The Titanium Vault hosted by RJ Bates III
RJ Bates III, affectionately referred to as the Viking Wizard by his students, started his real estate investing career in 2014 after attending a real estate education program that put him $65,000 in debt. RJ contracted his first deal he found on the MLS and wholesaled it for a $7,500 assignment fee. That was the end of his former life and the beginning of his venture into becoming a real estate investor. Since that moment, RJ has become an influential figurehead in the real estate investing industry. He has successfully purchased and sold over 2,000 properties all across the USA including wholesale deals, rehabs, rentals, owner finances and short term rentals. One of his passions is being the host of The Titanium Vault Podcast where he interviews the top real estate investors. He has won back to back Closers Olympics earning him the reputation as the King Closer! Finally, RJ and Cassi DeHaas, his partner, have started their education platform called Titanium University.
The Titanium Vault hosted by RJ Bates III
Brad Chandler: Wholesaling 200 Properties Annually
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Real estate investors, entrepreneurs and agent's wife, place unlocking the secrets to real estate investing and entrepreneurship. Welcome up through that titanium bolts posted by Rj Bates. But third, here's RJ.
Speaker 2Hello and welcome to the titanium vault on your host, Rj Bates. Today I'm sitting down with the one and only Brad Chandler. Brad, how are you doing?
Speaker 3I am awesome today. I'm so excited to be on the show.
Speaker 2Yeah man. Well, I don't think anywhere near as excited as I am to have you on a. I consider you a kind of a legend in the wholesaling business and uh, definitely somebody that I look up to. So, uh, why don't you take a second to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do in real estate investing.
Speaker 3Yeah. So I'm a founder and CEO of express home buyers. This year we'll do a probably 250 wholesale deals. And the thing I'm most proud of is I will not have looked at a single house or spoken with a single seller. Um, I've got a team in place that does all of that. So, um, I'm also president of Brad Chandler coaching, which I started last year because of my time that I don't have to spend on the business, so let's go back all the way till I was 10 years old when I was 10. My folks got divorced and my dad was the breadwinner and so when he left, he didn't provide us any support to my, to my mom or my three sisters. So, uh, things got really, really, really tight and I can remember one day when I was 10, my mom saying, you know what, we may lose this house and have to move into public housing and actually advance, I'd actually visited that same public housing, whether because as a nurse she'd go see patients and she didn't have the money for childcare. So she'd bring me along and uh, look, it was Charlottesville, Virginia, so it wasn't the worst in the world, but they still had shooting. So it was a 10 year old. I was, I was scared to death. So I thought to myself, man, I can't, I, I gotta figure out something as I get older. So this never happened. So in ninth grade I read a book, a Robert Allen Book on how to buy real estate with no money down and I said this is what I'm going to do because there's no limit to the amount of income you can make. So I basically studied real estate for the next 15 years. I'm an investor, bought my neighbor's house in late 2002. And I went and talked to him and he says, yeah, I buy a house that 30 percent below market. I fixed them up and I resell them. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's what I'm going to do. So I decided in December of 2002 to start and I was working a full time job just like most people out there listening to this. And I was like, I was not a corporate guy, didn't want to climb the corporate ladder. So I come home at 6:00, I put my newborn sleep and I spent some time with my newborn son. I put him to bed at eight and I worked from eight to midnight, work on weekends and rj week after week after week went by and there were no deals, but I kept going to these investor meetings and hearing all these people doing deals and so each week I got more and more persistent. I said, I'm going to make this happen. And in July I bought my first house in July and August I bought six houses and then October of 2003 I quit my full time job to focus on express homebuyers. And here we are, you know, approaching 2,400 deals later,
Speaker 2man. That is, that is incredible. It's amazing. They hear these stories where certain circumstances kind of catapult a different successful entrepreneurs to find that level of success. So you know, with, with your situation, with what happened in your childhood and, and over the course of those 15 years where you were studying real estate, did you, did you learn about wholesale and did you know that that was going to be the way to get started? Or did that come later on when you were going to the networking meetings or did you not start in wholesale and did you actually start in rehabbing?
Speaker 3I never heard. I never knew what wholesaling was until 2003 when I went to these meetings. But here's what I mistakenly back then Rj, I thought I thought wholesaling was for the less sophisticated a person who didn't have an education. It had bad credit. And then I thought the per the real smart people like myself, uh, we, we would do rehabs so well after doing 15 to 1700 rehabs and getting my ass kicked so many times. I said to myself, there's got to be a better way because in, in, in December 2016, like we were having trouble making payroll. It got so bad. And I'm like, I'm like, if you look at all of our problems, 95 percent of them are from freaking Rehab. So we decided at that time to stop. And since that time we have done nothing but wholesale and it has been. We tried it actually four years ago, but we couldn't make it work because we didn't know how to find the right buyers and now we know how to find the right buyers and now we're crushing it. We did A. we've got 33 prop, 31 properties under contract last month in the month of May. See,
Speaker 2that's so funny that you say that because currently right now my business, we wholesale a lot and but we also rehab a lot and, and I agree with what you're saying. Almost all of the issues that we have in our company, cash flow wise or just stress, it all comes from the rehabs. Very rarely do I ever have any kind of stress or cashflow issues when it comes to wholesaling. Those really wholesaling solves all those problems because it sure does. Yeah. I mean you're able to turn those properties so quick. So. So you're saying you actually didn't start wholesaling until 2016.
Speaker 3You got it. We tried it a couple times but just couldn't get it to work. And, and, and one other thing about it is we, two years ago we had an excess of $30,000,000 worth of debt on properties that we own today. We have zero debt because we're not buying anything.
Speaker 2Right. And, and your life has gotten better and all of the stress has gone away, right?
Speaker 3Way Better, way better. We had our best year ever financially last year. Uh, we, we, we got rid of people because you don't need people turning on and off the utility is and paying property tax bills and dealing with the lenders. And it's a very complex. Rehabbing is very, very complex on so many levels.
Speaker 2So. But you were a fairly high volume rehabber, right?
Speaker 3We were doing, we had 85 renovations going on. We're doing $10,000,000 worth of construction a year.
Speaker 2So yeah, I mean that's, that's very high volume. How did you mentally make that leap from, okay, we're going to be nothing but a rehabber to now we're nothing but a wholesale or was there any kind of, I guess how long did it take you to make that decision?
Speaker 3Literally like a week if not that, and we just, we just, we just burned the ships. We actually had so many renovation projects going on. They were going poorly that we actually stopped or innovating someone, some of them midstream and just start selling them as is. We're like, we're just done, we're done, done, done. I've done that
Speaker 2myself as well. So I, I understand exactly what you went through and kind of the decision that you made. Uh, unfortunately for myself, I kind of made the opposite. I wholesaled and then started rehabbing and then I was like, why did we start doing this? Like the Shiny Object Syndrome, you know, it was like, well, why am I selling this one? You know, I could make so much more money, but what you don't, there's that costs, the opportunity costs, the cost of time, the cost of just peace of mind. It just for us. And it sounds like for you as well, it just made it a lot more sense to be wholesaling. So it took you a week, you made that decision and how did you, how did you figure out how to start finding those right buyers that you talked about?
Speaker 3So we started calling cash. We started calling real estate agents who had sold properties to cash buyers and they, they were the ones who, who gave us the best buyers and the buyers that we're willing to pay 82, sometimes eighty four cents of ARV, 84 percent of ARV minus repairs. So we were thought, here's, here's, here's probably this is a golden nugget guys. So write this one down. All of these supposed gurus out there that are teaching wholesaling, unfortunately a lot of them aren't doing a doing it at all, if not even if they are, they're not doing it. The volume that we're doing, you know, $30 a month or 20 a month. But here's, here's what I can remember. Fifteen years ago, sitting in a meeting and the leader said, Ari guys, you want to wholesale, here's how you make money. You got to sell the properties for 65 to 70 percent of the actual repair value minus repairs. So if you want to make money, just get them below that. Well, RJ, you've been in the business for awhile. How easy, how easy it is to get it to pick up a property for below 65 percent of ARV minus repairs.
Speaker 2I, I think we have sold, bought and sold properties in 15 different states. And out of those 15 different states may be too. Were we able to find any deals like that on a regular basis? So it is extremely difficult.
Speaker 3It's extremely hard. And that's why most gurus teach wholesalers. They can make two to five, maybe $10,000 a deal. Well what here's, here's what really happens in the real world is that there, there are thousands of investors out there that are happy buying it, 80 to 85 percent of ARV minus repairs. So you just have to go find those people. And then when you get under contract at 65 to 70 percent, then you make a nice 10, 12, 13 percent spread in for for us last year, that equated to $37,000
Speaker 2per per, per wholesale in the. It's kind of going back to that whole theory, you know, I hear it all the time. There's no good deals on the mls. What you were doing was as you were going and finding those buyers that buy deals off the mls and then bringing them off market properties at the similar discounts that what they were already buying. Correct.
Speaker 3I never even thought about it that way, but you're 100 percent. Right,
Speaker 2right. I mean that's what you hear all the time. You can't find good deals out there. Molests will. The reason somebody is buying those deals. I mean, and so you went out and found him. That's a, that's a great way to build your buyers list. And I've never, I guess like you said, I've never really thought about it that way. We've kind of done it a little bit that way, but never going directly to the agent and saying, Hey, you know, who's buying these properties? Um, so do you work with those agents the or are they just kind of pass it off the contact information to you?
Speaker 3So, uh, it's a really great question. People always ask us, well, what do you pay the realtors? Well, what we tell everyone is listening. We're going to look at these contracts that we get in on this house on a net basis. So if we get two contracts for $100,000 in ones where their realtor and they want three percent, so we're going to net 97 and the other one without a realtors for 100 gets which one we're going to take. We're going to take the hundred. So we tell the realtors, listen to either have your buyer pay you because you're bringing them a killer off market deal, pay. Have you have them pay on the front end or promise that promise to make them promise to you. The realtor that they're going to give you the listing on the back end once the house has rehabbed.
Speaker 2Gotcha. That's pretty cool. I liked that. I like that a lot. So as far as your company went, marketing wise, nothing really changed from being a fulltime rehab or to a fulltime wholesaler, correct?
Speaker 3No, I mean other than we're always trying new things and try to improve, but no, it had nothing. If no, no change at all. You're still looking for the motivated sellers, just what you do with the property once you get under contract.
Speaker 2So let's dive into marketing a little bit. You don't have to share all of your secrets, but what is your favorite type of marketing that you use on a regular basis?
Speaker 3So what does the best for us right now is online. I'm both a combination of paper click and SCO. We're actually generating upwards of a thousand leads per month outside of our core DC market all over the country and we're actively, uh, we're actively virtually wholesaling. So, uh, earlier this year we wholesale the deal in Tampa where we made $38,000 and we never saw the property.
Speaker 2That's amazing. See? And so what, let's talk about that real quick because I get questions about virtual wholesaling all the time. Actually this pre, this past week I had someone reach out to me and said, what's a great episode on your podcast, Rj about virtual wholesaling? And I went through my entire list and I'm like, I haven't really had a guest on that. Talked about virtual wholesaling a lot. So let's talk about that a little bit. We've done some virtual wholesaling but we've always specifically targeted the market and, and got the lead. So in this circumstance you got lead in Tampa but you weren't marketing to Tampa. The lead just came to you. So how did you acquire that property without seeing it? Did you have boots on the ground there or did you go find someone to be the boots on the ground? And how did you find the buyer?
Speaker 3So we actually, uh, W W we were marketing, they're just because we set up a webpage on our site. Our site is so highly ranked. They, I, I can, um, I can put new pages on and sometimes within a couple weeks it's on the first page of Google. That's the power of having a, you know, a powerful website that we've worked on for years. So that lead came through a, it was a web lead actually. So we had the owner actually send us pictures and then we likely did the same thing. We, we, this is what we do everywhere we call local realtors. We call local cash buyers from lists that we've pulled and we do, um, we do a facebook ad, we put it on craigslist, instagram, and we just started putting them on bigger pockets and connected investors and we'd be getting some good traction through both of those last two ones.
Speaker 2Wow. So you, you actually market properties through instagram as well when you're trying to sell them?
Speaker 3We do, we do.
Speaker 2That's cool. That's cool. They, you're the first person I've heard say that I have, I've personally acquired properties through instagram, but I've never sold one through instagram, so that's pretty cool. I'm a huge advocate for digital marketing when it comes to locating motivated seller. So I'm right there with you with Seo and paperclick and the power of those. Do you still incorporate cold calling or direct mail or bandit signs in your business or is it mainly on the digital side of things?
Speaker 3So we do a ton of direct mail. I mean, we were doing, I don't, we're probably still doing over 100,000 pieces a month. We're doing close to 200,000 pieces a month last year. Um, we have incorporated cold calling. We're in the infancy, well, we've been doing it for a couple months, but we're really going to take a hard look at it and dial it in. Um, so if there's listeners out there that say, well, I don't have money for a website, I can't go spend a couple thousand dollars a month on Seo and paperclick, what am I going to do? I would say you pull a list of what I teach my students. You pull a list of high equity owner occupied, which mean they live in the house and non owner occupied owner occupied, which means they don't live in the house. You mailed them postcards and then you follow up with, uh, with phone calls. And I haven't. I have a student in Richmond who started me January twelfth. He had completely bombed on his own in December. I mean, he was like, is my phone broke? And he wasted thousands of dollars. He'd signed up. Uh, January twelfth with me, he did, he's a, he's a navy guy, former navy guy, so he's great at following instructions. So he did exactly what I told them, the list, the postcard, everything for 10 straight weeks. He got a deal. Well then he called me in a panic and was like, my direct mail doesn't work anymore. What am I going to do? I'm having cash flow issues. So, so he's like, I'm going to start calling. So he started calling and since that time he has had, he had his best month ever in the month of May. He closed eight deals from cold calling. The exact same list that I told them to pull.
Speaker 2Yep. And for the people, I know I've said it before in the podcast, but I'll say it again when the return direct mail. So the mail that you get that's returned to you, do not throw that away. Those are now cold call leads. Skip, trace them cold called them. You can actually probably skip trace them and find the correct address. Excuse me, the correct address to send them another letter too, but returned direct mail is a great lead source to follow up with and cold call because majority of investors don't pay attention to it and really just discard that as that was wasted money. And those can be some of the best leads that you get on direct mail.
Speaker 3Rj or you were just starting that now. Are you, um, actively closing deals doing that?
Speaker 2Yes. Yes. And, and that came from attending a mastermind and Larry Higgins have skipped genie is the gentleman who taught me to do that. And at first it was funny because he asked the entire room, he was like, Hey, who's doing this? And everybody was kind of like, you know, no, we just pretty much throw it in a bucket or way or recycle or you know, nobody really had a plan for it and he's like, you're throwing away gold. Like those are some of the best leads. And so we started skip tracing them. You can look up and find the ones that are tax delinquent. And those are the ones that we follow up with first. Um, it, it, it's a game, it's a numbers game, you know, I mean, it's all about followup because a lot of times they're going to be very difficult to contact, but uh, we've had the success of contacting people and they don't even have the idea that they even own the house, you know, I mean there's people that have inherited houses and they didn't even know they owned it and that's why it's taxed delinquent and amazing weeds come from return direct mail. So there's some golden nugget right there. So let's talk about, you know, you discussed that right now you're, you're closing all these deals and you don't even look at them or really know what's going on as far as the property. So let's talk about your team. What does your team look like? How many people do you have?
Speaker 3So if you see, we've got a number of full time Va's, I think we're between eight and 10. We have 26 full time employees and va's. So
Speaker 2let's talk about the Va's. What do you have the Va's working on? Because I hear people say that all the time. They're like, I need to get a va, but it's almost become one of those things where they don't even know what they're getting for. It's just that's what you're supposed to go do. So what do you utilize your va's for?
Speaker 3So first of all, I'd give anyone advice that is look at, take a chart, take a piece of paper for 24 or 48 hours and in five minute increments, write down everything that you're doing and what you're gonna do is you're going to, you're going to see a bunch of $10 per hour, $10 an hour tasks that you're doing and anyone who's in this business is worth 100 to $500 an hour, most likely. So get get the va to take those $10 an hour activities off your plate so you can focus on closing more deals. Our Va's Rj, we've got actually two of them on the marketing side, which you're doing a lot of outbound link building for search engine optimization. So they do a lot of marketing and then the remaining six to eight a bright. Now we have them call in cash buyers, but they will, they'll call cash buyers. They will, they'll do nurture on our, on our leads, uh, and they have been doing cold calling as well back in the day when we were renovating houses. We had one full time virtual assistant that all she did was turn on and off utilities.
Speaker 2Yeah, that can become a very burdensome task when you become a volume rehab. I've, I've learned this very quickly. Um, we, we took down a significant amount of properties all within a matter of time together and my assistant basically just became the full time utilities person and I was like, this is not what I want my assistant to know. And so you're absolutely right, you do need to write those tests down. But more so than that, really the people that you have on your team, you also want to make sure that they're doing the task that you hired them to do. Just like I ran into the problem where my executive assistant was doing tasks that I didn't even want her to do. So the task that I needed her to do were falling on my shoulders, so it kind of stairsteps down. You need those tasks delegated all the way down to the level of which the person can handle. And so a virtual assistant is great. The handle and those kinds of tasks. So let's talk about the full time employees that you have on staff. What are those people's task and duties look like?
Speaker 3So we have a controller, we have a client care coordinator that takes a property from contract all the way through, we know resale, um, she's got someone who also helps her, a full time employee that helps just, you know, dealing with the closing and stuff like that. Um, we have two full time people at our marketing and then the three, the two to three Va's, like I said, that support them. And then we have an acquisition staff. We have a manager who does dispositions and acquisitions and then he currently has, I think for team members and we're actively trying to hire six more uh, in acquisitions and dispositions right now.
Speaker 2Wow. That's quite a team. How long did it take to build that team? So
Speaker 3I started building my team almost from day one, so within six months I think I made my first hire or within three months I made my first hire and then probably within a year I had a team of about five or six people and then we've just grown out over the years. When I look at Rga, when I, when I, when I speak to all my students and I go to these masterminds and I just speak with other unrest around the country, people in general are probably 90 to 95 percent of people's problems. They either don't have the right people in the right seat or they don't have a person period and they're just trying to do too much. And the bad thing is, is that most, um, well, first of all, most gurus don't teach it because they don't have, they've never hired people. They don't have a full team. But literally it's so, so, so important. But yet, business owner, after business, owner after investor, after investor overlook it, you have got to spend time finding the right people.
Speaker 2Bull retaining the right people, training in, leading the right people, and then you have got to be good at getting rid of the people who shouldn't be there and it's just, you know how it is when you get busy,
Speaker 3it's just like the last thing you want to deal with so you keep people around that shouldn't be there and really you're just, you're hurting them more than you're hurting yourself because you should let those people go and let them find an opportunity somewhere else that they'll thrive in.
Speaker 2Right. Well, I get asked it all the time, you know, because hey, I call it the fancy markets that we're in. You know? No, no one cares that we invest in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No offense to Tulsa, Oklahoma, but it's just not a sexy market, but we're in Hawaii and everybody wants to talk about Hawaii. They could care less if we'd done one deal or 100 deals in Hawaii, talk about it and they always ask me, how are you doing that? What's all about? The people that we have on our team is nothing fancy that we've been able to do. It's just connecting with the right people, having the right people in the right seats, and I talked to investors all the time and they've been investing full time for four years and they've never made a hire yet. They want to know rj, how are you doing so much? Well, just like you. Within two, three months of starting the business, I was like, we got to hire some people. We got to put people in these other seats so we can grow this and you start building the team and before long you understand if you're putting them in the right seats and literally the right people, your business should grow and that's how you're able to do more and so that's what we've been able to do. It sounds like what you've been able to do some more results by bringing people on and putting them in the right seats. Do you accredit that to a lot, to the success that you've had? Well over 100, a hundred percent,
Speaker 3and it's. It's not only that you, it gives you ability to do more. It actually gives you the ability to do less, less work. Right, and, and have, you know, the e myth, Michael Gerber's book, most most people think that people start businesses to make a lot of money and have freedom. Well, what they really do is end up just getting another job. That's just it. It's actually pays, pays worse than your full time job because you know what? They don't create systems and they don't hire really good people. So yeah, I mean the fact that I can, you know, look, we did 33 deals last month or 3:30. We had 33, two of them fell out, so we have 31 deals last month and I didn't do anything. Wow. Who Do I attribute that to? I attribute it to the team that I put together. Right? And, and, and anyone can do it by the way, guys, like I teach us a lot in my level two coaching program. It's called entrepreneur to CEO, teaches you how to go from an entrepreneur to a real full blown CEO. It's all about you want to grow. I guarantee you if it just, like you said earlier, people want to know why it's. It's people you can't grow because you're not investing enough time in, in hiring and retaining the right people. Bottom line, that's it. But.
Speaker 2Right. So you've mentioned that several times that you're not involved in the day to day. So what does a, a week and Brad Chandler seat look like? What are you dedicating your time to outside of the coaching program?
Speaker 3So I have spent an immense amount of time in the coaching program because I'm so dedicated to my students' success. So that's what I spend most of my time doing. I have always been passionate in my business, express home buyers with sales and marketing. So I still, I still attend our marketing meetings. I'm still, I just love to hear what we're doing marketing wise. And then of course I give my input and say, hey, let's try this. Let's do this, let's try this. So, um, when I'm not doing marketing in marketing meetings, which is really only an hour a week for express home buyers, all of my time is dedicated to, uh, um, to the coaching business when I'm not traveling. I travel a lot. I played a lot of golf with my son, he's an Avid Golfer and he his tournaments around the country, so just like to spend time with my family and uh, work on the coaching business.
Speaker 2So speaking of your son, I was actually going to bring that up because I see your post on facebook all the time. It does look like he's a hell of a golfer. So, uh, let's talk about his little success that he has going on here is you've got to be the next tiger woods,
Speaker 3you know, that's yet to be determined. But he, uh, when he was 13, he shot, he shot 66 from 6,000 yards if you know, if you don't know golf, it means nothing to you, but a 600 power from 6,000 yards when you're 13 pretty much means you can do anything. Uh, he has. He has been struggling lately, although I played with them on Saturday for qualifying around any shot, 100 par for 18 also. He, he, he's got game and he just needs to, you know, just like the perseverance I spoke about earlier that got me my success. He just needs to know that he's got to work really, really hard and just keep persevering through the ups and downs.
Speaker 2Yeah. I was on Tucker Mary Hughes podcast a couple of weeks ago and he asked me about hobbies and what is something that I really get joy out of and for me, you know, travel and some of these other things are things that I enjoy really. Like the number one thing that gives me joy is just spending time with my children on things that they love to do. And my son, he's five years old. He loves hockey and I know that's odd that we live here in Dallas, fort worth, but he's a huge Dallas stars fan. He's been a dallas stars fan since he was three months old. I would turn on a game and he would just be glued to the TV and uh, he, he loves playing hockey, love skating and there's nothing that gives me more joy than seeing him out there. He'll, he'll be out there for an hour straight skating and practicing in the entire time. He is grinning ear to ear and there's nothing that brings me more joy than that, so that's awesome. I love seeing the posts with you and your son and go into the different tournaments. It's just a. it's one of those things like more than anything you've ever posted about real estate investing inspires me to achieve the kind of success that you've had as a business owner is that, and it's the power of living the life that we're meant to live.
Speaker 3Yeah, and guys, everyone's listening to this and some people are, some people have what rj and I have and some people don't, and the people that don't. When you're thinking about God, I wish I could spend more time with my son or daughter doing x, Y, Z activity. Guess what? You can. You can. You just have to change your behavior and change your habits and just make it happen there. There's enough resources whether you get coached by me or someone else change if, if, if you know, go for what you want in life and just make it happen because it's so worth it. Once you get to the point where you can, you know, enjoy the time,
Speaker 2how many years do you think it took you to get to the point where one day you were sitting in your office and you're like, there's no day to day task for me to handle. How long did it take to get there?
Speaker 3It was probably 10 years, but looking back on it, um, well my, my partner and I made a big, big mistake over the years. We're both visionaries, which means we're not good at actually integrating or we're more of the, hey, here's the strategy. So it wasn't until about three years ago that we brought on a kind of a coo, a implementer type, and had we done that, um, I probably could have gotten to that place within three to five years if I just brought in that person who was really good. But at that time I thought I was the smartest guy in the world and I could run the company. Well, you know, that wasn't the case. I mean, I did, I did, I did fine. But I should have. So if you're, if you, if you get a rocket fuel now and take that visionary integrator and you've got, maybe you've got two partners and you're both visionaries, guaranteed you got chaos in your business, you've got to get some. And he was like, Coley detail oriented.
Speaker 2That is, that is quite possibly the biggest golden nugget out of this entire interview right there is, understand that you are not the smartest person for everything in your business. Learn your role in the business and become the best at that role. Not Try to be the best at everything for. Because for me, I don't, I don't really know it clicked and still some days I don't think it clicks. I have to remind myself because I'm so like I'm the, I'm the best I can, I can do this. And I go do it real quick and I have to be reminded. My partner cassie tells me all the time like, what are you doing that's not even a $10 an hour job? That's like a, I don't even know if we pay anybody to do that. Why are you doing that? And, uh, it's, it's because of that, that mindset of, well, this is my baby, nobody cares about it more than me, it doesn't matter. And, and someone broke it down where it's like, if you broke out all the jobs and like you said, as as owners and real estate investing, we're probably 100 to $500 an hour just being general, like an average of what we should get paid per hour. If you break out all the jobs, it, you're, it doesn't make sense for you to do those jobs. It really doesn't. And so bringing on someone that's an integrator to fit your vision is absolutely necessary. And we, we've seen huge changes in our business once we kind of came to grips with that. And, uh, it sounds like you did too. And like you said, it took you 10 years. It could have taken you three to five years and you know, for everyone that's listening, if you're in those beginning stages, take heed of that advice and don't make the same mistakes that Bratton I made, you know, we, we found success now. Uh, I would've much rather have just done it a lot easier and saved myself a ton of headaches over the time. So good stuff there. I'm sorry. Sometimes I ran on something that's passionate like that because I, I, I do this to give back to the real estate investing community and, and I want people to see mistakes that have been made by others and learn from them rather than making the same mistakes. Mistakes themselves. So. So let's talk about it. You know, you kind of talked about your expanding some to some virtual markets. How does that look in your business? Is nationwide going to be something in your future or are you just going to continue to pick specific markets that you virtual wholesaling. And
Speaker 3so from the day I started the business, my goal was always to become a nationwide company. So we're still, we've still got that vision, um, insight right now. We've just built a bunch of city pages, you know, sell my house fast in Tuscaloosa, sell my house fast, spokane, Washington. So we're, we're getting these leads in organically without really paying much and we're working those leads. So we're starting to put a team in place now to do more and more and more of these and then we're just going to see where that takes us and it might be that, hey, we just sold a couple of deals in Denver. I'm making that up but we just did a couple of years in Denver. Well maybe it makes sense to actually spend some marketing dollars there and get some boots on the ground. So we'll just figure that out, you know, as, as we grow and what our growth pattern is going to look like. And can we do everything virtually or do we have to put people, you know, boots on the ground. How many markets are you in right now? Well we had a w. We were operating just in the DC, in the south Florida market as we speak. I'm like with boots on the ground.
Speaker 2Gotcha. And outside of wholesaling, are you ever going to rehab or are you doing anything rental wise? Multifamily, passive income wise or is it just strictly wholesaling?
Speaker 3So we bought 80 unit, 80 single family houses between 2010 and 2012. When we could buy him at, you know, 50 percent of the value they were a couple of years ago or even 40 percent, um, we sold most of those off in the last year just because, uh, the yields weren't that great and they'd appreciate it substantially. I'm personally, I'm doing some with my wife some, uh, both, both rentals and if you can imagine, fix and flips. We actually bought. We actually bought one from the company from express home buyers. Uh, we put in like 10 grand and we think we're going to make about $30,000 in profit. Now. People are like, well, you're just tell you just talked about how hard renovations were. Let me make something, make, make a point, or get something straight. One Rehab when it's $10,000, not that hard. We redid that. We redid the hardwood floors. We put in new appliances. We painted, we put it into a kitchen floor. Like literally that was the extent of it. That's not too hard. Try to do that on 40 houses at one time where the average renovation is $60,000 and you've got permits involved and you're moving walls and you've got structural issues. It's a whole different ballgame. So look, if you can, you know, if your only means is to buy from a wholesaler and you've got a decent rehab crew and you want to do one or two at a time, fine, but when you, when you go from one to five, it's not. Or if you go from five a month to 10 a month, it's not twice as hard. It's like 50 times as hard, as exponentially harder as you add each rehab.
Speaker 2Absolutely. So let's talk about that. You know, your team's taken down all of these properties. Are you ever taking properties down subject to the existing mortgage or seller financing or anything creative on the financial side of things for, is it always, you're just making a cash offer because you're going to wholesale it?
Speaker 3Uh, the ladder? Um, we have done some, we've done some of that stuff in the past, but not much of it at all. It complicates things. Um, you know, we always had access to capital so we didn't need to, I don't know if that's good or bad thing, but right now it's just, it just strictly cash offers because we know we're going to wholesale them.
Speaker 2Right. And, and to be honest with you, when we wholesale it, I guess I should not say this because it's not 100 percent accurate, but majority of the time we're going to wholesale. It's just a cash offer. Very rarely do we go to those creative strategies if we're going to wholesale a property. So I understand that aspect of things. So I always like to ask people what is their why? What is your driving force behind everything that you're creating with express home buyers, you, you discussed that you want to make this a nationwide company. Why is that a dream of yours? And kind of what is your why in this business?
Speaker 3You know, I think it's a couple fold now. I think it's, um, transpired over the years to just help people more and more. That's why I got into coaching business. It wasn't about the money, it's really just about helping people. Um, I think if you look back why I wanted to be a national company, it was probably ego driven, but I think we do stuff, you know, I think we do things really, really well and we're ethical. We been an a plus rated with the better business bureau for, you know, since 2003. So just doing something on a large scale that as actually provides jobs for people and treat people nicely. And we're, we're not scamming people. We say here's the offer, if you don't like it, you know, you can go sell your house with a realtor. We're not some of those sleazy investors that are, you know, sending multiple people buy and lying to him about the comps. So just, you know, try to make the world a little better place. And then really what's driven all of this is what we talked about 10 minutes ago is just the time with my family. I just love, I just love being able to spend time with my family because my kids, my son's about to turn 16 and it seems like he was just born two years ago. The time just goes so fast. So spending as much time as I can with them is, is, is what I want to do.
Speaker 2So one, one question that I, I guess it's not a question but something I want to ask my listeners for because I was doing research for this interview before, looked up express home buyers on facebook and I saw something that has happened to me and it was one of those things that just never set well with me and I wish there were something I could do about it but I can't. And so hopefully we can help brad out. So I went to his express homebuyers facebook page and there was someone that went on there and left a one star review based off of Brad's company making an offer and he was mad and he called him a vulture and all these things. And as investors we know that's not the case. He just made an offer on what he could purchase the house for, so for anybody that's listening, help brad out, go to his facebook page, express home buyers are based out of Virginia. Leave them a five star review because I had one of those on my company and still to this day it irritates the living pits enemy, so everybody brought out by giving them a five star review on his facebook page.
Speaker 3Thank you so much in advance. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2I mean, you know how that goes. I mean it's like you didn't do anything. You send them a mailer and the guys had made me an offer. You made them an offer and then he went left you a one star review. It doesn't even make any sense, so some people don't understand how this business works or they don't care and they think that we're out to hurt people were. I saw your. Your response and your response was absolutely what I would have said as well. Like I've helped thousands of people out. I haven't helped thousands. I've helped hundreds, but you've helped thousands of people out and there are situations where you know, they, they hug you and they're crying because you helped them out of a bad situation and for one person to think that we're doing something wrong or are vultures, are trying to steal properties, just not fair. So help brad out. Everybody knows what that's like.
Speaker 3Rj, you gotTa, you gotTa, you gotTa. Keep in mind that it's tough. You've got to have compassion for those people because honestly at the end of the day, they're there. They're likely just really unhappy people and anytime, anytime in their life they get a chance to vent or make, try to make someone else look bad, they jumped at the opportunity. So, you know, it's hard, but I, I have compassion because I lead a very happy life and I can't imagine life unhappy like that. Absolutely man. Well Brad, I know you're a super, super busy guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2no. In this interview, you made it seem like you aren't, but uh, I appreciate you so much for taking the time to sit down with us and sharing all the knowledge that you have. I, I truly do look up to you. You're an inspiration for so many people in this business and I just thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us today.
Speaker 3Oh, you're welcome. And let me give. Let me give a couple of free things out that are really cool. If you have a family or friend or whoever that's doubting you in the wholesaling business, have them and you should watch this to brad chandler.com forward slash case study. It's actually, I literally ripped apart from start to finish how we made $33,750 on a townhouse. So show them that video and if you're interested in learning more about how to grow at a wholesaling company and kept some really killer marketing secrets that I give out, just go to Brad Chandler.com/webinar and register for one of our upcoming webinars. I think you'll find it really useful.
Speaker 2Awesome man, I will put those, uh, those links in the show notes and a, again, just thank you for sitting down with us and a preciate everything that you shared with us today.
Speaker 3Thanks for having me. Take care of buddy. Alright, bye bye. Bye.
Speaker 1Thanks so much for listening to the titanium vault with your host rj veins, the third for more info and stay up to date, visit www.podcast.thetitaniumvault.com. And on facebook.com/the titanium vault. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review and we'll catch you next time.