February 6, 2018

JF1253: Learn How To Deal With Contractors & Save Money with Ryan Garcilazo


Ryan is a contractor and investor who specializes in training investors how to deal with contractors. This is huge as investors, especially flippers. With proper construction knowledge you’ll be able to save money on bids, as well as keeping yourself from being taken advantage of. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!

Best Ever Tweet: 

Ryan Garcilazo Real Estate Background:

-Owner of the Gacilazo group, who train investors, newbies, contractors and wholesalers how to rehab

-They buys, renovate, and turn—either renting or selling—an average of about 16 properties a month

-Has flipped nearly 600 homes and worked with nearly 1,000 investors

-Won top 550 contractor awards the past fours years. Earned a spot on on the INC 5000 list

-Say hi to him at https://www.thegarcilazogroup.com/  

-Based in Chicago, Illinois

-Best Ever Book: Extreme Ownership

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TRANSCRIPTION

Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.

With us today, Ryan Garcilazo. How are you doing, Ryan?

Ryan Garcilazo: I’m good. How are you, sir?

Joe Fairless: I’m doing well, and nice to have you on the show. A little bit about Ryan – he is the owner of the Garcilazo Group and he trains people who are just starting out – contractors and wholesalers – how to rehab, because he has rehabbed nearly 600 homes and worked with nearly 1,000 investors. He won the Top 550 Contractor Award the past four years and earned a top stop on the Inc. 5000 list.

As he said right before we started the interview, he said he wants investors to see the flip through the eyes of a contractor, not necessarily the investor. With that being said, Ryan, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?

Ryan Garcilazo: Thank you for having me on. So really quickly, my background is [unintelligible [00:02:58].29] for the past ten years. We own the Garcilazo Group, and in that company we are a general contractor that services Chicago and Florida, and over the years we basically rehabbed over 600 homes, probably closer to 700. [unintelligible [00:03:10].27] about the first hundred or so, because they were all messed up. I don’t wanna count everything that we messed up, but hey, they do count. At the end of the day, we figured out the business and we did figure out exactly how to do this business right and scale it as contractors.

One of the things we realized first and foremost is our investors simply didn’t understand how to rehab, which is common everywhere, in every state, on every coast; it doesn’t matter who you are, what program you come from, where you learned how to invest, rehabbing is a strategic game that you must master.

For example, you have investors who are learning how to real estate invest; that’s one half of the battle. If you really wanna touch a home and you wanna rehab it and you wanna do something physically to alter its appearance, you have to know how to do that, because just having a general contractor alone is not gonna get you to the promised land; as an ex-general contractor, I made money off every line item – I hit you with a GC fee, I have change orders coming up my ass, and you are gonna pay them. Why? Because you’re scared I’m gonna walk away. You didn’t know how I do my job; you didn’t understand the construction process. Because at the end of the day, like I always say, real estate is one industry, and construction is a whole separate industry. You have to know both to flip a house.

So what we decided to do after all these years, we said “You know what, there’s an opportunity here”, because I’m tired of seeing and hearing all these investors going to all these meetups worldwide, nationwide, and the first thing out of their mouth is “I need a new contractor.” Not necessarily true. What you need to start saying is “I need further education and training on rehabbing in constructions.” That’s when we opened up the Rehab Depo Inc. based out of Chicago.

What we have a is a three-month program where essentially we do one month of classroom time with an investor. We show them how to rehab through the eyes of a contractor. We teach them how contractors operate, how they think, how they work, where they’re fraudulent, where they try to scam you, where they try to pad things, how to price, how to bid, the whole nine.

The second month is all ride alongs and the third month is hands-on in our state of the art rehab facility where we’re actually gonna teach investors how to cut their own drywall and install their own drywall, how to paint properly, how to frame a wall, how to frame a window, how to frame a door. Why is that important? Because as an investor, if you can understand the time it takes to do these installs, you’ll have a better respect for your contractor. More importantly, you’ll also understand how long certain tasks take in a rehab, so you can better calculate how long a project is gonna take. So you’re in control.

The whole idea is we’re no longer the adversary, we are your advocate, and we wanna put you in the driver’s seat so you have enough leverage to negotiate and work side-by-side with your contractor, so you don’t have to wonder if he’s lying, you don’t have to wonder if this is true or not true, you’re gonna understand the permit process, you’re gonna understand how architects work, you’re gonna understand how to read blueprints… We’re gonna teach you the art of constructions, fully-focused on rehabbing. We’ve been doing that all year, and it’s an amazing, amazing turnaround, I’ll tell you that.

Joe Fairless: What are some common things that contractors do to pad their bottom line?

Ryan Garcilazo: For example, at the end of a bid usually you should have the GC fees. When we were contractors, I always had a GC fee. I wanted my clients to know what I’m making as my overhead. The GC fee in the common world can be as high as 33% if this is a consumer job. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you call me to remodel your kitchen, I could easily charge you 33% markup, and you’re gonna pay it, because that’s consumer world. In a rehab, we all know as investors – because I’m an investor as well – that you do have a budget, and usually that budget is very, very tight; in our reality, we investors always want the best quality, the best materials, with the lowest budget possible. The reality of what I’ve just said doesn’t work; it’s logic. You can’t have the best without paying for the best.

The other thing is in this business you’re never gonna get the A contractor, because the A+ contractor doesn’t rehab. They don’t need to. They’re all building Chipotles and McDonald’s and skyscrapers. Why? Because they have their market and their margin where they can make their 33%. What’s happening is a lot of contractors now are coming into this game of rehabbing, and they’re still thinking they can mark up the same price, and you just can’t do it, because the rehab budgets don’t hold 33%. You have to be able to charge 10%-30% and go after volume.

The contractor that scales his business to 100 properties a year — it’s because I was charging 10%-13% per project as my markup, but I was able to do 10-20 projects a month because of that. This is a volume game.

So that’s one area where contractors are able to pad projects, if they’re not putting in a GC fee, because they’re not being honest. For whatever reason, they don’t want the investor to see what they’re making. I don’t see why this is business.

So what they’re doing now is if the electric line item for a full gut rehab is 13,5k in Chicago, they’re gonna make it 15,5k in Chicago and they’re gonna put 2k in their pocket. Then they’re gonna put in a line item, or maybe the whole house needs to be [unintelligible [00:07:48].07] in Chicago for 16k – they’re gonna make it 18k and put another 2k in their pocket.

All they’re doing is they’re messing up their accounting, they’re messing up their books; they’re gonna have poor money management when it’s all said and done, and who suffers? The investor. Because the guy is trying to take money off every single line item, but he can’t track that; that’s an accounting nightmare. Whereas, all you have to do is put your GC fee at the end and say “I’m making (I don’t know) $6,500 of this $100,000 job. Great, more power to you. It’s very easy now to calculate your cost because you have a line item for that, and if you had a hard money loan that’s coming in from your investor, it’s easy to track that because most hard money loans have a line item on the [unintelligible [00:08:27].09] sheets for a GC fee… But contractors don’t know that, and investors don’t know enough to share that. That’s why we’re here.

Joe Fairless: When you started out doing the rehabs on homes, what were some of the mistakes you made that you referenced earlier?

Ryan Garcilazo: When I first started off, I really didn’t have a grasp on understanding what a fix and flip versus a buy and hold price points would be. I didn’t have a grasp on what a full gut, a medium gut and a cosmetic is. Really, I didn’t, until you get in there. And then all of a sudden you have the problem solved.

I like to consider rehabbing from a contractor’s level like medicine – when a doctor is in surgery, he’s got a team of nurses and another physician usually with him. Why? Because they’ve gotta problem-solve, and you have to be able to problem-solve immediately. You can’t just let the patient lay there. Well, a house is the same way – when you run into a problem, you’ve gotta have a team, and that team is supposed to work together with you cohesively so you guys can problem-solve and figure out how you’re gonna get that [unintelligible [00:09:23].00] off the wall or the ceiling, how you’re gonna get your [unintelligible [00:09:25].26] is the house is too wide? Do you need to do something else? Do you need a column? If you’re in the basement, and you realize in Chicago you need seven feet and you don’t have seven feet, okay, now you’ve gotta excavate. That  was a problem for us. I knew nothing about excavation; I didn’t understand the whole process of you have to remove the current concrete [unintelligible [00:09:43].20] you have to hope that you have footing on the exterior walls, because if not, you’re risking the house collapsing… And then it’s also about the season. We’re in Chicago, it’s cold all the time. Our winters are like Antarctica, bro. So we have to continue thinking about all the outside elements and outside variables on top of that.

I was not prepared for that in my early 20’s… I simply was not, because I wasn’t seasoned enough. So it just felt like problem after problem after problem, and then you add the contracting issues of learning, with a huge learning curve, add that to investors who also were very new, who didn’t understand a) how to rehab, b) how their lending worked, so I wasn’t getting paid on time. I didn’t even know how to submit a real draw, to be honest with you… So there’s the accumulation of a lot of issues that kind of combusted into an explosion.

So you learn very hard, and it was very financially costly on both sides. So that’s again another reason why we saw the opportunity over the years. Once we started really focusing on quality and material choices and design and how funding works, we became a powerhouse contractor and there was nobody to compete at our level, because we understood both sides of the fence – we understood real estate, we understood investing, and we understood construction. Once we figured all that out, I wanted to take all my mistakes and I wanted to start teaching investors proactively “Let’s avoid this.” Basically, “I wouldn’t go through that door, unless you wanna waste $1,000. I wouldn’t go through that door unless you wanna lose and breakeven on this million dollar venture”, because I’ve been there, and I’m just telling you; you don’t have to listen to me, but I’ve been there, and it’s not going to work. School of Hard Knocks, I believe in that.

For example, I used to work with hedge funds when we first started, and they had awarded me my first three projects. I think the rehabs were around 25k a piece, so I’m like $25,000 in. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I’m paying all this money up for labor and materials, and I forget that I need to start invoicing for draws. But what happens is we weren’t following some of the protocols and materials and spec choices of this hedge funds, so they weren’t honoring draws. Hard lesson learned right there, when I’m putting out 10k/month and I’m only getting 2,5k back to run a job. Those are the mistakes I was making, and that’s very, very real and it’s still happening today.

Joe Fairless: On the flipside, what are some mistakes that you see investors make, who you’ve come across and you were like “Oh, man… Really? That happened? You thought this?” What are some of those things?

Ryan Garcilazo: The number one mistake is investors have an expectation of a rehab, when they shouldn’t have any expectation if they’ve never done it. There’s a thing called production. In construction, for the rehab you have three phases – you have phase one, which is production phase. That’s preparation, getting prepared. The analogy I like to use is the whole world is always under construction – roads, highways, buildings, bridges… There’s always something under construction everywhere you go and no matter what city you live in. Do you think that it only took them 30 days to prepare for that, or did it take them months, if not years to prepare for a project that’s gonna take 3-4 years to complete? It takes time and preparation.

The number one problem I see with investors is they’re missing the time and preparation, because they don’t know how to prepare, they don’t know what to do first. So what we teach them is “Okay, you have pre-walk, you have contract period, then you have pre-con, and then you’re set up for day one demo.” All of that has to happen. The moment you put the house under contract, if you have a 30-day holding period before you close, there’s a lot of preparation that needs to happen in those 30 days so that your contractor can effectively start the same week you close on the house.

Joe Fairless: What did you say — you said pre-walk, contract period… What else?

Ryan Garcilazo: You have pre-walk, you have contract period, and then you have pre-con, which is preconstruction period. All of that equally takes about a week to do, and then you have your couple of days — it’s like the couple days before you go to war. You’re like, “Alright, I’m ready. We’ve done our walk.”

Pre-walk is very, very important. That’s when the real estate investor walks the home with prospective GC’s. There is no scope of work in hand. You’re sharing your vision, because you’re really trying to get feedback from a good GC, who’s gonna give you feedback. A crappy GC is not gonna tell you anything; [unintelligible [00:13:37].22] “Yeah, we can do this.” I don’t like that kind of GC. Why? Because as a former GC, I engaged with all my investors.

So pre-walk is when you’re walking in, you’re sharing your vision as an investor… “Here’s what I’d like to do – I wanna knock down this dining room wall, I wanna do an open floor concept, I wanna see the kitchen from the front door. I wanna remodel the bathroom, refinish the hardwoods, a nice chandelier with some [unintelligible [00:13:57].02] on the walls.” That’s the vision. You walk pre-walk with your contractor the whole way through… However many floors it is, so be it. Multifamily – so be it.

Then at the end of that conversation you have to get three verbal commitments to get to contract period. You’re basically asking him a question in a certain way that makes it seem like you’re basically telling him. What we do is we train you to understand how long a project takes, so one of the things you’re gonna get verbal commitment-wise is you’re gonna tell him “Alright, well I put this property under contract today. It’s the 28th. I close on it 28th December. I wanna make sure you can start that week. Is that a problem?” So you see, I’m kind of asking the question, but I’m basically telling him when I want him to start.

He’s gonna say “Yes. I have a month to think about it, shouldn’t be a problem.” Boom! Verbal commitment number one is in the bag. Next verbal commitment – “I’ve been looking at this, I’m anticipating about an eight-week project. Does that sound good to you?” “You know what? Yeah. I think I can do it in about eight weeks.” “Great. I’m gonna give you ten weeks though.” You always give your contractor an extra two weeks because of inspection periods and surprises that will always happen. You’ve got verbal commitment number two right there.

And verbal commitment number three is the most important. You’re gonna tell him your budget. The idea of this is simple – you think that project is 75k. Fine. You’re gonna tell him that you need him to do it for 62.5k; you’re gonna start low. So your next verbal commitment is basically telling him, “Alright, buddy, my budget on this is 62.5k. I’m gonna get all the contract paperwork together in the next 48 hours and send that over to you.” A good GC will say “Wait a minute, I can’t do it for 62.5k. However, I could probably do it for maybe 65k-68k.” You know you’ve already got the money in the budget for it, because you leveraged him low on purpose. So you say “You know what, I’m cool with that. How about we meet in the middle? I’ll give it to you for 67k.” You already know you have the loan for 75k, so you already have a contingency within your own loan that you’re already paying interest on. That’s a win. The contractor doesn’t need to know that. That’s how you negotiate.

You’ve just left your pre-walk with no paperwork in had, with your three most important verbal commitments that you can get from a contractor. Now you go into contract period. You draft up your [unintelligible [00:15:57].15] from the conversations you had at pre-walk, you’re gonna make sure your budget is a little bit more defined so he understands what he’s making on that 67k. Then you’re gonna have your contract, you’re gonna leave a blank schedule in there for them to fill out, and then you have a blank sublist sheet; let them fill it out. If there’s gonna be subs on this job, you wanna know who they are. Send that over to them via DocuSign, give them a couple days, they send it back – great, you’ve got everything done, you can review it, and then you set up a pre-con.

Pre-con is usually a week before day one demo. Because remember, in the contract paperwork, your contractor has just supplied you basically his project timeline – a start date, how long it’s gonna take, and an end date. So you have all that. Now you say “Cool. I close on the 28th, you’re saying you can start January 1st. Cool, no problem.” So basically, you’re gonna walk the house between Christmas and New Year’s and say “I need the agent there, I need the architect there if I have an architect on the project, and I need my GC there”, because now it’s all hands on deck, and you want everybody on the team in on any changes you may have made. Maybe you or the investor have made some changes with the architect that nobody knows about. Maybe you and the agent have made some changes that nobody knows about based on comps. Now that contractor needs to know.

So everybody meets at the property, now you go up to the project one last time; it’s more detailed and thorough than pre-walk. You address any possible change orders, you renegotiate any possible financials, and you discuss all the plans of action for this, so that come week one of demo, the plan is already set in motion, baby.

That’s how you prepare for a budget, that’s how you prepare for a rehab. And I guarantee, from my personal experience, I’ve never – with the thousands of investors I’ve worked with – gone through that with an investor who’s initiated it. I have initiated it.

Joe Fairless: So that is the production stage, correct?

Ryan Garcilazo: That is correct.

Joe Fairless: Alright, what’s the next stage?

Ryan Garcilazo: Construction. The construction stage is the next most important part of this. So you want to be able to walk hand in hand with your contractor. Your contractor is gonna know more than you – and he should, unless you’re a contractor. So we have a rehab progress book that we give to our investors. It’s a book that we created with the mindset of a contractor. He knows the stages and phases he’s going to go through to get things done, so we created a rehab progress book where we tell our investors “Always walk your property  twice a week minimum, more if necessary.”

Everytime you walk a property, you’re walking a property with a mission, there’s a purpose. You flip with intent; you’re not there to sit there and go “Oh, look at me… Here’s my pictures I’m putting on social media so that my network thinks I’m doing something”, because that stuff is all smoke and mirrors, and at the end of the day, when you don’t get the return you’re looking for, everybody will see that it was always smoke and mirrors from day one.

So you walk and you flip houses with an intent. Every progress walk you’re gonna go into the property and you’re gonna continue checking the schedule. Day one, week one, demo. How much is the demo gonna take? Ask your GC this. Great. We have the dumpster there. Was it there before day one? Yes. Great. How many dumpsters do you think you’re still gonna need on this project? Two. Awesome. Let me know if there’s anything I can do as an investor. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you so we can keep that timeline, because every stage matters.

Once demo stage is done, you go in with your project rehab book, you’re gonna go look at that and you’re gonna say “Okay, I’m gonna go through my first demo phase and I’m gonna ask questions. The dumpster – was it ordered on time? Yes/no. Was the dumpster removed on time? Yes/no. How many dumpsters were needed for this type of project? You make a note of that. And then you write down, were there any issues associated with demo? Maybe there were, maybe there weren’t. You write Yes/No.

Then there’s another little line item under the demo phase that says “Was there a draw associated with it? Yes/No. How much was the draw that was requested? How much was approved?”, because that’s always two different things. You’re gonna request $4,500, but the lender might see $2,000. That’s the nature of the business.

So you wanna document all that. If you have a lot more issues, then there’s a box, and that box is where you keep your notes. Make your notes on this demo phase. And then you go through all the different phases, as they happen. Your permits, your [unintelligible [00:19:41].15] the inspection period, then you’re framing, and then you’re setting and you’re moving… You’re going through all those different phases and it’s basically teaching an investor indirectly what phases should be coming up next, so that they’re learning, because they’re gonna go quality-check it themselves. So every time they do a project, walk their project, manage it. At the same time, they’re able to try to punch list as they go. They may have noticed a week before that that [unintelligible [00:20:03].15] or that base was cracked, and you made a note of it and you’ve told your GC, “Hey, don’t forget that that needs to get picked up and replaced. You installed it, it’s cracked, it happens, I get it. No big deal”, however, I notice a week later it’s still there. “I wanna make sure you don’t forget that.”

So basically, you’re punching as you go so that you’re minimizing all the list of things they’ve gotta do at the end of the project. You’re trying to create a win/win. You’re the investor, man. You’re in control. The agent works for you, the contractor works for you; the lender is working with you. They all wanna make money with you, so as an investor, we are empowering you, so that you understand how this process is supposed to work, and that’s the construction phase. Very, very detailed. There’s a lot of house walks, two weeks minimum, progress checks, checking your notebooks…

We also have a plan for our investors in projects that are $100,000 or over on the rehab. Go get yourself a [unintelligible [00:20:49].26] put it on the wall, drill it into the studs, and put all of your contracts, all your paperwork, all your scheduling, all your materials and [unintelligible [00:20:56].20] and pin it to this board, so that every time everybody walks the house, you have something to reference they are on the property. Because if it’s a $100,000 rehab, there are a lot of moving parts, and every construction project in the world, whether it’s a rehab, or a bridge, has a set of construction documents sitting somewhere near the project or on it. You have to have that.

Joe Fairless: With the construction stage, what would you say is the most overlooked aspect of it?

Ryan Garcilazo: The most overlooked aspect I think is putting too much trust in your contractor, simply because investors don’t know enough, so they trust that their contractor is gonna guide them to the promised land. And most do, trust me. Not all contractors are bad, let’s be honest… But they need direction. Contractors are blue collar guys, they’re simple. “Give me some directions, give me some directives, give me step-by-step, point me in the direction, crank me up and watch me go.” Without direction, they’re gonna start assuming you don’t know what you’re doing.

When I was a contractor, I used to see a lot of my clients – if not most – they simply just didn’t know what the hell they were doing, so I took it upon myself to make certain decisions. Some decisions I know they’ll like, some decisions I know they won’t like, and at the end of the day, that causes a problem of communication and transparency, because if I’m making decisions on your behalf because you can’t make them, because you don’t know how to make them, and then all of a sudden later I made a decision on tile because I knew it was cheaper and you’d like that but you hate the color, but it’s already installed, we’ve got a problem. Because now I’m gonna tell you “Take the initiative here, man. This is your house, not mine. I’ve been asking for tile selections for a month, they’re not here. I have to make a move, my guys need to get paid.”

The most common issue is putting this trust in your contractor because you as an investor don’t know what to do next. We kind of help you with that, obviously.

Joe Fairless: And is there a stage after the construction stage?

Ryan Garcilazo: Yeah, post-construction. Post-construction is when you wanna make sure you work with your contractor to honor a warrantee for a year, you wanna make sure that they’ve got all their final lien waivers signed, you wanna make sure you have your sub-lien waivers signed, you wanna make sure the punch list has been complete once or twice and that is signed, and then obviously I need final inspections to be done with the city’s [unintelligible [00:22:54].23] Make sure they come to the final inspection, sign up on that, that you have everything you need. Because once you have something going on and you have a buyer that’s interested, they’re naturally gonna call their buyer inspector, and the buyer inspectors, let’s be honest, some inspectors are paid to find problems, that’s what they’re supposed to do. I’ve never heard of an inspector coming out and saying “Nope, the house is perfect.” No such thing. So you wanna be prepared with your contractor.

A smart investor will hold back $500. The reason why you wanna do that is because you wanna be able to get your contractor back to the job site if there are some issues that an inspector finds. Now, at the same time, the inspector may find something pretty big, that has nothing to do with the original scope of work. That comes down to your relationship with your contractor.

In Chicago, we have a lot of power lines that go from the power poles from the alleys to the back of the houses. They actually are still connected to the houses. Well, now what they want contractors to do is if you’re doing a full renovation, they want you to bury that line, and that has nothing to do really with the city; it’s everything to do with the electric company. For us it’s ComEd. ComEd wants $1,000 for you to bury that line. Guess what? That wasn’t part of the scope of work. Most contractors don’t know that. The cities can do whatever the cities want. All of a sudden that’s an out of expense budget and that’s $1,000 and that the investor has to pay, and the reality is you’re probably not paying your contractor to do that. You’ve gotta pay the city to do that. Different story. Those are common scenarios.

Other common scenarios are they don’t like the way the water is draining. Maybe they might add six-foot extensions on the down spots, so that the water drains away from the house. Little stupid annoying things are very common, and most investors who are seasoned, they try to be proactive about that. But again, a home inspector’s job to find things.

Joe Fairless: And I assume – but maybe I shouldn’t – that that’s the last part of the process. You’ve got the production stage, the construction stage and the post-construction stage. Is that the final one?

Ryan Garcilazo: Those are the three main stages of a rehab.

Joe Fairless: Okay.

Ryan Garcilazo: Naturally, there’s a hell of a lot more that goes on, of course, and I’ve spoken about them.

Joe Fairless: Yeah. Well, what is your best advice ever for real estate investors as it relates to your area of expertise?

Ryan Garcilazo: My opinion is simply this – there are a lot of programs out there that are excellent. You have Fortune Builders, you’ve got the Homevestors Franchises, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, [unintelligible [00:25:01].04] You have a lot of programs out there that are teaching you how to real estate invest. All those programs are good, because you have to learn something.

My recommendation is you call a company like ours, but then again, there is no company like ours, so you call The Rehab Depot, because if you want to spend a little bit of money upfront to help you, it’s way better than losing tens of thousands later, and then that whole thing of “I told you so.” The reason why I suggest this is because we lived it.

I’ll go out and I have a lot of clients that listen to this podcast, and I have a lot of past clients I have a great relationship with who also listen to this podcast… My point is this – they’re probably not gonna like the fact that I say this, but I’ll say easily 90% of my clients over the past decade never reached the return they wanted because they didn’t know how to rehab. Don’t be that person.

If you’re new, or even if you’re a veteran and you’re still not getting the returns you’re looking for, come learn how to rehab. We have online courses, and we have Skype courses, and we also are working in different markets. Give us the call so we can help you walk through the process, man.

Joe Fairless: Cool. Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?

Ryan Garcilazo: Let’s do it, man. Let’s do it.

Joe Fairless: First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.

Break: [00:26:06].10] to [00:26:55].05]

Joe Fairless: Alright, best ever book you’ve read?

Ryan Garcilazo: Extreme Ownership.

Joe Fairless: Best ever deal you’ve done personally, and not your first, not your last, but somewhere in between.

Ryan Garcilazo: I made 130k off of one flip.

Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake you’ve made on a transaction that you haven’t talked about already?

Ryan Garcilazo: I under-bid a job grossly and came out of pocket to finish it.

Joe Fairless: Best ever way you like to give back?

Ryan Garcilazo: Oh, I do a $1,000 giveaway every Christmas. I walk around with a hundred dollars and I just randomly hand it out to people on the street.

Joe Fairless: And where will you be during Christm– no, I’m kidding. What’s the best ever way the Best Ever listeners can get in touch with you? …which you’ve mentioned, but feel free to repeat it.

Ryan Garcilazo: My phone number is simple – 847 899 5713. You can find me on social media under my name… Two names – The Rehab Depo and Ryan Garcilazo. And obviously, on my web page, www.thegarcilazogroup.com. Reach out to us, let’s get you in the program and learn to flip, baby. That’s what we’re here for.

Joe Fairless: Well, thank you for being on the show, talking about, from a GC standpoint, how to see the flip through the eyes of a contractor versus the eyes of an investor, and the three phases in the rehab process – the production phase, the construction phase and the post-construction phase.

In the production phase make sure that we identify and get the start date, the length of time that it will take in the budget, and you talked through…

Ryan Garcilazo: The biggest thing, brother, is the three verbal commitments, man. Just remember that somehow, some way, you need to learn how to get the three verbal commitments… But first, we get the property under contract.

Joe Fairless: And I’m glad that you talked through how to actually have that conversation with them, where you kind of did a role-play and went through that process… So thanks for being on the show. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Ryan Garcilazo: Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. I look forward to working with anybody and everybody. Have a good day.

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