There’s the power of social media now. You can just DM people and reach out. There’s not as many of these barriers to entry. There’s not like two, three secretaries you have to get through to get to somebody. Plenty of people try to either estimate their own repairs without getting two, three, four quotes in hand. Top operators understand how to analyze risk, but they don’t let it paralyze them so therefore they don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. They get enough information to make a good informed decision and then they just take action. So I do think it’s important to definitely take the right step because certainly early on in an investing career, one loss can really set you back or take you out of the game. Minimize some loss, go partner with somebody who’s already been doing this space and just ask a bunch of questions. I didn’t have to go outbound as much. I created an inbound funnel where people can come to me.

What’s going on guys? Corey, thank you so much for coming on. I know you’ve done hundreds of transactions in the Knoxville area. I want to take a step back and just kind of see how you got into real estate in the first place.

Cool. Well, first off, thanks so much for having me on here. I was super excited to join you guys today. Yeah, to take it back. I mean, really my, I would say journey or intro into real estate or real estate investing started off as just being honestly a first time home buyer. I was 22 years old, bought my first home. That was even driven a little bit out of maybe ego. I don’t know. Our fear, I was 22. I quit high school my senior year, went to work in full time. So I was seeing a lot of my peers start to graduate college, starting to wonder like, what do I have to show for myself and just go through all those little throws of it. So for me, what I could at least justify that was equivalent of a college degree was, I guess I’ll just go be a homeowner. I wish I could say I could see it all out, but it was based off of that. Became a homeowner. I was a restaurant GM owner operator at the time as well. I could started that business just right beforehand and started just house hacking, a. K.a. Roommates really before that was really a term. Rented two other bedrooms to guys that worked for me at my restaurant and that offset my living expenses. And that was sort of the initial just launch was, hey, how can I just buy a house, get my foot in the door. I figured out I could offset my living expenses, which was really cool. I found a nice little niche in the, this is probably 2010, 11, 12, flipping vacant lots. So I’m also a big comic book nerd. And so I would go to these different estate sales and auctions and whatnot. And I found this auction house that was selling all kinds of stuff. There was cars and boats and tools and collectibles and like real estate would happen to be there. And so I was going there for usually the comics, the collectibles, and then maybe I’d find like a tool that I could swing buy a pawn shop on my way home and sell it for 25 bucks and like pay for my gas kind of stuff. But I started to look up and see other stuff that was trading and like real estate was going around. I was like, “Man, huh, there’s these vacant lots that are selling in and around the central Florida area that I lived at the time.” And they were selling for let’s say 3000 bucks. But like a cursory Zillow search was telling me that they were selling from anywhere between eight to 10 grand. So I was like, “Well, there’s something there. Maybe I just try my hand at one of these.” So I took a swing at one. I found a lot down in the south end of the county that happened to be like between two houses. It was a subdivision that had tanked, builder went belly up. So you had this like halfway built subdivision of just house, house, vacant lot, house, vacant lot, vacant lot, so and so forth. So I just bought that lot between the two and ended up selling it to the neighbor because for me logically

That

Just made sense, right? Who else to buy this, but the person right next door. And so that was old, just reached out to them and said whole like, “Hey, I thought I was going to build here and economy kind of sucks, whatever.” And Zillow had a little printout, Zillow says it’s worth 10, we take eight hemmed and hawed a little bit, right? But they took it and that was all I needed to know was like, “Oh, that works. I could just do that. ” So then just rinse repeat and found that little hack just kind of playing around the central Florida market for a while, which was a lot of fun. I guess there, just fast forward, I was into the restaurant business there for like a decade, managed the whole team there and it was a lot of fun, but also hit kind of a ceiling of achievement that my now wife while she was in grad school and Couldn’t really foresee myself continuing down that path forever. And so sold off a good chunk of that business, sold my house that I had house hacked. That’s what allowed us to relocate here to East Tennessee where I had some family here close by and just got up here and like, “Man, let’s just try this real estate thing out. ” I had friends funding up from the service industry that had gone into real estate. And so part of me was a little bit like, “Well, if they could do it, Mandy could do it, so could I. ” This is my bartender or something like that. If they could do it, I can surely do this. And so that was it, man. I just jumped in with both feet and the sales end of things and started to invest in this market just the same, connected with some cool people in the area, met some cool just clients, people looking to invest in this market as well by me just plinking around. Honestly, online, some of my early clients or early investors was me just not knowing what I didn’t know. And so I’d say probably one of my first main investor clients was this guy Declan. Shout out to Declan out of Southern California. But I picked up this Frankenstein of a triplex kind of thing in the south end of Knoxville and it was like, nobody local’s going to buy this wild thing. I don’t even know who’s going to buy this. So I took like $20 Facebook ad and threw it in Los Angeles, California because just like, let me just pick a giant pond of whatever, six, eight million people. Somebody’s going to jump on this. And he called me. He didn’t buy that property. Somebody else is some couple from South Florida ended up buying that. But it was a good foot in the door because this was a guy who sold his place. He was doing a 1031 exchange, wanted to invest in this market. And so he allowed me to go help him out. And he bought six properties over the course of like six, eight months. And then that just really is what pushed me into building my network and connecting with people and just being his project manager, so to speak, to help find it, analyze deals, buy it, fix it up, et cetera, get it stabilized. And that was a great introduction just to this market and to building out the network that I now get to have.

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For the listeners, just what’s the business look like today?

Sure. Yeah. So today, now we’ve certainly grown a lot to this point. So now I’m the managing partner of a real estate sales team. I’ve got myself and six others on that sales team, as well as just an operation staff. So we’ve grown much beyond just kind of me, the solo dolo producer. We started to have to realize, “Hey, I’m topping out. I’ve got to grow. I’ve got to just bring on people in order to help grow this because I can only do so much at the end of the day.” So Teamwork’s a big, big part of that. I

Love it. I love it. Well, what was the main problem that you were trying to solve when starting the sales team business?

So quickly, as I was working with some investors and just investing myself, I recognized that there wasn’t any one place where people could go to, there was an opportunity there in the market for a sales team that really specialized in working with investors, both local as well as out of state folks. There wasn’t any one person who was like, “Oh, they’ve got all the resources.” Either they’re bringing in the acquisitions and finding off market properties or they have the project management experience or contractor connections, the lending connections, both either conventional money or private capital. There wasn’t any one place that people could go to where you could just, “Oh, I could just plug in right here and they’ve got me. ” So that was kind of the aha light bulb. What if we just go build that and be that for people and just become sort of that, try to be a one-stop shop for that investor, whether they’re local, trying to just maybe get started, get their first deal under their belt to get their first property, or they’re a seasoned investor, maybe they’re trying to sunset their portfolio and, “Hey, Corey, I’ve got 10, 20, 30 units I need to move.” I wanted to really be that one spot that people could just go plug into that we have all of the people that you would need to know, the guy who knows the guy kind of model.

I like it. I like it. Why do you think a lot of investors overlook that part of the business?

In terms of overlook either the sales side or just the network to tap into? Is that what you mean?

Kind of both, but more the network.

Yeah. I think a lot of people still think that they have to do it all themselves. They have to go find all this other thing. And I’ve realized I had some good mentors in business and I recognize, what if I go find the one person that’s either the most connected and just start asking them like, “Hey, who do you know? Who should I know? What’s the best place to go to? ” Yeah, I’m a big just believer in collaboration and teamwork. And also just go, “I don’t have to build this all myself. I can just go find the most qualified person to answer that question or help solve that problem.” And I think a lot of people just still think they have to go it themselves or they have to be the ones to build this widget versus like, “Well, just go buy the tool or just go grab the resource.” The internet’s a powerful thing. So you can actually find a lot of these things out there and find these people just to connect with. And you can like through the power of social media now, you can just like DM people and reach out. There’s not as many of these barriers to entry. There’s not like two, three secretaries you have to get through to get to somebody.

Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. Awesome. Now just a really quick word from our sponsor. This episode is sponsored by 10x TV, the secret weapon behind some of the most successful real estate investors in the country. Here’s the deal. Most people are stuck cold calling, texting, spending hours chasing low quality leads, but the smart ones, they’re using TV commercials to flip the script. With 10x TV, motivated sellers are calling them already warmed up, already trusting them because they’ve seen them on TV. It’s high credibility, high leverage, and way less hustle. This isn’t a theory. The founder of 10x TV has been a real estate investor for the past 24 years and TV has been his number one lead channel year over year for the past 13 years since starting TV. Want to find out if your market’s available, go to 10xtv.co for a free marketing audit and see how TV can become your unfair advantage. Again, that’s 10xtv.co. Corey, one question, from the investor standpoint, what would be a common misconception about what you’re offering with the sales team? I’m sure investors hear that and there might be some confusion to it. What do you think the most common misconception is?

Common misconception is that we handle just sales, Right? That we’re just say a real estate like sales team, and so therefore that’s maybe all the value that we bring to the table. And while I would say that 99% of my peers, yeah, that’s the case because 99% of my peers are not in the investing space. They’re not investing with you. They’re not actively doing deals as well. Part of my thing is the reason I can consult with my clients so well is like, I’m walking side by side with you in this space, in the trenches. I’ve had the big wins. I’ve had some good losses in there as well. People I think that paint a picture as though this is always just home run swings and you’re six figure all the time. No, that’s not real investing. Real investing is just a compounding effect over time, trying to minimize loss. In the end, that’s not to say you don’t take losses, it certainly can happen, right? It’s investing with your own risk. So I’d say that’s one thing that really just separates us apart from a lot of that or just making misconceptions that we only handle, say, the sales side of things. And while that’s a part of the business, we handle a lot of the other aspects as well from the acquisition, from the project management, from the property management to just putting the deal together, really just being that with that one central node I could go to, I could just click this button, I could just go talk to this group and I’m tapped into everybody.

I love it. I love it. What mistakes do you often see investors make that you think could be really easily avoided?

Man, yeah. So let’s see. I see plenty of people try to either estimate their own repairs without getting two, three, four quotes in hand. Or I’ve seen this mistake happen a bunch more than I wish I could say, is investors say from out of state that are trying to flip a property from out of state and there’s no, and they don’t have somebody there on their team that can offer as like a quality control. Who’s checking your project manager? Who’s checking your GC? Are you just taking their word that everything’s square or they send you some potato quality pictures or video and you’re like, “I guess that looks fine.” We’ve rescued countless clients in that spot. We’re maybe having a conversation, they start to reach out and they’re looking for somebody to help them dispo or sell this properties are done flipping it. And we go by there to go take a preliminary look and we’re like, “Oh man, somebody’s been cutting some corners here.” And then we have to go back and try to square things away versus if they just would’ve had the help from the start helping to really find the right contractors to plug into a job and to help go check on a project once, twice a week, just ensure that things are plugging along on time and on budget, really the on time, because that can be a big deal killer for a lot of people is when those projects just stretch out a couple months longer than they really should and suddenly there goes all your margin because of holding costs.

Oh yeah. What do you think separates top operators from everyone else in your experience?

Yeah. Treating it like a job, not like a fun hobby necessarily. It’s a JOB. It’s whether it’s a part-time job for you, sure, but you still have to go at it with a certain level of seriousness and understanding what you’re doing here. This isn’t just back of napkin math or playing with just kind of fantasy figures. This is just real life, real people, real gains, real losses too in that, right? So taking it serious, treating it like a job. And to that point also, top operators understand how to analyze risk, but they don’t let it paralyze them so therefore they don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.

They

Get enough information to make a good informed decision and then they just take action. Whereas a lot of people will just sit on the sidelines and kind of him and haw and opportunities pass by and then you end up with people that just never take action. They go years and they listen to all the podcasts and they go to meetups and they pay for these courses and they still just don’t take action. At a certain point, you just have to be able to bet on yourself and take a swing.

Yeah. And I think another piece to that, when we’re talking first time investor, when it comes to the first deal, I feel like a lot of investors maybe rush the deal or just rush to get a deal to say they’ve gotten a deal and then they lose a bunch of money on it. How important do you think the right first deal is for an investor to have that confidence to move forward and do more deals and trust their gut?

Sure. So I do think it’s important to definitely take the right step because certainly early on in an investing career, one loss can really set you back or take you out of the game. So there’s certainly a healthy amount of fear or respect that needs to come with that. One thing I would offer for that person who’s maybe just looking to get their first one going is go find somebody who’s already doing it in the marketplace and find a way to do some kind of joint venture or partnership with them. Help spread that risk out a little bit. Maybe it’s you bring some of the capital, but they’re bringing the deal, they’re bringing the opportunity, they’re bringing their trusted contractors, their network to it. And you’ve got the ability to now shadow somebody and observe and just ask questions without having to just blaze your own trail. I think some people would get a lot further if they were just to maybe swallow the pride or just kind of like go with it like, “Hey, why don’t I just go again, find the person who’s already doing it in my marketplace at a high level, offer them some kind of value.” And that might be, “Hey, I can bring some of the capital to this or I have a skillset that can help this. ” Whether that’s from the accounting and I can help manage the money and the books better than maybe you’ve been able to, or you have some level of contracting experience and you can bring some of that experience to the table to help bring some sweat equity to it. But go partner with somebody. I think for the first one, it doesn’t have to be a home run, right? It doesn’t have to be like just by doing in and of itself, even if it comes out flat, let’s just say you get just the money back that you’ve put into it, you will have gained like a tremendous amount of experience just by doing that alone is certainly, I think, worth the price of admission. But if really minimize some loss, go partner with somebody who’s already been doing this space and just ask a bunch of questions.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. A lot of people, when it comes to the word success, they got their own definition for it. They got their own way of measuring it, the way of chasing it. How do you define the word success? How do you measure success? And then how do you strive for it every day?

Yeah. So you’re right. It looks like success looks different to everybody. If you ask 10 people that, what does success look like to them? They’re going to give you different answers. For me, now it’s very much … I’ve got three kids under five, so family time, quality time is super important to me. So being home for dinner, being home on say weekends, that’s winning that success to me. Early, say pre-kids and in and out of my investing journey and building a sales team and that, I was really chasing internally what we call the income flip. How do I hit that point where my passive income offsets my living expenses and then from there it makes the jump. So I was really just chasing that. That first pillar was what I was considering success. I was like, “I can hit this, then that’s the goal.” And we were able to hit that thankfully, made some of the right moves, right times, met the right people that helped along that journey. So for now, me, I measure it based on quality time and minimizing losses at that point, that’s my measuring stick for theirs. It’s all right, can I not take a loss now because at those times, if you have a loss can set you back and you recognize you have to now double the work to hit to achieve the same gain. If I took a $40,000 hit, well, I’ve got to go now generate 80 to kind of replace what I had plus on top of it. So That’s what it looks like for me.

Awesome. Awesome. What are the biggest changes that you’re seeing in real estate right now?

Sure. So I’ve seen people definitely can get over their skis on flips, jumping into stuff where they’re just wishing and praying at the margin workout, or they’re just talking themselves into something where the numbers just aren’t real, so they’re not as conservative with their numbers on that. We’re seeing certainly some people pivot into the new construction and build to sell, build to rent space. We’ve been underserved in that for the better part of a decade here in this country where we really just stopped building houses for a good while. So we’re now starting to see that recovery. And with that comes opportunity for those to get into it. And with that also comes some added risk or some complexity because now there’s just more competition out there available for buyers to choose from. And ultimately it’s healthy for the market. It’s good. I think people just need to take a bit more calculated risks. Again, partner, joint venture. I love partnering with people on my flips. In fact, this past year we did four of them and I partnered with somebody on every single one of them because it allowed me to keep a little bit of dry powder aside from just bare cash in case another opportunity came up, allowed them to participate in the deal and we could share in the wins. And yeah, that’s where I would say things really heading are trending right now.

That’s awesome. AI is the new buzzword nowadays. How are you using it? How do you think it’s going to change investing and where do you think it’s going?

Sure. How are we using it currently? Certainly heavy research base. We’ve filtered it into our CRM, our client relationship management tool, which allows us just to quickly search through emails, search through databases to be able to find relevant information that we need. I use it regularly where I have it feeding me daily news updates. So I can just go into ChatGPT and I’ve given it a prompt where it’s just going and pulling relevant real estate information or real estate news headlines over the last say 24 hours. And it screens it every single morning. It just drops in my inbox at eight o’clock every morning. So I always have just like the most up-to-date information that’s coming through. That’s some simple ways we’ve been able to utilize it. I have seen it get very, very sophisticated both from a texting and voice to voice application for investors. So you’re seeing some people really pivot towards using bots or agents to pre-screen or pre-qualify seller leads for them. There’s a guy I know based out of Nashville who’s doing this at a very high level where he’s almost completely replaced his sales team, which was a paid salary positions and comes with all that extra overhead to where now he just has an AI agent that is texting with people, it’s getting on the phone and talking with them and having very high level believable conversations. It’s ultimately getting somebody to set an appointment with him, which is just incredible to see that get built out. So I see that continuing more. I have seen too where people, as they’re building those out, and there was a fear for a little while of like, “Do you tell people that this is like an AI bot or not? ” And what we’ve actually seen is when people realize that’s what they’re talking with, actually their guard goes down significantly and they’re willing to actually just talk more because there’s not this level of maybe influence that you might otherwise have in a voice to voice or face-to-face conversations. So when they’re just talking to a robot, they’re actually willing to talk a lot more, divulge a lot more information than they might on the initial phone call with a human, which has Been fascinating to watch that happen. We’re starting to play with some of those features internally and it’s pretty intriguing to see actually the level of conversations that people will have when they know about it on the front end. They’ll be like, “Okay, yep, cool.” As long as I think they eventually get to a person, it actually works out really, really well.

Interesting. If you were to start from scratch, I’ll let you keep all the knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years, but you’re going to completely start from scratch. What would be the main focus first? What would you focus on first?

Okay. So assuming I have everything that I have up to this point, but you’re just dropping me off in a new market or a new place and Go, right? Awesome. So I would take a pivot that we did here a couple years ago. So I started off my career here in real estate in Knoxville, heavy outbound prospecting, heavy light, just cold call, sit on the phone every day, three, four hours for three, four, five days a week and just grind it out and talk to people. And that was a lot and I built a great skillset and knowledge base and built a database out of that. I would pivot to a different strategy which has worked out well for us, which is actually going and starting a meetup and starting a place for people to come together. I think certainly since post pandemic, we’ve had a big need for community collaboration for people to come back together because we were all forced apart for a year and a half or so. We’re told like, “Yeah, don’t hang out, don’t get together, don’t do anything.” So by starting a meetup, what’s been really interesting in that is you initially become the central point of a community. So people therefore want to go network and engage with the person who’s like hosting the party, right? If you throw a good party, you want to go up and say thanks to the host for throwing a sweet party. In that, what I found certainly was I didn’t have to go outbound as much. I created an inbound funnel where people can come to me and then it’s my opportunity to connect and add information and discover what they want to do. So for like my sales team, it was like we have this meetup now we’ve been running for close to five years and we have over 2000 members of that community, which started as 11 people on a Zoom call. But for guys on my sales team now, I can say, “Hey, every month we’ve got a meetup that we put together where we’ve got a hundred people that come through that. ” And if you’re to tell somebody in sales, “Hey, I’m going to stack a room together where a hundred people all drove about 20 minutes across town to come sit in a room to talk about real estate for like two to three hours.” If that’s not a motivated warm lead, I don’t know what is, right? So find a way that you can get people together where they can come to you as maybe you don’t have to go as outbound.

I love it. I love it. If someone’s interested in using you in Knoxville or interested in the meetup, where can people learn about you, more about you? Where can people find you? If someone wants to reach out, where can they reach out to you at?

Totally, totally. So if you wanted to check out our meetup, like first and foremost, I would highly recommend go ahead and check out GridInvestor, that’s G-R-I-D, think like a power grid or a network, gridinvestor.com. You can all search for that on YouTube as well. We live stream the first Wednesday of every month at 6:30. We’re live on YouTube. You can absolutely tap into that room. So we’ve got a hundred people in the room and we’ve got a couple dozen on the live stream as well. So that’s a chance for you to connect, see what we’re doing and plug in there. You can certainly find me all over socials. I’m just going to be @coreyking. That’s going to be on Facebook. That’s also going to be on Instagram as well. So you can absolutely check that out as well if you want to reach out to me.

I love it. Corey, I appreciate your time, everyone. Thanks for watching and we’ll …