Flipping Blueprint (eBook)

Introduction –

Who Am I and Why a Blueprint?

The year was 2001 when I quit my job. I was managing a travel company for a boss who was the definition of horrible. He had just gone off on a particularly nasty, expletive-filled, and sexist tirade in front of multiple employees, stormed out of my office, and slammed his office door like a child. I had had enough. I packed up my belongings, walked into his office and dropped my keys on his desk, and told him “I’m out.” He looked up at me and said, “Do you know what this does to me? I should shoot you right now.” He kept a loaded gun in his desk. I calmly turned around and walked out of his office, gathered up my belongings, and left. I was done, I was free. For the next few months I traveled and enjoyed the stress-free life of being unemployed. However, my finances, or lack thereof, soon caught up with me. With my savings dwindling, my checking account decided it was time for me to get a new job. After the high stress levels and long hours of my last job, I wanted something simple, something stress-free, something easy. I looked through the want ads and answered a data-entry position at an appraisal company, and that is where my real estate journey began.

I quickly went from the data-entry position to getting my appraiser’s license. After a year of learning how to evaluate residential properties, I took the plunge when I was 22 years old and bought my first property. A $134,000 two-bedroom/two-bathroom condominium located in Las Vegas. The condo had been a rental property for an out-of-state investor and looked the part. I doubted the tenant had ever cleaned. Dust was piled on top of every surface it could cling to, darkened footpaths were carved into the carpet, and the smell would have been enough to turn away anyone that didn’t have a strong stomach. It was perfect. I negotiated the price down from $145,000 with a few thousand dollars in seller-paid closing costs thrown in and bought the property with a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan. I found contractors to replace the carpet and paint the property. I found other contractors to lay tile and install granite countertops. I bought materials and installed fixtures and completed small repairs myself. You quickly learn the extent and limits of your construction skills when an electrical current is coursing through your body. I moved into the property before the work was done and continued to work on it evenings and weekends. I overpaid contractors, the project took twice as long as it should have, and I overimproved the property. I did almost everything wrong, but when it was time to sell I sold the property for $279,500 and made more than $80,000! I was hooked. I bought another property, then two more; I moved from one house to another. I started buying rentals and making passive money. 2004 and 2005 rolled through and it was hard to not make money on real estate. Everyone could qualify for a loan, and you could buy a house and sell it the next day for a profit. But it couldn’t, it wouldn’t, last. The final property I bought before it all came tumbling down was on June 30, 2005, a dream home for my wife and I. I had my own appraisal company I was running out of my home office, and the real estate investing was just a side gig at that time. A way for us to take nice vacations and buy a bigger and better home. But I saw the market shifting, red flags began popping up. I saw new-home builders start offering more incentives to buyers. I saw inventory levels of houses increasing. I became nervous and cancelled the contracts that I had on several new-construction properties. Although the real estate industry was passionately telling people to keep buying houses, it was looking like this fun roller-coaster ride we had all been on was about to take a plunge. I tried to warn my friends, but the hype kept pushing people to buy well past the point of no return. I began selling my properties in 2006, but we had already reached the pinnacle and were headed down faster than I could have imagined. The pace quickened, and we began screaming our way to the bottom through 2007 to 2009 as the Las Vegas market dropped 65% from its peak values. Markets across the entire United States were in a free fall. Business came to a halt, and my family, like many others across the country, felt the collapse of an over inflated and unsecured economy. If you didn’t know it already, I hope you do now, real estate markets are full of up and downs.

After years of struggling and fighting our way through issue after issue, reduced work, financial stress, dwindling accounts, I finally saw a change in the market. It was 2010 and it was time to buy. But not like before. The speculative purchases people were making from 2003 to 2007 were gone. I began to do more research and became a more knowledgeable buyer. My wife and I cashed out the $80,000 that we had left in the stock market and went all in. We began to flip. But not like before; we were not going to get hurt like that again. We began to buy rentals again. But not like before. Things started to look up for us. We started making profits again. I bought a new home for my family, a short sale that was a steal, because the banks didn’t know how to handle their inventory. Then one night in January 2012 everything changed. It was that time in the evening when you check your phone before going to bed, there shouldn’t be any calls, everything is fine, and you can go to sleep. I had three missed calls and three voice mails. I listened to the voice mails and heard a distressed voice come through the phone speaker, muffled by the sound of sirens. My father had had a heart attack. My father, my friend, my son’s Opa. I raced to the hospital, 80 miles an hour down 35-mile-an-hour roads. I still vividly remember that nighttime drive, me repeating to myself “No, no, no” all the way to the hospital. When I arrived I had to run from one side of the hospital to the other, three different desks I had to stop at to find him. Frantic, I remember the looks on the nurses’ faces; they already knew. No matter how fast I went, it was already too late. He was gone, just like that. I was hit, I was knocked down. It sometimes takes a shock for you to figure out your life and whether you are on the path you want to be on. It took me 6 months to fight through my depression, my pain, to realize I wasn’t doing what I wanted and I wasn’t providing for my family the way I wanted. I was working too hard and not getting anywhere. Time is precious, time with your family is precious. I was working 10- to 14-hour days, 6 and 7 days a week. I had to change what I was doing. Again I doubled down on real estate, as I knew this was the path to recovering my time and reaching financial freedom. At this point I was flipping a house about every 2 months, but still as a side gig, I knew there had to be a better approach. There had to be ways to be more efficient, more profitable. I closed the doors of my appraisal business and I began going to real estate–investing seminars, paying tens of thousands of dollars sometimes. I would pick up a little bit of knowledge here and there. If I only learned one thing, gathered one missing piece of information at each of these events that would save me or make me $1,000 on a deal, and I could repeat that experience 100 times, the seminars would more than pay for themselves.

Sitting in one of these rooms, I finally took stock of who was there with me. It was a $40,000 event and there were about 500 people in the room. Most of them didn’t know a thing about real estate, and I had to wonder how many of these people could have even afforded to be there. Over the course of that weekend I found out that many of these people had maxed out credit cards, had borrowed money from family, or had taken out a second mortgage to attend. I was frustrated. I was sad. Most of these people had drunk the Kool-Aid and were starstruck by these pseudo-celebrities and were being taught next to nothing! I was there to hopefully find one or two nuggets of gold; these people were there because they thought they were going to get the keys to the kingdom! The guru at this particular event answered one of my questions while he was on stage by telling me to just use Google to find my answer! In this room of 500 people who each paid $40,000, he was telling me, and all of them, the answers were on Google. So why did I, why did we all pay him $40,000? Well, guess what, it was on Google, not all the information I was looking for, but parts of it. There were still missing pieces to the answer of my question, to everyone’s questions. Pieces these gurus didn’t know or couldn’t provide. I had other attendees coming up to me at these seminars addressing questions to me instead of to the staff who were the supposed “experts.” Little did we know that these staff members who were paraded around as the “experts” had for the most part never even flipped a house! They were just salespeople trying to gain your trust for the next upsell. Maybe you have also paid $20,000, $50,000, even $80,000 to attend a real estate–investing course and learn what a guru said was the best way to “flip a house” using his or her secret formula that could make you rich just like him or her. You went to the classes, the boot camps, the bus tours, the action-packed weekends with lots of jumping and dancing and “getting out of your comfort zone,” but you still can’t get a Realtor to work with you or find you flippable properties. Your education materials are sitting on a shelf or in a closet just collecting dust. Why isn’t this working? You are not alone. There are tens of thousands of people who have gone to these...