Show Summary

Andrew Waite, Publisher of Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine, knows the Real Estate Investing Industry inside and out, as is a leading voice to actually turning this “Industry” into an Industry. In this episode, Andrew shares his take on the shift over the last several years to how the $300 billion a year real estate investing industry has always been a roll-up of fragmented ‘mom and pops’ and individual investors…and it’s recently become a hotbed for institutional players. If you want to know what’s happening in the real estate investing industry…don’t miss this opportunity to hear from the prophet himself.

Highlights of this show

  • Meet the ever so charming, Andrew Waite, Publisher of Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine (and sponsor of the FlipNerd.com VIP Show!).
  • Learn about the history of real estate investing; a fragmented industry made up of individual investors and off the radar of major players.
  • Learn about the future of real estate investing; an industry that has caught the attention of the largest institutional players and hedge funds in the industry.
  • Join the discussion on technological advances that are making this extremely inefficient business more efficient than ever, backed by deep pockets and major players.

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

FlipNerd Show Transcript:

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

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

Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with the Flip Nerd VIP show. Today, I’m back with a very special guest and a good friend of mine, Andrew Waite, who’s the publisher of Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine. They’re in their tenth year. We’re going to have Andrew tell us more about that. I hesitate to say that he is a leader in our industry because I’ve used those words several times. He truly is one of the very top leaders and voices of the real estate investing industry. I’m excited to have him here today.

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

Advertisement: RealtyMogul.com is an online market place for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan fast and close in as little as 10 days. Rates start as low as 9%.

We’d also like to thank National Real Estate Insurance Group, the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you.

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

Mike: Andrew, thanks for being on the show.

Andrew: Thank you Mike. How are you doing?

Mike: I’m fantastic. How are you sir?

Andrew: If I was any better, I’d be twins.

Mike: I don’t know if your wife would like that.

Andrew: That could be a problem, yeah.

Mike: I’m glad you’re on the show. You’re also a big supporter of FlipNerd.com and a big supporter of everybody that’s pushing the envelope in the industry to try to improve the real estate investing industry.

Why don’t you take a second and introduce yourself for those who don’t know who you are and tell us a little bit more about you.

Andrew: Just to make sure that the definition of what and how we support, Mike, the big thing for us is that we’re worried about standards-based process that’s sustainable. Part of the issue that we’ve seen with real estate investing is that it’s been a rather unsophisticated business that’s allowed a lot of predatory behavior by opportunistic educators and others, that’s why I’ve liked Homevestors for so long as being a really sound and sustainable alternative.

When we got into this business eleven years ago, August of 2003 we started planning and producing and selling the magazine. The mistake we made was we were going just after the flippers or the folks that showed up at a real estate investment club. What we didn’t realize is that when we analyzed these people, it turned out that about 10 to 15 percent of the market were indeed flippers.

Most of the real estate investment was Mom and Pop owning a couple of doors, a house, a small apartment building, a duplex or whatever, they were renting. Maybe they bought it in a distressed condition and renovated to the ability to rent it at retail, but whatever it was they didn’t define themselves as investors. They defined themselves as average Americans with some investment in real estate. It may sound like a nuance, but it’s very critical in the way you position yourself.

If you position yourself as an investment magazine, like we do, or a guy on a yacht with blondes at midnight trying to pitch education; these people do not relate to this. They’re looking for basic help in terms of optimizing their investment and making sure they’re doing a good job for themselves, their family, their kids’ education, their retirement. You can’t build credibility in that space by being a boisterous, credit card machines in the back of the room, opportunistic education thing.

After our first two or three years, thinking that was our market, we did some analysis on who was our market, discovered this and then started going a little more institutional in our approach. What that has allowed us to do is, first of all, retain our business during the end of the real estate market as we knew it in 2007/2008. Businesses were trying to find out how to exploit this asset class that, surprisingly enough, it’s a vast asset class. I’ll get to the numbers in a minute.

Mike: Like you said, it’s very fragmented. That’s always been very interesting to me. I come from a corporate background as well, and it’s a huge, huge industry. One of the largest industries in America. The company I worked for was number one in this space and they had six percent market share. So it’s very fragmented.

Andrew: The things that we worked out was, first of all, calling them investors was not the right title. They were just average Americans with real estate investments. Nuanced, but important. The second thing is, when you look at the installed base, if you will, of rental properties, coming from the computer world, that’s where the installed base comes from, the existing asset base of single families and properties less than four doors that fall into that category. Of the total rental households in the United States, 58 percent of them are housed in homes and properties owned by individual investors.

Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, right? These were not institutions. That gave us huge pause. We had been validated in a big way that Home Depot came to us and said, “Okay, you’re one of the only brands that seems to be embracing this and understanding where the market’s going.”

We also saw with the arrival of the major funds in the real estate market in 2010/2011 that here was a grossly undervalued asset base, in terms of distressed housing, that has a life way beyond just the trade.

What we’ve seen is these vast funds, the Cerberuses, the Blackstones, the Colony Capitals, etcetera, pour billions into this market, and continue to pour billions. They’ve just changed their position a little bit in terms of investing in it, because they see it as a hugely vast market. A very interesting and very stable asset base with a very long life. As long as Maslow’s Law dictates we require shelter, there’s a demand for properties that house individuals.

Mike: One of the things that’s interesting when we talk about the fragmentation and how that’s changing with institutional players coming in; I know you’ve been a big part of the voice at capturing the transition to making this an investable asset class versus something that Mom and Pops or individual investors do.

One of the things that’s always benefited individual real estate investors is the fact that there are so many inefficiencies in this industry. How do you see that changing over the years to come? This market has gotten more efficient in the last few years alone, I can feel it.

Andrew: What you’re going to see is far more efficiency. One of the things that is very interesting, and I don’t think I’m violating any non-
disclosures; when Home Depot got into it, the first thing they did was fund the study that we conducted. That study said there were eight to nine million real estate investors, individuals, in the United States. There was this 2.6 to 4 trillion dollar asset base that nobody was paying attention to.

In the middle of it, the Blackstones of the world jumped into the business and said, “Okay, what do we do with this? We’re buying it low, we’re going to renovate it, generate some income,” and of course, their return on investment also includes an exit of some sort.

That exit turns around and suddenly becomes concepts. These companies are packaging blocks of assets and they’re going to turn around and offer a Charles Schwab experience to passive investors using real estate. That’s a way a lot of people can feed property in on the sell side, and buy property out on the buy side.

But, the more interesting thing that I find, and you talk about fragmentation, all of my previous lives have involved channel management. Distribution is a big deal. In the last publication we had, which was Technology Investor, based in New York, talking about NASDAQ stock; what we found was the distribution of stock was a federally managed and regulated environment, national in scope, based out of New York, and there were some pretty accepted standards in terms of suitability and appropriateness of an investment to a client. All the rules of “Know thy client.”

You turn around and you say, “Okay, I’m going to invest in real estate.”
You find right off the bat that the regulation of real estate sales, etcetera, is local in nature in terms of state jurisdictions with apartments or real estate and every one of them has a slightly different twist on it. Second of all, the individual real estate practitioner is typically even more constrained in their practice because of span of management and local practice.

What they’ve done at the same time that they’ve become specialized in neighborhoods, is that some have claimed that they’ve become specialized in the niche of real estate investors. What you find is that by saying that, they’re already in violation of their licensing.

If you have a real estate license, a realtor license or a broker license, the first thing you’re not allowed to talk about is future value. That is considered to be bordering on talking about investments. Investments imply retirement and that is a very strictly regulated area.

With most regulations, their errors and omissions insurance as carried by their brokers prohibits investment practice. So what you discover is the whole regulatory environment is designed for the profession, whether it be securities or whether it be realtors, it’s not designed to help individual investors as customers.

There’s a vast opening here for people with the right understanding of how to go about it, how to work within the rules and bring the appropriate regulation into space. Because it’s going to come if we keep doing what we’re doing as badly as we’re doing it.

Then, ultimately, we have this incredible asset class with things that are not offered anywhere else. And the ability to leverage it in a number of ways. Through appreciation, borrowing, tax implications, real income, and all the risk mitigation that can go on with real estate investments.

It’s a business that really doesn’t understand itself, and as a result, doesn’t promote itself very well. I think that gives opportunity to a wise investor like yourself, or one of your Flip Nerd subscribers or readers.

Mike: What do you see coming here? You see them as an asset class that individuals can invest in? Or is this going to get packaged and get sold to schoolteachers and policemen?

Andrew: There’s room for everybody. You can still pick your level of participation, whether you want to be an end investor, whether you want to invest directly and own a property yourself, or you want to participate in a managed fund. If you want it as a career, there are companies like Homevestors that you can basically sign up with for 15 grand and become a Homevestors associate. You get all the education, all the support, the technology as part of your ongoing advertising fee and royalties.

Beyond that, when you start looking at some of the other ways into the market; there are a lot of people that are in transition from their corporate lives to their “what are they going to do for the rest of their lives.” The luxury of retirement is getting more and more remote for a lot of people. The demand for housing, if you look at the demographics, is just going to get bigger and bigger.

Part of the problem we’ve got with that is with the demands there, the exiting stock is going to be priced up and up and up, and the new stock is not coming on at the pace it needs to, because of lending constraints and all sorts of other craziness. At the end of the day, this is one of those assets that’s going to attract a lot of people to it.

Mike: I try to not get too market specific here on the show, but in my market in Dallas, we have rental properties that were in for, I tend to focus on what we call C-class property, and we may be in those properties for, say, 40 to 50 dollars a square foot or less, which is half of the build price. Those are in cities where they’re never going to build again and those markets are just going to continue to be a higher and higher percentage of rental properties. They don’t build rental communities anymore. You have to wait for them to age to get there, generally speaking.

Andrew: Absolutely. You’ve got to watch your markets very carefully, because what you find is that if you don’t have the employment demand for those houses, or you have the wrong employment price point, minimal income, etcetera, some of that old stock that’s aging into rentals is also aging out, period. And it should be knocked down and rebuilt.

What you end up doing when you do that inside the projects, or price points that the average person can’t afford, gentrification occurs. It’s an interesting dilemma, and most of the so-called government solutions end up being very short term.

Mike: There’s been a lot of hedge fund buying. We’re getting offers on our retail homes that we have in resale for full price, or close to it, from hedge funds which can’t sustain itself in most parts of the country. What do you think is going to happen with all this buying, where folks are overpaying and pushing out investors?

Andrew: There are two classes of hedge funds. The leaders are genuine leaders, they’re very bright people that understand, better than you and I, what the dynamics are, the money, buying the property, managing the property, and ultimately packaging or exiting the property. None of these plans are short term.

Then there are a whole bunch of wannabes that saw a strategy and copied it. They’re not sure why they copied it, short of, “Well, if Blackstone did it, so am I.” Blackstone did it very strategically the guy jumping into the market now is probably not doing it strategically. It’s more copycat. Those
“me too” guys always tend to get the short end of the stick.

Mike: It’s probably more the folks that can raise money and it’s the proverbial dog; we raised the money, now what are we going to do with it?
Let’s go and make some sloppy decisions.

Andrew: You mean as the dog that caught the car?

Mike: Yeah, that’s right. So, Andrew, tell us a little bit about your background, before you started Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine.

Andrew: I’m a recovering lawyer. I found myself recruited out of a law firm into a computer company that was essentially a start-up that sold itself to Honeywell. That division of Honeywell was spun out and bought by Datapoint. The technology we were pursuing was the ability to account for telephone calls. Lawyers had an issue with the amount of telephony expenses in their long-distance charges in their files when they were defending or prosecuting cases, and they needed to recapture them.

I found myself in that business and realized that from the point of view of, if you become a specialist in something, you’re probably one of few. So I became specialized in the whole business of telephony accounting on the customer side. Although, it turned out that we were being driven harder by customers in terms of what they needed, and a lot of that flowed back into the telephone company.

We ended up building call centers because the basic telephony switches we were building were very high volume and very high management. We discovered that if we flipped them around we could take calls rather than just originate calls. That got me into telemarketing, airline reservation, the catalog business, etcetera, in terms of how do you manage big call volumes and provide customer service.

From there, we built the company, sold it off, took it public, blah blah blah. A buddy of mine was a publisher in New York who was very interested in what we were doing in telephony. We were doing something which was far more fun, because we dealt with people as it related to telephony, as opposed to lots of technology that related to telephone companies. People were more interested in profit rather than the outcome for customer service.

I was adopted by this publisher who said, “Come to New York and help me publish a magazine on call centers.” And we started that in 1987 and I found myself in the call center business. I stayed on the board of directors until ’97 when we sold that company.

In the meantime, my previous employer, Technicon Industries, launched a venture capital fund in Palo Alto called Visionary Corporate Technologies. They hired me back running sales, and I ended up both sales and marketing there.

We sold that, and I found myself in the venture capital business with another company, and then got hired by Anderson to run part of their customer relationship management practice.

My partners decided to launch another magazine, “Technology Investor,”
because we’d made a lot of money on the sale of our previous publishing company. We thought we were really smart, but we couldn’t find the magazine about how to invest. So, we created “Technology Investor.” We sold that. It closed on September 10th, 2001, and I came home to Phoenix. We know what happened on September 11th. We all sat around licking our wounds as we watched the stock market crash.

I worked out that my real estate investments, of which I had a couple, had been untouched by this. I thought, “That’s weird. What’s going on, here?
Where’s the magazine?” So I went looking for the magazine that would explain to me how to get involved in the real estate space and I realized there wasn’t one. Nothing on newsstands, there were a couple newsletters. There were a lot of gurus out there teaching. There were some books, but none of them were really involved on a day-to-day, week-to-week, repetitive basis like a magazine was.

I did a little research and I jumped into it. Then I discovered all the flaws and why real estate investments were different than traded assets or stocks, funds and bonds. So, it was a matter of working out how to navigate that in the context of what are the needs. There were so many marketing opportunities in the real estate investment space. Here we are, 11 years later, and we’re building software for Home Depot and other clients based on mobile technology and business system integration, basically, back where I came from.

Mike: You’re not just a publisher of a magazine, you are a dating service, bringing people together. And you’re behind some of these technologies that are being built, is that right?

Andrew: I am a partner with the development company. I’m doing all the selling for them. People constantly tell me, “I want to go to the beach. I’m tired of doing this.” What you find is that there are very few people who understand business process who can then articulate it into a solution and then build something to do that.

What you find with technology, whether it be mainframes, the web, PCs, or mobile; most people are brought up in just one niche. When you say to them, and this is what happened at Home Depot, “Okay, we want you to interface with the mainframe which, oh by the way, is running on a 30 year old BMS, A.G. Edwards technology or databases.” They go, “We don’t do that. We don’t understand it.”

You go, “Who’s going to solve this problem?” Because you’ve got data in that system that needs to be over here to be useful to either. And so, what we’ve found is that there’s a huge opportunity for going back into system integration. That’s what we’re doing with some of this mobile technology. Directly focused at the investor market. If you’re a national account for Home Depot, like Homevestors is, you’ve got those technologies coming to you at no charge because they want to capture the revenue.

The first people to embrace this were all of these institutions, because they saw the ability to leverage their manpower. Huge force multipliers in these mobile technologies. I think we’ve only just scratched the surface on what mobile technology is capable of. Its mobility and versatility and ability to do just about anything, as a media computer, or a terminal off an existing system. It leverages a lot of stationary technology.

Mike: The people that are on the front lines as real estate investors tend to be old school. Technology has not collided with the front line guy in real estate, generally speaking. A lot of us in the Homevestors system are using iPads for a lot of things now. But, there are still people that are ten years behind where they should be.

That really feeds into the fragmentation and inefficiencies, because there is so much information available to us as real estate professionals, but it tends to be in many different systems. It’s in the county tax records, different databases that you don’t have access to. Very few people are pulling that all together, but I see it coming.

Andrew: There’s a very good example with Homevestors and the implementation of mobile technology. There are multiple sources of the data and there’s no single vehicle that plays traffic cop and brings in the right data at the right point in time of the process.

So, when Home Depot looked at the platform mobility as a process, they said, “Okay, where are we going to use this to leverage point of sale?
Mike, buy something.” Right? That’s great, but in the process of buying something, there was some data created, and what did that mean? Well, Homevestors said, “Okay, if we’ve got this tool from Home Depot that allows us to calculate materials costs and labor costs, that is one fourth of the data our agents need to know when they’re buying a house.” Because we know what our margins need to be to make it a worthwhile transaction, and we know what it’s going to cost now to renovate it.

We need to pull in the data from the tax records, the market comps, what the income should be for this property, and the calculations related to it meeting fundamentals. The only thing missing was then how much did we need to pay for the house to make it a viable buy? That was a process that took many months for some Homevestors recruits to learn how to do. They would take three to six months to get comfortable with this process. We have, in many cases, collapsed that to three to six weeks. We’re taking a lot of what was considered to be a black art and we put it into a mobile app. So, you just have to fill out the forms and join the dots, and you’ve got an answer.

So, that buying decision support component came out of something else. But that data is the proforma that could populate a loan origination document that could be pushed automatically into underwriting to give you an answer as to whether or not you’ve got a loan to buy this house. That’s all happening in minutes. That sort of integration and seamlessness is hugely powerful.

Mike: Absolutely. I know you have a crystal ball, I don’t see it there with you, but why don’t you tell us where you see things going over the next year or two. A lot of real estate investors are feeling it’s tighter in their markets to buy houses right now, largely because interest rates are still low. Builders are lagging by a couple years in many markets. Hedge funds are paying more than we typically would for houses. That’s caused some grief for a lot of real estate investors. Why don’t you tell us where you think things are going to go over the next year or two?

Andrew: I don’t think it’s going to get any better for real estate investors who want to go it alone and do it the old way. My argument is that we are transitioning now from a do-it-yourself, hobby, cottage industry into a retail environment where there’s still a place for you as a real estate investor, don’t get me wrong. Just not as the guy who does it all. You can buy houses and renovate them, and there’s a fund or somebody that will buy them from you to sell through their retail distribution system. You’ll either pay a fee for the distribution, or you’ll take a discount to exit the property.

Then there are going to be companies like Homevestors who offer an easy way to get cradle to grave support in terms of real estate investing. You guys are the only people in the space at the moment, and that’s associated by your success with the associate franchise space. Your fee to join the environment and your ongoing maintenance fees are less than what most of these gurus charge for their second or third weekend in mentoring. And you’ve got lifetime support, and they go, “Good seeing you, thanks for your money. Goodbye.” The deliver a lot less than they promise.

The whole realtor space is being organized by the likes of Own America, who is setting up huge buying processes. They will go and scour the MLS and pocket listings and other options, bank REO properties, etcetera, to determine if there are properties in there that meet their client’s buying criteria. Their clients are the funds and the mid-cap turnkey companies. Companies like Own America are basically mobilizing idle capacity amongst realtors. Realtors are real anxious to make money, and they have a local presence already to go find those properties.

Own America is also integrated with the Home Depot approach and about to be integrated with Homevestors as offering you properties that they’ve found to help you enrich your buying side. That’s going to continue to exist for a long time. At the end of the day, if Blackstone were to do it all by themselves, dis-integrated from other people, they wouldn’t find many of those properties.

People like that, and local turnkey companies will look to that class of conduit as a source of properties, because they’re acting as agents rather than the actual principal in the transaction, which is a realtor’s function.

On the sell side, a lot of these funds are going through their inventory and are re-balancing them. They sell houses that don’t fit, they buy more houses that do fit, and they’re using the agents to sell those properties into a retail environment. So there’s that whole section of the market.

We’re seeing a proliferation in the space of individual associations and clubs and so forth, trying to relive some of the old model and aggregate either vendors or lenders or whatever. I think they’re hanging onto an old model, thinking that they can keep taking money from individual, wannabe investors without giving them a lot of value.

Then there are a lot of multi-level marketing companies. The Strongbrooks, Real Estate Worldwide, folks like that. Just network marketing companies that sell education. They’re a total dead end for an investment.

Mike: Tell us a little bit more about where you’re going with “Personal Investor Real Estate Magazine from here.

Andrew: We’re a print product to start with. That’s really important because as everybody will tell you, print is dead. But at the end of the day, what you find is that print is credible. That’s a hard one to dismiss.

We’ve got presence in Barnes and Noble, and airport newsstands nationwide. We still sell magazines. That is not dead, by any means. It allows us to publish an electronic version on all of the electronic newsstands.

We were really late to the market in terms of publishing electronically, because the whole assumption in the internet was, if print is dead, the internet was free. My question is, “How do you monetize dead product in a free environment?” It was a contradiction.

When the world of the tablet burst onto the scene in 2010, instantly what they did, which was really clever, was they replicated the financial model of traditional newsstands. So I now could monetize out content in an electronic environment. We were on the iPad within three months of it being launched.

So, we were very early in the tablet market. We were never in the give-away space. We tried to avoid that like crazy. We’ve backed up a little bit and provide much more content on our website, www.PersonalRealEstateInvestorMag.com We’re publishing studies and a lot of economic stuff in terms of what it means to real estate investors. There’s a lot of basic how-to stuff, too, with some great partners.

In the middle of it, when I first saw the mobile technology, I went, “Here we go again.” If you notice, every time there’s a shift in technology, from PCs to LANs, LANs to the web, all they did was reproduce what they were doing in a new vehicle. So, when the first jump into the web for print product, all they did was put a screen up that replicated a print page.

They didn’t take any advantage of the dynamics. It took a few more years to do that. That’s what happened with the mobile technology. And we still do it, as it turns out. We create a PDF version and push it into the app store.

With this request from Home Depot to help them do a number of things, I saw something that was a new platform and a new model for publishing and information distribution. Giving the ability to be dynamic with the mobile technology. We’re in the middle of building that technology now. Think in terms of Angry Birds meets real estate investment.

That’s where we’re going with this. And by the way, it’s full of rich media inventory to be able to be sold. It’s a mash up of all of the things that we’ve been doing for years in terms of media and some of the other platforms that we’ve been involved in.

Mike: You’ve shared a lot of insights about how the industry has changed with more institutional players and some of the smaller individual folks maybe getting squeezed out or having to reinvent themselves. Talk a little bit about how the magazine is changing to better provide content for the new players and the old players that are having to reinvent themselves.

Andrew: The issue that I think is really important, that underlies all of this, is principle and standards. You can’t really conduct a predictable business that will attract customers unless there’s a predictable behavior and a standards-based behavior.

We got really sideways with one of these companies out of Memphis, because we said, “There are gap accounting standards, generally accepted accounting principles that need to apply to rental property. You can’t leave stuff out because it’s inconvenient or it compromises your so-called return on investment.” And they were pissed about it.

Wouldn’t you know, after three or four years, they’ve now adopted gap principles, but not without getting really pissed that we were calling them on it. At the end of the day, they were having to buy back properties from investors who they’ve disappointed by not meeting their representations. You can’t run a business like that. It’s a short-term play. They got caught, and they had to buy back a bunch of properties as a result.

That sort of behavior, instilling standards so that the external customer can trust our industry, is the first step. People go, “That’s not a lot of technology in that. It’s not future thinking.” At the end of the day, it’s all about human nature and behavior. Unless you reinforce good behavior and force out bad behavior, you don’t have an industry that’s got any legs.

That’s been the problem with real estate investment. It’s been fragmented. It’s allowed a lot of shonky operators to thrive. The worst people in your Market are those folks that don’t follow principles. You walk in with a comp price that’s sustainable, with a lot of data, and they’ll come in and undercut you, whatever the product or service may be.

They’re going to lose money and go out of business. They’ve got to be cutting corners somewhere. And sure enough, the customer goes with them because they’re cheaper and the customer has a less than satisfying experience. We see it all the time. I’ve always enjoyed being the most expensive vendor in most markets.

The statement made to somebody who chooses the competitor that’s cheaper is, “I promise you’ll be back to talk to us in a couple of years.” And, inevitably, they would have a really poor experience because the margins weren’t there deliver the customer service experience and the quality of product they were looking for. And they’d be back at our camp going, “Sorry we didn’t go with you the first time. You were right. We didn’t get what we’d bargained for. At the end of the day, it’s about our business, not their ability to sell us a cheaper product.”

We all buy our materials from the same places. We all hire labor at the same places. And we all know what the costs are. That’s the great leveler. If somebody’s willing to compromise their margins, they’re probably going to go out of business.

Mike: Yeah, that’s one of the challenges with real estate investors. There are so many people that want to do this. They come in, do a deal or two, get wiped out, and I kind of liken them to fire ants. You can kill a mound, but they just keep coming back.

Andrew: The fire ant phenomenon of real estate investing. Absolutely. I think P.T. Barnum said, “There’s one born every minute,” right? You can fool most of the people most of the time.

Mike: There are a lot of folks that deserve for this to be a vehicle to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve. And they follow the wrong people, or they get caught in the wrong system, or they say they can do it themselves and they learn they can’t. That’s the frustrating thing for me. I don’t generally talk about the Homevestors system too much here. Obviously, I’m one of the largest mentors in the Homevestors system, but when we’re talking to people about joining, and they say, “I’m just going to do it alone,” or, “I’m going to go with another shop,” that we know is comparing apples and oranges. It’s sad.

Andrew: The reason I talk about Homevestors is you’re such a clearly superior alternative and you provide not only the core education and support systems, but you connect your pupils/associates with the Homevestors brand. You’re supplying the leads to these people that nobody else is seeing. You won’t let them get into trouble because they hurt your image and your overall performance as a brand and a company.

When you go to one of these travelling salesmen, these circus promoters, these predators, it’s about the event and making sure you pay them. But don’t call for any support, because they’ve moved on to the next person. They’ve got to feed the monster by selling more people more deals. Not real estate, education.

Mike: Andrew, thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate it.

Andrew: You’re very welcome, Mike. Good luck, God bless, and thank you for the opportunity.

Mike: Good to see you, as always.

Andrew: Offer your readers our magazine:
www.PersonalRealEstateInvestorMag.com. Or you can push it through FlipNerd as a resource for your clients.

Mike: Absolutely. We’ll have links below the video to get access to your magazine. If you’re not a subscriber, I highly recommend it. It’s really the only industry publication that’s stood the test of time and has a lot of great information and resources in there. We appreciate that, we appreciate your support, Andrew.

Andrew: Thank you, Mike. Anything I can do for you, just ask.

Mike: I’ll ask. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Andrew: Bye-bye.

Mike: Thanks for joining us on today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To listen to more of our shows and hear from incredible guests, please access all of our podcasts in the iTunes store. You can also watch the video versions of our shows, by visiting us at FlipNerd.com.

 

Copy link
Powered by Social Snap