The Mindset Shift You Need in Real Estate for 2023| Brad Chandler

Brad: So here’s the advice that you’re not gonna hear in any other podcasts in the world, especially real estate investing podcasts. It’s really easy to tell someone to a new student or an experienced person. Hey, Johnny, go Hey, Sally go focus. 83% of Americans aren’t happy. Why aren’t they happy? Because they don’t have self love and self compassion. Why don’t they have self love and self compassion because they’ve got unresolved trauma or stress from their childhood?

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Justin: What is up everybody? Welcome back to the science of flipping podcast. I’m your host, Justin Colby. I have a very, very important guest here, a guy that I have known now for years and years and years, one of the largest real estate investors, wholesalers in the space. And it’s someone that I’m super excited to have on the show. Mr. Brad Chandler is here with us. What’s up, buddy?

Brad: Hey, Justin, thanks for having me.

Justin: Yeah, well, this, this episode is going to reach the audience here early 2023. Hopefully it will be out within January. But as I say those dates, it is very important to say those dates because I want to talk about what has gone on, I want everyone to know a little bit more of your background here, I want you to kind of give them some relatability of who you are, and what you’ve been able to build now over almost 20 years, you’re, you’re on my guy. So this is the real deal. Guys, if you guys don’t know him have not heard of him. He’s in the northeast, but he is a major, major player in our space. And so I know this has been a big year for you. It has been a challenging year for a lot of investors, however, you somehow have flipped that script. So I want to talk about that. And how we can go into 2023 as real estate investors, what you kind of predict how we can pivot move, adapt what you’re doing, and kind of what has made that change for you. So if you want to, you know, tell people who you are and what you’ve done and where you came from. That’d be pretty cool.

Brad: Yeah, man. So I read a book on how to buy real estate with no money down when I was in ninth grade, and knew that I always wanted to do real estate because I wanted to make a lot of money, right, and there’s unlimited income potential in real estate. So in late 2002, an investor bought my neighbor’s house in Vienna, Virginia, and I wouldn’t talk to him. He says, Yeah, I buy house at 30%. below market, I fix him up and I resell them. So I’m like, shit, that’s what I’m going to do. So I spent eight long months I had a newborn son, I’d come home from a full time job and spend from six to eight with him, put them to bed and I worked from 8 to 11. Every night pounded, we buy houses, signs, knocking on doors, you name it putting out you know, handwritten about hundreds of letters. And each week that went by each month and went by I got more and more persistent. Because I go to these real estate meetings, I’d see all these deals being done. I’m like, if they can do it, I can do it. So that’s one of my keys to success is just ultimate persistence. So it took me eight long months to find my first deal. So that’s July of 2003. I bought six houses in July in July and August of 2003. I came home in October and told my wife at the time, I just quit. I started Express Homebuyers. She’s like what? We have a newborn son and I have two kids, you we’ve got to you’ve got to support and you just quit. I was like, it’ll be fine. And here we are 20 years later, 4,000 plus houses and it was fine. It’s fine.

Justin: That’s right. 4000 houses. So there’s there’s a funny connection there. Right. So most of my audience knows it took me nine months to get my first deal. I did not have kids or was married, but I was broke, busted. Disgusted, right. But I had that same persistence. I had the same commitment. I literally have a one on one student that is kind of just in the trenches right now. He’s kind of down and out. He’s feeling like he should be making more progress. He’s like, how did you just keep going? And I said, Well, I made a decision to commit to this. And I was going to win. What I didn’t do, it said when? And I think that’s something that you probably did, as well as you just said, I’m gonna go win and provide for my family and go be a lion, my terms of like, we got to go kill for the tribe, right. And you just didn’t say when it was going to happen, but you knew it was going to happen.

Brad: Yeah, and by the way, I first started, I was making $60,000 years at my full and my full time job and I had a negative net worth of $80,000 from graduate school. So I didn’t have fun. I couldn’t go launch, you know, a $10,000 a month marketing program because I didn’t have any money.

Justin: That’s right. That’s right. It’s funny because you know, in the newbie space and you and I you’ve done this now almost 20 I’ve done this 15 I try to always pull myself back to where the newbies right I’m a coach, you’re a coach and it’s like one of those things it’s like, gotta remember that that fear and the hesitancy and the stress and the anxiety and man I gotta make this work right in in the thing that I believe the reason you are you and I and me and and those that have made it for this longevity, right? Is this ability to again persist, no matter what, right? Meaning, you know, it will work. You know how it works. You’ve been around others, you and I were in a mastermind, four or five years, not six years ago, (Brad: six or seven) Yeah, up in Sedona, which was phenomenal, by the way, still one of my most memorable to this day. But I say that to all say, you know, even then like you got to be able to adjust and adapt and make sure you are moving with the times. And so kind of let’s bring this a little bit more current you’ve done 4,000 deals, you and 2022 Because officially as we’re recording this 2022 is over, had, you said the largest grossing revenue year ever is that correct?

Brad: We had, if not our top, I mean that we’re finalizing numbers, but if not the top, we had one of our top two or three net profit, highest net profit years ever.

Justin: Now, how did that happen? When most took a pretty well, I don’t want to say a beating right. But there’s a lot of what I would call blood in the streets from experienced investors, right? They got a little bit too greedy is usually what I would say they’re right? They were too hungry because they were winning so big over the last three to five years. I personally knew this season was coming. I knew it was coming. So I took a lot of my chips off the table. Right? So I stopped essentially flipping I think I flipped two homes in 2022. Now my friends who I would sell to, we’d be like, Why do you keep wholesaling me these deals? I’m making 60, 80 grand, you’re making 20 grand? Why don’t you just flip this, right? Like, why aren’t you like, why are you selling and I’m like, brother cuz I know. At some point, this music turns off, I just don’t know exactly when. So I’ll take my 20 You can keep your 60 High five, you get to buy dinner. But I’m going to be a little bit more reserved. And that comes through experience. Because I’ve had to eat my shit sandwiches when I was being greedy and going a little too heavy. So how were you able to have such an incredible year? We’re in the last 90 days towards the end of the year. I think there was some blood in the streets, people were taking some beatings.

Brad: So I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a really complicated answer. I’m going to try to boil it down. So we went through being in business for 20 years, we went through the downturn of 2008, the worst real estate downturn ever from 2008 to 2012. And we learned some lessons. But did we learn everything? No, because we got stuck with some rehabs to the differences in 2000. You know, 2008, 2007, we had like 80 renovation projects going on at any given time. Now, fast forward to this year. Last year, you know, we had a maximum of 15 or 20. So did we get caught on some? Absolutely. But your question on why did we have such a good year, I went through a major life transformation two years ago, where I found self love and self compassion by an on telling myself the untruths that came from childhood trauma. And as I did that, I realized that I started the business, as I said, to make a lot of money. And I think that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs do, make a lot of money because why they’ve got to prove their worth. I didn’t start out the business saying, Hey, I’m not worthy, but my subconscious mind did from my childhood trauma that was never processed. So when I made that switch, and I found the self love, like everything in my world changed, including business, and one of the things I shifted from was, hey, I never have to go do these crazy things, again, to make millions of dollars, I lost Justin I lost $9 million in five business mistakes, trying to cheat trying to chase my worthiness. So when I shifted in business from Oh, I’ve got to make a lot of money to prove my worth to the world, which again, was a subconscious thought I didn’t wake up saying that. I shifted from that to making an impact. And so I started to attract people from podcasts like this, people were like, dude, I want to go work for that guy. And I literally attracted people. And now my focus is not on going to open a new market when I shouldn’t. It’s how do I make the greatest impact on the sellers, on my employees on my investors. So now I coach my team members, and there’s a lot of suffering people out there. 83% of Americans identify as not being very happy. If you’re not very happy, you’re not going to be a great worker, if you’ve got anxiety and depression, you don’t sleep, you’ve got headaches, you’re not gonna be a very good worker. And some of my workers were like that some of my some of my employees team members, so I had been focused on how do I make the biggest impact in their lives? And that’s when you know, look, is that the reason you can decide for yourself but I think it’s a big reason why we’ve had such an such an impactful and profitable year.

Justin: Yeah, I think part of the answer without saying it I’ll kind of reframe it is your extreme focus. You reframe your focus from just beat making as much money as humanly possible to prove your own self worth to making an impact creating value, loving yourself being there for others filling your I mean, a generic way of saying that is filling your tank up so you can pour into others, right? And that’s my way of saying what I heard right right there. And obviously helped right? I mean, you you were able to do more revenue in the given year did you do as many flips? Are you primarily wholesaling? Through 2022?

Brad: We did, I was probably 50/50, flips and wholesale.

Justin: Okay, and how many doors did you flip

Brad: So we did a total of 300 deals, and I’m gonna guess we probably wholesaled you know, probably 200, or close to 200 of those. And then we rehabbed another 100-120, something like that.

Justin: Yeah. And then just for my own curiosity, since you’re on my podcast, towards the last 120 days, are, were there or are there some of those flips that are lingering, and, and maybe a little bit of a loss leader is? Oh, that’s what I’ve seen in the masterminds? I Mean.

Brad: Absolutely the last 90 days, things have changed drastically on us and volume. I mean, one of the things that, you know, no one can predict what’s going to happen. But six months ago, eight months ago, nine months ago, when everyone was trying to predict what was happening, I was saying at least Hey, I don’t know what interest rates are going to do. But I know, for one thing, the volume is going to be way, way down. And it is way, way down now. So you know, it’s something you’ve got to be focused on is the focus. That’s I was gonna say earlier, Justin, do you know much chaos, I created my business for the first like, 17 years? And why did I create chaos? Because it was always, you know, people talk about the shiny object syndrome. Why is there a shiny object syndrome? It’s not because the person has ADD it’s because what can I do to make some quick money? And I would I mean, chaos, all my, my staff would be like, dude, every day, you have a new idea. It’s because I didn’t love the state that I was in. I didn’t love myself. And I was unconsciously trying to continuously change it. Like, let’s do something to make me feel better. Let’s go open that market, when I can’t even do basic shit in this market, let’s go up in that market. Because then maybe I’ll make a million dollars there, and then I’ll be worthy.
Yeah, would you even say that shiny object syndrome had something to do with like, creating more work, to kind of not have to think about or feel about what you were dealing with inside about being worthy, right? Let me go open up a market. Let me go create something, now I have to go deal with it. Because I just created this baby over here. So now I have to take care of this baby and grow this baby and all this stuff, which allows you to kind of pull out withdraw personally. So you don’t have to feel the lack of love. If you want to use your words,

Brad: Yes two things distraction. It was a complete distraction. So it made me change my state. And it was well maybe I can be worthy. So it was like a double edged sword that both edge of the swords were super sharp and cutting me.

Justin: Yeah, no, I think it’s interesting, because I always as an educator, I try my best to always put myself in, you know, the newbies shoes, and or someone who’s not at where I’m at, right? Someone who might be doing some deals, but they’re like just trying to get into a, you know, better financial place. Right. I think there’s a couple things that I would give suggestions to right. And I think this is I think you’re going to say that this holds true. Extreme focus gives you extreme results. And in your case, and what you’re saying here in this episode is your focus turned inward, right, in a good way, not in a bad way. Your focus turned into how do I become the best version of myself every single waking moment, and probably even sleeping, so I can give to my business, to my family, to my son, to my world. And from there two years ago, you’ve seen this massive growth within your business. (brad: Absolutely). And that comes from extreme focus, right? And what I would tell most people right now that are listening to this, and I know I do have a decent amount of newbies listening, and this is when you’re starting, you likely are trying to Brad’s point, grasp at anything that can make you dollar. Right? let me go get my first dollar. Let me try this thing over here. Let me try this thing over here. But I would also encourage you get really focused on one thing, and go full steam ahead at it. Because if you don’t pick up your head and you keep moving forward, you will get there. Right? You will get your first deal, you will make your first million, whatever that thing is that you’re trying to do. I’ve always found even at the what I would call the more upper echelon elite level. The masterminds, you and I are a part of being around these people. It is the chaos that is created with a lack of focus that drives them away from attaining even more right achieving even more whether it’s financially business personal. I think that is the root of a lot of it, right? Where I’m the same way as an entrepreneur. You’re a visionary, right? So you create these things, you’re always in a new idea. Maybe this is going to work. What would you say to those listening to say, okay, whether you’re a newbie, maybe you’re even if you’re a doer, and you’re getting deals done, and you’re frustrated right now, the last 90, 120 days has really kind of spun you out, right? You’re not either getting your first deal yet or you’re losing deal flow. Things have changed. What would your advice be for those?

Brad: So here’s the advice that you’re not gonna hear in any other podcasts in the world, especially a real estate investing podcast. It’s really easy to tell someone to a new student or an experienced person. Hey, Johnny, go, Hey, Sally go focus. 83% of Americans aren’t happy. Why aren’t they happy? Because they don’t have self love and self compassion. Why don’t they have self love and self compassion because they’ve got unresolved trauma, or stress from their childhood. When you have that lack of self love and self compassion, it’s impossible to focus. Because again, you’re trying to distract yourself, and you’re trying to swing for the fences. So it’s not enough to just go say, Go focus. It’s like telling an alcoholic just stop drinking. You’ve got to, you’ve got to go to the source of the pain and figure out what is the pain? And here’s the thing, Justin, I’m a pretty smart guy, right? I didn’t know this. I didn’t know the only reason I know this is because I went to get my son help for anxiety and a lady on a zoom call said to me, you have a tick, you blink, you blink profusely. When you talk about your childhood, if someone would ask me to tie childhood trauma, I’ve been like, no, my dad spanked me a couple of times with the belt, but I didn’t have childhood trauma. Well, that’s what most of my clients think 9 out of 10 of them are like either happy childhood I get into it. I’m like, Oh my gosh, no, you didn’t. That’s what’s driving your behavior, your failed marriages, your drug addictions, your alcoholism, your obesity, whatever. So that’s a really, really, really deep answer that some people are gonna be like that guy’s nuts. But I’m telling you, I’m not nuts. It’s science. And I’m living proof of it. That my focus is like laser focus. Now I’ve got this. I’ve got the best team I’ve ever got. And we had our best year ever. So that I mean, this that’s crazy when you can prove it

Justin: Right. You literally saying here I’ve done this for 20 freakin years, the last two years, including 2022 has been the best year ever. Right? I would say that’s not crazy. That’s something people should admire and seek after, right? Because I think there’s a lot of people that want more, they’re going into 2023. You know, this will come out early in January at some point like, they’re going to say, Okay, I want to go accross to Justin, how do I crush it? What? What marketing should I do? And I get the tactical side, but people have to understand, you’re listening to someone who’s done this for 20 years, he’s made millions and millions and 10s of millions of dollars. I mean, shoot, he’s lost $9 million. So how many millions has Brad made? Right? The point to that is something like this is more valuable. I mean, I’ll use you know this, but I mean, shoot in my 20s, I went to a ton of therapy because of my childhood. Right? And that’s why I do believe I’ve been able to have in have so much success and reach certain levels, is because I’ve dealt with a lot of that. And quite frankly, I probably even should go to more. And I don’t think that’s ever a bad thing. But I think it’s something everyone needs to hear. And whether people want to recognize or not as a brand or whatever. I’m just gonna go kill and I’m going to make a lot of money and I’m going to drive Lamborghinis. That’s fine. That’s, that’s what they can do. Real estate can absolutely create that lifestyle for you. But if that’s the purpose of why you’re doing it, you probably won’t have longevity in the way that Brad does. Or maybe even myself. The purpose has to be bigger, right than just making a lot of money. Right? Because to Brad’s point, that could just be you trying to prove your worth, right? Yeah, I think that’s incredible advice. What um, I know there’s, there’s you now we’re talking about, like a test that you could even put people through? Where could they go to like, just take a quick little test in private by the way, you don’t have to walk around, say, I heard this podcast, Justin and Brad and I’m take the test and private. Where and they go to do this?

Brad: Just email me literally, Brad@bradchandler.com and put in the subject line self love, and I’ll send you a quiz. Look, we’re on a real estate podcast. And there’s someone be like, what we’re talking about self love and real estate pockets like was Justin going crazy? But I’m telling you that when you lack self love, like it affects all areas of your life, most people think like, Oh, I’m gonna go figure out my mental capacity, or my mental issues from my marriage or my kids, right? But it affects every area of your life. When I look back over the 20 years of all of this chaos, and all of the millions of dollars I lost, it’s this exact reason. And if you’d asked me three years ago, did I have self love? I’d been like, Oh, of course. But I didn’t I didn’t know. So you can’t change until you’re aware. And when you can make that shift of focus. If you want a Lamborghini, you know, the best way you can get a Lamborghini is to figure out this shit, and come up with a purpose in your life. Because when you have a purpose in life, and you’re trying to make an impact, you’ll have more Lamborghinis than if you’re just trying to buy Lamborghini to show your worth.

Justin: I totally agree. And that’s the vast majority of people, right? There’s no one that says that better in my opinion than like a Gary Vee. Right? This guy’s made a lot a lot of money. And he walks around as if he doesn’t, right. If you just look at him, you would never really actually know, that part, right? And I think he really echoes what you’re saying in a lot of sense. And so I think for those that are interested, I think it’s something everyone should be doing. I will be doing right just to just to understand. I’m a West Coast boy, right? So I’m all about self development. I came from San Francisco and so we’re big in that my family is being that my my aunt’s a healer of energy and in this whole thing, and so, to give a little bit to finish a little bit more on real estate, I’d like to kind of give every One some takeaways going into 2023. I’d like to ask you a couple more questions of how marketing wise, what were the marketing channels you were using? Were you doing a lot of creative deals in 2022? And then your outlook going into 2022? Or I’m sorry? 2023?

Brad: Yeah. So I think I think something’s really important. Justin, I’m gonna how many people are talking about this. But one of the things, you know, how do we survive the downturn, we we did a couple of things we staged houses, we made the landscaping look really, really good. My partner used to say, Brad, We don’t need to sell thoudand houses, we just need to sell one house in one neighborhood each time. So let’s make that house the nicest possible. So we’re going back to not that we didn’t ever do great renovations, but we’re making the house look really, really, really sexy. We’re also spending more and more putting more emphasis on active constant sold comps. I don’t know what most training programs look like for newbies. But active comps probably weren’t talked about a lot. Because when the markets going up, you don’t look at active comps, you look at the solds if you look at so if you look at solds. Now you’re gonna be out of business real soon. So I just I just want to throw that in there. Your question was marketing.

Justin: Oh, that’s part of my question. Right is how to attack 2023. But, but also like, what did you do in 2022? marketing wise? How were you able to do 300? Homes? What like marketing for those that are out there? Like, Hey, I’d need to do some marketing. What marketing strategies were you using?

Brad: So yeah, TV has always been our bread and butter. So we kept on cranking on TV. We did pay per click advertising, both Google and Bing, we started to get into some of the streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku and whatnot and that’s pretty much it. We did a tiny bit of direct mail, but not much.

Justin: I love it. And so that marketing budget again, for those out there, everyone wants to be able to do 300 deals. Right. So some are newbies, and some are doing some deals, but what kind of marketing budget do you need to put behind that kind of volume? (Brad: The six figures?) Yeah, right. And I think the reason why I’m asking poignant questions, I think people really need to recognize where Brad and I are at our marketing budget is not going to be everyone’s marketing budget and the ability to do this. But that’s okay, because Brad didn’t start with a six figure marketing budget. And I damn sure didn’t start with a six figure marketing budget, you need to take advantage of what’s to what’s your resources, whether it’s a privy, which I think is largely the best software out there for $97. Or door knocking, or door hangers or cold calling, like, do what you need to do just to go create the marketing revenue, so you can start putting money into marketing now. With that said, what are we doing? 2023? What are you changing? How are you adapting? How are you pivoting in this new year 2023.

Brad: So just and by the way, I got my first three deals from one homeowner by a magnet that I had on my wife’s car at the time that said we buy houses and big letter, magnet cost, like 60 bucks. So, so yeah, be bold. Don’t worry about what other people think about. And if you if you worry about what other people think of you? You need to go take the self love quiz, because that’s one of the questions on there. What are we what are we doing in 2023? Like, it’s tough. Now, man, I’m not going to sugarcoat it right? It’s tough in the terms of the volumes way down. It’s harder to sell product. A lot of these blog, these hedge fund buyers are gone are not buying right now. So what are we doing? I mean, we’re just trying to get better everything we do, we’re going on every single appointment now. So when we would have liked, you know, picked and choose some in the in the past, we’re going on every single appointment. We had a massive success this year in realtor referrals. I mean, there was a couple, there was a couple of months where we made over $60,000 a month in just realtor referrals. So I’ve got it I’ve got a great team that can the guy work with can actually help you do that. So if you’re out there and you and you’ve got a marketing budget of at least 10 grand reach out to me on that level too. And I’ll hook you up with this guy. So just continue to do realtor referrals, continuing to really keep an eye on what marketing is working, and what’s not. Just continuing to hone our skills in terms of being in the properties, we may go back to some things like it’s back in 2008, through 2012, we would give brokers incentives, we go to their office, we take them to the Redskins games, you know, if you sell our house within 30 days, we’ll give you another $3,000, whatever. So continue to stage our houses and make them look really pretty. Those are the things we’re really focused on. It’s just getting, you’re not going to survive in this market if you’re not really dialed in. So if you’re chasing a bunch of stuff you better like we said earlier, focus, focus, focus, because it’s going to be tough. But I think as as prices level, if interest rates stay high, there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity for like some creative financing stuff. So we’re gonna get sharp on that as well. But I don’t like the idea of going and buying a house with a mortgage of $450,000. That’s, that’s worth 380 Because someone tells me it’s cash flows. I don’t like that. I would never advise people to do it. I know there’s gurus and stuff out there that do that. I’m not one of them. If I’m going to buy an asset, I don’t want to buy an asset that’s you know, that’s got a debt on it that 70 grand more than it’s worth, even if it does cashflow.

Justin: Right, yeah. 100% I just bought a seller sub two deal in Dayton, Ohio. And it’s because it has a little bit equity. So there’s some equity in it. It’s not some A smoking deal, but it has a great interest rate at 3.75%. The rents are way higher in the mortgage payment. It just makes sense, right? It’s not some phenomenal deal. But I’m also not someone that’s going to go pay, you know, 30% More on that property just because the cash flows, I’m not in it for the cash flow, I’m in it for the wealth accumulation, right? Because then banks will go lend on the equity you have in these properties. And that can either go in your pocket tax free, or could go to buying more properties, which would probably be my advice there. So I tend to agree with you on 2023. I think getting extremely again, we’ve used this word a lot focus, but I really just boiled it down to buying runway, my first six months of 2023, I want to buy as much runway as I can, what that just simply means is keep doing what I know to be true and what works, and put the hustle hat back on, right? And do whatever it takes to continue to buy runway. And through that you will see a lot of people fall off, right? So competitors are going to fall off. And then some normalcy will come back to the market with the buyers realizing Okay, interest rates are gonna stay around six and a half percent, which is kind of my gut feeling. And then the sellers gonna realize, Oh, I’m not going to get 2021 pricing, right, because right now we’re in that moment where sellers still want 21 pricing. And buyers want, you know, a deep discount because they know the interest rate on the back end. So to me, it’s by runway do what you know to be doing, for me is PPC, cold calling. Those are my two main horses, and then I layer on some texting in there. But I love those two because it brings in vast volume, and then it brings in motivation.

Justin: So dude, I appreciate you coming on here. I appreciate you being vulnerable, sharing some stuff personally, with the audience. I second Brad, I support Brad in this in encouraging people to really focus on themselves, as it really will help you speed up your path to success. If you can be the best best version of yourself. You will win bigger there is no doubt about that. Brad is living proof of that. I’m living proof of that. And again, email Brad for that a quiz. I guess we’ll call it’s not a test. But it’s a little quiz. Because all entrepreneurs need to focus on themselves. Because if you can’t, you won’t run your business properly. Brad, I appreciate you dude. Any last words?

Brad: No. I mean if look, if you’re suffering or struggling, there’s no reason for it and just reach out to me. I’ll talk to you I got a free 30 minute call. Just go to Bradchandler.com and sign up and I’ll help you and you mentioned the word success. Not just success in in business, success in your relationships, and your children, in your home and your health. So it’s big, it’s huge.

Justin: Amen, brother. Well, I appreciate you being on here. We will talk soon. That is it for this episode. Go crush 2023 Dude