Avoid These 8 Fatal Mistakes as a Real Estate Investor if You Want to Win in 2025

All right guys, so in today's video I'm gonna have a very raw and honest conversation with you guys about the worst mistakes that I've made in my real estate career. And if you are someone who's going through a rut, or maybe going through a tough time, or maybe you've been thinking about quitting, I'm sure you'll find some nuggets in this video with everything that I've gone through. So with that being said, let's get started. So in 2022 is when I got into real estate And right as the interest rates were going up is when I bought my first couple houses. So we underwrote the deal kind of thinking that it was going to sell for this amount, but then the correction happened and we sold over here. Also, I made a ton of mistakes with the construction. I had some contractors steal from me and I was just being over hopeful. And that's one thing that you can't do in real estate. So looking back, these two houses, although they were like a big loss, they were one of the best things that could have happened to me because that pushed me to get into more coaching and hire mentors that kind of taught me how to run the business. So fast forward the following year, 2023, that's when we kind of like started scaling and I made a ton of mistakes doing that. So I'm sure we'll cover some of those. Right here. But, you know, if you are someone who is flipping, you probably have been going through this issue where you lose money. I know friends that have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. So if you are feeling bad about it, you know, kind of hearing the other perspectives could make you feel a little bit better, just knowing what other people are going through. Uh, because here the main difference is what do you do when you're down. Right? A lot of people quit, but this is when you should push to get better at your craft so that you don't make the same mistakes again. So with that being said, let's go into my next mistake, which is not tracking my KPIs soon enough. Now, it took me 2 and a half years to start tracking my numbers. I know, that's crazy. And once I did it, it took me maybe 2 to 3 hours to really find out what was going on in my business. So if you can see, this is 2024, but we spent like $232,000 and we made $650,000 from this campaign. And we made like an additional like $400,000 that were deals that were coming from the previous year that closed in 2024. But if you take a look, we spend money like in direct mail where I spent $24,000 and made $26,000. So it was like a 1x. I was paying paper lead agencies, you know, $10,000, no deals. This was Facebook, someone else was managing it, managing the campaign, spent $28,000, made only like $63,000. So it was like a 2x return on ad spend. This was another PPL company. $21 spent, $25 made. Insane. Pretty bad. Another pay-per-lead. No deals from here. This was one of our best channels in 2023. And it still produced like an outcome, but I should have cut this like as soon as I saw that it was not performing. So on this one, we spent $17 grand, made $53 grand, like a 3x. Um, this was something to learn about, like, um, foreclosures and stuff. Um, as you can see, PPC was our best. We spent close to $100 grand and we made $462,000, and our return on ad spend was a 4.81. So our cost per contract was around $3,500, and we would make like $16K per deal. And then the rest is more so the same, but over probably 80% came from PPC. And by spending money here and not knowing my numbers, the total of all these amounts that I spent was close to $130 grand. If I would have put that extra $130 grand in PPC, at a 4.8 would have made like an extra probably like $500 grand at least. So our margins would have been way higher. All this money that I spent would have been in our bottom line. And like I said, we would just cross the $1.5 million mark and have a ton of profit left over. So although I spent— I wasted $200 grand, I also missed out on an additional $600,000. A potential profit. So this is like a $600,000 loss or $700,000 loss by not doing this. So if you're someone who thinks you are, hey, I'm working on the business, I'm driving the revenue, I'm too good for KPIs, and just hearing the word KPI stresses you, you should really, really consider looking into that because there's money in there. And The KPIs are the back end of your business. So if you don't know what's your cost per contract, lead to contract, how much you're making per contract, you're going into it blind. You got to know what your goal is and what you need to go to do in order to get there. So $700K loss goes to show you something. So don't make the same mistake. The third mistake was delegating marketing or thinking that I was not good enough to learn marketing. So you guys know that we do Facebook ads in-house and we crush with that. This is the last 30 days. We got close to, I don't know, probably like 230 leads. And our conversions here is 25 leads to a contract where looking back when I was running Facebook, our leads to contract was 84 and we're spending way more. So we were like 60% better than the other companies. And now we have probably like a 15x on Facebook. Uh, we get like 10 deals a month from Facebook and, you know, we crush. I have other videos on the channel kind of going over our process. So if you're someone who needs some help and you're already doing deals and just want to perfect it and have a profitable marketing channel, uh, follow me on Instagram, and send me a DM. Maybe we can book a call and see if we can implement that into your business. I don't work with newbies. You got to be doing deals and got to be able to spend on marketing. But bringing this in-house was the best decision that I could have ever made. Because if I wouldn't have done this, I probably would have quit real estate. Because at the end of last year, I made a post about this on my Instagram, but I had probably like 15 houses on the market. Nothing was selling. And I was used to making $100,000 per month. And the last quarter of last year, it was horrible. Like, nothing was selling. I had no money, and I really was thinking about quitting. Honestly, I made applications to other companies, and I kind of wanted to quit. But something told me, hey, you need to learn this. And looking back, this was the best decision that I could have made because now we have a very profitable business, and our leads to contract is very low, and our cost per contract is like $1,000. So if I was to spend the same amount that I spent last year, we're gonna make way more, more money. And that's our goal. Our goal now is to chase profit, not revenue. And that's one of the things that I'm going to talk about in the other mistakes. Also not going from hustler to CEO soon enough. Because a lot of the times, like I was saying earlier, we think, well, I'm driving the revenue, I'm making things happen. But remember, when you delegate is when you buy your time back. So you gotta go from, you know, hustling and taking every call to building a sales team, you know, in order to scale, depending on what you wanna do, right? But if you wanna scale, you gotta start building people and you got to give them SOPs and systems and processes that they can follow and you got to hold your team accountable to whatever your goal is via per quarter, per year, per month, per week, and you got to know how your metrics and your numbers are going to reflect your goals and what you need to do in order to achieve those goals, right? Also, I was not tracking my KPIs like I told you earlier, right? And now you kind of need to know your numbers. CPL, your cost per lead, leads to a contract, leads to a deal, cash conversion cycles, how fast can you profit that money that you're investing in marketing. Um, we would call, call like manually, or we were like outsourced VAs, and the conversion was kind of like very bad. And now like we build a profitable inbound system that's crushing, like I told you guys. Um, also I was falling into the revenue trap where I was just kind of going into it mindlessly, where, okay, like, I just want more revenue, more revenue, more revenue. But the only thing that matters in your wholesale business is how much money is left over for you at the end of the day. Because as we already know, expenses are going to rack up. If you have the money in the account, you're probably going to spend it. So if you're not taking money off the table and putting it into your account, however you're doing your financing, you need to think clearly what your goal is and what you need to do to make that happen. Kind of goes into your marketing plan, right? If you are trying to hit a goal, let's say you want to do $50K a month, but you don't have the budget, what's required to get to $50K a month. I mean, you're going into it blindly and you basically just need to know what the conversions are for each marketing channel that you're doing, but you gotta have at least one profitable channel that's giving you at least a 4X return. Return on your ad spend. For us, like I said, we crush with Facebook and PPC as well. So look into your numbers and see what's converting and cut out whatever is not working. Going to the other one was thinking that no one would be as good as me in sales. So I would be in the closing, the closer seat. I would be like, oh, I don't want to hire anyone. I'm okay, I'm doing this, but it kind of goes to show. So my guy Vinny, I hired him 3 months ago and he got 27 contracts his first 90 days in. So now he's getting like 10 deals a month. And what did this for me was I was able to kind of buy back my time because now I can focus on the most important things that are going to drive the revenue and are going to push the business forward to whatever our goal is, right? So now, our goal is $200K per month consistently. So my job as the CEO and owner is making sure that that happens by holding the team accountable and investing in the marketing so that my team gets the opportunities that they need in order to achieve those goals. But also talking to the team and kind of seeing what they want to achieve financially, right? And then that's how you can reverse engineer your numbers so that you account for how much they're gonna make, how much commission they're gonna make, and how many deals the deals they need on a monthly basis in order to achieve that. So most closers will do anywhere from 5 to 7 deals, and Benny's crushing. And we do invest a lot into the sales training, and we constantly review calls, give feedback for them to improve. But everyone's bought in the vision, and everyone's a culture fit where they know where we're going and what we need to do in order to get there. And have their permission to hold them accountable. So kind of goes to show you, you can hire some great people. You just need to put in the systems and processes and onboard them correctly so that they don't fail because ultimately it's all your fault. As a founder and owner, it's your job to give them the opportunities and resources in order to grow. So that's one of the other mistakes that I wish I knew earlier. And if I would've done that earlier, I mean, we would be in a way better spot right now. So don't make this same mistake. The other thing kind of goes into people, right? Not believing that people could take things off my plate. Now my business kind of operates for like 85% without me. I trust everyone in my team to do what's required in order to achieve our goals, right? So we're a very small team. We're a team of 5 and we crush. And I trust every one of my guys. So I have 2 lead managers or like setters, have 1 closer and 1 dispo manager that kind of helps me with everything. And what was hard was like training them to become better and also killing that limited belief that I couldn't find those people. To help me. So you got to go from, like I said, hustler to owner and really seek and find those people that you can align with, that you can groom and train and get them to perform better so that everyone is on the same page and everyone is winning. So I put this on my story a couple weeks ago. You know, we closed 11 deals in June, um, we got 12 contracts, and we only spent like $15 grand in marketing. So there's great people out there. but great people are only going to work for you if you yourself are great. If you're an A player, they will work for an A player. Like an A player is not gonna wanna work for a B player or a C player. So you gotta be the one that shows up fast and before them and you gotta have their back just like they have your back, right? So everything changes when you go from the hustler to the owner 'cause now it's not only about you, but it's about them as well. So there's great people out there, you just gotta attract them, you gotta onboard them properly, and you gotta give them training so that they get better. The next mistake that I made was cash mismanagement. I was talking about it earlier, but last year I was going through cash crunch, and it's happened to me multiple times, and I know most investors go through this. There's a really good book called Profit First by David Richer. It's a good guy, I know him. Basically what this talks about is whenever you get profit from a deal, you need to break it up in chunks into different accounts. So for us, we have the— our income account where all the money goes in. We have a profit account. So when a deal closes, now what we do is we save 50% of that into that profit account. We have an OPEX account, which is for the expenses. We have a pass-through account, so any property that we own and hold and we need to make payment, like interest payments on, we have an account that we fund specifically for that. And then we have a rehab account. So if we, we don't do much flips anymore, but if we were going to do a flip, we want to have some money in there, or maybe we fund some money for a seller or something. Then the other one is taxes. We got to account for those. So we break up every deal in these specific buckets depending on what our goal is. But yeah, not managing our cash properly put us in some tough, tough situations. And it takes a couple of these things to happen before you learn. You know, for me, I'm kind of stubborn. I'm like, oh, I can work myself out of it. But if you kind of know what your process is and what, how much you need in order to keep the lights on and survive and do the things that you want to do, it becomes way easier. And also you can reverse engineer your goal and be like, okay, if I want to make $300K this month, based on your current expenses and marketing spend and salaries, how much you need to grow in order to net that and build a team to achieve that. Because that's the whole goal, right? Um, but yep, that was one of our worst mistakes. The other one was, you know, chasing revenue instead of profit. And I preach on this a lot, like on my Instagram, where you need to stop focusing on revenue and reverse engineer the profit that you want to have in your business. Because there's nothing worse than working so freaking hard and not netting what we want to net. So whenever I talk to my friends or anyone that's interested in some coaching with the real estate, with the Facebook ad stuff, I kind of go over this with them. Now my goal is just to simplify my business as much as possible so that it serves me into what I want to achieve, but also to take care of my people and my employees and what they want to make, right? So, you know, stop spending money on like shiny objects or like trying all these different marketing channels or like sales process, whatever. I can guarantee you that you already kind of know everything that you need to be doing. You just need— I feel like a lot of people are heading in the right direction. They just need some hand-holding and some tweaking in order for things to actually compound and for you to get to where you want to get. So you need to be very strict into figuring, figuring out the business that you want to build and not stopping until you get there. And, you know, becoming the person that's going to be that, that's going to give you those results, right? Um, so lesson: chase profit, not revenue. Now I put here some of the things that you can do in order to get out of those situations or ruts or down lows that you're in? Number 1, you need to start thinking like a business owner, not a hustler, right? You can hustle and make $200,000, $300,000, just you kind of doing everything. You can do that with 2, 3 deals a month with a low marketing spend, right? But in order to scale and get bigger, you need to hire a team. And in order to do that, you need to be a founder and an owner, and you need to be held accountable for everything that happens in the company. And like I said, you got to train your people in order to achieve those things, right? So you got to shift from being the doer of everything to become the architect of systems and holding your team accountable. Number 2 is you need to get obsessive with your numbers. So like I was saying earlier, if you don't track your KPIs, you're giving you're doing yourself a disservice and you're missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't do that. Whereas now, like if you know your cost per lead, cost per contract, lead to a deal, cash conversion cycle, profit per deal, you stop guessing and you basically run on numbers. And wholesaling is basically just sales and marketing. And you gotta be able to figure those things out, right? Use your KPIs to reverse engineer your revenue goal/profit, how many deals you need, how many leads you need, and how much you need to spend, and what kind of team you need to hire in order to achieve those things. Focus on profit, not revenue. So you need to set a profit margin goal. So I know the traditional margin for real estate wholesaling is for like 30 to 40%. Um, for me, it's like we work too hard to just net that amount. So that's why I preach my Facebook stuff, because it's given us tremendous returns. And I want people to— I want, I want to help people because I know that what that did to my business and what it can do for your business, right? So if you're curious about what that would look like, like I said, just send me a DM on Instagram and we can talk about it. Um, but some things you can do is track your expensive expenses, your team efficiency, and your marketing waste, because Sometimes you need to cut out some channels and that's going to go back into your pocket, or you can spend it in other channels that are more profitable. Um, the other thing is you need to simplify and focus. A lot of the times we are too distracted or we get the woman in the red dress syndrome where we're chasing after shiny objects thinking that's a solution. But a lot of the times The work that we need to do is with ourselves, and a lot of times we know what we need to be doing, we just don't do it, right? So like I said, most wholesalers, they have like 4 to 5 marketing channels and none of them are performing well. And I hope that my example of the KPIs goes to show you what you can do in order to optimize for that. But you can start with just one channel, your best one, optimize it and become the best at it so that you chase that return because you don't need many, many marketing channels. You need one or two and nail those, and I know it can take you to where you need to get. Um, also you need to start building systems at scale. You need a process for everything that you do in order for your team to be able to follow it and for them to do what it's required, right? So you need to do SOPs for acquisitions. You need to have a sales process. You need to train them on the sales process. You need to give feedback on the sales process. You need to have one-on-ones with your team. You need to talk to your dispo team. You need to set the KPIs for those. And also I don't recommend building like a bloated team. Like I said, we do a lot with like a small team and I give them ownership of their goals. And like I said, I help them get there pretty much, right? And your job is to create repeatable processes, not just a one-off hustle wins. So that's part— that's hard. I know it's hard when you— whenever you're in the weeds and you're being pulled in every direction to not want to do that, but this will be a game changer. Number 6, tap into an untapped market. So for us, we learn Facebook, we crush Facebook, but also we market in Spanish. So that's kind of like our blue ocean where we do very well because everyone's fighting over the same like list, like if you're cold calling. And basically for us, like we do it in Spanish and we get probably like 10 leads for $120. So it's crazy. And then if you account for the conversion and the profit that we make per deal, we make like $18,000 to $20,000 per deal that we contract. I mean, that's when our profit margin goes through the roof and our CAC, our cost of acquisition is very low. So all of this is margin and it goes into your pocket. So like I was saying earlier, optimize for profit, not the revenue. And maybe you're very good at buying deals from wholesalers or agents or angels— I'm sorry, and agents. Some agents may send you some deals, right? If you're really good at that. I know a friend, those over 7 figures, it's basically all organic because they don't spend much marketing on that. And they make a lot of money. So you gotta find what your blue ocean is. Maybe it's foreclosure list, maybe it's door knocking, whatever it is, find it and freaking go to town with it. Because I guarantee you, you are doing something that most people are not doing. And I want you to tap into that 'cause that's what I did and it grew my business so much. Also, you need to have a 90-day game plan. Right? If you are going through a rut and you're losing, you need to have a conversation. Ask ChatGPT, hey, this is how much I'm spending, this is how much I'm making, what I need to do in order to get there. You know, give it feedback and it can help you build a plan in order to achieve that. So that's basically all I have for you guys. If you're going through that period of time I guarantee you, like, as long as you don't quit, you're gonna get through it. Um, there's a really good book that I recommend everyone to read. It's this one. It's Outwitting the Devil, Napoleon Hill. Uh, kind of talks over how the devil plays with your mind, and when you start doubting yourself, you don't perform as well. Um, kind of the, the book goes over like all the ways that he traps us. But like I said, you can get through it. I know you can. I know you can. And it's only a matter of time. And I know Alex Hormozi talks about it, right? He talks about that lonely chapter. Uh, he talks about the Rocky, uh, cutscene when he's getting beat up by Apollo Creed, and you see him like all beat up, and the movie takes, you know, a couple minutes. And then that period in your life can take a couple years. And no one is with you when you're going through that. But although it lasts a little bit, as long as you don't quit, you will get through it. So don't let, don't let that stop you. The only guarantee that you have is that as long as you don't quit and you keep on showing up, you're gonna get through it. So I hope this was helpful for you guys. I have other videos on the channel. I'll link one here above me. If you haven't subscribed, subscribe already. Follow me on Instagram and stay tuned for more videos. We'll be posting 2 to 3 videos per week. So with that being said, I'll catch you in the next one. Hope this was valuable for you guys and maybe you find a nugget. Uh, if you have any questions or anything I can do to help you, send me a DM, and I'll catch you soon. Bye!