BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 218: Driving for Deal Flow and Remarkable Educational Marketing with Erik Stark

Episode Date: March 16, 2017

Why is it some investors buy deals every single month, when others look for years without landing a single great real estate deal? Two words: deal flow. On today’s episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we sit down with Erik Stark to talk about how he consistently drives leads to his real estate business using “driving for dollars,” direct mail marketing, and a fascinating “education marketing” strategy that you’ll be excited to try for yourself! In This Episode We Cover: Erik’s background What exactly deal flow is The importance of focusing on the strategy The first step in driving for dollars How to identify a distressed vacant house How he tracks his mailers What systems he has in place, including outsourcing Tips for finding out if there’s existing mortgage on a property The Smart Sell Book he authored What R3 zoning is What’s changed in the past two years since he was interviewed His plan for the next years And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BP Podcast 093: 0 to 400 Deals (in 5 Years!) via Smart Marketing with Erik Stark Mike Cantu Brandon’s Instagram – Beardy Brandon! Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The Peebles Path to Real Estate Wealth by R. Donahue Peebles The Success System That Never Fails by W. Clement Stone Smart Sell Book by Erik Stark (Contact Erik directly) Tweetable Topics: “You need to stop chasing opportunity and start working a strategy.” (Tweet This!) “I don’t want to spend my life trying to tell people why I’m better than everybody else.” (Tweet This!) “If you are looking at properties and not writing offers, it’s like going to the gym and not working out.” (Tweet This!) “Cash is everywhere now. There’s no shortage of cash; there’s a shortage of real opportunity.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Erik Erik’s Personal Website Erik’s BiggerPockets Profile Erik’s Facebook Profile Erik’s Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 216. Isn't this 218? I can't read. This is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show 218. 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 million.

of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everyone? I am Dave Meyer, guest host and random guy that's sometimes on the podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. You get better every time you do that. You got to know. Okay.

Awesome. Well, maybe Dave will put the outtakes in and people can see that I'm not getting better at this and actually regressing and getting way worse. That might be true. That might be true. So what's been new in your world? Oh, not too much, man. I just been, oh, well, actually, I've been evicting tenants, which is never fun.

Fun. Yeah, so I have to do that. But it's actually going pretty well. They actually got out and I'm doing a bunch of maintenance now to make the place so much better. So I'm excited. I can go over tomorrow. It should be done. Let's see how much better this place looks.

What was the biggest mistake you think, or maybe there wasn't a mistake, but was it like the biggest lesson learned in the whole eviction process with those tenants and everything? I'd say two things. First, I should have evicted them a long time ago. probably the one lesson is like people sort of are who they are and if they show signs that they're going to be bad tenants, it's probably better to just cut and run. And the second was that I didn't actually legally evict them. So I was going to. I told them I was going to, but said that, you know, if you are willing to leave by the end of the month and follow

like a couple stipulations, I said, you know, clean the place so I can show it, do all these things. I will let you off and will not follow through the legal process. You know, as challenging as they were as tenants, you know, they're young professionals with careers. They don't want that on their record. So they agreed. It worked out better for everyone and enough to go to court a million times than cost me any money.

So whether you do the cash for keys or just sort of try and reason with these people, I think trying to negotiate instead of just automatically assuming you got to go the court route would be really good. I love that. I love the cash for keys. Yeah, definitely works. So cool. All right. Yeah.

What do you say we? Well, I don't know, nothing. I don't do much different. I don't know. What have I been up to? I honestly don't know what I've been doing this different. Rosie is, you know, beginning to not walk, but, you know, stand up and move around objects. Oh, that's awesome.

That must be very exciting. It is exciting. So cool. Well, quick tips. That sound good. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Let's go to our.

It gets to me. Quick. Quick tip. All right. So the quick tip today. It's very relevant for the show, is don't be afraid to look for off-market deals, especially as a newbie investor. I was really nervous about this.

I felt like I wouldn't know what to say. If I could ever actually get someone to call me back, I was a little nervous. I felt like going to MLS route was the safest way to go. But recently, I bought a home and I did it off-market. I wound up, like, seeing a house I wanted, I, you know, Google mapped the address, went into County Records, got the guy's number. I called him up. I said, listen, man, I want to buy your house. It was very lucky. He was willing to sell it to me for the right price. The closing went through really easily. Not everyone's going to go that easy, but it really opened my eyes because I had

been looking for houses for probably six months and couldn't get anything. And out of desperation, I just tried something and called and I got the deal and I found a great place. So I really encourage people to do that. That's awesome. That's a great quick tip. Good job. Thanks. You know, a perfect segue into our show. It is a perfect segue into our show. So today's show, actually, we're talking with Eric Stark. And Eric was actually on the show back way a long time ago, like number 93, like way a long time ago, like, what was that, two and a half years ago or something like that?

Anyway, and we're talking a lot about marketing back then, but he's got some new, cool stuff going with marketing. And today we dive both into some really advanced strategies. And we also talk about some really just basic stuff. So if you're brand new and you're like, how do I get my first deal? Listen close to this. And if you've been doing 100 deals a month, he's got some cool things to talk to you guys about too. So, yeah, definitely stay tuned for that. It's awesome.

I mean, it's really just like an in-depth look at how to market your business. And I think it's something people who are new, at least for me, I never thought about it. It's just like, oh, you just buy houses that are on the market. But once you start getting into this business a little bit, you see that the real money and the real opportunity is off market. So this is an awesome, awesome thing to listen to. It is. Here's the thing about traveling. If you buy food at the airport, a burrito, salad, bag of peanuts,

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All right, Mr. Eric Stark, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. How you doing? I'm doing good, man. How are you guys? I'm doing well. Good. Yeah. How you doing, Dave?

Oh, pretty good, man. It's a beautiful day here in Denver. It's like $60. degrees outside, as you could see. Well, if you're watching, it's really nice out here. No complaints. Nice. And you're in Denver. Eric, where are you at? Boker-Rotone, Florida. Boca Raton, Florida. What's it like there? Is that hot and miserable? It's very hot and sticky out. I mean, looking outside right now, it's pretty gloomy, but probably probably 84 and miserable. Nice. Nice. Well, anyway, well, we're glad to have you on the show.

Again, you've been on the show in the past. If people, you know, probably remember back in show number 93, I think it was. So people can listen to your story, BiggerPockets.com, so I show 9.3 and learn a little bit about you. But maybe before we kind of jump into what you've been up to since then, because it's been a few years, what you give us a recap, who you are? How'd you get into real estate investing and kind of just go from there? Man, just try to get my story straight.

First again, thanks for having me. And you guys have an awesome community. I'm honored to be here to give back to the people that are part of the bigger pockets. And I just thank you guys for doing an awesome job. But my name is Eric Stark. I've been a full-time real estate investor since 2000. Well, I started in 2006 and do my first deal until late 2007, but I own and operate a company based in Michigan with my business partner, Steve Mills. And we started off kind of wholesaling properties, got into renovations.

Now we buy multifamily, commercial, and do development deals. And I do a lot of that from my home here in Florida, since I handle a lot of the marketing acquisition, deal structuring and raising some of the private money where my business partner handles a lot of the, management development city planning building zoning things like that so we have a beautiful partnership going on that's awesome that's awesome and so you're finding like what what is your part of the deal you find deals correctly that's your part of the partnership correct yeah we i handle all the prospecting and marketing so i'm the one in charge of getting the marketing campaigns going out making sure you know the calls are coming in the leads are converting over and making sure steves got something to work on next month that's a good thing so for people who are new can you just explain like

what that even means like what what what What do you mean like you're doing deal flow? Like what is your objective and how are you going about doing that? You know, that's a really good question. You know, the word deal flow means a lot to me because the way that I look at real estate is, real estate to me is not much more than like a lead generation system. So one thing that we figured out early on, we started getting into direct mail is how can we find a couple of ponds that we can fish in

and work them very, very strategically instead of this week going after, you know, this week you're going on short sales. Next week it's REOs, then it's probates, then it's after. absentee owners. We picked a couple of very specific niches and kind of created like a relatively masterful system around those. And those would include things like our top 100 properties. I know I talked about that on episode 93. We're very successful with doing probate marketing. And then we do a lot of very specific mailing for properties that are not at their highest and best use as far as zoning's concerned. So a lot of our deal flow right now is very strategic. We're not just saying, hey, here's 10,000 absentee owners.

mail them and see what happens. We are going after, you know, four or five, six hundred properties that are located in a specific zoning area. And then when that deal comes to us, we know that we can take a duplex, slip a third unit into the basement, do an accessory dwelling unit on the garage and back, and I'll have four units from what used to be a duplex property that we're paying a lot of money to get these things. So we've got to kind of use some strategic ideas to get these things to their highest and best use. So deal flow to me is a little bit different than most people. Most people are just like, just mail all you can and wait for the deals to come in. We're a little bit more strategic.

That's cool. You know what I like about the word deal flow or the concept, maybe more of deal flow, is that and this is something that I struggle with my entire life is when I think of real estate, I think in terms of I'm going to go and buy a deal. So I get into like, okay, now I'm going to go buy a deal mode. And then I go out and I find a deal. And I'm like, yeah, I got it. And then I switch modes and I go over to now I'm in rehab mode or now I'm in selling mode.

And then it's like, okay, I'm done, take a breather. Now, let me get back into buying mode. And the problem is you can only do a few deals like that per year. I mean, at most, maybe like three or four, right? If you're really, really quick about them. Deal flow is like, how do you get that coming in continually? And I think consistently the leads that just come in. And so, and that involves a lot of just marketing, whatever.

And that's what your job is, this deal flow. And so can you talk about that real quick about, let's say you don't have a partner and you're just trying to get started with real estate. How do you consistently get deal flow if you're trying to do this all by yourself? Or do you just have to, do you need a partner? No, you definitely don't need a partner. I think exactly what you described is a lot of, I think everybody goes through that. I think we even go through that at times where you're constantly jumping from this side of the

pendulum to the other side of the pendulum and you're limited in your own capacity. So, you know, we have a lot of people that come to us and they want to know how can they, you know, either get involved or, you know, business has really changed. We're not getting the amount of deals that we used to do. And I would say, well, walk me through how you're getting leads right now. They're like, well, my realtor calls me from time to time with the deal. And I'm like, that's not lead flow. That's like, that's like hoping on a good opportunity comes your way.

And then even when it does come your way, you're hoping you don't get beat out at a highest and the best situation. So when to summarize that very simply, I tell a lot of people that you need to stop chasing opportunity and start working a strategy. And what I mean by that is even if you're going to go out and do a driving for dollars campaign, pick one area that's really, relatively close, preferably one that's in demand versus more like a war zone, because if you're driving for dollars looking for distressed properties in a war zone, you're just going to write down every address. You might as well mail everybody. But if you go to the beautiful parts of town and say there's 2,500 properties in this subdivision, go drive those streets and create a campaign based on either highly distressed or highly desirable properties that you would like to mail over and over and

over. To me, that's what we call working a strategy. Now, I know a lot of people, like, how many houses do you expect to buy? We're only mailing 100 or 200 or 300 mailers. Well, our letters are very personable. They're highly valuable. There's a lot more education that goes into it, like our smart sell book here. But to summarize that relatively quickly without going too much of an off ramp, I would always advise people to work a strategy and stop chasing an opportunity. Do you think that's a good strategy for people who are new to real estate investing? How long did it take you to develop that and really hone in on your personal strategy? I think that's actually the best strategy for people that are just starting in real estate

for the simple fact that most people don't have money to put into a marketing campaign and anything you don't have the money to put into, you're going to make it up for with it in time. And to be honest, I still spend a lot of time in the streets looking at, not looking, but building my list. When I moved to Florida several years back, the first thing that I did, is hopped in my car, drove all these neighborhoods close to the beach, and went after every distressed, highly desirable looking property in the area, got them on an Excel spreadsheet and started mailing them. I think that's a great strategy for even a seasoned investor to do.

So let's dive into that a little deeper and maybe just go step by step on how a new investor can do that. Because I love driving for dollars. I think it's a great way when you don't have a lot of income or a lot of extra capital to go mail 20,000 people a month. So like what is the first step for driving for dollars? How do you pick that neighborhood and then what? You know, for me, it's all about going after properties that are in demand. I do not want to deal in war zone areas. I don't, I think that's the most competitive place for people to start is the highly competitive where landlords are buying and, you know, slum lording it and there may be a couple of rehabs. It's a high wholesale concentration. I prefer to go after A or B class neighborhoods that it's very easy to identify, but it's where more people want to live and call home. So, you know, real estate 101, and I learned this from you guys, you guys remind me of this all the time. Real estate 101 is location, location, location. When I have a

great location, my options are like unlimited. I could buy the absolute best deal in the worst part of town and only have one exit strategy. When I bought an absolutely dumpy property in a gorgeous part of town, I have unlimited options. I can rehab it. I can build new. I can add on to it. I can wholesale it. I can rent it. Like, you're unlimited. So I would advise everybody to start with an area that's close to their home that's got a high concentration of sales. that has an in-demand location. And I guess if I were to put a connotations around the word in-demand, go to the place where you want to take your spouse out to dinner this weekend.

That's where I want to buy real estate because it's always in demand. I would tell people to start right there. Awesome. And so once you find the properties and start assembling the list, how do you go about doing the mailing? Are you doing it yourself or using a company? And what are those letters actually entail? Great, great questions, man.

So, you know, for me, if you guys could see my, I have yellow pads. Like, I'm not kidding. Like, you will not go into a room. I mean, I'm not kidding. I have multiple yellow pads all over my life. I have a yellow pad everywhere that I go for thoughts and ideas and properties and strategies. And just about every area of my life has a yellow pad dedicated to it. So grab a full tank of gas, grab 100 stamps, 100 envelopes, a yellow pad of paper,

and go get in the streets and start jotting down addresses of not only the distressed properties you want to buy, but the desirable properties that you want to buy. Talk to the neighbors, leave notes on the door, research the taxpayer address, get the letters out. If you can do a couple of handwritten, personally crafted letters or a photo of your distressed property to somebody that lives 1,500 miles away and hasn't seen it in two years, you differentiate yourself a lot different than the person that's just mailing another postcard wanting to buy your property. This might be a stupid idea, but I just just popped in my head. You know how like selfies are very popular, right?

You know, it'd be kind of an interesting strategy is to take a selfie of you in front of their house, like pointing at the house, right? I'm trying to. You should try that. I'll let you know the test results. Okay, I want to know because it's a funny idea because somebody gets a letter in the mail, like a postcard and it's a picture of a guy pointing at a house. And then people are like, wait, that's my house.

Like, you guys heard that first right here on bigger pockets. You watch. That's about to blow up. That's a funny idea. Yeah, try it. Let me know how it goes. Okay, so you go around, you're looking for houses that look vacant, look distressed. What does that look like?

What does a vacant house or distressed house look like? Overgrown, you know, just shingles falling off the roof, bushes haven't been trimmed, newspapers on the driveway. But more importantly, guys, like, if you ever learn anything about me, like, I'm like kind of anti-wholesale in a way. I used to love wholesaling properties because, like, I'm a lifestyle person. I have a wife and a son. I want to spend as much time with my family as I can.

but it took my partner to really like put a harness on getting me to wrap my you know i used have such a hard time saying why would i want five hundred dollars a month in cash flow when i have ten thousand dollars right here like i don't get it yeah but the moment that i stop going out and creating that i'm only as good as my last month as a wholesaler now when i can buy and and keep these rentals on tap and have good income coming in now i can choose the options that i want I do in life. So I don't want people to only go after distressed ugly houses. I actually want you to go after the more desirable ones that you're going to hang on to and not wholesale. I want you to find a way to keep them. That's cool. That's cool. I like that. You know, when I, when I drive for dollars,

I always go around. I look for houses that look nasty and obviously those. But I also, I write down every multifamily property I can find. Because in my opinion, at any given point, I would say half of the landlords out there hate being a landlord. Like people just don't like it. They're not good at it. And so I'm assuming every multifamily I see, there's a fairly good chance that person hates owning that property and is probably more motivated than the guy who has a nasty, you know, vacant house. Like, yeah. So, like, again, that's just how, because I like multifamily. So I write down every multifamily that I see. And, you know, and another thing just to add real quick before we move on on the driving for dollars thing is so many people, you know, you, I'm sure you've encountered this. Dave, you've encountered, I'm sure. We tell people these ideas like, hey, you know, driving for dollars. It works. Direct my marketing. It works. And they go out and do it once. And like, yeah, I did. I did it.

once. It didn't work. You know, I did a mailing. I sent out 300 letters. I sent out a thousand letters. It didn't work. Like deal flow is not about I did it once, right? Like, it's about I do it, right? There's like a difference there between that. So like, I don't know, for example, people who post a Craigslist, right? Great, you posted Craigslist once. I think what's more helpful is go to your phone, pick up your phone. If you're listening to us right now, people pick up your phone, talk to Siri or Google or whoever you talk to on your phone and be like, hey, remind me every Monday at 5 p.m. Go renew my Craigslist. that because that's now you're creating a system, you're creating a process that can be followed

week after week after week or every Tuesday at 5 p.m. I go driving for dollars. That's just what I do. Those variables will kill you because exactly what you just pointed out. People like, well, I did driving for dollars and I mailed one campaign and nobody called. Well, the marketing statistics tell you that you're 2% the first mailing, 4%, 7%, 10%, up to 80% on the fifth mailing. That's crazy. Mail as fast as you can. It's all about probability. You can't do like a single test. then expect the results for that to be your final results. Like, you have to keep trying and keep putting yourself in position to get lucky. And ultimately, you will. But you actually brought up a great point about those marketing statistics. So that's what I wanted to get to next was how are you

tracking this stuff? Because I know the yellow pads are appealing, but do you have a more sophisticated system for how, like how you're keeping track of leads, which ones are converting and how much money you're spending on them? The simple answer is I do have a system, but it's completely manual. So, you know, we've discussed setting up the proper systems in our business. And the only thing that I really would need to better track our mailers is to dedicate every campaign to its own callback number. The issue is, is we get some website opt-ins. I get a lot of emails from people that contact me. So let's say I'm doing probates, driving for dollars, and my strategic R3 three zoning mailers. If all of those come back to, and they do, I'll tell you guys exactly how

I do this. So we drop our mailers in the mail every Saturday so that they get picked up either Saturday or first thing Monday. The reason we do that is because I want my, if my seller lives in Michigan, he's likely going to get his mail either that Monday or no later than Tuesday for his property. If he lives in California, he's going to get it no later than Wednesday. I've studied the statistics and my own marketing that anytime somebody receives a mailer after Wednesday, you're likely never going to hear from that person. So if I drop a probate, an R3 mailer, in a top 100 mailer in the mailbox on Saturday, it gets picked up Monday, delivered Tuesday, I get all these phone calls coming back to one person. Now all I do is when those calls come in,

it's on a call capture. So for some people, it can be as simple as a Google voice. It's free. Everybody can set one up. I forward every single one of those call captures to a virtual assistant that looks up either the name or the address that they left on that message. And then she's the one that comes back to me at the end of each week and says, we had 13 people who called, how many appointments did you, you know, did you set up to go on? So that's basically the way that I know it's not the most, you know, strategic, but it works for me and it's a very, very simple process. But that is basically how I track a lot of my mailers. The issue that I don't know is if a call comes in five weeks from now, I don't really have a way to track. Did that come from this week's marketing campaign or the

one I did four months ago? I don't really have a way to track that. As long as it's working in the aggregate, somebody helping more money that you're spending. Whoever's listening, somebody post a comment below and tell me how to change that. Because I would like, I would like to know how to measure my statistics a little better. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you're right. Like if you had multiple phone lines or, you know, different extension numbers. I mean, there's, you can get really, really technical with this. But at some point, people take that technicality, something, they get overwhelmed and they just never do it.

And they never send a mailer period. I mean, you're making money in real estate and your system works for you. So, you know, whatever. If you can find little ways to improve it over time, and it's great. You know, one tip we heard, I think it was actually here on the podcast a few weeks ago. And it, I feel bad. I don't remember who said it. But somebody suggested to, and I don't know if you do this, but setting up retargeting on your

website. So in other words, if somebody comes, like you send a mailer out, right? And then they go to your website and then they don't opt in. They don't call you, right? Yeah, you put that little cookie on their computer or whatever. So then all of a sudden they see your ads on Facebook and on Google and whatever. Anyway, no, they're just little, again, somebody said that. Yeah, somebody, yeah, exactly.

Turn yourself into a little bit of a stocker. So all right, so cool. So you go out and do the job, go back to driver for dollars. We'll sum this up here. You go out, drive for dollars, get lists of people's names. And then I'm assuming you look them up on the county records. Do you have a virtual assistant do that? or how do you get their address?

Yeah, so at the end of my day, I come back and I got like 15 yellow pages, like with chicken scratch and addresses. And one way that I try to organize it is I have one pad for multis, just like you said, in one pad for single family. So when I turn down a street, what I'll do is I'll put the name of that street in the far left margin. And now all I'm doing is just going down the right side of that red line. I know you guys can barely see it if you're, but I want to put the street on this side

and then all my address is on this side. So all I do is tear this sheet of paper out. forwarded to my virtual assistant over in Africa. And now she does the majority of the research. Now, if I got 300 properties in a day, she may go through and be able to do 250 of them, but she'll come back and say, hey, these ones I'm a little, like,

I don't know if the mortgage recording date means that it's overfinanced. You know, she's in Africa. She doesn't know these streets like I do. So she's still dependent on my knowledge to, you know, help her organize and categorize this properly. but she generally will go through, do the reverse search homework, find out if there's an outstanding balance on it, get the taxpayers information, load up my Excel spreadsheet with notes, send it back to me for my final okay.

Then we upload it to a Google Drive. It goes over to my assistant. She gets a three-step letter campaign, and we start mailing. That's awesome. That's awesome. So real quick, one thing that I, and this is going to be very, I'm sure, county specific, but how are you finding out what they own a mortgage, you know, or what that balances. We don't have the system in place to find out if people did any kind of refinance.

So, I mean, generally, if somebody bought between like 2004 and 2008, we usually just exclude them. Okay. However, if you're after 2008, we'll still mail you because you usually bought it a pretty reasonable number. You have some equity there, but there's no real. And our, our Michigan public records are the worst throughout the United States. I mean, we're working with our realtor board. We're working with real comp, with realists, with First American. We're working with our GIS department to try to find better information, and it's just not there. We don't have it.

All right. Well, that's cool. So then a couple quick things, and then I'll let, I know Dave, you probably has some stuff to jump in, but you mentioned our three zoning mailers and then top 100 mailers. Can you touch on each of those real quick? I know you talked about the zoning earlier, but maybe just touch on each of those things. Yeah, so our top 100 actually stemmed out of when we first got into driving for dollars, we were only going after distressed properties.

And before long, you know, that realization came that, you know, eventually we would like to stop flipping houses and just become buyers and keep some of these things. We have the same kind of thought process you do that says most landlords hate being a landlord. So there's got to be some kind of opportunity to start the relationship, have the discussion. And we call it taking people off the market. You may not want to sell now. But I can't tell you guys, like, I really can't count how many deals. that come to us four years later where, you know, people like, we received your mailer, you know, we verified that you are who you say you are, you know, we've seen your project over

here, we know you're a part of the chamber. And years later, I really cannot emphasize how powerful it's been in our business to take people off the market just by mailing consistently over and over and over the in-demand properties that we want because they're usually not getting mailed. And if they are, people don't really know what it is that they're mailing. It's just a blind mailer. So we set out to create our top 100 properties, which are the most in-demand, highly desirable properties that would truly set us financially independent. And we want to start creating a campaign just after going around those people. That's why we put together our smart cell book. And then our R3 zoning, we do a lot based on zoning. Our three is just one of them

that we're doing right now that I forget what the actual technical term is, but it basically allows us to take a duplex and put another basement unit in there as well as an accessory dwelling unit. And to your average investor, they just, like, they don't even know that's possible. So they just get a lead and like, oh, here's another lead that I can't pay as much as a seller wants because the guy's just in la la land. Well, we can pay for it because I know that we can buy it, add value to it, get the rents up to this. And now it makes financial sense. Yeah. So a lot of people just don't have, they're not educated when it comes to understanding the city zoning.

Yeah. Definitely something I lack in. I don't understand a lot of zoning. because I live kind of in the wild west, like, where it's like, zoning, whatever, just put it up. That's why it's beneficial to have a partner like I have, guys. Like, again, I'm the same type of person you are. I don't want to deal with contractors.

I don't want to deal with city officials. I don't want to deal with zoning boards. Steve loves it. He doesn't want to deal with leads. He doesn't want to do with lead calls. Perfect marriage. That's awesome. I love that stuff.

So can you tell us a little bit about that book? You keep flashing. Where did that come from and what do you use it for? Yeah, so the Smart Cell book was, was a book that, Steve and I created it started from a little report that we began mailing out to people. And, you know, we started having conversations with a lot of these landlords. And what we were finding is a lot of them wanted to capture the equity that they had in their property, but they didn't want cash.

They don't want to lose the income. They don't want to take the tax hit. And they want some form of security in their life where they don't really want to sell. So we tried to figure out how can we meet these objections, but still. get control or buy this property or give them what they want in exchange for us getting what we want. So we created the smart sell book, which educates them on how you can capture the equity in your property today and then bleed it out over time, either as an interest income or a principal in interest income.

And you're building your own burger. You know, there's when we're not subject to a bank financing approval, we can sit with the seller and literally create any kind of, any kind of options that they want. they're like, listen, I want $20,000 right now as a down payment. And then we start out at 4%. And then once you guys increase the rent, we'll go up to, you know, 6% after the year one. We have that potential, but you can't do that when you have bank financing. So that's just, that's kind of how it started off. Can you give me an example of what's in the book? Like, what do you tell people? I mean, yeah. So the chapters are, the chapters that we have in there are

determining and understanding the real value of your property in today's economy. Chapter two is how to get more than top dollar for your property, and that's nothing more than you want X amount of dollars. We'll let us show you how to get even more because in 10 years, if we're paying you 5% interest, your 150 principal is locked. You're going to make an additional $46,000 at 5% interest over 10 years. So you're getting more than top dollar for your property. Then it goes into why selling your property now may be the best time in history, how to protect yourself when selling your investment property, why working directly with a qualified buyer is more beneficial than using a realtor, and how to sell your property today and receive a secured income tomorrow.

So here's why I love this. I love this. Okay, so from a marketing standpoint, obviously Dave can jump in. He's one of the smartest marketing guys I know. But like for marketing, like it's so good to provide just valuable content up front. You're not necessarily bugging people. You're not demanding anything. You're just saying, hey, here's some good free.

I mean, look at bigger pockets, right? Look what Josh built over the past, you know, decade and a half. Like let's just provide massive amounts of free content. Just more free content. We'll do a podcast. Let's do these, you know, webinars and books and all the stuff that, you know, you might pay 20 bucks for a book. That's not cost money though, right?

It costs money to create the stuff, right? It doesn't cost you money to create a book and stuff. But at the end of the day, like, people are like, oh, I like that site. I build trust. I like Bigger Pockets. I like Eric Stark's company, you know, like. And so when they're ready to buy or sell or whatever, I just think that's, it's genius. Totally.

I love this. I'm going to steal something from Scott Trench, who works here at Bigger Pockets. You told me this this morning, that anything you want to sell, provide enough information in your first meeting with that person that they would buy just that information, not even what you want to sell. So, like, if you're providing that information that it actually is providing like monetary value in their thinking, they're much more likely to actually go with you and actually do a business transaction with you.

That's been the very painful side of creating this is there's been a handful of times when they now have our book and can basically go to their realtor and say, this is what I want to do just with a different it's sure it really is painful you know there's probably going to be a lot of people that contact me off this podcast that opt into the website want to you know that that's a way of and again I want those people to use it because oh investors but when this gets into hands of my competition it's really bad it's really bad yeah I hear you I hear you I do applaud you for coming on the show you know like a lot of guys we talked to actually to come on the podcast like are very wary about you know giving away their you know their secrets or whatever you

You know, like, but I love the fact that you're very open and honest about all this stuff. It's fantastic. I hope people use a lot of the stuff we tell you today, but the fact of the matter is, a lot of them don't. Yeah. They don't. Not your community, though. Your community. There you go.

So let's, let's assume this all works exactly how you want. They agree with your, your proposition there. They call you. What happens next? How do those conversations go? Face to face meeting. You know, for a guy like me, a phone call is not a place where I'm, I'm trying to close people over the phone.

It's nothing more than getting me the opportunity to sit face to face with that person and go over their options. And at that point, it kind of just becomes like I've given up the fact of trying to go to a multifamily or an apartment building and try to get them to sign on the deal day one. It's likely just not going to happen unless like there's major family turmoil or a major distress. I'm all about adding value, like you said, in building that relationship. So when I go sit with that person, I'm trying to ask them a series of questions to kind of see the unseen and hear the unheard.

You know, what's going on with this property? What's going on in your life? Where are you right now and where are you looking to go? And is there a proposal that I can put in front of you that can take you from where you are to where you want to go in the shortest time with the least amount of hassle? Sounds kind of rehearsed, but that's how we do it. I like it. So we're listening for the clues where, and it's generally, meet with the husband. You know, the wife wants to travel to Arizona more because the grandkids are

there and he's managing properties and he doesn't care about golfing, but she wants to travel and she's been urging him to try to sell this property. And he's like, but honey, I'm trying to make you understand if we sell our property that we've gotten 8 to 15% growth on, whatever that number may be, wherever you're at in the United States, if we've held this property for 30 years, it's supported our lifestyle, we've got 12% growth over that time. Why would we take a cash lump sum and then put our money in a bank account and start unwinding our wealth four times faster than we built it because let's face it, if you take a half million dollars and stick it in a bank account, what are you going to get like 1% maybe? We can pay you guys 5%. So my whole goal is to meet with them

and find out where they are and where they want to go and start crafting an offer that I can put in front of them that says, here's the way that you can sell, preserve your principal, live off of your interest, bleed out your tax burden, and continue to grow your wealth over time. Now we just have to figure out what that looks like on paper. What's the down payment? What's the actual contract price? What is the interest rate? Do you want it for two years?

Do you want it for five years? Do you want a graduated scale? The options are unlimited. it and it just basically comes out of the questions we ask in that, you know, in that meeting. I love it. Like I just think it's, I don't know, again, going back to the marketing, like when you can just provide options, you can provide information, you can be there to hear people. You're just building relationships.

Like this is like this exact podcast could have been done about pretty much any topic in America. Like, like just replace the word real estate with anything, shoe sales or, you know, like print advertising. I don't know, selling books. It's all the same. I love that. I love that.

So before we kind of shift gears and head on, I'm curious a little bit like, can you sum up maybe in the past two years since you've been on the show? Like, what have you guys, what have you done differently? Where have you moved to? What have you done the same? And where are you headed into the future? No, so I think the last time we were on the show, we talked a lot about like our swipe file marketing. And what I mean by that is we began having the reason that this book was created because we eventually figured out we, better differentiate ourselves from the competition or else we're just going to do a very good job of

blending it. And that happened based on a conversation where I talked about on the last show where we had this lady that contacted my office one day and said, don't ever mail me again. I will never ever sell my property to people like you. And I'm like, what's people like me? So I told my assistant, get this lady on the phone. And from a lady that called and, you know, was a firecracker and said, don't ever contact me again. We went on to buy that lady and her husband's like the majority of their portfolio, they lent us several hundred thousands of dollars at five and six percent money. But one of the things that we did throughout that process is I was taking Pete out to lunch one day. And when he showed up to lunch, he pulled out this folder.

And he said, hey, I thought you might like to see these. These are all the other mailers that I've been getting from like investors and realtors wanting to buy my properties. I don't even know like here, whatever you want to do with them. And like a light bulb just went over in my head. And I'm looking through these and I say, well, you know, our letter is a lot different. Our language is a lot different. Our presentation is a lot different. But at the end of the day, we're all badgering these people to try to buy what they have.

It doesn't matter if it's a postcard, a yellow letter. It's the same. It's the same. There's no value. It's, hey, look at me. We're better than the next guy. Sell us what you have instead of the other person. So we created a book that instead of trying to qualify everybody, we only want to discuss.

people that want to sell. I don't want to spend my life trying to tell people why I'm better than everybody else. We're not. If you want my simple answer, we're not any better. If this sun gets too bright, let me know I can pull these closed. You're good. I don't mean that like a jerk kind of like. I just know it's getting really bright over here.

People listening to the podcast right now, like, what is he talking about? You have some nice sun spots on your face. It's okay. Yeah, this thing just like blasted through the clouds over there. But we wanted to start creating like some educational marketing for the simple fact that we wanted to differentiate ourselves from our competition. And I got tired of like answering the same objections over and over and over again. So if I can send you guys a book or a free report or have you guys call a pre-recorded message that explains who I am, what I do. And more importantly, the only thing they care about is how do we help you?

They don't care about who we are. They may want to know our track record just so they know that we have the ability to close, but they don't care about Eric Stark. They want to know about the result that I can give them, and I can give it to them right in the form of a book. So that's kind of why we just because it kind of fills a need. Awesome. Cool. So what's next for you?

I mean, you've obviously been really successful. What are you planning over the next few years? You know, this book will probably become like a mini franchise opportunity. We've had a lot of people contact us and say, you know, will you write me a book? how do we get involved in it? You know, is there a way that, you know, we can learn what you're doing? And, you know, just like you kind of talked about at the beginning of the podcast, you can listen to these great ideas and people are going to be like, oh, I'm going to create a book. I'm going to, but I promise you guys, there are so many variables that go into this process. But right now it's relatively simple. We have a couple letters that go out, but mainly we do a lot of direct response advertising.

So when it comes to, we still mail our top 100, which is a very, very focused list. of in-demand properties, but that's only 100 properties. How many do you really think you're going to buy in a year when you're only mailing 100 of them? So now what we started doing is just doing direct response advertising in our smaller newspapers, the placemat marketing, because the majority of the people that own the properties we want to own are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old. They're not hanging out online. They're not looking for a website. They're looking for, they're looking at their placement at the local diner that says, hey, honey, this guy wants to tell you how you. You can sell the property for top dollar and collect a secured income for life.

Call this pre-recorded message. They leave a number of their information at the pre-recorded message. We mail a book out to them. And then we follow up from there saying, when would you like to me discuss the situation? So this probably will become a franchise opportunity soon, but we're just going to buy more real estate in our local market. Sweet. Awesome. So I think one of the, this has been awesome.

I mean, I think marketing and getting off-market deals is an incredibly important. part of becoming a real estate investor. But it kind of requires a bit of confidence. I know for myself, I just did my first off market deal. I don't know why. I just, I don't know. I felt weird about it. So what would you suggest to people like to get the confidence and start doing it? Like, is there any tricks you picked up along the way or any, any last things on the marketing piece that you would suggest to new investors? Definitely, I would, I would tell you to work a strategy and stop chasing opportunity. And the reason I always jump back to that. that is because if you're going to master probates, you're going to speak the probate language

like somebody who's got 10,000 hours in the game. Will you explain what probate is? Probate is when somebody has passed away and there are assets or real estate that's involved in the family trust or estate that may be going up for sale. And it's usually a general indication that it's a relatively low-hanging fruit opportunity that you can educate your prospects on and try to buy their real estate. I don't know if that's summarized it, but that's what that's what probates are to me. But I always tell people to work a strategy instead of focusing on opportunity because if it's

ario's today and it's short sales tomorrow and top 100, like you don't really specialize in anything. And every face-to-face meeting that we have is all about that person. If they don't want to know about short sales, if they're going through like when you're dealing with probate, you're dealing with a very sensitive situation. When you're dealing with an REO, it's a very insensitive situation. Nobody cares. You're just Xing numbers off of an Excel spreadsheet. You know, 60% of after repaired value minus repairs, here's your offer. It takes a little bit more craftsmanship to take a probate style deal down. So I guess to answer that

simply, I would tell people to really master one technique before you move on to something else. I guess if that makes sense to you. Right on. Yeah, absolutely. Did I answer your question? Yeah, definitely. That's around for a minute. That's good.

That's good. All right. So before we get out of here, we got a couple more sections of the show we want to get to. Let's begin by heading over to our world famous fire. It's time for the fire round. Wouldn't it be great if your house plants paid rent while you were out of town? I mean, they've got the whole place to themselves, lots of sunlight, zero responsibilities. But no, they just sit there waiting for someone to spray them with some cool mist,

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investors, listen up. Our friends at Dominion Financial already have some of the best DSCR rates in the industry. Now they're the fastest too. They just launched 10-day DSCR closing. That's right. 10 days, and they're still the only lender with the DSCR price beat guarantee. That means faster closing, the best terms, zero guesswork. That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Dave, why don't you lead the fire-round questions off?

These are from the Bigger Pockets Forum. So what do you got? All right. I have been thinking, does anyone have any advice for me in how apartments different from single family houses and duplex? Yeah, the one major difference is if your tenant moves out, you either have another unit generating income or multiple units generating income for you. But generally when it comes to, to me, they could be, so they want to know how they differentiate, right? Yeah, I think they're like, it was in like the landlording forum.

So maybe maybe we take it from the perspective of like, you know, from a management perspective over dealing with the properties or something like that. Yeah. So we generally try to look for properties that have like more than five units just because, even like a duplex or a four unit can, anytime you have anything that's relatively under 25 units, you have like, it's such a small community. And one person with a dog can, like,

ruin it for the rest of the people in the other three units. So we generally try to focus on ones that are a little bit higher in a unit mix. I think right now there's a huge opportunity with the, with the studio or the, like, for years, I was against buying one bedroom apartment. So I'm like,

I just, I don't want them. I want two, or, you know, two bedrooms and up. But now there's such a huge opportunity to cram, you know, living space into such small quarters. I think there's a gigantic opportunity to, you know, take a five unit, cut it down and make it an efficiency in some way or sacrifice a unit here and, you know, add a little bit more living space here. So aside from the general fact that single family and multifamily differ because if your tenant moves out, you still got more income coming in, there's big zoning potential behind that too if you want to learn the code for your city.

Big potential. Cool. Right on. I really like that. I'm doing that right now. I mean, I have planned vacancy in one of my units and the other ones are able to cover it. So I'm not making a lot of money this month,

but able to cover it and that's a huge difference. You wouldn't have a single family. Yeah, true. All right. Number two, I got a small 644 square foot condo that has always been rented to one person. Now that tenant emails me and they said their fiancee is moving in with her. She's been a good tenant. One year, no problem, pays rent on time.

What do I do? Let her move in, put them on the lease. What? Increase the rent. Yeah, definitely put that person on the lease and, you know, meet with them in person and say, I generally don't allow this because it is such small spaces. If we're going to do a modification, we only require that they pay, you know, $100 more a month or $150 more a month, whatever it is, and add their name to the lease just so they don't come in and damage my unit. And I can't do anything about it. All right. Number three. That's fair, right? I mean, if you're moving somebody in, he's obviously getting ready to cut some

expenses in his law. I mean, who wouldn't want to share space with the spouse for 150 bucks more? Yes, there you go. The only question I have on that, and I don't know the law on this. And I wonder, because you know how like familial status is a protected class. So like, for example, they said, hey, I'm moving my kids in. You can't just charge more for that. I don't know what it would be for fiance. Actually, that's an interesting question. Like, you're moving in a boyfriend. I mean, obviously twice as many people. You're using twice as many utilities. I would imagine that you could charge more, but I actually don't know. So, interesting question. If anybody knows the answer to that question. There's an attorney listening. Jump in the comments at BiggerPockets.com.

I'd love to know more on that. All right. Number three, Dave. All right. I am in college. What is the best way to get started? Thanks, man. I'm working on it. It's been like 12 years. I'm in college. What's the best way to get started with real estate? Have as many face-to-face meetings with buyers, sellers, and lenders of real estate on a daily basis as you can. That's the fastest way. like the websites, the marketing, everything else just creates a barrier, have as many face-to-face daily conversations with buyers, sellers, and lenders of real estate and write offers. If you are looking at properties and not writing offers, it's like going to the gym and not working out.

I love it. I love it. All right. Last question. This is a little bit of a base hit I'll give you here, but I like this. Everyone in my market is sending direct mail. So my response phrase is just dropping. How do I stand out?

Add value. Change your mindset from. Again, I call it badgering marketing because everybody's sending the same thing saying, look at me, open me. Like, if your unique selling proposition is I can give you cash in three days, you're missing the mark. Like, we're over it. Cash is everywhere now.

There's no shortage of cash. There is a shortage of real opportunity. So, you know, I would tell you to differentiate yourself and learn how to educate the specific target markets you want. You're not going to write a book that appeals to, landlords, absentees, probates, a reos, foreclosures, and short sales all in one. One market, one piece of educational material,

one completed system, and move on to the next. There you go. I like it. That was easy. It does. All right. Let's head up, head over to the world famous. Famous for. Famous for.

Famous for. Was that an accent? I love you guys. Yeah, I always do that. I told you. I like go into it. British, like, nanny voice every time we do this. All right.

Today on the famous four, we're going to be talking about number one. What is your favorite, what's your favorite real estate related book? I don't know. I'm probably the only person that's ever been on this podcast. That's never once read a Rich Dad book. Oh, wow. I don't know if it's crazy, but I've never, ever, never read one of his books ever. Really?

Really? Nope. You guys got to read Rich Dad Poor Dad. Poor Dad. It's a great book. Let's a high five. That's a good question. I would probably say it's called Peebles Way to Real Estate Wealth. I got to be honest, I haven't really read a lot of marketing books. I've probably, or real estate books.

I've read everything but probably People's Way to Real Estate Wealth was probably the one that come. You know what? Mike Cantu. Mike Cantu is one of my favorite educators. He had a really small little publication book that I think somebody else assembled for him based on the CDs he created. It's one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Okay. Very simple to implement. All right. Great.

Well, that's actually the next question is what's your favorite business book in general? Favorite business book in general? Gosh, man. These are tough questions. I'm a big fan of anything that's old school. So like the success system that never fails by W. Clement Stone, that's probably one of my all-time favorites. I'm not a big reader of stuff that's new. I like the, you know, the 20s, 30s and 40s because like they've removed the shiny object.

that seems to be everywhere in today's publication. So I'm a very big fan of, you know, the Henry Ford's, the W. Clements, the Rockefellers, the people that just had like real tried and true principles. Perfect. Perfect. All right. Next question. Number three, Dave.

What are your hobbies? What do you do for fun outside of real estate? You know, I'm a family guy, man. I'm lifestyle driven. I spend a lot of time at the beach. I spend a lot of time with my son who runs an exotic car website. He travels all around South Florida and gets to sit in like the other day, sat in a 5.3 million dollar Pagani Hawaii at prestige imports. So I spent a lot of time with my family,

a lot of time educating other people. I go to a lot of meetup events. And I do a ton of networking down here. And I usually find myself, you know, trying to help, trying to educate people. But I live a very simple, you know, quiet, you know, humble, humble, easy life. But family, family driven and try to keep it simple. Spent a lot of time snorkeling, fishing, a lot of time on the ocean, boating, jet skiing, stuff like that. Awesome. Awesome. All right. My last question of the day. That's great. Eric, what do you think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up or they fail or they just never get started?

It's taking action. And I know that sounds so easy. But I think even before you start to take action, the prerequisite that comes before that is you have to know what you're taking action on. You know, there's days when I'm like, what did I even do today? And I just realized that I wasn't focused enough in my day to do a couple of things progressively in the right steps. There's a difference between doing right things and doing things right. And I think if you mix those up, that is the difference between success and failure. You can look at properties all day long and calculate spreadsheets and do all this. But if you didn't write the offer, it's not going to come. I think that's perfect. I think it's perfect.

All right. Last question of the day. Uh-oh. David Meyer. Where can people find out more about you? You know, I'm online. You can find me on Facebook at the Eric Stark. Have a Instagram page, Real Estate Hatch, where I give out a lot of

of free tips and stuff like that. But I have a website, the real Ericstart.com, but I'm usually online. Just Google my name. I'm very old to get a hold of. I'm very active on my bigger pockets profile. You guys can always contact me through there.

So find me. I'm here to help. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, speaking of Instagram, the other day I changed my Instagram name. It was always like something like Brandon Turner official or something like that, something lame.

Anyway, I changed it too. Like, and I don't know, it made me laugh, but beardy Brandon. Because it's so much easier to say, right? And nobody,

I don't even know, the word beardy means, but beardy brandon just sounds right. So I'm like, now you can never shave. I know. I can never say. So then I went and bought the domain name, beardybrandin.com. Oh, man. Maybe I'll use that someday.

I don't know. It made me laugh. But anyway, all right. All right, Eric. Well, this was awesome. Yeah, really, really appreciate it today. And this was a ton of fun. And I learned a ton of stuff.

I really am like, my wheels are turning right now. And like, how can I do more education marketing in the real estate space? I think it's fantastic. So keep it up. Thank you guys. Let us know how that selfie campaign goes. I'm on it. I'm going to go snap a couple of these right now and send them out.

That's awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll see you around. Thanks a lot, man. You guys are awesome. Bye.

Awesome show. Awesome show. Huh, Dave? Dude, that was awesome. I learned a lot. This is something I'm trying to get into for sure. As I mentioned, the top of the show, I did once. And now I sort of got the taste for it.

So this was really helpful, like, learning how to scale this up. Yeah. And you know, one thing I picked out, we didn't really talk a lot about it on this. episode, but I mean, it was kind of an undercurrent theme is that Eric runs the marketing deal flow for their business. His partner does the other stuff. And so by having somebody dedicated to that, like, not all of us can just have a partner right off the bat, but when you guys can get to that point, I mean, like, I love that idea of just having somebody do deal flow. They just do deal flow.

Then like, it's kind of a right brain, left brain kind of thing anyway, I feel like so. Definitely. And it shows the importance of it that someone's full time job is dedicated just to doing this in a successful partnership shows that you have. to be doing it. So it was awesome. Do you find most of your deals that way? Are you just all driving for dollars? No, I mean, I'm, I'm all over the place.

I got out of like the last six or seven deals I did were all from like six or seven different sources. It was weird. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it was very, it was a weird year because like, it was like MLS and then driving for dollars and then direct mail marketing and then the website and then there was a HUD deal and there was Zillow and.

Yeah, who knows. Anyway, it's weird. Whatever you can get them. Whatever you can get them. Yeah, just go out and get them. But the problem is like I have the same problem that I was saying earlier on the show. I still operate from the, okay, now I'm in buying mode. All right, now I'm in fixing mode.

Granted, Lester hired an assistant to kind of help do the managing contractors. And I basically worked deal flow last year, which is why I bought a lot more. But I'm still not that good at it. So something I'm trying to work on is just deal flow. It's just too hard to change pace that much. You know, like being like hustling on the street and also doing renovations at the same time, it's just too hard. It's too hard. People just stop and then they get bored and then it's like, now I'm ready to go find another deal.

but you don't have that consistent deal flow. So anyway, start working on your deal flow, people. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get out of here. All right. See you later, man. All right.

For the Bigger Pockets podcast, my name is Brandon, and this is Dave. Sign in us. Later. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others.

who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. All right, for those of you who are still listening, we've got a new segment of the show that we've been doing the last few weeks called the Random Five. Random Five. And we're going to throw a few questions at you, Eric. You ready?

All right. Yes, sir. All right, number one. Do you have any habits you wish you could erase? I have a deep question. Oh, man. I got a lot of bad habits. Yeah, I think just being inconsisting.

and I would probably consider myself a relatively consistent guy in my daily routine. But yeah, one habit I'd like to totally do away with is being distracted. Absolutely. Nice. What are you freakishly good at? I ask this in interviews all the time. What am I freakishly good at? Gosh, man, I think I suck at just about everything.

You don't have like one super weird skill? I would say my super, my unique ability is definitely the ability. to help people and provide a solution just because even though I do talk a lot, when I know that my goal is to go out and this is the end result of what could be, like I'm all ears and eyes on them trying to figure out what it is they want because I can generally create a system or a process that gets them there. So maybe my unique ability is to provide, you know, find solutions where most people can't see them. Nice. All right. Next one. Number three, would you rather have a living massage therapist or a living chef?

I'm a massage therapist. I cook a lot of my own food and I inherit a lot of stress in the business, so I definitely need massages more often. Good question, though. If you could master any musical instrument, what would it be? The piano. Classical. That is.

All right. Last question of the random five. Has a teacher ever changed your life and how so? Yeah, lots of people have changed my life. I mean, everybody's a teacher to a guy like me. I mean, I'm, I think the reason I say that is because I'm not the person that's out there looking for like the be all end all. Like this totally like changed my life for everything. I'm looking for just like one tweak, one nugget, one simple way that I can do something better.

And you just taught me something today. I'm going to be the guy that goes and test how to take a selfie of your property. I just learned something from you. So when that works, you just put a tweak in my business, you're a teacher. There we go. All right. Well, Eric, thank you so much again. And for those who found this little section of the show, thanks for listening.

Make sure you guys leave us out rating and reviewing iTunes. And we'll see you next week. Bye. Thanks, guys. See you later. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calicoe content. And editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www. www. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only.

All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC does. claims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.