I'm becoming a REAL ESTATE AGENT

We're gonna head over to the bank and get a hundred thousand dollar check. They must have known I was coming for my money. Hundred thousand dollars, like we can't afford it. Lock up the bank.

So I'm becoming a real estate agent. Let me explain.

Even when I started first mowing lawns, I would listen to bigger pockets and other real estate books like Rich Dad, Poor dad, and learned everything I possibly could about real estate and real estate investment. All right, here we go.

There are three reasons why I'm becoming a real estate agent. The first one is for me to save on fees. Because every single time you purchase or buy real estate, two and a half percent typically is going to the buying agent and two and a half percent is going to the selling agent. So like 5% of the purchase price is just going in real estate agent commissions. I want to get my 2 1/2% back by self representing myself. And now that I have a 5, $6 million real estate portfolio, I've spent tens thousands of dollars in just agent commissions. When usually as an investor I find my own deals, I usually literally just send them a screenshot like I want to buy this and we go put an offer on it. It's not like they do a lot of work for me. And so I'd rather just find the deals myself and save on these commissions.

Let me be very, very clear.

And that is I am not becoming.

A real estate agent to sell real estate. I'm becoming a real estate agent to invest better in real estate.

The second reason why I want to become an agent is because access to better deals. All right? When you become a real estate agent, you get to know people locally, brokers get to know you, and you're able to get on the inside, know how of these deals that are coming on the market prior to them even coming on the MLS where everyone else gets to see them on Zillow and Redfin and all the rest of it. I can see them prior to that and hopefully get a better deal and access to deals that are off market.

See, this is what we're dealing with, you know, late at night and I gotta get 70% to pass the quiz. That is one question out of a 35 question question quiz that I am getting wrong.

Now. The third and final reason why I want to become a real estate agent is to be able to teach everything that I know to Augusta Nation. All right, so in our daily masterminds, we've already talked about real estate in the past. Ray Kroc was one time giving a lecture. And he asked a student, what kind of business is McDonald's in? And they said, oh, well, that's easy. It's hamburgers and french fries and milkshakes. And he's like, no, it's real estate. And so as I begin to think about Augusta Nation people getting multiple locations, I start asking myself, is the play actually for them going to be owning the real estate that each of their shops are sitting on top of and then renting that out, appropriately via house hacking on Airbnb or short term rentals, or renting it out and being a property manager, or subdividing it on a shop space and commercial land and leasing it out?

This is a tiny house. I bought this bad boy and it's.

Hopefully going to get delivered here next.

Week, so you guys will be able to see it. And my goal is to make this pay for the entire property that we're getting for the Mount Vernon location. So yeah, house hacking to its finest. This will be an Airbnb on wheels.

So it's considered an rv. These are all options to make good money in real estate. But furthermore, it's a very tax efficient way of growing your wealth. And in the seven steps of wealth at a Gusta Nation, the last one is investing. And over the next 12 to 24 months, a few of our owners are going to be reaching that level. And I want to make sure I have plenty of knowledge to be able to pass along to them for them to be able to grow their wealth using real estate. For example, last week on one of the Mike Minute masterminds for Augustination, we talked about the option of becoming an agent. And then if you self represent yourself, you get two and a half percent of your commissions back. If you're a first time home buyer, you can literally get a 3 1/2% down FHA mortgage. And that's great. And if you're able to self represent yourself and get two and a half percent of that back, you can literally get your first house for just 1% down payment. That's an excellent deal. Especially if there's some shop space on there. You can run your business out of there. This is the type of investing strategies I need to learn, grow and understand so I can pass this along to our owners at Augusta Nation.

Speaking of real estate, this is one of the Airbnbs that we have managing. And you can see this is where people book, this is the calendar on the back end where you can see all of our distributions. But what I did just right now is book off the 8th, 9th, and 10th.

And the reason I did that is.

Because we consistently keep getting complaints about a smell of smoke. And what we actually think has happened is the wood, like the trim, the closet doors, the cabinetry, literally has absorbed a smoke smell because we put an ozone maker into the room, and that should clear out all the smoke cells. And it does. But then it comes back after a couple days as we keep getting complaints.

And giving refunds to people.

So we're literally going to take those three days. We're gonna have the contractors come in there, paint it, they're gonna replace the shelving and the sliding doors on the closets, and hopefully just get rid of.

That smell once and for all.

Like, we just keep getting complaints, and we can't have that keep happening. Now, every single state is different when it comes to getting your license for real estate. And so literally what I'm doing right now is studying. And this is what I was doing last night. This is why I got off a little bit earlier, stayed several hours last night, late last night. And yes, I am having a little bit of lunch that is just lettuce, spring greens with some ranch. No, habanero ranch. Like a healthy version of it. So just wolf it down. But every single state is different. In Washington state, for example, we have to do 60 hours of training and then 30 hours of practice. Then you got to pass quizzes. That quiz allows you to get the certificate. That certificate allows you to then go take the test. All of this information is literally what I feel is how I learned in college. It's like memorization. Pass the test, get the piece of paper. A lot of this is not super necessary to be a good real estate investor or even a good agent. And I'm not trying to sell houses. Like, I'm not going to sell houses. I'm not going to be the guy.

Like, I want to sell your house or like, you know, you want me to show you houses on the weekend and doing open houses, I am not.

Going to do that. This is for my own personal investing and for training others in Augusta Nation. But I got to get through this. And it's a pain in the neck. And I literally feel like I'm back in college and I was got. I got burnt out in college on cramming for tests, reading books, and just cramming information in my brain for the only reason of passing a test.

I hate it.

So this is very painful and something I have to, like, force myself to do.

And I get tired doing it. And it's like the Only time I.

Read like and try to do this anymore. I only listen to audiobooks and I only watch videos. I do not read at all.

Hardly.

Literally. Besides my bible, don't read anything. This is painful. So 90 hours of course material, not so bad. But that's like 30 evenings. If I do three hours in an.

Evening, that's like 30 evenings plus the quizzes.

Then I go sit the test and I gotta actually know the information. Cause if I don't get a 70% I don't pass.

See.

And then I get distracted all the time with like actually real investing in real estate.

Over the weekend I came up with this term called capacity based growth. And it's basically where you grow to capacity in terms of without having to buy more trucks and equipment. You make sure you maximize your efficiency and your revenue up to a certain level. Then you switch to where you raise prices so you don't have to keep buying more assets. But anyways, Lee's been helping with me creating a framework for it. So it's actually a really good tool for our owners to actually know when.

To grow and when they should be.

Switching more to profitability mode where they raise prices, the growth kind of slows down and their close ratio goes down. So he's been creating the framework kind of formalizing what I was talking about in our last Mastermind. And over the weekend I was just alerted that if you actually go to augustalongersurface.com franchise, if you go all the way down here to the startup costs right here, we we didn't do our math correctly. Shame on us.

Look at this.

You add up all the initial costs like the solo operator model and it actually ends up being 12,999. I don't know where we got 9,000. That's got to change because it needs to match up with the franchise disclosure documents because that is a breach. You have to have all your marketing material has to exactly line up with franchise document. So mess that one up. Gotta change this up right away.

Alright, so I'm gonna tell you all about the deal I just purchased.

We're gonna head over to the bank and get a hundred thousand dollar check so we can close on the deal tomorrow. But before we do that, while we're driving, let's talk a little bit about clickbait. So this is for everybody that is saying you're doing these clickbait titles for your vlog and it has nothing to do with the titles and all the rest of it. Alright, let me explain, explain this.

Okay.

If I Titled the videos the way that my day actually went. It would look something like this.

46 emails, 96 phone calls, 32 voice notes.

That'd be day one, day two, vlog, four and a half hours of Zoom calls. Like, it would be super boring. You gotta remember that literally 90% of my day, I can't share in the vlog because it's either just a bunch of Augusta operational emails and calls and phone calls and text messages and zoom and all the rest of it, or it's just confidential. Like, I can't share all the drama that happens. And trust me, there is a lot of drama that happens over the course of 90 plus locations because I. I don't want to share things that are confidential. Effective July 8th. What in the world? The bank is closed. That's crazy. I gotta go to a different bank.

Look at this.

Effective last week, it's closed. Literally, it's all boarded up. Gonna have to go to a different branch. They must have known I was coming for my money. $100,000.

Like, we can't afford it.

Lock up the bank.

Okay, back to what I was talking about with clickbait.

Most of what I do throughout the day is either really boring or I just can't share it. It's too confidential. So the other 10% of my day, I have to somehow make it interesting because most of my day is just Augusta stuff. And you guys would get so bored if I just talked about Augusta stuff all day, every day.

So I take that 10% and say.

Okay, what's interesting about today?

Is it real estate?

Is it something to do with the gym? Is it something to do with my online businesses? Is it something to do with anything else other than Augusta and confidential stuff? And I try to make an entire video about just that little part.

Now, if you want me to do boring titles, I'm sorry, you should probably.

Just unsubscribe because I'm not gonna make these videos for just 200 people a day because no one would click on videos that the titles were that boring. So I'm gonna make it interesting as much as I possibly can. Now, let's talk about this property that I just purchased for the Mount Vernon Augusta lawn care location, first and foremost. Why am I doing this? Because a long term play, and I want to invest in this location for the long term and keep it for myself. Secondarily, the rent on our current place is going up and I just don't like the location because there's a lot of theft and I don't really Feel.

Like the owner wants us there and.

Will not sign a long term lease. I don't like that hovering over my head. As I grow a location, I want to have security, I want a long term lease, or I want to buy the land myself. So there was this property like 5 minutes drive from our current where we rent. They were originally asking for a purchase price of $650,000. It's perfect. It has a rental property, it has land, it has a spot for us to be able to have the shop and an Airbnb. It's gonna be great. But they wanted $650,000, and guess what? They didn't get it. They lowered their price. They lowered it down to 600,000. Then they lowered it down to 570,000. Did they get 570,000? No, they didn't. I offered $540,000. And in order to get that nice juicy price, I had to come in with some negotiation tactics. So what did I do? I g beefy earnest money, $20,000 in earnest money to show that I was a serious buyer. What else I do? I waive the inspection because I don't need the inspection. I'm buying it for the property, not so much the house. So I was able to get this property for literally $540,000 instead of $650,000. And if you're not telling me that we're in a correction in the real estate market, I'm sorry, but we are. And fortunately, I was able to buy it at pretty good interest rate. Five and a half percent, not fantastic compared to last year, but better than it was even a month ago in terms of interest rates.

But tomorrow is the closing date, and we need $100,000 to close the deal. So we're going to the bank to get the cashier check.

I just need a part of these.

And then I need to get a cashier's check too, if I can.

All right, we got the cashier's check. Tomorrow afternoon, we close on the deal, we sign it at the title company.

And then it's ours.

Last night I kind of got all the contractors read because we got to.

Put a whole bunch of gravel down.

Fences up, because we're going to separate the residential, where we're doing a rental property, and the actual shop space, plus an Airbnb for the tiny home. And so I got all the contractors ready to roll last night. And then I really hand everything off to Liz. We're a really good team because how it works is like I focus on the acquisition, getting the property and then I hand it off to her and.

She does all the management.

So then she's going to find renters, make sure everything goes smoothly, like shifting the utilities over. So all that's off my plate after the initial acquisition and purchase of the property. My recommendation out there for any business owners or people that are trying to invest in real estate. If you have a business that's kicking off good money, don't spend your time doing the management of the property. And by the way, pay good money for your manager. If they're offering you like 5, 4, 6% of the revenue that you're going to take to be a property manager, probably not enough meat on the bone for them to actually get extended excited.

About managing your property.

Give 10% but expect a really good manager. Liz is the best of the best, but you're not going to be able to get a great property manager if you're giving them a 3% of the gross rent. Just stop being cheap, stop tripping over nickels. In order to save pennies. Some people are gonna be like, why? Why did you waive inspection? Why did you waive the inspection? You are such a novice, you don't know what you're doing. Okay, maybe that's true, but here's the reason why I don't trip over pennies when I'm going after dollars. And ultimately this property is gonna probably save or make me six to $7,000 a month in revenue and the mortgage is gonna be like 3,000 or 3,200 with insurance and all the rest of it. So why in the world would I care about a little inspection when I know that the bones of the property, the actual infrastructure of the AC and the heating and the electrical is all brand new? If there's a ten thousand dollar repair, it's not gonna change whether or not this deal is a good deal. And Honestly, if a 10 or $15,000 repair is going to make or break a deal, you probably don't want to do that deal. There's not a meat on the bone.

These type of strategies when it comes to the real estate side of things.

Is what's going to allow owners of.

The Gusta Nation to build their wealth.

In a very tax efficient way, especially.

As they get multiple locations or begin.

To grow and expand and need shop space.

You can house hack, you can figure.

Out ways to subdivide land and really make a difference. And that is why I'm getting my real estate license.

So the question is really, what business are we in? Do we actually mow lawns and do landscaping. Are we too like McDonald's in the real estate game? And I truly believe after an owner has been in business for five, 10 years, they have multiple locations. That investment tool is extremely valuable to build wealth and do it so in a very tax efficient way. And so, yes, that is the game plan. Five, 10 years, building your business, generating income, taking that income, investing in an asset that's tax efficient and grows and appreciates over time.