Epic Real Estate Investing - Fix and Flips Tips - Mark Sestilio | 1194

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

In today’s episode, Matt is joined by Mark Sestilio, an REI Ace client who made a huge success in fixing and flipping the properties! Tune in and hear Mark’s tips on fixing and flipping so you can capture some of his experience and wisdom and implement them into your real estate investing! BUT BEFORE THAT! Did you know that a consistent generation of real estate leads can help your find properties and buy them with discounts? Yes, it can! Therefore, Matt is going to share with you 7 methods on how to generate real estate leads! Let’s go! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Gilbert Gottfried. I don't know anything about real estate, and I've never watched this podcast, and I've never met or heard of Matt Terrio. But that doesn't stop me from saying that Matt Terrio host a real estate investing podcast called Epic Real Estate Investing Show. and you can subscribe and tune in seven days a week. See, nothing could stop me from saying that.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but nothing could never stop me before. This is Terio Media. How to generate real estate leads to find motivated sellers is the primary skill of a real estate investor because if you can do this and do it consistently, you'll never be short of opportunities to purchase real estate at a discount. And for you, I've got seven tried and true methods for generating seller leads that I'm going to share right now.

You're ready? Let's go. Welcome to the all-new, epic real estate investing show. The longest running real estate investing podcast on the interwebs, your source for housing market updates, creative investing strategies, and everything else you need to retire early. Some audio may be pulled from our weekly videos and may require visual support. To get the full premium experience, check out Epic Real Estate's YouTube channel, EpicR-EI.TV. If you want to make money in real estate, sit tight and stay tuned.

If you want to go far, share this with a friend. If you want to go fast, go to rei-Ase.com. Here's Matt. If you want to be a successful real estate investor, there may be no more important skill set than knowing how to generate real estate leads of potentially motivated sellers. If there's one area that differentiates the struggling investor from the elite, it may not be talent, money, or personality, but rather a system for generating motivated seller leads. You know, most real estate investors, they think they're real estate investors first,

but the truth is that the very best ones are marketers first. They focus on marketing, which generates these motivated seller leads, which gives them the opportunity to then invest in the very best deals in the marketplace. See, without a source of these motivated seller leads, you'll waste valuable time trying to convince sellers that parting with their home is a good idea, rather than working with sellers who are passionate about moving forward with you on a deal. And by the time we're done here, you're going to have seven proven methods for generating motivated seller leads for your real estate investing business.

Oh, by the way, if you're still looking to get that first deal under your belt, I put together a free training just for you to help you get that first deal done. And then how you can earn $5,000 a month flipping contracts and properties working as little as one hour a day. And you can access it at matsfreetraining.com. All right. So let's begin with defining elite. And it's really simple. Elite is nothing more than the name and contact information of someone who has the ability to sell a property. And these aren't in abundance. They're everywhere. But for our purposes of fighting discounted real estate, we're going to define what we're looking for by adding one additional criteria. This lead needs to sell, as opposed to 95% of the sellers in the market

that want to sell. And we call this type of lead that needs to sell, a motivated seller. So a motivated seller is someone eager to get rid of a property in their possession, and it's typically for one of three types of distress, either it's personal distress, financial distress, or the property itself is in some sort of distress. Now, before we jump into the strategies for finding them, let's look in more detail at the two primary conditions that we need, sellers to meet. Either they are willing to sell the property at a very favorable price, which would fall within a range of 20 to 50% below market value, or they're willing to sell the property at favorable terms, which might include something like seller financing,

no money down, zero percent interest, stuff like that. Ideally, you want both conditions to apply, but at least one is generally required for someone to be defined as a motivated seller. and the big advantage you have when working with motivated sellers is speed. You see, these folks have a compelling reason to sell that property and do it quickly. And understanding that reason and helping resolve it is what makes it possible to buy deeply discounted real estate. Now, let's run down seven proven methods for generating motivated seller leads. The first one, direct mail. Despite what you may have heard, direct mail is still one of the most effective methods for generating seller leads for real estate investment businesses of any.

size. The ability to generate a targeted list of motivated sellers from sources such as, say, list source or U.S. Leads list and send them a piece of mail that speaks directly to their needs, this is a strategy you should strongly consider because it works. And why does direct mail work so well? Well, the reason is that you can target a very specific list of property owners, and a lot of them very efficiently based on their potential motivation to sell. For example, you can buy a list of individuals who own a house in one city but live out of state. And we call these out-of-state absentee owners. And another great example would be a list of individuals who have recently received a notice of default letter, commonly referred to as a pre-foreclosure. An even better

strategy is to start stacking these lists, for example, targeting out-of-state absentee owners who have been served a notice of default to really pinpoint sellers who need to sell their property. And finding a list of out-of-state owners who are also behind on payments or they're behind on their taxes, it's a much more valuable list because you are now stacking their motivations. The most affordable resource that I've found to do this with a wide number of different motivations that you can stack on top of each other like this, that can be found at propstreamepic.com. One of my favorite lists that I market to are properties that have been on the multiple listing service for more than 60 days that are owned free and clear.

Now, this has turned into a great source of seller finance properties for me. And you can get free access to this list to 4 7 Days at PropStream Epic.com. Lead generation method number two, bandit signs on wheels. Bandit signs on wheels, this is a moderate take on the traditional bandit size that you see hammered into the ground and on street corners and on telephone poles all across your market. You've seen those ugly yellow signs, right, with the black markers reading, we buy houses. Yeah, those. So we took the idea of a basic bandit sign and applied it to, the back window of a car. And a private RAAA's client of mine, Aaron Silver's, has built a significant

portion of his business around this lead generation strategy. See, he had hundreds of cars on the road in Boise, Idaho with a sticker that read, we buy houses in any condition. He had those cars just driving around town. And each sticker had a phone number with an extension so that he knew which car generated the phone call. And every time he gets a lead from one of his cars, and then he ends up buying that house, that driver is compensated. The trick here is making a making sure that you have a phone system that allows extension tracking so that you know which car generated the call and who needs to be paid for that lead. And there are a number of phone services that do that, but we use REI Blackbook and you can get 14 days of free access of that

at Epicblackbook.com. This is an excellent long-term growth strategy for generating leads at scale. Now, lead generation method number three, driving for dollars. And this is the act of hopping in your car and driving a neighborhood or your entire market in search of houses that look vacant or in some form of districts. Many people, they've got their own system for doing this, and we have our own here as well. So when you find a property that appears to be vacant, instead of just jotting it down on a notepad, you can use a special app on your phone just for this. And it works like this. When you see a distressed piece of property, pull out your phone, open up the app, and then take a picture. And like magic, the seller's information will pop up right there on your phone through the app.

you can call the seller right then and there. Or you can just click a button in the app and a postcard is going to be sent to the seller. And on that postcard, it reads, hey, I'd like to buy your house. Call me. And the picture that you just took of their house, that's on the postcard too. It gets a lot of attention. Then once you do this, the property is going to be automatically saved in the app. And then you can reference it on your desktop when you get back to your office.

Do this for every property that you have found on your drive, and you will have built a nice list of properties that might not appear on any of the marketing list that you're sending your direct mail to. And that means these properties aren't appearing on your competitions marketing list either. This is a great way to find deals that your competition won't. And if you'd like to give that app a seven-day test drive, plus

get $30 of free postcard credit. Go to epic deal machine.com. Lead generation method number four, property finders, sometimes referred to as bird dogs. This is a great way to multiply your motivated seller lead generation efforts. So, what is a property finder? Kind of self-explanning.

where I think, but it's someone who locates distressed properties on your behalf and is compensated for doing so. For example, you can recruit an individual who is already walking or driving your targeted neighborhood, like, you know, maybe your mail carrier or an Uber driver or the ice cream man or gardeners or the pool guy and ask them to send you the addresses of any houses that look like they're in a distressed state. Why would someone go out of their way to do that for you? Simple. You're going to pay them to do it. You can incentivize them or compensate them either by lead that they give you or per closed deal. Lead generation method number five, Google Ads.

And these are often the very first search results that you see when performing a search on Google. You can pay money to Google and they will put your ad in front of people who are searching for keywords of your choosing. For example, if you like your ad to appear when someone types the phrase in how to sell an inherited house in Phoenix, Google Ads will allow you to do just that. The leads you capture from Google Ads tend to be some of the highest quality because those people are actively searching for a solution to a problem.

They're searching for the solution that you provide. Compare this to direct mail, where you are trying to grab their attention before they toss your mailer in the trash. Google ads can be fairly competitive in the real estate investing niche, and they can be expensive if you're slow to respond. But if you can position yourself to call your leads back as soon as the lead comes in, the payoff with Google Ads can be extremely high. Now, lead generation number six, Facebook ads.

They're also a great way to get in front of motivated sellers. If done properly, you may have heard that you just can't find motivated sellers on Facebook. That's not true. Facebook has over 200 million daily active users, including people who are behind on their payments, dealing with bad tenants, or may have recently inherited a house. But you must realize people do not go to Facebook to find answers to their questions or to necessarily solve problems. Maybe create some new ones.

I don't know. They are there, though, to browse their newsfeed, see what their friends and family are up to, or to stumble across some news or an interesting article. The mistake many investors make when running Facebook ads is that they go directly for the ask. They run ads that read, we buy houses or sell your house fast.

See, there's no consideration for the wants, needs, or emotions of their audience. But the beauty of Facebook is that you are in control of who sees your ad. You can create your ideal audience and only show your ads to them. For example, you can upload a listed email addresses and phone numbers and run a very targeted ad to that list. I don't know, maybe you pull that marketing list out of out-of-state absentee owners from PropStreamEpec.com or the list of all those property dresses you gathered while

driving for dollars, load those up and put your ads in front of them. Imagine having sent someone a postcard that you'd like to buy their house and then the next time they log on to Facebook, boom, there's your ad right in front of them again. Amazon has been doing this to us for years. We as real estate marketers, we have the ability to do the same. Now, just like in your direct mail, what you say to your audience matters, and specificity attracts the right person to you. The more targeted you can be with your messaging, the better results you will get.

All right. Lead generation number seven. Networking. This doesn't sound fun to most people, but done correctly, it's the most effective form of marketing for motivated sellers there is, and it's free. Remember, real estate, it's a people business. Every piece of real estate you buy or sell will be from or to another person. People know people, and the right people know motivated sellers.

So two groups of people that do are, one, local attorneys, and the second would be county and city inspectors. You see, attorneys are always working with clients that need to sell their income properties or homes quickly due to reasons such as probate, divorce, or bankruptcy. And you can reach out to local attorneys via email or direct mail, and better still, network with them face-to-face at local business gatherings and events. Getting in touch with the right attorneys can be a great way to find motivated sellers. Focus on lawyers that practice real estate law, family law, bankruptcy law, and estate law. Now, county and city inspectors are continually checking properties and buildings to see if they're up to code or not. And they flag properties that have issues such as unpermitted landscaping or zoning violations or septic system violations and unpermitted upgrades.

When a property owner is overwhelmed by multiple liens, they might be motivated to sell quickly and below market price. Networking with inspectors is a very effective strategy for compiling a motivated seller's list. Now, as a bonus, I saved the best for last, and this is where your best deals come from. And you might have heard this expression before. The fortune is in the follow-up. Yes, you have heard it before. So although you don't want to inundate your leads with constant contact for fear, of turning them off, the biggest mistake you can make when marketing for motivated sellers is not

following up. So schedule reminders to follow up with your leads, whether with an email, a text message, or a phone call. This is because it takes time to cultivate trusting relationships, and not all of your leads will be ready to sell right away anyway. So once you plant the seed, it might take some time before a lead is ready to sell. Keeping in touch with your leads will help you catch them at just the right time. And here's why. Only 2% of your deal, will happen the first time you engage with them. 3% of your deals will come as a result of your second contact, and 4% will say yes on the third.

And you'll need to make four contacts at least to capture 10% of your potential deals, meaning there's a lot of potential in the leads that you've already generated, as 81% of your deals won't occur until after your fifth engagement with their owners. Now, here's the beauty of it. 44% of your competition gives up, after the first touch. 22% more of them give up after the second. 14% will give up after the third and 12% after their fourth engagement.

And what that means is, 92% of your competition will give up before an eventual yes. And this is really important, especially if you feel your market is saturated or really competitive, that 8% of the real estate investors in your market are getting 81% of the deals for no other reason than they followed up. So, follow up. If you'd like to explore the possibility of working together one-on-one and becoming a master real estate marketer,

thereby a very successful real estate investor, go to r-e-i-a-a-a-east.com, answer a few questions, and pick a time for us to hop on the phone and brainstorm some ideas about getting you to the next level of your real estate investing. R-E-I-Ase.com. Please stand by. We've got overhead to pay. We'll be right back. Boating for flight 246 to Toronto is delayed 50 minutes. Ugh, what?

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From coast to coast, epic investors are doing the most. It's time for another epic field report. Today, we're going to talk about something a little bit different and talk about fixing and flipping. And specifically, an RIA case client who's really doing some amazing things in the Tampa market. As you can see right here, nice fat flip. It doesn't look like much. But boy, he sure pulled a profit out of that way. Yeah, this one over here, the $84,470.

There's another little house over here, $49,000 private. Another one here for $51,000. Add all he's up adds to be quite a bit. And then this little guy right here for $87,000. So we're going to talk to him today and try to get you some tips on how he was able to pull this off. And specifically, you can potentially capture something from him and his words of wisdom and pull it off yourself. All right. So I guess today he is returning back, coming back to visit us.

already at ace climb up and got a little bit of a slow start. And we worked some things out and he started to get some good results and started to build some momentum. And now as you just saw, he's absolutely crushing it. And however, he'll never tell you that because he always wants to do better. He always thinks he can do better. He was calling me and tells me he has these problems and we get on the phone. I was like, what problem? He just made $89,000 on your last fix and flip.

Anyway, he has high standards for himself and he's inspired to be very successful, more successful than he has been. So without further ado, please help me welcome to the show, Mr. Mark, Sistillo. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on. Good. Welcome back, buddy. How's Tampa, Florida? Gorgeous right now. Yep. This is the time to be here, that's for sure.

This is a good time. What is this? This is April. So this is the one that's not too humid. Yeah. No, it's like perfect. Like 60s in the morning and 80s in the afternoon. It's great. Fantastic. Well, super duper. We kind of have the getting started conversation, I don't know, several months ago. And I just wanted to check in with you and kind of share and shining the light on your most recent results. You're doing really well for yourself. So I guess bring up the speed since the last time we're here and what business looks like for you today. Yeah, we've been spending a lot of time on making adjustments with your guidance.

And I didn't have a little bit of a slow start. It's really almost been like two years, Matt, since we started. And it was kind of a blur because that was right when the pandemic. started as well. So I've been in real estate a little bit before that and had some experience, but I knew that I needed to make a shift and get some guidance and make some changes and really be able to ramp it up and really kind of start stealing my business a little bit more. So everything's been good with your help and kind of tips on where to go and what to do and adjustments to be made with pretty tough market. We're successful. It's a lot of work.

but as you see that we made some pretty hefty profits. So let's go ahead and just kind of look at that of what you have been able to accomplish. So this one's kind of hard to see. This looks like a condo. Tell me about this one quickly. Townhouse. By the way, all those, maybe I should have sent the after pictures, but all those pictures are the before pictures.

Okay. Well, that makes a lot more sense. I'm like, wow, this is really expensive now to live in Tampa. You know, I sent the before pictures just because that's what we look for, right? And that's the type of losses that we look for, although a couple of them were in that shape, including this one. All we did on that was cleaning up a little bit and throwing back on the market. So that was really like a hotel.

So this one, you made $51,000 of profit. How much does a house like that cost? We sold it for 110, 110 or 115, and got under contract for $42,000. Now, this was a kind of a long process. It was a probate deal. It had a handholding and stuff to kind of get it to the finish line. But we made it work and there was actually, there was somebody living in there that didn't want to move. So that took some time as well.

With the market appreciating so much over that extended period of time, it appreciated. But we didn't really do anything to that house. Really? Well, I consider that a huge win right there. Yeah. Talk about this one. actually this is the same scenario on that one we just cleaned it up a little bit as well and it was almost exactly the same scenario but the sellers were ready to move and we made him a fair deal

and actually we we purchased the property with them still living in it kind of cut them a deal to give them time to find another house to live in so they got their the majority of the cash when we closed on it and then they got a couple months to to find another property and then moved out and we cleaned it up a little bit fixed just a few things and just to make it a little bit more presentable

and I think we sold that one for like 175. That's amazing. That's amazing. We should have called this episode Small houses big profits. This is a little bit bigger. Yeah. You know, a lot bigger profit as well.

Yeah. And this was almost a full rehab, roof, paint, flooring, updated the kitchen a little bit, fix up the bathrooms a little bit. There's a really nice pool in the back that we had to do two things to, had to update the electric. So this is one of those scenarios where the seller needed a cash buyer. Like, we're not going to sell this house in the retail market to somebody that, you know, was going to require financing. So because of the electric situations. But not a huge rehab. It was like a $30,000 re-nap, 35 maybe.

Again, it looks much nicer now, but really good house, good neighborhood, three-bedroom, two-baths, two-car garage with a pool and a big fountain in the back. Well, okay, so we went over like four or five houses there. Probably adds up to pretty close to $400,000. So those are your wins. Let me know. What do you learn along the way? What are your biggest lessons is a fix and flipper?

I think we've just had to adjust. And I think that the biggest thing, a lot of that adjustment comes with the adjustments in marketing and learning how to convert better of the conversion. I have a small team, an assistant and an acquisition manager that I've trained and we work together closely on the leads. And shout out to Josh Miller and other RAA's client that I've been using Go for Close for a while now. We got a couple deals in the beginning, had to make adjustments again, something. things didn't work out. We made adjustments. They're still making adjustments and we're really seeing the results now. A lot more leads in, better quality, more of the type of houses that we're looking for and the type of sellers that we're looking for. And that's working good. We get a lot of leads a week that we got filtered through. But that's kind of a takeaway, everything that I've learned is just

making those adjustments and the tweets to the marketing. I've been really having houses for a while. So that's pretty easy for me, other than the contractor situation. That's really difficult right now with the amount of people that are the workers out there that are, everybody slammed. So it's hard to find more contractors. And I'm really feeling that right now. And so I have five other houses that we're renovating at the moment with a couple for sale. And we got two more coming up.

So we got the marketing dialed in. We tried that a lot. We tried to do a bunch of different ways. doing it and we finally got it working, but we eventually kind of discovered that, you know, let's just outsource it and give it to someone else to do that part, right? Yeah, and I think that was a big step for me. We're doing a lot of our marketing in-house with my assistant, with some other help. I want to scale the business a little bit.

I'm not necessarily going to do 200 deals a year, but I want to get to a point where kind of I'm working on the business and not so much in the business. and we've got to start outsourcing stuff. Yeah, outsourcing the cold texting and calling is a huge help. So then really my acquisition manager and I can just focus in on the acquisition and the conversion and the amount of the. We got the leads down and we got the marketing down, just outsourced it's someone that knows what they're doing over at goforclose.com and go check them out. Tell them an epic section and I'll take good care of you. But really, and everyone thinks like it's a lead problem or they think it's a money problem.

But it really comes down to being where the real money is made in real estate is the conversion process. It's taking that lead and converting it to a signed contract. And I know you're doing this a while for yourself, but you did bring somebody in. Can you tell me where you found the person and then how you got them to a point where you're confident about just delegating it and letting them do it? Well, I think in any other situation with you got to hire the right person, right? I do over a couple other businesses, and I kind of learned that along the way as well. And quite honest, I found Thomas. So shout out to Thomas.

He's doing great. I found him right out of college. He interned with me, marketing, like helping me out with some marketing when we were kind of doing everything in-house. Okay. So let's pause there because I know that's bad. People have questions. When to fight an intern, because that sounds like a really sweet deal. You know, you find someone fresh out of college that's hungry.

They're going to come and work for free for a little while. How do you find that person? Well, the way we did it is we just signed up or posted on the nearby local college that we were looking for somebody interested in interning and that may have some either a major or have interest in marketing. And we had a few people apply. I actually had two interns last year. And then this one, Thomas, he really has got a great head on his shoulders. And he started interviewing for jobs. And I started thinking like, man, you know, I really feel like he's the run fit for an acquisition manager position.

And so we started the conversation. And I got the ability to meet him, understand him, understand his personality and his traits and stuff. And then like I said, I thought he was a really good fit. And we talked about it. And we kind of hit the ground running before he ended up snagging another job out of there right now. to college. Right. Well, good.

So you went through a few of them before you, and then you found that you liked. Then you had kind of a sense, okay, I don't want to let this person go. And so what kind of conversation do you have and, you know, without, you don't have to even reveal as much detail as you want, but you have to reveal everything you don't want to. But I know a lot of people, this is a question that comes to me frequently. And when it comes like, maybe for bird dogs and acquisition managers, what do you pay them, how do you pay them? What's that structure look like?

Yeah, really, Thomas, didn't have any real-world work experience, but he had the right end on shoulders. He had the right mentality, he had the right personality traits that I felt like would be a really good fit for being an acquisition manager. And I felt with him coming right on college that I could kind of mold him and just be a mentor to him and teach him the ropes in order to do this. As far as the pay it goes, he's full commission and he makes 10% of the profit of the deal.

It's that simple. I paid him a little bit of a salary to start out to get his feet wet and obviously he had no other income coming in, made sure that he was comfortable over the first couple months. And then we kind of hit the ground running. I mean, we went, got a couple, few deals early on. Then there was kind of, again, an adjustment period, but we made those adjustments and, like,

we're pretty steady and taking 10% of the profits that you see there. It's pretty good for him, you know, starting out. And we got a lot more to come. Right. I mean, totally. I mean, if you got an $80,000 deal, right? That's like, that's a good profit. That's a good payday for, especially for a kid, for anybody.

I was going to say it's a good profit for a kid coming out of college, but that's good for anybody. All right. So I'm kind of narrowing in on this because I didn't even know we're going to talk about this, but I think this is important. and a lot of people want to know about it. It's because people think about they might have the resources, they might have some money to throw up marketing in leads, but they might not have the time to actually go out and convert these needs to contracts.

How important do you think it was your experience and your experience going on the field and have any conversations with the sellers to help him learn those ropes? And then when you hit that dry period, what kind of adjustments did you make? I expected there to be obviously a learning curve for him. And he was completely raw to real estate, although he was very interested in real estate in college, and he expressed that. But we, everything's a process, right? And we use your daily Naviscape NAMNNator scorecard.

And I started using it when I started working with you and we still use it today. Our numbers, our goals are much higher than they were when we started. and I really kind of just tried to ingrain in him that we have to do these activities on a daily basis in order to get to the finish line with getting a property of your contract. Obviously, he needed help with analyzing deals, understanding rehab, understanding all the costs and the calculator that we use. That came fairly quickly. There's always things that he's still learning. but I think what was probably the biggest learning curve was dealing with different personalities and different sellers and learning how to build rapport, build trust, and then take them through

a full sales process. And using your nine point seller interview, we've kind of added to that a little bit and kind of try to take every single lead through a process and get an offer of their hands. And then start walking and see if it works. And you just have to learn all that stuff. And they're still learning. I'm still learning, but we're getting better. Fantastic.

Super. I don't know if you thought it slipped, but I caught it when you said you have, what, four or five other deals under contract right now. I'm going to dial it a bit more on your acquisition manager and how you guys have been able to create this good partnership together with regard to locking up all of these deals. What does the lead flow look like right now? And then what is the number of appointments he goes on right now?

and panel what, based on those number of appointments, how many contracts did you expect to get signed? Yeah, so our kind of like top metrics are as a team. So between Thomas, which makes most of the calls and then my assistant slash lead manager, marketing manager, that does a lot of follow-up stuff, we're trying to get like 150 calls a week. combined. Thomas is the bulk of that. Probably 75 to 100 calls a week. That's his target. His target on appointments is five appointments a week. He's probably averaging three-ish appointments a week. And our target on offers is 25 offers a week. Thomas probably has, he probably makes five to ten of those offers.

because those are more kind of where he's billed report. He's talking with the seller that understands their motivation. Then we send blind offers and letters of intent off of the properties on the MLS that have been on there a long time. That's where it's up. We're trying. Sorry about the music here. There's a lot of people around here. It's spring break in Florida right now.

Yeah. Where my office is, it's right on the main strip where people are jamming their car music all the time. But we're, we want to. get one contract to week. That's kind of our goal. Obviously, that doesn't happen all the time, but we hope that all those other metrics that we said would produce an average of one contract a week, and that hopefully would also produce one closed deal week. Our target is three, four deals a month, and we're getting there. You know, if people know about your daily navigator, I think you said to hit 100 points a day

was an initial target where our goal is to hit 250 points a day as a team. So that includes the marketing that Gofer Close does and now to the point where our goal is going to go up now because we just signed up a month ago or so with a new direct mail marketing company that I'm working closely with. but I'm outsourcing that now too. And that's going to be like 3,500 letters a month.

So then it'll go out weekly. So whatever the mat is there. Oh, so 250 points a day as a team. And the team consists of go for clothes. It consists of Thomas and yourself. And then you also have an assistant, right? Yep. So between 40.

Okay. So there's no surprise to me as to why you get in the results you get. And so it's good. I remember at the beginning, and I'm just curious what it's like now, and you sent me over some pictures and stuff to ease for the promotion of our conversation. And your wife was in those pictures. I remember the beginning, she was a little bit concerned. You know what you're doing, Mark?

Are you sure? How are the sentiments now? I know you just had a new baby. Congratulations. Not yet. No, she's like, she's due any day now. Got it. I've got like four students that are all having babies right now.

So I'm trying to care. Hopefully she doesn't call me while we're on this call. Okay. Hopefully I didn't jinx that and you got to go. All right. Yeah. How is she feeling about everything now? She's great.

She was, when you and I started together, she was helping me out with the business because we have other young kids and she wasn't working since she was helping out, kind of kick-starting some of the marketing and doing what you said and doing the in-house marketing stuff and, as you can see in the picture there. But I think she's really pleased with the commitment that we made with you and obviously need to see the results. The deal that you showed up there are only a few other houses that in the last four or five months that we've sold, I've wholesale it to you. We got another one that we're wholesale in here shortly. And we're just trying to ramp it up a little bit and get

to the point where, like I said earlier, that I can kind of work on the business a little bit more than working into business all the time. Perfect. Okay, cool. So I'm going to take this question here quickly and build it up a little bit. Hey, it says, how do I know if I found the right house to flip? So when you're getting these deals under contract, how do you know or how do you determine which ones you're going to say flip, which ones you're going to hold, which ones are you going to say wholesale? You're going to fix some and then you're not going to fix some.

Yeah, so like Matt said is, we look for deals and had a lot to do with the motivation of the seller. In my particular market, I've chosen not to... flip houses or deal with houses that really are in war zones that are something that I don't particularly want to do. Massive rehab, 100,000 plus rehab. I don't want to do that anymore. It might come up again, but I've kind of picked the avenue that I wanted to go in with. And what that is is, it's mostly hoteling properties. So, and in the good deal, on a property, fixing it up a little bit to make sure that it passes the home inspection,

the four-point inspection in order for somebody for us to sell it to a retail customer that needs financing. The sweet spot is like in between. We're going to avoid the war zones, but we don't want to go too high either and have to do too big of a rehab over $100,000 out of the buck. So that's kind of your sweet spot in there. Yeah, even before I met you, I was not. nervous of the market and we were going to have some kind of crash or something. So I had already

kind of started doing that, the hoteling situation. And it seems to just have still continued to work out. Like, I'm not a designer. I don't want to be a designer. And if you guys like that and you want to put your personal touch on every, you know, part of the house, then that's cool. I get it. And some to definitely be proud about. I'm kind of more of the thought like my scope of work and the materials that we use in every house is like almost exactly the same. It's just kind of simple. I want to be more on the marketing side and the acquisition side of things, just finding good deals and also finding deals to put in my rental portfolio as well. I do say to my team that we're looking for the right house, not just the right seller. If you have the right seller, then obviously you're going to be able to

get a deal, but we're not necessarily looking for the right seller. in some area an hour and a half away from Tampa that's in the middle of nowhere and it's a mobile home that he wants to just give away. I still probably won't do that deal because it's just a pain in the butt. Yeah, we say a lot that we're looking for the right house and if obviously some of those houses that you saw were smaller just two bedroom one bath houses. They were in good neighborhoods. The bigger one in the townhouse, they were kind of in some. suburbs, three bedroom, two-bath, two-car garage, house with a pool. Everybody wants that.

So that's, it's just a really easy sell. Again, we didn't do a massive renovation on that. We just cleaned it up, put some new flooring in there, didn't even replace the kitchen, but we did put new granite countertops, painted it, made sure everything works, updated electric. I think we replaced the AC on this one. to, but the roof was good. It was like eight years old or something like that.

So that was okay. A lot of people have a different type or a different definition of what whaling is. And I'll tell you what I understand it to be. And then it sounds like you might be a little bit different. That's perfectly okay. I just want to know that that people know that there's variations of it. But old tailing is a house that doesn't need a whole lot of work.

And essentially you just go in and you can just clean it up in most cases. But it sounds like you're doing a little bit more than that. What do you classify as well? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the deal, right? Some of the houses, I guess to me, the hoteling definition would be like you're just cleaning it up and make sure in that making sure that it passes a home inspection, the four point inspection. So you got to make sure that the roof is going to pass, the electric, the plumbing, and the EC. So that you're going to find out a little bit in your due diligence in the property. and then you can clean it out, trash it out, and then throw it on the market.

In this scenario on Seabring there, we did do a little bit more because I felt like by just doing a little bit more, we were going to make a significantly more higher profit, which we did. If I didn't do anything to that house, then for the electric situation on that, then I probably might have made $20,000 or $30,000, which wouldn't be bad, but I kind of had a hunch that, you know, that's the right house. The 3-2-2, the fool, you know. Yeah, it looks really good. I mean, right?

Yeah. And this was before, right? You sent me all the before pictures. Yeah, I guess I should have said in the after, too. But that's before. Oh, that's fine. Perfect. Okay.

Cool. So we've talked about how we're acquiring the properties, how we got through the conversion process. And then the whole whole is just to find it. deal, then you can decide kind of what, how you're going to profit from it. Are you going to put this one, a wholesale letter, we're going to hold a little bit, flip, or you're going to hold on to this one. I guess what's the, what do you see in the market right now? Because I'm anticipating some shifts just based on monetary policy and interest rates, particularly when it comes to reselling

properties on the retail level to resident owners. Are you seeing any shifts or any changes right now? I'm not seeing any shifts at the moment. A few months ago I sold a house that was about an hour away from Tampa, or actually a couple, didn't get the offers that I thought I was going to get, although they were a good deal still. Anything in Tampa, like, you just get blown up. There's just 15 offers in the first two or three days and escalation clauses and all that kind of stuff. And you and I had this conversation a few weeks ago with the supplying the demand thing. I just don't see much changing in my market.

I can't speak for the entire country, but in my market, I don't see a lot changing. And what I'll add to that is that in my price range as well, I don't do high-end properties, pretty much all of the properties that we sell, will sell between 250 and 500. And in my opinion, I think that if we're selling a house for $300,000, if the interest rates go up a point or more, then that person that did qualify

for a $300,000 mortgage now doesn't qualify for a $300,000 mortgage. But there's a lot of people that still qualify for a $350 or $400,000 mortgage that will just be in the place. So it might drop the numbers a little bit, the amount of people that, but it's still the bread and butter price zone, right? I don't see it affecting my price range that much. The good will it fun for doing your flips is to be right at or just below the median sales price. To your point that the people that qualify for it now might not be able to qualify for it later,

but there's plenty of people shopping at higher price points that will easily be able to qualify. And based on the supply and demand dynamics across the country, Yeah, I don't see that your market getting hit that much either, if at all. It's 15 offers before noon and maybe it's down to 12. That's still amazing. Like years ago, you get one or two offers in a week and you only need one buyer. I think where we might feel it is in the outskirts a little bit, about an hour away outside of Tampa that we do deals in as well. Smaller neighborhoods might not be quite as much demand and as many buyers.

but I don't think we're not big enough to really have a great view of how everything's going to play out. But I also think that we'll kind of feel it coming. Right, right. We'll finish coming a little bit. Totally. Yeah, with that said, what is it about the future that you're most excited you're looking forward to right now? I mean, to be honest, this appreciation that is happening, I really don't want them to stop because it, it's, It's funny. It's difficult to it's been at rehab and some of the properties, the longer it takes, the more money I'd end up making on the back end anyway because it keeps appreciating.

I know that might not happen or it might slow down a little bit, but I think what I'm really looking forward to the most is continue to make the adjustments and increase the marketing a little bit and hopefully add more to new team members in the next year or so, again, so that I can work on the overall. business and not quite as much in the business. I'm trying to increase the rental portfolio for passive income. We're working on that. I'm still bullish. I'm still stoked about Tampa as a whole. It's a great place and it's getting a lot better. And there's tons of people moving here. So the demand is just staying super hard. Super. Congratulations, Mark. And thanks for taking time out today to share with us your success. And I know you've inspired others. And yeah, let's do it again. let's touch base in another six months and see what you've conquered then. Sound good?

Yep. So it's great. 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 poor. Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first?

There, the last one. Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that refreshes. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.