December 26, 2021

JF2672: 4 Wholesale Secrets for Scaling During a Recession with David Olds


David Olds began investing in 2002 when he and his wife flipped their first house. Seeing the benefits of investing, David started to seek bigger deals in commercial real estate. Today, he has accumulated over 100 rental properties and continued to flip, having wholesaled over 1,000 deals. In this episode, David shares his secrets to wholesaling, how he survived two recessions, and how to maximize deals during market downturns.

David Olds | Real Estate Background

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TRANSCRIPTION

Slocomb Reed: Best Ever listeners. Welcome to The Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Slocomb Reed. This is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. Today we have David Olds with us. How are you doing, David?

David Olds: Slocomb, I’m doing amazing. Thank you so much for having me on.

Slocomb Reed: Great to have you here. David’s company is Nationwide Property Liquidators. He’s a full-time real estate investor with 20 years of experience, both active and passive. Current portfolio, he has wholesaled over 1000 properties, rehab-flipped 27, rehabbed to rent 30 or so, and he has 62 rentals currently. He’s based out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and you can say hi to him at nationwidepropertyliquidators.com. David, tell us about yourself. What got you into real estate?

David Olds: Man, I tell you, I get that question a lot, and I’m embarrassed to tell you that it’s the most cliche thing ever. I was in an airport, I was waiting to pick somebody up, and I’m moseying through the bookstore like most of us do, because we’re just killing time… And of course, I picked up Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Man, talk about one book that can just change the trajectory of your life. That’s what that book did for me. So I’m sort of leaning there on the rack, just killing some time… I read about 10 or 15 pages, and like, “Wow, this is really good.” I’ve got to go pick up my kids, they were flying in, unaccompanied minors, from seeing a relative in Ohio. So I took that book home and just devoured it. One thing about me is – I’ll tell people, “I may not be the smartest guy around, but I’m really coachable, trainable, and I follow directions really well.” At the end of the book, he says “Real estate is the thing you want to do. Go get involved with a real estate investment group, a REIA, or a meetup, or something like that.” That’s what I did, and that’s sort of how I got my first toe dipped in the water for real estate investing.

Slocomb Reed: I’m one of those, too. Whenever I track my progress as a real estate investor, my day one is the day that I picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad.

David Olds: Isn’t it amazing? [unintelligible [00:03:02].13] people, same thing.

Slocomb Reed: Yeah. That was about 20 years ago. David, when did you buy or wholesale your first property?

David Olds: Our first property, my wife and I bought. We bought it in 2002, so 19 years ago. That’s a funny story I tell people. I came out of the closing — and this was a house we bought for ourselves. I said to my realtor – because I didn’t know anything, I’m like, “Why did I buy this from Wells Fargo? I don’t understand.” She’s like, “Oh, it’s a foreclosure.” I’m like, “I kind of don’t really understand what that means. Can you tell me?” Of course, she explained it to me. That property — and we had just gotten married, we moved in, and… Because I worked in home improvement, and like lumber sales, that type of stuff… We fixed it up a little bit and resold it two years later. As we’re selling it, the same realtor, we’re going to closing, and she’s like, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. You know you’re not going to have to pay taxes on the money, right?” I said “What? What do you mean?” She’s like, “Yeah, it’s a homestead. You’ve lived there for two years, the government doesn’t tax you on it, because it’s your primary residence.” What?! $47,000 I get to put in my pocket, and I don’t have to pay any taxes?

So even though it was our primary residence, it really was an investment vehicle. So we did that, we sold that property, and we went and bought another one that we made almost 100,000 on. So that was how we slid into investing, while I still had a full-time job, was buying these properties, living in them, fixing them up with the sole intention of reselling them again in two years. Over the first, probably five or six years, we did that as often as we possibly could.

Kind of in the middle there is where I found Rich Dad Poor Dad and got involved with the Real Estate Group in Orlando. That led us into traditional rehabbing, buying, creative financing, subject-to, all those different strategies. So if you think back in time, there aren’t many investors that were around back then still, compared to the total number of investors. But in 2008, the market started getting really bad. Central Florida was the worst of the worst places to be. So we knew we needed to do real estate someplace else, because the market was so bad there; it was just loaded up with foreclosures, and it was really tough to make money.

Slocomb Reed: What did your investing look like in 2008? You were in Central Florida, you’d done some wholesaling and some flipping… Is that all single families to this point in 2008?

David Olds: Yeah. Just flipping at this point, no wholesaling. So here’s where we are. 2008, I went to this boot camp, a seminar up in Boston, with a guy, and he was teaching apartment investing. That’s what I wanted to do, was I wanted to learn how to invest in apartments, because we’re all just playing Monopoly, right? Everybody who’s got a house wants a duplex, everybody who has a duplex wants quads, everybody who has quads wants apartment complexes; everybody’s always trying to level up. That was the goal. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve done a couple of deals, I want to do apartments.” So we were looking for new markets, emerging markets. So we’re going to go through a market shift here at some point in the future, and understanding how to look at markets, what’s going up, and what’s coming down is really important.

Anyway, Chattanooga, which is where I live now, Chattanooga, Tennessee – it was an emerging market. There were a lot of things going on here that were causing explosive growth. So we came here with the intention that we’re going to buy some small multifamily 8 to 10 units, maybe 20 units. We had these visions of grandeur. But again, 2009 – think back to those times. It’s not like it is now. Do you know who was lending money? Nobody. Because banks were spending all their time taking properties back. They weren’t in the money lending position. So we fell backward because we were doing a lot of marketing to get [unintelligible [00:06:32].12] deals. We fell back into wholesaling, and that’s sort of how we got started. But as we’re wholesaling and we’re doing a lot of marketing, deals were coming in, and we were able to take those people and turn them into owner-financing.

Owner-financing was relatively new to the masses in the single-family real estate business like our world. But in commercial, everything that we’re doing now as individual real estate investors has been done in the commercial world forever – novations, and assignments, and all the crazy lease options, lease wraps, and all that type of stuff.

Slocomb Reed: A couple of questions about your wholesaling. You were doing a bunch of marketing to find deals in ’08. What kind of marketing were you doing?

David Olds: Back then, there was only a couple of things you could do. It’s not like it is now. There was direct mail, and really, there was ListSource, which was about the only place where you would go on to pull lists. There was no Propstream, there was none of that stuff, no BatchLeads. Facebook really wasn’t even around back then. So we would do three things really for leads. One, driving for dollars. We would drive neighborhoods, looking for distressed properties, properties that look like they’re empty, tall grass, that type of stuff. We were looking for duplexes, triplexes, storefronts, anything that we can find, because I had no money, broke. When I moved to Chattanooga, I had $5,000 in my account. It was me, my wife, and my brother. A lot of people look at us now like, “You run all these million-dollar companies.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s great. But we started with zero; literally nothing.” So driving for dollars is one thing. We’re coming home every night, I’ve got this list, my wife is handwriting yellow letters and postcards to people. So we were doing that, putting out a lot of bandit signs, the street signs, “We buy houses, we buy duplexes, we buy apartments. We’ll buy anything, just call us. Please just call this number, we’ll buy.” Then we were downloading some lists and trying to do some targeted marketing. Because again, our goal was to buy multifamily stuff.

Slocomb Reed: Were you working a job at this time too, or was wholesaling your primary source of income?

David Olds: Yeah, just a little bit. I worked for 84 Lumber when I was in Florida, and I told them I was planning on relocating to Chattanooga. So I was on a little bit of a guarantee. And it was supposed to be for a year, but it lasted about three months before they’re like, “Hey, you’re a really good guy, but you’re not selling anything.” In fact, nobody was selling anything right now, because there was no new construction going on back then. They laid me off, so I had to make this work. I had a wife, two boys, and three fat dogs at the time, and I had to generate money. That’s why wholesaling became just crucial for us, because it’s very quick in your life cycle and a wholesale deal can be as short as 14 to 21 days from the time you put something under contract to the time you get paid.

So we were using that in conjunction with going out and finding these other deals and working owner finance where the seller will be the bank for us.

Break: [00:09:17][00:10:56]

Slocomb Reed: Tell me more about that. You’re doing this wholesaling, going into 2009 to 2010, at a time when banks aren’t lending. Tell us more about how you were structuring those deals so that you didn’t have to get financing and you weren’t selling to end buyers who couldn’t get financing either.

David Olds: Let me tell you where I’m at now. We’ve got a portfolio, it’s about five million dollars, a mix of single families and small commercial units. So again, let’s go back in time. So when there’s a market shift — let me tell you that, we are never going to know when we’re at the top of the market, or even when the market starting to decline, until it’s already happened. Anybody that’s out there projecting right now, “Oh, in March the markets going to crash.” Full of crap, they have no idea, I promise you, because I’ve been through two market corrections already. So we knew something was happening; there were foreclosures. This was when all the gurus are out, “Hey, you can market to foreclosures and do whatever. This is going to be your strategy.” Well, that was a struggle, because imagine, you’ve got somebody, they’re in foreclosure, they owe 100,000, the market is starting to slide; it hasn’t fallen off the cliff yet, but it’s starting to slide.

Typically, it’s very hard to find a way to make money on those deals. Or quick money, at least. So you can buy them, take over their mortgage, and that’s some long-term money.

So understand, that was a little bit of a struggle. It’s difficult to wholesale a house that’s worth 100k when they owe 97k. Where do you make money there? So I tell you that to understand this – so I come to Tennessee, and I have to start doing some marketing, and I can’t. I don’t have the money to do unlimited marketing, so I have to be very targeted. I sort of backed into this by accident, and I said “Well, I don’t want to do foreclosures, because I’m tired of dealing with that, and all the problems that come with foreclosure. I’m just going to market to people that own their houses free and clear. They can do whatever they want, because they own the house and they’re not bound by any banks or anything like that. And I actually have done some research, and somewhere between 35 and 40% of all the properties in the United States are owned free and clear. Did you know that? That’s a phenomenal number. I had no idea when I looked that up. So my intention was for wholesaling.

There wasn’t this master plan… I’m telling you how I sort of cavemanned my way backwards into this. So I said, “I’m tired of dealing with foreclosures, so I’m only going to market free and clear properties, and the ones I drive by that look like they’re distressed.” So I did that, so we’re getting in these deals… And I’d also done some training. This amazing guy, this name is Chris Kirschner – he had a thing called the Autopilot System. He’s not around, he doesn’t teach anymore. But he had this amazing course and it talked about how to make different offers to people.

So I’m hustling, because I got to do something, because I don’t have a great job, or a job that lasted; I got my wife, got my kids, I got all these things, I’m in a new city, we knew nobody, it was like to burn the boats kind of thing, we come here… But I’ve got this other thing where I know how to make multiple offers. And I bought the Carleton Sheets course, and  I’m buying all the courses. Don’t laugh at old Carleton boy; people goof on him, but he knew what was up.

Slocomb Reed: People who invested back before the recession, there are a couple of names that always come up from who they learn from. Carleton Sheets is one of them, for sure.

David Olds: He was the man, dude. I’ve still got his course on my bookshelf in there. I boxed up a lot of courses that I bought there in storage, but that’s one that I leave out there. So Chris Kirschner teaches in his thing; you can make multiple offers, and it really was geared towards making subject-to offers. And I thought to myself, “Sell?” As you’re talking to all these people who want to sell, because they’re motivated – that’s going to be the first thing – but I’m making them an offer… And let’s say you call me and say “I want 70,000 for my property.” I’m like, “Okay, great.” And I know you own it free and clear, because you’re on my list, and that’s where the lead came from. But for me, like a wholesale deal, you want 70k, I’ve got to be at 45k. You’re like, “Geez, man, I just can’t take 45.” I’m like “Hey, I get it. Let me see. Let me ask you a question. Do you need all the money at once? What are you going to do with it?” It’s got to be that kind of pacing; that pace, like it’s the first time you’ve ever thought of it. “Slocomb, man, I want to help you out. I know you’ve got this thing, you’ve got these tenants you hate, and you’re moving to Florida…”

Slocomb Reed: Do you need all the money at once? That’s a great question.

David Olds: Right. Like, what are you going to do with the money? If I give you that 70 grand, you know the government — I’m not an accountant, but you know the government’s going to take a third of that. Do you need it all at once? What are you going to do with that money? “I’m going to put it in the bank.” The bank’s paying about 1% right now. Man, if I could find a way to get to that 70 grand, would you be interested in that if we didn’t do all the payments upfront? So you sort of work backwards into it. So what I was able to do was I’m making all these wholesale offers, and people are saying, no, no, no, no. Because only one out of 10 people are going to take it. Then I back into this, “Hey, do you need all the money at once?” Sometimes people say yes. “Okay, cool.” Hey, I can’t help you. I’m not your guy. If anything changes, call me. But a lot of times, people say “No, I don’t need the money. I’m just moving, or I can’t deal with these tenants”, or whatever it is. I’m like, “I might be able to find a way to make this work for you. Let me run back to my office and work some numbers. Let me see if I can find a way to make this work.” And that’s it.

From there, now we make them a terms offer. I make them a cash offer, a 100% owner finance offer, and maybe another offer where I give them 2k to 5k down, and they’ll pick one. Whatever one they pick, I’m like “You know what? That’s the one everybody picks.” Because I just want to affirm whatever, I want to anchor them and affirm whatever their decision was, so they feel good about it. Because people want to be like other successful people. If you pick the cash offer after all that, I’m like, “You know what? I’ve got to be honest with you. That’s what most people pick, they just want the cash and be done with it.” Or if you pick a zero-down owner finance offer, “Man, that’s really smart. That’s what most people pick, because they just want to find a way to make the most money for this deal.” Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. And if you pick the one where I give you 2000 bucks down, I’m like, “You know what? That’s really smart. That’s what most people pick, because they want to know that I’ve got a little bit of skin in the game.”

So it doesn’t matter. The key is that all those offers work for me. It doesn’t matter to me which one you pick, because I wrote the offers. They all work for me, any one of them. I’m going to wholesale your house, or I’m going to get a house for free, or I’m going to put two grand down, get a house for free, and pay less money, because it’s a sliding scale. I’m going to give you money; maybe I’m going to give you 62k instead of 70k. But if I can get the house with zero down at 5% interest for 10 years, I’ll give you your 70k. What do I care?

Slocomb Reed: A couple of things for you, David… Tell us how your real estate business transitioned coming out of the recession, and tell us how your success with single families transitioned into your commercial investing.

David Olds: So there’s definitely a difference in what I do now as opposed to the recession. In our wholesaling business back in 2009, ’10, ’11, ’12, probably almost into ’13, our business was very geared towards landlords. Again, you have to think of what was going on in the retail market. Nobody — I don’t want to say nobody; I don’t want to overgeneralize. Primarily, the real estate market still hadn’t started to get traction again. It took longer than any of us thought that it would. We thought, “Oh, 2008, new president, whatever. Things are going to happen, there’ll be an adjustment.” But it took a long time to come out of that, longer than anybody thought. So primarily within the recession, we were doing $25,000 deals. We were really strong in the lower-end areas. I don’t want to say “hood”, because I hate that word, but lower-income rental areas.

One of the things that I learned is don’t ever put your own biases or what you think on the marketplace. The data will tell you where people are buying and where they’re not. I know there are some investors who are like, “I don’t want to invest there, I only want to invest in nice areas.” That’s cool, but your returns are going to be lower, they’re going to certainly be lower in the nicer areas, because your entry cost is going to be a lot higher, so your return is going to be lower.

Man, if you go into those low-end areas – I tell people to drive through there on a Friday night at about seven o’clock. Do you see all those people sitting on the floor? Do you think any of them own those properties? No. They’re all tenants. So who owns those properties? Landlords. I know people that own half of the downtown area, all those houses that most people turn their nose up at, and those guys are making $800 to $900 a month off every single one of them. I mean, they’re just ridiculously rich. So in the recession, we’re primarily into landlords, as we come out; then we start getting into wholesaling more nicer properties in nicer areas, because now the rehabbers are coming back into the market. So the easiest time for us to buy properties, when we bought… We were over 100 properties at one point, where we bought the bulk of those; it wasn’t in the recession. I’ll be honest with you, the worst the news was about them saying “Oh, the real estate market is terrible”, the easier it was to buy. Because people are like, “Just take this, just take my house; just take my apartment building”, whatever it was.

So I guess to answer your question, it was far easier to buy during the recession than it is right now, because now everybody thinks they’re sitting on a pile of gold, and prices are running up through the roof. So how did we do it? We made a lot of offers; we got out there, we got up to the plate a lot of times, and we were swinging all the time. So the small apartment buildings that we’ve got, the 8, the 10, the 15 units, the quads, the triplexes – a lot of those came because we were talking to a guy who owned a single-family house, and he also owned these other properties. We were getting deals that way, and then we were also direct-mailing anybody with 20 units or less. I feel like I went a long way. Did I answer all the questions?

Slocomb Reed: Yeah, that’s good. How did your strategy shift as you started negotiating with apartment owners, as opposed to single-family owner-occupants and landlords?

David Olds: I tell you, it’s not a lot different. The people I’m dealing with are the smaller — they’re not the institutional guys; they’re not guys that own 1000 units. I’m not the best person to speak on that. The people that I talked to, they own a couple of houses, they own an 8-unit, a 10-unit. And before you can negotiate – I always really stressed this to my team and to our students, is you’ve got to build a great rapport with people, and you’ve got to figure out what their motivation is; you’ve got to figure out why they want to sell. I had one guy that sold us 27 doors; he had multiple properties. It was1.2 million dollars, and we bought that property zero down, 4% interest, on a 17-year term. A million-dollar deal, we did like no money.

Funny, I remember going to the closing and I was at one of my properties — this is back in the day when I actually was out painting and doing stuff. I looked down at my jeans, and they were kind of painted, I had a hole in them, and I’m like, “I should be dressed better to go get a million dollars in properties.” [laughter] I remember distinctly having that thought sitting in my old, beat-up pickup truck.

But I listened to this guy’s story – his name was Tommy Baker, and he owned a bunch of properties here in Chattanooga. He called me up one day, he’s like, “Hey, I want to sell all these properties.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” From a wholesaler’s point of view, package deals are very hard to sell… Because a wholesaler – we’re trying to move properties, everybody understands what we do. It’s far easier to sell one property at a time than try to sell 27 doors at once. Because there’s a limited number of buyers who have that kind of cash available. Wholesalers – we sell to cash buyers.

So I talked to him, I said, “Tommy, send me over what you got.” He sent me an email, I looked through them, I called him back, and I said, “Listen, dude. I want to help you here.” I can tell he’s an older guy. “But to be honest with you, you’re looking for like full retail on all these properties. Your best bet would be to put these things on MLS and go ahead just sell them.” There’s something powerful too in telling somebody that, “Hey, I can’t help you. I’m not your guy,” but trying to at least point them in the right direction. So this is what he said, “Listen, I don’t want to do that.” “What do you want to do? How do you think I can help you?” He’s like, “Well, I need to sell all these properties. I can’t take care of them.” I’m like, “Okay, are you open to doing any kind of owner-financing?” I threw that out there and he’s like, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” I said, “Holy…”

Slocomb Reed: Hah! That’s awesome.

David Olds: I’m like, [unintelligible [00:22:37].03] Because we always get scared, what if somebody says yes? I’m like, “Okay. Well, send me over what the rents are. Let me look at it. Let me see what I can do. Then why don’t you come to the office tomorrow?” So he comes to the office and we sit down, we’re having a conversation… We don’t jump right into that. I want to talk to him like “Hey, man. What’s going on? How did you get these things?” I’m always fascinated talking to old-time investors who’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m like “How’d you get these deals? What did you do?” So his story was this… A long-time investor, kids were grown, out and married, he was probably 70, and he had self-managed all these properties. But here’s the thing, man – he was diagnosed for the second time with brain cancer. Heartbreaking. He was such a nice guy.

He said, “Listen, here’s the truth. I’m not going to make it. I’ve got three or four months left. Here’s the thing. My wife – I need to make sure that she’s got income forever. She’s never dealt with properties, she’s not going to be able to deal with them. I don’t want her to have to liquidate these things after I’m gone. I want somebody that I can trust, that will pay me on these things ,or pay her, that’ll get her through the rest of her life, so she’ll have income, so I know that my wife is being cared for.” Man, do you want to feel like a ton of bricks hitting you? I’m going to tell you, sitting in that room across that table, that’s what that it felt like. I said, “Okay. Yes, I want to buy your properties. I’m your guy. Let’s figure out the terms and how we can do this. Let me work on this over the next day or two. There are 27 of them. We need to go out and spend a day or two, and I need to get into all the units to see where we’re at.”

Because typically, when you’ve got a person that’s going to do that, for the most part, they’re probably distressed, in some way. He’s an old guy, he wasn’t great at keeping up with all of them; some were good, some were bad. We met again and I made him a deal. I’m like, “Here’s the deal, dude. I’ll give you everything that you’re looking for, every single thing that you want. Here’s what I need. The only way I could do it at this amount is zero down. I’m not going to put any money down. We’re going to do 4% interest over 17 years. The way I came up with 17 is I’m just playing with an amortization schedule. I know what the rents are, what the insurance is going to be, I know what the mortgage is going to be. I’m playing with those numbers so that I get myself to a cash flow number that works. And here’s what we can do. Either you can give me all the deposits and we can prorate the rents, like the security deposits and the taxes, and you can give that to me, or I can just not make payments for a couple of months to kind of offset. So we can work this out. What do you want to do?”

We ended up kind of coming to something in the middle, where I think he gave me the deposits and the proration of rent, and I took care of the taxes. So I went to this closing, 1.1 something, I don’t know, just right around 1.2 million. I put no money down, I walked away with $10,000 and 27 properties.

Slocomb Reed: That’s awesome.

David Olds: Kind of a good deal. But, again, I tell that story to people and they’re like, “That’s what I want to do. I want to do those deals.” I’m like “Yeah, that’s like saying I want to go down to Braves Park, where they won the World Series and hit a grand slam every time I get [unintelligible [00:25:32].29] It doesn’t happen. You’ve got to get up to the plate and take swings, because you’re going to get some base hits and then you’re going to get the grand slam.

I’ve actually done two big deals like that, but really, the bulk of all of my properties… But it’s the same process. It’s the same process whether you’re buying a single-family, a duplex, a quad, 20 units, 50 units, 100 units… It’s the same process. Why do you want to sell? How can I help you? What is it that you really need?

Break: [00:25:57][00:28:54]

Slocomb Reed: It sounds like you’ve done a really good job of making sure you get up to the plate enough times that you’re sitting across the table from those sellers who need to sell you 27 units all at once, on 100% seller financing.

David Olds: Yeah, it’s pretty neat.

Slocomb Reed: David, what is your Best Ever advice for our listeners?

David Olds: Different advice for different people. If you’re just starting out – because I get asked this a lot – the best advice is pick one strategy. I tell people real estate is like being a doctor. You could be the eye doctor, the nose doctor, the mouth doctor, the elbow doctor, the butt doctor, the toe doctor, whatever; lots of ways to do doctoring. Same thing with real estate – lots of ways to do real estate. You can wholesale, you can rehab, you can buy apartment complexes, you can buy storage units, you can do land development, you can do lease options… Lots of things you can do. All of them make money, every single one. So pick one that fits your personality. If you’re like me and you’re yappy, and you want to talk to people probably, wholesaling is probably a good place for you to be.

Some things that I could never do – I don’t like talking to banks; they’re very slow-paced. I couldn’t be like the short sale guy or the loan modification guy. That’s not for me, that doesn’t fit my personality. So find something that you really like and that resonates with you, and that you enjoy, because this will be a struggle. Being an entrepreneur – it’s not easy. Instagram, I think, it’s always the flash, the bling, the Lambos, and all that stuff… But when you’re starting out, it’s a little bit of a grind. So find something that you really like, but stick with it; don’t have that shiny ball syndrome of, “Oh, I’m going to do storage units. Oh, now I’m going to do lease options. I’m going to do tax deeds. Now I’m going to do whatever.” Find something that you enjoy, and really stick with it.

As you progress, again, another piece of advice is – like, this is hard; we’re all in the beginning, we’re all solopreneurs, we’re all starting out, and it can feel really lonely. You’re sitting at Starbucks, trying to grind this out, you listen to a podcast, you’ve got some idiot on here with a Patriots hat telling you how great he got this million-dollar deal, and it sounds so simple, or whatever… ll of us want to make it sound like the most glamorous thing. But it can be a grind, and it can be lonely. So whether you’re at Starbucks, or you’re sitting in your living room, or your garage, or your bonus room, or whatever, you can feel like a man or a woman on an island, like you’re out there all by yourself. And what I tell people is get a tribe; get some friends, get some people — I’m not saying do the business with them, but be around people that are doing this every day. Get around that campfire.

So whether that’s an online community, which is okay, but if there’s a local meetup in your area or a real estate group, you should be at that. You should be about two or three times a week, especially when you’re just getting started. Because one of the most powerful things that help all of us as human beings is that you have to believe that this can work. You have to believe it and feel that all the time. So when you’re around those people, like “Oh, Bob just did a deal for $6,000 and he did it in one day. That’s great. Joe just bought these storage units. Holy smokes! I can do that.” Because when you see other people doing it, it gives you the belief that you can do that, too.

So get around those people, have people that cheer you on, you should cheer on other people, be excited about their success… I’ve got those people all over the country that I’m friends with, that operate on a super high level, that I can call and go “You cannot believe what happened to me today, with my company…” Here’s the thing. I promise all of you that are listening, if you haven’t done your first deal and you’re struggling with something, my company is going to do 4.8 million dollars in assignment fees next year; there are days we struggle, too. We all have problems.

Slocomb Reed: Absolutely.

David Olds: Yeah, man. Don’t ever be confused like, just because I’ve got a picture on top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris that my life is perfect. I run a company, we deal with people, and I mess stuff up, too. We all had bad days. So find those people that you could jump on the phone with and go “Holy smokes, guess what I did today? I screwed this up royally.” My friends can call me and go “What are you doing when this happens?”

So those people that you –if you want to call it mastermind– that you have a relationship with, you help them out in a bad time, they help you out in a bad time, you all cheer each other on, and I’m excited about their success and they’re excited for mine.

Slocomb Reed: David, I totally get that. I have my list of people that I call when I have a certain struggle, or even when I have a certain victory that people outside of real estate just aren’t going to understand. I know who I’m going to call to talk to about it, because they’re going to know what the struggle was I went through it, and how big of a deal it is, this thing that only real estate guys understand. David, what’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you?

David Olds: Instagram is a really great place. It’s very easy, @davidoldsrei. I answer all of my questions or messages. If you have a question or something I can help you with, or a deal with what you’re struggling with, certainly reach out. Our website is the exact same, davidoldsrei.com. We offer lots of resources on there, some coaching, free videos, and all that kind of stuff. So definitely go over there and check it out. I think they’ve got some free contracts loaded, and free marketing stuff that we just give away for free there, because those are the things that people ask for the most. So ueah, @davidoldsrei on Instagram, or davidoldsrei.com is our website.

Slocomb Reed: David, you’ve taken us on a journey here. You got into real estate accidentally through some live and flips. You found Rich Dad Poor Dad like a lot of us. Heading into the recession, you moved to an emerging market so that you were in a good position to continue real estate investing. You focused on free and clear owners and landlords. Coming out of the recession, you transitioned into bigger deals, with a focus on making sure you were getting in front of any sellers as possible and figuring out how you can offer them what they needed to sell to you. And it’s brought you to around a five-million-dollar portfolio today. Your advice to all of our Best Ever listeners is to play your strengths, do what works for your personality, and make sure you stick with it.

David Olds: I love it when you say it. It sounds great. [laughs]

Slocomb Reed: I get to spend 30 minutes listening to you, soaking in all of your wisdom, and trying to summarize. Thank you again, David. And Best Ever listeners, we will see you tomorrow.

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