Should we always Seller Finance Rental Properties?

Hello YouTube, we're back. It's Christian and Cody and this is Whiteboard Wednesday. We're going to be sharing 5 questions from last week and a couple quick announcements before we get started. One, if you're trying to learn how to do this and need a step-by-step, you're always welcome to watch everything on our channel for free. If you want to break it down into pieces, come up with your own multifamily strategy, we have launched our online course, The Multifamily Strategy. Check us out there. We'll put a link below, and we're gonna launch right into this week's 5 questions.

Question number 1: Where do you learn how to write clear and valuable contracts? Do you learn through real estate school?

Real estate school— so there is no school to learn how to do this. Now, you learn some of it through our course that I just mentioned, but in reality, getting your real estate license through like a traditional real estate brokerage school or going through just one online course, reading one book. There's no one way to learn all of it. The way to do it is to go out and buy real estate and to meet with people who own real estate. If you meet with other owners in your market, you surround yourself by people doing deals, buying real estate, that is where you're really going to learn how to do this. Practice makes perfect. You write a few contracts, you have a great broker look over it, you talk to other owners. We've learned how to write a great contract by buying great real estate. Now, Cody, our next question from Ali Adams. What is your scripting when it comes to leaving messages when building new relationships? When would be a good time to call them back after leaving a message? Those are great questions.

Well, I mean, you're not always going to leave a message. Typically when we're doing a, you know, actually going out and selling something, I'm going to leave a message. I want them to know who I am. If I'm going to leave a message in this situation, I'm going to give them the reason that I gave them the call. I'm going to say, hey, this is who I am. You do your quick little intro. I was calling because you own this. I'm not calling to buy it. Please give me a call back. This is my phone number. That is going to be my call script if I leave a message. But if I'm actually going to build a relationship with someone, odds are I may not leave a message. I may just call them back in an hour they see, okay, it's the same number, I'm actually going to pick up because it wasn't an accident dial.

Yep, simple enough. Always leave the messages very quick and simple. I have a little rule: never longer than 45 seconds. Just keep them quick, easy. If you're going to leave a message, don't get weirdly specific or overtalk. Just make it easy to call you back, move on.

Then our next question from Benton Smith: you go for seller financing on every property? Question mark. I'm 22 and just bought my first rental.

First of all, congratulations on buying your first rental. You have done something that most people will never do. So congratulations, you have entered the top percent of investors, ones who actually have investments. So congratulations there. Now as far as the seller financing, seller financing is a tool in your arsenal that you can use to pick up properties. For Cody and I, it has been the tool that we rely on the most. Cody, every deal you've done has involved seller financing, right? Yep. Every single one Cody's done. I have done 2 deals on smaller properties. One conventional, just a standard everything, just vanilla transaction. Found a deal, cash flow day 1, bought it through a bank. No bells and whistles. Second deal I did, I used hard money to buy a duplex and then refinanced. I did the BRRRR strategy, which again, is not a holistic strategy, it is a tool. In your tool belt. You should definitely know how to seller finance, especially the way we do things, relationship-based selling. That lends itself to creative financing, using the seller as a member of your team. Phenomenal way to buy real estate. At some point you may need to involve a bank, you may need to involve other players, different structures. Your goal, if you're getting started and you want to scale, yes, learn seller financing, but learn a lot of different methods and a lot of different tools on how you're going to pick up your portfolio.

It is a tool and a tool alone. And if you're using a screwdriver to hammer a nail, that's probably not the right tool for that situation. Seller financing has been the opportunity and that tool that I've used to go build my portfolio because it's the tool that I had in my tool belt. If you don't have it yet, if you're not finding those opportunities readily, you either need to go meet with new people to get those opportunities, to get the tool in your tool belt, or you need to approach it a different way. And there's nothing wrong doing one way or the other.

And in conjunction with some of Cody's seller finance deals, he's used different private capital sources. He's used other things in combination with seller financing. Today we're looking at putting some of the seller finance stuff into bank debt. So yes, almost everything we've done is use seller financing. No, that's not the only way to do it, and we use other methods as as well and are in the practice or process of practicing, do Waste to Buy Real Estate.

It's a lot of Ps.

It is a lot of Ps. All right, Adrian, I don't know how to attempt the last name, so I'm just gonna say Adrian K. He said, besides Grant Cardone, who has inspired you in real estate and business, entrepreneurship, mindset, etc.? So who are your inspirations, Cody, outside of Cardone, who we've referenced a few times on this channel?

I like Jordan Belfort, believe it or not. You know, they seem to go back and forth with each other, and that's totally fine. And there seems to be a cult-like following for both that are just at each other's throats. I like to take the best pieces from each party. So I look up to Jordan Belfort a lot, not for what he did in the past. I try and look past that because everybody makes mistakes. His mistakes were rather large, but, you know, you don't always see everyone's large mistakes. Some people aren't as public, or some cases aren't as public, so you don't exactly know. And coming as a, you know, starting out at 19 years old, I just got to look for the best people in the space. And Jordan's very good at connecting with others. And so one part about building relationships is building rapport, understanding where other people are coming from, where they're going, why they're going there, and at the same time being able to connect with them at the highest level by sharing my bits and pieces to build that relationship. I'm coming from a place of not knowing anything. In the beginning, I thought I knew everything, and then I quickly realized at 19 I knew next to nothing in this space. And so when it comes to building relationships, I look up to Jordan Belfort because, you know, he burnt a lot of people, but in the process, he was able to clearly illustrate and map out how to build rapport at the highest level. And so I looked at that, I was like, okay, I can take a good piece from there. Then looking at Grant Cardone, okay, he knows how to go buy big apartment buildings, and his math is correct, like, oh, if you raise the net income, it's worth more. I was able to take the best pieces from him, and I've just been able to gather bits and pieces from people. If I were to drop some names of some of my current folks that I've learned from, you wouldn't know them. Like, we wouldn't both know them because they're just owners I've cold-called over in Central Washington. But I've taken the best pieces from a whole bunch of different people, and I combine it to build out my very own strategy.

And there's some celebrities that we follow that are phenomenal. I have not found anyone who's been more valuable than those owners you just referenced. The people that you've never heard of who've done exactly what you want to do, if you can network with them, connect with people who are doing exactly what you want to do, those are going to be your most valuable inspirations in both business and real estate.

And then the last question for the day from Jackson: What's your guys' day-to-day look like?

Oh my goodness, I don't even know how we start to answer that, but I'm just gonna start talking and the right answer should come out. Every day looks completely different. Neither Cody or I have an official 9-to-5 job.

We have more like a 5-to-9.

Yep.

5 AM to 9 PM.

We work a lot. As we're structuring our day, it depends on what is most critical. Putting your priority stack in front of you every day is very important. Our calendar is always full and we are very, very good at putting things on the calendar because Cody and I operate together a lot of the time. I need to know what Cody's doing, he needs to know what I'm doing. Our time is typically going to be weighted towards our most immediate product. With the mentorship, I really wanted to get that recorded. I wanted the highest quality videos, recording content, test questions. We dumped a lot of hours into that the last 2 months to bring out the best content. We're looking to expand property management soon. That is going to be one of the highest areas of focus, and a lot of our day is going to be into selling owners into third-party property management. I want to network with people and expand our market share.

Also want to pay off all the properties. Some people are like, oh, you should never pay off your debt. Well, we've met with folks who— and I haven't met them yet. Christian got the pleasure of meeting them over in Texas, but someone who owns a lot more real estate than we do, who's been in the game for a lot longer than we have, and recommended that— well, number one, I'm gonna get slapped around, and two, he's gonna pay— like, I should pay off my debt. So we've seen people who are worth significantly more, who are way smarter in the space, and they're recommending paying off the debt. So now what are we doing? We're looking at, okay, how do we adjust our pieces so we could pay off the debt, and then we can go expand at a lower leverage point. We're focused on a lot of different things, but whenever we're focused on that priority number one, we're gonna go knock it out. There's bits and pieces we have to learn and adjust on the fly to make things happen, but at the end of the day, as long as we're getting a little bit better than we were when we woke up, we had a good day.

I'm gonna add one little piece to that. When you have a chaotic existence like Cody and I do, where we have a lot of projects— real estate, building, rehab, property management, mentorship— When you have all these pieces, make sure that they're all vertically aligned. If you're chasing a bunch of different products or projects, if you're after, say, you're looking at cryptocurrencies and you're looking at digital real estate and you want to do Airbnb and multifamily, you're going to get nowhere. If you chase 5 rabbits at the same time, you're going to go hungry. Our friend Dion shared that and I absolutely love that analogy. Make sure that everything you're doing is in alignment. That is the first thing that we do when we stack our day. The things that we do all build on each other, and that is a rule that we always follow.

You could be great at anything as long as you don't try and do everything. So keep that in mind as you're moving forward. And if you have more questions, you just have ideas you want to share, you want us to talk about, we do this every single Wednesday. Put them in the comments below. Like, comment, subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll see you guys next time.