruise, that was exciting. Yeah, that was exciting. Cruise, which was amazing Royal Caribbean. I got to plug them. Royal Caribbean was absolutely unbelievable. Like, the crew, there were a few people who weren't amazing. Did you get to fight with the crew?

The ice sculpture guy, he was carving in. Like, you know, like 80 countries, I think they had. And so, like, you know, there's some cultural stuff, I think. But like overall, everybody was unbelievable who worked on the ship. The entertainment was great. The whole thing was fantastic. It was really nice to thaw. And then I did three days at Disney with my family and kids.

And that was unbelievable. We stayed at the, I forget the name of the hotel already, but that's the hotel that the tram goes through, the monorail goes through. And yeah, it was fantastic, man. Really, really nice. I'm back, and today's Thursday, today's Tuesday that we're recording it.

But yesterday, we just brought on our latest employee, our new product manager. So lots of exciting stuff happening. And I feel good. It's great to be back, very excited to be here. And yeah, we got a phenomenal show, man. Phenomenal show. I've done a lot of talking.

You've been, man. You got something happening in the next. next week or two, right? I mean, nothing that important, right? Nothing that important, you know, a living being being brought into the world, you know, any week now. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, let's get on. Today's show is... At any minute, there will be a miniature, Brandon Turner, frightening. A female miniature Brennan Turner. More like a mini Heather Turner. She better look like Heather. She better look like Heather. We don't want her looking like me. Hell no. All right. So yeah, anyway, it's coming. it up real soon. You guys will hear about that. I'm sure soon, but I got my little girl coming. So it's exciting. My wife is ready to pop. I mean, she's, she's ready. So anyway, today's show is really high energy, really fun. The number one problem people have today in real estate, I hear it over and over is not being able to find deals. You will not have that problem after listening to today's show.

Like, you will not have that. You can't use that as an excuse anymore at today's show. It's so actionable. We'll have to find another excuse. Yep, another excuse. Yeah, you'll love it. But before we get to that, Let's get to today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip is if you guys use the rental property calculator on bigger pockets, you will notice that there is a new little feature on there. On page three of the calculator, it now asks you for the sales percentage. And what that means is that you can enter in when you go to sell your rental property someday, what percent does it cost you to sell it?

Maybe 6% for an agent and a few percent for closing costs. The reason you can now do that is now on page four on the bottom of the chart or in the graph. and if you use it, this will make more sense to you. You'll now see a line that says overall return or total return. What that does is it basically allows you to incorporate the idea that the property value is going to hopefully go up and that the loan is being paid down. And it incorporates more than just cash on cash return. So anyway, if you're interested in learning more about that, we wrote up a blog post about it.

You can get to it at biggerpockets.com forward slash total return. Excellent. Cool. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy, and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims.

And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly. That's why more real estate investors are turning to steadily. They focus exclusively on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builder's risk policy, or midterm holiday guests. You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability, and even loss of rental income. Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage. Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance. Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor.

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 properties mid-rehab. That's where blind spots can creep in. NREG 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.

Before your next acquisition, review your insurance. Talk to NREG and get investor-specific coverage from specialists who actually understand real estate at NRE.com slash BPPod. That's N-R-E-I-G.com slash B-Podd. Here's the thing about traveling. If you buy food at the airport, a burrito, salad, bag of peanuts, you start wondering if you should have opened a savings account for snacks. So wouldn't it be great if you could actually earn money while you're traveling?

Well, you can. Airbnb has something called the co-host network. While you're away, you can hire a vetted local co-host with hosting experience to help take care of things, communicating with guests, preparing your space, managing reservations, everything runs smoothly while you're off making memories. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Really quickly, guys, this is show 176 of the Bigger Pockets podcast.

Check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 176. You can also go to biggerpockets.com slash podcast to find all of our previous shows. You can also find links there to transcripts. We've got transcripts for all of our own shows now. And transcripts will come out somewhere one to three weeks after a show is released. So just keep an eye off for that if you do need transcripts. You have something you want to say. I forgot.

I was going to have another quick tip. Anyway, this is random quick tip. Yeah, quick tip part two. If you go to, if you have an Amazon Echo at home, which are kind of cool little, you know, Amazon's new little. The thing that the CIA uses to spy on you. And I think I might have maybe mentioned this actually a few weeks ago. But if not, I'll say it again anyway.

You can actually say, Alexa, play a bigger pockets podcast episode and it will play a podcast right on the Amazon Echo. It's pretty cool. Yeah, very exciting. I'm glad you've opened your home for people to listen to everything that you talk to your The new iPhone update, Siri, like the new iPhone, now listens as well. You just say Siri and you talk. Yeah, if you turn that on.

Oh, yeah, of course I turn that on. Weirdo. I want the government to know what I'm doing, all right? Oh, yeah. I mean, the government, we're friends. All right. Oh, buddy, buddy. All right, man.

So, let's do this. Oh, by the way, leave us a rating and review. We love those ratings and reviews, and they really do help us do that on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you listen to the show. Tom Krull, my God. this guy is literally like I think he might have taken like 50 caffeine pills before he started the show. Talk about energy. I mean, it's, it's amazing. It's amazing. So the next time I want to get motivated, I'm just going to play the show because it's crazy. It's crazy. But Tom is a very active real estate

investor who did over 100 wholesale deals in his first 18 months. And today we just talk about getting deals. How do you find deals? How do you get those deals? And, it's going to blow your brain. So stay tuned and let's let's make it happen. All right, Tom, welcome to the show, man. Good to have you here. Good to be here, guys. I'm so excited. Yeah, it should be fun. I'm just to give a little prep. Before Josh said those words right there, he could remember what to say, how to bring in Tom. So he's like, hold on to guys a second. I got to remember what I say here. So that was really, that was really good, Josh. You remembered how to say welcome to the show. I have been away, as I talked about. I've been away

for a few weeks and I'm just gathering steam and you know that that plus like Tom's like a bullion energy and really bright ass yellow shirt just confusing to me so I'm just like I don't know what to do with myself

I had an orange shirt on but I got coffee on that leave it's just two both birds with one stone nice nice well all right well Tom thank you thank you for coming on the show. We're excited to have you. And obviously, you do have a ton of energy, and we are super excited. But let's get into this thing, man. So you're a real estate guy, and you've got kind of an interesting story. And I think the audience would love to hear it. So

how did you get going? How'd you get started in the world of real estate? So I hit rock bottom, right? Like so many people do. I got right slammed down. I got fired from my job, which was, it ended up being great. But it was a horrible nightmare, nightmare job. I was making a very low salary and I was fired and I was selling long care and I'm an overweight guy and I was in Florida and I had sweat in weird places knocking on people's doors. It was so bad. You were that creepy sweaty dude who keeps banging on my door. Oh yeah.

That's what the car is. Hold on. Did you want to sell? Do you guys want long care? You have a towel and some water? So it was a nice. It was a nightmare. I hated every minute of it. I didn't know anything really about it. And I wasn't making any sales. I am the world's worst salesman in the world. I go from sales job to sales job, never make any sales, getting fired from every single place. And I got fired. And my brother was a real estate investor out in California. I live in Florida. And my brother said, you got to get into what I was starting off when was wholesaling. And he said, you got to get into real estate investing. It's great. And I was whining like a little baby the whole time. I was going, well, San Diego was so big and Port St. Lucy's so small.

So he just dragged. Wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. You got to do the whole interview in that voice. That's what it sounded like. And he gave me some big brother kicking the pants. And I had a ton of failure all over the place. He would say, you know, I would say, oh, you know, the homes in San Diego are more money. And down here, they're so small.

And it's just, you know, it's just a whole nightmare. And he just pulled me through kicking and screaming. And I did some initial mailings. And I completely lost all of my money because I made some mistakes when I did them. And it was just a nightmare. I mean, the whole thing was a total nightmare. But I think when you hit rock bottom, that's when you really can just make it happen because you have nothing to lose. There's no safety net.

So you just go, go, go like a rhino, which I loved. And it ended up being great. I love wholesaling. I love real estate investing. And it's led me onto this show, which is amazing. because three years ago, I would have been like, hey, Brandon, Josh, you guys got 50 bucks I can borrow for gas? Which is true. So now it's like, bam, I'm ringing that victory bell every day.

I love it. I love it. That's awesome. Wow. You guys, we need a guest who has more energy. Sorry about Tom. Sorry, Tom. Oh, go ahead.

You can apologize. Just keep doing it throughout the show. All right. I want to know about your first deal. How did it actually, how did you go from that first mailer, which didn't go, which I'd love to hear why it didn't go. Yeah, I want to hear about this mistake. And then, and then how'd you get the first one? So my brother was telling me what mail to go to do.

It was an equity list and owner occupied homes and he gave me all the criteria. But then at the last minute, my brother like disappeared and he was like gone. He went on vacation. And I was left and my wife was pressured me. She's like, should I buy groceries or pay the mortgage? And I'm like, oh, so I just did a mailing quickly. And I forgot to put. on the list source list last market sale date. So it was 100% equity and every single person was like,

I just bought my home for cash like three or four months ago. Like, why would I sell it for a discount to you? But I did build my cash buyer list at the time, which was fantastic. So that one was a complete failure. The second one, I had to sell my golf cart, which is a big deal in Florida because you need a golf cart to get your kids to school down here. So I sold my golf cart. I think I sold it for about 2,500 bucks. Really? You guys drive golf carts around? I love it.

We have two of them. We have a four-seater and an eight-seater. It's like a little. It's a little. It's old people and golf carts. It's, you hit the nail on the head. You hit the nail on the head.

So I sold a golf card. I made about 2,500 bucks with it. I took 2,000 of that or so, and I did my second mailing with the right criteria. And I got my first deal. It was Dorothy Cannon on base short. Oh, it was awesome. I made every single mistake you could possibly make in the book. I had no

idea what I was doing. It was like every single mistake because all I was thinking about is like, I've got to get enough money just to live. And I went there and there was a guy James who was at the house with Dorothy. He's an agent. And he was trying to convince her to list. And I was trying to convince her to sell it to me for cash. And it's so funny because James now is one of my big buyers. He's on my cash buyer. list is one of my agents. So we're friends to this day, but I said, oh, no, you know, Dorothy. I said, you know, agents. I said, oh, you know, you never know. I said, you know, I'll buy the house and they're going to do this and list it and do showings and you don't want to be bothered. So finally she asked James to leave. I was like, is this happening right now? So I finally

listed her house and I think I made, I made $2,000 on that deal. But what was so funny was, I didn't know that as a wholesaler, it's really not a good idea to attend a closing. I didn't know what I was doing. So when we were at the table, the buyer, he had said, the title company said, well, who's paying closing costs? So I, you know, they looked at Dorothy and she's like, well, I'm not paying it. And they looked at the buyer and he said, well, I'm not paying. And I said, well, I'm definitely not paying it. So we had to like at the last minute asked the buyer to pay the closing cost. And then I had to get in my car and follow the buyer home for my assignment fee, which was like crazy. But it was awesome. I loved it. And we had a great time. And then ever since then I did

right after that I did a mobile home where I made $7,000, which was incredible. And then that was it that I just rhinowed right through. And, you know, it was an amazing adventure. I mean, it's a total blessing. I really, I really, I really love it. I think it's real estate investing is just so I can't believe everybody doesn't do it. I mean, it is so lucrative and exciting and awesome. And that's, but that's the beginning stories.

And Dorothy Cannon was the first one. And her husband at the time, her husband passed away. I said, well, where are you going? She's, well, I have to move in to South Carolina to be with my boyfriend. And I couldn't believe it. I'm like, wow, okay, that wasn't a lot of time. But I guess, you know, that's normal. So that's what happened.

You know, it was a great first deal. And all those mistakes were totally worthwhile. That's awesome. How many deals have you done total now in the past few years? Because, you know, I don't know exactly. I've done, I did about 100, just over 100, my first 18 months. And then after that I did really keep track. But I've done, I've done several.

I mean, we have, you know, three, four, five, six a month. that are closing every month. It's amazing. It's pretty regular now, so it's awesome. And I don't go out to the houses anymore, which is awesome. So that's good, too. That's cool. So we're going to get into this whole thing because, I mean, that's hugely impressive.

And I think a lot of people are listening saying, wow, this guy's full of shit. Yeah, like, I mean, seriously. Oh, did I just cross on the show? Whoops. I'll be a bit. That's okay. So, no, but I mean, like 100 deals in the first 18 months. Like, how is that even possible?

So, you know, I'd love to hear that. Like, how is that possible? How do you close 100 deals in your first 18 months? I'm assuming they're all wholesale deals. Right. So they were all wholesale deals. And it was a mixed bag. There was a lot of things I was doing back then that I don't do.

For instance, I was doing mobile homes back then, which are much, much smaller profit. And, you know, it's like when you use the word motivated seller, the people in the mobile home parks are really, they very often, if you talk to the property managers of the park, they'll even just give the home back. to the property manager or to the property management company. So some of those deals were much smaller. But I think it's really, you know, what I found was the people who were crushing it in wholesaling at that time that I had met with and I had gone through some conferences and I met with some people, they have this attitude, which I love, I love, I love, which is progress, not perfection. And it is so key, you know, other people talk about this.

There was some of a person I can't think of his name who was saying. It's called imperfect action instead of perfect planning. I think what happens with a lot of people is they really get caught in that analysis paralysis. I know we talk about it. It's such a cliche thing to say, but it's really true. It's like you don't, there's so much you don't need to know in order to do a deal and you just get in your own way. I always say, you know, real estate investors are complicated. Real estate investing is easy.

So I think if you could just get out of your own way, follow a system that works and just rhino it where it's just the most important thing. like God family wholesaling or real estate investing or whatever it. I mean, that's really it. And that's, that's the secret. It's just, you know, pushing through and just making it happen and staying laser focused, not having shiny object syndrome, which my brother would call me up. Maybe like, if you call me and talk about podium, I'm going to punch you right in the face. I'm like, okay. He's like, I called him with him. I was like, well, should I put the field of the phone number in the address? He's like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, go do a deal. Get on the phone right now. We're going to stop mentoring you. So, you know, I had, I had my my brother as my coach kind of pushing me the whole way.

And that's basically how you do it. Progress not perfection is really, I would say is the answer. That's really the key. I like that. We talk about that a lot. Yeah, we don't use those words. But yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome.

So before we move forward, anybody listening to the show should go over to YouTube and watch this because I feel like I'm talking to Jonah Hill. I'm literally sitting here talking to Jonah. And, you know, He's super excited about real estate and I don't know what he's going to do next, but it's, it's, it's, it's uncanny how much you look like him. I'm sure you've heard that before. All right, good, good.

Let's, all right, let's get back to it. How do you find the deals? I mean, you know, that's a lot of deals. So how are you going about finding them first and foremost? You said you spent $2,000 on that second marketing. Are you just doing mailings? What are you spending a month? Talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so this is so critical. I mean, I love this question because this is, I think, the number one mistake that people make when they start is if you ask people who are doing deals what they're doing and you ask people who are not doing deals, there's like that there's this old movie about a horse race. I can't think of the name of the movie, but he goes around and he asks everybody who's not winning at horses, like what horse they like and then he crosses them off the list. And you'll find a similarity. What you'll find is with the people who are not doing deals when you ask them, hey, what are you doing for? deals. So always say the same thing. Well, I'm doing a little bit of direct mail. I'm kind of handwriting some cards. And I'm also putting out bandit signs. And I'm also calling Craigslist. And I'm also, door knocking. And I'm also and I'm also and skip tracing and everything else. If you ask the people who

are doing deals what they're doing, they're like direct mail. That's all I do. I'm the number one guy in my territory. Bandit signs. It's all I do. I put out 250 a week. PPC and SEO. I have a website. That's all I do. So what you find is instead of dipping your toe in the water. on 15 marketing channels, if you just get a big footprint on one channel and slam it, that is the secret. So for me, that was direct mail. I embraced it and I just went 110% into direct mail. I had no distraction, no shiny object syndrome with bandit signs and Craigslist and everything else. And there's a place for those things once you have the channel automated and producing deals consistently without you. But to lose attention on multiple channels, I think is a killer.

specifically about the deal i mean to to just cut right through all the BS and the fluffing to how am i finding deals i right before the show i pulled a campaign report here these are the best list that we're mailing right now these are my top nine lists before before you read them can i what do you mean by that i mean like for people who are brand new have no idea what a list even is what are you talking about okay so here's the theory every single real estate deal no matter what you do starts with a good deal every single thing whether you're a wholesaler hotel or retail rehab or landlord, it starts with a good deal. So in order to start with a good deal, and now we've been doing a little bit of wholesaling, I actually now buy a lot of rentals, which is so awesome because

I cherry pick and my account manager will be like, don't do that. No, no, I'm doing it. I mean, because we're buying homes at like 20 and 40 cents on the dollar, so it's crazy. So what happens is what you want in this business is somebody who you have to understand your services and what you bring to the table for the seller. And then you have to get people who have equity, who have a reason to sell quickly for cash for one reason or another. So we call them motivated sellers or some people call them other kinds of sellers. But at the end of the day, there are legitimately people out there every single day who want to sell for one reason or another and not use a real estate agent. Sometimes they're embarrassed of the way their home looks and they don't want to fix it up. They may not have the money to fix it up because they may be out of state. They might be an upset landlord and they don't want to deal with an agent. You know, they might say agents have body odor. I don't know. We've had all kinds of crazy reasons of why. I've heard that.

I've heard that, too. I heard that a podcast once. But whatever reason, they have a reason that they don't want to use a real estate agent. So as a wholesaler or a hotel or rehab or whatever you do, you have to know your services and what you can do to help those people to sell quickly, give them cash, let them stay in the home after closing. let the tenant stay in the home after closing or whatever the particular set of circumstances are. So what we do is we find these lists of people who are typically on on those they're in that, they're in that classification of people who are willing to give a good deal for their property.

And that's kind of what these lists are. Okay. Okay. So now, so that's what the list are. And then you're going to mail, you're going to mail to these lists. But what are these lists you're talking about? Give us some examples. Okay. So these are the highest conversion rate list.

people track response rate, which is how many people call in. We don't really track that. We track conversion rate. So how much money do we spend mailing the list and then how much money do we make back and we go after that? So what we do, the first list that we mail is the equity list. We don't separate absentee owners from owner occupied. We think that's a huge mistake. We find most of our deals, the majority of our deals are actually owner occupied deals. Really? So we haven't. Yeah, absolutely. We, the bigger deals are definitely absentee owner deals. but if you said over the last hundred deals that we've done, how many were owner-occupied versus absentee owner, 100% owner-occupied wins every time.

Wow. Okay. So let me just break that down for a second. So for those people who are maybe unfamiliar with how this direct mail stuff works, and so you're talking about there's two types of people. They either are owner-occupied, meaning they live in the property, or they are absentee owners, which means they don't live in the property. And you can buy a list for either one of them.

And so, like, personally, I'd mail to absentee owners. I've never even, like, in my head, considered mailing to owner-occupied because I'm just like, oh, I don't know, everyone says to do absentee owners because you get better leads. But I love the fact that you said that. It's just very contrarian, and I'm definitely going to, you know, do that now because now I'm like, well, what are you looking for, though? And there's owner-occupied. Like, how, you know, I would presume that you're going to, I would have presumed like Brandon that your odds of successor are pretty slim on something like that. So, you know, you must have some criteria that you've narrowed things down to within there. to filter out and find folks who are owner occupying and interested in selling.

So specifically the criteria that we select on after a lot of testing is 40 to 100% equity, an age range of 45 all the way up till 65 plus. Age range of the home is. Of the homeowner. Homeowner, okay. Yeah. Yeah, this is very interesting. If you look at motivated sellers, literally, I mean, you can do a deal with a 23-year-old

occasionally, but you are going to find that the overwhelming, majority of your deals are usually with people 45 plus. So we just find that in the data. So now we plug it right into the criteria. So we do the age of the home of the home owner. We do the equity and we do a last market sale date from three years ago. So in this case, if we pulled a list today, it would be 2013 all the way to 1900. This way they didn't just recently buy their home in the past three years. And then we do in the criteria, we do not separate out absentee owner from owner-occupied. And I know there's another equity piece that I'm missing. Last market sale date equity, age.

Oh, and then obviously property type. And we do single family residential. We also do, we have a separate list where we do specialty properties, town homes, quadplex, duplex, triplex, and all of that. Okay. Okay, cool. So equity, equity list is the first one. And equity simply means when you say 40 to 100% equity, that means that they, at least

list sources, algorithms, believes that they have a good deal of equity in there, right? Absolutely. And how good is it? How good is list source on that data? Do you know? You know, pretty accurate. I mean, here's what I can say is I've tested other lists. And when it comes to our general, what we call in our company, like our world list,

everybody in our county who is mailable. I live in a small county, so now we pretty much mail the whole county almost every month. But for our world list list, we find that list source is the best one. We've tried other companies, and it just wasn't hitting as much. Okay. I use them as well, so that's good. Yeah, I love them. All right, cool.

The other one is code violations. Code violations is a fantastic list. I would suggest everybody runs over to their municipality, township, city, county, whatever it is. Anybody, what we find the best criteria is for the best conversion rate is closed violations for any sort of yard or landscaping violation. So not the ones that are currently open, but the ones that are closed for high lawn care, high weeds, uncut lawn, uncut landscaping. Anything like that is awesome. You're looking at stuff that's close. So stuff that they've had to fix, they've fixed or been fined for meaning that they're not there to kind of take care of their deals and properties.

Right, but it's closed, which is interesting because you would think that the ones, the open violations are hotter, we find the exact opposite. And I can't really explain it because you would think the open violations are the ones that people aren't taking care of the property. It's not the case. Again and again, it comes back that it's the closed ones, which is kind of a little statistical anomaly. And we can't really understand it, but that's just what the data says. Yeah, I would guess it's because, you know, just the average Joe, you know, we'll get a code violation, we'll go fix this problem. And then, you know, so like there's probably a lot of of those open ones at any given point. Definitely.

But the ones that are closed means that it went further maybe. I don't know. Yeah. And also the list is bigger. Yeah. Right. So the closed list is much, much bigger, which is. Oh, yeah.

True. Yeah. Cool. So you've got that one. The other one, I mean, one of my absolute favorites because these are like our biggest deals are tax delinquent. I learned this from Jack Bosch. I went to a seminar. He said, check out the tax delinquent.

We did it. The tax delinquent, I will tell you the most effective tax delinquent list. We look for a few things. Number one is that they must be at least two years or more behind on their taxes. That's number one. So it can't just be they didn't pay this year or last year because that could be totally inconsequential. So they've got to be two full years at least behind.

They still must be the owner of the property because sometimes there's an auction and ownership changes. So you want to make sure the homeowner is still the same. and the most important is it's got to come directly from the county. And I will tell you this, and I learned this from Jack, is that he uses the rule of five. Everybody that you go to with the county is going to tell you, no, no, no, no, this list doesn't exist. There's no such thing. We don't tax people.

We don't know what you're talking about. If you are persistent and you get that, I am telling you right now, that list is smoking hot and it will change your life. So get the tax delinquent list for sure. It's a game changer. I love that. Definitely. One of the deals I'm getting this month, I'm getting a fourplex. and it came from a guy who's five years late on his taxes.

Now, I didn't mail to that list. I just mailed to an absentee owner one, but yeah, five years late. And he is, I mean, he asked, the negotiation was we have to close by the 31st of this month because the county is taking it back on the first of next. And like the county, like, it's too late. And so like, we have three weeks to close in this deal. So he was the most motivated I've ever dealt with because of that. Are you going to, so is that, what do you do?

Are you going to do wholesale them or do you actually buy it and then rehab? I'm going to keep this one as a rental. I'm rehab it and rent it, basically. I love it. We're here. Bird. The victory bell. I like the victory bell.

That's awesome. The victory bell. I love it. Well, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean, the tax delinquent list, the motivation is through the roof. And these people are literally raising their hand like, hey, I have a major problem over here. And they just want to get rid of the property in the worst way. And I love it.

So, yeah, that's the list. Number four is this one is smoking hot. Nobody even mails this, which is like crazy. The garage sounds. They go tomorrow. Yeah. Tomorrow they will be mailing this list. So here is the deal.

Go to Craigslist. Go to your local newspaper website. Don't go to garage sales. That's a total waste of time. But what you do is just have a VA. Pull all the garage sales every week. Check all of the ones that have a different address, the mailing address from the property address,

and just send them mail. Because just about the time they find out that their tenant is skipping town and having a garage sale and selling all the appliances is the exact same time, bam, that your litter is hitting. and they're like, hey, how did you know that I wanted to sell right now? So those are fantastic deals. It's the garage sale list. I would definitely recommend everybody, you know, especially if you're on a really

tight budget and just getting started in any form of investing, handwrite those cards every day. It is worth it. Absolutely. So that's awesome. Can I clarify that? So you're saying have a VA. I mean, you could do it yourself if you don't have a VA, but either hire someone

to do it, pull the list of all the garage sales in your area and then go and check each one of those to see if they're basically absentee owners or not. That's what you're saying, right? Right. So just go to the property appraiser page and see if the mailing address is different from the property address. Perfect. And if it is, send them a mailing. And that's a landlord who's moving out of a rental property right now.

Or even better, it's like the granddaughter is moving out of the grandfather's house right now. And she hasn't paid rent. I mean, it's always a good deal. And as far as the VA, here's the thing I always say about a VA because people are always scared to hire VA. Here is the bottom line is that if I want to get off like this roller coaster. serve income and deal flow. The bottom line is I am, here's, here's the number one secret in America for getting off of that is don't hire Brandon and Josh to do your data entry or your, you know, because you guys as entrepreneurs and me as an entrepreneur, we are high level creative, 45,000

people. And if you ask to people like, well, you know, I'm on this roller coaster, well, why? Well, how much mail has gone out in the last five weeks? They're like, well, I was busy with this and this and that. And they're like, that's because you stink as an entrepreneur at data entry and repetitive tasks and things like that. So just outsourced it. The VA is going to make some mistakes. Who cares? If the VA makes a mistake, it's not a big deal.

Just learn how to have the VA do it because otherwise no consistency. First of all, VA stands for a virtual assistant for those unfamiliar. And where does somebody find or begin looking for a virtual assistant? I love Upwork. I use Upwork and I found pretty much all of my VA's through Upwork, which used to be Odesk, I think. Yep. We use it. Yeah, it's awesome.

And those people, the people, there's trustworthy, honest, hardworking, sincere. I mean, we have a team to best, the best, the best. And they love that repetitive data entry stuff. They're like, they live for it. So I'm like, great, that's great because I still get it. So it's a good fit. Well, I was going to say, what I love about that garage sale thing is that it's definitely

a system that you can write down the system, make even a video on to do it or make a Google doc that explains step by step and then you give to somebody and they work that system from now until the end of eternity. I mean, they just work it. And you're not involved anymore. I love things like that that you can do. So I love that. Great.

Totally. And the thing about, too, to keep in my. mind with the garage cell list or any small list is make sure you track it over time because the small list if you get one deal for every just say for simple math that you get one deal for every thousand pieces of mail or whatever your numbers are you have to track that over time because sometimes in some towns the garage sale list is very small so don't give up on it if you're just trying it go for a while and let that run because the small you know all of the statistical anomalies in direct mail will always come from the smaller mailing so just give it time to play out that that's key cool I love it

All right. So that was number four. What's number five? Number five. Oh, U.S. lead list. Lance and Terry inheritance list. I love it. Very, very cool list. The inheritance list is consistently good for us. We do deals all the time. Those guys are great guys. I've always had good experiences with them. So we've tested them. We've used it. It works. And it's awesome. So the inheritance list is pretty easy. So explain what that is. So U.S. Lead List is a company that provides the list. And the inheritance list is what exactly? So the inheritance list is when a person inherits a property, they now have the right to sell it. So that's the key with the inheritance list because you're not waiting around for the deals like you are with probate, which is before inheritance or pre-probate. So on the inheritance list, these people are ready to sell today, which is like awesome. The only hiccup with the inheritance list is what we do with the inheritance list is there's, I'm not going to say it's typical, but very often there are multiple siblings involved in the deal, which does tend to complicate the deal a little bit. So we always recommend use a mobile notary when you send out your contracts.

If you have a sibling in Missouri and Seattle and Newark, then send a mobile notary. And that's usually the best way to do it. But you will have some additional complications because when a property is inherited, it's very often inherited with multiple people. Have you heard of that new notary company? It's kind of a topic, but that new notary company that does entire notaries on Skype, I think it's on Skype online. It's fascinating.

Like, yeah, the one person's at their computer in Seattle, you're at your computer in, you know, Florida, and there's a notary in New York. And it's a three-way call, and they notarize it all on video. I don't remember what the company's call, but somebody wrote an article on BP, the blog a few weeks back about it. And, uh, now, fascinating. I am writing down right now. That's right there. That's rhino. Bam!

I like it. Wow. I love it. I love it. That's a riot. Holy smokes. Poison girls. Do not do jokes.

Boo, boom. Boom. All right. All right. Moving on. Number six. Number six is, so six and seven is probate and pre-probate. They're two different lists.

I recommend using them. We use this. The thing with probate and probate and probate, just means that's where the status, if someone passes away, the home goes into a state of probate or pre-probate, which gives creditors time to like get together to see if there's anything that they're going to put against the estate. And it basically just figure out everything about the property.

I don't even really know exactly what it means, but what I do know is that when we mail it, we get deals, and that's the key. So don't overcomplicate this. Just get out of your own way and send a mail piece. That's the key. I've never heard of probate. I've heard of probate hundreds of times. I've never heard of pre-probate. So for my knowledge, explain what it is and how that works. I mean, if you don't know, it's fine. But how would I even find a pre-probate? Absolutely. No idea what it is. The vendor who called you check out pre-probate. And I was like, okay. So I'll test anything with direct mail. And essentially the way it was explained to me is that this is the deal right at the moment that the home is about to go into probate right before then. And I remember there was some advantage to it. And I don't remember what it was. But we did test it. And my acquisition managers love it. So it gets us deals and that's it.

I love it. Beautiful. You'll find that I love a man who understands everything about his business. I'm just messing with us. The thing is, it's like, you don't need to. It's irrelevant. of it. That's the whole key. Well, that's not true. Actually, hold on, hold on, because there's an important point here. It is actually important because at the end of the day, you're dealing with the seller. And so you need to know, generally and, you know, who they are in kind of what circumstance they're facing because our job as real estate investors is to help them find a solution to the problem they're having. So, you know, probate is obviously, you know, somebody passes away in the estate.

You know, there's an issue with the estate and where it's going to go. So, no. Knowing that alone is enough, obviously, to get you to the deal. Right. And there's some questions, too, about who do you mail in a probate deal? Do you mail the attorney or do you mail the estate person? So I would just ask the vendor who sends them to you. But at the end of the day, that is, you know, the thing that I always look at with education is it's always better. A lot of people put the education in front of, like the cart in front of the horse. You know, to me, it's like that's mastering your craft. Get the revenue and then have the time to, relax and say, okay, now let's figure out the whole thing that this process. Why is it working? And, you know, but yeah, I totally agree. You got to be cautious about that. You don't want to,

you know, especially, you know, in real estate investing, you don't, you always, you want to know what you're doing before you do it. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So we got six, seven, two more, right? A brand new one that we just started testing, which was awesome was fine motivated sellers now. It's a subscription site. It was, I think it was Kent Clothie or Chris Richter. But that one tested out really, really well for us just recently. So that's a brand new one. And the newest one that we just started doing was, and one of our tribe members, so it's called the arrest record list. This one was crazy successful. So a friend of mine, Vitaly, in Atlanta, I think he's in Atlanta, he started pulling all of the recent arrest records of people.

And he started mailing that list. It worked out fantastic. So he got a high ROI on it. And other people I know mailed it and they got a high ROI. So we've started mailing it and it's crushing it. So that's it. That's the full entire list of that. Where do you get a list of everybody who's been arrested in your town? It's totally different for every county and community.

So there's no standard answer. It could be anywhere. It can be online. It can not be online. You really have to do some digging. There's no standard answer there, unfortunately. But if you can find it and you can match it up to the property appraisers website for an address, it's key. But what we found is everybody has a different way of finding it and locating it.

And there's also a question of when it becomes available. So it's not always instantly available. Sometimes it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly. So you have to kind of do a little digging. Wow. That's awesome. I love the actionable stuff. I mean, I think our listeners, I think we are, I'm definitely going to change a little bit of what I do and add in some more direct mail.

Because direct mail is been good. I mean, like, I've never been a big direct mailer, but the more I do, like the more I love it. Because the MLS is getting more and more difficult. So like you said, when people just like master that one thing and push into something else, I don't know. I love it. I love it. Mail. Yeah, you can take away my other channel. But, well, any other channel, if I could lose it, but if I lost my direct mail, you would shut down my business.

Yep. I mean, and then there's a lot to be said to about the database. And, you know, we always tell, you know, we always say the money is in the database. So it's the follow up. 98, 99% of the people who call in today are not ready to sell their house today. So follow up, follow up, follow up. What does that mean exactly? Like, I mean, how are you, you were saying earlier, you sent to your entire county once a month.

Is that the frequency with which you're following up every month to somebody until they say taking me off the list? Or how does that work? Essentially. So what we do is the goal in the CRM is to get every single seller to an absolute yes or an absolute no. So this, you know, when you're doing follow up, you want to be careful about, you know, hey, you know, we spoke last month. Are you still interested in selling? No, I'm not really. Okay.

Thank you very much. Click. The whole thing is you've got it. You really have to listen. you have to really like pull a yes or a no. So if they say, hey, listen, take me off your list. I'm not going to sell my home. That's so much better than, well, I'm thinking about it, but maybe next month and then

you call it back next month because otherwise you have a sea of follow up. But I think what we start to find is that we're finding most of our deals now in the database. Or I shouldn't say most, but a large majority are in the database from people who were three, four, six months old. And those deals are usually really, really good deals, which we like. Yeah. If you want a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies are built for your type of property.

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bigger pockets and get a $100.com Amazon gift card. That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. So can you tell me which of these lists, like, which is your best or your favorite in terms of the number of deals you get. Which are, oh, it's like, which is our best list? Yeah,

like, what gives you the best results right now? So the largest deals, well, you know, I'd have to look. I'd have to look. I don't even really know.

I mean, I know the most consistent deals are the equity because we're mailing that every month and it's so large. So it just brings in like an even flow of deals. The absentee owners on the equity list,

certainly the deals are definitely bigger. There is no question about that. but the majority of the deals come from owner occupied. Just recently, like I, you know, we had a deal just yesterday, which was just closed. We did $17,000 on, which is awesome. I have the check sitting right here. I mean, that was like, yeah, and that was a, I don't know what list that deal came from. You know, the whole thing with these lists is that when you just, when you have them going out all the time and there's consistency, I think that's the key is you want to just get the consistency of the deal flow, of the lead flow so that you can do like some really easy, just basic.

And not to dig into numbers, but just basic budgeting and forecasting and things like that. And then, you know, you can, you know, I was listening to a podcast and that somebody said, well, you know, how much do you spend on your direct mail? I was about to ask you that question. Yeah. So here's the deal. I'm in a small market and I can only, I'm capped out. So I can't really mail anymore. But really the answer that I always give is, and I know it's a scary answer, but the deal is you should really spend.

And I wish I can give credit to who I heard this from because I can't. remember, but you should really spend whatever your deal is per month. So if you make an average of $12,000 per deal, spend $12,000 on your direct mail. And I know that sounds totally crazy. And if you're just starting off, that's really scary. But here's the deal. If you really want like explosive growth and to do a lot of deals, that's a really good rule of thumb to go by is spend what you make on one deal in a month. And that's a great rule of thumb. But it's scary. But here's the deal. Everything you want is on the other side of your comfort zone. So it's a good, it's a good rule of them to go by. Hey, Tom, so how many pieces of mail are you sending out on average a month?

We send that about 20,000. 15 to 20,000. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that's the cap. There's only about 24,000 mailable addresses in St. Lucie County, which is where I'm at. So 15 to 20,000 pieces of mail.

How many phone calls does that result in on average? So it's totally different per list. So what we do is we have a two-month mailing cycle. So everything's on an eight-week cycle. So all of the lists are on an eight-week cycle. So whatever is mailed on week one is mailed on week nine, is mailed on week 17. And then we're constantly tracking those campaign reports to see, you know, okay, this one was a total bust. And then we'll mail it one more time just to double check.

And then if we still get nothing, that one's off and we replace it. Sometimes we have to pull a new list from list source. But I'm very capped in my market. So if you're in a big market like Salt Lake City, Atlanta, you know, it's a whole different animal. But I would still suggest once every two months is a good rule of them as far as a schedule to go by. Okay. And you said the same letter every two months? Or you know, letter once, then a postcard, then something else?

We send the same. So for the first two campaigns, we send the same postcard, and then we send a letter. And then we send on the fourth mailing, we do a corporate. So one thing that we have found is that if you go from Tom, the local friendly real estate investor to Tom, the, you know, the home buying company. Um, in the corporate, you, you get different phone calls. So the people who call up to the local investor are different from the people who call from the corporate investor. So we kind of on the step on the fourth mailing, we change it up a little bit.

So it's index, uh, postcard, postcard, a letter and then corporate. Okay. And do you have a, do you have a like a estimate of what your funnel looks like? And what I mean by that is if you had, if you sent a thousand pieces of mail out, let's say, if you sent 10,000. How many phone calls do you typically on, I know there's a lot of lists, but let's just say equity list maybe. You send out 10,000 letters. How many phone calls do you think you could expect?

And out of that, how many deals do you think you close? It really fluctuates, but like one to three. One to three percent is about the, you're asking about like response rate on phone calls? Sure, yeah, yeah, because you say, yeah, you don't track necessarily. Well, yeah, so one to three percent response rate maybe. And then out of those deals, like, I guess what I'm wondering is what kind of return do you see? If you spent 10 grand, what do you expect to make personally? So that really fluctuates because, so for instance, I had a campaign report we just did.

We made 35% times our money. So we like every dollar we made $35, which was like great. That never happens. Which list was that? That was an equity list. Okay. I actually have that one. Which county was it?

I'm just pulling it up right now. Yeah, that was, uh, that was a Temecula. Oh, yeah. Sure. Oh, buddy. Get that rhino out again. But that was, you know, so that number though, it really, it really fluctuates. It's hard to pin down a number to like forecast and say because sometimes we could take

that same list and mail it in six months and we could get like two times or nothing. So I find that this business is a little bit. I'm not going to use the word seasonal, but it just seems like different times of year. Whether the kids are out or in Florida, one thing we have to deal with is called snowbirds, so the people who come down here for the winter and then go back home for the summer, that affects our business. Our demographic is a little bit different. And that's why even on these lists, some people might find in one area that one list is really, really good. In another area, one of these lists is not so hot. So our top lists are not necessarily the same

list as in San Diego, say, for instance. Sure. That makes sense. Cool. All right, so let me ask you this question. I know we've been going for, what, almost 40 minutes now or something like that. So we'll start moving towards the end here. But a couple of quick things here. First of all, somebody's brand new. They're just starting out there. Listen to the show. They want some deals. Whether they're a wholesaler or a flipper or renter or landlord, they can't find deals. In fact, we did an interview, a survey recently asked people what their number one problem is in real estate. And the number one response was, I can't find deals. So there's a brand newbie, can't find deals. What is some actionable steps that you can give them? Like, feel free to talk directly to them.

What do they do right now to go get a deal soon? So here is the truth of the matter. When they say they can't find deals, they're just getting in their own way. There are deals everywhere. So even if you just look, so the first thing you have to do is you have to believe there are deals. So, and I know that sounds ludicrous, but just look on MLS, the same exact 322, three bedroom, two bath, two car garage homes in your town, you're going to see that if you have an agent, pull a report out of 100, 99 of them sold for this, 98 of them sold for almost

exactly the same price in the same area, but one sold really, really high and then one sold really, really low. Here's the deal. The deals are there. And this is going to sound a little amateurish, and it's going to sound a little elementary, and it's going to sound a little silly, but I don't care. I'm just going to say it anyway. Here's the deal. If you really want to do a deal, you are going to have to be motivated the way a kidnapper would motivate you, because here's the truth of the matter. And I know this sounds crazy, right, but just kind of go down this journey with me for a minute. The bottom line is if someone, God forbid, kidnapped your child and they said, hey, your ransom is you got a wholesale a deal? I guarantee you'd wholesale a deal in 72 hours.

All of a sudden, you would have perfectly clear laser clarity in instantly in five seconds. You wouldn't be playing around with podium fields and designing a really cool logo and picking a really cool. I can't do any deals. Well, what did you do all day? Well, I was looking for a good domain name on GoDaddy. What are you talking about? So, the problem is, is I know this sounds completely out of whack and out of the field, but if you're serious and you want to make a change right now, put yourself in that crazy mindset because I guarantee you, you will do a deal. I guarantee it. It may not be pretty. You only make $500 on it, but I'm going to tell you once you do one, the second one's easier, the third one's easier,

the fourth one's easier, and so on and so forth. And it'll just declutter everything. So even though that's not specific advice, you know, I would say if you want specific advice, you've got to pick one channel and just explode it. Do bandit signs? I know somebody, Kelly, who went in and... What I would say is do banit signs and do whatever... Oh, no bandit. Josh doesn't like talking about bandit signs.

No, ban onus signs. Do bandit signs if you're allowed to do bandit signs. Right. Do whatever you're comfortable doing. Let's clarify. No, let's clarify. I mean, bandit signs are fine as long as you're doing them, you know, where they're allowed. I mean, if you're just blasting up signs illegally,

no, don't do it. Absolutely. That's the key is, but pick a channel and crush it and make sure you're doing it legally, but you've got to pick one and crush it. You've got to know that these deals exist and you've got to just absolutely do it with the determination and the perseverance of a person who's trying to save someone else's life. And I know, again, it sounds crazy, but I am telling you that if you want to do a deal, that's going to clear up a lot of your schedule about what you're working on if that's the kind of mentality that you have. Yeah, I love that. I love it. I love it. And on the band of science, I am serious.

I'm, you know, like, it's one of those things that, you know, the gurus will go and they'll say, yeah, get signs. It doesn't matter. Just put them out everywhere. You know, like, that is, that's bad for you. It's bad for real estate investors as a whole. It's bad for our image. It's bad for our name.

Don't do that. Do it if you're allowed. Where you're allowed, how you're allowed to do it. Don't just be an ass and, you know, litter your neighborhood with a bunch of crap in a way that you're not supposed to. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Cool.

You know, what I love about your message here is, like, you know, everybody knows that it listens to the podcast. I'm a huge fan, Josh, the fan of the one thing, the book, the one thing. We love that book because the whole idea of the one thing is like, what's the one thing that if you did it right, everything else wouldn't matter, right? So like you're like, quit focusing on a million things and you're getting the right website and get the right business card. I mean, what matters do that and do it with all your heart and all your focus and

intensity? Get to revenue. What's the revenue producing activity? And it's not building a website and it's not making a business card. It's, well, first you got to understand how you're, you're going to understand how you're going to do a deal. What, you know, like the basics, you got to know a market. And then you, then you go out and take the action that you have to take to do it.

Right. I mean, it's, it's, but it gets confounded by like all the structure and stuff that people think about and that a lot of, a lot of people put out there, you know, that are trying to sell you on something, right? It's like, everyone wants a piece. And don't be anticipatory, right? So it's your main goal is to do a deal. All you need to know, and David Allen talks about this in his book, getting things done. And everybody, a lot of people talk about this is you have one goal to get that deal. All you need to be worried about is what is the very first thing I need to know in order to get that deal.

You don't have to worry. Don't be researching how to get a purchase agreement when you haven't even spoken to a seller yet or even know other script on how to talk to the seller or even know where to find the seller. So, you know, use a napkin. I mean, I mean, that's the way to do a deal is on your first deal. I mean, everybody that you speak to who is, you know, most people, I would imagine, they'll tell you, you know, I'd like, I just did a minute ago. It's on my first deal. You make every mistake in the book. So the myth of education is that, oh, if I get really educated, I won't make a mistake. Here's the deal. You are going to make a mistake whether you have four years of education of real estate or none.

So the mistakes are coming. You've got to just get comfortable with them and know, hey, I'm going to get some cut check moments, but I'm just going to keep working past them. So yeah, that's that's the key for sure. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. Cool. All right, well, I had two more questions before we head to the fire round. Number one, what's your long-term plan? What comes, I mean, your wholesale, you mentioned you buying some rentals.

How are you going to turn this into long-term income? Yeah, so that's exactly what I'm doing. Now what I do is I cherry pick my pipeline. So I just bought a house last week. It was an awesome house. We bought it for about 60. It's worth about 120. So it's awesome.

It rents out for, I don't know, 12 or 1,300. So that's what I do now is every time. I'm trying to once a month. buy a new rental property. It's been an awesome adventure. I read the book, Derek Keller, the real estate, the millionaire real estate investor, I think is the name of it. You know, and he was talking about that. So that was kind of what motivated me to do that. And yeah, that's the long-term game plan. It's just to get, that's, you know, what I know, you guys have Clayton Morris on the on the podcast. He's my good, good buddy. And he was,

you know, we talk about the financial, the freedom number. So I just want to get to that number. That's it. There you go. I love it. Absolutely. That's great. That's great. All right. My last question. One more. Yeah, one more is how many hours a week do you work? On my wholesaling business, I work probably five hours a week. Wow. Wow. I would guess. That's awesome. But I have other stuff going on. But the wholesaling business is pretty well automated at this point. Other real estate stuff or other stuff stuff? I don't know what you guys want me to talk about. No, no, no, no. I mean, so is it stuff relevant to you finding? buying real estate deals or is it just it's other things other projects it's other projects yeah other projects and you know just family and things like that oh cool so you've built a a five-hour

workweek business five-hour work week i'm working that tim ferris angle of four hours but i don't know i can't get there but i don't think i can get there emotionally that might be why i do enjoy it so that's part of it how many um since that's happening and you've got such a pipeline obviously you have help you've talked about the vAs how many people are on your team all together other. Just two. You and two VAs? Me, a VA. Well, I have one full-time VA. I have one part-time VA and then I have an acquisition manager. And then I have like kind of a support group around that of agents, property managers, people who bring me deals, things like that. But directly, it's myself,

two VAs and an acquisition manager. Awesome. Got it. Cool. Awesome. Cool. So let's get to the world famous Fire round. It's time for the fire round. All right, these questions come direct out of the bigger pockets forums, and we're going to fire them at you, Tom. Are you ready? Are you prepared? I am ready. All right. Boom. Number one, how can someone submit a lot of offers?

Won't real estate agents just get mad? How could someone submit a lot of offers? Won't real estate agents just get mad? I'm not prepared for that question. What is that question? Let me rephrase. Here's what they're wondering. They're like, on the MLS, if somebody's going to go and go submit 100 offers, your agent's not going to want to do that.

So they're saying how does somebody submit a lot of offers? How do I go submit 10 offers in a month? I have no idea because I don't do that. I don't know. I don't really work with MLS offers. So I don't work with MLS really at all. So I don't know. I don't really ever submit an offer on MLS.

But I was saying, that's an answer. I mean, right there is don't use MLS. Find non-MLS stuff. You're dealing directly with the seller one-on-one, right? Right, exactly. Yeah. We never work with MLS. Even if an agent brings us a deal, it's always an offer.

market deal. So they'll say, hey, we have a deal or a property manager, which is, by the way, agents and property managers, great source of properties, but they're always off market. So it's never a listed property or anything like that. Cool. Cool. All right, for someone going into their first deal, where can someone find their most affordable deal? Yeah, I don't fully understand that question, but I'll just ask it. So their most affordable deal would be a deal that is not, that they don't have to market for. So for instance, yeah, a lot of times people, people, will at like a meetup group or a RIA meeting, they will say, if you talk to the new people, they'll say, well, you know, I know somebody who's selling a property. A lot of times it's a relative.

So we've actually done deals. As a matter of fact, I bought a house once at the doctor's office in the lobby of the doctor's office waiting to go see my doctor. It was guy in the lobby. And it was an amazing experience. So just always, you know, always having a sense of urgency and always knowing what you do and talking about it, you'd be amazed the kind of conversations you have, but we did it. in the, well, not in the doctor's office, but afterwards we did it later. And it was a great home right here in Spanish Lakes, which was awesome. Wow, that's awesome. Very cool. All right, next question. Do you recommend if I don't have a lot of money starting with mobile home investing? I do. I think, you know, for what I do, mobile homes are great. I find that the one trick with mobile homes is that you have to make sure, which is a big problem in Florida, that they own the land and they don't lease it. That was always a huge problem when I was doing mobile homes. I don't. don't do them anymore, but they have to, the homeowner, the homeowner of the mobile home has to own the land and not lease it.

Otherwise, it's very, very difficult to sell. So, yeah, I would say I did a lot of mobile homes when I first started. I love it. It's easy. Cool. Nice. Nice. All right. Last question. I got three to pick from here. I'm going to go with, once somebody gets a property under contract and finds a cash buyer, who do they need to contact to start the closing? A title company. So here is where you do not. want to become an expert. In my world, I know this is going to sound a little crazy and a little controversial, but I would I consider what I do really has nothing to do with real estate and more about really being like a pawn shop. And what I would suggest is if you're going to get started doing this, I know that sounds crazy, but there are experts all around you that are more

than willing to help all the time, agents, property managers, title companies, brokers, people who will, if you are not the slick car salesman and if you are a humble underdog and you come in as a servant and you say, hey, I'm just getting started on this adventure. Can you, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. You know, this is what I'm interested in doing. Can you help me? People will root for an underdog and they will help you every step of the way. So that would definitely be a time when you want to bring in a title company. And that's something you should probably have picked out before you have a deal.

It's just kind of get some know what you're doing with the title company because they're going to give you some heads up on things to look for. That's great. Great. I got one more question. Actually, I'm going to add in here. This was not from the forum. This is the question that I was going to ask in the forum, so I'm just going to ask it to you instead. So I've noticed I've had a couple times in the past few months where I've had people call me and want to sell their properties.

And then in the one particular was really bad. We went all the way like four days before closing and then found out they had this massive lien on the property. When the title company did the title search and all that and we found out there was the guy just lied to us and said there wasn't a lien when there was. All right. So my question is, do you go and look like, do you actually go to the courthouse? and do a, you know, a search of the title yourself, or you just wait for the title company to tell you if there's a problem? We wait for the title company to tell us if there's a problem.

Okay. So the way I did it was pretty much right. I mean, like, I just. Yeah, well, the way we do it is as soon as the property is ready to go. As soon as we have it under a purchase agreement, then we bring it to the title company. And basically our agreement with the title company is like, look, we're going to close all of our deals with you. So don't charge me if I can't buy this property.

So they'll do the title search for free. And some of them are so good. They can tell you like almost instantly. they have people who they're connected with. So once you do a lot of deals with them, they can tell us pretty quickly. One advantage we have in Florida is we can close a deal like in three days. It's amazing, which I know that's not everywhere, but it's awesome for us. Yeah, that's cool.

That's cool. Oh, yeah, well, good. Hey, Brandon, what did you end up doing with the property, Brandon? With that one? I just said, sorry, I can't. Yeah, we just told them sorry, we can't deal with it. And he didn't never called us back and just totally disappeared. And I was like, oh, okay, well, oh, we fight out later.

Well, because that was the one, I think I told the story a few weeks ago, but that was the one, maybe I didn't, that was the one that was the guy thought he was getting a, like, cash in like a briefcase. Because when we said we're going to pay cash for property, so he asked where he can pick up the cash from us at, where we're going to do the exchange. And we're like, well, you know, the title company is going to give you a check. He's like, oh, I don't need a check. Bring it to the park.

Yeah, like sure nobody's watching. So what he was doing was trying to steal. I mean, he wanted us to bring him 35 grand cash. And then we were going to find out later that there was a lien on it. And he was going to steal 35 grand. That was his plan was to get cash. So anyway, that deal went away. All right, moving on.

Let's wrap this thing up by going to our world famous. Famous for. All right, number one, first of all, for those people who have never listened to the show before, the famous four are the questions we ask every single guest, every week, and we love to hear their answer. So number one, what is your favorite real estate related book? So my favorite real estate related book is a little crazy, but I went to a conference and it was recommended to me by three very wealthy real estate investors.

And it is the four spiritual laws of prosperity. and that book is a game changer. It'll bring a supernatural power to your business like overnight. I believe in it. I swear it. It works 100%. And the three people, the three guys who showed it to me were people I respect. And it was amazing immediate results.

So that is my number one real estate book for sure. Cool. Fascinating. All right. Favorite business book? No doubt traction. That book is a game changer. Oh my goodness.

Oh, my God. Oh, there it is. Right there. I love it, Josh. Yeah, there you go. So it's, yeah, that's my, by far, Gino Wickman, of course. I mean, the guy's a brilliant genius and comes from real estate. So, so game-changing book.

Awesome. Cool. Awesome. What do you do for fun, man? I've got four kids, man. We got, I have little Lucas. He's now, I do. I have four kids.

My wife and I got married in college. We started in college. We actually got kicked out of a Christian college because we had number one a little too early. Whoops. Yeah, we were very politely, we were very politely asked to leave because we rhinoed kid number one. There's a lot of jokes there. But yeah, that's, but, but yeah, so I just hang out with my kids. Yeah, absolutely.

But it's great. And we have a great time. We're looking for a vacation home right now in Charleston, South Carolina. So we're really excited about that. And I just spent as much time as I can with my wife and kids. And it's awesome. It's an awesome adventure. I love it.

Nice. Very cool. All right. My last question. What do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? I think that, and you guys just had an episode 173, and it's on minute number 22 with Steve Jones. And he said it, which is when he's talking about a rehab and you guys are asking about the rehab, and he says, well, and you said, well, have you had any, I think, Brandon, you asked about mistakes. And he, and he says, you know, it's the mistakes is where you learn.

the most lessons. So I will absolutely assure you that if you are close, progress, not perfection, imperfect action and not perfect planning is the name of the game. Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes is the key. You got to get out there and fail and then get out there and fail again. And when it hurts, you've got to fail more. And you just got to go for it. I mean, that's it. It's so easy. Real estate investing is not complicated. Real estate investors are complicated. Get out of your own way. Excellent. Awesome. I love it. Cool, man. Before we let you go and go do what you do, run around? I don't know.

What is that? I thought I have a lot of energy. I swear to God, man. I don't think I've ever met a human being like you. It's fascinating. Like with as much energy as you have, I can't understand how you wear the lawn guy, you know, dripping sweat all over the place.

Like, your metabolism must be off the chain. I don't know what is going on with that. I don't know what this body is. It's been a challenge. Yeah, for a long time. All right, man, before we let you get out of here, where can people find out more about you? And I know you've got some stuff going on that you wanted to share. Yeah, I've got an awesome podcast that talks about wholesaling, which is wholesaling ink.

And we have an awesome website called wholesaling inc.com. And if you have any questions, you can check us out there. And it's a great resource for anybody who's interested in crushing wholesaling. Cool. Cool. I love it. I love it. All right.

Tom, it's been a pleasure, man. Yeah. Guys are the best, man. This has been a great show. We got the victory bell. We got the victory bell. That's what I'm talking about. Did you guys get it yet?

I don't. I didn't. What? You guys didn't get it? No, you mailed us a bell? You sent us bells? We've got victory bells. Yeah.

What is the deal with that? You didn't get it yet? Come on. I didn't get it yet. But that's amazing. That is amazing. We may have to start using it on future shows. So we'll

awesome. You are more than welcome. Tom. And hey, listen, again, thanks so much for those of you guys listening. You can check out Tom also on BiggerPockets. And be sure to check them out on the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 176. Tom, thanks again. Good luck to you.

And we'll see you around. Thank you, guys. It's been an awesome adventure. Good stuff. All right. Thanks, Tom. All right, guys, that was Tom Kroll, a name I will never forget. That's probably good.

That was a good show. That was a, I'm fired up. Yeah, how could you not be? Yeah. And that yellow shirt was so bright and shiny. It was very bright and awesome. Yeah, yeah. No, it was awesome and lots of great actionable tips for folks.

And so if you're not out there marketing, like we talked about up front, you don't have any excuses. I mean, this thing has given you lots of ideas, lots of ways for you to get out there and find deals regardless of whether you're looking for wholesale, buying whole, flips, whatever you're looking for. So get out there, make it happen. and yeah man good times it's good to be back it's good to have you back yeah the site didn't blow up without you so look at that well you know community exists and i hear you played like 3,000 hours of racquetball while i was gone i did play an awful i've been playing an awful lot of racquetball it's been nice yeah we've got to play when you come to town i know we should you know you're gonna lose but it would be fine of course i'm

gonna lose because your arms reach across the entire racquetball yeah i just stand there i just like hit it with my toe and it's great that's it all right all right man Well, you guys, thanks again for listening. Show 176, show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 176. We'll see you next time. I'm Josh Dorkin. Sign in out. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio,

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