Skip to content
Home Blog BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

75 Deals at Just 20 Years Old with William Brown

The BiggerPockets Podcast
72 min read
75 Deals at Just 20 Years Old with William Brown

$700,000-plus in wholesale fees—fresh out of high school!

On this show, Will Brown reveals how laser-focusing on “deal flow” allowed him to build a rental property portfolio, build a self-sustaining business, and amass a small fortune… all in a matter of months.

You’ll be blown away by Will’s story of being struck by inspiration while playing Grand Theft Auto at age 18. That led to the BiggerPockets Podcast, and well… you’ll have to hear the rest of his story to believe it.

If you want to know the exact structure of a four-deal-per-month wholesaling business and the specific marketing methods Will uses to reach sellers, check out this episode. He walks us through how he handles leads, how he manages his business from 3,000 miles away, and why he’s handing over the reins to a partner so he can focus on building a technology startup.

This is a fantastic episode highlighting a BiggerPockets member who took massive action, trusted the process, and saw massive results. Download this one, and make sure you’re subscribed to the BiggerPockets so you won’t miss a show!

Click here to listen on iTunes.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Brandon:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 371.

Will:
Since July, like the one I told you, the $30,000, I would say that’s our first deal. From then until now, we have some closings this week and next week, 75 deals, $770,401.06 in collected assignment fees.

Automated:
You’re listening to BiggerPockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you’re here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com, your home for real estate investing online.

Brandon:
What’s going on, everyone? This is Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets Podcast, here with my co-host, Mr. David Greene. David, what’s up man? How are you doing?

David:
I’m really good. I did cryotherapy last night with some of the Go Button’s guys.

Brandon:
What the heck is that? What’s cryotherapy?

David:
You basically sit there and you cry a lot and it’s supposed to be therapeutic. No, I’m kidding. It’s people using really cold temperatures to try to heal your body. So you do that. Freeze yourself and they had all kinds of different things. So I’m trying to-

Brandon:
[inaudible 00:01:08].

David:
… I honestly was somewhat underwhelmed if I’m being honest. I was expecting a lot.

Brandon:
I actually never heard of it before. But I kind of put it in the same category as like a lot of, I mean, I’m not saying chiropractic or what’s the pokey things you put in your body?

David:
Acupuncture.

Brandon:
They might work. I have no idea but I had to put them all in the same category. Some people are really passionate about it, and other people are like, that’s hokey. So I have not tried it personally. I’m going to get a ton of hate mail now on my Instagram.

David:
I know, that’s what happens when you take a controversial stance like that.

Brandon:
I know. But I said, I don’t know. I’m just saying, I tend to look with suspicion upon a lot of things. But anyway, well, I’m sure you guys can tear me apart. But with that said, that’s actually closely related to today’s quick tip.

David:
Quick tip.

Brandon:
It actually has nothing to do with today’s quick tip. But today’s quick tip is very simple. Here’s what I want to encourage you guys to do today. Go out there today in the next 24 hours, and I want you to have one conversation with a possible seller, not an agent, maybe a text message but an actual interaction where you say something that says I’m back, whether that means your door knocking, whether it means you’re going to call somebody on Craigslist, a landlord on Craigslist and say, “Hey, I don’t want to rent your house, but can I buy it?”

Brandon:
Just get in that practice, go talk to a seller within 24 hours from right now, and if you do that, let us know. Post about it on Instagram or on social, tag it @BiggerPockets, let us know. You can also tag @davidgreene24 or @beardybrandon, that is today’s quick.

David:
Quick.

Brandon:
Do you know how many people are going to do that? Probably like one out of 100 that listen to this, but I want to see more people do it. So I mean, just that practice of getting out there and doing it. I encourage you guys to do it. So, oh that’s really all I got. So today’s show is all about generating leads. We’ve got a guest on who’s only 20 years old, did 75 deals in the past 18 months, something like that. The guy is a machine and no pun intended because of his new business, artificial intelligence stuff, he talks about that a little bit later in the show as well, and he’s got some stuff figured out in terms of lead gen and why that’s one of the most, if not the most important things a real estate investor can learn how to do.

Brandon:
So tons of good actionable advice today. So grab a pen and paper. Take some notes today, and let’s get into it. David, anything you want to say before we get into it?

David:
Yeah, one thing if you’re a BiggerPockets Pro or Premium member, then you can buy a BP Con 2020 tickets today. So check your inbox for more information because Brandon and I hope to hang out with you in New Orleans, October 5th and 6th. If you’re not a Pro or Premium member, stay tuned and we’ll announce when you can get tickets because they’re going to go on sale for everybody later.

David:
We had an awesome time last year in Nashville. Some people said it changed their life, and you got to see Brandon and I pretty much all day long. Hanging out and talking to everybody. So if you’re a Pro and Premium member, go grab some tickets because you’re not going to want to miss out.

Brandon:
Yeah, this thing a 100% guaranteed is going to sell out and probably soon, so jump in, make it happen. And with that, let’s get to today’s show.

Brandon:
Will, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast, man. Good to have you here.

Will:
Thanks, man. Happy to be here.

Brandon:
Great. All right, so let’s talk about your real estate journey. I mean, you’re a young guy. I mean, you’re how old? Do you mind me asking? Is that weird?

Will:
20.

Brandon:
20?

Will:
Yeah.

Brandon:
All right, so you might be the youngest one we’ve had on the podcast. I’m not sure. I don’t know if we’ve had a 20. I know we had a 21. I don’t know, I’m probably missing somebody. But tell us how you got started in real estate so many years ago?

Will:
Yeah, absolutely. So, man, it feels so long ago, October 2016. I went into one of these mastermind things with my mom. She kind of knew I was an entrepreneur, she knew I kind of wanted to do that sort of stuff but neither my parents were entrepreneurs. Both of them were actually landscape architects.

Will:
I was never interested in real estate. It bored me. I wanted to play video games because I could do things quicker. I could move up quicker. I could acquire more things. Real estate that’s too adult, that’s too slow. So I go to this event, and it’s a three-day seminar, like your classic one, and it gets to the end of it and we’re hooked.

Will:
I didn’t know anything about it. They’re really good. Some of them, they’re really good, and the end of it, we basically go back and talk to my dad. He’s like, “You guys are crazy. We’re not spending $20,000 on this.” And then they kind of helped us see reason like, “Oh, yeah, it probably doesn’t make sense to spend 20,000 on this.” So I was salty for a couple months from October to November then December, this is of 2016, and then January of 2017.

Will:
I always love to play video games, and I was playing Grand Theft Auto. Are you guys familiar?

Brandon:
I love Grand Theft Auto.

Will:
Round cars and things like that and-

Brandon:
And do good deeds for people. Drive around, do good deeds, help people cross the road and stuff. Yeah, it’s a good game.

Will:
… Uh-huh (affirmative).

David:
How many points you get for helping little old lady cross the street?

Brandon:
I think quite a few.

Will:
It just doubles your score for the day, it’s like whatever score.

Brandon:
That’s what I thought.

Will:
So they came up with this update where you could buy properties, and they would cash flow, and you could start to stack them, right? Just like in real estate, and I was playing there and this thought hit me. I remember the exact moment, I was riding my motorcycle, or whatever. I was like, you know what?

Brandon:
Did you have a gun on your hand?

Will:
I don’t remember which one. I know I did.

Brandon:
Okay.

Will:
I want to do this in real life. I mean, it’s I want to at this point, I’m getting bored. I see this isn’t going anywhere, and I kind of had like the life that I was pretending to live and then the one that I was actually living. So, then and there, right? I finished playing and I unplugged the Xbox. For the note record, I have not plugged it in since then.

Brandon:
Wow.

Will:
And what I did is I went to my room, I went to my desk and started Googling real estate investing. More like this fury. I started Googling stuff, and I found BiggerPockets. I started looking around. I think I read the Ultimate Beginners Guide. I was, whoa, this is complicated. And so I listened to podcast number 77 with Michael Quarles five times in a row. And then I’m like, okay, this is great. So I download all the podcasts, and I think for the next week, I just start at one. I listened to one and then I listened two and I listened to three, and then four, but I think I was talking with David, my personality type is I’m a driver, but I’m also a fidgeter. I don’t know if it’s ADD or something but I can’t just sit there and listen, right? I got to be engaged, and I’m like, okay, I can’t drive and do this. I can’t do this. I can’t read and do this.

Will:
So what I started doing was I started making little paper cranes with post it notes as I was listening to podcasts because that allowed me to be present and just listen and not necessarily get bored, but allow me to do something. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of these paper cranes now in a chest that I made. They’re kind of special to me, because it’s just what I forged and I would write notes on them and then form them, and that’s how I got started and learned about real estate and started the education.

Brandon:
That’s cool. It’s funny, you mentioned the fidgeting. I’m actually at this very moment twirling a pen in my fingers. I can’t not do it. Every podcast I’ve ever recorded, I’m twirling a pen in my fingers. That’s what I do. Anyway, that’s cool though. I mean, I love the tangible side of this is the tangible proof that I did hundreds of hours of education to learn that stuff, and I didn’t pay $20,000 for it. That’s cool.

Brandon:
All right, so you got excited, you started learning, you’re still young. I mean, I don’t know any 16, 17, 18-year olds jumping into real estate. So what happened next? How’d you buy your first deal? What did you do?

Will:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So my friends thought I was totally weird. I was listening to real estate podcasts in high school. They’re like, “What do you doing dude?” And I was like, “Hannah, you know what? This is something I’m interested in.” So fast forward to that summer. I start taking the action. Going and putting out the handwritten bandit signs, not using any technology, not knowing what I’m doing, getting yelled at by people because we put the signs in their yards and they weren’t very happy with that, but I just started to learn and started to kind of gain traction. It’s just about the taking the action part of it. I wasn’t showing any results, but I was more interested in learning the processes than getting an immediate result.

Will:
So then the next fall, I go to college, and I go to William & Mary, which is where I went in Virginia for one year. I do the first semester and kind of get caught up in college life but college for me was this playground for startups. I was like, oh, there’s nothing here and here and here and here, and I think at one point, I had four different startups in college. One where I would pick up trash from my friends dorm doors, for $2 a week. I’d hire people to go around in picking up trash, and the bureaucracy shut me down. They said it was a fire hazard.

Will:
So all this is pressuring and I’m like, I want to do these good things. I’m providing value and they’re stopping me. So I read The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, because I was working 13 to 15-hour days, and I was not making any progress and I was not going anywhere, and that book was like the medicine I knew I needed and I kid you not I read that and that same day, I withdrew all my positions from different clubs I was in. I stopped all my startups, shut down websites.

Brandon:
Wow.

Will:
And I realized that I had to focus on the one thing that I had had in my mind for the last year and a half, which was real estate, but I had all these reasons why I couldn’t do it, and I went to our library. I went to the third floor, the corner little room, kind of like this one, no windows, and I started making cold calls.

Will:
I started getting on the dialer, started listening to more podcast and just became hyper intentional and focused as, okay, this is the thing I’m going to do, and I’m not going to give another option because I know what can be done. I’ve heard it on 250 podcasts, why shouldn’t I be able to do it?

Brandon:
Yeah, that skill right there, the ability to say, you know what? I’m going to shut down everything else that I have going on, even though they’re all good ideas, and I’m going to focus on this thing, because if I just do this right, everything else becomes not important. I don’t even need to do the other things because this is the one thing. It’s like, I use the analogy a lot, and I said it at the BP Conference last year in 2019. But I said, people are always building bridges from where they are today to where they want to get to, financial freedom island, and so they’re building this bridge, and then they get 20-feet into the bridge, and then they start building another bridge, and then they start building another bridge. And pretty soon, they got 50 bridges, trying to span this distance, and because you’ve got 50 bridges, each one only moves a foot every year versus if you had one bridge and you focused your energy on that.

Brandon:
So kudos to you for recognizing that set. Hey, if I have multiple things I’m not going to get anywhere. The very first quote, the very first line in The ONE Thing is a quote from I don’t even know who said it, but “If you chase two rabbits, you’ll catch neither. You won’t catch any.” So very cool. Okay, so you said real estate, that’s the thing. I’m going to go into it, I started making cold calls. I mean, who are you calling? What were you saying? Was that terrifying as it would be for me?

Will:
So yeah, and I lived at Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg, which is where William & Mary is, is all really nice houses, and it’s like a retirement community. So it’s all really nice houses, where there are old people who don’t want to be bothered, and I just kept calling and I started looking. I was like, okay, how do you make an offer? Like 65% of the zestimate, may get an offer, and I just felt wrong. I was just like, I must be doing something wrong because I just don’t feel like there’s a fit here. I’m not providing value to these people that have problems. The only problem they have is me calling them and taking their time.

Will:
So I started to really learn to iterate, but it’s in that muscle people talk to me and they’re like, “Hey, what should I do?” And usually the first thing I say is, “I’m well and happy to help you, and what I want you to do is go out this weekend and door knock a 100 doors because if you can’t get over the fear of rejection, first,” I guess that’d be a tip to anyone who’s looking to get their first deal. Go and door knock a 100 doors, “because the problems that lie between you and doing deals have nothing to do with the market, have nothing to do with your knowledge base but if you can’t go out and knock on a 100 doors, just download a simple script and say, ‘I’m interested in buying your property, would you entertain an offer?'”

Will:
Then that’s something you got to look out for yourself, and that’s always going to be there, and you’re going to focus on building the other bridges and not work on that one, and it’s going to hold you back.

David:
Will, let me ask you when you first made that decision, hey, I’m going to go full time. I’m not going to just play this video game. How old were you?

Will:
January of 2017 would have made me 18.

David:
Okay, so you’re 18 years old. You unplug that Xbox and you strike out to a brave new world. I want to kind of back up and just ask, do you think that you were successful because you just didn’t know you weren’t supposed to be?

Will:
I wasn’t supposed to be?

David:
Well, at 18 years old, you’re not supposed to be able figure out real estate investing. That’s common conventional wisdom, right?

Will:
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the answer to that. I think I was just frustrated with the different paths that I saw that were open to me at the time, and I didn’t have entrepreneurs, I didn’t have mentors in my life, I didn’t have people I could talk about these things too. And I started getting on the podcast, and it’s kind of, Brandon, you and David, and just this new way of being, this freedom. It’s not, you got to do this then complaining about this. It was fresh, and it was inviting.

Will:
I was like, this is a new world to live into, and it’s one that can sustain me, sustain my family and sustain future ventures that I’ll want to go into. So I think it was the desire there, and the curiosity.

David:
The reason I asked is most people that want to do what you did don’t because they have all these stuff limiting beliefs in their mind. That I can’t do it, this won’t work, blah, blah, blah, and at 18, you just hadn’t had enough of life to tell you that you can’t yet to where you actually believe that garbage, and so you went and you made things happen, and we’re going to hear more about your story. But for the people that are listening, there really is no excuse that an 18-year old can do it if you’re older than 18, and you’re not.

David:
It’s all the stuff that you’ve learned along the way that makes you think you can’t and whether you realize it or not intuitively knew this because when you made people go door knock, you basically said I’m going to help you get rid of all the garbage you think about fear of rejection and what would they think and I don’t know what to do, and just get it all out of the way so that they came to learn from you as a blank slate. Is that more or less why you think you had people doing that?

Will:
Yeah, and what percentage of them do you think actually went out and did it?

David:
Yeah. Oh, I can imagine man. Did you actually track that?

Will:
Like 10% because I followed up.

David:
You did track that.

Will:
If someone asks me something, I follow up. I’ve got planners on planners. I’m not the most organized person, but I kind of think it’s a little savagery, but every year, when everyone’s posting on Facebook their New Year’s resolutions, I write down what they say, and I’m holding them accountable in the grass like a tiger, right? In the grass throughout the year.

Brandon:
That’s funny.

Will:
Just so I can know, right? Like, what’s this person up to? Are they just talk or do they have walk as well? So that’s this little funny thing that I do.

Brandon:
That’s funny. That’s awesome. I love that idea. Yeah, I have a performance coach, his name’s Jason Drees, and he’s always telling me that and I guess most of success or doing things has nothing to do with the tactics. You got to mention maybe, I mean the tactics, the strategies that’s fine, and you can tell these people go door knock a 100 doors or they have a goal to lose weight or to build a real estate business but it’s not the tactics or strategies that people struggle with. It’s all up here. There’s something mental that stops people.

Brandon:
And David, you brought up a good point about like, sometimes you just don’t know that you’re not supposed to or that the norm isn’t success. Do you remember, we interviewed Kevin Carroll, a long time ago, I think it was episode, I looked it up, 209?

Will:
Yeah. He said, I want to flip 100 houses.

Brandon:
Yeah, because he had friends that were flipping 100 houses. So he’s just like, “So I just went and flipped 100 houses.” And it was like, no, most people just flip a house their first year. And he was like, “Yeah, I didn’t know that. So I just assume that everyone flips 100 houses their first year.” And so he just went and flipped 100 houses. I don’t know. That mentality is just crazy.

Brandon:
I read another story recently about a lady who was some kind of sales trainer or something like that, and she went to a seminar and they said, the guy at the seminar was saying, if I teach you this strategy, I’m going to teach you guys today you’ll be able to close 80% of the people you pitch. And so she went out there and followed exactly it, worked hard at it, got up to like 50, 60, 70%. Couldn’t break 70%. Oh wait, 70, 75%. She was stuck there, and she couldn’t close more than that.

Brandon:
A couple years later, she went back to this guy and she said, “Yeah, I don’t understand. How do you get to 80%?” He said, “Oh, I didn’t say 80%, I said 18%”. And so it’s because she thought 80% was the bar it just changed her mentality, and she was closing like three times, four times what this guy was. So anyway there’s such power in like the way that we think.

David:
I just made a video that I put on Instagram today because I was listening to our interview with Jocko, and I’m like, oh, there’s just so much good stuff in here and I was thinking about how he was talking about if you focus on the target that’s too far out there, it’s blurry and it’s fuzzy and you can’t quite see it. So you focus on your front sight and keep the target somewhere in the background, and as you get closer, it comes into focus more. And for somebody like Will who, and again, we’re kind of jumping the gun here because I know we haven’t described what success that he’s had.

David:
It was really that he just thought 80% was possible so it happened, and what I like to tell people is prepare for the absolute worst. Expect to knock on 100 doors to get one opportunity. So when the opportunity comes you give it everything you have, right? Tell yourself this is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s okay. I like it because if it’s anything less than that, you’ll be really grateful, you’ll be happy, and most of the people that I see that don’t succeed, I see this a lot for agents that come work on my team or get real estate. They just thought it would be easier than it is. It’s that simple.

David:
If you think of people that don’t stick with going to the gym, they just thought it would be easier than it was. In general, we set a bar way too low, and then when it wasn’t that easy to clear it, we say, oh, I don’t want to do this anymore, and for like someone like Will, who just didn’t know where the bar is supposed to be set, he’s like, well, I’ll just go do it, right? Anything’s better than not succeeding. You made it happen, and I point this out because Brandon and I both did things that we didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do.

David:
Brandon slept on a couch at seven feet tall so that he could house hack. I started buying in other states without knowing that that was risky, and you shouldn’t do it. I just never heard anyone say, you shouldn’t do it. It didn’t seem any different to me, and most of the success we had, I mean, you started basically, the podcast for BiggerPockets and built it up to be this gargantuan thing because no one told you that that was hard to do. You just went out there and did it.

David:
So thanks for letting us jump in there Will and point out a part of your story that’s really great. Of you can remember where you were, go ahead and pick it up and run with it again.

Will:
Yeah, for sure. So now it’s school, right? So after reading The ONE Thing, after making cold calls, this is getting to a point where things are starting to pick up speed, and I’m actually starting to show results and show traction. So I finished my first year of school I think was May 2nd, 2018 and basically I pack all my stuff in a car and my parents, their lifelong goal was to sail on a boat.

Will:
So when I went to college the year before they sold our house, and now they’re kind of living and running a charter business on a sailboat in the Caribbean.

David:
That’s cool.

Will:
Which is really cool. Really nice family meetups and vacations. Nice warm weather down there, and I pack all my stuff in the car and I drive down because I had a connection in Norfolk, Virginia, the bad area of Norfolk. I then got a place to crash, where I didn’t have to pay rent, on an air mattress in a living room.

David:
Nice.

Will:
Where there was a bulldog that was peeing all over the floor, and stuff. It was there, and I was so excited. So excited more than ever before my life because I didn’t have school obligations, I didn’t have other obligations, I could just focus, and I started gaining traction. I had at a partner at the time. His name was Josh. We basically started working together. We were going to get probates and things like that. Making all these cold calls. I think we were up for three or four weeks just making so many calls.

Will:
My first deal, I don’t think it, I don’t know, we can see if we can consider it a deal or not because I got a second first deal. The first deal was a probate that we went to, and I did none of the work for the deal, and here’s what was great. We went and I had another mentor of mine who I met at REIA, his name’s Phil and we knew that he was flipping houses so I kind of be skipping school and setting up his security system for him, right? Just how can I add value? How can I add value? How can I add value? And we’re like, “Hey, we got this, but we don’t really know how to do it.” He says, “You guys come along with me to the appointment and I’ll handle things, so you can watch.”

Will:
I remember just Josh and I were standing awkwardly in our kitchen, right? With our hands behind our back while he’s negotiating with them on price, and he’s like, we’ll do it with three or $5,000 commission. I go, I’ll just pay out of pocket. So, that was the first deal. That eventually closes after some hiccups. We didn’t handle any of the title. I didn’t even know what title was, I didn’t know anything like that, and he hands us, he pays us and we go and we cash it, and we’re holding 2,000, whatever deposit and 3000 in cash. I was like this is the most cash I’ve ever held in my entire life.

Will:
We go to the supermarket and we’re like, we don’t have to budget for food. We’ve made it, we’re rich, we got $3,000 in cash. Paying for cash for everything. That was a great feeling, and then things started to get real, right?

Will:
So we started pick up traction, then I basically I moved to a place that we knew we had to kind of want to move in the same building as Phil so we could be with proximity. Just by the waterfront, which for there was I think, was 2,000 a month in rent, and our only goal was make enough to pay rent, right? Make enough to pay rent till the next month, and we start talking to people. We get into marketing arrangements, we get into partnerships and start really learning and here’s a huge distinction, at one point, I was on triple line dialer, and then my partner was across the room, and we went as hard as we could, as far as we could go, as fast as we could, with the cold calling, and we had to wait for the calls to come in.

Will:
So we’re playing mobile games on our phone, because again, fidgeting, right? I’m not going to sit there and be bored. There’s got to be a better way. We’re spending all our time trying to get a lead, and then we got on call with someone through some mutual groups who’s like, yeah, I mean, we can just, it’s called marketing, they’ll call you. And we’re saying, okay, it was ringless voicemails at the time, you’re going to send out this ringless voicemails, and then from nine to 12 in the morning, sellers going to call us, they’re going to call us saying they want to sell that will be completely game changing. And I remember I was like, there’s no way this is possible but if it is possible, it’s going to change everything.

Brandon:
Can you explain real quick what ringless voicemail is? Because that’s a that’s a cool technology that actually probably drives some people nuts, but from a marketing standpoint, it’s amazing.

Will:
Yeah, for sure, just sort of at a base level. It’s a technology that if Brandon’s got a cell phone, my technology sends him a voicemail and it inserts a voicemail into his voicemail box that I pre-recorded without bringing his phone, without disturbing him, and so he basically sees that he’s got a new voicemail in his box. So it’s kind of like direct mail, right? It sits with him. It’s not like they have to pick up the phone or not like a cold call. Maybe they weren’t home. Maybe when they get back, they’re going to be able to check their voicemails.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s cool because then it’s not as bad as like a robo dialer necessarily where you’re interrupting them at dinner with an automated message of the IRS is calling you. It’s in their voicemail, they can check it later. And be like oh, I must’ve missed a call and they can call back.

Will:
Yeah, and it worked and basically we had this guy, we were still getting started. We know what we’re doing. We had this guy that just kept calling us back and we’re like, well, this guy’s either psycho or really motivated, and so we call them back. We’re like, who wants to call, you or me? So we call this guy and he’s a guy that moves to the area seven years ago, whatever with the military and he wanted to move back and he bought cash and I kind of flipped his house a little bit. And he’s like, “I just want what I paid for it seven years ago.” So, “Okay, we’ll go out and look at it.” It’s this little kind of ranch type thing, really sweet house. So we’re walking around it. We’re like, okay, this seems possible. Did we remember to bring a contract? Okay, this is the first time kind of looking through the contract.

Will:
We got it from someone that sent it to us, and he was willing to sign it. We’re like, okay, let’s agree $25,000. That’s fine you for this house, which I don’t know where you might be in the country. But for that, that was like, okay, we had no idea what it was worth, right? He was like, I just want what I paid for.

Will:
So we’re like, okay, now I go on BiggerPockets, and I post it because I didn’t have any cash buyers listed. I had two people that messaged me about it. One person and then another person, and the first person we said okay, come out, let’s take a look at it, whatever, 8:00 AM tomorrow. So he comes out, walks through. I think after talking to people we didn’t realize that the lot was buildable, and that builders were buying lots for 50 to 60,000 there. The lot itself.

Brandon:
Oh, wow.

Will:
And the house was in pretty good shape, It was in pretty good shape. So we basically get this first guy, we’re like, “So you ready do it? We’re asking 60,000.” He’s like, “Let me go run my numbers.” Were like, “All right, man, but I got to tell you another guy is coming here five minutes later.” So the other guy comes, and I’m still in touch with this guy and I went actually back to visit him and the house once he had flipped it to see kind of what he done with it, and he comes in, he’s doing, he gets his dad over because there’s still like old knob and tube wiring in the roof. And we’re like, please be updated again. We didn’t know anything.

Will:
So he’s like, “Yeah, can you do 55?” We were asking 65,000. He’s like, “Can you do 60,000?” I said, “We can do 60,000 if you take your $5,000 earnest money, and you go drop it off at title today, I’ve got the assignment here.” We had signed the contract on the hood of his car, and pretty much we’re just dumbfounded and we’re like, now what do we do?

Brandon:
Yeah, and you got it for 25 you said, right?

Will:
25, Yep.

Brandon:
That’s awesome.

Will:
So I got to tell you, so that one the total, I think the assignment fee on that we’re on a 50/50 split with the person that was funding the marketing at the time was 30,000, 32,000. So we got half of that, and so that’s 16,000 check. I remember I think I posted the video, driving to the bank to cash it. It was great but it did not come easy. Every single thing that could have gone wrong went wrong. Primarily because the seller did not know real estate, and we did not know real estate either.

Will:
So you got two parties of a transaction. It’s the buyers first time buying a house and no one knows what they’re doing. So they were asking me a question because we had title, right? And their seller went to the title company, and he’s calling me freaking out. “Why is there not a check at title? Why is there not a check a title?” I’m like, “I don’t really know. Let me find out.” I didn’t know that Virginia was a record and disperse the next day state. So there’s so many things that I didn’t learn and it’s basically he started getting super pissed off, and we ended up giving him this whole thing is he wanted three days to move out his stuff, but he needed the money to move out that stuff.

Will:
So we ended up just saying what can we need to solve this? He was super frustrated on the phone, and we’re like, this must be a big misunderstanding. What if we increase the purchase price $5,000 and kind of gave that to you as an advanced through escrow? Because that’s what our attorney recommended us to do. He’s like, “Oh, that takes care of everything. That covers my moving costs.” And then we close the deal but we were on every cent and, everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

Brandon:
Yeah, there’s a lot of lessons in there. But I’m curious of like, looking back now that you’ve done this now for a couple years, and you’ve done more deals. For those people who are in your shoes or where you were then they don’t know anything, and so they’re saying I’m not… They choose not to invest in real estate. They choose not to take action because they don’t know the whole thing. I use the analogy of driving through fog all the time. You can’t see a mile down the road, so people stop driving.

Brandon:
I mean, we would never do that in real life. But with real estate, you can’t see a mile down the road so you pull over and you stop driving because you don’t know the whole picture. But you were just like no, we’re going to keep driving through this fog, we’ll figure it out as we go. So what kind of advice do you have for people that are in your shoes a couple years ago, that don’t know everything and they’re freaked out about having those, like seller upset or not understanding the local, how this works, how a title works and how escrow works?

Will:
Yeah, for sure, and I think it’s kind of my common thing and what I’ve been able to articulate is, are your reasons and justifications greater to you than your dreams and your wishes on what you want your life to be? Everyone’s got reasons, everyone’s got justifications. We live in an extremely justified world. You’re wrong, I’m right, we got to do this, and everyone’s honing different things. But at the end of the day, right? If you had control, right? Hypothetically, if you had control of your life, which we all know that when you take action and responsibility, you get that control, or your reasons and the justifications and all the things you’re worried about. Oh, I got to pay this, I got to do that, I got to pay rent, I got to do this, and I’m not old enough and I’m not this and I’m not that.

Will:
All those reasons, which you ask a random person on the street, and what I did in my mind, is I said, okay, let me stop saying, what was it if it was a random person on the street? Let me say what if it was someone I really looked up to? What if it was someone I admired? Would they say that those reasons are still justified? So what you want to do with your life? This is what was so difficult for me, because it was a burning passion for me.

Will:
I want to create my life the way I want it, and I think a lot of people say they do, and they’re comfortable where they are, and there’s a payoff from complaining, right? Because then you get to be with other people at the bottom of the mountain, always saying something could be someway else. So it’s kind of direct. So this bring up something in someone, then I would just take a look, if you’re listening to this, just like, is there a truthful element? Because I do know one thing, if something kind of frustrates you or confronts you, It wouldn’t confront you, Brandon if I said your beard wasn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen because that’s true.

Brandon:
I know it. I got this.

Will:
If you had issue with it, right? Or if you were insecure about it then it might confront something. So it’s are your dreams greater to you than your reason justifications? That’s what I would say. That’s what I would ask.

David:
I noticed to show up when people say don’t judge me. I don’t want to be judged. But we only refer to that when someone’s saying something we don’t want to hear. I’ve never heard someone say, “Wow, you’re really handsome.” And someone go, “Don’t you dare judge me. Who are you to tell me that?” But if it’s, you look ugly today that might come out and it kind of ties into the extreme ownership stuff we talk about, where if you’re only willing to accept what makes you feel good, and not what makes you feel bad, you’re never going to improve. And that’s what made me think of that as you were talking because the answers for what most of us need to be more successful are all around us.

David:
People are trying to tell us that the universe is trying to tell us that and we’re the ones who don’t want to hear it. It’s really us who gets in the way of our own success, and you hit a very good point there Will, when you said it’s because we take comfort in making excuses. We don’t actually want to be successful. We want someone to give us permission to not be successful because that’s easier. If you guys want to hear more about that whole idea of extreme ownership that was on show 365, we did with Jocko. Will, I realized we haven’t actually asked you what you’re doing as we’ve been listening to you tell us how you did it. Can you give us an overview of the businesses that you’re running? How many deals you’re doing? Where are you making your money?

Will:
Yeah, oh no. You called my bluff. It’s time for me to go. I got this far. No, so since July, like the one I told you, the $30,000, I would say that’s our first deal. From then until now, we have some closings this week, and next week. I got my pipeline up here, 75 deals.

Brandon:
Wow.

Will:
$770,401.06 in collected assignment fees.

Brandon:
Wow. How many deals? 70. That’s crazy.

Will:
75.

Brandon:
75 deals, and those are wholesale deals, any of those flips, any of those rentals? Are those primarily wholesaling?

Will:
Yeah, so I’ve never actually flipped a house.

Brandon:
Okay, that’s not a bad thing.

Will:
I either wholesale or I’ll take it down creatively myself. So those are just wholesale deals. Doesn’t include, I own nine units that I bought creatively financed through subject to owner financing and then I think there’s one that I bird. Well, I guess does that kind of… Maybe. I did light painting to it.

Brandon:
Sure.

David:
On your subject to deals, did you run into any trouble with the title company actually? How did you get around that? Because I’ve heard people say the title companies don’t want to do subject to deals anymore.

Will:
Yeah, so I think that’s a great intro is I went through four different title companies, and my team, we do not like when we have to use another title company, because I sat down after having a terrible experience with our first one and just being so frustrated, I sat down and I found a title company that was referred to me by a friend, where the two brothers are ex marines, and I basically sat down with them across my desk and just drilled them with questions. What do you do in this case? What do you do in this case? What do you in this case? Basically just my list of things that used to frustrate me, and it was night and day to me, and I was just, what do you do in this case?

Will:
I found a title company that wanted to work with me and that they were knowledgeable and that they were able to provide the things that we were looking for. That’s my answer to that is I found a little company that could do it, knew how to do it has done it before, and did it the right way, consistently.

Brandon:
That’s cool. That advice right there is solid. Not just with title companies, but with agents, with attorneys, with whatever. I mean, unless you’re trying to do something completely illegal, and even then I’m sure this advice applies, but there’s always somebody willing to do it, and a lot of times people will say we don’t do that. It’s because they just haven’t done it in the past, and they don’t want to learn how to do it. And so they just don’t do it. And so if you ask around enough, again, the same thing applies to lenders, right? Oh, yeah, we can’t get you a loan. You haven’t had a job for two years. Go to the next lender. Yeah, we can’t get your loan you haven’t done the same job for two years. Next lender. Oh, yeah, we actually have a program for people who have less than two years at their job. Great, right?

Brandon:
But the other banks will tell you, no, it’s not possible. They won’t tell you to go to another bank, doesn’t say it’s not possible. And so never believe what a bank says or when they’re talking about in generalities like, yeah, their program might not do it but those people are so narrow minded, in every industry that they assume that the entire industry believes what they believe, rather than believing that there’s other options out there, yeah. So 75 deals in a year and you’re 20 years old, which is…

Will:
A year and a half year.

Brandon:
A year and a half. Okay, in the first year and a half. At 20 years old which is crazy. I want to go into the nitty gritty how to, because the people listening to this show are like, I might not be 20, I might be 30, I might be 50 but they’re like, I want to make $700,000 in assignment fees. But before we get there, I want to go into nitty gritty, how you’re doing it? What you’re doing for lead gen? Who answers the phone calls? What your team looks like? I want to go through all that. But first, what the heck is wholesaling for those of you who have never heard the term before. Let’s get on the same page. How are you making money without flipping these houses without owning them as rentals? What does that mean?

Will:
Yeah, 100%. So under this still version basically the theory of it is that someone has a property that whether they inherited it or it needs a ton of work or there’s some emotional disattachment to it, someone died. They just don’t want to deal with it, that they are willing to trade a slice of their equity in that property for the speed and convenience of being able to sell it quickly and hassle free.

Will:
So wholesaling and being a wholesaler is the opportunity to go in and have authentic communication to find out what’s important to someone. Not trying to tell someone what they need, not trying to trick them as to what their property’s worth, we only ask questions, right? And let’s say it’s contracting a property with a purchase and sale agreement, and then either assigning it to an end buyer, who’s going to be a flipper, who’s going to be a buying holder, who’s going to be one of maybe some more of the sophisticated people in the market who has their own cash, or closing on it yourself and then turning around and reselling it.

Will:
Wholesaling is just the exit strategy. What blew my mind the first 12 months is that here’s the biggest thing, this is the thing I really want to say. I listened to 150 deep podcasts, right? And I was taking notes on each one, okay. And I was writing down all the things that everyone had and what they were still looking for. So they had money, they had network, they had connections, they had track record, they had all that stuff. They’ve weathered 08 recession, and there was one thing that still was the bottleneck for every single guests you guys had on here, and it was their deal flow.

Will:
It was the ability to get good discounted deals into their pipeline and to sell them, and so what I realized is, wow, if I can build a business just around that, I know I can do this because it’s not a function of having money, it’s not a function of having a network and it’s not a function of having a track record, because those guys have those things, and they still need this.

Will:
So I knew right away if it’s terms of value proposition, finding the deal, and wholesaling is simply the way to then sell the deal, take some of those funds, put it back into marketing and build your database.

Brandon:
It’s so good. Here’s why this is so important. I want everyone to understand this. We talked to Cal Newport, I don’t know like a year ago on the podcast here and he wrote a couple of my favorite books. One’s called, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. And in that book, he makes this point that if you want true financial success and freedom and all that, it’s not about finding some gimmick way to sell some random product that you get lucky. I mean, yeah, some people have gotten lucky and made money that way. If you really want success in life, develop rare and valuable skills. What in the marketplace is rare and valuable? And in real estate, the most rare and valuable skill a person can have is finding deals. That’s it today, and in 2012 that might have been different.

Brandon:
The rare and valuable skill then was being able to finance deals but today it’s how do you find good deals, and if you would just devote your time and effort to that you will never struggle in this market cycle. You’re not going to ever have a problem because there’s a million people out there who want a deal, and there’s like 1% of them that have the patience, endurance mindset to go out and actually do that to go find a good deal.

Brandon:
So it sounds like that’s what you did. Is you’re like, hey, I’m going to go learn how to build deal flow. Is that right?

Will:
Because that’s it. There’s really no other part of the business, right?

Brandon:
Yeah.

Will:
I mean, you could say, here’s all the different things and even still, as you scale up into multifamily, it’s still just deal flow. It starts in real estate, it starts with an opportunity. You don’t have an opportunity, you’re not going to be doing legal, you’re not going to be doing accounting, you’re not going to be doing finance. You can’t finance nothing. You can’t go get a loan from a bank on a nothing burger deal. Start with a deal, and then you can get a loan from whoever the heck you want, because it’s such a good deal.

Brandon:
Yeah, I always make that point that the better deal you have the easier it is to finance, right? I mean, imagine I have a million dollar house, I’m going to sell to you for 20 grand. If you don’t have 20 grand, I’m guessing you’ll find a way to come up with 20 grand, you’ll figure something out because you can make a million dollars on it. Nobody has a problem thinking of a creative way to buy a house for 20 grand, that’s worth a million. If you’re trying to buy a million dollar house for 1,000,002, you’re never going to get a loan in that, because why would you overpay. That’s stupid.

Brandon:
So the better deal you have, the easier financing which goes by the end, the most rare and valuable skill you can have in real estate is finding good deals because it makes everything else easier. That is your one thing, and that’s why wholesaling is kind of fun.

David:
It’s also important to point out that that is a principle that works for all of business. This isn’t just real estate.

Brandon:
It’s true, aging.

David:
If you can get your brain to think that way, you’ll be very successful. If you work in a company and you’re the person who greets people that walk in the front door and you get them a cup of coffee and you go tell someone else your lead is here. You are valuable, the company probably wouldn’t work well without you. You are not as valuable as the lead generator, who got someone to get that person to come in for the appointments to possibly spend money. And the principle there is that finding opportunity generating business is the most valuable thing you can do in any company, in any business that there is, and if you control that everybody works for you because they all need what you have. You have the opportunity, you have the revenue, they will play a piece in this puzzle to help you to do it.

David:
If you start off saying, well, I really want to learn how to manage properties, or I really want to know how to do a rehab. That’s cool. It’s not the most important part, you’re going to end up working for the person that has a deal if you get good at doing that, and I like to highlight that because if you’re the person that can, it’s the same as being a real estate agent, I have all the leads come my way. So I have opportunities to hire admin and hire buyer’s agents because all the opportunity comes through me because I found the lead.

David:
I could have got really good at being a transaction coordinator. It wouldn’t have been a whole lot of value to bring to someone else. So when you’re thinking of hey, I want to get into real estate investing, the first thing you should be thinking is exactly what Will did, how do I get leads, deals, opportunity and then everything else is a secondary problem or a tertiary problem.

Will:
All right, you guys want to know how in 2020?

David:
Let’s hear it.

Brandon:
Yeah, I do. How are you doing it?

Will:
So, if you’ve got listeners, right? You got a bunch of people spending 20, 30, $40,000 on direct mail, and this is like, a lot of people think you have to spend a lot of money to do this or that you need to be super intelligent. But I’ve gone and done the work and this is my way of giving back. This is my value for what BiggerPockets gave me. I want to show you guys the couple pieces of technology that I use the specific ones that I use and in conjunction with all of them and a couple key players on the team. I basically spend 15 to 30 minutes per deal that we close maximum now.

Will:
I live in California, my team’s in Virginia and they close and everything’s smooth and it’s able to fund what I’m doing out here, which we’ll talk about later.

Brandon:
That’s cool.

Will:
So November of last year, so last last year, New Year is screwing with me. I hired my first employee ever. Her name’s Sydney and she’s still with me, and she’s an administrative assistant because I recognize my personality type. I’m a driver, I’m a go getter, I want to move forward, I want to only focus on that, and there’s the rest of the business that has to be cleaned up. So a lot of people think that technology is going to be the answer to everything that I can tell you because we’re in it. AI is not there yet. You can’t have intelligent systems yet. What I have done is I don’t think I use any of the technology I’m going to talk about as it’s intended to be used.

Will:
I use it for its core component, what it does best at, and it plugs into the rest of my system so that it’s simple. Three rules, right? Keep it simple stupid, focus on the one thing and abide by the 80/20 rule every single time always. 80% of cold callers and offers are only going to generate 20% of the revenue. I listened to 80/20 rules of sales and marketing.

Brandon:
Yeah, so good.

Will:
And I was working out at the time I was listening to it, and I think I just like dropped the weights when they said this line. When it was inside 80/20, there’s another 80/20. 4% of what you do generates 64% of your total results, and that’s with cars on the road and sap in the trees or anywhere else, you look in the universe.

Will:
So I use the same thing in technology. I don’t like big fancy systems, I don’t like things that are like oh, and here’s all the features, right? When it comes to the operations I want streamlined, and I want simple, and I want it to be able to be easy, so I can train the next person on how to do it. So let’s start with lead gen. Lead gen is what the methods we’re using right now are text message, ringless voicemails, and mail to targeted lists. That is not new to most people hearing here.

Will:
I’m going to share the specific companies that I use, but moreover, I’m going to kind of let that there right now just to show you that I’m doing this using the same thing everyone else is doing, and it’s not just a function of lead gen, but it’s a couple pieces together. Lead gen comes in. Now, I’m a big believer, and I’m a practical person, and I like to optimize things. I don’t think a lead has slipped through our cracks in the last 12 months, since we got these systems up and running.

Will:
The key to this business is building a system that whether you’re using a CRM or whatever you’re using, that nothing slips through the cracks and that you’re on both an aggressive with a follow up on each and every single lead that comes in because if you don’t, you’re basically paying extremely high water bill, right? To get that water flowing for those leads. You’re paying all this 20, 30, $40,000 a month, and then it’s going into a bucket that’s got a big hole in the bottom, and why can I not get deals? But most people, right? They started with construction, and then they needed lead gen.

Will:
So they had their construction business and then they needed to add lead gen. So they were like okay, we don’t have the time, we don’t have the system set up, let’s just see if it’s a lead or not when it comes in, and then either buy it or don’t buy it and get on to the next one. The key here is build a bucket and tape all the holes and having someone manage it so that no lead escapes, unless their house has sold, or they’ve explicitly asked us to stop calling, they’re in there and they’re going to get followed up with every day until we reach them, every couple days after we reach them, every week, every month, every three months, every six months.

Will:
So the system that I use, I’m going to give a big shout out to these guys, because they originally had it on Podio, and Podio has all these different things that you got to configure, and then build a standalone system that has really good at some things and really kind of buggy at some other things. But the one thing it could do is track those leads and it had simple, it didn’t have any of the fluff, it just had here’s the notes, here’s exactly on here’s the stage of the lead, and here’s who’s assigned to on the team. That’s InvestorFuse, InvestorFuse 2.0, and what I was actually I reached out to them and told them come on here.

Will:
For me, this is just about sharing the tech that I use, I could share my screen right now and show our thing. So InvestorFuse, leads come in, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to generate leads, they’re different siloed to the business. Now, we have our specific technology we use for lead generation to get them in the bucket because here’s one thing to note, no technology again, right now is going to be able to follow up with and nurture your leads to the extent that a well trained and hungry and empathetic acquisition manager can.

Will:
I’m not saying that technology is not possible in the future, I’m just saying it doesn’t exist right now and trying to use automated follow up campaigns, that’s not what I’m about. I’m about getting on the phone and talking to people. So the system’s works. I’ve got the lead gen things. The text message one is called Lead Sherpa. We actually just started using them a couple weeks ago. It’s like TCPA complaint text messaging, and what we’ll go through and do is we’ll get a courthouse list. I don’t want a text message, I don’t want to pay 12 cents per skip trace for a list of a 100,000. But we’ll go through and we’ll get the specific list and then we’ll skip through their system and text, and I think the numbers that they’re showing like 93% of people responding. Text message you see some influencers like Gary Vee, that’s where they’re moving to. That’s where it’s going.

Will:
So that has been worked for us because you either get a yes or no right away and if it’s a yes then you have a conversation, and it’s there. It’s right there at their phone. They just text, yeah. I’m interested. What can you offer?

Brandon:
Yeah, what does the text say?

Will:
Yeah, so what’s cool is you basically can have some pre-form filled ones. I believe I have my acquisition manager handle it, but it’s basically like, “Hey, this is Tyler, and I was looking for Brandon and I wanted to call, or I wanted to shoot you a quick text here to see if you might consider an offer on your property at 123 Main Street in Hawaii.” Right? That’s it and they either say yes or no. If no, it automatically takes them off the list. I think their system has intelligence to do that, and if yes. Well, yeah, what’s your offer? Then just quick qualification. Okay. You tell them about the rehab, tell them about the all through text. So that has been working very well, and I don’t have the exact numbers like cost per lead. Because again, I’m so forward thinking. I’m like, all right, I want to see how many leads our deals per doing per month. But it’s not compared to anything else right now in the market.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s cool.

David:
I like that you’re pointing out that tech is not replacing the job of a human, but it is enabling you to do it better. I see a lot of people that are like, hey, David, I’m working on this platform. It’s going to scrub the internet for leads. It’s going to analyze the lead for you. It’s going to talk to the seller. It’s going to put it under contract. It’s going to arrange everything and you’re just going to sit at home with a Mai Tai in your hand and do nothing and then you’re going to get title to a property, and I just think like it’s almost annoying that you’re looking for an answer like that because it will never work.

David:
The seller of the property is not going to sell something to a bot that they don’t know. Now, you can use technology to make it easier for you to do that job like your pre-screening people. You’re gathering information, what’s the rehab going to be? So that you can then look at it, and then you have the phone call, and you form a relationship with that person to get the property.

David:
That is the way that people should be looking at how to use tech, it’s to enhance what they’re doing. It’s not to replace the actual work you still have to do.

Will:
100% and it allows you to scale, right? Whenever I would look at an opportunity, I’m looking at scale. Okay, you can do it once. How scalable is flipping houses? I got into so many arguments in the beginning, right? Because I was still just, I would say debates not really arguments. Well, if people at REIAs and basically what it’s come down to it and kind of my first question I ask, well, what are your goals? Right? Because if your goals are, you want to flip 100 houses, then obviously you got to flip 100 houses. But if your goals are how do you build a business that brings you 20, $30,000 a month, you don’t have a ton of capital tied into it, your overall risk is very low and it’s kind of streamlined and you can adapt quicker then at scale, I think wholesaling wins. I think wholesaling wins because of the lack of infrastructure that you need.

Will:
You need infrastructure for flipping houses, you need those contractors, you need all that money, you need all that. You don’t need any of that for wholesaling, and people could not believe how much money I’d be leaving on a table. We wholesale 75 deals. Do you know what that would be if I? I’d probably be up three or four million in revenue if I flipped it myself. But if I flipped them myself, I probably would have done 12 or 15, you know what I mean?

Brandon:
Yeah.

Will:
I wouldn’t have done 77.

Brandon:
The cool thing about that is you just really you’re focusing on your strength, which is in this case, lead gen. You’re just doing lead gen because otherwise if you’re going to flip and I love flipping houses, but when I’m flipping houses, I got to be good at lead gen. I also got to be good at the follow up, at closing, the title and escrow stuff and then the contractor stuff, and then the selling stuff. Forget that all that. I have to be good at everything. And so as wholesaling you got to understand everything because you can’t just go and give a crap deal to somebody, you got to understand what makes a deal, but you don’t have to know how to manage a contractor. You don’t have to know how to keep things on budget and on time.

Brandon:
Now I will say this just because we like to give this warning when we’re talking about wholesaling is that there are some states that specifically Ohio has had some issues and Florida and there probably others that have been like, no you can’t wholesale in the state unless you have a real estate license and there’s other some legalities in different areas. So just make sure you guys do your homework, do it correctly, do it legally, and don’t do anything that’s going to get you in trouble. But if you can be the person to find good deals, I mean, it’s a valuable skill.

Will:
And here’s kind of like in terms of job security, right? People will always have a problem with their house. People will always inherit a house that they don’t want. You know what I mean? Most millennials are living in cities now. What are they going to do with the house they inherited from their grandparents that’s in the middle of Kansas and they live in Denver? What are they going to do with it? You think they’re going to go learn how to flip a house and flip it. Now they’re going to want to sell it. So there’s always going to be deals.

Will:
So even if assignments of contracts get banned what’s to stop you from just being able to close on it and list this on the MLS? Give them the speed and convenience that wholesaling would and still turn around and sell it. Now you need to get funds. I mean every industry adapts, but people are never going to stop having issues with their houses, bottom line.

Brandon:
Yeah, agreed because what a wholesaler does is they solve problems. Now where the legality issue comes from, is people are saying well you’re practicing real estate without a license and you’re engaging in brokering because that’s what an agent does, is there in between and there’s a lot less regulation. So I think wholesaling we’re going to see more and more rules, not necessarily outline it but more more rules and guidelines and oversight, because it’s just been kind of a wild west thing in the past.

David:
It’ll be defined more in the future.

Brandon:
Yeah, and that will eventually probably happen. But right now, it’s still a little bit wild west. With that said you shouldn’t treat it as a wild west thing, I mean, treat it like a business like you clearly are Will, and, you know?

Will:
And on top of that I got my buddy, Warren over there on the shelf, Warren Buffett, I read that book when I was like 16, I did not understand half of it. He has a famous quote, right? When everybody’s getting in, it’s time to get out. When everybody’s getting out, it’s time to get in, and just buy the pure amount of Facebook messages and people that are just like, hey, I want to get started, I want to get started, I want to get started. It’s economics. The more people right outside of the deals, the more people that get into it that don’t know what they’re doing, that didn’t consult an attorney, that screw some seller over big time, maybe even unintentionally, and that’s where laws come in, right?

Will:
So it’s kind of that’s the direction that it’s heading kind of like everything is for regulation because wholesaling, I mean it really didn’t exist before 2010, right? And at the scale it is now as far as I believe. But now it’s an incredible opportunity. I seriously feel, to go back, if you’re starting with no network, no connections, but you’ve got hustle, and you can talk to people and you can think of at least systems oriented or partner with someone who can think with systems, there is more than enough technology, and you’re not going to be able to find a better wealth generator and a way to get into the real estate business and learn what’s up, than to start a wholesale business, and fail forward and fail fast and fail so many times until you get to the point where I want to fail more than anyone else in any room. I want to have fails, right?

Will:
At 20, I want to be able to fail more than the guy who’s 60 there in the room because that’s just traction. I’ve said it many times before. You can take away those 77 deals, right? Take away all that, take away all my properties that I own. Six months later, I’d have it all back and more because I’ve got the lesson and no market crash, nothing, no person can take away the lessons that I’ve learned and the knowledge about how to put this thing together and what’s working.

Brandon:
Makes sense.

Will:
No one can take it away. So for me, I’m going on to different ventures now with it, right? When it comes to scalability but this has been the greatest stepping stone, but it’s my fallback. I know that at any time point in my life, say everything goes south, right? Hopefully it doesn’t. So long as I’m not incapacitated, you can drop me off at any major metropolitan area in the country, and I will be able to have it back up and running in two or three months. That’s security to me, that’s like what most people rely on a diploma for. That’s why I said I’d rather rely on that than a piece of paper that’s going to become worth less and less as the years go on, my personal opinion.

Brandon:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So earlier we talked about this, I gave the analogy with the bridge building, right? Building bridges across the island. People do too many things. Now, you built up this wholesaling business and you’re kind of the visionary to use a term from the book Traction. You’re the visionary, you’re guiding the vision, you hired some people. So now you have a team of people I’m assuming that’s working this business for you. Correct? So what go ahead, yeah. Yeah, what’s your team look like today on that side?

Will:
Yeah, I learned a valuable lesson last year, and this is one I never thought I’ll learn, is that it is possible to grow out of scarcity.

Brandon:
What do you mean?

Will:
Let that sit in because most people contract out of scarcity, when you do less. For me, it was June. And I was moving out here to California to build our tech startup, and I knew that we’d have more and more expenses, and that I wasn’t going to have enough money. The word enough, not enough, big indicator of scarcity. So I started talking people, and we got super aggressive because we’ve had things working in Virginia for a long time, and I opened up in Baltimore, and opened up in Houston and opened up in Dallas and opened up in Florida, all simultaneously, all pretty much with new guys who I thought were like me. Who’d be able to figure it out. Wow, was that a lesson learned? Because I basically quintupled my marketing costs and the people that I had in place in Virginia, I was able to train them hands on, hey, here’s what you do. But from afar and five at a time, I found my time getting sucked up into the speed.

Will:
So, wow, this isn’t working or he said this about this person and we completely took our eye off the ball. I learned that lesson last summer and it was costly. It was very very costly. I spent all that. It wasn’t just the fun. It doesn’t cost that much to start off in any new market. My time and energy and my focus, lost. I kind of took my eye off the ball. So that’s what growth out of scarcity looks like. I said, okay, I don’t have enough funds right now coming into being able to build this thing into what I want, we need to grow more. And there were so many lessons inside of that.

Will:
So scaled it all down back to our core. Upsizing three months, downsizing three months, right? And now my entire team. It’s as lean as it can be, is my one administrative assistant, who’s my transaction coordinator. She’s my lead manager. She’s everything. She’s my problem solver. She’s everything, she sends out the contracts. She’s great, Sydney. I love you. I got one acquisition manager, I had two. One guy kind of wanted to go on to other things who saw I was kind of winding it down, which some people would say would be crazy. And I would probably say I’d be absolutely crazy. I’ll talk about that in a second as to how could I possibly be winding down something that’s generating me 20, 30,000 a month, bottom line?

Will:
How in any logical world does that make sense to do? And I talked to so many people, and maybe it’d be a good conversation. But one acquisition manager Tyler, he’s the baller, and I think he was actually on your mobile home scouting team.

Brandon:
Oh, nice.

Will:
Making a lot of those people but Tyler here’s a funny story with him. He was a fifth year at the fraternity that I was in college. I was in the fraternity for one year. So I think he and I had met at like one of the alumni stuff. Spent five years learning to get an accounting degree. If there’s people in college listening to this, listen to this. He spent five years to get an accounting degree and he sat down with me in like December, going into his first winter of accounting work at one of the big four accounting firms, and I started telling him, “You see I posted a little video based upon what I do.” He’s like, “No way. You’re not doing that.” Because he was listening to BiggerPockets too. I’m like, yeah, dude. We’re doing this [inaudible 00:59:09], send me your bank receipts. I don’t believe you.

Will:
I said, okay, I mean, I’m fine with that. I don’t think you’re trying to do harm me and you’re just curious. I just sent him like, here’s actual receipts of closing, and he was just dumbfounded. What I like so much is his loyalty. And he was like, “I’m going to finish up with my team, and then I’m going to come work with you and I’m work for you because I want to learn from you.” And Tyler, he’s got, kind of like what we we’re talking about at the very beginning. He’s got the grit to figure it out. He knows this is what he wants to do, and his dreams are bigger than his reasons. Why not?

Will:
He’s more justified than almost anyone else I could talk to. Spent five years to get an accounting degree. Did one winter in accounting, is now full time real estate investor, and what’s really cool for me is be able to pass the torch and be able to give him the reins to kind of take it on and handle and run the business and start, I think he [inaudible 00:59:55] at his first owner financed one yesterday actually and start building his portfolio and working towards it himself.

Brandon:
That’s cool. You know that’s one thing we don’t talk about enough about here is this idea of yes, you can hire an assistant, you can hire a transaction coordinator, you can hire a acquisitions manager, and that’s good for you, for your business to hire somebody because you can let the reins go. But we don’t talk enough about is what we’re actually doing is not just providing food on someone’s table, but we’re equipping them to change their own life as well, and so it’s this multiplication effect is that if we can hire people, you’re not just doing it for your own good, you’re doing it for their good as well and they’re going to be able to hire people in their future when they obtain financial independence or wealth or whatever they’re looking for. And so if you’re on the fence about hiring somebody, I definitely would put some serious thought into working with other people and teaching them what you know and what you’ve learned because again, they’re going to either they’re going to help you and they’re going to help themselves which is kind of cool.

David:
And Will mentioned something that’s really important about Tyler. Well, a few things I want to point out because everybody here that’s listening. You want to be a Tyler, that’s how you get opportunity. Tyler’s loyal. I could tell you right off the bat a lot of people or maybe even most people are not. They want to come and learn what you’re doing so that they can leave and go do it on their own, and if you have opportunity, there’s always going to be people that tell you, oh, I want to do this, and I want to do that. The minute it’s harder than what they thought, or they think that they could go take some of your business with them, a lot of people will leave and so when you’re in Will’s spot and you’re picking who’s the guy I’m going to give this opportunity to, a track record of loyalty will take you very far when you’re trying to get that opportunity.

David:
I don’t think Brandon worries would Ryan ever leave me or screw me over? But that’s not the case for a lot of people, and that he’s got the grit to figure it out. Tyler says okay, how do I gotta figure this out? He doesn’t think it’s Will’s job to teach him every single scenario that he could ever come across and say, what am I supposed to do with this? And those two qualities will get you very far. I wish I had people like that that were coming to work because I’d love to be able to pour into someone like that. Then help them build wealth the same way that Tyler is.

Will:
A 100% and here’s the litmus test, right? I wanted him to come right over. I want him to come over in January, and he said no. He was like, “No, I don’t want to. I got to finish with my team.” I was really pushing him because I wanted him to join, and the flip side of that coin was I realized that there was a loyalty there that would be so tremendously valued in the future, and okay, it was actually best to hold it off. Let’s just set it and let’s reconvene the conversation in the spring, which is what happened.

Will:
So if you’re looking to hire the person, a lot of people put a job post on Indeed, those are people that are looking for work. You know what I mean? It’s one of the biggest things it’s not I wouldn’t say poaching but you share, right? That’s because I posted a video. I barely ever post on social media. For a millennial, I really got to get better at that because every single time I do something good comes of it. If he didn’t see that video, it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t be in business. He’s been a core component of it. He saw that video and said, I want to come to you but here are the things that I need to do first for my team back here.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s neat. That’s neat. So to go to the bridge building thing one more time. This idea of people build too many bridges. You built one bridge, and then the cool thing is you hired someone else to build that bridge. That’s the way that you have multiple bridges, people that want multiple streams of income. I actually, this is a horrible idea generally, to try to build multiple streams of income. What that means is you’re building multiple bridges. The way to do it, though, is you build a bridge, and either you make it or you hire someone else to finish that bridge and build it for you, and then you can go and build another bridge.

Brandon:
So it sounds like you got somebody else building your bridge for you now. That one’s going, and now you decided to move to California and do a startup. I’m just curious, I know I’ve seen the word AI. It’s on the back behind you, and you mentioned it earlier. What are you doing right now with artificial intelligence?

Will:
Yeah, so to take it way back. I always knew just listening to how cool, I feel like I’m in the era before the internet, right? It’s like, okay, when this internet thing comes across here is going to be all the functionality and things that it can do. I mean, I’m seeing the studies and the use cases and the papers of what AI can do. It was like science fiction, and I just knew I want to do something like that with my life. And I was coming into, I turned 20 last June, so I had this blind spot as to what do I really want to do? And I got to tell you, that blind spot got cleared through a conversation that lasted from 6:30 PM to 5:00 AM in a hot tub in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the end of a business mastermind.

Will:
We were having super high level conversations, and it was hard. I was so confronted, because I had built this real estate and building so much traction, and I was like, wow, here’s another bridge. The fog cleared and I saw the next bridge that had to be built. And I realized that I’ve got goals. It’s like a 2000-piece Lego Saturn V behind me. It’s one of my goals is to colonize Titan by 2050, which is Saturn’s largest moon, and the goal is just kind of pioneer space travel.

Brandon:
That’s cool.

Will:
That stuff it just excites me. It’s so exciting to me. It’s moving humanity forward. How am I going to do that? How many single families do I need to trade in, right? For a rocket ship? I don’t know the conversion rate there, but it’s not good, and it wasn’t for me. So the big thing is, I think it starts with financial freedom. You get financial freedom, right?

Brandon:
Yeah.

Will:
And then you get creative freedom, or I would say, kind of thought freedom, which is you been able to do the self development work to get control of your emotions and be able to forge the beliefs and tear down the ones that you don’t want, and then it comes up to this thing called creative freedom, which is pretty much your thoughts, you have the ability to manifest them into the world.

Will:
You see a problem, you can architect a solution and build it, and that’s what we’re trying to do right now in AI, and the first vertical we’re going into, basically our mission is remodeling customer service through conversational artificial intelligence. So, when you call your bank, and your healthcare provider and your insurance company, you got to wait on hold. You won’t have to do that anymore. With all these applications, you won’t have to do, wait. It’s such a good glaring problem that no one’s working on, and we were sitting here a couple weeks ago, and we didn’t know exactly the first vertical we’re going into because we’re building the tech, and it’s 2:00 AM in our office, we’re really having our think tank session, and we’re getting frosted flakes from someone also sublets this office space, and they’d like to sell real estate software. And the thought hit me real estate, property management, we’re solving customer service, we could do this, we could do this.

Will:
So what we’re actually building now is a technology that allows property managers to no longer be in the trenches, but to be like in the sky box seats of their business. So our AI automatically handles all the communication between vendors, owners, tenants, the logistical scheduling, the follow-up on the confirmations, everything like that. We had our first kind of meeting with one person who actually leases us this space to get feedback, just like can you get to automatically integrate with mail and send them through the notices and all these problems that before were just I got to hire someone do that or do that.

Will:
It’s like now a door has been open to be able to come in and give a solution because we got the little puzzle piece, which is through text messaging, and later it’s going to be voice, we’re able to effectively communicate and have a conversation, because we take into account context in it, which is not something that no other tech company is doing. And property management is one that is near and dear to my heart, because I don’t think I’ve pulled more hair out over the simplest things, going back and forth on my property manager, as the owner for three days playing phone tag, trying to get a report. Trying to get an answer, and the more people we would talk to, real estate only works if you’re holding real estate. If you don’t have property management or a sufficient system in place, it’s not going to work. You’re not going to get the returns that you’re saying it’s just going to be a mess.

Will:
It’s the ugly duckling of real estate, which is it’s one of the most challenging businesses I feel in this vertical, and we’re bringing what we can to say, what if we took the time-intensive part that’s been out of your control up to this point, and now it became in your control which is this new holding.

Brandon:
That’s cool. What’s the company going to be called? Or what’s it called?

Will:
So it’s called Achieve Intelligent Technologies, Inc.

Brandon:
Okay, and with that, let’s move on to a segment of the show that I love near and dear to my heart. It’s the deal deep dive. All right, Will, so this is the part of the show where we dive deep into one real estate deal that you’ve done and just kind of get the nitty gritty details on it. So do you got something in mind that we can pick apart?

Will:
Oh, yeah, I got a good one.

Brandon:
All right, awesome. So first of all, let’s start with this question. What kind of property is it and where’s it located?

Will:
So this is a single family brick ranch, located in Virginia Beach and is four bedrooms, three baths, 3000 square feet, nice area opportunity.

Brandon:
Okay, number two.

David:
How’d you find that deal?

Will:
We found that deal. I think that came through our RVM marketing, we had a couple going on at the time. Yeah, ringless voicemails.

Brandon:
Ringless. Cool, okay. How much was the profit? How much did they want and then what’d you end up paying for it? Remember?

Will:
Yes. So it’s an interesting, there’s a couple really good nuggets in here because I almost didn’t do this deal because the guy comes in he says, “Hey, the guy I’m speaking to he lives in Kentucky.” His sister was living in the house and the mom had just passed. He’s like, “Will, I know the house is trashed, and we just got to sell it.” So we’re having a show in at this time, “Go out there and take a look and let me know what you can offer.” I was like, Oh man, bidding wars people are kind of paying some dumb prices in this market. I don’t think this will be something.” But I go out there and it was the first property I actually went out there with Sydney and she’s taking pictures and I’m walking around, and there’s five other companies out there walking through. A bunch of people taking pictures, taking notes, just like we are.

Will:
It’s kind of awkward as showings with sellers usually are when there’s multiple people. And pretty much, I don’t think he had initial asking price, but I call him back the next day after it, and there was like I said, five other people and I almost didn’t call him back. I almost deleted this lead because there’s no way I’m going to get it. There’s so many people out there. I recognize some of them. There at the REIAs, and I call them but the one thing I focused on up to it because I knew I was going to be in a bidding war, is how do I build the best level of rapport with this person than I’ve ever built in my entire life.

Will:
Be the best friend, let me give him this just all the way. It had just felt natural to me. It wasn’t like I didn’t have to fake it, I didn’t have to force it. I’m just going to be this person’s best friend. So I talk to him, and he sounds a little sad on the phone. I’m like, “What’s going on?” And he’s like, “They came back. They offered us 195.” I think my… I was willing to kind of offer in the mid twos, but he was like, 195 I was like, “Wow, that’s really low.

Will:
For me, that’s really low. They offer you that?” He’s like, “Yeah.” “Have you gotten any other offers?” “No. No one else has called me back.” Five companies went out there. No one really made him an offer. It’s like okay, so well let me ask you like, “I mean, you probably ran this across your brothers and sisters. What do you guys want? What would you be wanting to let it go for?” He said, “225.” so I was like, “Okay 225. All right, yeah, let me just rerun our numbers, check up. I’m pretty sure that work and we could probably do that.”

Will:
So we lock it up with him at 225. A week later because that’s kind of how we do with our disposition a little quick tip is we have our buyers list and then we basically hold the showing properties for buyers, unless it’s baking and there’s a lockbox and there’s nothing there. Inside of that someone could possibly steal because we’ve had issues with that before. But we have the showing and we have eight people line up and this is prime real estate. Prime Kempsville neighborhood of Virginia Beach and it’s just like the ideal flip property. It needed a ton of work and had capacity to be super beautiful in a neighborhood where homes were selling 350,000 to 450,000.

Will:
So we have the showing. People come and go and people are kind of giving me figures. I’m kind of like, well, I don’t know, I don’t know. Here’s the biggest thing. We talk about the things that’s like kind of being afraid of rejection. So many people like as buyers don’t give offers, I guess, because they don’t know what they’re doing or they don’t feel that offer is kind of good enough, and that’s going to reflect badly somehow on them. So most people and I think and I talk and I have people that come out to multiple of our properties, and they just never give an offer. They never throw their hat in the ring to say, okay, what is it? Because I’m usually pretty flexible on our prices, right? I’m more about getting this deal done to get to the next. So this guy didn’t get them any offers, and we had to track down these eight people, and I remember I was back, we have a two bedroom apartment, the other guy had moved out.

Will:
So I was using the other bedroom as an office. And she’s like, “Hey, I just got an email back from Jim.” Jim was a guy who is kind of like big time in the area, and he says, “You guys are in luck. I’m flipping a property right around the corner the other street and I’d love to take down two at the same time.” My offer, right? So I have it at 225. $1,000 over any other offer up to 281,000.” I didn’t even know how much that was. I couldn’t do the math at the beginning. But I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I was like, what the heck because I was just completely unexpected because from our buyers, we’d also gotten cash offers of 205 and 235 and 255. You know what I mean?

Brandon:
Yeah.

Will:
It was so above and beyond.

Brandon:
That’s huge.

Will:
So we reached back and said and I think 270. We’re like,” Okay, if you can do 277 you got this deal?” And he says, “Okay, deal.” And I basically walk, and I remember I walk to subway, and I clue in everyone, all the contacts that I have with the title company. My marketing partner at the time, everyone’s saying I’m going to be a mother bird here and protect this thing like it’s my baby bird. Good thing I said that because for the issues that were to come down the line with getting it to actually close so many lessons in it, it was absolutely necessary. So we’ve got everyone on board, we started things. I was like, okay, we’re going to be absolutely seamless on this. They run the title search, right? A week later, and I got an email back saying, hey, Will I got some interesting news here. Turns out one of the daughters has $120,000 judgment attached.

Brandon:
Oh no.

Will:
A $120,000 judgment. So it’s like I don’t know what that means. And like, well, we don’t know. It’s kind of our biggest. We got to draw the dots. It was the most complicated title that I’ve ever had, because it was like they had to connect with all these different hospitals and this and this, and this. I think was like four weeks later, of drawing lots and connections and fact finding and I remember, I was actually skiing with my family last February, and I finally got the email. The clear to close after going through all that, because they’d finally connected that the bankruptcy she had filed in like 2001 covered or whatever, negated the judgment on it. And that it wasn’t. Because I mean, a $100,000. That’s a pill to swallow. You know what I mean?

Brandon:
Yeah.

Will:
Be taken out of the deduction, I think they owed like 40,000 or 50,000, made a bunch of equity. They wouldn’t have had it before. So it was just, I would say on that perseverance because there were so many things. I got a $53,000 deal here on the line, and when people aren’t picking up my calls, when things aren’t that, I’m showing up to the title companies in person in the office saying what’s going on. I put everything else on hold, right? Back to the one thing, what’s your most important priority? It was not about getting new leads. It was not about how do I get other deals or solving this problems. How do I solve the immediate task here because if I can solve this one, this is the one that’s going to have the biggest payoff and move us forward.

Brandon:
That’s cool. That’s cool. All right. Well, that covered a lot of the kind of the last few. It was a wholesale deal. So you didn’t have to actually fund it, right?

Will:
Yeah.

Brandon:
Okay.

Will:
I assigned it, yep.

Brandon:
Yeah, perfect. And then the rest of the what you do with it, we know that. You wholesale it, what was the outcome? You kind of talked about that. So what was the final profit then that you actually walked away with?

Will:
So at the time, I was still on a 50/50 marketing agreement. So I walked away with a check for 26,000 from the 53,000. Like 26,500. Which to me at the time, I did not nearly have the overhead I do now. That was completely game changing to me because I’ve been doing 4000, 7000, $8,000 deals. And for that one, but again, it’s the lessons that were learned on it that I get to keep with me. That money isn’t spent.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s cool.

Will:
That money has been invested but it’s the lessons no one can take those away from me.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s awesome, man. All right, last question, David.

David:
What did you learn from this deal?

Will:
I learned first and foremost that there is power in being open to possibilities and being willing to say, I don’t know how exactly this is going to turn out but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Example A, or Exhibit A, making the call to the guy even though there were five other people there. I had no idea one of them gave the guy. I don’t know if they just didn’t know what they were doing. They just gave him a super low ball offer on purpose, but I had no idea, and I almost didn’t call the guy.

Will:
I learned that in cases of bidding wars. Probably the only reason I got that because here’s the thing. One week later, one of the buyers finally got back to them with an offer of 235, 10,000 above, but my rapport with the guy was worth to him more than $10,000 because I basically told him, you know that there’s me some issues with this and we’re going to get you through it and I’m just going to keep you updated and posted the whole way.

Will:
We’re not going to bag on it, no matter kind of where we get to. So the level of rapport that I had with him, and then not taking the first offer that we got that was 230 but seeing and looking around. Now one of our favorite things to do is when we buy a house, see who’s flipped them in the neighborhood, because if they comp off their own property, now that almost eliminates all risk for the flipper, because they knew that one and they know the floor plan, and they can just another one, they can do it again.

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s cool, man. That’s awesome. Will, congratulations on that one. And like you said, The lessons are more valuable than even the profits. So thank you for sharing those. And now we’re going to move on to the last segment of the show. It’s our…

Automated:
Famous four.

Brandon:
All right, Will, this is the part of the show where we ask the same four questions we ask every guest every week. Question number one, Will, favorite real estate related book?

Will:
I spent 18 months trying to come up with one that would be different but I got to bring it back to basics. You guys know what’s coming, Rich Dad Poor Dad, all the way. It’s the one because it’s not super technical, but it invents a possibility. That’s an alternate reality to that maybe you might be living or may have thought that there is a new way to live life, and here’s kind of how you might start going about. It’s totally mindset. It juiced me up. I remember reading it. That was the first book I read because it was recommended on the podcast, and I think that’s where a lot of people got their start.

David:
All right, what about your favorite business book?

Will:
Oh, man, my favorite business book. It’s without a doubt, The ONE Thing because you love it geometric progression. ONE thing, it’s just it applies everywhere, and whenever I’m trying to solve a problem, I actually go back open up that book and go back to some of the principles but ONE Thing for sure by Gary Keller.

David:
Okay, and how about some of your favorite hobbies?

Will:
So my hobbies since moving out here to LA. I really liked going to the beach. I like hiking. There’s some good hiking around here. I like to work out a lot. It clears my mind, and I’m going to go with a good classic. I like sleeping. 20-year old hobby. It’s probably one of my favorite things.

Brandon:
I enjoy the sleeping as well. It’s awesome, man. Well, hey, all right, so let’s go. Last question. What do you think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up, they fail or they never get started?

Will:
Yeah, so I thought about this because I know it’s coming, and I think almost if I can condense everything into it is being brutally honest with yourself about your plan A, and not having a plan B.

Brandon:
Yeah, Interesting. So, going all in. We talked about that. Did we talk about that? Oh that’s right. I talked about that was the with Josh Dorkin the other day. I was doing Josh Dorkin has a new podcast, and we’re talking about we were watching shark tank and Barbara Corcoran was tearing this lady apart because she had a plan B on Shark Tank. She was like well, my parents pay for my rent and so I don’t really have any expenses and they kind of take care of me and she’s like, “I ain’t. I’m out. I’m not investing because you have a plan B.” That’s what you’re kind of saying?

Will:
Yeah, and sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking that our plan A is a good one, and then if you don’t have a good plan A, and you don’t have a plan B, that’s a recipe for failure. That’s a recipe for fire and disaster. But being brutally honest and getting brutally honest feedback from people that you respect, right? Sending people DM on Instagram, hey, what do you think about this? Can I pick your brain for a second? About your long term vision at the end of the day, right? If your plan A has you doing the processes and the actions inside of it, are actions that you take and you love doing, you really can’t go wrong.

Will:
If your plan A is wanting to do this, and I really don’t like doing this, but it’s going to get me here. It’s probably not going to work because like you said, it’s not about easy. There’s going to be trials and tribulations but being honest with yourself, and say if I only did one thing for the rest of my life, is this what I would want to do or am I doing this to try and get somewhere else? It’s what I would say.

Brandon:
Good answer, man. Good answer. Well…

David:
All right. So for people that want to know more, where can they find out more about you Will?

Will:
Yeah, so I’m also going to leave some of the links to some of the tech that I put about here, and if you want to get on our newsletter, and maybe because you own properties, you want your property manager to kind of take a look at our tech or you’re a property manager yourself and you want to automate, we’re going to to set up a URL here. It’s called arestech.ai. That’s A-R-E-S-T-E-C-H.ai. I’ll throw up a couple links up there and put in a spot to put your email in. And then also, you can follow me on Instagram and see the time that I post every six months and that is @will.jbrown.

Brandon:
Awesome.

Will:
Send me a message there. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions but if you’re just getting started, I’m going to ask you to go door knock a 100 doors, so keep that in mind.

Brandon:
I love that. That’s so cool, man. I’m going to start doing that too, I think when people ask me for advice, I’ll be like, yeah, just go door knock a 100 doors. That’s cool, man. All right well, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Really appreciate having you on the show today. So we’re going to get out of here.

Brandon:
Of course everyone check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com/show371. You can get links to all the stuff that Will talked about there as well, and you can leave a comment there, talk to Will there, go check all of his links and sites and all this cool stuff he’s doing. So, again, thank you very much Will, this has been awesome.

Will:
Thanks. It’s been a pleasure. Happy to give back.

Brandon:
Thanks, man. David.

David:
Yes, sir. This is David Greene for Brandon the beautiful beard Turner, signing off.

Automated:
You’re listening to BiggerPockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors, large and small. If you’re here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you’re in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com, your home for real estate investing online.

Watch the Episode Here

Help Us Out!

Help us reach new listeners on iTunes by leaving us a rating and review! It takes just 30 seconds and instructions can be found here. Thanks! We really appreciate it!

This Show Sponsored By

roofstock logoRoofstock is the #1 marketplace for buying and selling leased, single-family rental homes. Their marketplace of tenant-occupied rental properties makes it easy to invest in cash flowing properties across the U.S. and start earning cash flow day one. They even connect you with vetted local property managers, so you can invest and own remotely with confidence.

To sign up for a free account and start browsing cash flowing rental homes, visit roofstock.com/sell.

Deal Machine e1562821662145Deal Machine is a smartphone app that lets you (and your team) pin distressed properties, look up the property owner on the spot, and send them a personalized postcard in seconds – directly from the app. You can set the mailer on repeat to make sure you won’t forget to follow-up. And, while the app is sending a custom postcard, you can look up the owner’s phone number and email instantly.

Go to dealmachine.com/bp to get a 14-day free trial and $40 worth of mail!

Mid-roll Sponsor

simplisafeCheck out SimpliSafe Security’s DIY home security systems; an affordable, wireless, cellular, and customizable system that doesn’t require a contract!

Go to SimpliSafe.com/pockets to enjoy their 60-day money back guarantee.

Fundrise

Fundrise enables you to invest in high-quality, high-potential private market real estate projects. I’m talking anything from high rises in D.C. to multi-families in L.A. — institutional-quality stuff. And each project is carefully vetted and actively managed by Fundrise’s team of real estate pros.

Their high-tech, low-cost online platform lets you track the progress of every single project, and keep more of the money you make. Oh, and by the way, you don’t have to be accredited. Visit Fundrise.com/biggerpockets to have your first 3 months of fees waived.

Post-roll Sponsor

Oracle NetsuiteSerious entrepreneurs and finance teams run on NetSuite, by Oracle -the world’s number one cloud business system. NetSuite offers a full picture of all your finances all in one place, in real-time, right from your phone or your desktop. No more guessing. No more worry that what you don’t know could kill your company. That’s why NetSuite customers grow three times faster than the S&P 500 and you can too.

Schedule your free demo right now and receive their free guide –“Seven Key Strategies to Grow Your Profits” at netsuite.com/biggerpockets

In This Episode We Cover:

  • How Will built a powerful marketing machine
  • How he’s able to spend only 30 minutes on each deal
  • How he prevents leads from slipping through the cracks
  • Ringless voicemail messaging and text message marketing
  • Why he prefers wholesaling over flipping houses
  • How he handles tricky title issues
  • Why it’s never a bad idea to make an offer
  • Will’s artificial intelligence startup
  • And SO much more!

Links from the Show

Books Mentioned in this Show:

Tweetable Topics:

  • “Fail forward and fail fast.” (Tweet This!)
  • “I want to fail more than anyone else in any room.” (Tweet This!)

Connect with Will

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.