Epic Real Estate Investing - Brian Trippe - Wholesaling & ALAREIA | 511

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Meet Brian Trippe, a versatile real estate investor who holds over 70 rentals with the goal to make the biggest Real Estate Investor Association in the country!  Discover what led Brian to leave his job as a college professor and jump into real estate, the most significant knowledge that Brian learned from his personal experience, his book, Nothing's For Sale, and his Youtube channel REI LIVE.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. What is producing the best results? What marketing channel is producing the best results? And I told him, it's like, let's go do it. Let's go do that. And that's the best, that's the most consistency I ever had in my wholesale business is when I went deep versus going wide. So today I'm joined by a real estate entrepreneur who has many businesses in the real estate space. He is a versatile real estate investor who holds over 70 rentals, holds tax liens.

and tax deeds, he buys and sells notes, he sells homes with owner financing and even has a mobile home park with over 250 wholesale transactions under his belt, his model is leveraging profits into buying more passive income, a guy after my own heart. So please help me welcome to the show Mr. Brian Tripp to the epic real estate investing show. That's where we're at, I think. Yeah, Brian, welcome to the show. How's it go, Matt? I'm glad to be here. Yeah, glad you're here as well. Before we get into all everything that you accomplished, real estate wise, what were you doing just before getting involved in real estate. Great question. I was a Division 1 college basketball coach. Get ready. I'm ready, man. I'm ready to go. Division one college basketball coach, man.

My whole life, I knew I had teaching and coaching in my blood and ended up from Indiana, originally Northwest Indiana, Chicago land area. Lowell High School, Lowell High School, two town south of Marriville, which is a couple towns south of Gary. Got it. Division One High School. No, no, no. So I was coaching Division I college. Oh, okay. Down here in Alabama, yes, sir. Oh, okay. It's fantastic.

All right. So what, at Alabama? I wish. That's the dream job. No, so I did a lot of graduate assistant type of work at UAB, the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I kind of leverage that into a video coordinator position at Troy University in what we call L.A., which is lower Alabama. Right.

I've heard of it. Yep. And then, you know, just from there, I made more money on my very first real estate deal than I did an entire year coaching and teaching. I was an adjunct English professor as well at the college level and made more money on my first real estate deal. It was very clear to me I needed to give this real estate thing a real shot. Yeah, that could be inspiration enough right there, huh? Totally. Right? So that was actually my next question. What inspired you to leave? So I guess it was the money. So yeah, I chased the money, man. Right out of the gate, I was chasing money. I think that that's fine to do

in the beginning, but it's going to wear you out pretty quickly if you're just doing nothing but chasing money. And I did get, I got a little bit of burnout. But man, totally chasing that money. Never had any kind of money like that. I made $10,000 on a wholesale deal. And it was just like, are you kidding me? I've never made that much money in one chunk ever. Right. And, you know, came from a really tough upbringing, a single parent household, living in a two room shack with an outhouse, didn't even have indoor plumbing, just crazy, crazy upbringing and just always knew I had the fire in me. I just didn't have an outlet for it. and it became real estate. You know,

I never knew it would be real estate, but it's just, it's crazy how things kind of evolve and happen. Yeah. I love that you said you're in it for the money, because I got into it for the money as well. I was like, when I started over,

I was like, okay, I got to learn something, how to do something new in life. What pays the most? Trying to keep it real, right? You know? Totally.

Totally. Totally. All right. So tell me, what does your business look like today? So I have many businesses. I've started with one. I started with a wholesale business where,

you know, we built a million dollar wholesale business right here in Birmingham, Alabama. Kind of got that to where it was a little bit on autopilot, started just kind of slowly evolving to do more things. I started open to brokerage, real estate brokerage. I bought the mobile home park that you mentioned, started acquiring more and more passive income,

did a couple of flips. But today, most of my time is spent, I don't know if you can see this backdrop behind me, but most of my time is spent with ARIA. I started ARIA about a year and a half. a real estate investor association. We're now a top 10 Ria in the country. And I've got plans to grow this thing into the biggest thing in the country. I really believe that we can do that right here in a little little Birmingham, Alabama. And that's my passion. My passion is

coaching and teaching. That's been my passion my entire life. I finally have an outlet to where I can make money at it. It was hard to make money at coaching unless you're the best of the best. You know, you've got to be the Caliparis and the Shashefsky's of the world. So finally have an outlet for it. I think that this is, you know, this is it. I've had a lot of fun doing it. I've got to get to know a lot of great people like yourself and all throughout the country, but really just teaching people how to become financially free through this powerful thing that we call real estate is just, it's completely transformed my life,

just this coaching and teaching piece of it. Got it. So now that you're, you're coaching and teaching, it's this rewarding thing that you've got going on. When you see people getting started, now that you start working with a lot of people, what is the biggest mistake that you see them make when they get started? The biggest mistake, well, we can talk about mindset. I think mindset's critical, but the biggest mistake people make in the beginning is they try to do everything. They try to do way too much.

And I'm a big believer in depth versus width. I think the depth, like, do one thing. If you want to get into real estate and you want to try to wholesale and flip and this, look, there's a million things. There's a hundred ways to make a minimum. million dollars in real estate, right? Maybe even more. There's a million ways to make a million bucks. There could be a million ways. But, you know, people just try to do too much. They try to, even with their marketing, even if they say, you know what, I want to just focus on wholesaling.

They try to do the whole entire city. And I just discourage that. Pick, start where you are. Start where you are. Get to know your market. Get to know your neighborhood. I mean, get to know where you are first. And then let's, let's branch out and do a little by little. If you're marketing, do one thing. focus all your efforts into one marketing channel and go very deep in that channel versus trying to yourself out too thin. That's the biggest mistake I see. Totally. Totally. I can sense your passion about that and I say that several times where I say it very frequently myself. Does that come from personal experience? How did you learn that and why is that so important to you? Totally from personal experience. I'm a product of a big box company. That's how I got started in real estate and went through rich dad

education. I'm not going to say anything good or bad about them. It's just pretty much indifferent. But one thing that they were lacking was that local touch. There's nobody boots on the ground to kind of show you how it is where you are in your specific market. Where you are, Matt, is completely different from where I am. And it's just completely different real estate worlds. They just are. And I didn't have anyone to actually show me the ropes locally. And I think that that is, that's huge. So to answer your question, it was a lot of trial and error. I messed up. I went and tried to, I mean, back in 2014 and early 2015, we were doing, we were on TV, had radio ads going. We had billboards. We had obviously

doing direct mail, doing bandit signs and we're doing all this stuff. And I couldn't figure out why my, my realist, my wholesale business was just a roller coaster. I couldn't figure out why we were, one month was incredible. And then the next month, we went into a single deal. I couldn't figure it out. And then finally, one of my mentors told me, look, you're doing too much. You're just dabbling in all these little things. What's your, and he asked me point blank. What is producing the best results? What marketing channel is producing the best results?

And I told him, it's like, let's go do it. Let's go do that. And that's the best, that's the most consistency I ever had in my wholesale business is when I went deep versus going why. If you had to answer that question today, what's working best for you? What was your answer to me? Cole calling. Cole calling. Yeah. So, it's, you know, everything's evolved.

As you probably know, you know, wholesaling is evolved just because of the market cycle that we're in. I mean, we're in a crate, you're talking about Birmingham, Alabama. When you think of real estate, you don't think of Birmingham. But I think it's, I think it's across the board. It doesn't matter where you go. Real estate's hot right now. And we found that our direct mail numbers were just in just plummeting. And just trying to just through other sources.

what hey what are you trying you know my network's really big like yours is what are you trying here what are you trying there and we started you know drop this is what I teach I teach drive for dollars get 500 addresses go go out and drive around localized to where you are get 500 addresses of distress homes homes that appear to be vacant and then we skip trace against those addresses for phone numbers and we cold call and that's the quickest way I found for a brand new person to get a deal today is through that means so cold call calling. We're just now getting into Facebook ads, so I can't really give you a hard data on that. But cold calling, I just think it's evolved. I mean, I know a lot of people that are still doing

direct mail and they believe in direct mail. And we could do direct mail and it could still be profitable, just not as profitable. We're just trying to find a different channel. So that's what we do the most today. And what I was saying regarding the cold calling is like what's old is new again, right? No, there's no doubt about it. I think everything is cyclical. Real estate is technical, marketing cyclical. I mean, old school way of marketing, handshake stuff. You know, it's all, even though we do a lot of things virtually today, everything's simple. Totally. I mean, we've got two clients. One's in Toledo, Ohio, and one's in Orlando, Florida. And we pretty much started everybody off with the same type of marketing suggestions. And it was crushing for the dude in Toledo

was just crickets in Orlando, and we just swapped out a new piece, and all of a sudden it was crushing in both places. It goes ebbs and flows. I think society just goes through this learning process, you know. So when you're a cold call, let me ask you, what's your approach? It's just, hey, do you want to sell your house, or how does that work? It's super direct. So we do two different things.

We have what's called press one transfers. So they'll just get an automatic message if you've ever thought about selling your house, press one now. And so they'll speak to someone live. we do that approach. The more effective approach that we found is, yeah, literally do it. We go through the mojo dialer, the dials three at a time. We do that. We pick up the phone. Hey, you know, we kind of use the all shucks approach. You know, I don't even know if I have the right number. I don't even know if I have the right guy. I just drove by this house. It appeared to be

empty. I was just curious if you were the owner, you'd ever thought about selling it. It's just something that simple. And it, you know, it's a numbers game. You know, not everyone hits, but, you know, So one out of 20, we're going to get an appointment, you know, something like that. So, yeah, we just, you just got to stick with it. Yeah, nothing wrong with those numbers, actually. You know, one deal that's 20 calls and 10,000 bucks. That was a lot of numbers per call, right? No doubt.

Ain't no doubt. So now that you're teaching and you're coaching people, what's one, I know your antenna's up now, but what other coaches are doing, what everyone else is teaching, it's just kind of how the reticulate. or activate or fires off when you get into something. What's one piece of bad advice that you hear out there that just kind of really gets under your skin? Oh, man.

I am a huge believer in, I mentioned this earlier. I'm a big believer in the local guy. I'm a big believer in the local model. It's not impossible. It's not for everybody, but it's what I needed. I needed someone here that I could touch. We go on appointments with our students. Like we are right there next to them in the trenches with them.

And I feel like that's what kind of sets us apart a little bit. We're not a big national company. We are specific to our area. We know the area they can come to our office and feel us and touch us. So I'm just, I'm a big believer in that. I like the local touch. I think that you can complement that with like a mastermind, a big national, more of a national type of mastermind or a national type of flavor.

But I'm just a big believer in the local guy. I just, you know, I already mentioned depth versus width. There are a lot of guys that'll tell you to go out and do a little bit of everything and just try this and try this and find what works. I think I think you need to listen to one guy. I'm not a big believer in trying to piece this together and piece this and piece this and take what this guy says. I don't think that that works.

I tried that. So I just, I know how to get a deal. I know how to do a deal. And if you listen to me, I'm going to show you exactly how to get a deal. the quickest route to a deal right here in my local area. Yeah, I know I can see a really big upside to that because a common complaint or the biggest concern right before someone gets started is they all think their own market sucks.

If they have, they think the grass is greener on the other side, you know, and if there's someone local that can actually show you know this works, I think there's a lot to be said for evidence, right? For sure. No doubt. No doubt about it. Awesome. Awesome. Let's see. What's in the future right now, Brian? I guess you're talking about your rear group. What has you so excited about that? What all goes on? How does that work? Are you different on your rear group? So yeah, that's a great. I love that question. How are we different? Man, we don't sell. How about that? Really? Okay. That's great. We do. We do not bring in. It's all they do. And people, but here's the thing that people are sick of that. People caught on and they're sick of it. and I'm sick of it. I went to my old Ria group that was here in Birmingham, and that's all they did. They sold every single month. And the only people that come back to those groups, the only people

that go to those groups are brand new people. You can't get someone to consistently go to a Rhea. You're not going to ARIA. That's right. When's the last time you went to Aria, Matt? It was like five weeks ago, but they wanted me to speak. So as a speaker, I'm talking about as a voluntarily going as an attendee. When's the last time you went? It's been a long time. More than a long time. It's been a long time. So here's what we've done, Matt. I aligned myself with all the biggest and baddest players in my town. And we got together and kind of created a little bit of an alliance.

I propped them up as experts. And obviously they came and spoke. They all come to my group. All of the experienced investors come to this group. I'm there. And we bring in speakers from all throughout the country and we have local people, but we don't sell. We sell membership, which is $99 a year, dirt cheap.

And we sell our. three-day workshops, which is a couple hundred bucks. You get three full days of education for a couple hundred bucks. That's all we sell. We don't allow any outside speaker to come in and sell their product. Now, we've had some great speakers come in and they'll lead capture and they'll go and do and they'll do a lot of business through our RIA later. It's no guru stuff, no run to the back of the room garbage that I think that our, I think most people have kind of caught onto that and they don't like it. So we wanted to create, I wanted to create an atmosphere that was the, the complete opposite of that. And so we've grown to, now we're over 700 members in a year and a

half. We're getting regularly over 200 people come to our meetings. And I have plans to grow this thing into one of the largest reas in the country and potentially take this thing, take this model national to where we can actually have these little, these little groups, we're going to call it something else, have these little groups all throughout the country. So I actually wrote a book about, it. I wrote a book about how to do this and it's called Nothing's for Sale. Nothing's for sale. Nothing's for sale. That's the name of the book. And if you don't mind Matt, I'd love to give your audience a free copy of that book. And go to my website, nothing's for sale.com. And you got a page. I have no upsells on there. You pay me a little tiny bit of shipping and handling. I have no

upsell, no agenda. I just want to give you a free copy of this book. Nothing's for sale.com. Perfect. So who did you write this book for? Who's the ideal reader of this book? So the subtitle of the book is how to become the local authority in your real estate market. So I've become the local authority in Birmingham, Alabama. When people throughout the country think of Birmingham, they think of Brian Tripp. Not because I'm doing the most deals, not because I've got the most money, the fastest cars, the biggest house, not because of any of that stuff. It's purely marketing and it's purely I've been giving away all the information. You can go to our YouTube channel, all the information out there. We give away everything for free. Nothing's for sale. The only thing I ever sell is my

personal one-on-one time if I'm going to coach you personally one-on-one. That's it. Everything else is out there. Everything else is free. So we've created a kind of a cult following because there are so many people that have been burned by the gurus. So many people that have been burned by the, I got burned. So many people got burned by these huge packages that are just unnecessary. It's just unnecessary. It's just unnecessary. In today's age where you have YouTube University, essentially, all the information's out there. There's nothing that you or I could tell anyone that they're not, that they can't find on YouTube. But why they might hire you, Matt, why someone's going to hire you as a coach to coach them, they're going to hire you for speed of implementation. That's why they're going to hire you. And that's why

they're going to hire me. Speed of implementation and your network. Because your network is silly, right? I mean, you know everybody. So that's why they're going to come to you for, that that next jump, that next leap. Yeah, I mean, this is the first time we've ever talked with something that you just said that was right on point. I mean, we're just, you're preaching to the choir. We don't even consider ourselves a coaching company anymore. We don't consider ourselves really an educational company because we know it's all out there. Right. You get that for free here. And we just changed the whole model of the upper pro academy. We're basically giving that thing away now too. But we are now a systems and implementation company. The closer we can get you to the finish line

and then we'll give you all the support that needs to go with it, you know, the more successful our students are going to be and the people that work with us. So, yeah, we're just, you know, the information is everywhere. It's implementation is where it's at. That's right. I totally agree with that. 100%.

All right. All right. Great to meet you, man. Super. So you said something earlier. You said you wanted to, you have this goal to make this the biggest RIA group in the country. What does that have to look like to be considered the biggest?

Numbers. Numbers. I want numbers. So I think the most important thing when it comes to really any business, but real estate in particular, the single most important thing to real estate is networking. You have got it's not just who you know, it's who knows you. You've heard all these sayings. You've got to talk to people. You've got to get out of your comfort zone and talk to people that you can align yourself with to where you can do more deals. We don't, we don't consider anything or anyone to be competition. I don't, I don't even believe in

the word competition. I want to collaborate like with people like yourself. I want to collaborate with as many people as possible. That's why we have a podcast just like you do. We want to bring on expert guests just like you do because we want to collaborate with these people because you're obviously, Matt, you've been doing this for a very long time and you know what you're doing. I want to see it. What can we do? How can I provide value to you and how can I provide value to your listeners to where we can we can do business together? That's how, that's my outlook on everything. And that's what we teach people at our RIA. So you asked me, what does that look like? It's pure numbers.

We want to convince the world that networking is the single most important thing. So get up off your couch. Even though you can see everything on YouTube for free, get up off your couch and come to our live events. Because we're not selling you anything. We create an environment for networking so that deals can be done. Preach, Brian. I'm right there with you, buddy. I would say you can power and shove it.

have a bunch of money behind a marketing machine to get some deals fast. But if you want to go far, it's with the people in your network. Totally. And I like the no competition thing. Because I think we get most of our deals now from fellow real estate investors. It's totally true. And that's, that's a great point, Matt. People don't get this. People just don't understand that. Most of the deals that we do are through referrals or through people that we've met. And whether it's a JV, a collaboration, it's just all through just the natural progression of networking. It's awesome, awesome. So share with this real quick.

If someone wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Yeah, you know, go get that free book. I have no agenda. I'm not upselling you on anything. Nothing's for sale.com. Go to that website. Nothing is for sale.

Nothing's. Nothing's. With an S on the end, nothing's. Got it. And then F-O-R, spell out for F-4Sale.com. And our second edition is coming out where it's going to be on Amazon here soon, but come get a copy really, really cheap. I think you pay $5.99 shipping.

So I can pay, you know, my administrative person to go and handle all that. And I'll sign it for you and get that out to you as quick as possible. So you can email me. You know, I'm the kind of person. I'll email you back the first time. But if you keep asking me for a million things, I'm probably not going to continue to email. But, you know, you got a couple questions or even better if you're in Birmingham or in the state of Alabama, come check us out. Our RIA meetings are on the second Thursday night of every single

month. We meet at the NBC Suite Hotel in Homewood, which is just south of downtown Birmingham. So you can email me directly info at alaria.com, A-L-A-R-E-I-A. God, I wish we would have met sooner. We just did our epic intensive in October in Birmingham. I saw you were here. Oh, and you didn't even come up, come by and say hello? I didn't know you and I actually didn't find out too late. We actually, I'll talk about. I'll talk to you offline about this. We actually have a lot of mutual friends. Oh, cool. All righty. Well, sweet. Thanks, Brian. I really enjoyed this. It's always nice to talk to somebody that sees eye to eye with you. Doesn't always make for the best podcasting. But it's nice to meet you. And it's,

I just like it that there's other people out there spreading the good word. So no doubt. Your contribution to epic real estate investors all over the world. And thanks for being here. Let's do it again. It's been an honor being on your show. I've been following you for a long time, Matt. Thank you so much for having me. Brian, take care. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.