BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 33: How to Close 27 Deals in Your First Year While Working Full Time with Sam Craven

Episode Date: August 29, 2013

On today’s episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we sit down with a relatively new investor who is absolutely crushing it as a flipper and wholesaler – Sam Craven. Sam has an incredible story of learning to fight through the initial problems that all new investors face and achieving a lot of success while investing during his weekends and evenings. Sam has a ton of great tips on marketing, making a plan, running an investment business, and a lot more. Don’t miss this show! Read the transcript to episode 33 with Sam Craven here. In This Show, We Cover Working with family without killing each other Closing 27 deals during the first year in business Getting leads with direct mail Investing while holding a full time job Partnering with other investors when first beginning How to lower your direct mail response rate … and why you want to Tips on online advertising Making a plan for future growth How to stand out from the “bad wholesaler” crowd How to build a sophisticated buyer’s list How to handle major problems when they come up Links from the Show BiggerPockets Pro Memberships LoopNet.com Books Mentioned in the Show The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller The E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber Tweetable Topics “To grow as a real estate investor, get involved in the conversations about real estate.” (Tweet This!) “Transparency is key when attracting clients, partners, and investors.” (Tweet This!) “Good deals are found through relationships.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Sam Sam’s BiggerPockets Profile Sam’s Website – Senna Homes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with Brandon Turner, our most excellent, excellent co-host. Hey, Brandon. Hey, Josh. What's going on? You know, I'm all right. Summer is, summer's over. Kids are going to school.

You know, life is moving on. Nice. You know what I did this week? I have no idea. My first eviction is over. Oh, congratulations. That's good, doesn't it? Yeah, Sheriff came yesterday and took the lady away.

Really? Yeah, all her stuff is sitting out at the curb. Anybody wants it. There's a whole pile of free stuff. Oh, jeez. Nice, nice. Well, you know, that's part of the life of being a landlord, I think. It is.

But honestly, it was not that bad. I mean, my attorney handled it. He knew what he was doing. He was competent. He took care of the whole thing. Not a big deal. I mean, it's going to cost me a little bit of money. I don't know how much yet, but yeah, it wasn't too bad.

You have any feedback on that? Any tips you want to give to folks listening who have never evicted and may be facing one or just to kind of prep them for an impending eviction other than have a good lawyer? Yeah, I mean, that is the biggest thing is have a lawyer that does it from the start. I mean, I should learn how to do it, you know, because I'll probably do a lot of them over my career, but I kind of learned while he was doing it. He kind of walked me through what he was doing. but yeah, have a good attorney and, yeah, don't break any laws.

That's a very good tip because their self-help evictions are a fast way to get yourself on the front page of any and every paper. Yeah, I heard this story one time about a couple who wanted their tenant out and they didn't like him at all, so they went underneath into the basement. It was like a multifamily, and they took a chainsaw and they cut all the joists on the floor so that when they weren't there, the floor would collapse and the people would suddenly be no longer there. That's the dumbest thing I've heard.

They're in jail right now. Yeah, they are. But yeah, true story. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I've heard some bad ones. That's probably at or near the top. Wow.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. All right, man. Well, let's move on to the show. We've got a really cool show ahead. And before we get into it, I'm just going to run on into our quick tip. All right, today's quick tip. If you guys have ever wondered how different people have company logos in their Bigger Pockets form signatures, all you have to do is create a business profile in Bigger Pockets, which is totally free.

However, in order for your logo to actually appear, you would need to upgrade to a pro account, not a Pro Basic, but a Pro Account, where you can set up this advanced enhanced signature, which will show up below all your posts on the forums. So think about what that could do for your networking and for your branding. Members and non-members could see that, could see your brand when they read your post. It's a great way to build up your name and your company's name. So in order to do that, just upgrade to BiggerPockets Pro at biggerpockets.com slash pro.

And we'll put the link there in the show notes at BiggerPockets.com slash show 33. That's right. Show 33. But, yeah, listen, so today we've got an interesting, interesting story. We got a guy who, you know, I think is fascinating. This is one of those investors who said, you know, one day I'm going to be a real estate investor. And, you know, he didn't just start haphazardly buying property or anything. He set out to create a plan. and he figured out how he was going to do everything and plotted it.

And it's been working wonders. So let's talk about him. Sam, Sam Craven. He's from the Houston area and works a full-time job. But he's actually been building a really active investment company doing both flipping and wholesaling during the nights and evenings over the past year plus. And this guy has done a ton of deals. It's actually going to blow your mind.

So stay tuned and listen up because. the actual number of deals he has done since getting started is crazy. It's crazy. So he's in a place that a lot of you guys who might be listening are in currently, which is why we wanted to talk to Sam today. So last thing before we go into the interview, please remember guys to jump onto our show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 33 and leave them there.

Again, questions, comments, thoughts, feedback, anything like that, definitely be sure to get back to him. All right. So let's get this going. Sam, welcome aboard, man. Nice to have you. I appreciate it, guys. Really glad that you were able to have me. Yeah, we're glad to have you.

So let's let me still Josh's line here and let's jump right into it. That's funny. You know, I'm a funny guy. What kind of investing do you do? I mean, what's your thing? Well, my father and I, we've built a business here in Houston, service in the Houston metropolitan area, and we buy houses to wholesale, to flip,

to do kind of what we call wholesaling, and we're also expanding into multifamily. Nice. Nice. And how did you end up getting interested in this whole thing? Was it your dad's idea, or was it your plan? Well, it was kind of, well, I guess I should start from the beginning.

So about two years ago, I bought my first house for my wife and I to live in. We were one year out of college. We bought a foreclosure in the woodlands that was, which is just suburb of Houston, that was essentially a crack house. It had been vacant for a few years. People were squatting in there. You bought a crack house for your wife to live in? Yeah.

That's awesome. How did you feel about that? She was not happy about it. Okay, just checking. She was not happy about it at all. She likes it now. But, you know, starting off, she wasn't terribly excited. Gotcha, gotcha.

Once she saw what we could turn the house into, she was absolutely on board, because it was way more house than we could afford it otherwise. Gotcha. Gotcha. So, but anyhow, we purchased the house, kind of realized that, hey, you know, we just signed on the dotted line, came into a quiet. came into quite a bit of equity because of it. And it was kind of like an aha moment for me where it's like, well, what if I did this a couple more times? So from there, I was kind of going through some career changes and just studied, studied for about a year.

And in that same time, my dad, who's now my business partner, was in the process of attempting to purchase a local business. And it just fell through. It just wasn't working. And right about the time that I was ready to start pulling the trigger and start doing some marketing for some wholesaling, I was talking it over with my dad and we decided to go into business together. And that was July of last year. Okay.

So July of 2012, you decided to get into the real estate game. Yep, it's go time. Okay, so we're going to come back to that. It's now August, 2013. Right. How much real estate have you guys done? We've purchased $2.4 million of real estate and we've sold 1.5. Nice. How many deals does that work out to? It's 27 deals.

Whoa. So you have done 27 deals in a little over a year. That's awesome. Wow. Wow. Wow. The reality is it's our first six months, we did three deals. The rest of those deals have been since January. So you're the exception to the Get Rich Quick Rule. It's a lot of work.

I'm not sure it's. Yep, that's what I know. And that's what I knew you would say. I mean, this is not a, hey, you know, set it and forget it, as they say, you got to bust your chops to make this happen. Definitely so. And having a business partner, especially someone like my father has helped us immensely. I mean, he has a lot of experience on, you know, building companies and turning around companies.

So it's been great. Well, how has that been for you working with family? I know some people say it's terrible, don't do it. Some are okay with it. What are your thoughts? Starting off was rough. I mean, you know, we, my father and I, we always had a good relationship. But, you know, living with your father and knowing your father and working with your father are two different things.

So it was definitely a learning curve in the beginning, just, you know, as with any other partners. but at the end of the day, I know there's no one else out there that has our best interest at heart like family. Is there anything that people who are listening can do to make sure that the working relationship with, you know, say if they decide to work with family? Do you have any tips on how to do that without killing each other and destroying your entire family cohesion? Remove emotion is the best thing. It's the best thing I could say. My dad's got a really good business head on their shoulders. And it just gets complicated if things get emotional.

I mean, you guys have your family. There's history there. And that's not always the case when you're just bringing in a business partner. So if you guys can be honest with yourselves and remove emotion from discussions, I would say that just gets you through 99% of it. But it's been an incredibly rewarding experience doing this with my father. That's great. I agree.

That's great. So it was definitely easier than it, you know, said than done, but it's wise. Yeah. Yep. All right. So how did you guys actually get going? You know, what was the first deal? And, you know, why did you decide to do that?

Outside of the crack house, of course. Well, yeah. Actually, I still live in that crack house. Was that the crack house we see behind you with the nice ceiling fan? I don't see any pipes, you know, on the counter. That's good. No, needles, no pipes were, uh, We're cleaned up now. And actually, I'm moving out here in a couple weeks. We just bought another house.

So this is going to be a rental house now. Awesome. But what was your question? So what was the first deal after that? How did you really start to ramp things up? Okay. Well, so when we decided we wanted to do it, we set a marketing budget. And we set some short-term goals for ourselves. That was how many houses we wanted to buy a month, what we were willing to spend, starting off and kind of choosing the marketing avenues that we wanted to go down. And the first one that we chose was direct mail. And the first goal that we set was we wanted to buy one house a month and spend $1,000

a month on direct mail. So we started direct mail. First month, nothing was really happening. Second month, nothing was really happening. Toward the end of the second month, we got our first real promising call. It was a call that I have not heard since. It was one of those ones where someone left a message and they said, I'm a motivated seller. I want to sell fast.

Let's get this thing done. I'm willing to take bottom dollar for it. It's never happened again and probably never will happen again. But this particular deal, it was kind of outside of Houston, a little outside of what we know. It was a house, Pier and Beam house, had some pretty bad foundation. shoes and it was on six acres. And we weren't exactly sure what to do, but we knew we were getting it for a good price. So what we wound up doing was contacting some local investors in town, seeing if they'd be willing to work with us on this one and see if we could learn

from them. And so we brought it in a local investor. They went out with the house with us and looked at it and met with the people. And basically they put it under contract and agreed to pay us a $2,500 finder's fee. Not a home run. We learned a whole heck of a lot, especially for that being our first deal. But, you know, if that deal would have come to us three months later, we could have turned that into a $20,000 wholesale deal easy.

But definitely don't regret it. Still have a great relationship with the investor that helped us. Still lean on them every now and then. So it was definitely positive. Okay. So let me ask you about that because I think a lot of people come out of the gate and they're like, all right, well, I get the concepts. I'm ready to go.

I'm going to start putting some money down in marketing. I'll drop a thousand this month, a thousand next month. And all of a sudden, somebody calls me, and then they are scared to death. Holy cow, what do I do? You know, this guy actually wants to sell the property. I don't have contracts. I don't have paperwork. I don't know where to go.

I don't know what to do. What kind of advice would you give to them? I mean, clearly you met up and partnered up with somebody who can help you through that process, right? I mean, would you say that that was the best move you could have made possibly? At that time, absolutely. We made the best move we could with everything that we knew at the time. And we knew we didn't know a lot then. Yeah.

So really, that's where networking comes in and going out there and meeting people and picking their brain. I mean, that got us that deal. otherwise we wouldn't have had the confidence to go forward to that deal and make any money on it. Okay. Okay. Well, and I think it's important that you have the deal. I mean, like, people always say if you have the deal, the money or the figuring out what to do with it is the easy part. So once you can get the deal, then I think if people are having struggle or struggling and getting going, they probably just don't have the deal yet.

Right. Yeah. And so let me really quickly jump back on that one again. So a thousand a month on direct mail. What was the strategy? So how did you market? Was it yellow letters? Was it, you know, and who'd you market to specifically?

It was yellow letters, and we marketed to absentee and high equity owners. Within, I believe we picked five or six zip codes within Houston to market to. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Nice. Okay. All right.

So you get this first deal. You wholesale it. You find the guy. He helps you out. That's awesome. Now what? On to the next one. So continue marketing, continue direct mailing.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one thing that we learned a hard lesson early on is after those first three months, you know, we got two deals. We got another deal the following month. And then we changed our marketing. We started, you know, we chose different zip codes. We chose postcards. You know, we changed our marketing.

We changed it too much. We changed it too soon. And the phone stopped ringing. I mean, we were, you know, running around pulling our hair out, wondering what the heck was going on. But after we changed it, we did the same thing we did before. You know, we leaned on the people that we knew that were experts in direct mail. Actually, someone who we met through bigger pockets. Got us on the phone, talked us through a couple deals, talked us through how to get our marketing back on track.

And by the end of December, actually, I believe in December, no, excuse me, November, we purchased our very first. whole flip property off of our direct mail. And so that went early January and didn't make a killing on it. I think we only made $23, $24,000 on it. You said whole flip. That was a flip. I mean, like, that was one we actually went and did the renovation. Oh, okay.

Like a whole entire flip. Yeah, yeah. I just wholesale. I thought you just invented a whole new concept. No. The whole flip. Yes. I've got a course for $997 on hole flipping.

Just call me at josh's holeflip.com and I'll teach you everything you need to know. Okay. I'm going to go register that domain now. No, but actually, can you tell us about that flip? I mean, what was the house like? What did you do? And what did you learn in that flip?

So the house was awarded to a gentleman in a divorce and took us a long time to negotiate. the purchase price on that one. And it was actually pretty interesting because that was he wound up being our first private and private lender. He wound up, you know, we were about $5,000 apart on price. And it was a pretty thin deal as it was. We really kind of just wanted to get it just to do it and learn. But my dad wound up negotiating with him. He owner financed the house back to us. So all we had to come up with then was the renovations. So we got our first private lender and our first flip with our very first kind of all in one one swipe. That's cool. Did he own it free and clear? Did you do like a

subject to? He owned it free and clear. Nice. Yeah. Cool. Cool. All right. So why did you decide to suddenly start flipping houses? I mean, you'd been wholesaling, you know, less work. You don't have to worry about contractors and all the headaches. come with doing that, what was the motivation at that point? Well, that was all part of the business plan, quite frankly, was to put together the marketing strategy to bring us leads, and from those leads turn that into money somehow. Whether that was wholesaling, whether that was flipping, it didn't matter to us. We knew we could put the processes in place to manage the flips, just needed to learn a little

bit more about, you know, industry, managing contractors, those kinds of things. So when this property came along where the numbers looked good for a flip, we jumped on it. It was ready to go. Got it. So you said earlier you got three projects done in the first six months and then the rest of them have been since then. So I'm wondering, is that because of, you know, a lot of the people we've had on the show like Sharon Bornholt or Jerry Puckett have talked about that most of the deals come from later direct mailings, like after they get three, four, five, six millions. Have you found that to be true as well in your case? Is that why it took so long? Absolutely. Absolutely. So the reason it took so long was two things. We got impatient and didn't let

the direct mail work and change things. And then so once we finally changed things three months in, you know, it took three months before we really started getting any good leads off that direct mail. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the process a little bit. And I know we've we've covered this in previous shows, but I'm just interested. So you send out your direct mail, you got these postcards, you find somebody to help you make them, you send them out, and you put a phone number on there, or you link to a website. Did you do both? Do you always go to send them to the phone? And if you do send them to the phone, are you answering the phone calls? Do you pay a company to actually screen it and have an answering service, or do you just send it to a voicemail, like a Google

voice. So what we did, once we realized what our mistake was kind of third quarter or fourth quarter last year, we really ramped up our marketing to the point where late last year we were spending about $4,000 a month on direct mail because we wanted to be fully invested in it. We wanted to start 2013 off right. So when we were doing that, we were doing it with yellow letters. And we were getting about 400, 450 calls a month and they were going to voicemail. Half of them wouldn't leave a message and then half people that left a message, if not less, were just worth not calling back. So it was getting overwhelming and, you know, with my dad being the one answering the calls, he hardly had time to do anything else. So we made the decision in February to switch to post

cards. It allowed us to lower our costs. We actually brought postcard fulfillment in-house. So we lowered our cost quite a bit. We could send more postcards per dollar and also our response rate dropped from postcards, which sounds like a negative, but when you realize that we went from 20% of the calls being worth even looking into to 90% of the calls being worth going out to look at the house. It really cut down the time taken to deal with all these incoming phone calls. So our productivity went up. Yeah. Yeah. That's been our experience with it. That's really interesting. So how do you know who to call back? I mean, what was the indicator in those phone calls of the bad calls? Well, we'd call them all back. And so it was real time consuming. We wouldn't know until we talk to

them. So now that our response rate is so much lower with these postcards, but the people tend to be much more motivated, it's going direct to my dad's cell phone. So Robert picks up the phone and talks to every single person to calls. They'll get a live person right then and there. Got it. Got it. And did you, but previous to that, you were not answering the calls. You were, you were saying to them to. Right. It was going to voicemail. And what we would do is we had a account set up with an, you know, voice over IP company. And then each type of direct mail would have its own phone number so we could track, you know, how's absentee doing, how's high equity doing, how's probate doing. So we could capture those metrics and see, you know,

how many deals we're getting off each one. Got it. That's cool. And when you switched, you're still marketing to all those different types of properties, but you're just, you know, you're just taking those calls and figuring it out as you go along. That's correct. We're still marketing to all that, And we're also doing internet marketing, SEO and Google AdWords. And we're about to stop doing our newspaper advertising. It's just quit working for us. So let's talk real quick about the Google AdWords. That's something that interests me a lot.

Like, how is that working for you? You're getting a good return? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, when we have a website and, you know, when I paid the gentleman to build it, he did some basic SEO, but it's not great. It's like 50% there.

So if you search for any of the keywords that I've paid to show up for with Google AdWords, our website doesn't show up. So as far as, you know, when I started experimenting with AdWords, we were immediately showing up in Google, which is just, it's worth it. We were getting good leads. A couple of our big, big flips have come from AdWords. And so recently we're going to continue spending about $1,000 a month on Google AdWords, but we're also going to be spending money on SEO.

The websites in the process of being redone currently, and the SEO is going to go full bore here probably by the end of this month. Do you have any tips on the AdWords stuff? I'm sure you don't want to give away all your secrets in terms of what exactly you're putting on there, but would you be willing to share some of it at all? I can share that it's an incredibly frustrating experience if you're not familiar with Google AdWords because the first month we did it,

you know, I was spending $1,500 and we got almost no leads, but we were getting, you know, 10,000 clicks. And it's just, the best advice I can give since I'm not very good at it is to hire a professional. Yeah, and Google AdWords is really easy to suddenly lose, like you said, $1,500 and, and, yes, it is. I had a campaign going years ago, like, for some, I don't remember what I was doing. I was trying to advertise for some house I was selling or something.

Anyway, I forgot to set, like, a daily limit or something like that. And I spent $300, like, overnight on something I was doing. That might have been Facebook advertising. I don't remember. Anyway, I spent, like, $300 overnight for nothing. Like, I got no leads out of it. And, yeah, I can definitely sympathize with that. We blew a lot of money the first couple months.

And as I learned a little bit, it got better and better. and we're doing pretty good now. We've got at least, you know, we're buying about one house every two months off of Google AdWords, and every house that we get off AdWords pays for itself 10, 20 times over. So it's definitely worth it.

Do you happen to know off the top of your head what your cost per click is? Like, how much are you paying Google for each of those clicks? Right now, about $9 to $10. Okay. $9 to $10 per click? Per click.

So it can show up as much as it wants. to, we can show a million times, but if somebody doesn't click it, you don't pay. Exactly. And, you know, I've set a daily limit, like you said. I learned that lesson in the hard way. Yeah. And, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it.

I mean, it sounds like you're targeting some pretty long-tail stuff, some, you know, really very, very specific. We got much more specific with it because in the beginning it was just real broad, and we were getting a bunch of clicks and we're paying a bunch of money and the leads weren't any good. So I found that if, you know, I can bid higher for clicks and get better leads. Yeah. Yeah. So, no, that's great. That's great.

All right. So I just want to kind of work really quickly through that. We talked about that first flip. Now, you know, 27 deals. My goodness. That's, you know, that's a considerable amount of deals to do. So obviously you guys systematized and built up. And you said from the beginning, I'm going to spend X amount of dollars.

That's going to amount to X amount of leads and started to turn it into a formula for yourselves. But how do you do 27 deals in a year as somebody who probably doesn't have the systems yet? How did you start to ramp that up? We did a lot of stuff ahead of time. We had the systems in place. I was building a buyer's list from day one. And we were meeting with contractors from day one. We were planning ahead.

We got together, we set our goals, and so we knew what to plan for. So even though we weren't there yet, and even though we were getting frustrated with the things that were coming in right this second, we knew we were going to be at a different place as we grew month to month. So we set everything up ahead of time so that when we got to that point, when we finally got that wholesale property that we were ready to send that to our buyers list. We had a buyer's list. We had the email campaign set up. We had the marketing set up. We had everything we needed to put in that email to sell that property. So that when the deal started coming,

it was ready to go. So what does that mean? Actually, I've got two questions. One is, what does that mean to set up? What do you really need to do A? And B, you know, how I know we like to rank on the gurus here and aren't super fond of them in many ways. But, you know, these guys are saying you can be a real estate investor and do it without having any cash. You don't need any money to be an investor. You can just jump in and start doing it. And so do you believe in that? And I guess those are two totally different questions.

So hit one and hit the other. Which one you want me to hit first? Oh, man. Start with the money. and then we'll go to the plan. Okay. As far as wholesaling without any money, if you find a property on the MLS,

you can wholesale it and it takes very little money out of your own pocket. You can find your buyers on Craigslist, which is free, and you can find your sellers on the MLS, which is usually free to get on in certain areas. But the reality is you're not going to find great properties on the MLS. You're going to have to spend some money, to do some marketing. We've secured properties for as little as $10 in the contract, but we probably spent, you know, if you look at it over the course of a few months, we probably spent $500,000

to get that house. So while it's much easier to wholesale with a much smaller budget, it definitely requires some money and some proper planning to do it. Yeah. Okay. And so you did talk about planning and how does one do that right how do i say hey i want to i want to i want to ramp up this business i want 30 deals in the next you know year and a half and i'm willing to put the money down to do it i'm going to spend the money in the marketing and the infrastructure but how do you how do you plan for that and had you know what did what did that plan look like to you well i think yeah i think the most important thing are setting goals um you know we have five year five year goals We have three-year goals.

We have one-year goals. We have six-month goals, and we have next week goals. So your five-year goal is going to dictate when you back it all out what your one-week goal is going to be. I mean, how are you going to get, you know, you keep the end in mind. So our goal has been to build a single family flipping business that buys 10 houses a month. That's what we want to do. We also want to have a business that buys distressed. apartments and multi-family.

So we start with the end in mind. We know, okay, so if we want to be buying 10 houses a month, how much do we need to spend on marketing? Well, okay, so we don't have that much marketing right now. So how much can we spend on marketing right now and how many deals will that get us? So we put the systems in place where we can track all that stuff, see how we're doing, see what our return on investment is on our marketing, and adjust. because what our goal was in the beginning is going to change.

It changes consistently. But as long as you have the reporting and the systems and the personnel in place to track that stuff, it becomes much easier to hit those goals and to grow at the rate that we want to grow. Yeah. No, I think that's awesome. I compare it kind of to a plane. Like when a plane takes off from, let's say, New York to L.A., it doesn't always shoot straight. I think actually Glenn Schworm said the exact same thing in a comment today on a blog post.

He said like when a plane takes off, you know, it's constantly altering direction. I mean, the goal is kind of the same, but it's constantly changing a little bit just to match with whatever the world's doing, whatever things are doing. So, yeah, I think that's awesome. And I mean, another part of that, I think, is people, everyone listening right now is doing exactly what I think people should do is that's just getting involved in the conversations. Just by hearing us talk about what your plan is, that helps other people figure out what their plan should be, especially if they want to get into wholesaling or flipping. Yeah, and I did a lot of that starting off, reading, listening to podcasts. I spent a lot of time on BiggerPockets. Where?

BiggerPockets.com. That's a cool side. I like that place. Yeah. Spent a lot of time on bigger pockets, learning, asking questions, being the newbie. And it's just been an incredible resource. Just suck up as much information as you can. can so that when you're ready to pull the trigger and do something, you've got the confidence

to do it. Yeah. No, that's awesome. Well, cool. Let's move on a little bit. I'm wondering what kind of properties you're looking for, whether you're wholesaling or flipping. What are you looking for? So when it comes to wholesaling, our whole business model is kind of, I might offend some people when I say this, but in Houston, there are a lot of wholesalers that just aren't good at what they do. They pay too much for a property. Then they try to take too much profit out of the property, and then they try to sell the property. And they do that by not being honest about what the repairs are to get the house rent ready or flip ready, and not being honest about the ARV, knowing that some people don't have access to the MLS to pull proper comps. ARV is after repair value. I'm sorry about that.

That's okay. This is an acquies. We're just helping those people who don't know. Yeah. So what we did is we built our marketing model and our purchasing model around the fact that every property that we buy for wholesale is going to be given, is going to be accompanied by a line-by-line general contractor quote that is absolutely executable by a real general contractor. And our ARVs are going to be conservative.

Our after-repair value is going to be conservative. our rents are going to be conservative and be real. So, you know, we make our money when we buy the house, not when we sell our house. And I think that's something a lot of wholesalers forget. It goes the same for flipping. I mean, if you can't get the house for a good price and you're going to try to pass it off as this great investment to a bunch of other people, you're going to piss off a lot of people in the process and you're going to lose customers.

So we always sell our properties. at a fair price with 100% visibility of everything that the property needs. And because of that, because we do that so diligently, we haven't held a single property for more than 48 hours when we go to wholesale it. I mean, they absolutely disappear. I'm going to jinx myself just because I said that. But I mean, that's what we work towards. I mean, maybe that means we're not taking quite as big of a margin as we could, but the

reality is the smallest wholesale deal we've ever done. $8,000. Yeah. Except for that first $2,500 one. Yeah, I'll expect, except for that little guy. I hardly count that. We're not going to forget about that. That was a finder's fee.

That was a finder's fee. Okay, okay. Parse it a little bit. Okay, that's fine. Call it what you will. No, I think that advice is amazing. I mean, like, I wish every wholesaler in the world could just rewind that last five minutes and listen to it like 10 times because I wasn't listening.

What do you say? to sum up it means get a good deal like you have to get a good deal stop stop don't be afraid to pass up a deal yeah i think people just get emotional they get like you know oh somebody called me therefore it's a good deal yeah yeah well and you know in our last podcast uh show 32 with with will bernard we we talked about that a little bit as well uh you you can't chase a deal at southern california is crazy it's hot you know uh yeah these properties are coming on the market and they're always being bid up. And I think, you know, just so many new investors in particular find themselves chasing deals.

And frankly, I think, I think there's some sophisticated investors who are screwing with these guys too. I think there's a lot of people who are putting in offers just to watch people chase it up and, you know, I don't know, man. And you're seeing people buy these properties that they think they're going to flip and they're paying ridiculous amounts of money. There's not a chance in hell that they're going to make any money on it. I don't know. It just baffles me. Yeah. I see that a lot in the Houston market.

There's people that are going in. They're buying properties to wholesale. And their whole customer base are people that are new and don't know what they're doing. And when the market turns and things are a little bit different than they are now, they're going to be out of business. Yeah. Well, and I think that that's one of the things. You know, those guys have zero credibility in my book. And frankly, I hope anyone who does that is goes out of business because I think that's probably one of the scummiest things you can do is prey on newbies who don't know anything and, you know, unsophisticated, quote unquote, investors. It's awful. All right. So you talk about not going after the unsophisticated then buyer. How do you find the sophisticated ones? Like who are you selling all these deals so quickly to? Because of relationships, honestly. We work hard to build relationships with our buyers.

We have a buyer's list of 990 people, I think, at this point. But 90% of my properties, 90% of our properties are sold to the same five or six people. And there are some that are in Houston. We've got some buyers that are out of the country. We've got some buyers that are on the far east and far west coast. So I think we find those buyers by marketing for those particular buyers, by networking in our local area, but also by providing a product that instills confidence so that if there's someone in Washington, D.C. that wants to buy one of our properties, they know exactly what they're getting. They don't have to fly down here to see that property. And they'll buy from us time and time again. And I think that's something that a lot of people have repeated over and again on the show. You know, your 900 strong buyers list is really a five strong buyers list, a 10 strong buyers list.

I mean, you know, the bulk of those people, maybe somebody will eventually buy who's on that list. But, you're really going to be reselling to folks, the same small group of people. Absolutely. Yeah. We've experienced the same thing. So you don't need to pay like a nine-nine. 97 a month plan to find a buyer's list or anything. No. How are you? You said marketing for them.

And networking, obviously, we understand there's, you know, good ways to do that. Are you doing anything like direct mail for buyers or did you do anything like that? No. No, all of our buyers are coming to us through local networking events. We've been asked to speak at a couple Rias here in town. That definitely brings in a lot of buyers, potential buyers. And then also, Craigslist. I've got 10 ads that I run on Craigslist.

I update every Monday morning. And that's usually good for adding about 10, about 10 buyers a week. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking about wholesaling or flipping your first property, but not sure where to start. The truth is, deals don't just fall into your lap anymore. You need to go out and create opportunities.

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I mean, you've got a job. That's correct. I have a full-time job. And when you started, you had a full-time job. Well, you had just transitioned, I think you had said, right? I'd been with, yes, yeah. Yeah, okay. And so, you know, that's pretty impressive. You know, I think a lot of people think, hey, I can't do this while I work.

I mean, I've got to focus on my job and how am I going to find the time? Obviously, it's night and weekends, right? I mean, you get, and in your case, obviously, having a partner who's available potentially frees up a lot of your kind of during the daytime, right? Right. Having the partner is huge because he's in the business full time. Yeah. So if he needs to run out and manage a project, he's there. If he needs to go meet with a seller, he's there.

I can answer the phone during the day and manage some of the back office stuff. But I take care of all of those things, you know, after 5 o'clock. or on the weekends. So it's been a long, 13 months of lots of long hours and lots of working weekends. Do you have any tips for folks who are working a job on how to get started or where is it pretty much everything we've covered already? You guys have done a pretty good job of covering it in some of the previous podcasts. I would say that having a partner that you can trust is definitely spoiling. but also being willing to just work and work hard.

You know, 5 o'clock, when you get home from your job, sit down and start cruising the MLS or start contacting marketing companies to start handling your direct mail. You've got to put in the effort to do it. But, you know, there are a lot of tools out there to make it to where you can take some of the burden off of you. Companies that will handle all of your fulfillment, companies that will handle answering all the calls

and just sending you the leads. So there's definitely a way to do it. All that stuff takes a little bit extra cash, but it's definitely doable. Nice. Cool. Well, let's talk real quick about financing your flips. How are you doing that?

We have private lenders that we work with. Okay. And how did you find these people? Networking in town. The local Ria clubs. So I can't, you know, you don't just put ads up and say, Hey, no, no, no. I need a private lender. No, I see people doing that, and it's really, really scary.

I mean, you're breaking all kinds of laws by saying, you know, we're looking for a private lender for this project and we'll pay 14%. You just can't do that. We believe from the very beginning that in order to raise the money for our project, we couldn't just find the project and then raise the money. We need to have those relationships in place. and with all of our different private lenders, it's been a long-term relationship. I mean, it takes time to build up that trust for someone to hand over a quarter million dollars to you. So we take that relationship very seriously. We protect our investors.

We have all the systems in place to protect them. They understand every facet of our business. And if they want to come on to our work sites, we let them on. If they want to understand our books, we show them our books. Yeah. Transparency. Yep. Okay, so how do you hook the first one?

I mean, you know. It's kind of that chicken and the egg thing again. Yeah. Yeah. What comes first? Yeah. Is it a deal? I mean, how did it work out?

I told you, you know, our first lender was basically the homeowner on our first flip. That's right. With him, he just had to have confidence in us and our ability to do the job. And when we finished that job, he was upset because he knew the paychecks. You're going to stop coming. But, you know, landing the first one was a lot of conversations. I believe conversations over three months in order to get, you know, the lender comfortable with who we are, and then, of course, us comfortable with the lender and how they lend and

what their terms are. It's a long process and understanding relationships and how to build relationships and how to keep your partners because they are essentially partners in our business. I mean, their success is dependent on our success and our success is dependent on their success. Is there like a standard set of terms that you guys usually use or does that really vary between lenders? It varies between lenders. Okay.

Got it. Got it. No, that's great. Yeah, I think it's one of the challenges that most investors come to is, hey, I've done a couple wholesales or I used hard money. Now I'm ready to ramp up. and I need private money. I don't want to pay the hard money rates.

What do I do? And how do I start doing it? So good advice. Good advice. Okay, so how do you adjust when things don't go according to plan? And I'm sure your business over 27 deals hasn't been perfect. I'm sure things have gone wrong. Yes.

What do you do? How do you get through it? The best thing I could say is have good people around you. You know, it's tough to have a plan in, place for every little thing that'll go wrong. But just stay calm, focus on the end goal, and have some good advisors, have some good people around you that you can go and approach and say, hey, I'm in way over my head or I made this mistake. What would you do? When something goes wrong, we wind up calling quite a few people and getting advice. Usually the last people

we call are the attorneys because they charge and that is what it is. But, But there's a wealth of knowledge out there if you're able to go and network with some people. And you can find answers on a place like, say, BiggerPockets.com, for example. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. So there's actually been quite a few times. When we were running into our issues with our marketing, you know, there three months in,

I went to Bigger Pockets. I started a thread. And someone on there, Michael Quarles actually reached out. and he coached us through it and got us headed down the right road. That's great. That's great. You know, what I do to plan for things like that when things go wrong, I actually had these these plexiglass windows installed in my house.

So when I take my laptop and chuck it against the window, it doesn't go flying outside. What about the laptop? Oh, you know, just buy another one. No, that's good advice. I mean, it's, you know, investing can be frustrating and clearly things aren't always going to go right. No, definitely not. Yeah. Definitely not.

That's kind of what keeps things interesting, actually. If everything went right all the time, it probably wouldn't be nearly as fun. Yeah, right on. All right, well, let's, you know, before we start getting into our, you know, fire rounds and other fancy things, rumor has it that you are you're trying to pick up a fairly fancy property you're trying to pick up I think it's like a 7,642 unit property is that what to do it?

I'm not sure fancy would be the word to use it. It's a 319 unit apartment complex that's come to us through relationships that we've started to build with brokers as we've pushed to build our multifamily business This is a property that we've partnered with on someone locally who has about $8 million and I think it was like 450 doors or so under management of apartments. And this has been a property we've been negotiating on for the last 60 to 90 days.

And just recently earlier this week got word that things are moving forward on it. That's great. So this particular property, though, like I said, it's not exactly fancy. It's 319 units. It's 20% occupied. Whoa. And all the buildings need roofs. 80% of the units need AC units.

And it all needs quite a bit of work, but there's a huge potential for upside. Wow. Wow. So finding a 20% occupied building has got to be a diamond in the rough. I'm sure your cost per door is pretty good. or at least you haven't closed so you will be pretty good when it's all sudden done because it's going to require

a lot of money to fix this place up. Right, so our acquisition cost per door is incredibly low and we feel we already have an estimate for getting all the renovations done inside and out. So we feel pretty confident this is going to be a heck of a deal.

We're in the process now of raising the $3 to $3.5 million that we're going to need to move forward on this. And And so we're pretty excited. That's great. That's great. So how did you transition, right?

I know the answer. You had a plan. But what really made you go, hey, I'm flipping houses. All of a sudden, I'm going to buy a 319 unit building to rehab. That's a big jump. You said it yourself. It's all part of the plan, right? So we knew we wanted to do apartments.

We've started doing direct mail for apartments in Harris County. and we started building the relationships to the brokers. Because in this deal, we found a partner who has experience with these types of properties, it's just not that big of a jump. We have a mindset that this is a business. We've built the systems. We're not just investors. This is a full-fledged business.

And so everything's been put in place so that if something like this came along, we're ready to handle it. We're ready to move forward. We're ready to do it, hit the ground running. Nice. So while it seems like it's a big jump, really the only big jump is going to be raising the money. It's more money than we've ever had to raise before. But we've already put the processes in place to handle it. And so this building was not on, it wasn't on loop net, it wasn't on any of these listing

sites. It was kind of, it was a straight direct mail relationship opportunity. Yes, this one actually didn't come from the direct mail. This one came from broker relationships. Got it. Got it. That's my personal belief anyway, is that most apartment buildings, I mean, I could be wrong on this, but I think most apartment buildings are good deals are found through relationships. Like with houses, obviously, most things are found on the MLS maybe, but it just feels like

apartments are usually relationships. Yeah, and we've kind of noticed that because it seems like, like I said, we've been doing direct mail. We've been sending 1,500 letters every two months to assets in Harris County in Houston. and the response rate hasn't been that good. And we haven't gotten a single deal from it yet. But consistently, the best-looking deals are the ones that are coming from or the relationships with the brokers.

Yeah. So, and really, really quickly, how does that work? Obviously, you've got a history. So do you just start calling commercial brokers and saying, hey, here's who I am, here's what I'm looking to do, here's my plan. And if you find any opportunities that are discounted or at certain cap rate, let me know. Um, sort of. If you call them and you say that, you know, you might see deals for the next a week or two. But the reality is, um, I believe in lunch, sit down, have lunch with them,

learn about them, um, learn about the types of properties that they get, see if you can help them in any way. Um, you know, maybe some properties come to us from our direct mail that's, you know, not good for us, but they have a customer for. So, you know, try to build a real relationship from it, not just spit out who you are and then hope they call you in the next couple of months. Yeah. Follow up with them, continue to have lunches with them, get to know them, yeah. That's great advice.

And I think that applies in all aspects of business, particularly in this business. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Brandon, Brandon has people take him out for coffee all the time. Yes. Not all the time. Apparently, it's like weekly.

He gets free Starbucks coffees from people. No, it's like once a month. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. It's good. Yeah. It's the perks.

It's the perks. of being the, you know, the host of the largest real estate investing podcast. Oh, there you go. There you go. Use it up, man. Because you're not going to be the co-host for long. All right. So great, great stuff.

Really, really good information. I think it's time to transition to our fire round. Fire round. That's awesome, Brandon. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So fire around. Really quick questions. Try to make our answers quick. And most of these questions do come directly from the BiggerPockets forums at BiggerPockets.com slash forums. So first question, what should a recent high school grad do if they want to get into real estate investing?

First thing I would do is just read bigger pockets, read as many books as you can, and start networking. And figure out what you want your direction to be. Do you want a wholesale? What? types of properties do you want to wholesale? What types of properties will your market support for wholesale? And instead of budget, start after some properties. Let's say you were not an investor yet and somebody would give you 100 grand. What do you do with it? What's your first step with 100 grand? I don't know. Can I go to Monaco or is that? Well, I like that plan too. Bet it all a black. Yeah. Again, I would go back to goals. What are your goals? What do you want to do with that?

money. You could lend it as hard money. You could try to buy some single-family homes with it, or you can take a good chunk of it and buy and renovate and do a flip. I think it's just going to depend on what the end goal is. Yeah, right on, right on. All right on. So, successful direct mail is all about testing to see what works. So for someone with a relatively small budget, how do you recommend they begin testing? Yellow letters. Start testing with yellow letters. Start testing with yellow letters, do the research in your market, figure out what your median home price is, figure out what zip codes, a lot of those houses are in, and start targeting them. Yeah, and measure, you know, measure how many people call, measure how many deals you get,

how many letters you send. If you send letters on Monday, what kind of response rate do you get? If you send letters on Friday, what kind of response rate do you get, that kind of stuff. Right on. There's that famous quote, I think it says, like, what matters, gets measured or something like that. And it applies that. Like, if something's important, like measure it and then you can figure out what works and what doesn't. Yeah. Cool.

All right. Next one. Do you use any apps on your phone or like an iPad or anything for real estate investing? And if so, which? Do I use any apps? Yeah. Is there anything? Probably the calculator app a lot.

Otherwise, not really, honestly. Oh, okay. well, the local MLS app is a great tool. Here, H-A-R, the application on my iPad is incredible because I can walk up to a seller and a seller says, my house is worth half a million dollars. And I can show them where their house is worth $80,000. And it's pretty tough to argue. Yeah, I want to be in that conversation. Yeah, well, they're not fun to have because they're never happy that their house is.

Yep, yep, of course. All right. Flipping multifamilies. Well, have you done it or you haven't done it yet? Not yet. All right. I'll let you know in 18 months after we finish this big. Yeah, baby. We're looking forward to hearing about this one, man. This is going to be a fun deal.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we talked about planning for things going wrong. What's the biggest mistake you've made in your investing so far? Biggest mistake we've made, probably trusting sellers. that's come back to burn us quite a few times. Really? Yeah.

Do you want to give an example? Yeah, like, oh yeah, I went through probate. Or, oh, no, I don't owe anything on it. Or, yeah, I paid the whole thing off. Just real quick story. Had a wholesale under contract for $50,000. The house was worth $100. The guy said, oh, yeah, it's all paid off.

It's not a big deal. Reality was he had a mortgage for $110,000 on the the house that he thought the government had paid off for him. In reality, the government was just trying to foreclose on him. Trustee sellers is a big one. Okay, so instead of trust but verify, just freaking verify. Verify, verify, verify, verify, verify. Nice.

All right, last question of the fire round. Real estate agent license. Should you be licensed? Neither. My father or I, we are not licensed. my mother has a license actually and so we can operate on the MLS we flat fee list all of our stuff through her but that's easy to find elsewhere I'm gonna I'm gonna extend the fire round actually we're gonna move out of the fire round and I'm gonna ask a question about that because that's an interesting thing flat fee MLS I I know I was

I was an agent back in SoCal and yeah that was a long time ago and yeah flat fee MLS guy just got no respect. The traditional agents wouldn't show the listings. It was persona non-grata type of stuff. How does that work for you guys? Fantastic. Absolutely great. Our last flip, which had a 200 and, well, so two flips ago, had an ARV of 259,000.

We sold it probably is about 3 to 4% above market. We sold it in eight hours. A flip we sold earlier this week. Again, we were about 4% or 5% above market. Sold it in 20 hours. So here where the market is so incredibly quick, and the buyer's agent is going to make their 3% commission no matter what. They don't care.

And we do our flips in such a way where we're the best-looking house in the area. for an incredibly good price. That's why they sell as quickly as they do. So we really haven't run in that issue at all. Now, if the market changes, we may, and we're more than happy to pay it, but right now it's just not necessary. Gotcha, cool.

All right, well, let's move on to our famous, famous, fool. Really? Am I doing the show with a little girl or a Sasquatch? Come on, Sasquatch, let's do it. Famous four. How do I take him seriously? You don't.

No, no, not at all. All right. Famous Four. What is, do you have any favorite real estate investing books? Gary Keller's book, Millionaire Real Estate Investors, really good. Yeah. I enjoyed that one. Okay, right on.

How about business books? The E-Mith. Good. And I forget who wrote that one, actually. Michael Gerber, I think his name is? Yes. The E-Miff, I thought it was incredible. Nice.

Nice. You talk about it almost every show. It's that good. People need to read it. People need to read it, absolutely. There you go. There you go. And what about hobbies?

I see in a picture behind you a tire of a racing car. Are you a car racing guy? Yes, I am. So all through college, I worked as a professional mechanic on Ferrari Challenge and Star Mazda race teams, and that was really my first passion. Also through college, I raced professionally and race for Formula SAA. Actually, actually, I didn't race professionally. I raced kind of amateur.

But yeah, that's absolutely my first passion is racing. Second is travel. And my wife and I just got back from a two-week-long camping trip all through the southwest. Nice. And based off of our truck. So that was a lot of fun. We really enjoy travel. That's great.

That's great. Cool. All right. Final question. What do you believe sets apart the investors who succeed from those who do not? planning and execution and confidence in that execution. So there's a lot of investors who do onesie-toosies, and then there are investors who build the big business.

We hope to be the investor that builds a big business. I mean, we've done, like I said, you know, over $2 million this year. Next year we want to be at four, and then the year after that we want to be at eight. And that's just our single family homes. That doesn't count what we want to do with commercial and everything else. So I think having the plan, having the vision, and having the wherewithal, or at least the people around you to coach you towards that end goal is pretty important. Great, great, great, great advice, great advice. All right, guys, well, this has been a lot of fun.

It's Sam Craven, show 33 of the BiggerPockets podcast. You can find the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 33. Sam, thanks so much for being with us. And, of course, we'll see around the site. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you. All right, guys, that was Sam Craven with some awesome, awesome stuff.

I thought the interview was fantastic. I think Sam might have done more deals in his first year than most of us have done thus far. What do you think, Brandon? Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's done more than me. And hey, also, real quick, if people want to reach out to Sam, they should definitely check out his website at www. Sennah homes, S-E-N-N-A-Homes.com. But yeah, I just realized we didn't say that in the podcast. So, yeah, Senahomes.com.

And he's also on BiggerPockets, of course. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Well, congrats to him and his success. And obviously, we want more of you guys to be successful just like Sam. So keep listening to these shows. Make sure you're paying attention and interacting and asking questions.

Jump on these show notes at BiggerPockets.com slash show 33. And let Sam know what's going on. Hit him up with questions. tell them what you think. Otherwise, of course, you want to be interacting on bigger pockets like Sam did. And, you know, it's just an incredible place to learn. We've got these free podcasts. We've got thousands and thousands of really high-level forum, well, blog posts,

and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forum discussions. The site is incredible. The content is insane. And guess what? It's all free. That's right. Now, we do have paid memberships, as we talked about in the Quick Tip. But what did you say?

Yeah, yeah. So we've got these paid accounts. And they've got a lot of value. You should check them out. If there's any interest, go to Biggerpockets.com slash pro, and you can find out all the benefits of upgrading. That's pretty much it. Remember to follow us on our networks, Facebook, Twitter, Gplus. We're everywhere.

Make sure to interact with us on our various. social networks outside of V1 and only bigger pockets. And definitely, definitely, definitely. Also make sure I'm actually forgetting what I was supposed to say, which is why I'm trying to extend it out here. Hold on, it's going to come to me. Brandon, say something so I could come up with what I was going to say because I can't think and talk at the same time.

By the light of the silvery moon, I don't remember the rest of the words. I keep going. That's all I got. Oh, if you haven't already, make sure to leave us a review or a rating on iTunes. Why would I forget that, Brandon? You say it every week, I don't know. I say it every week, but I forgot it this time.

Anyway, guys, make sure to leave us a rating and a review on iTunes. It helps us get more visibility. It makes us feel good. All right. Well, for bigger pockets, this is... Is this thing still on? This is Josh Dorkin. Signing off.

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