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What is going on, Investor Thrive Nation? This is the Painless Wholesaling Podcast. I have David Dodge on here with me, who is the man, the myth, the legend. What's up, David?

What's going on, Nathan? How are you, brother?

Dude, I'm doing great. And everyone that's listening here, that maybe, maybe this is your first time listening to the Painless Wholesaling Podcast, this is Nathan Payne., and my goal is to make your journey into real estate investing, wholesaling, whatever you do, painless. All right, I gotta make it painless because it can be painful, and I can't take away all your pain. You're gonna have to go through some growth. That's why I bring on experts like David here to learn from. So we're going to dive into what David's about, how he's done hundreds and hundreds— wasn't it like 700 deals so far, David?

Uh, 700 wholesales specifically, 200 BRRRs, about 1,000 transactions in the last 8 years.

Well, you better slow down, dude. Yeah, but so we're gonna dive right into, uh, you know, what David's about, how he got started, how doing so many deals. Let's go right into it. So, David, kind of tell me, man, like, tell us in 30 seconds just a quick overview of who you are and then we'll dive into your story.

Yeah, man, no worries. So I started investing in real estate at the age of 20. I'm 38, so I was 18 years ago. And for the first 10 years, I was doing it the wrong way. I was doing it the slow way. I was finding properties at full retail on the MLS. I was buying those properties via, you know, agents. I was going to the bank and getting an 80% loan, which required me to have 20% out of pocket. So I was either borrowing that 20% or saving that 20% or a combination of both. House hacking in the beginning and then just doing rentals. And basically over the first 10 years, all through my 20s, I was buying about a house a year. And at the end of that 10-year period, when I got to the age of 30, I think I had 12 rentals. So I got lucky 2 years out of 10 and was able to buy 2. Properties instead of one.

Let's go.

It's just slow. It was good. I mean, I'm not, I'm not upset about that. Happy, happy that I did that. You know, I built a lot of wealth and a lot of equity, but it was just slow. About 8 years ago, at the age of 30, I decided, hey, I'm going to do this full time. I learned about wholesaling and I just started wholesaling for the next couple of years. I just was wholesaling, you know, exclusively. And then probably about 4, maybe 5 years ago, I was, you know, early 30s. I was like, you know what? I kind of lost track of the buying and holding and landlording, which I had done for 10 previous years. Right? I kind of circled back and I'm like, all right, I now have this new skill set of marketing to sellers and running appointments and making offers and following up and built out systems and, you know, had built a team. And I was like, this is great because I had essentially set myself up for lots of deal flow and high volume of deals. And, uh, essentially what I did about— let's go with 4 years. I don't know the exact date here, but let's go 4 years ago. I just said, hey, you know, I'm going to change the model a little bit. I'm still going to market, I'm still going to do some wholesaling, but But instead of wholesaling every single deal, I'm going to change it and I'm going to do what we like to refer to as keep the best and wholesale the rest. So I just made a small pivot and over the last, you know, 4 or 5 years, um, I've bought and rehabbed and rented and refinanced over 200 properties. So I've done the BRRRR method over 200 times. I've written a book on the BRRRR method. It's available on Amazon and Audible. It's literally called The BRRRR Method. Pretty straightforward. There's a few that have that same title.

I was about to say that's a good title and I'm surprised no one took it, but you're saying some people did, but you don't—

oh, there's people, you know, I didn't create the BRRRR method. I didn't invent it. I'm not the founder of it. It's just an acronym, you know? But my book is like 370 pages. It's really, really deep. It dives into all the pros and the cons and the mistakes that I made and the ways to do it right and not do it wrong. And we break it all down. But yeah, for the most part, you know, over the last couple of years, I'd say 8, I've been a full-time real estate investor, hundreds and hundreds of wholesales, probably 700+ wholesales, 200+ BRRRRs. I just got my real estate license like last month. Wow. And I, I operated without it for 18 years, so you don't need it. The only reason I got it is just to essentially help friends and family, you know, with real estate transactions on the retail side of the business. But I'm not an agent, like in terms of like, you know, I am an agent. Let's, let's not go, let's not say I'm not, I am, but I'm not operating day to day. I'm not promoting or marketing myself as being, you know, an agent. I'm an investor. I just have that tool in my belt. So at this point, I love doing podcasts. I love helping. I love giving back. I love teaching people how easy it is to get started. I built out a a free community online that teaches people how to get started. It has free courses. All right, what is it called? It's called Real Estate School.

That's a great name too, bro.

Can't beat that, bro. Real Estate School. The URL is R-E-I-S-K-O-O-L, so it's school spelled the cool way.

Because the other one was probably like, what, like a million dollars? What's up? The other one must have been like pretty expensive because—

yeah, I couldn't get my hands on that one, you know. But, uh, it's actually hosted on a platform called Skool.

S-K-O-O-L.

Yes, that makes it easy. Yep. And then, and then I'm just a group within that platform. But we've only had the group live for, I think, 5 weeks and we already have over 600 members in the group. It's free to join right now. At some point we may start charging, but right now it's free. I plan on keeping it free for a little while. It's got free courses on wholesaling, free courses on landlording, free courses on private money lending and how to get private money, free courses on data, how to run comps, how to make offers. It's all there. Everything's free right now.

It's phenomenal. So, so let me ask you about school, because that's kind of newer to me. Is that—

is that—

were you doing something on a different platform before you transitioned?

Yeah, I was, man. I've been, I've been coaching people for about 5 years. I think I've helped over 60, maybe close to 70 people get their first deal at this point. So I love helping. I love coaching, bro. Yeah, man. I love helping people. Love coaching. Love mentoring. I'm just like, you know what? How do I— how do I reach more people and help, help more people essentially? Right. What were you on before? Multiple platforms. Thinkific, Kajabi, my own WordPress website. All these different platforms.

Do you like Kajabi? I did not. I didn't like Kajabi.

You know, it's got pros and cons. You know, all of them do. All of them do. But this new platform, reiskool.com, so our real estate school is better. It's, it's got it all in one.

It's— everybody check that out.

That's it. Got a community. It's got a calendar with free trainings. We do 2 or 3 free trainings a week. Um, there's free courses in there. There's a community, of course, where members can collaborate and joint venture with each other and, you know, market their deals. And, um, it's just awesome. There's a leaderboard in there, so it kind of tracks, you know, who's engaging. And one of the things I like about it the most, Nathan, is it rewards those who are there to engage, right? If somebody wants to just come and take a free course, that's great, we got no problem with that. But there's 5 or 6 courses, and I'm going to be adding more and more as time goes on. And I only give away 2 for free right out the gate. All of it's free right now, but in order to access third and the fourth and the fifth course, you got to engage a little bit. And as you engage, you get points, and as you get points, it unlocks stuff. So it's really built to get people in there and to actually engage. And that's really what makes groups powerful and strong. It's not just having big— you know, having a group with 10,000 people, for example, in a Facebook group sounds cool. It's trash. People are going to watch your— watch a video or go take a course or or engage, that's a— that group is worthless. It's worthless.

Yeah.

So my goal has always been to, to really get— bring people together and joint venture and to collaborate.

So yeah, man, I've done a ton of deals through collaboration. It's huge. It's a great way to get deals. So, um, I'll have to check that out because I use Discord right now for my community, and, and I've tried whatever I can to get them to engage. And same with the Facebook groups. I have a big Facebook group. I just asked someone that has 170,000— 168,000 people in his Facebook group just reached out to me and was like, hey, can you help me, you know, get, get this, uh, community rolling. And I'm like, sure, but you're right, like, the size doesn't matter.

It's about— this is the way to go, bro. Check it out. I've been— I've done Discord, I've done Slack, I've done Facebook, I've done Thinkific, I've done Kajabi, I've even been on some other platforms outside of all those, and none of them hold a candle to Skool. It's, it's so easy to use. There's a mobile app, it's got a calendar, it's got courses, it's got the community, there's a leaderboard. Like I was saying, it forces engagement and it actually, you know, rewards people for the engagement. That's, that's what you need. That's what you want. So I would highly recommend it.

Wow, dude, you just— you're helping me out. You're helping the podcast, Painless Podcast Nation over here.

Trying to make your life painless too, Nathan.

Dude, you really are, because, uh, Discord really is— I think it's cool the way you can separate everything in like different categories and have different channels because people don't want to talk within Slack.

It's similar to Slack. Yeah.

Is school the kind of the same where you can have different channels depending on what people want to talk about?

Yes, you can have different categories. So categories, you're still going to have a— you're still going to have a feed like any social media would, and you just have different categories and you can search those categories. But what I like about it is it's not so much chat, it's more about posts. And again, that's what makes it fun because you can get points for getting likes and comments. And, you know, just chatting is one thing, right? But being able to engage and dive deep on certain topics. So Yes, it does have, you know, the ability to separate out, you know, deals versus questions versus free trainings or call replays or gold content or, you know, whatever the category you want.

I freaking love it. Everybody that's listening, go check out isreiskool.com.

You nailed it. It's called Real Estate School. That's just the URL that gets you there quickly.

Freaking dope. So let's, let's dive into newbies. Everybody that's listening here was— is a newbie or was once a newbie. How do you suggest a newbie go? Goes and gets started, brother? What's—

what's— yeah, I love it, man. So, you know, here's the thing. I was a newbie once. I trained tons of newbies. Like I said, I've helped 60, maybe even 70 people get their first deal at this point, right? And most people, including myself, when I've started, we get analysis paralysis. We think we need to know everything. We want to go study something. We want to go read 10 books. We want to go join 5 groups and 5 masterminds and go on this retreat and do this and do that. And here's the thing, you don't need to know it all. That's the secret. In fact, the more you try to learn, the harder it's going to be. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but what you need to know is, is that you only need to focus on the next step. You don't need all of the steps. You don't need it all. What you need to do is you need to focus on step number 1. And here's the deal, guys and girls. Step number 1 is marketing. And guess what? Marketing is just a fancy word for getting people on the phone. So you either spend money to get your phone to ring, or you spend time ringing other people's phones. That's it. That's the business. It's the whole— that's the whole thing. So that's step 1. So don't even worry about step 2 or step 3 or—

Don't worry about the contract yet, bro?

Are you sure? Absolutely. Get people on the phone because people are going to get the contract and they're going to say, well, this guy's got a contract and this guy's got a contract and they're not going to know which contract to use. They're going to spend 5 days or 5 weeks trying to make their own contract from pieces from their contract. Listen, guys, I give away all of it for free. All of it inside real estate school. Free contracts, free joint venture agreements, free assignments. It's all free. It's all out there already, right? If you don't want to use my contracts, then go use somebody else's. But no, I would happily sit here today and I'm not arguing by any means, but I would say no, knowing what contract to use is not part of step one. Part of step one is getting people on the phone that own a home, asking if they have any interest in selling, figuring out what motivations or problems they have. And then going to helping them solve those problems. And then if you can make an offer or they are of interest in selling, then let's go to step 2. But don't worry about step 2 until you've gotten step 1 down or you are actively doing step 1. If you don't have any leads, you don't have a business, Nathan. You know this.

That's true, brother.

I don't care what business you're in. You could be a dentist. If you ain't got nobody's teeth to fix, you ain't got no business, bro. You got to have leads. And that's what marketing is. It's getting people on the phone some way, shape, or form. That own a property that have interest in selling that property. The more motivation they have, the better for you and I as the investor or the wholesaler.

But you got to get people on the phone. 100%. So, Dave, let me ask you this. For people that are in analysis paralysis and they're like, okay, David just made it super easy, said I just need to call somebody.

I got to call somebody.

What happens when you're coaching these people and they want to do everything but call somebody? How do you help them? Because that's, that's kind of where I'm at, too. It's like I tell people to go establish relationships with buyers so they have like someone that they can reach out to as like another mentor and can tell them what to pay. And but yeah, either way, they got to get in the approach.

But I think that, I think that needs to be happening all the time in the background. It's not like if I was going to sit down with somebody right now, like new person walked in and they work at a restaurant and they don't know the first thing about real estate. They never even bought a house. They're like, Dave, I'm ready to get started. I'm going to say, all right, cool. Don't read any books. Don't take any courses. Let's pick up the phone and start calling for sale by owners or people that have properties listed on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Zillow, for sale by owner or for rent. Call them and say, hey, do you have interest in selling this? If so, great. What are you asking? And then start making offers to people, start setting appointments with people. You can learn everything in the evening, in over the weekend, next week. We can always— there's always time to learn step 2. But guys, step 1 is the most important part. It's leads. It's getting people on the phone. And if you don't have any leads, you don't have any business. So it's all about starting. And when people come to me and they say, Dave, I get this all the time, Dave, I've been, I've been, you know, doing this part-time for 6 months. And I say, oh great, what are your numbers? And they say, well, what do you mean? And I say, well, how many sellers have you talked to this week? Have you made any offers this month? And they're like, no, not yet. I'm not there yet. And I'm like, well, then you're not doing anything. You have, you have done zero. You have not taken any step towards that first deal. You're in analysis paralysis land. Trying to learn step 9. And guess what? You can't go from step 1 to step 9. It doesn't work that way. Get people on the phone, make friends, find problems, and then go solve them. And then come in, in real estate school, we basically are offering mentorships and coaching, right? It's indirect, but it's in there. And it's like, hey, I got this seller appointment. What do I do now? You're going to have 20 people comment. Great. Have you determined the comps? Have you— have you got the repairs? You need help? Drop a link with photos. We will help you.

There.

That's right. But don't worry about step 2. Don't worry about step 9, guys. Step 1, start making calls or start spending money via mailers or ads online or radio or billboards or bandit signs or park benches, or just go to networking events, right? One of the things that I tell everybody that I work with, everybody, no matter what, is that you can't keep your business a secret. And I know it sounds dumb. It's like, oh, duh. But I can't tell you how many people I work with that have said they've been doing this business for 2 months or 5 months or a year in some cases. And they've never made a single Facebook post saying, hey, you know anybody that needs to sell a house? Yeah, they're keeping their business a secret, guys. You can't keep your business a secret. When's the last time you drove by any business and they didn't have signage up? That's right, nobody does that. You gotta tell everybody you know. So hypothetically speaking, you need to be shouting from the rooftops what business you're in.

Even if you suck— well, you feel like you suck, right? Nobody sucks if they're starting. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I feel like a lot of people don't shout because they don't feel like they're worthy yet, right? Or they're, they're ready, or they don't know, right?

They're not worthy, they're not ready, they don't know how to do this, guys. Those are limiting beliefs, right, in the field? Yeah, absolutely.

That's, that's very interesting, brother. So I coach, you coach, and a lot of times is people are looking for everything but to get on that, that first step, right?

They're trying to do everything. Why, why wouldn't they? Let's, let's talk about this for a second, Nathan. The hardest thing for most people to do is to make the first phone call. It's so much easier to say, you know what, I think today I'm gonna get a business card. And tomorrow they say, I'm gonna work on my logo. And then they say, oh, you know what, it'd be kind of cool to have a website. And all they're doing is kicking step one down the road, bro. That's it. So, you know, business cards might be necessary, a logo probably not necessary, but it's cool to have. Same with the website. I, I did 30 deals before I had a website. I probably did 5 or 6 before I even had a business card. You know, you don't need these things. What you need is leads, and all these other things can be helpful. They can build credibility. They can help showcase your, your, you know, you and your business and your credibility and your testimonials and all that good stuff. But it's not necessary. It's not step 1, guys. Step 1 is talking to people that have problems that own houses so we can come in and solve these problems for them. That's step one. So the free mentor session is this podcast right here. Stop picking up more books and stop going to YouTube and stop going to these places to try to learn more. You know enough. Yeah. From this. What have we been on this for? 17 minutes. You know enough in the last 17 minutes to get started. I promise you.

Hey, you're right, bro. Like, really, if you, you take a look at the people that have been in analysis paralysis and you say, how many calls have you made? They probably narrow it down to like less than 10, a dozen.

I made a dozen calls and you've been at this for 6 months, guys. I made a dozen calls before 8 AM today. Come on. Yeah, right.

So, well, hey, so let me ask you this, um, so how long have you been coaching for?

5 and a half years. 5 and a half years. Closer to 6 actually.

Has your approach to coaching always been this direct where you're just like, make a call, or did that take time to be like, okay, this is really—

No, I would find it over the years. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I just know now, you know, I have, I have a lot of students that can get a deal usually within about 6 to 8 weeks. Not every student, but most of them. And the reason is, is because I tell them, hey, if you want to kick this can down the road for 6 or 8 weeks, that's fine. Let me know when you're ready to take step 1, and that's when I'm ready to start helping you. But I don't want to work with people that aren't ready to take that first step. I literally turn people away all day because they're like, oh, Dave, I got to go do this, I got to go to this retreat, I got to go read this book. And it's like, cool, when you're ready to quit doing all that bullshit— pardon my language— and you're ready to actually do deals, step one is step one. You can't go around it. You got to start there. So when you're ready to start showing me your numbers, how many calls, how many texts, how many mailers, you know, whatever it may be, how many bandit signs, how much time or how much money have you spent on your marketing business? Because that's really what business we're in. Then I'm more than happy to help people, but I turn people away more than I actually bring them on because they're not ready. I think a lot of people that aren't ready— I'm happy to help, but you got to be ready to do step one. And if you don't think I can, I'm not gonna— I don't have any reason to work with you.

I just think a lot of people think this business is like, uh, something that they can just sit back and, and relax and just like, okay, this is like my dream. It is.

It can be. Here's the thing, it can be, right? When you want it, whenever they're ready to scale, meaning hire acquisitions folks, right?

They want that. They want that lifestyle immediately, though.

They want that. They want that day one. And that's, you know what I tell people straight up, if that's what you want, go find somebody that's going to sell you that dream and take your money. I'm not that guy. I don't want to take your money and have you hire me and pay me as a coach to lie to you. I'm not going to lie to you. And hopefully anybody watching this live tonight, tomorrow, next month, 2027, doesn't matter. This is who I am, guys. I want to help, but I want to help people that want my help. Not just people that want to pay and then hope and pray. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in hoping. I'll get your results, but you gotta, you gotta be able to put in the work.

And nothing's worse than that, you know. And that's just inevitable. Sometimes people just, they feel like paying sometimes is, is their—

them taking that first step, taking action.

No, I feel like it though, you know.

Yes, I, I agree 100%, Nathan. It, you know, it, it is taking action in a way because it's showing that you're serious, but then prove it. That's kind of where we're at now, right? Prove it. Right. So it's not hard. You know, we use simple, simple, simple scorecards with our students. Here's a scorecard. And basically, if we go a week without talking and they're like, hey, I got a question about this, I'm happy to answer that question. But typically I'm saying, show me your scorecard. And if you don't have any, any calls or any marketing, we're not even going to talk about your question. It's not relevant. Right. And I'm not going to be rude, of course, but I'm going to be firm. There's a difference, right? I'm going to be firm. Who gives a shit about what assignment contract to use? You're not on step 6.

Yes, sir.

You gotta go back to step 1. So you can tell I'm very passionate, you know.

Bro, you've been coaching for 5 and a half years. Yeah, you've been, you've been coaching for a while. You, you've seen what the excuses are and you've seen what was required to succeed, and you're saying you're just preaching it, bro, from the rooftops. Let's go!

I'm screaming from the rooftops, man. You can't keep it a secret. You gotta, you gotta get it out there.

Well, Dave, you've been, you've been more than gracious enough with your time to the Investors Thrive Nation here. I appreciate you. Where can we find you?

I know you've already said it, but just give me a real estate school, baby. Go Google it and you can Google it. S-C-H-O-O-L or S-K-O-O-L, either spelling will find me on there. I'm on there. That's my preferred method of communication. It's free to join right now. We're going to start charging down the road at some point, but anybody that joins before we start charging, probably not for another 5, 6, 7 weeks, to be honest. But anybody that joins in the meantime gets free access to Life. You can make posts and tag people in there. You can send DMs in there. There's free courses. There's a community. It's got everything. It's, it's basically the product that I've been looking for for 5 and a half, 6 years. And I just found it myself about 3 months ago. And I've been using it for— I'm so wrong. It's phenomenal.

I'm literally looking at it right now. We got Stephen Townes.

At +206.

We got—

bro, he's crushing it. Steven is my— he's one of my, uh, one of my, uh, you know, most active guys in there. That's right, Robert.

We got Kim Harris, number 4. I love it, man. Just giving people— giving people recognition for taking action. That's what's important.

So hey, David, it shows how many people are online. Like right now there's 8, which is cool. Yeah, yeah. Um, but sometimes there's 30 or 40 people online and we only— we're only at 600, man. I'm gonna make this group 100,000, no problem. You know, it's, it's one of my goals.

So, well, let's get it. And that's a great, great name. So I wonder if you get organic traffic there just from people searching.

You know, the group was private until 2 days ago. Not, not meaning charged, just private. And I just opened it up to public literally 2 days ago, and it just finally got Google indexed this morning. So I'd imagine we'll start seeing some pretty massive growth over the next couple of weeks. I'm even running ads. I'm running ads. I'm paying money. Let's get people into a free group. That's how much I love helping people.

What's your coaching business? Is it also REI School or is this just the name that you found for the coaching business?

It's called Discount Property Investor because that's what we do. We buy properties at discounts.

You know, don't get it twisted, people. We don't buy it at full price.

But real estate school is where I want to push everybody. It's free right now. It's awesome. There's so much value in there. I mean, it's— we're constantly I'm doing 2 or 3 free trainings a week right now, and all the calls are recorded and archived. And there's a call library. It's awesome. Yeah, of course there's a mastermind and an upsell, but that's not why I'm here today. Not at all. Why wouldn't there be? Right.

It sounds like you got a lot of value. So honestly, I want to check it out because Discord, when people go in there, they're freaking lost, dude.

Sign up. It's free. You'll, you'll be— he'll have access in 10 minutes.—

or less. My brother David Dodge, everybody. Thank you for coming on and reach out. And if you don't go to real estate school, I don't know why you wouldn't.

It's free. I don't know what else to tell you.

There's nothing else to say other than go right now. All right, everybody, catch you on the next one. Peace out, Dave.

I appreciate your time, brother. Likewise, man.

Thank you.