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This is the Better Life podcast here with your host, Brandon Turner, and my
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co host, Mr. Cam Cathcart.
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Cam Cathcart, man, how you doing, dude?
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I am so good.
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Good. I asked you that question, like, 30 minutes ago when we recorded the last podcast.
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But I won't talk about the date night. My wife. Date day. My wife and I went on. Let me think. What's something new that's going on in my world right now? I don't know, actually.
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You hurt yourself playing basketball.
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I did. I did. And I, you know, I did it to myself. That. That was. I had a breakaway layup, and I tripped over my back foot, and I fell. And then this knee went into the back of this calf, and I. I felt like such. Because there's nobody. Like, it was by myself. Yes.
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That's great.
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And I just. Luckily, there's no, like, ligament or anything. It's just a deep, like, muscle bruise, I think, but dang. Yeah, dude. It just. It wasn't great for my ego, but I understand. I was gonna dunk it, though.
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Are we gonna get. Hit the sauna after this and make that feel better?
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Yeah. Oh, yes. You didn't te.
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I know.
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And now I'm wearing jeans.
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You're in jeans. In the sun. That's weird.
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We'll go. All right.
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We'll do. We did last time. You know what I mean?
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You got to do what you got to do.
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Yeah. You know, sometimes you do. Speaking of that last episode, last week on the podcast, we talked about the seven deadly sins of a real estate investor. And those were, in case you didn't watch it, those were lusting after shiny strategies. Gluttony for education, greed for impossible returns, Sloth and deal flow, wrath towards the market, envy of other investors, and pride in bad math. And while we were talking talking about that, we started talking about some of the bad deals we've done. And I said, let's do a whole episode on the bad deals. So today's episode, everybody is on the three worst deals each of us have done. We're gonna go three, two, one on the three worst deals we've done, explain what went wrong and what we learned about it. The goal with today's episode is so that you don't make the same mistakes that we did, because you can learn from your own mistakes, and you should, but you can also learn from our mistakes, and that's even better. So you got three in your mind that you can come up with. I can start with the first one. You can think.
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Yeah, I've got I've got good ones in mind. Yeah.
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All right, I'll go first. The year was 2012 and I it was a bottom of the market. It might have been 11. And there was a duplex came on the market and it was like, I don't know, 100 grand, which was a great deal. And I offered, I think I offered 80 on it. And they said no. And I said fine. And this is again bottom of the market. Drop the price of 90. Then I stopped watching it, dropped it 80, 70, 60. And that's when I noticed that I was like, well, they keep dropping. It's way cheaper than I originally offered. So I forgot them. 45. And they took it for a duplex on the hill in this town with a amazing view, huge house, 4,000 square foot house and or duplex top and bottom. Could have been triplex, actually. The basement could have easily turned into one. And I was like, 45 grand. I can't miss. Like, I just can't. There's no way to lose money on a deal like this. So I buy this property. 45 grand. I told the story last week, but I'll say it. And I went to my hard money lender and I was like, here we go, I got it. And he goes, no, we're not going to fund this. And I was like, why not? And he's like, well, it's just too big of a deal, too much risk, blah, blah, blah. All these reasons that he was dumb. And so I just did it anyway. I went around him, I found another lender. I convinced the guy to fund it. Had to sell my firstborn child, which wasn't born yet. And at the end of the day, I spent 12 months of my life on that project. Every day I was there for like 12 months. Me and my wife both worked on was beautiful. I mean, it was unreal. I mean, like all new hardwood floors. I built a staircase up the middle of the home. I turned it to a single family house from a duplex to a single family. Beautiful property. When I was all done with it, views were amazing. I listed it for $180,000 on the market. And then for the next nine months it sat on the market. I dropped it from 1801-701601-50140, 130. Got an offer at 120 and sold it there. Lost 15 grand, give or take some. But add up your in a whole year of work. So I worked for free for an entire 12 months and I lost about 15 grand. Could have obviously Been worse. Here's a couple of lessons learned from this, everybody. Number one, the highest and best use of that property was not a flip. It was to keep it as a duplex and really turn it into a triplex. In fact, when I ran the numbers after I was all said and done, I would have cash flowed a thousand dollars a month as a duplex and I would have had to do, not a. Whatever I put in, I don't know, 50 grand, 60 grand worth of work. I would have had to put in about 10 grand to keep it a duplex. I didn't need the stairs up the middle. I didn't need the high end, you know, granite countertops and cherry hardwood floors. I could have just kept it a duplex. So highest and best use was not necessary. I was just caught up on the flipping shows. I was watching a lot of the flipping shows that sounded really great and I wanted to make money and make a big chunk of money. That didn't work. Other lesson, and this sounds so stupid, but I didn't realize at the time I'd only up until that point flipped houses that were like 1200 square feet. A 4000 square foot house costs four times more than a 1000 square foot house. And for some reason that just did not occur to me that a bigger house costs more money. And so I blew my budget. I mean, I think my original budget was like 20 grand. Oh, I was just completely blowing the budget and working for free. That was a big lesson. The last lesson I'll share about this property is that that deal today, that house today is worth half a million bucks.
B
Ooh.
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And I sold it for 120. And so you only lose when you sell.
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When you sell.
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That's, that's the game. So there's my first horror story.
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Yeah.
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What do you got?
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So I've got, yeah, I've got three in my head right now. And two of them if I could take back, I would. One I wouldn't. And I'll explain as I go through all three of them. But a couple other things on these is, is as I'm thinking about them, we have, we have a very firm buy box. And all three of these were outside of our buy box. They were all, they were all 100 plus year old houses. They were all in an area that I know really well, but I don't know. It is what, like we play in the suburbs for, for our. And these are all in the city. And like another thing that we say a lot, which is the one I'll the first one I'll talk about is like, we don't want to take over somebody else's work. And we did on this one. And so the first one, and this is, this is our biggest loss ever. And I want to say it was around $80,000. And there's so many learning lessons from this. But I got sent a deal from a wholesaler and I ran some numbers on it and they had. It was already completely updated except for a couple of things. And I tried to learn, like, what was going on. It was apparently a husband and wife were flipping it together. They got a divorce, they just wanted to sell it. I ran my numbers on it. I didn't put in a huge rehab budget on it. I want to say we bought it for 2:70. And I thought, like, we can put 50 into it. And I think that, like, I, I had my sale price at like 4:35, something like that, and so didn't think they needed a huge rehab. And first red flag, which I committed to 270. So I had to do 2 70, but I bought it for 270 and the wholesaler sent over a $70,000 assignment. I'm like, I could be overpaying for this.
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Yeah.
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Wow. Yeah, I could be. I could be running my numbers wrong.
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So that was.
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My number's my number. So I'm going to close on it. And I ran the numbers. I felt good about that. The second thing is we got into it and we'd already walked it, but we hadn't done like an in depth budget on the rehab and hadn't like looked at what we had looked what they'd done, but we just hadn't looked at it in detail. And everything they did was wrong. Everything. And they didn't pull permits.
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Yeah. And so it was pretty typical for like amateur flippers on both those things. They do things wrong and they don't pull permits.
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Yes. And so we had to call in, you know, we, we were pulling permits, wanted to do it right. And essentially the guy that came by, he. He just ripped the house apart. So we had to gut the entire house again to show plumbing, electrical work, because they didn't pull permits for any of this stuff. And so we had, we had to gut the entire house. And then at that point, we didn't like the style. They'd done like 2020 style of like gray floors, gray walls, white, you know, white kitchen. And we didn't like that. And at that point we had already gutted it, so we kind of switched up the rehab and we ended up spending about $140,000 in the rehab. And this was also. I like, sometimes you should just take the loss because I think if we would have listed it what I originally thought it would sell for, which is like 435, we would have lost $20,000 or probably not even $20,000. I think we would have actually broken even if I. Well, maybe not. I don't remember exactly what it was, but we got done with it. And I was like, we're losing money on this or not making any money. It us six months to rehab. It's been a huge headache. We're going to list at 500,000 because I wanted to still make money. So we listed at $500,000 sits on the market. This also pissed me off. We got an offer like that first weekend at like 416. I think we would have made at that time. I think we would have made money. I don't remember exactly what it was. And I was like, oh, we got an offer at 460. Like, let's try and get them to 500. It's first weekend on the market, or look for another offer. So we didn't take that and we kept on the market at 500. Month later, we go back to that 460 offer and like, hey, if you can get to 480, and they're like, oh, we've already found another house. So then we do a price drop. Then we do another price drop, we do another price drop, we get all the way down to 430, and then we can offer it like, 415 on it. Yeah, it would. Dude, it was. It was. It was nasty. It was a terrible, terrible deal.
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Dang.
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And I did. I mean, everything that I would tell somebody not to do. And what's sad is I knew all of this. This wasn't like. This wasn't like my first year. This was like last year. So I guess this wasn't like my first year. But everything that I was told that. That I know I shouldn't do, I did. And we lost money.
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So happens. Mm.
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Yeah.
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All right, my second story. This will be a quick one. I just bought it. I bought a house. Single family house. I thought it got a great price. I can't remember what I paid for it. I think 40, 50 grand. Again, I lived in a cheap area of Aberdeen, Washington, and a cheap house. Again, bottom of the market somewhere. 2013. Maybe it was after that flip, or maybe it was in the middle of it. So I buy this house, I fix it up, and I put on the market to sell it. And again, I don't remember all these, let's call it. I put on the market, bought it for 50, put on the market, put 20 into it, had 70 into it, put on the market for maybe 100. Doesn't sell, doesn't sell, doesn't sell, doesn't sell. But why doesn't it sell? Because the house had two massive problems. One of them was a 200 foot cliff in the backyard. And so this giant hill that just went up. You know, I was on top of the hill with that other house. The flip I mentioned earlier. We are on top of the hill. Great views. When you're in the bottom of the hill and like literally your backyard is just the hill. When you go look at that property, everyone just looks up and goes, nope, that's going to fall. Like that's going to. That's going to landslide right on this house at some point. And during the middle of that, actually about a house, about 12 houses down, part of the hill did kind of fall and came and took out a house. And so nobody wanted to buy that house for that reason, which is part of why I got it for such a good deal, you know. Second reason is this house had a shared driveway with the neighbor. And when I bought the house, perfectly clean, nice driveway, nothing wrong with it. I'm sure there were nice people. No, they immediately started putting like again, shared driveway like, like so like car tires and engines and just garbage and just kept piling up more and more and more. And like I think there were just tenants that live there that had moved in and. And nobody wanted a house with the neighbor that you're sharing a driveway with. Somebody who just fills it with crap. And I couldn't control it. So now we end up, my wife and I ended up moving into the house for like six months.
B
Really?
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Yeah, we lived in it for a little while because I couldn't get a. I couldn't, I couldn't get a refi if I didn't live there. So I finally refinanced while I lived there, Sold it a year later. I think we broke even on it after everything said and done.
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So nice.
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Yeah, I mean, at least we didn't lose money, but that was a terrible deal.
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Yeah, My second worst deal, which we lost, I want to say $75,000 on. On this one too. Right around there. It was again, it was an older house. I think this one was built in 1904. It was an absolutely beautiful house. It's like it was down in the City area. And in this, this was a really luxury like neighborhood. I mean it still is. But a couple of things that, that were red flags that I should have known is one, it was a hundred year old house. So like my rehab budget is going to be super inflated. I just didn't take that into account. Just because every time you're flipping one of those, like you open up a wall and there's a million other things that you need to do and so didn't really take that into account. The second thing that I didn't take into account. Well, I took it into account. I just trusted myself I think versus I guess one thing for us in our business is we. And I tell people this is like we don't want to bet on a house. Like the numbers tell you usually where it's at and if they, if we don't have good data, we're not going to do the deal. Yeah. And on this house, the area that it was in, every house was built different. They're all custom builds back 100 years ago. And so some are four bedrooms, some are three bedrooms, some are 3500 square feet, some are 2500 square feet. It's not like we, we do do a lot in neighborhoods where it's just like track homes and Every house is 1200 square feet and they're the same build. So we know ex. He wasn't gonna sell for this. We didn't. And so we bought it what I thought was a really good price. I think we bought it for 350, 370, something like that. We did, I think we had $170,000 budget and we ended up putting 240 into it. Whoa. Yeah, it's be. It was beautiful. And then I had my ARV at 775 and it did take us about a year to do. It was, I mean permits, crazy amount of permits. We did completely gut rehab. The house a beautiful again, it was beautiful house. And so when we got done with it, the market had shifted a little bit down and we listed it in like the mid to low sevens. But one thing that I missed, and I shouldn't have missed this, but I did miss it because I was looking at other three bed, two bath, you know, 2500 square foot comps. But all of those houses had a bathroom on the main level. So it was like three, three one up top and then they had a bathroom on the main level. Ours didn't. And so we had, I mean we had a lot of showings and every single piece of Person's feedback was like there's not a main level bathroom. Like we don't want to have friends over Zane and then send them upstairs to go to the bathroom. And so that was my fault. And then the other thing that I didn't take into account was just. I mean I know this so I feel stupid saying this out loud but just holding costs. I want to say that was like 6k a month plus in holding costs. And I think I put 6 month holding time and ended up taking us a year. So we added an extra $40,000 in holding costs on that too.
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Yeah, people don't realize how much holding costs especially if you're using like hard money and stuff like that.
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Like yeah, we were using hard money for purchase price and rehab and that was 12% and I think we borrowed $550,000 or something like that. And so we were paying 5,500 bucks a month and. And in just interest, not including insurance, not including utilities on the house and so it was over $6,000 a month in holding costs. So that stacked up and we lost money on it. A lot of money. That house was beautiful though. That was one that was. I was really proud of.
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Yeah. But do you wish you would have kept it?
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No, that one wouldn't have worked.
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Okay.
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Yeah, they would said. I mean it probably would rent for 4,500 bucks a month and we were into it for at that time with the holding costs and everything. Mid to high six hundreds. Yeah. Bummer.
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All right. For my last one I got a few I could choose from but I'm gonna go with a mobile home park that I bought in one of my funds. We bought this property in. I'm gonna get a little political here and this is not a political as in like what I necessarily believe though I am pretty conservative. But I bought it in Michigan and Michigan is a much more blue state than I buy in today. I will never buy in Michigan again because of. This is. The town was even worse. I mean they. They were all blue hair. Like. Like city council. They hate mobile home parks and they desperately wanted to get us out. I've never had a city hate me before. Like hate my business before. Like and actively try to destroy it. And so they would do things like this. Like they would. A unit would go and get red tagged because a unit was let's say a unit. Like we don't own the homes by the way, so they're not our homes. But a tenant's home gets red tagged from the city because they don't like the condition of it. They then red tag it. But they say, well, you guys have to fix the problem. We're like, okay, well, it's not our house, but we're happy to, like, you know, rectify the problem. They say, yeah, we're not gonna give you permits. What do you mean you're not gonna give us permits? Yeah, we're not gonna be permits because you have. You're red tagged. We're like, I know. That's how we have to fix it. They're like, oh, yeah, sucks to be you. And that's literally what they would say.
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They wouldn't give you permits.
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Correct. To fix it. Correct. And not on one house. On dozens of. There was every day come over and give another red tag. Even if the house wasn't bad, they would just red tag stuff. And they were just. And when we talked to them, they're like, yeah, we're trying to shut you down. And they just say that. And we're like. And they're like, sue us. And we're like, are you serious? So we threatened and we had a lot of lawsuit stuff going on with like a child molester living in there who ended up going on tv. Like, of course they didn't say that. And he was on the front page of like all this stuff of like this poor. In this. This poor man is trying to get evicted from this horrible investment company. He hasn't paid rent in nine months and he's a child molester. Of course we're going to kick the guy out. Oh, they don't say that. So that like, there's him in the city council, arm in arm. It was anyway horrible property. They just systematically tried to destroy us and that property. And I will never forgive them for that. Yeah. And we ended up selling it. Lost a couple million bucks on that deal.
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What town?
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It was in Michigan. It was. Right. It was near Detroit.
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Near Detroit.
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I will say this, though. The reason we buy mobile home parks in funds and why I think I will always buy things in funds is because the rest of the fund was doing phenomenal. Did phenomenal.
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Yeah.
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And it more than made up for the fact that that one sucked. And so that's why when you buy in a fund, like multiple deals, sometimes you get a one off. Crazy.
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Diversify your risk.
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Yeah. Imagine if you were flipping houses in a fund of 10 flips. Like, yeah, you have the one bad one and then a bunch go good. And overall you're like, all right, the fund actually kind of worked. If you're going to Raise capital funds can be an interesting way to diversify risk.
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Yeah. And that, I mean that is why we do flip at scale where it's like, hey, we're going to lose money on properties. We just know that we have one right now that we're going to lose $35,000 on. But when you do 100 of those a year.
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Yeah.
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It's like it makes, you know, 25 to $30,000 on and so it evens out.
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Yeah. There was a dude, a buddy of mine, we interviewed him biggerpockets years ago. But maybe he said something basically like he's like, I buy. It was like 150 houses a year. He goes, I buy them all sight unseen. And I know that I'm going to lose money on 30% of them. Wow. He's like, that's just my numbers and I know that I'm going to lose it and that's okay. And so I just do it and I lose the money and I just. Overall, I win.
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Yeah.
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And I was like, that's wild.
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That is wild. We wouldn't do that.
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But.
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But at the same time we just know that we are going to lose money on houses.
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Yeah.
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And, but we know that we're going to make it up. Versus if you're doing, you're doing three a year and you have two bad ones that lose 50, 60, even $20,000, like that's tough to make up. So my last one and this is the one that. So the other two, if I could wave a magic wand, I would not have done those. I mean I learned on both of those but honestly I learned things that I already knew and I just did them anyway. So it was just stupidity. This one was our very first deal. I've talked about this before on here, but it was our very first house we ever flipped. Again. It was 100 year old house at the time. I don't think it was 100 years old. I think it was built in 1923 and this would have been 2020. So just. So, yeah, 98 year old house. But I just didn't know anything. And so I had this dream of like, we're going to get in there, we're going to open up the walls and we're going to add a bathroom. And I was like, it's going to cost $30,000. Contractor, once we'd already closed on it, walked it and was like, yeah, what, what you're wanting to do is going to be well over a hundred thousand dollars. And I was like, that doesn't Work for this deal. And I guess going back, part of it was because I just. I so badly wanted to get into the game that I bought it without having all the answers. I just like, yes, I'm gonna buy it. So then to make up for that, my wife and I. And at that time, we had two kids. We. We moved. We just got an air mattress and moved into the house. And we did like, a really. A poor man's flip where we. We didn't change the layout or anything at all. We painted, we refinished the cabinets, I changed out toilets, like, things like that. And we sold that. And similar to your first one, we. We broke even on that. I think we might have lost a couple grand. But if you added in, like, our man hours, we weren't there for a year, but we were there for four months, working all day, every day, we would have lost a significant amount of money. But that, when I look back on, I'm like, I'm so glad we did that because you got us to where we are today. That was our very first one.
A
And I hope that maybe we can kind of end this kind of conversation with idea is like, I, we. We don't say these stories to scare you, but every investor is going to have these horror deals that just went bad. Sometimes it's our fault, sometimes it's other people's fault, but deals go bad sometimes. But that's okay. That's just part of the game. Again, I'm not saying you should buy houses that 30% of them go bad, but like, like, when you just get in the game, know that, like, just knowing it. Like David Green once said to something to me, he said, like, all negative emotions are mismanaged expectations. Yeah, right. In other words, like, if, like, to go to the extreme, right? If, like, if you knew that if you expected to get cancer and then you got cancer, you'd be like, well, yeah, I got cancer. I knew that was coming. Or if somebody cheated on you and you're like, well, I know that's literally what I signed up for. I knew that they were going to cheat on me. You wouldn't be sad about it. Like, it's when you don't expect something that you then get negative emotion around it. And so, yeah, obviously, you know, you can take that to a crazy place, but the general idea is if you just expect that things are going to go wrong, when they go wrong, you're like, all right, well, they went wrong. What do I do to fix it? I'm going to move forward anyway. I'm going to learn from mistakes. I'm going to hopefully not make that one again. And you just keep going. It reminds me of Thomas Edison, I think is his quote, but who knows? It says, success is nothing but going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. And so it's like you're just like, oh, you fail here and then you're going to try something else and you fail there and you try something else, but if you lose enthusiasm and you stop trying. Or Mark Cuban's quote, which is the great thing about entrepreneurship is you only have to be right once. That's not necessarily true for real estate investors. Like, it takes more than one deal, but when you're building the business, like, one business can make you millions of dollars. You just gotta be right once. You might fail 10 times in a row. Your 11th one makes you 3 million bucks. You sell the company, you're done.
B
Dude, dude, that's good. That. That's mismanaged expectations, which I see that a lot. And I. Sometimes I feel like it's our fault or my fault where it's like you share your wins all the time. And when I'm marketing to get. Get people into deal flow, it's like, hey, I've made all this money. Which all that is true, but it's taking a lot of work to get there. It's taking a lot of losses, a lot of sleepless nights. And so just getting into real estate knowing that that's going to happen is great for the newbie investor of like, hey, that's going to happen. But I'm also going to be able to build something I'm proud of, make a lot of money, get out of my W2 job. Like, all of those things coincide with each other. And so, yeah, having that when you're getting into it. Okay, what's your best deal ever? So we can end on a.
A
And then a high note. My favorite is still, I don't know if you call it best. And financially, my favorite is still the fourplex I bought for my daughter Rosie, which I have a funny story on that one. I'm not afraid to admit it, I'll say it, but I'll get to it in a second. So I bought this property for my daughter Rosie, the week she was born. That thing we bought for like, I don't know, 50 grand, 45 grand, put a hundred grand into it. So we're 150 basis all in. And we then rented out all four units separately. We refinanced it, we burned it, we Got most of our money out, not all of it. And then we put it on an 18 year path plan so Rosie gets it when she's 18. And the idea at the time was like hey, in 18 years we paid off the zero. At that point it should be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 and Rosie will have 200 grand for college. Well in reality we're halfway through it. Rosie's nine now that property is now we owe 85 grand left on it, 90 grand left on it and it's worth like like 350 probably. Wow or so. So we're already have more than we thought we were going to get at the end anyway. So we've been thinking about should I sell it, should I hold onto it? Like you know, it's cool to own that property. So again this is the part that's kind of embarrassing. It shows you like I got a lot going on with you know, 14,000 units and hundreds of employees. So I don't necessarily look at that property very often. So I asked my team the other day, I was like can you shoot me the report from last year on that property? I want to know how much cash flow I made now we were cash flowing over a thousand a month for while I was managing it or I wasn't even self managing. We hired a manager but with the management in place and repairs capex all that we were making over a thousand a month in cash flow. And they sent me the report I lost $35,000 last year property.
B
Was it because you had a bunch of.
A
Because I had four evictions throughout the year that and then each one was a trashed and so I ended up having my yeah, I have a contractor for six months straight working on the property fixing up one after another. And so like it's a lot of catbacks that need to be done anyway. So I'm not saying it was but it was 35 grand loss and I now have two vacancies there right now out of four and I think multiple things happen. I think that maybe the managers needs to be replaced. Yeah, so now I could go dump another bit of money in, get it fully fixed up, find a different manager, restart the thing. Oh this was another one. This shocked me on it. The reason it cash flowed so good is because that I love that property. Water was separately metered on each property, each house even though it's a fourplex each. So tenant pay their own water, sewer, garbage. Here's a quick tip for everybody that almost no tenant looks at the overall payment, they only look at the rent. So here's what I mean by that. If they're comparing the average tenant, if they're comparing two apartments, one apartment is $800 a month and one is $800 a month, plus they have to pay their own water, sewer, garbage, no tenant looks at that, though. Those are two of the exact same in their mind. And I don't know why, but that's just financial literacy for most people. They don't think all in. They just think, what's the rental? So in other words, we were charging whatever call it a thousand dollars a month, plus they had to pay their own water, sewer, garbage, which is about 100 bucks a month all in. That's $400 a month that I don't have to pay. At some point in the last nine years, I don't know when the property manager just stopped, just was like, we're
B
not going to build back.
A
And we've been paying now for at least several years. I looked back a few years, we've been paying the water, sewer, garbage for that property for no reason other than that somebody somewhere wasn't paying attention. Here's the lesson learned on that one. It's still my favorite deal because Rosie has hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity. We're going to probably sell that property, 1031, into something real simple, like a really simple mobile home park or something like that, or even a single family house. But the lesson learned was like, if you take your eye off the ball, no one cares about your business like you do. Nobody cares. I stopped looking at it because it was just making money. And as soon as it does, it reminds me of the story in the Bible. Moses is, like, out there with the Israelites and they're fighting some war, and they tell him to lift his hands up. And it was hands are. Israelites are winning the war, and he puts his hands down. They start losing this battle. And so they end up, like, holding his arms up. Yeah, I feel like that with business, if your arms are not up in the air, like, if you're not looking at the thing, as soon as you look away, that part of your business goes always. Yeah. So, like, you have to constantly be looking at everything or else it just
B
goes, yeah, yeah, always, man. I mean, it's still incredible that you have.
A
It's still cool.
B
Yeah, yeah.
A
We still got a couple hundred grand. She's got more than enough for college. I hope she doesn't even use it for college. Hope she starts a business or buys real estate. But whatever, you got nine years to figure it out.
B
What about you? So I'll give my favorite deal. I'll do this really quick and then. Most profitable deal. Most profitable deal was just a flip. And I think I did follow my rules on this one where as I was comping it out there was a lot of as is comps in like the low to mid-400s and there was one at 500 that was rehabbed or was done really poorly. Just I knew that ours would blow that one out of the water. But I told the wholesaler that brought me the deal, I was like there's no data to say that it's worth more than 500, so I'm going to run as 500. Even though we both knew that it was probably worth a lot more than 500, we just didn't have a comp to prove it. And so I just ran my numbers at 500. We bought it for somewhere in the twos and put, you know what the
A
wholesaler made on it was the fee.
B
The wholesaler still made $20,000 on it. Yeah. So the wholesaler still made a decent amount of money on it. But that wholesaler, I love that wholesaler, they reverse it always. So it's like they bring me on the appointment, I give them my offer and then they just go in below that offer and try and make a spread. Yeah. So yeah, it ended up selling for like 560 is what where I think we ended up selling at. And we made about $120,000 on it. So ends up. Yeah, so that, that one was most profitable. And we've, we've, we've only had a handful of six figure flips. That's not a normal thing in our business. My favorite deal ever though was actually a wholesale deal that I did and it was this lady, super sweet lady and her husband and her son got into a head on car accident and they traumatic brain injuries. Her husband worse than her, her son could still kind of function and get around. Her husband was in a wheelchair and couldn't talk or anything like that. Really, really sad. And she had to sell her house. And because of just all of the stress in her life the house had went to shambles. And, and it wasn't an area that I don't flip in but was able to get an offer that she agreed on. And then I, I just made up in my mind I was like I, I'm not going to make a of this house. And so I think I put under contract for like 45 and then I knew a. A hedge fund that. That would buy it because it's in a kind of a rental market. And I think I wholesaled it to that hedge fund for 60. And I just. I called her and I said, hey, I want to increase my offer to 60.
A
Oh, that's cool.
B
Yeah. And so just.
A
That's fun.
B
Let her have all of it. And she bawled her eyes out, and it was just. It was really cool for me, like, it was, like. That was the most fun deal that I've done.
A
You're a good man.
B
Yeah.
A
Cathcart car. It's not true what they say, but
B
it's not true what they say. I mean, I could really use that 15k right now. So I'm kind of regretting. Yeah. So that was a. That was a fun deal.
A
Nice, man. Well, good job, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave us. Ratings, reviews, all those good things. And if you're on YouTube, of course, hit the little like button and subscribe to this channel for more content like this. We'll see you next week. Peace.
Date: May 19, 2026
Hosts: Brandon Turner & Cam Cathcart
In this candid and insightful episode, Brandon Turner and Cam Cathcart dive deep into the real estate deals that went wrong—the three worst deals each of them ever made. Through personal stories and lessons learned, the hosts reveal costly mistakes, mismanaged expectations, and the importance of learning from failure. Their mission: to help listeners avoid the same missteps on their real estate journeys, all while keeping things approachable, honest, and a little self-deprecating.
Brandon’s Favorite: Bought a fourplex for his daughter Rosie (23:56).
Cam’s Most Profitable: A flip that netted $120K after sticking to conservative math and not stretching on after-repair-value projections (28:11).
Cam’s Favorite: A wholesale deal where he passed all proceeds to a seller in need, boosting her offer from $45K to $60K:
For more honest and practical real estate insights, subscribe and join Brandon and Cam each week on The BetterLife Podcast.