David:
This is the BiggerPockets podcast show 611.

Jason:
If you would have told me that seven years ago, when I started that I’d be doing what I’m doing right now, I wouldn’t have believed that it was even possible. What was sad would be, I wouldn’t even believe that I was the kind of person that was capable of doing it, which was even more sad for me, right? I had to get into this space where we proved to ourselves, and we had proof of concept like, “Wow. This works. Wow, I am capable of doing it.” That confidence, that self-confidence is like a muscle that you build over time.

Jason:
Now, when I say that I’m going to do something, I know that it’s going to happen because for the last seven years, I’ve been doing everything that I’ve been saying that I’m going to do, right? It doesn’t start out that way but you can get there and it doesn’t need to take a lifetime.

David:
What’s going on everyone? My name is David Greene and I’m your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast, the best real estate investing podcast in the entire world. Here at BiggerPockets, we believe in helping you find financial freedom through real estate so that you can live life on your terms and do what you were meant to do, instead of what you have to do. We do that by bringing on different guests who tell their stories of how they found financial freedom, as well as industry experts that share advice, opinions and information that can help you become more successful.

David:
If you’re looking to get plugged in with over two million other people on the same journey, I highly encourage you to check out biggerpockets.com. Our website where there is a forum that you can ask any question you could think of when it comes to real estate investing, a blog where you can read articles written by other successful investors, as well as this podcast and others all designed to help you find financial freedom through real estate. I am joined today by my amazing, mysterious, captivating, and now athletic co-host, Rob Abasolo. Rob, how’re you feeling today?

Rob:
Lactic acid is building everywhere I mentioned right before this I went on my first run in three years. I thought I could do it. I did it. I ran five miles.

David:
You ran five miles your first time?

Rob:
Yeah, yeah, but you know.

David:
What the heck?

Rob:
Yeah, but they are 12 minute miles. I mean, it’s offensive to even call it running. I’ve been known actually. I’ve actually run three half marathons without training every single time. I was like, “Yeah, I could do five miles.” I’m paying for it today, my friend.

David:
You got a little bit of delayed onset muscle soreness?

Rob:
Yeah. Isn’t it supposed to be worse on the second day, though? I think tomorrow is going to be the bad one for me.

David:
I always feel it right around 22 to 24 hours after I worked out. That’s where it starts to hit me.

Rob:
I’m going to be healing up pretty good, though. I’m really simultaneously nervous and excited because a friend of mine sent me two A5 Wagyu steaks, and two oxtails and I’m going to be eating that right after this. I got to get a load up on the protein to heal up [inaudible 00:02:48].

David:
You need that protein to rebuild those muscles. That’s right.

Rob:
Yeah.

David:
Today’s podcast is brought to you by Rob DOM’s, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. It’s real.

Rob:
It’s real. I’m really excited about today’s episode with Jason Pritchard. We talked about a lot of good stuff, man. He basically scaled from, he started out doing a couple of deals and now he does about 75 deals a year, which is a really, really, really, really crazy feat. He gives us a really honest look at the growing pains of that business model and scaling up a team and the financing involved with flipping that many houses and just really, really easy to talk to and made it feel very digestible, I feel like.

David:
Yeah, and he did a great job of explaining sort of the entire process, how we’re getting leads, how we’re talking to those leads, how we’re wrapping them up, who we pass it to, to work on the rehab, how we decide if we’re going to wholesale it or we’re going to flip it. It’s a really good overview of what a successful business could work like.

David:
In addition to flipping all these houses, he’s got 83 rental properties. Jason is, I mean, this is the archetype of what you want to scale your business look like if you’re a flipper. He’s got income from flipping. He’s got passive income from rentals. He has six short term rentals that he’s working on. I mean, he’s kind of doing it all.

Rob:
Oh, yeah. Man. There were a lot of selfish questions are like, “Yeah, but how exactly do you do this because that seems very hard?” He was very, very gracious with his answers, I feel like.

David:
All right, moving on to today’s quick tip, Jason makes a comment in today’s show. You want to make sure you stick around for it, where he talks about his W2 job was in sales, and he took his skill from his W2 job and applied it into his real estate investing business. Because he was so good at sales, he did very well with convincing sellers to sell him their off market deals. The point to pull out of this is that if you’re not happy at the job that you currently have, if you’re just phoning it in and going through the motions and waiting for some new inspiring opportunity to crash your path, and then you’ll give it your best, it’s not going to happen.

David:
You have to do your best with where you’re at before your next opportunity is going to present itself. If you do a good job developing skills where you are, you will have those when the next opportunity comes. BiggerPockets wants to help you with that. We want you listening to more content that will help prepare you for the opportunity that will be coming your way. If you feel like you don’t know enough about business or finance or living within your means, you can check out the money podcast, which is all based on building financial independence.

David:
We’ve got the rookie podcast if you’re a brand new investor, and you’re afraid about asking silly questions, or you don’t even know where to get started, that caters to your demographic but the point is, there are resources out there that will help get you ready for the next step where you can take charge of your life and you don’t leave it up to fate. That was today’s not so quick tip. Rob, any thoughts before we get into the show?

Rob:
Mm-mmm. Man, I’m excited to jump in.

David:
All right. Well, let’s bring in Jason. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. First question for you, if you were so independently wealthy that you could hire someone to announce you every time you arrived at a party, at an event, even maybe to work, what would you have them announce you as?

Jason:
Thy Jason Pritchard. I love the ring of thy before. It’s strong. It’s elegant. It’s classic.

David:
Very strong, very.

Jason:
Classic never gets old.

David:
Yeah, it rings of old school masculinity and value.

Jason:
That’s right.

David:
I can see that sort of emanating from your person as we speak here. Well, thank you for being here. I think we’re going to have a fantastic show today. Before we get into the nitty gritty of what you got going on, can you tell me a little bit about what your portfolio looks like or your business looks like right now?

Jason:
Yeah, yeah. We’ve been fixing and flipping in central California for the last seven plus years. We’ll do about 75 deals this year, on average. That’s about what we’ve been doing the last two or three years. We’ve got 83 rentals as of right now. Most of those are single family, small multifamily, small apartments in California. Then, we’ve got a handful of out of state rentals in Cleveland, and also in Northern Indiana.

David:
That is fantastic.

Jason:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a mix of fixing, flipping right now because with the market what it’s doing, we’re more flipping and less wholesale but we do a little bit of both. Then, we cherry pick the best ones to keep for ourselves. We also have six Airbnb, three that are live right now, kind of wading into the short term rental market as well, which has been a very pleasant surprise for us with how they’ve performed.

David:
Who is the we?

Jason:
Myself and my wife.

David:
Okay.

Jason:
Yeah, yeah. When I [inaudible 00:07:14].

David:
No business partners?

Jason:
I have a formal business partner through our nonprofit but that’s kind of a separate arm. I had mentioned that in some of the notes that I have but I have my own private real estate business. That’s mine and my wife’s, and then through our nonprofit, we do some affordable housing stuff and I do have a business partner with that.

David:
This is amazing. The reason I ask because I often hear people say, “We,” and then they go on to you drop these huge numbers like 83 rentals, and tons of fix and flips and 75,000 units and then you find out that their part of the we was like 1/10 of one half of that whole enterprise.

Jason:
Yes. Yeah.

David:
This tells me that you’re the real deal. It also tells me that no doubt, you are very good at finding off market opportunities…

Jason:
Yes.

David:
… if you have all these different exit strategies. Maybe we should start there. Tell me a little bit about how you built your business and how you’re finding all these opportunities.

Jason:
I built my business originally by just going off market. I got started in the end of 2014, completely self-educated, never had a coach mainly because I didn’t have the money to hire a coach or mentor go through that type of program. I started by listening to BiggerPockets podcast, Sean Terry how to podcast out. That’s how I learned the business. I found out very quickly in 2014 that there were just not a lot of opportunities that were listed on the market at that time. I spent a few months at the beginning, just beating my head going on like realtor and Zillow, and just trying to pencil out deals with the cheapest properties that were listed. We just could not make the numbers work.

Jason:
I found out very quickly that we had to shift and adapt. I dove headfirst into direct to seller marketing. We started with direct mail. I mean, I’ve done everything: direct mail, cold calling, bandit signs, door knocking. We just kind of cut our teeth doing that. I’d say 99% of the deals that we’ve done have been off market. I’ve actually only ever bought one property that was listed with an agent and that’s because I had a working relationship with that agent.

David:
All right. I’m assuming you started off with fixing and flipping for the most part, maybe you had a couple rentals and then sort of just started to pour more marketing dollars and resources into looking for off market opportunities and hit some kind of a rhythm where now you’ve got the same sources that are providing a decent number of leads.

Jason:
That’s correct. Yeah, it was all fix and flip for the first two years. I was mainly just looking to replace my income from my old corporate job. I mean, I’d worked in corporate America 15 years prior to getting into the real estate market and real estate field. If you would have told me back in 2014, ’15 that I could just replace my W2 income with income from my real estate business, I would have been happy camper just because I was so miserable and unhappy with what I was doing at that time.

Jason:
I just wanted to fix and flip. It sounds cliche but we used to watch all the flipping shows on TV, my wife and I, and we were always entertained by it. I always thought to myself, if these guys can do it, I know I can too and let’s just start there and figure out everything else after that. I didn’t really understand what wholesaling was at the beginning. I just knew that I needed to buy deals below market value in order to make all the numbers work out.

Rob:
Just for clarity, I’m kind of curious, to what did you do? What was your corporate job before you got into the real estate stuff?

Jason:
My corporate job, I’ve always been in sales and sales management. I worked for two large companies in my early 20s and all through college, and after I graduated. The first company, was a technology retailer. We did all outside sales. It was all business to business. That’s where I really learned the value of marketing lead generation and understanding how a sales process works. I excelled at that, honestly. I did really well. I was paid very well at an early age. I thought that that’s what was going to be, my life was going to be working as like a mid-level executive, climb the corporate ladder, make a couple 100 grand a year, and just kind of do that life.

Jason:
I found out after being at my first company for about seven or eight years that my heart just was not in what I was doing. I felt like I was just getting burned out. I thought it was the company. I moved to another organization where I worked in sales and sales management there. I went through the same basically seven-year cycle there where I thought I was going to climb the ladder.

Jason:
I was doing well, and I found myself at this transitionary period in my early 30s where I was just miserable and I was looking around and I was like 32, and I could see my future with some of the older employees that I worked with. I said, “This can’t be the rest of my life, man. I am not going to do this for another 30 plus years.” I’d always been drawn to real estate. I’d always just kind of talk myself out of it for different reasons. I finally just said, “You know what? We’re going to go all in and try this and if it doesn’t work out, I could always come back and get another job.”

Rob:
Would you say it’s been pretty applicable to use your sales acumen and knowledge kind of in the wholesaling in real estate business?

Jason:
It has been invaluable. I talked to so many people that are interested in getting into the type of business that I’m in, fixing and flipping houses or buying rental properties. They don’t understand how much of a sales job I think it is at the beginning. They don’t understand that the purpose of sending out direct mail is to get the phone to ring. When the phone rings, you got to answer it. You got to be on top of your game. You’ve got to be willing and able to build rapport and go out and negotiate.

Jason:
It’s very much a numbers game. There’s a lot of rejection, especially at the beginning. I had basically been doing that for 15 years. All the rejection, realizing that it’s just a numbers game, you’re not going to close every deal that you go out there on. I was just focusing on understanding the language of real estate. Once I understood that, all my old sales instincts kicked in.

Jason:
For me, I think it was my big competitive advantage getting into the industry. It just took me a little bit of time to understand how a real estate transaction worked. Then, once I understood that, I just hit the ground running.

Rob:
Is there a skill within that, that you feel like you mastered just to the nth degree that you’re able to actually execute every single deal or in your business?

Jason:
I think for me, the way I equated and this is the example or the analogy that I would use, I think we’ve all been in experiences where we’ve purchased something, a car or a house or a vehicle or a product and we’ve walked away from that interaction feeling very good about the person that we worked with, right?

Jason:
Just like, “Man, that guy, Jason, he was nice. He was really good. I really liked him. I liked doing business with him.” I learned very early on that people make decisions, and they do business with people that they like and trust. I think I was just really good with my interpersonal communication skills. I’ve always been good at that. That’s been something that is a strong suit for me. I honed that in my time in corporate America, and it was directly applicable towards the real estate business.

Rob:
Can you give us a little bit of an idea when you were first starting out, I think, you might have mentioned this, but were you wholesaling first and then that went into flipping? Were you doing them both at the same time? What was that progression like?

Jason:
It was only fixing and flipping because in my head, the deals were a lot further, fewer and further between when I first started, right? I didn’t have 5 deals, 10 deals consistently in my pipeline, right? Every deal that we bought, my thought process was we just need to maximize the amount of money that we can make from this and I thought fixing and flipping was the way to do that.

Jason:
We started out, our first deal was in 2015. We maybe did four or five houses that first year. Second year we doubled up and then after that second year where I really kind of got my feet underneath me and I understood that, okay, I’ve got a little bit of momentum. I understand how this works. I had no construction background, no real estate background. I barely understood what an agent did. I didn’t know how everything worked. I needed a couple years of just managing projects and penciling deals out and understanding what things cost.

Jason:
Once I got that under my belt, I eventually got connected with some other investors in my area that were more buy and hold investors. They were the ones that really encouraged me to start keeping some of these properties. They basically told me, “Listen, you just have another high paying job. That’s all that you’ve got right now with this business and until you can start investing in stuff that you can keep long term, you’re always going to be on that hamster wheel.”

Rob:
For sure. Well, I guess I got questions here because for me, I think the idea of going out and doing a flip, that’s pretty achievable for most people. I think most people, if they save up a little bit of money, they can do a hard money loan, they can get into a flip, but how many deals are you doing right now, consistently at a time?

Jason:
We always have about 18 to 20 projects on our books at any given time. Here’s what I mean, when I say that, I mean, we’ve got three to five projects that we purchased that we’re getting ready to start construction on. We’ve got another five to seven projects that we’re actively rehabbing. Then, we’ve got another three to five projects that we’ve got completely rehabbed, and were in escrow or on the market listed to sell.

Jason:
We typically stay right about that range. That’s about the capacity that my team has with the relationships with the contractors, and just, that’s about the max that I want to do as far as properties that we’re rehabbing. Then, anything else that comes in above and beyond that scope, then we’ll look to just assign it or do some type of quick exit strategy, maybe wholesale it or something like that, to just to monetize it and just move on.

Rob:
I got to imagine, probably in this then, if you’re doing the level that you’re doing 75 flips or so or deals every single year, can you tell me a little bit about, because I think the big question that comes through here is, obviously, you’re going to be making a lot of profit here, do you have to kind of stash away a significant portion of your funds for taxes or is your buying and holding and your rental strategy sort of helping to offset that side of things?

Jason:
It’s a mix of both, man. I feel like it’s tough because if you don’t show any money, and you’d really aggressively depreciate your rentals, then you’re not as bankable when you want to go get a big bank loan, right? Your borrowing profile maybe doesn’t look as sharp as if you show a bunch of money. We’re constantly finding the balance between those two things.

Jason:
I’m very fortunate that my wife is still a high school counselor. She’s W2. We leveraged a lot of her credit profile at the beginning when we initially started buying rentals until we were in a space where we could borrow just kind of on our own and we’re making lending relationships where we could get the loans that we needed without necessarily showing that income.

Jason:
It’s a balance. I don’t love writing a big check to the IRS. We just did that a couple of times already this year. That always is painful when you do it, but there’s a purpose behind it because you know you’re setting yourself up to maybe leverage some financing on some future deals.

Rob:
Well, it’s really hard to think of it this way. Someone that I talked to one time, put it very simply and they said if you’re paying taxes, it means you’re making money. I’m always like, “Okay, you’re technically right about it.” I would still rather not pay the taxes but that doesn’t make sense.

Rob:
Honestly, I don’t really hear a lot of people that come in and say that kind of what you’re saying, you want to do a good balance of both because I think the kind of the popular thing, that’s going around a lot right now is cost segregation. Obviously, it’s not new, but more and more people are learning about it. A lot of people are trying to effectively just nix out the entire tax bill but that’s not something that you necessarily are looking to do.

Jason:
It depends on the person’s situation. I mean, it really does. My wife and I just purchased, I don’t want to say it’s our forever house, but we purchased a house that we’re going to be very happy in for, I would say, the next 8 to 10 years. We’re in a really good place with our rental portfolio. I could probably get more aggressive with the depreciation on our rentals now and have less tax liability if I wanted to, because we’re in a really good spot, I think, for the midterm future, right?

Jason:
But if you’re in a position where you want to be really bankable, then you’ve got to show some money. I mean, I feel like I’ve had my mentors that I look up to when I’m very vocal and open on my social media about just the different things that I’m doing with my businesses and some of those guys will reach out to me and they’ll say, “Hey, I just wrote a $1.5 million check to the IRS for this year. I agree with your thought process. If you’re writing a check that big, then you’re making the income obviously to offset it. There’s a give and take there for sure.

David:
You know something? Jason, you just have such an impressive business so far. I want to commend you for that.

Jason:
Thank you.

David:
This is probably more than we’re going to be able to get into in one podcast because I’m thinking how did you build a team to get these leads? What does that structure look like? How did you build a team to manage the rehabs? Then, how are you managing all of your rentals? This is not something any one person can do by themselves.

Jason:
No.

David:
There’s that and then there’s the actual sales techniques that you’re using, which I think could be really good. We might have to have you on again to dive into that because I just can tell there’s a lot people can learn from what you’re doing. Before we get into any of that, I sort of wanted to highlight an issue that I can see that happens with someone like you that has so much success so quickly, is it’s sort of, this is probably not the best analogy, but it’s like you’re a bodybuilder and you’re becoming tremendously fit, but you have certain areas that you like working out more than others. When you’re good at working out, they become much more unproportionally big than the areas that you don’t like, right?

David:
You’re probably making a ton of money. You’re investing it very well. You’re probably cash flowing very strong. There’s even more money coming in. You’re very strong in that area but like you mentioned, you haven’t taken advantage of enough depreciation with some of what you’re buying and that’s why your tax bill is so high.

David:
At a certain point, you’re going to have to shift your thinking from okay, I’ve got this thing on autopilot. Now, I have to buy bigger property so I can take advantage of accelerated depreciation. You’d have to get some apartment complexes or luxury real estate, something like that. It’s very common to see this happen. It’s okay. I don’t think if you’re paying taxes, there’s no one that should be critical and say, “Oh, he’s paying all those taxes.” Well, yeah, that’s because he’s making all this money. He doesn’t have time to figure out how to save all the taxes.

David:
Ultimately, as we’re growing, we’re trying to build this balanced, well balanced approach to where we’re making good money, we’re investing good money, and then we’re saving in taxes. I see this all the time. There’s some people that do really well saving in taxes, but they don’t make that much money, right?

Jason:
Yup.

David:
They brag about, “My tax bill is so low.” Yeah, well, you make less than somebody does with their W2 job.

Jason:
That’s right.

David:
It’s not as impressive when it comes to your approach where you know, “Hey, I could be doing some stuff to save money,” but that would take away from what I’m doing over here. What’s your perspective on how you sort of handle that problem?

Jason:
I’ll be honest with you, I’m an analytical person, but I don’t make every decision based on does it fit this exact formula or whatever. I think I have learned to trust my gut and my instinct. I also have a lot of people that I surround myself with that I trust to take advice from, right? That’s one of the things that I’ve learned that has really moved the needle in my businesses that I didn’t know about finances, financial literacy, and education.

Jason:
My upbringing and my parents, and everything, that was great but this was stuff that we did not openly talk about. I was just unfamiliar and I had a lot of bad financial habits, even into my mid-30s when I started in the business. I had to relearn and retrain the way that I thought about money. Then, I’ve learned that I just need to be around other people that are have done or are doing the things that I want to do and get their advice, kind of pool that information together, sit down with the people that are closest to me, my wife, and we have to make the best decision for ourselves. That’s it.

Jason:
There’s no right or wrong answer. I don’t know that there’s just shades of gray when it comes to, especially to something like this because everybody’s situation is going to be different. Our tax strategy has changed. I think when we were at the beginning, I did want to depreciate more, because I was just not used to writing that check, but as we’ve made more money, and I’ve become more mature investor, and I’ve gotten around, I think older, wiser people that I like and trust and have taken their advice, they’ve kind of guided me and schooled me on to more long term thinking when it comes to this but I’m still learning, man. I’m still very, very brand new to this, you know what I mean? I feel like we’ve got a lot of runway left to go.

David:
I just figured it out last year. Last year was the first year where I’m like, “Okay, I’m taking all this information. I’m putting it together. I’m making it somewhat of a priority. I bought a property I normally wouldn’t buy, but it worked out great. The tax benefits were insane. I’m like, “Okay, I get it now.”

Jason:
Get it. Yeah.

David:
Actually, it covered me for two years, so I won’t have to pay taxes for those two years. I make my money in the way that won’t be taxed, which is different than, like how you make your money matters also. Now, moving forward. I’ve got it. I’m probably not going to pay taxes anymore. If you want me to connect with my CPA, I’m happy.

Jason:
I love what you said, you got it. I think we all have these light bulb moments that happen throughout our journey, where something happens and it just clicks, everything clicks, and you’re like, “Okay, now I get it, right?” I know and trust and have faith that those things will just come. As long as I keep my head down and do the work, eventually, we’ll get to a point where that light bulb moment comes for me and it may be this, right? Hey, just having this talk, having getting on the show and then talking to your people and then that’s it. That’s really cool. I think people just [inaudible 00:24:22].

David:
That’s what I wanted to highlight, right? Because there is an approach that would say, I don’t want to put my pedal to the metal until I’ve built the road in front of me perfectly. I know exactly what all the plans are. It’s just not practical. I don’t know any successful person that made it happen that way. It’s more like riding a motorcycle, you hammer the throttle and you hang on. You adjust your balance as it’s going and you start to get yourself under control and then a sharp turn comes up and you got to figure out what to do there.

David:
Rob’s business has exploded. Then, last year, maybe two years, there’s no way he’s going to have all these details perfectly outlined, but would you trade that to go back to where you were when you weren’t making money? No. You clearly made the right call, right? It’s not going to be a perfect blueprint with a foundation that’s laid beautifully. Then, the framing goes up.

David:
That’s what something looks like when you’ve done it thousands of times, but in the beginning, it’s not that. You’re sort of going, figuring out as you go. That’s perfectly fine because you’re obviously very successful. Once now you’ve got all these pieces in place, when you do figure out the tax component, it’s just going to be icing on the cake, but I mean, 83 rentals, six short term rentals, all the houses that you’re flipping, you’ve clearly done a lot of things well.

David:
If we’re going to sort of carry on from there, tell me in the building of the teams that you had to do, which I, just from hearing your story, I’m pretty sure this has been the most challenging part is getting the people that you want to work with you. What challenges did you face? How did you overcome those team building challenges?

Jason:
I think there’s so many limiting beliefs that we have. I think the first challenge that I faced was just changing some of those belief systems and developing a mindset and a self-image that actually, I believe that I was capable of doing some of these things because I literally had no money. I had nothing when we were getting started. I was bootstrapping everything, which is good because it makes you become very resourceful at the beginning, but then, you’re also coming from a place of scarcity when it comes time to start growing and reinvesting in the business, right?

Jason:
I was very worried about, can I afford? I mean, it’s funny to say now, but $15 an hour or $12 an hour or whatever minimum wage was at the time when I hired my first in person assistant and I was doing everything myself. I mean, I went from flipping one house at a time to flipping three to four properties at a time. I think we’re up to about a dozen rental properties.

Jason:
I was doing all the direct mail myself. I was answering all the calls myself. I was going out and meeting the contractors in the Home Depot parking lot and cutting checks myself. I was doing all the bookkeeping. I was negotiating all the deals. I was managing all the properties. I just reached this point a couple years in, where I just did not have the capacity to do any more. I was a one man army and that’s all that I knew that if I don’t do something soon, then this was going to change.

Jason:
I originally started hiring out virtual assistants. That was a big game changer for me. I looked for virtual employees first because I knew I could just save money and I had so many repeatable tasks that could be done from a phone or a computer that I figured, “Hey, you know what? I see other people utilizing Vas. Let me try this.” I started with that.

Jason:
Then, I hired my first in person, it started as a personal assistant, and then became my property managers, then my project manager, and then that role has kind of splintered out and grilled into individual roles. Now, we’ve got six people on the team, not including my wife, who also is kind of right there with me on the top. I guess seven people that helped kind of run and manage day to day operations.

David:
How did you find the people that you ended up wanting to hire?

Jason:
Social media, believe it or not. It’s funny how, not funny, it’s been amazing to me how powerful of a tool social media has been for me. I was not a social media person before I got into real estate. I had MySpace and then I was dark on social media for eight years. Then, when I started flipping houses, I didn’t know anybody. It forced me to build a network online because I literally did not have anybody that I could tap into locally in the real estate field.

Jason:
I said, “You know what? I might as well just post what I’m doing and maybe it can motivate and inspire some people, and maybe it will lead to something.” I was always very consistent with my social media and just being authentic and open about the things that I was doing. It resonated with people, especially locally. That was what turned into, now, eventually I just started saying, “Hey, I need an assistant for my business.” I had a few people reach out. The first person that I hired came from that. For the most part, the best hires that I’ve had, believe it or not, have been from social media or either referrals from people that I know and trust.

Rob:
Yeah, let me ask you this a little bit because if I’m being totally honest here, I think one of the more daunting things, like you hear a lot of people talk about scaling up, building a team, all that type of stuff, but it’s really hard to put some tactical steps here because when it comes to hiring a team, that means you got to pay people.

Jason:
Correct.

Rob:
In the very beginning of your business, you’re in the throes, it’s really tough to know, well, for a lot of people starting out, they may not be tracking their expenses or cash flow, having profit loss statements for everything. I’m kind of curious, as you started embarking on this and hiring people, what was your thought process for paying them? Were you paying them per project? Were you paying them a salaried role? Has that changed from sort of where you stand now?

Jason:
Yeah, at the beginning, I was just paying a base hourly. No bonus. No anything. I just didn’t understand. I come from a background in corporate America where I knew about payroll and these other different things, but it’s just a different animal when it’s your own business, right? Again, I was coming from a place of scarcity. I was trying to extract the most value that I could and pay the least frankly, right?

Jason:
I was just doing base. Then, I started to realize, as my company was growing, and as these responsibilities started piling up, there was no way that I could afford the level of talent that I needed just paying a base hourly wage, and then that’s it. Then, we started incorporating bonuses for our projects based on profitability. Then, we started incorporating bonuses to people that were helping us with property managers for getting our rentals turned in a certain amount of time. We do the same thing now for our Airbnb’s.

Jason:
I tried to do, I try to supplement my payroll in a way where instead of having one big salary and paying everybody 75 to 100 grand, we keep a reasonable base, and with the different bonuses, it allows them to make significant amount of money. My top person in my company should be making well over six figures, but we do a base salary, project management bonus, and she’s also a licensed agent. She gets a portion of the commissions of a lot of the flips that we sell.

Jason:
I like doing it that way. My explanation to my team is we are not a company that has consistent predictable top line revenue every single month where I can just say, “Hey, listen, we’re going to make X amount of dollars every month. It’s very easy for me to reverse engineer and project where we’re going to be at as far as expenses.” Some months we’re closing multiple deals, and we have a ton of money coming in, and then another couple of months, we don’t have anything and we’re just spending money, right?

Jason:
I want to reward you and pay you financially in a way that’s aligned with my company. As profits and revenue are coming into the business, I’ll tie your bulk of your compensation to that. That’s worked very well for me.

Rob:
That’s really smart. Yeah. Was this the process? Was it something that you kind of figured out along the way?

Jason:
Yeah. It sounds great now. You know what I mean? At the beginning, I was literally just flying by the seat of my pants, literally, I am a big believer in, I like to stay outside of my comfort zone and just not pushed so hard that we get to a point where we’re being reckless. I’m constantly pushing the envelope. Sometimes that can be scary and sometimes it can feel like you have no idea what’s going on. Some days it feels like the wheels are just going to completely come off.

Jason:
Then, sometimes things just click and it feels like, “Wow, this is working well.” It’s just been a constant process of progression and leveling up year after year that’s gotten us to this point now.

David:
How closely tied together are your, like the rehab crew and the people that focus on selling the property, getting it ready, versus the acquisition side where you’re sort of filtering through leads, and then setting someone up to go close on it? Are they the same people? Are these two different departments?

Jason:
No. They’re separate departments but we’re all integrated. The right hand does know what the left hand is doing. My operations manager, her name is Morgan, she also oversees a lot of the construction that we do on our rehab projects, and she’s reselling them. She’s helping me underwrite deals. She’s helping me understand what the resale value is going to be. I have final say so on what we’re going to buy and what we’re not going to buy, but she knows and understands. We’re on the same page and aligned with what those values are. Then, those numbers are then passed down to our acquisitions team.

Jason:
The way that it works is our leads come in. We do lead intake. We qualify them for motivation, all these other things. We send the property over to Morgan or myself to help with underwriting the deal. Then, we give them back an offer range that we think we could work, and we let them close that deal.

Jason:
Then, it just goes on the assembly line. Depending on what the exit strategy is, if it’s going to be a rehab or a burr property, then we’ll just get it scheduled with our contractors. We’ll get our bids in and we just hit the ground and start running and gunning.

David:
Do you have one person who’s sort of overseeing all the projects and they’re delegating things out or is that your role right now?

Jason:
No. I do not. That’s one of the things that I delegated out very early on, because I did not have a construction background. It was cool at the beginning. I still do like to see a really rundown house turned into a nice pretty house and hand that to somebody that’s going to live in there for a while. That makes me feel good but I don’t get any real joy or excitement in the process of doing it anymore. I delegated that out years ago.

Jason:
We do have a pretty good system in place now where we can buy, fix and sell a house and a lot of them, if I didn’t want to, I would never have to go out to them, which is good. We’ve systematized our design aspect. It makes it easier on us and it makes it easier on our contractors. We have two or three color schemes that we go with. We make a final decision on which one it goes. We send that list of material to our contractors. It’s got all the vendors where they go to buy it. Our prices are skews. We do phone sales for everything.

Jason:
We try to put out the best quality product that has kind of a custom look and feel without totally breaking the bank and it’s that balance between those two things that I have found has gotten us the really, really profitable deals, the things that sell for top dollar where it’s not just a carpet and paint, quick and easy rehab but also not over improving the property because we’ve over improved a lot of properties and left a lot of money on the table. You just kind of learn those things the hard way as you’re starting out.

David:
I found that in most businesses, like someone starts it and then you start hiring people to do parts of the job, the owner tends to move towards the front of the funnel and delegate the stuff that comes later on in the process.

Jason:
That’s true.

David:
I’m not surprised to hear that you’re still in acquisitions and you sort of delegate out the things that happen after the thing is acquired. At a certain point, you may even have one of your employees or hire someone out to be the one that negotiates and puts it in contract and you will move higher into how do I get more leads coming in for us to qualify? It always just seems to be-

Jason:
We have that now. It’s very interesting. Acquisitions and sales has been the thing that’s been the hardest for me to let go because deep down in my heart, I do feel like I’m still kind of a deal junkie. I always enjoy the hunt of doing a deal. I still get a little bit of a charge right now, even closing deals out. I’m good at it. At the beginning, I always had limiting beliefs because I said, “Well, if I’m the best person on my team to do it, and we could make 40 or 50,000 on this deal, I’m handing over this opportunity to somebody that may not be ready to close it and we’re leaving 50 grand on the table if the deal doesn’t get done, right.

Jason:
I had to overcome those beliefs and realize that in order for me to go to the next level, I needed to be a good enough coach and leader to be able to take the skill sets that were in me, download them into somebody else and make them stick. Now, we’ve got an acquisitions rep. We’ve got a followup specialist. We’ve got cold callers. I oversee that piece still, and I’m almost kind of fully extracted out of there. I like to interject myself. My coach says that I like to steal the ball from my team, and then dunk it and tell everybody how good I am by dunking. You know what I mean? I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m getting better at it but I’m not there yet right now.

David:
When it comes to these, finding these off market deals you’re talking about, I know you’ve talked about investing being a linear process. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Jason:
Yeah. When I say a linear process, what I mean is that you have a very clear and laid out process that you have to follow. There are steps and you can’t skip step one to go to step two or step three. One of the questions that I get all the time, especially for new investors is, if I had to start all over with no money, no resources, just the experience that I have, what would I do? I always tell them focus all of your time, effort and energy on step one. Step one to me is marketing and lead generation. That’s it. In this business, at least the niche that I’m in, if you don’t have your marketing setup and you don’t have leads coming in, you don’t have a business.

Jason:
That was one of the big things that was ingrained into me in corporate America was just the value of those leads. We knew exactly how much the company was spending every single month on our marketing budget. We were grilled. If leads came in, and we didn’t live answer or we didn’t call them back within a certain amount of time, our sales manager or my manager was all over us, right? Then, I was all over my guys. I just took that mindset and my thought process to this.

Jason:
I think most people, they skip the sales, marketing and lead generation because there is a lot of dirty work that’s involved with that process. Nobody likes to get on the phone and make 500 calls a day and get beat up on the phone by all these random sellers. Nobody likes to go out on appointments and get told no hundreds of times before they get a yes.

Jason:
Instead of just leaning into that and getting great at that, they want to skip that process and jump to how do I find the money to do a deal? Then, they want to jump to how do I find a contractor? Where do I interview contractors? What title companies are the best title companies in town? I tell them, “Listen, it doesn’t matter. If you had a $10 million and a construction company, if you don’t have deals coming in, it doesn’t matter, you have no projects to work on. You’ve got to focus on step one. I was just fortunate that a lot of my experience and background prior to breaking into real estate really taught me that and that was directly applicable towards the business I got into.

Rob:
I have a question in regards to sort of the financing of this operation because, this kind of gets back to what I was talking about earlier, one or two deals very digestible for people starting out. I sort of want to talk about, if you’re doing three to four deals at a time, I think you said you had 18 projects or 18 to 20 projects on the books.

Jason:
Eighteen to 20 approximately on the books all the time. Yeah.

Rob:
How does one really approach the financing aspect of that because if you’re doing one and you go in hard money, a lot of the hard money lenders out there will require 20% down, there are some that will do 10% down, I think it’s possible to find some that’ll just do the whole thing, but it’s very expensive, and it’s very manageable for one, but if you want to go from 1 flip to 10 flips, what is that financing approach and then is there a difference between going from 1 to 10 and then 10 to 75?

Jason:
Yes. For me, I started using all my own money because I was afraid to ask anybody else for money because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I mean, the conversation that my wife and I had at the beginning was, at least if this gets totally screwed up, it’s our money and we’re not borrowing money. I cashed in my life savings. I borrowed against my 401k. We took a second mortgage out on our house, and we use that along with maxing out all our credit cards and everything else. That, along with hard money, is what we did to initially start doing our first, maybe dozen deals, right?

Jason:
We would just borrow as much money as we could, get a hard money loan to cover the difference. Then, we would just fund the deal, sell it off, pay everything down, take that profit and reinvest it in the next deal. We did that over and over again until we start to get to two then to three. Then, it reached a point where cash management became a big deal. When you’re flipping at volume, that’s something that I don’t see a lot of people talking about is how to properly manage your cash within your company in order to be able to cover your overhead every single month and your payroll and the mortgages that you take in.

Jason:
What I eventually started doing, through just networking and building a community out, is making relationships with private lenders. That’s how we fund everything now. Depending on the deal, we may use hard money from time to time, but 95% of the deals are funded from different private lenders. I like that, because it’s easy. The terms are negotiable. I can get all the money that I need. I typically borrow 100% of the purchase price, the rehab costs and my holding costs. I’m borrowing all the money that I need.

Jason:
You have some people that want to get paid every month, but my preference would be to pay them at the end of the project. Then, that way, we don’t have cash crunches during on but cash management is a very important component of that business.

Rob:
Yeah, it seems like it could get pretty, pretty, I don’t know, like tough to keep track if you’re talking about three, four flips, you’ve got a few credit cards, if you’re using your home equity line of credit, and running the books on those different properties and breaking it all up. I mean is that-

Jason:
Accounting was a nightmare for us. It was a nightmare and especially once we got into like year three and four, where it was like, “Okay, now we’re flipping 30, 40 houses a year. We’ve got a dozen rentals. We’ve got a lot of things happening at once. We can’t just keep a separate Excel spreadsheet for every project. It doesn’t work like that anymore, right?

Jason:
We had to mature. We worked with our CPA, and eventually found an accounting team that basically handles all of our books. Now, they’ve got a custom built out of QuickBooks for us where there’s job costing, we have individual P&Ls on every single project. They pay all of our bills every single month. It’s one team where the finances kind of funnel in and funnel out. I just oversee, along with the people on my team, our key KPIs and those reports that get fed into us so we can make sure that we’re in a good space financially to make sure we’re managing everything.

David:
It’s a nice business model, man. That’s actually probably the most impressive thing.

Jason:
It sounds good me saying it but it was a lot of hard work. It’s, even now, it’s not perfect, man. The analogy I use with my team is we’re building the airplane while we’re flying the airplane in midair. That can be fun. It can also be really scary at the same time. [inaudible 00:43:13].

David:
I think that’s everyone’s business, though. You go to a workshop or you go to some seminar, and they get up there and they sound just like you. Here’s my flowchart. Here’s what this person does. It gives us impression that everything’s clean and nice. Then, you get in there and it’s actually complete chaos, and you are more or less trying to just keep this thing from crashing. What you’re describing is what you’re striving for, but it’s okay to be messy.

David:
That’s what I want to say is like, I think, we get compliments on my real estate sales team that we are the most organized, structured, best systems in place. It is constantly just, who’s doing this, why do I have to do it, how come they’re not doing it? This person messed up. It’s affected… There’s no way to have this happen without it being messy because there’s people involved. There’s emotions involved. You’ve got sellers that have, maybe want to sell, maybe don’t want to sell, right?

David:
You’ve got, I thought we were going to do it this way. Well, someone else does give me another way. I guess what I’m saying is it is okay to be messy as long as it’s successful, right? With time, it does get smoother and then someone quits or leaves or has a baby and doesn’t want to work and you got to throw a new person in there and it’s right back to messy. Has that been your experience?

Jason:
A 100% and I think that piece of advice that I would give to the people that are going through some of those growing pains is don’t be too hard on yourself. I had to take that lesson very early on. I was my own worst critic. I was so hard on myself.

Jason:
Even though we were doing great, I would always just beat myself up because we did not fit this image of what you see about that guy on stage with the flowcharts and everything’s dialed in. It took me a while to realize that nobody’s business is completely dialed in. It’s all just a progress, our process and we’re just progressing each and every day.

Jason:
I’ve learned to balance being grateful for where we’re at, and also just not being satisfied and knowing that we’ve got so much more left to do. That’s been a good space for me, because if you would have told me that seven years ago, when I started that I’d be doing what I’m doing right now, I wouldn’t have believed that it was even possible. What was sad would be, I wouldn’t even believe that I was the kind of person that was capable of doing it, which was even more sad for me, right?

Jason:
I had to get into this space where we proved to ourselves, and we had proof of concept like, “Wow, this works. Wow, I am capable of doing it.” That confidence, that self-confidence is like a muscle that you build over time. Now, when I say that I’m going to do something, I know that it’s going to happen because for the last seven years, I’ve been doing everything that I’ve been saying that I’m going to do, right? It doesn’t start out that way but you can get there and it doesn’t need to take a lifetime either.

David:
It’s such a good point. I think about that all the time. If you look at like, use a weightlifting analogy, or something, that just works so easily because you have to do it in increments, but you see someone bench pressing 400 pounds, and you look at where you are now and you’re like, “I could never do that. That’s impossible.”

Jason:
No. Yeah.

David:
It’s impossible yet at this stage, but the person that’s going to be doing it is not you right now. It’s going to be years of you adding five pounds onto that bar incrementally. And when you have that frame, that’s not going to be impossible. We all have a mental frame or a business frame or an emotional frame, something that will allow us to be capable of leading other people, managing other people, handling complex problems.

David:
As you’re listening to the podcast, and you’re like, “I’m just trying to get my first house or my second house,” yes, what Jason is doing would be impossible. That weight would crush you if we tried to load up the bar, but you’re not going to start off where Jason’s at. You’re going to start off where you’re at and just keep working out. You end up at where Jason is. It sounds like what I hear you saying is you’ve embraced, that’s just the reality of how life works. Quit worrying about if I could do it right now. Just have faith. You’re going to get there if you keep pushing.

Jason:
Yes, worry, doubt, and fear, those are emotions that don’t serve us. I learned a long time ago that I’ve got to be self-aware enough that when I feel myself going through some of those emotions, acknowledging them, but also reverting back to my prior experiences and realizing like, “Listen, every time you’ve been worried about something, you’ve overcome it.” 99% of the time, the problem doesn’t even manifest itself and the 1% of the time that it does, you figure out what you need to do. You overcome it and you move on so at least you learned something from it.

Jason:
I think most people are so caught up in those three emotions: worry, doubt, and fear that they just stop themselves from doing everything. You’ve got to work on your mindset along with the tactical real estate stuff that you’re going to learn in your day to day business. Those two things for me just go hand in hand.

David:
Good deal. We are going to move on to the next segment of the show. It is the famous deal deep dive. In this segment of the show, we are going to dive deep into a deal that you’ve done. Do you have one in mind we can dive into?

Jason:
I do. We just sold our most profitable deal ever in February. That would be a great one to unpack.

David:
Let’s talk about it. Rob and I will fire questions at you. If you could just answer that question, we’ll fire the next one. First question is very simple, what kind of property is this?

Jason:
It’s a single family house.

Rob:
Okay, how did you find it?

Jason:
We found it via trustee sale. We bought it at auction.

David:
Nice. How much did you buy it for?

Jason:
1.72 million.

Rob:
Okay, how did you negotiate it?

Jason:
We just ended up having to come up with a bid that we thought was good for the property. With these trustee sales, there isn’t direct negotiation with the seller. It’s basically house has been foreclosed on. We had to put in a bid that we felt we could make money on that.

David:
You’re flying blind. That’s tricky.

Jason:
Flying blind. Flying blind.

David:
There’s no baseline to go off.

Jason:
That’s right.

David:
All right. How did you fund this deal?

Jason:
We funded it with money from one of our private lenders and because of the amount of money that was required to buy, fix, and sell it, we ended up giving them an equity portion in the deal because there was no other way to structure it.

Rob:
What did you do with the deal? Did you flip it, rent it, burn it?

Jason:
The plan was to flip it. We were going to work with a construction partner, do a full blown rehab. This property was in 17 mile drive on Pebble Beach. It’s one of the most desirable neighborhoods in California. We thought we were going to buy it for 1.72, put about 5 or 600,000 into it and then sell it for 4 but about 45 days after we bought it, a broker from that area cold called us and said, “I have somebody that will buy it as is right now. They’re just going to tear the house down and build a mansion.” We ended up selling it to his buyer and we made about $825,000 in 60 days.

David:
All right. We know what you did with it there and we know what the outcome was. Last question is what lessons did you learn from this deal?

Jason:
This is what I would tell anybody that is following along, everybody sees the money on that and they get caught up in the money, but you need to understand what was involved in even getting us to a space where we could buy a $1.7 million deal that we thought we were going to get to 4 million. There’s so many different obstacles and hurdles that came up. I’ve got a whole big post on my social media account. You can go to my Instagram and you can read all the different things.

Jason:
To condense it, we basically talked ourselves out of buying this deal. We waited until five days before the bid was due to even ask about raising the money. We got the money basically the day that the bid was due. I missed all the commercial flights to San Diego where I needed to go drop the check. I had to pay $8,000 to book a private plane…

David:
Wow.

Jason:
… to get me to San Diego, to drop the check off at the trustee without even knowing whether or not we were going to win that bid. There were so many different mental obstacles and objections that we had to overcome before we even got there. We found out couple days later that we won, 60 days later, we sold it and made 825 grand. I mean, it was one of the most wild and amazing experiences that I have. I would focus less on the money and more on just what it took to get there mentally. It was seven years of work and building a foundation that got us there.

David:
Well, congratulations on that.

Jason:
Thank you.

David:
That’s wild. I mean, I can only imagine how fast your mind was would racing. We don’t want it. We don’t want it. We don’t want it. I want it. Then, boom, everything is just chaos. Can we get there? I mean, that have been a cool thing to video and turn into a YouTube video or even, it sounds like a TV show.

Jason:
I was gone. I was on my Instagram story the whole time. Maybe, I’ll go download my stories and send it to somebody and they can edit it and they can see everything. It was the wild… I was literally scared to swipe the $8,000 to charter the plane. Had I not done that, we wouldn’t have done the deal, right? I was negotiating. There’s all these steps where I was negotiating in my mind where I was like, “Nah, this is too risky. You’ve never done a deal this big. You’ve never done this.”

Jason:
Going back to that conversation that we had about building the muscle of self-confidence, I was able to tap into that experience and just say, “You know what, you got this dude. All the indicators are there. This feels right. Let’s go and see what happens.” It worked out.

David:
Congrats on that. That’s a very cool story.

Rob:
That’s crazy, man. That’s so good.

Jason:
Thank you.

David:
We’re going to move on to the last segment of the show. It is the Famous For. This segment of the show, we ask every guest the same four questions every episode, and we’re going to fire them off to you, Jason. Question number one, what is your favorite real estate book?

Jason:
My favorite real estate book, I would say as the Go Giver. It doesn’t apply directly towards real estate, but it helps people understand that if you come from a place of abundance, and if you help other people, you’re not taking away opportunities from yourself. The momentum that you get by helping somebody else actually gets the two of you where you want to go faster. That is my favorite book I applied towards real estate. It’s also the most gifted book that I’ve ever given out as a gift.

Rob:
What is your favorite business book?

Jason:
I would say Think and Grow Rich, even though it’s kind of a mindset book, I think the lessons in there can be applied directly towards a business. It taught me the value of networking. It taught me the value of visualization, masterminding with other high level people. There’s some universal laws in there that directly apply towards any business.

Rob:
When you’re not out there growing your empire and flipping 75 houses a year, what are some of your hobbies?

Jason:
Travel. My wife and I love to travel. One of the fringe benefits of flipping all these houses is we rack up a ton of credit card points. We were in Italy two weeks ago. Basically, we’re able to stay in every hotel for free, fly for cheap.

Rob:
Nice.

Jason:
We travel once a quarter. That’s basically our goal is to take one big trip once a quarter. Yeah, travel is definitely our thing.

David:
In your opinion, what sets apart successful investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started?

Jason:
Mindset for sure. I think if anybody’s going to take anything away from this podcast is that you can be great at negotiations, you can have great people skills, but I think if you have a losing mindset or a losing mentality, you’re going to self-sabotage. For me, everything is built off the foundation of self-improvement and mindset. If you can get your head screwed on straight every day and show up and be consistent, it’ll be much easier to find the success that you’re looking for over the long term in the real estate field.

Rob:
That’s awesome, man. Well, lastly, can you tell us more about where people can find out about you on the interwebs?

Jason:
Sure. I think the easiest place to find out about me would be just on social media. Instagram and Facebook is where I’m most active. It’s just my first and last name, Jason Pritchard. If you type those things in, that’s the easiest place to connect with me. If you’re in the Central California market, we do monthly meetups. We get 200 plus people that come to those. I love giving back to the community. That’s been a great way for me to build my network out here. In person, in this area, you can do that but if not just hop on social media. Shoot me a message.

David:
That is awesome. Jason, I love your story. I hope that we can get you back on here again to dive into it a little bit deeper. I don’t know how we haven’t crossed paths already. We’re both in California and you’re doing something pretty awesome down there. It’s probably because you live in no man’s land. Fresno is like the Bermuda Triangle of California. Fly over it. You hope your plane doesn’t crash and then you end up in Southern California and all of a sudden you’re in California again, but it’s like the wild, wild, west out there. Is that where you’ve lived your whole life?

Jason:
Basically, we bounced around for a little bit until I was five and then my dad got a teaching job at Fresno State. He’s a professor at Fresno State and Fresno has been home base since first grade for me, man. I really love it out here. Roots run deep. I’m bullish on the Fresno market. I actually think that we’re going to see a lot of growth in the valley and I’m very happy where we’re at. Everybody talks about the prices in California, but there’s still some affordability and some good deals where we’re at.

David:
I agree with you, especially in that Bakersfield Fresno area. That’s where people are going to be moving into because prices are just getting crazy in other parts.

Jason:
That is correct.

David:
I think you got a lot of room to run there also.

Jason:
I think so.

David:
Rob, where can people find out about you?

Rob:
You can find me on YouTube at Robuilt, Instagram @Robuilt, TikTok @robuilto, and I’ll have to resurrect my MySpace. I’m sure that’s still out there somewhere, [inaudible 00:55:40]. What about you?

Jason:
I don’t know if I want to resurrect my MySpace. Hopefully, my MySpace stays [inaudible 00:55:45].

David:
Someone will. I’m telling you [inaudible 00:55:47] play.

Jason:
Oh Jesus. I need to go looking out. Oh, no.

David:
Someone’s going to make MySpace cool again but bell bottom jeans keep coming back all the time, right?

Jason:
Oh yeah.

David:
Remember those slap bracelet things.

Jason:
Mm-hmm.

David:
Maybe you guys don’t remember those.

Jason:
No. I remember. Yeah.

David:
They’re very popular. They made a comeback, right? How many iterations of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have we’ve seen? Someone’s doing that to MySpace. Mark my word. If I could buy stock in MySpace, I would right now because it’s going to come back. It’s also ridiculous.

David:
Thank you, Jason. This has been great. You can find me online on all social media @DavidGreene24. Please look very careful at the screen name that the newest iteration of this garbage is David with two eyes. They’re faking my account and messaging people. If you get a follow request from me, look very carefully before you accept it. Makes sure it’s the right one. This is going around on social media quite a bit. I don’t have the blue checkmark yet. You don’t know that it’s me.

David:
You can also find me on YouTube at David Greene Real Estate, not as exciting of a name as Robuilt but pretty easy to remember, if that’s what you’re thinking. All right. I’ll get us out of here, Jason. This has been great. This is David Greene for Rob, the most interesting man in the world, Rob Abasolo, signing off.

The year was 1999. An exclusive group of multi-billionaires gathered in Sun Valley, Idaho, just like they do every year.

As usual, no reporters were allowed within miles of their gathering. This was a safe place for the wealthiest Americans to freely share ideas, strategize, and break from the rigors and pressures they faced the other 51 weeks in 1999.

But something was different this year.

People were whispering about one of their most revered members.

“Do you think he’s senile? He is almost 70 [years old], after all.”

“He’s lost his touch. He had a great run for about four decades, but he’s clearly fading into irrelevance.”

“The market has left his returns…and his old-fashioned thinking…in the dust. My high school grandson’s returns are three times higher than his.”

They were talking about Warren Buffett. And they were gloating about their massive wins from the run-up in tech stocks. Newer attendees like Jeff Bezos were celebrated while Buffett was discounted.

Buffett wasn’t ruffled. He knew what he believed, and he wasn’t about to trade decades of expertise and success through value investing principles to join yet another fad.

For Buffett, the issues surrounded the lack of actual value in the tech firms exploding in price. Companies like Amazon, Pets.com, and Webvan were the darlings of the S&P 500, yet, they had little to no profits driving their popularity.

Their popularity can also be called speculation.

Taxi drivers and college students were becoming overnight millionaires. Of course, many investment titans like Buffett were discarded as outdated relics of a soon-to-be-forgotten generation.

Time Magazine mocked Buffett that summer. It reportedly stated: “Warren, what went wrong?”

So how did Buffett respond? In his usual dry humor, he addressed the audience of doubters.

Buffett began by saying, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is more like a weighing machine. In the end, the weighing opportunity wins, but in the short term, it will be determined by the voting chips. However, its voting mechanism is very undemocratic. Unfortunately, as you know, it does not certify voting qualifications.”

Elsewhere, Buffett said he preferred investing in Wrigley’s over tech. He said he had no idea where technology would be in a decade. But he knew how people would be chewing gum.

“Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it’s the lack of change that appeals to me. I don’t think it is going to be hurt by the internet. That’s the kind of business I like.”

Of course, we all know what happened. The tech bubble burst, about $5 trillion was lost, and Buffett landed on top, again.

When everyone is mutually rewarded from the market’s rise, expertise is no longer celebrated.

This is a phenomenon that raises its head late in boom cycles. This is not new. There are many examples in the past century:

• As reported by Time: “There is a famous story, we don’t know if it’s true, about how in the late summer of 1929, a shoeshine boy gave Joe Kennedy stock tips, and Kennedy, being a wise old investor, thought, ‘If shoeshine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.’ So the story says Joe Kennedy sold all of his stocks and made a killing, and maybe that’s the beginning of the fortune that made JFK president three decades later.”
• The stock market fell out of favor in the early 70s when I was a kid. The world ran away from the markets and shunned former experts. But this same world was quite different in the late 90s. Barnes & Noble’s shelves were bursting with books on trading stocks. I sold my company to a publicly-traded firm for a ridiculous multiple. Who needed experts when everyone was getting rich from the market’s bull run?
• Barnes & Noble’s shelves switched to millionaire landlord books from 2004 to 2007. Real estate experts with years of knowledge were ignored, and “Newrus” (my fun term for New Gurus) became celebrities. (Who didn’t know a fix-n-flip guru?) Then 2008 hit.

The Death of Expertise in 2022

So, what is going on now? Is this happening again?

I will say yes.

I know many people making a killing–millions of dollars–in real estate right now. Many of them were in high school, college, tech jobs, or engineering as recently as 2015. I applaud them!

I just spoke with a prospective investor who told me he’s made over $5 million in buying random parcels of land and reselling them a few years later. He’s a tech genius but only invests in real estate on the side.

Yesterday I spoke to one of our investors in Southern California. He told me the story of his family’s industrially zoned land near Los Angeles. He bought other family members out a few years ago when the land was worth $4 to $5 million. He just got an offer for $25 million, and his broker said he might be able to get $27 million. I’m so happy for him!

I applaud all of these investors! But there’s a problem.

Expertise is discounted late in cycles. When everyone is being rewarded relatively equally, it is hard to tell who the experts are. Therefore, it’s hard to know who to listen to and who to invest with.

How did this sound last time around? For those of us who were investing in real estate leading up to 2008, this is what we were hearing:

• “It’s different this time.”
• “This boom has now become the new norm.”
• “People are moving here for the lifestyle.” (Where was “here”? Everywhere. From Las Vegas to Buffalo, New York.)
• “Buy land! They’re not making any more of it.”
• “Everyone needs a place to live.”

In the Summer of 2005, the soon-to-be-nominated Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, said: “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, and might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s [going to] drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”

In mid-2007, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen told Fortune Magazine: “This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.” His brother, John, a true expert, was shorting the housing market and made a fortune in the next few years.

P.T. Barnum said, “Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.”

Where is the crowd rushing right now? And are we living and investing in a time where true expertise is devalued, and hype is the operating principle of the day?

Howard Marks said the top of a bubble is reached just after the crowds think the bull run will go on forever.

But trees don’t grow to the sky.

Marks, a true expert, made much of his fortune in late 2008 at the other end of the spectrum: buying distressed assets when the crowds thought markets would decline forever.

In the autumn of 2008, a reporter interviewed Marks about his strategies during the free-falling market. He said their firm, Oaktree Capital Management, was buying up to half a billion dollars in assets per week. The reporter said, “Wait, you mean you’re selling, right?” Marks said, “No! We’re buying. If not now, when?”

True experts like Buffett and Marks are often busy going against the herd.

How Can You Get Burned When Expertise is Declining?

There are probably many ways. Just look online. Check out the thousands of “news stories” and opinions regurgitated as facts.

The internet has caused people to think they are more informed than they are. Users think they understand a topic by quickly searching and skimming often misleading headlines. Before the internet, rigorous study and deep research were required to develop a strong opinion on a matter.

Part of the problem is a society that has produced today’s education system. When everyone is rewarded equally, people don’t have to think critically and research deeply to get an A. But this lack of judgment doesn’t play well in the real world, and it can result in us treating non-experts as gurus.

When I was a boy…no, I’m not going to tell you how I walked six miles uphill in waist-deep snow!

We didn’t have rubber mats on playgrounds when I was a kid. Our incentive to master the monkey bars was to avoid a skinned-up knee or a broken arm.

When we increase comfort, we kill aspiration. I fear that a society that has protected our kids from potential pain (I’m guilty as a dad!) may have also protected them from the ability to reason deeply and clearly delineate risk and return.

(Some of the comments in this six-paragraph rant came from a review of Tom Nichols’ book The Death of Expertise.)

Rant complete.

I can see at least two obvious ways this could hurt your real estate career.

First, we all need to be lifelong learners. But I’m warning everyone to be careful who they are listening to. Look for true experts rather than Newrus.

Second, be careful who you invest with. You may passively invest in direct deals, turnkey homes, debt for house flippers, syndications, or funds. I applaud you. But I would warn you to do everything in your power to find the real experts. Put your money on them.

So, how can you tell if your “guru” is a real expert or just another Newru?

Identifying experts

Have typically weathered multiple up and down cycles.

Pay the price when they’re wrong. (They put skin in the game and don’t make a killing from non-performance-based fees.)

Anticipate change. They don’t assume the future is the same as the past. (Just look at interest rate declines over several decades, for example. Do you really believe that will continue?)

Look bad when novices soar but shine brightly when the crowds are in turmoil.

Invest in boring deals in times when others chase shiny assets.

Are comfortable with chaos.

Experts who play the long game will win in the end. Don’t yield your common sense and experience to Newru-Gurus.

Epilogue

There will come a day when expertise is celebrated again. We’re in a late-cycle phenomenon, and the current situation could signify a coming reversal.

Then expertise will be celebrated as it should be, and true experts will shine as they always do.

Many of the fallen will lick their wounds.

Some will vow to never invest in real estate again. Others will look for the next guru.

Prepare for a market shift

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