How we started in Real Estate, Co-Founded 5 companies! | REIal Talk Podcast Ep. 1

Hi, everybody. Hey, Flip and Danny here from Freedom Real Estate Group, family of companies. And we'd like to welcome you to our very first, first ever, ever podcast. And our podcast is called Real Talk. And you'll have to look back at our little title page to see how we spelled that, but it is our Real Talk. And this is essentially the goal of our podcast is just to give you a little insider look into what we're doing over here. We do have a few companies over here just in the last year. A few. Just in the last few years. And so this podcast really is just to take what we were doing on the, on the vlogs and expand more and give you more information about that and then give you little snippets. This is going to be, again, more high level, valuable content. More so than just the brush the top of the topic, like we're doing on all of our vlogs.

Yeah, so he nailed it. We wanted to mirror our vlogs. So you're going to see some commonalities between what we talk about in that three to five minute vlog. @ least that's what we're intending it to be. Sometimes it ends up to be 10 minutes. But you're going to see some of those talk topics, get that high level overview that he just mentioned, and then we're gonna dig in, and we're gonna dig in a lot deeper into these topics during the podcast. The podcasts are intended to be somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the topic. Whenever we get Randy in here, just plan for 40 minutes or 60. He's got so much wisdom in that brain of his that he's gonna pour it out and give you just tons and tons of value. I learn every time that we sit down. But that's the idea and the goal. Also, it's meant to be laid back. Flip and I were talking about yesterday. He's like, can I wear shorts? Did you end up wearing shorts?

Yeah, wear shorts. 70 degrees outside, come on.

You can wear shorts, you can wear a T shirt. We don't care. Hats, whatever. We're very, very relaxed. In fact, I kept my jacket. Usually when we're in this room, I put my jacket way over there so it can just be a little bit more professional. But honestly, who we are is just who we are, and we like it and we want this to be as real as possible. So if I get cold, I'm grabbing my jacket. Hope everybody's cool with that. And every now and then you might even be in flip flops because the weather's warming up. That is the idea and goal of this podcast. So we have our iPad here. Sometimes we actually will script something out. It's a lot easier for vlogs that way because he and I can go on and on and on. Especially me. I'll ramble and I'll go 10 different directions before getting to the actual point. So we try and script those out because they're supposed to be shorter on these. We're just doing quick bullet points because we are just going to talk and we're going to share whatever comes to our top of mind. And for instance, I was on the phone with somebody recently talking to me about private money lending, and he shared a story with me, and I said, I'm gonna share this on the podcast. So that's the type of stuff that we're gonna do here. So we're gonna start by putting together maybe our first, like, four vlogs so we can get caught up, because we really kind of want to be. Hey, you saw this vlog. Next week we're gonna be talking about in this. In the podcast. You got a preview. Now we're gonna dive deep, so we need to play catch up a little bit, because I think we're on maybe 15ish on the blog.

16. Just finished 16.

All right, so we're gonna do about three or four vlogs in this podcast episode just to catch you up in case you've missed any of that. And we're starting with who and what is frag. And you're gonna hear us say frag a lot because it's the initials of Freedom Real Estate Group. And so we call ourselves the Frag Family, the Frag All Stars, the Frag Team, whatever. But it's our family of companies. And so I'm gonna give you a brief story about our family of companies here so that you're gon. And we'll dig in a little bit when we go through each one. So when we first started Freedom Real Estate Group, we've been investing since 2008. And actually, in 2008, we got our license to be realtors. We hated it. So we went to the investing side very, very fast. Got a coach, learned 12 different ways to buy and sell real estate. We've been investors ever since. We've invested in Texas, Arizona, here in Ohio. We've got properties in Michigan. Where else? Anyways, we partnered with an attorney at one point in time and started buying nationwide. So I can't even remember where all of our properties are at this point. In time, because we had so many people working with us. That was back when we were doing subject to and wraparound mortgages. So that tells you kind of the history of starting in 2008, where the investing strategy was completely and totally different to what we are doing now. We've done a little bit of everything because we've watched the market go from. From where it went from 2018 to where we are here in 2021. So there's lots of stuff there. So, anyways, I'm going to jump back into the frag. See, I told you tangents. I'm really good at them. So jumping back into frag, we say frag a lot. That's the Freedom Real Estate Group family of companies. The short end of it, to sum it up, so that he can take over and start talking about what we do, is that we started Freedom Real Estate Group here in Ohio because we wanted to start doing turnkey real estate. It was something that we were introduced to back in Arizona. We're actually working with somebody selling turnkey properties from Arizona, but they are properties here in Ohio. And we are like, we love passive income. That's why we did subject to and wraparound mortgages, because we loved passive income. So I was an owner finance freak. We were all about just building up the passive income once we learned turnkey real estate. Like, this is perfect. We want to do this, too. Let's move to Ohio. So we moved to Ohio, started Freedom Real Estate Group, essentially, and then expanded upon that. So we never really intended to have the six companies that we have today, but it happened. And we're about to tell you that story and kind of go into why it all happened and how it all happened. We intended to just have Freedom Real Estate Group and a renovation company to rehab our properties, but we didn't even think that was gonna be a separate company. But a few things happened, and we're gonna talk about that next.

Yeah. So just to expand a little bit on that, it was in 2015 when we were in Arizona. I was walking around in the backyard. Well, it was AstroTurf yard, but I was walking around in the backyard talking to someone in New Hampshire about a property in Ohio. And I'd never even been to this property. And. But that's when I quickly realized that didn't matter. But the other thing that we realized very quickly about turnkey, about doing turnkey properties, is that we can build up the relationship with the investor. So we talk to them once, figure out, we get to know what they want, who they Are. And then while they buy one and well, hey, I've got another one. Another one. And so it's repeat sales. And that's one of the things that we missed about real estate investing is just the onesies. And we didn't get to build up that relationship with the other investors because you only got. You only sold them one property or you only bought one property from them. And so we fell in love immediately. And so that's one also one of the main reasons why we jumped so heavy into turnkey. And then. So when we started doing turnkey real estate. So I'm going down to here, right?

Yes.

Okay. So we said we started doing turnkey and we're here in Ohio, and so we're doing the quickest and easiest marketing, and that's wholesalers. And so I just networked with a whole bunch of wholesalers and I was getting properties in and enough properties that it was feeding our pipeline. All of a sudden, I didn't have any deals and I contacted all the wholesalers and nobody had a thing. And that's when we went, we need an acquisitions company. We need to do it for ourselves.

Yes.

And so that's what we still deal with wholesalers. I just bought one this morning from a wholesaler. But we prefer to do our own marketing and to bring the properties in ourselves. And so that's when we created Cash for Ohio Houses. It was born almost two years ago now. And it's actually. It's had its ups and downs, but recently it is just cooking right along.

It is killing it right now. C4OH is one of mine. And so we're always going to say short initials, you know, Cash for Ohio houses. You'll hear C4OH. That's our quick way of. Because I'm simple and fast and so if I can shorten something. Not like now, going off on a tangent, but I'm explaining it to you. So in future episodes, when I say C4 oh, and hopefully, you know what I'm talking about. Sorry. Keep going.

So right now, C4 oh, they basically focus on the areas all around Dayton down into Cincinnati. That's our. That's our rice bowl. That's our area. That, that. Those are the. Because C4H's main, main goal is to bring in properties to fill the pipeline for Turnkey, for freedom. Real est for the turnkey properties. Now, there are times when frag is too full. They don't have any room for any more rehabs, and so we'll wholesale them. There's also times where we'll bring in a property that doesn't really fit the parameters that we need for our. For the turnkey properties. And so we'll just wholesale those too. So there's times where there's what I call leftovers, and those. Those go to.

I've never heard.

We put those out as wholesale deals to other investors and in this area. But our main focus for C4. Oh, is bringing in turnkey properties for Freedom Real Estate Group.

And you also do that for retail deals as well. Right, because we really want something. We want 250 and under is kind of our ideal little niche for retail flips.

So that's another part of the leftovers is when we get a property in and it has to fit the exact parameters for it to work for turnkey real estate. And sometimes it's the value, the ARV is just a little too high for it to really work. And so we'll go in and we'll do a full retail flip, and we'll put it on the mls.

Awesome. And those are just so, you know, properties that you can actually get from us. So if you're somebody that says, hey, I'll take a property as is, and then I'll renovate it, and I'll, you know, capture all the margins involved in that type of property. Certainly you can use our resources if you're out of state and you need our resources to do something like that. But what would they. They would just contact you?

Yeah, they would contact Mark.

Mark. Yeah, they would contact Mark.

We're gonna go. You're jumping ahead, but we're gonna get. We're gonna get into that.

You know what I'm gonna do? I'm moving my chair because this microphone is in the way, and I can't see it.

There you go. That's gonna move it forward. That's gonna move it forward.

Okay. This is better. All right. Anything else on C4?

Oh, I'm cool.

Okay, next topic is the next company. We kind of go in order. This Bulldog Renovations, our abbreviation for this is bdr. So if you ever hear us say BD or bdr, we're talking about our Bulldog Renovations Company. So this company was born because of Freedom Real Estate Group. So we truly intended to. To have a renovation company handling all of our rehabs. We needed it. We didn't intend this to be a company. So let me walk you through that. So we hired a project manager. When we started Freedom Real Estate Group so that they could run our rehabs, there was no way we were going to be able to build this company and run our rehabs at the same time, especially at the volume that we wanted to do. Because at this point in time, we'd been doing turnkey for quite a while and we were going to go big or go home. And so we needed somebody's help and expertise in that area. So. But Bulldog Renovations wasn't anything. The project manager was paid by Freedom Real Estate Group and they were hired by Freedom Freedom Real Estate Group to manage the rehabs for us as that happens. If you've ever been in the renovation business, you know that things happen in construction. There's bad contractors, there's issues, there's whatever. There's neighbors that call and say, Freedom Real Estate Group owns this property next to me and the contractors do it xxxx and we're like, crap. Well, that's not good. We need to go fix that. Because Freedom Real Estate Group is our main brand and company. The last thing we want is a contractor that we hired that is just not doing what they should be doing and is maybe the roofing. That might have been the thing. They were tearing off roofs and they didn't put tarp down, so everything was falling in the grass. I think that's what it was. We've had contractor stories that could be an entire podcast. The worst contractor stories ever. Anyway, something like that. So we had had that happen. And I said, hey, we are building this thing up and we're spending our blood, sweat and tears and money on this company. And we know the vision forward and the last thing that we want is contractors to ruin main brand name. So we wanted to create a renovation company that protected the liability. Who they were, the ones that were hiring the contractors. In that same step, if you guys are following along here, you'll notice I no longer want Freedom Real Estate Group even buying the properties because now they can go online, see who owns the property, and we're still getting tagged. So Freedom Real Estate Group no longer hires the contractors. Freedom Real Estate Group no longer buys the properties. We created two different entities and didn't need to do this. And I found that out by an attorney later, but that's beside the point. We created two different entities, three in total. Bulldog Renovations. They're the ones that hire the project manager. They're the ones that hire the contractors. They're the ones that pay the contractors. Then we created two different entities. One that would buy all of our turnkey properties for Freedom to sell. One that would buy our retail flips. Part of that was I just wanted the separation. I'M a little bit of a left brainer, a lot of a left brain. And I tend to overthink everything all the time. I'm getting better at that. That's why I'm fast and simple these days, is because I don't want to overthink and keep on making those mistakes. But we did create those separate entities. It did help the team because every time one of our entities bought one thing, they knew it was a retail flip versus the other entity that knew it was a turnkey property. But ultimately, because we're not holding deals, we actually are holding deals in our turnkey entity now. But at the time, we weren't. It could have just all been flowing through the same entity. But that's. See tangent. You're welcome. Anyway, so Bulldog Renovations. So that's Bulldog Renovations, how it was created, why it was created. And then the story that, you know, we've kind of gone through as six companies has ultimately emerged today in 2021. The thing that we're doing now that I wrote down is Bulldog Renovations is a cost to Freedom Real Estate Group. So Freedom Real Estate Group has to cover the overhead for that entity, because Bulldog Renovations isn't necessarily making their own money. They're only doing renovations for Freedom Real Estate Group to be able to serve what we're doing in Freedom Real Estate Group, which is providing turnkey properties and retail properties, retail flips. So we are watching our overhead expand and expand. And ultimately, as we've continued to grow and as we've continued to sit down with Randy, who's our cpa, CFO and everything else, we're always going, how are we better? How do we become better? How do we become more profitable? How do we cover the costs that are being incurred over here by this other entity? Because they're not doing things that are really meant to be profitable. They're serving one of our other entities. And we do pay them for project management and all the things that we have to do in order for them to be able to cover their overhead. But again, they're not doing enough to actually be a sustainable business all on their own. So we launched in 2021 external rehabs and roofing. And so those two things, external rehabs means Bulldog Renovations is now doing renovations for our clients. Sometimes when a renovation is needed, they now serve our property management company when a renovation is needed. They also serve local investors when a renovation is needed. And then we launched a roofing division because we do roofing anyway. So now we're outsourcing that as well. We're doing metal roofs, fiberglass roofs, shingle roofs. And that is all really. We've done a little bit of both in 2020. We're launching it officially and big here in 2021. We've also tested out in House crews. That will be a later. I threw it in here as a bullet point because we've done a lot in the renovation company. And many of the people here that are going to be listening to this podcast are other investors that we know. And we'll talk about things that you guys are going, should I do this? And we can tell you our story and you can determine whether you should do it or not, because you'll hear our mistakes and what we learned. So that'll be a future episode of in House Crew versus hiring GCs to do the work. I'm Dennis Bulldog.

So back to frag, Back to Freedom. Now, Freedom Real Estate Group, that's what I call the mothership, and that's the umbrella over all of the other companies. That's what's above the front door when you walk in. That's, you know, everything's frag, first and foremost. But regarding Freedom Real Estate Group and our turnkey sales, we do have a few different options there she was talk, she talked about it earlier. Number one is the turnkey option. Now, these properties are done. These properties will have a tenant in them when you close or will have a tenant very shortly after you close. These are, these properties are finished. These properties are done. They're not done to retail grade on the property, but they're done way above rental grade. And so, in fact, some of our properties could sell retail in that neighborhood because of the level of our rehabs that we do for our turnkey properties. The other kinds of properties that we do have available now, one's called the I.C.F. again, more initials. Right. I swear, this is the military. So that's the instant cash flow. So now this series. This is because a lot of the properties that we buy already have tenants in them. And I would say about 70% of the time that the, the rent that they're paying is not market rent. It's way low. And so typically on those kind of properties, we work with the tenant, try to move the tenant out so that way we can fully rehab the property and then put a new tenant in that property at market rent for the investor. But there are those times where we get a property and it's, it's not only at market rent or it's above market rent. We're like, oh, let's not kick this guy out, you know, let's keep them in. And so we can sell that as an instant cash flow series property. Then the last option that we have is the ic and that stands for.

I don't know, instant Cash flow.

No, that's icf.

Investor Cash Flow.

Investor choice is what?

Investor Choice. I'm not the sales guy.

A lot of you guys, you might know it as the BRRRR Method. This is a property that we just bought. Our renovations team hasn't gotten to it yet. So we can sell it to you as we bought it, which nine times out of 10, not very good condition, but you can buy it like that. And then you can hire our renovations company, Bulldog Renovations, to go in there and do the renovations. But you would be getting it at the very low cost. And that, you know, we'll put a little bit of money in there for us, but you get it at the lower cost. And then you can hire our renovations company and you can go from there. But that's the BRRR Method. And so we call the ic, which.

Stands for Investor's Choice.

Investor's Choice.

Look, I learned fast.

There you go. But again, Freedom Real Estate Group, that's the mothership that's over everything. And that's why we call ourselves the Frag Team. The Frag family.

Yes. Frag Family. All right. Okay. So we're at. You've done to frag. We're at ipm. Okay. So IPM stands for Independence Property Management. Not to be confused with irg. He's going to talk about that next. We'll get there. But they both have independence for a reason. He'll explain that when we get to the IRG section. So IPM is our property management company. Why did we start ipm? We actually go ahead.

Because we needed it.

We actually did intend to always create a property management company. We were not going to create a property management company, I think until this year. Right. Was it 2020 or 2021? Do you remember?

21.

Okay. So we were waiting because building this many companies, it's all kind of happened, as you've seen. By necessity, we were required to create another entity and another entity and another entity because something happened that we lost control over our own business because something was out of our control that we couldn't fix. That's why C4OH was started. Right. That's why Bulldog Renovations was started and two other entities to buy properties because something was. We needed to control a piece of. To make sure that our family of companies was successful. IPM, or property Management company is no different. We had tested out five different property management companies in this local area.

Seemed like 10.

Property mismanagement, financial mismanagement, communication issues, complaints galore. And the frustrating thing for us is that we are very transparent about everything that we do. We are very transparent that nobody's perfect, including us. Everybody makes mistakes. That's okay. Please just fix them and be honest about, I screwed up, I'm going to fix this. And that's what we do. And that's why so many people do like working with us. Because we're not going to hide behind a curtain and pretend it didn't happen. We're going to say crap. And the language might get worse. If you're talking to me, we screwed up, we're going to fix it. So we're going to talk you through how we're going to fix it. I hope you'll be patient with us and work with us while we figure this out. And I apologize and it is okay if they say, hey, we want to move on to another company. We screwed up. That's, that's what, that's how business works. So our problem with these companies is that they weren't like us. They didn't think they had a problem. They weren't willing to fix the problem. There was one company we ultimately filed 11 different real estate division complaints against, went to their broker. It was a mess because they refused. They had clients writing them, clients writing letters. Our attorney was writing them. They just wouldn't change anything. So IPM was born. We said, forget it, we're bringing it all in house. Because we might not be perfect, but at the very least we care. We care about our clients, we care about our own personal properties. And we are going to do our best to jump in when we screw up and fix it. And we're going to figure it out and we're going to get to where we need to be. Because at the very least, if you have a problem, our client, then we can jump in and try and fix it as opposed to it being stuck and we can't do anything because we're out. We don't have the control of the other companies. So that's why Independence Property management was born. And I talked about that. I talked about that. So the, the interesting thing that we've learned about property management is that it's like a three prong approach of clients that you have to serve and serve really, really well in order to be successful. One, you have to serve your owners well. You also have to serve your residents well. And we use that term on purpose. These are not tenants to us. They are residents because that relationship is important to us. The relationship of us communicating well, serving them well, doing, like, all kinds of cool things that we've got in our, like, kind of. We have this raving fans approach to everything that we do company wide. We're not there yet, but we try so super hard and we're going to get there. We now have a wow department in our marketing division that is again, trying to aggressively get us to the point where we're building raving fans in every aspect of the business. Residents are no different. We want to serve them. They are your resident, they pay your rent, and we want to make sure that they're paying it, that they're staying in the property for as long as possible and you're not losing money through vacancy issues or the fact that we don't get there fast for maintenance. Like, there's so many things that we want to show in our business that rewards them as well as our owners. And then the last one is vendors in property management. It's tough and it can be tough. And I just had a huge discussion on Facebook about this issue of sometimes there's a process of getting funds in. In order to pay a vendor. The last thing you want is a vendor going, hey, I need to get paid. Because they, they have to pay their bills and they just pay for materials and, you know, their time and everything. And so we wanted to get on a weekly pay schedule just like we do for our renovation company, so that they're never waiting for funds. So we actually identified a solution because we're like, this is our third alarm of this company. We have to serve owners, residents and our vendors. Because if we don't serve our vendors and we're not paying them time timely because we're waiting on owners to be to send over funds, we're losing our vendors as a result. And then what does that do for anybody? It hurts our residents, hurts our owners, hurts us because we lose great relationships. So it's a three prong approach. It's not an easy business to be in, but we are getting better and better and better. And I would say this is why I brought my phone. I don't usually take my phone to things like a podcast because as you saw probably earlier, I turned it over because it keeps flashing at me that somebody's texting. So just got this today before this, and it wasn't timed for any reason. Chris, our property manager, just said, hey, I wanted to show you this because I hadn't seen says in our good news Slack channel, Happy Tuesday. Fastest property to get rented after turns. And it has the address, which I won't actually say in the podcast. And then it says, Chris wrote, vacated 319, back on the market, 325, rented 3:30, move in 4. One owner got full deposit back and an extra month's rent. Lost zero dollars due to vacancy.

That's awesome.

Isn't that awesome? That's why I brought my phone. I just had to share it when I was talking about ipm. All right, you're next.

All right, so the next one is IRG or initials, which. This one stands for Independence Realty Group. Now, when we started the property management company, we realized that we had to create a brokerage for that property management company. So that involved a real estate broker. So we had a real estate broker to come in. We created our own brokerage called Independence Property Management. We also realized, well, you know what? I think we're missing items here because I'm licensed here in the state of Ohio. And we also had a couple other people in the office that were also Realtors. And so we said, hey, you know what? All those retail deals that we're getting, stop feeding those out to other realtors. Let's create a brokerage here in house because we can use the same broker. And let's create a retail brokerage so that way we can sell our retail properties as well as any other listings that happen to come through. Because we're constantly getting leads into cash for our houses. And we say, okay, what's your house worth? It's worth 200. Really? Okay. And how much do you want? 220. Okay, well, let's put, let's, you know, if you. It is, if you're willing to list it with us, we'll. We'll put it on the MLS for you and we'll be your listing agent. And so we have that happen a lot. And so, so that's when IRG was born, Independence Realty Group. And now we have a few agents in there. And also it's. It's bringing in some additional revenue. It's not our revenue, you know, generator. It's not anything that we're, you know, going to be celebrating, but it does enough that. To make. But make do.

Yes. Yeah. It's already, from start, profitable company.

Yes.

And great splits for the agents that we're working with. And this is one that wasn't built out of necessity. Right. We actually did it. We Built the brokerage already and that was so much work. Why not, like you said, stop paying other agents and other brokers to list our properties? Why not keep it in house so that our company can pay another one of our companies to list a property and we can build agents and do different things because we have that extra thing? So that was convenience.

It was the first one that actually started as a bonus and not out of necessity.

Yeah. And we're not really intending to, you know, make that one huge now if it happens to be huge because somebody comes in and runs it and makes it huge because I don't want that job. We have enough on our plate. But that's great. We are attracting organically more agents because we're not advertising for it, but organically, they meet us and say, talk to us about it. We let them know, hey, you got to be experienced because we're not going to babysit you here. We've got too much going on. So our broker does the babysitting, not us. Okay. Anything else on irg?

That's it.

All right, so last one. This is also one that was not built out of necessity. The opportunity came my way by talking to somebody that I know and I jumped on it because we have been excited about getting into apartment investing and storage investing for a very long time. If you followed our vlogs, you know that we recently closed on a 56 unit apartment complex in October of 2020. It was a necessity. There's so many things that we do because we say we can do it, we can, we can do anything that we put our mind to. I truly believe that it does limit our capacity and ability to do it all really super great. Like I want to, because we're juggling so much. But when you got to do what you got to do to ensure the rest of your family of company survives, you figure it out. Right? So this 56 unit apartment complex we ended up buying because we were intending to wholesale it in order to buy 15 other properties that were 12 single family, three duplexes. And the buyer just kept on dragging, dragging, dragging. And oh, the lender backed out and what, you know, okay, okay. And we really, the seller wouldn't let us close on the 15 properties until the whole package closed. So we're waiting, wait and wait. And finally he comes down, he's like, all right, so I think I'm gonna be able to close here soon, but I want it at your cost. And so I was just like, if we're, if, if we're not gonna actually Win by making some money. Why don't we just buy this ourselves? We actually know that it's a good deal. We know that it was acceptable at the price that we were selling it to them for. They've dragged us along this entire time, and we've got 15 properties that we would like to have already rehabbed and sold at this point in time. So we're just. We don't deal with people like that, and it's somebody that we won't work with again because don't drag us, you know, along on this road and then suddenly feel like, I've got power and control over you because I know you want to close on these other deals. Give it to me at cost. No, we're just. We're gonna figure it out. And we did. So we ended up buying the apartments because at some point in time, we just lost faith in them. Right. When people do things like that, I don't know if he really, truly had the financing. In fact, I asked the transaction coordinator, right, to say, hey, do you even have faith this can close? If we wanted to go ahead and give this deal away, could he close? It's just like, I have no idea at this point. No idea. No updates from the lenders. And that's just a red flag on top of other red flags. So we cut relationships like that. That just goes to say, again, we got into the apartment game a year earlier, Actually quite a few years. I mean, I was gonna wait a little bit before putting apartments on top of everybody. Okay. But we. We went into it anyway, and I loved it. I love it. We are doing so well in terms of renovations on those properties. We've just been fast, fast, fast, fast in terms of getting the people out. The story about the drug dealers, the homeless activity, like, there's. This is one of those nightmare deals that you would never, ever want to be in for your first apartment complex. But we're just the type of people that says, hey, this is what's facing me. I've got to figure it out. I can't whine about it, can't complain about it. I just have to figure it out, find a solution. And fortunately, we have a great network between our mastermind and local investors here that we meet up with all the time. We've got great people and great resources that we can tap into to answer questions. So it's turning out to be, you know, pretty great. We're going to refinance within a year and have all 56 units rehabbed. Like, that's just unheard of. When somebody said, you're crazy, I went, I kind of knew that already, but am I really crazy? Was that stupid for me to think I could do it? But we're doing it. It's because we're moving fast and just staying on top of everything. So, anyways, that goes to the sixth company. It's Freedom Capital Group. It's F. C.G. i'm still getting used to those letters because this is such a new company. It just was. Literally, it's being born right now. The LLC is being created right now. That's how new this, this company is. It's a company that is going to do apartments and storage investing, it's going to do syndications. Right now we're working on a 384 unit complex in Florida, Daytona Beach, Florida, that we're going to be buying. We're raising 12.2, $11.2 million for it. It's a fantastic, fantastic deal. It's the first syndication that we're doing and we're doing it because I'm aligned with really, really amazing people. I also have so many private money lender relationships that I can for our Personal Freedom Real Estate Group portfolio, I can't use all the money at my fingertips. So this was the perfect opportunity to help my private lenders be able to use every single dollar that they say they have available. I now have a way between syndications and our own private lending for our own deals and our own apartment and investing. I can now use all the money. In fact, I'm constantly going, tiffany, how are we? Do I Do I need to talk to more people and raise some more money so that we can do everything that we're doing? And the advantage that it's brought our investors is the diversification. Because I've had a lot of investors who said, I'm in 30 syndications already, I want to diversify. Can I be a private money lender with you, work with you on apartments, or just be a lender on your single family and multifamily? So the opportunities that we're bringing everybody, even our turkey key investors, they'll get on with me. I just bought a turnkey property with you. In fact, I'm going to be talking about that in just a second and I'd like to talk about private money lending because as I listen to you on another podcast, I realized that I'm going to be able to save money faster if I do private money lending with you in between buying my properties. So there's so many opportunities that we've been able to bring the people that we work with, whether it be local investors or clients of ours, that that's why this was born. I thought this is just another opportunity. It got us into something that we wanted to do anyway. So I wrote for notes. Diversification for our investors. That's a big thing I hear about all the time. Thank you. Because I can do so many things with you guys. Tax free wealth. That's going to be the syndication type stuff because you're not a lender for us, that's a different program. You're actually an investor who owns shares of the company that owns the apartment. So totally different investment opportunity. That's why people say diversification to me all the time. Because they're in that type of investment now. They want to, to hold debt. They want to be a private lender and be in this type of investment. So that, and then it's longer term. Syndications are usually five to seven years at least the ones that I've been involved with. And I think I hit everything there. So we'll dive into some of that stuff because one of our vlogs was about the syndication. So we're going to do a podcast that dives deep into all the benefits of a syndication and also the differences of the other opportunities that people do and why they diversify across all of them. So that is our brand new baby Freedom Capital Group company number six. Bam.

So obviously you hear us starting more and more and more companies. It was just a little over three and a half years ago. That was when Danny and I were both working for each other out of our house. And then we decided to hire our first employee. And actually she started three weeks before we got our very first office. And then we got into that office and it was a 5,000 square foot office, but it was too big. And so we got rid of 2000 square feet only to a month later actually need the 2000 square feet.

We literally built a wall.

We built a wall because the owner wanted us to build a wall. So we built a wall, closed off 2,000 square feet. The wall was built a month later, tear down that wall, took the wall down.

There was a video about that, right? With you and a hammer. That's funny.

Yeah. So anyway, so then we were, we filled the 5,000 square feet and we were, we did a three year lease. But by the end of that three year lease we had people sitting in the hallways, we two people in offices. So we needed to get a bigger office. So. And then I'm sure you've seen the video in December of us showing off this new office that we got. Vlog number one. Vlog number one, absolutely. Yeah. And we walked you through the office. It's. It's just a little over 15,000 square feet. About 3,000 square feet of that is a. What we call a warehouse space. But there's plenty more offices, cubicles, plenty more larger rooms for training events, and just a better. Just a whole better atmosphere for. For the company. And everyone just loves it.

Yeah.

So that's the expansion. I already know where this. We have this place for five years, so I already know what we're doing in five years.

And so, I mean, you even built this podcast.

Yeah, yeah, we built this room because. Just for. It's a video room for recordings. But yeah, this. This is a benefit of having this many offices. We can make one office just. Just for recordings.

Yeah, for sure. Love it. Okay. Oh, why Dayton? You want to start this one? You want me to Go ahead.

Yeah. People always ask us, why are. Why are we in Dayton, Ohio? Not very many people go to Dayton for a purpose, I'll be honest. But when we realized, like I said, I was standing in the backyard in Phoenix, Arizona, talking to somebody in New Hampshire about properties in Dayton, Ohio, and I could not believe the prices of these houses. And I was just. And. And that's why people want to buy here, because the prices are so low, the cap rates are so high, the cash on cash is great, and so it's a great area. You're going to get more bang for your buck here than you can anywhere else. I mean, the neighborhood we lived in, in Phoenix, one house there equals about six houses here. And so it's just absolutely amazing. And so that's why we loaded up the truck, moved to Beverly, and we came to. We got here to Dayton, and it's been great ever since. We've been here now. Since 2015. Yeah. So going on six years now. And, you know, one of the things that we always talk about. We'll end the. The podcast with this, our little catchphrase. But it's. It's. You don't have to be where you're investing. We've got you covered. We've got the property management, we've got the rehab team. We've got everything right here for you. You just need to sit back and. And cash your checks.

That's right. And so he hit the highlights. We actually did a vlog that was probably 8 minutes. Ish of the top reasons why the binding. We went through a bunch of reasons. But when we were talking about this podcast, I was like, let's just hit on the one that we all talk about, the one that we talk about all the time and truly why people invest here in the Midwest with us. So thank you for throwing that in. So before we close, I might do this every time, I might not, but we're gonna do it this first time for sure. I love talking to investors. My primary reason why I'm ever gonna get on the phone is because you're wanting to get involved in a syndication or you're wanting to become a private money lender. I don't let anybody else or, yeah, I don't let anybody else talk to you. If you want a syndication or if you want to be a private money lender, you're gonna talk to me and me only specifically. That started because private money lending relationships, they're trust based. They're the most important relationships that we have. They are the reason why we've grown as big as we are, because we have these relationships that allowed us to do as much as we're doing right now. We did not start off with enough capital to do what we are doing here today. So I needed those relationships and I built those relationships and I've never, ever damaged those relationships, ever. Never paid anybody less than what they're owed, never. Just didn't pay, never didn't pay on time, never got foreclosed on. Like, these relationships are gold to me. So you talk to me and me alone. What comes of that is great stories. So I will literally get off the phone, I'll finish my notes, I'll hand them to Taylor and say, put these notes in podio, send an intro to Tiffany, and then set a task for me to share this someday on whatever it is that I'm doing, whether it be podcast or vlog or anything like that. Because the story just impacted me in such a way that I thought this is something other people should hear. And, and I get to hear stories like this all the time. And they are so impactful and so many people have the exact same story. They come on these calls wanting the passive income, wanting the financial freedom. And financial freedom to me is the, is the passive income. It's the mailbox money. I don't believe having $5 million in the bank is financial freedom. I believe having money coming in your mailbox and hitting it, whether you're working or not, whether you're in the hospital or not, whether you're disabled or not, whether whatever, whatever, whatever, you've got the Money to sustain your life the way that you want to live and the quality of which you want to live it. That to me is freedom. We could, we get to start doing whatever we want at that point in time because it's going to be there no matter what. So I truly, truly, truly love these conversations because it's the exact same thing I've been talking about all the time. And people are telling the same story over and over and over again about diversification, about financial freedom, about passive income. So today I brought a story with me and I'm just going to read it because these are, these are not his words. I actually told him, I said, I'm going to share this. I won't share your name, but I'm going to share this with the podcast because it really like I literally had this conversation, I think a week ago or two weeks ago, and I knew I was going to do the podcast and I wanted to share the story. So anyways, he knows I'm sharing it and I'm gonna keep on sharing these stories probably. Okay. So he had just bought a rental property in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And the reason that I said these aren't his words is because these are my notes in my pad about his story. So as much as I can capture and as fast as I can write it. So forgive me for, you know, it's not his words. So, yeah, just bought a rental property in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He used to think real estate investing was out of reach for the common person until he started a study and listening to podcasts and learned that there are other ways to do this even if you aren't rich. I can't tell you how powerful that was to me when I said that because so many calls I have. I didn't know I could be a private money lender. I only have $50,000 and it's my self directed IRA account or my 401k account or my whatever. I can really start investing in real estate or be a lender in real estate. I can do this. I can do this. Like, I didn't have to be rich or be in the real estate industry to be able to take part and earn the type of interest that you're talking about. That conversation, a lot of our lenders are brand new investors that have $50,000 and that's it. And they said, hey, and you know what we do? We don't have a lot of properties that are $50,000. So what we do is they pour in their $50,000 and we top it off with our funds to be able to fund whatever needs to happen. And then some of the people who say, I have $50,000 after the first deal, they go, so I might have another $200,000 in my bank account. Can I go ahead and do it? Because they went through the process, right? This is a trust based relationship. Private lending is. So then they suddenly have more money, they start doing more deals with us. We have people with over a million dollars that have been doing business with us for years. We have many people with very large buckets of cash that now trust us. And they're in different programs depending on how it is that we can help them reach their goals. That's the power of this. And that statement was why I said, I'm sharing this on the podcast, because I hear this all the time. So I'll just pick up where I left off. His wife is a labor and delivery nurse, but she was in an accident and it's hard for her to be on her feet that long. Every day. They cashed out her 401k because he said, when I trust myself to do my own retirement planning more than I trust Wall street, then it's time to move my money. Rather than chasing and hoping that there is no crash, or rather chasing and hoping that we don't outlive our retirement money. I realized hope wasn't a strategy. Then he went on to share that he likes the BRRR strategy in turnkey investing because he's focused on cash flow versus appreciation, which is why he invests in cities like Dayton. He had $110,000 to start, but when he buys a property, because many times he's doing that BRRRR method, he ends up keeping 10 to $15,000 inside the deal. So that 110 just went to 95 to $100,000, right? And then when he refinances, that's what he gets back out, 95 to $100,000, which depletes his cash. So he heard me on another podcast that I was talking about private money lending on, and he started thinking, and this guy, like he is a thinker, like he's the left brainer, probably worse than I am. He'll just think and strategize. And so he started thinking that this was a really great way to do both and recoup his cash faster. He used the words accelerated savings process through earning interest on lending in between the deals he's buying. So rather than saving money for 12 to 18 months in order for him to get his next deal, he's investing the balance, maybe $85,000 is what he said of what he has when he refinances. And he's going to earn the interest on those funds to grow it back faster to be able to buy the next deal. Then when he refinances the next deal, he'll do the private money lending process again. Wash, rinse, repeat. In his words, this should cut the time in half between deals he's able to purchase because he's utilizing that sitting cash into private money lending. And I just was like, bam. Not only was there power in everything that he shared with me in that mindset and the growth in the path that he's been on, but then to hear his strategy of why he's doing what he's doing, many people are just like, I want to diversify. I want to do some turnkey and some private lending. He actually had a strategy behind it. He did. He wasn't doing it for diversification. Diversification. He just realized, my money is sitting here anyway, and I'm trying to replenish it so I can buy the next property. What if instead of replenishing it and it's sitting over here earning little to no interest, I actually stick it with Danny and earn higher interest, accelerate that savings process? I thought that was super powerful. That's why you guys got to hear the story, because I loved it. It made me very, very happy, and I just had to share. He gave me permission to share. So that's how I'm ending my portion of this podcast. Take it away, Flipper.

I love it. I love it. And. And I love the story, too, because everyone likes real stories.

Yeah.

Because we. We're not making this up. These. These are real stories. So. All right. That's our first podcast.

We did it.

We did it. We finally got our first podcast under our belt. So. And that was all about the Freedom Real Estate family of companies.

Yes.

And so we hope that you enjoy this. We hope you got something out of it. A gold nugget, maybe somewhere in there, but. And we're going to have more of these coming out soon. Not sure when podcast number two is, but I know that it's right around the corner.

Our marketing director wants us to do it weekly.

Okay.

We'll see if that happens.

Yeah, we'll see. She looked at our schedule. We hope that you enjoyed it, and we hope we look forward to seeing you on our next vlog or on our next podcast, whatever it may be. And again, remember, private money calls go straight to Danny. So if you want to talk, I'm Blake Shelton. Yeah, yeah, Blake Shelton. There you go.

Sorry.

So anyway, but that's it from us. And our new tagline that we'd like to start with today is invest smart, live happy.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.