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.
Hi, my friends it's sneaked back here again at the social media blueprint podcast. I've got a guest today coming on by the name of Mike Wolfe, prominent investor in Canada, buying property in the United States. He's bought some in Canada as well, but he's really big on us real estate. And he's probably the foremost expert that I know and buying at auctions tax deed sales, and I wanted to bring them on because what's happening is that with the whole thing that shook up in the marketplace, it created a bit of a surge of people getting behind in their mortgage.
(01:06): And folks go into foreclosure folks, go into tax foreclosure and mortgage foreclosure, both. And because of that as a real estate investor, you can help out a lot of sellers by stepping in and saving them. So I started looking around my network and I'm like, Oh my gosh, Mike is the guy. And I asked Mike if he would come on and he's kind enough to jump on. So you'll feel like the audio is not perfect on this one, because I actually interviewed him on the fly. This guy's normally traveling like the world he's been to 150 or so plus country, something like that, some crazy amount, but he's always going on the go speaking on stages. She's speaking on stages across Australia and New Zealand, all kinds of places. Anyways, he teaches people how to do this whole auction process. So I highly recommend if you want to learn the auction process, take notes during this one, take notes and learn this process. This is a skill set to learn. Even if you're not planning to go to the physical auction, you should understand the process because if you get a seller that calls you and they've gotten notices about going to auction, then you should understand the process that you can step in and guide them. You can give them your feedback and actually possibly save the day for them. Okay. Without any further ado, let's go ahead and let Mike talk.
(02:16): Good to see an eight. Yeah. And that every time that I talked to Mike, he's always somewhere else in the world. Mike, how many countries have you been to now? Probably close to 75. And I'd be at a higher number if only they, ah, the borders were open. Cause I was actually supposed to first I was supposed to do a tour across Australia where I was going to be actually speaking. So I was going to be working while I was there, which I don't always do. And then from there I was going to visit a whole bunch of South Pacific countries, but that, of course all got Kai Boston and I'm here up in Canada and it's peaceful and the weather is good. So I'm going to complain. Beautiful man, beautiful
(02:55): Mike, what we want to pick your brain on? And so everyone knows too. Mike is, he's kind of my idol. When it comes to lifestyle entrepreneurship, Mike has figured out how to balance this. He's a grandpa. He'd never guessed it. Cause he looks like he's like 25. He looks really good, but he's a grandpa. He manages the family. He manages business and he travels the world nonstop except for in the midst of this whole pandemic. But he's traveling all the time. So when it comes to like lifestyle entrepreneurship, this is the guy that I strive to be someday. He's very relaxed, easygoing, but he did it by building a real estate business. First one that brings him passive income and he's done really, really well at it. But Mike, I want to pick your brain on right now is this whole auction thing, like what's about to happen. Tell us, like shake your crystal ball for us and tell us based on what you're seeing. Are we going to see a lot of foreclosures come into the steps? What's going to happen? Yeah.
(03:48): Likely to happen. It's kind of right now, we're in a bit of a bubble and I think people are kind of still in shock. And if things aren't really back to normal in so many ways, meaning, you know, right now there's the government handing out money to keep people afloat. People don't know, am I still going to have a job when the sands am I not? There's gonna be so many different businesses. Unfortunately not reopening, especially like when you look at retail, when you look at restaurants, the government has put a moratorium. You know, the banks can't foreclose on people right now, which is I'm grateful for. I hate to, I can't even imagine what that would look like. A banks were foreclosing and landlords were kicking out tenants in the middle of all this mayhem. But of course what happens when that comes to an end, people won't be getting handouts from the government.
(04:30): The banks will not be lenient. Landlords of course have to get rid of bad tenants at some point. Cause he can't no, he can't make your mortgage payments and pay your property taxes if you don't have income coming in. So what we're very likely to see unless the government wants to keep printing money, which they may do because who knows. But what we're most likely to see is a really big onslaught of pre-foreclosures foreclosures and you know, things like the tax deed auction. But my personal favorite auction takes place in Houston, Texas on the first Tuesday of every month. Well, it's been shut down now for three, four months. And obviously you're going to have, even if there were no new foreclosures coming down the pipeline, you're going to have a whole bunch of properties that were supposed to have gone to auction over these past few months. And they're all going to be coming down the pipeline. And so we're going to see a lot of opportunity at the auctions and also some of the stuff that you do or the social media, there's also a chance to get to these people while they're in pre-foreclosure before they lose their homes. And that's also a great strategy going forward. Cause we can help a lot of these people, you know, before unfortunately they lose their homes to the bank and to the County, Mike, how would you do that? Like, okay, so we're sitting here,
(05:41): I know that. And hopefully you'll tell us about this. I know that you lead a lot of investors to go to foreclosure auction tours onsite and you, them through the process. And we want to know about that while we're together, but what would you do? Like we're all real estate investors here. What should we do to start prepping for this? Yeah. Well the big thing
(05:58): Is, you know, going to these auctions, it takes a lot of education because if you just show up every month, there's a list of all these properties that are going to go up on the auction block. And some of them are great deals. Some of them are horrible deals and some of them are really dangerous deals, hidden in disguise and something that looks really good. And so what I mean by that, I do a four day training normally live, you know, on tax deeds, tax liens. And a lot of times we were in the class. We spent the first couple of days in the classroom, day three, we go driving around, looking at properties and evaluating them. And day four, we actually go as a group to the auction. So day one and day two, and we're doing our due diligence. You know, we're, we're looking at this list and a lot of times these homes on paper look really, really good. And I'll give you one example. So I've seen properties that looked phenomenal, the pictures look great. The home looks beautiful. Then we go driving around and where this beautiful home used to be. There's now smoldering ashes. And one of the challenges that these auctions is that what you see after you bought it is what you get. You can't go back after and say, Oh, well it looked really pretty in this picture. Or you put a picture of the next door neighbor's house, not the right house. And they don't know
(07:05): The County will do that. I'm like who's putting up
(07:07): The fixtures, the County, but they're paying somebody, you know, an hourly rate or maybe per home rate to go take these pictures. And they're zipping by taking pictures as quick as they can getting onto the next one. And the County is not liable for what's on there. One of the challenges I had is when I was trying to figure this out, which was probably around eight, nine years ago now I took every course. I could find it right? Every, every book on the topic and the more I read, the more I tried to learn, the more confused I got, meaning that, you know, I went to some courses that they actually said, Oh, you don't need to go use the property. You just use Google maps. They'll look at the pictures online. Well, the danger to that is if you're dealing with a home that's been vacant for a few years, it could be vandalized.
(07:45): It'd be burnt to the ground. And there's just so many different things that could happen. And that's just physical part of the home. There could be problems with title. There's a whole lot of really great things about these auctions, such as the fact that the mortgages all get wiped out and you know, I've had students pick up single family homes for like $7,000, $7,000. Yeah. One of my clients got a home for it. It was $7,200 and he kept it as a rental property. Back when he got, it was 900 a month rent, I think I was getting like 1200 a month rent or something. He paid $7,200 for. So that's a beautiful side of the equation. And I don't know where you'd get a property for those kinds of prices anywhere else. But the negative side to the equation is that there's a lot of pitfalls. So what I did after I took these courses and I tried to figure out what was true, what was false because of course they owe us from the comfort of your own
(08:35): At home, you don't need to, you don't, you don't need to go drive by
(08:37): The property and Oh, you don't need to pull title and you don't need to do all these. So anyway, I made myself a human Guinea pig and knowing I was going to lose some money. That's going to be my education. So over time I managed to figure out, you know, what works my doesn't work well, I'll give you another example. There, there was a very well publicized and you can probably find this on Google that somebody last year, I think it was last summer at Fort Lauderdale bought what they thought was a Villa worth. If I remember correctly, it was probably worth 200 and something thousand and they got it for $11,000 and they thought they got this really amazing deal. It turns out they bought a strip of land that was a hundred feet long and like three feet wide that was separating two villas.
(09:15): And they thought they were actually buying a property. So the good news is, all this stuff is avoidable. If you have the education on how to do it. And it's all stuff that, unfortunately I see a lot of people making really expensive mistakes at these auctions. And you know, there's just so many different pitfalls and that's so my advice would be, yes, definitely get educated once you know how to do this properly, then the auctions are a great place to find deals, but also want to caution people. You know, obviously you're not gonna be the only person there. There is competition. So it's not like, Hey, you take the class. And then every month you just go pick out 10 properties that you want and make a couple million bucks. That's not get rich quick, but if you do the work and you're consistent with it, you can make a really, really good living. Even if you get a couple of deals a year, you can make a pretty killer living. You'll buying homes for those kinds of prices.
(10:00): Yeah. Mike, so this $7,000 house. I want to go back to this for a minute. Oh yeah. Excited. Yeah. Yeah. You got my attention here. Okay. That some of those know our house key bought the tax lien. I assume
(10:12): The tax deed. So that was, let me clarify, let me, let me define all this because I know you don't necessarily know what even a tax lien or tax deed is. So when somebody gets behind on their property taxes, usually two, three, four years, it's not like they're one day late and then their home's going to go to auction. But when they get behind on their property taxes, eventually the County is going to need that money to pay for their police force or keep their schools open, et cetera. And so eventually they gotta put these homes up on the auction block and it does create an amazing opportunity when this happens now in the interim, of course, the people are getting notices in the mail saying, Hey, your home is you don't pay your property taxes. You're going to get a penalty. And eventually, you know, we're going to put, we're going to have to sell it.
(10:54): And people often don't take the seriously. As you know, maybe it beginning of these notices for two or three years, they're not even taking it seriously until finally they get something say, Hey, you know, next month on the first Tuesday at your home's going for auction. So then they go scrambling to pay this off. But what a tax deed is, is basically it's an opportunity to buy. You're actually buying a piece of property. So in the case of the 7,000, our home that you're really excited about that was a tax deep. So my client bought the deed to the property. He now owns that home is his. He can rent it. He can live in it. He can flip it. He can do what he wants
(11:26): On day one. He put the seven grand down and it's his Sunday.
(11:30): It's his day now. And depending on the state that you're working in, there's different rules that apply. Now. Most States, if it's a tax deed state, you own that property right from day one. And you can do whatever you want with it. Now in Texas, one of the reasons I like Texas is that it's a little bit more complicated. And one of the things that I like to teach my students is that when you kind of go and I'm sure you teach us too, when you go the extra mile, you go just a little bit further than what other people are willing to do. That's where the better deals are. So if you go to a state where it's like, you go to a state where it's super easy, you just buy the home and you can flip it the next day. Then you're quite often competing against institutional investors that have tons and tons of money.
(12:10): It's very hard to compete against these guys. So what happens in Texas, it's called a redeemable deed state. What that means is that the previous owner, even though they began with given chances for like three years, four years to go save their property, they get one more chance even after you bought the home and that for them to redeem it, they have to give you a 25% premium over what you paid for it. Plus whatever necessary repairs you put into that property. And I use the word necessary. It really need to take that very seriously because if you, for example, decide, Oh, I love this. How am I going to put a hundred thousand dollars chandelier that won't be considered necessary? And when then if the people were to redeem it, I'll give you a 25% premium on the house and they're going to acquire your new chandelier and you're not going to get anything for it.
(12:53): The other hand, if you put it up on a new roof, you have to change the carpet to make it livable. Any of that stuff, you know, if you spent $10,000 rehabbing it, you're going to get 12,500 back plus a 25% premium on whatever you paid. And that's within the first six months. Now, there are ways an estimate stuff that I teach us as ways that you can flip it. So if your strategy is to flip a home, buy the home for seven grand seller for 90, there are ways to do that. It's a little bit more complicated, which is why it keeps a lot of people away. They don't understand how to deal with that. Redeemable E part, they know how to do a regular deed. They don't know how to deal with that part, especially if they're using other people's money. They don't want to wait six months.
(13:30): If they're using hard money, for example, they're not going to want to wait that six month period. Those are deeds. Now the other side of the equation is you have tax liens and what a tax lien is. And it varies from state to state. But typically you're getting, what's called a TLC, which is a tax lien certificate. And you're basically getting, so let's say no, mr. Smith hasn't paid his property taxes. He gets a notice in the mail saying your taxes are due June 1st. It's a thousand dollars. If you don't pay on time, we're going to assess a 10% penalty. So June 1st comes and goes, mr. Smith doesn't make that payment. And now the County has owed the thousand plus a 10% penalty. So now they're owed $1,100. So what they do is they go and sell that certificate for a thousand dollars to an investor like you or me or anybody watching this.
(14:13): And you're going to pay the thousand dollars. The County is going to keep bugging mr. Smith to make payment. When he says that 1100, they're going to send that to you. So you put in a thousand, you're going to get 1100 back. What eventually happens with these properties and a very small percentage of cases is mr. Smith never ends up paying. And then it becomes, you know, there's a certain redemption period at that time, mr. Smith now can, cannot go and just pay the property taxes. You can actually foreclose take the property. And so if you ever saw those late night infomercials back, you know, back in the eighties and nineties, you know, somebody bought a home for 500 bucks. That's often a tax lien where, you know, they put it in a very small amounts of money. The thing I like to caution my students on when it comes to tax liens is often if you're going to get that property for this really small amount, like 500 bucks, not always, but quite often, there's going to be something wrong with it.
(15:03): And to give you an example, imagine you bought a lien on a piece of land and this land unbeknownst to you was contaminated and there's like a $50,000 bill to make that land up to code again and make it safe. If you foreclose on that property now becomes your liability to fix that. But I think that you got for 500 bucks might cost you another 50,000 bucks and may or may not still be a good deal. So you have to be really careful. You still have to do your due diligence, whether you're doing liens or deeds in order to make a profit at it and not get stuck in some of the traps. But once you know what you're doing, it's a can be a very lucrative business. Dude. This stuff is killer. This is gold. Okay. And I want to open this up to, we've got some folks we're streaming right now, back to our Facebook groups.
(15:46): And there's some people that are watching. Then there's also some of our elite students, some folks that jumped on, they were early adopters on podcasts. I launched and whatnot, and they're here, live with us too. So Diana Jason, Jordan, if you've got questions that you want to send over, or if you want to talk, we can turn on your mic too. And we can talk to Mike. Mike's a super approachable guy, one of the most down to earth successful real estate investors that I've ever met. And that's why I like them, frankly. So, but let's see, you guys can join in the conversation with us as well. Mike taught me this little thing the other day, like you got my curiosity wheels circling on overages overages. Nobody talks about overages in this whole tax lien or tax deed process. What are they? And how do we take advantage of these overages is a really cool strategy that I didn't know.
(16:33): You know, I had heard bits and pieces about it, and I didn't know that much about it until a couple of years ago when I actually by coincidence had a mutual friend, introduced me to somebody who's an expert at this. And so anyway, what an overage is, is when you go to these auctions, let's say opening bid is $5,000. And let's say the property sells for 50,000. So that first $5,000 that belongs to the County fair and square, that money is for the back taxes owing. And that additional 45,000 actually does not belong to the County. The County is not really supposed to make a profit in theory, on these homes. So that actual, additional 45,000 is called an overage. And that actually belongs to the previous homeowner. And most previous homeowners have no idea that there's money owed to them. The County makes very little, if any attempt to attack these people, cause the County wants to keep it and their little slush fund.
(17:21): And so an amazing strategy. That's a great win win is to track down the homeowner and say, listen, I know somebody owes you $45,000. If you're willing to give me, you know, power of attorney and let me help you retrieve it, I have to give me, you know, whatever you negotiate, 20%, 30%, 40% of it. I'm going to get you this money. So imagine you're in there. The homeowner's position where you just lost your home, you're probably in pretty bad financial shape. And all of a sudden somebody comes to you and says, Hey, I can get you 45,000 bucks. It's going to get your attention. Some people will actually be skeptical, even though this is all true, they'll be skeptical when you approach them. So a buddy of mine who actually does this strategy, he actually gives them a 10% of it upfront. So if he says he can get them 45,000 and he let's say he's taking half of it just for easy numbers, he'll give them, you know, 2000, $250 for 10% just in good faith.
(18:13): And then he'll get them the other money later on. So it's a really great win-win strategy. And one of the things that I love to teach is that there's so many different ways to monetize these auctions. It's not most people just think, Oh, I'll go to the auction. I'll bet I'll get a property. That's great. You can do that. But there's also every month when they publish that the list of the homes are going for sale. That's a list of people that are in trouble. So that list is bald. And in terms of, you know, going and talking to them before they lose a home and going in and creating options for them. And so for me, but if I was going to do this full time these days, I'm, I wouldn't say lazy, but I have teams that do a lot of different things for me.
(18:49): And we, we have so many things on the go, I don't need more on my plate, but if I was starting fresh, I would come up with a marketing campaign towards the pre-foreclosures before they lose a home, then the ones who can't help and can't get ahold of, then I would go and go to the auctions and, and pick up those properties for pennies on the dollar. And then the stuff that, you know, whether you win or lose, there's going to be a whole bunch of people owed money with these overages. Then I would go and skip Tracy's people and, and get in contact with them and help them recover that money and then get a piece of it. So there's so many different ways that you can monetize this. And it's not what most people think. Like I said, most of us like, Oh, you go to the auction and you bid and that's it.
(19:25): And that's great if that's all you did, that's great. But the auction in Easton, which is my favorite one takes place once a month. And the amount of research you need to do, I don't recommend if you're just doing auction work. If you weren't doing the pre foreclosure stuff, I wouldn't even look at the list till probably like three or four days before the auction. Because a lot of these people, when they get a notice in the mail, after all these years saying, Hey, your home is going up on the auction block. Suddenly they get very serious and it's very humbling. And they go ask their friends for money. They go ask their relatives for money. People they wouldn't have gone to before now, they've lost, you know, before they were too proud, now it's become very real to them. And so a lot of these properties as a month progresses, will get canceled.
(20:04): Some of them, because investors like us are doing pre-foreclosure with them and building them up before it gets to the auction. So if I was just doing the auction, that's going to take up maybe three days, you're going to spend maybe, you know, on the list four or five hours for the entire month working that you've got 25 other days where you could be doing other stuff. And so I would never just say, Hey, let's just do the auction will work for four hours a month. And then the rest of time, just sit back. Cause there's gonna be auctions where you get nothing. You're going to come home empty handed, and then you've got nothing to do. So I'd be doing your social media stuff to attract distressed buyers. I'd be going after pre-foreclosures. I be doing how much other strategies for the rest of the month, especially for people that want to do this full time.
(20:41): Do you want this to be your career? You want to always be feeding your funnels, eating your pipeline with deals. Yeah, that's fantastic. Fantastic. Okay. We've got a couple chats over here. I'm just going to read this out to you. This is from Diana. There are some properties that say occupied. If they pay a lien, do you have to foreclose or evict to get them out? But you don't. If it's a lien, you don't have to foreclose it you're, you're not obligated to, but you're probably not going to get, I mean, you could negotiate with the homeowner at some point, depending. And this depends on the County, by the way, because in some places it's actually against the law for you to contact the homeowner. It's all done in some places, all done by the County. So you're not even allowed to approach them in other places where it is legal.
(21:23): You could potentially work on a deal with these people, but usually it means they're for very, very small amounts of money. And you know, quite often, if they're occupied, it's usually going to be, it's more likely to be a tenant than a homeowner. If the plus a, you know, you're getting a lien for $500, somebody can't pay their $500 in their boats lose their home. Usually there's either something really wrong with it, or it's tenant occupied and they're collecting rent. Well, they're not making their property tax and probably not their mortgage payment either. So, so in theory, and some places you can, to be honest, I'm a much bigger fan of tax deeds and tax liens. And the reason for that, if you're buying, let's say a $500 lien, even if you get 20% on it, it's a very small amount of money. I mean, it's better than leaving in the bank for sure.
(22:03): But if you get to the part where you're going to actually have ownership of this property, you have to do a lot of due diligence. And if let's say 98% of the time, you're just going to get this interest payment. You're going to get, you know, a hundred bucks or 500 bucks. You're going to get a relatively small amount of money. And for you to do the due diligence can be very, very expensive. So it makes it a little bit cost prohibitive, unless you're doing it close to home where you can actually drive the properties yourself. So I'm not trying to do a deed where I'm going to get a much bigger heyday on it. And you know, with those deals, you can definitely negotiate with a homeowners. At times, most of the homes will be vacant, but the ones where the people are still there, there's different ways to negotiate with them.
(22:42): But yeah, for liens, when it's the very small amount, there's almost always going to be a problem with the property because it's usually such a small amount. Got it, got it. So I used to buy a lot of foreclosures in like bank foreclosures. They went through the whole REO process. They were taken back from the bank and I bought some pre-foreclosures, but it was always very risky because at least the States that I was doing it, there was a long redemption period. Meaning even though I might buy the rights for it, the homeowner can come back and redeem. And then all the work that I put into it kind of goes to waste. I can get my money back, but I wouldn't make anything. Is there a redemption period on tax seeds? Only in a few States, one of them being Texas, one of them being Georgia.
(23:24): I think Connecticut, if I remember correctly in any case, there's a few States where there's a redemption period. And normally I don't like to go when you're getting to a place where there's a redemption period, you have to exactly what your rights are and what the previous homeowner's rights are. And in Texas, I really like it because the previous homeowner doesn't have any rights except for the right of redemption. And they have to give you a 25% premium, not just on what you paid for the property, but also on the work that you did. And so you'll never be out of pocket as long as, I mean, unless you can do your due diligence properly, we will never be out of pocket because the tenant came back to regain. And if you go to the Georgia, for example, they have a one year redemption period.
(24:01): And my understanding is during that year, you can't do anything on their property. You can't rent it. You can't live in it. You can't rehab it. You can't do anything with a property. That's my understanding. I've never done it there. So verify that if you're thinking of doing taxis there. So if you're, if you're in Georgia and I love Georgia for other things, that's where my turnkey operation isn't and I love, you know, regular foreclosures, but I don't like doing taxis there because I don't want to invest money halfway to whole year before I get any kind of return on it. It just ties up your cash. They have to know if you're in a state where it's a redeemable deed, you have to know what the rights are of the previous owner and what you're allowed to do during that redemption period. So in Texas, it's very, you know, there's a lot of things you can do with that property.
(24:41): You can put a renter in there, start collecting rent, right from day one. If the homeowner happens to still be there, which usually they're not, but if they are, you could potentially charge them rent. So there's a lot of different things that you can do a lot of different exit strategies in Texas, whereas in Georgia, exact opposite, nothing for a full year that you can do, by the way, there is a 20% redemption. So the homeowner wants to buy it back. I'll give you a 20% premium, but you know, a lot of times nothing happens. You can't get ahold of the owner. And in the meantime, the home is just sitting there in limbo. And of course, when you have a home sitting vacant for a whole year, who knows what's going to happen, you gotta keep it insured. You gotta pay for utilities.
(25:16): So you gotta be really careful to know exactly what you're getting yourself into before you jump in. But that's why for me, I don't invest I'm Canadian, but I don't invest up in Canada because the numbers don't make sense to me. So I always recommend people go where things are the most favorable for you. These days, a lot of stuff can be done online. And you know, for the stuff that can't be, I, I, you can build a team like I've got people in Houston that go around taking pictures and videos of the properties and the streetscape for myself. And also for my students. I've got, somebody goes to the auction on behalf of myself and my students every month. So a lot of stuff can be done remotely. If you have a team and you have the right systems in place, at least what I teach is that you don't necessarily have to invest close to the home, invest where the best returns are and where we are, where things are the most favorable for you.
(26:00): Mike, on the Canadian note, we do have some folks that are part of this program that they're from Canada. Can we still do wholesaling in Canada? Like, could I assign contracts if I get a good deal off market? Can I assign it to another investor? Absolutely. Yeah. So when I talk about, I don't like doing deals up here in Canada. That's cause I'm mostly a buy and hold investor myself and the home prices are ridiculous and pretty much every major Canadian city, the home prices are very, very high and rent relative to purchase price is very low. So I get way better returns than Atlanta. And that's why I take my clients who want to buy Turkey properties there. But also the things like tax deed, auctions, there's very little of that in Canada. We don't see a lot of that at homes going for auction.
(26:39): Usually there's so few that there's so much competition that they go about, you know, above market value. So that makes no sense. But if you're a wholesaler, absolutely you can be doing that in Canada. We can be doing flips. If you can get a good deal, you can do flips. So not a great place to buy and hold, but yeah, some of the strategies that you're teaching and you're attracting people in social media and looking for deals that can definitely be done on a candidate, double close, is there a law or restrictions to buying and selling same day where you actually close on it and sell it to somebody else. And that's going to vary from province to province. So I would talk to them to a lawyer in your local market. And there there's different ways. You know, I, I know people doing, you know, double closes or there's, you know, writing it up in certain ways.
(27:20): A lot of times, if you call it one thing, you can't do it. You've changed it slightly. And now all of a sudden you can do it. So for example, in places where you can't do rent on and Texas is one of them, by the way, at least in Houston, I don't know if that's statewide, but you said you can't do a rent to own, but if you do a rental contract and then you do a totally separate contract that gives somebody an option to purchase the property, then it's fine. You do one contract, call it rental. It's not fine. So sometimes it's working with a, you know, getting a professional to help you write the contracts properly and go through it with you and showing you the proper way to do it. So just cause you've heard, Hey, this isn't legal or can't be done here.
(27:56): That doesn't necessarily mean it's a case. It means that if you do things the traditional way that everybody else is doing, then you can't. And if you tweak it a little bit, sometimes you can. And so I'd always taught, I'd always get a, you know, a lawyer to look at the contracts and tell me exactly what you're looking to do. And then when you find a good one, just go to town and just send the deals to them and they'll know how to close it for you. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Mike, I don't want to put you on the spot and I don't want to take too much of your time. Could you give us maybe just a couple of minutes about why Atlanta for turnkeys? And if we want to know more about the turnkey operation, they're like give us some of those goods. Absolutely.
(28:30): I'll tell you how I pick a market. So I guess I gave it a little bit education into my thinking. When we go into a market, I'm not looking to buy one or two homes to give you an idea. We've been in Atlanta now for close to eight years and had done around a thousand that we sold around a thousand homes to investors around the world. And so I definitely don't throw it a dark map and pick that market. There's things that I look at very specifically. And the first thing that I look at and most people don't even think of this is I look at how landlord or tenant friendly is that market. And so what I mean by that, if you're in California, I love visiting California, but I will never buy a rental property there because if you get a bad tenant, it can take you, I have a friend, it took them almost 18 months to get rid of a bad tenant.
(29:10): And so yeah, when the laws are very much in favor of tenants, I think there's a course out there for tenants on how to not get kicked out. So they will make your life very, very miserable. And I don't know about you, but I've never once had my, you know, my bank called me up and say, Hey, Mike, I hear you're having a hard time collecting rent just to pay your mortgage, whatever we don't care whenever you get rent, I've never once had that happen. If I did have that happen, then maybe I would consider California. And I'm not just taking a California in New York. There's a whole lot of places that are very, very tenant friendly. And so even if on paper, the numbers look great, your chance to collect your rent in a place where the laws are very much slanted towards your tenant.
(29:48): You're going to be in big trouble. At some point, I'll take this one Dennett and they could just wipe out your life. So that's the number one thing I'm going to look at? I won't touch places that are very, very extremely in favor of the tenant. And number two is I always want to find a market that is right for appreciation. And so, you know, what causes appreciation is obviously, you know, population growth is simple supply and demand. If the population is going to grow like right now, you know, post COVID, what I believe we're going to see is a lot of people moving away from very expensive high cost of living places. So for example, imagine you wake up and you're in Manhattan and your one bedroom apartment, that's four or 5,000 bucks a month and your job is no longer there. You're not gonna be able to sustain that lifestyle for very long, unless you have a lot of savings.
(30:31): So you're going to burn through that really, really quick. So if you contrast that you could be living in a beautiful three bedroom home in a nice neighborhood in Atlanta for, you know, 11, $1,200. And the cost of living is very low there. The charging homes that I sell start at $70,000 already fixed up already with a tenant in place. Yeah. So that's not even a down payment at some of these markets. So people are going to move to places that have worked for them, or there's an employment where the cost of living is affordable and places that are desirable. And so the number two thing I'm looking at is where I want to be in the path of progress. I want to go to places before other people figure out they want to go there. And so, you know, Georgia, one of the things I love about Georgia, even though I don't like it per taxis, I do love the fact that it's extremely, not just landlord friendly, but it's very business friendly.
(31:18): And so they have a lot of tax incentives for businesses to open up their offices there. So head office, Coca Cola, Turner, broadcasting, home Depot, Delta airlines, you know, the list goes on and on and on of companies with head offices there just because it's a very, very low tax rate for them. And the government knows, Hey, if we make it favorable for businesses to move here, they're going to hire a whole bunch of people and we'll tax those people. So basically it's, there's a lot of jobs that economy is really good. And the other thing that's really important is this diversified. So you go to one industry towns where I am right now, I'm in Calgary. For those of you don't know calorie as an oil town, we are definitely going to be, you're already feeling the pinch before COVID and now it's, you know, downtown Calgary, there's a whole lot of commercial real estate sitting empty, a lot of office buildings where oil people used to be sitting at those desks, or they're not there anymore.
(32:06): So when you're a one industry town you're doing good, you're good. As long as that industry is doing well, when you're in a multiple industry town, if you know, Delta airlines is probably going to be struggling for a little bit, you know, if they had to lay off people, when people can go work at Coca Cola or then go work at home Depot, or there's so many different industries there. So very, very business friendly, which is attracts people all the time. They also get a lot of people that come there whenever, you know, hurricane season, you know, people get really sick of hurricanes in Florida in the Carolinas. And you know, Atlanta quite often as a beneficiary of some of these people just get sick of evacuating. So the population is growing businesses. Good. And what that means is that, you know, at some point, people are going to realize that this market is way under priced for how good the economy is and what's going on there.
(32:51): And that's when you get your booms, all of a sudden, and this is how I personally created my wealth. I happened to be in the right markets at the right time I got in when they were cheap, the markets Rose up. And so the thing that I do differently than most people is at some point, Atlanta is not going to make sense. And because I don't invest where I live, I invest where it makes the bet, right? Can't make the best returns, some point I'm going to move to a different market. And I'm going to build a team. They're going to find another opportunity. And my customers, my clients who have bought homes in Atlanta through me, when the time comes in, those properties rise up, they're gonna be able to sell those homes and then hopefully be able to buy, you know, two in the next market.
(33:27): That's what I did. When I went from Phoenix to Atlanta, every home I sold with Phoenix, I could purchase two in Atlanta and I doubled my portfolio. They'll take you more money out of my pocket. So that's why that is also the second step. And the third step is what most people go to first. And that's, they look at the cashflow. They're looking at, well, how much money am I going to get every month if I buy a hundred thousand dollar property, how much they'll put it into my pocket every month. And if you go to that first and you skip the other two things, well, you might get great. What I call paper returns on paper. It looks really, really good. If the numbers made sense in California, which they don't really anywhere any market in California that I'm aware of. But even if they did, if you can only collect rents for three months and then your tenant decides they're not going to pay and they stay there for a year without paying you that return is not going to look anything like what you were expecting.
(34:11): So very, very important before you go straight to your cashflow is looking at those first two things. Then cashflow is very important after that. Once you've got a great market in terms of being favorable for getting rid of bad tenants, and it you're in the path of progress where things are going to grow and your homes are going to rise up in value, you're going to make money that way. Then of course you want it to be sustainable. So you want to have cashflow coming in every month. So you want to get to a good market. And Atlanta is a good market for that as well. So those are the, those are the things I look at when I'm picking a market. And that's why I love Atlanta and, and mean I'm going to be actually sad the day that I've got to switch markets.
(34:46): Cause that has been, you know, all the markets I've been in. It's been my favorite market for buying and holding now for flipping. I love you sinks. I love those auctions and the pre-foreclosures of foreclosures. I the overage list is I haven't really done. I have so many students I've done overages. I haven't actually tried them yet, but if I was going to be getting into that sort of thing, that's more of the markets I've looked at and I'm sure, you know, a whole bunch more as well. So those are some of my criteria that I look at.
(35:13): Dude, you are dropping like mad wisdom on everybody. So we've learned not only like the best of the best on auctions, but we've also learned how to pick a market for turnkey rentals. Like I know that you're a wealth of knowledge and people are going to want to follow up with you
(35:27): And get more. How do we get ahold of you? What's the best way. Yeah. That's that is to, you can actually email me info@mikewolfmastery.com. So it's more of just like the animal info, Mike Wolf, mastery.com. My website is Mike Wolf, mastery.com obviously. And yeah, I'd be happy to answer any questions anybody's got anytime. Cause I I don't know if you noticed like kind of like talking about real estate again.
(35:52): Yeah. I'd say you just went on a roll for 41 minutes of nonstop, like drinking from a fire hydrant worth of knowledge. Like you're good, man. You're really good.
(36:01): I get excited. I get, I'm very passionate. I've been doing this for 31 years. I'm still passionate about it and I love it. And I, it makes me cringe when I hear people's horror stories. Like I hear about some of the mistakes. So they got involved with the wrong people or they have a bad taste in their mouth about real estate investing. And I, I just know how it has been to me. I don't have good has been to you and a lot of my other friends and it drives me crazy when I, when I see somebody who gets knocked out of the business because of a simple, either simple mistake or just, I don't know if some of the stuff that I've I know back when I first started, I'm sure you had the same experience as trusting. I made every mistake in the book and I know how, how much it hurts. And there were times that I did want to get out of the industry. I'm still glad I didn't. So, so now that I kind of figured out a few things, I'm very passionate about it and I love to help other people succeed at it as do you.
(36:45): Yeah, Mike dude, you are so great and gracious for coming in and sharing like this today for our SMB family members feel free to reach out to Mike. Mike is one of the most passive guys I've met, like totally friendly likes to talk to people about real estate. So if you've got questions about either the auction process or about turnkey rentals, this is the guy that I would go to in, whenever you do put the date on the calendar, Mike, I will be the first person signing up with you for your next auction to her. So I know that you schedule, I don't know if you've got a date yet, but scheduled.
(37:18): I'm hoping I'm hoping to do the first week of October. Of course a few things have to happen such as the ability to put crowds together again and in a room. But I'm optimistically hoping for October. Maybe if things go really well, maybe September, but I, I just don't want to put anything on the calendar. I am doing a three day training this week, this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I'm going to be teaching. I'll be touching on tax deeds. You know, that's a four day course in itself. So I obviously can't teach that. And other strategies of three days, I'm going to be touching on it. And we're going to be talking a lot about things like pre-foreclosures and wholesaling and flipping and overages and bringing in a whole bunch of guest speakers, including yourself. So anybody wants to sign up for that $997 and I give a money back guarantee.
(38:02): You get to attend day one. If you don't think it's the second best training after Nate's, that you've ever attended, latterly refund your money. So anybody's interested in that. Just email me at that email address and let me know that U S army on eights and Nate's program. Matter of fact, I'll even, I'm going to give the friends and family discount to your people. So I'll give you 25% off. So just say you saw me at Nate's and you want that discount. Like I said, there's no rest if you, if you don't like it. And I think Nate's gonna be speaking on Friday. So if you don't like him and you want your money, you're going to love, you're going to love it of all speakers. So if
(38:37): You don't think he can do these strategies or faster money back and cheerfully refund, Mike, this is awesome, man. So again, it's, I think it's info@mikewolfmastery.com. Is that right? And I'll add that to the comments, to the video after this too. My dude. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. God bless you, man. Sounds great. And everybody stays today and thanks so much for having me, Dave, it's been a pleasure to hear. Awesome. Thanks guys. Thanks Mike. Okay. Awesome. I'm so glad that we got to have Mike on like that legendary guy, really good person, deep down has his ethics grounded. So his real estate business thrives because he's an ethical dude. And as you can see, he's really, really giving them we had them on there for what, 35, 40 minutes. And he was willing to go more and more and more so blessed opportunity to have them.
(39:25): So on the next episode of the social media blueprint podcast, you're really going to want to hear this message. We're actually going to be going into why God wants you to succeed in. I'll give you a little bit of a hint, okay? God wants us to succeed because it's in our destiny. It truly is. I'm going to go into some different principles on this, but we're going to get deep onto why God wants you to succeed in the next episode of the social media blueprint podcast. So I look forward to seeing you there also, if you're like someone searching right now saying, gosh, I wonder if I should get involved with this real estate stuff. I wonder if Nate's team can help. Then what you can do is come on over to SMB podcast.com and book a free call. No obligation. What we've got is we've got a couple guys, myself included and a couple of other guys and gals on our team that will take calls. We don't have a ton of them, but we'll take calls. We'll build out a marketing plan for you. You can either use that marketing plan to take it off and, and go running on your own to set it up and start doing real estate deals with it. Or if you want our help implementing it, then we'll show you what we can do to help implement it. Anyways, you do that by going to SMB podcast.com. All right, I look forward to hearing you and seeing you on the next episode.
(40:36): 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.social media, blueprint.com/podcast.
