Winning Real Estate in Every Market

Mike:Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I’m excited to have April Crossley with us today. She’s going to talk about, really, her story as a woman in real estate investing, as a leader in her market for bringing new investors into the business. She has a lot of experience raising private money. But we’re also going to talk about how she shifted her business as the market kind of shifted to take advantage of some opportunities that she wasn’t. And more importantly, how you can do that, too.
Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. In fact, real estate is just a vehicle to freedom. A group of over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country meet several times a year at the Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as friends and build more fulfilling lives for all of those around us. On today’s show, we’re going to continue our conversation of fueling our businesses and fueling our lives. I’m glad you’re here. Hey, April, welcome to the show.
April:Thanks for having me, Mike. I’m excited.
Mike:Yeah. It’s always good to see you. So, this is going to be great. So, I think what’s happening right now in the market, everybody feels like . . . not everybody, but a lot of people are feeling like, “Hey, the market is getting kind of . . . ” For a while, they’ve said, “Hey, the retail market is hot, and I feel like business is getting a little harder. Now it’s starting to slow down.”
But the truth is, is we’re not really here necessarily to talk about what’s going on the market today, we’re just talking about general kind of trends and cycles in the business, and how people can kind of take advantage of those things. And I know you’re going to do it through sharing your story of some changes that you’ve made. So, without kind of stealing your thunder, why don’t you tell us a little about your background and how you even got started in real estate investing?
April:Sure. So, I started back in 2004. I actually have a degree in biology, of all things, worked in healthcare for 13 years, wanted to be the CEO of a hospital, I was in school for my master’s degree. Like, everyone else, read a book on real estate and I was like, “This is pretty cool.”
My husband was a realtor, at the time I started learning about investing, took a course. Long story short, after lots of marketing and looking, and learning, it was a big learning curve from healthcare to real estate, someone wholesaled us a deal. A wholesaler that was taking this course with me in my area came to me and was like, “I have this deal and I have no money.” And I didn’t know what to do with it. I’ve never done a deal before, so I took it to my husband and was like, “This guy has this deal and he has no money.”
And my husband’s kind of like, “We have no money to buy this deal, either. But let me ask this guy that works in my brokerage. He’s flipped houses before and I’m going to, like, ask him, maybe he’ll do the deal with us.” So we went to him and asked him, and he was like, “Yeah. Absolutely. It’s a great deal. Like, I’ll bring the money, you guys bring the deal and sweat equity, and we’ll split profit on it.” And that was it. That was our first flip project. The wholesaler made 20 grand, we made 20 grand, the other guy made 20 grand. So it was a really good deal. It was back in 2004. And that’s a really good deal for my market. So there was, like, 60 grand in profit there. And at the end of the day, I learned that the guy that brought the money, it wasn’t his money. He literally brought someone else’s money.
Mike:Oh, wow.
April:And the only reason I found that out is because, at the end of the deal, his private lender came to us and was like, “Hey, you guys did a great job. This guy is not using my money a whole lot, so if you are going to keep flipping houses, please come to me, I’d love to fund your deals.” And we were like, “Wow.” So that was my first introduction to, you don’t need your own money because all these other people have money that they want to make a good return on. And that started our business was this guy’s money. And it was only, like, $265,000, which at the time, I was like, “Wow. That is so much money,” until you realize you can only really buy in my market. And some people, they’re going to be like, “You can’t even buy a deal with that.” But in my market, you can buy, like, two deals with that, okay?
Purchase and rehab because I’m in a pretty cheap market. So we’d started slowly flipping houses and just kind of dabbled in it for a couple of years, bought some rental units, doing cash-out refi. And it just kind of started my whole, “I’ve never bought anything on market.” I just realized there’s a lot of people that have a lot of money that don’t know how to find deals, and then there’s me. So, I can become really good at finding deals, which is what I did.
And then I just started, like, using other people’s money to do the whole BRRRR method and flipping houses. And then once I was flipping enough houses to replace my income, I did that for three years in a row, and then I left my job. So I retired from healthcare about six years ago. And now I’m just really super passionate about, like, obviously buying off-market, I’ve never bought anything on the market, and using other people’s money to do so. So we went from $265,000 to access to millions and millions of dollars. So, yeah.
Mike:That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And so a little bit of a tangent here. So you came from a healthcare background, I came out of Corporate America, a lot of people listening to the show, like, I always kind of say, it has kind of become a cheesy cliché of mine, like, nobody came out of the womb, like, flipping houses. Like, we all have varied backgrounds, right? But you pull on what you know, right? And so what are some of the things that you learned from healthcare, and dealing with patients, and bureaucracy, a whole bunch of other things, maybe that you were able to apply into your real estate investing business, that helped kind of lead to your success, would you say?
April:Yeah. That’s a great question. I would say the ability to listen to people. And you hear it all the time. If you have a really good coach or mentor, they always say, “You need to be listening, not talking when you meet with a seller.” I came from a healthcare background, that’s all we do, is listen. We’re compassionate and we listen to people all day long. So, my strength was always definitely in meeting with sellers and listening to them, and giving them time to talk, and they really trusted me, and I was good at building rapport with them.
So even if I wasn’t the highest amount, they typically went with me because they felt good about it, they felt good about me. So it really taught me that. And I think a lot of people kind of see, like, doctors and attorneys, and people like that as, like, way up here when . . . I mean, I worked in healthcare, and I can remember when I was flipping houses, being in OR with a patient on life support, talking to a doctor who’s doing heart surgery about how I’m flipping houses and how he has all this money, and he would like to do something like that. And I’m like, “You should be a private lender.”
So I think just the ability to just talk to people and listen to what their needs are, and connect them, and solve their problem, whether it’s someone that has a lot of money or someone that is in a really bad situation, and just needs you to be sympathetic with what they’re going through.
Mike:Amazing. Yeah. There’s no doubt, you know, when we . . . Obviously, I do a lot of coaching. You do some coaching too. We teach people all the time on sales techniques. I mean, John Martinez would tell you the same thing. Like, you know, use less of this, use less of your mouth and more of your ears, right? I don’t know what the right ratio is. We’re like, “Hey, do you do, like, 75% listening and 25% talking in, like, max?”
April:Yeah. Yep. Yep. It’s true. It’s definitely true.
Mike:Awesome. So, I know one of the challenges that you faced in your business and, you know, some people will be listening to this and be like, “Boohoo.” You know, like, you got good at raising money, so you had access to a lot of money. So what you did not do was a lot of wholesaling. So you were flipping stuff, you were keeping more rentals, and things like that. But I think over the past year or a couple of years, maybe, you started to transition more into wholesaling.
So I wanted to talk about a couple of case studies. One is, like, for people that are out there, that are, I’d say one of two things, either they’re not buying direct from sellers, so they have to retail it, or those that have found a way to get access to money, so they tend to retail everything, when that’s not always the best thing to do. But let’s talk a little bit about your story and kind of roll it into, like, a case study for people that may be facing the same.
April:Yeah. So, I really only knew one way and that’s, like, the tunnel I think a lot of people get stuck in because usually the first way you do things or the first thing you learn is what you tend to stick with. So the first thing I learned was like, “Wow. There’s people with money, and if I can get a good contractor, I can flip these houses, and that’s great.” So, for a long time, I flipped and that’s what I do.
But what would happen is, I get houses that I didn’t really want. I’m like, “I’m not going to work on that house and I don’t want to buy in that area,” and I would just let it go. Either just wouldn’t call the person back, wouldn’t do the deal, or I would just send the lead to someone else and they’d give me like 500 bucks. Like, “Here’s an address, do whatever you want with it, I don’t care. Just send me 500 bucks for the lead.” And that was kind of all I knew.
Well, then you get to a point where there’s only so many good contractors, okay? So I kind of had this moment with my favorite contractor where I was like, “How many houses can you comfortably flip a month?” And then I need to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest because if I’m finding good deals, I can’t just keep letting stuff go for 500 bucks.
And I was so against wholesaling, I don’t know why Mike, don’t ask me why. I just kind of had my blinders on or something, I don’t know. I just always had, like, this icky feeling about wholesalers, and I never bought a deal from a wholesaler ever. They’d bring them to me, and they always were, like, really crappy deals, so never wanted to go down that road.
But, like, just tying into how the market has changed, also, people are paying a lot more now than what I’m willing to pay as a flipper. And I’ve kind of realized that there’s people out there that are flipping, that are doing the work themselves. There’s people out there that are using their own money, so they’re paying more than me. So these types of people are paying more than me, so how can I monetize these leads that I’m getting without having to flip them all? Because I didn’t have the capacity to do that, nor did I want to do that. That’s when I actually found Investor Fuel, and started just kind of coming to Investor Fuel and learning from you guys. And my first meeting was a huge eye-opener for me about how much money I was actually leaving on the table by not wholesaling.
Mike:Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting, over the past, I’d say five years, I’ve been investing now for 11 years. So, there was a time where, at least this was my belief, like, a wholesaler was a supplier to a rehabber, and sometimes a landlord, right? But I think wholesalers . . . I think if you’re a good retailer, you should be a wholesaler, and you might choose to play the retail role as well. Like, if you buy it direct from seller, you have options, right? You can rehab it, you can keep it as a rental, you could maybe wholesale it. And so, the farther upstream you go, the less options you have, like, to where if you’re buying from a wholesaler, generally you have to retail it. And so, when you realize that the lower you are kind of in the food chain or the supply cycle, or whatever, you just have more options. I don’t say food chain, that sounds negative.
But what’s happened over the past like four or five years is I feel like there’s a lot more people that are keeping rentals, willing to buy rentals. And so, you know, one of the things that I used to think as a wholesaler is like, “Well, if I wouldn’t retail that myself, why would anybody else want to retail that?” And we had some of that too. Once you start to realize, it’s like, “Hey, like, maybe they’re using their own money and they don’t value the opportunity cost of that, or maybe they’re doing the work themselves, and they can do it cheaper than me, or maybe they’re getting fixed-rate financing at 4% on some Fannie Mae loan or something,” who knows, you know, right? And so, you start to realize, like, “Wow. There’s all these different scenarios, who am I to judge that somebody would not take a deal that I wouldn’t want myself?” Right?
April:Right. It’s kind of just not really understanding how other people buy and what their goals are. And like, now, that’s something my partner and I . . . Like, I’m really proud of her. She, like, really gets to know our buyers and how they buy. And because I say, like, raised on private money, that’s what I say, my whole investor career I have been raised on private money. That’s all I knew. So I assumed this is how people buy. They buy like I buy. They buy with private money and they flip. And then people would tell me they use their own money, and I would look at them like, “Why do you do that?” Or they use the bank’s money, “Why do you do that?” And they look at me, and I use private money, and they’re like, “Why do you do that?” And it kind of just all came together and started clicking for me that people are buying differently, and they’re paying more and, for them, it’s a good deal, and that’s all that matters.
Mike:Yeah. And, you know, not that you should ever mislead anybody or want anybody to not make money. But ultimately, it’s not your . . . You might think it’s a thin deal, and maybe they think otherwise, and it’s not your job to talk them out of a deal. If they can make it work, let them make it work.
April:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Mike: It’s funny. So, what would you say is your key takeaway is that if there is a deal out there, and sometimes it’s geographically-based too, right, like, you wouldn’t do a deal, like, “It’s too far out, my contractor doesn’t want to go there?” And it’s like, “Well, there’s wholesalers in that area, they don’t have that same limitation that I do,” right?
April:Yep. Yeah. So, like, when a deal comes to us, sometimes it’s just dependent on, like, how many flips are we doing right now? So, like, this month, we’re going to buy our fifth for the month flip, flip, like, house, we’re actually going to renovate. So if another flip comes my way, I’m honestly probably not going to take it on. I will wholesale it off because of the capacity with my contractors. I’m really spoiled by my contractor, so I really only take on what he can handle. And sometimes it’s location. I just don’t like the location. And it’s more of a rental location, like, a rental market, where people are picking up rentals left and right, but it’s not a rental market for me. And we don’t buy single-family homes anymore, so there’s some . . . If I came across some rental on it, it made a good rental on it, and it was a single, I wouldn’t buy it anyway, so we kind of wholesale those off too.
Mike:You say you don’t buy them for rentals, right? You don’t . . .
April:Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike:So, let’s talk about the other situation that a lot of investors face, which was really the opposite of yours, but I know you’ve seen this too, of people that only wholesale. And, you know, sometimes they’ll be a deal that maybe they could make $10,000 or $15,000 on, but they can make $30,000 or $40,000 if they just had access to that capital, they never get good at that. And I know you know a lot of folks like that. You lend to a lot of folks probably that had that situation at one point, So let’s talk a little bit about that kind of case study or that avatar of the person that is only wholesaling, and why they should think about doing more retailing, at least on those kind of cherry deals that are no-brainers.
April:Yeah, I just feel like . . . Again, they were probably raised on wholesaling. That’s all they know. They might realize people can flip, but not how valuable of a service they’re bringing to the table. Like, if a wholesaler brought me a good deal and said, “Do you want a joint venture on this with me?” Meaning, just how I started, “You bring the deal, I’ll bring the money, and let’s flip it, and you can make a bigger chunk of profit.” I feel like that’s a great way for people to start and build confidence and to start setting a track record for future private lenders.
There’s more money out there right now than ever before. So, a lot of times I hear people that teach wholesaling say, “You should wholesale to build capital.” I am a firm believer in you should have some kind of reserve there. But you don’t need a ton of money because there’s tons and tons of money out there. So I feel like people that are just wholesaling really need to take that leap. And if it’s not getting private money on their own because they can’t, either because their credit’s poor or they have zero money in reserve, they should do a joint venture. I mean, it’s just going to open up doors for them once they do that first flip.
Mike:Absolutely. Absolutely. So, let’s kind of talk about this in the context of, like, market cycles, right? And so, I think, you know, like, we just talked about here, I believe too that people should have multiple kind of tools in their tool belt, right? Like, you shouldn’t do all retailing, you shouldn’t do all wholesaling. Depending on what market you are in the country right now, the retail markets are starting to slow down a little bit.
I’m not a believer that there’s going to be any sort of crash. I mean, there might be on the coast in California, where things have maybe gone up a lot, maybe there’s more pressure than, you know, some of our Midwestern markets or Texas markets, whatever, that seem to be a little more stable, I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean things won’t go sideways for a while. And so, you know, I think when the market starts to shift down a little bit, you should probably consider doing less retail. If there’s less sales activity, you want to do less selling, is my general rule.
April:Right. Right. Yep.
Mike:Just how to, like, use all these extra strategies so that you can prepare to ride out market cycles. And so, what I’ve kind of taught for years is like, when the retail market is hot, you want to do more selling activities, which is why we personally haven’t kept a lot of single-family rentals over the past few years because I can’t believe how much I can make by selling them, right? But when the market slows, it’s like things just went on sale. I’m going to be keeping more than I do more buying activities. But just share your thoughts on kind of running those cycles and having all those kind of tools in your tool belt to be able to do it, whatever.
April:Yeah. I mean, hindsight is 20/20, we were investing in 2006, 2007, 2008, we saw that whole cycle, but I was working full time. My husband had way more knowledge than I did, at the time, and was very much like, “We’re not buying, you need to just . . . We’re standstill, the market’s crazy. We’re not buying.” Looking back, now I feel you can buy in any point in the market cycle, just like you said. You just have to be smart about it.
So now things are super hot again, which is why we’re doing a lot more wholesaling because people are paying a lot more than we are. But we’re also being very cautious on the flip or retail side of things. We’re still very conservative with our numbers. I’m still making sure that, if for some reason I would get stuck with that house, it’s rentable. It’s in a rentable area. I can cover the expenses with the income from the house.
And I mean, we raise a lot of private money and we work with a lot of private money lenders, and we’re starting to really get down to the nitty-gritty and interview our private lenders, and say, “”You know, so many private lenders want to lend on flips, but would you be willing to hold financing long-term?” So, should anything change with the banks and they don’t want to give loans, and I get stuck with a flip, can I put a private lender on that long-term and pay them interest instead of paying a bank, and really getting cash heavy? We’re right now looking, other than private lending, just doing refinances on some properties to get cash-heavy. So if the market does churn, like you said, when it’s down and stuff isn’t selling, people are still buying, but the people buying, are investors. We’re the ones buying.
So, I think as someone that sells property to other investors, we have to be smart about our asking price and make sure it’s a good deal for everyone all around. I think we’re always going to be able to sell stuff to other investors. What we’re going to want to keep more ourselves when the market downturns. So, we’re trying to get in a cash-heavy position to be able to scoop those up when it happens.
Mike:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Well, maybe we could talk about raising private money as an entire show and then some, right? Talk a little bit about, for people that are listening right now, maybe we’ll take, like, a few minutes and kind of share some of your tips on being able to raise private money and build those relationships a little bit. Maybe you could . . . You know, what are some tips that you think . . . ? Because there’s a lot of people out there that just would have no idea how to get started. They’re like, “Well, all my friends are broke or my family doesn’t have any money,” or whatever. But, you know, you shouldn’t probably go to your friends and family anyway.
April:No. I don’t recommend.
Mike:That’s just asking for trouble. But maybe share, you know, some of your best tips on how to start to build those relationships and raise private money.
April:Yeah. And it really is a relationship-based business. I think one is just, like I said before, joint venture, that’s how we found our first private lender. I mean, as soon as you start joint venturing on deals, that money is coming from somewhere. If it’s from that investor, it might be someone that’s burnout, that eventually is just going to want to lead because it’s easier, or you might be introduced to their private money lender. So joint venture is one.
The other thing is just really talking about what you do on social media, like flipping houses. A lot of people think they want to flip houses because they have money. And they don’t realize how much work it takes to find a deal. So it’s really about taking the time to build relationships with people that want to flip houses, and finding out why they want to flip houses. Is it because they’re trying to make money or is it because they have money?
And then shifting their mindset about like, “Hey, you know, you can make the same return, but I’ll do all the work. Like, I’m going to find the deal. I’m going to place the contractor.” And a lot of people don’t know what private . . . and then they’re like, “Wow. So I can just lend you my money and make that return, and not have to do the work?” It’s like, “Yeah.” But you can see the flip and everything.
So I think joint venturing, just taking the time to create relationships, going to real estate investment meetings, I tell people all the time, I run a meetup group in my area, at any one time, that I can just stand there and count five or six of my private lenders that are in the room. And they don’t stand up and say, “Hey, I’m a private lender,” because then everyone attacks them. But they will have conversations with people and they’ll come up to me afterwards and say, “Hey, do you know this person? I talked to them, they really seem like they have their stuff together. They’re really ambitious. She seems like a great person. I’m thinking I might tell her I’m a private lender.” Like, they do it very cautiously.
Mike:It’s true. Yeah.
April:So just meeting people at investment meetings. If you do a flip project on a joint venture, I talk about like on-site rehab project meetings a lot. We would open up our rehab projects to people, leaving just, like, the community posting on your Facebook page, hey, walkthrough, take a look at it, run through all the numbers with them, and specifically spend time focused on the return a private money lender would make. And we get a lot of lenders from that.
Mike:You’re the only other person I know. So I used to do these things called “Rehab Live,” where I would have events. And I was doing it to me coaching students and people. I always met potential lenders in the mix, but I wasn’t looking for lenders. And so I think that, you know, we teach this all the time, use what you have as your platform. Like, and actual doing what we do as real estate investors, is the best way to attract things that you need. Like, you don’t have to go do a live events, that you’re on stage and showing slides. Like, let the house be your stage, right?
April:Yeah.
Mike:Welcome to the platform. Come look at what we’ve done here. And I’ve started to use what you’re doing a little bit where you literally just say, I never called out like, “You like all this, well, it’s a lot of work, but look how much my lender made. They never even saw the house.” Like, just kind of saying those words, and people would be like, “Wait, your lender made $6,000 and they never saw the house,” or whatever it might be. And just kind of saying that, you know it gets the wheels turning on people, like, “Wow. this is really cool, but sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t want to do that.” Just saying those words, always just kind of pointing out, “My lender made this and they never even saw the house.”
April:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just talking about . . . I mean, you could go to a real estate investment meeting, and I’ve taught people this before, and just go to that meeting and say, and the meeting’s about a rehab project or private money and just post on social media, like, “Went to this great real estate investment meeting. I’m so blown away by how much money private money lenders make doing flip projects without doing any other work.” You should see the number of comments that people get on these posts that are like, “I’m interested in flipping, and I have money. Do you want to have coffee? Do you want to go to lunch? That’s crazy. Tell me more about this.” Like, simple stuff. It doesn’t have to be your meeting. It doesn’t have to be your flip projects. You just have to get the conversation started.
Mike:Yeah. And I think that’s one thing that a lot of people stumble on is they’re too direct, right? “Would you be interested in lending?” instead of saying things like, “Do you happen to know anybody that would be interested or [inaudible 00:26:05] I made?” And you’re not saying, “Well, would you be interested?” They’re like, “Well, why didn’t you even ask me?” They’re almost, like, offended by it, like, “Hey, I am here. What do you think of me?” It’s like, “Well, I just didn’t want to ask you directly,” is really what you’re trying to do, right?
April:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Mike:Have you found, when you raise money from people, that, you know, let’s say they have a certain amount of money but, you know, nobody has unlimited funds, that they start to tell their other friends that might have money as well, right?
April:Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, it’s, I think, hard for people to see that are just starting raising capital. But I mean, once you do one deal with someone and they trust you, it’s kind of like . . . So, I was telling my attorney about this, and my attorney wants to meet with you, or I have one lender who’s like, “So I have family in Europe, and they want to know when they can start sending money over so I can start giving you their money, so you can make them the same money you make me.” It’s just like all snowballs. It all starts to snowball.
Mike:Yeah. That’s awesome. And the truth is, once somebody does . . . You know, we could have, like, a whole show on this or a whole training. But I know we can obviously just talk on this for hours, right?
April:Yeah.
Mike:But the most important thing probably is to find ways to exceed that person’s expectations, right? Pay them on time, maybe pay them early, do a lot of gratitude for it. And then people build up that trust, and they’re like, “When’s the next one?” You pay them back and they’re like, “I don’t want the money back. Can you use it again? Can you use it again?”
April:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’re very big on, like . . . Every Friday, we send out pictures to our private lenders to update them on the project, what’s going on with the project. We send them gift baskets at Christmas. And honestly, a lot of times, my lenders will say to me, “Why did you send me a gift basket? I should be sending you a gift basket. Like, you’re making me such good money. Like, I’m not going to make this money in the bank. Like, I’m like, the bottom line is the relationship goes both ways. And without the flipper, the lender wouldn’t be making the money they are, and without the lender, the flipper won’t be making the money they are, so you both need each other. There’s not one that’s like above the other.
Mike:Right. Right. Yeah. And those are the best relationships, right? You can say that with the contractors or anybody, that’s why you need each other, you respect each other, you appreciate each other. Those are the best relationships to have no matter . . . even outside of lending.
So, well, speaking of relationships, April, I was hoping maybe you could share a little testimonial. You’ve been a member of Investor Fuel for a while now. We bring in experienced investors that have a lot of experience. You have a network, you have a REIA club, a lot of people look to you. Maybe you could just share some of your thoughts on the value of joining a group like ours, even for experienced investors that sometimes might feel like, “What value can I possibly get from being around other people?”
April:Yeah. Absolutely. So, I honestly, and I say this to you guys all the time, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for my business was join Investor Fuel, hands down. And I was definitely scared to join. I interviewed a lot of coaches before I joined. I just feel like you guys have values that align with mine and you have great integrity, and you provide so much support.
And being an experienced investor and coming in, you think, “Oh, I have like X amount of experience, I’m doing fine.” And then you get around people who are like, way up here, you know. So, just everyone in the room adds value to each other. Everyone looks at everything differently, gets rid of that tunnel vision, especially because everyone’s from different markets. So it’s interesting to see what’s working and what’s not working in different areas of the country.
And just being in that room with . . . I mean, you know the format and the presentations, and everything, but just the networking in between in the meeting is you learn so much. It’s definitely probably in . . . I’m not even in a year yet. I think I joined last November, so the year in November, like, tripled my business, for sure, since joining. Yeah, amazing. Just because I’m monetizing, wholesaling, and learning different marketing methods, and leveraging people in the group from all over the country that have different ways of doing things. The support is just phenomenal.
Mike:That’s fantastic. Yeah. One of the things that I’ll kind of reiterate here is, you felt like, when you came in . . . Like, there are people in the group doing more volume than you, let’s be honest. But you have this level of expertise around some specific things like raising money, building relationships, and things you’ve done with . . . I know you’ve share some tips on what you do with gift baskets and even generating leads from like probate attorneys and stuff. You hear these little nuggets, right, and those little nuggets can, like, move your business like 50%, or double it, just little bitty things.
Because, you know, let’s face it. As experienced real estate investors, what we’re best at is execution. Like, all these ideas are out there. You could go watch YouTube all day long and hear little nuggets, too. But most people will never do anything with it. And when you hear that somebody is doing it and you can apply it, and most importantly, you’re part of a network that you can go back and say, “Hey, I tried this and it didn’t work. Like, tell me, what did I do wrong?” And you’re like, “Oh, you can kind of collaborate on, do this. try that. Oh, no, no, don’t do it like that. Do it like this.” Those little things, because of the relationships, really allow those little nuggets to turn into big things, right?
April:Yeah. I mean, it’s awesome. Everyone in the group is so giving and they make themselves so accessible. And people have reached out to me for things and I’ve reached out to other people in the group for things. And it really is those little things that you hear that’s like, ” Oh, I’m going to start doing that,” and it completely changes your business. It’s awesome. I can’t say enough good things.
Mike:Well, we’re glad you’re the member of the group. We love having you there. Everybody loves you. The truth is that, you know, this industry, it is predominantly male, all right, so we have some power women in the group and . . .
April:There are some great women in this group. Yeah.
Mike:We’re glad having one of them. We’re looking for some more power women for the group. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, April, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
April:Thank you for having me. It’s fun. Thank you.
Mike:And everybody, this show is relatively new. We’ve been doing the “FlipNerd Real Estate Investing Secrets Podcast” for five-and-a-half years. But if you haven’t already, we’d love it if you’d subscribe to us on YouTube, Stitcher Radio, iTunes, anywhere else, and keep listening and give us a positive review. We’d love some reviews out there. But just keep on listening. So, April, thanks again for joining us.
April:Thanks, Mike.
Mike:And everybody, we’ll see you on another show soon. Take care and have a great day.
April:Have a good day.
Mike:Are you an active real estate investor? If so, and you want to latch on to the power of surrounding yourself with over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors, all committed to building stronger businesses and living richer, fuller lives, you should jump on a call with us to learn more about Investor Fuel. Simply visit investorfuel.com to get started.