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- [00:00]
A
This is the Better Life podcast, the show that helps you build wealth, live intentionally, and create the life you don't need a vacation from. I'm your host, Mr. Brandon Turner, here with my co host, Mr. Cam Cathcart. Cam, dude, what's up, man? How you doing?
- [00:13]
B
I'm great. I'm great. I've got a sinus infection.
- [00:16]
A
I've had, I've had those. That's not great.
- [00:18]
B
No.
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A
Do you do the nasal rinse thing? Do you know about that? Like the netty pot or the netty pots?
- [00:24]
B
And yeah, I, the doctor gave me antibiotics, which I haven't taken yet, but I'm going to because it's, it's getting, it's getting bad. I, I, my face feels so full right now.
- [00:35]
A
Oh, yeah, I get that. But once or twice a year, it sucks. But yeah, there's a, there's a thing they sell. It's called, like, I don't, you know, the something. They sell it like Rite Aid, and it's like this not, it's not the net. I mean, the neti pot works. And there's another one that you squeeze. Those suck. Yeah, yeah, those things are cool. But there's one that they sell. It's like a hundred bucks and it's like this machine and you put it in both nostrils and it goes up and down into the whole machine. It's all self contained. So you're not like, doing it over the sink, that thing? TMI of everybody. But no, that thing doesn't burn. Like, the other ones tend to burn and, like, be really uncomfortable. I'd recommend it. It's a great thing. I wish I knew it was called. You know what else is a great thing? Well, I, the other day I was out there and it was really foggy and I was trying to catch some fog, but I missed.
- [01:20]
B
There's that so good.
- [01:21]
A
You can't even hold it in the cough. That's great. Yeah, I get it. Missed. Missed. It's pretty good, right? Anyway, hey, if you've ever looked at real estate investors who hit financial freedom in like a few years instead of like 40 years, and you're like, what do they know that I don't know? This episode is going to be Cam. And my answer to that. So if you're sick of dabbling and just limping along on your journey towards financial freedom and you want to actually build a rental portfolio that will actually change your life, this is that playbook. So stick around. This might be that roadmap that you've been waiting for. And if you're a real estate investor already and you're on this journey, but you want to go faster and get real help from Cam and I like along the way, check out the Better Life tribe. That's literally what we do. So Cam and I, every week, we're teaching, we're masterminding. So check it out. A Better Life. Com. That's the letter. A Better Life. Com. But that said, it's time to get into today's show with the 12 Step by Step steps to getting actual real wealth and financial freedom through rental properties and real estate in general. We'll talk a little bit more about flipping, but generally the passive income comes from rentals. So we'll talk about that. Cam, I'm excited about this topic. You excited about it?
- [02:27]
B
I'm excited. I mean, I love passive income.
- [02:30]
A
I do, too. I do too. And flipping and wholesaling may be a part of that, so I'm sure we'll talk about that. But again, you're not likely going to build up financial freedom just from flipping or from a business. So whatever you do for income, whether that's flipping wholesale, whatever, we still want to help you guys build up some financial freedom. So with that said, you want to. You want to kick us off, Cam? Yes.
- [02:49]
B
Step one is going to be setting a clear financial freedom. And you need a number. You can't just say, hey, I want to make enough income to pay for my lifestyle. Like, you need a clear numerical goal written on a board, written in your notebook, wherever that may be. And then you need to reverse engineer that into quarterly targets. And so if we were going to say, hey, I want to make $12,000 a year in passive income in, in three years, and we reverse engineer that into quarterly targets, what would that be? There's 12 quarters. So we, we need every quarter, we need to add a thousand dollars of passive income.
- [03:27]
A
I agree. And if you reverse engineer that, you're going to get there. There's a famous, I don't know, story anecdote quote. It basically says it's from Jack Welch, the guy who ran ge. And he once either said or said, he said, I don't know, that he wants to be able to go to every employee in that company. All like 200,000 employees, any employee at 3 in the morning and shake them awake and say, where is GE headed? And every employee should be able to say, we're going here and know exactly what that number or that metric or that goal is. And the reality is most people don't operate with that Level of intentionality, there's like financial freedom. Okay, cool. But I want to hear I'm going to go for $10,000 a month in the next three years in order to get there. I'm going to do this. I'm going to back into this. I'm going to back into this. And so by the end of the first year I might not be, you know, I wouldn't say divided equally necessarily. Like if I wanted 10,000amonth in three years, I'm not going to say, well, by the end of this year I'll have $3,333 in cash flow. You might ramp into it. But I might say, hey, this year I'm at a thousand right now. I'm going to get to 2000 by the end of the year and then next year I'll get to 5,000 the year after the 10. Now that's a clear plan that we can reverse engineer. So I'm a big fan of just saying like where are we going? Let's walk backwards to be able to get that.
- [04:35]
B
And I think too like with that it doesn't have to be cash flow specific because if I was starting from scratch and I was reverse engineering, I want to cash flow 12,000 dol in the next or $10,000 in the next three years and I was starting from scratch, my first quarter might be. I don't care about buying or adding any rental properties. I want to get involved in a mastermind, a local mastermind. I want to pick my buy box and so it doesn't have to be, I think completely correlated with. Well, it is correlated, but it doesn't have to be. I want to add X amount of cash flow this quarter. You can ramp up to that over time.
- [05:09]
A
100% agreed. And hey, if you're interested, quick little plug here. Every single year around the first of the year, usually it's like the fourth or fifth. I don't know the exact day yet. I'll, maybe I'll edit this and put it in later. But otherwise we do a goal setting retreat for the better life tribe and you don't have to be part of the better life tribe to go. There's always like a small fee just to make sure people actually show up. And we put a lot of time into this thing. But if you want to do a like a multi hour, like many hour long goal setting for the entire year, it's one of my favorite things we do all year long anyway. It's coming up here first week of January. Just go to betterlife goal setting.com and we'll get you registered for that. All right, number two, pick one cash flow strategy and like criteria and then go all in. So a huge mistake I think people make in today's market. We talk about this on a lot of podcasts. Cause it's just so important these people try to do a little of everything. Yeah, I might do a little bit of midterm rentals, might do a little, I got a short term rental or two, I got some multifamily, I flip a couple houses. You know, I do this and that, I just dabble. But in today's market, dabblers don't do anything because like you have to be great, you really have to be good today. And most people are not good when they're dabbling. And so you gotta, I know it's not sexy and you wanna do everything and there's time to do everything once you get to financial freedom. But let's just pick one thing that you can just work at and get uniquely good at. And the way you become uniquely good at something is by just going all in on one thing. So maybe that's, hey, I'm gonna do midterm rentals or I'm gonna do rent by the room pad, split co living, whatever you wanna call it, I'm gonna do, you know, whatever. A small multifamily. And you got to pick something that works with your market and that works in today's economy. But you find that thing, you go all in on it and then same with criteria. Right? It's like, I buy house, like what's your criteria for what you buy, Cam?
- [06:51]
B
We buy three bed, four bed, two plus bath houses and certain zip codes. Not on septic, not on a main road and that need a cosmetic rehab.
- [07:02]
A
Yeah, that's literally. So now Cam knows if a deal, like he can be really good at those deals and do better than most people, but because they're not focused on that specific criteria. And you are. Yeah.
- [07:13]
B
And I think one thing that's important when you are picking that cash flow strategy is to research it. And obviously. But like for us when we started in 2020, we could cash flow in St. Louis class A and B plus rental properties using the BRRRR method. Now we cannot. And so if you come into this and say I want to buy Class B plus and Class A rental properties and build $12,000 in cash flow, I've got bad news for you. Probably just not going to work. So you do have to research what are the strategies that are producing cash flow right now. And some of those lower income, the cheaper houses are still cash flowing or going rent by the room or short term midterm type rentals, things like that are cash flow. But you have to research it and know what is working in your market to produce cash flow.
- [08:02]
A
Yeah, that's awesome. And so hey, if you're on YouTube watching this right now, in the description, I'll put a link to an ebook that I wrote. It's called Cash flow isn't dead. 20 plus strategies for finding cash flow in 2025 and beyond I think is what it's something like that. Anyway, I put a link to it in the description below. You can also, if you are not on YouTube and you're just listening to this podcast, just go to my Instagram Beardy Brandon and shoot me a dm. And in that DM just say the word fringe, F R I, N G E and I'm going to send you that same ebook. It's totally free, but it's just like all the things that I'm super fascinated by right now that are producing cash flow for me and people that I'm friends with. So that's all there. And again, just pick the one. Go all in on it. And again, if you're part of the Better Life tribe, you obviously know this because every week we bring in, you know, either Cam and I or we bring in a guest speaker to talk about these strategies. But if you're not in a mastermind like that, just go out there and just start researching those things and find one that just appeals to you. Maybe it's mobile home parks, maybe it's apartment complexes, maybe it's something and then just go and research the heck out of it and then move on to number three, which is build your lead funnel. What does that mean that can be.
- [09:05]
B
On market or off market? I obviously buy most of my stuff off market. I think you're going to find the best deals off market. But if you know what your cash flow strategy is and you know what your criteria is now, you can start focusing on that. So if I was wanting to build cash flow in St. Louis, Missouri, I know that class A, Class B is not probably going to cashflow, But I do know that you can buy houses in North county for $70,000 and they rent out for 1300 bucks a month. And so I'm going to focus all of my efforts on finding houses in that market. I'm reaching out to wholesalers, I'm reaching out to agents, I'm reaching Out to property management companies, senior living facilities. I, I'm, I saying, hey, these are the houses that I'm looking for. If you come across anything that fits this criteria, send my way. If you wanted to, you could take it even a step further and you could start doing direct mail, you could start doing ppc, ppl towards that, that buy box or criteria that you're looking for. But you have to have leads coming in to buy those houses.
- [10:02]
A
If you had to pick like you had no other option, you could only choose one lead strategy to fill your pipeline and to get off market deals. What would you do? Cam, I'm just curious but you per, this is not advice for everyone else, just you and your business right now. What would you pick?
- [10:18]
B
Connector leads. So connector leads is free leads. And part of this is because I'm a big relationship guy, but it's building relationships with wholesalers, with real estate agents, with property management companies, with junk removal companies. We bought two houses this week. One from an agent that had an off market listing that they didn't want to take to the market and one from a wholesaler. And I think the wholesaler we paid an $8,000 assignment Fe and the agent is just getting their standard commission but they're the buying and selling agent so they get 6% on it. And so I love connector leads.
- [10:49]
A
They're free.
- [10:50]
B
I think they fit my personality better where I'm not super data driven, I'm not a systems guy, but I'm really good at building relationships and so it fits my personality better. Maybe somebody that, who is more of that engineer data, very analytical, the direct to seller marketing leads or a better opportunity because you have to have a lot of data. Like that's something I've realized in our company is like the data that we pool, whether it's from resimpli or we don't use resimply to pull data. I don't know why I said that. But from deal machine or from propstream or we use data flick the data that we're pooling, it has to be so niche and so dialed in and we just don't have that in our company. We haven't dialed that in yet. So we buy way more houses from connector leads and we're just better at it.
- [11:38]
A
And I think that just fits with like you said, it's your personality, it fits with that. And so you lean into what works for you and what you like doing. I don't do a lot of it anymore and I never really did a lot of it. But I like direct mail because my brain, like, my personality is not so much like the connector. Like, I don't like talking to people ever. Like, it's like, put me on a podcast, it's fine. But put me in a crowded room and I'm like, gonna go find a corner. And so, like, I would rather focus on the numbers and like, how many did I send? What's my response rate? The marketing side is where my personality is. So that's generally how I tend to move in real estate. But again, just find what works for you.
- [12:12]
B
Well, one of the reasons I say connect your leads right now, where it's just real estate cyclical, but is the fact that can direct to seller marketing leads have gotten so expensive. I mean, we're spending seven plus thousand dollars per buy right now. And three or four years ago, we were spending three to 4K a buy. And if anybody says they're spending three to 4K by it immediately sets off a red flag saying that they're lying. Like our callback rate, I think I said this a couple weeks ago, we're at 0.2, meaning for every 10,000 pieces of mail that we send, we're getting 23 calls on that. And, and then out of those 23 calls, maybe 10 are qualified leads. And maybe we're going to buy one or two of those. No, I would say we should buy more than that. We should buy at 34. We might buy three or four of those. That's if things go perfect. And so it's so hard to buy houses right now from direct to seller leads. And so I would rather connect with a bunch of wholesalers and a bunch of agents.
- [13:12]
A
Yeah, I love it. All right, well, moving on. Actually, let me put some examples to this of how, like, we're giving you guys General 12 steps here, but I want to give you like, if I personally, this is not advice, but this is. If me personally was like, I have to get financial freedom in 3 years, I need 10k a month, what would I do? Let me just tell you. First of all, I would set that clear number of 10k. I would then say, well, I'm gonna buy whatever. I'm gonna get my first thousand this year, I'm gonna get to 5 next year, I'm gonna get the 10 the year after. So it's like 1, 4 and 5 or whatever the number is. Right? So I now have that very clear. I would take that again. We're sticking on point number one here. I'm kind of going through all these. I would then Say, well quarter one, I'm going to do what again, let's say say I'm brand new to real estate. I would say quarter one, I'm going to perfectly nailed down my crystal clear criteria, know my buy box, get it all nailed down and I'm going to attend whatever ten Better life tribe meetings or whatever, right? Then I'm going to pick that cash flow strategy. I'm going to say again, this is not advice, not the only thing that works. But I would probably pick let's say small mobile home parks, just for example, because I like mobile home parks. I say I'm going to buy 20 to 50 unit mobile home parks. I'm going to buy them in the Midwest within an hour drive of a major city. And then I'd say I'm going to go all in on that strategy. Great. And then I'm going to say, well how do I build a lead funnel for that specific thing? Now you might be wondering why I chose that. I just like it. Like it works and I like it. And so I'm just going to go all in on it. I got to build a lead funnel. Well, how do I find 20 to 50 unit mobile home parks? Well, I can go on market and I can build relationship with brokers who specialize in mobile home parks or I can go off market and I can build a list. I'd probably go off market and build a list. In that case I'd go get a list of every single mobile home park and this might be a very manual task. It could just be searching like I'd literally go to Google, type in like St. Louis, Missouri Mobile home parks and just build a giant list of everyone and then find out how many units each one has and if it's owned by a mom and pop landlord. And I'd put a lot of work into having a VA build me out a massive list of leads and then I would start building that funnel. I'd probably start calling direct mail, doing things like that. So that's again just like the first three points here, here's how I'd personally do it if I had to start over right now. And then that leads to number four, I would build my team early. This is super important to me. I am not good at doing anything for the long period of time. For a long period. I'm not good at doing anything for a long period of time. Like I'm really bad with consistency and I'm really bad with persistence. Like any diet, any new idea, sport, whatever. It's like I Do it for like a week and I'm done. Because I'm entrepreneurial, because I'm a high. Like, I guess my, my predictive index is called a maverick. It's like I just, I am just not one cut out for doing the same thing over and over and over and over. But you know who is cut out for doing the same thing over and over and over? Most employees in the world. And so what I have learned from me is because I know that I'm not gonna stick with the boring stuff week after week, year after year. I just hire people to do that stuff for me or I bring in partners and we divide up the work and we hold each other accountable to it. And so I would say, so tip number four is build your team early. And now that team might include your lender, your agent, your contractor, things like that. That's obviously important. I call that like external team, but there's your internal team and that's like an acquisitions person. Like, I will not drive for dollars three times a week for the next 12 months. I just won't do it. Will that get me a deal? Guaranteed? Almost guaranteed. Will I do it? No chance. But if I pay a college kid to go drive for dollars three times a week and I pay him 20 bucks an hour, that will get done. Now I might have to pick a couple ones, I might have to manage them. I'm at the fire one and pick up a new one, sure. But I would rather do that work of managing a college kid to go and drive for dollars than drive for dollars. Does that make sense? I just out of doing the work, I want to build an internal team. It doesn't have to be expensive. It can be virtual assistants, it can be local college kids, it can be partners where you don't pay any money, you just split it. But I have to get out of doing everything myself if I wanted to get financial freedom fast.
- [17:08]
B
One of the things that I think with that too is people need to realize how hard it is to do this. And I know on Instagram and YouTube sometimes we. It's not a purpose, but we make it seem like it's easier than it is. But if using my context specifically, I'm a single family guy and we've built a, a pretty large single family rental portfolio. But for you to do that, to be able to focus on finding good deals like that is, is in and of itself a full time job. And then you've got to put those under contract, you've got to raise money for them. You've got to set up utilities, you've got to work contract to close, you close on it. And then because we are finding off market deals that usually need rehab, you have to rehab that property and then once you're done rehabbing it, you've got to find a tenant for it. And then once you get a tenant in there, you have to manage it. That is so much work. And to be able to do that and to add $10,000 a month over the next three years in passive income, that's going to take an astronomical amount of work that you need a team for. One of the reasons that we were able to scale so fast with our rental portfolio was because we knew from day one, hey, we're trying to scale this thing. And so my only job when we started was finding deals and then my wife's only job was managing the project. And then we hired out a property management company. And so like that I think is really, really important for people to realize if you want to scale, you have to build a team.
- [18:34]
A
A thousand percent agree. And again, for those who are like I can't afford it, the team doesn't have to be paid. They can literally be partners and just go buy twice as much and have somebody else doing half the work. If you need to do that until you can have four people, then you buy four times as much. Like if you have to go that route, go that route. But I'm a big fan of that. You have another good or something you said in there made me realize there's also when I said why I chose mobile home parks earlier, one of the reasons I chose that too is imagine if a single family house that you put in all the work to buy a single family house. How much cash flow cam today on a single family house would you make in cash flow off one house? Would you guess like pure cash flow after everything said and done?
- [19:13]
B
Negative.
- [19:15]
A
Okay, assume it's a really good deal, you bought it off market, you got a pretty great deal, you got a decent interest rate on it because you went with Better Life real estate funding@betterliferef.com and got into the 5% range on a DSCR, which we can do. Betterliferef.com let's say you got that on.
- [19:31]
B
A long term rental. If stars align, maybe three to 400 bucks a month.
- [19:38]
A
Okay, so how many of those, let's say making 300 bucks a month, how many do you need then for financial freedom of 10 grand a month? 35 of them.
- [19:47]
B
35.
- [19:48]
A
The reason that I, I immediately jumped to mobile home parks. Not that you should. Again, not everyone should. And there's lots of value in doing single family and smaller deals. But if I can get a mobile home park or if I can do a rent by the room or if I can do an assisted living, those ones have much more cash flow per unit. Same with short term rentals. Short term rentals, if you do them right, or even midterm rentals, those are more cash flow friendly strategies. But like 150 unit mobile home park could probably make you five grand a month in cash flow when you're all done with it. And you could probably get seller financing on the whole thing. I'm not trying to talk people into mobile home parks. I'm just letting you know there's certain strategies where I'm not saying the same amount of work, but it might be the same amount of work to find a mobile home park as it would be to find a single family house and the cash flow might be 10 times greater. Same with a rent by the room. Assisted living would be harder. I mean if really want to, if we want to go real simple here. If you had to get financial freedom in three years, here's actually what I would do. I spent a whole first year just learning how residential assisted living worked. I spent my whole second year buying one of them and my whole third year learning to manage that one. And at the end of three years, you'd be making 10 grand a month off of one single assisted living facility.
- [20:54]
B
You'd be making more than 10amonth.
- [20:55]
A
You can make more than 10. Yeah, yeah. Did you go play pickleball, by the way?
- [20:58]
B
I did not, no. I was sick.
- [21:01]
A
Yeah, it's all right. We have a, we have a friend who does residential assisted living and he's a better life tribe member. Anyway, he plays pickleball. We play together and we're going to play together sometimes when I'm back on Maui. So anyway, again, I don't. I'm not talking crap about single family. I like single family. I buy single family. I just if the gun to my head, I had to get a financial freedom quickly. I'd probably start today with something larger like that and just figure it out. And that you're going to say something. People are thinking, well, yeah, that'd be great, but I can't afford a 50 unit mobile home park or apartment complex. And you're right, you probably can't. That's why step number five on our list is you want to do it or you want me to do this?
- [21:40]
B
Master Your capital plan.
- [21:43]
A
Capital plan.
- [21:44]
B
How are you going to get money for this? Especially for somebody that's starting out with no money? And that's why I think that single family is probably the smallest barrier to entry for sure as a single family route. Now with what you said, I actually think that's a great idea where it's like if you're trying to do it in three years, when you spend a year learning and you spend a year finding the right deal and putting that together, you can go raise money for that. People will be interested in partnering with you. But you have to have a capital plan. Whether that's private money, whether that's a hard money lender, whether that's partnerships, whether that's bank financing, you have to have capital somehow, some way. I know that a lot of people have, have seen again the YouTube videos of buying real estate with no money out of your own pocket. And that is completely true. But the money has to come somewhere. Whether even that can be from the seller using creative financing and owner financing. But the money has to come from somewhere. And so you have to build those relationships and figure out where that money is coming from.
- [22:47]
A
You know, how you deal with maintenance requests as a landlord is such a stark difference between the pros and the amateurs. The best landlords don't just fix things. They build systems that actually make tenants feel heard. The problems get prioritized and repairs get done fast. And now there's something really cool worth checking out. So Turbo Tenant just released a free AI tool that actually troubleshoots maintenance requests for you. So when a tenant submits a request, the AI reaches out together details like where the issue is, what's been tried already, and even collects photos. It can actually walk tenants through simple fixes, you know, like flipping a breaker or, you know, whatever, and drastically reduce that kind of vague back and forth request that drains your time. So if you manage rentals, it is worth a look. Just check it out@turbotenant.com that's turbotenant.com same question asked earlier. If you had to start right now and you could only pick one strategy for financing your real estate from this point forward, for the next, let's call it a couple years, what would you pick? Can only choose one.
- [23:44]
B
Private money.
- [23:44]
A
Why private money?
- [23:45]
B
Private money I think is the easiest to get. Well, I would say hard money is the easiest to get, but private money, it's easier once you have the money where it's like, hey, for my private monies, I pay them anywhere from 8 to 12% annualized on their money. I don't have to bring money to the table. So, like, with a lot of hard money lenders, you have to still bring some money to the table. For me and my private money lenders, I can text somebody right now and say, hey, I've got a deal. It's a $200,000 purchase price, $70,000 rehab. I need the money in two days. And they say, where do I send the wire? And so it's just really, really easy. And then I might take six months to rehab that property and either refinance it or sell it. And then I'm paying them, let's say, 10% of that money. So whatever that is, 2500 bucks a month or something like that for six months. And so at the end of six months, I'll wire them back. My math is terrible, but $280,000. So I like private money a lot. I think there's something to owner financing. I just am not an expert in that at all. And so I don't want to talk about something I'm not an expert about. But owner financing, I think, is a really great strategy for some people as well.
- [24:55]
A
I agree. And it kind of depends a little bit on the stress, like on the asset type. Right. For flipping, yeah. I think private money makes perfect sense. Or for burr investing, it makes great sense. I would not do private money necessarily to buy a mobile home park because you can't cash flow when you're paying 8, 9, 10%. Right. So it kind of depends on the strategy a little bit. But for mobile home park, seller financing is awesome. Like, it works really, really well. I'd probably do a combination of seller financing with small local bank financing. For example, I'd find a mobile home park, let's call it a 30 unit. They're asking a million bucks for it. I get the seller to put $200,000 second mortgage. I get a bank to do a $700,000 first mortgage, and I'm at 900 total. And then I got to bring a hundred thousand dol to the table. And if I don't have a hundred thousand dollars, then I'd find a partner who could bring in a hundred thousand dollars. So partner brings a hundred grand, seller carries a second mortgage at 5% for the next 20 years of 200 grand, and then the bank comes with the rest. There I just did that deal with no money down. Yeah. Do I got to pay the partner someday? Somehow we got to work that out. Sure. I'll work out the numbers. But if I don't have to bring any money. Shoot. I do those deals all the time. And so again, it just, you pick your strategy and we're kind of going in sequential order here for a reason. It's like now you, you know where you're trying to get to. You got your strategy, your criteria, you're getting leads coming in with your funnel. You got a team working the lead so that they actually happen over and over and over and over. You don't miss a beat there. And then when you start landing deals, which you will because you're doing the work, then you're going to be able to finance that thing. And I, based on whatever strategy you're at. So again, pick and master your capital plan.
- [26:25]
B
And I think another one that people forget about a lot is doing some sort of partnership or equity partnership.
- [26:32]
A
Yeah, my favorite thing. Thing.
- [26:33]
B
Yeah. Where I've got investors, especially on some of our rental properties, they have the money. So, so one of the things, and this, this might be getting too in the weeds, but a burr right now in, in recapitalizing 100% is not possible. Where I'm into a property for 200, let's say $160,000, I get it appraised at $200,000, the bank gives me 80% and I, I, I can pull out all of my money just because of interest rates and DSCR loans. It's not possible. Usually a bank's gonna say he be able to lend $140,000 on this. Well, I've got partners that say, hey, I will cover that $20,000 difference right there in exchange for equity in the property. And so have done that before where I don't have to leave any money tied up into deals still. I'm still buying rental properties. I'm just not owning 100% of the rental property like I was before.
- [27:27]
A
Exactly. I'm a big, big believer in that strategy. And so yeah, no matter how much money you have, you can get in using equity partnerships or a combination of equity maybe plus debt. Like for example, let' wanted to do a mobile home park and I didn't have the money for the down payment, so I found a partner. And maybe I would say something like, hey, I'll give you 15% of the equity on this deal, like of whatever we make. And I'm going to give you 6% on your money, but I need $250,000 and then the bank's going to do 750. And now I just did the deal with no money down, but the cash flow Wise, I can still make it work because I'm just paying the guy 5% and then down the road they get another. So you can kind of split debt and equity that way too. And that's a pretty good bet for somebody is, oh, I make money consistently every month, mailbox money, and I get a piece of the back end. That sounds cool. So I may look into that as well.
- [28:10]
B
Yeah, and that's, that's what we're doing is the equity partner gets 100% of the cash flow, which isn't much right now, and then they get a piece of equity in the property. And so for me, I'm not making money on it, but I'm making money in the long run, a lot of money without using any of my own money.
- [28:29]
A
Yeah, exactly. Love it. All right, moving on. Number six, track the right KPIs every week. So at the end of the day, your business comes down to a series of KPIs. KPIs meaning key performance, performance indicators. It's basically putting numbers to the actions you're supposed to do. So examples would be how many leads came in. Like I can tell an investor is serious or not based on whether they can answer the question, how many leads did you get last week? How many calls did you make? How many follow ups did you complete? How many offers did you make? How many times did you underwrite a deal last week? And if they're like, I don't, I don't know, I did I. None. Maybe some, like, if they don't have any way of tracking those, those KPIs guys, they're just not serious. And so, I mean, you can survive, you can make good money not being serious. Sure. You can build financial freedom over a 5, 10, 20 year period and you can get lucky maybe, but if you were like, my family will starve if I don't have financial freedom in three years and you actually wanted it, that's how I would know you're serious, because you're tracking it. How do you know a good salesperson is a good salesperson? They know their metrics. How do you know a good real estate investor is a good real estate investor? They know their numbers, or at least they have them documented if they're not the one doing the work? You could pull it. Like I could pull up right now and tell you exactly. Again, not off top of my head because I'm not the one doing it, but I could tell you how many sales calls we had last week for the Better Life tribe or for first deal or how many mortgage applications we had for ref. Because my team tracks those numbers meticulously. Same with when we're buying mobile home parks. Like, we know how many broker outreaches we had, how many offers we made, how many, you know, conversations we had, how many, all that stuff. We know all of those numbers and we even, like, those numbers are defined. Like, we have targets around them. So we say, oh, we're going to analyze four deals every day. Because we believe that one out of every ten deals we analyze, we're going to make an offer on. One out of every ten we offer on, we're going to get a deal. So we reverse engineer our goals for the quarter down to our actions, and then we track our KPIs.
- [30:17]
B
And we use this analogy a lot. But real estate investing is so much or similar to just taking care of your body or being in shape. Like, if I say, hey, I want a six pack by my birthday on April 12, that's my birthday, April 12, 1991. But if I say, hey, I want a six pack, like, I know that there are certain things that I would have to do. Like, I've got to track my macros. I have to work out three times a week. I have to walk 10,000 steps a day. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I could not get there without tracking those things. Just knowing me, knowing my personality, Like, I would have to have very set KPIs that I have to do every single week consistently over the next, what is it, probably 20, 24 weeks until that date to get there. And it's the same way with real estate. Like, you have to have KPIs that you are tracking every single week if you want to be successful. Very rarely are you going to be successful if you don't track your KPIs. What's that saying? You cannot manage what's not measured. Like, you have to measure everything in your business if you want to be successful.
- [31:30]
A
I agree 1000%. Hey, here's a question for you. Of all the KPIs and stuff, if you had to only pick three that your team just had to report every week, what would those KPIs be so that you knew whether or not you were going to be buying deals or not?
- [31:46]
B
Great question. Connections made, houses walked, offers made. And I've thought about that question a lot because it used to be like our highest priority was buying houses. Um, but I feel like sometimes you can do everything right and you don't buy a house. And so I wanted to, like, what are the indicators that we can do before buying a house that would almost guarantee us buying a house? And so it's connections made, houses walked, offers made. Another thing that we used to have was leads, but sometimes it's like, oh, I can get on Facebook and I can find a thousand leads, but are they good leads? And so we still track leads. We still obviously track houses bought. But it's. To me, the three biggest would be, hey, are we making connections? Because I said earlier in the podcast, connector leads is. Is our number one funnel for buying houses. Are we making connections, are we walking houses, and are we making offers? And if we do those three things, everything else will work out in our company.
- [32:43]
A
Beautiful, man. Love it. All right, number seven, create weekly accountability. Now, I don't necessarily mean you hire a coach or you have a accountability group, though that could be a piece of it. Especially if you're a solopreneur, having an accountability buddy or a partner or team, like super, super important. Like a group of people that are all solopreneurs doing on their own. Yeah, that's great accountability, awesome. But what I'm more referring to is what is your accountability internally with your team? Because at this point, you have a acquisitions person. We already talked about that. Maybe you have a virtual assistant or executive assistant. Maybe you've got a finance person, whatever, you've got a few people. And if not, maybe it's you and your spouse, or maybe it's you and a business partner. How do you make sure that you're hitting the KPIs that you're tracking and that you're looking at them on a regular basis? Like a cadence of accountability is what EOS calls it. And so that, again, that might be just a weekly L10 meeting. To use EOS language in L10. It could be like just a regular scoreboard meeting where we look at the scoreboard. It could be the Better Life tribe. We talk a lot about this idea of reios. And so we've got meetings that we talk about in that how. Here's the agenda. This is what the call looks like. This is what I commit to doing. This is what I did last week. This is what I'm going to do this week. That's just accountability. So however you can build that, a cadence of accountability, super important.
- [33:55]
B
Going back to six, where it's having the right KPIs, like, that is incredible. But if you don't hold yourself accountable to those KPIs, they mean nothing. Like, you're never, you're never going to be successful. And so having some sort of accountability around that is the only way that you will be successful is having KPIs. But then accountability scorecard chart around that. Whether that's if you're a solopreneur and it's just buddies that you know from a mastermind or hiring a business coach. Coach. If you have employees sitting down with them and going over it every single week making sure that they are hitting their KPIs. It is so important. I say this all the time, but consistent action is the only thing that will make you successful. Consistent action over and over and over again.
- [34:46]
A
A thousand percent people should rewind that list that again because it's so true. Consistent action. You get the results of what you repeatedly. I say that all the time in the Better Life tribe. I'm always like, you get the results of what you repeatedly do. So what are the repeatable things you're gonna do? Get some accountability to make sure you actually do them and then you will get the results you want. All right, moving on. This is another piece of the Getting the results of what you do is number eight, build a CRM and a lead tracking system. In other words, like how are you tracking what leads come in and what part of the funnel they're operating in? And if you're saying, well I don't wanna know what a funnel is, you are gonna need to know what a funnel looks like and how a CRM works if you want to scale to financial freedom quickly. Because without it you're just. It's all living in your head. It's all guesses. What CRM do you currently use right now, Cam?
- [35:30]
B
Podio. Podio. And if you are a member of Better Life. Last night on the call I just dove into our CRM. How we what once a lead comes in, how we put that lead, enter that lead into podio, how we analyze that lead, how we've got a bunch of different workflows and AI agents that connect a bunch of different things. Google Drive into podio, but we use podio. We love it. Part of podio is and it doesn't have to be podia, but resimply left main, even a spreadsheet like it's so important that you are tracking. Again, this goes back to tracking KPIs, but you're tracking your leads, you're tracking follow ups. That is important because you don't want to miss out on anything.
- [36:12]
A
I love that. I, I am a huge fan of Resimpli. I mean they're all really Good. But I, I like resimply a lot now. I don't do a lot of the standalone smaller deals. So we don't use RE simply for mobile home parks, to be honest. Like our mobile home park leads, like when we're really in acquisition mode, which we're not really in right at this moment, but like most of that we just do on a spreadsheet. It's not as efficient as a podio or a resimply, but we're not dealing with thousands of leads or anything like that either. With mobile home parks, we were very like, hey, we have 20 this month that we gotta go filter through and we're gonna analyze everyone and make offers on every single one and we might land one or two of them. And so we can do that inside of a spreadsheet. And so I said say that for a reason is like if you don't feel like you're capable yet of getting a podio or resimply or one of the bigger ones and you're like, I, I just, I'm not that, not there yet. Just know that I bought a billion dollars of real estate using spreadsheets. So like you can do that as well if you need to. Obviously, I think there's benefits to using the actual CRMs, especially if you're doing what Cam's doing. You're going to do a lot more volume, but dang, get a CRM. Track your stuff. All right, speaking of that, one of the things that I want you to track, we talked about this a few times today already, is analyzing data deals. Like are you running the numbers on deals? And this is something that people really get wrong in because they, they might do a lot of deal analysis, but they analyze deals incorrectly. And so if you just do something over and over and over, but you're doing it the wrong way, you're just going to reinforce how to do things the wrong way. So my encouragement is make sure you're running the numbers right. If you need help with that, we have a free 5 day deal analysis challenge. I'll put a link to it down in the description below. So it's just five days. We'll teach you how to analyze a deal better than 99% of investors out there. So it's very meticulous, very. Every day builds on the previous day. And it's totally free because I just do not want to see people buy deals that don't actually cashflow when they think they're going to. So once you know how to do it right, you just get Your reps in. Get your reps in. Like, set a goal. I'm going to analyze 10 deals a week, 20 deals a week, 5 deals a week, whatever the number is set, that put it in your, your KPI tracker, your habit tracker, accountability tracker, whatever you want to call it, and then do that work of analyzing deals and you'll get better and better and better. And once you, like, get really good at it, it's not that you don't have to analyze. You'll never, I would say you will never get to a point where you can just wing it. Almost everybody I've heard that just wings their analysis ends up losing money over time. What it does though, is allows you to see what nobody else sees in other properties. Like, once you've analyzed a hundred houses in a certain neighborhood, you're going to be like, oh, I just know because I've analyzed so many, that type of house does better or that this layout is better, or that, oh, I can add a bedroom here. And it's going to add this much value. Because you're so dialed in on that one thing and you run the number so many times. That's the value. That's the superpower is being able to see the things that nobody else sees because nobody else is that focused and dialed in. Yeah.
- [38:57]
B
One of the KPIs that I had when I first started was I was going to analyze or underwrite seven deals a day and I wasn't ready to buy at the time and I wasn't even finding leads. I would just get on Zillow and look at, at like, hey, what are some houses that look distressed? And I'm going to underwrite these and see where my offer would be versus where it's listed at. But, but doing that allowed me to know areas so well because I did every single day for probably 200 days. So what is that? That's 1400 properties I wrote over 200 days. Where now I know, hey, here's the areas that you can get close on on cash flow, you can find good deals on. And then when something, when I did start buying, when something popped up, up, I would immediately know, hey, this is something that's worth my time. Diving into a little bit more. And so it actually built a lot of speed in my company by doing that for a long period of time.
- [39:51]
A
Beautiful. Yeah. When I was doing the webinars over on bigger pockets for years, I was like, that was the main thing. I would just sell the pro membership. Like that was the argument was just analyze. It was like analyze 10 deals a week. If every week you analyze 10 deals a week, just. You don't have to do anything else, you have to buy anything. Just analyze 10 deals a week. And after a few months, you'll be so good at deal analysis, you'll recognize good deals, you gain the confidence, you'll be able to buy deals and that sold thousands and thousands of pro memberships over at BiggerPockets. And the same thing applies today as well. Analyze deals, run the numbers. If you want some help with that, again, five Day deal analysis challenge. Link in the description. You can also shoot me a DM on Instagram that just says 5 d. C. Like 5 day challenge, 5 DC. Just shoot me an Instagram message that says 5 DC and I'll send it right over to you. Now, once you run the numbers. Here's the secret about running the numbers, and I love saying this. Every property, when you run the number, like when you do the math, has a number that makes it work out. Like, every number has a price. And so our job as investors is not to, like, go blindly look around or stumble around until we find that hidden treasure that no one else saw. No, our job is to go find the number that we know could work. And if it's even in the realm of possibility of being accepted, you make an offer offer. And you're gonna get rejected most of the time. But you're never gonna get the girl if you don't make an offer. You know, like to her. You're never gonna get the guy if you don't make an offer. You're never gonna get the property if you don't make an offer. You gotta actually go after what you want. And so that's why number 10 is make offers fast and often. What do you got on that one, Cam?
- [41:21]
B
I think that a couple things. And you said this already, but you have to know that very rarely is that offer going to get accepted. And that's okay.
- [41:30]
A
Okay.
- [41:30]
B
That is okay. Because you need to make a lot of offers. And so I, I tell people this all the time, where I'll talk to somebody and they'll say, hey, I can't find a house. And I. You've heard you talk about how many houses you buy. And I'll ask them, how many offers have you made in the last six months? And they'll say, three. And my answer will be, then, of course you have not bought a house. Because it takes me right now every 10, 15, 20 offers to buy a house. And so you're not going to buy A house with three offers. And so you have to make a lot of offers and you have to do it consistently. That's why I think it's important you have down here like aim for three to ten offers a week. I think you should aim on that higher end to 10 offers a week. Because if you are offering 10 times a week, you are bound to get one accepted over the course of a month. I could almost guarantee you if you are making 10 offers a week, you will get a house accepted in a month. Probably more than that, but important to know that you're not going to get your first offer accepted, you're not going to get your second offer accepted. It's going to take a lot of time to get an offer accept accepted.
- [42:33]
A
Yeah, every, every week, you know, I do the first deal call with the, with the newbies that are in the first deal. And one of my favorite things is when people say, yeah, I made an offer this week. Like I always celebrate that because I'm like, that's such a massive win. Like, because it's always like this. I made an offer this week but it didn't get accepted. I hear that a lot. I made an offer this week. I'm like, congratulations, that's the coolest thing ever. It's like somebody saying, yeah, I went to the gym and I ran four miles but I didn't lose any weight so I didn't win. It's like, no, you did the action, you did the work. Of course you don't see it day one. You don't see it right in the morning moment. That is a massive win when you can make an offer. So set some goals around offers, make them, don't be afraid. And the more you make, guess what, the easier it is, the better you are getting rejected and the faster you can make those offers. Yeah, Super Big Number 11.
- [43:14]
B
Create a renovation playbook. If you're buying single family, most of the houses that you're going to do, you're going to have to get rent ready. You can speak more on if you're buying a mobile home park or a multifamily. But you have to have a renovation playbook. You have to have, have a scope, you have to have the materials that you're going to use. You have to have the level of rehab that you want it to be at to be rent ready. You have to have the standards attached to that for that rent ready property. And what I see a lot is people focus on finding the deal and then they start the renovation process and it turns into mass chaos. And they haven't through the renovation at all. They don't have contractors lined up. They don't know how to track the money that they're spending. And it becomes interesting. Huge mess. They end up losing money. The renovation takes too long. They can never get it finished. They can never get a renter in there. So you have to have some sort of renovation playbook.
- [44:09]
A
I agree. And yeah, that's going to depend a lot on what, what you're buying. Like when we buy a mobile home park, for example, we don't do necessarily renovation. What we do is we do infill. And so we're going to go in there, we've got systems, we got processes. Like we have checklists. And we're like, this is what it takes to get a pad ready to rent out. Here's how we find a home to put in there. Here's how we finance the home that we're going to put in there. Like, all the. Those are systematized. And what we're really trying to get at here is if you want to scale up a real estate business and make actual big money doing it, you just got to build systems and processes around this stuff. And you just don't wing it. We have to get out of winging it mode into business mode. And that's what like a renovation playbook would look like. Whether it's your scope of work, do you have a good scope of work written out? Do you know how you build a scope of work? When in the process do you create your scope of work? Like, what's your material list look like? What paint colors do you do on every project? Like, I used to think that you had to pick new paint colors based on whatever you were feeling in the moment for every single flip that I did. And then finally one day I was like, wait, they're different people every time going into these houses, like, I could literally the same color every single time. So we just started doing the same color every time. Guess what? No one noticed. Like, the. I just. I watched a lot of flipping TV shows, so I thought you had to change everything every single time. And you had to go to that specialty lamp store that sold the special lamp that takes up 20 minutes of the episode of, you know, with Chip and Joanna Gaines. Because I thought that's what people do. Did. No, that's not. You just do the same lamp at every single property because it just. It's easy. And they have it at Home Depot for $97. And it's on my list. And now that we did, that's what we buy. And last, last but not least, maybe the most important one of all, build your management team.
- [45:41]
B
If you are trying to scale and to build passive income, you have to get great at property management. And that can either be you doing it yourself or hiring a third party property management company. But you have to get great at property management. And there is so much involved with property management. The, the leasing, the, the screening of tenants, the maintenance, showing properties, it's so important. And going back to same with the renovation playbook like you cannot wing property management. And I see a lot of people that get into real estate and think that they can wing it. Honestly we just had a portfolio that was shopped to us. It was like, I think it was 12 single family houses and I was talking to the seller of and they were like, I just don't know how you manage properties. Like I don't know how you can do this. And I started talking to them and they still go to the person's house to collect cash for. I got like, well of course, of course you're failing. Of course you hate it because you've built no systems around this. And so I think for a lot of people it makes sense to, to outsource it to a third party company if you can because you want to focus on the acquisitions and the renovation part of the process. But for us we, we have in house property management now we've gotten to a point where we've hired on on a couple full time team members that manage our properties in house.
- [47:00]
A
I love that. Hey, if you are self managing though, my favorite tool for self managing is called Turbo Tenant. A lot of you guys have heard of it before. They're actually a sponsor of this podcast. But even if they weren't, I still love Turbo Tenant for a couple reasons. One, they now have AI powered accounting built for real estate pros. They did not have this when I got started. Nobody had this when I got started. It was absolute mess. But now they have accounting and it's AI powered. It's super cool. They also have this new like maintenance tool which it's like an AI tool that chats with your tenants about what the problem this so that you're not going back and forth with 20 different text messages. It's an AI tool that does that for you. So you just get the information you need. Plus you can accept rent online from a tenant, you can handle the maintenance requests. You can do all that stuff and really manage your property using Turbo Tenant. And it's like, it's like a Netflix subscription. It's not a lot of money and it will make your life 10 times easier. So check that out, all that stuff with turbo tenant@turbo tenant.com let them know I sent you and that this podcast is awesome. That's pretty much all we got for the 12 steps. I'm going to review them one time and then we're going to get out of here. And here's all 12. I want you to just listen to this list and say, hey, if you did this, would you have financial freedom in three years? If you had a very clear financial target, a number, a goal, and you reverse engineer that into from a three year goal to a one year goal, to quarterly goals to weekly goals, and you went all in on a cash flow strategy, something like mobile home parks, rent by the room, small, multifamily, whatever. The thing is flipping even, you went all in on strategy strategy and you really identified what your criteria was. And then you built a funnel that delivered leads all the time, but that you didn't do it because four, you had a team running those leads because they were getting paid to do it. And then you knew how you're going to finance those deals, whether it was private money or the burst strategy or equity partnerships or seller financing. And then you tracked your KPIs every week. So you made sure you knew how many leads were coming in, how many calls were being made, how many follow ups were being completed, all that. And then every week you met with your team or your partners or your accountability group and made sure the work was getting done and you were getting held accountable to it. And you had a CRM that was tracking all your leads and you were underwriting regularly, five, ten deals a day. You were making multiple offers every week. You knew that you had a playbook for renovating your properties when you did buy them. And then you had solid property management in place. You do those 12 things. Cam, is there any chance you would wouldn't be wildly successful over the next few years?
- [49:24]
B
I think that there is no chance that you wouldn't be wildly successful.
- [49:28]
A
I agree. So everybody go and do it. If you found this video helpful, smash that like button. Follow us on all the social media stuff. Cam, what's your Instagram? And Cam Cathcart. Cam Cathcart.
- [49:42]
B
I post pictures of my family.
- [49:44]
A
Yes you do. And I'm Beardy Brandon. I post pictures of my beard and that's all I got, everybody. So thank you Cam for another great podcast episode and I will see you. Actually, in a week, I'm coming to hang out with you for dinner.
- [49:55]
B
Can't wait.