How To Purchase 150 Properties In Just Two Years with Steven Pesavento

Steven Pesavento has been investing in real estate for two years where he bought and sold 150 properties based in Denver, CO. Steven considers himself a beginning investor maybe not quite a beginner in a lot of eyes, but for himself and his goals, he's just getting started. We'll take a dive into Steven story where he shares on how he has been able to scale to the level he is currently at in just two years. Listen to this episode on podcast.

• In the last two years he bought and sold 150 houses in two different markets, like Raleigh, North Carolina and Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• He focuses on scale and building a team, where he has people on the ground who are going out and signing up these contracts, getting properties under contract directly with the sellers and doing direct response marketing, direct mail, PPC.
• His philosophy is simple, that he has to do enough deals rapidly to get enough information to learn quickly.

Whenever you take on the decision to cut overhead, it's a trade off� - Steven Pesavento

• He is a big person on modeling others, so he found a few investors who he was able to learn the ins and outs of how their business was working and kind of take seven to 10 years of real estate experience and condense it down into a few months. And so he really started modeling, which is just another word for copying started kind of ripping off everything that they were doing and he started applying that in his business and he really took off.
• He was learning from investors like, Andy McFarlin, Bill Allen, Mike Simmons, Justin Williams, a couple of people from around the country, they're part of a mastermind group called eight figure flipping or seven figure flipping."

Steven mentioned that while there's two separate groups, there's one group that he was a part of, but he got connected to them through an event that was going on and he wasn't a really a big fan of spending money on coaching or mentorship. He thought he could learn everything on his own and he was, Steven was trading some of his experience in other fields, building websites and doing things like that for the ability to learn from some other investors. But when he came across these guys, he could just tell they're really authentic. So he ended up trading so of his time to get access to it and then readdress really took off after that. And things just really grew and it's been a great two years.

• The biggest thing is you want to hire people who are better than you at certain areas of the business. So you can focus it on your core competency. Steven says he is best at building systems sales and really putting a team together.
• In addition he hired out an acquisition manager to go on sales appointments, a lead manager to answer the phones, a disposition manager to sell wholesales, a project manager to manage the flips that we have going.

In order to get scale, you're probably going to have to spend some money and you're gonna have to do something that's repeatable.

For his that was marketing, direct mail was the first channel that he went after. And he started out with about 10 or 15,000 mail pieces for that first month. But now he is up to a point where on any given month where between 50 and a hundred thousand mail pieces per month. So what that does for him is it gives Steven enough pieces of marketing going out every day that we know that we're going to get a certain number of phone calls and from those certain number of phone calls we're going to get a certain number of appointments and we can pretty much expect how many contracts he is going to get.

So the biggest thing about being able to do volume is just hiring the right people and training them and really managing them, which is a totally different business than being kind of the one man army that a lot of investors are kind of being able to go out there like a Swiss army knife and go out and do every single task. Steven don't go on appointments, he don't live in the market and he's not looking stuff up over the phone. So he really have to rely on other people. And the biggest piece about building anything to scale is you really have to rely on, on your team and your partners to do what they need to do.

The biggest challenge is whenever you decide to move quick, you're going to make mistakes and you're going to have to learn from those mistakes really quickly. So when you're doing marketing at scale and you make a mistake, that mistake costs you a lot of money.

So if for example, you're making a change within your system and you have 200 phone calls coming in a week and you have something go wrong with your CRM or you have something go wrong with your call system, it's going to really impact you and you're going to have to figure it out really quickly. How you're gonna be able to come back from that. In other words, what he learned was you really need to have redundancy in the system. If our CRM goes down and you don't have a backup available so that our team is able to get in there and do the things they need to do to make sure that the machine continues to run.

Learn from mistakes quickly and have some systems in place to make sure that you are not stuck with one option. His model for the first two years was partnerships. So he had a partner on the ground, 50/50 equity partner and that person was responsible for managing the actual renovations and flips when the team was going on out there in North Carolina and Minnesota. They made sure that Steven was not losing money, that he is not making bad investment decisions, but it happens when you're doing stuff at scale, you are gonna lose some money. It's never a good feeling, but it is a great feeling when that's off your books and you're like, okay, well I learned a lot from that.

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