How We Built 6 Companies with Real Estate (Copy Our Strategy)

We'd write with a Sharpie on a piece of paper, you know, hey, we're looking to buy a couple houses in this neighborhood. And then you photocopy that on this bright colored paper and you put it on houses in the morning. And so we would get up and we would walk neighborhoods. It was Texas, so we would do it in the morning, and we did the work. We drove to a neighborhood, spent two, three hours putting flyers on people's doors. And she would talk to people. I would avoid them like the plague. And. But that's how we got started. You know, there were. Sometimes we would get back to the car and we'd already have a couple voicemails. Well, we were musicians, and musicians have a lot of free time. And so we were working with the art auctioneers on board. And then Danielle found out how much art auctioneers make, which was exponentially greater than what musicians made on the cruise ship. Yep. And so next thing I know, my cabin door gets thrown open and says, you're going to be an art auctioneer. And so it was about maybe four months later we got off the cruise ship as musicians, and like two weeks after that, we got back on a cruise ship as art auctioneers. This was all fine and dandy until 2008, when the real estate crash happened. And it was hard to sell artwork to people that were losing their houses. And we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do next. And we were both drawn to real estate and we really wanted to do it. And what's the first thing most people do? Not everybody, but most people, when they want to get into real estate, they go and get their real estate license. That's right. And so we've studied and got our realtor's license, and we got our license September of 2008. And if you know the time frame. Yeah, the timeframe of that. That's. It's called. That's like being a bad comic. It's all about timing. And. And so we got our license, and it took us eight months to do one deal as realtors. And we're like, okay, this isn't fun. You know, when we started living on land, that Nestle started to dwindle. And then when it took eight months to do one deal as realtors, that was really digging our savings. When we went into the real estate investing, we're like, okay, how can we do this? But let's keep it on a shoestring budget. Let's try to not use as much money, because a lot of the strategies were no money from us. And so the story about doing the multicolored paper, we'd write with a Sharpie on a piece of paper, you know, hey, we're looking to buy a couple houses in this neighborhood. And then you photocopy that on this bright colored paper and you put it on houses in the morning. And so we would get up and we would walk neighborhoods. It was Texas, so we would do it in the morning, and we did the work. We drove to a neighborhood, spent two, three hours putting flyers on people's doors. And she would talk to people. I would avoid them like the plague.

And.

But that's how we got started. You know, there were. Sometimes we would get back to the car and we'd already have a couple voicemails. And so we knew that back then that's. This is what we want to do, because we loved it. It wasn't work. It was, yay, I get to put fires on houses today.

It really was fun.

Yeah, it was fun. Oddly enough. Yep, it was fun.

Yeah. So I like that you really did the start. Right. That was kind of the. That got us started. And the key for us is that we did hire a mentor so that we could skip the learning curve. Right. And in that market, that was more critical than ever to understand the market and which strategies were going to work. So we were successful doing that. We also teamed up with people in that. There was like five of us that were doing it together. And that's another theme of our life and our freedom journey, is that we've always believed in having a team around us for accountability purposes and just simply to have more fun. So from doing those types of deals, then we're in Texas for that. Right. And so is Arizona, our next trip.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we were in Texas and we were doing multiple ways, real estate investing. And then your mom got sick and was in the hospital. And so ICU, you know, we had lived in Texas for 10 years at that point. Yeah, we're like, it's. I think it's time. And so we. We loaded up the truck and moved to Arizona, just north. Just north of Phoenix. And so we got there. But all of the strategies that we were doing in Texas, it wasn't as amenable to do them in Arizona. You know, we could. It was just not as easy. But wholesale properties were. You could throw a rock and hit a wholesale house in Phoenix. And so that was a strategy that we focused on while we were in Arizona. And we got that down really, really well. I put a lot of Miles on the car because I was driving for dollars every day. But that's how we found our.

Yeah. So the landlord, about six months or eight months into us living there, they got foreclosed on or they were getting foreclosed on.

Yeah.

Getting ready.

Yeah.

They asked us if we could move so they could move back into there.

Yeah. I think it was the phone conversation went, so do you need 30 days or 60 days to move out of the house?

So I'm gonna go into why saying that. This little part of the story, I feel like is important because at that point in time, we were like, okay, what do we do? We pack up this big. It was a really beautiful, nice, big house that we were in, and we pack up this, you know, big house and then moved, you know, somewhere else within Arizona, or, hey, working with this guy in Ohio, and we're actually doing really good things.

And he kept saying, if you lived in Ohio, we could do more deals.

Exactly. So suddenly we're like, maybe we should move to Ohio. Flips was born in Napoleon, Ohio. So he was just like, hey, it's moving back home. To me, essentially. I had never lived somewhere where it frequently snowed, so it kind of felt a little exciting. And ultimately we decided to move. So that's our story. And the reason I tell you this part of the story, and you're going to hear it frequently as we get. As we continue sharing our freed journey, is that everything happens for a reason. And Flip likes to say, you can never tell good from bad. So having that phone call and just be like, what, like you want us to move? We just got here. Like, we've only been here eight months. That at the time, I bet I can't even remember the feeling, but I bet it felt horrible. In 2017, we form Freedom real estate Group, which is our very first company of our Freedom family of company. We hired our first admin who worked out of our house, and then we ended up getting an office, and we ended up hiring a salesperson I think was a very first person sales and marketing person. And then we hired a transaction coordinator. That was our third hire. Right. And then it didn't take but six months for us to be knocking down an office wall because we were growing so fast. Freedom real estate group was a turnkey marketing company, and we were buying houses, rehabbing houses. We were going to tenant the houses, but we were outsourcing everything but the marketing piece. We were building our audience. We're getting to know the buyers who wanted a product like this. And we were Selling them that product. But we outsourced renovations. We outsourced property management. We outsourced acquisitions to the wholesalers that were bringing us deals. We were losing customers because our property management, we had outsourced it to, like, five different people. But prior to that, we were struggling just getting started because the contractors were just, quite frankly, ripping us off. They were doing a bad job.

Nice way to put it.

Yeah, they were doing a bad job. They would take pictures of things that were finished, but it was like, take a corner of a painted wall and go, look. You know, the room's painted. And if you actually went there and walked there in person, you realize the whole entire rest of the room is not painted. And you're paying somebody for doing a job that's only partly done. Or they take pictures of different houses that aren't even yours. And you don't know because you don't have time to be on site all the time to watch them.

Yep.

So the very first company that we bring in house, not expecting to build this company was a renovation company. It was called Bulldog Renovations when we first pulled it in. And we hired a project manager to be able to be accountable to us, to be on our side. You go to visit the house, make sure that are actually in the house, make sure they're actually doing the work, walk the property before we pay them. Let's make sure that we don't lose these companies before we've even gotten started. So that was the first company that we brought in, and it was out of necessity. And then the second one that we brought in, which was actually our third company, was property management, because we outsourced it to five different property management companies. And there was just mismanagement on all levels. Since we brought property management in house, we went ahead and built a brokerage because that you have to have a broker to have a property management company. So having a retail arm of that, where you can have agents in there that are buying and listing properties, that meant that every time we bought a property that was a retail flip, not selling to an investor, actually selling to an owner occupant, we could go ahead and list it through our brokerage and keep all the money in house. So that was company number four. That wasn't built out of necessity. It was just built because we had to build the property management company anyway.

Might as well.

And then the fifth one I'm going to let flip tell you about, because he was in charge of acquisitions.

Yeah. So. So I was the acquisition department.

Yes.

And so I was Responsible to get all the properties in every week. And I was constantly bombarded with Danny and or Tiffany saying, we need more properties. And there was this one time when they said they needed more properties. And I reached out to all my contacts, which were wholesalers, because that's typically where we got their properties from, and nobody had any deals. And that's when we went, oh, we need to. This is bad. And so it was. It was. That was bad news. That was when we realized we need our own acquisitions to find department. And so that's when we created Cash for Ohio Houses again out of necessity. And that one's been a slow struggle, but it's finally getting into its stride now. Yep. And it's, you know, so that way we're in control of our acquisitions. You know, we. We can control everything that's coming in now. We still. We still deal with wholesalers. We, you know, we buy a lot of properties still from wholesalers, just not as much, and we have more control.

Yeah. That was the day we went. If we didn't think we achieved freedom at this point, because it really felt like we had five more jobs with five other companies. If we didn't think that we are on the road to freedom or have achieved it, that was the day we went, boom, we did it. And we were so excited. The team was excited. We fell in love with multifamily because the economies of scale, we were able to reduce the cost. That $800,000 budget, the cost got reduced largely because our contractors were willing to do the work for less because they could buy in bulk and they could put all the materials on site. They weren't having to drive to Home Depot and Lowe's every single day. It was just a wonderful, terrifying experience for our very first deal. But that really was the culmination, I think, of our freedom journey. And it what launched company number six, and we said, hey, we want to do more of this. We are going to intentionally build this company. And it's a fund management and syndication company. That's where we are. We had hired a CEO even as we built that company in number six to run companies one through five so that we could, you know, just make sure that these companies are taken care of while we built the new one. And really, that's where we were. It was truly a win win. And we said, this is it. All of the hard work was for this day for us to see that this come true. And so we wanted to share the journey.

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