Show Summary
This is episode #363, and my guests today are partners Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott…a couple guys that are crushing it up in St. Louis.
If you own rental properties, you’ll understand that maintenance and vacancy expenses can kill your cash flow. We’ll…what if there was a better way? Jimmy and Bob started lease options, or a rent to own model a few years back that has turned the tables on their cash flow, and because of specifics of their model, it’s allowed them to do more deals.
More deals with less headaches…how’s that sound?
There are some golden nuggets in today’s episode…please help me welcome Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott to the show.
Highlights of this show
- Meet Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott, St. Louis based real estate investors.
- Learn what a lease option, or rent to own deal is.
- Join the conversation on why lease options are good for consumers, and where they make sense.
- Learn why lease options make sense for real estate investors.
- Learn how to fund your lease option deals.
Resources and Links from this show:
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
Mike: This is the FlipNerd.com Expert Real Estate Investing Show, the show for real estate investors, whether you’re a veteran or brand new. I’m your host, Mike Hambright, and each week I bring you a new expert guest that will share their knowledge and lessons with you. If you’re excited about real estate investing, believe in personal responsibility, and taking control of your life and financial destiny, you’re in the right place.
This is Episode 363, and my guests today are partners Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott, a couple of guys that are crushing it in St. Louis. If you own rental properties, well you’ll understand that maintenance and vacancy expenses can kill your cash flow. Well, what if there was a better way? Jimmy and Bob started lease options or a rent-to-own model a few years back that has completely turned the tables on their cash flow. Because of the specifics of their model, it’s allowed them to do more and more deals. So more deals with less headaches, how does that sound?
There are some golden nuggets in today’s episode. You definitely don’t want to miss it. Please help me welcome Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott to the show. Jimmy and Bob, welcome to the show, my friends.
Bob: Thanks, Mike. [Inaudible 00:01:14] Jimmy: How’s it going?
Mike: Hey, guys. I’m excited to talk about this. We haven’t really talked about creative finance a whole lot on the show in the past. Honestly, where I’m at in Dallas, the market has gotten tighter than ever. When I look back about how many deals I could’ve offered a creative financing solution to in the past, it just wasn’t a tool in my arsenal, I feel like I could have bought hundreds more houses. Would you guys agree that you’ve been able to kind of ramp up your business when you started to get a little more creative?
Bob: Definitely. Definitely. A lot of guys that do kind of focus on the creative side of the business, they’re taking the trash leads that a lot of wholesalers do nothing with. It’s those skinny equity deals that you’re just like . . . Real quick, you run some comps and figure out what the seller owes or what they’re wanting, and you’re like, “Nope. Move on.” So you can take advantage and really tie into some of those networks of other people in your town, and get a creative finance business kind of off the ground pretty easily without a big ad spend yourself.
Mike: Yeah. So before we kind of jump into talking about lease options and what you guys are doing, maybe you could take a couple minutes and just introduce yourselves, and tell us a little bit about your background.
Jimmy: You want to go first?
Bob: Sure. Yeah. So I went to the Air Force Academy, played football there, and was a civil engineer. I got out in 2011, jumped into real estate at the time. I started wholesaling and did that for about two years, pretty much exclusively. Did one flip here or there, then kind of got into rehabbing houses and pretty much providing turnkey investments to a lot of hedge funds that were buying up here in St. Louis a few years ago. Then, Jimmy and I met a few years ago, and kind of got started together from that point.
Jimmy: So I’m Jimmy. I went to West Point. I didn’t get playing time like Bob did. I rode the backs of the football team.
Bob: I was just on the [extra point 00:03:12] team. It doesn’t count.
Jimmy: I did my five years in the Army. I was an Army Ranger, and while I was on my second or third deployment, I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, and I’m like, “I’m so tired of taking orders. I’ve got to find a way to get out of this.” Real estate, it made a lot of sense to me.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: So instead of actually going full force in real estate, I got a job in medical sales for six years. But while I was overseas and the whole time I had a corporate job, I was picking up one or two properties every year. Then, when me and Bob met, I was ready to leave my job. So I was looking for cash flow anywhere. So I started my private lending to him.
Mike: Okay.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:03:56] wholesale my house. Then, after a while, actually, we ended up bidding against each other on a few houses. Finally, we’re like, “Hey, man. We’re doing the same thing. We get along. We’ve got the same mindset and some different skill sets that match well.” So we figured, “Hey, let’s jump in together.”
Mike: That’s awesome. So you guys were kind of competitors, didn’t really . . . You just probably knew of each other, but didn’t know each other real well, and then just kind of it went from there. Right?
Jimmy: Right.
Bob: Yep.
Mike: Right. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So you guys are both in St. Louis now. Were you both originally from St. Louis, like before you went into the military?
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Yep.
Mike: Okay. Cool. That’s great, man. So let’s talk a little bit about lease options. I guess, initially, you’ve already kind of told us at the very early stages you weren’t doing any creative finance. You were doing it probably the traditional way. So tell us a little bit about that, and then kind of what led you to saying, “Hey, there’s another way to do this.”
Jimmy: I mean, to really sum it up, we were bad flippers and really bad landlords. So we were like, “We either have to quit or find a new strategy.”
Bob: I think we had right around 10 rentals or so. For whatever reason, at the end of the month, what was in our bank account didn’t match up with what we had on our Excel spreadsheet, as far as what we were supposed to cash flow. We were just getting eaten alive by repairs and maintenance. We were chasing rent from deadbeat tenants that really were not quality people you should have in your property. So those two things combined, just we were spending a lot of time and energy, and really essentially pulling our hair out, being like, “What is going on?”
Stumbled across lease options, put together our first lease option deal. I remember getting that first $5,000 option deposit on a house, and it just blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, wow. This really works.” From there it was just gangbusters.
Jimmy: Bob told me about the concept and I’m like, “Wait a minute. They’re going to give us a down payment, they’re going to do all their maintenance, and we’re not really going to be landlords?” I’m like, “No way, dude.” Out of nowhere, I was so desperate at that point like, “Well, we’ll try it. Let’s see what happens.”
Bob: Try anything. Yeah.
Mike: So tell us . . . Maybe explain it for those that are listening right now that don’t quite understand what a lease option is, or just sometimes . . . There’s lots of different flavors. But there’s lease to own, rent to own-type stuff. But maybe just kind of share what that means to you and maybe talk about what it’s not, I guess, what a couple different varieties are that you use.
Bob: Yeah. Depending on what part of the country you’re in, like you said, it can be called “lease option,” “lease purchase,” “rent to own,” various different names. But in the end, it’s pretty simple. It’s basically just a tenant buyer is renting the house from you, the landlord. Within that rental period, they have the right to exercise an option to purchase the house at an agreed upon purchase price. So we typically do two-year lease option agreements. So let’s say a tenant is going to pay $1,000 per month, and they’re going to also sign an option to buy that same house within two years at a price of $100,000.
Mike: Okay. What happens if they don’t? We’ll come back to some of these things, because I want to talk a little bit more about why it’s a good thing for the tenants or the potential owner, why it’s a good thing for you guys. But what happens if they don’t exercise that option? Do they just become a tenant? Or you kind of go back to them, and you kind of renegotiate the deal? Or maybe both? Explain that a little bit.
Bob: Our personal philosophy is that we’re a great cash flow market. As long as the tenant-buyer has been paying the rent on time and if they’re taking care of the property, if they get to the point where their option expires, we’ll just let them [pull 00:07:46] it over. We don’t really charge an extra option deposit or anything else, just because we’re in it for the cash flow.
Mike: Right.
Bob: So as long as they’re happy, we’re happy. We let them stay in the property and kind of extend out their option. Now, if the market has rapidly appreciated in that two years, I mean, a lot of places around the country, the market has been pretty hot, you do have the right to reset that option price. Some people do kind of charge an extra option deposit. But for us, we started this game by soaking up “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and really wanting the cash flow. So that’s our main goal.
[crosstalk 00:08:21] Mike: Go ahead.
Jimmy: We can also owner finance them. If they’ve finally reached a 10% down payment mark and they really want to own the house, but they just can’t get their credit squared away, we’ll step in and become the bank and owner finance them, where they’re actually on the title for the property.
Mike: Yeah. Okay. To clarify that for people that are listening, the option is to buy it within two years. So what that typically means . . . Well, it could mean a lot of different things. But just to kind of clarify the differences, one is they can go get a traditional bank loan and buy it from you, just like you would do any transaction, and then they become owners. Which is probably what you guys typically prefer, I guess, to kind of be cashed out. If they can’t, then you have the possibility or the option of saying, “Well, you can take ownership and we’re going to finance you,” and then you have whatever terms you might negotiate with them. Right?
Are you looking to change your life through real estate investing? If you’re interested in either getting started or taking your business to the next level, please check out FlipNerd’s private program at theinvestormachine.com. This is the most robust real estate investor coaching, networking, and mastermind on the planet, and designed for your success. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, ready to take personal responsibility for your own success, and ready to dive into a world-class instructional coaching program that provides you step-by-step instruction to help you achieve financial freedom, then you should apply today. Spaces are limited, and candidates are only considered after an application and interview process. Our 12-month investor program is unparalleled. Think you might be a fit? Learn more today at theinvestormachine.com.
. . . saying, “Well, you can take ownership and we’re going to finance you,” and then you have whatever terms you might negotiate with them. Right?
Bob: Exactly.
Jimmy: Right.
Bob: Exactly. The preferred method is cash out. We [inaudible 00:10:16] on Friday, and that’s definitely the goal. But if someone is demonstrating, like the quality tenant, and they’ve been making their payments on time, and for whatever reason the bank financing isn’t there, we use the option of owner financing as kind of the backend.
Jimmy: Then, at that point, they get all the tax advantages of being a homeowner and whatnot.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:10:38] credit a little bit more.
Mike: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about why options make sense, and let’s kind of start with why it makes sense for a homeowner to use a lease option or a rent to own program, even ultimately some seller finance stuff. But why they would do that versus just getting traditional financing and going to buy a house through a realtor, like the traditional route. Like why would they go your route?
Bob: Well, there’s actually a huge portion of the buyer’s pool that actually they just can’t go the traditional route. They can’t walk down to the local bank and qualify for a traditional mortgage. A lot of times it’s a credit issue. But a lot of people we’ve put in place, it’s not a history of regular credit abuse. It’s a one-time event that has happened. They lost their job or there was an illness in the family. So those are really the cases we’re trying to help, someone who in general is a good person and just a minor hiccup happened in their credit history. They want to own a home. They have a desire to be homeowners. They understand the value that’s there long term. But for whatever reason, they can’t qualify. So some of the other situations that people can’t qualify for is they might be self-employed, entrepreneurs, and they need two years’ tax return.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So even people who have a 750 credit score have 30%, 40% down payment. A bank is not going to talk to them. It’s kind of crazy how tight the lending restrictions [inaudible 00:12:13].
Mike: Yeah. I know that’s [starting to 00:12:17] loosen up a little bit. I think we’ve got a little echo here, guys. Sorry about that. It’s starting to loosen up. It seems like credit stuff is starting to loosen up a little bit. Maybe lenders are starting to get a little more sloppy. But certainly, for the last five, six, seven, eight years, it was just downright hard. There was this whole class of kind of working class Americans that were working hard, but they just couldn’t get financing for a house. Right?
Bob: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, if you kind of add up all those little categories of things that people might not qualify for, you’re looking at roughly 80% of the buyer’s pool. So if we, as investors, target that 80% that pretty much nobody else is talking to, we’re putting ourselves in a great position.
Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. So talk a little bit about why lease options make sense. You guys talked about it a little bit already, but why they make sense for you and other investors to use that as an exit strategy.
Jimmy: Because maintenance is an infinite liability. Like you get done with “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and they show you your spreadsheet, and there’s this little column that says “Maintenance.” They are like, “Estimate between 5% and 10%,” and in reality it’s much more than 5% or 10%.
Mike: Yeah. Especially if you have . . . I know you guys do some, and I do too, what I call kind of “C Class properties.” I mean, they’re good properties. They’re in working class neighborhoods and all that. But sometimes people just tear them up. Right?
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Bob: Exactly.
Jimmy: We’re not going to say, “Hey, we don’t do maintenance.” But the maintenance we do is to protect the asset, like the roof, the mechanicals. When we were regular landlords, you would get the itemized list from a property manager of what these expenses were. Most of the expense is the drive time for the handyman to go out there. You’re still getting charged $20 an hour while he’s at the pro desk, talking to the girls there, and then getting a coffee on his way to the pro desk.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: So just eliminating that is a huge expense.
Mike: Yeah. Talk about the psychology a little bit of the person that you’re selling to. They have this owner mindset now like, “I’m going to own this property.” So they’re more likely to take care of it. Maybe, you guys, talk a little bit about the flexibility you give to them to make improvements and make updates. I mean, what do you guys accept there?
Bob: Yeah. So we’re pretty flexible as far as what kind of improvements they can make. As long as it’s nothing structural, we pretty much let them have at it. If it is a structural change, they’re opening up walls or adding additions, or what have you, obviously, we want them to have that go through us just so we can bless off on it. But people do have a homeownership mentality, and a lot of these folks are really putting some major improvements into the property. Yes. They have the right to exercise an option at [their 00:15:00] house. But at the end, they’re putting money into your asset.
If you’re a landlord and you’ve been dealing with regular tenants, I know it’s very hard to comprehend that, but it does happen. We’ve got one guy who’s putting a whole addition on the back of a house. I mean, we’ve had people build decks. These people really do view it as their home and improve it, and in general take very good care of it.
Mike: Yeah. Also, I think, if you compare it to a new car buyer versus a used car buyer, whenever you go buy a used car, you’re kind of at the mercy of what’s available, some stuff that’s not perfect, or whatever. If you get a new car, you just have more options or you can special order stuff, or whatever. But talk a little bit about the psychology of a buyer that is a lease option-type buyer. Because I know that one of the benefits for real estate investors is you don’t have to put as much into the house. You don’t have to make them perfect, because you’re going to allow that person to do some of the work themselves, allow them to kind of make it the way that they want. But maybe talk about that kind of issue as well.
Jimmy: So I’d say half our tenants are probably contractors.
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: So if they buy retail and they buy a fully fixed up house, they can’t leverage any of their skills.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: They’re going to [pay the 00:16:17] full market value, and then everything they can do around the house isn’t leveraged at all.
Mike: Right.
Jimmy: So [option 00:16:23] for them, they get a little less than retail price. They can get in the house now without having to wait for the banker, and they’re actually able to leverage their skills and create value in the house. They walk away with equity when they actually do close on the house. [And their 00:16:38] equity, their work.
Mike: That’s awesome.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Mike: Yep. So how do you fund these deals? I mean, I know you guys probably use Subject 2’s a little bit. So how do you . . . I mean, let me ask you this. Before we go to the funny part, let’s talk about kind of buying. So if you’re doing traditional wholesaling, you’re trying to buy as deep as you can, because there’s going to be another middle man above and beyond you. You’re probably going to sell to a rehabber or a landlord, or another investor. So traditionally, when you’re buying as-is houses, if you’re not re-fixing them up or keeping them yourself, you’re selling them to somebody that’s expecting to get it well below market value, right?
So with the route that you guys are going now, does it allow you to . . . I know that it’s kind of a nasty word to say, “Does it allow you to pay more?” But effectively, you’re able to sell it for more. So talk about that phenomenon. Does it allow you to kind of pay more and do deals that maybe you wouldn’t have done previously, because there just wasn’t enough meat on the bones?
Bob: Definitely. To your last point, we don’t have to make the houses quite as nice. The homes that we shoot for when we’re acquiring properties are the ones that are dated, but they’ve been very well-maintained, your typical grandma house, old lady. She bought it in 1975, 1980, has been meticulously cleaned and maintained, but just she hasn’t spent any money updating the kitchen or updating the bathroom since then. So those homes are perfect. Because if you were going to try, and fix and flip that house, put it on the retail market, you’d have to gut the bathrooms, you’d have to gut the kitchen, and spend a lot of money fixing that thing up.
So the price that a rehabber has got to get that house at to be able to spend all that money doing that rehab on is going to be less than we can afford to pay for that same house. Because we can install lease options on a buyer without really doing a whole heck of a lot of work on it, and get kind of a wholetail-type price, maybe a little bit more for it.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: We can still make that same margin on the backend that a rehabber is going to make without spending a lot of time rehabbing the house, overseeing contractors, and putting all that money into the deal.
Mike: Sure.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:18:59] I mean, it’s MLS that we buy [inaudible 00:19:01].
Bob: Yeah. So we buy probably 60%, 70% of our deals just straight off the MLS. It does take work. It’s making a lot of offers. Maybe for every 10 to 12 offers, we get one accepted. Then, we also are buying stuff from wholesalers, and then a little bit of direct seller stuff as well.
Mike: Yeah. That’s great. So when you sell, how are you sell- . . . Are you selling them as rentals? I mean, it’s a rental, and then they say, “But you have the right to buy it, or the option to buy it.” Or are you positioning it as it’s for sale, but you’re going to finance it if they rent it for a little while first? How do you position that and where do you sell them at?
Bob: Yeah. We position it as for sale, but basically you’re going to rent to own it until you can buy it.
Mike: Okay.
Bob: So we’re posting in Craigslist. We might put it in both the For Sale and the For Rent categories, just because a lot of the people don’t even know that rent to own exists and it’s an option.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So you do want to target both demographics of people and kind of both buyer mindsets. But if it’s on our website, it says kind of “For Sale.” But it’s going to be a lease with an option to buy.
Mike: Sure. Do you guys . . . I’m not an expert on this, and for those that are listening, I don’t know if you guys know. But I know there’s some weird stuff with options in Texas, and some states have different things. So as you guys that are listening to us here, I’ll just put my lawyer hat on and say talk to an attorney that knows this stuff in your market. So [inaudible 00:20:30] . . .
Bob: Yeah. You definitely [inaudible 00:20:31] the local guidelines. We actually know a guy down in Texas who’s doing lease options, John Jameson. From my understanding, as long as you are the owner on title, you’ve got the simple title to the property, you as a real estate investor can use a lease option as an exit strategy. It’s those creative type of deals where you’re doing a sandwich lease option or some other stuff that that’s not allowed in Texas.
Mike: Okay. Yeah. You guys . . .
Jimmy: John is the expert on that.
Bob: Yeah. Definitely, if you’re in Texas [inaudible 00:21:03] do lease options, I’d go to him first, and then [inaudible 00:21:06] Mike: Yeah. Awesome. So if you guys are listening, let’s just talk about your business model a little bit. So one of the challenges with a lot of people that do seller finance or more creative stuff is on one side you’re usually saving realtor commissions by not listing it on the MLS. The flipside is, then somebody has got to do all that work of showings and stuff like that. So can you guys share a little bit about your model and how you pull that off when you’re doing some volume?
Bob: Yeah. So we try to automate as much as possible. One of the things that’s really helped is we use rently.com, which is basically electronic lockboxes. It’s essentially like a [inaudible 00:21:45] box. But a potential tenant will download an app on their phone, and for a $0.99 fee Rently is basically charging their credit card. So right off the bat, you’re verifying their identity. So you’re not just giving the lockbox out to random people. Then, when they show up to the house, it shows when they entered the house, when they left the house.
So it kind of scares off anybody who’s got any ill intentions with your properties. [Inaudible 00:22:15] you’re just giving out the lockbox to everybody, and it kind of burned us a few times. But it’s just really nice just to see, “Hey, we’ve got 150 showings on properties last week.” So it becomes one of those KPIs that we can track and really see the health of our business, kind of a leading indicator.
Mike: Yeah. That’s great. Then, ultimately, are they kind of coming into your office and signing, effectively, a lease and paying for the option? Or how does that work?
Bob: Yeah. So kind of our first level of prescreening folks to understand if they’re serious is we ask them to submit an application. There’s no application fee. So they can submit an application online, or kind of fax it to us or email it to us. Once we have an application where it tells us how much they have for an option deposit, how much they can afford monthly, and kind of all the other general information, from that point it looks like it’s going to be a good fit, we’ll call them up, do a little bit of pre-negotiation on the phone, make sure we’re all on the same page.
Then, we have them come into our office for what we call a “buyer’s meeting,” which really just fleshes out the entire lease option program, and make sure again everybody is on the same page and all their questions are answered. If at the end of that they’re ready to move forward, we typically get about a $1,000 deposit, and then set up an actual lease signing within a week or so after that.
Mike: Okay. The option fee, typically, what are you able to get for an option to buy one of your properties?
Bob: We typically shoot for about 3% to 5% minimum. But sometimes we get more than that. We’ve got sometimes as high as 10%. Also, we occasionally get folks who will prepay some of their rent as well. So we kind of set minimums on our website. But we, as much as possible, try to build that urgency when people call us and say, “Hey, these properties move very quickly. We get a lot of interest. So if you really want this property, tell us the most you can afford per month, the most you have for a down payment on a house.”
Mike: Yep. Awesome. So let’s kind of come back to how you fund deals. People that are listening to this could buy them themselves, just like they would buy a rental, or get bank financing or whatever, as long as the bank, I guess, will allow you to potentially wrap the note if you need to do that. But you could fund it just like any rental, and then turn somebody into a lease option tenant, I guess. Or you can do . . . Maybe talk about some of the other creative things that you do.
Bob: I mean, really, for our funding, we use all private money. When we first started, I still had a job. So what do you think? We got like . . . Between friends and family, we probably had $300K to go buy houses with. Then, we would get a tenant-buyer in there, and then we would go to the banker, “Hey, it’s occupied. It’s cash flow. Refinance and sell.” So we were turning money like every six months, and it was a grind. We even had a few hard money loans on it, four to six-month balloons. So by the time we would close on a house, do a little fixup, place a tenant-buyer, and refinance, it was a grind.
Jimmy: Yeah. So then, our two main lenders, they were like, “You guys are growing too fast. You’ve got to stop.” To me, that was like a signal, “Oh, we’ve got to hit the gas.”
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Like, “These idiots, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” At that point, we had raised probably $0.5 million, and we had a local guy who was a commercial guy in town, he gave us a line of credit for $1 billion. But we were buying so fast that we were chewing that up quickly, so we had to find a way to get private money. So we started doing a daily YouTube video, and we’re just kind of appealing to the people who don’t want to be involved in Wall Street, but they find that an 8% return would really match their needs.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So we fund all our deals now from self-directed IRAs and we do one investor, one property. That’s another advantage of doing single-family stuff. We don’t have to get lawyers involved to create a fund or things of that nature.
Mike: Yeah. That’s awesome. You guys know, we have definitely had a bunch of self-directed IRA folks on the show before. You guys know as well as anybody that there is a massive amount of money that’s parked in IRAs that would love to work with guys like what you’re doing, for sure.
Jimmy: Yeah. To actually acquire property in a self-directed IRA, I don’t think it’s that great of an option. So private lending is kind of what you’re left with.
Mike: Right. Yeah. Awesome. So what other . . . I know you guys do some Sub2’s as well. Is that right?
Bob: Yeah. We’ve done a few Subject 2’s and also sandwich leased options. For those that don’t know what Subject 2 is, basically, you’re buying the house to take in the deed to it. But the original financing that the seller had is still staying on there. So you just got to have your paperwork squared away, and you definitely have to have a seller who’s open to it. But they’re definitely out there and it’s nice when you can kind of step in and take over somebody’s 3.75% 30-year fixed rate loan.
Jimmy: We get all the wholesalers. We’re not doing any letter campaigns or anything. It’s other wholesalers saying, “Hey, this is too skinny for us. Do you guys want it?”
Mike: I got you. I got you. Cool. Yeah. It sounds like you guys don’t do a whole lot of Sub2’s. But I’ve done some and they can be a pain, for sure. Well, you know, especially, it seems easy, and then you have a hail storm and you have an insurance claim, and then it’s like all hell breaks loose. So we could have another show on that. But cool, guys. Well, talk about how people can get started. They need to learn more about this. I mean, you guys do some webinars and stuff where you teach people this stuff as well. Right?
Bob: Yeah. I mean, I’d say that the best place is our YouTube channel. As Jimmy mentioned, we do about a video a day and we do tons of walkthroughs of properties here in St. Louis, and really talk about which type of homes makes sense for the lease option model. If you go too far on the low end, it can be really tough. So you don’t really want to be in the low-end neighborhoods. But you want to find houses that people do eventually want to own. But then, on the reverse side, if you go too high and you’re trying to buy with cash, the homes just aren’t going to cash flow. So if you’re going in the higher-priced markets, you definitely need to do more of the creative stuff, the sandwich lease options, Subject 2-type deals, or owner financing.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: But our YouTube channel, Joint Ops Properties. That’s the best place.
Mike: What’s the name of your YouTube channel?
Bob: Joint Ops Properties.
Mike: Yep. Okay. Well, good. We’re going to add a link down below for those of you that are listening and [inaudible 00:28:56].
Jimmy: We’ve got a course out there on how to get started with specifically lease options at autopilotassets.com.
Mike: Autopilotassets.com. Awesome. Well, we’ll add links down below for folks that need to reference back to that. So awesome, guys. Thanks for being with us today. I definitely appreciate you.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the FlipNerd.com Investing Show. If you’re not yet an Elite member of FlipNerd, you’re missing out. We have tons of great training, including a new detailed masterclass published each month, and living training webinars with experts twice a month. Plus, you’ll get access to all of our archives, where we already have a growing library of masterclasses and other training videos. Elite members also get membership in our incredible online mastermind group, where many of the top real estate investors from across the country, including many of the hundreds of guests I’ve had on the show in the past, are already members.
Whether you’re brand new, looking to get started, or a veteran, you simply must join today. I promise, you won’t be disappointed. To learn more or join today, please visit flipnerd.com/lab. That’s flipnerd.com/lab. See you on the next show.
This is Episode 363, and my guests today are partners Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott, a couple of guys that are crushing it in St. Louis. If you own rental properties, well you’ll understand that maintenance and vacancy expenses can kill your cash flow. Well, what if there was a better way? Jimmy and Bob started lease options or a rent-to-own model a few years back that has completely turned the tables on their cash flow. Because of the specifics of their model, it’s allowed them to do more and more deals. So more deals with less headaches, how does that sound?
There are some golden nuggets in today’s episode. You definitely don’t want to miss it. Please help me welcome Jimmy Vreeland and Bob Scott to the show. Jimmy and Bob, welcome to the show, my friends.
Bob: Thanks, Mike. [Inaudible 00:01:14] Jimmy: How’s it going?
Mike: Hey, guys. I’m excited to talk about this. We haven’t really talked about creative finance a whole lot on the show in the past. Honestly, where I’m at in Dallas, the market has gotten tighter than ever. When I look back about how many deals I could’ve offered a creative financing solution to in the past, it just wasn’t a tool in my arsenal, I feel like I could have bought hundreds more houses. Would you guys agree that you’ve been able to kind of ramp up your business when you started to get a little more creative?
Bob: Definitely. Definitely. A lot of guys that do kind of focus on the creative side of the business, they’re taking the trash leads that a lot of wholesalers do nothing with. It’s those skinny equity deals that you’re just like . . . Real quick, you run some comps and figure out what the seller owes or what they’re wanting, and you’re like, “Nope. Move on.” So you can take advantage and really tie into some of those networks of other people in your town, and get a creative finance business kind of off the ground pretty easily without a big ad spend yourself.
Mike: Yeah. So before we kind of jump into talking about lease options and what you guys are doing, maybe you could take a couple minutes and just introduce yourselves, and tell us a little bit about your background.
Jimmy: You want to go first?
Bob: Sure. Yeah. So I went to the Air Force Academy, played football there, and was a civil engineer. I got out in 2011, jumped into real estate at the time. I started wholesaling and did that for about two years, pretty much exclusively. Did one flip here or there, then kind of got into rehabbing houses and pretty much providing turnkey investments to a lot of hedge funds that were buying up here in St. Louis a few years ago. Then, Jimmy and I met a few years ago, and kind of got started together from that point.
Jimmy: So I’m Jimmy. I went to West Point. I didn’t get playing time like Bob did. I rode the backs of the football team.
Bob: I was just on the [extra point 00:03:12] team. It doesn’t count.
Jimmy: I did my five years in the Army. I was an Army Ranger, and while I was on my second or third deployment, I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, and I’m like, “I’m so tired of taking orders. I’ve got to find a way to get out of this.” Real estate, it made a lot of sense to me.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: So instead of actually going full force in real estate, I got a job in medical sales for six years. But while I was overseas and the whole time I had a corporate job, I was picking up one or two properties every year. Then, when me and Bob met, I was ready to leave my job. So I was looking for cash flow anywhere. So I started my private lending to him.
Mike: Okay.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:03:56] wholesale my house. Then, after a while, actually, we ended up bidding against each other on a few houses. Finally, we’re like, “Hey, man. We’re doing the same thing. We get along. We’ve got the same mindset and some different skill sets that match well.” So we figured, “Hey, let’s jump in together.”
Mike: That’s awesome. So you guys were kind of competitors, didn’t really . . . You just probably knew of each other, but didn’t know each other real well, and then just kind of it went from there. Right?
Jimmy: Right.
Bob: Yep.
Mike: Right. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So you guys are both in St. Louis now. Were you both originally from St. Louis, like before you went into the military?
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Yep.
Mike: Okay. Cool. That’s great, man. So let’s talk a little bit about lease options. I guess, initially, you’ve already kind of told us at the very early stages you weren’t doing any creative finance. You were doing it probably the traditional way. So tell us a little bit about that, and then kind of what led you to saying, “Hey, there’s another way to do this.”
Jimmy: I mean, to really sum it up, we were bad flippers and really bad landlords. So we were like, “We either have to quit or find a new strategy.”
Bob: I think we had right around 10 rentals or so. For whatever reason, at the end of the month, what was in our bank account didn’t match up with what we had on our Excel spreadsheet, as far as what we were supposed to cash flow. We were just getting eaten alive by repairs and maintenance. We were chasing rent from deadbeat tenants that really were not quality people you should have in your property. So those two things combined, just we were spending a lot of time and energy, and really essentially pulling our hair out, being like, “What is going on?”
Stumbled across lease options, put together our first lease option deal. I remember getting that first $5,000 option deposit on a house, and it just blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, wow. This really works.” From there it was just gangbusters.
Jimmy: Bob told me about the concept and I’m like, “Wait a minute. They’re going to give us a down payment, they’re going to do all their maintenance, and we’re not really going to be landlords?” I’m like, “No way, dude.” Out of nowhere, I was so desperate at that point like, “Well, we’ll try it. Let’s see what happens.”
Bob: Try anything. Yeah.
Mike: So tell us . . . Maybe explain it for those that are listening right now that don’t quite understand what a lease option is, or just sometimes . . . There’s lots of different flavors. But there’s lease to own, rent to own-type stuff. But maybe just kind of share what that means to you and maybe talk about what it’s not, I guess, what a couple different varieties are that you use.
Bob: Yeah. Depending on what part of the country you’re in, like you said, it can be called “lease option,” “lease purchase,” “rent to own,” various different names. But in the end, it’s pretty simple. It’s basically just a tenant buyer is renting the house from you, the landlord. Within that rental period, they have the right to exercise an option to purchase the house at an agreed upon purchase price. So we typically do two-year lease option agreements. So let’s say a tenant is going to pay $1,000 per month, and they’re going to also sign an option to buy that same house within two years at a price of $100,000.
Mike: Okay. What happens if they don’t? We’ll come back to some of these things, because I want to talk a little bit more about why it’s a good thing for the tenants or the potential owner, why it’s a good thing for you guys. But what happens if they don’t exercise that option? Do they just become a tenant? Or you kind of go back to them, and you kind of renegotiate the deal? Or maybe both? Explain that a little bit.
Bob: Our personal philosophy is that we’re a great cash flow market. As long as the tenant-buyer has been paying the rent on time and if they’re taking care of the property, if they get to the point where their option expires, we’ll just let them [pull 00:07:46] it over. We don’t really charge an extra option deposit or anything else, just because we’re in it for the cash flow.
Mike: Right.
Bob: So as long as they’re happy, we’re happy. We let them stay in the property and kind of extend out their option. Now, if the market has rapidly appreciated in that two years, I mean, a lot of places around the country, the market has been pretty hot, you do have the right to reset that option price. Some people do kind of charge an extra option deposit. But for us, we started this game by soaking up “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and really wanting the cash flow. So that’s our main goal.
[crosstalk 00:08:21] Mike: Go ahead.
Jimmy: We can also owner finance them. If they’ve finally reached a 10% down payment mark and they really want to own the house, but they just can’t get their credit squared away, we’ll step in and become the bank and owner finance them, where they’re actually on the title for the property.
Mike: Yeah. Okay. To clarify that for people that are listening, the option is to buy it within two years. So what that typically means . . . Well, it could mean a lot of different things. But just to kind of clarify the differences, one is they can go get a traditional bank loan and buy it from you, just like you would do any transaction, and then they become owners. Which is probably what you guys typically prefer, I guess, to kind of be cashed out. If they can’t, then you have the possibility or the option of saying, “Well, you can take ownership and we’re going to finance you,” and then you have whatever terms you might negotiate with them. Right?
Are you looking to change your life through real estate investing? If you’re interested in either getting started or taking your business to the next level, please check out FlipNerd’s private program at theinvestormachine.com. This is the most robust real estate investor coaching, networking, and mastermind on the planet, and designed for your success. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, ready to take personal responsibility for your own success, and ready to dive into a world-class instructional coaching program that provides you step-by-step instruction to help you achieve financial freedom, then you should apply today. Spaces are limited, and candidates are only considered after an application and interview process. Our 12-month investor program is unparalleled. Think you might be a fit? Learn more today at theinvestormachine.com.
. . . saying, “Well, you can take ownership and we’re going to finance you,” and then you have whatever terms you might negotiate with them. Right?
Bob: Exactly.
Jimmy: Right.
Bob: Exactly. The preferred method is cash out. We [inaudible 00:10:16] on Friday, and that’s definitely the goal. But if someone is demonstrating, like the quality tenant, and they’ve been making their payments on time, and for whatever reason the bank financing isn’t there, we use the option of owner financing as kind of the backend.
Jimmy: Then, at that point, they get all the tax advantages of being a homeowner and whatnot.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:10:38] credit a little bit more.
Mike: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about why options make sense, and let’s kind of start with why it makes sense for a homeowner to use a lease option or a rent to own program, even ultimately some seller finance stuff. But why they would do that versus just getting traditional financing and going to buy a house through a realtor, like the traditional route. Like why would they go your route?
Bob: Well, there’s actually a huge portion of the buyer’s pool that actually they just can’t go the traditional route. They can’t walk down to the local bank and qualify for a traditional mortgage. A lot of times it’s a credit issue. But a lot of people we’ve put in place, it’s not a history of regular credit abuse. It’s a one-time event that has happened. They lost their job or there was an illness in the family. So those are really the cases we’re trying to help, someone who in general is a good person and just a minor hiccup happened in their credit history. They want to own a home. They have a desire to be homeowners. They understand the value that’s there long term. But for whatever reason, they can’t qualify. So some of the other situations that people can’t qualify for is they might be self-employed, entrepreneurs, and they need two years’ tax return.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So even people who have a 750 credit score have 30%, 40% down payment. A bank is not going to talk to them. It’s kind of crazy how tight the lending restrictions [inaudible 00:12:13].
Mike: Yeah. I know that’s [starting to 00:12:17] loosen up a little bit. I think we’ve got a little echo here, guys. Sorry about that. It’s starting to loosen up. It seems like credit stuff is starting to loosen up a little bit. Maybe lenders are starting to get a little more sloppy. But certainly, for the last five, six, seven, eight years, it was just downright hard. There was this whole class of kind of working class Americans that were working hard, but they just couldn’t get financing for a house. Right?
Bob: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, if you kind of add up all those little categories of things that people might not qualify for, you’re looking at roughly 80% of the buyer’s pool. So if we, as investors, target that 80% that pretty much nobody else is talking to, we’re putting ourselves in a great position.
Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. So talk a little bit about why lease options make sense. You guys talked about it a little bit already, but why they make sense for you and other investors to use that as an exit strategy.
Jimmy: Because maintenance is an infinite liability. Like you get done with “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and they show you your spreadsheet, and there’s this little column that says “Maintenance.” They are like, “Estimate between 5% and 10%,” and in reality it’s much more than 5% or 10%.
Mike: Yeah. Especially if you have . . . I know you guys do some, and I do too, what I call kind of “C Class properties.” I mean, they’re good properties. They’re in working class neighborhoods and all that. But sometimes people just tear them up. Right?
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Bob: Exactly.
Jimmy: We’re not going to say, “Hey, we don’t do maintenance.” But the maintenance we do is to protect the asset, like the roof, the mechanicals. When we were regular landlords, you would get the itemized list from a property manager of what these expenses were. Most of the expense is the drive time for the handyman to go out there. You’re still getting charged $20 an hour while he’s at the pro desk, talking to the girls there, and then getting a coffee on his way to the pro desk.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: So just eliminating that is a huge expense.
Mike: Yeah. Talk about the psychology a little bit of the person that you’re selling to. They have this owner mindset now like, “I’m going to own this property.” So they’re more likely to take care of it. Maybe, you guys, talk a little bit about the flexibility you give to them to make improvements and make updates. I mean, what do you guys accept there?
Bob: Yeah. So we’re pretty flexible as far as what kind of improvements they can make. As long as it’s nothing structural, we pretty much let them have at it. If it is a structural change, they’re opening up walls or adding additions, or what have you, obviously, we want them to have that go through us just so we can bless off on it. But people do have a homeownership mentality, and a lot of these folks are really putting some major improvements into the property. Yes. They have the right to exercise an option at [their 00:15:00] house. But at the end, they’re putting money into your asset.
If you’re a landlord and you’ve been dealing with regular tenants, I know it’s very hard to comprehend that, but it does happen. We’ve got one guy who’s putting a whole addition on the back of a house. I mean, we’ve had people build decks. These people really do view it as their home and improve it, and in general take very good care of it.
Mike: Yeah. Also, I think, if you compare it to a new car buyer versus a used car buyer, whenever you go buy a used car, you’re kind of at the mercy of what’s available, some stuff that’s not perfect, or whatever. If you get a new car, you just have more options or you can special order stuff, or whatever. But talk a little bit about the psychology of a buyer that is a lease option-type buyer. Because I know that one of the benefits for real estate investors is you don’t have to put as much into the house. You don’t have to make them perfect, because you’re going to allow that person to do some of the work themselves, allow them to kind of make it the way that they want. But maybe talk about that kind of issue as well.
Jimmy: So I’d say half our tenants are probably contractors.
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: So if they buy retail and they buy a fully fixed up house, they can’t leverage any of their skills.
Mike: Yeah.
Jimmy: They’re going to [pay the 00:16:17] full market value, and then everything they can do around the house isn’t leveraged at all.
Mike: Right.
Jimmy: So [option 00:16:23] for them, they get a little less than retail price. They can get in the house now without having to wait for the banker, and they’re actually able to leverage their skills and create value in the house. They walk away with equity when they actually do close on the house. [And their 00:16:38] equity, their work.
Mike: That’s awesome.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Mike: Yep. So how do you fund these deals? I mean, I know you guys probably use Subject 2’s a little bit. So how do you . . . I mean, let me ask you this. Before we go to the funny part, let’s talk about kind of buying. So if you’re doing traditional wholesaling, you’re trying to buy as deep as you can, because there’s going to be another middle man above and beyond you. You’re probably going to sell to a rehabber or a landlord, or another investor. So traditionally, when you’re buying as-is houses, if you’re not re-fixing them up or keeping them yourself, you’re selling them to somebody that’s expecting to get it well below market value, right?
So with the route that you guys are going now, does it allow you to . . . I know that it’s kind of a nasty word to say, “Does it allow you to pay more?” But effectively, you’re able to sell it for more. So talk about that phenomenon. Does it allow you to kind of pay more and do deals that maybe you wouldn’t have done previously, because there just wasn’t enough meat on the bones?
Bob: Definitely. To your last point, we don’t have to make the houses quite as nice. The homes that we shoot for when we’re acquiring properties are the ones that are dated, but they’ve been very well-maintained, your typical grandma house, old lady. She bought it in 1975, 1980, has been meticulously cleaned and maintained, but just she hasn’t spent any money updating the kitchen or updating the bathroom since then. So those homes are perfect. Because if you were going to try, and fix and flip that house, put it on the retail market, you’d have to gut the bathrooms, you’d have to gut the kitchen, and spend a lot of money fixing that thing up.
So the price that a rehabber has got to get that house at to be able to spend all that money doing that rehab on is going to be less than we can afford to pay for that same house. Because we can install lease options on a buyer without really doing a whole heck of a lot of work on it, and get kind of a wholetail-type price, maybe a little bit more for it.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: We can still make that same margin on the backend that a rehabber is going to make without spending a lot of time rehabbing the house, overseeing contractors, and putting all that money into the deal.
Mike: Sure.
Jimmy: [inaudible 00:18:59] I mean, it’s MLS that we buy [inaudible 00:19:01].
Bob: Yeah. So we buy probably 60%, 70% of our deals just straight off the MLS. It does take work. It’s making a lot of offers. Maybe for every 10 to 12 offers, we get one accepted. Then, we also are buying stuff from wholesalers, and then a little bit of direct seller stuff as well.
Mike: Yeah. That’s great. So when you sell, how are you sell- . . . Are you selling them as rentals? I mean, it’s a rental, and then they say, “But you have the right to buy it, or the option to buy it.” Or are you positioning it as it’s for sale, but you’re going to finance it if they rent it for a little while first? How do you position that and where do you sell them at?
Bob: Yeah. We position it as for sale, but basically you’re going to rent to own it until you can buy it.
Mike: Okay.
Bob: So we’re posting in Craigslist. We might put it in both the For Sale and the For Rent categories, just because a lot of the people don’t even know that rent to own exists and it’s an option.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So you do want to target both demographics of people and kind of both buyer mindsets. But if it’s on our website, it says kind of “For Sale.” But it’s going to be a lease with an option to buy.
Mike: Sure. Do you guys . . . I’m not an expert on this, and for those that are listening, I don’t know if you guys know. But I know there’s some weird stuff with options in Texas, and some states have different things. So as you guys that are listening to us here, I’ll just put my lawyer hat on and say talk to an attorney that knows this stuff in your market. So [inaudible 00:20:30] . . .
Bob: Yeah. You definitely [inaudible 00:20:31] the local guidelines. We actually know a guy down in Texas who’s doing lease options, John Jameson. From my understanding, as long as you are the owner on title, you’ve got the simple title to the property, you as a real estate investor can use a lease option as an exit strategy. It’s those creative type of deals where you’re doing a sandwich lease option or some other stuff that that’s not allowed in Texas.
Mike: Okay. Yeah. You guys . . .
Jimmy: John is the expert on that.
Bob: Yeah. Definitely, if you’re in Texas [inaudible 00:21:03] do lease options, I’d go to him first, and then [inaudible 00:21:06] Mike: Yeah. Awesome. So if you guys are listening, let’s just talk about your business model a little bit. So one of the challenges with a lot of people that do seller finance or more creative stuff is on one side you’re usually saving realtor commissions by not listing it on the MLS. The flipside is, then somebody has got to do all that work of showings and stuff like that. So can you guys share a little bit about your model and how you pull that off when you’re doing some volume?
Bob: Yeah. So we try to automate as much as possible. One of the things that’s really helped is we use rently.com, which is basically electronic lockboxes. It’s essentially like a [inaudible 00:21:45] box. But a potential tenant will download an app on their phone, and for a $0.99 fee Rently is basically charging their credit card. So right off the bat, you’re verifying their identity. So you’re not just giving the lockbox out to random people. Then, when they show up to the house, it shows when they entered the house, when they left the house.
So it kind of scares off anybody who’s got any ill intentions with your properties. [Inaudible 00:22:15] you’re just giving out the lockbox to everybody, and it kind of burned us a few times. But it’s just really nice just to see, “Hey, we’ve got 150 showings on properties last week.” So it becomes one of those KPIs that we can track and really see the health of our business, kind of a leading indicator.
Mike: Yeah. That’s great. Then, ultimately, are they kind of coming into your office and signing, effectively, a lease and paying for the option? Or how does that work?
Bob: Yeah. So kind of our first level of prescreening folks to understand if they’re serious is we ask them to submit an application. There’s no application fee. So they can submit an application online, or kind of fax it to us or email it to us. Once we have an application where it tells us how much they have for an option deposit, how much they can afford monthly, and kind of all the other general information, from that point it looks like it’s going to be a good fit, we’ll call them up, do a little bit of pre-negotiation on the phone, make sure we’re all on the same page.
Then, we have them come into our office for what we call a “buyer’s meeting,” which really just fleshes out the entire lease option program, and make sure again everybody is on the same page and all their questions are answered. If at the end of that they’re ready to move forward, we typically get about a $1,000 deposit, and then set up an actual lease signing within a week or so after that.
Mike: Okay. The option fee, typically, what are you able to get for an option to buy one of your properties?
Bob: We typically shoot for about 3% to 5% minimum. But sometimes we get more than that. We’ve got sometimes as high as 10%. Also, we occasionally get folks who will prepay some of their rent as well. So we kind of set minimums on our website. But we, as much as possible, try to build that urgency when people call us and say, “Hey, these properties move very quickly. We get a lot of interest. So if you really want this property, tell us the most you can afford per month, the most you have for a down payment on a house.”
Mike: Yep. Awesome. So let’s kind of come back to how you fund deals. People that are listening to this could buy them themselves, just like they would buy a rental, or get bank financing or whatever, as long as the bank, I guess, will allow you to potentially wrap the note if you need to do that. But you could fund it just like any rental, and then turn somebody into a lease option tenant, I guess. Or you can do . . . Maybe talk about some of the other creative things that you do.
Bob: I mean, really, for our funding, we use all private money. When we first started, I still had a job. So what do you think? We got like . . . Between friends and family, we probably had $300K to go buy houses with. Then, we would get a tenant-buyer in there, and then we would go to the banker, “Hey, it’s occupied. It’s cash flow. Refinance and sell.” So we were turning money like every six months, and it was a grind. We even had a few hard money loans on it, four to six-month balloons. So by the time we would close on a house, do a little fixup, place a tenant-buyer, and refinance, it was a grind.
Jimmy: Yeah. So then, our two main lenders, they were like, “You guys are growing too fast. You’ve got to stop.” To me, that was like a signal, “Oh, we’ve got to hit the gas.”
Bob: Yeah.
Jimmy: Like, “These idiots, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” At that point, we had raised probably $0.5 million, and we had a local guy who was a commercial guy in town, he gave us a line of credit for $1 billion. But we were buying so fast that we were chewing that up quickly, so we had to find a way to get private money. So we started doing a daily YouTube video, and we’re just kind of appealing to the people who don’t want to be involved in Wall Street, but they find that an 8% return would really match their needs.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: So we fund all our deals now from self-directed IRAs and we do one investor, one property. That’s another advantage of doing single-family stuff. We don’t have to get lawyers involved to create a fund or things of that nature.
Mike: Yeah. That’s awesome. You guys know, we have definitely had a bunch of self-directed IRA folks on the show before. You guys know as well as anybody that there is a massive amount of money that’s parked in IRAs that would love to work with guys like what you’re doing, for sure.
Jimmy: Yeah. To actually acquire property in a self-directed IRA, I don’t think it’s that great of an option. So private lending is kind of what you’re left with.
Mike: Right. Yeah. Awesome. So what other . . . I know you guys do some Sub2’s as well. Is that right?
Bob: Yeah. We’ve done a few Subject 2’s and also sandwich leased options. For those that don’t know what Subject 2 is, basically, you’re buying the house to take in the deed to it. But the original financing that the seller had is still staying on there. So you just got to have your paperwork squared away, and you definitely have to have a seller who’s open to it. But they’re definitely out there and it’s nice when you can kind of step in and take over somebody’s 3.75% 30-year fixed rate loan.
Jimmy: We get all the wholesalers. We’re not doing any letter campaigns or anything. It’s other wholesalers saying, “Hey, this is too skinny for us. Do you guys want it?”
Mike: I got you. I got you. Cool. Yeah. It sounds like you guys don’t do a whole lot of Sub2’s. But I’ve done some and they can be a pain, for sure. Well, you know, especially, it seems easy, and then you have a hail storm and you have an insurance claim, and then it’s like all hell breaks loose. So we could have another show on that. But cool, guys. Well, talk about how people can get started. They need to learn more about this. I mean, you guys do some webinars and stuff where you teach people this stuff as well. Right?
Bob: Yeah. I mean, I’d say that the best place is our YouTube channel. As Jimmy mentioned, we do about a video a day and we do tons of walkthroughs of properties here in St. Louis, and really talk about which type of homes makes sense for the lease option model. If you go too far on the low end, it can be really tough. So you don’t really want to be in the low-end neighborhoods. But you want to find houses that people do eventually want to own. But then, on the reverse side, if you go too high and you’re trying to buy with cash, the homes just aren’t going to cash flow. So if you’re going in the higher-priced markets, you definitely need to do more of the creative stuff, the sandwich lease options, Subject 2-type deals, or owner financing.
Mike: Yeah.
Bob: But our YouTube channel, Joint Ops Properties. That’s the best place.
Mike: What’s the name of your YouTube channel?
Bob: Joint Ops Properties.
Mike: Yep. Okay. Well, good. We’re going to add a link down below for those of you that are listening and [inaudible 00:28:56].
Jimmy: We’ve got a course out there on how to get started with specifically lease options at autopilotassets.com.
Mike: Autopilotassets.com. Awesome. Well, we’ll add links down below for folks that need to reference back to that. So awesome, guys. Thanks for being with us today. I definitely appreciate you.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the FlipNerd.com Investing Show. If you’re not yet an Elite member of FlipNerd, you’re missing out. We have tons of great training, including a new detailed masterclass published each month, and living training webinars with experts twice a month. Plus, you’ll get access to all of our archives, where we already have a growing library of masterclasses and other training videos. Elite members also get membership in our incredible online mastermind group, where many of the top real estate investors from across the country, including many of the hundreds of guests I’ve had on the show in the past, are already members.
Whether you’re brand new, looking to get started, or a veteran, you simply must join today. I promise, you won’t be disappointed. To learn more or join today, please visit flipnerd.com/lab. That’s flipnerd.com/lab. See you on the next show.
