Starting Over with Real Estate at 40 Years Old | Jeremy Beland

In today’s episode, Jeremy Baland and I delve into the transformative power of real estate investing in overcoming financial adversities. The conversation kicks off with expressions of gratitude for the absence of Monday morning dread, attributing this to their successes in real estate. Jeremy Beland and I share compelling narratives of financial rebound, starting from personal lows like foreclosure and bankruptcy to achieving significant success through real estate investing. They emphasize the critical role of mentorship, calculated risks, and the adoption of five principles of success, which include defining desires, committing, and taking massive action. Throughout the discussion, the importance of marketing strategies, adaptability to market changes, and the value of sacrifice for achieving long-term goals are underscored. We also highlight the significance of sales skills in converting leads and the potential of real estate to create wealth and freedom, despite challenges such as cash flow difficulties in certain markets.

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Justin: All right, Science Flipping podcast listeners, as always in this episode is brought to you by Rocketly.ai. If you’re looking for a seller, lead generating system that has automation in AI Bot and has sellers coming to you, then Rocketly.ai is your choice. Make sure you head over to the website, fill out an application and schedule a demo now to see the power of Rocketly.ai. What is up? Science of Flipping family. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. The Science of Flipping Jeremy Beland is in the house. He’s an incredible real estate investor, someone that I had the privilege of getting to know in the boardroom, mastermind, and most recently, I got to know a little bit more about a story. What is up, brother, what’s happening? How are you?

Jeremy : Hey, Justin, my man. Life is great. Just happy to be on the show. It’s a privilege. It’s an honor. Thank you for having me as a guest today. Really appreciate it.

Justin: So little known story where I lived? Did you know I lived in Boston for about a year (I did not know that it’s great city). It is a great city. I lived right in Beacon Hill, so right downtown, I owned a door to door sales company. (Wow). And you can imagine how a California boy yours truly handled going door to door in the winter, (Yeah, great). Let’s just say I had to call my family and move back to California. Not kidding at all.

Jeremy: That was smart. Yeah, my wife and I, we woke up this morning before a morning walk. It was a balmy 16 degrees this morning.

Justin: Dude. So listen, you have a eerily similar story to mine, and I knew the second we started talking about that, that this episode was going to be fire, because you have created something really, really special, coming from a very dark place. I’ve been able to I pride myself on doing the very same thing. And I think the more people hear from myself, but not just myself, but people like yourself, that regardless of the predicament you’re in, regardless of where you’re at financially, regardless of the situation that you think is insurmountable, it can be overcome, as long as you go do my five principles. Decide what you want and who need to be, get it and commit to it and take massive action. Those three are, you are the epitome of it, dude. So I’d love to just jump into your story a little bit so people get to know a little bit more about Jeremy and in that side of who you are?

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Jeremy beland. I’m out of New Hampshire, just an hour north of Boston. You know, I was a troubled youth as a kid, got arrested a lot, didn’t even graduate high school, all the good, all the things you don’t want your child to be as a kid, I was. You know, around 13-14, years old, my family ended up losing everything. We ended up losing everything in foreclosure, and had a cause, repossessed and everything. And I went into a world of trouble after that, getting arrested, drugs, drinking. Then eventually, somehow, as I hit my 20s, I found health and fitness, and I kind of gone into this life of like, all right, I want to self improvement and get better, and then I found myself with a good sales job in my early 20s. I was originally high rise window cleaning in Boston, some of the buildings that you probably door knocking on in the winter, not a lot of fun. You know, 19, you know, about 20-21, years old, I found myself a sales job, and did pretty well into my 20s. And then, you know, I got married, had two young kids. I was, you know, live in the traditional middle class America house. It was like my dream come true, white picket fence type house. And I was doing great making six figures, and I just had everything that I want. And then all of a sudden, 2009-2010 came a lot of people, you know, maybe young on as far as your audience goes. But that was a time of the Great Recession, and it was docked during that time, and I went from having a really good six figure job to be basically a year later out of work, and because I had no college education or even a high school education, it wasn’t just a housing crisis at that time, it was an employment crisis, and I couldn’t find work anywhere. And I was like, you, door knock. I was going through the old Yellow Pages trying to find a job every single day to provide for my family, and I couldn’t. And at this time, I was get I was at face of foreclosure. I was facing facing bankruptcy. The mortgage companies were folding left and right at that time. And I actually started to learn about real estate investing at that time. Started doing some training, started reading some books. We used to have to get CDs, audio CDs from the library back in the day, before all these wonderful podcasts. But you know what happened was that I was able to realize that, am I going to be able to see my house if I get a real estate investor involved? So I ended up finding a real estate investor in my local market. He came out. We said, Hey, Jeremy, you know, we can help you in your situation here. I can show a sale. I can work with this mortgage company prevent you for foreclosure and bankruptcy, which was great, because I wanted to go into the Air Force at the time, was the only job opportunity that I had. But in order to go in there, because I needed top secret clearance, they wouldn’t allow me to go in with a foreclosure or bankruptcy because they were afraid I was gonna steal government secrets or something like that. So. You know, at make a long story short, this guy came in. He short sale my house. You know, he was able to give me money for like, a refrigerator and money for like, a pool and a shed out back. And at that time, that was money for, like, food on the table for my kids. It was Christmas gifts that we needed at that time and as clothes to put on my children’s back. There were only three in one at the time. I was in a huge depression. So, he saved me, and then I went into basic training. Just before the age cut off at 34 years old. I left my family for six months. I was in there with a bunch of 17 year old kids. My nickname was Gramps, and they’re like, getting yelled at. Be like, Dirt bag training, get on push-ups and all this crazy stuff by 24 year old kids. But it was actually the best thing that could ever happen to me, because I actually went in there and I rebuilt myself. I was selfishly, had to go away to work on my confidence, and I came back out as a new man. I started building myself back up. Got divorced, had, you know, I was a divorced dad now, with two kids, got myself back into making a six figure sales job. And then I started approach 40 years old, and then I started to see people in the 40s and 50s. And 50s start to be like, unemployable. Basically, they were losing their jobs like you spent all this time going up the corporate ladder, but the further and higher you go, the more stable it comes. And I just didn’t want to be in a third situation in my life where I was losing it again, and I was super scared. So, you know, I started looking at, I want to get into real estate investing. And then I realized the best way for me to get it, because I had no money, because I didn’t know you could use other people’s money at that time, just thought you had to have money, was to get into wholesaling. And I thought, if I could get into wholesaling, least I can learn to get great deals from the bottom level direct to the seller. And then I could decide what I want to do for them and what I want to wholesale flip them, keep them as rentals, etc. So at that time, I had a condo that I lived in for two years. I basically sold that townhouse, made $17,000 worth of equity. It was the only money that I had. I paid $6,000 of credit card debt. I took $11,000 they take. I took five of it, and I invested into a coaching program called wholesaling with Tom Kroll taught me how wholesale my first deal in 90 days. That’s $6,000 was my marketing budget, my contract, my LCA basically started my business with 11 grand, moved my kids into this crappy two bedroom apartment, a crappy pot of town, and I was all in just as I was turning 40 years old. And then since then, I sit today on this podcast at 47 I’ve gone on to do over 400 off market deals, over $8 million in gross profits, and I built three different markets to seven figures since that. Obviously I’ve had a lot of help with a lot of great coaches along the way. It wasn’t just that one coach, but, um, you know, as you said, to start this man like, there’s so many times I could have said, I don’t have the money, I have kids, I don’t have the bandwidth. Whatever the excuses are, I just made it happen. It wasn’t easy, but, man, I’m so thankful I did. So that’s my story.

Justin: Yeah well, so there’s so many things that I want to be able to unpack here, right, all the way to the point of, like, you know, you tend to repeat what your parents gave you, right? And you talking about how your parents and family were never really good with money and this type of stuff, and that trickles into you, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself going through a foreclosure scenario. I want to talk about what a short sale is versus foreclosure, but really what I want to highlight, and you should be very proud for yourself, because it’s something I find to be some of the main characteristics of the most successful people I’ve ever interviewed here on this podcast, and or myself, or otherwise, is people make a decision that they’re done and they want more, and they decide what they want, and that’s what you were able to do. And you decided who you needed to be to get it. Part of that was joining the, I think you said Navy, or was it the Air Force? (Air Force, yeah). Air Force. Part of that was joining the Air Force. I needed to shape up. I need to shape up, ship out, like, put my shit together, so you decided who you needed to be. That is a hard one for a lot of people, because they’re not willing to make the sacrifice. You don’t want to leave your children. You don’t want to go do that. You don’t want to be called gramps and waking up crazy early and doing push up and, you know, 19 year olds are basically, you know, punking you, right? But you made that decision of what you wanted, then you made the decision who you needed to be, and then you took massive action, right? And in that, you know, well, I’m sorry, first, then you committed to it. The commitment was selling your home (Yep), paying a coach, and going all in (all in), that’s committed, right? And then lastly, you took massive action. And that’s those three pillars, decide what you want, who need to be, commit to it, and then take massive action. You embody that, right? And that is why I was super excited to have you on this podcast. Is because you yourself, whether you knew my principles or not, which you didn’t, of course, but you literally did that. And it just goes to show those three now there’s two other ones, which is being extremely uncomfortable, which you were, right? You moved your kids into a two bedroom house. It was not comfortable you were financially like pushing yourself. And then lastly, not worrying about when the results were going to come, right, not having a time result expectation that you put on yourself. You just knew they were going to come. And you embody all those principles. So I applaud you, and you should be proud for yourself. But let’s take a rewind really quick for all those that don’t know what a short sale is, besides or in comparison to a foreclosure, he didn’t go through foreclosure. The bank took a short on the loan that he owed them. That’s all. Someone bought it for less than he owned the bank, which kept a foreclosure off of his credit score, etc. So it really does help him. I went through foreclosure, and so that was a very big bummer, right? I slept on a couch, went through foreclosure. Let’s unpack a little bit of this, and we’ll get into the real estate stuff, I swear, but unpack a little bit of the cyclical, inherited, geez, yeah, part of like putting yourself into kind of bad situations financially, that kind of became adopted from you, from your parents, right? Is, is that part is very common. I see all the time when talking to people that ultimately end up making it, you can go and say, you put yourself in this bad scenario, because that’s what you were shown as a kid, and you replicated it.

Jeremy: Yeah, to some extent, you know, obviously I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So we follow our parents as you know, basically how to live life and what to do, what not to do. Their situation was a little bit different. You know, they basically, you know, took, my father, filed at the time, quit his job and decided to start a business, and just, just made a huge mistakes and didn’t care to fix it. You know, my situation was like, I was out of a job, whether I wanted to be or not. I was very successful, but the whole economy changed in a year. I just put an addition on my house, and within a year and a half later, was upside down, $150,000 in equity. There was no vol modifications, no refinance options, there was nothing I was screwed, yeah, and I find a job anywhere, because I never graduated high school or went to college. And you know, I went from making $100,000 plus a year to two years later in the Air Force make get $32,000 a year. And that was the best I could find. You know, my what I learned from that time was I was living to the edge of my means, right? So, if I made $100,000 a year, I spent $100,000 a year. We, you know, we had a pool. We put all the addition, you know, we took all the equity out of our house, you know, different things like that. You know, I don’t do that stuff anymore. That was the big mistake I made then. But what that time really taught me, more so for myself than as going through a childhood is just, you know, if you if you think you’re just safe, working a job for somebody, or if you think you’re just safe, just going to do what you got to do, things could change. And I, you know, and if I’m going down with the ship, I want it to be like I (Your ship) fighting and my ship, right? And I’m going to put all in and just work myself off and listen, you know, it’s still not easy. After all these years. I still have sleepless nights. I still have cash flow problems occasionally. And, you know, sometimes I have all these stresses of our team and all this other stuff that comes along with it, but I want to change for the world. I love it, and it’s better than going into a place where you can be easily. Just say, Hey, we’re downsizing. We’re gonna let you go. And then what? Right? And that’s scary to me.

Justin: Yeah, you give you’re making a decision allow someone else to have the ultimate decision, right. And so, you didn’t want that. And like I said, if you’re gonna go down with the ship, you’d rather be your damn ship that you’re going down with, right, rather than someone else’s. So let’s get into the real estate spot. Because, you know, this is what we’re all here to talk about. You’ve done very well over the last seven years. You’ve done well, you know, 400 and something deals in the last seven years, correct? Yes, sir, yeah. Where are you primarily finding those deals? What is your, you know, marketing or lead gen, that you focus on?

Jeremy: Yeah. So, you know, it’s been in a few different markets. Our primary market right now is, you know, southeast Florida and New Hampshire, Massachusetts. Those are the two markets we we focus on now. You know, it really depends the market again has changed a lot over the years. We we’re constantly ebb and flowing. What we do marketing today may change in six months, 12 months, because we just check out KPIs. But everything we do is based off off-market acquisition. So, you know, we do inbound and outbound lead generation to look for distressed properties owners or distressed people distressed situations, in an effort to acquire their properties at a deep discount, exchange for, you know, and give them great value for whatever their problems are, solution to their problem, exchange for equity in their homes. And then we decide, once we get the property under contract, what we want to do from it. We have different exit strategies for that. But, you know, we do things like direct mail. We’ve done cold calling. We do pay per click, social media marketing, like Facebook marketing, we’re doing direct TV ads these days. We do pay per pay leads. You know, we’ve done it all. We don’t do texting anymore. That was great three years ago. We’ve abandoned it as of last year that it just wasn’t working anymore with the regulations. We even do ringless voicemail stuff like that. So we’re always doing different things. Usually have a few different marketing channels going on. We try to just run it simple and lean.

Justin: Yeah. So, the thing that I echo, and you and I are definitely cut from the same cloth, brother, is you need to have multiple marketing strategies. I don’t care if they’re paid or free. Right? And so what I mean by that is, if you’re doing direct mail or PPC, those are heavily paid, probably the most expensive right in the space. Or if you are generating leads from other investors and bringing buyers and doing coho sales, I don’t care if you’re calling agents and making offers on listed properties, those are essentially free models, right? And there’s other free models, door knocking, etc. But I don’t care how much money goes in or how much time you’re spending, you should always have two or three at a minimum two, because people like you and people like I do. So, if you’re listening to this and you’re newer, then you need to wrap your head around that, right? I talk a lot about being dynamic or versatile, like you can’t just be a one trick pony. My story always talks about when I was buying homes only from the auction and the hedge funds came in, well, they were paying 110 cents on something. I could pull it pay 70 cents on I stopped buying homes. I couldn’t buy I couldn’t compete, right? But that was my only way to get deals. So, I had to make a change, right? And if you make a change too late, you can go under financially. And it almost happened to me three different times. I made the same damn mistake. So now I know a lot better. Now I can help others listening to this episode, and you can help others in your program make sure that they’re not just one trick ponies. You’re not just doing just direct mail, you’re not doing just whole door knocking, or whatever you need. Make sure you’re diverse and versatile in your marketing strategy. And you agree with this, right? This is just a straight lead game. The more it leads, the more opportunities you have to your point, the more you can exit, you can wholesale, you can flip it, you can keep it as rental.

Jeremy: Yeah, for sure, you know. And what I’ve learned over the years is like, what works for marketing in one market may actually don’t even work in other markets. So you really have to just check in. You know, we always have a few going on at a time, but we’re constantly testing and retesting marketing channels, right? So, if we just said, and this, we do this by KPI key performance indicators, they basically guide us to what decisions we make from a marketing standpoint. You know, if I just said, hey, well, we’re doing texting because it’s cheap. Well, you know, I got 11 to one return on that 2019 now I’m lucky to get one to one in return, right? So, it doesn’t work anymore. The KPIs tell you that. And you know, sometimes mailing is great, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes cold calls are great, sometimes it isn’t. So, we’re constantly testing, retesting, and, you know, you know, so we’re always just trying different things to just make sure we get a good return in general. Marketing is, you know, it’s finicky, and it takes some time, but all the marketing channels work to your point. All grateful lead gen, I really think you know, the key to success in this industry is your ability to take those leads to come in, and your ability, from a sales side, to convert them to revenue. You know, the way the ability to take less reads leads to convert to deals is a lot better than somebody who doesn’t have experience and takes a lot of leads to convert to the same amount of deals like that, that nuance and that skill and that practice and that experience and that education, I think, is critical in this industry, and I think a lot of times it’s overlooked unfortunately.

Justin: A 100% the things that you said, right? You need to make sure you’re adaptive in your marketing. Things change literally overnight, right? I mean literally you now. Everyone now sees what’s happening with text messaging is essentially dead. I know it’s not officially dead, but very, very, very difficult relative to what it was a year or two years ago. Everyone understands what direct mail was. You know, 510, years ago, I was getting north of a 1% callback rate. Nowadays, we’re lucky to get a quarter of 1% callback rate, right? I mean, things just change. PPC marketing, Google PPC, you know, we were able to get leads for like, $50 a lead. Now it’s like $250, $300, $400, $500 a lead, things change. You have to change with it. A secret to my success in real estate over 16 years is that exact principle, being able to be, being able to adapt, being able to be fluid and move with the markets, move with the changing times. Now, AI is a big component. We use Rocketly.ai, which obviously have to introduce you to that if you haven’t seen it yet, but it is a massive game changer. And this all happened since, literally, I can remember June of 2023. Is when we built Rocketly, which was not Rocket at the time, it was just internal. You have to adapt. You have to change. Covid made us change. Covid made us go 100% virtual. You can’t, you can’t expect to continue to win at a high level, doing the same thing you’ve always done forever. You might make some money, especially if you’re just doing the right thing, but you’re not going to win at an extreme level if you’re not adapting and changing. That’s what you’re highlighting.

Jeremy: Yeah. 100% I mean, I wish the market was always up until the right but last year showed that that isn’t the case. And talking about pivoting 2023 was probably more of a pivot for most people than it was in 2020 with covid. And yeah, I mean, you were constantly pivoting and adapting. It’s been a change. And I think from my company’s success, you know, obviously it’s the biggest challenge, but it’s also our biggest. Accomplishment to persevere through all this. You know, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go already in my time of being in this business for seven years. But the ones that are able to, you know, survive, thrive. But you have to find ways to just, you know, constantly pivot through all the challenges. Like you said, it’s not going to always just do the same thing and expect up to right to result. Well, once the interest rates go from two to seven, that changes everything. And people rate locked in their homes that, and a lot of those people aren’t selling anymore, that changes a lot of things.

Justin: There’s no doubt. The the thing that you and I were kind of offline, just chatting about is this idea of being a dynamic real estate investor, which is how might, how I label it, but you might say something different, but it’s essentially, it is polarizing to say, don’t be a one trick pony and only wholesale. Don’t do that. You know, wholesaling has a space to go get your first check, second check, fifth check. But if you want to grow something special, if you really want to be a big real estate investor making real money, you have to be dynamic. You have to be fixing flipping. You have to be running the BRRRR model. You have to have long-term, short-term rentals, you have to be doing novation’s. It’s all encompassing.

Jeremy: Yeah, and we do all those things that, you know, just in the first couple of years when I didn’t know any better, and we didn’t really have much resources, we were living wholesale deal to wholesale deal. Right? The money came in, we put it back into the business, try to grow the business and spend money on marketing a lot of times too much money, because I didn’t know what I was doing. But, you know, as soon as I knew how to leverage other people’s money, and I couldn’t, it couldn’t happen fast enough, because I got sick of dealing with the cash buyers, because I felt like they were always nickel and diming me, and I was spending so much time and effort and money getting these great off market deals, I felt like I was leaving a lot of money on the table. So one of the exit strategies we first did was we started listing all of our stuff on the MLS, and I went from a $20,000 average, you know, disposition fee, to $35,000 overnight, just with the power of the MLS. It was a game changer my business. And then we filed private money, which allowed us to now start taking down properties. We started wholetail, and we started flipping. We gave us opportunities to do BRRRR, novation’s. We do that a lot. We do a lot of direct to retail buyers. So lot of our houses qualify for traditional financing. There may be a house that may be a little dirty, a little bit dated, but is move in ready, but the sell is distressed, so we still get it at a discount. But for your average fix a flipper, there’s not enough meat on the bone, but for a retail buyer, it works great to get it 5%-10% below market values, is a win for everybody, and we still make money doing it. So yeah, we have many, many multi strategies. That’s why for us, it’s all about focusing on off market acquisitions, acquiring any property we can, putting it under contract, and then leveraging our knowledge to dispo out of it as profitably as possible.

Justin: What is so, for those that don’t know what innovation is, it is essentially the way to wholesale a property on the MLS, right? So you contract a property, you get a couple documents signed, attorney, in fact, et cetera, to get the authority to put it on the MLS. You put it on the MLS for a flat fee, usually not having any agent involved, and then it opens up your buyer pool, right? I mean it quite literally. Is how all of the experts, myself, Jeremy, so many others, that have been around for any amount of time, it is how we maximize our dollar on every single lead possible. Because we have a buyer pool of the entire MLS, which is the biggest buyer pool there is, right?

Jeremy: It’s been a game changer on our industry. And I would, I rarely sell things off market anymore, as much as much as the sellers will allow me to put their property on the MLS, as much as I’m going to do it.

Justin: What do you have your your pitch for innovation? What’s your style of pitch? I mean, I’ve heard a handful. What do you say?

Jeremy: Yeah, you know. So the way we do innovations, typically, is just what happens is, if we have a property under contract that we’re showing on the MLS, you know, rather than doing a double close, well, a lot of times, have this seller sign a contract with us that puts seller A together with buyer B, and we end up being the third party and basically allowing us to put them into contracts so they we sign the rights over, but still, for the fee, we still pay the commissions of closing costs. So it’s kind of this work around thing. I’m really not good at articulating it, because it’s a little complex. It’s not as high as it sounds. My sales guys do a great job of navigating it. We don’t do it a lot. We probably do it half dozen times a year.

Justin: Yeah, it’s a game changer, for sure. What is, what would you tell someone who’s maybe a little gun shy about going after marketing? What would advice be to that person who doesn’t know what marketing, doesn’t know how much to spend, a little scared to kind of jump into the marketing game? Yeah?

Jeremy: Well, I mean, it really comes down to individual situation. So it’s going to be two things. If you think of like a scale where you would weigh two things. You know you’re going to have one side that’s going to be money, the other side is going to be time and effort. So the more money you spend on marketing, the less time and effort you have to be involved, right? But if you’re not going to spend a lot of money, you’re probably going to have to spend a lot more time and effort. Meaning like cold calling and door knocking is relatively cheap if you’re doing it yourself, but it requires a lot of time and effort. PPC doesn’t require a lot of time and effort other than just answering your phone, but it’s very expensive, right? So finding that combination that works best for you and individually is best. You know, it’s really hard to be a professional off market acquisition company, whether you want to buy properties to for  flip or to wholesale, whatever your exit strategy is, and not realize that marketing is going to be an expense. You don’t have to spend a ton of money, but there is marketing involved. Just like with any business, we’re a marketing business. First, we’re spending money to market to generate leads. Now if you want to just go knock on doors, great. Well, I’m telling you, you’re going to have to knock have to knock on thousand doors before you get a deal. It’s gotta be costing out things set for time, but thousand doors, you know, if you want to do cold calling pole lessons, just start calling. That’s great. Be a hustler. But reality is, you’re gonna probably be calling two, three hours a day, six days a week, probably for six weeks straight, before you get your first deal, and then you still have to keep calling after that to get your second deal. Most people never do it because they lose motivation and get burnout. So, you know, find a way to come up with some money. You have credit cards. You’re going out drinking with the guys, you’re going with sporting events. You’re buying nice clothes. Think about things that you’re spending money on that you don’t necessarily have to spend money on. Find a way to save some of that, find a way to borrow some money, find a way to sell your house, like I did whatever it takes. If this is really the path you want to do, then you got to be all in. It’s you’re gonna have to spend some money. I always spend $6,000 originally stopped my business, and there was a couple times I was like, Holy shit, I’m gonna run out of money here. And then the deal came in, and then you live to the next deal. And then eventually you just start getting big ball, big momentum on your side, and it starts taking off. And your first year will be the hottest year you’re going to be working. And it’s, you know, struggling to pull together every deal and every ounce of revenue you can, but you’re going to build this awesome, great foundation that’s going to change the rest of your life, but you’re going to need some marketing, so don’t be afraid. You got to just spend it. It is what it is.

Justin: Yeah, the willingness to sacrifice, whether it is again, going out, drinking with their boys, buying nice clothes, living like you know, you are a shining example of someone who lived like most people are not willing to live. Most people are not willing to sell their house to come up with 17 grand, right? Most people won’t do those things. I’ve talked to thousands of entrepreneurs now since you know, I started podcasting back in 2013 by the way, I just saw my first podcast back in August of 2000. But after talking to thousand of entrepreneurs, thousands of real estate investors, it always goes back to the people who are willing to make the sacrifice. Whatever that is. It could be financially. It could be, you know, time time sacrifice. It could be personal sacrifices, like I interviewed, a guy by name is Jason Wojo, incredible online marketer. He basically hasn’t dated for five or six years. He has locked himself in his house and just perfected his craft to the point of now, five or six years later, he’s like, All right, I’ve hired the team. Finally, the things are going, I can exit and I can actually start dating. And he hired a dating coach. I just bring that example up, because those that reach high highs, they make sacrifice. And those of you that want to be in real estate investing, those of you that want to be you know that you love the TV shows. I know Jeremy and I are both going to support you. We’re both going to be here for you. Jeremy has a coaching program. And you know, make sure at the end of this, we’ll tell you where to go find more about Jeremy. But we want you to get into the space, because it is more fun to win with people than it is to do it alone. But also, we also know the life it can create. And so we don’t need everyone to make massive sacrifices, but you will need to make something some level. Whether it’s a financial Cut The Check, sacrifice, whether it’s a, you know, to stop going out with the boys. Sacrifice, whether it’s a video game, sacrifice, sell a home, sacrifice whatever. Understand that is one of the biggest ingredients in success, is willingness to do it. And here’s what I would say to end this little rant, if you aren’t willing to sacrifice, then just don’t bitch, don’t complain, keep your job. Live a mediocre life, make 100 grand or 200 grand a year. Be okay with that, and don’t complain. That’s all I got to say to you.

Jeremy: I could agree more. And to your point, you know, I had to burn the candle for the first three years starting my business, and it was really hot, like seven days a week, you know, I was going, going, going. And, you know, there was a lot of compromises, sacrifice, but three years after that, I built a team. Now I have an abundance of time freedom. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. So ask yourself, are you willing to work really hard for three years to build a life where you can then come and go as much as you want the rest of your life? I think we all know the answer, the hot pot though, Justin and make one more point, just piggyback on your list is I think about people like in the when they start the gym in January, right? They want to lose weight, or they got to quit alcohol. Nobody ever makes it three weeks, full weeks, right? Then they all quit. So it’s like a New Year’s resolution. So if you’re going to if you want to change your life, you have to be that person says, I’m going to make all the sacrifices, compromises I need to do to go to the gym for an entire year, and I’m not going to quit. If you’re going to be the person that just falls back into the same old routine and starts making excuses three four weeks in, then, you know, probably do the same with this business. And again, like you said, don’t bitch, because that’s the life you choose.

Justin: That’s it. Real estate investing is an incredible art. It’s an incredible way to make money, and then it’s an incredible way to build wealth, right? I just bought my buddy just made this hoodie. It says rich is not wealthy, and I love it, and I just wore to boardroom, because you and I, you know, obviously connected at boardroom, but it’s true, yeah, you are not wealthy if you’re rich. So I would choose, you know, wealthy over rich every day. But the reality is, real estate is the only vertical I’m aware of that can create both simultaneously, right? You can get very rich in technology, right? You can go create a billion dollar technology company, but then you have to sell the company. You have to take your money, you have to go invest it into real estate, which would create, right, so, but we are in the space of like we can go make a lot of money and increase our wealth over time. Talk to me a little bit about your model. Do you have any formula of the wholesale to flip to buying BRRRR like do you wholesale one, keep one as a rental. Flip one, keep one as a rental. Do you have any type of formula to it?

Jeremy: I don’t have a formula to that extent. You know, as far as buying it, hold, I want to buy hold I want to buy hold as many as I can. That’s actually one of my personal goals this year. So, you know, as we’ve gone and scaled and built it from markets and, you know, obviously 2023 we had some challenges as well. You know, it really just depends on, like, cash flow needs and everything else. So, you know, a lot of times we just look at, like, All right, what’s coming in the pike? Do we? We’re already working on three or four projects. We want to take on more and suck the bandwidth out of the company. Know this wholesale, you know is, this is, does this make a great buy and hold up here in Northeast buy and hold is very, very expensive when I started this journey, you know, you could find a nice off market property for like $50,000 a door. Now it’s $200,000 a door. So, you know, it’s very hard to cash flow up here, but the equity gain over years is, is very enticing to get into it. So, you know, it’s very tough. You know, we just kind of monitor whatever the company needs are, you know, obviously I’d love to say that every month like clockwork. You know, 10 deals comes in, but some months it’s 10. Some months it’s zero. The next month is six. So you have to weave all those things. And unfortunately, money still goes out the door, whether money comes in or not. So we just got to weave all that. But personally, I’m trying to buy and hold as much as I can. That is my personal wealth. I allow my people on my team that opportunity too, because I want them to have, you know, success and wealth through what we’re building together. But you know, for as far as the flip goes, we’ll flip it if we think we can make good money, if we think we can make a little bit less and wholesale it, or whole tail it, and not have to put in all that effort, then we’ll take that that approach as well. So we try to take the easier road to revenue, not necessarily the hotter one.

Justin: Do you focus on any type of price points at all?

Jeremy: Regards to what?

Justin: You know. Like the reason why it’s very simple for me is I stick to under $300,000 price point of homes. I stick to single family homes. So it’s very easy for me to wholesale flip or keep them as rentals. They fit all It’s just math at that point, at what buy price and what rent ratio, does it become a better BRRRR? Then it becomes a flip. At what point does it become better wholesale then it becomes a better wholesale flipper rental. So I, for me, it’s very simple, because I only target a certain amount of price points, and then I can just run the math backwards.

Jeremy: Yeah, for sure, that makes perfect sense. So, in New Hampshire, the average price point is 400,000 Massachusetts, you know, you’re approaching $600,000. So single family burrs up here. They just don’t exist. No way. You know, we have some outlying areas that you can get to cheap enough, but it’s very rare. It’s even really difficult to do it on a two family. You really need to have a three family up. So we don’t market a lot to multi families. We do to smaller multi families. If those opportunities come, we take advantage of them. But for the most part, you know, we focus just mostly on single, small or multi families and those price points that you say a lot of first time home buyers. So, you know, we really the wholesale just comes down to like, you know, if we can’t get access to the MLS, the seller just doesn’t want us to promote it on the MLS for whatever reason, then, then we’ll just wholesale out of that we put on the market, and we take the highest and best offer we can get.

Justin: Yep, I love it, and I know you you coach a bunch of other people. What’s kind of your mission when you bring in students into your REI freedom? What are you kind of focusing on for them?

Jeremy: Yeah, thanks for asking. You know, we’re really focused on the sales skills of working direct to sellers. So as we talked about early on this podcast. You know, there’s a lot of marketing channels that generate leads. Obviously, some are better than others, but your skill set, your ability to take those leads and convert them to deals and revenue, is really the area that you need to get really good at in this business. So you could be a new person just starting out. It may take you 60 leads to get one deal. But with some good sales training and some good coaching on that side, you can now take 25 to 30 leads to get one deal. And you know you’re now, obviously you learn the skill set to get these these deals at a lower price point. Buy better with those sales skills, also exit out of them for a higher amount. So you’re learning how to buy more, buy cheaper, sell higher, and also get more deals with the same amount of money that you’re spending on lead gen. So refocus those sales skill on those sales skills. Because, listen, you’re dealing with people. You’re dealing with distressed sellers, habitual procrastinators. They tend to ghost you. Life is falling down around them. They crawl under rocks. They want help, but they don’t accept it. There’s a lot of nuances that come along with that. And you know, you’re not just dealing with, you know, business to business type sales. These are people that are emotional or rational, and it requires a lot of skill and nuances to successfully handle their emotions, handle their objections, and successfully convert deals.

Justin: So where can everyone go find out more about Jeremy and then Rei freedom?

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, Facebook.

Justin: That’s the best way to go. Just go join our Facebook REI freedoms group. It’s a private group. Me and Dan told back, who’s a great coach himself. We provide a lot of great coaching in there for free. We just want to provide a lot of value. As you said, you know, it’s a lot funny when you could do it together. You heard my story. I’ve been very blessed. I live a blessed life of freedom. That’s why we call it REI freedom, because anybody could build a life of freedom however they want, through the power of real estate investing. It could be wholesaling, it could be flipping, it could be BRRRR, could be syndication. I don’t care what you want to do, but real estate allows you this great opportunity to build a life for your dreams. So, you know, come in REI Freedom Facebook group or Reifreedom.com on the web, either way it works.

Jeremy: And I appreciate you mentioning that. Thank you.

Justin: Of course, bro. I appreciate you spending some time here at The Science of Flipping  brother. Appreciate you. Keep affecting lives, keep crushing it. You’re asking rock star, see you all on the next episode Science Flipping. Peace.