BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 410: Life-Changing Deals: 5 Traits They Have in Common with Ken Corsini

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

What does it take to pull off a home run real estate deal? Today, we put that question to Ken Corsini, HGTV star and author of Profit Like the Pros: The Best Real Estate Deals That Shaped Expert Investors. Ken spoke to a diverse group of 25 investors about their very best deals, and in this episode he breaks down the common threads that run through each of those stories. You'll also hear Ken's tips for building your own personal brand in your market, and how he used his "Flip or Flop Atlanta" fame to build a brokerage and mortgage company. Throughout this episode, Ken points you to individual investors in the BiggerPockets community; be sure to check out their BP profiles to learn more... and pick up a copy of the Profit Like the Pros in the BiggerPockets store today. Every format includes a bunch of great bonus materials, including a breakdown of 22 investors' worst deals – so you can avoid the same mistakes. In This Episode We Cover: How personal connections often lead to home run deals Honing in on a specific niche and building expert knowledge How one deal can change the trajectory of your career Ken, David, and Brandon's personal best/favorite deals Common traits of the worst deals featured in Ken's book How Ken built a personal brand, then spun it into different businesses How he controls each aspect of his real estate transactions (title, lending, etc.) And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Flip or Flop Atlanta Best Deal Ever (Youtube Series) BiggerPockets Podcast 339: 60,000 Tenants?! How Frank Rolfe Built a Mobile Home Empire BiggerPockets Podcast 405: Investing in the Only True Recession-Proof Asset: Yourself! with Lewis Howes BiggerPockets Podcast 235: How to Find and Fund Real Estate Deals with Anson Young BiggerPockets Podcast 401: Follow these Steps to Get People to Know, Like, and Trust You with Jordan Harbinger BiggerPockets Podcast 329: Financial Freedom Before 30 Through Just 10 Deals With Felipe Mejia Self Storage Properties at Pennies on the Dollar with Stacy Rossetti Real Estate Rookie Podcast Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show410 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 410. You don't ask for money. You present an opportunity. I think this is where people get stuck. They think, well, I don't want to be the guy, you know, with my, you know, tail in my hand, you know, meagerly asking for their money. You're not asking for their money. You're presenting a financial opportunity.

And they're lucky if they get to invest in your project. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What is going on to everyone? It's Brennan Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with an investor that I look up to a ton. Yes, our guest also, but also Mr. David Green. Hi, you didn't know all I was going to say that, did you?

Oh, you caught me off guard with that. Brandon, I wasn't expecting a compliment for you. Usually you're telling me to stop talking, just sit there and look pretty. Well, when you got that shaved head like you, it's hard not to sit there and look pretty. So, you know, people got to admire it. It's okay, man. You know, you bring a lot of value to this show, especially the YouTube. So thank you, man. Oh, that's, that said. I have a face for, I have a face for podcast, not a face for radio. I like it. Exactly. Well, today's show is another really, really awesome look at what it takes to become successful in real estate, but not one way to become successful, not two, but five different things that some of the top of the top, some of the best deals in the world.

Like, what do they require? Our guest today is going to go through five of those because our guest is none other than the world famous. And yes, really like literally world famous. Ken Korsini. Ken is the host of HGTV's Flip or Flop Atlanta. Ken has been a friend of Bigger Pockets for a long time. I mean, he was, he's been around longer than I've been around, I think, in the real estate. And he is just like a wealth of knowledge.

He does everything from like real estate flipping to wholesaling to rentals to brokerage to loans to everything. New construction development. New construction. Yeah. All this stuff. And he just wrote a book for Bigger Pockets. And in fact, that brings us today's quick tip. Today's quick tip.

Go pick up Ken's new book. It's awesome. It's called Profit Like the Pros. You can get it at BiggerPockets.com slash profit book. Again, slash profit book. It's interviews. It's basically he did a series of video interviews like 25 of them. This book is almost like they take the.

stories from all 25 video interviews that he did and writes a chapter for each one on the best deal people have done. Like, what are the things that made them successful? And throughout that book, when he was writing it, he kind of pulled out a few common threads. And that's what today's podcast is all about. So the quick tip is go get the book. The long tip is listen to this whole show because it is fantastic. We all joke that rentals are passive. But if you're spending nights matching receipts or guessing what a property earned last month, that's not passive at all. Baselane fixes that part of landlording, the financial chaos. Their banking and AI bookkeeping system automatically tags every transaction,

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and set custom roles in approval policies. There's even a dedicated bill inbox for each property to keep everything organized. Ready to simplify your workflow, book your free demo at bill.com slash bigger pockets, and get a $100 Amazon gift card. That's bill.com slash bigger pockets. Then now, I think it's time to get into this. Anything you want to add before we jump in, Mr. David Green? Your common thread quote was awesome. That's exactly what I think every listener should do, is listen to the show and ask yourself which of the pieces of advice that Ken is giving would

apply most accurately to your own life. Look for the common thread and the struggles you're having or the area that you're looking for guidance and then go put it into play and you should benefit from this. I know after listening to Ken, I was thinking about things a lot differently. We had like a 30 minute conversation with them when we finished up. This is an awesome interview. Yeah, really, really good. So with that said, let's get to the interview with Mr. Ken Korsini. All right, Ken, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. How you doing, man? Good, man. Thanks for having me back. I guess I didn't screw it up the first time since you're having me back. Yeah, you know, we'll allow it this time. I really enjoy like, I mean, every time we talk, I really enjoy talking with you. I always learn a lot and grow. And now you got a new book coming out. And so, you know, we're publishing through bigger pockets. And I'm excited about that. Not just because I'm, you know, my, my picture is on the front cover. But I know, artwork picture of me, which really made my beard like accented on that picture. I don't know.

It looks very good. It took up a lot of space on that cover, too, just the beard itself. It did. Yeah, you guys have to go check that out. Definitely. What's the link for that book? I think it's biggerpockets.com slash it was a deal book. Is that right? We're going to call it. Oh, profit book. Bigger pockets.com slash profit book. Check out the picture of me, everybody. And of course, the book itself. You know, it's a good book. But before we get into that, let's hear real quick. For those who didn't listen to your last episode, don't know who you are, whatever. Who are you? And why are you here? Wow. Well, do you have two hours. I got four. We do long form podcast here. So I am Ken Korsini out of Atlanta, Georgia. Most people probably know me because I happen to be on a HGTV show called Flipper Flop, Atlanta. Interestingly, though, I've been contributing to Bigger Pockets way before then since 2011,

and written a ton of blogs for Bigger Pockets, had a turnkey flipping operation here out of Atlanta, sort of morphed into just a straight flipping operation. And now it's a little bit of everything. Obviously, having a TV show opens up a lot of opportunities. And so we do new construction and brokerages and more. and all sorts of fun stuff that we can get into. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool.

What's been your favorite thing? I mean, like, I know you did construction for a while and you had a background in construction, right? Like, you went to school for that, is that right? I went back and got a master's degree. Yeah, actually, after I started flipping, I went back on a master's degree just so I could kind of hone in on the, on the new construction. So yeah, new construction's a lot of fun. I mean, we do a lot of custom construction. Honestly, I've enjoyed, I've really enjoyed the brokerage piece where we've brought on over 200 agents now here in Atlanta and seeing kind of what that's grown into. And it's just, it's really scalable, you know, and as an entrepreneur, it's fun to scale things. And it's hard to scale

flipping. Like I beat my head against like just the ceiling of flipping and it was hard. But then I sort of fell into this broker's thing and it's been fun to watch this thing grow as quickly as it has. Because like I said, it's super scalable. That's neat. Well, let's let's jump in a little bit. I want to jump right into this idea of the book that you wrote is about interviewing. I mean, you like, you interviewed me, you interviewed a lot of people about like their best deal. right. So you talk about, like, what was that about? And then we're going to go into the specifics of why we're talking about that today and how it's going to help our listeners. Sure. So I've always love the idea of just hearing somebody else's story, especially a real story, like a really cool,

interesting deal. To me, it has always inspired me more than anything else. Even before I got into real estate talking with people that were in the space and hearing, you know, how they landed some off-market deal was just super inspiring to me. And I said, you know what? Let's do something fun with bigger pockets where we take it a step further and just have a show that we just, do best deals. And so, you know, you and I were kind of talking at the time of, that's a pretty cool idea. Let's do a YouTube series called Best Deal Ever. And then, you know, we created all this really cool content. We've got all these amazing interviews so far. And some of them were just so good. It was like, you know, these should be in a book.

Because this is, there's a lot of good education that you could extract from these stories and make it a, you know, entertaining and educational book. And so from that, that series, that's, you know, it's on the YouTube, Bigger Pocket's channel. We extracted the 20, that I thought would really be a good addition to the book and then created a book out of it. That's awesome. And here's why I think this is so helpful. You know, especially when people are first getting into real estate, a lot of people, they don't know what the right path to pursue is, right? They don't know if they should flip or do rentals or be an agent or whatever. Like, there's a million options, right? So when, what I typically tell people, I know you probably

say the same thing in David, you as well. It's like, just like get a feel for a lot of things. Like figure out what you're like, that's why podcasts are so helpful because you hear what single mom from Detroit what she did and you hear what HGTV star Ken Gorsini did and everything in between right like you see like like people doing million dollar deals and you know the grant card owns and you see the the person just doing their first two three deals and so this book basically gives you that like here's 25 stories of people who have succeeded and does something really cool so when people are reading it they go oh i want to do that or that that really fires me up that gets me excited and that's what that's what i love about this so did you notice in the process of writing

did you notice like common themes like like people who are super successful had a great deal like were there things that stood out as as awesome yeah yeah absolutely it was when it's funny i was even while i'm doing the interviews and then when i took a deeper dive into these interviews and started writing the book it inspired me i've done i've done so many of these different types of deals before and yet i'm in there and at the end i'd finish a chapter and be like man why am i not doing that that is so cool because there's just so many interesting fun things that you could be doing as an entrepreneur in real estate that, you know, I haven't explored that I want to try. And even to this day, I mean, there's still a handful of things on my to-do list that came

from this book. So whether you've never done a deal or you've been in this business for 20 years, there's always something you can explore. There's other ways to make money, especially as the market shifts and adapts. There's ways that you can adapt your business into certain niches and sort of stay relevant and stay successful. And that's one of the things I love about the book. But yeah, absolutely. To your question, absolutely. There was a lot of really cool threads where I had to go back through the book even. And at the end of each chapter, too, there's a takeaway. It's sort of a high level. I've told you the story. I've given you some educational nuggets. Now, what are the three or four big takeaways from this chapter? And even in

my mind, it sort of helped me sum it up. Like, okay, here's what you can walk away with and extract some interesting nugget or truth. And so I went back at the end of writing it and looked at all 25 chapters and said, okay, what are the common theme, the themes between all these different takeaways? And it was really cool how there really are some interesting common threads that sort of weave throughout the entire book that you can walk away with. That's cool. I mean, I would love to just go through those today, really. Just like, I mean, we'll go through a list of, you know, as many as we can get to on what are those common things? Because I think that people are interested in like what makes people successful in deals? Like, what are those common traits?

So I think, yeah, we just kind of burn through that. David, anything you want to do before we get into that? I wanted to bring up a conversation that you and I had, Brandon, that relates really strongly to what Ken is mentioning here. because we kind of glossed over this awesome resume. Oh, I just went to school and got a master's degree in construction on top of already flipping houses and being on TV. And I remember there was a commercial where you were like driving a backhoe or something just mowing things over. Oh, and I also own a brokerage and I do loans and a title company. That's all.

The point is Brandon and I were on a walk one time. And you were telling me about either a book you read or a person you talked to that said, when you're young, you should say yes to everything. When you have a chance to do it, go do it. learn everything you can about as many things as you can. And then as you get older and you start to recognize where your skill set is, where your highest and best use of your time is, you start saying no to everything. You really niche down and you say, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And that's probably where your bridge building analogy would start to come in. Like, I'm just going to build this bridge or that bridge. But once you get that bridge built,

you can do what Ken's doing where he's now like launching little side businesses off of the bridges that he already has built. He's not building a complete new bridge from California to Hawaii, but he's got extra lanes that he's maybe adding to the bridge that he's got. And I wanted to point it out that you don't have to say, like, you don't always have to say, no, you can't do this and tell yourself no to everything you want, but maybe you have to say no for now. And then later on, you can get into it. And I'm sure in the book, like Ken, I know that you dove deep and you figured out, what are these people doing well? What are the common themes that I can see? And I wanted to highlight that that was a conversation. Brandon and I had that really helped.

and you're kind of an example of what that should look like when it's done right. I appreciate that. And I think your sentiment's right on because especially when you're starting out and I was guilty of this, it was like the squirrel mentality like, oh my gosh, there's another shiny new object. Let me go chase that. And it's real easy if you're wired that way to want to go chase everything. And I've had to be really disciplined.

And I would still say I'm not perfect at it. And I still probably do that a little bit. But I like the bridge analogy a lot. Like for us, we built a brand because of television, right? So, especially locally, we have a really well-known brand, which is RedBarn. And so it was how do we leverage that brand? We've built this brand now, and that's sort of the bridge. Obviously, brokerage scales really well with the brand because you've got hundreds of little

billboards and people's yards all over the area, which is great for brand building. And what goes along with construction, so that works really well in renovation. It's really just sort of bolt-on mortgages or bolton title. And so, like, you sort of feel like extra lanes in the bridge that's with this brand. that we built. And to be honest, as an entrepreneur, it's also just a lot of fun because you want to scratch all these itches. You want to explore like different businesses. And I've done enough mortgage. I have a, Danny, how it works. I've just never been on this side of the table before. And so it's kind of on that side of the table. It's similar to you because you're sort of exploring

that as well. It sounds like. But I knew it was time to do mortgages when I had done so many for myself and for my clients that I didn't have a whole lot more to learn. Like what you said is the really good point. The bridge was built. I just had to do a little bit of work to kind of finish it off. So for someone in your shoes that's done as many deals as you have, how did you know when it was the right time to say, okay, now I can add on to this? I think we probably were up to about 100 agents and we're like, okay, it's going to work. Like the brokerage is going to work. Like we've got a building now. We've got agents. We've got a thriving community. We built sort of a cool culture. And these agents are sending

deals elsewhere. You know, it's like, well, we want to capture some of that. It just makes, and then not only that, honestly, part of it, part of the reason we did title and we did mortgage is it's also the client experience. Like the more control you have over something, the better able you to serve your clients. And for us, the only reason we're able to grow is because we put a lot of emphasis on client service. You don't come back to us if we do a crappy job.

So if we can control title, make sure that's smooth. We can control mortgage, make sure that's, well, then now we're just growing the monster because we're controlling it. That's exactly right. That's really what motivated me to do it too is I was frustrated with the lender's mistakes hurting my business and the title company's bad service

reflecting poorly on me. So it starts off where you just want the control to make sure it goes well. And then you recognize how to make that profitable once you have that control. That's an awesome, awesome point. Totally. Really good. And it's been fun too. Like you're an entrepreneur. So obviously, it's fun to stretch your wings a little bit and try different things that you wouldn't have otherwise done and explore businesses and just and some are going to work and some aren't. But again, it's not so far outside. You know, it's not like I'm swapping industries for something that totally doesn't make sense. It's something that works ancillary to what we're already doing really well. So let's talk about that. For the people that are saying, hey, I want to be able to do it,

what are some of the common themes that you recognized, hey, this is what the entrepreneurs who did it right and were successful. This is what they did well. And then maybe some of the things that they didn't do well so that we don't have to make those same mistakes. Yeah, so that sort of feeds back into the book. I mean, some of the common threads I saw in the book. And in the books, just to clarify, It's not that I just interviewed 25 of the best top real estate investors in the entire country. It's really a pretty good sampling of different skill levels and different experience levels where some have only been in the business two or three years. Some have been in the business a long time.

And every story is a little bit different. In a lot of cases, the stories are it's sort of that level up story, like where this is the first time I discovered that this is the niche I want to be in. And then that sort of opened up everything for them. So that's a perfect first one to talk about. is how a lot of folks discover their niche, whether it's early in their career or late in their career, and they just hone their skill, they fine-tune it,

and then they just scale this knot out of it and do really well at that one specific niche. That's just like the bridge thing, right? You have one bridge. Like you figure out what that bridge is, and then you just keep building that bridge, making it stronger and stronger and stronger, knowing that that's going to get you there.

So how do you balance that? Or how do people in the book or that you know, balance that, picking one niche, going with that one thing with, I want to see what's out there. And I want to have my cake you need it too. I want to do all these fun things because I'm an entrepreneur. How do you balance those two things? That's a good question because it's funny because not everybody niches down. Some people do really well experimenting with a lot of different things or having a repertoire of a number of different businesses. And some people are more suited, I think, to just find

one business and do it really well. For example, Frank Rolfe, I'm not sure if you know, Frank, he's a mobile. So great example. He's in the book. where he had just sold a business. He was in the billboard business. He had sold it. And he was just trying to figure out, what am I going to do next? I'm not sure. And he happened upon a mobile home park that somebody was selling.

And he made a very conscious decision. Okay, I'm going to learn this business. And this is the first deal I'm going to do. If I can figure out this one deal, then we'll see if this is a space I want to be in. So it was a very conscious decision. I'm not doing anything else. And he actually moved into the mobile home park for that first year. Like I'm going to learn it to the extent that I'm willing to move into this mobile home park, manage it.

And if I can learn this business really well, then this is, and sure enough, that he's one of the top mobile home park investors in the country now. But that's how he started in that niche, which I think is really admirable. Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah. Frank was on episode, I think, 339 of the Bigger Pockets podcast back in the day. So if you guys want to hear more about that, obviously check out, you know, the book. But it's also, we have an episode with him. Yeah. And I love that example.

Like he just became like the king of that niche. Like he's, he's that guy. Now, I would almost argue that other people that you see that are successful that feel like they're doing a lot of things like you. They see you doing a lot of different things. Like you also didn't start a brokerage at the same time you started flipping.

At the same time you started doing mortgage at the same time you did title. Like you built those things on as you, what David and I talk a lot about with the, to keep harping on the bridge is like you either wait till your one bridge is completed and you've got it built to the island that you're trying to get to. and it's at least functioning. And so you can put somebody else to run that bridge, like the toll worker to sit there and manage it.

And then you go build another one. Or you hire someone else to build other bridge. Like, hey, you know it'd be really cool to have a mortgage company. So you go and like either acquire somebody else's bridge or you hire someone to build that bridge if you're busy doing another one. So I would say like people that I know that look like

they're doing multiple bridges really aren't. They're still doing one bridge at a time. They've got other people working their bridges or they're one bridges that's automated at that point. Do you see the same thing? You're 100% right. And I guess to clarify, I'm not in the day-to-day of any of these businesses because I couldn't be, especially when we're for filming. And that's really sort of what this is where it all started is

we were so busy filming a show that it was sort of, you know, these are opportunities, but I have to delegate. I have to find people to partner with. And so really all of my businesses, they're all partnerships, every single one of them. And I bring in really, really good people. And honestly, they're the ones running the day to day. We know, we meet once a week. We look at P&Ls. We look at a high level. So we're working, you know, not in the business, but on the business, but there's no way I can have my hands and all these different things and I'm be in the weeds, being the day to day. And you're right. There's always, it's really a sequential progression. Like, what is the, what you first laid a foundation for that initial bridge.

And these are really all boltons. They really just plug into the existing central business. And I don't think I would have done this except for that we had built the brand on TV. Really, that's the only reason we're able to sort of quickly expand into these different businesses. Well, how can people listen to this right now that don't, obviously don't have a TV show like, you know, a big podcast or whatever. How do they build their brand on a smaller level, perhaps, like in their local market? Like, is this whole thing possible to be able to bring on the partners and have all the people doing it? Is that possible at a smaller level, do you think? 100%. Yeah, there's, I mean, even Atlanta alone, I mean, I can count on two hands the number of

guys that just started as wholesalers and have built really good businesses. And crap, I was in the business for 15 years before I ever did a TV show. And all I did was flip houses. So yeah, there's absolutely there's opportunity to build brands now more than ever, because, it's so much easier to advertise. It's so much easier to get in front of people. It's so much easier to target your marketing, too, to your audience where you can build the brand to that audience, whether it's Facebook ads or Google ads or even a local billboard. Absolutely, you can start even just wholesaling, building into a sizable flipping business locally can absolutely be a recognizable name. Yeah, that's really good. We talked a lot about that back on episode

but 405 with Lewis House here on the podcast where like we talk about like your brand is recession proof like if you build that personal brand people in your area know you're the person to go to you're the flipper you're the wholesaler if you've got a decent social media you got email list you got whatever it is like you're that person like it's the exact same concept on a large scale that's why I tell people who are new to like start going to local real estate meetups real estate clubs and maybe even start your own if there's not a good one in your area start your own real estate club just get together at a local restaurant bar whatever and just Start meeting with people, become that connector, and then you can put together those partnerships.

Now you're known, you have that brand as like the real estate guy, real estate gal, and you can put that stuff together. So, yeah. Let's talk about that because maybe not everyone can have a TV show. So it's very easy to write that off and say, well, that doesn't work for me. I'm not Brandon Turner, Ken Korsini. However, what does it mean when you have a brand? I was just talking to somebody about this and we were boiling it down to, I was basically walking through downtown Walnut Creek and I saw that Nike was selling eyeglasses. and I would have bought those.

But like, what the heck do, like, shoes and clothes have to do with glasses? Why would I buy Nike glasses? It's or, and right next to that store, there was Yamaha Pianos. And I had the same thought. Like, Yamaha makes motorcycles and jet skis. Why would I think their piano was good? But it's because what you think is, if that company is doing it, it's probably doing it well, right? Like, I like Yamaha,ama motorcycle, Yamaha motorcycle.

So, Yamaha, I think I just made up the word right there. It sounds like, like a Hawaiian company. I would trust their pianos were made well. And that's the same where if you see Ken on TV and you see what he's doing and he has a reputation and you trust Ken, you would trust his brokerage, you would trust his lending company, you would trust his title company. And what I'd like to highlight is that that trust is not dependent on you being a celebrity. That just the celebrity status gets more people to see that you can be trusted. Yes. But Brandon, to your point, it absolutely works in a local market. If you're running the real estate meetup, you're the celebrity in that

world and people get a chance to get to know you to see your integrity, to see how you work. Do you keep your word? They're more likely to trust you when you're going to build your brand. And everybody listening here can do that. Yep. It's funny because you guys just made the perfect segue into one of the other principles that I know is throughout the book. And the perfect example of this is Anson Young. You guys know Anson, obviously. He's written books for bigger pockets. awesome. And yeah, did exactly that. So he started up a meetup. He's in, uh, in Denver. And his best deal came through a meetup. And so one of the common thing, and it's, there's actually a couple other people in the book that did the exact same thing. They created their local brand by starting their own meetup or their own RIA. And ultimately,

what it comes down to is personal connections. I mean, it's so, it's amazing how simple that is and how we forget it. It just comes down to people. Like, we're in a people business. this day in and day out. And the second you isolate yourself and try to run a real estate business is the second you're on your way to going out of business. Because everything comes down to being in the, and it's not just people, it's personal connections. And so for Anson, he was, he created opportunity for himself in his RIA group. But then when it came to get the deal, it came through the Ria group. It was one of the people in the group. And it was one of those, it was like almost like a probate deal, you know, where there's a family involved. But he took it a step further. And so much of it

comes down to then making a personal connection to acquire properties. And we miss that as well. I mean, so many of the stories in the book were acquired because they made a conscious effort to get real with people and to empathize with people and to make a personal connection where then all of a sudden the person that's selling the house, they trust them and they like them and they know them and they feel like, okay, this is somebody I can do business with. But man, it's so easy to miss that. And it's when it's just dollars and cents that if you're really going to be successful, you have to connect with people. I think that's, I mean, I know you interviewed Brandon for the book and a lot of his stories

in there, but that's why I think we all love Brandon because he shares so much of himself that it's like when I first met Brandon, I mean, he might have a different story. You might think it was weird. But I already knew I wanted to be his friend, right? There was, I knew enough about Brandon that unless he ended up being a serial killer or something, which he didn't. I knew I was going to like him. I kind of knew what I was getting into.

We already had trust before he even knew who I was, or at least I had. had trust with him. And I think that's why a lot of people invest in his fund. That's why Open Door Capital's done so well. People hear Brandon, they know he's a man of integrity. He's a man of honor. He's going to do what he says. They're going to do business with them. And you know who really made this point, honestly, that we should give a shout out to here was Josh Dorkin. He hammered this home on this podcast for so many years that if you do not have integrity and you do not do business well, you will not stay in business. And that's just a really good point to highlight here that the people that are successful, all the people that Ken talked about and are in this book are all people of integrity.

That's why they're still in business. That's why they're doing well. Totally. That's a really good point. Couldn't agree more. It's funny, even Brandon's story in the book, you know, one of the things I remember highlighting about that story is even your mailer, like the mailer that got this ridiculous response rate was because it was a personal letter. Like I think maybe did you have a picture of yourself on the letter? And it was like, I'm going to connect with you before I even meet you. And the last, letter just, I mean, it worked off the charts, like your response rate. Yeah, it was like,

I mean, it was a small sample rate, but I think I said, what, 300 letters and got 40 phone calls. It's like a 12% response rate, which, uh, yeah, granted, like, nobody was doing direct mail in my town at all. I would think I was, I'm sure I was the first piece of direct mail any of those people ever got. So they're all like, what is this? Like, this guy sent me a handwritten letter that was like, you know, not actually handwritten. It was printed to look like handwriting, but like, yeah. And I think it just people, I would like to say this. People like to do business with people they like. people like to sell to people they like, they like to buy from people they like.

There's almost, we've talked about this on the show before, but there's a likeability quotient, like or number on every deal. In other words, if David and I both were bidding on Ken's deal and we both put it in our offer, if Ken hated David because he was just aggressive or rude

in the way he offered. And he liked me because I, he's like, oh, that was a nice guy and he seemed really, really cool. Now, he's not,

he's not going to give a $100,000 discount. But there, but I guarantee he would give me $1,000. So somewhere between that, there's a number and it's different for everybody. But the more somebody's going to like you, the more of a discount they'll give you, the more chance they'll take your offer above somebody else's. And I think people forget that in this industry.

You could just be a normal person and make people like you, get people to like you. And yeah, it's all it takes. It's a personal business. So that's what you notice is that a lot of these deals have the personal connection somehow involved in the story. It did. Whether you're connecting with people so that you could invest together so you could partner with people or you're trying to get that acquisition and you're working with the seller.

because, I mean, let's be honest, most of the times, if somebody's in distress and they're selling, you know, there's a reason behind it. And if you approach them as just a businessman and it's just dollars and cents and it's just selling me the house, it's really hard to convince them to sell you the house. But if you come in there and you're genuine, the other idea behind it is also not just connecting, but also solving problems. Like if you come into something and they're in distress, it's not just how do I buy the house? It really, if you approach it as how do I help them? because here's the situation that they're in. And I know if I do this, this and this,

it really is going to ease the burden for them. And people sense that. And if you solve their problems, they're much more likely to sell to you or just to work with you in general. Even if you don't end up buying the house, that still comes back to you in the long term. Just helping people.

We'll come back to you in the long term. It just does. Oh, good. Hey, just another quick shout out to another podcast episode we did a while back. It was on episode 401. So now a couple months ago with Jordan Harbinger. The whole show was called.

It was like, follow these steps to get people to, know like and trust you. So if you want to get better at just getting people to know like and trust you, definitely check out that episode. It is just full of really good ideas about like being intentional about making people like you. So definitely check that one out. When I bought my first rental, I thought collecting rent would be the hard part. Nope. The admin crushed me. Every night was receipts, tax forms and checking who was late on rent. I kept thinking if this is one unit, how do people run 10? Base lane changed that. It's Bigger Pocket's official banking platform that

handles expense tracking, financial reporting, rent collection, and even tenants screening, all in one place. It's the system I wish I had from day one. Sign up today at baselane.com slash bigger pockets and get a $100 bonus. Baseline is a financial technology company and is not an FDIC insured bank. Bank banking services provided by Threadbank, member FDIC. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals, or LLC held properties. These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG. They specialize exclusively in real estate investors, understanding

portfolios, risk at scale, and cash flow protection. One claim can erase years of returns. If you own a rental property, don't assume you're covered. Have NREG review your insurance with someone who gets investing at NRE.com slash BP pod. That's NREIG.com slash BPPod. Tax season reminder for all the real estate investors listening. If you own rental properties, short-term rentals, commercial buildings, basically anything that's not your primary residence, you need to know about cost segregation. It's an IRS compliance strategy

that lets you accelerate depreciation on your properties, which means you're paying less in taxes this year and keeping more cash in your pocket for your next deal. Cost segregation guys is the go-to firm, having done over 12,000 of these studies with $500 million in total depreciation identified. Head to Costsegregationguise.com slash BP to get a free proposal and see your potential tax savings. All right. So number one we talked about was to review real quick.

Number one, we talked about was discover their niche. And then two was focus on your niche. And then number two was personal connection. What else you got for us? What else did you notice is a common thread? Almost everyone is, I see this between investors who they see opportunities where other people don't see those opportunities. Most of those deals, you know, were passed over by somebody else because they didn't see the opportunity where an investor kind of puts their creative lens on and they turn the property around. Why do they turn the property on? Because somebody else couldn't or didn't see the opportunity there.

So somebody that buys the, so Stacey Rosetti, she bought a self-storage facility. Well, she bought it from somebody that was grossly underperforming. Well, she saw that there was opportunity there. She bought it and implemented just some simple basic systems, some simple basic marketing. and next thing you know, it's firing on all cylinders. Or the other one, which I know you guys talk about occasionally, is just extra space in a house that you can finish, like a basement or an attic or just space that you didn't even realize it existed.

Or, you know, who's a perfect example of this is Felipe, Mejia, who's on, he does the newbies podcast. You know, his whole model is basically taking just a normal house that's got a lower den in a garage, and he converts that area into rentable space. And now he's renting by the room. And so he's renting to five people instead of one family. And instead of getting 1,500 a month, he's getting $3,000 a month in rent.

Well, nobody else sees that. That's just something that he's able to cleverly put his creative lens on and see. And again, it's just recognizing opportunities where other investors don't. And this goes back to what we mentioned at the beginning of the show, is like, especially when you're getting started, but even for experienced people, a book like yours, or if you want to go back and listen to all 25, you know, YouTube videos, you can do that too if you have a lot of time to kill. And or listen to every episode of this podcast.

Like by hearing those stories, that's what then makes you recognize what I call hidden potential, right? The hidden potential that's in, I mean, every property I feel like or most probably have hidden potential somewhere. Like maybe can you convert it to an Airbnb or could you add that bedroom?

One of the tricks I use all the time is that look for two bedroom houses that have over a thousand square feet. If it's a two bedroom house with a thousand square feet, typically two bedroom houses don't sell for as much as a three bedroom in most areas. A three bedroom. adds a ton of value.

And if it's over a thousand square feet, there's usually a massively large dining room, living room, family room, pantry, whatever, that you could turn into a third bedroom fairly easily. And so for a couple thousand dollars, you can usually take a, you know, 12, I mean, I've seen like 1,800 square foot two bedroom houses. And you're like, well, that clearly has some extra space in there.

Like nobody needs that big of a kitchen. And so that's just one example of hidden potential. Just even like rehabs in general can be potential. That's why we like the birth strategy so much. is like you buy in past the problem. It's a part of business in general. The people who buy other people's businesses and recognize you could be generating revenue in this way if you added bar sales to your restaurant or something like that, right? Or a buddy of mine that was a police officer with me, he opened a brewery and he went and bought a food truck and he just parks it right

outside of the brewery. And now he's selling food and the alcohol. He's doing really well. This is, I mean, just not thinking in those ways, like you mentioned, Ken, so many people are losing money. I would say on my real estate team, we have 27 houses in contract. 13 of them are house hackers who we found properties that have more square footage than was advertised on the deal. So an agent puts it on the MLS showing 1,400 square feet because that's what the tax record show. But it has an entire unpermitted basement that has been finished or partially finished. And we can go in there. The person who buys the house can fix it up, live there, run out the upstairs. and then when they move out, they've got a cash-hilling property in the most expensive market in the

United States, just by one little difference. I'm just not going to look at the same houses in the same way that everybody else is looking at. And that's a great, great point to highlight is everyone else tends to look at the world from the same lens. If you can just focus yours a little bit different, all of a sudden opportunities start popping up. You know, so you bring up Airbnb because there's a handful of stories in the book, too, about Airbnb where that's really in the last couple of years, one of those businesses that's come on where, you know, somebody has a failing rental or it's a house that just doesn't make sense for anything else. And then that one person realizes, hey, this makes a great Airbnb. And they come in there and then they start killing it on Airbnb. But again, it's just

another, you know, arrow in your quiver that's when you're looking at properties. Yeah, that's really what is. And the more deals you hear about other people doing, the more unique ways that you see on the people doing, the more chance that you'll recognize that, which is again, why like, why, I mean, I know we're hovering this book a lot today, but obviously, like, we're talking to the author, so why not? But like, this is why it's one of the, like, I love books where it's like you read it and it's almost impossible not to make your money back a thousandfold from the cost of a $20 or $30 book, right? Like, oh, yeah, I spent money on a book and I learned 25 cool strategies that help people make

a lot of money. Like, how does that not compute to a good investment? So, yeah, it's really good. Maybe maybe down is a good time just to maybe mention the book more officially and formally. What's the book called? And tell us like, you know, a quick 30 second. Like, what's it about? I mean, we know what it's about.

But what's it called? And gives a little plug for it. Yeah, sure. So the book is profit like the pros. And again, oh, there's a great, look at that. David's holding it up for me. It's got braided. Why else would you need an excuse to buy it? Yeah, you could actually, you could buy the book. Throw the book away. Take the front cover. Tear off just my picture. Go to Staples, blow it up big, put it on your wall and you just have a picture of me forever in your room. Yeah. Or just sticking your wallet. That's true. You can keep a small and close to your backside. Anyway, keep going on the wall. I hung mine on the wall right above my bed. There you go. Absolutely. First thing. Or in the ceiling. Yeah, there we go. Anyway, okay, so anyway, my face is on the cover, but profit like the pros. Yeah. Yeah, so profit like the pros.

Again, it's 25 individual case studies. And what makes the book super interesting is the fact that it covers everything. It's single family houses. It's Airbnb. It's multifamily. It's commercial. It's mobile home. It's self-storage.

It's land. One of my favorite ones is actually some of the land deals that are in there, which I've not done a lot of land deals. But it's super inspiring. The whole idea is you're looking at other investors that have had six And we break down why were they successful? Why did this change their business? How did this make them a better investor? And we break it down into real education, small educational chunks that you can take and absorb and then potentially implement in your own business. Yeah, that's awesome.

And you can get it right now at BiggerPockets.com slash profit book, profit book. I think it's the 17 bucks for the e-book on Bigger Pockets, $25 for the physical book. And then there's the ultimate edition, of course, that we usually put out has the audiobook, the e-book, and the physical book, all combined. And it's like $45. So I definitely go check it out. And there's some bonuses you have there, too. Can you talk about the bonuses real quick? And then we'll move on.

Yeah. So there's a number of bonuses, actually. So almost all of the contributors gave us either presentation or video walkthroughs or just some additional content about their story. But the other half of the content, which is really funny, is I got the worst deal ever from all these folks. So you hear sort of their best deal in on the book. And then part of the bonus content.

is like a five to ten minute interview about their worst deal ever. That's awesome. Because not everything is roses in this business, right? Sometimes things go sideways. And it's fun to hear somebody that's been really successful, some of their failures. It's good to, I just like commiserating sometime. You know, when you just sort of screwed something up, okay, we've all done it. It's fun to hear what, you know, how they're not perfect. And that goes back to what I said earlier, like about the investment. Like, it's like, you hear one thing from one of these, these worst deals. And you're like, oh, now I'm not going to make the mistake. Like, does that not pay yourself back a hundred times over? So you guys, check out

the book. I think you're going to love it. It's pretty awesome. I got it a week or two ago here in the mail and I've been devouring it. It's awesome. It's a very, very cool. Good idea to put that together. That was awesome. I like it. I appreciate that. You might have a little help in that. I'm not sure. No, no, I don't think so. But we didn't have a conversation about it. It was your, you asked me what I thought about it. And I was like, it's a really good idea. You pushed me over the edge. Yeah. There you go. That's what I'm good at. All right. So to review, again, you can go get the book at Profit Book. BiggerPockets.com. slash profit book. But let's go through the list. We got discover their niche and they really hone in

on that niche. Then we got the personal connection. So we're really building your personal brand, connect with people in your local market. Number three is they see those hidden opportunities, the opportunities where other people don't see them. And the way you do that is by just talking with a lot of investors, reading books like this one and just like getting a general knowledge of how real estate works in a lot of ways. You start picking up on these little things. What else we got for us today? There was an interesting common thread too that a lot of times it was the one deal that change the trajectory for somebody. You know, they're operating in one sort of status quo and they stepped

out in faith and like, you know what, I'm going to try this niche and see how it works out. Or I'm going to market to this area and just you would have, and all of a sudden, instead of getting $15,000 per wholesale deal, they land a $100,000 wholesale deal and it changes everything. I mean, you know, just a mindset of, wait a second, it doesn't have to be the way it's been. I just opened my mind to something new. And it, and for most these investors, it changed the trajectory of their business. And it's interesting how all it takes is that one deal if you're willing to step out in faith and do it. That's really cool. You know, I want to ask you, Ken, do you remember in your own life one of those moments where something worked out either a hire or a deal you did or something and you thought, oh, wait, it can be like that?

Then it changed your trajectory. I mean, early on, I mean, it's a simple, I think for me early on, it was as simple as I was really just wholesaling very early in back in 2005. I was connecting people. I wasn't buying anything. And it was finally, you know what? I think I'm ready to buy a house. And I think it was, it's like 2007. I think I bought it as an owner finance. And I think I turned around and wholesale it. No, no. I actually bought it and resold it. So it was one of the first houses I actually put in my name. I titled it in my name and resold it and make like $75,000. This was in 2007. I'm still in my 20s. And I just remember being like, holy cow. I went from making $4,000 to $6,000 per wholesale deal to making $75,000 on one deal.

And it's just like, that's it. I'm buying houses and selling houses. Forget wholesaling. This is where it's at for me. Because that was, I mean, that was more than the salary I'd made in the corporate world, bam, in one fell swoop. That's cool. How about you?

I was going to ask you the same question. But I want to say that when Ryan Murdoch brought me that first mobile home park, what it did, it taught me that like I could put together big deals with other people. So I raised the money for that deal from, you know, Mindy Jensen was part of one of my partners on that one. I put some money into it. Ryan put some money into it. And we did a big deal and we're like, whoa, like that wasn't any different than doing a $100,000 deal and we did a million dollar deal. And so like that changed the trajectory. Then I went full into, you know, mobile home parks. And that really was the beginning and kind of a soft way of what opened our capital is today.

Now we're like launching like, we what was $15 million last year? Now we're on fund three. I think we're just launched now. And so like we like took off in a completely different trajectory because of that one deal. What about you, David? The investment deal that did that was when I bought my 4plex. Before that, I didn't even consider ROI as a thing. I just, I didn't look at it from numbers. I sat down and said, well, how long would it take me to get all my money back? That was just how I looked at it.

And I realized it was three years, which was like a 33% ROI. And I thought, that's not normal. Everything else takes a lot longer than three years. How did that happen? And then I kind of reverse engineered and saw, oh, this like real estate thing is really big. And that's if rent doesn't go up and rent goes up out here all the time. And that was when I made up my mind, I'm going to do this. This is, I'm going to put in everything I have into.

I'm going to work 100 hours a week. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to buy these houses. And then right after that, the market dropped off in California. But because I had this huge like swell of just passion, I wanted to do it, I started investing at a state before anyone else really talked about it. And that's what got me down that path. But it was a moment where your emotions were affected, not just your mind. It wasn't like, ooh, that's a people.

piece of information I needed. Something switches in you, Ken, when you realized I can make as much on one deal as I did in the entire year, I'm doing everything I can to put my attention on this. And this, if I, everything I pour into it, I'm going to get more out of it, I think. And maybe that's a good barometer to look at is that moment when you know, I'm not going to think about how much effort I'm putting into this because I know I'm going to get back more than whatever I put in. Right, right. It was for a lot of people, at least in the book, it was interesting. It was it was making that move from single family to multifamily. I think we have the three stories in there where people made that leap because,

granted, to your point, it's like, wait a second, this was not that different. I used the same private lenders I'm using in my single family business. I just moved them into this multifamily, you know, and next thing you know,

I've got two million in equity instead of 50,000 in equity. What just happened? Why am I focusing on single family when I could be? And these people have, you know, that's what they do now is just multifamily. Yeah, that's really good.

So if you can kind of sum up that, like a tip for people for the obviously one trajectory kind of changes thing what what do you have for people in terms of like to get to that point to find that deal that that changes everything for them i think part of it's just mentality it's your mindset what what do you believe you're capable of and not capable of and a lot of people i think have self-limiting beliefs that yeah i've done some wholesale deals but i'm just not ready for that next big one but the truth is you're always laying the groundwork for the next best thing you really are and whether it's in the same industry the same space, if it's single family or multifamily,

there's always that step up project that is going to, it's going to come in your path. And are you willing to grasp it? Are you willing to take that risk or not? Now, that doesn't mean, you know, you want to take bad risks. But when you know how to analyze a property and there's an opportunity and you want to, you know, you believe in yourself, you've got good people around, you've got partners potentially, you've got investors that trust you,

seize the opportunity to take that step up into that next investment. That's so good. Yeah, I talk about in the book that I'm launching next year, it's not going to be a while before it comes up, but the new multifamily book, Brian Murray and I writing, we talk a lot about this. You know, a lot of investors get stuck in their comfort zone forever

because, like, they're comfortable there, right? It's nice there. And then there's like the way far outside that is like the inability zone, which would be like dangerous, the danger zone where, you know, you shouldn't, you know, you're not going to go from a single family up to a 40 unit or 100 unit apartment building knowing nothing, right?

But in between that, there's a stretch zone. It's like, let's get outside the comfort zone. Let's try something. Let's expand our horizons. And so if you're, you've been doing single family and duplexes and triplexes for a while, maybe it's like, hey, you know, like the 12 unit, the 15 unit, the 20 unit, like that's totally attainable. Or switching, hey, I'm going to add some flips into my business to generate some more capital so I can hire more employees so I can do more of the burr that I've been doing. Whatever that next thing is. I love, I actually wrote this down because it was such a good quote.

You said you're always laying the foundation for the next great thing. And that's so true. But people don't realize that. They just keep laying the same foundation. And then they never build on that foundation. They just keep laying it, even though they have it, they just maybe lack the confidence needed to start building the next big thing. That's good. I like that.

The stretch zone, that's perfect. It's that place in between where you're ready for that, but you're not biting off something more than you can chew. I feel like there's someone out there that needs to hear that or maybe a lot of someone's. Because if you think about skyscrapers, I would bet you 80% of the work is in laying the foundation. Once it's laid, you're just like every time you drive past it, oh my God, it's that big, right? It goes up really quick, but creating the foundation is what takes so long. You know, and single family construction is the same way. When they're first laying a foundation, building the framing, it takes a really long time.

Once all that's up, it's like the drywall goes up, the finishes go in, the roof is done, and boom, the house is ready. So if you're spending all your time just on that foundation and you never start scaling, you're putting in all the work and you're never actually getting the benefit of that work that you did. I think we need to write another book. David's going to write this one called skyscraping, the art of growing your, I don't know, You guys can write it together.

Ken and David, skyscraping, the art of laying a foundation so you can reach Mile High. I don't know, heights. There we go. You can get the Mile High Club. My Leda Good Foundation. All right. That's really good. Thank you for Kevin, by the way.

I producer Kevin for the assist on skyscraping. That's a great name for a book, actually. Kind of like blue fishing. Have you guys read blue fishing, by the way? Yeah. Phenomenal book. Phenomenal book. We should get that off on the podcast.

Getting outside your comfort zone. But I'm dying here. Hold on. Brendan's choking on his own brilliance right now. Let's give them a minute to get himself together. So Ken, I'll ask you this. When you have a foundation laid and you're ready to scale, often, one of the things that holds you back is capital. So with the people that you talk to in the book, how do they address that problem of, hey, I know what I'm doing. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to let this thing loose, but I don't have unlimited funds. That's a great question. So I'm thinking through the people who, the most obvious ones were the ones that scaled in a multifamily. and most of them, apparently it's contagious, Brandon.

I don't know how you did that. I'm still dying over here. I don't know. Amazing. The power of influence, apparently. No, it's most people, you know, part of laying that foundation in single family homes is working with private lenders. If you're really going to be a serious, even, I mean, even an intermediate flipper,

you've found people to work with in terms of raising capital. So you know how to raise capital. And a lot of times, if you're transitioning to multifamily or commercial, you're going to take those same lenders with you or your same banking relationships with you. In fact, I remember a number of years back, I scaled up into a large commercial property. It was like an eight-acre self-storage facility. It was a boat and RV storage facility, did really well on it. But again, it was I had a local banking relationship and I had private lenders that I used for the equity. And it was the exact same relationships that I was using in single family.

that I took with me to that next step. And it's not, I think people get intimidated by capital. It's there. There are, there is hungry capital out there right now, especially right now. And nobody knows what the stock market's going to do. There's hungry capital looking for stable investments. And the second you figure out how to get one or two or three private lenders, you've figured it out. You've got your pitch down. The sky's the limit. There's an opportunity to raise a lot of money if you're willing to buckle down and do it. Yeah, that's really good. A lot of people are asking the question. When, when this comes up, up other people's money. I would say the first objection everyone has is fair. I don't want to lose

other people's money, which is a good objection to have. I don't want you to lose other people's money. I don't want you to lose my money. My advice would be, don't go start borrowing money until you know you know how to do this. And you've done it well, at least on a smaller scale, right? When the foundation is late, then you can go up fast. Don't try to go up fast before the foundation. But the second piece would be there's like a guilt aspect. Like, why would they let me borrow their money if they don't get any chunk in the deal. And they, ignorant people that aren't aware of what's happening in the financial world don't understand that there's people with a lot of money that are itching for somewhere to put it. They're hiring people to say, help me find a way to

deploy this capital, that you are actually the answer to someone's prayers when you need money to start investing. And I think when you understand that, it will change the reluctance to go after private money to fund these deals. Yeah, absolutely. It was funny. You didn't even mean to. This is a great segue. This is the fifth one I was going to talk about. It's one of the common threads throughout the book is the fact that these people are almost all using other people's money, whether it's private lenders or it's an owner finance. It's somebody else's money if they're the one that got the loan and now you're coming in with the subject too and using their good credit. But other people's money is an absolute must. It's a common theme throughout

all of real estate investing, including this book. And once you can figure out how to tap into it, this also brings up a good point that I remember Stacey Rosetti talking about. is when you ask for, you don't ask for money. You present an opportunity. I think this is where people get stuck. They think, well, I don't want to be the guy, you know, with my, you know, tail in my hand, you know, meagerly asking for their money. You're not asking for their money.

You're presenting a financial opportunity and they're lucky if they get to invest in your project. That's really the mentality you have to have when you approach anybody about investing. Totally. If you just think about the lending industry, you've got these really big banks that say, we've raised all this money, we need to lend it out. We're going to charge interest. and they pay people like me, a mortgage broker, to go find people that need to borrow money to buy a house, right?

There is an entire industry, a huge one built on. I have to find somebody who can help me make money by borrowing my money at an interest rate. And the same principle applies on the smaller scale when you're dealing with private money. You're absolutely bringing someone an opportunity. And the way I look at it, that money that they are not lending out is losing value. As inflation continues to go and their money just sits there, they are literally losing money. So you are helping to prevent that from happening to them while you are making them money because you have a skill that they don't. These are people that aren't listening to podcasts and they're not reading books and they don't know about Ken and Brandon that have so many good ideas that they can't even talk without choking in the middle of it because they're all rushing to get out of their throats.

But we do, right? We know how to make this happen. So you are helping bridge the gap between people who have money and their inability to do anything with it. Yeah, you know, I get a common question. I want to fire that you can. And people ask me to all time. So I tell stories a lot of times about, for example, one of my first deals ever, I discovered the birth strategy is I bought a property, couldn't sell it, was trying to flip it, couldn't sell it, brought in a partner, they helped me refinance it. Then later I bought a triplex. I brought in a partner. And that partner put in all of the money needed for the down payment, and I put in no money whatsoever. Today I flip houses doing the same thing, but now I'm on the money side. And whenever I tell these stories, I mean, even in my fund, right? Like we raise a bunch of money and we go buy big mobile home parks. People always ask the same question is, well, why would they ever give you money? and then split it with you when they could just go do it themselves?

Why would people with money not just go take that deal and do it themselves? So what's your answer to that? I mean, most of the time, the people with the money are busy working a nine to five. Yeah, yeah. Right? They don't have the time or the expertise. They're not the boots on the ground. I can't think of one of my private lenders who has the expertise to find an off market deal

in my market, to renovate it, you know, and then turn around and make money on it. So they need conduits. They need people like us who are the boots on the ground who know how to make the transaction work. It's funny, I don't, I never get pushed back for my private lenders of, you know, like, man, I should be making this. They're thrilled to be making that money. They're thrilled. They're somebody with some level of expertise that's doing it for them. Yeah, I wonder if we thought that way in things that weren't real estate investing.

Why would you open a restaurant? Why would anyone go eat your food and they could cook at themselves? Why would you open an auto mechanic shop? Why would I pay you to fix my car when I could just fix it myself? Like, it'll never end. there's always a way that you can look at it like that, but there's an obvious reason why we go out to eat and why we pay someone else to fix our car. It's the same thing with this. Yeah. Yeah. I think people tend to look at other people and they put them, they put them cells and their

mentality in other people. Like, like, they love real estate. They love the idea of making a lot of money. And that's like the big thing for them right now. So they don't, they, they don't understand why everyone else is in the same way. But like, I put a lot of money into my flipping business. And I don't like my partner, Greg, he runs all of it. Like, I mean, he runs the business. And like, he doesn't have to put any money in. So it's great. great for him. And people are like, well, why, why, why, why wouldn't you just go take all the deals, Brandon?

Because I'm busy. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't have time to go and to do all the things that Greg does. And yeah, as soon as you realize that, that people have different things that they're interested in, like, and that they're good at. Like, I'm good at money right now. I just have the ability to raise a lot of money and I, I have a lot of money on my own. And like, I'm, that's my strength right now is I'm doing, I'm doing, I'm well capitalized. But I don't have time.

I just do not have time. And there are millions of people like me out there. millions of people like me out there that have money, have an interest in real estate because everybody loves real estate. If you were to go poll the average American, everybody likes the idea of real estate. So just most people will never do it because they don't think they can. So give them an opportunity to. And now of a sudden, you've got yourself a partnership with potentially no money or at least low money down. Yeah. Well, again, that's a big part of this book. There's so many of the people that leveled up use partnerships. And I would I would tell people

partnerships are an amazing thing because you take somebody else's strength and you take your strength and you combine them and sometimes your strength might be the money like you said but sometimes a lot of cases it's somebody else's me that's what they're bringing to the table and who cares if they get 50% of the deal you know it doesn't it doesn't matter just do more deals yep it's figuring out what somebody else brings the table and not being afraid to partner with them yeah i love that question if you can i think we asked that even recently another episode where i said like if if you brought in a partner who had every skill that you lacked and and had motivation and drive and expertise and was that you guys worked together well,

if you gave them half of all the profits, could you do twice as many deals? And the answer is with the right person? 100%, a thousand percent. You could probably do 10 times as many deals if you had the right set up. So stop thinking that scarcity mentality. If I got to have it all myself and instead thinking, what's possible if I had the right team around me? And that applies to really every business, right?

It's really everything. All right, man. Well, we're going to slowly get out of here, but I have one more kind of follow-up question for you. What is your best deal? ever. Ken, what's, what deal? Yeah, what deal strikes you as like one of your best deals or the one that stands out as like, that was it? You know, I've, I've had a couple woppers. I mean, I hit mostly base hits and singles and doubles and some triples occasionally. And I've had a couple home runs over

the years. I probably talked about it in the last podcast. So I'm going to talk about one. Maybe I didn't talk about the last time it was on there. Here one recently is a deal that I bought. It's a commercial property on 18 acres. And the reason I bought it is because it had the potential to subdivide. And this gets back to what we were talking about before. See the potential, right? And we build houses. We need land. We love small, minor developments. And I was like, you know what, let's peel off eight of those acres and build some nice custom homes on them. There's a building there I can move my office into. So let's move my, in our construction office in there for a little bit. And we did that. So we had two uses. I mean, I basically took a $600,000

property, peeled off 300,000 of it, which went into lots for properties that we built and made good money on. But the other $300,000 went into a building that we were using up until just a couple of months ago. We moved out, found another office, and I'm currently lease purchasing that property for $800,000, getting $6,000 a month in rent. So our nut on it was about $300. Now we're selling it for $800. Wow. And again, it's just seeing the potential to peel off land. That's another theme in the book is people miss that. When there's opportunity to subdivide, that land can sometimes double and tripling value from what it was worth as part of that existing, that initial property. And in our case, 18 acres down to 10 acres, nobody cared.

Nobody missed those eight acres that became custom homes. And so it didn't really hurt our value in terms of selling that building. And now we're selling the building for about 500,000 more than what we paid for it. You know, that kind of reminds me of that old, like, I've seen it like an Instagram meme or I've been going to call it, like, a motivational picture a lot. But it basically was like, it says like a bar of lead is worth like $12, right? but you divide that into like, you know, I don't know, it's called dice, like a little metal dice. And now it's worth like $80.

And then you divide that into whatever and you get smaller and smaller. And then the smallest one was like into watch springs. It's worth like $350,000. If you were, because you can make, you know, 350,000 little honey springs out of this bar of lead. In other words, when you really niche down and like and subdivide something, you can get a lot more out of it. So the same price to the bedroom account, right? Like you, you rent by the bedroom. Now you make more individually than you would as a whole.

And I think that applies to subdividing property as well. If people think, like, how do I get more out of this on a small level? How can I make this smaller? You can usually make more money. It can't like Super Bowl ads, right? Like, there are national $2 million, $3 million Super Bowl ads. And you can also buy a local ad on the Super Bowl. So the Super Bowl is selling, let's call it $100 grand for an ad in one market.

But they can sell that 50 times across 50 markets. And they can make $5 million on that same ad spot that normally was only worth $2 million. So it's subdividing in any industry is a cool strategy to go to hidden potential. And it makes so much more sense than saying where can I buy a bar lead for $11 instead of $12 and spending six months trying to find where the cheaper lead is, right? That's right. That's a good point. Well, cool, man. That's awesome.

That's a good deal. So where are you headed in the future? Last question before we go into the famous four, where are you headed in the future? Where do you see your business going? What's your life look like in the next few years? Well, so we've got a couple projects in the works with HGTV right now. And so we'll be filming the end of this year, the beginning of next year. And again, for us, the whole reason we're on TV is to build a brand, to build businesses.

That's it. So it's fun to see where they're, honestly, it's fun to film. Like we legitimately enjoy it. It's fun making TV. Again, part of being an entrepreneur is creating. And so it's fun to create television. And, you know, our goal is to just grow this machine, grow this brokerage, you know, grow the mortgage side of the business, see how big we can get it.

See if we can get it regional. And see if we can get it national. And again, there's only so many businesses that scale well. And I feel like we've kind of stumbled into one that scales really well. And so we want to see how big we can scale it. It's going to be a fun ride. That's awesome, man. I said that was the last question before I famous where I have one more.

What do you need from our audience? What could our items bring you to add value to your life? Is there something you're looking for specifically, whether it's deals, whether it's, you know, investment, investor? What is it that you need right now that would help you in your business? Well, I'm still an investor. I mean, I love deals. I look at deals every day.

I mean, it's, I still, I still make sure that I am. I'm on every wholesaler's email list. And I still scan and now, don't open them all. But I wait until I see a zip code I like. But I still open them. I still like looking at deals. And if I see something I like, I usually send it to my acquisition manager and say, hey, research this. But send us deals, man.

I still like investing in houses. I still think there's opportunity. I will say this. We probably won't be buying and holding a lot this year. But I think in the next year, two, three years, there's going to be another real opportunity to buy and hold. And so keep them coming, man. I like looking at deals.

All right. Well, with that said, let's get to the last segment of the show. It's our Famous Four. All right. These are the same four questions. We ask every guest every week here on the show. And I know we asked you this last time, but we're going to ask you again. Maybe they've changed.

So number one of the Famous Four. Oh, before I get to that, let's hear what's going on this week around the Bigger Pockets podcast network. Hey, it's Felipe from the Rookie Show. And last Wednesday, we talked to Amy and how she built a portfolio that's spitting out $6,000 in cashflow all by just delay. her gratification. Just go back and listen to Last Wednesday show. All right. Let's dig into the famous four. The four questions that we ask everyone. Number one, favorite or current, either current favorite or, you know, just like all-time favorite real estate related book, other than your own, of course.

Yeah, well, I was going to say profit like the pros for those of you that are watching could very easily become your next favorite real estate book. You know, it's funny, I don't read a lot of real estate books. I feel like I've got masterminds or whatnot that sort of keep me current on stuff. But I'll, I probably said this the last time. I don't remember. But I'll go back to my favorite resource. And it's the, it's the resource that got me into the business, which was Carlton Sheets. Yeah. No money down. I mean, I go back to Ken Korsini, 27 years old, founded at a garage sale. And I listened to those CDs and read those workbooks for a year straight. And it changed me. It really did change my life. It's what got me in real estate.

Very cool. Okay. What about your favorite business book? So I just read one here in the last, handful of months that I really, really, it really resonated with me. And I again, I even mentioned this in my book. I don't read a ton of business books, but this one resonated with me a lot. It's called Called to Create by Jordan Raynor. I'm sure if you've read it or not. I haven't. It's a really, it draws a really cool parallel between, you know, God being our creator, but also being the first entrepreneur and how us being created in his image, we're entrepreneurs because he was an entrepreneur were first. And it really changes your motivation. It really lets you see people as my, again, I know we keep harping on this, but we're in a people business. Being in real estate, it's about

people. And being created in his image, we should be about people more than we're about product. And it was really satisfying to draw those parallels between, you know, how he is towards us and how he feels towards the world and how we're created to be. That's awesome, man. Very cool. Yeah, that's, I mean, I was just thinking about a lot of stuff you're saying. They could probably go for a long time down that rabbit hole. That's really, really good. When Brandon and I interview people that are successful almost every single time, they aren't just smart. They're good. They do good things that help other people. They create win-win opportunities. Their business is making opportunities for other people's businesses. It's very rare that I come across someone who's just

pure smart and not, they don't have a good heart. Because like we were saying earlier, they don't usually stay in business. So by focusing on like what you said, Ken, people first, it's going to give you an opportunity to take your good ideas and to take your hard work and actually put it in the play and get some traction going. Cool. Next question. What are some of your hobbies? It's when I always joke that I had hobbies before I had kids.

And now my kids, I feel like I'm right. I think my hobby right now is being an Uber driver for my kids to all their sporting events because it's just, well, we coach baseball and we coach basketball. But I will say this, in in between literally daily sports activities. with all my kids. We have made a conscious effort to become campers. So we went out and bought a brand new camper this summer. I think COVID probably played into that a little bit because we like to travel, and this is a great way to. And we've started exploring our local state parks, which I've never really done before and really have started to appreciate what's all around us, all these amazing camping

opportunities in these parts. And it's a great way too for us as a family to get away and unplug. It's like no devices. Turn your cell phone off. Kids put the iPads away. And let's just sort of just reconnect with each other and reconnect with nature. And it's been a really good, a really good investment for us. Yeah, so good. I'm jealous. I want to do that. All right.

Last question from me. What do you think separates successful real estate investors? It's like the whole episode. But what do you think separate successful real estate investors from all those who give up or they fail or they just plain don't get started? You know, it's funny. Right before the show was like, I've got to answer this question. So I thought about it for a second.

And a common thread in real estate. And you guys know this because you're in it is adversity. I feel like every day you come to work, what adversity am I going to face today? Because it doesn't matter what you're doing in real estate. You're facing some level of adversity. And there's a huge percentage of the population that doesn't know how to persevere through adversity. And it's funny. Even in my inbox.

As soon as we got out this call, I've got an inbox full of just, you know, things we got to deal with. We've got to work through and things go sideways and inspections don't come back the way you want them or financing falls through. And I feel like a lot of people get into real estate and they get out really quick. Maybe that postcard campaign didn't generate what they wanted it to generate or that first deal that they were expecting $10,000 in commission. They made $1,000 in commission and it just didn't feel worth their time. If I didn't push through all the adversity I faced in real estate over the years, I mean, I'd have given up forever ago.

It's the people that stick with it and push through that find the unicorns, that find success that end up in a book like profit like the pros because they were willing to Stick it out. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I often remind myself that the opportunity exists because there's adversity. That if the adversity went away like we all want, so would the opportunity. And so you have to learn to be grateful for that.

I mean, just being a real estate agent, you realize that it's very easy to start getting upset when things go wrong. Like, why can't it go smooth? But the minute that every deal goes smooth, why do you need an agent? You'll go do it without an agent, right? And so like the best thing that can happen for that profession is that there's a lot of things that can go wrong. And I think that principle applies to everything.

If you learn to be grateful for the obstacles, you will figure out a way to persevere when everyone behind you leaves. And that's why there's so much out there that you can go take. It's a really good, good point. Thank you. All right. Last question of the day. This has been fascinating.

And I'm sure everybody is on the edge of their seat wanting to get more. Ken, where can they find out more about you? You can actually check us out on our website, red barnhomes.com. We've got resources there for buying and selling houses, for building houses, for renovating houses. We've got some resources there for investors as well. We also talk a little bit about our nonprofit that we have out there called Rockstar Kids

that you're welcome to donate to or learn a little bit about. Again, red barnhomes.com. Check us out. All right, cool, man. And of course, they can get the book by going to biggerpockets.com slash profit book. So they should do that. And I don't know, man.

That's all I got for you today. So thank you for being a part of this show. Thank you for all those videos on YouTube. I mean, they've been blowing up over there as well. And thanks for writing the book. Thanks for having me on, guys. Always a pleasure to talk with you, gentlemen. Had a good time.

Thank you. Awesome job. Thank you, can. Everybody, please go check out, Profit with the pros. Leave a review. Like the pros. What did I say? I don't know.

I said Prophet with the pros, didn't I? It's because I'm trying to hold the book up on the screen and talk at the same time. And I clearly am not the whole. You can't like chew gum and walk at the same time either. Yeah. But at least I can talk and breathe. You can't say this. This is David Green for Brandon choking on his own brilliance Turner.

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