The big challenge is this: How are investors like us who are not backed by a billion hedge fund who are investing money from our own pockets? How do we buy, sell, and invest in the properties we believe in, yet still make a profit without risking all of our own money? That is the challenge. In this podcast, we'll give you the answers. My name is Nate Armstrong and welcome to the social media blueprint.
(00:34): Welcome back to the social media blueprint podcast. Hey, today, we've got a special episode today. We're going to be talking about passive income. So specifically, if you want to get passive income, start here, start here using the buy discounted rentals housing method. Okay. Here's where this is going to go down. We've got three main topics that we're going to cover today. We're going to cover how to find these deals who needs help help right now, which is AKA. This is the people that actually go out there and get the properties from and where to start. Now. I want to start with a quote from one of the most famous men in the world of investing and that's from Warren buffet. Warren buffet famously said, if I could buy a couple hundred thousand single family homes, I would, if I could feasibly buy a couple of hundred thousand single family homes, I would.
(01:20): And he said that because there's a time that's right for every investment class, that's out there including houses. Now I want to go through a few different things. Point number one that we're going to talk about is how to find these deals. Now, most people, when they start thinking about finding deals immediately, what comes to mind is you call up a realtor or a real estate agent. And you start looking through the MLS, which is also known as the multiple listing service. That right there, my friends is basically let's sign up for the most competitive way to get property in the world. Well, I'd rather do something really crazy. Like hit my head against the wall over and over again. No, thank you. I played the MLS game. I bought well over probably 200 properties via MOS. And you know what? There's a time and a place for that.
(02:05): But in this market right now in a competitive market like we've got right now, the MLS is just a place where thousands of marketers, the realtors who have thousands of clients per brokerage, they farm these properties out and you just get tons and tons of competition. Maybe you've submitted an MLS offer before. You know that if you're working with a realtor, they're going to make you put up things like big earnest money checks. You're going to have to shrink your inspection periods. You're going to hear words like multiple offer situation, which cramps you into a more competitive situation. No, thank you. I don't want that kind of stress on the deals that I'm doing. I'm also not talking about cold calling to find deals, cold calling. If you've ever heard me talk about cold calling before, it's probably, I despise it. It's one of the ways that most real estate investors quit.
(02:54): The business is cold calling. You see it's just bad positioning from the start number. It's not something that you dreamed of doing when you were growing up saying, Oh, I'm going to be a real estate investor. You never dreamed of doing cold calling. It's more than likely if you ever got stuck in the cold calling trap. It's because you thought the leads were cheaper. Maybe you paid pennies for the list of leads and you thought, Oh yeah, I'm going to make these cheap leads work. And I'm going to get deals. The reality of cold calling is this it's you calling people, asking them to sell your house. You unsolicited calling people. No thank you. That positioning right there. Unfortunately puts you in a spot where the seller, if they don't want to sell, they're just like, what the heck? Why are you calling me? And people get hung up on, they get rejected.
(03:38): It takes hundreds of those calls to get one single deal. Even if that, like I talked to one lady, she had called 4,000 sellers on a cold call list and she didn't get a single deal, 4,000. And I asked her, I said, why didn't you just give up? Like most people give up. Most people quit. And she's like, no, I got to make this work. I got to make this, took her a year, a year of making those calls. She was doing it after her regular job. After a nine to five was done. She was kept calling every night. And I don't want to see that for you or for anybody. Like don't do the cold calling thing. It's just not worth it. Not worth the time. The investments, the headaches, the disappointment, the agony. No, thank you. Not at all the third method though, on how to find deals.
(04:17): This is where we're going to focus. This is obviously I've got my show. Name is called social media blueprint for a reason. I've gone all in on social media. I know that more than 62% of Americans right now are on one social media platform alone. That's more than half of America. I know that I can get a ton of people off of social media. And it's only the beginning of my friends. This is only the beginning of the era of social media. Yes, it's been around for 10 plus years and it keeps growing every year. But think about this. There's a stat that's on housing wire.com that says right now, especially after we went through the whole like virus thing that the Facebook newsfeed is up in usage, 82% over last year. Think about that. That's 82%. That's almost double. The usage has been going on in the Facebook newsfeed.
(05:09): Now if more than half of Americans are on Facebook alone and is plus all the other social media platforms that are out there, but just Facebook as an example, it's the largest one. Facebook has half of America for 35 minutes a day. Can NBC ABC Fox news, Comcast can any of these major networks claim that they have more than half of America consuming at least 35 minutes of their content every single day? No. Is the answer. I've looked it up. I've tried to find any stats. The closest one that I could find was a couple years ago from CVS that had somewhere around 30% of America, but it was really, really small. It wasn't 35 minutes a day. It was a weekly stat that they throw it out based on consumption. So the fact that Facebook's got us for 35 minutes a day is a very powerful statistic.
(05:53): Now, if you do anything like I did, when I, my first mistake and you think like, well, cold is cheaper. I'm going to do that. Or the MOS that's free, right? Well, here's the reality of what free gets you. And this is what it got me. When I first started in this business, I brutally placed 31 offers on the MLS 31, all to get rejected, rejected, rejected. Sometimes I get a counter. I get laughed at, I get nasty comments that would get sent back to my realtor. My realtor would forward them to me and my realtor. This is the worst part. After 31 offers, my realtor fired me. My realtor just said, Hey, if you're just going to submit low offers and I didn't think they were low, like I ran my numbers. I checked them. They, I followed the books. I did everything I was supposed to do, but my realtor certainly thought that I was just trying to submit low offers and they fired me.
(06:42): And that's the reality of going with the free method, the MLS, okay, let's get into topic. Point number two, who needs help right now? This is where we want to focus our time. Right now, you probably have noticed that the travel industry is in shatters. Like it's taken a big Digger. So naturally the biggest housing provider or rental provider in the travel industry, Airbnb they've taken a hit to business. Insider published an article that the internal evaluation of Airbnb, because they're not a public company at the time of this recording, at least their internal value dropped by at least 16%. So think about this. The owners of Airbnb, anyone that has internal stock of Airbnb, it's not a public company. As of this recording, their valuation went down because less people are booking. Less people are traveling, et cetera, but you know, who really took the beating beyond Airbnb.
(07:35): It was actually the owners, the owners of the individual houses. You see, I know it for a fact because I'm one of them. I've had our properties listed on Airbnb over the years off and on. I had one that was dedicated full time to it. And when the whole virus thing broke out, guess what happened? All of my bookings went Gonzo overnight, totally zapped away. And even the ones that I had, there was no refund policy on because that's the way that most of these bookends work, you can set up the contract before someone ever makes the booking in. Even on those ones, Airbnb made the decision to go against the contract that they had with their owner in refunds individuals, the homeowners. So basically the only person that got hurt in the equation at least got hurt substantially. We're the owners of the properties.
(08:25): Now, I don't know if I should be disagreeing or agreeing. I disagree with their move. I don't think it was a smart move. I understand and can appreciate the fact that during the whole virus thing, people are suffering and there can be returns, but I think it should have been left to the option of the owner. Not just, Hey, take this. We're taking this money away from you and we're giving it to these other people. It should have been up to the owners. That's the way I think that that one should have went down. And a lot of owners agree with me on that. And you know, when the whole thing kind of shook out my wife and I, we prayed about it. We asked the big guy and we said, you know, what, what should we do? What shouldn't we do? We have other property with listed with VRBO and VRBO did not punish the owners.
(09:03): They let owners keep the money. We ended up refunding a hundred percent of it. We were funded a hundred percent of it to everyone. And we gladly did it out of the goodness of our hearts during that. Whereas their BNB approach was no, we're just going to punish the owner. So I'm telling you all this for a reason, by the way, the reason is this, most people that own Airbnb property, vacation rentals, or VRBO property, vacation rentals, they don't have the wherewithal to take a big Digger like that. Like, Hey, you're just going to lose three months of income, four months of income. And then furthermore, the vacation industry as a whole is shattered like any of the major airlines right now, they're down way, way, way down travel is down. And it's going to be that way for awhile. I don't know when it's all gonna recover someday.
(09:50): We'll all recover, but it's going to be down for awhile. People have this fear and the stigma. So the vacation owners out there, the vacation rental owners, they're going through some pain right now. Now, if you wanted to get into a place in a market, I would be tapping on that market. Like I'm literally doing it right now. A lot of the places that I'm looking at property right now for purchase, they are in these vacation rental type places, Florida, as an example, Florida is a place that has a ton of vacation rentals and there's a lot of price drops going on right now. If you look at any and all the forecasts from Zillow, median, home prices in each area, almost every market is showing negative for the future. Not like catastrophic, negative, but 1%, 2%, 3% here and there. And that is because while supplying demand, that's what dictates all of this.
(10:38): The second thing that I really want you to look at is that landlords went through a period where they can't evict some places, some States, they still can't evict. There's a moratorium. Other places they've lifted that eviction policy, but still like if you go for three months without payment, you couldn't evict. You still had to pay your mortgage. You still had to pay your taxes. Still had to pay your insurance. And you're a landlord and you still had to pay those bills, but you couldn't evict when the tenant's not paying any of the bills. And now all of a sudden you got three months stacked up like that. What's going to happen. You're going to be in a position where unfortunately that's, you might be in a financial pinch. And what we're finding is a lot of landlords are coming to us right now because their money incoming money has been frozen.
(11:21): Now I know you might say, well, need, hold on. Didn't the banks have to freeze for closures to what you had. They did. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that the money wasn't due the bank still tallies that up. The bank still collected the interest. I actually reached out to my bank for one of our rental properties. And I said, Hey, I'm not making any income. Can we freeze my mortgage? And they said, no, they flat out, denied me, said no to me. So that was, that had to keep paying it. Never missed a payment. Okay. Another spot to look is we talked about Florida already, but I want to emphasize this from a different angle. Biz journals published an article on this and I'll link it to the show notes too. But they said that Florida had the most new unemployment claims in the United States in this article.
(12:01): So combined vacation rentals that are now going to be sitting vacant, plus all of this unemployment. There's a lot of pain. That's there in, unfortunately with that pain, there's people that need help. And if you are a real estate investor right now, and you're not stepping up to help and to serve those people, then I don't want to call you a real estate investor. And I'm saying that with love, but real estate investors do step up. They do serve this. Isn't all about like, just go take advantage of people. Not at all. Like I'm helping sellers right now left and right that are coming to me saying, Hey, like I just had one in Nashville. The lady, unfortunately, she's being foreclosed on and she's going to lose her equity in her property. 100% of it. If I don't step in and pay cash for this property, I even tried to refer her to a realtor so she could list it and sell it higher.
(12:46): And she straight up told me, she's like, I'm already past my deadlines. I gotta get this done now. And like, so if I didn't step in and save her, she'd lose her equity. And that's the reality of the marketplace right now. And, and you as a real estate investor can step in and help those people. You can serve those people. If you do want help with that, if you want a team that's close seven figures worth of real estate deals myself and a couple of our team members. Then what I'd advise you to do is do this, go to social media, blueprint.com/podcasts, social media, blueprint.com/podcast. And you can jump in and you can actually see what we're doing behind the scenes. I put together a training. It's my best stuff. Literally my best training on what we're doing right now to use social media, to bring these people to us.
(13:32): So then we can step up and help them and serve them the way that real estate investors are supposed to serve them. Now, the third topic is this. The third topic is where do I start? And I know for a lot of people like you see all these. And I made this mistake early on, like there's so many shiny objects as a real estate investor. Like I could look at for closures, like a little short sales. I could look at probates. I can look at this, that, but just to hop all the madness I made that mistake for you. You don't have to make it. You just got to pick one swim lane and go with it. And let me tell you how basic this business needs to be boiled down to here at the social media blueprint. This is what we boil this down to in whether you work with us or you do this on your own, you still need to know these three bullet points.
(14:13): And this is how simple the business should be. It should be leads, calls and offers, leads, calls, and offers. Those are the three data points you've got to track. The three things you got to get good at this business is generating leads, calling people and making offers. So the leads that's we run ads to get leads. We don't like buy lists to go call that suicide. No, thank you. Investor suicide of your business. I should say you don't want to do that stuff. No. You want to pay for ads that bring in the right people to you. It's so much better to spend a little bit of money to get quality people coming to you. Okay. The next one is calls. This is talking to people. It amazes me sometimes. Like we all think like in our minds, I got this, I got this, Nate.
(14:58): I can talk to people. No problem. But it's the little things. It's what to say when to say it. How to say it it's Hey, the seller says to you, what's your company website. How long if sellers start doing that kind of stuff to you it's because some of the wrong things are being said. The seller is looking for you to be confident. The seller think about this. When the is making a decision to sell their property. This might be the biggest single financial decision they've made in their life. Think about it. Where do most people spend more than a hundred thousand dollars in an investment? It's not very often. Okay. It's usually the house, the home residence. That's the single biggest investment that most people make in their lifetime. So when it comes time to sell that thing, like they're looking to deal with someone that has confidence.
(15:44): It doesn't mean that you got to have 40 years of experience. Heck, when I got into this business, I had no years of experience, but it's your confidence. It's what to say when to say it, how to say it. So those calls have to be really, really good. You've got to be confident. You gotta be truthful. You got to be able to provide clarity. You've got to be able to provide assurance for them. You got to really be there to help them. Okay? The third thing is offers. Now most people, when they get into the real estate business, they learn one way to make an offer. That's a cash offer because they're either going to buy it themselves or they're going to try to wholesale it. And so they learn how to make this cash offer in that cash offer. They'd throw it out there and they hope it sticks essentially.
(16:24): And sometimes it does work like one out of 30 times you might get lucky and a seller will say, okay, I'll take the low ball cash offer. But normally that's not how this stuff goes. We don't just throw out this cash offer and hope that it sticks in our approach. When we make our offers, we actually show the seller, our profit open book. Okay? Some people, your job might be dropping right now here in that. I hope not, but that's real life. Like when you're sitting with a seller, the seller already knows you there to make a profit. There's no reason to hide it. In fact, if we do hide it, it just creates a distrust. And you don't want that. Instead, what you want is you want to create this feeling that they can share stuff with you. I actually asked them, what do you feel is a reasonable profit margin for me to make?
(17:07): And then I go through every number with them line item on a spreadsheet. We work on the numbers together. We arrive at the offer price together that way they're they know that I'm not just there to try to give them a low ball offer. I want them to feel part of the journey. And then if they can't take my offer, then I switched to one of my other 17 different ways to buy houses. Yes, there's 17 different ways to buy houses. Okay? So that's what you do. It's the leads, the calls and the offers. That's how we take this whole thing and start creating passive income. We get the good deals out there that we want to buy. We want to keep, and then we can create passive income from that. Now on the next show, the next show is a real special one. The next show we're going to be covering this, not doing anything for your investment or accounts or retirement accounts, what that's actually doing to you.
(17:55): So for the folks that are kind of like paused and afraid, like, gosh, I don't know what to do with my retirement accounts or investment accounts when you're just sitting on the sidelines actually can be worse for you. So we're going to cover how not to do that, how to basically break free from that trap and be able to actually put those vehicles to work for you. All right. I appreciate you guys. We'll talk again very, very soon. I'll see you on the next episode and do me a huge favor. If you've enjoyed this, please take time to give us a rating or a comment. I read every single one of them. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. We'll talk soon.
(18:26): Hey, cold calling can't stand direct mail. Wish there was a way to have sellers coming to you instead of having to chase them down. Now there is it's called the social media blueprint and you can get it absolutely free when you go to www.socialmediablueprint.com/podcast.
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