In this video, I sit down with Danny O’Bannon, a trailblazer in wholesaling commercial real estate. Discover how he earned $200K on a single deal without ever owning the property! From actionable tips to lessons learned, Danny shares his journey, from starting in residential real estate to dominating multiple markets in commercial deals. If you’re looking to scale your real estate business or explore the lucrative commercial space, this video is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!

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Show Transcription:

Tony Javier (00:00):

I am going to show you how Danny O’Bannon made over 200 k on a piece of commercial real estate without ever owning it. If you think you can make good money with residential real estate, imagine adding a zero to the end of each deal, and it is not as hard as you think. See how you can do a fraction of the amount of deals and make more money. Let’s go.

Tony Javier (00:18):

We have a really cool guest for you, Danny O’Bannon. He’s wholesaling to multiple markets. And the cool thing that I like that we’ll they’ll jump into is he’s wholesaling commercial real estate, one of the only people that I know that is wholesaling commercial real estate. Uh, so what’s going on? Danny? Ready to jump into this?

Danny O’Bannon (00:36):

Yeah, man, I appreciate you having me on.

Tony Javier (00:38):

Yeah, man. Doing some good stuff. So you’re in multiple markets, you said you’re, you’re wholesaling in Tacoma, Boise, Spokane, um, and you’re doing some commercial real estate. So, um, I guess tell the listeners, and you have your own podcast by the way, so you can mention that later if you’d like to. So tell us a little bit about how you got into real estate and where, um, kind of your journey from where you started to where, where you are now.

Danny O’Bannon (01:02):

Yeah, so I actually, I’ve been in real estate for, uh, almost 10 years. I started in 2012. So, um, and I actually got into it. I was in college and I, I wanted to get into stock investing. Um, I grew up a single, single mom of six kids and I had a friend whose dad was pretty, pretty wealthy and I knew he did something with stocks. I had no idea what that even meant at the time, but I understood at a, at an early age that you could either trade your time for, for, you know, getting paid by the hour or you could leverage your money, right? Um, my mom was single mom with six kids, so she was working six, seven days a week. And I saw, you know, how much he worked and how much my mom worked. And I’m like, okay, I, I want that lifestyle, you know?

Danny O’Bannon (01:44):

So, um, I had my own lawn mowing business in college and I would just have my headphones in while I’m mowing listening to music. So I thought, why don’t I try to find some podcasts on and figure out how to invest in stocks, figure out if I can learn something while I’m, while I’m mowing lawns. And in that research, like trying to find pod or stock investing, I found real estate investing on podcasts. And so I would just eight hours a day listen to all these podcasts and I joined Facebook groups and I’m seeing all these checks that people are generating from wholesaling. And so I just kind of made a decision, you know, it was like a few months of doing the, the research and being in that analysis paralysis mode. And I kind of realized like, alright, I’ve learned everything I can learn in this business without doing it.

Danny O’Bannon (02:25):

Like if I’m gonna go any further, I need to actually take some steps. So I bought a, a $500 course at the time, and it, it taught me to pull absentee owners from ListSource. It was the only list I knew about. It was the only list I knew how to pull, and it taught me to send them yellow letters. So I just started doing that. Like I was in my mom’s basement printing off yellow letters, handwriting the envelope stuff in ’em, and, um, sending ’em out. And it took me about three months to get my first deal. Um, it was pretty brutal. You know, you’re getting these calls, you don’t know how to talk to these sellers, and I’m just making a joke of myself on the phone, right? And I was getting pretty, uh, discouraged. And finally I got a call from a seller and she’s like, well, how are you gonna buy my property if you haven’t seen it?

Danny O’Bannon (03:05):

I’m like, you need to come see it, come out here and see it. So I’m like, okay. You know? So I set the appointment, um, and I did not want to go like the day came and I just knew that, you know, I didn’t know what to say to this person. Like, I was just thinking of every reason why I shouldn’t go. And I finally was like, you know what? I’m just gonna go, like, even if I fail, I’ll learn something. So one thing I did was I, I had already started kind of networking. Um, so I reached out to an agent. I just said, Hey, will you send me the lowest comps in this area for this house? And so I met the seller at the house. It was a vacant house. Um, we walked the property, we stood in the kitchen, and um, she’s like, well, what do you, what can you pay?

Danny O’Bannon (03:41):

And I said, well, here are the, here are the sales in the area for a property like this. And she said, oh wow, okay. She’s like, well, how about 50 grand? Um, and at the time, like, I didn’t think it was a good house. I didn’t think it was a good area. I didn’t really, didn’t think 50 grand would be a good price. But, um, I had found one person in this market that was, that was doing deals. I found ’em on Craigslist. Um, and I previously took ’em out to lunch, so I kind of knew him a little bit. Um, so I called, so I signed the contract with her. She gave me the key right there. Um, I had to, I put a hundred dollars on the contract for release money and I had to drive to my brother’s house and borrow a hundred bucks.

Danny O’Bannon (04:19):

And then I drove to her house and gave her the a hundred bucks. ’cause I didn’t know you could, you’re supposed to deal with the title company, <laugh>. Um, and then I called that buyer and I met him over there. And thankfully I didn’t say a price first because I was thinking, I was hoping I could make five grand, you know, maybe he’ll pay 55. Um, and he ended up saying, you know, I can pay 70 for this property. So we did the deal. Um, I made 20 grand and that was, that was kind of my entry to the business. You know, that year I ended up doing nine deals. Um, and my ninth deal I took down is a, a rehab, which made every mistake you could make doing a rehab. I was on the job doing demo, like doing all the work myself. And I, I figured, you know, while I’m rehabbing, I’ll just do more wholesale deals.

Danny O’Bannon (05:03):

Well, I didn’t do any wholesale deals ’cause my time was split, right? I was going to school and I was working in my rehab. Um, and so I actually had to go back and get a full-time job once I graduated school. And I did that for about three months. I’d worked from like seven to three 30, and then from three 30 to 10 I’d work in real estate. And after three months of doing that, I had made double what this job was paying me a year in three months. So I quit that job and I’ve been in real estate ever since. And that was probably since like 2013 or 2014. Love that. Go ahead.

Tony Javier (05:36):

Yeah, I was gonna say, I love that story, man. ’cause like a lot of people get analysis paralysis and don’t even go on the appointment, right? I mean, you, you almost didn’t, right? It’s like, it’s, it’s a, it’s a mental game. It’s like you can get as much education as you want to. And a lot of people will spend, i, I know people spending 50 to $100,000 on education and they don’t use it, right? So just showing up, right? You didn’t have to have like the greatest skills. You didn’t like you showed up and you, you, you had someone that gave you a price that worked, you didn’t, maybe didn’t quite know it at the time that it worked, but you made it happen. And then you took action and found someone that would go look at the property to see if you can hold a seal to ’em.

Tony Javier (06:16):

They made you an offer and bam boom, that gives you the confidence to put that deal together and move forward, right? Because without that deal, it probably would’ve been a lot tougher for you to do the next like, to, to continue to for sure. You know, in the business, right? You just need that taste that, you know, that one deal you get under your belt and, and you probably look, look back at it now, and you think to yourself, that was the, the most easy deal that I could have done. Knowing what you know now, right?

Danny O’Bannon (06:43):

A hundred percent. Yeah. And it’s, it’s funny that you say just show up. ’cause like that’s kind of my, been my motto even to this day. You know, business gets hard. Um, you know, especially when you’re trying to scale and either learn a new, new thing or get into a new market. And that’s always been motto is just show up every day, um, show up with your team, your team shows up every day and you drive forward. You constantly push through those barriers. And so, yeah, I mean, we’ve had it quite the journey over nine years. We’ve, the company’s changed a lot and it’s, I feel like it’s, we’re always changing. We’re always tweaking things and doing new stuff. So,

Tony Javier (07:18):

So I wanna take a moment to share with you 10 x tv. It is the buzz in the real estate investing world right now. And guess what, I was one of the first to do TV commercials over a decade ago. If you want high quality motivated seller leads that are asking you to do business with you, instead of you reaching out to them, go to claim my market.com and we will show you our TV launch formula. We have the shows and stations that we know work. We have the scripts that we know work. We’ve basically taken the formula that I’ve created over the last decade plus that I’ve been doing TV commercials and we are now plugging it in for over a hundred real estate investors around the country. And if you want to be one of those as well, reach out to us. Claim my market.com. If you want a 10 extra marketing, go and apply and see if we have a spot in your market. Now, back to the video.

Tony Javier (08:03):

Well, you hit, you hit a, you hit a point that a not a lot of investors say you did a, you’re doing a hundred deals a year. You did at one point. I can’t remember what exactly what it is, but let’s transition that. That’s not the most impressive part. Let’s talk about the commercial real estate. ’cause I, I’ve had three, um, pretty successful commercial real estate guys on the show. You may know some of them. Corey Peterson, um, oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I’m, I’m drawing a blank on the other two. So Cory, Pete has done very successful, uh, commercial developer and I’ve had a couple others as well that I just interviewed. Um, but they take properties down, like they actually buy them, they’ll reposition them or just cashflow them, syndicate them, bring investors in. Um, but you wholesale commercial property and I think you said one of ’em you didn’t even really mean to, uh, and you and you, you got some pretty big checks from those. So tell us about those. I want to hear about those.

Danny O’Bannon (08:56):

Yeah, so, you know, I’ve met a lot of the guys, you know, probably some of the guys you, you mentioned that, you know, I, I, I know and I see how, um, what you can do in the commercial space, right? Closing on these properties. And so we made the decision last year that we’re gonna go all in on commercial and add that division to our business. Um, but we’re wholesalers at heart, right? Like, I’ve never done a syndication, I’ve never done a value add and repositioned the property, especially one that’s outta state, that’s a hundred and, you know, eight units or anything, right? So, um, once we made that decision, we just started applying the, the wholesale model that we know that works into the commercial space, right? I mean, it’s completely, entirely different business, but in terms of the acquisitions and generating leads and acquiring deals, like, we just applied that and I think that gives us a competitive advantage of a lot of people in the commercial space. Um, but so we, so we started doing our marketing, um, and we got a deal on our contract that was an 86 unit in Osh, Texas. Uh, never heard of it, never been there. You know,

Tony Javier (09:57):

I just heard of it the other day. I have, I have someone that’s getting ready to do TV in that area, so, okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s funny. That’s the first time I ever heard that. And then you mention it. So

Danny O’Bannon (10:04):

Yeah, so we got a crazy good deal. I think we got it for like, gosh, I’m trying to remember the numbers. I wanna say we got it for like either 800 and we sold it for one, 1.1, or we got it for 1.1 and sold it for 1.4. But either way, we got, we got a really good deal on our contract and, um, we brought it to one of the guys that we know that are closing on deals. And, um, we, we wanted to be a part of the deal. Um, we, we wanted to just get, he was gonna pay us a hundred grand and give us an acquisition, like per like limited partner percentage equity in the deal. Um, but his financing fell through and we’re like already 30 days into this being under contract. Um, and the reason why it fell through, by the way, is because it was such a, it needed like a million dollars in renovation and we had this thing for like a million dollar purchase price, right?

Danny O’Bannon (10:52):

So the bank looks at, okay, what is your, what, what is the percentage of the repair budget versus the purchase price? And they want, like, I think they wanted it to be around like 64% when we were well above that, but it was because we got such a good deal, right? Like we got such a low price that it was, it was like 90% of the purchase price was gonna be the renovations, right? So his financing fell through and rather than exploring other options, he just pulled out on us. And so we started scrambling and we ended up finding a buyer, um, and we assigned it to that person for a 300 K assignment fee. Um, but what was interesting is he actually turned around and reassigned it for 170 5K assignment fee. So this deal had a four 70 5K assignment spread on it.

Danny O’Bannon (11:38):

That’s insane. Um, and you know, there was a lot of the, I would say like doing TC and, and single family, there’s a lot of problems that come up. Well, doing transaction coordination in commercial, there’s like even more problems, right? There’s just bunch more due diligence, a lot, a lot of more reports that you have to get the financials. Um, and the particular seller that we’re working with, I mean, to put it lightly, like they were just a little bit crazy. Um, and so we learned a lot in that deal. Uh, but yeah, we got it closed and our first deal we made 300 grand and then we, that was kind of like, okay, we can do this. You know, when we got into commercial, a lot of people told us that you really can’t assign apartments or commercial deals. Like it’s not really a thing.

Danny O’Bannon (12:21):

Like people were kind of like saying that I was surprised, but you know, I, I figured there was a way to do it. Um, and since then we, we’ve closed another deal that was 108 in apartment in Clarkdale, Mississippi, which again, I’ve never been there. No, no one on my team has seen this apartment, but we got it under contract. Um, an acquisition guy that used to work for me actually got under contract for 1.78 and it was way too high, like absolutely too high. So we ended up renegotiating this property all the way down to $1.2 million with the seller. Wow. Um, and then we ended up assigning it to a cash buyer for 1.6. So on that one we made 400 grand. Um, we paid an agent who brought the buyer to us 35 grand. So our net was 365.

Tony Javier (13:08):

Man, that’s crazy. That’s phenomenal. How did you find those deals? So, you know, obviously residential real estate, there’s all kinds of marketing mediums, commercial real estate’s a different animal. You can use some of the same mediums. Uh, but how did those deals fall in your lap? How did you get such good deals?

Danny O’Bannon (13:21):

Yeah, you know, it was interesting ’cause another thing that we got into when we got into commercial, they said, you know, you really can’t have, uh, like a, ’cause we have a call center, right? We built in the Philippines that does cold calling for other investors. Um, we built that for our company and we were getting, you know, 15 to 20 x returns. And so we had people reach out and just kind of like organically grew into its own company that does it for investors, but it’s in the Philippines, right? And the commercial guys are like, you know, I don’t see that working like cold calling these property owners mm-hmm <affirmative>. Um, with those type of colors. And so we’re like, well, we’re just gonna test it. And so we have that, that company does our SMS marketing and their cold call marketing. Um, and so that’s what we did.

Danny O’Bannon (14:00):

We just plugged in commercial list into SMS marketing channel and the cold call marketing channel. And the first deal was a text message lead and the second one was a cold call lead. So, um, what I’ve found honestly is, you know, a motivated seller is a motivated seller, whether they’re selling a house or an apartment, like they’re, they have problems that need to be solved and you as an investor is a problem solver, right? So you’re there to help them and if you can’t help them, if they don’t have a problem to be solved, like you’re not gonna do a deal anyways, right? So we found that so far we’ve had success with the same marketing channels that we were using in single family.

Tony Javier (14:38):

You know, it’s so interesting. I saw your hat and I’m like, that hat looks so familiar. I actually am getting ready to sign up with your company, call it to scale, right?

Danny O’Bannon (14:46):

Yeah, yeah,

Tony Javier (14:47):

Yeah, yeah. Devonte is who I’m working with. He, uh, I can’t even, I don’t even know how I got in touch with him, but, uh, he’s an animal man. That’s, that’s so funny, dude. Yeah, he just sent me a link to sign up I think yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to to sign up. Yeah. Uh, talk to him and, and, uh, love it. ’cause I’m paying per lead. You have a per lead program, uh, yeah. Where you don’t just charge per hour, which I really like. So, uh, so that’s awesome. Um, so, so the website is call to scale.com and that’s with a number two. So if you guys wanna go there and check it out, um, it’s a pretty cool program. So commercial real estate, so cold calling with commercial, again, I don’t like, I think about 15 years ago, I’ve been in the business 20 years, about 15 years ago, I remember someone telling me they heard about a deal where someone made a million dollars wholesaling, commercial real estate. And at the time I was like, man, that would be awesome. Maybe I need to look at commercial real estate and wholesaling and all that. Over the last 15 years, I don’t even think I’ve heard of anybody really wholesaling, commercial, maybe like a four unit building or something like that and making, you know, 20, 30, 40 grand, but wholesaling, big commercial buildings, what would be, so, so that’s something you’re obviously getting into more. So are you starting to take down more commercial deals? Are you wanting to steal wholesale commercial deals?

Danny O’Bannon (16:00):

Yeah, so we, we, we don’t, we don’t wanna be in the, we will always be wholesaling like deals here and there. Like not everything fits our buy box. Like for example, we got a 48 unit under contract that’s not necessarily a value add. Like the person who bought it just did all the work and he’s already at the top of the market rents. Um, so we assign that one for just a hundred K assignment fee, right? But we want

Tony Javier (16:26):

Just a hundred K <laugh>. Yeah,

Danny O’Bannon (16:27):

Right. Well, a light hundred K assignment, but no, so we wanna be closing on these that the biggest hurdle is, you know, we don’t have a, bank’s gonna look at me and say, well, you have, you have to have the balance sheet, right? And you have to have liquidity to get approved for a certain type like size loan. And so when you’re buying a 5 million asset, like, you know, I have, I think it’s like at least 10% liquidity in the bank, and I’m not sure what, what you have to be worth. Like maybe at least 5 million, something along those lines, right? So we need to develop relationships with people who could sponsor loans that have the experience. So a lot of my friends, like I have a buddy who got it to at the same time as us, and he closed on his first deal.

Danny O’Bannon (17:07):

And basically what he did was there was a guy who’s done commercial deals, he’s got a portfolio, so he’s got the balance sheet, he’s got relationship with banks. So he was able to sponsor the loan, get a third of the deal, um, and he brought another guy in who brought in some money. He got a third of the deal, my buddy got a third of the deal. So I’m trying to put together some relationships to where I can find, you know, good guys that we, we wanna work with and, um, that we can do some business with where we can actually close on some deals, start raising money, and then eventually we’ll start a fund and then we’ll close on deals in the fund.

Tony Javier (17:38):

Awesome. Yeah, I’ve got some really good relationships. Corey Peterson, I mentioned, if you don’t have his contact information, I’d love to connect you with him. Yeah, I’m sure he’d love to, to maybe participate and help you with your deals. And then I’ve got another guy that, um, started exactly the way you did in commercial where he was getting sponsors. He was giving up like 70% of the deal. Uh, long story short, he um, I was actually, interesting enough, I was loaning him money to keep his business going and now he’s, I think he’s got like three, $400 million in real estate. Like he just blew it up over the last five years. Um, so if you want a connection with him, I’m sure he’d love to, really good guy would share any kind of information with you. But he’s scaled up really quickly. He’s raising a lot of money. He’s actually going to, I don’t know if it’s hedge funds, but he’s going to these big funds now, now that he’s done a certain amount of deals and instead of having to raise a hundred thousand at a time or even 500,000 at a time, he’s got these big funds that are giving him millions of dollars at a time, uh, to invest in deals. So he doesn’t have to raise the money from a lot of different investors. So he’d, he’d be a cool guy to talk to.

Danny O’Bannon (18:47):

Yeah. So that’d be great. Yeah, anybody that you can connect me with, that’d be awesome. I might know who you’re talking about, but, um, I haven’t met Corey yet, so,

Tony Javier (18:55):

Yeah. Well, cool. Uh, what else would you like to share? I mean, you’ve done a lot in the last eight years, man, congrats on your success. I’ve been in the business 20 years now, um, eight years. Um, you know, the business has come more and more competitive every single year, especially in the last 10 years. Um, what would you contribute, other than just showing up, what would you contribute to the growth and success of what you’re doing? So not only have you done residential, you’re not doing commercial, you’ve started your own call center, like you, you’re doing all these great things. What would you say the secret to getting to where you are now that you’d wanna share with the listeners?

Danny O’Bannon (19:31):

Yeah, so what I’ve been really good at is like, I don’t pretend to be the the sharpest guy in the room. Um, I, I’m very impatient, so I don’t wanna recreate the wheel anyways because I wanna, if I wanna do something, I wanna do it as quickly as, as humanly possible. So just aligning yourself with the right people in the industry. There’s somebody you know that’s, that has a business model or is is doing something that you wanna do, like see if you can get around that person. Maybe they sell education or maybe you can just bring some value into their business, then they’ll work with you. Um, because I was able to really grow quickly, um, when I started getting around people that, uh, either doing education or, you know, I can create an alliance with them and we can learn from each other, uh, because it’s whatever you want to do, chances are it’s, it’s being done right now at a pretty high level.

Danny O’Bannon (20:19):

And if you can learn that model and, and just model it, you know, you can, you can get into it a lot quicker than spending a, a year, two years to figure it out. And the other thing I would say is it’s focus. Um, ’cause I’ve been really, I’ve had times where I’ve been really focused and had a lot of success and I’ve had times where I haven’t been, and I’m chasing multiple rabbits and I haven’t had as much success. And that actually goes back to commercial. I mean, last year when we started commercial, we turned off single family altogether just to do commercial. And then we realized, well these, when you start a new marketing, it takes three to six months to really hit anyways, right? And then you get your first deal and the commercial, it takes 90 days to close. So we realized we need the consistent deal flow that single family spit off.

Danny O’Bannon (21:02):

So last year was actually really rough because it was like, we built this huge business where we’re doing 15, 20 deals a month, and then we turned it off to get a commercial, and then we had to turn it back on and build it back up, right? So, um, I’m actually in the, the building phase of, of two divisions. Now I’m building back up single family and I’m, I’m building back up or I’m building commercial up, right? So, um, staying focused and waiting till something is truly stabilized before you go off into your next, you know, venture would, would be a huge recommendation because it’s something that, you know, as an entrepreneur, I fail at all the time because I want to do all these things and, uh, I get myself in trouble doing that sometimes.

Tony Javier (21:41):

Yeah. Two key points that I’ll reiterate. One is, um, you know, surround yourself with great people. Find a mentor, find a coach, find a mastermind. Um, find somebody or a group of people that will inspire you, help you grow. You can learn from their successes and, and especially from their failures. And then two, laser focus. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially in general, but real estate investors can chase, uh, chase shiny objects. That’s where I’ve gotten in trouble in the past where I didn’t have my business fully automated to where I started chasing other things, had to come back and regroup and, and, you know, probably lost a few steps in the process, but I’m fortunate enough now that I’ve got great people in place to run certain businesses to where now I have those businesses where I don’t have to be in them. And now I’m chasing the shiny objects which, um, are leading to great things and chasing one at a time. So those are some good, um, some good, good points. So I mentioned call to scale.com, if you guys want to go there and check it out. Um, any, any other, uh, websites or any other ways for people to reach you that you want to, uh, mention before we wrap it up?

Danny O’Bannon (22:46):

Yeah, you can check out our podcast. It’s called Step-by-step REI. Um, we started that because selfishly we wanted to talk to high level people, um, and find out, ’cause people get on podcasts and they’re like, oh, I’m so great. I do this, I do that. But it’s like, how are you doing that? You know? So we really wanted a show that we could dive into somebody’s business and give real value of how they’re doing it. And so we started that. It’s on iTunes, step by step REI. Um, since then we’ve had some people reach out. They wanted, you know, to do some, uh, consulting and, and teach. And so we, we have some courses that kind of show exactly how we have our wholesale business set up, um, which you can see at step-by-step wholesale.com.

Tony Javier (23:27):

That’s awesome, man. Congrats on your success, man. I’m, I’m glad that we connected and, uh, we’ve got a lot of, a lot of synergy and a lot of things that, uh, that I look forward to working on you with. So, um, yeah, get ahold of Danny if you want to, uh, to scale up your business with, with cold calling. And, uh, he’s got some commercial real estate. If you want to invest in some deals, get a hold of him. So, uh, thanks Danny. We’ll connect soon and, uh, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for having me. All right, have a good one.

Tony Javier (23:53):

Thanks for listening. Please make sure you like and subscribe. And if you love this video, you are gonna love these too.