Exploring the Wide World of Real Estate Opportunities

This episode of the Real Estate Game Changers show, features an extensive interview with Parker Stiles, a real estate entrepreneur who began his career in commercial real estate before transitioning into wholesaling houses. Parker shares his journey from getting fired for being 'too entrepreneurial' to building a successful wholesaling business that operates in multiple markets. He discusses the importance of personal development, learning from failures, and how multi-level marketing played a role in his growth. Parker details his first deal, the importance of having a business plan, mentorship, and how adopting a step-by-step approach helped him succeed.

He explains his business model, including hiring practices, leveraging private notes for deals, and strategies for dealing with various market conditions. The conversation covers practical tips for acquisitions, dispositions, negotiations, setting expectations with sellers, and dealing with unforeseen challenges like property damage. Parker emphasizes the significance of sales skills in the real estate industry and advises on continuous learning and training.

Chapters

• 0:33 Meet Parker Stiles: From College to Real Estate Mogul
• 4:26 The First Deal: A Wholesaling Success Story
• 8:09 Expanding Horizons: Virtual Wholesaling and Market Growth
• 10:58 Strategic Decision Making in Real Estate Investing
• 12:43 Innovative Financing: The Power of Private Mortgages
• 25:18 Underwriting and Selling: The Owner Financing Process
• 30:06 Wholetailing vs. Rehabbing: Maximizing Profits
• 31:48 Building a Real Estate Empire Across Multiple Markets
• 32:29 Exploring Remote Work and Team Dynamics
• 33:30 The Decision to Close a Brick and Mortar Office
• 38:06 Insights on Hiring and Team Management
• 41:28 Strategies for Virtual Sales and Building Rapport
• 43:59 Effective Daily Routines and Sales Metrics
• 47:00 Navigating Compensation and Deal Structures
• 55:42 Innovative Approaches to Dispositions and Price Negotiations
• 59:38 Learning from Challenges and Setting Expectations

Transcript

Mike: 0:00

All right, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Game Changers show. I'm your host, Mike McKay, based in Jacksonville, Florida. And each and every week we do this show with people who are changing the game of real estate all over the country. And this is a live show. So if anyone has any questions, please put them in the comments for our guests to answer. If anyone is in the Jacksonville area and you've worked in sales and you're thinking about getting into real estate send me a DM on Instagram. We are hiring acquisitions people. We're looking for three this quarter, so if you're good at sales, send me a message and let's talk. This week on the show, we have Parker Stiles. Parker, welcome to the show.

Parker: 0:36

How you doing? Happy to be here.

Mike: 0:38

Awesome man. Over the people who don't know you could you tell us about how you got involved in real estate and how that's led you to where you are today?

Parker: 0:48

Yeah. So I got involved in real estate right out of college. Um, I knew that I wanted to be in real estate in some capacity, but, uh, obviously there's a lot of different avenues of which way you want to go. Do you want to be a real estate agent and residential or commercial? It's, I feel like that's the first thing. thing people think of with real estate is, uh, Oh, I'm going to go be an agent. I got to go get my license. So, uh, I, I did that thing and but I didn't want to be in residential. I wanted to be in commercial. I thought that was, new and exciting. And I got a job at a commercial firm, working with tenants and landlords in the industrial commercial space and you As a lot of us aren't entrepreneur, entrepreneurs are, I was impatient and wanted that six figure income faster than the two to three years. I thought it was going to take me to develop that where I was at. And I stumbled into, I was big into personal development. I was reluctantly involved in some multi level marketing stuff for a little while. That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. And while I'm glad I don't do that for a living now, it definitely built the framework, the mental framework and foundation that I needed to pursue the grind of becoming successful. It's the best way I can script that. But anyway, I, Did that in commercial job for six, seven, eight months or so. I ended up getting fired from that job. For, we won't go down that road, but I, the quote was that I was too entrepreneurial and they didn't think that their investment in me was going to pay off in the long run. Now, I don't know if handwriting yellow letters at my desk from time to time had any thing to do with me. Getting fired from that job, but maybe you did or didn't but backing up. I stumbled into the reason I said personal or multi level marketing is it got me into that personal development realm. It got me listening to all of these people podcast, reading books, audible, and that funneled me into just stumbling into flipping houses. Real estate. This was in 20, 2014. Wholesaling really wasn't this big, sexy term that was being thrown around yet. So I was following some guys on rehabbing houses. I'm like, this is my thing. This is what I'm going to do if I ever get fired or maybe quit or, something changes with work. Like I'm going to go be a rehabber, but I'm going to go ahead and start and dip my toes in the water. Like we all try and do. And yeah, I ended up, I actually did get fired from my job and said, okay here it is. I, your wish is my command, right? I talked it into existence somehow, can you be careful what you wish for? And so from that point on, it was just, spending all day at the house, in my sweat pants and sitting on the couch, watching, YouTube video after YouTube video, podcast after pod, I was just a sponge absorbing every piece of content that you could think of and developing a business plan, so to speak. One of the guys I was following though, Matt Theriault. with Epic real estate investing. One of his kind of mottos was learn step a and then do step a learn step B and then do step B instead of trying to, we've all heard analysis paralysis and you try and learn the whole thing. And there's all these different ways to do it. And then you just end up doing nothing. So I really didn't want that to be me. And I just wanted to Go and start digging in the dirt somewhere and getting traction. And that was what I did when I got fired. I went back and actually paid some additional money. It definitely wasn't what coaching costs these days. But I did get some one on one coaching and I said, Hey, I'd literally just got fired from my job. This is going to be my thing. Tell me what I need to do to make it happen and I'll do whatever you say. And so that was start. That was December of 2014.

Mike: 4:26

So was the first deal you did a flip?

Parker: 4:28

It was actually a wholesale. I bought it. I'm sorry. So let's call it. Let's call it a wholetail It was a wholetail long before that word ever

Mike: 4:36

Haha Yeah.

Parker: 4:38

So I went to I got this a quick story on that first deal. It took me eight months By the way, to get that first deal I had talked to hundreds of sellers that did not sound anything like the coaches would tell me these conversations would sound like they were all FUs and stop mailing me. And this is an insulting offer and all these things until one day. This the first one called me and I had this conversation with this gentleman and he was an older guy in his 80s It was really like 10 minutes down the road from where I was living. And it was an abandoned house He said i've got a tear down. They're they're saying they're gonna tear down this property they're gonna put a lien on it for fifteen thousand dollars after they tear it down I grew up in this house. My parents raised me in this house. I asked him why he had it He said, so his cats could go in and out and have somewhere to stay. He didn't actually live there. There was mold from the floor to the ceilings. Place was trashed. It was incredible. It was the first house like this that I had laid eyes on during this journey. And so it was a big deal to me, but I remember what he said on the phone. He said, if you can figure out how to keep this house from being torn down, And not get these memories, essentially taken away from me. I'll practically give it to you. So he said, and that was the first, that was like the click. That's what these guys are saying. These people are like, so I need to go find more of these people. I said, sir, I don't know how I hadn't bought a house yet. And now that they're tearing it, they're going to tear it down in a week and a half. Long story short, I ended up closing on that house seven days later. Luckily it wasn't a super expensive house. The capital wasn't too much of an issue, but I just brought my resources together. I'd been going to RIA meetings within an hour radius, building my network, finding connections. And I called all the people in those individual connection was just like, I got one. What do I do? And I ended up buying it, closing on it, and I was going to rehab it. And then I went to a seminar actually in California that I had already planned. It was that one of my coaches, my coach was doing this, Matt Theriault in California. And I met this guy and he was like, why don't you try and wholesale it? I didn't even know what that was. I'm like, how do you how do you do that? I like, I already bought it. I'm going to rehab it. And he's go see if somebody else will go buy it. How much do you think you're going to make on the rehab? And I was like, Maybe 40, 000 or so. And he's what if you could make 20 grand now without doing anything? Would you take that? I was like, sure, definitely. I said, but nobody's going to pay anything more than I paid for it. I ran my numbers and I've got these, spreadsheets and formulas and like, why would anybody pay more than what I paid? And he's like, why are you negotiating for somebody that's not you? So that's a good point. So went back home. I called some people, I put it on Craig's list and I had that thing sold in two weeks and it was like 17, 000 in my checking account. That was the first paycheck. It was the first like, all right, this is real game on. Let's go. I

Mike: 7:36

Gotcha, so did you jump only into wholesaling after that? Or are you still going on the rehab route?

Parker: 7:41

actually didn't, I stayed rehabbing for the next, I don't know, two years. There were a couple of wholesales trickled in, but I definitely wasn't building that business model. I wanted the before and after pictures. That's all I can say. I don't know why. But apparently that's why I was going through all this, all the stress from contractors taking advantage of me and opening up walls and finding 10, 10, 20, 000 more in repairs and all these things as to be the HGTV star for some reason,

Mike: 8:07

Yeah.

Parker: 8:08

at least in the beginning

Mike: 8:09

So what does your business look like today

Parker: 8:11

today, we're in a few different markets. So I pulled. At that meetup or at that seminar that I mentioned before, I had discovered virtual wholesaling. And so

Mike: 8:22

2014 or

Parker: 8:24

20, 2014, this guy was talking about how he was flipping houses, toes in the sand. Not going into any of them. And he wasn't in any of his markets and I was like, this sounds pretty cool. I can do this alongside my rehabbing of houses in Atlanta. And fast forward. I set that up. I liked that business because it forced me to delegate. I couldn't do it all myself.

Mike: 8:49

Because you weren't, because you weren't there. Is

Parker: 8:51

exactly. So I was going to pick a market and I found a, there was a data guy there. And I asked him after the event, I said, Hey, I want to do this. Where do I need to go to do this? Where's the best place to do it? And he could have closed his eyes and pick somewhere on a map or actually looked at a bunch of data. I don't know, but it landed on Knoxville, Tennessee, or Charleston, South Carolina. And I said, Charleston sounds like a more fun place to visit. So let's do that. There was like no real research that went into it. So maybe I got a little lucky there and picked a good place because we're still in Charleston. It's our, probably our heftiest market that we have. And so Charleston, South Carolina, I had to pull out of Atlanta cause everything was all my time and money was going into that about a year and a half later. I was doing a couple of deals a month and had the system and the people had made, a bunch of mistakes there as far as hiring and firing and finding right butt right seat type of deal. And then once I got that I copy and pasted what we had and I put it in Atlanta. And then for a few years, we scaled up Atlanta and Charleston together. A couple bolted on Columbia, South Carolina. Which is about two hours from Charleston. So it was plug and play there. Not a whole lot of differences. And then we ended up bolting on Charlotte North Carolina. So Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Charlotte are our markets today. We're primarily in South Carolina. And then I would say Atlanta and Charlotte tail end behind it. And we are a full scale wholesale shop. Okay. That is the fundamental kind of baseline business. And then we've adopted exit strategies over the years to capitalize in other ways on those deals. So imagine a conveyor belt of off market opportunities coming across your desk on a weekly basis. And then we wholesale to create cash. Feed the machine, pay the team, keep the lights on, et cetera, find opportunities. And then we we utilize rental properties. We have a long, a private mortgage company for long term notes. We have a short term hard money company and just funnel that stuff in for passive income. It's all about trading the active gains into passive streams for us.

Mike: 10:57

And. How are you deciding when something is, Hey, I'm just going to wholesale this one, or, Oh, we're going to renovate this one, or, we're going to buy this cash into a private mortgage on it. What's your, how do you decide which strategy to go with on each deal?

Parker: 11:11

For a while, it was spending hours looking at the deal and, wasting a ton of time going through different scenarios because I didn't really know, I think the best advice I've gotten in this business is SOP everything out, track it, write it out, make a process. And then give it to somebody to implement and take control over. And so one of those processes with, in regard to your question is how do we make decisions on what goes where what entity is going to be buying it? And what's the exit strategy going to be? And so we just wrote these things out as far as if the wholesale is going to be X, then what could we get by wholetailing it? What could we get by rehabbing it? If that's a certain multiple of the wholesale number. For example, if we could rehab it and make two and a half X plus what the wholesale fee was going to be, we're going to take it down and rehab it. If it's going to be two X or more, we'll take it down and wholetail it. If it's the right fit for that, it's going to be vacant at closing. The place is in decent shape. It's not a complete train wreck, et cetera for the wholetail. And then for a rental property, obviously a little bit more complex calculator. That we have built for that. Same thing for the private note or the long term mortgage and the hard money is just that works for the wholesale and the bolt on. So my goal is having every buyer that buys one of our properties also use our hard money lending company to bolt on and double dip on the profits there. And we can go into detail on any of those exit strategies if you want.

Mike: 12:43

yeah. Let's talk about the, the private mortgage one. I haven't, heard that many people talk about in the way that you and I were talking about it offline. So could you share how you approach that?

Parker: 12:52

Definitely. So private notes, um, being the bank is obviously a killer thing to be. Banks, banks are, are where the money's made. Um, and I think. It is not a one size fits all strategy. I love rental properties. There's some people who are like, I just don't want to be a landlord. And that's okay. I have rental properties and I have properties on owner financing and I just think they really compliment each other well. So we just did one, I'll say that the last two that we did, I'll go through the brief numbers. One was a property we bought for 250, 000 in outside of Atlanta. We went in and put about 30 grand into it, painting the walls, changing all the trim work, light fixtures, just lightly updating it. It was already like a 2005 house, so it didn't need a ton. We ended up listing that on the market for, I believe like 415. And we ended up taking an offer in the high three hundreds. Now we write in the description. Ask about owner financing for for this deal or a seller is offering owner financing for to a deserving buyer at a sizable down payment, I believe is the actual terms or verbiage that we use. And so they're asking, and it really just depends on the offer, right? You, we may have a cash offer that we want to take and not sell it on terms. But getting on the MLS gives you all the options there. It gives you the best amount of offers. And so if it's cash, if that's the best number, we'll take that. But ideally we want to turn it into a note for that return. And so in this case, the buyer actually put. Like 300, 000 down 315 that they had just sold a property. They didn't want a large debt amount. And I actually almost bought their property that they were going to sell. I talked with the agent and it sounded like a cash deal and I almost bought that house she was selling to, but I got beat out by open door. So lost it there. But she took all that cash. She put it down for this property. So we were all in it for about two 80. She put a little over 300 down. So we profited about 10 grand on the deal. So there's your, quasi wholesale fee right there, right? If you're looking at it like that and then we financed about a hundred thousand dollars at 9. 9 percent on a 30 year and I don't know what her payment is. I believe it's somewhere around six or 700 bucks a month. And that was a good size for her. She also tried to get debt on her side initially and was unable to due to credit. And due to a bankruptcy that had been resolved. And so we ran her through our underwriting process and got her approved for the a hundred thousand. She wouldn't have gotten approved for much more than a hundred thousand. But we did get her more than, I think she only got approved for 50, 000 from the, from a FHA lender. Plus if we sold FHA, we would have had to, Sit on our hands for a little bit longer as well because of that restriction on timeline for resale. So this helped us being the bank helped us in numerous ways. It helped us make money now upfront at closing money over term over the term cashflow which we, if they call them the three terrible teas with rental properties tenants term termites and toilets, we don't have any of those. If her roof's leaking, she's not going to call me. She's just going to go fix her roof. And then money later. When she pays off, if you guys study the, an amortization calculator, she's probably paying off 5, 000 worth of that a hundred K principal in the first plus or minus four to six years. So there's going to be a large payoff on the back end as well, much bigger when you combine everything, the money now, money over the term, and money later, much larger than what we would have made on the rehab. I also have tax benefits from that because I'm not making it all in a lump sum now, I'm getting it over the term so it's lowering that tax liability or stretching it out at least.

Mike: 16:59

Are you only looking for people to put down like that large of a down payment or what are your guys requirements? Okay.

Parker: 17:05

We thought we were going to be getting somewhere around 15 to 20 percent down on this deal. And so that, that's what we were, that's what we were expecting to get. This one was a little bit different.

Mike: 17:15

So are you just leaving your own cash in these deals or are you like selling the note on the back end?

Parker: 17:21

Great question. So on this one, we had a private lender put up a hundred percent of the financing on the front end. So we needed to pay that private lender back and to

Mike: 17:30

for your purchase? You mean

Parker: 17:32

Correct. Yep. We had about 280, 000 in debt plus, interest at 7 percent annualized. And so we needed to pay that lender back. That lender wasn't willing to stay in the deal long term. And this is this is one of the struggles with notes is not leaving your cash in it. Now we do more of these in Columbia, South Carolina on properties that are like We buy for, we did, we just closed one a couple of weeks ago that we bought it for 40 and sold it for 80 and the seller put 40 down. We didn't we don't have any cash in it. There's others that we have where I might have 40, 60, a hundred thousand dollars of cash in it. This one being two 80, what we were going to do. Is we were going to do a split note. So hang with me here on the note origination, when we would sell it to the buyer, instead of being one note for a hundred or four. In this case, if we got let's see, 80 percent of 400, 000, let's just call it for easy numbers. Let's say the loan was 300, 000. So if the note was going to be for 300 grand, we would do two notes. So one note would be for 80 percent of that 300. And then the second position note would be for 20 percent of that 300. Now we would go sell the first position note on the secondary market. At, we could probably get 90 percent of par for that. And then that half that we would use,

Mike: 19:03

not familiar with nodes. The, let's say it was 250, that, that math is wrong, but 90 percent of 250, if the loan amount was

Parker: 19:10

So we'd be getting like 225, 000 there and then on top of the down payment and the other monies that came in. So we would use that cash to pay off the lender. And then we would get to hold that second position note, which was still about 450 bucks a month, because it's still they're both 9. 9%. 30 year am notes. It's just ones in first position, 80 percent of it. And then the second one's the second position is the other 20%. The reason why I like the split note, there's a little bit more steps to it, but you get cashflow immediately from day one. The other way to do that, to get cash back would be selling a partial. So if you created that one note for 300, 000, you could go to the secondary note buyers market and you wouldn't sell the whole note, Cause you're trying to keep the cashflow. You'd sell maybe five years of payments for 280, 000. You'd have to run a future value calculation and find out how many months of this, that, that would probably be like 2, 100 bucks a month. How many months of 2, 100 a month payments do I have to sell to get 280, 000 from an investor? If that ends up being 68 months, then you would do paperwork to sell 68 months of payments. The why the ACH would go to that note buyer instead of myself. And then on month 69, I still have 25 years left of payments on that mortgage and I got all my money out of it So imagine stacking these up as you go down the line and you've got yes It's not money now, but you get all your cash back out of the deal you sold five or six years of payments of a 30 year term and then All of a sudden down the road, they start kicking in and you start getting these paychecks from these from these notes that you still are first position on

Mike: 21:09

What do they like they must want some kind of like discount on under some kind of return though, right? When you're selling those first 5 years of payment. So what? What's typical? I have no idea about notes.

Parker: 21:20

8%, 9%. It really depends on the asset. So that's one of the factors that you, that's one of the main factors you're calculating in on your calc on your calculation for to find out how many payments you need to sell. If the investor wants 9%. Then you might have to sell 80 months of payments if they wanted 7%, if they're okay with a 7 percent return, you might get away with only selling them 65 payments

Mike: 21:44

And then you said you prefer, though, the 1st strategy to split note because you get to the cash flow basically right away on your

Parker: 21:51

just for more. Yeah. We're where I'm at right now. We're building cashflow to cover. All of our personal expense, expenses, all of our business expenses, we want to replace all that, get it out of the way. So yeah right now I would rather have investments that are bringing me cashflow that I can actually use and instead of stuff, that, that may be a strategy we pivot to in the future where you're just stocking it away for a later day.

Mike: 22:16

Got it. So typically except on the cheaper homes, right? Typically you're utilizing one of these strategies so that you can get your money back and then go do it again.

Parker: 22:26

Exactly.

Mike: 22:27

Got it. Okay.

Parker: 22:28

So on the other one in South Carolina bought it for 40 sold it for 80 a little bit simpler the seller put forty thousand dollars down. I'm sorry the buyer put forty thousand dollars down So that gave me my money back for my purchase price So now i'm in it for about eleven thousand dollars Because I had to pay commissions to my team, commissions to the real estate agent, there's some payroll and stuff that needed to be paid that was associated with that deal. So that, that was about 11, 000. So that's my money in on that. And then I'm getting about 356 a month. In principle and interest cashflow, which is a incredible cash on cash return. And when the payoff occurs for a long time, it's still going to be around 40, 000 because on a 30 year M, payment or a debt at 9. 9 percent with that amount of principle it's not going to change much.

Mike: 23:23

And then what is that? Typically the rate that you're putting on these notes about 9. 9%.

Parker: 23:29

7. 5, I've got a 8. 5 I've got some 9s lower 9s, and then the rest are 9. 9. Usually it's 9. 9. It honestly, I don't know why this is, but it was a little bit more difficult to get 9. 9 percent after rates went up. Before it was such an arbitrage and I was like, why would it be more difficult now? But at the end of the day, like you're providing a service for people to get homeownership and have debt that might not be getting approved for debt elsewhere or might take an incredible long time to do this enabled this lady to beat out. Other buyers that were competing for this deal. So it brought her up to the top of the list as well, as far as seniority for the deal. And I don't have a prepayment penalty, they can go refinance me out in a few years if they're building credit and we had one payoff yesterday and it's nice when they pay off, it's a, it's windfall of cash and, you get to put it back to work.

Mike: 24:27

Yeah, and then most of these buyers there, you're just putting it on the MLS. They're just coming through that way.

Parker: 24:32

Craigslist is good for the cheaper properties. MLS is better for the more expensive properties, a sign in the yard that says seller will finance no bank qual for qualification is killer for all of them.

Mike: 24:46

really? Interesting. Okay,

Parker: 24:49

will finance no bank Q U A L with a phone number and a crappy yellow sign and scribbly handwritten font. You'll light your phone up.

Mike: 25:00

interesting. And then is that all happening simultaneously, though? It's on the market and you have that sign in the front yard and you're posting on a list or you have a tiered approach to it

Parker: 25:09

All at the same time. So we, I do have an agent that's working that and they're doing all of those things, taking the calls. The thing with the agent is. You just want them to understand the owner financing process. You want to do some training with them so they can understand how the how the money works.

Mike: 25:27

Yeah, and you mentioned before you underwrote her what are your underwriting requirements? Or do you just hand that off to a 3rd party?

Parker: 25:37

I've got a registered mortgage loan officer that we pushed these through. So it is run through an RMLO. Um, it, we, we use a guy that is not local to the state, but he's registered and licensed in about 13 or 14 different states. There was a referral for us. And the reason we use it, you don't have to use an RMLO. If you're selling to, we're trying to do these. To personal like selling to actual persons, not entities. So that's something I didn't note. I don't want people buying properties like this for rental properties because I'm pricing it retail. I'm pricing it retail to where there's no cash flow to buy it as a, like you're making a bad decision if you're buying it for a rental property. So I push away those buyers, unless they're going to pay cash. I want the, I want people that. It's the roof over their head. That has the least amount of defaults. I follow a guy that has a bunch of these and the one default he's ever had was the one investor he ever sold one of these properties to. So I'm not saying that's going to be every case, but you definitely, Think about it differently when it's the roof over your head versus the roof over your tenant's head and times get tough and you don't want to make your mortgage payment. So it's a different thought process there, but the RMLO process allows it to be Dodd Frank compliant on the backend. You're going to have much more difficulty selling a partial, doing a split note or anything like that when you do not have a Dodd Frank compliant RMLO.

Mike: 27:08

I'm not again, not familiar with notes. Why is that?

Parker: 27:11

Just from Dodd Frank when it came out and everybody was being taken advantage of for predatory loans, it's essentially. A stamp of approval saying that this borrower has the ability to repay this debt and you did not Try and do anything sleazy to lock somebody into something that they shouldn't have been locking themselves into

Mike: 27:31

Got it. So the RMLO will get all the stuff from the the borrower and then do they just approve them? And then you just go by their underwriting criteria or do you have to give the RMLO your own underwriting criteria?

Parker: 27:46

I'm underwriting the property and then they're underwriting the borrow Or a hundred percent. So I'm going off there underwriting a hundred percent because they're agreeing to make the payments. I'm underwriting as far as my loan to values and things like that, to where if I have to take the house back, it's going to be an okay scenario for me. Arguably, it's going to be a better scenario for me But we don't want that to happen We want them to repay their debt and then we want somebody else check in a box that says hey based on their income their credit their stated you know that sometimes when credit is low they ask for other Sources of income they might ask for bill receipts netflix car payments They want to see a year, you know of good history of payments It's still some sort of a process. So a little hack here is on the purchase agreement for these. You want to include that earnest money is non refundable once they have decided to buy the property and they agree to move forward with the underwriting process. And time is of the essence. So earnest money is refundable if they do not get approved. So that is the only, once they sign a contract with me, the only way that they get their earnest money back is if they do not get approved by my RML, RMLO. And if I decide not to sell the deal to them,

Mike: 29:03

Got it. Got it. Because, yeah, it's similar. You don't want people not cooperating just to

Parker: 29:09

we had some before that were just like, ah, this is too complicated. I don't want to do this anymore. And it's way less complicated and way faster than if they tried to go through a bank and, provide blood samples and this, that, and the other. But still. When they have low credit, which most of these buyers do have low credit, otherwise they wouldn't be talking to you for, private debt in the first place. They have to verify income in some creative ways for it to be Dodd Frank compliant and people live busy lives and they get frustrated and, sometimes they'll try and walk away from your deal, but if they've got 2, 500 on the line and they agreed that they were going to move forward with it definitely adds some security.

Mike: 29:50

Yeah, for sure. And then, um, you were mentioning before obviously you bring in the deal on the kind of the wholesale side of the business. I know you said if you can make two and a half times flipping it, you'll do that. And then you do you say it was two times if you're wholetailing it

Parker: 30:06

Two X for the wholetail. Yeah.

Mike: 30:08

and in your guy's world is a wholetail. Cleaning it up, or is it like, just throwing it on the market? Literally the way you bought it with maybe sending a cleaning person over there.

Parker: 30:15

I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday. Somebody, this guy was saying a wholetail for him is 10 grand or less and spend a wholetail for me is, we're not really doing anything other than, we might junk it out and put and do a professional cleaning crew and then take good pictures But we're not improving the property. If we're improving the property, I think it's a rehab might be a little one But it's you know, you're still rehabbing the property. so

Mike: 30:40

a paint job.

Parker: 30:41

I Yeah, so if i'm not having if i'm not having to bring in contractors and you know Do all that stuff then like i'm cool with just two xing the the exposure there, the profitability for the increased exposure,

Mike: 30:53

Yeah, how did you guys decide on those numbers or those, those ratios.

Parker: 31:01

maybe not the, you know, best answer, but just from experience doing, doing rehabs and, you know, seeing how long stuff can take and then doing some wholetails and seeing how, Wow, that didn't turn out the way I thought it was going to. And just under what am I, what type of numbers do I want to see to, to go into this, to go on title, to get with insurance, to, turn on utilities, to I'm all this stuff. So there's, there's just inherent more risk when it comes to going on title with a property and that's okay. If you're set up for that and are buying, so that's what it all comes down to is, Hey, if we're going to wholetail this cool, but you need to go back and get a 10, 000 price reduction.

Mike: 31:46

All right. All right.

Parker: 31:46

team.

Mike: 31:46

Yeah, gotcha. And then you're in four different markets, I think you said. So are you running that virtually in the sense that like your sales team is where you are? Or do you have sales people on the ground in every market?

Parker: 32:00

They're on the ground in all but Atlanta, but mostly majority Charleston. Going forward, all of my hires will be in Charleston. And I just, I like that area. It is, has become one of my hubs. I've got a guy in Columbia. I've got most of my guys in Charleston. I have a couple guys in Charlotte because we actually opened a brick and mortar office there that we're in the process of shutting down now. We can go into that if you want to. But and then my head of operations is in Atlanta, but no salespeople. So they're scattered out because we've been, hip hop and around. But we are very. Centralized on communication with zoom and other tools, that we use for for, getting stuff done.

Mike: 32:46

Yeah

Parker: 32:47

I'm in Athens, Georgia, by the way. Yeah, I forgot to mention that. I'm about, that's an hour and a half East of Atlanta. So I didn't really want to do anything in my market. I specifically, I don't know, I like the idea of not. Not having and not doing any work where I live. Maybe I'm missing out and there's flippers around me There's stuff happening all over maybe I'm maybe I should have my hand in that bucket but I not having the excuse or the need to have to go check on a rental property or Go make sure a rehab's being and I know that it is Even if I had people for it, if I was here, I'd get sucked into it. And so I'm like insulating myself with hours of drive time. And if I have to go there it's a damn good reason.

Mike: 33:30

Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about the the not within Charleston. You said somewhere you shut down Charlotte. You shut down a brick and mortar office. What made you decide to open one and then what made you decide to close it?

Parker: 33:39

I loved the aspect of W2. Team leads and how much more you can get out of someone in an office when you have a manager, they're there working the office, the transfer of communication and the flow of education from one person to the next. And just the overall. Hype and the energy and like I'd see all these guys Facebook feeds of you know spitting the money machine out and spinning the wheel and playing ping pong and I'm like That's cool one two I don't want an office where i'm at so i'm not gonna be at this office So i'm gonna have to have the right person to run that office Rewind a couple years ago. I hired a guy as a full time recruiter You For our sales team, we hired 50 something acquisitions agents in about eight or nine months. It was a high five zero. It was a high revolve. It was a messy revolving door, loud experience. We were following a certain model that I do believe works. In an office, but we were trying to do it virtually hiring a bunch of people getting them on the dialer there They'd have tier one tier two tier three agents as they moved up and graduated through the ranks They got access to different, type of leads direct mail ppc, etc and We were running group interviews on Indeed a couple of times a week with eight to 15 people on them. And, it was a whole thing, but we ended up saying this guy that was the recruiter would be a great fit to run the office. Because he kept telling me also he's like he ran a 500 seat call floor Had a lot of experience hiring and firing and over that year period of doing this heavy recruiting model. He's like dude if you can get me an office I can get my hands around these guys next and like to get more out of them because he was having people not show up to work and not calling on the dialer, not doing, it's frustrating when you're trying to get somebody to do something and they say they're going to do it and you're two hours away from them and they're zooming you in their bedroom. And, it's just, it's tough to get a lot of juice out of the squeeze. So maybe that when they're new. When they're new and maybe the culture is not, a super right fit for them yet we were still figuring a lot of stuff out with all of this. And I was like, maybe the offers, maybe the office is the answer. So he was in Charlotte, we ended up getting an office in Charlotte. I said, let's give this a go. We hired some people, put them in the office and went about a year and I learned a lot from that. I wouldn't take it back. And I met some great people. And that guy that ran the office, he ended up in my opinion, maybe not being the right fit to run that office, but I didn't want to be the one they're running the office either. So that's but he's my GM now, and he's the most amazing fit for, The tweaked specific role that he's doing now virtually, but he didn't, we didn't need an office for him to be the GM of the company and all the people that were in the office, they were cool working from home. So it's just a pivot that we're making to have these people move, work from home, go back to what we know. At the end of the day, it was too many news. It was a new office for us, a new office environment. It was a new market. It was new being that I was not at the office. It was a new manager running an office on his own. And it was just too much new at the same time. And so we did close, we closed six figures worth of deals during that time, but. Based on the spend and the overhead and the noise and the incongruency of how it didn't, it just didn't really mesh with the other virtual team. I have another sales manager with five acquisitions agents that all work from home, we're running and gunning over there and they just didn't blend. As far as pay structure, comp plans and term and marketing and where did the leads go? I just desperately wanted it to be simpler. And I learned for myself that I don't want an office I've done virtual for so long that I. I can't go back. And maybe that office would have worked out if there were, different people in different seats, that's life. And that was our experience. And we've capitalized on it and we've got an amazing plan that is really humming along right now.

Mike: 38:06

It's interesting that you mentioned that we're actually in the process of hiring a recruiter to recruit in house to recruit salespeople now. Any tips or takeaways you can share as I go to hire this person?

Parker: 38:17

How many people are you trying to hire during a certain amount of time?

Mike: 38:21

We're looking to hire three sales reps this quarter. So in the next two months.

Parker: 38:25

Got it. And so is it just a contract deal where after the quarter is up that hire will go away?

Mike: 38:31

No they'll be there. We're probably going to hire at least one additional sales rep every quarter, and then there'll be some other roles to fill like project management, other stuff like that. So it'll be a full time person overseas, but full time

Parker: 38:43

Got it. Are they going to be doing any training or just recruiting? I

Mike: 38:49

recruiting. I'll still handle the sales training.

Parker: 38:51

think that simplifies things a lot. This guy was running the training also. And it becomes becomes a lot, but he was a great sales trainer too. So it, it just depends on who you're bringing on. If it's just recruiting, really. I think it's somebody that knows how to work systems like indeed and wise hire and all those things. If I don't know what process what platform are you going to go with, if not multiple.

Mike: 39:13

We have a lot of stuff up on Indy now, or just not getting enough of the quality that I want from there. So actually the purpose of this role is she's going to, this person's going to build an outbound recruiting strategy As well as handle, obviously, the stuff where initial screenings that come from Indeed.

Parker: 39:28

That's cool. No, I'd like to hear from you on the outbound stuff how that works. We really just press the button pretty hard on Indeed with with spend and played the, there was a couple of work around tricks with Indeed for cost per, going the cost per click way, instead of doing the pay per application way. And, we do like multiple ads and different cities and there were some Little hacks with Indeed specifically that we were doing, but we did over time they closed some of those loopholes and we did see, um, Yeah. So sorry, sorry for hyping that up there and then letting you down. But we saw the same thing as you. Kind of quality did decrease a little bit and we were going back to the application route and then just rejecting a bunch of those applications. But they're out there with recruiting. You probably would agree. It's. Hire sales first and teach them real estate versus the other way around. And that's, I think if that's the main thing and it's a culture fit, I love the aspect of like multiple round interviews with different people on your team. And maybe it's a zoom call first. Then it's a more formal interview with maybe someone higher up, if not yourself. And then before they get hired, it's a going and getting a couple of beers with some of the team members, if you're local or have that ability, the people we hired in the office, we had them come in and hang out at the office and then they might go down and get a snack or something and just like informal. There was not like the hiring manager was not present. They got to ask questions to the team, to, to someone that was on their level playing field and they would basically come back to me or come back to my now GM and say do they think this is a, they're a good culture fit for our team or not?

Mike: 41:14

The, yeah, the other, you mean the other employees who are hanging out with them

Parker: 41:18

Correct.

Mike: 41:18

and interesting,

Parker: 41:20

Some people are just great interviewers and they can trick it. The, that can sniff it out sometimes.

Mike: 41:27

Yeah. What so your sales team now it's all virtual.

Parker: 41:31

We do go on some in person appointments. Virtual gets tossed around a lot. And so the way that we're set up is we are in virtual satellite markets. I am not there. So I call it virtual because it's for, it screens all day for me, but I do have boots on the ground. And I would say we're 85, 15, as far as phone appointments to in person appointments.

Mike: 41:57

being phone or got it.

Parker: 41:59

We're pushing and we've gone back and forth. I used to do all in person appointments. I've done all phone appointments and now we just push if you have a good conversation and you're within 45 minutes, go drive to their house, go shake a hand, go make eye contact. Because we've proven now. to the agents that we have, they know they're going to get a better conversion rate. They know they're going to get deeper discounts on the property and they know they're going to build better rapport with the seller. I got a guy who we call him Mr. Sweet tea. He'll go out and, he's brought a jug of sweet tea and he'll just go sit on a porch step with an old lady and share a glass for two hours talking about life and, come home with the contract. It's just this deep level rapport.

Mike: 42:39

Wow.

Parker: 42:40

Got I've got one guy that went to this lady's house, realized that she was a dragonfly fanatic. And she, older lady, probably in her 70s, dragonfly fanatic. He went to, he came back the next morning. She had to leave. He said he'd come back to bring the contract. He went to Hobby Lobby and bought a nice box that was like the size of a piece of paper and it had this crystal dragon fly on the front of it. And he delivered the contract in this 5 box. To this lady and she just she he said she cried like flip, like immediate signature. You can't do that stuff over the phone. So I'm not saying we're doing that at every appointment. Those are some of the cool stories, but it definitely gives you that ability to go multiple layers deeper. When you are in person some of the drawbacks is if you're trying to run real volume, it could hold you back there. I think that's. Less of an excuse than people try and make it seem sometimes. Cause there's high volume guys doing in person. You just got to set it up, right?

Mike: 43:50

Yeah what's your what's your expectation right now of like your acquisitions reps? What do they need to do every single day or what is your sales manager's expectation of them?

Parker: 43:58

Yeah. In the morning they're waking up and getting their day started. I expect them to get their day started or I'm not monitoring. Them in their house on cameras, eight 30 or so getting ready, getting prepared maybe reading a book. We've got a book club with our our team, a book club chat that my sales manager runs a lot of guys, a lot of our guys and girl that we have are in girls are into fitness. And so we've got like a fitness workout chat where they're sharing, PRS and stuff like that. So that, the culture is a big piece to this. Communication about stuff. That's not just work related. And so that's the morning. We stress morning routines, whatever it is for you just have one, because doing something consistent at the beginning of each day is just. Scientifically proven to get you off to a better start. At nine o'clock, we call that our power hour from nine to 10. Is time to be on the phones. It's just a determined time of great conversion rates of answer rates. And so from nine to 10, we do that 10, 10, every day is our huddle. So our sales manager, if it's on Monday, we run our weekly review call. It's about 30 minutes where we go through all of our metrics from yesterday. We go through our contracts that were signed last week, our contracts that our dispo coordinator put an escrow last week how much revenue was closed last week, any announcements from any team members. And then we break for the huddle right after that. And then every day after at 1010 is the sales manager huddle, where they're running through a, they're running through their scorecard. We gamified it. So they've got a scorecard that tracks their their text, phone calls, offers made, appointments set. Contract signed, a couple of other different things. They've got a running, like how much do they have an escrow? How much have they closed this month? There's a daily, like a yesterday's number and then under it is a month to date that keeps updating. So we see who's, and so we gamified it by its ranked. So each one of those metrics for calls made. Dialer attempts made, offers made, things like that. They all have certain point values and that works into a formula where it gives them an effort metric score for the for And so then we have the conditional term set on excel where I have a standard of 50. And it's, if they score 50 or higher, it turns green. If they're under 50, it turns red. Nobody likes to see red. So they're competing there. And then it also ranks them one through six. So whoever has the highest score, like they're competing for that top spot. As far as the effort metric score. So that's how we go through those initial ones. And then we cover offers made yesterday. And then appointments and offers that are scheduled for today. And my sales manager's pulling up Google street view and Zillow and comps. And we have an offer approval process that they have to submit pieces of information for him to give that stamp of approval on the offer. And then it goes out and we break. Usually is about an hour call.

Mike: 47:00

Gotcha. And what are you expecting your reps to bring in like per month in terms of like deals or contracts?

Parker: 47:05

I want them being somewhere that this is low. In the world of wholesaling i'll admit and it's something we're working on But like I want a guy's closing at least 20 deals a year if it's under 20 closings then, we're having conversations and they may not be the right fit. But we've, we do about a hundred deals a year. So between the the agents that we have probably pushing like one, 120 or so, I would say would be where we come out this year if I had to guess. And three contracts on average a month. As far as like new signed deals is where I'm happy with them, but they're 1099. They're a hundred percent commission. There'd be different standards if it was W2 monthly paychecks, but we have a, I guess for the revenue, they get bonused at 40 K. That's the tier point. So if they close under 40 K, they get 12 percent of whatever that, whatever revenue they close. Okay.

Mike: 47:59

Is that per deal? Is that

Parker: 48:00

If they close 40, 000 or more in a month. Or 120 grand or more in a calendar quarter. We give them the opportunity to catch it up in a quarter. We'll back pay a bonus of an additional 5 percent for all of that revenue created. So if they have a crappy January and just do one deal for 25 grand, They're going to get 12 percent and then if they crush it in February and March and they close, 100 and 130 or 150, 000 total then we'll go back on all of that 12 percent paid revenue and up it to 17%. And after somebody has been with us long enough to do half a million dollars in gross profits, then we bump them to a senior status and it goes from 15 to 20.

Mike: 48:43

Okay, gotcha and then they, and then that 40 is that's not 40 per month. That's 40 per deal. You were saying, right? If they want to jump right away up at higher

Parker: 48:53

40, 40 per month. Our average deal size over the last two years and a couple hundred deals is like 21. 5.

Mike: 49:00

Okay, got regardless of it's a wholesale or a wholetail or whatever. It just does the average number.

Parker: 49:06

We've been primarily wholesale. You think about the last two years is the time of the hedge funds, and so we were, wholesale and a lot of stuff, just taking those rips to the hedge funds. Now that interest rates, have gone way up as of last year. We started building those contractor relationships again, to go take more stuff down, do some rehabs, have some wholetails in there things like that. Also I believe throwing. And that number is phantom profit. And so if we buy something for a rental we calculate a phantom profit of what we believe it would have conservatively wholesaled for helps us pay bonuses and stuff for when we're taking deals down internally.

Mike: 49:43

Yep. Makes sense. Gotcha. And then, so you have all the reps in different markets and we were talking offline you guys are doing like a lot of different, a lot of different types of marketing. Are those leads always going to the person who's in that market because you want someone

Parker: 49:57

Everybody's sharing.

Mike: 49:58

everybody's pairing. Okay. Yep. Okay.

Parker: 50:00

Yeah, everybody's sharing, but we help each other out. If somebody needs an in person, like every now and then we'll run across a seller that, I'm not signing unless you come to my house and, sit down with me and all that stuff. They might partner with an agent that's in that market and they Hey, we'll split the deal or whatever, usually, they can just get it done over the phone and then we have runners. For getting pictures and stuff like that. One thing, a cool little tip that I'll throw out there that really helped us this year is if you were buying virtually, when you go to the house, a lot of times it's not in the condition that the seller said that it was. So you end up, having to get a price reduction to make the deal work. Do you get it then? And sacrifice once you get your buyers in and you find out you didn't actually get it deep enough because there's more things wrong that you didn't find, but your buyers did fine. And then good luck getting a second price reduction. Or do you wait to get the price reduction? After all your buyers get in and risk the seller saying no, because by that time they have talked to other options and their real estate second sister is, half sisters come in and said, Oh Hey, if it doesn't sell, I could probably get you 50, 000 more than what you signed. So there's, they have all these other options after you've waited that long to go back. There really wasn't a good answer for us except to figure out how to get to Google. Price reductions. How do we set the stage if the seller is not honest with us or just simply didn't know or doesn't know about their property? How do we set the stage to not kill rapport and get to price reductions? What we do is at the at the contract signing time period when we're having, we call it the DocuSign call. So we have the discovery call, which is the initial call. Then 30 minutes later or whenever they set the appointment time, it's usually 30 to 60 minutes. We have the offer call, we make the offer, and then we have the DocuSign call right after that if they're agreeing to receive the offer. We don't release the number until they're ready to sign. So if they give us any pushback, we, we hold that offer and that DocuSign call until they say that they're ready, because we know we lose all of our leverage the second we give them our number. So just a little thing there negotiation wise. But once we offer that DocuSign call at the end of it, we say, Hey, Awesome. Looking forward to this. This is going to be great, but just to let you know, our next process is to get to the house, get pictures and start that you'll be reached out to by, two girls on our team, on our transactional coordination team, blah, blah, blah. But if we get to the house. and discover that it's not in the condition that you and I discussed about. I just want to warn you, my finance team is going to make me get back on the phone with you and get back to par, so to speak, on the price. As far as what we agreed upon. So is there anything else that you think we should know about? Sometimes we'll find out about stuff that sometimes we don't. So what happens if we go to the house and it's not, we get the pictures back and we're like, Whoa, this is terrible. This, that, and the other look at this foundation crack and the whatever. So we go back and. Obviously we're not making stuff up. We can back this stuff up by the pictures that we received, but they're using that as leverage and saying, remember when I said this, I had a meeting with the finance team this morning, this property came up and it's just not what we agreed to pay for. It's not the, it's not the same condition or there's this or that, or you said the bathrooms were updated or you said it was, blah, blah, blah. So that's our, so we're going to have to be, 12, 000 lower because that's what we thought we were buying. Now I want to forewarn you after we get that that price reduction, want to let you know

Mike: 53:49

they say, okay, that's fair enough and

Parker: 53:51

Yes, you say now just in full transparency, we have not done the inspections yet. This is just pictures. We have not done it. We have not gotten our team inside to do the actual inspections because that's our due diligence. But this is just pictures. We're getting back to par here. If we discover anything during inspections, we're going to have another discussion about any newly found liabilities we might come across. Does that all make sense? We do this. We have that conver that was a piece that I left out in that call prior when we're going over the DocuSign agreement with them. So we're essentially just setting the stage. There's two opportunities for a price reduction. If you're A, not being honest or B, not Simply just don't know. And there's stuff that we find, can we all agree that's fair? And so it's worded a little bit more it's sweetened up a little bit better in our scripting. But that's the gist, that you can use that gives you what have, what I've learned doing this is everything. Everything is proper expectation setting. So many fires can be just avoided completely if you set better expectations on the front end. Wars could be avoided if we set better, better communication and better expectations were set up front. Big thing with hiring, it is very hard to get somebody to do something that they didn't think they were initially hiring up, hiring for, or signing up for when it comes to an acquisitions agent or an operations manager and different responsibilities you're wanting to give them, if you tell them all that up front. They will just run through brick walls, doing all those things. But the second you change it up and you add something else, you might get some, you might ruffle some feathers. So it's all about being clear upfront expectation setting.

Mike: 55:41

Yeah, for sure. And then, um, how are you guys running your dispositions being in so many different

Parker: 55:47

We, I had a my head of operations did, she used to be my admin. Then she started doing this before me. Then she started taking over TC. Then I hired a TC VA, for her and we got to about 30 files at one time and she, this was last summer and she called me crying one day I can't do it anymore. I'm just I can't do both. She said, I need you to convince me not to quit because I'm just burned out. I can't do this many. So it was improper communication on my end. That was proof that I should have communicated better and we should have, had a closer tie on that. That was the moment where I was like, all right, I need a dispositions coordinator. Like I didn't want to do it, but that got to do it now. So we very quickly went out and recruited and found somebody who we believe is a great fit. They've been with us for about seven, eight months now. He's rocking and rolling. He does a lot of investor lift. We have a lieutenant account with a investor lift and that's a big piece to his SOP. We have, yeah. Great email list from just contacts that I've built over the years in Charleston, Atlanta, and Columbia. So we have two fold, like we're using investor lift to funnel it out to people that are not on our organic list. And then we are adding people. By the week, usually around 12 new unique buyers a week, adding to our organic list coming from investor lift. And now that V that dispositions coordinator, he actually has a we call him Dispo Dave. He has a VA of himself or for himself that is, helping her sole focus is how do I get Dave on the phone with more qualified buyers to set people up? To get them into showings get them into walkthroughs and collect offers. So there's, we've got a whole dashboard created in Excel. We call it the Dispo dashboard. We just found it was a lot easier to organize stuff there than Excel. So all of the real time stuff. Is on the Dispo dashboard as far as property address, exit strategy how many times has the flyers gone out? What's the under contract price? What's the last marketed price? How many buyer inquiries do you have? And then you click on a hyperlink and go to a tab that's specific for that property. And then you'll see all buyer inquiries and like their offers and have they viewed it or had they not viewed it? Are they no longer interested? And stuff like that. And then the Podio platform is used for once we choose a buyer, all the data that we want to save for long term historical purposes, who do we choose to sell it to, what did they buy it for all that stuff goes in our Dispo app of Podio, which is our main CRM for the company.

Mike: 58:31

Gotcha, and then I guess it's all what you said before proper expectation settings. Are you also, it seems like you're getting a lot of people through the property. Are you also just setting that expectation? With the seller ahead of time to make sure there's no issues or.

Parker: 58:45

It's with the seller. We're saying like, we've got to get our team inside. It's part of our process. We are saying we have the ability to market the property. So it, we just I dunno, I guess to specifically answer your question, we're being a little bit more vague in that category. I'm not straight ups except for our novations. strategy where we're over over what's the word? Advice, not advising, but letting them know we're telling them everything I can't think of the word I'm trying to think of, but we're letting them know everything that we're doing upfront. We're being very clear. We're not the buyers. We're listing the property on the MLS. We're using an agent that you're going to be partnered with. Man, that word's killing me, but on cash The cash deals were just this is the process due diligence period. We're going to get our team in. We're going to go in and inspect the property, make sure that there's nothing in there that you and I haven't talked about. And then we'll push to closing, which is, that's what happens

Mike: 59:36

Gotcha. Awesome. We're getting close to the end here and there's always two questions I like to ask at the end. First is what is the craziest or most uncomfortable situation that you have ever experienced in a real estate deal?

Parker: 59:53

crazy or uncomfortable. Um, I guess this is kind of both crazy and uncomfortable. It's always uncomfortable when booked profits that you think you're going to make just get ripped right out from under you. So does that qualify? We. We have a deal right now where it was about a 30, 000 wholesale fee. It was in South Carolina. Property is on John's Island. It's known for having very old air property, like air owned property passed down from different multiple generations. Very, No survey slash very old surveys. So the lot lines are really mixed up. And so we needed a survey, not only a survey, but the survey had to be recorded with Charleston County, which is a difficult County to get them to work with you on the surveys that ended up taking us, that, that pushed a closing that was supposed to be two weeks to make 30 grand out to gosh, about five months. To get it just to get the, and we had to pay for it. So I had to pay like 3, 000 for the survey to get done, filed with the County. We are finally, getting it finally getting it. We got it approved. We got it filed. At first they came back and they're like, Oh, we need you to make these changes and edits and this, that, and the other, but we got it done. And we were like, I don't know, five, six days away from closing the other air to the property. So that triggered probate the probate could be another three, plus months. It's not a super complicated one, but still you're like almost there gone. What happens a couple of weekends later? I'm going to let you guess

Mike: 1:01:36

and now they're air

Parker: 1:01:37

now,

Mike: 1:01:38

now.

Parker: 1:01:38

one

Mike: 1:01:38

Uh, I don't know. I don't know

Parker: 1:01:41

house, it burned down. How do you win? You just, so we had, I'll throw this little hack out there we have in our contract. How do you win? A stipulation that says if there is a total loss of the property or an insurance claim on the property, we have the ability to take over the insurance claim proceeds as long as there is an overage on top of what we originally agreed to pay the seller. This actually made me about double and one, one and a half times the assignment fee, what it was going to be when another house burned down last summer like another week before closing and instead of making like a 21, 000 assignment fee, we made like 35 from the the insurance proceeds. So cool, cool little thing there. I didn't even know I had it in my contract for five, six, seven years. Didn't even know it was there. And then the house burned down and I was like, wait a minute. Don't I have something in there that says something about casualty or loss? I did a bunch of research. Figured out it worked. So that property, I don't know if that's going to work out because we did just hear back that the max payout would actually be less than what they are, what we were going to pay them for their purchase price. So I don't know how that one's going to work, but I know I need to figure out at least how to get my how to get my 3, 000 paid for somehow for the survey, or I may be out on that. So that, that was one that. You get kicked in the shins and then when you're down, you get kicked in the gut and it's just overall frustrating. I said it to my wife the other day. I haven't been in a bunch of other businesses, so this may be naive to say, but I feel like that there's, this is the best business at allowing you to lock in income and then just finding dozens of dozens and dozens of new ways every year to just creatively rip it out from under you.

Mike: 1:03:28

Yeah, geez. I have not had any houses burned down, knock on wood. So, so the second question, yeah, I hope it stays that way. Second question I I always ask is if you could go back in time when you were looking for your first deal, give yourself one piece of advice, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself?

Parker: 1:03:54

I think I was just too anxious to get the deal in the beginning. So probably I would have gotten myself better sales training sooner. Like a big thing for us is. Same sided selling and going for the no. So if John Martinez, I'll re I'll rephrase that. If you don't know, John Martinez, go find him on YouTube. And I think Garrett, he's got a, he sold his education company to somebody else. I don't know if you know his name. But go Jerry. Yeah. Go get access to his stuff, incredible stuff. But the overall mindset is go for the no, don't be too eager. Don't have commission breath. You're trying to push sellers away from you versus just trying to sell them the analogy of the bully. On the school yard, they, or no, the girl and boyfriend. Like you're trying to chase the girls. The girls are running away from you. But if you're, playing hard to get that, that kind of deal. But it really does work. So I probably had a lot of commission breath, early days. So going and getting some sales training, realizing that mentality that if you are a wholesaler. And you are, your business is generating off market leads to go Dispo in whatever fashion doesn't have to be wholesale. It could be whatever, but if you're in the lead gen business, you are in sales and marketing, not real estate. So go get sales training upfront. That's probably, same thing with hiring, hiring sales first, teaching real estate second. All of that stuff rolls together. So I think I got, I did a ton of real estate training in the beginning and the beginning, multiple years before I even started looking at sales stuff.

Mike: 1:05:31

Yeah that's an awesome piece of advice. If people want to reach out to you after the show, maybe they want to get on your buyers list or they just want to connect you with you. How can they go about doing that?

Parker: 1:05:40

Yeah. So buyers list would be Barrington wholesale. com and you can find me on Facebook, Parker Stiles.

Mike: 1:05:46

Cool. Awesome, man. Thanks for being on the show.

Parker: 1:05:49

Thank you. See ya.