Epic Real Estate Investing - Building a Real Estate Empire: Insights and Expansion with David Olds | 1302

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Dive into the captivating journey of David Olds, the visionary founder of EZREI Closings, as he shares his remarkable ascent to becoming the nation's premier transaction coordination company. Joined by host Matt on the Epic Real Estate Investing Show, David unveils his riveting tale from humble beginnings in real estate in 2002 to navigating the tumultuous 2008 financial crisis and emerging stronger. With a keen focus on fixing and flipping homes, David's evolution into streamlining the closing process for investors nationwide is a testament to his adaptability and foresight. Discover the pivotal role of community, real estate groups, and innovative strategies like wholesaling in David's success narrative. The episode shines a spotlight on EZREI's dynamic office expansion and the invaluable contribution of its dedicated team. As David shares insights on scaling a business and the importance of robust networks, listeners are invited to explore the services offered by EZREI. Immerse yourself in David's visionary perspective on the future of real estate investments and embark on a journey towards building your own thriving real estate empire.  BUT BEFORE THAT, Matt gives you tips on how to replace your six figure salary with real estate investing! P.S. Whenever you're ready to go deeper and further with your real estate investing, looking into my partner program to help you get your first deal might be the move... take the first step here for free 👉 https://epicearnwhileyoulearn.com/ Sponsor: Baselane - Banking Built for Real Estate Investors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. Hey, strap in. It's time for the epic real estate investing show. We'll be your guides as we navigate the housing market, the landscape of creative financing strategies, and everything you need to swap that office chair for a beach chair. If you're looking for some one-on-one help, meet us at rei-aise.com. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go.

Let's go. By the end of this, you're going to have a step-by-step guide for replacing your six-figure salary with real estate investing so that you can escape the rat race and finally quit that job you hate. Best of all, I'm going to give you several pro tips to reduce your risk and any headaches you might potentially deal with. Because even though the housing market is a little crazy right now, it is still very possible to do. For example, I just helped Ryan walk away from his 9 to 5 because he had replaced his six-figure corporate salary and then some. And if you want to do the same, I'll walk you through the process. First, it begins with a simple math formula because we need to know

how many properties you need to replace your salary. So if your salary is, say, $100,000 per year, that's $8,333 per month. And if your typical income property produces $250 per month, you need 33 properties. And here's what the basic property math looks like. You purchase a $125,000 property, you put 20% down, and then borrow the rest. Now that the property is yours, you're responsible for taxes, insurance, maintenance, vacancy, and property management. These numbers, they can fluctuate month to month. But if managed properly, this is what you can expect. average out over a year. It's your net operating income. The last number to subtract is the mortgage payment for the money you borrowed, and that would leave you with approximately $250. That's your cash flow.

So you need 33 of these properties. If you'd like a simple calculator that will give you the exact numbers, you can grab a copy of mine at deal math.net. Now, if we're starting from scratch, 33 properties, that may sound like a lot, but you can reduce that number in one of two ways by decreasing a property's expenses or increasing its income, or to reduce it even further and faster, do both. As an example, Mercedes and I, we always accept pets in our income properties. The first reason is that many landlords don't, so we have less competition for tenants.

The second reason is that we charge pet rent. We get an extra $100 per property. You see, that one tiny difference would reduce what you need to replace your salary down from 33 properties to just 23. If you increase the income per unit by an additional $100 per month by, say, charging extra for parking or storage, appliances, furnishings, landscaping, housekeeping, utilities, outdoor amenities, whatever additional opportunities your property might present. You might have to use a little bit of creativity, but the opportunity is there. And by a

combination of any two or three of these, you can get your total number of properties needed down to 19 or so. And you can work it from the other direction too. For example, when the mortgage rates come down, a refinance that decreases your mortgage payment by just $100 will reduce your mortgage payment to a point where you need just 15 properties to replace your six-figure salary. By continuing to optimize and manage the income and expenses on your properties, you can accelerate the process significantly. Now, if you weren't afraid of a little extra work on the management side, you could fairly easily increase the per-unit income by $1,000 each,

by just changing the use to a vacation rental or student housing, you know, rent each property by the room. By doing that, that's just nine properties you need. Now, I don't know about you, but that seems far more doable and enjoyable than working for someone day in and day out for the next 50 years, doesn't it? Yeah, but how? I mean, where do I get the money to buy all these properties? That's the easy part, and I'll get to it a minute.

But before I do, if you're serious about pulling this off, you've got to first answer this question for yourself. And this is step two. Which freedom is the most important to you? Is it debt freedom, a free and clear home, or financial freedom? Why not get them off? I like the way you think. That would be great, wouldn't it?

Unfortunately, each freedom requires a different set of action. and most of those conflict with each other. Pursuing them all simultaneously would be like trying to lose weight by eating donuts. I mean, you'd enjoy both, but they can't coexist. If financial freedom isn't a clear number one to you, then you're not going to make it. And here's why. You need to embrace debt to become financially free in the society and the economy of which we live. Being debt free isn't a part of the process to replace your salary.

Unless you're already sitting on just a pile of money, it'll take a lifetime, maybe a couple of lifetimes to buy your nine properties without debt. And if that's the case, why invest in real estate at all? If a free and clear home is your number one freedom, you will retire your money before you retire yourself by locking it all up in your home. I mean, you may dream of sitting on the beach sipping fruity drinks all day, but paying off your mortgage puts your home on vacation first while you still get up and report to work every day. Now, step three, if financial freedom is your number one and you prefer it sooner rather than later, and here's the easy money, part I promised. You will need to leverage OPM, other people's money, debt. And I'll show you exactly

why. But first, I don't use debt for vacations, luxury goods, non-essential vehicles, dining and entertainment, or everyday expenses unless I can pay it off at the end of the month. That's bad debt. That's not what we're talking about. I'm talking about good debt, like using it on myself to educate and train myself to earn more. Debt is good when used for your own business, for real estate investments, for value add property improvements and your primary residence. Rich people love good debt. And there are two primary reasons. The first reason, good debt increases returns. Imagine you and a friend are going to buy your first investment property. This $100,000 house produces a 10% return on investment, not too shabby. You both have $100,000 that you've saved up. Your friend decides to pay cash for

the property because they like having no debt and receiving their 10% return. You decide to use $25,000 of your $100,000 and borrow the rest to purchase your investment property. From the $10,000 you receive each year, you make the payments on the money you borrowed, leaving $4,600 for you. To calculate your return on investment, divided by the money you invested, $25,000, and your ROI will be 18%. Close to double what your friend is receiving. And that's how debt increases returns. And if we were talking about the appreciation on the property, debt multiplies returns. But wait, you still have $75,000, so you can buy, three more income properties, which will get you to your target number of properties four times

faster. Okay, I get it, but where do I get that big bag of money to buy these property? You may not need it because of the second reason rich people love good debt. It can be a tool for expansion like this. Start shopping for your first property and negotiate the price. Don't pay full retail. You don't have to do that. And then you put 20% down, collect your rent, and make your mortgage payments. The first thing here to acknowledge is that using good debt like this, just allowed you to take a small portion of your resources to gain control of a large portion of someone else's. Debt allows you to gain 100% control of this property, which gives you 100% of the rights to its revenue, appreciation, depreciation, deductions, amortization, and its hedge against inflation.

Now, imagine you do nothing over the next five years, but just manage it and collect the rent. With an average annual appreciation rate of 3.5%, the value of your property is now $119,000. and you've paid down $4,000 of the principal adjusting your equity position to $63,000. You can now use your equity to repeat the process three more times. Do nothing, but wait another five years and do it again. Do nothing again, but wait another five years and do it again. Using good debt like this, plus just a little patience, allows you to expand. You don't need the money to buy all of these properties.

The first one bought them all for you. In 15 years, just 15, you've built a small real estate empire that will support you for the rest of your life. Unlike the traditional 40 years scam, I mean plan, where 95% of the population at the age of 65 by following that plan, they are all still dependent on church, family, or state for support. Now, if you're wondering, with the median home price at an all-time eye, where do I find properties like these? Stay with me, and I'll show you. But there's this bigger problem to overcome, and that's understanding that avoiding debt is just,

Just one part of the big scam we've all been sold. As of this recording, zero companies, not one on the S&P 500, are debt-free. To me, that's a clue. I mean, if being debt-free is so fiscally responsible, why don't the richest people follow that advice? From day one, we've been told to work hard, avoid debt, and save money, so that at some point, 40 to 50 years from now, will have a mountain of money so high that it'll produce a stream of money to carry us happily into retirement. But it doesn't work.

You see, most people don't make enough to save enough to build their mountain or they don't start early enough. You see, to earn $100,000 produced from a safe 5% dividend, you need to have saved $2 million. That will require 40 years of uninterrupted contributions of 10% of your pre-tax salary. If you started just 10 years later, you're only halfway there at the same age. If you get started any later than that, forget about it. But let's say it does work for you. Let's say you are the exception.

You traded 40 years of your life for it. How much time you got left? And what's the quality of that time? I did the math. It's not a good trade. The best years of your life, they're behind you. That's the scam. I then did the math to see if I should just forget the mountain altogether and focus on the stream first. With the most conservative calculations, I just showed you a 15-year plan. With some intention, I sought more of a 10-year plan, but with a little extra effort, it turned out to be a four-year plan for me. And it's been a two-year or less plan for some of my clients like Josh. and Corey and McKenzie, Enrique, and Tony, I mean, just to name a few. This one small shift in focus from the mountain to the stream, it's super important because I know what it's like if you don't figure this out, especially when it comes to the anxieties that come with a dead-end job, a salary that won't keep up with inflation, no time for yourself, sleepless nights about whether you'll be able to retire or not, and the inevitable regrets of not taking a leap for more lucrative opportunities,

I suffered through all of them. At 38 years old, I hit a point where I realized that if I failed, I could always go back and get some lame-ass job. But if I didn't try, that would be time I could never get back. And that reached a point for me where it was unacceptable. Escaping the 9-to-5 grind at the age of 42, that was sweet. But if I had acted on my real estate dreams sooner, I'd have been ready for the PGA tour, not just starting to get ready.

Now, step four, where do I find properties like these? You may have to leave your market to find them. But they're there. There's plenty of them. If you can't find them or don't have the time, leverage a turnkey investor like cash flow savvy, they can do it all for you. But if finding properties like these, if that's what becomes the barrier for you, you'll need to reevaluate if financial freedom is really your number one freedom. You see, your inability to replace your six-figure income will not be because you can't

find the properties, but rather, one, whether or not you're willing to leverage debt to buy them, and or two, whether or not you're willing to retire yourself before you retire your home. And the struggle is temporary, by the way. Here's my rule of thumb. Use debt to grow your passive income. Eliminate debt to preserve your passive income. But you've got to build it before you can preserve it. Playing it in a way that you think is safe to protect something you don't have is putting the cart before the horse. I mean, that's what most people do. And that's why most people fail to get what they actually want, the financial freedom. But that traditional plan ain't producing it for anybody. If this is all new to you, I understand the possible overwhelming feeling. Very well, we could have

really challenged some of your sacred cows. But just start small. Take a one property at a time. Go super slow if you have to. Pick up just one property every other year or so, and you're done in 20. Still, in half the time, how all the sheep are going about it. Even if that first $30,000 down payment, if that's just too much for you right now, you can get started for much less. I put this together last month. Ten methods revealed to vaporize new real estate investors' most common obstacle, the down payment. You can grab a copy of it at zero-downkit.com. We'll be back with more right after this. Stop spending countless hours on busy work and focus on growing your real estate business and maximizing your return.

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Baselane.com slash Matt. Baselane.com slash Matt. That's B-A-S-E-L-A-N-E. dot com slash M-A-T-T. Hope is not a financial strategy. Let's get back to work. Today, the mastermind behind easy REI closings has revolutionized real estate with his innovative approach to investing.

His journey began in 2002, and despite the 2008 financial crisis, he adapted. and thrive, establishing himself in Chattanooga, Tennessee as a leading wholesaler. His expertise covers a broad spectrum, including flipping properties and managing over 100 rentals. With the mantra, simple is scalable. He built easy REI closings into the nation's largest transaction coordination company, empowering investors to close deals officially across the U.S. So please help me welcome to the show, Mr. David Old.

David, welcome to the epic real estate investing show. Matt, thank you so much, man. It's an honor to be here. Appreciate you having me up. Yeah, awesome. Glad to have you. So there's a lot I want to dive into. I think the service that you provide is such an essential element of a successful real estate investing operation.

It's so time intensive and it's so critical and important that you get all that stuff right and it can make deals. It can break deals. So I want to get into that. But first, I want to learn more about you. How did you initially get involved in real estate investing? What was happening just before 2002 that caused to make a move into this industry? I grew up in Boston. I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, was a Boy Scout, Eagle Scout, all those things.

But the biggest thing is, you know, growing up, my dad was an ex-military guy and was the, you know, came from that born in the 40s, right, from 1945, I think. So very much like, we're going to fix up our house. We're going to do additions. We're going to do all of these types of things. And we had this big, like, two-acre lot in Drake at Massachusetts, which is right on the New Hampshire border. So you know what we get a lot of in the fall in New England? A lot of leaves, right? So I was constantly like always having to work around the house, rake leaves, mow the grass, like all these things.

And Matt, I'm going to tell you, as a kid, I'm like kicking rocks as I'm mowing the grass. Like, I hate this. I'm never going to do this stuff. I won't make my kids do this. I literally remember saying these words, I'm going to live in a condo. I'm never doing any of this stuff again. So it turns out after college, I went to Florida, and I started work for this company called Scotty's hardware stores.

So they're a very big hardware chain all over Florida, 177 stores before Depot and Lowe's put them out. You know, I started working, working for them and was now kind of thrust back onto the other side of working with homeowners and contractors and things and decided to get married in 2002 and we bought our first house and what did we do we started fixing it up tearing out the pink carpet putting in laminar replacing the cabinets putting up crown molding tearing out the sliding glass door put in french doors putting in a new concrete pad all of the things that i swore i would never do as as a kid because the truth is we all become our parents right so we did that house and we sold it and made 50 000 and because it was two years later.

And the weird thing about it was we bought this foreclosure. So I remember going into or coming out of the closing with my real attorney, I'm like, her name was DJ. I'm like, DJ, I don't understand. Like, why was there nobody else there? And why did I buy it from Wells Fargo? Like, she's like, yeah, dummy, it was a foreclosure. Like, oh, okay.

So two years later, we're going to sell it after we fixed it up. And we're going in this time. She's like, hey, you know, you don't have to pay taxes on this because I was a little worried. And I'm like, well, why not? She's like, oh, because it was your primary homestead residence dummy. She called me dummy a lot. So that's someone in life that reminds us of who we really are. Oh, yeah.

I'm surrounded with a team now that keeps me incredibly humble. So we bought the next house into Barry, Florida. It was literally the ugliest house in a beautiful neighborhood and spent the next like two years. We dropped like 20 loads of dirt and sod inside. I, you know, laid tile, put in a brand new kitchen, new doors, all of the things. And we sold it. And this time we made like $85,000. And I'm like, oh my God, we need to figure this out.

And I happened to be at the airport waiting on somebody in the bookstore, like just literally leaning on one of the shelves. And I picked up a book and started reading it. I give you three guesses and the first two don't count, which book it is. It's rich dad, poor dad. And like the most cliche thing ever, right? And for real estate investors, you know, again, I always tell people I'm not that smart, but I'm really good at following directions.

And at the end, he says, join a real estate group, right? Cool. So that was sort of how it happened, how I ended up getting involved in, real estate and sort of trying to figure it out and navigate my way through things. Got it. Yeah, that is a common advice to join a real estate group. Go be around a bunch of real estate investors. How did that transition happen kind of from you being a spectator at one of those groups and actually taking action? So I'll tell you an interesting story. And now people don't believe this because, one, I'm an incredible introvert, right? I'm on here, yapping like crazy,

but I'm incredibly shy, introverted. So I read the book and I remember it was July. And I'm like, I'm going to go to this first meeting. It's the first Wednesday of the month in Orlando. at the Bumby Theater, no idea where any of this was. So I got directions, I printed out my old MapQuest directions, you know, 2004 or whatever it was. And I drove down there and I was so nervous. So, man, I'll tell you, I've never been so nervous in my life. And I pull into this parking lot. What I didn't know, I had no way of knowing.

CFRI, Central Florida Real Estate Investors Group was the third largest in the country. So there's like 200 cars there. And like every place you look, cars wrapped and decals, I buy houses, we buy houses, inspectator, you know, all the things. And dude, I was so nervous. I'm driving around looking for a park a lot and right out the other entrance and just drove home. And like, I did the same thing. That's so funny. This is why I asked the question because I did the same thing. I was like, oh, no, I can't go in there and meet all these people. I'm like, I don't belong here. Like I keep in here. I don't, I'm not good enough to be here, all those things, right? That insecurity. And I tell people like, you know, I can count on 20 years, you know, five times I didn't tell my wife the truth. And this was one of them. How to go? Couldn't find it. Couldn't find it. Couldn't find it.

So I remember I didn't go the next month. I do remember I went back in September because that's my birthday. It was like right on honor about my birthday. So, man, I drove down there like fucking white knuckle. Like the whole time, I'm like, I'm going in. I'm going to do this. You know, all that positive self-talk stuff. I got down and like immediately like slammed it in park, got out of my car,

went paid my $20. And I walk in. And, you know, it was real. This was like the heyday areas, right? There was all these vendors that were out there in the lobby with tables. And like, I don't know what to do, but I see people picking up a bag and go pick. I'm like, I'll just do what everybody else is doing, right?

I don't want to look like a nitwit out of place here. So I did that and then, you know, some bell rings and we all go in. So, of course, I go in and I'm, it's an auditorium. It's like a theater, an active theater, but they rented it once a month. So I sit in like the far back left hand corner, right? And I've got my little notepad in my pen and I'm like, okay, great. First meeting of September, right? Whatever.

Like, I'm taking all these silly notes. You know, it was interesting and this is very foundational. I do remember this from the very first meeting. they used to do this thing called deal of the month. And what that would mean is they would pre-select three, four people, and they would get up and they would talk about a deal that they've done, right? And at the end, everybody would clap, and the people who got the most applause got like this $100 home depot card.

So, man, I remember the first guy who gets up there. I wish I could remember his name, but his name was the – I call him Bob, right? So this guy's like 90 pounds, 90 years old, like Florida, overalls, everything but the straw coming out of his mouth. And he's got this super deep accent. And he's talking about, yeah, I was driving to North Carolina to see my kinfolk. North Carolina, kinfolk, got it. Okay.

And I stopped in South Carolina and I saw this house was for sale. So I went in and talked to him. And the guy's talking like he's got marbles in his mouth. And he says, yeah, he wanted 80,000 and I offered him 40 and he didn't take it. So I left him my business card and I just went to see my kinfolk. And two weeks later, I was on my way home and he called. me and said he'd sell for 40,000. And I'm like, sell for 40,000.

Got it, okay. Right. And he's like, so I stopped. And I spent a couple days and we bought the house and I hired a contractor. And we just sold it for 120,000. I'm like 80. Scratch that out. 40.

So, this is like 2004. I'm like, holy smokes. Okay. Got it. Like taking my notes. So the next girl gets up, who is this Russian girl who is as beautiful as day is long, gets up there, barely speaks English. And I'm like, okay, this girl's name. No, it was Olga. No, it was Olga. I do remember. Okay, because we had a Russian car.

I do remember her name. Okay, go ahead. So she gets up and she is like 25 from Russia, been in the U.S. like two years. And she is flipping mobile homes all over Orlando, like for five grand apiece, like three or four a month. I don't know what the next two people said, because I just sat there and I was freaking stunned because, like, I can say, to myself relatively bright. I went to college. I got a degree. And I'm looking at these two old guy who's 100, right, speaks with marbles in his mouth, barely understand him. Nice guy. Like, I'm not, like, nice guy. I got you. But he's making probably 60 grand on that flip. And then you got Russian girl who gets up there who I don't even know what really what she was saying. And she's

making, you know, 15, 20, 25 grand a month. And I'm like, what am I doing with my life? We all have those moments in, you know, in our life or in our journey where you can look back and go, oh, this was a foundational thing. So, you know, I look back at that and this really sort of gets me through bad days where I'm like, listen, there are people far are not as smart as me who are making a ton of money because they just have a process. They follow a system, you know, my operations manager, she's coined, if you do the thing, the thing works, right? But you don't have to be super smart. You just got to go out there and do the thing. So anyways, that was sort of my very first rea, my recollection of it.

From there, I just got deeply involved and went to all the classes and workshops and boot camps and hired a couple of mentors and just did all that stuff. Follow the instructions. Follow the recipe, man. It's amazing. I like that saying if you do the thing, the thing works. I say everything works. Nothing doesn't, right?

Yeah, no, it all works. It drives me crazy when people are like, all that course I bought or whatever, that's crap, it doesn't work. Well, it didn't work for you. But, you know, obviously it works for some people, but typically it's you just didn't do the work. Yeah, did you actually work it? Is the question I always got. All right. So you start from, you've got some instructions. You go out there and you take a little bit of action. You obviously did the next deal. How long do you

think it took from that meeting until you got your next deal done? Yeah, maybe eight, nine months. I mean, it took a little while. My first deal was a sub two. So I remember specifically hiring or getting involved in like the small group coaching, learning how to do subtoe and what a trust was and all of those types of things. And doing some marketing. And it's interesting back there in the mid-2000s, we were all marketing to pre-foreclosures. It was the hottest thing ever. Not one of us had the forethought to go, huh, wonder what's going to happen when the bank takes all these properties back, right? Nobody, nobody dawned on them that the future was going to be just a crater. So, yeah, I went and I was doing this marketing. And again, I bought courses for everybody, like marketing

courses, all these different things. I was able to sort of mix and match and blend and cool things sort it together to make them work for me and my personality. And I remember I was sending out this letter and the headline on it was, let me do for you what your realtor can't. So we were marketing to expired listings, right? Got it. And essentially this guy called. I had set up voice connect, which is an answering service out of Atlanta, which I figured out from going to the RIA meetings because I had a job, right? Like I was still working. I got this lead sheet. I come home and this guy was selling his dad's house that he inherited and had two loans on it. So I went over to the house made to the appointment.

Nervous as anything could be, but I bought this course, and there's this one specific CD that Chris Kirshner put in there that said, play this on your way to your appointment. Smartest thing ever, right? So it literally says, okay, you're going to an appointment. I want you to pull over about halfway there and listen to it. And it really like, you know, you can do this. Here's what you're going to say. Keep it simple.

Pumps you up. So I remember going there. And I knew it was going to be a sub two type deal. So his process was, what's the house worth? then you subtract all the repairs, then you subtract the mortgage, and here's your equity that's left. And you make them an offer based off of that and taking over the mortgage. And the whole out-of-body experience, I'm standing there.

The house is empty. We're in the kitchen and I'm going through this. And I had already pre-filled it out because the software pre-filled it out with like some percentages. But I knew the numbers he was giving me were higher, right? So I'm like, well, how long do you think it'll, what do you think it'll cost up to? First off, like, what do you think the house is worth? What do you owe? okay let's let's work on the rest like what do you think we need to do for electrical stuff it's like

oh well you're probably gonna have to rewire the whole house and that shed out there you're gonna have to run electrical stuff out there so man man maybe seven or eight thousand i'm like in my brain i'm screaming like you had 2,000 on the sheet because like i understand how math works i'm not calculus smart but i'm i'm addition and subtraction smart right so we're adding all this up and like the number was so much lower than i that i had anticipated i'm like inside my body's just like going crazy. So I'm like, all right, Joe, let me go outside. Let me call my partner and see if we can find a way to get this done for you. I literally got out there and called my wife. I'm like, oh my God, you're not going to believe this. This is crazy. And they're watching. So I'm trying

not to be too animated, but I'm like, all right, well, you just, you know what to do. So we went in and made them to three-off for kind of letter of intent. And they picked one. And that was the first, like, true investment property that I bought. It's awesome. It's crazy. It's the craziest thing ever. You always remember the first one, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. detail. Oh, crystal clear. I remember anxiety standing at the dollar is there,

as they are unknowingly pushing their own number further down. So you've got a full-time day gig, and you're doing this on the side, and eventually we scale up and we're doing millions of dollars a year. So what was kind of the process first to quit the day job and then, or millions in transactions, it says. Yeah, it was a rocky road. You know, now kind of just put the other bookend on it, wholesaled over 1,500 houses, 1647, I think was the last time we counted, wholesale, rehab,

dozens of houses, had over 100 rentals at one time. And now, of course, we own Easy REI Closings, which is where the largest transaction coordination company. But that's today. But let's go back to 2006 and 7, we're doing these couple houses. My wife and I both had full-time jobs. I ran a large production facility. We made doors and moldings and millwork and all the stuff that you put in your houses. But again, like the market crash. It got really bad in 2008, and I was a salesman for 84 lumber. So everybody felt a little bit of a slowdown, but nobody knew like we were just going to hit the side of a cliff, right? It just gnash the million smithereens.

Eventually, you know, my wife was at the time assistant purchasing manager for Ashton Woods Holmes, which is a large custom builder. So as things started to get a little bit bad, like, of course, she got laid off. I got let go from, it was really pro-build and then I got hired on an 84 lumber for a little bit. So we knew everything was starting to get terrible. We still didn't know like the collapse was going to happen. But I started looking around at other markets. My brother was going to start to work with me and went to some events. I went to a Dave Lindahl event where he talks about emerging markets.

And that's how we ended up picking Chattanooga. But I still had about six or eight months before we were ready to move. So I bought this last house in Deltona, Florida. It's a 742 Trafalgar Street. I'll remember that until the end of time. And it was a probate deal, right? Through somebody I knew, the guy passed away, we picked it up for a really big. a good deal, Matt. It was $97,000. Very typical block, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch with a two-car garage

in Deltona. And so I got it for 97, right? So when I bought it, it was July of 08. And one block over two blocks down, identical house had just sold for 214. That's a deal, right? So I go over there. We actually moved into it. I took the carpet up, laid new tiles, scraped the popcorn, did all the stuff, right? Completely remodeled it. I was younger, skinnier, and had more back then, so I did a lot of it myself. So I got done with it in November. And like, I call my realtor. I'm like, hey, Shana, new realtor. She didn't call me dumb. So I liked her. I'm like, hey, Sheena, got this house. We're all done with it. She's like, well, you know, we should put it on the market in January because nobody buys anything from Thanksgiving to Christmas and you don't want a

bunch of days on market. I'm like, all right, well, that makes sense, right? Cool. Well, I call her like, you know, January 2nd and she comes over and she walks through and she says, hey, this looks really good. I'm like, I know. said you did a good job. I'm like, I said, what can we get for it? She goes, well, and this is 2009. So we're still on, we're on notebooks, right? You know, there's no iPads. There's no Facebook. There's none of that. So she goes, well, probably, you know, she's pointing stuff. 146, maybe, maybe 147. I'm like, it's a little off. One, one, two blocks down. 214. Yeah, that was last summer. 25% just like that. They're higher 30, percent. So, you know, like every

knit with new investor, I'm like, well, my house is better. Those are foreclosures, right? Look at how dirty they are. My house is in perfect shape. And she's like, yeah, it doesn't matter. That's what the comps are. So I'm like, well, I can't sell for that because I knew I was moving. This was going to be my last move

with, you know, 50, 60 grand. I was, you know, this was it, right? Because no matter how many rehabs you've done, nobody saves money, right? Let's be honest. You're going on vacation, you're paying bills, you're doing all the things, right? Yeah. So I'm like, I'm not doing that. She goes, well, what do you want to do?

I'm like, I'll do 155. And I thought I was the most magnanimous SOB that's ever walked the face of the earth. She was like, okay. So out she goes. She's a listing agent. She didn't care. Sign in the front yard.

Off she goes. Dude, not one call, not one click, not one, nothing in January. February comes around. I call her again. I'm like, Jane, like, I've told my boss I'm leaving.

Like, we got to do something. Tell this thing. Yeah, I'm like, because, dude, we weren't used to this. We were coming out of like, you think it was hot in 2000, 2019? Like it was super hot in the mid-2000s. Like a dog will sign out in front, right? That's four-five.

It's amazing. Yeah. So I'm like, all right, how about if we go to 147? Do you think that'll at least get us some calls? She's like, well, probably not. I'm like, what you just told me? She's like, yeah, that was last month. Like, literally this is what it's like, right?

I'm like, well, we'll go to 147. We got a couple calls, still no showings. I'm like, oh, my God. March comes around. I'm like, all right, what's the number? I'll go to 142. She's like, okay, we can try a couple showings now, but no sales. So, you know, April hits and I'm like, what do we got to do? She's like, honestly, if you really want to sell this thing, you probably need around 127. Oof. And the way that I explained to people, because it drove me crazy the last couple years where people are like, we're in a market crash. We're not in a market crash. Let me tell you

what a crash is. A crash is a fat kid chasing a tennis ball down the hill, trying to get ahead it. The prices are falling so fast. There's no, you can't get in front of it, right? That was the problem that I had. You have to make such drastic cuts, which I didn't have the financial wear with all to do that, but banks certainly did. So anyway, so that's kind of where we were. Finally, I'm like, I can't sell it for this. I went back and I'm like, oh, I understand how to do marketing. I know how to do bandit signs, street signs. So I went out and bought a bunch of signs. It said, you know, 3-2, Deltona, owner-o finance with $5,000 down for like, I think I put 159 or something on the paperwork. So,

literally we left there no jobs five grand in the bank i've been going back and forth to up here to chattanooga we had bought this house sub two meaning we took over there the mortgage and it was in east lake chattanooga which is not the best area it was kind of on the side of the ridge and i'd been in this house like two months before and i don't know if you've ever experienced this like you see something and you have like this you just remember things in a much rosier rousier manner than they were but you know i hadn't been there so literally we packed the truck we're moving out new lady moves in It gives me the $5,000. Drive 57 miles from Orlando to the Chattanooga.

Just exhausted, just in time to go to the closing that afternoon. Drive this big U-Haul truck over to this house, and again, not the best area. Just absolutely exhausted at the beginning of June, so it's hot as the days long. So this house, like I don't know why I never dawned. I mean, like no air conditioning. Floors are kind of wonky. It's a 1900's house. It's not been remodeled.

Half the electricity is not working. everything I could do. We pulled a couple of mattresses in there, like in a fan, because everybody was just exhausted and ready to kill each other. And man, like the worst night ever of my life. Like literally, I laid there on that thing. I left this beautifully remodeled house in Deltona, Florida. Yeah, I lost my job, but I could have found a job, but I'm here for real estate. And then, you know, you've got a wife, you know, two boys, three fat dogs. And it's the worst feeling ever to be in this dump of a house that I moved us to, right? And just. And I'll remember that forever. Like, I cried myself to sleep that night. Like, this is not what a good husband and father does. Like, this is terrible. So that was terrible. Like, that's the lowest point ever, right?

But there you wake up in the morning, you're like, well, shit, we better figure this out. We better figure out a way to do this, right? Because the kids like to eat and get new shoes. My dogs, all of them, I've always loved cookies, right? They like all that stuff. So you've got to figure it out. And my intention in going to Chattanooga was, oh, we're going to buy some multifamily. It's going to be like Monopoly.

We're going to buy duplexes and triplexes and apartment complexes. complex of them. But for those that don't know in 2009, the banks were not lending money, right? They were very busy taking properties back. So there was no money to lend. Also, didn't have a job. I didn't really think that through, not having a paycheck, right? So interestingly enough, like people know me for being like a wholesale guy, but I had tried to wholesale in Orlando and it didn't work. Like I put out a bunch of signs and never got a deal. But now, there's a difference now. now we were desperate. Now we had to figure something out, but had no money.

So the marketing channels, of course, none of the marketing that people do now was available then. It was, you know, it was bandit signs, Chris Chico's postcard and yellow letter and flyers that you'd put out at the... It's so funny because I think about that as well. Everyone's looking for the latest gimmick or the latest thing that's going to bring them deals and stuff like that. Like, none of this existed when I started. I mean, I talked to very few people that were actually in the 2005, six, seven, eight. So it's nice to talk to somebody that, I mean, I can tell you there. But back then, I mean, this is why the events were so big because we'd have all these little marketing pieces because we want to get in contact with people.

And I was like, well, talking to people is free. You can just go talk to the people. People are everywhere, man. Yeah. So, yeah, the marketing thing and everything. But I'm sorry, but I got it. We're at the bottom and things were tough then. I was right there with you.

And fortunately, I wasn't flipping much. I was always buying a whole. I took the rich dad thing to heart. Well, I did. I wish, I wish. If we go back in time, I'd buy 500 houses. I'd pay so many houses. But again, you know, the decision we had to make at the

time was with the information that we had. You didn't know the market was going to 5x. Like, who, nobody knew that. We were surviving, you know, we were listening to Dan Rather, say, we don't know if the government's going to open tomorrow. Like, it was bad, right? For people that didn't exist to there, go YouTube, Dan Rather, in the financial

crisis. It was ugly. Like, we don't know if the dollar's going to worth anything tomorrow. Like, thanks for collapsing all day, every day. It was ugly. Right. Yeah. So obviously you got, you know, you just said we had 15, 16, 100 wholesale transactions under your

about the last time you counted. You've done millions of dollars. You had hundreds of rentals. A lot of transactions. So from that point to then, in one of your tagline, as simple as scalable. Yeah. And you have to have that experience to do what you're doing today with your transaction coordination.

So was that just trial and error? or was there a secret? Was it just hiring more people? Or was it just in the right systems? What actually allowed you to operate at that volume? Yeah, interesting. It was a progression. I was the worst poster child for scaling and outsourcing.

I didn't want to do it. People would come to me and say in the early days, right, 2009, 10, 11, you've got to hire VAs and you got to hire all these people. I'm like, nope. Why? Because I'm smarter and nobody can do it as good as me. And nobody works as smart as me. And all those narcissism that all of us entrepreneurs have where we're the greatest

at everything, right? Nobody could do it better than us. Even the narcissism is a little bit of fear too. You don't want to do it, right? Yeah, because your business, it's this Faberjia, that you've got, and you feel like it's so fragile. You don't trust anybody to do any part of it. And, you know, it's a big leap.

And even in our business now, where our clients trust us to get their deals closed, I clearly understand that it's a big leap of faith to trust that we'll get it done. So that was a struggle. our business really didn't grow outside of Chattanooga, really until 2015 or 2016. You know, very slowly I brought in a girl to do bookkeeping. It was a bad choice there. We could talk about bad hires on a whole other podcast.

But, you know, I brought in a partner, and my brother was one of my partners for a little bit. You know, I brought in this other kid, this local kid that I thought I needed. I brought in another friend of mine. He was getting right out of college at the University of Tennessee here. And he was probably, you know, my best partner ever, brought him in just to help with acquisitions

and just free me up to do some more rehabs. And then I brought in this fourth partner because it was my wife, myself, Justin, and this fourth partner we brought in. And now we're splitting the pie four ways, which starts to get a little bit, it gets problematic, right? Because we're used to making so much per month.

So we had to come up with something like, well, we're going to have to expand out into some other areas, right? We're going to have to go somewhere. We've got to add some markets so that we can find a way to do more deals. And that sort of necessitated, okay, I'm going to have to bring in somebody help me with Dispo, right? And then he had more of a business background than I did. So I could lean a

little bit on him and he brought in some acquisitions people. So begrudgingly, we started to grow and expand. And it wasn't instant success that. Like, I figured every way there was to fuck something up. Like, we just invented new ways to lose money. Right. Like it was, you know, let's try this marketing channel. Let's do this. Let's take what we think we know and just apply it to St. Louis. And it'll be great. We'll just send postcard all over St. Louis. And we're like, people are calling us up. If you'll take my house for $1,000,000, it'll be great. We're like, yeah, we got planned contracts today. I don't know if you've ever been to the part of St. Louis I'm talking about, but it ain't good.

All right. I've got probably 20 properties still in St. Louis. Yeah, well, this is that bad section where you don't bring your car to a full stop, right? I have a house that I don't, even though I'm on title, I don't own it anymore in St. Louis. They took it from me, and I just, no one's going to help me get it back. Let them have it. So, yeah, so just through trial and error and necessity over the next couple of years, we turned on to, this was before virtual, wholesaling was really a thing.

We grew it to be a pretty big company, nationwide property liquidators at the time. We were one of the biggest in the country. So that was great. I went through a couple changes, that partner, that last one I brought in, actually both of my partners, they left. So it was back to just being me.

And we had to relaunch the company again from zero and build it back up again. And then COVID happened. And this is kind of how we ended up in the business we're in now, is this room that I'm actually sitting in was our transaction coordinator's office. And we had a couple of them in here. And remember when COVID hit, initially, everybody got very nervous and laid off a ton of people.

So I was one of the original Investor Lift cartel bosses. So we were at this event and a couple of guys like, hey, I let go on my transaction coordinator. Can you help me close some deals? Because I was sort of known for that. Like I taught dispositions and all of that. So I was sort of the second half of the business guy. And I'm like, yeah, my people have some bandwidth. We can certainly do that.

And I was doing a lot of JV deals. And I remember this one guy, Mario, didn't speak great English, but he was from Alaska, of all places. And investing or, you know, getting deals, wholesale deals in making Georgia. So we did like six or eight deals with this kid. And typically if you're doing JV deals, you don't do that many with somebody, right? You do a couple. They figure it out on their own and they sell their own deals. So I was talking to Mario and I'm like, hey, man, like, dude, I love doing your deals.

You get great deals. But let me just ask you a question, man. Why do you keep bringing us your deals? Like you've made plenty of money. It's like, oh, well, you guys do a really good job selling them. I'm like, thank you. Appreciate that. Also, you deal with the title company and I don't have to.

I'm like, oh, that's a thing. People aren't good at that, right? And especially throughout Investor Lift, like I had more people calling me like, hey, what do I do with this lost death certificate? You know, is there a fast way to do this with a dead person or bankruptcy or foreclosure, whatever it is? So just something we kind of fell backwards into a little bit.

And one day I'm like, you know what? I think there might be a need for transaction coordination, like on a big scale. And I had no idea that anybody was a TC other than for some realtors. And I remember asking one of my buddies, one of my best friends. And he's like, dude, that is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. That's freaking brain damage. That's the worst part of the business. Why would you want to do that?

That is dumb. I'm like, you know what, ma'am? Corey, Corey Geary. I'm like, you know what, ma'am? I think I'm going to do it. I think it would work. I think there's definitely need for it. And, you know, what we've realized, what we knew then and it's been affirmed and we

realized now is, you know, it really takes up 25 or 30% of your time. It's not the most fun, glorious, glamorous, sexy, part of the business, right? It's the boring stuff, right? It's collecting documents and following up with people and, you know, understanding how to navigate the closing process. And sometimes it's easy, but other times it's a rat's nest of unwinding spaghetti that's been through the dryer, right? It's just this ball of just crap. And we have the ability to do it at an inexpensive price because we do a lot of deals and we're really good at it. Awesome. I can't imagine ever doing a transaction without one because I'm allergic to pay for it.

and that kind of stuff and assist. So thank God for you. That's amazing. I appreciate that. And then about a year ago, I was driving back from Dallas with my VP of Operations, Heather. And it's a long, terrible drive through, like, Arkansas. And we're talking about, like, what are some verticals we could expand out into,

like, notary service, you know, picture taking service? Like, what could we do? I was like, I remember it was like 11 o'clock at night. We're driving in the dark. And I'm like, title company? Like, are we smart enough to open a title company? can we do that? And yeah, we brought in another partner,

girl who's just amazing that runs one of the biggest title companies here in town. Also, the wife of that kid who got out of college who was my partner. We brought her in as a partner and we started Easy Title and escrow. So it's a title company that we just use for our clients so that we can make sure they just get the highest level of service. Got it. So business is booming. And we first talked.

It wasn't as shocked to me, but it was nice to have validation of what my hunch was, because if you're watching the news or you're watching all the clickbait stuff on YouTube, you just think the market's stalled and it's about to crash at any moment. And actually very much not the case when it comes to off market, right? Well, there's no data that says the market's going to crash, right? There are no foreclosures coming. You'll see somebody quote something like foreclosures are up 300%. Yeah, but we're down 1,000.

With 300% from zero, right? Yeah, well, it can't be any lower. And the three, we're at now is like 5% of what it was at the height. I don't know. I do not understand people, the media and people on Facebook always want to spout the bad news, right? So there's no foreclosure, crisis coming. Like, there are no short sales. I know people that do professional short sales, and they are scrambling to find deals, right?

There's just not that many out there. Now, are people having a hard time? Yeah, of course, right? But I really feel like more of the hard time is consumer confidence, which is because the media is out there, just blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. You know, housing prices were up like three, three and a half. percent last year. We have an incredible shortage of properties. There's currently between three and four months in the best markets of inventory. And it's, you know, six months is a balanced

market. So we have half the houses out there that we need to. So is it hard if you're buying a house? Yeah, I'm getting ready to buy a house now too. And I look at the prices. I'm like, bang. But one thing we know, like pricing is always going to go up, right? So when we bought in 2009, we thought we were buying it, you know, 120% of the market, right? While housing,

you know, pricing, they just continue to go up, it's inflation, whatever it is, right? I'm not going to get into all that. But we do know that real estate

is a good, consistent investment vehicle. Right. You're just going to buy and hold or be in a landlord or, you know, whatever you're going to do.

So, no, I'm always optimistic about it. I think you have to be. From an investor's point of view, I see people online crying in the blues. And I'm like, bro, do you make a lot of money in 2019,

2020, 2020, yeah. Like, That was literally the top of the market. Sellers were asking gold plus 20% for their house. Literally. And you were making money, right?

Yeah. Well, now people are in trouble and, you know, willing to make some deals on their properties and you can't make money now. Like, what's wrong with you? Oh, there's too much competition. Your competition sucks. Let's be honest. Most of them don't even pick up the phone. Let's pick up the phone and talk to people, man.

Just go out and do the thing. Golly, people drive me crazy, right? I would always say that. Like, when I was wholesaling, we shut it down about. not June of last year, it's almost a year ago, but I put my team up against anybody because we're just, we do the thing, man, we're going to pick up the phone, we're going to talk to you, we're going to call you back, we're going to just, man, just go out there and do the thing. It's not hard. Yeah, you just got to pick up the phone. That's it. That's the whole thing. Fuck people. Friend Daniels have a whole business. Just as a goof sometimes, I'll drive around if I'm in another city traveling, speaking somewhere, and we'll call we buy house the signs.

And it usually takes about eight to call one where somebody actually picks up. Like eight. Same thing real deal. I can't tell you how many times I've driven around and wanted to, oh, that's a nice house. It's for sale. Let me call penelope. No answer. No call back. It just befuddles me that people do marketing and pay the money for the marketing dollars to do signs or whatever it is. And then just don't answer the phone. I don't get it. I've been hosting a coaching call, a group coaching call on Thursday nights for 11 years, 12 years of all the recordings. And the point being is the student will bring a deal in. And I'll ask them, What did the agent say when you asked this question? Well, I didn't ask. Well, let's call them now and ask. I'm doing it right here with a bunch of people. And it's always just straight to voicemail every single time. I want to show them like, this is how you do it.

This is how easy it is. But they won't pick up the phone for me to demonstrate. So as a transaction coordinator, what are the services that you can elaborate on what you actually do? And here's why I'm asking this question. Because I can't imagine doing a transaction without a transaction coordinator. I don't want to do any of it. I think I did when I was a real estate agent in 2001, I think I did my paperwork on my first deal and I haven't done it since. And so people that haven't done a deal before, they actually just don't know what's coming for that.

And they don't really see the value in it. And they might not even be paying attention right now because they don't know what the value that is. So kind of share with me what you do as a transaction coordination company. So in realtor world, your transactions are actually far simpler, right? Because typically, you know, what does somebody own a house? three to four years. It had clear title four years ago. You got a bank loan on it. You know, those are generally pretty straightforward. They do a little bit more. They'll schedule, you know, some inspections and things that we won't do. But, you know, on the investor side,

again, you can have a very clean deal, right? Penelope owns it. She bought it for cash six months ago. Now she's selling it very easy. Not a lot involved there. I mean, they're still calling around, getting paperwork, faxing documents, coordinating with the title company, coordinating with closing. But what do we do as investors? What's our job? as investor. First off, we're here to try to help people. Let's at least do that. But as an investor, we go out and we find sellers who have problems, right? Distress, distressed seller, distress house. So within that, the more problems that we won't solve, the deeper the discount. So, you know, death divorce taxes, bad tenant, probate, blah, blah, blah, whatever all the things, right? So that's cool,

right? As an investor, we're all trained to go out and do that and negotiate and get that low price. So that's the acquisition side of the business. However, over here, the disposition side, what do we say when we're disabling a property? Hey, Matt, got this great property. You're going to make a lot of money. I guarantee you clear title and proration of taxes. Well, let me tell you, there can be a grand canyon

between that ball of spaghetti you've got over here and clear title and duration of taxes. So what we do as a transaction coordinator is, from the moment you have that contract signed, literally going to hand that off to us like a baton and a relay race, and you are done. I want you to go get your next deal, go sell your deal, go do whatever you're going to do. That file is going to come to us, and literally it's drag

and drop in software. It comes to us. We're going to assign it to the right title company because we know not every title company will do every type of a deal, right? Just because someone may do wholesale, doesn't mean they'll do sub two, doesn't mean they'll do innovation. So that's going to come to us, and we're going to assign it to one of our coordinators. We have three, four teams of coordinators. And let's say it goes to Claudia. So Claudia is going to say, hey, Mrs. Smith, I'm working with Matt on your deal over here at 1, 2, 3, Maid Street. hey, Mrs. Smith, I'm going to be your point of contact from here all the way until closing, because you're out. You're done, right? I want you going and getting more deals, right?

So great, Mrs. Smith, I need to ask you a couple of questions for the title company, so I get you paid just as quickly as possible. Because what do they all? They all want to, they all want to get this problem solved, but ultimately they want to get paid. So great. So then from there, we're going to start to ask Mrs. Smith, all of the questions, right? Now, without a transaction coordinator, I can tell you what used to happen to me as a wholesaler, right? I take my contract, take it over to the title company, and then they'd be like, great, we'll get to work on it. Well, three or four days later, they call me back, oh, this is Bob Jones. Is Bob married? I'm like, I don't know. Well, you got to find out.

Well, Bob, are you married? No, I'm divorced. Okay. Title company. No, he's divorced. They're like, oh, okay, great. Well, was he divorced before or after he bought the property? I'm like, I don't know. Bob, you divorced before or after? F that, whatever, I threw her out three weeks ago and we're divorced. I'm like, okay, great, just got divorced. They're like, well, he's on the property for four years. Either the wife's going to have to sign or we're going to need a copy of the mayor or divorce decree. I'm like, Bob, right, this is what your life gets eaten up with and it's death by a thousand paper cuts. And the problem is you don't realize because it's just,

you just think you have to do it and you don't. You know, that's one of the most common things that we hear from our clients after 30, 60, 90 days. Oh, my God, I did not realize how much time I was wasting on this stuff, right? It's five minutes here. It's an hour here. It's where do I find this death certificate? Now I'm going to spend all afternoon Googling, you know, where do I find lost death certificates, right?

Just these million questions because, remember, what did we do? We targeted people with problems, right? I hear pull the car lean and the, you know, the bad tenant and, you know, all of these things. and your buyer wants a copy of the lease and what's the HOA, how are you going to get a release from them, and who's your property manager and who's holding the deposit? Like all these things, right, where yeah, you can do it yourself,

right? It's like just beating your head against the wall, but is that the highest and best use of your time? Well, no. Where should your time be spent? Marketing, acquisition, dispositions, the things that actually move the needle. What we do is very important, right? What we do get you paid, but it's an administrative

task, right? I can do it for you cheaper than you could go higher the who dunks the fries at McDonald's, right? You can hire us literally less than that. And, you know, we're going to do a couple of things. One, we're going to free up your time. I'm going to give you 20 or 30 percent of your time back. We're going to do it at an incredibly high level, right?

You're going to have more time to spend to go out and get more deals or, you know, work on your marketing or spend time with your Go team or your acquisitions team. And then the coolest thing is for our clients is we'll show you how you can offset our cost and actually pass it on to your end buyer. So, one, not only do you don't have to do it. You're not literally the best team in the country, don't it who we did $238 million last year, right? So we've done a couple of things.

We didn't show you how to offset it and actually turn your transactions into a profit center. If someone is going to wholesale a property, what do they have to have done before you take over? What do they give to you for you? Sign contact. There are a couple of drop-down menus when you're dragging and dropping a sort of, I need to know, is it a single-family, multifamily trailer?

What are you going to do with it, right? Meaning wholesale, sub-toonovation, assignment, wrap, whatever. I need to know those two things. I need to have the seller's contact info. That's it. And just give me the contract, and I'll take it from there. We'll collect all of the documents.

They're bringing the assignee, right? Well, I want to, as soon as you have your acquisitions contract, your A B contract. Yeah, because here's what I know, Matt. I know that you can assign this deal tomorrow. And what do you want? You want a fast closing. You want to get paid, right?

So we're very aware of that. We're always trying to compress time in our business, right? I want to get you from the moment you have that signed contract to the day that. wire hits just as quickly as humanly possible, right? So, you know, I've been doing this for 22 years and I have a little understanding and especially opening a title company. We realize that what really holds most of this up is those questions and answers, right? Divorced, you know, it's all of that, right? And how many times have you been at the last day and they're like, oh, there's two John

Smith, I need the last five of their social, right? Oh, what's the boarding address? How do they want to close? They want to do this a person, notary? Like, there's just a thousand questions, right? well, after doing almost 4,000 transactions, it's like the matrix for us. Like, we can see the bullets coming in incredibly slow motion. So we're just very good at asking all those questions up front. So the moment you give me that AB or contract won, that first contract, like, I'm going to gather all that information day one or as quickly as I possibly can. So by the time you're like, hey, man, here's my buyer. We're like, boom, on the phone with Joe.

Hey, Joe, looks like you're buying this deal from Matt. One through the Main Street. You're closing in those LLC. Awesome, man. I need your corporate docs. who's authorized to sign. Oh, and you're using RCEM capital for hard money. Great, who's your contact over there?

Let me give them a call. Let me gather up all the terms for your, so I get your deed of trust done. Let's get this off to the title company. Boom, I want to get this thing closed. I want to get it closed out as quick as I can. Because for us, we can get anywhere from 30 to 50 new contracts a day. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the I love Lucy,

where she's got the pies, right? I've got to get the old stuff out to make room for the new stuff that's coming in. So our coordinators are incentivized to get these things closed just as quickly as possible. In the event that someone hands you the A to B contract right away and are as unable to procure a buyer, what's the prospect look like? No process for us. So we're a little different than some other people. We work on a subscription model.

So we have different tiers based on the number of deals you're doing. So you could be doing one to five or you could be doing 40 plus, right? So obviously, we charge people at a different level. I wouldn't charge the guy doing three deals a month, but I charge the 40 guy. And obviously, I couldn't make any money charging the 40 guy. will be charged the other person for. But because they're on that subscription model, one,

we're really almost, if you were to divide it out, it'd be like 400 bucks a deal, which is incredibly cheap. You know, the industry averages anywhere from, I've seen 800 to 1,500 per deal. So we can do it at a super low rate for you,

and we also don't charge a cancellation. Now, you start to get 50, 60, 70% of your files that cancel. Somebody in our office is going to give your call and have a conversation. Like, what's going on? What can I help you with? We have a ton of resources here.

You need help dispo. You need acquisition. help, comping help, like, I will, you know, jump on a call with a client to try to help them tune those things up because we want you to be successful. If you're successful, I'm successful, right? We have a lot of our clients who start at one to five. They're doing two or three deals a month. And, you know, now they're in the 12 to 15 range, right?

So we want you to grow. It's good for you and it's good for us. Perfect. So the other thing I think is really unique about your company and your service that separates you from darn near every other transaction coordinator out there is you handle these investor deals, you handle the creative stuff. For example, with the subject two, a lot of people are afraid of the subject to, and this is pretty much all that we talk about here.

So I know what people's fears are when it comes to this creative stuff, is do I get the right documents in place? What about the do-on-sale clause? I've explained that a thousand times, but when it's time to actually do it, they need to hear it again. So with the subject, too, like, what do they need to bring to you for you to take over and complete that? One thing we don't do, Matt, is I don't give away contracts.

And I know that I do give away my personal wholesale contract at one-pillar. age. I crafted that. It's mine. But it's not a lot of people want an ovation contract. Well, that's great, man, but I'm not the guy who created that. Of course we have them. I have every contract in the country. I venture to guess I've got yours in here somewhere too. But it's not my property to give away. I'm not giving about Eric Brewer, Correier, you know, Pace Morby, like that's their intellectual property. So I don't give away contracts. Now, we will, when we onboard a new client,

we'll review your contract, right? Because we did 2,000 files last year. We can see the things in people's contracts that causes them some dilemmas. So we'll definitely look at those contracts. And if you want the advice, like, you know, hey, man, here's what I would do. I don't think you need this.

You need to strengthen this. You don't have this. We'd love to give you that advice. Some people listen. Some people don't. And problem with your contract is never a problem until it is, right? Until it costs you a $40,000 deal.

So, no, we're happy to do that type of stuff. I tell people we're not attorneys. We're just really good at the thing that we do. always consult an attorney. This isn't legal advice. But after doing the number of deals that we've done, we just have some experience in it. Okay.

So it's up to the client to bring their own structure. Yeah. And again, people will bring us stuff and we'll be like, hey, for some reason, this ovation, you decided to cram it all into one document.

You really need to have your AIF and your indemnification, separate, as separate pages and here's why. So we'll guide people. But again, those aren't my contracts to provide to people. Sure.

And we work with every coach out there, I feel like, I started giving out somebody's contracts, I'd be pissed, right? Well, that's not what I was asking, but I get where you're going with that. So you're in all 50 states, right? You can operate in all 50 states. Yeah, one of the things that was important when we started to do this because we were nationwide wholesalers that were real investors, right?

I've done sub two and sub two assignments and novations and wholesale and wraps and land contracts and all of the things. So I knew that real investors, you never know what the deal is going to be, right? What you do with that deal is more dependent on the circumstances, right? So real investors are going to do more than just wholesaling. So that was the first thing. So we made sure that our initial round of coordinators, like I personally trained them to make sure that they understood,

hey, here's what these deals are, here's what it means. And then every coordinator since then has been certified and we make sure that they understand it before we ever put them on the phone with a client. And the second thing was like we do, it's a virtual world now, right? You can be any place. So we were very intentional about those two things that we could operate in all 50 states and that we could do.

any transaction type no matter what it is. And we work with some of the biggest coaches and influencers in the country for any of guys like Eddie Speed. Or if you can follow Eddie stuff, you're in good shape and the world's preferred TC and closing company. So the reason I asked about all 50 states

won't obviously so we can service everybody. But the second thing would be in that, don't know if this is connected to the contract conversation or not. It had to do with there's going to be certain different disclosures for certain types of transatlvest. action certain types of or certain geographical areas. You have checklists for every state and so everything is in compliance.

Yeah, we keep a pretty detailed database on what's going on on all the different states, you know, what's required. The way I explain it to people's here, there are 50 states, right? And let's just start big. There are attorney states or title states, escrow states, abstract states, right? They all do it different. And then when you break it down even beyond that, there's 3,200 counties who all love to find a different way to do stuff. Right.

And it's my job to know, right? Or to at least know how to ask all of those questions. Because if you give me a deal and you're like, hey, I've absolutely positively got to have this closed in the next 14 days. Like, we have to be ready. We have to know, oh, Jefferson County in Alabama, I better get this water lien company release order now. Right. Like there are these things that we have to do so that we can get these things closed. Or you're a client, you call me and you're like, hey, I've been operating in Tennessee and I think I'm going to go to New York.

I'd be like, okay, you can. You certainly can, but it's a challenge, and you're going to want to put 90 days on your contract because you're never going to close it in 30 days. This is not going to happen because there's two attorneys, and we want to set you up for success wherever we can. So, yeah, we definitely can do that for people. Super. You know, real estate is every transaction a little different, and every area is a little different

than every investor is a little different. So if you want some more information, you want to get in touch with David and his team, you go to easy, R-E-I-Cloosings.com, and then forward slash epic, let them know that you came from here. You heard this podcast. They'll give you a very special attention over there. They're the epic people. So with the amazing volume of transactions you're doing and you're growing,

what are some of the trends that you see in the real estate market? Man, I'll tell you, creative is getting even bigger. Nobations. Novations have been big for a while. Novations are over 40% of our business. But creative over the last year, year and a half, we've definitely seen more of that. Lots of great coaches out there that are opening people's eyes to how you can buy these things with no money down or very little money out of pocket and all that type of stuff.

So we see that. Our biggest states are the southeast states far, far, far in a way. For us, number one state is Texas, followed by Florida, Georgia's big. Why is that you think? Well, a lot of reasons. If you're a wholesaler, there are much bigger spreads to be made down here because, and this isn't a political thing, right? Like, I left Boston because I hate the snow, right?

But there's always going to be far more people that are migrating south than are moving to Buffalo, right? I don't know if you've ever been to Buffalo in the winter. I went to a Buffalo Bills and Patriots game and it was terrible. But there's always going to be people moving in this direction, which what does that do? That puts pressure on the market. Now it becomes a supply and demand issue, right? So if there are 10 people bidding on every house, well, what's that do?

Price goes up. If you have a rental and you've got 10 people who want it, what's going to happen? Rental rates are going to continue to go up. So one, it's a good market for investors because we know that if I could find a vacant house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, it's going to sell very quickly. if I'm priced at least reasonable because everybody wants to buy that house at least put a tenant in it. Or, again,

we have less than half the supply of houses that we need. So there are going to be 10 people that want to bid on that house day one. Maybe I should buy this thing and rehab it, right? You don't have that kind of pressure on the market in the northern states. So all of the data, you know, we work with a lot of the big CRMs and

investor lift and then our own data all shows the exact same thing. Like the biggest stuff is happening down here. Got it. Yeah. So the The creative stuff is big. You've seen a lot more. The transactions are moving south mostly. That's where the migration.

Yeah. We don't say we don't do deals in Ohio and New York and Maine, stuff like that. We certainly do, but they're not our biggest states. Right. By and except in the imagination. Now, you know, if you live up there and you're very familiar with it, you're not trying to drop in there virtually and don't really know the market. Like, you could crush it in Massachusetts, right?

If I still live there, I'd feel like I'd be the biggest investor in the state, but to try to go up there and not particularly know what's, in this neighborhood and in this street and, you know, just gets a little more difficult and challenging. I always say, if there's homes there and people live in those homes, then there's money to be made there. Absolutely.

There's money in every single market to be made. A lot of our clients are virtual, so they're kind of popping in and out of cities all over the country. Perfect. So, you know, with as much of you've accomplished as an investor and now as much as you're seeing, working with investors as a transaction coordination company,

what's some advice you'd give to new investors who want to, you know, succeed in this business and make it a full-time thing. Yeah, man, the advice I give people is you have to find a tribe, right? You have to find some people to surround yourself with, whether it's a coaching group or a real estate group or if there's nobody, start your own meetup because doing this on your own, does it work? 100% it works.

Guaranteed it works. There's too many people out there that have proven you can make a ridiculous amount of money doing this. But if you're trying to do it on your own, it can be hard, man. It can be lonely sitting at your kitchen table. Yeah. Trying to go through leads and pick up the phone and be motivated to call people. So find some people. There's power and numbers, right, knowing that you've got your little

group and some days somebody else is going to be crushing it and you're going to have a hard time and they're going to help you. And then another day, you're going to be the guy crushing it and you're going to help your buddy. And, you know, if you feel nervous about competition, which is crazy, right, there's, you know, we can't buy all the houses available in the United States, right? But no, I'm always a firm believer in that. You know, get around other people that are doing real estate, you know, go to events, go to masterminds, go to boot camps, go do those things. And because you're going to see, and this is what happened for me.

Once I got outside of Chattanooga, my God, there are some amazing people going on some really big numbers that I didn't even think were possible until I got out there and that really inspired me to go to the next level

and then ultimately open a company like Easy RIAe closing. That's awesome. Yeah, be intentional about creating your environment, really, in your network. I like it. So let's finish up with this.

What plans do you have for Easy RAA closing? What are you excited about with regard to the future in your company? Well, so we'll, we 4X, the company last year, We'll double it again this year. So that'll put us somewhere around 500 clients, which is pretty big. The title company is growing quickly, and we're finishing up licensing in a couple of different states.

So we'll be the largest independent title company in the next two years in the country. That's amazing. We're going 3,000 transactions a year that literally our transactions company is spraying across title companies all over the state, all over the country. So once our title company is fully operational, we can just turn that on ourselves. It'll be a monster. So it's cool. We went out yesterday and looked at some new office space. We're going to go from 6,000 to 13,000 square feet.

And hopefully that'll be enough to get us through the next couple of years. So, yeah, it's fun. It's exciting. It's, you know, we're growing something that's awesome. Our team is just crazy good. We get so many compliments when we're at events and things. And it's awesome. And I get to be the face of that.

So it's cool. But I tell them like, look, I'm just the nitwit that's out here on video, right? I'm just a dancing monkey that they put on stage. Like, it's our team that does everything, right? They're the one servicing the clients, solving the problems, you know, getting these deals closed and getting people paid. So super proud of our team and the buy-in that we have from them and that, you know, they're on this journey with us. It's awesome. Congrats, Dave, on your success. And a pleasure

connecting with you. Let's stay in touch. Let's do it. To go and see Dave and what he does and give him a shot at your next deal and all your future, just hand the stuff over to somebody. And I can't think of anyone better right now. That's equipped to do that at easy, r-e-i-closings.com forward slash epic. All righty, Dave. Any parting words? Are we good to go? Man, thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure to sit and chat with you. Likewise. Take care. Stop spending countless hours on busy work and focus on growing your real estate business and maximizing your return. Baseline is a comprehensive property management platform that caters to the needs of landlords and real estate investors by offering a suite of financial tools designed to simplify the

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no monthly fees. That's baselaine.com slash mat. Baselan.com slash matt. That's B-A-S-E-L-A-N-E dot com slash M-A-T-T. And that wraps up the epic show. If you found this episode valuable, who else do you know that might too? There's a really good chance you know someone else who would.

And when their name comes to mind, please share it with them and ask them to click the subscribe button when they get here and I'll take great care of them. God loves you, and so do I. Health, peace, blessings, and success to you. I'm Matt Terrio. Living the dream. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow.

You didn't know, home, boy, we got the cash flow. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.