if you're a real estate investor or you want to be a real estate investor and you're looking for more money and funding for your real estate deals regardless of what a hard money broker or lender would say don't go anywhere because i'm getting ready to plug you into the money well hello and welcome to another episode of real estate investing with jay connor i'm jay connor the host of the show also known as the private money authority and if you've never heard of private money wow i do need to get you plugged in the first six years of our investing business started back in 2003 first six years my wife carol joy and i we relied on local banks and mortgage companies and boy did i get a rude awakening in january 2009 had deals under contract and i learned overnight very quickly that my lines of credit had been closed with no notice like myself and the rest of the world so i was introduced to this wonderful world of private money in less than two weeks of losing my lines of credit and in less than 90 days we were able to raise over 2 million dollars in private money from individuals so we're not talking any kind of institutional money any kind of traditional banks no hard money brokers we're talking about private money so if you want to get money and get it fast for your real estate deals i've got a free gift for you i just released my new book which is titled where to get the money now subtitle how and where to get the money for your real estate deals without relying on traditional or hard money lenders so this gift is going to save you 20 bucks you can go to amazon and get it in fact it just hit number one when it came out very recently but you can get it for free right here from being on the show now i'm gonna be totally transparent and ask you to pay a couple of bucks to cover shipping and handling but the book is free so you can go to www j-a-y-c-o-n-n-e-r.com forward slash book b-o-o-k and we'll get the book rushed right out to you again that's jay connor c o n j-a-y e r dot com forward slash book b-o-o-k well i'm so excited to have a very successful entrepreneur as a guest here on the show with me today that's just been really beating down the bushes since he launched his career he's a serial entrepreneur i mean he's got like seven or more businesses that he's running and he's like way too young to have that much good stuff going on but nonetheless uh he's got a very successful track record in wholesaling rehabbing rental business etc that he primarily focuses in new jersey pennsylvania and also down in florida now in just five short years my guest has completed more than 100 transactions including building a rental portfolio of over 40 units that's fantastic now in 2020 my guest founded a social media management and skip tracing business that helps busy real estate entrepreneurs drive more leads into their business now he's done all this while he was serving as a drill instructor and cyber security officer in the united states coast guard he's recently retired to the williamsburg virginia area now on top of all that he's built his real estate investing team to eight team members who work mostly remotely all across the world and he's completed again 100 real estate transactions while adding that rental portfolio together on top of all that he's the founder of the south jersey real estate investor network in atlanta county now his passion is to inspire and share all his tools and experiences that have been a driving force in growing the group from just one investor at the very first meeting to having over 1 300 members of this group and he's hosted more than 30 events investors in the group have completed more than 100 deals since my guest started it so let's reveal the secret as to who my brilliant guest is and his name is john paul kilduff also known as jp so jp welcome to the show thank you very much that is such a um an awesome introduction just listening to you say it just as like it's so surreal like and unbelievable sometimes just to hear it so thank you for that introduction yeah absolutely i mean um so you just started what then uh 2016 or so yes sir that's right 2016.
I had about about five years left in my coast guard career and i was doing i.t at the time and i just said uh you know there's i was really i was looking for what i was going to do when i finished my coast guard career and i knew that being in it wasn't it i quickly found out when i became an i.t that the only thing i really liked about computers is actually the internet i don't really like anything else when it comes to i.t so real estate was uh what happened across my plate and that was back in 2016. so where do you get so your your website inspirable i'm not sure i'm saying that right you nailed it but anyway for the sake of our audio attendees that's www dot the word inspired and then able so inspired i-n-s-p-i-r-e-d a-b-l-e uh where do you get your drive from i mean you're like doing all this stuff and it's like uh where's where's all that come from yeah so that's a that's a great question i really do believe that a lot of it is um you know i grew up and i was classified as adhd which back in the day was probably something that was uh negative and you know was considered you know troublemaker and never going to amount to anything because they couldn't concentrate but over the years i really found a way to kind of harness all of that energy and then take it and focus it in one direction and i realized you know with that 80d i was able to like start so many different things and have so many irons in the fire and um and then i quickly realized that i suck at finishing projects and so that's why i ended up growing up growing a team to actually help me finish some of these things that i started and so you know through the adhd and then the military background you know everything that the military's instilled in me is you know with processes and systems and checklists and just discipline and time management i think the two together make for just an amazing combination to become an entrepreneur yeah so did you start out wholesaling is that how you started your real estate investing career actually my very first deal was a flip i got my first flip about two weeks in um to becoming a real estate investor i went through a training a real estate education program and two weeks into that program i got my first deal and it happened to be a rehab um but i the rehab quickly went south and so i picked up my first couple of wholesales thereafter to try to make up for all the losses that i took on my first on my first flip so what's the big lessons learned on your first flip that you would uh recommend to folks not to make the same mistakes oh my gosh um so it would be not to give up your power to the contractor you know getting into the business and starting out i think you know the contracting part of things a lot of it is is confusing and daunting and overwhelming um you know whether it's private money or contracting or marketing but with the contracting side of it for me personally i didn't know a lot about swinging hammers and everything that went into construction and so i quickly you know gave my contractor the benefit of the doubt and gave them the power to do what they want and um you know they blew smoke uh as much as anybody has ever blown smoke and um you know they ran off i gave him a five thousand dollar deposit for a roof and he ran with that and then you know one of the estimates that he gave me he said the septic system was good to go when it had failed uh so that was twenty thousand dollars that i didn't anticipate so you know my the lesson i learned was the system that we have in place now to to vet and hire contractors we have a five-step system that all contractors have to go through no matter what there's no compromise in order for them to do work with us yeah speaking of rehabbing um i was i was visiting with a gentleman this morning over the phone and um he's coming to my upcoming live event anyway uh he's rehabbed one house and um and he said that he and his wife actually did the work and i told him a quick story i said you know a student of mine not long ago was saying jay i love rehabbing my own houses it's like therapy to me and i said to the student i said well anybody who rehabs their own houses needs therapy you agree with that yeah absolutely oh mercy look do i look like i know how to swing a hammer i don't know looks could be deceiving i mean people look at me and they're surprised that i don't know how to swing a hammer well these looks are not deceiving i don't know what to say but you know what i know how to find somebody that can find somebody to swing a hammer right yes 100 that's the entrepreneurial spirit right there yeah i like it that you've got a checklist put together a five-step process on locating and actually vetting out contractors now what i want to do jp i want to jump right in because right now time the timing of this question that i'm going to ask you could never be more relevant than today's market and economy and that is you know whether you're wholesaling rehabbing it doesn't matter you always got to find the deals and you know my wife and i and our team we've been doing this business um since 2003 uh here in eastern north carolina and i've never seen it more challenging uh for people particularly that don't know what they're doing to locate the motivated sellers so my guess is in williamsburg virginia it's like where we live and most of the places across the country we sure can't rely on the multiple listing service to find deals these days right yeah no that's correct i mean it's so tight we were you know we we have a system where we try to submit about 10 to 15 offers a week and there's just not 10 to 15 properties to put offers on on the mls anymore no so the i grew up in a little town called newport but the zip code services like 17 or 18 000 people um and uh it's one of the markets that we invest in and a year ago there were right at uh 100 houses which was not many in the multiple listing service 100 out of 17 000 and uh two weeks ago there were 28.
so my goodness that is so are gone um so yeah so it's tight so i don't want us to rush through this i mean if we don't talk about anything else other than this topic this will be well worth the time of our listeners and that is in today's market what are your personally your favorite ways and best converting ways to find motivated sellers and a sub question to that of course it's going to take more than a sentence to answer that well let's just start with that let's just start with that how are you actually consistently getting motivated seller leads these days yeah that's a great question and super relevant to what you know the conversation that i'm having on a daily basis with so many investors and uh we actually have 10 different marketing campaigns that we implement on a daily basis and i would say the number one producing campaign that we have right now is text messaging and cold calling and what we really love about text messaging and cold calling is the cost to actually acquire a deal is so much lower than most of the other paid forms of marketing out there and also the response time is so much shorter you know where you know direct mail is a little bit more expensive and the response time to get a response back from a seller is typically a week two weeks three weeks depending on the the frequency in which you're sending your mail and also whenever they feel motivated enough to contact you you're waiting for their response rather than a text message or a cold call where you're hitting them right away and you know by the end of that text or by that call if they're going to be motivated to sell or not and so you know for our direct mail we're typically you know every batch we try to we try to get super hyper focused on about three to five hundred names and we'll send out batches of direct mail like that but with text messaging you know we're sending out three thousand to five thousand text messages so because the cost is so low you know we're able to cast a lot wider net and really increase our chances because um you know as you know jay and maybe your listeners know as well like it's a numbers game right that's why we submit so many offers on the mls and that's why we love text messaging and cold calling because it's you know in a numbers game if you're hitting 3 000 to 5 000 you're more likely to get you know a motivated seller so that's really our number one campaign right now that we're paying for our our next one that produces the the most lead is believe it or not and i know that this is different for everybody across the nation depending on what their municipality allows for but bandit signs you know we still get a high number of conversions and calls off of bandit sides and the cost to implement a hundred bandit sign campaign is probably you know anywhere from 150 to 250 for the material and then you know for us we pay um some high schooler a dollar a sign to go put them out so i mean we're all in for like 350 dollars most of the time and you could tell when our bandit signs go out because we typically are getting calls that week uh from those banded signs and so that's a really good one for us on the paid side yeah demanded signs uh what does your bandit sign say it says um cash for house 594 cash that's all it says it's yellow with black writing that says cash for house 594 cash it's super simple and as big as i can the 594 cash what is that is that a number or what is that it is actually and because our area is hyper local i don't have to include an area code because of where we put it in south jersey so they like anybody who sees the sign just automatically assumes that it's a 609 number i got you got you now back before you continue to go forward um back to the texting and the um and the outbound calling calling um i assume you've got that all automated with a virtual assistant doing doing the outbound calling and texting right yeah i actually the first time i thought i was going to be able to handle the texting myself i i kicked off a list of about 5 000 and i was texting um a new owner every 10 seconds and i started it and i went to go walk away from my desk and i got a response i was like oh a response and then like literally like every 10 seconds i would send one i would get almost the same amount of responses coming in that whole day eight hours i never left my desk i'm like yeah no i can't there's no way i can run this myself so i quickly i actually did it the next day again only to document the steps that i took to start it and what i did to respond to it and i created imagine this a checklist or a system behind how i was doing what i was doing and then i went out and i found a virtual assistant that could do it for me and we have a i mean we've been through so many different virtual assistants until um we found the company that we currently work with and we've been working with them for a little over three years and they've provided all of our virtual assistants since so that and that's um riva global i don't know have you ever heard of riva global r-e-v-a global i haven't heard of them oh they're phenomenal the way that they do business is completely different from any other virtual assistant company out there and like i said i've been with them for three years so it's been amazing that's great so what are your best performing lists to text an outbound call and just so everybody knows what we're talking about there's all kinds of lists you can get you can get absentee owners you can get high equity you can get low equity you can get pre-foreclosure you can get um zombie listings and the list goes on and on and on and on and on um what's your favorite uh best performing type of list yeah so i actually um i do this um this uh this thing uh where i actually put myself in the shoes situationally and through like life's like um all the different little milestones in life and one of the best things that we ever discovered was taking what people when do they normally buy houses when do they normally sell houses throughout their life and so typically that's when they get married how long do people normally stay married on average seven years and then they have to sell a house and if they stay together and they have kids when do they typically sell a house like 20 years when the kids graduate and the house is too big and so we use that as markers of like okay and we work our way backwards and we basically say um you know at what time would somebody be in this specific situation and so our favorite list right now that we're seeing the most uh the most leads come back are our absentee owners uh so people who have bought a house that no longer live in that house that they bought between 2008 and 2012 because that was the lowest point in the market as you know jay right so in 2008 and 2012 if they bought a house during that time there's a couple of things that we know about this one great time to buy a house two they have owned the house for long enough where um on average tenants last about three years in a property and then it turns over and so if they've owned it since then there's a chance that they've gone through at least three cycles of renters and at this point they may be like so fed up with turning properties over on top of what's currently going on with covid and eviction moratorium and also on top of that the appreciation that's happening in the market so the combination of all three of those they bought low they can sell high and there's a potential that they're having non-performing tenants uh you know those are the ones that we're having the best uh luck with right now got you so on your so you don't try to or do you try to segregate it's like on absentee owner you got two different kinds of people that own that house you got people that are you got people that are perfect what we call professional landlords right they have multiple properties but then you got people that just have like like you know i live here we live here you know next to a military town havelock north carolina also cherry point naval air base and so a lot of the military will buy a house then they move and they say well we'll keep the house from in and out so that's what i call non-professional landlords that just have like one property uh do you try to segregate and talk to those people differently or an absentee owner is an absentee owner yeah so that's a great question and we we do think about that whenever we are whenever we're talking to somebody however on the list that we're stacking um there's nothing in there that says that they're professional or not unless they're owned by um some sort of like llc or trust like you know something like that that typically tells us that that's a professional landlord versus an accidental landlord they got orders and now they moved and you know they're they're just happened to be a landlord because they couldn't sell the house in time or whatever right so we don't segregate that but that is something that we're aware of whenever they call in i got you so in the time that we've got remaining which is only about five minutes i'd like for you to share with everybody how you run your company in an automated fashion with your team member and what i mean by that is how the team communicates how you're kept informed as to what's going on so if you can just sort of walk us through step one step two step three um a campaign starts right so you got a campaign that starts what happens from the time that somebody on your team buys the list or rents the list to closing a deal yeah so this is actually gosh i don't know five minutes is enough to be able to describe it because there's just so many different things that happen within that time uh there's about 137 different tasks that we load into this program called teamwork it's basically a trash uh task tracking software that happens from purchase to sale but to start from the beginning i'm the one that always um i'm pulling and stacking all of the lists and as soon as i get all those lists i send it over to my skip tracing company best skiptracer i send it over there they give us all of the mobile numbers and the landlines and the emails and as soon as we get that list back we then load it into my virtual assistant will get that list and then that list will get loaded into um a text messaging platform as well as an email campaign platform and then they kick that off and once they go through they are they have three different um levels that they classify leads in they have cold warm and hot and what i've realized is that's different for everybody so depending on what that lead is depends on what they do with it if it's a hot lead that'll come straight to me or my acquisitions team through an email and it goes into our system we use a crm or a customer relationship management tool we use a crm called realflow and so realflow is where we track all of our leads and properties and stuff like that and so me and my team use the same thing oh beautiful i love realflow i've been on i love realflow too but not to slow you down but the one thing that is a challenge with realflow is it doesn't communicate from the crm to actually um being able to communicate back out to the people like others and you know what i'm talking about i mean what i mean we have to like manually like when they come in and respond i got a virtual assistant manually putting all the leads in real flow and quite frankly i just haven't wanted to deal with changing yeah well i mean and so for us it's not broke so we're not looking to fix it i'm sure that there's other tools out now since we've implemented five years ago that will allow for that automation but we have a really good system built out um so you know once if it's a hot lead it goes into realflow we get notified and then from there i'm the one that picks up the phone i'll do the negotiations i'll put it under contract and then i'll hand it back to my acquisitions team and they'll either if it's a wholesale they'll market it to our buyers list um or if it's a rehab we'll start um or rental we'll start working that 30 day contract to close window where there's a ton of different tasks and again teamwork is what keeps all of us on track we're all virtual nobody actually lives in the state that we actually flip and do our our business in so everybody's virtual so that's that i think that to answer your question jay the communication piece there needs to be a communication piece that's virtual whether it's google drive google hangouts email teamwork something where people can keep track of the different tasks that need to be done so that way people get notified and so that way the process can keep happening without a bunch of different phone calls and so once we get up to that that um that purchase part you know we remotely close on everything and um as soon as we close on it it goes into the redevelopment stage with our contractor who we've highly vetted up into this point so then our contractor has a weekly they take pictures and they take videos and they'll submit that inside of our system teamwork and from there we'll review everything and we actually cut an e-check so we have an e-check system through deluxe e-checks and so once we review the videos and the pictures we literally just go right on the computer we cut them to check for the draw that they're requesting and they continue to keep working and then we'll do that all the way through to the end of the project and then our realtor is someone who we heavily rely on to constantly visit the property because they have a vested interest in the finished product the the speed in which we complete things and so we'll have our realtor communicate with us the whole time keeping eyes on the project and then once it's ready uh we hand it off to our realtor and they do you know all the marketing on the back end to sell it and i mean there's there's a whole bunch of other things in between that but that's really like the high level and how we communicate what's your criteria on staying in a deal and rehabbing it or wholesaling it out to another real estate investor so i wholesale it if it's a really good deal i don't keep any of the really good deals i only keep the tight deals the ones where there's no really meat on the bone if it's a really good deal then those are the ones that i'm wholesaling out and so we actually use the 70 rule 70 percent of arv minus the repairs that's our offer uh typically if we can get someone to accept that that leaves us you know from that 70 to about 73 percent in our market that three percent is what i use for my wholesale fee now if i have to come up on my offer and include that that extra three percent into my offer then that's the ones that i keep i gotcha that makes sense and so uh one last question and that is everything you're doing is virtual so who are your eyes and who are your feet uh going at looking at properties in these different cities is it the general contractor is it the realtor is it all the amount who's looking pictures so realtors and contractors are the two main people um we've actually because of the the network that i'm in uh the real estate education that i joined i have a large network about 35 000 people across the nation and so i can actually go into that network and i can say hey is any does anybody want to learn while they earn and i teach them the systems and they could be my boots on the ground there and so they'll do like an unpaid internship or maybe a small paid internship to be like that pseudo project manager visiting the property looking at the repairs and we teach them how to do all that that's great that's great well uh jp um parting comments and advice and uh we'll give out your contact info one more time yeah so there's one thing that um i always love to tell everybody that i speak to and it's kind of i mean it's kind of cheese ball but it's totally true it's you know whether you think you can or whether you think you can't you're right and so a lot of the times as real estate investors uh this game is really tough on us and so um i think the story that we tell ourselves is extremely important to our success right so if if this is something like a real estate if they if people want to be a successful real estate investor they have to believe in themselves and they have to you know at the beginning it's a lot of you have to eat sleep and breathe real estate investing especially if you're trying to do it part-time so being willing to sacrifice you know tv fantasy football uh fishing and all the stuff that you love in order to get that up and running you know that's what it takes sometimes especially if you're trying to attack it part time excellent advice jp jb thank you so much for joining me here on the show yeah absolutely thank you for having me it was a blast absolutely so folks there you have it jp culoff and his website again is www.inspiredable.com that's i in the word inspired insp ire d a b l e inspired ebola.com check out jp he's phenomenal glad to have everyone joining us here on the show today and um wow i know you were impressed today on today's show i'm jay connor the private money authority wishing you all the best here's to taking your business to the next level and we'll see you right here on the next show real estate investing with jay connor [Music]
