The Real Estate Lifestyle

Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright from FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting expert interview, where I interview successful real estate investing experts and entrepreneurs in our industry to help you learn and grow. As a shameless plug, I’ve got to tell you that we’ve totally revamped FlipNerd.com and that we have a very robust platform in existence for real estate investors to find deals and find vendors and build community and a lot of great things. So go check out the all new FlipNerd.com.
For today’s show, I’m joined by Steve Cavanaugh. He’s a Maryland based real estate investor, mentor and coach. He’s the president of the Southern Maryland REI Group and he’s an avid musician. Steve, we haven’t talked about that yet. Got to hear about your jam sessions that are world famous, I hear. But Steve’s main exit strategy is rehabbing and unlike many investors, Steve is focused a lot more on quality versus quantity. A lot of us get hung up in the volume game and a lot of chest thumping with how many deals we’ve done.
But Steve may only do five or six houses a year. He primarily rehabs them and has stayed lean and mean so he’s able to maximize his profit and use that to live the lifestyle that he wants. So it’s a refreshing story that we all need to hear every once in a while to question why we work so hard and are we using real estate to live the life that we want, which is why almost all of us got into this game anyway.
So Steve has some great lessons to share and we’re going to talk about just that. How to use real estate as a tool to create the lifestyle that makes sense for you and your family? Before we get started though with Steve, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
RealtyMogul.com is an online marketplace for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan and close in as little as 10 days. Rates start as low as 9%.
We’d also like to thank National Real Estate Insurance Group, the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large-scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you.
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.
Hey Steve. Welcome to the show, my friend.
Steve: Hey Mike. What’s happening? Thanks for having me.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Glad you’re here. So every once in a while, it’s funny, I was talking about how I was telling you right before hand that I was just at my mastermind meeting where there’s some really high volume folks in there and not to take anything away from any of them, there’s, quite frankly, you’re not allowed in the group if you don’t do a lot of volume. That’s kind of the measure of how much experience you have or whatever. And it’s kind of an interesting dynamic because we all got in this game, whether you do a lot of volume or a little bit, everybody pretty much got in this game with the hope of it creating financial freedom and lifestyle freedom, which is ultimately at some point you start to realize they go hand in hand. But freedom of time is every bit as valuable if not more than financial freedom, right?
Steve: Absolutely.100%.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So it’s always great to hear these stories because a lot of people that end up doing a lot of volume, what ends up happening is they have these huge burdens of just the overhead and the expense. And it’s a vicious cycle of this monster that you have to continually feed and next thing you know, you might be doing a ton of volume, but it takes a lot of risk and a lot of treasure to get to that point.
Steve: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah. So I’m excited to talk about this because I think it’s something that everybody needs to hear. Ultimately you can’t put units in the bank and that doesn’t really matter.
Steve: Right. That’s so true.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Hey before we dive in to talking about that and getting your perspective on everything, tell us about you, how you got started as a real estate investor and maybe sprinkle in some of your jam session stuff.
Steve: Sure. All right so my story goes like this, I graduated college in 1999. I was a communication arts major, music minor, jazz guitar performance and pretty much had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, like most people out there. So I was fortunate that I knew some people that were able to get me a job right out of college in the IT industry. Had nothing to do with what I went to school for but it was a paycheck and I knew I could buy a new car as soon as I got out of college, so I was excited to do it.
Well, I did the 9 to 5, which was actually 9 to 6 or 7, for five days a week for four years and absolutely hated it. Just hated every bit of it, you know how this is going and sitting in meetings where your superior just listens to themselves talk and just irate customers and all this stuff. I was, at that point in time, I created and started and ran the support desk for our software that we were supporting and it was rough. So I hated it and I was driving, commuting one hour each way so and I just finally came to a realization one day, I’m spending half my life on the road and I just hated it.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: So one of the thing that’s great about IT is that there usually is a little bit of downtime in between customers screaming at you so I hopped on the internet. One of the websites that I came across was FlippingHomes.com and that’s where I came to know Steve Cook and I learned about his boot camps that he used to run back in the day in Baltimore. So Baltimore is just up the road from me, it’s about an hour and 10 minutes from where I’m sitting right now. And I said, “Well, I can go ahead and go up there.” And, at the time I think he was selling his boot camps I want to say for $1300 a course.
I was living paycheck to paycheck in a job and it was $1300 more than I had at the time. But one way or another, I came across the $1300 and I made the investment. I went to the boot camp and learned what I needed to learn, I came home, I immediately applied it and a few months down the road, I did a wholesale deal where I flipped two lots to a local builder. I made over $100,000 on that first wholesale deal.
Mike: Wow.
Steve: And I just, I took that as a sign that this was what I needed to do. So I immediately then right after, I went back to Steve’s boot camp again the next year, I plowed that profit from that into my first rehab deal and I made $62,000 on that first rehab deal and I said, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave my job as a result of doing this.” So after four years of working the job and after getting the real estate stuff up and running, that’s exactly what I did.
Mike: So tell me again, you worked at the job for four years and how long into it did you do those first couple of deals?
Steve: It was probably about halfway through.
Mike: Okay. So you stuck it out for a couple of more years?
Steve: I did. I did. And one of the things that was great, we all have things going for us or going against us at any given time. One of the things I had going for me at that point in time was my wife and I got married, and she had a regular job. She was teaching at a school. So we were able to live very cheaply under her salary as I kind of made the transition from full-time working for somebody else to full-time real estate investor. So that was one of the things I had going for me is I had a wife who worked.
Mike: No, that’s great. It’s great when you can live on one income or if you get into the… this wasn’t the truth for me and it’s not true for a lot of people either, but when you get in early enough to where you maybe you don’t have kids yet and don’t have a lot of financial responsibilities yet. And it just kind of gets harder and harder to make those leaps as time goes by and you get more, more debt and more responsibility and all those things. So then along the line, I know you run a REI group now, you have a coaching club so kind of talk about overtime how that’s evolved.
Steve: Sure, so the actually the REI group started up back in like 2002, which was around the time that I just started learning about all this stuff. And at that point in time, another gentleman was running it and he also worked – he was also in the Navy and he got stationed overseas somewhere so essentially he said, “Steve, do you want to take this thing and run with it?” And I wasn’t up and running enough in the business at that point in time to know what I was doing.
But what I did was I kept everybody’s email addresses, so when it came time for me to actually give the thing a push again and start it back up, which I did in 2006, I had all the info, I blasted out, I said, “Hey guys. We’re going to meet here now and we’re going to do it.” And I’m proud to say now, I mean, it’s quite a great group that we have going in southern Maryland, it’s the Southern Maryland Real Estate Investors Group. It’s the southern Maryland’s only REI.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: And we have a membership of over 1,000 and a typical meeting is anywhere from 60 to 80 people.
Mike: That’s awesome.
Steve: Yeah.
Mike: So let’s talk a little bit about, I think a lot of real estate investors, a lot of entrepreneurs, once you make the leap and decide to start a business, then it for a lot of people it becomes a volume game. It’s always how do I do more? How do I become bigger? How do I take on more and more and more? And they’re just never satisfied with enough. And that could certainly could wreak havoc on your life and your family and stuff like that because you’re job or your business becomes your mistress that you can never get away from.
And to be frank, I find myself in that situation all the time. And I know a lot of real estate investors do. So talk about how you had the foresight to know or how you got to that point where you know that I’m okay just doing this and staying lean and mean and not trying to take over the world all the time?
Steve: Sure, let me give you my upfront disclaimer before I go into this. I’m not perfect and as you say, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of going back there.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: And it’s very easy to just keep another thing on and then next thing you know, you’re just drowning in your own success.
Mike: Right.
Steve: It happens. So but back to your question, I think the place to start is having a vision. You have to know what you want your life to look like. Forget about money, forget about yachts and palm trees and all that stuff, just say, what do you want your life to look like on a daily basis? What type of interactions do you want to have with your wife, with your children, with your family, with your friends? You need to go just start, very simple. You know, keep it very simple here and just write down on a piece of paper what do you want your life to look like and then the key is, this is big, you build a business to serve that life. So the life is in the middle and the business is around it.
So many of us do this the opposite way. We say, how can we make the most money? How can we work the hardest? How can we have like the biggest ego? How can we have the biggest business out there? And then what they try to do is then they try to build a life around the business and fit it in any nooks and crannies that may exist. And what happens is the life usually ends up falling apart, the business goes along with it. So I feel like I’m preaching, I’m not.
Mike: No, hey, this is great. These are great lessons. To be honest, we have a lot of people that listen to this show everyday. Thousands of people, which is fantastic. But let me tell you the two, probably if people are listening to this right now, the two most common people are either people that want to get into real estate investing because they see it as a vehicle for a better life. So that’s an important part of hearing this message.
The other type of person that listens to this show is a high performing person already, like you and a lot of the other guests I’ve had on the show, continue to listen, afterwards, that this will resonate as well because a lot of people fall into the trap of how do I take it to another level? How do I take it to another level? And you start to lose track of why you’re working so hard or why you started your business in the first place. So preach away, my friend.
Steve: Yeah, like I said, I’m not an expert on it but it has served me very well just keeping things simple, doing very profitable deals, outsourcing a lot of it and just staying focused on that vision, what you want to do.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. People have heard me say this before, I think real estate investors specifically, like let’s just say in your business where you say you do around five or six deals a year, maybe, rehabs? Well, there’s a big difference between five and six, right? I mean I know just based on your geography, they are higher profit deals. But one deal could be 20% of your annual income for your family potentially so I think a lot of real estate investors get themselves in situations, this feast or famine situation, to where they’re always fearful of the famine, therefore, they try to feast as much as they can.
Steve: Sure, sure. I think that’s common for most entrepreneurs, really. I think it’s something that’s innate in most entrepreneurs.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So talk about how you get comfortable with the fact of, let’s just say, doing five or six deals a year and not saying, “Well, I’m going to shoot for 8 or 10 just to provide some cushion for myself” and then it starts the cycle of well, maybe I need to do 12, you know, how do you get to a point where in your mind you’re just like, this is enough and I could pull back right now?
Steve: You know, that’s a really good question. I don’t know that you ever truly get comfortable with that. I think it’s like somebody who just starts out saying, “You know, if I could only get to where I have $5,000 in a savings account,” then it’s $10,000, then it’s $100,000. And then “I can’t wait until my net worth becomes a million and then it’s two million.” Then it’s 10 million. I don’t know that there’s ever really a comfort level with that.
How do I deal with it? I mean, I setup that vision and say, “Am I accomplishing these things, business and money aside, am I accomplishing these things that I want? Do I have a good relationship with my wife? Do I have a relationship with my children that I’m looking for? Is the business getting in the way of that or not? You know, how could the business better serve my life and not the other way around? ” And I think that’s the way to do it.
Now, if you’re asking me how do you stay relaxed in the midst of everything else that I like to do, I do yoga, I work out three to five times a week and I try to meditate whenever possible so just to really relax and just really breathe in life. I think it’s very important and I think it’s often overlooked by many high performers in our culture today.
Mike: Yeah. No doubt about it. Talk a little bit about your exit strategy. So one of the ways you’re able to do less volume is to kind of squeeze more out of the fruit that you do get, which is through rehabbing and part of the problem with a lot of people who do high volume is, it’s hard to be a really high volume rehabber. You kind of have to wholesale a lot or assign a lot of deals and take yourself out of the mix where there’s less risk because with rehabbing you and I both know as a professional rehabber, you don’t think there’s probably a whole lot of risk in your business. But that’s because you’re probably more hands on. You couldn’t do high volume rehabbing and never visit the properties, never approve the deals because somebody’s going to eat your lunch once in a while, which is going to bring you down.
So the way you’ve been able to do it is just by not having a lot of people in your office. I think you said you had one assistant, kind of staying lean and mean. Talk about how with the kind of role that staying lean and kind of squeezing more fruit out of the juice allows you to do the kind of volume that you do and still live a great life.
Steve: Sure, that’s a great question. How long do you have today? There’s a lot of different ways
Mike: Three hours. It’s a three hours show today, everybody. Just kidding.
Steve: The primary way is I have never ever deviated from the formula. I use the 70% formula, ARV times .70 minus repairs equals offer. And I use real ARVs, not fake ones or imagined ones or inflated ones, I use real repairs. Usually down to within a thousand dollars, so I’m not just kind of ball parking, I’m really trying to narrow down what it is and I use contractors that I work with for many years who essentially can run the jobs without me. They know what I want from job to job, all the way to the colors of paint on the walls and everything else.
Mike: Okay.
Steve: The other thing is, I really, really know my geographical area. I know my neighborhoods and if I get a call or if I look at a property, I can analyze it usually in a minute, I know if it’s a deal or not.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. And talk about, so I know the answer to this, but do you do any wholesaling at all?
Steve: I do some wholesaling. Right now, I’ve got a large coaching group and I work with folks and walk them through their first three deals. So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll wholesale to my students
Mike: Okay.
Steve: Because we participate in a JV fashion on those three deals. I don’t juice the frontend of those deals but I will usually mark them up a little bit to cover my time for marketing effort and putting the deal together.
Mike: Okay, okay. And so talk a little bit about how you, because you’ve been doing this long enough to where you’ve seen a few market cycles, so how do you kind of manage risk as markets shift?
Steve: Well, again, I’ll go back to the formula. When everything was kind of ramping up, you can buy anything and put it on the market. I’m sure you know that.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: It was pretty easy to do that. But then when everything started crashing, I remember back in 2008, it was the fall of 2008 when the stock market kind of melted down. I remember watching CNBC and thinking, “Gosh, everybody’s kind of crying blood in the streets, what are we going to do here?” I saw it as tremendous opportunity and around here, we just had a lot of foreclosures and we were pretty big. We weren’t Miami or anything but it was pretty bad around here.
So really what I did is I actually took a few months off and I sat back and I just kind of watched everything. And then I picked my entry point again and I knew that if I could buy a house and then rehab it and put it on the market retail priced where all the short sales and the foreclosures were priced, that if any buyers were going out, they would look at, every three houses was a rehab short sale or a foreclosure, they’re all priced the same. Well which one do you think they’re going to pick?
Mike: Right.
Steve: They’re spending half their day with a realtor going through these cold, wet, nasty, moldy houses and then they come at the end of the day into my beautiful staged rehab, which one are they going to pick? So that’s how I stayed ahead of things when everything was kind of crashing. But I was always making sure I was using accurate ARVs, being nimble, getting in and out of deals as quickly as possible helps to mitigate that risk as well.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. So talk about your kind of structure of your team and how much effort you put in to watching the rehabs, actually going out to meet with sellers if you’re buying direct from sellers, some of those things to where a lot of people I’ve had on the show, a lot of other real estate investors, there’s always a couple of different paths. One is the hands on approach where you have your hand in everything and you’re – that’s my guess as that’s how you stay lean and mean.
The other side is try to outsource everything where there’s virtual people doing everything, call centers taking calls, all that stuff, which adds more effort but it allows them potentially more freedom and there’s a lot of drama that can come with all that as well. But maybe just talk about a day in the life or a week in the life of your role in each part of from generate leads to working those leads to buying, selling and rehabbing, all those things – kind of how much you’re involved.
Steve: Sure. So on the marketing and acquisition side of things, I do all the talking, negotiating, meeting with sellers – any of that sort of thing.
Mike: Okay.
Steve: My assistant’s full-time. She pretty much runs my office. So she pays the bills and does all the invoicing and all that stuff and she helps put the marketing out there and all that good stuff. So we have a number of different ways that we acquire deals, but as far as like I say in negotiating, meeting with seller stuff, that comes down to me. I like to take down the deal when it comes time.
As far as rehabbing, I work with a general contractor who I worked with since 2007 and really once I started ramping up the business. And I’ve just been very fortunate to work with the same guy for this long. And he does about 80% of my rehabs. And then the other 20% we sub out. So we sub out HVAC, we sub out carpeting, roofing, stuff like that.
Mike: Okay.
Steve: And the good thing is he knows all these subs. Now I don’t necessarily go through him for them, but we work in a triangular fashion to get things done. So he can kind of keep an eye on the jobs for me. There’s many weeks that go by where I don’t actually visit the job site. I just talk to the contractor, usually once a week and he kind of keeps me up to date on where we’re at with the job. We just have that trust level right now. He’s also very credit worthy, which I’m sure, as you know, is hard to find credit worthy contractors a lot of the time. So he can float me in between draws and all that stuff, so it works out very well on the financial end of things as well so it’s pretty cool. Having that team member is huge for me. He most definitely my ace and one of the cornerstones of my business.
And then on the realtor side of things, I actually am not a licensed agent. I use licensed agents. We have four realtors on my time that handle acquisition and then sales side of things. So whenever we want to go make offers on MLS properties, we just put them all in an email, hit send, and then it’s taken care of. I don’t fool with any paperwork or anything like that and then they go ahead and take care of listing it. My assistant, actually, goes out and takes the pictures for us. We’ve got real high-end camera equipment. We take very nice pictures of our homes. I believe that is so key these days to selling property on the MLS. And then the brokers handle the rest of it.
Mike: Okay. And in terms of monitoring a rehab, do you go out to the house and walk through with your contractor and say here’s what we’re going to do. And do you do like a final walkthrough or are you totally hands off at this point?
Steve: Sure. So when we acquire the property, yes. I do go walkthrough with the contractor and we develop a scope of work right there at the beginning and write it all down. I hand it to my assistant. She puts it in Excel, we send it over to him, he prices out the line items and that’s what we work off of. And then we get the sub to price everything off of that’s we work off of.
And then of course, usually throughout the course of the rehab, any time there’s an issue, I’ll get a call on that and say, “Okay, Steve, how do you want to proceed?” Most of the time, I’ll just follow his recommendation. Again, we have a trust level. I know he’s not juicing me on stupid stuff. There’s really only an issue if there’s absolutely an issue. And then towards the end of it, I do like to come through at the end, do a punch list, make sure everything looks good. And I’m always thinking, what’s the buyer going to think when the buyer walks in this house and just try to make that first time that the buyer walks in the house just so spectacular that they’re just overcome emotionally, all rationale goes out the window and they’re ready to pay full list price for the property.
Mike: Yeah, that’s awesome. My model’s very similar. I have a contractor that’s probably rehabbed – I don’t even know, 150 houses for me that, I trust his judgment. I walk through the beginning for half an hour and tell him, “Here’s what we want to do.” And the only thing we really talk about is the stuff that’s unique to that property, otherwise, everything is the same paint we’ve used on the last 200 houses and generally we always decide do you want satin nickel or oil rubbed bronze.
Couple decisions like that and that’s an easier decision these days because ORB is really not that much more expensive than satin nickel, so it’s like, let’s just do ORB here. Are we going to use ceramic tile or travertine or some sort of flooring if it’s a little bit higher dollar house. Other than that, pretty much everything’s the same as every other property that we’ve done recently. And so, it’s usually pretty quick conversation.
And it’s a great place to be where you get to that point to where you have some people like that on your team that you know have your back and you can trust implicitly to just make decisions. Unless you want to tear down a wall or you’ve got a major issue that we need to discuss, just use your best judgment and go.
Steve: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, talk a little bit about, we’ve got maybe five more minutes or so, talk about, so I know you mentor folks, I know you’re a lifeinaire. Give some advice to people who are listening here on how they can use real estate to kind of build the lifestyle that they want – some of the just general advice that you share with people.
Steve: Well, probably one of the first things I would say is do the vision, aside from the business, then plug the business into the vision. Already said that a couple times. Beyond that, I believe, conventional theory is bird dog then wholesale, then rehab, then buy rentals, then move into commercial property. That’s kind of conventional – that’s what everybody tends to think.
I think of it like this. I think the first thing everybody should do is learn how to rehab because a rehabber needs to know how to buy below market, which is also what a wholesaler knows how to do, how to look for properties. A rehabber needs to know how to look for properties. Wholesalers and bird dogs need to know that. If you own rental property, you’re going to need to know how to fix that rental property up so, you can learn who the contractors you use are, you can learn what the prices to pay those contractors are through rehabbing. So I actually think that getting into a program, linking up with a mentor that knows rehabbing is your key to learning all real estate investing because everything starts and ends with these homes that we build.
Beyond that, I think, I look back on my college degree and my communication skills and all that stuff at the time, communication, communication’s majors, we were kind of like joked about it. It was like we didn’t really learn anything but we knew how to party kind of thing. I think that aside from the house, I think that communication skills are huge because when it comes right down to it, real estate is a people business. It’s all about the people. So I think whatever you can do to develop and enhance your communication skills, your people skills will only serve you in this business.
Mike: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting about the rehabbing part. I agree with you. A lot of people say, well I’m on a bunch of wholesalers lists but we’re never able to make the deals work because the numbers, they’re lying. Or their numbers are bullshit or whatever they might say. But the reality is, is I think that much more often than somebody being dishonest, is they just don’t know because they haven’t rehabbed.
Steve: Right. That’s right.
Mike: They just assume somebody told them somewhere that you can rehab any house for $10 a square foot. It’s like, no that that – I mean, what if you got foundation issues, what if you got, you know, old electrical that’s outdated. These kind of rule of thumbs are really loose at best. So I think that’s more of the issue so I agree with you, that’s awesome.
Steve: Rehabbing is a fundamental skill and I believe if you’re going to be in real estate for the long haul, you should learn it.
Mike: Yeah, and I would say even for the wholesalers that are out there that are hearing us, if this resonates with you, my intention wasn’t to call you out, it was to get you some better education. But, one thing to think about is, when you sell a house to somebody and they’re going to rehab it, ask them if you can watch them rehab it and just try to get the education on what they did and how much it ended up costing. You made some estimates on that house, what did they actually spend on it? And try to learn that way. It’ll help you kind of sharper your sword. I’m trying to use some analogies here but it’ll effectively make you a better wholesaler.
Steve: That’s a great suggestion.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. So if people want to learn more about you, your club – we haven’t talked about your jam sessions yet
Steve: Nope.
Mike: So tell us about your jam sessions, these famous jam sessions.
Steve: Sure. So I don’t know what all you’ve heard but basically what I did
Mike: I’ve heard it all, man.
Steve: You’ve heard it all?
Mike: No, no I haven’t. I haven’t. I haven’t.
Steve: Tell me what you know.
Mike: I don’t know a lot other than you.
Steve: Okay. A few years ago, I guess maybe four years ago now, I hired a film crew to follow me around and some other musicians and film this curriculum that I developed many years ago called, “The Art of Jamming.” And what it does, is I’m a lifelong musician, I’ve played music my entire life. I created this curriculum. It’s “Art of Jamming,” it’s how to improvise with one another. So if you and I are both musicians, there are techniques that we can learn to sit down, to go over that will develop and facilitate the ability for us to essentially communicate through the music.
And a lot of people don’t necessarily think of music that way, they think of it as a set of chords that you play and then you think the lyrics of the I’m not necessarily talking about singer songwriter stuff here. I’m talking about the nuances of improvisation, especially in the jazz idiom and like in the jam band genre. You see a lot of this where there is a lot of interaction between the musicians and communication through the music. And when you can get to that point, music’s a whole lot of fun.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: So what I did is I said, there are these concepts that are easily learned once you know what they are and put together. So I hired this film crew, I did a lecture for two days in the classroom. They filmed the whole thing and then I took this band out on the road and we played a number of gigs and we did interviews with the band guys and essentially, illustrating the concepts all the way through. It came together in a 45-minute film that is available at ArtofJamming.com.
Mike: That’s awesome. That’s cool, man. So tell us some other website. How do other folks find out about you and your club and
Steve: Sure. Southern Maryland Investors Group, which meets once a month down here in southern Maryland, if anybody is anywhere close. And we have folks from Baltimore, DC, all over the state of Maryland come down. We meet the third Tuesday of every month and you can go to our website at SOMD – as in southern Maryland –SOMDREIG, Southern Maryland Real Estate Investor’s Group.com.
Mike: Okay, awesome. Where else can they find you?
Steve: Yeah, Snowbirdflipper.com. Snowbird.
Mike: Snowbird flipper.
Steve: Snowbird flipper. So, it’s been part of my life in their vision now for a couple of years to get my business to the point where I would be able to be a snowbird and I hate the cold and people say, “Well, Steve, it doesn’t really get that cold in southern Maryland.” Well, I tell them, “Yes, it does.” We have four full seasons here. It’s cold in the winter, let me tell you. And I don’t like it when it’s below 50. I like it when it’s warm, I would say the higher the better. People start crying foul when it’s 90, 100. I say, “Bring it on.” I’m here in the heat and humidity in southern Maryland, let me tell you.
But my family loves southeast Florida in the West Palm Beach area. And we’ve been going down there for about 12 years now and this will be the first winter that we spend down there. We usually go down there three or four times a year. But we’re going to actually spend four months – January through April of 2016, and I’m documenting the whole process for folks. If you go to snowbirdflipper.com I’ve got an eBook on there that I’ll give to you it’s “How to Work a 10 Hour Work Week” and it’s got some of my rehabbing secrets in there.
Mike: Awesome. We’ll add those links down below the video here. Steve, thanks so much for your time today. Great to see you and I appreciate you sharing your message because I think a lot of real estate… hopefully this resonates with a lot of people. Even as busy as I am, I love hearing these stories because you start to question, does busyness equal happiness?
Steve: Right.
Mike: And whether you agree with anything you heard today or not, I think you’ve got to hear these stories every once in a while to question, kind of like you said, what’s your vision? Why are you working so hard? And if you’re not working hard, then congratulations and thanks for joining us today. But anyway, Steve, thanks for joining us, my friend.
Steve: No problem, Mike.
Mike: Please stay in touch.
Steve: Yeah, man. No problem.
Mike: All righty. Bye-bye.
Are you a member of FlipNerd.com, the most robust real estate investing platform in existence, where you can find off market wholesale deals and great vendors literally in your market? You can get access to advice from experts and learn about local clubs and events right in your backyard. If not, please visit FlipNerd.com and register for a free account. You can register in less than a minute. It’s pretty much the coolest site that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry. So get on over to FlipNerd.com.