KGCI: Real Estate on Air - From Barns to Riches: Sam Hopkins, Finding Deal in Rural Areas

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate, you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd. Be Uncommon. Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor, Chris Craddock and Jeff Saferight. Welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. I'm your host, Chris, Scratic, and I am super pumped about our guest here today. We are going to talk about how to find deals that a lot of people are missing out on, especially if you're an agent that is an investor. You've got to understand that there is so much hidden inventory out there that you're never seeing because you're not looking in the right spaces. If you don't end up buying properties

and creating wealth, you're going to be on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. Even if you make a ton of money on a flip, it's still a job. And the only way to get out of the hamster wheel is to build wealth. And the definition of wealth is when your money and your assets work harder than you work. Right. So that's the goal. So that when you go on vacation, your income doesn't go on vacation. When you get sick, your income doesn't get sick.

That is wealth. We've got to be darn good at what we're doing on the day to day. And then parlay what we make into assets that. will pay every single day. So with that said, today, we are going to talk to Sam who is killing it in rural areas, right? So I'm right outside of the D.C. area. Sam is killing it in rural areas. And there's a lot of little intricacies that change when you're in kind of the suburbs and in the city versus when you're further out. So we're going to learn a little bit about that from Sam as well. So Sam, tell us about yourself. Yeah. So I've been in real estate games since 2020.

I started as a wholesaler primarily. I did start with the intention to buy rail properties, like you said. You can do a bunch of flips. You can do a bunch of wholesale deals, but it's all transactional income. It's active income that you have to continue to work for. Even though now that I have acquisition managers and transaction coordinator and project managers, I'm not technically involved in all the day-to-day of everything that goes on in my flipping and wholesaling company. It still does take a lot of time.

I'm in intention, right? So I had a red rich dad, poor dad, cash flow quad, and that was my intention. over time I've gotten into buying rentals and also fixing flips. And right now we're doing primarily fixing flips for active income and then trying to buy large multi-family properties and single-family rentals this year for long-term wealth and for that residual income like you I talked about. That's awesome. That's awesome. And so what does your day-to-day look like? What is your business like? What's your bread and butter right now? Right now, most of my time is honestly spent raising private money for our deals that we're taking now. It takes a lot of

capital when you're doing flips at scale as obviously with the purchase price of rehab holding costs. So raising private capital and it's kind of managing the high level, high level overview of everything that's going on in my company, monitoring our KPIs to make sure things are going as they should with marketing acquisitions, making any adjustment needed there. And then there's people and processes. That's the other things that I spend my time on. It's really the three piece, private money, people and processes where I spend my time. It is awesome. Do you ever watch the profit, Marcus Lomonis? No, what is that?

Is it a... It's like short tank step two. It's a guy who he buys into failing businesses. And what is it? People product process is what he always talks about. And these are the things that we've got to fix if we're going to take something that's failing and make it not failing.

And I think he was the CEO of Camping World. And I think he still earns it. And so now he has all of these other businesses that he kind of creates into a symbiotic relationship. We buy a sign company that provides signs for all of his businesses and everything else. So it's really cool. All right. So with that said, you are, you're mainly working in rural areas.

Is that right? Yeah, I would say not all extremely rural, but, you know, we buy statewide in Virginia. So, like, we'll still do some deals occasionally like in Richmond and kind of where you're more your neck of the woods up in mid, northern Virginia. But we do a lot of, a lot of our fixes. But most people would consider rural areas. when I say rural, I'd say under 50,000, under 100,000 population in the city and counting is what I consider rural. Right. Okay. So how are you, how are you finding your deals? So what I want to

give you our time up to is one, how are you finding your deals? Two, how are you evaluating what to do? Because I know you have a couple different exit strategies or pull on to them strategies. And so how are you finding them? What are you doing with them? And then what is the future what is the goal? And also, I know you said there's a way for some people to partner and connect with you going forward. Yeah. So why don't we just start with how are you finding in the deals? Yeah, yeah, lead generation of that's where it all starts, right? So we have a combination of paid marketing that we do. So we do direct mail. We do cold calling. We do Google ads, paperclip. Those are the main paid channels we're doing right now. We've done other things in the past. I'm sure you've tried everything under the sun, right?

We've done TV. We've tried social media. I mean, we've tried to. at all, TikTok even for seller leads. But right now, those are our main bread and butter channels for paid advertising. And then we get a lot of referrals because I've been doing it for not as long as you, but I've been doing it for four years now. So I get a lot of referrals from. Actually, we just got a deal under contract this week. I had a seller call me for my old Google voice number that I hadn't used them four years from a deal that we had wholesale from four years ago. And she wanted to sell me a package of six houses all together in a bundle and same area. And it's probably going to be a six-figure spread. Just a referral from a repeat,

repeat customer, right? So we get a lot of referrals from attorneys, agents, things like that for free. And then I, lately, I told you yesterday, I've been focusing on buying deals from other wholesalers as well. I check, like I check investor lift marketplace. I check Facebook marketplace. I check Craigslist. I check all these different places multiple times a week, almost every single day to try to find other wholesale deals that make sense for a fixed flip. And then also the MLS, I've been buying some stuff from the MLS. And I want to start also looking at auctions, just trying to get some more free deals because, you know,

if you spend $80,000 a month in marketing to close deals versus you can close the same amount of deals from not spending anything on marketing, obviously that just goes straight to your bottom line. So I'm trying to get more of our deal flow from free channels as opposed to just trying to outspend everybody on marketing spend. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a tough. It's a tough one. So like our agent business, we have a Zillow flex account, right? And so we pay Zillow when we close. is we pay them a percentage. And one of the things that the CEO of EXP said a while ago was he was like, listen, in a changing market, there are three things that you need to understand and need to work on if you want

to win. And I thought this was really interesting. He said one was the person that goes bankrupt first loses, right? So don't go bankrupt, right? Keep your cash. The second one, he said in a changing market, variable costs always will win out. over fixed costs. And I thought that that was really interesting because fixed costs, like, you see that a lot with, especially with investors, is they're totally open to fixed cost, right?

Hey, look, if I swipe this $20,000 worth of leads on my credit card and I have no money and I'm going to go into debt 20 grand and ever swipe this, then I'm going to do all these deals and I'm going to have a Lambo next month, right? And they end up with 20 grand for the debt. Yeah, I don't understand the cash convergence like what it goes behind it either. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. If it was easy, everybody would do it. It's not that easy.

Learn, grow, all that. But understanding that variable costs are really good. And the last thing I thought was interesting was tie into resources that you already have at your disposal because a lot of them have all the resources they need that they just don't use them. But with what you're saying there, I'm curious. So I've got some good friends of mine out in Chicago, GEO, Jeff Nidiger or his business partner, Kevin, by any chance. No. Okay, they do a massive amount of business out in the Chicago area.

And they used to only buy from wholesalers and they were doing okay. But when they went direct to seller, their spreads just became so much better and bigger. And so I'm just kind of curious, do you, like, how are you weighing that whole like the difference in the spread between direct to seller versus wholesaler buying? I mean, because you're still getting deeps, right? So how are you doing? Yeah, so it really depends on your market. One thing we kind of talked on or touched on yesterday, like if you're in a hotter market with a lot more investor activity, there's a much bigger spread between what you can, what you can sell the property for to an investor versus like if you just did a fix it with yourself.

Like for example, like in a rural area, it's very hard to make big assignment fees because there's just not a lot of, there's not a lot of competition. Like a lot of times like when I was wholesaling in rural areas, I would sell to the same two or three buyers every time, so they knew they had all the leverage, so they were not coming in at. I never got bidding wars of my wholesale deals. They're trying to beat me down on price because they know they're the only buyer in town. Whereas if you wholesale in Richmond or Northern Virginia is very competitive, so you can drive up price, you can sell stuff at 85, 83 cents on the dollar. I would say just trying to bring down our average cost of acquisition. We still are marketing direct to sell, we're always going to market direct to sell, because that's where you're going to need for juiciest deal, right? you don't have a middleman a real drawer wholesale you got to pay so you can get those bigger spreads

but we're finding a lot of flips that hit our numbers for what we want to make from other wholesaler so I think it would be it wouldn't make much sense

it would be pretty foolish to just disregard those free deals and just only market direct the seller when we can still buy I mean I bought probably I think eight

properties under contract with the past 45 days from wholesalers in the MLS that they all hit my numbers for what I want to make on a flip so just supplementing supplementing what we're already doing direct to seller and then also reducing our ad spent a little bit

to drive up our net property. Right, right. No, that's great. So now, I know you said you do, you do some cold calling. How does, how is that playing out for you? I've got a lot of friends that love cold calling as an elite source and I've got other friends that are like, holy crap, stay so far away from that. And actually, it's so funny because legit, the same day that you and I spoke, I had just talked to somebody who crushes it in their business. They do so much business. And they were just like saying, we hate cold calling. We tried it so many different ways.

It's never worked. BAs in-house, all the other stuff to find deals. And we think it's the worst. And then literally I talked to you later that day. And you're like, it's been great for me. So I'll talk to that because I think what's so funny is like, just because something works for somebody doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody. just because it doesn't work for somebody doesn't mean it won't work for everybody.

So I just would love to hear how you think about that. Yeah, so, I mean, it's not. For one, it depends on your expectations, right? If you expect to just get a $5 an hour VA in the Philippines to start cold calling for you and block up 10 deals a month, it's not going to happen, right? One thing to keep in mind for newer wholesalers is that the cash convergence or the sales cycle

is much longer with cold calling compared to other market channels. For example, like with Google Ads, pay-per-click, if you put 10, 15 grand on a budget, you're going to get leads coming in today that have high intent to sell their property because they're Googling, need to sell my house fast, or avoid for closure, things like that. They have high intent. So average Google Ads leads, you can convert the same day to come in. It's pretty common for a one call close when it comes to Google Ads when it comes to Google Ads. Whereas Cole calling, you're reaching out to them. So the timing might not be right for their situation right then and there or they might not be available to a talk. They probably don't have as much motivation as like a Google Ads or a TV leader, right? But we get so many cold call leads that convert after they've been in our CRM for three, six, nine months. I mean, we've even had some really big spreads from cold call deals that came in two years ago. It's just the follow-up is much longer with the cold call lead because of the intent and because of what's the outbound channel. So as long as you keep that in mind, I mean, we get a great return on our ad spend with cold calling. We still closed deals every month from cold calling.

But you just can't rely on it, in my opinion, is your only channel if you're starting out because it does. take a long time for some of those to convert. Right. So here's something that I, because I live in both the agent world and the investor world, it's so funny because every time I go to a conference or any sort of speaking engagement with just agents, not investors, but they're just, they, we talk about distressed or motivated sellers. And so many agents are like, oh, no, no, you don't know my market.

There's not distress. Like our market's hot. There's not distrust or sellers in my market. Nobody's getting divorced. Nobody's not on their property, Texas, nobody's losing their job. Just go ahead.

I'd love for you to speak to that for the, and I know most people that listen to this podcast are not of that ilk, but I want everybody to hear this because I just, it becomes white noise when you hear it from me over and over again. So speak to that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's like perception is reality, right? I mean, if you think there's no motivated sellers in your market, you won't find any. If you think there are, you'll find them. I mean, it's no different than anything else. If you think there's no money out there for your deals, you're not going to be able to raise private money. If you think there's lots of money out there, you're going to raise private money.

I mean, here's, like I was saying, I mean, people become motivated because of situations that are usually unforeseen happening in their life, right? People go to jail. People get divorced. All those things happen everywhere in the country. I don't care where you're at. Obviously, certain areas where the income level is lower, the education level is lower. It might be more common to come across the stress sellers, but they're distressed sellers in every market for sure. Absolutely. And I'll tell you what,

when that becomes the focus of your business and you have a real estate license and you see yourself as an investor, I mean, it's just awesome because if they want to sell like somebody just trading in their car at a massive spread and they know you're leaving money on the table, fine. You buy it. You flip it. You do. whatever you want to do with it. If they don't want to sell at a massive spread, but they're motivated, then you list it. You make money theirs. And either way. And then when you list it and you list it as is, don't tell them to fix it up because that's not what they're looking to do. If you list it well below, like the Zillow price, you're going to have massive madhouses at your open houses,

and you pick up buyers, and then you get both sides of the deal, and then you get more buyers. And it just builds this massive business by focusing on that one area. So with that said, Sam, tell us how do you evaluate your deals for what you want to do with them? Great question. For one, it depends on where they're, I look at a couple of different things, first and foremost. Where is it at, right? Because I'm not really trying to do fix and flips outside of Virginia, and I'm trying to stay as close to my location as possible because I have a project manager that goes and checks on these projects. And if I have to send him four or five hours out, it dilutes his time, focus from everything else. So if it's close

to home, then I'm going to look at it as more of a flip potential. If it's outside of our area, then we'll probably look at more of a wholesale or renovation type of transaction. Also, the condition of the property, as I'm sure you have experienced the heavier full gut rehabs. I try to stay away from them because they're a massive headache. They always take longer than expected. You can deal with pulling permits and headaches with the city. There's more risk involved. They end up not really being worth the time and energy a lot of times it goes into them. So if it's like a full gut rehab, I probably will look to wholesale it. It depends on the profit margin.

It depends on how many good cops are there, like how confident am I in the after repair value. I mean, there's a lot of variables that I kind of run in my head. It's like kind of many calculations in my head to determine. But for the most part, I mean, if the property is in good conditions, I always looking to get a little bit closer to retail, novation. If the property is like a light to monitor rehab in my backyard, flip. If the property is a full gut rehab or is outside of my territory, probably wholesale.

Cool. Cool. Love it. Love it. Okay. And then when do you want to hold on their properties? When are you looking at holding on of the stuff? I already am. I said I already am. I got a... I'm saying like what makes you decide I want... Oh. Oh, I said like when am I going to start buying rentals. Well, right now, my mindset is actually different on that now than it was when I first got into the business. When I first got to the business, I was really attracted to the cheap single family houses. I was so attracted to the, oh, you can buy a house for $20. grand ran out for $500, $800 a month on Section 8, you're meaning the 2% rule or the 3% rule. It's awesome cash flow. The problem is that's awesome cash flow on paper for those D-class properties in rougher

areas. They tend to be cash flow on paper, but they don't cash flow in reality because you're getting beat up with deferred maintenance. You might cash flow, you're supposed to cash flow $200 a month. And then the water heater or HVAC roof goes out or the tenant trash is your property. And they don't appreciate, right? what I've realized for myself is I don't really want the rentals for the cash flow. Obviously, I want them to cash flow and I don't want to have negative cash flow. I wouldn't buy rentals. I know if it wasn't at least breaking even their positively cash flowing. But my main goal in rentals now is for the long-term appreciations. I want to buy in the right areas. And then also the tax benefits. Tax benefits is the biggest thing for me to get the depreciation. So I'm for higher quality assets, specifically multifamily properties where I can get a bigger amount of depreciation to offset my taxable income than I'm making through wholesale. and flipping. Absolutely. No, that's great. That's great. Yeah, I'll tell you, one of my,

one of my best buds, again, Maraq Chavez, if anybody's ever gone to any grid networks, he's a counter grid. He used to buy tons of properties in Cumberland, Maryland, because they cash flowed like crazy, but there was no appreciation. And he was like, Chris, they looked awesome on paper, like you said. And then he said, five, 10 years later, maybe I made $8,000 or $10,000 in the property, you know, that I paid very little for. And then all of a sudden, a roof would need to be replaced. And there's my 10 grand. And everything I made just went out the window and it did appreciate so it worth what I paid for it. And I've made zero dollars and it's five years later. I know people with 50, 100 plus single family homes. Like I'm sure you probably met people that

own a bunch of single people at homes and D class areas that they kind of pound their chest at the door count. They're like, oh, I got it's 200 houses, 300 houses. But they're not making any. money. I mean, they make good money compared to the average, like, middle class person, but they're not, they don't really have what you consider a few money, or they're not really truly wealthy, right? They, they, they're stuck managing the properties themselves, and they're usually cash pool because they're always having to fund these capital expenditures that are happening with the properties, and they don't have enough, these don't have any appreciation. They have nothing to show for all their time. So, yeah, I would, I want higher quality, higher quality stuff. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I've got a, yeah,

I've got a good friend in St. Louis who owned a ton of properties and didn't really have a ton of equity in them until COVID hit. And then even these, they're all small spread properties. But thankfully, they all just went up and he was able to make some money. But it definitely wasn't like the hammer or retire money. But it was good money. So, all right. Let's go to the last part. I know you are looking to, you have a ton of properties and you're looking at what you're going to do with those properties.

and you're looking for some people that partner with you. You might just talk about that opportunity real quick. Yeah, yeah, definitely have a lot of lending opportunities available for people that have cash that maybe you have in a savings account or a retirement account not really earning much of a yield. We pay our private lenders a really strong double-digit return for Oliver Phillips. So like I said earlier, that's one of my focuses right now is finding more people that we can help get a good return on their money and help us do more, do more quality projects. Cool.

And so what does that look like? If somebody were to invest with you, what does that look like? Yeah, yeah. So basically they become the bank, right? So they get a deed of trust. In certain states, it's obviously called a mortgage in Virginia. It's a quality deed of trust. They get a first lien position deed of trust.

On the property is collateral, just like, you know, Chase Bank or Wells Fargo would. And it's also a promise or a note is drawn out by the title company and, you know, notarized the closing, basically spelling out the terms of the loan. And I personally guarantee all of my, a lot of investors won't do that, but I personally guarantee everything for my investors. And then I pay typically very depend on the deal. typically 1% per month to my lenders. So, for example, if I'm buying a $100,000 property with $100,000 loan amount,

it's $1,000 per month every month I own the property. And it lets me, some people have asked me, like some of my friends or family members that don't really understand what I do to the fullest level, they're like, well, why don't you just use your own cash? I'm sure you've gotten that before. And if I was doing one at a time and that's all I want to do, that would be great. But with our goal, our goal is to do 96 single family flips next year. It's pretty much impossible to do that with your own.

cash unless you just come from, come from money and you have a trust fund with $20 million. That's not going to happen. So let's us do more deal flow, help more sellers, provide quality housing in our market, and also help people get a good return on their money. Yeah, no, that's, that is interesting. You do deals. I was just talking to somebody the other day, and they, oh, man, they're talking about doing deals and he's, oh, well, it's not that much in cash.

You can just do it. And I'm like, but think about. all that it takes when you hold on to something, right? Like you take something down, you've got the cash for that. Then you've got the cash for the repairs. And then you're holding it while you're repairing it and then you're holding it while it's on the market. And then you're holding it while it's under contract. And then you add your next project to it. And then your next project. And your next project. And eventually it all starts snowballing. But at the end of the day, when you've got millions of dollars out while you're going through it. And the business

term for that is your cash cycle of money. And that's why a lot of people like to wholesale, right? They're willing to take less money for the cash cycle. And I thought this was, I know we've only got a couple minutes left. I know, yeah, you just got a couple minutes left. But I do think that it's really interesting because wholesaling in more suburban and urban markets tends to be a little bit more lucrative. But, you know, what we were talking about yesterday, I thought was just interesting. And I think a lot of people should think about that if they're listening to the podcast. Do you mind just kind of touching all what we were talking about? Yeah, I was saying like for bigger cities, I think that the, I think wholesaling is a better,

better strategy than flipping because, I mean, it'd be a lot harder for me to do what I do here in my market in your market because I can buy a house here for 60 grand, for 30 grand to it and flip it. But in your market, there probably aren't any $60,000 houses. So you've got to raise a lot more capital or have a lot more capital of yourself. And it limits how much volume could do. Also, the typical margins like in your market or not as your market, like if you're flipping in California or like other high dollar areas, Washington State. I mean, people are buying 85 cents on the dollar.

So you only have that 15% margin. Typically, more rural areas, you can buy at 70%, 65%. So you have a little bit more cushion. So even though you don't have as much gross profit potential, I'd rather do a little bit more volume and still have 30, 40% cushion on every deal to where I'm not going to be in a whole $100,000 at the market chips. And in rural areas, one other thing I was telling you is, even though it's not as hot for investor activity, a lot of times there's a shortage of affordable housing because

there's not a lot of investors coming in and fixing them up. So typically in my markets, man, anytime I fix the property and I list it to where it can qualify for an FHA, USDA, VA, VA loan, there's a ton of pent-up demand in that starter home price range. So stuff still goes quick even though it's a rural area. It's stuff like I listed a flip it went full price, had two cash offers on it. Well, one cash offer, one FHA offer, full price. By the third day, we listed it on the market, even though it's in a rural area. That's awesome.

Yeah, it just makes sense. Understanding what your markets will absolutely help you win, right? And what works in whatever it is? Santa Barbara is not going to necessarily work in St. Louis. So that said, Sam, how can people, I know we're at the top of the hour here, how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn either more about what you're doing or more about how they can partner with you on stuff? Yeah, the social media I'm most active on its Facebook.

Sam Hopkins on Facebook, my profile picture of me, skydiving. and my cover photo is made on TV for our TV commercial. And then I'll also give you my email. My email is Sam Hopkins, his first and last name at company name, undlewhombuyers.com. So they can also email me. Cool.

Sam Hopkins at Gundillahombovers.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here with us. And if this has been helpful for you, if you would be willing to leave an honest review, that would be super helpful. And if we can do anything for you, please reach out.

the place where I still respond personally is on Instagram. And I know I'm a couple weeks behind for some of those that have reached out to me on Instagram. So I promise I will respond. And it's me on Instagram at this point, responding, just because people have been so great helping me. I want to give back and help others. But I just may not be right on the ball of that. But I will get to it.

All right. With that said, Sam, thank you so much for sharing some of your knowledge and expertise. everybody understand there are deals out there to be had. You just got to go find them. Thanks for helping. Make sure everybody understands that. Sam, go crush it. You're the man. Thanks for being here. Thanks for me on Chris. You have a great day. Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate, you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd. Be a

Uncommon. Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor Chris Craddock and Jeff Saferight.