Scale Your Business: Effective Networking for Real Estate Success

John Harcar (00:01.354)
All right. Hey guys. Hey, hey, hey, how are you? Eric guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host John Harcar and we’re here today with Eric Nicholson. And what we’re going to talk about is, know, besides his journey in business and real estate is, you know, he’s going to share with us, you know, his wholesaling business, you know, his experiences, some things he learned. He’s going to talk to us a little about how to set up a really good operation because that’s really, really key.

Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business. And we do that by providing the tools, the community, and the resource to grow and scale your business, which in turn helps you live that life you’ve always dreamed of. So Eric, man, welcome to our show. Yeah. Hey man, I’m excited to talk about your journey, what you learned in wholesale.

Eric Nicholson (00:46.65)
Thanks,

John Harcar (00:54.68)
But before we get into all that, you know, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit more about you, you know, your kind of journey in business and real estate and, what brought you to today?

Eric Nicholson (01:02.864)
Sure. So my career was a legal field. I was a litigation paralegal for many years. And at a certain point, I just hit the ceiling and I figured that I cannot grow beyond what I thought I should. And income wise, if you are not a licensed attorney, you can’t just open up your business, start taking the clients, no matter how good you are at…

what you are doing and I was working for the personal injury law firms before. So I started to look for firms that pay more, like they’re in Washington DC, they’re more specialized, more high level litigation teams handling billion dollar cases. And what I discovered is that was just too much stress. The work environment became very toxic compared to what I had before.

And I felt like, okay, they pay me more than I used to get, but it’s just not worth my mental health to remain in that kind of environment. Just not for me. Maybe somebody else would be happy with it, but it’s not me. I am basically, I’m actually an entrepreneurial person by nature. The only thing is that like with most of the people, we are not going to take action until we’re almost forced by life to take it.

John Harcar (02:19.31)
Right.

Eric Nicholson (02:19.855)
And in my case, I was like, okay, I don’t want to stay in the box. I don’t want to be a litigation paralegal. I don’t want to compromise my health, you know, well-being to make more money in the very complex litigation cases. But why not use my entrepreneurial creative personality? I’m very kind of like, I like the…

a sense of freedom and I’m also able to organize myself, discipline myself and do things that I have to do systematically. So why not take advantage of those characteristics that I possess? And when I was looking at what to do, you know, I was in a wholesale industry business years back, more than 15, 16 years ago, I was in a reverse channel liquidation business. I was liquidating the products.

So I already had the, I already knew how to negotiate the price. I already knew how to contact people, how to target, you know, markets and find the products that are going to sell in that market, how to analyze and figure out what the product will work. I mean, it’s not a real estate, but I had the idea of the how wholesale, how the business works. And that actually gave me a sense of kind of like confidence that, you know, I would be able to figure it out.

John Harcar (03:20.375)
Interesting.

John Harcar (03:34.456)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric Nicholson (03:42.832)
And I registered my company actually in 2018 and I did not plan to plunge in it. I thought I’m going to take it easy, slowly, you know. But then COVID happened, everything went to the back burner. But once the COVID ended and I told you about the changes in the work environment that I experienced and all that, I was like, this is the time. So then I plunged 100 % full time into real estate.

John Harcar (04:05.304)
Yep. Yeah.

Eric Nicholson (04:11.191)
I love it, I love it very much. I like that dynamic nature of it, right? It’s never boring. It’s never the same thing they are after the day. Right now I’m wearing seven hats. Eventually I’m going to give everybody to wear their own hats and I will wear one of them. But overall, I I feel alive. I’m doing what I enjoy doing and I just, I have to say.

getting into the real estate field was I think I found a place where I like to be and I found things that I like to do. And you know, I could actually tell a lot about how I would like to help people, how I like to help people accomplish one thing or another thing. And some of it could have been true since here, some of it could be a marketing ploy. But let me tell you one fact that

What I find out is that if you do this business right, not only you get into the business, which is profitable, can retire comfortably and have everything you want, but you also change the landscape. So if you go to a place that has a ton of distressed properties and you find those sellers that you can take those properties by from.

that have no use for it because they are left there. They sometimes go to tax lien auctions. Sometimes they’re condemned because nobody cuts the grass and everything. If you take those properties one at the time and either yourself or some other investor that is interested in buying can exchange the hands and transfer that fate of that one building, if you keep repeating that, imagine what impact you can have because you’re gonna have the whole streets, blocks.

John Harcar (06:02.37)
Mm.

Eric Nicholson (06:04.815)
And eventually, probably parts of the city is changed because of what you are doing, right? So you are also helping to make the cities and places a better place to live. So I think it’s rewarding in that sense as well. I mean, I’m not making it up. I’m not just saying it for the sake of like sounding nice, but it’s just the fact.

John Harcar (06:10.573)
Yep.

John Harcar (06:26.284)
Yeah, 100%. All right, well, there’s a lot to unpack there. If you ever known any of my podcasts or watch any of them, I like to go backwards a little bit. So you’re in the legal field, right? And you did some wholesaling of products. So you’re basically just selling products or sell low or buy low, sell high, right? I mean, same kind of process.

Eric Nicholson (06:44.493)
Alright, so are you talking about my past experience in the public? So in my past experience, I was locating the product. You know, there is a reverse liquidation check. When the goods are not sold in malls, stores, whatever, they actually go back to the warehouses that have to liquidate them, get rid of them at any price because they have already profited from the main bulk of the products. So I would actually go and find them. There would be like a pallet of

John Harcar (06:48.864)
Yes, yeah, you’re passed.

John Harcar (06:55.47)
Got it. Okay.

Eric Nicholson (07:13.007)
t-shirts, boys t-shirts, you all different colors. I would say, okay, the MSRP, the sticker on it is $40, whatever. I okay, I’m gonna liquidate them. I’m gonna pay you $1.25 or $2.50 a piece. Are you agreeing to that? No? Have a nice day. Call me if you change your mind. If you do, okay, then I’m your guy. I’m gonna take a pallet or two and three and then I’m gonna liquidate them. Then I took them and I liquidated them. I sold them to the…

John Harcar (07:16.322)
Yeah.

Eric Nicholson (07:41.123)
mom and pop shops that were retailing.

John Harcar (07:44.494)
Okay, where did the whole real estate come from? Like where did that idea come from? How did you find, I mean, did you kind of type in, know, wholesaling and then that came up? I mean, how did you find the whole real estate piece?

Eric Nicholson (07:55.98)
No, no, no, no, no, no. I actually didn’t know about wholesaling for a long while. I knew about the real estate and in the real estate, I have had, you know, basic understanding that you have to go get your license, become a realtor and then you can put the properties on market and, you know, get your commission and all that. But my expertise, like not my expertise, but I was

In a market, buying the product and selling product. I was not in a market representing the seller. I was not in a market representing the buyer. I wanted to have a niche where I could basically be a real, in control of my business as an investor, not depend on anybody else. And in a wholesaling, when I was doing the goods,

I was in control of everything. I was making the decision on behalf of myself, not on behalf of my buyer or a seller, on behalf of myself. This product is worth paying X amount of dollars because I believe that it’s going to worth to the retail buyer X amount of dollars or whoever I wanted to find as a buyer for the product, right? And this is very similar to it, except it’s much better. So instead of selling the pallets of the goods and spending all the time and energy and

John Harcar (09:09.848)
Yep. Yep.

Eric Nicholson (09:18.723)
warehousing and hiring people can have one transaction that will cover that, right? And then, and you can scale it, right? And I thought when I was thinking about where should I employ my past experience and my business kind of like acumen, and I thought that the real estate appeared to be the closest to what I could have done. And I think it’s also one that you can scale and get far beyond of where you start.

John Harcar (09:48.078)
Yeah, 100%. You talk about scale. You mentioned earlier that you’re wearing seven hats. What does your business look like today? mean, are you a one man show? Do you have a team at all?

Eric Nicholson (10:00.367)
I’m almost like a one-man show. Why I say that? Because I have one VA, myself, a guy who executes everything. I have an IT guy whose sole job is to work under my direction and pull the leads, niche leads from the specific sources. And I still do the skip tracing myself. I’ll get the spreadsheet data from him and upload it and get the numbers myself.

And then I do have a third guy whose job is to do the search engine optimization. As you probably know, it takes time, several months, so it’s still in the works. So for the most part right now, I wear all the hats, like once the lead comes in, I have to go and inspect the property. I have to make an offer based on the comms, based on my evaluation. I have to.

get the transaction coordinator to connect all the bits and parts myself. I have to send it to the title agency. Although they do the good job, they can process everything, but still I have to do that, right? Then I have to do the assignment of the contract, which is at this position, right? So I have to decide how am going to dispose of this property? Am I going to find a cash buyer for it? Am I going to buy it myself?

Is it an allocation? So I’m doing all that.

John Harcar (11:27.928)
You’re doing it all and it’s not easy doing it all. I did a one man show for a long time. What’s your plan on scaling? mean, are you looking to bring people into your team, delegate some of these things so could focus on maybe the higher producing activities?

Eric Nicholson (11:43.076)
I’m glad that you asked because one of the things I’m putting together, I want to have the cold, cold team of five individuals, each one of them working four hours a day. I don’t want to have anybody working eight, 10, 12 hours because they get exhausted and people don’t pick up phone throughout the day. They pick up mostly between three and seven and eight. So I want to have five people who will be ringing the phones in that particular market.

And then once I have five people that are a team, then I want to create exact copy of that team in several different places. So I’m currently looking for North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. So those will be the four states where we will one by one jump and scale once we put this five team operation here on a smooth track.

John Harcar (12:41.866)
And how are you selling your leads? I know you’re doing the disposition. Do you currently have buyers in all these markets? How did you go out and find them might be a better question.

Eric Nicholson (12:52.131)
Very good question, very, very good question. First of all, I was worried about marketing initially before I started to get closer into the operations myself. But what I discovered is that if you have a good deal, your deal sells itself. You’re gonna have people lined up to buy them from you. So I have a guy, Jesus, we regularly meet, he’s a general contractor.

John Harcar (13:09.307)
yeah.

Eric Nicholson (13:19.331)
and we discuss things, we even do the podcast together and he constantly, he even phones me up like, I’m looking for two more properties this month, know, so buyers I have, you know, and I’m just bringing you Jesus as one example, buyers like him, all you have to do is go to investors meet up places and not like the, you know, not necessarily the place where they’re trying to sell you something.

I like a software or something because those are good, but for their own sake, right? If you want to buy something to, if you want to build a system, that’s the place you have to go. That’s your place. should go and learn. But if you want to find the cash buyers, go to places where investors who buy them can get together because they do. They actually have launches on weekends. They have places that they retreat to and meet each other.

Grab a drink and just talk to people. What are you doing? Are you what? Are you holding? Are you increasing your portfolio type of property? So once you have those actual people who have those portfolios and actively looking for the properties, if your numbers work, they will be the ones who will grab it from you just like that. You don’t even have to sell it. Now what you have to do, and I think it’s gonna be increasingly the case if the market keeps stalling, is that you will have to actually put more effort.

into selling the deals, although closing them at a good price will be easier, but selling them will require more effort. And then if that is the case, okay, you can put on multiple Facebook groups, there are multiple investor Facebook groups where people actually post the deals and buy the deals. That’s one venue that where you can do, you can post it on investor left, but.

John Harcar (14:45.368)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:07.734)
Yeah, I was going to say this software is like investor lift and yeah.

Eric Nicholson (15:10.541)
Yeah, yeah, investor lift is another option. The third option is you are not a realtor, right? So you are a principal in charge of the contract. But if you incorporate into your contract an explicit and express permission from the property owner that you have a right to market that contract in any different platforms that are of your choosing.

then you could potentially list it even on MLS. You’re not an agent. You don’t sell it for yourself. You sell the contract. You hire an agent to list it. So you could do it on MLS. You could auction it off. I mean, there are so many ways you can do it and you have to just use your brains when you assess the value of your deal and figure out which channel I should employ to liquidate this product, right? And sometimes you might be mistaken. You might say, it’s a great deal.

John Harcar (15:41.166)
innovation.

Eric Nicholson (16:06.797)
I’ll sell it to my guy tomorrow and may not like it. So have those other options lined up so you can spread it wide and find the buyer in it as quickly as possible and try to make everything happen within 30 days because everything works better when it’s done that.

John Harcar (16:23.971)
Yeah.

John Harcar (16:27.758)
sure when you’re going into these virtual markets, you know, the Georgia, the Tennessee, you know, wherever you’re not, are you having do you have someone boots on the ground? Because we know like in markets, literally, it could be price of one house is 100,000 across the street is 50,000. I mean, so how are you getting those real detailed like, you know, insider type of information?

Eric Nicholson (16:50.829)
I’m glad that you asked about it because before I do something, I do the research, right? So I’m not in any of those markets, but way before I got into any of them or before I’m doing it, I already gather piece by piece the information, which I find very useful because when you are not actively actively looking for something, there are things that you find out that come through to you and they’re like, you will need them later on.

So one of them was like during the conversations I found out about and I cannot tell you off the top of my head because I’m not using them right now, but I have already saved them in my links. I already saved them in my email boxes, specific folders. There are companies like boots on the ground and all you have to do is hire some company, pay them. I think that you want in particular, I remember they are charging you about 50, $60 to go there, take the basic pictures.

give you the basic report. If you pay them extra, they will do the videos. They’ll do like multiple pictures. They can even put a drone out there if you want and take the picture from the sky. So if your concern is how am I know that I’m not buying a cat in the box? Well, that’s your solution. Hire one of those guys. They’ll go for you, take the picture, send you the report. And what else do you need?

John Harcar (18:14.734)
Very true. So you don’t go out to check out the areas. You just have someone that’s there. You do your online due diligence.

Eric Nicholson (18:22.319)
Let’s be realistic. If you do three, four deals in each market and you have four or five states, are you going to take a plane and fly every day all over the

John Harcar (18:27.533)
You learn.

John Harcar (18:34.478)
Well, I meant like before you go into a market, do you go out and talk with, you know, I don’t know, go out and talk to local people, local experts, you know.

Eric Nicholson (18:41.343)
yeah, obviously, let me back off them because I didn’t understand your question. I thought about each individual property. Yes, for example, in Tennessee, I have a good attorney that I have, who actually was the one who suggested the market to me. There is a very, you know, there is one niche there, which is a tax liens, right? And I have established a good report with them. So I already have a relationship with them.

John Harcar (18:48.649)
No, no, no, no, no.

John Harcar (19:02.766)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Nicholson (19:08.505)
So tomorrow if I need to close a property in Tennessee, if I need to file a motion to get the property through whatever process there exists, if I wanted to hit this tax lien properties before they hit the auction, maybe they have to redeem that. Like in Maryland, you can just pay it off and redeem it up to six months after it’s sold in the tax lien auction. Whatever the process is, I already have a guy there. That attorney has in-pass done flips.

So he’s not just an attorney, but he’s somebody who’s aware of what this business is about, somebody who ran it. Just one example, and the same thing applies to Georgia Atlanta. I already have a guy there who’s a wholesaler there. So I would say actually one way you can do this is you can partner with people and you can find people that are good at something.

John Harcar (19:43.809)
Right.

Eric Nicholson (20:02.443)
And they need somebody who is good at something else. Maybe you are good in marketing. Maybe you are good in finding those deals, finding the sellers and closing those, you know, leads. And then they will be your dispo guys locally or they will be your attorneys locally. So I would say without doing that homework, I would not recommend anybody to do it because you will have property under contract. You will have 30 days and you will be scrambling.

John Harcar (20:17.165)
Yeah.

Eric Nicholson (20:29.987)
figure out the rules, regulations, how do they handle this? How do I find the title company? How do I find the buyer for that? So no, do your homework, get the groundwork laid out, give people heads up, say, you know, I have those thoughts, I’m coming that way, maybe in the six months, seven months, nine months, and lay your ground. And then once you’re ready, then you go there and do it, implement.

John Harcar (20:49.155)
Right.

John Harcar (20:56.43)
Great information, man. This is I love about talking real estate. You you blow through time and decide we could probably be on here for another 30 minutes. If there’s people out here, there are folks out here that are listening to you that, you know, what you’re saying resonates with them, maybe they want to talk to you a little bit more and learn from you. What is the best way that they’re able to get in touch with you?

Eric Nicholson (21:14.415)
Sure. So my company is called Astute Realty LLC and I have a website and they can go to www.webuyhomesinmd.md is abbreviation for Maryland.com. Webuyhomesinmd.com or they can call me, know, feel free to call me 240-415-8290.

and I’ll be glad to speak with you. Even if you have just a question, if you are a wholesaler or if you want to be an investor and you just want to chat, you want to ask a couple of questions, I don’t mind helping people answering questions and sharing some of the knowledge because a lot of the time it’s simple stuff but there is so much information out there that you feel overburdened. You can’t process all that information.

Like where do I find the answer to say, and it’s very simple. Like it’s right there, but you don’t know and you waste maybe you spin your tires for a month. Give me call and ask and I’ll be happy to share my knowledge and my expertise with you.

John Harcar (22:25.998)
That’s awesome. Guys, take advantage of it. If you’re out there and you have questions, reach out. Eric, thank you again for coming on here and dropping so much good information. Guys, I hope you really enjoyed this show. I know I did. And we’ll see you on the next one. Cheers. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, buddy. Have a good one.

Eric Nicholson (22:41.114)
Thank you John, appreciate it. Thank you very much for inviting me. was a pleasure. Thank you. Alright, you too.