Reinventing Real Estate: A Journey of Bold Moves With Abdullah Abunasrah

Are you one of the many busy professionals working in offices day in and day out? Do you wonder how some people grow their wealth fast, retire early and play on work days? Well, you're in luck because Ginny Bolling hosts this show Pivots of Prosperity where she interviews people that can do just that play on work days. Many guests have become financially free. She also interviews people that are on their journey and people that are in support roles like attorneys, contractors, brain brokers and others. Commercial real estate is the common element. She is on a mission to be sure. Busy professionals know they can own substantial commercial properties too, like apartments, self storage facilities and others and not have to do the work managing them. Passive investing is the key. Syndications are the typical method. Tax write offs are some of the biggest rewards. Ginny and partners find the deals, build a strong team and business plan, then offer the investment opportunities to passive investors. New episodes are released every Tuesday at 12, so watch for new releases. If you want to get involved, let us know. You need to get pre qualified to hear about most deals. See the show notes for contact information.

Hello, Hello. Jenny Bowling here with Pivot to Prosperity, sponsored by Pivotal Real Estate Investments where we help investors build wealth and income through commercial real estate that also adds to communities. And today we have Abdullah Abu Nastra. Did I pronounce it right?

Yes, ma'. Am.

All right. And he's our guest. I met him through the mastermind. I belong to Race Masters and welcome. I, I want you to tell people who you are and what you're into because I think that will appeal to a lot of my audience.

Hey guys. I'm Abdullah Binasra I from Memphis, Tennessee. 28 years old. I'm into a lot of things. One of my favorite things, honestly is helping people, kind of seeing somebody I know or somebody around me kind of get back on track or, or kind of do something exciting that makes them happy. So I like helping people and I also like cleaning and organizing processes too. That's kind of what I do. That's what I like doing.

Interesting. Okay, and you are from the auto industry, right?

Yes, ma'. Am. Yes.

Tell us about that.

We, my family has been a wholesale operation for the last 30 years. I've been doing it my entire life. I actually sold my first car, I want to say, at 12 years old. And I'll never forget it, but I've been doing it a very long time and we, we have a relatively big operation. We're doing about 200 cars a week throughout both locations. And it just, it just got Kind of to the point where there was no, we were kind of employees to the business and we couldn't kind of not go to work or kind of back out of it or have anything in place to where we could technically exit out of. So that's why I started kind of exploring different options and learning new things and got into real estate. So it's been a, it's been a very interesting journey. It's taught me so much for sure over the time.

And so you're kind of bringing the volume turnover, trying to help that volume turnover, but in real estate, right?

Yes, ma'. Am. Yes, ma'. Am. When I, when I got into real estate, I, I, I saw so many ways to kind of improve it and make it better. And I figured out different things that kept people from actually getting into real estate. And that's, that's kind of how I came up with the, the, the website, the marketplace that I designed. I, I'm using it to basically help bring on all types of new people into real estate. And I basically offer my time to, for them to use me as like a consultant for whenever they want to walk through their first process. So we just, we designed it to where it can do extreme volume. The, we, I designed it around my, you know, whenever I used to buy cars, anytime I'd sit down at a computer or go to auction, I usually buy 20 or 30 cars. And to do that you have to get your underwriting process down to like 30 to 60 seconds. So I basically took that like knowledge right there and I implemented it into real estate by providing all of the data points that you want to see to basically say this is what I need to buy right now, this is how much I need to make an offer, all within 60 seconds. And obviously these are cheaper properties. They're not, you know, you're not dealing with millions and million dollar, you know, complexes or anything. Those take a lot more underwriting. But on a cheaper house that you're trying to rent out, thousand dollars, you know, we have the perfect system in place.

Okay, so it's for, if you're renting or selling.

Yes ma'. Am. It's fix and flips. Anything you can, you can. Okay, so you can buy stuff that is cheaper. Re, like more rehab. Yeah, fix it, put it on the MLS and sell it. You, you do have three types of buyers. You have your fix and flippers that just want to fix, buy something, fix it and flip it. And you have your people that want something light rehab and, and want to rent it out themselves. Find a tenant and all that. And then you have the third type of buyer, which is somebody that wants to buy something, turnkey that has a tenant in it and is cash flowing already right off the bat. So we're, we're categorizing those three and targeting all three, basically.

Interesting, interesting. Okay, so what would you say the average price of a, of a house is that's on your database right now?

Around 50 to 150,000. That's what they're ranging from. That's the, that's the stuff we like, you know.

Okay. And is this nationwide?

Yes, ma'. Am. Yes, ma'.

Am.

Okay. And where are most of the listings coming from so far?

So anybody can list on it. We're, we're going to open it to the public basically to where any, any distressed seller, anybody that needs to sell their house within 30 to 60 days quickly can put their property on the website. Takes about 2 minutes. All they got to do is take pictures and do like a quick description of it and upload it. So anybody can list Realtors direct to seller or wholesalers. And idea is that if someone is interested in a property, it doesn't finalize anything. So, so once they submit an offer, basically it gives, it opens the line of communication between them and the seller, the buyer and the seller, and then they can figure out the fine points from there. So we're basically giving people more access to deals. We're trying to make it to where they can get on if like, let's say, because the hardest thing about buying these 50 to $150,000 houses is actually finding the deals. That's what takes the most time. Because let's say that I'm, you know, I just sold something quickly and I need to liquidate. I need, sorry, I need to buy something within 30, 30 to 60 days. If I want to go find a deal, I have to go through 100 of emails, I have to go through 100 Facebook posts, and I have to go through 100 different realtors or whatever. And basically how this works. And at that point, you don't even know what's still available or not. So how this works basically, is that if I need to buy something today, I can open this website, this tool, and find whatever deals are right then and there on the market. And I can sort it by the percent of pmr, which is the prospect market report, sorry, the current offer divided by the prospect market report plus the rehab. And we just. You can categorize it from there. You know, you can actually play with it you can put your buy box, you only want stuff in a certain area, you only want stuff in a certain zip code, you know, you can go buy the most you want to see. So that whenever there's, you know, and at one point it will be. But whenever there's about a thousand listings on the website, you can fly through so many of them so quickly with the way we're designed. So it's going to be hard to kind of see it today. But once there's a thousand deals on that website, people are going to start noticing the difference between, you know, being able to say, I want something in Tennessee, I want it under $150,000. I wanted to have under $20,000 in rehab, I wanted to have X. And then the only deals that are available pop up. People are going to appreciate that, you know, because you're talking about spending five minutes looking for a deal and finding ones that actually fit your buy box that are still available and have all the details you need to have in front of you, versus having to find that one deal, hoping it's available, calling the wholesaler, making sure that they still have it, trying to negotiate, do that fun stuff, figuring out what the house needs in rehab or calling the individual. It's a process coming from, coming from somebody like me that I have 11 doors right now. It's, it's a process, it's a job to find deals. And the problem is, is that if you're not focusing on only the deals you like, you are bound to make a mistake. So, like, if you get kind of desperate and say, man, I really need to buy a deal right now. You're going to open your email and you're going to buy the first deal, that even somewhat makes sense. But after you go buy that deal, this has happened to me, by the way. After you go buy that deal, it's actually going to come back. And right after you close on that deal, you're going to find the deal that's way freaking better and it's going to make you hate that deal from the beginning. So, you know, it's just, we're, that's what we're trying to do. We're just trying to clean it up.

We have patience days.

And yeah, good data, good data. Make it easy to people, you know, and, and the idea is that all we want to do is show you guys the deals and show you what we know about it. And basically you do your own underwriting from there. So if the house says, if our prospect market report, and this is A good example. There's an Atlanta house right now for 100 for 70,000. My prospect, like the prospect report says that it's worth like 160 or 170. And I looked at the comps and I would comfortably, comfortably say that house should bring around 220 to 270. So it makes a significant difference. But if you can just get to that deal actually and like that deal and see that. Okay, this house, you know, I'm looking at the pictures. It doesn't look bad. The video looks good. It has a walkthrough video that looks good. Okay, I'm going to actually do some more homework on this house. Take the address, put it into my app. If it's prop stream or whatever, do my own homework. And then after that, I'm going to look at the pictures and actually do my own rehab to make sure that the rehab estimate is right. But the idea is that I got you to that deal way quicker than if you were to have to go find it on your own. You know, that's what we're trying to do.

So, and, and so it takes a couple minutes to put the listing in. Now, what are the fees and costs that the listing or buying person has when they're on the site?

You're gonna love this one. You're gonna love it because I love it. I love it. I don't know anyone that does it like this. So it's free to list. We don't charge anything. There's no contracts, no obligations. We basically tell people that you have. We want to market it for 14 days only. We don't want to show the same property for more than 14 days. That's one beautiful thing about it. Second thing is, if we don't perform and if your property does not close, not just find a buyer, but if it does not close with our buyer, you don't owe us anything. If it does close, we only charge $1,000 at closing. No matter what the house sells for. If it sells for 2 million, we charge $1,000 at closing. That's obviously just today. I'm sure at some point it's going to go up, but. But it's going to be the same ballpark. It'll never go more. Because like I said, we're targeting volume. We're not targeting one gross deal. We want to sell a thousand deals a day. We don't want to sell 100 deals a day. So that's 1, 2. The buyers don't pay anything. The buyers have no buy fee whatsoever. So whatever Fees they see in place on that rehab calculator. That's everything on the listing. That's what you should be paying at closing. And we have. We try to get the estimated closing cost into the listing too, but that's just the estimate too, so it can't be right. So buyers don't pay anything. Sellers don't sell, pay anything. If they just want to list. And it's $1,000 at closing. The only thing the buyers pay is there's a deposit to register to bid. That's it. It's $500. Once they pay the deposit to bid, that's how we know that our sellers aren't going to have their time wasted. You know, these are serious buyers. That's what we're doing is we're filtering serious buyers from basically people that are just making offers just to have fun. Kind of like on Facebook right now, people just send you a million offers whenever you try to sell a couch or sell a tv. And they have no intention. I can't imagine if we open this platform up with no deposit and. And only require, like, you can make an offer whenever you want. It would be a disaster.

It would be a disaster. Yeah.

So that's why we require a deposit, you know.

Right.

And the deposit is refundable as long as they never bought their first house. So basically that deposit is like a. And structure in place for their. The rest of their time with prosperity, basically. And if they never offered or bought anything, sorry, if they never bought anything, they can get the deposit back. Even if a deal fell through, we'll give them the deposit back.

So that's really enticing. It is. So I know you're at the beginning stages. You've been working like crazy on this. I've heard you talking to people about it. How many listings do you have at this point?

So we launched about 10 days ago. We got. I want to say we. We had overall probably 30 listings from start to finish. We have active right now, I want to say seven, and then we have 10 that expired. But we're still showing them just in case. But they're still available.

But yeah, with the launch, you might want to give people more time because, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just deleting the deals we don't like. Like the deals that. The deals that either the. The. It's a little too high on the high side. The seller doesn't want to negotiate those deals. There's no sense to keep them on because nobody's gonna like them if. And if if we have someone that fits that buy box, we still can't see the deals and we still offer it to them, but we really show only the deals as far as the expired ones, the ones that are, you know, decent. So that once again, we're just saving people time because time is the most valuable thing you have, not, not money.

So how many buyers do you have registered with 500 on deposit now?

I don't know. I don't know. Not much. I mean, it's, it's probably under 10. Like it's not much.

Yeah, you just launched.

I'm just saying, like, it's not, it's under. I haven't looked in a few days. Honestly, we've been pushing out so heavy.

So, so somebody looks, they see something, they like. Right now, can they do a deposit immediately and, and make an offer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So you can make, you can make.

An account without register. Like you can make an account without leaving a deposit, but the, the, the, sorry, you can make an account without making an offer, like enabled and, and you can just tour the website, see addresses and stuff without leaving a deposit. But if you want to submit an offer, you have to leave a deposit.

So does that mean you don't get the contact information until you give the deposit?

Well, if you want to, if you want to get the contact information, you have to make a deposit, like. Yeah, sorry, you have to make an offer.

Yeah, but you give out the address in advance.

Yeah, if you have an account with us. Yeah.

Okay. That means you have a deposit.

No, no, there's two types of accounts. There's two types of accounts. So your first account is just someone that wants to see the addresses. Look at everything, look at the comps. Okay. You don't have the addresses and basically if you don't have an account, you can't see the addresses. That's just to protect the sellers. Basically. Once you make an account, you can view all the addresses, but once you want to make an offer, then you leave a deposit.

Gotcha.

You can see everything. The only thing you cannot do without making a deposit is make an offer. That's the only thing you can't do. You can do everything else with the website, though. We don't put the contact information on the website.

Right? Yeah, I wouldn't think so. So, and how heavily are you promoting this? Are you giving it everything you got yet or are you, or what are you doing?

I've been giving it everything I got. I've had a, I've had a Ruffle Cup. Sorry. A couple rougher days than usual. My last two, three days have been, you know, a lot of funny things have been going on in life, but I've been promoting it pretty heavy. I've been. We hit seven different platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, Alignable, Instagram, all that stuff. And we basically go in there and we market to all of the active real estate groups and push it out there. And then we also promote it to anybody that's like, we see that's buying in that buy area. So we have a lot of buyers, a lot of actual buyers that like lists. It's just we haven't found the deal that they like yet. We don't have enough deals just yet. So we're. We're kind of pushing on both whenever we're pushing to get deals right now. And we're also pushing to sell the deals that we actively have, like the activism website.

So you had said seven platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, Alignable, Instagram. What are the other three?

You're gonna make me brainstorm. So we got Bigger Pockets Capital real estate network. Sub 2. Is that. Is that 7? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I got 7 in front of me right here.

Would you say after Bigger Pockets, you.

Got Real Estate Network.

Got that.

The real estate Network. Raising capital.

Oh, raising capital.

And whenever I say network, I'm just talking about, like, talking to people. You know, it's kind of like what you do. I go in there, I just talk to random people and I tell them, hey, the same way we met. Same exact way we met. You know, think about, if I wasn't doing that, I wouldn't have met. So I'm not really marketing. I'm just kind of introducing the idea. And then word, I'm. I got cold callers that basically call different, you know, realtors, sellers and stuff. And. And also a couple buyers that just to let them know about our platform, too. So it's probably going to be like this for probably a month until I kind of get really the ball rolling. But it's probably going to be a lot of kind of cold outreach, meeting new people for the next month.

You're gonna do any outdoor advertising signs.

You talking about, like in the yard?

I was talking the big.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I can't. I'm not gonna lie, I can't even afford advertising right now. I can't afford to do advertising. So I'm just. I'm kind of doing the cheaper stuff right now and just using my effort to kind of make it as valuable as possible. And. And once we Kind of get a little more funding coming in, then I'll, I'll kind of really go wide open throttle, you know, I'll really. Because we, we have a plan to have an app on the app store within 12 months. That's our, that's our goal, that's our plan and building a server for all of this. So.

So would you like to show us what the website looks like while we're on the air here?

Sure. Okay, let me open it up. All right. Can you see my screen?

Yep, I can.

All right, so this is the home page. We have like a quick tutorial on how we work. It's a whiteboard thing. Pretty, pretty nice. I'm obviously not going to.

It is. I saw it. Yeah, yeah.

Now if you're interested in selling your property, you basically go to the sellers tab and it basically gives you the quick instructions of how to list it. And it's everything, self service. You don't have to be with anybody if you're not ready to list. Like if you're interested selling something, we have a part where you can just say no and then submit your contact information and we'll basically just email you this to your email directly. And it's pretty simple. You just put the property address and then you put the property details and a bunch of pictures and hopefully a walkthrough video. Walkthrough videos help the most. And then you go to properties where the listings page are. And these are the different, these are the different deals we have right here. So like this house right here, this Bible house. Our estimate is that the house is worth 150,000. The current offer is 67. 5. That makes the percent of PMR, this number right here, 45% and no rehab. Basically, if you're interested in this deal, you'll go in, you'll look at the pictures, do whatever you want to do. And then gives you all the details of the house rehab estimate. It gives you a disclosure of what the rehab estimate is. Quick description. This is a turnkey property. I want to say. This is the one that has a tenant in it already. 1 year lease, $1,250 price to capital, corporate employee with tenants. And then there's a walkthrough video at the end. And then if you're logged in to view the full address, you must be logged in. And this is the one without the deposit. It shows you all the comps that are in the area. And then over here is a rehab calculator. Basically, if you want to make a sorry A offer estimator. Offer calculator. If you want to offer, say, 70 grand, it would basically say that your estimated spread from ARV to the current offer is 79,000. So that's including the rehab. If there is any. That's including any fees associated. It's saying that the prosp fee is $0. So that people understand there's no surprises. The closing cost is just the estimated cost. This is. This is what we do. So once you submit an offer, nothing happens. All that happens is we. We connect you to the seller and you guys do your own thing from there, basically. And. And there's just different resources, meetings, and if you have any questions or about what we do, it's all on there. And we have several ways to contact us as you get a message, little chat box somewhere. But I'm logged into the developer mode.

Do you have to own or have a contract on the property to list it?

No, no, no, no. You have to own it. You have to own the house, first of all, obviously to list it. You're a wholesaler. If you're a whole. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, you're correct. Sorry.

Okay. Yeah, usually, yeah. Equitable titles.

Yeah.

And what about if there's no rehab needed? Is that allowable to just list a property on this?

Anybody can list you. Anybody can list this house, this mine.

And just see what happens.

What's the worst that can happen?

I know I have it on mls, so I might as well, right?

Yeah, you never know. You never know.

There's a little rehab that's needed.

So that's. Never know until you try, you know.

Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. So also, you said a walkthrough video is the best. So what if you don't have that fancy techno, the camera. What do you. What do you. Is there an app that you've found is the best for walkthroughs?

It's just a video. It's just like a YouTube video. 11:40 Ohio. Like, it's just a walkthrough video with your phone. Like, that's.

How do you keep it from moving?

I mean, this is how they are, you know, like, this is my house right here. This is one of my properties. So I just talk about the property. And people do this. People, a lot of wholesalers do this, believe it or not, because videos sell the property. Like, think about it. Now that you're looking at a video of this house, you're a lot more comfortable with it because you actually see the fine details. And I'm sitting there talking about it, you know, I'm explaining the process of what's going on and what all the house I did to it. What's the story behind it, you know. So, yeah, it's just. It helps. It's not necessary, but it doesn't. It's just a cell phone video. You take the video, you upload it on the same little thing with the pictures, and then we'll do the rest. So we just upload them to YouTube on a YouTube page, basically, and we list them on the website, so.

I see. Okay. Okay. What else was I gonna ask you? So how do you find out if there's a transaction going on? Is there something that the people need to sign to. To commit that they. If it sell. If you buy, you're paying, or if you sell, you're paying the thousand.

How do you track that place? Yeah, we have a contract in place. If basically we find that buyer, we send you an agreement like a docusign that says if this buyer closes the deal, you just have to pay us. So if it doesn't close. Yeah.

Great. Well, it sounds like it's going to be very interesting. I suspect lots of wholesalers would love to know about the site.

Yeah. And I think you said. I think you said we were on the mls. We are not on the mls. We're not.

No, no. My house is. Is what I said.

Okay. Your house is on the mls. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're not. We're not realtors. We're just. Like we said, we're just technology guys. We just kind of put this together. So.

Right.

We don't require. We're not brokers. We're not anything. Not representing anybody.

Yeah. Well, that's interesting. And I am sure you're going to get lots of people checking it out. It's just how much can you do to get that. That awareness out there?

If anybody's going to do it, it's me. If anybody's going to do, it's me. I'm very. I'm very aggressive. I'm very aggressive and I'm very. I have a really good team behind me, too. A group of very smart people. So it's. If anybody's going to do it, it's me.

Oh, great.

Willing. God willing.

All right, well, so now I'm coming to the big question here, because we're going to wrap it up. Is there a pivotal person or event that's happened to you to bring you to where you are today or that's pushing you forward to Anything in particular in the future?

My dad. My dad, he's. He's a. He's a, you know, awesome guy, and he's just getting a little old and he's. He's been working in the. The car business his whole life, so he's. I just. I don't. I don't see how he can retire if, you know, someone doesn't make some kind of, you know, exit strategy or something else for them to do, basically. So I'm hoping I can kind of retire my dad soon and, you know, have him hang out with his grandson instead of being at work all day.

Nice. That's nice. Yeah. We can do a special appreciation for him if you want to give us his name. We'll put that on the show. Notes.

His name is Jim Abonastra. Jim. Yes, ma'. Am.

All right.

All right.

Well, so why don't you tell people how they can reach you?

My, my. All my social media is my first and last name, Abdullah Obanastra.

You can reach because a lot of this is audio only.

Okay. Okay. My. The name is A B, D, A as in Apple, B as in Boy, D as in Delta, U, L, L, A H. And my last name is Albinosra. A as in Apple, B as in Boy, using Universe, and as in Nancy. A S, R, A H. And that's just about anywhere. Or the website. If you go to the website and submit a contact form, I'll. I'll be the one to see that. So there's a lot of ways to contact me. Just great.

Yes. Well, thank you. It's been enjoyable to have you on here and to learn about this. And stay tuned.

If.

If my house suddenly sells through this, we'll say something. All right.

At least we got the friendship going.

Yeah. Well, we wish you luck, too. I know it's not easy to launch a new company.

No, it's not fun. But I'd say it's a. It's a good experience. So it's a learning. It's a learning curve. So I appreciate the opportunity. That was good talking to you.

Likewise. Thank you.

Take care.