Podcast Transcription

Dave: Here we go.

Melina: Is that me?

Dave: And they’re off.

Melina: Is that my breathing? I don’t know.

Dave: That’s probably…

Melina: Whatever you do, don’t breathe heavy into the mic when somebody else is speaking. Which is what I do.

Melina: Welcome to “Flippin’ Off,” a purpose driven podcast about flipping houses and making a difference.

Dave: Well, here we’re again, honey. How are you?

Melina: Hey.

Dave: It’s Dave Boswell with my beautiful wife Melina Boswell and it is so nice in here because it’s like 80 degrees and outside is like 110 or something.

Melina: Yeah, so my sinuses are not happy so I sound a little nasally today because I’m having an allergy.

Dave: I was just gonna say that we both sound… oh no. Oops, sorry.

Melina: Yeah. That’s gross.

Dave: We apologize.

Melina: That’s nasty. Yeah, well…

Dave: It’s gonna happen. Just letting you know ahead of time, it’s gonna happen. But we’ve got things to do. We’ve got Tim and Oscar in the studio and that’s Tim Wilkinson and Oscar Solares. Today we’ve got a bunch of things that we’ve been kind of brain dumping about, and what’s happening. So it’s kind of a really exciting time for you guys specifically.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been fun, too.

Dave: Here we are, if you’ve caught some podcast in the past, we’ve kind of talked about Tim and Oscar and their stories and so forth. And we don’t wanna hit so much on that today. We really wanna talk a little bit more about some of the strategies. And one of the strategies that you’ve implemented recently and one of the things that Melina has been talking about, like pretty much this whole year. Dealing with homeowners and specifically like how we’re finding leads, and then once we find leads, all the different challenges that come up with inside those leads. A common thing that a lot of people ask us about is, you know, they get these buzz words. Okay, I’m gonna be a wholesaler or I’m gonna be a fix and flipper and then they just think that’s it.

Melina: Right, yeah. It’s one of my pet peeves. Because I think that people don’t understand that the magic in real-estate investing is not… like everybody likes to take something ugly and make it pretty, right. Everybody also likes to make money on a property, without doing anything to it. So that would be wholesaling or fix and flipping. That’s all the easy part and one of the pet peeves I have has to do with language, right, and how people identify what they do. So I spent a lot of time like in my foundations class. Just going over terminology and language, and really understanding the real power inside of being a real-estate investor. And that is finding motivated sellers. So it’s all about finding leads.

Dave: Right.

Melina: Yeah. You coined the phrase, “Deals are not found, they’re created.”

Dave: Right.

Melina: And never has that been more true than I think in what we’re seeing in the market right now.

Dave: Right. And people always use the… to make sure we’re clear even in our own terminology. Because, so I’m looking for deals, I’m looking for deals, I’m looking for deals, right? But it has to start with a lead.

Melina: Right.

Dave: I think you said the things like, “Isn’t it funny that a lead is… the deals fold backwards?”

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Right?

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: So we got to start with the lead, right. One of… you mentioned your foundations class and you do an amazing job at getting through a lot of those… breaking through some of the, I don’t know, buzz words, myths. Some of those things that you talk about specifically with language, right.

Melina: Right. And the idea that there is just a magic list that you can get and you’re gonna get motivated sellers, and you’ll just get a bunch of leads and you never have to leave the comfort of your own home. You can be a real-estate investor in your bunny slippers.

Dave: Right, right.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: I had a student not too long ago and he said, “I can’t believe that when I came here, like the magic sauce is like I have to have conversations with people.”

Melina: It’s true.

Dave: I’m like, what did… what did you think was going to happen? And he’s like, “Yeah, I thought you guys had access to some sort of like list, you know, because that’s what I get. All the email list and drips that I’m on, they’ll always send me this stuff, if you’ll just spend this much money, give us X number of dollars a month, we’ll just pipe in fresh leads to you and then you can literary make offers, like from the comfort of your laptop on your couch. And eventually, you’ll get yourself a lead that turns into a deal.” And I told him straight out, I was like, “I feel bad for you because, no, this is actual work. You’re gonna actually have to get up and have conversations with people.” And I think that was completely like a foreign language to him.

Melina: Yeah. I think it’s a disservice that people don’t understand they’re being given. When you aren’t taught how to have proper conversations with motivated sellers, then you were being cheated in my opinion. I think it’s all about the conversation. Because like I was just thinking, as you were talking about finding lists and invest from your couch. That maybe true in like some areas in the country for example. So you may be able to find motivated sellers or be able to buy properties in the Midwest for example, and that maybe one strategy. But if you want to be a real-estate investor, like in California, and you want to be a wholesaler or a fix and flipper, then you need to learn how to have conversations with homeowners, no matter what. One of the things I pride myself on is that when people take my training, I can drop them into any market anywhere in the country and they’ll make money. Because they know how to have conversations with motivated sellers. They, number one, know where to find a motivated seller, how to identify them, and then most importantly how to have a conversation with them. And I believe that’s everything.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Melina: And it’s been cool to watch all of our curriculum sort of expand from there. It’s just grown and it’s… I don’t know, it’s turned into some pretty awesome stuff in my opinion.

Dave: That was one of the things I wanted to touch on today was we get… sometimes we even get people like come, they’re like, okay so I joined this club. Now what? Okay. I come to… we have an initial three days of training, which kind of we immerse people in, we give them the basics, show them where to find some basic leads, where to be able to do some basic analysis, get other investors attentions, right. Because at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to lean on… when you first get started in this business, you’ve gotta lean on someone else’s credibility. Okay. I don’t know a single person who’s ever come to the club, taken our training and then on Monday went out and just did a real-estate deal all by themselves. I don’t know anybody.

Melina: I don’t either. I know people have come to our training and then got a deal, but they got help from one of the senior investors inside the club.

Dave: Yeah, exactly. And with that, that’s kind of how the curriculum has developed over the last… have we really been doing this almost 10 years?

Melina: Can you believe that?

Dave: Time is flying.

Melina: Crazy. Yeah.

Dave: But over the last decade, I can now say, we’ve developed curriculum. And that curriculum was based on challenges that we came up with by focusing on those leads. So I got Tim and Oscar here today and one of the things that they’ve done a really good job is obviously driving leads and working with new people that are going out and having those initial conversations. They typically have those conversations and then they get stuck, right, I mean it’s common. Yesterday, I had three students reach out to me with the exact same thing. Talked to a homeowner, this is what they’re thinking. What do I do next?

Melina: Yep.

Dave: From there, I got on the phone with each one of the homeowners and set up follow up conversations with them. Perfect, perfect. Because they don’t know what they don’t know just yet. And each one of them involves three totally different strategies inside dealing with those, and we can’t teach every “what if.”

Melina: Yeah. It’s like every possible scenario.

Dave: Right. Because we could “what if” it to death.

Melina: Yeah. We’d never leave the classroom.

Dave: Right. Well, one of those things that came up for Tim and Oscar was that they… well, Oscar and Tim. Tim and Oscar. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg over here. But nonetheless, what came up for them was that as they were running through and finding leads. They’d find out that they have NOD or Notice of Default and lo and behold the homeowner passed away.

Tim: Right.

Dave: And they came to Melina and said, “Hey, we need to have a class on like when does it make sense for us to help an heir?” Right? Whoever this property is being left to. “When does it make sense to help them go through probate and when does it not?” Maybe you guys can kind of expand on how that kind of came up for you, and I think you guys have now taught that class for the last year. Has it been about a year now?

Oscar: It’s approaching that I think, yeah.

Tim: Yeah. Coming up on a year.

Dave: So coming up on a year and I know it’s changed and you’re continuing to add to it and stuff changes, which is a cool part of what we do. Because this is what we do every day.

Tim: Yeah.

Oscar: Yeah. You know, the reason it changes is because we’re active in the market. So things show up on a regular basis and we have to figure it out and make it work. And then that becomes an opportunity to share that information with the club members and educate them on how that took place.

Dave: Right, right.

Oscar: There was essentially a need that we identified, that Tim came up to me and said, “Hey, I’m thinking of this. What are your thoughts behind it?” You hear about probates, specifically being a lead source.

Melina: Right, exactly.

Oscar: But we didn’t look at it that way. We looked at it more as like you said, when does it make sense to really help someone through the probate process? So we don’t go out looking for probate cases. We go out there looking as you said before, the notice of defaults, right, and helping those homeowners. The club members that are educated now, are really capable of, to Melina’s point, have those conversations initiated, then engage us to carry those conversations forward and work through the process. But I give credit to Tim, it was his brain child of let’s put something together that’s gonna make sense for people. And how do we do that?

Dave: So do me a favor, Tim, define probate for me so those that are listening… may or may not know what that means.

Melina: Putting him on the spot.

Tim: Yeah, right. So probate is a… it’s a legal process that frankly you have to go through, in order to transfer title after you pass away. If ownership of the property is owned in an individual’s name.

Dave: Got it.

Tim: Who passed away.

Dave: No trust.

Tim: Yeah.

Dave: Set up ahead of time, which everybody knows they should do it and they don’t get it done. So there is always new properties that need to go through probate, and basically the legal process of deciding who has a legal right to the property.

Tim: Right.

Dave: Ultimately, right?

Melina: I think people because they have a will. I think that is the misconception of so many people. Especially people in this generation that are getting older and they’re now passing away, which I think are baby boomers. They believed, oh, I have a will so therefore, I’ve covered my basis after I’ve passed away. Not understand that doesn’t cover it.

Tim: Right.

Dave: And a little disclaimer, none of us here are attorneys. We’re not here giving law or practicing law, in any way, shape or form.

Tim: Right.

Dave: So if you’re listening to this and somebody has told you something different, then apply it as you see fit to each situation.

Melina: Go see a lawyer.

Dave: Who does estate planning.

Tim: Right.

Dave: Like the Mark Koehler’s of the world and KKOS, those type of guys. Anyways, so go ahead, Tim.

Tim: Melina mentioned that people think that they have a will and that is going to take care of things. But at the end of the day, I can’t think of one person who puts in their will, that I want Bank of America to be paid.

Oscar: Right.

Tim: So the purpose of probate really… like at the end of the day, the purpose of probate is to make sure that all creditors that the decedent owed, get paid. I mean, if I broke it down to why we need a court process to make that happen? It’s because the creditor wants their money. If you put in the will, like I’m not gonna put in my will that I want my credit cards to be paid. I’m gonna say, I’m gonna leave the house to my kids or whatever that is. So the will itself has to be presented in front of a judge and then the judge is gonna make sure creditors get paid. And then after all of that is done, then what’s left over can be distributed to your heir. So that’s what the probate process is all about.

Dave: Got you.

Tim: In my mind, as a non-attorney.

Dave: You guys had a recent local deal, actually, in Orange County, right? That…

Tim: Right.

Dave: I know Jeff and Flora were out doing what Melina teaches and finding the distressed properties, and this was a notice of default. So the notice of default comes up and we’ll just protect the identity of the homeowner, and not mention the street or anything just for privacy purposes. But we’ll just… in Orange County.

Tim: Right.

Dave: In the last… what has this been, 60, 90 days now?

Tim: We’ve been working on it since the end of last year.

Dave: So the end of last year.

Tim: Is when the… so Jeff and Flora had attended Melina’s class, learned how to go talk to notices of default, homeowners that are in notice of default. Then they went and talked to these people that were living in the property, and found out that the owner had passed away.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: So they approached Oscar and I, because we have quite a bit of experience in dealing with probates. We were able to help them get the probate process started. They had actually started probate on their own, without an attorney, had a done couple of things wrong and they were facing a foreclosure sale now because it was taking too long. They had done it wrong so the probate process wasn’t moving forward the way it should.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: So we were able to help get that cleaned up with them and then we enrolled an attorney, to step in and help them out.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Okay. So it’s…

Melina: It’s like they were stuck and you un-stuck them.

Tim: Right.

Dave: I was gonna say… so you left out a few like key things, I wanna stop you real quick.

Tim: Sure.

Dave: So the people that are living in the property are whom?

Tim: They were…

Dave: Were they tenants? Were they family? Were they…

Tim: One of them claimed that he was the care giver of the…

Oscar: Decedent.

Tim: …of the decedent.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: And frankly he thought he owned the property.

Dave: Okay. Well, that’s a challenge.

Melina: But that’s so common. It’s kind of crazy how common that is. It’s an auditee, but it does happen a lot. I’ve seen and talked to so many people in that scenario. It’s weird.

Tim: Yeah.

Dave: So who started the process? Was it the care giver?

Tim: No. The son.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: Started the process.

Dave: Okay. And he got stuck because he didn’t know what he was doing, messed up paperwork.

Tim: Right.

Dave: And so the probate court is kind of kicking stuff back to him and none of that is stopping the foreclosure from looming?

Tim: Right. So he didn’t have the money to talk to an attorney or get things started with an attorney. So he attempted to do it on his own. He did a couple of things wrong, not huge things, but it was definitely… if the things are not done exactly right, then the judge just pushes it back and postpones things. So he was stuck in that space of I don’t know exactly what the judge is asking me to do. And he couldn’t afford an attorney. So we were able to come in. We helped him. We enlisted some paralegals and we paid for the paralegals, to help get things cleaned up. And then we enlisted an attorney, to continue the process. Based on our agreement of purchasing the property, which was his ultimate goal was to get rid of these tenants/squatters that were in his dad’s property. He just wanted to sell it. And we came to an agreement to purchase the property and inside of purchasing the property, included us paying for all fees and paying the attorney and taking care of everything that he couldn’t pay on his own. And at the end, he got all of his money.

Dave: Gotcha. So he just wanted to sell the property. Dad’s passed and he’s got this problem. So just kind of put yourself in that person’s position, right. So I’ve lost my dad first of all. So there is trauma that’s there, there’s the grieving process, all that that’s taking place. On top of it, you’re now getting notices from the bank.

Tim: Right.

Dave: Right, that we’re taking probably the estate’s largest asset I’m assuming.

Tim: Right. Its only asset.

Dave: Its only asset.

Tim: And it had equity in it.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: There was enough equity to make it… to where it made sense for him to actually go after it.

Dave: Okay.

Tim: But he couldn’t get it and he was getting ready to lose it.

Dave: Got it.

Tim: He was getting ready to potentially lose his dad and anything his dad was getting ready to leave him.

Melina: Yeah, it’s awful.

Dave: Yeah. And that’s the kind of the thing, right. So how do you connect with that? Let’s say the person sends an email to an NOD list kind of thing, you know, from the comfort of their home on a laptop. Who’s gonna pay attention to that? There’s no relationship. There’s no connection there. There’s no nothing. So you guys step in this guy’s world and said, “Look, you know, we understand what you’re going through. We’ve helped lots of people go through the same process. We have connections and resources to do it. On top of it, financially we’ll pay for all those things. And potentially we’ll save you from losing the home. And on top of it, make sure you get paid a fair amount.” I don’t know what those numbers were. But a fair amount.

Tim: Right.

Dave: And then you guys could either rehab the project or wholesale a… whatever you ultimately end up doing to exit the property. Take care of the squatters or sorry, tenants, whatever they were at that point. Create a win, win, win, win, win. Like all the way down the line.

Melina: Exactly. I think it’s like a text book scenario really. Because one of the things I teach all the time is you always make your money on your acquisition. People always wanna focus on the exit and oh, I can’t wait to flip it. Well, the flipping it is the easy part. The more difficult part is the acquisition and that’s where you make your money is on the acquisition and you just get paid on the exit strategy. So whatever you do to sell it, like you said, they could have done whatever they wanted. I always tell students, “How do you know that you made a good acquisition?” If you can do whatever you wanna do on the exit. So if you can play it out a million ways. If you can go, hey, I can keep this as a buy and hold because it will actually cash flow, check. I can rehab it and make money, check. I can wholesale it and make money and leave money on the end for a rehab or check, check.

Dave: Yeah.

Melina: And you’ve put your homeowner in a better situation.

Dave: Right.

Melina: So to me, you know, not only do you make your money on your acquisition, part of the “making money on your acquisition,” is leaving your seller in a better place than when you first met them. It’s always a goal that I teach my students to go after. And in this scenario, it’s just textbook because they did all of that.

Dave: Yeah.

Melina: I don’t even think they knew what your exit was gonna be right away, right? It didn’t really matter.

Tim: We didn’t know.

David: And I remember potentially you two were having a…

Oscar: We had a spat.

Dave: The spat…

Oscar: Like a lover spat.

Dave: The spat over…

Tim: A partner spat.

Oscar: Business partner. Business partner.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. I think Tim was going, I wanna fix and flip it.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Because there is gonna be this great story behind it and then…

Melina: Well, the pictures are always so awesome when you see the before and the after and the video. That’s where all the sexy is.

Dave: Right. Who doesn’t love it, right?

Melina: Totally.

Dave: Then you’ve got Jeff and Flora, I’m sure, who are saying that will be kind of fun to… all right, sure.

Tim: This was Flora’s first deal ever.

Dave: Yeah. Cool. Yeah, so she’s saying let’s do that and then ultimately… I don’t know how much you wanna reveal as far as numbers, but the homeowner got paid really well.

Tim: Yeah. The homeowner got all their equity.

Dave: All their equity.

Tim: And we were able to come in and…

Melina: And the property needed a lot of work.

Tim: Oh yeah, it had a lot of work that needed to be done to it. Plus, there was evicting the tenants that cost… that we had to pay for. Yeah, there was 12 people in the house.

Dave: Wow!

Tim: They were “cooking” in there.

Melina: What does that mean?

Oscar: It wasn’t spaghetti.

Tim: They were cooking drugs in the house. When you walked in, you could smell it.

Melina: In Orange County?

Tim: Yeah.

Melina: No!

Dave: No, right?

Tim: So there was a lot to deal with and…

Dave: I mean, you’re talking about last year. This is… how long from the beginning to end, would you guys say this took?

Tim: Probably from the time that Jeff and Flora like talked to the heir and got things started with us to the time where we exited the property, was like seven months. Almost eight months…

Oscar: Seven or eight months, yeah.

Dave: Seven or eight months. And so, we’ll just do it this way, what’s the gross amount of equity that was pulled out of this place that the homeowner had potential to lose, the total number.

Tim: The gross ended up being around $100,000 of total potential equity in the property. That includes after it gets all fixed up and everything.

Melina: Yeah. And, you know, one of the things…

Dave: Pretty significant.

Melina: It is. Absolutely. It’s an interesting thing. One of the things I teach in class is that you can actually increase the value of a property intrinsically.

Dave: For sure.

Melina: Right. And that’s really what they did. Some people would say, oh, they didn’t swing a hammer so they didn’t increase the value of the property and I absolutely… that is not the case. They increased the value, because they… well, first of all, got ownership.

Dave: Sure.

Melina: Like, you know, otherwise it’s worth nothing. And then tenants. Leans, tenants, eviction, like yeah.

Tim: Yeah.

Dave: There’s so many moving parts to this thing. I don’t wanna go all day about this idea. But there’s so many moving parts. And honey, chime in here as you see, but we hear… and I guess it’s maybe just a product of what society is now producing in that we have this very… I don’t know what the word is, but this really myopic kind of view of like this is exactly what real-estate investing is. Like what is real-estate investing? I buy a house and I fix and flip it and then I make money.

Melina: That’s because it’s a 30-minute TV show. Let’s just be honest. Really that’s what happens, is people watch it. They watch a TV show and they see something. They see it ugly in the beginning and then in 30 minutes, it’s been transformed and the real-estate investor walks away with 40 grand.

Dave: Yeah.

Melina: Right. Yeah. And so, people are like I wanna do that. And, you know, you get to see the fun parts of, should we paint it white or should we go grey? Should we go earth tones or should we add some color? Right, that’s all the stuff that’s fun. Everybody loves that stuff. And so, that’s what people think is the truth. And there is a part of that. But that…

Dave: Is such a small part.

Melina: Such a small part.

Dave: Yeah. And I think that…

Melina: It wasn’t seven months of picking out tile, I assure you, right.

Dave: Right. So all those moving parts. And even for myself, I lean on Melina a lot. I say all the time, she’s the smartest person that I know. She’s the best at when it comes to real-estate and problem solving and dealing with people and emotions. There’s just nobody you’re gonna meet better. So she’s able to step into somebody’s world, help them do that, and then help guide them all through these landmines that come up. Because that’s exactly what happens. We call them putting out fires.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Melina’s a… she’s a captain of a gigantic fire department basically. You know, like all the time if something comes up. And now I got to evict these people. They’re not really the owners. And then, there’s a trust. Oh, there’s not a trust. Oh, we don’t have the original trust document, we have a copy of a copy of a copy, you know. So many things that can happen inside all these different deals. And I think we even maybe take it for granted or possibly even take you for granted, honey, in that, you know, the expertise that you have in negotiating all these different things to be able to get them done. And then seeing students like Jeff and Flora, and Flora’s very first deal. And then, you know, I have a homeowner and when you meet Flora, you know, you look at her and she’s so sweet and kind and just an absolute sweetheart.

Melina: Well, she’s an accountant. She’s a number cruncher. She’s a… right? So her getting into this business is so far outside of her comfort zone, to say the least. She talks to computers and spreadsheets and not people and…

Dave: Just like Oscar.

Melina: And Tim actually, both of them, which is really funny. I was just thinking… as you were speaking, I was thinking, that’s really very sweet and I receive your compliments, but like I really had nothing to do with this deal. Totally Oscar and Tim did it, all on their own, which is amazing.

Dave: They’ve plugged into… go ahead, you were gonna say something.

Tim: I was just gonna say this deal, she didn’t have much… she didn’t have really anything to do with this deal. However, I think it’s interesting because you’re talking about how… we talked about like the class that we put together and how it changes all the time. I think it’s interesting, I think about how we actually got started or how Oscar and I got started down this path, and it started because I had a lead come across my desk years ago and I needed help. What I learned from Oscar, like Oscar was my mentor in that I was able to reach out to him and helped guide us through that situation. Now, I’ll be frank, we lost money on that transaction.

Melina: Wait. Hold the presses. Are you telling me you can lose money in real-estate investing? No!

Oscar: Yeah. Hard to believe, right?

Melina: No!

Oscar: Nobody ever wants to talk about this.

Tim: Right. Well, here’s mistakes… we make mistakes. And I’ll tell you this much, and like this is a term that I love, I have spent so much more money on way less education than that. So with that, I brought to Oscar…what I learned from Oscar, was that, hey, we’re just gonna attack this thing. He didn’t know the answers. I didn’t know the answers. We just attacked it and we figured it out. And from that perspective, we have built a class off of going and just attacking these deals and learning whatever there is to learn out of that deal. You know, win some, lose some. Win big, win small.

Melina: It’s so great. You know what? I was just thinking, that is how the entire club has been created. Like if you were going to put like a name of the club, it’s like its practicum. That’s what we have. We have practicum because it’s practical curriculum or practicing curriculum. That has been born as a result of each one of our own experiences. Right?

Tim: Right.

Melina: How did I start teaching distressed property acquisitions? I don’t know, after doing hundreds of them.

Tim: Right.

Melina: So then suddenly your experience becomes a device to be able to train and to share your experiences with other people, which I think it’s so cool. And actually, like you said, like it’s so much cheaper than what we’ve lost probably in our own education.

Tim: Right. Yeah, that’s very true. A common thing we get, because we’re all kind of… I probably said this somewhere in the past, but we’re all taught like we go to school, then we go to college, right. And you go to college and I know Oscar is dealing with this right now. Like here’s the curriculum for your son that in order for him to graduate and have a degree, he has to have these X number of classes, right. And when you’ve done that, you’ve graduated and you have that degree. So there’s some sort of expectation, I think that we’re in our mind saying, okay, so if I can do that, then now I’m done and I have my degree. I call them receipts. But I have my degree and…

Melina: You mean your college receipt?

Tim: Yeah, exactly. It says I survived college, right. And then I become something. This is the flip side. So when you said practicum, that totally hit home because it’s like the classes that we teach inside there, are never the same. Stuff is ever-changing. Experiences are ever-changing. The leads that turn into deals are always different. The end-result may be the same. Hey, we fix and flipped it and did X, or we wholesaled it and did X. But all the details leading up to that are totally different all the time. And that’s what makes the club so unique in what we do.

Oscar: So one of the things that really stands out for me, is that Tim and I have been around for seven, eight years or so with you guys and we’ve learned a ton from you guys with our teaching and so forth. But that never ends. It’s an ongoing process of learning and developing your skill-set. It’s every day, just recently… I mean even this morning we were having a conversation about another deal, that’s gotten weird on us. So now we have to jump through hoops and get things done…

Melina: A fire?

Oscar: Make a phone call. She put her fire cap and hat on or helmet, whatever you wanna call them, and moves forward. But it’s a never-ending process of learning. The cool thing about what we do as a club is that we don’t… it’s not a one and done thing for education. We’re like, come back, repeat this class and repeat it again and repeat it again. What I’ve found is that the more I sit… you know, I interact quite a bit with Melina in her class. But I’m still learning.

Tim: Sure.

Oscar: And there’s the part of learning from Melina and then learning from Melina answering the questions that club members have. It’s so invaluable to sit in that classroom and listen to what people are experiencing, and then the answers that are provided to them. Real-estate investing, knowledge base nirvana for me.

Tim: Wow!

Dave: Yeah, those of you club members that are listening to this podcast right now, what that means to you is that repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: Let people repeat because we know there is value in repeating. Jeff and Flora needed you guy’s help to get this deal done, right. They were repeating classes, coming in and taking the practical experience from Melina, taking it to the field, then being able to work on that. I’m sure they had questions throughout the entire time as they’re repeating classes and so on and so forth. And then what do you know? Activity produces results, right, honey?

Melina: Always.

Dave: You know? So they do that and then wow, what do you know? I stumbled upon a lead, that turns into a deal and I need help. Let’s go to the guys that can help us out. You guys create a joint venture, you all had a very handsome pay day and…

Melina: Yeah, why don’t you just to tell us what you guys ended up netting on that property for your team.

Tim: We netted 30… I wanna say was like 33,000. Right in the 33,000 range. Like without going down to decimal points, which is what I typically would do. I wanna say that the total net was right around 33,000.

Dave: Wow! That’s fantastic.

Melina: For each of you?

Tim: No, for our team.

Melina: Oh, for your team. Oh yeah, right. Got it.

Oscar: Flora.

Melina: Right.

Oscar: Received a comparable amount.

Dave: I got it. A comparable amount.

Tim: Yeah, is that too big a word.

Melina: No, it was good. It was good.

Dave: So your team. In other words, you guys partnered up with and….

Oscar: Tim and I and our team made the 33,000.

Dave: Got it. And then Jeff and Flora each made roughly the same.

Tim: Roughly the same.

Dave: Yeah. That’s…

Oscar: Each.

Dave: Each?

Oscar: Each.

Melina: That’s exciting.

Dave: I don’t know. I’m dumbfounded sometimes when people can’t grasp the idea that they didn’t come to one class, and go talk to one homeowner and then out came this. This is months and months of doing the activity, right, to go have that kind of pay day. Everyone who’s listening just heard 30 grand. Let’s just round it off and call it 30 grand. Made 30 grand. If you did one real-estate deal in a year, continuing doing what you’re doing right now. Nobody go quit their job.

Melina: Right.

Dave: You can’t make money in this overnight. But if you did that and then one year you made an extra 30 grand. How significant would that be?

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: It’s as simple as it gets. Then gosh, you know what ends up happening. If they stay the course and continue doing the activity, it doesn’t turn into one deal in a year. By year two, it starts to snowball and we see people closing two and three and four and five. You know, and unfortunately, most people will quit along the way because they’re like, nah, it hasn’t happened for me fast enough. Right?

Tim: Right.

Dave: I mean, I know you… Tim, you even experienced that back in the very beginning. I mean it took a long time to get to where you’re at.

Tim: Oh, yeah. I wanted to quit a lot of times.

Dave: Right. And you’ve had some of the biggest pay days of people in the club.

Tim: Yeah. Frankly, after my first big pay day. You know, over six-figure pay day.

Dave: He even has a struggle saying over a 100 grand.

Tim: Yeah. But even after that kind of a deal, I still experienced times where I wanted to quit.

Melina: Wait, you mean…

Tim: Just making that deal didn’t make it like…

Melina: Money can’t buy you love.

Tim: Right. Or happiness.

Melina: Oh!

Tim: Yeah.

Melina: I thought it would make everything better.

Tim: Sometimes I just get so frustrated and I think, oh, I’m gonna quit.

Melina: Wait, I’m just gonna go and work a 40 or 50 hour a week job for somebody else. That’s what I’m gonna do.

Dave: Right.

Tim: Right.

Dave: Good luck. And that’s not true because I know you got a phone call and you were doing cartwheels on.

Tim: Right.

Dave: I can’t wait to send this to one of our mentors, Mr. Chris Albin, who’s been in the studio before. But Tim got a phone call on our way in here and he comes in, you would have thought it was like a really hot data something.

Tim: It is.

Dave: Apparently it is for him. But Chris called him and said, “Hey, I’m working on this big deal. I wanna run my strategy by you.” And Tim’s like, “I think I’ve arrived.”

Melina: Actually, Oscar said that. I don’t think Tim said it.

Oscar: I think it’s awesome.

Tim: Yeah, it is awesome.

Oscar: It’s awesome to just being around Tim and seeing where he was and where he’s been and to where he is today. That’s cool stuff.

Melina: It’s very cool because there is some… I mean, let’s face it, Tim has had some haters. You’ve got some haters.

Tim: Oh, yeah.

Melina: You know. So…

Tim: I still do.

Melina: I know you do. I know. And that’s okay, you know. It’s just classic.

Dave: People… we said a lot, people don’t wanna celebrate people’s successes anymore. We…

Melina: We don’t want to celebrate greatness.

Dave: That’s right. We definitely don’t wanna celebrate greatness, it seems to be a lot more. But that’s okay.

Melina: We do.

Dave: We do and we love it. We love being in the studio…

Melina: We love it.

Dave: With you guys and being able to share and celebrate. And I am so freaking happy to see you guys close that deal. And by the way, Melina and I were not involved in that deal. We didn’t get paid on that deal and I couldn’t wait for you guys to close it so the whole club could celebrate.

Melina: Yeah.

Dave: So anyways, congratulations. Thanks for all you guys do for the club. Thanks for the initiative that you take to help everybody else out, to be able to share. You know, there’s no trade secrets. Like we don’t hold back inside the club. The whole idea is like, hey, this is what we do, share with everybody and the cream will rise to the top. So with that, we’re gonna call this one done. And I look forward to…

Melina: Not one-and-done.

Dave: Definitely not one-and-done.

Tim: Oh, no.

Melina: Oh, no.

Dave: We’ll catch you guys in a couple of weeks. And you guys try to stay cool out there.

Melina: Meanwhile, we’re flipping off.

Dave: Flipping out.