28 Jun Interview with Brandon Simmons
Brandon Simmons with Flip2Freedom shares how he has moved 350+ properties for over $4,000,000 in fees in less than four years.
Video Replay of Interview with Brandon Simmons
Podcast Replay of Interview with Brandon Simmons
Show Notes:
If you want to get a hold of Brandon, message him on facebook at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1705155719
Transcription:
Steve: Hey everybody, thank you for joining us for today’s episode of real estate disruptors. Today we’ve got Brandon Simmons with Flip2Freedom and he’s here to share out he’s moved over 350 properties for over $4 million in fees. If this is your first time tuning in, I’m Steve Trang, broker owner of Stunning Homes Realty, co-founder of OfferFast, the one app you need for wholesaling, and I help people become real estate entrepreneurs. If you’re excited for today’s show, please give me some waves, give me some hearts, and before we do get started, I started this show because I wanted to give back to our community. We’ve struggled before, I’ve struggled, you struggled …
Brandon: Of course.
Steve: We’ve talked about it offline and so we want to short cut that struggle for as many young leaders as possible. I don’t charge a dime for this show. I don’t make any money doing this. Here’s all I ask. This is the cost to you for listening to the show. If you get value out of this show, please tell a friend, either share the episode now, tag a friend below, or tell them they’re best takeaway from the show later on that way we can all grow together. Don’t forget that this is a live show, so please post your questions down below and Brandon would love to answer them.
Brandon: Of course.
Steve: You ready?
Brandon: Yeah, I’m ready.
Steve: All right. First question is a simple one.
Brandon: Okay.
Steve: What got you in the wholesaling?
Brandon: Well, I’ve always had an interest in real estate. One of my favorite books as Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think a lot of people read that.
Steve: A lot of people loved it.
Brandon: That got me into thinking about real estate as investing.
Steve: How old are you?
Brandon: When I read that? I was probably in my early 30s.
Steve: Okay.
Brandon: Basically what happened was we moved to Arizona in 2010. 2009 I moved here and then the family followed me a couple months later, and I heard about this podcast Flip2Freedom. Sean Terry was on it, just started the podcast. He lived in Phoenix Arizona, brand new and I found out that you can flip properties with little or no money down and I was all in. I wanted to try it out. That’s what got me going.
Steve: The podcast was a big hook for you?
Brandon: It was, yeah. Whenever Sean first started the podcast, he literally just used his iPhone, recorded in the car. You can hear the air-conditioning blowing and stuff. I remember meeting up with him. There’s about five or six of us that would meet up at a paradise bakery, and we were all just brand new hungry to get a deal done. I think whenever I signed up for the Flip2Freedom Academy, Sean has thousands of members now. When I signed up, I think it was the 35th or 36th person to sign up.
Steve: Wow.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Okay. The podcast was a big pool for you?
Brandon: Definitely, yeah.
Steve: Okay. What were some of your early struggles? I mean I guess were you always with Sean? Did you do it on your own?
Brandon: No, no, I did stuff on my own for a while. It took me about eight months to do my first deal, and everyone remembers their first deal, right?
Steve: Right.
Brandon: It’s like your first kiss and that’s what I remember the most. I was working at Wells Fargo, working full time, I was working six days a week, at least 60 hours a week.
Steve: What were you doing?
Brandon: I was in the mortgages. I was a loan processor and an underwriter.
Steve: One of those guys?
Brandon: Yeah, one of those guys. I didn’t have a lot of time to do marketing, I didn’t have a lot of extra money to spend on marketing, so I started to just email people off at Craigslist, and then I would send text messages and call them from my car as I was driving home. I had a 45-minute commute. Yeah. I struggled. I mean there was months and months, there’s no deals coming in. I didn’t really hit the marketing I should have, but I remember about it was about 30 days before my birthday, I wrote down on an index card that I wanted to make $5000 by my birthday which is November 16th and I gave myself 30 days to do that. I ended up getting that deal done me and Sean went 50/50 on that. I ended up cashing my first check for $5500 the day after my birthday.
Steve: You missed it.
Brandon: One day, but I got an extra 500 bucks.
Steve: Well and I think there’s two great lessons there, right? The first one is that you made a commitment to yourself, you told the universe what you wanted and you got it. The second thing is there’s a lot of people there that can’t afford to market and they feel behind, in reality you don’t need money to get started.
Brandon: Not really. I mean it takes a lot of action, right? Massive action.
Steve: Right, massive action. That’s cool. Knowing what today, what would you do differently?
Brandon: Oh, I mean I know so many different marketing ways now and everything from cold calling, ringless voicemail, direct mail, online pay-per-click. It just depends on your budget and what you want to do, but I would start getting the phone to ring today instead of just waiting. There’s nothing wrong with doing a cold calling. That’s what I was doing is cold calling.
Steve: Right. Calling Craigslist and calling people. Yeah.
Brandon: Craigslist, Dillo, for rent, for sale, all those.
Steve: Yeah, we’re going to talk about all those fancy tricks later on. Okay, so we’re talked about how you connect with Flip2Freedom, so it was the podcast. You listened to it and you reached out to Sean.
Brandon: Here’s what happened. I was still doing deals on and off on my own, and Sean had a sales guy. He had a small small company, just a couple sales guys. One of his sales guys was given a talk at Toastmasters and he had a heart attack and died.
Steve: Wow, so don’t go to Toastmasters.
Brandon: No, I guess not, yeah.
Steve: He’s a super nice guy.
Brandon: Okay, and you knew him?
Steve: Yeah, his name was Steve. Everyone loved him. He was physically fit. I mean just was one of those freak things …
Brandon: Wow.
Steve: He passed away and Sean called me up and said I want you to come work for me, and I had the golden handcuffs on. I had a good job, I was getting paid well, I had insurance and benefits and all the stuff you like in corporate America, right?
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: I was like, “Oh no I’m good. I’m happy.” He’s like, “No, no, please just give it a try. Just come on over. I’ll make it worth your while.” I was really debating whether to do it and I remember I was talking to my little brother. He was taller than me. I called up my brother Jeff and I was telling what’s going on and he said, “I will kick your butt if you don’t take that job with Sean.”
Brandon: Cool.
Steve: I talked to my employer and they they said if anything happens, you’re always welcome coming back. I took the leap of faith and never look back.
Brandon: What year was that?
Steve: That was three and a half years ago.
Brandon: Oh, so not even that long ago.
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: Cool, very cool. Okay. I come through a lot of the Facebook groups, the forums, not the forums but a lot of questions and there’s some themes in there. I want to get them answered from you.
Steve: Sure.
Brandon: If I was brand new today and I needed to find a mentor, what should I do?
Steve: You want to find someone that’s already doing deals. Whenever I moved to Arizona, I decided to find a realtor to help me buy a house. I went through a group, but I wanted to find a realtor that was also an investor because that’s what I want to do, is I want to invest in real estate. That realtor ended up becoming one of my best friends and still when my best friend’s today, and he’s been one of my mentors. One of the things I think of is you got to get clear what you want and what direction you want to go for and just copy those that are successful already.
Brandon: All right, find someone’s already doing it.
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: I mean right success leaves clues. That whole motto that Tony Robbins always chants and stuff, that’s true. I mean I got hooked up with Sean. I remember Sean Terry calling me up the first time before we did the deal and everything, before my first deal with him. I got a hold of him, I tracked him down somehow. I don’t know how I got his number and my wife and my kids we were all at chick-fil-a over in Gilbert and we’re eating dinner. I get a call and I answer it and it’s Sean Terry and I’m like, “Oh my gosh Sean Terry’s on the phone. Jennifer I got to take this call.” I remember telling my wife after that that I think everything in our life is going to change.
Brandon: It didn’t happen overnight and it took years before I ever actually started working with Sean, but I knew that things were happening, momentum was coming. I could see something was changing on the horizon. I think you just look at who’s already having success and find those people, and most of the people that are really successful want to help people.
Steve: Yeah, they’re givers.
Brandon: Yeah, definitely.
Steve: Okay, so how would you go about finding a mentor? We know what kind of mentor we want. How will you track them down if you’re not in the circle yet?
Brandon: Facebook is great. There’s a lot of Facebook groups, there’s podcast like yours. I found Sean through a podcast right and then here’s what’s interesting. Do you who Jesse Itzler is?
Steve: I know the name.
Brandon: Jesse Itzler is a billionaire and he owns Atlanta Hawks and stuff. He came to speak at one of our events. One of the things that I took away from whenever he gave his keynote was he cold calls. If you want to get a hold somebody, don’t be a chicken, get on the phone, and make a phone call, and that’s it. That’s what I did with Sean too.
Steve: Right, yeah. Well, that makes complete sense and I’ll reach out later and we’re going to talk about as far as taking action.
Brandon: Sure.
Steve: Okay, so then finding mentor that’s obviously one of the things you want to do. What would you give a new guy … I mean you’re coach already, so what are the first five things someone should do if they want to get in the wholesaling?
Brandon: Well, I think the thing is you got to start talking to sellers.
Steve: TTP.
Brandon: Talk to people, right? Brent Daniels, I love Brent and he’s so energetic and enthusiastic about it. That’s the simple recipe, start talking to people today, start talking to sellers, start talking to other wholesalers or investors. Find out what the best areas of town where they’re doing deals and ask them about how to find buyers, how to get on the phone. It’s literally a phone call. If you have your smartphone, you have the most important tool you have, you need.
Steve: Right and a a super computer too.
Brandon: Yeah, exactly. I can get on there, I can find out, I can start calling sellers, I can start talking to other wholesalers, and you can find those people on Craigslist and stuff that, right?
Steve: Right.
Brandon: I would call up title companies that work with investors and ask them who their best buyers are, who does the most transactions with them.
Steve: Well, that’s a good tip, yeah.
Brandon: I just got four new buyers this week just because I asked two title companies for recent buyers.
Steve: Yeah, so I got to go do that later on after this.
Brandon: Those are the basic things and then if you want to figure out what type of marketing budget you have, if you’re going to start Direct Mail or you’re going to start doing ringless voice messages or sending text messages, I used a Google Voice number. I just started texting people. There’s a great website, it’s top secret, I don’t want to really give this out. If you go to fiverr.com, fiverr.com, you go there and you can find someone that will send 50 text messages for five bucks to sellers off a Craigslist and all of a sudden your phone will start ringing.
Steve: Oh wow, that’s awesome. That’s a huge tip.
Brandon: Yeah and it works.
Steve: What I told one of those guys, they’re asking this question yesterday as far as finding a mentor. I said, “Look find who the players are and just offer them. I’ll just JV with you. I will bring you deals, just tell me how to find deals.” They were like, “Well they won’t respond.” He was like, “Well that’s because they gave up on you.” You got to believe in yourself and prove to them that you get the grit and the command and the passion to go after it. When someone comes to me, it’s like I want to learn, awesome, go do these things, either you go do these things and you have questions or I never hear from you again. Either way is fine.
Brandon: It’s a test.
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: I mean I get bombarded with people. I get people calling me, texting me and I’m polite and I talked to everyone pretty much. I answered the phone …
Steve: You never knew who the next person you’re going to talk to?
Brandon: Yeah, and if they will take action, then I will do the next thing for them. I will help them with whatever’s next. If they don’t take action, okay they weed themselves out. It’s that simple. I think also if you’re looking for a mentor, there’s a lot of people that are takers and not givers. You need to be a giver first …
Steve: Absolutely.
Brandon: Ask those mentors or potential mentors, what do you need help with, how can I help you. I mean they’ll open up their whole business to you if you’re willing to serve them to you.
Steve: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so another question I saw last night when I was going in the forums was creative financing. I know we’re going to talk about it later on, but do you have any creative financing books you can recommend?
Brandon: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of coaches and mentors out there. When it comes to lease options, there’s seller carryback, there’s wraps or agreement for sales or land contracts. Those three things are all the same thing, they’re just called different names in different states, basically just wrapping the existing mortgage, and then there’s lease options. I love Joe McCall and Gavin Tim’s and Claud Diamond for lease options. One of my mentors and one of the guys I got one of my favorite books from on lease options was from Michael Carbonare. I don’t even know if he coaches anymore or anything like that. He still has a website and I think you can get his whole program for $99 or something. It went over everything lease options.
Brandon: It was cut and dry, very simple, it had all the contracts. He learned from Claude Diamond. Claude Diamond was like the grandfather of lease options, but other books would be Wendy Patton. I have all these books and so my wife wants me to donate half of my library to goodwill because it takes up so much room.
Steve: I can be goodwill free.
Brandon: Yeah, okay. Wendy Patton’s awesome she talks about subject too in lease options and Sean has a great training. It depends on how you learn. Some people won’t pick up a book, some people will listen to audiobooks, some people will want to see video and follow that whole thing. I love all all of them. I do videos, audio books, I have audible account and have so many books on that.
Steve: I’ve gone to Flip2Freedom Academy and it’s great, great stuff.
Brandon: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about each of these creative financing options.
Brandon: Sure.
Steve: Let’s break it down real quick, so the first one was seller carry.
Brandon: Seller carryback.
Steve: Okay, so elaborate on seller carry.
Brandon: A seller carryback basically and these are really simple explanations on …
Steve: We’ll go high level and then we will play on how to break and how to use it.
Brandon: I’m not an attorney or anything like that, but I’ll tell. Seller carryback …
Steve: Use it on your own risk.
Brandon: Yeah, use this at your own risk. Seller carryback where someone owns a property free and clear, and they’re willing to carryback the mortgage. They’re going to act Wells Fargo or Chase Bank and they’re going to create a mortgage note deed of trust, whatever it is in your state and carryback that loan for that balance. This is how I bought my last couple rental properties. I found a realtor that owned one free and clear, I found another guy that owned $30,000. Whenever I bought my last property, the guy came to close with $30,000.
Steve: What?
Brandon: Did a carryback for it, and I put zero of my own dollars into the deal. You can get really creative if how to work it out.
Steve: Okay, so let’s do that real quick. All right, so now I’m the homeowner, you’re at my house.
Brandon: Okay, sure.
Steve: I own a free and clear, right. The first thing we offer is cash.
Brandon: Of course. You want to be your big discount, yeah.
Steve: Right, so we offer as far as cash goes? The first number you throw out approximately.
Brandon: It depends on the percentage, but it’s usually around 60%.
Steve: Okay, so it’s 60. I was like, “Brandon that’s just not going to work. I need more, I know it’s worth more.” Okay, and then you say?
Brandon: Well, it’s the seller’s market, right? Everyone wants top dollar, so I always ask questions and what I love about seller financing, it’s non-confrontational. Well, what do you want?
Steve: I want 200,000 and what it’s worth.
Brandon: What it’s worth, okay. Have you considered listing the property?
Steve: Yeah, but I don’t want to deal with people walking through the house and stuff that.
Brandon: What I usually do in off the role play for a second is I go through different pain points and I try to get them thinking about why are they not using these steps and then I offer the seller financing. Why aren’t you listing it? Okay, you don’t want to list it because of what?
Steve: People walking through the house odd hours and I can’t trust a realtor’s going to steal my refrigerator or something.
Brandon: Okay. I mean but you can get the most money by listing it though, right?
Steve: Yeah, I could.
Brandon: Okay. What about renting it? You can rent it.
Steve: I don’t want to fix the water heater at 2:00 in the morning.
Brandon: You don’t want to fix toilets on 4th of July and stuff like that either?
Steve: No, I want to enjoy my barbecue.
Brandon: Okay. Well, you can just put it on Zillow for sale by owner. Have you thought about doing that?
Steve: Yeah, but then I’m just going to bombarded by a bunch of realtor calls.
Brandon: Well, I mean how are you going to get $200,000 if you’re not when to jump through the hoops with some of these things?
Steve: That’s why I called you.
Brandon: Okay, well let me ask you a question. What if I could figure a way, what if I could figure a way that you can still get what you want for the house and if I can create something like that, would that be something that would work for you?
Steve: Just pay me the money I want and we want work out now.
Brandon: If I give you $200,000 for the house, you’re cool with that?
Steve: That’s awesome.
Brandon: Okay, so I do things two ways. It’s either I buy houses cash at a discount or I buy them on terms. Typically when you buy a house and we’re giving you full asking price, we just need you to help us out with that and help me with a carryback or what we call you act like Chase or Wells Fargo, and you’re going to you’re going to get interest on this and there’s going to be an investment for you instead of just putting the money in the bank, right? Then …
Steve: I’m going to get 200,000, I’m going to make money every month?
Brandon: Exactly, yeah.
Steve: Okay.
Brandon: Usually what I ask them is there’s a lot more questions I go through and feed through this, and I know we’re doing a quick role play, but what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to find out their motivation, what their hot buns are and I really focus on that because usually they’re more focused on that and then it’s amazing if you bring in your little handheld calculator on your iPhone or whatever, and you show them how much interest. They’re they’re ecstatic because the mostly getting on a bank or CD or credit union is like 1% right now. We’re giving them a ton of interest and you can create it where you’re doing principal payments only, you can do a principal and interest or you do interest only. You get really creative on what you need to do.
Steve: All right, okay so that’s seller carry?
Brandon: That’s seller carryback.
Steve: We went cash …
Brandon: That’s not loan in place. Yeah.
Steve: The cash is that’s no go and then now I have a mortgage. What’s the next step?
Brandon: If you have a mortgage in place and typically the way there’s an Arizona or the way that we typically do our deals, if it’s not an FHA loan, then we try to do what’s called an agreement for sale which is also called a wrap. You do an exact wrap. Imagine the loan is a beach ball, okay and you just wrap it, like put a blanket around it. It’s exact same payments, exact same interest rate, everything is the exact same, except you’re just creating a new loan, that’s the wrap or the agreement for sale. It’s also considered installment sales. It’s how they used to sell land, like farms and everything back in the day.
Brandon: It’s an installment sale and the way it works and the way we set them up is the loan does not transfer over until that existing loans paid in full and we usually negotiate these deals for three to five years at least, the longer the better especially for investors. If you’re flipping those or assigning these, investors love these, they eat these up. I mean because it’s an easy way for them to get loans without having to qualify for a loan because most of the time as a real estate investor or a landlord, you can only get four loans, maybe if you’re lucky up to 10. You can do tons and tons of these.
Steve: Right. Okay, so how you presented to me?
Brandon: It’s the same process. Basically …
Steve: It’s the same to the part where I can’t do the seller carry?
Brandon: Right.
Steve: Okay.
Brandon: Here’s the negotiations, so depending on the seller carryback and depending on the wrap your, biggest negotiation is down payment. You want to give them the least amount out of pocket as possible, okay and because whatever that cuts into your profits when you assign it. Also if you’re going to keep it in your own portfolio …
Steve: You do repairs?
Brandon: Yeah, so that’s where the negotiations is. I usually ask the question so if we can get you out of the loan and you don’t have to worry about making payments anymore like that, I usually ask where are you moving to?
Steve: Moving with my kids.
Brandon: Okay. I try to find out what expenses are going to cost, how much is it going to cost you to move. Typically our max that we ever give someone typically is no more than $5,000. One of our acquisitions guys was notorious and he would basically get zero down or maybe no more than a thousand bucks, and then we could turn around and assign that for 10,000, 13,000, 15,000 or whatever. That’s where the negotiation comes in, is how much of a downpayment you’re going to give them.
Steve: Okay, and then so cash didn’t work, seller carry didn’t work, wrap didn’t work. What’s next?
Brandon: That’s the lease option and that usually works really good for the FHA loans and those are also really good for the really, really tie deals like where there’s hardly, hardly any equity at all. I’m talking even up to zero equity. All these creative seller financing deals, if you use terms, you can still create a deal out of it if you do it right. I had the deal in Mesa. They basically owed what the house was worth and I was able to negotiate a 5-year lease option and we just did an assignment. Now here’s what’s beautiful is something, and a lot of times you find these as landlords.
Brandon: The rental properties, they just want something to take over, they just want someone that rent the property and then you basically offered. If I can rent the house for a year or two and then buy it, would you be okay with that? That’s the question, that’s the whole script right there.
Steve: Okay, are you going to be calling me today fix things?
Brandon: No, so typically what we negotiate is depending on how we set up the lease option, if we stay in the middle or if we just assign it, we put that $300 or $500, whatever that first repair cost is, no more than $300 or $500 month of repairs. Then what we do is we usually have them get a home warranty. If there’s any big ticket items, the home warranty covers everything else. This is really a hands-off rental for the landlord, for the seller and these are really easy to negotiate if you set it up correctly because they’re already wanting to rent the property, they don’t want to be a landlord and if you’re taking away that stress and sometimes one of our buddies, Andrea LeBaron, like he does too is sometimes he’ll even sweeten the pot by offering a little bit more on the rent.
Brandon: You’re giving them everything they want, here’s the negotiate, what do you want, okay here you go.
Steve: Yeah, can I rent that from you?
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Right.
Brandon: Usually the negotiations is how long you can get it for and a lot of times they want some of that lease option fee that you get from the tenant buyer. Usually it’s three to five months and so you can do two things. I get this from Claude Diamond and shout out to Claude Diamond on lease options here, is if they are asking for a option fee upfront, don’t give them an option fee. Give them prepaid rent because that prepaid rent means you don’t have to pay rent for those couple three months, and then all sudden you get all that back from that tenant buyer.
Steve: That’s huge.
Brandon: That can save you a lot right there.
Steve: Uh, so I never thought of that. That’s a good one. All right, got to write that down later on. Okay, so I see you a lot on Facebook live, so tell me about that, what’s the strategy behind that?
Brandon: No strategy. Just for me, I just to tell people what’s going on because my job previously before transition into coaching is dispositions and the COO of Sean’s real estate side of the business. I was responsible for selling all of our property, so a lot of times I’m in front of a property or we’re doing an auction or we’re having people show up and we’re trying to bid the price of the property up.
Steve: Right, in the auction effect, a little bidding against each other.
Brandon: Yeah, and then I’ll get people before I do the auction or before I do the open house or the inspection period, I will put it out there. I’ll do a little walkthrough of the house and I try to solicit offers that way off of Facebook live. I’ve sold in so many houses off of Facebook and Periscope just by doing that.
Steve: Periscope.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: I don’t even really used Periscope before.
Brandon: Yeah, no, I haven’t really used it in a long time. I mainly use Facebook live now, but Periscope was really hot what two years ago.
Steve: For a little bit.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Okay, so you’re doing the Facebook live. I know that you mean dispositions is I mean that was what you were doing. If we could rank your top three ways of moving a property, what would be those three?
Brandon: It’s really, really simple and shout out to Larry Goins on this because he has a great book on real estate day trading and this is one of the ideas I got from him, was you do a whisper campaign. Basically you mean you do a quick phone call to a couple of your top buyers or maybe it’s just an email to them. You’re getting your top five, 10, 15, 20 buyers that are really active to get a look at the property before you do anything else and I try to see where they’re at. I can really gauge how hot a property is by the amount of phone calls I get and stuff. Then the next thing I do is I do a text message.
Brandon: I have a VIP text message list and I send out a text message to maybe 1500 or so cash buyers that have already bought properties from us. Typically there are already people in our database that have already bought something from us, so they’re on our VIP text message list, and then we do our email blasts and the email goes out to our entire cash buyers list. There’s you can sell a property really quick and just take the first offer or you can try to push the spread and try to solicit the highest off, and that’s usually what I do.
Steve: Right, okay. Max has a question. “With doing these lease options or raps, have you ever seen any of these loans get called on a do on sale clause?”
Brandon: Not yet. It is a possibility.
Steve: It’s always a risk, yeah.
Brandon: Yeah, it’s always a risk typically on the raps. On lease options, it’s not usually an issue because it’s a lease and there’s not usually anything recorded unless you go file and record a memorandum of the option. If you’re keeping it for yourself, I’d record it, record an option on it. If it’s just a lease option, if there’s nothing recorded or nothing to trigger that do on sale clause, it’s usually not an issue. Again, I’m not a realtor, check with title company, check with your attorney.
Steve: Check with everybody.
Brandon: Yeah, check with everybody. I mean it really here’s the thing as are they giving their payments and then we set everything up through a note servicing company or through our title company. As long as the banks are getting their payments, they’re not stressing out typically.
Steve: Yeah, they’re not time.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Okay. I mean it’s a complicated question, but what does your organization look today?
Brandon: It’s small, it’s not crazy. Sean is the owner CEO, okay. We have a couple acquisition sales guys that actually go out meet with homeowners. We prefer to do face to face meetings and they go a lock up the properties. I typically had been selling the properties, so there’s three sales guys on that and then we also have our leads managers and what we call the folks that take the phone calls for the leads. Any type market and goes out and someone calls in there, they’re answering the phone and they’re taking all the information down about the lead, so we have three people that take those incoming calls and then we also have some cold callers.
Steve: Okay. Interesting, all right. What else was there? Oh so Matt Potter wanted to know what is your top lead source.
Brandon: Right now?
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: Because it changes and it fluctuates a lot on what we’ve been doing. Our number one for a long time was pay-per-click and we had a ton off a direct mail, but everyone seems to be going and we’re going that same direction where it’s more ringless voice message.
Steve: Oh Sean’s the one that’s pushing that?
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: The reason why it’s popular is because Sean keeps telling everyone about it?
Brandon: Yeah. I mean probably four out of eight deals are going to be ringless voice message deals for us, so it’s probably half of our deals and cold calling and cold calling is like a mix of that with ringless voice message.
Steve: For our less experienced wholesalers, what is ringless voicemail mean?
Brandon: There’s a system and there’s different software’s out there. It started out with slide broadcasts and slide dial where it doesn’t ring your cell phone, but you can drop a voice message in there and then all of a sudden, they’re like what the heck and now they’re coming up more and more. People are starting get frustrated, right? It just depends on how to filter through that and the way that we have it set up is people will call back and they leave a message. It’s either like a FU, take me off your list, don’t ever call me again or yeah I want to sell my house.
Steve: Right. Those ones are callback.
Brandon: That’s the ones we call back or they’ll call them that leave a message, so we call those back as well.
Steve: Okay, very cool. Then I know I met you at one of the Flip2Freedom events, but I also came to a couple of your meetups. Let’s talk about the meetups.
Brandon: Sure.
Steve: Why do you do them?
Brandon: This is all Sean. Sean is really big about being very transparent and open and giving back to a community. He actually started the whole Flip2Freedom idea as a way to help train new investors to help bring deals and stuff that, but one of the things I’ve always known about Sean is as soon as something works, he tells everyone about it. I mean I remember …
Steve: He’s a giver.
Brandon: Yeah. He’ll probably correct me on this, but I think he was paying less than ten bucks pay-per-click, maybe as high as 30 or something and now you can pay over $100 on pay-per-click …
Steve: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Brandon: On the same keywords but back when he did it, it was so low then all of sudden he started sharing it and then those same keywords went up on price.
Steve: Yeah. We were joking about this, Sean and that old lady, before I …
Brandon: That video has been around forever, right?
Steve: Before I even knew who Sean was because I was in pay-per-click also before I got really big. I was like who is this guy with this old lady.
Brandon: He says she’s brought in so many leads, he’s so grateful for that one old lady video.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, I know I bet, I bet. Okay, so what is your favor for skip-tracing?
Brandon: That changes too. Basically I started with just white pages and everyone has everything from TLO, Skip Genie. There’s some great guys that were in a mastermind with, they have their own skip-tracing services and stuff like that. I shout out to Sal and the Carlos and Jerrod Vitalis also has skip-tracing. Basically you’re just trying to get phone numbers, right?
Steve: Right.
Brandon: Just trying to attach phone numbers. There’s DataZap out there that can depend phone numbers for a lot of your mailing lists and stuff like that. If you get a mailing list and you want to get the phone numbers with it, there’s companies DataZap and other these other skip-tracing companies that are probably even better than and some of these other ones.
Steve: Right. Okay. Do you have any interesting war stories?
Brandon: Oh wow.
Steve: Where to start? Which one is the best one?
Brandon: Well, I remember I was going up to a house. We bought a house for $8,000 …
Steve: Wow.
Brandon: In Phoenix and it was a shack that was getting ready fall down. It had a gate around it and a fence around it, and it’s one of those places you know there’s junkyard dogs in the yard. I rattled the fence and everything, and I have a concealed weapon, I have a pistol I carry with me sometimes, so this is one those times I was carrying my gun. I rattled the gate and no dogs come out or anything like that, so I started walking up to the house because I need to put a lot box on it and do all that stuff, and all of a sudden I hear this roof, roof, roof and I take off and I just pull out my gun. I thought I was dead, I thought I was going to life. Well, I was fine, it was the dogs next door.
Steve: It was a heightened …
Brandon: Oh, I was freaking out and I was just so nervous, but yeah. No major war stories. I’ve had to deal with drug addicts and prostitutes. We had one house that we bought that they basically run a brothel out of it.
Steve: Wow.
Brandon: Hoarder homes are fun.
Steve: Love hoarder homes.
Brandon: We have a dog hoarder home. We had 45 five dogs removed out of the house …
Steve: Oh wow.
Brandon: Here in Tempe.
Steve: Okay, there was one in the news just a couple of days ago.
Brandon: It may have been the same seller or something.
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: I mean those are some nasty ones and if you go into a house that’s been vacant for a long time, don’t open the fridge.
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah.
Brandon: I learned that the hard way.
Steve: I was trying to host a deal with Jamil and I signed the photos, and this lady was so high … His girlfriend was so high that she couldn’t even get out of bed, so I’m just taking photos and I get a text back from Jamil. I was like, “Why is there a woman half covered on these photos?” He’s like, “What do you want to do? Couldn’t move her.”
Brandon: One of the houses we bought it was just … It was a hoarder home, it was one of those nasty places that never got cleaned up, the kitchen probably wasn’t cleaned in a decade, and it was junk everywhere, nasty dirty house. The guy was living there, there was like nasty house wood … They had a room with cat pee all over the place and stuff, but the guy was watching porn non-stop on the TV and so he had a big screen TV and the porn was going on. Our sales guy Raphael took pictures of the house and I didn’t look through all the stuff, and we sent out that link with the pictures with the porn on the TV. They’re like oh no I can’t believe that one out, so we had to delete that picture.
Steve: Oh, that’s too bad. Okay, and then what are some of your favorite tools?
Brandon: I’m a big software guy and I love to be able to use my telephone, my iPhone so we use Podio and the best are few. Everything’s of the Podio apps great to keep track of our CRM. We can check out contracts, we can check out phone numbers, email, so I can just call right from my phone. Some of the apps that I’ve been really fallen in love with, one is called LandGlide and shout-out to Carlos Reyes and Sal on that. Basically if I’m trying to sell a house and I’m at the house, it will geo-locate me where I’m at yeah and then I can look around and I can find all the owners that have LLCs. Then what’s really neat about in Maricopa County, you can just click on that LLC.
Brandon: You can get that name, you can get the address and then if you go on the website for the tax assessor’s office. In Maricopa County, all landlords have to register the rental properties, and they put their phone numbers on the registration so you just go on the website and you find their phone number, and you can call that landlord right there.
Steve: Yeah, that’s huge.
Brandon: I love LandGlide. There’s some really simple ones Zillow Rentals, you can take that and you can draw a circle around the location you’re at, and it’ll pull up all the rental properties and those are all landlords that are buyers a lot of times. You can just call them and ask what they’re looking for anymore home.
Steve: Or frustrated landlords.
Brandon: They could turn into a lead, right?
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: Buy a house from them.
Steve: Right.
Brandon: I use a lot of apps that. As far as other apps, I’m trying to think of ones … Oh Property Radar. Property Radar is great right now for foreclosures if you’re trying to find … Because what happens is our sales guys, we make them go on appointments and then we also have them drive the neighborhood 15 minutes before an appointment, and they’re looking for vacant homes, homes that are in foreclosure, anything that looks that they’re in distress. Then one of my other favorite apps, I forgot about this one Deal Machine.
Brandon: Deal Machine is awesome because you can take a picture of the house all from your phone, it’ll pull up their phone number, their email, you can call them right when you’re in front of the house and then if they don’t answer, you can send them a postcard right from your cell phone, so check out that. That’s awesome.
Steve: Powerful.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Very cool. We’re going to get you an affiliate link.
Brandon: Yeah, right.
Steve: Okay, so in doing my research before you came in here, I saw something that you posted and it’s really important to me because I know so many people that are career students or I want to go do this someday, whatever and you just have to start. That’s all you have to do is just start and you’ll fill your way there, right?
Brandon: Right.
Steve: I saw what you wrote, I thought that was really cool and I thought a spoke to a lot of people that have come to me with questions that’s still haven’t started yet, and I think this message needs to be heard. I printed that if you don’t mind reading it.
Brandon: Sure, yeah. I remember writing this a few months ago. All right. “I have a confession, I haven’t always been honest with myself, I pretended to be an entrepreneur but actually I was a wanttopreneur, a fake, a phony, a fraud. I acted like I wanted to be successful, I read a ton of books on real estate, marketing and sales, and I signed up for a ton of gurus webinars and courses. I designed cool business cards. I bought domain names on GoDaddy, but what I was actually doing is staying busy instead of taking action now, I mean real action, the type of action that actually brings results and puts money in the bank account. I remember my first deal like it was yesterday.
Brandon: I was working six days a week and had little time and money for marketing, but when I decided to take massive action I had success, and I wrote down the five steps I took. Number one I got clear on my intention. Number two, I wrote down my goal. Number three, I prayed everything depended on God. Number four, I worked two everything depended on me and number five, I cashed my first whole check.”
Steve: It’s awesome. Yeah, and I think it’s powerful because a lot of people need to hear it. There are a lot of people that just want to some day or lucky him he has all the opportunity and whatever, and no you just got to start. He said goo out and do it, right?
Brandon: I am so impressed with some of the … We have some of the youngest guys in our meetup, guys that are doing 6-figure months. I mean talking about 21 years old years, 20 old years old, 19 years old and they just took massive action. They didn’t try to decide how to do things their way. They just asked how were you doing it, they followed that same recipe and they got results. They didn’t reinvent the wheel at all.
Steve: No, and they just found what worked and just kept doing it and doing it better and do it longer, right?
Brandon: Taking massive action, have faith and you’re going to fail. News alert, you’re going to mess up, you’re going to screw up at some point, you’re going to fail, that’s just part of the process, just keep going. You don’t really fail unless you stop.
Steve: Right, and I think this is great also for any industry, right? That’s not even just wholesale. This is just any industry.
Brandon: Any entrepreneur, anyone that has a goal or that’s realistic. I love Gary Vaynerchuk because one thing he always says is you’re going to die, so take action. Don’t wait, just do something right now.
Steve: Yeah, and I like also he says I don’t have any issues with your ambition, I just questions sometimes whether your actions line up with your ambitions.
Brandon: Right. Are you watching Netflix tonight or are you working on your business.
Steve: Exactly. Very cool. What would you say is your biggest hurdle right now?
Brandon: Time. I get pulled in a lot of different directions, and so one of the things I am trying to prove upon is carving out and time blocking, and then being really, really efficient during that time. That’s something I don’t have down perfect yet. One of my mentors, that’s the thing that we talk about a lot is how to time block and how to really be efficient during that time.
Steve: I’m a very big fan of strategic coach with Dan Sullivan, and so I’ll give some tips …
Brandon: Sure.
Steve: On time blocking to be more efficient. I love it, but the biggest thing is you have to have more free time, intentionally plan the free time, and then you have to intentionally plan your focus times. Oh, these are the days so focus days free days and buffer days. On your focus days, you’re working in your top three, you don’t work on anything else. For me personally, it’s the podcast, meeting agents I don’t know yet, and talking to my existing agents. That’s it.
Brandon: I love that.
Steve: On my focus days, that’s all I do, I don’t do anything else. You got to figure out what your top three are and then on those focus days, you don’t do anything else.
Brandon: That’s great advice, and that’s what’s funny is that you’re saying that, that’s what I’ve limited myself down to is three things. That’s it because I think we get too overwhelmed with many things on our to-do list. Tony Robbins, Dan Sullivan, all those guys, Brian Tracy, one of the things is just being focused and then The ONE Thing. Have you read the book The ONE Thing?
Steve: Yeah, oh it’s an amazing book.
Brandon: Yeah, I love that.
Steve: If you can bring it all down to one thing, that’s awesome.
Brandon: That’s the 80/20 rule and then even super focus on just the one item they need to hit on, and I love it because that helps me break it down for myself because that’s a reality. Reality of my life is I’m helping a lot in the business, I have my own real estate business, I have my own virtual assistant and my thing is sometimes you get pulled in so many directions, I have to just stay focus and I will put my phone on airplane mode for the next hour or something. I haven’t I haven’t given myself permission to do that in the past, but now I’m doing that better, trying to.
Steve: It’s all depend on having the right people because if you don’t have the right people, you can’t do that.
Brandon: I know.
Steve: I’m very blessed to have the people I have in my organization. Okay, so what would you consider to be your superpower?
Brandon: I think really simply is I feel I get along with people pretty easily. I make friends fast, I always try to find something that I can find something in common with people, whether where they’re from, whether they’re doing, and I’m often love it. I mean I like meeting people and I think my superpower is just being able to relate to people.
Steve: Yeah, very cool
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: I already know the answer to this, but what book have you given more than any other book?
Brandon: Well, I think the answer would be The Go-Giver, right? We’re both in a little mastermind and the premise behind that mastermind is that book The Go-Giver, trying to figure out how you can serve others first and it’ll reciprocate, it’ll come back to you, and that little book I think is one of those books has changed my thought process, that’s what Sean preaches. Sometimes we get frustrated in the business because he lets out these ideas and these marketing things that are working to everyone else so quickly that oh man like …
Steve: Just let us take advantage for three months.
Brandon: Yeah, and so everyone else is doing that same mailing list or this same type of marketing piece, but that’s just how he is and that’s what’s amazing. That’s the example that’s been set for me …
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: Is have an abundance mindset that there’s more than enough, we’re in the same room breathing air, often you get mad because I’m breathing more air than you, you’re acting like you’re going to run out of air. No, there’s plenty of air in this room, so there’s abundance all over the whole universe.
Steve: Yeah, and so you had given that book to me and for me the longest sound is like a couple of people say you need to read this post. I was like I don’t really need to read it, right? I’m already a giver, but I wish I read that book sooner. The number two for me was the most powerful one, the one that needed to learn the most and that was that your ability to succeed or go to whatever love you want to go is completely proportional to the number of people you can help. Right. I will pour a lot into people, but I wasn’t pouring a lot into enough people.
Brandon: Right. It’s one thing to give value but how many people are you giving value to. That’s why this podcast is amazing because now it’s given you a larger reach, more people to serve.
Steve: That’s what’s so exciting about it, that’s why it’s a top three activity.
Brandon: Right.
Steve: Okay, so what was your favorite best or most interesting failure? The more catastrophic, the better.
Brandon: The more catas … I’ve had a lot of them, so it’s hard to just dial down to one. I think that’s part of it is just having failures is my wife … Okay, so here’s one of the realities is I switched jobs like it was going out of style. I mean I was …
Steve: Entrepreneur at heart.
Brandon: My wife I feel really bad because she gets so stressed out because all of a sudden I quit another job. I would always have a job and I always got a job instantly, but I job hopped all the time and I think that created some instability and our family for a while until I settled down a little bit, and I just got focused. Part of I think was because I wasn’t happy or I didn’t have that clarity of what I wanted, and once I got clear, then all of a sudden it was all real estate. Everything, read, sleep, breathe, real estate. In fact, I talked real estate so much, my wife has a code word to tell me that I’m talking too much and so she starts come out breastfeeding, that means I got to stop talking about real estate.
Steve: That’s awesome. That’s a good tip for some of the mom listeners out there. Okay, and then what lesson would you want to impart? I know we talked about a lot of different lessons, but if there was one thing that someone walked away from this needs to hear. What would be that lesson?
Brandon: Just take action, just don’t even allow yourself to think because I analyze things a lot, I overanalyze things. Don’t be stuck in that analysis paralysis, right? Just take action and do it. If you mess up, who cares, just move on. You lose a little bit money, so you lose a little bit of sleep, so you have a little stress, you’ll figure it out. Just take action right now. Whatever that goal is, do something towards it today.
Steve: Very cool, so that’s it. Well actually, I take that back, there were a couple of questions here. Brian Salmons wants to know what does your business look a year from now.
Brandon: Oh a year from now, cool
Steve: Yeah.
Brandon: It’s pretty simple is I’m doing a lot more coaching, I’m doing a lot more real estate deals virtually and within my own market here locally. My business is multiple streams of income from coaching from my own deals outside of Arizona and inside of Arizona, and I’m traveling my family. My daughter’s going to college up in Idaho, I’m going to be able to go visit with her.
Steve: Probably old enough to have a kid in college.
Brandon: Yeah, and then I have family in Indiana and Kentucky, I have family in California. We just want to go visit family. We don’t to go on a cruise or on a vacation and money still comes in.
Steve: Yeah, very cool, so that’s where we’re going to wrap it up. What will be the best way for one of our listeners to get ahold of you?
Brandon: Shoot me a Facebook message. That’s probably one the easiest ways.
Steve: Is there a particular brand of Simmons they should be looking for on Facebook?
Brandon: The bald guy.
Steve: Bald guy.
Brandon: Just look for the bald guy with the suit and tie right now.
Steve: Okay, awesome. Okay.
Brandon: Yeah.
Steve: Then guys again if you like this show, please share this episode right now and then next week is the 4th of July so we’re not going to be going live. We might have a special episode if you’re okay with me releasing the negotiation thing we did yesterday.
Brandon: Okay.
Steve: Maybe we’ll have a special podcast episode of just me doing some power negotiations with Scott Bauer and Rafael Cortes. It was a lot of fun.
Brandon: Hopefully the audio turned out, I don’t know.
Steve: Yeah, we’ll see, but then the week after that we got John Gluch. He’s a top agent in Phoenix. His team is doing massive amount of deals. I think they’re doing over 120, 150 units. I don’t know what the exact number is, but it’s something super crazy. It’s going to open up the door or pull back the curtains on what’s working for them, and then also don’t forget to visit our website, realestatedisruptors.com. You’re going to find out about upcoming events and all the video replays, transcriptions, and all this of this show. That’s it. Thank You Brandon, appreciate i.
Brandon: Thanks Steve, I appreciate it.
Steve: Then thank you guys for checking out the show. I appreciate you guys as well.
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