JF2181: Don’t Ignore Low Hanging Fruit With Andrea Weule

Andrea Weule Real Estate Background:

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“One good thing about being a wholesaler is you get to keep the really great deals for yourself and pass the good deals to others” – Andrea Weule

TRANSCRIPTION

Theo Hicks: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Theo Hicks and today, I’m speaking with Andrea Weule. Andrea, how are you doing today?

Andrea Weule: I’m doing awesome. How are you, Theo?

Theo Hicks: I’m doing great as well. Thanks for asking and thanks for joining us, and looking forward to our conversation. Before we jump into that, a little bit about Andrea’s backgrounds – she’s a full time real estate investor and the president of Archway Investment Corp, she has 13 years of investing experience, she currently holds 24 rental properties and has completed over 500 deals; these are wholesale, flips and lease option deals. She’s based in Englewood, Colorado, and her website is wealthhealthgrowth.com. So Andrea, do you mind telling us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on today?

Andrea Weule: Absolutely. I actually started out in real estate for the homebuilders. I got a traditional job out of college, worked in every department of the homebuilding industry, from warranty to construction to sales and marketing, and I definitely enjoyed that, and then decided that I should be making a lot more money myself if I’m doing this much work. So my husband and I dove into real estate full time. Actually, I guess part time, while I was still working our day job and all that, but really just loved taking communities, neighborhoods houses and fixing them up and improving them and helping people grow their wealth through real estate including ourselves, and it’s been quite a journey. It’s been awesome. I live here in the Englewood, Colorado area, south of Denver, but we’ve invested in 16 different states now. So we’ve been able to take our business on the road, if you will.

Theo Hicks: Perfect. So based on what you’re saying, it sounds like right now you’re doing a real estate yourself, but you also have a coaching or consulting type program as well?

Andrea Weule: Correct. Yep. I focus real estate wise, mainly on wholesaling and rentals right now mainly because I think they’re the ones that I enjoyed the most, and I think the market is prime for both of them right now for sure. And then I love helping other people find their niche in real estate, helping them grow their real estate or their wealth through passive income, if that’s their strategy, or if they’re more creative and like doing flips and different things like that, helping them find their passion and their future profitability through real estate.

Theo Hicks: So let’s base our conversation on those two categories. Let’s first talk about your portfolio, and then let’s talk about your consulting coaching program. So you said you focus on wholesaling and rentals right now, you said that you have 24 rental properties?

Andrea Weule: Yep.

Theo Hicks: How many wholesales are you doing per month right now and how many rental property deals are you trying to do per month? Or it can be per year too, whatever time frame you want to use.

Andrea Weule: Well, I like to always keep things as real as possible. So in the wholesale world, we are doing one every month for sure. Some months are great. I’ve done a couple of months where I’ve had eight different closings, and then again, some months, things just don’t stack up the way that you want them to, and that’s just how real estate world works; we only get one. But I do a lot of investing here in the local market with helping people find fix and flips and projects that way, and then I do a lot of wholesaling in the Midwest, helping people in more expensive markets like Denver, Seattle, California, find cash flowing rentals and wholesale them deals in the Midwest. So that’s where I focus a lot on that.

And then for rentals, we’re averaging one a quarter. We’ve been a little slower the last couple of years just because I felt like the market was hitting the top of the market. I still wanted to grow our portfolio, but definitely wanted to not be too aggressive and buy something that I’m banking on appreciation that’s not going to happen for 10, 15 years. And then we also took some of our properties and did a lot of evaluation in the last six to nine months. So we bought a handful of properties, which is why we’re down to 24, because we wanted to make sure that the properties we’re holding long term are the properties that we want to hold forever. And so those properties that were good, but not maybe amazing are the ones that we wanted to liquidate for now, while the market was up, take that cash and then be able to have that cash available to capitalize on maybe slower or lower price point market over the next couple of years and continue to build up that rental portfolio.

Theo Hicks: Is your wholesaling business the lead pipeline for your rental business or are those two separate things? Are you getting leads for your wholesaling business and buying some of those, or you’re getting leads, wholesaling all of those, and then getting leads separately for the properties you’re buying as rentals?

Andrea Weule: Both. So in Denver, I’m not interested in buying properties here as much, just because our price point is so high. So the wholesaling that I do in Denver is a lot more for a fix and flips type investor. Whereas again, in the Midwest, all the properties I’m seeking out, I’m always going to consider myself. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about being a wholesaler – I think you can always focus on finding great deals, passing them along, but keeping the really great deals for yourself. So that’s definitely been our strategy in the Midwest.

Theo Hicks: Yeah, that [unintelligible [00:07:50].27]. It sounds like a good way to– because as you mentioned, you’re buying every quarter. So when you’re not buying rentals, you’re wholesaling, and then you’ve also got a continuous lead of deals coming in that you can always find a way to make money off of. That’s what I was getting at.

Andrea Weule: Absolutely, absolutely, and it just definitely keeps bringing the funds so that I have a reserve of cash to buy properties when the great ones appear.

Theo Hicks: Can you tell us a little bit about your lead generation strategies? Maybe more specifically, just talk about– it sounds like you’re wholesaling the deals in Denver, and then in the Midwest, you’re wholesaling and then also considering buying those, but you don’t live there.

Andrea Weule: Correct.

Theo Hicks: So let’s talk about that. What’s your lead generation strategy for these deals that are out of state?

Andrea Weule: So any market that I love, I always have a good agent sending me deals at all times, because I feel like when you ignore the MLS, you are ignoring the low hanging fruit. If somebody lists their house for sale, they want to sell it. So I try not to ever ignore that. Yes, there’s a lot of competition. Yes, they might want to sell it retail, but it seems silly to me to ignore it. So I’m always making offers via the MLS. But I would say my favorite off-market strategy is getting lists. I usually use ListSource, I pull lists. Most of my listings, I’m focused on active adults. So I look at 55 or better, people who have lived in their house for 20+ years that may be considering downsizing, maybe moving to more of a assisted living or low maintenance living, and I focus my mailers on those leads. So a lot of the verbiage that I’ll use in those mailers will be “Are you looking for your next adventure? Are you looking for less stress?” things like that, so I’m hopefully talking to them more directly. And then in addition to sending the mailers to them, and I always do at least three mailers for every address that I call, I also try to do bandit signs. I get people in those remote markets to put out bandit signs in areas that I’m focusing on. I just post ads via Craigslist under the Gigs category, hire somebody, have signs shipped to their house and they can put up signs for me. I use a couple of different programs to have them- -make sure that I get the signs out there. They take pictures with them and I can see the geotag on where the bandit signs are. I can pay them very easily through PayPal. Sometimes I have people that will continue to put out signs forever for me, I have people that they do it once or they don’t ever do it, and maybe it cost me the amount of signs, but I get boots on the ground without me flying out there. And then lastly, I also take that same list and I put each of the addresses and people’s, individuals’ information into Spokeo, and I look up phone numbers and emails and I cold call and shoot emails to them.

So I figured if I approach them three times, I have a better conversion rate and I’ve been fairly successful that way, and then I found once I get somebody talking to me and interested, it’s pretty easy to do things remote. With technology these days, people can take pictures with their phone and text it to me, we can get on a Zoom call, a Skype call, a FaceTime call, and they can walk me through the house and I can get a good feel for the condition of the house right there, and have all the data that I need just from what’s on the internet and my conversations and pictures that I get from those leads.

Theo Hicks: Well, thank you for sharing that. I don’t have any follow up questions. You answered every question; you gave us a step by step process, so I appreciate that. Let’s transition into the other part of your business, which is your consulting coaching business. So your website, which I’m assuming this is the website of your coaching business, wealthhealthgrowth.com. So you already mentioned that you help people find the niche that they want to do, help them grow their wealth, but what about the health aspect of that? What’s your approach with that?

Andrea Weule: My husband is obsessed with biohacking, and again, I’m actually listening to the book Superhuman, which is all about biohacking right now. But really, the healthier you are, the more that you can accomplish, the more you can grow, the more you can learn, the more money you can make. I found people that take good care of their bodies, their minds and their spirituality, they can accomplish so much more. They have more energy, they have more focus, they have more drive and can get more done for themselves, for their family, for their businesses.

So again, it’s more whole approach to investing in real estate because I find when I’m working with people, a lot of their struggles, it’s not really real estate based. It might be time management based, it might be struggling with objections with their family, it might be they’re exhausted all the time, whatever that may be. So we can incorporate just small tweaks. We don’t have to completely upheave somebody’s life, but we can make small tweaks to their life, to their daily schedules, to how they approach things to help them be more successful with their real estate business, and actually live a more fulfilled life.

Theo Hicks: What is the most unique or interesting biohack that your husband’s done?

Andrea Weule: You know, that’s a fun thing. He loves cryotherapy, he loves infrared saunas. We have grounding mats all over our house. So you plug in these mats to the ground in your house so that when you’re just sitting on the couch watching TV, you’re getting the benefits of grounding like you’re standing on the soil outside. We have a Trusii machine which hydrogenates water. So you can get hydrogen in your water which is supposed to help with clarity, your skin, energy, all kinds of different things. We have a daily calendar. He’s got me meditating, which I’m very type A personality, so meditating has been a struggle. So we’ve compromised on I will work on my meditation practice, but we’ve moved on to doing yoga which has a lot of the benefits of meditation, but I actually get to move and do something. So it’s definitely been a journey to learn all that our bodies can do and our minds can do if we hold ourselves accountable.

Theo Hicks: Alright Andrea, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?

Andrea Weule: My best real estate investing advice ever is pick a swim lane. Especially when you’re new to investing in real estate, everybody wants to try everything. They want to try the latest, greatest strategy, they want to try whatever it may be, and the struggle with that is you never get to the other side of the pool. If you’re changing lanes all the time, you’re never going to get the results that you want. So I always, especially when I’m working with people, have them take some time to think about what got them excited about real estate in the first place, have them spend a lot of time going through what their actual current resources are, what do they have and how does that apply to what they want to do in real estate, what resources do they need to potentially plan for or partner up with somebody for to focus their real estate investing, and then to truly set that goal and work it daily.

I think people struggle so often with coming up with what is the latest, greatest and they have all these big plans, but their day to day activities are not aligned with their goals. Their day to day activities are not getting them the results that they need to moving themselves forward. So ensuring that they have the right passion, they have the right resources and they have the right goal, and then they’re working it every single day. And I truly believe in creativity and that’s why we’ve done so many deals. I believe creativity is amazing and there’s all kinds of different options, but the baseline end goal strategy should be defined, and then you can add perks to it if you will. So you can add a kickboard, you can add water wings, you can add some flippers if you want, but stay in your swim lane until you get the results that you need, and then branch out from there.

Theo Hicks: Perfect. Okay, are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?

Andrea Weule: I am.

Break [00:15:33]:09] to [00:16:45]:02]

Theo Hicks: Okay Andrea, what is the best ever book you’ve recently read?

Andrea Weule: The best ever book that I recently read was Doing Good Better by William MacAskill. It’s a data-driven book about how to be more effective with your altruism. So how to give better if you will, and it’s just is very Malcolm Gladwell-esque and it’s a lot of statistical data, but it really definitely opened my eyes about how to be more effective and more efficient with almost everything I do.

Theo Hicks: Yeah, I think I remember seeing him on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few years ago. Okay, if your business were to collapse today, what would you do next?

Andrea Weule: What would I do next? That is definitely a scary thought. I think I would focus a lot more on personal development. I think I would go into more coaching with helping other people build their business. We’ve built up our business very successfully, and I think I have so many tools and life experiences to help others grow their business with whatever that may be, breaking through a lot of the things that I talked about earlier – time management, what are your fears, obstacles and moving yourself forward.

Theo Hicks: What is the best ever deal you’ve done?

Andrea Weule: Best ever deal we’ve done. It was probably a lease option we did here in the greater Denver area. My father in law’s one of my best bird dogs. He met somebody at his office that got a new job, was trying to sell this house, and this is in the 2009, 2010 downturn of the market, and the guy called his realtor and his realtor said, “You’re going to have to this, this, this, this, this,” and just listed off all the negatives about him selling his house right now and all the costs that it was going to take. So the guy was just like, “I don’t care, I’ll just let the bank have it.” So he’s venting to my father in law. My father in law says, “I don’t know what Andrea does, but can she call you?”. So I called him, I offered to buy his house on a lease option. So in three years, we’ll buy your house, we’ll pay your mortgage, and I think I even gave him an extra 50 bucks a month; taxes, insurance, all that plus an extra 50 bucks a month, but the option price was what he owed at the time we purchased the house. So he wouldn’t make any money at the end. So he just gets to walk away and that’s that. We leased it for two years, and then sold it for about two and a half years in and made $35,000 on the closing costs of it, and it really cost us nothing. We had never put anything into it because we cash flowed about $250 to $300 every single month after paying him his fees, and again, it was in great condition. So it was a long term lease option deal that was a homerun for us.

Theo Hicks: Nice. And on the flip side, tell me about a deal that you lost the most money on, how much you lost, and then what lesson you learned.

Andrea Weule: So I would say it’s probably one of the rentals that we have right now is probably our least favorite deal. It’s one of those deals that I trusted, but I didn’t verify. So I had this deal brought to me by an investor friend and all the numbers looked right on paper, and we’ve done a couple of other deals in the market, so we didn’t think much of it, so we moved forward.

The issue was when we looked at the tax rate for this rental, the tax rate that had been paid for the last several years had been homesteaded. So it was a much lesser rate than the actual tax rate for an investor like myself. So that was a shocker, but then also at the same time, they were passing a large mill levy in that area. So the taxes went from what I thought was going to be somewhere around $40 a month to $260 a month. So our cash flow pretty much went down to negative $10 a month for the property. Granted, it’s appreciated and we’ve just used this property with our other properties that are in that same LLC to float it out. So it’s definitely worth more equity [unintelligible [00:20:37].11], but it definitely was a shocker when I didn’t pay enough attention, I didn’t do the research. So again, you can trust, but always verify.

Theo Hicks: What is the best ever way you like to give back?

Andrea Weule: I love service organizations. They’re a dying breed in today’s world, but I’m actually starting my fifth year as Kiwanis Club president. We sponsor key clubs, do all kinds of different service work throughout our communities, and I think being involved with service organizations is huge, and that’s really what I do with Archway as well. I am the president of their investment corp, which is– Archway is an affordable housing nonprofit here in Denver that has over 600 units of affordable housing. We work with the VA to get veterans off the streets and into housing, and have services there to provide food banks for them. Also, I do career education. We have after school activities for parents that have kids. So the parents can work longer and make sure the kids are getting their homework done and staying out of trouble. So again, just being involved in your community, and a simple way to do that is to get involved with a service organization. Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary, Optimists – any of those are great organizations that are always doing amazing things in the community that people are not really joining anymore due to lack of time and different priorities, but service organizations are amazing.

Theo Hicks: And then lastly, what is the best ever place to reach you?

Andrea Weule: Through my website, wealthhealthgrowth.com or you can shoot me an email directly at info@wealthhealthgrowth.com.

Theo Hicks: Alright Andrea, thanks for joining us today and walking us through your business. We talked about your three main focuses – wholesaling, rentals, and then coaching.

Andrea Weule: Yep.

Theo Hicks: So from a rental perspective, you told us how you do an average of one per quarter, and that you recently sold some of those properties, and then you’ve got your wholesaling business where the goal is to do at least one every month, but some months, more than one; other months, just one. And that you focus on, for the wholesaling at least, out of state, finding really good deals, and then always trying to hand pick out the best ones to buy yourself and then wholesale the rest, and then you’ve gone into a lot of specifics on how you generate your out of state leads.

You mentioned that first and foremost, you don’t want to ignore the MLS. So you always have good agents in those markets who are sending you MLS leads, because  there’s a lot of low hanging fruit on there. And then you said for your off-market strategy, you get a list from ListSource and you focus on 55 or older, people that have lived in their house for 20 or more years. So people who are most likely looking to potentially move out to a retirement home or some vacation home or something. And you talked about you send those people mailers. First of all, you do three mailers per address, and you said that you direct your verbiage toward that target market, which is saying things like, “Are you looking for your next adventure? Are you looking for less stress?”, you talk them more directly.

You also post ads in the gig section on Craigslist to have people post bandit signs. They have to take pictures and prove that they actually did it. You got trackers on the signs, and then you pay them through PayPal, and then you also use Spokeo to find the phone numbers of the people from your list to do cold calling. And then you also mentioned that once you’ve got a lead and you’re trying to work your way through the deal with them, it’s not that difficult with the technology because you can do FaceTime or Zoom calls, do property tours, they can send you pictures, so you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting into.

We also talked about your consulting business. We focused mostly on the health and how your husband is into biohacking. You mentioned that you have a more holistic approach to real estate investing and that the healthier you are, the more money, more energy, the more you’re gonna accomplish, and then you gave us some examples of some biohacks like cryotherapy, grounding mat, hydrogenating your water, meditating, doing yoga.

Then you also mentioned that with some your clients, something that you realized is that people’s issues aren’t really real estate related, like not knowing how to do a deal, but it’s something else, like a relationship problem or a personal problem or a mindset problem. So I thought that was also interesting.

I also really liked your best advice, which was to pick a swim lane, because if you’re trying to swim across the pool, the fastest way is to stay in one lane and go as opposed to keep changing lanes constantly, going back and forth. So what that means is that when you’re new, there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of different niches, strategies, people. You need to find the one that makes you the most excited, and you said, then you figure out what resources that you currently have, it’ll help you do that specific niche, and then figure out what resources you don’t have that you need to outsource, so you can be successful in that specific niche. And then you need to go out there and set a goal and work towards it daily.

So that’s everything we talked about on the show today. I appreciate you coming on, Andrea. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Best Ever listeners, as always, thank you for listening. Have a best ever day and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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