Ep. 75 How To Buy 1000 Houses WITHOUT A Bank with Mitch Stephen

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to raise your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. You can get a free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com, just click on the book link. Also, if you're an accredited investor, check out our Invest link to learn how to gain access to our Self storage fund as well as other institutional quality real estate opportunities. Today's show you're not going to want to miss with Mitch Stephen. Both educational and highly entertaining, Mitch tells you the story of his first deal. How he used a baseball bat to close that deal. How he buys and sells over 100 houses today and has no recourse on these loans. You're not going to want to miss today's episode with Mitch Stephen. On today's show we have Mitch Stephen. Mitch has been a self employed real estate investor for over 25 years. His real estate investing career started at the age of 23 when he read Nothing down by Robert Allen. Stephen has purchased well over 2,000 houses in and around his hometown of San Antonio, Texas. He's a high school graduate, but he never stopped learning. Books, CDs, seminars and webinars were his classroom. And today, after writing four books on his way to his sixth book, he specializes in owner financing properties to individuals left behind by traditional lending institutions and giving new life to properties that scar neighborhoods. He's perfected a method of achieving cash flow without having to be a landlord, without having to rehab properties. And he's mastered the art of raising private money and the classic nothing down deal. And today he's going to talk about that as well as his new book. Today's show is sponsored by the Airbnb Kickstart course. My wife and I started our first Airbnb here in the last year and we've come to love the ability to earn more money than we would if we had a long term rental. If you're interested in starting your Airbnb business with little money, scaling your Airbnb business, or just learning tricks about the industry in general, just check out our airbnb course@nextlevelincome.com Airbnb that's a I R, the letters BNB and you'll get a 20% discount code. Mitch Stephen, welcome to the show.

Hey, what's going on? Chris, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. Had a blast being on your show. I love your history, Mitch. I love all that you've done for our audience that might not caught my interview on your podcast, maybe catch us up a little bit and talk a little bit about your background, your history, how you ended up in San Antonio and what you're focused on today.

Well, I graduated high school at 18. It took me about 16 years to find what I was really supposed to do, where I belonged to. I tried everything else in between. Sometimes people ask me, like, mitch, how did you get into real estate? And I said, what's the last thing left? If it didn't work, I was going to shoot myself, because there wasn't any. I tried everything else. It didn't work out for me. So, you know, I had a high school degree. I had a glass ceiling. No one really wanted to pay me what I was worth. In my book, My Life in a Thousand Houses Failing Forward to Financial Freedom, I talk about. It's a story more entertaining than the rest. A lot of my books are how tos. This one's a story about how a dumb ass figured out how to buy a hundred houses a year for over two decades. So it was a morphing process. I kept coming to these conclusions a little bit at a time, usually over some great painful event, and trying to figure out, you know, how do you stop that pain from happening? And then when something pleasurable would happen, like I'd make some money or I'd find a stress, how do I ramp this up or how do I do more of this? And so over the years, I'm not the smartest guy in any room ever, but I just been 27 years. I've been 27 years in the same field, you know, and I've been kicked and shoved and stabbed in every different corner of this business, you know, till finally you kind of figure out where the knives and the guns are and how to protect yourself. So. So I bought a house every four to five days for over two decades. And that doesn't count the ones that I didn't buy, you know, so there's a lot of experience. And the ones that I missed or that I. That fell through or that I didn't get. So there's thousands of houses of experiences in this, you know. Thousands.

No, it's amazing.

And so, you know, after certain amount of time, you should get good at it, you know. So I think I put in my 10,000 hours. I figured it out one day. And if I only work 12 hours a day, I think I've put in 60,000 hours. So, you know, if 10,000 hours makes you a pro, I don't know you've.

Done it a few times.

Yeah, I got 60,000 hours at least.

Well, let's talk about the beginning. You said it took you 16 years to figure it out. And one of the things that I enjoyed talking to you about because I read a bunch of his books, Robert Allen, that's something we both have in common. So I guess let's go back to that first deal, Mitch, because I'm going to guess you didn't go from buying zero deals to buying a deal every four or five days overnight.

Well, I kind of did, man. I quit my job in March of 1996 and I bought 45 houses that year. And then the next year I bought 65. And the next year about 150. And that was too many. And then I kind of settled in around 100. But what Robert Allen did for me was it was a very pivotal time in my life. I was getting to be in my early to mid-30s and I still hadn't found myself. And I had read this book by Robert Allen, who had the audacity to suggest that I didn't have to have any money to make a lot of money in this business.

And so I just taking a quick pause, there like is nothing down from the 90s.

Yeah, nothing down where I started to see how, you know, if you don't have money, then you're a professional deal finder, contract writer, upper. And it didn't take a lot of money to figure out how to write an effective contract and how to go out and call on people and try to negotiate great prices. So, you know, it was a little. Some negotiating books. Then I had to spend some time with a realtor or attorney, you know, explain these contracts to me because I'm not the most literate person in the world and I'm certainly not good at reading contracts. And so I had someone explain every paragraph to me, you know, and which paragraphs were ultimately important to me and which were the throwaway paragraphs that I really didn't need to pay attention to. But they were in there and this is what they mean. Cause I almost didn't go into the business because the paperwork was intimidating me too much, you know, Cause I'm not a paperwork guy.

Well, I think there's a huge lesson in there. The fact of the matter is you don't have to be good at everything. Right? Be good at what you're good at and then find somebody else to put on your team that can help figure that out.

So when you don't have money, you're trading time and expertise. If you don't have money, you better have time and expertise, you know, because all you have to gain and you got to figure out how to profit without money. And if you don't have money, which most of the people I know that started in this business almost 100% didn't start with any money. And the few that I know that started with a lot of money lost it all and then had to start over again with no money. So when someone comes to me and says, look, I got a million dollars and I want to go into the real estate business, will you train me? I said, yeah, here's the first thing we can do. Go put the million dollars in a CD somewhere and we're going to learn how to do this business with no money. And if you can learn how to do it with no money, then it's time to use your money because you'll understand how it works.

There you go. I love it. All right, so you read Robert Allen's nothing down, you go out. Let's talk about that first deal you did, Mitch.

I stumbled into it. One thing I learned from Robert Allen is, you know, you have to make offers that your financial standing, which mine was pretty much zero. So I had no money. So I had to make offers to people that would work. And my first deal was a fourplex and the old man had a lot of rent properties. The son was the typical silver spoon in the mouth son. Didn't know how to do anything, wasn't driven to do anything, and he just inherited all these houses because his father passed away. And this particular fourplex had a self designated rent collector who lived there. He was a very ominous tattooed up guy that probably wasn't into good things. And he was intimidating the young man and collecting the rent from the other three tenants and keeping it and oh, wow. And he had everybody intimidated. And I recognized that he was afraid of this problem and was trying to sell it. So he was kind of a don't want her. And I told him I could relieve him of that problem and I would handle that guy, that monster that he had over there. But I needed nothing down and I needed no payments for a year. The reason why I needed no payments for a year is because after I got all these people out, I was going to have to completely remodel four units and I was going to take everything I had. I didn't have anything, but I did have credit cards. I had lots of credit cards and I had good credit. And at the time they were offering those 0% for 12 months or 18 months or six months, you know, 0% introductory offers. And I, I had gotten my hands on a bunch of those cards that thinking, I'm going to need some amount of money at some point and I need someplace to go to get it, and I'm not going to go out in the street and beg for it. So I need to know where it's coming from. And that's where I went. So he agreed to it because I told him it's going to take me a year to turn this place around. Because turns out it only took 45 days to turn it around.

But amazing.

Who would have known? I mean, I knew, but, you know, selling that, it's going to take a long time to fix this place. The guy was very afraid of this place, didn't know how to do anything about the place. So he gave me no down and no payments for a year. I racked up in 1996, I racked up 30,000 or $35,000 worth of credit card debt fixing up these units. But the interesting story is how I got the guy out. Now, I'm not telling anyone to do it like this. Back then it was more the wild west.

And this was. Were you in Texas at the time?

Yeah, I'm in Texas, yeah.

Wild west, yeah.

And it's July and it's 105 degrees every day. And these houses, these fourplex was really military housing because right across the street was a fence and a military base. I mean, right. You looked out your front door and you saw the fence, and then there was the big, vast base, military base. It was built in the twenties with hardly any insulation or anything and, you know, just an old build. And so I was going up to talk to this guy. There was a baseball bat in the front yard. So I picked it up and I turned it around and like to put the handle towards him so I didn't look threatening. And I said, hey, you got this bat out in the yard. Is this your kids? He said, yeah. And I said, well, I need to come in and check the air conditioning. So then I didn't hand the bat to him. I just kind of kept holding it by the opposite end, you know, so it wasn't threatening. And I was holding it with one hand down to my side. And he let me in. I said, your window unit was all window units. I said, your window unit's not working right. He goes, no, it's blowing pretty damn cold. And it really was. It was blowing really cold. It was fine. Said, no, it ain't working very. It ain't. It's not really up to par. It's not what you need. He says, well, what's the matter with it? And then I turned the bat around and I started banging on the air conditioners, breaking it. I was trying to knock it out of the window, but it wouldn't knock out. But so I just kept hitting it in. The air conditioner's going. And he goes, what are you doing? And every time he'd step forward, I'd swing the bat back, so he'd have to step back, and then I'd hit it and then he'd step forward and I'd swing back and he'd back up. And I kept hitting this thing. And he said, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? I says, well, I'm finishing fixing this air conditioner. He says, you're not fixing anything. I says, yeah, I fixed it perfect. Now it runs just like you pay. I gotta go now.

Was that in the book?

The only reason I could do this was because I'd already done my research and the man had warrants for his arrest. So I knew he couldn't call the police on me because he had warrants. So then I told him as I was on the way out the door, I said, I know you have warrants for your arrest, too. So I think you need to be out of here by midnight tonight. Or my friends that work at the police department will be here about 12, and they're going to pick you up and they will get you out of my house for me. And. But you will have a nice place to live. They're going to serve you three meals a day. It will be air conditioned there.

And, oh, boy, did you have somebody on standby in case that didn't work out as well as you planned?

I wasn't that smart. I was a long time ago. Like, I'm not telling anyone to do this. I'm just saying that's what happened. And then I started working on. I got one person out. I worked on the duplex. I got it rented. Then I'd already given the other two people notice to get out. So while I was working on those two, I'd given them the 30 days notice. By the time I finished, I was working on that one and those two, and then I got them all rented. And the rents coming in would go straight to my credit card bills and paid my credit card bills. By the time the year was up, I had paid all my credit cards. Off with the rent money that I was collecting now. So I was collecting about $5,000 a month and Fourplex, Yeah, you know, about a thousand dollars. A little over a thousand dollars a piece. So just the math worked out. I knew this math would work out. That was my plan the whole time. Get a year free, I'll put the rehab on the credit cards. And I learned all that from Robert Allen. It was like, how do you make it work? How do you figure it out?

That's awesome.

You don't have anything.

So then you went on to do, you said, 45 deals the first year scale up to 150. So I'd love to start talking Mitch, about. Okay, so I want to hear that, everyone to hear that first story because I think I talked to a lot of investors, like how do I do this first deal? You know, and so you gotta, sometimes you gotta look for a deal with hair on it.

The other thing I want to be transparent about, it was a lot different time back then. There wasn't a guru on every corner, there wasn't a course, there was no Internet, there was no podcast and zoom.

To go see people on stage, get tapes, books.

I mean they had some of those guys out there, very, very few. You know, Carlton Sheets was around that time. Dave Deldato, Jimmy Napier, Jack Miller. But they were obscure, they were cult like, you know, way back in the background somewhere.

Who's the terms guy? I'm trying to remember who that guy was. There's another guy.

Yeah, Paper Tigers. He wrote Paper Tigers. I know he. So anyways, back in the, when I was doing this, just so you know, 45 houses my first year when I was started out, you could get in the classifieds at 8 o' clock in the morning and by noon you could have a perfectly good deal. And if you screwed up, you'd have two. And you wouldn't even know how you're going to pay for the 1, much less 2. And so it was a different time. And I just want to be clear about that. It was a different time, but it does still show adaptive thinking, out of the box thinking and how to manipulate wherever you're at these days. There's much more sophistication and what you can do and what you can't do. Although prices are higher, you know, I went on beyond that. I took the credit cards to another level in this town that's the skyline of San Antonio, Texas behind me in 1996. You could buy houses on the lesser parts of town, east side, west side, south side For a hundred, for 10,000, 12,000, 8,000, 15,000, 20,000. We had the cheapest houses like Detroit. You know, my neighborhoods were functional, rough, but they weren't blowouts like Detroit. So there were still semi decent neighborhoods or you could still function in these neighborhoods without getting killed. And so I started buying houses again. It wasn't, it's not the same time, but I figured out that if you had good credit and you applied for a credit card, they send it to you. The full card, the full boat, the full cash advance. I mean if they just checked your credit and they sent you the card. Well, when I figured that out, I sent out for 75 credit cards in a two week period. And I got 50 of them, 45 or 50. And so I went around town going, I need 10,000 on this card and 10,000 on this card. And this buys the house and rehabs it. And I take that, those two credit cards inside the file because when I sold the house I would get a hundred percent of the money in my bank account because it had no liens on it because it was on the credit cards. And then I just open up the file and we'd call credit card company, find out how much I owed both of them and we pay the credit cards and whatever was left over was mine, which most of the time was 15, 20, 25, $30,000.

That's a good return.

I went from not knowing where I belong to like shooting out of a rocket trying to figure all this stuff out by myself and common sensing my way through. At one point I had like $250,000 worth of credit card debt and a half a million dollars worth of houses, free and clear. And that's when my wife packed her bags when she found the credit card bills. We'd only been married about 30 days and I knew she wasn't going to say yes, so I just did it on my own and tried to make it to the mailbox. But with so many credit cards coming in every day, I missed the mailbox one day and I got discovered and she was going to divorce me because she thought I was a lunatic. And the reason I didn't ask her was it taken me seven years and all these books of reading to get where I was at. And there's no way I was going to explain it to her in a 30 day period or anything. I mean, it'd taken me years to get this kind of nerve or this confidence, whichever way. Well, both, you know what I mean? And so I just explained to her really, she had her bags packed. She was stepped between the car and the door so she couldn't shut it when she got in. I said, if you'll let me explain, if you give me 60 seconds, I'll explain and then you can do whatever you want to do. But I said, you're being irrational. Which is I learned not to say to your wife. So she looked at her watch. She says, okay, you got 60 seconds. I said, this is not gambling in any stretch of the imagination. I know exactly what this $20,000 house is that I bought for 20,000. I know exactly what it's worth when it's fixed up. It's worth 45. But I'm going to put it in context that I'm gambling. And here we go. You think I'm gambling. So let's put it in context of five card draw. I'm at a poker table. We're in a five card draw game. I got $250,000 table, and I discarded two cards and I'm waiting for my other two cards to come back. And you're leaving before my two cards. What if I win? Leave me if I lose. Why are you leaving before the game's over? And so she said, okay, you better win. She went back in the house and then I proceeded to win. And I've been winning for 27 years after that.

Let's shift gears a little bit. Mitch, I'd love to talk about. This is your fourth book out that you just released here, right? So your fourth book is the Art of Private Lending.

Art of Private Lending. I wrote it with my partner, Mike Powell. In the book, we're just explaining how to minimize your risk and how I've been able to survive 27 years without having gone under because of the loans that I make and why my private lenders haven't gone under because they made loans to me under certain conditions. And I explained these conditions and I explained the paperwork and why that a person shouldn't be afraid. The maximum they're loaning is $65,000 on a. On a home, that's 100,000. So to put that in more complicated terms, when you're only loaning a 65% loan to value, you have a 35% pad there. Everyone should be comfortable. I'm comfortable as the guy who's buying the house because I got enough margin in case something goes wrong. I don't get upside down. But my lender, if he happens to not get paid by me, which has never happened, but in the event I didn't pay him, he would get my house. And my promise always was, if I can't pay you or don't want to pay you, I will walk my position in that house to you. Be it a note that I have with someone in it. I'll walk the note over to you. And my first lien, collateral rights, or I'll walk the deed over to you. Depends if I own the house or I have sold the house on seller finance terms. And I have a note, if I ever can't pay you, you won't have to sue me. I'll walk these papers over to you. That's the integrity level. And I tell my private lenders that every time. Look, I have two rights every day. I have the right to pay as agreed or I have the right to walk my position over to you. Because all the $26 million that I have out is non recourse collateral only wrappable loans I'm allowed to wrap.

So let's talk about this. So our investors are familiar with this. So we go and we buy apartment buildings and that debt for them is non recourse. That means the bank's not coming after them. They're going to take that property back. But Mitch, you're doing this with single family homes, right? So share with the audience. How are you doing that?

Well, you don't pool money. If you start pooling money, you get into SEC regulations, all that. Mine doesn't fall under the regulations because I have one lender, one piece of collateral and one borrower. It's a collateral only loan. And if I don't pay them, they either get the house because I walked it over to them or they file foreclosure on me and hire an attorney and they foreclose me out of the house. So they're going to get my house one way or the other. It's just my promise is if for any reason I don't pay, I'm going to walk it over to you. You'll never have to sue me. That's the agreement. That's how I sleep at night, owing $26 million. And the only reason I have collateral only loans is, and I pay a premium interest rate to these people, 8% on average, you know, 10% to some of them. Is there sharing in the downside? Catastrophic risk, which was the only thing that kept me awake at night was not whether I was going to be able to run my business right and make it all work. What petrified me is what if Kim Jong, dumbass over in Korea drops a nuclear bomb in downtown San Antonio and pollutes a 20 mile radius of my town. That's not my fault. And I don't want to lose my storages and my house and all my free and clear stuff that has nothing to do with this over something that I had no way of knowing.

Absolutely.

So I'm paying a premium. But you share in the catastrophic risk of this house. So if you're not worried about a meteor hitting this town or a volcano going off or a nuclear bomb being dropped, then you're in a really great position. You know what I mean?

No, I mean getting paid 8 to 10%. So how are you finding all these houses, Mitch? How are you finding the money? And then are you keeping these houses forever? You selling them? Like, how's the whole process work today?

Well, the problem was I used to buy the houses, create the notes and sell the notes. But One day in 2001, I think it was, yes, 2001 Associates, which was division of Ford Motor Credit, who bought all the secondary notes out there, all the subprime notes, no matter who you sold your note to, they were bundling them all up into millions and millions of dollars worth of bundles, if not billion dol dollar bundles. And they were taking them to associates and like selling to associates and making 1%. But they were huge numbers. And when they closed, the note buying business ceased in the United States of America for all practical purposes, for about seven years. And I had 53 houses in my inventory at the time. And my whole way of doing business was just ruined. My exit strategy was ruined. And I was in a panic for that for a few days. And then I said, the only problem is I've been borrowing money like for 12 months because I was in and out of these houses. I just have to change the color of the money underneath. I need 10 year money. I need 15 year money that I can wrap, that they make a payment to me and I make a payment to my private lender and it goes on for years. That's why I have 26 million out. Because unlike a flipper, you could put out 300,000 and then in 90 days or whatever, it comes back, well, I put out 300,000 or a million dollars on a bunch of houses. It don't come back for 10 years.

Yeah.

So I have to keep finding more and more and more and more money, you know what I mean? And keeps racking up. So I became very good. And one of the reasons I wrote this book was to help explain to people why loaning on real estate is A good deal. How you can move your 401ks and your IRAs over into a self directed plan so that you can decide and quit leaving your financial future to the whims of Wall street and that ticker tape and, or taking the only other choice, which is to leave it in a CD at 1%. So I found a happy medium, great collateral, premium interest rate that they're earning and a track record to boot. So, and I'm explaining in there the paperwork and why it all worked and why it's all worked this many years and that you can go out there and loan your money if you want to, directly to people like me, individuals, and make 14, 16, 18%. If you want to go to work, if you're going to make 14, 16, 18% on your money, you're going to have to do the work. If you just want to make 8, 9 or 10 and keep playing golf, then loan it to me. But I'll use the same strategy, the same protections that I'm telling you to use otherwise. And some people that get my book go on to open their own hard money business or take their own stuff and get their own money out themselves. And other people say, you know, sounds like a little more work than I want to do at 68 years old. I think I'll just loan my money to this guy that seems to have it all figured out for the last 27 years.

Yeah. No, that's terrific. So that's how you're, that's how you're finding how many, about how many houses you buy a year now, Mitch.

It's always about 100 since the. Pretty much not 100. In 2020, I did 83, which was a little less than I thought, but a lot better than I thought because I thought at one point I was only going to be at like 30.

Okay, so if you're buying 100 houses a year, are you keeping all these? Are you selling them? What's going on?

Well, I'm selling them 70% of them. I owner finance my buyer, they make payments to me, I give them 30 year note at 10%, no balloon. They just owe me payments for 30 years.

Wow. So you got, you got both sides of it figured out now.

So I'm borrowing my money at 10 or 15 years, at 8% and then I'm selling the house. You know, let's do a scenario. I buy the house for 50, I borrowed from the private lender 8%, 15 years. Okay. The lender knows I'm going to wrap. He's given Me permission to wrap in the deal. He also knows it's non recourse collateral only. Banks love me. I'm so bankable it's not even funny because I don't have any recourse. I have lots of debt, but I don't have any recourse debt. So then I take this $50,000 purchase and I sell it for 100 grand. I sell it with 10% down and I'll carry the 90 grand at 10% for 30 years. So I'm paying out on 50 at 8% and I'm collecting on 190 at 10%. So you see, I'm making, I'm making 2% on my borrowed money. And if I have 26 million out, that's like I have a $26 million 2% CD.

Yeah.

And then I'm making the full 10% on the difference between the 50 and the 90. So there's 40,000 there. I'm making the full 10%. And I got paid 10 grand as a down payment to do this because I have zero of my own money in this. That $50,000 represents the whole house and the repairs and everything. I'm all in at what I borrow. I just never want to be all in over 65% of what I can own or finance the house for. So I get those things racked up. And to answer your question, no, I don't have 2,500 notes. A people pay me off whether I like it or not. Now my people are not inclined to go refinance. That's the problem with putting a balloon in with these people. The reason they're buying a house that you at 30 years at 10% interest from a seller finance is because they're flawed. They're inherently flawed. And if you think by putting in a balloon payment that they're somehow going to straighten themselves out, they're not. They're going to be flawed in five years too. They just can't seem to always make the car payment on time or whatever. And so I learned early on that expecting these people to change and to be able to refi, no matter how.

You work with them, setting yourself up.

For failure, well, you're setting yourself up for worse. Because if a person put a lot of money down, which should be a good deal in the beginning, like wow, this guy put down $25,000 on a $75,000 house. Way to go. Well, five years when he doesn't make the balloon, we're all in court and a judge going, you're going to take this man's $25,000 and five years worth of payments. And he put in grass, in a fence, in a back porch, in a pool. No. Now by the law, it should be my house. He can't do what he said. But the court hates you and they're going to rule against you. So I just started making straight seller finance notes.

And they can pay you off if they want to?

Yeah, they can pay off with no penalties against the law to have a penalty on a homestead, you know, anytime they want. So when you have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people paying you their mortgage payment, how I usually end up getting the call for a payoff is they need to move. They put the house up for sale with a realtor and the realtor finds a new loan buyer and. And now I'm getting a call for a payoff, which is a good day too. I prefer that all my houses go the full 30 years, but they never will and they never do. You know, very seldom I've been in 27 years, I have one person that's still making that original payment.

How about that? So these people, they have a hard time finding a place. They want to own it, they want to priorit ownership. How are you finding these people? Mitch, I know we talked a little bit before. You've had to solve a lot of problems in your time. How are you finding these people to buy the houses for you?

So how we sold houses was we had a salesperson and we put 20 bandit signs around each house in one sign in the front yard, you know, I'd have 15 houses for sale on any given weekend. So that's over 300 bandit signs. So my one sales guy's getting 150 phone calls to 200 phone calls a weekend. And half of them are tire kickers. And you know. Oh, I'm sorry. After you explain the whole thing. I'm sorry, I thought this was for rent or will you rent it? You know, I don't have a down payment. It's like, my gosh. So by one o' clock on Saturday, my salesman has quit. He's checked out, he's had enough. So I had to invent livecom l I v e c o m.com as in live communication, so that I could, you know. Livecom sells phone numbers. They're $2 apiece a month. And every phone number comes with a text distribution list. And they're smartphone numbers that we have today. Smartphone numbers capture the incoming caller cell phone number and puts it in the text distribution list. So no Matter what they're calling that line for, if they're calling from the cell phone, I'm snagging their phone number, and it's going in a text distribution list. So I can actually talk to these people later or tell them about the next house I have, or tell them that I've reduced the down payment on that house, or tell them I changed the price, or tell them that I text them back and say I've decided to remodel the house. You know, check me out in two weeks when I'm done. You know, I'm not selling it as is now. And so now, today, using that technology, we don't have to put out any signs. We don't even put out a sign in the front yard. And how that works is how do.

You get people calling in then?

Well, I had so many people calling during the period that I had signs that I worked myself out of having to have them. So in San Antonio, Texas, population 2.5 million people, I have 10,000 people that have called my owner finance signs that refuse to get off my list. I'll send them a text, like, once every six months saying, man, if you no longer want an owner finance house, reply to this message right now with the word stop, and I'll quit sending you this stuff. And I have 10,000 people that won't leave. So. And I can text them all using Livecom for 2 cents apiece. What I've learned is I only need to text 3000 to sell my house. And how I learned that was livecom has a hello button for every phone number. If you choose to turn on the hello button whenever they finish a call listening to the recording about that house that says everything and, by the way, answers at 6 in the morning or 12 at night. This recording answers and delivers a perfect set of information. The salesman never could do that, never could deliver even one house the perfect amount of data. You know, all correct. So they call the number. I have the livecom number forwarded to a recording within Livecom. Make the recording, they're calling. They're getting all the information. I'm capturing their phone number. And then when they hang up, if I have this hello button turned on, they're getting a text right after they hang up that says to keep up with my inventory and be notified every time I have a new house come for sale. Go to my Facebook page. On my Facebook page, I'm posting all the pictures of my houses. This you know how much it takes to buy them. And I'm training my people how to buy my houses. You will. If you're serious, you will give me a $2,000 non refundable check that goes towards your down payment. It's non refundable. If you're approved, it is refundable 100% if you're disapproved. But I'm not moving until I have 2000. I also need paycheck stubs. I need to conform with Dodd Frank. You need to give me this stuff. And I saw I'm training them so that when my salesman now goes to show a house, and early on, we don't do this now, we don't have to. But early on, when he was going to show a house at 6 o', clock, he would send out a text message to three or four or five thousand people saying, I'm going to be at 123 Main street with the doors open, showing this house if you want to come look at it. He'd go to show one person the house and there'd be 10 people in the front yard.

Oh, it's great for sales too, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So. So he showed the house. But now what we did was to limit the calls, was we told him everything about the house, but then we didn't even give him a phone number to contact us. Then we said, if you think this is the house for you and your family, this is what you do. You load up your family in the family car and you drive to 1 through 3 Main Street. You get out, you walk around the front yard, you walk around the backyard, you look through the windows, you check out the neighborhood. And if this is still the house you think for you and your family, and you definitely have 15,000 or more down or whatever the number is, then call the red phone number in the back window. So 200 phone calls that weekend went down to eight. And my two sales guys are fighting over them. And these people are winners. I mean, they vetted themselves. They've proven they really want a house. They can follow directions. They just rise to the cream of the crop. But I still have all the phone numbers of all the people that still are interested.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Mitch, your story has been entertaining and educational for all this. For people that want to learn more, how to get your books, if they can work with you. Livecom, all these tools that you talked about today, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you.

Man, just go to 1000houses.com, 1000houses.com over there. I just did my 500th podcast interview. You can See my podcast, I just finished nine months of a 10 minute segment. Every working day I have 180 segments over there, 10 minutes long. If you're interested in the business, if you want coaching or training, it's all over there. If you want to find my books, they're all over there. About to come up with my fifth and sixth book here shortly. And if you're remotely at all interested in how I quit smoking and drinking and lost £50 and picked up an extra 40 hours a week that I was spending wasting my time, how I made that personal transformation without a doctor, without a therapist, without a patch. I quit smoking and drinking on the same day two years ago. I'm not pushing it on anybody. I'm not preaching it, but so many people wanted to know about it and how to do it. I'm giving away a free copy of that book. It's like 80 pages. I just explained my thought process and what I went through to do it. It's 1000houses.com. Enough. All lowercase.

I love it.

We're had enough of my addictions and stuff. And so if you want that free, I'm not selling that. I'm doing that to try to help mankind. If it helps anybody, I'm happy.

Mitch, that's awesome. And you know, it really is amazing. There's everybody, my coaching clients, there's so many people that are high performers, still struggle with a lot of these things. I know a lot of them personally and it really means a lot that you're offering that to our audience. So again, that's 1000houses.com enough. We're going to link that in the show notes as well. And Mitch, I really appreciate all the time you spent with us today, sharing your story with the audience and providing all the value you have.

Thank you so much, Chris. It's always a pleasure to be around you. That's one of the reasons I like doing podcasts and one of the reasons I like being on people's podcasts is I get to meet and to talk to some pretty damn sharp people and you're one of them. So I appreciate you very much.

Thank you, sir. Feelings mutual. Have a great afternoon. Bye bye. 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.