BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 197: Starting with $10k and Buying 52 Units in 3 Years with Chris Heeren

Episode Date: October 20, 2016

Get ready to be inspired, amazed, and blown away with today’s BiggerPockets episode! Today on the show we’re sitting down with Chris Heeren, a real estate investor from Wisconsin who’s absolutely crushing it with his rental property investing. In just the past three years, Chris has built a massive portfolio of houses and small multifamily properties — and he did it with just over $10,000 to start AND while working full-time. Packed with tips, stories, and incredible advice, this show will completely revolutionize the way you run your real estate business forever and prove — once and for all — that anyone can succeed no matter their situation. Listen up! In This Episode We Cover: Who exactly Chris is How be obtained 52 units in 3 years The story behind his first duplex Tips for using the BRRRR strategy How he found ways to fund his deals The process he used to create teams to help his investing Quick tips for being persistent How to counter-offer How he finds and offers on deals via the MLS Advice for buying properties while working a full-time job His average purchase price How he uses direct mail marketing How to find great property managers Chris’s $8,000 mistake What the next 6 months look like for him And SO much more! Links from the Show Want to be a Podcast guest? BRRRR Strategy BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Blogs How to Create Your Own Handwritten Font For Free (For Direct Mail Marketing) (blog) BiggerPockets Portfolio BP Podcast 117: Maximizing Productivity to Get Things Done with David Allen BP Podcast 125: The Key to Business Success with Bestselling Author of The E-Myth Michael Gerber BiggerPockets Analysis Tools Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki Landlording on Auto-Pilot by Mike Butler The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber Getting Things Done by David Allen Tweetable Topics: “There’s always a way. You just have to be determined, be motivated, and not give up.” (Tweet This!) “I’d rather have half of the deals out there than none of the deals because I didn’t start.” (Tweet This!) “If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’ll never grow in the future.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Chris Chris’ BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 197. So I started out with what I thought was going to be one house, and it turned out to be five units in my first month. 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.

Hops. To the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's going on, man? Oh, you know, it's been a rainy few weeks here in Washington State, but sun is shining today. I know, shocking, right? Weird. Hold on. Let me get my violin out.

Yeah, you want to play me a sad song. Yes. Yeah. No, it's been good. Other than that, other than the rain, you know, I've been busy buying real estate and trying to rehab deals and I had a hoarder house. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago and that's all taken care of. So what about you?

What'd have been up to? I don't know. Holidays. Holidays are here. They're coming. They're coming. I don't know. Just, you know, usual stuff, man.

Work is crazy. Getting ready for a big move to our new office. We've hired a few new people. So getting them on boarded, it's just been, yeah, I've been very busy here. Bigger Pockets is growing by leaps and bounds. And we're continuing to put together an amazing team. team of people to help make bigger pockets even better. So I've been super busy with that. But on the personal level, it's just soccer on the weekends and, you know, birthday parties.

It's schools and season. It's pretty much what I do. That's, that's very cool. Yeah, exciting, right? Exciting stuff. Oh, just wait. You'll be there soon. I know. I'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. We got a show, don't we? We do have a show today. This is one hell of a show. It is one hell of a show. It is. Especially, like, one thing I really liked about it. His honesty of like, this is what sucks. This is what's really, really good. His story of like the $8,000 he lost last week. Like stuff like that. Like I love, that's what I'm yeah, the bigger pockets podcast. Like, I don't know, we don't mess around. We don't, we don't just fluff things up. Like, this is real life stuff. But this guy's impressive anyway.

Well, you're going to get rich and you're never going to make mistakes. And everything's going to be perfect. Just buy my course for $997. And you two will be, you know, living with babes and bikinis all around you. That's all I want. That's all I want in life. Babes and bikinis. Yes. Now today show is about this guy, Chris, who went from zero to 52 units, three years, starting with just a bit over 10K.

And something that everybody could do using the burr strategy. Burr. Yeah, which we talk a lot about on the Wednesday webinars. So if you're not part of the Wednesday webinars here on BiggerPockets, you should come hang out with me at BiggerPockets.com slash webinar. You can sign up for next weeks. Awesome. Awesome. By the way, if you want to be a guest on our show, we get a lot of people asking about that.

Go to BiggerPockets.com slash guest and feel free to submit yourself. We have lots and lots and lots of people. So if we do not pick you, do not cry. There are like 500 names on that list now or something like that. Yeah, it's a huge list at this point. But anyway, why don't we get to today's, quick, am I going to do this? Am I on my own here? Quick tip. Today's quick tip. Let's do it. All right.

Today's quick tip is, so this is maybe something that a lot of you are going to be like, well, of course, I already knew that, but many of you don't because we get this question all the time at the Bigger Pocket support team, which the support team is awesome, by the way. But the question, people ask all the time, can I share BiggerPockets articles on my Facebook page? Yes. You can share a link to any Bigger Pockets article. And in fact, we encourage you to share links. Yeah, if you like a podcast, yeah, if you like this podcast, share a link to it at BiggerPockets.com

slash show 197 on your Facebook page or your Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever. Yeah, that stuff is all kosher. We love that. Yeah. What's not okay is, you know, taking an entire article and pasting it onto your website or even, you know, half an article. Take a paragraph, say, hey, I just read this great article. Here's a sample and you take a paragraph and you link to link back to the original article. That's totally cool. We love it. We encourage it. But, you know, don't steal our content. We don't like that. But do share it. I mean, like, listen, get it out there. you know, help your friends, family, colleagues see some of this amazing content, help them become successful by reading and consuming it as well by sharing it.

So that's today's quick tip. Managing properties can feel like a full-on circus. You're juggling vendors, tracking payments, chasing approvals across multiple properties, and maybe a few HOAs, all while trying to keep tenants happy and owners confident. One delay can throw everything off, and suddenly your day is all clean up, no progress. That's why hundreds of property managers rely on bill to streamline their finances. Bill for property management lets you add all your properties, assign permissions, pay bills, and receive payments quickly and efficiently without the usual bottlenecks.

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That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy. all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Now, you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10.10. The portfolio features 4,700 single-family rental homes spread across the booming

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talking about their high level returns. But that's not the number that actually matters. What actually matters is what you keep after taxes, and that's where multifamily real estate quietly stands out. With built-in advantages like depreciation, the right deals can generate steady cash flow while reducing the tax drag. Bam Capital structures its multifamily investments around those fundamentals, pairing tax efficiency with disciplined operators and a long-term approach. This isn't about chasing hype or guessing market timing. It's about building durable, tax-aware wealth over time. Learn more at biggerpockets.com slash bam. Guys, as Brandon said earlier, this is show 197.

Wow, we're almost there. Yeah, almost the 200 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. And you can check out the show notes of BiggerPockets.com slash show 107. You could interact with our guest, ask them questions, find links to their profile on anything else that we're talking about, find a link to the video for the show and whatever else you want. Also, guys, please, if you're a listener, jump on the device that you're listening to us through, whether it's Stitcher, iTunes, the platform, the software, or whatever it is, iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud. And leave us a rating review. Subscribe if this is your first time. Subscribe to the show so we can keep pushing it to you and to your device. And let us know how we're doing. With that, let's get to this show. Today's guest. Today's guest is Chris Heron. Chris is a real estate investor. What is it? It's,

It's not Milwaukee. It's Madison, Wisconsin. Yeah, I think he said outside Madison. Madison, Wisconsin area. As Brandon said earlier. Where the Packers are and cheese has cheese and packers. They like cheese. Yeah, yeah.

This guy has done some unbelievable stuff working a full-time job, building an unbelievable portfolio, tons of creative strategies for getting his money for financing. This is the guy. He's the energizer bunny of real estate investors. He does not quit. He just keeps going and going and going and never takes a no for an answer. And it's amazing. He's an inspiration for newbies.

It's an inspiration for guys who've been doing this for a long time. So please listen up. All right, Chris, welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here. Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm excited. I'm excited. We have a celebrity, dude.

We have a celebrity. It's a pretty big deal. Why don't you tell us why are you a celebrity, or at least, you know, so what? I do have a day job. I am a business analyst, but I do play disc golf professionally on the weekends. So I did take top 10 in the world back when I was in college, but now I play more locally around the Wisconsin Midwest regions. And I play about 20 to 30 tournaments a year or so between March and October. And actually just last week was the last disc golf tournament of the year.

And I just secured the 2016 Wisconsin State Championships. Wow. Defended my title from 2015. So luckily that was a stressful weekend, came down the last few holes and managed to pull it off. Well done. You said we had a celebrity. Seriously. Disc golf is a big deal, I've heard.

Oh, I thought you said golf. I thought he was like a golfer. I'm sorry you did. Tell people, what is disc golf for those who don't know? What is that? Well, disc golf, I don't want to say the term frisbee golf, but they're discs, and it's played a lot like golf where you have teapads and baskets. And you have 18-month holes on the course. T-pads, not P-Pets.

And it was not to shovel the T-pads after November, so it gets a little rougher out there. Yes. I grew up in that Midwest weather. This is the thing where they have the chains, and they're throwing the little frisbees into the chains, right? Is that what this is? Yep. That's what we called disc golf. Okay.

And you were top ten in the world. That's pretty awesome. I'm giving you a hard time, but I think it's awesome. So nice. But you're not just a disc golf player. You're also a real estate investor. No, we're not interviewing. We're not here to talk about that, though.

That is pretty cool. But we are talking about your real estate investing. So you've done like a deal or two in the last few years. Is that right? Yep. I decided to get into real estate right around 2013 or so. We bought our first property at the very end of the year. And currently now just closed on our 52nd rental unit.

So we went from zero to 52 in just over two and a half years. Now, is that like one big 52 unit apartment building or were you talking multiple purchases? That's next year. So I buy mostly single family houses and duplexes. So we have just over 20 single families and 10 duplexes. I have a couple of triplexes in there as well. None of them are purple though. So I'm okay there.

I have the purple triplex. No, it's not purple anymore. Mine's green now. All right. Oh, it's better. All right, so you went. That's crazy. 52 units is pretty awesome in three years.

That's impressive. Wow. So we need to talk about how you made that happen. Yeah, we got rewind and go to the beginning of this. this conversation. All right, so how'd you get started? There we go. What was the impetus for getting into real estate? All right, sure. Well, about three to four years ago, I had a different day of job than I have now, and I was working in 60-hour work weeks, and I'm looking around, and I see 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds to the left of me and to the right of me doing the exact same work that I'm doing. And I realized

there's absolutely no way I want to be doing that for the next 30 to 40 years. So I actually read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, like I think 99% of the other investors out there did. Really changed my mindset and started thinking about how we could build and grow our assets. So we decided to take the next year and start really educating ourselves. We found bigger pockets. We started reading books. I went to a couple seminars. And in the meantime, we were saving up enough for a down payment. Then the time came where we had just over $10,000 saved up and we started looking for our first duplex. And we happened to find one based off of bigger pockets. It was 2% cash flowing duplex where the rents were about 600 per side. And the list price was $4,99.

Wow. And so I'm like, okay, came on the market that day. We walked over to it. Everything looked good. It currently had tenants inside the building. So we put an offer on it, a low-ball offer of about $50,000 or $40,000. They came back saying that there's multiple offers, what's your highest and best? I offered $50,000.

And lo and behold, they said they had a better off. So then I went to my realtor and said, well, let's submit a second offer. Let's do $52,000. And he's like, ah, it's not very typical. but okay, well, I'll submit it. And they came back saying they're still going with the other guy. And then I'm like, well, let's submit a $54,000 offer. I want this property.

And he was really hesitant, but ultimately he ended up submitted in a $54,000 offer. Still nothing. And so I really didn't want to give up. And finally I asked, okay, let's just do a $56,000 offer and see what happens. He said this is not kosher to what typically real estate agents do, but he submitted it. They finally came back and said, I'm in second position. Wow. So my realtor finally convinced me to move on to find another property.

We went ahead. We found a triplex this time. This one rents off for 500 per unit, so 1,500 per month. And the purchase or the list price was 70,000. So I offered 50,000 again. And ultimately we came back and negotiated down to 595 for the triplex. And got the accepted offer. Everything looked good.

We were about to close on the property. And then here comes this first offer back at me. It turns out that when the seller, or when the seller, the buyer is actually doing an inspection report, they found some electrical issues and asked for a thousand dollars off. And since my fourth offer was so much higher than his offer, the buyer was like, you're done. I'm not even going to mess around with that offer. I'm going to give it to this other guy. And so I was like, oh, wow, I only have enough for one of these. I tried getting out of the triplex, but the guy wouldn't refund my measly $1,000 earnest money. So I decided I'd

buy both. I went around, started asking some friends and people. family and got enough for two down payments on these properties. So I started out with what I thought was going to be one house and it turned out to be five units in my first month. That's awesome. And then all my money was gone and I thought, well, this was fun. I'll have to wait another year before I buy my next property. I'm guessing that didn't happen, but we'll get there. I've got a whole lot of questions here. So you had used all your money. Did these properties require any work or were they ready to go? The duplex was rented out by the time we closed, on it, the bottom unit had left. So we went ahead and we started remodeling the bottom unit.

And we probably put, we probably put about 10,000 into it. I did most the work myself. But you said you were out of money. Sorry, I just wanted to ask how you actually got the money for that. Well, again, so we had about our $12,000 saved up, which is enough for about one down payment. But we did get a loan from my parents helped chip them. And so we got a couple smaller other loans from just friends and family to help pay for some of this. Now, the good news was I did buy rate. So the duplex praise at closing as is at about $80,000. So we were then able to kind of discover the new tactics that I would use going forward.

We went ahead to a different bank about two months later, refinanced at $64,000, pulled all of our money we had into the property back out. And now we were left with another $10,000 to go find another unit. So in other words, you did the Burr strategy that we talked to talk about. Kind of. It was like a hybrid bird where we actually closed with the bank up front and then had to do a separate closing. We burdened about an extra $1,000 in their closing costs, but absolutely worth it. Just trying to learn how to do the whole process in the first place. That's cool. That's awesome.

Yeah, that's great. So you did something that we don't hear a lot of people do, and you alluded to it several times. You offered, submitted a new offer, tried it again, try it again. And then they finally came back to you later when the other guy fell out, right? I think most people saying like, hey, that doesn't make sense. You shouldn't do that. Well, you knew you had a lot of room in there, right? I mean, you're buying a 2% deal. It gives you a whole hell of a lot of room. So what was your limit? I mean, like, you did the math. I mean, you could have gone up, you know, another 10, 20 grand and still made, you know, a lot of money on this thing, right? Right. And again, keep in mind, this is my first property. So I don't know exactly what I'm doing. But based off of what I've seen other three bedroom one bathroom duplexes go for, I thought that this thing would definitely. praise at 80, 90, even $100,000. And the assessed value was, I think, right around 90,000 as well. So it looked like there's a lot of room in there. The guy was motivated. He was moving to Vegas in like a month and just wanted to ditch his property. Right. Huh. Cool. Now that's awesome.

So, you know, to the listener, I mean, I think it just goes to show you if you find a good deal, you shouldn't chase it to the point where you're not making money. But I think it is okay to chase a deal to the point where you still are making money. And that's, that's exactly what you did. And, you know, obviously the numbers on that thing still are stellar. So, well done. Yeah. Yeah. And so what that did was it set the building blocks for, I guess what Brandon calls the Burr strategy. So going forward, what we did is what we put together a game plan saying, hey, we can do this again. I know we can. And if we can find properties at like 70% of actual value and then go ahead and refinance them back with the bank, pull all of our initial

capital back out, we can turn these as fast as we can find them. So what I did is I started going around trying to figure out where can I find some additional capital to actually pay for these all cash. And so I started talking to a bunch of banks. And that's where perseverance comes through and not giving up. Because I talked to quite a few banks that say, oh, you can't do that. You can't refinance based off the appraisal values. We only do purchase price or with a two-year time frame. So about the seventh or eighth bank that I talked to, they said, yeah, yeah, we're, if you bring us a deal that you already own, we would be able to do a cash out refinance and pay you up to 80% of the appraisal value. And so that really set the tone to where

we picked up our next property. It's a five-bedroom house. We paid $27,000 for it. And we, I did all the work again myself. So I put about $5,000 more into it. And the property praise at $55,000. So again, do my first one, all we did was put about a $35,000 mortgage on it. Now, now I absolutely would have put a high as a raise. mortgages that could possibly get on it. By that time, we pulled up our capital back out, and our first actual Burr Strategy property worked out great for us. So then I started talking to more banks, and I tried tapping into, I got a helock. I talked to a bank, and they actually gave us a $15,000 unsecured line of credit at 5%. We got a credit card through a bank that did free cash advances

that had an 8% interest rate tied to it. Tapped into my 401k and took a $50,000,000, dollar a 401k loan from myself. And so what I did is I built up a way that I could use funds. Now, it's no different than if you just went to another investor and asked for private funding. But I wanted to use banks since I was more comfortable going that route and the interest rates were all around 5%. Whereas private funding can get six, seven to 10%. That's amazing, man. So we actually started right off the bat.

I think last November is when we really hit the ground running. And we started buying two properties a month. And I've been doing two properties a month ever since. last October. That's awesome. The biggest deal yet was just back in September where we closed on 18 units from a returning landlord. And we got our purchase price. It was $310,000. And the appraisals came at $450,000. Cover everything, including some of the repair costs that we'll put into them. And this is in Detroit, right? I was going to say, I don't touch Michigan, so I really should be on your good side here. Yeah. This is Wisconsin. This is in Wisconsin or outside Madison.

an area. Okay, cool. No, those people don't know what Burr is. We've talked about Burr a few times today. That stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. It's exactly what Chris is doing. He's buying properties. He's fixing him up. He's renting him out. And then he's pulling the cash back out in a refinance so he can have the money to go do it again and again and again. And normally, where everyone gets stuck on the birth strategy and the danger of it is what if you can't refinance? Because most banks require you to wait at least a year, sometimes two, to do the refi. But I love Chris that you said, you just persistently just went to a bank after bank after bank until you found one that was like, yeah, why not? And I found that as well. I mean, there's some banks that will do it,

not everyone, but some will do it. So what I found out is you should only talk to the small community banks or credit unions. Those are all the ones have had the most success with. And after I found my first bank, we did about five or six of these. And then they realize, hey, wait a minute, we're really funding 100% of these properties. And they actually, they changed their game plan around on me and said, we're no longer going to do this. And I was absolutely crushed. I thought my dreams just came crushing down, but I didn't give up and went through. And I called a whole bunch more banks. And we finally found another credit union that was willing to do it. And now, since then, I've continued to call banks. And so I have about three or four or five lined up that we can use.

So if any of the others decided to back out, we can, we won't be stuck in this scenario where we don't have to buy a property. I love that. And I love that you said, like, you know, you were crushed that like all your dreams. You had this plan. right like this burr plan and then everything changes i find that's so true in real estate like we make these huge gigantic plans which are really good and then everything changes and you got to like re-scramble again and that's okay that's just part of the game i think eisenhower said what plans are useless but planning is everything it's like you know it's still important to have those idea of where you're headed what are you doing just know that you have to be a little bit flexible and sometimes

scramble but i love that you are i think that's i think that's i think that's one of my favorite quotes Eisenhower. Come on. Anyway, you were saying? I think that's one of the keys to what I'm actually doing. And since I do have a full-time day job, I'm not able to do a lot of this stuff during business hours, which has really forced me to create teams in the place and get the contractor crews out there to turn them and to have property management. And I think a great tip that I just learned this week.

Well, I didn't learn this week, but it actually fell in the play this week, is always I have two property managers in one area. I've heard of people getting burned in the past where they have. have a lot of properties and their property manager backs out on them. I literally just had my second property manager say he's no longer going to be doing units in this area. So he backed out. But luckily, since I have my plan into place, we have a great property manager right now that's going to take those on almost seamlessly. And so we're not left holding the bag trying to manage 50 different units while working a job. Hey, so Chris, you're demonstrating something here that I think is so important. I think if you're a listener and hearing what Chris is talking about, like just

stop, rewind the last 10 minutes and listen up again. You basically said, I want to create this strategy. I need to have the resources to do it. And you went and you you hit up your credit cards. You hit up everybody. You needed to find a way to finance it. So many people come out and they say, well, I don't have any cash. I don't have any way to do this. I don't have the resources. The banks are saying no. And most of the time, they asked one bank. They talked to one person. They looked at the cash that they have in their savings account and they said, well, I don't have that. said if there's a will, there's a way, I'm going to figure out how to do it, and you're persistent, and you were hungry and digging and digging. And not only that, but once you went and found

the money, you said, I'm not going to stop there. I'm going to go and find more money for when this money potentially dries up, or if I need to just keep growing and they can't keep up with me. That's amazing. Like, you know, listen to that people. Listen to that listeners, because that's the kind of hunger that's going to help you to build a kick-ass portfolio. It's not this, I got rejected once. Actually, you got rejected many times on your offer on that first property and you eventually got it. You got rejected many times on the banks and you got the money. That's what you got to do. You got to hustle. You got to be hungry. I love it. Right. And I think the most powerful phrase out there is, don't ever say you can't. Always ask yourself, how can you? I've done that so many times.

And that's what's really taking me to the next level where I honestly feel that I can't go any farther. And so my first strategy was to buy one house a year. And then we bumped up to one house a month. And every time I say that, I'm like, I don't think I can do this, but if I could, how could I do it? And then you put your game plan into place, and it really changes your mindset. When you say you can't, it blocks your thinking to even try figuring out a solution to it. And I think it's very powerful to go ahead and do that. Yeah, I love that thinking. Just to add one more thing to something you just mentioned earlier about resubmitting that offer, you know, like multiple times.

One thing that I've done successfully a few times is where I'll submit an offer and then they'll reject it. Like they'll say too low, right? I'll re-simate the exact same offer. I mean, the same piece of paper, I'll have my agent do it. Just cross off the date and put the new date on there. I read this in a book a long time ago, and then they'll reject that one. I'll do it again a week later. Same up paper, cross off the date, put the new date on there.

Because what it does, it's this constant reminder to the bank going, oh, man, or whoever the seller is usually it's a bank repo. The seller, oh, man, they've offered five times now every week the same amount. They see the dates building up. It's like this subtle, hey, this property is sitting there doing nothing. And I've done that successfully multiple times. So just another quick tip for people. Yeah, I can definitely see that. taking place on are you foreclosures. Yeah, yeah, it works pretty good. Another thing as well,

like, yeah, I mean, just being persistent, like when people say no, it doesn't mean no for sure, it just means no for now. And I love that you were just pushing through on those deals. That's great. Well, so, okay, so let's go back to that. I want to talk about the 18 units real quick, because that's something that we don't hear very often, people buying big portfolios. Was your, that wasn't like an 18 unit property, right? That was multiple properties, or did I misunderstand that? Correct. So, so we were talking about MLS properties in the beginning. and so I bought everything off to MLS my first year. Now, a tip to do an MLS properties to get back to this 18 unit real quick.

When I was doing my MLS properties, I would literally have an agent give me all the listings that morning that came out. We would look through the listings. If they meet the 2% rule, I would then pull my calculator out and we would see if it was actually a deal or not. If it was, I would submit an offer 30% below the list price immediately without seeing it. We'd have a walk-through contingency in there. And what I was hoping for was a counteroffer to come back. with that counteroffer, it gives you a two to three days before you have to accept or decline it. So that would give me enough time to go through the property, see if it was a great deal.

If it was, I would buy it. If it wasn't, I would move on to the next. That was my strategy for the first year. Our second year in 2016, we've converted over to direct mail and have been absolutely killing it with that. And so this deal, the 18 units, was through a direct mail letter. We submitted a letter to an owner. He came back, said he had 25 units, which was about 14 or 15 different properties. And he just wanted to get out.

He had some health issues and wanted to spend the rest of his time with his family. And so originally, we went through the properties. He wanted about $750,000 for the properties. We were asking about $500. And we were too far apart. However, then we did a second mailing about three or four months later. He didn't sell any of the properties at that time. He decided now was it time to sell.

He came back, was more open to our offer. And so I couldn't even handle that amount of properties. So what I did is I went to the Madison Ria, and we found another partner that wanted to buy half these properties as well. So we went in as a split deal. He was going to pick up six of the properties, and I was going to pick up eight of the properties. And we went in with a, it's kind of a unique offer where we had two separate parties offering two separate prices for the whole package deal.

And really his thing was he wanted to sell all of them. It was either all or nothing. Wow. That's fast. I've never heard of anybody doing that before. Yeah. Grabbing another partner to take half of a loan. Was it two offers then, or was it a single offer split up?

It was a single contract, single offer for one lump sum. price and then we had an addendum break out which party gets each of the houses. And so the beauty on this was, so when we do appraisals, what we find out is when you're, and you're using a bank up front at closing, appraisals tend to come pretty close to the actual listed price of the property. It doesn't matter how great a deal is. I've found some amazing deals. And somehow, lo and behold, that appraisal is what I bought the property for.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's like magic. The beauty of doing these package deals are, I mean, they have their one lump sum of price of $500,000 for 15 different properties, but they don't know what we decided on individually for each property. So they came back and they were almost forced to do an actual real appraisal. And so that's how I came back at, well, my portion came back at $458,000. And my purchase was $310. That's awesome. That's really cool. One thing you mentioned a minute ago that I love that you said this is that when you were buying the MLS, you were just making offers even without looking at the property.

Now, this is something that a lot of newbies get stuck on. And I'm not. not saying every newbie should go make a bunch of offers without looking at them, because it is valuable to go look at properties. But when you have a full-time job, you don't have time to go out and look at every property that looks halfway decent, walk through it, make your, you know, do the analysis, run the numbers, do an estimate, make your offer. You're like, you'd never do anything else all day. So I love the fact that you were just waiting. You were just trying to get them into conversation. If they wanted to make a conversation, they wanted to start negotiating, now you'd go look at the property. And I do the exact same thing, because otherwise we would never do anything else.

We just look at properties all day. Right. And so I do have a 100 mile commute every day. So, luckily, I think that's actually part of my success because it forces me to listen to podcast daily. And I knock out quite a few every day. And I do listen to them on like 1.7 speeds. So you can probably tell my voice why I speak a little faster.

It's definitely changed over the last two years. So, but even with working, I don't get back until 6.15 at night. And then I sit down and eat dinner with my family. put the kids to bed. And around 8 o'clock, it's about the only time I have to do all my real estate from 8 to midnight during weeknights because on the weekends I'm usually traveling around the Midwest. So really, it forces me to actually have the realtor. So sometimes if I want to walk through the property and I can't get to it, I have my realtor

go ahead and take pictures. I have a real good relationship with a couple different contractor crews. And so they're able to go through the properties, estimate the rehabs without me being there, send me over what they think is a fair price for the property. and we can go with it. And so as long as I have a walk-through contingency, it gives me a couple days that figure out where in my schedule

I can go down and walk through the property myself. Especially when I walk through it at night, here's a tip. Don't ever walk through a property in night and then buy the property. Always go back during day hours. There's always things you think it looks good

until you actually get out in the sunlight. Yeah. Chris? That's a good tip. Chris, you can't do that. I mean, how are you buying properties working a full-time job, not seeing? them. I mean, that's crazy. That's absurd. That's right. So don't do it. I guess you leave all the deals

to me. Yeah. No, look, there's so many people again who are like, I can't do it. I'm working. I have no time. How am I ever going to see the properties? Again, I just, the reason I'm harping on this, because we just on a daily basis hear from people who always say it can't be done, it can't be done, and you're saying, you know, how am I finding a way to get it done? So you got the realtor taking the photos, the contractors going in and doing the work. So you found people who can do things that you're unable to do because of your full-time job, your commute and everything else, and they're supporting your efforts to go out there and build this business the way that you want to build it. It's, again, I love it, man. I just, I love your attitude. I love how you're doing this.

So I'm just going to keep repeating that throughout the show. That's my job. Well, well, the trickiest part, I think the biggest thrill that I've had to overcome is actually having my wife sign the spousal consent form in front of a notary. So my wife does an in-home daycare. So she watches eight kids. And she's basically trapped in the house from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. so she doesn't have any way to get out and actually do any of these tasks that would be normally very easy to do if you had a day job. You could just go out and get it done over your lunch hour.

And since I'm working 50 miles away, I can't just come back to the city and get my stuff done as well either. So what we've had to do is we've worked with banks where they literally have people come out. at 8 o'clock at night to our house to do these closings for us. And we hired notaries to come into our house that watch my wife sign paperwork. And there's always a way. You just have to be determined and be motivated and not give up. You know what I think is interesting about this. The fact that you have a full-time job, like I, okay, let's say two years ago you had quit your full-time job and you just gone into this. It sounds like you're pretty handy because you worked on the first few properties yourself, right? Like you kind of. Well, so my strategy was I had no clue what I was

doing. I was the YouTube king back two years ago. And I watched YouTube, learned how to do everything myself. And I did that. I wouldn't take that back for anything. I did that to learn what it takes to rehab a house, what goes into it, what to look for when I walk through a property. And the same thing with management. We managed up to our first 10 units ourselves, just to learn how to do the management and understand what it took to actually make it successful before we handed it over to a property manager. And I thought, it's very important to actually learn from the ground up what you need to be done versus just handed it over to someone and assuming they know what they're doing. Well, I love that. And I was going to say, like, I don't think if you

would have quit your job, like, let's say three years ago and just gone into this, you probably wouldn't be as far as you are today. Like, I feel like having a full-time job, and I've tell people this a lot, like, having a full-time job is actually an asset because it forces you to think in terms of systems, teams, other people, you know, a business versus I'm just going to do this. Like, if you were just working at, you know, working at home, didn't have the commute, didn't have the job, it'd be just too easy to go, oh, I'm just going to take care of this. I'll just manage that property. It's okay.

I'll go and rehab this. So, yeah, I mean, like, if you're listening to this right now, somebody out there listening to this and you have a full-time job and you're like, I need to quit that job. I need to get out of this job. Like, think instead, like Chris here, like, how do I make it happen with the job? Because with the job, now you can get loans easier. Now you can get a lot of things.

So, yeah, I think it's fantastic. So the cool part is once we just close on that 18-unit deal we just purchased, I went back to the bank and I had them recheck all of our numbers and pull our credibility. and our debt-to-asset ratio without my daycare income and my day job income. So both me and my wife can now officially quit our jobs, and banks will still give us loans to go ahead and continue this process. So we finally got over the big hurdle,

and my plan is to hopefully retire by March of 2017. We're going to try to tie up a bunch of loose ends here. We want to make sure we pay off some student loans, car loans. I want to save one-year's salary up in the bank. So we're actually looking to sell a couple properties. It's actually pretty cool. Literally five minutes before this podcast here, I had my realtor call me up and say, we just got an accepted offer on our property we have on the MLS.

So it's pretty exciting to hear that. So we're trying to drastically put that money in the bank and then retire from my day job. And so originally when I got into real estate, I actually wanted to do this just to build passive income so I could quit my job. And what I found out is I absolutely love it. I love nearly every aspect there is. putting together deals, finding the funding, doing the rehabs, managing the work. I love all of it, and I will absolutely do this from here and out. If I had $100 million, I'd still be doing this.

They would just have a few extra zeros on the end of each of the deals. So is your wife going to also retire in March? Is that the plan? We hope so. She's actually taking her real estate license exam here in November. So we do a lot of direct mail. So what we have is we have, just for example, our first direct mail, we sent out 600 letters. and we got 50 responses back saying that they wanted to sell their house to us.

We ended up buying one or two deals off of that, which left us with a bunch of mediocre deals and a whole bunch of people that wanted to sell their house off the MLS. So our plan is to hopefully start building our network up, and we can take those mediocre deals. They're amazing over two, two and a half percent rental property deals. They're just much closer to the actual market value. And our strategy is to buy 70 percent so we can get all of our money back out. But other investors, they still want to hit that 2% rule. So if we can partner up with other investors, we can hand off those deals to them.

And then the ones that are at absolute full market value that don't cash flow all that well, we'll just turn those into listings as well and list them on MLS. So hopefully there will be no more dirty diaper change in our new future. Nice, nice. All right, I got a couple questions. Are you actually buying at 70%? Like, what's your average purchase price? Oh, man, that's a good question.

I don't actually know. Because you're making your offers at 70%. So for an example, that's what we're shooting for. We're shooting for 70%. I've bought some 50%, 40%, but I've also screwed up plenty of times. And I buy them and they appraise everything I have into them. So I might buy it at $25,000. The rehab goes bad.

I put $30,000 into it. I'm all in for 55. It appraises at 70. I'm still able to pull 100% of my capital back out. I just have a higher mortgage than I was hoping for. And a couple of the properties, they come in, they assess, or they appraised exactly at what I paid for them. So I am out that down payment.

However, now that we have, we've built up this portfolio, we're bringing in a good chunk of cash every single month. So if I end up forking over $4,000, $8,000 for a down payment, within that month, we can build that money back from the cash flow and pay it off to be back at start. And that's one of the beauties of rental properties, too, is that it kind of compounds on itself, right? Like the more money you start making rentals,

the more you can use that to buy more properties, which means you have even more cash flow, which means you can buy even more. I mean, like, it's just one of the really great parts about buying assets versus buying liabilities, like, you know, new cars and stuff. And so when we first started, our game plan was to put $1,000 a month away. Between both our jobs, we could save up $1,000 in discretionary funds. And so we're going to allocate that towards real estate every month.

And literally, after we started doing this burr process, we found that we didn't need to do that anymore. So after about seven months, we stopped contributing to our real estate fund account. and it's just grown crazily ever since. That's fantastic. On top of that, using the birth strategy, we're able to increase our portfolio without actually sticking our capital into it.

So what we're doing now is taking all of our excess cash flow and building up our cash reserves. And that's how we're going to hopefully retire at a much safer level than, say, someone that goes ahead, quits their job because they did their first deal and they want to do their next flip. Yeah, I love it. You talked about sending a lot of direct mail.

Initially, you said you sent 600 letters on that first minute. What are you sending now? Ooh, that's a good question. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word a lot. So we've done a couple like a thousand piece mail letters. And the response has been. So when I say we, I changed my mindset. So at the time we were doing MLS properties,

I literally had zero time left in my day. I do my checklist every Sunday on what I need to get done every day. And every second is almost tied up. So I actually had to go out and partner with another person where he was just trying to get into real estate. He hasn't done his first deal yet, but he was very intelligent and had the right mindset and drive. So we partnered together. I taught him what I learned from all the podcasts I've listened to.

And so he did a lot of the work up front putting the letters together. And we started mailing, I think we did about 1,000 mail letters at a time. And the idea was we'd take turns doing the deals that came in. So he would have first pick on the single family house out of first pick on a duplex. When we bought one, we'd switch over to the other person. And what that did is give him it in. He's working with someone that had some experience. and had some credibility and gave me the extra time that I didn't have to put the mail this together.

Someone in my scenario would say, there's just no way I can do my own direct mailing. But if you can field that out or just partner with someone, it just really opens the doors. I'd much rather have half of the deals out there than none of the deals because I didn't start. I love that. Should I say it again? I love it. I love it. I love it.

And so going back to your original question, right now we haven't sent any out probably the last month or two just because we got that major deal up. And that's tying all my resources up. They get these units. Some of them were vacant. Some of them we had to evict. So we're turning those around. But going forward, I really want to ramp it up once my wife gets a real estate license. So that's kind of the hitch we're waiting for right now.

So what does your letter say? I don't have one sitting around here. It's real simple, like two sentences. We are interested in buying your house. Please call us at this phone number. Nice. That's it. And the most simple it is.

The more simple it is, the better it is. And so what we're doing is we're doing the typical yellow letter red in. We're putting a normal envelope with a stamp on it, hand addressed with red ink on the front. And we're folding over the flap in the back. We're not even licking the letters. So it's really easy to pull out the letter. And they pull out, read it, and just says, we're interested in buying the house. So it's interesting.

People don't normally get that. So right away they call you. Even if they don't want to sell their house, they're calling you trying to figure out what's going on. And you can talk to those people. And they might know other people that are in a desire to need to sell their house, even if they don't even want to sell their own house. So we're seeing great response rates of 6%, 8%, 10%. That's fantastic.

And your partner guy, he's actually handwriting these. Is that what you said? Or is he doing the computer thing? I hand wrote the first 600. That was a nice, again, it's kind of the mentality. I want to do it myself to learn how crappy job it really is. And so since then, we start using computer fonts. We bought a pretty fancy printer.

that a printer that will kick out quite a few letters. Nice. Hey, by the way, if people want to know, like, because I do the same thing with my direct mail, we have a blog post on the site on how to use that handwritten font stuff to make direct mail letters. Biggerpockets.com slash DM, like direct mail, DM letter. And you can kind of see my process there. But so, okay, so you're sending those letters out.

Your partner's kind of doing the one that's kind of orchestrating this whole thing, which I think is just one of the best ideas I've heard. I've never heard of anybody doing that before. It helps everybody. Helps everybody, yeah. So if you're a brand newbie, you got no money. let's say, and you want to get started in real estate. Why not find a guy like Chris and say, hey, let's work this together.

You know, let's direct mail together. I mean, I just, there's so many good things about what you're doing. That's very cool. So here's a tip for a newbie investors. I had this happen with a college student that is really motivated. He found me on bigger pockets and wants to start learning on what I'm doing. And so he actually reached out to me and asked what he could do to help out. And it just happened that I bought this hoarder house.

And this is the craziest hoarder house you've ever seen. We had things stacked up to the ceiling, and there were little one-foot trails throughout the whole house just to get around. And we ended up picking up that deal. And I had no way to get this stuff out because the seller wanted to go through everything. And I was trying to manage this, and I was getting absolutely nowhere. So I thought it would be a great idea to go ahead. Here's your task. If you can pull this off, then absolutely.

I think we got ourselves a winning candidate here. So he went ahead and he managed the whole project and just killed it. He rocked it. He got it all done in probably three weeks, which I thought it was going to take. three years to do. And so now, actually, so we're working with him as well. And we have another deal that we're working on right now with another retiring landlord. He has 30 free and clear properties. And so the college student, he doesn't have any money or credit or a job or income. And so we're going to take most of the properties, hopefully. And there's a few of them in areas

that we don't want to own in or rent in. And so we're handing them off to him. And he's going to do an owner financing contract on those and hopefully get into him with none of his own money. and not even have to use a bank. That's awesome. I love it. Hey, who are you mailing to? What's the criteria on your direct mail? That's another good question.

So definitely absentee owners, but I find our biggest response rate would be homeowners that have bought their house prior to 1999. So you're just straight up sitting to people who bought prior to 99. That's, that's interesting. And so what we're doing is we have some smaller select areas where we're buying properties. So we're not mailing to larger 1 million population cities. They're smaller suburbs.

I'm trying to stick to like 60,000 people and above, but we pick out smaller portions and just do a pretty large chunk of mailing in that area because we know we want to buy rental properties there. We're not trying to wholesale them to other people. We want to buy them ourselves. So we do a lot in a small area. Got it. Cool.

And are you, how often are you doing your mailings? Is it, you know, every couple months? I mean, are you consistent or are you kind of trying to get there? We will be consistent next year. It's probably about every month or so, and it's tailored off just because of all the properties we've been buying recently. Like, I'm not willing to expand farther than I am right now just because of how fast it's growing. We want to make sure we have our capital expenditure accounts keep up with our properties. So I highly recommend we start buying rental units that you put aside a minimum $1,000 per unit, probably $2,000 per unit.

And I know a lot of banks keep that as criteria. The banks I use don't. So I've been free to not have those reserves in place. However, again, to be safe, especially since I am highly leveraged on a lot of these properties, we're just going to go ahead and do it anyways. And that's a number that I'd recommend shooting for. That restricts us from buying too many properties too fast. We have to make sure we have the reserves in place to go forward.

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LLCs. So that's the second line of protection. The third line of protection is they're highly leveraged properties. So we're not sitting on a bunch of equity. We're sitting on a bank-owned properties that we are collecting the cash flow from. So when I'm doing the BR process, if we don't have any of our own capital into it, it really mitigates the risk that we have out there. Yes, it's possible if we go through foreclosure, we'll lose everything we've worked for, but it's not the money that we put into. Now, keep in mind when I say we are 100%, we're not 100% leverage. We're buying these and we own probably 30% of most of the properties out there on paper. And that's just based off of the appraisals. So when you buy a property at market value and you

stick 20% down or you buy a property at a steep discounted rate and you put a mortgage that covers all your cash flow or all your capital, it's still the same boat. We still own 30% of them. Now, on top of that, the market, we are at the peak of the market, and I do watch that daily to figure out where we're at. And that's why I'm buying these cash flow and properties in C neighborhoods. The properties we're buying now, we're upwards of 3%. The last couple I even got upwards of 4%. And so there's going to be no appreciation in the near term future. But there's so much cash flow, I can't send the sidelines and just wait. So I'm going to buy these properties and these properties can sustain 40% vacancy rates. So long as I keep them occupied

60% of time, we can still pay our mortgages and our taxes and our insurance and our property manager and still fund our CAPEX accounts and still make sure we have our maintenance accounts in there as well. So I feel like I'm guessing you're not, yeah, I'm guessing you're not running 40% vacancy though, right? Yeah, probably. Right, right. So what we're doing, the average house in my portfolio is probably about a $30,000 to $35,000 house that rents out for $850 per month. And so a lot of people buy that $70,000 house that rents out for $8.50 per month. And that's where your mortgage is going to be $500 plus, where our mortgages are only $200. Hey, Chris, how do you find a good manager to man these?

Because, you know, buying in those city neighborhoods, it is tough to find good management. And it's frankly tough to find good tenants. So what are you guys doing to make sure that happens? And you do keep above that 40%. I mean, we joke about it, but sometimes that's hard when you're in a not-so-great neighborhood. Well, right now we find that we're probably right around 5% vacancy. And to find your property manager, it's kind of like a bank. You just got to keep going through them.

So I went through multiple property managers until we found a couple of good ones. Again, that's where the strategy of having two property managers. I always have that flexibility of if one goes south, I can plug in a new and test them out on a small chunk of my properties rather than give them all of them and be that much more at risk. And the biggest key I've learned the hard way is communication and a property manager. I had a good property manager that had all the systems in the place and worked out well, but he just would not communicate with me whatsoever. And things started falling apart. And this is the guy that literally just came to me this week and said, we're done. things aren't working out between us.

And luckily I have this great property manager we're working with that is a great communicating on it. Makes sense. Hey, what are some of the mistakes you've made? There's a lot of mistakes. We can work our way backwards. So my mistake I made last week cost me $8,000. So we're doing our first flip.

It's a big one. It's pretty much what everyone says. I bought a bunch of properties. I thought, you know, I can make this flip work. I know the area. We bought a house for $26,000 from a sheriff's sale. auction and it was assessed around 100,000. So we thought we could make a good $30,000 chunk of profit. Well, seven months later, we ate up basically our entire budget. And luckily, we got an

accepted offer for well above what we were thinking we could buy the property for. And we were back up to looking at making about $10,000 on this flip. So we left it vacant and had all the lights off and someone broke in last week, sold all the copper plumbing out of the house. And my insurance company won't cover it since it was vacant. So, we left it. So, we left it back in. So, So my lesson learned there is to when you have a vacant property, always make sure you have a truck parked outside the house. Always make sure you have a light on it in the back and plug in a radio and make it playing. So if they get through the truck and the light and they open the door up, they hear a radio. Hopefully they would not seal all your copper plumbing.

Yeah. And secondly, check your insurance policies. Make sure that I was buying rental properties. So they're insured if someone's occupying the house. But since this was my first flip, I just threw my normal pocket. policy on it, which actually doesn't cover houses that are vacant. Yep, that's good tips. Let's see another, I know I've had quite a few lessons learned in the past here, so.

Don't worry. That's a pretty good one. That's a good story. It's not a great story. It's a good story for us all to learn from. It is unfortunate. I am sorry you lost all that money, but thank you for sharing it. Yeah.

All right. So what, you said you earlier you're going to retire. You want to retire here by the end of, or beginning of, next year. So that's coming up pretty soon. What comes next? I mean, you've mentioned also earlier that you're thinking a big apartment complex. Is that where you're headed? Yeah. So I love the, the bird. Basically, I call it flipping a house to myself strategy. And so I want to start pursuing that on apartment complexes going forward. Now that's going to take full-time dedication to learn how to do it. Apartment complexes are a different beast from single family and duplex properties. So there's just no way

I could comfortably do that, work in my day job. I wouldn't say the word can't. I just, I don't want to go there. So I would rather focus on the next six months, we're going to continue doing what we're doing, retire from my day job, and then go forward. My plan there is to find mom and pop 20 to 50 to 100 unit apartment complexes that are undermanaged, go in there,

use investor funds to use the 20% down payment, maybe even use some of my own money for the down payment, fix them up, get rents back to market values, decrease expenses, and then go ahead, refinance it 18 months to two years down the road and hopefully pull all of our capital back out of it and have none of our own initial cash into it and do that going forward. That's solid. Sounds good.

Good plan. And then the other plan, obviously, I think we discussed already was with my wife getting her real estate license. So we really want to grow that portion of our business as well, too. Nice, nice. And are you still going to be continuing the not Frisbee golf, disc golf game here? Is that over too? Yeah, so. You're getting old now.

My ultimate plans, I would love to be a world champion. And so they have different age divisions. There's a master's division for 40 and older. And so I'm 35 right now. I'm actually looking maybe to cut back from the sport for the next year or two, just to do some more traveling and spend time with my family. And now that if I can retire from my day job, I can really start focusing on training mentally and physically to get into my peak shape again.

and I really like to go after the Masters World title in 2020. That's awesome. Can I ask a serious question? Don't get mad at me. How does one get into peak shape for Frisbee golf? I mean, we're throwing a Frisbee here. A disc. Okay.

That's a completely fair question. What kind of training are we doing here? I get through a Frisbee. Can I be a champion? Yes. Josh, you are a champion. You're already there. Thanks, Chris.

And so for me, I haven't been able to practice. So I literally play tournaments on the weekends, and I have maybe five practice rounds a year right now. So what I want to do for me training-wise is actually start practicing again, going out and playing courses not during a tournament but for fun and actually just to learn how the different discs fly and just be a little more consistent in my game. Gotcha. Okay.

So not like doing sit-ups and push-ups and rocky style running. I'm pretty good shape. I need to do that too. All right, good deal. I figure if 99% of the disc golfers out there don't do that, then, hey, I'll work the extra effort if that's going to get me that one extra stroke at the end of the day. Hey, Brandon? Yes.

You do realize that there is actually hope for you to become a professional athlete? There is hope. I could become a disc golf athlete. I want to play. Chris, next time I've never played, I think it would be fun. Next time I'm home in Minnesota, maybe I'll have to drive over to Wisconsin. and you and I can play a game at disc golf. I think that's fair.

We could do, what, $100 a stroke? I would crush you. Come on, I'm a racquetball player. It's like the same thing. You're right. Let's cut that down to $1. All right, moving on. Let's shift gears here and head over to the world famous Fire Red.

It's time for the Fire Round. All right, the Fire Round. These questions come direct out of the Bigger Pockets. forums. Let's get into this thing. Number one, should I consider, as a new investor, should I consider buying more than one property if the seller has more than one to sell? I know you've done that, but for a brand newbie, should they even consider buying, you know, hey, I'm going to buy a portfolio from this guy? Well, I think all my answers to these are going to be, it depends. Sure. So fair disclosure there. I mean, some of the bonus aspects of that would be you have multiple units, so therefore

if one goes vacant, you're not sitting 100% vacant. The downside to it is if something goes wrong, you have more units that you haven't necessarily learned or experienced or have even your teams in place set to handle those. All right. Next question. Is there a schedule you follow daily to make sure you're paying enough attention to each of your properties so nothing falls through the cracks? That's a good question.

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the tips that I do that causes me to be successful with the scenario that I'm in is I do have checklist. I do have daily checklists out there. every Sunday, I sit down, I write out what I have going on every single day of the week for the next week. And I put into place to make sure I can get those tasks done or checked upon so they don't get missed. Basically, I have this whole checklist in my phone. So constantly, I'm going throughout the day and things pop up and I'm like, oh, I got to write that down.

So I make sure I write down on my phone so I don't forget it later on. Then I come home, download that off to my to do-lis checklist just to make sure it doesn't get missed. And I think those checklists really help you out, just trying to manage once you get into multiple properties. on a very thin timeline. Also, in order to make those checklists work, you really need to have your goals set in a place first so you know that you are working on the right things. You can make yourself busy all day long

with random, mediocre tasks that actually don't help you achieve your true end goals. So I'd say my tip there is set your goals in a place first, then figure out what's going to take to get there, put those on a checklist. And sometimes I don't finish them all. Like I might have three or four tasks at the end of the day that didn't get finished.

The next day, before I start any of those tasks, I make sure I finish the previous day's tasks off so they do get done. Nice. Hey, just like curiosity, what app do you use on your phone to, you know, track your checklist and stuff? Gosh, it's not a good app. I don't recommend it. Okay, okay.

It's called checklists. Oh, okay. Nice. All right. By the way, so the reason I said that's a good question, too, is like, do you have a schedule to follow? I've said this before on the podcast, but I'll say it again now. I have this reoccurry nightmare.

Seriously, at least once a week I have this where I bought a property and forgot about it. And then, like, six months later, a year later, all of a sudden I remembered, oh, oh, yeah, I forgot about that. castle that I bought over on that hill and then it's all depressing and I'm getting foreclosed on. It's weird the nightmares that real estate investors have. Well, at least I do. Hey, Brandon. Yes,

John. Did you know? Did you know? Did I know what? You can go to biggerpockets.com slash portfolio and enter in all the properties on your portfolio. We're in data right now. We are just testing this thing.

We're just building it out. But you two, Chris, can do this. And that way you won't forget about that castle that you just bought. Yeah, I will not forget about the castle. That's actually a goal of mine is good of castle. But anyway, moving on. Biggerpockets.com slash portfolio. Portfolio.

Yeah, that is actually a really cool feature. So number three, for someone just starting out with direct mail marketing, what should be their goal or what should be my goals, kind of the way the question was phrased? Like, what do I set a benchmark of this is my, how many open rate I'm going to get or whatever? What's my goal? I think the best goal is said is to actually go ahead and do it.

So go ahead. If you're sending out 100 or 1,000, the key is just go ahead and actually get them. sent out. And make sure you answer the phone calls and return the phone calls. Don't just, when the phone rings, throw it around to the freak out and go, oh my gosh, what I do next? Just go out there and do it. And once you start doing it, you're going to learn what works, what doesn't work. And I mean, setting benchmarks always helps to help you keep on track. But if you don't, if you're just starting out, you might not know what you've been trying to shoot for.

So that's where I just recommend go out there, send a list of whatever you can afford budget-wise and knock it out. I love that. Yeah, because so many people want to do it. direct mail, they just never actually do it. They just talk about it. Cool. Last question. How is the best way a new investor can manage their time between real estate and their personal life when they're starting out? It really depends on what your end goals are. So knowing that I wanted to get through a lot of these properties very quickly and quit my day job within two years, I had to sacrifice things that I don't know if I would recommend. So I don't see

my kids as much as I'd hope to. I don't, I haven't played practice rounds of disc golf in several years. I had to sacrifice things that I love in order to achieve something in the near future that I knew was going to be there. If someone is just looking to do a couple rental properties, then maybe focusing on your family up front is the best way to go. If you're trying to see right now, I don't see my family too often just the way it is with disc golf and my job. So for me to actually leave my day job and be home all summer long, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get there, which may mean sacrifice for a year or so. so I have 30 years of a better life. All right. So I guess that was that the last question of the fireman.

That's it, man. That was it for the right. Let's move on to the world famous. Famous Four. The Famous Four, these are the same questions we ask every guest every week. And I know you've heard the show probably most episodes. So you know what's coming. Number one.

Chris, what is your favorite real estate book? Well, I think I gave it away earlier. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is probably the milestone book that converted me over. So since everyone says that, the next one I recommend is landlording on autopilot by Mike Butler. So he worked a full-time job and managed 70 to 90 units himself. And it gives you a lot of great tips of how to put systems into place to make it much easier to manage tenants. There you go. Great book.

Favorite business book? The EMith Revisited. Same category. Everyone recommends that. So the next one I recommend would be getting things done by David Allen. So that's really helped me get through the process of buying 50 properties while having a full-time day job. It does take a lot of coordination, and there are a lot of tasks out there that need to get finished. And I want to make sure that those tasks aren't just sitting on my desk under a sheet of paper, never getting done.

So by being organized and having that checklist really helps me be very efficient with my time. That's awesome. Cool. All right. And by the way, we've had both those guys on the show, Michael Gerber and David Allen, so both of your favorite business books, we've had both those guests. So if people want to go back and listen to them, just go to bigger pockets.com slash podcast and look for them there. We're actually hoping to build a search bar soon. I don't know where the progress is by that, but we should have a search bar at the top pretty soon.

You can search for a specific podcast. So we'll get there. Number three, Josh. Oh, totally blanked out, man. That's all right. You're getting old. I know. What?

Okay. Outside of, you've kind of answered this question, but outside of disc golf and your family, what do you do for fun that is not real estate? Well, right now, disc golf would be my only answer. I do like camping, but really in the last three years, that has been my main focus, playing disc golf, real estate, and family. Right on. Very good. I guess he considered listening to podcasts and other hobbies, so I do listen to 25 different podcast series every single week.

Wow. Definitely bigger podcasts is my number one. Yes, of course it is. Oh, my God. I look forward to the most. Good. Yeah, that's crazy 25 shows a week. That's impressive.

Yeah, they're on markets. economy, on real estate, on business, just trying to keep up on tabs of where we are in the economy and the market and trying to foresee where we might be headed in the future. Is there a disc golf one? A disc golf podcast? What? There are a disc golf podcast. You're not on my list. Okay. You're above that. All right. Number four, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors out there from all those who give up, they fail, or they just never get started? Yeah, that's a big questions. So there are a lot of different answers. Just real quick, I'll touch on a couple of

of them. So one, you need to understand your why and what motivates you. If you understand that, then you can focus going forward. Next, you need to have perseverance. There's going to be quite a few hurdles in your progress. It's not all rainbows and unicorns out there. So there's things you have to get over, trudge through. If you have your why in place, then it's a lot easier to get through those and keep trucking forward. Next is you need to stay focused. So there's a lot of stuff in real estate. A lot of shiny objects out there, a lot of squirrels. And if you start focusing a little bit on everything, you're going to be good at nothing. So focus on one little niche that you can become an expert in and do it very successfully. Also, good communication is key. And lastly, education

and learning from your mistakes. You got to constantly grow. If you don't learn from your mistakes, you'll never grow in the future. So if you mix all those together, you're bound to have a successful career. Wow. It's like you wrote it down or something. That's awesome. That's good, man. All right. Last question. Chris, where can people find out more about you? Where can they link up with you connect? Vigertockets.com. So if you want to get hold of me, just shoot me a message and I'm checking that daily. Perfect. Awesome. All right. Chris, this has been fantastic. Seriously, unbelievable show. I bow down to you. You've done an amazing job building a portfolio and your and feedback's been fantastic. So thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your

story. It's an absolute honor to be here and I'm glad to help out others. Awesome. We'll see around. All right. We'll see you. All right, guys, that was Chris Heron. Big thanks to Chris. You know, I... Chris Heron. You very loudly pronounced that. Good job. Well, you know, I want to get it right. I didn't like that show at all, did I? You hated that show. You kept saying, man, this sucks. I hate this. I don't want to talk. It was terrible. No, what a great show. Oh, my God. I enjoyed it. So many good tips. Here's what's funny. So after we got done recording,

and Chris is going to kill me for saying this, but he was like, oh, man, I just, there was so much I wanted to say, I just gave no tips at all. It was terrible. There was no advice. We're like, what are you talking about? That was like one of the best shows we've ever done. Yeah, he's got some, I mean, he's a high expectation guy. I mean, he's brought a good show. So if you guys, if you guys liked this show, let them know in the comment section at biggerpockets.com.com show 197. Ask him your questions there, leave your comments, and yeah, connect with them on bigger pockets. Perfect. Good stuff, man. Well, good plan, good guy.

Making good things happen for all you listeners, you know, get out there. Don't take no for an answer. I mean, Chris is the prime example of that, you know, make an offer. You know, if you got room, go ahead, follow up. Don't take that no for an answer. Now, obviously, don't go make crazy offers that don't make sense. That's not what we're saying to do. We're saying, you know, feel free to chase until you've got, you know, no more room to chase. Josh, how would somebody know the numbers

that they should, you know, how much they should offer? How do they do that man? That's, that's an interesting question. I'm glad you raised the, you raised it,

Brennan. Thank you. Yeah. Well, we here at Bigger Pockets have built a suite of calculators. No way. Yeah, it's amazing.

No way. It's amazing. Tell me about it. Yeah. Tell me about it. Well, well, well, Brandon, let me tell you about it.

If you go to BiggerPockets.com, I believe, slash analysis. That's true. you can find our suite of buying hole, burr, flipping, and wholesaling. We have a whole suite of calculators

that you can use, help you analyze all the numbers, help you determine if these properties are good deals or not. So go to biggerpockets.com slash analysis and you can check out the calculators. And of course, if you want to learn how to use them,

you should definitely come to one of our Wednesday webinars. Brandon talks about the calculators in almost all of them, biggerpockets.com slash webinar. and yeah, that's it. What do you think? Was that good? That was a good plug.

That was a good commercial. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not as commercially as you are. You were not as commercially successful and good looking and, you know, all those good things. You're finished. Thank you for talking. Time to go. Folks, this was show 197 in the books.

I'm Josh Dorkin. Sign in on. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. So 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. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.

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