1,000+ Real Estate Deals: Lessons from Greg Yuter of Home Cash Guys

Mike Hambright (00:00.878)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show today. I’m here with my good old friend, Greg Yuter, joining us from a PA. He’s operating in a few other States too. We’ve been friends for a long time. Actually, we didn’t bring up the, how we originally met or where, you know, we both came out of the home investor system a long, long time ago. I forgot about that. But anyway, Greg’s here. He’s going to, he’s going to be talking about just lessons learned from being an operator for more than 20 years have done well over a thousand deals and kind of lessons learned throughout the business. So Greg, glad to see you buddy.

Greg Yuter (00:30.648)
Yeah, you too, Mike. It’s been quite some time.

Mike Hambright (00:32.066)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re talking about our aches and pains and like old guy stuff. So, you know, you know, it’s been a long time when you start talking about like how things have rolled out over the last 20 years, right? So but there’s a lot of wisdom there, too. Like you you’ve been as I like to say, I’ve got a lot of arrow wounds in my back or as I have said, I know that I like to say it, but it’s the truth is just a lot of lessons learned from kind of writing the ups and downs of the business and things like that. So before we jump in, I think this is

Greg Yuter (00:38.941)
You

Greg Yuter (00:45.732)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (01:01.954)
going to provide a lot of insight for people that maybe haven’t been in for quite as long that they can help kind of weather some of the storms they might be facing. maybe share a little bit about share your background a little bit.

Greg Yuter (01:13.614)
Yeah, so originally I was actually went to school for communications, worked for CNBC for a very short period of time, decided that really wasn’t for me. At that time, that was the late 90s, so I’ll date myself a little bit. And I kind of fell backwards into IT. Went into that corporate world for about 10 years, decided that there’s definitely a better way. Started to do a little bit of research and then decided, hey, you know what, I’m going to try my hand at real estate and

happened to find Homevestors where ultimately, you know, you and I met, bought that franchise, went through a couple years of building that up. And then unfortunately the crash happened of 09, 08, 09. Sold that off, restarted everything from scratch. Actually had a lot of overhead. It’s just some bad mistakes made and some of it was uncontrollable. And then moved on to rebuild the company to where it is today. And even, you know, went through the trials and tribulations of COVID.

Mike Hambright (02:10.102)
Right, right. Yeah. And the last few years, let’s not forget that. right. So what, what are, what are some of the lessons learned that you, that you can share with just riding the ups and downs, right? There’s a lot of wisdom that happens when you’re going through certainly the downs, like it’s not fun, but I think once you get to it, like there’s some people that ride the up and all they’ve ever known is up. And then when there’s a down, they quit and they move on to something else. Right. And it’s like, well, whatever else you get into is also going to have ups and downs.

and it’s going to get hard too. so if you just keep jumping into the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, you never really build up a kind of tough skin. You never build up like principles that can help you weather the next downturn or things like that. And so there’s a lot of lessons learned. What are some of your key lessons you’d say you’ve learned from just riding the market cycles, if you will?

Greg Yuter (02:59.555)
You know, it just, as you mentioned, you gotta focus on one thing. And now for years I got involved and it was doing rehabs and then it was rentals and then it was other aspects within there. But you know, at the end of the day, when you concentrate all your energy, and I like to say, you know, where focus goes, energy flows, is when things start to come up. So you’re gonna have to, think with any business, you’re gonna have to understand that there’s gonna be dark days and gray days, but being persistent.

just figuring out what the next challenge is as they come and seeing it through because there’s a why behind it. Why am I doing this? And that actually is going to, I think, push you and pull you through those difficult times, which there will be.

Mike Hambright (03:39.97)
Yeah. And I think you start to learn too, that whenever there’s a down cycle or a downtime or something bad happens, there’s always a silver lining there too, right? You don’t know what it is right away, but it’s like, there’s always some positive, mean, probably almost always some positive that comes out of it. could be that your competition went to the sidelines. It could be a major competitor left the business. It could be just the mindset of sellers is like, they’re, they’re more reasonable in terms of negotiating and a lot of those things, right?

Greg Yuter (04:09.017)
Absolutely, there’s tons, there’s always lessons to be learned. know, there was blood in the street, as they say, right, there’s opportunities, right? So just kind of figure out, hey, what’s working, what’s not working, reinvent. I would say, you know, make sure you have yourself a good financial cushion too so you can take the blows when they happen, and they will happen. Look, there’s gonna be, in wholesaling, there’s gonna be fallouts, there’s gonna be delays, there’s gonna be other things that come up, but you gotta be able to weather the storm. Just survive until the next stage. That’s all you gotta do is make it through.

Mike Hambright (04:23.746)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:37.102)
Yeah.

Greg Yuter (04:38.305)
and fail fast and learn from it.

Mike Hambright (04:40.666)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So how about some lessons learned from a marketing standpoint? I’m sure you’ve spent millions of dollars in advertising over the years to kind of operate your business and and there’s lots of lessons learned there. What are some what are some of them?

Greg Yuter (04:54.633)
Don’t stop. Just keep going. Persist. Measure. Tweak. Gauge the data. What’s working, what’s not. What’s working. Put more into it. If a certain area is working or a certain medium is actually working for you and you’re getting your return on ad spend that you were looking to get and maybe plus, just keep focusing there and just do more of that and perfect that system.

Mike Hambright (05:16.748)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, tracking is really key, right? A lot of people and I think you do it. You’ve been playing the game for a long time. I’m sure that you’ve had channels that you tried for a few months. You cut it because you didn’t think it was working. Then you got a few more deals that came back around through follow up or whatever, right? It takes time for sellers to make a decision and then you have regrets that you shouldn’t have cut that. I mean, that’s happened to you, right?

Greg Yuter (05:19.821)
Huge.

Greg Yuter (05:38.778)
countless amount of times. Whether it be PPC, PPL, postcards, Facebook. Just recently we made a blunder. We had the marketing team cut Facebook. There was other reasons for this, I looked at this and I said, what are you doing here? We spent $11,000 and made, it was roughly $110,000. mean, you got to focus on getting this right and putting the money into there and made a great amount of money. So, you look, you goof up.

Mike Hambright (05:40.99)
Right.

Greg Yuter (06:08.333)
But you gotta be able to measure and track everything and understand when to actually cut it and when to stick with it.

Mike Hambright (06:14.83)
Yeah, yeah. And I think you have to understand the fact that some of your advertising drives people through other channels like mail and pay-per-click, you know, drives people to your online sometimes. So it’ll look like your SEO is doing well, but it’s like there were other things, certainly TV as well. TV drives people to your website, right? So if people think their SEO is crushing it and the money they’re spending on TV or mail or things like that,

doesn’t seem to be doing as well, have to give attribution to those other channels because all marketing channels ultimately work together on some.

Greg Yuter (06:48.889)
they do and some of it’s more so for branding such as like billboards or something like that. It’s more of a branding aspect of it. So yeah, you definitely have to look at that and understand what contributed to it ultimately.

Mike Hambright (07:02.072)
Yeah, yeah. How about the kind of lessons learned from a sales standpoint? Maybe sales and kind of sales team of standpoint.

Greg Yuter (07:11.043)
Lesson learned from sales and sales teams. Train your people. And when you think you’ve trained them enough, train them again. And make sure that they’re adhering to systems and they’re all saying the same thing and you’re gonna get consistency at that point. Otherwise, you got a bunch of wild cards out there, which we’ve had, that were just kinda doing stuff and promising things that the company could not fulfill, which is not good. So it doesn’t help with your reputation. So get good scripts, train them, train them, train them, and then train them again.

Mike Hambright (07:39.256)
Yeah. What are some ways that you train people? I you could obviously send them to some people that provide training. You could create your own internal training and role playing type stuff. Like what are some things that you’ve done that have worked well?

Greg Yuter (07:50.403)
We’ve done both actually, you know, we’re more so sending them out right now to get trained some, but now also too, we’re not hiring unless they have multiple years of experience. So they’ll come in, we’ll train them on the way that the company operates, what were our models, and then run through with them a couple of times of the scripts, listen to the calls, everything is recorded. There’s even, you know, the AI that’s doing the transcribing of everything. And then, you know, we’ll tweak them a little bit. So it’s gotten a lot easier over the years.

Many years ago it was just one-on-one role-playing, know, testing stuff out, what’s working, what’s not working.

Mike Hambright (08:25.442)
Yeah. And are you and you’re so you operate virtually now like it wasn’t always that way you were you were belly to belly at some point, right?

Greg Yuter (08:33.112)
Yeah, prior to 2014, we going out, I would say to the majority of the properties now. It’s 100 % virtual. The only exception is maybe someone’s in our backyard, it’s an elderly couple or something, and they just can’t do business online, so we’ll go out. Other than that, it’s 100 % virtual in multiple states.

Mike Hambright (08:55.34)
Yeah. And I guess that allows you to hire acquisitions managers that are national. It could be anywhere. They don’t have to be in your market, right? So that opens up lot of opportunities.

Greg Yuter (09:04.108)
Yeah, Yep, absolutely, all virtual.

Mike Hambright (09:08.376)
Yeah. Yeah. I recall you were virtual. You were doing stuff virtually even in, even in Philly before. mean, really COVID escalated a lot of people moving to virtual and some have moved back to being in person, but you were doing virtual in a really meaningful way, way before COVID and way before a lot of people were doing that, I believe.

Greg Yuter (09:30.136)
Yeah, like I was saying, like 2014, I figured out, know, hey, I can’t, I’m wasting so much time, you know, not only on the phone. Well, obviously it’s important, right? Setting it up, but then going out to these properties, I mean, sometimes you’re there, it could take you almost the whole day by the time you travel to it, you sit with this, the client, you come back and then you’re just exhausted. like versus learning how to do it virtually. And now you just have somebody wherever they are, wherever you are, just talking with people and getting it locked up online.

Mike Hambright (09:57.87)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. How about from a team building standpoint? I know that’s probably changed over the years for you too, especially if you had more of a virtual team. think one of the challenges that a lot of people have had really ever since COVID happened, a lot of people started to have more virtual teams is building culture or having, you know, relationships with people when you’re virtual. Of course, my team is largely virtual. I would prefer that everybody be in person, but it’s just not realistic, right?

We do a lot of stuff over Slack and things like that. But what are are some lessons learned about building a team and having a as as much as possible, having a cohesive relationship with your team, even if you’re virtual?

Greg Yuter (10:39.129)
You have to get everyone to buy into the vision of the company and what they’re doing and adhere to that. Also, setting your standards too for the team. What’s acceptable, what the goals are. We meet. Team meetings are every week. Then individual meetings, depending on who it is, twice during the week. So we’re always in touch. We’re communicating through Google Chat. We use the Google Workspace, essentially. So we have the cameras. So everyone is bought in.

Everyone knows that they get individual reports that the AI prints out based on the performance and what the standards are. So everyone knows exactly where they need to be and what is needed if they’re not performing to those standards and what the repercussions would be if they’re not.

Mike Hambright (11:26.168)
Yeah, that’s great. And how about from a business operations standpoint, just things that have allowed you to run your business back when you started, like literally we started around the same time. So there were no CRMs, like it was like whiteboards and spreadsheets and Manila folders and stuff, right? And it’s gone now to laser guns and X-rays and AI and all that stuff, right? just like what are some lessons learned over that time period?

Greg Yuter (11:43.289)
from the birth.

Greg Yuter (11:51.447)
Mike, I-I just-

I was just telling someone the story. wasn’t even that long ago, if you really think about it. I think it was 2012, roughly. A lady I was dating was from the Middle East, and we flew over to see her family. So it seven-hour difference. And I was literally working off a paper with a seven-hour time frame. I mean, just jotting stuff down. Like you said, no CRMs. Then we moved to the top producer. Then, I mean, it just kept on evolving and evolving and evolving. And now, you know, what helps us run the business is this AI technology. We’re using

Claude, which is built into GHL, and it pretty much just monitors everything, live dashboards telling everyone, hey, look, you’re meeting the quota, you’re not meeting the quota, what we’re looking at from all the KPIs and metrics that you need to effectively know whether you’re on track or you’re not.

Mike Hambright (12:44.524)
Yeah, yeah, the key has always been like what we’re doing now is just there’s just better tools to manage it before you decide to do it more a lot more.

Greg Yuter (12:52.953)
A lot more manually, mean, just think about it too from that, know, how are you getting your lists versus now, which you can do, you know, if you need a script, you can literally go onto AI and say, hey, I need a script for whatever. And it could produce these scripts based on like different sources that it pulls. I mean, whereas like, what did I do before? I had to buy something, I had to talk to somebody else. Now it’s, pretty much here right in front of your face. If you know how to utilize the resources.

Mike Hambright (13:19.618)
Yeah, I have a I did a podcast earlier with somebody that runs a like a prop tech company, just, you know, massive company now that just kind of started it, like for his own reasons, and then builds it to a huge company. And it’s just the tech that’s available now is kind of crazy. And, you know, if you’re using AI right now, which you are, and I am in many ways trying to use it as much as possible, like, we’re at such the infancy of where that’s going, it’s kind of hard to even imagine.

hard to imagine what’s even going to be possible in just literally like a year or two, let alone five or 10 years, you know.

Greg Yuter (13:52.09)
I don’t know where it came out of it. It seems like left fielding. One minute, you know, he’s like, oh, what’s this thing, ChatGPT, and you’re using it. The next thing you know, I’m getting introduced to this AI that’s just running the whole database and just spinning out numbers where, like you mentioned earlier, using spreadsheets. We’re actually still taking old spreadsheets and data and uploading it into the AI, into GHL, to actually give us the history and different key points that we need in order to evolve everything.

Mike Hambright (14:21.501)
Yeah, yeah. Where what are some things that you think are like? Where do you think from a tech standpoint? Where do think things are going from here? Like what can you? What do you see possible over the next couple of years that would have been unthinkable? Maybe just a year ago?

Greg Yuter (14:34.125)
I mean, from an automation standpoint, think that potentially like lead managers are gone. We’re already starting to see that, I think. you know, we’ll be able to repurpose them or reposition them into different roles. I think that from an acquisition standpoint, you’re not too far off the marker there. Honestly, I think that’s a couple of years, because it’s very, you know, emotionally driven, a lot of these things. So it’s going to be a little hard with the AI, I think.

Mike Hambright (14:41.24)
Hmm.

Greg Yuter (15:02.169)
But I think the majority of the business from it just you know moving through the Different stages is all going to be taken over from AI even from the sales perspective I think is right now We actually a vacant property for example someone will contact us. It’ll contact them back It’ll give them a schedule. It’ll give them once they back once we have verification. They’ll give them the lockbox So I mean, you know, what do you what do you need somebody back there to even sell the properties for maybe a little? Negotiation at this point and then of course the title work

Mike Hambright (15:33.41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m sure on the title side, AI and the ability, of course, the blockchain stuff that’s kind of coming up there will will be I don’t really hear a lot about that anymore, but I know it’s still coming on strong. So that’ll that’ll be kind of transformational as well. But

Greg Yuter (15:46.477)
Yeah, I think I’m a little dormant for now, trust me, that’s gonna come right back.

Mike Hambright (15:50.606)
There’s people working hard on it for sure, yeah. I think it’s really enabling operators or owners to be more of owners and just really understand how to manage the business with tools can analyze things way faster than what we do manually. There’s so many manual things that we were doing just a few years ago that it’s really, think AI is really helping us as owners really get our arms around the business more so than in the past.

Greg Yuter (16:19.926)
Yeah, it’s always going to be a human-based business. mean, and we’re always going to be solving, think, the same problems. Death, divorce, know, fire damage properties, inherited properties. Those problems are always going to exist. So it’s just a different way of going about it. How do you, you know, innovate to stay ahead of everything?

Mike Hambright (16:23.49)
Right.

Mike Hambright (16:40.418)
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk a little about your business model. So you were just in, at one point you were just in Philly. Now you’re all Pennsylvania and now you’re operating in some other markets. Just maybe talk about how your business has evolved to allow you to operate in multiple markets and maybe some of the challenges and pitfalls you had to overcome to do that.

Greg Yuter (17:00.032)
Yeah, I mean really, you know, going out to these different markets just opened up, you know, our brand and us to do more and more deals. Right now, we’re going to be really heavily focused in Pennsylvania to really dominate that landscape. We’ve been around, we know it like the back of our hand. And then we’ll start to just take that model and apply it to different markets. Right now, it’s Texas, it’s in Florida. So we kind of we back into it. We kind of look at we look at the laws. We look at like what title company we have there. If we don’t have one, what do we need?

What are the exit strategies we’re going to use over there? What the average days on market are, price points, so on and so forth. So we have actually a calculator that helps with that too. It makes it really easy to make offers. So those are all the different things that we’ve done that made it easier to just kind of drop into various markets. So let’s go through a basic checklist of we need these five things, for example, that’ll allow us to say yes or no to that particular market. So for example, if there’s a market where it’s very litigious,

They frown upon, you know, we’re not going to be bothered. It’s going to be a very difficult exit strategy. But other than that, that’s kind of some of the things that we’re doing to just, you know, drop into those markets. There’s always a need for what we do, is whether or not we can make it work in that particular market.

Mike Hambright (18:15.692)
Right. I mean, you’ve been doing virtual acquisitions for longer than most by far. So I guess the hard part, which is one of the more challenging parts of the business right now is the Dispo side, right?

Greg Yuter (18:27.416)
Yeah, I would say yes and no. mean, we’re still on the MLS. They’re doing a lot of the deals that we’re actually selling off there, too. Everything’s disclosed to the seller exactly the way that the transaction operates. In some states, you need to get an attorney and fact document signed to allow that to be listed. Then we have companies that do self-listing for like a couple hundred bucks, and you get it on there, and it’s the same as you would operate anywhere else.

Mike Hambright (18:53.272)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, Greg, if folks want to connect with you, if they want to learn more about what you’ve got going on or maybe talk about the opportunities that worked with you, where can they go?

Greg Yuter (19:04.46)
Yeah, HomeCashGuys.com. You can find us there, find us on social media, which we’re in the midst of revamping, but that’s some ways. just ask for me. If you want to get in touch with me, got any deals you want to put through, you know, we do some JV deals. We’d be more than happy to talk to you.

Mike Hambright (19:21.324)
Yeah, awesome. Thanks for thanks for joining me today. Yeah, great to see you buddy always so everybody thanks for joining us today. I think you know the lesson one of the big lessons learned here is just to play. I like to I say this all the time play the long game right there’s lots of ups and downs. If you jump out of real estate and you jump into some something else which a lot of people have over the past few years that too will get hard crypto trading day trading whatever all those things get hard right and so that.

Greg Yuter (19:23.96)
Yeah, anytime. Thanks for having me.

Mike Hambright (19:48.076)
The key is, and I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that do something for a year, two, three years, it gets hard, and they think the solution is just to move on to something else when, honestly, the big solution is to get around people that have broken through that barrier and gotten to the next level, and you can operate for a couple more years, and you’re gonna hit another level of hard, it’s like a video game, right? You just get to the next level, fall on your face a couple of times, and eventually you’re gonna crack through and be able to get to the next level, the next level, the next level. So you’re never gonna do that if you keep moving on to something completely different, right?

Greg Yuter (20:12.93)
Yeah.

Greg Yuter (20:16.972)
Yeah, like you said, the key is focus because once you start restart, you just restart the clock. Now you just gotta, you you take many years potentially just to get up to that next level. So stay with what you got. Do what you’re best at. Stick there.

Mike Hambright (20:28.482)
Yeah, absolutely. Greg, great to see you, buddy. Everybody thanks for joining us. We’ll see you on the next show.

Greg Yuter (20:32.984)
Alright, you too, Mike.