RJ Bates: From $7,500 on First Deal to doing 50 Deals in 50 States

Yo, what's up everybody? We are live, Investor Thrive Nation. We are on the Painless Flipping Podcast and I got one of my heroes on here. We got RJ Bass III. What's up, bro?

What's going on, man? Excited to be here, dude.

I'm so excited to dive in on how you got your first deal and how you got to where you're at right now, closing 50 deals plus in 50 states. Is that right? And you did it twice.

Twice. Yes, twice now, 2020 and 2023.

You know, RJ, I'm a pretty spiritual guy. You know, I love Jesus and I'm always about like preaching the gospel and talking to people about it. I almost feel the exact same way about what you just did with 50 Deals in 50 States Plus. How are we not preaching this to the whole world, bro? How does not everybody know this?

You know, I will say we do have kind of a cult following around it. We had people both in 2020 and 2023, so a 3-year gap that showed up every single day, all 8 hours, every single day along with me, man. They were donating money so I could get coffee and energy drinks. Uh, yeah, man, there's a cult following around it for sure. Uh, but I would love to see more people hop on there and see, because dude, how can you not get more actionable advice than watching someone work 8 hours a day for 50 days straight? That was the thought process behind it. Yeah, I think if you've ever struggled being able to get on the phone with sellers, there's your opportunity to figure out how to do it.

Absolutely incredible. Absolutely incredible. We'll dive more into that because I honestly— it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Because I— so you know about the strategy I teach where it was like you get a deal with no marketing spend, brand new, you start with your buyers. So I did a challenge, one deal. It was get a deal within 30 days with no spend. Bro, you did 50 deals in 50 states in 50 days. Is that right?

50 days? Yep, bro.

I did what? I did one deal in 30 days. Come on, dog, you rocked me.

But I was spending money. You weren't spending any money. There's a difference.

But, but still, it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I think everybody here, it's like, hey, if you do that model where you're like, hey, let's go pay for some leads, let's get some deals— like, you're, you're the only guy in our industry that is like shows actually has done. That's why I respect you, is, uh, there's so many people out there, bro, they talk. It's like, but when's the last time you actually closed the deal? Are you even doing the business or are you just teaching it, right?

Exactly. Well, I appreciate that, man. I appreciate the shout out for sure.

Well, I love it. We're going to dive in deeper, okay? So everybody just stay tuned because we're going to be getting into how he did 50 deals plus in 50 days twice. You know, unheard of. Uh, but let's, let's talk about your first deal, man, because a lot of people listen are people that haven't done deals yet, and I want them to know RJ, how he got his first deal and how he scaled and how he's at where he's at right now. So let's talk about that first deal.

Tell me. Yes. So, you know, you and I both are educators and we're passionate about helping people. And my— one of the many reasons why I'm passionate about educating people is because my entry into learning wholesaling was $65,000 in debt. To pay for education. So I went to one of the big box educators in the hotel seminar. Go to the back of the room. Well, we'll call your credit card. We'll get you a credit limit up. And I basically begged my mom to, to put the education, $65,000 on a credit card for me. And she did. And essentially what we got taught was to place offers on properties that are listed on the MLS. And then when you got them under contract, you sell them on Craigslist.

Oh gosh.

Like that. I mean, essentially, like if they had just said that sentence, it's pretty much what we got for the $65,000.

And you would have been like, I'm good.

Right, right. Like, if that's all you're going to tell me, like, all right, I appreciate it.

Now, Can you believe people just like live with themselves at that high of a ticket price and giving you that info?

To be honest with you, man, I don't know who actually like ran that, what the name of the company was, because everyone we ever dealt with was just a failed student that they converted over to a coach. So that's, that's all we were dealing with was, hey, I, I attended this exact same thing like 3 months ago and now I'm a coach. So it was rough. But essentially what happened is, is, you know, I, I have no analysis paralysis. I immediately started taking action. I mean, while I'm in the classroom and they're saying, here's what you do, I'm on Zillow, I'm finding the properties. Hey, as-is. Okay, search as-is. You know, it's got to be cheap. All right. This house is pretty ugly. It seems pretty cheap. And I got a property under contract here in Arlington, Texas, for $92,000, went through a realtor and got the contract accepted. The seller was a very experienced investor and basically he was like, hey, I just don't want— he was wholesaling it. I just, I don't want to do the work. Put it listed on the MLS. I got it under contract. One of the best benefits of this first deal was my escrow officer at the title company that the seller mandated that we use basically become— became my best educator because I was told that you don't do assignments, you have to do a double close because you have to use our transactional funding company.

These guys are double dipping everywhere, bro.

Everywhere you could. They also wanted us to set up an LLC and all of that.

Right?

So, you know, I'm thinking I have to do a double close and I have to use transactional funding. She was the one that was like, no, we can still do a double close but just a pass-through of funds. I'm not going to charge you anything extra.

Had your back.

Yeah, she walked me through that. So immediately after I got it under contract, I did what they taught me to do. I went and listed it on Craigslist, and within 30 minutes of that property being on Craigslist, I got a call from, uh, an old guy investor, and he's like, hey, I want to walk the property. Like, this is how he's talking to me. Hey, I want to walk the property. And I'm like, um, okay, well, let me call my realtor and I'll get it scheduled. When would you like to walk it? And he's like, no, I'm here now. I want to walk right now. And I'm like, I, I don't think it works like that. I, I'm pretty sure I need to schedule— mind you, I'm completely ignorant. I don't really know. And I'm like, no, I think I need to go call my realtor and get this scheduled. And he says, don't worry about it. One of the back windows was unlocked. I'm crawling through right now. And I'm freaking out. Oh gosh. He walks through about 4 or 5 minutes with me on the phone. He's like, all right, I'll take it.

Wow.

So called my realtor, said, hey man, I'm so sorry. Someone crawled in. I'd already told him I was wholesaling it.

Yeah, yeah.

And, uh, he wrote the contract out, we did the double close, made $7,500 on it. The best part of the story was from that moment until closing, every single day I would call Dana, the escrow officer, and I would say, Dana, I'm just, I'm just letting you know, I do not have $92,000, so I'm gonna show up to closing and I have no money. But I'm walking out with $7,500 and she's like, yes, RJ. And every single day I'd call her just to verify, like, I'm just making sure because I don't want to be embarrassed. Like, I don't want to mess this up, right?

Yeah, that's amazing.

And, uh, the day that I closed, uh, I got the $7,500. I'll never forget because Cassie and I, my partner, were contractors. We were doing a roof for around $7,500 total was our, like, entire contract price on this house to do the roof. And I remember thinking to myself, I have to go pick up an extra bundle of shingles, drive over there, sling it in the car, sling it in the, you know, take it to the guys, and I'm gonna make probably $1,200 for doing this roof. But I did nothing but just push a couple pieces of paper, and I'm making $7,500, and there's nobody to pay. I'm getting to keep all $7,500. Forget contracting. I'm sold on wholesaling. And we never looked back.

That's, that's honestly, that's an incredible story, bro. That's amazing. Have you told that a lot or—

You know, we don't really tell that one so much because for— and I'll give a reason why. I mean, we kind of neglected the, the contracting business from that moment. That was August of 2014. Mm-hmm. And essentially, we— no sales, no anything. And I was still trying to figure out wholesaling because, you know, it got a little bit harder.

Yeah.

You know, it wasn't simple as like, hey, just go get a deal off the MLS.

No, not at all.

So it took us a couple of months to get the next deal. And in that deal, when we had to put our earnest money down, pushed us to $11 in our bank account total. And that was the make or break moment where I said, trust me, Cassie, let's put the earnest money down. And we sold that deal. That was the moment that was like our back is against the wall moment. The first deal was kind of like, is this real? Is this happening? That was the moment where it was like, I'm going to believe, I'm going to trust in wholesaling. So yeah, it was only a 2, 2 and a half month time difference, but that's where it really kind of— all right, we're doing this for real now.

Wow. Incredible. You know that story, the first deal you got? I feel like sometimes when it just happens, I don't want to say it was easy for you, but I feel like sometimes people, like, they get that first deal, they're like, oh, wow, I didn't really do much. And then they, they don't get anything for like 6 months, a year, and they're like, then they flame out, right? But you kept on, you stayed strong. So sometimes I worry about that deal, that first deal for a lot of people, especially if it's like a giant one and super easy. People like think it's like that and it's like, hey, bro, you probably got lucky on that list or cold calling, right? And I think you also, you probably don't do that strategy anymore. You're probably like, that was— I got lucky, probably.

Yeah. Yeah. And listen, I believe the same thing where, you know, you can almost handicap yourself with those first couple of deals, assuming that whatever happened is like truth, like this is how it's always going to be. But because we were consistent with our actions, we learned very quickly, like, okay, this is what wholesaling really is. And we never kind of relaxed and said, all right, you know, we're making a lot of money now because that first year, 2015, we did about $750,000 in assignments strictly off the MLS. So because we didn't know any better, so it was all MLS deals. And, and but it took, you know, 5, 6 days a week of constant action to get there.

Amazing. Yeah. And a lot of people don't have that kind of success in their first year either. So that must have felt pretty freaking good.

Oh, dude, that was life-changing. We had never made anywhere close to that type of money. So yeah, absolutely.

So let's kind of talk about you're the king, the king closer, right? That's what they call you. Is that self-proclaimed or is that the name given?

No, it's not self-proclaimed. It's hard to see. But these are the Closers Olympics belts that they said, hey, if you win the Closers Olympics, then you're the King Closer. So it actually says King Closer. I didn't come up with that. I just keep winning the damn thing. So that's why.

Yeah, exactly. You did not self-proclaim. You freaking got deemed, anointed, signed. There you go. Closer. So tell me about this. So you had the experience through contracting, got your first deal. Have you always been the king closer? Have you always been great at sales, or is that something you had to learn through your journey?

I, I think that there was probably a little bit of natural ability there. You know, it kind of got passed down to me in my genes. My mom and my dad were both great salespeople. I'm gonna go all the way back to my mom's dad, one of the most charismatic characters of all time. I, I definitely get a lot of my personality from him, and, uh, I think that plays a huge role in the fact that I'm super comfortable just talking to people and being on the phones. But I have learned a lot through getting my teeth kicked in. I mean, it wasn't always like, hey, first dial, you know, I'm just getting deals. I had to learn a lot through, through trial and error.

Yeah, I agree. When I first got into this, I had a sales background, so I was like, oh, I can convince people to take a low offer. And then you soon find out, you know, it's not so much convincing as finding the right opportunity, right? And, you know, I've done tons of sales training like John Martinez. I did Franklin Covey sales training, you name it, like Never Split the Difference. I'm sure you've read all those.

Yeah, I've gone through that.

But it's interesting to see. Yes, it does separate. Like when you're, you know, whoever's against you on that phone, they don't stand a chance, right? Yeah, I know you probably feel like that.

Yeah, I will say because we're about to talk about the 50-50-50. I did meet a guy He was out of Delaware. He was, he was my one contract I got in Delaware. He was a car salesman and I basically just begged him at the end. I was like, hey man, just give me $1 off of your asking price so I can just at least tell my team I got you a little bit lower than your asking price. And he was like, no, it's going to be a hard pass. Like, you're just going to give me my number. And I said in the contract, we signed it up. We still made a $10,000 assignment fee on it, but that guy, I will never forget him. He was my match. I couldn't get him to even come down $1.

Bro, you got those guys that just like, they know how to play the game. They're like, sorry, man. I'm like, I'm gonna move on.

He was a master of the walk away. The close.

He closes the book and walks away. Dude, I find that difficult to walk away. That's something I need to work on. It's definitely a skill set. So let's, let's dive right into where you're at right now, because again, in, in this podcast, I like to talk about where you started and now where you're at. And right now you went from, you know, when you first started $7,500 to freaking 50 deals in 50 states. Could you have ever imagined when you first started in that, that room, you know, where you're in the back running up that card or getting that first deal? Could you imagine being able to do 50 deals in 50 states?

Not the first deal, but I will say April of 2015, I'll never forget it because I decided, hey, if we can do this in Dallas-Fort Worth and we're not going to walk these properties, we're not seeing them in person, we can do this anywhere. So we quickly went virtual to Austin, San Antonio, Houston, the other major cities here in Texas. And we started doing deals. And, and so mind you, we had only been full-time 4 months and we're already going to other cities. And then it was, well, let's do Phoenix, let's do Portland, let's do Baltimore. So we started expanding. We went virtual pretty quick and it was always like, yeah, we're going to be 50 states. We didn't really attempt all 50 states though until 2020 when I did the first 50 Deal Challenge, and that was all through SMS marketing. So huge difference, right? So two 50-day challenges, 2020 all SMS marketing, got 86 deals in 49 states in 50 days. Got my teeth kicked in though. I, I share the story. You go watch day 1 and then you go look at day 50. I looked like I ran a pres— like a 4-year presidential campaign. Like, I, I visually aged. Yes. During those 50 days because it was just so brutal in some markets like the Colorados, the Utahs, the Californias. You know, pretty much anything on the western side of the United States, extremely brutal, especially with those outbound, uh, well, your, your state, Utah. I mean, dude, just y'all are brutal out there. Y'all hate me. I don't know. Thank God you like me, but yes, I like you.

Well, when I found out, because I've done deals in those West markets as well, I just feel like they're a little bit— what did you say? They're a little bit more investor-minded, like they're a little savvier, or what do you think it is? They're just rude or what?

I think for me, my avatar, my motivated seller avatar, is the tired landlord. There's a lot less like cash-flowing savvy landlords in those places because y'all's property values are so high. So like in Utah, hey, I've got a $500,000 house, but it can only rent out for $2,800 a month. It doesn't cash flow. It's like, it's difficult for me to talk to my avatar because they really just don't exist in those locations.

Right.

Whereas like in Ohio, I could talk to that tired landlord pretty much every other phone call because it's like, yeah, I own this house, it's $50,000 and it rents out for $1,200 a month. That's a no-brainer. I could do that. I could have that conversation. So I think that's my main issue with the Western United States.

Would you say those are most of the people you text and you marketed to were tired landlords?

Yeah, for sure.

Okay. I always felt like tired landlords was— that's where we got a majority of our deals when we marketed a lot.

Yeah.

Finding the right opportunity. So was it— was your marketing more of like, let me find the tired landlord and find the right opportunity, or was it like convincing or trying to find a way to get people to want to sell?

So again, 2020, Because I see Clive asked me, he says, hey, I only see you talking to people from your website. You're right, Clive, because in 2020 I was doing all outbound. It was all SMS, right? And it was, hey, I wanted to talk to— I was pulling the list on batch leads. I was going after the tired landlords, the vacant properties, the pre-foreclosures, the tax defaults, all those, but basically centered around the ultimate filter that I used after I stacked everything was absentee owner so I could get the landlord. Now in 2023, my, my main avatar is still tired landlords. It's just with inbound, not with outbound marketing. So that's where you're seeing, hey, people, I'm— everyone I'm talking to has pretty much come to my website on some level because I'm doing a lot of the pay-per-lead models through like Speed to Lead and LeadZoho. So Google PPC, Facebook, YouTube ads. It's pretty much all of our leads are coming from.

Yeah, I love LeadZolo.

They're great.

Um, let me ask you this. So do you still do a lot of the outbound or is it all inbound now?

So all of our, uh, lists that we pulled on batch are still cold called daily by virtual assistants. That's the only outbound that we're doing.

If you could, would you just get rid of that if you had to pick one? Would you just be like, man, let me—

oh yeah. Okay, yeah, it would be strictly the inbound, the paper lead model if I had to choose.

Yeah, it's so interesting that how the market— marketing has changed because when I started to do text was just like, it was money, bro.

Yeah, money.

But now it's, you know, obviously a lot of regulations making it more difficult. So the inbound model, I think that's where they're all trying to push it. That's what, you know, Facebook, Google, you know, the regulations on call— cold calls and texting, they're all trying to push it to inbound.

Yeah, absolutely.

Which, which is nice because at the same time, inbound leads, they, they come to you, right? You're not chasing them.

Dude, listen, if you go listen to how different I talk to sellers now in 2023 than I did in 2020— in 2020, it was like we had to fight tooth and nail just to find out if they wanted to sell. Now it's, I'm making sure you still need to sell 'Cause you came to my website and then it's, what is your price? Second question out of my mouth is, what is your asking price? 'Cause they're coming to us, right? We're not going after them. And it just puts us on such a better position in the conversation where I'm getting an asking price out of them early on. And then from there on, it's all about understanding their pain point, their motivation, and why they need to sell. And it's easy to navigate the conversation.

Yes. Let me ask you this about the price, because a lot of people, they teach like, hey, ask for that later or get them to make the offer. But well, actually, you do get them to put their offer first. So they're asking price. So what if, you know, house's ARV is $150,000 and they're like, I want $120,000 or $130,000 when you immediately like, that's not a deal for a flip. Do you just hear the price no matter what they give you and just nod your head and then go into motivation? Or do you try to immediately be like, 'Ah, what, you're asking too much.' Like, so in that scenario—

that's a great scenario because that is a very common—

yeah, they see Zillow, right? They see Zillow and they're like, 'I'll give you a little bit of a discount for the agent commissions,' right?

It says $150, no agent commissions, and I know the floor needs to be replaced, so I'm giving you a deal at $120, right? Yeah, very common conversation. So what I do there is is I get the price immediately. So my, my spread here is I've got 4 monitors. On my far right would be my CRM, and on my third monitor is where I have my comps. So I say, what's the price? $120,000. I'm copying and pasting that, I'm putting it into my comping system. My next question is, tell me a little bit about the property, what you got going on. Very open-ended question. That from there is going to tell me where their motivation, where their pain point is, because I didn't ask them anything specific. They're going to talk about what's the most important thing to them in regards to selling the property. So this is where they'll talk about the condition, financials, anything like that. If I don't get a lot from that answer that they tell me, I'll ask them, especially if I'm confused by how we got to $120,000. If they start saying the house needs work or something, I will flat out ask them, how did you come up with $120,000? Because people don't really ask these questions.

Of course.

So it differentiates me from the other conversations they're having. And so at that point in time, they just answer. Just like when I ask, hey, what's your asking price? Is the second question. 98% of the time I get a number. When I ask them that, they'll fully explain it to me. And so at that point in time, it's either I'm killing the deal because it doesn't work, or I'm explaining why we need to dive deeper on price, um, and kind of go into it where it's like, hey, well, you are motivated and the house is distressed, but $120,000 is not going to work out, and this is the reason why. That's where I go with kind of educating the seller a little bit on how the numbers work.

I love it. So I've heard you talk about this, and I agree fully about the marketing in the states of the West, West Coast, like the west side of the United States. And you gotta— it works, but you just have to spend more money, right? You make more money, we got to spend more money. And when new investors are in those areas, they don't really understand when they hear, like, you know, that you've got to cold call a certain amount of people. They just don't get it. Just requires more. So do you mess in those areas knowing that it requires more spend, more effort, or do you try to just stay where it's a little bit less?

So I break it down into— I try to simplify everything because we are nationwide and we teach nationwide. I tell everybody, hey, there's essentially 3 types of markets. There's the extremely low-income markets, low price points. This is going to be like your Jackson, Mississippi's, your St. Louis, Missouri's, your Birmingham, Alabama's. Those are going to be super easy to get deals. Also going to be difficult to dispo. Okay, so you really don't want to do too many deals there because that's where your termination rate could go super high. Then your bread and butter markets, right? This is going to be Midwest, Sunbelt states, places like Ohio, uh, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, places like that. That's where you want to do like 70, 80% of your deals. And then you're going to have the super difficult places with your high assignments, and this is going to be your Arizonas, your Californias, your Washington states, and even up in the Northeast, New Jerseys, New Yorks, places like that. You always want to be marketing in all three of those, but you need to understand that it's going to take more time less volume in those super difficult markets. But yeah, you absolutely don't want to miss out on— like, dude, New Mexico could be considered a more difficult market for most people, but we've kind of cracked the code there. And, and, you know, we're averaging, you know, $30,000, $40,000 on an assignment in New Mexico. So we don't want to miss out on that just because it's a little bit more difficult to get deals there. So that's kind of what we teach is like you need to have your bread and butter markets, but you always want to be dabbling in the other markets as well because you never know when those markets are going to change either, right? Market is going to shift in some of these locations and you want to be in there when it happens.

So let me ask you about the 50 days, uh, 50 deals in 50 days. No one in our industry— has anyone ever challenged you on that? Be like, bro, I can I can do that.

Never, never, never.

So what, what can we do? Or what, what are you thinking? Because I know you're 50 days, 50 deals in 50 days. You're thinking, your mind's going, you're like, okay, I got to get— So what are your thoughts on getting this thing out there more? You think about doing it again? Are you thinking about just, you know, making more videos? I got to know what's the plan with that.

The plan is absolutely to keep doing it because I enjoy it. And also I use it as a way for me to gauge what needs to change and where we need to pivot in our business. Because on a day-to-day basis, I'm not doing acquisitions and dispositions unless I'm live. So pretty much at this point, you pretty much see every deal I ever talked to because I turned the camera on. So it's a good way for me to kind of dive back into the business to see where we need to pivot, where we need to change. So I think at this point I'm going to do it more frequently. As far as getting it out there, I mean, dude, I need people talking about it, right? Sharing it. You know, people love to talk about great stories. I, to be honest with you, Nathan, what I think the problem is, is people don't have the attention span for it. It's 8 hours. It's very long. So what I've done is I've kind of chopped it up, made shorter videos of specific conversations that I've had. Those do really well. The problem is, is that what you're missing out on that is, is all of the work that I do in between the good calls.

Yeah.

And I think that's really the, the actions taken there are what differentiate the people that succeed in this business, the one, the ones that don't succeed in this business. That's why I love sharing it. But I also think the reason why it hasn't blown up where, you know, they're getting 25,000, 30,000 views a video is because people are like, no way, I'm not watching 8 hours. Just like they're not willing to work 8 hours a day, Nathan. Let's be honest.

Very true. Do you feel like people don't believe that it's true? Like, even though it's all out there, do you think they're like, I, I know he said he did it, I don't believe it? Do you feel like people don't believe it?

Uh, I, I think people say that about when they see it on Reels and Shorts and they just see like the 1-minute conversations. I get that pretty frequently. I've never had anybody come on one of the lives and be like, this is bullshit, like, I'm not buying this because it's too real. There's too many— no, there's too many nos. Like, it's not like I'm picking the phone up and it's just like, contract, contract, you know what I mean? Kicked in too.

So is that a landline you got there, bro?

Oh yeah, bro, we got it. Uh, we've got that all hooked up in our office where you can text and everything through. So yeah, I got the old school landline.

Hey, that's, that's, that's baller status right there. You got the landline. That's how we know you're real. You wouldn't be rocking a landline unless you were doing deals. There you go.

I love it.

So, wow. I'm really impressed, man, because I've been in this space for a while and I haven't seen any educator, whatever you want to call it, coach do what you've done, right? That's like, let me put up or shut up. Why? Why don't you think that is? Why don't you think more people go live? Is it because they're out of that seat and they're they're just like not in the business? What do you think's going on?

I think it's because of the, the risk, risk to reward, right? Um, the consumer marketplace doesn't demand that the educators and the influencers prove that they're actually doing it because that's not what the consumer is actually looking for. What they're actually looking for is, is to be coached, right? But they're not necessarily looking for it from a player. Which in this regard, when I'm doing it, I am the player. So I think that's part of it and it's just not really demanded from the marketplace. I think if more people said, hey, I would like to see you actually talk to a seller, then we would be forcing coaches and influencers to get on the phones and do it more often. But to be honest with you, with as many people that I know in this industry and after attending Family Mastermind, I feel like I pretty much know everybody. Um, I just— I don't think anyone's gonna do it, bro. I mean, it's the risk versus the reward. Hey, I get on the phone, I get my teeth kicked in, that hurts the brand, it doesn't look good, it could really hurt me. There's very few of us that are willing to go live and show it.

Yeah, and I, I love it too. I love going live too because it's— for me, as a— as I learned, the most important thing for me was like, are you even doing this? Does this— is even legit? So when I see you doing, I'm like, there's respect, but there's also like, that's who I'm going to go reach out to and learn from. So it's— I think you definitely attract the right avatar, the right people that are probably action takers as well, right?

Yeah, I think that's the case for sure. And then also it's the ones that are hungry to learn, like the little tiny idiosyncrasies about talking to a seller, about pulling lists, about, you know, cold calling. Like, how do I upload my batch leads data into my batch dialer? Like, these are things that people don't really talk about a whole lot, and when they see me doing it live, that's where it's like, okay, I want to learn from that guy. That's why I love doing it, because I never really have to sell myself. If they've seen me, it's like, yeah, you're the guy that does it live, so I love it.

Okay. And last question I have for you is how much of your success do you feel like is from knowing the knowledge of the market, like knowing how to market? When you said, I go for the tired landlords, I understand where I'm going. How much do you feel like it's that versus sales? Do you think it's both? What do you— what would you have to say?

I'm going to— I'm going to have to say it's got to be sales, just to be honest with you. The ability, because it— I say my preferred avatar is the tired landlord because That's the conversation I prefer to have because it's more efficient, it's quicker. I could get that deal closed in 10 minutes. But as we can see, you know, you can go watch my videos now where there's me being empathetic with— like, I just posted a video, um, a, a woman lost her husband tragically to a mass shooting. Um, that was on the 50-day challenge. Um, I made an offer to a brother brother, who the seller, I made an offer to him and I got a call back about a week later from the brother and he was murdered. And, you know, these are extremely sensitive conversations that I have to navigate, where yes, they led to contracts being signed and deals done, but very sensitive, time-consuming, and to be quite frank with you, mentally exhausting on my side to have that where, dude, the weight of hearing someone like— I've never actually spoken to someone who lost someone in a mass shooting. To have that conversation was like tragic. Like it brought me to tears. And so for me, it's like I can have those conversations. I can still close the deal. But I'd much rather just talk to the guy. It's like, hey, I want to sell my vacant house for $60,000, take it or leave it. You know, that's a lot easier to have. It is.

Yeah.

So I think going to the— to your point, it's sales. It's not so much the marketing side of things, but I can navigate any conversation at this point because of the skills that I've developed through sales.

Man, that's impressive because I agree with you in the sense that like when you deal with someone that lives in the house and they got to get out and they got to move and there's the heartache like, oh, my son died here or something happened. Those are, those are definitely, definitely difficult to navigate versus, hey, get this tenant out of here or it's vacant. I don't care.

Right.

That's those are, those are definitely a lot easier. So when's the— when do you think you'll do the next 50-day or next year?

I, you know, I'm working on it. Um, we, we wanted to knock out— we have our 2-day boot camp, uh, this week.

I think we got someone that's going right here, bro. You got this guy.

Yeah, hey, there you go. Uh, I, I don't know who it is because it says Facebook user, but excited to see you. Um, so yeah, we've got that coming up this week. We wanted to knock that out because this, this past 50-day challenge, we did a Crucible right in the middle of it. And I'm going to be honest with you, I think it almost killed me and Cassie. Like, that was a mistake because we went live Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, did the boot camp Friday, Saturday, and then immediately rolled into going live the next week.

Amazing.

It was just, it was a lot. So I think we're going to start having that conversation. So maybe towards the end of the year, rolling into 2024, I foresee that being the case.

And I'm assuming when it's 50 deals in 50 days, that's under contract, not all of them closed within those 50-day period, correct?

Actually, great question. 125 contracts were signed. All right, well, let me give you this: 164 were sent in the 50 days, 125 contracts signed, and then 65% of those closed. When you remove the JV deals that I got from like Crucible students or someone on the live saying, hey, let's JV it, or even call-ins saying, hey, let's JV it, that our direct-to-seller was 70% closed from the 50 days. So I'm really proud of that. That's a high metric, very high, especially sight unseen, virtual, 70% closed direct-to-seller. That was, that was probably the most proud metric I had from this past 50 days.

70% is excellent close rate. You know, I think when I started going nationwide, when I first started, I think my close rate was like 15%, bro. It was—

I didn't know. Don't feel bad, Nathan. That's everybody when they first start going. So don't feel bad about it.

You're like, hey, I offered 50%. And they're like, dude, that deal's in Peoria, Illinois. Nobody's buying that for at least only 20%, bro.

Hey, I love Peoria, Illinois.

Oh, all right.

But you're right. You got to buy deep there.

You got to buy real deep. Yeah. Exactly. Well, RJ, it's been a pleasure, man. Thanks for staying with me. And I know we've had a lot of, you know, a lot of engagement. People are loving it out here. So, RJ, where can people go to learn more about your process and how to, you know, do deals the way you do it?

Man, YouTube. I mean, YouTube channel. Go, go subscribe on there. RJ Bates III. All these 50 days are on there and I've chopped them up. You go down to the playlist. It's live call playlist and you can see them. They chopped up— some of them are as short as 8 minutes, some of them are as long as 2 hours for one conversation with a seller. So just a blend of different types of conversations. I'd say go start there, and if you're really vibing with what you're seeing, then, uh, hey, connect with us, you know, send me a DM on Instagram or something like that. Let's see how we can work together.

Amazing. All right, everybody, you heard it here first. RJ Bates, go work with him. He's going to show you how to close more deals. He's the king closer. All right, everybody, peace out. Have a good one, everybody.