Colton boldly left the W2 world three years ago to embark on a successful wholesaling journey with his brother. Over this period, Colton has not only navigated the dynamic market but has also expanded his business to a team of 10, closing an impressive 90 deals, including 15 profitable flips 🚀
See full episode transcriptTranscript is autogenerated by AI
All right, everyone. Welcome to the real estate game changer show. I'm your host, Mike McKay, based in the Jacksonville, Florida market. And each and every week we do this show of people who are changing the game of real estate all over the country. We are currently hiring acquisitions people local to Jacksonville. So if you don't have real estate experience, we're not requiring it, but if you have some sales experience and have done well in the past, send me a DM. We're actively looking to hire people this quarter and let's kick it off. This week on the show, we have Colton Fast. Colton, welcome to the show.
Colton: 0:32Hey man, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike: 0:34Absolutely, dude. So for the people who don't know you can you just share a little bit about how you got into real estate and how that's kind of led you to where you are today?
Colton: 0:43Yeah, the, I guess the shortest version is I was working W 2 as an analyst. I was in e commerce and transportation in my W 2 career. My brother started doing real estate. He just quit his job one day and started doing this. He's a wild man. I never really paid much attention to it, but. He brought me in to, and then a couple of years later, I ended up quitting my job. Cold Turkey. I quit one day. I quit on a Monday. I was working on this on a Tuesday, on the next Tuesday. And been doing that ever since is October 3rd, 2020. And and I've been wholesaling flipping no baiting mostly since then. I have a couple of buy and holds that we've held on to just by happenstance, but now I'm I've been a full time real investor for coming up on three and a half years. A
Mike: 1:24And what kind of like, changes have you guys made to your business since like, you know, first jumping in until today, what are some major points?
Colton: 1:32lot of expensive lessons between then and now. We just chalk up to, we just chalk it up to that. But you know, we had some crazy successful months in early 2022. The first six months of 22 rates were 3%. I mean, you could buy anything and resell it and make money. It was, I mean, people, it was just. Easy. It was easy. Quite frankly. We tried to scale with that. The market turned around on us. Phoenix kicked us in the teeth. I, we ballooned, I had 21 employees ballooned back down, or, you know, cut back down to like six. And then just we were trying to recover basically from growing this huge overhead. We were running it about 88,000 a month at peak in mid 20, 22, and then the market, and then we found ourselves unable to keep up with that. Very quickly. And so that's a heavy burn when you're spending that much. And so when we just, I was just cutting for a year and a half almost, and I finally started to grow again. We, I cut down to about 24, 000 a month, really started to build a more solid foundation underneath me. Cause at that point it was like, we went from like 20 K a month to 88 K a month. In like eight weeks, it was craziness and we didn't have the foundation to do something like that. And so We i've been cutting ever since I finally started to grow again. I hit the floor and bounced maybe Four or five months ago. We're finally growing again. So it's been wild.
Mike: 2:51What are some of those foundational pieces that you felt like you were missing when you're scaled that you've since built out?
Colton: 2:57I think a lot of it comes down to the people my people are Skilled. Now they're trained, they're reliable. They know how to handle many different situations. One of our core values that we dialed in was reliability. And that's us being reliable for each other. And it's us being reliable for our customers, for our partners, for everybody that we work with. And we didn't have that we just, cause we didn't. We just simply weren't good enough. Jimmy Vreeland CG facilitator, one of the head guys, he says that the way to become a good real estate investor is to do this for 10 years. There's no, you know, you can shortcut it. You can learn from everybody. You possibly can, but like you do this for 10 years, you'll have a really reliable foundation underneath you. I'm chipping away at that.
Mike: 3:35Yeah. What'd you do to make sure that you kind of hired better people going forward?
Colton: 3:39I think you can do a lot to try to get the right people in. But I think at the end of the day we end up hiring people and taking chances on them and just trying them out. And higher, slow fire fast, they say. And I, at our most recent. Meeting of at collective genius, they said, hire fast, fire fast. Somebody gave a presentation that said that I say, I would say that we do that at the end of the day. I ended up hiring people, giving them a shot because you just can't know in a three part interview process, if you're going to get the right person. I believe that I've probably hired and fired 50 or 60 people to have a team of a core, reliable, solid team of five. Now that's consequence of my, you know, lack of leadership at times. And it was, I perfect throughout the process. Absolutely not. But I don't believe that the numbers were pro would probably be too far off if I was the best leader in the world. You know, I think I'd have 10 reliable employees instead of six. Like,
Mike: 4:35How are you kind of, making that decision early on if you're going to keep someone or let them go and say, I don't know, pick a role. If
Colton: 4:43I think it reliability to me says a lot about a person that's coming in I need. Them reliable in their own way. You know, I need an acquisitions person who I can rely on to be aggressive in following up and in pushing the deal to a yes or a no, you know, in sales, we don't say that I, we don't say we need a yes, right. We say we need an answer. So I need to be able to rely on my acquisitions person to push for that answer. I need to rely on my admin to get the paperwork out. I need to rely on my you know, Dispo to get the marketing packet ready and to get it emailed to our buyers. I'm really looking for reliability. It's huge for me. It's something that I land on consistently. We kind of got together four or five months ago and said, who what are we guys like? We need to revamp our core values. There's six of us here who have been here for a year or two years. And obviously and then obviously I've been here the entire time, but it was what makes us, and we're all alike and what about us is alike. And we really tried to vet out and extract like why. Are we all alike in the way that we operate in the way that we work together in the way that we do this business? And that's how ultimately we landed at our core values and reliability was the first thing on the list.
Mike: 6:03You guys just like that core values analysis to, to reset them. Did you guys just go sit in a room and figure that out or was there a certain exercise you went through?
Colton: 6:12So my team is I think I have nine people now. I have one guy that's local. He's my acquisitions manager and the rest of my team is in the Philippines. And so I, and I will, I definitely think there's many advantages to having people local and having Americans, but for the cost and the return, I think that my people are awesome and it's, it takes a lot of time to train them. And it takes a lot of time to have them in a place where you, they know what to expect and they're capable of doing what I want from them. But when you're there, I think it's huge, but we talked, we went three rounds to come up with our core values. Basically, I said, everybody write down what you think makes us alike and makes us, makes up our culture here from a core value perspective. And then. We, everybody wrote it down in their own column, we compiled them, and then we found that like so many of us said the same things. And so we, and we kind of came to it that way, but ended up with five different things that, you know, we found that are important to us.
Mike: 7:13I gotcha. That's awesome. And then what other foundations did you feel like weren't there that as you scaled up too quickly, right? Cause I know a lot of people are trying to scale, right? So probably a helpful lesson to share with others.
Colton: 7:27I think we thought that, you know, if you hire great people or even good people that they can come in and be performing within a week. And when you talk to some of the guys who've been doing this for a long time, they have 30, 60, 90 day tracks for their new employees. So when you. Hire like that before you start to see productivity is the hockey stick or whatever, right? And so we're, we didn't have time to allow people to become performing in their job. We grew the burn rate faster than we were able to absorb it. And then what really was a crazy time for us was we had about 350, 000 in receivables. And the rates started to go up and the Phoenix market just fell off a cliff overnight. It was, I don't know, we'd have to look at all the numbers to really know, but like between 15 and 20 something percent, the market fell within like 60 days. So 350, 000 in receivables. Turned into next to nothing. So one thing that's important to, to me and to us as we run this, even today, as we run this business is understanding our cashflow, knowing how much money I will have at any given point, whether it's going down or it's going up, I'm taking, if I have a bunch of receivables, I'm not going to wait for that cash to hit. I'm going to start spending it now because I want to start to take credit against my future receivables so that I don't, so that I can move quicker. And so I was thinking, yeah, So if I have It's let's say I'm going to make 250, 000 in the next 90 days.
Mike: 9:00And is this like revenue that you like know is coming in like pretty damn sure
Colton: 9:04Yeah. Let's call it receivables, right? Like we know that I've got 10 deals at 25, 000 a piece and they're all pretty squarely deals. And of course, some of them are going to fall out because that's life, but let's say that I have 15 and five are going to fall out. So I have 10 at 25 K a piece. I'm gonna make 250, 000. They're all set to close in the next 90 days. I'm not gonna wait. For them all to close before I start spending that money. I am going to take credit against that in my mind and in my cashflow to say, well, I will have this 250, 000. So I'm going to up my marketing. I'm going to start upping my marketing today. If I'm growing, if I'm in a growing phase, right, I'm going to hire two, two new. Two, three, four people today, because I know I'm going to have that money to pay for them in three months. So as I had, as we had those receivables coming in, I was like, we hired like seven lead managers in like a six week span. And we hired two, three acquisitions people. We just hired all these people because we were going to, we didn't have the money to pay for them, but we were going to have the money to pay for them. And. 60, 90 days, but then we didn't cause it fell out, right?
Mike: 10:16so do you think that's, that was a bad play or it was just a bad play that you got because of the timing that with the market, right? Would you do that again if you, if it
Colton: 10:25I would not do that again. Not that way. And right, right. And that's Jason Medley, the founder of collective genius. He tells a story about two developers who were building skyscrapers right next to each other. And one guy was building faster, bigger, taller. And the other guy was building way slower. And if you looked at it, you would be like, man, that guy who's building higher is doing way better. But then a storm came and the tall one blew over and the short one didn't. And then he goes and asks the guy, how come yours didn't fall over? And he says, every time I built another story, I dug my foundation, another foot. Right? I was building under the surface where you couldn't see I was getting better. I was attaining and that's where I say we didn't have the foundation. We didn't have the skills. I didn't have the skills as a leader. If we weren't good enough at sales, our systems weren't dialed enough. Our reporting wasn't good. We just thought that hire everybody. And like, they're going to create their own jobs. And cause that's what we would do. Right. But we're, our employees are not us. And so that was We burned a lot of cash. I probably wasted 700 grand in 2022 just to, to that right there.
Mike: 11:39Yeah. How would you think about scaling today in terms of receivables and managing your cash flow and all that?
Colton: 11:48I don't want to call it slowly because I think you can grow fast and smart. But. I want to call it steadily. Maybe for me, it's one piece at a time and where the most dire need is. And I also think it's important to understand what you want from life and from your business. That is something that I've really come to, that I've really grown into from the last Couple of years. I mean, maybe even the last six to nine months. And I'll credit I don't know if you're familiar with the whale club and Paul Sparks and Steve Trang, but with that we. It really pushes you to the core of like, what do you want from all this? And what do you want from the business? What do you want from life? And how do you get there with the minimum effective dose? It's asking like, how do you get free? And one such example is I was talking to Paul the other day and it was Hey man, what'd you write down for the year? Well, I want my wrote down, I want to net 750K. I want my profit to net in at 750K for the year. And he said, You need to live. And I was like, well, really for me to just continue living the lifestyle that we live right now, I need 200 K. And he said, well, why limit the upside? What you really want to do is lock that 200 in so that you can feel comfortable, confident, knowing that your lifestyle and that your things and what you have now is not go anywhere. Well, how quickly can you lock in 200 K to free yourself for more upside than the additional five 50, right? And why cap yourself there? And so it looks at things a little differently. And it also talks about different currencies besides money. How do we value our time and our impact, our relationships our energy those things. And it's like, yeah, I can make more money if I work a thousand hours a week, but. I'm giving up my time currency, I'm giving up energy currency, I'm giving up other currencies just to make more money. Where do you want to stop making that trade? That's a wrap.
Mike: 13:44of the, that idea of locking, like let's say the 200 K and is that just how quickly can I make 200 K and put it in my bank account so that I'm not, it's all upside? Is that the idea or is it?
Colton: 13:56What there's a lot to this. This is a really this is all kind of based on a book called Rigging the Game. And, it, this runs really deep, but there's a, one thing we talk about is the barbell and the barbell is on one side, you want to create reliability in your business. And if I can create reliability in my business 200 grand a month is roughly like 16, 000 or 200 grand a year is roughly 16, 000 a month. So how can I create without with the minimum amount of time, the minimum amount of risk, 16, 000 a month. Now, once I create that and it's reliable, then I've created that reliable side of the barbell. And then on the other side of the barbell, how can I chase asymmetric upside? Like how can I chase huge bets that are where I can risk a hundred dollars to make 10, 000? And how many small asymmetric bets like that can I make? How many development projects can I underwrite? How many builds, how many huge wholesale deals? What, you know, what can I chase that's huge, but doesn't risk me a lot? And I'm free to do that if I have a consistent, reliable business on the other side, paying my lifestyle,
Mike: 15:03Yeah. So talk about that and how you applied that to your business specifically,
Colton: 15:09I am working on applying that to my business, right? Like, that's a very difficult thing to achieve. I think wholesale is innately unreliable. I think there are people who have made it reliable, but they've, it's taken them 10 years or more to do. I think wholesaling is innately unreliable and I'm super jaded about it as well because of what's my experience over the last 18 months with. riding around the Phoenix market and getting whipped around by interest rates. And so there's many times I've considered like, what can I do that creates something reliable? Cause I feel like I could do this for 10 years and it's not going to be reliable. I mean, I'm just in, I've flipped a property in from June and I ended up closing and selling it in like November. And when I bought that property, there was a model match comp on the same street for four 50 I made mine nicer and it sat on the market. For 90 days and I sold it for 415. So I had the perfect comp. I made mine nicer and I, and the market just doesn't accommodate that. How can I build a reliable business in an environment where things aren't as they appear to be? And so I'm working on applying reliability. I think it comes down to, I think a lot about running my business from the CEO seat and becoming unemotional about their results. And it's easy to get pulled into the day to day. And we deal with some very emotional situations with foreclosures and with people and people are obviously emotional, but I am, I'm working on looking at my KPIs and thinking we're short and cold calling. Why? And what can we do? Well, we can do two things. We can increase volume or we can increase conversions. So do both. And then, and I want to look at every aspect of the business and just apply that do both, right? We can increase volume. We can increase conversions, do it there and execute that's unemotionally. That's what I'm working on doing to create reliability.
Mike: 17:06Gotcha. Awesome. And we were talking a little bit offline about how you were saying that you're really big on the data with marketing and you know, you got to start with some, well, you can say it better than I can. I'll let you, I'll let you tell me what you were saying offline.
Colton: 17:22Yeah, I think that we create a business as a system. And I think that if you put crap data in the top of the machine, then you're going to get, you know, lackluster results out at the bottom of the machine. So we have. We've achieved a pretty high return on ad spend over the last three years from having very potent input from the data perspective at the top of the machine, we don't put just anything in because it creates a lot of weak results and we. We stack data. We really pursue motivation. We understand at this point, what kind of data creates what kind of results. And one, one such example, maybe one of the most extreme examples is counterintuitively people are always like, I want to go call the FISBO people. Right. I'm going to go call FISBOs. Yeah, I see exactly. This is one of the most extreme examples, right? Because the FIS, you might think that, right, because these people are selling their own homes. It is for sale. You think, wow, they must be motivated. It's exactly the opposite. FISBO people are trying to scrape and scrap for every dollar. That's why they didn't hire an agent and you cannot get them down a single dollar in selling their property. So it's on one side of understanding the data. That's the, that's one side of the spectrum. While on the other side, we fish in the most potent ponds we can fish in, which in my opinion is foreclosure. Followed closely by probate and those are really, those come with their own challenges, but followed closely by another thing I love is absentee owners, which I know that and not all knit, this is what some people, most people, I guess, don't probably understand until you do this enough, but not all niche lists are created equal. Right. Like you can, and that's where we have taken the time to really understand what input creates what output,
Mike: 19:21yeah. And are you, do you guys have any like specific strategies around, let's say foreclosures or probates or yeah,
Colton: 19:30to be honest, we're on pause on probates because we do foreclosures was a large part of our revenue in 2023. I would say it's 60 to 70 percent of our revenue came from foreclosures. And and because when interest rates changed and people started, people clammed up, right. And owner occupants, people, the question became, you know, these people's mortgage payments are 1, 100 and then they're like, well, if I sell my house, where am I going to go? And what's the payment going to be? The truth for those folks was your payments can be 2, 600 and you're going to be in the same house or worse. I know you're, and you're not going to do that. You know, there's those memes floating around the internet that are like when the cup, when the young couple bought their starter home, but found out it's going to be their forever home, you know, it's that's the reality. And so who's, and so we, you know, when you ask yourself who's going to sell their house, people that absolutely have to. Which a lot of times are people in foreclosure and people who don't care, who don't have to find another place to move and replace their living situation, absentee owners. So we went fishing in those ponds. And that's one thing I think that is so under underrated about doing what we do is. We have to adapt constantly when that, if you were just going to keep hammering your head against the wall of owner occupants for all of 2023, you probably didn't do very well, but it, but if you were dynamic and you said, where's the business, and then you did the work to go there. Then you could, we did just the same. We did just the same amount of revenue we did in 22 and 23,
Mike: 21:02then,
Colton: 21:03is a huge win by the way, in that environment.
Mike: 21:05no, it is.
Colton: 21:06Yeah.
Mike: 21:07I mean, I'll be honest. We certainly didn't
Colton: 21:09Yeah.
Mike: 21:10And a lot of people didn't that I talked to in Jacksonville, at least
Colton: 21:14It was unbelievably difficult environment. The last 18 months,
Mike: 21:18what like, I know, like some people have like different strategies foreclosures. Like I know people are like, I call them as soon as, you know, the pre foreclosure you know, the lease pendants goes in other people. I'm like, I don't waste my time until two weeks before closing when they're super motivated. What's your guy's strategy, if any, along those lines
Colton: 21:35We. Follow them for the entire process. The day that the Liz pendants gets filed, we, they, I have a girl who her entire job is to pull data pull data, clean data, skip data, entered into the system. We will call all the numbers associated with that skip trace. And then if we don't get the results we're looking for, it'll get tagged as a reskip. It'll get skipped again through a different service and then we'll do it again. We I'm instituting mail that's going to go out on a certain cadence the pre foreclosures in Phoenix are 100 days 90 to 100 days and so we follow
Mike: 22:09to a hundred days before the foreclosure starts
Colton: 22:12from notice of trustee sale to the foreclosure date the auction date,
Mike: 22:18Oh, okay. That's quick.
Colton: 22:20Florida is So we're non judicial florida Is judicial and it is wild. I started doing, so we asked ourselves that same question, right? Well, where are we going to get more opportunities in an environment where people are going to be selling 3 percent rates and buying at eight? And the question was, and the answer was like the same places in other locales. So what we did, we made our attempt in October to jump to like 10 different markets. We launched foreclosures only in Alice, San Antonio, Houston, Vegas, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, Little Rock. A little bit in Columbus, we launched everywhere and we knew that was going to create, we handled the data challenges just fine. We're strong there. The sales challenges were minimal. It's the operational challenges when we would contract a deal and then how the heck are we going to make money on this thing? Those were big, those were issues that, and very quickly we realized like. Making money on a contract in some rural part of Florida between, you know, between Jacksonville and Orlando or, you know, in the general area down there, it was extremely difficult. And the other thing we found because of the judicial state was like, some of these people had been kicking the can down the road for like years. And so their arrears were like 60, 90, 120, 000. That really limits you on your, on our ability to. Pay the arrears or to make the deal work in some way, shape or form. And we've, so we, long story shorter, we cut off a lot of those markets and we're primarily focusing on Phoenix and Dallas now.
Mike: 24:02Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned that with like Florida, because a lot of guys who focus exclusively on foreclosures here, we'll actually kind of look at the court records before they even put the data in their system. And they're like, Oh, geez, the guy owes, you know, he hasn't paid his mortgage for seven years. Forget it. Like it just. I had a guy who hadn't paid his mortgage in like eight years.
Colton: 24:23Yeah.
Mike: 24:24I was like, how did he even stay in the house? It's incredible.
Colton: 24:27They just keep kicking the can. I don't, we'll still do it, but I don't really like Florida. I don't really like judicial states period for I'd rather do business outside of the court system period.
Mike: 24:39Sure. You went to like 10 different markets. Was it, was that the main reason you got out of like a lot of them? Or was it just like the dispositions part that was hard? Like, was it just all judicial states? You were like, no, then that cut out quite like the majority of them or.
Colton: 24:53It was also different reasons for different states. It was hard in my opinion to get the data in Atlanta. And so there's a book called the lean startup. Have you read that?
Mike: 25:04Years and years ago. Yeah. Yeah.
Colton: 25:07So the lean startup, the premise is basically you create a minimally viable product and then you test it and then you take feedback quickly and you adapt and you just kind of iterate that over and over. So for us, we quickly launched into 10 different markets. We gathered feedback as quickly as possible and we found right away reasons we didn't want to do several of them. And so Houston buyer demand, I felt was horrible. We had several properties that I thought were deals that did not move. And then we put them on the MLS and everything. It was a very small sample size, but nonetheless I didn't like it because every property I contracted, there was 15 properties just like it available in the same neighborhood. And so I didn't like that. And so I thought that just looking at it for two seconds compared to my experiences in my market and in other markets I didn't like the supply and demand that I've, that I saw and felt in a very short period of time. I F I think deals can be, had, I think it needs to be super discounted because I don't think demand is very strong. Felt the same way about San Antonio. The operational challenges with the judicial stuff in Florida that had me Turned off to that as well. But within three weeks I contracted a, what should have been a 30, 000 deal in Arlington, Texas, in the middle of Dallas. And we actually ended up losing it at the closing table, but nonetheless, it proved the model. It proved that we could do wholesale. We took it all the way that, that far, it proved that we could. Wholesale and make money in the Dallas area. And that was enough for me to dig more in there and less in the other places.
Mike: 26:48Gotcha. So you guys are focused now. You said on Phoenix Dallas is pretty much your two.
Colton: 26:54Yeah. Phoenix is, I mean, we've just been building our business here for three years. I can make any number of phone calls and have anything I need here. And it's just easy. And I, and when I asked myself. If I needed to make money tomorrow, my back was against the wall and which it has been at, you know, multiple instances throughout this journey where would I go to make money? The answer was here still. And so I wouldn't cut that off.
Mike: 27:21Yeah. I'm with you. We feel the same way about Jacksonville. You just start to know enough people and you can make opportunities out of stuff.
Colton: 27:26You can, if I really needed some money right now, I could probably figure out how to make some money in the next couple of weeks, you know, it might not be earth shattering and I, you know, I sacrifice oftentimes the short term. Some people are the opposite. I sacrifice the short term for the long term. I have a better business than I operate it. We I find myself building the car a lot more often than I find myself driving it. And some people drive the car, some people will drive a hoopty and Never build a Ferrari. I love to build a Ferrari and at, to a, at a fault, like to a fault, I love to build this business better. I will go, I should make sales calls, but instead I am working on my better automations or whatever, you know,
Mike: 28:19Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm guilty of that myself. Wow.
Colton: 28:25So that's, yeah that's definitely where it causes short term pain at times.
Mike: 28:32So is your strategy, I know you said outbound, but does that mean for you primarily cold call or,
Colton: 28:38We, we cut off texting in like November with the 10 DLC apocalypse. I know that it's still working and I just, we took a break. We may go back, but the other thing I hated about texting was I've got like 15, 000 leads in my system at this point. And so many of them came from texting and there were, all they ever were was like somebody that said yes or 700, 000, like that's a lead all day. Send it in. But then we never got them on the phone. We never got any other information. It's clogging up my system. I'm sending text messages to them, you know, we're calling them forever. It's it's clogging up my system with all sorts of bad leads.
Mike: 29:23and you find that you're able to get better ones from cold calling?
Colton: 29:27Yeah. I like cold calling for two reasons. So we qualify better. We are able to ask more questions and you can have the, you know, a lot of like older people say, stop texting me, just call me. We can get all this done, you know, in a two minute phone call. I'm going to text you for three hours to get all my questions answered. I've, I think most of us who do business probably feel that way. And so we can vet better. We can qualify better. And number two is a meeting them where we're going to do the deal. We're not, I'm probably not going to do the deal over text. I mean, you can, but we're going to do the deal over the phone and I'm meeting you there. So I'm meeting you in the place that the deal is going to be executed. I love that for that reason.
Mike: 30:10How deep are your cold callers qualifying before they're passing it over to an acquisitions person?
Colton: 30:15With a very light touch we're at most, we are going to ask one question of all four qualifiers. At most, we are going to ask for timeline, condition, motivation, and price. Once with no pushing.
Mike: 30:31Of those things.
Colton: 30:32one of each of those things, tell me about the condition of the property. Yeah. Tell me about the condition of the property and give it to me on a one to 10. Oftentimes that's the one question that will spur a longer response. So people just from asking that are going to say, we remodeled it in whatever, or it's in bad shape and la da. The next one is what kind of timeline are you looking at? And then what's got you thinking about selling in the first place? And or we will say, where are you thinking about calling before we think about selling before we called you, or is it just because we called you? Oh, yeah, we were already thinking about it. And then lastly, what were you hoping to get for the property? Now, if anybody doesn't want to give any of that information, then we just say, okay, that's fine. Because I want salespeople having sales conversations and those are not my, you know, six and seven dollar an hour Filipino cold callers.
Mike: 31:20So as long as I have one of those things that get passed along, one of those criteria.
Colton: 31:24So as at the very minimum to get passed along they need to own the property that they say they own and they need to be willing to talk to my, and they need to possibly be willing to sell it.
Mike: 31:35Okay. Okay. You ask, but it
Colton: 31:37We ask, but it's not, it doesn't have a bearing on whether it's a lead or not.
Mike: 31:41Does it get classified in your system differently when it comes in?
Colton: 31:44At the cold call level, I don't want things getting filtered out. It's not my cold callers job to opt things out. It is their job to opt things in. And so at the next level, at the acquisitions level or at the lead management level, that is where we can start to filter things out. I tell them if there's even the slightest hint of an opportunity to purchase a property here, send it in. If we don't like it, we will turn it down at that level.
Mike: 32:09And then your lead managers are US based or overseas?
Colton: 32:14So I actually don't have any lead managers right now. Any dedicated lead managers. So I have a senior cold caller who manages the cold calling team. She's my longest tenured employee. She's with me for over two years. So she will take the higher stakes phone calls and we'll take inbound calls to manage them to me or to, to acquisitions. And then I have an acquisitions manager who will take any appointments set by the cold callers as an appointment and he will field it. He will go through the entire process. He will make an offer if there's any hair on it. He's been with me for about six months. If there's any hair on that deal, if it's weird, if there's anything we need to address, that's a little out of the ordinary. He'll pass it to me to close, to finally contract. If it's a straightforward deal, he will contract it himself.
Mike: 33:03What's an example of something with hair on it in your business?
Colton: 33:07So if there's a, if there's a woman who wants to sell in 45 days and, you know, they're open to letting us snowbait the house and, you know, giving us access and all that stuff, then, and there's nothing real crazy and they're just like moving or it's a second home or it's vacant or it's easy like that. No problem, but if there's hair on it and the hair would be. There's a foreclosure in six days.
Mike: 33:32Yeah. Okay.
Colton: 33:33There's a tenant nonpaying who's in the process of an eviction. There is geez, there's a ugly divorce and there's fighting and violence. There's anything that's outside the lane of like contract the property, close it in 30 days. Then how do we, another thing might be like creative finance. Like, Hey, we can't, they're open to creative finance. Are they open to subject to, or whatever it is. Do you want to talk to them about how to structure this more complex deal? Cause I don't want to tell them wrong.
Mike: 34:09Yep. Got it. Okay. sense. And then. You know, we were talking a little bit offline, but you guys are a good amount of what you do is novations. And when are you guys kind of deciding to implement that strategy versus wholesaling it or, you know, buying it to flip?
Colton: 34:29Something very important to us is optionality in every deal that we pursue. So we try to set ourselves up in every deal for any exit. If I contracted someone. I want the ability to wholesale it, to novate it, to take it down, to flip it. I, the deeper I contract it, the more options I have. And the more willing the seller is to work with us, the more options I have. The better we set expectations, the more options I have. But I will take a, I will get a contract at 220. I will novate it to market at 250 or 260 and I'll also offer it wholesale at the same time for 240. Or two 35 or two 30. So I will offer it in both places at different prices. And it just depends on where I'm at from a cashflow perspective. If I want to take less now or more later, mostly is what it comes down to
Mike: 35:26Gotcha. And then you said setting expectations there. Like, I think obviously that's something that's super important with innovations. Like, how do you guys go about setting the proper expectations with that seller
Colton: 35:39for innovation.
Mike: 35:40for innovation? Yeah.
Colton: 35:42It starts off with our initial offer and that is that's the key to the whole process, I think, and having a good go smoothly, but we go through the process. Somebody, what are you looking to accomplish? Well, I want to 50. Well, from a whole self perspective, I can only get you, you know, to 10 and. If you give me more tools, I can get you more money. So work with me, work with us, and what I need you to give us to, in order to work with us, is access to the property on your timeline, whenever you like it. And I need you to let me list it on the MLS so that I can take partners, so that I can identify future buyers. People are going to buy it after we buy it. And you know, sometimes we identify a prospective or a future buyer and we'll build to suit sometimes. So if I have a buyer who wants me to do these certain things to that property, now you then they come in, they tell me, we do it, then we sell it to them. And by you allowing me to do that starting now, instead of after we close, you are streamlining our process. Saving us money. Therefore, I can pass a lot of those savings on to you,
Mike: 36:44And then, yeah, so it's kind of, they understand that in exchange for.
Colton: 36:48but it's all based on that first offer. I'm trading off my own low offer. So it's like, Hey, if you'll I know I additionally offered you to 10, but if you'll allow me these things that I can get you up to like two, it's still not quite where you want to be. I know you want to 50, but I can probably get you up to like two 30, two 35, maybe even two to 40 or close, you know? And I'm, and I truly am like fighting for them to get them more money. I think it's a better option. I do believe it's a better option. Like I'm not, it's not like a, I'm trying to get them to a place where they can capture as much equity as they can out of their property, but also is the easiest way possible. So they are, if they want to list the property and step into that uncertain place where it could be months. Before it sells and it could sell for less anyway, then, you know, those are not motivated people. That's fine. That's fine. Those are not our clients, not our prospective customer. That's not our ideal avatar, but to make it as easy as possible, give them the certainty that they're looking for. And they are going to leave a couple of bucks on the table. That's how we make money, but they're going to get in return certainty and convenience and. Expertise. Cause these are oftentimes not simple real estate transactions.
Mike: 38:02Yeah. And then are you guys doing the like the true innovation or do you often double close or
Colton: 38:08Depends on the buyer. Depends on the buyer that we identify. At that point we, we are set up to novate and we've set the expectation that, Hey, if this goes one of a couple of different ways, I might need some additional paperwork from you. But I don't know yet. So let's not waste our time doing it. And now if I identify an FHA or a VA buyer. Or anybody with a seasoning period or even any reason that I might want to novate and not go a, B, B, C, then I'll just remove myself as the B, connect the A to the C, have the A kick me back the marketing fee, the consulting fee, whatever it is. But if I identify a cash buyer via this process or a conventional buyer, I might just double close.
Mike: 38:46It's a little bit easier sometimes, even though it's a little more costly. Yeah.
Colton: 38:49It is super easy. I mean, it's just like double closing to an investor. It's, if I've got a seller that's. I don't know, getting cold feet or squirrely for any reason that I might just, and I can double close. I might, right.
Mike: 39:02Gotcha. And so you guys are doing, were you always on the phone? Closing from day one.
Colton: 39:09We didn't know how to close from day one.
Mike: 39:11Well, trying to close on the phone. You weren't running appointments.
Colton: 39:15we were, yeah, we were running appointments from day one. So how we, yeah, we were from it was my brother and I, we started October, 2020. I had several sales jobs in the past, but never was any good really. And what really started for us was that about two weeks into this business, my brother had all this data from three years of doing this business, but he didn't know how to market to it. And he didn't know how to utilize the data. I was able to take it. And from day one, create a outbound marketing. We hired six cold callers. Out of the gate and we, within two weeks, we had more leads than we could keep up with. They were pinging our phone all day long. It was like ping, ping. We were getting 30, 40, hot, cold calling was crazy at the time too, when we didn't know, but we could not make the calls to keep up with everything and even understand what needed to happen faster, fast enough to keep up with the leads coming in. So we were just inundated. We had hundreds of leads before we had called the first 50 and we knew we were losing opportunity because we couldn't keep up. And so there's an we knew an investor in town. We started to ship him all of our leads. So he would close the deal. He would monetize, he would do everything and then he, once he was done, he would just kick us back off the, off what he had made. And that was our whole first year in business, all of 2021, we did 278, 000 in revenue and only, I think two deals we executed by ourselves.
Mike: 40:43Super interesting.
Colton: 40:44Yeah,
Mike: 40:45And at that point after that, you decided to stick to all the phone because of the efficiencies are
Colton: 40:50bite the bullet and figured out, I mean, we were making a nice kickback. I mean, he was paying us 30 percent just for the lead after when he was done. But that meant we were in our minds. We were leaving 70 percent on the table. And we thought, and when you looked at our year at the end of 21, it was like, yeah, we did almost 300, 000, but the guy we gave all our leads to did 600, 000 on our leads. So that's hard to turn down. So we've, we said, we're going to bite the bullet. We're going to figure out how to sell. We're going to build a real business and we're going to grind it out and towards. And so we pulled our leads back from him. Great guy. Still work with him today. A little bit pulled our leads back from him and started to tee stuff up for ourselves. And at the end of 21, we had a bunch of stuff lined up and it all just aligned and we hit for. It all just aligned for February 22 and we hit for 211, 000 in February 22. And that's when we were really off to the races.
Mike: 41:50nice. What did you guys do to get like. End of that year, right? And you start saying, okay, we're going to do this all the way. We're going to take it all the way ourselves. Instead of just generating the leads and handing most of them off. Like, what did you do to get it to the point where you get off the races?
Colton: 42:06Just call the damn leads. You know, I get,
Mike: 42:09so simple, right?
Colton: 42:10Yeah. I mean, I get targeted by that. There's a clothing brand. I don't know if you get targeted by it too, but it literally, all it says is call the damn leads and
Mike: 42:20I'm going to, I'm going to buy it. Is that a shirt? I'm going to buy
Colton: 42:22It's a hat as a shirt. I saw it on there, but that's, I mean, literally it's almost as simple as that. I know we missed millions. I mean, we, that's the, I guess that's maybe more of the truth is we missed millions and opportunity in being unable to capture. The opportunity in front of us. Now, it was due to lack of skill, lack of effort, lack of discipline lack of knowledge, lack of context, lack of everything you can think of, but there's one I think about today that still hurts me. I, it was a one point I could have bought this property for 1. 325, but because it was in that price point, it scared the shit out of me. And the guy was like begging me to buy it at 1. 325 and Peter, his name was Peter. And Peter says, please buy this house for me. I need to get out of here, blah, blah, blah. Peter, I can't pay you that much. I can't do it. It's not going to work. Not two weeks later, that house was pending on the market at 1. 75 and sold net and at one, I think it closed at 1. 72. That is an expensive lesson.
Mike: 43:31Yeah.
Colton: 43:32And that, and many like it, that's the whole truth of how we, how you bite the bullet is you fuck up a lot.
Mike: 43:39Yeah.
Colton: 43:39That's if I would have known on that day, if I would have known, if that deal crossed my desk today, I'm capturing every single dollar available on that deal. And. That's it.
Mike: 43:50Are you guys, when you run your innovations, are you, cause people have different theories on this. Are you hiring a local agent or you have a dispositions person in house and you're doing the flat fee thing?
Colton: 44:01We do both. It depends. I don't know. I can understand the value of I've had to go really well using agents and I've had it go really poorly using agents. It introduces, I think over time and I think this is a principle for no matter what you're doing in any position, but I think over time you have to train your agent who's doing your innovations. And so when you use them the first time or two or three or four, you know, I had an agent send paperwork and offers and BC stuff to my seller who I was using. And it's just like common sense, like you don't, you're disclosing basically what I'm making before this. You're causing problems that could cost me significant money that didn't, that we would have never done. Right. So like, was it worth it? It's a detriment in the short term at times, but it totally depends. I do believe that if you had, I would be much happier utilizing agents. If I had multiple agents that could just, that I could just hand it to and they would do it.
Mike: 45:01Do
Colton: 45:01But to get to that point, I think is a investment.
Mike: 45:05you guys have like a process now when you hand something off to agents, like a checklist of like, how is this different than a normal transaction or yeah,
Colton: 45:14a woman named Christina. She runs a company called the SOP factory, and we talked a lot about. Basically getting the business to a point where you can hand anybody anything and they can do it and we're not there. So the answer is it should be yes, but it's not right now. Yeah.
Mike: 45:33Well, just call the damn leads,
Colton: 45:35we just called the damn leads.
Mike: 45:36Which is pretty effective. Outside of the cold calling, are you guys doing any other marketing?
Colton: 45:42Facebook ads.
Mike: 45:43Really?
Colton: 45:44Yep. Facebook. That's relatively new. We started that in early December. The potency of it I think is So I've never really generated inbound. We always said we were going to cut our teeth on outbound, figure out how to sell. They're cheap. They're high volume. I started getting some inbound leads and it was like, Oh my God, that is, these people are begging me to buy their houses. Like it is easy. I, you know,
Mike: 46:07you can sell inbound. Like
Colton: 46:09knock on wood, like it's easy. Like these people are like ready to sign. They want to sign today. Like, it's almost like this lady's like, yeah, can you send me the paperwork? I want to sign it. I want to get this started. I'm like. Are you sure? Like, you know, like you don't wanna think about it or, you know, talk to your husband or Nope. Se send it to me like, oh, this is moving a little fast for me,
Mike: 46:31yeah.
Colton: 46:32But yeah it's crazy. I really like it. I, the struggle, the new struggle, I think is getting ahold of some of these people.'cause they submit forms and you call. We try to call within 60 seconds of a form being submitted. And we usually make that and they don't answer the phone. And then we call and call and text and call and text and call and text and put them in the system until the day that one of us dies first. You know, and so that's the struggle now, I think with it
Mike: 47:01Are you guys sending people to a landing page from Facebook? Are you doing the lead forms or instant forms? What are they called
Colton: 47:06instant form. Native forms is what is the way that I talked to my, I have a Facebook girl. She's a third party. She actually cold called me and had, and converted me. And I'm an easy sell man. You can I like. I love giving people a shot and I had this girl, I could tell she's, you know, didn't have a lot of clients, but she knew Facebook and she's eager. And she's been running my Facebook for two months. I mean, she's, she knows what she's doing. She doesn't understand our industry, but I'm training her on that. And so she's definitely getting there and I'm pretty happy with our results so far. We're, we've closed it's going down a little bit as I convert, it's almost like when you start a baseball season. I've had seasons where I was like. You know, a couple of games in and you know, you go tell all your buddies I'm hitting seven 50, and then they're like, well, you won't be by the end of the season. Um, so with her, it was like, I was hitting, we were hitting like 600 or something right out of the gate and it's going down a little bit.
Mike: 48:06of 10 leads would
Colton: 48:07We had right out of the gate, out of the first, like seven or eight leads, we had five contracts.
Mike: 48:12That's incredible.
Colton: 48:13Yeah, we were qualifying really heavily. Our forms were like. Eight or nine questions. So if you filled it out We decided we wanted to open that up a little bit. And now they're coming in with less qualification, but more of them, which is totally what we want anyway, because I have all the infrastructure to, to qualify. Yeah, I don't need the form to do it.
Mike: 48:32right. What if Facebook has changed so much over the years, it's so much more like creative based now. Like what do your ads look like these days?
Colton: 48:40They're pretty simple. We run two ads. One of them is like, you know, like a standard, like sell your home ad. Cat fair, it's a picture of a house and I made, so we AB tested like three different images, one of like, an overhead. Drone shot of a neighborhood with like Camelback in the background. One of the front of a house, a deal we actually did. And another one of like a neighborhood, just a neighborhood overhead shot. The neighborhood overhead shot performed significantly better than the other two. Just standard looking Phoenix neighborhood. We run that same ad in Dallas with a Dallas neighborhood. So we, we want that to look local. The architecture in different markets is very different. And we're still getting there. So those are very standard ads. I would say I have some visions of running some video ads. I don't have that yet. And then the other ad we run and the other marketing message overall that we run is the foreclosure message, which in the foreclosure messaging, it's always, it's everything is like, I don't want to buy your house. We it's, you have options to keep or sell your house. The foreclosure messaging is, we want to help you with your situation. Now if that means that it steers away from us, that's fine. Like that's cool. We want to help you. And we will run through six or seven different options for people to keep their houses if that's what they want to achieve. They're not great options. And the path to making people who want to keep their house, the path to making them an offer runs through how do we keep our house? The options are terrible. I mean, at the end of the day, they are options, but they're not great options. But we also didn't do this to these people in foreclosure. We truly are trying to help and recommend suggestions for them to solve their situation. Have you tried a loan mod? Have you, can you get a private loan? Can you get a hard money loan? Do you want to do a bankruptcy? What else? There's a couple other ones, but when the answer is no to all of those things, it's like, well, I know you don't want to sell, but. Do you want to hear what the option is at least so you know, so you can weigh it against your other options? And at that point, most people are just like, yes, like, yes, I would like to know that option as well.
Mike: 50:49And then but you're running it. That's on Facebook. You're running a foreclosure out on Facebook.
Colton: 50:53Yeah. And I'm running, I'm not able to target a lookalike audience, but I have 2, 500 active foreclosure pieces of data from my CRM that I pull every single day. I'm not marketing to a lookalike audience. I'm marketing to the actual people in foreclosure.
Mike: 51:12Is
Colton: 51:12It is an actual audience. It's an exact audience. It's not a lookalike audience.
Mike: 51:16Is that from like the phone number matching the Facebook has there?
Colton: 51:20Email, matching.
Mike: 51:21Mostly email matching. Okay. How are you getting all these people's emails from skip tracing or using like a different, really? Okay.
Colton: 51:30does not match at anywhere near a hundred percent. I want to say that it matches at like 30%, but even that if I'm marketing to 30 percent of my entire foreclosure. So that was the, that was it, right? It was like, I have 600 roughly active foreclosures in Phoenix and it's a list I really like. Where can I get more? Well, here's 10 other major markets where I can get more that's, I wanted to go an inch deep in a mile wide on
Mike: 51:56Yeah. Where did those first four or five deals you got in the first bunch of leads were those foreclosures or were those the general ad?
Colton: 52:04in the first of the first cut Facebook contracts.
Mike: 52:07Yeah.
Colton: 52:08So we, you know, making plenty of continuing to make plenty of mistakes, but we were running the general ad to the foreclosure audience. So where the, you know, where the messaging should be like, we'll help you with all your stuff. The messaging was like, Hey, foreclosure folks, do you want to sell your house? Which. Which it works, it's fine, but it's not ideal for the process. And we want the process to be consistent from the moment they experience our first ad to the time that they close our, their property with us. So it was just that. It was just this get a fair cash offer ad was the first four or five contracts that we got.
Mike: 52:45Really? Wow. Incredible. And were you guys doing any other targeting with Facebook's targeting? I know they limit it so much for housing these days. I
Colton: 52:52They do. They do. It's really limiting. We're experimenting with interest targeting right now. Everything is very much in a testing and calibration phase. We're still trying to figure out what's we're running tons of AB splits. I had my budget ballooned so that I can get a lot of testing out of the way early and then I'll probably claw the budget back. As soon as we figure out what we like and we'll just get targeted on that instead of spending a little bit in 10 different places.
Mike: 53:19And then outside of Facebook, you guys running anything else
Colton: 53:22The only other thing, the only other thing that I'm in the middle of instituting is mail to the foreclosure people. Every single foreclosure in the system as a part of the process is going to get a mail piece sent on day one, which is going to hit six days later. I'll probably mail them at least three times in across their 90 day foreclosure journey. And I, it's so low cost at such targeted low volumes that it's free as far as I'm concerned.
Mike: 53:53And then you said like, you'd like to keep that messaging consistent. So when your cold callers are calling foreclosures, are they also using that similar messaging? That's like, I want to help you versus do you want to sell your house? Yeah.
Colton: 54:06have my best cold caller calling foreclosures and she's my senior cold caller. She can handle the more delicate. Types of conversations and she is basically saying to people, you know, let's do you want to, that's the first fork in the road with every foreclosure conversation, do you want to keep your house or do you want to sell your house? I would say that the overwhelming majority of people say they want to keep their house. And so at that point, it's like, okay would you be open to a conversation with my foreclosure specialist to talk about some options for that, you know, it's a free, no obligation consultation and then sure. So now they have a, they've been found. They've been hunted and now it sends over to my skilled person or myself who can really talk about those options. But if that person says, I want to sell the house out of foreclosure, then okay. Tell me about the condition. Tell me about the timeline. Tell me about the, you know, now help me help you.
Mike: 55:05So is that pretty much the opening of that cold call? I saw you were in foreclosure. Did you, would you want to keep the house or sell it? Or how does that script open up?
Colton: 55:12Yeah, basically. Hey, calling about the property on whatever. I thought you had, I, we, you know, I saw you had a foreclosure on it scheduled. I just wanted to see if you had a minute to talk about it, if we could help you in any way. Some people just will start to spill their guts. Right there. They need help. They want help. Some people are grumpy. Most people say I've got it covered and you know, piss off. But at the end of the day, the biggest challenge we face in any type of marketing and especially in this marketing is getting ahold of people. That is the number one hurdle. Once we get there, converting is. Is and will always be relatively the same
Mike: 55:48You guys live transfer those over once a
Colton: 55:51as much as possible. Yeah. We live transfer is our first priority. We then try to set appointments or callbacks within 10 minutes. And then if not available for either of those things, we will set a timed appointment and for as soon as possible and really try to avoid setting anything for further than 48 hours out.
Mike: 56:09yeah. Yeah. I would imagine.
Colton: 56:11Yep.
Mike: 56:12Gotcha. Well, we're getting close to the end here. And there's always two questions. I always like to make time for at the end. And the first one is, what is the craziest or most uncomfortable situation that you have ever experienced in a real estate deal? Oh,
Colton: 56:27Oh man, I know the prepped for this, but there's maybe a couple One guy, I was in his house and then we were showing her and I, when I go to an in person appointment, I walk in and I say, all right, well, you know, happy to, do you mind show me around the house? Point. Cause I'm not there to look at the house. I am, but I'm not right. Like I'm there to talk to the person. And so some people like will open the door and say, go ahead, look around. And I don't want that. Like I need to go with you. So this guy's like, yeah, go ahead. Look around. I'm like, well, Hey, do you mind, you know, walking me around, point out anything I can't see with the naked eye and, you know, tell me about the place. And we're walking around and blah, blah, blah. We get into the back bedroom and I'm opening doors. Like I'm always, I kind of test the waters with closets and stuff, but I just opened doors and I want to look around and I get, we get to the master bedroom, this house is falling apart. This house is disgusting. And. I go to open the master bathroom door and as I'm opening it, he goes, and like tries to stop me, but it's too late. And there's a dead and decaying cat in the middle of his bathroom. Just, and this guy was 350 pounds. Like answer the door with no shirt on just, you know, and here's the kind of people sometimes that we deal with. He, this man needs help. He can't take care of himself. He can't take care of his cat that died in the middle of his bathroom. And it's been letting it, and he let it sit there for a month instead of scraping it up with a shovel, right? Like it's, there's, this is the kind of stuff we see and deal with that. That was. I'll never forget that one. I had another guy that answered the door with like a world war two era gas mask on. And his house was also disgusting. Walked around, took a look at it. He wanted like. 350 for his house or something. We got done walking. I thought it might work. Right. And I didn't know the condition of the property. That's why we go look at them. By the time I got done walking out of there, I thought to myself, man, I can only offer that dude like one 90 or something, but I'm there and I have to do it. And so I offer this guy, I told him like, Hey man, the condition of that property is nowhere near what you said it was on the phone. Best I can do honestly is like probably just South of 200. And this dude with his gas mask on, he had it on the whole time we were walking around the house, first of all, starts walking at me like he's gonna, like he wants to, and I'm like, I felt in danger. Like, and I've been in a lot of houses and this is the only time I ever really felt like, okay, I need to leave. Like, so that's another fun one, but I got plenty more. We could, I could talk
Mike: 58:58yeah. I thought you were going to say for a second, you thought you were in danger. He started walking towards me and then he took it off and said, you got a deal.
Colton: 59:05Oh no. I left from my happy ass bounced out of there. I never saw him again.
Mike: 59:10Yeah. Yeah.
Colton: 59:12like a big guy. I mean, he was like six. He was one of those dudes. It's just big, like six, six to 80, you know, like way bigger than me. And just, it wouldn't have been a fight. It would have been him beating me. Yeah, that dude is yeah. That dude is scary.
Mike: 59:33Yeah, I got it. It's a nice time to go. I'm with you.
Colton: 59:36Yeah. Yeah.
Mike: 59:38Cool, man. Well, the second question I always like to ask, and it's kind of for the newer people listening is if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice when you were looking for that first deal, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself?
Colton: 59:53You got to take more shots.
Mike: 59:54Call
Colton: 59:55would say you got to call it M leads to you. Got to call the damn leads. You got to take more shots. The beauty of this business is that everyone's always scared and I'm still scared sometimes, but beauty is just businesses. You get a. Basically a no consequence shot to sell someone else's home and take, it's, you do your best. You try, get your inspection period. If you have an inspection period, it's no harm, no foul. Set the proper expectations and that you're going to do your best and. Take it. Take a shot. Take your shots. There's that's always the fear, right? What happens if I can't find a buyer? Well, you cancel, like, you're going to have a lot of difficult conversations in this business. Now, buck up and have those conversations when you need to have them. Some of the most pain you will feel is when you kick that conversation down the road. I still do it today. We all do. With that conversation, that painful conversation that you should have had three weeks ago. It's even more painful today because you didn't have it three weeks ago. That is the advice that I would give myself. That's the advice I'm going to give myself now. As that's, I still need it, right? I might send me this recording and I'm going to play this for myself because it's still a difficult thing for you. When it's time to fire that employee, you fire them when it's time to drop price, reduce the seller. Cause there's no other way. Price reduce when it's time to cancel when it's time to. Do what you need to do. Do it.
Mike: 1:01:22Yeah. For sure. What are you what are you doing now? You said kind of part of that is setting proper expectations when you shoot your shot, right? So like, talk about that a little bit. I think it's interesting.
Colton: 1:01:32Um, understanding that there's many different, one thing that we do that I think is really important for, um, integrity sake is telling these sellers like we have a diligence period. It's not a secret, right? Like we have a diligence period. We are going to explore. This is the reason I have this period, Mr. Sellers, so that I can. Make sure over the next 10, 14 days that this makes sense for us. This is a lot of money. I'm not, you know, we're not going to buy something that doesn't make sense. This is the first step in the process of us buying this property. Now, if at any point over the next 10 or 14 days, we find that doesn't make sense or that things change. That, you know, at the end of the day, this could change right now, nine times out of 10. It does not because we're very good at what we do and we take care of this stuff up front. But I just want you to know that we are not closed until the deal is closed. I will provide you with updates along the way, but you know, you just got to understand that I have this period of time to make sure that what I'm buying is what I think it is.
Mike: 1:02:35Yeah. Having that conversation upfront. Makes it way easier if you've got to have that conversation later.
Colton: 1:02:42You got to tell people what's up. You can't. This business is, everyone thinks it's so cloak and dagger. It's like, for us, it is like we, we're going to explore five different things with this property at this exact moment. I don't know what we are going to do with it. I truly do not. I might keep it as a short term rental, a long term rental. I might find someone else who wants it. I might put it on the MLS. I might not put it on the MLS, but I need the option to do I'm, I might flip it. I might move into it. This house I'm sitting in, I bought to flip and I ended up moving in cause I liked it. Right. So all of that is the truth. And now do I know, of course, that like 80 percent of the time I am going to find someone else to buy it. Sure. But it is also true that I might do any of those other things with it. And at this point in time, I do not know which, so understanding like all I do know, Mr. Sellers, that on that day that I wrote on there, you're going to get your money. That is true. How I do that. That's up to me. That's my business.
Mike: 1:03:40I like that. Cool, man. Well, if people want to reach out to you afterwards, if they have any questions or maybe they want to send you some deals to buy in Phoenix or Dallas, can they go about reaching you?
Colton: 1:03:51My cell is 402 250 9279. That is probably the easiest way to get ahold of me. And then following that, my email is Colton at fastpropertysolutions. com. My Instagram is ColtonfastREI. And that's it. I'm pretty active on Facebook too, but I don't know how to give you that link. Facebook, my backslash Colton dot fast Facebook, I think. Yeah, that's right.
Mike: 1:04:17Cool.
Colton: 1:04:18Yeah.
Mike: 1:04:19Sweet, man. Well, I appreciate you being on the show. This is awesome. Thanks. Bye. Bye.
Colton: 1:04:22Yeah. Thanks. Appreciate you having me. This was great. Nice talking with you, my man.
