There are many house flippers, who end up becoming real estate wholesalers. I think many people feel you become a wholesaler first, and then work your way up to flipping. Many very successful real estate investors like to wholesale, because it takes less time and less money than flipping. On today’s episode of the Invest Four More Real Estate Podcast, I interview Cory Boatright, who is a real estate investor and entrepreneur. Most real estate investors, think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but Cory has started over 40 companies. Not all of them succeeded, in fact most of them failed, but a couple of businesses hit it big. Cory tells us all about how he started out in real estate at age of 21, started many non real estate related companies and has evolved from flipper, to wholesaler to coach.
How did Cory start out in real estate?
Cory bought his first house at the age of 21, a fixer upper. He was not planning to be a big real estate investor at that time, he just thought buying one house would be a good investment. He bought the house and ended up doing most of the work himself to fix it up. I can relate to this very well, as one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was repairing a flip myself! Cory lived in that house for a couple of years and it turned out to be an awesome investment. Cory was still distracted by other business and was focused on a number of other businesses, including drop shipping. One of the businesses that succeeded for Cory was selling high-end electronics (this was 15 years ago). Those plasma televisions we buy now for $500 were once $15,000 and that was what he sold. He ended up selling that business and then pursuing real estate full-time.
How did Cory learn about real estate investing?
Cory knew nothing about real estate investing, except that he made decent money on the property he bought. He began his education by purchasing every real estate course he could find on eBay. He bought the courses, learned what he could, and then sold them back to other people on eBay. He learned all about flipping, wholesaling, tax liens and many other strategies.
Cory started out flipping, but quickly grew tired of dealing with contractors. He switched his business model to wholesaling and loved it. During the late 2000’s the housing crisis hit and Cory found a new niche, short sales. He started a loss mitigation company that helped agents and investors negotiate short sales with banks. Cory loved working with short sales and the profit that came with it. He even helped develop software to make the short sale process easier. But bank regulations changed how he was able to conduct business and short sales became less profitable as time went on.
Here is a great article on short sales
How has Cory’s real estate career evolved?
As you can see, Cory has not just been a real estate investor. He has started companies and businesses to help real estate investors and help himself invest better as well. After learning new techniques and better ways to invest, Cory was approached about coaching. The next phase of his real estate journey opened up when he started helping others learn how to invest in real estate. Cory has a thriving coaching business for real estate and as a life coach as well. Cory still invests in real estate himself, but his 60 rentals he once owned were reduced greatly due to a divorce. He highly suggest not getting a divorce!
How can you contact Cory?
Cory can be found at realestateinvestingprofits.com, where he also has a great podcast and many resources for investors.
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Transcript:
[0:00:58.0] MF: Hey everyone, Mark Ferguson with Invest Four More, welcome to another episode of the Invest Four More real estate podcast. I’ve got a really cool guest on for this show, Cory Boatright with Real Estate Investing Profits and phenomenal results coaching is with me. Cory’s got his own podcast and extremely successful investor and does some really interesting things in his life.
Cory, thank you so much for joining me, how are you today?
[0:01:23.7] CB: Phenomenal man, thanks for having me on here, I appreciate it.
[0:01:25.9] MF: Yeah, no problem. Great to have you, I know you’ve had a really interesting journey, you started over 40 companies, only a couple were successful, hoping that lead you to real estate. We are talking in a podcast that I did for you the other day and you got started at a very young age in real estate, how did you first get involved in real estate?
[0:01:46.8] CB: Sure. 21 years old when I got my first rental property, I kind of stumbled into it with one of my good friends and it was a little duplex in Oklahoma city and didn’t know what I was doing but we ended up moving in that place, fixing everything ourselves which I thought was going to save me a lot of money just like when you and I were talking how sometimes the logical things don’t always come out most profitable in the end and what happened was I fixed all those things myself.
Learned what I didn’t want to do very quickly but over two years lived in that place so it saved money and ended up flipping it for almost double what we paid for and that really was the first time, I was like, “Wow, this is pretty interesting.” However, at the time I was growing my E-commerce business which was a high end electronics, high end AB Electronics Company and we were just doing really well with that.
All my focus was — I’m sorry if you can hear the background noise but I’m here at Starbucks, actually it’s all about shop, I use Starbucks. Basically it’s growing that business and it began to take off. You remember when plasma TV’s were 15, $20,000 mark.
[0:03:06.9] MF: Yeah.
[0:03:07.4] CB: They first came out. That’s when I got involved with that when it was just right here and it was just cruising up and now of course you can go, same TV I used to sell for 15, $16,000. You can go down the store now and buy for $500 and it’s pretty insane. That’s the nature of electronics.
That happens, I grew that business, I sold it before I was aged 25 and I got really excited form that, I knew I wanted to do something else and I started to look around and notice a lot of folks that I sold these plasma TV’s to, I kept a list of all these clients and they were highly affluent. Obviously, not everyone could afford something like that and the ones that could, they were doing pretty well and do you know whenever I would talk to these folks, I’d ask them, “What made you successful? What was it that gave you the ability to be able to get something like this?”
Because it was a high — it’s like a toy right? Some of these guys were just stroking checks and it’s just really, at the time, my early 20’s I was just like, “Wow, this is very exciting to me and I want to learn.” I asked them a lot of questions and some of them would take an hour on the phone and talk to me about stories. I think about 95% of them all had a story with real estate.
[0:04:28.1] MF: That’s awesome. I want to get into that more but first I’m guessing that was one of the two companies that succeeded. You said you had started over 40 companies. But, what was your game plan when you were younger, were you just trying different things to see what’s successful or how did you start 40 companies?
[0:04:47.8] CB: I know, it sounds crazy right? I had a TNC video company with one of my good friends as well which we actually sold VCR tapes to lawyers for deposition trials and whatnot and they used to pay $120 for these things and it was just because basically there’s only a couple of guys in town that would provide this service for them.
I figured out a way to obviously get a VCR tape cheaper than $125 and we would go and make these recordings and did that for a little bit. I sold Wicker knives for a while, I sold Genzi knives for a while. I got involved with several little MLM companies. At one point I had my own car business, its called Boat Ride Auto Finders. I had a car lot, we had “buy here, pay here loans”.
The list can go on and on, most of these things I figured out I did not like to do them and the real estate business and the drop ship business which was interesting, the high end electronics business was a drop shipping business and I just so happened to live in a town where the founder of a company called Petra Industries, he actually started this company which was a drop shipping warehouse, if you will, for all these other companies.
He was going to the founder of the company that did a billion dollars in business the second year that I recognized what he was doing. I looked at his numbers and hit a billion dollars in business and he lived in my city. He was going to my church. I actually had a chance to connect with him and worked some bills out and that business grew and I grew that business and I sold that business and from there really start looking more heavily into real estate. And form real estate — really, that’s the other business that has been successful.
The drop shipping business which also had to do with Internet and I succeeded in that business because I was great at marketing and the same guy can sell the same TV right? I would sell faster and more TV’s than he would because I realize what the market wanted, I would go online and find these places where people were hanging out to buy this high end electronics and it was places where they had Net Jets’ ads on there, it had pictures of people with Rolexes.
They had pictures of people with the boats, they had pictures with attractive women and on this pictures and having a lifestyle business, with all lifestyles. When I posted different images in marketing, it was all about lifestyle and then it was all about how fast somebody wanted to have an answer to something because these people are used to getting what they want.
I just catered to that and it gave me the advantage but from there, skip on from there and went to in real estate, I started, after I sold my business, I started looking at other different methodologies, I didn’t know anything really about real estate, besides the fact I stumbled across one when I was 21 years old.
So I really wanted to learn as fast as possible and I went on eBay and I started to type in “real estate investing”, “teach me real estate investing”. I just went on eBay and started typing all this stuff about real estate investing and I ended up getting course after course. All the Ron LeGrand courses, all the Carlton Sheets courses, you remember these? Remember that big Ron LeGran three, like yellow, blue, red? All that he had for wholesaling and for flipping houses.
He had one for doing fix and flips and what I would do is add a strategy. I would go through these courses marked on eBay, I would go through and I mark them up, I put highlighter on them and I mark it and put the notes in, I’d take all these bits and pieces out of these courses and I make my own kind of notebook of things that I thought was the most important then I would resell the course back on eBay and sometimes I would get more money when I resold the course than whenever I bought it.
For one year and one day, 366 days, I did nothing in my car except listening to audio books for one full year which is tough for me. I’m a musician and play guitar, when I got in my car I wanted to listen to music but for one full year, my discipline was, “Don’t do anything besides listen to audio,” and in fact it was a joke, I had my friends, when we’d says, “Who’s car are we going to go into?” “Oh don’t go into Cory’s car because all you’re going to hear is learning,” right? They didn’t want to hear it.
So one full year I did that but I went through it and I learned tons of Brian Tracy, book Psychology of Selling, Dale Carnegie books, How to Win Friends, and Influence People, tons of Tony Robbins’ stuff. I read the whole bible, I had a whole bible on audio. Just tons of self-development books and tons of real estate books. Ron LeGrand courses, Carlton Sheats courses. Back in the day there was these tons of teachers and it really gave me I think a good foundation on the fact that, “Wow, I don’t have to go to school to learn this, I thought I had to be — have a certification, I thought I had to had have a degree to do this?” I really did.
I know it sounds silly now but I really thought that if I’m going to be dealing in real estate, to me this is like, this is such a big deal, I put it up there right along with law. If I’m going to be doing something like this and I’ve really got to — but when I realize it, most people that were doing real estate that were being successful at it were either fix and flippers or wholesalers. I remember the day that I figured out that someone didn’t need money to flip their own house. Do you remember you’re figuring out the fact that wholesaling really meant flipping papers, not houses?
[0:10:45.3] MF: Right.
[0:10:45.6] CB: You remember that? You remember when you thought — for a long time I still thought wholesaling meant I was going to buy somebody’s house and then I flip it but most of the time you’re signing a contract. And so that gave me permission in a way to go, “If I don’t need the money to go do this stuff,” because I thought, “Okay, I have some money but I didn’t really want to spend it all at one time.”
I thought, “If I don’t need the money to do this well what do I need? I need education, I need specialized education on how to do it.” That’s what I did, I learned on how to do something and got out there and started hustling man, hustling hard and became a bird dog for a mentor of mine and then from there I realized that he was flipping properties.
So I started to flip my own properties and then from there I had a fix and flip business which I was not able to learn how to succeed because I just didn’t know how to keep contractors not drunk on Saturdays. Really.
[0:11:46.3] MF: We all run into that problem.
[0:11:47.6] CB: Yeah, you run into it right? The days I thought I was going to make 25, $30,000 on the flip here in Oklahoma fix and flip, I’d ended up making $15 which is still okay but the whole point is when you’re taking a deal down to make double than what you would make on a wholesale deal.
I just started to focus more and more on other parts of real estate and for me, what really kind of set the trajectory was wholesaling. That was in 2006, 2005, 6, 7 was a good time to get involved in a little thing called short sales. That’s for me when I started to put all the focus in short sales, that’s when everything took off for me because I realize that you could actually make more money from a property that was over leveraged, no equity, than you could from one that hadn’t had the equity.
When I realize that, that time, not very many people were doing it, I think Jeff Caller at the time was doing it, if you remember Jeff. Not too many people were really doing the short sale game. I just started loss Mitigation Company and took off and that really, we did for about four years solid in the short sale game and focused heavily on that.
Had a big loss Mitigation Company, we were discounting on average 500, $600,000 a month from banks and we got up over $50 million dollars total from whenever we completely, I’m not involved with short sales as much now because of all the red tape that came out as you probably know.
You’re talking about doing BPO’s, we had 50 short sales in the hop for any given time Mark. Any given time we’d have 50 short sales in the pipeline. We’re closing on average two, sometimes three a week, I had BPO agents that were all around Oklahoma and sometimes when I couldn’t get the BPO number I would find out who that just came out to do the BPO for the bank and I’d order another BPO from the same person that just went out and did the BPO.
He wouldn’t even go back out the house. He would just send me the same one that he sent the bank. That was one of the ways that I was able to get the number from the bank which I knew when I had that number where they’re going to be, they’re going to be around 80, 82, 83 cents on the dollar and sometimes that BPE, as you know, could come in pretty low.
We did really well on short sales and then of course all the new changes came out, the FHA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and started new regulations and how long you had to hold the property and then the big option came out, the option agreement with Jeff Watson was a big proponent when that first came out.
I went through that whole deal and then we started moving to doing land trust instead of doing purchase agreements and went from land trust, went over to doing option agreements and it just became after a while, you’re just trying to figure out a way to — as an investor you’ll figure out a way to get around something but whenever the feds started coming in and really was trying to make an example of people.
Even if you’re done, your eyes and crossing your tease. At the end of the day, whenever you went to closing and you signed off on something, you would say something along the lines of you didn’t already have this property, resold, you didn’t have a buyer already waiting for it, you weren’t going to resell the property for at least 90 days and it started getting more complicated.
We started selling LLC’s to get around it, we started to put stuff more in land trust. After a while man, it just wasn’t worth it, there’s just easier ways to find a paycheck.
[0:15:27.2] MF: Right. Yeah, let me stop you there for a second but for those who don’t know. A short sale, basically the owner of the home, their loan is more than they can sell it for. I give your houses $100,000, you might have a loan of a $120,000 and you have to go to the bank, ask for basically permission to sell it for less than what the banks owed and the bank is taking a loss on those deals.
When you started your loss mitigation company, I’ve heard of different people using that term as far as if they help agents negotiate with banks but it sounds like you were basically trying to negotiate short sales to purchase yourself, is that right? Then wholesale?
[0:16:05.2] CB: We have both of it. We had an investor company that was putting offers in and then my time, my ex-wife at the time which was also a real estate agent and we had a credited system for all the real estate agents that we got for a title company. We do these classes and we weren’t really able to solicit but we’d give out our cards and say if you have a deal, you have a question about it.
Everyone was calling us about these short sales because no one knew about them and the agents hated doing them because it took forever. Don’t worry about it, you don’t have to worry about — we’ll do all the loss mitigation for you. That worked out really well, we got a lot of agents who got credits for working with this, brought us deals, it worked out really well.
[0:16:49.2] MF: Yeah, as an agent who has worked on short sales. I can see using any company because like you said it can take the six months to complete a short sale with some of the banks like bank of America or some other ones and you’re sending them pages and pages. That usually had to be faxed at that time which was crazy and yeah, it was just a huge pain to get anything through.
No, very cool. From what you said as far as a new changing regulations, they pretty much made it impossible to wholesale short sales now because all the regulations and you can’t resell it within a certain amount of days, like you said you don’t know a buyer beforehand, there’s a lot of red tape now on short sales.
[0:17:30.5] CB: It was to get the most, it’s not impossible. People still do it now, mostly with cash buyers but at the time, we were using retail buyers because when you use a retail buyer, you were making the most amount of money. Imagine, you get a short sale for let’s say 75,000, you got it resold for 130.
It’s a pretty good chunk of money but that’s a retail buyer, they’re getting a loan, they’re putting money up. Then you’d have to have the banks understand what was going on and the lenders have to understand what’s going on and that was pretty as the regulations starting to get tighter and tighter, that was very difficult.
Then we started to just move to cash buyers and that was a lot easier, definitely a lot easier. Anytime you’re dealing with cash buyers, it’s so much easier. There’s just not nearly as much red tape but back to what we’re talking about short sale very quickly. You’re right about the fax, when you fax things in all the documents, it was sometimes this thick.
It would take sometimes a week to get the paper work plus you’re trying to get it from the home owner. The home owner has to give you all the authorizations. Everything that you basically a power of attorney if you will to some degree of everything. You just met this person right? You’re trying to get all this information.
You have to really know what you’re doing, you have to have negotiations down, you have to have your strategy down. We had a pretty good team on how that worked. The entrepreneurial side of me of course was thinking, how can I make this process, anytime I see a ping, a process of that’s painful, I always get excited. One of my good mentors told me that whenever you have a headache or it sucks for you but fantastic for Tylenol.
Great advice right? Because you said be Tylenol, how could you be Tylenol? I found a guy that started a software company, he actually had a great software and we started to go and look and see what can we do to make a short sale package quicker. How can we get it automated basically?
We sure enough started a software company that was called short sale builder. If you remember, it got pretty big, we had almost 5,000 users, we charge $97 a month. It was a pretty big business, this was before real flow really came out which I know Greg and Josh at the time are really good friends.
Short sale commander and all these other companies are coming out but we were just right in there and we came out the thing called the short sale builder and you hit a button and it would build the whole packet and it was automated and all you had to do is fill in a couple of fields and it would automate it and our packets were going to the top because when you’re dealing with loss litigators, they’re making $10 an hour, they wanted to make it simple. That’s what we did, we found a way to make the package simple for them.
We knew exactly what they needed in the order that they wanted it in and that’s what we did, we created this short sale software and ran that business for two years and so that was all a part of that whole short sale movement and yeah, that was another part of the whole sorts of things and then I became a reluctant kind of information marketer for that business. First I was doing this Dennis here in Oklahoma city, I was having a Dennis where people come for breakfast and then people are asking me more questions, let’s do lunch.
We did lunch and then we started doing dinners and we started doing group dinners and we started doing group dinners and then we started putting on classes for the title company and everything — we started doing this and someone said why don’t you just create a corps, this guy named Chris Chico connected with me one time because I was on a forum called easy HUD back in the days, it’s called easy HUD.
I was answering everybody’s questions on this forum, he said, “Dude, you are this guy that is an authority figure for this short sales and on a forum, do you want to be a moderator?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll be a moderator, that’s cool.” After I did that, he said, “Hey, I got a big list of people, let’s do this webinar thing,” which at the time no one, I mean I hadn’t even barely heard of a webinar but, “You need to create a course and we’ll split it, we’ll create it and we’ll sell it for $1,500 and we’ll split the profits 50/50.”
I was like, “What? A course, like one of those guys on TV?” Literally it’s not something that really I was thinking of doing but they started explaining the fact that you make a course one time, you could sell it forever and you could help a lot more people and all these things I’m doing I could just sell them my course. I thought okay, that makes sense. I created a course and I think the first night we did our webinar, we sold like 150 courses on the webinar.
[0:21:52.3] MF: Wow.
[0:21:53.0] CB: Which was for $1,500 man, it was like a game changer, it was the biggest aha thing in my life. I was like, “Wow! I mean we just crushed it and people loved it and it was exciting.” From there, I was hooked. I was hooked form the internet and real estate fusion right? I started to go to these different events, one called the virtual investing seminar, that’s where I met Preston Eli. You know Preston. I met Gary boomer shine, I met Sam Bale. I met Collin Egbert from realestateinvestor.com back in the day.
I met all these other guys that you see and teach now. I think Dan Meryl was at that one, Chris Chico was at that one, just tons of people, they’re kind of just getting started and that’s where I met some of those guys and then we did a virtual investing seminar two and just started to see more and more real estate going online. More and more going online. You had to figure out a way to get in front of those people. Yeah, that was a little bit of the story, interesting thinking back about it now.
[0:22:57.8] MF: Very cool. So along, I mean you’ve done obviously a tremendous amount of different businesses and your career’s evolved or their business have evolved in that interesting route from wholesaling to short selling to coaching. Are you investing in real estate still now yourself or, I mean what’s your personal investing look like?
[0:23:16.7] CB: Sure, I have a portfolio of properties right now, I had 60 at one point, it’s down quite a bit less than that now when I went through a divorce that was not a good recommendation for keeping properties. But yeah, so I still have a little portfolio or properties. Yeah, I still have a little portfolio properties which is cash flow is always great.
Especially if you have paid free and clear houses, someone’s always going to need a place to live, you’re never going to go wrong investing in real estate. Someone’s always going to need a place to live okay? I know you know this better than anybody but it’s always a great investment. The challenge is that whenever I started getting involved with it, there were bank of America and Chase, all these were allowing you to do 10 properties per spouse.
You know what I’m talking about, you could do 10 for that. It’s easy to just get a whole bunch of properties and told what I would say is make sure that you think things through a little bit and don’t buy properties on cash flow. Back in the day, it was really easy to get caught up that you’re just going to get all these cash flow and these renters you’re going to pay for the rest of their lives and that’s true.
You have a renter pay, that’s true. At the end of the day you want to buy a property based on the value of that whole sell value of that property, if you are an investor, it is your responsibility to purchase that property at a price that is going to make sense to the person selling it to you, but it’s also going to make sense to you that you don’t want to buy anywhere near retail.
As an investor, it’s an absolute shame if you pay anything more than 80% of a property, in fact, here in Oklahoma, I mean we bought properties for 50, 60 cents on the dollar. I think it’s a travesty as an investor if you’re buying anything near your retail. It’s your responsibility as an investor to be a good negotiator because negotiations go right along with being a good investor.
If you’re an investor and not a good negotiator, I mean you’re going to pay way too much money for properties. Biggest advice that I could say about being an investor is learn negotiations. Because you’re going to be dealing with someone that has an issue with time, they need to get rid of a property quickly and have a reason.
There’s a motivation. So the better that you can get at defining and understanding which of those motivations and what that time means to that person and be a good listener and be in Tylenol to whenever they have the headache. You’re going to win. Sometimes that means that you’re buying properties at a price you’re thinking, “Why would anybody ever sell me that?” Think about in your life, if you’ve ever had something, it doesn’t have to be a house but you had something and it was worth a lot of money.
Whether that’s a $200 shirt or $200 pair of jeans or $500 pair of shoes or a thousand dollar watch or $3,000 watch or whatever and you just for some reason the value wasn’t the emphasis at the time of you wanting to get rid of that thing right? Maybe it was that bed, a couch, or something like that. You know what I’m talking about? We all do it right? We got to get very good at being negotiator.
One thing I teach in our coaching program called How to Flip Contracts Not Houses is we talk about the four personality types Mark and I put an animal to them just so people can remember them and it’s worked really well by doing it. We talk about the Koala, the personality, we talk about the monkey personality, we talk about the owl personality and the shark personality.
If you are a koala which basically you can just tell people what to do, that’s the koala personality but you can’t be over aggressive because they get really freaked out about it. If you’re the monkey and you’re smiling, you’re the type of person that wants to just make everybody feel good and smile and telling jokes and you’re being just kind of general about things and you come in and you’re the owl personality and you’re very specific saying, “I’m going to give you $30,123.5 for your house.”
That’s going to turn off the monkey because they’re not used to being that specific about things. They just want to smile and have a good time the whole point of the monkey is to influence you even if the very thing that they want to influence you wasn’t the beginning thing that I just started out with. So it’s important to understand negotiations. It’s a shark, the shark personality is going to be very overbearing, they’re either going to have a dead fish handshake when you meet him or they’re going to be very aggressive, they’re going to talk loud.
What’s the disadvantage about the shark? They’re not good listeners and they want you to get right to the point. If you’re a person that likes to tell a bunch of stories like the monkey does, shark is not going to deal with you, you’re not going to get as best of a deal. I think understanding personality types is one of the advantages that you can have on getting the best deal as an investor.
[0:28:17.9] MF: That’s great. What you talk about with getting great deals on rentals, I always like to say, “Buying below market value.” You don’t want to pay retail even if you’re cash flowing, cash flow is great, I love to buy for cash flow but if you walk in with 20% equity, it’s such a huge bonus if you ever need to get out of that property or you want to build fast, it makes it so much easier than paying straight retail.
[0:28:38.7] CB: It’s so much does. Yes, absolutely.
[0:28:41.2] MF: With the personality thing, I think like you say, so many people want to do their own thing, what’s comfortable to them but I liken it to someone wants to email you in your column every day, it’s not going to work, if someone wants to call you every day and you’re scared to talk in the phone, you just want to email them, it’s not going to work, it’s the same type of thing, just figuring out what works best for that person not what’s best for you…
[0:29:03.5] CB: That’s right.
[0:29:03.6] MF: …makes things so much easier when negotiating it and doing deals. It’s great advice.
[0:29:08.0] CB: Generally interested in the person’s situation. If they say, “So what are you wanting to sell the house for? It’s a nice house, why do you want to get rid of this thing?” “Oh man, my grandma is sick and I’ve really got to get some money to help her out and I can’t stay here.”
Don’t just go, “Okay, I’m sorry about that your grandma’s sick, what happened to her you know?” If the personality type, depending on if they’re telling you that first off? The shark is going to be — he will get very quick to a point. I got a few things going on in my life right now. Okay, well, obviously, he’s not wanting you to engage in the story. But listen, be a good listener.
Someone’s telling you my grandma is sick and they start telling you details, she’s down at this hospital and she is this many months away from living or whatever story. Man, hang out in that story for a little bit. Be genuinely interested and care about people. Sometimes we just look at people at numbers. I’m guilty of it too. Whenever you start looking at business and people, they start to blend together but people are people.
They have feelings, they have emotions, they have desires and wants and fears. They have objective things that they want to accomplish goals they want to check. They also have dislikes and likes that they would either like you or dislike you very quickly. It has a lot to do with you understanding that personality type and how they are and making them feel comfortable. Fantastic book, I know you read it. It’s called How to Win Friends and Influence People.
One of the very best books talks about marrying modelling. Very important to understand that. I want to go back to about the offers because you mentioned this I think it’s important, we come up and we teach in a class called WMRP Mark. This is a very simple way, the very simplest way that I could come up to explaining how to make offers. Let’s say you have a hundred thousand dollar house okay? We use WMRP, the $100,000 is the R value. After repair value we’ve all heard of before okay? We call that worth. That’s what the worth is, okay?
The WMRP, so the worth and then the M stands for the wholesale market. What is the market for wholesale? For here in Oklahoma City, it’s going to be 60, 70 cents on the dollar. For this example, $100,000. Now you’ve got the worth, now you got the wholesale market, it’s 70,000. Next one is WMR, the repairs so that’s what R stands for. How do you, if you’re not a contractor, how do you come up with repairs?
Well what we use is $12.50 times the square footage. This example it’s a thousand square foot home. That’s $12,500. Before I even look at the house, before I even look at the house, I know unless it’s just a complete absolute hit, we’re going to use a number around $12.50 for the repairs and then after that is the profit the pit, stands for profit and we work in $10,000 on every single whole sale flip, right?
Now you’ve got WMRP. What do you think on a $100,000 property, how much money are you going to make an offer on that property right? If you have $100,000 then you got 70% at your mark, that’s $70,000. Now you’ve got $12,500 because it’s $12.56 times a thousand square feet. $70,000 minus $12,500 is what?
[0:32:42.4] MF: You’re $57,500.
[0:32:45.6] CB: Then you minus $10,000 off that.
[0:32:48.3] MF: $47,500.
[0:32:49.5] CB: That’s where you’re going to start. Let’s say that you don’t make a $10,000 profit, let’s say you make five, it’s better to always start at 10 because you can always come down. I see people all the time going, “Oh there’s no way I’m going to make that.” They’ll make the offer on a property with their profit in mind because they’ll think I’m a good guy.
I’m only going to make about $5,000, $3,000 on there. That’s fine but you want to start higher because you may get beaten up on that property and it’s your responsibility as a good negotiator to start a little higher. That’s what we do, we build it in and I’m telling you, unless you’re on the east coast or west coast, you want to use what your wholesale market is. Maybe closer to 85, 90 cents on the dollar but using that formula and sometimes that $12.50 mark on the east coast.
They’d use anywhere from I think it’s $17.50 to $20 worth it. Obviously if you’re around La Hoya it’s a lot different but you know what your wholesale market is. What are people paying for properties in your area and then what’s the general idea what they’re getting repaired for and you find that number out and you can start making quite a few offers on property site unseen and it’s amazing how close you’re going to be within a couple of thousand dollars by using that little formula.
[0:34:04.2] MF: That’s awesome. You’ve mentioned your coaching programs quite a bit? Obviously you know your stuff. You know you’re wholesaling, you know the flipping side of it. What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you to start learning more about you? Is it your website? Or I know you have an awesome podcast as well.
[0:34:19.9] CB: I love for them to just go on your podcast. I love that people come to the podcast and just listen to some of the interviews and if they’re interested from there, obviously just like you, we have to be a good fit right? Three coaching and application based only, maybe you don’t like me, that’s okay, maybe you do, maybe we will get into a good program where we can learn together.
We have different programs available but go to the podcast first and then once you’re there, if you’re at realestateinvestingprofits.com. Go ahead and sign up, get on our list and then you’ll see a little link at the top for coaching and that will explain more about our different programs. I don’t want to spend all the time here talking about the programs but we got a really successful students.
I really focus on making you get to your first deal, first flip as soon as possible and usually that’s going to be about $7,500 to $10,000 pay day. From there, then you can look at other things you want to do. It’s amazing to me how many people talk about doing commercial deals and short sale deals and fix and flips and all these other things and Mark, they’ve never done their first flip.
[0:35:32.8] MF: Right, it’s called focus right? Focus on one thing first.
[0:35:36.6] CB: Because there’s so many things out there you know? Imagine the confidence that you get that when you get that first pay day and all of a sudden, everybody’s telling you it couldn’t work, you’ve now have proven them wrong but what’s more importantly, you’ve proven yourself that it works.
I’m telling you, the confidence that you get whenever you see that wire or you go to the title company, you get that check, the confidence that you get from that moment — I always tell my students to frame their first check. Sometimes it might be $3,500, it might be, heck, it might be $1,500 but it might be a whopping 15 — $20,000 depending on where you are.
A guy in San Diego right now does a $42,000 flip. $42,000 whole sale flip, okay? Where he put a piece of paper and flipped it. That’s just amazing.
[0:36:24.4] MF: Nice. All right, one last thing before we get going here. I know you’ve got to go, I’ve got to go here pretty soon. What’s one piece of advice for people who haven’t started investing in real estate, they want to get started, what’s something they can do to take action right away.
I always tell people, “You’ve got to take action at some point. You can educate yourself all you want but really, to get the ball rolling, you got to take some action.” What do you think is something someone can do to really get started?
[0:36:50.9] CB: Sure. Obviously whenever I talk to different folks about why they haven’t done their first flip yet, the number one reason is fear. You can say in all these other different ways but it comes down to, they were unsure or they’re fearful of some particular method right?
Here’s the thing about fear. I look at fear like a balloon okay? The more air you put in fear, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The funny thing is, even though they’re just air in that thing, it looks massive and here’s the other thing. When you step away from fear, which is what most people do because they don’t want to deal with it and it’s kind of guarding what they want on the other side is you I know on the other side of fear is everything that you want but it’s guarding you, right?
As you step away from it, fear gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But as you step into it, it gets smaller. The first mindset tweak is step into fear and it gets smaller. Not stepping away. The other thing is, remember on Ghost Busters whenever a slimer… remember slimer? Remember that thing that was just guarding that door and Dan Akroyd and the other guy was sitting there with their Ghostbuster guns and it was coming at them and they were freaking out right? That thing is coming at you. It looks mean and scary and then it hits them and what happens? Did they die?
[0:38:20.6] MF: Nope, they got a little dirty.
[0:38:22.2] CB: They got slimed. Remember that? They got slimed, I got slimed right? That’s the worst thing that’s going to happen to you. You’re going to get slimed meaning that people are going to say stuff about you that may hurt your feelings okay?
You have to get over that, as an investor, you have to have some thick skin because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it okay? You’re walking into your fear, don’t worry about getting slimed because on the other side of that is everything you’ve ever wanted. Fear is guarding the door to your dreams or ambitions, everything that you ever wanted.
I know it sounds motivational but it’s actually psychologically the truth. Read this book called My Happy Chemicals. It talks about the way that our brain responds to cortisol and the way our brain responds to certain fears of our lives, we’re either usually living in the past or the future.
Usually not living in the present because something in the past has scared us or something was scared of what’s going to happen in the future right? My biggest thing to get across here is step into fear. The worst thing that could happen is you get slimed but the best thing that happen is you’ll get over it, you’ll overcome it on the other side of it is everything you’ve ever wanted in life.
[0:39:41.3] MF: I think the scenario, it could happen. It’s not worth talking on things and then thinking about it instead of investing or depositing it like it happened from it. If you just change your whole mindset about how you look at things, it changes things big time. Great advice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Cory for being on the show, really appreciated it. Again, realestateinvestingprofits.com, that’s your site, phenomenal podcast as well.
[0:40:11.1] CB: Thank you man.
[0:40:11.6] MF: Yeah. I’ll do a write up with this, have all your contact information for people who want to get a hold of you and yeah, thank you very much for being on the show.
[0:40:18.3] CB: Thanks, I appreciate it man. Sorry about the background noise.
[0:40:22.6] MF: No worries. All right, take care.
[0:40:25.9] CB: See you mark.
[0:40:27.2] MF: Bye.