5 Key Strategies for Real Estate Investors with Greg Helbeck

Mike Hambright (00:01.282)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m really excited to be here with my buddy, Greg Helbeck. We’re good friends, been friends for a long time. Dude, we became friends like shortly, I think you were still operating in your parents basement maybe. Yeah. And so it’s been awesome seeing you grow. I mean, how long ago was that? That was like probably seven or eight years ago.

Greg Helbeck (00:12.203)
I was. It looked a lot different too. I didn’t look this old.

Greg Helbeck (00:22.511)
2000, it was probably 2018 and I was in college and I didn’t have any facial hair or bags under my eyes. No, not much. Took some time.

Mike Hambright (00:25.357)
Okay.

Mike Hambright (00:30.158)
Could you grow facial hair? Could you grow facial hair yet or? Yeah. You started drinking coffee and then the hair came, it puts hair on your chest and on your face.

Greg Helbeck (00:38.991)
That’s right, exactly. You get older quickly, I’ve realized. So it’s been journey and I remember the first time I met you, was in one of your, at Investor Fuel, I think it have been the third one ever. And it was in, I think it was in Addison, Texas or something like that. And I remember going there and I was blown away with, I’d never been to a mastermind before and it was something else. So it’s been a long time since.

Mike Hambright (00:41.752)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (00:57.667)
Yeah.

You were like the Wonder Kid. Wonder Boy.

Greg Helbeck (01:02.351)
Honestly, the truth is I got lucky because John, who was a sales trainer at the time, took me under his wing and I got all this notoriety for being his apprentice. That’s the truth. And that really helped me, honestly, in my journey. That was a long time ago. It’s funny how time flies.

Mike Hambright (01:16.706)
Yep. Yeah, man. Well, hey, before we jump in, for those that don’t know you, just tell us a little bit of background on you. We just talked about some of it, but give us a brief overview of, has Greg held?

Greg Helbeck (01:25.423)
Sure.

So I’ve been a full-time flipper and wholesaler for like almost 10 years now. I started when I was in college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I’ve discovered real estate and know, podcasts and all that. And I think your podcast was one of the flip nerd show back in the day. I was listening to that. And you know, I just became really interested in and quietly obsessed with the business after hearing what is possible. And you know, I wanted to do the business and that’s what I wanted to do. I was still in college and you know, I went out and started putting bandit signs out and you know, creating a little marketing plan and it took

me like nine months and I did a deal in New York which is a really hard market which I guess we could talk about and you know I got a check for like $5,000 and I was like holy shit and then I got another one for 10 and then 15 and then I started slowly you know building my business Velocity House Buyers and you know it was it’s been a journey but I

I started when I was young and back in the day, it’s crazy to say that, like there wasn’t as many podcasts, there was barely any software, direct mail. mean, no one was doing that. Cold calling didn’t exist. So it was a completely different landscape. And I’ve just seen over the last 10 years how fast this business evolves in live time. And I realized how quick you have to pivot as an operator because, you know, stuff moves so quickly now with technology in the market. So we’d been able to do that for the last 10 years and it’s

Mike Hambright (02:30.893)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (02:46.637)
It’s been a great ride.

Mike Hambright (02:48.726)
Yeah, two quick things. I’ll say I had somebody heavy hitter that you would know if I said their name, asked me like, man, who’s crushing it right now? Like who’s doing really well in this market? Because this is a person that does a few hundred deals a year and they’re like, they’re struggling, right? And so, and I just said, you know what, the people that have done the best are the people that were able to adapt to this market and just stayed focused operationally on how to improve and how to get better. And the people that are not doing great are those that are like,

thinking, well, maybe I should just move into crypto or like they’re just getting attracted to the shiny objects that are all over the place for guys like us. And I said, those that stayed focused are great. And those are doing well. And those that, you know, were kind of like the grass is always greener somewhere. They’re kind of struggling. The second thing I’ll say is, dude, I’ve always known you to be a great student. Like I know John took John Martinez, took you under kind of his arm early on. And you were kind of the wonder kid, like sales trainer and all that. But you were always very

Greg Helbeck (03:22.681)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (03:34.85)
I couldn’t agree more with that.

Mike Hambright (03:46.338)
focus on the process, you know, and that’s one of the things I know we’re gonna talk about today is just like thriving during a bad time, which you’ve done really well over the past couple of years when not everybody has. And it’s because I know one of the reasons is because you’re a great student, like you learn something and just your words, like you have to pivot, right? It doesn’t mean you get out the business, but it means you figure out, I mean, let’s be honest, there’s still people that are dying, there’s still death, divorce, inheritance, problem rentals, like all kinds of things going on that create distressed opportunities.

Greg Helbeck (04:13.369)
yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:16.343)
for folks like us, they’re still out there. It’s just a matter of you staying focused and making sure you get those, you know?

Greg Helbeck (04:23.407)
100 % and one more thing I want to add to that Mike and I appreciate the kind of words is that I think a big problem that has happened in this business that I’ve seen me we know a lot of the same people these like you high-volume people is they build a high-volume business that turns into an overhead machine

And then they can’t pivot when the market shifts. I’ve always, you know, admired people who can do that because you’re building more of a bigger company. But at the same time, I’ve kept my business relatively small, like under 2 million a year, because I want to be able to control that. And if there’s a problem in the market or the marketing, it’s like turning a jet ski or a speedboat around versus a cruise ship. And I’ve seen the people that net the most money don’t do the most gross revenue because they have overhead. Like trust me, I got some overhead.

Mike Hambright (05:01.506)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (05:10.257)
but I don’t have a six figure a month payroll, which and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve always looked at this business and seen the volatility that happens and I’ve been aware that I don’t need to build the biggest building in town. I want to build one of the most profitable ones and that’s a big deal in this industry and I see a lot of people get over their skis and get into trouble with big high-volume particularly wholesale operation and flipping businesses.

Mike Hambright (05:25.827)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (05:36.79)
Yeah, part of it is, you know, there’s a lot of people that have done really well in this business. And probably this is probably true for like all small businesses, entrepreneurship wise. Like if the owner stays involved, if the owner is really good at doing the thing and then they decide I want to be less involved in the business and they start to pull themselves out and they start to like.

Greg Helbeck (05:54.253)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (05:57.418)
add people in and you know that’s how everybody that’s how every business I mean that’s how Jeff Bezos grew his business let’s be honest like he was hustling in a garage and then you got to you start to pull yourself out but this is a hard business to pull yourself out of and it’s also part of the problem is is

Greg Helbeck (05:58.286)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (06:02.465)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:13.346)
you know, unlike Jeff Bezos, like most of us are bootstrapping all this stuff, right? So we’re cheap, like we’re buying cheap houses, I want cheap labor, I wanna get cheap leads, you know, all this stuff. And then we kind of cheap out on people too, like, so we try to find somebody that might be able to do it, but we often are not looking for like high caliber executives to come in and take things over. And so, you know, you can’t replace yourself with subpar talent, honestly.

Greg Helbeck (06:20.868)
Yep.

Greg Helbeck (06:33.11)
Exactly.

Greg Helbeck (06:37.571)
With a four dollar RVA. and another thing too is that the business is very, know, people, the gurus say it’s repeatable and to an extent it is, but it’s really not because every property, there’s a lot of money on the line per transaction. So you have a very high ticket sale in terms of revenue per deal. And you have a lot of complications that can derail your revenue. I.e. you have a 70K assignment locked up, but then you find out the seller’s underwater and you got to do a short sale. So now that 70K that you thought you were going to make, that you told Facebook you were going to make, turns into zero.

and now all of a sudden your bills still have to get paid but the revenue that you projected didn’t actually turn into reality therefore you get into this cash crunching spiral and that’s why I’ve kept my business more on the lean and mean side because of those things that I see every single day in my business.

Mike Hambright (07:24.834)
Yeah. So let’s talk about the things that you’ve done really well over the past couple of years in a kind of a down market. The reality is I’ve said this several times, like if you look, when you have the benefit of hindsight, like looking back, right? Most people that are

wealthy or ultra wealthy from real estate made their money because of down markets. Like that creates opportunities, right? But not everybody has been able to make that shift. So let’s talk about a few things that you’ve done over the past year or two that you think have allowed you to kind of thrive during a difficult time.

Greg Helbeck (07:54.571)
Absolutely. So the first thing I’ll tell you is we started building up our relationship marketing and what that really means in English is that instead of relying on paid marketing and getting a good ROAS, which is still very important, we’ve branched off and we’ve reached out to our network in the local New York market at least, and even Seattle now, to where we have a lot of wholesalers bringing us properties and we have a lot of realtors bringing us properties and then we have referrals from sellers we’ve bought houses from and we just have people, know, professional, know, attorneys bringing us

deals and we’re making the public aware that you know we want to do deals with with the people that we work with right so we’ll reach out to wholesalers and we’ll say hey if you have a house that you know you can’t sell or you want to sell to us or whatever the case might be you know feel free to present it to us and our pitch is like even if we don’t buy it we’ll help you out for free so we’ve been getting a lot of people just bringing us deals for free like now they see my videos online at the end of every video I talk about hey if you have a house in one of these areas bring it to me I’m happy to look at

it we’re getting a lot of deals that way and it costs us absolutely nothing and I don’t mind paying big assignment fees or splitting a deal 50-50 with somebody because to me it’s like I would have never had that opportunity if they didn’t reach out.

Mike Hambright (08:56.524)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Mike Hambright (09:06.21)
Yeah, I’ll give a little tip. I’ve said this to several people and I don’t know if anybody’s quite doing it yet is, you know, the flip nerd podcast that you like the precursor to the investor fuel show. We did, we started that in, well, it’s been 13 years ago. So basically when I started that, it was one of the first six or seven podcasts in existence, a real estate podcast. And now there’s

I don’t know, hundreds or maybe thousands, yeah. Which is fine. And I didn’t really know when I started it, but my buddy Joe McCall was out there, Matt Terrio, Sean Terry, Jason Hartman had one. So there were some other people out there, right, but some early adopters and people that ultimately I didn’t know and have become friends of mine now. But…

Greg Helbeck (09:31.789)
Hundreds. Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (09:40.153)
Sean Terry.

Mike Hambright (09:51.762)
I think there’s a huge opportunity for the local podcast. Like the problem is, is people like, you went to start a podcast in Oklahoma city and you just interviewed real estate professionals, like brokers and agents and lenders and title companies and even investors, right? All that, like.

Greg Helbeck (09:54.742)
huge.

Mike Hambright (10:08.556)
The problem is people look at it like I don’t get a lot of views because all the stats are like nationwide, but it’s like, who cares? Like you just want the quality conversations, right? And so I think people, if they were starting some little, I probably create a training program around this and sell it. is a, the local podcaster just becoming the local expert. And who cares if somebody halfway around the world is watching it or not. You don’t care. In fact, you don’t even want them. So, yeah. Right.

Greg Helbeck (10:34.243)
You don’t want that. It’s not your customer. And you don’t have that celebrity approach with like, that is such a good idea because even if you get 10 downloads an episode, those 10 downloads are real meaningful downloads. So your opportunities are going to increase tenfold.

Mike Hambright (10:45.314)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (10:48.795)
And you know, when you’re in your local market, like someone might run into, you’re the guy with the podcast. You’re the real, and you’ve just build that celebrity effect. And that’s what we do too. When our, with our social media stuff is like, I’ll go into a house and I’ll talk about the house, where it is local. And you know, people, there’s a lot of people who live in, you know, New York and Washington where I reside and you know, it gets a decent amount of views, but I don’t really care about that number. Like you said, I just care about, you know, what, what is the result? Are they getting value from it? And do they know that I’m the guy who.

Mike Hambright (10:54.584)
Right.

Greg Helbeck (11:18.609)
houses in that market and that’s been working very well for us. Like we had a mutual friend of ours reach out to me and he said, hey do you buy in Gig Harbor? And I said yes I do, it’s a great area and you know a day later we’re making a deal with him and we’re paying him a hundred and sixteen thousand dollar assignment fee because he knew that I buy houses in Washington State. So if I didn’t have that message out there I wouldn’t have this beautiful hoarder special down in Gig Harbor.

Mike Hambright (11:19.938)
Right.

Mike Hambright (11:35.758)
Yeah, it’s awesome.

Mike Hambright (11:40.226)
Yep. Yeah. Awesome. So in terms of your relationship marketing, can you share a couple like tips and tricks? I you shared some like you’ll help you’re willing to help people. How do you get, you you said for wholesalers, if you’re having a hard time moving your deal, like contact us. So there’s probably some people that will come to you because it’s the path of least resistance. Like I know this guy’s a real buyer, but there’s also the wholesalers that are just like, they’re not selling unless you pay top dollar. And I know you, Greg, you’re not the type of guy that pays the most. So how do you kind of balance that?

Greg Helbeck (11:57.261)
Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (12:09.347)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:10.498)
where people want to work with you because it’s easy even if you don’t pay the most, you know.

Greg Helbeck (12:14.359)
Sure. So a lot of the wholesalers that are reaching out to me are one of two things. They’re either new

to the market or they don’t work in that market. So our friend is a very sophisticated wholesaler. He doesn’t know Washington state very well. So he was able to leverage my knowledge of the area because I’ve been living here for a while. And he knows that I’m a reliable buyer who’s going to get the deal done. And he had a ton of room on the deal. So, I mean, he still made a fortune. So that’s like the first avatar is like the sophisticated wholesaler who gets a random lead out of state. The second avatar is the new wholesaler who doesn’t know what they don’t know and they can leverage me.

to help them through the process. I’ll give you one example. There’s a house we’re doing right now. Wholesaler brought me the deal. Seller’s in foreclosure, needs to sell, serious situation, and he doesn’t have the money or the knowledge to get that deal done. So if he comes to me and he agrees to get a $10,000 wholesale fee from me, he trusts that I’m gonna step in there and get the deal done, which we’re doing right now. So I would say…

If you’re looking to do this as an operator, you need to understand your, your avatar is a newer wholesaler. Someone who’s not like the biggest wholesaler in your market, because they’re going to max their deals out or somebody who’s out of state and they just want to work with someone that they already know. like if I got an elite in Omaha, Nebraska, I’d call Mike because I know that he’s the guy in Omaha. if I sell it to Mike for less than I don’t really care. Cause I know he’s a serious buyer. So, you know, that’s the kind of way that I go about it. And we get a lot of deals from sophisticated wholesalers who get a

deal in my market that they just they don’t especially New York like they don’t even know how to get started over there right with the attorneys and stuff so it’s a very big value add yeah

Mike Hambright (13:48.974)
Yeah, well it’s a whole different animal in New York for sure. So yeah, that’s great. I say this all the, I’ve said this recently. I was talking about some coaching stuff and I was like, you I think one of the problems with new real estate investors is they’re trying to get rich on their first deal. And I’m like, just try to learn. you know, you don’t want to lose money and you should make money, but like, you know, don’t try to maximize your profit. Try to maximize your learning.

Greg Helbeck (14:04.534)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (14:14.766)
on the first five or 10 deals because you’re trying to do something that can feed you for a lifetime, not like get rich this year and then you fizzle out, you know?

Greg Helbeck (14:21.543)
Exactly. Yeah, we’ve dealt with that with new wholesalers where they kind of posture up and they get cute and then all of a sudden they can’t get the deal done. Like I had an example where there was a wholesaler, they were like pressuring me to make a decision and it was like freaking, like for no reason. And then they gave me pictures of the house and it was pitch black and they were going off all these things and I’m like, dude, like.

You and they had a ton of room on the deal. I’m like bro like I can’t even see the full picture here It’s like freaking six o’clock at night. It’s pitch black like how are you supposed to get me to pay like you know? You’re not even local to this area and the deal didn’t work out But yeah, you got it You got to look at it like if you leave a little bit of money on the day and I’ve done this too like I’ve there’s a serious buyer here in Seattle I’ve left money on the table selling them deals for the relationship because they’ve done 4,000 houses and these guys are you serious operators so I want to get in the door with them and be an ally of them and I

I’m willing to leave 5,000 on the table because they’re reliable. don’t really care, you know? So I think the biggest thing that you mentioned that I want to just make a huge point on is…

All you have in this business is the relationships. And that’s a continuity, there’s continuity there. It’s like a seller’s gonna sell you one house most likely. But a good relationship in a market is worth its in gold. Like even an attorney, an attorney brings you a deal, you pay five, 10K more than you want because their client needs it. Whatever, you make an extra, you make $10,000 less, that attorney’s gonna bring you the next deal because they know that you’re serious. you know, it’s like, you know, one more thing, and I’m just rambling here. The thing with relationship marketing,

too which has gotten me to kind of like sometimes pay more depending on the situation is if I pay 10k more for that property right it’s gonna cost me 10 grand to get the deal no matter what with marketing so if I pay an extra 10k then I would like to it’s almost like I paid for the marketing but I didn’t have any of that risk of the marketing not working out so that’s another way we can justify sometimes paying higher numbers if needed

Mike Hambright (16:16.568)
Yeah, I love what you’re saying. I think of this phrase sometimes of transformational instead of transactional, right? Like thinking the long-term and for guys like you and I, I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, but same, you you’ve got a lot of wisdom for a younger guy too, which is one of the reasons that I think you’re awesome, Greg is, but it’s like, there are so many people that I do something with. They join Investor Fuel or…

they come to some event that I’m at or whatever, and I’ll hear all the time that people like, man, I started listening to your podcast 10 years ago. But they’ve never stepped up, they’ve never done anything, but it took years of building that relationship for that to come back around. And it’s just, I kind of use this phrase sometimes of being a farmer, is just kind of planting these seeds all the time, and you don’t know when the harvest is gonna be, but you know it will come eventually. And so a lot of real estate investors, especially probably a lot of entrepreneurs, but a lot of new real estate investors are so focused on

Greg Helbeck (16:48.717)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:11.084)
that deal or the next deal or whatever that they’re not thinking about. What about five years from now or 10 years from now, you know?

Greg Helbeck (17:16.687)
And it takes a lot of time to build credibility because a lot of people, they try to run Facebook ads and they think their cold traffic is going to convert to deals right away. And it’s like, if you have a podcast or you put out videos, people spend hours with you. They watch your stuff. like, I bet you you’ve had people come up to you, Mike, and they’re like, Mike, feel like I’ve known you forever, man. I’ve seen 400 of your shows and they know everything about you and they’ve never even spoken to you before. And that’s the power of the media.

Mike Hambright (17:25.325)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:34.858)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and I want to say, Greg and I on here both have podcasts, obviously, so not everybody needs to go out start a podcast, but in terms of building relationships with people, mean, obviously the most common way is a RIA club or some local meetup or local, just kind of meet for coffee. There’s people that doing like lunch and learns. mean.

Greg Helbeck (17:58.637)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:59.074)
We know people that are doing all those things. And honestly, for the average person listening to this, that’s probably the easier thing to do. And I know you would agree with this, even though we’re doing a lot over podcasts and online stuff, The relationships are better if you meet in person anyway, right? Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (18:13.935)
100%, 100%. You shake someone’s hand, forget about it. There’s that. And even, there’s a guy in Arizona that’s a huge buyer and he tries as much as he can to do in person stuff, but when he can’t, he’ll FaceTime the person instead of speak to them on the phone so he can put a face to a face. And I actually started doing that and it’s been working pretty well. Like we were at a situation the other day and I’m like, you know what, you have an iPhone? They’re like, yeah. I’m like, hey, answer this FaceTime call. And the next thing you know, they see me, I see them. And there’s a little bit more of that trust factor because we can see each other.

the body language versus just being on the phone.

Mike Hambright (18:46.2)
Yeah, yeah. And the key is, you know, whether it’s a podcast or a meetup group or lunch and learns or any of those things, the real key is consistency, right? It would have been easy for you. I mean, truthfully, let’s be honest. You know, we just restarted the investor fuel podcast and kind of got away from it for the past year or so. And we’re committed to more than ever kind of do a lot of episodes over the next year and kind of going forward. But

Greg Helbeck (18:55.413)
Absolutely.

Mike Hambright (19:10.606)
That’s one of the things that when we were doing our annual planning here late last year, it was like, what have we kind of gotten away from that has served us well in the past? And I’ve always been a massive relationship guy, but it was really slowing down or even stopping for a while the podcast. I was like, that was a terrible idea. Like how did, how did I even let that happen? But you know, we’re back now.

Greg Helbeck (19:28.323)
Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you’re back because you’re like a legendary podcaster in the real estate space, man. Like you’re one of the OGs. So, you know, that’s been your main thing. That’s, that’s you build everything. Huge.

Mike Hambright (19:36.79)
Yeah, but you know the point is is like consistency is like, you know, it’s easy when you are trying to do relationship stuff to feel like this isn’t really working or you know, I’ll just skip this month or this week or whatever. And I think you know enough and I know enough for sure to know that you should you just got to never quit because you think people aren’t watching or aren’t paying attention. And but

Greg Helbeck (19:47.361)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (20:00.726)
You know, you never know, like, especially if you’re meeting in person, like that consistency of people blocking off their second Tuesday every month to come to this event. People want that in their life. And I think probably more than ever, certainly through COVID and all the other crap we’ve been through over the past like five years or whatever, is that people really crave human relationships like…

Greg Helbeck (20:17.816)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (20:23.074)
physical relationships to be able to go out and meet people and have a beer with somebody, shake their hand, whatever, versus all the online stuff. Because the online stuff is everywhere, but it’s generally kind of shallow,

Greg Helbeck (20:32.683)
It is, yeah, you don’t have that, when you have that local, that local person is so critical. Like, I’ll give you an example. There’s a guy I’ve borrowed a lot of money from for years, never met him. We met in person like three months ago for a cup of coffee and we were able to really like, you know, take our relationship that we’ve had that’s been very successful.

and really expand it just by meeting each other and going face to face and shaking each other’s hand. It’s like you’re just putting like, you’re dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s and you remember it, right? You remember it. That’s why masterminds in person are so powerful, because you’re there, you’re meeting people, you’re next to people, you’re having dinner with them and that’s really where you can build these really, really deep relationships that can start online but then obviously they can continue. It’s kind of like Tinder or whatever. You start online and then eventually you meet up.

Mike Hambright (21:21.142)
I don’t know anything about that, Greg. Yeah, yeah. So tell me about, you’ve been flipping more too, right? You’ve been basically retailing more than wholesaling over the past couple of years as well, right?

Greg Helbeck (21:22.637)
Yeah, me neither.

Greg Helbeck (21:27.149)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (21:31.459)
Yeah.

So I feel like now with the market, just to kind of back up, like before 20, before mid-year 2022, wholesaling was like the easiest thing you could ever do. You can lock up a property at 90 % of the value and sell it to some fund at 105 and you know, not very hard to do that. You can offer the seller more than everyone else and whatever. That obviously stopped. And I’ve just seen a lot of people kind of like fell out of wholesaling because of the competition increased, cost of leads, cost of deals, everything increased and their margins went away overnight. So something that I’ve always been aware of,

is not wholesaling everything because I started my business, I guess, as a wholesaler, but very quickly I realized that the hardest part about this business is getting the deal at the right number. So, you know, back in like 2018, 2019, I started actually closing on properties and realizing how much more money you can make. So as the market has shifted, I’ve seen, even though the wholesale side might have kind of softened up because these cash buyers want a really good deal, you know, the MLS, at least in my local area, is still very, very strong for well-priced properties. So I’m able to get these properties at a wholesale number

and instead of assigning them for maybe 20 or 30 grand, I can take them down, clean them out, paint them, throw some new floors down there and make 60 or 70 grand on the same transaction. You know, obviously I got to wait a little bit longer, but I’ve seen that allow us to be much more profitable on the marketing side and much more diverse on the relationship side because we are actually the buyer.

and we know the MLS is gonna get us the most money. And the key to do that without losing your shirt is you really gotta know your local market and you gotta really understand the inventory situation going on. Because in New York…

Greg Helbeck (23:03.651)
There’s not a lot of inventory. hard to build. know, there’s just, that’s always been that way. That’s why that market’s always generally gone up. But compared to like Southwest Florida right now, there’s a ton of inventory. So I wouldn’t want to be doing that down there. So you got to know your market and understand where the demand is. And every time, you know, we’re doing properties, we’re under our median in the county and we’re, only doing this on properties that we know we can put on the market as is. You know, if it’s a heavy fixer or something like that, we can flip that, but we’re, know, we’re going to look at that a little bit differently. So I see.

I got a small coaching group right now and the big thing I’m telling these guys is like, listen, don’t wholesale every house, man. And we’ll look at their deals and me and Josh will be like, dude, you should freaking just close on this and put it on the MLS, it’ll triple what you’d make on the same lead. And I’m starting to kind of get that message out to more people because it’s a tremendous opportunity right under your fingertips.

Mike Hambright (23:55.008)
Yeah, yeah, started, I really started leaning. mean, nobody was talking about this stuff when I’m like, you if I go back to 2009 is when I started a whole tailing and, and it was just this realization that there are just like those people that go to shop at outlet malls, right? Like they’re willing to take an imperfect sweater. It’s like, don’t really like that color.

Greg Helbeck (24:03.32)
my gosh.

Greg Helbeck (24:12.303)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (24:16.802)
and it doesn’t fit great, but man, it’s a really good deal, right? And it’s like, Americans just want deals. It’s like the reason there’s outlet malls everywhere, or people like wholesale this and that, Costco’s a wholesale warehouse, like everybody wants deals and they’re willing to buy stuff that’s kind of imperfect. Maybe it’s a sweat equity situation, right? And so it’s the same thing on housing. And there’s obviously a lot of pressure on affordable housing. if you can go after, I’m sure you know, you know, believe this as well that.

Greg Helbeck (24:19.768)
Yeah.

Yes.

Mike Hambright (24:44.003)
the primary target for this is the first time home buyer versus like a move up house, right? It’s to find that person that’s like, they couldn’t afford that if it was all fixed up and you sold it for full retail, but they’re getting a fixer upper at a good price and yeah, they’re gonna do the work, but it’s livable now, but they’re gonna do the work, right?

Greg Helbeck (24:46.787)
Yes. Yeah. yeah. Sure.

Greg Helbeck (25:01.055)
Exactly. And another thing too is like, you when I say real estate’s location, location, location, like I’m big on zip codes, man. Like where’s that property? Like I’d rather buy a property for a little bit more money or a decent amount more money in the right area compared to some sick deal in the middle of nowhere where there’s, you know, no comps. So, you know, that’s, that’s the thing that I’ve realized is like,

Mike Hambright (25:07.491)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (25:21.485)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (25:25.389)
where that property is and the inventory around it is a lot more important than the price you might be paying. like I’ll buy deals from wholesalers sometimes with tighter margins, but I know the zip code and where it is and I know that that’s gonna fly once it’s on the market. So, you know, it goes down to local knowledge.

Mike Hambright (25:39.51)
Yeah. You can look at the, you can look at the comps too, to see if you look at days on market for houses that sold, like if you pull up all your comps, like let’s just say there’s 20 comps in that half mile radius or something. If like the ones that are moving, if you look at days on market and the ones that are moving the fastest are the ones that are at the lower range of that price point. And they’re kind of probably fixer uppers or the, they were imperfect houses versus those that are trying to stretch the retail price and like set new comps.

Greg Helbeck (25:50.34)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (26:05.123)
Yes. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:06.894)
If you can see that people are tending to go towards those value type deals, then you know that’s a perfect neighborhood to do a whole tail deal in.

Greg Helbeck (26:14.159)
100 % and that’s another I guess that other thing I guess as you kind of mentioned that is the the n-word in real estate innovations people you know discovered these like I don’t know three years ago and I didn’t understand it when I first learned about it but

Mike Hambright (26:25.549)
Yeah.

Greg Helbeck (26:29.013)
once I realized the power of those, we started doing those with the right situations and basically just putting found money in our pocket. So we’ve been able to implement these novation strategies and get a lot of these deals to the finish line that might not have worked out for whatever reason. So I think that’s another tool that people can add to their tool belt. And it’s not that, I mean, they’re honestly not that difficult. think people make them seem more complicated than they actually are. So I feel like, yeah, it’s it’s really simple. A novation is very easy.

Mike Hambright (26:53.294)
Yeah, it’s human nature.

Greg Helbeck (26:58.989)
transaction to do. As long as the seller knows what’s going on and they’re aware of everything it’s like it’s basically like doing a wholesale deal. It’s like it’s so simple. If people make up seems like they’re like you got to learn all this stuff I’m like no you don’t. You just got to tell the seller what you’re doing and you know make sure you have the right paperwork that’s about it.

Mike Hambright (27:08.227)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (27:16.206)
Awesome, well Greg, any kind of words of wisdom for people that have been struggling a little bit and they can see some light at the end of the tunnel now? I’m not saying because we have a new president that everything’s gonna change, but the truth is America just became more business friendly and I think there’s a lot more predictability in markets and financial markets and stuff like that. So I think there’s some change in the air, right? So what advice would you give to people that have maybe been on the struggle bus for a little bit here?

Greg Helbeck (27:26.447)
As of an hour now.

Yes.

Greg Helbeck (27:44.663)
Yeah, I would say that if you’re on the struggle bus right now, you got to figure out what’s like the actual problem that’s holding you back. Like what’s like your real bottleneck and it’s either a marketing problem or you know, a deal problem, like whether it’s getting deals from wholesalers or converting those sellers.

And you got to isolate your problem and then figure out the best way to select. For example, you got to isolate your bottleneck. That’s like the takeaway. So let’s say your bottleneck is like you can’t get enough leads or whatever. Then you got a marketing issue. And if you have a marketing issue, you either have a budget problem or a time problem. If you’re like doing cold calling. So you got to really figure out the route that’s holding you back and fix that before you try to fix the next five things that might be broken. Because once you fix your problem, you’re going to have the next bottleneck and you got to fix your problems in a

to the actual sequence that they’re in. But to give you more practical advice that’s not theoretical, you can’t rely on wholesaling and you need to understand how to close on properties in today’s day and age because…

Even though the market’s gotten softer, there’s still a lot of competition and there’s still a lot of people that are looking to get the same kind of deals that you want. So if you’re able to have two or three different tools in your tool belt, flip, novation, wholesale, whole tail, you’re going to be able to get a lot more of these opportunities to convert into revenue because you have multiple ways you can fix it. So I see a lot of new investors, they just want to wholesale. I’m like, don’t do that. Have wholesale be a way you can make money, but partner with someone like me or whoever in your local market who has the ability and the

knowledge to close and potentially JV with them or whatever the case might be and or raise money you know get private money and you know you got a part I think you should still party with someone if you’re borrowing other people’s money but you know just look at yourself as an investor not a wholesaler or insert the blank

Mike Hambright (29:31.842)
Yeah, absolutely. You’re an opportunist. When you find opportunities, you gotta be able to monetize as many of those as possible. Awesome.

Greg Helbeck (29:36.109)
Yeah, exactly.

Greg Helbeck (29:40.466)
Exactly. Especially starting out. you know, in the beginning, I talked to lot of new investors and, you know, I give them advice and I’m like, listen, you don’t need to build a business overnight. Do your first deal. See if you like this business, get paid, see if you like it. And if you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, then, you know, you got $10,000 to try something out. You know, it’s like, you know, people think they got to build some big business overnight. It’s like, dude, do your first deal, get some money, and then we’ll talk about the next steps. That should be a new investor’s first thing.

do your first freaking deal and try to do it within six months.

Mike Hambright (30:10.958)
There you go. Well, Greg, thanks for joining me on the show today, Great to see you. Everybody, we’ll see you on the next episode.

Greg Helbeck (30:13.859)
You’re welcome. was a pleasure.