All Forum Posts by: Jason Bible

The areas of town with an ARV north of 300k, that experienced flooding, are getting killed. Massive number of HML and PMLs foreclosing, we call it Harvey 2.0. Getting back into the affluent flip market to early.

Now if you can hold 400k+ houses in memorial, they will rise to 1MM in a few years. 

yes, get it

If you consistently CLOSE new deals I would sell and find the next deal.  If you are a new investor that rarely buys property I would hold and rent.  

Amen to what Steven said.  Pay him and never EVER do this again.  

Whats your budget?  How many total units in SA?  How many do you want to buy this year?

I have not posted this update in a year or so. Quick background, I started in real estate with my biz partner Tom full time in July of 2013. Since then we have bought nearly 400 houses, borrowed and paid back nearly $60MM in private money, and almost $10MM in rehab. Below are 20 things we have learned over the last few years.

1. Be yourself, no reason to be anyone else. Tell your seller this is your first deal. Never seem bigger than you are. If its just you or you and your spouse in this business, don’t hide it.

2. There are no secrets or shortcuts.

3. Make decisions quickly but be slow to change your mind. At Ignite this year I was chatting with a few coaches about how bad most REIA's are. One person said, Jason you should start a REIA. In less than 24 hours we implemented a REIA in Houston and we just started one in DFW last month.

4. Be of value to your customers. Give value first. Symptoms of poor value is crushed margins and having to up your “bid” for a property. If money is your customers first concern you run a commodity business and are not building a brand.

5. Business is never about you. It is always about them. They don’t care about your why, they care about their why. Why are they selling the house? If you don’t know the real reason; making an offer is a waste of time. Price out of place is a no sale.

6. There's a big difference between investors and business owners. Investors deploy their capital into deals and realize a return, ROI. Business owners create profit through a consistent system of generating leads and producing deals. Few know this distinction and it is one of the biggest reasons for failure, only second to inaction.

7. Success requires action AND patience. You must execute relentlessly; however, it takes time to realize gains from your labor. If you’re expecting to make massive amounts of money in 6-12 months and only work on your business 40 hours a week you are going to be incredibly disappointed.

8. The more complicated the deal, the less money is made. Simplicity yields the highest rate of return.

9. Focus on one strategy. One of the most detrimental attitudes of any new business is trying to generate revenue from every lead. Know the house you want to buy and only pursue that end. Our modern economy only rewards those that are highly specialized. Generalists are broke.

10. The difference between armatures and professionals is consistency. Those that consistently do become successful. I recently met someone that knocked on doors every day for six months and got their first deal. He knocks on one door after another. Once he got that first deal he reinvested in his business and built an empire.

11. Not everyone is cut out to be business owners. Ive met people that I thought would flourish in this business and not make it and I’ve met folks I thought would fail build an empire.

12. Never stop marketing, never stop marketing, never stop marketing. If you do, close shop

13. If you are not working nights and weekends, you wont make it in the business.

14. Be extremely careful selecting partners. I’ve seen more partnerships implode than those that survived, even fewer were successful. To partner you must have a very highly level of business maturity.

15. How you offer is more important than what you offer.

16. The longer I do this, almost 4 years, I find there are few ways to do this business right and a litany of ways to do it wrong.

17. What scales works, everything else is background noise.

18. what gets measured gets managed, but not everything that is measured matters. Ex. Response rates, one of the most worthless metrics in marketing.

19. A contract is not a sales or marketing document. It’s the consummation of a relationship steeped in relieving the sellers burdens, your company’s value, and your integrity. It is your word, close or don’t, but never contract if you don’t intend to close.

20. Stay humble.

 1. You can buy all over, however, this city is YYUUGGEEE, I'd pick an area of town that has ARVs from 100-150k.

2. Low end and section 8

3. wholesellers and networking events

4. HAR, if your are a realtor, real aqusitions, lifestyles quest...

5. This is one of the most competitive markets in the country.  You are going to work HARD to find great deals.  

NARRPR

I am a little confused, all of those liabilities come out of the seller's proceeds.  We've bought some really nasty houses with title issues and wholesaled them, so not sure I understand the issue.

 @Bill Gulley

Your post gave me a chuckle.  There's no next level or mentoring.  FYI, I don't have a method to take credit cards, however I would bring at least one card to the event as I am sure we will have a great time saturday night in city center.

Looks like my last post was pulled as it contained too much self promotion. I think it is obvious that I do not spend much time on BP, to busy actually buying real estate and managing our team of nearly 13 employees, so hopefully this is a bit more in-line with their standards.

I have paid for a substantial amount of education and I have also received free education. I lurked here for years when I was first starting out. One of the biggest challenges in education is quality content. More often than not, I find that the vast majority of educators, free and paid, have little to no real deal volume and use that lack of experience as a foundation for education. We feel we have a unique perspective as we have grown rapidly in one of the most competitive markets in the US. Naturally, we were approached to host a class, since it is fairly obvious we are doing something completely different than what is available in the RE education market.

When we began the process of constructing a class we looked at all the classes we have taken and what was available on the market and asked a simple question "can we provide value?" I had hoped that we could have simply pointed to another educator/mentor and refer new and experienced investors alike to that educator/mentor. Unfortunately there is not someone we could send people to that has our same values or understanding of business. 

I've said for years that we run a sales and marketing organization that happens to be in the real estate industry. I agree with your comment about apprenticeship. My business partner is fond of saying that real estate education teaches students how to build a car pre-Henry Ford, when the industry should be teaching how to be Ford. The reality is that most "investors" are little more than sole practitioners and the only real value in their organization is the real estate, with zero goodwill value. This is one of the most important reasons why they can't grow their business into something that does not resemble a job.

We also figured out that the outdated model of "taking someone by the hand" is incredibly ineffective as means to teach someone to build a going concern. Most people assume that because they work in a business they understand business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again back to the issue of investors being little more than self employed sole proprietors.

So what we decided to do was spend 90% of our class time teaching owners how to run and build a business. The vast majority of folks attending the first class are people already in the industry looking to step up to the next level, no clueless newbies to "trick" into an expensive coaching package that provides little value. These are folks that have a highly attuned "BS meter" and I am honored to have them in our class.

Regarding who is qualified to teach real estate, people like us are easily "googleable." Although I suspect you read my "resume" that was removed today. It is a bit odd that you replied to a post in the Houston forum yet live in Springfield.  If you were local you would have a much better understanding of who we are and would likely have seen us on stage at a Houston event.   It is also convenient that we are on local biz radio for 5 hours a week and take live calls from the audience.  It is a live streaming show from anywhere in the world and you can call us anytime.  

-JB