#193 Fourth Generation Real Estate Investing

Speaker A: What is up, entrepreneurs and business owners? Welcome back to the Stronger Business podcast. We are in the studio today. I'm super excited to, uh, talk about real estate, all the different aspects of real estate. My guest today, man, he's got his hands in all sorts of stuff. It's buying, it's investing, it's hard money lending. Um, there's been flipping, there's been all sorts of things learned along the way. We're going to have some really cool conversations, teach you a lot today about things, um, he has learned and experienced in dealing with real estate and all the different aspects. Um, I'm excited to learn a lot. We have Parker Styles with Barrington Acquisitions and all sorts of offshoots from that. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Speaker B: Thanks, Chad. Happy to be here, man.

Speaker A: And today's gonna be cool. I'm excited. You've got a really cool story of kind of getting started and adapting and being able to pivot a lot of different directions inside of different aspects of real estate and I guess primarily around different property and different versions of how you treated that and still treat that as an investor. Kick us off, man. Tell us a little bit about how in the heck you got into that. What made you want to get into that? What's the good, what's the bad, what, what do people need to know and how did you get into it? And give us a little background.

Speaker B: All the good stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, uh, I actually always knew that I wanted to be in real estate.

Speaker A: Okay. I'm always interested in.

Speaker B: I'm a fourth generation real estate investor. I did not know that until like two or three years ago.

Speaker A: And that just screams like family money

Speaker B: is what I hear there. I know, I know. So I like, went up through, you know, middle, uh, school. My dad owned and managed. You know, we're in a house Athens now. I'm sure you're familiar with, uh, with Five Points and Stiles Properties. Used to be there, the brick apartments. That was what my granddad built. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Speaker A: So what a prime location.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was landmark.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We ended up selling it in, you know, 2014. The great, uh, recession was, was rough on us and that. And there was about 100 single family houses kind of scattered out around historic downtown Athens and all the little offshoots, little, uh, duplexes and triplanes.

Speaker A: You really did grow up around, like, a lot of rental real estate.

Speaker B: My first, uh, doing punch outs for my dad. I love it. So my dad didn't do any flips, uh, necessarily. That wasn't his business. He managed his dad's apartments and rental houses, uh, his whole life. And then he got to the point where he owned them with his four sisters.

Speaker A: Oh, my God.

Speaker B: But he did all the work and had to make all decisions. But he had four older sisters breathing down his neck, making sure he was

Speaker A: making the right move. Four older sister than him.

Speaker B: That may have been a better position. But anyway, that's what I grew up around. So, uh, I read, um, rich dad, poor dad when I was 13, changed everybody's life.

Speaker A: Same here.

Speaker B: And I heard you and Chris Petty talking about it. Uh, so I read that when I was 13. It was cool. It kind of gave me that entrepreneurial, uh, vision, uh, a little bit. I think some of that was in me to begin with, but that brought some light to it. Uh, I did the, the classic entrepreneur things. I was selling stuff at the end of the driveway. Lemonade. I made these little candy balls me and my sister would go sell. Um, we had a Christmas tree removal company back in the day. We'd go with my dad's trailer and we made this tarp thing with two by fours and we'd go get Christmas trees and pick them up. So, you know, that was that. But I was going through middle school and high school thinking that I was going to be running the family business, right? You know, running the rentals and taking over and, you know, everything was kind of set. Um, and, you know, that's not obviously how it didn't. It didn't end that way. So we, you know, went through the recession and, um, we just. There were old houses, old houses, old apartments, a lot of deferred maintenance, a lot of stuff that we had just kind of kicked the can a little bit, so to speak. And, um, they did it. They did incredible renovation, um, on the apartments. Looks really good. But we started getting some offers around what made sense. And he let it go. Um, so that for me was like, what am I gonna do now? That was my destiny and all these things. And ended up being the best thing possible. Because that happened when I was in college. Uh, about halfway through, I went to Kennesaw State University. And, um, uh, I kind of took that point. I really wish I didn't do this. It delayed my education and real estate further because of the recession that we were in. All that we were hearing in school was, it's a terrible, terrible time out there. Everybody's losing their ass. Everybody.

Speaker A: Like the best looking back is like the best time ever.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. My best rentals to date are the first ones that I bought um, and I, you know, like, indicator. Incredible appreciation. Like, I mean, I bought a three bedroom, two bath, uh, brick ranch property in prime indicator. It's not a terrible neighborhood, but it's not, you know, prime time either. Bought it for $55,000. It's just, I mean, like multiples and multiples of 100% returns. So it's really, really frustrating. But I took that as I'm gonna stay in college and keep drinking and having fun. I'm not gonna get out in the hot real worldbath. I'm gonna hang out here in my protected little bubble where I get a meal plan and I get to drink Keystones all day. And so life is good. Yeah. So that's what I did. I mean, it was fun, it worked out and like, I just had a little bit of a later start and I could have built something even bigger. But, you know, hindsight's 20 20.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: Um, so yeah, I got out of college and, um, my first job was at a commercial real estate firm as an agent. I was like, hey, you want to be in real estate? What are you going to do? Go get your license? But I didn't want to get my residential real estate license. I didn't want to go down that common path. What I thought was common path. Want to kind of go a little different way. My parents could tell you there's a lot of other moments, um, where I did that that they probably didn't appreciate. But me too, straight up the air, I went commercial. Um, so I got in an industrial real estate firm and was working under a broker and just kind of learning the ropes. I realized that was going to take like three years to build, um, a six figure income for myself was my projection. Uh, and about a few months in. So I was like, I need a side hustle, right? What's my side hustle going to be? I need to make some money.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker B: And I was listening to podcast and I was big into personal development because I shame to say, but I was doing some multi level marketing stuff and I'm glad that didn't become my.

Speaker A: You learned some stuff from that. Oh.

Speaker B: But it built a phenomenal foundation to build the mind that you need to become an entrepreneur. The failures that, you know, that was the. I remember explicitly going out and I had one of my goals from some random CD that I was listening to was to go get a certain amount of NO's, go get 15 rejections today and call that a win. Like, you can't. There's no better training than doing that. And I'm talking, like, this is public. I'm out there trying to sell this stupid energy drinks, talking about how good it is on the green of my campus where my peers are looking like an idiot. And there's just no better training than that. Similar to, like, door knocking, like Cutco or stuff like that. Like, rejection is such a big part of entrepreneurship. And so I learned that at the beginning, um, which was great. And so I stumbled into a podcast on flipping houses. This guy, Matt Therio, um, out of California, and he just had this no BS Mentality of raw content. And there wasn't a lot of. This was 2014.

Speaker A: Okay. Oh, God, that's early in the podcast days. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: And so he had, like. He had like a hundred. And he had like 150 episodes at that point.

Speaker A: Holy cow.

Speaker B: Yeah, so he was on it. He was an early. He came from, uh, the rap game, actually, and, like, produced music and stuff. So he was kind of already in the recording scene and, uh, spun into this. But, um, yeah, I stumbled into that and started listening. I listened to probably over the next, like, four months, I listened to all 150 episodes. And that gave me. I'm talking, like, when I was brushing my teeth, taking a shower, washing the truck, all the stuff. And that gave me my foundation that I needed to kind of, like, start applying. And I got fired from m. That job at the commercial real estate firm for being too entrepreneurial. Were the words that they used, uh, to let me go, I'm sure not

Speaker A: at the time, but. That's awesome.

Speaker B: Looking back on it, it is awesome. I love telling the story, but I was, like, completely blown apart. Like, I was destroyed. I've gotten fired from, like, seven jobs. You had to call your. I couldn't call my family from real estate. Right. I literally couldn't tell my family. I didn't tell my family that I'd gotten fired for like, two and a half months after it happened because I was so ashamed of what had happened. Like, I'm not even kidding. My. Maybe this is just. It took me a while to learn, but I'm a bad employee. I'm unemployable. I can't. When somebody tells me to do something, there's this thing in my brain that, like, tells me, nah, don't do that. No, go this way instead. But if I have to do it because me. Because I told myself I have to do it, I would do it with, like. My parents always told me growing up that I had insane, um, persistence. I was so Persistent. I would just go and go and go and go and fail and try again, try again. And so that's a foundational aspect that's needed for entrepreneurship too.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker B: And so at the time my dad was selling the building, the apartments that I was telling you so when I was at this firm. And so one of my roles at that firm was to, he was trying to 1031 obviously. And it said, and for those of you who aren't familiar, it's a term where you can defer, uh, your gain, uh, your taxes on your gain from a sale into a uh, piece of property that you're purchasing. And you're kind of restricted on the amount of time that you have to do that sale. And it has to be a like kind you know, investment and things of that sort. So I didn't actually find him anything and they let me go because I was too quote unquote entrepreneurial. They said, you're probably gonna go, you know, work with your dad. And we see a lot of opportunity. I was like, guys, it was one sale. The money's gone. There's nothing, there's nothing for me there. And they just, you know, there was, there was no going back. They're like, we had already made our decision. We've been thinking about this. Oh, so it was terrible. So remember like 90 days earlier I'd stumbled in this podcast. Yep. I was like, this is going to be my side gig. Right. If I ever quit, you know, or God forbid get fired, this is going to be my full time thing. I'd made that decision mentally and I literally, I believe this. I thought it into existence.

Speaker A: Like I agree.

Speaker B: I'm um, big on dream boards. I'm big on you know, visualizing getting really, really, really, really, really, really, really clear on your goals to the point where you can see it. You see the color of that vision and you really, your actions change of what you need to do. It's not airy fairy, it's just you actually subliminally or your um, the, the, the part of your brain that you, that you can't here thinking the thoughts, you don't know the thoughts but it's affecting like the things that you're doing, the actions that you're taking and those little things increments over time affect the outcome.

Speaker A: 100% agree. Can't explain it. Thought it was a bunch of frou frou for a lot of years.

Speaker B: What's the secret, Right? The secret was that movie on Netflix. And uh, that was big. And all the uh, Multi, um, level marketing companies just watching that. And it's. It took me a. I watched it, like, I've probably seen it 10, 15 times. I literally, at one point, I had it on my calendar because it was so uplifting to me to watch that you had scheduled. I scheduled watching it.

Speaker A: Oh, I love that.

Speaker B: Like, every month and a half I would watch it, but back to the thing. And so I thought it into existence and I got fired. And so I was like, well, I guess there's no turning back. This is going to be my thing now. I'm talking like, no marketing had been done, no houses had been walked through. I had just listened to about 80 podcast episodes. But no, I was, like, fully certain this was going to be my thing. And so I told my wife. I'm sorry, not wife. I told my girlfriend at the time, Casey. And I went to her house, her apartment, uh, that day. And trying to just remember, think through that day. I got there before she got home. She was a schoolteacher, and I was there when she got there. And she was like, hey, uh, why are you here? And I was sitting on the porch. I bought myself a six pack on the way home. I was about 80% of the way through those beers. And I said, I got fired today. And so we had that whole conversation. She's great at reeling me in, helping me see the, you know, the light and things. Long story short, I had a pity party for probably three to five days or so. Um, and then I was like, quit being a bitch. It's time to go, dude. You literally said this is what you were going to do. Be careful what you asked for. So I spent the next two months before I told my parents, uh, drunk on a vacation with them one night that, uh, I was building. I built a business plan. I had to get serious. So I stayed home all day in my pajamas watching YouTube videos and reading books and, you know, listening to more podcasts.

Speaker A: You strategize and you, like, really hammer things out on paper.

Speaker B: I can't remember if I told you, but I was. When I was working with my dad. Ah, ah. On his maintenance team as one of my earlier jobs, um, there was this guy, longtime worker for my dad. Um, he had some mental, uh, issues, but it was still good to work and everything. And then my dad hired this new guy, younger, right? And, like, I started working with him m. And kind of, kind of liking him. And we were laughing and making jokes, and this other guy, he really liked that too much. He thought we were kind of talking smack about him and, uh, all that stuff. And he ended up going to my dad and telling my dad that I was slacking on the job and things like that and kind of inserting some words that were not accurate. I'm not saying I wasn't the best 15 year old employee, but I was doing the job. I was showing up and my dad fired me. I didn't know that, uh, he fired me. He fired his son from.

Speaker A: That's hard. From the job.

Speaker B: Yeah. So think about that. Like, I just got let go from my first professional job. I had all these other experiences of being let go. My dad had fired me from a job. I was just like, who am I? Like, why this identity crisis of like, what am I meant to do? I don't fit in any of these buckets. And so the entrepreneur bucket was like the only thing left.

Speaker A: Yep. That's awesome. So you went right into flipping at that point. Was that kind of the model you were looking at?

Speaker B: Wholesaling was not like this sexy term back then, but it was there. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be the rehabber. I wanted to be the guy buying from the wholesalers.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Why? I don't know. Maybe I wanted the before and after pictures, but I didn't want to be the wholesaler at that time. That was a partial mistake. Uh, but it was a good learning lesson. It took me, uh, a year and a half of getting taken advantage of by contractors and making some mistakes on contracts and buying a bad deal or two. Um, you never know what you find when you start breaking into the walls. And, uh, I decided, I think that wholesaling would play really nicely with my rehabbing business. Think short, uh, term income and medium term income. And then I was only doing that.

Speaker A: I knew that cash flow sides of it. I like that. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I only did flipping or did rehab. I'm glad I understood this from early on. It's a glorified job. Like, if you're not sending the marketing, working the leads, following up, walking houses, working contractors, you know, you're not making money. And so my dad told me something a long, long time ago. He told me a lot of times, and, uh, you know, the older I got, the more sense it made. He's like, he's like, parker, you got to figure out how to make money in your sleep.

Speaker A: So I was in the exact same place. So day job, tax, accounting, career in education. That's what I've always done, but always the entrepreneur side and the real estate side. I always wanted to learn. I got into buying foreclosures right there. Kind of on the pre recession, but starting to get into the recession a little bit. But all I knew growing up, all I knew in general was hard work for money. Money. I didn't know how to be entrepreneur. I didn't know how to make money when you sleep. I just know how to, I knew how to like put in work and get some sort of compensation for it. And so the flipping like really appealed to me. And I'm like, I can do this and I can buy it for this and put in this for this many months and I can, I can walk away with 20 grand.

Speaker B: It's like magic.

Speaker A: It is. I'm like, I got $20,000. Like, this is unbelievable. It's like half my salary right now for working all year. And I kind of like it. And that's kind of all I knew. And two things happened to me. Number one, a buddy of mine, a business partner, now he's like, man, that's dumb. I was like, what do you mean I just made $20,000 in four months. He's like, yeah, but you're working every weekend and every night on this stuff.

Speaker B: He's like, what if you put that

Speaker A: into learning how to make 4,000amonth, every month, the next 10 years? And I'm like, wait a minute. You may be on to something. But then the real recession hit and I was in the middle of about five different rehabs or flips, but it was the greatest thing that ever happened because I had no choice but to convert them into rentals.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, you got forced into it.

Speaker A: So then I learned rental real estate. I'm like, wait a minute. That if I map this out, this is so slow and boring. This sucks. But if I map this out. Hold on. There's something to this.

Speaker B: Boring businesses make money.

Speaker A: So I was in the same boat. Um, but. So when you thought about it from a different angle, did you immediately switch from rehabbing or did you continue to do that?

Speaker B: No, I'm too stubborn for that. So I, uh, continued flipping and ah, I started this. Um, well, yeah, when the wholesaling came on, I went to this event and this guy was on stage talking about, this is like probably 2016 now. Uh, guy was on stage talking about virtual wholesaling. He's like, oh, that sounds awesome. I did the rehabbing, guys. It's not all, it's cracked. He made the same statement. He was speaking to you. I mean, you're just like, oh, exactly. And he said, I don't go into houses. I don't mess with contractors. I don't even live in the States. I'm doing this in. I've got a place in the Bahamas, you know, he's doing all this stuff and sot up so fast. Oh, yeah. Like, the money was already wired. And so he told me kind of what to do. We talked after the event. There was this marketing guy there who, um, later scaled a company, Audantic. I'm not sure if you're familiar. They were one of the first in, like, the predictive, uh, analytics kind of data for homeowners. He was a big data guy that got into real estate and kind of merged those two skills together and started selling lists. So I talked to him. He was there. I said, man, where do I go? Like, the nation's my oyster. Where should I do this? Hawaii? Should I. Nevada? And he said. He came back like a week later and said, parker, it looks like Knoxville, Tennessee, or Charleston, South Carolina would be two excellent places to start your virtual wholesaling business. And I was like, awesome. Uh, m. I literally did no due diligence. He could have just picked those names out of a cereal box for all I know. And I said, well, Charleston, the beach sounds way more fun to visit, so let's go with that. I love it. Um, it worked out better because now that I understand the market's better, they have better appreciation than Knoxville. The property values are a little higher. Uh, especially when you get in closer to the water, the values go up. Higher the values, the better rips you can make on some of the deals. And they have plenty of their, you know, suburb type areas, too. And so I got in this virtual wholesaling thing and that took all my time and all my money. And it was, you know, if you've read, uh, 10x by Grant Cardone, but overall principle of whatever you're trying to do is probably going to take 10 times longer, cost 10 times more, and be 10 times harder than you think it is. And that was that. Uh, and so I stopped all my rehabbing, stopped my marketing in Atlanta and just focused everything on this virtual wholesaling business.

Speaker A: So you went all in?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm like five hours. I live in Watkinsville down the road, so from here, so it's about four and a half hours or so. I went there in the first couple years of that business. I was probably there four times the first couple years. Truly virtual, Truly virtual. But I did that because I was scared to take all the hats off myself. And that forced me to do that. I couldn't do everything if I was four hours away. I had to hire someone in sales. I had to hire somebody to take all the phone calls. I didn't have to do that, but I wanted to because I hate taking. Got to get rid of the phone calls. Um, I needed a realtor to help me with valuations. I needed a closing attorney, I needed buyers. Every time I would go down there, I would have. Because it was so inconsistent. I would have stacked meetings for like all eight hours of the day that I would have built the prior, like six months. Hey, I'm gonna let you know when I'm down there. It's like June, I'll let you know when I'm down there this Christmas. And we'd meet and I would just meet at a coffee shop all day long talking to these, hey, what are you looking for? What are your numbers? What's your back of the napkin? How do you do that? Like, why this and not that? Um, what do your repairs run for? The different things. Just fact finding. And thinking back to that now, it just like bores me to tears. Like thinking about. But that's like the stuff that you gotta do in the beginning when you're like trying to figure it all out, put all the pieces together. Um, and I don't wanna go too down, too far down that rabbit hole, but that was kind of the start of the. My virtual business. It took me about a year and a half to start doing a little bit of volume there with consistency and had some of the right people in some of the, the right seats. Um, then I was in Atlanta. I was living in Atlanta at the time. I said, why don't I do this here too? Like, I don't know if I want to start rehabbing again.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: But I can do this here. Also. Let's cop. I have the systems. I've got some SOPs, you know, and some word documents. Like let's, let's find the people and do it here. That took about 90 days and I had the people in place and I was sending out my first mail campaign. Um, and so we started doing some deals there. And that was kind of the next two years of just scaling, um, those two markets.

Speaker A: Awesome. And that wholesaling side, I love it because it's a lot more predictable. It's a lot faster from a cash flow standpoint. Takes a lot less work assuming you do a lot more volume. But then again, it's still.

Speaker B: It's transactional.

Speaker A: Yes. Mostly that. Transactional one time money. Yeah.

Speaker B: And so that's the foundation of my companies. Okay. And so the way that I look at it is wholesaling or flipping. It's, it's glorified job. But really the foundation that I needed to build was a sales and marketing company.

Speaker A: Oh.

Speaker B: Because if you're a flipper, you need leads.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: So I started mailing, doing ppc, all of these things to, you know, cold calling. I was doing all, buying all the bandit signs and Sharpies and getting them taken up and putting them right back down and all the stuff and getting calls. Well, now I'm getting more calls and I'm getting calls on properties that I wouldn't buy to rehab myself. But am I just going to throw away the leads? No, you go find other buyers who would buy them from you. So that's where the wholesaling comes. I don't think wholesaling is meant to be a one size fits all business for everything. Now it can be, and it's, there's, there's right ways to do it and there's guys that just crush it and that's all they do. But for me, it's not that. For me, it was a cog in the wheel. And so the foundation sits a sales and marketing company that generates leads and works leads and is a conveyor belt of discounted off market contracts on properties that come across my desk on a weekly basis.

Speaker A: That's brilliant because it's essentially, if you are doing all that work and generating those leads just to flip or rehab, you're throwing away 95% of everything you're generating. Now you're saying, hey, how do I recraft this and get value out of 100% of what I'm generating?

Speaker B: Then 20, 17, 18, 19, I mean, just appreciation just keep going up and up and up. And then hedge funds come in right into the single family space and they start gobbling up everything. Uh, msr, Tiber, all these, uh, big companies, uh, we start realizing that we were rehabbing a couple here and there. I'll insert that. We kind of went back to a couple rehabs, but it was a cherry pick. It wasn't all of them. It was like, hey, this looks like a good one. Um, but then we saw how much the hedge funds were paying and how much some of the buyers were paying and, and we were getting exposure to more buyers. I was consistently spending money and time on building my buyers list. A lot of people just focus on getting the next seller, not building their, their network of their buyers. So, you know, now we're at a point where if it's anywhere close to a deal, you know, it's, it's sold. And uh, when I say sold, I mean contracted with the end buyer with five grand of non refundable earnest money and sometimes hours.

Speaker A: That's awesome.

Speaker B: Sometimes the first email blast. Um, and that allows us to do volume. And so we got to the point where during those years where it was just going up and up and up, it's like, man, okay, what would I rather do? Buy this and rehab it and make $60,000 and I'll probably get paid four and a half months from now or wholesale it to this high volume buyer or maybe hedge fund and make $50,000 and I'll close next week and I have to do no work, hire no contractors, I don't have to close. No risk, no going on title, no utilities, no insurance. You know, it's a no brainer.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And so that's how we look at all the deals now. It's, they're definitely not, you know, hedge funds have completely pulled back for the most part, uh, from my perspective at least. And uh, buyers are way more cautious and stuff has continued to get more expensive. So you know, that just brings their prices down. So we look at each deal that comes along and I have a team and we say, you know, all right, here's what we think we can wholesale it for. We compare that to uh, if it's in decent condition, what could we wholetail it for? Which is, you know, merging wholesale and retail basically where we just buy it and throw it up on the mls, we junk it out, get professional pictures and you know, throw it in the pool of sharks. And then, or we rehab and do this or we buy it as a rental property or we buy it and resell it on owner financing. There's a certain product that makes sense for that. And we have a company that just holds 30 year notes long term, like a private bank, basically.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker B: Um, so you're able to look at each, look at all of those individually and we just compare. We have rules. If this and this and this condition is met, then we do this. If this is not at least 2x this and at least 2x 1 1/2x that, then we go back and we don't do that. We do this. If the returns are here, then we're going to put it in this bucket. And so we're just matchmaking and dropping them into the different buckets as they go.

Speaker A: I love it. And you're letting the rules tell you what to do. And, uh, that's the systemization of it all. Because, uh, for me, I will only buy real estate that has options I don't like. I only have one model to make this work. I like having. If I buy a property, I have an A, B and C option. You're doing that with a system and formulas that not only has options, there's rules to tell you how to best

Speaker B: leverage the right option. I would spend an hour, you know, looking at a property, and it's so much mental draining energy. Huh? Deciding what's the right way to do that. Yes. And trust me, it wasn't my idea. It was a coach that I paid for. And, you know, great ideas came up in the room and I wrote it down, I went back and implemented it. So I can't take credit for it. But. But he just said, all right, well, you end up coming to a decision on those. Right? You don't just think about that idea into eternity and never come up with something. So go back in your thoughts or do it again on a couple more and come up with the rules and just put it on paper. It's so simple, it makes you want to hit your head against the wall. So it takes all the brain power out of it. And you can apply that brain power elsewhere on, um, teach it and you can give it to somebody else.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's the fact that you can teach it. I love it. So for. So for people out there wanting to get into some version of real estate investing or rental property, should people be reaching out to guys like you? And, uh, people don't know how to go find deals. And in reality, people don't want to go put in the work and the due diligence to find out, is this a good property for me or not? Uh, is the path of least resistance connect with people like you or on wholesale deals, is it to invest money with other people doing it and to have management and teams in place that are better at it, Reduce risk? What's your advice for those people out there who have the money and the desire to get into these kind of things, but they don't have the experience or the know how or exactly what the best step is?

Speaker B: I think 90% or more of people don't really know what they want and, and just aren't clear on their goals. They think they know what they want. Um, and that might be to own a bunch of rental property or do a bunch of flips or. It may not be. But I think you need to get really clear on what kind of investor you want to be and what you're currently doing now. Like for me, I just gotten fired, so I had all the time in the world. It's like, what, what, what do you have? There's, do you have, do you have time? Do you have experience? Do you have money? Think of that like ah, a bar chart. How high do your bars go on those individual categories and that kind of tells you where to go. Do I have a lot of time but no money and no experience? Or do I have a lot of money and not much time and not much? So that kind of will help you dictate where you should go, who you should reach out to, what you should and should not do on your own, even all the way down to marketing. As a simplistic view, you could say if you have a lot of money and not much time, then PPC is a good way to market because it is more expensive and there are more motivated leads that are, you know, think about hunting versus fishing. They're biting the hook and coming in, uh, and it doesn't take as much time. You have less. You would have a lower, this would be a metric that we track lead to deal ratio or lead to contract ratio. Working that lead source than you would say cold calling. If you have less money and more time, uh, heat up the phones and get on there and it's going to have, you're going to have a lot of bad conversations. You're going to have a couple good ones hidden in there and you might need 15 good ones to get one contract and you might need two contracts to close one deal. So it goes down the line. But if you have more time and not much money, it's cheap to cold call. So that applies that way too. Um, but you may not even want to be an active investor.

Speaker A: I think that's most people think they want to be, but they don't realize what that means. And passive investing is what I will say, going back to what you just talked about, I love the clarity and simplicity behind that and it truly makes it really simple. Where are you at now and what do you have and where do you want to go? Like that's until you know where you're at and where you want to be, you can't fill in that gap. You can't fill in that middle area. You're blindly throwing darts at that point.

Speaker B: Yeah, imagine uh, putting a destination into your gps, but you aren't able to give it a starting point. You just get that little annoying spinning thing on the screen. And just keep going.

Speaker A: Uh, why do you think more people don't passively invest? Is it trust? Is it fear?

Speaker B: No, it's just fear. Yeah, because that's getting, not knowing. It's lack of education.

Speaker A: Getting a return on your money right now without any work is not that hard and not very risky compared to the work you and I may be doing for a little better return, but a heck of a lot more time working risk.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that people, um, just, they hold their chips close to their chest and um, there's a lot of stories about people losing a bunch of money and it's not always wrong. Um, but yeah, you can go put it in treasury bills and do that. Uh, and that's a good return right now. But that won't always be the case. Um, but we make some posts on Facebook and I get a lot of people reaching out to me saying like, hey, I got some cash sitting stagnant, what can I do? I had um, one of my employees that's been with me for almost a year now just told me he's got six figures in a non producing 401k and he's like, hey, I saw you post this Facebook thing saying that you could convert that self directed and you're helping people invest with you and make double digit returns. And I'm like, David, you hear me talk about this all the time. Why have you not brought this to me sooner? Um, so we looked at some or I'm going to show him some projections of like what that can do over the next 10 years on his account and he didn't have to do anything different than what he's doing right now. So like, maybe that's you, maybe it's not. But the passive option is there and there's plenty of ways to do that. The next stage up for me, like I'm doing some passive investing as well.

Speaker A: Me too.

Speaker B: I'm building uh, four townhomes in Charleston, but I'm not doing any of it. My partner, that's his world, that's his expertise, it's my money and he's taking it through and the entitlement and all the stuff, but I'm kind of getting a learn. So that's why passive investing is cool. Because you don't have to get your time sucked away. If you have some money, you get to put it in there and you get a free education all along the way. And if that is something you want to go do actively, which for me, development, that is in the future. Um, but I Don't have the time to make that course change right now. My blinder's on, I'm set, I'm head down. Um, but my money can go to work and make a great return with somebody that is their lane. Uh, and I can learn along the way.

Speaker A: Love it. I love that. Because you're right. You can figure those things out on your own, but it's going to take a heck of a lot more time. It's going to cost you a lot more money. Money not only you're not going to make any money as a passive investor, you're going to lose. I mean, just the experience of trial and error of what you have to go through to figure those things out. You're going to lose money.

Speaker B: I can't say that I have not lost any money.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so when you think about if I can be a passive investor and I can get an education, that's the golden ticket there.

Speaker B: And our passive investors, they don't lose. Uh, even when I lose, they don't lose because then I lose the investment. It's a small circle that gets around 100%. They don't see the darkness in the night, even if it is there. Um, so.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's good advice, man.

Speaker B: The only thing I haven't talked about that I wanted to talk about that I love, just in case people might be able to bolt it on, is our hard money lending business.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So about three years ago, I started getting some, hey, Parker, you know, I'm buying this deal from your team. Can, you know, would you finance it to me? And I was like, um, I don't know, I kind of pushed back a little bit. Then I started looking into it, started doing some deals, started getting some 10%, 12%, you know, 14, 15% interest loans on these, on these properties. And they were my properties. Like, I had already underwritten them. They went through my team, the property,

Speaker A: you know, the numbers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was getting the first position, uh, on the property. And, you know, then I started asking for some points up front and started getting juicier. And then I go into masterminds. Um, that's been a big, A big part of my education and how I've been able to kind of, in my opinion, leapfrog, um, is we started making that a focus of it's quiet money. It's. We all have these loud, busy businesses that have a lot of moving parts and we need to diversify and get another income stream. And so we are already wholesaling the deals. And you don't even have to be wholesaling the deals to do this. This is just an easy bolt on for me. But so on all it was a quick change. We just on our flyers marketing all the properties, we just said, hey, ask us about our in house financing. So we started raising private money faster than we already were. And a lot of uh, my private investors fund my lending business. And so we're playing the arbitrage game. We pay them and we're getting a higher return. We're making the arbitrage and we're getting some points up front and it's on all the deals that we're already doing. So worst case scenario happens. I already own and operate a flipping business. I just take it back and hold it as a rental or just fire sell it on the mls.

Speaker A: Awesome opportunity for the investor and for you. I mean a, you guys are making money multiple times on one property. You've really eliminated the risk with the other skill set and other business models. You have it for the investor to have it collateralized, to have the first position to have you guys who can transition that asset into something different.

Speaker B: Um, and I started talking to these guys that have 10, 15, $20 million out on the streets and I'm like, what does your business look like? What does it entail to do that much volume? And it took one time. This guy goes, it's me, my mom and we've got an admin.

Speaker A: Oh my God.

Speaker B: I just put my palm on my face and like walked out. You ever seen the big short?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: That moment where he's like, picks up the phone, he's like, it's a bubble, it's a bubble. We're in a bubble. Like that was, that was the moment that I was feeling that at that point I was just like, this is, this is, would be idiotic for me to say no to. And so I went back and said I had done maybe like seven loans over the last couple years and said I need to put a business around this. I need an entity.

Speaker A: This is sops.

Speaker B: And that's really what we're working on, uh, scaling on. We want to have five million out. We have a little over two out now. Uh, want to have five by the end of the year, 15 next year and 50 by year three is the push.

Speaker A: So are you currently raising for that right now?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: What's the minimum? What type of terms do you all look for?

Speaker B: My minimum is 50. Right now we're in the 8 to 10% range. Um, whether it's for a loan or whether it's for a property, uh too. And so there's multiple options there. But we're talking to some private equity groups right now. Um, I've got a warehouse line of credit with a bank in Atlanta where we are assigning our collateral of the note that we're creating and assigning that to them and then they're funding a ah, large portion of the note that we're creating and we're coming up with the down payment basically. Um, between that, that's kind of going to get us um, a couple stepping stones there. And then in probably sometime towards the end of next year we'd see ourself, uh, starting a fund.

Speaker A: That's awesome. And so $50,000, 8 maybe more percent return for an investor collateralized by the property. Very little to no risk in the deal.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean we're the first position. We know all we do all day is I hope that things, I hope the borrower. That's why I tell the borrowers when they ask questions about the docs and why they're so heavy and all this stuff. Listen, this is worded and written to where things go really badly for you if you don't do what you say you're going to do. Now I'm a nice guy, I've made some flexes here and there but like if you're going to take advantage of the system, we want the property back because we know we're in it at a good spot and we know exactly what to do and have the people to do it to go maximize profit on the back end.

Speaker A: I love it. For the investor, is there a minimum term before they could liquidate or are they tied to that property based on.

Speaker B: We usually do six months just because that's our term for the back end. So put your money in for six and pull it out. And sometimes you know, we'll do uh, we might do a 60 day extension and we'll ask and you know, some investors say hey I got somewhere else I want to put my money in so I want to pull it out. So you know, we'll refi them out and you know, go from there.

Speaker A: But it's really cool. That's awesome. And that's kind of back to if you're thinking about doing some of these things or thinking about getting into real estate. What an awesome option if you don't have enough for a down payment or you're not in a place where you want to take on a rental property and mortgage or bln. Or an awesome opportunity to Be an investor and to learn and to have conversations with guys like you that's been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years and that specialized in the these things. And I don't know, it's. The education piece is almost more valuable than the return. A lot of these scenarios. I love that. Um, all right, part of the podcast where we get to share Parker's max out moment. You know, who our audience is. If, um, there's one tip, one tactic, one takeaway, the max out moment. Or they can leave this episode and have something that gets stronger. What is your maxed out moment, man? What advice or what tactic tip? Something to go read, something to do.

Speaker B: Oh, there's so many. There's so many good things. Um, I hate questions like this, by the way, but I, um. You said it a second ago. Education and I mentioned a few minutes ago, Masterminds. Yeah. Um, it's become a thing that is much more common to find getting groups of people in a room. It started with that app meetup, you know, and then it kind of formed into Masterminds. I think people realized how much money they could do getting a lot of people in a room and talking about how to make a whole lot more money. But I've been in a mastermind. I've been in two different masterminds for, um, over six years on both of them. And it's. It's just been exponential. Like living. Living in Athens. Um, it's not like living in Phoenix or it's not like living in Scottsdale. It's not like living in D.C. you know, it's not a big city. It's not like Buckhead. So, you know, we. I don't see that this is just me. I'm just telling you from my perspective, we don't drive. You know, there's not Ferraris on the road all the time. There's not, you know, there's not all this stuff happening. So I go to these masterminds and, you know, we're going on the Strip and I, you know, seeing all this stuff, and I'm just like, constantly blown away by, like, God, I've been thinking so small.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it happens 100% every quarter, without fail. By 90 days, I'm back in the little bubble again. You know, I go back to my house in the woods and, uh, you know, I pass probably a thousand head of cattle before I pull on my dry. It's just different. Right. And so you get comfortable. You think about where you're at comparison to, like, who's around. You and it's just a, uh, it's a very quiet, um, trap.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And so you go out there, get in the rooms. The more that I'm in business, which hasn't been that long, uh, the more I realize your scale and success is your people. It's who you have. It's right butts in the right seats and your relationships to outside partnership opportunities. And you don't know how good your team is until you swap it with a new team. And I'm not saying go fire everybody, but I don't think I've had a moment where someone has left and I replace them with someone that was just as good or worse. They are always better.

Speaker A: So true. Man. I've never thought about it like that.

Speaker B: And it's tough to do. I'm the. I know you're supposed to be slow to hire and fast to fire, but I'm the opposite. Um, and, uh, that really rings true to me. Uh, so get in the right rooms. Don't be comfortable in the rooms you're in. You know, you want to be scared. You want to be intimidated. Scared's, uh, the wrong word. Um, you want to be. I leave these meetings sometimes feeling almost kind of down, almost a little ashamed. Like, dude, you've set the. You let the bar lower too low. And there is a healthy amount of that to have because my wife could give you a 30 minute speech on this and why too much of that is a bad thing. And be happy with where you're at and what you have. And so it's a delicate, um, balance.

Speaker A: But that's what I would say, man. That is an awesome, awesome max out moment. I could not agree more. And I just went through that. It's funny, I've never thought about doing it in cycles of 90 days. And I think that's brilliant the way that mastermind schedule works for y'. All. Um, this just happened to me. Um. Um. I have more in my life than I ever dreamed I would accomplish and more success than I ever dreamed and probably deserve. And I love our life and I love what we have, and I love and have things mapped out that if I don't screw it up, we're in just a place that I just never dreamed I would get to. And that's cool to have a life that I live, but I get. I don't know, it's easy to get content or to get to a place to where you just settle, even though settling is in a place that I never dreamed I would be. We just got back. Um, from vacation in Nantucket. And it was that the level of wealth and the business owners there and, um, the hundreds of multimillion dollar yachts. And I mean, I just. And I've been before, but it's just been a while and I kind of forget. But like leaving. We spend part of the time in Athens, part in Charleston, and kind of come back and forth and it kind of happens in Charleston. It's a whole different world than Athens. But leaving Athens and going to Nantucket and the amount of like wealth and business owners and like real freaking money there. I came back and I was like, I want to grow. Like, it's just inspiring. And it's like it opens your mind to a whole nother world of business owner and investor and what can be accomplished.

Speaker B: And it's one of the masterminds that I'm in called the boardroom mastermind. And it's kind of like that 90 day thing. It's like when a boardroom would get together and meet. That's also what I called the boardroom. His name's Kent. And, uh, Kent always says he's like, there's levels to this shit. Yeah, it's like that there truly is. You go to places like that and you're just, wow, my mind expanded.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. And you're right. And my wife's the same as yours. There's a balance there. Uh, I will push too far in the grind and grow section sometimes. Not need to be reeled in.

Speaker B: That's that entrepreneur mindset. What is. I think either Ed Mylett or one of those guys calls it being, um, blissfully dissatisfied.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: That was, that was a term that I used in one, um, conversation, heated conversation with my wife about why I think the way that I do and why we go down some of these, like, you know, grind rabbit holes. Sometimes I am happy. I love our life. But.

Speaker A: But. But there's something to knowing you can do more. Not. Not that you need it, not that there's something about like, I. I have the ability to do more. And I feel like I'm wasting that if I don't pursue this.

Speaker B: Great way to put it.

Speaker A: It's interesting, man. This has been awesome. We could, we could do this for another two hours.

Speaker B: I love talking about this, man.

Speaker A: I definitely want to circle back and get you back on and we just continue to talk more. How do people connect? Where do they find you if they're interested in doing business with you guys? Where they reach out to.

Speaker B: I'm not big on all the social media platforms. I'm trying to work. Work on, uh, that and getting some presents out there, but Facebook really is probably the best message. Me on Facebook, if you have any questions or if you'd like to do anything together with us or see if there's any way we could help you.

Speaker A: Parker.

Speaker B: Uh, Stiles.

Speaker A: Love it, man. Well, this has been awesome. You all go out, find the right people, get around the right groups, do some awesome stuff this weekend. Go get stronger. We'll see you next week.

Speaker B: You afraid of. You know, I got it. If you want to come get it, stand next to this money, like.