BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 96: Finding Deals, Wholesaling and House Flipping in a Hot Market With Anson Young

Episode Date: November 13, 2014

Real estate investing isn’t always about the speed of the chase – sometimes patience is key and the amount of deals you close might not be as important as the quality of each deal. If you’d like to hone your deal-finding skills and knowledge of your local market, don’t miss out on this BiggerPockets Podcast episode, where we sit down with Anson Young to discuss the art of unearthing great deals, which properties are the best to flip, and how to handle a hot real estate market. Anson got started in the real estate world back in 2004, when he moved to Arizona and bought his first house. A year later, he sold the property and moved back to Denver with his first big check, and he has been in the Colorado real estate game ever since. Exploring many sides of real estate investing, he’s found a niche in the wholesaling market and continues to grow his network and expertise of the local real estate environment. If you want to hear more about the many forms of real estate investing and how to break into your local market, be sure to check out this episode! In This Show We Cover: The key to being a good wholesale buyer The ins and outs of ARV and what it means to the real estate market Where the best areas are to purchase based upon neighborhood location How to understand localized real estate The dos and ds of co-wholesaling The differences between flipping and rehabbing How to target your best buying audience Whether you should use pre-foreclosure lists or not Who the best people to invest with are The most efficient way to find a private lender Whether a BPO is the way to go When you should make a package sample deal How to attract financiers when you are new to real estate Which types of properties make the best house flips And lots more! Links From the Show The BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Calculator BiggerPockets Blog Books Mentioned in the Show? The Book on Flipping Houses by J. Scott Brandon Turner’s The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down The TenX Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Rabbi Grant Cardone The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker Connect with Anson Anson’s BiggerPockets Profile Anson’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show 96. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dork and host. to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my somber-looking co-host.

I don't know. You look so sad, man. Brandon Turner. I was reading something on the page. I don't know. Ignore me. I'm glad you're panitation. These people are listening on audio mostly.

There's, you know, they can't tell I'm looking distracted. I can. It's distracting. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. What's up, man? How you been? I've been good.

I've been good. It's been good. It's been good. Winters coming in. It's getting cold. Taking my dog out in the morning. Not fun. Nice.

Not fun. Yeah. I'm sitting here looking at like a mini blizzard. it wasn't even supposed to snow today. It's like 10 degrees out. Yeah. Yeah, it's awful. You want to whine about it?

Yep. All right. Move on. I do. I do. All right. Great. Thanks.

Awesome. Hey, hey, everybody. Check it out. Listen, this week, some cool stuff happened. We got a facelift. I actually did not get a facelift.

But I know, I felt it coming. I felt it coming in for Brandon. Yeah, I was going to say it. Now, the bigger pockets blog just got a facelift. We just put a brand new looking feel to it, cleaned it up. modernized it. The old blog was a little stale.

So we've cleaned it up and we added some new features in the past week or so where members can leave comments without having to kind of jump through hoops. So check out the blog at biggerpockets.com slash a re-news blog and read our content and get involved. There's some great stuff in there. That there is. Cool. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. Today, let's get to our quick tip. All right. Our quick tip today is quick.

If you want to be a guest in the Bigger Pockets podcast, normally we just choose people based on, you know, the whims of whatever we want to choose. But we want to give you the opportunity to. Don't give that away, man, because there's some angry people, how do they pick them at least guess. I want to be. Yeah, you'll never know my, my, how I, how we choose. But the inner workings. Yeah. But if you want to like throwing your name into the hat to be a guest on the bigger pockets podcast, just go to bigger pockets.

It's podcast. Just go to biggerpockets.com slash guest. And you can fill out the little application there. Let us know who you are. If you are somebody who's done, this is not necessarily like the newbie podcast, but if you are experienced, you've done multiple deals. You've been in this for a little while now. Throw your name into the hat. Just come and fill out the form.

And if you're chosen, we've got a lot of people already. So there's no guarantee it will choose you. But if you are, you'll be a guest on our show. So come biggerpockets.com slash a guest. Nice. And you can tell your mom that you're on the Bigger Pockets podcast with all one of our listeners. There you go. Yep.

Now we've got about 35,000 listeners per show now. So, yeah, it's well worth a shot if you've got anything to talk about. And we all actually do. So, you know, we definitely encourage people to do that. Really, really quick, let's talk about today's pro tip, which is we definitely encourage you if you are Bigger Pockets Pro to get out there and make your enhanced forum signature for non-pros. There's definitely value in this for brand building, for getting your name out there,

getting your company's brand out there. You get to put your company logo on your forum signature. below all your posts, links to your company profile. You could link to your website as well. And it's just a great way to kind of get your name out, let people start to know who you are and who your company is. And it lets people know you're a little bit more serious on the forums, too, somebody to actually, you know, if you got no form signature whatsoever, nobody knows anything about you. So it kind of shows that you are a serious person. Yeah, and they can go check out your company and read about what you guys do, what your focus is. It's a good way to help build

your business. So if you are here to On Bigger Pockets to build your business, we definitely encourage it and you can upgrade to pro at biggerpockets.com slash pro to get that ability. All right. Our guest today, he's bald. He's funny. He's from Denver.

And he does pretty much anything and everything under the sun. He's an active wholesaler, flipper. I don't know what else he does. We'll find out more. We've actually had him on the show before. Last time we had him on, what was it, show number 134. Show number 34, which was our least listen to show, which is why we're bringing him back.

Anthony, it wasn't. It wasn't. It was not. Josh is just mean. But I'm excited to bring him back. He's a friend of mine, a local, and a great guy. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance, and those who think that they have.

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slash host. Anson Young, welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you here. Thank you guys. It's awesome to be here again. Awesome. Even though it was the least listen to the show. Maybe we'll just double our, we'll double down.

Yeah. Yes. Let's see, while we're losing, we'll just keep pressing it and hoping people come. There you go. There you go. Awesome. So Anson, Anson was one of our guests here at the 10-year anniversary party of Bigger Pockets a few weeks ago. It was cool hanging out with him.

I've hung out with him before, but I know Brandon got his, I got a chance to do that. And I think you guys hit it off a little bit. Yeah, we went to this amazing burger place. And I picked your brand on wholesaling for like an hour and a half. And I learned a ton. So that's why we were like, I should get you back on the show. And we'll talk about more of what we talked about in our burger meeting. Yeah.

No, that was awesome. 10 years, happy anniversary again. Thank you. That was a lot of fun and lots of books to be had. If you missed out on that, then you missed out on that, I guess. What kind of books are you talking about? What book is that? I think it's called the book on, oh yeah, my book.

Brandon's book. The book on investing in real estate with no and low money down. We had a book signing party. We did. Anyway, if you want to get biggerpockets.com slash no money. There you go. There you go. All right, Anson.

So for those people who are unfamiliar with you who may not have heard you previously in the show, why don't you give us like the elevator pitch of who you are and what you do? I'll give you the short version. I haven't been working on my elevator pitch like Brandon's blog. I guess it's in the book too.

But basically, I am a wholesaler, rehabber, investor, kind of trying to broaden my horizons into buy and hold eventually. but like most guys who are in my fast-paced, whatever world, we can't see the long term. So we just chase after the short cash all the time, I guess. Nice.

Yeah. Chasing your tail a lot. They're short-sighted. Oh, yeah. It feels like Groundhog Day every day. That's okay. Working on your job, right? Working on my, yeah, my job.

My job of every day having to find deals and all that fun stuff. Right. You know what's funny about what you just said, just real quick to interrupt you. I was talking to a guy yesterday, and we were talking about how, you know, wholesalers and flippers are generally more of the, they want the quick cash now and the buy and hold guys or later. And I equated that to the idea that ever since I was like two years old, I ate Lucky Charm cereal

for breakfast a lot and I would always eat the cereal first marshmallows at the end. I would always save my marshmallows. And which explains a lot probably why I'm a buy and hold investor more than I am a flipper and wholesaler because I'm okay eating the marshmallows at the end when it's just pure marshmallow. It's so good. Pure sugar. I'm okay. I'm okay eating that nasty dry dog food cereal until you get to the marshmallow at the end. It's amazing. Anyway, so everyone listening to this. Ask yourself, do you eat your, and they won't be our next sponsor. They won't be our sponsor. Lucky charms. Yeah.

Sponsoring. Yeah, too bad. You know, I think I did save the marshmallows last too. Okay. Well, count Chocchilla is more. Oh, yeah. That should be our, our new question to the famous four. What's your cereal? Your favorite, your favorite cereal. All right, well, remind us to guess, go back to the story. I mean, how did you get started? How did you get into this whole game? Got started about 2004.

We had briefly moved down to Arizona for a couple years, decided to just kind of jump in, get involved in a local RIA. This is after, of course, reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, just like everybody else's story. But started getting involved with the local Ria, cash flow 101 games, just following people around like a lost dog and offering to do pretty much any anything for them, any kind of job, like if you need me to run across town and get something done, you know. And so eventually I got picked up by one or two very kind people who I owe my start to doing crap jobs for them. And then eventually just buying my first house down in Arizona

and we sold it a year later, moved back to Denver with a big check and pretty much been hooked ever since. And never stop really learning, never stop finding mentors and masterminds and kind of keep that going. Every time I stop, it feels like everything slows down. So just keeping that education piece rolling for sure. Cool. Cool. And that was a living flip, correct? That first flip. That was. That was a live in flip. We had kind of tried to lease option it. And I had one guy on the hook. And And I lost him because I had zero experience, of course. But, you know, we just decided to move into it. And we live there for, I think, a little bit less than a year.

And we ended up selling at the perfect time for Arizona, Phoenix area. And that was, you know, that was pretty much that. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, really quick to those people listening, this is show 96, the Bigger Pockets podcast. And you can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 96. All right, Anson, what have you been up to you since we talked to you last time? Since you talked to me last time, I've been doing a lot more rehabbing by myself and with a partner, a lot less wholesaling.

But that's just because we've just been keeping everything that we would have wholesaled. And any wholesales that I've gotten passed along to me, I used to co-wholesale them, you know, shop them to my buyer's list. Instead, we've just been buying them and holding, you know, and flipping them, obviously. So I'd say that that's kind of the big difference, kind of moving in that direction. But that's not to say we've done some wholesale in the last year, but it's been a lot more keep everything that we can find, which is kind of a not like a greedy thing, but it's just, you know, hey, these are great deals. We can make more money on them, rehabbing them. And there's frankly just kind of less deals out there in general, it feels like. So are you keeping them just because?

you've got better margins on it? Are you keeping them because you've built out a better team to be able to handle them? Why keep them versus the wholesaling? And I'm assuming if there's probably some leftovers that you do still wholesale. That's right. We've been keeping more just because the numbers are better. I mean, we can, you know, in four months, make, you know, four times what we could make in wholesaling. And then there's, so there's not a lot of volume there. So if we would make five grand on a wholesale, instead we're trying to pull down 20 out of a flip. And so if there was a huge flood of volume coming down, it would make sense just to keep turning them. But since there's not a huge flood, you know, we're basically making the most of everything that we got.

It's kind of like a quantity over quality kind of thing. Like, I mean, when there's a lot of deals to be had, you can turn them quickly and get the quantity. But when there's less deals to be had, you got to shoot for the quality. That makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. So on that regard then, I mean, what have you seen your market? Is that what your market's been doing? What have you seen the last year in your market in Denver? Well, it's been, it's been really, really hot. A lot of the A plus neighborhoods are just so on fire that it's, it's been hard to find deals in there, find wholesale, you know, find people who are actually working that market on good margins. And so since it's been great on the sale side, so everything that that's, that's, that's, you know, find people that. been put to market that we've finished rehabbing has been gone pretty much immediately, you know, just days, one, two days, and that's it.

Multiple offers, you know, one, one had 18 offers in the first day. It was like, it was like, well, maybe we underpriced that a little bit. Well, I mean, let's talk about that. So 18 offers in one day, you know, when you looked back at it and analyzed it, did you underpriced it or were you competitive? I mean, I know Denver is really, really tight. I mean, there's not a lot coming out. So I'm just curious about that.

Yeah, it was probably like, we probably priced it fairly for when we first bought it. And then four months later, you know, we could have marked it up another 10 grand from what we thought the ARV would be. We ended up actually, we listed for 150, 155, and we ended up getting about 175 as the top offer. And so, I mean, yeah, we were kind of on the low side on that, but we ended up where the market was bearing and it appraised just fine. That's what I was going to ask about. If you run into appraisal issues when, because I know like in a hot market when, you know, when there's a lot of buyers out there that want to buy. And so they just keep bidding the price up higher and higher. A lot of times people run into the problem of, well, sure, they're willing to pay that, but no bank is willing to lend that much because the ARV is not there.

But you didn't have that problem on that one. No. We haven't had any appraisal problems in the last year. And there's been ones that we thought, let's say, oh, $195 is our RV. And when it comes to market, we put it out for $2.10. Yeah. And it goes under contract just fine. It passes appraisal.

We have no issues. So right now, not so much. It's kind of slowed down a tiny bit. But anything that's moving ready that's really nice that's being put on the market is flying off the shelf. Hey, really quick, what is ARV for those people who are unfamiliar? It's the after repair value. So it's what the house is worth after all the upgrades and repairs are done to it.

So what, I mean, because, okay, I was just in Denver a couple weeks ago, you know, visiting Josh and hanging out with the BP office. And when I was there, I went around driving around looking at houses. I pulled up, you know, my Zillow app and I was his cruising neighborhoods, me and Josh were looking at like property prices. Nice plug for Zillow, by the way. Yeah. Well played.

Yeah. Everything. Everything, okay, so everything that we looked at was like 900,000, a million, you know, a million five, four million, 500,000, you know, 500,000. Like, the cheapest house I saw the whole time was like 500,000. So where are you buying in Denver? What kind of neighborhoods are these that you're buying 150 or 170? Because I, apparently, I wasn't in those neighborhoods. No, I don't think you were. If you were anywhere around Josh's office, that's a really hot, high-end area. And where, you know, attached townhomes are selling for one. Yeah. One million. So that area, not so much. It feels like everything that we've done in the last about two years has been in the suburbs of Denver. So, you know, the north suburbs or the southeast suburbs where these are the cookie cutter. Everything was built in the 70s. You know, we're not running into. any crazy sewer issues. We're not running into anything like that. So basically kind of, I wouldn't say on the outskirts of Denver, but definitely, you know,

Denver Central is very hot. It's very, it's just you really can't find a house for $150,000, $200,000 that you would want to move into. So, you know, a little bit on the outskirts. And with that comes newer houses that have a lot less issues. They're not built in the 1910s. And you have to deal with all that stuff. So, yeah.

You know, and it's, it's a good point. I'm glad we're talking about this because, you know, people always ask on the forums or just generally, you hear people asking, hey, what's a good city to invest in? Right. And what we're talking about here is how localized real estate really is. I mean, it's literally localized within a few miles. Neighborhood by neighborhood, you know, where we're located at our office, it's in Cherry Creek. It's a higher end neighborhood. Houses, like you said, attached houses are a million plus.

Whereas an attached house three miles away might run you $150, $175,000. Absolutely. So it's important for newer investors to understand that. It could even go block by block. You know, when you're considering, when you're looking at real estate, you can't look at it on that. The city is really a macro level. It's too big. You have to go on a neighborhood by neighborhood level.

And, you know, I think Anson here is proving that with exactly. exactly what we're talking about. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Hey, so you mentioned earlier something called co- wholesaling. I'm just curious.

What is that? I don't know that we've talked about that term before on the show. It's where maybe another wholesaler has a deal and he's having a hard time selling it. And if I come along with my buyer's list, I can shop it to my buyers. If I have somebody who wants to buy it then, then that wholesaler and I can split. at the fee or maybe I mark it up, but it's kind of a contentious thing because, you know, you see a lot of wholesalers trying to co-wholesale, but they're not getting the other wholesalers permission.

Well, they're stealing. Yeah, yeah. And not only that, but like I've seen a lot, even the last couple of days where friends of mine on Facebook are like, I just got my own deal shopped back to me for 15 grand more than I have it, you know, and then some of them actually went ahead and tried to play with those people. and, you know, like, yeah, yeah, I'll buy it. Go ahead and, you know, get me information from the, you know, from the seller or whatever. And like, you know, really try to bind these people up.

So I don't try to go about it that way. If it's basically friends of mine or people who I know in the market here locally who have a deal, maybe they've pushed it out to the buyers. They haven't got anything. I'll contact them and say, hey, can I just shop this to my list? We'll figure it out. If I have a buyer, great. You win, I win, they win.

Everybody wins. So co-sailing is exactly that, but I wouldn't do it without permission, without even sometimes an agreement, sometimes that equitable interest thing gets weird when you're not even the person who has it under contract and you're trying to sell it. So definitely get permission and maybe have an agreement with that person that says, hey, you know, this address, I'm going to try to sell for you. We can have it locked up, you know. And I think that's a very, very, very fast way, not doing what you're doing. but but you know just saying hey here's a wholesale deal find it on on a site somewhere find it on Craigslist and just start selling it to people with the hope you can get a buyer

and then go back to the guy who's listing it and say hey man I found a buyer for your deal well dude you don't have my permission to promote that what are you doing right right and that that leads to that could lead to some serious problems some reputation issues and and yeah challenges I love, don't do that. I love when I see MLS properties on Craigslist for like $15,000 or $20,000 more than they're on the MLS for. And yeah, somebody's just hoping that they went and found it on Redfin or Zillow or Trulia and they're like, I'll just put it over on Craigslist and mark it up $20,000 and hope that I can make that profit. Like that's wholesaling to them. Somebody else will get in there, right?

Yeah, that they're thinking. And that's called getting yourself in a lot of trouble. Yeah. That's also true. Yeah, don't do that. So, okay, so flipping houses, that's what you've been focusing on rehabbing and flipping. We talked about why it's because of the whole quantity versus quality thing. So maybe we can kind of talk about how are you in today's competitive market?

How are you finding deals? A lot of them have been straight MLS. That's a game for me that's losing its appeal day by day just because it is that Groundhogs Day thing. You're going out there with the most competition. Everybody's eyes are on there and looking for the same kind of thing. So in the meantime, been doing some. direct marketing with one of my partners. We've been knocking on doors of pre-closures.

Like you physically have been actually knocking on doors. Yep. That's awesome. Here's why I think that's awesome, right? Because you're like a professional, full-time, like you're doing this real estate investor. And like, that's not, you know, too low for you. You don't have to go and, you know, hire a, you know, I don't know. I mean, not saying anything bad about hiring people, but I just love the fact that you're out there hustling still, like, and making your business work. I love that. Well, you just said the word. He's hustling. That's why he's probably one of the most active investors I know in town. I mean, he's a hustler, and that's a good thing.

Right. And it's not glamorous work. I mean, it's almost literally where I started at in Phoenix was, you know, one of the guys like, hey, I don't have anybody in that neighborhood, you know, in that area. Can you just knock doors for me? And that was kind of my start in the whole thing. And nobody loves to do it. But it's definitely, you know, the more uncomfortable things are.

that's where you find less people. So less competition anyways. So there might be a few people knocking on doors. So let's talk about door knocking a little bit. I don't think we've ever actually really focused on that. And I want to make a point on that, by the way, because I, you know, when I got started as an agent, I used to do a knock. And it was a horrible. I mean, it's horrible.

It really is not fun. You get people slam the door in your face and, you know, you try and be polite. And, you know, I baked cookies once and, you know, they threw them at me and some. a lady punched me once. No, that's all, those are all lies, actually. But I did do a knock. And it was, it was horrible, but there was nobody else doing it in the area that I was doing it. So it did help me to get an inn.

And what you just said, Anson, about doing the unglamorous things. I used to also go and hang door hangers. So I do or knock. And if they weren't there, I'd put a hanger on the door. That's exactly where I started. And, you know, what I've noticed is this. like at my house, I never get hit up by investors. I never get hit up by agents.

None of them are marketing in my area. I have like one or two agents who send something in the mail to me, but nobody's marketing to me. And I'll be selling my house at some point probably in the next year. And I don't even know who I would use as an agent, you know, maybe you. But I don't know who I would use because there's nobody marketing to me. And it's so silly. Like you guys get out there because I know there's a lot of agents that quote unquote

work my neighborhood, but they're all doing the lazy stuff, right? They're trying to get the low-hanging fruit and nobody's putting in the extra effort to bang on the door, get to know everybody in the community and be the guy that everybody's like, oh, yeah, that guy's always kind of around being helpful, offering stuff, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So how are you door knocking? I mean, what does that even mean? What does that look like? Obviously, you're knocking on doors, but do you just drive up a random street or how does that work? Well, it's a little more targeted. So we're getting pre-foreclosure list. and based, and we can filter those out by equity,

we can filter them out by all kinds of things, but I usually go for, they only have one loan, and they have a little bit of equity, you know, at least, well, some are a lot of equity. We target those first, but there's not all that many out there. Sure.

And so you have this list, and it might be, you know, 15 in an area, or 15 to 20 in a zip code. So we, you know, just jump in the car, go knock on the door. A lot of times they're not home. So we'll leave them a note, We'll just leave them like a handwritten note,

either a sticky note or something in an envelope with their first name on it so that when they get home, they see something, they open it up. And there's a lot of theories around how to open up people, how to, you know, what you say in that note that you leave. And for me, it's basically just, hey, Joe, I really need to talk to you.

Can you give me a call? And then my name and then phone number. And a lot of times it's like, hey, what do you want? You're like, who are you? What do you want? And so it's a little bit talking them down off that ledge, but you're doing that anyways. if you're knocking on their door and you're like, hey, I understand your house has a sale date of,

you know, November 29th. What do you want to, you know, kind of go that route? You're talking people down on that way, too, because you're basically just by physically standing there. You're like a physical representation of the problem. Of the problem that they don't want to deal with in the first place. So you standing there is usually enough to either enrage people or, you know, depends where they're out in the process, but usually there's a lot of anger involved. So two things. One, why would you even choose to do that? Like when I was doing it, I was doing it as a realtor in a neighborhood of people who weren't in deep trouble, right? So, you know, I probably would not be the door knocking on pre-foreclosures because for that very

purpose. I'm not as substantial an individual as you are. But I know you pack heat, so that always helps. Whoa, rumors. No, no, no, no. But like, hey, why not just send the mail to them or get on the phone versus doing that? And then have you had any experiences where people are like, you know, really, really angry and almost get physical to that point? I mean, in terms of like safety, is it something that the five foot three woman who's, you know, wants to be an investor should be doing? And I know many of you five foot three women are very capable of defending yourselves. However, So the first part in that why am I doing this? It's basically with direct mail. And we've been ramping up direct mail, just not to this list. Since that list is readily available, it's public information, there's a lot of people who are going after that.

So while they might have 12 letters from investors that are easily ignored, you just don't have to open them. It's a little bit harder to ignore, you know, a six-foot-one guy, you know, 200-something pounds that's knocking on your door, not in a mean way, I'm there to genuinely help, but there's a lot less competition that way too. And literally, this is why, because when you have people who have, you know, they might owe 30, this is a literal scenario where they owed about $30,000 on this house, as is, was worth easily 110 and then fixed up 170, somewhere in that neighborhood. And we're knocking on their door. It was about three weeks before their foreclosure

date and they're standing there going, I don't know what to do. I didn't know that I could sell it. I didn't know I could sell it to you. I didn't know I could sell it on the market. I literally don't know what to do. And so if you can stand, you know, if you could be a help to them and help them. And then also, obviously, you're running a business too. But, you know, in a lot of times with short sales, I can also say, if it's not working out for me, I can definitely try to either help them it as an agent, I have that in my tool belt, or I can refer them to an agent or, you know, a lot of times they just don't know what to do. Their head might be so far in the sand that they're just not thinking correctly. And so when it came to that deal, it was just a light bulb.

Like, oh, this is exactly why I'm doing this because they're ignoring their mail, but they're not ignoring me and I'm standing here talking to them. I'm the only one literally standing there talking to them. Yeah. That's a huge advantage. That's great. That's great. And then, As far as safety, I wouldn't say it's for everybody. You have to have a pretty thick skin. A lot of people slamming doors in your faces. A lot of people who get pretty angry. I haven't had, you know, any angry elves since probably Arizona.

It seemed like, I don't know what it is about Arizona. There's just hot, hot heads or something. But there was a lot of like... You just made a lot of fans, by the way. Yeah, right? No, I love Phoenix. No, there was a lot of, you know, jacked up trucks parked in the middle of the yard and having to go up and knock on this door and you know that it's going to be

it might be confrontational. And so don't be afraid just to, it's not worth it to, just don't be afraid to walk away. Just walk away if you feel like you're ever, you know, in danger at all. I mean, it's not worth it. It's one house on a list of thousands. And so, you know, totally not worth it. Don't put yourself at risk. So yeah. And it's a good point. And, you know, safety has been something that's really been at the forefront of the real estate. industry lately. We had the murder of the agent. I forget where it was about a month ago. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that can, there's a lot of crazy people out there, right? Bottom line. And, you know, whether you're an investor or agent, you know, I think we all basically should be looking out for each other and, you know, be smart and be safe. And if you ever feel like you're in a position where you're uncomfortable, get out, you know, it's as, and since it's not worth it. You know, there's other deals, other opportunities. will come and you know you should really have a plan as both investor and agent and you know i think

one of the easy things that people can do is if you're going to do or not let somebody know you know where you're going to be what your plan is if you're showing houses or if you're just you know showing your own house let let somebody else know where you are you know just in case it's just always a good practice absolutely let them know where you're going and maybe just a list of addresses say, hey, my plans to hit up these 20. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, so you mentioned the lists. Where can somebody get absentee lists? Is it from like list source or something like that?

The one that I was talking about is pre-foreclosure. And that is public information. You can usually go to your county website and pick that up. In Denver, there's a subscription website. It's called Renav that we use. And it's nice because you can just filter out a lot of things by equity or lenders or stuff like that. As far as I know, they're only in Colorado. So not a huge help for a nationwide audience, but I'm sure that there's something available on a greater level. Maybe foreclosures.com, but I've never used it. So I don't want to plug it too hard. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. So we talk about finding deals. How are you going about financing your

deals? So we basically reached out to people three years ago who had individuals, and we found these people on list source, actually. There's just individuals who had made loans to similar, you know, investors and basically called them up or sent a mail that said, hey, I see that you loaned on 1, 2, 3 Main Street. We do similar projects in a similar area. Would you like to, you know, start dating so that we can eventually get married and be, you know, together forever after? But these two guys have been great.

They're basically just guys who have a lot more money than they know. do it and are happy with secured first position notes on real estate. Nice. So if somebody else wanted to do that, how does somebody go about finding private lenders like this? So you can do exactly what I did, which is go to list source.com. And they pull all kinds of general lists, but under the mortgage tab, there's an option for private party loans.

And this is where it's an individual and not an institution. So it knows the difference between Josh Dorkin, loaning on a property and Wells Fargo. So you can pull all these. I'd pull the most recent six months. And then boom, there's an entire list of private money lenders in your area. Some I think might be hard money lenders,

but I think the majority are, you know, basically guys like mine. They're just guys who have relationships with known investors. And, you know, if you can get them on your team, then all the better. That's great. That's great.

I don't think we've heard anybody use that as, well, at least tell us about that secret. There are no secrets, people. Anson's pissed off. Everybody in Colorado, don't do that. Anyone else, go ahead. But yeah, no, I think it's a great idea. I mean, you're literally targeting those people who are looking for exactly what you're providing. So why not?

Exactly. That's great. That's great. Cool. And you said that you've got two people, two private lenders. How long did it take? How many people do you think you hit up to get those two people? Probably 2030. Okay. Which doesn't sound like a lot. But maybe these people's terms weren't what we were looking for.

So I think we just kind of hit on the right people at the right time. And then thinking about going out and doing kind of a second round of this. and not only to retest the waters, but it'd be nice to have a little bit more capital at time. You're going to go pull up that list, get their home addresses and knock on their doors? Absolutely. That's the best way to do it.

Hey. Hey. No, put that skill to the test. No, but it's either a lot of people mail them, but if you can get their phone number on whitepages.com or something like that, I mean, just a quick cold call can usually be exactly what you need. Set up, you know, if you can set up a meeting and like I said, start dating before you, you know, go anywhere else.

I mean, a lot of guys will throw their hat in the ring with somebody who has a track record and a little bit of, you know, you had the balls to call them up and, you know, solicit them. And if you're serious and you have a track record, then they would see the benefit to that. All right. So you've got a track record, you know, or so you claim. That's great. You know, you're calling me up. You want my money. What, you know, how do you demonstrate that track record to me? How do I believe a word you say? We usually have, you know, the last number of properties, sometimes all of them that we've ever done. And basically just, you know, present it to them to say, hey, here's the numbers on our last X amount of deals. And, you know, you can look them up by tax records. You know, it's all verifiable. this information. If they need to drill down and see HUD ones and promissary notes and stuff that we've done with other investors, I don't think I'd be too, you know, that would be fine. I mean, basically anything that gives us credibility.

And if they need a little bit more, then, you know, it's all there. We're not trying to hide anything from anybody. So do you have a, sorry, do you have a package that you provide them or are you like, hey, just look me up? Probably should have a package. I mean, we would print something out if we were going to run to meet somebody. But it's, like I said, something that we've done one round of. And so it hasn't been, you know, definitely needed to sharpen those skills.

So go back around for round two and maybe we'll have something a lot more professional. Yeah. Nice. But that's kind of like the whole theory behind. I mean, I do a webinar on BP every couple weeks about like how to analyze properties. And I walk people through the bigger pocket as rental property calculator or the flipping calculator that we have. My main belief is that if you're trying to attract financing, you need to have a professional image to show people, especially if you are new. If you don't

have like, hey, here's the addresses for the last 30 houses I did. If you don't have that, at least come together with something professional. It says, look, I know how to do my numbers. I know how to take, you know. Dude, are you like picking on him? This is our guest. No, no. He's got the 30 more deals. He doesn't need that. He doesn't need that. He just got to like walk in the room me like, whoa, is that Anson? He was on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Oh, my God. Two episodes.

Oh, that guy's amazing. Anyway, so a legend. A legend. A legend. A legend. So, anyway, so that's why I always encourage people to, especially when they're new, is to do an analysis on a property. If you're brand new, then just do a sample analysis.

That's a, that's a tip that Michael Blanc, who's a writer on our blog, he always says is put together a sample deal. Don't lie and say it's a real deal when it's not. But this is what the deal is going to look like. This is what I'm looking for in a deal. present that to a lender or a partner or whoever it is you're trying to do. I love that tip. I think that's awesome because it says, oh, yeah, they know what they're doing.

So it kind of on that same note then for somebody who's brand new and just starting out, besides having a presentation, do you have any tips for people who are listening that need to attract financing? Because that's hard to get financing for deals. What do you suggest for people? It is. And I think the caliber of the individuals that we did attract, they wouldn't, they probably wouldn't have lent to us on our first deal, our second deal. These are guys

where track record was huge. And so, you know, it's just starting out. I think I said this on my first podcast, but it was based, you know, my very first flip deal was basically partnering up with somebody who did have cash and wanted to find a flip.

I had a little bit of experience in finding these distressed properties. And so creating, you know, kind of a partnership where he's bringing the money. I'm bringing pretty much a deal. I'm bringing the Anson. Bringing the Anson, which is worth a lot.

But, no, but, you know, I would say a partnership like that could be, you know, could be huge on the first few deals. And then once you have even two under your belt, you know, say, hey, we did two in the last, you know, three, four, six months, whatever. You know, that's more track record than a lot of investors even have. And so coming, you know, then coming to, you know, where you're cold calling soliciting people from a list source, then it becomes a little bit easier. But in the beginning, I'd say, just like you said, like, hey, here's some sample deals. This is, you know, you can build a sample deal based off of your criteria and your business model. And then when you're presenting that to investors, you say, hey, this is exactly the kind of deal I'm looking for. I won't do a deal that's less than this because then it puts a risk.

And so you're basically funnel your business plan into, let's say, the bigger pocket slipping calculator. And there you can say, this is my ideal deal. And putting in that much work beforehand, I think, lends to a lot of credibility. You know, you didn't just show up. And with a blank piece of paper, you have something there that's, you know, hey, I've analyzed the numbers backwards and forwards on potential deals or the ideal deal. You know, and this is exactly what my business is looking for. I won't put your money at risk or, you know, my money. at risk or anything less.

And I think a package should include deals. It should include, you know, if you haven't done deals, professional, what are your criteria, what are you looking for, how are you going to, you know, how are you going to find these deals, what you know, what you're planning to do with them, your references, personal, professional, you know, anyone who has been around that can vouch for you. And anything you can put together to demonstrate that you have some semblance of credibility, even though you have not done a deal is going to assist you in building that credibility. Absolutely.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Hey, and really quick on the calculators that we were mentioning, you guys both mentioned, you can find those at biggerpockets.com slash analysis if you're looking. Also, this is show 96 of the BiggerPockets podcast, and you can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 96. There are two kinds of real estate investors.

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All right, Anson, so what kind of house makes the perfect flip? What kind of house At least for you, yeah. For me, yeah. For me, I do like the more suburban houses that don't need a whole lot of insanity. I see a lot of the benefits to adding square footage or pop tops or, you know, scrape and builds,

those type of things. That's just not where I'm at right now. So if I can get a 70s house in the suburbs that needs, you know, a ton of updating pretty much top to bottom and get that at a significant enough discount, you know. And my area town, it's a, you know, it's a desirable school district. So if I can find something in that school district, there's, you know, one huge plus, plus move in ready, plus, you know, pretty much a lot of things that hit on people's

checklist when they, when they're looking for houses. It's moving ready in the right school district. I mean, that's exactly what I'm looking for, pretty much. Yeah, right on. Right on. So, you know, the inside could be a hot mess, but you're not going to bust out walls, external walls and, you know, scrape or a pop the top here in town, you're going to just clean out the inside. Exactly. Yeah. And I'd like to eventually get into more of the development side. But, you know, it's, that's another big step up too. So in my progression of where I'm at, I just know that I'm not 100% ready for that, since I don't know a lot of the numbers on foundations. and basically excavating and going from the ground up.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And we've got a couple really cool threads about those topics. Jay Scott in particular has started a few of them. And we'll find links to it in the show notes. But he literally does a house build from start to finish and walks through the entire process and shows everything that he's done. And it's amazing and well worth a look.

do you ascribe to the 70% rule as a flipper? And can you tell us what that is? Well, the 70% rule is basically you take your ARV, which we talked about earlier, you multiply that by 70%. So now you have something that's 70% of your ARV. And then you usually back out your expenses, your rehab, and then your potential profit. And that's pretty much where you want, you know, where this guy,

guidelines says that you want your house to be at. So if it makes sense after all that, then great. I'd love to do 70% deals all the time, but it's, you know, they're a little bit more rare. Because at the end of the day, you're not buying it 70% of ARV. You're buying closer to 60, 55% of ARV. So if a house is worth 100,000, you might have to buy it at 55 to make it work with all those other numbers, rehab, profit, expenses, all that fun stuff. So I would say that it's a great guideline to filter deals through. It just doesn't work at every market. And that's been, you know, well talked about, I guess, on the forums and everything else. But if it's a 70% deal here, then it's a deal. It's a good deal. And other markets, it might not be. But it's not hard and

fast. Usually ours is like we want to make a minimum of $20,000 after everything. And so that's kind of our rough numbers that we work with. Okay. So you start with the profit in mind and then work backwards from there instead of working from some, you know, 70% role, I guess. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Right on. And how good are you at hitting those numbers and how good were you when you started? I mean, was that a natural progression? I'm assuming the answer is yes. It is. I think. I think, think one of the crap jobs I took when I moved back to Denver was basically doing BPO's for an agent for eight hours a day. So I crank out, you know, 10 to 15 BPOs a day. And that was invaluable to my

knowledge at ARV and that piece of it. When it came, when it came down to kind of going into the market and flipping myself, the missing piece was estimating rehabs. And so that piece, you know, obviously Jay Scott has a book out about it. That's pretty much the only book that I know that that's that detailed and comprehensive. The book on estimating rehab costs. Exactly. And so while the ARV piece, you know, it started off with a lot of good experience getting that. Even then it gets refined and honed over time. But for me, the rehab piece was the big piece. And that was a lot of, you know, my first partner was, who lent the money was was also in, I wouldn't say in construction, but he did a lot of the work himself. So he knew a lot of

the numbers on rehab. And then it came to shadowing other investors, following them on potential deals to see how much these things were costing them. And then, you know, working with a few contractors and just walking property after property and kind of getting a better idea of what all those numbers are because the whole keys to the deal. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, really quick, the book, the estimating book, You can pick that up if you're interested. It's the Bigger Pockets book on estimating rehab costs at biggerpockets.com slash flipping book. And you can also get the book on flipping houses at that place. And it's a great book.

It covers a ton of stuff. You mentioned BPO's. And BPO's what broker price opinions. I always get the BPN. No, that's it. Okay. So, you know, just for those people listening, what is a BPO? And I love the idea that you went and did BPO's.

I, as an agent, was desperate. was desperate to do BPO's because I wanted to learn about the industry and I thought it was a good end to get in with REO banks and eventually become an agent that the banks would call up to list their properties with. So if we could just spend like a minute or two just kind of explaining how all that works. Yes. And I think that it was a good way to get in with banks kind of back in the day was they would start you off with, you know, hey, we're going to assign, you know, 10 BPO's over time to this agent. if they crank them out, they do a good job, they do them on time, and their values are pretty good, then they might feed you a listing or something like that. I'd say that those days probably are gone.

So BPO, broker-pice opinion, usually it's a bank of science, but I know that there's note servicing companies who want BPO's on their houses. There's lots of other uses for these. it's kind of an appraisal light. I'm not a licensed appraiser, but these banks were entrusting us to provide a value for these houses in foreclosure. And so,

you know, at the time, it was kind of just a BPO farm that would just farm out to agents. We would get assigned a certain number a day. You know, we'd crank those out at $50 a piece or whatever they're paying. And so it really consisted of driving by the property, taking pictures of the outside. At the time, you know,

couldn't really knock on the doors and get on the inside. They just didn't want that. So outside pictures, pictures of the street, basically they want to notes on everything that's going around in the neighborhood, what the curb appeal is, all that fun stuff. And then a lot of the work starts

when you're pulling comps on the MLS, comparables, three active, three sold, and you plug all those into their spreadsheet, and you can do adjustments on those comp. So basically if this is a three two, three bedroom two bath and this is a three bedroom and three bath, what would the adjustment be for that extra bathroom? And so that's kind of the short version of what an adjustment is. So you would go through that whole report and then come up with the value that you thought that it would sell for as is.

And then what a value that you would assign to it if it was repaired. So if they put in the work to fix the roof, fix the outside, paint it, do landscaping. Obviously, you don't know what's going on inside, but you can kind of estimate what's going on. And so you would give those two values and then ship it off to the bank and, you know, get your 50 bucks. And it's, I mean, it's a great way to get to know the process. And it's cool that you did that. So no, thank you for explaining that. I think a lot of people hear these terms thrown around and I want to make sure that we at least do our part to cover it. back to the flipping contractors so how do you find and manage them okay that's i don't want to be a broken

record because i know we talked about this a little bit the first time but um my experience with contractors isn't great it's basically let's ask another question then no no no no no i draw the contractors who anson has jerked over no i'm just kidding yeah it was me no it um you know it was basically basically, you know, a big contracting firm here in Denver that left, you know, a ton of investors high and dry. And this was 2010, right into 2011 is when this whole thing happened. And thankfully, I wasn't hugely screwed by it, but I did have two or three investor friends who also were using this company who got just worked over. Basically, they just disappeared overnight. And these guys had written five-figure draws to them, you know, 30.

$30,000 draw. And, yeah, and that money is nowhere to be seen. Hopefully they're in January. No. No, they're not. That's awesome. Yeah, no. So when it comes to trusting contractors, that's definitely something that I need to work out.

I've talked to a lot of people here locally. And right when I was kind of about to jump back into that realm, because right now we kind of project manage small crews. and then we sub-out anything that needs a permit. So electrical, H-FAC, those kind of things get subbed out to licensed contractors. And then any non-licensed work that can be done, we have crews that we just manage. And that's worked out really well. And while we've cycled through a couple crews, we're not entrusting them with the entire job.

You know, there's kind of a puzzle piece that comes together. And so that's been the work around to being, you know, screwed by. by a contractor. And right when I was about to dip my feet back in, there was just a couple of horror stories through the bigger pockets meetups of contractors who have just worked over some of these BP members and some of them, you know, newer or like right on their first or second flip.

And it really just didn't, it just doesn't set well with me that somebody can just run off and then change your business name and then start work next week. That's awful. That's so awful. So finding them, I think, you know, I think Jay Scott has a lot of good advice on that where you can show up to Home Depot early. And I've done that to find, you know, different, different pieces of that puzzle that we talked about. I think that that's a great way to do it, honestly, is to find the hustlers who are working hard and find those guys.

And, you know, and usually a lot of times when you find these people, don't let them go because they're, you know, they're so good. But, you know, there's always a time when things change in the arrangement or these people's lives where, you know, things start going downhill. You need to recognize that immediately and start cutting. Yeah. And, you know, my philosophy, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, this is kind of my experience. I'm curious, both of you guys. You know, generally when I've dealt with contractors, and again, this is not all because there are some really amazing contractors that are, you know, phenomenal. but it seems like the contractors I've always kind of run across are always looking to do something

bigger and better, looking to do their own projects, but never quite have all the skills that they need to do that. You know, they're not organized enough or they're not financially capable enough or something else that they never quite fully get there. And so a lot of them seems to kind of come and go and, you know, flip and flop and the wind. Now, again, yeah, I'm going to get, you know, some. slammed by contractors with a hate mail now. But like, yeah, my dad's an electrical contractor.

So, you know, I totally appreciate contractors and good ones who are professional. But boy, oh, boy, man, there's there's just a whole lot of unprofessional ones. And it's, it's so challenging, so challenging to weed through them. And I don't know. I know we've talked about it, but even the guys that we've talked to on the show who've done a ton of deals, just, you know, we all have problems finding real solid contractors. That's true. I found that it's very much an e-myth thing. People who are good at baking doesn't mean they're good at running a bakery.

That's like the whole theory of the e-myth book. And people who are good at fixing a door, good at fixing a door, good at fixing a flooring, sanding a floor down, installing insulation, whatever, are not necessarily good at running a contracting business. And I think that's the problem that contractors face. And I think, yeah, I don't know the answer necessarily. I think we've got a lot of good suggestions we've heard on the podcast. But nobody's, I mean, nobody has like a foolproof way because they're just clearly,

is not a foolproof way to get a good contractor. I guess what comes down. Absolutely. I don't know if we figure it out. If we can figure out the formula, we'll be rich boys. And I think what you said was key was hanging on to the ones when you do find them. Because they are there. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. So once you find them, you just treat them well, you pay them well, and you reward them well. And I think that's how you do it. Well, and you had mentioned something else. You had mentioned the BP meetups as a place to go to. to quote BP meetups, right? People who create meetups through BP as a place to link up with other investors and kind of share notes on who you're working with and who's bad and who might be great. I think that's an amazing idea, and whether it's a BP meetup or a local real estate

club or RIA or something more formalized. You know, the in-person networking is essential. It's just so, so important. And so, you know, I know Brandon and I talked about this and we want to chat really quick about the whole concept of these local meetups. And really quickly, as a result of bigger pockets, we've got 250,000, 200, 20,000 members now. Our members have realized, hey, this is a great opportunity to find all these other local people, get together, and let's just, you know, let's network, do business, do deals, you know, without having to potentially go to another club or meeting that's happening in town that might be all about upselling you. You know, you kind just get together and it's kind of an independent quote unquote bigger pockets meetup right so you

started one here in denver and so maybe you could talk about why why did you start having a local meetup and why would somebody else want to do that so right after the bigger pockets conference which no there was an actual conference but anson is using his quote fingers to to mention the bigger pockets conference but there was one a couple years ago there was one yeah and so there needs to be one again Oh, my God, the pressure. We won't talk about that. The pressure. Now you have the staff involved so you can probably pass it off to somebody.

Well, if you guys continue to push me and pressure me. We will. We will. Don't worry. Anyway. So right after that, there was after an evening session, there was probably about 15, 20 people just hanging out in the bar of the Hyatt. Just this free form of expression of just, it was like the forums on crack plus beer. It was, well, yeah.

It sounds dead. is this kind of hyper networking with people who you know and you might only know them through online and that's kind of a newer phenomenon but you know you've listened to them you do realize online has been like 20 years now it's not that new well a lot of people find their wives and husbands and you know i'm just saying it's a new phenomenon so there was just this just this great exchange of of ideas and and people that you know from online. And so I think I, and I talked to Brandon about this, but I think I came to you, Josh, and I was like, that was amazing. Let's do that locally. And you were like, great. I want nothing

to do with it because I don't have enough time to do it. And so that's where it was born out of was basically, and then I posted something on the forum not too long after that says, hey, let's, you know, continue that. Or if you weren't involved in that, let's start kind of that process here. And so it's It's kind of just an informal group that gets together. And there's no agenda. There's no speaker. There's nothing sold, obviously. And it's basically just, we're all going to introduce ourselves.

We're going to talk about what we do or what we want to do. And then we'll just open it up. And you can go find and tackle that person that you really want to talk to and bend their ear all night. And that's basically how it works. And so it's been great for finding contractors or, finding, you know, these ancillary contractors of electricians or just people like that who people really want to share. You know, we talk about deals. We talk about deals that people might have, people, what they're looking for, what they want to do, you know, just all kinds of stuff.

That's great. That's great. And, you know, there's, I mean, there's meetups now in dozens and dozens of cities around the country and world. I mean, I know Brandon was that one in New Jersey with Darren Sager plan that had like 150, 200 people. there's one in Seoul Korea that meets. I think it's maybe once a month and they get, you know, I think a dozen or two dozen people to that. They send pictures to us on Twitter. It's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. And so anyone listening, if you run a group, a meetup group or through BP or any of you guys putting together groups, share those pictures, share what you guys are doing because, you know, you're going to get other people excited and

you know, get them to want to be involved. And of course, the more people that get involved and get excited about your local meetup, the more people now you're networking with about deals and that you have in your circle to build up. So it's a great thing. Why would somebody want to host a meetup? Is it complicated? Is there a lot to do? Or is it just like, let's find a bar and do it? Yeah, it's pretty much find a bar and do it. And I think you provided us our first place at the work share place that you were at. And when that stopped working, I just reached out to another bigger pockets member who lived more central downtown and said, would be a great place to do this.

And she said, here. And so we just started doing it there. And what I would say is contact the management and just basically say, we're going to have, you know, five to 20 people here because that's kind of where our group is at. And so we're going to have five to 20 people here. Can you offer us any kind of happy hour special or reserve, you know, a section for us? And so that's pretty much what we did.

And now we have, you know, happy hour specials. We always have a section reserve. so we don't have to worry about that. We basically just show up and they know that we're going to be there the third Monday of every month. So it's literally that easy. And just posting it on the forums

to get the word out there, obviously. And people will come for sure. That's cool. And the key in doing that is, you know, post and I guess first generate some interest using the local networking area of the site. Just say, hey, I'm in, you know, Phoenix, Arizona. And I want to do a local meetup

and obviously use those words, Phoenix, Arizona, because we have a keyword tool, right? So anybody who follows the word keyword Phoenix or Phoenix, Arizona, is going to get alerted to that. And then they'll find out and say, oh, this is great. Which, by the way, as another tip to those people listening, if you don't have keyword set up on the BiggerPockets keyword tool, just go to biggerpockets.com slash alerts. At the very, very, very least, you should probably have your town. your city, the area that you're at as keywords. And your name. You should have your name as a keyword.

Yeah, I have my name. Yep. Yeah, I get a lot. A ton. Yeah, because people don't always use the app mention feature on BP. Yeah, exactly. Somebody's talking about you. You probably want to know that they're talking about you.

For good and bad reasons. Oh, yeah. That jerk, Brandon Turner. I hate that guy. Hey, you got my post. Good. Beard. That's funny.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So use that. I mean, use the keywords. Use the alerts. And from a networking perspective, it's invaluable.

It's extremely helpful. And so just write down, hey, we're looking to do this. Anyone interested in you get a group of people? And if they're like, yeah, let's do it. Cool. And then post that thing in our events and happenings. Hey, it's happening at this state, this time, this place. And if you build it, they will come.

Exactly. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. All right. Well, my kind of last question before we move on towards the later half of the show, can you talk about any mistakes that you've made, whether it was, you know,

early on or maybe even in the last year since we last talked to you. Are there anything that you maybe did wrong or you wish you could have done better? I'd say when I first started out in wholesaling, I probably made a lot of just dumb mistakes like reputation damaging mistakes of kind of like what we talked about before of trying to sell deals that aren't yours without permission. You know, I talked from experience on a couple of those things. Nothing ever turned out weird or you know piss anybody off but I'm sure it you know it just doesn't look great when somebody's

trying to throw long deals when just just mark them up and shoot them out to your list and and the person who's you know who's selling the deal might be on that list and so I'm not saying that that that's exactly what happened but it's basically just little things like that

where you know you get a little bit more experience you get a little bit more well read on the forums and you kind of learn okay you know now that I'm buying houses from wholesalers, you know, that's exactly what I wouldn't want to see from, you know,

somebody who's running a business, trying to, you know, just trying to do little things like that. I'd say that lately we've been trying to push the boundaries a little bit on design. And so there was kind of a funny incident where I posted a floor just kind of as a, just to see what people thought on a,

on a Facebook group that's a little bit, they're a little bit more cynical than I'd say the average BP member. And so I posted a floor shot of like, hey, what do you guys think? We're branching out here. And it immediately, there was like 50, 70 replies. And it was pretty evenly split. There's a lot of hate for it. And this is, you know, it's not a big deal.

They're basically those reclaimed wood-looking tiles. And then we kind of did have been this modern kind of design where there's like, a bright white one in the middle of these of these designs. And so you see that in higher-end houses, which we're trying to do is kind of bring in a little bit of those elements from higher-end flips, higher-in new builds, those kind of things, and put them into a $200,000 median home-priced house.

And so a lot of people who are used to this HGTV idea of everything, just beige, like a beige explosion in these lips, that, you know, it's funny how much, like, Viterol was just like, I hate that. And so I'd say that we've done that lately and probably, I wouldn't say mistakes, but we have shut out some buyers that might have been looking for that product. So at a down market, that could have been a huge mistake. But at the same time, in an up market, you know, people who you might cut out, you know,

three out of 10 buyers. Right. Now you still have seven willing to put down money on a contract. And you may expand your market as well by doing that. Exactly. So I think it's just getting bored of seeing the same old thing over and over again. Well, I think it's cool to experiment, right? I mean, that's what you're doing. You're kind of bringing a little bit of art and creativity to what you're doing instead of making it so formulaic, right? Exactly. So I'd say that it could have been a huge mistake if the market was a little bit down. But at the same time, there's still a lot of people. I might cut out half my buyers just based on that small poll of experienced rehabbers. And half of them hated it. They, you know, they thought it was the worst. And the other half were like, I see you're trying to do something new, you know,

do something a little edgy. And it's, you know, I'm no designer. But for that many people to just say, I hate it, I knew that I, you know, that we had cut out a big chunk of buyers too. Gotcha. That's cool. That's cool. So there's are mistakes.

What about victories? I mean, what, you know, really cool accomplishments? What have you done in the last year that you've been really, really proud of? I'd say two things. one is cohesive branding is something that I've been trying

to do a lot of where my you know I brought up a web presence I think last time that we talked I was like I don't really have a website

I don't really need one and I think that everybody needs one in some capacity whether it's just to vet you as a professional or that hey this guy really is

in business and he has a web page to prove it not you know not that that proves everything but basically cohesive design across the board when it comes to the real estate piece,

since I am licensed, any marketing that I'm doing is branded, and then pretty much having this web presence that's also branded. And that sounds like something that's little like, oh, we should have done that first. But for me, that's been a big victory this year is to get that all together and taken care of. So now that when I do market, you know, I have this cohesive thing where it's not just a yellow letter from a random person, you know, it's something that's branded and a little more visibility and a little more credibility. And then the other piece was there was a virtual wholesale deal, which wholesale is kind of

the marriage of wholesale and retail. And it was out of market, obviously, two hours north. And that ended up to be a huge learning experience. with a lot of pieces of it. But at the end of the day, it was a great deal and learned a ton from it. And that was kind of the capstone to, you know, this last quarter was that deal. And kind of branching out to,

I've done some virtual wholesaling, but doing this virtual wholesale where you, it's a whole different element when you have realtors involved and all kinds of stuff like that. So when you throw it out on the market and you're doing a, you know, instead of doing it to investors, which I'm used to doing,

now I'm trying to get an end buyer, somebody who's going to live there to buy my wholesale deal. And so that was kind of mistakes of, I couldn't find a wholesale buyer in time. So plan B was close on it and then, you know, wholesale it. So didn't do any work to it. Just threw it right back there, out there on the MLS.

And that was a huge, that was a great win for recent time. Awesome. Cool. Awesome. That's great. That's great. All right. Well, let's move on to the world famous. It's time for the fire round. Oh, whoa, scary. That's scary. All right. Question number one, these come from the forums on bigger pockets, which you can get to at biggerpockets.com slash forums. But number one is what fix-up projects

add the most value for the least cost to a rehab in your opinion? Oh, I like that question. That is a good one. I'd say what pretty much kitchen bathroom, that's kind of like the age old answer, but if you can do a kitchen for five grand, a whole brand, brand new kitchen cabinets, tile, countertops, all that, plus, you know, about three to four grand per bathroom, that kind of gives you the most bang for your buck. I mean, you can have a house that needs, you know, little deferred maintenance here and there, but if the kitchen and the bathroom,

are pristine and they look just amazing, I think that wows a lot of buyers and it helps them kind of overlook some of the smaller details. Maybe we didn't scrape the popcorn ceiling, but the kitchen of the bathroom were so amazing that they're just blinded. They're like, oh, I got to buy this.

Nice. Nice. All right, all right. When it comes to wholesaling, what source of leads produce the most closed deals for you? Sort of leads produce the most closed deals. I'd say the pre-foreclosure list leads and whether that's mailing or knocking

on doors for us has been the most profitable. There's a hundred different ways to do that. But for us, that's been the most profitable. Cool. Cool. All right. For a newbie wholesaler with absolutely no experience, what first steps would you say are crucial? First steps

as a newbie wholesaler. I think that the first steps are to definitely get out there into your market, into your local Rias or Bigger Pockets Meetups, definitely talk to people who are buying, learn what they're buying, their criteria. I'd say that before almost anything else, because then you can know if what you're going after

is realistic, if it's, you know, and at least then you know exactly what your buyers are looking for. And so you'll always have that information. These guys usually buy, and who are at these meetings, they're buying for years and years and years. So even if it takes you another six months to get everything else up off the ground, you did that groundwork of, hey, I know exactly what these guys are looking for. Now I know what to go after, whether it's, you know, this guy looks for two, threes and the zip code.

I mean, that could be enough information to get you started. So you're not looking all over the city. Yeah. Now you're just looking in that zip code. Yeah. So right. Right on. Right on.

Cool. All right. Last question. Would you consider involving a family member in a deal in any way. or do you believe it's a recipe for disaster? I personally would not. That's just...

I'm not judging you. I'm just asking the question, man. I mean, I personally would not. Brandon's judging you. Judging you. I see him. He's got judgey eyes. Look at those judgy.

They're very judgy. Judgy Mick. Judgers son over there. I don't have like a rich. jungle that has a ton of money that, you know, throwing this money at me for deals. But even on the real estate side, on the licensing side, things get weird when things go weird. And so it's like, when things aren't working out exactly, you know, to plan, so to speak, even friends and family get really strained relationships through that. And it's hard to recover from that. And so

from doing that on the license side and things, you know, nobody's not talking. to anybody anymore or anything. But it's still like, if I can avoid that headache, then great. And would I love to work with, you know, my good friends and my family? Sure. But is it worth it to have things go crappy? I don't know. And for your friends and family who are listening, it's not you, it's me. That's right. It's not you. Nice. Awesome. Cool. Cool. All right. So we have had you on the show before, but we're going to do it Anyways, let's get to Famous Ford.

All right, Famous for these questions we ask every guest and we've asked you before, like Josh said, but we're going to find out if anything's changed maybe. The first question is, what is it your favorite real estate-related book? So my new favorite book, and this isn't, I'm honestly not trying to plug this, but I've been reading through Brandon's new book. And it's been, it's been really good, only because that's a big piece that I haven't,

explored a lot past reading on the forums. And so now I have, you know, Brandon's insight to how he's done, you know, these deals. And, and that, that's been really cool. So when I start on the buy and hold side, that's been huge. So there it is. I will, I'll give you a 20. What is the, the book on, I got, I got to read the title. It's really, really long. He made it super. It is really long. I'm investing in real estate with no one low money down. It's, it's, It's a good book. It is. Thank you.

It really is. I didn't mean to plug that when I was thinking about it earlier. I'll give you your 20 bucks later. It's okay. Good work. Nice. All right. All right, cool.

Thank you. What about favorite business book? So this is another recent read, I guess. I guess you can just say one of the two books you read most recently. But this one is a short-room memory. That's about it. This one is the 10-X rule by Grant Cardone. and it's more of a goals.

I think he's a sales coach, but this is definitely like how to take your goals and then ramp them up as high as possible. Because my goal used to, not really goal, but it used to be like, if I could do this wholesale one crappy deal a month, I'd be fine.

Like, I've reduced my expenses enough to the point where that's fine. But if you aim for one and you get zero, where are you at? If you aim for 10 and you get one, at least you know you're covered. But if you kind of like that, if you shoot for the stars and you land on the moon or something,

I don't know how that phrase goes, but at least you're still up there. You know, at least you're partway there. So that's been huge for me is that book kind of helping me out with if I shoot for, you know, 10 deals a month and I land at 8, oh no, you know, it's like,

I only need one to pay my bills. So, you know, so it's kind of that mentality, just ramping everything up in your life to 10 times what you, what you thought you could do. And so it's kind of a mentality goal book. Nice. Right on. I'll check it out. Cool, cool. Hobbies and any, any new hobbies, I see you and your family on Facebook all the time. So I know there's a lot of cool, like outdoorsy stuff. Yeah, there is. We, uh, I'm trying to get my wife into camping and, uh, and maybe, maybe we can work on that together because I need the same same thing. And so this summer, they don't want to go and hang outside and crap outdoors for days. Who wouldn't want to do that? I don't know. Hold on.

That's the tweetable topic of, yeah. It doesn't want to go crap outdoors. Yeah. I don't know. I did get them into kind of a yard camping where we set up the tent in the yard and spent overnight because I have a four-year-old and then my wife. And at the end of it, she's like, that wasn't so bad. So trying to get rid of that. We already do, we already hike, so you might as well just stay out there. I don't know. It's like, you're already there. You might as well to spend the night. And then the other piece is

same with kind of adventure race or obstacle race type things. We did tough mutter this year. Nice. And I basically drug my wife up there kicking and screaming. And I was like, you are going to thank me for this. And she was not happy. And then then we were done on the way home, she's like,

I'd do that again. So it was, it was was a cool way to like kind of kind of just stretch your your what you think you can do it's kind of one of that you know can you do 12 miles and be cold miserable the whole time but at the end you're you're so exhilarated that hey i did that and uh and so for us that that was a lot of fun so we're looking forward to doing a bunch more of those next year and maybe some outdoor camping if she wants to go crap in the woods like how you talk about your wife clapping in the woods versus herself. But, you know, we'll make sure she doesn't listen to the show. By the way, if you guys are doing one next year in the spring, not the winner in the warmer,

warmer weather. If there are those, I, and you want somebody else, I'm down. And you guys on the show, all of our listeners, you heard it here first, I do want to do one of those. And I'm looking for a partner in crime to drag me out because my wife won't do it with me. So, nice. Yeah, absolutely. Let's rock it. Absolutely. Nice. Cool. Cool. All right. Final question. for me. What do you think sets apart successful real estate investors from those who never get started, fail or give up? I have to go back to my original answer because for me, I struggle with it too, which is, you know, massive action consistently. So I'd say consistency last time.

This is basically the same thing, just I guess, rewarded in that if you're not working on this every day, you're not going to get to where you want to be. You know, if you're not working on at least the things that matter. You could be working on your website and then never go out and find buyers and sellers and do the marketing and do the work to get deals, but you're wasting your time. So be consistent on the right activities

and you will, you'll definitely reap the benefits. But I found that any time that I've, my deal flow or anything has gone downhill, I can trace it back immediately to not, working on the right things consistently. And every time. And I've been doing this for eight, nine years now.

So every single time, you know, you think it'd be easy to wake up and be like, oh, this is exactly what I have to do. But life happens. Things happen. You know, you get into ruts or whatever. But if you're consistently working on the, you know, dollar producing activities, the rest will worry about itself. Yeah.

That's great. That's great. And so, you know, a lot of people find themselves spinning their wheels in busy work and never actually doing anything. and I think regardless of the industry, that's something that we just, in general, people fall into. So I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's definitely just a people thing.

It's not, you know, we're not all unique. You just got to wake up every single day and just hustle. Yeah. Hey, man, where can people find more about you? Where can you get a site or, you know, are you on, you know, how do people find you? I'm on bigger pockets, obviously. A lot of people find me there. and I'm also at

Ansonpropertygroup.com and that's just a basic seller website that they can come to and check out if you want to check out things there that's great. But Bigger Pockets is the best place to find me. Just send me a message and we'll hook up there. Awesome.

Cool. Awesome. Well, Anson, thanks so much for coming on the show. You are, you know, it was great having you back. Definitely appreciate it. Picked up some new tips. and want to thank you for joining us. I'm absolutely glad to be back, guys.

Thank you so much. Well, thank you. Awesome. All right, guys. Well, thanks for listening to Show 96 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. Again, show notes can be found at BiggerPockets.com slash show 96. If you are listening to the show on iTunes or elsewhere, please go on iTunes and leave us a rating review. Let everybody know what you think of the show.

Hopefully, you guys like it and leave us a good rating. Those ratings certainly help us out. The reviews help us out. They help people who are searching for us to find us and find out, you know, hey, these guys are, they're doing good stuff. So thank you very much in advance. If you haven't already left us a review, we'd appreciate it. Beyond that, follow us on Facebook on Twitter, on Gplus, on LinkedIn, on YouTube.

We're, you know, sharing lots of great content in those places and get active on the site, get out there, make things happen. If you don't have a local real estate club or group in your area, create one, hit up Anson, he'll help you out, you know, posted in the show notes or just get in touch. And that's it. We appreciate you being a part of our world, our community. And, you know, we want you to get out there and make things happen.

Don't just spin your wheels. Be successful. Go make it happen. So good luck to everybody. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you. And stay warm because it is snowing. Yet once again, it's like 10 degrees out in snowing.

Welcome to winter. Nice. I'm Josh Dorkin. sign it off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place.

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