Epic Real Estate Investing - How to Find the Best Real Estate Market for Investing | 1185

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

In today’s episode, Matt is joined with Josh Miller, one of the most successful REI Ace clients who blew the real estate business in just 18 months! Mowing forward he decided to retire from real estate and establish a software company, building an application that helps its users to easily find their best real estate market for investing! Tune in and find out how you can download and use the app for yourself, as well! BUT BEFORE THAT, you will learn how to generate cash flow in real estate as Matt shows viable and profitable ways of doing it. Let’s go! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. How to generate cash flow in real estate. And that's a really good question because there are a number of ways that you can do this. And when you do, you can not only make a significant difference for your overall portfolio, you can make a difference in your overall lifestyle. So if you're looking for ways to generate cash flow in real estate, you're going to walk away with six very viable and profitable ways of doing it. You 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, Epicurei.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 reiase.com. Here's Matt. So I'm going to go over first why real estate is such an ideal investment. And then I'm going to cover six different ways to maximize this specific profit center of real estate, the cash flow profit center. If you decide at the end that you want some more help, stick around and I'll show you exactly how to get it so you can set yourself up for financial freedom and ultimately retire early. The popularity of real estate investing has increased. Exponentially in the last five to 10 years. People from all walks of life, all backgrounds,

all experiences have been attracted to real estate because of the cash flow that it produces and the lifestyle changes that it can make. So cash flow, positive cash flow specifically, nobody wants negative cash flow. We're looking for positive cash flow. What that is, it's the income or the profit that's left over. After receiving income from the property and deducting those expenses, what's left over between those two numbers, that's your cash flow, that's your profit. And that's a result of the buy and hold process. And it's really what it sounds like. You buy the property and you hold on to it. You find somebody else to live in it and they pay you for the right to live in it. That is where the income comes from. That is what produces the cash flow.

Now, before I give you those six types of cash flow that you can produce from real estate, I want to go over and cover why real estate is such an ideal investment. An ideal is an acronym. And each letter stands for. something specific, a specific benefit of real estate. So the I stands for income. And what's great about real estate is it produces multiple types of income. It can produce active income that comes from flipping properties where you buy low, you sell high and you get to keep the difference, that type of income. And you can get really rich with that type of income. A lot of people have. And it produces what we call passive income or residual income. And this is the type of income that

is produced by like I just mentioned earlier, someone living in the property, and paying for the right to actually live there, paying the landlord. So those are two types of income. And that income is what actually produces financial freedom. And overall, it produces wealth. So you have your active income to get rich. You have your passive income to get wealthy. The D stands for deductions.

With real estate, you've got some tax advantages. You've got depreciation and you've got deductions. And real estate is really kind of the final tax shelter available to the average person. And most people kind of, discredit this or don't understand it or don't value it much. And that's really a shame because most Americans with the purchase of just a few investment properties can virtually eliminate their tax liability. And that is legally, honestly, ethically, morally, and even with Uncle Sam's blessing. That's one of the aspects of real estate that really goes unchecked, unnoticed, because it's not

really a profit center. It's not money coming into each and every month. But it is once a year that money that you get to keep in your pocket. It's money that's not. leaving it. Next, we have equity. That's pretty simple. Most people know what that is. Equity is the difference between what a property is worth and how much you owe on the property. That difference is the equity. So if I own a $100,000 property and I have a $75,000 mortgage on it, there's a $25,000 gap there. That is my equity. And equity is a result of you buying low or waiting over time for our next one, appreciation. Appreciation just happens. Real estate will be worth more in 10 years than it is right now.

It's worth more now than it was 10 years ago. And I really don't see that stopping any time soon. It's really a result of supply and demand and good old-fashioned economics and inflation. Now, what gives real estate its superpower is this L. Leverage. The ability to use other people's money to acquire your assets, to acquire your real estate. Leverage is available to the average person inside of real estate, unlike it is in real estate. unlike it is and really in any other investment. And this is really important because, you know, you can get rich and many people have using their own money, but you get wealthy using other people's money.

And what leverage does is it will typically increase all of these profit centers by three to five times. And this is what makes real estate an ideal investment. So the six best real estate investments for producing cash flow. The first one is single family homes. And that's pretty simple. can kind of understand that. Everyone kind of gets their start there. This is where you purchase the property. You hold on to it. A tenant moves in and they pay you for their right to live there. And you get

that income. And what's really great about single family homes and really all of the examples that I'm going to give you is that you are starting to buy this ideal investment and you are taking ownership of it. But it's not really you buy it. It's your tenant buying it for you. So I look at this as as as long as you come up with a down payment, your tenant is going to pay the rest. So single family homes, really great way to start. Not to mention, great place to continue real estate investing. If you've been doing this for a while, there is no reason not to invest in single family homes. I'd say for the next 10 years, based on the supply and demand in this country, we've got more people than we've got houses and we're not building fast enough. This is going to be really sound

investment for the foreseeable future. So number two would be multifamily properties. And those are exactly what they sound like. Multiple families live in the building, like apartment building specifically is what I'm talking about. But you could look at this from a point of duplexes and threeplexes and four plexes as well. These are multifamily properties. And these are great cash flow providers. And most of the time, they're going to produce a greater cash flow than your single family home. But there's some pros and cons. You know, with the single family home, you get the benefit of appreciation as the market continues to rise. But then you also have some liability if that property should go vacant, it's not producing anything. The multifamily properties don't necessarily rise with sales comparables in the

market like single family homes do. There's a lot of other things that you can do for a multifamily property to increase its value, but it's not going to appreciate in the same way the single family does. Further, if you've got multiple doors in that house or in that building and one of them happens to go vacant, you're okay because you've still got the other properties paying your rent too. So you kind of limit a little bit of your risk or liability there when it comes. to your cash flow. Now, number three would be townhouses. Townhouses are a subset of single family homes, and they are excellent for producing cash flow. Townhouses are multiple houses attached to each other. And typically they share a common law, but each one is owned individually. Each one is an

actual residence. And renting out row houses or these townhouses means you are giving your tenants a little bit more space. They might come with a yard and a little bit more. privacy as opposed to an apartment building type style living. So traditionally, you're going to get more cash flow from a townhouse than you would from a unit in a multifamily property. The other nice thing is townhouses are typically cheaper than the single family house. So it's easier on you in the acquisition, but you don't necessarily lose out on anything when it comes to the cash flow. But here's the kicker. Very often they are accompanied by HOA, Homeowner Association dues. So when you're looking at townhouses, make sure that you're taking the HOA, if there is one,

but if likely there's going to be, make sure that you are deducting that in your cash flow calculation, because that's a real expense and it happens every single month. Number four, condominiums or condos for short. These are multiple buildings with separate units owned by the investor. Similar to townhouses, these are units that may also share a common wall. And there are many reasons as to white condos are among the best performing assets in real estate when it comes to cash flow. As the population, continues to grow and the demand for housing increases, you're probably going to see more and more condominiums being built as we're running out of land. We have a fixed supply, but we need more houses

to house the growing population. You're likely to see more and more of these over the coming years. So you want to become familiar and get comfortable with these and learn how to get them to produce because as of right now, they're already great options for cash flow and that's likely only to get better. Now, number five, short-term rentals. Now, short-term rentals can be a, in any of the previous categories that I just shared. It could be in single family, could be a multifamily, could be in townhouses, it could be in condominiums.

But what makes short-term rentals so unique is they are just that. They are short-term rented properties, meaning your tenants might be staying in there for just one night or maybe a few days. And what that allows you to do is charge more. You can typically charge more per night than you could a collective 30 days in a row.

And this cash flow investment is probably the fastest growing in popularity because it is so lucrative. Rule of thumb, you could probably get three times the income from a short-term rental than you could if you had rented that property out to a long-term tenant. And if you're not familiar with the term short-term rentals, this term you probably are familiar with. That's Airbnb or VRBO. These are the mega websites that market these properties for landlords to help them attract these short-term tenants that are willing to pay this premium. And so you'll see that there is a significant difference between a short-term rental property

and a longer term traditional rental property. There is a trade-off, though. They're typically going to come with higher expenses and more labor on your part. But for most people, that difference in income is totally worth it. And number six, are turnkey properties. Now, depending on what market you're buying in and what type of properties you're buying,

you might not want to do all that heavy lifting. You might not want to go out and look for just the right opportunity, crunch the numbers, and you might not want to go and do repairs and rehab. You probably don't want to go out and look for tenants and finding the right tenant, having to screen the tenant, making sure you're getting just the right one. You might not want to arrange for property management. You might not want to deal with any of that. You might want to have all of that done for you. Totally understandable, by the way.

And this is ideal for busy professionals, people that are either too busy to do the work or they just flat out don't want to do the work. But they understand the value of real estate inside of their investment portfolio. So they want to have a piece of real estate. Well, you can have all of that done for you. And that's exactly what Mercedes does at cash flow. savvy. And if this is resonating with you, it sounds like a really viable solution or a good way to go about it for your cash flowing needs, then you're going to want to go and download her free investor packet that have all the details, all the information of how this works. And you can get that for free at cashflow savvy.com. Now, after you download that, you'll have the opportunity to pick a time to hop on the phone with her and have a conversation and brainstorm some ideas about what

this might actually look like. And if you don't like it, that's fine. You can say, no thanks. I understand now, but this is not going to be for me. Or you're like, okay, this makes total sense. So glad I crossed your path. Let's go for it. And let's go. And then she'll go ahead and she'll take care of the rest. She's going to go find that property.

She's going to fix it up. She's going to put the tenant in there. She's going to arrange the property management. She'll even arrange the financing if you need it. And she's going to hand you over this property already cash producing on a silver platter. That's it cash flow savvy.com. We'll be back with more right after this. Boarding for flight 246 to Toronto is delayed 50 minutes.

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19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly. Concerned by your gambling or that if someone close to you, call 18665-3-1-2-60 or visitcomex Ontario.ca. Hope is not a financial strategy. Let's get back to work. Let me introduce our guest. Happens to be an RIAe's client of mine, and he's turned out to be a really good friend as well. And he's one of my more successful clients.

Definitely top 10. And he blew the business completely out of the water in 18 short months, which was pretty remarkable, to where he put himself in a position to retire from real estate, really, altogether. And he said, I don't want to do this anymore. I got something else I want to do. And he went to pursued his passion. of starting a software business and he took the proceeds that he had earned from real estate,

the passive income that he created from real estate. And he just applied it all there to go pursue his real dream, his real vision. And that software, his first project happens to be right around the lead generation activities that he used and implemented in his own business to be such a successful real estate investor. And initially it was the way he was using it was all pieced together with spreadsheets and bubble gov and duct tape and barbed wire. And then he went out and he just kind of rebuilt the whole full. thing and a more user-friendly platform polished it up.

And then he's got to a few different model evolutions. And he's just kind of like a done-for-you service now. He's done straight agency with it. And he's working with quite a career, helping them duplicate his results that he achieved in this very time. So he's got a gift for you today. So make sure you stay or stick around to the end. And that gift is going to help you pick the best market for you.

So without further ado, please help you welcome Mr. Josh Miller. Josh, welcome back. Welcome home, buddy. It's good to be back home. You know how we met. Do you remember the night we met? I do. It was in Manhattan Beach at a bar.

Yeah, it was the happy hour right after a event, the first by investor by investor event. It was so funny. I remember that I never even told you this. I just remember we were at the bar and Mercedes and I were there, and we were networking and interacting with the room. And you were just standing by my side, looking up and just smiling the whole time and just asking me questions.

And I was like, who is this guy? You're so nice and friendly, but you're so many. questions you're so curious and you know who knew I could know I would ever see you after that night and then you came to an event and then decided to work together so it's been great ever since so thanks for being persistent with that yeah I remember my biggest challenge and it was I was marketing nationwide I was buying and selling homes all over the country and it was working so-so but it definitely wasn't going to get me to my dream of living passively and getting to my financial freedom and the first advice you gave me was you need to narrow it down pick a market so i spent

six months trying to figure out what market to go to and it's kind of funny because that's circling back to where we're at now is how to pick a market and i remember i picked you said pick a market and so of course i picked three markets and i wanted to know in all three markets and i remember sitting in the like one of these mastermind events you had after one of the events and you're like, no, you need to pick one market, going to one market. And so I picked my top one market and, uh, yeah, the rest is history. The rest is history. Well, Sueber, you're calling from Paris, Paris, France right now. Yeah, I moved here in December and it is absolutely amazing to do whatever you want. I got my whole day to spend with my kids and we travel and every week we're

traveling and but the consequences are there's some delay so I'm sorry about that it's remarkable you know we sit here and the how spoiled we are a signal and transferring all the way across the globe and then all the way back and engaging in a conversation and we're like this damn one second delay is you know what's yeah we're so blessed in the more times that we live but let's go ahead and I'll go ahead and share my screen here with the link that you passed over to me and I'll certainly share the link with everybody before we go. So you can play with this tool yourself. And you're just going to walk me through it.

So rather than you zipping around all over the place, you walk me through it and we'll go from there. Yeah, I think that'll be best. So if you just go ahead and scroll down a little bit and heads up, we're doing a massive update to this tool. So it may look slightly different. The updates coming out probably the end of this week. So just adding a few more neat features.

But as a backstory to this, this is really if you're doing marketing of any sorts to try to get distressed homes. And if you have an unlimited budget to do your marketing, you don't need this tool. Just send away, mail every house, cold call every house, door knock every house. But if you have a limited budget, you need to be very precise on who you talk. target and this tool will allow you to find those zip codes where you should be targeting so that at the end of the day, if you say you have an absentee equity, high equity list, and you've got the option of which home do I mail to, you'll want to mail it to the zip codes where you have a better chance of finding those distressed homeowners. Okay, perfect. So I got that. So what do you think is most important? I'm kind of gathering right now, like, people ask, what's the best list?

What's the best list? What's the best list? What's the best list? What's the best list is the first place to start? Is that right? Yes. So no matter what list you're choosing within that list, you'll want to then target the right zip codes. So let's say you decide that your best list is going to be a high equity. absentee owner who's on the house for 15 years or longer. For example, if you take that across your county, you're going to still be left with an insane number, say 50,000 people. So how do you narrow that down? Well, you want to narrow it down first and foremost by the zip code. Or if you want to reverse this

and you're unsure about where to even start marketing, you want to first pick the zip codes and then find out what niche list you can get within those zip codes. Got it. So what is it that you look for in a zip code then? So there are a lot of things that you're going to be looking for depending on what your exit strategy is. And so this tool is specifically built for folks wanting to wholesale properties or perhaps whole tell properties.

If you're looking to build up a rental portfolio, I would use a completely different set of data. This is more of, hey, I want to make some quick money. This is where I would focus. Very good. Sure, no one is going to reject quick money. So let's focus on quick money today. All right. So here's the tool and tell me what I'm looking at and where do you start?

So the first thing that we got to do is I always prefer to market starting off in your own state or in your own county or in your own metro if possible. So you're in Vegas, right? So let's go ahead and start with Vegas. and let's filter that down. So over there and state up at the top, let's choose Nevada. And then under the Metro, let's choose Las Vegas.

Okay, so now we've essentially just filtered it down to the Vegas metro area. We could further filter down to county and cities, but this will give us a good comparison. Now, I could have easily put a number next to each zip code and said this is number one, number two, and number three, but I didn't because this next few steps is really more of an art than a science.

So we're gonna be playing around with different scenarios to figure out what's gonna work best. My favorite thing to start with is really, it's kind of hidden there, but is that distress score. What that distress score represents is essentially how many vacant properties there are in that zip code, how many pre-foreclosures happen, How many folks haven't graduated from high school?

There's a lot of data packed into that one number. And the higher, the distress score, the more pain there is going to be in that zip. So if we go over to the demographics tab, let's just go ahead and just filter our data down. What you just did by sorting, that's perfect. but we're going to actually just remove everybody that has no distress. So over then that's distress score. Let's filter it starting at about 50. And it's up to you on how far you want to go.

Personally, I don't really love the war zone. So I might remove anything over, let's say, 96. But again, you want to leave it open because you know your area best. And you may know that, hey, it used to be a war zone when all the census data was collected. It's being gentrified. So it's up to you on that. So let's go back up to the top left. Let's go back to the cash sales tab.

So we can just further filter this down. So now we are only seeing the distressed zip codes. Next thing I like to look at is I like to see a lot of absentee owners. But instead of just looking at the pure count, what we're doing is we're taking the. Last six months, the total number of homes that were sold to an absentee owner, and we're dividing it by the total number of single family homes in that market. And the reason that's so important is to sort by the percent of absentee owners is because this is why if you are going to, say, send a lot of direct mail out or call one market, now you're increasing your. your chances that you're going to actually be hitting the areas that have the most activities,

the areas where there are, these homeowners will have the most likelihood of selling because history has shown that there's a lot of absentee owners buying and selling in that market. So yes, we just sort by percent of absentee sales right there. And that's pretty much it. I mean, we can further do some additional filters, but this is going to give us pretty much at a big ballpark what we need. And so what? Five zip codes would be kind of like Sarah, where do we want to start? Yes and no.

So it looks like I don't have too much data on like that 89018. So I would probably remove that. Also, the home prices. I need home prices as we speak. And I'm looking at the ranges. So they all seem within a fair amount. If I started seeing like 400s or 500s or 100s, I might change my filters to say, hey, I don't want these crazy outliers because there's probably a reason for that. But those all look fairly decent.

The other thing I want to make sure is that there's great percent of cash sales. So if I'm looking at that cash sales column and I start seeing some really low numbers, I might step. step back and be like, hmm, I wonder why there's not much activity in here. These numbers are amazing though. I mean, most markets are not going to be this crazy hot towards investors. It's like 1.9, 1.5 is a really good numbers. Anything over like half a percent is going to be a really good. So clearly what this is saying is all these zip codes, if you bought a property, you're going to have a really,

really easy time finding an investor to flip it or if you yourself want to flip it to a landlord, you're going to be able to charge that premium dollar because there's so much activity happening in these Zips. Got it. By the way, if you're listening on the podcast and you can't see what we're doing right now, please go to epic rei.tv. That's the domain name, epic rei. dot TV, it'll take you to the our YouTube page.

And then you can actually see what we're looking at. It's pretty remarkable. And it's something that you're going to want to go do for yourself at finding the market is important to you. And speaking of this, I'm constantly amazed at how many folks who do their marketing don't constantly look at this. They get into this habit of just pulling the best list. What's the best list?

But I mean, to constantly go back and say, okay, what's my best zip codes and then target that. So this isn't just for people starting out. Even if you're an established investor and you're like, oh, I know my best zip in my market, you should really pay attention to this. And this is where you should spend the bulk of your marketing dollars. So I use this even for my Google ads, for example, when I'm running my PPC, my ads online, while they don't exactly allow you to run ads against a certain zip,

You can't find a location and do a radius around that location. And essentially, I know I'm going to get the biggest bang for my buck by doing that. So it goes across the board of not only starting, but as you're an established investor, this is where you should putting your heart, your soul, your money is in these top tips. Got it. So let me clarify. So if someone who was, you know, I always recommend having a couple factors stacked into your list. So we went for absentee owners, let's say some sort of leave on them and owned,

I will always choose over, owned over 10 years or more. So if we took that, that's a good performing list. That list would perform potentially much better here in 8-9169 than it would perform here, even though it's the same list. Exactly. Yes. Got it. The data.

So you could, you could essentially pick these zip codes and market to all lists and have a better response than picking the best list and say one of these lower numbers. Yes. Right. Okay. I'm understanding the logic. Okay. Yeah.

So I'll add that if you have a super, super niche specialty list. Again, this is just coming down to everybody's got a budget. So no budget, spend everywhere. So what I like to do is I like to start with a super niche list and those all ignore the zip code. So if I can find a water shut off tax and link with vacant, and deceased person, I'm doing that no matter where they're at. Because there's only so many.

But once you go through your great data, then you're left with, you know, your absentee, equity owned a while. And that's where you just don't have the budget to go across. So how many Zips codes depends on your budget. If you got a very small, you'll want to go the first top two or three. If you got a larger budget, expand that to the top of the top 10 until your budget runs out. Got it.

Got it. Okay. Perfect. Super. Anything else to notate about this market? Let's sort by cash sales real quick. I'm just curious to see kind of like your top rank cash sales and along with the distress score along with the price. So I'm looking at that 8-9-109 just because it has a slightly higher distress score.

But that home price is kind of up there. Okay, so I've never given much, you know, obviously I don't want to do luxury homes. That's if I'm slipping and I want to do a high volume slipping. But I've never given much credence to the actual home price. And it sounds like you do. How come what's your experience there? It really depends on your exit strategy.

Like if, and yeah, so with the rents and with the lease options, I do like the a little bit higher, but on the wholesale deals, my experience has been that the lower the home price, the less the homeowner cares about discounting his price. Like for you, you know, you're trying to make 15k off of the deal. And so for a homeowner who has to, you know, it's not as big of a deal for them. it appears to knock off their price 15K or it's more of a percentage now that I think about it. Right. So as a percentage, it doesn't feel that much for like I'll tell a story. I had a realtor that I bought a house from.

She was a really huge realtor and she just did high, not high in homes, but the $300,000 homes. That's all she listed and sold. And she had a rental and it was about 150. And she called me up and she sold me her property. And I was like, you're one of the biggest realtors in town. Why don't you do it yourself? And she's like, it's whatever. It's like chum change.

It's not worth my time to list this property. So I guess that's always stuck with me. Like the lower end homes, they just don't care as much. Got it. So, Josh, tell me a little bit about Go4Clothes and what you're doing with your service over there now. Yeah, no, we have gone through a couple iterations. I really love data, as you can tell. And so we have gone super deep into, well, let me back up. We started with the software, but what I found is that everyone is good at different hats and has different skill sets. I was not necessarily a salesperson. And so having a. done for you marketing seems to make more sense than saying,

hey, everybody needs to wear this marketing hat, and I need to teach you how to use the software. And it was just becoming, again, something that I wasn't in love with. And so transitioning to this done for you service where we can just take all of your needs with regard some marketing and just be the best at it. That's where we're at now. And just recently, we also started offering the data.

So we do the data, the people, and the marketing, marketing service. But the data I feel like is the key to everything. Without the right data, without the right specialty list, doesn't matter how good you are at the actual marketing. Well, super. And Matt, Ploscovake is an area. He's quite and he's picking our hometown. Both of us, Josh, Los Angeles. So let's go ahead and look at Los Angeles. So L.A. is so big. You may want to just pick a couple of things. cities around you that you already know, hey, this is where I want to target. We'll go with the whole county right now, but.

I know Matt's up in the end of the Glendale area. He's in the Pasadena area. So the reason you only seeing a few zips is it's a nice area. And so it's eliminating, because of the demographic score or the distress score, it's eliminating all those nice dips. So you're not left with a whole lot of options, but this is where you're at. And so this is why this is so important is this is going to save you a ton of money.

So instead of just blasting the whole Pasadena, now you can say, hey, I'm only going to touch 91101. And I mean, looking at all of these numbers, that's it. I mean, 911101 is where you want to be. And 737, absolutely. Absolutely amazing. It's a good deal actually over there. Yeah, you may want to widen that so you can see it without it breaking into it too.

But essentially, yeah, you don't have a whole lot of options and so maybe you just target all of these. The fact that there are cash sales for 737 is a little surprising that there's that many, but it does go to show you that it's competitive and people are flipping and the number of absentee owners. that's huge. So in the last six months, 102 properties are, have been sold there. So, I mean, there's definitely a lot of activity. There's a lot of money to be made. That would be my ideal target market right there. Got 9101, Maddie. All right. So Matt actually had a coaching call,

and he's on this live stream today. We just talked earlier. And so he's got a little bit more marketing, he's got another round of marketing that's going out and he can go ahead and make that adjustment. So we'll make that adjustment for the here. But if you were his coach, Josh, and him living in this area, would you recommend he focuses here and that should be enough business for him or would you venture or suggest maybe going to a different market? I mean, with the level of competition there, I would say the traditional take get a large list is going to be very difficult, and I would suggest going super, super niche. So my favorite niche list is the deceased, tax delinquent, vacant property.

And of course, everybody in their mother is going to find that list because it's a little obvious. But what 99% of people won't do is the actual legwork to locate the actual home owners. So the traditional direct mail, cold calling or texting won't work. And you'll want to put in the legwork of actually going out and door knocking or using services like there's tons of them been verified or people searches to find new relatives and calling up each relative saying, hey, notice this property looks a little rundown, vacant. you know anything about it and really digging in. So it's a very manual way, but although what I'm saying is it new and this methodology has been around forever, it's amazing how few people actually do it.

So that would be my recommendation if you're deciding that, no, I want to flip here. I want to find, I want to make some big money in this market. It's 100% possible. People do it every day. It's just a lot harder. Okay. Definitely that that's something that I'd recommend to him for sure, based on your logic there. I agree.

If we were to look at a different market or an additional market and do this say virtually, do you think it's better to, from your experience and your clients, to go to a market that's close to your area? Or does it even matter if one on the other side of the country that's going to? Again, it's hard to sound like a broken record, but it depends on your end goal. Like if your end goal is to build up a rental portfolio, then I would say do a market where you could eventually go into that. So yeah, you start with the whole selling, but since your goal is to build up the passive income anyways, you might as well learn the market and go into the market that has both the good numbers and could eventually lead into you building up that rental portfolio. If that's out of the question and yeah, you're like strictly whole selling, then yeah, I would just cherry pick and just this is becoming more and more popular of not sticking your roots into one market, but literally just expand, expand, keep expanding, keep expanding, build your boots on the ground and then expand to the next one and literally just keep cherry picking all the best dips across the country.

So start in one, don't try to do it all at once across the country, start in one market, cherry pick, find the boots on the ground that can take your photographs, that can list the property, your cash buyers, and then move into another market and repeat. But always using the best zips. If you don't use the best zips, you're kind of wasting your time. Got it. And we have some other markets. We'll go ahead and look at. But I got a question that just came up based on when you said, you know, we're starting with the zip and then evaluating the zip. Is there a way to play with the parameters to find the best step and kind of reverse engineer it?

Theoretically, yeah, you could. I would say doing all states and all metros probably won't give you it. I mean, I guess I've never done it. We could try. Do you want to try real quick? Yeah, I'm just thinking of someone that's, you know, okay, I don't want to work in my market, which is almost everybody. Everybody thinks their market sucks and everyone else's market.

That's what everybody thinks. So if I wanted to say, okay, I'm going to pick a different market, which one should I do and say they didn't have a relationship there and they didn't have any knowledge of the market. They just want to base by the numbers, which one's going to produce the best results. I would not necessarily use this to do that. I would more, because this is, I built this specifically for within mind, I have a Metro in mind and I want to find the right. If I was to do, try to say, hey, the country's my oyster, I could go anywhere. I would look for the least amount of competition. That's why I chose Omaha, Nebraska, and it turned out really well.

And so I would use this tool to make sure that there's no competition. Like, you want activity, but just not too much. So when we sort this, let's go ahead and do this and look at across the whole country, I would ignore the hot ones that have great numbers if it's also going to be a very competitive market. If you've never heard of it, that's great. That's probably the market that you should end up in. I'm getting my days on market from realtor.com, and unfortunately, they're not publishing everything. Otherwise, I would also filter.

So pay attention to it as we look at the data. If the days on market is 171, I'm not. I would be very cautious because we're in the hottest market in history. But let's go ahead. Let's sort by a percent of cash sales right there and see what we come up with. Let's also do one other thing. Let's under the cash sales, let's do a minimum up there on the center. Yeah, let's put a minimum of like 10 homes there.

That's just saying in that zip code, we want to see at least 10 cash sales. 10 cash sales in the last six months. Okay, so the other thing to be wary of is just vacation spots. So cash sales and absentee owners tend to flock to vacation spots. So this Fort Pierce, Florida, it could be a vacation area. So I would investigate that before I'd say, yeah, for sure, grab that one. If you click on it, it should zoom in to it, just so we can take a look at it. No, probably not vacationary.

Usually they're surrounded by like lakes and stuff. Right. Yeah. I mean, I've never heard of it, but maybe everyone else in the world has. So maybe that would be a good one. Obviously like some of these other ones like Kansas City, I would stay away from New York, Indianapolis. I mean, these are amazing, amazing markets like out of control hot, the best in the country.

But you're going up against a lot of stiff competition. And if you're new, I wouldn't jump into that right away. Can you tell by looking at this if there is competition there? I mean, there is. Here's the actual numbers. I don't have it. I mean, I could add another column. I actually have the data, so I will add in another column.

That's a, I meant to do it. It'll be here that I'll add it into the next additional. So you're going to, next time you look at this, you'll see another column with the level of competition. And the way I'm pulling that data is I'm looking at the amount of Google ad costs, like for certain words in a given market. And that tells me how competitive that market is. And so if your market costs $500 for sell my house fast versus, you know, $50 in another market, that's what tells me the level of competition.

And again, like I wish I had more days on market. I haven't mentioned it until now, but do keep an eye. on your days on market, that data is all pulled monthly. So if you start seeing like some higher numbers, like in the, you know, 80, 90, 100, just being aware that possibly the market is slowing down. And so this is just something to keep in mind when you're giving your offers that, hey, if it's a very low days on market, I can be very aggressive on my, offer like if they are asked I can I know the price is likely to continue going up like for me

what is driving the future is really the days on market high days on market means be wary low days on market means be aggressive so let's go ahead and um maybe maybe filter these home prices let's go under 500 000 see what we get again I would stay away from these um while there's certainly money to be made these Lake Arrowheads and Big Bear, they're not showing up because of the best market. Right now they're just showing up because that's where there are the cash sales and the absentee owners, but they're not necessarily distressed. So 29 palms there is looking really nice, low home price, a lot of activity. I would definitely highly consider that one.

What are the needles in Barstville? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, 160. that's getting low. It depends on your strategy. Just be wary of when you get too low, you're dealing with possibly homes no one wants to touch. So make sure you know very specific what the buy box criteria is and don't go lower than that on your marketing. So yeah, if you know you have a buyer that will buy a $100,000 house there because it's dirt, go for it. But don't move into that unless you know you already have a buyer lined up.

for those type of properties. Perfect. All right. So the basic criteria is one, you want to do them. You don't have a huge marketing budget. Second thing is you want to do this on your own. If Josh, they wanted to work with you directly, just have you do all of this stuff for them. Kind of explain what the actual services that you guys do.

Yeah. So the first service and what I'm most proud of is our data service. So how do you get like I mentioned before that tax, vacant, deceased property, either you do it yourself do a ton of work or you hire a company like ours that will go digging and not only get those niche lists, but about 80 other incredibly niche lists that take a lot of skill to get that data. And we get that data daily and we'll feed it to you so you're the first person to get it and market to them. So that's our data only service. If you're like, hey, what else can you do? We can not only take that data, but we can actually

do the marketing on your behalf. So we can send the text messages. We can do the cold calling and we can actually do the Google ads and get on the phone with distressed homeowners who are looking to sell and then pass over those homeowners once we have them on the phone. And so literally at that point, you don't have to worry about marketing and you can focus on sales. You can focus on disposition.

So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. Perfect. Yeah, you do it for them and they get to spend. time doing what they get paid most to do. That's to negotiate contracts and close deal, right? Exactly. I think I've shared this with you before, but I bought hundreds of properties and I've talked to two homeowners because I'm not good at sales. And I recognize that. And what I'm good at is the data and the marketing. So that's all I focused on and I hired out for that part that I'm not the best at. So yeah, the vice versa, if you're looking for somebody who's really good at marketing,

we are the best. I can say that with a full confidence after spending six years working on this, that it's taken a lot of effort, but really happy with what we're delivering for our clients. Perfect. I've been happy with the results as well, and it's a pleasure to refer people over to you.

And if you'd like to work with Josh or at least have a conversation to see if this is going to be a good fit for you. You can go to goforclose.com, and Josh is spreading the level. of here, keeping it here at Epic is in taking a significant discount off the onboarding fee if you decided to move forward. And I believe it amounted to about 85% off if you use promo code Epic unless something changed. I don't know. No, that's still true. And like, there is no place to put a discount because then everybody wants a discount if you put the little discount word in. So this is really the only place I'm doing this. So please mention Matt. Matt and I go way bad.

So say Matt Terrio, say Epic, just let me know when you do us that you are to see the password then. Yeah, it really is because there's no way to get it. Otherwise, the proposal goes out and it's about like Matt said, 85% more. So definitely mention that's name. Super. Well, thank you, Josh, for staying up late for me in Paris, France. Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye.

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 world. We got the cash flow. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made to measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes.

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