UNIN 21 | How To Raise Money

How To Raise Money To Get Through Tough Times With Brandon Brittingham

  With the current market we’re dealing with, raising money is a challenge for everyone, especially the investors. Many business owners make a mistake as they walk on a journey of a sale’s mind instead of walking through a consumer’s mind. In this episode, Brandon Brittingham shares how you can raise money with a business owner mindset to get through tough times. He also shares his experience on how he was willing to gamble to build a massive brand in the first recession. Tim Herriage took the chance to squeeze out some more insights from Brandon, not only about how he maintains trust from an ethical point of view but also how it impacts doing business. Tune in to this episode to gain more gems of wisdom from Brandon. — Watch the episode here   Listen to the podcast here   How To Raise Money To Get Through Tough Times With Brandon Brittingham I’m with an absolute rock star. Brandon Brittingham. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you. Thank you. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself. I do a lot of cliff notes. Anything that has to do with a home sale. I own a company around it. I have been in the investment space for a long time too. Why I originally got into real estate was to be in the investment space, and then I got into the retail side. I tried to create Amazon in real estate to how we can make it easy on the consumer. I have always had an affinity and love for investing in real estate. I have always done that too. I was lucky enough to sit next to you at Kent Clothier’s boardroom in Chicago. I remember I was sitting there, and I had no idea who you were. I got up and spoke. Sometimes I’m a little bit of the alpha in the room. People don’t want to give me feedback, and you like popped up and quietly, “I can help you with that problem.” I heard the authority come out. It was like, “What did you do then?” I was like, “Who is this guy?” The more and more the day got on, it was so fun to watch you pour into people. I’m excited to have you here. I start every episode with the bottom line up front. Do me a favor, take two minutes, tell the audience the single most important things in this market they need to be doing, avoiding, focused on, and changing. Whatever you think the bottom line is for this real estate investor. In this market, a lot of people try to make the mistake is timing the real estate market. If you look at real estate over the whole, you are going to make money if you understand how to underwrite a deal. If I could do anything over again, one thing that I would tell people is to figure out how to go after the bigger deals because it’s another zero. Your underwriting is the same, and everything is the same. In a lot of apartment deals and things like that I have done, the underwriting is easier than a smaller single-family portfolio, and it is way less pain. The appreciation and the economies of scale that I have gotten from apartments are insane. Asset classes like apartments and single-family houses, over time, are going to beat anything that’s out there. It’s one of the safest places to place your money but people are always trying to like, “Should I buy now? Can I time the market?” You underwrite a deal. It’s a good deal or a bad deal. Over time, if you buy and hold, the key to wealth is buying and holding and not emotionally selling and buying on a whim. Underwriting is being smart about what you do with your money and holding for the long-term. If you study and pay attention to anybody that’s wealthy, they hold cash-producing assets. They never pay taxes on it. Keep buying more and figure out how to never sell it. Pull their cash out of it to live off of but they never sell anything. If you follow that model in real estate over time, it’s going to make you wealthy. Don’t care about timing the market. Now, we are going to see some pain across the United States. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s real. There’s going to be perceived pain from people that were probably smaller investors or they didn’t know what they were doing. There’s opportunity. I would tell everybody to raise as much money as they can. Stack capital because there’s going to be an opportunity. The bulk of my wealth that I have was because I bought a ton of stuff between 2008 and 2011. Now, those assets that I bought are 10X and 15X. Stack capital now and wait for the opportunity. Opportunity is going to come but if you see a good deal now, don’t wait. If you know how to underwrite a deal and you are going to hold it for the long-term, you are going to make money either way. Don’t buy and sell. Buy and hold. Buy and hold make you wealthy. Stack cash and assets and take advantage of the compound effect of appreciation. Too many people underestimate the compound effect of appreciation. I spoke at Scale & Escape and was looking for some good examples. Besides Tim, the lender tells them, “Buy houses and always pay interest.” It was an interesting thing. I found that in 1971, Warren Buffett bought a home in Laguna Beach and borrowed $120,000 against that home. The CNBC host says, “Why would you have taken a mortgage? You didn’t need it.” He said, “The interest rates were a little high but I figured I could do better with the money than the interest would cost me.” That house he bought for $150,000. It was worth $11 million when he sold it

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Wholetailing: Flipping Real Estate With No Money With Travis Johnson

  Have you ever thought about flipping real estate deals but don’t know how to do it? You’re not alone. Travis Johnson, a successful house flipper in Minnesota and author of the Seven Figure Flipping Book, learned how to flip real estate the hard way. With no books or training when he first started, he did everything wrong and took financial losses. Today, Travis shares his experience on how to get involved in flipping real estate deals with no money, wholesaling strategies, and treating real estate investing as a real business. Tune in! — Watch the episode here   Listen to the podcast here   Wholetailing: Flipping Real Estate With No Money With Travis Johnson Welcome to the show. With me in this episode is Travis Johnson. Travis, how are you? I’m very good. Thanks for having me here. I knew you from a mastermind but why don’t you take a minute to tell the reader a little bit about yourself? I’m based out of Minneapolis and the St. Paul area of Minnesota. I started investing part-time in real estate in 2001. I went full-time in 2016. I built my business from the ground up and doing quite well at it. I do a lot of rural investing. I also do a lot of the metropolitan where all the other investors are at. I like to start these episodes with what I call the bottom line up front. When I was in the Marine Corps, they always told us we had to tell the general the most important thing as soon as the briefing started in case he had to leave the room. Take two minutes. Talk to the reader about what you think the most important things are that they need to be paying attention to or doing in this market. That’s a pretty broad question that you’re asking me to answer but I can best answer it in regards to interest rates having a huge play. Over the last couple of years, interest rates have been fantastically low. When you purchase a house, if you had another contract and there was delay after delay, it didn’t matter. The values kept going up. It was an easy extra payday. Now, you have to pay more attention to interest rates going up. If you’re buying a higher-value house, you have to pay attention to that. The main point I would say is to pay attention to interest rates but also get out there and do stuff in regards to investing because wholetailing, which we can dive more into the show, is working well and will continue to work very well in the near future. I also have my little secret strategy as to how to invest in the rural market. We’re going to talk about wholetailing and rural markets. I love the interest rate conversation. It’s one of those things that I’m always having but let’s go back. What is a wholetail? How I define wholetailing is actual wholesaling. That’s where you get a property under contract with a motivated seller and then you’re going to find an investor that’s going to want to buy that contract from you on an assignment basis. You’re wholesaling it from the motivated seller to the end cash buyer and you’re making a fee in between. On the wholetail side of it is retail. If you take the retail side, you’re selling it to the consumer. It’s someone that’s getting a bank loan typically for the property. The property has to be in lendable condition. All the safety issues are taken off the table. Not having a collapsing deck is a good example but it is move-in ready other than it probably needs updates. That’s a good way to look at it for wholetailing. If you can do the actual wholetailing and eliminate the wholesaling part knowing that you’re going to capitalize very fast on turning around your wholesaling to a cash investor but it’s to an end-user or the person that’s going to cash you out on the retail end, you would make huge margins on your deals. How does that work? Are you charging full price? Is there a discount? What do the numbers look like? In the last couple of years, it has gone through the roof that what I thought was well over retail for a nice house. That’s what wholesaling was getting. Now, the retail price is going even higher so it’s back-filling. That’s how it works in regards to that. For me, the better answer is, for example, a house all fixed up was worth $150,000. It’s move-in ready. The paint colors are neutral. The carpet is in. The hardwood, floors are done. Everything’s fine about the property. I’ll wholetail it for $150,000. I’ll probably sell it for about $130,000 or $140,000. There is a slight discount underneath but you’re hardly doing any of the work on the inside. The nice thing is you’re getting this thing on the public market. Yes, MLS.   For some people that wholesale or assign properties, part of their problem is they can’t test the public market to get the maximum price. You’re going to have to take title to the property. There’s no way around it. Is this an inner-city thing? Is this a rural thing? Where do you find this strategy has the most bang for your buck? I’ve been fortunate to be very successful even in the rural markets. I’m doing that strategy a lot but if you want the biggest return, go to the heavy metropolitan areas where it’s a dense population. You’re going to make insane numbers doing the wholetailing strategy. How long have you been doing this? I’ve been doing it full-time since 2016 but investing part-time since 2001. What’s been the best part about it for you? The financial freedom and flexibility with family schedules. We have four kids. Being flexible with school schedules and getting everyone where they need to be, that’s what

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