This Video Took 9 Years to Make. 70 rentals at 24

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]When I was 15 years old, I was scrolling on YouTube one day and I found this clip of Grant Cardone where he said, >> "Son, if you want freedom, if you want financial freedom, you can work or you can buy real estate."

[00:00:16]>> From that moment, I told myself that one day I'm going to own a ton of real estate.

[00:00:23]That was literally all I knew. I knew nothing other than the fact I knew I wanted to own a lot of real estate one day because well, Grant Cardone said it'll make me financially free. And my YouTube algorithm when I was 15 was nothing but Grant Cardone and Tai Lopez.

[00:00:54]So obviously when 15-year-old me decided he wanted to buy a lot of real estate, he did what Tai Lopez told him to do, which was to read a lot of books cuz knowledge. So I did just that. I ordered whatever books popped up on Amazon whenever I looked up real estate. And there were other books I read than the ones I just showed. But the biggest one was a few Bigger Pockets books. And then I actually got Grant Cardone's free real estate book. And after reading all them, it turns out turns out you really need money before you start buying real estate.

[00:01:24]I want to clarify. Yes, there are ways to invest in real estate with very little money or technically no money with subject to, but it is called investing for a reason. For you to truly get the benefits of real estate, you need to invest into properties and assets. For you to truly get the generational wealth creating perks of owning real estate. The type of wealth that Grant Cardone talks about, you get out of real estate, you get by investing, by having a strong cash producing business first or strong income first before investing in real estate.

[00:02:02]So, I got back onto the wonderful 2017 YouTube algorithm, started trying to find ways to make money online. I was 15 years old. I had zero skills and zero money to invest in starting a business.

[00:02:14]So, I went down a lot of rabbit holes, but Alex Becker was the first make money online guy I came across. And that's where I discovered SEO marketing services. So, I learned SEO and tried to market it to a few businesses. Didn't really work out. So, I went to the next trending make money as a 15-year-old niche and discovered SMA marketing. Gave it a go. Did not work out. And each one of these hustles, I put all my will into it. It was a lot of effort. I definitely did not fail because of a lack of effort. Honestly, looking back on it now that I've had few runs with business. If I just stuck to one of those things instead of switching, it would have worked out. The last thing I got roped into an MLM. I don't judge myself too hard. I mean, I I 15 years old. I was trying to make money. Look, I don't judge myself too hard for that one. But hey, as he started to go poorly, I was wrestling and I was in band. So, became pretty easy to easy to move on for the time being and be a kid.

[00:03:07]So failure after failure, I did what was logical and decided to go to college and I said I would just figure it out afterwards.

[00:03:17]I was not going to try to start a business while I was in college because I decided I was going to go to college to focus on wrestling for roughly the first two years of college. My whole life revolved around wrestling in college. And I had fun. I loved wrestling and I was having fun in college. But in the back of my mind, there was this kind of nagging feeling that I believe was a promise I made to my 15-year-old self to one day own a lot of real estate. But then something happened that forced me to re-evaluate my priorities.

[00:03:55]I got a concussion. And then I met Antonio George.

[00:04:00]We started talking in the locker room one day about real estate. During this whole time, I never forgot about real estate and my desire to get into it. I had been listening to podcast anytime I could when I was driving or in between classes. I was always listening to Bigger Pockets. But I never pulled the trigger or anything. I was just learning everything I could about real estate. So yes, your sec your first step should be to earn, but while you're earning, you should be learning. So that's what I was doing minus the earning part. I was learning, but I wasn't earning. In my head, I was going to college to learn how to earn. But things changed once I started talking with my teammate Antonio George. When I got a concussion, something about it made me realize I need to start focusing on how to earn now and not later. I can't explain exactly what switch it flipped in my head, but it made me realize that being in college is great. Wrestling is great, but my body I only had so much time with maximum energy to start earning. So, one way or the other, it flipped a switch in me to decide to start earning now. And at the time because I was talking to Antonio, my brainstorming sessions with my damaged brain turned into actual action because Antonio was there to amplify my thoughts and ideas into actual action. So what did we do?

[00:05:24]I'll get to that next. Wholesale real estate is how Antonio and I got started.

[00:05:29]After a few weeks of us just talking about real estate and how we both understood that we needed to get into real estate, but we both also understood that we needed some income before we could get into real estate. We both were independently doing research. In our own pursuits, I came across land wholesaling and Antonio came across real estate wholesaling. We both attempted wholesaling on our own before we came together and worked together to wholesale. Before and after practices, we would be sharing our stories on our attempts at wholesaling real estate. I would tell him about how land wholesaling was going and he would tell me about how his wholesaling houses was going. What is wholesaling real estate?

[00:06:07]This took Antonio and I a little bit to understand and it was very confusing for us at the time or maybe I just had concussion brain. But we had to spend a lot of locker room conversations trying to figure out what exactly wholesaling is and how to do it. But here it is in a nutshell. Seller with a house. Here's your seller. Seller. And then over here, I'm going to put a buyer. Moneybags. We have a buyer with all the money. We got the buyer. The buyer here, he wants deals. Buyer is an investor and he wants houses to add to his portfolio. Seller owns a house. You are going to get this buyer. You're going to get this buyer, this house under contract for him. So you cold call, text, door knock, PPC, PPL, SMA. You advertise like crazy to homeowners to get a house under contract. This is a contract. You're getting a house under contract at a discount. These homeowners are supposed to be distressed homeowners who need to sell their house quickly for cash. So that's where you are negotiating with the seller to get it at a low price. So you get under contract at say $20,000.

[00:07:19]Yes, we have gotten houses under contract for $20,000. So the seller is going to get paid $20,000.

[00:07:26]Seller will get paid $20,000. You then show the buyer this house and say, "Hey buyer, you can have this house for $30,000." Buyer says yes. And then you assign this contract. This contract is just the right to buy this house at $20,000. So you assign the contract to the buyer for the difference, okay? For $30,000. So then you get paid the difference of $10,000. Sounds simple. It is simple, but it is not easy. Cuz what you'll find, sellers do not want to sell at a discount. Buyers do not want to pay your asking price. So, how do you fix this? You do a lot of marketing, a lot of cold calling, a lot of door knocking, and you speak to a lot of sellers, an ungodly amount of sellers, a tremendous amount of volume. But this is basically wholesaling, and it's what we sought after to do. We thought it'd be really easy, and we'd make a lot of money and then be able to buy rentals. That's not how it went.

[00:08:27]Here are the strategies we were both trying. Doing. Door knocking. Antonio was doornocking pre-forclosures. Here's how it went for Antonio. Door knocking.

[00:08:39]I attempted SMS. I was texting people who owned land and I was trying to wholesale land. I had no idea who was going to buy this land when I wholesaliled it. After about 3 months of texting people, I successfully did my first deal and made uh measily $2,000.

[00:08:56]Not bad. But it became very clear how much volume of effort was required in order to wholesale successfully. That's when Antonio and I decided to join forces to wholesale together. See, because we both were having to go to class and wrestle, we both knew we did not have enough time to fully pursue wholesaling. After I did my first deal, it took thousands of text messages and hundreds of leads for me to be able to pull off one successful wholesale deal.

[00:09:22]For me, that first deal was proof of concept, but also was proof of how much volume was required to succeed. So, Antonio and I needed to work together to do enough reps in order to succeed at it. while we both were wrestling full-time and in class full-time. So, Antonio stopped door knockocking and I stopped texting and we started cold calling using a multi-line dialer. What is a multi-line dialer? Well, one person with one phone, this is a telephone, can call one call at a time. They're using one phone to call one person at a time, one call to one homeowner. See, when you're doing that, you call, no one picks up, you leave a voicemail, you hang up, you go to the next one. It can take 20, 30, 40 phone calls before you even speak to someone on the phone. So, this is what the multi-line dialer did for us.

[00:10:08]Instead of only being able to call one person at a time, it's as if you have several phones calling all at once. So, it's calling four different homeowners.

[00:10:18]And then this way, if this person doesn't pick up and this person and this person, those three don't pick up, but this one picks up. For you, it's as if you only made one phone call, called four people, and got to one person. In the time of just one phone call, you basically called four people. For us, because we were going to practice and going to class, every minute we had, we had a juice. So, when we got this multi-line dialer, we could basically do 4 hours of calling in the span of 1 hour. Between the two of us, we said we would always get at least 5 hours a day of cold calling in. I could do two and a half. He could do two and a half. I do two, he does two. We do a morning shift, evening shift, whatever. It didn't matter. As long as we hit five hours per day, that was our non-negotiable agreement to ourselves. So, you're probably thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of cold calling. I bet you guys got so many deals right away. How long did it take us to get a deal under contract? And how long did it take us to actually make any money off of wholesaling?" After 1 month, we walked our first deal. Did it go under contract? No.

[00:11:21]After two months, we walked a few more deals. Did they go under contract?

[00:11:25]Actually, yes. We got two houses under contract. Did we flip them to a buyer?

[00:11:29]No. They were in the middle of nowhere.

[00:11:30]We thought we were getting great deals cuz we were getting houses under contract for like four grand. Turns out there's a reason we were getting them under contract for 4 grand cuz nobody would buy them. At 3 months, we thought we were going somewhere. We started to learn a little bit more about what our buyers like and we got a few places under contract and even got under contract with a buyer. But when the buyer got out to the property, condition was way worse than he thought and he defaulted. So we got a contract with the seller and a contract with the buyer, but no one ended up closing. Month three, again, bail. Months four through six, more of the same stuff. We kept getting places under contract, thinking we had an end buyer, they go out to the property. It was way worse than it looked. However, one thing we did start to get good at was negotiating with sellers lower. So Ed, every time we got these deals under contract with the seller and buyer, we're always just right there. The seller's price was so close to the buyer's price, but the buyer was either always under or the same as the seller.

[00:12:27]And we were running into the same issue over and over of the buyer going out there, them telling us what's wrong, them needing it lower, and then our price with the seller being above what the buyer needs it for. How did we finally fix this? Renegotiating. That is how we got our first deal under contract with a seller and a buyer where we make a profit that got to close and we actually closed on a deal. So the months four through six was a lot of the same stuff from months 1 through three.

[00:12:51]However, this time we got better at negotiating with sellers and getting the prices down and also putting pressure on the buyer to come up and get the deal done. See, a lot of a lot of new wholesalers will not renegotiate with a seller and will not lowball enough. But in these months, we started to just lowball like crazy and renegotiate to get down at our price. Then I remember it was in October. We got our first ever deal where we made a profit. We got under contract for $5,000 and we wholesale it for $7,000. We made $2,000.

[00:13:20]However, we are running the multi-line dialer monthly subscription on a credit card. So, we had to pay that off. So, at the end of the day, we both profited 500 bucks each, which to this day is the most excited I've ever been for wholesale deal closing. and we have closed $50,000 plus wholesale deals. Our largest wholesale deal to date was a $75,000 deal. And it does not compare to how excited we were when we made that first wholesale check. And then from there, we set out to scale and we wanted to get to 10,000 per month so that way we can save up enough cash to buy our first rental. We both were in the mindset of getting good at wholesaling, but we also both knew that to truly become wealthy, you need to own the real estate. Wholesaling is a hustle. You eat what you kill. If you're not having a good month wholesaling, you're not getting paid. So, the income can be very up and down, and you're not truly building generational wealth. If you're not cold calling, you're not closing sellers, you're not getting money, and it is not a true vehicle to become profoundly wealthy. It is a vehicle to get cash. So, here is roughly how scaling went and the biggest unlocks we had to scale our wholesaling operation.

[00:14:27]Unlock number one was hiring a VA.

[00:14:29]Instead of us cold calling every day for five hours, we hired a VA that cold called for five hours a day. We paid them $5 an hour, $15 an appointment, $40 a deal. This unlocked us each tremendous amount of time to get better buyers, learn about better marketing, and go on more appointments and focus on the higher leverage tasks. And that eventually turned into two VAS that were cold calling all day. We could go to practice and the VA would be calling.

[00:14:53]And then when we'd get out of practice, the VA would have some warm, ready to go leads for us that we'd call, set up an appointment, or get under contract. The second unlock was better buyers. So, a lot of wholesalers will find one buyer and think that's all they need. But in our niche market, after we went from having only three buyers to five to 10 buyers, it unlocked so many more deals.

[00:15:12]We were able to move and it also gave us such a better understanding of what buyers are looking for. So, we got better at negotiating with sellers cuz we could truly explain to them why we need it at the prices we have it at. The third unlock was mail. Once we were getting consistent leads and deals from our cold calling, that's how our our first 20 deals were all from cold calling. It was pretty inexpensive. Each VA cost us roughly 600 bucks a month.

[00:15:34]The dialer cost us roughly less than 500 bucks a month. The skip tracing and list pooling and data pooling another few hundred bucks a month. But our first 20 deals were from cold calling. The thing about cold calling is the ROI is super high, but it's super inconsistent. So one month we got no deals and the next month we got three or four deals. It took us about another 60 days to get our second deal and then 30 days for the third. Then our fourth, fifth, and sixth kind of all came together. And then there was a long pause where we weren't getting any deals, but our cold callers were still getting leads every single day. But what really made our deal flow consistent and stable was when we started mailing as well. So we weren't just relying on one channel, we were relying on two now. So that balanced out. If cold calling was slow one month, mailing would be strong. So then it stabilized us. Another unlock was hiring more VAS. inbound VAS for the mail and calling because whenever you leave a voicemail they'll call back. So that was kind of an in-between unlock we had. But then after mailing big unlock was PPCS SEO. So we started paying for Google ads and we got our own website ranked in Google. From there as far as uh the next bigger unlocks we had PPL and we had SMA. So what really started to make our wholesaling business a business was when we got to a three-legged stool with our marketing. We had deals coming in from calling, mailing and PPC. And then I kind of group the other ones like PPL and SMA kind of more accessory marketing that kind of gives us that gave us omniresence in our market and provided more legs of the stool to give us consistent deal flow. Once we started to have consistent deal flow, that also gave us leverage with our buyers. So, we were able to force a higher spread on our deals because they knew we were going to keep sending them deals and that we were not just another Tik Tok wholesaler that was going to send them one deal and never speak to them again.

[00:17:17]We were the deal plug in our market. So, that was how we really got our wholesaling operation to be a cash cow that allowed us to get enough cash to get into our first rental. How did we find our first rental? This whole time, we'd been mastering learning what buyers buy and what they don't buy. and we built a pipeline that gave us first dibs on all the best deals in our market. So, one day we had this house come into our CRM that we got under contract for $30,000 that needed basically no work, only some cleaning because it had problem tenants and the tenants needed to be evicted. That's why the seller was motivated. We could buy it for $30,000 or make a $15 to $20,000 wholesale fee because the offers we were getting back from buyers were between $45 and $50,000. We didn't agree on a certain timeline on when we were going to buy our first property, but we knew we wanted to be real estate investors, not just wholesalers. We had a decent amount of cash set aside, not as much as we would have liked. If we bought it, we'd be making few hundred bucks a month. If we wholesaliled it, we get a fat check for 20 grand.

[00:18:25]Continuity fix. Step one, learn. Step two, earn. Step three, $30,000 under two grand in closing costs. And this is it. Two years later, we had no idea what we were doing when we bought this place. We had no boots on the ground we were using for remodels or trash outs or anything. So, we took it upon ourselves to cl trash out and clean the entire place. Now, how it's sitting today, not too bad, just a little smelly. But when we bought it, it was rough. We loaded up my Ford Expedition with all the junk that was in his house.

[00:19:24]We loaded up Antonio's pickup truck. We spent 3 days trashing this place out all on our own. It is a three bed, one bath market rent for a place like this. In our market, about 950. At the time, it was only about 800 market rent. Since then, the tenants just moved out who were here for about a year and then we had another set of we went through two tenants our first year owning it cuz we were just bad property managers. It's vacant now. Tenants just moved out. We just put on a new roof. We were so excited that we had our own rental property. We didn't care how nasty it was. We were in there ourselves. We cleaned it ourselves. Our total cost to get this place ready trashed it out under 200 bucks to go and dump. He did two loads of my expedition and two loads on Antonio's truck. It took us 3 days, but after it was trashed out, I spent like 50 bucks on cleaning supplies.

[00:20:20]After we had those first tenants move in, who were definitely not qualified, but they were okay with how crappy our trash out, clean out, and cleaning was.

[00:20:31]So, we let them move in. After they moved out, we eventually did pay for a painting. So, the total money we have put into this property, purchase price $30,000. And over the last few years, we've maybe put in $4,000 and then the roof that was $6,000. So, over the last few years, we're all in about $40,000 on this property. And it's going to rent for $950 per month. So, do the math on that. I mean, this place is like 15 cap and above. So, it was an amazing deal.

[00:21:05]And I'm glad we bid on it. I got to be honest with you, after we bought this property, we were pretty broke. Between what we were spending on marketing to keep our wholesaling running and the cost to acquire this property, we were very asset rich, but cash poor. You'd think buying a rental property, you'd feel really wealthy. You're like, I own a house. I own a rental. I'm about to get paid monthly. But we just dumped $30,000 into this house and we didn't know anything about the refinance process or getting a cash out refi. All our cash was tied up and we were just going to be making 900 bucks a month or really more like 300 bucks a month after expenses. We didn't stop feeling broke once we started buying more properties after this property. Only a month later, we bought our second and our third. But we felt so unbelievably broke while we were acquiring all these properties because any cash we had was going right into a house. Our buddies and teammates found out that we were buying houses and everybody thought we were just rolling in it. They thought we were balling out of control. But little did they know, the amount of cash we had was barely even half a month of our operating expenses between payroll and what we were spending on marketing because every wholesale deal we were throwing into buying properties. And every one of those properties we bought, we did not run the numbers right on the remodels and had a lot of maintenance and repairs and collections on our rentals were poor because I was managing it. So, we had all these rentals, but we were struggling to collect rent and all our cash was tied up. We didn't know how to use a bank or refinance. So, we were extremely cash poor and it made it really difficult to keep running our wholesaling business and our rental portfolio. But we were okay with it because like I told myself when I was 15, I didn't care what it took. I wanted to own a ton of real estate. And to me, I didn't care how much cash I had or how thin we are running. All I wanted was door count. I wanted the vanity of owning more real estate. And it caused me to undervalue cash and keeping enough cash to be operationally sound. I had a scorched earth mentality when it came to door count. I didn't care if we ran all of our accounts to zero. I didn't care if I had to pay rent on a credit card.

[00:23:22]All I wanted was more units, more properties, and to grow the portfolio.

[00:23:26]In hindsight, this caused a lot of pain and a lot of problems for Antonio and I.

[00:23:32]Eventually, we realized if we wanted to keep scaling, we needed to have reserves in order to cover payroll comfortably and to keep operating our portfolio. So, we chilled out. We dropped the obsession with unit count a little bit and focus more on getting operationally sound.

[00:23:52]Step four, we thought, okay, we bought deal one. Now, we should just buy as many deals as we can using whatever cash we can from our wholesaling. Step four is not buy a ton of deals. Step four is what we should have done after we completed step three, which was bought our first deal, is lay a foundation that could handle us scaling quickly.

[00:24:15]Instead, we skipped building a foundation. What do I mean by foundation? Getting your accounting set up, your bookkeeping set up, and getting your lender set up. So, having the ability to tap into the equity of these houses you're buying so aggressively before you need it. So, what we should have done for step four instead was set up a foundation, have that QuickBook set up, the reconciling routine, the flow of taking a property from purchasing to remodeling to refinancing, having the procedures along the way already built out. So for us, the biggest thing we should have done before we started buying a bunch of houses was nail down our lender, our DSC, our lender that lends based on the income of the property, your credit score, and the value of the property, who also did not have a seasoning period. If we had that lender starting out, we would have also done better remodels, more complete remodels, which would have saved us on the property management side. We would have moved in better tenants quicker and we would have had less headaches after they had moved in and had less tenants move out because of how poor our remodels were. All because if we had the right lender, they would have encouraged us from the get-go to do a more complete remodel, spend a little bit more, but it'd be okay because we would get to refinance and pull all that cash out after the fact and then the next deal we wouldn't have to be relying on, say, a wholesale deal closing in order to fund it. And with that as well our accounting. If we had set that up before we started buying so aggressively, we would have seen that we needed to set aside reserves for payroll, proper allocation of funds for purchases and remodels. And it would have prevented us from ever getting overleveraged or biting off more than we can chew. Step five is really about buying back your time and scaling and making it so where steps one through four get done without you putting in any effort. So, how did that really work out for us? Here were our key hires that allowed us to turn steps basically one through four into a system that was getting done without us.

[00:26:19]Assistant, we hired our assistant. She solved our accounting and bookkeeping problem because she had an accounting background and she jumped in and said, "Hey, we need to solve all this.

[00:26:27]Everybody sends me their invoices and charges." So, she jumped in and that solved part of step four for laying our foundation. She got it systematized and a clean routine without me or Antonio having to learn how to do it or do it.

[00:26:39]What she also did then was handle all the admin stuff with remodels and cards.

[00:26:44]She really babysat all of our accounts to make sure we don't overspend and we keep reserves. And she started to really monitor all the funds going in and out.

[00:26:53]So, she was kind of she she very much is more than an assistant. She, if anything, is more like a CFO or a chief of accounting because she forced us to integrate accounting systems and made us be super dialed with how we were using funds, how we were processing receipts and monitoring budgets on remodels. and she just jumped in and integrated all these systems we needed that we were not doing that we also didn't have time to cuz Antonio just wanted to focus on getting deals and I just wanted to focus on increasing scaling our marketing from our wholesaling business to the rentals she took ownership of all the admin work so that if I didn't wake up one day or Antonio didn't wake up the business is still running VA manager this is what truly took the the earn step to another level the VA manager made sure all our VAS, all of our marketing, and all of our systems for wholesaling. Every day we're running. He makes sure the cold callers clock in, make sure the lists are pulled, he makes sure the mailing lists get mailed, he tracks KPIs, and he basically babysits all the lead generation for our wholesaling business.

[00:28:00]So, what that means is even if I don't wake up, we're getting leads generated and they're feeding our follow-up specialist. So, that's the next hire that contributes to step one. Follow-up specialist is getting fed leads that our VA manager is taking ownership of, making sure show up every day. Our follow-up specialist is qualifying those leads and handing them off to Antonio.

[00:28:23]So, all Antonio has to do is close those leads where we either buy it for our portfolio or wholesale it to increase our income. We're continuing to earn and we're looking at hundreds of deals because our VA manager is making sure we get hundreds of leads coming into our CRM. Our FOB specialist is qualifying and really chopping down those leads.

[00:28:42]So, Antonio only is looking at the most qualified properties for our portfolio or to wholesale. And then there's one other way we're earning. Like I mentioned earlier, we did start a title company. One day we were on a phone call with our DSCR lender and we threw out the idea of starting our own title company because we realized between the volume of deals we were doing with wholesaling and our own buying that it was a legitimate number of transactions that we could start our own title company with the combined clients our lender was bringing in and getting our buyers to do all their closings with us.

[00:29:13]So, we brought up the idea to our two closers we were using at the time at I won't name the title company, but we brought up the idea to them and they had revealed to us that they have been thinking of starting their own title company for a long period of time. So, what did we do? We started Red River Title. So, that also is contributing to step one, which is earn. An important thing I have been learning lately is that you should really focus on increasing your earning capacity, your active, your earned income as much as possible from your business or your W2 while buying real estate. I think a lot of investors, they earn enough to buy their first deal and they try to rush to just doing real estate full-time when in reality you want to keep on trying to increase your actively earned income from your business businesses or your W2 and then putting that cash into real estate. So, that's been an adjustment for us. When I was 15, I thought, "Oh, once I start buying real estate, I'm just doing real estate full-time because passive income, every door pays me money." And I think back to my mentality in getting into real estate back in back when I saw that video of Grant Cardone, it was very much, oh, so sick. I just get paid from my rent rental units. In reality, it should have been, I'm going to have a great business that makes lots of income, and I'm going to park the money into real estate, then one day I can retire off the real estate. So, the biggest shift in mentality has been away from just chasing door count and living off of the portfolio as soon as possible because oh, if I just get to 100 doors, then I can just, you know, sit on a beach, do whatever. It's moved away from that to let's grow big business, big business, producing lots of income. Keep buying the real estate portfolio, but don't overleverage. Don't just chase door count as a vanity metric.

[00:31:20]at the office. Antonio just got here.

[00:31:25]I think a lot of real estate influencers and gurus would probably say that step five is something along the lines of scale your deal pipeline, get access to more capital, leverage more, when in reality I believe step five is less about your business and more about you, specifically you as the operator of your business. Let me explain. If you've done the math on how many doors or properties it takes for you to fully retire from real estate by owning a ton of real estate, you probably understand how long it actually takes to have a massive real estate portfolio that can take care of you, your family, and your kids to come.

[00:32:02]That is why step five is about longevity. Step five is to make growing your real estate portfolio boring and with the people you love. It's going to take you five years minimum to have a portfolio that is significant. It will take you 10 years at least to have a portfolio that can legitimately take care of you and your family. With that, if you're going to have to be doing this for 10 years, you cannot be operating where every deal you're at a 10 as far as stress and anxiety goes. You have to get to the point where buying, remodeling, renting, refinancing a property is boring to you. Once it is boring, then you can increase the speed in which you do those deals. But if it's stressful and you are losing hair every single deal and you're trying to scale that, you're just going to scale your problems and scale your anxiety and stress. So before you can scale to a bunch of doors, you have to make doing one door, one property boring. How do you get to boring? by doing a lot of deals, looking at a lot of deals, going under contract on a lot of deals, and buying, remodeling, refinancing a lot of deals. And Tony and I just had a deal fall through this week because of a title problem. When we had our first deal fall through because of the title problem, it felt like the end of the world, my stomach dropped. I was stressed out. It ruined my week. Now, I get a call about a title problem with one of our properties that we're trying to buy. It doesn't even move the needle on the stress. So, that's the first way, it'll become boring. The second way is going to be once everything starts to turn into just numbers. If you've done enough deals, eventually you'll know if you have 10 deals locked up in under contract going to the title company. Two or three of them are going to have issues. Two or three of them might not close. Once the stuff that is scary and feels like bad luck becomes just another number, another statistic, that's when it becomes boring. Then the other thing about doing it with people you love.

[00:33:55]Antonio and I hired an assistant who had a lot of experience in corporate world and business and she really emphasized to us while we were going through one of the hardest seasons of our business ever about focusing on people over revenue.

[00:34:11]Businesses are people. And I think that isn't talked about enough these days.

[00:34:16]Maybe because of AI, I don't know. But Antonio and I in the beginning, it was always, "Hey, let's make more money this month with the wholesaling or hey, let's get more doors." That's all we were judging our success on. Our assistant taught us to start judging success on watching the people we work with develop, enjoying the relationship we have with the people we work with and judging months not just off of revenue, but off of the people that are our business. And while we were in that season where revenue sucked and we were just in the trenches because we were really trying really hard to grow and we were overwhelmed, bit off more than we can chew, everything changed when we learned to just focus on our people and not bottom line. Now obviously you still got to be watching that. You got to be watching revenue. But after we got through that season, we realized, hey, if we genuinely enjoy who we work with and the process of everything is relatively boring and we are just trying to tweak the system and flow of things to make it more enjoyable for the people who work for us, work with us and ourselves, the door count will come. The key is endurance. You will be successful no matter what on a long enough time horizon if you don't quit. One of the best ways to guarantee you stick to it for a long time is make it enjoyable. At the bare minimum, make it not painful.

[00:35:36]So, if you are doing deals and every single deal feels like pulling teeth, that's the first thing you got to solve if you want to own a ton of real estate.

[00:35:43]The two biggest things for where we're at now that is allowing us to pursue owning a ton of real estate is volume.

[00:35:51]Boring and enjoying who we work with.

[00:35:53]Looking at an absurd amount of deals all the time, hundreds of deals. going under contract, financing a deal, remodeling a deal, that whole process is relatively boring to us because we have a great team and we've done it so many times.

[00:36:06]And lastly, enjoying who we are working with and enjoying the process. This is what gives us longevity and will allow us to stick to it for a long time. We stick to it for a long time on a long enough time horizon, everything works out. I think a lot of people get into real estate with the mentality of like, man, I just need to get to 10 doors and then I can retire and I can be done. And the investors who I've seen come and go are always the investors who had that mentality coming in. And not going to lie, I had that mentality with it.

[00:36:37]Antonio and I bought our first rental and we thought, "Holy cow, we're going to be rich. We're going to retire. We don't even have to work a job after a few rentals." And holding on to that expectation caused us a lot of pain. I think if you drop that expectation earlier, you will enjoy real estate investing much more. If you go into it with the expectation of, hey, I just need to get to 10 doors and then I can quit my job. It's going to suck for you.

[00:36:59]It's going to hurt. Let go that expectation. Just focus on your inputs and the outputs will come. It's going to be hard, but that's okay. It's supposed to be. Building a real estate portfolio should not be easy. There's a reason why that not that many people have massive real estate portfolios, cuz it's hard.

[00:37:16]But it just starts with one deal and then getting to the second and then the third and then getting that process boring and then just do it with the people you love. I think there's a lot of hype in real estate because of the people you see they post about you know the lifestyle stuff like that which the lifestyle will come but the first thing you need to figure out is enjoying the process of buying real estate without the lifestyle. You need to enjoy the process of buying real estate without the lifestyle and eventually that lifestyle will come. I live in a one bed apartment. I live extremely frugally. My enjoyment from real estate is the process of doing it. It's not the fruits of it. It's the planting of seeds. I enjoy right now. I enjoy working the field and planting the seeds. I'm not trying to eat the fruit. So, that's an analogy I got from uh an investor we've worked with and he he's from Brazil and he would always say, "Your income is the seed. You plant the seed, let it grow, then eat the fruit. The longer you can be happy just planting the seed, the more fruit you'll have one day. So, ignore the influencers, ignore the people you see online. Real estate is not get rich quick. It's get rich guaranteed. So, in the time it takes you to get to that guarantee, please just make it enjoyable. Don't worry so much.

[00:38:34]Don't take everything too seriously and everything's going to be all right.

[00:38:38]Guys, if you want to work one-on-one with me, I bring you into our market, introduce you to our team. We will do a deal for you or we will do a deal with you. So, if that'd be something you'd be interested in, please click the link below. Otherwise, let me know what you want me to talk more on and please like and subscribe. Thanks.