recent post
September 18, 2021UncategorizedGet New Posts via Facebook MessengeriTunes
Summary – Transcript
Get my help finding/closing deals without the fear of making costly mistakes by joining my Inner Circle Mentorship!
Apply to join today here
Hey, Mike Wolf from Mike Wolf Mastery. Today I’m coming to you from Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, and I want to answer one of the questions I get asked a lot. Now, many of you may or may not know that I am Canadian, but I don’t do any of my investing in Canada anymore.
Once upon a time I did. Now I do all my investing in the United States. Quite often people say, “Well, wouldn’t it be easier to invest close to home,” or, “Why would you go to all the trouble investing south of the border?” So, I’m going to tell you not only why I do it, but why … I can’t even speak, but why you should do that too. I’m speechless. So, there are a number of reasons. One, yes, absolutely, it would be so much easier to invest close to home.
It’s easier to invest in your own backyard, but the goal of having a successful real estate business, or any business, is it for it to be easy. The goal is for it to be profitable and successful, and hopefully create a lifestyle for you where you don’t have to work anymore. The goal of real estate in my opinion, should be pretty passive income, so you can create freedom for yourself, so you don’t have to do the things that you don’t want to do, and you get to do things that light you up, make a difference, and that are fulfilling and make you happy. So, yes, it would be way easier to invest in my own backyard. Just like it would be way easier to set up a lemonade stand as opposed to owning Apple.
If had a choice between the two and I was going for the easy path, I’d set up a lemonade stand and I would pray … You’re only going to get so far in life having a lemonade stand. If you own a successful company, which is what everybody should do. If you’re getting into real estate, you’re creating a business for yourself, and the goal of that business is for it to be successful, so that you don’t have to work so hard. Anyway, yes, it’s the easy, easy is not what we’re looking for. And, by the way, it is easier to invest in the US anyway, so we’re going to get to that in a minute. But, so the number one thing is in Canada, we have something called the Privacy of Information Act, and the Privacy of Information Act basically says that you can’t just go publishing information about people.
You can’t make a, I can’t just go put a list online of a whole bunch of people getting divorced or in foreclosure or whatever the case may be, whatever their distressed situation may be. For those of you who follow me and have worked with me, or if you’re in my inner circle, you know that one of the things that I teach and that I preach is that we are not real estate investors. We are problem solvers, and there’s a whole bunch of people out there, especially now that there’s, with this COVID pandemic, there’s a lot of people in trouble that need us to help them. Some of them have lost their jobs. They’ve lost their businesses. They’re starting over. People are going through a lot of transition and transformation right now, and they need problem solvers like us to go and help them.
Now, in return for solving their problems, we get paid. We create a win-win. If we can create a win for them, and we can also create a win for ourselves, then we get further ahead. Now, in Canada, as I mentioned, we have the Privacy of Information Act, which makes it very difficult to get access to lists of people that are in trouble and in the US, it’s the opposite. They have, instead of the Privacy of Information, they have the Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information act basically allows people to publish massive lists. For example, there’s foreclosures that take place all the time, and I can access these lists online. There’s also software. If I’m trying to find people in trouble, there is software that will allow me to find people that are going through divorce. I can target people over a certain age or under a certain age.
I can target people that paid cash for their homes. I can get access to a lot of information that I could not possibly get access to in Canada. Now, that’s not to say you absolutely can’t do real estate in Canada. You certainly can. There’s ways to do it. It’s a lot more work. It’s a lot more difficult to find these people in trouble, and it’s just a lot of red tape. So, as a human being, I’m not totally 100% happy with what happens in the US. I don’t necessarily think everything should be public domain. However, as a real estate investor, I am glad that I can get ahold of these people that need my help, come up with a solution for them, create a win for them and get paid for it. So, number one reason that I love the US is the access to information, and there’s so much, there’s so many different things that go on every month where lists are created.
For example, these auctions that I love to go to, which creates a second thing, and that’s, there’s certain strategies that work in the United States that don’t exist in Canada. Now, one of them, and many of you who follow me know this is one of my favorite strategies is something called tax deed. Now, what a tax deed is when people haven’t paid their property taxes in a number of years, eventually the county needs to put their homes up on the auction block because they need this money for their hospitals and their police force to keep their, for the roads. All of these things are paid for through property taxes. So, eventually the county’s going to put these homes up on the auction block, and I’ve had some of my students pick up single family homes in Houston, Texas, is my favorite place to do this strategy.
They pick up single-family homes for $7,000, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 that are worth 10, 15, 20 times that. So, these auctions … there are auctions by the way, that do take place in Canada. They’re very, very infrequent and quite often, because there’s so few of them and people get excited, they see the word auction and they think everything’s a good deal, these homes get bid up. I literally don’t know one single Canadian who’s ever picked up a good deal at an auction in Canada. Now, I’m not saying it’s never happened. I’m just saying, I don’t know, and I know a lot of real estate investors, I don’t know a single person in Canada that’s ever gone to an auction and picked up a deal that they went and made a paycheck on.
So, there’s certain strategies that work in the US that don’t work in Canada. That’s one of them. Tack fees, that’s other one. One of my favorites is also something called overages. Now, if we go back to talking about this auction for a second, let’s say the opening bid on a property, the opening bid is going to be whatever the back taxes are, and sometimes they’ll add in some legal fees. So, let’s say the opening bid was $5,000 on a home, and it ended up selling for 50,000. Well, that first $5,000, that belongs to the county fair and square. That’s where the back taxes. The additional 45,000, that’s what’s called an overage, and that that money actually belongs to the previous homeowner. And most previous homeowners have no idea this money is owed to them.
The county makes very little attempt to track them down, because they get to keep this money as part of their slush fund. There’s a statute of limitations, and once that statute of limitations runs out, the county gets to keep that money and they can do whatever they want with it. So, a great strategy, and this is perfect for people that have, if you’re watching this video right now, and you have very little money, and you’re thinking, man, I want to get into real estate investing, but I’ve got very little cash. Well, a great strategy is to go find these people, track them down and say, “Listen, I know somebody owes you $45,000. If you’re willing to split it with me,” and you can negotiate whatever you’re going to split,
You can take 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% of that money, and you can offer to help them get that cash and keep a portion of it. Now, you got to remember, these people just lost their home over a very small amount of money, and you’re creating a big win for them because they no longer, they’ve lost that home. Chances are $45,000, even even if they got 70% of that, that’s going to be a game-changer for them. That might mean the difference between living on the streets and being able to afford rent and have a place to live. So, it’s a great win-win strategy. Once again, this information is published publicly and you can get access to it and you can track down these people and help them recover this money.
Or, if you’re really heart-centered and you’re saying, “Oh, well, these poor people, I just want to give them the money. I don’t even want to take part of it,” you can do that too. You can go to the auction, make your money that way, flipping homes, and as a give-back project donate some of your proceeds or some of your time to tracking down these people and helping reunite them with this capital that’s owed to them. So, there are just a lot of different ways to make money in the US that don’t exist in Canada. Then, also, on top of that, as if we need more reasons, in every Canadian market that I’m aware of, the home prices are ridiculous right now. I mean, a starter home in Vancouver, 1 million bucks for a piece of crap starter that you want to bulldoze. In Toronto, $700,000, $800,000 for … Anyway, these prices are ridiculous.
Calgary, where I’m from, which is in a slump financially, the pipeline’s been canceled and oil is not doing very well. Yet, people are fighting over homes right now. It’s totally ridiculous. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like every market in the US is priced well. Certainly, California is not. New York, there’s a lot of markets that don’t make sense, but there’s a ton of markets that do make sense. One of my favorites is Atlanta, Georgia. Many of you know that I sell turnkey properties there. So, these are properties that I bought, I fixed, I put tenants in place. My property management team is looking after them, and we sell these to investors all over the world. The average house price that I’m selling a home for is around $150,000.
They started around 80 or 90,000, and in any market in Canada that doesn’t even get you a shed. So, when you just look at the sheer numbers, when you look at also the return on investment, how much rent you’re going to get relative to how much you have to pay to get the property, what the cashflow looks like, there’s so many reasons why I love investing in the US, and I would love to be able to invest in my own country, but it just that, the numbers just don’t make any sense. So, these are some of many, many reasons why I prefer investing south of the border. If you’re a Canadian watching this right now, I recommend that you learn how to do that too. You’ll most likely see much better returns than what you’re used to, and that’s one of the things I specialize in. Whether you’re American, Canadian, where you’re living, no matter where you’re living on this planet, I’ve got a free gift for you.
I’ve got an ebook which outlines a top strategy that you can do right now, even if you have little or no capital. I talk about things such as the tax fee, and the overages, and a whole bunch of other strategies that you can do right now. I know so many people are going through tough times. COVID took away a lot of jobs, shut down a lot of people’s businesses, and so I created this free ebook that’s going to outline some of the things that you can be doing right now to get started in real estate, no matter where you live. Some of these will work in Canada, by the way. All these will work in the US and no matter what country you live in, a lot of these strategies will work for you.
So, I hope you found this helpful. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel so you get all my latest videos, all my new content as I create it. Please give us a like, because that gets more attention to our videos. I want to help as many people as possible. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you’re safe and doing well wherever you’re at right now, and I hope to see you all soon, live and in-person. Take care.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER [...]
September 11, 2021UncategorizedGet New Posts via Facebook MessengeriTunes
Summary – Transcript
Get my help finding/closing deals without the fear of making costly mistakes by joining my Inner Circle Mentorship!
Apply to join today here
The amount of debt that I had at that time seemed like an insurmountable amount of money that I would never be able to pay off in my lifetime, and I thought, if I go get another degree, I’m going to be to far in debt. So I went and got a job at the phone company.
A good friend of mine, his mother was a manager, for those of you in Canada, at Telus back when it was Alberta Government Telephones. So it was government, it was union, paid really well. After a little while being there, I bought my first house to live in, because my parents were really encouraging me, buy, buy, buy a house. Don’t rent. Buy. So I did that. Great. Thank you. Thank you, mom and dad. That was great advice and I did.
Shortly after I bought that home, a mortgage broker that I use called me up and said, “Mike, if you want, you’re making really good money. If you want, I can get you another mortgage if you want to buy another home.” I’m going “Another home? Why do I want another home?” I wish I got that call like every day because I love to buy… Anyway, I don’t get those calls anymore. But he said, “You buy the home. You put tenants in place. They pay down your mortgage. 25 years from now, that home is free and clear, and the money that comes in every month is gravy. You’re going to have all this equity and that’s your retirement.” I go, “Okay, that kind of makes sense.”
So back in those days, I didn’t have a single clue what due diligence you’re supposed to do as a real estate investor. I just bought something that looked pretty and that was close to where I lived, so that was easy to collect rent. And that’s what I did. I put a tenant in there. They luckily paid most of the time. I went and collected my own rent, which don’t ever do. We’re going to talk about that. Don’t ever be your own property manager. A couple of years after I did that, the market in Calgary took off. My principal residence went up quite a bit. My revenue property went up quite a bit. And all of a sudden I was sitting on all this equity, which as a kid in his mid twenties was a lot of money back in those days for me.
I remember thinking to myself, over the last couple of years, I’ve made this much at the phone company and I don’t really love it. It was okay. I mean, it paid better than being a student, for sure, so I liked that part. I like getting paychecks. But I made this much at the phone company. I made this much in real estate and I don’t even know what I’m doing in real estate. And from that point, I was hooked. I basically went and quit my job pretty soon after at the phone company. Don’t do that. If you’re just starting, don’t quit your job today, please. Because I also found out that when you quit your job, all of a sudden you don’t get mortgages anymore and that mortgage broker stops calling you saying, “Hey, we can get you another mortgage.” So anyway, that’s another story for another day.
But the more significant thing I did was I went and I told my parents, “Listen, this law school thing, this is your dream. That’s not my dream. I’m not going to law school. That’s not what I want to do.” And I remember just my mother was just saying, “Mike, go get that second degree, so you have something to fall back on, and then you can pursue real estate. And if it doesn’t work out, then you’ll have that other degree.” I go, “No, mom, I’ve got this figured out. I know everything there is to know about real estate. You don’t need to worry about me.”
And that was that, I was set. Once I saw that first paycheck, I was hooked and I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Now the only problem was, remember when I bought that first property, that was meant to be a 25-year hold. Well, now all of a sudden, I had a lump sum of cash, but I didn’t have any money coming in every two weeks like I did before, and basically thought, I’ll just figure out. I mean, if I obviously got this big paycheck, I’m obviously the god to real estate investing and I’ll just figure it out as I go.
Well, what happened next is I went and bought another property using pretty much the same due diligence techniques as before, buying something pretty, close to home. And it turns out when you do that, those don’t necessarily make good flips that you can just turn around and flip a few weeks or a few months later to make a paycheck. And to make a long story short, that deal turned into a big nightmare where I lost a lot of my earlier profits. I realized for the first time that this isn’t as easy as it looks. The first time I was taking credit for something that had nothing to do with me. I had gotten lucky. My timing was good. The market, well, it went up tremendously in a very short amount of time and it had nothing to do with me. And for the first time I had to admit to myself that maybe I’m not the god of real estate investing. Maybe I’m not this expert yet.
And so, it would have been really easy at that point to just give up and say, “Okay, screw this. My parents are right. I’m going to go back to law school.” But I was in my mid twenties and it was very difficult for me to tell my mom that she was right and that I should have gotten that second degree. So, I basically went and decided I’m going to figure this real estate thing out no matter what, and I basically hired a mentor. It was somebody who was already doing flips, because I was going from this long-term 25-year hold to all of a sudden trying to flip homes. Those are two very different strategies. I didn’t realize that back then. So I found somebody who was already doing what I wanted to do.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER [...]
September 3, 2021UncategorizedGet New Posts via Facebook MessengeriTunes
Summary – Transcript
Get my help finding/closing deals without the fear of making costly mistakes by joining my Inner Circle Mentorship!
Apply to join today here
It really depends on your strategy, because for example, if you were a buy and hold investor, I would give you a much different answer than if you were a flipper or a wholesaler. So if you’re a buy and hold person, you’re trying to create passive income for yourself, I’m going to give you the three things I look at when I pick a market.
And number one, most people don’t think about this, is you want to go to a place that is very landlord friendly. And what I mean by that is if you look at California, for example, if you get a bad tenant in your property, they can live in there quite often for over a year without making any payments to you, and there’s very little you can do. And whenever you go to anywhere that’s tenant friendly, it seems like every single tenant knows how to play the system, to stretch things out to stay in your home for free. There’s actually books that you can buy that teach you how to be a bad tenant, which is very, very sad.
You want to go to a place that is landlord friendly. That’s why I do my turnkey properties in Atlanta. We can generally get rid of a bad tenant within three weeks, sometimes sooner than that. And so that’s the number one thing.
So the first thing is to give you security. The first thing you want to do whenever you’re investing is you want security and preservation of your capital. You never want to lose your seed money, because that is devastating when that happens. So that gives you your security. The second thing gives you your scalability. And what I mean by that is we want to create as much wealth as possible. Now, where most wealth comes from, despite what quite often we see if you go to a lot of these other real estate gurus, it doesn’t come from your cashflow. Your cashflow comes later. The thing you want to focus on next is appreciation.
Now, the reason for that is imagine five years from now. If the property you paid 100,000 for, five years from now, if that was worth 500,000, would you rather have that? Or would you rather have an extra 50 bucks a month rent? You get a lot further by having those big gains in the properties that you’re buying. Because if you don’t, how you get your next property is by going to your job and saving up a down payment again. If on the other hand, you could buy a property and it goes up tremendously, and then you sell that property and you take those proceeds and then maybe you go to a different market that’s lagging behind, maybe you turn that one property into two properties, or maybe you turn that one into three.
And so I did that, when I used to invest very heavily in Phoenix and did extremely well in that market. When I exited there and I took my proceeds, most of it went to Atlanta, and for every home I sold in Phoenix, I could buy two in Atlanta. So I literally doubled my portfolio without taking any money out of my pocket. Now, your next question should be to me, you should be asking, well, Mike, well, how do you know where you’re going to get appreciation? Isn’t it random? How do we know this?
Well, I’ll tell you the biggest things that cause appreciation. It’s very simple, supply and demand. Now, right now we’re in the middle of, hopefully the tail end, not the middle, hopefully the tail end of a pandemic. And what has this pandemic done? It’s taken away a lot of jobs. And so what’s on most people’s mind if they just lost their job, where can I afford to live? Where’s a good affordability? And two, where are there jobs? And so one of the things that happens in Atlanta is there’s a lot of job creation because the Georgia government is very business friendly. So what I mean by that is they know that if they can attract a lot of businesses to set up their offices there, they know these businesses are going to hire a whole bunch of people and they can go and tax the employees and make up for the money that they don’t get from the business.
And so Atlanta is head office to Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Turner Broadcasting, the list goes on and on and on. And actually, just recently Microsoft announced that they are making Atlanta one of their hubs, and it’s bringing in 9,000 jobs in the very short term. And so that is what attracts population growth, and obviously when people move to a place, they can’t, one, they typically can’t qualify for a mortgage yet because they’re just starting at a new job. And so what do they do? They become tenants. So one, they’re driving up the prices of the rental. They drive up that rental market. And then after a little while, after they’ve been at their job for a while, then they start to drive up the price of the home.
Some people, of course, come there with lots of cash. And if they’re coming from places like California, for example, they just sold their home for a million bucks and now they go see these properties for 100,000 or 200,000, they’re a fraction of what they just sold their home for, and they’re investing in that market. So those things drive up market.
And so things you want to look for, one is job creation. Two, a low cost of living. That’s the trend of where people are going to move to. And you also don’t want to go to places, and I know April put Detroit in there, and I’m not going to criticize it too much. However, if we take a place like Atlanta that has, like I said, Delta Airlines, which obviously travel industry is affected in a really negative, adverse way due to COVID, a lot of people at this point are not flying yet. That’s going to change. But imagine that a bunch of people just got laid off at Delta, which probably is true. Well, guess what? They could go to Coca Cola. They could go to Home Depot. They could go to Microsoft, any one of the numerous companies that have offices there. And if you have a tenant that has a job, you’ll have a much better chance of collecting rent.
So we contrast that with Detroit. Detroit is still known as the Motor City. And unfortunately if somebody just got laid off at Chrysler, well, chances are, they’re not going to get a job at Ford. And so you want to go to places where there’s a lot of different industries. So that’s the second thing you look at. You want to get that appreciation.
The third thing you want to look at, and this is what most people go to first, and it’ll lead you down a really bad rabbit hole, is they first look at what’s my cashflow going to be. And to be honest, getting an extra 50 bucks a month in the short term is not going to change your life. Getting that extra 200, 300, 400, 500,000 in appreciation in a few years down the road will change your life and will allow you to expand your portfolio. So you want to do things in the right order. So in terms of picking a market to buy and hold it, you want to do it in that order. You want that safety of your investment, knowing that the government’s on your side and that they will help you get rid of bad tenants.
Number two is you want scalability, and that comes from appreciation. And then the third thing that you want is you want to get that cashflow, which gives you your sustainability, meaning that if the market goes down, who cares? You still have, just like Michael said earlier, if the market’s not where you want it to be two years from now, instead of selling it, oh well, I’ve got this great cashflow coming. Sorry, I didn’t mean to . So there we go. I’ll get to your question in a minute, Karl. So you want to go in that order. You want to do those three things in that order if you’re buying and holding.
Now, if on the other hand, your strategy is to flip homes, you can absolutely do that in just about any market. If you want to wholesale homes, you can do that in any market. What I would do is I would look for places with at least a 50,000 or higher population. You don’t want to be doing it in some rural area where there’s not a lot of activity. It could potentially be close to home. One of the things I teach my wholesale students is that you can pick the market that makes the most sense, and then if you’re a wholesaler, also keep your own market. And sometimes they’ll just do the one. You’ll do your own market.
And the reason for that is you might find a really good market for wholesaling in, but then as you’re driving around, like I said, I gave you that example earlier, you see a home that is in distress and that home is a perfect wholesale deal or maybe a perfect flip for you. So you don’t want to ignore the stuff that you see while you’re driving around, just living your life. But you want to be really strategic when you’re picking a market. So you do want a bigger city. You want to go to places that are more popular. If you can go to a place where rentals make sense, too, remember when you’re wholesaling a deal, you might sell that to not just somebody who’s going to live in it, you might sell it to an investor who wants a buy and hold property. So these are the things you want to look at when you’re picking a market, but your strategy will really determine where to best go to pick your market.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER [...]
July 16, 2021UncategorizedGet New Posts via Facebook MessengeriTunes
Summary – Transcript
Get my help finding/closing deals without the fear of making costly mistakes by joining my Inner Circle Mentorship!
Apply to join today here
When you’ve been doing this a long time, and people all see all the fancy things that you’ve had over the years, and they see you on the beach and they see all these great things. To me, the most important thing, that stuff’s all awesome, I love it.
But the things that I think are most important are the things that you get to contribute back, the way that you get to change people’s lives. And so I just want to share with you a brief story about my favorite real estate project I ever got to do. And soI remember I was actually living in Las Vegas at the time and doing a lot of foreclosures there back in the day. And I was sitting at the Wynn Hotel at the bar and I was waiting for a friend of mine to show up.
And a few seats down, there was this woman there and she was sitting there alone by herself, waiting for her friend to show up. And I’m shy so I would never start the conversation but she came over to me and goes, “Hi, I’m Judy and I’m from New Orleans. Who are you?” And I said, “Oh, I’m Mike. I’m from Canada but I live in Vegas now.” She goes, “Oh, you’re living in Vegas. What are you doing?” “Well, I’m a real estate investor. We’re flipping homes and so I decided I’m going to hang out here for a while while I flip these homes.” And she goes, “Oh, you’re in real estate? I’m in real estate too.” I go, “Really? You’re in real estate? What do you do?” And she goes, “Well, I’m a realtor.”
I go, “So you’re a realtor in New Orleans? Okay. That’s interesting. How’s the market?” And she goes, “Well, to be honest, when Hurricane Katrina was approaching, I evacuated like I do for every other storm. And when I came back, unlike the other times I’ve evacuated, my home was under 20 feet of water and all my belongings were gone, everything that I owned was gone except for the clothing on my back. And I had found this one neighborhood, and every single one of my clients is either missing, dead, or their home was gone.” And I said, “What did you do?”
She goes, “Well, I was actually one of the lucky ones. My insurance company actually gave me the money for my belongings. Most people didn’t get that but I did.” And she said, “Even though I got the money and we fixed it up, to be honest, I got really depressed. And all my clients were gone, I had to start over from scratch.” And then I said, “Well, what next? You’re here, you’re in Vegas, you seem happy. What happened next?” And she said, “Well, I met this one investor who happened to be traveling to New Orleans from Austin, Texas and he said, ‘Well, what if we started to rebuild these homes, you think people would come back?’ ” And she goes, “I don’t know, we could try.”
So they bought one, they fixed it up, and they resold it and actually somebody bought it. And they did it again, and they did it again. And of course my real estate investor mind is going a million miles an hour, and I said to her, “Well, I don’t want to step on your toes. I certainly don’t want to take any business away from you. But I would love to come and help rebuild your neighborhood. I would love to go and take the skills that I’ve learned over the years and build a team and we’ll buy a bunch of homes and we’ll do it as a give back project. We’ll bring a bunch of people back to the city.” And she said, “Yeah. Not only are you not stepping on my toes, there’s so many homes and so many people were affected by this.” And a lot of people got taken. When the storm was approaching, they couldn’t afford to evacuate. And also all the flights were booked.
It was very hard to get out of the city. And so the citytook a lot of people by bus to Houston Texas. And after the storm, they never brought them back. And there’s several conspiracy theories, I’m not going to go into all the details. But many people think that the particular areas where they decided to take people from tended to be the poorest parts of town. And so a lot of people thought they’d get rid of the poor people, bring them to Houston, leave them there.
And then some of the areas, one of the areas that was really close to the French Quarter… If you’ve ever been to New Orleans and if you hung out on Bourbon Street, that’s the French Quarter of course. So there was an area very close to it called the Lower Ninth Ward that was very poor. And a lot of people suspect that they brought those people to Houston so that they could take that land. And instead of rebuilding the shacks that were on there, they would put stuff in there, luxury properties, and reinvent that part of the city. So Brad Pitt who happens to have a home in the French Quarter heard about this and so he was disgusted by it when he heard that. And so he bought up the whole Lower Ninth Ward and fixed up the homes and brought a bunch of people back which was awesome.
And I thought, “Well, I’m going to model what he’s doing,” and so I actually, back then I was speaking across Canada, and I offered training for people who wanted to learn how to flip homes if they would donate so that we could afford to buy more homes in New Orleans to fix up. And that was the start of this really cool project that to this day is still my favorite project I’ve ever done. I’ve done plenty of projects where I made a lot of money and worked a lot less hard than we did on this one. But when you go back and you meet the people whose lives you’ve changed, you can’t puta value on it. So, I just want to show you some pictures because it makes me happy, it makes me sad and happy at the same time. But I just want to show you what’s possible. When you figure this stuff out, it’s not just about the next paycheck. You can change, you can absolutely change people’s lives with this.
So this is the area next to the Lower Ninth Ward. Like I said, that’s where Brad Pitt was working. My realtor friend was a couple of areas over called St. Bernard Parish, and this is what it looked like during the storm. These homes were under water for several weeks. This is some of the stuff that we saw on the inside when we got in there, tons of mold. It was horrible, you can’t even imagine some of the stuff that we saw. We saw dead animals in attics, we saw people’s pictures, wedding dresses, irreplaceable stuff just lying there, it was horrible. Homes actually taken off their foundations and bashed into other homes. It looked like a war zone, only worse. And people were living off on their roofs.
When I did my trainings, one of the things that I like to do, as I mentioned, I brought a bunch of people down there and we were raising awareness and funds and I would do some teaching and I’d always bring some locals on the tour and talk about their experience and what happened. And I remember we brought this one elderly lady, she was probably in her seventies or eighties to the tour. And I remember she said she was up on her rooftop because that was the only safe place to be, you can see how high the water is. She was on a rooftop for about two days with her husband waiting for somebody to come by with a boat.
And finally, after two days, somebody did come by and I think the boat maybe held five or six people. And while they were on the boat, they were finally safe on this boat, and he died of a heart attack, right in front of the group of people. And so when you hear about these stories, you can’t even imagine some of the stuff that… You see these things, you can’t imagine what it’s like unless you’ve actually been there and spoken to the people there. Anyway, we saw a lot of craziness during this time period. And I can go on, I have a lot of pictures. These are the FEMA trailers, these trailers that the Federal Emergency, anyway, the government agency in the US is responsible for when disasters break out. They brought all these trailers and they had quite often two or three or four families living in these RVs for months and months and months on end because every hotel, if it was still standing, it was booked. You couldn’t find a room, it was just nonsense. And so a lot of people are stuck in these FEMA trailers. Anyway,so they put these Xs on the windows, and in the X, in each of the four triangles that it makes, they put the date that they went inside the home, how many people they found that were dead in there, how many people used to live there, and how many people are missing, things like that. So anyway, that was the before, and here’s the X that I was talking about with the different numbers in thetriangles. Anyway, so we would buy these homes and we would take them down pretty much to the studs. They were mold from top to bottom. First thing we do is we brought in a team to do mold remediation and we kept the outside structure because that was fine but we rebuilt the entire insides. This is a monument they still have in New Orleans and it represents the height of the water. So it shows you how high the water was at its pea and how it went down every couple of weeks. But it was a lot of water obviously.This is the Lower Ninth Ward where Brad Pitt was working and actually had I continued doing my trainings and raising awareness, I was actually going to try to get ahold of Brad Pitt’s team to see if he would come on our bus tours so he could attract more women and try just attract more people in all honesty to what we’re doing. And so we were going to try to reach out, see if he would come on our bus tour, we were going to raise funds for what he was doing too and team up with him. But after certain amounts of time, the city started to rip down all the properties because they were just dangerous, kids wanted to climb in there, there was broken glass and mold. And so eventually they ripped them all down so we didn’t get that far unfortunately. But we did manage to save probably around 15 properties. But this is what the homes look like in the Lower Ninth Ward, very, very poor part of town. These are the ones Brad Pitt was fixing up and so I’m going to show you the after here.
This is one of the FEMA trailers and this is Brad Pitt’s project. Coming soon, make it right. And had nine for the Lowest Ninth Ward. And theY had a lot of funding, a lot more than I did, and they were building homes like that instead of the shacks that were there before. And they were bringing people back. As long as they were working, they were allowed to have their home back. If they were looking for handouts, no, he wasn’t doing that. And so he was building really unique looking homes, ours were a little bit more traditional. But this is what he did. And this is the area I was working in and as you can see, a lot of the homes just weren’t there anymore. But we took homes like this that were still standing and took something like this, like it was covered in mold inside and we took it down basically down to the beams and started over with it. We made them really open and really kind of funky layouts. Here’s some before pictures and this is the after picture, and this is what we did inside.
So we turned these homes into something beautiful again and it brought people back to the city. So I just wanted to show you that because when you think about all the… People always see the car or the beach, they all see all this material stuff. This is the stuff to me that keeps me going after all these years and doing what I do and wanting to teach people, not just how to make more money, there’s a million ways to make money. The money’s going to come, money’s going to go. Changing lives doesn’t go away. So anyway, here’s some more pictures. And we took, not all the homes , we took home like this. Here are some people at one of my trainings, and this is what it looked like inside, here with a free shopping cart. And this is what it eventually turned out to look like.
So number one lesson that I already gave you, it’s not all about money. Number two lesson is you can take a home that looks like absolute crap and it can be transformed. So don’t think, “Oh, that home is ugly,” or that home needs a lot of work. Factor in the cost ofdoing it and anything is possible in this business if you have the right teams and the right know-how. So I just wanted to show that before we moved on and I don’t know, it brings back great memories. But I hope it inspires you guys to do some really awesome things. As you fill up your bank accounts and you have more freedom yourselves, don’t forget about other people that need a hand up. All right. Back to you Julie before I cry.
Julie:Oh, I love that Mike. You’re amazing. We love you. It’s okay to cry.Yeah.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER [...]
June 17, 2021UncategorizedGet New Posts via Facebook MessengeriTunes
Summary – Transcript
Get my help finding/closing deals without the fear of making costly mistakes by joining my Inner Circle Mentorship!
Apply to join today here
Philip asked, “Did you get a mentor before your first deal?” And I’m gonna say that, if we go way back in time, 31 years ago, my first deal was by mistake. I got really, really lucky. I was a little bit older than Austin but not much older than Austin, and unlike Austin I developed a very, very big ego at that time.
So I thought I knew everything there was to know about real estate, but really the reason I made money was the market happened to take off. I of course, being in my mid-20s, thought, “Oh, I obviously know what I’m doing and I’m crushing it so I’m God’s gift to real estate.” Then I went and did my next deal not really having much of a strategy and managed to lose a lot of my profits that I had made on that first deal. That actually made me very humble, and I’m usually somebody who doesn’t like to ask for help, but it brought me to a position where I either had to make… The next sale had to be a success, or I was not gonna be in real estate investing anymore, ’cause that was the last of my capital. And so I became very humble. I asked somebody who was doing flips in Calgary to team up with me, be my JV partner. I put up most of the money and gave them most of the profit in exchange for mentorship. That’s the one reason why I’m still here today. And so the reason I tell you this is that when you make mistakes in real estate, they can be very, very expensive, and quite often they’re more expensive than the cost of mentorship in the first place. So if there’s one thing I would’ve done differently, I would’ve got a mentor probably before I did that first deal, even though I got lucky and that one actually worked. But I should have definitely got one after that first deal, before doing the second deal, because I didn’t really have a strategy. I mean, I got really, really lucky. It’s kinda like buying the right lottery ticket and winning. Well, that’s great that you won, but once that money runs out, you have no way to duplicate that. So you actually have to have strategies and systems and skillsets. So my advice would be to get a mentor long before you do your first deal, especially if you’re gonna to do things… Wholesaling’s a little bit more forgiving than most strategies. If you’re gonna do a flip, though, or if you’re gonna go wing it and try to do a tax deed, go to a tax deed auction, you don’t know what you’re doing, guaranteed you will lose your shirt probably on the first deal. Even if you hilip asked, “Did you get a mentor before your first deal?” And I’m gonna say that, if we go way back in time, 31 years ago, my first deal was by mistake. I got really, really lucky. I was a little bit older than Austin but not much older than Austin, and unlike Austin I developed a very, very big ego at that time.
Yeah, definitely, and before I got any of my deals, before I even knew about investing, Mike was my very, very first coach ever when it comes to real estate investing. Now I had another coach who was more about communication and mindset. His name is Bryan Casella and he’s a millionaire himself. So he actually referred me to to Mike. I went to his, what was it called? The initial webinar, the three-day webinar, and that’s when the journey began. But before I did any real estate investing, Mike was my very first coach. So the answer is, yes, I had an actual coach before I did any deals.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER [...]