I’m the perfect avatar of someone that sells to an investor. I probably sold more houses to an investor than almost anybody else in Utah. Timing is so important and getting ’em within the week that it happens, we found to be a huge indicator of success. Look out everybody. All of real estate’s going to change. It’s going to be totally

Jason, super excited that we’re on this podcast together. It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these together. I love Jason. He’s so high level. He’s doing things similar to I am where he’s got multiple businesses and multiple streams of income, so it’s great talking to him as a service provider, as a real estate investor and just a general business owner. So Jason, thanks for being on here, man.

Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely, man. So tell us, people have trouble being in business for very long, right? I think the statistic is 90% of businesses go out of business. In the first five years you have created multiple successful businesses. What would you attribute that success to?

I would say probably, definitely intentionality of, so I started in the industry in 2012, so I’ve been in 13 years. First five years was working for somebody else and then the rest has been on my own. Yeah, so five and eight basically is where the two of ’em are. Eight years for creation, Utah, and I think six for investor machine. So I’ve been very intentional about, I don’t want to be, you call it a market of the moment business or a one cycle business or a multi-cycle business, and I’ve been very intentional about wanting to be a multi-cycle business in both. So what do I mean by that? It comes down to individual decisions that you make. So there was an Airbnb boom a long time ago right after COVID. I had Airbnbs, but the Airbnbs that I had all could be converted to single family rentals because Tony Robbins talks about the importance of identifying patterns, identifying patterns, creating patterns, pattern recognition being one of the primary skill sets of success.

So I saw with that, okay, Airbnb probably a thing that’s going to be hot for a little while and then it’s eventually not. So I never did. Have you ever been to Orlando and stayed in one of those 10 bedroom houses that are right next to the others? They’ve got a little pool in the back. It’s like it’s a really cool house to stay at for an Airbnb, but it has one use case. There is no family that’s ever buying that house to move into it. So I want to have multiple exit strategies on those, which turned out to be a good thing. I think I made it up to five to 10 Airbnbs and I now have one that doesn’t even make money year over year. It’s just in a beautiful spot that I want to keep. Same thing with even my flips. I hang out in the bottom half of the market.

I have missed out on millions and millions of dollars in flips, doing high end flips in Park City, Utah, doing east side Salt Lake, big nice flips. The challenge is those things are not super market resistant. So when you have the ups, the downs, the ebbs and flows and everything else, I get less affected by that. So I would say that’s probably answer number one. And then answer number two is having a diversified business as well. Different marketing channels have come in and played really strong and different disposition channels have come in and played really strong. I remember being at a mastermind years ago, and this was probably 2021, interest rates were low, everybody was texting and everybody was selling to hedge funds. They had one lever that they could pull for getting deals and one lever that they could pull for dispositioning deals, text, get a seller, sell it to a hedge fund for a ton, and they were making crazy money on little effort.

And I remember talking in that group saying, Hey, you guys have got not a lot of time to figure out building a real business rather than a market of the moment business. And within six months interest rates went up, hedge funds went away, regulations came in on texting, carriers got ahead of it, and all of a sudden that channel was almost completely gone and that way of dispositioning was gone and all of those businesses were gone. So it’s multiple strong marketing channels, it’s multiple ways to disposition and it’s just constantly fighting to get 1% better every day at the parts of your business and being able to adapt because I swear every year it’s a different group of things that work. So you got to be staying ahead of it. Masterminds come in very handy for this to help you wind up staying ahead of it and say, okay, what are other people doing? What’s working now, I’ve done presentations before where I’ve shown my marketing numbers year over year over year over year, and every year mail is my steady Eddie, like TV is your steady Eddie, but outside of that one, they’re all doing this.

It’s getting big enough to have multiple acquisition managers. You have one acquisition manager that has a great month and then they have a terrible month and you’re riding the wave with them. You have three. All of a sudden those waves tend to even out multiple marketing channels. Those waves tend to even out. You can do sub two, you can do wholesale, you can do flip. Right now the gap in my market between flip and wholesale is the biggest, it’s been 2021. I’m not sure if you wanted an answer this long or not. You can interrupt. I’m

Keep going. Keep going. Yeah, I love it.

Okay, so 2021 I could wholesale for a hundred percent of rv, right? The summer of 2021, I’m thinking, okay, I buy this for 200, put in 40 in rehabs and I can sell it for three 10. When it’s done, I’d send it out to the cash buyers list and someone would just pay three 10 for it. Right? Then they were banking on appreciation and everything else on the market was just so hot. So what was I doing then? I was wholesaling almost everything and what I wasn’t wholesaling, every single thing I remodeled, I kept as a rental because I could get a commercial 3% interest rate that didn’t even show up as one of my 10 loans. You got to look and see what the market gives and take advantage of it. Right now I’m doing a higher percentage of flips than I ever have because wholesale is still there and it works, but that number is spread.

Now all of a sudden it’s like we traditionally average like 75 to 80% of a RV what we wholesale for. Now we’re starting to talk 72, 71, that type of range. Now all of a sudden it’s like, well crap, now I’m leaving 30, 40, 50 grand every time on the table instead of 15 to 20 guess we better figure out getting in and remodeling. So it’s being able to see patterns, make adjustments based off of what the market is giving and having multiple tools in your belt to average out the ebbs and flows and highs and lows that come with varying market challenges.

So what it sounds like to me in just listening to you, and I kind of knew this before a little bit, is being market resilient or just resilient in general? Because as a business owner, especially real estate investing, I mean real estate investing is so up and down. You can make 102 hundred grand one month and you lose 50 grand the next month or the next two months and you just don’t know when those cycles are going to come. You can plan for ’em, you can try and gauge them, but they just happen. And so to be market resilient, you just have to have multiple exit strategies. Just like you said, you and I are pretty similar in our, so Jason does direct mail for clients. I do TV for clients. The ones that I feel like stick around, the ones that are consistent are the ones that they have multiple exit strategies. They have good solid operations. They’re not, like you said, flying by the seat of their pants and using one thing that’s working right now. They’re using something that’s working now and other things in the mix that if this one thing slows down, then these other things pick it up multiple

Because they will. It’s a guarantee, right? I’ve never done anything that is perfectly consistent, like from a marketing channel standpoint, they’re all some degree of up and down quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter.

Yep. That was going to be my next thing is you can’t just have one marketing strategy. We actually do have multiple people that luckily TV has carried them through and I’m sure you have that with direct mail, but you know what? Things happen. We’ve had slow months with TV where we’re lucky we had direct mail or had PPC or whatever it is to carry it and then staying in your lane. So I have a quick story for you. So you may know this. I did gap funding for real estate investors a few years ago and I knew what to do and I would teach this stuff, but I was getting into these higher end flips with investors because the market was hot and I thought, you know what? If something happens, I can figure it out and I can’t tell you how many deals I lost 50 to a hundred grand on because the $600,000 house, actually one of ’em went from eight 50 to six 50 because the interest rate change, and that’s one of the deals we thought we were going to make a hundred grand ended up losing a hundred grand. And so staying in that first time home buyer range, even now we have some properties that are a little bit above that, but we don’t have any that are too high. And if you can be in that first time home buyer range or lower, that’s just another way to keep yourself resilient because when the market does change, it’s usually the higher price properties that take a hit because 0.5 to one to 2% can be a big deal on an $800,000 house, not quite as much on 150 to $250,000 house.

So we are, and you’re dealing with the buyer that has a choice at the higher price point rather than the buyer that has a need. It’s your upgrade buyers that are like, okay, I could sell my house and my current mortgage of 1400 a month and I can get a house that’s 800 more square feet. That’d be cool, but I’m going to jump, I’m going to take my interest rate from 2.8 to 6.8. So my 1400 a month monthly payment just went to 3,400 a month. You know what? Actually maybe we’ll remodel. I think we’ll remodel, we’ll just remodel. We’ll make that house a little nicer. That’ll bell be great. I love the neighborhood.

Want to get motivated sellers that nobody knows about, introducing 10 x tv. If you want to create credibility in your market, find deals that nobody else knows about and crush your competition, you need to check into TV commercials. It is the new buzz in the real estate investing industry since we introduced it several years ago. I’ve been using TV commercials myself for the last 12 years and it’s absolutely crushed it. So if you want to learn how to get on TV and to do something that little to no people are doing right now, go to claim my market.com. Again, that’s claim my market.com. We usually only work with two investors per market. So if you’re interested, reach out to us and book a call to see if you can claim your market before anybody else does. Now back to the show, well, not only that, but when you have shifts in the markets, people that could afford an $800,000 house maybe can’t anymore. The markets change their job, they’re not making as much money or their stocks took a huge hit and they may have to downsize. Those are the people that are putting their houses on the market too and flooding the market and making it, I don’t want to say more competitive, but just more supply on the market. So

I have two more arguments for that case as well where I actually think, I believe that’s always been true, but I think it’s going to become increasingly more true. Argument number one is at least in my market, it’s going to vary for a lot of markets, but in terms of single family homes, the primary new supply that’s being built is for, I’ll call ’em 3,500 to 5,000 square foot houses. If you go to see a new build, that’s what you’re going to see. You don’t get a lot of 1800 square foot houses unless they’re like townhouses or row homes that have shared yards, et cetera. And so from a supply and demand standpoint, you’ve got more and more supply going into that place and not a whole lot of new construction supply. It just doesn’t make sense. And then problem number two, the jobs that AI is coming for is the person that’s going to buy that $800,000 house. I don’t know that that buyer has an extremely bright future over the next 10 years by and large. I don’t think that that’s a portion of the market that’s going to significantly grow to keep up with your supply that’s being created there. So I’m not super bullish on that price point period. I think you’re safer to flip a $2 million home than you are an $800,000 home right now.

Well that’s interesting you say that about ai. I’d love to have this conversation. I’d love to get your opinion on it. So first of all, AI I would’ve assumed would have taken out the 150 to $250,000 buyer because those are the lower paying jobs that can be easily disrupted by ai. So you think that it might be the mid to upper level people that may not have a job. Why do you think that?

So AI is replacing a lot of your knowledge work. So let’s take a radiologist for example. A radiologist has been rock solid for forever, but there’s already studies showing AI can more successfully identify problems in an x-ray or an MRI or a CT scan than what a radiologist can look at your developers. I mean AI is not going to completely replace developers, but one really good developer with AI helping them can do the work of eight to 10. So you have a company that used to have 10 developers, now they have one or two developers with AI helping them. That job market is going to slow and you’re going to have a higher unemployment in your white collar type of work. That’s two of what could be a whole bunch of examples. And yes, you’re going to get hit lower as well. I mean over time AI is going to come for all sorts of different jobs and sectors and I’ve seen graphs online of okay, this year is when we think it comes for here and here and here and here. I mean even you and I aren’t safe. There’s arguments that AI is going to make for a much better CEO than what we are too. So you have the easy low hanging fruit like drivers. You’re a semi-truck driver, you’re an Uber driver, the technology is already there. If you ever driven in Phoenix, there’s already self-driving cars driving around in there. It’s just waiting for government regulation to take those out. Yes, you have those, but there’s a lot of white collar work that’s definitely at risk because of this.

Very interesting. So I’ve listened to some podcasts recently about AI and you have two ends of the spectrum and then there’s obviously some that are in between. I heard a guy the other day said by 2027 he thinks 90% of the workforce is going to be unemployed. So that’s the extreme. AI is just going to disrupt things dramatically. And then there’s the other side which I think is probably, I had to say in the middle might be where it lands, but then there’s some that say, I was actually talking to Steve t train yesterday the day before. So first of all, he thinks that real estate transactions will be done from A to Z with AI by the middle of next year, which I think there’s going to be some human interaction in there. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a hundred percent ai, but then that takes a lot of wholesalers out of the mix if computers and robots and these companies can just go in and plug in AI and start doing deals where all the deals are going to go. So anyway, so moving over to what other people say, which I’m kind of a little bit more towards this side in that, first of all, Steve says that there’s not enough computer capacity for AI to take over as much as people think because if you think about if everybody’s using ai, you have to build computers, you have to have servers and

All these things processing. Yeah, I’ve heard Sam Altman say that a significant portion of his every day is just calling anybody he can to get more processing power along the way. That is their primary constraint

And you have the energy behind it. You have the logistics behind getting it and the storage and the real estate to buy to put that all in there. So that’s one component. The other thing is I don’t know that as many business owners, so the big companies, yes they are going to take it and they’re going to run with it a hundred miles an hour, but a big portion of, and I don’t know what the scenario is between Fortune 500 companies and just the everyday mom and pop or even just businesses like ours, but there’s a lot of those businesses down below that are not going to implement ai, which I think is a large portion of the United States. And so they’re going to be behind and it may be 3, 5, 7 years before they even start touching it and touching it is a lot different than making it good enough to where it starts replacing people. So I’m kind of curious where you are on this spectrum.

So I research this stuff a lot. That’s our job. We’re the CEOs, we’re the visionaries. There are people that work for us who are relying on us to successfully predict the future, and AI is the biggest disruptor in the space. So I listened to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of things, spent a lot of time thinking about this. So first off, there’s things where I say, where I’m like, Hey guys, this is what it is. Go do this. And then there’s what I call a gospel according to Jason, which is these are just my thoughts and this thing may age horribly or it may age well, I have no idea. So in, so I think you nailed it right on the head. There’s a difference between what AI is going to be capable of and what AI is going to be widespread adopted to do.

I have more faith in AI’s capability than I do in AI’s people’s willingness to adopt it as quickly as the very aggressive people project and I listen to the podcasts of the crazy smart guys that are really really into this and not just the Sam Altman’s, but even the moga dots and all sorts of other people that are utopias coming and we’re going to have universal basic income in short periods of time. There’s going to be huge unrest. I listened to all of it, it’s all fascinating, but I’ll use just one example of something that I think about. So we just had the big realtor lawsuit sit or Burnett where all of the brokerages had to settle for millions and millions of dollars. What were the headlines when all of this was happening about realtors and the buyer’s agent and what was going to happen? It was like buyer’s agent’s dead, right? 80% of all realtors are going to be unemployed within a year. The buyer’s agent is dead. Everything’s going to change because of this. It’s going to be revolutionary. Look out everybody, all of real estate’s going to change. It’s going to be totally automated. And I don’t know about you, but so of all of the flips you’ve sold in the last year and properties you’ve sold, how many have you sold without a buyer’s agent

Commission? Zero? I think

Me, it’s none, right? And I would love to sell without a buyer’s agent commission. The thing that’s so annoying is like precepts or Burnett, I could list 2.5% and every agent would just send the offer over at two point a half instead of 3%. But now post, since I can’t list it, it’s almost like the buyer’s agent is double energized. I wind up going to war over a half a percent on every single one, and I have paid 3% more often post-it or Burnett than I did pre sit or Burnett. But yet nevertheless, every article coming from Inman, every article coming from any other place was like death of the buyer’s agent. Half of all realtors gone within a year or two. I think people underestimate humans’ desire to keep doing things the same way. Now that’s what I’m saying in terms of short term projection.

So by a year from now, year and a half from now, two years from now, I’m not in that camp, but look at the internet, look at the car, look at flying and everything else. It starts with a few and it works its way to the vast majority. So over the long term I can see us getting there, but I don’t think it’s going to be the degree of crazy rapid adoption that a lot of the most AI people think. But I do think that I am in the camp that there’s going to come a point where you’re going to have fairly widespread unemployment and you’re going to have deflation. Stuff’s going to get really inexpensive to make, and so things are going to get a lot less expensive. People are going to have a much harder time finding jobs, and I think that you’re going to see the gap in America.

We think the middle class is a not a privilege, but if you look at the rest of the world, there’s not a lot of places that have the same degree of middle class. If you were to ask me to project the future, and I may very well be wrong, I think you’re going to see a massive widening of rich and poor. I think the rich are going to be extremely rich and more limited and you’re lower class are going to be much higher. And I wasn’t this way until the last six months. I’m not typically a fan of universal basic income type of things, but I don’t see a path forward outside of some version of universal basic income. Eventually when you have 60, 70, 80% of people unemployed, but that can also get things quite cheap, some basic universal income I think goes pretty far. So how does that relate to the real estate investor? I want to hang out in affordable housing. I want to master pad splitting and building and offering either affordable housing or luxury. You need to be in one of those two places. You need to either be providing for the richest of the rich or the poor. This middle class that we’ve had for forever I think has a 10 year time horizon. There’s my total guess that I may be dead wrong on all of it.

Yeah, I think 10 years we can all agree it’s going to be way different than it is now, but some people think the 10 years that most people think is going to be more like one to two years. So my concern is I’m stocking up on a lot of rental properties right now. So we buy and flip houses and then we keep a lot as rentals. And I would say, gosh, last year we kept, was it 40%? Yeah, 40% of what we bought as rentals. This year it’s going to be probably 30%. And my concern is I stock up on all these properties and all of a sudden you’ve got unemployment, you’ve got the stock market that crashes or takes some huge dips and then all of a sudden the real estate market takes a dip. What are your thoughts on that? What is your mode right now? Are you mainly just like, Hey, I just want to get rid of everything right now just because I don’t know what the future is, or are you also kind of betting on real estate and seeing that there’s probably still going to be some good appreciation in the next five years?

Yeah, great question. So you and I are a little bit apples and oranges in this regard. I would almost need to answer the question as though I lived in Wichita because the challenge is in Utah, I picked up all of my rentals up to 2022 and I think I’ve added one or two seller finances since I would love to add more, but prices did this, rents did this, and then interest rates made mortgages all the way up here. We were a really tough to cashflow state before, but if I want to go get A-D-S-E-R loan at a 1.2, I have to leave a hundred grand to 200 grand in the HEPs,

Let alone, and then that’s to get it to cashflow $200 a month. So I’ve got 150 grand into this house and I’m getting my 200 a month cashflow back. It’s just so exciting. I’m not growing the rental portfolio right now just due to market constraints, but I would still, if I was in a market like yours, I would still bet on real estate. And here’s the thing, it’s an inflation hedge, it’s a deflation hedge. As inflation gets higher and worse, et cetera, housing, the cost of housing moves in accordance with it, especially from an inflation standpoint. And as long as you’re buying affordable housing, people are going to have to have a place to live and you may have a big growth in section eight housing over time of all of your choices and places you can be. I think housing is still really, really strong.

Yeah, I think affordable housing a lot of people think is an oxymoron these days because the house man, so I’m the same way. I bought a lot of rentals before 2022 and actually 2021 I saw the writing on the wall and I started stacking up on properties and I think I kept 25 properties that year. It might’ve even been a little bit more. And then this last couple years I started looking at those and we didn’t even update our schedule real estate, and I just saw that the house that was selling for one 20 is now selling for 180. The house that was selling for 180 is now selling for 2 40, 2 50. And I’m like, oh my gosh. So I ended up starting to sell some of those and doing 10 30 ones and I am seeing that slow down. And so I was under the assumption that it would slow down, but now I think it might even just flat line. So I’m just reconsidering that, right?

Most smart market people that I know are predicting flat line and or gradual growth, the period of biggest growth in real estate values for the next little while is likely behind us. But I mean what we saw from 2020 to 20 22, 20 23, that space was like you look over the last a hundred years, it was one of the most extreme periods of appreciation. If you’re looking to hold really looking for short-term appreciation, then I don’t know that rentals are going to be the thing that would most help you reach that goal, but you still have the tax benefits you still have paying down, you still have an overall secure spot. So for me, that’s a good spot for part of your portfolio. But what you’re doing is probably your best case scenario, which is it’s the rich dad poor dad game. You start with rentals and then you sell those and then you 10 31 into something bigger and then it’s maximizing your return on your equity. And because otherwise now that you’ve appreciated that 50 grand across all of your properties, that’s money just sitting there. That’s not necessarily making you as much money as it could be. So you get a new loan all the way up to that, you take that equity, you roll it into the next bigger thing, you roll it into the next bigger thing and ultimately I would just say keep it affordable, not in your mid-range price point. My suggestion,

Yeah, I am not betting on appreciation as much. It is more of a tax play and it’s hard without visually showing this, but I have found that most of the properties that I buy, I can keep that property cost segregate, the purchase price less the land. Of course, I can take the renovations usually 50 to 80,000, write most of those off. I think like 80% of those I can write off in the first year and by the time I do the math on all of that, if I made 25,000 flipping this property, I would pay taxes on that. So let’s take just for round numbers, another 50% out of there. I’m bringing home 12 five. If I keep that as a rental property, I actually have $30,000 in cash tax benefits. So even if I don’t have the huge appreciation, even if I don’t have huge cashflow because a lot of these properties aren’t cash flowing, I mean it’s really hard.

This is a very difficult to cashflow market

Even in a Wichita, Kansas where I think, I don’t even know what our medium price point is now. It used to be like one 30 not too long ago. Now it’s like two 50 and that’s pretty low considering compared to most markets and we still can’t cashflow very well. Hey, let’s dive into investor machine. You and I run similar businesses. So investor machine, Jason helps people with direct mail. So what he’s done is he’s taken his system that he’s used over the years and basically is plugging it into other people’s markets and we use investor machine as well. So I’m kind of curious what you’re seeing from your clients. And then also is there anything else direct mail that’s changed that you would like to discuss as well?

Yeah, overall we’re seeing direct mail super solid. Previously you had a lot of people doing texting and cold calling to get deals and there was a decent chunk of the market share that was going towards. You have a certain number of sellers that are going to sell and they’re going to be split up across your marketing channels as texting and cold calling have pulled out. We’ve watched Mail Digital and TV grow to fill those same sources. And my favorite part of direct mail specifically that actually ties in pretty well to this conversation is the ability to target. I like hanging out at the low end. I like these zip codes and in the market, we were talking a little about this a little bit before, it’s getting harder and harder to disposition in the current market and there’s pockets that do really well. There’s pockets that aren’t doing it as well. I love being able to use my investor machine to build a buy box to say, these are the areas I want to target. This is the price points I want to target. This is the type of home I want to target and go and just hit the type of inventory that I really, really want to be able to go and hit.

People always ask, Hey, what’s the best list? What’s the best creative? So I’ll give some quick answers on lists and creatives. List wise, your niche lists that are going to perform the best is going to be like your probates. Notice of defaults are on the rise. They have a high likelihood to sell to investor, but they tend to respond better to an even more direct form of marketing like knocking on their door than postcards. But the postcards definitely still work there. Your evictions, your water shutoff notices, those type of lists are going to be your highest best performers and it’s the ones that you can’t just go pull from a prop stream type place. You have to actually go and directly get from the county, from the courthouse. Those are the ones that we’ve found perform the best in part of what we do is we go and have virtual assistants actually go get into Sedgwick County and pull those things out one at a time, but for any type of scale, the lists that work the best are going to be the ones that are embrace some version of predictive modeling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, AKA, okay, kind of like what Facebook does.

You’re building a lookalike audience. You’re saying, here is everybody that sold to an investor, here’s all of my successes, here’s all my successful calls. Then you’re going and training a model to say, okay, this is what success looks like based off of that. Here’s every homeowner in Sedgwick County. Who should I go and market to going forward? It runs a hundred million tests across all of your different lists and what all the different marriages and partnerships are to say, okay, if their notice of default plus vacant plus a home built in older than 1960, that one is like, holy crap, that’s it, versus these other homes aren’t it? And then get a specific score per property. So from a list standpoint, that’s like super elevator version. Those are the types of things that are going to be working the best right now.

The thing I like about what you guys do is you have virtual assistants that are pulling data somewhat in real time. Your lists are updated every single month, whereas if you go to a prop stream or some of these other data sources, they’re getting stuff that’s at least 30 days, maybe 60, 90 days old. So that’s something I really like about what you do. Then you’re not competing with as many people because you have the fresh lists. They’re more accurate and sometimes by the time you mail ’em, if you have old lists, they may have already sold to somebody else. So it doesn’t really do much justice,

Especially with notice of defaults. We looked at it recently, a lot of different national providers from, because as much as we love going and pulling lists manually with virtual assistants, it’s incredibly cost prohibitive, right? It’s expensive to go and do manually one at a time filtering through. You’re looking at a probate, you see the name, you got to find the representative. You got to see whether or not they own an address or whether or not they own property. You got to marry all the addresses together and put it into one record. So always on the hunt for anybody else that’s done it at the level that I need that I can just buy because it saves us a bunch of time, effort, and energy. And the problem with so many of the notice of default options is it’s like, dude, by the time you mail it’s already foreclosed, you might as well not even mail that list.

You’re just trying to get the people that successfully got the NOD extended or the Liz Pendens depending on what market you’re in extended. So yes, especially for your motivations, timing is so important and getting ’em within the week that it happens, we found to be a huge indicator of success. But I will say that’s classic investor machine, what we’ve been doing for forever. The big addition that we’ve really brought in now is the AI machine learning. And we’re now, so we know in a market, every market is wildly different. Hey, in this market you would think evictions would be a hot list and you would think it would be great, but for whatever reason, sellers here right after evicting a tenant aren’t like, you know what? Screw it. I hate this house. I want to sell it. They double down. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense to me, but they double down.

So maybe they appreciate. Do you think it’s because of the appreciation? They have a bunch of equity now and they just want to keep riding it?

Yeah, so I try to play the guess why game, but I found the more I play the guess why game, the more it just leads me to be wrong. I can’t tell you how many times. That’s why when we had the AI conversation, I was like, all right, here we go again. We’re going to play the Jason guess game

Because

I’ve made so many guesses over this last 10 years that I’ve learned that I’m not a perfect guesser. I’ve done plenty right? I’ve done plenty wrong. When COVID hit, I was like, oh my gosh, sky’s falling. And I told my grandma to sell her house because price values were about to tank, and I was listening to all sorts of smart people that were like, oh, yeah, this is the Black Swan event. Real estate prices are crashing. I was like, grandma, you got to sell your house right now. She was looking to build, so she wound up living with my aunt and I fire sold my whole inventory, and then I sat and waited for prices to crash, and what happened went right up. So definitely my guesser isn’t always right, but the data doesn’t lie. So for whatever reason, in one market, evictions are amazing in another market, evictions are trash in one market, probates are amazing, and on another market they’re not so good.

It just varies a little bit. So rather than just going and mining and pulling all those lists and then saying, Hey, we love evictions. We’re going to send them, we now are applying our efforts equal to who sells to an investor. So we’re learning in advance in the market, this is what’s ideal. This is the avatar of a person who sells to an investor, and then we’re finding out everything more that we can and honing in on those motivations even more. And that doesn’t just apply to motivations, that applies to zip codes, that applies to how old it is, how new it is. That applies to the type of owner that applies to whether or not the owner has pets, whether or not they’re a smoker, whether the way they vote their age. All of these other things play into likelihood of somebody choosing to sell to an investor.

And we’ve found as much or more success in taking our motivations, but then applying them through the lens of who sold to an investor in the past, and let’s go hit the same thing. Awesome. And the cool part is we just this year built my favorite thing, which is what I call the time machine where we can go and make all these assumptions and guesses and everything else, and then I can go run a mail campaign for you for the last six months with everything that we just learned and see how it would’ve done month over month over month, how we would’ve done. I’m like, oh, okay. We actually didn’t do as well as we thought. Now we’re going to try it this way, run it through the time machine, run it through the time machine. Boom, we’ve got the perfect mail campaign, now let’s go hit it.

So if you guys are doing any kind of marketing on your own and not using a professional, I think you’re kind of missing the boat. So many little logistics that if you’re trying to save a little bit of money and do it yourself, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. So if you guys are even thinking about direct mail, I’ve got some really good questions for Jason coming up here, but I want to give Jason a plug just because when I was doing direct mail back in the day, we were doing a lot of it ourselves, and then we saw a lot of competition and things just kind of tanked. And then when I heard about Investor Machine, we started direct mail back up and we let them do it and let them do the updated list, let them do the creatives. They’re working with a ton of other investors so they know what’s working, what’s not working throughout the US with a ton of different clients. So I would definitely recommend reaching out to investor machine to see, first of all, if your market’s available. I think you guys do semi exclusivity kind of like we do. You’re not going to saturate the market with too many people. So if people want to find out about that, where would they go? Jason

Investor machine.com, go to investor machine.com and then just book to learn more.

And by the way, I drink the same Kool-Aid. I pay a professional to do my SEO, pay a professional to do my PPC, I pay investor machine to do this, and I’m hoping to get my brand set and be ready to go for TV for next year, and you’re going to be my first call. I just don’t see any world where I would try to figure out any of that stuff on my own. I’ve been down that road. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, and for me, I couldn’t compete with the knowledge and information and data that you have or that investor machine has. So we put a phone number for our clients that opt in on our creative so that for the millions of pieces that we send out every month, we get results back. We see all the calls that come back in.

So we’re running a hundred split tests a month of, Hey, okay, on this creative we’re going to go male name versus female name on this one, it’s the exact same creative, but we’re going to go this blue instead of that blue, we’re going to go orange, we’re going to go yellow, we’re going to all of these different things. We’re running all these tests. And then what we’re finding back is this is who called, and these are the addresses that called. So you’ve got the wide area that you can analyze, which is, Hey, who sold to an investor? Then you’ve got the much more area you can analyze, which is who called in response to a mailer and sold to a client just like me, because it’s a different person. You have the person that may sell to an investor. For me, I am the perfect avatar of someone that sells to an investor.

I probably sold more houses to an investor than almost anybody else in Utah because I do a lot of purchased wholesales where we want to provide extra convenience to the seller. So I get it under contract for 200 and I just close a week later. I give the seller the month to get out. We come in and trash out the house, and then I turn around and sell it to an investor. I’m a great avatar of someone that sells to an investor. I do it like a hundred times a year, but I’ve never one time called a postcard ever. I mean, how often do you get postcards in the mail?

All the time. I even get my own postcards in the mail sometimes,

Right? Yeah. Every time I get the mail, I get a postcard. I’m not the avatar of a person that’s going to call on a postcard. So it’s two different things that we’re looking to stay ahead of is one, who’s the avatar that’s going to sell to an investor. I’m very much so included in that two, who’s the avatar that would call the number on a postcard? I’ve never done it one time despite getting one in the mail, literally every time I get the mail and selling a property to an investor twice a week. So yeah, so that’s why we train on all of the data of not just who sells to an investor, but we also want to know who has sold to you in the past and specifically who has called based off of your list. And that gives us amazing data, both to help our list get better, but it also gives us amazing data to help our creatives get better because we’ve all sensed stuff. I mean my, I’ve got a whole drawer with just stacks and stacks and stacks of postcards, things that we’ve tested, others have tested, et cetera. It’s really cool to be able to say, okay, how have each of these different things worked? And I can tell you a female name is going to get you a better response than a male name, and both of those are going to get you a way better response than a corporate name. If you just brand that thing. Remind me your company’s name again. Professional

Home buyers.

Professional home buyers. I was going to say priority. So if you just throw professional home buyers on there and the name Tony Javier is nowhere and there’s no person, you’re almost a half results. So you can have a banging list and all you need to do is put professional home buyers on there instead of Tony and you, almost half to your results you could do. I’ve told you about lots of times I’ve been wrong in the past. I don’t know if I have it. I’ll probably spare you the me searching, but I have a creative that I was so excited about. I paid a graphic designer to design it. I paid a creative writer to write it, and it was like perfect. I presented on this thing, I went all in on it and I broke my rules. Usually I make myself do the heavy testing of super new things, and then once it goes well, I send it to others.

But this one I was so excited about and so convinced that I told everybody at the start, and it totally tanked for all of us, even though everything seemed good and right, it was one of my lowest worst performers. And then we’ll have other creatives that I just like, I don’t like ’em that much. One example, the street view on a house, street view sucks. It gets people pissed off. No one likes to see a picture of their house on there. Another example, the check letter. It’s just slimy sending somebody a fake check with a value on their house and everything else. I don’t like sending them, I would never want to send them, but they work. And so you can only know that it’s going to be a really expensive budget to test every different thing along the way. Or you can say, okay, tell me what I do.

In markets like mine, it does vary so much from market, and I’m sure you see the exact same thing with tv. Life would be so much easier if I could apply the same formula across everywhere in America, but we’d have way more national investors if you could do that. Most of the people that I know that went to another market wound up coming back with their tail between their legs eventually including great operators because every market just behaves different. And so it’s a chance to learn how each different individual micromarket works along the way, but it’s the part that the client brings that helps us be successful too. We take everything we know from similar markets, they bring us what they know about their market. Ultimately it leads to a top-notch, high performing campaign.

Yeah. Awesome. This has been such a great conversation. This has gone in different directions. I didn’t think it would go. I have two more questions to wrap this up with you. Number one is, is there one mistake that you feel like you’ve made that you can give an example on, or one mistake most investors or business owners make that you want to talk about that if they didn’t make this mistake could make a huge difference in their business?

I’m going to pick this one. I’ve both done this one and I’ve seen plenty of people. I’ve done. The hard part is it’s like I just had to run through the 10,010 million mistakes I’ve made along the way to figure out what the big one is. I would say operating without a clear enough vision is probably number one. You’ve got Gary and Susan Harper and Sharper Business that work a lot of this. You’ve got the book EOS. You’ve got, I think Gary’s is called Rise. There’s another one. What’s Eddie? I just heard.

Yeah, I just heard him talking the other day. I know what you’re talking about.

Yes. I can’t remember what his is called. Empire. Empire Empire. That’s what it’s, you’ve got Empire, you’ve got Scaling Up EOS is going to be probably your most popular. I was way too late to fully adopt those things, and I think that was probably one of my biggest mistakes. And I’ll even just compare 24 to 25, 24, and there’s a difference between doing it to check it off and really coming in and doing it right, running those processes. So 24, I didn’t run any type of solid EOS process. I had kind of like your standard goal setting of like, Hey, we set goals at the start of the year and we were like, Hey, we’re going to go do this Wahoo High Five Go team. Let’s go do it. But I didn’t fully go through an EOS type process of this is my exact vision and this is what I’m going to come and do, and I see it and I know it, and I’m really excited and passionate about it in each of these different areas of my lives.

And then I’m going to get together quarterly and I’m going to review it and I’m going to figure out what are the specific rocks that I need to do to get those things done. And rather than having a hundred priorities in a department, it gets one. And the company as a whole has four things total. This is all we’re going to do. Really getting in and operating to a higher level. The EOS process, and again, I’m calling it EOS, but call it Rise, call it Empire, call it EOS, call it scaling up. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Pick the one that’s going to be best for you. I’m a huge fan of Gary and Susan, especially with Rise, but I would say that’s probably the biggest mistake is not running that to the level that I should have. And same thing. And so you and I were talking earlier before we started recording about KPIs and knowing and understanding your numbers, that’s worked into that consistency of meetings, consistency of vision, consistency of execution, like go get and run that. If you’re super poor, go read Traction and Self Implement EOS. If you’ve got plenty of money and need the help, give Gary and Susan a call and they’ll come in and sit with you for two days. Build it all out together. I would say that’s probably my

Suggestion. Awesome. And people also love to hear success stories and kind of motivational type things. What is one accomplishment or one thing that you’ve done that you want to brag about a little bit.

I will say for me, the ability to give back is probably one that I’m really, really excited about. My journey started, so I graduated with a degree in radiation therapy and I don’t have your typical entrepreneur makeup, DNA of the Maverick that’s out going to go take a bunch of risks. Totally unemployable, couldn’t work for anybody else. That’s not my, I got a degree in the sciences, but I read books like Rich Dad, poor Dad, like Richest Man in Babylon and got interested in real estate investing. Got a job, did it for five years, eventually started my own thing. But a big reason why I wanted to do it was I wanted to be able to improve the lives of those around me. And so obviously I’ve been able to build a total dream life for myself along the way. Been able to meet and exceed every different financial goal.

All of the things I set out to do was able to do, but along the way I’ve been able to help a lot of other people reach their goals too. Every sibling I have or family member I have is in a home or with multiple that I was connected to on all of ’em. I’m able to take my family all sorts of different cool places, my extended family, all sorts of different cool places throughout the world. And I would say what I’ve been able to learn through the struggle of the journey, I’m able to give good advice for different circumstances that come up for people along the way. So I would say the brag I would pick is the difference I’ve been able to make in others’ life through my real estate journey, while also building a great life for me. And then last one, the part I never talk about, that’s actually the hardest thing of everything that I’ve done, and that is everything I’ve done. I also have six kids, including five E kids in five years, and I started my entrepreneur journey three months before we had kid four and five in five years, and now we’re up to six.

I did not realize you had six kids. I have known you for quite a while, and I don’t think I ever knew that you had six kids the way you hold yourself. I would be a mess having six kids. I have one kid and that’s enough for me,

And I’m a total a DD kid. I mean, you’ve seen, I’ve had people say, I watch your podcast on 0.5. You’re the only person I ever watch a podcast on 0.5. I’m usually a one and a half guy. I’m moving fast, his brain’s going. And a lot of my kids inherited that. Like, dude, it is fricking wild at the Lewis house. It is never quiet. It is crazy. It is chaos. It’s not like a bunch of calm just sitting in church watching the speaker. It’s like, I’m going to get up there and play the piano type of kids in the middle of the service.

That’s awesome, dude. Well, hey, I consider you a friend, man. We’ve known each other for a while. I love these conversations. This is awesome. Just to be able to catch up and hear what you’ve got going on and successes you’ve had, and appreciate you coming on adding value. And if anybody wants to get ahold of Jason again, go to investor machine.com if you want to crush direct mail. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it, man.

Awesome. Thanks Tony.