From Sleeping on a Couch to Owning 20 Units (in 2 Years!) with Robert Charles & Ayoka Moss

Brandon:
This is the BiggerPockets podcast, show 460.

Robert:
I think that proved the proof of concept. I got out the car and I just spoke to the guy and I made a couple calls. I looked up some public knowledge information on Google Zillow, and that got me 2,700 bucks. And I cannot tell you the amount of wholesale deals that we’ve done after that, the multi-families that we brought. That $2,700 was probably the best check that I’ve ever cashed.

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Brandon:
What’s going on? It’s Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets podcast. And I got to tell you everybody, one of my best friends in the entire world, somebody that I just could not live without is my wife. David’s like, what? Oh, no, but my bestie in the entire world, David Greene’s here to join. What’s up, man? How are you doing? You’re not as bestie as my wife, but you’re bestie second to my wife. Is that okay?

David:
I’m okay with being second to Heather, but anybody else, I’m coming for them. They need to go.

Brandon:
Well, welcome to the show. It’s good to have you here again. I miss you. It’s been like a week since we hang out in person.

David:
Thank you very much. Yes it has. And absence makes the heart grow fonder, I’m already starting to like you a little more.

Brandon:
It does something. Let’s see, I wanted to ask you real quick before we jump into today’s amazing show. I know you’re closing on some deals in Maui and you got another big deal that you’re working on. Can you give everybody a quick update?

David:
Yeah, thank you for asking there. I closed on two condos in Maui where you are, and I’m really excited about both of those. They’ve actually gone up six figures from the time I put them in contract to when they closed, just because of the timing and how long it took them to close, right? It was like a 12 year closing.

Brandon:
Let’s give credit to where credit’s due. You also went after a bunch of deals. You negotiated strongly and then you got some amazing deals, way better than I got, because you’re good at what you do. So it’s not just luck, you’re good at it too.

David:
Well, I kind of have an upper hand because I work as a real estate agent. So I know the little nuances of what to look for, but thank you yes, for pointing that out. And it went so good. I’m actually putting a David Greene team in Hawaii right now so that they can help me find deals and help more of the people that come to us and say, hey, how do I do what you did?
I’ll have a crew that I can refer them to. I’m just big on Hawaiian real estate right now. I think we’re going to see a surge. I think the economy is going to do really well, and I think that buying in the best areas is something that everyone should be very conscious of. So thank you there.
And then I just maybe a week ago, maybe a little bit less, put a really big retail complex under contract that I’ve been doing due diligence on for a couple months now. That one’s in Minnesota. So I’m raising a little bit of money for anybody that’s want to just-

Brandon:
Minnesota with my mom and dad.

David:
Yes, exactly. [crosstalk 00:02:58]. I’m naming the LLC after you Brandon.

Brandon:
I hope you are.

David:
My Minnesota muse.

Brandon:
All right. With that said, we got to get chatting about today’s show because today’s show is so good. We got Ayoka and Robert today. They are a couple that left their property, left their home in New York city, ended up going across the country in a rental car. Like left everything, started over with nothing two years ago, and now they’ve done like 15 wholesale deals.
They own 20 units. They’re killing it. And it’s all based on… I mean, they got a lot of good stuff in today’s show, everything from burning their ships, if you know that analogy, to we have confidence. We talk about just overcoming fear and inaction and then just networking, how to connect with people that can help you do deals even when you don’t have any cash. Even though you’re just getting started with nothing, they go into all that and more today. It’s a phenomenal show, but first let’s get to today’s quick tip.

David:
Quick tip.

Brandon:
Today’s quick tip is, what do you got David?

David:
Today’s quick tip is to ask yourself what are the parts of you that need to change to get to the next level of success?

Brandon:
Oh, deep.

David:
One of the big enemies of success is when we look for an environment that is conducive to who we already are, and we actually try to bend other people, control other people, control an industry or an outcome to make it work for us. But successful people learn that they need to adapt to the environment they’re in. In fact, sometimes your best ability is adaptability. Today’s guests talk about specific things that they did to change the minds-

Brandon:
Did you just make that up? Hold on, we can’t just roll over that. The best ability is adaptability. That’s pretty legit.

David:
Okay, I do need to clarify. There was one time where I said, it’s tore up from the flora. You asked me if I made it up and we just kept talking and I didn’t make it up. It was in my head. I never said I made it up myself, but I didn’t deny that [crosstalk 00:04:57] And we got like 900 YouTube comments.

Brandon:
Mr. David steals quotes.

David:
Yes, it’s constant. I don’t want to become a plagiarizer like you. So no, the line that I heard was your best ability is availability and I remixed it into adaptability. So-

Brandon:
That’s really good though. That could be a book title. That’s going to be your new book title, the best ability of adaptability. Memoir of David Greene.

David:
Hardcore. Everyone I hire on my team that does well, this is what they figure out. They adapt themselves to the environment that we’re in. They don’t come in and try to change everything else. We actually just had a conversation on the lending team about the loan officer’s wanting an email template to send to everybody because that’s faster for them, but it’s not good for the client.
And we need to adapt to the client’s needs, not try to make them adapt to ours. So today’s guests give incredibly powerful insight on specifically how they did that, how they thought before, how they think now. And they refer to it as unlabeling themselves. The label that they believed they should think, and they should do, they had to get rid of it.
And I think that for, this is a really long quick tip now, but for everyone that listens, when you get done, ask yourself that same question.

Brandon:
All right, that was today’s long quick tip. All right, this intro is way long enough. Let’s get into the interview with Ayoka and Robert. You guys are going to love this. Ayoka and Robert, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Great to have you guys here.

Ayoka:
It’s an honor to be here.

Brandon:
Well, thanks. So let’s jump into your story. Let’s talk about how you guys got into real estate. So, what was before real estate? What were you doing? And then how did you first discover the idea of, hey, we want to invest in real estate?

Ayoka:
So, I guess, interesting story. So I originally, we’re from New York and I originally was working in loss prevention. So that’s my background. So I was working with high-end retailers, like Bloomingdale’s and Victoria Secret and stuff like that. And I actually ended up at the time I was working at Michael Kors. So I would say a district loss prevention corporate investigations. They gave me this long dragged out title to make me feel fancy and important. So-

Brandon:
I’ve got to admit, I was really hoping you were going to say you were a mall cop. I was really hoping that you were like chasing people down at the mall. I’m slightly disappointed that it was such a corporate job.

Ayoka:
Well, believe it or not, I actually did. I used to get… We always mentioned this, I was catching shoplifters and Rob was like, Rob’s had like a million jobs, but at one point I was catching shoplifters and getting beat up and he was doing makeup at Sephora.

Brandon:
Well, perfect. I love that.

Ayoka:
So, yeah, so I was working and I was catching shoplifters and all this stuff, and I actually just came across The Breakfast Club interview with this guy named Mark Whitten. And I was just kind of interested in this wholesaling real estate no cash or credit. And I was like, oh, what is that? And for me at the time, I had a, I guess, somewhat decent paying job and I wasn’t looking to leave or anything.
Rob was selling cars and I’ll let him tell his own story. So I just saw the interview about it and I was like, oh, okay, let me see what this is about. And somehow this woman wrote me on LinkedIn and it was completely unrelated to real estate. She was actually contacting me to see if I wanted to do like network marketing with Amway. And initially I thought it was a scam, but I remember being in the car with Rob and I was like, let’s just… I want to check this out, see what it’s about.
And so I did, and if I did not open that LinkedIn email, I know for sure we probably wouldn’t be here today. Long story short, her emailing me about Amway ended up being her introducing me to the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. And that is pretty much how I got into real estate because I had two years ago, I didn’t know what equity was. Two years ago I didn’t know what a real estate agent did. I mean, we were always renters and I just had no idea of the world that this that this world even excited.

Brandon:
That’s cool. Yeah, Rich Dad, Poor Dad has made such an impact on so many people’s lives like my own and so many. So Robert where did you fit into that picture? I mean, you were selling cars sounds like.

Robert:
Yeah. So I was selling cars at a Volvo, Ferrari, Porsche high-end stuff, and I’ve always-

David:
Sephora.

Robert:
Well, funny thing, I’m 6’4 and people would think I’d be the security guard, but I’m actually the one doing feathering and eyeliner on supermodels. And it’s just the weirdest thing, but I always thought it weird. So well, I always thought that when I apply for something, I want to be the best.
So when I applied for Sephora I wanted to own a Sephora. Long story short, I ended up selling cars for about two years and my company gets brought out after I have the best month of the company and I get fired. And I remember putting in all the extra days, the extra hours, just busting my butt. And none of that being given back to me when I got fired, no explanation of what to do next.
Just all my time that I invested was just completely gone. And I remember calling Ayoka, and she said, please, no matter what you do, don’t get a job. Come home, let me show you this interview and we can take it from there. And that’s how we got started.

Brandon:
All right, so tell us about that first deal. Did you guys do it together or were you doing stuff a little bit more separate? Or how did that work in the beginning?

David:
Before you get into the first deal, I want to know. Can you fit in a Ferrari at 6’4?

Robert:
No. You just open the doors, that’s it.

David:
And I’m glad we’re able to talk about this because I’ve been thinking about if I ever get a Lamborghini or Ferrari that wouldn’t even be comfortable. Brandon’s, obviously out okay. He would have to be sitting in the back seat. I don’t even know if they have a backseat for him. So me I’m at 6’2, am I borderline or is this out also?

Robert:
Listen, you have to be slim torso size nine., and I’m out that book. So I’m not in it. I don’t think so. Maybe convertible, who knows.

David:
So you basically got to be the supermodels that you were air brushing or putting make up on to fit in.

Ayoka:
Exactly.

David:
Okay, thank you for clearing that up Rob. Now we can hear about your deal.

Ayoka:
Well, I kind of like to… Me and Rob, I just want to say that all night last night, one, we are super excited to be doing this with you guys. And all night last night we were just up and we’re just like, okay, who do we want to talk to while we’re doing this podcast? And I feel like so we really want to talk to the us two years ago.
Two years ago, who we were is so completely different from who we are today and before we got our first deal. So to paint the full picture in a very quick second, Rob and I were living in New York. We were in a one bedroom apartment. We both work in our jobs, and when I found the whole real estate thing, I was really enamored. I tried to New York and as Robin, we’ve been together for nine years, this year make 10 years.
And we’ve never thought about being entrepreneurs ever. It was never even a thought in our mind. It was just get promoted, climb up the ladder, try to get more money, eventually get a house. We never wanted to have kids. I hope he still doesn’t want to have kids, but we never wanted to have kids, but we always knew we just wanted to have some sort of success.
So we never thought about it in the form of quadrants. With being an employee business investor, business owner, or self-employed, we just never thought about it. We just thought the path was employee. And so when I was trying in New York and at the time I tried to bring it to him, he was so completely closed off to the idea of trying something different, completely just not interested.

Robert:
The reason why I was so disinterested was because I felt like the only way you can make money, the only way you can be successful is if you give your all to accompany. You give every waking moment that you have to the business. And maybe they’ll give you something back in terms of a 401k or retirement or something. That was my thinking of what a job was.
So I would try to do every single thing that… I come in on my days off, drive, deliver cars out to the Hamptons and then pay for an Uber all the way back. So it’s like I really wanted to bust my butt. And when Ayoka came to me and told me about, hey, I don’t know if we’ll make money, stop what you’re doing that’s actually making you money and try to do this real estate thing. I’m like, you’ve got to be insane. There’s no way possible that I would sacrifice what I know now for what is uncertain in the future. It just didn’t make sense to me.

Brandon:
Do you think that’s what Rich Dad, Poor Dad did where they kind of reframe that in your mind?

Ayoka:
Completely. I just did not even… I never even thought about like… I never even placed myself in the position of the employee self-employed business. I didn’t know investor. I just never even thought about it. I didn’t have people in my circle that were anything but employees and that’s obviously not a bad thing, but I just… If you don’t have that around you, I didn’t have that in my family.
I didn’t have that in my friends. I didn’t have that in my network. I didn’t even think about having a network at that time. You have friends, you have coworkers and so on. And I just really would love to speak to those people that kind of just never really… That was where we were, where we just didn’t think about the other side that there is another side and before we got our first deal, I basically went to my VP at the time.
And I told him that I wanted to take a couple of weeks off, go to Tennessee and just explore. I didn’t go into great detail or anything. And I basically just told him a leave of absence in a sense. And I was granted it, but then they were like, hey, you can keep working remotely while you’re in Tennessee. And I was like, oh, I didn’t expect that. I had $5,000 to my name, and I was like, okay.
So I literally went into my office and I cut my badge and I said, I’ll never walk back in here again. And I was thinking about that last night. It was scary for us to go back into two years of what we’ve been doing because these past two years we’ve just been going. We haven’t been able to actually sit down and do this. So it’s really a beautiful thing for us. We came down to Tennessee with no car, really nowhere to stay.
I do have family in Tennessee. That’s how I came down here with my sister. She said, hey, you guys can come stay with us. It wasn’t the perfect environment at the time. So we went to a hotel and we were just like, hey, let’s figure this out. Rob had a friend that worked at Hertz and had a 40% discount getting rental cars. And we were like, all right, we got a car now.

Robert:
We just came down here and we rented a car. We actually came down here and before we came down to Chattanooga where we’re currently at right now, in New York, I feel like, you never know what happens in this world when it comes to your job. Because my selling cars and reaching out to people, just talking to people, walking up to people that or walking into a showroom, it trained me just to speak to people, just to get on the phones and call and say, how can I help?
And when we decided to come down to Chattanooga, we got on the phone with a seller that had six properties, and we didn’t know what we were doing. We just got down here, try to wholesale those six properties and it ended up being a complete disaster. But that’s another story for another day.

Brandon:
I kind of want hear that. Why was it a disaster?

Ayoka:
So, yeah, we were learning strictly off of YouTube, and we were like, okay. And you know what’s funny is that you were the first person, Brandon, that I saw. It was you and then Ty the Flip Man. And I was watching, I think you were going live at one time. And I actually went back in my email to try to find to coordinate these times is back in 2018, like July or so.
And I was telling Robert, so we basically just got to make calls to these people. We downloaded PropStream, which we love. And we got a list of vacant properties while we’re… And Rob called, and one guy that was out of state owner, he was like, yeah, I’m ready to sell. He lived in Georgia. His properties were in Tennessee, but he was like, okay.
We met with him and we had no idea what to do. And at the time we’re sleeping in the hotel and we’re like, yeah, we can buy all six of these houses.

Robert:
Yeah, we have cash.

Ayoka:
And he just loved our ambition I think. He literally would say, oh, I just… You guys young and oh, that turns me on, let’s do this.

Robert:
I can tell you guys have money. We literally have almost nothing to our name.

Ayoka:
A rental car.

Robert:
Yeah, a rental car with Wyoming plates. And I’m like, come on man, I didn’t drive here from Wyoming to come see your properties in Tennessee. But it’s the confidence that we had portraying, even though we had nothing. The belief that we knew that we could get the deals, I guess just maybe thinking naive, but knowing that we could do it, I guess maybe got us into speaking to him.

Ayoka:
Yes, so he allowed us to sign all six contracts. We negotiated down, we saw the properties and we were like, okay, so now we’ve got to get a buyer. So how do we do that? So we’re driving, we see, we buy ugly houses on abandoned sign. I’m like, oh, they buy ugly houses. These are all ugly houses.

Robert:
We got six of them.

Ayoka:
Yes. We call HomeVestors and a guy comes out and he looks at them. And basically he was just like, well, your numbers are all off on all of these. We liked them, but your numbers are off. And we’re like, okay. And long story short, our confidence fell because we were like, okay, we don’t know what we’re doing yet. And went back to the seller and we’re like, okay, we’re not going to be able to buy these properties.
And he was like, I understand, come back in the future and by the way, you need to start investing in Bitcoin. And we’re like, wow, that was easy. We thought it was going to be like… It was the hardest thing to go back and say, we’re not going to be able to buy these. We were like, oh, we’re going to get sued, everything but…

David:
I like that he threw in the Bitcoin close. And I got a timeshare also, can I introduce you in these nice Persian rugs while you’re here? One thing I liked that you two pointed out was the actual confidence swings that go on, especially when you’re new.. You get these crazy spikes where you’re like, I could do this. I could take over the world.
I could not just have 20 houses. I could have 100 and you can. And then the next day something happens and you’re like, oh, I suck at life. Why did I ever think I could be a real estate investor? This is overwhelming. I was a fool. And the reality is somewhere in between. It sounds like you two experienced that as well. Do you have any advice for the people listening who may be going through those same confidence swings for how they can get through that period?

Robert:
Yeah. For me, maybe it Ayoka tells me sometimes I have too much confidence. I maybe come off as maybe a little bit arrogant. What can you do? I’m a New Yorker, but-

David:
That Ferrari swag’s tough to brush off.

Robert:
Hey, I can’t fit in them, so I got to kind of feel it. But anyway, I think when it comes to confidence is the thing about confidence, it’s something imaginary. You can’t go buy it in the store. It’s not something you can build. It’s not something you can, not necessarily build, but not something you could go in. It’s not tangible.
It’s not something you can touch. It’s really just the self confidence in you that knowing that I can do it, I can bust my butt. I will do it. There is no plan B. If you have a plan B, plan A, you’re already prepping for that to fail. So when we came down here, plan A was our plan, no matter what. We were going to be successful. There was no ifs and buts about it.
And I think just saying that, regurgitating that to yourself every single day, Ayoka, she writes her affirmations every day. I believe that I’ll be able to fit in a Ferrari one day. I have those affirmations, but it happens with the mood swings when I say I’ll fit in a Ferrari and I’d go to McDonald’s and I get a McDouble, you also have to feed into that affirmation. You have to feed into it.
And I think when people have confidence issues, they don’t continue to nurture that. They just say it and it should happen like that, and you have to continue to nurture it. That’s the big thing I think advice with me that I’ve learned that we’ve nurtured it and continue to say it day in and day out.

Brandon:
You know one thing I’ve found with confidence is that confidence comes with repeated use of the right actions, right? Because that starts from your identity, right? So I’m not confident in a lot of things because I don’t have that identity that I’m confident. I’m not a confident Stick Shift driver, but I can do it, but I haven’t done it enough to be confident at it.
So when I do it… But if I practice it a whole lot, if I just did it over and over and over and over, I would start to get that identity of like, oh yeah, I can drive a Stick Shift. And once I believe that in my soul and my identity says, I can drive a Stick Shift, then I’m confident, and then it just comes.
And so when people get into real estate, I’m always encouraging them. That’s why the importance of analyzing 100 deals comes in. I say that on webinars all the time. Analyze 100 properties because after that, it’s going to be like driving a Stick Shift a hundred times. You’re going to feel pretty confident at the end of it.
So let’s talk about how you went from this, trying to figure it out, this failure of the first six properties that didn’t work out. A lot of people would just throw in the towel at that point. What did you do next? I mean, what was the first successful deal then? How’d you end up landing something?

Ayoka:
So we were driving for dollars, our first deal, and we would always drive for dollars. Like, okay, let’s train our eyes to look for ugly houses, train our eyes to look for problems obviously. And we were driving and we saw this one house and it was just disaster. And someone was out there mowing the yard. So Rob just said, “Hey, are you interested in selling this house?”
And the guy was like, “Well, I just mowed the yard for the guy, but I can give you the number to the person that basically owns the property.” So that’s what he did. He gave us the number. We called. Again, another, we’re still learning how to get our numbers correct. So we were like, okay, let’s put this one on the contract. We did successfully, and that deal pretty much got us $2,700. And it was the best thing that we… It was the best $2,700 we’ve ever, I’ve ever made.

Robert:
Yeah, I think that proved the proof of concept. We just got out the car. As nervous as I was, I got out the car and I just spoke to the guy and I made a couple calls. I looked up some public knowledge information on Google’s Zillow and that got me 2,700 bucks. And I can not tell you the amount of wholesale deals that we’ve done after that, the multi-families that we brought.
That $2,700 was probably the best check that I’ve ever cashed. I counted it at least… I probably counted until it was like $10,000, but it was just 2,700, but it was just the fact that we came down here, took action and it netted us 2,700 bucks off of just ourselves.

David:
So that’s where you made the connection between action and money

Ayoka:
Yes.

David:
That became real in that point. So this is awesome. Can you share what you did specifically that made that 2,700?

Ayoka:
Yeah, sure. So when we met with the… It was actually a caretaker of the owner and she was… It was so funny because I remember specifically when we met with her and we got the contract with them, they were like, can we take a picture of you guys? And we were like, well, I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos and no one’s ever taken a picture of the wholesalers. I’m like okay, sure. Rob and I was smiling.
She’s like, okay, one by yourself and one together. She’s like, I just think you’re such a beautiful couple. And I’m like I’m sure that’s not what it is. You just want to make sure that if anything happens to your house, that you have a picture of us for the news. So that was even more pressure for us because it’s like, okay, now she has a picture of us. We need to close this deal.
So I can’t remember the exact number that we locked it up under. I mean, it was… We negotiated them down from like, they wanted 40,000 to like 11,000. And at the time we were like, okay, let’s find a buyer. We found a buyer that happened to be my uncle’s landlord, and we just networked with him. And it was actually such a crazy story because he was such a big buyer in the area, a local buyer.
This house had been vacant for about 20 years. So the moment that we got it under contract it actually… And we got under contract with him as the buyer, the next day it was condemned. There was the condemned note on the house and we’re like, okay. And sellers are calling us, like, what did you do? And we’re like, we didn’t get it condemned. We ended up finding out that the buyer kind of had a lot of friends in high places and ended up getting the property condemned.
And he called us back and he was like, well, I can’t buy it at this price. And the number may have been like 20,000. We had originally on the contract for 11 with the seller. So we’re like, wow, we’re going to make almost $9,000 off of this. So he’s like, I can’t buy it at this price, it’s condemned. So I’ll but it at 13 or something. And we’re like, wow. So long story short that is… We learned easily that things like that can happen.
We’re happy that he didn’t just go around to the seller because he probably could have. He was a big name, but we kind of learned all right, trust and the relationships. We got to the closing table, we were very happy with that $2,700. So happy that we went back to New York because we still had our apartment there. We went back to New York sold everything that we had. I mean our TV, we were just in there for under a year.
So we sold our TV, our beds, everything for wholesale prices. So we really learned what that was about. And we were like, all right, all we needed to know is this was real.

Robert:
Yeah, I gave up. We went to New York, we gave up our… I gave my dog. We packed everything that we could possibly cram into contractor bags. I might cry about it because it so crazy because that $2,700 was not enough for us to set up any type of living situation in that state. But it’s just, I don’t know, I felt like that 2,700 bucks just like, boom.
That is this can work. So we crammed up. When I tell you David, we crammed up everything in a Lincoln Navigator and drove down here and it was just… It was a rental too, but we sold everything and cramped our lives, literally pushed all the chips into the center and came down here to Tennessee. And just off of that 2,700 bucks, that was enough for us to trust each other and trust what we could do and try to make it in the real estate world.
That was all we needed, 2,700 bucks. We didn’t need a guru. We didn’t need a $40,000 course. We didn’t need the systems, the secret lists. We didn’t need any… We didn’t even need, and no disrespect, but we didn’t even need a podcast. All I needed to know is that I could make 2,700 bucks by talking to someone because they had an asset that was just deteriorating. That was enough for me to push everything into the center of the table and make the bet.

Brandon:
That’s cool. This is why we preach all the time here. The first deal doesn’t have to be a home run. It doesn’t have to be a grand slam. Just get in the game because you’re going to start building that momentum and your identity starts to shift and you start to believe in yourself. And that’s exactly what I see with you guys. So what happened next? I mean, where did you go from there from that first… I mean, you’ve done a lot of deals now, so how’d that progress?

Ayoka:
Yeah, so… Oh, you want to take that?

Robert:
No, you’re the queen. You got it.

Ayoka:
Because you know I’ll beat you up. No, I’m sorry. Okay, so we came down where… And my cousin, thankfully he and his girlfriend said, “Hey, you guys can stay with us. That’s fine.” We were like, “Okay, that’s great. But you have a one bedroom.” But they were like, “That’s fine. You guys can have the living room.” We were like, okay, let’s take the living room. We can do this.
So we came down. We had all of our stuff and stuffed in the closet and the storage unit. And we were like, all right, so we have this couch and Rob always makes this joke about, he’s like, oh, I was holding you because if I don’t hold you, we’re going to fall. And I’m like, oh, I thought it was because you love me.

Robert:
No, that couch like seriously, for the comfort, people think they want the comfortability. I’m willing to change if I get comfortable. Our change was brutal. It was hard. That couch was so small. I’m 6’4 and I would sleep like this and I would hold her just so we didn’t fall off the edge of the couch. So it was just like it’s real life. It’s true.

Brandon:
I thought you were going to go with… I thought you guys were going to go with the analogy there of I’m holding you in life so we don’t fall off. It sounds like a-

Robert:
That analogy too, sure. Yeah, that analogy too, but yeah.

Ayoka:
Or whatever.

Brandon:
All right, keep going.

Ayoka:
Yeah. So we basically were asleep on the couch and every single day, even though I had family here, we would come down to Tennessee annually, like once or twice a year, but we would just stay in with my family. We wouldn’t go and sight see or anything. So we had no idea about the market. So now we told ourselves we have to learn the market here. We need to learn zip codes.
I don’t know anything. I grew up here, but I went to New York when I was 13 years old. So it’s a completely different city for me and him coming down with me, he had no idea either. So we’re like, all right, we need to drive for dollars. So that would be one of our main sources. We would drive, learn zip codes. And that’s how we would kind of learn what was the hot zip codes, what were the ABC class zip codes and D class zip codes.
And we would just drive around and learn all the zip codes and talk to everyone. We would just get creative. We’d go buy tickets and hand them out to mail men and women, and say, hey, we’re looking for vacant houses. So if you find one, here’s our number and here’s a lottery ticket. And we would get people actually working for us. We would try anything to be creative. We would have people just text us pictures and addresses of houses.
We would do anything to just kind of network. I mean, FedEx, UPS, anybody would talk to you and we would get a lot of deals from… The majority of our deals were driving for dollars. We started, I should say that where we were staying also wasn’t the best environment. So we would go. We had an office at Panera Bread. We would be there from 1:00 PM to 1:00 AM and we would tell people… We would talk to sellers and be like, yeah, when I get back to my office we’ll hone out numbers and stuff like that.

Robert:
Mind you our office is the next table over where it’s a little bit more quiet.

Ayoka:
And we got to know the staff at the local Panera Bread and Starbucks in the area. And they would allow us to even stay there all night and shut down the lights and stuff, and even lock up at, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, but they would actually let us lock the doors at night. We would bring them pizza, just show them we really appreciated them.
But to answer your question directly, how we would scale and get more deals was we were just talking to everyone, but we were not networking. When I say we were talking to everyone, when we would talk to… We’d make cold calls. We would definitely be in centers where we could talk to sellers. But when we would have to dispose these deals, we only had one or two buyers and we would only sell them… We would only look for what they pretty much wanted.
So we stayed very small in our networking for the first year that we were in Tennessee. And that we now know really hurt us, was staying small and not going out and talking to people, other wholesalers, people that were buying properties. We didn’t talk to… We were just like, okay, we don’t know anyone, so stay small. We didn’t join meetups, which is definitely something I would tell people to do. Join your local meetups. We did that during COVID and it changed our lives. Our lives changed from just COVID alone.

David:
So how many wholesale deals have you done now in the past couple of years? Because you started this a couple of years ago, right? You get that.

Robert:
Two years. So I think probably 15, 20.

David:
Wow, that’s awesome.

Robert:
15, 20 deals

Ayoka:
Yeah, right around 15.

David:
And what do you aim for in terms of profit on a wholesale deal? I mean, what are you buying them for? What are you selling them for?

Robert:
So, car sales that’s kind of… Our [judge 00:35:37] is more Ayoka is the analytical person and she’ll find the problems in the data. And when it comes to the negotiation and aiming for a certain wholesale fee, that’s on my side. And I usually try to aim for as much money as possible.

David:
That’s a good choice.

Robert:
So 20, 25,000, 30,000. Yeah, that’s what I aim for. And we’ve been blessed, really our average is kind of around the $20,000 range. We’ve had some 5,000, $7,000 deals, but thankfully we really do about 20,000 a deal.

Brandon:
Wow, that’s awesome. I know people who are listening to this right now are just like with their jaw dropped, you can make $20,000. Now, one thing we did not explain earlier that maybe we should touch on real quick is because wholesale is kind of a unique concept. And I know we talk about on the show here a lot, but just in case people are still at this point confused on wait, what the heck are you doing? What do we mean by wholesaling? Can you explain that?

Robert:
Yeah. So, wholesaling is by far the simplest thing in the history of mankind. When you look at a farmer, he grows and he sells it to Walmart and you buy it from Walmart. Walmart is wholesaling you produce. When you go to a dealership and they get the car from the factory, they give it to the dealership and you buy it, lease it, finance it. The dealership is the wholesaler.
Wholesaling is just a transaction. So what we do is we find problem properties where people per se don’t know what to do with it. We search for them. We look for them high and low. We try to find them. It’s certain people put properties on MLS, but for the people that actually don’t know what to do with their properties, they just let them go, like out of state owners, tax delinquents, your general list.
We find those people and we give them to buyers, cash buyers that either flip properties, they use them as investments. They do bivy things with it, but they’re buying them at under market value. So we find distress assets. We get them for a great price. We mark our fee on top of that for finding it, and then we give it to somebody that’s so grateful that they found this off-market property at such a steal, and they can make it into an investment of their choosing.
And that’s it. The simplest things. It sounds so simple, but it’s hard. It’s not easy. It’s not something where you could do just as a whim. It takes dedication and hard work to do it, but it’s a simple, simple concept.

Brandon:
Yeah, you’ll find a great deal. Find somebody who wants a great deal, make a little profit on them in the middle. And of course, we always say this. If people are listening to show and are like, well, I’m going to go do that. It’s an awesome way to invest in real estate. It’s an awesome way to get started. It doesn’t require a whole ton of money, but just be aware that every state has a different way of doing it.
And there are legal ways to do it and there are illegal ways to do it. So that’s just the warning we tell everyone is don’t just hear something on a podcast and run out and just do it. Do a little bit of research, but-

Robert:
Please.

Brandon:
Yeah. Do you recommend new investors jumping into wholesale? Or do you think it’s just a certain type of person that’s good for that or is that permit’s good for everyone?

Ayoka:
I think it’s good for everyone. I always say that I’ve really tried to… The last two years, I’ve really changed my mindset from limiting people from thinking that you can’t do something. I think you can do this if you can at a legal, I don’t know what to say, a legal age, but I think that there is no age limit on this as long as you can comprehend numbers and everything.
I think that there’s no specific… I am a girl that never had a degree. I tried to put myself through college. I come from a family that was on section eight and everything, food stamps and forward. Father was not present in the house at all. I actually found my father while we were down here wholesaling. It’s a crazy story as well. And found out that I had like 10 other siblings and it is insane what these last two years have brought.
But this, I would tell anybody, don’t let any story unlabel yourself. Don’t ever think that you can’t do something. You can definitely wholesale. You can be an agent. You can be an investor, you can be a millionaire. I would tell anybody that even questions, because I remember Rob and I questioning. There were nights that we lost contracts or that deals didn’t close and titles came back and they were… It was just a no go because of liens or whatever.
And those nights… Or even one time where someone saw that we had advertised the property on Facebook and they called us like, why are you advertising, the seller called like, why are you advertising my property? So there were moments where we second guessed are we supposed to be doing this? Should we be doing this? There are the great highlights, but I definitely wanted to come, and Rob and I was saying, we want to come to this interview very authentic and telling you that there are highs and lows in this.
There’s a certain mindset that you even have to develop to wake up on a couch that’s kind of very uncomfortable to going into a room of, a house with somebody that has 20 properties. And there’s a certain mindset shift that you have to do to not think about what your current situation is and put yourself at a higher level of thinking.
So to answer your question directly, anybody can do this. I would say if you’re a seasoned investor, because we come across seasoned investors, that’s just like I would love to wholesale. And I mean buyers… I mean, we talk to people that have a lot of properties and they’re building new construction. They would say I would love to wholesale, but I don’t know how to… I don’t want to spend time negotiating with sellers and all this stuff.
And then we talked to people that are just afraid to take action, period. Anybody can do it in my opinion. Just unlabel yourself.

David:
Well, I think that’s a great point because when we hear $20,000 to wholesale a deal, there’s often an assumption that it’s just free money or easy money. Oh, I found a seller. I made 20,000. No, to get that one 20,000, you probably had to go through 10 to 15 conversations and to get to those 10 to 15, you probably had to pursue 100. And to get those 100, you’d probably had to send out mailers to 1000. And nobody wants to think about the money that they spent putting out the mailers to 1000 at the time.

Ayoka:
Exactly.

David:
So that 20 grand isn’t profit, there’s some business expenses associated with it. That’s why I like buying from wholesalers, to be honest, because they’re front loading all the… They’re taking all the risks and they’re putting all the investment and I just get to swoop in once they’ve already got the deal under wraps.
And that’s why it doesn’t make sense when people complain about wholesale fees because they don’t understand there’s a cost associated. And there’s a skillset that you guys have developed that you’re very good negotiators, and you’re good at identifying, okay, there’s some opportunity here that maybe some people don’t have. What I want to ask you guys is how you transitioned into owning real estate.
This is a little bit less of a business. It’s active income and a little more passive income. And then once that transition was made, how are you balancing those two things where you’ve got activities that generate revenue through wholesaling, and then you’ve got activities that generate revenue through passive income?

Robert:
In all honesty, when it comes to kind of juggling the two it’s really hard. I’m not going to sugar coat it and say, we have a system here and that it’s… We were doing two rehabs while we were trying to have our wholesale business on side, which is two different things, fixing, flipping and doing a wholesale finding deals.
It was difficult because we had no experience flipping. So we wanted to do everything. I want to know what my contractors are doing because one, not only does it show that I have pride in my project because I’m there every day, but I also want to know so in the future when I do another project, I can price it out based on what they’re actually doing. I know what it’s… I don’t sound like a tool by just not… Hey, can you put this sheet rock up and do this light?
And they charge me 50 grand. I want to know what it takes. With that being said, being there every single day on that flip, it took so much away from us being outside, talking to people, getting deals in our funnel. And that’s the thing with wholesaling is you send out, everybody wants the secret sauce. They want the list, the super system. There is none.
To get deals through your funnel, you have to… The letter that you send out today might get you a deal 30, 60, 90 days from now. So if you need money and you want to send out one mailer to a delinquent tax person and hope that you get to close it next week, that’s not happening. Quit, that’s not going to happen. You have to send out mail. You have to talk to people.
You have to drive around and get things so cramped into your funnel that you raise your chances to wholesale something. It’s just a numbers game, and that’s the biggest thing we learned. So when we were doing that flip for three to four months, nothing was going in our funnel and it was brutal once we came out of that flip.

Ayoka:
Let me kind of go into detail how… I want to go into detail David. So when COVID happened, we were really terrified as wholesales. Because at that time we were just strictly wholesaling and we were… I actually don’t remember how that’s when I actually started reading a bit more, but I started thinking, okay, we need to now have some sort of income, some sort of cashflow coming in.
Because at the time with wholesale, and obviously, it’s a high-end job. It’s a high-end paying job. So we realized that if we cannot wholesale, because people are not lending, buyers are not buying, sellers may not be selling or even if they are selling, if there’s no one buying, we don’t have a transaction. That made us have the transitioning to how do we start accumulating cash flow.
So when COVID happened, we started thinking, how do we… We would make wholesale fees, and this is I feel like the mistake that a lot of people kind of don’t mention, but we didn’t have the mental fortitude to learn how to put away money. So we would blow a lot of our wholesale fees. We would just have fun with it. We weren’t thinking about reinvesting our money in all honesty. So it continued being, we need to chase this check continuously.
That when COVID happened, we were like, we need to learn how to get these wholesale fees and reinvest them into rentals. So obviously it’s kind of hard to find a house that is $20,000 or 10,000 or 8,000. You can do it, but we, at the time we didn’t know about creative strategies or anything. We actually, when they first started opening, when I guess businesses kind of started opening up, I started noticing that on my Facebook page I would post things about wanting to… How do I buy rentals?
And I would get no responses because the network on my Facebook were just people that… It was the same people I left in New York in a sense. So it was nobody that could help me with giving us knowledge. So I started clearing my Facebook completely. And this is something that I definitely want to mention that, one of the mindset shifts that happened to us was I lost a lot of friends and family.
Not on a bad note, but because our mindset started to elevate and I realized we didn’t have the network to help us get rentals, learn how to get rentals, learn how to get any sort of passive income. And I started deleting people from my Facebook and I started adding local people. I would just try to find anyone that was in real estate. I added real estate groups.
And I found one that basically was going to do a small meet up with COVID precautions and everything. And I said, “Rob, we have to go to this. This is where we’re going to build our team. This is where we’re going to find private lenders. This is where we’re going to find people that have rentals and everything.” So we went and we were scared.
I mean, because this was a multifamily meet up and I’m like, well, I’ve wholesaled a couple of duplexes, but we don’t… I’m sure everybody that’s in this room have properties. So we were just nervous. And we walked in and we were like, let’s just try to network with people. One guy that we came across, his name is David. He was one of the guys in the room that pretty much had a lot of properties.
So, there was a straight intimidation factor on our end, but we decided to… I was talking to him and he was saying everything that he had and everything. And I said, “Okay, can we take you out for lunch?” And took him out. We took him out for lunch and learned a lot basically from him. And that day I sat down with Rob and I said, “We need to send this guy an email and see how we can bring him value.
And then in return, he has properties. That’s something we want to learn. So in exchange, we need to see what he needs.” He told us that he wants multifamily units. So I said, okay, me and Rob know nothing about, besides the two or three duplexes that we flipped, we have no idea.

Robert:
No idea.

Ayoka:
… What that means, I buy multi-family. So we had him meet with us and explain to us what it is that he buys. He told us he likes big unit anywhere from… It had to be a duplex, but he doesn’t really like duplexes. He’d rather have like a street of duplexes and stuff like that. So we had to change our entire mindset because I realized that there was somebody out here that had what I wanted, and we need to, if I want to get that and learn that, I need to bring something to him.
So we started looking for deals for him, and we ended up partnering. This is getting to your question of how we changed into owning units. We found a duplex that was in an amazing area, and this we founded off of writing up. It was a probate. So Rob focuses on probates and I focus on everything else. And Rob wrote a letter to him. We looked in the obituary, we found out that this man’s wife had just recently passed away.
Wrote a beautiful letter. The gentleman called us, he was ready to sell and go into an RV and travel for the rest of his life. He was 83. He said he thinks he has five years left. So he basically wanted to sell. He wanted to sell us his house. It was a duplex. It was two units on one. And at first we were like, okay, we could wholesale this and make maybe 15 grand, but we also could learn to transition to cash flowing.
We brought the deal to the gentleman, David and David only knew us for about a couple months, maybe two or three months. And he was willing to just off of our ambition and bringing deals to him and learning. And we would take him out every single week, and we would be bringing him deals. Some things he didn’t like, some things maybe he did like, but he was willing to just off of seeing our work ethic, fund that duplex for us and give us the money to rehab it.
And we got an equity position in that instead of just wholesaling it. And that kind of opened our eyes to, wow, there are people out here that will help you that don’t care about your racial background or your background in general. Just want to know that you can do what… You can perform and you can find assets that are valuable to them and you can honor your word. And that’s how we got the transition into zero units and just wholesaling to now we have 20 units in about six months.

Brandon:
That’s awesome. I love that you say that because you were putting the work in. Hustle is like the great equalizer, right? Hustle is a great equalizer. I don’t care what somebody their background is. I don’t care if they have a college degree. I don’t care if they were living on the street last week and they’re 16 years old. It doesn’t really matter.
If you bring value, if you bring me a deal, if you prove that you can do that, then I’m going to pour into you and I’m going to help you because you’re providing value to me. And so, yeah, hustle is the great equalizer 100%. So how did you go… I mean, you bought the duplex and then all of a sudden you got 20 units. I mean, what would that look like? Was that all one big property, or it’s just a bunch of these little ones?

Robert:
So the duplex it’s a house 2,500 square foot. And then it has a garage apartment that it was built in the 30s. So it functions like a duplex, but it is a single family house with a garage apartment. And then like Ayoka said, looking for deals, completely switching our mindset and our systems from single family assets to multifamily assets, we were looking at a 45 unit complex.
And in negotiations to try to buy that property and bring it to David, we were driving around the area. And one thing I recommend, one thing that is a great thing, if you see something or if you get a feeling or a hunch, just stop and do it. So I came across a 15 unit complex that had the management number on it. And I said, you know what? Let me just give it a call and see what happens.
I gave it a call and I spoke to the lady, an old lady that owned maybe 60 properties, 60 units in that area. And I told her, I said, “Hey, we’re from New York. We’re looking at buying some property. Would you sell to us?” And the first thing she said is, “You’re from New York, please do not bring any of your liberal antiques down here to Tennessee.” I said, “No, ma’am, I’m not. I only brought cash.”
So, we’ve built… Long story short is I followed up with this lady every single day. Me and Ayoka did things for this lady. We put salt on her in her properties when it was snowing. We did everything to show value because we really wanted these units. So after about three months of followup, she gave us a call and said, “Hey, I want to sell these properties to you because you guys keep bugging me.”
I said, “No problem.” We brought it to our partner, David, and basically long story short, David kind of let us know we could either wholesale to him or we could take an equity stake in it. And long story short, we decided, you know what? Let’s build cashflow, let’s see where this goes. And we have our 20 units just like that, just based off of going to a meet up, talking to someone and bringing them value just like that.
And it didn’t take a bank or magic credit, it just was a conversation. That’s how simple it was. There’s times where my tenants call me. And I’m like, I’m not your… I don’t feel like I’m your landlord because I did nothing for that deal. But it feels like when I look at it, I did so much by bringing that guy value, that lender value.
I did it by bringing the owner value, which in the future she’s 100% going to sell us the 60 remaining properties that she has. And it was just a conversation. It wasn’t nothing special, no secret sauce. It was just us talking and bringing value and following up. And we have 20 units now that it feels like a blur. It’s so it’s so crazy. It’s so surreal.

David:
That’s awesome. Are you guys managing yourself? Is that kind of your role in the partnership?

Ayoka:
Yes. So we do self-manage and we also… We do have a management fee that we discussed outside of the actual ownership interest. So I just want people to kind of know that networking changed our lives in the last six months. We went from, I mentioned before, having our office at Panera Bread and the local Starbucks. And that was very real.
That was our office. Every single day, we came in like employees like clockwork. They knew we were going to be there. They knew where we sat. They were bringing us free food and so on and so forth to the point that customers knew us. We went from that to going to a meetup and taking another guy out that was just a very friendly… Actually we met him at, it was like a local cashflow game.
It was about six people there and we decided… It was advertised on Facebook. We said, “Hey, we need to get to know people.” This is all during COVID. So we went to that little cashflow game and met another gentleman that changed our lives as well. Took him out, his name was Mike, and we took him out to eat. And that same day we took him out to eat he said, “I have an office that is a storage unit, but you guys can convert it to an office.”
And we got an office just off of that. And we were always forward-thinking. He had an office in his storage unit building as well two doors down from us. And we knew that, hey, this guy has a wealth of knowledge. We need to find a way to bring him value. So we would just have basic conversations. Rob, he now does YouTube video recordings for him and in exchange, this guy does a lot of creative strategies.
Gave us our first office and we paid for it, of course, but it was insanely low to what people pay for actual office spaces. But you’re talking about someone that came down here with nothing and knowing nobody to finding ways to just get out there and bring value to people and things would come back. They would just come back to us. And the same way with the units. There are people out here that are willing to help.
I can’t wait to do this for someone. There are people out there that’s willing to help you because they see that you’re willing to help yourself and help others. And I think that was one of the biggest things that I want to bring to people is you can change your environment and you can… We completely had to change our course of friends. We had to change the family that we hang out with.
We had to change ourselves because there was a lot of arguments that happened and the mess in these two years, because we are developing entrepreneurship. We’re developing, learning about ourselves. The mindset I had two years ago coming from New York to Tennessee, Rob and I would say door knocking is one of our favorite things to do.
And we were so conditioned that we didn’t want to knock on people’s doors, because we were afraid of, hey, they’re going to see that he’s this, description of himself. And we’re in this country, Tennessee, and there were people telling us, don’t do that. Don’t knock on these doors with these Confederate flags and this… And they weren’t the nicest people. They were-

Robert:
How many times have I been invited by a little grandma to have cookies when I knocked? I’ve been invited more times into a house. And it happens to me so often that I’m like, there are really people in this world that just are genuine good people. There are more good people than there are bad people. And we would knock on doors and people would just say, come in, come take a look at my house. Come, just walk in and sit down and have a cookie, have this. And it’s like, there’s no excuse. There’s no excuse whatsoever.

Ayoka:
Yeah, you can’t make anything an excuse in the world. You can’t make the fact of not having a car and not having a place to stay. We exchange, for where we’re living now, we exchange value for free rent, basically. So we went from the couch to living in a two bedroom townhouse for exchanging… Just showing this guy’s property.
So we do his listings and showings for him, in exchange, we got a nice, comfortable place to live. And I just like to… I just want to point that out because I keep saying, I’m talking to the people out there that are stuck and I can’t do this. I don’t know anyone, I’m scared. No one’s going to help me. Why would they help me? I don’t have this education. We knew zero about real estate.
I think I started the interview by saying, I didn’t even know what equity was. I had no idea to actually have an equity now in property. So I would say bring value to people, it will change your entire life. And always think forward. When we meet someone or even doing this podcast, we’re like, all right, we really need to know who we want to target and we also want to know, how do we give to people and at the same exact time?
So we’ve met people that changed their lives. And even past friends, it’s hard for us to have conversations with the people we were friends with for the past 10 years, because our level, our mindsets are just completely different and they can’t really understand that. And it doesn’t make them bad people or us bad people. I remember when I really realized that our mindsets were shifting, because I was like it’s hard to have conversation with friends.
And I would just ask people like, “Hey, when you became at the level of success that you have, did you notice that friendships were deteriorating? Or is it just happening to us? Did you realize that family, you can’t sit there and watch them make the same jokes? Did you realize that the same shows that I love two years ago, I can’t stand now?”
And I just feel like those are the trials that we went through these last two years and it was very… I think we don’t… I really like to emphasize the power of mindset and just changing your environment. It’s a very real thing. And we had to get out of our own way a bunch of times, and that’s how we got to nothing. We’re at the epitome of everything, but getting out of our own way and mindset changed our entire life this last two years.

David:
Well, that’s what I’d like to sum up about what you’re describing here, is you two did what nobody else is willing to do. You packed up your stuff and you moved to an area that you didn’t know, that you literally didn’t know the zip codes. That was not an area that was comfortable for the current version of yourselves.
People didn’t think like you. Like you said, there’s Confederate flags on these doors that you’re knocking in. Then you’re getting advice from people that says, don’t go do that. That’s a bad idea. Then you two said, we want this so bad, we’ll figure out a way to do it. And you venture into this unfamiliar territory, which no one ever wants to do. They always want the comfort and the knowing and the certainty.
And you find they’re inviting me in for cupcakes. This is not as bad as what people thought. When you step on the other side of certainty, you often find that it was all the preconceived notions that we had about what to expect actually aren’t there. And to the victor, go the spoils. You guys are snatching up these deals and you’re doing amazing. And then you said, to take it to the next level, I got to bring value to someone.
You didn’t email the person and say, how do I bring value to you? You figured out what David needed by talking to him and listening to him. And then you said let’s venture into and figure out how to bring him something of value. And in that process, what I hear you two saying was you learned there were labels that you had mentally taken on yourselves, a belief system about how the world worked that you had to let it go, like a snake that just sheds its skin and has to grow a new mindset type of a thing.
And now you’re flourishing. And I love that you’re sharing this story with people because people that have crossed that line that I just described have all said the same thing. It wasn’t what I thought. It wasn’t until I got there, that I realized what was needed. It was me that had to change. It wasn’t that I had to make things work the way that I wanted them to work.
And for the people that take that journey, like what you’re describing, we kind of talked about this before we started the podcast. It’s good that it’s hard like this, because that barrier to entry is what makes it so everyone’s not out there just grabbing these deals for the few that are willing to do what it takes to burn the boats, to move to Tennessee, to go into a place they’re uncomfortable.
They deserve to get the lion’s share of those deals. So, I mean, I’m just juiced up listening to your guys’ story. And I wish everyone could hear. Calculators are good to analyze deals, right? Contracts are necessary to know, but what you really, really need is this mindset that you two have and that ability to just do whatever it takes.

Ayoka:
Thank you.

Robert:
Just to kind of put the cherry on top is I’m willing to do… If you don’t wake up every day willing to do anything and everything that it takes to be successful, just hang it up. It’s not fair to yourself. It’s not fair to everybody on this podcast. Everyone that’s talking about their journey of real estate, for you to listen, for you to absorb that knowledge and then not to change or not to take action, because you’re just wasting it.
But if you actually just put what you have to do into action, it’s showing respect to everybody that’s giving you information. It’s just take action, that’s all you have to do. It’s just change your mindset and take action and everything else will fall from there. Simple as that.

Ayoka:
Yeah, sometimes you have to change everyone around you. I had to question every single thing. Why did I think that? Why did I think that about money? Why did I think that about… Why did I think… Why was I intimidated by buyers? Why can’t I become a buyer? What is so intimidating about this person? And it’s not looks and everything. It’s like, how do I get where they’re at?
And how can I become that so it doesn’t intimidate me? And it’s just a real transition mentally that you have to do. And there are so many people out here that’s willing to help you for very little to nothing, as long as you can find a beautiful way to help them as well.

David:
Brandon, I want to throw it to you for the final thought there, because you’ve done a lot of this yourself. You’ve changed your body by changing what you put into it. You’ve changed your mindset by changing what you read and what you think. A lot of what we’re talking about here today, I know you’ve really taken… You’ve become intentional about in the last couple years. Is there any insight you can provide on how more people can take the same journey?

Brandon:
I mean, I guess I would just throw it at the thing I say all the time. It’s look at the lead measures that you do. The results are a result of what you do. Not what you want, not what you wish. And I think that’s what you guy’s story shows so much is it’s like, you didn’t just want a different life.
You didn’t just want to be successful. You were like what are the tangible things I’ve got to do? I’ve got to follow up. I’ve got to do this thing. I’ve got to do that thing. And furthermore, even when you don’t know what the next thing is to do, it’s like driving through a foggy road at night. You can’t see a mile down the road. You can’t see out the a hundred feet up the road, but you can see one foot in front of your car.
So as long as you just drive that one foot, you can see the next foot. And I think it’s like, those things just make people no matter what it is, they’re trying to improve your relationship, trying to improve your body, trying to improve your anything, life, finances, anything, just keep driving that forward one foot at a time. You’re going to be… You’re going to get so much further than majority of the world who won’t do anything.
So my final question before I head to the famous four is, well, it’s kind of a two-part question. Where do you guys see yourself headed in the next few years? What are you striving for right now? And then finally, what can our audience bring you? How can they bring you value? What do you guys need right now?

Ayoka:
So for me, I’ve always known that I’ve wanted… Well, our goal now was to get 30 properties before 30 years old. So that’s sneaking up quickly on Rob because he’s in June, but I have all the way to next year. So we decided to change that. And now we want to do 100 doors by the end of this year. And that is our goal is to have 100 doors.
And the cashflow side of that is that we want to have at least like 30K net. So we want to go aggressive because we never… And I don’t know, that might be aggressive to some people. It’s subjective, but it’s truly a goal for us to do that by the end of this year, continue networking with the amazing people. We’re definitely targeting B, C class multi-families with high returns.
And we want to get more investors, which is something that we’re learning and wanting to do. So we can find anything, we put our… If we put our mind to it, we’ll find any property. Where at one point we had a gas station under contract, for wholesale. But that’s our goal. And on a personal goal is I wanted to start a, basically like a YMCA type of foundation for entrepreneurs.
When we couldn’t find an office space and we were going to these Panera’s and stuff, I just started thinking, why can’t I just find a place for entrepreneurs that just want to go and just read and just do work on their laptops, and just be surrounded by that type of entrepreneurial energy? So that is something that I’m going to do. And I want to take it internationally and just have like a center. Kind of like a Panera Bread without the upsell of the good soups and everything.

Brandon:
The broccoli cheddar. Ah, so good.

Ayoka:
Oh, that’s his favorite?

David:
Yap.

Ayoka:
That’s one of my personal goals is just to get somewhere where entrepreneurs can kind of just congregate and just work in a little bit more high-end of a library with just more fun.

Robert:
And just to piggyback off of what Ayoka said, just the same thing. Just 30K net, 100 doors, maybe more than that. It’s really just our goal is just full speed. It’s just go hard every single day, and if you want to bring value to us, we would love to bring value to you guys. So if you have any… We’re an open book.
If you have any questions or anything like that. So if you want to bring value to us you could hit us up on Instagram. It’s reallove_ realestate. Ask us any questions, if you want to come out to chat and ride with us for a weekend, we got space in the car. We’re always looking for private money lenders because we find assets that we just want to be able to partner and give returns to. So that’s pretty much our goal for the next next year or so.

Brandon:
Awesome. You guys are awesome. You guys are killing it. So before we get out of here, let’s get to the last segment of the show. It’s time for our…

Automated Recording:
Famous four.

Brandon:
This is the part of the show where we ask the same four questions to every guest every week. We’re going to throw my you guys right now. So without further ado, and you may have different answers, you may have the same. So we’ll start with Ayoka first on all these and then go to Robert. But number one, do you have a favorite real estate related book?

Ayoka:
Oh man, I was trying not to be cliche and say Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but it was honestly life changing to me. So I have to recommend that no matter what. That’s everybody’s Christmas gift by the way, is that book, so.

Brandon:
There you go.

David:
Yeah, I found that it’s like a gateway drug to real estate. That’s what gets everybody into it.

Robert:
To be honest with you, books are something I have to get more into. I won’t lie to you, but when I hear… We sit in the car and we play low five music while we’re driving for dollars. And Ayoka kind of, we just bounce off topics of the book. So I felt like I’ve read the book, but that book definitely is just mine. It’s the Bible.

Ayoka:
Have you ever heard someone say they felt like they read a book? Is that the funniest thing?

Brandon:
That’s how much Ayoka talks about it.

David:
I feel as if I’ve read the book, because I’ve heard it told like campfire stories, generations have been passed down [inaudible 01:12:22]. We don’t have the original copy anymore. It was destroyed during World War I.

Robert:
Legend has it, yeah. It was destroyed.

Ayoka:
These are the argument we have. He feels like he pulled that list. He feels like he read that book. He feels like he checked that tenant, just-

Brandon:
I think he feels like he’s got 100 units right now. I mean, why pursue any more?

Ayoka:
Exactly.

Brandon:
I just feel like…

Robert:
I see that this is a biased interview, so I’m just going to be quiet.

Brandon:
Awesome. All right, number two, David Greene.

David:
Well, yeah. What is your favorite business book?

Ayoka:
I’m reading this right now by Stephen Schwarzman.

Brandon:
What It Takes.

Ayoka:
What It Takes. I-

David:
That sounds exactly in line with how you guys talk.

Ayoka:
I love him. I watch all his interviews and stuff like that. Never thought we’d be in the position that I would be doing… I find my fun from Yahoo Finance now. But so far it’s absolutely beautiful book and it’s really helping me increase my… Elevate my thinking, so What It Takes.

David:
That’s how you know that you’ve entered the financial independence brotherhood, sisterhood is when TMZ is no longer appealing, but Yahoo Finance gets you off.

Ayoka:
Yeah, what happened? I remember looking at all the alerts, now they’re banned from my life.

David:
Yap. Robert, how about you?

Robert:
Legend has it that is also the same. I’ve felt like I’ve read the book also. But listen, its different strokes for different folks, but I really just bounce stuff off of Ayoka and-

Ayoka:
He likes podcasts.

Robert:
I know, I love podcasts. So that’s my-

David:
Did you feel like you’d already been on the BiggerPockets podcast?

Robert:
I felt like this is the third time you guys are talking to me. So it’s like it is what it is.

David:
That’s funny. Okay, how about this-

Brandon:
Let’s shift it to podcasts. What do you listen to?

David:
That’s exactly what I was going to ask. Who’s your favorite speaker to listen to if you don’t like to read books?

Robert:
So I’m a huge Grant Cardone fan. I just feel like if you’re looking for someone with confidence and you really look at his story, it’s a fantastic story. And I’m a big person on Steve Trang. I like Real Estate Disruptors because I think the biggest thing that we have to kind of watch out for is who your teachers are.
And I feel like whenever someone’s speaking on a podcast or speaking in general, they don’t want to give the real juicy bits or it feels like maybe they’re holding some stuff back to maybe so you could buy that their course. And I feel like the way he asks questions, the way you guys ask questions, it really pulls out the mentality, the certain things that you need to do.
So your podcast, Steve Trang’s, it’s just a podcast that can really get the nitty gritty out, the meat. I’m addicted to those.

David:
Yeah, we just had Steve Trang on our podcast episode 452.

Brandon:
I was just looking that up too, yeah.

Ayoka:
I’ve got to listen to it.

David:
He was really good. That’s great there. And for those of you who listen and don’t like books, it’s okay. Not everybody likes the same stuff. Don’t feel shame or guilt because you don’t like reading. You got two options. You could listen to someone else who read the book so much that it feels as if you read it or you can listen to other people talk and that’s perfectly fine too.

Ayoka:
No, you can’t do that.

David:
I feel like I already have that Ferrari that I don’t fit in, and I feel like I fit in it.

Robert:
I’m going to get you down in the comments. I’m going to get you. How did you not prepare for this question? They ask the same four questions.

David:
That’s okay. You know what? Robert, you play a very important role in this whole thing being the whipping boy, right? We got to bring joy to people’s laughs at your expense. So you’re the real MVP at the end of the day.

Robert:
Listen. Yeah, follow us on real love and real estate on our Instagram. We do crazy stuff. You guys got to follow us.

David:
I love it. All right, cool. When we’re not piling on Robert, what are some of your guy’s hobbies?

Ayoka:
Oh man, I’ll be completely honest. We’re still trying to develop hobbies. We probably need to have more fun to be honest. But you know what? We spent the first, what, seven years that we’ve been together because this year make 10, having fun. So right now it’s kind of business. We really genuinely enjoy each other as friends and as being in a relationship.
I love him. We’re we’re still getting used to the fact that we’re together every day, all day. We went from having separate lives, separate jobs to the same job now. So it’s kind of we need to make more time for fun, I’ll just be honest about that.

Robert:
My hobbies are one, I love cars by the way. Love, love cars, but love cars. Probably go bankrupt when buying cars. But honestly, and not to say cliche thing, but it’s really looking at houses every single day. Just immersing myself in work, immersing myself with Ayoka. I love her so much, and I would not be where I’m at if it wasn’t for her.
She is equally as… Because of my mindset, I give it all to her for that because if she did not kind of show me what to do, I wouldn’t be here. So it’s looking at deals, being with her every day in a car, her telling me about books that I should read and me listening to them. That’s my hobby that I truly, truly love. And I love what I’m doing right now. I am so happy with where I’m at right now and where we look to be in the future.

David:
That’s so good.

Ayoka:
Wow, got scared you were going to propose.

Brandon:
Right there.

Robert:
It might be a first.

Brandon:
I mean, Robert just feels like he’s married anyway, so we’re good.

David:
That’s the whole point, right?

Robert:
Legend has it, I read a book on marriage and how to… Legend has it.

David:
It feels like you guys are already married Ayoka.

Brandon:
All right, let’s close up shop. My last question of the day. What do you guys think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail or never get started?

Ayoka:
Action and fear. I’ve been in both places. I’ve been the place of inaction and I’ve been in a place of fear and it’s still a constant battle, but that is the difference. The true difference, in my opinion, between the successful investors and unsuccessful or the ones that’s not trying.
It’s action and fear. Work on it. I never knew that fear was something that you could change. Action, obviously it’s something that you can change, but you can also change fear. And my advice for just changing fear is just do it. There are times where I’m scared to make the cold call, so I force myself to do it.
There’s times where Rob and I may maybe scared to knock on the door. So we go there, we open the door and we do it. You walk down the driveway, you have to do it. So I would say that’s going to be the act… The game changer for anybody’s life is just… Rob wants to go to the gym and I’ll just stop there.

David:
I mean, what if you feel like you did go to the gym?

Ayoka:
He feels like he went.

David:
I feel like I worked out today.

Ayoka:
Yeah, exactly.

Robert:
This is not what I signed up for. It’s becoming very evident this is different that all-

David:
It’s really good that this didn’t come out at the beginning of the episode, because this would have been an hour and a half of continual I feel like.

Robert:
Just to answer that question, I feel like what separates, like Ayoka was saying, false evidence appearing real. It’s I’m scared to do this. There’s going to be… I have to prepare. We went to a seminar and there was someone that has never done deals. And they were just taking notes after notes, after notes. And I said, “How many seminars have you been to?” I’ve been to hundreds.
I travel around the country following seminars. And that’s just a waste of your time. Just take action. There is never going to… You’re never going to be prepared for a seller opening the door and telling you their problems, because all that is you’re just never going to know. So doing it is what separates real investors from someone that just goes to seminars and listens to podcasts as great as this one.

Brandon:
There you go. Mic drop, I love it guys. All right, David, why won’t you to get us out of here with the last question?

David:
Last question of the day. For those who love your story, and maybe want to bring value to you two, where can they find out more about you?

Ayoka:
Our Instagram is a reallove_realestate. We do have a YouTube channel, but Rob needs to put more content on it.

Brandon:
C’mon Rob, let’s go.

Ayoka:
Yeah, it’s just Real Love and Real Estate and it’s nothing special. We just tried… We’ve documented so much of our stuff just along the two years and we just kept it to ourselves. So we just started kind of just finally just kind of sharing it with people. So, that would probably be the best way.

Robert:
It’s just exactly what it is. Day to day, evicting tenants and looking at deals and just the raw nitty gritty. So hopefully you like it.

Ayoka:
And the good and the bad, so yeah.

Brandon:
Very cool guys. And it’s Real Love Real Estate. Did I get that right?

Robert:
Reallove_realestate.

Brandon:
All right, I’m following you right at this very moment. We’re now friends.

Ayoka:
Oh, that is too awesome.

Brandon:
Well, thanks guys. And everyone’s going to follow too.

Ayoka:
Thank you.

Brandon:
So we’re going to blow up your Instagram. I guess that’s it. So David Greene, I guess we’ll get out of here. Ayoka?

David:
Well, I was curious why we never came up for a cool name for the underscore. Remember how the pound sign became a hashtag?

Brandon:
That’s true.

David:
We keep saying underscore, three syllables for one little line that isn’t worth the [inaudible 01:22:42].

Robert:
That’s true.

David:
All right, that’s a completely separate bunny show there. Thank you guys very much for coming on, for sharing your story, for pulling back the curtain and letting us see really all the ugliness that’s behind the success, because people don’t get to see that. They get to see the big checks and the $20,000 numbers getting thrown around.
But you guys showed, this is the work that goes into having the incredible body that gets shown on the airbrush magazine. So thank you guys. Really respect you for doing that here-

Robert:
We appreciate that.

Ayoka:
Thank you.

David:
It was great to have you on.

Ayoka:
We were so excited about doing this.

David:
This is David Greene for… Oh, that’s awesome. I’m glad to hear that. I hope you guys get all the follows of the world because when Brandon blesses you with a follow, it does big things for you. So watch what happens there. This is David Greene for Brandon, I feel like I don’t steal other people’s quotes Turner, signing off. Kind of a jerk move that I made. Brandon, wait to then be insulted.

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