The following is a short excerpt of a 30-minute call with Ryan G. Wright from Wednesday September 03, 2014 provided as part of the Elite Group Coaching monthly subscription, which is a program no longer offered by DHM:
RYAN G. WRIGHT:
The hardest deal you’ll ever do is your first deal. I remember… and I haven’t told this story too often… I remember my FIRST flip.
So I had some real estate background. I was a real estate agent (which I’m not recommending or endorsing that you do that) I fell into it by happenstance. I was going to college and my dad had invested in some rental properties so I went to real estate school while I was going to college. In fact I conned my girl friend at the time (which is now my wife) to do the same thing so we went to real estate school together for fun.
So we started out helping regular homeowners buy and sell properties, which was good because it helped us understand the market, but then we started talking and realizing that we were working nights, weekends, holidays and every other time when nobody else works and there was a LOT of emotion involved because people were buying and selling their homes. Not investors but people that are selling their own home and it is SUCH an emotional roller-coaster and you’re working nights and weekends and it is NO fun. So then what we started doing is helping real estate investors.
We went to a real estate conference… not a real estate investment conference but a real estate brokerage and Realtor conference… and there was this guy there. He was selling these tapes. I actually have them right in front of me sitting on my desk so I can see them. You could tell that he made these and recorded them himself… I mean he had little labels like you would get at office max on the front of the tapes and for some reason I spent like $2,000 on his course… and I actually listened to them. There was two courses actually…they were called “Foreclosure Fortunes” and “$10,000 Cash in 90 days.” They were talking about making money fixing and flipping houses and I was interested, but even after listening to the tapes I didn’t have the confidence to go and do a flip myself. I was chicken. I just couldn’t pull the trigger on it.
So what I thought though is rather than me going and doing a flip I’m going to go find investors and we’re going to help find them properties we’ll sell the properties for them because as a Realtor we’d make money on both ends because we’d make a commission on the buy side and we’d make a commission on a sell side. Now the best thing about it is that we didn’t have to work nights and weekends because we’re not driving around showing people properties. We’re just finding one and if it meets the numbers we know the investor would buy it. So then we started finding some investors and finding properties and selling them for them and making commissions on both sides which was a good gig for us.
Finally… my wife came to me and just said “Why are we doing this? We’re leaving $10-20K profit on the table… let’s just do one ourselves.” At the time there was a property on Lee Maur Street in West Valley City, UT, and we made an offer on it just like we would have for one of our investors and it got accepted.
Now I remember standing there looking at the house and I was about ready to crap my pants. It was the day our earnest money went hard… our earnest money was non refundable at the end of the day. We’re standing there in the morning. I’d already lined up financing. and I looked at my wife and I just said “I can’t do this.” She looked at me and said “What’s the worse that could happen? We’ll go bankrupt is the worse thing that could happen and honestly that wouldn’t be that bad because we really don’t have that much right now anyway.” So my wife is really the one that got me over the hurdle…. but we stood there together on the street looking at this house facing the possibility of bankruptcy… and we made the decision… we’re going to do this.
That first one was HARD… we made money on that first deal, but just everything and I mean EVERYTHING was difficult. Luckily we already had some experience on valuations for properties and we had some experience with rehabs because I’d grown up doing paint and carpet and all that type of stuff and manually doing the labor myself. So I knew what was too much and what not to pay and did a lot of stuff myself. But I’ll tell you… that one decision to do that property changed my life FOREVER. You know what I’m talking about… if you go back in your life and look at the decisions that changed your life for the better… moving forward on that property has to be in the top for sure.
Now… if you’ll step back for a second and you look at this decision with some wisdom you’ll see something… something that I didn’t see at the time. Something that is CRUCIAL… something that makes or breaks this story… MY story. A decision that is the REAL life changing decision… not as dramatic as purchasing that property but EVERY bit as impactful….
It was the tapes.
Those silly little made-in-someone’s-basement-office-max-stickered cassette tapes. THAT was the real decision. I dropped good money on those things… but looking back… if I hadn’t purchased those tapes I probably wouldn’t have started finding properties for investors and I probably wouldn’t have ended up on that street with my earnest money going hard and my wife convincing me to go forward.
That property and those tapes are really what got me into hard money because of how HARD it is to get money on these types of deals and because those tapes got me into it but they didn’t give me enough information or confidence to actually get started… it eventually led us into the hard money business and into helping other people open the door to financial freedom by showing them how to get hard money and make a profit flipping properties starting with your FIRST deal.
Let us teach you! Make an investment in yourself.
- Is it OK to invest in a state other than the one you live in?
- Is it OK for me to talk to the people evaluating my properties?
- How do you correctly value properties?
- How far away should I look for comparable properties?
- Are there any good online tools to value properties?
- How do I know if the crime rate is too high for the area?
- What are some good online tools to look at crime rates?
- Do I have to actually go to a property before I make an offer on it?
- Can I find good deals on the MLS?
Invest in Yourself!
Let us teach you!
- Is it OK to invest in a state other than the one you live in?
- Is it OK for me to talk to the people evaluating my properties?
- How do you correctly value properties?
- How far away should I look for comparable properties?
- Are there any good online tools to value properties?
- How do I know if the crime rate is too high for the area?
- What are some good online tools to look at crime rates?
- Do I have to actually go to a property before I make an offer on it?
- Can I find good deals on the MLS?
Learn how all this works by registering for our next webinar.
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