Show Summary
Where many are ‘all hat and no cattle’, Sam Sadat shares the secrets to taking action, and to not only surviving…but thriving in any real estate market. We discuss buy and hold investing, private lending, buying notes and more in this action packed show. Check it out!
Highlights of this show
- Meet Sam Sadat, investor, lender, mentor, real estate club owner.
- Learn the importance of becoming an expert in real estate finance.
- Join the discussion on how to stay safe in any real estate market.
- Listen in as Sam discusses why taking action is the best teacher you can ever have!
Resources and Links from this show:
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
Mike: Hey, everyone. It’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the expert interview show where I interview leaders and entrepreneurs from across the real estate investing industry. If you’re new and you haven’t listened to the show before, hey, welcome. We’re glad you’re here. And if you’re a loyal member of FlipNerd.com or an avid listener to the show, we’ve done quite a few here. This is actually show number 289. Welcome back. And if you’re not a member of FlipNerd.com yet, please go check it out. You can actually set up a free account in literally about 15 or 20 seconds. So pretty easy.
So here we are, episode number 289 with my friend, Sam Sadat. Sam is a real estate investor, a lender, a mentor, he’s the owner of a very interestingly named real estate club, his name is Sam and he has Sam’s Club, Sam’s real estate club that’s in LA. And we’ll let him tell you a little bit about that here in just a moment. Sam, welcome to the show, my friend.
Sam: Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on the show. It’s always good to see you, your smiling face. I’m very happy that you’re succeeding, making an impact out there in the real estate world and educating a lot of people. It’s an awesome thing you’re doing, man.
Mike: Thank you, Thank you. And to be real honest, show number . . . what’d I say, 289, on all of those, we had fantastic guests. Not all of them are as good as you, Sam, but we’ve had lots of great guests and I think that’s what makes this show is having access to great people like you, so thanks for being here.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: Great, great. So tell us a little about you, Sam, about what you do out there in LA. You’ve got a really diverse background and you yourself teach a lot of people and add a lot of great value to the real estate investment community. Tell us a little bit more about it.
Sam: Sure, I’d be happy to. Actually, I came to America as a teenager, very young, about the age of 16, 17 years old. I finished up high school very quickly in Kingston, TX as I told you. Then a couple years of college over there, then I transferred to UT Austin. One of my favorite places in the world, believe it or not, and I studied physics and engineering. So I still am crazy about physics. That’s one of the things that I do all the time, theoretical physics. I’m crazy about dark matter and dark energy and entanglement and quantum entanglement and quantum theory, all of that. I just really apply it to my business, to our model, helping our people to [Inaudible 00:02:26] using science as the main tool. Not just the woo-woo kind of stuff, if you know what I’m talking about.
So then I came to America, I worked for a couple of engineering firms and I realized it’s not the kind of thing I want to be doing for the rest of my life. When I looked at superiors, my superiors, they were making a little bit more money than I was, they were always stressed out, always inside. And I said, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
Mike: You see where your future was going to go.
Sam: Right. So when I called my Dad, I said, “Look, I’m leaving the field of engineering and physics. I’m going to go into the world of business,” not surprisingly, he was upset. “I paid all this money for you, you went to college, you got a degree from a great university, and now you want to go into the world of business?” And I said, “Yeah.”
So I was confused for a while. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but luckily I found my way into real estate and got myself really good training from a mentor of mine who taught me all about financing. And I was really good at numbers and math so I picked it up good. And then, a few years later, I opened up my first . . . that was back in the mid-’80s, I believe, I opened up my own mortgage company.
Of course, the mortgage system was very different back then. There weren’t all the back end points and cheating the consumers and borrowers get tons of points. You didn’t have sub-prime lending, none of that crap. It was just standard, you go in there, buy a property 5% down, 10% down, maybe 20%, get the financing long-term, 30 years, we had very few adjustable rate mortgages. Ad suddenly, about five or six years later, the market completely started to change, as you are aware. And in my opinion, it became very unethical. It became a kind of a market that was not really for the people anymore. It was for the big guys. Just collecting a lot of points, selling garbage loans to people.
So I saw all of that and I wrote a book, “Free and Clear: The Inside Secrets of Home Mortgage Financing.” And I basically exposed the entire thing, what the banks are doing and how the mortgage system works and how you as a borrower and a consumer can protect yourself, especially against predatory lending, practices that were common and. believe it or not, still are with all these new regulations. So I got myself out of the mortgage business.
Mike: Now, Sam, let me ask you a question. When you were in the mortgage business there, it was always primarily, I assume, homeowner based? At that point, had you become an investor yet or no?
Sam: Yeah, I had a couple of properties, a few. But I wasn’t really thinking about investing. I was thinking, “Okay. I want to make instant gratification.” The Bible talks about it, instant gratification versus delayed gratification. I wasn’t even thinking delayed, man. I said, “You know what? I want to make the money now. Give me the commission. I’m going to have fun with it. I’ll go out there and do whatever.” I wasn’t thinking about it, and I said, “Okay. So I got a couple of properties, I’ve got my home, that’s it.”
But no, I wasn’t really an investor so to speak. I became an investor afterward when I got out of the mortgage business, got into actually investing in real estate, writing a book, as I told you. And then later, then I started my real estate club in California back about 13 years ago. I completely dedicated myself to education and mentorship while I was doing my investing because I don’t want to be hypocritical. I don’t want to be teaching like another one of the gurus and here’s a book and a whole bunch of CDs, but you’re not practicing what you’re preaching. So I wanted to learn what the tricks are. If I’m doing a flip, what are the common mistakes that I’m making that others will not be making if I teach them, “Hey, look out, these are the traps. These are the pitfalls”?
So as I was practicing it, I basically created the mentorship program in my real estate club. Now, we have over 20,000 people in our database and over 200 people are VIP members that I started only a couple years ago. So we do mentorship, membership, of course, a lot of education, but I also invest in flipping properties, holding apartment buildings, units and we do a lot of private lending. And private lending is designed specifically for real estate investors, not homeowners.
Mike: Right, right. So, Sam, can you talk about what a typical kind of evolution is? Because I think it’s pretty typical that people become investors before they become lenders and I know you’re going to talk some more about how people can protect themselves by actually lending in this market where things feel like they’re tightening up, especially where you are in southern California. But talk about what is a typical evolution of a real estate investor that gets started and maybe eventually becomes a lender, where typically people don’t really become a lender without real estate investing experience. Or, if they do, they struggle because they don’t really know what they’re evaluating.
Sam: Right. No, I know what you’re talking about. First of all, a lot of people, most investors, unfortunately, do not understand real estate finance. They just jump into the game and, unfortunately, many of them, as you probably know, are going to spend $20, $30, $40,000, get crammed into some kind of convention conference hall and they pay all that money and in three days, they expect to become rich. First of all, let me dispel the myth: that is not going to happen. Nobody can teach you any field, let alone real estate, in three days and expect to get rich and charge you $20,000. In my experience, and I’m an educator, education is best assimilated and applied when you get it in small dosages over a period of time.
Because the brain does not have the capacity to cram all of that information in over a short period of time and expect to retain that information, let alone assimilate and apply it. So when you give me small dosages, which is what we do, and what you’re doing, small dosages of education and knowledge and you convey that to people and they gradually start seeping, that information seeps through the system, they begin to assimilate it. And gradually, they apply it and they become a lot more successful than the ones that thought they could apply a whole bunch of information overnight, that’s not going to happen.
Mike: Yeah and in this business, on the real estate side, so much of it is what I’ll say is on the job training. You learn it when it happens. People ask me all the time, “Well, what did you do when this happened to you?” And I’ve bought hundreds of houses and it’s very common that I’ll say, “That’s actually never happened to me before, but here’s what I’ll do.” And you just start to learn how to pivot, how to deal with turmoil and how to deal with challenges.
Sam: You’re right. You put your finger on it, Mike. The best teacher is action. Okay. So I tell a lot of these people, “Why are you spending $20, $30, $40,000 for a so-called guru that is going to teach you how to become successful? Take that $30,000 and invest it in a property. Even if it’s Dallas, TX even if it’s in the boonies of Cleveland. I don’t care. If you invest that money, you will learn much more in one investment when your blood, sweat, and tears are involved as opposed to giving it to somebody and getting a whole bunch of knowledge that you can’t even use.”
So action is the best thing to do, number one. And what I advise people and especially investors, is to learn finance. Understand the numbers because if you know real estate finance, you can structure deals in so many different ways. If you talk to real estate agents, what do they do? They know one thing only. “Here’s your down payment, here’s the loan, here’s the contract, here’s your home.” That’s it. Us, as you know, investors, we’re very creative in our acquisition. We buy properties subject to, we buy properties with owner financing, we buy properties in syndications, we buy properties in limited partnerships, we buy partnerships at a loose option. We buy properties in every which way.
And because we understand there are different strategies and we know how the numbers work, we can structure things. And that is so important. Otherwise, if you want to learn the basics, go become a real estate agent, make a little bit of commission and that’s about it. But you’re operating inside the box and no one that I know has become rich operating inside the box. You have to step out of it. You have to explore the gray areas, the areas that are so-called creative. I don’t mean illegal. I just mean creative, meaning expanding your mind, expanding your horizons, expanding your mindset, your attitude, so you can see things in a different way.
Mike: Sure. What do you say for the people that want to learn the finance side? What is the best way to learn that? Because there are so many ways to get creative, so many ways to structure deals that are nonconventional, for sure. How does somebody learn that? Obviously, you can learn a lot by doing it, but it’s not very common that you find a mentor in the finance space that teaches you how to do that. Someone may teach you how to rehab, teach you how to wholesale, they can teach you a lot of things. But how do you learn that?
Sam: Well, first of all, as an example, if you can get a job working for a mortgage broker, as an example, if you have a license or if you have no license, that’s a great way of learning the finance system. Second of all, there are some books out there. The book that I wrote, “Free and Clear: The Inside Secrets of Home Mortgage Financing,” it is all about real estate finance. I talk nothing but real estate finance and the structure.
But the book that I like and I recommend, I can send that to you later and make that available to your people, it’s about real estate finance that I found and it’s awesome. It gives you examples of various structures, various numbers, how you strategy, how different strategies require a different set of formulas and a different set of calculations. If you can understand . . . you know what the problem is, Mike, the reason that most people avoid the finance part? It’s because, unfortunately, in America, we are very weak when it comes to finance and numbers. Math, math is a major issue or lack of knowledge of it. You look at a lot of other cultures and a lot of other places and they may not be as advanced as America in a lot of different ways, but their math is good. They know numbers. And I tell everybody, if you want to be successful in real estate, know the numbers.
Right now, there are awesome calculators out there that do all the work for you. Right here, HP, HP calculator, this awesome thing, learn it and it could do math, miracles for you. Rate of return, leverage, monthly payments, amortization schedule, the whole shoot and shebang. The desire on the part of people is not really to learn the math and to meet with the hands of the experts, like the mortgage brokers, and as a result, they lose a lot of money. Because you don’t know what they’re doing with your money. You’re getting charged in every which way and you don’t even know about it. So yeah, there are ways you can actually learn that and there are great books out there. And YouTube. Don’t forget YouTube. I learned Spanish over a six-month period and I’m in my mid-50s. Over a six-month period, I learned Spanish and I’m actually able to converse. They have a lot of Latinos in southern California. I’m actually practicing that. And where did I learn it? On YouTube.
Mike: Really?
Sam: Yeah, on Safari, on the Internet. Not a dime. I did not pay a single dime. So utilize that. We’re so lucky that we live in this day and age. I am so grateful that we have the ability. The days that I was going to college back in Austin, I wanted to go and take one book from the library and it would take me two hours to find out what the heck that index with all that zeros meant. Remember all the crazy ways they actually categorized the books in there in the bookstores?
Mike: Yeah, the Dewey Decimal System.
Sam: Yeah, oh my god, I hated that damn thing. I could not find a thing if my life depended on it. But right now, you’re sitting there, you go on YouTube, you search Google, no matter what you want, it’s out there. How do I learn real estate finance? I guarantee you there are tons of sites, tons of videos out there. Learn finance if you want to be a successful real estate investor.
Mike: Great. So, Sam, are you ready to dive into the taking action portion of the show? In fact, are you ready to feed us some information to go take action from?
Sam: Absolutely.
Mike: Great, great. You just shared some great information about how people owe it to themselves to go learn what they want to accomplish, whether it’s financing, Spanish, could be lots of other things. In fact, I’ll tell you the truth, last night, we have a brand new garage door, three months old. For some reason, it was as quiet as could be and now it’s as squeaky as can be. And my wife has been on me to do something about it, which, typically, I don’t actually do any repairs around my own house. But she emailed me a video last night on YouTube and said, “Here’s how you do it. Go figure it out.” So quite frankly, I watched the video, I went on Amazon, and I ordered some lithium lubricant and I’ll have that thing fixed in a couple of days.
Sam: That’s exactly true. Learn whatever you want. Spend some time educating yourself. It’s amazing to me that I see people spending so much time in front of a television, watching all these crazy, nonsensical programs and they fail to spend a couple of hours educating themselves about financial independence, about financial freedom, about real estate numbers, strategies. And they wonder, “Why am I not succeeding?” Answer: you’re not spending enough time educating yourself.
Knowledge is good. Francis Bacon said, a great philosopher, he talked about knowledge being power. Correct. Knowledge, especially at that particular time, was power. Right now, in our day in age, it is not necessarily power, it’s a potential power. In my opinion, the action of the knowledge is the actual power. When you actually apply your knowledge. What good am I if I learn a whole bunch of stuff and I fail to apply even one of them? Okay, so I’m educated, fantastic, but am I applying? Am I powerful? No. Not unless I apply that.
Application and the action it comes from the thoughts, the mindset. Your feelings and your thoughts, determine your mood. In other words, if you’re depressed, instead of taking Prozac or Paxil and all that, the solution is very simple. I do two things when I get a little bit of a down feeling. Two things I do. One, I become productive. So productive doesn’t mean you’re busy, productive means you start something, you go through the motions, and you finish it. That’s productivity. Being busy is when you start something, you keep changing it and you’re never finished. So I immediately start finishing some of the stuff that I have not done and failed to finish. Immediately, I feel a lot better and my morale is going to boost. I get a boost in morale immediately upon that.
The second thing I do is what can I do to act and create something out there? Write some offers. I start writing some offers, getting on the phone, talking to some people and actually negotiating a deal. Anything that will take you closer to your goals and anything that is not random. Like watching TV, things like that are completely random, aimless, no purpose. All of those are activities. I’m not concerned with activities. I’m concerned with action.
And action has to do with productivity. Activities have to do with being busy and being busy is never going to get somebody rich. If you want to get rich, get productive. If you want to be productive, act, finish. Complete something. When you complete something, you feel a boost in your morale, which is a sense of wellbeing, which is a high spirit. The moment you feel that, you become untouchable. The moment you feel that, you start doing things and creating the right offers, that mindset, that attitude and that strong energy and feeling that comes from you will make things happen for you.
You could not get your offer accepted with a lousy attitude, but I guarantee if you change your attitude and your feeling and the mood, I guarantee you, the same offer, same scenario, the offer is going to get accepted. Because your energy is going to change the universe around you. And I’m not talking about woo-woo. I studied physics. I know how my energy applies to the universe and I can actually change my surroundings with my mindset. So it is so clear to me that action is the main thing that most people lack when they complain about not being successful, especially in our field.
Mike: Yep. There’s no doubt about it, boy, it feels good when you’re laying in bed at night thinking about all that you achieved that day. Or when I drive home at night and we have dinner and my wife’s like, “What happened today?” And I’m like, “Wow, I got this done, got this done, we bought a property,” whatever may have happened versus, “I was busy.” You’re right, I mean absolutely, if you actually accomplish things that day that you can mark off your list or show the achievement, it definitely feels good.
Sam: I do that to my kids. Of course, they’re not kids anymore, but I used to do that. “Dad, I’m bored.” My son. “Okay. Bring me a piece of paper, bring me a pen, okay. Write down the things that you have wanted to finish and you have not finished yet. One, two, three, four, go get them done.” I swear to God, as soon as they get them done, the attitude changes, they become more positive about things because that productivity is the basis of your morale. People forget that. The basis and the foundation of your morale and high spirit is productivity.
Go out there and get something done action. “Oh, I feel so depressed. I can’t act.” You know what? Action is under your direct control, feelings necessarily aren’t. So when you feel down, the only thing that is going to boost up your feelings and make it is act. And action means finish, complete, do something, clean up. They ask Mother Theresa, “Okay. So you say you want to change the world, you want to make the world a better place, what can I do to make the world the better place?” Do you know what she answered? She said, “You can start by sweeping this floor right now. Pick up the broom, sweep this floor. That’s what you can start on.”
That’s the essence of how simple it is, that people forget that by sitting in front of the television and just getting that information and not putting anything out, no energy out, no energy in, it’s the first law of thermodynamics. No energy is wasted. If you put energy out you have to get it back in because this universe maintains the energy at every level. Nothing is wasted, never. So if you want energy in, which means leads, business, money, put energy out.
Watching TV, I’m using that as an example. Watching TV a lot, it’s always energy in, nothing is going out, and until anything goes out, nothing of substance is ever going to come into your world.
Mike: Yup, yup. So, Sam, since people are watching a show here, which we want people to take action from and learn from so this isn’t some mindless information that you absorb and don’t do anything with, let’s kind of dive into what’s going on in this market. I know we talked a little bit before the show today and you decided you wanted to spend some time talking about where you’re at in southern California, and lots of other markets right now, and are feeling kind of like 2007 again. Things are getting a little over heated, people are getting a little concerned about buying too much.
I know some of your answer is you can lend, you can buy in other markets and you can buy and hold so you’re not worried about losing money because you’re not worried about selling right now. Can you kind of dive into some of the things and do it in a way where people can hopefully learn from this and go do something about it?
Sam: Sure, sure. You’re absolutely right about it. I definitely see the market. Of course, I’ve got to preface by saying that every market is different. Our real estate market has become totally localized right here. Even in southern California, the LA market is even different than the Orange County market. It’s different than the other counties surrounding us. So every market, I’m not quite familiar with the Dallas market. I know it’s picked up quite a bit.
But the key issue is this, as you’ve mentioned, if you’re buying for the purpose of holding and you’re not going to sell in a bad market, you will never lose money. We talked about it. I’ve never lost because I was able to hang onto my property every time the market went down. How did I do that? I did not get myself in trouble by over-borrowing on the property. I did not put myself in a negative cash flow scenario. Because if you are in a negative cash flow scenario, the moment the market goes the other way and starts going into the correction period and then your cash flow because you had to put a bunch of money out, you won’t be able to sustain that.
Number two, you do not want to get yourself into interest rates that are too high and stay in a hard money scenario for a long, long time. If you want to stay in a 10, 11, 12% for a six-month or one-year period, it’s okay. But over that, it becomes unsustainable. You’re losing your property, getting foreclosed upon. So what about what’s going to happen to the market? I know for a fact we’re going to have a correction. How big of a correction, I don’t know. But I know it’s not going to be as bad as what we had in ’08 because the dynamic of the market is different. We had the subprime issue, which we don’t have for the most part.
But I know there’s going to be a correction in the market and I want to advise people that in this market, don’t buy properties that are at market value if your market hasn’t reached the top. Or if you feel that your market has reached the top, you feel like you’re at the top of the market, do not buy properties at the top of the market. If you put that money, instead of buying that property and becoming the owner, become the lender. Loan that money. Loan that to investors, not homeowners, loan it to investors, get yourself 10, 11, 12% interest. You’re not liable for slip and falls, you’re not involved in management headaches, tenant toilet headaches, dealing with tenants or any of that kind of stuff. You are the lender, you have control of the property, if they don’t pay you, you can foreclose.
But I go into these things, and we have a lot of that. We have at least 20-30% skin in the game from the buyer. Because I figure if the buyer is not going to pay me a couple of years from now or a year from now, and even the market has made the correction, what if the market has lost 20% of the value? Well, guess what? The buyer has already put down 20-30% down payment so I really bought this property 70 to 80 cents on the dollar. So if I have to foreclose on it down the road, I still haven’t overpaid for it. Now I can actually take that property and say, “It’s my property. But I didn’t pay $500,000 for it. I only paid $400,000 for it.” So I can hold on a little bit longer. So that definitely is a great way to buy.
We also buy, for example, at the auction. There are not as many properties out there, definitely not, but one thing that we have done that’s been very successful is when we look at these properties in foreclosure, we’re not going after any of them that are dealing with big banks. If the big bank is foreclosing, we’re not touching it. What we’re looking for is small investors, small community banks, those are easy to find. And these people, it doesn’t matter if they’re in the first position or the second position. We can buy junior liens at a massive discount because when the first mortgage holder is foreclosing on the deal, the second and all the junior liens are going to get wiped out.
Just about two months ago we bought a $35,000 junior lien, a second mortgage on a nice property in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley, nice area. We got $35,000 for $8,000. Why would he sell it? Because in about a week, the first mortgage holder had the sell date on the property. When the property sells, he would lose his $35,000. It’s a lot better for him to assign the note and the deed of trust to us and walk away with his $8,000. We went in there, we didn’t even have to start foreclosure again. All we did was appear at the sale date, people overbid.
How did we know that? Because I knew that the amount of the money that was owed to the lender was way below what the property was going to go for. We went in there with a cashier’s check just in case nobody bid that we would actually take over the property, which would have actually been better for us. Of course, that didn’t happen. They overbid, bid up, bid up, bid up, property sold for way more than what the lender was asking. I got my face amount of the note, which was $35,000 plus additional expenses. And I walked away with about $38,000 for a five-day period.
Do that. Get creative, work and paper make you money. I love real estate paper. Notes and deeds, why? Because you don’t have headaches, you don’t have insurance issues, you don’t have any of that. It’s a negotiable instrument. Buy it, sell it, assign it, make money off of it, and that way, if anything happens that you end up with the property, you’re going to buying it for far less than the market value. So the chance of you losing it is a lot less.
Mike: Hey, Sam, talk to the people that are listening to this right now in terms of investing in multiple ways. So you invest in properties, you’ve got rental properties, you’re a lender, you’re buying notes, you’re apparently buying second liens. Lots of stuff there. So a lot of people, I think in this business, tend to get overwhelmed with there are so many different ways to make money and sometimes I think that paralyzes people. You and I both know that if you really understand real estate finance, like you’ve said, it’s all kind of the same. It’s really just a matter of how you calculate your return. But talk a little bit about how people that might be listening to this, if they don’t have a tremendous amount of experience with this or they’re not diversified, how they can diversify in other ways without getting overwhelmed with all the things you could do.
Sam: Yeah, you brought up a great point because you have too many options, you tend to get confused and we paralyze. Henry Kissinger said it best. He said, “Lack of alternatives will clear your mind.” And it’s every time my mind is cluttered and I say, “How many alternatives am I looking at right now?” Invariably, I see myself looking at different options. So what I do is I eliminate most of them and I end up with one and immediately, I get the clarity of the mind that says, “Okay. I only have one way to go.”
In my opinion, in this particular market, wholesaling and flipping property has become very difficult. I don’t know about your market, but in our market, the profit margin is very narrow. In most markets, I presume a whole bunch of people are doing the same thing. That’s why I like lending, buying junior liens, and particularly in your market, southern California is crazy and very unique, but in your market, I bet you in your market and in most parts of the country, I bet you people can find junior liens only focused on one thing: notes and paper. Trust deeds, notes and trust deeds.
Focus on that and sign up with a foreclosure listing company, such as County Records Research, Foreclosure Radar, any of those guys. Sign up with one of these guys, get a trainer, go out there and find out who you can buy junior liens from. Whether it’s a second or third, it doesn’t matter. If you do a good job researching the property and knowing the values there, figuring out what’s owed on the first mortgage and you pay pennies on the dollar for that junior lien, the profit margin on those are a hell of a lot better and much safer and you don’t need as much money as you would to go into a flip situation. Which in this market, I consider a pretty relatively dangerous situation.
Especially for people that do not know the business, they overpay. Ultimately, they overpay on purchase, they overpay on the rehab cost, and at the end, they are not going to be able to sell for what they want. And according to my friend, Kurt DeMeire, the owner of the County Records Research, he’s seen a whole bunch of these properties going into foreclosure by rehabbers and flippers right now. Hard money loans, high interest rates, over budget on rehab costs, paying too much for the property to begin with, just imagine, add one correction to the market, it’s enough to wipe out the majority.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Sam, I know you have a lot of information and you do a lot of teaching and mentoring and things like that. And, of course, you have your club, which we’ll add a link for down below. If folks want to learn more about you or about some of the things you teach, where do they go?
Sam: Google. Sam’s Club, you said it in the beginning, if you put “Sam’s Club Real Estate,” I’m going to pop up. I think we’re third or fourth on “real estate club Los Angeles.” The best way, so of course, SamsRealEstateClub.com, but Google is the best source. You know “Sam’s Club real estate Los Angeles,” it’s going to pop up all over the place. I’d be happy to help them. I talk to a lot of people during the day, some of them are not even members. I do spend time teaching [Inaudible 00:32:31] because I have a passion for it. I share from my heart, I don’t have things to sell to them, I don’t have teasers and upselling things. So we just share with them. We encourage them to take action. We don’t need to persuade anybody. We just need to give them encouragement. Go take action, do something, here’s a little bit of information. Maybe you can go out there and do something.
I want to validate you for what you’re doing because you’re bringing an incredible amount of knowledge and education to people out there for virtually free. And this is awesome because this is something people need to know. I don’t know of anybody who acted upon any endeavor with knowledge and failed ultimately. What you lose, people that lose, number one, are totally uninformed or uneducated, or two, they become so cocky about their information and over confident, that I know so much, that I don’t need to learn more, new strategies and they keep applying the same thing, eventually, that’s going to go all right.
Mike: Absolutely. I listened to a podcast of somebody, another real estate investor last night of some friends of mine. I won’t mention my competitors here for podcast. But no, anyway, someone who buys a lot of houses, like 50 to 100 houses a month and has a very successful business. He made some comment that just really stuck with me and I think it will really resonate with people. He said, “We fail every day. We make mistakes every day.” And I think a lot of newer real estate investors and a lot of people that have done something one way for a long time are so afraid of failing that they get paralyzed and they don’t move forward. When failure is not bad. What’s good is it’s an opportunity to learn from and adjust.
Sam: Absolutely. You put your finger right on it. Failure is nothing but a setback. And if you look at life itself, which is a duality, a concept of duality, failure is the other side of the coin to success. Do you know anybody who has succeeded without having failed?
Mike: No.
Sam: Look at the life of Abraham Lincoln, look at the life of Colonel Sanders, look at the life of people like Steve Jobs or even Bill Gates. You don’t know about their failures. The only thing we know about is their ultimate success. You read their biography and their life history and you realize that none of them got to where they got without having failed, getting the door slammed in their faces or any of that kind of stuff. You’ve got to go through that. So you’ve got to embrace failure because, ultimately, the other side of the coin is success.
Mike: Awesome, Sam. Well, we’ll add links for your club down below here. I appreciate you being with us today.
Sam: Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Best of luck to all of your listeners.
Mike: Absolutely. Thank you. Everybody, thanks for joining us today. Sam, please stay in touch, my friend, and I’m sure we’ll be talking soon.
Sam: Thank you, Mike.
Mike: Everybody, have a great day. Bye-bye.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: 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 sight that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry so get on over to FlipNerd.com.
So here we are, episode number 289 with my friend, Sam Sadat. Sam is a real estate investor, a lender, a mentor, he’s the owner of a very interestingly named real estate club, his name is Sam and he has Sam’s Club, Sam’s real estate club that’s in LA. And we’ll let him tell you a little bit about that here in just a moment. Sam, welcome to the show, my friend.
Sam: Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on the show. It’s always good to see you, your smiling face. I’m very happy that you’re succeeding, making an impact out there in the real estate world and educating a lot of people. It’s an awesome thing you’re doing, man.
Mike: Thank you, Thank you. And to be real honest, show number . . . what’d I say, 289, on all of those, we had fantastic guests. Not all of them are as good as you, Sam, but we’ve had lots of great guests and I think that’s what makes this show is having access to great people like you, so thanks for being here.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: Great, great. So tell us a little about you, Sam, about what you do out there in LA. You’ve got a really diverse background and you yourself teach a lot of people and add a lot of great value to the real estate investment community. Tell us a little bit more about it.
Sam: Sure, I’d be happy to. Actually, I came to America as a teenager, very young, about the age of 16, 17 years old. I finished up high school very quickly in Kingston, TX as I told you. Then a couple years of college over there, then I transferred to UT Austin. One of my favorite places in the world, believe it or not, and I studied physics and engineering. So I still am crazy about physics. That’s one of the things that I do all the time, theoretical physics. I’m crazy about dark matter and dark energy and entanglement and quantum entanglement and quantum theory, all of that. I just really apply it to my business, to our model, helping our people to [Inaudible 00:02:26] using science as the main tool. Not just the woo-woo kind of stuff, if you know what I’m talking about.
So then I came to America, I worked for a couple of engineering firms and I realized it’s not the kind of thing I want to be doing for the rest of my life. When I looked at superiors, my superiors, they were making a little bit more money than I was, they were always stressed out, always inside. And I said, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
Mike: You see where your future was going to go.
Sam: Right. So when I called my Dad, I said, “Look, I’m leaving the field of engineering and physics. I’m going to go into the world of business,” not surprisingly, he was upset. “I paid all this money for you, you went to college, you got a degree from a great university, and now you want to go into the world of business?” And I said, “Yeah.”
So I was confused for a while. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but luckily I found my way into real estate and got myself really good training from a mentor of mine who taught me all about financing. And I was really good at numbers and math so I picked it up good. And then, a few years later, I opened up my first . . . that was back in the mid-’80s, I believe, I opened up my own mortgage company.
Of course, the mortgage system was very different back then. There weren’t all the back end points and cheating the consumers and borrowers get tons of points. You didn’t have sub-prime lending, none of that crap. It was just standard, you go in there, buy a property 5% down, 10% down, maybe 20%, get the financing long-term, 30 years, we had very few adjustable rate mortgages. Ad suddenly, about five or six years later, the market completely started to change, as you are aware. And in my opinion, it became very unethical. It became a kind of a market that was not really for the people anymore. It was for the big guys. Just collecting a lot of points, selling garbage loans to people.
So I saw all of that and I wrote a book, “Free and Clear: The Inside Secrets of Home Mortgage Financing.” And I basically exposed the entire thing, what the banks are doing and how the mortgage system works and how you as a borrower and a consumer can protect yourself, especially against predatory lending, practices that were common and. believe it or not, still are with all these new regulations. So I got myself out of the mortgage business.
Mike: Now, Sam, let me ask you a question. When you were in the mortgage business there, it was always primarily, I assume, homeowner based? At that point, had you become an investor yet or no?
Sam: Yeah, I had a couple of properties, a few. But I wasn’t really thinking about investing. I was thinking, “Okay. I want to make instant gratification.” The Bible talks about it, instant gratification versus delayed gratification. I wasn’t even thinking delayed, man. I said, “You know what? I want to make the money now. Give me the commission. I’m going to have fun with it. I’ll go out there and do whatever.” I wasn’t thinking about it, and I said, “Okay. So I got a couple of properties, I’ve got my home, that’s it.”
But no, I wasn’t really an investor so to speak. I became an investor afterward when I got out of the mortgage business, got into actually investing in real estate, writing a book, as I told you. And then later, then I started my real estate club in California back about 13 years ago. I completely dedicated myself to education and mentorship while I was doing my investing because I don’t want to be hypocritical. I don’t want to be teaching like another one of the gurus and here’s a book and a whole bunch of CDs, but you’re not practicing what you’re preaching. So I wanted to learn what the tricks are. If I’m doing a flip, what are the common mistakes that I’m making that others will not be making if I teach them, “Hey, look out, these are the traps. These are the pitfalls”?
So as I was practicing it, I basically created the mentorship program in my real estate club. Now, we have over 20,000 people in our database and over 200 people are VIP members that I started only a couple years ago. So we do mentorship, membership, of course, a lot of education, but I also invest in flipping properties, holding apartment buildings, units and we do a lot of private lending. And private lending is designed specifically for real estate investors, not homeowners.
Mike: Right, right. So, Sam, can you talk about what a typical kind of evolution is? Because I think it’s pretty typical that people become investors before they become lenders and I know you’re going to talk some more about how people can protect themselves by actually lending in this market where things feel like they’re tightening up, especially where you are in southern California. But talk about what is a typical evolution of a real estate investor that gets started and maybe eventually becomes a lender, where typically people don’t really become a lender without real estate investing experience. Or, if they do, they struggle because they don’t really know what they’re evaluating.
Sam: Right. No, I know what you’re talking about. First of all, a lot of people, most investors, unfortunately, do not understand real estate finance. They just jump into the game and, unfortunately, many of them, as you probably know, are going to spend $20, $30, $40,000, get crammed into some kind of convention conference hall and they pay all that money and in three days, they expect to become rich. First of all, let me dispel the myth: that is not going to happen. Nobody can teach you any field, let alone real estate, in three days and expect to get rich and charge you $20,000. In my experience, and I’m an educator, education is best assimilated and applied when you get it in small dosages over a period of time.
Because the brain does not have the capacity to cram all of that information in over a short period of time and expect to retain that information, let alone assimilate and apply it. So when you give me small dosages, which is what we do, and what you’re doing, small dosages of education and knowledge and you convey that to people and they gradually start seeping, that information seeps through the system, they begin to assimilate it. And gradually, they apply it and they become a lot more successful than the ones that thought they could apply a whole bunch of information overnight, that’s not going to happen.
Mike: Yeah and in this business, on the real estate side, so much of it is what I’ll say is on the job training. You learn it when it happens. People ask me all the time, “Well, what did you do when this happened to you?” And I’ve bought hundreds of houses and it’s very common that I’ll say, “That’s actually never happened to me before, but here’s what I’ll do.” And you just start to learn how to pivot, how to deal with turmoil and how to deal with challenges.
Sam: You’re right. You put your finger on it, Mike. The best teacher is action. Okay. So I tell a lot of these people, “Why are you spending $20, $30, $40,000 for a so-called guru that is going to teach you how to become successful? Take that $30,000 and invest it in a property. Even if it’s Dallas, TX even if it’s in the boonies of Cleveland. I don’t care. If you invest that money, you will learn much more in one investment when your blood, sweat, and tears are involved as opposed to giving it to somebody and getting a whole bunch of knowledge that you can’t even use.”
So action is the best thing to do, number one. And what I advise people and especially investors, is to learn finance. Understand the numbers because if you know real estate finance, you can structure deals in so many different ways. If you talk to real estate agents, what do they do? They know one thing only. “Here’s your down payment, here’s the loan, here’s the contract, here’s your home.” That’s it. Us, as you know, investors, we’re very creative in our acquisition. We buy properties subject to, we buy properties with owner financing, we buy properties in syndications, we buy properties in limited partnerships, we buy partnerships at a loose option. We buy properties in every which way.
And because we understand there are different strategies and we know how the numbers work, we can structure things. And that is so important. Otherwise, if you want to learn the basics, go become a real estate agent, make a little bit of commission and that’s about it. But you’re operating inside the box and no one that I know has become rich operating inside the box. You have to step out of it. You have to explore the gray areas, the areas that are so-called creative. I don’t mean illegal. I just mean creative, meaning expanding your mind, expanding your horizons, expanding your mindset, your attitude, so you can see things in a different way.
Mike: Sure. What do you say for the people that want to learn the finance side? What is the best way to learn that? Because there are so many ways to get creative, so many ways to structure deals that are nonconventional, for sure. How does somebody learn that? Obviously, you can learn a lot by doing it, but it’s not very common that you find a mentor in the finance space that teaches you how to do that. Someone may teach you how to rehab, teach you how to wholesale, they can teach you a lot of things. But how do you learn that?
Sam: Well, first of all, as an example, if you can get a job working for a mortgage broker, as an example, if you have a license or if you have no license, that’s a great way of learning the finance system. Second of all, there are some books out there. The book that I wrote, “Free and Clear: The Inside Secrets of Home Mortgage Financing,” it is all about real estate finance. I talk nothing but real estate finance and the structure.
But the book that I like and I recommend, I can send that to you later and make that available to your people, it’s about real estate finance that I found and it’s awesome. It gives you examples of various structures, various numbers, how you strategy, how different strategies require a different set of formulas and a different set of calculations. If you can understand . . . you know what the problem is, Mike, the reason that most people avoid the finance part? It’s because, unfortunately, in America, we are very weak when it comes to finance and numbers. Math, math is a major issue or lack of knowledge of it. You look at a lot of other cultures and a lot of other places and they may not be as advanced as America in a lot of different ways, but their math is good. They know numbers. And I tell everybody, if you want to be successful in real estate, know the numbers.
Right now, there are awesome calculators out there that do all the work for you. Right here, HP, HP calculator, this awesome thing, learn it and it could do math, miracles for you. Rate of return, leverage, monthly payments, amortization schedule, the whole shoot and shebang. The desire on the part of people is not really to learn the math and to meet with the hands of the experts, like the mortgage brokers, and as a result, they lose a lot of money. Because you don’t know what they’re doing with your money. You’re getting charged in every which way and you don’t even know about it. So yeah, there are ways you can actually learn that and there are great books out there. And YouTube. Don’t forget YouTube. I learned Spanish over a six-month period and I’m in my mid-50s. Over a six-month period, I learned Spanish and I’m actually able to converse. They have a lot of Latinos in southern California. I’m actually practicing that. And where did I learn it? On YouTube.
Mike: Really?
Sam: Yeah, on Safari, on the Internet. Not a dime. I did not pay a single dime. So utilize that. We’re so lucky that we live in this day and age. I am so grateful that we have the ability. The days that I was going to college back in Austin, I wanted to go and take one book from the library and it would take me two hours to find out what the heck that index with all that zeros meant. Remember all the crazy ways they actually categorized the books in there in the bookstores?
Mike: Yeah, the Dewey Decimal System.
Sam: Yeah, oh my god, I hated that damn thing. I could not find a thing if my life depended on it. But right now, you’re sitting there, you go on YouTube, you search Google, no matter what you want, it’s out there. How do I learn real estate finance? I guarantee you there are tons of sites, tons of videos out there. Learn finance if you want to be a successful real estate investor.
Mike: Great. So, Sam, are you ready to dive into the taking action portion of the show? In fact, are you ready to feed us some information to go take action from?
Sam: Absolutely.
Mike: Great, great. You just shared some great information about how people owe it to themselves to go learn what they want to accomplish, whether it’s financing, Spanish, could be lots of other things. In fact, I’ll tell you the truth, last night, we have a brand new garage door, three months old. For some reason, it was as quiet as could be and now it’s as squeaky as can be. And my wife has been on me to do something about it, which, typically, I don’t actually do any repairs around my own house. But she emailed me a video last night on YouTube and said, “Here’s how you do it. Go figure it out.” So quite frankly, I watched the video, I went on Amazon, and I ordered some lithium lubricant and I’ll have that thing fixed in a couple of days.
Sam: That’s exactly true. Learn whatever you want. Spend some time educating yourself. It’s amazing to me that I see people spending so much time in front of a television, watching all these crazy, nonsensical programs and they fail to spend a couple of hours educating themselves about financial independence, about financial freedom, about real estate numbers, strategies. And they wonder, “Why am I not succeeding?” Answer: you’re not spending enough time educating yourself.
Knowledge is good. Francis Bacon said, a great philosopher, he talked about knowledge being power. Correct. Knowledge, especially at that particular time, was power. Right now, in our day in age, it is not necessarily power, it’s a potential power. In my opinion, the action of the knowledge is the actual power. When you actually apply your knowledge. What good am I if I learn a whole bunch of stuff and I fail to apply even one of them? Okay, so I’m educated, fantastic, but am I applying? Am I powerful? No. Not unless I apply that.
Application and the action it comes from the thoughts, the mindset. Your feelings and your thoughts, determine your mood. In other words, if you’re depressed, instead of taking Prozac or Paxil and all that, the solution is very simple. I do two things when I get a little bit of a down feeling. Two things I do. One, I become productive. So productive doesn’t mean you’re busy, productive means you start something, you go through the motions, and you finish it. That’s productivity. Being busy is when you start something, you keep changing it and you’re never finished. So I immediately start finishing some of the stuff that I have not done and failed to finish. Immediately, I feel a lot better and my morale is going to boost. I get a boost in morale immediately upon that.
The second thing I do is what can I do to act and create something out there? Write some offers. I start writing some offers, getting on the phone, talking to some people and actually negotiating a deal. Anything that will take you closer to your goals and anything that is not random. Like watching TV, things like that are completely random, aimless, no purpose. All of those are activities. I’m not concerned with activities. I’m concerned with action.
And action has to do with productivity. Activities have to do with being busy and being busy is never going to get somebody rich. If you want to get rich, get productive. If you want to be productive, act, finish. Complete something. When you complete something, you feel a boost in your morale, which is a sense of wellbeing, which is a high spirit. The moment you feel that, you become untouchable. The moment you feel that, you start doing things and creating the right offers, that mindset, that attitude and that strong energy and feeling that comes from you will make things happen for you.
You could not get your offer accepted with a lousy attitude, but I guarantee if you change your attitude and your feeling and the mood, I guarantee you, the same offer, same scenario, the offer is going to get accepted. Because your energy is going to change the universe around you. And I’m not talking about woo-woo. I studied physics. I know how my energy applies to the universe and I can actually change my surroundings with my mindset. So it is so clear to me that action is the main thing that most people lack when they complain about not being successful, especially in our field.
Mike: Yep. There’s no doubt about it, boy, it feels good when you’re laying in bed at night thinking about all that you achieved that day. Or when I drive home at night and we have dinner and my wife’s like, “What happened today?” And I’m like, “Wow, I got this done, got this done, we bought a property,” whatever may have happened versus, “I was busy.” You’re right, I mean absolutely, if you actually accomplish things that day that you can mark off your list or show the achievement, it definitely feels good.
Sam: I do that to my kids. Of course, they’re not kids anymore, but I used to do that. “Dad, I’m bored.” My son. “Okay. Bring me a piece of paper, bring me a pen, okay. Write down the things that you have wanted to finish and you have not finished yet. One, two, three, four, go get them done.” I swear to God, as soon as they get them done, the attitude changes, they become more positive about things because that productivity is the basis of your morale. People forget that. The basis and the foundation of your morale and high spirit is productivity.
Go out there and get something done action. “Oh, I feel so depressed. I can’t act.” You know what? Action is under your direct control, feelings necessarily aren’t. So when you feel down, the only thing that is going to boost up your feelings and make it is act. And action means finish, complete, do something, clean up. They ask Mother Theresa, “Okay. So you say you want to change the world, you want to make the world a better place, what can I do to make the world the better place?” Do you know what she answered? She said, “You can start by sweeping this floor right now. Pick up the broom, sweep this floor. That’s what you can start on.”
That’s the essence of how simple it is, that people forget that by sitting in front of the television and just getting that information and not putting anything out, no energy out, no energy in, it’s the first law of thermodynamics. No energy is wasted. If you put energy out you have to get it back in because this universe maintains the energy at every level. Nothing is wasted, never. So if you want energy in, which means leads, business, money, put energy out.
Watching TV, I’m using that as an example. Watching TV a lot, it’s always energy in, nothing is going out, and until anything goes out, nothing of substance is ever going to come into your world.
Mike: Yup, yup. So, Sam, since people are watching a show here, which we want people to take action from and learn from so this isn’t some mindless information that you absorb and don’t do anything with, let’s kind of dive into what’s going on in this market. I know we talked a little bit before the show today and you decided you wanted to spend some time talking about where you’re at in southern California, and lots of other markets right now, and are feeling kind of like 2007 again. Things are getting a little over heated, people are getting a little concerned about buying too much.
I know some of your answer is you can lend, you can buy in other markets and you can buy and hold so you’re not worried about losing money because you’re not worried about selling right now. Can you kind of dive into some of the things and do it in a way where people can hopefully learn from this and go do something about it?
Sam: Sure, sure. You’re absolutely right about it. I definitely see the market. Of course, I’ve got to preface by saying that every market is different. Our real estate market has become totally localized right here. Even in southern California, the LA market is even different than the Orange County market. It’s different than the other counties surrounding us. So every market, I’m not quite familiar with the Dallas market. I know it’s picked up quite a bit.
But the key issue is this, as you’ve mentioned, if you’re buying for the purpose of holding and you’re not going to sell in a bad market, you will never lose money. We talked about it. I’ve never lost because I was able to hang onto my property every time the market went down. How did I do that? I did not get myself in trouble by over-borrowing on the property. I did not put myself in a negative cash flow scenario. Because if you are in a negative cash flow scenario, the moment the market goes the other way and starts going into the correction period and then your cash flow because you had to put a bunch of money out, you won’t be able to sustain that.
Number two, you do not want to get yourself into interest rates that are too high and stay in a hard money scenario for a long, long time. If you want to stay in a 10, 11, 12% for a six-month or one-year period, it’s okay. But over that, it becomes unsustainable. You’re losing your property, getting foreclosed upon. So what about what’s going to happen to the market? I know for a fact we’re going to have a correction. How big of a correction, I don’t know. But I know it’s not going to be as bad as what we had in ’08 because the dynamic of the market is different. We had the subprime issue, which we don’t have for the most part.
But I know there’s going to be a correction in the market and I want to advise people that in this market, don’t buy properties that are at market value if your market hasn’t reached the top. Or if you feel that your market has reached the top, you feel like you’re at the top of the market, do not buy properties at the top of the market. If you put that money, instead of buying that property and becoming the owner, become the lender. Loan that money. Loan that to investors, not homeowners, loan it to investors, get yourself 10, 11, 12% interest. You’re not liable for slip and falls, you’re not involved in management headaches, tenant toilet headaches, dealing with tenants or any of that kind of stuff. You are the lender, you have control of the property, if they don’t pay you, you can foreclose.
But I go into these things, and we have a lot of that. We have at least 20-30% skin in the game from the buyer. Because I figure if the buyer is not going to pay me a couple of years from now or a year from now, and even the market has made the correction, what if the market has lost 20% of the value? Well, guess what? The buyer has already put down 20-30% down payment so I really bought this property 70 to 80 cents on the dollar. So if I have to foreclose on it down the road, I still haven’t overpaid for it. Now I can actually take that property and say, “It’s my property. But I didn’t pay $500,000 for it. I only paid $400,000 for it.” So I can hold on a little bit longer. So that definitely is a great way to buy.
We also buy, for example, at the auction. There are not as many properties out there, definitely not, but one thing that we have done that’s been very successful is when we look at these properties in foreclosure, we’re not going after any of them that are dealing with big banks. If the big bank is foreclosing, we’re not touching it. What we’re looking for is small investors, small community banks, those are easy to find. And these people, it doesn’t matter if they’re in the first position or the second position. We can buy junior liens at a massive discount because when the first mortgage holder is foreclosing on the deal, the second and all the junior liens are going to get wiped out.
Just about two months ago we bought a $35,000 junior lien, a second mortgage on a nice property in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley, nice area. We got $35,000 for $8,000. Why would he sell it? Because in about a week, the first mortgage holder had the sell date on the property. When the property sells, he would lose his $35,000. It’s a lot better for him to assign the note and the deed of trust to us and walk away with his $8,000. We went in there, we didn’t even have to start foreclosure again. All we did was appear at the sale date, people overbid.
How did we know that? Because I knew that the amount of the money that was owed to the lender was way below what the property was going to go for. We went in there with a cashier’s check just in case nobody bid that we would actually take over the property, which would have actually been better for us. Of course, that didn’t happen. They overbid, bid up, bid up, bid up, property sold for way more than what the lender was asking. I got my face amount of the note, which was $35,000 plus additional expenses. And I walked away with about $38,000 for a five-day period.
Do that. Get creative, work and paper make you money. I love real estate paper. Notes and deeds, why? Because you don’t have headaches, you don’t have insurance issues, you don’t have any of that. It’s a negotiable instrument. Buy it, sell it, assign it, make money off of it, and that way, if anything happens that you end up with the property, you’re going to buying it for far less than the market value. So the chance of you losing it is a lot less.
Mike: Hey, Sam, talk to the people that are listening to this right now in terms of investing in multiple ways. So you invest in properties, you’ve got rental properties, you’re a lender, you’re buying notes, you’re apparently buying second liens. Lots of stuff there. So a lot of people, I think in this business, tend to get overwhelmed with there are so many different ways to make money and sometimes I think that paralyzes people. You and I both know that if you really understand real estate finance, like you’ve said, it’s all kind of the same. It’s really just a matter of how you calculate your return. But talk a little bit about how people that might be listening to this, if they don’t have a tremendous amount of experience with this or they’re not diversified, how they can diversify in other ways without getting overwhelmed with all the things you could do.
Sam: Yeah, you brought up a great point because you have too many options, you tend to get confused and we paralyze. Henry Kissinger said it best. He said, “Lack of alternatives will clear your mind.” And it’s every time my mind is cluttered and I say, “How many alternatives am I looking at right now?” Invariably, I see myself looking at different options. So what I do is I eliminate most of them and I end up with one and immediately, I get the clarity of the mind that says, “Okay. I only have one way to go.”
In my opinion, in this particular market, wholesaling and flipping property has become very difficult. I don’t know about your market, but in our market, the profit margin is very narrow. In most markets, I presume a whole bunch of people are doing the same thing. That’s why I like lending, buying junior liens, and particularly in your market, southern California is crazy and very unique, but in your market, I bet you in your market and in most parts of the country, I bet you people can find junior liens only focused on one thing: notes and paper. Trust deeds, notes and trust deeds.
Focus on that and sign up with a foreclosure listing company, such as County Records Research, Foreclosure Radar, any of those guys. Sign up with one of these guys, get a trainer, go out there and find out who you can buy junior liens from. Whether it’s a second or third, it doesn’t matter. If you do a good job researching the property and knowing the values there, figuring out what’s owed on the first mortgage and you pay pennies on the dollar for that junior lien, the profit margin on those are a hell of a lot better and much safer and you don’t need as much money as you would to go into a flip situation. Which in this market, I consider a pretty relatively dangerous situation.
Especially for people that do not know the business, they overpay. Ultimately, they overpay on purchase, they overpay on the rehab cost, and at the end, they are not going to be able to sell for what they want. And according to my friend, Kurt DeMeire, the owner of the County Records Research, he’s seen a whole bunch of these properties going into foreclosure by rehabbers and flippers right now. Hard money loans, high interest rates, over budget on rehab costs, paying too much for the property to begin with, just imagine, add one correction to the market, it’s enough to wipe out the majority.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Sam, I know you have a lot of information and you do a lot of teaching and mentoring and things like that. And, of course, you have your club, which we’ll add a link for down below. If folks want to learn more about you or about some of the things you teach, where do they go?
Sam: Google. Sam’s Club, you said it in the beginning, if you put “Sam’s Club Real Estate,” I’m going to pop up. I think we’re third or fourth on “real estate club Los Angeles.” The best way, so of course, SamsRealEstateClub.com, but Google is the best source. You know “Sam’s Club real estate Los Angeles,” it’s going to pop up all over the place. I’d be happy to help them. I talk to a lot of people during the day, some of them are not even members. I do spend time teaching [Inaudible 00:32:31] because I have a passion for it. I share from my heart, I don’t have things to sell to them, I don’t have teasers and upselling things. So we just share with them. We encourage them to take action. We don’t need to persuade anybody. We just need to give them encouragement. Go take action, do something, here’s a little bit of information. Maybe you can go out there and do something.
I want to validate you for what you’re doing because you’re bringing an incredible amount of knowledge and education to people out there for virtually free. And this is awesome because this is something people need to know. I don’t know of anybody who acted upon any endeavor with knowledge and failed ultimately. What you lose, people that lose, number one, are totally uninformed or uneducated, or two, they become so cocky about their information and over confident, that I know so much, that I don’t need to learn more, new strategies and they keep applying the same thing, eventually, that’s going to go all right.
Mike: Absolutely. I listened to a podcast of somebody, another real estate investor last night of some friends of mine. I won’t mention my competitors here for podcast. But no, anyway, someone who buys a lot of houses, like 50 to 100 houses a month and has a very successful business. He made some comment that just really stuck with me and I think it will really resonate with people. He said, “We fail every day. We make mistakes every day.” And I think a lot of newer real estate investors and a lot of people that have done something one way for a long time are so afraid of failing that they get paralyzed and they don’t move forward. When failure is not bad. What’s good is it’s an opportunity to learn from and adjust.
Sam: Absolutely. You put your finger right on it. Failure is nothing but a setback. And if you look at life itself, which is a duality, a concept of duality, failure is the other side of the coin to success. Do you know anybody who has succeeded without having failed?
Mike: No.
Sam: Look at the life of Abraham Lincoln, look at the life of Colonel Sanders, look at the life of people like Steve Jobs or even Bill Gates. You don’t know about their failures. The only thing we know about is their ultimate success. You read their biography and their life history and you realize that none of them got to where they got without having failed, getting the door slammed in their faces or any of that kind of stuff. You’ve got to go through that. So you’ve got to embrace failure because, ultimately, the other side of the coin is success.
Mike: Awesome, Sam. Well, we’ll add links for your club down below here. I appreciate you being with us today.
Sam: Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Best of luck to all of your listeners.
Mike: Absolutely. Thank you. Everybody, thanks for joining us today. Sam, please stay in touch, my friend, and I’m sure we’ll be talking soon.
Sam: Thank you, Mike.
Mike: Everybody, have a great day. Bye-bye.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: 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 sight that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry so get on over to FlipNerd.com.