Pittsburgh Real Estate Investors Association

[Recorded introduction: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com Podcast. This is your host, Mike Hambright, and on this show I will introduce you to VIPs in the real estate investing industry as well as other interesting entrepreneurs whose stories and experiences can help you take your business to the next level.

We have three new shows each week which are available in the iTunes Store or by visiting FlipNerd.com. So without further ado, let’s get started.]

Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with the FlipNerd VIP Interview Show. Welcome back. Today, I have with me Josh Caldwell who is the Managing Director of the American Real Estate Investors Academy.
He’s also the President of the Pittsburgh REIA, has a BlogTalk radio show, all kinds of interesting stuff going on. He’s got a lot of great insights to share with us.

Before we get started, though, let’s take a second to recognize our featured sponsors.

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Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions as real estate investing can be risky.

Mike: Hey Josh. Welcome to the show.

Josh: Hey Mike. Glad to be on here.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for joining us today. As I was kind of preparing for the show, we put together some show notes and information background on you for folks that I haven’t had a chance to meet yet, so I’m glad we’re meeting here.

I want to learn a little bit more about you, but one of the things I noticed on here was that you were, one, you’re obviously, you were a marine, a veteran, so thank you for serving our country. That’s awesome.

Josh: I was young and dumb. It seemed like the thing to do.

Mike: Yeah. Well, hey, you did a great thing, I’m sure. But I noticed that you’re a retired Federal Air Marshall. I can’t say I’ve come across an Air Marshall before, so-

Josh: There are not a whole lot of us on the planet.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: It’s not the normal transition where you go from counter-terrorism to real estate, but there are some similarities where the A-plus personality type where you drive to win at all times.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Kind of crosses both those lines.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: It doesn’t seem like a natural fit, but it kind of is.

Mike: Well, a lot of real estate investors are packing heat. I know that. You pretty much have to.

Josh: And you should.

Mike: In some neighborhoods. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being on the show. So, why don’t you give us a little bit of your background and tell us a little bit how you got involved starting in real estate?

Josh: Okay Mike. The background part, I am the President of the Pittsburgh Real Estate Investors Association, the Managing Director of the American Real Estate Investors Academy.

I’m an author. I have my own radio show. I mentor students around the country, and basically, I kind of live and breathe real estate.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I got into it because I realized I was becoming old and fat, and in the exciting world of counter-terrorism old and fat is a bad, bad thing.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: My time of being an action-oriented person was coming to an end, so I needed to find something else, and in my search to find something else I ran into a fellow, a former marine as well, named Ron LeGrand.

If you happen to know Ron LeGrand, Ron LeGrand can teach you to do just about anything, and in my case he taught me quite a bit and then just kind of turned me loose in the universe.

That’s really where I came from, and, well, now I’ve got several of my own clubs, and my real passion is teaching people.

Mike: Yeah. So on the Ron LeGrand side, what you learned was how to become a mentor and coach other folks, is that right?

Josh: It’s one of the things I learned, yeah.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Ron is fantastic at passing information on and just using him to model, that’s the fancy new world we use for copying off somebody else’s paper, which is really the first rule of high school.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: You don’t really need to know anything. You just need to sit next to the kid who knows the answers to the test, and that’s a lot off the way real estate education really pans out.

Mike: Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, part of what we’re doing on the show here is to get a chance to talk to other folks and meet other folks. I mean, networking is critical in this business and it’s so easy too, if you’re focused.

Most folks like you and me and a lot of other folks that I’ve had on the show are very much an open book as to the information that they have or are willing to share.

Josh: Well, that’s very true. Not to cut you off, Mike, but anybody who’s watching this show should already know, Mike is a great source of information, and I, most of the guests that I’ve seen on here are fantastic sources and real estate, there’s something about the real estate entrepreneurial mindset where we don’t think in terms of competition.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And people, very successful people will be very open and explain to you in detailed steps exactly how they got from having a horrible job to, you know, owning the house of their dreams and living wherever they want to live.

Mike: Right. Right. Awesome. So, from there, talk a little bit about the REIA that you’re involved with, that you lead.

Josh: I took over the, what was the Western Pennsylvania Real Estate Investors Association by default. My predecessor passed away, and there was really nobody else to step in and fill the void. I kind of volunteered, and from there we’ve been growing this club like crazy.

We are the fastest growing club in the state at the moment, and a lot of it’s because of our basic philosophy is we teach people how to make money. That is the core of everything we’re involved in, is we don’t look at things as “Okay, what can we sell you?”

Mike: Right.

Josh: We look at things as “Okay, if I present this to you, will it help you make money?” My goal is to get you out of your silly job. My goal is to get your free, and really, all of real estate investing is the pursuit of financial freedom.

Mike: Right. Right. Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve got some guests coming up, a guy that was a mechanic. He’s a fairly young age and just started a few years ago buying houses and he was recently able to leave his job.

Stories like that are awesome, and there’s a lot of folks that I know that I’m blessed, and I’m sure, a lot of folks that you know that can never imagine going to work for anybody else again, and they simply don’t have to, so it’s nice.

Not that they’re necessarily ridiculously rich, but they’re free from having to do things that they don’t want to do anymore.

Josh: You know, Mike, as a mentor what drives people like you and I is that satisfaction of freeing other people.

Mike: Right. Right.

Josh: It’s not normal for me to be awake at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Mike: Well, I have a six year old, so I can’t say that.

Josh: Okay. That’s not entirely true. I have a two year old-

Mike: Oh, wow.

Josh: So it’s not intentional that I wake up before 10 a.m.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: But it’s not anything that’s required of me. I usually go to work in a t-shirt and jeans or shorts, depending on the weather. I live in Pittsburgh. Jeans happens a lot.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: But I make my own choices. I decide when I’m going to work. I decide how much I’m going to work, and again, going back to real estate investing and coming across a mentor like Mike, or some of the other people that are out there-

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: A lot of what we’re teaching people is how ot have that type of freedom where your income isn’t tied to a specific period where you need to be sitting in some building.

Mike: Right. Right.

Josh: You make your money. Once you get enough tools in your tool belt, you have enough understanding of how to make money, you work when you want to. You work from where you want to.

You know, I can be on vacation in Europe and check my emails and have deals moving forward because I’ve built the system, and I was not the originator of anything that I do.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I literally plagiarized everything that I do, and so did most of us. So it’s just a matter of getting plugged into a good system and moving forward from there.

Mike: Yeah, yes. Tell us a little bit more about your REIA. How many members do you have? Do you have the typical structure of a general meeting once a month and then some kind of niche type meetings sprinkled throughout and things like that, or are you a little bit different?

Josh: We’re a little weird. We’re growing at about 20% a year at this stage. We’re in the 500 range as far as membership goes.

Mike: Okay.

Josh: But again, in my great scheme of plagiarism, we’re copying a lot of stuff from Dustin Griffin’s Atlanta REIA where we’ve got, I think we’re up to 10 subgroups now. The subgroups are simply groups that meet outside of the regular meeting.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: They cover anything from wholesaling, commercial real estate, being a landlord, internet marketing, whatever we can think of, there’s really no ceiling to it other than our creativity and finding the proper leaders.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: But we realized a while ago in a two hour meeting, there’s only so much content we can deliver, no matter how hard we try.

Mike: Right.

Josh: The idea became “Okay, we’ll let’s break this out and expand into all sorts of little niches,” because I’ve always equated real estate investing with Baskin Robbins. You walk into Baskin Robbins and there are 31 flavors of ice cream. You like the one you like and nobody can tell you that that’s not the best flavor.

Mike: Right.

Josh: Real estate investing is very similar to that. I think the easiest thing to get involved with is wholesaling, and probably the top of the food chain is commercial real estate, but there are a ton of other ways that you can make money in real estate.

Mike: Absolutely.

Josh: And a lot of it is just how your personality gravitates, or what just works well inside your head.

Mike: Yes. Yeah, I don’t think a lot of folks realize how many different ways there are to make money in real estate until you’ve been doing it for a while, and some people, I mean, like myself, I’ve actually tried to stay pretty pure.

I mean, I wholesale, I rehab and I have rental properties. I’m intrigued by seller financing, but I don’t do it just because, if I do it, I want to go all in and do it in a big way. I don’t want to just dabble.

It reminds me of when I, for undergrad, I have a bachelor’s in finance and I had kind of a focus on investments. I didn’t realize until I got out in the real world and worked for a huge bank.

There’s probably thousands of people in that one company that would say they work in investments or they work in banking and they all had different job titles. I mean, they all had a different niche.

In real estate investing, I’m not sure if it’s quite that many, but there’s a lot of ways to make money in real estate investing. No doubt about it.

Josh: Very true. I mostly focus on, strange enough, owner financing.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Josh: It’s what I teach my local students, and I teach my national students as well, and to me, the hardest one is rehabs. Rehabs are very unnatural for me.

Mike: Got it.

Josh: I’m doing two now because Robin Thompson goaded me into doing them, mostly by making fun of me at dinner one night, but, to me, that’s a very difficult way to make a living.

Mike: That’s primarily what I do, yeah. I will tell you, it is difficult. It’s a difficult life because, you know, it’s…

Josh: Other people just take to it.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: For me, there’s just too many moving parts, too many variables, but somebody with a construction background, they think that’s the easiest way in the world to make money.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh: It’s just a matter of finding, you know, being exposed to enough different things, you know, note buying, being a private lender, you do things completely passively or actively, and anything in between.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: But that’s where our REIA club really comes into play is presenting all those things in front of you without any bias.

Mike: Right. Right.

Josh: And saying “Okay, you can do this, this, this, this,” until you find that thing that really, really fits with you.

Mike: Right. Yeah. Would you say, with your club, I always ask club leaders that I talk to, what they think the right mix is of, and you alluded to this a little bit, I know that the club business is a thankless job. You basically help educate a lot of people.

It’s not like people are making a lot of money doing it. They’re generally doing it, if they’re making any money, they’re usually doing it as a way to meet people and open up new opportunities in other areas or maybe there’s, you know, JVs you could do to get together or things like that, but what do you think the right balance is between the education side and the fact that you have to generate some revenue to be able to have the club survive?

Josh: Well, let’s address the revenue part first. That’s a good question, Mike. If you ever want to start a real estate club, you are a moron. Don’t do this. There are lots and lots of things that I could do that would make much more money per hour of effort than having a REIA club. It really has to be a labor of love, or, for God’s sake, don’t do it.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: The, to me, the right mix really is just push the education. The JV stuff just happens. The joint ventures with speakers and promoters and whatever, whenever I find something that I like, I’ll bring it in, but I have to be that filter and, first of all, evaluate it for content quality.

Mike: Right.

Josh: Just block out the bad people that you would find if you were just searching the internet.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: It’s more of a shepherding thing, but it’s, in my case, it is really my passion to teach people.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Which pretty much should tell you that I am a stone cold moron because, you know, in a couple hours a day I could make thousands of dollars or I can write a REIA newsletter. Guess which one I usually choose?

Mike: Well, it’s funny, there’s the balance between doing what you love and making money. Well, and I know that you have a BlogTalk show as well, a radio show.

Josh: I do.

Mike: Tell us a little bit about that.

Josh: It’s on BlogTalk Radio. It’s American-REIA if you’re looking for it, and mostly what I do is I interview my friends. Most of my friends in the real estate world are nationally known speakers. I will interview them and interrogate them and ask them every question about their particular niche or how they got started or what advice they would have to new investors.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: After the interview’s done, I’ll post it on my American-REIA.com website just to let other people hear from the big gurus that they normally don’t get to talk to.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: I use those personal relationships to get some of that content out there, and it’s really for the new investors who haven’t heard of these people yet. It’s just, it’s another area where I can put out just ideas for people to possibly pursue.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Very similar to what I’m doing here.

Josh: Yeah.

Mike: We’ll add links to all these things we’re talking about. I know you’re involved in a number of clubs and organizations, so for those listening that are ferociously scribbling to write this down, simply just scroll down and you’re going to see them, links to them, all right there.

How many, how often do you have shows and things like that? Is it a pretty active show?

Josh: I’ll do a couple a month.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And it’s just a matter of more when my schedule is clear.

Mike: Right.
Josh: I’ve got some ones, I’ve got a designer who was on DIY Network that I’ve been trying to line up for a couple weeks.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Josh: I’ve got some internet marketing folks. Again, Ron LeGrand’s supposed to be doing it soon.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: People like Lee Phillips, I did Al Lowry, Lou Brown, I love the bigger known speakers.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Guys like that I’ve already done interviews with.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I am more branching off into subjects that really aren’t covered.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Just to have a bigger body of material for people. When you talk about, for folks that, on the mentoring side of your business, or in being involved with the REIA club, teaching folks, one of the things that’s always interesting to me, and I love talking to people about, hearing their feedback, is the fact that there’s so much interest in real estate investing yet so few that ever get out of the gate or are successful with it.

I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit on why you think that is and we’ll kind of ease our way into what folks can do to kind of get started and be successful.

Josh: Well, it’s simple, but failure falls into one of two categories. Either you do not have the motivation to take action, which is your stinking fault, or you don’t have enough education and enough understanding of the technique.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Now most people will go ahead and they’ll either read the internet or buy a course or what have you, but that’ll give you the basics of a technique.

Mike: Right.

Josh: To truly understand how to put that technique into play, how to actually use it in the real world, you generally need to find a successful mentor in your area.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And that can come from a couple different sources. You can find people like Mike, people like myself, people at your local REIA club, you’ll be amazed where you find the successful people in that group.

Mike: Right.

Josh: They’re very open to helping.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: A lot of them will do it, you know, my local group, I don’t charge anybody any money. I will make you successful and will split the deal, but I have a vested interest in your success.

Mike: Right.

Josh: If you live in the middle of absolute nowhere, we can talk about fees to make that happen, but the money isn’t the important part. Your success is. And having somebody who’s already gone through all the steps, answering all the questions and things that weren’t covered in whatever course you’re into-

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Is really important. My mentors coming up were Jon and Stephanie Iannotti, who are fantastic teachers and actually just launched a course called Reacts, and having them there when I got confused, I didn’t understand what to do, you know, even things like the mechanics of closing a deal-

Mike: Right.

Josh: Can be very overwhelmingly complicated to a new person.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: But it’s very simple to those of us who’ve done it a few times. Right?

Mike: Just becomes second nature.

Josh: Yeah, Mike. I could blindfold you and get you drunk and hit you in the head a couple times and you can go to a closing and make it happen. You don’t have to think about it.

Mike: You know, the funny thing is, is, my wife and I, we’ve probably bought a little under 300 houses in the past five years. I’ve been to a title company to close those deals probably a handful of times.

I mean, we just do it out of our office, we FedEx, we notarize, we have notaries in my office. We just don’t really think about it, and it’s interesting, you know, that stuff, somebody sticks it on my desk and says “Sign here, here,” and I hand it back to them and the rest is just kind of done, so-

Josh: Yeah. Once you’ve done a couple repetitions.

Mike: Right.

Josh: Any skill, it doesn’t matter if it’s a physical skill or an education skill, once you’ve gone through a few repetitions it’s no longer scary.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And having somebody who’s already been there and already done that, it really, the entire concept of mentoring goes back into the Middle Ages with the old trade guilds. You know, you wanted to learn to be a stone cutter, well, you didn’t just walk up and start whacking away at a stone. You found some old guy who had already been doing it for 20 years and he showed you how to do it.

Mike: Right.

Josh: And that’s very much the way real estate education is still communicated, because there are so many possible questions no course is ever going to encapsulate all these.

Mike: Right.

Josh: You can go for a 4 day training, a 10 day training, I don’t care how long your training is, there’s still going to be things that weren’t covered.

Mike: Right.

Josh: And to be able to reach out to somebody who’s already done that, say
“Okay, I ran into this. What do I do?” or “How do I construct this offer?” or “I think there’s something here in this deal, but I don’t quite know what to do with it,” or “I have this under contract. I don’t know how to sell it.”

Mike: Right.

Josh: Those are incredibly valuable, and it goes back to the teaching somebody to fish concept.

Mike: Right.

Josh: Once that knowledge is implanted in your head, it’s never taken away.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: You know, the market can crash, you can go broke becaues you made silly mistakes, and come right back, and it’s just a matter of getting that into your skull in the first place and having a mentor, really, is the best and easiest way to do that.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Or you can struggle along for a few years and learn it yourself, the painful, hard, disturbingly unprofitable way.

Mike: Yes. You know, I think there’s probably a much bigger pool of people that aren’t successful because they don’t even, like you said, take the effort to try to learn those things, to try to meet a mentor.

You know, they may do something on their own. They may go to a weekend boot camp but they didn’t really talk to anybody or network there, so they have this cluster of information in their head and they end up saying “Well, we just had a baby”, or “I just started a new job,” or “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my job,” or they find reasons to never even get out of the gate, which is really a shame, but I don’t know how to help people with motivation that don’t have it.

Josh: The motivation’s hard. You really can’t get past that.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: You need to find somebody who had a pain point. Dentists are a great one because dentists kill themselves more often than pretty much anybody.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Being a dentist is apparently horrible.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: But those people understand pain and discomfort in their lives. Or somebody with that entrepreneurial spirit, I don’t know if that’s a genetic thing or if that’s something that happens as you’re raised, but that burning desire to succeed, the kind of guy who will just keep stepping forward at all times, no matter how discouraged they get-

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: Those are the guys that are going to make it. Your education prior to learning about real estate is irrelevant. I’ve seen high school drop outs do it. I’ve seen people with doctorates do it. Your income prior is irrelevant. Background is irrelevant. God, ability to speak English is irrelevant.

I’ve seen guys who came here, immigrated from countries I couldn’t really pronounce who have become quite successful in real estate because they just keep moving forward.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And it’s that mental attitude of “I’m not going to stop. I’m just going to keep going until I win.”

Mike: That’s right.

Josh: Is really a key to it, and then you refine it with your learning process. But yeah, I think a lot of the, I don’t know if the attitude’s even a problem. I think it’s fear that stops people.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: They’re afraid to pick up the phone or afraid to call the ad they saw on Craigslist that looks too good to be true, and having a mentor there to say “Get off your frickin’ butt and call these people-“

Mike: Right.

Josh: You’ll never hit a baseball if you aren’t swinging the bat.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh: You need that kind of encouragement to move forward, and there’s only so much you can do with the rah-rah part of it, but you need that little bit of hand holding, and if that little bit of hand holding gets you through your first deal, well, okay, now you’ve done it.

Mike: Right.

Josh: Now it’s not a big, scary monster. Now it’s real, and now you understand that, okay, you’ve done it once, go do it 300 more times.

Mike: Right. Right. So tell us a little bit more about the American Real Estate Investors Academy. Is that, that’s essentially your coaching program that you’re involved with?

Josh: It’s a coaching/an educational platform.

Mike: Okay.

Josh: That’s my coaching platform for people who live outside of my area.

Mike: I see.

Josh: And it evolved because I was at an equity trust event in Orlando and I met a couple of fellows from Idaho, and the guys from Idaho didn’t know that there were REIA clubs. I was like “Okay. I don’t know how you don’t know that,” but apparently, and I did a search, everywhere I could find, there was nothing near them at all.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I was like “Okay, there really is a population of people who are just not being served at all.”

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And if you’re out there on your own, well, okay, what are you going to do?

Mike: Right.

Josh: You’re possibly a victim of, and there are some frauds and some charlatans in our industry-

Mike: Sure.

Josh: You could spend a lot of money being their victim, but you’re missing the function of a REIA club where they act as a filter between you and the not so good guys.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: So I created that, and then I kept getting emails of “Hey, would you teach me,” “Hey, would you teach me,” “Hey, would you teach me,” so I finally broke down and said “Okay. I will create a program for people who don’t live anywhere near me, and it’s not just me, I’ve got some of my very well qualified friends that are willing to do mentoring on the side as well.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: And it’s a one on one program with us, because everybody’s an individual and everybody has different desires and they all start at different points as well.

Mike: Right.

Josh: An experienced wholesaler does not have the same issues that somebody who’s never bought a piece of property before in their lives has.

Mike: Right.

Josh: So that’s where that whole thing blossomed from.

Mike: Yes. Yes. Awesome. Well, as we sit here where we, kind of, coming on mid-year 2014, I always ask some veteran folks too that are active real estate investors and have their ear to the ground where they think the market’s going, where they think things are heading.

Of course, it’s different in every market in the country, but just across the country, where do you think things are going with real estate, interest rates, things like that?

Josh: Short answer? I don’t care.

Mike: Okay.

Josh: As an experienced real estate investor, if the market crashes, I’ll make money.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh: Market goes great, I’ll make money.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I just have to alter techniques. There are-

Mike: I’ve decided at this point actually that I think we actually do better in bad markets.

Josh: Oh, I like bad markets.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I wish we could have 2009, 2010 back right now actually.

Josh: Agreed. Desperate sellers are great buying opportunities. Hot markets are great selling opportunities.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: And in between there’s everything else that exists.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: It’s a question of , are you buying defaulted notes because the economy’s collapsed, or are you flipping stuff because the property values are skyrocketing?

Mike: Right.

Josh: And it’s just a matter of what technique you want to employ at that moment. I see a lot of really endemic, very large structural problems with the real estate market. I think, and not just the real estate market but all markets across, I think we’re heading for some big crashes unless something changes direction.
That being said, I really don’t care.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: I don’t. If the market goes well, I’m going to be fine. If the market goes horribly, I’ll still be fine. And I don’t, I kind of follow a market, but I don’t get real wrapped up in it.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: What I’m feeling in Pittsburgh is we have a lot of natural gas folks coming in, because we’re sitting on enough natural gas to power the country for the next 200 years.

Mike: Yes.

Josh: If we can keep the environmental wonkies from fighting it off, we will make a fortune in natural gas and our economy will grow quite a bit.

Mike: Right.

Josh: If we fight it off, I will be buying property in Ohio, because they’ll get the boom that we fight off.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: It’s just a matter of shifting to that different market a little bit.

Mike: I do think that’s one thing that’s important too, and I talk to folks a lot about this, I think it’s critical. There’s so many real estate investors that are a one-legged stool, right? I mean, they only wholesale. That’s it. They won’t consider doing anything else.

I know people that keep everything as rentals. They probably, that might be okay, actually, because-

Josh: Yeah, and long term, keeping rentals is the only safe thing you can do.

Mike: Right. Right.

Josh: You’ll take a beating some years, you’ll do fantastic other years, but you’ll eventually become wealthy.

Mike: Right. Right. But it’s really critical to be able to, for any successful real estate investor, to know how to survive and learn how to survive, and you just shift strategies in different markets and say “Now I’m going to do this, now I’m going to do that.”

So I think that’s really critical for anybody that’s listening, you should only be working with people that are teaching you how to not just survive but thrive in any type of market.

Josh: If you’re a one trick pony, at some point your trick’s going to not work.

Mike: Right:

Josh: So you need to have multiple tools in your toolbelt. Then the real concept is to become that transaction engineer, where it doesn’t matter what the deal is you know how to put it together.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: You may even look at properties and say, “Okay, I can do three or four different things with this particular piece of property, all of which will be profitable.”

Mike: Yes.

Josh: That’s really where you want to be. The other thing you really want to do is you want to eliminate yourself. Your long term goal is to replace you in your own business and completely automate it so that you have underlings who do all of your things.
Everybody I know that makes a seven-digit annual income, they don’t really participate in their own real estate anymore. When you start making professional sports money, you’re not the one who’s going to do this, you physically can’t. You need to learn enough about the business to instruct other people to do the functions you’re currently doing.

Mike: Right.

Josh: That really should be everybody’s long term goal. In the short term, I just want you to get out of your stupid job. Jobs, I guarantee you, I don’t care what your job is if you’re watching this, you’re underpaid. The reason I can guarantee that to you is that if they weren’t making a profit on your efforts, you’d already be fired.

Mike: That’s right.

Josh: So start making a profit on your own doggone efforts. The only way for you to get the most out of you is to be an entrepreneur, and the easiest way to be an entrepreneur is real estate. There are no barriers to entry, I don’t care what your degree is in, I don’t care if you have a degree.
All you need to be able to do is to talk to people and be able to think [inaudible 00:29:23] And you can really learn both of those skills, but if you can’t, talk to me or Mike.

Mike: Josh, that’s great. I don’t even have to ask you, do you have any final words to share with the people watching you just went ahead and did it.

Josh: I do want to throw one thing out, Mike.

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: If you go to my website, pittsburghreia.com, sign into my newsletter, it’s a free educational resource. I will give you my report “Ten ways to make money in Real Estate, even if you’re broke and have bad credit.”

Mike: Awesome.

Josh: It’ll help get you going in the right direction.

Mike: Awesome, awesome. We’ll have links for that below that video here. Great, Josh. We definitely appreciate your insights and your information and sharing your knowledge and experience with us today.

Josh: Fantastic, Mike. Glad you had me on.

Mike: Awesome, awesome. Thanks so much and we’ll see you around, okay?

Josh: Have a good one, man.

Mike: All right, bye-bye.

Josh: Bye.