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A talented and experienced Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur has the skills and tools to make deals work that most other investors can’t. And that’s a great thing! But should a real estate investor say yes and do every deal they can, just because they can find a way to make it work? No, they shouldn’t. In this episode, Jeff discusses the critical importance of holding two ideas in a healthy tension: finding ways to say yes to a deal, but finding reasons to say no to a deal. When we have the talents and skills to make deals work, paired with the discretion to turn down mediocre opportunity, we make better decisions.
Episode Transcript
Here’s a question for you. If you can find a way to make a deal work, should you go ahead and do the deal? Should you go ahead and buy the property? Well, it seems like a simple question. But I believe there are two things that we need to be asking ourselves. Number one, can we find a way to make this work? And number two, should we make this work even if we can find a way and in this episode, we’re going to talk about holding in a healthy tension to different things. Having lots of ways to say yes, but lots of reasons to say no, let’s cue up the theme song we’ll jump right in. Welcome to racking up rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chests of capital or insider connections can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans nor are we posting WE BUY HOUSES signs are just looking for quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people oriented dealmakers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out Win Win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media, this show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio. He thinks so much for joining me for another episode of racking up rental show notes for this episode can be found at thoughtful rt e.com/e 160 Episode 160. Please do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe or the Follow button and your podcast app. If you haven’t done that yet. It really helps fellow fat for real estate entrepreneurs who are looking for a show like this to find it and of course makes sure that you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. Thank you for that onward with today’s episode. So I think that one of the things that we need to keep our focus on all the time is that we’re basically trying to make good decisions in our real estate investing endeavors all the time, right? We want to make good decisions. And I would like to give you the argument that good decisions come from holding a healthy tension between two things. One is having lots and lots of ways to say yes to a deal more ways than most investors would have. But also having the discretion of lots of reasons to say no. And I think that when you have those two things in held in a healthy tension, you will only say yes to the things that really make the most sense. So for this episode, I thought it just makes the most sense to just let’s just separate these two topics, ways to say yes and reasons to say no. And then let’s bring it together at the end to talk about this healthy tension. So let’s talk first about ways to say yes, now an investor who has invested in themselves in their own education and their personal development, especially around the topic of deal. Structuring has a large what we call toolbox, they have a large box of tools that they can look at every deal and they can say, Okay, well, gosh, there’s lots of different deal structures that might work here. You know, I could buy this with a bank loan, very straightforward. I could buy this with complete seller financing, I could buy this with partial seller financing and put the seller in second position, I could buy this with partial seller financing and provide the seller with collateral and a different property, I could buy this property on a rap note, I could buy this property subject to the existing financing, I can lease this property with the option to buy it, I could wholesale this property, I could flip this property I could short term rent, and there’s so many different tools in the well equipped real estate investors toolbox. And that’s a really, really good thing. Most real estate investors don’t have a real deep toolbox to be honest, right? They have a few tools that they know well. A lot of those tools relate to buy low, sell high. A lot of those tools relate to look at what’s on the market, make lots of offers, negotiate through agents, but when you have the skill set to go off market with seller financing, and you find yourself sitting in the living rooms of lots of sellers, you have lots of opportunities to utilize what you might call a creative approach. Right? And if you also, there’s two types of skills, right? There’s technical skills, and then there’s seller relations skills, right technical skills are when you can rattle off the details of how an all inclusive trust deed works for him stance or you know the exact paperwork, you need to do a seller financing deal with a substitution of security clause. But the other side of your brain is the one that’s more relational. And when you have that set of skills, that also means that when you’re sitting in that living room, you can usually facilitate a conversation with that seller that gets them comfortable with what you are proposing. And that is very valuable. When you put those two things together, you can find a lot of ways to make deals work, we had an episode A while back, that was about the idea of your price, my terms or my price, your terms, right? That’s the concept that says, Well, I can pay you pretty much whatever price you want, as long as I get to dictate the terms or we could do it the other way around. If you want your terms, then I get to dictate the price. And when you take that sort of simple mentality about the flexibility of all the different elements of a deal, then you realize there’s usually a lot of different ways to make a deal work. And it’s a that’s a good thing. Absolutely. For you to have as many tools in your left brain and right brain toolboxes to be able to make things work and to get the other person to say yes, that’s a really good thing. But what is the risk of that? The risk of that is that you end up saying yes to a lot of stuff, maybe certain things that you shouldn’t say yes to. And that brings us to the second part of our of our sentence here. We just talked about ways to say yes, but now let’s talk about reasons to say no. Just because you can do something in life doesn’t always mean that you should write. Just because you can make a deal work doesn’t mean you necessarily should make that deal work doesn’t mean you necessarily should buy that property. You know, one of the questions I love to ask my coaching clients when they come to me, and what my opinion on a deal, one of the very first questions I asked them, probably the very first question is, tell me what you love about this deal? Right? Not what you like, not what some of the good stuff is. Tell me what you love about this deal. And it doesn’t even matter to me exactly what they answer with that question as long as they have an answer. Because if there’s nothing about the deal that jumps out at them that like, oh, my gosh, this thing is the best part of this deal, then that really, really concerns me because it might be kind of what I would just call a mundane deal. We don’t need to do mundane deals just because we can make them work. We shouldn’t do deals just to be doing deals, right. And we have another episode in this podcast about the topic of deal itis deal. Itis is a disease that is somewhat communicable between real estate investors. It’s unique to real estate investors. And it’s the disease that is is what happens when an investor wants to buy a property so badly that they start forcing it to work when it doesn’t really work. Right, they start rationalizing why they should do it. Just because they want to have it happen so bad. There’s another unique, nuanced form of deal itis, which is when you have good momentum and you you’re saying yes to lots of things, you tend to want to say yes to more things. And that’s another type of deal itis as you don’t want to say no, basically. And so deal itis is is a dangerous. It’s a dangerous condition that we have to be very aware of as entrepreneurs in real estate. We should not be doing deals just to do deals. So you know, I asked my my coaching clients this question, what do you love about this deal? And what that speaks to? is a related question, which is, I would ask you, if you’re looking at a deal right now, what is the big win that you will get from doing it? What is the big win? Now,
there are lots of different big wins that you could get from a deal, right? You could get a big win, like the most obvious one is probably a big win in terms of equity, right? You buy a $400,000 property for 275. And you’ve just created a bunch of instant equity, that’s a big win. And that’s the buy low sell high type, you know, buy low, buy below value type of mentality. That is the first thing you learn in real estate investing and that’s great. But that’s not the only type of wind right, you could get a massive cash flow when you could buy a $400,000 property for $400,000. But if you have the right plan for the property, you could generate a 20% cash on cash return and that would be a massive win. I teach people about the massive wins that come from what I call supercharged seller financing where you’re Buying super you’re buying seller financing debt from the seller, that has value to you in your portfolio beyond even just that single property that you just bought from the seller, once you know how to use it and harness that, that can be a win that’s makes a deal worth doing. You could buy a property and pay a fair price for it. But you could know that that Lot was dividable. And this plenty large and you could divide off a lot and sell it to a builder to recapitalize yourself from some of your investment in the property that could be a huge win. And again, it doesn’t even matter to me exactly what your huge win is. But it matters that there is one matters to me that you are in love with one particular deal or aspect of this deal, because it’s going to give you a huge win. That speaks to a deal that’s worth doing. When we have reasons to say no to stuff that we could say yes to because we know how to make it work. We know how to structure and make it work. But we choose to say no, it’s because we have standards, we have standards for maybe certain returns we get we have standards for how we spend our time, we have standards for opportunity cost, right? If you do a deal that you could do, even if it’s kind of a mundane deal, that takes 100 grand out of your pocket, well that’s 100 grand you don’t have for the next thing that might come along. You know, that’s three hours a week of your energy that you don’t have for the next opportunity to come along. So reasons to say no, are about having standards about appreciating the opportunity cost of your time, energy, and money. There are some people who will say, and I think maybe some you know, people have been around real estate for longer, you might hear them actually say, sometimes the best deal is the one that you don’t do. That’s an interesting thought. And I found myself scratching my head about that a few times, especially earlier in my journey. But I now I really understand it. If you do a deal that takes you off track that can take a lot of time, energy and money to recover from. So sometimes the best deal is the one that you say no to even though you could say yes, because you know how to structure it in a way that could work. If it’s not the right deal for you, sometimes the best thing to do is to not do it. So how do we hold these two things? Intention, right? The tension between you know how to say yes, you can find lots of ways to say yes, or at least a way. But you’re looking for reasons to say no. I think what this does is is it helps you make sure that you are doing deals that are worth doing. That’s another main premise in my coaching with with students and clients is that the lot of times they think to themselves, well, I don’t have the money to buy a property. And I say the first thing you need to go out is you need to go out and you need to create an opportunity for a deal that’s worth doing. Once you have a deal that’s worth doing. Now, it’s worth the effort and the money that it takes to do that. So you’re seeking to find a deal that is worth doing. And to structure that deal in a way that will work the best it possibly can. A key question that I would encourage you to ask yourself that I’m asking myself more and more. I’m asking my coaching clients more and more. If you don’t buy this property, will you regret it in six to 12 months from now? Okay, take note. I didn’t say if you buy this property, will you regret it? I said if you don’t buy this property, will you regret it? Six to 12 months from now? And I like this question, because I think it speaks to both ways to say yes, and reasons to say no. If you don’t buy this property, will you regret having missed this opportunity? Because you knew how to say yes. And it was truly an opportunity worth saying yes to. So I would ask yourself that question. Will I regret not buying this property in say six to 12 months from now? And if you can say yes, I will regret buying this property, then figure out the way to proceed. But if you if you look at that question, you say, I don’t know, I’m not sure that I’m going to regret not buying it, then then that’s a real big sign that maybe this isn’t a deal that is absolutely worth doing. So my friends, I encourage you to strive to have the skills to make deals work, where others can’t have the skills to look at a deal and say, Yeah, I can figure out how to do that when most of the other investors you might hang out with online or in Facebook groups or whatever, wouldn’t know how to make it work. Strive to have the skills to know how to make it work where they can’t, but also have the restraint to only do the deals that give you a big win. So strive to have the skills to make it work, but the restraint to say No, unless it’s going to give you a big, big win. And that is it for today’s episode of racking up rentals. Again show notes for this episode can be found at thoughtful our e.com/e 160 Please do us a big favor and yourself a big favor by hitting that subscribe or follow button and your podcast app and rating and reviewing the show. You know, I see literally every rating and review and I appreciate every single one of them. If you think we’re doing a good job here, give us that five star rating. And again, that helps show the platforms that you are listening and liking what you’re hearing. Thank you for that. Did you know also that we have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. It’s true and you need to be there. We’d love to have you it’s called rental portfolio wealth builders. And we’d love to have you join us over there just go to group dot thoughtful rte.com And the magic of the internet will take you right to that page within Facebook and you can hit the join button. If you liked this episode, take a screenshot of it please post it to Instagram and tag us in your posts. We are at thoughtful real estate. Well I’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening until then. This is Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to racking up rentals where we build long term wealth by being when when dealmakers remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
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