Live Q&A: Your Real Estate Questions Answered (Bottleneck Breakthrough Session)

Summary

The BetterLife Podcast

Episode Title: Live Q&A - Your Real Estate Questions Answered (Bottleneck Breakthrough Session)

Hosts: Brandon Turner & Cam Cathcart

Released: January 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this dynamic, community-driven episode, Brandon Turner and Cam Cathcart host a "Bottleneck Breakthrough Session," opening the floor to live questions from their BetterLife Tribe. The session is geared toward real estate investors at various stages, diving into actionable strategies for scaling portfolios, overcoming bottlenecks, using virtual assistants (VAs), systemizing businesses, securing off-market deals, house hacking in new markets, and more. Listeners gain both practical tools and high-level mindsets for building wealth and designing a better life through real estate.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Evaluating Room Rentals & Co-Living Opportunities

(02:00 – 06:00)

• Question (Megan): How to assess markets for a self-managed room rental or co-living strategy without using platforms like PadSplit?
• Brandon's Framework:
  • Check if the city is open to co-living; look for areas where others are succeeding with room rentals.
  • Financial viability: "If you can rent a studio for $500 a month, why would anybody want to pay more to rent a single room?" (02:10, Brandon)
  • Target cities where studio apartments cost $900+/month.
  • Make sure ample parking is available to avoid neighborhood issues.
  • Test demand by privately listing a “room for rent” to gauge response.
  • Furnishing matters: Furnished rooms rent much faster. Brandon’s tip: "There's something about that demographic... they don't want to haul their furniture around and so it tends to actually rent way quicker." (04:45, Brandon)
  • Ensure market demand by studying Facebook Marketplace listings.

2. Staying Organized with Corporate Formalities

(07:05 – 10:56)

• Question (Joe): How do you keep up with LLC requirements like meeting minutes to maintain asset protection?
• Hosts’ Advice:
  • Both admit they’re not strong at legal formalities ("I'm not very good at that either." – Brandon, 07:45).
  • Suggest using AI note-takers for meeting documentation—likely sufficient proof of compliance.
  • Consider delegating this to your attorney for a small annual fee ("I just get an envelope once a year in the mail... sign here, send it back, and then they just file all the stuff for me." – Brandon, 10:22).
  • Cam emphasizes this is not typically an entrepreneur’s strong suit—outsource if possible.

3. Delegating Effectively with Virtual Assistants (VAs) & Building Processes

(11:01 – 26:09)

• Question (Mark): What should I (and can I) delegate to a VA? How do you define their roles?
• Cam’s Experience:
  • VAs in his company handle tenant applications, maintenance follow-ups, utility and insurance set-up, transaction paperwork, and reminders for Cam to raise funds.
  • Pay reflects experience but even at $11/hr, their VA would be worth $75K+ stateside.
• Brandon’s Business Systems Deep Dive:
  • "All your businesses, any business in the world, is a collection of systems and or processes." (14:30, Brandon)
  • Before hiring, define each business process (e.g., lead intake, screening tenants, handling work orders).
  • Build SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for each process. "If you don't know the process, you haven't specced the process out yet, then you have no business hiring a person."
  • Use ChatGPT for writing detailed SOPs.
  • High-level hires should align with types of processes; don’t expect VAs to invent systems—give them the framework and let them improve it.
  • VA can also manage personal “life admin” tasks so you can focus on high-value work ("I just sent it over to my virtual assistant and was like can you just fix this for me?" – Brandon, 21:45).
  • "Entrepreneurs are terrible at doing work... That's why we're entrepreneurs... So get it off your plate, onto somebody else's, and that's how you're going to do it." (25:05, Brandon)
  • Action Tip: DM Brandon "processes please" on Instagram for his top 20 real estate processes list.

4. Structuring Seller Finance Deals with Retiring Landlords

(27:11 – 37:35)

• Question (Brandon D.): Just bought a fourplex from a retiring couple ready to unload an 11-property portfolio—how to capitalize on seller-financing opportunities without over-leveraging?
• Cam’s Playbook:
  • Maximize terms: low/no down payment, cash-flow positive day one.
  • Don’t get emotional—be willing to walk away from a bad deal, even if seller financing seems attractive.
  • Objective due diligence: Insist on rent rolls, walk properties, calculate rehab, and have a realistic exit plan.
  • "I don’t think you can buy too much real estate. I think you can just buy too much real estate in a dumb way." (28:58, Cam)
• Brandon’s Strategies:
  • Know what sellers want—often income security in retirement.
  • Build genuine rapport ("Make them love you... The more they love you, the more discount they give you.")
  • Employ “reverse selling”—convey hesitancy so sellers pitch you on the deal.
  • Don’t rely on seller math—always account for professional management and “hidden” expenses.
  • Practical tip: Young, serious buyers can present themselves as ideal successors for retiring landlords.

5. Best Markets to Invest and Live In (If Moving for Lifestyle)

(37:42 – 43:56)

• Question (Liz): Where should I move that offers both good real estate investing potential and a great lifestyle—preferably near the ocean?
• Hosts’ Picks & Debate:
  • Cam: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi; caution on Texas and Florida due to overbuilding and population shifts.
  • Brandon: Advocates for Austin, TX and Phoenix, AZ—believes they're rebounding and will resume strong growth; highlights job/industry growth (Tesla, Starlink, etc.).
    • References University of Virginia study: Texas (8.6m growth by 2050), Florida (5.1m).
  • Both agree South Carolina is attractive; Hawaii is amazing, but not the best for hands-on investing.
  • Fun brainstorm: “SendMomToMaui.com”—residential assisted living in Maui for retirees.

6. Off-Market Deal Sourcing: The Connectors Strategy

(46:54 – 53:35)

• Question (Cassie): What’s your best tactic for finding off-market deals right now?
• Cam’s Connectors System:
  • 90% of deals sourced from "off-market connectors": 50% wholesalers, 30-40% agents, 10% other professionals (property managers, contractors, probate attorneys).
  • Focus on smaller wholesalers with only a handful of buyers.
  • Relationship-building is key: meetups, coffees, regular house tours.
  • Outperform on execution: “They just knew us, they liked us, they trusted us to close the deal.”
  • Even if not the highest bid, reliability and trust clinch the deal.
  • For agent deals, ensure agents/wholesalers are paid well (assignment fees, dual agency, etc.).
  • “You have to be out and about all of the time. People have to know your face, they have to know who you are, they have to know that you're buying.” (51:27, Cam)
  • Snowball effect: Consistency means more, better deals over time.
• Brandon: On the commercial side, deep broker relationships are crucial—know the 10 agents doing 80% of the deals in your niche.

7. House Hacking and Picking a Strategy in a New City

(53:44 – 57:41)

• Question (Alexia): Moving to a new city (Orlando) for work—how to pick the right house hack/strategy without knowing the market?
• Hosts’ Steps:
  • Start with ChatGPT for a market overview and general trends.
  • Analyze local deals through Better Life’s calculators or similar tools; run numbers for various asset classes (L-T, mid-term, short-term, co-living).
  • Join local investor meetups—to get candid, real-world “what’s working” from local investors.
  • In a large city like Orlando, every strategy “works” in some context—“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find something that fires you up and copy someone who's already succeeding.”
  • Don't overthink it; focus on your preference and local proof of concept.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Brandon on Room Renting:
  "...if you can rent a studio apartment for $500 a month, why would anybody want to live in your house bedroom for $700, $800, $900? ...I look for an area where rents are high, and by high I typically look for a studio apartment at $900, $1,000 or more." (02:10)

• Cam on Delegation:
  “You can get [a VA] to do everything for you… They can handle so much… If she was stateside working in St. Louis… she’d be worth $75,000 a year. So we're getting a really good deal at $11 an hour." (13:17)

• Brandon on Business Systems:
  "All your businesses… are just a collection of systems and/or processes." (14:30)
  "If you don't know the process… then you have no business hiring a person." (15:55)

• Cam on Real Estate Risk:
  “I don’t think you can buy too much real estate. I think you can just buy too much real estate in a dumb way.” (28:58)

• Brandon on Seller Rapport:
  "Make them love you… The more they love you, the more discount they give you. There's a likability discount." (31:33)

• Cam on Off-Market Deals:
  “You have to be out and about all of the time. People have to know your face, they have to know who you are, they have to know that you're buying.” (51:27)

• Brandon on Action:
  “Entrepreneurs are terrible at doing work…So get it off your plate, onto somebody else's, and that's how you're going to do it.” (25:05)

• Brandon's Fun Business Idea:
  "Send mom to Maui dot com—the idea is we open residential assisted living facilities in Maui... There's a tremendous business opportunity." (45:17)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:00: Room rental/co-living market evaluation
• 07:05: Corporate formalities, minutes, and asset protection hacks
• 11:01: Delegating to VAs; structuring your team for scaling
• 14:30: Defining processes before hiring
• 25:00: Using ChatGPT to generate SOPs
• 27:11: Seller financing—building trust and negotiation playbook
• 37:42: Best US markets for lifestyle and investment—and the “Send Mom to Maui” brainstorm
• 46:54: Off-market “connector” strategy for finding deals
• 53:44: Finding the right strategy for house hacking in a new market
• 57:41: Summary and Call to Action

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Episode Tone & Atmosphere

Brandon and Cam are candid, approachable, and collaborative—sharing both their successes and areas they struggle, making listeners feel like part of an entrepreneurial community. They blend tactical advice with fun banter (“Entrepreneurs are terrible at doing work... we’re lazy!”), and encourage leveraging community wisdom (“All of us are smarter than any of us!”). The episode is highly interactive, fluid, and empowers listeners to take concrete action toward a better life in real estate.

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For Listeners Who Missed It

This episode is a treasure trove for investors seeking actionable systems, creative solutions to bottlenecks, and mindsets for lasting success. Whether you're looking to scale, offload day-to-day hassles, source undervalued deals, or level up your investment markets, Brandon and Cam lay out a clear roadmap—reminding you to define, delegate, cultivate relationships, and most of all, enjoy the adventure.

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Connect with Brandon by DMing "processes please" on Instagram for the real estate process list, and watch for future Better Life (Freedom Accelerator) Tribe offerings!

Transcript

[A]

This is the Better Life podcast with Cam Cathcart and Brandon Turner. Cam, what's up, man?

[B]

What's up, dude?

[A]

I'm pumped about this. It's you, me, and 25 of our favorite people in the entire world.

[B]

Yeah. Yes, it is. It's going to be a good, good call.

[A]

So for those who don't know, we are recording this live. I guess not live when you're listening to it, but we're recording this on Thursday. What's the date today? I don't even know. December 18th, 18th. With the better Life Tribe weekly call. Every single week, we do a call called the Bottleneck Breakthrough call, where Cam and I ju here. I always help people solve issues. Whatever's slowing you down, whatever you want to get through in your career in real estate investing, we're going to be able to talk through that stuff every week. And so this week, we thought, why don't we just record it and put it out as a podcast? So I want to actually open the floor. We're going to jump right into this thing with some Q and A from the people here. And I know there's always weird. Nobody wants to go first. So if you have a question, comment, thought, something you want to talk to Cam and I about, about your business, about your real estate. Could be something specific or general. Why don't you just do the little raise hand button thing here in. In zoom. And we'll let you unmute and we'll just talk to you for a while. Does that sound good?

[B]

Any.

[A]

Anything you want to add to that, Cam?

[B]

No, not at all.

[A]

All right. It's gonna be really awkward if nobody raises their hand whatsoever. So I'm gonna then start calling on people.

[B]

Someone. Someone throws a softball for the first question.

[A]

All right, go. This is it now. We're waiting. Who's got something?

[B]

Oh, Megan.

[A]

Megan. What's up, man?

[C]

I'll go first. I'll kick it off.

[D]

Everyone.

[C]

All right, we want to do. We want to move into room rentals? Co living strategy. I don't want to utilize pad split. I want to do it myself. What market dynamics should I be looking to evaluate to for my first property?

[A]

Ooh, I love that. So obviously, I'm not the world expert at this. I only have a few of these.

[C]

No, that's okay.

[A]

Yeah, but I've looked into a lot as well, and I think this is a valuable question for everybody because it is one of the most powerful strategies out there if you choose the right market. Right. So as I've done research and I'VE looked at it and I interviewed the pad split CEO Atticus on the show. Then I bought a couple of my own. A couple of things I noticed. One, if the city. This is a lesson I'm learning right now. If the city is absolutely opposed to you having a pad split and it's a hard one because you don't want to just go ask them because they're all going to say, oh, zoning laws say you can't have this many unrelated people in the house. So it's more like I want to know where other people are doing pad splits because then I know that it's. There's probably a way to get through it. There's probably a way to legally get through it. So number one, I want to know the city is not going to be super anti rent by the room co living. But then also I want to look for an area where it makes sense. So an example of that, what I mean financially is if you're trying to do a rent by the room or co living model, really the same thing. If you're trying to do one and you can rent a studio apartment for 500 bucks a month, why would anybody want to live in your house bedroom for seven, eight, $9,000. Right. They probably wouldn't. So one of the most important things is you want to go in an area where rents are high. And by high I typically look for a studio apartment is $900, a thousand dollars or more. So I want an area where they're just more expensive and if you can find that, great. The third thing I'm looking for is parking. I really want to make sure there's enough parking if you're going to have eight people in a house. Parking. What was that?

[C]

Parking. Got it.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. So parking super important to me that I've noticed because again, especially if you're trying to, I don't want to say skirt the law because legally you can do it if you set it up the right way. So I'm not saying skip the law, but if you don't want to fight the city and pay lawyers thousands of dollars to fight them to prove your point, you don't want the neighbors complaining. And the biggest thing is going to make neighbors complain is when you've got the cars for the property just lined up in front of their house. People get really ticked off when like you park in front of their house. Right. Even though it seems like it's public. Yeah. They still have a, they still have a problem with that. So anyway, I look for that. Obviously there's the things like job growth. You don't want a declining city necessarily and all that. But you know, all that stuff, you still got to be. It's got to work. But yeah, that's what I look for. And if you can find it, would.

[C]

You, would you start. I mean it's a bit cheeky, but would you start by looking to where pats but splits operating because they've already evaluated the market dynamics.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Go into those market. I mean we, we do rent by the room in Canada. We have 20 years. But it wasn't this big branding strategy. It was just because real estate was crazy expensive in Whistler and that's the only place you can do that. The only thing you can do. Okay, any other macroeconomic factors apart from job growth and things like that? Just basically anything. Studio apartment 900 and over is a good market. Look for parking, look for areas that aren't totally opposed to it.

[A]

Yeah, the supply and demand of affordable housing is important. And what I mean by that again, if, if you go on Facebook Marketplace and there's just listing after listing after listing of studios and one bedroom apartments, then it's like you're competing with them. That's just going to be harder. But if you put up, you can put up a fake listing if you want to that just says hey, I got a room for rent in this area and see if you get any response. That can be a really good way to kind of gauge the market and.

[B]

See kind of interest.

[A]

Now there is typically with co living, typically you want to furnish the property. Not everybody does. But usually when you see co living it's usually furnished. And the reason I actually like that is if you've got a choice. So we actually in our Atlanta pads, but we have a pad spot outside of Atlanta out in Stone Mountain. It's working really, really well. That property, we have 10 bedrooms in the home, seven of them we furnished, three of them we didn't furnish those three sat empty for like five months until finally I found out my team didn't furnish them. And because they were trying to test it and they just kind of forgot about it like that. They were testing and they just left them empty for months. And I was like, oh, just furnish them. It's like $1,000 to furnish a bedroom, go furnish it and then they rent it up right away. So there's something about that demographic. The person who wants to rent the room, they don't want to haul their furniture around and so it tends to actually Rent way quicker. In my experience, when you furnish it for that reason, then if somebody has a choice. This is my theory. If you have a choice between if you're a tenant and you need to go rent a place and you have got a budget of less than $1,000, you could pay 800 at a studio or you could pay 800 in a house. Now, most of you listening might think that you'd choose a studio all day long because you get to be alone. But in the studio, you got to pay your own water, sewer, garbage, electricity, Internet, and then you got to furnish it. And that is just expensive for a lot of people. So I think people would actually more often choose, or at least a lot of people will choose the house rental because it's all in. It's 800 bucks all in. They don't have to worry about anything more and they just spend time in the room anyway.

[C]

Love it. Thank you.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

Cameron, anything you want to add to that? I mean, I know you're not the. You're not doing a lot of the co living stuff, but anybody else on the call got a bunch of co living and you got anything you want.

[B]

To add to it?

[A]

Again, this is a community, a tribe. So all of us are smarter than any of us, but if not, we'll move on. All right, well, with that said. Joe H. What's up, Joe?

[D]

Hey, Brandon.

[A]

What's up? How you doing?

[C]

Good.

[D]

Yourself?

[A]

I am doing so good. We got snow right now. I'm in Idaho and snowing today for the first time and the kids are outside building a snowman. Well, right now they're warming by the fire. It's like cliche Hallmark movie parting to like, pick up my wife and carry her in the front door and just kiss her. Something like that. Just to complete the Hallmark feel. Anyway, what's up, man?

[D]

You're making me can't wait for snowboarding season, man.

[A]

Oh, I know. All right, man.

[D]

Anyway, one thing I'm working through and I want to see if you have any tips or advice on how you keep it organized, is I've been lacking in corporate formalities with all my companies so doing meeting minutes specifically, I've just been kicking that can. Oh, yeah, I'll get to it. Get to it, get to it. And so my legal advisors have been posting at me lately that I got to get it done, and that's to obviously keep my asset protection strategy intact. So I have now not necessarily a real estate question, but a lot of my LLCs involve real estate. So I just wanted to see if what tips or tricks you and Cameron may have to keep organized on that.

[A]

Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you and say I'm not very good at that either. However, I would guess and tell me if anybody else knows more than this, tell me wrong. I'm going to guess that these AI like meeting note takers, whatever, will they take the place of having to take minutes and notes in any meeting? Right. So I'm sure that that would take the place. So if you ever had to substantiate you had a meeting, I'm sure that would hold up in court. Probably better than you could do it yourself because, like, it's a third party taking notes. So that would be one thing. I wonder how. How vitally important that stuff is. Anyway, and again, I'm not an attorney. In fact, this might be a good time to announce this.

[B]

Is that.

[A]

Matt, can I announce what we're doing next year? Next year? Do we have that locked in? Maybe I don't have to say names yet, but yeah, go for it. Anyway, we're adding a new feature to the Better life tribe which is coming next year. And again we're kind of altering the name of the tribe. It's a freedom accelerator. However, we're going to add in monthly calls with. And I can say names. Do we have them locked in? All right. My attorney, Mr. Mauricio, Raul Mauricio is an amazing dude. He's going to start doing office hours with tribe members who can just come in and ask questions specifically around legal stuff. And we're going to start doing calls, office hours with Amanda Han, my CPA. So we have one of the best real estate CPAs in the country, if not the best, and one of the best real estate kind of minded attorneys in the country, if not the best, going to be coming in monthly, kind of alternating to help members out, ask questions. So before I get to my opinion, I will just say that this is why I'm super excited for next year. One of the things we're adding to the tribe is that ability. So pretty fun there. My hope is like that alone, you come in and pick Amanda's brain or pick Mauricio's brain one time. And my hope is that at this level what we're all playing at is you'll make back the cost of the tribe in one conversation. And that's everything we try to do in this tribe is to make it so absurdly valuable. So with that said. Yeah, I wonder how much the minutes are. I Would ask Mauricio that, like, where is that actually required? Cam, what about you? What do you do with that? He shakes his head.

[D]

Formalities.

[B]

I've never even heard of that, man. We're not great at that. It's something that we have to get better at. And it's honestly, as entrepreneurs, like, you're an entrepreneur, it's probably not your skill set. Yeah, that's the thing with most entrepreneurs is we run a hundred miles an hour and, and try and build. And that stuff is for somebody that is more of an operator minded type person and not the visionary and the guy that's pushing for growth. And so we have not been great at that in our businesses either.

[A]

I will say this. You know, obviously, like the open door capital level, I've got like team members that take care of a lot of that stuff. The legal, like, organization. But at my personal stuff, like Opendoor Properties, which is like my original company, we still own some properties out in Washington. Like, we still have to manage that. And my team doesn't manage. So my attorney just does all of it. Like, I literally get in. Your attorney might. Or an attorney might be able to do this for you as well. I just get an envelope once a year in the mail and I open it up and it's like, this is your meeting right now. And it's like I check some boxes. It takes me like two minutes and I check some boxes. Did you add anything here? Did you take anything away here, blah, blah, blah, Sign here, send it back, and then they just file all the stuff for me. And I think that cost me an extra like 200 a year for them to handle that. So that's also maybe like a who not how thing as well. So anyway, and I said, joe, get that off you who, not how, as soon as possible.

[D]

I appreciate it. Thanks.

[A]

All right, next question. I saw Mark. Mark, what's up, man?

[F]

Hopefully you can hear me. So, Yeah, I work 9 to 5. I'm managing my rentals. And I'm just curious, like, I'm trying to scale. I'm trying to use like freelancers on upwork, like a personal assistant, that sort of. And I'm curious if you have any advice of, like, what I can get personal assistants to do. And I'm also curious to, like. I know Cam has talked about his kind of company structure. Wondered if you don't mind sharing, like, what do you have your employees doing for you? Because I'm trying to, like, have my personal assistant, like, be my property manager. For me, it's working out sort of. I'm having to, you know, step in a lot. And I'm also trying to find more rental or more stuff to purchase and I'm thinking I can hopefully find people to help me do that. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that and if you don't mind kind of just talking about that.

[A]

Sure. Cam, you want to start? You want me to jump?

[B]

Yeah. I think that you can get your personal assistant. I mean, I wouldn't call them your personal assistant because they're doing so much more than that. But you can get them to everything for you. Well, not everything, but they can handle so much. Like right now, our we have multiple VAs within our company but is looking through says when within our property management company. I mean at any given time we have three or four houses that are on the market for rent and we're getting 10, 15, 20 applications a week, sometimes more than that. And they're going through that and they're picking out the best ones. This one meets the criteria. This one doesn't meet the criteria. Shooting out off our VA is looking and building them all the time, which is just kind of a checks and balances for our maintenance tech. Whenever somebody puts in a work order, they're making sure that work order has been seen and taken care of and checking off the box on that one. RVA is on. I mean we're going to end up buying, I think 16 houses this. And she is in charge of setting up utilities on every single one of those houses, setting up insurance on every single one of those houses. She's in charge of actually in podio, I raise the money for those houses. So I'm the one that's either getting private money or hard money. But I've made it very clear for her, if you don't hound me about this, it will not get done. And so she's and that making sure. Cam, did you get the money? Cam, did you get the money? Cam, did you get the money? And so, I mean we have our RVA doing so much stuff behind the scenes. And to be honest, it's things that like if I did them or if my wife did them, they take a lot of time and they're just not high value tasks. And we do, I think we pay our VA. We pay her actually higher than typical VAs. I think we're paying her like 11 bucks an hour. You can get them for four or five bucks an hour. But we love the one that we use and she's been amazing for us. And I mean if she was stateside working in St. Louis, she. She'd be worth $75,000 a year. So we're getting a really good deal at 11 bucks an hour.

[F]

Can I ask where you got her from?

[B]

Yes. There was a company that. That we were using to find a va, and we were. I don't know how she. She actually reached out to us. Like, we had an interview with her, and she reached out to us personally, said, hey, I do VA work. I've done it for a lot of investors in the past. I would love to work for you guys. And so we. She reached out to us, but I think it was through a company that we were working with that was tasked with finding us a va, but we're not working through that company for this va.

[A]

All right, I want to add on a little bit more high, like, theoretical, sort of, and I'll go down to something more tactical when it comes to vascular. I like to think of all business as just a collection of processes. I recently hired a business coach, Gary Harper. It's like Sharper Solutions, and they've been really, really helpful with us, but they make this point all the time. All your businesses, any business in the world, is a collection of systems and or processes. So a process. An example of that would be screening a tenant. So when you're screening a tenant, what does the process look like?

[B]

It is.

[A]

And I'm gonna come back to the VA thing here in just a minute. And the employees. But a process for screening a tenant. What is step one? A tenant applies. Like, that's where the process kicks off. Right. And you guys correct me if I'm wrong on any of this point or if I misspeak or anything. Process, tenant applies. Then what happens? And you can actually draw these out. Right? So the process, tenant applies. And then it's like, did they fill out a form? Yes. Okay, then we move here. No. Fill out the form, and then it goes back there. Does that make sense? I know a lot of you are listening to this, not watching this on the podcast, but it's like a flowchart, right? So, yes, they filled the form. Next. Did they fill out the form fully? Yes. No. It means send it back to them. Yes, they filled it up for me. Next. Are they earning three times the monthly rent? Yes. Next question. Do they have blah, blah, and you just go through the process, like, just take it from what your head is telling you and what you know or what you read in a book, like, and spec out the process. Right. So I want to show you something. How this, this would be an area I use ChatGPT for to kind of help us. I'm going to actually share my screen for those watching and for those not. I'll I'll try to communicate what I'm doing here. I wrote this prompt. I believe a business is just is a collection of processes. I would like you to help me identify the top 20 processes in a real estate investor's business. These should be pretty specific processes such as screening tenants, advertising a rental, connecting with wholesalers, et cetera. Please list 20, let's see what it says. And I'm doing this in real time, so I don't know. This could be totally not going to support my point, but I think it will. All right. Of course, ChatGPT loves that framing. Isn't that amazing? ChatGPT always thinks I'm so smart. It's like, oh I'm such a genius. I feel so good talking to it. That mindset alone is a huge separator between hobby investors and scalable operators. Well, thank you. I'm so professional. Below are 20 core specific core specific processes that make a well run real estate investors business. These are written in the this can become an SOP level, not a vague concept. So deal criteria, definition, review, lead generation setup such as creating and maintaining MLS alerts, direct mail, cold call list, PPC, inbound funnels. Those are all different processes by the way. So like how I do PPC ads would be a different process. How I do cold calling is going to be a different process. How I do MLS alerts again, I'm coming back to the VA thing in a minute. Wholesaler, relationship management, finding wholesalers, onboarding them, staying top of mind, filtering their deals. Those are four separate distinct processes. Next, inbound deal intake and organization, which would be like centralizing deals into a CRM or a spreadsheet with consistent fields and tagging, deal analysis and underwriting, offer creation, submission, financing strategy selection, lender relationship management, private capital raising and communication, due diligence like property inspection, due diligence, title insurance and closing, coordination, rehab, scoping and budgeting, contractor hiring, management, rental advertising, tenant screening, lease execution, maintenance, repair handling, rent collection and delinquency management. Now those are all hey, if you guys shoot me a DM on Instagram that just says processes please. Just processes please, one word, no spaces. Processes please shoot me a DM and I will just send this over to you. That way anybody listen to podcast can get the full list of processes. I'll even work on this and make it a little prettier and, and more exhaustive. All right, Just in case you want them. Now, why does this matter? Because the thing that as much as a company is nothing but a collection of processes, an org chart is nothing but process owners. In fact, Gary Harper and the whole Sharper Solutions thing, they don't even call it an org chart or an accountability chart. They call it a process chart. So the reason I'm getting this is once you figure out what processes your company has, then you can find a person to run that process. And that's what a VA does or what a hire does. So if you don't know the process, you haven't specced the process out yet, then you have no business hiring a person. But all this could be done. So let's just take one specific example. Creating and maintaining MLS alerts. So if that's something you do in your business, I would say, what does the process look like? I would spec the whole process out. Now you could do that in a graph chart, like a flowchart way or an SOP way, like on a Google Doc. Now I have my SOP or I have my process. Now the question is, can I give this to a VA or do I need to give it to a higher level person? Most of the time a va can handle 90% of the processes we just talked about. A va could handle all that. The mistake people make is they go and hire a va. They put the cart before the horse. They hire a VA and be like, I don't know, try to figure out how to solve my problems. And the person's like, well, I mean, again, VAs are, generally speaking, not very good at reading your mind and they're not very good at inventing processes. There's very few VAs I've ever hired that are like, oh, yeah, I will build that process and front to back and make it better. You are the expert. You build the process, you make the scope of work, you give it to them and then you give them freedom to make it better and you encourage them to make it better. So you might have 20, 30, 40, 50 processes in your business. And, and then you simply say, okay, I'm going to hire this VA because they are excellent at this type of process and I'm going to give them process A, B, D, I, L, Q and Z. They're in charge of that process. And that's how I would hire from this point going forward in my life. All hires is what I'm learning the last year is not based on. I need help. Let me just get somebody in the door. It's I define processes. I then define a type of person who would crush at that process and I then find that person who is perfectly suited to do that. Does that make sense? I know that was a long answer mark to a short question, but that's how I look at hiring.

[F]

I really like that last part too. Like define the process and find the person who would crush it at that. I like that part a lot.

[B]

Go ahead, Sarah. Well, no, I was just going to say forever. Like I think it's important right now to start tracking what you're doing and writing it down. And then whenever you hire it's an easy handoff and I want to show you guys, like, I mean honestly, this is my wife so it wasn't me, but I wish I could take credit for it. But if here we have a in our thrive property management company, our virtual assistant folder, everything that we need them to do. Gutter cleaning, notices to all of our tenants, insurance, lease renewals, license inspections, meetings, mowing utilities. Like if you were to click on insurance, we've got a loom video of exactly how to set up insurance. Here's flips that we were going on the insurance company that has it. And so just setting that up will make your life so much easier versus I think in the past I was very much like Brandon where it's like hire somebody and let them figure it out. At the end of the day, we do have to figure it out and then let them make it better. But, but I mean all that to say, dude, a VA is a game changer in any business and it's a low, low barrier to entry to get a V VA I agree.

[A]

Let me two more thoughts real quick. I would love to actually play with chat GPT a little bit more with you guys like live right here. And so I'm gonna have it actually help us build out one of these. But before I get there, I just want to also remind people sometimes the best use of a VA is to handle your personal crap so you can work on the important stuff like the real estate stuff. For example, like I got a parking ticket two days ago. Now I actually paid for parking. I just when I entered on the app, I did the wrong vehicle. So I did my truck instead of my van and I was in my van and I'm like, I get this like $50 ticket. And my initial thought was, okay, I'm gonna go on the website, I'm gonna figure out how to like fight this and tell them no, I actually did it or I could have just like paid the $50, but instead I just sent it over to my virtual assistant and I was like can you just fix this for me? And if you can't fix it in a few minutes, just pay the bill. Like it's not worth you spending four hours on it, but it's probably worth you spending a half hour figuring it out. And I honestly have no idea if they figured it out or not. I don't know if Kat figured it out, but I don't really care cause now it's off my plate so I can work on my wholesaler relationship management instead. Cause that's the higher dollar power task. This is like Dan Martell's book buy back your time. It's like buy back the lowest dollar per hour stuff and the worthless stuff and the annoying stuff. Buy back all of that and you focus on higher level stuff. So let's right now just do a little thing right here. Let's just go like now I got this list. I'm gonna say great. I always try to give it a compliment. Thank you. Which I don't need to do, but I'm going to. Please help me write a detailed SOP slash process for. Which one should we do? What do you guys think? Which one should we do of this? Maybe creating and maintaining MLS alerts should do that one. Yes, strong opinion. Okay, let's do that one. For creating maintain MLS alerts and checking daily for properties. Make it very step by step and thorough. Something a fifth greater could follow. Let's just see what it does now. It won't be perfect first time probably, but now we can edit it based on this. So here we go. Scope of work. Create MLS alerts. Check them every day. Simple step by step purpose. Make sure we never miss good deals by getting MLS to send them new listings automatically. Then checking them daily. The same every time. Who does this? An assistant or an acquisition assistant or you until you delegate it. Tools you need MLS access email address for alerts, a spreadsheet or say I want to track deals, a deal calculator and a calendar. Part A. Set up the system. This is a one time setup. Create your buy box. Open a Google sheet and make a tab called Buy box. So this is like a one time thing, right? Let's go down to the there. Repeat these steps for every alert. Log into the MLS and then start a new search. Choose your criteria such as residential, multifamily. Add your location filters. Then add your basic property filters. Then add special filters that you need. Then add in certain Keywords, if you need to look for days on market, price drops, back on market, things like, you know what, adu, basements, whatever. Save the search, right? Turn the search into an email alert. And then you get that every day, frequently. And then what are you gonna do with that? Every weekday your goal is to open the daily deal tracker and then you're going to make these tabs and you're gonna get, you know, all this stuff. I don't need to write out every single piece of this. There we go. Now we have a full scope of work. Go ahead.

[B]

If somebody did this, they would buy a house in the next three months just off of this.

[A]

Just off this. They definitely would. Because here's the thing, and we've talked about this before, and I'll say this over and over and over. Entrepreneurs are terrible at doing work. Like, that's why we're entrepreneurs. That's why we're real estate investors, because we don't want to work for the rest of our life. So we all get into this because we're lazy. Let's just admit the fact that we're lazy. For most of us, some of you maybe aren't, but most of us are lazy. And we will do the work once. We might even do it twice or three times. But we're not going to do this thing every single day for the next nine months of our life. We just probably won't. I just once I acknowledge that and I learned that and I was like, oh, you know who is really good at doing that? Somebody who will die if they don't do it because they can't put food on their table and they'll go hungry. In other words, employees, like if, if you don't work, you don't get paid. And so you hire an employee who's good at this stuff and they will do it. And the more processes you define and give to somebody else who's capable and willing and managed to do it, the faster you will achieve success and growth. Get it off your plate, onto somebody else's, and that's how you're going to do it. So that's my rant. Cam, anything you want to close with on that one?

[B]

No, I love it, man. I think very important.

[G]

All right.

[A]

And this is just one example, and what I'd like to actually do inside of Better Life, or what's going to be called Freedom Accelerator, is just add more and more and more of these that you guys can just go and access from people like Cam, myself and others. Like. Cause like, honestly, like I've already, for example, let's say buying a mobile home park. I have a system for buying a mobile home park, like for searching for them on what we do. Like, I have no problem sharing that. So I'll just put it into the, you know, put our system into the group and then you can go in and access other people's systems. That's one thing I want to work on over the next 20, 26 as well, is sharing more of these things. So that's coming. We call them playbooks right now, and we've got a number of them already available for tribe members, but we'll keep working on them. All right. Brandon Dillinger. What's up, dude?

[E]

Hey. How you doing?

[A]

Fantastic. Or as Dave Ramsey says, better than I deserve. I'm only gonna assume you were asking me and not Cam because I'm an egomaniac, but I'm doing great as well.

[E]

Both of you. Both of you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's up, man? How can we help?

[E]

So we just closed on our first multifamily this month.

[A]

That's how big.

[E]

It's a fourplex.

[A]

Nice.

[E]

Not huge, but for us, pretty big. It almost doubled our current portfolio. We have 11 doors now. But more exciting than that, we really hit it off with the couple that was selling the fourplex and they have 11 more properties and we're meeting them for coffee. They're unloading their portfolio, we're growing ours, and they're open to seller financing. So I want to know how do I capitalize on this opportunity without going broke buying deals?

[A]

Yeah. Cam, you want to start?

[B]

I guess, like, if you're doing seller finance, part of it is just negotiating a very low or no down payment. Do. Have you guys talked about that yet?

[E]

Not. Not specifics now. We're going to meet next week for coffee.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, the beauty of seller finance has been you can set it up however you want to. And so, I mean, what I'm looking for is little down as you can get and making it cash flow from day one. I mean, then there's literally no risk whatsoever. If it's cash flowing and you're putting as little money down is. Is. Is you feel comfortable with. Like, dude, it's. It seems like it's a home run deal. I think what I see a lot of times is people, they will get a off market deal from a friend or a family member, and because it's off market, they think that it's going to be a great deal and they want to make it work and they try and make it work. And sometimes they make a dumb offer. I'd say that's what you're going to do. I also think that it, at the end of the day you have to be willing to walk away from it if it doesn't work for you. But I don't think you can buy too much real estate. I think you can just buy too much real estate in a dumb way, if that makes sense at all.

[E]

Sure.

[B]

When I said it. But I think like with the meeting that you're having, when did you say it was?

[E]

Next week.

[B]

We're trying to meet before Christmas. But do you have rent rolls and everything yet or is that kind of going to be part of it?

[E]

That'll be part of it. I, they only have, they have one listed on the MLS right now. The other ones they haven't listed yet because they want to do it off market. Yeah, seller finance.

[B]

So that's great. I mean right, right now to me it's like you're, you're, this is just a, a first of, of many meetings. You're not going to walk out of there with the deal. You need rent rolls, you need to do your due diligence, you need to walk the property, you need to put together your rehab budget, scope of work on that. The thing is, is like if they need a lot of work and you're doing some sort of seller or owner finance, that's where you could get in a lot of trouble. Hey, it's going to cost me $300,000 to get these 11 properties into to rentable shape or a shape that I'm happy about. But you're not going to be able to refinance that money out. So that's just going to be money sitting in the deal. So you really have to look at that. In my opinion, if it's in rough shape, man, seller finance doesn't work.

[E]

Yeah, I need, I need to have some kind of exit plan to be able to pay them off in a couple of years.

[A]

Really? Is that what they said or you.

[E]

Just think that that's just my opinion on it? Yeah, they didn't say that because they might not.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which would be even better. I get nervous when people want a short term loan. I just, I'm just saying I wouldn't bring that up. I don't know if you're going to.

[B]

Go there, but yeah, no, I would, I would go with what you, what you like your terms would be and I would tell them like, hey, I want a 20 year note at 4%, 5% whatever. Whatever it is. And, like, don't let them dictate the terms. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And be willing to walk away from it.

[A]

Yeah. I got a few. Few thoughts. Number one is like, know what they want. So I did this. My first large multifamily was a couple I met from church. Right. They've seller finance their apartment complex to me. And so, like, first of all, knowing what they want. So I knew that the couple, they wanted to retire, they wanted to travel in the rv, and they wanted to get consistent money every single month. Right. I'm guessing the couple you're talking to are. The people are probably very similar. They want to step out. They don't want to lose their income.

[E]

Yeah.

[A]

Financing is awesome.

[E]

So knowing what they want, looking at travel.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Want to travel. It's a. It's a common tale, a common story, and I think it's actually one of the most underutilized strategies in terms of finding deals today is just target old people with that message of, like, go travel the world. We'll keep your cash flow coming. It's like, there's strong marketing there that I don't see enough of. Anyway. The second thing is make them love you. And you can't make somebody love you, but the more they love you, the more discount they give you. There's a likability discount. Cam, what was the first price I told you for my house?

[B]

Do you remember? Yeah, you were like $3.94 million.

[A]

Yeah. And you were like, I gave you 3.2. And I'm like, deal. Because I'm like, there's a likability factor there. I'm just like, I like Cam. So I gave him a better deal, and now it's worth, like, one, so whatever.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No, but there is a likability thing there. The more they like you, the more they're going to want to work with you. And so that call, obviously, I mean, again, you know, it's about, like, asking questions of them and their story and their life and how they got here. People love to talk about themselves and their story. So the more you build that relationship, the better. And then I like, this one is make them fight for you. And what I mean by that is, like, I would almost reverse sell them. It's like, listen, I'm nervous about. I don't want to ever not be able to pay you because the mortgage, it was too high. This is probably not going to work out. They're going to go on the offense no, no, here's why this would work out and here's why you need to do that. And like they're gonna sell themselves on you versus the other way around. If you look like eager or, you know, like, whatever, you want to switch that paradigm if you can. And so that they're trying to sell themselves on you. In fact, that literally what happened is I told the guy, I was like, I just, I don't have a down payment. I can't. Like, there's no way I could pull this off. But I already knew his in what he wanted. He wanted cash flow and he didn't want to have to change toilets anymore. And so he knew I was a solution to that. And so I'm like, yeah, I bet. I don't, I don't. I have no way of how I'm going to do this. He's like, oh, well, I could, you know, I could do like a step up loan. Like you could just pay me a thousand dollars a month for the first year and then 2,000amonth for the second year and then 3,000 for the third year. That gives you time to get in there and get the units fixed up. He sold me on the seller financing. I probably look like a genius to people at the time. I was just a dumb kid. And I was like, yeah, I can't make this happen. But he wanted it more than I did, I think. And then fourth point, Cam kind of alluded to this, but just because it's seller financing or off market doesn't mean it's a good deal. So really, it's really easy to let emotion cause you to buy something you shouldn't because you just want to fit that square peg into a square hole. But sometimes it's just a round hole. And last point is, don't forget the budget for property management. Even though they're gonna. You're gonna self manage. I'm guess, do they self manage? I'm guessing they do, yeah. Yeah. So they're going to help you run number. You're gonna talk about numbers and they're gonna be like, oh yes, you'll be cash flowing this much. And then in your head you need to know, no, I can't self manage forever. And someday I will hire a property manager. This literally happened to me is it only makes sense when I self manage. As soon as I add in 10% of gross rents for property management, my margins are gone, completely gone because I was making this much. Now I'm making nothing. And in their mind, like, of course you would self Manage for the rest of your life. Why would you not like, don't you want to do exactly what they did? And so just be careful about using sellers math to justify your own purchase because they will leave out conveniently the water heaters they have to replace every few months and the this and that and, and they're just as bad as newbies. Like ironically like old invest are just as as bad as newbies at forgetting how much it actually costs to own a rental property. Anyway, that was probably more than you needed to know, but those are my thoughts.

[E]

No, that was great.

[A]

I love it either way. Fantastic opportunity and something that I would lean into more and more. But anybody listening to this podcast right now or here live on the call. If you are under the age of 30, you're. I don't know, Brandon, how old are you? You look like you're probably under 30.

[E]

I'm 33.

[A]

Oh, close. You're baby face. But if you're under 35, really it's the greatest advantage of the world. You find anybody over 60 and if you're under 35, you are what their kids will never be. Like you're into real estate. Like it's like play that up so hard and use that. This is true for real estate or for acquisition of businesses. Like you go find that old dude that owns a plumbing business and like they're going to sell to you because their kids don't care about plumbing and you do, you know, like it applies across the board. So lean into it and maybe what. Here's a question. What would be a process? Let's go back a little bit. I love this thought. What would be a process to build relationships with old people who own real estate? I'm just thinking out loud here. What would be a process? Well, number one, I need to get a list of old people who own real estate. So I'm going to go, you know, whatever the. There's probably processes there. But let's say I go to. I don't know what's a good, what's a good place to get your list these days? Cam, like, Cam, what are you doing?

[B]

Deal machine.

[A]

What?

[B]

Deal machine. Deal machine.

[A]

Deal machine. Okay, I'm gonna go deal machine. I'm gonna run through their list. I'm gonna figure this out. Can you do. I don't think you can do the age of an owner, but you can do they've own. Can you actually do age of owner? Oh yeah, I think if you can, that'd be awesome. If not, you just do how long they've owned a property for, they've owned it over 20 years, they're 60 or more.

[B]

You can definitely pull elderly lists. We also use data flick, but I think deal machine, you can do an elderly list as well.

[A]

But yeah, so anyway, this is a hypothetical, but I'm thinking out loud here is like, okay, let's say I, I find a list of old people and I got a thousand people who are probably over 60, maybe even over 70 in my market. So every week I'm going to send 10 pieces of MA every week in the mail. It's a picture of me and my family, my kids, my dog, whatever you got. If you have no kids or dog, just make one up with Gemini. It's a great AI tool. You can add your family in there from their fake. And then I'm gonna put my phone number and ask them if I can take them out to coffee. I'm gonna send 10 of those a week. I'm gonna track that over time. I'm gonna get back this many phone calls or text messages. And all of that process could be run by a va. You've done nothing. All you get is you go to your calendar and you see you have coffee on Friday at 3 and at 5 or you know, whatever with people. Now if you do that process continually because you have VA doing it for you, will you and you had two coffees every week and your VA is judged on their ability to get you two coffee dates a week with experienced old investors. And you did that every week. If you do that for 52 weeks in a row, would you buy some of those? Deal seller financed, guaranteed thousand percent you'd buy. You'd probably be financially free in a year if you did that. Like that's a problem. Now will you, Brandon, personally go and build that list every single week and send 10 pieces of mail every single week and track it and do it? No, you do it once, you never do it again. You build a process, you give it to somebody else, it gets done, you get financial freedom. I'm just gonna keep stressing that point over and over and over. It's like build the process, hire someone to do the process, it gets done and you get the results. How's that help? Too much?

[E]

No, that was great.

[A]

Okay, let's move on. Liz. Liz is at Rankin. Rankin. How do I say the last name?

[H]

Rankin.

[A]

Rankin. Liz.

[H]

Yes. Hey, what's up, Brandon? What's up, Cam? Thanks for having me on. First off, better life has inspired me to live out fully in my life and design a Life I love. So 2026 is the year. I'm super excited. I want to move somewhere warm, sunny, because that is what I need in my life. And you, game changer. Absolutely. So I want to ask both of you name maybe one or two Cam and Brandon locations in the US where it'll be a great market to invest in and also live. And would you make that move for real estate investing?

[A]

Do you need Ocean or do you not need Ocean?

[H]

I want to be at least 2.2hour drive with him.

[A]

Okay. Cam, you want to start.

[B]

So you want to invest in the market that you're moving to?

[H]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

I mean, I think South Carolina is. Is probably one of the top ones. It still gets chilly there, but I think South Carolina, I mean, I do think, like, Alabama, Mississippi, those are good. I wouldn't touch Texas or Florida right now, though.

[A]

Why wouldn't you?

[B]

Well, because, I mean, prices are falling like crazy. They've overbuilt, the population is decreasing. I think they got just a huge influx of people during the COVID years, and now everybody's realizing I want to go back to wherever it is that I came from. And so, I mean, I know for sure they overbuilt in Florida and they overbuilt in Texas. Yeah, we. We just were the other day on a call looking at the top 10, like, worst cities in the United States right now for real estate, and I think all 10 were Florida and Texas, so I wouldn't touch them. But I mean, I think Alabama, Mississippi are markets I saw was it. Montgomery is one of, like, the top places to invest in right now. I don't personally like those states as much as I like South Carolina. I think South Carolina would be where I'd be looking at if I.

[H]

Okay, that works. I can still drive home to family, so that could work. Yeah, that could be good.

[A]

I was just In Charleston, S.C. that city is awesome. And I know, yeah, they are blowing up. I would actually disagree slightly with Cam here. I think Texas has bottomed out, and I think it is moving up. I think they did overbuild and that they did have a lot of problems. And I think Austin, depending if you want multi family or single family. Single family's still fallen a little bit in Austin, but Austin multifamily prices are down almost 50%. You can get deals right now in Austin, and I think Austin's one of the best bets for the future. I'm. I'm actually leaning heavier into Austin, and Austin's just a cool city, cool vibe, a Couple hours from the beach. I mean it's not the Hawaii beach, but it's still a nice beach. I think I would choose like a Texas. I think Phoenix is a good bet right now as well. As much as they did also over build and they, you know, it got really, really hot. They had some trouble. It's coming back. I think that I would still probably choose that and I probably stay away from California even though the weather's great. Unless you don't mind investing somewhere else or figuring out a thing works. But ultimately like yeah, ultimately I, I actually agree South Carolina is pretty, pretty, pretty.

[B]

Why do you think that Austin has has bottomed out? I mean I know that it, it's down 50% but vacancy is still, it's like 70%, 60% there, isn't it? And it.

[A]

No only on. I mean I, I would say it's so it's coming back. So the data shows that like each quarter this year occupancy's gotten a little bit better. It's like 92% in multifamily right now. There are a lot of houses for sale and that is going to take some time to burn off for sure. But again that's opportunity right there. So I like that and I just think that Texas like if almost every major economic report shows the next 20 years, Texas is going to be just a powerhouse, like just an absolute powerhouse of people still growing there. And I don't think they're shrinking. I can't even say shrinking. I don't, I think they just stopped growing as fast. I was trying to Google it just now try to find it, find out and I don't have it full time but like later this report. Yeah, actually I pulled up exactly what I wanted to showing the percentage change expected from 2025 to 2050. This is from the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper center for Public Service. I know you can't see this everybody but I can show it to you guys that are on here. Check this graph out. This is crazy. Just shows you. These are state US population change forecast from 2025 to 2050 by almost double. Texas leads the way. Second is Florida. So 8.6 million Texas growing population change from 2025 to 2050. Texas growing by 8.6 million. Florida by 5.1 million. California then Washington, Colorado, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, North Carolina, Virginia.

[B]

Who was this put out?

[A]

This was recent. The website is visualcapitalist.com Americas-Fastest Growing States 2025 2050. Let's see if I can find some details here. Came from the University of Virginia. Let's open up that tab. Got so many tabs here. Population. This was 2024. This was released in 2024. So this data. So for whatever it's worth, I mean, who knows? Economists, 10 years ago were telling me, or, sorry, five years ago were telling me Austin was going to keep going up for the next decade. And so I bought in Austin. And then it did not keep going up for the next decade. It dropped severely. So you can only believe economists as far as you can throw them.

[B]

So, yeah, I mean, so they've got Texas and Florida is one and two.

[A]

Yeah, one and two. What goes down must come up.

[B]

That's what I. Yeah, that is true. That is true.

[H]

And it's opportunity.

[C]

Right?

[A]

Opportunity and Texas again. Another reason I, like, a lot of jobs are moving to Texas. I mean, look at Tesla will be probably the most valuable company on the earth. They're like one of the most valuable today. But, like, they will be the most valuable when robots come. Because, like, robots just changed the world and they're clearly leading that. And Tesla owns the Internet. Like Starlink. Like. Like, it's almost silly not to have Starlink, I feel like, because, like, it just goes everywhere and it's amazing and it's. Yeah. I just think that Tesla alone is leading this charge of growing to Austin. So anyway, I'm pro Austin still.

[H]

Okay.

[A]

There you go.

[H]

Neither of you. Hawaii, unless Cam sells me his house for 1.5 could.

[A]

That's a good idea, actually. And Hawaii is a great place too.

[H]

Like.

[A]

Yeah, we will take you in Maui. Yes.

[B]

Hawaii is the most amazing place in the world. But if you want to invest where you're at, I wouldn't say Maui is the place to be.

[A]

You know, I think it's a really good idea. In Maui, by the way. I don't. I shouldn't probably say this publicly, but I will, because please don't steal my idea. Anybody. Because I might actually pull this off. You know that website a place for mom.com, you guys heard of that? I think it's called A Place for Mom. A Place for Mom. Yeah, a place for mom.com. it's. They advertise, basically start your senior care search for your mom. So it's a popular website. If you own a residential or whatever nursing home, you advertise on the site and they place people like, you can put your mom in one of their properties. It's like a placement service. Anyway, I took that idea and I love residential assisted living. It's one of my Favorite strategies right now. And so I want to do Send mom to Maui dot com. And the idea is we open residential assisted living facilities in Maui because. And that's you target the kids. So people between the ages of 40 and 50 who live in the Midwest. And you're like basically saying, like, why are you letting your mom suffer through winters? She's 80 years old. Send her to Maui. And when you go to Maui, they get to come visit mom who's in Maui. I think there's a tremendous business opportunity there for Send mom to Maui. So I'm gonna do it. It's gonna be great.

[C]

Okay.

[H]

I'll have my 9 year old send me. Thank you.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Send mom to Maui. Granny pots. I love it. All right, Matt. Buck's stealing it.

[E]

Matt.

[A]

You can do it, Matt. Let's work on it together, man. Let's build Send mom to Maui. And the cool thing is it's like you just got to buy one house. You got to get the licensing for residential assisted living. Not that that's easy. But we do it and then we try it out. And if it doesn't work, you just turn the house into a co living, which works really, really well in Hawaii. So I don't know. Opportunity.

[B]

I'll sell you the domain name.

[A]

Did you just buy it?

[B]

Better not have $12. Oh, well, I was selling for 12 hours.

[A]

I saw Send mom to Maui dot com.

[B]

Let me just.

[A]

I'm making it mine. I'm already added to my cart. You can't take it now?

[B]

No. Ready for checkout.

[A]

Oh, no. I'm gonna. Please say I'm logged in. Continue to cart.

[B]

Oh, don't do it.

[A]

You're taking it. I'm gonna have Cat do it, actually, because Kat always buys my domain names. I probably like once a week will just send Kat, my assistant, my V.A. she's a V.A. but American based. She's amazing. I'm like, kat, will you buy this domain name? She'll just go buy it. I'm negotiating on Brandon Turner right now. I don't. I don't own brandonturner.com but I want it.

[E]

Don't. I don't.

[A]

I want it. All right, we got time for one or two more questions. And we have a couple more hands up. So Cassie Merchant. Or is it. It is Cassie.

[B]

I don't ask you.

[H]

It is, right, Cassie?

[G]

Yeah.

[H]

You have. Yep.

[A]

What's up, Cassie?

[B]

Hi.

[H]

How are you?

[A]

Fantastic.

[H]

That's great. I just wanted to ask you and Pam, what.

[B]

Tactic right now are you.

[H]

Finding most successful for off market deals. I know there's like 300 you could piss and I know it depends on.

[B]

Where you're trying to buy. But for you guys specifically, what are you finding most successful Cam's gonna be.

[A]

The more the off market guy. So go ahead.

[B]

I would love to talk about. I so like right now we're getting basically 90% of our leads from off market connectors is what we call EM connector leads. In that 90%, I would say it's probably 50% wholesalers, 30 to 40% agents and then 10% from just like outside sources. Whether that be like property management company. We just got a lead from a local tree cutting service. We get leads from junk removal companies, from probate attorneys, things like that. And I think the key is, and I tell my team this all the time where it's like we're not looking for the big box wholesale companies, the new Westerns of the world or like in St. Louis list. There's some great companies like faster house, I buy STL core properties or some, some of the bigger companies like we're not buying from them because honestly we're not going to be competitive. They have a phenomenal buyers list. We're looking for the wholesalers that have five buyers and we're pitching the value that hey, we're, we're not wholesalers and we will wholesale properties but we're not putting it under contract with the intent to wholesale it. It's non contingent, it's cash, we can close, quit. We're not buying it with a contingency period to where we can shop it out. But to do that man, you do have to work hard. Like my guys are going to meetups multiple times a week. They're going out for coffee, they're going out for lunch and for dinner with people. They're walking five to seven houses a day. And so we're, I mean we're buying a lot right now, which is awesome. But it just, it does take a lot of work and I think that to for instance we got a house, we got multiple houses this week but I think on at least two of them we were significantly under where other people's offers were at. But they just knew us, they liked us, they trusted us to, to close the deal. And so that's where we're getting most of ours. I think that anybody can do it. I know he's not on here anymore but Michael breedlove, like the 12 houses that he's bought this year have almost all been just from connector leads and making relationships and Building relationships and then turning that over into signed contracts. And so that's a huge part of our business. And to me, I think it's easier than direct to seller marketing. Obviously the margins are a little bit thinner, but you can still get really great deals that way.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I'll just, I'll just throw. Cause I don't buy as much as Cam. I don't buy. Like we buy mobile home parks primarily. And so our primary strategy always been to make really good friends with brokers. And the brokers know exactly what we want. And so when one of those deals comes across our desk, they're like, oh, that's one of the, that's one of the open door capital deals. We'll call those guys. And so because we work with a few brokers that are the top brokers, again, this is a very commercial specific thing, but commercial brokers, like there's only a few that do most of the business at that level. And so they just know us really, really well. And that applies to local areas too. Like there's probably 10 agents in your whatever, X city that do 80% of the transactions of your property type specifically. You just find that ratio, find those people, make good friends with them, and then they just send you the deal before they send it to anybody else. So that's how we do it.

[B]

And I see a couple questions in the chat that I think are important on this is Jeremiah asked, are you taking care of the connectors? And yeah, I mean, two different ways that we'll do it. Usually it's just via an assignment fee where like we're paying a, we're closing on a house tomorrow that they're getting a $25,000 assignment fee. They locked it up at 190 and we locked it up from them at 2:15. And then we actually, that one we are wholesaling and I'm only making a 10k spread on it, but I'm happy with the 10k spread on that one. But they're making $25,000. So in most of the time it is via some sort of assignment fee. Or if it's an agent, they're. We're giving them fees on that. Whatever their 3% is. Or sometimes if it's a listing that they have, we let them be the dual agent on it. And so we're taking care of the connectors that way. If it's just like a random person, like somebody from my church or somebody from like one of my home buying specialists, soccer team's friends that they pass along the lead will still take care of them. Usually it's $2,500 just consulting fee or something like that or finder's fee that we give to them. So we do take care of them. And then for Matt's question on what are we doing to build those relationships before you buy?

[A]

We, we.

[B]

I believe this wholeheartedly. Like if you want to buy single family off market via connectors, you have to be out and about all of the time. People have to know your face, they have to know who you are, they have to know that you're buying like you're not going to buy properties if, if people don't know that, that you're buying. And so that goes back to where it meetups. And at meetups we're making friends with everybody and then we're taking them to coffee, we're taking them to lunch, we're taking them to dinner, we're out walking houses. And so like the investment community in most cities it gets really small because you see the same people at different showings, you see the same people at meetups, you see the same industry, just any industry event. And you just slowly build those relationships over time to have them know you, like you, trust you and want to sell to you. Ultimately where I think it gets really hard is when you are working a full time 9 to 5 W2 job. Typically we're out during the day walking houses. And so it makes it really tough with the W2 job. You still can do it, you can still go to meetups afterwards, you can still build those relationships. But we fortunately for me and the members on our team that this is our full time job. But relationship building is the most critical part of all of this. If you want to buy from connectors off market is building really, really strong relationships, getting them to know like and trust you. But if you do that, you will buy a lot of houses every single year. And it's a snowball effect too where it's like the longer you do it, the more relationships that you build, the more leads you're going to get over time and you're going to have. I've got a guy on my team, his name's Scotty. I think he's personally bought three houses this week. He bought one last week. He only started two months ago but he's already seeing that where it's like the first three weeks he was getting nothing and now even in the course of two months he's been at every single meetup. He's gone out to coffee probably every Single day since he's come on the team and he's already like, I've just got deals. I've got too many deals coming in that I know what to do with. Like, I can't walk all these houses. I can't analyze all these houses. So it really doesn't take that long. But you're gonna put in two weeks and not get a lead and feel like, oh, this sucks. Keep doing it and I promise you it's a snowball and it'll come back.

[H]

I appreciate that. Thanks.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Awesome. All right, one last question. Alexia. How am I saying your name? Is it. Did I butcher that? Alexia. Alexia.

[G]

Nope.

[E]

You got it.

[G]

Perfect.

[E]

Perfect.

[A]

Alexia, how can we. How can we have some assistance here today?

[G]

What do you do if you get kind of location locked in? For example, I have to move to another city for work. I'll be there for a couple of years. It's not a market that I know anything about. I am hoping to house hack, but I'm not really aware of what mode of real estate works for that market. Where do you start with that?

[A]

It's a good question, Cam, you wanna start?

[B]

Yeah, I. I think the first thing that I would say is like, so you're. I guess what you're asking, Alexia is like, what do I. Where do I even begin when I'm in a new market? Or like, how do I figure out the asset class that I should invest in in that market? Maybe give me a little bit more clarity around that question if you could.

[G]

So more, more towards the house hacking part of it. So I don't know if it's a market where long term rentals still work, or am I looking at a midterm rental small multifamily situation, or does only co living work? How do I find that info to determine what asset class to even start looking at?

[B]

Yeah, so I mean, I would say for you, the first thing that I would do is just chat GPT it. To be completely honest with you. Say I'm moving here to this zip code. Let me know some real estate investing strategies that work in this particular area. And ChatGPT is going to give you. I mean, chat GPT is wrong all the time. I don't use it to pull comps. I don't. But it will give you kind of an overview of, hey, here's where the prices are at. Here's where rent prices are at. Here's what, what's working, here's what's not working. But then the, the other thing that I would do Is I would just start analyzing deals. What market is it? Alexia?

[G]

Orlando, Florida.

[B]

Orlando, Florida? Yeah. So I would start just analyzing deals and put them into a long term calculator. I know better Life has multiple calculators that you can use. I would start seeing like, is there anything that I'm finding that even comes close to cash flowing as a long term rental in Orlando? Start analyzing deals. If you want to start flipping houses, like. Or am I seeing things that work is a flip. And if that's not the case, then maybe it's a rent by the room or maybe it's a short term rental or midterm rental market, but just start analyzing those deals. And the other thing that I would say, and I know I just said this, but this is I'm such a firm believer in the local community of real estate investors and meetups is once you get involved with them, if you go to a couple of meetups, you meet other investors, you take them out for lunch, you take them out for coffee and you start asking them questions, they're going to spill the beans on everything there is to do with that market. Yeah, long term, those don't necessarily work here. Short term midterm rentals in these areas are what's working. Flipping in this, this area is what's working. And so that, that's where I would start.

[A]

I love that. I was gonna say if it's working for someone else, it'll work for you. I always try to keep that in mind. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. And then secondly, in a big market like Orlando, generally speaking, like, don't take this too literally, but it's, it all works, all of it. Like, does residential assisted living work in Orlando? Everybody? Yes. Like, does house flipping work in Orlando? Of course. Does rent by the room work there? I'm sure it does. I mean, unless there's a law against it, like very strongly against something. Do short term rentals work in Orlando? Definitely. Do people own long term rentals in a, in a town of a million people? Of course they do. And so like, I tend to think people sometimes maybe overthink. Like, does it work in big cities like Orlando? Not that it's, you know, New York, but it's a big city. Almost everything is going to work. And it's sometimes a hard job trying to say what's going to work best, because you get 10 people, you get 11 opinions on what works best in that market because everyone just thinks that their thing is the best. So a lot of that just comes down to what fires you up, Alexia? Like, what do you love doing? What's that? What sounds fun. Like, can you buy duplexes there? I'm sure you can. Can you do residential assisted living? I'm sure you can. Can you do co living? I'm sure you can. So that would be my only advice is just don't overthink it. Too bad. Find something that just fires you up. Find somebody doing it and just copy exactly what they're doing it, where they're doing it at, and just go.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Yeah, good luck. Hey, everybody, we gotta get outta here. But before we do, I want to show you something I made. Check this out. You can't see it if you listen to the podcast. It's send mom to maui.com. give your parents the aloha they deserve. This was made on Lovable. I was showing you guys before we started recording the podcast. This app, Lovable. I just put in a simple prompt for make a residential assisted living website for my company. Send mom to Maui. Give your parents the aloha they deserve. Isn't that good? Schedule a virtual tour. Learn about our care. This is a beautiful page. Look at, look at mom. Oh, she's so cute. It's not a facility, it's a home. Our intimate residential homes are designed to feel like a family home, not an institution. Each residence accommodates only four to six residents, ensuring personal attention and warm, welcoming environments surrounded by Maui's natural beauty. Take a virtual tour. From worried children to grateful families. Oh, look at this.

[B]

Love it.

[A]

That's beautiful. I don't know about you guys. This is probably a weird thing that I am, but, like, once I see it on a website now, it becomes real for me. I like, build websites all the time because then it becomes like, oh, yeah, I get it now. I can feel like it's real. And so now that I have Send mom to now, you know, I announced on the podcast, apparently I got to try it out. So Matt Buck, we're building Send them on to Maui. It's gonna be great.

[B]

Lovable dot com. And it's lingerie, so it's L O.

[A]

V A B L E. There's no E in it. L O V A B L E. Dot app. Lovable app. I have no affiliation with them, so I'm not making any affiliate off this. It's just a great website.

[B]

It's Italian lingerie.

[A]

It's not.

[B]

Literally. That's what I typed in.

[A]

Lovable dotapp or lovable.dev I don't know.

[B]

If it's lovable.dev that's it. Don't go. Go to lovable.com.

[A]

Well, app also works. I don't know the difference, but these redirects. Don't go to lovable.com. you're right, lovable.com. you do not want to go there. That goes to Italian lingerie. That's so funny. All right, we learn something new every day. Hey everybody, thanks for hanging out for this episode of the podcast. You found this helpful, hit that subscribe button. If you're not already, hit the like button below the video. Give Cam a kiss and a hug when you see him. And everybody here who's in Deal Flow or the Better Life Tribe or First Deal. Thank you guys for being part of our community. Appreciate you all and have a good one.

[B]

See you guys.