BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 231: A Simple Strategy for Doing 25 Deals a Month with Brett Snodgrass

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

There are a lot of “shady” people in the real estate space, and wholesalers tend to be the worst offenders. So today on The BiggerPockets Podcast, we are excited to bring you an interview with Brett Snograss, an investor from Indianapolis market who’s (ethically) wholesaling up to 25 houses each month! Brett shares his exact strategies for finding deals, growing his business, and networking with others. You’ll even witness a “one-on-two coaching” moment as Brett walks Josh and Brandon through their “first deal” at wholesaling real estate. Brett is a great guy with a super powerful message that will leave you motivated and equipped to dominate your own real estate market! In This Episode We Cover: Brett’s background as an entrepreneur (and how he got sued!) Tips for buying discounted real estate properties How to get up to 25 properties a month His definition of wholesaling Why he doesn’t fix and flip A discussion on whether this is a good strategy for newbies How his company handles closing costs Why wholesalers run a transactional business The average profit per deal and a walkthrough of one deal How to use direct mail and a PPC website Tips for working on your marketing funnel What Brett’s team looks like And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums Real Estate Investing as a Side Hustle with Grammy-Winning Producer Seth Mosley Josh’s Instagram Profile Brandon’s Instagram Profile Josh’s Twitter Profile Brandon’s Twitter Profile Listsource AgentPro 247 BiggerPockets Webinar Jaren Barnes BiggerPockets Profile SWP:002 The Epic Adventure Story of Brandon Turner CallRail Becoming a Millionaire Real Estate Investor Using The One Thing with Jay Papasan Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki The ONE Thing by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller Traction by Gino Wickman The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy Tweetable Topics: “Your reputation is everything.” (Tweet This!) “If I can save myself 5 hours a week training somebody else to do what I’m doing, then that’d be awesome.” (Tweet This!) “Wholesaling is a transactional business.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Brett Brett’s BiggerPockets Profile Brett’s Company Website Simplewholesaling Podcast Simplewholesaling Properties Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 231. I think if you're going to be a full-time wholesaler, you have to treat it like a business. You're really not an investor. You're not in the passive game. You're not in the appreciation game. You're not in all that. If you're just doing wholesaling, you're just in a transactional business. I think people have to realize that.

You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. It's up, man. You know what?

Not a lot has changed in the past hour and a half since we recorded our last intro intro. This is true. This is true. But no, things are good. It's good to be alive. How about you? It is. I'm okay.

You know, I want you to tell me about this thing that I saw on, I think it was Facebook or Instagram. I see Brandon, something on Brandon's wall, and it's like, oh, there's my house. And apparently he was in a helicopter or some kind of small airplane flying over your house. Like, is that what you do? Because like, yeah, when I get rich, I'm working an airplane. fly over my house and take a photo. I was, no, I went flying with a buddy of mine.

And Neil King is a big and real estate investor out here. He took me flying again yesterday, which is the second time this year, I think, or maybe in the last year. Anyway, we flew over my house and scared my wife. She seriously thought we were going to crash into the house because Neil's a little bit crazy. And so, like, I don't think we were more than five feet above the roof.

You like pretty low rough. What's a rough? Roof. What do you say, roof? Roof. Roof. Roof. A fricking dog.

That's how we say in Minnesota. My family was out here last. weekend actually for my daughter's birthday. And whenever my family comes around, I pick up the Minnesota accent a little bit. And I start talking about Minnesota and all the boats and the roofs, stuff like that. That's great. That's great. We've got a fantastic show today. It's a great show. It is a great show. And this guy is super, super motivating and crushing it in his business. And like a lot of times we hear stories of people and myself included. And like back in the day, it was, you know, like they did a lot of stuff. Right. And then today it's

like, well, we're kind of slowing down. This guy's like speeding up. He's buying more deals today in our crazy market today than he was last year of the year before. And today we talk about how he's able to do that. How is he buying 25 deals every single month? It's pretty awesome. And he kind of goes in depth on that. Even like later on he coaches, so to speak, Josh and I on kind of pretending we were brand new just getting started. He kind of walks just step by step through it. So hang tight for that. It's pretty cool. You've upgraded how to buy properties. But did your insurance get the memo? When investors start scaling, insurance can't be an afterthought. Most policies were designed for a single property, not multiple rentals, LLC ownership, short-term stays, or properties mid-rehab.

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have opened a savings account for snacks. So wouldn't it be great if you could actually earn money while you're traveling? Well, you can. Airbnb has something called the co-host network. While you're away, you can hire a vetted local co-host with hosting experience to help take care of things. Communicating with guests, preparing your space, managing reservations, everything runs smoothly while you're off making memories. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. We have a quick tip, don't we? We do have a quick tip. All right, so today's quick tip actually is something, I was watching a YouTube video while I was jogging on a treadmill the other day. And it was like a Tony Robbins video, I think it was. And he was talking about this

concept in there. And I want to kind of explain what I heard because I thought this was fantastic. Basically, the idea is this. If you're unhappy in life in any way, it's usually because you have poor, or it's expectations versus appreciation. So let me give an example. He tells a story of flying an airplane from L.A. to Australia, and they never have Wi-Fi because it's over the ocean, right? But this one flight, they come on the announcement and say, hey, we're excited to announce, we've got Wi-Fi on this flight. Internet's going to be all the way to Australia. And people go nuts.

They start cheering and excited. and everyone's like, there's a miracle, and everyone's all happy, right? And it lasts for nine minutes. And then the internet goes out and they never get it back. He said, you would have thought there was a terrorist on board. And people were like angry and yelling at the flight attendants and just really mad. And the interesting thing was nine minutes earlier, it was a miracle. And now it's an expectation.

And people were like visibly upset for the whole entire flight because of it. So the next day, well, later on the day, I'm at Starbucks. And I'm sitting there in line. And it was a long time. It was like 15 minutes waiting for my drink, right? The guy in front of us is hitting. his steering wheel over and over and over and angry that they're taking so long. He's yelling out of his window.

Like, come on, right? But, like, I started thinking of what I heard. That was probably you. Right? But it's because he had this expectation and it was like, he deserved to have a five-minute drink or less, right? So I started thinking of this, this Tony Robbins thing. And, you know, I was like, I'm in a dry, like, they're going to hand me my coffee in

my window. Like, I don't even have to make it myself or go anywhere. Like, I was super, like, I was appreciative of it. And because of that, uh, I was. was not upset about it. Anyway, so there's a little quick tip for you. That's a little longer than it meant to be, but replace your, replace your expectations with appreciation. That's the quick tip. Pretty good, right? I like that because then you won't disappoint me, Brian. Exactly. If you didn't expect so much out of me, you wouldn't be mad at me every day. See, this is how it works.

Wow. Expect very little from me. Hold on. All of a sudden. And appreciate me instead. I'm going to be a much happier person. Expect little appreciate much. There's a lot to appreciate here. A lot here. All right. Yeah. Moving on. Yeah, we should. All right, guys.

This is show 231 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. You can check out the show notes at BiggerPockets.com slash show 2, 3.1. As Brandon said, we have a great show for you today. Our guest, Brett Snodgrass, is a real estate transactor. Let's call it that, right? He's a estate transactor. Yeah, he says he's not an investor. You'll hear why in a minute.

It's not. And he's been in the business for a bit. And he went, I want to find my notes here, but he went from, I believe the first year he did one deal. Then he did 10 deals. The following year in 2008, he did 158 deals. And now he's currently doing about 25 deals a month. It's phenomenal. The guy is wholesaling.

He's got his own definition of wholesaling. And I actually, I really like his definition, right? I like his philosophy on why he does it the way that he does it. I do agree that it's a cleaner way of doing things. I do agree that it makes sense. And one of the thing, it's not just for wholesaleers either. If you're listening to this going, oh, I don't care about wholesale. Just listen to his strategy.

It's not quite what you think of wholesaling as. Like this applies to people, landlords, to flippers, to anybody in the business, you're going to get a ton out of this show. Yeah, especially, you know, the show for the newer investors, I think is a great training tool beat because we talk a lot about the ethics of the business. What's okay and what you can and should do because, you know, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And so anyway, listen up.

It's a great show. Let's bring him. All right, Brett. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here. Thank you so much, Brandon, Josh. It is an honor and a pleasure to be on the Bigger Pockets podcast. I've been looking forward to this for many, many months and years.

So thanks for asking me, man. It is an honor. To be in the presence of such a man like Brandon. We don't often have the opportunity to be around, you know, one of the guys from the Lord of the Rings. It's pretty cool. Who am I in the Lord of the Rings? Am I like, I don't know. Gandalf.

Am I Gayndolph? I can do. I did the beard. All right. So other than Lord of the Rings trivia, let's talk about your real estate journey. You know, how did you gain? get into this whole game, this real estate business. What would you do before and then what was your first deal like?

Awesome. Yeah, I love telling my story. So I pretty much grew up in a middle class, Indiana home. My parents are both school teachers. My dad was a high school basketball coach. So if you're from Indiana and the Midwest, do you ever see the movie Hoosiers? You guys know? Yeah. Out there.

Best movies ever. Best movies ever. So Hoosiers came from Indiana. That was pretty much my life. It was my house. lived and breathed basketball growing up and got a college scholarship paid for college with it. So that was pretty cool. Did you go scholarship as a basketball player in college?

I did. Yeah. Small college. It wasn't like Duke or North Carolina. It was Huntington, Indiana, Huntington University. We were actually called, this is Indiana for you, the Huntington Forrester's. So there you go. That was a crazy mascot.

Yeah. But, you know, they weren't really into real estate. but I've always had that entrepreneur just kind of niche. You know, one of my very first businesses was I actually in the seventh grade, I bought and sold candy at school. I used to go to Sam's Club, buy big packages of gum, and then sell them at school. And I make, you know, I'd buy a pack of gum for a quarter and sold it a quarter apiece. So that was my like big, my big deal right there.

There is a warning label that says not to be sold to individual packets. But, you know, that was your first experience breaking the law, too. That's right. Yeah. Now I'm a wholesaler. So now. So that was, so I basically, you know, I went to college. I got a teaching degree, elementary education because my parents are both teachers.

And I got out of school and I taught for about four months. And I was like, man, this just, this just isn't fit for me. I love teachers. I love what they do. But this is, I wasn't passionate about it. So long story short, let me fast forward. I start some other businesses just to kind of, you know, again, breaking the law, I started buying and selling DVDs on eBay, right?

So DVDs are really popular back in the 2000s. And I found this website where I bought these DVDs and I would sell them individually on eBay. Well, lo and behold, I had a private detective show up at my doorstep and serve me papers because the DVDs that I had bought and sold where bootleg DVDs. So that's when I was kind of at my rock bottom. I decided to move home with my parents. So I'm getting sued by Paramount Pictures. And I'm also, you know, I was living a pretty crazy life.

I found out I'm having a child out of wedlock. So I'm moving home. I'm having a child. And I am like, if you look up Loserville in a dictionary, like my picture is probably right there. So I'm 26 years old. And my dad introduced me to Alain de Vell. and he bought these big pieces of land here in Indiana and developed them. And I worked for him off a commission.

And I remember I was getting ready to do this big commission, $3,500. And I was like, man, that was like crazy money to me because Paramount Pictures felt sorry for me because I was only making about $10,000 a year as I was substitute teaching and doing all these things. So I was going to make $3,500. And that was like, that was awesome. So I made that commission. I made that money. And then I was back on eBay. And instead of looking at DVDs, I looked at real estate. Did you guys know that you could even buy real estate on eBay? No, I didn't either, but I found this. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, I found this house in Youngstown, Ohio, and it was for $9,000. And this is back at the end of 2007. So take you guys back there, $9,000 in Youngstown, Ohio, I could buy this house. And I bought it. And then we, my dad and I went in

together because I had a little bit of money. I had $5,000. He had $5,000. And we didn't have have any money to fix it up. So we decided, well, now what are we going to do? Let's, let's market it and sell it. So we sold that house for $15,000. And that was my first deal. I made six grand. And I asked myself, hey, if you could do this with one, could you do it with 100? And that's kind of where it started. So, wow. That's crazy. I'm, I'm just like taking it back. I'm trying to, you know, process. I'm trying to, like, stay. I'm trying to stay at a jail and get sued by people. Wow. That's a good goal to go through life. San Antonio, don't get sued.

As long as I do that, I win. You bought this property on eBay, and you just sold it in the open market there after you didn't fix it. You didn't do anything to it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, because me and my dad, we only had $10,000 in the house costed nine. So we only had about $1,000. So I remember I drove six hours one way. I lived around Indianapolis at the time, six hours one way. I cleaned it up, took some pictures, and then I marketed online, you know, some of the local, I think, Craigslist and an eBay.

I remember that. I marketed on there and then sold it for 15 and that was my first deal. And we just kind of, you know, didn't know what you're doing. I started reading a few books about it and didn't even know it was called wholesaling, I guess at the time. I just, we called it, we bought a house and sold it because we didn't have any money to fix it up. That was pretty much what I knew. Nice. Wow. So what came next? You guys have this first successful venture in turning this house over, flipping it, wholesaling, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure. you have a term for it. You got the bug right. Now all of a sudden you're excited. How does,

how does that kind of grow from there? What happens next? Well, obviously, like I said, I was having a daughter and I was like, I wanted to really provide for her. And so again, I got the bug. I read some books. I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I read some of these real estate books. And like I said, I asked myself, if I could do this with this deal? Could I do it with multiple deals? Could I do it in my own backyard, you know, like Indianapolis. Is there deals like that here in Indianapolis? And I researched it and I found out that there was. And this is also a different time. This is back during the crash. So I didn't know that there was a crash because I didn't really know anything about real estate. I just knew that there was cheap properties out there and I could buy them,

you know, discounted. And then I could sell them to other investors, you know, from all over, all over the nation, all over the world. So what happened next was I started, I got a hold of a local real estate agent. And I said, here, I have an idea. I don't know if it's going to work, but there's a lot of bank owned properties out there. I want to put in, you know, I start off saying I want to put in about 200 offers a month. They're all going to be kind of lower than what they're asking, but maybe we'll get some. And that's, and that's pretty much what we did. So I worked with a local agent. And then in 2008, we went from, I think we did about 10 deals in 2007, 2008, we had a record year. We did about 158 wholesale deals in 2008. And that was mostly

just from the MLS and the agent and bank on properties. So, wow. How many was that in 2007? We did about 10, I think in 2007. Like I said, they were just kind of one hit and miss. And I, and I didn't really know what I was doing. And then in 2008 is when it really just went full time, full bore. We did about 158 transactions, me and my dad together. Okay. That, That's insane. Yeah. And so you're this guy who just made $6,000 in a deal, not going, not knowing your head from your ass.

And the next thing you do is say, oh, I want to do 200 offers a month on properties to this real real estate agent. Like, you know, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. So were you doing 200 offers a month in 07 or how many offers a month were you doing back in 07? No, we were, I'm not sure in the 07. I don't even know exactly. I have to take myself back because I wasn't journaling. I wasn't jotting all this stuff down. I would just kind of winging it just like I did through life, just like I did in everything, you know.

Yeah. But I was always just jump all in. Don't really think about it. I did that. And in the DVD business, which you did end up so well. And that's just what I did in real estate. And I was in, you know, people say, you know, lucky, blessed, right place, right time. Obviously it was a good time to buy discounted real estate, you know, for me. You know, people say, oh, I got killed in 2008. Well, I was very force. I didn't get into the business until, you know, that time, which really, you know, worked out well for me. Well, you were buying from everyone who was getting killed. Yes, yes. I was like, man, this is awesome. What I find interesting is that, like, you know, yes, 2008 was a crazy good time to buy really cheap deals, 2009, 10, 11, 12. But, but you didn't stop.

I mean, like, how many deals are you doing right now, like a month? Like, quite a bit, right? Yeah. And, you know, so right now we did, we're doing about 25 a month. Wow. So like what's cool about that though is that like people are saying yeah you were lucky to you were doing it in 2008. But now I'm in 2017. I can't do that here.

And you're like, well, I'm actually still crushing it right now. Right. So obviously we'll get to talking about how you do that. But I just just a message out that everyone listening. Like this isn't just because Brett was in 2008. He was buying all these properties. Like it seems like you had like a system. You had a process that you were working through.

And that's kind of what we want to drill you on today is how do you do this? Like, that's life-changing money to a lot of people. I mean, that would be life-changing money to me. So maybe we can start back a little bit. I mean, this idea of wholesalings, this is a term that is tossed around a lot in real estate circles, especially because a lot of the gurus, like, you know, the late-night TV or the come to my seminar guys, they really push this. It's like, this is the best way for a newbie to get started.

So my first thing is, can you explain what wholesaling, what that means, kind of? And then is it the best way for a newbie to get started? And before you answer that, sorry, there's very, definitions of what wholesaling is too. So, you know, I'd love to hear like, what is your version versus kind of what's out there. Yeah, definitely. I treat wholesaling in real estate, just like any other industry treats wholesaling. So if a grocery store buys fruit from a wholesaling company, they buy the fruit, they stock the fruit, and then they sell the fruit.

They don't, you know, say and sign a piece of paper and they say, hey, we're going to assign a this fruit and then we'll pay you, you know, after we sell it from our store. So that's what I do, you know, that's how I got started. That's what I knew. Nobody taught me about assignments when I was doing that, you know, six thousand dollar deal that I made. Nobody taught me anything about that. So I was just doing the only thing I knew. I bought the house. I closed the house. I sold the house to another investor. You know, what you ask what wholesaling is. A lot of people teach assigning contracts. We don't necessarily do that in my business. I'm not saying that, you know, if you're doing that, that it's totally illegal.

I'm not going to put anything out there like that. I know people that are very successful. I buy a lot of assignments, you know, I have a lot of wholesalers that assign me contracts, and it's fine. You know, I sign the assignment. I pay them their fee and we go the other way because we close the deal. There's the double closings, which is kind of like what we do, but you're just closing the same day with your other investor. the reason why I do what I do is because it's less messy. When you're doing 20 deals a month, 25 deals a month, it's messy.

And if I have to explain to every motivated seller that I talk to that, yeah, we're going to market your property and can you put a lockbox on it? And there's going to be people coming in and out of your house. And if I have to explain that 20 times every single month, it gets super messy. So I've decided, let's just take all that off the table. We have the resources to do that. I have the resources. Plus, we have a lot of private money that we use to buy it, just like fixing flippers.

We use the private money to purchase our deals. And it just helps us sleep at night, knowing it. And if we go to a motivated seller and we say, hey, we're going to buy your property, that's exactly what we're going to do. There's no funny business. It's not like, oh, we're going to buy your property, but not really, you know, we're really going to assign it or we're going to do something over here, you know. No, we're going to buy your property.

and that's what we do. So in our words, everything. So that's why we do it, how we do. We buy the property, we close it, and then we sell it. Now, really, really quick. You mentioned the legality of it. There's, there's a lot of debate about there. So there's debate on bigger pockets. There's debate in other circles. You know, there's arguments whether, you know, who can actually wholesale. And it's all based on, yeah, as I was going to say, it's all based on you have a real estate license to do a lot of based on that idea of and we're not here to argue that we're not here to get into that at all what you're doing you know there's there's no debate on that right you're buying the property you're

closing on the property and then you decide to sell it the question on that is what's the average amount of time between purchase and sale are you selling it the same day is it a week a month what's your kind of average it really varies but probably our average i'm going to say is around you know i don't know what exact but probably 30 days uh by the time we we buy it close it and then our next closing, if you take all the properties across the board, it probably average is 30 days. Some are like, yeah, a couple of days, but some are like 60 to 90 days. And yeah, we get we get caught with some dogs, you know, because the typical wholesaler is, if they can't sell the property, what do they do?

They back out of the deal, right? Well, we don't do that, you know? Obviously, if there's title issues or something like that, you know, that's a different story. But, you know, since we actually close on the deals and we do what we say, we're going to do. Sometimes we get caught, you know, with stinky deals. We call them dogs with fleas, you know, and we can't sell them. I mean, well, you just sold a property. I think that we had for six months. But if you average it across the board, probably 30 days. Got it. So what about, well, first I'll ask, I'll go back to, do you think this is a good strategy for new investors? Why or why not? And then I

want to ask you about the actual, like, profit you make on these. Yeah. You know, just kind of fast forward in my story. So we were doing, we were doing great in wholesaling. Then the market cut and started to bounce back, right? So me and my dad, we were kind of partners. And we said, now what are we going to do? And I saw a bunch of HD TV shows. And I said, let's do this fix and flip thing. That sounds like fun. That's for all the money's made. So we started doing that. I was a full time fixing flip flipper for three years. You know, fixed them up. We were doing maybe 30 a year, something like that, fix and flips. But I realized, man, that's a job. And I was terrible at managing the contractors. And I didn't know what I was doing with some of the rehab. And so about three years ago,

I said, you know what, I'm going to go back into wholesaling. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it big. I'm going to do it right. And that's when we came up with our company's simple wholesaling. And I think just to answer your question, Brandon, I think, yeah, I think it's a great strategy for new investors because I think it's simple. There's not a lot of moving parts. I always, always say that wholesaling is like the Flintstone's car, you know, it's like it can go fast, but it's just a simple vehicle. And fixing the flipping is kind of like a Ferrari. You know, if you lose one part, one bolt pops off, you can crash and burn. And that's kind of what I did in fixing the flipping. There's just so many moving parts. That's why it shows wholesaleing.

Hey, Brett, what the distinction, there's a line between your, your definition of wholesaling here and flipping. The distinction that I see it is you're not doing any rehabs on these properties, correct? That is correct. Yeah. Now, we'll do if a property is completely trashed. Also, we got a guy that goes around, he'll clean it all out. But that's pretty much it. Got it. Got it. And we'll get into how are you finding these deals later. I know we're going to end up asking that. So back to Brandon's question on whether or not it's a good strategy for new investors. Do you think it's good? I think it is.

Yeah, like I said, it's simple. I wouldn't recommend a new investor just going out and doing it on their own. People that come to me, I always ask, you know, partner up with a mentor, partner up with somebody, shadow them, see what they do, do some partner deals with them, you know, make half the profit or whatever they want to split it with you. And so you can get confidence, you can get your feet wet. And then, you know, a year later, do it on your own. You'll, you know, that's what I always recommend to people. I love that advice. I think it's, yeah, I don't, I think if you're brand new,

you should rewind the last 30 seconds to listen to it again, because that's like gold right there, right? Like, find somebody who can help you and teach you exactly what they want, how to do it, you go out and do it, and then you get the experience. They can help you do the financing maybe. I mean, there's so many benefits to doing it. I love that. So now, going back to the idea that you buy property and then you close on it and then

you resell. Now, the thing that's always put me off from that. I mean, I've done a little bit of whole thing. not a massive wholesaler, but it's the, I have to pay closing costs twice, right? And that's what a lot of wholesalers hate about it is. When you buy the property, you got to pay the, you know, county tax, or whatever that is, I think we call it excise tax. And then when you resell it again a month later, you got to pay that again. Like, is there a way around that? I mean, you have to pay the title company both times or an attorney or do you just have to get a good enough deal to cover that?

Yeah, obviously it's an issue and we're working on some different things. When we sell the property, our investor pays all the closing costs. That's just in our contract. So like, we don't have to pay any of that. Now when we buy it, we have to pay all closing costs. So yes, we do, you know, closing costs here in Indiana on the deals that we buy anywhere from $700 to $900. So that is an expense that we have to take under our wing. But again, if you're going to run a wholesaling business and I have to pay those fees, it's just any fee that, you know, we normally have to pay in just running the business. But it's just, it's just an expense. So it's just something that we do, And that's how we do business because, again, it's just less messy.

And I don't have to worry about the investor knowing what I'm making because he sees my assignment fee. I don't have to worry about the motivated seller getting upset because somebody else is showing up with their closing instead of one of our guys. It just gets confusing. That's why we do it because there's so many, there's so many confusing moments. You know, like, why do you want to put a lockbox on my house? Why do people want to come in? So you can say, oh, it's contractors. You know, I don't know.

Why is somebody else showing up at the closing and not your company? Why is what's this assignment fee on the HUD? What is all that all about? There's so many different things you have to explain. I just kind of take that off the table. Yeah, I love that. Definitely makes it simple. Yeah.

When I think about wholesaling, like, it's one of the things that's always held me back from jumping more hardcore into wholesaling is because I'm like, I hate explaining that thing because no matter how good you are explaining it, the motivated seller does not understand. Like, are you buying my house or not? The few times that I've done it, it's weird. It's hard to explain. that. And I love what you're doing. And when I heard that that's what you did, I'm like,

oh, that makes perfect sense. Like, why don't people do this? Like, I don't know. I like that a lot. So you mentioned this idea here of, you said the phrase, a wholesaling business. Like, first of all, I love that you said that. It's not just I'm doing a wholesale deal. That's what so many people do, right? I'm going to go do a wholesale deal. What do you, how do you define the difference between somebody who's just a wholesaler and somebody like you who's running a wholesaling business? What's the difference? Yeah. It's actually, funny because I read a lot of forums on bigger pockets and people say wholesalers are not investors, you know, and people chime in, yeah, they are, you know, or whatever. And I have, I actually

have to agree. I don't think wholesalers are investors. I have to agree that wholesalers run a transactional business. So it could be just like selling widgets or DVDs or whatever. You're running, you're, you're just transacting houses. So I think if you're going to be a full-time wholesaler, you have to treat it like a business. You're really not an investor. You're not in the passive game. You're not in the appreciation game. You're not in all that. If you're just doing wholesaling, you're just in a transactional business. I think people have to realize that. It's really not investing. It's just transacting houses. Well, you could say the same about flipping, right? I mean, you know, the only, I think the only true quote, investing is buy and hold, right? I mean, that's, you're investing.

I mean, the definition of investing to be, you know, you're not, you know, you know, flipping through this stuff in three months, six months or a day, right? It's it's long longer term. So what what kind of numbers are we talking about? I mean, you're doing a lot of volume here. So what's what's your average profit for a deal? And maybe you can walk us through kind of a typical deal that you might go through. Yeah. Our deals, our typical profit is not like some of your guys on the show. You know, I'm part of a mastermind group and these guys, they talk big, big numbers out in California or Arizona or some of these some of these cities where they're making you know 20,000 a deal or 30,000 a deal. Our typical deal, if you average it across the board, we make about

7,000 per deal. Okay. So, you know, that's average. Some are only a couple. Some are 20, you know, but average, I'd say it's about 7,000 per deal. So you're going, as I said, you're going wide, not so deep. I mean, you want to do volume in this business. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And we're starting to get more deals that are bigger numbers. You know, we got a deal last month that will probably be our biggest deal yet. And that's going to be maybe around 60,000. And that'll be one of our biggest deals that we've done. So back to the question.

Give us an example of a deal. And especially for somebody who's new, walk us through timeline along with it. So this question is going to be a long, all-encompassing question. You're going to literally answer every follow-up question that we would probably have. So from finding, finding your deals, how are you finding them? How are you going about, you know, closing on them? How are you going about, you know, marketing and reselling these properties? Yeah, it's just been, we've been able to scale over the last few years. It was pretty much, I was a one-man show for, for years. Me and my dad did a bunch of stuff together. And then he kind of

retired. And then I was on my own. A few years ago, after reading some bigger pockets article, I had a friend that really needed a job and he has going through some tough, tough luck. And I said, man, I heard about these people who are writing letters and mailing them. I don't think it's going to work. I think it sounds really stupid, but let's try it. So he started writing these yellow letters and mailing them out. And I paid him a quarter of letter. And people started calling and we started getting deals.

I was like, man, this is crazy. I can't believe this is actually working. We're doing about 250 letters a week. And now we're doing about 30,000. over the last, or we're doing about 30,000 a month today. So we really scaled that up. Nice. Yeah, so we do a lot of direct mail.

We have a PPC website, which is a pay-per-click website that we spend about $10,000 a month on. We have a company that has set that up. So if you type in, I need to sell my house fast in Indianapolis, we pop up and people fill out our form or they call us. So we have that. Those are two of our biggest lead generation. websites but you know what has started to beat everything in our business and just in the past four or five months is building a reputation and buying deals from other wholesalers and so we've really started doing that we have our own meetup here in Indianapolis called the simple wholesaling meetup

where we teach other wholesalers what we do and then so that so my my email gets filled with leads all day long from from other wholesalers and most of them aren't any good just like like any other, you know, somebody says my other wholesalers aren't any good, but probably 50% of our deals we buy from other wholesalers. So we pick up the deal, whether from one of those are our top ones, whether from other wholesalers, direct mail or paper click, we get on our contract, we go to the closing table, and we buy it. And then I have a guy here at the office. He starts marketing it.

We put it out through, we send a, on our buyer's list, we send an email out. We put it on Craigslist every week. And then lately the MLS, since the market is so hot right now, the MLS has been golden now. A lot of times, we'll just throw it on the MLS, which, you know, I don't think if you're assigned a contract, you'd have to jump through a bunch of hoops to be able to list something on the MLS. So that's a strategy that we've really, you know,

because the MLS is super hot. And so that's how we sell out of our properties too. I want to just jump to something that you mentioned. You had talked about putting together your own meetup. Last show that we did show 230, we actually talked about this as well. He had created his own meetup. It was Seth Mosley. And he created a meetup as well so that he could kind of become at the center of things

and really get more access, better access to deals. And it sounds like you've kind of done the same thing there, yeah? Yeah, I think it's all about branding. If three years ago, if people would, anybody would have asked, hey, do you know Brett Snodgrass from Indianapolis, Indiana? And everybody would say, no, I have no idea who that is. But through bigger pockets, and I've been a contributor on bigger pockets, through the blogs, our own meetup, we have a podcast, a simple wholesaling podcast. Now, through all of that branding, now people are starting to recognize that we are a great wholesale company. And, but to other wholesalers, we're actually the end buyer, because they don't really have. a buyer's list and we close on the deals so you know now we've not only become a wholesaler but we become an in buyer and if we can build our buyers list to to be really really good we we can sell our deals to other investors not like they not like new investors can so how does how does a new investor know if another wholesaler is full of shit like you know how do you how do you vet a deal

how do you vet that they really have the deal? How do you trust that they're not going to burn you? Like, you know, what do you do? I think that one of the biggest things is, you know, whenever you buy an assignment, you know, you're actually buying the purchase agreement, right? You're not, you're paying $5,000 for that purchase agreement, you know? That's what you're purchasing. So a lot of wholesalers, if they send out deals to us, they'll say, yeah, $50,000,

this house. I say, okay, we'll take it, $50,000. They'll send me an assignment for $5,000, but they don't send me the purchase agreement, right? So, like, I think that's one of the first clues. I'm like, you know, this wholeser, you know, because I'm buying the purchase agreement, I want to see what I'm, what I'm buying, you know? And other wholesalers, they're like, ah, no, you might go around, but, I mean, that's what I'm buying, you know? So, I mean, that's, that's one of the first inclinations. So they refuse to show you even a PDF of the, purchase agreement. Yeah, maybe, yeah, some of them. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on because I want to see, you know, what I'm buying for this $5,000. Yeah. Of course you do. So that's one thing. Obviously,

you know, wholesalers are are pretty easy to spot out. If people are sending other people's deals and you see this deal in multiple different places, you know, that's, that's, people try to sell our deals all the time. And it's kind of annoying, but, but that's just what other new wholesalers do. They take other people's deals pretend like it's their own. They send them out. And when they get caught, they look kind of stupid. So new people shouldn't do that. Yeah, I think that's pretty shady.

Yeah, slim shady, I think. Well, you know, and I think it's a good point to bridge, right? Like, you know, a lot of people will recommend doing things. Just do what you got to do to get it done. And what happens is you go and you do that. And very quickly, people who are. in the know are going to smell the BS, right? And all of a sudden, you're going to create this reputation for yourself as somebody who's shady. Now, here's the problem, right? Because Brett,

who does a lot of deals, runs into you. And you give him some BS. And now he knows you as shady number one, right? Well, in a year later, you realize, oh, you know what? There's another way of doing it. But you go back to Brett. Brett's like, dude, I don't trust you at all. I'm not going to work with you. even though you've totally changed, right? So, you know, that's why we push so hard at bigger pockets. Like, your reputation is everything. And you cannot do shady stuff in this business because it will stick to you. It will stick to you for a very long time and you will not last in the business.

You've got to do things the right way. You cannot be shady. And if you're going to go be shady, go get into a different business. We don't want you. Yeah, I think it's like I said, wholesaling is just like any other business. So imagine a guy, you know, he sets up, you know, a car wash and the cars start going through, but he doesn't clean off the top of the car or something like that. He just leaves dirt on it.

Well, eventually, you know, people find out, hey, man, this guy is, he's pretty dirty. He's pretty shady, like you said, Josh. And I think that's the same concept here in this business. Yeah. Yeah. Right on. So can I go back a little bit? I want to dive a little deeper into direct mail marketing because I think it's a fascinating topic.

And it's the way that a lot of successful investors are getting a lot of their deals still today. And it's very scalable. So my question, I guess, is, first of all, who are you mailing to? I mean, like, are they just all absentee owners or who are you mailing to? And then what's your letter permit say? Or do you have a, what's your strategy at maybe overall with direct mail? Yeah, we've done a lot of testing. Pretty much the best list that you can mail to, if you can find tax delinquent, you know, absentee owners that are older than 50.

I don't know. That's probably like super narrowed down, but that's like, that's the ultimate list. So tax delinquent lists or absentee owners that are older than 50. It seems like most of the houses we buy are, you know, older than 50. So and we typically, you know, and we're starting to try to get the list from the counties like the tax delinquent list. But we use the same websites. Everybody uses like list source, agent pro 247 is another one that you can get tax delinquent lists from. And our letter is pretty simple, you know, we, I found out, Our best response rate is a invitation style envelope. So it looks like a wedding invitation. And they open it up.

And it's pretty much just a postcard. It's just real simple that just says, hi. My name is Brett Snodgrass. And I want to buy your house at 1, 2, 3 Boulevard Street. And please call me. And we will buy it in seven days. And it's pretty simple. Not a lot of wording.

And that's pretty much what we do. And that's been our best response rate so far. Better than postcards, better than, you know, typed letters, anything. So that's what we pretty much do. Okay. And how much do you track your metrics? And I don't know if you know them offhand, but like when you send out, you send out 30,000 letters. Or let's look for simple math, let's go 10,000 letters you send out.

How many phone calls does that generate? And out of them, I mean, how many deals does I end up working through that funnel? Yeah. You know, I'm a pretty simple guy. I try to track them. but I'm still definitely working on it. But if we get a 2% response rate, so if two people call us out of 100 letters, that's pretty good.

We're like dancing in the streets. Like that is really good. So 2%, if you guys get two people to call you, have 100, that's awesome. Out of 30,000 letters, out of everybody that calls us, out of whatever the numbers are with that, if we can get, you know, typically 10 deals a month through direct mail, like I said, we do 25 deals a month. but, you know, let's just say 10 are from direct mail and the other resources I've already said

are from the other wholesalers, PPC, all that stuff, we're doing pretty good if we can get 10 a month out of 30,000. Okay. And if you can average, you know, seven grand apiece, that's $70,000 a month from that and you spend, what do you say it costs to send 30,000 letters? Typically, it'll cost this around like 82 cents apiece. So whatever that is, times 30,000. Okay.

So maybe, I don't know what it was, 23, 25, somewhere in there. Okay, so yeah. If you guys get to know me, I mean, my business is simple. I've always jumped all in. Don't really think about stuff. I like to track my stuff, but I'm not the best guy in that field. I'll tell you right there. I'll tell you right now.

That's okay. What I like to point out here is something that I talk about on the bigger pockets webinar every week. We do a live webinar every Wednesday. And I talk a lot about how the investors that are crushing it in this game all kind of have the same strategy. It's a giant funnel, right? Like you got to get a bunch of leads coming in. out of all the leads that come in, you're going to analyze a bunch of them. Out of the ones you analyze, you're going to make an offer on a bunch of them.

And of the ones you make an offer on, you're going to get a few accepted. At the end of the day, like, you have to get a lot of leads to filter down to the few that you want. And that's how you scale. So if you want more deals at the bottom of the funnel, get more leads at the top and then just work that funnel. And you don't have to know every single metric perfectly. Just the fact that you know that if you send more direct mail, it's going to hopefully funnel it to more at the bottom. Yeah. And I think direct mail, obviously everybody probably says this is it's getting more competitive.

You know, I used to be able to send out a thousand letters a month and get a few deals. I can't really do that much anymore. And that's another reason why we've been going more to other wholesalers because now they're sending out direct mail. And I was like, you know what? This is getting competitive? So let's start joining them. And now their direct mail, even though their direct mail is super competitive, we're actually working their direct mail too. And it's free.

Like, we don't have to pay anything for their for their deals. So, you know, that's the beauty of this business, you know, over a decade ago, scary when I, when I started in the business, everybody's like, you know, you can't work with competitors, all these other investors in your area, you know, this bigger pocket thing's never going to work because, you know, everybody's after everybody else. And, you know, what we've discovered is this. When we come together and we collaborate, we're actually all more successful. And that's exactly what you pointed out. Like, in your market and your local. area. If you start working with all the other local investors, all the wholesalers and everyone else, you know, you guys are going to all rise up together. You're going to get the deals. They're going to make the money. They're going to hustle and get deals. Turn them over to you and other people. It's a win, win, win. Don't have that. It's the abundance mentality. Yeah. The other thing with other wholesalers, too, I love it when I see emails from other wholesalers and a typical email from

this, a couple of them that I'll get, we'll say something like, hey, Brett, here's a deal, here's my price, here's the information, here's the pictures, you get first shot. And I like that because he's given us first opportunity, obviously. That's what that means. Unless he's saying it's everyone. Yeah, it's true. Shady. But, yeah, that's the shatingness of it. But sometimes I'll buy deals from other wholesalers that don't make a lot of money because the next one will make a lot of lot of money and I want to be first shot on there. So that's that's a that's one thing that we try to. And you know, I don't know if this is shady or not, but what it also does for a lot of new investors is it kind of quenches their, their hunger to go to build a buyer's list because we buy

and they go to us and then they go to us. Then they go to us again and again and again. And they don't go out and get other buyers because we buy it. And so that's another thing that, you know, it just kind of all works together. Well, on buyers. list. I mean, that's what a lot of the gurus teach people is like before you get started. Go find a buyer's list. Make a giant buyers list of all these people. And what you just said is that's not necessarily very necessary. You know, if you're there, I don't know how I did that. I like it. If you, you know, if they've got you and like, you know, five or six other, let's say 10 people like you, you don't even need 10. You know, you've got enough people to buy every deal you're

ever going to come across. Yeah. And I think it. It's, it's, it's, Even we have been buyers that, yeah, most of our deals sell to, you know, three, three companies. So everybody kind of has that, but we are that to a lot of new. Right. Yeah. I mean, at first, it'll take you a while to figure out who those people are. But at the end of the day, you know, all that matters is getting a great deal. Somebody's going to buy that great deal if you've got it.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Cool. So on that note, I mean, who is your typical buyer when you get a wholesale deal and you're going to go sell it, you know, 30 days later or whatever? Who were you wholesaling to? Is it companies, individual people? It's definitely a mixture. I mean, our top buyers, obviously, are big investors.

A couple of them are turnkey companies where they're going to fix it up. Indianapolis is a huge cash flow market. So we get a lot of people that come here that buy cash flow. So a lot of them are, the big ones are turnkey companies. But a lot of the flips that are good for retail flips, yeah, they're just one-up people or maybe somebody that's going to buy two or three. but the big ones are, you know, the turnkey companies that, and most of those are like rental rental properties.

Okay. Cool. And then you mentioned earlier, you talked about how you started out doing a one-man show and you've scaled it up. So how many on your team right now? And then what is your role in the business now compared to everyone else? Yeah, you know, it's pretty awesome. I was actually thinking about that.

I went today, I went for a jog. I was pushing my three-year-old son. We like to do that sometimes like at 1030 a.m. And I was like, man, this is, this is pretty neat that I can do that. because that's not for the last, you know, eight, nine years. It hasn't been the case that I've been able to do something like that. But like I said, I hired my first guy three years ago. He was writing the letters for me.

Since then, now we have a team of seven people, including myself. And then I just hire three virtual assistants. So including the virtual assistants, we have 10 now. And that's, I just hired them a few weeks ago. Yeah. Cool. Can you explain who all those people? people are like, I don't need their name and birthday, but what is their role at the company?

What does everybody do? And then what do you use the VAs for? Yeah, definitely. So let's see. So I have my acquisitions team, which is a couple of guys, Tyler and Alex. Alex, he was answering all of the phone calls, all the initial phone calls from all the direct mail pieces that came in. And then he would send him to Tyler. Tyler is the guy who's been with me for about two years. He analyzed the deal. He doesn't have to ask me what to offer here. He already knows that.

So he's going to the appointments. He's locking up the deals. He's looking at the houses. So that's my acquisitions team. And then I have my closer, which is Gary. He goes to all the closings, does all the title company stuff, deals with all the closing stuff. And then I have my dispositions team, which is my sales. They're the ones talking to investors, cash buyers.

that's Jaron and ASEA. They are a husband and wife team. And Jaron, he's the one talking to all the cash buyers, getting them on our contract. And ASEA, she does our website, does our property presentations. We put together like a nice property presentation, pictures, comps, rent rates, whatever. She does all that. Put them on our website so people can check out all of our properties on our website. She also is the one to put them on Craigslist and all that.

And then I have DARE. Darius is our marketing Jedi. So he does more of our podcast, newsletter, stuff on that side of stuff. And then our three VAs are really just to help with one of them does admin. And then one of them is going to work with Jaron and a C on the disposition side. And then one of them is going to work on the acquisition site. So we just added one more person kind of to each team.

Just as we're scaling, I noticed with Alex, with only two guys on acquisitions, we can only mail out 10 to 15,000 letters before their hair would catch on fire, you know. So now we're just trying to do more. So that's why we had to hire more people. Perfect. That's cool. Yeah.

And of course, Jaron, who works on your team, used to work with us at Bigger Pockets. He was one of our, like people we've hired over the years. Yeah, years ago. Yeah. So that's kind of how I got to know who you were. Brandon. Brandon was actually our second guest on our Simple Olsoning podcast. Thanks, Brian.

Oh, was I? Well, good. Good. The best episode ever. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I think I got the lowest hits now. Six listeners. No, but Jared is an absolutely awesome guy.

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book your free demo at bill.com slash bigger pockets and get a $100 Amazon gift card. That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. All right. So I don't know. Man, there's so much we get. Here's what I'd like to do next. What I think would be fun is because this is kind of like to show that I feel like for all the rest of the bigger pockets podcast world or bigger pockets world, when people say, what is wholesaling and how do I get started with it?

I'm going to send them to this show. So I thought maybe it would be fun. Let's pretend I'm a brand new guy. And I don't know what I'm doing, but I heard that wholesaling was a good idea. Can you in the next three minutes, five minutes, coach me and Josh, who are, you know, we're brothers and we want to do this whole thing thing. We're brothers. Yeah. We're brothers.

Good job. Can you explain like what do I do? I mean, Brett, I want a wholesale. I'm in your market. I want to go wholesale. What do I do? Help me out. Yeah, that's a good question.

First, I would start off with going the direct mail route or really just, you know, cold calling off of Craigslist or for sale by owners because that's all free. So kind of get some of that stuff going. you know, bringing in some leads. Once you get the phone calls, you know, really just a short conversation. I want to know three questions. What's the address of the house? What is the condition of the house to get it, you know, admit condition or really nice, moving ready?

And then what's your bottom line on the house? What's the price you need to walk away from the deal? And then I would use me, if you're brand new, I would use me to help you analyze the deals and come up with a number that's good for us on the deal. And then once you get the deal, you know, lock it up. I'll walk you through the whole process. And then we'll split the deal. That's why I do with a lot of wholesalers.

And then like I think there was a guy on, he actually, I met him through bigger pockets. Stephen Barton, he was a new wholesaler. And he was just getting going. It's about three years ago. And he came to me and he says, hey, I'm in your market. I want to do wholesaling. And we just kind of went through that together. That first year, I think we split.

50 deals and he made a lot of money. He started off with like zero, you know, and by the end of the year, I think you had like, I don't know, $50,000 in his bank account or something. We split all of our deals. Well, now he's going out doing on his own. That's why you always recommend get somebody you can do it with. I'll teach you, you know, the basics, direct mail and all that stuff, how to talk to people. But then help, ask me to help you analyze the deals. We'll do the numbers together. And then maybe we'll, and then we'll split the deal. But if you do, you know, 20 deals like that, build some confidence. Plus, you're using my money.

I mean, you know, they don't have any money in it. I pay for the deal. I buy the deal. I take it down. And then we split it. And I mean, it's a great. I do that with a lot of wholesaler. So that's what I would kind of walk you through.

I don't know if to answer your question. Like I said, I'm probably the dumbest. This might not be the show to send people to because I feel like I'm like the dumbest wholesaler ever. No, this is awesome. This is really good advice. Like, I feel like I'm learning a ton of stuff. And I've known wholesaling for years. But man,

Like, I feel like, I feel like super fired up. Like, I want to go build a big team and I want to start wholesaling this area. Like, anyway, that happens a lot on this show. But the problem with wholesaling, too, people always say it's just an active business. And it really is. But if you build a team that are doing the, the roles that you used to do and you teach them and you train them, it can be a passive sort of business. If you build the right team and put the right people in the right seats. And I'm trying to get there.

I'm still with my business. you know, 40 hours a week. There's a book, yeah, obviously people probably talk about called Traction and they talk about two people. They'd say the visionary, the integrator. I'm both right now. I'm trying to, probably the next year, I'm probably going to be looking for an integrator

to run the daily operations of the business, but I still do that. Once I get that in place, I'll be able to go on cruises like you guys and Disney World stuff. It's not that easy. But, you know, what's interesting is, that the visionary and integrator. I've experienced this where I played both roles.

And over time, you know, I've shifted to become mostly the visionary with very little integratorness, if that is they were. Do you still work really in the business? Like the, yeah. Well, I have a, I have a great team of managers who are doing the day-to-day stuff. And it's a challenge. It's really what's fascinating is I talk to CEOs all week. that's like my job is to talk to other CEOs and learn from them and come up with one or two

ideas a month to to move the needle. Right. And what I've learned is that that visionary role is very conflicting for somebody who did both. Because you're inclined to go and get into the business and do all this stuff. But you've also gone and hired people to do all that stuff. And so oftentimes what happens, and I know I experience it regularly and I know almost any CEO that I talk to, let's say tend to call it 50, 75 employees. We all talk about the same thing. It's like, oh, I'm trying to figure out what am I supposed to be doing every day?

What is my role? And it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. Like, you know, because you want to do stuff. You always want to be valuable. You always want to be helpful. But, you know, oftentimes you have to kind of step back and get out of the way a little bit for other people. And then you probably feel like, like, eventually, like, is this, is this even my company anymore?

Like, am I still a part of it? I feel like an outsider, you know, in my own business. So I think that happens a little bit. I think that happens a little bit for sure. So anyway, interesting stuff. Before we move on to the fire round really quickly. What's next? Where are you going? You've, you've now built this company, this transactional wholesale company, as you've dubbed it. What is the future for the company? What's your intention?

I mean, you know, it's deriving income for you. Are you, you know, looking to get into some buy and hold? Are you going to continue just focusing on the transactional? What's the goal here? Yeah, I love this business, simple wholesaling. I love wholesaling, but it's definitely not. It's just a means to an end for me. It's not like I'm super passionate on my on my grave. I want, yeah, he was the CEO of a wholesaling business. You know, that's definitely not it. It's a fuel.

I always talk to my team. You know, I love my team. It's like a family here. We have visionary meetings every, every week. And I try to inspire them. And for me, this is the money that we make is fuel for the fire. And right now, like, I have a passion of burning inside of me. If you listen to our podcast or you check out our website, I'm definitely a man.

of faith, a man of God. And that's, that's kind of my passion. So right now I'm building this thing, scaling it to build fuel for the fire. That's, that's my passion to build, you know, a ministry of some sort. So that's, that's kind of where what it is for me. But I love building it. And I'm trying to, every day, I try to think about what can I do, what can I build, what process can I do or system can I build to help me get one step more out of the business. If I can save myself five hours a week on training somebody else to do what I'm doing, then that's awesome, you know. And that's what I'm just trying to do every single day so I can use the fuel to build the fire.

I heard of quote. Maybe you and Brandon can become ministers together. Yeah, there we go. You guys would be the, you know, the seven-foot ministers. There you go. I was going to say, I just love the, I just love the idea of the, like, purpose inspired, I guess, like mission, you know, on your business. Like, it's not just about making a bunch of money, right? Like, if it's just about money, most people will never get through the hard work that takes to build up a real estate business because it's hard work.

But if you have some other reason behind it, some purpose that, that drives you forward. I don't know. I love that. And so, like, you've identified what that is for you. And I think that's fantastic. So keep that up. I think that's very cool. Yeah.

One quote that I just wanted to share was by D.L. Moody, somebody shared with me a few weeks ago. And it's really just hit me between the eyes. So his quote, D.L. Moody, who made Moody Bible Institute, said, our greatest fear should not be failure, but succeeding at something that doesn't matter. And that just really hit me. Like, I'm like, man, I don't want to succeed at something that doesn't impact anybody. So I don't know. And I think wholesaling does, obviously. but, you know, so that's kind of, yeah, I just want to share it. That was one of the first, I was one of the first Instagram quotes I ever shared on my, on my Instagram back in the day, yeah.

Nice. Am I allowed to like that quote, Brandon? You are allowed to like that quote. Okay. I like it. All right. So let's, let's shift gears here and head over to the world's famous fire. It's time for the fire round.

Let's get to today's fire round. These questions come direct out of. of the Bigger Pockets forums, and we're going to fire them right at you, Brett. So, number one, what kind of phone system do you use to handle phone calls? What's your phone strategy? Yeah, we use a system called callrail.com callrail. So we put a different phone number on every piece of mail that we use. So every time somebody calls that phone number, we can track that.

I'm assuming you don't mean like 30,000 phone numbers on 30,000 direct mail letters, right? You're saying like for each type though. Yeah. So if we send out a postcard, we'll use one one phone number. If we send out a yellow letter, every one phone number. Or lists, too. If we send out a tax delinquent list, we'll use a different phone number than if we send out an absentee owner, you know, over 50 list. So callrail.com is what we use.

All right. And it's really easy to set up a number. Why I like it is, you can set up a different phone number in a minute. So it's really cool. That's very cool. Right on. All right. What's the next question?

What's the best way to determine the comps for a property to determine what the ARV is going to be after repair value? Obviously, I'm a real estate broker, so I use our local MLS. If you can use your local MLS, I always think that's the best. Do you have to get a real estate license in order to do that? I don't necessarily think you do. You can here in Indiana, there's something called a non-licensed assistant, and we can have up to one non-licensed assistant. use and have access to our MLS, which, so if your state has that, I think, try to become a non-licensed assistant to a real estate broker in your area. So that's what we typically

use for the comps. And then we just look at the, look at the area and obviously, you know, we look at sold houses in the last, you know, six months and find if there's 200,000 and it's similar to our house, then we use a $200,000 ARV. It's pretty simple, I think. Cool. I like it. All right. Number three, I'm just getting started with real estate wholesaling. What are the biggest wholesaling mistakes people make? I want to make sure to avoid them. Biggest wholesaling mistakes. I think that if you try to wholesale other people's deals, like I mentioned in the show, that's a huge mistake. Number one, like you, you know, you can get in serious trouble if the other wholesaler doesn't know that you're trying to sell their deals. So that's a huge mistake. Let's see. Other huge mistakes. Not getting a mentor trying to do it all on your own, I think is a huge mistake. I did that kind of. I had one guy that I did some deals with, but he was, he was kind of shady. So I got out from under him. But I think get a real estate mentor. Somebody's doing the business. That's another mistake. People don't do. Just don't do it on your own. I think those are probably the two biggest. Cool. All right. Last question of the fire round.

If I'm wholesaling, I understand that I should be targeting motivated sellers and distressed properties. But I'm aware that if the motivation is high enough, I can negotiate a deal whether the property is distressed or not. So my question is, what do I do if the house is in good condition and there are minimal repairs? How could I negotiate a good deal when the house is in quality condition? Do I just play on their desire to sell because they're motivated? what do I do?

I think that you should like take advantage of them and play them like a fiddle. No. No, I'm kidding. Stop. No, after I just did the D.L. Moody. Wow. Yeah, geez, man. No, definitely that's not what to do.

We buy properties all the time that don't need hardly any repairs. There are motivated sellers out there that have a nice, a nice particular property. This one deal that we're doing, the one deal that I said that was probably going to be one of our biggest deals to this date doesn't need a lot of repairs. But the comps in the area, and I'll just kind of tell you about the deal, so the comps in the area are about 400, let's say high 300,000's $400,000. This is a pretty nice area here in Indianapolis. And the people that we talked to wanted 225,000. The property does need repairs, but it's probably, you know, It's functional, but it needs, you could spruce it.

Like I said, these 400,000 are properties. They're like really nice. This one is rental quality, I guess, right? So you could spruce it up with, let's say, 40 or 50,000, but that's just what they wanted. So, you know, do you play off their motivation? I mean, I don't know if, you know, I think a motivated seller is a motivated seller. Don't always think that it has to be a distressed property. you know, if they're motivated and they'll take a good price for the property and that's what they want,

I mean, you know, we gave them exactly what they wanted for their property and I can sleep at night because of that. So cool. Good answer. Cool. All right. Well, before we get out of here, let's head over to the famous four. All right. These are the same four questions we ask every guest every week here on the Bigger Pockets podcast.

So let's what you got to say, Brett. Number one, what is your favorite real estate book? The real estate book, I would probably choose. be, man, I'm thinking about business books. I read a lot of business books because, you know, wholesaling is a business. It's not a, it's not a, it's a transactional. But, you know, obviously the book that really, really changed us was obviously the book thereby says was just, you know, thinking differently and the rich dad, poor dad book, I

would say probably is my, is my favorite real estate book. But I read both, I read a lot of business books because, like I said, wholesaling is a business. So what would be your pick for a business book? Business book. Lately, obviously, I think it's the book traction. It's really just helped me scale the business and help put the right people in the right seats. And that's just helped me scale the business. But early on, which it totally changed my paradigm, my thinking, was the millionaire next door by Thomas Stanley.

And why I choose that book is, I don't know if you'd call that. a business book or not, but it talks about America's wealthy. And it basically says that the millionaires are not the guys driving the brand new BMWs or the guys living in the cookie cutter house that's worth $200,000 next door to you. And you wouldn't even tell that they were actually a millionaire. And that changed mine because I drove the most expensive car that I've ever driven was when I was completely dead broke. And after reading that book, I completely changed everything and I realized how to be frugal, and I don't have to be super flashy. And the guys that are super flashy are probably in a lot of dead or broke.

So that book I really loved. Cool. That certainly stands true by a lot of people that I know who are driving super fancy cars. Yeah, me too. All right. What about hobbies? What do you do for fun besides real estate? Well, I have a young family.

I have a three and a half year old, a two-year-old and a 10-year-old. So that case seemed pretty busy. I really like to go boating. So Indiana is not known for its lakes, but we have a lake. We're in a lake town here in Indiana. And I have an older boat, and we love to go boating and tubing and skiing. And I'd like to take my family out on that. Right, right on.

Hey, Brandon, didn't Seth on the last show talk about skiing in Indiana? Was that where he talked about skiing? I think it, yeah, I think it was Indiana. Yeah. Yeah, they're like skiing there, yeah? A snow skiing? Yeah. Yeah, there is.

Yeah, I used to live by a skiing. You have to like make your own snow most of the year. But they're in the winters, you know, yeah, there is skiing. All right, question number four. Yeah, not like Denver. Number four, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? Yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of successful.

Well, actually at my local meetup last week, I talked about how early do people get up. I think successful people get up. They have a certain morning routine. I think that's very, very important. That's what I typically do. I typically get up at 5 a.m. I think, you know, most of the hours, the most I get done between 5 and like 7.30, it's just crazy how much I get done between that time. And then you guys had on your show, the author of the one thing, the book, was it Gary Keller?

Jay Pappas on. Oh, Jay Pappas. They co-wrote it. They call right. Yeah. Gotcha. Awesome. That's been a very influential book for me is to, that's why I was doing all these different things.

I was doing fix and flip, wholesale, buy and sell, or buy and hold. I was doing some of that owner financing stuff. And then the last few years, I've really narrowed it down to one thing. And that's wholesaling. And that's just changed the game for me because now we are doing, you know, 20 wholesale deals, 20 fixing flips, whatever. And now we can just focus on wholesaling. And this year, you know, we'll probably do, you know, a few hundred.

So, I mean, that was a game-changing for us. Focus and keep it simple. Cool. Awesome. Right. Before we let you go, man, where can people find out more about you? I know you got the podcast. How do they get there?

You name it. Yeah. Check out our website, simple wholesaling.com, is our website. We have blogs and our podcast is on there. If you are a real estate investor and you're interested in Indianapolis, we have another website, simple wholesaling. properties and that is our property website where you can see all of our properties inventory either one of those is a great place to find me cool and you're also active on bigger pockets

yeah i am yeah we're a blogger on bigger pockets definitely we have i don't know how many forum posts we have but we've been on there for a few years we had a couple thousand yeah so we're definitely really big awesome awesome well thank you for that thank you for that really appreciate you coming on the show brett thanks so much good luck to you going forward congrats on your your business and your growing family. And we'll see around the community. All right. Thanks, Josh and Brandon.

It was an honor. And I hope I see you guys in person sometime if I get out west. Two. Take care. All right. All right. All right. All right.

All right. All right. That was Brett Snodgrass here on the Bigger Pockets podcast show 231. Again, you can find the show notes of biggerpockets.com. So, show. Two, three, one. What do you say, man? That was awesome.

I love, I love the integrity that he brings to the real state business. He's totally focused on running a solid integrity full. Is that a word? Integrity-filled business. I don't know. Integrative? Integrative. Yeah, I don't know. Integrity-filled business. What's the word? I don't know. Somebody to let us know. Go ahead. Twit-G.D.'s versus a TVD business. Versus, yeah, that was not integrative-a-dive. Intarity of a div. Yeah, do not tweet, Josh. Toad Brandon, the actual word. At J.R. Dorkin. Brandon. I don't know what you told. That's my Instagram. My Twitter is at brand and BP. I should change that to.

beardy Brandon. Beardy Brandon is so catchy, right? And so it makes you sound so handsome and. Well, you need it to sound handsome because you serve are handsome. But my mom thinks I'm pretty darn handsome. Come on. Well, you know, she is your mom. She has my mom.

That's not, I'm not jogging your mom. Your mom's great. Wait, are you insulting by? No. You all heard it here on the Bigger podcast podcast. Josh, making fun of my mom. Your mom's got to love you. We like, with all your flaws, she has to love your flaws.

Well, you know what, Josh, I appreciate you to go back to today's quick tip. I appreciate you. I expect very little, but I appreciate you a lot. Thank you. Thank you. That means very little to me. It was a good show. I mean, a lot of cool stuff and definitely a lot of fun, as always.

Yeah. Well, let's get out of here. Yeah. I'm done. I've had enough of you today. Take us out of here, man. Oh, really? You're going to let me?

Well, I appreciate you. Wow. So nice. It's my expectation. are so low. All right. From the Bigger Pockets podcast, this is Josh Dorkin and Brandon Turner. Sign off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com.

Your home for real estate investing online. It's time for it. It's time. The Random 5. All right, for the last segment of the show here, this is a little hidden featured section. This is the random 5 and now Random 6. We decided to add one more question to it.

So now we're the random six. And we'll get some cool music for that. But there's just random questions. Okay. I like random. I'm always random. So let's do it. Good.

All right. Number one. Did you have any pets as a child? If so, what were they? I did. I had a dog named, chubby. Chubby.

Yeah, dog named Chubby. I don't know why we're chubby. He always had a complex because his name was chubby and I thought he was always fat. But yeah. All right. Next question. That was my nickname in life also. All right.

Next question. What? What do you consider to be the worst possible topping to put on a pizza? Oh, man. The worst topple, man. topping. Let's see. I would have to say, you know, I'm not a big anchovy person, so I'd have to say anchovy. I don't think fish and pizza go together. So, yes, yeah, I think that.

If you could hike anywhere in the world, where would it be? Hike. Definitely, I'd probably pick Denver, you know, or not, or Colorado, obviously. So hike the mountains. Yeah, let's take, I haven't been out west much, actually. I've just been born and raised Midwest, but I love to go out there and take my wife, take my kids, and do some hiking out west in Colorado. Sweet. One of our guys, Craig just got back this weekend. He did his first 14er.

Of course, this time of year, especially with the amount of rain and snow we've been getting, he said there's feet of snow at the top of this peak that he went on. So he was wholly unprepared. I actually was out in Denver. I went to a conference a few months ago, and it was pretty neat. I was first time I've ever been in Denver,

but definitely a cool place. Remind me kind of indie as far as like the downtown area. Yeah, it was really cool. Yeah, it's cool and it's definitely not like indie at all because we're not much A-Hulls. It's so much cooler. Not that everyone in India is an A-Hull, just the guy who threw the can at me back in the day. Have I ever told this story? A long time ago, I think you did a long time ago, but I don't remember it.

I was driving to college in my beat-up car with no air conditioning and had the windows open. and I don't know, if something happened, I got vapor lock in my car on, I think it was I-80 that drives through Indy. Is it I-80 that goes through Indianapolis? No. We got 65 and Highway 70. Oh, 70. Okay. Highway 70.

And it was in the sweltering summer. This was when they were doing all the road work on the 70, 20 years ago. And it was down to one lane and my car died on the highway on that one lane. and so I had to get out and push my car. And of course, not a soul, not a soul stop to help this person out. So I'm there pushing my car, steering my car on the one lane. Nobody's assisting me. Get over, you know, drenched, absolutely drenched in so it's like 95 degrees and like 10,000 percent of humidity.

And I'm just there. Like I can't even go in the car. It's too hot. I'm sweltering on the side of the highway there. and this, I don't know if it was a pickup or an RV or what it was, but some guys are driving by, they're like, hey, man, you look thirsty. I'm like, yeah, I'm dying. Here, they take a can of soda and chuck it at me, start laughing and drive off.

This was my experience with Indianapolis. Hey, that's how Hoosiers roll. I'm just kidding. And that's what I hate Indiana. I know. Wow. All right. We're going back on topic here.

Is it my turn? Yeah, it's my turn. Okay. When do you feel impatient? It's not counting the time that you were in your car behind me on I-70 laughing and watching me suffer. When do I feel impatient?

Oh, man, definitely. Yesterday, my wife and I were driving two hours in our minivan because we have three kids, like I said. Man level. Yeah. And my two-year-old always copies my three-and-a-half-year-old. So they decided for the entire two hours to say mommy and daddy consecutively for about two hours. Wow.

Mommy and daddy for about two hours. So that was pretty, I got a little impatient with that. So like, but if you have kids, you just have to learn how to block out the noise. But that was a ride. So when my, when my kids decided to scream for like, two hours. That's by when I get impatient. That's funny because every time my little girl says, mommy or daddy, I like cry because I'm like,

ah! She just said my name. You know, it was cute for the first 15 minutes. And then, yeah. I think that goes away a little bit, Brandon, when they get to be like two and three. And you're like, oh, yeah, you're doing this just to be annoying. Yeah. Yeah.

But I'll tell you a quick story. We've actually labeled my, we're actually going to maybe brand this. So nobody steal this. But my son, my two-year-old, he just celebrated his second birthday. And for some reason, he's a baby beater. So we're going to put him like one of those white tank tops because whenever he sees a baby, he goes up and he's really nice and he pats it on the head. But then he, you know, decides to smack the baby.

And he's literally a baby feeder. Rocking the wife feeder. Wow. So he has an issue. We're going to send him to like our support groups here soon. Jeez. All right. Wow.

All right. Number five. What would you do? Actually, I'm going to go with this one. Has a self-help book ever helped you? And if so, what was it?

And I know we already talked about the one thing and I should I pour dad, but. Self-help book. Yeah, I just read a book. I would really recommend called Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy.

I have. And because if you're an entrepreneur, yeah, you definitely should read that. I have enough time. Yeah. It was an awesome book because what happens to entrepreneurs, they get sucked into their day to days. And I always get sucked into my emails, right?

So if you guys can't, have you ever had those days for like, you can't get out of your email? Because as soon as you, you know, answer two of them, you have 10 more that pile on. And sometimes that's me. So it's a really great book. It's definitely helped me, you know, now I check my email a couple times a day. and one thing that's really helped me with it just helps me as a father, as

a relationship guy, I want to always be in the moment and if you're totally sucked in to whatever you're doing in the business, you can't ever be in the moment. And that's been a goal for me is with my kids or whatever is just to always be in the moment

and not be thinking about some stupid thing. Great advice. Leave the cell phone on the counter and be there with your kids Yep, yep, yep. Last question of the random six. Can you juggle?

I can juggle for probably, I say, I'm a good 45 second juggler. Of 17 balls? No, I can do three. If you toss another one in there, I'm going to drop them right away. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. I can juggle one for like a long time. Just like one ball, just toss it up.

I'm really good at that, yeah. That's awesome. You should like go. professional. I might. A one ball juggler. She's got to the circus. I don't know if I want to be known as the one ball juggler.

All right, we're getting out of here. All right, guys. Thank you. 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.

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