BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 41: How to Profit Through Long Term Flipping and Lease Options with Douglas Larson

Episode Date: October 24, 2013

On today’s episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we are excited to bring you a fascinating interview with real estate investor Douglas Larson. Douglas has been investing for over 15 years, doing everything from flipping, buy and hold, lease options and more. Additionally, Douglas has some great stories of working for several weeks on a Guru sales floor, and sheds new light on the shady sales world that we, at BiggerPockets, stand so strongly against. You definitely don’t want to miss this entertaining and informative show! Read the transcript for episode 41 with Douglas Larson here. In This Show, We Cover How Douglas started investing in an expensive location Tips for starting while working a full time job How to encourage your spouse to support your REI dream Tips for bidding for properties in online auctions “Scandal” in the online auction world Working with your spouse in a real estate business Lessons learned while working the “Guru” sales training Tips for dealing with contractors and keeping them on the job site And a lot more! Links from the Show What Does the Fox Say (See the Video Below!) The 9-Year-Old Idea That Continues to Change Lives: Happy Birthday BiggerPockets! The BiggerPockets Podcast Homepage (Check out our new photo!) The BiggerPockets Resources Page BP Podcast 028: Note Investing and Raising Private Money with Dave Van Horn BP Podcast 037: Full Time Income, Part Time Lifestyle Real Estate Investing with Aaron Mazzrillo BP Podcast 034: Virtual Real Estate Investing and How to Find Great Deals in a Hot Market with Anson Young John T Reed – The B.S. Checklist Postlets.com **Also – be sure to check out this great article from Douglas from over in the BiggerPockets Member Blogs with even more information from Douglas, as well as some photos of some of the properties mentioned in the show! “Bigger Pockets Podcast Show 41…” ** Books Mentioned in the Show The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss Rich Dad Poor Dadby Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad’s Success Stories: Real Life Success Stories from Real Life People Who Followed the Rich Dad Lessons by Robert Kiyosaki The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt Tweetable Topics People pay good money for turn key investments (Tweet This!) A lot of people can talk story – but not everyone get’s it.(Tweet This!) Luck doesn’t fall from the sky. You make your own luck.(Tweet This!) Connect with Douglas Douglas’ Website: LuckyLarson.com Douglas’ BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 41. 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. All right, everybody, what's going on? This is Josh, your host of the Bigger Pockets podcast. here with the man from Japan. Brandon Turner.

I'm about as far from Japanese as I could be. I am pasty white here and very Swedish looking. Indeed you are. Indeed you are. What did the Fox say, Brandon? What does the Fox say? If you guys don't know that reference, look it up on YouTube.

It'll make you laugh. And don't blame me for it. Or you can, but you get really mad when you when you, when you, when you, when you, when you, look at that YouTube reference. Yeah, and you wake up in the middle of the night singing the song in your head. I have Josh to think for that.

Anyway, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. You know what? It was pretty cool for those of you who don't know, Brandon and I went to an event this past week in St. Louis. It was a financial blogger conference and got to spend some good quality time together and hang out with some fun financial, financial.

folks. Yeah. And we will have that five times fast, fun financial folks. I was going to say we're going to have photos of that in the show notes. If you want to see me and Josh together, and you can see actually how much larger I am than Josh. It's just,

including the one of me choking him out in us in a fight. Yeah, come check it out, BiggerPockets.com slash show 41. Yes, yes, yes. So, no, it was great. It was great seeing you. We got to overlook the Cardinals beating the L.A. Dodgers.

Yeah, that was cool. Like literally overlooking it in a skyscraper looking down into the stadium. Yeah, it was awesome. It was pretty awesome. So anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but things are good. Good to be back to work. Not that we weren't working.

And very excited to move forward and kick off another set of shows after our 40th. Yeah, awesome. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah. One more quick thing. This week was kind of cool. We passed a bit of a landmark here on Bigger Pockets. This past Tuesday, the 22nd of October marked the 9th anniversary of BiggerPockets.com.

Yeah, yeah. So a pretty big milestone. Very exciting to get past nine years. And, you know, I just want to make a personal thank you to everybody. Because, you know, without all the folks who come on the site and listen, there would be no community. There would be no bigger pockets. I would be nothing. I would be locked in a room, home alone with no one to talk to you. And I would be working in like a bank in like Seattle and miserable. So thank you. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Thanks. You're awesome. Anyway,

no, seriously. But thank you. Really do appreciate you guys come into the show and being a part of it. And I wrote a little piece and put it up on the site and we'll link to it from the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 41. So check it out. Cool. What that said, should we introduce the guest? Do that? Introduce him. Who's the guest?

You do it. Okay, fine. Hey, I don't get to do it. This is exciting. Yeah, go on, Brandon. Come on. You can do it. Do it.

Now there's pressure. All right. There's pressure. I do it. I'm going to do it. All right. Today's guest is Douglas Larson, Josh. Douglas Larson is an investor out of the Utah area.

And he is fascinating. I just have to say that. So I was excited. to get him on the show today. And I'm sure Josh was excited as well to have him. So that is his intro because I want to get into the show because it is packed full of really good information. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy and one of these smartest ways to protect

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about chasing hype or guessing market timing. It's about building durable, tax-aware wealth over time. Learn more at biggerpockets.com slash bam. So without further ado, let's bring him on. All right, Douglas, welcome to the show, man. Good to have you. Hey, good to be here. I can't believe I'm in the presence of greatness. Ah, that means you're in the presence of me. Yeah, apparently. Not Brandon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we are, we are glad to have you today. Now we are, we are, and we're just regular dude. So no, no greatness here. Hey, speak for yourself.

Okay, all right. All right, man. So tell us about yourself. How did you get started in the world of real estate? What's your story? I would love to tell you all about me. Long walks on the beach. Yes.

Puppies, international travel. Nice. No, hey, you guys started, I know you're not doing the quick tip, but you got to do it. That wasn't bad, man. I'm working on it. That was not bad. You got to do one for me. Let me do the quick tip.

All right. We'll do it all together right here. Are you ready? Mm, yeah. Do we have a quick tip? One, two, I have the quick tip. Okay. Oh, okay.

All right, here we go. One, two, three. Quick tip. Wow. All right, what's the quick tip, Mr. Larson? Okay, it's an unashamed plug. But I really think that you guys need to somehow put a bigger button on the, you know, the forum's homepage that gets somebody to the resources page. I, 15 years ago, when I started out, I would have killed for some of those resources.

You know, the real estate forms, the tenant screening, hard money lenders, it's there and it's, free and I think most of your readers probably don't even know where to find it because you have to do two or three clicks to get there but it's awesome. That's a great quick tip. Well, there is a link in the blue navigation bar at the top of the page. I believe that says resources. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not actually looking at the site. So I think it's something like that and there's a link to it in there.

So you can find it from any page. But that is a good quick suggestion. regardless. Quick suggestion. All right. So more about me. Yeah. What about you?

So 15 years ago, you started real estate. And what did that look like? Oh, well, probably like most people, you know, I either read a book or, you know, a lot of people saw an infomercial. And I saw, gosh, it was late night Carlton Sheets. And he was selling his no money down for three easy payments of 50. 59.95. I was like, yeah, man, I can do that. This guy's making millions.

So I bought the course. And it was really good basic information. But the guy was talking about buying houses for 30 to 40,000 bucks. And I'm like, dude, I was in San Diego. And I'm thinking that won't buy a trailer, let alone the land. Yeah. So, you know, if you add a zero, some of his number. and concepts would work, but it was still, it was probably another two years before I actually

put that stuff into action. But, you know, it was a good start. Yeah, I'll say that. All right. So you got, you got this thing. You got got some basics. And two years later, you said, hey, you know what? Time to do it. Time to take action. And how did that go? What did you do? Did you flip a house? Did you buy some land? What on earth happened? All right. Well, I try never to flip, but I try to buy everything as if it were a flip because you've got to have exit strategies. The first thing I bought was just a single family residence. It was in Riverside County, which is a more affordable area near San Diego County. They touch the northern edge of San Diego County. And I paid about 128 for a single family home. It didn't need much. moved in, sold it about a year later for 155, 57, something like that.

I remember coming away from closing with a $15,000 check after all fees and everything were paid. And I thought, you know what, that was pretty good. I need to do this more seriously. I had a day job at the time. And so I just thought, you know, that's it. Well, shortly after that, I moved to Maui. Oh, you've had it rough. Oh, poor Douglas.

I had to live in San Diego and then Maui. Don't be a hater. Oh, man, I feel really bad for you. Well, I now live in Utah, so in a couple months when I'm up to my neck in snow, you can throw me some sympathy then. All right, all right, fair enough. All right. So, yeah, I moved to Maui, and, you know, again, it was another jump up in price. And I was like, man, can I really do this estate thing?

But I did. You know, they were giving out money at pretty easy terms at those times. just hard to find what looked like a good deal. And you know how everybody says you make money on the purchase. But everything was at market value. There were no great deals to be had that I could see. So I bought a few things with some good terms. And I did five different sort of long-term flips, I call them. You know, they rented out for one to three years and then sell, that kind of thing. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Now were those properties, that required work

or were they properties that that you just acquired maybe right around market value, put people in and then, you know, potentially made just a little bit of appreciation on? Some of each. So one of them, the second house that I bought on Maui,

I found in the Mali bulletin. It's just, you know, the local paper there. Some guy was kind of a motivated seller, but he wasn't really bending on his price and he was willing to do a lease option. So I went and looked at the house and talked to him. Really nice guy. He wanted 10,000 down and 400,000 for the house and $3,500 a month. I thought about it, kind of dragged my feet. I finally called him back, oh, maybe two weeks later and said, have you sold yet? No, you haven't found the right people. So I offered him $3,000 a month,

5,000 down, which I borrowed from a credit card, and didn't really negotiate the contract price, because I thought it was fair. And if he was willing to help me out on the other things, we could work it. Then it had an Ohana unit, which is a mother-in-law apartment. It was a really tiny little one-bedroom. And I moved into that and rented out the main house, which was a three-two. And it worked out really well. And I think it's Brandon.

Is it you that always advocates buying a duplex and living in a house? Yep, that's exactly what you did, isn't it? Yeah, well, I couldn't really afford to do it any other way. And it worked. You know, it's an expensive market, and you have to make it work. And so little creativity never hurt. About 14 months later, I closed on the house, got a loan and closed him out. And then I sold it about a month after that for 507 and a true net gain of about 65 grand.

So, yeah, it was quite a year. good and it was nearly a no money down deal and i think a lot of your listeners are you know kind of you know five or five thousand right was what you put down from the credit card five thousand yeah what what uh so so let's talk about that a little bit more so that's that's a lease option can can you know for those people who've never done one you know kind of walk us walk us a little bit more slowly through a lease option i find a property the seller you know he's he's slightly motivated and you know say the property he's he's trying to sell that thing for a hundred grand just for easy numbers what what would this deal look like so 100 grand maybe that's right at

market value maybe he hasn't found a buyer yet maybe it smells like wet lab i don't know everybody loves the smell of wet labrador first thing in the most that's what my clone is that's why everybody was running away from you uh this weekend in st louis us, right? Exactly. It must be why. Now I understand. That sounds like another good story.

Anyway, so let's say there's issues, or maybe just, you know, there's a lot of sellers out there that just want to thumb their noses at read estate agents and just say, I'm going to do it myself, no matter what it takes. Right. Whatever it is, you know, they're willing to do something. Maybe it's tax reasons, whatever. And so maybe they're willing to do a lease option. Maybe it's something that you suggest or maybe it's something that, you suggest, or maybe it's something

that they have heard about and they come up with. And so I guess what it would normally look like is you make a rent payment. And usually it's about a standard rent payment. I don't know. Let's say $700 a month, $800 a month on $100,000 house. But let's say you both decide that you want to put not only a little bit down at the beginning, maybe $5,000 or $10,000 down to start this. And that's usually considered a non-refinery.

fundable deposit. But then you also put a little bit every month toward the down payment. So eventually when you go to purchase it, 12 or 18 or 24 months down the line, you've got a nice little chunk there. When I have structured lease options with people, you know, I might ask for $900 a month in rent, but I might say half of that or $500 goes toward the down payment because I'm telling you, People, when they start feeling like they have ownership in a property, they will take care of it. And they usually don't back out. So when they start seeing after 18 months that they've got several thousand dollars stacked up toward the down payment, they're pretty motivated to make that happen. Yeah.

That's a great. Yeah, very good strategy. All right. So we've got this one Maui lease option deal. That sounds good. You said you did a couple of other deals as well. four others. Were those also lease option? No, I think the other ones were

straight purchases. One of them was really ugly. The guy, sadly, had been kind of paranoid, schizophrenic. He stripped the walls to the studs. This was a condo, a townhome down in Kihei, and he took out all the wiring, the electrical wiring, because he said that the government was listening to him. Weird. I had a tenant, the last eviction I did, said the same thing. She didn't remove the wiring, but she said they were listening to the wiring.

Yeah, but you know what? That's really not that weird. These guys are actually ahead of their time because the government is listening to us. Just ask the folks in France right about now. Yeah. Yeah, they were a couple of years ahead of their time, except we don't rip wires out of walls. Indeed. So I had a lot of work to do on that one, but, you know, when you find something in complete disarray, it's a blank canvas. You can have a lot of fun with that. And very often, you know, your competitors will shy away from something like that. So if you're not afraid of that, you can do it. I think I only ended up making about $25,000 or $30,000 on that deal, but I sold that one on a lease option. And that

worked out well for me and for the buyer. By the time I sold it, you know, by the time he actually qualified and purchased it, it had gone up in value quite a bit. So it really was a win, win, win. You know what's interesting? I'm sitting here and I'm listening to you describe these deals. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, real estate investors seem to remember every deal that they've done. Yeah. Yeah.

And almost, you know, every number and detail. And you know which ones you remember the most? The ones you've lost money on. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Right, right, right. All right.

All right, cool. So you're off to a pretty good start. And it sounds like, you know, I think you had mentioned earlier to the lady who says, I don't listen to my interviewees. I think you said earlier something about back in the day when you were working a full-time job. It sounds like you at some point stopped that and went full-time. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. So I had a full-time job.

I was a dental hygienist. My father was a dentist, and gosh, when I was young, I thought I was going to be a famous, wealthy artist. but it didn't take long to figure out why they call them starving artists. Yep. My father had always complained about his underworked and overpaid dental hygienists, and I thought, you know, that sounds pretty good. I think maybe I'll try that. So went back to school for a little while and got a dental hygiene license in three states.

Colorado, shout out. There you go. California and also Hawaii. Nice. I worked in California a bit, worked in Hawaii, and yeah, it was a good paying job. You know, if you have to have a job, it was a good job. Yeah, especially when those guys with halitosis walk in the door. Oh, don't remind me.

Yeah. All right, so you're full time back in the day. Yep. You're doing your thing. How are you getting these deals on the side, right? So what, you know, what was it like to be a full-time dental hygienist and an investor on the side were you working during lunch were you working nights or weekends how are you doing your deals and when yeah nights and weekends and uh you know it was this was before smartphones all we had was

was dumb phones and so you know i'd hop on the internet sometimes in my lunch break they had a computer uh the offices where i worked and you know i was calling real estate agents and stuff on my lunch break or in between patients sometimes and a little bit of text messaging here and there You know, you just fit it in. If it's what you want to do, you just squeeze it in. And then as far as renovating the properties, if they needed it, yeah, it was nights and weekends, make it work. Did you do the work yourself? I would say it's always been a split.

You know, there's some things that other people can just do faster, better and or cheaper. You know, things like carpet. I mean, have either of you ever laid your own carpet? I actually, I lay my own carpet. Not anymore as much, but I always did. I'm a carpet guy. I hate it. It's the worst job ever, but it's, I don't know.

Yeah. You know, most of the time you find guys who can just do it, you know, better and faster and cheaper with certain things. You know, same with floor tile. You know, I've dabbled in that a little bit. But, you know, I'll do a backslash in a kitchen because those guys want, you know, $12 a square foot. I'm like, how come it's four times the price to do the easy stuff

that's up where I can reach instead of being on my, knees with a bent back. I don't understand it, but they'll do the floors for cheap, but it's the detail work that, you know, I end up doing myself. See, I'm not good at the details though, so I do the grunt labor there. But yeah, I mean, I'll spend two days doing carpet and an apartment and then I could hire a guy for $300 or $250 to do the whole thing. Yeah, I always feel stupid after I'm done. I'm like, why did I do that? Well, you should feel stupid. You are my favorite guest of all times.

Oh, sorry, Brandon. That's all right. So how did you, I mean, after that, you're in Hawaii. Like, how did you get to the full time? How were you able to quit your job eventually and start doing this? Well, it was kind of a twofold thing. I had done five deals in Hawaii.

And then I was, I actually met a girl on a singles cruise. She was from Utah. Oh, yeah. And what happens over the oceans? So, yeah, our first date was Jamaica. And, yeah, it was awesome. She had it rough. Well, so I decided that it was about time for me to make a move somewhere else.

I was ready to try something different. And so I proposed to her and moved to the Salt Lake area. of Utah. I had some family that was living in this area as well. And so it just made sense. And as soon as I made the move, I said, honey, you know, I have somewhat enjoyed having a day job, but I think I'm ready to go full time now. You know, I had proved to myself mostly that I could make money in it on a consistent basis. And I said, if I throw myself into this, you know, 40 hours a week, then I know I can make this happen. And I'm sure she was thinking at the time,

dude, I married a surf bomb and he just wants a sugar mama. That's awesome, don't we all? Yeah, but, you know, she's a numbers girl. And so after the first deal, and it only took about three months, I wasn't, I wasn't intending to do a flip per se. I just saw a sweet deal and thought, I've got to buy this house. This is great. And, you know, I got to say moving from Maui to Utah,

It was like everything was on sale. My wife was like holding me back. It was twice the house for half the price. And I'm like, I got to buy this. And she's like, what? You can't buy everything. So the first one, I think we made like 40 grand, and it was very minor renovations.

Literally like $2,000 for a little paint and a little bit of cleaning. But it was a newer home. And so she was like, okay, I can see this. This could buy a lot of shoes. All right. So let me jump in. So she's talking to you. She's saying, listen, hold your horses. You know, you're going a little, you're going a little crazy here. You know, it's, houses are less expensive than they were in Hawaii and you get twice as much space. But that, of course, doesn't mean that you're getting a deal now, does it? No, you got that right. Okay. So maybe talk a little bit about that, especially for the new folks who are, who are listening in and thinking, well, you know, oh, here I go again. Oh, stop me. Stop me. Stop.

me, Detroit. Don't say it. Oh, man, I had to say it. All right, all right, ready? I'm going to pick a new, like, I'm going to pick a new place to pick on, Rochester, New York. Okay, good. All right, or Buffalo. There you go. No, so, like, you know, you go to Buffalo and you're, you're like, you know, your Scrooge McDuck over there. You know, you've got, you got, you know, 10, 20,000 bucks. You can buy half the neighborhood. So, so what, you know, but that doesn't mean you're getting good deals, right? Yep. Well, as you know, you guys are experienced in this and you've had a million guests on as well. It's all about ARV or what you can get for the house compared to its neighbors. So, you know, you got to find out what people are really buying, what they want, and if yours is not

a phenomenal deal when it stacks up to what is selling, then nothing else matters. So, yeah, I kind of had to rain it in a little bit. I would even go to the grocery store. and I got the cart full of like frosted flakes and everything. And I'm like, it's only two bucks a box. And my Lisa was like, it's always two bucks a box. Well, you're just to paying like, you know, 10 bucks a gallon over in Hawaii, right? Yeah, for gas, yes. For milk is like 20 bucks a gas.

I swear, every box of cereal got like a first class seat to light a mouth. How can it be in that? But yeah, so, you know, it's all about value. The other thing is that, you know, to be honest, I bought a house in the Salt Lake area first, up on the East Bench, you know, a nicer neighborhood. And then after that, I found Park City, Utah. It's a ski resort town. And it's almost exactly the flip side of Maui. So, you know, it's all based around winter and snowboarding and all that kind of stuff.

but it's a, you know, it's a resort town, and I understood it. Smaller houses, higher price tags, but here's the key point. People pay good money for turnkey, and that's important. Gotcha. Yeah, Park City's awesome. I'm a huge fan of Park City. I love it there. But, okay, so really quick, just for those folks who are listening, this is show 41 of the Bigger Pockets

podcast. If you want to check out the show notes, go to biggerpockets.com slash show 41. I just want a little reminder there. But yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. Park City would seem to be very similar to, you know, different resorty towns in Hawaii. In terms of finding deals, what were you doing? Were you looking in Park City or were you looking back in Salt Lake? Once I did the Salt Lake one, somebody had told me about Park City.

City and I should really check it out. And again, I was, I was really new to Utah and I thought, yeah, I'll go check it out. And, you know, I saw all the telltale signs of a good, healthy, re-the-state market, things about to pop. This was 2004. And I saw inventory dropping, and the prices hadn't skyrocketed, but all of the really cheap inventory, and by cheap, I mean, under 300,000 had gone away. There just was none. And I thought, I've seen this before. I've seen this in California. I've seen this in Hawaii. And this is going to get good.

So I started buying everything I could and made my wife even more nervous. But she was on board. And yeah, we had some great deals there. And it was more of a strategy of, you know, buy and hold. And we'll see how it goes. You know, they were giving out money for free in those days. And, you know, it wasn't really free, but it was really easy to get those loans. You remember them.

Yeah. And so, you know, I just bought as many as I could, mostly homes, a couple townhomes, a couple condos, some needed work, stick some renters in there. And then after a year or two or three, it made sense to sell, maybe take some profits and move it to something else. And, yeah, you know, I usually go in thinking that I can make $60,000 minimum on a property. If I don't know that I can make $60,000 and I don't do it. And sometimes you get surprised to the upside, but sometimes you get surprised to the low. low side. We've all been there. But if you only make 25 or 30, you know, you're still okay. Yeah. All right. So, so this was 04 and two to three years later, we're pretty close to the

collapse of the housing market. So what happened for you? Did you get out before the market collapsed? Where were you at that point in time? Ooh. Doesn't sound good already. I like it. Good question. You guys have done this before. What, what, pick people until they cry? Yeah. That's Brandon's job. Yeah, 2008 and 9 were pretty painful. We felt the sting like everybody else. Thankfully, we did not have to default or even have a 30-day late on a single property.

But I'll tell you, it was ugly. There were several properties that to make them close, I had to bring money to the closing table. Maybe it was only $3,000 to $5,000. But, you know, when you went in thinking, man, I'm going to make some money on this and then you have to pay money to have a close. Not to mention you lost your down payment and everything else. Those are painful. So you had some significant upside down situations that you got out from under during this time.

In 2007, we had about $5 million in Revestate. It was 13 properties. And I could tell you about each one, but you don't have time. Many of them were rented. And yeah, we quickly as quickly as possible, ushered our tenants out because we saw the writing on the wall, you know, kind of coming this way, California, Arizona, and we were like, uh-oh, it's coming. So, you know, mortgages were just simply drying up. And so we tried to sell everything as quick as possible. A couple of them, we got left holding the hot potato, if you will. And yeah, those were, those were ugly.

But thankfully, we had enough money to ride through the ugly times. I did not buy a single house in 08 or 09, even though I tried. but the deals just were not good enough and it was in free fall. Yeah. So what would you say you learned during that time? Like what could you tell other people like from your experience? How can other people avoid the same thing? Well, I would say, you know, like anybody that was in my shoes, you know, you got to make sure you have three or four exit strategies. And so here's some tips that I'm sure you've seen similar things on, you know, the forums and stuff.

You've probably written about similar things, but, you know, exit strategies. Like, okay, number one, can I cash flow, lease this, or lease option it and make some money that way? Can I sell it traditionally? Do I know that I can sell it? And there's enough padding in there to make everybody happy. Can I potentially sell it owner financed? Maybe can I sell it in a, or can I put it into a non-traditional rental situation, like a seasonal thing? or an executive rental.

Sometimes you have properties in the right area. You put furniture in them, including beds and dressers and everything. And, you know, there's short-term people that want to rent sometimes. Or, you know, even can I move into it? That's an option as well. I know a guy who had, you know, he lived in a modest home. He was a construction guy doing spec homes, built a big, gorgeous mansion, and couldn't sell it, couldn't sell it.

So he sold his modest home and moved into the mansion and hung out there for a while when things picked back up again, recently. He sold it and made his money. Nice. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. So, yeah, that's great. And those are all things that that people want to think about before

they get into any property. Right? I mean, those... Before they get in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, for those guys who are thinking, hey, I'm going to buy a house and flip it, you know, don't just think about what's your after repair so that, you know, you can sell it. Ask yourself all these other things, too, right?

Are these feasible alternative and if not, are there any? Because if you limit yourself to one option, then the odds of bad things happening if the world turns on you are much higher, right? Bingo, yep, you got it. Yeah, right on. Hey, so you mentioned short-term executive rentals.

Have you ever done that before? Not really, but I did have a creative rental situation. I think I threw this up on the forums a while back. So I had a property I was holding in Park City, went into escrow in 2000s, late 6 or no, maybe it was late 7. And it fell out of escrow 45 days later. And it's wintertime. And this was more of the kind of home that a family buys, not really a second home buyer. And I was like, uh-oh, it's going to be a long, cold, lonely winter.

So I started asking around and found out that a lot of the resorts, they need housing for their employees. Most of their employees at these resorts, they fly them in from places. So, you know, I put in some beds and dressers and stuff, and I rented it out to 10 employees from the Canyons Resort. And it actually cash flowed amazing. It was $4,000 a month in rent. And then in the spring, when they moved out, I was able to sell it and actually do a little bit better than the first contract I had. That's great. That's creativity right there.

Yeah. Now, really quick, sorry, Brandon. On that, though, there are some laws, and I'm not going to say I'm familiar with them because I'm not about boarding houses and rental houses, that kind of stuff, when you're stacking a whole lot of people in, aren't there? There are. In Hawaii, I know for a fact that it's maximum of five unrelated people. Many neighborhoods will have that in different places. But to be honest, you know, in many of the resort towns, They're kind of used to seeing that.

College town is the same thing. They're kind of used to seeing it. So, you know, as long as they're not partying, making noise and stuff, it can usually work out. I don't recommend breaking the law. But, you know, if you're – sometimes it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. I'll just say that. There you have. Spoken from the words of Douglas, Lucky Larson.

Lucky's his middle name for one reason, isn't it? All right, so I'm wondering, we're going into the winter season here. And now, again, if people are listening to this podcast in the future, we might be in another season. But we are going into the winter here. So do you have any tips then on keeping tenants in the winter and finding them when the snow starts to fall? You know, it's the usual thing. Just try everything. If there's something that works in the spring, then do that as well as five other things.

If it means putting it out there on your Facebook page, if it means talking. and up among all your friends, if it means, you know, Craigslist, you know, your local, I even say do your local newspaper and sometimes there will be bulletin boards at the grocery store near where your house is and make sure to put the search terms that people are looking for. So, you know, if it's near a certain very desirable school or a park, make sure that those search terms appear because a lot of people are searching for a couple very specific. things and you want to make sure you've got everything in there, even if you've got like six paragraphs describing your home, you know, do the important things up at the top and then do

six more paragraphs in every possible search term so it'll pull up. That's a fantastic tip. That's really, really, really good because, you know, in the world of the web today, you know, that stuff's going to come up and it's not going to come up if you don't have it, right? So if you're in New York city and you know you're you're renting in the upper east side you know you're going to want upper east side and you're going to want you know close to the park you know talk about central park and you're going to want you know any of those other landmarks that people might be searching for because if i'm going to go live in the upper east side i don't want to be i want to be close to the park so i'm going to put park in there right so that's that's great hey let me throw another

little tip in there that i got from um some other users on your forum so You know, BP, as everybody knows, it's a great place to learn about stuff that you don't already know. And, you know, some things, sometimes it's something that you think, man, how could I have not known that? So I guess there's a website called postlets, P-O-S-T-L-Postlets.com, right? And, you know, you can create these nice little ads, and then you can throw it out from there onto Craigslist and about six other sites in, you know, a couple easy steps. And it's a great way to go and it organizes your friends. photos a lot better and gives you a better look than just going on Craigslist and doing four stupid little photos. Yeah. Yeah, no, we've been using that a lot lately, so that is a great

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Stop letting outdated lending practices hold you back. That's hostfinancial.com. where your property's potential meets unlimited financing. So let's move into the modern realm here. I guess we talked about your past. We talked about the market crash. After all that happened, you're going to start buying again, I'm assuming. So what has changed?

What's your business look like now then? Well, so in about 2010, you know, I figured a way to retool and start buying stuff. I made a whole bunch of offers on short sales, but none of those panned out. I must have made 75 offers on short sales. And I know a lot of people have had success with those, but only about three of those actually came down to the wire. And then suddenly second mortgage, they wanted another $10,000 outside of escrow. Not only is that illegal, but it made me mad. I'm like, wait a minute, I negotiated a price, and that's what I want to pay.

So anyway, none of the short sales worked out for me. But I started buying some bank-owned properties, some through auctions, and some just, you know, off the MLS, almost all are MLS or real estate agent recommendations or auctions for me in the last three, four years. Yeah. Okay. So auctions, are you talking about like, you know, online auction things like auction.com or where you actually go and, you know, hold up a number? Like, what are you talking about? Both.

Okay. I have not done the courthouse steps. Well, successfully. I've been to the courthouse steps, but there's, you know, you talk to those guys. and you know they'll tell you you got to know you got it you got to you got to have access to you know title and records and you got to have it fast and uh i just didn't have that so i didn't feel comfortable doing those you know in some areas when you're spending $20,000 for a house that's fine but you know here you know it goes to auction on the courthouse steps you got to pony up cash

to 250 grand it's like i got to know a little bit more than what i know yeah so all right so you so you You said you did do some of the online auctions. Yep. What was that like? You know, online and also the ones where they come around and the tuxedos and they sing the songs. Have you guys been to some of the events? I have not. No.

Oh, those are great, man. I won't name company names, but, you know, they wear the tuxedoes and they're, you know, dancing around and the auctioneer talks a million miles an hour and, yeah, or the online ones. But what's interesting about the online. online ones, I've learned this now, is that you're not just bidding against other potential buyers. You're actually bidding against the house. And I've found that out on the very last deal that I just did. I thought, you know, so I'm on my iPad and I'm watching these houses and I'm like, you know, this could be a really good deal at 200K.

I put it on offer of 200K and I said, I'm not going over that. I watched for the next two hours as the bids went up incrementally to about 234, and I thought, wow, that's just too rich for my blood. Oh, well. I checked my email inbox on my little laptop that's next to me, and it says, you're the high bidder, and I'm like, what the? And sure enough. Are they phantom bidding to get people to overbid each other?

Absolutely. What? Scandal. Oh, goodness gracious. Well, don't name names, or maybe do name. I don't know. That's crazy if that's really happening. No, but here's the thing.

Here's the thing is how many times have you watched some of those online things and you think, why is this property coming back on again and again two weeks later, three weeks later? I'm sure it's because of that phantom bidding going on. But I did not have confirmation of that until I called the unnamed auction company. to see about selling a different property of mine that needed a cash buy. And so I asked him, I said, how can we make sure that we get our target price? We can set anything we want as the reserve price. I know we don't have to disclose that, but how do you help us get to that price?

And he said, well, so here's some things that we can do. We can enter bids on your behalf. That's how they call it. And if you authorize us, we can enter bids on your behalf, not much different than what a bank does on the courthouse steps, making sure that they get their minimum amount. So I'm sure they've found a way to do it legally, but I bet most people don't know that they're bidding against a phantom. Yeah, that's interesting. Very revealing. Hmm.

Yeah, it's like those online poker rooms from back in the day where you're playing against, you know, the computer and only the computer. Yep. Well, I did get that house and I closed on that house. And I just put it into a lease option and it's going to be another good one. So, you know, I'm happy I bid, but just word to the wise, bid what you're going to bid. and then, you know, step back. Even if it says on there, reserve not met, you know, if that's what your max bid is, don't feel bad about it. You know, then step away and then maybe they'll just call you back in about two minutes after the end.

Yeah, we were kidding on the other ones. You're the winner. Oh, wow. That's funny. So how are you funding these things then? Do you use your own money, private, hard money banks? Since 2009-10, it's been all my money. Okay.

I take that back. I've done two hard money deals, and they were smaller, but I was tapped out, and so borrowed $50,000, hard money against a different unrelated property, bought the thing, and then paid it off within six or eight weeks, something like that. Okay. All right, cool. What about, I guess, let's move on a little bit to a couple more things. I want to make sure we get time to cover before we're done today.

And one of those is you mentioned in an email to me, we talked about you work. with your spouse. Can you kind of, I guess, share some thoughts on that and how that all works? Well, so I mentioned it first. I, you know, she, I'm sure she was thinking that I was just using her as a sugar mama, trying to build my business, as it were. And, you know, I'd love to say that it was my masterful powers of persuasion that got, but it was really, you know, getting a couple deals done. then she could see, hey, there's a lot of potential in this. You know, once she saw how the numbers work out and everything, and once she started watching HGTV, then she was fully on board.

You know, I think she absolutely loves being immersed in the projects along with me. She designs some of the floor plans, you know, when we want to blow out a wall or make a master bigger or something like that. She decorates. She does the staging when we're done. She loves the process. I see a lot of posters on the forums and they're like, how can I get my spouse on board? And I'm like, dude, get her to watch HGTV. And make some money on a deal or two.

Buy her some shoes. Well, I mean, I never thought about it in that way before, but that is an incredibly good tip for getting your spouse on board. Buy some shoes. No, no. Watch HDV. I mean, I think that's probably how I got my wife on board originally was watching like flip that house and designed to sell and all those. Yeah, the different shows that were on back then. They're kind of fewer of them nowadays.

But, you know, we need a bigger pockets TV show. That's what we need, Josh. That's what you need. Yes. Do we do? We have to call the HGTV folks up. tell them what's up. Well, I'm sure somebody's listening that's got some

influence. Maybe they'll decide that we can get some of these guys on board and do something fun, yeah. Yeah, we need like flipping wars or something, you know, fighting amongst each other. It'd be good. Well, how about that Will Bernard guy? You've had him on here before.

That guy's an animal, and I tell you what, that he posted pictures, that little YouTube video of his house that he ran out and that's beautiful. That could be TV show right there. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, really, you can take any of the stuff that you and these other guys are doing

and, you know, the work. But, you know, these shows want drama. They like the drama, you know, so they like to take the reality of what it is, which is kind of like, hey, oh, here we go again, more nails and hammers. And they turn it to like, contractor shooting nails that other contractor. And every time, it's like. Oh, I didn't realize it was going to cost that much every single time. Oh, no, what are we going to do with the head in the hands and the, oh, honey, can we afford it?

It's like, you know, we're not going to fall for that every single time. So think of something else. Well, well, so, I mean, back to your tip. You know, that was a good tip on, you know, getting your spouse to watch TV. You know, what about just kind of separating, right? separating your work life versus your home life because, you know, once you start to get that deep integration, I mean, the lines get fuzzy, right? So do you have any advice for folks on, you know, just kind of keeping a happy, that of course is assuming you guys are happy enough.

Of course, I hope you're happy, but, you know, a happy-go-lucky relationship while surviving a working in business together. Well, my wife will tell you that she just loves to be involved in the, in many of the decision-making processes. And, you know, there's sometimes where, like say on that one auction property I was just telling you about earlier this year, you know, I didn't really consult her on that. And, you know, she was a little bit hurt. You know, she didn't get to see it or plan for it or anything.

And, you know, I've taken her to some ugly houses. And she likes to be involved, you know, and she's stepping over dog crap and cockroach. and she's like, I see potential here. If we just bump out this wall. So, you know, it's being involved. And, you know, when they're not involved, and they just feel like this is something you're doing, you know, often by yourself, maybe it doesn't work.

As far as the separation, you know, every couple has to figure out what that looks like. You know, it's, you know, we'll watch some of those shows together and talk about some things that we liked or didn't like or where trends are going. I think our business life spills over into our personal life quite a bit, actually. For good or for bad. Yeah. I don't know about you guys, but like every conversation my wife and I seem to have anymore, we don't have kids.

And so like every conversation revolves around our business. And we have to like fight against that, like to stop talking about our renter that we're tired of or whatever drama happened. Well, I mean, we'll do it full time all the time. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, what I started doing and really only recently is, you know, consciously

set a time, you know, every day that is not, you know, it's family time. There's no work, it's not work time. It's not discuss the crap of the day. It's, it's time to just, you know, thaw. And so, you know, I make it a practice not to really get into work stuff. And I think that works, you know, from five, say five to seven every day, we're not talking work, period. And maybe that's a, that's a good quick tip. That is a good tip. I think that's a great suggestion. I decided to do a couple of flips in San Diego in 2011.

And so I talked to my wife into it. You know, I just, I missed the beach and that's where I'm from. So I convinced her to go down there. We took the family. We took the two boys. And, you know, when you're living in the renovation project, it's really hard to keep that separation. So literally, just like you said, Josh, almost every day I'd have to say, okay, we're going to the beach. We're going to start a fire in the fire ring.

We're going to roast some marshmallows. Daddy's going to take a couple waves. The kids are going to play on the swings. And then we'll come back home. And my wife would be like, she was like slave driver. Honey, we still got to do these. Wind? Hey, we got to take care of the fam.

We should have a bigger pockets like surfathon somewhere. That would be fun. Yeah, let's do it. Hawaii, Larson's paying for it. Will Bernard's paying for it. Does that guy actually work? He's got like 10,000 posts. He has a big flips.

And I'm like, how on earth? He's got to be doing the four-hour work week. And then with the other 36 hours, he's like on bigger pockets. I think so. He is an active guy. It's just a fan. I mean, it's okay. There's nothing wrong with all that posting guys.

Yeah, come on. Really, if you're listening and haven't posted yet, you're missing out. And that is true, by the way. That is true. Douglas can attest to that. True. All right. So I want to switch to something here really quick because Brandon had mentioned something to me.

And I want to hear it from the horse's mouth here. There's a rumor that back in the day, you spent some time in a guru, a sales center. And, you know, we won't mention names, but let's hear a little bit about what this whole thing was about. Okay. Confessions. Father, forgive me, I have sinned. No. Like many investors, you know, I had a bleak outlook for my income prospects during that 08 and 09, you know, banking collapse and property values were just sinking. You know, we had enough money saved up during the boom year.

that we weren't facing homelessness or bankruptcy. It's just, you know, I didn't want to take a job at Home Depot or go back to scraping teeth and giving shots. So I thought, you know, there's got to be something else I can do to use my skills. I got some skills, yo. So in late 2009, I heard a radio ad for a mentoring, a re-estate mentoring company looking for inside salespeople. And I thought, you know, that's got to be a perfect fit.

You know, I've been a successful investor for 10 years, you know, five of those have been as a full-timer at that point, three different states. And I thought, you know what, I can do this. You know, I'm a landlord. You know, I'll pay the bills with this for a little while. And, yeah, protect my investment capital until the free fall is over and then I can start investing again. Well, you know, in hindsight, the first red flag was when, you know, they told me in their, you know, interview process that real estate investors, quote, don't usually make good sales people.

And I was like, hmm, that sounds interesting. Then the second red flag, they said, you know, we want you all to sign this big, lengthy, five-page non-disclosure. So again, I can't remember. I can't mention the names of the mentoring company or the gurus, but I will just say that everyone has heard of these big names. But, you know, they say that it's because they're protecting their proprietary sales techniques but there was some scary stuff so as a part of the two-week training you know there was an

emphasis on um uh you know their sales was not really cost benefit you know you're not saying here's the features and then here's why it's so much better than anything else it was more about talking to people finding their fear and their failures and their pain vulnerabilities and then and then poking at those until they finally agree to buy your stupid overpriced. crap. That's pretty much what it's about. How do you really feel, Douglas? You don't like, you don't like poking people while they're down.

I mean, you're not a fan of taking the lady who just lost her husband and really shaming her to buy your overpriced course. Come on. You know, the last straw, and I'd only been on the sales floor for a couple of days. So training for like two weeks and sales

floor for a couple of days, and I was just like, this is just wrong. And they were they're calling people names on the phone and stuff and um wow there's like you know it's it's a room full of like 50 salespeople just a total boiler room yeah that's what i was going to say it sounds it sounds like boiler room the movie yeah and and then there's like um there's you go to the mentor room and there's two people taking you know phone calls and that's it 50 salespeople and two men you know that's all anyway so there's there was a a lady right behind me and she was always one of the ones getting the awards you know in the in the

weekly morning sales meeting and you know that kind of stuff and um she talked some old guy and you could tell because she had to speak really loud to this guy she talked to him into maxing out two credit cards for over $12,000 and it was the right thing to do because he could leave a legacy for his grandkids and you know they always say failure is not an option with our company behind you. But it just, it literally made me feel sick. Wow.

And that is the, that is the, I mean, that's my biggest beef with the, with the guru crowd is, is encouraging people to max out credit cards for education. And with the, hope that you're making an investment.

I mean, it's a lie that you're making an investment in yourself. And sure, it's worked for a few people out there, but yeah, I mean, it's just stupid and scary to me. What's that note guy you had on a while back?

I like his, Jay Van Horn. Yeah, he bought like his first eight or ten houses with credit cards. I mean, that's a good use of credit card. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you can be smart with it, it's not. Yeah, there's a lot of debate on bigger pockets about that, but I'm, I generally fall on the line of you can be smart with them.

It's probably okay. And I'm on the line of be careful. I'm older than Brandon here. And, and, uh. What was that, Josh? You can say that again? I'm old. Well, you know, if.

And sad. If there's any, I'm older than you, if there's any I've learned from, you know, being a part of that, you know, boiler room, it's that, you know, there are a lot of people who get excited about re-estate. They want to be a part of it. And, you know, maybe they do need a little bit of handholding and they're not afraid to pay for it. And the thing is, is if they got good, you know, a good personalized action plan out of it, I could totally see it and I could support it. supported. But the sad thing is that after they max out their cards, almost always, you know, they're told that they're going to go to this great boot camp or something else and they're going to get all this personalized instruction. And all they get is another sales pitch. And they can

be into it, $20, $30,000 and really have no practical knowledge. And that's my issue. And for those folks listening, the Tuesday, this past Tuesday, was the ninth, anniversary of the founding of bigger pockets. At birthday, too. Come on, Brandon, sing. Yeah, yeah. Love the enthusiasm. Anyway, so I actually wrote a post and we'll link to it about kind of the origins of BP a little bit.

And that was really, that was the big thing for me that was a turnoff about that whole aspect of investing. You know, I think, you know, I'm not one who's going to spend $997 on a course. I'd rather go get a college class at an accredited university or I'd rather, you know, at least at that time. You know, today I'd rather find a local expert, a local mentor who's doing it. You know, some, if I'm in Salt Lake, I'm going to go try and link up with Doug. Or if I'm in, you know, Aberdeen, I'm going to link up with Brandon, you know. So there's no reason to pay. Anyway, so that was really such a big turnoff for me seeing how people were just, it was one sales

pitch to the next. And I said that, you know, that's crazy. You know, we need an alternative. And that's why, you know, that's why I created bigger pockets. I just, I didn't want to trust the information I was getting elsewhere because everybody was tied into these guys. And, you know, anytime there was info, I was like, oh, is this legit or is this kind of like they're going to sell me on something five seconds later if I

listen to this. I don't know what to do. So anyway, I don't honestly know how much the gurus really know about these boiler rooms. So, you know, I can't 100% fault them. I'm sure the checks roll their way, no doubt about it, but I don't know if they really know what's going on inside there. Sure. But I will say that, you know, the stuff that I saw just in that one call center was not not okay at all. I will say that even with bigger pockets, bigger pockets is awesome. You got

great people. But, you know, I would seriously pay money to, you know, go with, say that note investor guy. Dave, was his name? Yeah, Dave Anhorn. Or, you know, you had on a while back, you're Aaron, the Riverside wholesaler. Yeah.

Who never even leaves his desk, you know. And Anson, you know, it's that virtual kind of wholesale I see their business model and I'm like dude that is clean that sounds easy it may not be as easy but you know I would pay some money if I needed to to actually sit in the chair next to them for a day or two and like really see what it's like but that's not what was being sold to these people and I think that's what they thought they were getting well and I think that's very different I you know I don't know that any of them any of the gurus are selling that

You know, that's something that you're only going to get from, you know, and honestly, I bet you if you called up Anson or Aaron or Dave and said, hey, I'm in town, you know, would it be cool if I sat down with you? I bet you they'd let you, you know, and they would say, are you kidding me? I'm not going to charge you a dime, you know. I think these are, you know, I think people, it's a different mentality, right? Somebody who goes to become the guru, you know, their job is not to teach. their job is to sell versus, you know, the guys who are kicking butt and are really just

trying to help people out. They'll help you out. They're happy to do it. I know plenty of investors who gladly will mentor and help folks for nothing. And they'll do it because they want to see other people be successful like they've become. And if nothing else, yeah, and they're giving back. And if nothing else, just being on the bigger pockets forums, I mean, I think the podcast we did with Aaron has like well over a hundred comments now people interacting in that in that thread and then

on the forums he's posting continually all the time I mean all these guys are and so yeah I mean that's the point is it's community building each other up and I think that's where the value is and a little plug for BP you know that that's that is what our forums are I mean our forums are a group of thousands and thousands and thousands of mentors helping one another I mean that's that's pretty damn cool, I think. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah.

I threw something out on your happy birthday nine, you know, nine years thing. You know, if most of the people in America, if all the people in America knew about, you know, your site, the gurus would be out of business because it is, it's almost the total complete package that you need to start doing this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, why don't we, why don't we move on to our second to the last?

the last section of the show. And we have our cool little Fiverr intro right here. It's time for the fire round. Exactly. That sounded great. All right. All right. So fire around today.

These questions all come from the bigger pockets forums. And they are questions that people ask and we're going to fire them quickly at you, Douglas. So starting, number one. What is the average timeline? for flipping a property? Average timeline. Well, you know, I'm a little bit different than most.

I buy everything, hoping that I can find a, you know, a good one to three-year hold strategy. Now, wink, wink, I'm not a flipper. I am an investor. I'm not a dealer. So every once in a while, maybe a couple times a year, I find a rental property that just doesn't work out. So we try to move it.

And mine are taking, you know, two to three months. the renovation part and if I have to sell it, not that I want to, but if I have to, you know, if it's not selling in one month, you know, you've got an acceptable offer, you know, you're probably priced too high or there's something else wrong. You know, I like what you just said. I'm not an investor. I'm a dealer. And I actually think that's kind of a...

Well, I'm not a dealer. You're an investor. Right, right. Sorry. Apparently, I don't listen to the lady who says... Anyway, the... You know, I think it's an interesting classification because, you know, we have a lot of discussion about what is an investor. And a lot of the purists will say, well, an investor is somebody who buys and holds, right?

And everything else, you're kind of working a job. I think dealer is kind of a good classification potentially to explain, you know, the wholesalers and the flippers. I mean, because that really is somewhat of what you do. Yeah. Yeah. Right on. All right. fire round question number two your contractor wants in on the deal would you do it

of course it depends on the deal i think you guys have said many many times you know um a percentage of something is better than uh percentage of nothing so or all of nothing um so you know it would depend and it totally depends on the contractor in fact um you guys usually in your fire round ask about uh you know contractors and how do you find good ones and there was that you know you guys remember the the home depot tip you guys tell It depends on where you are. You know, there's people you can talk to in all different parts of the country and they've got their own special way to find people.

We've got a website here called KSL.com. In California, I used Craigslist and asked for references. In Maui, it was all about word of mouth because there's a lot of people who can talk story, bra, but not everybody gets. But I'm pretty much the general. and then I farm out a lot of subcontractor work to other people, you know, plumbing and electrical and flooring and stuff like that. So somebody in Hawaii should like build a platform in the middle of a great surf beach

and like, you know, have a sign up like, hey, I'm the surfing contractor. I can get a job done, bra. There it is. Hey, another little quick tip about contractors. Yeah. Just came to me. You know, if I'm on a deadline and my subs, you know, are leaving for lunch, I just say, hey, I ordered pizza.

Stay. I can't tell you how many times my subs have left and they're gone for two hours or they're gone for the rest of the day because they got another opportunity to give a bid. And I'm just like, what? So if I'm on a deadline, I will order pizza. I'll bring back some hamburgers from Carl's Jr. and I'll keep them on the job so that they get it done. That is a really, really, really good tip.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, people definitely like free. And particularly, I've actually offered food to contractors who have been working on stuff before. And that keeps them local, which is nice. It means the job gets done faster. Oh, well, you can buy them some red bowls and it'll get done even faster. Maybe with a few crooked lines, but you know. Yeah, versus the guy in the post this week.

And I think Brandon will link to it in the show notes. There was somebody posted a photo of a contractor who was painting their house. They fell asleep. They fell asleep on the ladder. That was awesome. How do you do that? That's funny. All right.

Number three of the fire round. When is the best month to buy property in is there one? Oh, tough call. I do a lot of land as well. I bought, you know, a couple dozen pieces of vacant land. I love buying those in the late fall and winter because it's on extra sale. And then I'd like to pop those back on the market in the spring. Maybe after holding them for a year or two, but that's worked out well for me. Probably the same can be said for, you know, buying, you know, an extensive rehab. I'm not one of those guys that buys the really cheap ones. with thin margins. You know, again, I like to go in thinking I can make 60, 70,000. So if I can buy it in November, that's almost ideal, you know, working it, you know, manage the job and then pop it back on the market in March and you're golden. Yeah.

That's good. All right. If there's an old cast iron drain in a property, would you replace, well, if there are old cast iron drains in a property, would you replace them all to modernize even if they didn't leak yet? Wow. That's a tough one. You know, to be honest, I try to stay away from anything older than the, you know,

the 70s. It just as a general rule. I say that and I have a house from 1966. I'm just starting a renovation on now. So ask me that next time around and we'll let you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I was just, we were just in St. Louis for conference and I was visiting my brother who lives in a 150 year old house. And I walked in and, you know, it's got a lot of charm and it's really cool. but man oh man i i just like i see the plaster i see just the old i see everything and i'm like wow this is this is not for me you know give me give me 2000 or sooner i mean i'm gonna i'm in a mid-fifties house now but you know i i can't deal with the old stuff i love the other stuff like almost everything i have is 1920s or earlier yeah but it can nickel and dime

yes that's the problem that's the problem for sure all right well what is your favorite color door for a flip? Ooh, you know, I like a burgundy red door. It just says, look at me. Nice, nice. I have to plug mine in real quick. I've been, I switched recently from Burgundy to like a plum, like purple color and I love it. It's kind of weird, but it looks amazing.

So if you go around and find a bunch of houses and plum purple doors, yeah, those are his. There's like a dark purple. So it's like, I don't know what you call it. Anyway, all right. Last question, Josh. Last question, where do you buy most of your materials? Yeah, Home Depot and Lowe's. Okay.

Right on. Me too. Right on. Cool. All right. Final section of the show today and my favorite section of the show, which is the famous. Famous for. And where were you on that one, Douglas?

Dharie. Slow to party. All right. Number one. What is your favorite real estate? state book. Oh, yeah. I was ready for this one. So I'm going to say Robert Kiyosaki, but not the usual one. I did read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but you know what I really liked was success stories. You know, some of it's just, you know, regular business entrepreneurial stuff, but a lot of them are

real estate stories and they're creative and they're cool and I just really like that one, success stories. I listen to it on CD. Nice. I agree. I really like that too. I read the whole thing once in a Barnes & Noble. I just went in and I sat down and read the whole book there. There's a quick tip for people. Yeah, if you want to freeload some books, just go sit in the Barnes & Noble and read all day. Nice, nice.

All right, so what's your favorite business book? Oh, hard to nail it down to just one. I'll give you three. Millionaire next door. Seven habits. You know, that's old school, but great for getting your mindset on the things that matter the most. And getting rid of the clutter.

Freakonomics, loved Freakonomics. That was good ones. Yeah, nobody's said that one yet on the show. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Well, we will link to all those again in the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 41. And final two questions. Josh, you want to take the next?

Well, you know, I was half, truthfully, I was actually half listening because I, I remember hearing from a website, that guy, John T. Reed, who likes to talk about the gurus. And I was like, let me look up that phrase, the failure, not an option thing. He's got a page of the BS checklist. And on the BS checklist number 47 is use of the sentence, failure is not an option. Then he goes on and talks about customers of gurus are scared that they're about to waste their money, blah, blah, blah. And anyway, so yeah, that was interesting. I remembered seeing that somewhere before. Anyway, all right.

Crazy. Crazy. you. All right. Third, well, second to last question here is hobbies. I certainly gather that you're a hang ten kind of guy. You're a surfing dude. What else do you do for fun? Well, you know, I bought a couple snowboards when I moved here, traded in the surfboards, and I love to ride the mountain. It's good stuff. So Colorado, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, baby. I would know even more with less kids, but, you know. I'm hearing it.

I'm hearing it. All right. You know, spending time with the family, travel, you know, a little bit of everything. It's all good. Right on. Perfect. All right. Don't take your kids on a really long vacation.

I will say that. I took my family last year to England. Great, great, you know, scenery stuff to see. But, man, by the end of it, three weeks, I was like, you remember seeing, what was that? the shining red rum and i was i was starting to lose it nice he's back all right final final question of the day i think what do you believe sets apart the successful investor is douglas from those who give up and quit or never get started in the first place uh you know a lot of your interviewees in the past have mentioned drive and determination and those things are absolutely

crucial but I think Anson a couple shows ago, Anson, he nailed it throughout most of his thing he was talking about, you know, he had a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience that he learned the hard way doing grunt work for agents and stuff. But it was when he and his dad put together an action plan and that's really hard when you're a beginner, truly a beginner, because you take action on what? You know, sometimes you need a little coaching from bigger pockets or, you know, from another source. But, you know, if you can put together an action plan and then follow it consistently, dude, you're there. And the action plan has to include your skill sets, your abilities, your relationships, you know, what you bring to the table.

And then you have to understand your weaknesses too. You know, if you cannot swing a hammer, you know, then it's probably, and you don't even know anybody who does, you know, fix and flips are probably not. thing right now, you know, go to some Home Depot clinics and learn it maybe, but, you know, you got to know your strengths and weaknesses, put together an action plan, and make it happen. Yes, great. Yeah, that's great advice. And, you know, I'll add one. I never really jump in on this one.

But, you know, because of the ninth birthday, I, for BP, I did this post. And I sent emails out to folks and what somebody responded to me. And they said, you know, I've seen you over these nine years. and the one thing that you really demonstrate is perseverance. And, yeah, I thought about it. I was like, you know, yeah, that's probably the best word to describe it. And the reason I bring it up is I think if you look at investors over the long term, I mean, you know, you're a pretty good example, Douglas.

You know, the market beat you up a little bit. You know, you got whacked down when the market was hurting everybody. And you came back and you persevered and got back in the game and you're doing well. and, you know, there's going to be ups and downs as you do this. And if you are incapable of persevering and fighting through the challenges, then this may not be the right industry for you. Agreed. I'm deep sometimes.

Deep. All right, well, let's close this thing up. Douglas, where can people find more about you at? Luckylarson.com and certainly on bigger pockets. You can at me anytime and we'll chat. All right. I got to ask a question. Where did Lucky come from?

You know, I was a high school name. I had a math teacher called me Lucky once and it kind of stuck and I pull it out every now and then. You may notice sometimes, you know, when I throw something out there on bigger pockets, I'll put make your own luck. It's so easy for people to say, oh, good luck. And, you know, it's not like luck just falls from the sky.

You know, one of my favorite quotes is, uh, takes 20, years to become an overnight success. It's about the perseverance. It's about, you know, shaking the trees. And when you're out there shaking the trees all the time with a plan, you know, stuff falls down. That's how it works. Yeah.

You make luck. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, listen, Douglas, we really, really appreciate you being on the show. I want to thank you a lot for joining us. And, of course, for participating on Bigger Pockets. We'll be sure to link to your profile and some of the other stuff on the show notes at

biggerpockets.com slash 41. So thanks a lot for being with us. Hey, my pleasure. You guys are great. All right, guys, that was our show with Douglas Larson. Man, there was a lot of good information in there. Definitely worth a listen and maybe a second listen if you missed anything. As always, if you have any

questions for Douglas, Lucky Larson, make sure to post them to the show notes at BiggerPockets.com slash show 41. or you could just hit them up on biggerpockets.com and look him up and you'll find him. But otherwise, yeah, listen, that was great. And hopefully you guys are deeply engaging in the community. It's kind of cool. We have been watching the analytics on Bigger Pockets over the past months and years.

And what's kind of cool to see is we're watching people get more involved, spending more time, getting deeper into it. And, you know, I can't really quantify it, but I feel like we're getting a lot more happy members responding with emails and messages of joy after, after, you know, learning something new and things like that. Would you say that's fairly accurate? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think the community has been strengthened and there's more and more good information all the time on there. So, yeah, if you're not part of that, do it. Yeah, don't just read. Make sure to respond.

answer, get involved, and be a part of it, no matter how beginner or sophisticated you are. So, yeah, definitely check us out there. Also, make sure you're following us on social. Check us out on Twitter, Facebook, Gplus, LinkedIn. We share stuff and get into discussions on those platforms that we don't get into on the site itself on occasion. So definitely do that. And of course, those are great places to keep up with any kind of news that we've got to share. Otherwise, again, thanks for listening. Jump on iTunes and share some feedback, ratings, and reviews of the site of the show if you have a chance. And we actually added a cool new photo to the top of our podcast page at biggerpockets.com slash podcast.

I think it's kind of fancy, Brandon and I together. So check that out. But that's it. Thanks for listening. This is Show 41. I'm Josh Dorkin, signing off. And I think we're going to let Brandon close the show today. Oh, this is awesome. All right. This is...

Oh, I was just kidding. This is Josh Dorkin. Signing on. 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 height, 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. I was hoping you'd do that. I thought that would be funny. We have the same sense of humor exactly.

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