April 04, 2022

Wholesaling Houses for dummies. I'm going to tell you exactly how the whole process works, so stay tuned. Hey, what's up, guys? Thanks for joining me today. My name is Gaylan Stewart. I am an entrepreneur and real estate investor. We focus on wholesale and real estate. That's what my company does all day, every day. We lock deals up all over the United States and we also do some buy and hold properties, meaning rental properties for our long term wealth. And I do some fix and flip properties like you see on HGTV, but the real version, and we do that for the bigger paychecks. But my channel is all about wholesaling real estate. So wholesaling real estate for dummies, and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense or to be rude in any way, but just the simplest form of how a wholesale and real estate transaction actually works. So I'm just going to break it down for you to kind of make it simple for those of you that are brand new to this entire idea. And I'm just going to tell you exactly how we do it in our business and what it all means. So wholesaling real estate, it all starts with a motivated seller. Now, how do you get these motivated sellers? You can do them a multiple of ways you can do. You can drive around, write down ugly houses, write down the addresses of these ugly houses.

Then you can go to places like Ben verified dot com fast people search dot com true people search dot com white pages dot com sites like that to actually look up the owner and skip trace phone number meaning you're going to find their phone number so you can call them. So you can drive for dollars. That's one way you can get a motivated seller list. Or you can buy lists. You can buy lists from list source or from Adam data. There's prop stream. There's all kinds of different places you can buy lists from. I've got a couple of links in the description that could help you out, and I've also done videos on exactly how to pull these lists. So like I said, all sorts of the motivated seller. So you got to have the list, get a list of sellers that you can call on. Now then once you have this list, the key is to market to the list. So whether you call them on the phone. Right, or you can text message them, you can send them a remote, an EVM, which is a ring list, voice mail. Now you can go to several places online, just Google ring list voice mail. You can actually upload your list under there. It'll send the voice mail to the entire list and then just get ready for your phone to ring.

Okay. So you start with a motivated seller, so you can do marketing by calling text messaging orvms. That's all the cheapest ways to do it. And then once you get into it a little further, you can do other things like direct mail if you have a little bit of money to spend or do TV ads, radio ads, things like that. But initially, you've got to motivate a seller that you do marketing to get that motivated seller interested. Then you're going to answer your phone. You're actually going to negotiate with sellers telling them that you want to buy their house for cash. So the entire reason a seller would actually sell to an investor like me or a wholesaler is they want to trade. They're willing to trade time and convenience, time and equity, rather sorry for the convenience. So they're basically we're promising to do the deal fast. We're going to pay cash and close quickly. We typically cover all those costs. Right. But they're trading a little bit of their equity for that speed and convenience portion of it. Okay. So that's what I meant. They're going to trade their equity for that speed and convenience factor. K Because that's the whole point of wholesaling real estate. We typically close these transactions in 30 days or less and a lot of cases. K So far since the COVID thing has gone through, sometimes it's taken a little longer up to 45 days because a lot of the counties are behind on as far as getting the, you know, the proper documentation ready for the title companies like abstracting and things like that.

But nevertheless, so you're doing marketing. You have to start to motivate a seller, find these sellers by getting list or you drive for those lists, you start marketing to those sellers. Now you're negotiating with these sellers. K You have to show the confidence in you that you can actually do what you say you're going to do. You're telling them you're going to buy their house for cash and closing as little as 30 days. Well, you've got to be able to do that. So how do you do that? Now, once you have a contract with that seller, you get a purchase and sale agreement to buy their property. That gives you the rights to the property. Now, I have this contract that I need to sell because as a wholesaler starting out, you probably don't have the money to actually buy that house. Okay, so your goal is to sell that contract for more than you got it for. So just for easy math, if I got the contract for $50,000 and I know the house is worth 100 now I have to. Leave a lot of room on the deal for the end buyer or the end investor that's bringing the cash to buy this property.

They have to have room to make a profit. Right? So if I got it for 50,000 this contract, I'm going to try to sell that contract to an end buyer for 60,000, for example. So I want to make 10,000 on the deal. Okay. Now, now, once I sell that and the buyer agrees to do that, I'm going to simply do an assignment contract because I'm assigning my rights to my purchase and sale agreement to this end buyer. So he's essentially taking my place, my position in the original contract and going to fulfill on that obligation that I have with the seller. So what happens after that? Now, the now the buyer is on the hook for this property because they signed my assignment contract saying that they're going to pay $60,000 for this property that I got for 50. So now when we get to closing, everybody gets paid and then everybody wins, right? So now the seller is going to get the 50,000 that they were promised and now I'm going to get the 10,000 because I was the middleman. Right. And then the buyer is actually getting the property for 60,000, even though the property is worth 100,000. So that leaves them 40,000 to play with as far as renovating and still keeping a little bit of equity in the deal to where they can actually flip it for a profit or keep it and still have equity as a rental.

Right. So that's the whole process right there. Start with the motivated seller. You're going to do marketing to those sellers. You're going to negotiate with those sellers and get a contract. Then you're going to sell your contract to a buyer. And oftentimes it's motivated buyers because they're thirsty for these deals, right? They don't go direct to seller like wholesalers do a lot of times because they focus on fixing and flipping or buying rentals typically. Now there are some companies that do all of it like I do, but for the most part, they're looking for wholesalers to bring them deals because they know they're going to get deals that 60 to $0.70 on the dollar, and we're buying them at 40 to $0.50 on the dollar and we make that spread in between. So hopefully all that makes sense. It's clear to what the entire wholesaling transaction looks like. So at the end of the day, a lot of people win on this deal, right? Like I said, the seller wins because they got the 50,000. We win because we made ten grand to be in the middleman. The buyer wins because they're getting a 60,000 property that's worth 100 when they fix it up. That doesn't stop there either.

Also, the title company wins because they're getting business from this entire transaction Home Depot or Lowe's or your big box stores, they're going to end up winning because the end buyer is going to remodel the property. Right. So and then a contractor is going to end up making money because they're the ones that the buyer is hiring to fix these deals up. Then the neighborhood wins overall because now you suddenly have a nicer house in the neighborhood that was dilapidated. And then the ultimate end buyer, whether they sell it on the retail market or if it's a renter, they're winning as well because they get to move into a fully remodeled property and it helps the overall community as a whole. Right. So everybody wins in the deal, but the buyer wins even more because if they do keep the property, they get to depreciate that property for 27 and a half years. They also get the benefits of appreciation. They also get the benefit of a renter paying off their mortgage and they make a cash flow in between what their mortgage is and what they're charging for rent. So the buyer wins more than anyone in this scenario. So it's really important once you learn the wholesaling game and you kind of get a little bit of money and knowledge under your belt, it's important to start buying these properties yourself to keep them.
 

April 01, 2022

I've never bought a house that was actually listed for sale. Hey, what's up, YouTube? Thanks for joining me today and for doing my channel. I appreciate you. Please like unsubscribe if you feel this contact or this content is valuable. But today's video I'm going to tell you about a little bit about wholesaling real estate. That's what my channel is mostly about. That's what we do all day, every day. But I started thinking the other day, whenever just me and my wife was walking into the movies and I don't know what made me think about it, but I just thought about how what we do in wholesaling and real estate is we never buy houses that are actually listed. You know, the general public out there think that's impossible. It's like, okay, you buy a house that's listed for sale even if it's for sale by owner, right? Well, what we do in wholesaling is completely unconventional, you know, completely opposite of what the average person out there does. So and I know there are some wholesalers out there that actually have bought houses that are listed. But if you want to get the best deals out there, I'm talking about getting things 20 to $0.50 on the dollar like we do every day. Again, if you're new to this, it probably sounds impossible. I thought the same thing when I very first started. When I was researching and looking into wholesaling, I'm like, why would anybody ever sell their property? You know, $0.50 on the dollar? I just didn't get it right.

But now I'm actually a wholesaler and I've been doing it close to four years now, so it makes sense to me. People have all kinds of reasons to where they would sell your property, sell their property at a huge discount, you know, just to name a few. If they're going through a divorce, they typically got to get rid of the house because it's in both people's names and they want to start over with their lives. So they're probably more motivated to sell at a discount as long as it covers their mortgage that they owe. Right. A lot of people that are behind on taxes can't pay the taxes, obviously. So they're probably not keeping up with the House as far as repairs go. Probably don't even have insurance and things like that. Right. But there's multitude of reasons why people would sell at a discount. So if you think about this, if they have their list, their house listed on the market, on the MLS, the multiple listing service that realtors use. Right. It's got every buyer in the world on that because it's worldwide, because it's listed on the MLS. So people have it listed there. Do you think they're very motivated potentially? Right. There's occasions that somebody is actually motivated to sell quickly. They just don't know that there's any other way. But to list it with a realtor. So that's what they do. And oftentimes those houses will sell a little bit at a discount, but not as deep as the discount we're getting, because usually the people that we deal deal with are even more motivated.

You know, for example, they might live out of state and have a vacant property in another state that's just been sitting there that they're trying to maintain. They're paying for the lawn care, they're paying the taxes every year. They're making sure everything is up to code. As far as you know, sometimes they even got to board up the doors and windows just to keep people out of it. But oftentimes, vacant houses are just sitting ducks for for people to break in, live in, homeless people live in them, things like that. Right. So there's always motivation out there to sell their property at a discount. So it's up to us as wholesalers to reach out to those people and help them out. Right. I've said all along and many people have said it as well, that we are in the business of solving problems. Right. And ultimately that's what business is. In general, any type of business out there solves a problem. I don't care if you need some gum to chew, you're going to go to 7-Eleven or your convenience store to buy the gum. They solved the problem that you had about needing gum, right? So it's no different than what we do. People are in dire need to sell their house because it's too many repairs or they can't afford the maintenance or they're moving away or they're behind on taxes or they're moving into assisted living facility or they're getting a divorce or they're relocating because of a job transfer.

You know, all kinds of reasons. And that's where we come into play. We can help them out. But the point of this video is I never buy a house that's listed. You know, I'm trying to help my son buy a house. And he's always sending me these different properties on Zillow that are listed with the realtor. I'm like, Hey, that's that's the kind of property that we're not buying. I'm not paying retail, right? I mean, yes, I paid retail for my personal house because we had it custom built and that's just what we did, unless I want to be the builder myself, which I didn't. But other than that, when we're buying investment properties, we never, ever, ever pay retail, not even close to retail, as a matter of fact. So like I said, most properties we buy are in the $0.50 on the dollar range, so they're half price and that's usually at the top. We oftentimes get deals at 20 to $0.30 on the dollar. You know, it just depends on how we can negotiate it and what kind of how motivated the seller is. Sometimes they're so motivated they just want to give the house to you. I've actually had that happen to. Before someone was just like, I'll do anything. You can just take it if you want it. I'm like, Well, we want to give you some money. So we gave them 500 bucks for their house. You know, that helped them out because they were willing to give it away.

It sucked so bad for them that they wanted to give it to us for free, but I didn't want to take it completely free. So I said, Hey, let me give you at least 500 bucks so you can move on. And they were super excited about that because they literally wanted nothing. So you never know what somebody's motivation is. But the point is there's hundreds and thousands of properties out there that are just sitting vacant, not only just vacant, but they're just problem houses that people need to get out of. And we as wholesalers or investors are oftentimes their only solution. So a lot of things in life, you have multiple solutions like that pack of gum I told you about. I could probably go to ten different stores within a one mile radius to solve my problem. Right? But a seller with a with a distressed property and distressed situation, they don't have that many solutions. It's oftentimes us as wholesalers are the only solution. Sure, there might be other wholesalers, but you're talking maybe, you know, a dozen that might reach out to them over a period of time as opposed to going to get a piece of gum. I can go right now to ten places down the road. Right. And hundreds of places in the area probably. So the point is, I've never bought a property listed on the market. I've never even bought it for sale by owner property, typically because even those people, they want to sell it, right? They typically want retail or close as close to retail as they can get.

But these people that that don't have a house or so that's what I was trying to explain to my son. These people that we're buying from don't even have their house for sale. We just reach out to them because we know they have a motivation. They may not know that we know, but we know because we can buy lists and things like that or, you know, do it's public public knowledge. You know, if you're behind on your taxes, we can look those things up on the accounting assessor website. So, you know, that's public knowledge to where we know that they probably need help. They just don't know where to turn. So it's up to us to reach out to them. So how do we reach out to them multiple ways, like I've talked to in the past, cold calling voicemails, you know, direct to voicemail, it's called RV, SMS, text messaging. Sometimes we'll send them direct mail postcards, sometimes they reach out to us via the radio or the TV or billboards or same thing with direct mail as well, or bandit signs, things like that. But nevertheless, we're buying properties that are not listed for sale. That's the hardest part, I think, for people to get their mind wrapped around. I know that's the hardest part for my son and it's the hardest part for a lot of people, I feel, because they're just like, Well, how are you buying a house if it's not for sale? Because we actively pursue those properties and we pursue those sellers to reach out to them.

Okay, you know, if I want to sell my house and I and I obviously put it out there for the world to know that I'm selling my house, I'm probably going to ask for top dollar, right? Just like you would probably. But these aren't the same type of people that we're dealing with. We're dealing with distressed sellers and distressed properties both. Typically, when I say distressed property, it's usually means it needs a lot of work. It's dilapidated in some way, form or fashion. It's got overgrown grass, overstuffed mailboxes, boarded up doors and windows falling in a roof or a tarp to roof, you know, chipped paint all over or different things like that. And that distressed seller is a specific motivation that they have. Maybe it is that they can't afford repairs on the house, and that's why it's a distressed house and a distressed seller. But just the distressed seller in general is things like divorce behind our property taxes, you know, all those things I mentioned earlier. So they could be both distressed sale or distressed property. If they're both, it's even better. Right. But the point is, buy off market properties. You can't do that by buying houses that are listed for sale by owner or that are some Mlss. And I'm not saying you can't find deals that way because you can. I know people that buy those ways exclusively, but they pay a lot more to, you know, they might be paying 70, 80, $0.85 on the dollar even.

But if you could go direct to seller and get another 15 to 20% discount, why wouldn't you do that? That makes more sense to me because you can make a lot more money, you know, and especially once you have a machine going to where you have systems and processes built around your business and your marketing, you're always going to have leads coming in to where you can continue to bring those deals and that pipeline stays full. Therefore, you always make money consistently. But yeah, you could probably buy deals online. That are already listed on the Mlss or for sub owners, but you're just not going to get as better good of a deal. You might on occasion, but we always get 30 to $0.50 on the dollar going direct to seller. So I've never bought a house on listing on the market except for my personal properties and I probably never will. And those are the reasons why. So drop me a comment. Let me know your thoughts about that. Maybe you're just the opposite. Maybe you only buy on the Mlss and you're an investor. Because I didn't know people like that, like I said, but they don't get the discounts that I get. So drop me a comment, give me a, like, thumbs down if you need to. I don't care. I got tough skin. So if you stuck around this long, definitely subscribe, share this context so it can help other people. And I'll see you in the next video.
 

March 28, 2022

So I'm going to reveal to you my number one wholesaling real estate list. So stay tuned. Yeah. Hey, what's up guys? My name is Graylan Stewart. I am a virtual wholesaler and real estate entrepreneur. We buy and sell houses nationwide, but my channel is focused on wholesale in real estate. So I'll teach you everything having to do with that and I'll tell you the good, the bad and the ugly about it all too. So today's video, I'm going to tell you about my number one Marketing strategy hands down. Okay. And it's not even close. Okay. I have a number two and three that are close, but number one beats them all. And the best part about it is it's 100% free. Yes. You heard me right? It's free. F R E E. Okay. So I've talked about this in some of my other videos a little bit. Now this strategy I've been doing for a couple of years now and it's made us a ton of money and like I said, it is free. So the only catch and the whole thing is you have to do it consistently. But that's the catch in any marketing. Okay. And that's the catch in anything having to do with your business in general. Right? Everything you do consistently will eventually pay off. Okay. As long as you stay the course and keep doing it. Okay. So marketing is no different and especially this channel is no different at all. Okay. So now let me preface this like this. Okay. I do every marketing strategy out there literally. Okay. I do. obviously we like referrals. We do JV's we buy from other wholesalers. Okay, that's 3 marketing channels right there. But we also do SMS, RVM, Cold Calling, facebook paid ads. PPC paid ads. That's google Adwords. We do we do SEO Which is search engine optimization. We also do radio ads. We just started doing tv ads. we do direct mail, we have some bandit signs out there. so we do a little bit of everything. Okay, so when I tell you this is the number one strategy for me, it's probably number one strategy for anyone if you got into this marketing strategy. Okay, so, and that's why I know it works better than anything because I do everything. Right? So what it is is facebook Organic, that's the only one I didn't mention a second ago and I've talked about this and some of my videos in the past and I actually just came out with a course on it, because many people have asked me about it, like how does your facebook Organic work? And do you have a course? So the answer is yes. Now. Right, so basically this strategy allows us to get properties for free, we're getting these free leads and not only that these leads are most likely to actually get deals with. Okay, and what I mean by that, like Cold Calling leads, for example, it might take you you know, 100 cold call leads to actually get to a deal. So facebook organic leads is probably more like five or six of these leads and we're getting deals out of them. Right? So not only that, it's also these leads aren't getting hit by hundreds of other investors. Okay. So when you do Cold Calling or RVM's or SMS, you're buying mass gigantic list to market to, right? So everybody in their dog, every other company out there or individual wholesaler out there is also buying those same lists and trying to market to those companies or to those, sellers, Right? so that's where this is different. You know, it's kind of like, even with radio. Radio is one of our top three, you know, these are sellers that typically aren't getting bombarded bombarded with a lot of other people, They just happen to hear us on the radio. They're like, yeah, I kind of do want to sell my house. So then they call us, those are super hot leads as well. That's why it's number two or three out of all of my strategies that we do. but these facebook organic leads that typically are not even getting reached by other people. Nobody's really hounding them about, you know selling their property or anything like that because we're actually just asking a question if they're interested, they're reaching out to us saying yes, I am. And we end up getting contracts on these deals all day. not all, not all day, but we do this marketing all day every day and then we typically get bunch of these leads every week. So we end up getting two or three probably deals per month just from this one strategy. And that was just based on what we did last year, because I only did this probably for 3-4 months last year in total. And we did more deals from that, and compared to other marketing strategies overall. so, and that was not doing it consistently. So imagine if I had to do that consistently. The reason it wasn't consistent is because I was doing it myself. Obviously when you have a wholesaling operation, there's a million different, you know, positions and many different things going on at the same time. So that was just one thing that I never ended up doing consistently because I didn't have the time to do it, even though it literally takes you three or four minutes in the morning, three or four minutes in the afternoon. So under 10 minutes a day, but you've got to be committed to it and you can actually get a lot of deals from this. So What's even crazier is not only is this a free marketing channel, but we also averaged over $38,000 per deal from this marketing channel. And this is just based on our 20, numbers since it was a full year, we could actually look at it like that. So we took all the Facebook organic deals that we got And then totaled the dollar amount divided that by how many deals there were. And it was over $38,000 per deal. That's our highest marketing channel per deal out of everything by far. Right? Because last year average wholesale deal was about $20,000. you know, give or take a few 100 or whatever But it was around 20 grand was our average deal last year. And this one marketing strategy that's free Actually is $38,000 per deal. So that's crazy guys, that's why my course is worth it. Yes, there's other people out there doing something similar to this, but I've tested it. I've been doing it for two years, there's definitely a specific way you should do it because I've tried all kinds of different ways and you know, it's it's easy to take off facebook because they're kind of their own animal. they really regulate the things that go on in in their platform, you know, so we've tested all kinds of different ways and we found the perfect way to do this to where you get the most success out of it. So guys, if you're interested in the course, I'll definitely give you a discount so that you can get started on it. I definitely don't recommend it as a brand new person. Hopefully you already kind of understand what Wholesaling real estate is, you've already done a dealer to at least you know, because if you have then this is a no brainer marketing strategy for sure the course is well worth it. It's super cheap compared to you know what you're gonna get out of it and you only pay for it once you have access to the course for a lifetime. So you can always go back and refer to to it and and I give you everything step by step, exactly how to do it, what to avoid. and you know the exact steps it takes to actually start getting deals from this strategy and you can duplicate this over and over and over as long as you want. So it's just a one time be so it's definitely worth it, you know, I've said this before too, you know, people have no problem paying 20, 30, 40,000 year on college in hopes to make, you know 30, 40, 50 grand a year, you know forever and then they have this debt, they got to pay off for the next 15 to 20 years, but people are sometimes afraid to buy a little coarse that can absolutely make them six figures or more. so that never, never makes sense to me, you know, I'm all, about making things easier. So I've bought tons of different courses coaching different things like that, you know along the way, I spent about $250,000 on my personal development and you know the systems and processes everything involved with business, just kind of getting this whole thing figured out. So Basically, you know that 250 grand that I've spent over the last 3.5, close to four years now is exactly what I pour into this channel, tell you everything that I know, but obviously there's there's a bunch of things like these courses that you just can't explain. You know, there's so much more to just saying, here's what you do, you know what I mean? It's a detailed step by step list. So anyways, if you're interested in that, great if you're not no big deal either, but it's definitely my number one strategy, it's it's made us the highest paid a per transaction so I'm excited about that. So I just thought I'd share it with you but hit me up, drop me a comment. If you want a discount code, I'll be glad to give you one. But you can go to GraylanStewart.com and you'll find it on my page there or you can go to a direct link WholesaleGameChanger.com and you can scroll down to the courses and find it there as well. So but definitely hit me up if you want a discount code, I'd be glad to give you a discount. You know I'm not gonna give some giant discount but I'll definitely give you a discount if you ask, that's all you gotta do and that's the biggest part of sales you gotta ask for the sale. So it's the same thing when you're trying to negotiate with things with sellers or buyers or anything like that you gotta ask, you're not gonna get anywhere if you don't ask. So anyways, thanks for joining me. Hopefully you got value out of this.

March 25, 2022

This buyer actually stole $40,000 from us. Hey, what's up, guys? My name is Graylan Stewart. Thank you for joining me today. I am a virtual wholesaler and real estate entrepreneur, so my channel is all about wholesaling real estate. But we also do buy and holds for long term wealth and some fixing flips for the bigger paychecks. So today's video I'm about to tell you about how this buyer actually stole $40,000 from us. Okay. So this happened actually last week or so, so in the month of March 2022. So here's what happened. This was a deal that came in through a radio lead. K Radio is one of our best advertising avenues that we do on a consistent basis. Okay. So this came in as a radio lead and we do this marketing in Oklahoma City metro, which when you consider the Metro, it's really the DMA, which is all the metro and surrounding communities kind of spread out pretty far. So it's a little further out than we would like, but it's the only way you can advertise on radio and TV. So this was a radio lead that came in as a normal lead. One of my acquisition managers took the lead, you know, kind of talk to them for a little while. And this actually might have been one of the rare occasions where we got a one call closed, which is super rare in this industry, at least, because you've got to you've got to remember people are making one of the biggest decisions of their life when they sell their house or property to us, because most people only do that maybe one or two times in their lifetime as far as the people that we deal with, especially.

So this came in in a little small town in Oklahoma, K nowhere near Oklahoma City area. So it's a small town that I've never even been to, most people have never even heard of, but it was a property that was a distressed owner. Obviously they wanted to move, get out of that business and move out of state and just kind of start over with their life. Right. So this happened to be a motel. So this property, you may have seen a short video that I did, how we were going to make $80,000 on this deal. Okay. So this is this is this video, right? This is the same actual deal that I'm talking about. So this property came in. It was a smoking do you know, we basically it looks like because I read over the you know, the notes and everything from my acquisition manager, it looks like we actually paid what they were asking because it was a good deal. Now, how do you evaluate a motel? I have no idea. How did my acquisition manager do it? She had no idea either. So let's she actually did get my opinion on it. And I was like, hey, it sounds like we can't lose at the price that they're asking.

So we got the deal for 120 grand, right? So if you think about this, a motel, it has 20 units plus the owner's suite, which is like a three bed, four bath house within the hotel itself. So technically, there's 21 units, right? So if you do the math on that, 120 is like it's a no brainer. You can't lose on that deal no matter what type of condition it's in. Right. And it was actually in pretty good condition. I'm going to do the math on that just to see 120,000 divided by 21 units. That's $5,700 a unit, y'all. You can't get that kind of deal on anything. Right? So the reason I like this deal specifically, though, so out of those 21 units, obviously the one was the owners quarters. Right. Which still needed work on it, but the 20 units were all rentable units. Now they had four of those 20 units already converted to efficiency apartments to where it was just a property that somebody could live in permanently. Right. And she already had a couple of those units actually rented to where, you know, the like 600 bucks a month. It's pretty small. But when you think about that for an efficiency apartment, that's a pretty good deal. Of course, it's all bills pay because it's all on one one system or whatever, but so it didn't have separate meters or anything like that.

But anyways, I figured it was a, you know, a no lose situation. So 120 is kind of what I said. Yeah, sounds like that's a good deal. So lock it up. So that's exactly what she did. She got it for 120. So my acquisition manger got the deal and actually like a day or two later, once we had pictures and everything that we needed to start marketing the property, my dispo manager actually sent that deal out to our buyers list. Right? So we, we daily get added, we add buyers daily to our list just organically, automatically people just come to our site and sign up. Typically we get another 15 to 25 probably buyers per week just by accident, people just coming to our site and registering. Okay. So we're always, always actively trying to add to that list on our own as well. You know, whether we go to Facebook groups to copy emails from people. Saying that they've they're looking for deals or whether we're actively calling on these buyers nearby other properties. So we're adding buyers that way as well. But this was just a buyer that organically came to us out of nowhere. So the buyer actually lived in Phoenix. The property is in Oklahoma City. Well, not Oklahoma City. It's in O'Quinn, Oklahoma, which is a tiny little town about 2 to 3 hours from Oklahoma City. So it's super, super small community with like a couple of hundred people.

It's got a stoplight and a couple of stores and a school. You know, it's one of those kind of places, real small place. But it had this motel, which was a good deal. We thought, man, at $5,500 a unit, you know, you can't lose on this deal. So we sent it out at 200 thinking that's even a smoking deal at 200. Because if you do that math, I'm curious, 200,000 divided by 2021 units, that's even $9,500 a deal, which is crazy, right? Most of us, if they can get, you know, a property at 30 grand a deal, you're getting a smoking deal. So we sent this out at less than $10,000 deal. So we had a buyer immediately that said, yeah, I'll take it at full price, you know, earnest money, everything. Right, let's get it done. So there is lessons in this. So we always typically do, you know, for brand new buyers that we've never met, we want at least 5% down as a as an earnest money. So 200,000 times five. That's 200,000 times five is 10,000 earnest money. Okay. So that's kind of my rule of thumb. If it's brand new that we've never met or dealt with this buyer ever before, part of the vetting process is obviously we want to get proof of funds, which you gave us. We want to know that they're serious. It's as is type of deal. There's no contingencies, no nothing. Once you sign the contract, you're locked in basically.

Right. So my, my, my disposition manager did the due diligence, did everything correctly, and the only thing she didn't do was the 10,000 down. So a lot of times we'll do for people that we know, you know, it's kind of a $4,500 minimum. But on these bigger price points, we want 2500 to 5 grand typically. So, you know, I did tell her I mentioned that like, hey, let's let's be sure, since this is a new buyer, that we get like a $10,000 earnest money, but worst case scenario, get five. So long story short, I don't know what happened or why it happened, but she only got $2,500 down, which is not a huge deal because she did vet the buyer. The buyer and his partner actually flew down to Oklahoma City, rented a Tahoe, drove to OKC 3 hours away and met my disposition manager there to actually over just kind of look the property over and they even met the seller's everything, right? Of course they weren't instructed to talk to sellers, you know, because the buyer handled all this right. Or my dispo manager, because you never really want your buyer and seller talking. It's all via the dispatch manager or your boots on the ground. So everything was going good, you know, they agreed to the 200,000. They put their earnest money before they left town. They took it to the title company, which was only 2500.

But long story short, I was on spring break. We were actually snowboarding on the mountain, and I got a call from the title company that, hey, you can't get a hold of the buyer. So the buyer in the ghosting is our entire company and our title company for about two weeks. So my, my transaction coordinator and my display manager and the title company had tried to call email, text any way they could communicate with the buyer to kind of see, hey, we need, we need the funds wired and, and we're closing on this date, etc., right? So no one could ever get them. So what I did was I went ahead and bought a Phoenix phone number so that we had a local number. I'm thinking, well, you're probably answer a local number. So that's what I did. I actually bought the number and I ended up calling the guy from the Phoenix number. He answered first try. So once I got him on the phone, I did record the video or the audio as well, just so I would have it to kind of give to my team so they can learn from it. But I called the guy, he answered, and I'm like, Hey, this is Gralen. You know, you're buying a property from us in Oklahoma. He's like, Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm like, Well, we're closing on that Monday and no one has been able to get a hold of you.

My entire team has called, texted and emailed. We even got our acquisition manager that got the deal involved to see if she could reach, you know, the guy just so everybody kind of touched them. But my acquisition manager, display manager, transaction coordinator and title company, nobody could get a hold of the guy for two weeks. He answered my call for a strike. So I'm like, Hey, what's up? You know, why aren't you spotting? Did they call the right number? I'm like, Yeah. They call it the same number I'm calling you on right now. So everybody has the correct phone number and email. You know, you just haven't responded. So I'm like, Well, what's going on? He's like, Oh, nothing. You know, I'm actually getting on a plane right now. Tell them to reach out to me on Monday morning. I have all the money required and we're going to go for closing Monday. I'm like, okay, are you sure? He said, Yeah, everything's good to go. But he did kind of sound something in his voice. Told me that something just wasn't right. For one, we already know it wasn't right because he's ghosting us for two weeks, right? But for two, just the tone in his voice and the way he was trying to get me off the phone really quick. Yeah, the the flight kind of made sense, but still, I could feel that something was wrong. Right. So anyways, Monday comes around, same thing.

A company reaches out, transaction coordinator reaches out, he's not responding. So what's the deal? You know? So then I tell my dispo manager like, hey, log in the call reel because that's where I bought the phone number. Like call the guy from our Phoenix phone number that I purchased the other day. So she called him from that and guess what? He answered first try again. So my dispo manager spoke to him and he's like, Yeah, I just can't do the deal. So I'm backing out. So basically he was canceling the day of closing. Now in my book, that makes you super shady, super unreliable. And you're you're the kind of person I would never, ever, ever do business with. Right. So I told her, like, hey, I told this woman to this, you know, we're going to block this guy, tell everybody we know about the situation and what happened and how he canceled on us last minute. Obviously, he knew that he was backing out of this deal probably for two weeks. That's why he was ghosting us trying to avoid this situation. And we think he probably would have never replied to us at all if we didn't buy that Phoenix phone number. But long story short, my dispo manager said, you know, what would it take for you to actually buy the property? You know, everybody's counting on you. We've got about ten people in this. Obviously, we've got the sellers, you know, everybody on our team, you know, the title company is involved.

Like there's a lot of people counting on you to close this transaction today. So what will it take? And the guy was like, whoa, you know, my partner backed out and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I can probably go ahead and buy it for 150. So keep in mind, we've got it for 120 and that made me super mad. So it's like it was his plan all along just to come back on us last minute to get a reduction in which after I found out everything, I don't think that was his plan, but that's how it felt. So I was furious, right? I'm like, No, we're not selling the guy. I'll buy it myself if I need to and we'll fix it up and sell it or I'll keep it myself. Because I actually thought about keeping this because it'd be a great property, you know, at 550 $700 per unit, you know, remodel it and all that, you're still in at a super low price. But anyways, I was like, No, we'll never do that. So I'm like, Get him up, you know, closer to the 208 he already agreed to. Obviously, he already knew he was losing the 2500 if he backed out. But he was ready to just walk away from the deal because his partner bailed on them, evidently. But anyways, we weren't taking 150 at any means. So long story short, my decision manager did agree to 160.

I just like I left it in her court. She wanted to get paid on it. Everybody wanted to get paid and I wanted to stay out of it because it was just making me mad. Right. You know. So basically everybody agreed with my company and with him and the target company like, hey, we're going to do it for 160. So my transaction coordinator, Cynthia, did them over with a new price of 160. So it sucked really bad. Everybody was counting on this 80,000 payday and we ended up making 40,000 on the deal. And in my eyes, he literally stole 40,000 from us. You know, that's exactly what it did because he agreed to 200 last minute. You know, typically on a house I would have never gone for this deal out of took it down myself or we would have just found another buyer. We would have did something different. Right, because I never want a buyer to dictate what we do. This was a super rare scenario. It's a motel in a super small town that no one wanted to go to. He was literally the only buyer even interested at all. Like nobody was interested in this deal at all except for this one buyer. So it kind of had a stuck in a hard place. And, you know, if it wasn't for the sellers, you know, they were already kind of leery about us for whatever reason.

Usually radio confirms that you're a legit business, but radio for them, they told us that. Yeah, we don't know. We thought it might be a scam since we heard you on the radio, which is really strange. We usually get the opposite reaction. People kind of look like look at us like local celebrities because you're on the radio, we know your religion, right? But anyways, the seller had other friends in the city and different places that wanted to sell their house for cash as well. So they had a lot of referrals lined up for us as long as this transaction went smoothly. So not. Only did we not want to delay the closing on this Monday because it would look bad to the seller. We wanted to make sure we performed on it that day. So that's exactly why we ended up taking a $40,000 loss, because we're really we were kind of forced into it. He was the only buyer available, and we wanted to do right by the sellers and not even extend the day. We probably could have sold it if we got on the phone and really call it. A bunch of people might have taken us an extra week to close, but we probably could have did it or I wouldn't have mind. Like I said, keeping it myself. But long story short, we really did it to make sure we keep that relationship strong with the seller so that we can actually get all those referrals that they were telling us about, that they had friends and family that were ready to sell for cash just to make it an easy process.

So at the end of the day, I still look at it today and I always will look at it like this, that the buyer literally stole $40,000 from us because they agreed to 200. I ended up paying 160. So everybody on my team took a hit. Our company took a hit, so we all took a hit, $40,000 hit. But at the end of the day, we still made the deal happen. We did make $40,000, which I'm super thankful. It's not 80, but 40 is better than nothing. So we just did the deal and moved on so we can all just focus on other properties that we're trying to do. So anyways, hopefully, hopefully you got some value out of this video. Let me know your thoughts. What would you have done? Would you have just bailed on it? Would you have taken the 150 initially that the guy said he would do? Would you have done what we did or what would you do differently? Let me know. Drop me some comments. I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts and your mindset on what you would have done differently. But anyways, if you've made it this far, definitely like this content, if you don't mind, like share, subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next video. Thanks a lot.
 

March 23, 2022

What’s up? Graylan Stewart here again is Wednesday. The time goes by fast show so thanks for joining me. This is my vlog day so I just kind of say whatever is on my mind and just kind of go through my day. So I've got a Zoom meeting in about 30 minutes because I hired a follow up specialist a couple of months ago, but I'm also going to kind of cross train her into a couple of other little things like my rental workspace just to manage the messages because we get text messages and calls on our properties that I own that are vacant or whatever, and I had some land and stuff like that that's vacant. So we get calls and text messages on those as well. And I'm just going to teach her how to work that workspace because she can do that simultaneous with the other workspace that we have. And also I'm going to go over how to use the dialer that we have built into our Podio via smartphone because since she's a fellow specialist, that's what she mainly does is calls all of our leads in, in Podio that we're kind of older, they're all valid leads and they were hot at one point in time, but for whatever reason they weren't ready or whatever happened. They didn't sell the property to us. Right? But they got into our system somehow, so they're definitely qualified or they wouldn't be there.

So that's our main job is to call on those people. So I'm going to teach you how to use a dialer because she can get a lot further as opposed to we do have the click to call dialer, but it'll go a lot further if she actually has the dialer dial in for her the whole time. So she's definitely hungry to learn and and to make money and things like that. So that's always good just to train people that really want to do it. So that's always kind of rewarding too. But yeah, scaling is difficult sometimes all the time probably. Because in order to scale the business, not only do you have to have all your systems and processes in place, but you have to have the right people with the right mindsets in the right positions to truly kind of get to the next level because it takes all of us. You know, there's no way I could do all this on my own. Sure, I'm the brains behind it, if you want to call it that, because I've built all of this. But it's still even that I didn't do that alone because I've got other people that I rely on to help me along the way to do certain things like acquisition managers have to take those calls.

Otherwise we wouldn't make money. But I have to have the systems and processes in place for them to succeed as well and the training. So that's probably one of the hardest parts is probably getting all that kind of locked down, I guess, just to make sure that everything makes sense because it's like, sure. Systems and processes. I talk about that a lot and a lot of people probably do, but it's not as easy as that. It's like, how do you create systems and processes? In my opinion, the system is the whole like operation operating system. I guess like Podio we use is our main system that we use as a CRM that literally runs our business. But how do you has to do certain things for that to run our business? Then I have to have people willing to use the Podio so that Podio does its job, right, because there are tons of automations built in which I don't even understand them all, because you've got to do that on the back end. And there's a there's something called Globe Flow that you use in conjunction with Podio to kind of make all that work. I don't have a clue how to do any of that, nor do I want to know. I have a developer that does that for me, but there's so many different things going on, automations and things happening on the back end with every everything that we do within Podio, every button that we push.

I know you can't see this on the screen. So a three screen, it's just one big screen that there's three screens up on it. And yeah, everything you push in Podio, not everything, but it all does something. We've got so many different buttons that you can push that does things. So that's what I'm saying. The system is system. The process is easy to say, but it's not easy to do because you got to know. That's why it's always a work in progress. Know I've had this Podio I've been working on since I started. Basically, I spend money on it pretty much every month and I always have. I'm probably getting close to 30 grand that I've spent on Podio thus far, and it's money well spent that's made us at least a couple of million dollars since I've been in business. Probably more than that. But. Yeah. You just kind of learn as you go, though, what you want your Podio to do. And once you figure that out, you know, then you can start adding automations to the certain things that cause Podio. Everybody does it differently, in my opinion. I think I have one of the best Podio is out there because it's everything you need in every position. Because I have ten different workspaces and each workspace is different.

I have acquisition dispositions. There's marketing, financial texting, workspace, rental workspace transaction, coordinating a master workspace, etc.. But it just takes time. That's the thing. Everybody wants to scale and get to gigantic numbers today, which I do, too. But that's where it can mess you up, too, because I tried that early on. You know, whenever I I think I've told part of my story sometimes on some of my videos and some podcasts that I've been on, but my fifth month I did six figures and I was trying hard to figure out how to scale that because I knew I couldn't just do that on my own, but I tried to do it too soon. I think because you have to have the right people in place first. If you don't have the right people in place first, then how are you going to handle scaling? You can't. You have to have people ready to take leads despite managers ready to sell deals. So I guess you've got to you kind of have to have money to scale, put in place to where you could start paying people or be ready to pay people right away as opposed to later, because you can't have tons and tons of leads coming in and you're trying to do all this as a one man show. It just won't work like that.

You'll you'll end up losing a lot of money. So you have to have the right people in place. And that's hard to do. You have to have the right training for those people to succeed. Acquisition Manager is probably my hardest position that I've had to hire and train and keep people in because a lot of people say they can do the job and maybe they can. But if you can't, if you're not a fast learner and you can adapt to the way we do things quickly and you're not a good closer or good at follow up, you've got to be get a lot of things follow up, closing time management. You've got to be able to use Podio. So typing just all these little skills that add up to one big skill, the ultimate skill of closing, you know, not a lot of people are built for that. So that's been the hardest position to actually get going and sustain. I have one acquisition manager that's been with me over two years now and. But most of the others last. 3 to 6 months, probably. It's not like I've had a ton of them, but I've had several along the way. It's just a hard position to do if you're not really good at being organized and typing because you got to type into Podio. Kind of multitask here and there because you do have different screens open because you're comping properties, you're trying to take notes about the seller.

You're also thinking what you're about to say to the seller, and then you're ultimately closing them and waiting for your take on that. But you've got to keep doing that every day so that you have those that pipeline built up of interesting leads that you can potentially close. Because the goal in my company is for every acquisition manager to get at least 4 to 5 contracts per month and hopefully we close 3 to 4 of those per month per acquisition manager. So if they all do that, they should make really good money. I mean, the ultimate goal is technically they should be able to get probably six or seven contracts a month if they actually do the deal every day. They actually follow up every day, call new leads back. If they don't get it live within 30 seconds to a minute, it's preferable. You know, while they're high, you've got to get them while they're hot. That's the thing. That's why follow up is so important, because you can have a lead coming in today that's super hot and you're like, okay, let me do some research and get back to you. And you don't get back to them for three days. That leads no longer hot. The longer the lead sits there, the less likely you have of closing that deal.

So that's why it's important to follow up like a boss. For real. That's not just a cute saying at the fact follow up like a boss to wear. I mean, whenever I was doing acquisitions myself, I would call the seller a couple of times a day every day. I'm not calling them a week later. A week later, it's too late. I mean, I'm going to hound people to death until they either set their house today or they tell me to never call them again or they've already sold it. But even if they tell me, never call them again, I'm going to call them again. Those are the ones I might wait a week. But that's what you've got to do. You got to be super persistent and get on people all day, every day. So that's just what it takes in sales. I've been in sales most of my adult life, so highly successful at it. So that's what it takes. Relentless pursuit of an end of deals, but just super persistent, non stop, you know. Anyways, so I've got a zoom call 30 minutes with with my follow up specialist that's going to just handle some of the rental stuff, which only takes a minute or two here and there when a text or call comes in. So it's pretty easy. That's why I'm kind of cross training, because we don't think that that's not a position that needs a full time person, because most of my properties are managed themselves, because I do rent to own, but the vacant ones, I just need to get filled.

And oftentimes I don't have a ton of time to do that because I'm managing flips and running the business, things like that. So anyways, left rambling on, that's pretty much what's on my mind today. That's what I'm working on today. I'm just going to train her for probably 30 minutes. Then we've got the house cleaner coming, so we're going to head to the basement. My wife and I, we have two different offices on the main level here. We're going to go down there while they clean and do the thing and probably just try to work a little bit more down there. So it's really all I got today. Also, I guess the moral of today's blog is if you want to scale, you've got to. You've got to have systems and processes and it takes time to do that. And then you have to have the right people in the right seats willing to do whatever it takes to push you forward. So it's really a guts drop me comment if you've got anything to say. I'd be glad to reply and I'll see you guys next time. We'd like to subscribe. See you later.
 

March 21, 2022

I got sued in my whole selling real estate business.
 Hey what's up guys? Thanks for joining me today. My name is Graylan Stewart.
 If you're new to my channel. Thank you.
 So today's video is about how I got sued in my wholesale and real estate business.
 So as you know, we do wholesale and real estate nationwide, we do it all day every day.
 So obviously there's always risk and any type of business that you get into.
 Okay, so wholesaling real estate is not an accepted practice. You know it's it's there too.
 So um this industry can be super rewarding if you follow the steps that I teach on this channel and actually do the business all day every day, you'll be highly successful.
 So yes there is risk in it.
 So when you actually actively cold call people or send RVM's or send SmS to you know to different sellers motivated sellers out there you're gonna come across some people that don't like that.
 Actually you're gonna come across a lot of people that don't like that. Right?
 So there has been some different guidelines set recently over, you know texting specifically but also you know the hammer has kind of been coming down on the RVM's as well. You know RVM is basically it's ringless voicemail to where you make phone calls to sellers but you bypass their actual dial so they don't ever even know that the call is coming and you go directly to the voicemail.
 So it's ringless voicemail and I'm sure you've you've gotten those yourself and you just didn't know what they were called to where you all of a sudden have you know, a voice message on on your phone, you never even heard your phone ring.
 So that's an RVM. So we do those a lot in my business and we also send cold mass text messages which this day and age you have to be a lot more careful with it.
 Okay so there are different ways that you can get around some of these things but they are more difficult.
 Okay? They're making it harder and harder to actually do business in those methods.
 And cold calling has always kind of been frowned upon.
 Obviously there's a do not call list out there that that people can actually register for to make sure that there name or phone number isn't associated with those.
 And you can get in big trouble if you actually call that do not call list and it's kind of the same thing with SmS which is texting and also our VMS they kind of all fall around the same ballpark and you know, you can get in trouble per infraction for example if you send an RVM.
 To someone and then you try again over a period of time, whatever that time limit is.
 You know, you may have sent an RVM today but you also sent them one maybe four or five months ago.
 So both of those apply if you actually end up getting trouble you have to pay for those two Infractions gate and it's different depending on what you're doing and you know the legalities of it.
 I'm not even sure but we did in fact get sued and it's technically we got sued for cold calling but in fact they were RVM's.
 Okay so I'm gonna kind of walk you through what happened and now this was it was a while ago.
 I just don't talk about it a lot.
 But you know that's the beauty of my channel if you follow me at all.
 Um I'll tell you the good the bad and the ugly of wholesale real estate.
 So yes you can make tons of money but there's obviously risk as well.
 So I like to tell you everything about it.
 Okay so this was I believe Late 2019 maybe early 2020. I don't remember exactly.
 So at the time of this video this is March of 2022.
 So it was a while ago, a year and a half or so maybe two years somewhere in that ballpark.
 But so technically we got in trouble for cold calling the customer but in fact we sent an RVM.
 So ringless voice mail was sent to this particular seller for a property that they owned.
 Kay now this seller actually lived in California.
 So he was um an absentee owner if you want to call it that.
 So he he owned a property in a particular area that we were marketing to.
 And he actually lived in California that qualifies as an absentee owner because he owned the property that he did not live in.
 Okay but he's also an out of state owner. So that would kind of come up on two different lists.
 Um So we reached out to this particular list.
 He happened to be on the list obviously now he is deleted from any system that we have his phone numbers name everything associated with him just so this doesn't happen again.
 So what happened was we sent them an RVM.
 You know it was sent by one of my acquisition managers.
 Actually you know we send RVM's kind of at a mass. Right?
 And we have different voices for RVM's with different messages that just kind of dropped two different lists at All Times.
 So you know the message might have been something like hey this is Ashley and we're interested in buying your property.
 We have several in the area thought you might be interested in selling something along those lines. Right?
 So obviously the seller did or didn't reply but we said this There was five different communications with this particular lawsuit.
 OK but he actually catfish us or enticed us to to play his game if you will.
 Okay So we sent to the RVM. Didn't reply.
 I think another one must send and he called back.
 So when we send our RVM's, they're also set up with IVR's.
 Which is, I don't even know what that stands for. Internal voice recording or something like that.
 But nevertheless when the RVM.
 Is sent, you know, they can reply to that by pressing one or two. Okay?
 Or they can just straight callback a phone that phone call that they miss. Right?
 If you see a missed call on your phone a lot of times you'll just call that back say hey, I missed a call from this number.
 Or if you actually listen to the voicemail it's got two options to press one or two, press one to be connected with one of our acquisition managers.
 Press 2 to be uh to really removed from our list. Okay do not call this basically.
 So this particular seller actually pressed one.
 So he got connected with one of our acquisition managers which happened to be Ashley.
 She's the one that left a message. So she's the one that got the call when it came back through.
 And so he went through a whole process of listening to her, let her go through the script to getting all the information about the property et cetera right?
 Um and then it came to. Okay, he's interested. He throws a number out.
 You know, hey I could sell it for this price because we always try to get the number from the cellar.
 So went through the whole spill and you know at the end of the day we agreed on a certain price for this particular property.
 He was indeed the owner, he agreed to sell the house for us at a certain price.
 So the next step for us is sending the agreement okay?
 So we get him on the phone and send the agreement to him and then actually goes through that whole thing as far as getting that signed.
 So once he got the agreement, he actually saw what the company name was and then he straight ghosted us after that cake.
 He just basically ended the call abruptly and we didn't hear from him, you know, for a day or two.
 So then actually after a couple of days he informed us that said hey you know I know who you are, you solicited me, I'm on the national do not call list.
 You know, threatening to sue us and said basically, hey you're going to pay me, I want $15,000 for me not to sue you and I want to sue your company personally.
 I want to sue the owner of the company which is me.
 Um and I also want to Sue Ashley the acquisition manager that made the calls. Okay?
 So he wanted $15,000 for from each one of those 33 people or places right for me, Ashley and my company.
 So he wanted basically 45 grand for just go away okay, pay him and go away.
 So long story short obviously we're not going to pay 45 grand for that.
 So we're like okay well let's just see where it goes. So he did in fact about the lawsuit.
 Um they served me with papers at my home and um so I got an attorney, okay there's a couple of attorneys that I've worked with in the past.
 So this one took the case for me actually I think they referred me to someone else.
 And then that attorney that ended up using kind of got boots on the ground in California to kind of be eyes and ears for that area as well.
 So anyways, I ended up going through that process took a two or three months to kind of get it all finalized and we ended up just settling for each infraction.
 I think the minimum Um that you have to pay is $500 per infraction and there's five of them.
 So 2500. So we wanted to pay him a little bit more than the minimum, which was $1.
 So we paid $2501. But also I ended up paying the attorneys like 7500 bucks.
 So at the end of the day it cost me about 10 grand um to to go through that whole process.
 But we wanted to go to litigation, you know, to trial because you know, we were going to fight it because really we didn't actually cocoa, we left a voicemail and he kind of played along the game um, to make it even go as far as it did and when, when he was never even interested at all.
 So really we, we were hoping it went to trial, but obviously he probably knew the game that he would probably lose.
 Um, so we just ended up settling for $2501. So lesson learned.
 Um, really we didn't do anything technically wrong even though he was gonna do not call this.
 So we paid him, but we did find out later that this guy is an actual, Um, serial litigator.
 We found out that over an 18 month period he made about $1 million dollars just suing people.
 And we also found out that he's an actual real estate agent in California.
 So, you know, obviously he doesn't make money as a realtor. So he'd rather see people.
 So the moral of the story is, it didn't bother me. It didn't change our business practices.
 The only thing I did different was making sure that I scrubbed against against the known litigators list.
 I never scrubbed against the do not call list because then you wouldn't have anybody to call. All right.
 But I do now scrub against the known litigators list.
 So it's people that they know just sue people for for just those reasons calling or texting and things like that.
 So, so we do that now.
 But also at the end of the day, it really didn't make me stop doing what we do because in my opinion, it's just the cost of doing business.
 So, you know, we make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from cold calling And another $10,000, you know, as part of the marketing for that.
 You know, it's just the cost of doing business for me.
 And it hasn't happened since it only happened one time.
 This guy has been obviously blacklisted from every list that we have his phone number and name anything associated won't even come into our system.
 So that's kind of how we we did that.
 But that's my story and my loss to you guys let me know your thoughts.
 And have you ever been sued or are you afraid of that? You know, that's the thing.
 You gotta have thick skin in this business. Things are gonna happen.
 But I have obviously I made probably over $1 million dollars before I ever even got sued.
 And like I said, Cold calling alone brings us several $100,000.
 So it didn't really bother me at the end of the day.
 It was a pain in the butt to kind of go through that process.
 Still didn't change what we do. We still cold call all day every day.
 Still do our VM, still do text messages and I always will. So it is what it is.
 So, anyways, preliminary thoughts. Thanks for watching. Um, subscribe like share.
 If you would, I'd appreciate that and I'll see you guys in the next one.

March 18, 2022

So what if you could get 17 X. Return on your marketing dollars that you spend?
 Would you do it? Yeah I would too.
 So I actually did, I'm gonna teach you and show you exactly what I did. So stay tuned.
 Hey what's up guys?
 My name is Gray Lynn Stewart. Thanks for joining me. I am a virtual whole seller.
 If you're new to my channel thank you please like and subscribe if you haven't already. I'd appreciate it.
 So my channel is all about wholesaling real estate but we do everything that an investor in real estate, you know an investor would typically do in the real estate space.
 So mostly what we do is wholesaling but we also buy and hold for long term wealth and we do occasional flicks and flip properties as well.
 Usually a couple of them at a time two or three of them typically.
 So today I'm gonna share with you a strategy.
 You know this was based on my 2021 numbers for the entire year I added up what I actually spent on this marketing channel compared to what we brought back in revenue and profits.
 Okay so when I say profits, I'm talking about just the total assignment fee.
 Okay Um now my last year's assignment fee average was right around $20,000 per deal.
 So um you know those deals can add up fast but this one particular marketing strategy which may not surprise a lot of you is cold calling.
 So most people probably already cold call if you're in this space at all.
 And if you're new to hold selling, then this will maybe enlighten you. So cold calling is very effective.
 But you have to do it right. Um, otherwise it may not be as effective.
 And I don't necessarily think that my company did it All right either.
 And we still had a 17 x return.
 So the reason I say that, I don't think we did it all right either is simply because there's definitely better ways to do it.
 Okay. So what I did, uh, you know, early on, I started about 3.5 years ago.
 So early on when I hired a V. A to do cold calling for me, we pretty much, um, kind of just assumed that they knew what they were doing or I pretty much assumed, okay.
 When I say we, I mean we as a company meaning me right?
 Because at first it was just me, you know, starting out. So I hired a V. A.
 They already had co calling experience. They had worked for a real estate investor before the whole seller.
 So I assume that, hey, they know what they're doing already.
 They've already done this before and they kind of have a proven track record, so to speak, right?
 Obviously I didn't vet them, which is kind of hard when you, you know, they're in the Philippines and you're hiring, um, and they've worked for somebody else in the US.
 There's, you know, probably thousands of wholesalers out there could have been anybody right?
 So the bottom line is I trusted that they kind of knew what I wanted and what they were doing, right.
 And that's never the case typically. Right.
 So that's the thing you gotta learn when you're hiring VHS or any cold call or whether you're in house american, you know, that's the next door or in your actual office or if you're just hiring a V. A from another country, okay.
 They have no idea what to do right.
 They have done cold calling before and they might have experience, but at the same time every business runs differently and everybody does cold calling differently.
 Okay. So that's why I always suggest on my channel everything that you do in your business when you're starting off, I believe that you should do it yourself first whether you're good at that or not.
 Okay. You may not be the best sales person in the world, but it's important for you to get on the phone with sellers and actually talk to sellers and just learn and know what that process looks like.
 Even if you're not a good closer, um, or you know, whatever the part of the business is that you may or may not be good at.
 I still believe that you should do it so that you have first hand experience for one, but for two, so you know exactly what is kind of expected.
 But for three, you know exactly what that position goes through, you know, during that whole task or duty that that's set up for them.
 So it's important that you know that that way you are able to teach somebody else. Okay?
 So when I first got started, yes, I had done cold calling in the past for marketing and sales, you know for like yellow pages and and for my magazines and things like that.
 So I had done some cold calling for that before. But cold calling for sellers is completely different, right?
 Because you're not really selling anything per se.
 You're really selling yourself and selling your ability and and the confidence in you and your company to close on the deal because when you ask a seller if they want to sell and you're gonna pay cash, you have to have confidence to be able to portray that.
 So they trust you to do a contract with you, right?
 So if you don't have that kind of ver bid and persona and you know, vocalization, how can you expect a cold caller to be able to do that just because they have experience, right?
 So that's where I failed initially when I hired cold callers because I just assumed they knew what they were doing and it was a total waste of money, right?
 I mean, I did that probably off and on for almost a year before I finally figured out, okay, I actually have to train these people right there humans and they're people just like me and you and they have to be trained and to know exactly how you want things done.
 Okay. So that was where I failed. Okay. So fast forward a couple years later I learned, right.
 So now I actually have a co calling manager and yes, they are still from the Philippines and then I have three or four other cold callers That all they do is co call every day.
 So what we do in my businesses, co call from eight a.m.
 2 8 pm, pretty much Um six days a week, Monday through Saturday.
 So, and we take Sundays off for a cold calling, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that you could do like a 1-6 or something like that if you wanted to.
 I think that's totally fine. I would definitely stay away from during, during like church hours and things like that, especially if you're in the midwest or you know, the bible belt or anything like that.
 But but me personally, you know, we just, we just don't do that just because we choose not to.
 But like I said, I don't see anything wrong with it.
 But nevertheless, so I have a cold calling manager basically, I'm the only one that she talks to you or that I talked to.
 She's the only one that I talked to you, right?
 She's the one that hires all my other co collars and manages them to make sure that they're doing their jobs correctly okay.
 But she also co calls herself too so she gets a little bit more of an hourly wage and the others but at the same time I'm not managing a whole team of coke holders and managing that one person.
 So I still say that I don't have it all figured out because that's still definitely not the best way because it still is the fact that Filipinos you know they're amazing.
 Most of them have you know at least a bachelor's degree. Most of them have masters though.
 Um So they're super smart people that definitely appreciate them. They're really hard workers.
 That's what I really love about them the most they will do anything for you and to complete the task at hand.
 And that's why I love working with the filipino.
 Um people you know they're always hard workers and they're super smart and they're fast learners and they're gonna do what what what you ask them to do.
 Um It's it's hard to say that about the average american out there.
 I mean look at where we're at in today's society, half of the restaurants are half full because there's nobody to work there right?
 At least that's how it is where I live. So anyways, Filipinos are hard workers.
 So but the only thing that's hard that you can't really teach is our culture okay.
 So there's things like um even the roofs, you know they're just different where we live compared to the routes that they have in the Philippines.
 You know they they're just different types of roofs and and they don't know that unless you teach them that and train them on that.
 Right? So things like that yes you can train and learn but the things culture wise you just can't train.
 Um So that's the hard part unless they've lived in the US before.
 Like I had a cold caller in the past that they actually live in the US for like three years so they understood our culture and our, or just the way we talk to each other like when somebody's joking or not just little things like that that you and I would probably take for granted for the most part but at the same time it's those little things like that to where when you're talking to somebody over the phone, especially in like a sales type of a role.
 Um it's it's easy to understand that somebody may not get it all the way, you know what I mean?
 You could tell that there possibly foreign or probably foreign because they just don't get it right there just talking differently and they don't understand maybe the little inside jokes that you might try to say or you know just little things like that.
 It's hard to teach. So there's definitely better ways to do cold calling but at the same time You can just stumble through it like I've done and be successful at it because we did a 17 x return.
 I mean that's huge. That was our it was our number two or 3 overall marketing, you know best marketing strategy of 2021 but it was the best R. O. Y.
 As far as what we're spending for what we're getting back.
 So when you think about it like that It's easy to do right?
 You can cold call yourself, you know if you know that you're gonna get a 17x.
 And keep in mind these are Filipinos doing it.
 If you do it yourself, you're always going to do it better because you know how things are done right?
 You know how you want it, you're always gonna work harder on your own business than anyone else will.
 That's just a fact, right? So if you did it yourself even for an hour or two a day don't you think that would be worth it?
 You know, just until you kind of start bringing some money in Because Cold Calling works all I mean there's a lot of people out there that kind of don't like it or don't do it.
 But you know, we do every marketing strategy.
 So I I definitely consider myself an expert on marketing in general because I've done marketing my entire adult life and for my business, my whole selling business, we literally do every single strategy out there, right?
 And cold calling was our number 2 or 3 marketing strategy last year.
 But it was the number one ROI. So literally a 17 x return.
 That means if you spent $1, you made 17 or if you spent $10,000  times 17 is What is that?
 170,000 or something? I mean I'm no math whiz.
 Um even though that's zeros But you can do the math and you get the picture.
 So whatever you spend multiplied by 17. And that's my return. Right? So it's crazy to think about that.
 And it's even crazier to think about if you actually hired like in health people or if you did it yourself or if you actually hired a more of a US base or somebody more culturally sound in the US understanding of that kind of thing.
 You could even get a probably a bigger return than that.
 So that's exactly why I'm actually hiring the company out of Costa rica but it's owned by an american and it's got a lot of uh you know, really good speaking people that they understand the culture a lot better than like a filipino would because it's just a Philippine.
 The Philippines is it's basically a third world country. So it's just a lot different than United States.
 So anyways the whole point of this video is to let you know that you know co calling can actually be free, right?
 Because you can do it yourself or you can get your brother sister mother whoever your friend to partner with you in the cold call with you.
 Right? Because it actually works. All you gotta do is get a list of motivated sellers.
 You can buy those lists from list source or you can get them from prop stream you know um or you can just get a free list from your county that's tax delinquent or some water shut off or you know all kinds of different lists.
 You can actually get from accounting and direct to the source which is your county. It's always the best.
 But then you get that list skip trace it meaning you look for the phone numbers.
 There's companies out there that do that where you can do like free people search dot com or there's a lot of things that are similar to that being verified.
 Dot com is a super low you know a couple of dollars a month type of deal.
 And there's white pages dot com which is actually pretty good as well.
 So there's a lot of ways so there's no real excuses.
 Okay you can get a list for free or next to nothing.
 You can drive for dollars and get a list.
 You can skip trace it for free if you want to do it one by one or it's next to nothing.
 If you actually want to pay for it then get on the phone that's it.
 You're dialing for dollars, literally If you know that you're gonna spend a dollar and get 17 back, why wouldn't you do that for a couple of hours a day?
 Right. So that's my two cents, y'all?
 But there's definitely better ways to do it and you can grow into those, you know, that's why I suggest doing it yourself.
 Then you can hire people just make sure that you train them regularly, okay?
 And then eventually, maybe you can just hire a company that's really versed in the space to do that for you.
 So anyways, that's all I got for you today. Thanks for joining.
 I appreciate you very much like share and subscribe and I'll see you all next time.