Ep 209: Using Bright Investor to find the Best Deals with Donato Callahan

And then as you zoom in, it gets more specific and more specific. More specific. It actually shows a little like a pin. Like looking on Google you can click on to learn what kind of build permit was issued, what date at what property for what kind of project. So it gets more specific as you get, as you zoom in.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show, where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, we have Donato Callahan. Donato secured the prestigious Department of Defense Smart Scholarship following his high school validor valedictorian success. He later graduated magna cum laude from Boise State and dedicated time to wildlife conservation in South Africa and wildlife ecology studies in Montana. Amidst the COVID 19 lockdown, Donato discovered real estate investing, leading to the establishment of his first wholesaling company and the acquisition of 176 residential and commercial multifaceted family units by the time he was 23. He's on track to achieve nearly 400 units and $40 million in real estate this year. He speaks at numerous universities and he's empowering investors through his company, brightvestor, as well as his story. And brightvestor is a cutting edge real estate market research tool that we're going to be talking about today. And it helps investors get results to find their first properties, grow their portfolio, scale their portfolio, and ultimately profit. You're going to love this story. Donato, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, man, you got to get the St. Louis Arch behind you. I do love that bridge. That's a gorgeous picture. But I know you're in St. Louis, so, you know, that arch is pretty cool, too. It's a park, right? Isn't it a national park?

Yes, technically it is a national park. The smallest one you'll ever see. But yes, it is technically national park.

Yeah, I've been there. I've been there. And my son and I are going to be doing a road trip out to Colorado next month for a lacrosse tournament. And, and yeah, we're planning to go, go through St. Louis on our way out there. So we'll check that national park off his list. We got, we got all these parks that we've been to as a family, that's one of our big things.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah. Well, I'm really excited to have you on. Cause I'm a bit of a nerd. And you know, as we mentioned in the intro, you're a pretty smart guy yourself, probably smarter than I am, but I love data, I love analytics. But really I'm pragmatic and I love utilizing those to actually achieve something. We're going to talk about the company started Bright Investor, and how investors, how our listeners can. Can utilize that. But we were chatting before the show. Donato, I just wanted you to tell a little bit more about your background. And really I want. I want to hear about that first deal that we were chatting about as well that ultimately took you to St. Louis.

Yeah, absolutely. So no. Grew up in Iowa and went to college out in Idaho at Boise State University. And it was during the junior and senior year of my college, right when Covid was coming found, that I first got into real estate. Basically I had a lot of energy and nothing to do, and I just lost money in the stock market. Well, this sucks. Let's find. Let's find a different way to be in control of my wealth building. So after about six to eight months of learning wholesaling real estate, I realized that I wanted to buy something that kept paying me and being able to own something and build equity and well, buying one unit is great. Buying a few units must be fantastic, you know.

And so there you go.

Pretty quickly I found some partners who had some experience in the space from the institutional side, and they were looking to branch out, do some JVs. And I was a second semester senior in college and I was looking every day, looking at deals. And I knew I was going to be moving to St. Louis to start my job as a geospatial analyst for the Department of Defense after graduating.

Wow.

So I'm like, you know what? I know I'm going to move here. Let's look for some deals. And after looking, I ended up finding this 96 unit property in St. Louis. And I looked at the numbers, I looked at the underwriting, the comps, and I thought this might be a good deal. Brought on two partners. They all were professional underwriters. They thought, hey, this looks like a good deal. So we wrote an LOI for about 3 million bucks. And looking back, I had no idea what I was doing. Oh my gosh, how I had the audacity to do anything there. It was a situation of not knowing how much I didn't know, and being willing to just walk out in the and say, I'll be fine. We put an offer out and it got accepted. I accepted our loi. And so it was spring break year, I'd accepted offer and I was working through due diligence.

And so you're, you're 22 years old? 21. 22 years old.

How old are you at that point? I am one.

Yeah, 21.

I ended up graduating college that first week of May and road trip the days back home to Iowa, you know, got home at like 10 o', clock, 11 o' clock at night, bed, and I'm up at 4am the next morning in my Ford Escape, driving to Lewis to meet the contractors I'd hired for the on the ground inspection of the property. Yeah, so my team flies out, I'm there on the ground. We're meeting the tractors properties in way worse shape than we thought. It's, it's, it's a whole, whole thing going on there. You know, there's different financials not quite right. Xyz. So we go to the seller and say, hey, you know, we still want to transact, but we can't do it based off this price. It has to be. Yes, like this is just what it is. He wasn't willing to budge. So we ended up walking out of the deal and losing it. So I ate a couple grand in contracting costs out of pocket. But it was a learning experience. But it was through that and talking about it and sharing that experience with some people in my life that a few months later my old landlord in college reached out and said, hey, I know you've done some multifamily. I'm like, yeah, I've done multifamily. You know what I'm doing? She's like, I'm going to start, I'm going to go pay for a mentorship program to learn how to do it. And clearly you had some experience. You've shown that you take action. Why don't you join the program?

That's pretty cool. Yeah.

So it was through that program in about six months of time that we put together a small team, met sponsors, learned about syndication, and that ended up with me buying my first 172 unit in Waco, Texas.

Yeah, there we go.

That's how it all came together. And then since then I had. And that was July of 2022. So since then I have retired from my day as a geospatial analyst. I have just, as of this recording about two weeks ago, closed my second deal. In San Antonio. It's a 200 unit deal.

All right, Congratulations there.

And is working on my real estate software. And that's how kind of we got to today.

Yeah, I love it. So just for the audience, what does a geospatial analyst do?

You know, I'd love to tell you, but you seem like a nice guy. I think that's a take. Yet right now, basically what it has to do with is images and mapping. So basically taking a satellite and taking a picture of somewhere on the earth and using the data that you can get from the. To answer a intelligence question. So a really cool example is if we know a hurricane is going to hit off the coast of a country, we can take a photo of the area in that, you know, local villages or towns or cities before the hurricane hits. And then after the hurricane hits, come back and take another photo. And then a really cool example is we'll look at which ropes have actually been damaged or blocked to know which people can actually get out and which ones are cut off from aid. So the ones that are cut off, we then prioritize to port via, you know, air. No air support or other types of alternative means of transportation, because those. The towns that we know from imagery can't have access to anyone's health.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's cool. So. So the government's not just using those satellites to spy on us. They're actually doing some good stuff out there, which is. Which is good to hear.

Yeah, exactly. Yes, 100%, yes. Don't you worry about those open windows? You know, keep the blinds and the curtains open.

Oh, man. Oh, man. Yeah, we could go down. We could go down some rabbit holes, but that. That's not. That's not what this podcast is about. So that. That's. You have to go to a different podcast to listen about that. We're gonna. We're gonna stick to it. But quick question. So I know you had the. Was it. Was it the smart scholarship? Is that what it was called?

Correct.

For Department of Defense. So were you obligated to go take a role with the government through that scholarship, or how did that work? I'm just curious. I didn't look that up.

Yeah. So Smart scholarship is a program designed to get more students to come and work for the government sector as opposed to private. You know, they want STEM majors and they're losing a lot to the private industry. So when I was a freshman in college, you know, I went to Boise State. Never even officially toured. Said they gave me the. They Gave me a decent amount of money. If I work, I can probably get out debt free. Didn't look at any of the programs. I'm like, that works. I just wanted to go to college, not in Iowa, and somewhere I would have minimal amounts of debt. And I okay, you know what? This works fine. I'll go there. But it was through my second or third month of college, first semester freshman, I was looking at the library and looking up how to not pay for college, college scholarships, and found this program. And basically, you competed with kids who were undergrad grad students and doctoral candidates from across the country in all different disciplines of STEM. Usually about 3,500 to 4,000 applicants a year, and they took about 8% of those.

But if you won, you said 8%? Yeah, yeah. Not a big percentage, not a lot.

But if you won, they'd pay you a salary of 25 to $45,000 a year to go to school, plus they'd pay for all your school, plus you get paid internships over the summer. We were making like a grand a week and a guaranteed job when you graduate, but to work for them when you graduated for one year of every school, they supported you.

Gotcha.

Okay, so, yeah, being a third month in freshman in college who had no papers, no studies, no awards, no publications, I'm like, I'm clearly qualified for this. So I applied, and over the next few months got an email saying I'm the top 50% of my major. Like, great. And then a couple months later, they told me, hey, sorry, you didn't get it. I'm like, you know what? It was a long shot anyways, because I applied as a biology major, and they were like, engineers. So over 350 biology majors applied for my major. And then the week later, I'm sitting in my dorm, Amazon, get the urge to open my email, and they say, actually, congratulations, you won't. And I found out I was one of three biology majors in the country to wow my major.

How about that? Interesting. So you weren't even STEM major. That's. Well, first off, I love. I love the initiative you took in that you're talking about doing that with your first. Your first property you had under contract. But it's. It's a big thing. You know, we went to college a couple decades apart, and even back then, I was trying to figure out, like, how do I decrease the cost that. We just did a podcast not too long ago with Dr. Beasley, episode 170. So if you're listening and you're like, wow, this guy's pretty sharp. Donato pulled some strings and, and figured that out. Check out episode 170. And if you got young kids, check out our resource@nextlevelincome.com kids where we teach your kids how to be money pros, and then they can grow up to be like Donato and, and come out of school with, with no debt and hopefully. And the other piece of that, which I love, is you actually came out of school, basically set up with a job, too, and that's a big deal. That's a big deal. I do, I really want to get into the software stuff, but we're talking about some stuff that really, I think is important to a lot of people, especially, you know, those of us with kids that are teenagers that are going to be going to college soon. I've been listening to Charlie Kirk a little bit. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's a conservative, younger conservative guy. And I saw some clip, and he goes, and he sets up his table on college campuses, and then he's like, hey, come prove me wrong. But what was interesting is he wrote this book called College is a Scam. And I was like, what's this all about? So I watched an interview with him with my older son. He's 14, and he really liked it because the guy's very logical, and he kind of debates and argues with the students that come up to him, but his whole point is that 50% of kids that go to college, they come out with a degree, all this debt, and get a job that doesn't require the degree that they have. So I think, like, what you did, Donato, decreasing the investment that you made and then increasing the payoff, even if you didn't use it for that long, is such, such a great strategy. So again, just to underscore what you, what you put into practice, I think it's fantastic. Check out episode 170 on the podcast nextlevel income.com kids as well, for some resources. But back to the real estate piece. In my book, I talk about why I got into multifamily, and I got into multifamily because of the demographics. I spent almost two decades in the medical device industry, and back around 2000, I found I was like, wow, medical device space, it's. It's set to continue to boom because of all these baby boomers that are having surgery. Most affluent generation having surgery. A decade later, I learn about multifamily and how their kids, the millennials, are renting in Greater generation, in greater proportions than any other generation, and had that same trajectory as the baby boomers had with surgeries, with renting. And I was like, whoa, demographics. Let's go with this rising tide that we have out here. And what I love about Bright Investor, when you guys reached out to us, Donato, is you have. You have given the average investor the ability to utilize this massive amount of data that's out there. Kind of like you were saying with the satellites distilling it down to usable data when there's actually something to do. Tell us a little bit about why you started Bright Investor.

Yeah. So Bright Investor was the solution to a problem that I was facing. You know, I was, you know, back in college and I knew I was moving to Lewis, and I thought, you know, I'm going to move this city that doesn't have a perfect reputation if I can go online and find horror stories about, you know, so I don't know if they're true or not. And I'm over here thinking, I want to buy a piece of real estate there, and I have no idea where to do it, how to do it, areas the best for me, what the rents are nearby. And as a, you know, mapping student in my senior class, we had a project go make a something.

So I thought, well, now, did you switch majors or were you still a biology major?

That was. I'm still a bio major, but a mapping minor.

Oh, okay, gotcha. Mapping minor. All right. And. And just. And you're not drawing maps. You're. You're utilizing digital technology and those sorts of things.

Of course.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Actually, no. I had my inking quill. I was like, doing all.

That's cartography. Isn't that cartography? Technically.

Yeah, Cartography.

There we go. I don't know. There is. I pulled that one out of nowhere.

Yeah. So it was. Senior project was go make a map. And I thought, why don't I make a map about real estate data in a market that I want to learn more about?

I love it.

So that was my senior project, and I made four or five prototypes, and I had crime stats and I had rents and I had build permits, and I had all this stuff.

Nice, man.

This is. This helped me a lot, figure out where I want to invest. And so I played around with that prototype for a bit until I was about false fall of 2021 when I got connected to my current co founder. But he was a guy who just finished interning with bigger pockets with Brandon Turner for once in Hawaii.

Yep, yep.

And he was looking to connect with other young men in the real estate investing space, wanted to connect. And so I, I said, you know what, sure, why don't connect with him. I dropped a comment on his Facebook post and about a week later we started talking online. And then we just started doing weekly zoom calls. Just accountability checking and talking about what we're both doing. And about two months later, I said, hey, let me just show you this, you know, thing that I've been working on, toying with. I showed him the first prototypes of real estate market research, real estate mapping all the. Uncovering the best markets and spots that are the best for you. Yeah, Donato, you're not going to believe this, but I'm working on the same thing. And he shared his screen. I'm not joking, not joking, straight up. And he showed prototype that he had been building on a nationwide level. Because working with Brandon, he's like, brandon, what do you mean me to do? And he's like, Drew, I don't want to do the market research, I don't want to go find the best spots and do the comps. I don't want to do all that. And so Drew, my co founder, was saying, you know what, there's just not a good solution for this. So he was toying around with his own. So in that moment, like, okay, we're two random guys that are getting connected and we have the same idea. We have to do something with this.

Yeah, something's bringing you together.

Yeah. And that's where Brian Investor was born. Within three months, we had raised our first little bit of money, hired our team and started building it. Just finished our first full year of being live to the public last month.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow, that's awesome, man. So I've gone through it, I've looked at some of the features. I love, I love the demographic data and that sort of thing, but give us an overview of, of what bright investor has from a capability perspective. Are you a high income business owner or professional earning 2,300,000 or even more a year, but still feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck? Are you comfortable working until you're 65 or 70 to retire, or do you want to achieve financial independence and live life on your own terms? You could join myself and Matt4 and learn how we both became financially independent in our early 30s. We will teach you how to make, keep and grow your money. Teaching you strategies to maximize your earnings, keep your income that you've earned through tax strategy and legal structures and ultimately Teach you how to grow it by determining your personal investing strategy strategy as well as teach you how to analyze investments so you can grow your passive income to the point to live life on your own terms. Our coaching clients reliably do this in seven years or less. To learn more, check out our coaching program at nextlevelincome.com forward/coaching. That's nextlevelincome.com forward/ coaching.

Yeah, so Brentvestor is designed to help you uncover the best deals and the best areas to invest in for you. And so what we means is that we're including things from a high level like where is the most population growth happening? So where are people moving to, how much money are they making and is their income going up? Are people renting here or people owning here? Primarily. And then it's really cool. One of our most popular components is we actually can tell you where investors are investing and let you see it by tracking build permits. So we work with contractors across the, across the country to show you where residential and commercial projects are being developed or where properties are being rehabbed. And just like you're on the Weather Channel watching the Doppler move across the screen, you can see the growth, literally, you can literally see the city's growth and find out exactly where the path of progress is on a map. So we start with that high low stuff and then get into the nitty gritty like how many properties are on the market right now? What are the local rent comps for all these properties? What are they going to rent for? Address by address level. You can literally zoom in and see what crimes are happening where before you ever have to hop on a plane and fly out there, you keep yourself safe, avoid the war zones for any property in the country. So that's how we really help people get into it and then be able to find the right deals with our deal access and finding on and off market opportunities. That's what we do with bright investor.

No, I love that. And my wife and I started off, we used to send postcards to find vacant lots when we were, we were doing spec homes, you know, 10, 15 years ago and do that.

Absolutely.

Yeah. It's amazing where the technologies come and I've talked about this many times over the past several years. You know, when we moved to Asheville, we, we, I looked around, I said okay, where's, where is the future development going to be? And we, we settled on a place called West Asheville. And it was funny because people like literally Donato made fun of me when we moved there like, oh, you not, you not make enough money to live somewhere nice. And I was like, this is a cool area. Like it's walkable, it's up and coming. And what, what really appealed to me is that when I looked at the city of Asheville master plan, they said, hey, we're going to develop Haywood Road, which is kind of the main thoroughfare through West Asheville. So they were, they were telling us, hey, this is where we're going to put our future infrastructure dollars. We did the same thing in the South Slope where we bought our office. We actually bought it out of foreclosure. And same thing where we bought our house. We could, we knew that the city was buying the park. So it's funny because people are like, how do you know all this stuff? It's like I just go and access the data that's already out there. And what you, what you have done with bright investors, you've actually being able to pull this data. So investors can use all of the data that was either only accessible to people like, you know, groups like us that are paying, you know, multi thousand dollar subscription fees or you know, having to like grab this data from multiple different sources. How do you do use like how, how far down do you get from a local level? So crime data, growth data, building permits, super valuable. Are you able to pull like city level and county level development data and those sorts of things or does that just kind of come out with all these other data points? I'm curious.

Yeah, so we typically start at the city. So with the build permits you can track where people are investing up to a 25 mile to 30 mile radius around. And it starts as a heat map, kind of like nice brilliant blues and reds showing you where people are investing. And then as you zoom in it gets more specific and more specific and more specific. It actually shows a little like a pin like you're looking on Google that you can click on to learn what kind of build permit was issued, what date at what property, for what kind of project. Yeah, so it gets more specific as you get, as you zoom in.

I love that. Now who is this for? What type of investor is this for you? You talked about wholesaling, we talked about syndications, you Talked about buying 200 unit apartment. Who can use this?

Yes, this is for the entry to mid level real estate investor who does want to spend thousands of dollars on subscriptions, who does not want to have dozens of open tabs in their computer, doesn't want to jump between multiple sites looking to either buy their first deal, fill up their portfolio or expand into different markets because maybe their local one isn't affordable for them. So all for those investors. And so we have people who are residential real estate investors, flippers, wholesalers, developers and commercial syndicators using Bright Investor to be able to make sure they're investing in the right places. Because a part of what we do is also content creation. So you can log into Bright Investor and you can click Create Market Comparison Report and it'll show you head to head comparisons of some of the top markets. And we have these reporting functionalities that when you're raising money for a deal or if you're going to go to a lender and work with them on being able to get a loan for your private property or to go get a private lender for maybe a flip. Hey, my one pager. Here's all the data objective. I can't, you know, you aren't, you don't have the ability to go change any of this. This is the objective. No, no kidding. Information. Here's my plan. Here's why I believe in this and this area and it basically creates all this trust between who you're working with. Like oh, I can see why this is a good investment. I understand what you're doing. Let's go for it.

Yeah, I love that. And you have the ability, so you said you also have the ability to allow investors to get off market deals. Is that because investors are putting their deals on there? How are investors interacting with that respect?

Yeah, so we work with data providers, so similar ones to CoreLogic and for first America and things like Adam to actually provide MLS access and off market deal opportunities across the whole country. So meaning that if you want to look for motivated sellers, you can come on and bright investor and say, you know what, I looked at the zip code in this street. I really like the crime stats and the appreciation here and I want to look for some deals. So show me all the single family houses for you know, between 300 and $500,000 that have an absentee owner with lots of equity that is pre foreclosure and it'll pull up that list and we give you all that information including really soon the sales comps and the owner's phone number and email address so you can go ahead and call them and give them an offer.

I love that man. It's like a one. So it's a one stop shop essentially for your entry and really everything up to really your professional investor.

Exactly. And we take, you know, if you were to go ahead and break down all the different data that we have from public and private, all the different we're working on. It would cost the individual person between four and $5,000 a month just to get access to all, not to mention hours of time that people will be spending on it. Which is really the important part here is just how much time it takes because on the entry level side, you know your people who are working jobs, you're trying to get your first deal, families or spouse, there's kids, there's activities. Having to spend too much time on all the prep work you need to make sure you don't lose all your money before you get into your first deal can sometimes be the hurdle that you can't get over and that causes so many people to never actually take action. So we want to lower that hurdle. So get into it. And then once you're in it, you're looking at more deals on a consistent daily basis. You can't spend an hour, two hours per deal every single time. You need to be able to get in and do it really quickly. And so I need to be able to know is the area okay, is the deal in a good location, the deal specifics good, find that all in one place and then be able to share it with the people on my team that are going to help me make decisions in a really, really fast way.

Yeah, I love it. Give us a success story of investor using this.

Yeah, so it's awesome. We had a woman named Barbara also giving her a shout out. She came to our January launch event and she was trying to get her first property. She had never purchased anything before. She was scared, wasn't sure what's going on. And she actually won our full year of bright investor access for free giveaway during that event.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah, like, like you, I heard your story, you know, you won the lottery and get you a full year of bright investor for free. And she was over the joy, overjoyed. Being able to, you know, get this access to the platform and not two and a half months later she's coming to our weekly free educational webinars that we do every Tuesday night. Talking, doing market deep dives and education and just showing what brand messer she comes on. There's a section where I ask about weekly wins and she was like, NATO, I'm under contract for my first property in the U.S. i'm like, are you kidding me? Talk to me about this. She was like, yeah, you know, I, I used to live abroad. You know, I'm an immigrant I moved down to, moved here to, you know, to the US and now actually under contract for the first property that I analyzed and found with Bright Investor. And I feel so much more confident that I never would have been able to do this without this.

I love it.

So we took someone who was dreaming about being able to do this to found the area, found the property, put an offer in under contract with confidence within a period of like two months.

And she didn't even have to pay for it. She got lucky. How great is that?

She got it for me. And we have so many more people, you know, even folks who are working with other like turnkey providers, you know, they'd be sent or passive investors. I've had folks say, I had someone bring me five deals to invest in and I didn't know which one I wanted to buy.

Yes.

And so they used Bright Investor and they wrote me and said, hey, I use Bright Investor to decide which short play I want to buy and I'm closing on it next week. I never would have pulled the trigger if I didn't know and have the confidence to do it without this platform.

I love that.

It's just how it works. It's just fantastic for me to get to see people out there actually moving forward in their journey with this platform.

Yeah, no, I love it. And again, you know, going from like, you know, just where I saw things 20 years ago, 25 years ago, to 10 years, 10, 15 years ago, to today, this is a, this is an awesome tool. If listeners want to learn more, if they want to get access to Bright Investor, what's the best way to find out about Athenado?

Yeah, they can come to our website@brightinvestor.com and we offer a full seven day free trial without having to have a credit card. It's completely free. People can come try us out for a full week getting at what we do for absolutely no risk to themselves. It's awesome. It's a no brainer.

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Check it out. We're going to have all this in the show. Notes Donato. This has been a fun conversation. Love what you've been up to. Love your story, how you got here. There's a lot that listeners can take from that and listeners can take a lot from Bright Investor. If they're looking to get their first deal, looking to up their game when it comes to buying current deals, or even if you're looking at syndications, you're looking at passively investing, like you were saying, and you want to have more data to really help you decide which is the best deal to invest in. Donato, thank you so much for sharing your story, your wisdom and your new products with Bright Investor with our own today.

Absolutely. I appreciate you having me on and I'm looking forward to being back sometime in the future if you'll have me.

Look forward to it. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.