From Fascination to Fortune: My Journey in Real Estate Deals

Michael Stansbury (13:17.536)
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. My name is Mike Stansbury and I’ve got a special guest from South Central LA all the way from California, Cesar Mercado. How are you, sir?

Angelo Mercado (13:36.938)
Doing great, doing great. Thank you for having me today. get excited. This is my first time on the podcast. I have a lot to share.

Michael Stansbury (13:43.599)
Awesome, we’re gonna get into all that, but first, at Investor Fuel, the sponsors of the Real Estate Pros podcast, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs 2 to 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Caesar, let me tell you something. One of the things I like about you and I’ve read up on you is,

You’re doing a lot and you’re doing it at young age. You’re 24 years old out in LA and you’re wholesaling. Tell me, how did you get in the business? What’s your origin story?

Angelo Mercado (14:21.232)
origin story, like every kid from where I come from, South Central, the dream and the goal is to become rich and wealthy. So here comes my senior year. Everybody’s applying for colleges. And I told myself, I don’t want to go to college. There has to be a route. You need to make money, right? And real estate was always on my mind. I was always fascinated, right? Looking at Donald Trump movies, books, like this guy.

doing killing and realist and I knew I wanted to do it as well. Not too many people Mexican were doing it, so I knew I had to be that guy. So I go to my local community college, take every single real estate course that they had, some internships, had some brokages, and I remember walking to the brokages every single week.

I’ll look at the parking lot, I’ll walk into the office, I’ll see the agents, what are they wearing, their watches, and I told myself…

agents aren’t making as much as I thought they would, right? I thought they all would drive Mercedes, BMWs, had, you know, $1,000 Italian suits. You know, that’s what I pictured a real estate agent would look like. And I told myself, there has to be a different way. There has to be a different way to make money without little too much. going into the internships, I started talking to some of the agents and I heard the word wholesale. Wholesale? And I was like, what’s that?

that’s essentially when you find distressed property, find an investor, and you make the difference. Really? Okay. And I started digging into it, YouTube University, like everyone starts. And I came across this one guy, and I followed him, and a week later he made a post on his Instagram.

Michael Stansbury (16:00.664)
Right?

Angelo Mercado (16:09.352)
He said, looking for sales guys. Hit me up, right? The position’s gonna go by fast. I said, okay, I checked them out. And this is the guy who was living the dream I wanted, right? Penthouse in Hollywood.

I stopped watch designer everything living the life had a great car and everything I’m like, okay, that’s the guy I want to learn from if he’s doing real estate I want to learn from him and Later I went to the interview and just got under his wing. He hired me and I was his acquisition guy I was his acquisition guy for two years and That’s where I learned everything. I got exposed to the entire industry

Michael Stansbury (16:49.75)
Yeah, so two years you’re in acquisitions and you decide, hey, I’m gonna take this position and I’m gonna learn from the best, or learn from somebody who has what I want and then apply it. So you were very intentional about, it sounds to me like you live a life of intentionality. There’s something I want, what are the steps to go get it? And then you heard the word wholesaling and then you did your little research, right? You get on YouTube.

And you find out, this is something that I can do. And the one thing I want the audience to hear is that there was an opportunity and you said, I’ll take it. I’m ready. So in those two years, tell me, what were some of the biggest takeaways? What did you learn? What did you take with you in that education?

Angelo Mercado (17:45.866)
Right, so when I joined his group, he also had a partner. It was two of them, right? One of them taught me the hustle, the grit, what it takes to win in real estate. And it mainly has to do with sales, right? The grit you need to have in sales, right? The skills level you have to in sales. The other partner, he taught me personal development. How do you have to think?

How do you have to think? How do you got to see these opportunities? Are you going to give up when it’s tough? Or are you going to be open-minded and say, this is just one bad season, or this is a season I’m going through, but if I keep at it every single day, I will win and you will succeed. And so I got the best of both worlds. I got the sales killer.

And then I got the guy teaching me personal development. And for those two years, I didn’t question them. I didn’t do anything. They told me to do something. I did it. I’ll be at the office at 7 a.m. and I’ll leave at 7 p.m. Right? And I’ll get home and review the notes and the recordings and everything. So just two years of just constant hustle, hustle, hustle, learning the game, learning personal development and seeing them succeed in front of me was just all the motivation I needed.

Michael Stansbury (19:00.27)
So that’s interesting, know, most people aren’t willing to take two years out of their lives to learn something, to do something, to get a result. Most people like want it now. So was that intentional? When you got the position and you were with them, did you say to yourself, at some point I want to do this on my own, but I’ve got to have the quivers in my case. I’ve got to have the…

I’ve got to have the knowledge and I’ve got to have the, I’ve got to have, you know, like a baseball card has all the stats on it, right? I’ve to be able to close deals. I’ve got to be able to do these things. But yeah, at what point did you say, okay, I’ve got to, I’ve got to, I’ve got to do my own thing now.

Angelo Mercado (19:47.89)
Yeah, originally when I got in there and I was learning all this from them, I was making great income just being an acquisition guy. I was. I making great, I learned how to close deals, I know how to be consistent.

And I was making great income being an acquisition guy. But obviously when there’s partnerships, there’s things going on in the back end that the partnership wasn’t going too well with them. They decided to split. that opportunity, I was put in a position where like, hey, well, do I want to go with that guy? Do I want to go with that guy? And I noticed that it worked so well because I was getting the best of both worlds together. So at that point in my life, I had

to make a decision and both my partner and I said hey I think we learned a lot we know a lot we kind of ran their company because that’s essentially what we did we ran their company we trained the callers we managed the leads everything everything everything they were hands-off I said let’s just do it ourselves and I said yikes okay well that means we’re gonna have to invest our own money

into this now. He’s like, well, I mean, we know how to do it. And our mentor taught us that with a little bit of faith and belief, we’ll get it done, man. I’m like, all right, let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Michael Stansbury (21:11.65)
Wow, wow. So tell me what that first maybe month was like. When did you get your first deal that was yours and then when did it become like, all right, the train is off the tracks, we’re going down and we’re gonna go crush.

Angelo Mercado (21:25.258)
Mm-hmm.

Angelo Mercado (21:29.692)
It took us about two months to get our first day on ourselves. And like I said, when we were with them, we taught us everything. And it might have been, it could be a blessing and a curse, a blessing because I learned everything and a cursing because now I could honestly do my own thing.

So I knew how to pull lists, I knew how to get leads. And so for the first month, I built up a list. We started calling day in, day out, every single day. And we…

Michael Stansbury (22:03.662)
What were you guys doing at this point? Were you guys doing the calling yourselves? Wow, wow.

Angelo Mercado (22:06.686)
We were doing the calling ourselves, no cold call. We were doing the calling ourselves. We invested in a dialer. One day I’ll be on the dialer making the cold calls and then my partner will be doing acquisition calls on the lead that’s submitted and we’ll just switch off, take turns. And it took us about three weeks to get the first deal and that one was in North Carolina and ended up being a 25K rip and that’s what we needed to just go ham.

Michael Stansbury (22:36.3)
All right, so this is interesting. So this was not even in the market that you live in, right? And so most people are like, my market’s, we don’t do a lot of wholesale here. Well, you live in, have you ever been in North Carolina before?

Angelo Mercado (22:50.95)
never been in any of the states I do business in other than California.

Michael Stansbury (22:55.246)
Well, that’s awesome. So yeah, if you don’t mind, tell us what states you guys have been able to wholesale in.

Angelo Mercado (23:03.882)
We’ve been able to wholesale of course, California. This is my backyard. We’ve done deals in Texas Arizona, North Carolina, Indiana We’ve we kind of dabbled into a little bit into everything to see which one’s the best one for us which one would be easier cash flow as far as deal comes in like what stays easier to get deals in and things of that nature

Michael Stansbury (23:26.958)
So you dialed that in a little bit and then, you know, I like it. But when you got that deal in North Carolina, a little 25K rip, you just knew, okay, let’s just, let’s get back on the phones, let’s get the next one and let’s keep this thing rolling. So how long ago was that till today? Like what was the timeframe?

Angelo Mercado (23:48.822)
that was last year. Last year. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (23:51.683)
Okay, so the operations has moved pretty quickly. yeah, tell the audience what the operation looks like now, Caesar.

Angelo Mercado (23:58.954)
Yeah, so just to kind of build it up, last year when we got that first 25K, we got excited like, whoa, there’s not a commission checking no more. Now we got the whole pie, right? So we were just operating like that. We would spend the money. We were like, OK, we need another deal. So we were like that all last year, right? Just living off deal, off deal, off deal. Never really had anything consistent. We’ll go look for one when the money ran out.

But December, me and my partner said, okay, we have to build something solid. We have to predict how many deals are coming in. We have to predict what’s coming in revenue-wise every single month. So we’re like, okay, let’s start off and let’s invest in some callers. the first month we started with two and we set a goal this year that every single quarter we have to get five new callers. So that was our goal.

Michael Stansbury (24:58.702)
And what is their day-to-day look? Are they working four hours a day, 10 hours a day? is one, four, okay, gotcha.

Angelo Mercado (25:05.225)
We have four in the morning and then we got the other half in the afternoon as soon as the morning shift clocks out afternoon shift clocks in right and we grown it to now 16 callers we actually Hired more callers faster than what we anticipated it was supposed to be five at five every quarter, but now we’re at 16 and It’s going pretty pretty well. I have two acquisition guys

and they’re killing it right now. So now my role is just to make sure that the leads are there, the marketing is great, and my partner handles the disposition and selling the deals.

Michael Stansbury (25:42.851)
Okay, so that’s how it’s divvied up. So he finds, you know, once you find a deal, he goes into, I’m gonna scour and find the right investor that’s gonna buy this deal. so that’s awesome. And so are your VAs local or are they out of the country? Okay, and do you guys train them yourselves?

Angelo Mercado (26:00.318)
out of the country.

I them myself, I motivate them myself, I’m in the trenches with them. Sometimes I have to hop on the dialer for 30 minutes to show them you can get.

Michael Stansbury (26:12.37)
Right. Yeah, yeah. So that’s beautiful. I mean, that’s what you need to do. That’s leadership 101 is, hey, let me show you guys. Just watch me. So that’s how things are taught. Like, hey, watch me a few times, and then you go do it, and then I’ll watch you. We’ll make a couple adjustments. And if you can get them consistently doing that, then Katie, that is amazing. But the main channel you have for generating leads is outbound calling, correct?

Angelo Mercado (26:41.066)
call calling. We did SMS as well. SMS was really, really big for us. But regulations were very, very heavy last year. It was hard. You have to send text messages a certain way. Put your company name on it. All the regulations they were asking for. And at the same time, we were doing cold calling and we’re noticing that, hey, SMS is doing great, but most of our deals are coming through cold calling.

Michael Stansbury (26:57.197)
Right.

Angelo Mercado (27:07.783)
Why not just double down on what’s working and scale that? Scale that to the moon.

Michael Stansbury (27:11.756)
Right. If you had to say average cold collar cost you what a month? Just one. What would that be? Just one cold collar a month. At four hours a day for five days a week.

Angelo Mercado (27:29.857)
$3.20 a month.

Michael Stansbury (27:31.502)
$320 a month for one cold collar. That’s great. And that’s a good, and the expectation is for one cold collar to give you how many, how do you track your KPIs? it leads or deals or what do you really concentrate on as far as?

Angelo Mercado (27:47.466)
The quota for them is two. Two leads a day, right? Two leads a day and it’s every single one. Sometimes they fall short and they submit one, right? But what I like to tell my callers is sometimes they have real tough days and they have nothing and I kind of installed it in their mind that we cannot end the day with zeros. I’d rather have a not so good lead than you submit a zero. Why? Because every single morning…

Michael Stansbury (27:51.534)
Two leads a day. Gotcha.

Michael Stansbury (28:14.476)
Right. Yeah. And that’s for them, right? Yeah.

Angelo Mercado (28:17.29)
And I show them the status of the week, they’re at for the day, how did the day look before. And they sometimes, you know, get down when they see a red on their name for that day, right? And I’m like, hey, you don’t want to be that color with the red, right? You want to be the color with the yellow or green, right? And they’re yes, boss, yes, boss. And I just talk to them. I talk to them. I motivate them. And, you know, one thing I installed to my college is the same thing that was installed to me, right? The skill set.

It’s a big thing, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is being consistent and believing you could get results. That’s one thing I remind them each and every single day, right? And they love it. They love it because I treat them like a human. I know I did cold calling, you know, when I first started as well, and it’s tough. It’s not easy, so I relate with them. And they relate with me, and they’re happy working for me, and the results are…

Michael Stansbury (29:06.445)
Right?

Angelo Mercado (29:16.819)
I get to influx the leads every single week.

Michael Stansbury (29:19.342)
And that’s the big difference is leadership is about serving them. like you said earlier, when you get on that cold call and show them and then you hear their cold calls and being able to say, hey, I did this for four hours a day, me and my partner. And so we know how to do this and we can teach you how to do it well. It really is great.

is a great leadership quality and I bet you they work harder for you than you would for somebody else just saying, yeah, we need cold callers, we don’t know much about it, here’s the script, go get us some leads.

Angelo Mercado (29:58.376)
Yeah, there you go. Like I said, they’re human. And our main source of marketing is cold calling. So you got to make sure that the cold callers are taken care of real good because they’re at the front line for you, right? Without them and without their leads. Well, honestly, my acquisition guys wouldn’t have deals to close. So you got to make sure that they’re just as valuable as anybody in my company.

Michael Stansbury (30:20.686)
Awesome. So the other thing is your acquisition guys, they get the lead and they close them over the phone. Is that usually what happens? Okay, wow, that’s really good. So how did you train your acquisition guys? How did you source those fellas?

Angelo Mercado (30:27.336)
Over the phone.

Angelo Mercado (30:36.81)
So we actually had a hard time with that. Because the way we were taught acquisition and sales, there was no scripts. There was no scripts. I came in savage. I came in hungry. I came in as a fast learner. You tell me once, I got to hear once, and I got it. My partner was the same way. That’s why we bonded so well. But now when we started hiring guys and we had to teach them what we know, I’m like, yikes. You know what? Not everybody learns the way we learned.

Some people need a script. Some people need a sheet of rebuttals and objections, right? So me and my partner sat down and that was the hardest part. It’s still the hardest part of our job right now is making sure that we’re teaching what we know to ourselves guys. So my partner spent some time developing rehab sheets, developing questions, developing a script that doesn’t really sound like a script, it sounds like a conversation, right? And for us we take sales and

communication very very serious. Right? We don’t want to be on the phones and sound like the sales people. We want to get on the phones and actually have my guys having great quality conversations.

Michael Stansbury (31:47.118)
Yeah, that’s what I hear. I hear that you want them to know that the people are real people and that they’re the, you guys are there to solve a problem and help them with it. Awesome. Well, Caesar, you know, this has been, this is very great for a couple of reasons. Number one, how young you are and then how knowledgeable you, how you’ve taken, you know, what you’ve learned and filtered it to make a business that at 24 years old is really an envy.

enviable position because there’s not a lot of 24 year olds that are that are this focused and Crushing it like you’re doing man. So kudos to you. So where can people you know? Where can people find out more about you and your company and about what you’re doing?

Angelo Mercado (32:30.228)
Yeah, they can find me on, I’m on TikTok a little bit. I’m also on Instagram a little bit, not too much, just because I’m really busy on the day to day building my operation. But I do pop out from time to time at, they can find me at TheAngelo Mercado.

Michael Stansbury (32:45.42)
Okay, awesome. Caesar, we’ll put that in the show notes. Folks, thank you guys for watching the Real Estate Pros podcast. Caesar Mercado out of South Central LA, thank you for being a part of it. We want everybody like and subscribe and check out some of our other podcasts on the Real Estate Pros podcast. We’ll be coming out with some more soon, folks. Have a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Angelo Mercado (33:09.162)
Thank you so much. God bless.