Maximizing Income and Building Assets: Uncovering Alternative Revenue Streams in Real Estate - Conrad Jackson

00:00:15 - Mike Mills

Everybody. How we doing today? So, Realtors, you ever felt like you were boxed into a corner solely relying on traditional buying and selling in a fluctuating market? Imagine if there were multiple doors leading to diverse revenue streams in the world of real estate, an industry that has created more millionaires than any other one on the planet. Today's episode is about unlocking those doors, exploring avenues beyond the conventional, and tapping into wealth opportunities that real estate offers beyond just brokering deals. So, my name is Mike Mills and this is Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. And I've got 13 years of mortgage origination experience and 25 years being in the real estate business. I've seen every market you can imagine and I know what you're going through right now. Every week, I want to bring you perspectives from leading professionals in the real estate space, from spotlight interviews with top tier agents to new opportunities that could potentially change the way you do business. If you tune in each week. Whether you're a 20 year veteran to real estate or someone simply fascinated by the real estate market, this podcast will ensure you stay informed, innovative and always one step ahead of your competition. But before we dive in, quick reminder if you're finding value in these episodes, hit the subscribe button so you never miss a new podcast. And for the full episode experience, make sure you check out and subscribe to my YouTube page. Mike Mills, Mortgage and Finance. Your support keeps this thing going and helps me bring more enriching content week after week. So let's get started. So my guest today is a dynamo in the real estate world.

00:01:41 - Conrad Jackson

There's a word for you that's a word.

00:01:42 - Mike Mills

Juggling diverse roles as a realtor developer, property manager, investor, and soon to be YouTube sensation. I threw that one in for myself there. And somehow snagged an equally impressive lady in his life and together raising three big energy young boys. So he's going to tell us how he manages all of this and still finds a way to keep growing even when a market is slow. So say hello to my good friend Conrad Jackson. What's up, buddy?

00:02:10 - Conrad Jackson

That's good.

00:02:11 - Mike Mills

Yeah. I mean, you sound like you were the biggest deal that has ever walked.

00:02:17 - Conrad Jackson

I was like, who else is coming to the show? Who's here?

00:02:20 - Mike Mills

That's the idea. See, I'm trying to trying to pump this sucker up. So I do appreciate you coming in, man. By the way, for anybody who is new to this, this is Conrad's fifth time on the show.

00:02:32 - Conrad Jackson

Really?

00:02:32 - Mike Mills

So yeah, this is number five.

00:02:33 - Conrad Jackson

I was thinking it was no, no.

00:02:35 - Mike Mills

I went back and counted this fifth one. Now, you gotta remember, we started back way, way back when we were just sitting in that room over there.

00:02:42 - Conrad Jackson

That's true.

00:02:42 - Mike Mills

Having a Conrad's good friend of mine, we talk about this stuff all the time and I wanted to bring him today because just like, you know, man, right now, anybody that doesn't know the market is slow, right? Yeah, things are slow. And if anybody is trying to ignore the fact that it's not you're, delusional. It is slowed down.

00:03:01 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:03:01 - Mike Mills

Dramatically. But I don't want to take away from the fact I know that I saw something the other day. It was like so far this year, and I'm sure the number has grown because I saw this a couple of months ago, but something like 60,000 agents have already left the business by the second quarter of this year.

00:03:17 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, probably for the best.

00:03:18 - Mike Mills

Yes, probably for the best. But that means that the market for competition of other Realtors in the area is starting to shrink because the opportunity to earn income has dramatically declined for many in the business. Realtors, lenders, title companies, it's affecting everybody. If the rest of the market isn't in a recession, real estate certainly is.

00:03:37 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, for sure.

00:03:38 - Mike Mills

And it's not because of house prices. Home prices are still up, interest rates are still up. So what we're going to try to do today is talk about all the ways that you can make money in real estate still, even when the market's slow, and how using your knowledge as a real estate agent and diversifying the ways you generate income within the real estate industry can keep you sustained when markets are up and down.

00:04:01 - Mike Mills

For sure. Right?

00:04:02 - Mike Mills

For sure. Most agents, they spend time focusing on buying and selling. That's what they're doing. So for you personally, what happened to you that made you decide to branch out and do something other because you got into buying and selling just like everybody else. That's how you started, for sure. So what was it that kind of kick started you to move into something other than just representing buyers and sellers?

00:04:21 - Conrad Jackson

I think what really jump started, like most entrepreneurs, what jump started me trying to diversify and do other things was I was trying to solve problems that really irritated me when I was helping people buy and sell homes when I was being a Realtor. So the property management piece, I mean, I saw people doing it, not doing it well. I can do that. The new construction I've said this before, man, I'd get upset when I'd do all this work to establish a relationship with a sales rep, with a builder. And then after we do good work and I've kind of finally got in, they ship them out somewhere else where I'm not selling, and now I have to start over. And I said, Man, I'm just tired of this. I'm going to be my own builder. The investments, I actually helped someone who was trying to their spouse had passed away and they were offloading ten properties that their spouse had acquired over his lifetime, ten rental properties. And they were making close to seven figures by doing that. And I said, you know what? I need to do this also.

00:05:26 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:05:26 - Conrad Jackson

And if I start now, by the time I get to the point where this person is at, I may have double of what they've have because it wasn't rocket science. They were just buying and holding and maintaining. That's where all of this most of this stuff started, because I was irritated or I saw something that someone else was doing, and I said, I can do that.

00:05:47 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:05:48 - Conrad Jackson

That's really what kind of birthed all of this.

00:05:51 - Mike Mills

Your very first step, outside of just buying and selling with buyers and sellers, was the investment property.

00:05:58 - Mike Mills

Correct.

00:05:58 - Mike Mills

That was the little purple house. Was that the one?

00:06:00 - Conrad Jackson

It was the graffiti house. We call it the graffiti house. The 2016, we actually got that property off MLS, and it was spray painted from top to bottom, from the grass, the sidewalk, the roof, the Jeep that was in the side of the yard. Everything was spray painted. So that was a property that was cheap. Myself and my partner at the time, David, still my partner, we went 50 50 in on an investment, put 20% down, it cost us I think it was less than $40,000 was the total price of that house. So we put 20% down and we split it. Everything. It cost us a total of, I think together, like $6,000.

00:06:42 - Mike Mills

Had Dave done an investment before that?

00:06:45 - Conrad Jackson

Yes. So he had five condos that he had purchased in Arlington, and so those were buy and hold for him also. But this was like the first major rehab that we were doing.

00:06:58 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:06:59 - Mike Mills

So he just bought them and held them, like rented them out, basically, but didn't do any kind of work on.

00:07:02 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, eventually he got to the point where he was doing plenty, complete rehabs and things of that nature. But, yeah, this was our first rehab.

00:07:12 - Mike Mills

Rehab got you.

00:07:13 - Conrad Jackson

Major rehab where we were just changing walls and changing floor plans and doing all the stuff that you see stuff happening on TV, on the TV shows. We took a stab at it.

00:07:22 - Mike Mills

Now, if I remember correctly, because we've talked about this before, obviously, if anybody hasn't heard, you can go back to some of the previous episodes. We'll rehash a little bit of it, but if we get a lot more in depth than some of the other ones that we did. So on that one, you actually didn't sell it after you rehabbed it for a while, right? It was several years.

00:07:40 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, we held that one for some years, man. I want to say we sold that one in 2022. So just last year, right, so we held it for six years, right?

00:07:51 - Mike Mills

Yeah. So you bought that one, rehabbed it, I guess you rented it out.

00:07:54 - Conrad Jackson

Correct.

00:07:55 - Mike Mills

Is that right? Okay.

00:07:55 - Mike Mills

And then was the next move in that direction. Did you buy another property? It's the same thing. And rehab it, or was it just a rental?

00:08:04 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, we bought that one. We rehabbed it and in the course of us trying to complete the rehab, we bought another one which was on that same side of town, which was Fort Worth, kind of the southeast Fort Worth area. So we bought that one, and we didn't necessarily rehab that one right away. The second property, we were making enough cash flow on the first property, where we actually held that second property for almost a year before we even touched it.

00:08:33 - Mike Mills

Really?

00:08:34 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, it was cheap. I think that one was like $31,000, something like that. We were making the mortgage payment for the second house with the rent from the first house with the first apartment.

00:08:47 - Mike Mills

Really?

00:08:47 - Conrad Jackson

We had two apartments in that first property. Okay, so the rent from the first one covered the mortgage for both of those houses, which was why we took a little while to rehab them.

00:08:58 - Mike Mills

Because you had cash flow.

00:08:59 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, we had cash flow. I had two apartments out of the first building, and we were making some good coin on it, which is why we sat on it for six years.

00:09:06 - Mike Mills

So apply that to today, because right now, obviously Realtors are out there struggling to find business. Listings are popping up more and more, but the buyers are tougher to come by. So what would you say to someone says, well, I can't invest in real estate right now because prices are too high, rates are too high, there's no deals to be had. What would your response be to that for today?

00:09:33 - Conrad Jackson

It's just not true.

00:09:34 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:09:34 - Conrad Jackson

My response would be that's just not true.

00:09:36 - Mike Mills

All right, why's that?

00:09:37 - Conrad Jackson

First of all, you have negotiating power which we haven't had in half a decade. Yes. On the off market deals.

00:09:43 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:09:44 - Mike Mills

So what's an off market deal?

00:09:45 - Conrad Jackson

So off market deals that are not on the MLS, they're not hitting the Zillow's, they're not hitting the Realtor Com's or the Redfins of the world. They're not on there. They're not listed for sale in the Multiple Listing service.

00:09:58 - Mike Mills

And why is that?

00:09:59 - Conrad Jackson

It's typically because it's going either investor to investor. Maybe it's going from homeowner who wants to go for sale by owner, and they just want to pitch it out to a network of people that they know. There's a bunch of different reasons. Maybe the property is not going to qualify for financing, so they don't want to put it on the market through MLS and have to go through the inspection process and take less money. They feel like they can do a good enough job selling it themselves and just disclosing what they feel like they need to disclose.

00:10:30 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:10:31 - Conrad Jackson

So there's different reasons why it doesn't hit the market. But in those off market deals before, it would be okay if it's any bit of a good deal with any meat on the bone. Meaning that the price that they're selling it for is going to allow you to make money as an investor, either on a flip or on a buy and hold, where they're going to rent it out and be able to cover the mortgage and make some profit after that. If it's anything like that, they were gone right previous 2 seconds.

00:11:01 - Mike Mills

Yeah, because everybody was looking if cheap money was cheap.

00:11:04 - Conrad Jackson

Everybody was trying to the market was so demand it was such a high demand on market that people homebuyers were going off market to find something to live in as a primary residence, saying, I can't find this. Too much competition here. So let me just go in these off market channels or portals or groups, investment groups, and see if I can find my house there. And so before you had the competition there. Now just like listings on market are sitting, listings by wholesalers and off market deals are sitting as well. So you have a higher ratio of that that's happening, which allows the investor to actually negotiate a better deal. Right, which is what I was doing when I first started. It was a different market so you could negotiate a better deal. Just because they put it out at this price doesn't mean that that's what you have to buy it at because there's 17 other people looking at the.

00:11:53 - Mike Mills

Same thing right now as far as the financing is concerned. How does an investor try to make that work? Because like you said, you have two options, right. You can either flip it or you can hold and rent it.

00:12:08 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:12:09 - Mike Mills

One of the two. So if you're going to hold and rent it or flip it, either one, what avenue do you think you would go about in finding a way to get the money for that? Because the other issue, if you're a realtor right now is you probably don't have a lot of cash laying around either, necessarily. So what are some avenues to try to get funds to be able to pull that off?

00:12:30 - Conrad Jackson

So there's a few different ways, man. Creative financing is one of those things as an investor that you just kind of have to have as a tool in your toolkit understanding. Even if you don't understand every intricate detail, you want to understand different ways to have access to be able to lock up the property and purchase it. Right there's seller financing where you can go directly to the seller and say, hey, will you hold this note? Because some sellers don't need an upfront amount of cash. Some of them just need to get that property expense off, get that expense off the books. Or maybe they just need incoming cash flow in the form of mortgage payments and so they don't want to take I've had several times where I've talked to sellers, they don't want to take a six figure hit of income so they have to pay taxes on that immediately. Maybe they want to keep that asset on the books and let you make payments to them and pay it off over time.

00:13:22 - Mike Mills

Do you find that that is more like do you have more takers for that these days as far as seller financing is concerned? Do you think some people don't even know that they're willing to sell or finance?

00:13:32 - Mike Mills

Absolutely.

00:13:33 - Mike Mills

Ask them that question.

00:13:34 - Conrad Jackson

A lot of times you're finding yourself as an investor educating the seller on what it actually is and how it works. And once they get the education, they're a little bit more open to it. Got you. There's kind of this dark cloud going around that, oh, seller financing. Like, I'm not going to get any money. The property has to be completely paid off for seller financing to happen. These are all things that people just assume because that's what everybody's put out there. I've bought properties that have mortgages on it and the seller financed it to me.

00:14:03 - Mike Mills

Really? Okay. Yeah.

00:14:04 - Mike Mills

See, I've always understood that that was mortgage. Banks looked upon that in a negative way. They call that like a wraparound mortgage.

00:14:10 - Conrad Jackson

And it just depends on how you're structuring that deal, how you do it. Make sure you're doing everything legally closing it at a title company, legally making sure you're doing everything. Now there's some handshake deals that are shady. Sure you don't want to do those, right? But I mean, if everybody's upfront and honest and you do things the right way and close it at attorney's office, the title company to make sure that you haven't missed any I's dotted or T's crossed, it can absolutely get done.

00:14:33 - Mike Mills

And people don't get in the lienholders. Don't get into any trouble on that for.

00:14:38 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:14:38 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely. Every bank doesn't like it.

00:14:41 - Mike Mills

Sure.

00:14:42 - Conrad Jackson

Every bank doesn't love it. Some banks understand real estate more than others. Some banks understand that type of financing other than others. And some banks specialize in it. So you just got to understand these things going into it before you put that out there and know the ins and outs and where you can get in trouble. Where you can't get in trouble. Because what you don't want to do is have the bank calling your note due yes. While you hadn't planned on paying it off and the person who you're allowing to finance it doesn't have the money.

00:15:09 - Mike Mills

To pay it off.

00:15:09 - Mike Mills

But I guess you could probably say though that it's just like anything else, right? If you pay your mortgage and everything gets taken care of absolutely. The bank leaves you alone.

00:15:19 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely. They're not coming looking for you.

00:15:21 - Mike Mills

No.

00:15:21 - Conrad Jackson

So if they're coming to look for you, then absolutely you've done something that's alerted them to come look for you. So I mean, there's creative ways to do know seller financing is just jin.

00:15:31 - Mike Mills

Says a lot of people don't know that. As a lender, we can use the seller finance properties borrowers have as income if recorded properly and have three year continuance.

00:15:41 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:15:41 - Mike Mills

All right.

00:15:42 - Conrad Jackson

There's some ways, man, people have gotten there are smarter people than me that have done this and done it successfully and done it a lot cooler ways than I've done it.

00:15:51 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:15:51 - Conrad Jackson

I'm just trying to expose people to say that there's more than just traditional financing out there. Yeah. There's hard money lending. Also, hard money lenders are typically real estate investors who are trying to lend on good deals at lower risk.

00:16:08 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:16:08 - Conrad Jackson

And as a purchaser of that hard money loan or as somebody who's getting that hard money loan, the trade off is you're paying high fees, high interest in a short period of time.

00:16:19 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:16:20 - Mike Mills

Because it's all short term financing.

00:16:21 - Conrad Jackson

It's short term financing. But I tell everybody, it's like if a hard money lender agrees to do your deal, you probably have one. You probably have a deal that's somewhat decent because they're saying, if I'm going to give you terms, then if you screw this up, I'm going to take this over. And I'm an investor. As a hard money lender, I'm an investor.

00:16:38 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:16:39 - Conrad Jackson

So I understand what a deal is and what's not a deal. So I'm not going to give you terms on a deal if I don't feel comfortable enough to take that deal over if you screw it up.

00:16:47 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:16:47 - Conrad Jackson

So I tell people there's your confidence in your deal right there as you send it to them. They send you terms back. You know you got something.

00:16:55 - Mike Mills

Are the hard money lenders looking more at you personally and your finances, or are they looking more at the property in the deal?

00:17:01 - Conrad Jackson

Initially, they're looking at both.

00:17:03 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:17:03 - Conrad Jackson

As you establish a relationship with a hard money lender, they look more at the deal than they do at you.

00:17:09 - Mike Mills

Personally because you've done stuff with them.

00:17:10 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, absolutely. Especially once you get into that three, four, five times that you've worked with that same lender, then they start to kind of put you on cruise control because they understand that you've paid them back or are currently paying them back. So you're low risk as opposed to somebody that they don't know coming right off the street.

00:17:26 - Mike Mills

Right. Yeah.

00:17:27 - Conrad Jackson

So that's another way that you can.

00:17:29 - Mike Mills

Get so it's a relationship business just like anything else. Once you establish that relationship, then you're going to be further along in it.

00:17:34 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely.

00:17:35 - Mike Mills

So if someone's trying to get their first hard money deal, they've never done one before, do they reach out to somebody else that they know that's done with other lenders, or what would you do? If you're like, I found a property, I want to get it. I want to do hard money on it for whatever reason. And you can also explain why you would do a hard money loan on a particular property. How would you reach out or find a hard money lender?

00:17:56 - Conrad Jackson

First thing that I would do is, of course, like I do with real estate when you're trying to become a good realtor. You start asking your sphere of influence or people around you who have done it successfully for referrals. Who do I go to for this mortgage loan? Who do I go to for this contractor issue? How do I read this contract? Who's done a contract? How do I write this contract? You're doing the same thing. You're asking your peers and see who has done this successfully. So that's where I found my hard money lender was I found someone who had done a hard money loan successfully and said who would you go through? Can you give me their information? Right. And so I would recommend people doing the same thing. Typically, you're using hard money for properties that you're trying to close quickly because hard money loans can close very quickly a week, a couple of days in some instances, just depending on the property and the price. You're also doing it more times for properties that need repair or a major.

00:18:52 - Mike Mills

So you can get a little more money.

00:18:54 - Conrad Jackson

You can finance the repair money into the actual loan. So they will allow you to make draws and they'll hold back a certain amount for construction, allow you to make draws on that through the life of the loan got you. So that way you don't have to come up with the repair money out of pocket right off the bat.

00:19:10 - Mike Mills

And how much money do you usually have to come out of pocket up front? Let's say on your first deal, let's say you found a $200,000 property that you wanted to do a little rehab on. Not a lot, but something small. How much money would you have to.

00:19:23 - Conrad Jackson

Come up with depending on it really depends on even if it's your first deal, it depends on what the after repair value of that property could be. If you're talking about 200, you'rehabbing it for $40,000, and it's going to be worth 290 when it's done, then that's a little bit smaller margin than if you were rehabbing it for 40. And that sucker was going to be worth $400,000 or got you $500,000 when it's done, which you have that in certain hypermarkets north Dallas areas like that. Specialty markets, where you find kind of a hidden gem.

00:19:54 - Mike Mills

Right?

00:19:55 - Conrad Jackson

If there's a lot of equity in the deal, they'll still ask you probably for up front your first deal, they'll say 20%. But if there's a ton of equity in it, a lot of times they'll do 10% down. Really?

00:20:08 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:20:09 - Conrad Jackson

Most of them will tell you they won't, but it just depends on how much equity is in that actual deal, how much opportunity for appreciation you can have.

00:20:18 - Mike Mills

Would you say right now, especially because transactions are hard to come by, that even those guys are a little more willing to kind of step out of the box a little bit?

00:20:28 - Mike Mills

They are.

00:20:28 - Mike Mills

You think so?

00:20:29 - Conrad Jackson

They're a little bit more open to suggestions. These days, numbers are numbers and everybody's trying to find comparable sales and sales aren't selling as fast, so it's harder. For previous years, wholesalers could just pull numbers together out of anywhere. They just pull them out of thin air and say, yeah, this looks good. Boom, boom, boom, let's go to sell it at this price.

00:20:50 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:20:51 - Conrad Jackson

Well, now you don't have a lot of that data anymore because homes are taking longer to sell, right. So they really have to be strong on their numbers to be able to put out terms to someone who's trying to do a hard money loan.

00:21:00 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:21:00 - Conrad Jackson

Especially somebody new. So what they want to do is they want to make sure that those numbers work and that they're solid so they don't lose money on the deal, right. So they're paying attention a little bit more, but they're a little bit more creative. If you've got more equity in that deal, there's more room for the ARV to be higher, the after repair value to be higher.

00:21:16 - Mike Mills

They're going to spend a little more time on it, but they might be a little bit more flexible if the.

00:21:19 - Conrad Jackson

Deal is a good deal because they know if they get that deal they're going to be able to flip it and make a lot more money than probably what you're thinking you can make.

00:21:30 - Mike Mills

Real estate is obviously very hyper local and every area is a little different for sure. So if you were looking for a deal right now as a fix and flip or even as a rental, are you looking in McKinney or are you looking in what would be an area that you would look that's either maybe undervalued? You have to give specific areas. But just like if you're the investor, are you going to the high traffic areas and paying more or are you going to a lower traffic area and trying to find a dealer, where are you looking?

00:21:55 - Conrad Jackson

That depends on your tolerance for risk as the individual. Every individual is different. My tolerance for risk is pretty low and I'm a creature of habit. Like most investors, especially newer investors, you're going to probably start somewhere geographically close to where you already sell or live life or live or whatever. So I always recommend people to start where they're comfortable. If you're going into this for a rental and you're a newer investor, then you're going to want to look at places that have a great working class community with public transportation, high visibility, in areas that typically have a lot of rental units because you know that there's a lot of data there that's going to allow you to be able to rent your unit out when you find one in that area. Right. Going into the specialty markets requires a lot more legwork and a lot more risk. So unless you're from that area or you're familiar with that area, I would recommend staying. What you are in the areas that you're familiar with do where you're comfortable.

00:23:00 - Mike Mills

And there's still deals can be found.

00:23:02 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And if you're not finding the right deal for yourself, you're not looking at enough deals per day.

00:23:10 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:23:12 - Conrad Jackson

That's just it.

00:23:12 - Mike Mills

And where would you go to look for deals? Like, where are you looking? Where's the places you're checking out?

00:23:17 - Conrad Jackson

Everywhere. Just driving the neighbor, driving in the car and looking at houses that are boarded up or overgrown grass or seeing these for sale by owner deals, or seeing these there's a lot of trash and stuff on the yard. And people are setting their stuff out, finding these properties that have notices of the water being shut off or taped or tagged or whatever we call it. Driving for dollars, looking for signs that say we'll buy houses because they also sell houses because they've bought so many houses. Doing things like that are going to actually making sure that when you see neighborhoods popping up, brand new neighborhoods popping up and you're seeing For Rent signs out there calling those For Rent signs and asking the owner if they're going to sell the property, if they can't rent it, would they be interested in selling it to you?

00:24:05 - Mike Mills

Never know till you ask, right?

00:24:06 - Conrad Jackson

You never know till you ask. There's a lot of places that you can go to find out information. The tax foreclosure lists, they put them out on the county's websites or on the attorneys websites. Who handle the foreclosures? You can just Google it, who handles Tarrant County's foreclosures auctions? And boom, it'll give you attorney's name and you go to their website and they list every single county on that attorney's website that they handle. And you can pull up the list for that month and see what properties are going to come up for sale on the auctions. There's a lot of free things that you can do to find properties for sale. You just got to look or just ask. Yeah, we're on social media every single day and we're looking for properties and most of us don't put on social media that we're looking for properties. It's so weird.

00:24:55 - Mike Mills

Just ask the question.

00:24:56 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, we'll literally go to Facebook and go to Marketplace and just start thumbing through and hmm, I like this one, I like that one. As opposed to putting a message out which will go to 1000 people that look at your messages and say, does anybody have a deal?

00:25:10 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:25:10 - Conrad Jackson

Nobody does. I won't say nobody does it, but there's few people that will do that because I guess we have to mentally separate, oh, this is my personal but this is my investment. Where do you think you're going to find your best deals? Your personal sphere of influence, that's where the deals are going to come from.

00:25:28 - Mike Mills

We talk about this all the time when we talk to each other, but I want you to say it too, where everybody. Looks at real estate or even one property and says, I want to make $20,000 on this deal. I want to make 30,000 or 50,000, or whatever the case may be.

00:25:45 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:25:45 - Mike Mills

If you go to somebody and you say, either, A, you're going to break even, or B, you're going to make $5,000, and they say, Well, I don't want to spend time doing that.

00:25:56 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:25:58 - Mike Mills

What would you tell them in that regard?

00:25:59 - Conrad Jackson

I would tell them, you probably don't want to do investing. You probably don't want to invest in real estate, because the first deal that you ever do is the deal that you learn the most knowledge on. It's the one that's just education, you're paying for it. Right. So you're not going to come out usually with a home run, with a slam dunk on your very except on.

00:26:21 - Mike Mills

Your very first one.

00:26:21 - Conrad Jackson

On my very first one.

00:26:24 - Mike Mills

But in all fairness, you didn't sell it for a long time.

00:26:28 - Conrad Jackson

Exactly. We sat on that sucker. It's one of those where that's not.

00:26:32 - Mike Mills

The case, but you've had plenty since then.

00:26:35 - Conrad Jackson

I've had tons since then. Where they were not home runs. They were, man, those were help me get out of free agency, get me off this team.

00:26:42 - Mike Mills

Great learning experience.

00:26:43 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:26:44 - Conrad Jackson

Let me get out of the sport altogether. I've had some really bad ones, bad experiences, ultimately. But even then, still, even though even if it was a home run like ours was, I learned more on that one. I have lessons today that I've learned on that one that I still put in progress with the ones that we buy today, the lessons learned on that particular property. So I would tell folks, hey, if you're looking to get rich on your first deal, it's probably just not going to happen.

00:27:09 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:27:10 - Conrad Jackson

Even us, we didn't get rich on our first deal. It was a very good deal. We made some money, but we didn't.

00:27:14 - Mike Mills

Get rich off you couldn't retire?

00:27:16 - Conrad Jackson

I couldn't quit my job after that.

00:27:17 - Mike Mills

No.

00:27:18 - Conrad Jackson

So ultimately, I tell people, man, you're just trying to learn and get through the first one.

00:27:22 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:27:22 - Conrad Jackson

That's what you're trying without losing.

00:27:23 - Mike Mills

If you can do it without losing money, you won.

00:27:25 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:27:25 - Conrad Jackson

But even if you lose a little.

00:27:27 - Mike Mills

Bit, you're still paying. Cost of education.

00:27:28 - Conrad Jackson

It's the cost of education. We'll spend money all day on things that we buy that we say we're going to learn and classes that we never we fail.

00:27:36 - Mike Mills

$30,000 Texas Tech to go to college.

00:27:38 - Conrad Jackson

Exactly.

00:27:39 - Mike Mills

Not learn anything but how to drink.

00:27:40 - Conrad Jackson

Out of a cake. Exactly.

00:27:41 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:27:42 - Conrad Jackson

How to sleep in.

00:27:42 - Mike Mills

But you lose $5,000 but learn a.

00:27:44 - Conrad Jackson

Ton on real estate deals.

00:27:45 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:27:45 - Conrad Jackson

If you lose two grand on this one. No, I can't do that. So what people forget is the education piece is equally as important as the deal. Without the education, you can't keep going.

00:27:57 - Mike Mills

No.

00:27:57 - Conrad Jackson

And so that's what people need to understand when they're doing these deals is, hey, if this is any bit close to me breaking even, let's go ahead and take a stab at it. If this is what I plan on doing long term. Now, if you're just, hey, I'm going to come in once a quarter and make a whole bunch of money, and then I'm out and I don't want to do anything else. It's probably not for you. It's probably not the right deal for you.

00:28:14 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:28:15 - Conrad Jackson

But for those who want to do this long term and scale, you're going to take those lumps and there's an opportunity. What people forget is the market can change while you're doing the deal right for the bad, but also for the good.

00:28:26 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:28:27 - Conrad Jackson

And there's plenty of people who've made money that way where the deal looked like it was. I have one right now where I helped someone and she didn't think she was going to make a lot of money every month, and she got her term sheet from the lender for the refinance, and she's going to make a lot more money than she thought because situation changed, price a little higher, the property looks nicer. The terms are different from this lender, so I'm just like you just never know. So you step out there.

00:28:55 - Mike Mills

Well, you have to. People, unfortunately, live in a world where immediacy is the most important thing. What can I do right now? And especially as agents in the market right now that are struggling to pay the bills, maybe or haven't. I mean, it's a hard thing because you got to balance between, I got to make money because I got to feed my family.

00:29:14 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely.

00:29:15 - Mike Mills

But I got to have a long term plan. Because if you're constantly living in today, if everything is always what's happening right in front of your face, you don't have any plans or any ability to move into the future. The thing about real estate, which we talk about all the time, is there are so many different ways that you can monetize your knowledge about real estate and being an agent and coming into the business and doing it for five or ten years. The knowledge that you have compared to the average investor that's never done it before is astronomically bigger. Right. You have such a competitive advantage in being able to find deals and know what a good deal looks like absolutely. Which is not something that you can just explain to somebody. Right. It's a very difficult thing for you to walk in and go, I can tell you what a good deal is. You're like, Well, I mean, if you find deal, I can evaluate it and tell you if I think it's a good one. But I can't just tell you, look for this, look for this, look for this, because everything's different.

00:30:09 - Conrad Jackson

Investing in yourself, investing outside of real estate, just helps you as a business owner more. If I'm investing in these properties, and we're taking them down to the studs and building them back up. I can do my job better as a realtor because when I go in a listing appointment meant, my people say, hey, I want to do this, I want to do that, and I'm going to spend this amount of money on this and this amount of money on that. I can calculate it in my head and say, that's not going to give you a good dollar for dollar benefit, but this will. So let's not do this and let's do this. And now I also know what the consumer is looking for. I say, okay, well, if you're in a bind and you need to sell this property, you can go this route or you can go this route, you can sell it year at this cost, or you can turn around and rent it, and then you can make this amount of money and buy yourself some time. You just have options. You have so many other things that you can come to other than I'm sitting down telling you what your house can sell for. And that's my job for today. Thank you for letting me come.

00:31:04 - Mike Mills

But you got to be willing to understand that all of this is a long game and you can't just do everything in the short term for sure. You got to have an eye to the future and go, what I'm doing today is going to benefit me in five years. It's going to benefit me in ten years, and there's going to be a payoff for this, even though I may not feel it right now. And the thing is, right now we all have a ton of time on our hands.

00:31:25 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:31:25 - Conrad Jackson

Right. And the best agents that you find out there are the ones who are thinking outside the box, being creative. Like, look at it, for instance. One thing that we didn't say at the intro, I own a real estate photography company.

00:31:39 - Mike Mills

Oh, I didn't even know that.

00:31:40 - Conrad Jackson

Nobody knows.

00:31:41 - Mike Mills

Okay, well, now that's just another one.

00:31:43 - Conrad Jackson

Well, we don't really promote it as much. You probably should, but the listings that we take photos on are my listings, our team listings. But I own part of that company.

00:31:54 - Mike Mills

So what you did then is I'm assuming this is with Keith. Okay. So if anybody doesn't understand what he's saying is that he took his money and invested it with a partner who does photography, who is the photographer. You're not a photographer.

00:32:07 - Conrad Jackson

I am not.

00:32:07 - Mike Mills

You probably don't know the first thing about photography.

00:32:09 - Conrad Jackson

I can turn the camera on.

00:32:11 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:32:11 - Mike Mills

But, you know, Keith does, and you know, Keith is amazing at what he does, but Keith is probably also a really good photographer, but maybe doesn't have the understanding on how to grow and develop that business to the degree that maybe you could help him with.

00:32:24 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:32:24 - Conrad Jackson

And ultimately, you know, for me, I saw an opportunity where I could do what I was already right. And it really wasn't even a money play on the business. It was, I'm already doing this right. I already have my long term friend Keith, who's phenomenal at what he does. I have an opportunity to create a business with him, something that we're both already doing, have a funnel of income come in, and now I have another entity on the books that I can show as an asset when I want to go do something with a lender because it's showing it's generating income. I don't have to do anything different than what I've already done. Plus maybe file taxes once a year sure. And have a meeting or something for the entity.

00:33:11 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:33:12 - Conrad Jackson

Other than that, that's it.

00:33:13 - Mike Mills

That's great. And what you're doing, too, is you're taking the industry that you're in, and you're going basically vertical, and you're getting different parts of the process. I'm not saying go out and buy an appraisal company, but you have appraisals. You have inspections. You have photography, you have electrical work, you have repairs. You have what's, the insurance? It's terrible. But the home warranty.

00:33:41 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:33:45 - Conrad Jackson

But think of it like this, man. You have an opportunity. People have opportunities that they just pass up every day just because their antenna is not up.

00:33:52 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:33:52 - Mike Mills

They're not thinking about it.

00:33:52 - Conrad Jackson

They're not thinking about it. There are plenty of agents that are very good at putting together parties. I see agents all the time delivering pies and Popeyes, and there's workshops on how to go by and visit your clients and doing things in door hangers. And it's like, what if I just partner with somebody who did this for a living? Did door hangers for a living?

00:34:11 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:34:11 - Mike Mills

And then now you get cheaper door hangers.

00:34:13 - Conrad Jackson

Now I get the rate cheaper, and I can go out here and expand my business. And when times are slow, I have another revenue source.

00:34:20 - Mike Mills

Yeah, I think that's great. Again, it's just about how you think and the way you use your brain. Correct. All right, so let's move on, because that was a good one. But let's move on to property management, okay. Because every agent or not every agent, but a lot of agents that I talk to hate property management. They're like, there's so much time and so much effort and with very little return, they have all these negative things. But I've also spoken with several what I would consider pretty successful realtors that love property management, and they think it's fantastic. So, first off, tell us how many I love the way you put it, by the way, how many doors you have these days. I used to think of as properties, but we got to think of it as doors because each door is a rent. So how many doors do you got? How did that start? And then now your lovely wife is steering that ship. So tell me how all that transitioned into the right.

00:35:14 - Conrad Jackson

Now, last time I checked, I think we're at 30 doors.

00:35:17 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:35:18 - Mike Mills

That's downsized a little bit, though, right?

00:35:19 - Conrad Jackson

Didn't you have I think we were hovering around, like, 24 to 27.

00:35:24 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:35:24 - Conrad Jackson

We sold a couple, and then we.

00:35:26 - Mike Mills

Bought a couple more.

00:35:27 - Conrad Jackson

A few more.

00:35:28 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:35:29 - Conrad Jackson

So now we're at 30. Couple of other deals on the table that we're currently working through. Yeah, that's how we got there. I mean, it started small at the graffiti house, and we just kind of scaled up hard money seller financing, traditional financing, until we got to the point where we're at now. As far as how I feel about property management, I don't love it. It's not my favorite thing to do. But I understand real estate, right. And so I understand rents, rent, comps, understanding what a tenant needs versus what a buyer needs, understanding how to rehab, which came through the real estate, investing with rentals and whatnot. So having that knowledge, I understand what it takes to get a property rentable for a certain amount of money in the market. Also understand how to work with the Housing authority to get guaranteed rents in and get that stigma out of there, that, hey, housing tenants are the worst tenants. They're some of my best tenants, and we've been very blessed to have them.

00:36:36 - Mike Mills

Are you talking about? Section eight stuff.

00:36:37 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, section eight stuff, man. I mean, it's one of the best programs.

00:36:42 - Mike Mills

Explain to people how Section Eight works, because you blew my mind when you.

00:36:44 - Mike Mills

Told me that one time.

00:36:45 - Conrad Jackson

So basically what you have is you have someone who is typically making below a certain amount. A lot of times it's below the poverty line, but not all the time. It's below the poverty line. You're at a fixed income, right. And you are looking for housing that is subsidized by the government, and it's a government program. Right. And so you can apply there's a long list to apply, but if you can get on that program, you can go county to county, literally anywhere in the United States and have subsidized. Know it usually takes you to be on a program for, like, a year or so before they'll allow you to go to a different county.

00:37:29 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:37:29 - Conrad Jackson

But in some cases, a lot of cases, I see like 70% of your.

00:37:35 - Mike Mills

Rent paid on the first of the month.

00:37:38 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:37:38 - Conrad Jackson

Every single month, first of the month, direct deposit from the Housing authority, never late from the entity, never the government shuts down. You still get paid on time when there's a moratorium. So even with the government shutdown, never have ever had a payment government shut down, whether it's been COVID and the neighborhood shut down. Everything shut down. Direct deposit, first of the month, every month.

00:38:02 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:38:03 - Conrad Jackson

And you can take that piece of paper that they give you your voucher, and you can go after you've been on the program for like a year or so, and you can go anywhere. You can literally apply in Waco, right?

00:38:16 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:38:17 - Conrad Jackson

Be in Hill County. Live in Hillsborough, Texas.

00:38:20 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:38:21 - Conrad Jackson

After a year, you can pick up and move to Hawaii.

00:38:24 - Mike Mills

Wow.

00:38:24 - Mike Mills

And is it any property?

00:38:28 - Conrad Jackson

Pretty much any property that can get approved by the conditions which the conditions are typically, you're providing, like, air conditioning, you're providing some type of appliances, things of that nature. You're providing a safe environment. There's floors, there's a ceiling, there's doors, entry and exit points.

00:38:52 - Mike Mills

I guess what I'm asking is there's no city ordinances typically, or anything where a city can say you can't have this type of housing.

00:38:59 - Conrad Jackson

The restrictions typically can come if you are in, like an HOA neighborhood or something like that, where they say only a certain amount of rental units or no rental units.

00:39:10 - Mike Mills

It's not section eight. It's just no rentals.

00:39:12 - Conrad Jackson

Exactly.

00:39:12 - Mike Mills

Got you.

00:39:13 - Conrad Jackson

But they won't typically single out, like, a Housing Authority program.

00:39:17 - Mike Mills

They don't want to discriminate. Exactly.

00:39:18 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:39:19 - Mike Mills

So really, in all reality, aside from a few places, you can pretty much own any property that you own as.

00:39:27 - Conrad Jackson

Long as the property owner is accepting housing. Yes.

00:39:32 - Mike Mills

Yes. Wow.

00:39:33 - Conrad Jackson

Didn't know that either. And go to Alaska on section. You know, you can go to Florida, go to Destin if you can find someone who's going to rent you out one of their condo units and that sucker is approved, which, as long as it's usually standing in decent condition, a lot of times you don't even have to have air conditioning. As far as like central AC, you have window units.

00:39:51 - Mike Mills

Boom.

00:39:52 - Conrad Jackson

You can get that housing voucher. And I've seen tenants get 100% of their rent paid for.

00:39:56 - Mike Mills

Wow.

00:39:57 - Mike Mills

And with utilities.

00:39:59 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:39:59 - Mike Mills

And the thing that when you were telling me about this that really drove the point home was that program is so valuable for people to get into that you don't really have an issue with them paying their portion in most cases.

00:40:16 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah.

00:40:16 - Mike Mills

Because they're so terrified to lose absolutely. That benefit.

00:40:20 - Conrad Jackson

I think the waitlist for Hill County right now is like 1700 people wow. Right. 1700 people that have applied that are waiting to get on with Housing Authority. Right. And so once you get in and you get those benefits, the tenants are typically extra careful about keeping that unit in immaculate condition so that way they don't get kicked out of housing and get off of that program and have to pay market rent out of their own pocket.

00:40:52 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:40:53 - Conrad Jackson

So that's typically why I have the best housing that my best tenants are housing tenants because they don't want to get off the program.

00:40:59 - Mike Mills

No.

00:41:00 - Conrad Jackson

Where else can you go and pay a couple of rent for a unit that should cost you 1517, $2,000? So it's like, why would I screw that up? You don't want people screwing that up.

00:41:13 - Mike Mills

No, you don't. You don't want to mess that up because that's a fantastic benefit. All right, so back to the property management thing. Sure. When the door started piling up a little bit in the beginning, because at first it's not too bad. You can kind of did you ever use a property manager yourself?

00:41:28 - Conrad Jackson

I did.

00:41:29 - Mike Mills

You did? Okay.

00:41:30 - Conrad Jackson

And I still do.

00:41:31 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:41:31 - Conrad Jackson

I still do. It just depends on your market. And like I said, being comfortable with what you're doing. Most of my Fort Worth properties go to a specific property manager gotcha just because geographically it's for me to drive to. Kay doesn't manage those because usually I just give them to that person. So that way if the showings things have to happen certain times of the day, that office can just handle it. So I pay a property manager.

00:41:59 - Mike Mills

But you also know doing it yourself, though, you know the value of it. So if you find one that's good, that has a reasonable price, that does what they're supposed you're like. Yeah, I'll absolutely. But you only know that because you do it yourself and you understand.

00:42:11 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely, I understand what it's going to take in order to manage that property effectively.

00:42:15 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:42:15 - Conrad Jackson

And I also understand my tolerance for managing that property effectively. So a lot of times there are things that are good deals that I don't want to manage, so I give them to a different property manager who's happy to manage them, and they do a fantastic job.

00:42:27 - Mike Mills

So what made you decide to put together your own thing and then, of course, get your lovely wife involved with that one?

00:42:35 - Conrad Jackson

A couple of things. First of all, we're trying to scale our portfolio a certain way. Right. And there are certain things that we like to do that other property managers don't necessarily recommend. So there are times where I don't want to hear it from another property manager on your recommendations. I'm going to do it this way.

00:42:51 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:42:52 - Conrad Jackson

And it works. And it works for us. So what I started to do was just train my wife on how to manage our rentals and our properties and things of that nature for ourself. How'd that go? And it's fantastic.

00:43:03 - Mike Mills

Was it fantastic? At first?

00:43:05 - Conrad Jackson

At first it was hard for me to relinquish just because Delegating is not my strong well, and working with your wife and my wife, it's like it's going to be her way or no way at all. And I was okay with that because the tenants like her better, she does a better job. It freed up a third of my day, every single day for not having to deal with it. All I had to do was get it rentable and then let her take it from there.

00:43:30 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:43:30 - Conrad Jackson

And so it's worked out really well.

00:43:33 - Mike Mills

And the thing that you've always told me about that is the key to it is the systems that you've created absolutely. Around managing it, because absolutely. I think people get shy or gun shy on the property management side because they just think you're constantly dealing with tenants all day long, you're constantly solving problems. And to be fair, there is certainly amount of that. Right? There's an amount of that. But if you build the proper systems and you build a proper process of onboarding, getting someone in, getting someone out, collecting rent, all that kind of stuff, then the whole thing becomes very manageable. And then it's just like anything else where probably 80% of your properties just float along without a day's care and then you got 20% that take up a good chunk of your time.

00:44:15 - Conrad Jackson

Think of it like anything else that you do. I mean, as a realtor, you could spend all day wasting time showing people properties that they're never going to buy, right? So what do you do? You make sure to qualify those people to make sure you're not spending as much time on nonsense. So that way you're managing your time more effectively. Think of a professional athlete. They could spend all day on a court or in the gym, but they spend specific amount of time working in specific high level energy things to make sure that they perform better on their job, right? So you could waste time in the gym just dribbling a ball or hitting a tennis ball all day long the wrong way. So it's all about making sure that you understand and manage your expectations, manage your system so that way you're more effective. So the systems help the systems absolutely help the software, property management software. The team is probably the most important thing. Because even if you don't have the software, that's the most amazing, having the right people around you the contractors, the electricians, the HVAC guys, the glue guy, the contractor who can pretty much do anything, build anything, fix anything. The foundation people, the insurance people, the title people, the attorneys, just everybody who can help you do your job better is having that team and having that team's expectations managed as well. Helps you do your job better and helps you fly through the property management stuff, which my wife does very well for our stuff.

00:45:41 - Mike Mills

Well, especially right at this moment in time when the buying and selling of real estate for an agent is down, I'm sure those rents and those mailbox money that's coming in every month is.

00:45:54 - Conrad Jackson

Very important because as an investor who uses leverage and banks, you need to be able to show that you're bringing funds in. So even if you're not physically taking that cash for yourself personally to pay your bills and expenses, you're still showing the revenue coming in. So when they say, hey, okay, we'd love to do this deal for you to help you continue to grow, what can you show me as far as income? Well, if my real estate sales are down, hopefully something else is picking up the slack. And that's where the rents can be very important where it's not the actual dollar that you're seeing physically that you're able to spend, but the dollar that you're showing on your books that's coming in consistently, that allows you to continue to go and grow your business. That is huge because as realtors, sometimes you might need to go to the bank and get a line of credit to help you weather a storm for a certain period of time. Well, if your sales are down, that's all you got to go on. They're probably not going to give it to you. Right, but if your sales are down, but you've shown money revenue coming in from property management fees, listing photos, rents, home building sales, things of that nature, then you can show a lot more assets on the books which makes you look lower risk to the yeah.

00:47:10 - Mike Mills

So now you also do real estate investing, advising. Now you started a Facebook group and have been dealing with people in and out of. Now you now in all fairness and correct me if I'm wrong, you don't make any money off of that directly.

00:47:28 - Mike Mills

No.

00:47:28 - Mike Mills

Right. You're not charging for this.

00:47:31 - Conrad Jackson

Not.

00:47:32 - Mike Mills

So then explain to people why you would take your already crunched time and spend time advising someone on investing and what they should do.

00:47:42 - Conrad Jackson

Two quick reasons were first, I would get these questions all day long from people, how you do this? How do I do this, how do I do that? So for me to physically pick up the phone and call people or text them back, all of the answers was wearing on me. So I created the group. So that way, when I did things, I could explain it to the group and you could get most of your answers, not only from my explanations, but other investors who are in the group that could answer your questions or point you and redirect you in a direction that you could go to get those answers. So it helped me centralize one location to where I could help people more effectively with my time. Right. So I wasn't wasting time just trying to do each person individually, help them. And then I still get questions outside of that. So I can help you more on a one on one basis, but typically you can get most of your questions answered through that group, especially for general getting started questions. The second thing was it helped me be more visible, which allowed me to get more business indirectly.

00:48:53 - Mike Mills

That's right.

00:48:54 - Conrad Jackson

Because I was showing people these terrible looking houses that we were rehabbing and making really nice and showing people how to rent. Now, immediately, when people were thinking investments, they were thinking of me. They were thinking of real estate, they're thinking of me. They're thinking of contractors, they're thinking of me. They're thinking of dirty houses. They're thinking of but it allows me to be at the top of mind, which allows me to do my job more effectively, get more listings, get more buyers, get in front of more people, so that way I can reach more people and continue to grow our business. And that's the thing that people miss. If it's not, like you said, immediate gratification, hey, I'm doing this, but I'm charging people for it, well, then people are more hesitant.

00:49:36 - Mike Mills

Sure.

00:49:37 - Mike Mills

Because they're paying for something, what they're going to get.

00:49:38 - Conrad Jackson

Right?

00:49:39 - Mike Mills

Well, I've been deep diving into different ways to grow audiences and build content and all this kind of stuff. And from a social media standpoint, and one of the things that I've taken away from all this is when you give people free information, you dump your brain on them, and there's no expectation for reciprocation. There's no charging for it. There's no any of that stuff. You do that enough and you build a big enough audience, and even on the small scale, you're going to get questions and you're going to get people coming to you to look for resources because there's not the fear of, okay, you're trying to extract money from me some way, some fashion, sure. But the reality is, if you are talking to someone about investing in real estate and you're telling them how to locate deals and you're telling them what type of money you need, where to find the hard money lenders, you're going through this entire thing with them.

00:50:31 - Mike Mills

Right?

00:50:32 - Mike Mills

Well, now, they may have a cursory understanding on how to do this, but understanding how to do it and actually doing it are two very different things. Absolutely. And that's what sets apart people that have success and those that don't in a lot of cases, is that it's kind of like I always equate it to dieting, right?

00:50:49 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:50:49 - Mike Mills

Everybody knows that if you want to be healthy, you need to work out, you need to exercise, you need to eat healthy, you need to eat less, you need to eat the right kind of foods. You probably need some supplementation. There's a lot of avenue. This isn't a mystery. This isn't anything that people are just like, man, if I can only solve this puzzle. But the hard part is, in order for that to happen, you have to get up in the morning, you have to work out, you have to sweat. It sucks, you're tired. You don't get to eat that cheeseburger that you were really hoping to eat, or you don't want to have that piece of cake. But in order for those things to you have all the knowledge in the world, but if you don't enact and act on that knowledge, then it doesn't mean shit.

00:51:32 - Conrad Jackson

Well, think of it like this. I talked a lot, especially in the real estate rookie. I did like a YouTube class, like a class for beginners where I just went over some examples, live examples. You've seen it before? It was like an hour, and I recorded it. So anytime. Somebody comes to me brand new and says, hey, I'm thinking about getting in. Where should I start? I send them the YouTube link. Start there. After you've watched it, come back and ask me your questions. Right. So it's a good starting point. Well, in there, I talk about, like, today, different ways that you can get funding for your first real estate deal. One of them is private money. Private money is a way that you can get started on your first real estate deal without going to a specific bank. Right? And private money is typically someone who has access to capital. They're not necessarily investors. They just have access to capital. And they want to lend and make a return on their investment, but they.

00:52:24 - Mike Mills

Don'T want to physically do it.

00:52:25 - Conrad Jackson

They don't want to physically get out there and do anything. They just have excess cash or some capital that they want to put to work to make a return.

00:52:32 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:52:32 - Conrad Jackson

My very first private money deal came from the Facebook group. It was a friend of mine that I had helped buy and sell houses before we had a trust there. He understood that I knew the market. He was in the group. And so when I said, hey, I'm doing these deals, doing these deals, and one day he just reached out to me and said, I've got some money. I would love to lend. If you ever get a deal that might be a good fit, let's talk about it. And I found one, and we did it, and we did it successfully, and we've done it again, and we'll keep doing it again and again. Well, if I never created the group, if I never talk about what I'm doing, if I never ask, that doesn't happen. I've made a lot of money off of those deals. Yeah, and he's made a ton of money off of those deals.

00:53:23 - Mike Mills

Well, people have to think about it. Like, another example is like a plumber, right? Your toilet goes down in your house, okay? You call the plumber. Plumber shows up. First guy gets there, does a bunch of work, doesn't talk to you, doesn't.

00:53:36 - Conrad Jackson

Say a word, writes you a bill.

00:53:38 - Mike Mills

You paid $250, $300 because your toilet wouldn't flush. And you're like, I guess that was worth it. I don't know. But okay, right? Next guy shows up, you have another issue. You call them, they show up. And then you have the nicest you've met these guys, right? The nicest guys, they want to go.

00:53:53 - Conrad Jackson

Well, you see, you got this seal.

00:53:54 - Mike Mills

Around here, and over the years, when the toilet shakes and you don't keep those bolts down, it'll loosen up, and then it starts to leak. And then if you have a leak, then it's going to cause this problem. He goes through a litany of all the issues that you're having, how he's fixing it, where he's got to go get the part, whatever, right? You write him a check for $250. And you're like, I feel great that that dude just I know I got my money's worth right now. The next time you have an issue, are you then going to fix it yourself? Because you know how now, right? The plumber told you all the problems. All you got to do is go do it.

00:54:26 - Mike Mills

Right?

00:54:26 - Mike Mills

Well, there's a whole other level of knowledge that you don't have that you have to fight through in order to get something like that accomplished. But no, what you're going to do do is you're going to call back old Bob again, and he's going to come out and he's going to fix your toilet, and he's going to tell you everything about it. And every time he does it, you're learning a little bit more and a little bit more, but it doesn't mean that you're ever going to break down. Go fix that toilet yourself.

00:54:47 - Conrad Jackson

Exactly.

00:54:48 - Mike Mills

You're paying somebody else.

00:54:49 - Conrad Jackson

You're paying somebody, and he's giving you.

00:54:51 - Mike Mills

Even though you're paying for his service, to fix it. The entire time he's doing that, he's just giving you free information on what he's doing, how he's doing it, and why it costs, whatever it costs. And that level of communication that you deal with people and whatever it is you do, whether you sell real estate, whether you do mortgages or finance, whatever it is, when you communicate with people and don't feel like you got to hold back all your secrets, you got to keep everything here. Because if I tell anybody, then everybody's going to do what I'm going to do.

00:55:17 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:55:18 - Mike Mills

No, they're not.

00:55:19 - Conrad Jackson

Most people are not. I give information out every single day. I've literally been through a whole class on the first thing you do when you go talk to a bank. This is what the paperwork you're supposed to have, how you fill it out, what it means to them, what it should mean to you, everything. You take that into the bank, they will take you seriously.

00:55:40 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:55:41 - Conrad Jackson

And I've had a handful of people actually do it.

00:55:44 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:55:44 - Mike Mills

Well, I mean, it's the nature of life. I mean, we all have ideas. I'm most guilty of it in the world. If anybody could see my notes on my computer and all the ideas that I've had over the years on stuff that I want to do. But the truth of it is, and this is something I'm learning more and more as I get older and still haven't fully. I understand it, but I don't enact it well enough, is you get success by focus. You don't get success by being average at 20 things.

00:56:10 - Mike Mills

Absolutely. Okay.

00:56:11 - Mike Mills

You got to pick one thing. Now, what people don't realize is when you focus on one thing and accomplish it, that other opportunities will present themselves that fall in line with whatever it is that thing is that you focused on. But work on this for ten minutes and then, oh, that didn't work. I'm going to go do this and work on that for an hour, and it didn't work or work on this for a month. And if you're constantly starting and stopping and starting and stopping, you're never going to get anywhere. And you have to be laser focused on whatever it is that you want do. So if you're listening to this and you're going, okay, well, I don't know. Do I want to do property management? Do I want to do investing and flipping? Whatever it is that you think you want to do, just do that. Take all the rest of it and push it aside. You can get to it later if you're interested in it, but focus on this thing and do that thing. And it could be it could be coaching, it could be investing, it could be rentals, it could be a million different things. But pick that thing and go all in on it and educate the shit out of yourself. So that way when you come out the other side, you're the expert on it, and people will pay you for that information.

00:57:13 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:57:13 - Conrad Jackson

And ultimately, as a realtor, operate within the confines of what you already know. You pull comps all day, you look at deals all day. Okay, well, let's get educated with an investor. Let's go out with an investor once a week and figure out what an investor is looking at through their eyes. And then how about I find good investment deals and then I just send them out to investors.

00:57:34 - Mike Mills

Well, there's an entire industry in the wholesale world, which blew my mind, too, to some extent, is there are literally it depends on what you're willing to do. There are guys that go out and literally knock on doors in every single neighborhood and ask people if they want to sell their house.

00:57:49 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely.

00:57:50 - Mike Mills

Then those guys have a network of investors 1015, 20, 3100, whatever it is. That when they get somebody that says, yes, I want to sell my house, they kick that out to all those investors. And then within a day or two, most of the time, they're going to have a buyer. And all they did was connect a buyer and a seller and that's it. And they did nothing else. And they earned what usually their spread.

00:58:14 - Conrad Jackson

Minimum, they're making five grand.

00:58:16 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:58:17 - Conrad Jackson

Minimum.

00:58:18 - Mike Mills

You do two or three of those.

00:58:19 - Conrad Jackson

Don't do anything less than $10,000, and.

00:58:22 - Mike Mills

All you're doing is connecting people.

00:58:23 - Mike Mills

That's it.

00:58:24 - Mike Mills

That's the entire business.

00:58:25 - Conrad Jackson

I mean, there's people who go out and literally will buy these houses that are just in disarray. I mean, they're gross, they're nasty, and they'll just buy them as cheap as possible and clean them up and put them out for sale. Yeah, they don't even fix them.

00:58:36 - Mike Mills

They don't even fix them.

00:58:37 - Conrad Jackson

They just clean it up.

00:58:38 - Mike Mills

Just a little bit of makeup.

00:58:39 - Conrad Jackson

Clean it up. Just give it a bath, get the trash out, right?

00:58:42 - Mike Mills

Give it a good shave, a nice.

00:58:43 - Conrad Jackson

Little bath floors, and put that sucker out to somebody and make 1520 grand just like that.

00:58:50 - Mike Mills

All right, so, man, we're already almost at an hour, but we're going to go a little longer today because we got a lot of stuff here. Next thing is YouTube.

00:58:58 - Mike Mills

All right?

00:58:58 - Mike Mills

So let's talk about this a little bit because a lot of agents, they're like, okay, well, I got to do some social media. I got to get myself out there some. I got to present myself to the world if I'm going to do this. And they understand it, some don't and refuse to. And that's fine too. Everything's different for everybody. But why are you doing so tell me a little bit about how you started the channel or the show and then what you've been doing with it, and then if you're planning on what you've learned from it, if you're going to keep going on what you're doing, if you're going to change anything.

00:59:30 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, so the show, the YouTube show, Real Estate on Deck, we do it usually have two or three episodes a month. For those of you don't know, go to Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance page or just search me on YouTube. You'll be able to pop up and see how it started. Was my partner, Keith Photographer. Photographer, who also does my video. He's my videographer.

00:59:53 - Mike Mills

Another way you save money on doing video, by the way.

00:59:56 - Conrad Jackson

There you go. I don't know how to necessarily save money.

00:59:59 - Mike Mills

Well, I mean, maybe make a little bit. You're a top priority.

01:00:02 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's where it is. So we would go around to our different projects and I would have him film here, film there, different things, different listings, different new construction stuff. And he said, man, we should put together some type of content that we can push out to the public to just let people know what you're doing and the different types of businesses that you have up, but in a professional format, right? Maybe somebody picks the show up and they pay you big money, maybe they don't, but at least you have original contract.

01:00:32 - Mike Mills

Throw the lure in the water. Let's see what happens.

01:00:34 - Conrad Jackson

So for me, we had been talking about it for about a year and a half before we actually sat down, put a plan together, put a format together, and said, I'm going to commit to this. So I did. We put a contract together, me and him. 18 months was my commitment for doing this show. And we're going to get a certain, like I said, two to three episodes a month usually put out. Usually it's like one a week. We'll take a week or so off every other month. And he follows me around a couple of days a week. And we go through the different things, different aspects of our business. For me, it was just getting the show out there initially so that way I could be more visible. The goal was to just be more visible in a different way. I had the Facebook group that was doing well. I have my personal Facebook that promotes business and stuff too, that does well. Business, Facebook. This is just another avenue.

01:01:22 - Mike Mills

Sure.

01:01:24 - Conrad Jackson

Since then, it has turned into more business. It has shown people different things that we do that they just didn't know about me and about our business and the different facets of it. And then it's now turned into a spot where as opposed to me just showing where I'd like to take the show is education. I'm showing you what I'm doing, but I'm also showing you why I'm doing it this way, this particular way. So that way, when you're going out, I can educate you on how to look for a rental. What are things to look for when I'm walking a property the first time? What are things to avoid when I'm looking at a property? What different locations I'm in, maybe how to build a house or how to talk to a contractor. How to negotiate a contract with a contractor. What to put in that contract verbally or as far as on paper, how to make sure that that's enforced. All these things are where we're headed with the show so that way people can actually follow along and become better investors as opposed to just watching our business grow. And I think that's for me, something that'll be a little bit more fulfilling going forward and it'll keep me doing the show and keep me excited about doing the show.

01:02:35 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:02:35 - Conrad Jackson

Because I like to learn. Yeah, I learned more on YouTube and content than I learned in classroom. And I think that we're all visual learners. So putting it in a professional edited format helps people understand it and follow along with the points that you want them to make sure they don't miss well.

01:02:51 - Mike Mills

And the key on any of that stuff, when it comes to having content that you put out on a regular basis, I think people get frustrated with the again, this goes back to wanting everything immediately now. And if you post videos or you make a YouTube video, or you do whatever you do, and you get five views and one like or no likes or whatever, right. And you might do ten of them and you're just going, man, I guess nobody wants to hear what I have to say. And again, I was on my deep dive into all this content creation and whatever. Another thing that I've learned from all of anybody that you can think of that's out there promoting this stuff is number one, is consistency, for sure. You have to do it all the time.

01:03:40 - Mike Mills

Correct.

01:03:40 - Mike Mills

You have to do it. And I mean consistently. It could be once a week, it could be once a month, but whatever it is, it needs to be that on a regular basis and you can't expect any real return on that. There's one guy, because I've been looking at, obviously doing the podcast and looking at people who do podcasts, and he started doing his podcast back in 2017 and he has been doing it now for he's at, I think he's at 600 episodes. So he's been doing it for eight years. Now, granted, at this point in time, because this human and I won't name his name, but he's grown into something massive. Everybody would or a lot of people would know him if I said his name. His first three years of doing it, it was just basically he was just learning, trying to figure it out. But he did it every single week. Every single week. And his audience got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then by the time he was at year four, because he had started to add other facets of his knowledge base to what he was talking about his business and starting to grow things in other directions, now he's in the top four of all podcasts. Now, granted, again, he's built a network around that, but his point in listening to him is just like, I didn't know what I was doing when I started. I had to learn, but I had to learn by doing it. I had to do it all the time and I had to get better at it and I had to find new ways to attract people to listen and pay attention and find my niche. And I just got to believe that if you're going to commit to it, if you're going to do it, you can't commit to it for two months or you can't commit to it for two weeks, you have to see it through. If you think it's either not working yet because you haven't gotten great at it, or it's not working yet just because you haven't had enough time.

01:05:19 - Conrad Jackson

Right. It's like anything, man. I mean, us scaling our rentals, it took time, it took a lot of time. Me being a half decent realtor, it took time.

01:05:31 - Mike Mills

Yes.

01:05:31 - Conrad Jackson

So you'd be foolish to jump into something new, content creation, and think that it's going to happen overnight. For some people it does, but for most of us who are out here, it takes time. And so I'm guilty as the next man, I look and see how many people are watching and how many views and things of that nature. But I also understand that if I put my money in the stock market and I plan on seeing a return, a really decent return, it better be in there for at least ten years.

01:05:58 - Mike Mills

Yes, it's the same thing. It's such a thing where we just put our expectations in different places, but it's all because of, I guess, the paradigm of the way you think. Because like you said, if you invest in the stock market. Anybody that regularly invests in the market that isn't a day trader and trying to flip whatever they understand the Warren Buffets of the world that you put money into a good stock like Apple and you wait 20 years and your money will grow if the company is good and you do your research. But it ain't going to happen overnight. You're not going to make money tomorrow, and you're going to make money, you're going to compound the money on top of the money that you're making.

01:06:36 - Conrad Jackson

Think of it like our rentals that we have right now. The one that I have probably probably the two that I have the most equity in are the two that I've held the longest. Right. I've had better deals. That cash flow better, that are cooler, they look better, they rent higher, all that. But the ones that have the most equity are the ones that I've held for five years or more.

01:06:54 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, you do a ton of stuff, my friend. And one other thing I wanted to mention before we go is you also coach your kids in basketball.

01:07:05 - Conrad Jackson

I do.

01:07:05 - Mike Mills

Okay.

01:07:06 - Conrad Jackson

I do.

01:07:07 - Mike Mills

So somebody listening to this goes, all right, so you're telling me that this dude, we're not even going to have time to get into your development, really? By the way, just so everybody knows. Tell them real quick about the development.

01:07:18 - Conrad Jackson

Development. Got one going on Hill County. It's 20 acres we're developing, looking to develop 78 lots, which will be new construction for sale, where we'll be the builder. I'll probably sell some. I may build them all, I may sell them all. I'm not really sure. Whatever happens, opportunities. Yeah. Big seven figure development that we're working through with the city of Hillsborough that we're looking to continue to complete. We're about a third of the way there.

01:07:45 - Mike Mills

Well, buy properties, rent, do rentals, advise people on real estate investing, and next thing you know, you look up and have a seven figure development deal that you're working on that you're also brand new to learn how to do and experience.

01:08:04 - Conrad Jackson

There's no textbook on no. There's hardly any places you can get help with. Takes a lot of energy and effort and a whole lot of cash to get done. And it is something, but it's like anything, if it was easy, everybody be doing it. It's not easy. That's why me and, like, seven other people are doing it and we'll figure it out.

01:08:20 - Mike Mills

It's real estate calculus. You got to be ready for it. But I do want to talk about only with the kids and the basketball stuff, because the importance of this is we've obviously talked about it before, so I know where you're coming from on this, but the time that you spend with your family obviously is important. That's a big player. But when you'renting properties, when you're investing in houses, when you're showing clients, buys and sells when you're advising people and doing calls and helping them invest. We got 24 hours in a day.

01:08:51 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:08:51 - Mike Mills

And you can only use so many of those and they go away. So how do you find time for the kids? How do you find time for your children? Conrad time for the kids. How do you find time to spend your time coaching them and not just being dad that comes home after a long day and says hi and puts them to bed? But the other question is, what does it do for you?

01:09:13 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, I think with anybody who's got more than even if you just have one high demand job as realtors, we have like 30 jobs. Just being a realtor and then trying to branch out and be an entrepreneur, outside of the entrepreneurial realtor relationships that you have, it takes a toll on your body. So for me, it is work life balance. Right. That is my balance. I grew up playing basketball, playing sports my whole life. So basketball, of course, my favorite sport, passion, I could watch it all day. I'm a basketball junkie. I could sit in the gym and watch basketball all day. No matter who's playing. Boys, girls, doesn't matter. So for me, that is fun. And I was blessed with three boys who also loved the sport. And so it's rare that you can have that in a household. And so we use it as our family time. My wife didn't necessarily grow up loving basketball, but she's learned to love it because her kids doesn't play and they play competitively.

01:10:12 - Mike Mills

Mama loves everything the babies do.

01:10:14 - Conrad Jackson

So what does it do for me? First of all, it helps us spend more time together. I coach my two youngest sons teams, eight year old third grade team and five year old kindergarten team. I've coached them for a couple of years now, and I've coached my oldest when he was younger. Also, he plays sporadically and does some other sports and things as well. But it allows us to have family time together. We're in practice or training Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday we have games. Saturday we have games. Sunday we have training and games. So the only day we typically have off is Monday.

01:10:49 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:10:50 - Conrad Jackson

And they love it. It's family time. It's time we're in the car together. We're going bringing other kids home. They're spending the night with us, putting them through training, doing more games, doing tournaments. We develop friends and develop relationship. You know this. You ran sports, youth sports organization for years, so you get it. For me, it helped me be able to just shut off work.

01:11:15 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:11:15 - Conrad Jackson

Shut it down.

01:11:16 - Mike Mills

Yes.

01:11:17 - Conrad Jackson

Because what you have to have, you need that, or you'll go insane doing so many different things throughout the day. So this allowed me to not only spend time with my family, spend time with my kids in a passion that we all have, but also take a break from work. When you're with the kids, it's not work, and you have to physically shut it off. I have people who will call between after hours of tell them a lot of times on those days, like, I'm at basketball, I coach two teams, I train. So I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can. But it's probably going to be the next business day or the next day, and they're okay with it as long as I set the expectation. Also, another thing that's helped us is my wife had foot surgery this summer, right? Which literally sat her down. She could not drive. She could barely walk. And so I had to pick up the slack where she was always super mom. Now I had to turn into super dad and learn how to be super dad and take care of the kids. She couldn't even go upstairs for months. So washing clothes, putting up clothes, getting kids ready for school, and the byproduct of that is, now that her foot has healed and her surgery has healed, I'm still getting up in the morning getting the kids ready for it's our time together. I drop them off for school. Now it's our time together. So before I start the day I'm with them, when I end the day, I'm with them. And it creates a great work life balance naturally, that I don't have to force, that they appreciate. They know that I'm there, and I get a lot out of it, of course, internally, because you get to spend time with your kids and your wife. What better thing than that?

01:12:53 - Mike Mills

Yeah, it's hard because as human beings, we all want to if you're not working, then you feel like you're not doing enough, right? Especially if you're a high energy, high productivity type person. If you're not working all the time, I think you grow out of this, but especially when you're young, if you're not, I should be at my desk working, or I should be over here working, or I should be over there where I need to be working, working. You know what? There's truth to that. And there are times when you need to focus all in on work. But if you don't have something that takes care of your mind and your body, if you don't get physical activity every week to release the stress and all the anxiety that you have about all the problems that are occurring in your life. If you can't get out there and sweat it out and just exhaust your body for a little bit, whether you're playing pickup basketball or you're riding on your bike or you're doing whatever. And then on top of that, if you don't have something that is an activity, whether it be spending time with your kids, whether it be reading, whether it be I mow my yard and sit on my mower, listen to a podcast that I want to hear that just has nothing to do with any real estate related stuff. Just whatever it is to shut your brain off, to let it recover, essentially. Because if you're constantly firing at all cylinders, you're going to wear out. You don't have the tools. Your body is not built to go 24/7 days a week. It just can't. And not only that, but the time that you are spending is so much more productive. Absolutely.

01:14:22 - Conrad Jackson

If you can wake up refreshed, if you get a good night's sleep and you wake up early and you can be refreshed, you're way more productive throughout the day. It's scientifically proven.

01:14:28 - Mike Mills

Yes.

01:14:29 - Conrad Jackson

Right. If you can turn around and say, okay, well, as opposed to being a realtor and only depending on real estate from my realtor commission, if I can branch out and do one other thing that brings in some sort of revenue. That helps take the pressure off of you to feel better about spending more time doing things that help you with the work life balance. And for me, it's like, okay, I'm not doing all this stuff not to enjoy it with my family.

01:14:57 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:14:57 - Mike Mills

What's the point?

01:14:58 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, I'm not just going to be like, if I'm at a basketball game and you call me and unless that house is on fire, I'm going to call you back later.

01:15:07 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:15:08 - Conrad Jackson

Because I'm probably doing something that is helping me recharge my battery so I can be refreshed when I have to talk to you and have better solutions when I talk to you. So it's very important, and that's why this is important. That's why having a different revenue stream is super important, because it allows you to open up doors and more opportunities in different areas of your life that you need. Definitely need it. And so I just try to encourage folks to say, hey, I don't have the blueprint to do it all successfully. The only way to do it successfully, I do. It what works for me.

01:15:40 - Mike Mills

Yes.

01:15:40 - Conrad Jackson

Some people may not be able to do five different entities and five different things.

01:15:45 - Mike Mills

Well, you didn't start doing that overnight. It's all built on itself. It wasn't like you just opened all these at the same day. I mean, this all happened over time.

01:15:51 - Mike Mills

Correct.

01:15:51 - Conrad Jackson

And I have days where it's super stressful, where everything is coming down on top of me and I got to climb my way out of it and crawl my way out of it. And then the kids are not happy or my wife's not happy about something that I've done. That's part of it. But at the end of the day, there's exponentially more good days than there are bad days. We don't worry nearly as much. We have so much more fun in life, enjoying life, and not having to sit there and count penny pinch every single day as to how we're going to do this or how we're going to do that. We see an. Opportunity. Usually we can act on it because we've slowly built this thing up to where it is today.

01:16:31 - Mike Mills

Do you have any I hate to use the word hacks because it's hacked out at this point, but do you have any hacks? Whether it comes to how you organize your day, your productivity, like how you this day I do this or in the morning I do this, or in the evening I do this or I set aside a day with all of these things. How are you putting this all together to make sure that you still accomplish everything?

01:16:54 - Conrad Jackson

My calendar, reminder and To Dos are necessities for surviving the week and typically they're updated in the morning right after I take the kids to school.

01:17:05 - Mike Mills

Got you.

01:17:06 - Conrad Jackson

My communication with contractors, my communication with my wife on the property management updates or things, communication with builders, communication with clients, communication with new leads. Everything is on the calendar, on the reminders, on the To Dos. When I'm looking for a system to help streamline a process for a business that we're doing, it has to be able to communicate to either my vendors or my clients or potential clients through that system or I'm not going to even consider purchasing it and using it.

01:17:39 - Mike Mills

Got you.

01:17:39 - Conrad Jackson

Which most of them have it these days, but I'll set those in the morning and I'll set them for the week a lot of times in the morning, early in the week, Mondays, Tuesdays. And so that way when I get within the struggle of the day, I know that things are still being sent out at certain times to certain people who need to get them. And I can be more proactive as opposed to just reactive to everything that comes in. And I am very reactive because I have things that hiccups that come along the way. But I've gotten better along over the last few years with being proactive. If it's not on my calendar, not a reminder and I might to do, it doesn't exist.

01:18:14 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:18:14 - Conrad Jackson

And that includes coaching, training.

01:18:17 - Mike Mills

Yes.

01:18:18 - Mike Mills

Well, because you got to remember because someone says, hey, I have this thing, can you come help me with this? You got to look it up.

01:18:22 - Conrad Jackson

I trained myself to say, let me look at the calendar first before I respond. And I do. And if it's there, cool. My wife has access to put stuff on the calendar. So that way when it needs to be done, that could be a good thing, a bad thing, but for us it works out well.

01:18:37 - Mike Mills

That's a whole other thing because this is the constant thing with me, my wife, and this is the good thing or bad thing about living on your calendar is when you live on your calendar, you don't think about what's coming up.

01:18:50 - Mike Mills

Sure.

01:18:50 - Mike Mills

Because it's there. Because if I need to look at it, I got it there. Right. So when my wife comes to me and says, hey, we have this volleyball dinner tomorrow night, or in two weeks, don't forget, we're going to go. I'm like, cool. Put it on the calendar, right? And if she'll come to me, hey, don't forget, we're going to okay, cool. Did you put it on the calendar? And then we'll get to that point, and it won't be on my calendar. She's like, I told you three times. I'm like, how many times do I have to explain to you how my brain works?

01:19:14 - Conrad Jackson

Okay, we're completely opposite. Kay will put it on the calendar, and then she'll explain it to me three times to make sure that I look at it. She's like, hey, don't forget to look at your calendar for the thing that I put on. And I'm like, okay, I will do it. She's like, hey, did you look at it? I looked at it. We're good. Just remind you one more time, do not mess this up. It's one of those things where it works out, and that's how I'm able to kind of keep track if it syncs with all of our devices. So if I lose my phone, I still have access to it, or somebody else still has access to it, I can pull it out of the email. So it's one of those things you just have to have you just have to have in life, and if you're not doing that, you're operating behind the.

01:19:54 - Mike Mills

Eight ball, and you're already never going to accomplish. You got to plan. You have to plan.

01:19:58 - Conrad Jackson

Absolutely.

01:19:58 - Mike Mills

You have to carve out time in the day to plan whether it be and I say the day literally every day. You got to carve out a little bit of time every day to plan, what am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing this morning? And then I take the weekends, and I try to plan out my next week to say, okay, what do I got coming up? So I can make sure if I have this presentation this day, I need to prepare for it three days in advance to make sure it's ready to go. So I'm not scrambling at the last minute because I'm the king of procrastination. And those are the only way that you can overcome those problems is by planning for sure.

01:20:26 - Conrad Jackson

For us as Realtors, typically, the weekends are times where you're very busy or the most busy. So I'm usually taking, like, Monday, Tuesday to make sure as my weekend to carve out my plan for the week, because Monday is almost like a Saturday. You have a lot of catch up and follow up to do from the weekend.

01:20:44 - Mike Mills

Yes, a lot on your plate. All right, we'll leave with this. If you were starting out, you'd been selling real estate now for, let's say, ten years or whatever, and you knowing.

01:20:55 - Conrad Jackson

Hypothetically, or are you talking about directly hypothetically?

01:20:58 - Mike Mills

I got you knowing well, you put yourself you're a new Realtor or not a new Realtor. You're a seasoned Realtor, but you're looking to try something else in the real estate sphere. All right, you've touched on all these things, and knowing what you know now, where would you start today with the knowledge that you have if you were saying, I don't have any properties, I don't have any fix and flips, I don't do any of that stuff, but I want to try to start moving in a direction. Now, it's going to be different for everybody, but knowing what you know at this point, if you could go back, talk to Conrad, however many years ago and be like, hey, start here, where would you start?

01:21:34 - Conrad Jackson

So where I would start was first thing I would do is I'm a big proponent of buying rentals, buying holds. So I would partner with someone who either has aspirations to buy and hold properties or propose it to some of my clients who maybe didn't need to sell and I didn't understand the market at that time as, hey, you can make money other ways than just through commission. I would partner with either my clients or an investor who's kind of seasoned and learn the investing, real estate investing business for the buy and hold business. That way, that's where I would start. And how would I add value either through my knowledge of the market? Because that's one thing Realtors should have. If you've been in the business for ten years, you should at least know a market. Right. You should have the market knowledge where you can give education on what will sell, what will rent. You should have some capital. If you've been doing it for ten years, you think you saved something. It may not be the case, but you should have at least the opportunity to save some capital.

01:22:43 - Mike Mills

And if you haven't, then the first place you should start is going back to budgeting.

01:22:47 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, I would do one of those two things because oftentimes we don't have an aspiration to buy a house or as a Realtor. Some Realtors just don't want to get into that. But they have access to capital or they've made some pretty good commissions. So now maybe I'm just going to lend and get a return.

01:23:06 - Mike Mills

Right?

01:23:07 - Conrad Jackson

Okay. I would do that also because the people who are lending the money typically hold all the cards for these deals. So if you can get used to that and build your portfolio that way, you don't ever have to have any real estate. You just have to have the opportunity, opportunity to take over that real estate if your lending doesn't go the way that it's supposed to go.

01:23:24 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:23:24 - Conrad Jackson

Those are two things that I would start off with right out of the bat. Because you know real estate, you know the market. You should know understand contracts. So you can do deals on the lending side or the investing side, or.

01:23:34 - Mike Mills

Find you an owner finance deal or.

01:23:35 - Conrad Jackson

Find, you know, finance go that way.

01:23:36 - Mike Mills

You don't even have to worry about the bank.

01:23:38 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, for sure. And it doesn't when we say lending, let me make sure I make this completely clear. Not everybody who comes out looking for lending is looking for $100,000.

01:23:45 - Mike Mills

Right.

01:23:46 - Conrad Jackson

Some people want 7000, some people want 4000. And so just like with these investments, these rentals, you can start small.

01:23:53 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

01:23:53 - Conrad Jackson

Hey, I'll give you 4000 and get 5000 back in a specified amount of time. That's a pretty good return on investment.

01:23:59 - Mike Mills

Especially if it's a reasonable amount of time. I think you're in good shape. Exactly. Well, man, I really appreciate you coming in again and going through all this. I always learn stuff every time you're here. And I'm sure we'll do it again. We'll keep adding to it because I get the most out of these. We have people that come in all the time and I talk to social media gurus and lately I've been doing a lot of crypto and fractionalization stuff.

01:24:26 - Conrad Jackson

I learn a lot from those.

01:24:27 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

01:24:27 - Mike Mills

I pick up stuff from everybody. But when it gets down to the nitty gritty of actually doing it, there's very few people that I know that are boots on the ground and every aspect of this stuff. And you're definitely one of those.

01:24:37 - Conrad Jackson

Yeah, I appreciate that.

01:24:39 - Mike Mills

So thank you so much and we'll definitely do it again sometime. Thank you for everybody that hung around. And we'll see you next week.

01:24:46 - Conrad Jackson

Sounds good. All right, later. Bye.