MMM Episode: Building Wealth By Choosing The Right Exit On Every Deal with Alex Camaerie

Real wealth in real estate comes from options, not perfection. We sit down with investor and operator Alex Camaerie to map his path from selling homes in college to building Easy Cash Deal, an acquisitions-first company with 11 employees, multiple exit strategies, and a new lending arm designed for speed. Alex breaks down how he moved from doing every task himself to leading through outcomes, coaching team leads, and creating a process where deals don’t stall when the market shifts or a seller goes sideways.

We dig into the mechanics of multi-exit decision-making: when to wholesale, wholetail, flip, list, or use a novation. Alex explains why novations work with sellers who want more than a cash offer but less hassle than a retail listing, and how BRV—before repair value—beats ARV for underwriting as-is properties. 

You’ll hear the numbers, the comps, and how they cover commissions, closing costs, and repair items to attract rehab-loan buyers without taking on a full renovation. Then we zoom out to team building: dividing acquisitions and dispositions by strengths, hiring before it feels comfortable, using daily huddles to keep momentum, and setting timelines that drive accountability without micromanagement.

A wild case study ties it all together. When a buyer tried to backdoor a contract and a family member blocked access, Alex clouded title, pivoted from a 10k assignment to a light $8k rehab, and turned it into an expected 40k wholetail—proof that optionality beats obstacles. 

We close with the trap that takes experienced investors out of the game: overbuilding flips to “set the market.” Keep finishes sensible, price to move, and treat each project like inventory, not art. If you want practical tactics for sourcing off-market deals, executing novations, leading a high-output team, and using private lending to speed up closings, this conversation is your blueprint.

Enjoy the episode? Follow, share with a friend who flips, and leave a quick review—we read every word and it helps more investors find the show.

VCap Real Estate Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to the VCAP Real Estate Podcast, where we talk about building physical empires. Learn from industry experts about all aspects of the business of real estate. You'll learn how to buy, renovate, manage, and sell deals by people who actually do it every day. Build their fortune to do it. I'm your host, Paul Farrell. Let's talk. So tonight, we're gonna have an awesome interview with Alex. I'm very amped up for this. This has been a long time in the making. Alex specializes in long-term wealth, well-planned acquisitions. Um he's heavily focused on the Pocono area and also the surrounding areas. Um, and besides his professional endeavors, um, he also runs marathons, which is crazy to me. Loves traveling and reading, um, super devoted father and husband. So really cool all around. So I'm gonna stop talking. Alex, tell us how you got here.

Scaling Into Flips And Multifamily

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Yeah, cool. Uh Cole, thanks again for having me. Uh, my name is Alex Camerari, um, 35 years old. Uh, been doing real estate since I was 23, 24 years old. Uh, got started when I was a junior in college, helped kind of pay my way through by being a realtor and you know, selling some houses here and there. Got serious about it in 2016 and um bought my first investment property in 2017 using private money. Um, and then that sort of became like a cascade of um leveraging other people's money to get into like flipping houses. Um that was in like 2019. I did my first couple flips and then got kind of lucky with COVID happening. Um, not a great time in the world for a lot of people, but in the real estate space, um worked out kind of well. Um, kind of maybe snuck into a couple houses when you weren't supposed to, uh, made offers, sold them for very nice margins, and then bought those to get into um some multifamilies, some larger multifamilies that I wouldn't have been able to take down without those juicy flips. Um fast forward a little bit, 2021, uh got connected with my current business partner, um, and we started our business Easy Cash Deal, uh, which is a flipping, wholesaling, Novating, listing, all sorts of real estate endeavor company. Um, so we've been running that for about four years, and now uh we've grown to 11 employees. Um so we built out a pretty extensive acquisitions arm. We have a very strong uh dispositions team. Um and uh yeah, we do business in the Poconos, we get a lot of off-market deals, and uh one of the things that makes us unique, I feel like, is we have we leverage multiple, multiple exit strategies. So we don't marry like, oh, we just flip houses, or we just wholesale, or we just you know do um ovations. We kind of look at every deal, every opportunity, and we have specific underwriting criteria and decide what's going to be the best fit both for us and for the sellers of those properties. Um but yeah, I mean that's I guess 10 years of real estate sort of jest as much as I can there.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

I love it. If I shout, can you guys hear me if I let Alex have the mic? Cool. Cool. Um so I guess first question is like how has all that changed? So from like that first deal you did, what does it look like now? Where like is it a different synopsis? You have multiple exits, is has that changed, or are you running the same thing?

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Well, it's changed for me because I've kind of gotten out of the I still love analyzing deals, I still love running numbers, but now I'm in more of like the business building aspect of this. Um so my day-to-day has changed because we're still underwriting deals, we still look at opportunities, but now I have employees that I'm training how to do that. Um and when you have a team, you're there's a lot of other things you have to be focused on, right? There's training, there's holding them accountable, there's one-to-ones, uh, there's performance improvement plans we have to implement, things like that. So um I'm not doing that much like ground level type stuff where I'm you know going in and running my own rehab budgets and things like that. I still do that on occasion. Um, but I got started in 2016. I mean, my first deal was in Allentown. I bought a row home for$30,000 with a tenant in it, paying$950 a month. So I wish there was that today. There's not. Obviously, um the market's changed quite a bit since then. Um but yeah, I mean, there's been a lot that's changed. I mean, you can used to be able to wholesale deals very inexpensively and just immediately have a buyer. You know, now sellers are, I think, more educated. So that's why we can't, you know, not every seller is willing to take an offer that's 60 cents on the dollar. So about a year ago, that's when we started implementing novations into our business. Um, uh is anyone here familiar with novations? You know how those work?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Please talk about them. Explain what that is. Yes, please.

Building Easy Cash Deal And Multi-Exit Strategy

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Okay. So we started doing novations because um, again, we're making offers on houses and um sellers didn't like them, right? And hanging up the phones on us, and you know, who the hell do you think you are? Offer me that for my house. Um, but then you find out they don't necessarily want either a retail price because they do have like an understanding their house isn't in great shape. Um, so what what an ovation basically is is um we we lock it up at a price that is gonna be low enough where or high enough where the seller's happy uh they're getting a number they want, but it's um low enough where we can put it on the market and we can get a buyer that we're not just appealing to like an investor buyer. Uh novations get listed on the MLS, they get bought a lot of times by people that want to use like a renovation loan, like an FHA 203K or a conventional home style loan that they can buy and renovate. Um, so we have a whole underwriting process. Typically, on a novation, we're able to offer a seller maybe 20K, 30K more than a wholesale deal. And what the trade-off is, because you might be asking yourself, well, why wouldn't they just list that on the market regularly? What we do is we pay for all the repairs that might come up during appraisals and inspections uh on those properties. And that's part of our pitch to them. Is like, you know, we'll get you this higher number. Um, it's capped here though, because we're gonna be responsible for your closing costs, paying commission, and handling all the repairs, like I said. Um that's probably like the easiest way. So they're a little different. Like if you are doing a wholesale deal, you'll probably calculate an ARV. You guys know an ARV after repair value. With a Novation, we don't really calculate a uh ARV, we calculate a BRV, which would be a before repair value, which basically we look at like as is comps on the market, and we basically say, like, all right, uh, you know, let's use a buy level as an example. Um, we might look at, depending on the area, a buy level completely fixed up has a retail price of 300,000. So if I'm looking at a traditional wholesale deal, I might say, okay, what's 70% of$300,000? And I have, let's say, a 50k rehab budget, so I'm minusing that. And then let's say I want to make 20K on my wholesale fee, I'm gonna minus that. Does that make sense to you guys? On a BRV, what I might do is I might look at non-renovated buy levels on the MLS, and I might see that, okay, a non-renovated buy level that's still livable, maybe it's dated, dated bath, dated kitchen, whatever, we'll go for 250, not 300, but 250. So now my offer is gonna be that 250 minus the closing costs, which we'll average as a percentage, minus commission, because we're gonna pay commission, then minus a repair budget that's also based on a percentage. Usually it comes out to about five, six thousand dollars, and repairs will estimate. And then we'll put our desired profit on there. So let's say again, we want to make twenty thousand on that, and it spits out a number. Um, so then if we look at the comps and we know we can put this up, this is gonna move, um, you know, it'll go. Those usually work good if they're not, it's not like a house that's in horrible condition. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

So I'm assuming you're using that as a tool. So you're not doing just novations, like you said, but if it fits the right criteria, then you're like, this would be a good one for this. Yep. That's very cool.

Novations Explained And Underwriting BRV

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, we look at a lead comes in, we underwrite it based on a wholesale, based on a novation, based on if we buy it directly. Um and and then if we go through all that and they're like, yeah, honestly, like I just want that retail price. I have a uh uh a realtor team because I got my start in real doing traditional real estate, so I have a realtor team, so we'll just refer that to one of our listing agents, and then we'll list it. We try to go into every single opportunity with like four different exits, and I think that's what makes us unique. I'm not married to just do one thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

So I love that. So I want to dial back one step. You talked about the transition from doing everything yourself and starting to build, and now you have employees. Yep. What did that look like? Because I know there's people in this room that are just getting into that transitioning out of the self to people and they struggle. So, what worked for you on the other end?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Um so uh you have to already like it's not easy because at first you think no one can do something as well as you can. Um but then you it's just like there's a shift that has to happen in your head, I feel like, in real estate. Like a lot of us are just we get into real estate, we're like, I want to be an investor, and I and and you you get a thrill from doing all the all the day-to-day stuff, and it is fun. Um but then you have to start thinking about your time and how much of this you really want to get into. Like if you're want to maintain your W-2 and do some flips on the side, I don't think there's much of a reason to build out a team unless maybe you want to get like a VA or something that's just like you can get for a thousand dollars a month on Fiverr or something and just have to do administrative tasks, that can be helpful. But um, if you really want to go like all in with this, like it's hard just to do like a couple flips a year and be able to make enough money to support your family and build you know a legacy, right? So you have to flip a switch from like I'm a real estate investor to I'm a I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a real estate business owner. And then realize that, okay, if I'm spending all my time talking to sellers and then it's nine o'clock at night, and this is what we used to do, and I'm trying to find buyers for it by posting on social media, and I'm not spending any time with my family because I'm trying to just like move this deal. What am I actually good at? If I'm really good at finding talking to sellers and locking up deals, can I get someone that can do the other side of it and sell the deal off? So that you can start doing things like that. The first thing I leveraged though is like all the administrative tasks. I feel like that's what was bogging me down personally. I like sales, I like connecting with people. Um but yeah, I mean, it's just deciding like you got to begin with the end in mind, like you deciding like I want to full-on business with this thing. I didn't think we'd get to having like 11 employees. Um now I think what I'm most passionate about now, though, is that leading and managing aspect of it. And I just look at real estate deals as just like revenue, a widget that we sell. And my main job is to like motivate my team, speak vision to my company. Um like I said, performance evaluations at all times trying to elevate my company. Um, but that mindset shift obviously didn't happen overnight, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:24

That is so good. I just want to play that back. Um I want to go back to downside protection. So you mentioned about exits, and I love that you said you have multiple exits for every deal you do. What are a couple examples? And maybe someone's here like, well, I'm just gonna sell it. Like, why doesn't that work? And what should you plan for?

Choosing The Right Exit For Each Deal

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Yeah, I mean, so I'm primarily in the space I'm gonna talk about with this is in like the stuff I'm doing on a day-to-day basis with like flips and stuff like that. I mean, one of the things we do is if we lock up a deal, um, we'll go get a quote to do a full gut rehab. And then again, we're looking at what's that value on the back end. But before we do anything, like in between that time of like negotiating quotes with the contractor, we'll put it out there because like if we're buying it, we own the property, we can do whatever we want. I'll put it out there and see if there's another investor that'll buy it as is off me. And then like the way we'll look at it is like if I can make 20 grand, if if I like let's say it like for a flip, we want to make at least 40 grand on a flip. That's kind of like our bottom line number. Um, but while we're in that sort of period of um seeing whether the quotes are gonna work, I'll put it out there to host to it, wouldn't really be a wholesale at that point, be a whole tail because I own it. But um, I'll put it out there if someone's willing to pay me and I can make$20,000 and close on it next month versus$40,000 and I'm holding it for six months to like renovate, do all that stuff. I'm gonna go to the$20,000 in 30 days, like every single time. Um and we'll do that too, even if we're under the under contract to buy it, we'll we'll put it out there to investors and and do the same thing. See if someone will pay me$20,000 now versus I make$40,000 later. So it's just maximizing your time and maximizing your exits. Um I don't know if that answers your question.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

No, perfectly. I appreciate it. Um and your focus primarily in Pocono region, how far do you extend this way?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Uh so we're primarily in Pocono for the flips we do. We do like taking flips in Lehigh Valley. We actually just hired someone on our dispo team that's very much like embedded in Lehigh Valley, so we're expecting our deal flow down here to pick up. Um but we also a lot of our like wholesale deals come um come from the like Scranton Wilkesbury area. We're pretty deep in that market too. Um yeah, so I would say from where our office is in East Strasbourg, pretty much like an hour radius. Um we'll go west like into carbon, but we don't go up into like Ashland or Shick Shiny or like those areas, those are a little too depressed for us. Um but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Love that. Um I I just want to keep asking you questions about team building now because you got me amped up about that. So when you were building your team, I you kind of mentioned that your bottleneck, I guess, was time, right? And you started going into administrative. So administrative was the first thing that you kind of let go of. Yeah. Um, what was next? What did the next couple hires look like?

Market Focus And Territory Strategy

Team Building And Roles In Acquisitions/Dispo

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Uh so okay, so one of the first things that my partner and I did, like early on, it was just me, him, and we had a VA. I've had my one VA for like six years now. Um, she's a rock star. Um we were both we didn't understand uh division of responsibilities at all. Like at all. So we'd have a lead come in and we'd be like, the flow was literally like, all right, you call that one and I'll call the next one. And then wait, did you call that one? No, I thought you were calling that one. No, no, I'm on the next one you call. And then it was just like a shit show. Um, so what we realized is that like I I we we divided it up. Like I was in charge of acquisitions, my partner was in charge of dispositions, right? Um, we did that based on personality type because like my sales style is a bit more well was I'm again being like more in like the coaching role with my team, I would say I'm not as savvy with sellers as I was before because I'm talking to sellers kind of annoys me now. Um, but I was a bit more like um, okay, no, I understand where you're coming from. Like, and you have to be like that in distressed residential real estate because sellers are dealing with a lot of emotions and things like that. My partner's negotiation style is very much more like, hey, here's what it is. Like, we have five offers on this, like you need to make a decision within the next hour. That is amazing for a dispositions person because investors tend to like that. You know, investors are about time and when you're negotiating that way. So we're like, it's not gonna be great if we have him negotiate with sellers, right? Because they're gonna feel pressured and they're not gonna want to do deals with us. And for me, I can close investors, I can I'm pretty good at like whatever personality I'm talking to, I can kind of mirror. But I felt like my upside was more talk with the um on the acquisition side. So we had that first division of responsibility that helped a lot. But then to answer your question, um, we need we wanted to expand the acquisition side first so that we could take down more deals. Because if you it's great if you have amazing dispo, but if you don't have any deals for them to sell, like really the first arm to build out would be the acquisitions arm. Like, let's get so many deals that the dispo guy has trouble selling all of them, then we'll hire dispo. So we hired acquisitions first. Um, and we brought in someone actually who's a friend with my partner, really good, uh stud, um, you know, and again gave that leverage to where that was the first move into me, like, all right, I'm doing this with you, but I'm coaching you at the same time. Um, and then we brought in two more guys to be doing acquisitions, so then we empowered that first hire to begin coaching those two. So now my role moved to I'm coaching the coach. Um, and now what I'm learning about leadership now is because it's hard, like when you start a business. Um, you started that business, you know, it's just me and my partner in like we rented a little office that was like half the size of the stage. So we we we really uh came from the trenches, so to speak. So when you're growing your baby, like you are very like, hey, did you do this? Did you do that? And so it's kind of uh it's a journey to shed like micromanagement when you start building a team. Yes, because you want to have your pot and everything. But one of the things I'm learning now is like you can't attract great talent to your team if you're constantly micromanaging them, because top talent doesn't they don't go for that. So if that's your management style, you're only gonna attract people that are just order takers essentially. Um so what I'm learning right now to communicate to my team is in terms of outcomes. Like this is what I've been really like working on in my leadership role is like, and I know this this really doesn't have anything to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

No, I love it. Please keep going.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

But like um, I'm learning to communicate in terms of like outcomes that I want to see as a business owner, and not like how-tos and like I want it this way, this way, this way. I want to see what I want to see, but I have to empower my team to find their way and grow and develop to provide that outcome. So, one example of this is like currently um I want to see more out of my acquisitions team. I want to see them being more like you know, aggressive in terms of like showing up and high energy, and and and they do that for the most part, but I want to see another level of it. Now, where I'm trying to grow is I could go to my team lead, who was that first hire we made on the acquisition side, and I can say, Hey, I want to see this, and this is how you're gonna do it. But I'm not doing that. I essentially told him, This is what I want to see. How you get there, I'm not really concerned with, but I want to be walking into the office. This is what I want to see. And now that becomes my coaching point that empowers him as a leader to do his own growth journey to provide that, right? So those are just like some things I'm trying to develop more.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I absolutely love that. And I'm assuming to run with that a little bit, I'm assuming you have benchmarks and timelines for that. So you give him the outcome and then you have a plan, right? So, how does that work? How are you leading those guys after you have that conversation? Let's say.

Leadership: Outcomes Over Micromanagement

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah, I mean, everything is you know written out, and everything is just, you know, one of our company core values is honest communication. That's our number one core value. So anytime I have an issue with how something's being run, or they have an issue with how I might have approached something as an owner, we have an open door policy. So it's like we voice stuff because the worst thing you can have in any business is like passive aggressive shit going on. That's like horrible. It's like you will completely destroy your business if you allow for that. So um it's just open communication and like, hey, here's my expectation. I'm gonna give you two weeks, three weeks to develop this. And if I don't see it, then I will step in and then I will handle it the way that probably you're not gonna like. Yeah, because it's gonna result in maybe an outcome that you don't you don't want to see. Um, so it's just, yeah, given the space to do it, but like you said, you have to have a benchmark like met. This is this is how long I'm giving you. It can't be like an indefinite, oh, we're still trying to figure this shit out. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I know there's somebody in this room that is saying, like, okay, that sounds so good, but how do I pay that first person? Like, okay, I'm exhausted, I don't have enough time, I want to hire admin. Where am I getting money from this? What would you say to that?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Uh yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Um every hire that we've made, we've made before we felt like we were ready to. I would say that. Um depends like what you guys are doing. I mean, like um if you're only doing things like I know we were talking earlier, like cash flow versus like equity. Like if you're not if there if there's not enough cash flow in the business, like I wouldn't like you need money to run a business, right? You need revenue to run a business, and you have So these also kind of determine like do we flip something? Do we wholesale something for quick cash? Those decisions come down too to like what's our current capital position? Like if we're if everything is six months out on a flip, like I can't, you know, we can't make hires and things like that, right? So we have to balance that out. But I mean, quick rule of thumb that I was taught is if you have three months of their salary saved, then you're probably ready to hire somebody. Um, so what you determine what that salary is, you can look up, or I mean, with like Chat GPT averages, or you can look up what averages are online. But if you have, I mean, look, for acquisition guys, you know, if you want to go full 100% commission, you can. I mean, they're probably gonna be cowboys and do whatever they want when they want, and you'll have to tame them. Our guys are employees and they're base plus commission. Um, base is like, you know,$2,500 a month. So if you have$7,500 in the bank and you're serious about growing a team, you you you probably could hire somebody. You just don't want to. But not everyone has to build a team. Like, because I'll be honest with you, like your margins can shrink when you build a team because your expenses go up, right? So it's like it depends what you want. If you are working at W-2 and you want to flip two, three houses a year, make 50K a pop on them, and get 150K. I mean, it's not really 150K because you can pay short-term capital gain, it's probably like 70K or whatever. But if you want to do that, you can, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. If you want to have a team that kind of can flow, like we're we're very we're like one hire away, we feel like, from like our team's gonna be able to run on its own. And now we're getting into the lending space um so that we can focus on that, and now we have something humming along. But you know, that's not for everybody. Sometimes I wonder like why I'm doing this. It's like, you know, you get like three calls in a day that's like, oh, this shit hit the fan here, this shit hit the fan there.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Yeah, but ultimately um we know we're impacting people by giving them opportunities to grow and you know, things like that.

Hiring When Cash Is Tight And Compensation

SPEAKER_00 23:59

So I want to go into the lending thing, but first I just want everyone here to like recognize how real of a conversation this is, and I appreciate you so much just because it's rare that somebody sits up here and gives you the specific numbers and the specific details that you're saying. I'm sitting here absorbing this stuff, and if you guys aren't like cueing into this info, it is gold. So thank you for just sharing like the in-depth details. Um let's go into the lending stuff. Okay. And Alex doesn't know, but he's my new best friend because this is something we're working towards. And so what does that look like? What are you doing? Um tell me about it.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Yeah. So um we have Easy Cash Deal, and then we recently started Easy Cash Loans. Um, and uh I gotta give credit to my partner. I mean, so he brought the idea to me because um, again, coming from the dispo side, you know, he's like he's like, dude, we're doing, you know, we do between like 12 to 17 transactions a month on between our different channels. And um he's like built a lot of good relationships with investors, and we're just like looking at, I mean, we see the HUDs, right? We're like, oh, he got hard money with kind of crappy terms. I mean, he's putting 20% down, he's paying four points, he's you know, like, huh, you know, and then starts with that, and then it's like talking to him, then and some of these guys are like, Yeah, you know, if I could get better terms, we would. So then it's like, all right, we're we're providing deals for people, we're connecting with investors all the time, we're seeing what they're paying. Why can't we put together a product that we put in front of them? And now, you know, we'll find you a deal, we'll finance you your deal for you in-house. So we started doing that about a month ago. We currently have uh we just closed our first loan. We're closing another one Friday. We have 12 in process right now. Um and yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say we're the cheapest in terms of our private money, but we're the most streamlined because we don't require appraisals. Um, because we've been doing business in this area in Poconos for like since I shared since like 2016. So we run our own in-house underwriting and comps and everything. Um and we can make, yeah, we underwrite stuff in a day and get funding decisions in 48 hours. So as soon as title's done, we can close. So we're not the cheapest, but I like to think we're we're want to develop as like the fastest and the most streamlined. Um, but yeah, that's kind of like the next thing we're venturing, and then we're starting a fund. Um, well, I can't really can I I can't say I'm starting a fund or we're just you can oh gosh. I'm not in I'm not telling anyone to invest in this fund.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Uh nobody can invest, you can't invest. We're just talking about it.

Launching Easy Cash Loans And Fast Underwriting

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Yeah, but we may or may not be get looking into um you know having a fund. That would be the engine behind the loans that we're doing. So but yeah, it's all about though, like, again, like so you don't have to build a team, you don't have to build leverage in your real estate business, but doing so allows you to then have something that runs consistently without you, and then and then empowering you to move into something else without you having to be like, all right, well, now I want to get in the loan, so we don't have to do this anymore. You don't have to be an either or. You can have something that's humming along that becomes a funnel with vertical integration to this other thing. And now if we build this out to the point where this can hum along, well, now what we could do another vertical integration. I don't know what that would be. Maybe that's starting a title company or something. So now we're doing like deals that we're doing. Um, and we've had these conversations, but titles like a whole frickin' animal. Like you need to hire someone who like owns a title company already, like there's a lot of licensing stuff, so it probably wouldn't be that. But you can get into these things where now it's like, yeah, it's all run together. Like my goal would be to be in a position where I'm going over here, I'm coaching my leaders up. That's where I want to get to. I'm just like coaching up the leaders of the business. Um, so I guess a far cry from$30,000 Allentown Row Home, but here we are.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

It's growth, though, right? Yeah. I have one more question before we move into the next segment. And I know one of the things you say is disciplined execution. So what does that mean? Somebody that's here that says, like, that sounds good. How do you implement that? Or what does just what does it mean?

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Um showing up every day. If you like moving the needle every day is everything in entrepreneurship in general, but definitely in real estate, you gotta like if you're if you're active every day, um, and that can look like different things for different people, but if you're making calls to sellers to find deals every day, you're showing up and you're making 10, 15 calls or doing what you gotta do. Um, just doing that every day and sticking to it. Uh, we have a huddle as a team every single day to go through every single transaction that we're currently doing. Um to hold everybody accountable. Hey, did you do the thing that you said you were gonna do yesterday? Um no? Why? You know, we don't let stuff fall through the cracks like that. Um so yeah, just have a schedule, stick to it. You gotta be calling leads every day, and you have to be, if you're dispoing, you have to be calling buyers every day to sell your deals.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

So good.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

All right, this next section, I kind of want to do like a mini case study. Okay. Um, and so I want you to pick any deal, any opportunity, any venture, and I got four questions, and I'll remind you these. But what was the plan? What broke? What'd you change because it broke, and then would you do it again? Oh man. Um start off. Opportunity, what was the plan and what went wrong? I'm trying to think of something that went wrong. Um I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Like on a deal or something?

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Yeah, it could be a single deal, it could be anything, it could be hiring somebody. Absolutely anything.

Vertical Integration And Future Moves

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Well, we had one we had one recently on a deal in the heightened that we just we just bought. Yeah. Um that was a wholesale all day. Um buyer, we got a good price. Uh, buyer was happy, they locked it in. Um there was a this one of the sons of the owner was uh kind of like nothing going for him, living in the house, and was refusing to leave. Um held up the closing. The buyer ended up trying to backdoor um us and go directly to the seller. Um, and they were working out a deal, started ghosting us. So I call my title company up and I'm like, look, I need to cloud title immediately. How do I do that? Because we have we have uh you know equitable interest in the property, and we were beyond the 30 days with like the whole new like 30 days to we were way beyond that. Like we're in like day 60, and we're had an extension signed, so we're legally supposed to. So I got advice on how to cloud title immediately, did that. That forced the seller to re-engage with us. We were still trying to make a deal happen with the uh with the with the buyer. Um, but then he went to the property to find a walkthrough, and that son like threatened this guy's life, police get called, all this crazy shit. It was wild. So then we the buyer walks, um, and then we pivoted, and then we looked at it and uh got quotes and ended up uh buying it and got a number for like$8,000 from our contractor to do a bathroom, do a paint job, and do a couple other things. And um, that went from being like a 10k assignment, it'll probably be about a 40k wholetale flip with about 8k invested in it. That's amazing. Yeah, so again, just being uh nimble and willing to pivot um no matter what comes up. And like that was a that was very stressful. I went out to the property three times to meet the contractor out there, and this dipshit part of my French wouldn't let us in the house. Um, but we stuck with it and then um got him removed. Um yeah, and um now that deal, you know, knock on wood, you know, should be pretty good for us.

Disciplined Execution And Daily Huddles

SPEAKER_00 32:00

So love it. You answered all my questions, so I got no follow-up. I have one last question for you. Um, something you've seen, experienced, whatever it is, but what takes experienced investors out of the game completely?

Case Study: Pivoting A Troubled Wholesale

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, um, I've mentioned this to you before. One of the things I see in my space is um people just getting flips completely wrong. Um and what I mean by that is like everyone, not everyone, but like a lot of people have this like HGTV mentality when it comes to flipping houses where um you know they're want to be like, I'm gonna be like the nicest house on the block, I'm gonna put the nicest cabinets in, I'm gonna put the nicest flooring in, the highest quality product. And like what they do is they they try to set the market in a neighborhood, and it's the dumbest thing you can do. Um ultimately sellers or buyers don't don't care about your imported from Italy tile, you know? They're looking for a nice kitchen, a nice bathroom, and a fresh feeling when they walk in the house. Um, and I've seen a couple, actually, I was telling you just this year, a couple um folks that were our competitors. I don't I don't like rejoice in this by any means. I think it's kind of sad, but I've seen them now like they're uh got private lenders calling us, like, hey, have you heard from this guy? Like, we don't know where he is, he's just ghosting people he took out loans from because he got over-leveraged. Um and my partner and I would see his stuff on the MLS, and we're like, how the hell is he gonna get that? And then he started to not get that. Um but yeah, I mean, you go in and like, you know, Home Depot shaker cabinets, LVP floor, you know, your your basic uh tile. You can get stuff that looks good, that's inexpensive. People just want fresh kitchen, fresh bathroom, fresh paint, and you know, stay under budget. And we we we we're very conservative with our flips. We underwrite them. We'll look at what another flip sold for to get like an ARV, and I'll take another 5% off that price. I want to be priced with like houses that aren't renovated, sort of, um, just to move them quickly. Because it's like I said, I don't there's some flippers that they're like in love with the product they put out. I want to put out something good, and if repairs come up, we fix them, but it's a widget as far as I'm concerned. I just want to, I just want to move it and get the profit in our bank account on the back end. That's all. It's a I'm looking at profit PLs all day. I don't care about, you know, oh, my cabinets look better than yours. Like, not into that at all. And a lot of guys I know that had that mentality, now they're doing wholesales. Yeah, now you just see them throw houses with nothing done too much, and they make money doing it. I'm not hating, but they everyone kind of got that reality check because with the market being what it is right now.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And there's so much here that I want to go listen to again and so thank you. And so, Alex, thanks for being here. Let's give them a round of applause.