Scott bought his first home when he was only 14 years old! Now he’s done over 1,500 real estate transactions and he specializes in getting creative with his deals. Scott likes to get creative when he buys as well as when he sells. To hear expert tips on creative financing from both the buying and selling side, listen to this episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
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Scott Ulmer Real Estate Background:
-Owner of Little Pink Houses of America
-Bought his first home when he was 14 years old, and started investing full-time right after high school
-Developed unique Lease-Purchase program coined “ABLE” (Assembling Buyer Lease Estates)
-Has done 1,500 real estate transactions, specializing in non-traditional, creative, no-money, no-credit style deals
-Say hi to him at www.pinkaffiliates.com 904-500-PINK (7465) ext. 2
-Based in Jacksonville, Florida
-Best Ever Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
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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, Scott Ulmer. How are you doing, my friend?
Scott Ulmer: I’m doing great, sir. How about yourself?
Joe Fairless: I am doing great, and nice to have you on the show. A little bit about Scott – he is the owner of Little Pink Houses of America. He bought his first home when he was 14 years old (boy, that’s young) and started investing full-time right after high school. He developed a unique lease purchase program coined ABLE (Assembling Buyer Lease Estates) and has done 1,500 real estate transactions; specializing in non-traditional, creative, no-money-down, no-credit style deals. Based in Jacksonville, Florida.
With that being said, Scott, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Scott Ulmer: Sure, I’d love to, and thanks for having me, by the way. So I was born and raised in a real estate family. In fact – kind of a niche story – I joke that my father who grew up very poor, not only did he have to walk ten miles in the snow to get to school, but he didn’t even have shoes; he had holes in them. So he’s kind of a success story, rags to riches; he read a book when I was I think eight years old, from Mark Haroldsen, How To Wake Up The Financial Genius Inside Of You, and from there he started doing some low-end wholesale type deals, and kind of segued into a career into real estate.
So I effectively was kind of raised in that environment. I did buy my first house at 14. There was kind of a story behind that; I had help, of course, but I really jumped in full-time right out of high school, I did go to college… Actually, I graduated a little early so I could get out and start working. I always liked making money and wanted to do that. My folks wouldn’t let me drop out, so I was required to graduate, which in hindsight was a good thing.
I ended up buying houses for my father. That was my primary job. We were a volume-based company, and that was actually in Ohio. We were doing about 150 deals a year; we were buying for cash, we would renovate them and we would sell them on what’s called a land installment contract, which is very similar to a lease option – it has a few different moving parts, but in the end the model and the premise of the model is really to work on getting our buyers not just credit-qualified, but mortgage-ready in a fairly finite period of time. So the genesis for what we do today at Pink really started with my father’s company; he was kind of a pioneer. This would have been in the late ’80s, early ’90s, where he was very much doing volume-based business.
In my biggest month I bought 32 homes, I bought six in one day… We just were buying like crazy. My father would borrow private funds and would use those funds to purchase and renovate homes. There was a lot of sloppiness, there were a lot of things that were done improperly, frankly. No malice, but certainly not done the way that they should have been done, and it ultimately led to the downfall and demise of his company, of which I was an integral part of, and our lives just were devastated and involved prison, and just a lot of very, very hard times. From that, it was one of those moments – kind of the Y in the road, that you either let challenges and adversity define you and map out who your identity is going to be the rest of your life, or you learn from it and you grow and you decide that you’re not gonna let adversity take you down, and in fact you’re gonna use it as a springboard.
Through some of the toughest chapters of my life, it propelled me to where I am today personally, professionally, and certainly spiritually. Currently, I’ve taken the knowledge I had with my father… There’s another gentleman in the real estate world named Ron LeGrand; Ron brought me down, I ran his real estate operation and did most of his high-level coaching for a period of years there, and then branched out on my own to start Little Pink Houses about four years ago.
We are in Jacksonville, Florida, we have a staff of nine, and we really have to primary focuses – we have a very cookie-cutter system, we’re niche-based, we deal with executive-level homes and we do lease purchase — we call them executive lease purchase down here based on the price point and the targets that we ultimately go after. We also have a training arm which is intended to work with folks who would be potential partners for us that could open up our affiliate in their own market.
Kind of a condensed back-story of myself – 22 years full-time experience and a lot of mistakes. Kind of cliché, but it’s true. That’s kind of how you get from point A to point B – learning from those mistakes, and we’ve certainly made our share of them… But we’re proud of what we have today, and I’m certainly excited to be talking about it with you here.
Joe Fairless: You ended up going to prison, right?
Scott Ulmer: I did.
Joe Fairless: Okay, so when you got out, what were your immediate next steps to build up your career again?
Scott Ulmer: Sure. It’s a great question; I don’t know that I’ve had anyone ask me that. First of all, I had a young daughter and a wife who stuck with me, and that really strengthened our marriage. I saw a lot of folks go the other direction where marriages didn’t quite work out in the same scenario, but… LeGrand actually reached out to me before I got out and had made a job proposal to me, or maybe a job request. It wasn’t an offer, it was kind of “If you’re interested, give me a call”, and literally, within 30 days of being home, he flew me down, interviewed, offered me the job on the spot, and 3-5 weeks later I was down full-time. So fortunately, things kind of fell into place for me, but that certainly could have gone a lot of different directions.
I was very open to anything… You know, a lot of people looked at real estate – who were in it before 2008 and after – that maybe it wasn’t the vehicle that it was cut out to be, or the vehicle that was gonna separate them and earn them wealth and all the good stuff that comes with that. The reality is that real estate is cyclical, but what everybody went through in 2008, including myself, it didn’t deter my interest in real estate.
I’m a life-long real estate guy, I knew that real estate was going to be the path that ultimately would lead me to my destiny and my dreams; I never had any doubts about that. LeGrand showed up, frankly out of nowhere, and couldn’t have been a bigger blessing. I was tremendously grateful to him for the opportunity. He candidly, Joe, helped me from the lowest spot of my life and I’ll forever be grateful for that. I was very fortunate that I had that opportunity waiting for me.
Joe Fairless: How do you think about the challenges and adversity that you come across…? Because you mentioned earlier we can either let challenges and adversity define us, OR we can learn and grow from it. And you’ve chosen the latter, to learn and grow from it, whereas others wouldn’t… So how do you think about it? How do you process that in your mind?
Scott Ulmer: It’s a great question. I was sharing prior to the recording that everytime we have trainings here, I share really the entire back-story; it takes me about 30-40 minutes, and if I’m being totally honest, I get emotional every time I tell it, because I have a little bit of a slideshow in there, and there’s a picture of my daughter and I hugging on the beach when I first got to Florida, and I’d be lying if I told you that those emotions were not still very raw inside of me, because they are. But I guess — again, some of this may sound cliché, but it’s true… In life, there are a lot of things that happen to you, some of which you cause and others that just kind of happen, and it’s how you choose to respond to them.
When the proverbial bottom fell out of our life, at a time when everything really kind of went down — I was 26 at the time my father’s company went out of business, I was 31 when everything kind of came to a head… So at that point in my life I had a daughter and a wife that were certainly much more important than myself, and it was at that time I just said, you know, you’re gonna have those pity-parties every once in a while; my mom has a great saying – she says “Look, you’re gonna have your pity-party… Have it, 15 minutes, and get past it. It’s your choice how you wanna respond to it.”
I think processing the adversity for me – there were many times it felt overwhelming and I didn’t wanna go on and all those thoughts that are probably very common when you’re going through a tremendous adversity and a trying time… But I allowed myself a couple moments to kind of wallow in the pity, and then it was time to suck it up and get back at it. In the end, it was just a conscious decision to say “You know what, I don’t like what happened, and I’m gonna try to make the most of the situation. I’ve got a lot of life left to live, God willing, and I wanna try to make my mark in a positive way as best I can.” So it was a choice at how I wanted to respond more than anything, and again, it took a lot of reminders to myself and certainly a lot of digging deep. I would be lying if I said otherwise.
In the end, I believe that I had some great experience, I had some great knowledge that was very specific to a niche of real estate, and I just believed that there was a lot left for me, and I surely wanted to try to make the most of the life that I had and the adversity I had to go through. I felt that there would be opportunities for me to share that with other people that have gone through their own adversity and hope that maybe I could be a small inspiration to some people in the end.
Joe Fairless: So now let’s talk about your business that you have, Little Pink Houses of America. You said you have two different arms of business. One is the executive lease purchase, and the other is your training arm. So basically, an affiliate program for others to open up what you’re doing in their market. What is an executive lease purchase?
Scott Ulmer: Great. So our elevator pitch is fairly simple. We work with folks that can afford a mortgage and a down payment, but for a multitude of reasons may not be able to walk into the bank and qualify for a traditional loan today. Perfect example of our target demographic – husband and wife decides it’s time to buy a home; good jobs, income is sufficient, crediting [unintelligible [00:10:58].03] they go and they contact a local realtor, the realtor takes to an in-house finance company, they get this magic pre-approval letter that we always chuckle at, and with that, of course, they go look at a dozen homes, they identify one they love, they negotiate on it, it gets accepted – of course, contingent on their final financing being approved.
When they go back to the loan officer or loan originator, unfortunately, for one reason or another, they are denied at the finish line, so to speak. That’s our buyer – someone who is close, who has enough merit to get a pre-approval, has money saved up, has a down payment, can afford the mortgage payment that the income matches up, but can’t walk into the bank today.
Joe Fairless: Why would they get denied in that example? Because it sounds like everything is good.
Scott Ulmer: Well, they get denied for a lot of reasons. In fact, there are a ton of reasons right now. A lot of them are very, very quirky. I will tell you, one of the biggest demographics we work with is self-employed. Self-employed – they show a very good income, but they also show a lot of write-offs, and loans are based on net income on their tax returns, so after the write-offs are taken out, their net income shows not enough for the bank to loan on.
There are others where maybe an old credit blemish may have popped up that they didn’t see originally. We have folks that have been denied for – oh, my goodness – not enough time on the job, and… I mean, there are a lot of quirky reasons. At the end of the day the banking restrictions subsequent to 2008 have become very stringent, they still are. The reality is somewhere between 70%-80% of our population today in America can’t walk into the bank off of the street and qualify for a traditional mortgage.
Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately for us, because it’s what our business is really patterned after – we don’t see any real end in sight. People can be denied; they can be pre-approved and denied at the final for many, many reasons. Some make sense, some don’t make sense, but ultimately it’s just the nature of the world we live in today. So a lot of reasons, but that really is our target buyer and that’s who we really go after.
Joe Fairless: Okay. So this couple finds you, and then what?
Scott Ulmer: We have a very thorough vetting process. Obviously, we do our marketing and they will find us through a variety of maybe 3-4 primary marketing mediums that we use. They find us, obviously we show them the home, they love it… We have a very thorough vetting process. It’s one of the things, by the way, Joe, that I think really distinguishes us from any other folks out there or organizations out there that do something similar. Our platform is designed to provide a successful bridge or stepping stone for these folks to become mortgage-ready and ultimately successful in their financing… So we take them through underwriting.
We have a company that we work with that is a national lender, and they understand the nature of the clients that we work with. So when we take them through underwriting, we’re not looking for a surprise or “Hey, they are really qualified” in the end. We know the folks we’re working with are not qualified, and in many cases we have a good idea as to why. Every once in a while, folks just don’t quite know and we kind of discovered why through this underwriting process… But we know why, so by taking what they’re underwriting, they’re providing 2-3 years of tax returns, 90 days worth of pay stubs, 90 days worth of bank statements, any other pertinent financial information that would govern whether or not an underwriter would say yes or no to issuing a loan to a prospective borrower.
So through that process, we are told 1) why they can’t get a mortgage. So we are told the specific things and specific reasons. And then 2) through that process, we are devising a blueprint that is custom-made for every borrower we work with that has requirements for them to undertake during the process of our agreements, which are typically 6-12 months, with our buyer, before they’re required to get financing.
So for our contracts, we’re actually required to take some of these items on and ultimately help them get to the point where they can become mortgage-ready in that window of time.
After we have this vetting process, we get this report published for us… We even sit down with every one of our buyers and we have an interview – it typically takes about an hour – and I always say it’s analogous to a loan committee, if you will. We understand that there’s some really good folks out there that have good jobs, good income, and for a lot of reasons, as I’ve said, can’t get their financing today… So we wanna get to know them on a personal level, we wanna go through their report, their credit, find out what had caused them to be in the spot that they’re in, and most importantly, really identify with them and make sure that this is a good fit for them, good fit for us, and that they understand what will be expected of them through the course of their term with us, and ultimately what will be required for them to successfully complete our mortgage-readiness program, which the end point is ultimately to get their loan approved and ultimately a title in their name… And as we say, with a smile, but we’re sincere, we hope they live happily ever after.
Joe Fairless: So basically people are finding you or you’re finding them, who haven’t been able to qualify for various reasons, but for the most part they should be able to qualify; there’s just a nuance or two involved, and then you hook them up with a lender, and that lender identifies exactly why they are or are not approved, and then you help them put together a plan so that they are mortgage-ready. Then once they are mortgage-ready, what is the final step that wraps the bow on this?
Scott Ulmer: That’s a great reassessment. So once we all come to term and they are the right buyer for us and we feel good and they understand the expectations and frankly what the path looks like to success and we all agree and feel good – and we’re very big on relationships – we have what we call soft-closing, which means we close on the lease purchase, or the executive lease purchase. We do use a law firm for that.
Then after the closing we have a few systems that really govern it. They are required to work with a mortgage-readiness company that we work with as well. This company provides us monthly reports, they really do all of the work; it’s outsource, we just get the reports. We also put the buyer in touch with a local mortgage lender that we’re working with, who also works in conjunction with the mortgage-readiness company, which is similar to a credit repair company, but it’s not always credit with the clients we work with.
We specialize in homes anywhere from 200k to 500k in Jacksonville, which is a big swathe of the population, and folks that are fairly well-heeled, that can afford a 5%-10% down payment and ultimately the monthly payment in that range… So it’s not always credit, but we call it mortgage-readiness. So the mortgage lender and the credit repair company work with the buyer through the course of the term… And by the way, the mortgage lender is gonna be the one that writes the loan in the end, and so he/she is involved from really the first six weeks of them moving into the home, at which point they can finance with a loan at any time.
After they have moved in, we have a kind of post-closing process which I’ve just explained, and it’s all outsource, so the mortgage-readiness/credit repair company works in conjunction with the lender who’s going to write the loan, and ultimately our client. And it’s our intent to get them a loan as soon as possible. Again, most fall within 6-12 months; there are certainly exceptions to that, but most are not less than six. The majority of our deals are somewhere between six and twelve months, and a lot of it is because of the systems we have once the buyer is in there, that really mandate and force their hand to get their loan. That’s what we wanna see, that’s what’s best for them, assuming our agreements are predicated upon.
I learned in my experience that sometimes you have to force those – in a good way, of course. You’re really requiring them to fulfill the obligation on the other side of the contract.
Joe Fairless: And how do you make money on this?
Scott Ulmer: It’s a great question. In our real estate business we really have two arms. We work with for-sale-by-owner sellers, we work with expired listings, we have a few different target demographics that we’re going after, and we have a very simple presentation, our script is very good… It kind of lays out who we are and what we do. It is not for every seller. About four out ten for-sale-by-owner sellers that we work with or that we contact have the potential to work with us. The other six have their reasons that they can’t work with any sort of a terms-type sale.
So as we contact these folks, we’re kind of laying out the platform… Most of the for-sale-by-owner sellers we work with, Joe, earn an average of 11% to 14% more if they can wait to get a full cash-out anywhere from 6 to 12 months, versus selling traditionally today. So the reason sellers do this with us is really singular – it’s the economic benefits. If you’re dealing with a $300,000 home, you’re talking about a $30,000 to $40,000 swing over the course of a year. It some cases it can be even greater than that, depending on whether or not they have an underlying mortgage or they’re just generating cashflow through the 6-12 months.
When we find these sellers, we will negotiate what we call a strike price. We have the terms and conditions that we kind of negotiate with them. Most of them are preliminary, but we have negotiated a price that they can live with, and then we will mark our profit on top of that. We’re very transparent, we share with every seller that we have a minimum $10,000 profit that we’re going to be looking to generate on every deal that we do.
So if you take the average home – let’s say someone’s at 279,9k as an asking price; ten out of ten sellers list it high with the intent to take a little bit of a lower offer. Typically, we’ll be able to get them from the 279k to maybe 269k, 265k, 260k, depending on the negotiations we have. [unintelligible [00:20:02].08] we do a market analysis, of course, on every home. We then will take it back out at the price that we believe is marketable, and we’ve kind of carved our spread out from that scenario.
Joe Fairless: In order to do this then you need to have a for-sale-by-owner home, and a person or couple who can’t qualify for a loan to match them up with it?
Scott Ulmer: Pretty much. By the virtue of our agreements – we’ve got very strong agreements; when I say that, they are — we retained two law firms when we first started. We wanna make sure that we’re fully compliant with any sort of real estate licensing laws and any sort of real estate laws, period. So we actually have proprietary custom-made contracts that are very simple to understand. I learned a long time ago that we need to Keep It Simple, Silly; make sure that everybody can understand it.
In fact, our initial agreement we used with our for-sale-by-owner sellers is one page, and it’s just a work of art; our attorneys get the credit for that. The contracts we use obviously govern the entire model and the entire system, but you’re exactly right. We effectively are taking a for-sale-by-owner seller who has the ability to wait a short period of time before getting fully cashed out, and we’re pairing him up with a buyer who doesn’t need a terribly long time before getting their mortgage together. We provide them an absolute blueprint or a roadmap to their successful financing, we have post-closing systems that mandate that they follow through on what’s required, we have a third-party escrow servicing company we use that will debit the buyer account, and if there is an underlying mortgage on the home, that we get paid first, so there’s no equity skimming, and if there’s any additional cashflow above the mortgage, depending if we get that or the for-sale-by-owner seller gets it (it depends on what we negotiated)… But again, that eliminates having to collect payments; we put furnished home warranties on almost every deal we do, so repairs become the buyer responsibility. We have a home warranty in place just as a back-stop. But in the end, the simple way to look at it is just that – we’re pairing those two up, we’re carving a spread out in the middle, and then facilitating them through outsourced third-parties to make sure that they get their financing in the window of time that we’ve agreed.
Joe Fairless: Just looking at it from how — and I’m not in this space, so excuse me for the ignorance if I’m oversimplifying what I’m about to say… But it seems like a lot of work when if I take a couple different approaches, I could make more money and do less work. For example, if I find a for-sale-by-owner home and I wholesale it – boom, done, off my books, and I just made $10,000 on the wholesale. I don’t have to go find a motivated buyer, let alone have to set them up with these third-party people and track the process.
And on the flipside, if I find a person who doesn’t qualify for a loan, then maybe instead of matching them up with a home and take the spread, maybe I buy that home or figure out a way so that they can buy it from me, and then I work with them personally; that way, I can make profits on the down payment on the monthly payment, and then ultimately when they buy it. So help me understand the benefits of this, from a business standpoint. I get the altruistic standpoint.
Scott Ulmer: Yeah, and altruistic is not a bad word for it, and then this may be an altruistic statement, but our moniker internally and in many of our marketing is that we create homeowners. That’s our niche, we are proud of that. We wanna try to make a positive difference in people’s lives, and Joe, it’s a niche that we’ve identified in good markets and bad; there’s always a segment of our population that cannot qualify today with a bank loan, but can afford it, and certainly since 2008 that number of population has certainly increased exponentially.
As far as directly answering the question, wholesaling is something I’ve done just by virtue of doing a lot of deals over the years, so I’ve done my share of wholesale. I say this often – I know folks that make their living wholesaling; it’s never been my cup of tea. Very competitive, very saturated, and in my experience – which is extensive – you’re usually not generating 10k a pop. Oh, can you? Sure. I’ve generated 25k on a wholesale deal, but in most cases, wholesalers are walking with 2k, 3k; you’re right, you’re done, wash your hands and move forward. 10k on a wholesale flip would be pretty good, but I don’t think that that’s gonna be the consistent number that you’re gonna achieve, number one.
Number two, most of our profits are gonna fall between 15k and 20k. 10k is a number that is realistic based on the formula that we use. We have always believed that if you can generate $10,000 without having to use your own cash or credit, in a fairly short period of time – most of our sales are 45 to 60 days – and there’s just this massive pool of buyers out there… I’m not suggesting it’s easy, because we work hard, and we don’t make [unintelligible [00:24:38].14] about it; it’s not a get rich quick scheme over here, but it is absolutely a niche that is ripe for the picking.
We think we can do better than wholesalers with our formula, and because everything is outsourced – I don’t wanna pretend that there’s not an element of handholding and involvement, because there is, but it’s very minimal, once the buyer is in the home. And as far as buying them (the house itself) and then working with the buyers – we do do that as well. It depends on the motivation of the seller, it depends on the deal as a whole, and we do have opportunities with some additional lead sources that we’re generating where we find that low-hanging fruit.
What’s neat about our system is that we enter into an agreement with a seller with really four preliminary terms – the purchase price of the home, what they would consider on a monthly basis for the payment, if in fact they’re requiring any money upfront (about 50% of the sellers we work with are not requiring money or they’re not getting money upfront, which really just comes down to negotiating), and the fourth is the window of time that they would consider; in a term, as an example, 6-12 months. So we’ve preliminarily identified those with the seller.
Once we take those to our market and the buyers we’re working with, we then go back to our sellers and we typically will carve out a bigger spread and a bigger margin. In some cases, we then can buy the home and then be ultimately the seller in that case to the buyer, and generate a bigger spread. So there are some variations to what we do that encompass exactly what you’re saying, but we’ve always believed that if you have a formula, you’ve identified a niche, you do one thing and you do it really well… And we believe we do this very well. We’re not perfect, but most of our deals succeed and most of our clients are very happy.
Now, again, we are not perfect and we certainly have made mistakes, but this is the niche we’ve identified, we believe in the platform, we wanna create homeowners, and in doing so we believe we can generate a good living, and frankly our affiliates can do the same.
Joe Fairless: What is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Scott Ulmer: Wow, that’s a great question. I don’t know that I’ve had someone ask me that…
Joe Fairless: It’s the name of my podcast, so I have to ask it, otherwise I wouldn’t check that box.
Scott Ulmer: [laughs] I probably should have put two and two together there, right? Actually, I did some research on you – a very impressive career up to this point, I want you to know that. I’ve gotta tell you, one of the things that is probably gonna sound maybe even on the cusp of cliché, but there are so many people out here that we call white noise, and don’t get me wrong, there are some really genuinely talented and bright folks that are out there in the world of real estate education, but it scares me frankly, because I’ve seen a lot of things… When I was with LeGrand, I had the chance to really go all over the country, and I spoke with different groups and I had the chance to just meet some great people… And the amount of educators and trainers out there scares me.
Too many people get into real estate investing without really taking the time to research the folks that they’re getting advice from, kind of the template or blueprint that they’re going to follow… I think that the biggest thing would be — and by the way, that’s how people get stung; real estate is not rocket science; HDTV and DIY, they have all these “Flip This House” type shows that make it look like it’s a piece of cake, and you know, you get out there and you do this, that and the other and you walk away with an $80,000 profit. Well, sure, that can happen, but they make it look a little too easy, and I think so many people get into it with the rose-colored glasses that said “This is a piece of cake. I’m gonna go in and do my first deal and make $80,000” without really researching and making sure that what they’re doing is based in not just fact, but fact from somebody that knows what they’re talking about.
So the best advice I would give someone is before jumping in with both feet, make sure you’ve done your homework and make sure whoever you’re choosing to follow or be trained by really knows what they’re talking about, and didn’t do a couple of deals last year and now they’re out there training people. Unfortunately, I’ve seen that in more cases than one. So do your homework and educate yourself. There’s so much good stuff out there, so many great free pieces of content online, and of course, a lot of great trainers across the country. Align yourself with the right person and make sure you do your homework before you jump in. That’s how people get stung, by getting in over their heads because they didn’t do their homework and preparation ahead of time.
Joe Fairless: Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Scott Ulmer: I’m ready.
Joe Fairless: Alright, let’s do it. First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:28:38].18] to [00:29:29].03]
Joe Fairless: Best ever book you’ve read?
Scott Ulmer: Good To Great, Jim Collins.
Joe Fairless: Best ever deal you’ve done that wasn’t your first and wasn’t your last?
Scott Ulmer: I did a deal in Naples, Florida while I was on vacation. We bought it for 2.6 million and sold it for 3.3 million.
Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake you’ve made on a transaction?
Scott Ulmer: Where do I start…? I think the one mistake that keeps coming back to me right now, Joe, is I lose every time I lose my cool. That should speak for itself. Always maintain composure. Sometimes with homes and houses people can become emotional, and if you’re not careful, you can as well. So you always wanna maintain a good composure, a level head… I lose every time I lose my cool, so when I can just keep composed and connect on an emotional level in a good way, I can eliminate those types of unnecessary mistakes that have to do with the relationships as a whole.
Joe Fairless: Best ever way you like to give back?
Scott Ulmer: Wow, that’s one of the biggest things we like to do around here. Time – we like to give back in time; anybody can write a check, and we’re believers in financial, but we have a charity that we support, Little Pink Houses of Hope. It’s a breast cancer charity, and yes, that does come with a check, but we believe in hands-on, and I won’t get up on my soapbox, but we’ve had three or four things recently (just in the past two months) where we’ve been able to actually go out in the community and give time, not just a check. The meaning for that is just we’re very honored to be able to do that, and we try to do as much of that as we can.
Joe Fairless: What’s the best ever way the Best Ever listeners can get in touch with you or learn more about your company?
Scott Ulmer: Our primary real estate website is LittlePinkHousesOfAmerica.com. Joe, I didn’t ask you if you left when you heard our name; I’m assuming you did, most people do… But we love it. It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice for a color scheme, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and people remember us, and that’s part of our branding. So LittlePinkHousesOfAmerica.com and then PinkAffiliates.com discusses our affiliates and the opportunity that you can work with us and train with us here in our office in Jacksonville, Florida.
Joe Fairless: Well, thank you for being on the show and sharing your story and the challenges and adversity and how you have taken an empowering meaning from it and applied that to what you’re doing now, creating homeowners, and the business model behind what you’re doing, how you make money, how it benefits others, and the business that you’re in now. So thanks for being on the show, I’m really grateful you were on the show. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Scott Ulmer: Joe, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
